Media

The most successful journalists are rarely the best ones, as one very good journalist describes in his experience in Washington. “The people who succeeded and did well,” says Robert Parry, “were those who didn’t stand up, who didn’t write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people.”

In the “Origins of the Overclass,” Steve Kangas who appears to have been murdered in 1999, describes the relaltionship between the CIA and the media. “Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents,” Kangas pointed out. “People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.”

Gary Webb - Robert Parry

Katherine Graham - Sam Smith

Graham, in a 1988 speech to senior CIA employees, said: “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

(In the 1950s, Graham’s husband, Philip, played an important role in Operation Mockingbird, a major and remarkably successful effort by the CIA to co-opt journalists. Some 25 major news organizations and 400 journalists were seconded by the agency for its purposes during this period, as admitted by the CIA itself during the Church committee hearings. As one agency operative put it, “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”)

Michael Parenti: “In sum, the news media’s daily performance under what is called “democratic capitalism” is not a failure but a skillfully evasive success. We often hear that the press “got it wrong” or “dropped the ball” on this or that story. In fact, the media do their job remarkably well. Media people have a trained incapacity for the whole truth. Their job is not to inform but disinform, not to advance democratic discourse but to dilute and mute it. Their task is to give every appearance of being conscientiously concerned about events of the day, saying so much while meaning so little, offering so many calories with so few nutrients. When we understand this, we move from a liberal complaint about the press’s sloppy performance to a radical analysis of how the media maintain the dominant paradigm with much craft and craftiness.”

In The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard expresses his dismay with the American media’s coverage of the Timothy McVeigh trial for the Oklahoma bombing. “The reaction of the press disturbed me deeply. I never imagined that the machinery of cover-up could be so oppressively efficient.” (p. Evans-Pritchard alleges that the investigation was “rotten from the foundations up” and that the U.S. government were determined to suppress information that indicated that the Oklahoma bombing was “a broad conspiracy involving several members of the neo-Nazi movement in Oklahoma.”

George Seldes, Lords of the Press: “it is possible to fool all the people all the time - when government and press cooperate.”

Notes

Sam Smith, “The Canonization of Katherine Graham,” http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/PentaPap.html#CoKG

Daniel Brandt, “CIA and the Press: The Mighty Wurlitzer,” http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8425/CIAPRESS.HTM

Michael Parenti, “Monopoly Media Manipulation,” Michael Parenti Political Archive, May 2001,
http://www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press. ed. Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, 2002

Steve Kangas, “The Origins of the Overclass,” Conspiracy Archive,
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Overclass.htm

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: the unreported stories, 1997

Into the Buzzsaw

Robert Parry, “Fooling America,” A talk by Robert Parry given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993
http://www.webcom.com/lpease/collections/conspiracies/parryspeech.htm

The environmental oil barons

According to British environmental writer and activist George Monbiot, the United States government’s reluctance to combat climate change is due to “two great corrupting forces.” One is the corporate media, which he accuses of “downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it.” The second corrupting force is campaign finance. “The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose,” Monbiot writes in a recent column in the Guardian. “Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m.” Both political parties benefit, although the Republicans benefit most. “During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000.” Monbiot concludes bitterly that, “The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.”

Based on such compelling evidence, George Monbiot and other environmentalists understandably see the issue of global warming as a clearcut battle between self-serving oil companies recklessly funding climate change deniers on one side, and independent environmental groups selflessly fighting for the future of the planet on the other side. But the truth, as Oscar Wilde once observed, is rarely that pure and never so simple.

