Writing on behalf of Andie Nachgeborenen, jks asks: Michael Perkman said that you would be a good person to ask about Yale's Skull & Bones -- did you have a recent post or some information on this? Thanks, jks
First of all, start with a google search for skull and bones. Keep in mind that there is a lot of junk on the net and keep in mind that there are many rightists, Christians, professed "anti-occultists" etc with their own agenda, every bit as elitist, racist, sexist, misogynistic, anti-Semtitic and ultra-capitalist as Skull and Bones but who profess to be anti-S and B. I would suggest starting with Alexandra Robbins' "Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Paths of Power", Little Brown, N.Y. 2003 as she was the first--and only--to actually interview disaffected Bonesmen and Boneswomen (over 100) and her scholarship is solid, non-sensational, non-salacious and measured. See www.secretsofthetomb.com.I would also recommend some of the work of Ron Rosenbaum who was the first, along with others, to actually tape record and videotape with infrared cameras, part of a S and B initiation rite which shows how sick, twisted, occultist and even satanic these creatures are. http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4136 I would also recommend America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones by Anthony Sutton. Now you will hear some screams and cries over the name of Anthony Sutton. He is often quoted by the right-wingers who have their own thing about Bones, the companies that publish Sutton are generally right-wing, and Sutton himself came out of a background with the infamous Hoover Institution at Stanford and doing CIA estimates of Soviet intentions, technological development and capabilities. What is interesting however, is that Sutton was tossed by the right-wing and CIA for refusing to ratify their own conclusions with respect to Soviet capabilities--they wanted overestimates to justify and get funding for the continuing arms race against the Soviets--in his three-volume Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. Many who summarily dismiss his work have never read any of his stuff. He also wrote on "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution" (the major thesis of which was that the Bolshevik Revolution was partly financed by Wall Street and aided by Western technology transfers)and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (the same thesis with respect to the rise of Hitler). I quarrel with many of his inferences and conclusions from the primary source data he reproduces, but the primary source data itself is invaluable and Sutton was fluent in the languages necessary to acquire and translate them. Sutton also did work on the Bohemian Grove and the British "The Group" or "US", founded at Oxford and the British version of S and B without some of the Masonic and Illuminati occultism. He also documents, throughly, the role of S and B in setting up the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Philosophical Associaton, the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and influences of John Dewey in American education. Sutton's work is primarily useful for the orginal and primary source documents, artifacts and letters from inside S and B as well as from key Bonesmen in key positions in the U.S. Government, business, academia and media. Sutton was one of the first to fully document with primary source materials, in the original languages, the role of Wall Street, and Bonesmen Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker in the financing of Hitler from 1924 onward and the selling of Nazi securities AFTER Pearl Harbor (work that thoroughly pissed the right-wing off and was later confirmed--and an inspiration for--similar work by Charles Higham in "Trading With the Enemy" and by "The Secret War Against the Jews" by John Loftus and Mark Aarons. I would also recommend "Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society.", Edited by Kris Milligan, Trine Day Press, 2003. This work has a compendium of articles from diverse sources but is worth going through. Some of the work is from known LaRouchite sympathizers Anton Chaitkin and Webster Griffin Tarpley from their "Unauthorized Biography of George Bush" (available online in toto) and I would again urge reading their stuff for the primary source materials, sources, etc. Again, many of their facts are quite correct and their scholarship through primary sources impressive, but some of their conclusions--and certainly their affiliations--need to be regarded with suspicion. I would also urge a reading of "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race." by Edwin Black, Four Walls Eight Windows Press, N.Y. 2004 which documents thoroughly, the role of key Bonesmen and S and B in the "eugenics movement" in the U.S. and Britain that directly inspired and directed the sterilization laws against minorities in 27 U.S. states and that directly inspired the "race laws" of the Nazis from 1933 onward. The role of S and B in the "First International Eugenics Conference" London, 1912, the Second in New York City in 1921 and the Third also at the infamous American Museum of Natural History (the center of the eugenics movement) in 1932 that produced directly the leading concepts and "theoreticians" that produced the first Nazi "race laws" in 1933 is well documented. Finally, why bother? Is this not a potential diversion from the real stuff--the capitalist system itself and its own inner and defining institutions, power structures, imperatives of accumulation/expanded reproduction, "logic", etc and likely derivative--and very barbaric--dynamics and trajectories--regardless of which genocidal maniacs are in power? Yes, this is a real danger. It is very easy to get caught up in conspiracy theories, nuances of who is tied-in with whom, salacious details about sick and twisted rituals, intricate connections between Masonics, Illuminati, Bilderbergers, CFR, Trilateralists, the Italian P-2 Lodge, the Bohemian Grove, the Pilgrim Society, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Union Theological Seminary, the N.Y. Riverside Church,etc; this can become especially troublesome when the right wingers are talking about some of the same things and organizations but for entirely different purposes and agenda. But because the right-wingers have their own thing about S and B for their own reasons, is no reason to ignore this organization. This particular organization, a kind of "Preppy KKK",is clearly the most powerful, influencial, ruthless, connected, vicious and dangerous of any of the secret societies that I know of--past or present. Just the fact that they have produced three U.S. presidents, a host of supreme court justices, key U.S. Senators and Congressmen and that we are about to see two bonesmen go face to face for the presidency while no one in the press or even their opponents will discuss S and B makes them worthy of being studied carefully. Plus, I have found, as I just did while doing some "mass work" at the Democratic caucuses today, is that when some basic facts about S and B are mentioned and grasped, heads turn and people from diverse perspectives want to know more which leads me right into how capitalism was/is established, run and developed by and for these types of elites and elite rule at the expense not only of the many, and at the expense of many lives, but even at the expense of human survival itself. Another reason why analysis of this organization and its intentions and capabilities is necessary is that they are in a position--and clearly intend--to accelerate the development of full-blown fascism in the U.S. in ways and at paces that few other forces could dream of at least at this stage of U.S.history; as ol Chairman Mao noted: Strategically despise the enemy, but tactically take him seriously." If we keep on with rehashing old debates, jargon-laden formulaics, quote-mongering from the "classics", hero worship, blind appeals to authority in lieu of concrete evidence, cherry picking sources and data, refusing to even examine certain sources because of their ideological "pedigree", keeping detached from real conditions and struggles of real peoples, a-piori theorizing and hypothetico-deductivism from asserted "axioms", speaking without any concrete investigations of that about which we are speaking and writing, we risk not only irrelevance and the message not being heard and grasped on a mass level, we also risk doing the enemy's work for him. Dachau was built in March of 1933 six weeks after Hitler had taken the Chancellorship and well before he had come close to fully taking and consolidating state power. Among the first victims, were communists, social democrats, anarchists, trade unionists, righteous "gentiles", some Zionists, and others, who had all contributed in their own ways to sabotaging the formation of an effective "United Front Against Fascism" that Hitler himself said was the only hope of stopping him and his kind by staying within their own ideological niches, attacking those outside their niches as not pure enough ideologically, dismissing Hitler and his forces as not uniquely dangerous or different from other bourgeois forces, engaging in sterile debates and polemics, remaining detached from the intended victims of the nazis and by not studying and taking Hitler and his forces seriously when they could/should have been. Jim C.
