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ABOUT THE WRITER: Ivor Benson is a former South African
and Fleet Street, London, journalist; South African Broadcasting
Corporation news analyst and commentator 1963/64; Information
Adviser to Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front Government 1964/65;
political analyst and author of several books, he has traveled widely.
It is almost a joke now in the Western world, in the 20th
century, to use words like 'good and 'evil'. They have become
almost old-fashioned concepts, but they are very real and genuine
concepts. These are concepts from a sphere which is higher than
us. And instead of getting involved in base, petty, short-sighted
political calculations and games. we have to recognize that the
concentration of world Evil and the tremendous force of hatred is
there and it's flowing from there throughout the world. And we
have to stand up against it and not hasten to give to it, give to it,
give to it, every-thing that it wants to swallow.
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Part 1 - This Age of Conflict
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Knowledge can be of two kinds: knowledge of the world outside
ourselves, the macrocosm, and knowledge of the kingdom within,
the microcosm, both of them boundless.
The better we know ourselves, the easier it will be to know the world; alternatively, the better we know the world, so much easier it will be to know ourselves and our deepest and most enduring needs. It is not more and more knowledge that we need for the purpose of strengthening our position as individuals, but only knowledge of a kind that holds together and makes sense. We need a coherent interpretation of the history of the age in which we live and an insight into what it is that we must have if we are to be physically well and in good spirits. The following paragraph from a book by three university historians, published in 1949, will serve as a starting point for an exploration of what they describe as "this age of conflict": Two world wars and their intervening wars, revolutions and crises are now generally recognized to be episodes in a single age of conflict which began in 191l and has not yet run its course. It is an age that has brought to the world more change and tragedy than any other in recorded history. Yet, whatever may be its ultimate meaning and consequence, we can already think of it and write of it as a HISTORIC WHOLE. (1) (Emphasis added).An age of conflict that must be thought of "as a whole" must also be capable of being explained and understood as a whole; therefore, it is a highly condensed and simplified synopsis of the history of our century that we must have if the seemingly interminable succession of "episodes" of conflict and tragedy is to be seen as a whole and understood. The method I have chosen is to begin with a list of categorical statements which can be developed and expanded later and supported with an extensive bibliography. Here they are: We can think of our age of conflict as a historic whole, but what reason do we have to believe that it is the product of a uniform and continuous set of identifiable causes? Students of history can provide innumerable examples of major influences, baffling to all at the time of their occurrence, which yielded finally to quite simple elucidation and explanation. It is not only in history that events widely separated in space and time can be found to have. a combined meaning; for example, a few years ago when over a period of many months there were visitations of freak weather all around the world, in many cases with disastrous consequences the meteorologists were soon able to trace them all to a single cause or set of causes: they were able at least to show that the storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts, etc, belonged together and had an intelligible combined meaning. Needless to say, the meteorologists were not hindered in their investigations by "no-go" areas of inquiry of the kind to be expected by those who seek to understand worldwide visitations of freak political weather. We have no reason to suppose that we shall find an explanation of our age (lf conflict as easy to present and understand as spells of freak weather, but we are encouraged to hope that where we see in many parts of the globe, over many decades, a recognizable pattern of evil consequences, we can expect to find evidence of a uniform pattern of causes. What is required is an interpretation of the history of our century which will explain and render mutually intelligible the major changes which have occurred - those changes which brought more conflict and tragedy than ever before in recorded history. Among the few books of history in which any attempt has been made to interpret the history of our century as a whole are Oswald Spengler's THE DECLINE OF THE WEST and Carroll Quigley's TRAGEDY AND HOPE. Spengler's main contribution to historiography is his theory of the morphology of history in which he assigns to our present civilization in the West a condition of irreversible decline. Paradoxically, he does not regard this as a pessimistic view. One fact emerges very clearly in Spengler's analysis: What has happened in the 20th century must be seen and studied as an alliance of money and intellect with money, rather than pure politics, as the main moving power in world affairs. Quigley leaves many things unexplained - he may have done so intentionally - but he supports with a good deal of documentary evidence the thesis that much of what has happened in our century has been deliberately MADE TO HAPPEN. What he offers is, in fact, a conspiratorial theory of history involving a number of secret and semi-secret organizations like the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, the Round Table movement, the Royal Institute