In the history of the oil industry, the Rockefeller family towers above all others. In 1870, John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company which quickly developed a monopoly over the fledgling industry through such means as “stealth, deception, spies, violence, and the secret takeover of enemies who became friends.” (Dewar, p.260). By 1904, Standard controlled 91% of production and 85% of final sales, earning it the nickname “The Octopus.” Eventually, the unpopularity of Standard’s monopoly, upheld by Ida Tarbell’s excellent muckraking, drew the regulatory attention of the federal government. In 1909, the US Department of Justice sued Standard under federal anti-trust law. On May 15, 1911, the US Supreme Court declared the Standard Oil group to be an “unreasonable” monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Standard was ordered to break up into 34 independent companies with different boards of directors. “This seemingly devastating blow apparently taught the Octopus members to pay close attention to the formation of public opinion,” Elaine Dewar writes in Cloak of Green (pp.260-261). By then, John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world, and the dissolution of the Standard Oil monopoly would not seriously hamper the family’s enormous power, which “did not spring from money, but from the unique network of Rockefeller institutions and associations, beginning in the economy but now stretching axcross all the political, cultural, and intellectual boundaries of the national enterprise.” (The Rockefellers, p. 486)

nor their influence over the course of the twentieth century and beyond.

In 1966, one of the 34 successor companies to Standard Oil, Standard’s Atlantic merged with the independent company Richfield to form Atlantic Richfield or ARCO. Despite the break-up of Standard, ARCO’s founder, Robert O. Anderson, knew the Rockefeller family well enough to share the million acre Bodoquena Ranch in Brazil with John D.’s grandson, David Rockefeller, and another partner. He also served on the board of Chase Manhattan Bank, of which David was chairman. Anderson also owned a million acres in the United States, making him America’s largest rancher. Apart from huge stakes in ranching and the oil business, Anderson was renowned for his environmental philanthropy. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he helped found the Worldwatch Institute, the International Institute for Environment and Development, and the John Muir Institute of the Environment. William Engdahl, in A Century of War, also credits Anderson with the founding of Friends of the Earth, which Engdahl claims was deployed by the oil industry to target the rival nuclear industry. Despite Anderson’s environmental largesse, he was severely criticised for spearheading the controversial drilling of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field discovered in American history. An opponent of the Alaskan pipeline once doused Anderson with a can of motor oil. But Anderson held some surprising views for an oil billionaire, seemingly at odds with the industry’s interests. “He was an oilman who warned of global warming caused by fossil-fuel consumption in the 1980s,” Douglas Martin wrote in the New York Times obituary, “and more than once advocated higher taxes on his industry.”

Bilderberg etc.

Robert O. Anderson had a lot in common with another of John D. Rockeller’s grandsons. Laurance Rockefeller, like Anderson, is remembered for his environmental philanthropy. He had founded the American Conservation Association in 1958. And in 1967, the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, called him “America’s leading conservationist.” But like Anderson, Laurance’s relationship with nature was not uncontroversial. He too was a substantial rancher in South America, owning a controlling interest in 1.5 million acres of prime agricultural land on the Magdalena River in Colombia. According to Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done, “Laurance’s interests ranged from harvesting rich mahogany timberlands to building a hotel on the the projected Pan-American Highway to raising cattle.”
Nelson Rockefeller’s “shining dream” …
Apart from his inherited oil money, much of Laurance Rockefeller’s wealth derived from his investments in aviation and the military-industrial complex, neither considered to be very environmentally-friendly enterprises. As his obituary in the Washington Post recalls, “A meeting with J.S. McDonnell Jr., the St. Louis aircraft engineer and designer, led to an infusion of cash that created McDonnell Aircraft Corp., one of the most important military contractors in the aftermath of World War II.” Although his personal wealth was estimated at $1.5 billion, Laurance advocated a “simpler life-style” for fellow Americans. Writing in the Reader’s Digest in 1976, he championed the “emerging ecological ethic and the change in life-style which [accompany] it.”

