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THE SPOILS OF WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA

GENOCIDE, FRATRICIDE, BOMBING!

WHO PROFITS ?by Kieron McFadden. Researcher-Writer BAMR

Introduction

The British Association for Monetary Reform's work to expose the gargantuan fraud at the core of our money system continues.

If you have any comments, questions or input you feel may be valuable - or if you would like to help in any way please write, phone/fax or e-mail us - we will be glad to hear from you.

This booklet is itself an introduction for most people into the realities of the real driving force behind, not only the horrors now unfolding in the Balkans, but so many other unacceptable situations where people are killed, maimed, starved and/or just deprived of a just and equitable share of the bounties of this bountiful planet.

We now live in a world where those who govern us and those who suppose to inform us (the media) cannot be trusted to consider our vital interests.

Money dominates and the most powerful are the most wealthy.

Governments are bought and the media are controlled by the vested interests of those who own them.

And their vested interests do not align with yours and my aspirations.

This publication has been brought to you by well-informed people who share your own concerns for the common good and are determined that the truth is exposed that we may protect ourselves from deeply disturbing developments which threaten the very survival of mankind and all living things - among these the war in Yugoslavia.

We must not passively allow ill-gotten gains for a few to dictate the course of our future (and it is), when a truly simple solution is within OUR hands. Editor

THE HIDDEN FLAW

To analyse and understand how the war in the Balkans is being engineered and who has engineered it, it is necessary to return first to basics. You may not be aware that there is a hidden underlying fault at the very foundation of the global economy.

That the economy is not working well is self-evident. One only has to take a look at the chaotic mess around one. What is less easy to see is the fact that this mis-managed farrago of iniquity, injustice, poverty, corruption and environmental devastation traces back to one dreadful built-in, and carefully never mentioned, stupidity.

That flaw - and nobody is supposed to bring this to your attention - is the way in which our money is brought into existence: our money, and the currencies of all nations, comes into existence as credit.

There may not at first appear to be much of a connection between that fact and the bombing of both Serbian and Kosovan towns and villages. But bear with us and you will see how it works. You will see on whom such a system confers power and how that power is being used to smash up countries and to bring millions of us into war with one another.

Most people assume that our currency is created by our government, that British money is created by the British government, French money by the French government and so on.

This is not the case. Our currency is lent to us by private banking cartels.

Some time ago the government handed over to the banks its ancient constitutional duty of creating the nation's money.

Whenever the banks lend money to you or I, to industry, local government or central government, this is how money enters the economy. In fact it is almost the only way money enters the economy.

Money is created as a loan and that loan must be paid back, plus interest.

So, for example if a bank lends you £5000, which it credits to your account, it is at that moment entering £5000 into circulation. You, of course, now owe the bank £5000 plus interest. So when you finish paying off the loan, more money enters the bank's reserves than was created in the first place!

The same basic principle applies whether the money is lent to you, to a business or to the government itself.

It is easy to see from this that, if all our money comes into being as a loan on which is charged interest, then more money throughout the economy as a whole is owed to the banks than is circulating in existence!

Britain is a case in point: private, commercial and governmental debt to the banks now amounts to well over one trillion pounds. The total money in circulation is only around six hundred billion pounds. In other words approximately twice as much money is owed to the banks than actually exists in circulation!

If all of us and all of industry and government paid off all our debts to the banks, then there would be no money left that was not in the hands of the banks and we would still owe them a lot of money. The debt can never be paid off and the only way to cover the shortfall is to find more money. As more money only comes into existence through lending, then more has to be borrowed, which has to be paid back with interest, and so it goes on, forever ratcheting the nation's indebtedness skywards.

Thus we have escalating, never-ending debt throughout the economies of nations. Have you ever wondered if all nations are in debt (for example the United States National Debt is now 5.2 trillion dollars and its private debt a further 22 trillion dollars) to whom is all this money owed? Well now you know.

The money is owed to the international banking cartels and more money must be borrowed from them in order to pay it off, meaning more debts and mounting interest. Forever.

Whoever controls the nation's currency, as Thomas Jefferson once pointed out, controls that nation and as the international banker Rothschild opined, if you handed him the power to issue a nation's money he cared not who made its laws.

It is easy to see that as this process continues, and given a bank's legalised power to seize the assets of anyone who cannot pay off his debts to them, the banks gradually gain possession or control of all a nation's assets. And nations, become bankrupt.

Now here's a shocker: where does the money come from that the banks lend out? The answer is it does not come from anywhere. Banks are not lending money they have sitting in some reserves somewhere. They are lending money that does not exist until the moment it is lent. It is a ledger entry, numbers on a computer, only. It is conjured out of thin air.

For example if Joe borrows £5000 from a bank, the bank does not take the £5000 out of someone else's account. It simply enters the figure £5000 plus interest into its computer. Joe then has to pay back this £5000 plus interest through his hard work or by selling his assets. As he pays the money back it enters the bank's reserves as real money. The bank now has £5000 plus interest in its account as an asset where no money existed before.

You may find this unbelievable. It may wrap you round a pole trying to visualise such an incredible, dishonest sleight of hand that makes bankers rich for doing absolutely nothing. You may be incredulous that governments the world over allow this to happen. Well its very unbelievability is probably its best protection so don't take our word for it: check it out for yourself. You will discover that it is true.

