Who Runs the World? Part II

Who Runs the World? Part II

By L. Carlos Lara

This article, the second in a series, is exploring an issue that makes many people uncomfortable, including us. We have all heard sensational “conspiracy theories” about nefarious groups pulling the strings of the politicians and effectively running the world from behind the scenes. It is true that much, perhaps most, of what is written in this genre consists of either unwarranted leaps or outright falsehoods. Even so, there really is something here. The patient individual can weed through the speculations and exaggerations and find solid, scholarly evidence that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to world events. In last month’s issue, I alluded to a “secret plan” conceived by one individual over one hundred years ago— a man whose name we will reveal later in this writing. Murray N. Rothbard in his monograph entitled, “Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy” verified this secretive plot. There are many credible scholars—people who choose their words carefully and are by no means “paranoid”—who calmly argue that significant historical and current events in society, politics, monetary and foreign policy are orchestrated by an elite power group through many front organizations consisting of banks, foundations, trusts, think tanks, and publishing entities. 

The main source for this material comes from a twenty-year study done by Dr. Carroll Quigley, a prestigious historian and professor with impeccable Harvard academic credentials. His scholarly work was published in 1966 in his book, Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time. Most of the sensationalism associated with his facts comes from other writers who relied heavily on Quigley’s book and whom Quigley¹ openly dismissed as having misquoted his information. Some of these writers who sold millions of books in the 70s and 80s, in our estimation, have indeed stretched some of the Quigley facts. These authors went on to develop various apocalyptic scenarios that have pulled in millions of believers holding them in a state of fear and agitation through their own advocacy groups. Of course, this type of extrapolation is nothing new in the realm of conspiracy theories. The “Red Scare”² of 1947-1957 spread unfounded rumors of the Freemasons, Illuminati and Jews involved in an international communist conspiracy—later known as McCarthyism. Prior to that, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,³ first published in 1903 in Russia and which turned out to be an anti-Semitic hoax, was actively distributed by the American industrialist, Henry Ford, in the 1920s. Adolf Hitler publicized the same text as if it were a valid document in Germany in 1933 even though it had been exposed as a fraud. Academic British historian Norman Cohen⁴ noted that Hitler quoted from this document in his own manifesto, Mein Kampf, making it Hitler’s justification for initiating the Holocaust. 

I want to be clear that Quigley’s book is not even in the same league as these other controversial exposés. It is completely different in its academic writing, depth, and scope. It is a scholarly piece of work and he does not write as someone purporting to be discussing something sinister or controversial at all. One is actually impressed with the authenticity of his account. As one who has come to understand the workings of the central banks, I personally would recommend this book on that account alone. His explanations of money creation are excellent. His understanding of capitalism in all of its formative stages and the business cycle is accurate. He seems to write more as an economist than the historian that he is. In other parts of his book, his descriptive analysis of how the Asian, Hindu, and Islamic mind thinks is written more like a psychologist, leaving the reader to ponder the breadth and caliber of the author’s mind. It’s no wonder that President Bill Clinton thought so highly of his former professor, Quigley, and credited him accordingly, even though Clinton made Bs in his course while an undergraduate at Georgetown University and everyone else made Ds or less. 

Realizing how powerful and manipulating fear can be when discussing conspiracy theories, I want to proceed cautiously in continuing to examine the information in this important book, yet one cannot fail to see that Quigley’s masterpiece does contain some very startling facts about a secret society and about the man who conceived the cabal’s plan on February 5, 1891. This secretive plot is not necessarily the main theme of Quigley’s book, though it is definitely interwoven throughout the time span of history he covers. One is astonished to learn that after nearly one hundred years, Quigley asserts that the secret society had grown internationally and was still kept active by its members in 1966. Some of these organizations named by Quigley in 1966 are very familiar to most of us and we know are in operation in 2013. 

