COME BACK WITH ME TO THE FIG TREE

by James Reed
“But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid”
Micah iv, 4.

Thus begins volume 1, 1936 of the Douglas Social Credit Quarterly Review, “The Fig Tree”. I have been fortunate to be able to look over and reflect upon issues in those early years from 1936-1938, right to the war years. The articles are as crisp and relevant to today as they were then.

C.H. Douglas, “Regarding the Canon”, begins the short but fertile life of the journal with the remarks that culture, as represented by the media and political life, has ignored the basic “Canon” of Western civilisation – the core values and beliefs as expressed in the great literature, religion and philosophy. This has occurred, Douglas said because “a financial criterion rather than a realistic standard of Rightness has become its guide, and that in consequence the world is given over to the Father of Lies – the Enemy of Truth – and that the Money System is his chief tool”. (p.3)
One should not despair about this, Douglas also says “because we know how the Money System works, who controls and benefits from it, and further, what changes would tend to make it realistic”. (p.3) Such are the broad themes explored in “The Fig Tree”.

Thus we have the Marquis of Tavistock, also in Volume 1 writing on “Social Credit and Bird Life”, an early ecology piece where one of the benefits of social credit, through humanising the economy, will be to lessen pollution and increase the quality of life of birds, and indeed, all of nature.
Father Coffey, “God or Mammon”, Vol.1 No3, 1936, pens a powerful piece from a Catholic perspective arguing that the point of the economy is to serve man and that the point of man is to serve God. Father Coffey notes that the Popes, such as Pope Pius XI have condemned the international world-monopoly of Finance “and that is enough for Catholics”.
The Rev. T. Dixon in “The Laws of Nature and the Laws of Man” (No.2, September 1936) agrees, looking at things from the perspective of natural law: “Men must be made free to move in harmony with the rhythm of the natural law. They must be made free to follow the leadership of the wise physicists and saints, who are what they are because the rhythm of the natural law has beat its measure on their pulses”. (p.157)

Norman Webb in “The Downfall of Beauty” (No.7 December 1937) laments about how industrialism has eroded natural beauty and order: “The lover of beauty looks at the pre-industrial world and recognises that in some particular denied to us it was good; it was right. In those days, in spite of the fact that there were wars and pestilence, cruelty and hunger, (perhaps in some respects to a greater degree than today), there was focus; there was homogeneity; there was unity in diversity; there was fitness; there was taste. Even if he caught only fleeting glimpses of it, man still knew what he was concerned to achieve. The present industrialised world has forfeited all this, not because it has been mechanised, as artists have thought, but for the single, simple reason that it has been beguiled by an artificially imposed condition into desiring an abstraction – money – in place of the substantial things it can make. Realism and beauty are one, and the age that has lost the sense of what it wants to such a degree that it mistakes the shadow for the substance, is incapable of creating real beauty”.

Major Douglas in “Why Bother About Finance” (No.7 December 1937) agrees with this thesis of the alienating and destructive nature of the financial system: “The defective financial system… is the main cause of war”. This speech by Douglas to the Aldwych Club on 28 October 1937 is not often cited but it is Douglas at his best, and clearest. We should bother about finance because finance always wins, he says.

“The Fig Tree” contains a wealth of insights for today and many of these fine literary pieces are well worthy of reproduction in our publications today. I hope that this ‘cook’s tour’ has stimulated your appetite.  

FINANCE AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

by Chris Knight
Only relatively recently have environmentalists begun to pay attention to the role of the money problem in producing environmental degradation. Leading social credit thinkers Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt gave a masterly discussion of this question back in 1997 in the journal Local Environment, “Towards a Re-Evaluation of the Role of Finance in the Causation of Environmental Degradation”. They pointed out that the social credit writings of C.H. Douglas “anticipated the adverse social and environmental impacts of an increase of centralisation and globalisation of finance upon local policy formation”.

The A+B theorem implies that the consumer’s money can only cover total production costs if new money is created at an accelerating rate relative to future production. An economic treadmill is thus created by the money-debt system so that the economy must be constantly expanded by economic growth, the increased throughput of matter/energy in the economic system.