Your observations however would be correct: it is dishonest. It is, for the bankers supplying this debt-money, a kind of legalised permission to counterfeit. It does make them incredibly rich in exchange for producing nothing that contributes to the wellbeing of Man. If criminality can be defined as takingsomething without giving anything of value in exchange, then it is criminal.

It delivers wealth and thus enormous power into the hands of private banking organisations, a criminal' international banking elite. They have in effect an unlimited power to create, and rake in, money. It enables the them to buy whatever they want. It gives them control, (through control of the credit-money supply) of the destinies of nations and of the entire global economy.

When you can control the global money supply, when you can make governments sit up and beg for it, when you can move it about across the world and thereby make or break entire nations, then unless you are incredibly benign the rest of the human race is in serious trouble. And right here, right now, in the twilight of the Twentieth Century, near absolute planetary power has arrived. Unfortunately the men wielding the power are not benign and what they have been doing with their power marks them out as being very decidedly one space-bar short of a full keyboard.

In summary, nations are struggling with a currency that is debt. We owe more money than exists and can never get out of debt. The effects of this piece of lunacy upon the economies of the world are many and dire.

This single flaw is the common denominator to so many economic and social ills (and these ramifications are discussed in other BAMR publications) but let us focus upon one particular effect: the power it gives to the international banking cartels and the trans-global corporations they control.

MONEY FOR NOTHING, WARS FOR FREE.

In the old days, as now, war was an expensive business. A king wanting to go to war had to raise the money by taxing his subjects. As this was tantamount to demanding money with menaces it tended to make kings unpopular.

Another less overt way to raise money for some strong-armed foray into someone else's territory or to contest the claim of some third cousin twice removed to one's throne was to borrow it from the international money men of the day. This of course ran up debts which the borrower may or may not be able to pay off by asset-stripping some unfortunate neighbour he had just defeated in war. It was a little risky for the money lenders of the day, too. They were lending real money then and could not always be sure of getting it back.

On the other hand it could be a highly profitable business and war, on the whole, was a Good Thing - for those financing it as opposed to those actually fighting it.

It became even more of a good thing and almost risk-free when, in 1694, Britain's King William was having trouble with money and probably, bless him, did not understand it too well. At the time governments were scratching their heads over how to pitch the speed of money supply to the economy so as to avoid periods of inflation and at the same time finance their wars, build their palaces and even, from time to time, make life bearable for their people. Someone, probably the bankers, convinced King William that the bankers were the "experts" who understood money and that the job of issuing currency should be handed to them.

So it was. The bankers took on the job of issuing our money. But they added a venal little twist: they called the money thus issued a loan. Because it was called a loan, they were able to charge interest on it.

The rest, as we say, became history. Unfortunately every other nation has been duped into taking the same medicine on the pretext that it is good for them too. Many wonderful innovations have come from Britain over the years, but the idea of having the banks issue currency as a loan isn't one of them. It is one contribution to planetary civilisation for which the rest of the world owes Great Britain a very large raspberry.

Economically nations have been in trouble ever since they enshrined that stroke of brilliant banking fraud in their statutes. So has democracy and human rights and, as we shall see, the seemingly elusive goal of world peace.

This is not to suggest that a flawed money system is the only cause of war. War existed before debt-money reared its ugly head. The point is that such a system, as we shall see, hands a massive tool of exploitation and suppression to any lunatic who happens to get hold of it.

Quite frankly it is a system so daft that should sane men have achieved control of it they would have changed it. Unfortunately they didn't achieve control and the world is dying because they didn't change the system.

Now, in essence, the way the international banking cartels, the IMF, World Bank and so on, lend money to governments, though hidden behind a smoke-screen of complexity, boils down to exactly the same thing as discussed above.

The banks create money out of thin air, lend it to a government and the government has to pay it back with interest. Nowadays a government has trouble just keeping up with the interest payments, without even touching the principal. Britain, for example, now repays over thirty billion pounds a year in interest alone on its debt to the banks - roughly ten percent of its entire annual budget - and this after strenuous and near suicidal efforts by successive governments to reduce or at least slow down the rate of borrowing. Where do you think all the money from selling off the national silverware went? Well, Britain's Great Closing Down Sale provided money to slow down the rate at which our debt is increasing - a bit.

As money only enters the economy as credit, then efforts to reduce government borrowing create a shortage of money throughout the economy. This reduces spending power and shoves us into recession. It is in fact impossible for any country to get out of debt under this system. If it attempts to do so, its economy crashes!

Of course it is common sense, good basic housekeeping, to want to live without borrowing, to pay one's way in the world, pay the debts. At least it should be, but when money is debt, it's near suicide. Try living without debt; cut up the credit cards, start paying off the HP, the overdraft, the mortgage et al and refuse to take out any more loans and see what happens to your standard of living. It will drop like a stone.

A similar thing happens to a nation when it tries the same thing: recession, closure of industries, contraction of public services and millions thrown out of work. Yes, but what were the likes of Mrs Thatcher doing running a country when they did not even understand how a basic like the debt money system works? And well may you ask!

Another anomaly that results from the folly of issuing money as debt is that countries willing to borrow to ensure an adequate supply of money into the economy become successful, whilst racking up debts of galactic proportions. In fact to be successful they have to borrow. Thus the most successful economy on the planet, and the mightiest military and economic power, the United States, is the most indebted - to the tune, as mentioned, of almost twenty eight trillion dollars of private, commercial and government debt.