of' International Affairs and the American Council on Foreign Relations, all under the umbrella of what he calls an "Anglo-American network" of businessman, educationists, politicians and journalists. Quigley, who was Professor of History and of International Relations at the Georgetown Foreign Service School, Washington DC, supplies much other well documented information which no one has yet tried to fit into a general inter-interpretation of the history of our century. TRAGEDY AND HOPE was hastily withdrawn by its publishers, the Macmillan Company, arguably because it was found to have contributed too much to a fully coherent interpretation of the history of our century - to the embarrassment of those who prefer to work under a cloak of secrecy. The theory that much of what has happened has been made to happen is further endorsed by another consensus historian, Arnold Toynbee, not in his monumental A STUDY OF HISTORY but in his other public utterances, of which the following is an example, from a paper read at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Institute for the Scientific Study of International Relations at Copenhagen in June 1931 (published in INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, December 1931): We are at present working discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be, perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited.Quite clearly, the denudation of the national states of much of their sovereignty during the 20th century represented for Quigley and Toynbee part of the progressive fulfillment of their ideal of an elaborately planned "brave new world" to be raised on the flattened ruins of the old - for Quigley a world of "hope" with which to replace a world of "tragedy, a world of planned revolutionary change to replace a disorderly world of slow revolutionary change. Where and when did this age of conflict begin? The three co- authors quoted above say that it began in 1914. with World War I; but there are good reasons to believe that it began with the Anglo- Boer War of 1898-1902, which we can now see quite clearly as the beginning of the end of the British world imperium and as marking the inauguration of another imperium of a mysterious kind. If our century of conflict can be said to have begun with the Anglo- Boer War, then it is in South Africa that we may have the best chance of seeing more clearly the crucial historical change that was to spark off a great chain reaction of change involving the whole world. Until that time the record of the British Empire had been one of continuous progress, marred only by the hiving off of the American colonies. Britain had out paced all rivals in last century's scramble for colonial possessions, and could boast by the turn of the century to possess an "empire on which the sun never set". However, by a mere accident of history, Afrikaners - Boers, as they were called - who had trekked from Britain's Cape Colony into South Africa's virtually unpopulated hinterland, suddenly found themselves to be the owners of the world's richest gold fields. The eagerness of race-nationalists like Cecil John Rhodes and Alfred Milner to add the new Boer Republic of the Transvaal to the British Empire is understandable. In the climate of thought and sentiment then prevailing, not to have tried to grab so valuable a prize would have been virtually unthinkable. After a war that proved unexpectedly costly both in lives and money, Britain succeeded in adding to its empire both the Transvaal and its ally in the struggle, the Orange Free State republic, but all this happened in circumstances mysteriously different from those that had attended all previous imperial conquests. It was a war over which the British people were themselves sharply divided until the first shots were fired by the Boers; it was a war against which the British Government had been sternly warned by one of the empire's most loyal servants, General Sir William Butler, then Commander- in-Chief of British forces in South Africa; it was a war which gave rise to a greater outpouring of false communication than any other in British colonial history. There was something decidedly different about this tempting opportunity for further imperial expansion, which that prominent writer J.A. Hobson explained thus in his book THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA, while that war was still in progress. "We are fighting in order to place a small international oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power in Pretoria. Englishmen would do well to recognize that the economic and political destinies of South Africa are, and seem likely to remain, in the hands of men most of whom are foreigners by origin whose trade is finance and whose trade interests are not British".There can be no doubt today about the correctness of that assessment. Thomas Pakenham, in his book, THE BOAR WAR, published in 1979, has this to say about the causes of that war: "First there is a thin golden thread woven by the 'gold bugs', the Rand millionaires who controlled the richest mines in the world. It has been hitherto assumed by historians that none of the 'gold bugs' was directly concerned in making the war. But directly concerned they were ... I have found evidence of an informal alliance between Sir Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner, and the firm of Wernher-Beit, the dominant Rand mining house. IT WAS THIS ALLIANCE, I BELIEVE, THAT GAVE MILNER THE STRENGTH TO PRECIPITATE THE WAR" (Emphasis added).Hobson devotes an entire chapter of his book to mine-ownership in the Transvaal. A few of the financial pioneers were Englishmen; he names among these Rhodes, Rudd and J.B. Robinson. These had all made their fortunes in South Africa, but the others, "the small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race", were wealthy when they arrived