The Shadow State 66 The Rise & Fall of the Dutch Empire

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0:17 to another Operation Gladio Meet Secret Societies with Warhamster Brady. How are you doing today, Brady? Wonderful. It's a Sunday fun day. So let's start having some fun. We already are. So as we talked last time we met, which I think was almost two weeks. Yeah, we missed Friday because very scheduling issues. I told you we're going to talk a little bit about the rise and fall of the Dutch Empire.

0:47 Why is that so important? Well, because you can see parallels of their rise and their fall. You can see the parallels with Rome. You can see the parallels with the British Empire. And you can see the parallels with today's American Empire. And I think the lessons learned are really important. We're going to finish with talking about the golden age of the Dutch Republic. It was an amazing period of time and inspired some of the greatest thinkers the world ever saw.

1:13 And we're going to end with a couple of philosophers. And we're doing this because it really sets the stage for the philosophers that would come afterwards. And, you know, the people that would influence the, I guess, the intellectual thought behind the current people who run the world today. Everything from, you know, Hegelian dialectic all the way down to the Fabian socialists. So I think it's really important to what we're doing today to really set a few things in place. Make sense? Yep.

1:44 Alright, for those of us somewhat new to our show, we've started out basically looking at how secret societies blend in with things like Operation Gladio and our entire international espionage, diplomacy, etc. We did a long bit of series on members of Skull and Bones and Skrull and Key and other secret societies and noticed how they just kept showing up in the strangest places of influence in history and it can't not just be a coincidence.

2:14 There's a lot more to it than that. Yep. Excuse me. So this is going to see some of the same patterns. So jump in there when you see them, and you're going to be able to draw these parallels left and right. Okay, with no further ado, let me get a screen share. Oops. Helpful if I hit the button. There we go. How many people do we have watching already? I don't know. I know it's on here somewhere. I don't know. Go ahead. Okay. So here we are in the Netherlands.

2:55 Let me go through a brief history of it, because I want to get to the good stuff later. Netherlands means the low countries. In that part of Europe, you have a bunch of countries that are sitting up there in the Alps, and they have mountains, and then you have the low countries down by the coast. You have the high countries and low countries. Make sense? Yep. The other low countries would be Belgium and Luxembourg. It is the largest, the Netherlands, of the four constituent countries that make up the kingdom of the Netherlands, and also includes Aruba, Curacao, and Saint-Martin.

3:25 in the Caribbean. And it is now considered a unitary monarchy. But, back in the Roman days, the Romans had made the division of this area between the upstream, which is Germania Superior, which you should be able to see here a little bit, and downstream, which they called Germania Inferior, which would be the Belgium and Netherlands. And it's this area right here. This is where Rome was fighting. Holland is actually the formal name.

3:58 But Holland is actually just a region in the Netherlands. A lot of Dutch object to being called Holland, so we don't use that name. It only represents two of the twelve provinces. So, history. Prehistory, the oldest human Neanderthal. That's their oldest human where they found Neanderthal traces about 150,000 years ago. It gets interesting around 800 BC, the Iron Age. You had the Celtic Halstatt culture. It became very influential. And iron ore.

4:28 that they mined there brought some prosperity to the region. So it's always been kind of a trading region. They had a deteriorating climate in Scandinavia from about 850 BC to 650, and that brought Germanic tribes to the region. These people would become the Friese and the Saxons. Now, if you've ever watched me and my other shows with Douglas B. Gibbs, he talks a lot about the Saxons and its influence on America and some of our ideals.

5:07 of individual liberty, equality, and all that stuff. It's a very, very strong Saxon influence on that. They didn't have tribal chiefs. They were pretty much equal on all decisions. So we get to the Roman era. I'll go back to that. We had the Gallic Wars, where the areas south and west of the Rhine were conquered by Julius Caesar in 57 BC. Augustus Caesar would then conquer the entirety of modern-day Netherlands.

5:43 It would incorporate it into the province of Germania Antiqua by 7 BC. You can sort of see, oops, going too far. This is kind of how they had it carved up at the time. It's a famous battle called the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. It basically was the Germanic peoples versus the Roman Empire. We've seen this played out in Hollywood a ton of times, like Gladiator. That was the fight that was going on there. Publius Quintilius and three legions.

6:22 We're fighting against a German general by the name of Arminius. Arminius was actually a Roman citizen and military trained by the Romans. He went back to Germany and led his people. And the battle changed history quite a bit. Basically, everything north of this area, south would be Roman Empire. And you get like Hadrian in the wall and everything like that. Everything north of it was these free states. And basically set the Rhine River as the fixed northern frontier of the Roman Empire.

6:53 Kind of a big deal. Kind of. We get to the early Middle Ages. It was about 411 A.D. to about 1000 A.D. The Roman government in the area had collapsed around 406 A.D. So the Franks came north and they would conquer and unite all the territories in the 490s. Big language differences between French and Dutch. That's where they sort of started crossing over and blending. You had what they call the Romance languages versus Germanic languages.

7:30 I don't know where English fits in. No one's ever given me a good explanation for that. Yeah, here we go. We've got the Saxons and the Magnifresia, and down here the Franks. So these are the major tribes of the time. This is 716 A.D. Okay. The Frankish Carolingian Empire, we know all about the Carolingians. They controlled much of Western Europe at the time.

8:03 And they split it into three regions in 843 AD. You had East, Middle, and West Francia. And the Netherlands was considered part of Middle Francia. Following me so far? Yep. Okay, we get to the High Middle Ages. It's about the year 1000 or about 1384. The Holy Roman Empire now rules much of the Low Countries. The Holy Roman Empire was ruled from several different places, from Rome itself.

8:34 from france and also from spain because of marriages of nobility that's kind of this the throne would shift a bit that period of time is known for continual war in the netherlands itself which is really swampy land uh just natural change in the climate started to um improve so they could actually do some farming there and they started to thrive a little bit more this of course leads to an increase in population towns grew around monasteries and castles

9:06 mercantile middle class begins to grow. We've heard that theme before, right? Yep. Okay, here's their more modern map. We have the Netherlands there, Belgium, Poland. Right there, that's the middle of Germany. Okay, so what's going on then? Okay, we've got the continual war. Then the Habsburgs come in. The Habsburg Empire would later become the Austrian Empire. Well, most of these fiefdoms up there were united.

9:46 in the Netherlands by a guy by the name of Philip the Good in 1433. The House of Valois Burgundy and the Habsburg heirs would rule these low countries until 1581. And at that point in time, the Dutch fleet defeats the Hanseatic League several times in sea battles. Amsterdam then becomes the primary trading port in Europe for the Baltic region grain. So pretty much from swamp little backwater to

10:21 one of the major players in global commerce pretty quickly right so how'd that happen i'm going to stop the screen share i don't have any other cool maps um so how'd that happen what's going on in the world so the renaissance hits us around 1350 to 1600. renaissance of course is the french word for rebirth began in italy and spread across europe and it peaked with the high renaissance of 1490 to 1527 in italy

10:55 really got its start in Florence, the city-state, and it would quickly spread to Venice, Rome, Milan, etc. Then the Renaissance, these ideas, would then spread to the Low Countries, meaning the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Spain. It swept across Europe pretty quickly. And what was the real core function of the Renaissance was this concept of humanism. It was a study of Roman and Greek texts.

11:25 Really understanding our history. The pioneers were a guy by the name of Petrarch and a guy named Erasmus of Rotterdam. The concept celebrated human potential, individual achievement, secular learning alongside faith. Pretty important concepts, right? Right. Pretty much the building blocks of what America was all about. Right. It's coming out of this time period. Art and architecture are exploding.

11:57 You can go to any museum and see that. We had scientific discoveries, everything from Da Vinci to Copernicus. And of course, it leads to the Age of Discovery, which we now know as the Age of Colonization. Guys like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, all came out of this time period. As they're building new and better ships, they're learning cartography, compasses invented, all those kind of things that make traveling the world

12:27 Much easier than it had ever been before. This is all during the Renaissance. And the Netherlands is right at the middle of that. One of the big things that happens was something called, in 1440, a guy by the name of Gutenberg comes along and invents the Gutenberg Press. Now, you've heard me talk about this before. We're living through Gutenberg 2.0. Right. I want to talk about that a little bit and why that matters. Prior to the Gutenberg Press, the powers that be held a monopoly on information.

13:02 you know the first son born son would inherit the land second born son would go to the church and the third born son would go to the army so you know you had the taxation power that was how you maintained your fiefdom you had the clergy which had a monopoly on the written word which basically was the bible only and nobody could read it besides the clergy and of course the military was there to enforce it so it really was a feudalistic society you know a three-legged stool they used to prop it up

13:32 Well, the Gutenberg Press changes that because people can now read for themselves. They can write to their cousins in other towns. And you can reinterpret the Bible. And you don't have to listen to what, you know, an inbred Catholic priest tells you. The first thing that Gutenberg really distributes was about 140 copies of the Gutenberg Bible. I say we're living through Gutenberg 2.0 because of the Internet. You know, if you look at after the Revolution of 1776, we...

