Concept of freedom for every human was born in the U.S. July 4

The Concept of Freedom for Every Human Being was born in these United States on July 4, 1776

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

— The Declaration of Independence

The freedom that Washington, Jefferson and the other patriots sowed eventually lifted all boats. It took time, but the concept of freedom for every human — endowed by God and irrevocable by government —  was born in these United States on July 4, 1776. 

Whether they were deists or orthodox believers, this emancipation of man and woman derived from a milieu saturated in principles of Gospel liberty. Freedom was born in the minds of Americans who, from cradle to grave, inhabited a society and culture where the struggle to have “No King but Jesus,” resonated with the power of a dynamo. 

By Michael Hoffman

Copyright©2020. All Rights Reserved

www.RevisionistHistory.org

The recent upheaval in our streets has sometimes been dubbed the “1619” protests in a tip of the hat to the “1619 Project” published by the New York Times, which is woefully inadequate as history. For example, the 1619 Project suppresses the significant Judaic part in the enslavement of black people. The magisterial three volume history penned by black scholars that does study these matters, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, was banned by Amazon during Black History Month, in February, 2019.

When it takes up the ideology of white supremacy, the "1619 Project” omits all mention of the pivotal influence of the rabbinic Midrash and Rabbi Moses Maimonides in shaping savagely racist Judaic and gentile attitudes which dehumanized black people and furnished the specious justification for their brutalization in the holocaust that constituted the black experience of slavery in the United States. 

The rabbinic Midrash consigns black people to the role of inevitable enslavement as a matter of divinely established heredity (nowhere does the Bible say this). 

Maimonides, for whom countless buildings in America are named and whose marble plaque hangs in a place of honor in the halls of Congress, taught that black people are “irrational animals” and “lower than human” in his celebrated text, Guide of the Perplexed.

Thomas Jefferson on the History of White Slavery

Jefferson’s views on slavery were drawn from the classical world of Greece and Rome, where in many cases the majority of the slaves were white. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) Jefferson wrote of the history of the oppression of white slaves (p. 151): 

“...in this country the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants. Their situation and manners place the commerce between the two sexes almost without restraint. The same Cato, on a principle of economy, always sold his sick and superannuated slaves. He gives it as a standing precept to a master visiting his farm, to sell his old oxen, old wagons, old tools, old and diseased servants, and every thing else become useless...It was the common practice to expose in the island of Aesculapius, in the Tyber, diseased slaves, whose cure was like to become tedious….

“We are told of a certain Vedius Pollio, who, in the presence of Augustus, would have given a slave as food to his fish (fed his slave to the fish), for having broken a glass. With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture….When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death….they were of the race of whites. 

“That a change in the relations in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor peculiar to the color of the blacks. Homer tells us it was so 2600 years ago... ‘Jove fix’d it certain, that whatever day makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.’ But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites.” 

We cannot fully or adequately comprehend slavery in America without 1. taking into account the complacency with which the Founders viewed the enslavement of whites in antiquity and 2. without considering the extent to which Queen Elizabeth I’s empire established the buying and selling of sub-Saharan Africans as an important base of the economy. Let us recall too that Elizabeth was steeped in Renaissance Kabbalism, under the influence of her Protestant “Astrologer Royal” John Dee, the British empire’s occult founder.

Jefferson’s Ethics vs. the Barbarism of Maimonides

Undoubtedly Jefferson’s racist assessment of the intellectual and moral disabilities of black Africans played a key part in the acceptance of their bondage. Compared to Maimonides however, our future third president made that assessment reluctantly, with many qualifications, and one could almost say, in the fear of God: 

Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 153: “The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great dissidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations...let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. 

“To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. 

“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (p. 153).

“Hazarded with great dissidence...as a circumstance of great tenderness...I advance it therefore as a suspicion only…” 

Jefferson is not establishing a dogma, he is thinking aloud, while making allowance for error and in the fear of daring to do as Rabbi Maimonides did and deny to black people the Imago Dei:

 “... as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them.”

There is no foundation in the preceding statement by which the evil Ku Klux Klan praxis, Seedline Identity theology, or neo-Nazi hatred can build a white racist imperium upon. Jefferson’s early views, in 1781, were not intended as doctrine. This intellectual of the Christian Enlightenment wrote his words mindful that they were conditional upon his further observation and study, as we discover when we read the letter he penned in 1809 to Henri Gregoire Washington: 

“I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the Literature of Negroes. Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. 

"I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. 

"On this subject they (black people) are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief; and to be assured of the sentiments of high and just esteem and consideration which I tender to yourself with all sincerity” (emphasis supplied).

