Conspiracies against a people have long maintained a powerful grin on the minds of individuals. Historian Bernard Bailyn, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Ideological Origins of The American Revolution makes it clear that the American colonists were convinced of an English conspiracy to subvert their liberty. After the American Revolution, similar concerns remained. In 1798, Professor John Robison published inventor James Watt and past secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, focused on the Order of Illuminati created by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria, Germany on May Day in the historic year 1776

Weishaupt, an intellectual (which is often a serious flaw in my view), was a revolutionary in an age noted for revolution. Seeking to overthrow the authority of religion and state, Weishaupt apparently believed that the perfectibility of humanity would then become possible.

Thomas Jefferson found these ideas generally in tune with the thrust of the era and expressed no alarm at what he interpreted as Weishaupt's confidence in the long term potential for political anarchy, i.e., the absence of coercive authority, be it religious or governmental. Jefferson further attributed the secret, conspiring nature of the Illuminati to the conditions of political oppression that characterized Germany at that time. Presumably, the readers of this journal will be as untroubled about Weishaupt at this point as Christians and statists are alarmed.

On the other hand, some see in Weishaupt a desire for his organization to rule in place of those traditional structures that he wanted to discard. Especially in light of history thought-provoking Weishaupt sought to terminate the existence of private property. While property ownership has employed by the coercive authority that Weishaupt allegedly disdained, utopian attempts to structure a just society without it have invariably collapsed.

I believe they always will. The right to use or cease using something (an essential part of ownership), be it formed matter or conceptual knowledge created by human intelligence, is an essential component of humanity's social vitality. The notion of collective ownership fails to provide such a system that defines the rights of usage. Either individual aggressiveness usurps the right to use, or an overriding, unchallengeable authority makes the final allocation. Both ideas imply slavery as there is no check on power. Thus Weishaupt's anarchism was essentially a communist vision.

Several authors have discerned an Illuminati presence in the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Gary Allen, author of the cult classic None Dare Call It Conspiracy and whose works reveal a highly rational mind, considered an Illuminati presence in Paris as unquestionable. The fantastic savagery and wanton destruction of the French Revolution alarmed even liberal minded individuals over the fact that the destruction of a corrupted system did not assure its replacement with something better. It certainly disclosed that power wielded by the collective without a check by religion, state or property rights was disastrous for the progress the Western Enlightenment had initiated.

The Illuminati demanded perpetual silence, unshaken loyalty and submission to the Order. While such attitudes were tactically helpful in the atmosphere that prevailed in Bavaria, they are concepts unlikely to stir the hearts and minds of free thinking individuals. Moreover, Weishaupt's own definition of the Order was revealing. It was to:

...unite, by way of common interest end by way of lasting bona, men from all parts of the globe, from all social classes and from all religions, despite the diversity of their opinions and passions to make them love this common interest end bona to the point where, together or alone, they act as one individual

Superficially, these ideas would appear noble. There are problems, however; substantial ones. Most obvious among them is that Weishaupt failed to identify this "interest" that was to unite all people in a collective whole. Whatever "interest" was to overcome all the differences in humans that Weishaupt himself noted had to be powerful and thus, one would assume, conspicuous. Like authoritarians in all ages, Weishaupt might have been disguising his desire to rule under the flag of an undefined collective good.

Furthermore, the notion that widely diverse peoples would act as one, even when alone, suggests either a mystical source of knowledge to guide this unified behavior or a form of mental programming to command it. Weishaupt's goal of collective behavior would seem to imply the eradication of the same diversity of human existence that he explicitly recognized. It is also intriguing that Weishaupt's notions of a unified planetary civilization would be circulating in Germany at about the same time that the mystical, state-worshiping philosophy of German Idealism was becoming ascendant — a viewpoint most notable in the ideas of George Hegel.

