A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Twenty-One ... Number Twenty-Three ... June 7, 1974
THE CONTRIVED EVOLUTION
OF REGIONAL GOVERNMENT
PART SIX
THE GREAT "ISMIC" INVASION
The United States of America was forced into the Internationalist Arena through being manipulated into a war against Spain for Cuban independence. As a result of that unfortunate adventure, the United States obtained possession of Guam and the Philippines, islands in the Far Pacific. Their possession vecame a clear and positive violation of the Monroe Doctrine which, up to that time, had been regarded as inviolate as the Constitution itself. True, we were only holding onto the Philippines for purely "humanitarian" purposes and in due course they were granted independence. But Guam in the Marianas remains an unincorporated territory of the United States, and the first witness of our own violation of the most important foreign policy proclamation ever made by the United States.
Then, in rapid succession, came the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, intervention in the Boxer Uprising in China in 1900, diplomatic intervention in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt's ordering of that round-the-world cruise of the United States Navy in 1908 along with his threat to the world that we would "speak softly but carry a big stick."
These events established the United States as a world power and, more importantly, established us as an imperialist power in the eyes of the other imperialist powers of the world. Consequently, we became embroiled in the intrigues and vicissitudes of the rest of the world. And, we began to be infiltrated and infected, attacked and affected by the various "isms" that were causing upheavals and epidemics in the bodies politic of the nations of the Old World.
It should be noted that there was great unrest in the United States at this time, and thus the country was more receptive to foreign isms than in previous years. In his revealing but biased Tragedy and Hope, historian Carroll Quigley refers to this period as "the period of financial capitalism which investment bankers moving into commercial banking and insurance on one side and into railroading and heavy industry on the other were able to mobilize enormous wealth and wield enormous economic, political, and social power. Popularly known as 'Society,' or the '400,' they lived a life of dazzling splender."
"The structure of financial controls created by the tycoons of 'Big Banking' and 'Big Business,' Quigley continues, "was of extraordinary complexity, one business fief being built on another, both being allied with semi-dependent associates, the whole rearing upward into two pinnacles of economic and financial power, of which one, centered in New York, was headed by J.P. Morgan and Company and the other, in Ohio, was headed by the Rockefeller family. When these two cooperated, as they generally did, they could influence the economic life of the country to a large degree and could almost control its political life, at least on the Federal level .... The influence of these business leaders was so great that the Morgan and Rockefeller groups acting together, or even Morgan acting alone, could have wrecked the economic system of the country merely by throwing securities on the stock market for sale, and having precipitated a stock-market panic, could then have bought back the securities they had sold at a lower price. Naturally, they were not so foolish as to do this, although Morgan came very close to it in precipitating the 'panic of 1907,' but they did not hesitate to wreck individual corporations at the expense of the holders of common stocks, by driving them to bankruptcy." (A similar situation exists again today, with multinational corporations and conglomerates wielding enormous economic, political, and social power -- Ed.)
At the turn of the century, Big Banking and Big Business so ruled the roost, that the importation of Old World "Isms" was easy, and they were welcomed by many.
Into the United States came immigrants and political protagonists promoting peculiar and unusual doctrines. There flourished for a time and in varying degrees of intensity and expansiveness nihilism, anarchism, syndicalism, national socialism, international communism, Fabian socialism, Fascism, Anglo-Saxon Federation, etc., etc.
Before proceeding, a definition of terms is required, and an explanation of the historical dialectic of all these strange isms which are based generally on the theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:
In the beginning there was what now is called Utopian Socialism. That was the kind of socialism advocated by the social reformers such as Robert Owen, John Stuart Mill, and other like-minded social reformers. Various experiments in Utopian Socialism had been carried out in the United States, beginning with the Pilgrim Colony itself; all failed for varying reasons.