To make a cartoon of American history and cast Thomas Jefferson as a “hate-filled, evil white supremacist” who deserves to have his statues dynamited and his Declaration of Independence burned, is the kind of sheer bad faith and ill will of the sort the Bolsheviks visited with similar erasures and rewrites upon Russia. 

The conceit that people living in 1781 were required to exhibit the suffocating political correctness of 2020 lest they otherwise stand accused of monstrous iniquity, is a species of stupidity so abysmal it could only have been concocted on our Orwellian college campuses, corporate boardrooms and the dens of government bureaucrats. 

Let a competent team of historians survey the attitudes toward labor and bondage in 1776 or 1781 of the rabbis of Judaism, the imams of Islam, the chieftains of the Congo and the mandarins of China, and see how many Jeffersons they find among them. Precious few, we’ll warrant.

The freedom that Washington, Jefferson and the other patriots sowed eventually lifted all boats. It took time, but the concept of freedom for every human was born in these United States on July 4, 1776. 

Whether deists or orthodox believers, this emancipation of man and woman derived from a milieu saturated in principles of Gospel liberty. Freedom was born in America derived not from the Talmud or the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita or Buddha. It was the gift of minds who from cradle to grave inhabited a society and culture where the struggle to have “No King but Jesus,” resonated with the power of a dynamo. 

It was in the air. It was on the printed page. It was inescapable. Colonial and early America were Bible-literate societies to an astonishing degree. America’s gift of the idea of liberty evolved into a framework for gradually achieving freedom for all. 

On the steps of the ladder of liberation the first to gain the benefits of liberty were the free white yeomanry of America, then the enslaved (“indentured”) whites, and decades later, enslaved blacks. The second step has been almost completely erased from our nation’s history. For years this writer has been gathering new research material for a sequel to our book, They Were White and They Were Slaves. Most of this recent research testifies to the fact that the condition of whites in bondage was even more severe and more enduring than what we first detailed in our book. 

One must dig deeply in the archives because white slaves are nearly always mislabeled “servants.” Recently we found a military law imposed in 1756 on the American colonies by King George II (1683-1760), entitled, “An Act for the Better Recruiting of His Majesty’s Forces.” It was promulgated from Boston. Under this act, white slaves were seized from their owners and forced into the Redcoat’s army. 

How do we know they were slaves and not servants? By reading the protest of their owners against the king’s law, such as in Pennsylvania where the opposition was worded in terms of the army’s conscription of “a great number of bought servants.” 

The objection was to the interference with the legal property and rights of the owners of the whites in bondage, constituting a “manifest and grievous injustice.” To distinguish themselves from their white slaves, their petition was signed “the Freemen.” (Humble Address of the Representatives of the Freemen of Pennsylvania [to Lt. Governor Robert Hunter Morris], February 11, 1756).

After the American Revolution the British Crown could no longer dump white slaves in America under the “Transportation” of “felons” laws. These “felons” subject to capital punishment or enslavement in the colonies, were often English male and female shoplifters who had pilfered food or clothing, or poachers who had killed a deer or a hare on an aristocrat’s property. After 1786 they were shipped to “Botany Bay” (Australia). Their white skin did not prevent the merciless suffering inflicted upon them. 

Their enslavement is concealed by the juggling of words. Like the American white slaves misnamed servants, our potential outrage is mollified by the application of the term “convicts” to the white slaves of Australia. Approximately 160,000 were transported and placed in bondage in Australia, or Van Diemen’s Land (present day Tasmania). 

These “convicts” performed slave labor, and the females among them often toiled under the additional penalty of suffering enforced whoredom. These whites were regularly whipped. At the dreaded white slave camp of Port Arthur in Tasmania they were used as beasts of burden to pull passengers in a railway. 

In the face of these revisionist facts we find ourselves overwhelmed with contempt at the liberals’ idea that all the white people in that era were members of the “Master Race,” possessed of “white skin privilege.” To have credibility this hoax must exclude all considerations of class in the British empire, wherein destitute and indigent whites were regarded as a barely human, hereditarily tainted class. 

We know the identity of the members of the Master Class then and now, and they are not and never were white Christian slaves and paupers. 

This essay originally appeared in Revisionist History® no. 104 (September, 2019). Subscribe here.

Michael Hoffman is a professional historian and the author of nine books. His new history of the ruling class war on its own people, Hanging Poor Whites, is due for publication in early 2022.

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Whatever this is, it’s not America anymore

By Michael Hoffman 

http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html

Thomas Jefferson, more than any single individual the man responsible for founding our Constitutional Republic, may have his name removed this week from a Democrat Party fundraiser in Connecticut because he was a white “racist.”

There is also a movement to remove the name of John C. Calhoun, Vice-President of the United States under John Quincy Adams, from a college at Yale University because he was a white “racist."