Of course, no conspiracy theory is complete without bankers, and the Rothschild banking family has often been included in the Illuminati conspiracy, although apparently only in twentieth-century studies of this organization. While a banker's Interest in maintaining and even increasing control is fairly obvious, the Illuminati seemingly began as a challenge to existing authority - and thus the participation of the Rothschilds would appear to be less plausible in the eighteenth century than in the twentieth.

How much of all this is truly evil and how much is rather standard utopian confusion is impossible to say. Had not the perfectibility of humanity remained as a rhetorical cover for the one-world authoritarians who inhabit the present, our interest in the Illuminati would end. For reasons the liberal-minded Jefferson clearly understood, it was suppressed by Bavarian authorities as soon as it came to their attention.

Whether the suppression of the Illuminati was permanent and whether Weishaupt's ideas were successfully planted in New England are still debated. Gary Allen did not believe that the Illuminati disappeared in Europe. Recognizing a philosophical affinity and tactical similarity between Weishaupt and Marx, he asserted that the League of Just Men, an extension of the Illuminati, hired Karl Marx to write the Communist Manifesto, whose ideas have so damaged the science of economics. Allen went on to note that the fifth plank of Marx's infamous work read: "Centralization of Credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly." A more accurate description of the Federal Reserve would be hard to imagine.

Marx's fifth plank became a reality in the United States within forty years of his death. The picture of conservative American bankers exerting mighty efforts to create a central bank (the Federal Reserve) along lines defined by Marx is both fascinating and thought-provoking. If the idea of international financiers bent on world domination using revolutionary Communism to further their ends seems counterproductive, consider the following quote by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West:

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

Certainly, Communism, wherever it has been applied has proven to be a very conservative, authoritarian affair. A close reading of its philosophical understructure reveals why. Furthermore, Marx's appeal to worldwide proletarian unity (and control) differed only rhetorically from Weishaupt's "together or alone, they act as one individual."

The American Connection
Whether or not the Illuminati was cultivated in the United States is also unclear. Since Weishaupt's Illuminati was parasitically attached to some Free Mason organizations, the Masons have taken some heat in the United States, especially in the 19th century. But most researchers agree that the Masons and the Illuminati are not the same thing. Either the Illuminati did not exist in America or its critics were landing only glancing blows. It is worth noting, however, that Gustavus Myers in his History of The Great American Fortunes reveals:

Under the surface, the Rothschilds long had a powerful influence in dictating American financial laws. The law records show that they were powers in the old Bank of the United States [abolished by Andrew Jackson].

This may or may not have been related to the 1835 assassination attempt on Jackson after he ordered government funds removed from the Bank of the United States.

Be that as it may, German Idealism, with its mystical metaphysics and its collectivist epistemology, unquestionably began to thrive in the United States. Its influence on Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson was openly admitted by the famous author. This influence spread. By the end of the 19th century, thousands of American students, many of whom later became distinguished leaders in the United States, were journeying to Germany to study there.

Historian Antony C. Sutton made note of the undeniably critical role education plays in acquiring control of a society. In his brief study, How the Order Controls Education, Sutton comprehends a tie between the collectivist roots of modern education (which Sutton places at Yale just before the Civil War) and the ideas of the Illuminati. While Sutton's historical documentation for this tie is somewhat weak, although not totally absent, the philosophical similarities between Weishaupt's worldwide "common interest" and the one world collectivism that has increasingly marred American education since the late nineteenth century is far more evident.

In fact, the philosophic similarities between the various secret societies is generally more impressive than the known physical connections between them. Whether these societies introduced collectivist philosophies or were merely a product of them is a large, unanswered question. This author considers it more likely that the philosophies produced the societies. To me, the education system's effort to manufacture dutiful human components servile to a collective social whole is more in accord with philosophical collectivism than with the machinations of secret societies.

I must admit, however, that watching American educrats pathetically clinging to what Sutton called the Look-Say reading method (today called the Whole Word method), despite its churning out irrational, scrambled-brained illiterates at an unprecedented rate, is symptomatic of a conspiracy to produce incapacitated human robots submissive to authority. I am forced to conclude that there comes a point when even deep intellectual confusion no longer remains a satisfactory explanation for repetitive failure. It seems unlikely to me that even a bureaucracy can be that stupid.