The world's second largest economy, Japan, has a government debt of two trillion dollars.

Governments are in essentially the same boat as other borrowers. As all the money in use is debt they cannot balance their books and get out of debt. As soon as they try to limit their borrowing, they experience a shortage of money, cannot finance their hospital building, schools building, road building and other programs and must either increase taxation or borrow from the banks. So they borrow more to cover the shortfall and get further into debt. Debt repayment, naturally, is financed by the taxpayer and in Britain, as we have seen, this is to the tune of one tenth approximately of the entire annual budget - around £500 per head of population. But as the cost of everything now has a debt component, (a hike to cover the cost of repaying loans) the real debt component of the government's annual expenditure is many times that.

It is easy to see from this just how much power the international banking system has over national governments and how as time goes on more and more of a nation's wealth is removed into the hands of the bankers.

It is easy to see too how profitable this makes a war. To fight a war countries need money because wars are expensive, especially when you consider the money to buy one cruise missile would build an entire school or regenerate half the agriculture of some Third World nation.

Newspaper reports put the cost of Britain's contribution to NATO's illegal operations in Yugoslavia at some two million pounds a day at this writing, a total thus far of roughly seventy million pounds, with the cost set to escalate as the country is dragged deeper and deeper into the conflict.

A single cruise missile, for instance, costs Britain £850,000, a laser-guided bomb £100,000 or single Tornado fighter £21,250 every hour. It is not even clear if that figure of two million even includes all the ancillary costs of the highly expensive business of transporting, fuelling, supporting and maintaining a fighting operation. The real cost may be much higher. You can bet your life that if we are being told it is two million, it is almost certainly a lot more than that!

But where does the money come from? The government after all is forever telling us there is "not enough money" to keep our coal and shipbuilding industries alive, the Health Service healthy, books in schools or our old folk adequately provided for in their twilight years. How come the moment war rears its ugly head, the money is suddenly no problem? The government could not or would not find the money to keep thousands of miners in work but it had no problem finding the money to bomb the Kosovan capital, Pristina, to smithereens! We cannot afford to look after our own people but apparently we can afford to kill someone else's.

Well, there are two ways to provide the money to buy the missiles: take it from the citizenry through tax or borrow it from banks - and have the citizenry pay off the interest forever through tax.

Perhaps the government should come clean and inform us exactly how this war is being financed.

And when the war is over where does the money come from to finance the horrendously expensive job of rebuilding ravaged nations and smashed cities? More borrowing. The bankers, the suppliers to the world of money as credit, cannot lose. It does not matter which side wins, so long as they are at war.

PLUNDER BY PROXY.

An overview of the whole banking picture lays bare, in essence, the bankers' formula of World War Two as follows:

Find a cheap politician like Hitler. Lend him the money to build a war machine. Get him to pay you back with interest from the plunder of Europe before he collapses. Then while the fires are still smouldering, lend Europe the money to rebuild after the war is over and get its taxpayers to pay you back with interest.

This is plunder by proxy. The robber barons and pirates of old had to do their own dirty work but their modern equivalent do not even have to get their smart suits crumpled or bullet holes in the nice new Rolls.

Hitler, as we now know, was a psychiatric patient and German psychiatry, generously supported by Western banking interests, engineered the holocaust. Montagu Norman, the then Governor of the Bank of England and himself a psychiatric patient, "propped up Hitler's credit, arranged the armament of Nazi Germany, and guided the strategies of Hitler's powerful supporters - the [bankers] Rockefellers, Warburgs and Harrimans." (Executive Intelligence Review 7.10.94)

The parallels with Yugoslavia are on many levels quite uncanny but let us look at how banking interests, the global cartels, engineered war in Yugoslavia and the systematic dismantling of an entire country.

The first thing to realise about Yugoslavia, something on which the British press - being subservient to transglobal corporate interests - have been remarkably quiet, is that hers was a success story.

Yugoslavia suffered cruelly in World War Two and emerged from it in ruins. In that war she was our ally and lost 1.5 million people fighting the Nazis, standing against some 30 German divisions and losing more men than the United States in the process. These people saved many Jewish lives and the lives of many allied airmen.

After the war, under the leadership of Marshall Tito and with her economy organised along the non-capitalist, non-communist lines of social ownership and workers' cooperatives, Yugoslavia did a manifestly admirable job of rebuilding herself.

Her average annual rate of economic growth in GDP prior to 1980 was 6.1% over a twenty year period; there was free medical care with one doctor per 550 population; the literacy rate was of the order of 91% (higher, we believe, than either Britain, the US or Germany); life expectancy was 72 years. It is also worth noting that Yugoslavia embraced a federation of Southern Slavs. Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrans, Kosovars and the like, regardless of whatever had passed between them historically, were in the present getting along just fine - certainly as fine as the ethnic groups of America, Britain or Germany. As you know, past historical differences do not of themselves create present conflicts, otherwise Englishmen and Scotsmen, Czechs and Slovacs, Athenians and Spartans, Prussians and Bavarians and God knows who else would be busy ethnically cleansing one another right now with considerable enthusiasm.

We must also remind ourselves that in the current debt-money system, successful economies are the ones that run up the highest debts to the banks. They have to. Why? As an economy grows and more goods and services are created to be exchanged among people, more money - the tokens that represent those goods and services and facilitate their exchange - must be created and fed into the system. If that does not happen, the increased quantity of goods and services outstrips the amount of money in circulation and you have deflation. Deflation dampens down and ultimately suppresses economic growth. The whole thing then grinds to a halt.

