The Ugly Truth of John Maynard Keynes and the Battle of Bretton Woods
The Ugly Truth of John Maynard Keynes and the Battle of Bretton Woods
Lord Keynes talking with the USSR and Yugoslavian representatives at Bretton Woods 1944
Seventy-five years of revisionist historians largely funded by the British Roundtable/Chatham House and its American branch (The Council on Foreign Relations) have obstructed the true anti-imperial nature of the founding intention of Bretton Woods and the post war order centered on the United Nations.
Then, much as today, two opposing factions were vying to shape the essence of the world order as the Nazi machine (funded by Wall Street and London’s Bank of International Settlements) was drawing to a close.
In case anyone was confused about these factions, I am not speaking of capitalism vs. communism.
This faction fight in question was between New Deal nationalists led by Franklin Roosevelt vs those racist imperialists represented by Sir Winston Churchill who wished to use the crisis of the war to establish a revived British Empire strengthened by American muscle. FDR’s New Dealers were characterized by their total adherence to the belief that the plague of colonialism had to be undone and a new age of long-term development of great infrastructure projects had to characterize the community of sovereign nations for the coming century. These patriots believed in the internationalization of the New Deal, were committed to working with Russia and China as natural allies of America and profoundly distrusted the British.
In the case of Bretton Woods, where representatives from 44 nations convened for two weeks to create a new post war system in July 1944, this fight amounted to a battle between FDR’s trusted economic advisor Harry Dexter White (first director of the IMF and ally of FDR’s vice-president Henry Wallace) and Lord John Maynard Keynes (eugenicist, pedophile[1] and defender of the British Empire).
Churchill and Keynes: Hard Racist/Soft Racist of the Empire
Where Churchill represented the unapologetic conservative proponent of the “White Man’s Burden” to exercise dominion over the “inferior” colored peoples of the earth, Keynes represented the soft cop of the Empire as a “Fabian Society Socialist” (aka: Social Engineer) from the London School of Economics. Where Churchill’s ilk preferred mowing down their enemies with Canons, body counts and torture as seen in the Boer War or opium wars or WWI, Keynes’ Fabian methods preferred attrition and slow subversion. Either way, the result of either pathway was the same.
While many know of the racist and pro-fascist views of Sir Churchill who spoke admiringly of Mussolini and even Hitler[2]in the early days when it was still believed that these fascists and corporatists would act as marcher lords for the financial oligarchy, but most people are unaware that Keynes also supported Hitler and despised FDR.
Contradicting the mythos that FDR was a Keynesian, FDR’s assistant Francis Perkins recorded the 1934 interactionbetween the two men when Roosevelt told her[3]:
“I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”
Keynes the Fabian Eugenicist
Although Keynes is heralded as the guiding light of the New Deal (and, as such defended by modern Green New Dealers and Great Reset technocrats wishing to impose a top-down system of governance onto the world), the fact is that Keynes not only detested Franklin Roosevelt, but also humanity more in general.
This will be seen clearly in 1) his devotion to the theories of Thomas Malthus, 2) his promotion of eugenics as a science of racial purification and population control, and 3) his general devotion to World Government as a leading member of the Fabian Society.
From his earliest days at Cambridge where he rose quickly to become one of the select Cambridge Apostles[4], Keynes devoted himself to the service of empire, becoming Knight of the Order of Bath and Order of Leopold by 1919.
His early 1911 book on Indian Currency and Finance[5] (conducted during his five-year foray in the Empire’s Indian Office) ignored all actual political reasons for the famines plaguing India and argued coldly for a greater integration of the Indian banking system into the City of London controls which would somehow solve India’s problems. The provable reality was that Indian famines were coordinated tools of population control[6] by the Malthusian elite of the British establishment who considered “war, famine and disease” as the gifts nature gave the strong to manage the weak.
While his later 1919 Consequences of the Peace appeared to be a reasonably sympathetic warning that the draconian Versailles reparations would do incredible damage and lead to a new world war, in reality, Keynes was displaying a cold sleight of hand. Serving as British Treasury representative to the Versailles Conference, Keynes never opposed fascism: he merely argued that a more liberal pathway to global fascism could be established under the direction of the Bank of England. His opposition, though, to the more violent approach preferred by conservative imperialists among the British Intelligentsia, was one of form more than substance.
