15: Societicide

In 1502, the seventeen-year-old Bartolomé de las Casas arrived on the island that the natives called ‘Haiti,’ which meant ‘the mountainous island.’

Las Casas’ father was a merchant.  He had come to the land that the Spanish called ‘The Indies’ to take advantage of trading opportunities and brought his family.  The family arrived 10 years after Columbus had first landed there.

Bartolomé de las Casas was a prolific writer.  He began to write a journal of his time in ‘The Indies’ as a teenager and continued it for the next 59 years, until his death in 1566.  His journal and its associated texts eventually became the most comprehensive literature on events that took place in the land that came to be called ‘the new world’ that we have.

Las Casas came to the area as a teenager.  Teenagers like to hang around with other teenagers.  There weren’t a lot of Spanish teenagers on Haiti at the time. Las Casas began to spend time with local teenagers.  He learned the language very quickly.  His friends were people that the Spanish called ‘Indians.’

We will see shortly that the conquerors tried hard to have friendly relations with the locals, at least at first.  When they realized that the people who lived in these lands would not accept their way of life easily, they began to apply pressure.  When they realized that no amount of pressure would get the natives to change their ways of life to match the requirements of the conquerors, they began exterminating them.

When Las Casas saw that the people from the society where he was raised were killing the people he had come to think of as ‘his people,’ he became a vocal opponent of the treatment of the local people.  This put him into direct opposition with the people behind the conquest.

He spent his life working within the system to try to change policy.

But his opponents—the ones who wanted the locals wiped out—thought of him as an ‘Indian lover.’ The ‘Indians’ were the enemy. Las Casas was trying to thwart the goals of the conquistadors, which meant he was trying to go against the church.

In part, the Catholic Church reaction was defensive and personal against Las Casas:  Church officials realized his writings could show that the Christians had committed atrocities with the knowledge and support of the church.  In part, they began to fight him because he tried actively to change their behavior and bring some of the worst offenders against the local people to justice, including a large number of high officials in the church.  The leadership of the Catholic church didn’t want people to know the things he had written and didn’t want him to have a platform in his opposition to their activities.

They put his books on a list called the ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum,’ a list of books banned by the church.

This was not a passive ban that could be taken lightly.  The Church body that enforced this ban, the inquisition, was known for its incredible brutality.  The two countries most involved in colonization, Spain and Portugal, both had important alliances with church officials.  The governments of these nations enforced the ban against the long list of books. For centuries, no one knew about Las Casas’ writings, because they had been banned.

During the 1800s and 1900s, the church lost virtually all of its power to enforce its edicts. Officials no longer had the ability to gather books and destroy them, or to prosecute their owners.  In 1966, the Church officials realized that it did the organization no good to have a list of banned books when it couldn’t enforce the ban.  They officially ended the practice and made ownership of all books legal.

Although the ban didn’t exist anymore, it had been highly effective for nearly 400 years.  Most of the books that were banned were either not available at all or available only in ancient editions that were so old and fragile that the public couldn’t be allowed to even see them, let alone read them.

The internet is making more and more of these books available as time passes.  When I began to look for Las Casas’ works in the late 1990s, I found only excerpts from the first volume of the Historia on the internet, and then only in Spanish, with only one of his books (the Devastation of the Indies) having been translated into in English.  (The Historia was originally published in 1552; it was a six-volume set with 260 chapters and more than 2,600 pages.)  As more and more works of the period become available, we get a better and better picture of what happened.

I keep defaulting to Las Casas, however, for an understanding of this period in history, for several reasons.

First: he was clearly very intelligent.

Second: the people of his own time clearly placed a great deal of trust in him.  Columbus and many others trusted him so much they left their personal papers to him to help him write his Historia.

Third: he is able to see both sides of the issue.  He was a member of the conquering society, but he lived among and understood the ways of life of the society that was being conquered.

He spent his formative years with people of his own age who had entirely different ideas about the way human existence could work.  He was in a position to contrast these ideas with the ideas of the Europeans that had come to make a new life in this new world.

I think it is important to understand what Las Casas was trying to do with his writings.  He himself explains it better than anyone else can.  This is from the introduction to Historia:

The ultimate cause for writing this work was to gain knowledge of all the many peoples of this vast new world. They had been defamed by persons who feared neither God nor the charge, so grievous before divine judgment, of defaming men and causing them to lose esteem and honor.

It has been written that these peoples of the Indies, lacking organized nations and structured governments, did not have the power of reason to govern themselves.  In order to demonstrate the truth, which is the opposite, this book brings together and compiles natural, special and accidental causes which are specified below.  Not only have the new-world natives shown themselves to be very wise peoples and possessed of lively and marked understanding, prudently governing and providing for their people and making them prosper in justice; but they have equaled many diverse nations of the world, past and present, that have been praised for their governance, politics and customs; and exceed by no small measure the wisest of all these, such as the Greeks and Romans.

This advantage and superiority, along with everything said above, will appear quite clearly when the new-world natives are compared with Europeans.

This history has been written with the aforesaid aim in mind by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a monk of the Dominican Order and bishop of Chiapa, who promises before the divine word that everything said and referred to is the truth, and that nothing of an untruthful nature appears to the best of his knowledge.

Las Casas’ book includes enormous quantities of evidence from official documents, from the personal and professional papers of prominent people of the time, from eye-witness accounts by various respected people, and from things Las Casas himself saw with his own eyes.  At the end of the book, he summarizes its points this way:

I have declared and demonstrated openly and concluded, from chapter 22 to the end of this whole book, that all of the people of these Indies are Human.  They had their towns, villages and cities, most fully and abundantly provided for.  With a few exceptions in varying degrees they lacked nothing, and some were endowed in full perfection for political and social life and for attaining and enjoying that civic happiness which in this world any good, rational, well provided and happy society wishes to have and enjoy; for all are by nature of very subtle, lively, clear and most capable understanding.

Las Casas describes the first half century of conquest in very great detail.  His books provide a theme that we can follow to understand when, where, and how certain policies in the early years of the conquest became a reality, and the effects these policies had on the world and its people.

As we will see, at first, the conquering societies tried to assimilate the people of the new world into their culture.  But this didn’t last very long.  Let’s start with the early attempts at assimilation.

La Tributa

The Capitulations of Santa Fe had granted Columbus certain rights and authorities over any land he might discover.  This document granted Columbus three official titles:

1.  Governor

2.  Admiral

3.  Vice-Roy

Each title meant something specific:

As governor, he was essentially the government of any lands he might discover.  He could make all rules and laws that kings and governments of Europe could make.

As Admiral, he commanded the military.  If he made rules in his role as the governor and if people didn’t follow them, he could order the military to enforce the rules.

As Vice-Roy, he was the administrator of the land, a position of nobility.  This title granted him the right to share in any revenue he collected from the land.  In Europe, the government collected both rents and taxes from the land and people. He wanted his land to begin generating taxes and revenue.  The more money the land generated, the more he would get.

He told the natives that they were subjects of the crown and under his governance.  If they followed his rules, they would be allowed to live in peace.

What rules would he require them to follow?

He arrived back in Haiti in November of 1493.  Two months later, he passed a law called ‘La Tributa.’  This law required the locals to pay taxes.

They were living on land that belonged to the King and Queen.  Columbus was their representative.  He was required to make sure they compensated the owners of the land for their generosity in letting them live on it.

He had brought a large quantity of trinkets called ‘hawk’s bells’ to give away to the locals. (These were tiny bells, so named because people who owned hawks attached them to their birds so they could hear their birds coming.) The native streams had gold dust in them.  Columbus told them that they had to pay the king and queen for the use of the land where they lived in gold.

Qqq hawks bell picture page 273

They would have to open the bell and use it as a vessel; the tax started out to be ½ of a hawk’s bell full of gold every 4 months.  This worked out to be 2 grams of gold for each three-month period.

At first, the locals paid the tax.  They had a lot of gold.  A few people could go out and collect it and give Columbus what he wanted, keeping his military from bothering them.

Columbus must have decided he had set the tax too low and, in 1495, doubled it, to 4 grams of gold dust per person, per four-month period.

As the Vice-Roy, Columbus’ share was half.  The rest belonged to the owners of the land, the King and Queen of Spain.

The Requerimiento

The sovereigns had accountants who quickly realized that they weren’t getting the amounts of rents they should get.  They knew the native population of the island.  (Three million according to official records.)  The knew they were supposed to get ½ of 4 grams per person, or a total of 6 million grams every 3 months.  They weren’t getting it.

It turned out that Columbus had a soft heart.  He let some people slide on their taxes.  Sovereignties can’t work if some people are allowed to slide on their taxes. If some people can get away without paying, others won’t pay either; the discontent will grow.  Everyone has to pay.

If people won’t pay without aggressive enforcement of the tax, the government will have to enforce the tax aggressively.  The system can’t work otherwise.

In 1513, the crown cracked down, passing a new law ‘La Requerimiento.’ This law was posted in all of the towns and villages of Haiti, the only island under the total control of the Spanish at this time.  Criers were sent to read the text to the locals in their own language.  The government wanted the people to know that it was in charge; failure to pay rent would no longer be tolerated.  Here are some excerpts from the law:

Almost all those who have been notified of their obligations have received and served their Highnesses as lords and kings, in the way that subjects ought to do, with good will, without any resistance, immediately, without delay, when they were informed of the aforesaid facts.  If you do this also, you will do well and their Highnesses shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives, and your children, and your lands, free without servitude.

If you do not do this, or if you delay maliciously in doing it, we swear to you that with God’s help we will come mightily against you and you make war against you in every way we can; we will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and His Majesty; we will take your wives and children and make them slaves; we will sell them into slave markets and use the money as His Majesty commands.  We will take your property and do you all of the misery and harm that we are able to do to you, as is fitting for vassals who do not obey and do not want to receive their rightful master.

We hereby inform you that the deaths and damages that you will receive from this are your fault, and not His Majesties nor mine, nor the soldiers that came with me and will enforce these rules.  [The full text of this document can be found at http://www.gabrielbernat.es/ espana/leyes/requerimiento/r1513/r1513.html.]

It is often said that the truth is stranger than fiction.

It would seem hard to believe that anyone who truly believed in an afterlife judgment would write such a thing.  If a fiction writer claimed someone who believed in afterlife judgment passed such a law as a premise for a book, readers would probably not accept it.  But the document above is a real law passed by real people who at least claimed to believe in an afterlife judgment.

The government of Columbus and governors that followed him enforced the law as it was written.  The government under Columbus manufactured special copper medals, a different design for each three-month period. When people paid for a given period, they would get the appropriate medal attached to a string, to use as a necklace.  They had to wear the current medal around their necks at all times.  Any found without the necklace were deemed to be in violation of the Requerimiento.

The military went through all of the native towns at the beginning of each rental period inspecting everyone.  Soldiers had to arrest any people without the medals—along with their children, as the law specified—and bring them to the nearest market to sell them as slaves.  Any of the people who were passive and accepted the situation were allowed to live out the rest of their lives as slaves.  (Many records indicate that this meant days or, at most, weeks; they were not treated well.)

What if people resisted arrest?

The soldiers were required to execute any who resisted on the spot.  The government gave them instructions to conduct these executions in the most brutal and inhumane ways they could devise.  Here Las Casas describes the enforcement methods he saw used, with his own eyes.  (Warning: the quote that follows is brutal and graphic in its description of violence. Think about whether you have a tolerance for such descriptions before you read it.)

They spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house.  They laid bets as to who could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike.  They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby.

Extinction

When Columbus first arrived, gold dust was abundant in the streams.  The early miners removed it.  The easy gold wasn’t there.  The native villages couldn’t get enough gold to pay the taxes required for that entire village.  They realized that if they didn’t pay, the soldiers would come and enforce the order.

The natives began to desert their farms, villages and homes, in order to escape the death squads. They began to go into remote areas of the mountains to live.  The mountains were cold and many died of hypothermia; they had little food and many starved to death.  Las Casas discusses the decline in the native population at great length, not just on the big island of Haiti where he lived, but throughout the lands controlled by the people of the Western Hemisphere.  He points out that the official native population of Haiti was three million when he arrived in 1502.  The 1550 census listed only 200 natives left alive on the entire island.  The next census showed zero full-blooded natives.

There were three major mechanisms that caused the population decline:

The first was the decline in the food supply.  Food production stopped.  When Columbus first arrived, the natives had large warehouses full of food.  They kept stockpiles in case the harvest was short in a given year.  Las Casas points out that they burned these warehouses themselves and destroyed their own reserve food.

They truly believed that no one owned the land, so no one owned the food.  Even as the Spanish were killing them, they didn’t change this belief.  They didn’t lump the Spanish together.  Some were good and some were bad.  They felt those who were good deserved the same rights as the locals to the food.  They shared.

Finally, when they realized that the Spanish weren’t going to leave, they decided the only way to remove them was to starve them out.  They couldn’t let them starve if there was still food (it is hard to imagine this point of view, but you can find ample evidence that they held it in many of the documents of the time).  The only way to starve the Spanish was to destroy all the food.

This didn’t work, however. The Spanish had gold (the gold the natives were removing from the streams and later mines to give to the Spanish, in an attempt to get them to stop the killing).  The Spaniards could buy all the food they wanted in Europe and have it shipped back to them.

The second major cause of the population decline was disease.  The people from Afro-Eurasia had lived in close proximity to cows and other farm animals for thousands of years.  If a serf family owned a cow in feudal Europe, its milk could mean the difference between life and death for its owners and their children.  Cows can be stolen and, if they were to leave the cow outside at night, someone would eventually steal it.  To prevent thieves from stealing their farm animals, they would bring the animals into their homes and sleep with the animals.

Over the course of thousands of years, two very serious cattle diseases mutated to be able to attack humans: cow pox mutated into what is probably the most dangerous disease humans have ever had, smallpox.  The ‘rinderpest’ virus, a cattle disease, mutated to become human measles, a disease that is often fatal.

Afro-Eurasian people were not as susceptible to these diseases as people in the Western Hemisphere because they had lived with the diseases for thousands of years.  When an outbreak of smallpox went through a community, those highly susceptible would all die.  At first, this meant most of the people.  But those who had some sort of resistance would survive and pass down their resistance to their children.  In the next wave, a smaller percentage would die.  Each wave would kill a smaller percentage.  By the 1500s, Europeans had such a great immunity that most waves of disease killed only about 20% of the people who got it.

The native people had never experienced these diseases and had no resistance.

The 2010 paper, ‘The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,’ explains the role disease played in the decline in population:

Before Europeans initiated the Columbian Exchange of germs and viruses, the peoples of the Americas suffered no smallpox, no measles, no chickenpox, no influenza, no typhus, no typhoid or parathyroid fever, no diphtheria, no cholera, no bubonic plague, no scarlet fever, no whooping cough, and no malaria.  Although we may never know the exact magnitudes of the depopulation due to these diseases, it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492 (Newson, 2001).  Within 50 years following contact with Columbus and his crew, the native Taino population of the island of Hispanola, which had an estimated population between 60,000 and 8 million, was virtually extinct (Cook, 1993).  [Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24:2, Spring 2010, 163-188.]

The third reason for the decline in population is the one that got the most attention from humanists like Las Casas:

The conquerors enslaved the native people and either worked them to death, or simply slaughtered them. This was easy for them to do: the native people did not have any weapons, they had never had to develop militaries, they had never had to design their economies around war or give leaders the power to commit atrocities.  They had no experience in mass murder and had powerful social taboos against harming others; this often caused them to refuse to kill soldiers even when killing a few soldiers could have prevented the soldiers from slaughtering their entire village.

The people who had grown up in Afro-Eurasian societies had experience with war; they knew the most effective ways to kill, had all the necessary tools, and were willing to do anything necessary—including destroy the environment that supported them—in order to make sure they always had enough weapons to keep the killing going.

They had been raised to believe that their sovereigns gained their power and authority from God Himself. To disobey sovereign law was to disobey the all-powerful Creator of the universe.  Nothing was more important to them than sovereign law.

The Conquest of the Mainland

Hernando Cortez led the first large-scale military action on the American continent.  He left Cuba with a small group of ships on February 19, 1515.  His goal was clearly to conquer the entire continent.

The expedition made its first stop on the beautiful island of Cozumel, about 100 miles west of the tip of Cuba and just off the coast of Mexico.  The people who lived on Cozumel told Cortez that there were two other people from his culture who already lived in Mexico.  These two men were living in the city of Chetumal, about 100 miles southwest of Cozumel.

The two men, Gonzalo Guerro and Gerónimo de Aguilar, had been the only survivors of a shipwreck about seven years earlier.  Cortez wrote them a letter and sent it by native courier.  The letter invited the Spaniards to come to Cozumel and join Cortez’ expedition.

Gerónimo de Aguilar responded to the message.  He wanted to get back to the world he had left behind.  The other chose to remain behind and declined the offer.  He sent a letter back that explained the reason he wanted to stay behind.  (An engraved copy of this letter, together with a 70-foot high stature of Guerro, stands today at the main road entrance to Chetumal; Guerro is a great hero to the Mayan people; see text below for more information:)

Aguilar went with Cortez. He spoke both Mayan and Spanish so he could translate, a huge help in this expedition.  He also understood the customs of the Mayan people, so he could make sure that Cortez followed the proper protocols to get along with the people who lived there.

After the group left Cozumel, their next stop was the city of Potonchán (now called Celestún) at the mouth of the Tobasco River.

Peter Myrtar, the official historian of the Spanish Crown, provides this description of Potonchán:

 

There exists a great city extending along the Tabasco river; so great and celebrated, as one cannot measure, it extends flanking the coast about five hundred thousand steps and has twenty-five thousand houses, dispersed among gardens, that are made splendidly with stones and lime in whose construction projects the admirable industry and are of the architects.  [De Orbo Novo]

Cortez spent two weeks in this beautiful city.  While there, he met a woman who was to play a very important part in the conquest of Mexico.  In her native language, her name was ‘Malintzin.’ The Spaniards had a hard time pronouncing the last syllable, so they called her ‘Malinche.’

Cortez and Malinche became lovers.  Malinche decided to go with Cortez on the rest of his trip.

Most Mexican people today know the name ‘Malinche.’

The native people of Mexico consider her to be a great traitor. They put a large share of the blame for the atrocities that were to follow on her shoulders.

Malinche had been born and raised in Tenochtitlan (now called ‘Mexico City’).  She came from a prosperous family and received a good education.  She had moved to Potonchán as a teenager.  Her native language was Nauhatal, the language of the central Mexico valley, but she was very well-educated and spoke many local dialects.  She was fluent in Mayan so she could communicate through Aguilar.  Malinche had a natural aptitude for languages and became fluent in Spanish very quickly.

(Malinche and Cortez would eventually marry.  But this would be a long time in the future.)

Malinche was familiar with the legends and religious superstitions of the Mexican people.  One legend tells of a god from the east named ‘Quetzocoatal.’ According to the legend, Quetzocoatal had arrived from the eastern sea some 1,200 years earlier.  (This would be the year 319 AD by the Christian calendar, just before Constantine issued the edicts that led to the Dark Ages.)  The legend holds that the blond haired blue-eyed Quetzocoatal had created the administrative system that was still in place in Mexico as of 1519.

Quetzocoatal then told the people he could not stay and would have to return home.  He told them that he would trust them to rule themselves until he returned and took back his position of authority.  He said he would return and, when he did, they would have to return authority to him.

Malinche told Cortez that he may be able to take advantage of this legend.

Rather than taking the bold step of claiming to be Quetzocoatal himself, he could claim that Quetzocoatal would soon be arriving and that he, Cortez, had been sent ahead to prepare things for the god’s arrival.  Cortez decided to follow Malinche’s advice and pretend to be an emissary of Quetzocoatal.

His men were not very well suited for this mission.  They were mostly lower class people he had picked up in the bars of Cuba by promising them a share of any spoils they could find.  Cortez told them they would have to act respectably for the ruse to work. He set strict behavior rules. When two of his men violated the rules the first day, to show that he meant business Cortez conducted a quick court marshal and had them hanged.  The others appeared to have gotten the message because they were able to act respectably, at least for a while.

Under Malinche’s guidance, they headed for her home city, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City).  The closest landing was a native village located where the colonial Spanish city of Veracruz now stands.  They arrived there April 21, 1519.

Some of the men were afraid of what they faced.  Cortez was worried that they would turn coward and run, so he decided to make this impossible.  He unloaded the ships and put the goods they would need on shore.  Then he sent people out to set fire to the ships. The entire crew watched while they burned and eventually sank.  There was no going back.  They would succeed or die.

Malinche knew just what to say to the locals.  She told them that Cortez was an ambassador for Quetzocoatal.  Quetzocoatal would soon be arriving.  Cortez had been sent ahead to make sure everything was ready for his arrival.  He was to go to the capital, Tenochtitlan, and make arrangements so that the administration could be turned over to Quetzocoatal as soon as he arrived.

Tenochtitlan was an island city in the middle of a lake, connected to the mainland by three causeways. Cortez arrived at the gate to the main causeway on October 8, 1519 and formally requested entry into the city. The picture below is a copy of the map Cortez drew of Tenochtitlan.

Qqq map of tenochtitlan page 282

Mexico City

Many historians believe that Tenochtitlan was the most populous city on Earth at the time.  More than 500,000 people lived on the island itself, with at least 3 million more living around the lake.  The Aztec leaders knew Cortez was coming of course; they had messengers and a well-organized system for relaying news.  But they couldn’t agree on what they should do about it.

Some of the leaders believed it was a trick.  They thought that Spaniards had simply taken advantage of the legend, which was, in fact, what was happening.  But some were not so sure.  They thought it might be true.  They thought that they needed to at least let Cortez into the city to explain himself.

The leaders kept Cortez and his men waiting just outside of the city for a full month before they made their decision.  Finally, they agreed to let him in.  On November 8, 1519, Cortez and his men marched along the great causeway into the most populous city in the world, being welcomed as if they were the emissaries of their most revered god.

When they arrived, an island-wide feast and celebration was held in their honor.  Montezuma, the highest leader in the administration, hosted the party.  We can tell by the events that happened next that Montezuma was one of the leaders who did not believe that Cortez represented any gods.  Cortez must have realized that Montezuma did not believe him and would make trouble, so he decided to take steps to make this impossible.  Cortez told Montezuma he wanted to talk to him in private and they met in a side room where Cortez had stationed several armed men.  Cortez took Montezuma hostage.  He made it clear that he would torture and kill Montezuma if he didn’t cooperate.

Montezuma came to be regarded as a great traitor to his people because of his response: he agreed to cooperate.  Within a few days, Cortez had been granted the Aztec equivalent of the keys to the city. The Aztecs put him and his men up in the nicest building in town and showered them with gifts and honors. Cortez had it made.  All he would have to do is not make any serious mistakes and he would control this massive and powerful land without having to fight anyone.

The Fall of the City

Unfortunately, Cortez had already made a mistake.

He had partnered with the Governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, for this trip.  The governor provided all of the money and ships; Cortez commanded the operation.  They had agreed to split any profits of the voyage 50/50.  But Cortez clearly didn’t have any intention of keeping his end of the bargain.  He got his men together three days before the scheduled departure date and left with all the ships and equipment, without taking any of his partner’s men or even notifying them he was leaving.

Governor Cuéllar realized Cortez didn’t have any intention of sharing what he took with him.

The governor put together a second expedition to go to Mexico.  The leader was to find Cortez, arrest him, and bring him to justice.  The second expedition arrived at Veracruz in April of 1520.  Cortez found out they were there through Montezuma’s messenger system.  The party included 19 ships and 1,400 soldiers.

Cortez decided it best that he talk to them in person, so he left the city.

Here is the problem:

Cortez’s men were from the lower classes and were already having a hard time following the rules.  Many of the people on the trip liked to drink alcohol.  The Aztecs had an alcoholic drink called pulque, that they kept offering to the Spaniards.  (Pulque is fermented maguey leaves; when it is distilled it is called ‘tequila.’  The Aztecs reserved tequila for religious ceremonies, but ordinary people could drink pulque.  They still do; it is the drink of the very, very poor in Mexico today.)  Cortez had forbidden them to drink alcohol on penalty of death by hanging.

Another rule involved sex. Some of the local women were attracted to the Spaniards.  They kept flirting and trying to get the men into bed.  Cortez had forbidden any sexual activity with the locals.  (Since there were no Spanish females, this meant no sex at all.)  Again, men who violated the rule were to be hanged.

Cortez had let them know he meant business from the first, by hanging two of his men.  As long as Cortez was there, his men behaved.  But Cortez feared that if he left, his men might think they could get away with breaking the rules.

They apparently didn’t understand that they had to keep up the deception, because the 140 of them could not remain if even a tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands of locals wanted them gone.  Cortez was in a bad situation.  He didn’t want to leave, but he felt he didn’t have any choice.  If he could talk to the Spaniards who had come to arrest him, he might be able to get them on his side.  If he couldn’t talk to them, they could mess up his plan and make it impossible.

As soon as Cortez left, the men he left behind began to violate the rules.  The locals started to realize that these weren’t emissaries of their god at all; they were simple opportunists trying to get what they could. They finally evicted the Spaniards.

There are several stories about what happened next.  Some say that the massacre the Spaniards perpetuated was preemptive: they had learned that the locals would move against them, and they wanted make sure the locals knew they would not tolerate this.  Others say that the locals told the Spaniards to leave first, and they reacted with the massacre.

Regardless of which way it happened, the Spanish selected a religious celebration to show their strength. The Spanish blockaded all of the exits to the building where the celebration was being held and then killed everyone there.  The next day, thousands of citizens volunteered to use force to remove the Spanish.  The 140 of them had no chance against the thousands arrayed against them.

The Conquest

In the meantime, Cortez was on his way to meet the party that had been sent to arrest him.  He had some very good luck.  He located the Spanish camp and sent a spy in to get information.  The spy found out where the command tent was located.  The other party had no idea Cortez was there; he caught them totally by surprise. In the middle of the night, Cortez and his men moved in and captured the commander of the unit, Pánfilo de Narváez.

Cortez told Narváez that he had located a city of gold.  Cortez offered Narváez a choice: his first option was to put himself and his troops under Cortez’s command.  If he did this, he and all his men would share in the gold in accordance with their rank and Narváez would likely end up one of the richest men on Earth.

His second option was to refuse to cooperate.  If he did this, he would be executed, and Cortez would make the same offer to his next in command.  Narváez didn’t consider his choices very long.  He decided to put his troops under Cortez’s command.

By now, Cortez knew about the debacle in the city.  He knew that the Aztecs would never let him back. The city was on an island in the middle of a lake.  The only way to get there on foot was by a causeway so narrow two people could barely pass.  There would be no way to take the causeway by force.  But Cortez had another plan.

Smallpox infections lead to large numbers of pustules that fill up with puss.  The puss contains the variola virus, the source of the disease. Military leaders who want to use smallpox as a weapon can collect the puss and store it in vials.  The puss remains contagious for a very long period of time.  (As I write this, the disease itself has been wiped out.  However, the virus itself still exists.  Major world governments that have biological weapons have stored the pus that contains the virus in vials, in case they ever need to do what Cortez did.)  Cortez could smear some pus on blankets and other items that were bound for markets in Tenochtitlan.  Then, he would just have to wait; in about 3 weeks, smallpox would break out in the city.

Qqq smallpox picture here page 286

The illustration to the right is from a book written by Aztecs at the time of the conquest called the Florentine Codex.  It shows drawings of people with the disease that swept through Tenochtitlan in 1520. The photograph above it comes from a web description used to help physicians to help identify specific kinds of smallpox, depicting the symptoms of ‘Variola Major,’ the deadliest form of smallpox.

The quote below is from the Florentine Codex, describing the onset of the plague:

Before the Spaniards had risen against us, first there came to be prevalent a great sickness, a plague. It was in Tepeilhuitl that it originated, that there spread over the people a great destruction of men.  Some it covered with pustules; they were spread everywhere, on one’s face, on one’s head, on one’s breast, etc.  There was indeed perishing; many indeed died of it.

No longer could they walk; they only lay in their abodes, in their beds.  No longer could they move, no longer could they bestir themselves, no longer could they raise themselves, no longer could they stretch themselves out face down, no longer could they stretch themselves out on their backs. And when they bestirred themselves, much did they cry out.  There was much perishing.  Indeed many people died of the sickness and many just died of hunger.  There was much death from hunger; there was no one to take care of another; there was no one to attend to another.

At this time this plague prevailed indeed sixty days.

And then the Spaniards came.

They moved there from Texcoco; they went to set forth by way of Quauhtitlan; they came to settle themselves at Tlacopan. And in Nextlatilco, or Ilyacac, there indeed war first began.

The Spaniards didn’t really ‘fight’ for Tenochtitlan.

They waited until the city was helpless—with the great majority of the people either dead or crippled from disease—and took over.

Once Cortez controlled Tenochtitlan, he sent his troops outward in all directions.   The Spaniards treated Central America the same way they had treated Haiti: it was a cash register, a source of gold and other treasure. They took what each area contained and moved on.  The people were nothing but nuisances to be brushed aside.

What about their cultures?

In this area, the Spanish moved aggressively.  After taking Tenochtitlan, Cortez had every single building and monument torn apart, stone by stone.  The stones were then used to rebuild in Spanish Colonial style.  They destroyed any books or records they could find. The Spanish wanted to eradicate any trace of the culture, the beliefs, and the society that existed before they arrived in Mexico.

South and North America

In 1520, Hernando De Soto, then 24 years old, joined the Spanish military.  He was sent to a unit in Panama which was then under the command of Pedro Arias Dávila.

De Soto gained a reputation as an expert in biological warfare.  He was good at it.

His standard operating procedure involved organizing distribution of items that were infected with smallpox to the native people.  A few weeks after the presents arrived, smallpox broke out.  He would wait until the people were helpless from the disease and move in.  De Soto was notorious for his cruelty.  He wanted gold.  He would kidnap leaders and hold them for ransom.  Once he had all the gold people would give him for the leaders, he took others hostage and tortured them to get their gold.  Bartolomé de Las Casas described his activities in gruesome detail in La Historia.

De Soto’s methods were very effective.  He did things the other men in the military would not do and brought in far more gold than others.  His commanders promoted him over and over.  He was promoted to officer rank in 1521.  By 1522, he had his own command.

In 1523, he met Francisco Pizarro.

Pizarro had arrived in the new world in 1509.  He had accompanied the explorer Balboa in his crossing of the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific in 1513.  During the next five years, Pizarro became a close associate of Governor Dávila.  Dávila wanted power and Balboa was in his way, so he wanted Balboa removed.  This presented a problem: Balboa was an officer with a large contingent of troops who would protect him. Dávila told Pizarro that, if he could bring in Balboa, he would be well rewarded.  Pizarro was able to capture Balboa and bring him into the fort, where Dávila had Balboa beheaded.  He delivered the promised reward and made Pizarro mayor (Alcalde) and magistrate of the newly formed Panama City.

Pizarro knew about the ‘Great South Sea,’ as Balboa had named it (the Pacific Ocean, on the west side of the Isthmus of Panama), because he had been there several times. Native traders brought goods up and down the coast.  They had told Balboa and Pizarro of land rich with gold called ‘Peru’ further south on the west coast of what is now called South America.  In 1524, Pizarro and De Soto went south themselves to have a look.  They landed at the city of Tumbes; it had a population of 178,000 at the time.  The people of Tumbes didn’t have a lot of gold, but they traded regularly with the people further to the south and told the explorers that the lands to the south had enormous amounts of this metal.

The two conquistadors made a second trip to Tumbes in 1526.  They brought some blankets and other items that they traded to the locals in the markets of Tumbes, and then they immediately left.  As soon as they left, smallpox broke out among the people of Tumbes.  The next two years, an epidemic raged through the Incan areas, spreading from Tumbes southward.

Pizarro and De Soto then went back to Spain and spent several years there with their attorneys securing legal rights to conquer Peru and keep a share of any gold or sliver they could extract from the people there.  Their attorneys negotiated a very good deal: they had the right to keep 80% of the gold and silver they got from the land.  The other 20% was to be called the ‘quinto real,’ or the ‘royal fifth.’  This would go to the crown.

When they returned with their armies in 1530, Tumbes was uninhabited.  The smallpox had caused such devastation to the city that the few survivors had fled.  In fact, there had been many cities to the south along the coast; all were deserted. The survivors of the plagues had fled to the very high Andean mountains, where the disease hadn’t been as virulent.

The Incan leadership had moved to the city of Cuzco; the highest official left alive was named ‘Atahualpa.’  Soto arranged a meeting with Atahualpa and, as soon as Atahualpa arrived, Soto had him placed in manacles. He had done this many times before to other native leaders: he wanted their money.  He wanted to make the people think that they would be left alone if they turned over the required ransom to the Spaniards.  There was a storage building close to where the two met, a building now called the ‘treasure room.’  The building is still there; its floor size is 10 feet by 20 feet, and the ceiling is 8 feet high.  Soto wanted the building filled to the top with gold; after the Spaniards had removed the gold, the Incans had to fill it again, this time with silver. The Spaniards would take the silver and the Incans would have to fill it third time, again with silver.   Soto told the people that, if they did this, he would take the gold and silver and leave, releasing everyone unharmed, and never return.

The people complied and delivered the required silver and gold.  Pizarro and De Soto ended up with a total of 1,326,539 pesos, or about 50,000 KG (25 metric tons), of gold, and about twice that amount of silver.  The gold alone would be worth $2 billion at 2020 prices.

Qqq treasure room 289

Hernando De Soto’s share of the ransom was 17,740 pesos (630kg) of gold.  De Soto used his money to purchase a large estate in Castile.