In the current system the only way the money supply is increased is through issuing money as credit. Thus, as money supply increases to keep pace with increased production, the amount owed to the banks increases even faster.

From the point of view of corporate capitalism with the international banking cartels at its head, Yugoslavia's success story was a dangerous example. It did not follow the capitalist model and others might copy it. Its orientation towards social ownership and workers cooperatives also made it harder for the big corporations to move in and start gobbling up ownership of its locks, its stocks and its barrels as they have in England and elsewhere. Yugoslavia also has oil.

So again, looking at it from the point of view of some corporate capitalist Rockefeller-type sitting at the apex of a vast globe-spanning web of corporate and banking interests, something needed to be done about Yugoslavia.

How does one dismantle a stable and successful economy and move its considerable assets under corporate-capitalist control? And how does one into the bargain destabilise its ethnic groups so that the country will disunite and split irreparably into its smaller and weaker component parts?

One needs a lever, or rather a crowbar. The international bankers had a crowbar. Because of its success, the admirable job done by its people of rebuilding a prosperous and internally stable nation out of the ruins of World War Two, Yugoslavia had a national debt. As we have seen the current debt- money system creates a contradiction in which successful economies are and must be heavily indebted.

Yugoslavia owed a great deal of money to the international banking cartels. When a debtor, be it an individual or an entire country, owes its creditors money, those creditors can extract from the debtor certain terms and conditions in exchange for rescheduling those loans or for granting further loans.

Poland and Russia are modern examples of nations in hock to the bankers up to their collective eyeballs and obliged to implement austere economic measures in exchange for re-negotiating their loans. Just what kinds of "economic restructuring," "economic reform" or "austerity measures" is demanded by the creditors depend on which nation the creditors are dealing with and what they want to do with or to that nation. If they want to wreck a nation, all they need to do is set their conditions accordingly. If they want that nation to succeed, well that can be arranged too. But the plug can be pulled just as easily as the tap can be turned on.

Yugoslavia was dismantled and control or ownership of its industries and other assets was transferred to western corporate interests. How was it done?

First came economic "reforms" imposed by Belgrade's creditors. Those reforms essentially undid the successful actions of the post World War Two decades and plunged a once expanding economy into massive recession. They wreaked political and economic havoc that has caused the country to fracture and fall apart. NATO bombs seem to be completing the job by doing the same thing to the country's infrastructure. Bridges, roads, factories, refineries and the likes are being demolished and tens of thousands of Serbs and Kosovars rendered jobless.

The industrial sector was decimated and the Welfare State dismantled. The accumulation of foreign debt through the IMF (International Monetary Fund, basically an international banking institution which lends money conjured out of thin air to nations at interest) the restructuring and resultant increased cost of servicing that debt, devaluation, wage freezes, drastic curtailment of government expenditure and the abrogation of socially owned enterprises under self-management - in summary an increased flow of money out of the economy and into the coffers of international banks - precipitated an abrupt downturn in Yugoslavia's economic health. Industrial growth plummeted to 2.8% in 1980-87, then zero in 1987-88 and to minus 10.6 percent in 1990.

One must confront the ugly fact that this caving in of the Yugoslavian economy was entirely deliberate. If the international banking community had intended to help Yugoslavia to flourish, it could just have easily cancelled her debts. This would have cost them nothing because the money loaned came out of thin air in the first place. However as the intent was far different from help, savage conditions were imposed and Yugoslavia's economy began to unravel.

And with it, so did her society.

The austerity measures imposed by creditors upon that country as a condition of rescheduling her loans or lending her further money to cover the loan repayments she could not make, shoved her into a ferocious, devastating and ultimately fatal recession.

YUGOSLAVIA - BREAKING FOR SPARES.

In 1989, as the country slid into deeper economic trouble as a direct consequence of economic "reforms" demanded by her creditors, the then Federal premier travelled to Washington and negotiated a "financial aid package" - more loans of money conjured out of thin air - in exchange for further sweeping economic "reform" that included a devalued currency, making it more difficult to pay off the loan - a wage freeze (reduction of spending power) and drastic curtailment of government expenditure, which means less money flowing into the economy.

These measures, among other things, crippled the federal State system by depriving it of funds. Tax and other revenues which should have been transferred to the federal states and autonomous provinces were diverted instead to servicing the country's debt to Paris and London creditors. The states and provinces were starved of federal revenue and largely left to fend for themselves. The federal institutions and federal fiscal structure were thereby severely crippled and the political disintegration of the federal system accelerated.

Thus the budgetary crisis induced by the IMF contributed mightily to the alienation and eventual secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991.

The then government of the State of Serbia meanwhile had rejected the new austerity measures outright and this led to a walk-out of some 650,000 Serbian workers in protest against the federal government. The Yugoslavian Trades Union movement was united in its opposition to the new measures and worker resistance crossed ethnic lines. It included Bosnian, Slovenian, Serbian and Croatian workers standing side-by-side.

The IMF and World Bank's economic "reforms" shoved the country's industrial sector into bankruptcy. By 1990 annual growth of GDP had collapsed to minus 7.5% and declined a further fifteen percent in 1991, while output collapsed by 21 percent.