The Roundtable
Bringing our discussion of conspiracies toward the present, a society called the Roundtable was established in England during the final decade of the nineteenth century. Again, a direct documentary tie to earlier societies like Sutton's Order or Weishaupt's Illuminati is tenuous - after all, what good are secret societies if they leave a paperwork trail that is easily traced? But by now, the philosophy should be familiar - the spiel of a world gloriously united under an authority that bestows harmony, prosperity and even enlightened illumination.

Roundtable members believed that the British Empire was one of the highest achievements in all of history and set themselves to furthering the success of that same empire. Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley identified English noblesse oblige intellectual John Ruskin as the movement's founder. Ruskin's inaugural lecture at Oxford was so sensational that one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, the future gold and diamond tycoon, copied it out in longhand.

Rhodes' experience with Ruskin sent him on a lifelong mission. Receiving aid from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit (De Beers Consolidated Mines), Rhodes sought to have England control much of Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to "federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control." Dedicated to this purpose, Rhodes regularly overspent his $5 million yearly income and left part of his vast fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford.

With its large financial assets, The Roundtable was able to spread its influence far and wide. According to Quigley, it controlled many major periodicals, including the London Times. Its members also established and influenced numerous universities as well as other chairs of imperial affairs and international relations. They continually harped on the English failure associated with the American Revolution, holding it up as an example not to be repeated. Quigley noted that the Roundtable's "power and influence can hardly be exaggerated."

Whatever one thinks of the original Illuminati and the League of Just Men, it is beyond question that the Roundtable set its vast resources to the imperialistic task of controlling the world—and helped exhaust the British Empire as a result.

With the burgeoning power of the United States to contend with, it was only natural that it should be brought into the plans of the Roundtable. With the institutions of the United States increasingly affected by the collectivist nature of German philosophy and the country's own march into empire, the effort went smoothly. The expansionism of Theodore Roosevelt and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System (an event international bankers were keenly interested in) recreated political and institutional ties with England and Europe that had been at least partially sundered in 1776.

The Focus Moves to the United States
By the 1920's, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was established as an American offshoot of the Roundtable. There already were similar branches in Canada, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This furthered "international cooperation." During the 1920s, for example, coordination between the monetary policies of the United States and England was exceedingly close. So close, in fact, that the American currency was deliberately inflated to protect England from the damaging effects of its own inflation - a policy that played a major role in the crash of 1929. Resistance to this and other aspects of America's increasing, if subtle, involvement with Europe drove the anti-English and isolationist sentiment of the pre-World War II era in the United States.

Tying the American experience with conspiracies to the attitude of the League of Just Men, Antony Sutton also documented the remarkable flow of money and aid that went from Wall Street to the Soviet Union during the formative years of the Soviet Communist state in his book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. On the opening page, Sutton reprints a 1911 St. Louis Post-Dispatch cartoon by Robert Minor showing John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, John D. Ryan (National City Bank) and Morgan partner George W. Perkins shaking the hand of Karl Marx while Theodore Roosevelt looks on and is "Dee-Lighted," which is the caption of the cartoon. So even before the Czar fell, the usefulness of Marxist economics for established financiers seeking to maintain their control over the status quo was being utilized and publicly deprecated.

Like rock bands, where the same musicians constantly leave old groups to form new ones, there is a large overlapping between these various conspiracies. Many CFR members attend the more internationally oriented Bilderberger meetings (first publicly noticed in the 1950s). Until recently, the Bilderbergers had been even more discreet than usual since a major player, Prince Bernhard, was implicated in the complex, multinational, million-dollar bribe scandal involving Lockheed in 1 976. Bernhard's Dutch bank involvement with the CIA also saw the light of day soon after. There have also been rumors of Soviet involvement in these meetings.