In the present system most production is debt-financed. To pay off these debts, with compounding interest, a spiral of economic growth and waste occurs. Douglas saw this long before the other 20th century environmentalists began even diagnosing the ecological problem. This makes, I believe, C.H. Douglas, one of the founding fathers of modern environmentalism. I hope that you are taking notes Bob Brown!  

ZELMAN COWEN, QUIET, BUT STILL POLITICALLY CORRECT

by Vera West
Zelman Cowen, governor-general (following John Kerr) has died aged 92. He was the son of Jewish migrants, his grandparents both paternal and maternal being Jewish immigrants from Belarus, Russia. Cowen was, and is, seen by the new class as a “healer” after John Kerr did the right thing and sacked the out-of-control Whitlam.
Cowen’s thought though was firmly in the migrant-makes good-tradition. He “urged Australians to show more generosity towards refugees” (The W.E. Australian, 10 –11/12/2011 p.18) and related this to his own family migration experience. Never is there a mention about the “generosity” of the Anglo culture which allowed so many migrants to do so well. The Anglo culture must be infinitely giving and tolerant, until it is no more. 

COMMUNITY, ENVIRONMENT, LEVELS OF RESPONSIBLITY

Taken from http://sunnyvalefilms.wordpress.com/ 21/11/2011:
A community is defined by its boundaries within which responsibility is taken for whatever enters and whatever leaves it. Default communities in which we all participate are; our own bodies, our families, our residential property, and of course the global Earth – for which the same definition applies.
This points to another defining characteristic of communities; the structure of internal self-organising levels. At each level we find a community unto itself, each providing important feedback as needed for the other levels. When that feedback is ‘positive‘ and balanced at all levels then we see a dynamic, stable, self-organising system which can persist over time – indefinitely if it has sufficient resiliency to withstand external change.

What is this positive feedback? We all know of one kind – that blaring wail when the microphone is inadvertently turned up too high. It picks up noise from the speakers and loops it back into the speakers. That is unstable positive feedback. In contrast, stable positive feedback can be found throughout nature and within all organic cycles. That is why our bodies, river drainage systems and leaf shapes all share similar structural patterns.

How does that transpose into a discussion on levels in community? Consider those hill-bound coastal towns in traditional Mediterranean scenes you see on jigsaw puzzles. At the bottom is a commercial esplanade with its waterfront filled with (fishing) boats. Further up the hillside and scattered amongst the residences are the schools, and near the top is the local monastery. Each level focuses on its special function in the wider community, each responsible for serving the self-sustaining whole — the fishermen have their own community, the school-teachers theirs, and so on.

So if we want to participate in deliberate community, as we must for the sake of the future of our children, then the challenge is to (re)discover and affirm the positive feedback loop(s) we need to apply to our failure of community/society/planet in order to ensure a sustainability at all levels. Neoliberal economics suggests that ‘market forces’ lead to stabilised feedback loops. The evidence suggests otherwise.  

REMEMBER “WHY ICELAND SHOULD BE IN THE NEWS, BUT IS NOT”?

We reprinted an article from http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/728.1 by Deena Stryker, 15 August, 2011 in On Target Vol. 47 No. 49, 2011. It originated from “An Italian radio program's story about Iceland’s on-going revolution” as a “stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. (Australians) may remember that at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt. The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion".
Read further here…

A communication has come from Donald Martin (British League of Rights) which fills in more of the background to the people of Iceland’s brave stand against the international banksters. Donald writes:

In May 2010 I did a week’s campaigning in Iceland with a UK colleague and an Icelandic friend who now lives in Sweden. We had a good influence including meetings with many groups and individuals and long sessions with the President of Iceland and Members of the Icelandic Parliament. We also had some media coverage, a large newspaper article in the main daily paper, radio and television. The television interview brought us into contact with Jón Lárusson (a detective inspector of police) and his brother (a school teacher) who understand about Social Credit and Douglas. We also had an open meeting with a large number of contacts. We packed a lot into a week!

THE GREAT REFUGE CONSPIRACY

by James Reed
An argument has been developing at this site that proposed Constitutional changes, to allegedly recognise Aborigines, could have an unexpected spin-off of creating a new, multicultural, politically correct bill of rights. There is some distrust among conservatives about the soundness of recent constitutional interpretations of the High Court of Australia, and in other matters, this Court supports political correctness in a range of decisions. Even law professors have noted the centralist, anti-state tendencies of this court. Why take the risk of giving even more power to the legal-political class? I don’t trust them.