“wolf in sheep’s clothing” - Constantine

CIA, UFOs

Opening the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, [chairman?] Maurice Strong echoed Laurance Rockefeller’s call for a radical change in lifestyles:

“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption pattern of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”

Strong, like Laurance Rockefeller, apparently didn’t see anything jarring about a billionaire, with at least five homes around the world, exhorting the middle class to lead a simpler lifestyle. Hypocrisy is not the only thing they have in common. As Canadian journalist Elaine Dewar showed in Cloak of Green, Maurice Strong’s career, like Robert O. Anderson’s, is closely tied to the Rockefellers. Introduced to David Rockefeller when Strong was only twenty, Rockefeller money seems to have followed him all his life. When asked by Dewar about Strong, David’s spokesman said his boss considered they had “a strong working relationship.” Soon after their first meeting, Strong began work at the UN in New York, the land for which John D. Rockefeller Jr. had donated. But he quickly returned to the oil business. As the first chairman and CEO of Petro-Canada, the first oil company Strong bought was the Canadian subsidiary of Arco, owned by his friend, Robert O. Anderson. He was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1971 to 1978, during which time he became prominent in UN environmental affairs. As secretary general of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the running of his office, and received the writing services of ecologist Rene Dubos from the Rockefeller University. In 1997, he was joined by Steven Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, on the Earth Charter Commission, which published the Earth Charter in 2000. Funded by the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Earth Charter is described as a “declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society for the 21st century.” Strong quit his position as … over his connections to Tongsun Park, who was indicted in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. Although he owns a large ranch in Colorado, Strong now spends much of his time in Beijing where he does business. He is reported to be exporting Chinese cars to the US in partnership with George Soros. Strange activity indeed for an environmentalist.

Although Maurice Strong has played an enormous role in environmental activism within the UN, he is not that well known to the general public. That certainly can not be said about a close friend of his, who is without doubt the world’s best known environmentalist.

Al Gore

Presidential campaign sponsored with $100,000 from Strong.

Less well-known is his involvement with the oil business.
Elk Hills Charles Lewis

Armand Hammer, Occidental Oil

Ford Foundation: Natural Resources Defense Council (L.Rock.) Engdahl p.147
Colombia U’wa
omission of “who” Catherine Austin Fitts

Coincidentally, … Jacob Schiff

So, in this cursory tour of the strange interlocking history of the oil industry and the environmental movement, we’ve come full-circle. But what does it all mean?

“Philanthropy and its purposes remain the same as when John D. dispensed millions to winch the family name out of the mud,” Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein write in American Babylon. “Today the environmental movement receives about $40 million a year from three oil companies which operate front groups politely described as private foundations.” One of the big three is the Rockefeller Family Fund…

There is one thing we can be reasonably certain of though, the earth cannot sustain many Rockefellers and their mega-rich friends and associates.

There is one thing of which we can be certain though. The relationship between the oil industry and the environmental movement is not the unambiguously adversarial one that environmentalists such as George Monbiot would have us believe.

[David H. Koch]

“speaking from the pocket, not the gut.” - Monbiot

Notes

George Monbiot, “Hurray! We’re Going Backwards,” The Guardian, 17th December 2007
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/17/hurray-were-going-backwards/#more-1096

Douglas Martin, “Robert O. Anderson, Oil Executive, Dies at 90,” New York Times, December 6, 2007

Adam Bernstein, “Laurance Rockefeller Dies at 94,” Washington Post
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page B04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43444-2004Jul11?language=printer

Will Banyan, “Rockefeller Internationalism,” Nexus, February-March 2004.
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/rockefeller.6.html

Laurance Rockefeller, “The Case for a Simpler Life-Style”, The Reader’s Digest, February 1976, p. 61

The Earth Charter Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
http://rockpa.org/special_programs/the-earth-charter-fund/

http://www.philanthropy.com/stats/

http://www.muckety.com/

AIDS: Death by Design?

In his article “The Medicine Man,” journalist Edward Humes described Larry Ford as “a noted Los Angeles gynecologist and infectious disease specialist with an unofficial subspecialty: biological and chemical warfare.” According to Humes, during the apartheid regime Ford worked closely with South African deputy surgeon general Dr. Niel Knobel:

Ford began advising him on protecting troops from biological attack, as well as suggesting AIDS prevention programs in a country that today has the worst AIDS infection rate on earth — benign and praiseworthy endeavors that Knobel maintains had “no political agenda.” But the AIDS prevention program was for whites in the military, not blacks. A secret right-wing South African organization, the Broeder-bond, conducted studies around this same time that suggested the AIDS epidemic could make whites the majority in the future.

