Book Review
Title: The Clash of the Two Americas volume 1: The Unfinished Symphony by Matthew Ehret & Cynthia Chung
Genre: Non-Fiction, Science, Politics
Rating: 4 Stars
I recently read Volume 4 of this series and immensely enjoyed it as it was a great learning experience so I had to pick up the rest of the books starting with the first volume. Chapter 1; The International Dimensions of 1776 and How an Age of Reason Was Subverted look at hoe Benjamin Franklin developed connections around the world and achieved many great thing like turning the tide in the French Revolution but the idea it really highlights is that America played a much larger role than anyone expected at the time since it was dealing with its own fighting colonies and yet didn’t make as much as an impact as it wanted to. One thing pushed forward is that the British Empire was the enemy since they sought to conquer India and China while people like Franklin were fighting for the independence of nations so these ideas clashed and clashed hard. However, Franklin didn’t always succeed as Ehret goes into in Chapter 2 as we look at how Canada failed Franklin’s test.
The history of the “two Americas” involves examining where the American experiment failed to take hold and then evaluating the causes for the failure of leaders and citizens of other countries to take the challenge of breaking free of colonial systems of hereditary power that have kept humanity locked in a cage of empire. A primary example of this was French Canada who over 90 years failed to break free from the British Empire’s hold no less than three times and it must here be kept in mind that the British had only recently been hijacked by the Venetian Party faction during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but Franklin attempted this and did make advancements in French Canada but ultimately their chose submission rather than fighting for independence. In preparing the foundations for a reform of the world political-economic system, Franklin studied Chinese culture and strove to model western reforms on the best principles of Confucianism and the Chinese ethical constitution and he used these to great effect. Franklin also achieved many other things like codifying a system of banking that wasn’t tied to the worship of money but to internal improvement which argued for the creation of colonial scrip not under the control of private central bankers and this work was continued by Alexander Hamilton. Franklin also coordinated an international network of collaborators from Russia, France and even Morocco. However, when Franklin realises the Empire had no intention of giving up the American colonies he began pushing for a full revolution which was to come later on and despite his best effort to convince Canada he was blocked by the Empire at every turn.
Chapter 3 was one I was looking forward to as it looks at why France’s American Revolution failed and the Jacobin Terror between 1789 and 1794. The French Revolution is talked about in a drastically different way than what happened in reality. In reality, the American were making great stride to a revolution without bloodshed only to be hijacked by the Jacobians who ended up executing some of Franklin’s greatest supporters, King Louis XVI and his wife being among them. This hijacking of the revolution leads to a total power vacuum caused a young republican general named Napoleon Buonaparte to take power and institute himself in most unrepublican fashion as hereditary Emperor of France, unleashing a 15-year reign of war on Europe. The question remains about what exactly went wrong to lead to this series of events. One of the main reasons can be found in the banking system as Finance Minister Jacques Necker not only incurred a mass of unpayable debts from 1786-1789, but also imposed austerity which crippled the nation’s ability to heal and after hoarding of food was declared illegal by the Empire it led to famine and eventually the storming of the Bastille setting off a chain of events orchestrated by the Jacobians that couldn’t be stopped.
Ehret then begins looking into the 1815 Congress of Vienna and Lafayette’s 2nd Chance to Lead a Republican Transformation of France. This was an extremely interesting chapter and really highlights how small acts of human error can have far-reaching consequences. The Congress of Vienna implemented many treaties but a notable one is the Carlsbad Decrees which imposed a strict dictatorship and gave the Holy Alliance the power to fire professor and expel student who were accused of republican ideals. By the 1830s this backlash had manifested around Marquis Lafayette who nearly became the President of France but he made a fatal mistake. The French population was ready to revolt against the abuses of the new king and Lafayette was positioned to take control. Once he was declared the President of France and the errors of the Jacobin bloodbath of 1789-94 were corrected, then republican movements were ready to declare independence in Poland, followed by movements in Germany, Spain and beyond. However, when the time came Lafayette failed to capture the moment and fell to the false promises of Philippe Egalite’s son (the Duke of Orleans) who agreed to become a “republican King of France” and make Lafayette the head of the National Guard and defender of the people. Lafayette ignored the popular calls to become president and instead embraced the monarch and within minutes France had a new king under Louis Philippe I. Within months, the Marquis Lafayette had been fired from his position as head of the National Guard. The republican movement of Poland was annihilated as none of the support needed to advance their revolution was given by a monarchist France and the surviving revolutionaries made their way to France after the failed October uprising to find temporary protection under Lafayette.