Keynes and his fellow Fabians H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and G.B Shaw preferred the “slow and steady” “long game”, reminiscent of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus who famously fought his enemies by slow attrition rather than in full-scale confrontation[7]. Due to the public’s general ignorance of this strategy, we celebrate these Fabian Society luminaries for their pacifism, though in reality they were just as racist, fascist and eugenics-loving as their more short-sighted, hard-stomached counterparts sir Oswald Mosley, Lord Alfred Milner and even Winston Churchill.
Where the real solution to the hyperinflationary money printing and economic industrial shutdown of Germany during the post WWI years was to be found in the German-Russian Rapallo Agreement (destroyed with the assassination of American System Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau[8]), Keynes and his ilk merely called for economic integration of the German banking and military system under Bank of England/League of Nations control.
Keynes: Disciple of Thomas Malthus
Defining his misanthropic belief in overpopulation, British East India Company economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) asserted a new “fundamental law” in his famous 1799 Essay on Population:
“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
How could this crisis be avoided? Malthus answers it like only a devout imperialist could:
“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”
Although some apologists considered Keynes an anti-Malthusian- due to his theory that overpopulation might be overcome by encouraging spending rather than savings, which would, in turn, somehow create markets and thence new factories and more growth, the reality was the opposite. Keynes not only spoke gushingly of Malthus throughout his life as one of the greatest minds of all time, but even plagiarized many of Malthus’ own theories[9], for instance that of “demand deficiency causing unemployment and recession” outlined in his 1930 Treatise on Money. In his 1933 Essay on Malthus[10], Keynes wrote:
“Let us think of Malthus today as the first of the Cambridge economists—as, above all, a great pioneer of the application of a frame of formal thinking to the complex confusion of the world of daily events. Malthus approached the central problems of economic theory by the best of all routes.”
In his May 2, 1914 lecture Population[11], Keynes argued that government should “mould law and custom deliberately to bring about that density of population which there ought to be” and that “there would be more happiness in the world if the population of it were to be diminished.”
Saying that “India, Egypt and China are gravely overpopulated”, Keynes advocated using violence to defend the “superior white races” in this struggle of survival with the pacifist saying: “Almost any measures seem to me to be justified in order to protect our standard of life from injury at the hands of more prolific races. Some definite parceling out of the world may well become necessary; and I suppose that this may not improbably provoke racial wars. At any rate such wars will be about a substantial issue.”
As Acting chair of the Neo-Malthusian League, Keynes stated in 1927: “We of this society are neo-Malthusians… I believe that for the future the problem of population will emerge in the much greater problem of Hereditary and Eugenics. Quality must become the preoccupation.”
By 1946, Keynes, still a member of the British Eugenics Society (after serving as the agency’s Vice-President from 1936-1944) wrote in The Eugenics Review: “Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.”
This was not ivory tower theorizing, but concepts with very real-world significance.
By 1937, Keynes’ General Theory of Employment was published in Nazi Germany. If anyone wishes to defend the idea that the economist was somehow an anti-fascist defender of “liberal values”, let them read his own words in the preface and then either redefine “liberal values” or their naïve idea of Keynes:
“I may perhaps expect to find less resistance among German readers than among English ones, when I put before them a theory of employment and production as a whole… The theory of production as a whole which is the object of this book, can be much better adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than the theory of production and distribution of wealth under circumstances of free competition.”
Hitler himself was not only a devout eugenicist (whose racial purification policies emerged through the funding of the Rockefeller, Carnegie Foundations as well as British establishment), but was also a devout Malthusian saying[12]:
“The day will certainly come when the whole of mankind will be forced to check the augmentation of the human species, because there will be no further possibility of adjusting the productivity of the soil to the perpetual increase in the population.”
Keynes Contaminates Bretton Woods
During the Bretton Woods conference held in New Hampshire between July 1-20, 1944, the two opposing paradigms clashed again, much as they had done in 1776 or in 1867 over the terms of the post-war world order. On the one hand the American System of anti-colonialism competed for a system of win-win collaboration and multipolarism, while on the other hand, the British System of zero sum Malthusianism pushed for a unilateral Anglo-Saxon dominance over the world.
This clash took the form of the battles waged by FDR’s trusted collaborator Henry Dexter White against John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, where 730 delegates representing 44 nations gathered to settle the terms of the post-war order.