“There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for so much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”⁵—Carroll Quigley 

The man Quigley writes about is Cecil Rhodes.⁶ At that time, Rhodes had a virtual monopoly over all of the South African gold and diamond mines making him one of the wealthiest individuals on earth. As one of the precepts to his plan, Rhodes established a trust to fund scholarships for certain qualified students to attend Oxford University—The Rhodes Scholarship. This was Rhodes’s incubator for the best and the brightest young men in the world, selecting from them the ones with the right type of personality to move into positions of influence and later become members of his outer circle of helpers. Here the reader may need to quickly check him or herself for once Quigley’s facts begin to disseminate, extrapolation can quickly absorb us too. For example, we may ask ourselves: “Did Quigley demonstrate to Bill Clinton— a future Rhodes scholar—the road to the U.S. Presidency?”

THE PLAN’S IDEOLOGY 

The period leading up to World War I was a time of great change for Britain. While the upper class of England (landowners) was not allowed nobility status because of birth, it was able to become an aristocracy through traditions and behavior. All young boys were sent to expensive schools like Eton, Harrow, or Winchester to receive their educational training, however only the oldest, by “primogeniture,” was entitled to inherit the income-producing property of the family. This made it necessary for the younger sons to seek their fortunes overseas. The same was true of the more ambitious members of the lower classes. From these two sources Britain obtained its empire of colonies, and colonies became a source of great riches for individuals and companies. This led to the growth of imperialism. 

Imperialism took a turn after 1870 whereby instead of being advanced on the grounds of material gain, it was justified on grounds of moral duty and social reform. The person most responsible for this change was an eloquent speaker and professor at Oxford, John Ruskin.⁷ While the elite wealthy aristocracy lived in splendor and privilege, the masses in Britain were in poverty, ignorance, illness, and infested with crime. Ruskin delivered a powerful speech at Oxford, which convicted many of the undergraduates in his audience. He impressed upon them that their magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline could be lost forever if not shared with the lower classes, and furthermore to the non-English speaking masses of the world. It was their moral duty to do it. 

In that audience sat young Cecil Rhodes who was immensely moved by that talk and he held on to that idea for sixteen years. In the meantime, he used Lord Rothschild’s money, making his own fortune (DeBeers Consolidated Mines) in gold and diamonds in one of Britain’s colonies—South Africa. His burning desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control moved him to set up the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford in order to spread this idea. The stars aligned with the formation of the secret society when W.T. Stead,⁸ the most successful newspaper publisher in Britain, also a social reformer and imperialist (known today as the father of the tabloid), got together with Rhodes to incorporate the plan. Rhodes was to be the leader, Stead, Reginald Baliol Brett, (Lord Esher)⁹ and Alfred Milner (later, Lord Milner), were to be the executive committee (inner circle) with Lord Rothschild and about a dozen other Oxford and Cambridge Ruskinites, becoming the outer circle—the “Association of Helpers,” (later organized by Milner as the Round Table organization that would spread throughout the world). 

THE ROUND TABLES

Financial backing for the secret society came initially from the Cecil Rhodes Trust and loyal Rhodes supporters. Their first outreach was to build a local “settlement house” (Toynbee Hall) erected right in the center of England’s slums where upper class people could live while they went out each day to educate the lower classes with an emphasis on social welfare. This became the model for thousands of such houses in Britain and later the United States, like the “Hull House”¹⁰ in Chicago, which later spread to 500 such houses. When Cecil Rhodes died in 1902, Lord Milner (whom Quigley described as a very secretive type of individual) became the trustee of the Rhodes trust and expanded the movement even further by establishing the Round Table groups. By recruiting young men from Oxford and using his influence, he was able to win important posts for them in government and international finance. These were often referred to as “Milner’s Kindergarten.” By 1939 these semi-secret organizations were in all British colonies and the United States. When the wealthy Astor family became involved in making sizable monetary contributions, the Round Table groups were sometimes referred to as the “Cliveden Set,”¹¹ and the Astor relationship put the group in influential control of numerous newspapers in Britain like The Times and the Pall-Mall Gazette. In the the United States they controlled The New York Times, The NY Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post, as well as several universities.

Milner died in 1925 and Lionel Curtis¹² assumed the reins of the organization until his own death in 1955. During his tenure he founded a quarterly magazine called the Round Table that was used to keep the groups in contact with one another, and through his writings, influenced the creation of The Commonwealth of Nations.¹³ Later he organized the Royal Institute of International Affairs— also known as Chatham House,¹⁴ an international think tank.¹³ He was a staunch advocate of British Empire Federalism and Quigley quotes him as being passionate in his beliefs. 