Could Ford have been working with members of the Broederbond to help bring about their desired demographic shift? The existence of a covert white South African bioweapons programme was revealed by the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

Code-named Project Coast, it was run by another Ford friend and financial benefactor, Dr. Wouter Basson; Knobel had administrative oversight. Basson’s alleged ties to hundreds of poisonings and assassinations in South Africa and in the neighboring countries of Angola and Zimbabwe earned him the nickname Dr. Death in the South African press. Documents indicating he had arranged an offshore bank account for Ford were found in Ford’s papers after his death.

The commission uncovered evidence that whole villages, including an Angolan settlement of several hundred people suspected of harboring rebels, may have been decimated by Project Coast weapons. This finding parallels information Nilsson’s ex-girlfriend provided: She said Ford more than once boasted of wiping out an entire Angolan village during a civil war.

Project Coast scientists called to testify against Basson have said Ford was brought in to brief them on the use of biological weapons in mass attacks and discrete assassination, the latter through the contamination of ordinary items such as Playboy magazines and tea bags. One scientist involved with South African bioweapons development noted that Ford’s ideas — and arrogance — were not well received, and that his work was given little credence in the Project Coast lab. However, Ford continued to work with Basson and Knobel, who had a picture of him hanging in his den at the time of the suicide.

According to a recent U.S. Air Force Academy report on South Africa’s biological warfare program, Ford was part of a global network of scientists that Basson assembled to assist Project Coast. Whether that meant creating — or receiving and storing — toxins produced by the program is a matter of conjecture, the report suggests, as South African officials have been unable to account for all of the dangerous material produced over the years. The air force report quotes testimony from a Swiss intelligence agent who laundered money for Basson and who describes a worldwide conspiracy involving unnamed Americans.

“The death of Dr. Ford and revelations of his South African involvement,” the report states, “[raises] the possibility of a right-wing international network, [still] united by a vision of South Africa once again ruled by whites.”

In the wake of Ford’s suicide Fitzpatrick and Byron reminded a new set of FBI agents about the meeting between Ford and Deputy Surgeon General Knobel, in which the satchel of deadly germs was allegedly passed over to the South African — and about the fact that nothing was done to intercept Knobel as he returned to South Africa. Once again no explanation was offered. Byron suggested reviewing the surveillance recordings from the bugs he and Fitzpatrick helped plant so long ago. “You can get a blockbuster out of those, I’m sure.”

“Not even we can get those tapes,” he remembers the agent responding. “They’re sealed. National security.”

Matthew McLaughlin, spokesman for the FBI in Los Angeles, says the bureau’s policies bar him from confirming or denying Byron’s and Fitzpatrick’s accounts. Nor will he comment on their allegation that the government permitted Ford to illegally develop and traffic in bioweapons. McLaughlin does caution, however, that there are often reasons criminal activity is allowed to go on in order to preserve an investigation, and that no informant in any case has the whole picture. “We compartmentalize people we work with, and they are not privy to the breadth and width of a case,” he says. “They see the elephant’s toenail.”

Of course, Byron and Fitzpatrick say trade attache Gideon Bouwer was clear in their conversations 16 years ago about what had happened in the meeting with Ford. They say he raved about the ability to keep whites in power through biological warfare, and he hinted at being part of a separate agenda — some sort of extragovernmental conspiracy, like the one described in the air force report, that had plans to unleash biological agents worldwide on South Africa’s enemies if the need should ever arise.

“Just be ready,” Fitzpatrick remembers Bouwer warning him cryptically, then asking, “How fast could you get your daughter out of the country if you had to?”

