The Venetian Paradigm

The Influence of the Venetian Black Nobility

Aug 31, 2022

Letters from Vienna #85

The Venetian Paradigm

When my sister told me about the depopulation agenda I found myself in a quandary. Either everything I’d been told since boyhood was false (even at an early age I’d been asked whether I supported “capitalism” or not) or she was wrong. As it turned out: the former and not the latter was the case.

My problem was that I still, at such a late juncture (incredible though it may seem), believed that I lived in a “capitalist” system. In such a system, I assumed, somewhat naively, capitalists strove to maximise profits and had no incentive whatsoever to reduce the number of their customers; I was wrong.

Once I realised that this paradigm was broken and the word “capitalism” itself was nonsense (in the sense of Wittgenstein; it doesn’t correspond to a real state of affairs) I searched around for alternative paradigms and found them in the ideas of Webster Tarpley and Michael Hudson, which, to my mind, complement one another.

Webster Tarpley, in his tirade against Oligarchy, wrote: “These (Venetian) families and the state they built grew rich through their parasitizing of trade, especially East-West trade, which came to flow overwhelmingly through the Rialto markets. But there is a deeper reality, one which even derogatory stories about spice merchants are designed to mask. The primary basis for Venetian opulence was slavery. This slavery was practiced as a matter of course against Saracens, Mongols, Turks, and other non-Christians. In addition, it is conclusively documented that it was a matter of standard Venetian practice to sell Christians into slavery. This included Italians and Greeks, who were most highly valued as galley slaves. It included Germans and Russians, the latter being shipped in from Tana, the Venetian outpost at the mouth of the Don, in the farthest corner of the Sea of Azov. At a later time, black Africans were added to the list and rapidly became a fad among the nobility of the republic.”[1]

Of course, slavery remains in effect but has been (mainly) cleverly masked: “Debt peonage in today’s postindustrial economy” Michael Hudson opines “takes the form of obliging homebuyers, student debtors and others to spend their working lives paying off their mortgages, education loans and other personal debts, which typically must be taken on in order to survive.”[2]

In the case of student-loans the reason seems to have been more one of social engineering than anything else: “Roger A. Freeman’s (an advisor of Ronald Reagan) remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow (to go to college)… If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism — “that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”[3]

Some argue that we live in a neo-feudal society (as defined: “a strongly hierarchical ordering of society, a web of personal obligations tying subordinates to superiors, the persistence of closed classes or “castes,” and a permanent serflike status for the vast majority of the population”[4]) and there is much truth to this. Michael Hudson defines the “Neofeudal economy” as: “Medieval feudalism’s seizure of land and natural resources by military conquest and the extraction of groundrent is achieved today by financial means: debt leverage, foreclosure and privatization. Just as feudalism monopolized access to land for housing and food to force and enserfed population to work for subsistence, today’s economies block access to housing and education without paying debt service that siphons off labor’s income above basic subsistence levels. Instead of landlords controlling the economic and political system, money lords – the One Percent – are making themselves into a hereditary oligarchy by holding the 99 Percent in debt peonage.”[5]

Whichever way one wishes to define this phenomenon, how one “names the name” (in the sense of Confucius): whether one employs the word “slavery”, “debt peonage” or “serfdom” it corresponds closely to a reality we actually know and can empirically measure, a state of affairs, a concrete, cold fact, and, above all else: it is a state of affairs which can be remedied. There’s no need for speculative, abstract “Marxism”, “Communism” or any other dubious ideology (in the case of every ideology one must invariably ask: who financed it and why?); what there is a need for is simple justice and obviously enough: freedom.

The question we must therefore logically ask ourselves is: What measures can be undertaken to strengthen the liberties of the individual? What rights need to be reactivated and made sacred once more? “Habeas corpus” is the first one that springs to mind, an ancient right recently undermined by the infamous, phony “war on terror”. Progress doesn’t have to be “revolutionary” or “sweeping” but rather incremental.

Of Piracy, Buccaneering, Slavery etc.

“Indistinguishable from slave gathering operations” Webster Tarpley wrote “were piracy and buccaneering, the other staples of the Venetian economy. Wars with Genoa or with other powers were eagerly sought-after opportunities to loot the enemy’s shipping with clouds of corsairs, and victory or defeat usually depended more on the success of the privateering than on the direct combat of the galleys, cogs, and soldiers of the battle fleets.”