Among new legislation hastily cobbled together by western lawyers and consultants were measures to abolish socially owned productive units under the management of workers' councils and transform them into private capitalist enterprises under the control, in part, of their creditors. At the same time the entire three-tier banking system of Yugoslavia was liquidated and replaced by independent "profit oriented" institutions.

Measures were introduced under the IMF-World Bank sponsored reforms to freeze credit (ie cut off the money supply) to the industrial sector in order to speed up the process of creating bankruptcies, allowing creditors (national and foreign banks) to convert their loans into a controlling equity in the enterprises they had shoved into bankruptcy. The results were catastrophic. In 1989 248 firms were bankrupted or liquidated and 89,400 workers laid off. In the first nine months of 1990 a further 889 enterprises "failed" and a combined work force of 525,000 was laid off, normally without severance payments. In less than two years more than 600,000 workers out of an industrial work force of 2.7 million were thrown out of work. The largest concentrations of bankruptcies and lay-offs were in Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo.

Real earnings were in free-fall, social programs had collapsed and, as companies attempted to avoid bankruptcy by not paying wages, 20 percent of the industrial labour force were not paid during the first months of 1990. At the same time a flood of imports purchased with loans granted by the World Bank and IMF further destabilised the home markets, adding in the process even more to the country's debt to the international cartels. Abrupt hikes in interest rates had further crippled the ability of home producers to compete in their own market place.

The mood in the population was, understandably, one of despair and hopelessness. As a direct result of measures imposed by the international bankers, Yugoslavia was experiencing a social and economic catastrophe of immense proportions.

This program of bankruptcy continued unabated throughout the civil war and its aftermath and similar or even more severe "restructuring" measures have continued to be imposed on Yugoslavia's successor states by their external creditors.

These reforms are a natural extension of those implemented in federal Yugoslavia.

Fighting a long and brutal war is a financial burden on the participants, who are obliged to borrow heavily from the international banks to both finance the war and then finance the expensive job of rebuilding their shattered countries when the war winds down. Where else do the likes of Slobodan Milosevic acquire the funds to buy on the international arms markets tanks, shells and all the paraphernalia of warfare?

Newly independent states have emerged from the chaos already crippled by debt and obliged to cooperate in "economic reforms" instigated by their creditors. Their leaders in fact vie to cooperate with their creditors so as to qualify for "investment loans" and the economic reforms imposed actually hamper the job of rebuilding. Much of the money provided for "reconstruction" was however intended to enable repayment of earlier debt arrears.

In Bosnia, for example, the reins of economic policy have been handed over to, in part, the London based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, whilst the governor of its central bank must now be an appointee of the World Bank and IMF. Management of various parts of the Bosnian economy has been handed over to representatives of the various donor agencies. In effect control of the new "country" now resides firmly in the hands of western banking interests.

One might say that Bosnia has been quietly annexed by western banking cartels, to "save it" from suppression by Serbia, whilst the other states of the former Yugoslavia are not far behind.

Austerity measures imposed as a condition of new loans crash the economy and necessitate further loans. A civil war financed by loans and the resultant rebuilding financed by loans which actually are used to pay off old loans and divert money from the vital job of rebuilding, whilst racking up the state's external debt, the liquidation of enterprises and resultant takeover by external creditors all show a pattern of debilitation and virtual annexation by western banking and corporate interests.

The most frightening aspect of what has been done to dismantle and share out an entire country is that the same tactics could be applied anywhere. All countries have debts and all countries can be hit by massive hikes in interest rates or the withholding of loans needed to finance budget deficits. Any country could be targeted and dismantled. Including yours.

It is not hard to imagine therefore the likes of Tony Blair being obliged to cooperate in plans to hit a particular country militarily, whatever their individual feelings on the matter, in the face of an implicit or stated threat to "pull the rug out" from under their own national economy. Within the current global monetary set-up an already bankrupt and impossibly indebted country like Britain could quite easily be pushed over the brink into economic collapse. All the bankers have to do is withhold the credit-money supply or impose harsh conditions for further loans. Without those loans Britain would move abruptly into recession.

Of course, some might feel that we are being unduly charitable to Blair and Clinton, but BAMR's purpose is to expose the real architects of this conflict whose sinister manipulations have hitherto remained hidden from view.

THE ENGINEERING OF ETHNIC CONFLICT

There is another aspect to the breakup of Yugoslavia which we have not yet addressed. And that is the creation of ethnic tensions between its member groups.

This is the old "divide and rule" routine. If internal disunity can be achieved, in the view of those with their greedy eyes on the country's assets and oil reserves, this would form the dual purpose of breaking up the federation into its small and more manageable member states. At the same time conflict would act as a smoke-screen and scape-goat for the real causes of disintegration and impoverishment. And, as we have seen, a civil war means lots of borrowing to finance it, plus lots of lovely borrowing to finance rebuilding afterwards, and oodles of buying weapons from British and American arms manufacturers in whom the bankers often have share-holdings in any case. All this is lovely stuff for the banking cartels.

But how do you get people who have been living together peacefully for a number of years as neighbours, whose past differences are where they belong - in the past - who stood shoulder to shoulder in opposition to the reform measures and who are in any case among the most decent and sociable people on the entire planet, to start tearing one another to pieces?

This is where the bankers' old weapon against populations came in, those proven experts in the area of mass manipulation: psychiatry.

