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The Grand Deception - Part One
A Second Look at the War on Terrorism
© 2002 by G. Edward Griffin
http://www.Freedom-Force.org
Ladies and Gentlemen, the title of my presentation today is The Grand Deception - A Second Look at the War on Terrorism.
I was flattered to hear in my introduction that I have a reputation for taking complex subjects and making them easy to understand. I hope I can live up to that expectation, but I couldn’t help wondering if I can really do that with this topic: The War on Terrorism. How can you make that easy to understand? It’s such a huge and confusing topic. I feel like the proverbial mosquito in a nudist camp. I know what I have to do. I just don’t know where to begin.
There is a formula I often follow when I don’t know where to begin, and that is to start with history. If you discover the history, you should be able to figure it out as you go along. It was Will Durant who said, "Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it."
Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of history in the war on terrorism? If we continue to follow the path we are now taking, I’m afraid that we are. But to find out whether we are repeating the mistakes of history, we need to go back in time. So, I invite you to join me in my time machine. We are going to splash around in history for a while and look at some great events and huge mistakes to see if there are parallels, any lessons to be learned for today. I must warn you that it will seem we are lost in time. We are going to go here and there, and then jump back further, and then forward in time, and we will be examining issues that may make you wonder "What on earth has this to do with today." But I can assure you, when we reach the end of our journey, you will see that everything we cover has a direct relevance to today and, in particular, to the war on terrorism.
THE HIDDEN AGENDA OF TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS
Lets start our time machine. We turn the dial to the year 1954 and, suddenly, we find ourselves in the plush offices of the Ford Foundation in New York. We see two men seated at a large, Mahogany desk, and they are talking. They cannot see or hear us. These men are Roland Gaither, who was the President of the Ford Foundation at that time, and Mr. Norman Dodd. Mr. Dodd was the newly appointed chief investigator of what was called the Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The Ford Foundation was one of them, so he was there as part of his Congressional responsibilities.
It was about 1972 that I happened to meet Mr. Dodd in Virginia. I had a television crew with me, because we were producing a documentary film and had some open time. I called Mr. Dodd and asked if he would be willing to make a statement before our cameras, and he said, "Of course." I’m glad we obtained the interview, because he was advanced in years, and it wasn’t long afterward that he passed away. We were very fortunate to capture his story in his own words. (For those who are interested in viewing his complete testimony on video, it is listed in our catalogue. It’s called "The Hidden Agenda" and it’s available in both video and audio formats. The full transcript can be downloaded free of charge from our web site, www.realityzone.com.)
So, back to our time machine. The year is 1954, and we hear Mr. Gaither say to Mr. Dodd, "Would you be interested in knowing what we do here at the Ford Foundation?" And, of course, Mr. Dodd says, "Yes! That’s exactly why I’m here. I would be very interested, sir." Then, without any prodding at all, Gaither says, "Mr. Dodd, we operate in response to directives, the substance of which is that we shall use our grant making power to alter life in the United States so that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union."
Dodd almost falls off of his chair when he hears that. Then he says to Gaither, "Well, sir, you can do anything you please with your grant making powers, but don’t you think you have an obligation to make a disclosure to the American people? You enjoy tax exemption, which is an indirect way of saying you are subsidized by the taxpayer, so, why don’t you tell the Congress and the American people what you just told me?" And Gaither replies, "We would never dream of doing such a thing."
A STRATEGY TO CONTROL THE TEACHING OF HISTORY
There is much more to be learned from this conversation, but our time is limited, so let’s move on. The question that logically arises is, "How would it be possible for people in these prestigious organizations to even dream that they could alter life in the United States so it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union?" What an absurd thought that would be! The answer, however, is not absurd at all. To bring this about, all that needs to be done is to alter the attitude of the American people to accept such a move. How could that be done?
The answer to this second question was provided by another powerful and prestigious tax-exempt foundation, the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace. When Dodd visited the President of that organization and began asking about their activities, the President said, "Mr. Dodd, you have a lot of questions. It would be very tedious and time consuming for us to answer those questions, so I have a counter proposal. Why don’t you send a member of your staff to our facilities, and we will open our minute books from the very first meeting of the Carnegie Fund, and your staff can go through them and copy whatever you find there. Then you will know everything we are doing."