He was now officially a member of the landed gentry.  He began to look for a suitable wife.  Queen Isabella’s cousin, also named Isabella, was unmarried.  Soto wanted her for a wife.  The king needed money very quickly to pay for a war and De Soto had money to lend (gold was used for money in Europe at the time).  De Soto agreed to make the loan provided the king paved the way for him to marry Isabella.  The two were married in Castile, Spain, in 1537.

The Queen was very close to her cousin and wanted to give her and her new husband a truly magnificent wedding present.  She ended up giving the De Sotos the province that the Spanish then called ‘Florida.’

At the time, the Spanish had not explored any areas north of Cuba.  They used the term ‘Florida’ to refer to all Spanish possessions north of Cuba.  God Himself had granted all land of the Americas to the King and Queen of Spain, and their heirs and assigns, forever, in the Papal Bull of 1493.  The queen of Spain gave all land North of Cuba to her cousin and her new husband, Hernando De Soto, in 1537.

Officially, Hernando De Soto was the ‘Marquis and Adelanto’ of Florida.

The term ‘Adelanto’ translates to ‘president.’

The title ‘Marquis’ meant that he would have the same rights that Columbus had: if he could put any land under Spanish control, he would be entitled to administer it in exchange for a share of the revenues it generated.

De Soto was now president of North America.  He had never been there.  He wanted to see what his land looked like.  He led a group of 800 people through the lands in the southeastern part of North America during a four-year period between 1539 and 1542.

The map below shows his route.  Several of the people in his group were writers.  They kept journals describing their four-year trip through the areas that are now the states of Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas.  Four accounts exist of this journey.

The first to be published was by the ‘Gentleman of Elvas,’ an otherwise unidentified Portuguese knight who was a member of the expedition. His chronicle was first published in 1557. An English translation by Richard Hakluyt was published in 1609.

Luys Hernández de Biedma, the King’s factor (the agent responsible for the royal property) with the expedition, wrote a report which still exists. The report was filed in the royal archives in Spain in 1544. The manuscript was translated into English by Buckingham Smith and published in 1851.

De Soto’s secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, kept a diary, which has been lost. It was apparently used by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in writing his La historia general y natural de las Indias. Oviedo died in 1557. The part of his work containing Ranjel’s diary was not published until 1851. An English translation of Ranjel’s report was first published in 1904.

The fourth chronicle is by Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca (the Inca). Garcilaso de la Vega did not participate in the expedition. He wrote his account, La Florida, known in English as The Florida of the Inca, decades after the expedition, based on interviews with some survivors of the expedition. The book was first published in 1605. Historians have identified problems with using La Florida as a historical account. Milanich and Hudson warn against relying on Garcilaso, noting serious problems with the sequence and location of towns and events in his narrative. They say, ‘some historians regard Garcilaso’s La Florida to be more a work of literature than a work of history.’ Lankford characterizes Garcilaso’s La Florida as a collection of ‘legend narratives’ derived from a much-retold oral tradition of the survivors of the expedition.

We have already looked at some excerpts from these writings.  They describe a densely populated land with well-organized people. The diseases that would soon ravage the land had not yet arrived.  Historians differ about how these diseases came.  Some claim that De Soto brought them and spread them.  He had a long history of using germ warfare and was very familiar with the methods needed for this.  But since De Soto clearly intended to be in the same general area for many years, this seems unlikely.  The disease would have spread much faster than he traveled; when it caught up to him, he and his men would all be at risk of death themselves.  (In his previous germ warfare campaign, he had spread the disease and then immediately left for four years.)

It is possible.  De Soto and many in his group died in 1541 after an outbreak of disease that could have been smallpox.  But it is also possible that the disease arrived later. We know that the plagues were already spreading north from Mexico City and outward from the areas in the western part of America that the Spanish had explored.  It is possible that these plagues were not spread intentionally: infected people can carry both smallpox and the measles, the two most deadly diseases, without symptoms.  But, in the end, it really doesn’t matter whether the diseases were spread intentionally or by accident.

Post-Holocaust Societies

There is an entire literature genre called ‘Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic fiction.’ You can find hundreds of such works on the internet.  I expect that most people in the world today have read many books and/or watched many movies on this topic.

To have a story, some people would have to survive the collapse of society as they know it.  The books and movies tell the tales of the survivors.  The structures of their societies have collapsed.  Although the plots vary, the standard story involves people who flee cities and come together at some country location.  They spend most of their time struggling just to survive. We might imagine that survivors of the great American holocaust, deprived of the societies that had kept them comfortable, would have done the same things.

Human beings survived.

But the immense, well administered, prosperous, and orderly societies that had existed for thousands of years no longer existed.  Long before the first British corporations landed in Virginia, the societies that had dominated the Americas for thousands of years were basically gone.

In its simplest form, a ‘corporation’ is nothing but a group of people who agree to work together on a project. People have worked together on various projects from the beginning of human existence. But the corporation as we know it now—as a legal entity with rights to enter into contracts, to hire and fire, and to do other things as if it were a real human being—appears to have originated either in the time of Alexander or in the time of the Roman Empire.

Corporations as legal entities are necessary for extremely large projects that will take many decades to complete. Investors won’t be willing to put their money into a project if they are worried that the project might not be completed. If the project will take a very long time, there is a good chance that the people behind the project will either die or lose interest before it is completed. It doesn’t make sense to invest in a project under these circumstances. However, if the people behind the project can set up a legal organization that will continue, and make sure the project gets finished, with legal rights belonging to the investors, the investors feel safe. If they can have these assurances, they are willing to invest in projects that will take many years or even many decades to complete.

This is where the organizations that Romans called ‘publicans’ and that we now call ‘corporations’ come in: they are legal entities with legal rights that are entirely separate from the rights of the people involved. A corporation can raise money; it can take on debt, it can make contracts, it can elect or appoint its own administrators, and it can continue to exist and work on a project for many human lifetimes. Its existence doesn’t depend on the identities of any people.

As I write this in the 21^st century, corporations play a huge role in society. Virtually all weapons made in the world today come from corporations. Corporations are responsible for the great majority of environmental destruction in our world today. Corporations control virtually all of the press and media sources, so they control the information flow; they use their immense power to control public opinion.

Corporations also have immense control over governments. They have powerful lobbyists, political action committees, and other political organizations that allow corporations to basically write their own laws in most of the world. If corporations want wars, they have very powerful tools to make the wars happen. (Many claim that William Randolph Hearst started the Spanish American War simply to give him some ‘news’ to put between the ads of his newspapers.)

Corporations make nearly all manufactured goods in the world today. Corporations run the financial systems that dominate the world, the transportation systems, the distribution systems, and the great majority of the value-creation systems that are in the world as of the 21^st century.

We can’t really understand how the world got to be as it is now without understanding the specific type of corporation that exists in the world today. Although this type of corporation is similar in nature to the publicans that existed during Roman times, they have a great deal of rights and powers that early corporations did not have.

To really understand these critical entities, we need to understand how the specific type of corporation that exists in the world today first came to exist and the way it evolved to gain its present powers.

China, India and The Rest of the World

This book is about the way the world came to be in the mess we are in now, as of the 21^st century, perched on the edge of extinction. It has focused on events that happened in what is commonly called the ‘western world,’ which includes Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and after 1492, America.

What about the rest of the world? Aren’t the events there important as well?

If we want a general view of history, we need to understand what was going on in the rest of the world. But all of the key structures that dominate our 21^st century world, all the structures that place us at risk, and all of the structures that we can potentially use to save ourselves, originated in the part of the world collectively called ‘the west.’ The massive corporations that now dominate the world, governments that are essentially vassals of corporations, the amazing scientific advances that gave us electricity, telephones, computers, smartphones, photoelectric and other non-destructive energy production systems, all came to be in the ‘west.’

The two most important non-western cultures had enormous productivity; they invented a great many things and had a great many products that westerners wanted but didn’t know how to make. In many ways, India and China were both far more advanced than Europe as of 1600 AD. But both of these cultures were to be conquered by western cultures and ultimately forced to accept western ways. As I write this in the 21^st century, India and China and, for that matter, all of the cultures and nations of the world, have adopted a cultural, economic, and political model that originated in Europe and then evolved in America.

The Absolute Need for Enormous Corporations

In 1492, Columbus reached what people would call ‘West India.’ Seven years later, in 1497, the Portuguese trader Vasco De Gamma reached what came to be called ‘East India’ with a route that went entirely by sea. At the time, Europeans didn’t know that these were two entirely different continents.

But traders don’t care about such things. They care about making money. Both of the continents that were on the sides of Europe had a great many products and resources that were not available in Europe.

The West Indies (America) had no factories at all. Certain very useful goods needed large-scale facilities to make; they needed factories, or they couldn’t exist. The people in America had never seen goods made in factories because they had a culture that was fundamentally inconsistent with factories. (Natural law societies don’t allow people to modify the planet and you can’t build a factory without modifying a part of the planet.) They had virtually no steel, almost no glass, no mirrors, no brass. Of course, they had no gunpowder and no guns, so they depended on bows and arrows to bring down meat and defend themselves from aggression. These people would trade things of incredible value to Europeans, like gold, silver, and animal pelts for trinkets that were made in enormous factories and that were extremely cheap in Europe.

The Chinese had silk and tea.

India had Opium.

People in Europe soon found that they could make vast fortunes trading with the other continents.

They needed some things that were incredibly expensive and required enormous investments to make this work:

They needed ships, of course. Lots of them. The bigger the ships they had, the more money they could make. They wanted lots and lots of enormous ships.

They wanted to build them, but they didn’t have any shipyards to speak of. They therefore needed to build shipyards. The bigger the shipyard, the larger the ships it could build and the more money it could make.

Corporations could raise far more money to build shipyards than private proprietors. Corporations ran the shipyards.

Of course, shipyards need a lot of raw materials. Corporations could supply them cheaper than mom-and-pop businesses. All of the businesses needed financial services. Financial corporations like the giant Medici Bank operated throughout the empire, providing funding and letters of credit, so that people could get the money they needed to operate the massive businesses.

Although these corporations were quite large, at least relative to the corporations that had existed before, they still had very limited ownership because the structures needed for corporations with large numbers of owners weren’t developed until 1600. These structures existed because a group of wealthy people in London wanted to get much richer than they already were and realized that they would have to bring small investors into the picture to make their vision happen.

The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies

Some businesses simply can’t operate without enormous investments. For example, say that you and a group of friends in the late 1500s Europe wanted to open a business to trade with China.

You would need a lot of ships for this. You would also need a network of supply depots to keep the ships supplied, an army to protect them from pirates and thieves, and buyers and sellers in China and Europe to conduct the actual trades. This kind of business requires an enormous investment.

 

 

Normally, when people want to open businesses that require large investments, they start by going to their friends, relatives, and business associates to put together an investment pool. They then share the decisions and benefits.

But some businesses require so much money that even the people with the largest families and largest networks of friends and business associates can’t raise enough.

In the late 1590s, a group of investors in London wanted to put together a business to trade with China. They knew they didn’t have enough friends and relatives to provide the funding. They decided to set up a new kind of corporation. This type of corporation has come to be called a ‘public corporation.’ They set up this corporation so that anyone in the ‘public’ could invest in it.

The people who wanted to form the new corporation needed small investors to be able to trust them. Rich people may take advantage of their power and take the money that small investors put into the business, and not give the small investors anything in return. The people who wanted to form this business realized it couldn’t work unless the small investors had protections that they could trust. Of course, most of the investors who were forming this business were part of the government. They put together a set of legal practices that would give the small investors rights.

The first business they put together on this model got its charter on December 31, 1600. The founders called it the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies.’ Most people called it ‘The East India Co.’ After the French and Dutch governments put together their own corporations that were essentially copies of the British Company, people had to specify which East India Company they were involved with; this was the British East India Company.

Any member of ‘the public’ could invest in this company. The company’s secretary kept a record of all shareholders, with their addresses and the number of shares they owned. When the company wanted to make decisions, the secretary sent out ballots to the registered addresses. The shareholders could fill out the ballots and send them back, and their votes would be counted. When the company had money to pay the shareholders, it would send out checks to its shareholders at their registered addresses.

If you were a shareholder, and wanted to sell your shares, you would have to find a buyer and agree on a price. After this, you could send an order to the secretary to change the registration information, and you wouldn’t be involved anymore; the new owner would get the ballots and checks.

The idea worked very well and the company was able to raise enormous amounts of money. The company eventually had more than 2,690 ships; it had forts and supply depots, trading houses in India, China, and America, and an army that was larger than the armies of most countries to protect itself from people who might want to interfere in its business.

But it was soon to be overshadowed by an even larger company, which added a new wrinkle and became a new kind of public company, now called a ‘joint stock public corporation.’

< The VOC

The investment group that was eventually to be called the Vereenigde Oostin-dische Compagnie, which translates to the ‘Dutch East India Company,’ started with the same model. But its founders added a new feature that made the corporate stock far more attractive to investors: it issued paper ‘stock certificates’ to the owners of stock.

Investors liked this for several reasons. One was that it made buying and selling stock much easier. If they wanted to sell their shares, they could make a deal, give the buyer the certificates, take the money, and walk away.

The new system also offered privacy and anonymity for owners. A lot of people with money don’t want others to know they have money. They want to hide money from their families, or perhaps from creditors, from thieves or extortionists (who could go to the records of a company like the British East India company and find out how rich their target was by the number of shares the target owned), or from governments that may want to tax them.

In the new system, the paper stock certificates represented ownership of the company. If you wanted to have a share in the company, but didn’t want anyone to know that you had a share, you could go to anyone selling shares and buy the certificates. You could then go to a banker (or later, a brokerage house) and put the shares into an account. The bank would hold the certificates and register them in the bank’s name, not yours. The dividends the company pays would go to the bank, which would then transfer them to your account. You would get the money, but no one would know that you were the owner.

If you wanted to vote on an issue, you could simply tell the bank how you wanted to vote. Your banker would vote on your behalf (by ‘proxy’), again, leaving you out of the picture.

The new company was called the Vereenigde Oostin-dische Compagnie, and its logo featured its giant initials, the VOC. Investors from around the world really liked this new system and made huge investments in it. As large as the British Company was, the Dutch Company quickly became even larger. Here is a quick description:

 

Qqq voc flag 299

 

The VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade. Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the British East India Company, the VOC’s nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. [Darleen Ross, 1602 Establishments: Dutch East India Company, 2012.]

Corporations that Colonized North America

In 1606, a third corporate innovation came into existence, the kind of company we now call a ‘holding company.’ It is formed specifically to ‘hold’ shares of stock in other corporations. The first holding companyto get a charter was called ‘the Virginia Company.’

The Virginia Company wanted to undertake a massive project. This project was so vast that the founders decided they were better off to divide it into three separate projects to be administered separately. They were going to remove the native people from the east coast of America and turn it into a kind of copy of Europe. They would extract and sell the most valuable resources first; they would then divide the land into farms, towns, and cities along the European model and sell everything, dividing the money among the shareholders.

The founders of the Virginia Company petitioned the Parliament for a ‘patent’ on the land they wanted. A ‘patent’ is a deed or title. They wanted a large government to accept them as the owner of the land. The majority of the founders of the Virginia Company were high in the government and easily convinced the government (themselves) to grant them this patent. According to the government of England, the Virginia Company owned the landing Eastern North America.

The corporation would have to protect its land from other European nations. But this wasn’t a big issue because the land they wanted didn’t have any gold. Other European powers wanted land but there was still plenty of land that had gold on it available for the taking. The other countries were fighting over this other land; they would leave the Virginia Company alone. The corporate managers realized that, eventually, other countries would see what they were doing and try to take the land away from them. But they thought that if they had a large enough presence in America, other European powers wouldn’t be able to remove them without massive strength. They wanted to get the land populated, and fast.

The Virginia Company ultimately had a great many subsidiaries. The company originally divided its patents among three different administrations. The map below shows the original division:

 

Virginia company map Qqq map 301

 

The Plymouth Companies would administer the northern zone, the London Companies would administer the Southern zone, and the central zone remained under the administration of the holding company (the Virginia Company).

Corporate sovereignties

The directors of the company made the rules and formed the governments of the colonies that eventually split off of the land granted to the Virginia Company. The colony that eventually came to be called Virginia organized its government this way:

The Virginia colony had a government that consisted of two houses. The upper house, called the Virginia Governor’s Council, made all legislation and was allowed to enter into financial transactions on behalf of the colony. The board of directors of the Virginia Company appointed all members of the Virginia Governor’s Council.

Qqq indenture page 301

The Virginia Company’s business model involved selling very large amounts of land to private investors. They knew that people would be more likely to buy the land if they could control the legal system of the colony. The company formed a ‘second house’ of government, called the ‘House of Burgesses,’ to be controlled by landowners.

This system of government gave the corporation general power but gave the landowners control of the details.

People who bought enough land were guaranteed a voice in government. Shareholders of the company were also guaranteed a voice in the government. The largest landowners were shareholders; they had a say in the upper house through their role in the company and in the lower house because they were landowners. (The Washington and Jefferson families, for example, were both shareholders in the company and owners of large parcels; they had a say in all policy decisions.

Slaves: first White, then Black

Most of the people who bought land from the Virginia Company in the first sales didn't have any interest in actually living in America; they just wanted to own land there. Once they bought land, they needed to find people to actually work on it. England had laws requiring people to pay their bills; if people took on obligations and couldn’t pay, they were criminals and put into prison. Debtor’s prisons were horrible places and few people survived; for most people, debtor’s prison was a death sentence.

In 1597 the British Parliament passed ‘The Vagabonds Act’ which allowed corporations to pay off the debts of debtors, thereby saving them from hanging or debtor’s prison. Instead, corporations would send debtors to work on foreign soil as ‘indentured servants.’

The law says that the servants could be put to work ‘on foreign soil.’ This is a very important provision. These released debtors, to be called ‘indentured servants,’ would be considered to be slaves. Slavery was not legal in England so the corporations couldn’t put them to work in England. But the Virginia Company and other companies that chartered land in America got charters that granted them sovereignty. They were in charge of their own laws. Corporate land was technically ‘foreign soil.’ (America didn’t become British soil until the Treaty of Paris made it a part of Britain in 1763; this is an important transition as we will see shortly.)

The Virginia Company planned to sell large parcels of land to wealthy investors in Europe. The buyers would then bring in indentured servants to work this land. They would work first to remove the resources, and then to organize the land into towns, cities, and farms along the European model. From the very first, the Virginia Company’s business model was built on slavery.

The initial investors didn’t treat their slaves very well.

Here is a sample of the reports of the way indentured servants were treated that were coming back to the Eastern Hemisphere, from the academic paper ‘The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas:’

 

Conditions for the workers were hard. One observer commented, in explaining the colony’s high rate of mortality, that “the hard work and the scanty food, on public works kills them, and increases the discontent in which they live, seeing themselves treated like slaves, with great cruelty.”

The response of some workers was to run away to live with the Indians. The Company clearly felt that this action threatened the continued survival of their enterprise, for they reacted forcefully to this crime. In 1612, the colony’s governor dealt firmly with some recaptured laborers: “Some he appointed to be hanged, Some burned, Some to be broken upon wheels, others to be staked and some to be shot to death.”

The underlying motive of maintaining labor discipline was apparent to an observer, who remarked on the punishments that “all this extreme and cruel tortures he used and inflicted upon them to terrify the rest for Attempting the Lyke.” [David W. Galenson, ‘The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis.’ The Journal of Economic History 44:1, March 1984, pp. 1-26.]

 

About 70% of people convicted of the crime of non-payment of debt during the early 1600s were sent to America as indentured servants. The great bulk of early arrivals to the land were technically slaves. (Even after the United States became a country, it had white slavery; the Constitution recognizes it.)

In some cases, they were indentured to a specific company which had a use for them. In others, people called 'agents' would buy large numbers of these slaves and send them to America to be sold in slave markets. This quote describes the way this worked:

 

By the time the servants reached the colonies they were dirty, sick, and weak. Those with prearranged indentures were taken off the ship by their new masters, while those indentured to agents were readied for sale. Fresh clothing, clean water, and good food were enough to erase most of the visible ill effects of the voyage, and within a few days the cargo was ready for sale.

Newspaper advertisements or broadsides announced the arrival of “a number of healthy indented men and women servants…a variety of tradesmen, good farmers, stout laborers…whose indentures will be disposed of, on reasonable terms, for cash.” The buyers arrived on the day of the sale, and the servants were brought out for inspection. Strong young men, skilled workers, & comely women sold quickly, but the sick or old were harder to dispose of, and at times were given away as a bonus with more desirable servants.

In later years, it was not uncommon for one buyer to purchase the indentures of all, or a large part, of the human cargo. These “soul-drivers” loaded their merchandise on wagons and drove through the countryside selling it door-to-door the way the drummer sold sewing needles. [Barbara Bigham, ‘Colonists in Bondage: Indentured Servants in America.’ Early American Life, 1979.]

Pierce and Associates and the Plymouth Colony

In 1619, a corporation in London, John Pierce and Associates, a subsidiary of the Merchant Adventurers Company, purchased land along the west side of the Hudson River in the current state of New Jersey. The corporations intended to call this plantation ‘The Plymouth Plantation.’ The Merchant Adventurers contracted with a company called the ‘Planters and Adventurers,’ to recruit for the operation. The companies were able to recruit 55 people from debtor’s prisons in London, but this wasn’t enough to provide the workers that the company needed for the plantation.

The Planters and Adventurers had been in contact with a member of achurch group in Lieden Holland that wanted to emigrate to either to Virginia or Guiana. The corporation sent an agent, Thomas Weston, to Holland to see if these people could be recruited to go to the Plymouth Plantation. He found a total of 47 people in Holland willing to take the trip.

The people in Holland weren’t debtors. (They also weren’t repressed by authorities, as history books in the United States claim; they lived in Holland, a Catholic country, and they were ‘Puritan' Catholics, an accepted branch of the Catholic church.) Some of them were even able to pay their passage over to America. However, the company would not allow them to go unless they signed indentured servitude contracts for seven-year terms. They would work along with the other indentured servants for this time. If they completed their terms, each person 16 years old or older at the start of the trip would get one share of stock in John Pierce and Associates (the corporation) in exchange for their seven years of service. People who paid their own way—by paying ten pounds of sterling silver per person—would get an additional share of corporate stock for each ten pounds they paid. Here are the terms of the agreement with ‘The Lieden contingent’ from William Bradford’s 1628 book, Of Plymouth Plantation.

 

1. The adventurers & planters doe agree, that every person that goeth being aged 16. years & upward, be rated at 10li., and ten pounds to be accounted a single share. [note: ‘li’ stands for ‘libra’ which means 10 pounds of sterling silver]

2. That he that goeth in person, and furnisheth him selfe out with 10li. either in money or other provissions, be accounted as haveing 20li. in stock, and in ye devission shall receive a double share.

3. The persons transported & ye adventurers shall continue their joynt stock & partnership togeather, ye space of 7. years, (excepte some unexpected impedimente doe cause ye whole company to agree otherwise,) during which time, all profits & benifits that are gott by trade, traffick, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or persons, remaine still in ye com̅one stock untill ye division.

4. That at their coming ther, they chose out such a number of fitt persons, as may furnish their ships and boats for fishing upon ye sea; imploying the rest in their severall faculties upon ye land; as building houses, tilling, and planting ye ground, & makeing shuch com̅odities as shall be most usefull for ye collonie.

5. That at ye end of ye 7. years, ye capitall & profits, viz. the houses, lands, goods and chatles, be equally devided betwixte ye adventurers, and planters; wch done, every man shall be free from other of them of any debt or detrimente concerning this adventure.

6. Whosoever cometh to ye colonie herafter, or putteth any into ye stock, shall at the ende of ye 7. years be alowed proportionably to ye time of his so doing.

7. He that shall carie his wife & children, or servants, shall be alowed for everie person now aged 16. years & upward, a single share in ye devision, or if he provid them necessaries, a duble share, or if they be between 10. year old and 16., then 2. of them to be reconed for a person, both in trāsportation and devision.

8. That such children as now goe, & are under ye age of ten years, have noe other shar in ye devision, but 50. acers of unmanured land.

9. That such persons as die before ye 7. years be expired, their executors to have their parte or sharr at ye devision, proportionably to ye time of their life in ye collonie.

10. That all such persons as are of this collonie, are to have their meate, drink, apparell, and all provissions out of ye corn on stock & goods of ye said collonie.

The Mayflower Compact

The agreement between Pierce and Associates, Merchant Adventurers Company, and the Virginia Company allowed the company to build a plantation on land owned by the Virginia Company in what is now the state of New Jersey.

The ship actually landed in Massachusetts, some 300 miles north of its intended landfall. Almost certainly, this was not an accident. The passengers didn’t want to go where they were supposed to go; they would be slaves there. They wanted to go somewhere outside of the jurisdiction of their owner, Pierce and Associates. They wound up on land that was not owned by Pierce and Associates. The passengers then claimed that their servitude contracts were null and void and they were free. They wrote out a document claiming they were free and therefore able to form their own government and live as they pleased. This document was called ‘The Mayflower Compact.’

The corporate managers found out about the revolt of their indentured servants when the Mayflower arrived back in England on May 6, 1621. The attorneys for Pierce and Associates filed papers with the Virginia Company (the legal owner of the land) to swap the land they had originally purchased with the land the Mayflower passengers had settled. The company made the swap and the change in ownership was approved by the government in a 'Patent’ on the land issued the first of June 1621. Here are the details of the land grant, called ‘the Pierce Patent of 1621:’

 

This Indenture made the First Day of June 1621 And in the yeeres of the raigne of our soveraigne Lord James by the grace of god King of England Scotland Fraunce and Ireland defendor of the faith etc. Betwene the President and Counsell of New England of the one partie And John Peirce Citizen and Clothworker of London and his Associates of the other partie.

Witnesseth that where-as the said John Peirce and his Associates have already transported and undertaken to transporte at their cost and chardges themselves and dyvers persons into New England and there to erect and build a Towne and settle dyvers Inhabitantes for the advancemt of the generall plantacon of that Country of New England Now the sayde President and Counsell in consideracon thereof and for the furtherance of the said plantacon and incoragemt of the said Undertakers have agreed to graunt assigne allott and appoynt to the said John Peirce and his associates and every of them his and their heires and assignes one hundred acres of grownd for every person so to be transported besides dyvers other pryviledges Liberties and commodyties hereafter menconed.

 

The patent reestablished corporate control and allowed Pierce and associates to take back authority over the Plymouth Plantation.

The ‘Mayflower Compact’ therefore had no force whatsoever; it was simply an attempt by a group of bondage slaves to revolt against their corporate masters. As soon as the corporation heard about it, it took the case to court and got full authority back. The Compact had no impact on any laws or rules in Plymouth or anywhere else.

The Real Government of Massachusetts

In 1626, a holding company called the ‘Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England’ was granted a patent on all land in what is now eastern Massachusetts except the land that had already been granted to Pierce and Associates. The holding company had several subsidiaries, the largest of which were the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company.

In 1629, the shareholders of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England passed a resolution requiring all shareholders to move to and live in lands under the control of the corporation. Shareholders who lived other places and didn’t want to move would have to sell their shares to people who were willing to relocate. From then on, all corporate decisions would be made in Massachusetts itself. Here is the relevant part of the resolution:

 

Now, for the better encouragement of ourselves and others that shall joyne with us in this action, and to the end that every man may without scruple dispose of his estate and affayres as may best fit his preparation for this voyage; it is fully and faithfully agreed amongst us, and every of us doth hereby freely and sincerely promise and bind himselfe in the word of a christian and in the presence of God, who is the searcher of all hearts, that we will so really endeavour the prosecution of this worke, as by God’s assistance, we will be ready in our persons, and with such of our several familyes as are to go with us, and such provision as we are able conveniently to furnish ourselves withall, to embarke for the said Plantation by the first of March next, at such port or ports of this land as shall be agreed upon by the Companie, to the end to passe the seas, (under God’s protection,) to inhabite and continue in New-England: Provided always, that, before the last of September next, the whole government, together with the patent for the said Plantation, be first, by an order of Court, legally transferred and established to remain with us and others which shall inhabit upon the said Plantation.

 

The book, The records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England contains the original laws of what is now the state of Massachusetts. The first 20 pages contain the text of the original corporate charter. The rest of the book, some 400 additional pages, explain the laws the company passed and (very painful to read) descriptions of hangings, brandings, tortures, and other punishments the corporation inflicted against violators of the corporate laws. The company could and did make its own laws. These laws formed the foundation of the legal system for what is now the State of Massachusetts.

The Corporate Colonies

The colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were corporate colonies. They were created by profit-motivated corporations (certainly not by freedom-seeking pilgrims). These corporations operated the colonies for profit until 1763, when the Treaty of Paris made these lands British Soil.

Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina were formed by proprietary land grants. These grants went to individuals to whom the king owed money. The proprietors treated their land the same basic way as the companies: they wanted to sell the bulk of their land for the highest price they could get. Each colony formed a government to administer its operations. The owners of each colony set the rules for these governments. Buyers of large parcels of land got rights to involve themselves personally in the government; buyers of small parcels could vote for representatives. At least until 1763, when England began to require change, people who did not own land did not have any representation in the governments.

All of the above colonies used two kinds of slaves:

White slaves were called ‘indentured servants.' Most of these slaves came from the debtor’s prisons of England. The corporations brought over these slaves to make money from their labor. The corporate managers had incentives to work them as hard as they could get them to work and to provide as little for their care as they could. They had no incentives to allow them to form families and have children, because they would not own the children.

Although each corporation had different policies, generally speaking, they appear to have treated the white slaves as corporate assets; they wanted to maximize the return they got while they owned the assets and relinquish the asset with as little residual value as possible. A very large percentage of the indentured servants were worked to death.

Black slaves were property. The corporations had incentives to treat them much better than they treated white slaves, because the corporations knew that they could have their labor for the rest of their lives. The longer they lived, the more value the company got from them. In fact, the owning corporations had incentives to allow black slaves to form families and raise children, as the children would belong to the companies that owned the parents.

Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina, and South Carolina started as proprietary colonies. As noted above, the proprietors could make their own rules in these places. They all used both kinds of slaves.

 

 

Slavery in England

Slavery was abolished in Ireland in 1171. Slavery was abolished in England in 1381. At the time, the abolition applied only to British citizens. No British could be a slave or could own a slave.

In 1559, a case led to the prohibition of slavery of any kind. A man, Cartwright, was observed savagely beating another and was arrested for battery. Cartwright testified that the man was a slave who he had brought to England from Russia, and since the slave he was beating was his property, he could treat him as he pleased; the punishment was not illegal.

The judge ruled that the man was not a slave because slavery didn’t exist in England; the fact that he had paid for his slave in Russia didn’t matter. The judge claimed that slavery could not exist in England. His exact words were ‘England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.’ Upon reaching British soil, all slaves became free.

Several important British court cases involving slave litigation established that the colonies in America were not British soil and therefore slavery could exist in the colonies. In these cases, several important rulings became a part of British law that would have an important impact on the events that would happen later (when the colonies would break way from England to form a new country, in part so the corporations that ran the colonies could keep their slaves).

The first was in the case of Chamberlain v. Harvey. Chamberlain had claimed that the ruling in the Cartwright’s case did not apply because the slave in the Cartwright case was white and his slave was black. The judge disagreed. He ruled that the law didn’t recognize black people as having different rights than white people. This ruling led to a significant difference in law between England and the colonies because the colonies accepted that whites, particularly white slaves, had entirely different rights than blacks.

The second important ruling, in Smith v. Brown and Cooper, involved the different status of slaves in the colonies. In this case, Chief Justice Holt held that ‘although blacks could be bought and sold as chattels in Barbados, that was not the case in England.’ (England had many colonies in the Americas; the colony of Barbados was an island in the Caribbean.)

His ruling includes the follow sentences: ‘As soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free. One may be a villein in England but not a slave’.

The ruling in Smith v. Brown and Cooper made it very clear that the colonies were not ‘British Soil.’ The ‘colonies’ had entirely different laws than those that applied on British soil.

CHAPTER 5 Pythagoras and Socrates

Today, we think of Pythagoras entirely differently than people did in his time.

In his time, he was a traitor and outlaw.  For most of his life, he was a wanted man.  He had to travel incognito and meet with others in secret to avoid being caught.

Eventually, the authorities caught up with him.  He was executed by a particularly brutal method:  He had traveled to the town of Croton, in southern Italy and was meeting people for a lecture.  The authorities considered him and everyone he associated with him to be dangerous. They decided to get rid of them all. They blocked the doors and windows to the building where the meeting was taking place and set it on fire, killing everyone inside. This included the man that may have been the greatest thinker the world has ever seen.

This is the way Pythagoras died.

It is the same Pythagoras you learned about in school.  His achievements are all over the map and in nearly every field of human endeavor.

If you focused your studies on hard sciences, or math, you learned he was responsible for basically all initial work that formed the foundation of these fields.  It was his idea to build mathematics on something we now call the ‘number line’ and to visualize numbers as lengths on this line. He also was responsible for showing the difference between ‘rational numbers’ and ‘irrational numbers,’ meaning he essentially showed us what a ‘number’ was.  He was the one who proved the number line was infinitely dense (a key finding that forms the foundation for all higher math), and for proving that irrational numbers were real numbers (they really existed and their values could be calculated).

All engineers and designers in the world use the theorem named after him almost daily.  But this is only one of the proven theorems he gave us that form the foundation of virtually the entire field of engineering today.  He is noted for the beauty of his geometric proofs:  he proved his most famous theorem (that the area of a square drawn on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is exactly equal to the sum of the areas of squares drawn on the other two sides) using nothing but a pencil, ruler, and geometricians compass.