Then came the great change, in 1848, when Marx and Engel were commissioned to write out the socialist credo which they called The Communist Manifesto, and which begins with the threat, "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism," and closes with the command, "Workers of the World, unite!" This Manifesto marked the end of the peaceable Utopian Socialist period, and the beginning of the political and militant period of Scientific Socialism. After 1848, the International Socialist Movement was marked by three "Internationals," or meetings, each of which changed the course of the overall movement. The First International held sway from 1864 to 1876, twelve years during which time nihilism and anarchism became so predominant that the movement was disrupted and a Second International was founded in 1889. The nihilists and anarchists were expelled and the whole movement began to lose its militancy. This resulted in a showdown between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, with Trotsky establishing a Bolshevik headquarters in Brooklyn, and with Lenin heading a similar Bolshevik group in Geneva. Kerensky, who died in exile in the United States in 1972, was nominal head of the Menshevik group. Then in 1919, all the dissident elements of the old Second International organized the Third -- or Communist -- International.
The bickering and infighting among the socialists led to a number of schools, increasingly doctrinaire, increasingly bitter toward each other, but always ready to cooperate with each other when called upon by the faceless men who controlled all the schools of socialism.
Most violent were (and are) the nihilists. They believe that conditions are so bad that everything must be destroyed utterly, governments, religions, institutions, civilizations, buildings; perfection exists only in absolute nothingness. The nihilists are the bomb-throwers, the arsonists, those who kill and destroy in the belief that these are worthy ends in themselves.
The anarchists are a milder version of the nihilists. The anarchist believes that man is not sinful, but innately good; all the world's evil arose because man's innate goodness was corrupted and distorted by coercive power. The remedy is to destroy the state and its government, whatever the form of government may be. Destruction of the state will lead, according to anarchism, to the disappearance of all other forms of coercive power and to the liberation of the innate goodness of man. The anarchists believed that the simplest way to destroy the state was to assassinate the chief of the state; this would act as a spark to ignite a wholesale uprising of oppressed humanity against all forms of coercive power. These views led to the assassination of numerous political leaders, including a king of Italy and a president of the United States in the period 1895 to 1905 (the man who shot President William McKinley, Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist).
Syndicalism was a later version of anarchism, and was more realistic. It aimed to destroy governments, but this public authority was to be replaced by voluntary associations of individuals in communes, cooperatives, and especially labor unions. According to the syndicalists, the state was to be destroyed, not by the assassination of heads of state, but by a general strike of all workers. The general strike would destroy the state and replace it by a flexible federation of free associations of workers (syndicates). The IWW movement in the United States was syndicalism's supreme effort in this direction; but the cooperative movement still exists as a form of syndicalistic socialism in the United States.
Opposed to the nihilo-anarcho-syndicalists in theory were the radical socialists who did not want to destroy governments as such but, instead, to give them all power over all economic life. Public ownership of all industry, all land, all resources, all means of production and all distribution of goods; this was the socialism that was able to conquer most of Europe and, through the late Norman Thomas and his followers, capture control of the National Democratic Party from 1932 onward. In the United States this form of socialism evolved into the welfare state program espoused by the majority of United States Senators and Representatives who call themselves Republicans and Democrats, but doctrinally are radical socialists.
Yet a different school of socialism evolved out of Bolshevism and came to be called Communism. International Communism has expanded enormously, thanks to efforts on the part of the United States Government to keep it alive. More about this later.
Yet another form of national socialism, called Fascism, developed in Italy under Mussolini. A slight alteration of the same ideology was called Nazism in Germany. Historians are reluctant to point out that much of the New Deal Program under FDR was fascist; and no one in authority in Washington seems willing to confess that Nixon's New Federalism program is a direct steal from the Corporate Socialism that was developed -- and which still functions -- in Italy (which doesn't really have a government, but is run by State-owned or State-chartered Corporations).
Then, there is Fabian Socialism which, because of its extreme importance in the Contrived Evolution of Regional Government, will be dealt with in great detail in future letters in this series.
We have listed several of the different denominations of socialism. There are yet others, such as the revisionist communism copied from Mao Tse-tung's interpretation of the writings of Karl Marx, the SLA, other militant and radical cults claiming to be followers of the true gospel of revolution according to Marx. Each of these groups, from the Nihilists to the Socialist Labor Party, has had its part in the destruction of the original American System.
But there is one power, almost nameless, which has had more to do with the socializing of America than all of the socialist cults individually or severally, because this one power controls them all and uses them all whenever occasion and circumstance demands!