International banking interests have traditionally flowed money into psychiatry's coffers. They heavily financed, for example, German psychiatry in the build-up to World War Two. Nazi psychiatry implemented the archetypal "ethnic cleansing" programs of the Third Reich, although at the time it went under the name of "racial hygiene". Banking firms like the Rockefellers poured money into British psychiatry, notably the Tavistock psychological warfare centre in London.

Similarly Serbian psychiatry.......

From the ranks of Serbian psychiatry emerged one Jovan Raskovic and his book the "Mad Country", a pseudo-scientific work in which the mind-doctor, an enthusiastic practitioner of ECT (electro-convulsive torture) purported to have "discovered" that the Serbian people were superior to their Balkan neighbours and the only fit race to assume leadership of the region. This psychiatrist and his book were feted, lionised and promoted through the Belgrade media and Raskovic was granted the status of the greatest scientific thinker of his age. Apparently the Serbs are not up to thinking for themselves as we are and actually believe what they read in the papers!

The parallels with Nazi psychiatry are chilling. In Nazi Germany similar pseudo-scientific arguments were put forward, during a similar period of engineered economic collapse, by psychiatrists like the infamous Ernst Rudin, that targeted the Jews and other ethnic minorities as the inferior races and as the scapegoats for the country's ills. Masquerading as science such propaganda provided justification for the suppression of a "inferior" race by a "superior" one - although what is so superior about the cowardly act of herding frightened mothers and their children into a shed and killing them using a deadly gas (manufactured by the way by IG Farben a company led by the Warburg banking family, partners of the Rockefeller banking family right through the Holocaust and World War Two) is beyond me. Perhaps one had to be there.

The trick is to dehumanise the victim. If you can make someone believe that someone else is somehow less human (dumber, dirtier, sneakier, smellier, creepier or whatever) and less worthy of life, then vicious suppression of the victim's rights can be made to seem acceptable or even necessary. Certainly the attitudes of Serbian ethnic cleansers towards the Bosnians and now the Albanians in Kosovo show that the Serb mind-set, on the part of some Serbs anyway, has lurched dramatically in that direction.

A program of "scientific" vilification of non-Serbs was conducted by Serbian psychiatry and popularised through the Belgrade media.

Alongside this was run a campaign of reawakening old differences and grievances and restimulating historical fears of one ethnic group towards another, along with some carefully staged incidents to "prove" the point.

In Croatia Raskovic installed three ex-mental patients of his to start up a Serbian Democratic party to represent the Serbian communities within Croatia and to stir up Serbian nationalist sentiment against the Croatian government. Raskovic did the same in Bosnia where his pupil the "Butcher of Bosnia," psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic was installed as a leader of the Serbs in Bosnia. The rest is history and does not need re-telling here except to point out that, as in Nazi Germany where psychiatrists ran the extermination (racial hygiene) programs, in Serbia psychiatrists appeared to figure prominently in similar programs, now dubbed ethnic cleansing.

It should be remembered that such propaganda entered into societies already rife with uncertainty and a popular mood of fear and bewilderment. Member states of the Yugoslav federation were already driven to near despair by harsh economic reforms instigated by the IMF and World Bank. A long period of liquidations and bankruptcies, lay-offs, non payment of wages and plummeting living standards had been engineered. The federal system was already fracturing fiscally and people were thrown into disillusionment with the political traditions and institutions of their country. This was fertile ground for psychiatry to work its dark magic, using its knowledge of mass manipulation to stir up ethnic tensions between hard-pressed and fearful groups.

Bewildered and demoralised peoples were induced both to blame and to fear one another. These tensions grew and simmered and finally exploded. The civil war ensued and by the end of it the member states were hopelessly in hock to the banking cartels. Western banking interests had more or less taken control and have worked ever since to tighten that control still further.

If some pretext can be found to have troops on the ground, an armed physical presence in the annexed territory and if it can be done in such a way that it appears to be "help" and is not only not opposed but is supported by other nations, then one really has it made.

The civil war was seen as the cause of impoverishment but the civil war was a symptom, a deliberately created and highly profitable smoke-screen that explained it away and successfully hid from view the real causes. It also provided an excuse, in Bosnia's case, to have an armed "peace- keeping" force physically present in the country to protect and enforce the interests of the country's new masters.

So too the civil war in Kosovo.

Keeping Belgrade in the frame of mind to commit the atrocities that can be shown in western media and used as an unassailable reason for moving in an occupying force is easy if you are an international banker.

You find yourself a cheap politician, a Hitleresque stooge whom your pals in Serbian psychiatry have messed up with electro-shock and drugs and turned into a man-made monster without impulse control or feelings of responsibility or remorse.

Thus we have Slobodan Milosevic, ex-patient of the psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic, whose parents committed suicide and whose own wife is taking psychiatric drugs for "depression", in power in Belgrade. Slobodan can be relied on to support Karadzic's atrocities in Bosnia and the similar atrocities being carried out against the Kosovars because Slobodan is not quite right in the head.

The western media one controls can be relied upon to report the atrocities committed by Slobodan's Serbian troops, themselves out of their heads on drugs supplied his psychiatrist pals, in graphic detail. Western TV screens show streams of refugees fleeing the ethnic cleansing and the NATO bombs raining down on their villages from the sky. Slobodan's ethnic cleansing can be blamed without your media having to make things up. Your tame media will report what you want them to report and ignore what you want them to ignore. The public under this barrage can be persuaded to accept the invasion of a foreign country as a tragic but unavoidable measure to protect innocent people. They will applaud the bombing of women and children as "the only way to stop the killing".