His many, many proofs provide the foundation for the field of logic:  He explained what conditions would have  to be met to show that a premise has been ‘proven.’   He also explained what common fallacies appear to show proof, but actually don't.  (If you listen to politicians, you will see endless examples of these fallacies:  they claim they are saying something that makes sense, but their arguments really don’t prove anything. Most people haven’t studied Pythagorean analysis and don’t realize they are being tricked.)

If you were more into the liberal arts, you probably learned about Pythagoras in music class  He invented the ‘Pythagorean interval,’ also called the ‘perfect fifth.’  He showed why it is ‘perfect,’ with the frequency of  the tones having a perfect mathematical relationship to each other. He created the ‘circle of fifths’ that gives us the 13 note ‘chromatic scale.’  This is the foundation for all western music.  (The 13 notes are the 13 black and white keys of the piano.)   He also showed that there is a simpler 8 note ‘octave’ scale that lies inside of the more complex 13 note scale.  (The 8 notes of the key of ‘C’ are the white keys of the piano.)  He invented the idea of a musical ‘key’ and showed how to make different ‘chords,’ (major, minor, diminished, ect.) in different keys that created different moods and feelings in listeners.  The great majority of the musical instruments in use now were designed using the mathematical relationships between the notes that he presented to the world more than 2,500 years ago.  If you like any (western) music, and it lifts your spirits or brings you closer to nature, you owe a debt of gratitude to Pythagoras.

His musical studies led to the findings of a field called ‘harmonics,’ which study the interactions between various waves. (Sound is waves of moving air; these waves interact to create peaks and valleys; our ears recognize so many sounds, even when mixed together, by identifying the harmonic relationships.)  The harmonic relationships he explained are important in optics and the studies of lasers and other high-energy beams.  The field of quantum mechanics is built on the wave theories that come from Pythagoras. (Look up ‘The physics of music’ on the internet for many illustrations of his contributions.)

This is what we remember Pythagoras for today.

In his own time, he was notorious for his anti-establishment views.  He felt the society he lived in was unsound.  It was dangerous, violent, aggressive, destructive and totally illogical. Anyone could see that this type of society wasn’t capable of meeting the needs of the human race as a whole.

Of course, they can be forgiven for this:  they were not intended to advance the interests of the human race as a whole. They were intended to help the people who ran specific countries organize them so that they could give better for the people of that country.

But Pythagoras noted that they couldn’t even really do this:  Most of the time, the endless wars and competition didn’t do anything but impoverish the people on both sides and create misery and hardship.  Then as now, the great majority of the people (the proverbial ‘99%) lived lives of drudgery and servitude, often getting up before they were fully awake and then working until they were too tired to work anymore, for barely enough to keep them alive.  The world is bountiful and there is plenty everywhere.  The rich get richer and the governments of the world waste enough money to make everyone prosperous on war every year.  These systems not only don’t benefit the human race as a whole, they don’t even benefit the people that they are supposed to benefit.

Pythagoras claimed something better was possible.

But it couldn’t be built on the same foundation that supports the system he lived in.  To have a better system, we would have to accept that that a lot of the beliefs we were raised to accept about the way society works and the wonderfulness of the type of society we have, were not true. We have to realize that the quality we call ‘patriotism’ is not a virtue that can make the world better, it is a toxin that poisons any attempt to solve the most dangerous problems of the world. We have to accept that the entities called ‘countries’ are only not worth destroying the world over, they are not even real things:  if we stopped believing in them. They would stop existing:  they are therefore only figments of our imaginations.  If we want sound societies, we have to understand that the people who we are trusting to run our systems are not on our side. They don’t want better societies. We have to accept that the system that elevates these people to positions of power is flawed.  We have to find ways to get around their authority and work to build a better world ourselves.

Pythagoras made sense.

This made him dangerous. People listened to him and stopped respecting the people they were told their entire lives they were supposed to respect.  They stopped thinking of the rules that required them to hate the enemy of the day (whoever the people who called themselves the ‘leaders of country’ decided to fight) were nonsense and dangerous.  Pythagoras was a threat.  Not just to the leaders of the country where he was born or where he was physically located at any given time (he traveled a great deal), he was a threat everyone who depended on respect for the establishment for the things they wanted.

Pythagoreans

When the authorities killed Pythagoras, they hoped to kill is ideas too.  But this didn’t happen.  Pythagoras had realized that the authorities didn’t want the things he said to be heard.  He kept his discussions away from the public eye.  He traveled a lot.  In each area, he had a group of like minded people. They wanted something better. They discussed what had to be done.  But they didn’t advertise or use the public forums for this.  They kept their discussions private, among people that they knew would be tolerant before they let them join.  The group was active in many parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa; Pythagoras spent time in many places and talked  to a lot of people.

We don’t know a lot about this organization.  We just know it was large and had a lot of members.  It lasted a long time.  (Some say it is still around, active in the anti-establishmentarian movements that you find in the graffiti marked parts of major cities around the world.)   We know it had rituals that members could use to identify other members as they traveled.  We know it used symbols, the most common of which was the geometrician’s compass (to reflect the greatest achievements of Pythagoras, which involved his geometric proofs).  We know it inspired Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great:  The emblem of the Pythagoreans was carved above the doors on Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and above the doors of the libraries that Alexander the Great built all around Persia, North Africa, Asia, and the parts of Europe closest to Macedonia, where Alexander was born.  (All of these3 buildings and all the documents they contained were destroyed, intentionally, in the book burnings and attempts to destroy knowledge that followed over the next 600 years;   We will look at the reasons this was done later.)

We know  that the work of Pythagoras inspired Socrates and most of the information we have about the ideas Pythagoras had about world came to the world through Socrates.

Socrates

Socrates was born one century after Pythagoras, in the year 470 bce.  He was raised by his grandfather.  We don’t know much about him, we only know that he was a Pythagorean. Socrates grandfather had visitors who talked about the ideas of the great thinker.  I can imagine Socrates falling to sleep listening to these discussions.

Socrates grew up a believer.  Better societies were possible. But there are some things we don’t talk about in public. People wouldn’t understand.  They loved their countries.  They expected everyone to feel the same love.  They hated the people they had been raised to believe where their enemies.  They expected everyone to feel the same hate.  They focused their lives on these feelings.  People who didn’t feel the same were dangerous. They didn’t know what think about them.  If they don’t hate the enemies, maybe they sympathize with the enemies.  Maybe they wanted the enemies to win and crush the wonderful systems their leaders and teachers represented.  When they started to feel this way, they might report them to the authorities and have them investigated.  Sometimes, the authorities are more afraid than the people themselves.  They don’t want to take chances with security risks.  They remove them from society, often by removing them from life itself.

There are some things that cautious people don’t talk about.

But a lot of time had passed since Pythagoras had been put  to death.  Socrates felt that the world had changed.  They were foolish and ignorant back in the olden days (a century before Socrates had been born).  Now, they had sciences and did research.  They weren’t perfect.  But they were a lot smarter than a century ago.  Pythagoras was ahead of his time.  But that was a long time ago.  Times had changed.  Socrates thought that they were ready now.  He wanted to bring these ideas to the world.

Most of the ideas in the books of the Possible Societies series come from the arguments presented as direct quotes from Socrates in the socratic dialogues.  Although all of his own personal writings were destroyed after he was executed for sedition (‘corrupting’ the minds of  young people with his ideas) and treason (not feeling the love he was supposed to feel for his country and the other things he was supposed to love and not feeling the hatred h e was supposed to feel for the people his leaders called ‘enemies’), his ideas were reconstructed by Pythagoreans and we have enough to understand what was important to him.  , including Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander of Macedon (also known as Alexander the Great, discussed in later chapters).

Before I describe this message, I want to take a little detour to show how it was received and how, exactly, the name of Socrates came to be such an important one in history.

Socrates Arrest

Socrates told people that the leaders, experts, and other people who ran society didn’t have any idea how to build a sound society.

They didn’t even have any interest in this.

They knew about and cared about war.

War is organized and planned mass murder and destruction.  It wasn’t a logical thing.  It could not be a foundational element of a sane, sound, and logical society where people take the best advantage of the skills and talents of other people and work with them.  If we want a sound society (one with δικαιοσύνη, to use his term) we need to start with some other foundation.

Socrates is famous for the depth of his arguments.  (Law schools call the method of correctly arguing cases ‘the socratic method.’  It is based on his method of arguing and, to this day, is still considered the best way to get a point across.)  He makes sense.  It is hard to go over his arguments and NOT see his point.

The people who listened to him started to lose their faith in the great system around them that is often called ‘the establishment’ today.  It was not a good thing.  It was not on their side.  His ideas had a particular attraction for young people.  If the system didn’t work for them, didn’t work for the world, didn’t work for the human race, and didn’t even really benefit the thing they were raised to worship called a ‘country,’ why devote  their lives to serving this beast?  After talking to Socrates, they didn’t want to play a part in the system anymore.

These young people talked to their teachers, t heir parents, their advisors, the people who were planning their lives for them.  These people represented the system that they no longer respected.  They wanted the young people to step forward, get a good job, make lots of money, maybe even go into government, become rulers, and run the wars themselves. After talking to Socrates, they didn’t want to do these things.  They had other goals, but they were goals that their advisors teachers, and even their parents couldn’t really identify with.  They didn’t want to play a part in the system, they wanted to study it, identify the way it worked, find ways to create a better system, and help put it into place.

The parents, teachers, and advisors thought it was bad for the young people to think this way. They wanted them to stop listening to Socrates.  But, well, you know how young people are:  tell them not to do something and they will only want to do it more.  They couldn’t stop the message without stopping the messenger.  They filed complaints with the authorities.

The authorities decided to have a talk with Socrates.

We don’t know who said what.  But we know that the two sides didn’t get along.  Socrates told them he wasn’t going to stop.   He had not harmed anyone.  He had not violated any laws or rules.  He would not stop.

The authorities decided to up the stakes.  They said that they could charge him with the crimes of heresy (not accepting doctrine that people were required to accept) and ‘corrupting youth.’ Socrates thought it was nonsense. His country had freedom of speech. He was protected by the law and had done nothing wrong  No jury would convict him.

The authorities wanted Socrates to take the threat seriously.  A war was on.  The enemy was the most dangerous enemy anyone has ever faced.  (When wars start, all enemies are depicted this way; some people believe it every time..)  They could tell the jury that his ideas hurt the morale of youth and therefore harmed the war effort.  They said that if he made them take him to court, they would have a very good chance of winning and, if they won, they would seek the death penalty.

The Trial

The trial was held in public. A jury was empanelled with 501 members.  The trial would last one day.  A majority would be required to conflict and impose sentence.

One of Socrates followers, Plato, was in the audience.  He took notes of the trial and published them under the title ‘The Apology.’

Socrates arguments were pretty simple.  He told the jury he had done no harm to anyone.  In fact, no one had claimed he had.  He was not on trial for doing anything wrong, he was there because he had shown the people of Athens that their leaders were fools and didn’t know what they were doing.  He had embarrassed them.  They were putting him on trial for making them look foolish.

He says:

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him—his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and the result was as follows:

When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom.  My conclusion was exactly the same.  Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.   Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the enmity which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this.

But necessity was laid upon me and I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!—for I must tell you the truth—the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better.

There is another thing:

Young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!

And if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practice or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected.

These people are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are drawn up in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate accusations.  And this is the reason why my three accusers, Mellitus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians.

And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing.

Then the prosecutors had their turn.

They appealed to the jury’s patriotism.

Their country was at war. It was the most important war in all of history.  (All wars are portrayed this way at the time they are being waged.)   We can’t afford to lose it.  We must think of our boys in the trenches first.  They must fight and kill until all the enemies are dead or their leaders surrender and throw themselves on our mercy.

Our enemies are monsters. If they win, they will storm the city, desecrate our art, rape our wives and daughters, kill our mothers, enslave our sons, and (if the worst of the fear mongers are right) eat our babies.

Socrates might be allowed to say what he wants to say after the war is over and all threats are gone. But the time is not right.  The war is the only important thing now. Nothing that harms the war effort can be tolerated.  Socrates has to stop.

If we have to put him to death to stop him—and he has made it clear this will be necessary—we have no choice:  it must be done.  You—all the members of the jury—owe it to your country, to your gods, and to your loved ones to make sure this happens.

Fear is a powerful motivator.  Hatred can always be called forward in time of war.  People had lost loved ones.  They wanted someone to suffer for it.  Here was a heretic (this was one of this charges) who didn’t believe in the war effort. Socrates was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed.

The Socratic Dialogues

After Socrates was gone, the authorities collected all his papers and destroyed them.  His thoughts and ideas were dangerous.  They wanted to protect their people from these dangers and had to be careful.  If they left the papers, they might fall into the wrong hands and corrupt young people, making them anti-war and anti-establishment.  As far as we know, they were successful and not a single word from Socrates own hand survives.

But the ideas they considered so dangerous were not really Socrates own personal ideas.  They had come to him through the Pythagoreans and originated with the great geometrician himself.  All that Socrates was trying to do was to open a mental door, in as many people as he could talk to.  He wanted to let them know that they should not be afraid to think about these things. Their minds belonged to them. The authorities wanted them to think a certain way.  But their minds belonged to them.  They had the right to use it any way they wanted.

The Pythagorean movement was widespread.  We don’t know exactly how widespread because these people knew the authorities didn’t like their message, so they met and interacted in private.  If you look on the internet, you will see a wide range of opinions including everything from claims that it was just a small group of mathematicians who got together to discuss the ideas behind irrational numbers (which Pythagoras had discovered and which were considered to be the result of witchcraft for thousands of years after their discovery), to the idea that all subsequent anti-establishment secret societies originated with the Pythagoreans.

After Socrates was dead, many members of this movement came to Athens to meet with the ‘young men of the richer classes’ that Socrates had ‘corrupted’ with his ideas about society. They decided that Socrates ideas should not die with him.  They wanted to recreate his most important arguments.  They worked on several books that are now called ‘socratic dialogues.’ They recreate Socrates ideas.

Many attempts have been made to destroy these ideas or to distort them to make it appear that Socrates was trying to say something he wasn’t trying to say.

In some ways they were successful.  Almost all of the socratic dialogue Critias was destroyed.  This is important because Critias was his version of the title book of this series, Possible Societies:  it explains different societies and shows how they work.  The book Timaeus is very clearly a tiny part of a much larger work. (Socrates speaks only a few times in this book and his comments are short sentenes that all take the form: ‘but I told you in our previous discussions that is not how the world works.’)

But we do have enough information to put together his basic ideas.  The fundimental arguments are in the book called ‘πολιτεία (‘politikas’) which explains how societies that divide the world into individual territorial units that have sovereignty operate and shows why they can never meet the needs of the human race (never have ‘δικαιοσύνη’).

Πολιτεία

In the set of dialogues called ‘Πολιτική’ (Policia, again, the name Socrates uses to represent ‘societies that divide the world into countries’) he works out the basic principles of societies that work this way:

First, he points out that war is an inherent part of societies built on this premise.  The following quotes are all from the book ‘Πολιτεία.’:

Socrates:  Then a slice of our neighbors’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours?

Glaucon.  That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

Socrates: And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?

Glaucon.  Most certainly, he replied.

Socrates: Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in nations, private as well as public.

Glaucon.  Undoubtedly.

Even in Socrates’ time, people realized that war brought economic benefits.  It created jobs, it stimulated economic activity, and it stimulated invention and discovery.

Even today, there is great dispute over whether the benefits war brings outweigh the costs.  In other words, it isn’t clear whether war is a good thing or a bad thing.

Socrates clearly doesn’t want to get into this issue.  He isn’t trying to say war is bad and should stop.  He is only trying to show that war is an inevitable consequence of the foundational operations of societies that divide the world into sovereign territorial entities.

After having shown this relationships, Socrates goes on to work out the natural consequences of war and the things that must happen in any society built on principles that lead naturally to war.

Indoctrination

To have war, a large number of people must spend their lives cutting down forests to make charcoal, digging through the ground for ore, smelting, and doing things that cause immense harm to the world.  Some people will have to devote their lives to soldiering: they will have to go to schools where they will learn how to kill without remorse or constraint; they will have to practice stabbing human-shaped dummies with knives, spears, or pikes until they can do it mechanically, without even thinking.  They will have to learn to follow orders without even the slightest hesitation: if ordered to cut off the head of the man on the right of them, they must not think first, they must act.  (This kind of order is often used to test the fitness of soldiers.)

Then, when the war comes, they must actually kill real people.  Idealistic soldiers often are shocked when they get to a war and find that most of the people they will have to kill are women, children, and old people who don’t pose any threat to anything.  People must kill and kill and kill, while other people are trying their very best to kill them.  They must do these things in horrible conditions, often living in trenches with fetid, rotting corpses for weeks on end, knowing each time they go to sleep they may not wake up again.

People are not normally drawn to these conditions.

They would not do them unless their minds had been prepared to make them think that these conditions were necessary, and that their fighting, killing, and risking death day after day brought about some greater good.

Logic and reason would tell us that there is no greater good.

As Socrates pointed out in his first argument above, the war is not about making the world a better place. It is the natural consequence of the structural realities of societies that are built on certain foundations. War will happen.  Once we know that war will happen, we need to make sure our people are indoctrinated. These things go together.  Have one thing and you must have the other.

They must be indoctrinated.

Socrates then provides some basic information about the specific way the indoctrination must happen.  It must start with the most gullible and naïve adults by singling them out and intentionally lying to them. Then it must be made sure that only those who believe these lies are allowed access to the children in that society.   It must be made sure that the truth never gets into any book that the children might read; they can only hear the lies. They must hear them over and over again until they come to believe they are the truth.

Socrates

: We begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn more complex ideas.

Adeimantus:  Quite right.

Socrates

:  You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

Adeimantus:  Quite true.

Socrates

:  And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

Adeimantus:  We cannot.

Socrates:  Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers.

 

The first thing that is necessary to make people willing to accept the reality of societies divided into nations (territorial sovereignty societies) is to make sure that the people can’t get objective information.  We have to ‘establish a censorship of the writers.’ 

This is particularly critical for children.  If we want children to grow up to be willing to fight in and make other sacrifices for the wars, we must make sure that we regulate the things they ‘receive into their minds.’  We want to make sure that they can only receive into their minds the exact thoughts that ‘we should wish them to have when they are grown up.’ 

Socrates goes into very great detail about the specific aim of such indoctrination: it has to be used to train people to override their moral restraint and personal views of right and wrong so they will follow orders to commit the atrocities that are a part of war.  It is to turn them into monsters with no regard for anything but the orders they are given:

 

Socrates:

 As we were saying, the members of the warrior class were to be dogs, and to hear the voice of the rulers, who are their shepherds.  The young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is doing wrong; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

 

Socrates and Adeimantus then discuss intricate details of the indoctrination process.   For example, they note children are extremely susceptible to the power of music.  Music can tell them the way they are supposed to think about various matters. For example, do you want them to believe mass murder is a good thing?  Create a song that associates the most horrible murders with the most beautiful music your musicians can create. 

I went to my first two years of school in France and learned the Marseilles as my national anthem.  We sang it regularly in class and before every important event.  It has one of the most euphoric, happiest melodies ever written, a melody associated with these words:  ‘They come right to our arms to slit the throats of our sons and our friends’ and ‘after we fill the furrows of our fields with blood, the day of glory will have finally arrived.’  

You will find similar messages in the songs that young children are required to sing in other militant countries.  These songs associate the most wonderful and uplifting melodies with stories of tools that strike without warning and blow children into tiny pieces. 

The education systems couldn’t get people to accept these things if they started with adults who could study the issue logically.  The adults would argue with them and never accept them.  But if you start when children are very young, and use tools like music and poetry to create neural pathways that associate the acts you want them to do with beauty and happiness, you can make the associations in their minds, without them even realizing they are being manipulated. 

Socrates and Adeimantus then discuss various other tools needed to manipulate the way children think in societies that are built on this foundation. This includes the need to distort history to glorify both the war and the winner and turn war into some sort of wonderful cloth that wipes away evil and leaves only good.  You can’t make them think this by presenting truthful, accurate, objective information, so you have to lie.

 

Corporations are ‘cooperations.’ they represent people cooperating. People can cooperate on anything they want to do. Some people want to take steps to bring the people of the world together. They want to reduce the stresses that lead to war. They want to take steps to ease environmental problems. They want to unify people. People who have common goals can cooperate on anything they want.

Soon after the newly empowered corporations came to exist, people started to use them to help do things to make the world a better place.

If we rate corporations by number of employees, man-hours worked, and international presence, the largest corporation in existence as I write this is not one of the massive destroyers or weapons companies. It is the largest humanitarian organization in the world: The International Red Cross and Geneva Convention.

This organization was formed long before anyone now alive was born. It has the largest lobbying system in the world, with lobbies in 196 nations – meaning all official nations. The Red Cross has 98 million workers, including employees and volunteers, who work either for the international corporation, or for one of 196 separate national corporations, one for each official nation on Earth. It takes full advantage of all of the special privileges granted to corporations in the early 1800s, and could not exist or operate as it does now if the corporate structures that Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, and the other corporate benefactors had not given corporations the rights they gave to them.

The International Red Cross (IRC), in collaboration along with its national ‘chapters,’ has an agenda. It uses all of the tools and powers it has at its disposal to advance this agenda. One of its agendas involves something called the ‘Geneva Convention.’ This document puts limits on the things national armies and governments can do during wartime and requires them to respect certain rights. Of course, governments don’t want limits on their ability to act during war and don’t want outside agencies to have the ability to force them to respect human rights. The IRC has used its massive lobbying administration, the largest on the Earth, together with ‘grassroots’ pressure generated by its lobbies, to get all 196 nations to ratify the first protocol, and is lobbying hard for even more restrictions on acts of war and additional protections for human rights.

The IRC is not unique. There are literally thousands of other corporations that are non-governmental humanitarian organizations (either ‘NGHOs’ or just ‘NGOs’).

These corporations do things that governments claim to do but generally don’t really do; they help people.

 

Henri Dunant

The IRC does some wonderful work. It has saved my life and saved the lives of many people I know (this is described below) and brought about real changes in many areas of society.

But it does not do what it was intended to do when it was originally formed.

Its founder, Henri Dunant, had a far wider agenda in mind for the organization he created: he wanted to bring the entire human race together into something that we might call a ‘community of humankind.’ This community would bring together the people of the world and give them a forum, a voice, and real power (due to control over wealth) that was entirely separate from the governments of the world.

He didn’t want to wait for wars to happen and then bury the dead, patch up the survivors, and get care packages to prisoners of war. He wanted to create an organization that the human race could use to transfer power from the nations of the world to the people of the world, thereby reducing and ultimately eliminating the idea of ‘sovereign nations,’ and eliminating the most important structural forces that actually lead to war.

This almost worked. It didn’t quite work, for reasons discussed below, and the changes that Dunant had in mind didn't become reality. But if we understand what he was trying to do and the specific reasons that it didn’t become reality, we can take advantage of this information to make a second attempt. Sometimes, people fail at the first attempt at something. That doesn’t mean they should just give up and never try again. The world has changed a great deal since Dunant's attempt. We, the members of the human race and inhabitants of the planet Earth, have incredible new tools that he did not have. If we use these tools, take advantage of the information we have about others who tried to do the same thing (Dunant was trying to do the same basic thing that Alexander the Great was trying to do, just using different tools at a different time) we can put together a package that has a very good chance at succeeding.

 

Memories of Solferino

In June of 1859, Henri Dunant, a French merchant, was traveling through Italy to meet with Napoleon III, the Emperor of France. Dunant had a mercantile reason for the trip: after France conquered Algeria in 1847, the French government began selling land in Algeria to raise money for wars in other areas. Dunant had purchased some of this land. The Algerian authorities accepted that he owned the land, but they had refused to accept that he owned a critical right that his title granted: the water rights.

Algeria was an occupied territory.

Under accepted rules of warfare, Algerian authorities were required to follow the rules of the occupying nation and give Dunant all of the rights he had purchased. To refuse was an act of defiance against the occupiers and an act of war. The Algerian authorities would not let Dunant have the water rights. After exhausting all administrative avenues, Dunant sued the Algerian officials in French courts. The courts agreed he had the rights, but they didn’t have any authority to enforce the ruling, because Algeria was a foreign country. Only the military could enforce the ruling. Dunant took his case to several military officials, but they didn’t have enough troops to help him. Dunant was told that, if he could get the commander in chief to authorize more troops, he would get his water rights. He would have to convince Napoleon to help him.

Napoleon was not in France at the time. He was leading his military in a war against Austria. The battlefield was northern Italy. Dunant traveled directly to the battlefield. He arrived at the village of Solferino, Italy on June 24, 1859. The armies had just fought a battle there and, when the Austrian army retreated, the French army followed them, leaving the dead and wounded soldiers on both sides, together with a large number of dead and wounded civilians, to rot and bake in the hot summer sun.

This event changed Dunant’s perspective and his mission in life.

He felt he had to do something about the horrible consequences of war and decided to create an organization to do something about it. Here are some excerpts from Dunant’s book about the experience:

 

I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings. On that memorable twenty-fourth of June [1859], more than 300,000 men stood facing each other; the battle line was five leagues long, and the fighting continued for more than fifteen hours.

Here is a hand-to-hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness; Austrians and Allies trampling each other under foot, killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses, felling their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with saber and bayonet. No quarter is given; it is a sheer butchery; a struggle between savage beasts, maddened with blood and fury. Even the wounded fight to the last gasp. When they have no weapon left, they seize their enemies by the throat and tear them with their teeth.

The stillness of the night was broken by groans, by stifled sighs of anguish and suffering. Heart-rending voices kept calling for help. Who could ever describe the agonies of that fearful night! When the sun came up on the twenty-fifth, it disclosed the most dreadful sights imaginable. Bodies of men and horses covered the battlefield; corpses were strewn over roads, ditches, ravines, thickets and fields; the approaches of Solferino were literally thick with dead. The fields were devastated, wheat and corn lying flat on the ground, fences broken, orchards ruined; here and there were pools of blood. The villages were deserted and bore the scars left by musket shots, bombs, rockets, grenades and shells. Walls were broken down and pierced with gaps where cannonballs had crushed through them. Houses were riddled with holes, shattered and ruined, and their inhabitants, who had been in hiding, crouching in cellars without light or food for nearly twenty hours, were beginning to crawl out, looking stunned by the terrors they had endured. All around Solferino, and especially in the village cemetery, the ground was littered with guns, knapsacks, cartridge-boxes, mess tins, helmets, shakoes, fatigue-caps, belts, equipment of every kind, remnants of blood-stained clothing and piles of broken weapons. The poor wounded men that were being picked up all day long were ghastly pale and exhausted. Some, who had been the most badly hurt, had a stupefied look as though they could not grasp what was said to them; they stared at one out of haggard eyes, but their apparent prostration did not prevent them from feeling their pain. Others were anxious and excited by nervous strain and shaken by spasmodic trembling. Some, who had gaping wounds already beginning to show infection, were almost crazed with suffering. They begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death struggle. There were poor fellows who had not only been hit by bullets or knocked down by shell splinters, but whose arms and legs had been broken by artillery wheels passing over them. The impact of a cylindrical bullet shatters bones into a thousand pieces, and wounds of this kind are always very serious. Shell splinters and conical bullets also cause agonizingly painful fractures, and often frightful internal injuries. All kinds of splinters, pieces of bone, scraps of clothing, equipment or footgear, dirt or pieces of lead, often aggravate the severity of a wound and double the suffering that must be borne.

 

Dunant’s description of the horrors of the battlefield and the heroic efforts the volunteers around him mounted to try to ease the pain of the wounded goes on for many pages.

Then he gets to his point:

He talks about his idea, the idea of forming an organization that would eventually become the largest corporation the world had ever seen, with offices in every nation of the world and more employees than most nations have people:

 

But why have I told of all these scenes of pain and distress, and perhaps aroused painful emotions in my readers?

Why have I lingered with seeming complacency over lamentable pictures, tracing their details with what may appear desperate fidelity?

It is a natural question.

Perhaps I might answer it by another:

Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?

Societies of this kind, once formed and their permanent existence assured, would naturally remain inactive in peacetime. But they would be always organized and ready for the possibility of war. They would have not only to secure the goodwill of the authorities of the countries in which they had been formed, but also, in case of war, to solicit from the rulers of the belligerent states authorization and facilities enabling them to do effective work.

The International Red Cross and Geneva Convention

Dunant had lived in Geneva, Switzerland earlier in his life and knew people there. He decided to promote his idea in Geneva. There, he met a wealthy businessman and philanthropist named Gustave Moynier. Moynier was interested in the project and they decided to join forces to try to make the ‘society’ that Dunant advocated a reality.

Moynier had a team of attorneys on retainer. They needed a ‘vessel’ to hold this new ‘society’ they were creating, and the lawyers created a corporation that was eventually named ‘The International Red Cross and Geneva Convention.’

They incorporated this organization in 1863.

It was one of the ‘privileged’ corporations, existing under the new rules that Washington, Jefferson, and Adams had created in the Western Hemisphere, which had quickly spread to the Eastern Hemisphere. This means it had no termination date on its charter and was designed to last for as long as the founders wanted it to last (which was forever). Over the years, the Geneva office has formed corporations in 185 nations of the world and is now a collection of 186 corporations, one in each of the 185 nations of the world and the holding company that owns the 185 national companies and is headquartered in Geneva. The company’s website says it has about 98 million employees, many of whom work for the company as volunteers. For references, this is far more than any army in the world has, far more than any national government in the world has, and far more than any private for-profit company in the world has working for them. Based on its public figures, the Red Cross is the largest organization of any kind on the planet Earth.

What is its mission?

This is from the corporation’s website:

 

The international Red Cross and Red Crescent network is the largest humanitarian network in the world with a presence and activities in almost every country. The network is made up of all the national and international organizations around the world that are allowed to use the Red Cross or Red Crescent emblem. It also represents all the activities they undertake to relieve human suffering throughout the world.

The global network is unified and guided by seven Fundamental Principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality. All Red Cross and Red Crescent activities have one central purpose: to help those who suffer, without discrimination, whether during conflict, in response to natural or man-made disasters, or due to conditions of chronic poverty.

The three parts of the global Red Cross network are the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the more than 185 national societies.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the national societies are independent bodies. Each has its own individual status and exercises no authority over the others.

The highest decision-making body of the global network is the International Conference which meets every four years to ensure unity in the work of the international network and to discuss and act upon humanitarian issues of common interest. Delegates to the International Conference are members of the ICRC the IFRC, national societies and representatives from signatories to the Geneva Convention.

 

A large percentage of the world’s ‘privileged’ corporations have lobbying arms designed to manipulate legislation to their benefit. The Red Cross is no exception. It wants certain things and actively lobbies for its policies. One of Dunant and Moynier’s first projects was the creation of a global treaty designed to limit the damage and destruction of war, called the Geneva Convention. The treaty required the signing governments to conform to certain standards and not do certain things that nations typically did during times of war, like use chemical and biological weapons, torture prisoners, bomb civilian hospitals (which could treat soldiers if they existed), and hold prisoners without notifying their families that they were in captivity.

Many military planners did not want to sign this treaty, because it would limit their ability to conduct war. Dunant and Moynier’s corporation created lobbying organizations to try to get governments to agree to these terms. In many cases, even with lobbyists working full time, governments would not agree to the terms. Dunant and Moynier’s corporation then brought in media experts to persuade the people of each nation to put additional pressure on their government, to get them to sign the treaty. The lobbying efforts have been very successful and, to date, the Geneva Convention has been accepted by 196 of the world’s nations (all of them).

Are Corporations Evil?

The Red Cross is a corporation.

I have had personal experiences with the Red Cross. This organization has saved my life, saved lives of my loved ones, and helped people I care about on many occasions. I want to give a few examples:

I was born with hemolytic disease of the newborn, a disease that requires a complete blood transfusion within hours of birth or the baby will die. Thanks to the Red Cross, the blood was available, and I survived. I would not have lived 24 hours without the Red Cross.

In 1983 I was in Tucson when hurricane Octave dropped six feet of water, destroying every bridge in town, washing out many of the roads, and cutting the utilities for, in many cases, weeks. I was driving when the road in front of me disappeared in a rush of water. I was stuck in an unfamiliar place, with no way to get anywhere.

But I saw the white tent with the Red Cross on it.

They had blankets, cots, fresh water to drink, meals to eat, and doctors to help the wounded.

In its paper ‘The Tucson Flood of 1983,’ the Natural Research Council and the Committee on Natural Disasters points out that neither the federal government, the state government, the county government, nor the city government had prepared for the flood. There were no contingency plans in place and the governments didn’t play any significant role in the relief effort. They didn’t even activate the emergency broadcast system to notify the people that the disaster was coming or tell them what to do after it came, which was why many people, like me, had been trapped by the rushing waters.

The governments had no idea what to do. We have seen, throughout this book, that governments have other priorities. It is not their job to worry about disasters (that is what the Red Cross is for!).

The International Red Cross has teams of analysts who watch the weather all over the world looking for events like this. Their teams identify the potential for disaster and notify governments to prepare. However, the governments don’t always heed these warnings. (Just as they did in other famous cases, like hurricane Katrina, the government ignored the warnings about the Tucson Flood; for political reasons, they often refuse to cooperate with the Red Cross, leaving their people without assistance of any kind.) The people of the Red Cross have dealt with all kinds of disasters; they have teams of dedicated experts in place who make plans and get ready to deal with problems, wherever in the world they happen. Their response teams were already in Tucson setting up relief facilities before the local government even realized a disaster was coming.

In 1996, my aunt was driving in Mexico late at night. She was going 70 miles per hour and fell asleep at the wheel. Her car ran into the median and rolled several times. The top half of the car was torn completely off, and the accident tore off half of her skull, exposing her brain, and breaking both of her arms and one of her legs.

