The Workers' Paradise

To MANY PEOPLE then living, the period from 1914 until the mid-1930's was a full-blown fulfillment of Apocalyptic prophecy. Those years witnessed a devastating world war, a sudden worldwide influenza epidemic which killed tens of millions of people within a short period of time, and an international financial collapse marked in Germany by a hyperinflation of its currency. Sudden meteorological changes also occurred. Portions of the United States became arid "Dust Bowls." This brought about large-scale crop destruction and the loss of many family farms to foreclosure. This was a period in which reports of spectacular "fireballs" (brilliant blazing meteors) were published by the New York Times with increasing frequency. Some fireballs seemed to bring with them violent storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters. New messiahs were appearing throughout the world. Surely, believed many, God was ushering in the Day of Judgment. The beginning of the 20th century witnessed many changes in Germany. The autonomous principalities were being merged into a single German nation. Leading this unification effort was the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty, which was also in the process of forging a large German war machine. This machine was commanded by the Kaiser William, a Hohenzollern, who helped plunge Europe into World War I. Behind the German militarization lay the Brotherhood network. In the early 1900's, a number of mystical organizations in Germany were espousing a curious mix of Aryan Master Race ideas and mystical concepts about the future glories of Germany. This concoction resulted in the notion of a German Master Race. One of the most prominent writers in that genre was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman raised in Paris and tutored as a young man by a Prussian. His most important work, Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts ("The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century"), was published in 1899. In that work, Chamberlain extolled the glories of "Germanism" and announced that Germany was the nation best suited to bring about a "new order" in Europe. He indicated that Germans belonged to the western Aryan group of peoples and were therefore racially superior to all others. From Germany would arise a new race of "Supermen," he declared. Chamberlain believed in eugenics (improving the human race by carefully choosing natural parents) and he proclaimed that all Aryan Germans had a duty to breed the superrace from their Aryan seed. Chamberlain also did not hesitate to express his anti-Semitism. He stated that Jews introduced an alien influence to Europe and that they debased all cultures into which they became assimilated. Emperor (Kaiser) Wilhelm of Germany and many members of the German Officer Corps were deeply inspired by Chamberlain's writings. The Kaiser invited Chamberlain to the royal court and reportedly greeted Chamberlain with the words, "It was God who sent your book to the German people and you personally to me."1 Chamberlain remained a guest at the emperor's palace at Potsdam where he became a spiritual mentor to the Kaiser. The mystical ideas espoused by Chamberlain did much to push the Kaiser and other German leaders into the megalomania that brought about World War I. World War I itself was triggered by a series of crises caused by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austrian throne. He and his wife, Duchess Sofia, were shot on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo by Serbian assassins who belonged to a secret occult society called the "Black Hand." A political chain reaction followed the killing, and World War I got underway when the German Chief of Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke (himself a mystic, although by some accounts not as fanatical about German destiny as the Kaiser), ordered full military mobilization, followed by an invasion of France on August 1, 1914. Members of the mystical network had once again started a brutal and senseless war. There is another story from World War I worth sharing. It is the tale of an unusual peace. It was told in Parade magazine by the writing team of Irving Wallace, David Wallichinsky, and Amy Wallace in their "Significa" column. Here is the story as they wrote it: Amid the horrors of World War I, there occurred a unique truce when, for a few hours, enemies behaved like brothers. Christmas Eve in 1914 was all quiet on France's Western Front, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. Trenches came within 50 miles of Paris. The war was only five months old, and approximately 800,000 men had been wounded or killed. Every soldier wondered whether Christmas Day would bring another round of fighting and killing. But something happened: British soldiers raised "Merry Christmas" signs, and soon carols were heard from German and British trenches alike. Christmas dawned with unarmed soldiers leaving their trenches, as officers of both sides tried unsuccessfully to stop their troops from meeting the enemy in the middle of no-man's land for songs and conversation. Exchanging small gifts—mostly sweets and cigars—they passed Christmas Day peacefully along miles of the front. At one spot, the British played soccer with the Germans, who won 3-2. In some places, the spontaneous truce continued the next day, neither side willing to fire the first shot. Finally the war resumed when fresh troops arrived, and the high command of both armies ordered that further "informal understandings" with the enemy would be punishable as treason.