In the next chapter, History as Warfare: The ‘1619 Project’ and the Plot to Destroy the Republic, we begin to see the major cultural fight breaking out between the two philosophical ideals. On the one hand Donald Trump’s now disbanded 1776 Commission had attempted to revive a lost practice of teaching American history as though the United States were a good thing in world history, while on the other hand the New York Times’ 1619 Project invoked a method that saw only evil in America’s 250-year experience. During its short existence, this “project” has quickly won over thousands of academics, and in spite of its proven fallacies, Jones was still awarded the Pulitzer Prize legitimizing the fraud in the minds of countless school administrators, policy-makers and academics. While many try to frame America as evil and Britain as good, this raises several questions. If Britain was threatening to end the slave trade as the 1619 Project authors teach, then why did the Empire override dozens of petitions from the colonies between 1650-1765 demanding an end to slavery? Rather than oppose slavery, the British Royal Africa Company, under the direction of the Privy Council, and Board of Trade enforced the mass important of 8 million African slaves into the Americas during the 18th century alone.
Britain further its influence by destroying Indian textiles and subduing the “Chinese dragon” with a program of mass opium consumption that would stain the 19th century. This means that the City of London quickly took control of world textile manufactures which created a primary export market for southern slave plantation cotton and a new set of addictions began: the addiction to the easy money derived from cheap slave labour. This proto globalization established a global closed system of controls onto all nations through cash cropping, free trade, speculation and drugs. Britain’s influence can be seen throughout the Civil War from supplying the south with battle ships, weapons and finances to providing logistic and diplomatic support internationally. Even British Canada was given over to the Confederacy’s intelligence headquarters which deployed spying, money laundering, and terrorist operations against the Union during the entire war.
Now we begin to look at Hamilton’s Genius and the American System. This was such an interesting chapter as it highlights the two opposing ideals in the context of the banking system. During the period of 1783-1791, the newly established American republic was in financial ruins with no means to pay off its debts or even the soldiers who fought for years in the revolutionary war. It was only a matter of time before the fragile new nation would come undone and be reabsorbed back into the fold of the British Empire. The solution to this unsolvable crisis was unveiled by Washington’s former Aide de Camp and now Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s idea for the national bank was premised on the unification of private profit with the wellbeing of the whole nation in order to overcome the dichotomy of state vs individual rights which has plagued so much of philosophy and human history. This was the exact method needed to fix the issues plaguing the new nation but it was met with strong opposition and every president that has supported this system or tried to revive it has died in office. They also had to deal with many City of London-affiliated traitors in America like Aaron Burr who established the speculative Bank of Manhattan which started Wall Street and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804 ending many of Hamilton’s grand designs for the young republic, the system was never completely destroyed despite the decades of attempts to do so.
In America, the clash between American vs British Systems defined all major conflicts from 1836 when Andrew Jackson killed the 2nd National Bank (along with thousands of Cherokees) and brought the nation under the heel of British Free Trade, speculation, and cotton plantation economics. Following the IMF’s protocols that would be imposed onto victim nations 150 years later, Jackson cancelled all internal improvements in order to “pay the debt” and deregulated the banking system which resulted in the growth of over 7000 separate currencies issued by an array of state banks rendering the economy chaotic, bankrupt and prone to mass counterfeiting. Seeding these differences clearly laid out side by side it is insane to think anyone would have followed the British system but many did.