Again, Mr. Dodd was totally amazed. He observed that the President was a young man at the Carnegie Fund and assumed he had never actually read the minutes himself. So he accepted without hesitation and sent a member of his staff to the Carnegie Endowment facilities. Her name was Mrs. Catherine Casey who was, by the way, hostile to the activity of the Congressional Committee. She was placed on the staff by political opponents of the Committee to be a watchdog and a damper on the operation. Her attitude was: "What could possibly be wrong with tax-exempt foundations? They do so much good." So that was the view of Mrs. Casey when she went to the boardroom of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. She took her Dictaphone machine (they used magnetic belts in those days) and recorded, word for word, many of the key passages from the minutes of this organization starting with the very first meeting. What she found in those minutes was so shocking, Mr. Dodd said she almost lost her mind, and she became very ineffective in her work after that.
Basically, this is what those minutes revealed: From the very beginning, the members of the board discussed how to alter life in the United States, how to change the attitudes of Americans to give up their cherished principles and concepts of government and be more receptive to what we will call the collectivist model of society. I will talk more about what the word collectivist means in a moment, but they used that word quite often. And they discussed this in a very scholarly fashion. After many months of deliberation, they came to the conclusion that, out all of the options available for altering the attitudes of people in the United States, there was only one that was really dependable. That option was war. In times of war, they reasoned, only then would people be willing to give up things they cherish in return for the desperate need and desire for security against a deadly enemy. And so the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace declared in its minutes that it must do whatever it can to manipulate the United States into war.
They also said there were other things needed, and these were their words: "We must control education in the United States." They realized that was a pretty big order, so they teamed up with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation to pool their financial resources to control education in America - in particular, to control the teaching of history. They assigned those areas of responsibility that involved issues relating to domestic affairs to the Rockefeller Foundation, and those issues related to international affairs were taken on as the responsibility of the Carnegie Endowment. Their first goal was to rewrite the history books, and they discussed how to do that at great length. They approached some of the more prominent historians of the time and presented to them the proposition that they rewrite history to favor the concept of collectivism, but they were turned down flat. Then they decided - and these are their own words, "We must create our own stable of historians."
They selected twenty candidates at the university level who were seeking doctorates in American History. Then they went to the Guggenheim Foundation and said, "If we provide the money, would you grant fellowships to candidates selected by us, who are of the right frame of mind, those who see the value of collectivism as we do? Would you grant them doctorates so we can then propel them into positions of prominence and leadership in the academic world and in professional historical associations?" And the answer was "Yes."
So they gathered a list of young men who were seeking their doctorate degrees. They interviewed them, analyzed their thinking processes, and chose the twenty they thought were best suited for their purpose. They sent them to London for a briefing. (In a moment I will explain why London is so significant.) At this meeting, they were told what would be expected if and when they win the doctorates they were seeking. They were told they would have to view history, write history, and teach history from the perspective that collectivism was a positive force in the world and was the wave of the future.
Now lets go back to the words of Mr. Dodd, himself. He said: "This group of twenty historians eventually formed the nucleus of the American Historical Association. Then toward the end of the 1920’s the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 [a huge amount of money in those days] for a study of history in a manner that points to what this country can look forward to in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is a summary of the contents of the other six. And the essence of the last volume is, the future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with characteristic American efficiency."
COLLECTIVISM VS INDIVIDUALISM
Now we must turn off our time machine for a moment and deal with this word collectivism. You are going to hear it a lot. Especially if you delve into the historical papers of the individuals and groups we are discussing, you will find them using the word over and over. Although most people have only a vague concept of what collectivism is, the advocates of collectivism have a very definite understanding of it, so let’s deal with that now.
In order to appreciate the essence of collectivism, we need to step backward and look at the larger picture encompassing the political ideologies that divide people in this age. You find those who claim they are conservatives, and they will debate wildly with those who think of themselves as liberals. Left wingers disagree with right wingers. You find people who say they are Socialists or Communists or Fascists or whatever words they choose to identify their point of view. But, when you ask them to explain what those words mean, very few can agree. For the most part, they are merely labels without clear or precise definitions.