2 The above is another one of those small, but noteworthy, episodes revealing that human beings do not seem to be naturally prone to war. Given the chance, they will lay down their arms and engage in far more constructive and lighthearted pursuits. What caused those soldiers to fight again were the pressures of an artificial social structure arising out of many of the factors described in this book. One major event of World War I was the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This was the revolution which turned Russia into the communist nation we knew for most of the 20th century. The Revolution occurred one year before the end of World War I. It was led in large part by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who is better known by his code name, "Lenin." At the time of the Revolution, Russia was an enemy of  Germany. The grimness of World War I had aroused in the Russian people a strong anti-German sentiment. Opponents of Bolshevism were able to use this sentiment against the Bolsheviks by accusing Lenin of being a German agent. To some degree, this accusation was true. Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II, wrote, "They [the Germans] transported Lenin in a Sealed Train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia."3 Churchill was referring to the train on which Lenin and his entourage traveled from their revolutionary headquarters in Switzerland through Germany to Russia in order to lead the Revolution which had already gotten underway. The German military guaranteed safe passage for Lenin's train through Germany, but would not permit Lenin or his followers to step off the train while it was on German soil. At the train's first stop in Germany after crossing the border from Switzerland, it was met and boarded by two German officers who provided a silent escort for the revolutionary party. The officers had been briefed earlier by General Erich Ludendorff, Chief of Staff of the German 8th Army on the Eastern Front. Ludendorff later became one of Germany's most powerful political figures and a prominent supporter of Adolf Hitler. Michael Pearson, author of an excellent book, The Sealed Train, presents evidence that the Germans continued to support the Bolsheviks even after the Russian Revolution was over. The German military wanted to ensure that the Bolsheviks were able to retain their power in Russia. According to German Foreign Office records released after World War II, the Foreign Office had allocated by February 5, 1918 a total of 40,580,997 German marks for Russian "propaganda" and "special purposes." Most of that money is believed to have been sent directly to the new communist regime...According to the same documents, fifteen million marks had been released to Russia by the German Treasury just one day after Lenin officially assumed power in November of 1917. A telegram sent December 3, 1917 by Richard von Kuhlman, German Foreign Secretary, stated: ... it was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels that they were in a position to build up their main organ Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow base of their party.

4 Three months later, another telegram sent by von Kuhlman 

revealed: ... the Bolshevik movement could never have attained the scale or the influence which it has today without our continual support.

5 Lenin understandably denied accusations that he had received any assistance from Germany. Germany was Russia's enemy, and Lenin would have been considered a traitor to Russia. After all, why would capitalist Germany assist communists? The oppressive Russian Tsar had already abdicated before the Revolution and the Provisional Government set up in his place was a republican form of government patterned after the United States. Most people believe that Germany helped Lenin overthrow the Provisional Government in order to end Russian involvement in World War I. German military leaders wanted nothing more than to disengage from the Eastern Front so that badly-needed soldiers and supplies could be moved elsewhere. The Provisional Government had continued the war against Germany, whereas the Bolsheviks did indeed pull Russia out of World War I after they took power. The question is then raised: why did Germany aid communist revolutionaries? There were other political groups in Russia which could have been supported. For one thing, the Bolsheviks probably stood the best chance at success. A more important factor is that some very prominent German industrialists and financiers with influence into the German military were supporters of the communist movement. Their support had begun long before World War I. One of Karl Marx's most visible backers had been the wealthy German industrialist Friedrich Engels. Engels even co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Marx. Significant support for communism also came from the German banking community. Max Warburg, a top leader in German finance, lent his assistance to the Bolsheviks, as did banker Jacob Schiff who, though an American, came from the same German family which had shared a house in Frankfurt generations earlier with the Rothschild family. According to Schiff's grandson, Schiff had loaned about twenty million dollars to the early communist government in Russia. The combined infusion of Western loans and German treasury money was the only thing that enabled the early Bolshevik regime to survive. There were many reasons why Western bankers