DIRECTED
HISTORY IS NOT CONSPIRACY THEORY
PART 1 of 4
By Professor
Steven Yates
March 17, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
Lately (example here) I’ve found myself using the phrase directed history. I didn’t invent the phrase; others have used it as well (examples here and here although the latter is a tad hysterical for my tastes). What it expresses is the idea that key events in modern history—wars, revolutions, transformations, concentrations of wealth and power, for at least the past 250 years but possibly longer—have not been random or the mere product of economic forces but were guided: directed. History has been taken in a specific direction by a powerful superelite, as I call them. I use the term superelite to distinguish from national elites.
The superelite are global. There is an excellent case to be made that their home base is the City of London (the “City Within the City”), which headquarters the British Crown, the Bank of England, N.M. Rothschild and Sons, the London Stock Exchange, and the London School of Economics (LSE) founded by the Fabian Society and contained within the University of London. Satellite bases are to be found in Basel, Switzerland (the Bank for International Settlements), Brussels in Belgium, New York City, Washington D.C. of course, and elsewhere. Superelite goals: global economy (achieved, for the most part), global currency (a slow work in progress), global government (in the planning stages). While there is room for debate on the specifics on what the superelite want to accomplish—as a researcher drawing inferences from a variety of sources and not an insider, I don’t have a crystal ball—I sense they would prefer transitions through all these stages that are seamless as possible. Perhaps they believe the world will be a nicer place if the populations of the nations of the world simply capitulate, or just allow events to take place unnoticed. Directed history, as I conceive it, need take no stance on whether the superelite is benign or malevolent. Carroll Quigley, the macrohistorian whose ideas figure centrally into the story, believed them benign. I believe he was wrong. If they encounter sufficient resistance the superelite will have no qualms about plunging the world into whatever crises are necessary to accomplish their goals, be they economic depressions or destructive wars.
Such notions will, of course, get you branded as a “conspiracy theorist” (or worse) in mainstream media and academic circles. We all know what a terrible thing that is to be.
There is just one problem with the label: what the superelite are doing isn’t a conspiracy. The term might have applied at one time to certain of their schemes like the creation of the Federal Reserve System, but not anymore. The reason: conspiracies by definition are hidden from you. A perfect conspiracy, could there be such a thing, would be undetectable. The first job of would-be conspirators is to hide the conspiracy, and arrange things so that no one outside the circle can rationally believe there is a conspiracy. The architects of the Federal Reserve System did this for over two decades.
Directed history isn’t a conspiracy theory, because for the past couple of generations, the superelite have had members or supporting fellow travelers who were not hiding. They haven’t been shouting their plans from the roof of Congress, of course. Nor will you see them on Fox News, much less MSNBC (although it isn’t impossible). Those either believing that something was going on behind the scenes, and sometimes those actually working towards a global regime, have written down their thoughts: sometimes in books, sometimes in articles, and sometimes in speeches. Some of their writings aren’t about specific plans, but provide dead giveaways where their priorities lies. Trust me: it isn’t with We the People.
It is true that hardly anyone reads their words. This is a side effect: for well over a hundred years now their footsoldiers have been laying waste to education in this country. This started when Horace Mann went to Prussia in the 1840s and persuaded the State of Massachusetts to assist him in founding a school system based on Prussian instead of American principles. According to the latter, the individual belongs to himself and to his God. According to the former, he belongs to the state. Very slowly, public education was transformed to produce, instead of an independent and critically thinking people prepared for life in a free society, graduates who would obey government edicts, service monopolistic corporations (whether as employees or consumers), and not question authority. And attendance was made compulsory.
At the college and university level, the Morrill Act of 1862 created the public land grant system. Higher education, conceived as a system of “agricultural and mechanical” colleges, was to have as its main end the training of technicians and bureaucrats. Traditional liberal arts learning—of the sort that doesn’t necessarily increase one’s “marketability” but prepares the student to understand the founding principles of his country—has been in a kind of limbo ever since. The central role subjects like history, theology, philosophy, etc., staples of the kind of education that produced James Madison and John Adams, dropped precipitously over ensuing decades. The subjects themselves became micro-specialized shadows of their former selves.
The program in secondary education advanced with John D. Rockefeller’s Southern and General Education Boards and advanced further through John Dewey’s Rockefeller-bankrolled Progressive Education movement, designed to socialize rather than educate. The details are readily available (for example, here and here). As a result of decades of misschooling, most Americans today are far more interested in sports, American Idol, or Lady Gaga’s latest wardrobe catastrophe. The masses’ subjective preferences make athletes and celebrities rich, while automatically working against their own best interests. Markets, of course, can be allowed to deliver what the masses want. It sounds blunt, but if the masses are made stupid by their government schools, the market will reflect that by delivering a steady parade of high-tech gadgets and cheap, tawdry garbage most if not all of it made overseas instead of in their home country. Those self-educated or intelligent enough to sense something amiss and stand for independence will be at a consistent disadvantage (witness the fate of the Ron Paul campaign).
