As we have seen, Douglas had as early as 1924, in Social Credit, warned of the impending disintegration of Civilisation under prevailing finance-economic policies. The Great Economic Depression of the thirties prepared the way for the Second World War, both events being predicted by Douglas. The rapid expansion of the Social Credit Movement throughout the English-speaking world, including the U.S.A. during the Depression years, and the serious threat to the Credit Monopolists with the direct challenge in Alberta, was met in part by a diversion in the form of what came to be known as 'Keynesian Economics.' As Douglas said, John Maynard Keynes was an able man. He not only conceded that the banking system creates all new credits, but by inference in his major work, 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', admitted that Douglas was right concerning a deficiency of purchasing power. The Keynes solution was not to recommend that the individual gain access to his own inherited credit as a right, but that depression conditions should be overcome with an expansion of credit to finance deficit budgets. This would enable Governments to "stimulate" the economy by "pump-priming." It would, of course, increase centralised control over the individual. And Keynes did admit that one result would be inflation, but this could be "controlled." Keynesian type "money-reforms," which Hitler and Mussolini had introduced, were offered to desperate people as the only answer to major depressions. Marxist theoreticians like John Strachey welcomed Keynesian policies of "controlled inflation" because they must inevitably undermine stable society. Consider the state of industrial societies today, as inflation produces increasing confrontations between employers and employees. In a little-publicised attempt to help avert the threatened Second World War, Douglas at one stage made an approach to Hitler, suggesting that if he were genuine in his anti-Judaic sentiments, he would end the policy of "full employment" which required Germany to strive to "export or perish." But Hitler, a paranoiac, was a product of the will-to-power philosophy.
The result was, as Douglas said, that by "allowing himself to be put in ostensible control of powers greater than himself" Hitler was at the mercy of those who put him there. When the Second World War started, Douglas expressed the view that the work of the Social Credit Movement would not be lost. Early in the war he predicted that the real objectives of the war were the establishment of an International Police State, the restoration of the Gold Standard and the Debt system, the "elimination of Great Britain in the cultural sense, and the substitution of Jewish-American ideals," and "The establishment of the Zionist State in Palestine as a geographical centre of World Control, with New York as the centre of World Financial Control." In an article in The New Age of January 14, 1932, 'The International Idea,' Douglas examined the reasons for the campaign to establish the World State: "there is a perfectly straightforward and practical explanation of this propaganda for internationalism, and for practical purposes one does not need to look further. Hardly a day passes without a leading article in The Times or other papers of the same type of interest, remarking, as though it were axiomatic that the world is one economic unit, and that no adjustment of the present discontents can be expected which does not proceed from international agreement. These journals are ably seconded by High Clerics. This opinion, you will notice, is never argued; it is always stated as though it were obvious to the meanest intellect, which is, in fact, just about what it is . . . the simplest explanation of this is that if you can make a subject large enough and involve a sufficiently large number of people in the solution of it, you can rest assured that you will never get a solution. A democracy of a thousand voters can be personally approached and convinced on any subject within a reasonable period of time, but if you enlarge the franchise to include everyone over twenty-one in a population of 45,000,000 you can be reasonably sure that any general conclusion at which it will arrive, it will arrive at twenty-five years after that conclusion ceases to be true. If you can superimpose upon that by means of a controlled Press, Broadcasting, and other devices of a similar nature, something that you call 'public opinion' (because it is the only opinion which is articulate) you have a perfect mechanism for a continuous dictatorship, and moreover, it is the form of dictatorship which is fundamentally desired by the collectivist mentality - a dictatorship which has power without responsibility."