Consider the existing chaos caused by Gillard’s plan to move thousands of asylum seekers out of detention centres and into the “community”. This is essentially what the legal-political class has wanted because with each seeker being a law suit, they will all end up here and by chain migration, each seeker will bring out, ultimately, many more migrants. State governments are already in “revolt” about funding issues. (The W.E. Australian, 10 – 11/12/2011, p.1) This is nothing compared to what lies awaiting us with the total open borders “Australia” that could be legally created by Constitutional change, or even a Federal multiculturalism act.

Forget about the pain of the carbon tax. That is small fry. Unless these problems are resolved, the spiral downward into chaos is inevitable. Kiss your “lifestyle” goodbye.  

AUSTRALIA! THE DEATH WISH “NATION”

by Peter Ewer
Apologies to gentle readers who faint at the use of hard journalism in the struggle for our existence! It may be time for a tea break as this news is rather bitter. You see it is a symbol of our plight. Australia permitted China in 2009 to use a station at Mingenew, Western Australia, to track its satellites. It did this, apparently, not realising the dual purpose nature of China’s space program, with its military aspect. China was thus able to track Australian and US military activities. (The Australian, November 28, 2011, p.5)

The US military were disturbed by this, but they shouldn’t be. Australia, even in the 1930s, was gripped by the suicidal desires that advanced capitalist natures and under “Pig Iron” Bob was only too pleased to sell iron to the Japanese which was then fired back at Anglo Saxon soldiers. Today, nothing has changed; indeed, matters have gotten worse. Our goal is nothing short of making the entire world radioactive.  

BOOM! GO THE BOOMERS: MEDITATIONS ON LEARNING THE ART OF EATING DOG FOOD!

by James Reed
Of the many things I hate, the 60s pinko generation of the Left is high on the list. They call themselves “Baby Boomers” and they have lived like “babies” all of their lives – that is, those who conformed to the Establishment’s particular brand of evil ethics. Thus, it is interesting to read Bernard Salt, “Boomers Facing Day of Reckoning in Funding Retirement”, The Australian, December 8, 2011, p.29.

In short, the Boomers’ super is not going to give them the lifestyle that they are used to. They will need to learn to live on less. I agree. This selfish generation has, in my opinion, eaten away at the social fabric of civilisation and deserves to live for the rest of their days on dog food! Seriously, there is a lesson here about how consumer indulgence can bring a people down. Almost all of our present politically correct madness is the product of a group of affluent people who have too much, especially too much time on their hands. From this comes all mischief. 

ICELAND TO RECOGNISE PALESTINIAN STATE

Wow! "It Takes a Viking!!!"--Stan Hess, November 29, 2011:
Last November the Icelandic parliament approved a measure on United Nations' annual day of solidarity with the Palestinian people; and Palestinians reaffirmed their bid for UN membership. Iceland's parliament voted in favour of recognizing the Palestinian Territories as an independent state, the first Western European country to do so according to Iceland's foreign minister.

The measure was passed symbolically on the United Nation's annual day of solidarity with the Palestinian people. The vote paves the way for formal recognition by the small north Atlantic island, which led the way in recognizing the independence of the three Baltic states after the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991.

Source: https://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/iceland-becomes-first-western-european-country-to-recognize-palestinian-state-1.398533 

SMART METERS – WHAT IS THE REAL PURPOSE?

Okay who pays when someone’s house goes up in smoke because of a badly installed smart meter? -- “Christopher of Diamond Creek”
Dear Victorian Liberal Party.
You have lost my vote next election. This is disgraceful. I own my property and I do not want something forcefully installed on it against my permission that has murky benefits at the very best. This is wrong on so many levels. Have any of the other concerns been addressed in the audit on these devices? Is the reasoning really because too much money has been spent to put a stop to a bad idea? You've now accepted both MyKi and Smartmeter with this reasoning. It's foolish. Both should have been scrapped they are utter failures and have wasted billions of dollars of our money and will continue to do so.
-- “Johnno of Adelaide”