Notes

Edward Humes, “The Medicine Man,” Los Angeles Magazine, July, 2001
http://www.edwardhumes.com/articles/medicine.shtml

He who pays the piper calls the tune

Philanthropy, generally understood as the generous donation of money by the rich to good causes, has a much less understood dark side. In Tragedy and Hope, historian Carroll Quigley explains the origin of the major tax-exempt foundations such as the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations:

In spite of the great influence of this “Wall Street” alignment, an influence great enough to merit the name of the “American Establishment,” this group could not control the Federal government and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions thoroughly distasteful to the group. The chief of these were in taxation law, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but culminating, above all else, in the inheritance tax. These tax laws drove the great private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-exempt foundations, which became a major link in the Establishment network between Wall Street, the Ivy League, and the Federal government.

The tax-exempt foundations, a response to unwelcome tax laws, were quickly turned to advantage by some of the richest people in America. Writing in 1966, Quigley tells us:

More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could “blow off steam,” and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went “radical.”

“There was nothing really new about this decision,” Quigley informs us, “since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier.” We can, I believe, safely assume that the elite have not in the meantime abandoned such a successful strategy for controlling the terms of public debate.

To clarify, I’m just following the advice of Deep Throat to Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” That applies to right and left, liberal and conservative, to those causes we like, and those we despise. It’s worth pointing out that concern about the influence of tax-exempt foundations on public opinion is not an idiosyncratic pursuit, but has been studied by many academics such as Edward H. Berman, Rene Wormser, Frances Stonor Saunders, James Petras among others, but it’s not something the corporate-owned media are likely to bring to your attention. It’s also worth noting that at least two authors, Carl Oglesby and Kirkpartrick Sale, distinguish between two major groups of foundations, each representing the dominant power elites in the United States, namely the Yankees and the Cowboys to use Oglesby’s terms (or the traders and the Prussians, as Peter Dale Scott calls them). All agree that power has shifted from the Eastern Establishment to the Southern Rim, or from the CFR to the American Enterprise Institute. All this is of more than academic interest, and should not be casually dismissed as another “conspiracy theory.” As Joan Roelofs, points out in “The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism”:

Those who wish to promote change should look closely at what sustains the present system. One reason capitalism doesn’t collapse despite its many weaknesses and valiant opposition movements is because of the “nonprofit sector.” Yet philanthropic capital, its investment and its distribution, are generally neglected by the critics of capitalism. Most studies of the subject are generously funded by the nonprofit sector itself; few researchers have followed up on the observation of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto:

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society…. To this section belong the economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.

Rene Wormser: “An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group. Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders; unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the power of churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of value.” (page viii)

Roelofs: “The environmental movement has also been a threat to “business as usual,” especially when degradation is linked to corporate activity. The response from the foundation world has been the creation and funding of many organizations, think tanks, university institutes, and conferences on “sustainable development,” as well as the ideology itself of sustainable development.

Foundation influence was substantial in every aspect of the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Many of the nongovernmental organizations at the Global Forum, the “grassroots arena,” were funded by foundations, if not their creations. Even official governmental delegates were tutored by the foundation network, which “provided technical assistance to developing-country governments that lacked the resources to participate fully in the debate, and provided texts to governments that didn’t know the issues well enough to draft the subtle language needed for compromise.”3

(3. J. Maughan, “The Road from Rio,” The Ford Foundation Report, Summer 1992, p. 16.)

In “Philantrophists at War,” Daniel Brandt concludes:

“Whenever and wherever big money is on the move, with interlocks to other big money as well as to the secret state, we would do well to agree with Oglesby: “Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.”"

This Namebase review of Kai Bird’s The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms reveals the ostensibly surprising links between corporate imperialism and progressive politics:

“The Bundy brothers were born to rule, and they knew it. From the Boston elite, through Groton, Yale’s Skull and Bones, and Harvard, their superiority was widely acknowledged. William Bundy joined the CIA in 1951, worked in senior positions in the Pentagon and State Department during the Vietnam War, and was editor of “Foreign Affairs” at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1972-1984. McGeorge Bundy was a Harvard dean from 1953-1961, a national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-1966, and head of the Ford Foundation from 1966-1979. He died in 1996.