A memorial to the Confederate dead in Helena, Montana may be removed as well because the soldiers were white “racists." 

These attempts to ban historical memory smack of Bolshevism and are largely a result of pressure from Big Business, the same corporate America that funds the “gay” revolution.

The Money Power has decided that respect for the Founders of our nation, or the Southern boys in gray who fought for states rights from 1861-1865, often with tremendous self-sacrifice and heroism, are bad for business!

The Money Bags can’t face up to convention boycotts and all of the other intolerant attack methods consisting of economic boycotts and culture-erasing bans undertaken by those who holler “tolerance,” so they cave in, as the pusillanimous former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates did recently when, as head of the Boy Scouts of America, he advised us that it was no use any longer opposing the admission of homosexual Scout Masters.

Thomas Jefferson fought the Money Power and warned that a nation disconnected from agriculture and home enterprise would be captive to the banks and money men; in other words to the usurers that rule us.

I’m not interested in symptoms. If I have a middle name, this is it: “Not interested in symptoms Hoffman.” The root of our national rot is found in the fact that Conservatives and Rightists are all ruled by leaders who are patriots only after they have made certain that their profits are secure. That’s not leadership, and since we are fighting a ruthless, revived Bolshevism that is engaged in a permanent revolution, “our Conservative" leaders ensure that We the People engage in retreat after retreat. These alleged “Conservative leaders” conserve very little. Actually, they fulfill a mandate of the Cryptocracy, to manage our nation's decline, so that the decline will not be so rapid as to scare off the eternally skimmed taxpayers and military recruits, causing them to join, or work toward, the building of a militant, no-usury, truly Conservative, Third Party with an independent media and private schools to cultivate and strengthen it.

Treason and betrayal within our own ranks are the signposts all about us. Meanwhile, “scientific” polls with self-advertised “plus or minus 3% margins of possible error" tell us what we think. Suddenly, in just 20 or 30 months, a “majority” of Americans now support sodomite rights; or they tell us that we support the historical amnesia that calls for banning America’s history so as to appease the unappeasable, eternally aggrieved and resentful racial “minorities,” and their intolerant, neo-Bolshevik white allies.

In a sense we deserve this state of affairs because the godly side in this battle consists mostly of double-talking wimps at one extreme or mind-controlled maniacs such as the Charleston shooter, at the other. The steadfast dedication of our sophisticated enemies, their no-compromise demands for change, coupled with their will-power and vision in working hard to occupy high posts in the media, academia, corporations and government, has left us out-gunned and on the run. We have God on our side and yet we continue to abandon Him and retreat to the “safety" of our bank accounts. In Mammon We Trust.

Speaking of the controlled media,the rabidly Zionist Wall Street Journal propaganda sheet, which publishes an anti-Putin editorial or “report” every three or four days, suppressed all news in the July 6 edition of the resupply on July 5 of the International Space Station (with US astronauts aboard), by a Russian cargo ship. 

The Wall Street rag has published editorials of late decrying Vladimir Putin’s alleged “Russian propaganda” machine, but the Journal doesn’t even have the fundamental ethics to give credit where credit is due in the pages of their fish wrapper. And by the way, should the US government be goading into war a Russian nation with the technological prowess to build and fly reliable space rocket engines, a feat which the U.S. has of late trouble accomplishing? But perhaps the U.S. corporate media regard an American war on the Russians as obligatory, since they continue to dare to obey the God of the Bible and forbid the marriage of sodomites. 

I didn’t fly Old Glory on the 4th of July as I usually do, because whatever this is, it’s not America anymore. 

Michael Hoffman is dependent on your donation to continue these  columns (1 Timothy 5:18); you can also support this Truth Mission by purchasing Michael's books, newsletters or recordings.

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Fundamental to righteous government is the establishment of justice

Updated May 18, 2017

The jurist Howard B. Rand has perhaps written between twenty and thirty volumes.  From a brief essay he wrote some years back called From the Cradle to the Grave, we should take note of his opinion on what the Preamble actually means to us as a basis for our system of laws. 

 “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”  

Rand lists the following five mandates that must be weighed with every action initiated by government for that action to be in compliance with the Constitution:

“1) Establish justice.

2)  Insure domestic tranquility.

3)   Provide for the common defense.

4)   Promote the general welfare.

5)   Secure the blessings of liberty.

“Let us examine this list carefully, for the solution of human problems does not lie in changing the original purpose for which governments came into being, a purpose sanctioned by God, nor in changing or discounting the reasons for the writing of the Constitution of the United States, but in a restoration of the administration of laws that already exist, the keeping of which will assure the blessings of all these five points and more also – even freedom from want.  We challenge those who propose to set up a form of government that will make everyone conscious of government in his business, domestic and private life and that, instead of thus attaining their desired end (that is, tranquility and peace), will but establish inequalities, injustice, tyranny and oppression” (end quote).