Who helps people like this?

If you travel in Mexico, you will see volunteers collecting coins at all of the speed bumps built to slow down traffic before pedestrian crossings (called ‘topes’). The money collected, together with additional contributions from the international community, goes to buy ambulances and build networks of clinics. After my aunt crashed, people saw the wreck and notified the Red Cross. The nearest clinic sent out an ambulance, which brought her to a place where she could be treated. The volunteers at the clinic stabilized her and called me; I came down from Tucson to get her to a hospital.

She never got a bill.

They didn’t ask if she had the ability to pay.

Eventually she recovered fully from her injuries.

Without the Red Cross, what would have happened?

Perhaps passersby would have wanted to help, but what could they do?

Maybe they would have been able to get her to one of the peasant shacks along the side of the road where she may have had a little contaminated water to drink while she died, but not much else.

I had relatives whose homes were destroyed by hurricane Katrina. They told me that they were impressed by the government response: it put up big tents with red crosses on them, gave them clothing, water, food, and a place to stay.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the government wasn’t involved in this: a corporation did it all.

This corporation had nothing to do with the government of any nation on Earth. It was not created by any government, it was not run by any government, it was not funded by any government, and it was not under the control of any government. In fact, the government of her nation (and state, and county, and city) had initially refused to cooperate with the corporation for political reasons. (Government officials generally don’t like outsiders come in to provide aid to their people when this will make the governments look foolish when people can have an efficient service providing network in place to replace them.) In fact, they actively worked to prevent the people affected by the disaster from getting the care and assistance they needed.

You can go through disaster after disaster.

In prisoner of war camps, the Red Cross sends packages to the prisoners, it helps prisoners get letters to their loved ones, and it provides medical care which is often the only care the prisoners are likely to get. Although Earnest Hemmingway likes to portray himself as a freedom fighter who volunteered to fight the fascists in World War One, the truth is that he volunteered for the Red Cross and was not a fighter at all. He was an ambulance driver, one of many unpaid people who picked up wounded from the battlefield, provided emergency treatment to stabilize them, and brought them to Red Cross hospitals (again, not run by any government) for the only care they would receive. When nuclear power plants melt down and governments work to prevent the public from panicking (which would happen if they had correct information), the Red Cross sends people with potassium iodide tablets (the best prevention for cancer for those exposed to large doses of radiation). It educates people of the dangers, at least to the extent they are allowed to do so by the governments of the nations where the meltdowns occurred.

It is simply not true that governments are the only tools that humans can use to deal with global problems. History tells us that it is not true. In fact, history tells us that the new ‘privileged corporations’ are far more effective at helping the members of the human race meet common needs than global governments.

What Might Have Happened?

The central book of this series, Preventing Extinction, explains the way the mechanical structures of human societies function. It shows that, if we understand these structures, we can use tools that are already at our disposal in many cases to manipulate these structures to alter the nature of our societies. The Red Cross shows us that it is possible to use the tools called ‘corporations’ (particularly the ‘privileged corporations’ that came to exist after the United States of America was formed) to carry out global change.

In fact, the Red Cross was initially formed to do exactly what I will propose: create a forum for the human race which could be used to bring all members of our race together in a common structure that operated independently of the governments and nations of the world. If not for some personality conflicts, the Red Cross would have done far, far more than it has done to date.

The Red Cross was formed as a collaborative effort between two men, Henri Dunant and Gustave Moynier.

The two men had entirely different visions and entirely different ideas about what the organization should be designed to do:

Dunant wanted to create a comprehensive organization that would do much more than patch up people and provide relief after disasters. He wanted to create an organization that would empower the people of the world. They would be able to use the corporation as a tool to allow them to work together, outside of the auspices of their governments, and then eventually use its lobbying power to make the governments of the world conform to standards that the human race (working through the corporation) had created.

Moynier had a different goal.

Moynier was a deeply religious man who believed that God had created the world as it was.

Any attempt to change the fundamental realities of this society would go against the wishes of the Creator of existence and were therefore morally wrong. Our job is to accept the basics of reality and do our best to do good, in spite of the horrible forces that surround us. Moynier thought it was wrong to try to change the way the world worked and would not allow Dunant to put his policies into effect. The best we could do, Moynier thought, was to accept the reality of war, wait for wars to go through an area, and try to build up some karmic credit by burying the dead and providing aid to the mutilated.

Dunant fought with Moynier over the goals of the International Red Cross for the next 15 years.

Dunant was the president of the company; Moynier was the chairman of the board.

Dunant made his proposals but the board of directors, under Moynier’s control, rejected them.

 

 

The tensions increased over the years. By the mid 1860s, the two men were no longer talking to each other. Finally, Dunant decided to take the case to court: it was his idea and his company. He had a vision for it and Moynier was getting in the way. The courts would force Moynier to either accept Dunant’s ideas, or remove him from the company.

But Moynier did not give in easily. He fought back. An old saying among attorneys goes: ‘Court is a place where attorneys fight over which of their clients has the most money.’ The two men both neglected their personal affairs to come up with money to pay their lawyers.

In 1868, Dunant ran out of money. He had lost his home, his businesses, and everything he owned. His financial backers decided he was a lost cause and stopped sending him money. Finally, in July of that year, Dunant had to file for protection under the bankruptcy laws. He was dead broke.

Moynier took advantage of this. He called a special meeting of the board of directors. He told the directors that Dunant was incompetent: he couldn’t even manage his personal finances. How could they trust him to manage the huge company that the Red Cross had become? For the good of the company, Dunant had to go. The board listened and fired Dunant. He was broke and unemployed. He had not changed his life goal; he just lost the ability to work for it. People who had ideas for new humanitarian organizations came to him, and he supplied some of the intellectual muscle behind several important organizations that exist in the world today, but because of his reputation, he could only work behind the scenes.

The Wikipedia post for Dunant describes his life after being fired from the Red Cross in this way:

 

Dunant moved to Paris, where he lived in meager conditions but he continued to pursue his humanitarian ideas and plans.

During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), he founded the Common Relief Society (Allgemeine Fürsorgegesellschaft) and soon after the Common Alliance for Order and Civilization (Allgemeine Allianz für Ordnung und Zivilisation). He argued for disarmament negotiations and for the erection of an international court to mediate international conflicts. Later he worked for the creation of a world library, an idea which had echoes in future projects such as UNESCO.

In his continued pursuit and advocacy of his ideas, he further neglected his personal situation and income, falling further in debt and being shunned by his acquaintances. He lived in poverty and moved to Heiden in 1887.

 

In 1901, a newspaper reporter met Dunant, who was then living in a lower class rooming house in Heiden. The reporter wrote a story on Dunant which came to the notice of the newly formed Nobel Prize committee. Alfred Nobel’s will had indicated that am special prize, called the Peace Prize, should go to a person who had best enhanced the ‘brotherhood of people,’ and done something notable to create world peace. No one had done more to this end than Dunant.

His effort hadn’t worked, but he had tried and done everything he could to make it work.

Wikipedia says of his death:

 

He died on 30 October 1910, and his final words were “Where has humanity gone?” He outlived his nemesis Moynier by just two months. Despite the International Red Cross’s congratulations at the bestowal of the Nobel Prize, the two rivals never reached a reconciliation and none of the prize money went to the Red Cross.

Alternate Reality

We might speculate how the world would have looked today if certain things had happened a tiny bit differently in history.

For example, what if Alexander the Great had survived his assassination attempt?

What if he had had time to live a normal lifespan, and had had time to finish putting his intellect-based society into place?

People today would look back at the period when people formed ‘nations’ (the period from 4000 BC to the time Alexander’s society was completed) as a primitive time, when the people who ran human societies had no idea what they were doing. Perhaps, if Alexander had lived long enough to complete his work, people today (having eliminated the idea of nations and the problems accepting this idea creates) might think of our race as more evolved than the human race was when it accepted the idea of ‘sovereign nations’ and other primitive beliefs, superstitions, and illogical principles.

We might also speculate about what the world would look like if Moynier had been willing to listen to Dunant’s ideas. What if Moynier’s parents had not raised him to believe that an invisible superbeing in the sky created everything? What if he and Dunant had worked together instead of fighting each other for the first 15 years the Red Cross existed?

Perhaps nothing would have come of it and the world would be no different than it is. Perhaps the idea would have been seen as being too far out and been rejected anyway.

But perhaps we would have a 160-year head start on forming an organization that works to bring the entire human race together. Perhaps there would already be a forum the entire human race could use to meet their common needs that is not related in any way to the idea of ‘nations.’

Perhaps, rather than using their lobbying power to get governments to sign accords promising not to use chemical weapons in war, they would have agreed to terms that would eliminate borders entirely and eventually eliminate the idea of sovereignty entirely.

Throughout this book, I have tried to show that the societies that dominated the world for the long history of the human race were built mostly on beliefs and unprovable opinions. Certain people stood apart from the believers and had their own visions. Socrates tried to educate people that it is not immoral or heretical to use logic and reason on society, and accept that societies built on the idea of nations (which he called Πολιτεία) could not meet the needs of the human race. He failed to create a general awareness of this truth. In fact, his ideas angered people so much they had Socrates put to death.

But the fact that Socrates failed doesn’t mean that the entire rest of the human race should give up on this mission.

It doesn’t mean any attempt to educate the people must fail.

Many activities in human history that eventually succeeded failed with early attempts. We can keep trying. If people continue to try, we have a chance at succeeding. The only way to make sure we fail is to decide we are doomed before we begin and refuse to try.

Dunant had a vision. He really did do wonderful things; he probably did more to prevent or mitigate human hardship than any human being ever had done in history.

He considered himself a failure, however.

He had failed at what he was really trying to do.

His failure is just the failure of one person. There are 7.5 billion people alive as I write this. It is not wrong for us to try again. Perhaps the conditions have changed to the point where the roadblock that stood in Dunant’s way some 160 years ago have been whittled down and can now be overcome. Perhaps there is one or more of these 7.5 billion who is even more intelligent than Dunant, or has more skills, talents, or other resources.

Perhaps it may be you.

How can you say for sure it is not you, unless you try?

The Internet, Part One

In recent years, new tools have provided new hope to the people of the planet Earth. We now have new tools that allow us to work together as never before, and make our world better through the interactions of people all over the world, with no special rights or privileges granted to people just because they were born in one particular ‘country’ or have the backing and support of a particular government. One of the most powerful of these tools is the internet.

The internet is an incredibly powerful tool that the people of the planet can use to help us work together to create a better world, but it most definitely was not created for that purpose. In fact, it was created for the opposite purpose: Like a great many technological innovations, it was originally built for war. The specific demands placed on its creators were such that this tool of war would not be able to work if it didn’t provide the incredible capabilities that it has that can help the people of the world. If we want to understand the power of this tool, we really need to understand why, when, and how it was created; we need a kind of historical framework to understand why the people who run our current societies were forced to create a system that would allow the people to displace this power structure, if the people didn’t like it, and replace it with one that met the needs of the entire human race, not just the needs of the small percentage of the people who were born in the right ‘country,’ or with rich parents, or in other privileged situations.

The Internet

Governments must respond to military necessity. Sometimes, military necessity forces them to do things that they otherwise would not do. We have seen this before in history: when people discovered how to make steel, militaries had to have it. It takes a lot of people working together in one spot to make steel. It takes a city.

The people in the city must have the freedoms necessary to engage in the business enterprises needed to cut down forests (to get wood for charcoal, needed to smelt steel), mine iron, and build refineries, foundries, and weapons factories. They would have to be given freedom to learn the necessary skills. In order to make sure they remained ahead of enemies, they must have the ability to get information about other areas, making it necessary to have school systems and research facilities. The people who made the steel would have to make enough income to support themselves and raise families; some of them would have leisure and use this leisure to analyze the way the world worked.

Some of them may decide they didn’t like the feudal system or even the general organization of society. They may decide they want to organize themselves in a different way and change the existing order. It is dangerous for the warlord/kings to allow cities to exist.

But they had no choice.

After several thousand years, with no significant military advances, the warlord/kings had gained control of their realms. In Europe, they had created a theocracy, with no books allowed, no education allowed, no activities or organizations that might potentially threaten the existing order allowed.

Then came gunpowder.

The church-run governments clearly didn’t want to allow people to have educations. (If they did, they would have allowed education before military necessity forced them to do this.) They didn’t want to allow literacy, books, open discourse of ideas, or free enterprise. But they had no choice. They had to react to military necessity.

In very recent history, a new military necessity has forced governments to grant people more freedom to information than ever before. It has forced governments to allow true ‘freedom of speech,’ in that governments can no longer effectively prevent information from getting to the people. It has forced governments to allow open communication between people all over the world, allowing people to see that all people everywhere are basically the same. Being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line does not make people different.

Ironically, this new tool, the internet, was originally created by military organizations; its initial purpose was to allow them to fight prolonged nuclear wars. It was created to allow mass murder and destruction on a scale that people who lived only a century ago would not even have been able to imagine was possible. But, again, once the tool exists, it doesn’t have to be used only for its intended use. We, the members of the human race and inhabitants of the planet Earth, can take advantage of this tool and use it for any purpose we want.

This book is about the way the structures of the societies we were born into came to exist. We can’t really understand all of these structures without understanding how and why the internet came to exist, and the incredible hope this tool should bring to anyone who cares about the human condition.

 

The History of the Internet

On February 11, 1939, the German periodical Die Naturwissenschaften published a one-page article that changed the world in many very significant ways. The article was called ‘Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: a New Type of Nuclear Reaction’ by the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frish. The article suggested, for the first time, that atomic nuclei may be split ‘like a droplet of water,’ releasing fabulous amounts of energy.

Here is the relevant text of the article:

 

On bombarding uranium with neutrons, Fermi found that at least four radioactive substances were produced.

At first sight, this result seems very hard to understand. The formation of elements this way has been considered before, but was always rejected for physical reasons, so long as the chemical evidence was not entirely clear cut. However, new ideas about the behavior of heavy nuclei suggest an entirely different picture of these new disintegration processes. On account of their close packing and strong energy exchange, the particles in a heavy nucleus would be expected to move in a collective way which has some resemblance to the movement of a liquid drop. If the movement is made sufficiently violent by adding energy, such a drop may divide itself into two smaller drops.

These two nuclei will repel each other and should gain a total kinetic energy of c. 200 Mev., as calculated from nuclear radius and charge.

 

Meitner was saying it would be possible to cause the nuclei of atoms to split. If this happened, energy would be released. She gave information needed to calculate the amount of energy that would be released. It was immense. Far beyond any energy release of an ordinary chemical reaction.

Albert Einstein had recently moved to the United States. At the time, the United States didn’t have any significant expertise in the kind of physics that Meitner understood, and Einstein appears to be one of the few (the only one, as far as I could see) who realized how important this discovery was. In August of 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, the President of the United States. He warned that the United States would have to start learning about physics, and fast. Here is the relevant information from his letter:

 

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

 

At the time, the United States was still a pretty backward nation scientifically. Although its corporations produced the best conventional weapons in the world, its people were restrained by laws like the Butler Act that prohibited teaching certain aspects of science. As Meitner herself pointed out in her research documents, no United States physicists, other than Einstein, even had the background to understand the concept of ‘uranium disintegration.’

This changed very rapidly.

 

 

The very same day Roosevelt got Einstein’s letter, he formed the S1 Uranium Committee which immediately hired the Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, to begin work on creating a bomb. The committee wanted to recruit Meitner for the project, but she was rejected as a potential pacifist, which made her a security risk. Einstein was also rejected, for the same reason. (In fact, Roosevelt had good cause to reject Einstein, as he almost certainly would have done his best to keep the bomb from existing, see sidebar for more information.)

On July 6, 1945, the scientists had a bomb ready to try; they tested it and it worked as expected.

It took them another month to put together two additional bombs. Exactly a month after the concept had been proven, they used the second bomb to destroy the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 166,000 people. Three days later, on August 9, the military used a third bomb to destroy the city of Nagasaki, killing another estimated 90,000 people.

The next day Emperor Hirohito ordered his top military commander to surrender.

 

The Electromagnetic Pulse

On August 28, 1945, ‘Operation Blacklist’ began: this was the military occupation of Japan.

Under internationally recognized rules and standards of war, anything that had belonged to Japan before now belonged to the United States. The United States government could take whatever it wanted. The United States government took a lot of land from Japan. This included roughly three million square miles (an area slightly smaller than the continental United States) in the Pacific Ocean, which was named ‘United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands,’ and was administered by the United States military. The Trust Territory had about 2,100 islands which were home to roughly 150,000 people. These islands were some of the most remote lands on Earth. The United States government had developed the nuclear bomb very quickly, and without much regard to safety. It had accumulated vast amounts of very dangerous nuclear waste and needed a place to put it. The military decided that one of the islands it had taken from Japan, Elugelab, was the best place to dump it. The island was turned into a nuclear waste disposal site.

In 1952, United States military scientists realized they could build a bomb that was so powerful it would make the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like firecrackers by comparison. The new bomb might potentially destroy a very large part of the planet Earth. To minimize the possibility of destroying anything in the United States, they wanted to test the bomb as far away from the nation as possible. Elugelab was ideal, for the same reason that it was ideal for the disposal of nuclear waste.

The government called the test bomb was ‘Ivy Mike.’ It was the first ‘two stage nuclear device,’ or the first ‘hydrogen’ bomb.

The test took place on November 2, 1952. The scientists had an estimate of the damage the bomb would do. They expected it to produce a very large crater on the Elugelab, and so they set up instruments on the island far away from the test site to measure the destructive power of the bomb. The bomb turned out to be far more powerful than they had anticipated and blew the entire island off the face of the planet (it no longer exists). It also vaporized several ships that were at sea with instruments (and presumably crews) to measure the blast impact. Because the bomb destroyed all of the instruments designed to test its power, the scientists didn’t have any idea how powerful the bomb really was.

 

 

They eventually realized that the additional explosive power came from something called an ‘electromagnetic pulse’ or EMP. This pulse altered the nature of matter close to the bomb, causing normally benign elements to take part in the nuclear explosion. Of course, the government immediately started to work to find new military uses for the EMP.

They found that the bomb had done more than vaporize the island. It had ionized nearly a third of the stratosphere of the planet. The charge in the atmosphere had only lasted a brief fraction of a second, but when it reverted to its previous state, it created very large amounts of electricity in any electrical conductor on the third of the Earth underneath the ionized area. The charge created far more electricity in the conductors than they were capable of carrying; most of them melted. Even thousands of miles away, on the island of Hawaii, fuses blew and communication systems (which use fairly thin wires that can’t carry much electricity) were destroyed.

Military planners thought that they might want to create electromagnetic pulses intentionally, to disrupt enemy communications. If they could blow up a bomb in outer space, it wouldn’t do any damage here on Earth but may send an EMP that would wipe out communications on a third of the world.

They didn’t have the technology to send nuclear bombs (or anything else for that matter) into space as of the 1950s, so they couldn’t test this theory until 1962. On July 8, 1962, the United States government sent the largest payload that had been put into space to that date: a nuclear bomb.

The payload was a specially designed EMP bomb called ‘Starfish Prime.’ Starfish Prime had a yield of 1,400,000 tons of TNT (1.4 million tons); it exploded 250 miles over the South Pacific at three seconds after midnight Honolulu time on July 9, 1962. A reporter some 1,400 miles away describes the event:

 

At Kwajalein, 1,400 miles to the west, a brilliant white flash burned through the clouds rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky above the overcast. From its surface extruded great white fingers, resembling cirro-stratus clouds, which rose to 40 degrees above the horizon in sweeping arcs turning downward toward the poles and disappearing in seconds to be replaced by spectacular concentric cirrus like rings moving out from the blast at tremendous initial velocity, finally stopping when the outermost ring was 50 degrees overhead. They did not disappear but persisted in a state of frozen stillness.

All this occurred, I would judge, within 45 seconds.

As the greenish light turned to purple and began to fade at the point of burst, a bright red glow began to develop on the horizon at a direction 50 degrees north of east and simultaneously 50 degrees south of east expanding inward and upward until the whole eastern sky was a dull burning red semicircle 100 degrees north to south and halfway to the zenith obliterating some of the lesser stars. This condition, interspersed with tremendous white rainbows, persisted no less than seven minutes.

 

Although the technical results of the test are still classified, it clearly had an effect on communications.

Three months later, on October 22, 1962 Russian military planners tested their version of the EMP device. This was a test called ‘Test 184;’ it detonated an EMP device with a yield of 300,000 tons of TNT, 200 miles over Kazakhstan.

The Russians allowed some of the results of the test to be published. An article by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (‘Response of Long Lines to Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility’) describes the result:

 

The EMP from Test 184 knocked out a major 570 kilometer long overhead telephone line by inducing currents of 1500 to 3400 amperes in the line. The line was separated into several sub-lines connected by repeater stations, each repeater station was 40 to 80 kilometers apart, with most being closer to 80 km. There were numerous gas-filled overvoltage protectors and fuses along the telephone line. All of the overvoltage protectors fired, and all of the fuses on the line were blown.

The EMP from Test 184 also damaged radios at about 600 kilometers (360 miles) from the detonation, knocked out a radar about 1000 kilometers (600 miles) from the nuclear explosion, and caused a fire that destroyed a power plant at Karaganda, Kazakhstan.

 

The United States government ordered studies on the potential effects of the electromagnetic pulse. A report made to the president of the United States called ‘Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack,’ says this:

 

The high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is one of a small number of threats that has the potential to result in defeat of our military forces. The damage level could be sufficient to be catastrophic to the Nation, and our current vulnerability invites attack. Briefly, a single nuclear weapon exploded at high altitude above the United States will interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetic field to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) radiating down to the Earth and additionally create electrical currents in the Earth.

 

The Russian test showed conclusively that any conventional communication system could be totally destroyed with a single bomb of the correct type, exploded in the correct way. Military planners in nuclear states realized that they wouldn’t be able to retaliate against nuclear attacks if this happened.

The problem is that the communication systems as of the 1960s used a single wired connection to send each message. If this single connection is damaged, communication stops. In critical cases, the government had redundant communication systems, with two or sometimes even three backups to get the information through in case the primary line is cut. But an EMP bomb could potentially wipe out all three of these lines at the same time, ending communication entirely. Military planners realized that, if they were to be able to continue to fight a nuclear war after the first bomb goes off, they would need an entirely new type of communication system. This new system would have to work in a way that would allow messages to get through by multiple pathways that go in many different directions and use many different ‘architectures’ or designs. That way, even if a large percentage of the pathways were destroyed, the messages would still get through and the nuclear war could continue.

Within days after the Russian test, the United States government formed the ‘Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’ or ‘DARPA’ to find a new communication system. Researchers there came up with a solution called ‘packet switching.’ This system involves breaking messages down into ‘packets’ of fixed size and sending them to their destination through multiple pathways. If one expected pathway should no longer exist and a packet can’t get where it wants to go that way, the packet remains in the system, going down path after path until it can find a path that gets it to its destination. As long as there are any paths left, all packets will eventually get where they need to go. Once all of the packets have arrived, a computer reassembles the message and it can be read.

 

Why The Government that Created the Internet Can’t Censor It

A great many scientists came together for the project. One of these scientists, Robert Kahn, realized that the system would only be reliable if it had something he called an ‘open architecture,’ and only if it didn’t have any central control mechanism. Here is the basic idea:

 

The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”.

In an open-architecture network, the individual networks may be separately designed and developed and each may have its own unique interface which it may offer to users and/or other providers. including other Internet providers. Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. There are generally no constraints on the types of networks that can be included or on their geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will dictate what makes sense to offer.

The idea of open-architecture networking was first introduced by Kahn shortly after having arrived at DARPA in 1972. Four ground rules were critical to Bob Kahn’s early thinking:

1. Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.

2. Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.

3. Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.

4. There would be no global control at the operations level.

 

There are two key points:

First the new communication system would not be built by the military itself. The military would set up the initial system and connections but, once they existed, anyone would be able to expand on it. They would do this using any kind of computing network they wanted to build, with no limits to the kinds of connections they made to it. Each connection would be entirely separate. Even if enemies were able to figure out how to destroy one kind of connection, the other connections would work entirely differently and continue to operate. Over the years, many different types of connections have been made to the network, all of which work in different ways (‘designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements’).

Second, there would be no global control.

That means once the military created an internet, it wouldn’t be able to control it.

The internet would be like Frankenstein’s monster: once it came to exist, it would be autonomous.

If people used it for things the government didn’t like the government wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

Of course, governments don’t like to create things that empower the people. But planners at DARPA realized they had no choice. The communication system would only be reliable if it met the standards that Bob Kahn had set. They would not be able to carry on a nuclear war without a communication system and, to be reliable it would have to meet these standards.

The government had no choice.

It had to create this system.

The Internet

In 1965, DARPA scientists made the first internet connection between two computers, one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., and the other at the University of California in Berkeley.

The system worked. In 1970, scientists developed a ‘host to host’ protocol that allowed computers to ‘talk to’ each other. This allowed computers to form connections on their own, without the need for human input. Computers could then make and break connections as necessary to get information through, without any need for humans to be involved.

The system would be more secure if it had more connections. The military needed people all over the world to develop connections, so it obviously couldn’t keep the system secret. In 1972, Bob Kahn made the new system public, together with the first application, an email program that would transmit, store, send, and allow replies to messages. He called the system ARPANET (after the acronym for the military organization that developed it). In the 1970s, military contractors were connected to the system and starting in the 1980s, university researchers gained access to it. In 1988 the system was opened to commercialization and non-military corporations began making their own connections.

 

The original ARPANET grew into the Internet. Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design. It would begin with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but would soon include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks.

 

The system was designed to be impossible to disrupt:

If it were possible to disrupt communications, enemies would figure out how to do this and take advantage of it. If this were possible, the internet wouldn’t be able to do what it was designed to do: allow communication needed to conduct a nuclear war over time. The ‘open architecture’ protected it both from enemies and from the government that created it.

Has it worked?

If you look on the internet, you will find a great deal of information that proves it has. Various sites have leaked information that is very damaging to the image the United States tries to project. For example, you can watch videos taken from United States helicopter gunships while they were machine-gunning unarmed civilians in the streets (with the pilots protesting the orders and being threatened with court marshals if they violate them). You can see photos and watch videos taken of the United States military massacring children and committing other acts that any sane person would call ‘crimes against humanity,’ also under orders from higher-ups. Recent disclosures on the internet include documents from the United States National Security Agency that tell that the agency is involved in warrantless surveillance (and therefore illegal surveillance) of hundreds of millions of civilians who are not under investigation for any crime. These internet disclosures exposed to the public that the NSA and other United States government organizations have the ability to turn on the microphones and cameras on cell phones, webcams, and laptop computers (even if the devices are turned off) to listen in and watch conversations that people expect to be private. One site the government would very much like to shut down is Wikileaks.com, which makes available copies of hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents. Many of these documents reveal that high government officials have lied and fabricated evidence in order to start otherwise unnecessary wars, and that they frequently violate or ignore formal agreements –both verbal and written promises, and even violate the Constitution that they are supposed to be upholding – to complete clandestine projects (many of which they have denied exist). If the government could take down this information and make it unavailable, it would do so. The fact that it has not taken down this information is evidence that it doesn’t have the ability to do it. It tells us that the web works for what the government is trying to do with it: create an information and communication system that can’t be destroyed by any entity, even itself.

This tells us something very important:

There is one thing that forces governments to implement changes that allow science, open-minded research, and free transfer of ideas: military necessity.

It is hard to find much that is good to say about nuclear weapons and a great many people wish they had never been invented. But nuclear weapons have forced governments to do something that they almost certainly would never have done otherwise: they have forced governments around the world to allow people access to true and correct information about our past, present, and future. People around the world that have access to historical documents are putting them on the web and making them searchable. Anyone with a computer and connection can go through them and sort out realities of history that conflict entirely with the political messages that governments try to pound into children’s minds in history classes. If people can find out the truth about the past, they can put together the truth about the present. They can work out capabilities of the human race by going through past records to see what we have really accomplished in the past.

They can see that we really are capable of more than we have yet achieved.

They can see that there are different roads that head into the future, and we have many choices.

Our ancestors put us on a road. The people who lived on Earth in the past put together ‘modes of existence’ or societies built on the principle that unlimited (sovereign) rights to the world are ownable. They built networks of rules, laws, social conventions, taboos, and indoctrination systems to try to force us onto the same road.

It is not the only road that leads to the future.

Summary

This chapter has dealt with two recent historical events. The first is the use of the new privileged corporations as tools to help advance the interests of the human race as a whole. We know that it is possible to use the new type of corporation to do many things that many people tend to believe are impossible. It is possible to use corporate structures to bring the entire human race together for a common project and make governments accept standards that are in the long-term interest of the human race as a whole. This is possible, as we have seen through the work of the IRC, even when these standards are at odds with the selfish interests of individual nations. We know this is possible because it is happening.

The second is the miracle of the internet. We get this miracle from an unlikely and ironic source: nuclear war planners. As you have seen throughout this book, war planning has to take priority over anything else in the societies we were born into. Governments want to control their people, keep them in the dark, and prevent them from learning certain truths and realities. They want people to really believe that others born on the ‘wrong’ side of an imaginary line are horrible, heinous monsters who have no regard for anything that decent people care about, so that the people will support the separation of the world into ‘nations’ and the violent and inhuman conflicts needed to keep these divisions in place. But once EMP bombs were discovered, war planners had no choice but to create such a forum. Nuclear wars could simply not be carried out without an internet that was designed to be impossible to censor. Perhaps the reason this miracle was created is abhorrent, but that doesn’t make it any less of a miracle.

You and I were born into what Chinese philosophers call ‘interesting times.’

There is a lot going on. When we were born, the human race was already firmly set going down a certain road, a road that clearly leads to extinction. The system already had education systems designed to make us believe that this is the only road that goes into the future, and we must follow it just as past generations did. The people who built this system designed it so that the path of least resistance for each of us as individuals is to conform. We are all to play a part in this system and move our race further down this very same road, while training the next generation to do the same.

But the interesting part is that we are in a position to change this. We have the tools. We have intelligence, access to information, and knowledge about the past, present, and possible futures that people have never had in the past. The destiny of the world is not in the hands of past generations, it is in our hands.

 

Takeaway points

 

Governments are forced to allow people more freedom if it is a military necessity. This chapter explored two such instances which have shaped our ability to use corporations and human cooperation to change the world for the better.

 

Corporations CAN and currently ARE used for the good of humankind.

 

The Internet has given the people access to true information beyond what the government and corporate-controlled media provides. This interrupts the brainwashing necessary to fuel the hatred needed to induce a constant state of war.

The Rich and Powerful in America could not keep the powers and wealth they had held before 1763 if the colonies remained a part of England.

They would have to break away.

Would this be possible? Let’s consider some of the things they would have considered in the early stages of the analysis:

Here is information from the British military indicating their troop strength as of the early 1770s:

 

The total land forces of Great Britain exclusive of militia numbered on paper 48,647 men, of which 39,294 were infantry; 6,869 cavalry; and 2,484 artillery. These troops were unequally divided between two separate military establishments, the English establishment and the Irish establishment.

The English establishment comprised 25,871 infantry organized into 46 regiments and 20 independent companies; 4,151 cavalry organized into 16 regiments; and 2,256 artillerymen organized into one regiment of 4 battalions. Of the aforesaid infantry one regiment of 482 men (the 41st) and the 20 independent companies of 1,040 were largely non-effective, being composed of ‘invalids’ 2 doing garrison duty in Great Britain and the Scilly Islands.

An examination of the location of the British army reveals the fact that while small detachments of it were to be found in many distant quarters of the globe, the bulk of it was distributed unequally among three different countries. There were roughly speaking 15,000 men in England, 12,000 in Ireland, and 8,000 in America. The remaining 10,000 were distributed among the West Indies, Africa, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Scotland. [The full text of original document can be found at https://www.americanrevolution.org/britisharmy1.php.]

 

These numbers tell a very interesting story: the British government really didn’t have any substantial forces in America. This makes sense: prior to the war, the colonial militias had been responsible for defense of the colonies. England had sent troops in to fight the French during the war but had removed them when the war was over.

The total British military forces in America worked out to one soldier for every 187 square miles of land the nation had gained in the Treaty of Paris. This means that if the soldiers were evenly spaced across the American land that England had gained, each soldier would be 187 miles from the nearest other soldier. For perspective, consider that the current city of New York alone has more than 50,000 police personnel (more than the total global British military force as of 1770) to keep order in that one city alone; more than the total British force in all of America.

Anyone could see that the tiny British force in America could not protect the land England had gained against a professionally planned and well-executed military campaign. From the events that followed, we can tell that the people who eventually made the war happen, and won it, appeared to have figured this out not very long after the peace treaty of 1763 was signed.

Manpower of the Separatists

The people who planned war with England considered their options. England couldn’t give away the land west of the divide to attract recruits, because they had already ruled that they would protect the existing treaties with American natives and allow them to live there from then until the end of time. But the colonists didn’t have to respect these wishes. If they could defeat England in a war, they would get roughly 450,000,000 acres of additional land. They would get all land west of the divide. They could send appeals out all over Europe that they would give away free land to anyone who came to America to fight for independence.

Here is the text of the first of several land grant bills that the Continental Congress passed as soon as they began raising armies for the war, in September of 1776:

 

Resolved that Congress make provision for granting lands in the following proportions : to the officers and soldiers who shall so engage in the service, and continue therein to the close of the war, or until discharged by Congress, and to the representatives of such officers and soldiers as shall be slain by the enemy, such lands, to be provided by the United States, and whatever expense shall be necessary to procure such land ; the said expense shall be paid and borne by the States in the same proportions as the other expenses of the war, viz.: to a colonel, 500 acres; to a lieutenant colonel, 450; to a major, 400; to a captain, 300; to a lieutenant, 200; to an ensign, 150; each noncommissioned officer and soldier, 100.

