So-called ‘democracy’ is a sham, the ballot a travesty. In modern bureaucratized
systems, whose birth dates from the mid-nineteenth century, the feudal organization
has been carried to the next level, so to speak. A chief objective of what Thucydides
referred to in his epoch as synomosiai (literally ‘exchanges of oaths’), that is, the outof-sight fraternities acting behind the ruling clans, has been to make the process of the
exaction of rents from the population (a ‘free income’ in the form of rents, financial
charges and like thefts) as unfathomable and impenetrable as possible. The tremendous
sophistication, and the propagandistic wall of artfully divulged misconceptions
surrounding the banking system (we will return to this theme in Chapter 4), which is
the chief instrument wherewith the hierarchs expropriate and control the wealth of
their supporting community, is the limpid testimony of this essential transformation
undergone by the feudal/oligarchic organization in the modern era. The West has
moved from a low-tech agrarian establishment built upon the backs of disenfranchised. Giacomo Preparata in Conjuring Hitler.