“Fundamental to righteous government is the establishment of justice.”

This justice will never be accomplished with an unrighteous monetary system in operation as we now have.  It has been revealed in the Pentateuch, the Psalms, Ezekiel, the Lord Jesus Himself and one thousand five hundred years of Church history that the charging of interest on loans of money is not allowable. Michael Hoffman did not miss any of the Biblical and Church history interdictions against usury in his Usury in Christendom.  

During the past three hundred and twenty years, many different historical narratives show us clearly that a usurious monetary system is a bane upon civilization.  Money and credit created out of nothing that is lent at interest is indeed a tool for economic oppression. Without attending to this severe problem of the outlawing of usury first (as Mr. Rand put it), none of the objectives named in the Preamble will ever be attainable, because the political class has evolved into a swarm of swindlers and shavers just like the bankers that Jefferson so named.

Most reformers today though, have not yet embraced the only vision that will overturn the beast of usury capitalism.  They write about reform, but only a reform that has already been tried during Colonial America by followers of Ben Franklin’s philosophy — that moderate usury is not harmful.  And still today, almost no one argues that bankers be stripped of their authority to create money, as Thomas Jefferson advocated.  Although some of the reform-peddlers are very professional at articulating their cases, all will fall short of bringing prosperity to the people. St. Paul wrote twice in his epistles, “A little leaven, leavens the whole lump.”  

As long as everyone can charge interest on loans of money, that interest will show up in prices. Jefferson explained this very carefully with his observations on the price of a bushel of wheat. Yet he missed the fact that the interest charged by the Bank of the United States on the "bills of credit" it issued as loans to the people, would also be figured into the price of a bushel of wheat.

40% to 60% of all prices go to pay directly for...usury

Usury of control freakdom is only one of several drawbacks that results from usury capitalism.  Let’s call it what describes it accurately and thoroughly.  

As for circular thinking, I think this is better described as dogma that is bereft of the truths given to us in the Christian Bible.  This is something that church scholars and legates are guilty of fostering.  Fortunately for us, Bible translators have provided for us enough accuracy to separate the true from the false.  

Whenever usury is present in any monetary system - gold included, the usury is like leaven in the prices of goods and services.  It is sufficiently pervasive to the extent that 40% to 60% of all prices go to pay directly for this usury.  Moreover, 20% of our national budget is used to pay just the interest on our national debt at the same time that the principle continues to increase.  In other words, no principle is included in Treasury’s payments to the bankers.  In addition, the remainder of the national budget that is paid for government expenditures and infrastructure out of tax revenues also has this pervasive usury that is present in all government expenditures.  The now deceased architectural professor Margrit Kennedy along with the economist Anthony Migchels both calculate an accurate number to account for existing usury in all prices is 40%.  So this 40% of all existing earned wealth is earmarked for the parasites and vultures of mankind.

A second drawback inherent in usury capitalism consists in the fact that with usury present in all prices, the poor and all those unable to cope in such a system due to physical disability or mental deficiency are victims of the system along with the willing dupes who must pay nearly half their earnings to fund this morally bankrupt system.  Many, who are mentally deficient have no advocate to assist them in securing a lifeline with government subsidies, wind up living in cardboard boxes, vacant homes or abandoned automobiles in blighted areas without heat and without running water.

You see, when the LORD gave His laws to Moses, He said there should be no poor in the land.  In Leviticus chapter 25 He commanded that the people should not be oppressed.  That is why all debt was released every seventh year, no usury was allowed nationally and no property taxes existed.  The perfect law of love, God’s love, was present 3,500 years ago in the Mosaic Law. 

These are reasons enough for me to declare and predict the downfall of usury capitalism or any system that does not incorporate God’s laws into its foundation.  Anyone who teaches that love and living by the fruits of the Spirit are the whole extent of what is is necessary to be followers of Jesus Christ is a pied piper leading others to their own demise because they ignore that the rest of the Bible actually teaches us how this can be accomplished specifically.  The New Testament is replete with directives from several different authors that we must observe all things whatsoever the LORD has commanded us.  A simple deduction from this for the reasonably intelligent is that God is not only a God of love, but also of justice, judgment and mercy - yes mercy - else the pied pipers and the wicked would have no recourse whereby they could repent. 

We have all doomed our national existence to the scrap bin of history from ignoring monetary issues as a critical aspect of our laws, both in civil affairs and in the churches.  We are responsible for the untold millions of human lives lost in wars that never should have been waged because we have allowed a class of money lovers to emerge at the top of our social structure as parasites.  These vultures live off of the carnage that exists and the waste of resources that occurs in the prosecution of these wars.  How will we stand before the LORD when He tells us it was our own fault for ignoring His laws?  Ignoring doctrine and dogma is therefore as destructive as heresy and circular thinking.      