 

This offer wouldn’t have been particularly attractive to locals of course. They knew that the promised land was already inhabited by large numbers of American natives.

 

 

The king had made sure the natives knew that they were to be granted rights. They realized that the colonials would not respect their rights and would try to remove them or worse if they won, so they considered the colonials to be enemies.

People in the colonies knew that, if they got this land in exchange for fighting, they would have to place their lives at risk just to go there. If they were able to survive there, they wouldn’t be able to make any money because the Ohio lands were too far from markets were money was used.

Foreigners didn’t know the details. This offer was extremely attractive to them. To understand how attractive this offer would have been to European farmers, you have to understand that conditions weren’t much different for most rural people in Europe than they had been during the Dark Ages. The people who actually worked the land were called either ‘tenant farmers,’ ‘peons,’ or ‘serfs.’ The landlords assigned these people parcels of land and quotas they had to pay as ‘rents’ on that land. If they missed the rents, their landlords would punish them, usually by execution.

The colonial separatists could attract people to fight for them by offering an alternative to this miserable existence: Europeans could come to America and fight for the separatists. If they won, they would become owners of parts of the planet. They would get a minimum of 100 acres of their own land. Remember that an acre is the amount of land needed to support one person.

They would be rich.

The separatists also needed experienced officers. They wanted these people to desert from foreign armies, preferably with their entire units. If they did this, they would get truly fantastic amounts of land. Here is the text of the appropriate legislation they passed in 1776:

 

This Congress will give, to all of the said foreign officers as shall leave the armies of his Britannic majesty in America, and chuse to become citizens of these states, unappropriated lands, in the following quantities and proportions, to them and their heirs in absolute dominion; to wit, to a colonel, 1,000 Acres; to a lieutenant colonel, 800 Acres; to a major, 600 Acres; to a captain, 400 Acres; to a lieutenant, 300 Acres; to an ensign, 200 Acres; to every non-commissioned officer, 100 Acres, and to every other officer or person employed in the said foreign corps, and whose office or employment is not here specifically named, in the like proportion to their rank or pay in the said corps; and, moreover, that where any officers shall bring with them a number of the said foreign soldiers, this Congress, besides the lands before promised to the said officers and soldiers, will give to such officers further rewards, proportioned to the numbers they shall bring over, and suited to the nature of their wanes.

 

The War

American history books try to make it appear that the war was a battle for freedom and liberty by ‘the colonists’ who were united in opposition to an oppressive England. The books try to make it appear that the only theater of war was in America. None of these things are true.

First, the war was not just between the separatists and England. The French Government had not been happy with the results of the Seven Years War (called the ‘French and Indian War’ in the United States) and wanted their land back in Canada. The French government had been ready and waiting for an excuse to try to take their land back. As soon as they saw that England was involved in a battle with the colonies, they attacked English positions all around the world. The Spanish government also saw the war as an opportunity. Spain declared war on England in 1779. The Dutch government saw this as an opportunity to take advantage of British occupation in a war against both of its traditional enemies; they declared war on England 1780.

As we will see shortly, the great bulk of the fighting, and all definitive battles that ultimately decided the war, took place in theaters other than the Americas. The story that the hard-fighting colonials defeated the largest and best equipped military on Earth due to their intense devotion to Washington and the other leaders is false.

The story that the great majority of colonials supported the war is also untrue. The ‘British Headquarters Papers, New York,’ also known as the Carleton Papers, contain records kept by commanders-in-chief of the British Army in North America during the American Revolution (1776–1783). These 30,000 manuscript pages provide details of the services of Loyalists of all classes in the war. They list 54,557 American persons who served with or worked for the loyalist (British) cause during the war.

The Americans didn’t keep very good records, and a large percentage of the records that did exist were lost in the few years after the war was over, so we don’t have exact numbers for the troops that fought for America. Estimates range between 40,000 and 80,000 total fighters. The majority of these people were not locals from the colonies. They had responded to the advertising in Europe and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to get the free land. Again, we don't have exact numbers from the colonialists, so we don't know for sure, but it appears that more people from the colonies fought on the side of the British than on the side of the separatists.

The American Actions

The British brought over a total of 56,000 soldiers over the course of the war to fight the separatists. The British also hired 30,000 German mercenaries.

From the first, the British forces dominated the fighting. General Howe lead the British forces. They landed on Long Island on August 22, 1776 and began to set up their forces. They attacked on August 27. Washington gave up his positions on the island and retreated to Manhattan on August 30^th.

Howe began his attack on Washington’s positions in Manhattan on September 15, 1776. Within a few days, all of Washington’s troops had retreated to what is now called ‘Fort Washington,’ a position on the north side of the island that was the highest point on the island and its strongest fortified position.

On September 21, New York City was destroyed in a fire, the worst disaster ever to hit that city. The fire destroyed an estimated 2/3 of the buildings in New York. According to the British account of the fire, a team of 230 saboteurs, led by Captain Nathan Hale (under the command of Washington) went to the fire houses and destroyed all of the firefighting equipment of the city. They then began to set fires all over the city, burning much of it to the ground.

Where did the British get the idea that Captain Hale, acting under orders from Washington, had set the fires? As the fires in Manhattan burned, Hale had traveled across the river to Queens. He was drinking in a tavern and told people that he had been involved in the fire. A British solder, Major Robert Rogers, in civilian clothes, went to Hale and bought him a drink, thanking him for his service. Hale then told Rogers everything. Rogers told the authorities who arrested Hale for the act. Hale, drunk by then, continued to brag about the action. The British court marshalled him the next day and, again, he bragged about having burned the city down, so he was sentenced to hang, and was indeed hanged shortly thereafter.

To his dying day, Washington denied the account. He said Hale was a spy, sent in to discover information about the British positions, and none of the continentals had anything to do with the fire. The history books believe him of course: he won the war and the writers of the history books were working for the government Washington created.

Retreat

Howe took Fort Washington on November 15. Washington himself was at Fort Lee, on the other side of the Hudson River. Three days later, under British bombardment, he abandoned For Lee with his 2,000 remaining troops (Howe had captured 2,838 of Washington's troops, more than half his army, when he took Fort Washington). He headed south through New Jersey.

Washington was defeated at virtually every battle. After a year of battle, he had been driven into the remote mountains of Pennsylvania, in the isolated village of Valley Forge, where he stayed in the winter of 1777-1778.

In 1778, France declared war in an alliance with Spain. Spain and Holland were both preparing for war (Spain would officially declare war on England in 1779 and Holland in 1780). All three countries began massive shipments of both manpower and material to the colonial army in the hopes that it could keep a large part of the British forces occupied while they arranged their attacks in other theaters.

In 1778, France and Spain began preparing for the largest action of the war, a planned invasion of England itself, with 40,000 men. This was to be called the ‘Armada of 1779.’ The British had to move troops from other theaters to protect their homeland.

Meanwhile, France, Spain, and Holland, all worked together in a coordinated effort to wipe out as much British shipping as they could. They managed to prevent British supply ships from getting through to the American ports for most of the war.

Finally, with the help of armies sent by three other countries, and the British forces unable to get reinforcements or supplies due to the naval blockade, Washington’s troops began to push the British back. Howe had been removed from command due to his failure to take out the Continental Army when they were at Valley Forge. His replacement, Cornwallis, was driven back to Yorktown, where the French Fleet stood to prevent the British from removing their troops. Cornwallis was trapped. He surrendered to a contingent of 5,500 French troops under the command of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau. on October 19, 1781.

The Rest of the War

France took advantage of the harm done to the British Navy by taking the islands of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago, St. Kitts, the Turks, and Caicos Islands. France and Spain joined forces to invade England in 1779, but the invasion failed. French and Spanish forces besieged Gibraltar from 1781 to 1783 but didn’t defeat the troops there. The French captured Minorca in Europe and Demerara and Essequibo in South America in February 1782.

In India, a French fleet commanded by the Bailli de Suffren fought a series of largely inconclusive battles with a British fleet under Sir Edward Hughes, and the only major military land action, the 1783 Siege of Cuddalore, was cut short by news that a preliminary peace had been signed.

The two sides were tired of fighting.

Representatives of England, France, Holland, and Spain signed the ‘Second Treaty of Paris’ on September 13, 1783, ending the war. The combatants didn’t invite the United States to sign, even though the treaty officially created the United States of America.

For the next month, the British hastily evacuated loyalists from New York. Over the course of the war, about 30,000 black slaves had traveled to New York City and to freedom. (The British freed all slaves in areas under their control.) The treaty required that all slaves be returned to their owners, but the British commander refused to comply. November 21, 1783, George Washington and Governor George Clinton entered New York City. The war was over.

The treaty that created the United States didn’t even mention the war, it said there had been a ‘misunderstanding.’ Here is the text of the treaty:

 

The Definitive Treaty of Peace 1783

In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.

It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore. And having for this desirable end already laid the foundation of peace and reconciliation we agree to a Treaty of Peace be concluded between the Crown of Great Britain and the said United States and have agreed upon and confirmed the following articles.

His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.

And that all disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries of the said United States may be prevented, it is hereby agreed and declared, that the following are and shall be their boundaries, viz.; from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, viz., that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of St. Croix River to the highlands; along the said (and then continues to define all land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes as belonging to the United States)

 

Note that the treaty gave away four times more land than was included in the states listed in the document.

A new nation had come to exist. This nation had more freedom, liberty, and equality than had ever existed in any nation for any kind of person for all of history. But only a certain kind of person had these advantages: a corporate person.

 

United States

On January 21, 1785, representatives of the Government of the United States of America negotiated the ‘purchase’ of all land in the southern and eastern parts of Ohio from the Native American groups that lived there under an agreement called the ‘Treaty of Fort McIntosh.’

The lands were ‘purchased’ this way: several prominent members of the negotiating tribes were kidnapped and held hostage. The government agreed to release them unharmed if the tribal leaders would agree to put an X mark on a piece of paper in front of a notary public, to make it a valid signature. Here are the terms of the treaty:

 

The boundary line between the United States and the Wiandot and Delaware nations, shall begin at the mouth of the river Cayahoga, and run thence up the said river to the portage between that and the Tuscarawas branch of Meskingum; then down the said branch to the forks at the crossing place above Fort Lawrence; then westerly to the portage of the Big Miami, which runs into the Ohio, at the mouth of which branch the fort stood which was taken by the French in one thousand seven hundred and fifty-two; then along the said portage to the Great Miami or Ome river, and down the south-east side of the same to its mouth; thence along the south shore of lake Erie, to the mouth of Cayahoga where it began.

The Indians who sign this treaty, as well in behalf of all their tribes as of themselves, do acknowledge the lands east, south and west of the lines described in the third article, so far as the said Indians formerly claimed the same, to belong to the United States; and none of their tribes shall presume to settle upon the same, or any part of it.

The post of Detroit, with a district beginning at the mouth of the river Rosine, on the west end of lake Erie, and running west six miles up the southern bank of the said river, thence northerly and always six miles west of the strait, till it strikes the lake St. Clair, shall be also reserved to the sole use of the United States.

In the same manner the post of Michillimachenac with its dependencies, and twelve miles square about the same, shall be reserved to the use of the United States. [Source: https://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers]

 

The treaty specified that payment would be made for the land:

 

The Commissioners of the United States, in pursuance of the humane and liberal views of Congress, upon this treaty’s being signed, will direct goods to be distributed among the different tribes for their use and comfort.

 

 

The United States now owned the land. It could begin disposing of it as it had agreed to do before the war.

Who Got the Land?

In this initial ‘purchase’ of land, the United States government obtained 20,312 sections (square miles) of land. The land ordinance stipulated that 252 of these sections be granted to soldiers who had fought for the Continental Army, fulfilling the terms of the enlistment contracts.

The soldiers got slightly more than 1% of the land taken from the American native people in this transaction.

What happened to the rest?

Between October of 1787 and July of 1788, the new Government of the United States sold more than half of this land, 10,593 square miles (6,780,000 acres) to a company called ‘The Ohio Company of Associates’ and its wholly owned subsidiary ‘the Scotio Companies.’ The company was run by four top military officials: Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper, Samuel Parsons and Manasseh Cutler. The company didn’t buy its land with real money; the land was paid for with military script, the ‘continental dollars’ which had been issued during the war and were never redeemed for hard currency and therefore effectively worthless. The largest shareholder was the new secretary of the U.S. Treasury, William Duer. George Washington was part of the project and personally submitted the petition for this land to the Congress. It was, of course, approved.

All of the documents of the Ohio Company of Associates are now in the library of the University of Ohio at Marietta. Here is a quick summary of the corporation’s activities:

The first act of the corporation was the formation of the town of Marietta, Ohio, which was to be the company’s headquarters. Corporate resolutions authorized the layout of the streets, public areas, and dictated the lot sizes to be subdivided and sold in markets. Most of the current towns and cities in Ohio were organized, surveyed, and sold, by the Ohio Company of Associates, the Scotio Companies, or other subsidiaries and associates of these companies.

Over the next decade, the Congress appropriated additional lands, removing the inhabitants if they would not leave voluntarily. Until 1830, this removal was not officially sanctioned; that year, the Congress passed ‘The Indian Removal Act’ which made it lawful for the government to remove Indians from all land east of the Mississippi and ‘extinguish' their rights to the land, even if they had been given this land for the rest of time in treaties.

Creation of A Corporate Paradise

After the proclamation of 1764, certain very powerful people in America decided they could not make the world around them work as they wanted it to work if the land around them remained a part of the country of England. They had to turn it into an independent entity, one where they could make the rules. They gained this right in 1784, with the Second Treaty of Paris, that created the United States of America. They no longer had any requirement to adhere to any policies of England. They could make their own laws and rules.

They wanted corporations to have protections that they had not enjoyed under English rule and they basically organized their most important document, their Constitution, so that this was the case. Let’s look at the specific rights that they gave corporations in the new system:

 

Before the United States began issuing charters, corporations could only get rights for a limited period of time. As the end of the charter period approached, shareholders who wanted the corporation to continue to exist would have to petition the government for renewal of their charter. The government could then decide to renew with no changes, renew with certain changes, or not renew at all.

Governments commonly reduced rights of corporations at renewal time. Consider the British East India Company. The company got its first charter on December 31, 1600; this charter had a 15-year term. The British parliament renewed it in 1615 but required the company to pay higher percentages of its profits to the government in the renewal than in the original charter. The government renewed the charter over and over, but each time transferred some of the rights that had belonged to the corporation to the British government.

In the renewal of 1783, the company lost the right to govern the nation of India (which the corporation had conquered and governed independently of the government of England to that date). In the renewal of 1813, the company lost its monopoly on trade with India and China and had to accept competition with other companies. By 1873, the government had transferred so many rights away from the company that there was nothing left of the East India Company. The company’s charter expired, and the company ceased to exist.

In the United States, people who wanted to form corporations didn’t have to request the right to open a company from the government and then wait for approval. People wrote their charters themselves and then simply registered them with the corporate commissions. This policy persists in the modern United States.

Who decides how long the corporate charter will last?

If you want to create a corporation (and you can if you do it in the United States; anyone can), you can decide this yourself. If you want it to last ‘until dissolved by the shareholders,’ you can put this into the charter. If the shareholders want to keep the company for a million years (and if there is a world in a million years) the company will last a million years.

 

 

Why does this matter?

If you are opening a company that will have a limited life, you have to set it up so that it will do everything it is designed to do before the term expires. If the facilities of the company are expected to last a century, and if the only way to make a profit from them is to use them for a century and therefore spread the cost of building them over a century, you won’t be able to justify the facilities if you can’t get a charter for at least a century.

A lot of factories that exist in the world today require investments that are so vast they are hard for the human mind to imagine. These factories have to be able to operate for a very long time, and spread their costs over a very long time, or they won’t make profits. If companies can’t get very long charters, they won't build these kinds of factories.

For example, Forbes magazine points out that it costs about $10 billion to build a computer chip factory. For reference, the Louisiana purchase price of $15 million, adjusted for inflation, would be $1,040 million or $1.04 billion in today’s money. To build a single computer chip factory, you would have to spend roughly ten times the amount the United States paid for a fourth of its land.

People are going to be far more confident in investing if they know the company is going to be around and generating income indefinitely. Say you are putting a large amount of money—your life savings—into a company that is making computer chips. If the company had a 15-year charter that might not get renewed, you would have to worry a lot about the investment. The company will have to spend most of the charter period designing and building the factory. By the time the factory is operating and generating revenues, the company will be at the mercy of the government. If the company has a forever charter, however, 15 years is nothing. After 15 years, the company will be operating and generating very nice free cash flows. (This would have to be true or no one would build the factory; they build it to make money.) Your shares in the factory will still have an infinite life ahead of them. If you want to sell them, you will easily be able to do so, probably for far more than you initially invested.

Forever rights also have important political implications: if companies know they are going to be around for an indefinite period of time, they can justify building massive political lobbies to manipulate legislation. They can invest in media to shape public opinion for their benefit and they can form truly massive ‘political action committees’ (PACs) to manipulate elections.

No one today is working in London to protect the interests of the British East India Company. But the Du Pont Company, which has been around more than two centuries, started building a lobbying organization in the 1800s and continues to employ hundreds of people to figure out new and better ways to manipulate the government to get policy advances the interest of the company.

 

Article 1 of the Constitution protects the rights of corporations. Here is the relevant text:

 

Article 1, Section. 10.

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

 

Lawyers know how to make their statements confusing, so that people who would probably object to the terms if they really understood them will not be able to understand them enough to realize how offensive they are. At first glance, all of Section 10 appears to be incompressible gibberish. If you break it down, however, you can see it is actually nine separate rules:

 

1. No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance or Confederation;

2. No State shall grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal;

3. No State shall coin Money;

4. No State shall emit Bills of Credit;

5. No State shall make anything but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;

6. No State shall pass any Bill of Attainder;

7. No State shall pass any ex post facto Law;

8. No State shall pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts;

9. No State shall grant any Title of Nobility.

 

The sentence that wound up turning corporations into persons under the law is sentence eight: ‘No State shall pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.’

This sentence doesn’t say ‘people have the right to make contracts.’ It says that states must take themselves out of the picture. They don’t even have the right to consider the issue.

As we will see shortly, the Supreme Court was called to consider this issue in the case of Fletcher v. Peck. In that case, a corporation had made a specific contract that the government of Georgia wanted to nullify. (The company had purchased land from someone who did not own it and then proceeded to sell the land to others.) The Georgia government claimed that it had the right to nullify the contract because it was not made between two persons, but between a government official and a corporation and, since corporations existed as servants of the people, if the corporations did wrong or broke the law the state could nullify their contracts without violating the rights of any human people.

The court ruled that it didn’t matter. The state has no right to interfere.

After the delegates to the Constitutional Convention approved the document, they realized that history might reflect poorly on them because the document didn’t actually protect any of the rights of the people in any way. They added a group of amendments called the ‘Bill of Rights’ that granted certain rights to human persons. The Supreme Court has since ruled that all of the rights granted to human persons in the amendments also apply to corporate persons.

This includes ‘freedom of speech,’ and since the court has ruled that giving money to government officials is a form of ‘speech,’ it includes the right to bribe government officials provided the companies do it the right way.

 

The First Amendment reads:

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

 

This does not say ‘Congress shall make no law abridging right of people to say what they want.’ The ‘speaker’ may be a human person or a corporate person; the protection applies equally to all entities the constitution recognizes as ‘persons.’

In some countries, paying for votes is called ‘bribery’ and is illegal. This is technically true in the United States as well. But as long as the payment is not specifically tied to a vote, the courts consider it to be ‘free speech,’ not bribery, and protected under the law.

Here is an example that will help you see the difference between bribery and free speech: say you tell a legislator you will give her $1 million for her vote on a measure and she agrees to sell her vote to you. In forming this agreement, you make a contract with her to buy her vote (either orally or in writing), then she votes as you request, and you give her the $1 million. This is called ‘bribery.’

However, if any of these conditions is not met, it is not considered bribery. For example, you can tell her you are thinking about giving her $1 million as a ‘no strings attached’ gift. However, you need to make sure that she is ‘friendly to your cause’ before you can justify this ‘no strings attached gift.’ You can say that you will be watching her during the vote to see if she is ‘friendly.’ If she is, she will get the $1 million; if not, she won’t. (You are only paying for ‘friendliness,’ not the vote, and it is not illegal to buy friends.) Then, she votes for your cause. You then give her the $1 million and tell her that you may want her to be your friend again and will make the same deal each time.

Say you do this again, and everything happens in the same way. This is not bribery under the law. It is not only not illegal, but it can’t even legally be regulated. The government is prohibited from involving itself.

Corporations know exactly what legislation they want. They can afford to pay attorneys to write it. They can then tell their ‘friends’ in government that they are figuring out who will get their lobbying money and letting them know that they are looking for friends of the cause to introduce legislation for them. They can offer gifts to any government officials who prove their friendliness to the issue by voting for the bill. If they want to do something that the majority of the people of the United States would not approve of, say increase subsidies on burning coal, they can create legislation with deceptive names like ‘Clean Air Act’ or ‘Clear Skies Initiative’ to increase the subsidies, and hide the actual effects of the law in thousands of pages of legal jargon that no real person could read and remain sane. The companies will get what they want; there is nothing that the people can do about it.

 

Corporate persons have the right to support any candidate for government office that they want, just like human persons. Again, however, human persons can’t put together nearly as much money to support candidates as corporate persons can.

The 2007 paper ‘Executive Summary: Does Money Buy Elections?’ analyzes the relationship between spending and election results. The paper’s findings:

 

Threshold Effects of Campaign Spending

Non-incumbent candidates require a spending threshold of between $0.7-$1 million in order to credibly compete. Incumbents enjoy an inherently competitive position and choose a similar minimum spending level when faced with a serious challenger. Less than 1% of challengers and 5% of open seat candidates spending $700,000 or less won election. More than 45% of non-incumbents with spending of $700,000 or more won election. [Americans for Campaign Reform, ‘Executive Summary: Does Money Buy Elections?’]

 

Logic tells us that money buys elections. The study confirms this. In the United States, money equals speech. Corporate persons can come up with far more money than human persons, so they can speak louder and more forcefully than human persons. In the United States, the government is prohibited from interfering in this. The government is barred from putting limits on the amounts that can be given to people to get them elected, or given to political action committees (PACs) that create negative ads to prevent people from getting elected.

 

The founders of the United States wanted even more rights than this for corporations and corporate owners. When governments drew up corporate charters, the governments set the limits of responsibility for the owners.

If they wanted, they could make the owners responsible for certain acts of the corporation. If you invest in a company, you are a part owner. If owners are responsible, and the company does something horrible, you may be personally responsible and lose everything.

The people who created the new nation were corporate owners. Their companies did very dangerous and destructive things. They didn’t want to have to worry about potentially being liable for something their companies did.

In the new nation, governments wouldn’t write corporate charters, the people who formed corporations would write them. If they wanted, they could write charters that exposed the owners to liability for acts of the corporation.

 

 

But the people who formed corporations didn’t want this, so they didn’t include these provisions in their charters. If the charters don’t say they are liable, they aren’t liable. The corporations can do anything they want. No matter who they harm, the damages can never pass through to the owners of the company.

Here is an example so you can see how profound this difference is from the earlier corporate rules:

The Consolidated Edison Corporation owns two nuclear power plants in Indian Point, New York, about 38 miles north of Manhattan. A 1957 government report known as WASH 740 (‘Theoretical Possibilities and Consequences of Major Accidents in Large Nuclear Power Plants’) showed that an accident at such a plant would ‘permanently destroy an area the size of the State of Pennsylvania.’ In the event of such an accident, the entirety of New York City and Long Island, most of New Jersey and Connecticut, and large parts of the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts would be permanently destroyed. This would obviously cause trillions of dollars in losses. How much of these losses would come out of the pockets of the owners of Consolidated Edison?

Exactly 0¢.

They are never liable for damage caused by companies they own, even if the know that what they are doing is dangerous. They wouldn’t be liable even if they had intentionally caused the disaster for personal gain.

This is not a flaw in the system. It is the way the corporate system in the United States is designed to work. The people who set it up had immense amounts of corporate wealth to protect. They set up a system which was as close to a paradise as possible for persons who were lucky enough to be born as corporate persons, rather than the lowly and inferior human persons.

A New Country and New Policies

On January 21 of 1785, representatives of the government of the United States of America purchased 13 million acres of land from the people they called ‘Indians;’ this included all land in the southern and eastern parts of the current State of Ohio. The purchase agreement was called ‘the Treaty of Fort McIntosh.’

 

What did the sellers get in return for this land (enough to support 13 million people): the treaty makes their compensation very clear:

 

The Commissioners of the United States, in pursuance of the humane and liberal views of Congress, upon this treaty’s being signed, will direct goods to be distributed among the different tribes for their use and comfort.

 

What goods? Well, the government could decide what goods. How much? The government could decide this too.

This was clearly NOT a purchase agreement negotiated in good faith between a willing seller who expected to receive something of equal value to the item given up in exchange for the land. The government did get people who they classified as ‘Indians’ to put X marks on the documents in the presence of notary publics who certified that they were valid signatures. For a very long period in history, this was enough in the United States: it meant that ‘Indians’ had sold the land. Any that didn’t leave were trespassing and could be removed by force.

Who Got the Land?

The Congress set aside 161,280 acres of this land (252 sections) to fulfill the terms of enlistment contracts made to soldiers who had fought in the war. Another 6,780,000 acres went to a company called ‘The Ohio Company of Associates’ and its wholly owned subsidiary ‘the Scotio Companies.’ The majority of the shareholders didn’t want to disclose their identity. (People could own stock anonymously long before the United States was formed; the Dutch East India Company had pioneered the structures that made this possible over 160 years earlier.) But we know who brought the petition for these land sales to Congress for approval, and personally pushed it through Congress. We know the operating officers of the company, Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper, Samuel Parsons and Manasseh Cutler; all of these men were close personal associates of George Washington.

All of the official documents of the Ohio Company of Associates are now in the library of the University of Ohio at Marietta. Here is a quick summary of the corporation’s activities:

The first act of the corporation was the formation of the town of Marietta, Ohio, which was to be the company’s headquarters. Corporate resolutions authorized the layout of the streets, public areas, and dictated the lot sizes to be subdivided and sold in markets. The money went to the shareholders of the Ohio Company of Associates, the Scotio Companies, and other subsidiaries and associates of these companies. Over the next few years, the rest of the land that had been ‘purchased’ from the ‘Indians’ went to the company and then more land was ‘purchased,’ the same way.

The great majority of the native people did not accept that anything had been purchased from them. They could not have sold the land even if they were offered a fair price; they didn’t own land and didn’t believe it could be owned. In 1790, Henry Knox, the Secretary of War under President George Washington, ordered Josiah Harmar, commander of the U.S. army in the Northwest Territory, to remove the Native American residents of the lands that the United States had purchased, together with a large buffer of surrounding land.

Harmar was ordered to remove these people, using any force necessary. He ordered his men to use force to get these people out of their homes and out of the territory. His men would not do it. His entire unit deserted. Washington then fired Harmar and replaced him with Arthur St. Clair, then the governor of the newly formed ‘Northwest Territory of the United States,’ which included all land to the north and west of the Ohio river, all the way to the Mississippi River. (This included the current states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and parts of the current state of Pennsylvania.) St. Clair failed for the same reason Harmar had failed: he just couldn’t get his men to do the things necessary to remove the American native people from their homes. Washington took personal control of the operation.

 

 

Problems continued in the Northwest Territories through the next few years, but massive outbreaks of smallpox went through the American native communities over these years, making it relatively easy to deal with the natives. (Washington’s troops were all inoculated against smallpox and did not get the disease; see sidebar for more information.) Over the next few years, the government purchased additional land from the American native people and granted it to the Ohio company, The Scotio Company, and other affiliated companies. Then the companies moved west, gaining ownership over and selling land in the current states of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. They won the war, so they got the spoils.

How and why the Supreme Court interpreted the constitution to grant unlimited rights to Corporations

In 1794, a group of speculators and politicians formed four separate corporations in the state of Georgia: the Georgia Company, the Georgia-Mississippi Company, the Upper Mississippi Company, and the New Tennessee Company. The speculators held secret negotiations with members of the Georgia legislature and the Governor to purchase 40 million acres to the west of the Georgia state line for the sum of $500,000.

The purchase agreements were held in secret because the government of Georgia didn’t own the land in question. British treaties had created an area called Yazoo River Indian Reserves. All the land sold to the companies were in these reserves. The governor of Georgia thought that the United States didn’t have to honor the British treaties anymore because they weren’t a part of England anymore. The land was open; it belonged to whoever took it. The corporations were wiling to take it and he was more than happy to accept money from them in exchange for his permission for them to try. The ‘sale’ itself didn’t net any money for the state of Georgia; the government of Georgia had agreed to sell the land on credit. The only payments that the companies had made had been bribes, paid to the governor and others involved in the sale. (This is not an allegation; all of the negotiators, including the governor, were later tried for and convicted of accepting bribes.)

When the public found out about this deal, they didn’t like it. Not only did it expose their dishonesty for stealing land that had been given to people in legitimate treaties, it didn’t net any money for the state or the people of the state. All the money went to the government officials, the land went to the corporations, and the people of both jurisdictions (the State of Georgia and the native people who lost their land) got nothing. At the time, a politician named ‘Jared Irwin’ was running for governor of Georgia. He called the land sale the ‘Yazoo Land Scandal’ and made it the focal point of his campaign. He promised that, if elected, he would work through the legislature to nullify the sale and restore the land to its rightful owners, the native people.

Irwin was elected and kept his promise: on February 13, 1796, he signed a law that nullified the land sales and ordered all parties who had received payments from the corporations (all of the people who had been bribed) to return the money. The corporations found a way to take the case to court, arguing that the state had no authority to nullify the sale, due to the provisions of Article 1 of the Constitution. Both parties to the lawsuit, Robert Fletcher and John Peck were shareholders of corporations. Fletcher’s corporation had bought a tract of land from Peck’s corporation. Fletcher’s company had paid for the land and claimed to own it. The nullification would essentially take away his company’s property. He claimed that this was a violation of his rights.

The case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. The court ruled that the land sale could not be nullified. Article 1, Section 10 of the constitution prohibited states from interfering in contracts. (The exact text is below.)

Fletcher’s company could keep the land.

There wasn’t anything the Georgia legislature, or for that matter the United States government, could do about it.

This ruling set several important precedents.

One involved American native claims to land. The Georgia legislature did not own the land it sold. The land had been granted to a group of American natives for all time. If the court had ruled to allow the nullification, the land would have been restored to the natives.

In his arguments rejecting the nullification, Justice Marshall wrote the majority opinion. Here are his remarks regarding the rights of the Indians:

 

It was doubted whether a State can be seised in fee of lands subject to the Indians title, and whether a decision that they were seised in fee might not be construed to amount to a decision that their grantee might maintain an ejectment for them notwithstanding that title. The majority of the Court is of opinion that the nature of the Indians title, which is certainly to be respected by all courts until it be legitimately extinguished, is not such as to be absolutely repugnant to a seisin in fee [meaning an absolute seizure; this is from feudal law and refers to the right of a king to seize property without compensation or cause] on the part of the State.

 

Although this appears to be gibberish, if we eliminate the superfluous words, we get something that makes sense:

 

The Court is of opinion that the nature of the Indians title is not absolutely repugnant to an absolute seizure on the part of the State.

 

If we remove the double negative, the message becomes obvious:

 

The Court is of opinion that it is OK to seize land that has been reserved for any of the races that are lumped together under the term ‘Indians.’

 

The court had ruled that if the officials of a government wanted to simply take the land that had been reserved forever for Indians under legal contracts, they had this right. They did not even have to bother to come up with excuses or pretend to give compensation (conduct a ‘seisin in fee’). They could then sell this land to whoever they wanted.

The second important precedent involved the use of fraud in contracts. The attorneys for the state of Georgia argued that the corporation should not be able to keep the land because its negotiators had used fraud to get it. The issue of fraud was not in dispute by the time of this particular ruling, because the legislators who had signed the sale documents had already been convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for their signatures. The court ruled:

 

If a suit be brought to set aside a conveyance obtained by fraud, and the fraud be clearly proved, the conveyance will be set aside as between the parties, but the rights of third persons who are purchasers without notice for a valuable consideration cannot be disregarded. Titles, which, according to every legal test, are perfect are acquired with that confidence which is inspired by the opinion that the purchaser is safe. If there be any concealed defect, arising from the conduct of those who had held the property long before he acquired it, of which he had no notice, that concealed defect cannot be set up against him. He has paid his money for a title good at law; he is innocent, whatever may be the guilt of others, and equity will not subject him to the penalties attached to that guilt. All titles would be insecure, and the intercourse between man and man would be very seriously obstructed if this principle be overturned.

 

The corporations that got the land by fraud had then sold it. The new owners, including Robert Fletcher, were ‘third persons.’ They had provided a ‘valuable consideration’ and their rights ‘cannot be disregarded.’ Fletcher has ‘paid his money for a title good at law; he is innocent, whatever may be the guilt of others, and equity will not subject him to the penalties attached to that guilt.’

In other words, if you commit fraud to gain title to land, then sell it, the buyer deserves all the protection the law would provide if the buyer had bought from a legal owner.

This seems like a rationalization. If I were to forge a copy of the deed to Justice Marshall’s home, then sell it to a third party for $1 (a ‘valuable consideration’), I doubt Marshall would believe that the third party deserved the full protection of the law to remove Marshall and his family from his home so that the person I sold the home to could move in.

