By L. Carlos Lara
Who owns and runs the world? If you have ever thought deeply on this question, or one similar to it, you most likely became dispirited rather quickly during the exercise. The reason for this is that you found yourself losing all hope in the prospects of a happy future. That’s right. It didn’t take you long in your investigation for your thoughts to travel down dark corridors and open doors you wished you hadn’t. And, if you used the Internet to help you connect certain missing pieces to the puzzle, you may have gotten even more disturbing insights than you bargained for. This topic can easily become frightening and there are wide ranges of opinions on what is factual and what is fiction. Even so, what we do not fail to sense is that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. Far too many of us have already given up even attempting to resolve the vastness of our societal problems. So why, you may ask, would I choose at this time to write about a subject that is so overwhelmingly discouraging? Believe me, I am fully aware of how even writing on such a topic may put off certain readers; I grappled with whether to even “go down this road” at all.
There was one overriding reason that pushed me over the edge to go ahead and start this series: As simplistic as it may sound, I happen to be one of those few who believe we can actually do something about this disturbing situation. It is not too late. There are a few others that feel exactly the same way as I do, and we have good news. This series of articles, divided into several parts, attempts to make a case for the solution. But first, what exactly is the problem and from where does it originate?
When I was in high school in Dallas, Texas, I had a friend who lived two streets up from me who owned a hot rod car that I was crazy about. It was my dream car and I was sixteen. Usually on Sunday afternoons, when days seemed like they lasted forever, I would pay him a visit. I knew he would be out under his carport tinkering with that car so I would go there just to be able to see it. His next-door neighbor was married to a young woman from Russia (at that time it was known as the Soviet Union). Occasionally, she would be out in her yard and would greet us from across the fence in her broken English. I never thought much about those instances until President Kennedy was assassinated and later learned that my friend’s neighbor was Harvey Oswald1, the man accused of assassinating the President. His wife was that Russian girl. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the dark side of life came very near to me. After that event, America was never the same for me again.
I start here with my own personal account only because the question of who assassinated President Kennedy is a prime example of a cauldron of debate that has been brewing for more than fifty years. How much is true and how much is unfounded “conspiracy theory” is anyone’s guess. There have been movies and books galore written on this subject and yet it still remains one of the most controversial events in American history. But keep in mind that this is only one of hundreds of such conspiratorial-type occurrences in which belief remains questionable. This happens because separating fact from fiction is not easy. It takes effort to discover the truth. The problem is that truth revealed can many times remain grim. Somebody still killed Kennedy, but who—and more importantly, why?
It’s important, for the proper reading of this present article, to know what we mean by “conspiracy.” The dictionary on my desktop computer defines a conspiracy as “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. An agreement of silence, to say nothing about an issue that should be generally known.” In essence, a conspiracy is a contract to lie.
In 1987 Bill Moyer,2 who is best known as an American journalist and frequent voice of PBS, came out with a scathing documentary entitled, The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis in which Moyer spelled out how the Cold War (which began after WWII) had enticed Americans to relinquish the control of government to the National Security State. In it he interviews several high-ranking military officers that attest to the existence of a secret global war, carried on without accountability. The documentary was so critically rebuked by the establishment that Republicans attempted to use it as a way to cut the funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS. Moyer, who was also the White House Press Secretary (1965-1968) under the Johnson Administration, cast the spotlight directly on the covert actions of the CIA. In Moyer’s interview with Admiral Gene LaRocque, LaRocque stated that The National Security Act of 1947, which was signed into law by President Truman, “changed the direction of this great nation and established the framework for a National Security State which gave us the National Security Council, which gave us the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”3 In effect, Moyer set out to prove that our democratic system had been corrupted and had established a new secret form of government with a new morality that is always looking for threats and organizing society to oppose those threats. Under this paradigm the CIA, under covert operations, wages its own wars—“off the books”—that includes assassinations, instigation of riots, and the removal of foreign leaders from office when they pose a threat to the United States. In 1953 it was Iran, where the issue was oil. In 1954 it was Guatemala, where the issue was land. In 1954 it was Viet Nam, where the issue was Ho Chi Minh and the spread of communism. And it was Cuba in 1961. When Kennedy refused to give military support to the CIA for the assassination of Castro, the CIA floated the idea of a Castro “hit” to the Mafia.
If I had not lived through all these events that Moyer describes in his documentary and remember experiencing them by seeing and hearing about them on the news at that time, I wonder if I would be able to take seriously how far astray our world has gone just in my own lifetime. Bill Moyer has summarized the matter in this way: “We’ve turned the war powers of the United States over to…well, we never really know for sure, who, or even what we are doing, or what it cost, or who is paying for it. The only thing we are sure of is that this largely secret global war is carried on with less and less accountability to democratic institutions and has become a way of life.”4
Who’s really in control?