“Both brothers were cold war liberals, which meant that their foreign policy tended toward imperialism. They knew that it was never a question of dominoes falling, yet the lure of hegemony led them to share much of the responsibility for the Vietnam War. McGeorge also shares responsibility for nearly starting World War III during the Cuban missile crisis. Later, at the Ford Foundation, a limo would pick McGeorge up in the morning, and he’d spend his days giving millions to minority activism centers, women’s studies programs, and writing essays in defense of affirmative action, presumably to balkanize and destroy the New Left. When Henry Ford II naively objected and left the board in 1976, Mac Bundy defended himself by telling reporters that the Foundation was “making the world safe for capitalism.” He wasn’t kidding.”

Notes

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p.938

Daniel Brandt, “Philantrophists at War,” NameBase NewsLine,
http://www.namebase.org/news15.html

Review of Kai Bird’s The Color of Truth, Namebase
http://www.namebase.org/sources/dN.html

How we are controlled

Anthony Sutton argues that the left-right political division is “a control device” used by an elite that subscribes to Hegel’s understanding of the historical process. As Sutton explains,

For Hegelians, the State is almighty, and seen as “the march of God on earth.” Indeed, a State religion. Progress in the Hegelian State is through contrived conflict: the clash of opposites makes for progress. If you can control the opposites, you dominate the nature of the outcome.

In 1947, the first director-general of UNESCO, Julian Huxley wrote “UNESCO: Its purpose and Its Philosophy,” in which he revealed the globalists’ adherence to the Hegelian dialiectic:

“The task before UNESCO… is to help the emergence of
a single world culture with its own philosophy and
background of ideas and with its own broad purpose.
This is opportune, since this is the first time in
history that the scaffolding and the mechanisms for
world unification have become available…. And it is
necessary, for at the moment, two opposing
philosophies of life confront each other from the West
and from the East….

“You may categorize the two philosophies as two
super-nationalisms, or as individualism versus
collectivism; or as the American versus the Russian
way of life, or as capitalism versus communism, or as
Christianity versus Marxism. Can these opposites be
reconciled, this antithesis be resolved in a higher
synthesis? I believe not only that this can happen,
but that, through the inexorable dialectic of
evolution, it must happen….

“In pursuing this aim, we must eschew dogma - whether
it be theological dogma or Marxist dogma…. East and
West will not agree on a basis of the future if they
merely hurl at each other the fixed ideas of the past.
For that is what dogma’s are — the crystallizations
of some dominant system of thought of a particular
epoch. A dogma may of course crystallize tried and
valid experience; but if it be dogma, it does so in a
way which is rigid, uncompromising and intolerant….
If we are to achieve progress, we must learn to
un-crystallize our dogmas.” [3]

…

One of the most effective means of putting people off looking into these questions is the attachment of the “conspiracy theory” label to them. Few people, and certainly no self-respecting intellectual, want to be called a “conspiracy theorist.” The problem is that a vast range of issues which challenge the dominant view of the world presented by respectable academics and the mainstream media, from the highly probable to the downright bizarre, are all lumped together as “conspiracy theories,” serving as a warning to the curious who dare to entertain them that to do so will invite the ridicule of all right-thinking people. But as John Judge points out, “Not all “conspiracies” are created equal.” In other words, some conspiracies are more plausible than others. “The government did kill JFK, and they lied about it,” Judge says. “That does not mean there was never a Holocaust, or that the world is run by the Illuminati.”

“I’m willing to be called a conspiracy theorist,” as John Judge says, “as long as you call everyone else a coincidence theorist.”

Judge accuses the progressive magazine The Nation of having a “anti-conspiracy fetish.”

John Judge explains why many on the left disdain so-called conspiracy theories.

The blindness of Chomsky and the other left structuralists is that they make the class out to be monolithic and without mechanisms to carry out its will. They fear that if you think there was any reason to kill a president then you don’t understand how capitalism works, and that you will be filled with false hope about the Kennedy clan, who were only more of the same old ruling class. They can’t let themselves think JFK could really have intended to pull out of the Vietnam war…

“The real history of the world is a history of competing conspiracies,” Ishmael Reed says in Mumbo Jumbo.