14:07 The powers that be realized they'd lost their monopoly on information, and they wanted it back. They wanted to centralize control again. Throughout the 1800s, really, most communication was a telegraph, and that was pretty much a government-sponsored monopoly. Yes. We get to the 20th century, and we have the advent of radio, and shortly thereafter, the television.

14:35 and that was the sole way people were getting their news, and those were automatic monopolies, everything from RCA to the broadcast TVs, and the same was the case around Europe. The powers that be, the governments, had control over the means of communication, and the result in the 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history. To me, there's no coincidence there at all. I think there's a direct causation. Do you want to say anything on that before I go on? Well, just to relate it to Operation Gladio and your...

15:05 context of the telegraph. You have the Pony Express in America. You have the ITT Corporation, which we found throughout Operation Gladio controlling entire countries, telegraph and telephone when it gets fielded at scale, controlling

15:33 the entire communication process. So it kind of overlaps everything that you just said. They basically have either complicit ownership in these corporations or they have backdoor capabilities in these same entities that are being fielded to continue the control of information. Yeah, the Pony Express is a really good example.

16:03 It's really a nice little instrument of power if you know what everybody's reading and writing. And you're the one who tells them what the news is. So we get to today in the Internet. And of course, the Internet was a DARPA government creation, which they decided to give to everybody. And as you and I have talked about quite a bit, it was used as a tool to overthrow governments and to spread misinformation. This all changes in 2016 with Brexit.

16:32 We saw it at its worst during the Arab Spring. It was absolutely abundant. That was used for social media. That's when it exploded onto the scene. And obviously, most of the social media companies have a, shall we say, a little bit of a government, CIA connection. A little bit. Yeah. 2015 and 16, the Brexit vote was an absolute FU to the establishment. And that was purely a social media phenomena.

17:04 Same thing happened when Trump comes down the escalator. 2016 Trump revolution was absolutely social media driven. And what we see happen after that is the powers that be go into hyperspeed mode. And you don't hear him talking about freedom of speech so much as we need to protect everybody from misinformation. Yes. The censorship industrial complex explodes. And they're trying to make it so that we, you know, that the populism, we can't talk to each other. And the fact that you and I are sitting here on a Sunday with a great audience.

17:33 um tells us that we're winning they aren't going to be able to shut us up and that's because the internet is more powerful the genie got out of the bottle frankenstein's monster is unleashed so we are living through gutenberg 2.0 and if we execute this and keep getting the right information out we've got a chance to enter into a period of freedom the world has never seen before and if we fail we're going to live under the biggest feudalist you know one world government autocratic authoritarian system ever correct so

18:02 that's why we're doing this anything you want to add to that before i go on nope okay oh yeah interesting gutenberg didn't actually really invent all of the parts about the everything about the printing press china had already invented woodblock printing in the 7th century movable type was invented in china in 1040 using clay gutenberg just you know created a metal type cast uh used oil-based ink that could work with metal

18:28 I create a screw press from wine and oil for even pressure and then a hand mold for efficient tight production. And I know about what half of that means. But that was Gutenberg. He changed the world. Directly leads to the Protestant Reformation. And this is a big deal. It really starts in 1517 on Halloween, October 31st. A guy by the name of Martin Luther circulates his 95 theses in Germany. Some say he posted them up on church walls.

18:59 And basically what he's doing is he's challenging the Catholic Church's corrupt practices. And it was bad. The church was selling indulgences, meaning you can sin all you want. If you give enough money to the church, the priest will forgive you. It's a pretty corrupt practice. I don't remember the Bible saying anything about that. Right. They also had something going on called simony, which was the selling of church offices to the highest bidder.

19:32 which would obviously be the nobles. These are corrupt practices. The everyday person couldn't stand it, and that really led to the Protestant Reformation. A big part of that was got by the name of John Calvin, who lived from 1509 to 1564. So same time period. As he was growing up, it was right after Martin Luther circulated his thesis. Calvinism is still the main religion in the Netherlands. Basically, it institutes...

20:07 He said the institutes of... Okay, Calvin, some of the things he did is he basically systematized the Reformed theology. He stressed that God's sovereignty, predestination, and disciplined church life were the keys to happiness and salvation. Calvinism was spread to France, and they became what's known as the Huguenots. You know the history of the Huguenots. They basically were, you know, not quite as bad as the Israelites, but they went to a lot of different countries because of religious persecution.

20:39 And the Huguenots had a huge influence on revolutionary America. You also saw a lot of Calvin's teachings would end up in Scotland and they became the Presbyterians. And he also got it in the Netherlands, of course, because they're all Calvinist. And of course, it influenced Puritanism in England and in America. We went through skull and bones. We talked about the Puritans. And they were, I guess you call them a two-sided coin because, you know, the Puritan work ethic is a thing.

21:13 And the Puritans, most of the founders of a lot of the colonies here, and they were also, shall we say, not very tolerant of people that disagreed with them. And it was a very strict, you know, they burned teenage girls. This happened not too far from here. In fact, I've been to Salem recently. So that's Puritanism. It's got a good side and a bad side. Agreed? Yes.

21:47 this reformation also accelerates the rise of what became the nation states. And what would happen is if you're a little prince with a little fiefdom, you would adopt Protestantism so you could seize Catholic church lands and assert independence from the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope. And that's popping up all over Europe at the time. That's all really started with Martin Luther. One of the big ones was Henry VIII of England.

22:20 He broke with Rome in 1530 AD for political reasons, mainly because he wanted his marriage annulled, and the Catholic Church wouldn't do it. So he said, okay, I'll create my own church, and I'll divorce my wife. Anglicanism would involve blending Protestant and Catholic elements. That would be the Anglican Church that most of our founding fathers and the original colonists came here to get away from it.

22:52 Because the Anglican church just put the, oh, I don't know, we'll just make the king, you know, the spokes, the mouth of God. All right, this leads us to the rise of Venice, Flores, the Medici's and the banking system that we talked about last time. The Netherlands at this time, this is 1568. Philip II of Spain is the Holy Roman Emperor. And the Dutch people revolt and start what's called the Eighty Years' War. It's a long war. It's actually about four wars.

23:33 This is mostly done at sea, and it's about conquering, you know, trade ships, etc. But the Dutch are now spreading their wings. Last from 1568 to 1648, the causes are listed as reformation, which we just talked about, centralization, excessive taxation, and of course the Dutch nobility wanted to get more privileges. In 1581, the Dutch

24:06 Pass and it's called the act of abduration which established the Calvinist dominated Dutch Republic and Dutch colonialism would begin We'll talk a little bit more about the Dutch Golden War, but there's a few other battles going on at the time Something called the Thirty Years War begins the 1640s. That was basically everyone in Europe fighting each other Starts out as religious conflict, but it turns into a brutal power struggle involving almost the entire continent First World War maybe

24:42 You know, we talk about the European disease of wanting to, you know, spreading their ideology all over the world as they colonize everything. It's a way of thinking that's dominated Europe for quite some time. And of course, they probably got it from their Roman forefathers. But this war devastated large parts of Central Europe. And some of those areas have never recovered economically. Cognitive nomad. Cognitive nomad. So if she floats like a duck, she's a witch. Yeah, I love Monty Python too.

25:17 He also says, wasn't Philip II also the one who permitted banned Templars to reskin their identities? Or is that Portugal? I'm not sure. So I'm going to look that up. Let me know. I don't have that in my notes. You know that one, Colonel? No. Okay, so about 8 million people die in the Thirty Years' War due to war, famine, and disease. We've got a couple of plagues thrown in there. It's not exactly the best time to be a peasant. That would end with what's known as the Peace of Westphalia.

25:50 We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Well, let's talk about it now. Because there's a couple of treaties that came out of it. There was a Treaty of Munster, which was between the Holy Roman Empire and France and her allies. And there was a Treaty of Onesbruck, which was between the Holy Roman Empire and Sweden and her allies, including the Netherlands. One of the big things that came out of that is it allowed Calvinists the same rights as Lutherans and Catholics. Go figure. It also confirmed a concept.

26:21 Known as Curis Regio Aes Religio. And that word basically means whoever rules land determines religion. I think the British had something to do with that. It also granted, this is a big one here, it granted individuals limited rights of worship and immigration. So if you live under an oppressive religious regime, you have the right to immigrate elsewhere. That was not the case previous to that. Can you imagine? You're stuck. Yeah.

