By Dr. Ingrid Rimland Zundel
Thanks to best-selling author, David Irving, the establishment view that the United States of America became embroiled in World War II as a result of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941 is no longer accepted by major historians. The origins of this conflict, says South African politician and noted banker, Stephen Goodson, have far deeper roots.
Goodson explains the background as follows:
During the 1930s Japan rapidly expanded her industrial production, while the rest of the world, with the exception of National Socialist Germany, stagnated. By 1941 Japan had become the leading economic power in East Asia. Her exports were steadily replacing those of America and England.
Writes Goodson:
- Japan has very few natural resources, so what was the secret of her success? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to return to the year 1929, when one of the twentieth century’s foremost monetary reformers, Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, went on a lecture tour of Japan.
Douglas’s economic theory advocated the transfer of the money creation process from private banks, which create money out of nothing as an interest-bearing debt, to the state. This government created money he termed social credit. He also favored the payment of a basic income or national dividend to each citizen. This dividend would provide consumers with the additional buying power necessary to absorb all the current production of goods in a non-inflationary manner2.
- Douglas’s financial proposals for an honest money system, based on government creating the nation’s money and credit on an interest-free basis, were enthusiastically received by Japanese industry and government.3
All Douglas’s books and pamphlets were translated into Japanese, and more copies were sold in that country than in all the rest of the world put together.4
Since its inception in 1882 the largest shareholder of the Bank of Japan (Nippon Ginko) had been the Japanese Imperial Household. Its reorganization into a state bank, which was administered exclusively for the accomplishment of national interests, was implemented in 1932.
The reform of the central bank was completed in February 1942 when the Bank of Japan Law was remodeled on the Reichsbank Act of Germany of 1939.
Goodson continues:
“The Bank of Japan Law declared that the bank was a special corporation of a strongly national nature. The Bank was ‘to assume the task of controlling currency and finance and supporting and promoting the credit system in conformity with policies of the state to ensure the full use of the nation’s potential’. Further, it was ‘to be managed with the accomplishment of national aims as its sole guiding principle’ (Article 2).
As for the functions of the Bank, the law abolished the old principle of priority for commercial finance, empowering it to supervise facilities for industrial finance. The law also authorized the Bank to make unlimited advances to the government without security, and to subscribe for and to absorb government bonds.
In respect of note-issues the law made permanent the system of the maximum issues limit; thus, the Bank could make unlimited issues to meet the requirements of munitions industries and of the government.
On the other hand, government supervision of the Bank was markedly strengthened. The government could nominate, superintend and give orders to the president and the directors; there was also a clause giving the government more comprehensive powers to give so-called ‘functional orders’ to the Bank, to direct it to perform any function it deemed necessary for the attainment of the Bank’s purpose.
Moreover, the law made a wide range of the Bank’s business subject to governmental approval, including such matters as the alteration of Bank rate, note-issues and accounts”.5
The results of these reforms can be seen in the sustained improvement which took place in the Japanese economy, once the shackles of usury had been removed. During the 1931-41 period, manufacturing output and industrial production increased by 140% and 136% respectively, while national income and Gross National Product (GNP) were up by 241% and 259% respectively. These remarkable increases exceeded by a wide margin the economic growth of the rest of the industrialized world.
In the labour market unemployment declined from 5.3% in 1930 to 3.0% in 1938. Industrial disputes decreased with the number of stoppages down from 998 in 1931 to 159 in 1941.
In contrast to Japan, America had a private, mostly foreign owned central bank, the United States Federal Reserve Bank. Since its establishment on December 23, 1913 under highly suspicious circumstances, this bank had been undermining the US Constitution and destroying the freedom and prosperity of the American people.
A contemporary indictment of the US Federal Reserve may be found in a quotation from the opening paragraphs of a speech given by the Honorable Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency (1920-31). It was delivered to Congress on June 10, 1932 to the general acclaim of the members present.
“Mr. McFadden. Mr Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever know. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt.
The depredations and the iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks acting together have cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over.
This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States; has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are not Government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.”
Mr. McFadden then went on to expose how the Federal Reserve Bank buys votes in the States in order to control the state legislatures; and how they use their vast financial resources in maintaining “an international propaganda” for covering up their previous misdeeds and setting in motion new opportunities for their “gigantic train of crime”.
According to McFadden, these 12 private credit monopolies were “deceitfully and disloyally” foisted on an unsuspecting public by foreign bankers, who in 1904 bankrolled Japan in her war with Russia. In 1917 they financed Trotsky’s political programme in America and paid for his passage to Russia. With the assistance of their branch banks in Sweden, these international bankers “fomented and instigated the Russian Revolution”, which resulted in the “destruction of the Russian Empire”.
Goodson points out something astounding to many of the uninitiated:
It can thus be seen that the US Federal Reserve Bank was intimately involved in plotting and financing the overthrow of the Russian Empire7. With its stranglehold on the media and its placemen occupying most of the key positions in government in 1941, the Bank was in a favourable position from which to manipulate and provoke war with Japan.