Let’s put some meaning to them. I think that all of the great political issues, the ideological issues at least, can be divided into two viewpoints. All of the rest is fluff. Basically, a person is either a collectivist or an individualist. We are talking about collectivism vs. individualism. What do these words mean?
First of all I should tell you that, from my observation, collectivists and individualist, for the most part, are all good people. They want the best life possible for their families, for their countrymen, and for the world - for mankind. They all want peace, prosperity, and justice. They want freedom. Sometime they disagree over what the tradeoff should be for freedom; but, still, they all want the good things for their fellow man. Where they disagree is how to bring those things about.
THE DANGER OF GROUP SUPREMACY
The collectivist believes the group is the most important element of society; that all solutions to problems are better solved at the group level than at the individual level; and that, the larger the problem is, the larger the group should be to solve the problem. And so they believe in collective action. They believe in organizing group activities to provide for all of the advantages they want people to have. They want to protect people. They want to make sure they don’t suffer, that they are well clothed and fed, and that they are treated justly. The solution to all of these problems is a collective solution. "We shall do it through group action." The more complex the problem, the larger the group should be, until finally the most complex problems of all can be solved only by the largest groups of all.
The collectivist sees government as the solution, because government is the ultimate group, and so the collectivist mind can be easily recognized. It always has an affinity to government as the solver of problems. The individualist, by the way, is more skeptical. He tends to look at government as the creator of problems. But that’s another issue. We will get to the individualist in a moment. The collectivist sees government as the solver of problems; and, of course, the larger the unit of government, the better. Collectivist solutions gravitate from local government to state government to national government and finally to world government. If there is a really big problem, such as the environmental issue involving the whole planet, the collectivist is convinced that it cannot be solved except through the action of world government.
The collectivist believes that the group is more important than the individual and, if necessary, the individual must be sacrificed for the group. Sometimes that is expressed in terms of "the greater good for the greater number." It’s a very appealing concept.
The individualist on the other hand says, "Wait a minute. Group? What is group? That’s just a word. You cannot touch a group. You cannot see a group. All you can touch and see are individuals. They make up the group. But the real substance of the group is the individual within it. It’s like a forest. Forest doesn’t exist. It’s a word concept. There are only trees." So the individualist sees that, if you sacrifice the individual for the group, you have made a huge mistake. The individual is the essence of the group. He is the core of the group. The group has no claim to sacrifice its own essence.
Collectivists are often critics of religious and family values, because collectivism demands unquestioning obedience to the state. Since loyalty to family or religious codes often conflict with the concept of group supremacy, they cannot be tolerated in a collectivist system.
THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Collectivists and individualists both agree that human rights are important, but they differ drastically over what is the origin of those rights. There are only two possibilities in this debate. Either man’s rights are intrinsic to his being, or they are extrinsic; either he possesses them at birth or they are given to him afterward. In other words, they are either hardware or software. Individualists believe they are hardware. Collectivists believe they are software.
The view of individualism was expressed clearly in the United States Declaration of Independence, which said: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men." Nothing could be more clear than that. "Unalienable Rights" means they are the natural possession of each of us upon birth, not granted by the state. The purpose of government is, not to grant rights, but to secure them and protect them.
By contrast, all collectivist political systems embrace the view that rights are granted by the state. That includes the Nazis, Fascists, and Communists. It is also a tenet of the United Nations. Article Four of the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights says: "The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize that, in the enjoyment of those rights provided by the State … the State may subject such rights only to such limitations as are determined by law."
The reason this is important is that, if we agree that the state has the power to grant rights, then we must also agree it has the power to take them away. You cannot have one without the other. Notice the wording of the UN Covenant. After proclaiming that rights are provided by the state, it then says that those rights may be subject to limitations "as are determined by law." In other words, the collectivists at the UN presume to grant us our rights and, when they are ready to take them away, all they have to do is pass a law authorizing it.