26:59 That treaty also had a bunch of territorial changes. France gained a bunch of land. Sweden gained a bunch of land, and they got access to a bunch of Baltic and North Sea ports, and that's going to matter. Prussia, which would become Germany, gained a bunch of territory. Of course, the Dutch Republic and Switzerland were both formally recognized as independent states. That's the Peace of Westphalia, and we're going to come back to that. During all this,

27:28 There's also something going on called the Dutch-Portuguese War, which is said to have gone from 1598 to 1663. So here's these lowland Dutch, you know, 12 provinces joined together to form a republic. And within seven years, or around a decade or so, they're all over the world declaring war on the world's great maritime powers. And they did that because, you know, they had better and faster ships.

27:57 They had ships that could carry more cargo. They could beat everyone by costs because they could ship more at each time. They were also absolutely brutal colonists, the Dutch were. Yes. So, and we'll get into this more. The Dutch East India Company, the Dutch West India Company was basically fighting against Iberian Union and then the Portuguese Empire after 1640. Iberia was an area that became split up in terms of

28:27 between Spain and Portugal later on. You had private companies declaring war against sovereign navies and winning. They're basically pirates with a market. They're traders first, but they did a little piracy on the side and, you know, a little conquest never hurt. It goes back to your whole distinction between pirates and traders was a letter.

29:01 of marquee yep yeah that's exactly right uh this is also known as the spice war the dutch are basically trying to take over the entire spice trade in the uh east indies which we now call like indonesia in those areas the spice islands yes the dutch would eventually get a monopoly on this trade and one of my favorite stories about that is that's also settled what's now known as manhattan and everyone talks about they basically bought it from the indians for a bunch of beads well

29:32 one of the islands in the east indies and i should have written this down um had a pretty good production of nutmeg and um the english had that island so basically the english british empire traded the netherlands that island for manhattan correct i don't know who got the better end of the deal so this sets us up for what's known as the golden age of the dutch republic which is basically from 1588 to 1672 the almost 100 year run

30:02 The Dutch Republic is formed in 1588, the United Provinces of the Netherlands. It is formed as a confederation, just as the United States was under the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation. It's an important term. We talk about states' rights. That's because we're a confederation. We're a union of sovereign states. Well, so was the Dutch Republic. Now, we've become a national government since Lincoln, but that's a different conversation, right?

30:34 Okay, so this golden age where the Dutch are the most richest and powerful people on the planet is pretty interesting. Of course, the Dutch Republic actually lasted until 1795, 200 years of decline. In 1795, it would fall to what's called the Batavian Revolution. But at their peak, this tiny little area of population of only 2 million people ruled the world. They invented capitalism.

31:03 They invented the stock market, the corporation, the initial public offering. They invented the central bank. They took everything they learned from Venice and the Di Medici's and turned it into a central bank. So, gotta love the Dutch, right? They also became the very first global reserve currency. The Gilder was the reserve currency and people used it because they trusted its value.

31:32 That was one of the key reasons they were able to be dominant in the world stage. They had better banking. They had this corporate structure to pool money. Even if you were trading it between Paris and London, you'd use the guilder as the exchange because it was stable. It's a very powerful thing to be the reserve currency. And we'd see that later on when the British pound would take over as a reserve currency. And when they stepped aside after World War II.

31:59 You know, we set up the dollar as the reserve currency, and that's allowed us to be the global hegemon for quite some time. They also built the most valuable company in human history. It's called the VOC or the Dutch East India Company. The command of the seas, this small little area of two million people, they had planted their flag on every populated continent on the earth and handled at their peak one third of all global trade. Want to repeat that? Go ahead.

32:36 Because I don't think most people understand the underpinnings of how these empires are created. Yeah, not just by military force. Correct. Especially once we start getting into this period of time, 14, 1500s, you know, being a mercantile empire was very powerful. And you're seeing the fading away of the land-based empires.

33:10 And that's probably why Russia didn't, you know, rise faster for many reasons because they didn't have access to most of the world's, you know, ports and seas. Okay, so how did they get there? How did they become so powerful? So by 1602, the Dutch companies were sailing and trading around the world. Small trading companies have been doing commerce in the East Indias. They were pirates. They were doing the spices. But they're burning each other out with competition. You know, they're trying to squeeze every penny out of it.

33:43 And when they bring their goods back to Europe, you've got competition. So the prices are going down and down, and the profits are just disappearing. So seven of these companies get together and they merge into the VOC, which is the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch West India Company would form a little bit later, and that's basically the Caribbean trade. Most of that was slave trade. The Dutch were brutal slave traders, and they were also brutal colonists down in Africa. The Afrikaners.

34:14 In South Africa, we're Dutch. Of course, with all their wars with the British, that changed hands a few times. This company then, this private company known as the VOC, was given a government charter. They could negotiate treaties. They could raise armies. They could coin money. So you want to talk about our multinational corporations being powerful? The VOC says, hold my beer.

34:48 This is basically taking the entire S&P 500 and putting it under one leadership, under one company corporate arm. And the maximum value of the Dutch East India Company would be today's equivalent of $7.9 trillion, which is more than the market cap of, I believe, the 420 biggest companies in America, all concentrated in one company. What could go wrong? So let me also.

35:20 just kind of tie it into the stay-behind units. The Boers were basically the Afrikaners, Conners, however you want to pronounce that. The Boer wars between the Brits and the Boers that were located in the southern part of Africa, the Boers are Dutch colonists.

35:48 During the First Boer Wars, they used the stay-behind unit concept to defeat a much superior British force that was deployed down there. So that just kind of ties in all of the information between the two subjects. And the Boers were tough as nails, as were their Dutch ancestors. These are really tough people. You come from Saxon blood.

36:19 Very, very intelligent, very resourceful, innovative, and tough as nails. It is a history to be respected. Yes. The very first public shares are issued, so everyday people can buy shares in this giant company. And the Dutch stock market opens, and other companies start rising up. None of them anymore close to the Dutch East India Company. But basically, they invented the modern corporation and the stock market in one fell swoop.

36:52 Think Jekyll Island changed the world? This one did even more. At its peak, the VOC would employ 50,000 people and run over 150 ships plus another 40 or 50 warships. And it's a company, not a country. Yeah. The country is a confederation of about 12 different provinces run by the principalities or other nobles. And they may be shareholders.

37:23 Or they may be able to tax the British East India Company, but the boardroom, the VOC, is what's making the decisions. Yes. It's absolutely a boardroom, not a palace. So critical to this conversation. Because that's kind of what we're morphing into. Obviously, what we're morphing into, we talk about the superclass, or you call it the international syndicate. It's just the same thing on an international scale. But the international syndicate is an international scale.

37:54 the birth of it yes that's the critical piece yeah but back then it was on a national scale that were operating internationally now it's on an international scale that the governance is all over the world yes although there are some centers of specific influence dc new york city of london uh oh i'd say we'd probably have to bring sweden in there and of course uh brussels

38:25 Yeah, they still have an outsized voice compared to their population. Okay, so their expansion was violent and genocidal. That's kind of a problem. There's something called the Jakarta Massacre. What's going on is they're going to these spice islands and they're forcing the people to cultivate the spices that they want instead of the food that they need to grow. Correct. What could possibly go wrong?

38:56 And of course, you get the resulting famines and poverty and violent uprisings, etc. And the Dutch were not really very nice to people that revolted. But that is so critical to this whole conversation, because that's what we found in South America. And that's what we found all over the world. When you force production.

39:20 of your desired resource it makes the population dependent on your imports into that population for survival food and it makes them go ahead I was gonna say yeah it's extraction of resources not value creation it's a two totally different model you know yeah so you have you have indigenous populations that can survive based on the allocation of

39:51 the resources internal to and you're talking about indonesia but the more they come in and colonize and force out the survival capability of the population and make them dependent upon the overlords um they you you basically have captured that population and you can control it because it's now captured 100 and we've seen a model play out over and over again and it's still happening today you know that's

40:22 The memes may change a little bit. Yeah, that's what was going on in Guatemala, right? So United Fruit goes down there and confiscates all of that land through corrupt land deals, and they want to extract the bananas. But by doing that, you take away the locals' capability to produce their own food. We did the exact same thing after we overthrew Mossadegh in Iran. And then you make the population dependent on your...

40:49 trade into that country because they can no longer sustain life based on their own agricultural products amen so you have a system that's based on monopoly monopolist monopolistic uh power the use of force extraction instead of value creation how do you think that's going to hold up if any real competition enters the world stage

41:14 So what else is going on here? The Bank of Amsterdam is the world's first central bank. It was created in 1609 and basically what it did is it offered merchants a fixed stable value currency. The Gilder becomes the global default reserve currency and Amsterdam is now the financial capital of the world. Their stock exchange called the Bourse opens in 1611 and they're trading very sophisticated contracts like they're trading futures, options, forwards, commodities.