People of Christian faith, like me, rest in the sovereignty of God, the Creator, whose will for mankind and the world will be ultimately fulfilled according to His eternal plan. In essence, we believe God runs the world and everything in it. This typically encompasses the Judeo-Christian belief and the spread of this belief coincided with the spread of Western Civilization. With this belief also comes an assurance that we are all given some measure of freedom, within His will, of choice. Therefore, human action is a force in the world. This is what makes ideas of the mind and the actions that follow so powerful. Ultimately ideas move the direction of world events. The unfortunate aspect of this power is that men possess it and men are not angels. There are such things as evil ideas. History is glutted with examples of ideas that perpetuate deception, theft, and tyranny. But do powerful men with evil ideas actually come together in secret to organize the control of the world?
The man most closely associated with the spread of these types of conspiracy theories was Carroll Quigley (1910-1977),5 an American Harvard-educated historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. Quigley himself did not spread these theories, but rather authors interested in conspiracies often cite Quigley’s book, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World In Our Time, as an authoritative source on conspiracies. Quigley had impeccable credentials and trappings of respectability. He was a legendary professor at Georgetown University, and a former instructor at Princeton and Harvard. President Bill Clinton credited Quigley during his acceptance speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention as being his mentor while a student at Georgetown, and for providing him (Clinton) the blueprint of how the world really worked. The Washington Post, in an article published shortly after his death in 1977, referred to Quigley as “the professor who knew too much.” Even so, his 1,336-page tome published in 1966 lied virtually dormant until W. Cleon Skousen discovered the implications of it and published The Naked Capitalist,6 which became a national best seller. Skousen was followed by Gary Allen, a spokesman for The John Birch Society, who wrote None Dare Call It Conspiracy,7 which had sales of over five million copies in 1972. The contents of these books provided the massive paradigm shift of grassroots conservatives from mere anti-communism to a much larger anti-elitist worldview. What did Quigley write about that was so profoundly fascinating? His book details a twenty-year study of an elaborate structure of the prestigious scholarship program at Oxford, banks, foundations, trusts, think tanks, and publishing entities, the initiates of which are described as the Round Table Groups (Council of Foreign Affairs). These groups have come to dominate the financial and political affairs of the world—a secret plan with a set objective conceived by one man in 1891, a man whom we shall identify in a subsequent article.
More importantly, Quigley wrote his book as an insider to the worldwide organization, with permission and direct access to its secret documents and records for more than two years in the 1960s. Quigley’s entire work, which spans Western Civilization in its world setting, highlights WWI, WWII, and the Cold War until 1967. By his own admission, Quigley had no aversion to most of the group’s aims, regretting only that the group wished to remain unknown. G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature From Jekyll Island,8 relied heavily on Quigley for information about the Federal Reserve and the individuals who played a large part in its formation. Dr. Gary North,9 the famous economic commentator and historian, also has interesting discussions of these curious facts in his book Conspiracy: A Biblical View, stating that Quigley at the end of his life eventually referred to the group he profiled as a malevolent influence in political affairs.
In addition, I recently discovered that Murray N. Rothbard, one of our most famous scholars from the Austrian School and one of Mises’s star disciples, directly referenced this secret group in a monograph he wrote entitled, “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy,”10 written in 1984. It was Rothbard’s work that emboldened me to pursue my research into the workings of this group described by Quigley. The initial findings are alarming, giving credence to Mises’ emphasis that we all have a moral obligation to fight what he called an evil idea. Rothbard has in fact been very prolific in writing about the specific individuals intimately connected with this group from its inception. He has exposed this idea’s tentacles tracing them all the way to the various seats of power. In many of his writings, Rothbard made clear why wealthy elites are only able to profit from wars and control world affairs by their connection to State power. Consequently, it is in their best interest to continue to perpetuate the lie.
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take away from them the power to create money, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.” –Josiah Stamp, Bank of England Chairman, 1920s
Next month in BankNotes, Part II of “Who Runs the World?”
References
Harvey Oswald: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xU7Lhd7Wwo
Bill Moyer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers
The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis, http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/secret_government
The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis
Carroll Quigley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
The Naked Capitalist, by W. Cleon Skousen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Communist
None Dare Call It Conspiracy, by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_Dare_Call_It_Conspiracy
The Creature from Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creature_from_Jekyll_Island#The_Creature_ from_Jekyll_Island
Dr. Gary North, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
“Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy,” World Market Perspective, 1984; Center for Libertarian Studies, 1995. Mises.org 2005. 2nd edition, 2011, http://mises.org/document/1223