Compare that with the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. It says Congress shall pass no law restricting the rights of freedom of speech, or religion, peaceful assembly, the right to bear arms, and so forth - not except as determined by law, but no law. What a difference there is between individualism and collectivism.
REPUBLICS VS DEMOCRACIES
We are dealing here with one of the reasons people make a distinction between Republics and Democracies. We have been taught to believe that a Democracy is the ideal form of government. Supposedly, that is what was created by the American Constitution. However, if you read the documents of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution, you find that they spoke very poorly of Democracy. They said in plain English that a Democracy was one of the worst possible forms of government. And so they created what they called a Republic. The bottom line is that the difference between a Democracy and a Republic is the difference between collectivism and individualism.
In a pure Democracy, the concept is that the majority shall rule. That’s the end of the discussion. You might say, "What’s wrong with that?" Well, there could be plenty wrong with that. What about a lynch mob? There is only one person with a dissenting vote, and he is the guy at the end of the rope.
Ah, wait a minute, you say. Maybe the majority should not always rule. How can we protect the individual from the group? Maybe the group could become dangerous. Perhaps we should put limits upon Democracy.
That is precisely what a Republic accomplishes. A Republic is simply a limited Democracy - a Democracy with limits on what the group can do, with limits on what the majority can do. Republics are characterized by written constitutions that say the government - even though it represents the majority - shall not do this; the government shall not do that; and it shall be prevented from doing that, also. We have individual liberties and rights that stand higher and are more important than the group. And so we begin to get a handle on the debate here, the issue, the cleavage between these two concepts: collectivism on the one hand, individualism on the other.
COERCION VS FREEDOM
We come now to the next element of this debate, which is how to bring about desirable group action. The collectivist says you have to force people. That’s why he has an affinity to government. Government is the embodiment of legalized force. You can always spot a collectivist because, when he confronts a problem, his first reaction is to say, "There ought to be a law." His attitude is that we must force people to do what we think they should do, because they are not as smart as we are - we collectivists. We’ve been to school. We’ve read books. We participate in discussion groups. We are smarter than most of those people out there. If we leave it up to them, they are going to make terrible mistakes. So, it is up to us. We are the privileged, fortunate ones. We are the ones who shall decide on behalf of society and we shall enforce our decisions by law so that no one has any choice. That we should rule in this fashion is our obligation to mankind.
By contrast, individualists say, "We also think we are right and others are wrong, but we don’t believe in forcing anyone to comply with our will because, if we grant that principle, then others, representing larger groups than our own, can compel us to act as they decree, and we will have lost our freedom.
The collectivist will say, "I think everyone should wear seatbelts. That just makes a lot of sense. People can be hurt if they don’t wear seatbelts. So, let’s pass a law and require everyone to wear them. If they don’t, we’ll put them in jail." The individualist says, "I think everyone should wear seatbelts. People can be hurt in automobile accidents if they don’t wear seat belts, but I don’t believe in forcing everyone to do so. I believe in convincing them with logic and persuasion, if I can, but I also believe in freedom-of-choice."
As an individualist, I am not opposed to collective action. Just because I believe in freedom of choice does not mean I have to move my piano alone. It just means that I renounce the right to compel someone to help me. Individualists seek cooperation based on voluntary action, not compulsion.
And so here we have a second distinction between the collectivist and the individualist. The collectivist believes in coercion. The individualist believes in freedom.
THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM
There is one more issue to cover before restarting out time machine, and it has to do with the political spectrum. We often hear about right-wingers versus left-wingers, but what do these terms really mean? For example, we are told that Communists and Socialists are at the extreme Left, and the Nazis and Fascists are on the extreme Right. Here we have two powerful ideological forces pitted against each other, and the impression is that, somehow, they are opposites. But, what is the difference? They are not opposites at all. They are the same. The insignias may be different, but when you analyze Communism and Nazism, they both embody the principles of Socialism. Communists make no bones about Socialism being their ideal, and the Nazi movement in Germany was actually called the National Socialist Party. Communists believe in international Socialism, whereas Nazis advocate national Socialism. Communists promote class hatred and class conflict to motivate the loyalty and blind obedience of their followers, whereas the Nazis use race conflict and race hatred to accomplish the same objective. Other than that, there is absolutely no difference between Communism and Nazism. They are both the epitome of collectivism, and yet we are told they are, supposedly, at opposite ends of the spectrum!