41:45 everything short selling exists they're trading on margin uh they got sophisticated counting techniques um they're trading insurance contracts yeah would we talk about lloyds of london with insurance contracts they didn't start it the dutch started it you know basically insuring a ship that's going to get back with its cargo and people are trading and investing on that and speculating and you're busting another myth here tell us again when that central bank was created

42:15 1609. And a lot of people are on the internet all day talking about Sweden was the first central bank. Their central bank was not created until 1668. There's a comment in the chat about tulips. Yeah, this is when the tulip mania happens, where this little flower becomes more valuable by gold by a long shot. And like every mania, it went...

42:44 Prices went up like this and came down even faster. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the tulip mania, but if you guys ever want to get a really good lesson in how markets can be completely distorted by frenzies and mania, that's what you want to look up. The Dutch tulip mania. So their ships were totally innovative. It's called the float, and it had a fatter belly, and it could carry more cargo. Huge competitive advantage. Remember I said it was really a swamp land back then?

43:18 Well, the Dutch engineers are figuring out how to drain the land. A lot of the Netherlands is below sea level. And they've got all kinds of real... I mean, this goes back 400 years. They learned how to basically engineer their land. They built this thing called a polder, which helped with drainage. They had windmills popping up everywhere. We laugh at windmills now, but back then it was a source of pumping water, grinding grain, powering sawmills to build ships. This is a big deal. Their whole canal system.

43:50 Exactly. I mean, this is being done without electricity or power tools. So, again, very impressive and innovative people. We talked about the Renaissance inventions, the telescope, the microscope come out. Guys like Rembrandt, the arts and all the philosophers. Now, we're going to come back to the philosophers at the end. But I think that's one of the most important parts about this. Were there secret societies in the Netherlands in this golden age? Not really. The Rosicrucians were there.

44:21 That started in Germany and spread to the Netherlands by the 1620s. Is that a secret society or an academic circle at the time? We ask that because a lot of Rosicrucians were studying alchemy and hermetic thought. There are some connections there to secret societies, but it really isn't evident in the Golden Age of the Netherlands. No Freemasons existed. There's no real evidence of that until the 1730s, so after the Golden Age.

44:51 So this is not really a secret society-based story. I looked. I couldn't find it. So what happened? Obviously, they're still not the most powerful country in the world. Well, first of all, the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, became too big. As we've seen with these dynastic families, the next generation probably isn't as hungry as the generation that performed the wealth, right? Let's say three generations to poverty.

45:20 One generation to build it, the second to, I don't know, expand upon it, the third one to blow all the money. That's exactly what's going on. And this company now has an army of bureaucrats. And it's this far-flung empire that could not be centrally planned. It was way too big. They didn't have, you know, global communications. The senior officials become corrupt. They start cooking the books.

45:48 They even had a name for the corruption. It was so systemic, it was called, I'm going to try to pronounce this right, Kenevelarij. It's K-N-E-V-E-L-A-R-I-J. I don't know how to say it, but there was the Dutch word for systemic corruption, and it was everywhere. And this corrupt system of graft, it almost became a parallel economy. All the corporate reports are doctored.

46:16 The central board has no idea what the real numbers are because they're getting lied to by all of their underlings. But the company keeps paying dividends to the shareholders. And since they don't have as much money coming in because it's all being stolen and looted, they start borrowing money to fool the shareholders. And they go to the central bank. And the central bank's more than happy to keep lending them money because they can't afford for the VOC to go down. Because that's basically the heartbeat of their entire power source.

46:47 So basically, the exact same system you're seeing in the United States today with our $38 trillion in debt. That's what's going on in the Netherlands. That's how they're fading. They started robbing themselves. They were bankrupt for years, but the company was kept alive, but just by political connections. The debt got over to over 100 million guilders. And I don't even know how big a number that is today, but I think it's just around the same size as our national debt. And of course,

47:19 Now we've got a decrepit, aging, maritime, corporate empire. And what happens? Competition shows up. Really in the 18th century, a little bit before that, and it's the British East India Company. The French had something called the Compagnie des Indes, East India Company. And spice demand is weakening in Europe. What else is going on is you have the Industrial Revolution in England.

47:49 And they were 50 years ahead of everyone else in the Industrial Revolution, gave them a huge advantage in shipbuilding and stuff and cannons and all that. In 1688, and we're going to have to talk about this next week, but there's something that happened in England called the Glorious Revolution or the Bloodless Revolution. Basically, it was a bunch of the lords and merchant princes got the British king to abdicate without too much blood and replaced him on the throne.

48:18 was William and Mary, William of Orange. Obviously, he's Dutch. So now you've got a Dutchman sitting on the throne in London. He brought a bunch of his ideas with him about banking and about trade and about stock exchange. And it gets implemented in England and they adapt it very, very quickly. And now the Dutch Republic has real competition. Amsterdam has stopped producing.

48:51 Anything, it becomes just a hub of pure financial speculation. City of London, Wall Street, all in one place in Amsterdam. What happens when a country stops producing its own goods? They go downhill fast. So these financial speculators, they need something to invest in. And the smart ones realize that these Dutch companies are all getting ready to go bankrupt. So they start investing money into British government bonds.

49:26 merchants are subsidizing their competition. And they wanted the interest rate from the British pound was paying good interest. So as you might imagine, a bunch of wars with Great Britain break out. And they last for about 130 years, starting in 1652. How are we doing on time? Pretty good? Yeah. The first Anglo-Dutch wars in 1652-54, it happens after the British Navigation Act of 1651 required all goods to London to be on English ships.

50:00 The Dutch said, no, no, no, no, no, you got to take our ships, so we're going to fight a war over it. Nobody really wins, but England emerges with that Navigation Act intact. So Amsterdam no longer is the global hub, it's got competition. They would fight more wars in the 1660s and 1670s, two more wars. Probably militarily it was a draw, but there's a lot of economic losses. It made their markets unstable and produced a ton of debt in the Netherlands and in England.

50:40 This would continue, again, up until 1784. There's a real famous incident in 1776 in a place called St. Eustatius Island in the Caribbean. 1776, what else happened that year? Well, this has something to do with St. Eustatius. It's a Dutch trading hub, and pretty much all the goods are going straight through there to the Americas. That was the financial lifeline of the American Revolution. Yeah, that's right. It was the Dutch.

51:12 They were already on their way down, but they were still a world power. They were past peak, but still strong enough, basically, without them. They talk about how France and Russia helped the American Revolution. The Dutch are equally as responsible, basically just getting us our weapons and selling all kinds of goods. They sold arms to the colonials. What happened with St. Eustatius, the Dutch were the very first people to recognize the American flag, and the Brits caught a Dutch ship.

51:43 Which had with papers about the treaty negotiations. Because the Dutch were going to sign treaties with the new American country. And of course the British don't like that. So they attack this weakened Dutch fleet. They capture over 200 Dutch cargo ships. And the shipping lanes from that day forward were dominated by the British Empire. That's because the Dutch were helping the American Revolution. That was the final blow. The Brits were strangling the Dutch economically by cutting their trade routes. The VOC even weakened.

52:14 state by 1781 suspended payment on its outstanding debts at no revenue bank of amsterdam got caught completely naked i've been extending credit to the voc secretly people start hearing about this they get runs on the banks they start demanding gold and silver for their guilders and the bank's reserve ratio goes from 97 to less than 30 percent the gilder loses its reserve status in less than three years

52:46 By 1784, the bank's insolvent with debt to GDP of greater than 250%, and the British pound becomes the new reserve currency. The VOC would dissolve in 1799, and the Bank of Amsterdam would be wound down by 1819, as if it never existed. The Dutch Republic ends in 1795, and shortly thereafter, Napoleon would make the Dutch a French colony.

53:23 As I said earlier, it's a kingdom. What did I call it at the beginning? It is a good name for it. No, I can't find it. But it is some kind of kingdom with constitutional rule. Right. Okay, so that's kind of your history. But I wanted to talk about the philosophers because they really influenced the people we're going to talk about next. And there's two in particular that jump off the page. I'm trying to decide which order I want to do this in. It's very interesting.

53:59 It's very interesting that what you just said about the 1776 and the revolution in America basically kind of the pivot point, not that they weren't already on the decline, but the escalation, if you will, of the destruction.

54:27 of what was one of the key um uh competition to the british empire yeah and you know what's funny is we know a lot more about the british empire and um oh yeah i forgot i was going to give an apology in advance you know i'm not a theologian and i'm not i'm not i don't have any dutch ancestry so i'm giving a high level overview so people who really know these topics better than i do feel free to correct me i'm just trying to give a really broad because yeah

54:59 Because this is history that has been, you wouldn't say it's been hidden, but it's not contextualized at a strategic level. And that's what you're doing. We're not talking tactical level specific things. You're looking at a very strategic level of this evolution that has been left out of normal day.