financed the Bolsheviks. The common origins of communism and the inflatable paper money system in the same mystical network is one factor to be considered. Marxism closely followed the basic philosophical pattern of Christianity and other Custodial religions with their "final battle" and Utopian messages. Perhaps the most important fact about modern communism to explain Western banking support is the fact that communism is actually capitalism taken to an extreme. To understand this, we must take a look at what "capitalism" really is. "Capitalism" and "free enterprise" are often equated. They should not be. "Free enterprise" is unfettered economic activity; it occurs where there is a free and open market for the production and barter of goods and services. Entrepreneurs (people who start businesses and take the risks) are the backbone of "free enterprise" systems. "Capitalism," on the other hand, has two basic definitions. The first definition elates to so-called "capital goods." Those are goods that are used to manufacture other products. A typical capital good would be a machine used on an assembly line. A "capitalist" can therefore mean a person who buys capital goods and uses them to manufacture other products for a profit. This type of capitalist is usually found in a "free enterprise" system, but he or she does not require a free enterprise system to survive. He or she can exist in almost any type of political or economic system so long as a profit is made. In fact, this type of capitalist often survives best in a closed enterprise system where there is little or no competition. Governments are capitalists when they own and invest in capital equipment. The second type of capitalist is the "financial capitalist." Financial capitalism is the control of resources through the investment and movement of money. It may or may not involve the purchase of capital goods. A financial capitalist usually invests his money in company stocks and influences the use of resources by determining what enterprises he will invest in. A financial capitalist may also be a banker who is entitled to create inflatable paper money to lend, and who is able to influence the use of resources by how he lends out his "created out of nothing" money. The financial capitalist also does not require a free enterprise system to survive and often benefits from monopolies. As we can see, capitalism is not the same creature as free enterprise, even if they often co-exist. Free enterprise and capitalism frequently come into conflict with one another because capitalism tends to move in the direction of monopoly and free enterprise tends to favor free and open markets accessible to any entrepreneur. In 1989 and the early 1990's, Russia and most Eastern European nations voluntarily dismantled communism in their nations to replace it with Western-style democracy. The Soviet Union was abolished and most of the Soviet republics became independent countries united in a loosely-knit confederation called the "Commonwealth of Independent States." Private ownership of land and business was restored to a large extent. Nevertheless, it is still useful to discuss what the Soviet Union was like under communism to understand how this important Brotherhood faction did so much to perpetuate significant problems within our own lifetime. Furthermore, communism still dominates other nations and continues to inspire revolutionary conflict in the Third World. The economic system of communist Russia was an ultracapitalist one because its industry was even more monopolized, and the nation's economy was even more dominated, by the same institutions which dominate capitalist nations. The most significant of those institutions was the Soviet central bank, which operated just like the central banks of Western nations. The major difference was that the Russian central bank had, and still has at the time of this writing, an even more intrusive role in the country's economic life. The Soviet Union's central bank is called the Gosbank. It is both a central bank and commercial bank rolled into one. As of 1980, the Gosbank had approximately 3,500 branches and 150,000 employees. Major Soviet enterprises, which were all government owned, depended upon the Gosbank for loans to tide them through periods when their outlays were greater than their incomes. In other words, communist government enterprises in the Soviet Union also operated on a profit-loss basis and they had to borrow money from the Gosbank when they suffered a loss. As in non-communist nations, Soviet enterprises paid interest on the money they borrowed. The only difference was that the Gosbank charged a fixed interest rate whereas many Western banks have a fluctuating rate. The Gosbank was, and still is, a "bank of issue"; i.e., it is empowered to issue money. Gosbank creates money "out of nothing" just as Western banks do. Although the Gosbank was ostensibly under government control in communist Russia, it was in fact a semi-autonomous institution to which Soviet enterprises were, and still are, deeply in debt. The Gosbank was even more dominant in Soviet financial affairs than are central banks in Western nations because all transactions between Soviet enterprises had to go through the Gosbank. This allowed the Gosbank to oversee all day-to-day financial transactions involving Soviet enterprises. The Gosbank was also in charge of dispersing wages to all of the workers. It was an enormous bureaucracy which