in the country and had access to seemingly boundless funds in Europe, including the German Dresdner Bank, which Hobson believed to be largely owned by Wernher and Beit. Rhodes, too, had to go to an international banking dynasty, the London Rothschilds, for money with which to buy out his rivals and gain complete control of the diamond industry in Kimberley. General Sir William Butler was even more emphatic about the sources of power and motivation which were decisive in precipitating the war, "the train-layers setting the political gunpowder, as he called them. In a despatch to the War Office in June 1899 he wrote: "If the Jews were out of the question, it would be easy enough to come to an agreement, but they are apparently intent upon plunging the country into civil strife ... indications are too evident here to allow one to doubt the existence of strong undercurrents, the movers of which are bent upon war at all costs for their own selfish ends." (4)Noticed by few, and by even fewer understood, effective control of the British Empire at a decisive point in history had passed, if only momentarily, out of essentially British hands. Or, to put it differently, the center of gravity of real power in the world had shifted significantly. That was the mysterious change that was to inaugurate a chain reaction of more change, first for the British Empire and then for the whole world. More precisely, it was the first clear sign of the commencement of a process of change in the realm of finance-capitalism which was not to be complete before the middle of the 1930s. Other changes are less readily noticeable, one of the most important of these being radical changes in the methodology of warfare - the human mind itself has become a battleground for warring interests as never before in recorded history. Political warfare - \/on Clausewitz's "war by other means" - there has always been but never before on the scale practiced after the turn of the century. Persuasion there always was as a means of readying a population for war; but the world was to encounter in the late 1890s something unprecedented in the quantity and audacity of the lying propaganda that was used in drawing the British people into the Anglo-Boer War. This new evil, or recurrence of an old evil on a gigantic scale, came as a great shock to General Butler, who wrote as follows to the Colonial Secretary on December 18, 1898: "All the political questions in South Africa and nearly all the information sent from Cape Town are being worked by what I have already described as a colossal syndicate for the spread of false information".Hobson wrote in his book THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA: "South Africa presents a unique example of a large press, owned, controlled and operated by a small body of men with the direct aim of bringing about a conflict which shall serve their business interests".With prophetic insight, Hobson wrote a book, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JINGOISM, which, as an analysis of the dishonest uses of propaganda, bears comparison with George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR. Only a few of the major historic changes which ensued need be mentioned for our present purposes: the Anglo-Boer War; two World Wars; the Bolshevik Revolution and setting up of the Soviet Union as an industrial and military super-power; the dismantling of the colonial empires and conversion of the former colonies into new nations, few of them economically viable; the delivery of mainland China and other vast areas in the Far East to totalitarian socialist rule; the setting up of the United Nations with its innumerable agencies as the prototype of some form of world government; and the progressive undermining of the national sovereignty of all the Western nations. It is significant that the first years of the 20th century also ushered in a phenomenon that was to remain a conspicuous feature of the ensuing age of conflict, namely the concentration camp, symbol of an expanded barbarity in which civilians join the soldiers in the front line of every major conflict. We need to know what were the deep-seated changes in human affairs which gave rise to a worldwide chain-reaction of conflict and tragedy. As we shall try to show, these deep-rooted changes occurred in two quite separate realms, money and intellect. So, let us begin with an examination of the great change which took place in the world of money. Towards the end of the 19th century money began to acquire a new role and meaning in human affairs as economics began to prevail over politics. The two need to be clearly distinguished as sources of value, motivation and control at the level of leadership. Politics is a social function concerned with the total welfare of a community, long-term as well as short-term, in which the requirements of economics, although always important, have only a supportive or secondary role. Economic thinking, a mere department of political thinking, is concerned exclusively with the requirements of economic prosperity and progress. It assumes automatically that whatever is good for business is good for the community as a whole, an attitude of mind that excludes virtually all other considerations. What happened towards the end of the 19th century was, therefore, not something of sudden occurrence; it must be seen rather as a crucial stage having been reached in a process which had continued slowly during most of the preceding century. Not only did the Anglo-Boer War signalize the beginning of the end of the British Empire, it also signalized the beginning of the end of national financial sovereignties all over the Western world, a process that was to reach its culmination only in the 1930s when the great American pioneering families, headed by J.P. Morgan, were finally edged out of their dominating position in Wall