The third precedent here involves corporations as persons. Although this particular issue was not a part of the allegations of either party, legal scholars claim it was decided here because the buyers were corporations. Marshall (writing for the majority court decision) refers to them six times in the decision as ‘persons.’ The court ruled (without being asked to do so) that corporations are ‘persons.’

This case set precedents for four different issues:

 

 

 

It is important to understand the importance of Supreme Court rulings in the United States legal system. Once the Supreme Court has ruled on an issue, all future court decisions MUST conform to the Supreme Court rulings. If a judge rules counter to a Supreme Court Ruling, the losing attorneys may appeal the ruling. Higher courts MUST reverse the decision to conform to the Supreme Court ruling. You may think that appeals should eventually extend all the way up to the Supreme Court, which would then have the opportunity to reconsider and revisit the case. That is not correct. If later supreme court judges could reconsider past cases and reverse them, the entire body of law built on the original rulings would lose its foundation. To prevent this the Supreme Court’s authority is limited to cases that have not already been decided in past Supreme Court rulings.

This particular issue has been decided. It cannot be changed through the judicial process. The rights are cast in stone.

Is This Good or Bad?

The new corporations had incredible rights. This led to incredible changes in the way the world worked.

The new types of corporations could justify making investments to build factories and other facilities that would never otherwise be built. A lot of businesses can’t operate without doing things that are very dangerous. A lot of businesses can’t operate without producing pollutants that have great potential to kill, cause disease, and harm the environment. People can't justify opening these businesses if they think there is even a chance that they may be held personally responsible for the damage. If they formed their companies in the United States, people didn’t have to worry about these things.

Immediately after the United States started these policies, people moved from all over Europe and began opening factories and other businesses in the country. Explosives factories, steel mills, chemical plants, underground mines, and other facilities are incredibly risky. If nothing really bad happens, the owners of these businesses can make incredible amounts of money. If something bad happens and the owners are found personally responsible, they could lose everything they have built up over their lives. People won't take this risk.

If they created their businesses in the United States, they didn’t have to worry about the risks. They weren’t personally liable, ever. No matter how much damage their facilities cause, they couldn’t ever lose more than the amount they invested in that particular venture. They didn’t have to worry about the government changing the charter or possibly not renewing, after they had made massive investments. In the United States, the government had been set up so that it couldn’t interfere in these things.

Is this a bad thing or a good thing?

That depends on your perspective and what you are trying to accomplish.

A great many of the wonderful things that we now all take for granted would never have existed if not for this system. Shortly after the new corporations became legal, people began to build truly massive steel mills in the United States. These mills dwarfed anything that had ever existed before. People could build them in the United States because they knew the United States government would protect the rights described above.

Steel mills competed both by offering to sell for lower prices and by making higher quality products. The price of steel fell dramatically and people gained access to steel of a quality that had never before existed. People could start building things that they couldn’t build before, like thousand-mile long rail systems for trains and steam engines that run locomotives that can pull hundreds of tons of cargo. In time, people built mills that mass-produced steel in such incredible quantities that ordinary people could afford steel tools for the first time in history.

 

Building steel that was high enough in quality and cheap enough that engines could be built that could run on diesel and gasoline. They could build cars that were cheap enough for ordinary people to buy.

The new corporations could fund research in a new way, pouring incredible amounts of wealth into searching for new and better ways to do things. Once the inventions existed, factories could start churning out new products at prices so low it is hard to even imagine how they could do it. Consider a smartphone today: it has a computer in it far more powerful than the computer that guided the first rocket to the moon. It has a camera, voice recorder, navigation system that gives your position accurately to a few feet, and connection to a network of servers that can hold more information than the largest library. And, of course, it has a phone.

How much would you expect to pay for such a device? If you could go back to before the new corporations existed and asked this question, the people wouldn't even answer you. They would think you were insane: such devices could never exist. If you could go back to the 1960s, when primitive prototypes of all of the components of smartphones existed but were so expensive that only corporations and the super-wealthy could afford them, the estimates would be sky high. But you can go to a pawn shop today and buy such devices for the equivalent of a day’s wages.

Are the changes in corporations that have taken place over the last 420 years good or bad for the human race?

They are very, very good in a way.

They are also very, very bad in a way.

They are good because they have resulted in innovations and technologies that almost certainly wouldn't have existed if not for these corporations.

It is possible to turn the things that make up the planet Earth into products that can make life very pleasant and comfortable for humans. The largest component of the part of the Earth we can get to, the crust, is silicon dioxide. This is the raw material we can use to make solar photoelectric cells that can produce all the electricity we could ever want from the sun. Silicon dioxide is also the raw material that we use to make glass (heat sand and it turns into glass) and the main ‘filler' used for concrete in buildings.

The next most common material in the Earth’s crust, after silicon dioxide, is aluminum. We can process this into electric wires, car motors, airplane parts, refrigerator coils, and millions of other useful products. Next most abundant is iron, used to make steel. Next after that is calcium, the binder for concrete. We can literally turn these raw materials that the earth is made of into luxury high rise skyscrapers that can allow us all to live in what writers of the past depicted as heaven, high in the clouds with all manner of comforts at our disposal.

Almost certainly, the great majority of these things would never be available at all if not for the new kinds of corporations that came to exist in the United States at the end of the 1700s.

Why is this the case?

We can tell that they would not have existed because of the history of Rome. As of the beginning of the first century on the calendar we now use (the year zero), Rome had basically the same level of technology as England and Europe during the 1700s. They went through 322 years of development before Constantine forced the empire into the Dark Ages. They knew how to mass-produce steel, concrete and glass. But they never had the massive steel mills that the United States began building almost immediately after the new corporations became reality. Their steel never became cheap enough to allow them to make train tracks or beams for bridges; the quality never improved enough to make engines for vehicles. They were almost there; they just didn’t have the edge to push them into a true technological revolution. They didn’t discover electricity, they never had televisions or radios, they never had airplanes or satellites, they never had computers or photography, let alone movies and music players.

The changes that have taken place in the last 230 years, since the new corporations became a reality, have changed the world forever. They brought us technology that we almost certainly would have never developed otherwise. No matter what the disadvantages of the corporations that now dominate the world, we need to thank people like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and the other corporate moguls that put together the new system. They gave us these things.

They gave us more than this: they showed us critical tools that we, the members of the human race and inhabitants of the planet Earth, can use to bring about continued growth and progress in the future. Perhaps, if we had a society that put the human race in charge (like the society that Alexander put into place, built on the principles worked out by Socrates), the human race may be in a position to make critical decisions about how we want the world to work. We can look at the empowered corporations developed in the United States as tools. Do we want to use these tools? Do we want to build versions of them but with slight limits, with as many of the good features as we can have and as few of the bad ones as possible?

If we hadn’t been through the experience of the past few centuries, we wouldn’t have this option. The experience is a gift to the human race, perhaps one that will benefit us for the rest of eternity and bring us advantages beyond imagination. Who knows what we will learn about the other beings in the universe from radio signals we will be able to interpret from space? Who knows what we will learn by studying DNA in machines that would almost certainly have never been invented without the events that took place in the period between 1787 and 2020?

From another perspective, however, these events are potentially very bad for the human race.

We currently have society types that do not put the human race in charge. In these societies, the profit-motivated corporations with their allies the military-focused xenophobic governments are in charge. If the shareholders of the corporations and government leaders want something, but the people of the world want something else, the corporations and governments will get their way. We the people have no forum we can use to make our desires reality.

As I have pointed out several times, this book is a part of a series about the nature of human societies. It is designed to provide a background of information to help you understand what is possible. Humans are extremely capable beings. We can organize ourselves many different ways. The societies that existed in the past tell us that we really do have choices. If we understand what has happened in the past, and how we got to where we are now, we can map out a plan for the future that will give us (again, ‘us’ means ‘the members of the human race and inhabitants of the planet Earth) a forum. It will give us rights to flows of wealth and these rights will give us powers. We can put ourselves in a position to use information about the past to build sound, sane, and healthy societies. We have a long way to go to get there but we really do have the tools to get there. The central book of this series, Preventing Extinction, explains how to make this happen.

But we have a few more events in history to go over before we are up to date. Hopefully, the rest of the book will help you see that we really do have a great deal of hope.

17: America

Prior to 1748, the divide of the Appalachian Mountains in North America marked the dividing line between two entirely different types of human societies. All of the people on the west side of this divide had been raised in and lived in societies built on the principles of natural law. They had been raised to believe, and raised their children to believe, that humans are residents on this planet but not the owners of the planet. They had been raised to believe that the planet we live on is not a simple possession that can be ‘owned’ by fragile and temporary beings of any kind, not even the animals at the top of the food chain: human beings. The land couldn’t be owned and was not owned.

Since, according to this belief system, no one owns the land, no one owns the gifts it gives. The people who lived in societies west of the Appalachian Mountains had no natural mechanism to determine who got the food and other good things the land produced. They had to have meetings and make joint decisions about how to distribute these things. They shared in whatever way they thought best.

The people on the Atlantic side of the mountains lived in societies based on an entirely different belief system. They were raised to believe that the creator of existence, an entity whose name was ‘God,’ had created the planet in six days. On the final day, God made man and started to give away the land to certain groups of people.

The owners of the land owned in the same way people owned simple consumable goods like apples: if you own an apple, you can do anything you want with it. You can—in fact, you are expected to—destroy it totally for your own benefit, by ‘consuming’ or eating the apple. People in sovereignty-based societies were raised to believe that the owners of land had the same rights: they could do anything they wanted with it, all benefits of its existence belonged to them and, if they wanted to destroy it, they had every right in the world to do this. It had been given to them directly by the Creator of existence, God. Once he gave them the land, he gave them orders to dominate and subdue it.

They were not just allowed to destroy it if they could benefit from this: they were required to do this.

This particular land, the eastern coast of North America, produced immense amounts of food and other crops. It didn’t take a lot of human labor to put the seeds in the ground in the spring and bring in the crops in the fall. After selling all production and paying the cost of the labor (which may be nothing more than the cost of maintaining the slaves), the owners had immense amounts of money left over. The more land they had, the more money they would have at the end of each year. They wanted to own as much land as they could get.

As of 1748, the people on the east side had not tried to take control of the land west of the divide. There are important practical reasons for this. We need to understand these reasons before the events of the next few years will make any sense. Since the events that happened in the late part of the 1700s led to changes that shaped many of the important structures of the world today, we need to understand these events before we can understand the reason the world works as it does now.

The Blue Ridge Divide

The dividing line of the two cultures was called ‘the Blue Ridge Divide.’ This was called a ‘divide’ because it ‘divided’ the waters that fell from the sky as rain. If a drop of rain that fell would eventually end up in rivers that drained to the west, toward the Ohio or Mississippi Rivers, that land was ‘west of the divide.’ If a drop of rain that fell on land would eventually flow toward the east, into one of the rivers that drained into the Atlantic Ocean, it was ‘east of the divide.’

The formal western boundaries of the states of North and South Carolina and Georgia had been drawn exactly at the divide, as formally stated in the land grants to the Virginia Company:

 

‘At the heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West’

 

The lands of the Virginia Company and the lands granted to the proprietors had been not been totally clear about the western boundaries of the land grants. Although the corporations and proprietors did claim some land on the west side of the divide, they hadn’t exploited any land west of the divide forpractical reasons. To understand the important events that changed as of 1748, we have to understand these reasons:

The corporations and proprietors that got the colonial land grants were in business to make money. They had put together a certain system to do this and the system worked well for this. The Virginia Company (the holding company that owned the companies that actually sold the land) provides an example: the company had a committee called the ‘Board of Trade and Plantations.’ This committee made planning decisions.

The members of the committee would pick a tract of land for the corporation to focus on. They would have the area mapped and surveyed. They would plan the way they wanted the developed area to end up, picking the best places for towns, commercial properties, building lots, large farms (plantations), and small farms. They would then create a use plan that would subdivide the land into lots of various sides with different uses. They would design the roads and other structures needed to create a European-style system of working farms, towns, and businesses.

The Virginia Company didn’t actually develop the land itself. Once it had a plan, it would work with smaller development companies to get the improvements made. The development companies would put in the roads and other improvements in exchange for a percentage of the land.

The development companies would have to sell most of the land they got this way to cover their costs; the shareholders in the development companies would then decide what to do with the extra land (the land left over after selling enough to cover all their costs). In some cases, they kept it and turned it into plantations; in other cases, they sold it and distributed the money among shareholders.

At some point, the improvements would be finished, and the development companies would have sold large amounts of land to private owners. These private owners, in the new towns, plantations, and farms, would have a community and markets. The Virginia Company would still own the majority of the land in that area. (The company had only given away part of the land to the development companies.) The Board of Plantations would sell the rest of the land; this would be quite valuable now because the buyers would get land that was already in developed areas, with markets, roads, and all of the structures they needed to have good lives.

The company had not developed any land west of the divide for two reasons:

The first was the cost: the divide is incredibly rugged. To get people to the other side, they would need to build a road. The road would cost a lot of money. Until 1748, the Virginia Company and its subsidiaries still had plenty of land east of the divide and the Board of Trade and Plantations couldn’t justify the enormous cost of building a road across the mountains.

The second reason was political: the company’s land patents ended at the divide. To develop more land, the company would have to go to the British Parliament and get patents to land on the other side. They had not done this as of 1748.

By 1748, the company was running out of land on the eastern side of the divide. Investors began to realize it was only a matter of time before the land to the west was opened up. They began to start planning for this to change.

Peter Jefferson

Peter Jefferson and his partner Joshua Fry ran one of the development companies that helped the Virginia Company develop its land. Jefferson had done a large development project in Albemarle County, near Charlottesville, Virginia. After selling enough land to cover his costs, he had had an 11,000-acre tract of land left over. He decided to turn this into a plantation. He bought 175 slaves, had them clear the land, and began to use their labor to raise tobacco there. His slaves also built a mansion for him, which he named ‘Shadwell.’ His plantation generated an enormous income for him.

He was now a ‘gentleman investor.’ He no longer cared about small development projects, but he still wanted to make money. He decided to look for an extremely large project that had the potential to make him obscene amounts of money.

Jefferson and Fry’s land development corporation was called the ‘Loyal Land Company of Virginia.’ The company had a large surveying division and team of explorers and map makers. Jefferson and Fry knew that the land on the other side of the divide would eventually be developed. They wanted to know where the best land was so that, when this happened, their company, the Loyal Land Company, would be able to move in and claim the best land. Jefferson and Fry drew up the map shown on the following page, the first known map of land west of the divide.

The map shows the divide as a line of peaks marked ‘The Blue Ridge.’ This ridge starts in the lower right corner and runs upward to the top center of the map. The surveyors looked for places to build roads to provide access to the land.

 

Qqq Jefferson map page 251

 

The squiggly line to the east of the divide would run up to a pass that the engineers who designed the road would ultimately name the ‘The Cumberland Gap.’ The major north-south road to the west of the divide would later be named the ‘Great Wagon Road;’ it would provide access for the people with the ownability-based societies to the lands that are now a part of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Jefferson got together with other gentlemen investors to consider the project. They decided it was too big to be done by a single company and eventually decided to build two companies. The lands south of the Ohio River would be developed by the Loyal Land Company, under Jefferson. A second company would be formed to develop the lands north of the river. This company would be called ‘The Ohio Company of Virginia.’ The two companies would have overlapping ownership but would be administered separately. The Ohio Company would be administered by another prominent Virginia family, the Washington family. Jefferson would run the Loyal Land Company.

The other investors in these two companies included all of the men whose names are listed in the text box below.

 

 

They had to get the patents on the land before they could even start to raise money for the project; no one would invest unless they had the rights to the land. On November 6, 1747 the two companies filed official petitions with the Virginia Board of Plantations laying out their plans. Jefferson requested 800,000 acres of land south of the Ohio River; Augustus Washington, the largest shareholder in the Ohio Company, requested 200,000 acres north of the river, for a total in land grant requests of one million acres.

The Board of Plantations ruled that it could not grant the request because it didn’t have the rights to any land west of the divide. The Board told the petitioners that they would have to refer their petitions to the Ministry of Colonial Trade and Plantations in London for a decision.

The head of the Ministry was a man named ‘Thomas Pelham,’ (also known as the ‘Duke of Newcastle’). Pelham was solidly behind the project. In fact, he was so solidly behind it, and worked so hard to make it a reality, that most historians who analyze his relationship with the corporations in the colonies claim he was on Washington and Jefferson’s payroll. (Pelham became staggeringly wealthy, presumably from the kickbacks he got from the colonial corporations. He was ultimately able to use this wealth to buy his way into even greater power and became the Prime Minister of England.)

Pelham drafted a measure that would extend the authority of the Virginia Company’s Board of Plantations to allow it to make land grants west of the divide. He didn’t have the authority to grant this right, however. After Pelham drew up the documents, he submitted them to the Privy Council, the council that reviewed requests on behalf of the King George II. He submitted this measure on February 23, 1748.

Many people in the Privy Council opposed the measure.

The main reason involved potential problems with France. England and France were in the final stages of negotiating the peace from their most recent war, which involved disputes in India. The British East India Company and the French East India Company had disagreed on the areas where they had authority in Asia. When the companies began to fight, they called in their respective governments to put military force behind their dispute. This led to a war that is now called the ‘War of Austrian Succession.’ The war had just ended when the Pelham introduced the new measure. (The official treaty ending the war had been negotiated and approved as of the end of February; it was signed in April.)

The Privy Council knew that they might have a similar problem over the land in America. The French government had granted large amounts of land west of the divide to two giant French corporations (these grants are discussed below). The French companies had been granted monopolies, with government protection. If the British government granted land west of the divide to British-chartered corporations, the rulers might wind up back at war with each other.

Pelham lobbied for the proposal personally. He pointed out that the French corporations had not developed any of the land in the proposed land grant area; there were no French settlements, no French forts or even trading posts in this area. This wasn’t like India, where every square inch of land was already generating incomes for the companies. Most of the land west of the divide had relatively thin populations of American natives (the population had recovered a great deal since the great plagues of the 1500s, but it was still not even close to the carrying capacity).

No one was using most of this land.

Pelham argued that, since the French had not settled it, they had forfeited their rights to it and the land was still available to the first to claim it and actually do something with it. The French weren’t there, and the British could make money exploiting it. He worked very hard to get the measure passed.

The Formation of the Ohio Company of Virginia

In late fall of 1748, Pelham wrote Washington and told him that the proposal was likely to be approved. Washington called an investor meeting at his home, Mount Vernon, on October 20, 1748. The lead investors decided that, as soon as the land grants were approved, they would start to sell stock in the company called ‘The Ohio Company of Virginia.’ They decided to start with an initial public offering of 40 shares, which would be sold at an initial price of ₤100 per share (this is about $20,000 per share in 2020 United States money).

They elected the first corporate officer, James Wardrop. He would be the treasurer of the company. As treasurer, he would arrange to take in the letters of credit which guaranteed the payment of the money from prospective shareholders. As soon as the grants were approved, the letters of credit would be replaced by cash and the company could begin to operate. [The full text of the first corporate resolution of the Ohio Company can be found at https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735057893798.]

Pelham was very persuasive and able to overcome the resistance in the Privy Council. The council approved the request in May of 1749 and King George II signed it into law on June 4. On July 11, 1749, the Virginia Company’s Board of Plantations approved the grant of 800,000 acres that Jefferson had requested for the Loyal Land Company and the grant of 200,000 acres that Washington had submitted for the Ohio Company. Two other parties had assisted with the lobbying and these people were granted an additional 450,000 acres. The initial land grants totaled 1,450,000 acres of land.

 

 

This land grant was made in exchange for an agreement to build a road across the mountains, the road that eventually became known as the ‘Cumberland Gap Road.’ The Ohio Company of Virginia (Washington’s company) would be the lead company on the project.

The French Actions

As noted above, two French corporations had interests in the area. It may help to understand the events that followed if you understand these interests:

In the early 1600s, Samuel Champlain explored the Great Lakes on behalf of a French trading firm. In 1637, he returned to France to form a trading company of his own. He got together with a group of investors to form a company called ‘Compagnie des Cent-Associés’ (company of 100 associates). This company obtained patents on all of the land that is now eastern Canada in the Great Lakes region, and all land north of the 45^th parallel west of the Great Lakes all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

The company created a development plan for the eastern part of New France (later renamed ‘Canada’), and founded the cities of Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto.

In the late 1600s, a second French company, the Compagnie Française Pour Le Commerce Des Indes Orientales (the French East India Company) petitioned the French government for the right to begin operating in the area around the mouth of the Mississippi River. The company obtained patents for large amounts of land and founded the cities of New Orleans, Mobile, and Biloxi. The company made requests for land grants further north on the Mississippi River. The French government eventually granted patents that extended all the way up to the headwaters of the Ohio River, bringing them to within a few miles of the Great Lakes and the land grants of the other French Company.

As of 1750, neither of these companies had even explored the land in the Ohio River Valley. In fact, they had built only one settlement of any size upriver, the town of Ste-Geneviève (now Ste-Geneviève Mo). The most northern trading post the French East India Company had was St. Louis, which was more than 600 miles away from the land grants of the Ohio Company of Virginia.

 

Qqq land grants in French and English north America 256

 

The French claimed the land, but they hadn’t developed it. The British knew all this when they considered the requests to allow settlement west of the divide. They guessed that France would not interfere in their operations in the Ohio Valley, because the French companies had not shown any interest in the area.

But this guess turned out to be wrong.

The Ohio Company started active work in 1750. Their first actions involved transporting the equipment they would need to begin construction across the mountains. They built storehouses which had to be guarded to protect them from both the French and the American native people. They were building small forts. The French found out about this right away. The French companies called shareholder meetings and discussed what to do. They finally decided they would not allow the British to create a presence in these lands. They were going to keep them out. Most of the shareholders in the French corporations had high positions in the French government. Saying ‘the shareholders decided to keep them out’ was the same as saying ‘the French government was going to keep them out.’ The government ordered the French military to begin building a network of forts in the Ohio River Valley.

The first fort was to be called ‘Fort Le Boeuf.’ This fort was at the site of the current city of Erie, Pa., on Lake Erie. The second was to be called ‘Fort Duquesne.’ It would be at the current site of the city of Pittsburgh, Pa. Other forts would fill in the area between these two main forts, creating a line that the French could defend.

The new forts were clearly designed to prevent the British companies (The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Loyal Land Company, both chartered in England) from developing their land. Washington and Jefferson found out about this right away. They were going to use all of the power they controlled in the British Parliament to make sure that the French attempts didn’t succeed. They had been granted the land through legal processes: it was theirs. Their government was required to defend the legal rights to land it had granted. They wanted to make sure the government got involved and prevented the French from interfering.

Global War

The conflict would bring England and France back to war. The war spread very quickly and eventually had theaters of action all around the world. In the end, 12 different countries would be involved.

Different historians call this war by different names, depending on the country they wrote for. United States historians call this the ‘French and Indian War.’ In French-speaking Canada, it would come to be known as the ‘War of the Conquest.’ British and French children would come to call it the ‘Seven Years’ War.’ Swedish and Prussian (German) children would be taught to call it the ‘Pomeranian War.’ Historians on the Indian subcontinent would call it the ‘Third Carnatic War.’ In the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and areas that were part of the Austrian empire, historians would call it the ‘Third Silesian War.’

Although this war would get different names in different theaters, it was really all the same war. Some historians believe that the standard numbering of the world wars is in error as this particular war was actually the first global conflict and should therefore be called ‘World War One.’ The second world war started in 1918; the third world war started in 1938. But whether we call it a ‘world war' or not, it was definitely a global conflict. There is no dispute about the events that started it or the identity of the person behind these events: George Washington.

This war was fought over the rights of corporations. The corporations got their governments to grant them land with overlapping patents. The corporations then had their governments bring in their armies to defend their patents.

This was not the first time that corporations had used governments of nations to protect their interests. England and Holland had had five separate wars over the rights of their respective trading corporations (the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company).

 

 

France and England had been at war as recently as 1748 over the rights of their respective corporations in India (French East India Company and the British East India Company). Although this was not the first ‘war where corporations used nations as tools,’ the 1754-1763 war was critically important because of events that eventually forced the corporate leaders in parts of North American to declare independence from their parent country. They then created a new country that was built around entirely different principles than the countries of the past.

But all this for later. Let’s consider the first war first:

The War

When the French military began building forts, the shareholders of the Ohio Company called several meetings to decide how to respond to these French. One key shareholder of the Ohio Company, Robert Dinwiddie, was the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia and in charge of the Virginia Militia. Dinwiddie wrote a letter to the commander of the French forces on the letterhead of the Virginia Militia. This letter claimed that colonial officials had received ‘many and repeated complaints’ about French ‘acts of hostility.’ It claimed that France had acted ‘in violation of the laws of nations’ and ‘in violation of treaties now existing between the two crowns.’

The letter then orders the French to leave the area peacefully; it threatens war if they did not do this. Dinwiddie was essentially pretending to be an agent of the British military, with the authority to make war on behalf of England. (He most definitely did not have that authority; the Virginia Militia was a private army run and controlled by the Virginia Company, not affiliated with the British military in any way.)

The full text of the letter can be found at http://explorepahistory.com/ odocument.php?docId=1-4-1A.

 

 

All plantation owners in Virginia had to put together militia squads that would be under the direction of the Virginia militia. The plantation owners would create the units, train them, and equip them at the expense of the plantation owners. The units would work for the plantation owners most of the time, mainly keeping the slaves under control. If the Virginia Company had to do something that required a lot of troops, it would call the units together.

The Mount Vernon plantation had its own military unit. George Washington’s brother, Lawrence, had commanded this unit, with a rank of major. When Lawrence Washington died in 1752, George took over command, inheriting the rank of major. Washington’s family had more at stake in removing the French than anyone else, as they owned the majority interest in the Ohio Companies of Virginia. Washington met with Dinwiddie and asked him to let Washington carry the letter to the French personally.

He wanted to do this in part because he wanted to visit the French Fort to access its defenses to see if the Virginia Militia could overcome them. He was planning for the war that he hoped to create. George was 21 years old at the time.

Washington carried the letter to the French fort. The French commander—Legardeur De Saint-Pierre—read it. The next day, he wrote a reply and sent it back with Washington. The reply basically said that Saint-Pierre was a French military officer acting under orders. He did not have the authority to abandon the fort, but he would forward the letter to his superiors and would follow their orders, whatever they were. The complete text of the reply letter can be found at http://explorepahistory.com/odocument.php?docId=1-4-18.

Washington went back and had another meeting with Dinwiddie. They had threatened war if the French didn’t leave. The French commander had said he wouldn’t abandon his post, a clear rejection of the ultimatum. They started to plan for war. They sent letters to their representative in England (Thomas Pelham, who was the Prime Minister of England at this time) asking England to declare war on France.

Washington was very impatient. He didn’t want to wait for a reply. He wanted to start the war right away. He called up his full militia unit which, including reserves, consisted of 140 men. He left two colleagues, William Trent, the operations manager for the Ohio Company of Virginia, and Joshua Fry, the second largest shareholder in the Loyal Land Company, to go to Dinwiddie, inform him of their actions, and put together another unit to assist. He headed west.

Washington intended to build a fort. When it was finished and fully equipped, he would bring in enough troops from Virginia to remove the French from their forts, one at a time. But Washington was impatient. He wanted to start killing people right away. He got his chance.

On May 26, Washington’s scouts told him of a party of French in the vicinity. The party turned out to be headed by a French diplomat named Joseph Jumonville. The French wanted to keep good relations with the native people and hired professionals to make treaties with these people and make sure that the natives saw the French as their friends. This was Jumonville’s job. When the French found out that Washington was coming to build a fort, they sent Jumonville to try to convince Washington to leave, hopefully without bloodshed.

It is important to note that France and England were at peace at the time. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had been signed on April 28, 1748, ending the most recent war between the two countries. This was a very rare period of peace and less than a month into the peace, Washington was determined to make sure it didn’t last.

To his dying day, Washington claimed that he had been absolutely certain at the time that Jumonville and his men were a hostile military force who had been sent to attack and kill all British in the area, including himself. They were not wearing uniforms. Washington claimed this was a violation of the international rules of war: all warring military forces have to wear uniforms. He believed—or at least claimed he believed—that they were the spearhead of an offensive that was intended to fight its away across the mountains and drive the British from all of the colonies. He claimed England was under attack and he had an obligation as a member of the British military (he was not, but he said he was, claiming the Virginia Militia was a military unit authorized by the British government) to remove them.

The night of May 26, his 140 men surrounded the French party, which had a total of 32 men. At daybreak, the battle was to begin. Washington gave very clear and explicit orders to his men: Washington was to fire the first shot. No one else would fire until after their commander began shooting. At the very first light of dawn, Washington began firing. No one in the French party was yet awake. Washington was firing into their tents while they were still asleep.

The French Version

When Jumonville heard the shooting, he got out of his tent and started shouting for people to cease firing. Washington’s men complied.

Jumonville realized that Washington was there. Jumonville was under orders to deliver a message written by the French and addressed directly to George Washington: he was to arrange to collect the things he had brought over the mountains, transport them home, and leave the land forever. If not, the French military would seek authorization to remove him and his men by force and this would lead to war.

After the attackers had stopped firing, Jumonville began to read the ultimatum out loud, in French. His adjutant was standing beside him translating it into English. No one was shooting. Jumonville was a professional diplomat. He had an air of authority and expected people to listen while he talked. He read the entire ultimatum through. Then he paused and Washington shot him in the head, killing him.

The second shot started the melee again. In the entire engagement, Washington’s men killed 10 members of the party. Another 21 surrendered and were eventually executed. One member of the French party escaped into the woods. He was the only French to survive the engagement. Washington’s party had no casualties. Washington called it a ‘successful military engagement.’ The French called it a massacre.

The Frenchman who had escaped went to Fort Duquesne to inform them about the engagement.

Different historians describe what happened next slightly differently, but in his own journals Washington claims that he scalped Jumonville and then ordered his men to begin scalping and mutilating the other bodies. He claimed he did this because this was what the Indians did to their enemies and he had to do it to impress the Indians so they would respect him. (It was NOT their practice; the Indians who were watching the activity were so horrified that they sided solidly with the French in the war that followed. In every war between the Indians and any country Washington was fighting for from then on, the Indians sided against Washington; when they found that Washington was fighting against England in later wars, they sided with England.)

Some historians have gone so far as to claim that Washington didn’t order the mutilation of the bodies; he tried to prevent it. They claim that as soon as the firing stopped the Indians rushed in and began taking scalps. Washington tried to prevent it but was powerless against the claimed overwhelming Indian action. This claim goes totally against Washington’s own words, both in his journals and in other official documents where he admitted the actions; it also goes against the eyewitness accounts and testimony at the French military inquest. But it the only way that historians have been able to twist the report to make it appear that Washington was on the side of good.

Washington also ordered the bodies to be left above ground, even though his own men wanted to bury them. This seems like a strange order on the surface, but if Washington was trying to start a war with the French, it makes sense. He wanted to commit an atrocity that was so egregious that the French couldn’t help but respond, and he needed to make sure they found the bodies. (He didn’t know that one of the French had escaped.) Again, Washington blamed the ‘Indians.’ He claimed he left the bodies above ground because this was ‘the Indians’ practice.’ Again, he either misunderstood the ways of the Indians or simply made this up as an excuse thinking that people who had been raised to think of the Indians as primitive savages would believe it. In fact, the tribes in the area considered it a religious responsibility to bury the dead, without regard to tribal affiliation.

The next day, the French soldier who had escaped made it back to the fort and explained the situation to the French commander. Here is the account of the response, from the official records at Fort Duquesne:

 

The commander endeavored to discover the place where the Murderers had retired. He was informed that Mr. Washington, with his detachment, was in a little fort which the English had built and called ‘Fort Necessity.’ He set out a detachment to recover, if possible, the French prisoners, or at least to oblige the English to withdraw. Colonel Louis Coulon De Villiers, the brother of M. De Jumonville, was charged with that commission. He was expressly commanded not to use any violence if the English would retire peacefully.

He [De Villiers] left Fort Duquesne on the 28^th of June. Having passed the place where the Murders had been committed and where the remains of the French still lay, he arrived, the third of July, in sight of Fort Necessity. The English who were without the fort fired a volley and retired into it. The fort was immediately set ablaze and attacked. De Villiers put a stop to it about eight o’clock at night, in order to propose the English to surrender. The proposal was accepted and the surrender document drawn up. [Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, A Memorial, containing a summary view of facts, with their authorities : in answer to the Observations sent by the English ministry to the courts of Europe, 1757. The text of the surrender document can be found at https://www.nps.gov/fone/learn/historyculture/capitulation.htm.]

 

The surrender document required that Washington he admit he had committed the atrocities described above. Washington signed the document. Historians have a hard time explaining this. Why would he admit to something that they claim he didn’t do? The standard altered version of history holds that the confession was not explained to Washington. It was in French and Washington couldn’t read French. He thought he had been signing something entirely different and had been tricked into signing the confession.

De Villiers followed his orders. He had been ordered to allow the British to leave unmolested if they agreed to do so. Washington agreed (he had no choice: De Villiers had total military control of the situation and could have wiped everyone out).

Washington returned to Virginia to plan his next move. He and Dinwiddie got together to write a letter to the Thomas Pelham, the Prime Minister of England who had always worked tirelessly to advance the interests of the American corporations. They claimed that they had been in the area doing a survey and were attacked without warning; they had to kill the attackers (Jumonville and the others) to protect themselves from slaughter. The French had started a war. The British had to respond.

The Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham, did exactly what Washington had hoped for. The enemy had gained military control of the territory and were infringing on British sovereignty. They had to be removed. Under Pelham’s urging, the Parliament approved sending two regiments (about 2,000 men) to America to defend the disputed land.

