Before I open hostilities in the blogosphere against the Freemasons, which I have come to see as a sort of meta organized crime group operating internationally, I would like to pay homage to my grandfather, Walter Scott Boyd, who may or may not have been associated with the Freemasons early in his adult life. He was named after renowned Scottish man of letters, Sir Walter Scott.
Sir Walter Scott is claimed by the Freemasons as one of their own. He penned works that addressed issues that resonate to this day and unexpectedly permeate the social milieu of societies around the world. Because these issues recur, they challenge us to reaffirm our values as open modern societies. Some of the manifold issues Scott wrote about include the relationship of religion and politics, religion and economics, religion and secret military orders, as well as sectarian strife, freedom of conscience, and rule of law. His works can be seen as helping people bridge their differences, and facilitating civil intercourse between members of societies differing in their particular religious and cultural backgrounds. In that respect, his works are tomes that still resonate today, as they address common issued we continue to grapple with in modernity.
My grandfather was born in 1906 in West Virginia, and was raised in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He worked his way up to the level of a journeyman metal worker, becoming skilled in the diverse crafts of metalworking. He rode an INDIAN motorcycle, and travelled around a bit with his fellow motorcycling aficionados. He used to tell me a story about a rather large Russian fellow in their group who would forget to turn after he got drunk, and they’d have to fish him and his bike out of the woods at every bend.
At some point he decided to go abroad as a true journeyman, and he went to Russia to build buildings. I’m not clear on the exact time frame, but is must have been Soviet Russia sometime before the rise of Stalin, maybe late 1920s to early 1930s. If he was a Freemason, he was an old-school, blue collar Freemason, who went to another country to work side-by-side with the people there, building buildings, creating bonds of community internationally.
I believe that my grandfather m a progressive Republican, along the lines of the Theodore Roosevelt school of thought. In those days, it was possible to be a Republican and a progressive. I recall at one point while I was in college before joining the army or perhaps after enlisting that we somehow got on the topic of communism, and my grandfather told me that it “reads like a dream, but it just doesn’t work”, after which I just sort of gave him that old smug adolescent sort of—how could you be so naïve Gramps—sneer. I was a pure-breed red blooded American who could never be deceived by such utopian drivel. Naturally, that was before I’d ever read any substantial studies of modern history outside of high school curriculum, let alone social theory, such as some of the work of Max Weber, for example. At any rate, I believe got his point across that it was worthwhile to take into consideration other ideas rather than to dismiss them offhandedly or dogmatically. And I was impressed that he had gone to what seemed a distant and remote a place as Russia.
Later years I came to learn that it was the USA’s refusal to integrate the newly formed USSR under Lenin, rejecting his pragmatic compromise of communist ideology for modern economics in the form of what he proposed as the New Economic Program. And it appears that the primary reason for that refusal was pressure from the Morgan finance empire, who had been lending huge amounts of funds to the, apparently, oppressive Czarist regime. Lenin had refused to agree to repay the debt owed to corrupt financiers by the Czar.
At any rate, while my grandfather was toiling away with Russians and whoever else was there erecting modern buildings, getting to know the and be known by people, establish a degree of mutual intelligibility and trust, it would appear that the House of Morgan financiers were pulling the strings in Washington DC to alienate and isolate the USSR. They succeeded, Lenin lost his bid to rationalize the economy, and Stalin ascended with an inward looking hard-line agenda.
That was a successful creation of an irreconcilable “divide”, which is half the battle of “divide and conquer”.
I want to belatedly express my gratitude to my Grandfather for doing what he could to make the world a more humane place. Thanks Grandpa.