Although this conference is famously associated with the creation of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it is falsely assumed to be a Keynesian creation. Keynes’ role as representative of the British Empire, much like his earlier role at Versailles in 1919, was defined by the intention at all costs to shape the conditions of a post-nation state world order on behalf of the City of London. Like Bertrand Russell and other Cambridge Apostles before and since, Keynes was trained in the sophistical deployment of statistics and mathematical logic to cover for the imperial rape of target nations.
Lord Keynes was deployed to lead the British delegation to Bretton Woods and advance a Delphic plan that called for creating an International Clearing Union controlled by the City of London denominating all payments in a common accounting unit: the Bancor.
The Bancor would be used to measure all nations’ trade or surplus deficits- expropriating surpluses by the end of the year and taxing countries with deficits. The imposition of a “mathematical architecture” upon the physical (non-mathematical) systems of nations was the surest way to keep an invisible cage upon the earth under an ideal of “mathematical equilibrium.” The sadistic fiscal austerity demanded by mathematical economists and other technocrats in Brussels reflect the still active force of Keynes’ spirit haunting the world today.
The Bretton Woods as a Global New Deal
In opposition to Keynes, the anti-colonial program of FDR was represented by his close ally Harry Dexter White and Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau. White (today slandered as a Soviet agent by CFR- affiliated historians) fought tooth and nail to ensure that Britain would not be in the driver’s seat of the new emerging economic system or the important mechanisms of the IMF that he would go onto lead. White ensured the colonial economic “preference” system Britain used to maintain free trade looting across its empire was destroyed, and the pound sterling did not play a primary role in global trade. Instead, a fixed exchange rate system was set up to guarantee that speculation could not run rampant over national growth strategies and the dollar (then backed by a powerful PHYSICAL economic platform) was a backbone for world trade.
At Bretton Woods, Dexter White and Henry Morganthau reached agreements to provide vast technology transfers to help South America industrialize[13]. At the same time, large-scale programs modelled on the New Deal were presented by delegations from India, Eastern Europe, and China[14]. It is noteworthy that the Chinese delegation introduced infrastructure plans first laid out by Sun Yat-sen in his 1920 International Developmentof China[15] which both Mao, and Zhou Enlai endorsed alongside the Kuomintang’s Chiang Kai-Shek! Had these plans not been sabotaged, it is amazing to consider what sort of progress might have opened up for the Chinese 70 years before anyone heard of the term “Belt and Road Initiative”.
At this early stage, Russia was still happy to be a founding member of the IMF and World Bank which were designed to act as cheap lending mechanisms for long-term, low-interest, high-tech global development.
Commenting on support for FDR’s post-war system of mutual interest, Stalin stated: “Can we count on the activities of this international organization being sufficiently effective? They will be effective if the Great Powers who have borne the brunt of the burden of the war against Hitler’s Germany continue to act in a spirit of unanimity and harmony. They will not be effective if this essential condition is violated”.
Just as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was used like a national bank to fund thousands of great infrastructure, transport, energy, and water projects during the New Deal and just as Glass-Steagall broke the monopoly of private speculative finance over the productive economy, these New Dealers wished to use the World Bank and IMF to issue long term, low interest productive credit for long term mega infrastructure projects around the world. Not just in Europe’s reconstruction.
Leading figures among this group of patriots included Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, FDR’s confidant Harry Hopkins, and leader of the republican party Wendell Willkie who worked closely with his democratic rival by becoming an international ‘New Deal ambassador’ . In 1942, after being deployed by FDR on a world tour to organize an international New Deal projects in a race to end colonialism, Willkie wrote:
"In Africa, in the Middle East, throughout the Arab world, as well as in China, and the whole Far East, freedom means the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system. . . . When I say that in order to have peace this world must be free, I am only reporting that a great process has started which no man--certainly not Hitler--can stop. . . . After centuries of ignorant and dull compliance, hundreds of million of peoples in Eastern Europe and Asia have opened the books. Old fears no longer frighten them. . . . They are resolved, as they must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations.”
FDR’s battle with Churchill on this matter was well documented in his son/assistant Elliot Roosevelt’s book As He Saw It (1946):
“I’ve tried to make it clear … that while we’re [Britain’s] allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we’re in it just to help them hang on to their archaic, medieval empire ideas … I hope they realize they’re not senior partner; that we are not going to sit by and watch their system stultify the growth of every country in Asia and half the countries in Europe to boot.”