Daniel Krynicki

Author of History of Money and Usury in America (forthcoming in 2017 in an expanded edition)

***

The Talmud and the Constitution

"The Torah, The Constitution, and the 4th of July"

Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater

Spiritual leader, Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center

Huffington Post | July 2, 2011

(Michael Hoffman’s analysis follows this essay)

his speech that became known as "The Spirit of Liberty," delivered in New York City's Central Library, in the midst of World War II, the preeminent judge and judicial philosopher, Learned Hand, asked, "What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it." (As quoted in Time magazine, July 4, 2011)

There is a great deal of talk these days about the Constitution, about liberty and American values. In a cover story this week in Time, editor Richard Stengel asks if the Constitution still matters. Of course it does, but how we interpret it, how we try to understand what the framers meant, and how we apply it today is presenting us greater challenges than perhaps it did in the past.

Stengel writes, "As a counterpoint to the rise of constitutional originalists (those who believe the document should be interpreted only as the drafters understood it), liberal scholars analyze the text just as closely to find the elasticity they believe the framers intended.

Everywhere, there seems to be a debate about the scope and meaning and message of the Constitution. This is a healthy thing. Even the framers would agree on that." (ibid.)

On this July 4th weekend, as we celebrate our country and all of the amazing contributions it has added to the world, including the ideals and values of the Declaration and the Constitution, I wanted to share some thoughts about how this struggle to understand the meaning of an original document, formulated in a different time, in a different era, by very different people, is a very Jewish idea, one that we in fact gave to the world thousands of years before 1776.

We don't have a constitution, but we do have a Torah. And, like the debate we are having today in regard to understanding what the framers meant when they crafted the Constitution, Jews have been arguing about the original intent of the Torah pretty much since...well, since the Torah itself! There are laws, statutes and directives in the Torah that have been subject to debate, discussion and overruling, starting with the daughters of Tzelofchad, which we will read about in a few weeks, who question the Torah's earlier ruling about inheritance only being for sons, and Moses inquires of God and the rule gets altered.

There are verses in the Torah that were explained away by the rabbis of the Talmud as either not applying any longer, never applying or they get made so complex to enact that they eventually fall away.

What the Jewish tradition has that almost no other religious tradition shares, and which a great deal of modern jurisprudence is based on, is the Talmud and all the subsequent later codes, all of which work to explain the meaning of the original document, the Torah, and what it's framer (or framers depending on your view) meant. The Torah condones the death penalty while the Talmud pretty much outlaws it. The Torah tells us to take our malcontent children to the gates of the city and if they can't be reformed by the elders, to stone them to death. The Talmud tells us that never happened and never should happen. Sorry!

And, in the reverse, the Torah is pretty clear about what keeping kosher should look like, and it is pretty simple, while the rabbis of the Talmud and later codes expanded the laws and made them quite complex. We have a long history of interpreting our Torah, redefining its meaning, and using very advanced and creative hermeneutical tools to either alter, or in some cases, downright change, what the original meaning seems to have been. We have the principle of PARDES, which is a rabbinic literary invention, whereby each word of the Torah has four levels of interpretation: the literal meaning, peshat, a more subtle or hinting reading, remez, a creative commentary, drash, and a totally hidden or mysterious meaning, sod. Through this technique, and many others, commentators, most famously Rashi, 11th century in France, have sometimes completely changed the text from what it literally says. Our tradition is incredibly fluid and flexible and always has been.

Today, both in American life and in our Jewish life, we are facing challenges from those that want to read both of our foundational texts, the Constitution and the Torah, in a literalist manner. I will leave the legal aspects of the Constitution and how to understand it to the lawyers and experts, but from what I have read and studied, the framers seemed to want a document that would grow and develop in meaning based on the growth and innovation of the new country they were founding. As Stengel writes in his Time article, "There have been few conflicts in American history greater than the internal debates the framers had about the Constitution. For better or for worse -- and I would argue that it is for better -- the Constitution allows and even encourages deep arguments about the most basic democratic issues." The Torah, I would argue, has a similar make-up, namely that we have been arguing about, discussing, and interpreting the meaning of the text for thousands of years. And, we know that the times were different for the framers of the Constitution as they were for the authors of the Torah. Cultures were different, practices were different, perhaps we might even say that morals were different.

The framers of the Constitution, while giving us freedom of religion and speech, also thought blacks were 3/5's of a human and slavery was okay. The Torah also thinks that slavery is okay, even as it seeks to give rights to slaves that never existed. And, in interpreting text for today, we are called upon to use our own minds, hearts and experiences to understand and apply meaning.