regulated Soviet economic activity to a remarkable degree. As we can see, communist Russia was a financial capitalist's dream. The Marxist idea that everything is owned "collectively" under communism simply meant that a select elite in banking and government had complete authority to direct the use of all exploitable resources in the country. Soviet workers were paid wages with which they could buy personal goods, but under Soviet law they could not own land, buildings, businesses, or any large industrial equipment. Soviet citizens could sell only "used" or personallyproduced items, but they could not hire others for personal profit or engage in middleman activities. Although there existed limited exceptions to these restrictions and a flourishing black market, Soviet laws nevertheless created an effective monopoly in which Russian workers were highly exploited in a rigid feudalistic system; we need only compare communist Russia to medieval feudalism to appreciate that fact: As in old European feudalisms, the majority of the Soviet citizens were forced to suffer chronic scarcities of goods and services, and they were told that they had to endure it as a sacrifice for the good of mother Russia. As in old feudalisms, the Soviet people were effectively "tied to the land" by a rigid bureaucracy which forbade people from moving without government approval. That regulation existed to control the economic and political life of the Soviet Union by deciding where people lived and worked. That was the same motive used to tie people to the land under old feudal lords. This caused the Soviet people to become, to some degree, serfs. Emigration to nations outside of the Iron Curtain was severely restricted which, again, added up to a form of serfdom because the people were anchored to the land on which they were born. As in old feudalisms, the "elite" of communist Russia were accorded special luxuries and privileges denied by law to the "masses." In the communist U.S.S.R., such privileges included fancy stores in which only a relative handful were permitted to shop. The "elite" also found it easier to travel outside of the Soviet Union and to send their children abroad to be educated. The old feudal lords maintained the system by offering a fortified castle into which the serfs could retreat when attacked by marauders or foreign armies. The Soviet system also stayed alive by encouraging xenophobia and by regularly reminding the Russian people about the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Nazi Germany. The Soviet state promised its people protection against a frightening and dangerous outside world. As we can perhaps see, Marxist glorification of the laborer fit the Soviet communist system very well. Because the system put such severe limitations on ownership, the vast majority of people were only valuable as workers and bureaucrats. Communism is also openly atheist, i.e., it denies the existence of any spiritual reality. The Soviet communist system thereby satisfied the Custodial intentions expressed in ancient texts of preserving Homo sapiens as a creature of toil whose existence from birth until death shall be one long struggle for physical existence with no access to the spiritual knowledge which might set him free. A significant aspect of the Russian Revolution was the role of espionage services in that upheaval. By the time of the Russian revolution, the international intelligence community had grown into a large and sophisticated affair with con- siderable influence. Throughout all of history, Brotherhood network members in positions of political power found intelligence services an ideal conduit for promoting Brotherhood social and political agendas because of the secrecy which typically surrounds intelligence activities. As a result, many intelligence services turned into sources of manipulation, upheaval, and betrayal. This behavior was already evident in Russia, at the time of the Russian Revolution. Before the Provisional Government was established, Russia was ruled by a Tsar (emperor). The last Tsar had at his disposal a vast intelligence network known as the "Okhrana." The Okhrana consisted of several intelligence organizations which performed all of the usual espionage functions with their secret agents, double-agents, agents provocateurs, and secret dossiers. The Okhrana spied on Tsarist friends and enemies alike and acted as Russia's internal security police. Inside Russia, the Okhrana engaged in extensive anti-subversive activities. The unpopular domestic activities of the Okhrana were a major issue used by the Bolsheviks to attack the Tsar. The Tsar, of course, was eventually unseated. That must mean that the Okhrana had failed. Or had it? Historians have noted that the Okhrana had heavily infiltrated and assisted the Bolshevik movement. The Okhrana did this through spies known as "agent provocateurs." An agent provocateur is someone who deliberately agitates others into committing illegal or disruptive acts, usually in order to discredit or arrest the manipulated victim. In America and other nations today, agent provocateurs are often used by police agencies to entrap or compromise targeted people. These activities are sometimes called "sting" operations. There seems to be an obvious reason for engaging in agent provocateur activities. If a targeted person does not commit an act for which he can be defamed, compromised, or imprisoned, he must be made to commit one. Because most