The French pushed a measure through the French government to send six regiments, three times the British forces, to defend the disputed land.

The British military planners decided to try to wage the war on the sea. They blockaded the entrances to harbors and waterways in New France and began commandeering or sinking ships they suspected of carrying troops or military cargo. The British had to remove warships from Gibraltar and various sites in the Mediterranean to blockade New France. France took advantage of this and began to attack the weakened positions in Europe.

To do this, the French military had to draw troops from its border defenses. Fredrick II of Prussia (the nation to the east of France) saw the weakening of the border defenses as a great time to have a war with France. He ordered his troops to attack France from the east. To do this, he had to pull troops from his border with Russia. Russian military planners decided this was a perfect time to attack Prussia from the east. This put Prussia in a war on two fronts, the east and the west.

Austrian and Swedish military planners could see that Prussia, which was now in a two-front war on the east and west, couldn’t defend its northern and southern borders. They mounted a coordinated attack from the south and north in 1757. (This would be almost comical if it didn’t involve death on such a vast scale.)

England had to remove troops from India, where the troops had been defending the British East India Company, to defend its possessions in the Mediterranean Sea, now under attack from French forces. This allowed the French East India Company to successfully drive the British out of areas they had conquered in India.

Fredrick of Prussia turned out to be a very capable military commander. Even though his nation was at war on four fronts, he managed to drive back the invaders and gain back all of the land the invaders had tried to take. This allowed him to focus on the war with France again, and he began to conquer large amounts of French territory. The French now had no choice but to move troops from other theaters of war to defend their homeland. They were desperate and pulled most of the forces out of India, allowing the British to take back their lands there.

Then they began to pull their troops out of New France. This left their possessions in America vulnerable to attack.

The British moved in and took control of all important cities in New France.

When the French sued for peace in 1763, they were in a hopeless situation in America. They had lost all of their land there from New Orleans to the North Atlantic. As a gesture of generosity, the British allowed them to keep the city of New Orleans, but nothing else in America.

 

Treaty of Paris

Before the Treaty of Paris, the colonial powers had never formally agreed to the limits of authority of the different countries in America. As noted earlier, English courts had ruled that the colonies were sovereign territories under the control of the corporations, not a part of England.

The treaty formally granted all land east of the Mississippi River to England.

Here are the words from the treaty:

 

In order to re­establish peace on solid and durable foundations, and to remove for ever all subject of dispute with regard to the limits of the British and French territories on the continent of America; it is agreed, that, for the future, the confines between the dominions of his Britannick Majesty and those of his Most Christian Majesty, in that part of the world, shall be fixed irrevocably by a line drawn along the middle of the River Mississippi, from its source to the river Iberville, and from thence, by a line drawn along the middle of this river, and the lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to the sea; and for this purpose, the Most Christian King cedes in full right, and guaranties to his Britannick Majesty the river and port of the Mobile, and every thing which he possesses, or ought to possess, on the left side of the river Mississippi, except the town of New Orleans and the island in which it is situated, which shall remain to France.

 

England now had clear title to 6.5 million square miles of land. Most of this land was in Canada or east of the Appalachian divide and had never belonged to England before. Included in the massive tracts of land that now formally belonged to England was the tiny strip of land that had been under the control of British corporations and proprietorships before the war. This land had a total area of roughly 360,000 square miles, less than 7% of the total land that England had gained.

Trouble In Paradise

The Washingtons, Jeffersons, and other key shareholders in the corporations that had rights to western lands, had cause to celebrate. The French had moved out of their lands. George Washington had made a huge gamble and it appeared to have paid off. Their side had won.

They naturally expected that they would now begin to move onto their lands and start making money, to compensate for the immense amounts they lost when the French moved in. But this didn’t happen. The British government had changed leadership. The new leader of England, King George III, had an entirely different attitude about the western lands than the leaders at the beginning of the war. The earlier leaders had been pro-exploitation, pro-expansion, and pro-corporation.

King George III was none of these things. He had a particular problem with George Washington and clearly refers to him and his corporation several time in the proclamation that he issued immediately after the war was over. Washington and the expansionists in the cabinet had perverted the law to gain control of immense amounts of land. Washington’s companies had no right to this land and would not be able to keep it. In fact, if Washington or anyone else associated with the colonies even set foot on the land west of the divide, they would be guilty of high treason and executed (the exact words follow on page 270; they are a part of the Proclamation of 1763 below).

If England had had a constitutional system, where the government was bound to support the rulings of past leaders and were prevented from changing past policies by the highest laws of the land, the corporations may have had a chance. But England did not have a constitutional government; it had a monarchy. The king could decide he didn’t like the policies of the past and change them, and this is exactly what happened. The king issued a proclamation that announced that the shareholders of the Ohio Company and Loyal Land Company would never get their land back, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

The Real Story of George III

According to American History books, George III was an evil monster, with no regard for the rights of law-abiding citizens and insatiable hunger for power, control, and tax revenues from the hard-working colonies. It may help you to understand what happened over the next two decades (from 1763 to 1784, when the Second Treaty of Paris was negotiated) if you know a little about his background:

King George III was the third in a line of rulers called the ‘Hanover line.’ He was the first in this line to have been born and raised in England, the first to be educated in England, and the first to speak English as his native language. He became ruler when his grandfather, George II, died in 1760.

As a result of some arcane provisions of the secession laws, the leadership of England had passed completely out of England to the first ‘Hanover’ king in 1714. Hanover was a part of Germany and the first Hanover King, King George I, didn’t even speak English. His son, George II, was the second ‘Hanover king.’ George II was born and raised in Hanover. His native language was German; he only learned English late in life and never became fluent in it.

These men had never really been active in affairs of England. They let their English ministers do pretty much whatever they wanted to do. The first king, George I, couldn’t really interfere in affairs of England because he didn’t speak the language. The second, George II, spent almost all of his time in his native Hanover; he wasn’t in a position to affect affairs in England because he was almost never there.

George III was George II’s grandson. He was born in London and raised in England. He became king in October of 1760, about ¾ of the way through the war. George III was 22 years old when he took office. He was young and idealistic.

He believed that the war had changed something fundamental and basic with regards to England’s authority in America. Before the war, the British had almost no presence in America. A tiny strip of land along the Eastern seaboard was under the control of British corporations and proprietors; all land to the north, south, and west, belonged either to France or Spain. After the treaty was concluded, England had more land in America than the entire area of Europe. All of the major powers of Europe had signed the Treaty that granted this land to England. All agreed that it was England. King George III believed he had the obligation to administer this land in a moral and responsible way.

Unlike the members of the previous administration, George III was no friend to corporations. He didn’t like them. He felt that he couldn’t leave the land in America to be exploited by profit-motivated corporations. He had to change the way things worked in America and decided to make changes that would roll back the powers of the corporations and deprive them of their gains.

In the three years between 1760 and 1763, George had gotten rid of all of the pro-corporate people his father had hired. The Pelham brothers (first Henry, then Thomas) had been prime ministers since 1643. They had filled the ministries with people who agreed with their viewpoint. George III had removed the ministers, one at a time, and then in 1762, removed Pelham himself. After removing the people that the Pelham’s had put into power, King George put his own people in, people who agreed with his ideas.

On October 7, 1763 the new king, then 25 years old, issued new law of the land for America, called the ‘Proclamation of 1763.’ It announced several radical changes to British policy in America. It announced that the corporations would be stripped of most of their power. As soon as the details were worked out, they would lose the right to control the governments of America. New governments that represented all of the people (not just landowners and shareholders) would be put into place.

The proclamation announced that the laws the corporations had passed to help them exploit the lands would be replaced by new laws that were ‘as close to the laws of England as practical.’

One very important change involved slavery. Slavery was not legal in England. Once the new laws were put into place, it would not be legal in America either.

British courts had held that all persons were entitled to equal protection of the law, regardless of their race. The courts had specifically ruled on Negroes. The British courts had determined that Negroes were true human beings and their rights would be projected on British soil. The law held that ‘as soon as a Negro reaches British soil, he becomes free.’ The land in America was now British soil. The proclamation would allow a transitional period so that the change could be smooth, but the lands in America would have to bring their laws into conformity with British law. That not only meant that they would have to free all Negro slaves: they would also grant them the same rights as whites and make sure that they had these rights. (If you live in the United States now, you will realize that this still hasn’t been done.)

The biggest change the proclamation announced, however, involved the rights of American natives. All corporate land grants west of the divide of the Appalachians were nullified. The corporations owned no land at all in these areas and would never own any. If they sent people into areas that had been designated as native reserves without written permission from the natives, they were guilty of high treason against the crown and their own government would punish them by hanging. The divide of the Appalachian Mountains had been the unofficial border between two types of societies. It would become the official border.

These changes totally altered the realities of existence for the wealthy and powerful people of the part of North America that had been settled by the corporations and proprietorships. They would lose their total control over the government, their ability to enslave people (both black and white) for their benefit, and their ability to use fraud, trickery, deceit, and genocide to remove the races they considered to be inferior from land so they could sell it.

As we will see shortly, the corporations would have only one way to prevent the edicts in this document from taking effect; they would have to fight to become a separate nation, with the authority to make its own laws.

Let’s consider the exact words of the proclamation:

 

The Proclamation of 1763

 

BY THE KING. A PROCLAMATION

Whereas We have taken into Our Royal Consideration the extensive and valuable acquisitions in America, secured to our Crown by the late definitive Treaty of Peace, concluded at Paris, the 10th day of February 1763; and being desirous that all Our loving Subjects, as well of our Kingdom as of our Colonies in America, may avail themselves with all convenient Speed, of the great Benefits and Advantages which must accrue therefrom to their Commerce, Manufactures, and Navigation, We have thought fit, with the Advice of our Privy Council, to issue this our Royal Proclamation, hereby to publish and declare to all our loving Subjects, that we have, with the Advice of our Said Privy Council, granted our Letters Patent, under our Great Seal of Great Britain, to erect, within the Countries and Islands ceded and confirmed to Us by the said Treaty, Four distinct and separate Governments, styled and called by the names of Quebec, East Florida, West Florida and Grenada.

 

Before this time, the chartered corporations and proprietors, through their administrative bodies, made their own laws.

The corporations and proprietors wanted to make money.

They made laws that made it easier for them to make money.

People who bought large tracts of land got rights to participate in the ‘upper house’ of government, the house that made all important rules. People who bought smaller tracts could vote for the elections of the ‘lower house,’ and have some say in the operation of the nation. People who did special favors for the corporation, or had large numbers of shares, would be given large tracts of land and the governmental power that went with the land. People who didn’t own corporate shares or land, and didn’t know people who could help them in either the government or the corporations, couldn’t participate in government at all.

This would change. The British government was announcing new governments that would work in this different way:

 

As the state and circumstances of the said Colonies will admit thereof, they shall, summon and call General Assemblies within the said Governments respectively, in such Manner and Form as is used and directed in those Colonies and Provinces in America which are under our immediate Government:

And We have also given Power to the said Governors, with the consent of our Said Councils, and the Representatives of the People so to be summoned as aforesaid, to make, constitute, and ordain Laws. Statutes, and Ordinances for the Public Peace, Welfare, and good Government of our said Colonies, and of the People and Inhabitants thereof, as near as may be agreeable to the Laws of England, and under such Regulations and Restrictions as are used in other Colonies.

In the mean Time, and until such Assemblies can be called as aforesaid, all Persons Inhabiting in or resorting to our Said Colonies may confide in our Royal Protection for the Enjoyment of the Benefit of the Laws of our Realm of England; for which Purpose We have given Power under our Great Seal to the Governors of our said Colonies respectively to erect and constitute, with the Advice of our said Councils respectively, Courts of Judicature and public Justice within our Said Colonies for hearing and determining all Causes, as well Criminal as Civil, according to Law and Equity, and as near as may be agreeable to the Laws of England, with Liberty to all Persons who may think themselves aggrieved by the Sentences of such Courts, in all Civil Cases, to appeal, under the usual Limitations and Restrictions, to Us in our Privy Council.

 

Only a small part of the lands Britain had acquired had any Euro-Americans on them at all. Virtually everyone on the western 4/5^th of the land England had acquired were members of the races that the people on the other 1/5^th of the land typically called ‘savages.’ British courts had already ruled that these people were real human beings, with the same rights as other human beings. If these people were given the same power as Euro-Americans in the government that the king intended to form, the ‘savages’ would control the great majority of the land of the continent, all with the backing of this new king.

The Euro-Americans had many reasons to fear this change. Even in the eastern areas, Euro-Americans were not in the majority in many places. Roughly ¼ of the total population of the area west of the divide were slaves of African heritage. In areas where the plantation system prevailed, a tiny number of Euro-Americans owned an enormous number of Afro-Americans. (George Washington owned 311 slaves for example, and Thomas Jefferson owned 175.) If every human being had an equal say in government, in the plantation areas (where slaves outnumbered masters) the Afro-Americans would have more power than the Euro-Americans.

 

The Great Divide

The next section of the proclamation required all Euro-Americans west of the divide to move east of the divide, abandon their territory, and never return except with the express permission of American natives:

 

And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our Interest, and the Security of our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds.

We do therefore, with the Advice of our Privy Council, declare it to be our Royal Will and Pleasure, that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our Colonies of Quebec, East Florida, or West Florida, do presume, upon any Pretence whatever, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass any Patents for Lands beyond the Bounds of their respective Governments as described in their Commissions: as also that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our other Colonies or Plantations in America do presume for the present, and until our further Pleasure be known, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West, or upon any Lands whatever, which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.

And We do further declare it to be Our Royal Will and Plea-sure, for the present as aforesaid, to reserve under our Sovereignty, Protection, and Do-minion, for the use of the said Indians, all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments, or within the Limits of the Territory granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company, as also all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West and North West as aforesaid.

And We do hereby strictly forbid, on Pain of our Displeasure, all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved, without our especial leave and Licence for that Purpose first obtained.

And We do further strictly enjoin and require all Persons whatever who have either willfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any Lands within the Countries above described or upon any other Lands which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are still reserved to the said Indians as aforesaid, forthwith to remove themselves from such Settlements.

 

Qqq proclamation of 1763 273

 

All Euro-Americans who lived west of the divide would have to abandon their land and move east of the divide. They would not be compensated for their lost land. The proclamation explains the reason that the king had decided not to compensate the people who had lost the western lands:

He had reviewed the documents and discussed the issue with his agents that dealt with the American natives and determined that they had not really sold any of the land at all. They had been tricked into putting ‘X’ marks on pieces of paper that said things that were entirely different than they were told they said. The land had been stolen from them, so the thieves would not be compensated:

 

And whereas great Frauds and Abuses have been committed in purchasing Lands of the Indians, to the great Prejudice of our Interests and to the great Dissatisfaction of the said Indians: In order, therefore, to prevent such Irregularities for the future, and to the end that the Indians may be convinced of our Justice and determined Resolution to remove all reasonable Cause of Discontent, We do, with the Advice of our Privy Council strictly enjoin and require that no private Person do presume to make any purchase from the said Indians of any Lands reserved to the said Indians, within those parts of our Colonies where, We have thought proper to allow Settlement: but that, if at any Time any of the Said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said Lands, the same shall be Purchased only for Us, in our Name, at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians, to be held for that Purpose by the Governor or Commander in Chief of our Colony respectively within which they shall lie: and in case they shall lie within the limits of any Proprietary Government, they shall be purchased only for the Use and in the name of such Proprietaries, conformable to such Directions and Instructions as We or they shall think proper to give for that Purpose: And we do, by the Advice of our Privy Council, declare and enjoin, that the Trade with the said Indians shall be free and open to all our Subjects whatever, provided that every Person who may incline to Trade with the said Indians do take out a Licence for carrying on such Trade from the Governor or Commander in Chief of any of our Colonies respectively where such Person shall reside, and also give Security to observe such Regulations as We shall at any Time think fit, by ourselves or by our Commissaries to be appointed for this Purpose, to direct and appoint for the Benefit of the said Trade:

And we do hereby authorize, enjoin, and require the Governors and Commanders in Chief of all our Colonies respectively, as well those under Our immediate Government as those under the Government and Direction of Proprietaries, to grant such Licences without Fee or Reward, taking especial Care to insert therein a Condition, that such Licence shall be void, and the Security forfeited in case the Person to whom the same is granted shall refuse or neglect to observe such Regulations as We shall think proper to prescribe as aforesaid.

And we do further expressly conjoin and require all Officers whatever, as well Military as those Employed in the Management and Direction of Indian Affairs, within the Territories reserved as aforesaid for the use of the said Indians, to seize and apprehend all Persons whatever, who standing charged with Treason, Misprisions of Treason, Murders, or other Felonies or Misdemeanors, shall fly from Justice and take Refuge in the said Territory, and to send them under a proper guard to the Colony where the Crime was committed of which they, stand accused, in order to take their Trial for the same.

Given at our Court at St. James’s the 7th Day of October 1763, in the Third Year of our Reign.

 

George Washington had personally surveyed most of corporate lands in western Pennsylvania. Under the new law, he couldn’t even go back there without being arrested for treason. The shareholders of the Ohio Company had put up millions of dollars (in current monetary equivalent) to develop the land. If they even went back there to try to visit what had been ‘their’ land again, they could be arrested and hanged.

In fact, all of the people who thought they had a comfortable lifestyle that would continue indefinitely could see their lives crashing down around them. They would not only have to give up their slaves, property, and power, they would have to give up their way of life.

They didn’t want to do this.

2: Descent of Man:  Evolution

 

The world we live in is a crazy place. 

It is divided into roughly 261 (about; the number changes all the time) of the entities we call ‘countries.’   Each of these ‘countries’ organizes its wealth and population to compete in a massive global game.  The goal of this game appears to be to get prizes that include the rights to territory, resources, more ‘activity’ that the rulers of the country can extract something they call ‘taxes’ from, and to put more of the things we call ‘jobs’ into the territory. 

The ‘teams’ (‘countries’) have no limits to the tactics they can use for this.  They have weapons that can destroy the world.  The leaders of the countries have deployed the weapons and made them ready for use.  If the game demands it, the people who control these weapons assure us that they will use them.  They can kill millions or even billions of people if they want. 

To gain advantages in these contests, the countries encourage and subsidize the rape of the world; during active periods of game play, all matters other than the ongoing conflict are pout on hold:  inequity, corruption, poverty, disease, and risks the health of the planet are pushed to the bottom of a long, long list of military related priorities. 

This arrangement does not exist by consent of the people of the world:  The members of the human race have never been asked what we want.  Do we want the ‘countries?’   Do we want this crazy game to happen?  No one knows what the human race wants because there has never been any attempt to find out. 

How did this situation come to exist? 

What forces in our past made things work this way? 

If we don’t understand this, we can only sit and stare at the events in utter confusion.  We will never be in a position to do anything about them.  If we do know, we have a starting place.  We can understand why the planet we call ‘earth’ works this way.  (There may be other worlds with intelligent life.  It is very unlikely they all work this way.  The book Possible Societies, a part of this series, explores this issue.) 

We actually have a great many incredible tools that can help us understand these things.  Most of these tools are brand new and have never been available to researchers before.  This chapter deals with a very important part of the puzzle, the ‘descent’ of man.’  It shows that there is abundant evidence that modern humans are the descendents of animals that were very intelligent, but not nearly as intelligent as we are.  Evolutionary forces pushed these animals to organize their modes of existence or ‘societies’ in certain specific ways. 

Humans evolved from these animals and our societies evolved from their societies.  If we want to understand why our societies work as they do, we need to understand the forces that caused their societies to work as they did. 

Evolution is a controversial topic.  I want to go over the controversy a little here to show why new evidence that has only become available since the pandemic has made it impossible to deny that we evolved and still accept the basic principles of mathematics and the things we can see with our own eyes. 

 

The Final Stage in Evolution

 

Darwin’s book ‘The Descent of Man’ was published in 1871.  The book made a case that humans are descendents of non-human animals in the ‘ape’ family.  The term ‘ape’ was loosely defined at the time because almost no research had been done on the category of beings.  They looked similar to humans in many ways, but people didn’t really know much about them.  Darwin claimed they looked like us because they are our ancestors.  We are their ‘descendants.’  We ‘descended’ from them.

Many people objected to the ideas the book presented.  In most cases, the critics didn’t even bother to consider the arguments themselves.  They wanted people to reject the very possibility that humans may have descended from apes, without even the evidence.  (The evidence is very solid and it is hard to reject the connection if you understand it, but if people can be convinced to not read the book, they can easily reject it based on the premise that we just don’t want to believe it.) 

The people in governments and other organizations associated with what is commonly called ‘the establishment’ tried very hard to keep people from reading the book.  This makes sense:  they need the people to think a certain way for the people to keep listening to them.  If Darwin’s arguments were right, the established ideas about how humans came to exist and the reasons we are here are clearly wrong.  If people accept that we were created by a supernatural being (or beings for polytheists) then they will accept that everything around them works as it because this is the way things are supposed to work.  There is intention behind it, and we are powerless compared with the intention of one able to create universes with a few incantations.  We must do what the leaders of the system want us to do without question.  To even question the system is to insult an all-powerful being who can smite us in an instant for our arrogance. 

Authorities banned Darwin's book in many places.  In places where the leaders had the power to do so, they went even farther than this, passing laws that allowed them to arrest and imprison people who even told others (particularly children, whose minds had not yet been fully trained to accept the system) this book existed. 

Before Darin’s book was published, many people in professional, scientific, and academic circles knew about the premise.  Scientific articles had been published and read by a few scholarly people.  But ordinary people had not seen the ideas and didn’t have any simple ways to understand them if they did.  Darwin’s book was designed for ordinary people.  He used simple and intuitive examples, backed by evidence that was easy for people to verify and understand to make its point.  It was a lot like Galileo’s books in this regard:  It allowed ordinary people to understand that the people in charge of the systems around them really weren’t as smart as they wanted people to believe and didn’t actually understand now the world worked.  This made it dangerous. 

When I went to school, the laws against teachers telling children the book existed had been repealed.  Teachers couldn’t be arrested for this, but school boards could still make rules against discussing the topic and, in the United States at least (where I went to middle school), most school boards wouldn’t allow this.  Teachers weren’t happy with these decisions.  They wanted to be able to present these ideas to their students and let students make up their own minds. 

One of my teachers was in this category.  He told us about the controversy.  Some of the students talked to their parents about it.  Some of the parents complained to the school board.  A short time later, the teacher who talked about it was gone and we had a replacement teacher.  I asked what had happened to the former teacher.  She said she wasn’t allowed to discuss it. 

Some people asked questions about evolution. 

She told us about the policy.  There were things she was allowed to say and things she wasn’t allowed to say.  She was allowed to tell us there was a new and highly controversial theory that conflicted with established views about how we got here.  The school board had determined that it was not appropriate for students to get involved in controversy, so we couldn’t discuss the details of the theory. 

I was a rebellious teenager.  I saw the world being destroyed around me.  I saw my friends older brothers coming home from the war in body bags.  I blamed the older generation.  I blamed the ones who trying to keep me from learning about things they didn’t want me to know about.  If someone tells me I am not supposed to read a book, I want to read it.  I went to the school library.  They didn’t have it.  The county library had a copy, but it was off limits for any who were under 21 (along with dangerous magazines like National Geographic that showed people who were not clothed to the standards of western religions).  One day I found a copy of Darwin’s book, along with Desmond Morris’s ‘The Naked Ape’ at a community flea market. 

I was surprised that there was any controversy at all over this book, because Darwin didn’t appear to be taking any position on anything.  He didn’t say the standard ideas were wrong.  He just said ‘we have evidence that tells us something interesting.’  His evidence was compelling.  I tried to talk to others about it, but found this quite difficult.  Most people said they didn’t want to talk about things the man who thinks we are monkeys was saying.  It was a ‘highly controversial theory,’ by someone who was obviously a troublemaker and should not be taken seriously. 

In college, I met a few who were a little more open minded.  They seemed willing to accept that it should be accepted as one of the many creation stories accepted around the world.  We should weigh it against the Hindu creation theory, the Buddhist creation theory, and the American Indian creation theories to see if it could displace the ‘known facts’ that had been accepted for all of history.  But it shouldn’t be a preferred theory.  It went against the grain.  We should not accept it until we have absolute proof. 

 

Absolute Proof

 

In 1961, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel prize for discovering something they called the ‘genetic code.’  They said there is a coded message in a molecule in the nucleus of our cells.  This molecule was called ‘DNA’ or ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,’  This molecule has links, each of which may be one of four amino acids. 

These links are arranged on a sugar frame (called deoxyribose) in sets of three.  Each links are called a ‘codon.’  There are exactly 64 different possible ways to arrange 4 amino acids in sets of three, so there are exactly 64 ‘codons.’  You could say, therefore, information is written on the DNA molecule using an alphabet with exactly 64 letters. 

These scientists discovered that the codes are not just random letters that spell out nonsense. 

They mean something. 

They found that each codon (each of the 64 letters) represented one of the amino acids that go together to make up life.  The message (at least a part of it) was a kind of parts list and assembly instructions for proteins.  A special organic structure called a ‘ribosome’ was able to ‘read’ these letters.  It would then use this information to create complex proteins.  The ‘genetic code’ they discovered shows how the list of letters became proteins. 

The information they got didn’t come from analysis of DNA itself.  They only had one very grainy photograph of an actual DNA molecule

 

 

The information about the code came from models they had built.  These were styrofoam balls connected with wires.  They got the information about the size of the balls and the directions of the links from Linus Pauling’s book ‘The Nature Of The Chemical Bond.’  No tools existed, at the time, to sequence DNA itself. 

In the 1980, scientists found a process that they could use to sequence DNA itself.  If they had a piece of DNA with less than about 150 links, they could determine the exact ‘letters’ (in the 64 character alphabet, described above) of these links. 

At the time, this was basically a novelty with no real practical use:  the DNA message in humans is more than a billion characters long.  They could sequence up to 150 characters in about a day of hard work.  They couldn’t sequence a chromosome (about 46 million characters).  They could chop it up into tiny pieces, then sequence the pieces.  But they didn’t have any way to tell which piece was first, second, and so on.  They could read up to 150 of these characters, equivalent to reading a random 2 line piece of text in a series of volumes that is more than 330 feet thick.  (This is how much space would be required to write the billion character code in human DNA on paper.)   

In the early 21^st century, researchers found ways to fit the sequences together.  They could chop up the long DNA molecule into short pieces that could then be sequenced.  (After the pandemic hit in 2020, this became very import and people could do it by machine.)  They could then feed these pieces into super computers to look for places where there were overlaps.  They could figure out where the lines fit into the entire genome.  This depended on computer power that simply wasn’t available until about 2020, when the first massively parallel sequencers came into use.  A group of scientists around the world created an organization called the Human Genome Project that would allow them to work together try to sequence the entire genome of humans. 

 

There is a reason I am stressing the dates and going through the process in detail.  I want you to realize that the information we have about DNA, including the information that provides mathematical proof of the link between apes and humans, is brand new.  A full human genome was only published, for the first time, in 2022, only two years before the writing of this document.  Evolution may have been called a ‘theory’ before this, but now it is not possible to consider it anything other than a scientific principle without rejecting both the basic principles of mathematics and evidence we can all see with our own eyes.  This matters because if we accept that we evolved as a scientific principle, we must accept relationships between the way we live and the way our evolutionary ancestors lived as something other than mere coincidence. 

 

On April 14, 2003, this organization announced it had general outline of the way the entire human genome fit together.  They didn’t have the genome itself.  But they had a framework that would allow them to begin to fit the hundreds of millions of different bits of information onto and this would eventually give them the genome. 

By the end of 2019, they had 98% of the genome sequenced and assembled on this framework.  They were still missing vital pieces of the puzzle.  But they knew exactly what they were missing and could begin putting the puzzle together. 

 

A Pandemic Creates New Tools to Sequence DNA Quickly and Efficiently

 

Then something important happened:

On December 10, 2019, several people in Wuhan China were hospitalized with a disease that was eventually called ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome 2’ (or ‘SARS2.’)  The disease was very similar to a disease that broken out several years earlier, was highly contagious, and appeared to be extremely serious with the potential for a very high mortality rate.  It was a very dangerous disease. 

Wuhan had one of the most advanced genetic research labs in the world.  The hospitals sent samples of body fluids to this lab.  Researchers found a virus in all infected samples that was not present in samples of people without the disease.  They concluded the virus was the cause of the disease.  They sequenced the DNA of the virus and published their findings. 

The earlier outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome 1 had caused the Chinese government to create a response plan, in the event another similarly dangerous disease was detected.  It was a draconian plan that basically locked down any area where the disease was detected to prevent transmission.  People wouldn’t be able to leave their homes, not even to work, get food, or get medical care.  The health authorities in Wuhan considered the evidence and decided to activate this emergency plan. 

On the fifth of February, 2020, several people on the Diamond Princess, a luxury cruise ship, came down with a disease that resembled the Wuhan disease.  The ship was docked in Japan at the time and the Japanese Authorities were very worried about it spreading from the ship to the shore.  (The Olympics was scheduled for just a few months later.)  They issued a draconian quarantine edict.  The news media covered it all. 

People on the ship started dying.  The media found they could hold people’s interest 24 hours a day by covering the event.  I remember watching the news and seeing the bodies being wheeled out of the ship by people in full protective gear. 

The genetic sequence of the virus was so similar to the sequence of other common viruses, that only a few labs had equipment capable of telling them apart.  There was a global panic.  People didn’t know if they had it and, at the time, there was no way to tell who had it:  only a few labs globally had the equipment needed to tell the sequences apart, and this equipment was incredibly slow.  (At first, the samples were run one at a time and it took about 72 hours to do a test.)  

Global governments tapped the industry to make as many of the machines as possible as rapidly as possible.  Entire industries that had been devoted to manufacture of consumer goods or war materials were retrofitted to make more machines.  Governments offered incredible financial incentives to people who could find ways to automate the process, speed it up, and increase the number of tests that could be done at the same time.  Factories began to stamp out sequencing machines by the millions. 

At the end of the pandemic, these machines were available everywhere.  As recently as 2020, you would have needed a multi-million dollar grant at a university to do even the most basic genetic testing.  Now, you can buy a fully-automated machine that can turn out results in less than an hour for less than the price of a broken-down used car.  You can sequence either DNA or RNA (the machines can do both) in your own garage if you want to do this. 

The first peer-reviewed and verified study that contained a compete human genome was published in the March 31, 2022 edition of Nature Magazine.  But thousands of other articles, not peer-reviewed or verified to be scientific, were published that contained genetic information about animals, plants, viruses, bacteria, molds, and other life forms. 

New genetic information is now everywhere and new discoveries are published each day.  The peer-review and verification process takes a lot of time.  There just isn’t time for this process to run its course before new information is public.  We are now in a time of ‘free-for-all’ genetic information, where new findings go on the internet before we really know what they mean

It is important to understand, however, that the new information is incredibly easy to verify.  The machines are cheap and available everywhere.  You can buy one and test your own DNA if you want.  If you have artifacts from your ancestors (say a lock of hair from a great grandmother) you can test their DNA and tell things about them that their own doctors didn’t know in their time.  Scientists can use these same processes to test ancient artifacts, including some that are hundreds of thousands of years old. 

 

Are We Related to Apes?

 

The members of our closest evolutionary ancestors that are still living (the pan genus, discussed below) have DNA that is almost identical to that of modern humans.  Both the codes and locations of the ‘genes’ (coding sequences) on the chromosomes are the same for 98.7% of the codes n the DNA.  Another 0.7% has nearly identical code sequences, with tiny differences either in the codes or in the locations of the otherwise identical genes on the chromosomes. 

This means that only 0.6% of human DNA is unique to humans and not shared by members of the pan genus. 

Any introductory book in statistics will explain tools that people use to determine the likelihood that this correspondence would exist in animals that are not related.  Douglas Thobold’s research (discussed in Chapter One) shows that the odds of the genetic relationships we see in DNA existing without us being related are more than 10^2,860 to one against. 

We are related. 

What about the intermediate links?  There are links between humans and members of the pan genus.  New information comes out every day about these links.  However, no one who is publishing this research (at least none that I saw) are claiming it does not support Darwin’s claim.  People may disagree about the number of links, the names of the beings at each link, the genetic code differences, or other details.  But no one that I have read have claimed that the chain itself does not exist. 

Darwin didn’t have any DNA evidence at all. 

His evidence came from other places.  He used intuitive examples and logical arguments.  His arguments were very compelling, but they weren’t really what we call ‘proof.’  It seemed very likely we descended from apes.  But people who wanted to claim this didn’t happen could still find ways to make it appear that they were right.  But the genetic evidence is subject to mathematical analysis. 

You can sequence your own DNA.  You can then go to a zoo and get a sample of DNA from a member of the pan genus, and sequence that.  You can see the resemblance.  You can do the standard statistical tests to determine the likelihood that a relationship exists.  You will find the same thing others have found:  the relationship exists. 

 

Keywords for seo:  Global politics, International relations, Nuclear weapons, Environmental destruction, Human evolution, Darwin's theory, The Descent of Man, Genetic code, DNA sequencing, Human Genome Project, SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Genetic testing technology, Evolutionary evidence, Human-ape DNA similarity, Pan genus, Evolutionary links, Scientific controversy, Evolutionary biology, Genetic relationships, Statistical analysis in evolution,

This chapter discusses the evolving understanding of the universe's age and the origins of life on Earth. It highlights how scientific advancements have repeatedly challenged our preconceptions about cosmic and biological history.

 

2: The Universe

 

How did the world around us get here?

Many theories about how the world came into existence seem to be designed to manipulate people, rather than to inform and enlighten them.  For example, I was taught that a super being in the sky made everything through a magical process that violated all of the known laws of physics.  This being was a god whose name, they told, was ‘Jehovah.’