Carl Oglesby: “Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.” (pp. 27-2

Daniel Schmidt: “If you asked Americans to line up according to whether they believed in conspiracies, on one side you’d get a bunch of major media journalists and Ivy League professors, many of whom belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. On the other you’d see Californians, UFO abductees, and folks wearing aluminum-foil hats to keep out Big Brother’s mind-control waves. The middle of the room would be deserted — it requires thinkers who are widely-read on politics, the secret state, and current history, and have no propertied interests or lucrative careers to protect.
This middle position requires constant sifting of reams of material by very smart people, and an instinct for the probable and not-so-probable. Even those who are qualified seldom write on this topic, as it’s difficult and the audience is small.”

Daniel Schmidt: “The historical record of who did what, what did he
know, and when did he know it, should be the bible of
journalism. Today that record is largely invisible. A
huge chunk is kept from us by our secret state, with
too few reporters objecting, or pursuing FOIA
requests. Another chunk is ignored because it precedes
the 1980s and cannot be found on Nexis. It’s a rare
reporter who does more than lift a finger to dial a
telephone, whether directly or through his keyboard
and modem. It’s too difficult, deadlines are pressing,
and there’s an adverse market for investigative
pieces. Newly-released CIA documents on Oswald can
easily get lost, for example, under the hoopla that
accompanied the publication of Gerald Posner’s “Case
Closed” — a book that was sloppy, one-sided, and
nurtured by Random House editor Robert D. Loomis, who
admits to an anti-conspiracy grudge.

“The trivialization of conspiracism may itself be a
conspiracy, but until there’s more evidence of
deliberate patterns in this regard, one can only hope
for more benevolent interpretations. In many cases,
high-level conspiracism is more reasonable than the
succession of coincidental lone-nut explanations that
satisfy most reporters. This applies to the three
recent assassinations in Mexico — an embarrassment to
journalists. It also applies to the JFK, RFK, Malcolm
X, and Martin Luther King assassinations.

“So why are most reporters such wimps? Perhaps it’s
because the word “conspiracy” suggests hard or even
dangerous work ahead, whereas “lone nut” means that
their weekends will be free. If the paycheck is the
same in either case — or often much fatter in the
latter instance — then only reporters who take their
social obligation seriously might consider the
question of conspiracy. And how many fit this
description?

“Admittedly, it’s too easy for conspiracists to become
intolerant or to get lost in microanalysis. The latest
count of bullet trajectories on pinheads seemingly
draws more bitter debate than the big picture of who’s
pulling the strings. It’s rare to find anyone who
achieves that delicate balance between historical
macroanalysis and conspiratorial awareness. The
brilliant Carroll Quigley comes to mind, which
explains his appeal to a broad spectrum of admirers –
including Pat Robertson from right of center, Carl
Oglesby from the left, and even Bill Clinton from
wherever. Regrettably, Quigley’s 55-year narrative
shuts down just prior to the JFK assassination,
precisely when we needed him most.”

Daniel Brandt: “In 1932, Huey Long said, “They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.” Nothing has changed in seventy years.”

Daniel Brandt on Eric Chester: “The Cold War period in American history was characterized by a seamless cooperation among international charities, quasi-governmental organizations, major foundations, funding conduits, and the CIA. Any semblance of private- sector independence was more calculated than real — a veil that is stripped away by following the careers, connections, and correspondence of the key players who show up on the interlocking boards of directors. This book singles out the International Rescue Committee, and to a lesser extent the Ford Foundation. Its impressive original-source research makes a mockery of any historian who would pretend that these organizations can be considered separately from the CIA’s influence and agenda, particularly during the Cold War period.”