The British and American arms manufacturers stand to make a bundle but this is never mentioned, and everyone misses the irony of the Apache helicopters despatched to the American Balkans war machine: 'Apache' was the name of one of the many native American cultures ethnically cleansed virtually to extinction.

Good, mad old Slobodan can be relied on to keep things going to the bitter end, until Serbia and Kosovo both lie in ruins and the international bankers, fresh from lending money to finance the war, can conjure new loans out of thin air to finance the rebuilding of shattered nations, whilst western business interests move in like vultures and asset-strip the smoking remains.

NATO has been manouevered into breaking international law by using force against a sovereign nation that poses no threat to them, while claiming they are acting in the interests of humanity or civilisation as we know it or some such fabrication. Milosevic is a man-made monster messed up by drugs and ECT - one wonders what excuse NATO leaders (and they know who they are) have for their war crimes.

Far from its original mandate, to protect Europe from outside aggression, NATO has become the military arm of the banking system, its once proud armies, our sons and daughters, unwitting enforcers for the global loan sharks. And the loan sharks do not even have to pay for their services. We do that, through our taxes.

The more nations can be dragged into this expensive mess, the more cruise missiles fired, bombs dropped and sorties sent out, the more it costs. The arms manufacturers and other firms linked into the military-industrial complex of the peace-loving West, see their shares soar on the stock market and no war can be financed without loans.

The bankers meanwhile, if they really wanted to, could stop Milosevic any time without a shot being fired or a NATO pilot risking life and limb to strafe a TV station. All they have to do is stop lending him money!

They could launch a full economic recovery of the region too, and in the process restore peace and stability, simply by cancelling all outstanding debt. It would not cost them anything because the money they loaned did not exist in the first place.

Bombing Kosovo and Serbia to bits will achieve nothing but make bankers rich and at the same time exacerbate hatred and mistrust. It will maim and kill a lot of innocent men, women and children. Almost all the casualties of NATO bombing thus far have been non-combatants, many of them Albanians, whose only crime was to be part of a successful nation on which western corporate interests had designs.

If you want to stop murder in the Balkans it is the bankers to whom you should address your protest because it is they who hold the power and they who have engineered the conflict. And it is they who, with a snap of their fingers, could stop the ethnic cleansing overnight.

There is a simple solution to the whole thing that restores justice and necessitates not a shot being fired. The solution applies not only to Yugoslavia but to all nations.

The first step is for all of us who care is to unite and with one voice expose and denounce the real machinations that created the tragedy.

The second step is to cancel the country's debt. It is money owed on the basis of loans that were created out of nothing in the first place.

The third step is for the country's government to restore unto itself the job of issuing the country's money supply. The money brought into circulation thereafter is spent into existence, not loaned. All the government has to do is ensure the money supply does not outstrip economic growth and create inflation, nor fall too far short of it to create deflation.

The money thus issued would be used to reduce taxation.

Considering that government debt repayment, and debt pushing up the cost of virtually every service and commodity, is built into taxation, that reduction would be considerable.

Any country with an adequate supply of real, stable money, any country with reduced taxation and free from crippling debt-financing that seeps insidiously into every nook and cranny of the economy, would boom.

There would be enough money supply for schools and hospitals to be built, unencumbered industries would flourish and their people would be able to get on with the business of living without the artificially created stress of debt-money sabotaging their every effort to live decent lives.

Any nation producing its own money would no longer be prey to the manipulations of creditors. It could run its affairs in the interests of its people without crippling austerity measures being imposed on it from outside.

Without the influence of those external creditors, nations could not be manoeuvred into war by third parties who profit from people killing one another.

The war in Yugoslavia was created. The people of the region and we in the West have been manipulated into waging it. Not one Serb, not one Kosovar, Englishman, American or anybody else needs to die. No bridges, schools, hospitals or roads have to be blown up using weapons that you and I pay for one way or the other. Madmen like Milosevic and Clinton do not have to order in tanks, troops or planes against ordinary people to"solve" a problem that was created by international bankers manipulating a debt-money supply that those bankers conjured out of nothing to begin with.

The bankers, given the power they have currently, could stop Milosevic and bring the troops on all sides home in the blink of an eye if they wanted to. But they won't.

So it is up to us. We can stop this war and all such future wars because reform of the money system is the key and it is easy to implement given the will and the demand for it.

Now that we know how the whole thing was engineered, now that we know how to resolve it, this war, if it continues, will be our personal responsibility.

It won't be good enough to blame nuts like Milosevic, cynics like Clinton or vacillators like Blair. Refugees of various nationalities are dying under a hail of Serbian bullets and NATO bombs.

They are our friends. For God's sake let's help them. We all have the same common enemy.

MAN - THE MUCH MALIGNED

It is self-evident that things do not just "happen". They have causes, be those causes natural or the actions of men.

Wars, for example, are created by the deliberate actions of people. Someone has to want a war for it to happen and that someone has to be in a position to make his wish reality - and virtually every war will analyse down to that someone being a third party playing one side off against the other.

Man as a rule finds wars scary, disruptive, expensive, painful, messy and incredibly inconvenient. He does not like them and has better things to do with his brief time on Earth. He is too busy bringing up his kids, pursuing his career, fixing up his house and enjoying football, to be much tempted to dismember people he has not even met, with whom he had no beef to begin with and who live half across the planet in any case. And that applies to you, me, Americans, Serbs, Kosovars or anyone else.