“Piracy shades over imperceptibly into routine commerce. Through decades of treachery and mayhem, the Venetians were able to establish themselves as the leading entrepot port of the Mediterranean world, where, as in London up to 1914, the vast bulk of the world’s strategic commodities were brought for sale, warehousing, and transshipment. The most significant commodities were spices and silks from India and China, destined for markets in Central and Western Europe. Europe in turn produced textiles and metals, especially precious metals, for export to the East.”

“Venetian production from the earliest period until the end was essentially nil, apart from salt and the glass manufactures of Murano. The role of the Venetian merchant is that of the profiteering middleman who rooks both buyer and seller, backing up his monopolization of the distribution and transportation systems with the war galleys of the battle fleet.”

“The Venetian approach to trade was ironically dirigistic. Venice asserted a monopoly of all trade and shipping in the northern Adriatic. The Serenissima’s own functionaries organized merchant galley fleets that were sent out one or two times a year to key ports. The galleys were built by the regime in its shipyards, known as the Arsenal, for many centuries the largest factory in the world. They were leased to oligarchs and consortia of oligarchs at a type of auction. Every detail of the operation of these galley fleets, including the obligation to travel in convoy, was stipulated by peremptory state regulation.”[6]

This piracy and buccaneering, which once formed the basis of the Venetian economy, underpins the wealth of the “West”; all is based on plunder (in addition to the drug and slave trade). Headlines such as: “US sends more stolen oil from Syria to Iraqi bases” shouldn’t therefore surprise.[7]

“In the 1500s European merchants introduced opium smoking;” Alfred McCoy tells us “in the 1700s the British East India Company became Asia's first large scale opium smuggler, forcibly supplying an unwilling China; and in the 1800s every European colony had its official opium dens. At every stage of its development, Asia’s narcotics traffic has been shaped and formed by the rise and fall of Western empires. Before the first Portuguese ships arrived in the 1500s, opium smoking and drug smuggling were almost unknown in Asia. Most of the traditional Asian states were inward-looking empires with only a marginal interest in sea trade. Their economies were self-contained, and they only ventured abroad to trade for luxury goods, rare spices, or art treasures. Asia's large cities-such as Peking, Phnom Penh, and Mandalay-were inland ceremonial capitals. For the most part, coastal areas were considered undesirable and therefore remained relatively underpopulated. While Arab traders had introduced the opium poppy into India and some parts of southwestern China in the seventh century A.D., poppy cultivation remained limited and opium was used almost exclusively for medicinal purposes.”

“Europe’s “Age of Discovery” marked the beginning of Asia’s opium problem. Only six years after Columbus “discovered” America, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded the tip of Africa and became the first European sea captain to reach India. Later Portuguese fleets pushed onward to China and the Spice Islands of Indonesia. These early merchants were not the omnipotent conquerors of later centuries, and Asian empires had no difficulty confining them to small commercial beachheads along the unoccupied coastlines. However, from the very beginning of the Western-Eastern encounter the traders were hampered by a factor that was destined to plague these entrepreneuring European merchants down through the centuries: Europe had almost nothing to trade that the Asians were interested in acquiring, except its gold and silver specie. Unwilling to barter away the basis of their national economies, the Portuguese sea captains embarked on what one American economist has called “slash and burn colonialism.””

“Fortifying their coastal enclaves against possible reprisal attacks, the Portuguese proceeded to sortie out into the sea-lanes of the South China Sea, confiscating native cargoes and plundering rival ports. Once the competing Malay, Chinese, and Arab sea captains had been subjugated, the Portuguese took over inter-Asian maritime commerce and paid for the silks and spices with their plundered profits. Medicinal opium had been carried by Asianships in the India-China-Spice Islands’ triangular trade, and Portuguese merchants fell heir to this commerce. Still eager for an enticing exchange commodity to barter for Chinese silks, the Portuguese imported tobacco from their Brazilian colony in the late 1500s.”[8]

“British participation in the Atlantic slave trade” John Newsinger states “is arguably the worst crime in British history. Estimates of the numbers shipped to the Americas by the slave-trading countries range from a low of 10 million people to up to as many as 15 million. Whatever the figure for those shipped, some 2 million is a conservative estimate for those who died while making the voyage whether from illness, violence, starvation, suicide or whatever.”[9]

