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For other people of the same name, see Edward Griffin

G. Edward Griffin (born November 7, 1931) is an American film producer, author, and political lecturer.[1] Starting as a child actor, he became a radio station manager before age 20. He then began a career of producing documentaries and books on often-debated topics like cancer, Noah's ark, and the Federal Reserve System, as well as on Libertarian views of the U.S. Supreme Court, terrorism, subversion, and foreign policy. Since the 1970s, Griffin has promoted laetrile as a cancer treatment,[2] a view considered quackery by the medical community.[3][4] He has also promoted the Durupınar site as hosting the original Noah's ark, against skeptics as well as near-Ararat Creationists. He has opposed the Federal Reserve since the 1960s, saying it constitutes a banking cartel and an instrument of war and totalitarianism.[5] In 2002, Griffin founded the individualist network Freedom Force International.

edit] Early life

Griffin was born in Detroit, Michigan, on November 7, 1931, and became a child actor on local radio in 1942. By 1947 he was emceeing at WJR (CBS), and continued as announcer at WUOM and station manager at WWJ-TV (NBC), 1950–1955. He earned his bachelor's from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1953, majoring in speech and communications.[6] Griffin served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, reaching the rank of sergeant.[1]

edit] Political advocacy

By 1964, Griffin had completed his first book, The Fearful Master, on the United Nations, a challenging topic that recurs throughout his writings. When George Wallace ran for U.S. president in the election of 1968, winning five states for the paleoconservative third-party American Independent Party, Griffin served as a writer for Wallace's vice presidential candidate, Curtis LeMay,[1] a retired General of the Air Force. In the next year, Griffin began producing political films for American Media of Los Angeles[1] (later moving to Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village, California), of which he is president.[7] While he describes his work as the output of "a plain vanilla researcher", Griffin also agrees with the Los Angeles Daily News characterizing him as "Crusader Rabbit".[8]

Griffin has been a member and officer of the conservative John Birch Society for much of his life[9][10] and a contributing editor to its magazine, The New American.[11] Since the 1960s, Griffin has spoken and written at length about the Society's theory of history involving "communist and capitalist conspiracies" over banking systems (including the Federal Reserve System), American foreign policy, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the United Nations.[9][12][13] From 1962 to 1975, he completed nine books and seven film productions; his 1969 video lecture, More Deadly Than War: The Communist Revolution in America, was printed in English and Dutch. In 1974, he published World Without Cancer, and in 1975, he wrote a sympathetic biography of Society founder Robert W. Welch, which was well received by members of the organization.[14][15] Six of his documentaries from the early period were re-released in 2001 as Hidden Agenda: Real Conspiracies that Affect our Lives Today.

edit] Health advocacy

In 1974, Griffin wrote and published the book World Without Cancer,[16][17] and released it as a documentary video; its second edition appeared in 1997, and it was translated into Afrikaans, 1988, and German, 2005. In the book and the video, Griffin asserts that cancer is a metabolic disease facilitated by the insufficient dietary consumption of amygdalin, a view which has been rejected by the medical community. He contends that "eliminating cancer through a nondrug therapy has not been accepted because of the hidden economic and power agendas of those who dominate the medical establishment"[18] and he wrote, "at the very top of the world's economic and political pyramid of power there is a grouping of financial, political, and industrial interests that, by the very nature of their goals, are the natural enemies of the nutritional approaches to health".[19]

Griffin also advocates the use of Laetrile, a semi-synthetic derivative of amygdalin as a treatment for cancer, often referencing the work of Dean Burk to support the use of Laetrile.[20] Since the 1970s, the use of Laetrile to treat cancer has been described in the scientific literature as a canonical example of quackery and has never been shown to be effective in the treatment or prevention of cancer.[3][21][22]

The author of a critical review of World Without Cancer asserts that Griffin "accepts the 'conspiracy' theory... that policy-makers in the medical, pharmaceutical, research and fund-raising organizations deliberately or unconsciously strive not to prevent or cure cancer in order to perpetuate their functions". The reviewer concludes that although World Without Cancer "is an emotional plea for the unrestricted use of the Laetrile as an anti-tumor agent, the scientific evidence to justify such a policy does not appear within it".[23]

Griffin's websites refer visitors to doctors, clinics, and hospitals with alternative cancer treatments,[24] including sellers of Laetrile.[16][25] He does not sell Laetrile himself.[16]

Griffin founded The Cancer Cure Foundation "in December of 1976 as a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education in alternative cancer therapies".[26] The foundation expanded its mission in March, 2002 to include disseminating information about other medical conditions, and it changed its name to The Cure Research Foundation. During the 1980s, Griffin returned to producing films about terrorism, subversion, and Communism.

edit] The Creature from Jekyll Island

Griffin enrolled in the College for Financial Planning in Denver, Colorado, and became a Certified Financial Planner in 1989.[27] He described the U.S. money system in his 1993 movie and 1994 book on the Federal Reserve System, The Creature from Jekyll Island.[1] This popular book[28][29] has been a business bestseller;[30][31] it has been reprinted in Japanese, 2005, and German, 2006. The book also influenced Ron Paul during the writing of a chapter on money and the Federal Reserve in Paul's New York Times number-one bestseller, The Revolution: A Manifesto, which recommended Griffin's book on its "Reading List for a Free and Prosperous America".[32]