provocateur actions are aimed against alleged criminals or subversives, it would appear that provocateurism is a useful tool for battling crime and subversion. In actual fact, it is not. Upon careful analysis, a researcher soon discovers that provocateur actions are almost invariably carried out by people within intelligence and police agencies who are criminal or subversive themselves. Provocateurism proves to be a frequent cover for officially-sanctioned subversion or criminality. Provocateur actions are the best way for police and intelligence services to disguise their secret support of criminal and subversive elements. A clear example of this was the Russian Okhrana. The Okhrana sent many agents to join the growing communist movement in Russia. Okhrana agents insinuated themselves into the innermost circles of the Bolshevik Party and directed many Bolshevik activities. This infiltration was so great that in the years 1908-1909, Okhrana agents constituted four out of five members of the Bolshevik Party's St. Petersburg Committee. Although arrests of revolutionaries were frequent, the Okhrana did far more to assist the Russian Bolsheviks under the guise of provocateurism than it did to harm them. The Okhrana provided regular monies and badly needed materials to the revolutionaries. It worked to stamp out two rival parties to the Bolsheviks: the Social Democratic Party and the Mensheviks. The Okhrana helped launch the Bolsheviks' major propaganda publication, Pravda. When Pravda was founded in 1912, Okhrana agents served as editor (Roman Malinovskii, who was also a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Lenin's chief lieutenant in Russia) and treasurer (Miron Chernomazov). The Okhrana may have also supplied the Russian communists with the infamous dictator Joseph Stalin. Biographer Edward Ellis Smith, writing in his book, The Young Stalin, suggests that Stalin—a revolutionary who later rose to the top position of the Soviet government—may have entered the communist movement as an agent provocateur. Historians have pointed out that Stalin was a main contact between the Bolsheviks and the Tsarist police and he was able to get many badly needed items from the Okhrana. After the Tsar abdicated in early 1917, the Provisional Government disbanded the entire Okhrana network. Bolshevik propaganda had loudly denounced the Okhrana and one  would therefore have expected the victorious communists to leave the Russian intelligence apparatus dismantled. The Bolsheviks did just the opposite. Within six weeks of their overthrow of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks reestablished the intelligence network. This is perhaps not so surprising when we consider the heavy Okhrana involvement in the Bolshevik Party. Lenin merely did some organizational reshuffling, gave the Okhrana a new name, and made the intelligence arm of government even more dominant and oppressive than it had been under the Tsar. By 1921, only four years after the Revolution, the Bolshevik secret police employed ten times as many people as the Okhrana had done under the Tsar. It was an open secret in Russia that the Okhrana was back, more terrible than ever. The name given to the reorganized Russian intelligence apparat was the "Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage," better known as the "Checka." The Checka changed its name and form several times during the ensuing decades. In 1922 it became the GPU, then the OGPU, and in 1934 it was reorganized into the "Peoples Commission of Internal Affairs" (the "NKVD"). It was finally transformed into the modern KGB—history's largest intelligence organization. In 1992, the KGB employed approximately 90,000 staff officers for internal security and the political prison system alone. The KGB operated its own army of 175,000 border troops and carried out most of the espionage and agent provocateur actions for which the Soviet regime had been so well known. An organization the size of the KGB was obviously, expensive to run. The enormous resources required to maintain this immense intelligence bureaucracy were factors which helped keep the Soviet economy so dismal. Soviet workers paid for the massive KGB every day with a lower standard of living which they are still struggling to raise. As of this writing, the KGB continues to exist within the Commonwealth of Independent States, but there has been some restructuring to reflect the breakup of the Soviet Union and some of the KGB's functions have changed. One person to write about the Russian Revolution was Arsene de Goulevitch, a former general in the anti-Bolshevik "White" Russian army. Although Goulevitch can hardly be considered impartial, he did have some interesting things to say in his book, Tsarism and the Revolution. According to Goulevitch, English secret agents were numerous in Russia before and during the Revolution. In fact, some financial support for the Leninist cause was rumored to have come from English banking sources. One of those rumored sources was Alfred Milner. As we recall, Milner was one of the organizers of the Round Table. He was also a major political figure in South Africa during the Boer War. It was during the Boer War that the English created the modern concentration camp. If Goulevitch's allegation contains any truth, then we might better understand where the Bolsheviks got the idea to establish a massive concentration camp system as part of the new communist economic system: namely, from