In addition to all this the scale of the British plunder of India is simply off the charts. “At the beginning of the eighteenth century,” Shashi Tharoor tells us, “as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.”[10]

Of Free Markets and Free Trade

The ascendancy of the kleptocratic West was solidified by ideas such as the “free market”, which Michael Hudson defines in the following fashion: “To the classical economists, an economy free of land rent, usurious banking practices and monopolies in private hands. But as finance capitalism has superseded industrial capitalism, it has inverted “free market” rhetoric to mean a market free for rent extractors to obtain land rent, natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial gains “free” of government taxation or regulation. This inverted re-definition depicts a free market as one free for the financial and propertied classes to subject the economy to a network of extractive tollbooth fees. Such a “free market” has become a doublethink term for the path to neo-feudalism, financialization and kindred rentier policies.”[11]

Similarly, “free trade” is not really free at all. Michael Hudson clarifies matters with his definition of the term: “The stage of trade policy that followed mercantilist and protectionist success in raising first Britain and then the United States and Germany to industrial and financial dominance. Pulling up the ladder, these leading industrial nations demand that other countries open their markets to lead-nation exports and investment instead of protecting, subsidizing and modernizing their own industry and agriculture and financial power in the United States, while offshoring employment to the low-wage countries.”[12]

The Plundering of the Ukraine

The irony is that this is not the West many Ukrainians signed up for. They were duped by sirens such as Henry Bernard-Levy[13] and his sugar-coated words of “universal human rights”, “democracy” and of course: the hope of prosperity. Yet, this was not to be. In fact, it was never part of the plan. On the contrary: the aim was always to suck both the Ukraine and the Ukrainians dry.

As Pepe Escobar recently wryly noted: “What’s left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.”[14]

What has become abundantly clear in the meantime is that the battle for the Ukraine is essentially a battle for its riches:

“After nearly six months of fighting, Moscow’s sloppy war has yielded at least one big reward: expanded control over some of the most mineral-rich lands in Europe. Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, as well as massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.”

“The lion’s share of those coal deposits, which for decades have powered Ukraine’s critical steel industry, are concentrated in the east, where Moscow has made the most inroads. That’s put them in Russian hands, along with significant amounts of other valuable energy and mineral deposits used for everything from aircraft parts to smartphones, according to an analysis for The Washington Post by the Canadian geopolitical risk firm SecDev.”
...
“The worst scenario is that Ukraine loses land, no longer has a strong commodity economy and becomes more like one of the Baltic states, a nation unable to sustain its industrial economy,” said Stanislav Zinchenko chief executive of GMK, a Kyiv-based economic think tank. “This is what Russia wants. To weaken us.”
...
“Yet SecDev’s analysis indicates that at least $12.4 trillion worth of Ukraine’s energy deposits, metals and minerals are now under Russian control. That figure accounts for nearly half the dollar value of the 2,209 deposits reviewed by the company. In addition to 63 percent of the country’s coal deposits, Moscow has seized 11 percent of its oil deposits, 20 percent of its natural gas deposits, 42 percent of its metals and 33 percent of its deposits of rare earth and other critical minerals including lithium.”[15]

The fact that the Ukrainians can only expect more ruthless exploitation in the near future is cold comfort:

“While the United States and Europe flood Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars of weapons, using it as an anti-Russia proxy and pouring fuel on the fire of a brutal war that is devastating the country, they are also making plans to essentially plunder its post-war economy.”

“Representatives of Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland this July to plan a series of harsh neoliberal policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.””[16]

The Venetian Model and the Question of What is to be Done

Much as I love Venice Webster Tarpley makes an extremely persuasive case and I sincerely believe that we’re living within the Venetian paradigm of slavery, exploitation and population reduction.

The question remains: what’s to be done. Obviously, we cannot rely on any ideology, whether it be Marxism, Communism or Fascism; all have been tried and found wanting. The first step is to reject the cold Nihilism and Dark Satanism at the heart of the “Black Nobility”, a Satanism, which is abominable to behold[17]. Seeing the world as it is, naming names, looking at reality with clear eyes is the first step; the second is to realise that we’re responsible for our own fate.