The title refers to the November 1910 meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia, of seven bankers and economic policymakers, who represented the financial elite of the Western world.[33][34] The meeting was recounted by Forbes founder B. C. Forbes in 1916,[35] and recalled by participant Frank Vanderlip as "the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System".[36] Griffin states that participant Paul Warburg describes the Jekyll Island meeting as "this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy".[37]

Griffin's work stresses[38] the point which Federal Reserve chair Marriner Eccles made in Congressional testimony in 1941: "If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."[33] Griffin advocates against the debt-based fiat money system on several grounds, stating that it devours individual prosperity through inflation and it is used to perpetuate war. He also described a framework of central bankers underwriting both sides of an ongoing war or revolution.[39] Griffin says that the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Bank are working to destroy American sovereignty through a system of world military and financial control, and he advocates for United States withdrawal from the United Nations.[11][40]

Edward Flaherty, an academic economist,[41] characterized Griffin's description of the secret meeting on Jekyll Island as "conspiratorial", "amateurish", and "suspect".[42] Griffin's response was that Flaherty had miscategorized the book with other publications and had labeled all criticisms of the Federal Reserve as the results of conspiracy theory.[43]

Griffin advocates a free-market, private-money system superior to the Fed caused economist Bernard von NotHaus to deploy such a system in 1998. Griffin states that von NotHaus's private silver certificates, known as Liberty Dollars, are "real money".[44]

edit] The "Mandrake mechanism"

The Mandrake mechanism is a term coined by Griffin in this book. Mandrake the Magician was a comic strip character from the 1940s. He had the ability to magically create things and, when appropriate, make them disappear.[45] Griffin's view is similar to many other gold-standard supporters' critique of the fractional reserve banking system and the Federal Reserve in particular: that it makes money "magically" appear from nothing.

In Griffin's view, the "magical" quality of this mechanism is really just a simple mathematical limit (mathematics). When banks loan money, they don't actually loan existing money. Rather, they allocate money to loan, but they are limited by how much money they can create. The law basically says that, for each dollar a bank has on hand in one of its savings accounts, it is allowed to create another 90 cents to give out as a loan. (The dollar from the savings account is still there, and can still be spent by the person who owns the savings account.) This loan is then spent, and the recipient puts it into another bank, and that bank can now loan 90 cents times 0.9 = 81 cents. This can be repeated many times (depending on the demand for loans) until it approaches its mathematical limit of 10 dollars.

For example, when the Federal Reserve holds on deposit 1 billion in marketable United States Treasury security then the banks in the banking system, public and private, and bound by US financial law, are able to generate 10 billion in new debt over time. In September, 2008 the US Public Debt was 5.8 trillion and from that debt there was a potential to create approximately 53 trillion ((5.8x10)-5.8=52.2) dollars of money (as debt).

edit] Noah's ark

Also during this time, Griffin wrote and narrated the 1992 documentary The Discovery of Noah's Ark, based on U.S. Merchant Marine officer David Fasold's 1988 book, The Ark of Noah.[46] Griffin's film said that the original Noah's ark continued to exist in fossil form at the Durupınar site, about 17 miles (27 km) from Mount Ararat in Turkey, based on photographic, radar, and metal detector evidence. Griffin also narrated that towns in the area had names that resembled terms from the Biblical story of the flood. He presented a viewpoint that the flood might have been the action of massive tides caused by a gravitational interaction between Earth and a large celestial body coming close to it.[8]

Popular Mechanics stated Fasold had described his research as "radar imagery ... so clear that Fasold could count the floorboards between the walls";[47] Griffin has continued to promote this view, as did Fasold's co-researcher Ron Wyatt and Wyatt Archeological Research.[48] Creationists Andrew Snelling and John D. Morris prefer a near-Ararat site; Snelling supports geologist Tom Fenner's view that "a great deal of effort was put into repeating the radar measurements acquired in 1986 by Wyatt and Fasold .... After numerous attempts over a period of one and a half days [Geophysical Survey Systems] were unable to duplicate their radar records in any way."[49][50] Fasold himself revisited the site evidence with geologists Ian Plimer and Lorence Collins and came to doubt his initial position, saying, "I think we have found what the ancients said was the Ark, but this structure is not Noah's Ark."[51][52][53]

edit] Libertarian advocacy

In 2002, Griffin founded Freedom Force International, a libertarian activist network,[7][54] whose members value individual freedom above government power. The organization's position that the exclusive role of government is to protect people's rights and property, not to provide services like welfare, reflects Griffin's view that collectivism and freedom "are mortal enemies." One of the organization's stated goals is to elect people with such views to government offices and onto the boards of nonprofit organizations—true to its motto, "Don't fight city hall when you can BE city hall."[55]

In 2006, Griffin was interviewed for the documentary film America: Freedom to Fascism.[56] He endorsed Ron Paul for U.S. president in the 2008 election.[7]

edit] Bibliography

edit] Filmography

edit] References