Let's talk about the Rothschilds

True story: the only member of the Rothschild family who chose to live in Israel, was Bethsabée de-Rothschild. A descendant of the French Rothschild house. Bethsabée was a ballet enthusiast. After the second world war, when she lived in New York, She took some ballet classes with the Martha Graham dance company, and later became their producer and in fact their patron. In the early 1960’s she moved to Tel Aviv where, with the help of Martha Graham, she established her own ballet company and school, named “Bat Sheva” - the original Hebrew version of her name. In 1965, she met Jeannette Ordman, a classical ballet dancer and teacher, and a cousin of my grandmother, while she was looking for a rehearsal manager for “Bat Sheva”. The two women have developed a unique relationships, and in 1968, they founded a new dance company and school, called “Bat Dor”. Few years later, Jeanette moved to live in de-Rothschild's villa, in the North of Tel Aviv. Their partnerships continued until de-Rothschild's death in 1999.

If you want to know what Bethsabée's family thought about her life story, you can refer to the autobiographical book of her brother, Guy de-Rothschild, in which he wrote in length about their other sister, Jacqueline, and her husband, the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, but to Bethsabée he dedicated only one sentence, mentioning that she lives in Tel Aviv and runs a ballet company there.

So when Bethsabée died, the “Rothschild development fund” that manages the family's assets and interests in Israel, sent a representative to meet with the dancers of Bat Dor, and tell them that the Rothschilds don't want to have anything to do with Jeanette or the company. Needless to say that Jeanette was not present. After a long struggle to get her fair share of what she saw as Bethsabée's and her’s common heritage, Jeanette got an unknown some of money from the Rothschilds, but it was too late and too little, and in 2007, she died, dismayed and heartbroken, few months after Bat Dor was closed.

I never met Jeannette Ordman in person. I think I saw her dancing once, when I was six or seven, but it is just a fade memory. Her story always floated around in the circles of our family, like a fable for the open minded, “The baroness and the ballerina”. It is part of our Jewish - Lithuanian tradition to tell stories as a way to convey moral lessons. I guess this is what I am doing in this post.

But wait. Don't jump to the conclusion, that I just made your case about how evil the Rothschilds are, and how terrible it is that this kind of people supposedly control the world. This is not the moral lesson of this post. In fact, it is almost to the contrary.

I'm on Steemit for more than two months now, and I like this social network very much. I am very happy to be part of a community which produces high quality, original and thought provoking content. A community of freethinkers who are not afraid to write what's really on their mind. However, every once in awhile, it gets a little unpleasant when certain extreme ideas come up. Given what this post circles around, it is probably not hard to guess that I refer mainly to alt-right ideas.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not ruling out the alt-right philosophy completely. A Lot of the claims, made by alt-right people are, IMO, quite correct. There is certainly something wrong with the conservative right’s socioeconomic approach and specifically with the death based economy that it fosters. It is true that the combination of conservative thought and greedy, short term revenues hungry financial policies, is creating unacceptable income gaps and concentration of too much wealth in too few hands. But to try and explain that with shallow catchphrases like, “Fiat money is theft” and “The Rothschilds want to rule the world”, is not only missing the point, but is also a repetition of old mistakes.

Know this: the same ideas that are used by the alt-right in the last few years as if they are new, are circulating around for almost 250 years. The rhetoric that is now spread through YouTube movies, was circulating for decades in print. Same claims about a world conspiracy of bankers, same stories like the one about Nathan Rothschild and the battle of Waterloo - a false story that was traced back to an anti-Semitic french newspaper from about 50 years after the event, same call to destroy the existing corrupt order.

And while all this is stated very firmly, using hard and often intimidating words and imagery, what remains much more obscure and faint, is the suggested alternative. Because you see, the real problem of the alr-right is that it's right. Alt-right followers are scared of the possibility that they may in fact promote leftist ideas. They must protect capitalism while avoiding the fact that the risk of too much wealth concentration is built into the capitalistic system. They need scapegoats. They must say that capitalism could be great, unless there were short sighted politicians and power hungry Jewish bankers.

So maybe my moral lesson from the story I was telling in this post, is that rich people are just like any other people, only with lots of money. It doesn't really make that much difference. They are still people. They love, they hate and they sometimes do good things and sometimes bad things. Some of them are more capable of containing the complexity of certain life stories and some are less capable. Just like everyone else. The reason we see them as different is because of the way we look at money. The whole thing with money is, that it’s just a story we tell ourselves. Money is the story that makes economy human. Without it we couldn't trade any non physical things, like ideas, innovations or creative thoughts. And the more humanity advances, the more the concept of money becomes abstract. It used to be precious metals, then it became IOU notes and now it evolves into algorithms.

The way we tell the story of money has a real economic value. We can tell about the son of a humble merchant from Frankfurt who innovated global banking, a cornerstone of humanity's huge progress in the last two and a half centuries towards more freedom, longer and healthier life and a so much better understanding of the universe. Or we can tell the same story as a story about greed and desire to control the world. History tells us that whenever the latter version was chosen, it led to chaos which perhaps alt-right followers would applause to at first, but the next step was always tyranny. The next step was Hitler or Stalin or Mao Zedong or Pol Pot.

If we want to really deal with our social and economic problems. If we want more security, more prosperity, better life for everyone, we have to stick to the stories that hold some truth. When I see how certain alt-right followers buy into any conspiracy theory out there, I know they do not hold the answer. When people convey certain ideas to us, we should always bother to verify their story, and if we find that it is full of lies, ask ourselves why do they have to lie to us? If their position is right, why do they have to spread venomous misconceptions? Why do they have to render certain individuals or groups into a concept, crush their entire existence into a word?

Our lives are sometimes hard and complex, and when we, the regular mortals who just try to make ends meet look at the very rich, it is very easy for us to forget that many of them didn't start off from a better position than ours, and even if they did, it is still up to them to determine the course of their lives, just as it is up to us to determine ours. It all comes down to setting our priorities right, to planning our future correctly and to being faithful to the beliefs that we value. In this sense it is true that we were all created equal, and it is true that the accumulated power of the small decision made by each of us, is the most powerful thing in the world. If you want to really free yourself, stop believing in status and privilege. They are just a bedtime story.