Street. In the relations of politics and high finance there subsisted a very complex state of affairs until shortly before the commencement of World War II, which can be briefly explained as follows. There had always existed within the national states of the Western world families or dynasties of bankers, like the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Montefiores, etc. who lent to governments and specialized in transactions across national frontiers, but these were never fully integrated as an international system capable of controlling politics on an international basis. These concentrations of high finance, although always influential, lacked the power wholly to control the politics of the national states, but each remained an important part of a nationally oriented constellation of financial power. This was a situation that suited them well enough in the circumstances prevailing until the turn of the century. Enormous influence they could exert, - both nationally and internationally, but not the dominating power they were later to acquire. Paradoxically, in spite of the enormous lead which the Jewish banking dynasties had gained in international commerce, it was the gentile financiers with their ownership and access to the cornucopia of new wealth, plus their control of national politics, who First established high finance on a fully internationalized basis. The facts are supplied by Dr. Carroll Quigley: The apex of the system was to be the Bank of International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury bonds, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by sub-sequent economic rewards in the business world. (Tragedy and Hope).Quigley explains further that the Rothschilds had been pre-eminent during much of the 19th century, but at the end of that century "they were being replaced by J.P. Morgan", whose central office was in New York, although it. operated as if it were in London "Where it had indeed originated as George Peabody and Company in I838". The process by which the separate national concentrations of financial power were absorbed into a global concentration was only completed in the 1930s, producing among other historical consequences the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, the outbreak of World War II and subsequent involvement of the United States and Japan, and the setting up of a Marxist-Leninist People's Republic of China. Professor Quigley supplies many of the facts about the final shift in the center of gravity of financial power, and his story begins with these ominous words: "The third stage of capitalism is of such overwhelming significance in the history of the twentieth century, and its ramifications and influences have been so subterranean and even occult, that we may be excused if we devote considerable attention to its organization and methods." (Opp. cit, p.50).It is the story, assembled from a vast accumulation of documented facts, of a process of change in the United States, beginning before World War I, which Wilmot Robertson was later to describe as the "dispossession of the American majority", (5) culminating in what Quigley calls "a shift on all levels, from changing tastes in newspaper comic strips . . . to profound change in the power nexus of the 'American Establishment'" From the 1880s the United States had been ruled from behind the scenes by a plutocracy supported by the fortunes of the great American pioneering families - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Duke, Whitney, Ford, Du Pont, etc - a power constellation with J.P. Morgan as its banking center. This "Eastern Establishment" is described by Quigley as "high Episcopalian, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, and European-culture-conscious", and was matched with a similar establishment on the other side of the Atlantic with Montagu Norman as its banking head. The two worked closely together and came to be known as the "Anglo- American Establishment. Quigley tells us of the "decline of J.P. Morgan itself from its deeply anonymous status as a partnership (founded in 1861) to its transformation into an incorporated public company in 1940 to its final disappearance by absorption into its chief banking subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company, in 1959".Quigley says that the less obvious implication of the shift in Wall Street was the realization by the Morgan group that it no longer had the votes on the Board of Trustees of Columbia University to nominate a successor to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, the retiring president. In a word, the control of American higher education had quietly been taken out of the hands of America's great pioneering families, described by Quigley as "high Episcopalian, Anglophile and European-culture-conscious" - a studiously discreet way of saying that they were not Jewish. Wall Street fell into the hands of the international financiers like a ripe plum, their real battle having been fought and won in the realm of parliamentary politics by methods which are still standard practice in the Western world; these include the financing of party politics, the manipulation of public opinion through the medium of newspapers, radio, the cinema, the book trade, etc, plus the penetration, financing and manipulation of trade union movements. This was a take-over exercise in which America s emerging secret rulers could draw on centuries of accumulated expertise and experience as a nation struggling to survive in dispersion. The eclipse of the power of the great American Families first took the form of taxation laws, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913 and culminating in the inheritance tax, which drove all the great family fortunes into the refuge of tax-exempt foundations. Morgan and his circle lost control of the Federal Government as one