Just as the Constitution didn't know from healthcare, military drones, the internet or globalized commerce, and so lawyers and judges must figure out how to legislate on these matters based on what they think the intent of the framers was, along with later precedent and case law, so too the Torah didn't know from many of the cultural and religious issues facing us today in modern American life: from end of life decisions that involve modern medicine to using technology to bring Shabbat services to homebound seniors. And, because it is so timely with New York's landmark marriage equality law passed just last week, I believe that the Torah verse from Leviticus that has been used for generations to deny gays and lesbians their equal rights in our tradition, must be finally read away with the same Talmudic logic and thinking that was used to read away killing our wayward children. We have changed, evolved, moved as a society and culture, even if some don't agree.

Remember, plenty of people thought slavery was still okay, and the Civil War didn't finish the job when it comes to racial discrimination. As Judge Hand told us, we must sometimes trust our hearts and not our texts.

However, another timely issue that fascinates me, and directly relates to this discussion is that of circumcision. While this merits an entire sermon, I want to end with this thought: Why is it that this ritual, which appears in Genesis, is really, for the most part, one of the only so-called "primitive" rituals from the time of the Bible that we still follow and practice without any real challenge or dispute. Sure there are fringe groups of Jews that have always been against brit milah, but 99% of Jews, religious and secular, follow this ancient ritual without question. Sure, many moms have trepidation, but they still do it. We have never stopped doing it and today, in the face of ridiculous legal challenges, which have thankfully been abandoned in Santa Monica but continue in San Francisco, Jews of all stripes, along with Muslims and religious freedom advocates, are fighting for our right to continue this ancient practice, even as we don't do most of the ancient Biblical practices any longer. Why is that? Fascinating question.

And so, as we celebrate this 4th of July, let us be grateful that we live in one of the freest countries ever to exist, yet we are not perfect. The Constitution must never be allowed to become an idol, just as the Torah must never be allowed to become an idol.

One midrash teaches that Moses shattered the first tablets as a reminder of that notion. We must always do battle between fear and liberty, between power and freedom. That is the great gift, and great challenge, of being human. Thomas Jefferson said it best, when he wrote, "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression." That is our great challenge, as Americans and as Jews. May we ponder deeply on this, our nation's birthday. Shabbat shalom and God bless America.

(End quote from Rabbi Grater; emphasis supplied).

Michael Hoffman’s analysis of 
Rabbi Grater’s Essay 

First let’s look at how Rabbi Grater employs his terms: "There are verses in the Torah that were explained away by the rabbis of the Talmud as either not applying any longer, never applying or they get made so complex to enact that they eventually fall away.”

In Orthodox Judaism the Talmud and the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament = Pentateuch) are conflated. Both are referred to as Torah. Rabbi Grater ignores the conflation, perhaps not wanting to reveal that the Talmud is held in at least equal esteem (actually in greater esteem) than the Old Testament. Next we should realize that Grater’s writing represents the Revelation of the Method. He openly admits that the Talmud tampers with the Word of God as found in the Bible.

The rabbi further states: "The Torah condones the death penalty while the Talmud pretty much outlaws it. The Torah tells us to take our malcontent children to the gates of the city and if they can't be reformed by the elders, to stone them to death. The Talmud tells us that never happened and never should happen.”

This appears like a liberal’s dream. All the “bad parts” of the Bible have been reformed by the Talmudic rabbis. First let’s dispense with a lie: the Talmud does not forbid the death penalty for a malefactor classified as a rodef (pursuer) or a moser (informant). Are these rare categories which are seldom invoked and sparsely populated? Not really. The entire population of Palestine is viewed as rodef, all subject to the death penalty when “Israel” goes to war as it did in Gaza 2008-2009. They can and are killed in times when “Israel’ is not at war, as well.

The Old Testament was in some respects a harsh law code. Who was it that actually reformed it? Jesus Christ.

Now comes an important admission: “...the Torah is pretty clear about what keeping kosher should look like, and it is pretty simple, while the rabbis of the Talmud and later codes expanded the laws and made them quite complex. We have a long history of interpreting our Torah, redefining its meaning, and using very advanced and creative hermeneutical tools to either alter, or in some cases, downright change, what the original meaning seems to have been. We have the principle of PARDES, which is a rabbinic literary invention, whereby each word of the Torah has four levels of interpretation: the literal meaning, peshat, a more subtle or hinting reading, remez, a creative commentary, drash, and a totally hidden or mysterious meaning, sod. Through this technique, and many others, commentators, most famously Rashi, 11th century in France, have sometimes completely changed the text from what it literally says.”