Perhaps our best way of approaching this subject is to call on one of the opposition's own witnesses. Carrol Quigley, previously quoted, devotes considerable space in his book to a discussion of the Institute of Pacific Relations, a satellite of the Council on Foreign Relations, which was composed of ten national councils in ten countries, with international headquarters in New York City. IPR was thoroughly investigated by the McCarran Committee (Senator McCarran was probably the first American in an official position to try to warn the Nation of the danger of Fabian International Socialism). This investigation of the IPR was of especial importance in that it revealed officially the interrelationship between the Council on Foreign Relations, the tax-exempt Foundations such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, the Communist Party, U.S.A ., and the Fabian Socialist apparatus which operated out of the Ivy League Colleges, with financial aid also being supplied by Rockefeller and Morgan interests in Wall Street: Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, National City Bank, International General Electric, International Telephone and Telegraph. Individual contributions came from Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Thomas Lamont and Corliss Lamont, and other communists and communist-fronters.
Quigley admits that IPR developed a party line and that "this IPR line had many points in common both with the Kremlin's party line on the Far East and with the State Department's line in the same area." The State Department was (and is) controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations; so the Kremlin and State Department policy toward the Far East being the same at that time, is hardly a coincidence.
However, after Quigley admits so much, he goes on to explain how Nationalist China "fell or was pushed" (IPR-man Owen Lattimore's phrase), then Quigley makes the statement that this whole affair was a "radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America."
"This plot, if we are to believe the myth," writes Quigley, "worked through such avenues of publicity as The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine and had at its core the wild-eyed and bushyhaired theoreticians of Socialist Harvard and the London School of Economics. It was determined to bring the United States into World War II on the side of England (Roosevelt's first love) and Soviet Russia (his second love) in order to destroy every finer element of American life and, as part of this consciously planned scheme, invited Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and destroyed Chiang Kai-shek, all the while undermining America's real strength by excessive spending and unbalanced budgets."
Quigley says this is all a radical Right myth. But he has a reservation and isn't quite sure that he believes what he wrote, because he immediately adds:
"This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and I have, for 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 (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), 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."
Our concern in this series of letters is with the American affiliates of this secret network, groups which also have "no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups" and frequently do so.
Here is a network of secret and semi-secret organizations which originally sought to reunite the United States (England's lost colonies) with Mother England, with a view toward creating a world government that would be administered by an Anglo-Saxon Federation composed of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the British Commonwealth of Nations (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.). As the control of this network changed, the aims of the secret cabal also changed, so that the final aims now consist of a World Authority administered on behalf of Big Banking and Big Business. This World Authority is to be divided into Regional Authorities, they into National Authorities, and these in turn are to be divided (or have already been divided) into Administrative Regions; as the United States has been divided into Ten Federal Regions for administrative purposes.
To accomplish the total Regionalization of the World there are two principal groups which originated in England, and which now are active (and in a controlling position) in all of the English-speaking Nations of the world. Similar affiliated groups are in control or in positions of great influence in all other developed Nations of the world.
In the United States this control is exerted over economic and monetary affairs by a network of groups, the best known of which is the New York City based Council on Foreign Relations, which is directly affiliated with similar organizations in all other nations of the world.
The second group which controls political and social affairs is an organization which might be said to be made up of all officers and no soldiers, and began in England as the Fabian Society. This Fabian Society developed a special kind of Socialism that is especially appealing to men who once believed themselves to be freemen.
Between these two, the groups controlled by the Round Table and the individuals controlled by the Fabian Society, there is a camaraderie and an interrelationship so that at times it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. And between the two, there is the determination that we shall have a "World Community," whether we like it or not, and that at the nation-state level we shall have Regional Government, whether we like it or not.
If we are to understand what we have called The Contrived Evolution of Regional Government, then we must first trace the history of these two power groups, the Round Table Groups, and the Fabian Society. We must understand how they originated in England, one at Oxford University, the other by way of the London School of Economics which was founded for the express purpose of teaching the fundamentals of Fabianism.
Do not expect an exhaustive or comprehensive treatment of these groups in this series of letters. Our principal subject is Regional Government and we shall try to deal with Round Tablers and Fabians only as they relate to Regional (and World) Government.
How a gaggle of defeated diplomats grew to the place where they could dictate to whole Governments, and how a drawing room study group developed into a behind-the-scenes power that could draft programs for Regional and World Governments; these are the topics upcoming.
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