Another international organization, The Trilateral Commission, was organized along similar lines with the additional intent to briny Japanese elements into the game (Trilateral refers to Europe, North America and Japan). An article discussing the Trilateral Commission was published in the March 30,1980 issue of the San Fernando Valley News. This article listed some well-known names of American leaders from across the political spectrum.

In June of this year (1996), a newspaper named the Spotlight threw considerable light on the May 30 to June 2, 1996 Bilderberger meeting in Toronto. According to the Spotlight the Bilderbergers' most significant problem is the growing populist unrest in the United States— although the "problem" is by no means absent in Europe. Recognizing that loyalty to the ideals and institutions upon which the American Republic was established would preclude the total authority sought by the United Nations on a wide range of issues, a speaker criticized ". . . stubborn Americans, who want to cling to every last shred of sovereignty... "

The Spotlight reported that "new 'scientific studies' will warn of impending world disasters" that require the authority of a "supranational" agency to address. Refugees fleeing farms for lack of "sustainable growth" will lead to famine in the cities

If reforms are to succeed," asserted another speaker, "we must convince the middle class [in the United States] that supporting new powers for the UN is a patriotic duty, to save his country from natural disasters... We must promote a 'Lincolnesque' view. . . the world cannot long endure half-poor and half rich...hunger in Africa and poverty in Russia are as important a problem for America and other industrial nations as highways and bridges.

Thus, in the ethical vacuum typical of collectivist thinking, the causes of poverty in Russia are unimportant and Americans who mortgaged their future during the Cold War should accept the burden of Marxism's complete moral bankruptcy. How well this will be accepted by a middle class increasingly concerned about falling into poverty remains to be seen.

Some notable American attendees were Lloyd Bentsen, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, William Perry, George Stephanopoulos, William F. Buckley, Jr.. and Norman Podhoretz—the final two conservatives were given responsibility for "suppressing populist and nationalist grass- roots rebellion in the United States." This would seem to be an unenviable task in a nation just beginning to realize the rate at which it is falling.

Given the inherent tendency of power and control to seek expansion, it would seem safe to assume that a path is currently being cleared for the inclusion of the Chinese economy into an international organization dedicated to control and profit for those who rule. The neo-Marxist structure of the long- suppressed Chinese economy requires only a little freedom to allow the creation of wealth necessary for the Order to begin its siphoning operations. The trick is not to let freedom get out of hand.

As a natural product of the desire to control the world, groups like the Roundtable, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission have/had a specific interest in transcending partisan debate and influencing all political elements in the country in which they are/were working. Over the years the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations reads like a list of who's who in American leadership circles, with both liberals and conservatives well-represented:

Colonel House (intimate advisor to Woodrow Wilson), Walter Lippman, John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, Christian Herter, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Alexander Haig, Bernard Baruch and the banking interests of Warburg and Morgan as well as the Rockefellers . . .

The list goes on and on, and the membership of similar organizations (like the Bilderbergers) sounds a similar bipartisan note. But I think the point is made; both sides of mainstream American ideologies are capable of adhering to the ideas spun out by the one-worlders.

Since believers in conspiracies believe that many Republicans and Democrats work for the same organizations, they are less confused than most Americans over the fact that there are no real differences between, say, Teddy Kennedy and the late Nelson Rockefeller or that modern politicians can so effortlessly change political parties. In a remarkable article published in the September 1970 issue of New York magazine entitled "Richard Nixon and the Great Socialist Revival," liberal author John Kenneth Galbraith approvingly detailed Nixon's "great new thrust into socialism." That the anti-Communist, cold-warrior Nixon would rule in a manner so comforting to neo-Keynesian Galbraith suggests either a complete philosophical ignorance on the part of Nixon or the existence of a conspiracy wide enough to include men like Nixon and Galbraith. Of course, both of the above is also an option.