money-and-intellect alliance was subtly replaced by another. And the fact that a money-and-intellect alliance behaves in much the same way no matter who controls it made the change hard to detect. The Morgan group dabbled in the politics of the radical left and lost no time in trying to get a foothold in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. But at this game they were no match for their Jewish rivals. The rival Wall Street elites were both fired by the ideal and ambition of a "new world order", but there the similarity ended. The original American establishment, like its British opposite number, was for containing the Soviet Union with its socialist rulers with a view to ultimate absorption of the Russian empire into a new world order to be raised on the foundations of the British Empire and which they, as inheritors of the Rhodes dream, would control. The other, the new Eastern Establishment. was for building up the Soviet Union as an industrial and military giant which would replace the British Empire as the foundation of a new world order These developments in the realm of finance capitalism and power politics came to a climax towards the end of the 1930s, coinciding with a considerable eruption all over the Western world of a social phenomenon misleadingly described as "anti-Semitism". (6) Professor Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism puts it frankly and succinctly: "Twentieth century political developments have driven the Jewish people into the storm center of events . . . the Jewish question and antisemitism . . . became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement and the establishment of the organizational structure of the Third Reich . . . then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity." Henry Ford, who for many years had roundly condemned all the big bankers as the natural enemies of private enterprise industry, now drew a clear distinction between the house of Morgan, which he described as "constructive", and its rivals, whom he described as "warmongers".(7) Morgan himself, like his opposite number in London, Montagu Norman, was known to dislike the Jews. The talks of Father Coughlin and writings of Father Denis Fahey, the frantic efforts of Charles Lindbergh to keep America out of the war, and the activities of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts in Britain, were all reactions to the appearance of the Jewish people in "the storm center" of 20th century politics. What all these alarming developments mean is that a highly concentrated Jewish financial power was suddenly seen to be gaining ascendancy in the West. Another layer in the prevailing political reality during the last decades of the l9th century must now be studied separately - namely, the thoughts about the future that were then circulating in the English ruling classes. Cecil John Rhodes was one of the most potent men of action in English history, but he was also a visionary and dreamer, pictured by friend and foe as a callouses bestriding the continent of Africa. His ability to inspire activity and loyalty in others was proverbial. In the realm of pure thought, however, the unifying and emergising agent was not Rhodes but John Ruskin, at one time Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University, who had armed a generation of young Englishmen with an ideology of service having as its object the creation of a better and happier world. This was to be imagined as an extended application of the civilizing and humanizing concept of the British Empire; it was to be a fellowship of free and independent states held together by an abstract principle which came to be labeled the "English idea". The numinosity, or sense of magic, evoked by these ideas can be traced to a single cause: the ideology of a "brave new world", with order and welfare for all mankind, was offered as a replacement for a religious orthodoxy that had long since begun to crumble under the impact of a scientific "enlightenment"; there was something to restore to the existence of the educated and energetic a keen sense of meaning, purpose and direction, and ideology, moreover, which sanctified imperial expansion and the personal advancement of all its servants. So potent was this ideology as a secular religion that it won converts all over the Western world; even former leaders of the conquered Boers, including General Louis Botha, who was to be South Africa's first Prime Minister, and General Jan Christian Smuts, yielded to its psychic charm. Practical measures to give effect to this political idealism took the form of a range of operations including the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, the semi-secret Round Table movement, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the American Council on Foreign Relations, etc. This was definitely a racial affair, invoking on both sides of the Atlantic a genteel racial response. Ralph Durand, in a book about Oxford University published in 1909, wrote of "Cecil Rhodes of Oriel, the dreamer of great dreams ... Believing that the preservation of the peace of the world lay in the hands of men of Teuton blood, he made provision in his will for the founding at Oxford of scholarships that would be open to citizens of the British Empire, the German Empire and the United States"- OXFORD: ITS BUILDINGS AND GARDENS, published by Grant Richards, London. The fatal flaw in this ideology does not belong to the art or science of politics nor that of high finance, but to an area of knowledge less readily accessible to exploration and discussion, namely, metaphysics. Quigley puts his hand on the key to that riddle: each of the central banks in the different national states, he says, "sought to dominate its government" and to "influence co-operative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world". What this means is that