Runnymede Institute

History doesn’t repeat itself by itself, every nuance on the world stage has it’s hidden purpose. Well paid troublemakers don the costume of an intended target to perpetrate malicious acts that force the hand of the paying aggressor to retaliate in self-defense.

With renewed focus on the Middle East, the gruesome murder of 241 US Marines at their Beirut headquarters 25 years ago leads us to once again ponder the wisdom of empirical planners. They’ve encircled Syria with a mandate to kill and the least we can hope is that US Grunts aren’t being positioned for another blood sacrifice to Moloch.

War drums beat but European agreement on regime change in Syria is limited to the elected ruling class kow towing to their private Central Bank masters, a throwback to the failed Lombard System that went haywire exactly 666 years ago;

“For more than 100 years, this Venetian-created monstrosity destroyed and looted the continent of Europe. Countries such as Naples and England were driven to bankruptcy; woolen and other production collapsed; food production declined; and, by no later than 1290, Europe began to lose people. Cities, towns, and nations were all ensnared in the Venice-Lombard web of debt and usury. In the absence of sovereign national credit institutions, the Lombard bankers became the de facto creditors and financial dictators of Europe.

Much like the financial vultures of today, the Lombard bankers not only drove their victims into debt, but used that debt to seize real assets. By 1325, for example, the Peruzzi bank owned all of the revenues of the Kingdom of Naples, the most productive grain belt of the entire Mediterranean area. In Castile and England the entirety of wool production was pledged as collateral for the Lombard loans. The situation in France, Hungary, and elsewhere was similar. Europe was transformed into a gigantic tax farm as local rulers looted their economies and people to send money across the Alps.”

Their downfall is best illustrated by the career of Sir John Hawkwood, who came to prominence during the Hundred Years War in the English army, cut his teeth for the merc trade and fought in the internecine wars resulting from the Lombard’s demise!

Textbooks offering a sanitised version of that endless conflict weave fine tales of Edward III enforcing his claim to the French throne and skim over the relationship the English king maintained with his Lombard League bankers that financed the invasion. Their demands made engagements that much more brutal because the best loot went to the king’s creditors and soldiers of fortune had to constantly forage for any plunder.

Hawkwood was the most successful of the lot in freelance rape and pillage but he was knighted for his valour as a regular soldier. War happened then as today, bankers did as they pleased, usurious overlords were exercising an iron grip of control attributable to the autocratic rule of the early Caesars. On the somewhat transparent legal side of business, they lent to merchants and governments but were mostly efficient ‘fences’.

Edward III’s campaign of slaughter won him the prize which he’d sought but defaulting on his loans to ‘Italian’ bankers collapsed the Lombards. Treaties of peace along with ceded territories such as Calais satisfied the monarchs and ruling elite but did little for the common soldier left unemployed and stranded on the continent. Armed bands had formed and approached the Pope’s hideout in Avignon to extort his own illgotten loot.

They were successfully bought off as a unit, The White Company, and the displaced pontiff wasted no time in elaborating on the riches his home grown enemies guarded behind city walls on the Italian peninsula. The elected leader of these neerdowells was Hawkwood, who would go on to win fame and fortune but also provided future bankers with templates for conniving conquest through Nicolo Machiavelli’s book ‘The Prince’.

Although Hawkwood didn’t subscribe to taking on a nom de guerre to prevent his family from receiving a ransom demand in case of his capture, for the rest of his life he would be known as Giovanni Acuto, an Italianised monicker. He couldn’t possibly hide behind a facade, the killing business was a sustainable going concern on which too many people depended for their livelihood and after all, he was a genuine knight.

“The White Company was very highly organized – its modern equivalent, though on a much smaller scale, might be the yakuza (gangster) gangs in Japan. Apart from the soldiery the company employed lawyers and notaries to keep track of bribes and ransoms, sort out contracts and provide safe passes. Accountants and secretaries were a further necessary part of the organization as plunder had to be divided up among the troops who then sold their share through outside brokers. Also attached to the company were a huge retinue of priests, prostitutes, cooks, barbers, jesters and doctors.”

