by Stanley Ezrol & Jeffrey Steinberg
2004-06-25
Executive Intelligence Review
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"When you leave here, you're not only going to know the value of Jesus. You're going to know the people who rule the world."
-- The CCF and the God of Thunder Cult, by Stanley Ezrol & Jeffrey Steinberg
The Mind Possessed
In 1974, the well-known British psychiatrist, Dr. William Sargant, published a book, The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism and Faith Healing. The book was a sequel to his 1957 study, The Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing, the earlier book being a how-to-do-it manual for producing a "cultural paradigm shift" towards an existentialist, irrationalist dark age society, which was precisely the agenda of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).
In the 1957 study, Sargant had written:
"Various types of belief can be implanted in many people, after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of 'herd instinct,' and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility."
Dr. Sargant was a prominent British Tavistock Institute psychiatrist, who spent two decades, beginning in the mid-1950s, working in the Congress for Cultural Freedom-linked Cybernetics Group/MK-Ultra project on the use of psychedelic drugs and other forms of brainwashing for mass coercion.
The traumatic events of the 1960s -- from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis near-eruption of global thermonuclear holocaust; to the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the subsequent flagrant coverup; to the later assassinations of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy; to the urban race riots, and the mass carnage of the American war in Southeast Asia -- transformed the post-World War II Baby Boomer generation from an optimistic, future-oriented generation, into a collection of irrationalist, babbling counterculturalists and drug abusers, in total denial of reality, and living from one sensuous experience to the next.
When the dust finally settled on the 1960s, the Baby Boomers emerged with a new set of wildly irrational axiomatic beliefs, typified by the mass appeal of radical environmentalism, and the even more widespread belief in consumerism and the "magic of the global market."
Such ideas would have been shunned but a decade earlier, when America was still a production-oriented society. But that was before the great "shock traumas" of the 1962-71 period.
American Dionysians
In preparation for the writing of The Mind Possessed, Dr. Sargant and his team had conducted exhaustive field research, profiling modern-day primitive religious cults, including a wide range of irrationalist, nominally Christian, denominations that particularly proliferated in the most backward rural areas of the American Deep South. This was the America of Elmer Gantry, of "barking dog" convulsions and circus-tent revival meetings.
The Sargant book drew the parallel between such primitive people under the influence of witch doctors, fundamentalist preachers and pagan gods, and the victims of the 1960s drug/rock/sex counterculture. Describing the historical accounts of the celebrations of the ancient Greek pagan god Dionysus, Dr. Sargant wrote:
"Many of the other dancers approached very near trance, and showed states of increased suggestibility at the end of a long and intensive period of repetitive and monotonous dancing. They looked very much like fans of the Beatles or other 'pop groups' after a long session of dancing."
Indeed, a concluding chapter of The Mind Possessed had profiled the newest form of fundamentalist religious irrationalism, "Beatlemania."
One of the clear lessons to come out of the Sargant studies, and other similar profiling work by such Cybernetics Group/CCF players as Dr. Margaret Mead and her husband, LSD-experimenter Dr. Gregory Bateson, was that the most efficient means of promoting irrationalist cults was to exploit existing movements and subcultures.
In the case of the United States, the British "Liberal Imperialist" mind-benders and their "American Tory" cohorts had a three-century track record of consciously promoting such irrationalist movements, to draw upon. Thus, one of the major forms of cultural warfare, directed against the republican tradition of the American Founding Fathers, through the British Fabian Society and its later Congress for Cultural Freedom spawn, was the revival and promotion of the "Great Awakening" and related forms of subversion, including, most prominently, the "Lost Cause" ideology of the pro-British, feudalist Confederacy whose credo, taken from John Locke, was: "Life, Liberty, Property." A medievalist Catholic version of the same credo, promulgated by British Fabians G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, was later translated into "Tradition, Family, Property."
Beginning early in the 20th century, in tandem with a U.S.A. top-down revival of the racist Ku Klux Klan sponsored directly out of Hollywood with enthusiastic support from the Woodrow Wilson White House, the British Fabian Society promoted a Confederate revival, aimed not so much at secession, as at the subversion of the historical American commitment to the Leibnizian "pursuit of happiness" and the U.S. Constitution's Preamble's mandate to promote the General Welfare. Major players in this Confederate revival would later assume leading roles in the Congress for Cultural Freedom subversion.
The Great Awakening: The 'God Who Despises Man' (1730s)
During the colonial period, a student of Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, the notorious Jonathan Edwards, backed by the land-owning "River Gods" of the Connecticut Valley, became the chief philosophical opponent of Leibniz's Massachusetts Bay Colony leadership, led by Increase and Cotton Mather.