something had already gone wrong in the West's different national power structures - all had incorporated a system of money creation and debt, a corrupting influence with implications of infinite complexity. Money had become progressively the measure of all things, with a ruling elite drawn less and less from the land and more and more from the factory and the counting houses. The nations had, in fact, become plutocracies, capable of maintaining themselves in power with a public opinion not sought and consulted as before but CREATED as required by newspapers, patronage and other "rewards in the business world". Such a conversion of money into public opinion and support was accomplished in Britain by Rhodes and Milner and their "gold bug" partners, with a total disregard for all moral considerations. Money had shown what money could do. There was, thus, an iron inevitability about the outcome of a struggle which the gentile financiers did not even see as a struggle: AN ALIEN HIGH FINANCE firmly united by long-range political aims, increasingly influenced the politics of the different national states and finally DISPLACED the gentile financiers as managers of the new international banking structure. And educated minds, conditioned by John Ruskin's secular ideology calling for a "new world" to be raised on the foundations of the British Empire, seem to have had no difficulty in transferring their attachment and enthusiasm to a new idealogy worked out by Marx and Engles. Antony Sutton's trilogy, WALL STREET AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, WALL STREET AND THE RISE OF HITLER, and WALL STREET AND FDR,contains a vast quantity of information but is more remarkable FOR WHAT IT OMITS. For that Which is omitted is precisely what Professor Hannah Arendt correctly describes as the "catalytic agent" in the "storm center of events", namely, the role of the Jewish people in 2Oth century power politics. So far as Sutton is concerned there is and always was only one "Wall Street Establishment", which is made to carry the main blame for the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution and later fur the financing of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. That is a misleading over-simplification of the story. In fact, Wall Street during the two preceding decades had a sort of split personality, one half of it symbolized by Morgan and the other by Warbug. It is true,as alleged, that "Wall Street" helped to finance the Bolshevik Revolution, but in this exercise the Warburg faction (Jacob Schiff in particular) took the initiative, with the Morgan faction getting all The bad publicity as they belatedly tried to get a share of the action. There is much evidence also to support the contention that "Wall Street", this time clearly the Morgan interests, supported Hitler's rise to power. But at the same time who, if not the internationalists, were funding the Communist Party in these crucial elections in Germany in 1930 in which the communists gained spectacular successes? The fiercest political struggles in the 1930s all over the West can now be more clearly seen as so many proxy battles on behalf of rival concentrations of financial power, culminating in World II and the triumph of the internationalists. In Britain opposition to World War II came from what remained of the British end of the original Anglo-American establishment, labeled the "Clivenden set" - Cliveden being the name of the home of Lord Astor. This interpretation will also help to explain one of the weirdest and most mysterious episodes in American history - a reported attempt, with the assistance of the American Legion and armed forces, to set up a "fascist style" dictatorship in the White House. News of the plot was given brief front-page treatment in the NEW YORK TIMES on November 21, 1931; a congressional committee was set up to investigate the allegations; but then all news of the plot faded out of the press. Those involved included a few leading personalities in the American Legion and another organization known as Liberty League, which together seem to have undertaken to make available a force of 500,000 men. Leadership of the operation was offered to Major-General Smedley D. Butler, a much decorated military hero, but there is no real evidence that he ever agreed to go along with the plotters. (8) Significantly, it is exclusively the gentile power -wielders of big finance and big business who were identified as the culprits behind the scene, all linked in one way or another with J.P. Morgan: Grayson Murphy, a director of the Guaranty Company; Jackson Martindell, associated with Stone and Webster, allied to the Morgans; the DuPont Company; the Remington Arms Company, controlled by DuPont; and the Morgan-Harriman financial interests. It would seem, therefore, that the Morganite financiers and industrialists, finding themselves at last outmaneuvered and outgunned in Wall Street, were tempted to take desperate measures against the international financiers - as had been done with some success in Italy and Germany. As the rivalry of separate national constellations of financial power gave rise to last century's scramble for colonial possessions, so the consolidation of financial power on a global basis in the 20th century required the dismantling of all the colonial empires and their replacement with innumerable new states over which the separate nations of the West would be able to exercise little or no influence. A clear distinction must, thus, be drawn between the pace and quantity of change and conflict in the world up until l939, when the new imperium was still in the process of being established, and the pace and quantity of change and conflict after the new imperium had emerged as the only real victor in World War II. So much for the revolutionary change which occurred in the realm of high finance.