This isn’t a new phenomenon, just one made considerably worse in recent years. To some extent, the masses have always been the masses, regardless of what nation we are in. This shouldn’t matter. Most adults, if left alone, are able to manage their lives and sphere of influence—and raise their children. More complex societies, especially when they become as materialistic as ours, require more vigilance. Most common people either cannot or do not rise to the occasion. Thus the greedy and conniving overwhelm the innocent simply because they can. Civil society should reduce this risk. Hence the encouragement of Christian principles and the creation of Constitutional controls intended to ensure a state to fulfill its legitimate responsibilities without becoming a tyranny. In our era, both have almost been obliterated, at least from the pinnacles of power. For the past 160 or so years in particular—the era of metaphysical materialism as a view of the nature of the universe and of human beings—those who are fascinated with power have had little trouble obtaining it if they were smart, patient, and able to plan carefully. Most people, I believe, tend to expect good from others; when confronted with evil intentions, they refuse to believe them. As I’ve observed elsewhere, Adolf Hitler wrote down his aspirations in Mein Kampf, published in the mid-1920s. He was ignored. Germany paid a terrible price. We will also pay a terrible price for failing to see the many “smoking guns” lying around.
Some of these “smoking guns” are well known to those who have paid attention. Unfortunately they often appear unreferenced on websites, recycled from other websites whose creators didn’t verify their validity. This can be trouble, because we all know there are bogus quotes circulating, especially attributed to the Founding Fathers but sometimes putting words in the mouths of more recent political figures. I’ve long found this annoying; so one day, while researching my book Four Cardinal Errors, I trekked to the nearest first rate university library (at the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga.), located the primary sources and tracked down exact references, with page numbers.
There are more I suspect are valid, but they are second-hand. I have avoided second hand sources. What we have here are guaranteed genuine (with one exception, carefully noted as such)! To be sure, there are people—I hear from them from time to time—who want nothing to do with any of this. They have convinced themselves that talk about shadowy elites and their organizations—or a superelite—is all paranoid delusion. They ridicule “quote mining.” They are comfortable with the idea that recent history leading up to our present crisis comes down to bad decisions and unlucky accidents, or perhaps just blind cultural and economic forces. They demand more evidence, when the truth is, nothing would convince them of what they contemptuously call conspiracy theory. If you are reading this and don’t want to believe it, then don’t! It’s no skin off my nose. The sourced material says what it says. I present it as evidence that those of us who wax on about a superelite and its influence know what we are talking about; and that those who dismiss us as “conspiracy nuts” haven’t done their homework, are being deliberately obtuse, or are simply lying!
Confining ourselves to just the past century or so, the first highly visible political figure to record his thoughts on shadowy figures operating behind the scenes was Woodrow Wilson. Dr. Wilson had been surrounded by the elites of his time while President of Princeton University. They recognized in him a kindred spirit who would prove useful. They assisted him into the presidency in 1912. His book The New Freedom (published that year) contains the following:
Since I have entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above a whisper when they speak in condemnation of it. They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new man’s wares (pp. 13-14).
The superelite of the day had held their now-infamous meeting at Jekyll Island, Ga. back in 1910. The most proximate cause of their ploy to create a central bank was the Panic of 1907, which they had engineered. They’d gone to Jekyll Island in secret, using first names only to travel, and there they planned the Federal Reserve System. This probably does count as a conspiracy (the best account is still G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island, 1994). Wilson, as everybody knows, went on to sign the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. This was a major turning point for the country. With a stroke of his pen, Wilson handed this nation’s monetary system and by extension, its economy, over to a small group of very wealthy and powerful men who have done their best to centralize and control it ever since. Arguably, the U.S. became a plutocracy on December 23, 1913. It was the end of essential controls on the power-seeking minority.
To further their goals, the plutocrats would need to control more than just the monetary system. They would need to control information. They would need control over what ideas and opinions reach the masses. This was not hard to achieve. In 1917, Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas told Congress:
In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.
These 12 men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy, and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.
This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915.
They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the national Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the army and navy, under the false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is “patriotism.” They are playing on every passion and prejudice of the American people” (Proceedings and Debates of the Second Session of the 64th Congress, Vol. LIV, Congressional Record of the House of Representatives, Feb. 9, 1917, pp. 2947 – 48).
In other words, the press was used to manipulate public opinion into support for U.S. entry into what became World War I. Was Calloway right, or was he delusional? His remarks prompted a call for a Congressional investigation by one J. Hampton Moore of Pennsylvania, but the call (to the best my research has been able to turn up) went nowhere. The elites were not, of course, in the habit of allowing those not in their orbit, even members of Congress, to pry into their private affairs. Consider this unproved if you will. But it fits the general pattern we are talking about. It is consistent with the idea that thousands of political and bureaucratic decisions regardless of party or ideology, supported by thousands more editorial decisions within a burgeoning mainstream media, all taking this country in a single direction by accident, is stretching the law of averages a bit.
Control over monetary policy to ensure a continued accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few is characteristic of any plutocracy—and it was especially desirable to conceal this within the supposedly free, capitalistic marketplace that America was held to exemplify. John Maynard Keynes, far and away the most influential economist of the past century, wrote in his early work Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920):
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
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Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless, and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer method of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose (pp. 235-36). For part two click below.
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� 2012 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
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