Jehovah said a few words and the Heavens, and the Earth appeared.  Then a few more words and light appeared.  Jehovah used this method of chanting incantations to divide the waters and create land, then create plants and animals.  Once the right environment was created, He created the man and then, out of that man, woman.  

At a certain point, Jehovah created the societies that are now in place: He divided the land into nations and gave the pieces away to different people.  Jehovah then set these nations against each other in battle, by creating war.  He then accepted that the winners of wars had gained rights to the land they conquered.  He organized wars because he had a destiny in mind for each square inch of land:  he wanted it to belong to certain people.  He organized the wars and watched them, manipulating events so that the ones he wanted to have the land won the wars. 

My teachers couldn’t explain much of anything about the reasons anything in history happened.  They only said that Jehovah was behind it all.  Jehovah is very wise and loves us with all His heart.  Whatever the reason for Jehovah’s actions, it is a good one, one we must not question.

If we accept this version of ‘How the World got where it is now,’ we are led to believe that there is a very specific way that we are supposed to be acting. 

The world works as it does because that is the way it is supposed to work.  Jehovah gave certain groups of people and their descendants nations and gave them orders to hold dominion over the land (dominate it by force) and subdue it (exploit it to carry out assigned tasks, including the task of holding dominion over the land.)  We, the children of Jehovah, are not supposed to question the realities of the world around us.  War is NOT an accidental occurrence or ‘problem.’  It is a deliberate and integral aspect of life on Earth, as envisioned by Jehovah.  If we accept this version of history, we have a certain very clear role:  We are to work hard, pay taxes, support leaders who excel at warfare, and help them organize our economies they will be better at war.  We are to contribute to the ‘system’ until we are dead, then reap our reward in the afterlife.

Cynical people may feel that this explanation is not a legitimate attempt to figure out how the world came to work as it does.  They may think it is a tool, one of many tools that people have created over our (actual) history to manipulate.  It is not designed to help us understand how the world cam to work as it does that we, the people of the world, can use to work together with others in our species to solve problems and move our race toward a better future.  It was designed to make us accept a role for ourselves as servants of the masters and cogs in a machine that benefits a tiny minority at the expense of the great majority.  

How Did We Get Here?

Science can tell us a lot about history.  Often, our prejudices tell us to reject science, because it doesn’t conform to the things we want to believe.  We want to believe that we (humans) are the center of everything.  We are important.  The universe revolves around us.  When we look at ‘the beginning of the universe’ we often think that it corresponds, more or less, with the beginning of humans.  (The creation story claims that human history began 6 days after the universe was created.)   Early analysis to determine the age of the universe involved reconstructing geologies in religious books.  Go back to the first human, then six days more, and you are at the beginning of everything.  Using this method, researchers came up with the Ussher–Lightfoot chronology which held that the first humans were created on October 16, 4004BC; the universe was created 6 days earlier on October 22, 4004 BC.  

The 19th century saw a significant shift in thinking about the age of the the universe. Geological evidence, such as the slow erosion of mountains and the accumulation of sediments, suggested a much older Earth. Scientists like Charles Lyell proposed that geological processes were gradual and had been operating for millions of years.

In the 20th century, astronomical observations began to provide more concrete evidence for an ancient universe. Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe in the 1920s led to the development of the Big Bang theory, which posits that the universe began as a singularity and has been expanding ever since. By measuring the rate of expansion, scientists could estimate the age of the universe. Early estimates placed the age around 10 billion years.  Later research pinpointed the first moment of existence more closely, giving an age for the universe of 13.2 billion years.

We want to want to put a date on it and Hubble’s theory made this possible.  Our produces make us want this date to be as close to the date that humans came to exist as possible, because this makes us appear to be more relevant and important than we would be, if we accept an earlier date. 

In recent decades technological advancements such as the James Webb Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to observe galaxies at incredibly distant distances. These observations have revealed that even the estimates built on the Big Bang Theory are far too short.  The James Webb Space Telescope has observed galaxies that appear to be fully formed and mature—billions of years old—just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang was supposed to have occurred. 

Many still cling to the Big Bang Theory, in spite of evidence it is wrong.  But new theories are emerging to replace it.  A few of the more promising candidates are in the text box below. 

 

 

We have prejudices that distort the way we look at history.  We want to believe we are extremely important.  We want to think that our time of existence is all that is important and anything outside of this period of time is unimportant.  We want to make the ‘unimportant’ period as small as possible so we can pretend it is irrelevant and nothing of any importance happened until a few thousand years ago.  This just isn’t true. 

Even if we accept the 13.2 billion year figure, and compressed it into a year for the purposes of comparison, the human experience would be insignificant.  If we start the year at January 1, the first members of the ‘homo’ genus (our ancient ancestors) didn’t evolve until December 31st at 11:48 PM.  This is a mere 12 minutes before midnight.  Recorded history didn’t begin until December 31st at 11:59:46 PM, a mere 14 seconds before midnight. 

Why does this matter?

The human race is currently in a very dangerous situation.  We are at the very edge of extinction.  We need to look at reality objectively if we are to understand how to get us out of this mess.  We will see that objective analysis shows that we have very real tools we can use to help us get onto a path that leads to a sound, healthy, prosperous, peaceful world where we live in harmony with nature.  But we can’t build these kinds of systems on things we want to believe but that objective evidence tells us did not happen.  We will need to accept things that go against our preconceptions of our own importance.  Some of these things involve evolution and our very strong relationship with very violent and highly territorial apes that fight over territory just as humans do.  We will see that if we accept the science behind this relationship, we can see that we can understand the forces that push use to divide into ‘nations’ to fight over territory.  If we understand them, we can alter them. 

The truth is that we can only say one thing about the origin of the universe:  It happened a very, very long time ago, so long that the period of human existence is meaningless by comparison.

Solar System Comes into Existence

We have considerably more information about the age of the solar system. 

In December of 1998, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hosted a seminar.  They brought together scientists to establish an evidence-based figure for the age of the solar system and of the Earth.  Here is the summary of findings from this seminar:

 

 

 

Earth Comes Into Existence

The Earth formed at roughly the same time as the Sun and other planets. The Earth started as a contracting ball of gas and began to form a hard surface crust about 4.4 billion years ago.

 

 

Scientists have many tools they can use to help understand how this took place.  The new space-based telescopes allow us to actually watch solar systems being formed.  We can analyze the composition of the different worlds and compare them to earth.  The Webb Telescope website provides detailed images that show planets being formed.  We have no need to resort to stories about beings with magical powers to understand how planets form.  We know how this happens. 

First Rocks

When the Earth first formed, it was a gaseous mass coming together under the effect of gravity.  The surface of the earth was the coolest part of the planet, but it was still far to hot to have solid objects in it for hundreds of millions of years.  The oldest rocks found so far have been dated to 4.28 billion years old.

 

 

 

3.  Life

We don’t know exactly when the first life forms came to exist on Earth.

We can only trace back to the point where we have evidence of life and assert that life originated sometime before that time.  The earliest direct evidence of life on Earth (so far) are microfossils of microorganisms mineralized in 3.465-billion-year-old Australian Apex rocks.  The illustration below shows the photographs of these life forms, along with drawings to help visualize their shapes.

 

 

 

Universal Common Ancestry

What happened to cause more complex animals to exist?  What happened to cause humans to exist?

In 1859, Charles Darwin published the book on The Origin of Species. This book proposed that it is possible (Darwin uses the term ‘not incredible’) that all life on earth started with a common primordial form, and evolved from there due to the process of natural selection.  He writes:

 

 

Recently, scientists given a formal name to the theory Darwin described.  They call it the ‘Universal Common Ancestry’ theory, or “UCA.” Understanding the UCA theory is important because it provides a foundational understanding of the realities of the world before evolution began, which can then be used to test this theory of evolution itself.

Before we look at evolution, let’s first explore how scientists have confirmed the UCA theory and the evidence supporting its validity.  This evidence comes from an the analysis of DNA.

DNA, or ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,’ is a molecule in the nucleus of the cells of all living things that have cells.  In 1954, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Charles Watson built models of DNA that revealed it contained coded messages within its structure.

 

 

DNA is made up of sequences of amino acids that code for proteins and other complex molecules that are needed for life.  The coding molecules are incredibly tiny, and it took roughly a half century for scientists to build machines that could read these codes.  These machines are called ‘gene sequencers.’

In the early 2000s, Douglas Theobald and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado obtained funding to use gene-sequencing techniques and statistical analysis to evaluate the UCA theory.  If different organisms had different origins — in other words, if they were not all ‘descended from a single primordial form’ — we would expect different coding methods to be used to code for complex molecules in different life forms.

Scientists can investigate the Universal Common Ancestor (UCA) by analyzing DNA sequences for various proteins across different organisms.  For instance, they might sequence the genes of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria responsible for syphilis, and then sequence human DNA, often using their own DNA as samples.  By comparing these genetic codes, they can draw conclusions about the origins of these species.  If the species had entirely separate origins, we would expect them to use different genetic coding mechanisms.  If their origins were similar but not identical, some parts of the coding mechanisms would match while others would differ.  However, if the coding mechanisms are found to be identical, it would strongly suggest that both the syphilis bacteria and humans share a common ancestor.

Scientists can investigate the Universal Common Ancestor (UCA) by analyzing DNA sequences for various proteins across different organisms.  For instance, they might sequence the genes of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria responsible for syphilis, and then sequence human DNA, often using their own DNA as samples.  By comparing these genetic codes, they can draw conclusions about the origins of these species.  If the species had entirely separate origins, we would expect them to use different genetic coding mechanisms.  If their origins were similar but not identical, some parts of the coding mechanisms would match while others would differ.  However, if the coding mechanisms are found to be identical, it would strongly suggest that both the syphilis bacteria and humans share a common ancestor.

If scientists sequenced a wide range of life forms and found similarities in some of them, but not all of them, it would suggest evidence for common ancestry among those with all these similarities.  The more similarities they found, the higher their confidence would be in a shared ancestry.  If they discovered that every single code was identical, they would be virtually certain that all these life forms share common ancestry.

Scientists can investigate the Universal Common Ancestor (UCA) by analyzing DNA sequences for various proteins across different organisms. For instance, they might sequence the genes of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria responsible for syphilis, and then sequence human DNA, often using their own DNA as samples. By comparing these genetic codes, they can draw conclusions about the origins of these species. If the species had entirely separate origins, we would expect them to use different genetic coding mechanisms. If their origins were similar but not identical, some parts of the coding mechanisms would match while others would differ. However, if the coding mechanisms are found to be identical, it would strongly suggest that both the syphilis bacteria and humans share a common ancestor.

The team published their findings in 2010.  They found that the gene sequences for various proteins were not just similar but identical in all living things.  They used statistical tests to determine how likely this is to be a coincidence.  Here are the findings from their paper:

 

 

If scientists sequenced a wide range of life forms and found similarities in some of them, but not all of them, it would suggest evidence for common ancestry among those with all these similarities. The more similarities they found, the higher their confidence would be in a shared ancestry. If they discovered that every single code was identical, they would be virtually certain that all these life forms share common ancestry.

This means that the probability of observing such genetic similarities by chance is approximately 1 in 10^2,860 —a number so large defies human comprehension.   To put this in perspective, let's consider some astronomical numbers:

There are estimated to be about 10⁸² atoms in the observable Universe, and, if the universe did in fact have a ‘big bang’ origin, about 10¹⁷ seconds have passed since the Universe's estimated beginning. If you had all of the necessary materials and could create DNA-based life in as many different places as there are atoms in the Universe, and you repeated this process once each second for all the time since the Big Bang, you would have created life 10⁹⁹ times. Even with this astronomical number of attempts, the chances of producing the observed genetic similarities by coincidence are vanishingly small.

In fact, you would need to repeat this entire experiment—creating life 10⁹⁹ times—approximately 102,860 times before you would have a 50/50 chance of producing one world with these similarities purely by coincidence. This number, 10^2,860, represents a 1 followed by 2,860 zeros—a number so large it defies human comprehension.

In other words, it is not a coincidence that all life forms on Earth use the same genetic coding sequence in our DNA. We can conclude that we have a common ancestry with a greater degree of certainty than we know just about anything else in science. This puts the theory of Universal Common Ancestry among the most well-supported ideas in all of science, comparable to fundamental theories in physics or chemistry.

Dating Artifacts

When Darwin was alive, scientists didn’t have any scientific tools that would give accurate dates on artifacts.

People had to rely on inference from the things they accepted and believed.  Western scientists, trained as many of us, were taught that nothing in the Universe is older than 4,004 BC.  For most of the last several thousand years, people in the Western world were required to accept this belief; those who did not, were guilty of heresy and could be put to death.  While the rigidity of this requirement eased during Darwin’s time, it was still uncommon for people to openly claim that anything was older.  Naturally, if nothing is older than 4,004 BC, then all artifacts were assumed to have come to existence sometime between that date and today.

In 1949, while working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley, William Libby discovered the first truly scientific dating method.  This process uses the radioactive decay cycle of carbon and is called ‘radiocarbon dating.’ (See textbox below for more information.)

 

 

Scientists began using this method in 1950 and found it to be extremely reliable.  To determine just how reliable it was, they needed to find other events that occurred at a known time in the past and test artifacts from those events to see if they obtained the expected results.

We know from many sources that Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupted on August 24, 79 AD.  This eruption buried many towns before the people could escape, encasing them in lava with the exact date of their death recorded on their date books and calendars.  We can test the radiocarbon dating method by dating artifacts left by Mount Vesuvius.  Other known eruption dates allow us to verify dates going back a very long way.  This process has been tested many times and is virtually 100% accurate giving us great confidence that this method determines accurate dates.

Over the 65 years since radiocarbon dating was perfected, scientists have developed many other scientific dating methods.  Radiocarbon dating is most effective for items of recent origins (less than 50,000 years).  Older artifacts can be tested with a similar method that measures the breakdown of potassium into argon.  By cross-referencing the results of many different tests, we can determine and have determined that these tests are extremely accurate.

As of 2024, scientists have come up with  many reliable and useful dating techniques based on other elements with extremely long decay cycles.  Most of these techniques only work for organic artifacts—those that were once alive—by determining when they stopped taking in air, water, and food, meaning when they died.  New methods such as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), are being developed to measure the amount of exposure that rocks, and anything has had to light.  By cross-referencing results from various tests using different technologies, scientists can get increasingly accurate scientific dates for artifacts of all kinds.

Evolution

The chart below lists the ages of the oldest samples of various living things dated so far.  We don’t know exactly when these organisms first appeared on Earth; they may have been here significantly longer than shown.  However, the figures below represent the minimum time we know for certain that these life forms have been on Earth:

 

 

How did one life form change into another?

Darwin’s theory, which is more than 150 years old, has held up and remains consistent with the discoveries made since.  Darwin describes the process of “natural selection,” the most important underlying process of evolution, in this way:

 

 

Over time, beings with advantageous traits replaced those without them.  The basic capabilities of the most capable beings on earth increased steadily, over billions of years.  By 60 million years ago, primates existed—Primates being the ‘family’ that includes humans.  Our ancient ancestors were present in this world 60 million years ago.

Paleogenomics

The field of Paleogenomics is the study of the evolution of DNA.  It is a brand-new field.  This is an excerpt from a 2019 article about the field:

 

 

Paleogenomics is a new field and so far, it hasn’t produced any results that conflict with the evolutionary analysis of other sciences.  The lack of conflict, however, is an important finding.  If the previous work on evolution had been incorrect, the DNA results would have shown discrepancies.  The fact that there are “no conflicts” gives us great confidence that the researchers who have studied evolutionary processes were on the right track and that all the basic processes that Darwin proposed are indeed operating.

Primates

Mammals had already existed for 140 million years before the first primates emerged.  Over this immense period, nature selected mammals with higher intelligence for survival.  The gradual increase in intelligence eventually led to animals that were so different from than their predecessors that they were an entirely new classification of beings.  Sometime between 65 million and 60 million years ago, the highly intelligent mammals that are classified as “Primates” came to exist.

Primates are mammals with these specialized features:

 

 

Incomplete remains of primates have been found and dated to 60 million years while the oldest complete skeletons go back 55 million years.  These skeletons were discovered by scientists at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in 2013.

Evolution did not stop when the first primates emerged.  All primates reproduce sexually, and sexual reproduction creates new combinations of genes—and entirely new animals—with each birth.  Once these new generations existed, they had to compete with their peers for resources.  Those with lesser intellectual skills and abilities were less likely to perish before they could mate, while those with greater skills were more likely to carry on the species.

Every 1,000 years about 500 generations had the opportunity to surpass their peers.  Over the span of a million years, some 500,000 generations had this same opportunity.

The individual changes didn’t need to be large.  Over this immense period, tiny incremental changes accumulated to bring about enormous differences.

6: The Era of Modern Humans Begins

 

Imagine you had a time machine and you set the controls to the year 70,000 BP (this many years ago) and the location to 30 degrees north by 30 degrees east.  This would take you into one of the richest and most fertile lands on Earth, a valley just a few miles south of the Nile delta called ‘Faiyum.’  Today, this land produces rice, a fantastic amount.  It produces more rice per acre than any other place on Earth.  The conditions are perfect, with endless sun, endless water, fertile land washed downriver from the tropics over the course of millions of years.  The modern rice is the same type as the wild rice that grew there 70,000 years ago.  It is rich and wonderful land. 

What would you expect to see?

Perhaps, if you had gone back a lot further, say to 1 million years ago, you might find some migratory people living in the area.  They may be living a lot like the migratory ‘Indians’ that Lewis and Clark encountered on their travels to the western part of North American in 1803,basically hunting and gathering for their meals.  They may look at you curiously and probably wouldn’t have anything to say.  Perhaps they may use the standard gesture for ‘are you hungry?’ putting fingers together and raising their hand to their mouth with a questioning look in their eyes.  If you smile back and have an affirmative look in your eyes, they may motion for you to follow them to their camp.  They would have some fish turning on a spit over a fire and some rice being steamed, together with roots and berries, in a hollowed out rock.  They would grab up a palm leave and scoop some rice and fish onto it, and hand it to you.  If they see confusion on your face, they may take a few fingers full and put it into their mouths, and gesture for you to do the same. 

They have no reason to do anything else.  They see strangers from time to time.  They are different and may know things they don’t know.  You may know about foods that they don’t know about.  You may know about medicines they don’t know about.  You aren’t a threat to them.  they don’t think you are going to ‘take their land’ because they don’t have any conception of human ownership of land.  They treat you well until they have reason to do otherwise.

That is what you might see if you went back a million years.  But for this example, you aren’t going back a million years, you are going back 70,000 years.  By this time, richer lands have all been taken over by people with territorial sovereignty societies.  Their land belongs to them.  Their food belongs to them.  They are suspicious of strangers.  There is a good chance they will kill you on sight, without even bothering to find out if you may have something to offer them.  (The conquering Spanish killed and killed and killed, without even bothering to find out of the ‘Indians’ they were killing may have something to offer them.)  

But there is a chance that you may happen on someone who treats you differently.  There are people who are compassionate and curious, even in societies where people are raised to be fearful of everything outside their experience.  You may know a few people like this.  You may even be one.  Lets say you the first person you meet does not attack you, but looks at you curiously.  She forces a smile (you can see the fear in her face, but she is trying.)  You try to match her smile.  She holds out her hand, palm forward, in the universal gesture that says ‘I am not holding a weapon.  I mean you no harm.’   She has a questioning look in her eyes.  She is asking you something:  Do you intend to do harm to her?   You should realize there is an appropriate response.  You need to show her that you don’t have any weapons in your hands.  You point the palms at her and, to be sure she understands, turn over the hands so she can see there is nothing inside.  Gradually, her fear leaves her.  Eventually, she makes the gesture:  ‘Are you hungry?’  You let her know you are.  (You don’t need words for this.)  She takes you back to her home.  She encounters a lot of others on the way.  They all know her.  She takes your hand, a sign that you are with her and under her protection.  The people she meets make confused faces but she pulls up your joined hands and puts them where they can see them.  You are with her.  If they value their relationship with her, they will not harm you. 

Imagine she takes you to her family home and gives you something to eat.  She makes it clear, without speaking, that you are her guest.  Her family is to treat you as such.  All this can be done without words. You don’t have to say anything and she doesn’t even have to be capable of speech.  We can make a lot of things known without speech. 

You could go to the same place today.  You could fly into Cairo Airport and take a taxi or Uber (41 minutes, according to Google) to the center of the Faiyum valley.   You could stay at the Lake House by Tunisia Green Resort  (about $55) and take a cab into the busy area where the common Egyptians live.  If you took some lessons in Nobiin before you left (Nobiin is the language that common people have spoken in that part of Egypt for many centuries), you may strike up come conversations with the locals.  You may ask for recommendations for restaurants, for example, ask about things that are for sale, or, if are very brave, talk about politics.  Most of the people you would meet are very poor and aren’t literate, so you wouldn’t expect to talk about things that are too complicated.  But even uneducated people can have great insight about many things.  If you found an area of interest, you might expect some interesting discussions.

Now I want to ask you to imagine what kind of contrast you would expect to find between the people who lived in this valley 70,000 years ago, and the people who live there today.  How do they differ? 

 

Complex Language Skills and Quarterly Extinctions

 

There were some important changes in the condition of the planet Earth that occurred starting about 70,000 years ago that may give insight about this.  The first to notice these changes and write about them was Charles Darwin, who discussed the in his 1830 book ‘The Voyages of the Beagle.’   He was studying fossil records and found a dramatic change in the number of animals that existed before and after a certain date.  There were a lot of animals that existed before that date that did not exist after that date.  In other words, there was a mass extinction event.  This mass extinction events has come to be called the ‘quaternary extinction events.’   It was such a dramatic change, that biologists consider it to be a dividing line between two eras, the Pleistocene and Holocene. 

Further research showed that the extinction events didn’t take place at the same time everywhere.  They moved in a kind of wave.  They started in north Africa about 70,000 BP (this many years ago).  They then spread up to the north and west, through Europe and up to the north and east through Asia.  They the extinction events traveled at a rather leisurely rate and reached the far east of Asia about 55,000 BP.  The wave arrived in Indonesia about 50,000 BP and arrived in Australia about 47,000 BP. 

Then, the wave of extinctions took a long pause. 

It began again in America about 15,000 BP.  It spread slowly, as it had spread through Asia and finally reached the tip of South America about 13,000 BP. 

Darwin’s evidence has been scrutinized in great detail by people looking for possible errors.  They haven’t been able to find any.  His findings have been verified over and over again.  These events happened.  Something caused a wave of mass extinctions of certain kinds of animals that started in Africa and then traveled around the world over the course of 58,000 years. 

What was this ‘something?’ 

Darwin’s book came out in 1831, nearly 200 years ago.  People have been trying to figure out what caused the quaternary extinction events for nearly 200 years. 

For most of this period, they worked very hard to come up with explanations that would allow them to claim that these events were not caused by humans.  There is a reason this was their primary focus.  Their field was built on assumptions that had been mandated by religious doctrines that held that humans have only existed for 6,000 years.  If humans didn’t exist before 6,000 years ago, they obviously couldn’t have caused events that took place 70,000 years ago.  There had to be some other explanation. 

Researchers tried hard to find something that made sense. 

They came up with a lot of theories.  The two that survive to this day involve possible collisions with comets or other bodies from space, and changes in weather.  Some of the theories pointed to impact by extra terrestrial objects that just happened to go in a wave over the areas where the extinctions took place.  Some claimed there was a climate change wave that started in Africa and traveled up to the Mediterranean Sea where it split, part going north and west into Europe and the other part going east through Asia;   then there was a pause and the climate changed in Indonesia and Australia.  Then there was another pause and this climate change event started again in North America 15,000 years ago, then traveled down to South America, arriving there 13,000 years ago.  Then the weather went back  to normal worldwide.   (You will find a lot of people on the internet who still don’t want to believe there were humans on Earth 70,000, and go to great lengths to try to make the ‘wave of climate change events’ seem plausible.  Many of the people who are behind these papers have letters after their names and good reputations in their fields.)  

When I first learned about these events, I was in graduate school.  The year was 1980.   At that time, the prevailing view was that the events couldn’t have been caused by humans because humans had not arrived in any of the areas where the events took place by the time they took place.  Radiological dating techniques were primitive and tests were very expensive, so not any artifacts had been tested.  Dates were estimates based on non-scientific analysis.  Times have changed a lot.  As the tests got better and cheaper, more artifacts were tested and the ‘date of first arrival of humans’ in the different areas was pushed back and back.  Now, a lot of evidence has been found that people lived in these areas when the events started.  In Australia and the Americas, the extinction events coincide with the arrival of humans in the various areas exactly.  A lot of people still try to find ways to make it seem that these events were not caused by humans.  But their arguments get thinner and harder to accept every year.  The prevailing view seems to be shifting as I write this in 2024.   More than half of the articles I found on the internet about the cause claim the events were caused by humans.  

 

What This Helps us Understand

 

The homo sapiens species (our species) already lived in Africa, Europe, and Asia, when the extinctions began.  But these homo sapiens were not the same subspecies as modern humans.  They were homo sapiens neanderthalis in the west (Europe) and homo sapiens denisova in the east (Asia).  We know that the homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens denisovan are the same species as modern humans.  If we were in the same place at the same time, we could breed with them and produce babies that were healthy and capable of reproducing themselves. 

But we don’t know much about the capabilities of these early subspecies of homo sapiens.  Most likely, if you really could go back 70,000 years BP to Faiyum, and spend time with the people there, you would not find them to have the same level of intellect as the people you would meet if you flew there and stayed in the Lake House and walked through the same areas today.  Back 70,000 years ago, you would probably be able to communicate with them on basic matters, like a need for food or a desire for sex.  But you probably wouldn’t be able to hold complex conversations with them.  You wouldn’t be able to plan an extremely complex event or activity, say one that required hundreds of people to cooperate and play different roles to work. 

Modern humans have fantastic capabilities to communicate complex ideas through spoken words.  There was obviously a time when our ancestors didn’t have this ability.  (The pans clearly did not have it.)  There must have been a time when this ability developed.  If you could go back to just before this ability existed, then compared the realities to just after it was common, you would expect to see a dramatic difference in the way people lived.  The ability to express complex and abstract thoughts through speech gives us fantastic capabilities that no other animals have.  We would expect to see some evidence of this change in basic realities of life for the people that occurred in the places and at the times when people gained this incredible capability. 

If we accept that the brain components that make it possible for us to express complex thoughts with speech developed in Africa about 70,000 years ago, and these components provided such great advantages to the people with them that those without them simply couldn’t compete, and there was a ‘wave’ of ‘increasing mental capability’ that started in Africa and spread around the world over the course of 57,000 years, then the wave of extinction events makes total sense. 

 

Speech And The Ability To Control The Environment On A Large Scale

 

Most likely, people wanted to get rid of certain animals all along.  Saber tooth tigers went extinct during these extinction events.  These tigers were fierce and powerful predators.  Humans have no real defenses against these cats.  We can’t outrun them.  We can’t outfight them.  Our skins are very thin and they can cut through them without trying.  At night, when we are most helpless, we can’t even see them.  They can follow every move we make.  We are little more than walking snacks to them.  They can grab us whenever they are hungry. 

We could kill them however.   We are very smart.  But a single person, no matter how smart, could not hope to successfully kill large numbers of tigers alone.  To hunt them, large numbers of people would have to work together in a very organized way.  Each of the people in the team would have a specific task.  It would have to be worked out in advance, together with contingencies and ways to get help from others if they couldn’t do their task themselves, or if they find themselves in danger.  This kind of activity would require a lot of communication. 

And killing one tiger, or even a hundred, won’t make any difference.  The only way to be safe from tigers would be to wipe them all out.  This means that the project would have to be carried out with cooperation of large numbers of other groups over vast differences.  This kind of activity could not take place without a very advanced capability to communicate with others. 

We know this:  Saber tooth tigers once existed in vast numbers in areas where humans lived.  Now, they are no more.  They ‘went extinct’ in the extinction events along with a great many other very dangerous predators.  This happened somehow.  Tigers eat a lot of different animals.  A lot of animals would have wanted them gone.  But only one had the ability to make this happen:  humans.  Stupid humans could not have made this happen.  The people who made this happen had to intelligent and articulate.  They had to be able to express complex abstract ideas, to understand complex plans, and to contribute to these plans over time, over a course of many generations, to accomplish something that all humans would have wanted.  (No one wants to watch human children being eaten by tigers.)  

Predators weren’t the only animals that went extinct in these events.  A great many other animals that are not predators went extinct too. 

These other animals all had something in common:  they ate foods that humans could eat and wanted to eat.  They competed with us for food.  Anything they ate, we could not eat.  Some of these animals were enormous and ate fantastic amounts of food.  A few mastodons could break into any granary that early humans made and eat an entire year’s food for a tribe in a single day.  There is nothing the people could do to prevent this without coordinated effort.  You aren’t going to scare a mastodon away as you would scare away a deer.  He outweighs you 10 times over and has tusks that can impale you, by a twist of his head.  Humans can hunt and kill mastodons.  But this requires coordination by a lot of people in a very complex project. 

Most likely, humans would have wanted to get rid of these animals all along.  But before about 70,000 years ago, they couldn’t do this.  (If they could have done it, they would have and the animals would have gone extinct earlier.)  Then, something changed.  Their capabilities increased enough to allow them to get it done. 

They gained the ability to wipe out predators and competitors in one area, in Africa.  The people with this ability then spread to Europe and Asia.  Most likely, this happened by the process Darwin called ‘sexual selection.’  People decide who they want as sex partners.  We hear people talking about this issue today:  ‘I want someone I can talk to.’  Those who can understand us and make us feel that they are on the same page are more desirable than the oafs and walking bags of hormones who can do the deed, but are strangers to us after it is over.  However it happened, it did.  The ability to express complex ideas spread. 

 

Speech

 

Modern humans have three tiny brain components that the people who lived before 70,000 years ago may not have had.  These brain components allow us to turn our thoughts into mental words, then turn these mental words into sounds (by speaking), then allow us to recognize sounds that are intended to be interpreted as thoughts when we hear them (including when we hear ourselves speaking), then to translate these sounds into thoughts that we can process as if we had generated these thoughts ourselves.  These brain components transfer the things we are thinking into the minds of others, through the medium of speech.  

Scientists have been able to identify these components using MRI scanners that trace electrical signals through the brain.  They have people think about something while in a scanner.  They see the pattern developing: that is the electrical signature of the ‘thought.’  They can then ask the person to consider saying what is on her mind, then to actually say it.  they can follow the electrical activity and find out where these mental activities are taking place. 

The thoughts that will eventually become the things we call ‘words,’ originate in a place called Broca’s area.  The signals are then transferred through Arcuate fasciculus to become the signals that cause our vocal chords to vibrate to create the sounds that we associate with these words.  When we sounds that our minds think may be words, the signals from the sounds are transferred to a part of the brain called Wernicke’s area.  They are then processed and sent back through the Arcuate fasciculus into Broca’s area, which tests them to determine if they are words.  If they are words, they are then processed back into thoughts in that area.  When we speak aloud, we hear our words and this gives us feedback that tells us the thoughts are being properly expressed, at least in a way that allows us to understand them. 

Genetic analysis is still in it infancy.  Almost certainly, there are DNA patterns that somehow get translated into the cell division signals that take place as babies develop to cause their brains to develop these components.  We can expect these genes to be found, eventually.  At this point, we will be able to compare DNA profiles of modern humans to neanderthals and denisovans to see if they had these genes.  If we find they didn’t, when we do, this is going to help us understand how we differ from neanderthal and denisovans.  We don’t have this information yet, but we do know this:  We have mental capabilities  that our evolutionary ancestors did not have.  These include our higher speech functions.  These capabilities allow us to do things that our ancestors could not do, including wipe out animals that feed on us and take food that, if not taken, would be available for us to eat. 

If you want to understand a complex concept, it makes sense to try get a big pictures of the concept first, before you delve into the details.  If you want to understand a car, you should look at a car first, and watch one work.  Then you can see how the parts fit together to make a working car.  It is very hard to understand if you only deal with details and don’t know how it fits together.  Cars have tiny devices called ‘piston rings’ that perform very complex functions.  You could study these functions for years before fully understanding every different thing different piston rings do.  But knowing this won’t help you understand how the car works, if you have never seen a car.  It is useless information unless you can fit it into a big picture that makes sense.

Here, I want you to understand how the conditions of existence for humans came to be as they are today.  We need to know this because we have a lot of very serious problems to solve.  If we don’t know how we got where we are, we have no hope in solving these problems. 

The development of the brain components responsible for complex speech marks an enormous event in human history, possibly on a par with the ability to use fire.  These are the key events in our past, the ones that we have to understand if we are to understand where we are and where we can go from here.  We may not have exact information about all of the details, but we do have enough information to formulate theories that fit all of the information we have and have a very high likelihood of being eventually proven to be correct.  We don’t have to wait for this proof to use the theories to help us understand the big picture.

If we accept that the brain components responsible for complex speech developed about 70,000 years ago, we can make a lot of sense out of things that otherwise are pretty hard to see clearly or understand.  I think it makes sense to accept this as a working theory:  the difference between modern humans and the lower subspecies (homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens denisovan) is the ability to turn complex thoughts into the things we call ‘words,’ to communicate these ‘words’ to others through speech, to recognize sounds that are intended to be communication of ‘words’ when we hear them, and to translate these words back into thoughts in our minds.  

We can do these things.  We know this.  This is not a theory, it is a fact.  The theory is that the lower subspecies did not have these brain components or the abilities they bring.  The theory is that this is the most important difference between modern humans, the subspecies homo sapiens sapiens, and the suibspecies that existed before 70,000 BP.