“[On the New Testament’s “Sermon On The Mount”:] The last was especially influential on Lionel Curtis. He had a fanatical conviction that with the proper spirit and the proper organization (local self government and federalism) the Kingdom of God could be established on earth. This was the spirit, which Milner’s Group had tried to use toward the Boers (Dutch farmers in South Africa) in 1902-1910, toward India in 1910-1947, and, unfortunately, toward Hitler in 1933-1939. In the case of Hitler, at least, these high ideals led to disaster; this seems also to be the case in South Africa.”¹⁵ —Carroll Quigley

After Curtis’ death in 1955 the group was run by Robert H. Brand (brother-in-law of Lady Astor), until his death in 1963 and then by Adam D. Marris, director of Lazard Brothers Bank (1966). Curiously, I was not able to find any information on Marris to see if he is still alive and in control of the Round Table groups. Lazard Brothers is a prestigious international investment-banking firm with 40 offices in 26 different countries. Its principal office is in Rockefeller Center in New York. When I would type in Marris’s name on Wikipedia it automatically took me to a Jerome Davis Greene¹⁶ and what Quigley has to say about this gentleman is most interesting. 

“One of the most interesting members of this Anglo-American power structure was Jerome D. Greene. Born in Japan of missionary parents, Greene graduated from Harvard’s college and law school by 1899 and became secretary to Harvard’s president and corporation in 1901-1910. This gave him contacts with Wall Street, which made him general manager of the Rockefeller Institute, assistant to John D. Rockefeller in philanthropic work for two years, then trustee to the Rockefeller Foundation, and to the Rockefeller General Education Board until 1939. 

[He was stationed in London in 1918 and lived in Toynbee Hall, the world’s first Rhodes-Milner settlement house where he came in contact with the Milner Group and movement. —Bracketed statement is mine from page 955 of Quigley’s book.] 

Accordingly, on his return to the United States he was one of the early figures in the establishment of the Council of Foreign Relations, which served as the New York branch of Lionel Curtis’s Institute of International Affairs.”¹⁷ —Quigley 

But this is not all, Greene is of much greater significance within the Institute of Pacific Relations,¹⁸ that helped increase the network of the Round Table groups with an additional 10 member countries making a total of 17 countries in all. In fact, Quigley says he wrote the constitution for the IPR “and was for years the conduit for Wall Street funds and influence into the organization. He is the symbol of the relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern United States which reflects one of the most powerful influences in twentieth century American and world history—The English and American Establishments.”¹⁹ 

BENEVOLENCE? 

In the aftermath of two World Wars, progressives²⁰ in the United States and other nations embraced the idea of international organizations such as the United Nations, which was formed in 1945, as a way to foster global justice and hopefully prevent future world wars. This may partly explain why Quigley himself was not at all against the secretive group he wrote about since they had similar international motives which he (Quigley) agreed with. His only disagreement with the group was the fact that they wished to remain anonymous. Clearly, from what we read these original founders, Rhodes, Milner, and Curtis were not only cultured and wealthy individuals, but they belonged to a British aristocracy who lived amongst great opulence surrounded by an unparalleled form of tradition and morality.  Although secretive, their original motives certainly seemed pure, as though they were involved in doing nothing more than the Lord’s work. Did something go awry?  

In November of 2009, just one year after the financial crisis, which attracted widespread media attention over the size of its company staff bonuses, Goldman Sach’s Chief Executive Lloyd C. Blankfein is quoted as saying: 

“We’re very important…we help companies grow by helping them raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose … doing God’s work.”²¹

Ironically, Quigley who seemed supportive of the group he wrote about seems to have years later changed his mind at the time when he attempted to reprint more additions of his book. He felt that a reprinting of it was being blocked.   According to an interview he gave in 1974: 