It is evident that what one critic called "globaloney" has been going on for some time. At the risk of appearing somewhat trite, I would like to point out that the individuals who propagate planetary unity under the authority of a world government are human; they die and influence our lives no longer. It is a waste of time and energy to focus on personalities. Only the ideas of these conspirators are picked up by others and carried forward. It is these ideas that must be examined and, when necessary, challenged.

The Inevitable Failure of One World
Even as you read this, the vision of groups like the Roundtable, the Bilderbergers and the Council On Foreign Relations is fracturing along the fault line of its inherent contradiction. Their mirage of a world collectively whole under a suprastate that they will manage is fatally flawed by the degree of conformity that is essential to a collective whole. Since openly acknowledging this intrinsic need for conformity would mean exposing the imperialist impulse that the Roundtable admitted was at its core, modern one-world philosophy just pays lip service to human variety and social diversity. It thereby sows the seeds of its own destruction. For if diversity is to be rhetorically encouraged (and human nature and biological science suggests it must always exist), then the cultural homogeneity implied by the existence of a world government cannot prevail without a resort to authoritarian, life-suffocating methods.

It is significant that the "common interest" that Weishaupt posited stands directly opposed to the diversity he himself recognized. Both Antony Sutton's Order and Cecil Rhodes' Roundtable recognized that only by a subtle programming of the human mind could such imperial conformity be even theoretically possible. This explains the necessity for state control of education, media outlets and eventually the entire economy since the marketplace is the greatest educator of all.

To an extent, such .... is brainwashing too strong a word? .... can successfully limit the information available to the rational process of the human mind and thus manipulate the outcome. I personally have no doubt that this is being done. How else could Newsweek and Time magazines analyze the American economy and society every week for decades without stumbling across the concept of paper money as a destroyer of societies when the historical evidence is so clear? How can a "free" press continually exhibit such mindless confusion over events ranging from the Kennedy assassination and Watergate to the multi-generational collapse of the American dollar and Whitewater? And why was the word statism dropped from so many dictionaries when anyone who reads history even superficially knows that it never went out of usage? Questions such as these can go on endlessly.

There are gaps in our knowledge and we often have no conception of how large they truly are. Do the names Hanson, Boudinot, Mifflin, Lee, Gorham, St. Clair and Griffin mean anything to you? Probably not. Surprisingly enough, they are the first seven Presidents of the United States. Under the Articles of Confederation after the Revolutionary War the American presidency was an almost ceremonial position limited to a one year term. These men were not blanks in history, however. John "Swede" Hanson set up the Post Office, established the first presidential cabinet and Benjamin Franklin was his Secretary of State. Thus, seven men whom most Americans have never even heard of were president before the Constitution was written and George Washington was designated as the "first" President. Clearly, the information to which we are exposed is laundered.

However successful such techniques of limiting the development of knowledge by controlling the informational environment may seem in the short run, they are a recipe for failure in the long run The notion of world government and the psycho-intellectual manipulations necessary to make it palatable are thwarted by the nature of human beings. The survival of the human species requires that it be free to personally develop and biologically evolve.

The subjugation inherent in the idea of a New World Order denies the necessity for the social diversity that has always been the hallmark of an evolving species. Only by divesting the information assimilated by the human brain of all content that might be used for the formation of creative, and thus dangerous and destabilizing, concepts, could humanity be rendered harmless to a consciously directed world order. This very process of starving the human mind diminishes its ability to operate as Homo Sapiens' fundamental tool of survival. As the average level of human intelligence then declines, human creativity shrivels, social cooperation degrades and physical starvation grows, the death rate rises, wealth formation (both material and intellectual) slows or even stops and the civilization being plundered stagnates. In this manner, the rewards for those in control steadily lessen; even the crude authority-based social structures necessary for an elitist despotism disintegrate as faith in the system fails. Before long, the proles no longer love Big Brother and the social order collapses.

Feeland Freeland is a life long student of American history. He is a free lance writer who lives in Mammoth Lakes, California where he and his wife home school their two daughters.

References

Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution , see especially Chapter 4, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1977.