[CTRL] [1a] This Age of Conflict

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This Age of Conflict
By Ivor Benson

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.

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present
controls the past"�George Orwell

"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, everything that it wants to
swallow."�Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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 1911 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)

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:

1. Our century of conflict is the product of an alliance of money and
intellect, with intellect almost invariably subordinate to, and at the
service of, money; money being in the 20th century the primary source of
great power.

2. We need to fill and identify the changes which have occurred in the
realms of money and of intellect, changes which have made this century
so different from all others in recorded history.

3. The change which has occurred in the realm of money is this:
Constellations of finance-capitalism which had been separate and
nationally oriented were absorbed into a greater constellation of
finance-capitalism serving a different set of long-term interests.

4. The change which occurred in the realm of intellect is this:
Christian orthodoxy was replaced by an ideology of socialism as the
basis of a consensus intellectual frame of reference and system of
values. This socialism or secular religion has given rise to what the
psychologist Carl Gustav Jung has described as a "psychic epidemic" now
afflicting the educated classes in the West.

5. The changes which heralded our century of conflict were first clearly
visible in South Africa in the late 1890s, producing the Anglo-Boer war
(the first of three great fratricidal wars in the west), the beginning
of the end of the British Empire and the beginning of a new and
unprecedented kind of world imperium�money-powered, race-oriented,
Zionist-national-socialist.

6. These changes in money and intellect have drawn the peoples of the
West into a dialectical trap, with money as thesis, socialism as
antithesis and the new imperium as synthesis; money incessantly
concentrates power, socialism promises the total dispersal and
distribution of power; the resolution of this contradiction supplies the
new imperium with its dynamic.

7. The process of the transference of financial power to the new
imperium was only completed in the 1930s when J. P. Morgan and the great
American pioneering families lost their dominance in Wall Street.

8. The immediate cause of the great increase in conflict all over the
world: External interference with the natural hierarchical system or
"pecking order" within and among ethnic groups, as everywhere states
were set up, and regimes established, which have no local or natural
right to exist. This interference by third parties is what makes
episodes of conflict in the 20th century quite different from conflicts
in other ages, conferring on all of them a shared meaning.

9. All these developments are linked to the moral evil of a system of
money creation and debt in which the nations of the West are at the same
time offenders and victims.

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 of 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, 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 co
nspiratorial 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 businessmen, 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 evolutionary 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 Boer 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
dispatch 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�von 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 governm
ent; 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
signalized 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
subsequent 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 1838."

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 ideology worked out by Marx and Engels. 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 20th 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 Warburg. 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 "Cliveden 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 l
inked 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 changed 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:

1. All the great religions which have endured down the ages, however
different in their orthodoxies are founded on the central belief that
human existence, like everything else in the universe, is governed by
immutable laws of cause and effect which the intelligence must discover
and obey. What this amounts to is a recognition that human freedom finds
fulfillment only as freedom under law. We are free to do as we please
but, if we are to avoid the disappointment of our hopes and
expectations, if we are to preserve psychic health, we must first find
out what can and what cannot be done.

2. Fundamental to idealism or humanism is the notion that the intellect
is fully qualified to be a law unto itself in promoting purposes which
can be visualized or imagined as socially advantageous, that is, well
intentioned and for the common good. The element of error in this
perception of the intellect as the highest source of guidance in human
affairs is extremely subtle, hard to detect, and even harder to explain;
it can be compared with a compass deflection in navigation which
progressively falsifies all positional and directional calculations. The
ancients called it hubris, an attitude that presupposes that the
intellect can conquer life itself as it can conquer the human
environment. Milton handles this most profound theme in the language of
symbolism in his great epic poem Paradise Lost. (9)

The almost irresistible attraction of socialism for the educated classes
who last century found themselves without the support of their ancestral
Christian faith is, therefore, understandable for it supplied a highly
plausible and ingeniously elaborated framework of ideas calculated to
free the world from many evils and to bring happiness and contentment to
mankind. It offered to the educated individual a laudable ambition and
an integrated intellectual frame of reference which promised to infuse
his existence with meaning and purpose.

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 o
ther 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 acceptable 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 John 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 va
lues 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.
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 self will 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 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."

 "The plan, I think, is the old one of world dominion in a new form. The
money-power and revolutionary power have been set up and given sham but
symbolic shapes (�Capitalism" or "Communism�) and sharply defined
citadels (�America� or "Russia�). Such is the spectacle publicly staged
for the masses. But what if similar men, with a common aim, secretly
rule in both camps and propose to achieve their ambition through the
clash between those masses? I believe any diligent student of our times
will discover that this is the case."�Douglas Reed

"The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul
of a nation, and by a nation I mean any community of people who are
spiritually bound together by language, environment, history, and common
ideals and, above all, a continuity with the past."�Vaughan Williams
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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