Rabbi Grater is admitting they make this stuff up, which results in a fantasy religion that pretends to be predicated on Biblical law and is in practice founded on man-made fiat. He reveals that the rabbis “completely change the text” of the Bible. How true! As Christ said, they nullify the Word of God. They change the original meaning, and this methodology has a parallel with those who get “creative” with the U.S. Constitution. Often times these U.S. Constitution nullifiers are inspired by Talmudic Judaism's Bible nullifiers and trained at law seminars conducted by rabbis.

Rabbi Grater writes, “...the Torah didn't know from many of the cultural and religious issues facing us today in modern American life: from end of life decisions that involve modern medicine to using technology to bring Shabbat services to homebound seniors.”

Here we see the inherently anti-Biblical orientation of Judaism. I have documented numerous cases wherein the rabbis despise and attack the Bible. They believe they are superior to God and must correct His “mistakes" by the intervention of their elevated brain power and great “wisdom.”

Hence, God, as reflected in His Word (“the Torah”)  didn’t foresee the issues that would face us in the modern world and the Bible does not have answers to those questions. Man must supply them. How? Through nullification:

"And, because it is so timely with New York's landmark marriage equality law passed just last week, I believe that the Torah verse from Leviticus that has been used for generations to deny gays and lesbians their equal rights in our tradition, must be finally read away with the same Talmudic logic and thinking that was used to read away killing our wayward children.”

Orthodox Judaism “kills” its wayward children spiritually, by laying burdens on them impossible to bear— burdens which steal their humanity through the imposition of religious fanatical, anti-life strictures and regulations. Rabbi Grater pretends that Judaism frees people; actually Orthodox Judaism enslaves them. It regulates human life down to how you should tie your shoes and what side of the bed you should sleep on.

We don’t need the Talmud to stop the stoning of children. Jesus Christ declared that the Kingdom of God is like the little child.

Notice the rabbi’s Talmudic logic, so unlike that of Jesus: we must permit homosexual marriage because we have banned the killing of children. How many children will be harmed spiritually by being legally adopted and raised by a homosexual couple?

Rabbi Grater: "The Constitution must never be allowed to become an idol, just as the Torah must never be allowed to become an idol.”

The rabbi is making an apples and oranges comparison: the Constitution and the Torah. The Constitution was made by man. Though we respect it, we must not make such a human document into a divine liturgy. On the other hand, God wrote the Torah. It is His Word. 

An idol is a false god. Is the Bible a false god? Is God’s Word false? In many cases the Talmud and the rabbis answer in the affirmative. 

God’s Word, says Noah, was righteous. The Talmud and the Midrash say he was a drunk who was sodomized on board Noah’s Ark. There are hundreds of other examples of Bible-denying in Judaism. The Talmudists worship themselves and their own words. God and His Word “should not become an idol”!

Rabbi Grater: "Thomas Jefferson said it best, when he wrote, 'All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.”

Grater forgot to mention that Thomas Jefferson also said:

"Ethics were so little understood among the Jews, that in their whole compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral subjects. Their books of morals chiefly consisted in a minute enumeration of duties...What a wretched depravity of sentiment and manners must have prevailed, before such corrupt maxims could have obtained credit...It was the reformation of this ‘wretched depravity’ of morals which Jesus undertook.”

The paperback edition of Michael's book, Judaism Discovered, is for sale here 

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Preserving the Memory and the Teaching of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

by Michael Hoffman | Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

"Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs." (Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, Monticello, June 24, 1813).

"I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." (Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, Monticello, May 28, 1816).

“Neither he (Benito Mussolini) nor T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) was interested in, nor bamboozled by money.” (Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 64).

This Saturday, Oct. 30 will mark the 125th annniversary of the birth of poet/philosopher Ezra Pound in the frontier town of Hailey, in what was then the “Idaho territory” of the United States.

To honor his memory and perpetuate his campaign for justice in economics and against the authority of money in government and society, Independent History and Research is reprinting his classic text, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which has been out of print for forty years.

Pound’s union of Jefferson, the small government populist, with Mussolini the Fascist, will certainly strike the reader as the oddest of conjunctions. Prof. Alec Marsh decodes the paradox:

“...Pound's critique of capitalism...is purely Populist, certainly not Fascist. Pound was against militarism...and had little interest in youth cults, mass spectacles or mystic Italian nationalism, which he seems to have accepted simply as the Italian way of doing things. What fundamentally interested Pound in Italian Fascism was the possibility it offered for what Emilio Gentile has called 'the conquest of modernity.' That is, Pound admired the attempt by Mussolini to overcome and control the impersonal economic forces unleashed by modernization. Volitionist economics is an attempt to formulate a practical program for those who have the will to master the forces of modernity — a will that Mussolini had in abundance....It seems clear that the man, not the party, interests Pound. And Pound is interested because he thinks that Mussolini might enact the economic reforms necessary to restore social justice...” (Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson).