This vision was expressed continually by FDR in his hundreds of speeches, as well as by his Vice-President Henry Wallace, in the creation of the Atlantic Charter, and Four Freedoms. It was embedded in the defense of national sovereignty in the UN Constitution (conspicuously non-existent in the British-directed League of Nations earlier). It was meant to be the governing spirit animating the world as mankind entered a matured age of creative reason.
So What happened?
As long as FDR was in office, this British-run hive was kept at bay, but as soon as he died, the infestation took over America and immediately began undermining everything good FDR and his allies had created.
Upon the president’s death, Harry Dexter White was ousted from his position as director of the IMF and labelled a communist agent. Henry Wallace was ousted for similar reasons and worked with White on a 1948 presidential bid as third party presidential candidate. William Willkie (who had discussed creating a new party with FDR) died in October 1944, and FDR’s right hand man Harry Hopkins who did the most to initiate a close bond of friendship with Stalin, died in 1946. Elliot Roosevelt interviewed Stalin a few years later, and recorded that Stalin always believed that Elliot’s father was poisoned [16]“by Churchill’s gang.” By 1946, Churchill ushered in the Cold War setting former allies at each other’s’ throats for the remaining 70 years while dropping nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan. Stalin bemoaned Roosevelt’s death saying “the great dream has died”.
In the wake of FDR’s death, Keynes’ model of governance which permeated the operating system of the post-war age, ensured that the sorts of INTENTION-driven large-scale projects that could finally end colonialism would not see the light of day.
It took the oligarchy another 25 years to dismantle the fixed exchange rate system of the Bretton Woods leading to Nixon’s 1971 floating of the US dollar onto the speculative markets, converting the world ever more into a militarized casino system. Rather than used as instruments for long term growth as they were intended, the IMF and World Bank were used as tools of debt slavery and re-colonialization as outlined in John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman.[17]
Today the world has captured a second chance to revive the “great dream”. In the 21st century, this great dream has taken the form of the New Silk Road, led by Russia and China (and joined by a growing chorus of nations yearning to exit the invisible cage of colonialism
Footnotes
[1] From Keynes: A Critical Life by David Felix: “[Keynes] advised Lytton, who was going on a holiday to Tunis and Sicily, on modalities "if you want to go where the naked boys dance." Responding to his friend's scatological taste, he closed with the lines from a poem: "We paid our suit to Janus/ Mistook the one mouth for the other anus." He himself was going to join an old classmate, now a colonial officer there: "I'm leaving for Egypt... I just learned that 'bed and boy' is prepared."
[2] In 1927, Churchill said to Mussolini: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism” and in 1935 said of Hitler: ““the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to… overcome all the... resistances which barred his path.” A full picture of Churchill’s pro-fascist views is laid bare in The Real Winston Churchill by Richard Seymour, Jacobin Magazine
[3]The Roosevelt I Knew by Frances Perkins, Viking Press, 1946
[4] Keynes, the Man by Murray Rothbard, Von Mises Institute, 2010, p.13
[5]Indian Currency and Finance, John Maynard Keynes, MACMILLAN AND CO, 1913
[6]Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India, by Shashi Tharoor, London, Hurst, 2017
[7] For a fuller exposition of the origins, aims and accomplishments of the Fabian Society, see: What is the Fabian Society and to What End was it Created? By this author, Canadian Patriot Review, 2013
[8] See Chapter 4 for the sabotage of the 1923 Rapallo Agreement
[9]Keynes’s plagiarism of Malthus and McCracken by Steve Kates, History of Economic Ideas, 2010 [10]Thomas Robert Malthus by John M. Keynes, Essays in Biography, 1933 [11] The full transcript of Keynes’ 1914 speech is re-published as an appendix in Keynes on Eugenics, Race, and Population Control by Jay Taylor, Von Mises Institute, Nov. 2019
[12]The Enduring Influence of Thomas Malthus by Renee Nal, RAIR Foundation, November 14, 2019
[13]New Understanding of the Bretton Woods Agreements Opens the Door to the Four Powers Dialogue by Gerry Rose, EIR, August 21, 2020
[14]From Great Depression to Great Recession: The Elusive Quest for International Policy Cooperation Editor: Mr. Atish R. Ghosh and Miss Mahvash S Qureshi, IMF, March 30, 2017
[15]The International Development of China by Sun Yat-sen, Shanghai Commercial Press, 1920
[16]Stalin Admitted Knowledge Of English, Roosevelt’s Son Says By Rick Hampson, Associated Press, February 6, 1986
[17]Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, Berrett =-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2004
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