We must now briefly examine a fundamentally charged Western intellect, which can be regarded as one of the main causes of our century of conflict - the other half of that "alliance of money and intellect". The change can be said to have begun more than two centuries ago and to have been concomitant with the decline of Christianity as the consensus religion of the West. The new kind of thinking and the new system of values which were inaugurated as a result of the decline of the influence of Christian orthodoxy came to be known as socialism. Socialism however, was only one of the symptoms of something much deeper with profound metaphysical implications, a condition better represented by the words "idealism" and "humanism"; socialism is, in fact, only idealism with an economic and political programme of sorts. So, it is this "idealism" which we need to understand, an attitude to existence that responds readily to any plausible programme or ideology proposing the betterment of the world and of mankind. Such ideologies have included anarchism, nihilism, syndicalism, socialism, communism, etc. This idealism supplies the psychic foundation for a system of secular belief which acquires the force and intensity of the religion which it has replaced. There is a fundamental and most important difference between 1- a metaphysical or religious system of belief, and 2- a secular or humanist system of belief . The difference can be stated as follows:
Yet it is precisely this idealism, this attitude and this plausible kind of thinking, which has given the world a century of conflict and tragedy without precedent in recorded history. Frankly, evil intentions in other ages never produced cruelty and disorder on so vast a scale as idealism or humanism have produced in the 20th century. Evil at the service of good intentions has been exposed by the experience of history as capable of producing the most dreadful consequences. It is in this area of conduct where ends are called on to justify means that the mind makes mistakes of a kind that the mind itself can not easily understand and where the mind is most exposed to the influences of hostile cunning. The great mistake is to suppose that the means used can be justified by the quality of the ends proposed when, in fact, as experience may only demonstrate belatedly, it is only the actual results produced that can ever justify the means. The idea that the laudable end envisioned, however distantly separated from the present, justifies the employment of whatever means are required for its attainment, is thus fundamental to idealism or humanism in whatever form it may take, whether as socialism or as that benevolent imperialism preached by John Ruskin and which captivated the mind of the young Cecil John Rhodes. Political idealism in action exhibits two major negative aspects: it undertakes long-term enterprises which are incapable of actualization because in conflict with unalterable requirements of human nature as expressed in instinct, and it produces among its "believers" a progressive blunting or description of what, for want of a more precise description, we can call "a sense of evil". In other words, immoral behavior in the service of an ideal is condoned and even recommended, and any suffering that ensues is habitually regarded with indifference as part of the price that must be paid for "progress". Socialism as a substitute for a discredited religious orthodoxy, after a long period of incubation in Germany and central Europe early in the 19th century, was given a more scholarly form as "dialectical materialism", a materialistic interpretation of existence, by Karl Marx and was later presented in a more delusive and accept- able form by leading British intellectuals, including Edward Pease, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb. The Fabian Society and later the London School of Economics were then set up as seedbeds for the future proliferation of socialist ideas and ideals throughout the English-speaking world, including the United States. Significantly Julius Wernher, of the Wernher-Beit conglomerate that supported Milner's effort to precipitate the Anglo-Boer War, contributed substantially to the funding of the London School of Economics and socialist movements everywhere, all vehemently "anti-capitalists", continued to receive massive support from the most powerful "capitalists." It was because of THE ABSENCE OF ANY FUNDAMENTAL ANTAGONISM between the philosophies of Juhn Ruskin and of Karl Marx that it was possible for the "Brave new World" ambition, so actively promoted by Rhodes and his heirs, to be absorbed into the socialist world-power vortex with hardly a sign that anything untoward had happened. In fact, the international socialists, instruments of the most highly concentrated financial power, were able to take over the Rhodes-Milner establishment, complete with its worldwide network of organizations - the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilaterals, etc - and continue to run it as if still under its original management; indeed, it simply gave the socialists a new Dimension for the exercise of their incomparable skill in the arts of deception. The decay of Christianity in its orthodox forms, and especially in its institutionalized form as the