One thing you can say with certainty about any war: ninety nine percent of the participants desperately don't want to be in it and the tiny minority who do are not usually the ones dodging the bombs and bullets.

If someone happens to be psychotic and really wants to get a nice war going, he finds it takes a lot of serious endeavour. People would rather not, if it's all the same to you, have to dig red-hot shrapnel out of their flesh or set fire to their neighbours' children. People must be cajoled, hoodwinked, implored, bribed, frightened, angered or otherwise persuaded into it because it is very low on their list of things to do with their all too brief span of years. They do not regard war as fun.

That is not to say Man is naturally a pacifist either. He will fight if he considers that his survival is threatened or, nobly, when he perceives that the survival of others is threatened.

Unfortunately that very nobility can be used against him. If you want to persuade men to make war, then create a real or imagined threat to them or to other people in whose defence they will take up arms.

Man somehow keeps winding up in these situations, up to his elbows in blood and gore, with dead children in his arms and the cities he laboured so long to build lying in ruins.

Psychiatry and other "philosophies" explain this away as a flaw in the genes and encourage Man to picture himself as some kind of rabid animal, an advanced predator for whom cruelty, pain and destruction are natural conditions.

This false view, however, contradicts the mass of evidence to the contrary. One has only to look at Man's behaviour when he is left alone to get on with the business of living: his willingness to help his fellows, his art and architecture, his religions, sports and recreations, his moral codes and his spontaneous outrage at perceived injustice or cruelty and the fact that at any one moment ninety nine percent of human beings are not at war with one another, to realise that war is the exception, a blip in the general pattern of Man's behaviour.

He is, in other words, basically decent but it is possible, if you are determined and work hard enough at it, to get him very upset.

Blaming it on "human nature" or shaking one's head in despair at how imperfect we are as a species not only does not solve the problem of war, it also guarantees that wars will go on happening. It also means we neglect to examine any war deeper than its superficial causes to see if there is, to coin a phrase, something funny going on.

If Man is basically good and decent and more interested in the football results than disembowelling some stranger, then perhaps the spawning of any war can be narrowed down to some cause more specific than general congenital dementia.

If a normally sane man suddenly goes mad we look for a cause, rather than blaming it on his genes. Was he hit on the head? Was he drugged or provoked beyond endurance? Is there then some hidden influence at work driving Man to war? We don't hate each other as a rule and regardless of creed or origins tend to want to get along with one another because there's no point in making life harder than it already is. So we are being manoeuvred in some way into blowing one another's brains out, into acting against our instincts and our basic nature?

A closer look at the war in Yugoslavia shows that this is very much the case.

Milosevic is slaughtering Kosovars, says the superficial explanation, NATO must intervene to stop the evil Milosevic killing Kosovars. The only way to do that is bomb the daylights out of first Kosovo and then Serbia.

In so doing it completely ignores "unimportant" facts that apparently the public does not need to know: such as the fact that NATO bombing has probably killed or displaced more Kosovars than Serb bullets or that Sad Slobodan, recently feted by the US State department as a man they could "do business with", could have been stopped in his tracks at any time without a shot being fired - had the West, or more specifically western banks, really wanted him stopped - and many other pieces of trivia hardly worth mentioning.

Of course nobody nowadays is gullible enough to believe that what he receives through the media is accurate information. And, true to form, what is currently masquerading as information is the usual concoction of half truths, omitted truths, filtered truths and downright fabrications designed to engender in the public a particular emotional and intellectual response - in this case popular support for NATO violating its own mandate and international law by bombing the aforementioned daylights out of the people of the Balkans as the "only available option".

Ask yourself who owns the media ?

The mandarins controlling our media may be a shifty bunch and they may work for a pretty dodgy cabal of corporate godfathers but they are nothing if not consistent. Unfortunately for them that very consistency is working against them. People have pretty well got them taped and have worked out a reliable rule of thumb: if it's in the media it isn't true.

Fair enough. But what is true? Who engineered conflict in the Balkans and how? Behind the superficial causes and the media-concocted, sanitised, edited highlights and slo-mo action replay special effects, what really happened?

What were the tactics used and powers deployed by certain men whereby Serb plumber was induced to kill Kosovo housewife, Kosovo bus conductor to kill Serb schoolboy - and young Brits, Americans, Canadians et al to kill by dropping large bombs on their heads and homes both Serb and Kosovar teachers, plumbers, schoolboys, toddlers, grandmothers, nurses and TV station doormen and make-up ladies?

If we really are going to cheer on the bombers and acquiesce in the systematic destruction of Kosovan and Serbian towns, the agonizing deaths of thousands of Serbs and Kosovars shrieking down upon them from the sky and at the same time hold onto our self respect, then we are duty bound to do better than base such support uncritically on sources of information that we know full well are unreliable.

If we are going to keep the right to call ourselves decent, civilised men, then we are duty bound to think for ourselves and to take a long hard look at exactly what has been going on.

The Slobodans, Clintons and Blairs of this world can act like maniacs cast far adrift from the vestiges of their reason and humanity and the media can behave like a new species of invertebrate complete with forked tongue but we do not have to be a party to it.

We can hold our heads up and act like men.

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented...If you want to be slaves to the bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the banks create money."


Lord Stamp, Former Director of the Bank of England

Kieron McFadden

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