Notes

John Judge, “Not all conspiracies are created equal,” 30 October 2002,
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/notAllCequal.html

John Judge, “”Conspiracy” Theories vs. “Coincidence” Theories,” Steamshovelpress.com,
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/latestword15.html

Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas to Watergate (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976)

Daniel Brandt, Review of Robin Ramsay’s Conspiracy Theories, Name Base
http://www.namebase.org/sources/eB.html

Daniel Brandt, “The Decline of American Journalism,” NameBase NewsLine, No. 9, April-June 1995, http://www.namebase.org/news09.html

“Mark Hand: Searching for Daniel Brandt,” Counterpunch, Jan 3, 2003,
http://www.counterpunch.org/hand01032003.html

Chester, Eric Thomas. Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA. Armonk NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.

Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its purpose and Its Philosophy (Washington DC: Public Affairs Press, 1947), page 61.

Dumbing us down

Anthony Sutton believes that reforming education is the first step toward creating a better world. In his 2002 introduction to America’s Secret Establishment, Sutton argues that our initial task should be:

To eliminate the Hegelian system that stifles individual initiative and trains children to become mindless zombies, serving the State. We need a lot less propaganda for “education” and a more individual creative search for learning. Instead of more money for education, we need to allocate a lot less. The existing system of education is little more than a conditioning mechanism. It has little to do with education in the true sense, and a lot to do with control of the individual.

Sutton argues that “this statist system is a reflection of the Hegelian ideas brought to the United States by the Skull and Bones “troika” of Gilman, White and Dwight, and then financed by Rockefeller.” John Dewey was a major figure in developing this American education system imported from Prussia. According to Sutton,

…the Dewey system was initiated and promoted by Skull and Bones members. Dewey was an ardent statist, and a believer in the Hegelian idea that the child exists to be trained to serve the State. This requires suppression of individualist tendencies and a careful spoon-feeding of approved knowledge.

In “Unsentimental Education,” George Monbiot describes the damage done by schooling to children at the other end of the spectrum, the elite:

“But the damage goes far beyond this skimming. British private schools create a class culture of a kind unknown in the rest of Europe. The extreme case is the boarding prep schools, which separate children from their parents at the age of eight in order to shape them into members of a detached elite. In his book The Making of Them the psychotherapist Nick Duffell shows how these artificial orphans survive the loss of their families by dissociating themselves from their feelings of love. Survival involves “an extreme hardening of normal human softness, a severe cutting off from emotions and sensitivity.” Unable to attach themselves to people (intimate relationships with other children are discouraged by a morbid fear of homosexuality), they are encouraged instead to invest their natural loyalties in the institution.”

And this has consequences for the rest of us, as Monbiot explains:

“This made them extremely effective colonial servants: if their commander ordered it, they could organise a massacre without a moment’s hesitation (witness the detachment of the officers who oversaw the suppression of the Mau Mau, quoted in Caroline Elkins’s book, Britain’s Gulag). It also meant that the lower orders at home could be put down without the least concern for the results. For many years, Britain has been governed by damaged people.”

Notes

Anthony Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, 2002
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119639.pdf

Gatto

Iserbyt

George Monbiot, “Unsentimental Education,” Monbiot.com, Posted January 22, 2008,
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/01/22/unsentimental-education/

What is to be done?

In the introduction to the 2002 edition of America’s Secret Establishment, Anthony Sutton asks the question that many of you are hopefully asking yourselves at this point: “What is to be done?” Sutton answers as follows:

If the voting public was even vaguely aware of this rampant and concealed scenario, it could, and possibly would force change. However, this is not a likely possibility. Most people are “go-along” types, with limited personal objectives and a high threshold for official misdeeds. What has taken over a century to establish cannot be changed in a few years. The initial question is education.

Apart from the dire need to radically reform education which we have already dealt with, Sutton ends on a cautiously optimistic note. “It is more likely that time, rather than the voting booth, will erode the secret power of this Yale group,” he believes. “Nothing
this outrageous can survive forever.”

Sebastian Haffner: “There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater.”
“sheepish submisiveness” (McGovern)

But rather than wait for time to heal all wounds, we would be well-advised to heed the words of G. K. Chesterton:

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.

Notes

Anthony Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, 2002
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119639.pdf

G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, p.13

Ray McGovern, “Creeping Fascism: History’s Lessons.” Consortium News, December 27, 2007.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/122707a.html