Church, proved overwhelmingly to the advantage of the new order of financiers. For many centuries in the West, Christian orthodoxy had been more than something to believe; it had become a world view, an interpretation of the totality of existence and, as such, the very medium in which men's minds had their reality, as water is the medium in which fish fulfill their existence. The educated classes in the west would need a new religion, better still a secular substitute, one fully in harmony with the new rationalist climate of thought engendered by a triumphant science. This was provided in the form of socialism, an intellectual frame of reference and system of values which has continued to dominate higher education in the West into the beginning of the 20th century, especially in academic disciplines like history, anthropology, sociology and political science This socialism can be said to have two separate and different realities: 1- It is something that can be believed; and 2- It is something that can be used. Spengler recognized socialism's double character when he remarked that every proletarian movement, even a communist one, "Operates in the interest of money" adding significantly "without the idealist in its ranks having the slightest suspicion of the fact". (10) The crippling effect of socialism as an intellectual frame of reference can be ascribed to the fact that it is basically a confidence trick, one of the components of a dialectical trap with money that funds socialism as THESIS, a socialism in which men believe as ANTITHESIS and "the new imperium" as SYNTHESIS. Money grabs and concentrates power and socialism promises the ultimate redistribution of ownership and power; the resolution of this contradiction supplies the new imperium with its irresistible dynamic. But why should an alliance of money and intellect ostensibly bent on reforming the world and reducing it to order have produced in the 20th century so much more conflict than was produced last century and earlier when the nations of Europe were engaged in a competitive scramble for aggrandizement, and especially for colonial possessions? It would appear that money and intellect as determinants in the shaping of history had undergone a radical change for the worse, giving rise, among other phenomena, to what Professor P.T. Bauer has described as "an undeclared, one-sided civil war in the West". (11) A money power alien to the West cannot tolerate health, strength and order in the West; it is, therefore, committed to policies of destructiveness. Health, strength and order in any part of the world can only mean selfwill and self determination in that area, an obstacle to money's global power-concentrating purposes. An alien money power needs a world of ethnic communities reduced to a condition of arrested cultural and political development and has concentrated its enmity on the Western community of nations, which it sees as the main rival for world dominion. The new imperium finds its strength in the weakness of all those it seeks to control. The 19th century plutocracies, by contrast, could not afford to weaken their own national communities; and by undisguised direct rule in their colonies, requiring little force, were able to create areas of order which were able to create areas of order which were almost always under their control. Moreover, the colonial powers tended to leave as much as possible unchanged and undisturbed in the areas which came under their control, ruling as far as possible through the medium of traditional institutions. Placing themselves, as it were, at the top of the primaeval hierarchical order. The new imperium has spread conflict and disorder trying to rule secretly and indirectly by means of artificially contrived surrogate regimes, everywhere disrupting the natural hierarchical order within and between ethnic groups. In other words, an extraneous power has everywhere prevented the emergence of what Robert Ardrey would call the natural "pecking order" within and between contiguous ethnic groups. In fact, in very many instances, a reversal of the ancient "pecking order" (12) has been found necessary by the world's new secret rulers. (13) It is this disturbance of relationships within and between ethnic groups which has given the 20th century an age of conflict and tragedy without precedent in world history. A process of unfolding history having as its culmination the decline of the West and a century of unprecedented conflict can be traced to many causes. but central to all the corrupting principle of USURY - money traded as a commodity and lent at interest - as a component of the world's monetary system. Our century of conflict thus has many meanings, some of them beyond our powers of understanding, but that which we need and can use is the knowledge that the peoples of the West have only themselves to blame for the plight in which they and the rest of the world find themselves today; for they have themselves created the morally unhygienic conditions in which evil flourishes as never before. The prediction and promise of the Old Testament prophets has been fulfilled: the nation of lenders has become "the head" and all the others, blind to usury's hidden peril, "the tail" NOTES
Other References in Text:
Part II of This Age in Conflict |