55:26 um conversation that when you understand from a strategic level these different periods of time and properly crediting the creations of these different things like your point about the central blank bank the corporations and stuff like that it becomes critically important to understand that lineage and properly credit

55:51 where it came from. Because then when you do get to periods like 1776 and you understand that the revolution in the United States, to your point, everyone talks about the French and the Russians, they don't talk about the Dutch. And to me, what they leave out is always more important than what they put in.

56:22 Yeah, I was just going to make the point that, you know, when you saw the British Empire take over for the Dutch, they copied a lot of the best practices of the Dutch and then added their own little English flavor to it. There's a comment in chat from a few minutes ago from Gonzo Johnny says to me, it's just powers jumping ship from Dutch to English to USA. Well, Gonzo Johnny, I think we're done here because that's the entire point. You got it. That really is it.

56:49 That's why we're telling this story, because America is making the same damn mistakes. And I don't want the American empire to fail. I guess I may or do want the American empire to fail, but I don't want the United States and what it's supposed to be based on to go away and be taken over by some monstrosity that they're trying to inflict upon us. That's the whole reason we do this. Yes. Yeah, the tactics, these patterns keep happening over and over again. They steal the ideas from their predecessor. Okay, let's share a screen and talk about some philosophy now.

57:22 I've decided I want to start with the one I don't like first. That's always a good place to start. Yep. Ever heard of Baroque Spinoza? I've heard of Spinoza, but I don't remember where. Well, we're going to hear a lot about him today. Okay. He was born in 1632 and lived for 45 years. He grew up in Amsterdam. He was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community for his radical views.

58:00 One of the real reasons the Dutch had so many great thinkers during the Renaissance is they allowed religious freedom. And people from all over Europe that were basically feeling like their religion was being impinged upon went to places like Amsterdam, or we'll call the Netherlands now. And so you did get some bright Jewish minds. You had all kinds of different Protestants. But that's one of the main reasons. It was this infusion of new thoughts, new ideas, new blood.

58:30 different ideas all coming together that made the Dutch so successful. So Spinoza, I don't know if that's a portrait or not. It's a picture I found of him on Wikipedia. He gets excommunicated by the Amsterdam's Jewish community because he had really, really radical views according to them. And let me give this apology again. I'm not going to go too deep in this philosophy. I studied this stuff in college, but that's three decades ago.

59:01 So there are going to be philosophers out there that tell me I miscommunicate some of this stuff. So we're getting into philosophy. We're only going to go so deep because we're just trying to show you how it leads to our broader narrative. But what's so radical about Spinoza? Well, he questioned the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of God. He said, did God really choose Israel? Now that's absolute blasphemy. He was arguing for a pantheistic view of God in politics.

59:34 And I'll give you some of his quotes here in a second. But it was so bad that he was excommunicated. You were not even allowed to speak about him or to him. So this guy's a bit of a maverick. He's the guy that developed what's called a comprehensive rationalist system. That sounds good, right? Rationalism can be taken to some very, very bad directions. He publishes something in 1670.

1:00:09 called the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. When he died in 1677, some of his contemporaries published a bunch of his works together and posthumously published his most famous book, which is just called Ethics, in 1677. What did he talk about? He talked about pantheistic view of God, immaterialism, everything within nature. There is no transcendent realm. So he's kind of denying the divine nature of everything. He was influenced.

1:00:42 by René Descartes, who was living in the Netherlands, a Jewish philosopher named Maimonides, and really listened to a lot of the ancient Greek writings, the Christoics and the Epicureans. Now, I like Epicurus, but the Epicureans took it too far. Why is he important? Why is all the stuff he talked about important? Who did he influence? Well, let me give you a quote. Well, I'll do the quote last. The first person who really cites Spinoza as his influence.

1:01:16 was gotten in the name of George William Frederick Hegel. That's probably where I heard the name. There's your mic drop. Yeah, Hegelian dialectic was influenced by Spinoza. Hegel regarded Spinoza as foundational to his entire belief system. And he would say, you are either a Spinozist or you're not a philosopher at all. Kind of a big deal. Hegel would also adopt Spinoza's monism.

1:01:50 but critiqued it for lacking subjectivity, and here it comes, and dialectical movement. He transformed Spinoza's static substance into a dynamic historical absolute spirit, and this is what led to what became known as German Idealism, and this is where you get the master race. And a lot of the things that came out of the Prussian education system all came from Hegel, which all came from Spinoza.

1:02:24 We're going to talk a lot more about Hegel next week, but just know that he came from Spinoza. We talk about Hegel pretty much every week, don't we? Yeah, in one way or another. You want to give new listeners just a brief 30,000-foot view of what the Hegelian dialectic always is? Because you describe it well. Well, and without using their terms, I describe it as basically creating...

1:02:53 embraces the strategy of tension, which is another name. It creates a polar opposite effect. And it's both, and obviously in today's terminology, it's best described as a left and a right venue, which is both created by the same controlling power. You pit those two against each other, which creates then the proverbial third way that then

1:03:22 you know, in my terminology, it's like electrical probes that shock a population from an extreme left and an extreme right into the middle so they can manipulate the masses.

1:03:38 And it's all fake. It's all created in order to manipulate people psychologically, economically, militarily, so that you end up with a controlled, terrorized population. And only when that happens are they susceptible to the psychological operations that then push the agenda of the international syndicate.

1:04:07 Yeah, Hedlum himself would have called it, what you just described, he said it's synthesis, I'm sorry, thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis. And the term I like using is manufactured crisis, where they need you to be afraid of something. And we've lived through two great examples. This is what the climate alarmist movement was. We're going to be so afraid that the earth's going to die on us, we need to become a communist. They did the same thing with COVID, the hysteria behind COVID.

1:04:37 It was a manufactured crisis. It was a very bad flu. It didn't need to shut down economies. And they did that on purpose to gain power. They do it always to gain power, to keep inching further down the field. And the goal has always been the one world government. And that's what comes from thinkers like Spinoza. Yes. Let's do some quick Spinoza quotes real quick.

1:05:07 All right, on God, nature, and reality, what he calls pantheism. He says, God and nature are one and the same thing. Whatever is, is in God. And without God, nothing can be or be conceived. So this is not an atheist. He's just redefining the nature of man and God. He's basically, people take these ideas and you get to, eventually we get to Malthus.

1:05:34 And the people of the depopulation agenda. And these one world government type people. When they talk about depopulation. They're basically trying to make man God. This is the anti-humanist movement. It's also known as technocracy. Or transhumanism. And it's here today. These people are not joking around. They are trying to replace the almighty. It says the more we understand particular things. The more we understand God. Knowledge is our new religion. That's where that comes from.

1:06:07 Talks about freedom, reason, and emotion. He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return. Freedom is the power to act according to reason, not according to passion. On religion and scripture, he says, the purpose of scripture is not to teach philosophy, but to teach obedience and piety. Piety, excuse me. Faith and reason are two different spheres that do not overlap. Let that one sink in. Excuse me.

1:06:51 I'm enjoying a mimosa this morning. Sunday. On nature and society, he said all things excellent are as different as they are rare. Desire is the very essence of man. On politics and the state, he says the end of the state is peace and security of life. Therefore, the best state is that in which men live in harmony.

1:07:28 In a free state, every man may think what he likes and say what he thinks. The sovereign power in a state has a right over a subject only in proportion to the excess of its power over that of the subject. His most famous iconic quotes are, I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, nor to scour in human actions, but to understand them. If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past. Well, that's pretty smart. I agree with that. The guy's not a complete moron by any stretch, right?

1:08:03 But it's the way his words were twisted by others where it got dangerous. The world is not created for man. Man is created for the world. Not sure I like that. So who else was he influencing on? Oh, the guy by the name of Karl Marx. Oh, yeah. Marx engaged deeply with both Spinoza and Hegel. Marx would then invert Hegel's idealism into materialistic dialectics. And he took Spinoza's.

1:08:39 ideas and turn it into materialism and atheism. So that's where we said his ideas can get spun in a different direction. Well, you got Hegel and Marx, or two of his most famous disciples. And this came, you know, it's one of the great thinkers of the Dutch Golden Age. A woman by the name of Rebecca Goldstein described him as, this is a quote, the renegade Jew who gave us modernity. So the modernity is one of his key principles.

1:09:12 Of the Fabian socialists. They thought they were modern thinkers. And could cast off the shackles of past values. And basically. Rebecca Goldstein says. He is the one who started modernism. So there you go people. Baruch Spinoza. Our anti-hero of the day. What do you think Colonel? That's crazy. Yeah. And it should be a household name. Because here's this guy 400 years ago. Or more.

1:09:47 Give or take. His ideas, written with a quill, would shape pretty much everything we live through today. He's one of the major shapers. And he's standing right in the heart of the Dutch Renaissance and their golden age of the Dutch Republic. So there's another great thinker from that time period. You know who Hugo Grotius is? No. People, if you don't know or love Hugo Grotius right now, you will in 10 minutes. He is...