If one knows anything of the history of western civilization’s struggle against usury, from the ancient Greeks to the medieval Catholics, from William Shakespeare to C.H. Douglas, a glaring contradiction will be found not in a conjunction of an American and an Italian revolutionary, but in the appropriation of Jefferson by Glenn Beck, the Fox TV disciple of the greed-is-good Khazar-capitalist, Ayn Rand.

Beck has plenty of friends in Pound’s native state. In Idaho we have a tabloid called the Capitalist Papers which is where the Tea Party and well-intentioned patriots like Phil Hart advertise and are afforded a forum.

Raul Labrador, Idaho’s “conservative” Republican candidate for Congress, is a shill for the corporate transfer of America’s wealth to China. His campaign is against “Obamacare” and government spending (except for spending on the national police state and overseas neocon empire). Nancy Pelosi is his cuss word; Ben Bernanke gets a pass.

Jefferson and/or Mussolini is not a book we intend to distribute to Idaho ignoramuses and expect that they will have a “Eurkea!” moment after reading it. It’s not a book for the completely ignorant. Pound was old school. He dealt in what the Scholastics called “First principles.” His thought patterns and arguments are lush with profundity, paradox and poetry.

Pound was not a snob, however. Like Jefferson, he was a man of the people despite an I.Q. that was off the charts. He cared intensely for the welfare of the poor and the workers. He was big on common sense and intuition and he would cherish a vision of an Idaho mountaineer in 2010 trying to parse his prose by a wood-fired stove.

We’re not promoting Jefferson and/or Mussolini as one of those supposed “blockbuster eye-opener books!” which is guaranteed to generate instant enlightenment in the reader. Since when is education anything other than a lifetime project?

Pound’s book should be in the library of every person who aspires to be learned -- we do advance that thesis and trust that it is not hyperbole.

There is no substitute for true education. One can obtain the appearance of learning by sitting at the feet of Glenn Beck and his chalkboard. Image and appearance are what modern America is all about. Mountebanks like Beck invoke the America of the past as a front for their support for anti-American usury banking and Israeli hot and cold foreign wars; the latter now being waged against Iran, where sanctions are beginning to destabilize the economy of a nation rooted in opposition to usury, and which is a threat to no one except those who believe they have a license to murder Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

From out of this nightmare arises the writer who gave us the Pisan Cantos, the intellectual who wrote the ABC of Reading, and the courageous campaigner for economic justice who penned Jefferson and/or Mussolini.

Reading Pound’s book is a journey into a great mind. We make no warranties concerning the degree to which it will “change your life” or “wake up your neighbors.” The extent to which this book can exalt your spirit and stimulate your mind depends on the extent of your own personal character and ennoblement.

Let’s face it, most of us are not spending our days making our way through the 100 Classic Books of Western Thought. Most of us spend our reading time on newspapers and the Internet. We haven’t read Aristotle or Augustine, Chaucer or Dickens, or if we did it was ages ago, in a stuffy classroom with a mediocre teacher, and from a motivation to pass a course rather than lift up our heart and mind.

Pound’s little volume fills a two-fold void. First, it starts us on our peregrination back to the tried and true paths and founts of our civilization which the Glenn Becks of our world have suppressed. Second, it serves as a sign of contradiction to the literati of America and Europe as they meet over the next days and weeks to celebrate the 125th birthday of a domesticated Ezra Pound, shorn of his lion’s mane. They want to forget that there was a reason he was locked up for twelve years by the U.S. government and it has to do, then as now, with the life-and-death struggle with the Money Power, the evil which underlies every other evil (Matthew 6:24; 1 Timothy 6:10).

Alas, in this economy, our own publishing enterprise is no longer what it once was, as buyers and donors drop by the wayside. Therefore, we are no longer able to order a thousand copies of a book at a time, with the resulting advantageous economy of scale that such quantity purchases afford. In our straitened circumstances, wherein we are fighting to stave off bankruptcy, we have engaged the services of the print-on-demand publishing trade. By this means we finance the printing of books based on the advance orders we receive from individual readers. If you choose to order, please allow up to four weeks for delivery. Overseas please allow up to five weeks (figuring an average of an extra week for air mail).

JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI (quality paperback; 138 pages), $17.95 plus postage and packing. Please do not send just $17.95 or your order will be returned. You must also pay for shipping (see below).

You can order by credit card at this link

Or you can pay with a US check or US Money order, as follows:

U.S. customers send $21.00 postpaid.

Canadians send US$26.00 postpaid. Foreign/Overseas send US $28.00.

Order from: Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816 USA.

Happy Birthday Ezra!

May we never forget the price you paid for telling the truth about money!

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