the English. The early Soviet concentration camp system was a large-scale affair that reached its height under Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin. Under the brutal Stalin, a crash program was launched to industrialize Russia, beginning with Russia's first so-called "Five Year Plan." The Plan required large quantities of inexpensive labor. To acquire it, a widespread concentration camp network was set up in Russia. The camps were administered by Russia's secret police, the NKVD. Concentration camp inmates were slave laborers who worked under brutal conditions. Nearly all of the laborers were native Russians who had been imprisoned under various pretexts. The camps were an integral part of the Soviet economy for many decades. In 1941, for example, 17% of the capital construction fund for Russia was allocated to the NKVD to help it operate the camps. Almost half of the chrome and two-thirds of Russia's gold production were carried out by camp inmates. Tens of millions of people passed through the camps and about 10% of them died there. An estimated three to four million people perished in the camps from the time of the camps' inception to 1950 alone. The Soviet concentration camps were decidedly "capitalist" institutions in that they were designed to callously exploit human labor to an ultimate degree. The "downtrodden working classes" had became even more downtrodden under their communist "liberators." With the ongoing reforms in Russia, it remains to be seen what will happen with the concentration camps. As of this writing, they are still in use as prison labor camps. The imposition on the Russian people of communism and its far-flung concentration camp system occurred during an already tumultuous era. World War I was a brutal conflict. It had claimed about ten million military casualties and millions more in civilian losses. When the war ended in late 1918, another catastrophe struck: a worldwide influenza epidemic. The epidemic lasted less than a year but managed in that surprisingly short time to kill over twenty million people; it was as sudden and nearly as devastating as the 14th-century Bubonic Plague. In Russia, these events were keenly felt. A famine, coupled with the influenza, killed about twenty million Russians between 1914 and 1924. The famine was caused largely by the communist revolution and the consequent economic upheavals. For the beleaugered Russian people, these events were just the beginning of a growing nightmare. Under the Five Year Plan begun in 1928 by Stalin, all privately-owned land was to be "collectivized," i.e., it was to be put under government ownership. Many peasants and landowners understandably resisted. Stalin's government responded by launching a program of mass murder similar to the French Reign of Terror. Peasants and landowners were targeted for physical extermination in order to seize their land and remove them as obsta- cles to communist Utopia. This extermination campaign lasted from 1929 until 1934. Millions of people were murdered for no other crime than that they happened to own land. In response, a rebellion broke out between 1932 and 1934 in which defiant peasants destroyed half of Russia's livestock. This rebellious act, coupled with the communist regime's attempt to bring in outside money by overexporting wheat (3.5 million tons within two years) resulted in another famine that claimed an additional five million Russian lives. The total death count between 1917 and 1950 as a direct and indirect result of the establishment of communism in Russia is estimated at roughly 35 to 40 million people. This is one of the largest mortality rates from any single episode in history. To this figure we should add the deaths associated with the establishment of communism in other countries, such as the two million land owners murdered in China during Mao Tse-Tung's crash industrial program of the 1950's, and the millions butchered in Cambodia in the early 1970's under the Khmer Republic. In terms of the sheer number of lives lost, communism was one of the single most catastrophic events in human history. My purpose in this discussion is not to beat a drum for rabid anti-Communism. It is simply to indicate that the historical patterns we studied have continued to recur in the 20th century. Communism is little more than a rehash of a worn-out theme which has been repeated over and over again with the same tragic consequences. "Communism" is but another in a long line of destructive artificialities arising out of the mystical Brotherhood network that has helped keep people fighting, suffering, and dying for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. "Communism" was not an alternative to the enemies it claimed to fight, namely monopolistic "capitalism" and End-of-the-World religions. Modern communism was their natural outgrowth. The dismantling of Soviet and European communism has been a cause for genuine elation throughout the world. Brotherhood factions have been coming and going throughout history, and the passing of each often brings about a period of resurgence. Unfortunately, East European reformers currently plan to preserve the inflatable paper money system and erect a graduated income tax scheme to help pay for it. Severe ethnic and nationalistic strife in several former communist nations reveals that other warring factions have been regenerated or created to mar the peace that should have come from the end of the Cold War.