1:10:18 He's on my personal Mount Rushmore. Born 1853. I'll get to that. Why do we care about Hugo? Born 1583. Lived till 1645. So those two overlap by a little bit. He's still teaching until 1645. And when Spinoza is a teenager. So Spinoza grows up reading Grotius. His real name is actually Hugo de Groot. So very Dutch.

1:10:51 You look at his Wikipedia entry and it describes him as a Dutch humanist, diplomat, a lawyer, a theologian, a jurist, a statesman, a poet, and a playwright. Kind of a Renaissance guy, yeah? He is the man who shaped the nature of how all nations interact with each other. He became known as the father of international law. Let that sit there for a second.

1:11:28 Kind of a big deal, yeah? Yeah. So how'd he get there? Well, he was a teenage prodigy who was educated at a place called Leiden University. His radical thinking got him in trouble, and he gets imprisoned in a place called Lovenstein Castle for his involvement in controversies over religious policy in the Dutch Republic. So the Dutch Republic wasn't all that free. They put free thinkers in jail.

1:11:57 I was going to say, how do you get imprisoned in what is supposed to be the free thought area? You piss off the powers that be. He became considered an enemy of the state. So he escapes. And it's kind of a cool story how he did it. His wife, for months, had been smuggling books in a chest to him, or smuggling books out of the castle. Many other guards would check to see the books. And they'd take his chest.

1:12:30 And she'd go home, come back a week later. After several weeks of this, she shows up with an empty chest. Hugo, Grotius, climbs in the chest. The guards even carry him down to the docks. He sails across the water and goes into exile in France for most of the rest of his life. Wow. So it's going on at the same time as the 30-year war. Did I talk about that a little bit earlier? A little bit.

1:12:59 Okay, this is just an absolutely brutal war all through Europe. Eight million people died, I did talk about it. And the brutality of that war just shocked his conscience. I mean, he's absolutely, he's seen this, he goes, this is awful. Mankind cannot treat each other in such a way. And so he writes a book, which made him the father of international law, and it's called De Jure Belli et Si Passis, which means On the Law of War and Peace, published in 1625.

1:13:30 This lays the foundations for what we now know as natural law. Hugo Grosch's people created natural law. He had something called the just war theory. And we'll get to that in a minute. But what he wrote, this is a quote, he says, I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all and carried on without any reference of law.

1:14:02 divine or human. What this book did is it placed legal handcuffs on the kings and generals of Europe. Think about that. Changed the morality of war altogether. He crafted an argument that destroyed the concept of what was always the case before, might makes right. He is the guy who got rid of that. His book. He writes, war is not a playground for glory. It is a legal procedure. He goes on to say there are only three just reasons to go to war.

1:14:40 Tell me if you agree with this or not. Self-defense, recovery of stolen property, or to punish a crime. Conquest and glory are not valid reasons. They are crimes. Well, I wish somebody would have listened to him. Well, we did, to some degree. Okay. I mean, we do have rules. We'll get into more with some of the stuff you created, but this is a great man we're looking at.

1:15:09 I know, but that's what I'm saying. How many wars of conquest have we been baited into? I mean, let's look at the entire 20th century. Yes, that's my point. I mean, what did he say was legitimate use of war? He said self-defense, recovery of stolen property, or to punish a crime. Yes. Do any of those apply to Iran?

1:15:41 Maybe. Of course, we haven't declared war the way war is understood today. Again, I've talked about this a bit, but we need to redefine what a war is because we live in the age of fifth generation warfare. China's been fighting a war against us, an information war for decades. Iran, too, through their networks and stuff like that. And we've been doing the same to other countries. Just because a war is not declared doesn't mean you're not fighting a war. We don't need tanks and battleships anymore. We fought a war against mainland China for 40 years using proxies. So he writes another book.

1:16:14 And this one's called Jus in Bella, which means the law in war. This is what forced people. Formally, the entire civilized world had to now distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Now that's pretty much followed to this day. That's crazy. He argued against the use of poisons and assassination. He argued for prisoners' rights, which we now have. He would hate the CIA as much as I do.

1:16:52 Yeah, I would say so. We could have used him on a couple of those committees. Yeah. The Catholic Church banned his teachings and his books because they wanted to continue to be the gatekeeper of morality. There's a king, Adolphus of Sweden, who did quite a bit of conquering on his own. He carried a copy of this book, Jus in Bella, with him at all times. And Adolphus created the world's first really disciplined professional army that didn't just rape, pillage, and plunder. And these are good things.

1:17:23 I mean, war is bad, but if you're going to fight it, can we at least have some rules to protect the innocent? Right. Well, that all comes from Grotius. Great, great man. He's not done yet. He also wrote another book called Mare Libra, which translates to free seas. Maritime law, where outside your border, outside your coast, like six miles, becomes international water. That's who you are, Grotius. That's where it came from. Now, of course.

1:17:57 He had some incentive to do that because the Dutch East India Company wanted there to be order on the open seas. Right? Right. So he basically formalized all that into a book, gets shared all over Europe, and people pretty much followed this in a short period of time thereafter, except for, you know, of course, when the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch were losing their letters of mark to steal each other's trade. But besides that, the free seas were free.

1:18:27 So philosophically, what he did is he secularized natural law by arguing that moral principles exist independently of religion or divine command. That's a core belief in humanism, and it is not exclusive of Christianity in any way, shape, or form, if you understand the way he wrote it. I would like to consider myself a humanist. So who were his influences? Well, natural law thinkers.

1:19:01 like Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez. We can go into detail on them. People, you want to look up some great thinkers, look up Thomas Aquinas, A-Q-U-I-N-A-S, and another one named Francisco Suarez. He also studied the Stoics and the classical Roman ideas of universal reason. He also understood the practical realities of the time, especially the Dutch trade and colonial expansion, and they required rules for international commerce and conflict. It was too chaotic.

1:19:36 He said, let's put some order to this if you're going to do it. So who did he influence? Well, how about Enlightenment figures like my all-time favorite, John Locke? John Locke lists Hugo Grotius as his number one influence. John Locke was probably the biggest inspiration, one of the two biggest inspirations for the Founding Fathers. I've got a little bit of a grudge with Thomas Jefferson because when he wrote Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,

1:20:11 He was lifting that from John Locke's quote, which was life, liberty, and property. Had you kept property in there, these people today, these Marxists, would not be able to say, oh, I'm a stakeholder. Now you have property. If our government exists to protect private property, as opposed to your pursuit of happiness, we would have much better property protections. All this stuff, this Marxist socialist stuff that's happening in our country could have been stopped if Jefferson had just listened to Locke and said property.

1:20:44 We will have to go to Locke a little bit more deeper, but today we have two of the people on my personal Mount Rushmore, Hugo Grotius and John Locke. Okay, who else did he influence? Oh, there's another fun guy to look up. Samuel Pofendorf. That's P-O-F-E-N-D-O-R-F. Another great thinker. I had to read a bunch of his stuff in college, and I don't remember any of it, so I had to go back and look some up, but he's an interesting guy, also influenced by Grotius. Grotius,

1:21:20 really was the guy who influenced most modern international law and institutions. The League of Nations, which we don't like, and the United Nations, which we really don't like, actually drew from Groschen's ideas of collective security and national rights. But he advocated for sovereign states to cooperate under shared law, not one world government. Correct. That's the difference.

1:21:52 They took his idea and bastardized it. And it's okay to have sovereign states cooperating under a shared law. That sounds orderly to me. Right. He's the father of that. One of the very first shows the colonel and I did was on the corporate side of Gladio where I talked about these international trade deals like the ISDS, Investor States Dispute Settlements, and how they tie in with the World Bank and all that stuff, all marching towards one world government.

1:22:23 They bastardized Grotius' ideas. Bastardized. It pisses me off. A guy by the name of Peter Borsberg suggests that Grotius was significantly influenced by a Francisco de Vitoria and the school of Salamanca in Spain. Something else to look up. They supported the idea that the sovereignty of a nation does not lie simply in a ruler through God's will, but originates in the people who agree to confer such authority upon a rule.

1:22:57 What a great idea. Yes. We the people? Correct. That's where it comes from, from Grotius through Francisco de Vitoria in the school of Salamanca in Spain. Bizarre concept, huh? No more divine right to rule? Let me give you some quotes before I do that. So let's pull up some of his quotes because there's some great ones.

1:23:35 On natural law and justice, he says, What God has willed is law, one of his foundational statements linking natural law to divine will. He says, The law of nature is so unalterable that God himself cannot change it. That's from the Law of War and Peace. He says, Natural law is the dictate of right reason, which points out that an act according as it is or is not in conformity with rational nature has inequality of moral baseness or moral necessity.

