DIRECTED
HISTORY IS NOT CONSPIRACY THEORY
PART 3 of 4
By Professor
Steven Yates
March 17, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
He sees them as idealistic, perhaps a bit naïve, and surely not responsible for the wars and economic miseries that afflicted the first half of the twentieth century. He targets instead nineteenth century tendencies: “Two terrible wars sandwiching a world economic depression revealed man’s real inability to control his life by the nineteenth century’s techniques of laissez-faire, materialism, competition, selfishness, nationalism, violence, and imperialism” (p. 1310). Those constituted “tragedy.” His “hope” involves turning from these values at last. Some of the items on this list we clearly should turn from (the second and the last two in particular), but it is dubious that centralizing the world will ultimately get the job done. Moreover, in light of the remarks of Wells and Russell, there are plenty of grounds for thinking that what the superelite want to accomplish is anything but benign—and could not be accomplished by benign souls.
It is one thing to theorize, or record history, and quite another to move the world forward towards the desired world regime. I mentioned that David Rockefeller Sr., who proved to be the most ambitious of the third generation of Rockefellers, studied at the LSE in the 1930s; he penned a thesis entitled Destitution Through Fabian Eyes (see his Memoirs, p. 75). He joined the Council of Foreign Relations and rose to its helm in the late 1940s, a position which served as a platform for his forging other Western hemispheric organizations leading eventually to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, achieved in 1992), and looking beyond to a projected Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, stalled for the time being). Rockefeller would also be instrumental in organizing the Bilderberg Group in 1954 with European heads of state such as Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Józef Retinger of Poland. Named for the hotel where the first meeting was held, the Bilderberg Group would hold exclusive, invitation-only annual meetings in plush hotels / resorts. Invitees would include other heads of state; CEOs or representatives from major corporations; a few military leaders; a few academics, scholars from think tanks, and foundations; and some from within mass media. The Bilderberg Group would gain a reputation for completely closing its meeting venues to the public for several days without prior notice or any reportage of what went on inside. Even those working in these venues were sworn to secrecy about what they saw or heard.
In 1970 Rockefeller came across Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970), by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then of Columbia University (once of Harvard). An émigré from Poland, Brzezinski had served as an advisor to the Kennedy campaign for the presidency in 1960 and would advise both the Johnson and Humphrey campaigns. He’d been invited to join the CFR and attend Bilderberg meetings. He would help induct President-to-be Jimmy Carter into the CFR and serve as his National Security Advisor. His book provided a vivid window into what the superelite envisioned, as well as hurdles it saw remaining in terms of the directed process moving history forward from the “nationalism” of more or less autonomous nation states through socialism to globalism. Brzezinski wrote:
The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: “international banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state” …
… A global human conscience is for the first time beginning to manifest itself. This conscience is a natural extension of the long process of widening man’s personal horizons…. Today we are … witnessing the emergence of transnational elites, but now they are composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions, and their interests are more functional than national. These global communities are gaining in strength and … it is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advance countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook (pp. 56 – 58).
Brzezinski worried that the populations of the world were not ready to live in a global society:
The new global consciousness, however, is only beginning to become an influential force. It still lacks identity, cohesion, and focus. Much of humanity—indeed, the majority of humanity—still neither shares nor is prepared to support it. Science and technology are still used to buttress ideological claims, to fortify national aspirations, and to reward narrowly national interests. Most states are spending more on arms than on social services, and the foreign-aid allotment of the two most powerful states is highly disproportionate to their asserted global missions. Indeed, it can be argued that in some respects the divided, isolated, and compartmentalized world of old had more inner cohesion and enjoyed greater harmony than the volatile global reality of today. Established cultures, deeply entrenched traditional religions, and distinctive national identities provided a stable framework and firm moorings; distance and time were the insulators against excessive friction between the compartments. Today the framework is disintegrating and the insulants are dissolving. The new global unity has yet to find its own structure, consensus, and harmony (pp. 61-62).
In the service of clearing these hurdles, he, Rockefeller, and Henry Kissinger organized the Trilateral Commission in 1973. The Trilateral Commission, unlike the CFR, recruited members from both Japan and Europe with the intent of working more closely to bring about a global economy and society. The final chapters of Between Two Ages offer the prescriptions that were gradually refined into the “free trade” agreements first between the U.S. and Canada and then between the U.S. and Mexico which paved the way for NAFTA. The signing of NAFTA and its going into effect on January 1, 1994 was a turning point at least as profound as the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 or Richard Nixon’s severing of all remaining ties between the dollar and gold on August 15, 1971. It began a mass exodus of middle class and working class jobs from this country that continues to this day. Perhaps I should note that while NAFTA’s ramifications were being debated by our political class, mainstream media outlets were universally hammering the public, day after day, with the O.J. Simpson debacle.
David Rockefeller Sr. has proven to be the superelitist’s superelitist. One oft-repeated statement attributed to him cannot be verified, since if real it was made at the 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany; such statements were not written down as official (it might have been secretly recorded, of course). Nevertheless it is interesting:
We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.
The source of the quotation is a handful of minor French publications, later noted in Programming, Pitfalls and Puppy-Dog Tales by Gyeorgos C. Hatonn (1993, p. 65). Rockefeller may or may not have said it, or something like it. He surely did say the following; it appears directly in his autobiography, published in 2002:
For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it (Memoirs, 2002, pp. 404-05; emphasis mine).