The solution for escalating prices would be for the governments to take back the utilities industry instead of allowing their mates in the industry to continue to rip us off. The only difference between a democracy and communism is that we get to elect those who will lie in bed with company CEOs'. Worth watching:  Rense & Dr Bill Deagle - Death By Smart Meter

IT LOOKS LIKE THE FESTERING BOIL IS NOW ERUPTING

NSW highlights corrupt ALP by Piers Akerman, Daily Telegraph December 13, 2011
“The growing list of NSW Labor MPs accused or found guilty of corruption continues to grow. Curiously, Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who owes her rise to the NSW Right, the same body responsible for the promotion of the disgraced NSW MPs, is studiously looking in the other direction.

Aided by a generally compliant parliamentary press gallery which seems to go out of its way to avoid asking the tough questions, Ms Gillard’s treatment of questionable federal Labor MP Craig Thomson has largely gone unchallenged. The inquiry into his alleged misuse of trade union credit cards is being handled by Gillard’s laughable trade union-dominated watchdog Fair Work Australia.

How the pattern of corrupt behaviour established in NSW can be ignored is bewildering. As Kate Sikora noted in The Daily Telegraph today, former Labor MP and lands minister Tony Kelly was found to be corrupt by the Independent Commission Against Corruption yesterday and faces criminal charges that carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. He is first former minister in 24 years to face jail for corruption but the third Labor MP to be found corrupt.

That could rise to four, with former energy minister Ian Macdonald accused last week. He allegedly set up meetings between accused murderer Ron Medich and electricity bosses in exchange for a night with a prostitute. One ex-minister, Milton Orkopoulos, is serving a 13-year jail sentence for child sex offences and seven ministers were forced to resign during the last days of Labor’s reign. Even Inspector Clouseau might be able to see a pattern in this appalling record but Gillard sees none and the media remain strangely blind to most of Labor’s dismal systemic lack of ethics.

The electorate has seen things differently in NSW where the Liberals Barry O’Farrell is steadfastly pursuing a statewide rebuilding strategy. Opposition leader Tony Abbott will face the same task after federal Labor’s disastrous attack on the national economy. Whether he will also have to pursue those alleged to (have) rorted the system is up to Gillard, its a task she should begin now.  

TENURED RADICALS

by Chris Knight
Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education”, (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1990; third edition 2008) is one of the most important contributions to the American “cultural wars”. The thesis is that there has been a long march a la Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci by the cultural Left through the universities leading to a rejection of Western culture as racist, sexist and homophobic. The replacement is feminism, queer studies, postmodernism and other trendy doctrines that now dominate the humanities, social sciences and to some degree, law.
In Kimball’s 2008 edition he observes that the university culture of political correctness is even greater. Kimball embraces the standard liberal idea of America as an ethnoracial melting pot (p.284) but objects to multiculturalism, quoting Theodore Roosevelt: “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin… would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” (p.284)

Ironically Theodore Roosevelt would have seen the real problem behind the “cultural wars” for what it was. Immigration is displacing the founding Anglo Saxon basis of American society. There can be no “melting pot” if the basic pot itself melts – only a mess. The “cultural wars” books fail to confront the stark racial realties strangling the West, but instead take the soft, secure, “culture” road. But it is races or peoples which create cultures, not the other way around. Destroy through blood poisoning the race of people who created the culture, and the entire civilisation is threatened.

Kimball characterises multiculturalism as rejecting the idea that a society like the United States is an integrated and unified society in which people of different races, ethnicities and creeds can live together. Societies are ethnically and racially divided. Kimball rejects that idea. Multiculturalists accept it and argue in favour of THEIR ethno-racial group. My position is that Anglo Saxons, and Whites in general need to be assertive about their race and ethnic groups. Ethnic pluralism has destroyed the Kimball view of society, but it is not too late to save our tribe. So let’s do it.  

VALE PERCY LAWRENCE, Victoria

Percy was a dedicated supporter of the League, for 44 years he was a “Mr. Reliable”. He had the ability to bring new people along to the local meetings in Gippsland. He served as secretary to a number of local organizations related to our cause. Percy was meticulous in everything he did. He did his best to run his farm with organic methods. Percy passed away peacefully on 30.11.11 at the age of 91 years

- - Don Auchterlonie