“The original edition published by Macmillan in 1966 sold about 8800 copies and sales were picking up in 1968 when they “ran out of stock,” as they told me (but in 1974, when I went after them with a lawyer, they told me that they had destroyed the plates in 1968). They lied to me for six years, telling me that they would re-print when they got 2000 orders, which could never happen because they told anyone who asked that it was out of print and would not be reprinted. They denied this until I sent them Xerox copies of such replies to libraries, at which they told me it was a clerk’s error. In other words they lied to me but prevented me from regaining the publication rights by doing so (on OP [out of print] rights revert to holder of copyright, but on OS [out of stock] they do not.) … Powerful influences in this country want me, or at least my work, suppressed.”²²  —Carroll Quigley 

What are we to make of this last statement of Quigley and his apparent reversal? More importantly, what about the material he writes? Is it true? One of the benefits of history is that it allows us to examine the facts utilizing hindsight.  I used hindsight in Part I in this series in attempting to properly analyze the material without endorsing it. In addition to that, I listed several important beliefs.  Here they are again summarized to provide you a quick review before going further in our analysis: 

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 the power of ideas is that men posses it and men are not angels. There are such things as evil ideas. We agree with Mises who said that we all had a moral responsibility to fight and destroy evil ideas. 

We also agree with Rothbard who made clear that wealthy elites are only able to profit from the masses and control world affairs by their connection to State power. 

In 1966, when Quigley’s book was published, there was still immense fear connected to communism, and this fear encompassed the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the John F. Kennedy assassination which was in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, the Vietnam War in the 70s, the gold standard which was finally destroyed in 1971, and Nixon’s resignation from office in 1974. These were back-to-back significant world events that point to mass confusion amongst the public in the United States. It is very plausible that, in an attempt to find answers to the driving forces behind these perplexing events, authors would write their strong opinions in books and use Quigley’s twenty-year study to support their theories. Some of these books, which sold millions to the public, helped expand several advocacy groups during this period such as the John Birch Society²³ and many others. Quigley was obviously caught in the midst of these growing controversies during these specific periods, but died soon after in 1977. 

What we eventually realize within the context of our own experience is that history does repeat itself. For example, in his September 1990 speech to a joint session of Congress (shortly after the Berlin Wall came down announcing the end of Communism), President George W. Bush described his objectives for post-Cold War global governance in cooperation with post-Soviet states as a “New World Order” and, either knowingly or unknowingly, unleashed a brand new wave of panic. Hundreds of new theorists within months of that statement came out with their own version of this new order with televangelist Pat Robertson leading the pack with his new best selling book, The New World Order. Robertson’s conclusion is that American imperialism incorporates everything from the Bilderberg Group to the Trilateral Commission covertly controlling government for the Antichrist. This is all to say that getting to the truth is not easy. 

But, there are two important missing historical pieces to this elaborate puzzle we have yet to explore, and Quigley discusses both. The first one did not actually make itself apparent till after World War I and that was the enormous profits that could be made from war. The second one is equally sinister and it existed long before the Rhodes-Milner Group originated. This was the founding of the first central bank in 1690 and it was conspiratorial from the very beginning. 

Next Month— Part III: The International Bankers

References 

1. Carroll Quigley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley 
2. The Red Scare, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Red_Scare 
3. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion 
4. Norman Cohen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_for_Genocide 
5. Carroll Quigley, “Tragedy and Hope-A History of The World In Our Time,” The MacMillan Company, New York, 1966, Chapter 65 American Confusions, Page 950 
6. Cecil Rhodes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes 
7. John Ruskin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin 
8. W.T. Stead, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomas_Stead 
9. Reginald Brett, Lord Esher, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Brett,_2nd_Viscount_Esher 
10. Alfred Milner, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Milner,_1st_Viscount_Milner 
11. Cliveden, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliveden 
12. Lionel Curtis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_George_Curtis 
13. The Commonwealth of Nations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Nations 
14. Royal Institute of International Affairs, http://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/about-chatham-house 
15. Tragedy and Hope, Page 146 
16. Jerome Davis Greene, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Davis_Greene 
17. Tragedy and Hope, Page 955 
18. Institute of Pacific Relations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Pacific_Relations 
19. Tragedy and Hope, page 956 
20. Progressivism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism 
21. Doing God’s Work, New York Times Article, November 2009, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/goldman-chief-says-he-is-justdoing-gods-work/?_r=0
22. Carroll Quigley Interview, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrSQNUK75LI 
23. John Birch Society, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society