1:24:07 Benjamin Franklin directly quotes that at the Constitutional Convention. On war and peace, he says, where there is no judge, there each man is judged for himself. He's explaining the right to self-defense that is in nature. That is one of our fundamental God-given natural rights. That's how we get the Second Amendment, the right to self-defense that came from him. He says war is undertaken for the sake of peace, and it is only just when it is waged for the sake of peace.

1:24:41 It is lawful to kill an enemy in a just war, but it is not lawful to use more violence than is necessary. You think we're not supposed to be bombing hospitals? No, no, no. We really shouldn't be. Okay. Just checking. You think this guy should be taught in school? Yes. Do you wonder why he isn't? Yes, because we don't pay attention to any of that.

1:25:09 That's why I was looking forward to this episode so much because Hugo, to me, both these guys, both in a good way, bad way first, then good way second, Spinoza, in a bad way influenced the rest of history. And then Hugo comes back and tells us, and this has been a battle between these two different ideas of individualism versus collectivism. On one hand, we've got the collective good. On the other hand, we have individual rights. And you can't have both. When the good as a whole allows you to trample individuals' rights.

1:25:38 you no longer have liberty. For hundreds of years. And that is the fundamental, the foundational bit of my entire concept of how we should live, how we should run our country. It all comes from Hugo. He says the free consent of the people is the only legitimate foundation of government. Where'd that come from? Yep, Hugo again. Liberty is the power of doing what is allowed by the law.

1:26:08 which is why we have a republic you must have some law to maintain order otherwise we get anarchy on international law in the sea oh who is another good one he said a people may choose their own form of government and they may change it when they please think jefferson read him at all our international law it's enshrined in our constitution oh yeah very much so and the declaration of independence and we just ignore these things

1:26:42 On international law and the sea, he says the sea is common to all and no one can claim ownership of it. He says the right of navigation is as free as the air or the sea itself. Man is by nature a social animal. Justice is the virtue which gives every man his due. There is no state so powerful that it may not sometimes need the help of others. It is better to have bad peace than a just war. And his most famous quote is...

1:27:17 Even the Almighty cannot cause two times two to not make four. He would die after a shipwreck. The ship he was on hit the rocks. He made it to shore, but could not survive the, I guess, pneumonia. And it was said that on his dying last words he ever spoke, he thought he had failed. He said, by undertaking many things, I have accomplished nothing. Not so, because three years later,

1:27:52 The Thirty Years' War ends in what's called the Peace of Westphalia. Every single participant at that peace conference had a copy of his book as their manual, and it created the modern international cooperation system. Even though we've distorted it, this guy did not fail. We now have fair treatment of prisoners and wounded was formalized in 1865 at the very first Geneva Convention because of him. If you go to the Hague, where they have the permanent court of arbitration,

1:28:22 where a lot of international justice has been done, there's only one statue out front of a man holding a book, and that is Hugo Grotius. He didn't end war. He stripped it of its legitimacy. That is a great man. That's all I got. That's profound. So what do we tell him today? What's our takeaway? What's our lesson here? A lot of them. I would love it.

1:28:58 the most profound lesson is our educational system is a dismal failure you know and of course that's intentional we we will talk about that more you know about horace mann who we have talked about quite a bit um we have brought the prussian education system to america in the 1850s and it's been going downhill ever since you know i think one of the big lessons is about the central banking and how these empires that you know you expand so fast eventually

1:29:29 You corrupt your system and become so bureaucratic and the bloat that it can't sustain itself. You know, it's like every company. It's one of the things I used to say when I was managing money. I told everyone, I look, every single stock in the world started at zero and will end at zero. Every single company. It always happens. You know, there's one exception to that. It's Beretta. It's been around about 600 years. But that's one of the big lessons is, you know, as great as the Dutch was, they called the Dutch Empire was a republic, but they had an empire.

1:30:01 As great and as powerful as it was, it was unsustainable because of bad corporate governance, central banking gone awry, cooking the books, and it just ran out of steam and could not stand up against competition. And there was also some morality issues in there as well. But the Renaissance period was amazing, but it really led us to the period we're going to hit on next week, which gets us into the 19th century and how these philosophers that came after these guys,

1:30:32 would bastardize or improve upon some of their ideas and how that's had such a profound impact on our everyday lives today everything we're living through today stems from you know these thinkers well what's interesting is you can see the um applicability of the dutch republic to the american republic as far as the corruption the central bank um

1:31:03 the debt, and here we sit. There's a comment in there. Cognitive Nomad says, time to add Hugo to the pamphlets we're making for the local schools. Please do that. Please. Hopefully homeschoolers do the same. It's just stuff people need to know. Do you want the guy who inspired Karl Marx and Hegel, or do you want the guy who inspired John Locke and me? The latter.

1:31:34 I give myself a little credit in there. But anyways, thank you very much for your great co-commentary. Well, thank you for bringing us all that research and information. I know you spend a lot of time digging into these things. And I know the audience greatly appreciates this. And they wait for every one of these. I get such positive comments on the content on these shows. So thanks for all the hard work. Yeah, we had some great comments in the chat today. So thank you for being here.

1:32:05 I try to read all the comments as we're going. It's kind of hard because I've got too many screens going. It requires you to be ambidextrous, and I don't do that very well. But, yeah, the people here are amazing. And please go down and like it on the repost it and share this information because this is critical to our understanding of.

1:32:31 the fact that we're sitting at the pinnacle of this very history right now in the United States. Yeah, and people really like what I'm talking about with these philosophies of the founding fathers. The other show that I do on a regular basis on my Rumble channel is called the Refederalist Report, where Douglas V. Gibbs, Mr. Constitution, and I are going through, right now we're going through Madison's notes from the Philadelphia Convention.

1:32:56 line by line, word for word, trying to get into the heads of the founding fathers. What was their true original intent? Because I don't think you can understand the Constitution unless you know what it was supposed to mean. And that's what sent me digging down these older philosophers. And then it started crossing over to stuff that you and I talk about. And everything always comes full circle.

1:33:15 It does. And if you guys aren't following Warhamster, please follow him and watch his shows on the Constitution, especially, as you pointed out, the homeschoolers, because you do such a great job going down into the weeds of that and what it really means, because one of their tools is corrupting language. And they will try to rephrase those.

1:33:43 the terms that were used back then in order to justify a complete misinterpretation of the intent and so you guys is um digging into the language and the intent with the federalist papers is critical to going forward i gotta respond to another couple comments in here i think i have a new best friend uh rob 8331 says anti-federalists were correct you damn right they were

1:34:13 And it says, The Law of Nations is a must-read. He's talking about Vettel's Law of Nations. There were three copies of The Law of Nations on the floor of Philadelphia, two of them in the original French. Vettel's Law of Nations is, and you're going to want to read about this because a lot of this has to do with our arguments against birthright citizenship and natural-born citizenship. But Vettel's Law of Nations was a direct descendant from Hugo. And The Law of Nations is an absolute must-read. Rob,

1:34:43 Great job. I agree with you. You're my new buddy. Two great comments. All Along wants to know if I've ever done a show on the 25th Amendment. I think Doug has talked about that quite a bit, but maybe I can get him to. Maybe he and I will do that on one of our other shows in the near future. It's a great question, All Along. Doug's really good on that one. That's a bit. That's good. We're going to read comments all day. Okay.

1:35:14 So thanks everybody for joining us. Warhamster, thank you for being here and have a nice rest of your weekend. I hope to see you Friday. Okay. Take care.

Entities here

Hugo Grotius25 Netherlands25 Baruch Spinoza17 United States17 United Kingdom17 East India Company15 West Germany8 France8 Ottoman Empire7 G.W.F. Hegel6 Amsterdam5 Rome5 Johannes Gutenberg5 Catholic Church5 Dutch Republic5 Operation Gladio4 Spain4 John Locke4 American Revolutionary War4 Golden Age of the Dutch Republic4 Thirty Years' War4 Holy Roman Empire4 Russia3 Dutch East Indies3 London3 Thomas Jefferson3 Karl Marx3 Martin Luther King Jr.3 Belgium3 Bank of Amsterdam3 Protestant Reformation3 Renaissance3 Caribbean3 Portugal3 Venice3 Peace of Westphalia3 De Jure Belli ac Pacis3 Baltic Sea2 United States Navy2 Pony Express2

Claims made here

Julius Caesar carried_out_attack Gallic Wars documented ▶ 5:07

“of individual liberty, equality, and all that stuff. It's a very, very strong Saxon influence on that. They didn't have tribal chiefs. They were pretty much equal on all decisions. So we get to the Ro…”

Augustus Caesar carried_out_attack Netherlands documented ▶ 5:07

Arminius carried_out_attack Battle of the Teutoburg Forest documented ▶ 6:22

“We're fighting against a German general by the name of Arminius. Arminius was actually a Roman citizen and military trained by the Romans. He went back to Germany and led his people. And the battle ch…”

