The Foreword That Admits This Book Will Make You Mad

The first page does not defend the book. It flinches, then dares you to keep reading. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi says he does not endorse every viewpoint inside, and that people will still stamp it as heresy.

Book: A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind | Author: Stephen Mitford Goodson | ISBN-13: 978-1-910881-49-1 | Publisher: Black House Publishing Ltd (1st ed. 2014; 2nd and 3rd 2017) | Author note: former non-executive director of the South African Reserve Bank

A politician who will not sign the footnotes

Buthelezi was writing as a Member of Parliament and president of the Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa. That is not a blog blurb. It is a veteran of the liberation years putting his name on a book about money. He also builds an escape hatch in sentence one. He will praise the subject. He will not vouch for every finding.

He asks a fair question. Why would a “seemingly arid” history of central banking make people this angry? His answer is that some readers will say Goodson has left “the parameters of acceptable historical debate.” Then he cites the credential that is supposed to keep the door open: Goodson researched this for decades and sat on the board of the South African Reserve Bank as a non-executive director.

And then the honest line, the one I respect more than the rest of the sales pitch. “I do not have the expertise to say whether Goodson’s findings are accurate.” That is a politician admitting he cannot audit the footnotes. Most forewords pretend the opposite.

What he can say is why the book hits a nerve. Central banking and the money system sit “at the core of the persistent profound and inhumane differences in wealth distribution” inside countries and between them. That is the raw nerve. Not a secret handshake. Who creates money, and who gets rich from the creation.

Bank notes or government notes

For years, he writes, his party argued that South Africa should reform its central bank and monetary system, even if that put the country “out of step with iniquitous world standards.” The pitch is simple. The Reserve Bank, like other central banks, “do not serve our own best interests and are in league with private banks.” That, he says, undercuts sovereignty.

The alternative he wants is publicly issued, debt-free money that belongs to the people as sovereign credit, plus an interest-free means of exchange. What South Africa has instead, he says, is private money produced out of debt by the private banking system. “Shifting from bank-notes to government-notes” would give people a decent life. He also says that “simple reform” would be harder than almost any other social change.

You can disagree with the mechanics and still hear the politics. He is not asking for a new flag. He is asking who is allowed to type money into existence.

1994 changed the vote, not the printer

Here is the line that makes the foreword local, not just a generic rant about the Fed. South Africa got political freedom in 1994 “in all its outward manifestations.” Inwardly, he says, except for a small group of black and white entrepreneurs, the general population did not thrive. The reason, in his telling, is the money system.

If real freedom is the goal, monetary reform has to be chased “with the same vigour and intensity” as political reform during the struggle years. That requires people to understand how money is created, whom it belongs to, and whose interests it serves. He thinks Goodson offers both a history of state banking “successes” and a blueprint for low growth, high unemployment, and failing services.

He closes with John F. Kennedy, speaking to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on 27 April 1961. Without debate and without criticism, Kennedy said, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. Solon, in that telling, made it a crime to shrink from controversy. Buthelezi wants the book read as an argument, not as scripture. “Thinking South Africans should read” it “as an inspiration for political action.”

I can live with that standard. Read it. Fight it. Do not treat silence as safety.

Goodson opens a history class

Then the author takes the mic. Goodson says history is the most important subject in any school system, above science and the humanities. History holds the culture, the traditions, the reason a people exist. If outsiders falsify or omit it, the civilisation rots. He dates the “slow disintegration of Western civilisation” to 1945. That date is doing a lot of work. Park it. We will see what he hangs on it later.

He quotes George Orwell’s 1984: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of history.” He also leans on Winston Churchill’s line that the further back you go, the clearer the picture gets. That is his method. Start in Rome, then walk forward until the modern chapters feel obvious.

I like the instinct to go back. I do not like the promise that distance will “assuage” every doubt. Old stories can be clearer. They can also be simpler because the surviving sources are fewer, and because the author gets to pick them.

Two money systems, one villain

The thesis is not subtle. For a nation to have full sovereignty, “absolute control over the means it employs to exchange goods and services” must sit with public organs, not private individuals.

When the state controls the money supply, Goodson says you get prosperity, peace, cultural enrichment, full employment, and zero inflation. When private bankers take the creation process, you get boom and bust, unemployment, baked-in inflation, and a rising transfer of wealth and political power to “this tiny clique.” The tool is the same in every era. Coin, notes, cheques, or a screen: they create money out of nothing as an interest-bearing debt.

The solution, he says, is “simple and self-evident.” Dismantle fractional reserve banking and the central banks that support it, or be “consigned to oblivion.”

The money half of that fight is a real debate. Who should issue the means of exchange? Should new money enter as public spending, or as a bank loan that has to be repaid with interest that was never created? You can have that argument without a cabal chart. Plenty of reformers have.

The line that will run the rest of the book

Then he adds the sentence I want flagged before Rome starts. Whenever nations opposed these private and central bankers and tried to restore “an honest money system,” the bankers “invariably invoked a ‘patriotic’ war” to smash the enemy. He says this has been “a feature of almost all wars during the past 300 plus years.”

That is the “every war is a banker war” line. It will not stay in the introduction. It is the plot engine for Napoleon, the Fed, Russia, the Boer War, 1914, the 1930s, Libya, and 2008. Once you accept it, every conflict has the same villain and the same motive. Once you doubt it, a lot of later chapters become a list of coincidences with a bow on them.

Buthelezi’s money question is fair. Who creates the rand, the dollar, the pound, and who collects the interest, is not a nerd side quest. It is the skeleton of daily life. The war thesis is the part that will try to explain too much with one story. I am not granting it in advance.

So here is how I am walking in. I will take the sovereignty claim seriously. I will treat “state money always means peace and zero inflation” as a slogan until the cases are on the table. And I will watch, starting with Rome, whether usury is a real mechanism or just the word he uses when he already knows who he wants to blame.

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