The next chapter was The 1804 Northern Secession Plot and the Founding Fathers of the Deep State. This chapter perfectly highlighted how hard Hamilton worked to maintain the ideals he supported and how much effort he put into thwarting the plans of his opponents. Between 1776 until his death in 1804, Alexander Hamilton used every ounce of his influence to ensure that the many traitorous movements launched by diverse branches of British operations in America under the leadership of arch-traitor Aaron Burr, failed to achieve their goals. These operations which included Canadian United Empire Loyalists, New York financiers and southern slave interests, can collectively be defined as the “founding fathers of today’s deep state” which evolved over the years and took over much of the nation after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Burr was involved in several different plots over the coming years which Hamilton managed to break down until his unfortunate death at Burr’s hands. One such plot was Burr breaking up the republic into two separate confederacies under the guise that “slave states and free states could not co-exist”. While this fact may have been true, rather than continue the struggle to abolish slavery by imposing the authority of the Constitution, such traitors made the argument that it were best to dissolve the nation and constitution completely. Under these designs, British Canada would merge with northern “free states” under a new Anglo-Saxon confederation, while the slave power would be free to create its own southern confederation. Under this design, both northern and southern confederacies would be defined by a special relationship with England and dominated by the City of London’s economic web of finance.
However, this plan hinged upon Burr’s 1804 victory as Governor of New York State and once again, just as in the presidential fight of 1800, Alexander Hamilton devoted all of his energy to ensuring Burr’s defeat. Without New York on board, the plot for Northern secession could not succeed, and again a new strategy had to be concocted. These various blockades placed by Hamilton led an enraged Burr to decided that Hamilton had to be eliminated once and for all, and in the wake of his defeat, Burr put all of his chips into organizing a duel with his nemesis, resulting in Hamilton’s death on July 12, 1804. This wasn’t the only plot Burr was involved though, he was discovered to be at the heart of a new plot outlined by Ambassador Merry. Instead of relying on “free new England” uniting with Canada, this new plan centred on Burr’s dominance of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory sold by Napoleon to America in 180462 as the basis for a new western confederacy. Napoleon’s desire to sell this gigantic territory to the Americans was a surprise to all and threw a big wrench in British plans to take control of this land and again suffocate the USA as a closed system locked onto the Atlantic Coast as had been attempted with the 1774 Quebec Act earlier.
This plan had the British working alongside the American’s under Burr’s employment to take full control of Louisiana, New Orleans, and then expand the territory by declaring war on Spain. According to testimonies delivered at Burr’s trial, Burr would then turn his attention to the capital where the sitting president would be deposed, and Burr established as Monarch of a new British American confederation. Again this didn’t work out and Burr found himself in court but he was set free fleeing into Canada for many years. Finally returning to the United States in the months before the War of 1812, Burr began rebuilding his political machine with a new focus on the use of the Wall Street dominated Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren which would ultimately drive America into a Civil War five decades later.
This plot under Jackson and Van Buren meant that protectionism was dismantled in favour of British free trade, speculation grew rampantly as did the southern slave power as the south was cleansed of Cherokee under the Trail of Tears and given over to racist oligarchs. The National Bank was destroyed in Jackson’s last year in office, cutting the USA off from its only means of generating sovereign credit for development resulting in the panic and depression of 1837. All major infrastructure projects were cancelled under the banner of “paying the debt” and America’s path to dissolution dreamed of by Burr and his Deep State cohorts in 1804 was accelerated in short order. This in short is how Jackson singlehandedly destroyed the United States and it has been clearly documented over the years and I would advise looking further into this.
We move from one influential force in the founding of America to another in Lincoln and the Greenbacks. You have to remember that during this time Lincoln was contending with Wall Street financiers who attempted to sabotage his ability to acquire funds for the war. The state of economic affairs was impossibly unmanageable with over 7000 recognized bank notes in the USA and over 1496 banks each issuing multiple notes. With this breakdown it was impossible for national projects and investment to go ahead. Manufacturing collapsed, speculation took over and the slavocracy grew in influence between the 1837’s bank panic and 1860. Lincoln committed himself consistently to ending not only systems of slavery but also all hereditary power structures internationally. In response to these issues Lincoln issues a new form of currency called Greenbacks and these went into circulation in 1862. Nationally chartered banks were now obliged to deposit into the federal treasury totalling at least one third of their capital in exchange for government notes issued by the Mint and Treasury. By 1865 Greenback made up of half of currency in circulation and were the sole source of funding for soldiers and industrial projects.