It’s tempting to compare ‘the company’ to present day Xe, mercenary firm Blackwater which recently changed it’s name and was bought by Monsanto but that honour more deservedly belongs to NATO, a Whitey banker’s band of odd multi-cutural Irregulars.

The firepower and prowess of Hawkwood’s horde made them rich and the Lombards disappeared from sight but their organisation decamped to the City of London while mercs exploited shifting allegiances and power politics of Italian factions for their own benefit. During lulls in the action, specialised operators that would today be called terrorists were dispatched to spread rumours, a quasi mainstream media of the day.

When Italian city-states chose to trade their liberty for costly security, mercenaries were the main beneficiaries but bankers too found their place in the New Order. It was easier to buy plundered wool at better than market rate from the jackals so their investment strategy enriched agressors but eventually choked off trade to a standstill. In such instances, the soldiers of fortune and greedy bankers got homicidally creative.

Following in Machiavelli’s footsteps, broad thinkers in the pay of The City refined his ideas and implemented them often, like founding the British Empire, counterbalancing Spain’s papal approved New World expansion. Thirteen colonies lost by King George III in 1776 were never out of banker grasp and their use as tool of conquest began with a Cuban false-flag attack on the USS Maine to justify the Spanish-American War.

Winning strategies beg modern repetition and elite bankers have studied every trick in the trade. It’s common knowledge now that American power was usurped in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act and Wall Street’s New York location being as impregnable as Venice once was, the Yanks had to be bamboozled next. The impetus for every war that’s followed is a payback for some outrageous incident never properly investigated.

A cursory review of modern military history and admissions from the architects of conflict such as MacNamara’s Gulf of Tonkin false-flag pantomime leave no shadow of a doubt that Hawkwood’s tactics are still prized today. Communist Vietnamese denied any knowledge and begged the world to believe they weren’t stupid enough to take on a giant but the newz organs of the day parroted a tale for hungry US military industry.

Can the same be said of the Beirut Marine massacre? Hezbollah was unheard of in those days and they flatly denied any desire to blacken America’s eye yet in the intervening years, they’ve organised themselves into a fighting force fully supported by the West’s designated targets. A better enemy couldn’t have been contrived in any other way and added to the fact that regional powers such as Syria and Iran came to Hezbollah’s aid, the New World Order chalked up three pigeons for the price of one.

In that line of thinking, Israel’s last botched foray into Lebanon may not have been the rout of the IDF as advertised but something worse. Hezbollah’s expected to defend themselves under whatever circumstances but IDF troops seemed to not have their hearts in that fight. It’s as though the entire fiasco was designed to make Hezbollah fighters feel invincible at the expense of Israeli cannon fodder, far out of character.

Machiavelli warned about mercenary tactics back-firing, today’s friends could easily switch sides at any time, as Turkey has done already because they too miss the ‘idea’ of their old, lost empire. The Gaza Flotilla wasn’t grandstanding per se but the Turkish government had no illusions they’d ever be allowed to disembark. It’s posturing and maneuvering for public consumption while in the background Syria falls off the map.

If Hawkwood were alive today, he would marvel at the fact that war preparations were made so long ago and that even with the seemingly random events being set years apart, the attack plan appears to be right on schedule. Like his own mercenaries, NATO soldiers don’t have a job waiting for them at home because the bankers took care of all that so they’ll fight because ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’!

American soldiers on ‘Drill’ in Israel present ample opportunities for exploitation, the worst of which is another suicide or possibly a manic rocket attack to fuse the national psyche of both peoples in determination to destroy a common enemy. Dress up one of the CIA’s Al Qaeda jesters as Hezbollah to commit some unspeakable atrocity and the powderkeg ignites to perfection, they certainly don’t call it ‘The Company’ for nothing!