Philip the Good united Netherlands documented ▶ 9:06

“mercantile middle class begins to grow. We've heard that theme before, right? Yep. Okay, here's their more modern map. We have the Netherlands there, Belgium, Poland. Right there, that's the middle of…”

Habsburg Empire ruled Netherlands documented ▶ 9:46

“in the Netherlands by a guy by the name of Philip the Good in 1433. The House of Valois Burgundy and the Habsburg heirs would rule these low countries until 1581. And at that point in time, the Dutch …”

House of Valois-Burgundy ruled Netherlands documented ▶ 9:46

RAND Corporation member_of Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 15:05

“context of the telegraph. You have the Pony Express in America. You have the ITT Corporation, which we found throughout Operation Gladio controlling entire countries, telegraph and telephone when it g…”

Martin Luther King Jr. founded Protestant Reformation documented ▶ 18:28

“I create a screw press from wine and oil for even pressure and then a hand mold for efficient tight production. And I know about what half of that means. But that was Gutenberg. He changed the world. …”

Henry VIII founded Anglican Church documented ▶ 22:20

“He broke with Rome in 1530 AD for political reasons, mainly because he wanted his marriage annulled, and the Catholic Church wouldn't do it. So he said, okay, I'll create my own church, and I'll divor…”

Netherlands carried_out_attack Eighty Years' War documented ▶ 22:52

“Because the Anglican church just put the, oh, I don't know, we'll just make the king, you know, the spokes, the mouth of God. All right, this leads us to the rise of Venice, Flores, the Medici's and t…”

Peace of Westphalia ended Thirty Years' War documented ▶ 25:17

“He also says, wasn't Philip II also the one who permitted banned Templars to reskin their identities? Or is that Portugal? I'm not sure. So I'm going to look that up. Let me know. I don't have that in…”

Treaty of Osnabrück part_of Peace of Westphalia documented ▶ 25:50

“We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Well, let's talk about it now. Because there's a couple of treaties that came out of it. There was a Treaty of Munster, which was between the Holy Ro…”

Treaty of Munster part_of Peace of Westphalia documented ▶ 25:50

Peace of Westphalia recognized Netherlands documented ▶ 26:59

“That treaty also had a bunch of territorial changes. France gained a bunch of land. Sweden gained a bunch of land, and they got access to a bunch of Baltic and North Sea ports, and that's going to mat…”

Peace of Westphalia recognized Switzerland documented ▶ 26:59

Netherlands carried_out_attack Dutch-Portuguese War documented ▶ 27:28

“There's also something going on called the Dutch-Portuguese War, which is said to have gone from 1598 to 1663. So here's these lowland Dutch, you know, 12 provinces joined together to form a republic.…”

Dutch West India Company carried_out_attack Portugal documented ▶ 27:57

“They had ships that could carry more cargo. They could beat everyone by costs because they could ship more at each time. They were also absolutely brutal colonists, the Dutch were. Yes. So, and we'll …”

East India Company carried_out_attack Portugal documented ▶ 27:57

East India Company carried_out_attack Iberian Union documented ▶ 27:57

Dutch West India Company carried_out_attack Iberian Union documented ▶ 27:57

Dutch Republic founded East India Company host_asserted ▶ 33:43

“And when they bring their goods back to Europe, you've got competition. So the prices are going down and down, and the profits are just disappearing. So seven of these companies get together and they …”

East India Company funded Dutch West India Company host_asserted ▶ 33:43

Dutch Republic founded Bank of Amsterdam host_asserted ▶ 41:14

“So what else is going on here? The Bank of Amsterdam is the world's first central bank. It was created in 1609 and basically what it did is it offered merchants a fixed stable value currency. The Gild…”

Dutch Republic supplied_arms_to United States Navy host_asserted ▶ 51:12

“They were already on their way down, but they were still a world power. They were past peak, but still strong enough, basically, without them. They talk about how France and Russia helped the American…”

Baruch Spinoza wrote Tractatus Theologico-Politicus documented ▶ 59:34

“And I'll give you some of his quotes here in a second. But it was so bad that he was excommunicated. You were not even allowed to speak about him or to him. So this guy's a bit of a maverick. He's the…”

Baruch Spinoza wrote Ethics documented ▶ 1:00:09

“called the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. When he died in 1677, some of his contemporaries published a bunch of his works together and posthumously published his most famous book, which is just calle…”

Baruch Spinoza influenced G.W.F. Hegel host_asserted ▶ 1:01:16

“was gotten in the name of George William Frederick Hegel. That's probably where I heard the name. There's your mic drop. Yeah, Hegelian dialectic was influenced by Spinoza. Hegel regarded Spinoza as f…”

Baruch Spinoza influenced Karl Marx host_asserted ▶ 1:08:03

“But it's the way his words were twisted by others where it got dangerous. The world is not created for man. Man is created for the world. Not sure I like that. So who else was he influencing on? Oh, t…”

Hugo Grotius wrote De Jure Belli ac Pacis documented ▶ 1:12:59

“Okay, this is just an absolutely brutal war all through Europe. Eight million people died, I did talk about it. And the brutality of that war just shocked his conscience. I mean, he's absolutely, he's…”

Hugo Grotius wrote Jus in Bello host_asserted ▶ 1:15:41

“Maybe. Of course, we haven't declared war the way war is understood today. Again, I've talked about this a bit, but we need to redefine what a war is because we live in the age of fifth generation war…”

Hugo Grotius wrote Mare Liberum host_asserted ▶ 1:17:23

“I mean, war is bad, but if you're going to fight it, can we at least have some rules to protect the innocent? Right. Well, that all comes from Grotius. Great, great man. He's not done yet. He also wro…”

Hugo Grotius influenced John Locke host_asserted ▶ 1:19:36

“He said, let's put some order to this if you're going to do it. So who did he influence? Well, how about Enlightenment figures like my all-time favorite, John Locke? John Locke lists Hugo Grotius as h…”

John Locke influenced Thomas Jefferson host_asserted ▶ 1:20:11

“He was lifting that from John Locke's quote, which was life, liberty, and property. Had you kept property in there, these people today, these Marxists, would not be able to say, oh, I'm a stakeholder.…”

Hugo Grotius influenced Samuel Pufendorf host_asserted ▶ 1:20:44

“We will have to go to Locke a little bit more deeper, but today we have two of the people on my personal Mount Rushmore, Hugo Grotius and John Locke. Okay, who else did he influence? Oh, there's anoth…”

Hugo Grotius influenced United Nations host_asserted ▶ 1:21:20

“really was the guy who influenced most modern international law and institutions. The League of Nations, which we don't like, and the United Nations, which we really don't like, actually drew from Gro…”

Hugo Grotius influenced League of Nations host_asserted ▶ 1:21:20

Francisco de Vitoria influenced Hugo Grotius host_asserted ▶ 1:22:23

“They bastardized Grotius' ideas. Bastardized. It pisses me off. A guy by the name of Peter Borsberg suggests that Grotius was significantly influenced by a Francisco de Vitoria and the school of Salam…”

Benjamin Franklin quoted Hugo Grotius host_asserted ▶ 1:24:07

“Benjamin Franklin directly quotes that at the Constitutional Convention. On war and peace, he says, where there is no judge, there each man is judged for himself. He's explaining the right to self-def…”

Hugo Grotius influenced Geneva Conventions host_asserted ▶ 1:27:52

“The Thirty Years' War ends in what's called the Peace of Westphalia. Every single participant at that peace conference had a copy of his book as their manual, and it created the modern international c…”

Hugo Grotius influenced Peace of Westphalia host_asserted ▶ 1:27:52

Dutch Republic influenced United States Navy host_asserted ▶ 1:30:32

“would bastardize or improve upon some of their ideas and how that's had such a profound impact on our everyday lives today everything we're living through today stems from you know these thinkers well…”

Hugo Grotius inspired Karl Marx host_asserted ▶ 1:31:03

“the debt, and here we sit. There's a comment in there. Cognitive Nomad says, time to add Hugo to the pamphlets we're making for the local schools. Please do that. Please. Hopefully homeschoolers do th…”

Hugo Grotius inspired G.W.F. Hegel host_asserted ▶ 1:31:03

Hugo Grotius inspired John Locke host_asserted ▶ 1:31:03

James Madison authored Constitutional Convention 1787 documented ▶ 1:32:31

“the fact that we're sitting at the pinnacle of this very history right now in the United States. Yeah, and people really like what I'm talking about with these philosophies of the founding fathers. Th…”

Emer de Vattel authored The Law of Nations documented ▶ 1:34:13

“And it says, The Law of Nations is a must-read. He's talking about Vettel's Law of Nations. There were three copies of The Law of Nations on the floor of Philadelphia, two of them in the original Fren…”

The Law of Nations derived_from Hugo Grotius host_asserted ▶ 1:34:13