By the time we hit chapter 9; A Historical Reminder of What Defines the United States, As Told by A Former Slave I was intrigued. This look at the life of Frederick Douglass who was a slave who escape and lived the life of free man even meeting President Lincoln. Douglass worked alongside Lincoln to end slavery and the President often took his advice and perspective on the matter to heart. Douglass recognised that humanity was indeed inherently good and would ultimately strive towards goodness if left to its natural tendency, that to punish the children of those who committed crimes before them would destroy any good that ever existed in the world. Knowing that this man also met his former owner on his deathbed and was happy to do so since he understood that they both stood of the same level almost brought me to tears.
Chapter 10 moves us into understanding the nature of the Deep State which is something we hear about a lot without truly understanding what it means. The Deep State is comprised of three prongs that Burr led on behalf of the British. Looking at the way the Deep State is structed leads us into some of the plots, one being the assassination of Lincoln. While many place blame solely on John Wilkes Booth as the lone shooter we have to question how many of those popular narratives infused into the western zeitgeist over the decades even acknowledge the simple fact that John Wilkes Boothe was in the possession of a $500 bank draft signed by Ontario Bank of Montreal President Henry Starnes when authorities searched his hotel room after Lincoln’s murder?
After the assassination an attempt was made to track down the people responsible but it only led to the deaths of four low level conspirators who were scapegoats like Booth. In a 2014 expose, historian Anton Chaitkin, points out that the money used by Boothe came directly from a $31,507.97 transfer from London arranged by the head of European confederate secret service chief James D. Bulloch. It is no coincidence that Bulloch happens to also be the beloved uncle and mentor of the same Teddy Roosevelt who became the president over the dead body of Lincoln-follower William McKinley.
We then move into some more political moves like the Sale of Alaska. The sale of Alaska stands out as an incomprehensible historical anomaly for many who choose to see history merely as a sequence of linear events determined by “practical decision making”. During this time the British had done much to subdue the world and were afraid that a Russian-American friendship would set into motion a great power alliance capable of undoing its global hegemony. It still has to be said that the Civil War would have been much darker if it wasn’t for Russia’s involvement. Czar Alexander II’s deployment of the Russian navy to California and Atlantic coasts of America in 1863 which kept British and French forces from assisting the confederacy in open warfare against Lincoln. This involvement forces us to look at how Russia ended up saving the United States.
In 1861, the Emancipation Edict was passed and successfully carried out by Czar Alexander II that would result in the freeing of over 23 million serfs. This was by no means a simple task and met much resistance, requiring an amazing degree of statesmanship to see it through. After several failures the Russian Navy arrives on the coastlines of the US and this was a relief since Britain and France were intending military action. If Russia had not done this, Britain and France would most certainly have intervened on behalf of the Confederate states as they made clear they would, and the United States would have most certainly broken in two at that point. It was Russia’s direct naval support that allowed the United States to remain whole. The next few chapters go deeper into these political move but I want to discuss Chapter 15 and How Huxley’s X Club Derailed a 19th Century System of Win-Win Cooperation.
In 1865, a group of 12 scientists under the leadership of Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Hooker, and Herbert Spencer created a group under the name “X Club” with the mandate to reform global British Imperial strategy. Now having studied both British and American history the X Club is something I have heard of before. The British Empire knew that this emerging new paradigm would render both its maritime control of international trade as obsolete and it needed to do something about it. The X Club’s support of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection was less a scientific decision in this respect and more of a political one, as Darwin later admitted in his autobiography that his own theory arose directly from his study of Malthus and this shows how lies and deceit in the halls of science has been happening for far longer than many imagine. By universalizing Malthus onto all living creation, the X Club obscured the qualitative difference between humans and monkeys which was advantageous for an empire that can only control humans when they adopt the law of the jungle as standards of moral practice and identity formation rather than anything actually moral. Support of Darwin still continues today but more people are waking up to the truth and I’d encourage anyone reading this to do your own research and draw your own conclusion.
Overall, while I found The Unfinished Symphony to be an interesting and informative read it felt very political heavy for me personally and it lacked the almost story-telling quality that Volume 4 has. This is most likely because Ehret’s writing has improved over time but I am eager to see what the other two volumes in this series have in store for me.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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