He couldn’t have been more open and straightforward if he tried!
What is even more interesting, in light of mainland China’s economic surge during the NAFTA / GATT / WTO era, is Rockefeller’s praise, long ago, of the “social experiment” begun by Chairman Mao. He wrote:
One is immediately impressed by the sense of national harmony…. Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution it has obviously succeeded not only in more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community purpose. General social and economic progress is no less impressive…. The enormous social advances of China have benefited greatly from the singleness of ideology and purpose…. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in history (New York Times, August 10, 1973).
The “price” of the Chinese Revolution to which Rockefeller refers was, of course, the mass slaughter of over 40 million Chinese people—we may never obtain an exact body count. Now scroll up and read what H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order. The superelite are devoted to an only partially imagined vision of a future world no less than was the most ardent Marxist. They may miscalculate or stumble from time to time, as we will see. But what counts is that the project moves forward.
Let us pause and sum up what we’ve covered so far. Modern and recent history has been directed by men operating primarily behind the scenes, but contrary to those who shout conspiracy theory at this sort of allegation, they are not hiding. They have a specific telos: a world regime, or new world order (call it what you want). It is already plutocratic in nature, with masses returned to serfdom and subject to constant monitoring. Its political economy is to be centralized and is best described by the term techno-feudalism (a term I began using, then discovered historian Dennis Cuddy using it as well; neither of us borrowed it from the other). Once we know where to look, the evidence for this is overwhelming. The single direction taken by modern and recent history has no better or more elegant explanation. While some would attribute this unified direction to advancing technology, the push for unification and centralization predates the technology. Thus we have a new paradigm for the study of modern history, which recognizes as a first premise the fascination of a few with power and their relative ease in assuming it over the many. The many, of course—the common people—have little interest in power beyond their own pursuits (family, occupation, church, etc.). This places them at a disadvantage, absent specific constraints on power.
The great unsolved problem of political philosophy and social order is how a society which upholds such notions as the rule of law is to control power: how, that is, can sufficient vigilance be encouraged in a population that it can place lawful checks on those in power, or who aspire to power, while ensuring justice. The basic premise here is that political power answers to law higher than its own. The superelite have never liked this. This is why they have encouraged an embrace of materialism and philosophical positivism within the scholarly world. Much modern philosophical “scholarship” in what is known as the philosophy of law consists of attacks, explicit or implicit, of various sorts on such notions as natural law. The superelite regard ordinary people as little more than cattle to be herded, of course. That they answer to anyone except each other is a bar to that.
The primary evidence for a new paradigm is empirical and testimonial, as we have seen. In addition to those we have cited, some at the center of activity, major politicians both past and more recent have spoken either of the hidden hands directing history or what the superelite envision as the “shape of things to come.” In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was also surely in a position to know, penned a letter to “Colonel” Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson’s right hand man, stating, “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I both know, that a financial element has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson …” (F.D.R., His Personal Letters 1928 – 1945, ed. Elliot Roosevelt, p. 373). One of the most oft-repeated recent examples is that of George H.W. Bush (Bush I). On March 6, 1991, on the eve of the end of the Gulf War, the first unnecessary destructive incursion into Iraq, he told Congress, “We can see a new world order coming into view…. a very real prospect of a new world order.” I don’t need a reference for this quote. I was watching (I think it was) C-SPAN that night and both saw and heard him say it. Bush had said—on September 11 of the preceding year (I found out later):
A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: A new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony (speech to a joint session of Congress, Sept. 11, 1990).
Interestingly, he was echoing a remark made by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev following the end of the Soviet Union: “For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change. Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order” (quoted in George H.W. Bush and Brent Snowcroft, A World Transformed, 1998, pp. 42-43).
More recently, in the wake of the Meltdown of 2008 and just before Barack Obama assumed office in the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, Henry Kissinger wrote:
The alternative to a new international order is chaos…. The financial and political crises are … closely related partly because, during the period of economic exuberance, a gap had opened up between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage…. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driving principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order…. International order will not come about either in the political or the economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves…. A new Bretton Woods kind of global agreement is by far the preferable outcome…. The extraordinary impact of the president-elect on the imagination of humanity is an important element in shaping a new world order…. The role of China in a new world order is equally crucial. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods…. (New York Times, January 12, 2009).
It all sounds very good, of course, on paper at least—a world free from terrorism? a world where nations are living in harmony?—unless we read between the lines in light of the whole picture and see that the interests of common people are not a priority here. Think of David Rockefeller’s praise for Communist China and Henry Kissinger’s furthering of the network of financial controls via political controls. This last, of course, speaks volumes of superelite unconcern with the processes that have decimated our manufacturing base and are demolishing our middle class.
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As minor as these are compared to what the Chinese endured, we are ensuring that the generation now moving through college will be the first to endure a lower standard of living than their parents. Those fortunate enough to find jobs will work longer hours for poverty wages, and will be unable to save. In fairness, there is more to the story. Public education has grown so wretched that its graduates are unqualified for the manufacturing jobs that are still available. This is why you will find manufacturers who are complaining that they cannot fill available positions simultaneously with near-depression levels of unemployment. For part four click below.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4,
� 2012 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
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