There’s only one thing that makes sense in constructing a political spectrum and that is to put zero government at one end of the line and 100% at the other. Now we have something we can comprehend. Those who believe in zero government are the anarchists, and those who believe in total government are the totalitarians. With that definition, we find that Communism and Nazism are together at the same end. They are both totalitarian concepts. Why? Because they are both based on the model of collectivism. Communism, Nazism, Fascism and Socialism all gravitate toward bigger and bigger government, because that is the logical extension of their common ideology. They cannot help becoming what they are. More government is needed to solve bigger problems, and bigger problems require more government. Once you get on the slippery slope of collectivism, once you accept that ideology, there is no place to stop until you reach all the way to the end of the scale, which is 100% government. Regardless of what name you give it, regardless of how you re-label it to make it seem new or different, collectivism is totalitarianism.
In truth, the straight-line concept of a political spectrum is somewhat misleading. It is really a circle. You can take that straight line with 100% government at one end and zero at the other, bend it around, and touch the ends at the top. Now it’s a circle because, under anarchy, where there is no government, you have absolute rule by those with the biggest fists and the most powerful weapons. So, you jump from zero government to totalitarianism in a flash. They meet at the top. We are really dealing with a circle, and the only logical place for us to be is somewhere in the middle. We need government, of course, but, the concept of what kind of government must be built on individualism, an ideology that pushes always toward that part of the spectrum that involves the least government necessary to make things work instead of collectivism, which always pushes toward the other end of the spectrum for the most amount of government to make things work.
JOHN RUSKIN PROMOTES COLLECTIVISM AT OXFORD
We are finally ready to reactivate out time machine. From the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we recall the curious words: "We must control education in America." Who is this "we? " Who are the people who are going to control education in America? To answer that question we must set the co-ordinates on our machine once again, and we are now moving further back in time to the year 1870. We find ourselves suddenly in England in an elegant classroom of Oxford University, and we are listing to a lecture by a brilliant intellectual, John Ruskin.
Ruskin was a Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford. He was a genius. At first I was prepared not to like him, because he was a total collectivist. I didn’t think I would like anything about him. But, when I got his books and started to read the notes from his lectures, I had to acknowledge his great talent. First of all he was an accomplished artist. He was an architect. He was a philosopher. About his only flaw was that he believed in collectivism. He preached it eloquently, and his students, coming from the wealthy class - the elite and the privileged from the finest areas of London - were very receptive to his message. He taught that those who had inherited the rich culture and the traditions of the British Empire had an obligation to rule the world and make sure that all the less fortunate and stupid people had proper direction. That was basically his message, but it was delivered in a very convincing and appealing manner.
Ruskin was not the originator of collectivism. He was merely riding the crest of an ideological tidal wave that was sweeping through the whole Western World at that time. It was appealing to the sons and daughters of the super wealthy who were growing up with guilt complexes because they had so much wealth and privilege in stark contrast to the world’s poor and starving masses.
In this milieu there were two powerful ideological movements coming to birth. One of them was Marxism, which offered the promise of defending and elevating these downtrodden masses. Wealthy young people felt in their hearts that this promise was worthy and noble. They wanted to do something to help these people, but they didn’t want to give up their own privileges. I will say this about John Ruskin, he actually did give of his own wealth to help the poor, but he was one of the rare ones. Most collectivists are hesitant about giving their own money. They prefer to have government be the solver of problems and to use tax revenues - other people’s money - to fund their projects. Collectivists recognize that someone has to run this governmental machine, and it might as well be them, especially since they are so well educated and wise. In this way, they can retain both their privilege and their wealth. They can now be in control of society without guilt. They can talk about what they are doing to lift up the downtrodden masses using the collectivist model. It was for these reasons that many of the wealthy idealists became Marxists and sought positions of influence in government.