In his mass revival meetings of the 1737-41 "Great Awakening," Edwards conjured up a kind of monster God, and ordered those assembled to join and obey. Otherwise, he told the crowd,
"[God] will not only hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets."
Edwards ranted that not only would individual men be wantonly dropped into the fiery pit of Hell or trodden underfoot, but that God had capriciously elevated Christian Europe, while consigning Jews, whom he had previously favored, Africans, the "savages" of North America, and other whole nations and peoples to the Devil.
Edwards married his daughter to Aaron Burr, the president of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. Upon the death of his son-in-law, Edwards himself was appointed the third president of the College. His grandson, Aaron Burr, Jr., was to become... the most vile traitor in our nation's history: our second Vice President; the assassin of the architect of our economic system, Alexander Hamilton; a secessionist plotter; and a founder of what became known as Chase Manhattan Bank and the New York Democratic Party.
After the Mathers' successor, Benjamin Franklin, led the nation through a revolutionary war, and the adoption of our Constitution, fanatical cults of the Edwards variety fomented the insanity which led to Civil War. As Lincoln referenced the story in his second inaugural address, terrorists of the John Brown type claimed God's authority in hacking farmers' families to death to oppose slavery, and equally fanatical groups claimed Biblical authority to maintain slavery.
Following President Abraham Lincoln's defeat of the British-instigated Southern secessionist revolt [1860s], the United States emerged as the most powerful agro-industrial nation on Earth. No longer was it possible for Britain to defeat the former North American colonies militarily. The alternative path was long-term cultural subversion.
The primary institution through which the new British strategy was prosecuted was the Fabian Society, which operated in conjunction with Cecil Rhodes' "Round Tables" and other institutions. The Fabian Society, shortly after its founding in the late 19th Century, formed the "liberal imperial" right-wing of the British Labour Party, on the model of Lord Shelburne's 18th-Century "utilitarian" Whigs. The Tony Blair "New Labour" neoconservative apparatus of today is a Fabian Society dominated continuation of the earlier efforts. Hence, Blair's perfect-fit alliance with the Dick Cheney-led American neoconservative wanna-be imperialists.
Varieties of Irrational Perversion (late 1800s)
In the United States Southern and Border states, survivors of the Confederacy, led by former Confederate Generals Albert Pike, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and others, organized the Ku Klux Klan, and a broader "Lost Cause" movement, to defend an agrarian, no-brains-required lifestyle.
During the long reign of Queen Victoria and her son Prince Edward Albert (later King Edward VII), American collaborators of the Fabian circles, typified by William James (1842-1910), developed intimate relations with British Fabian institutions including the "Cambridge Apostles", the Royal Colonial Institute and its associated Scottish Rite Freemasonic Lodge (now the Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs), the Society for Psychical Research, the H.G. Wells-allied New Republic magazine, and others.
As the founding chairman of Harvard University's Psychology Department, James helped launch a new dimension of religious insanity, beyond the earlier episodic "Great Awakenings." In a famous series of lectures at Edinburgh University, published under the title Varieties of Religious Experience, he proposed that Edwards' type of terror-induced "religious experience" be enhanced with drugs. "Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration," he argued, were necessary for creative thought, including a sense of the spiritual. He pointed out that drunkenness has been traditionally the best way to "get religion," but added the suggestion that nitrous oxide, ether, and other drugs ought also to be used.
In these lectures, James also promoted the British oligarchy-sponsored occultist Theosophical movement of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, and other strange religions which had been promoted to prominence after the Civil War.
The Fugitives: The Fabian Society Joins the Klan (1920s)
In 1917, Walter L. Fleming was appointed dean of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. During the preceding years, the college, once Southern Methodist Church-sponsored, had been taken over by a consortium of Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Wall Street financier interests. Vanderbilt, under Fleming, would provide the launching pad for the Fugitives, a literary mafia that would promote a revival of Confederate ideology and wage cultural war against the American System paradigm of scientific and technological progress and republican statecraft. Beginning in the 1920s, the Fugitives published a literary magazine of the same name.
Fleming's most famous work had been his 1905 history of the original post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan, which he prepared in consultation with many of the surviving "Tennessee Templars" who had led that organization. Fleming, along with other political, cultural, and spiritual leaders, had been instrumental in the 1915 re-launching of the Klan, which was promoted through the mass circulation of Hollywood's first full-length feature film, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, beginning with highly publicized screenings at President Woodrow Wilson's White House, and at the Supreme Court.
The Fugitive's high priest was a Rosicrucian mystic, Sidney Mttron Hirsch. Its temporal leader, John Crowe Ransom, had just returned from his Rhodes Scholarship studies at Oxford University. Ransom was well known, at least by his family connections, to Dean Fleming, because his great uncle, Tennessee Templar and Ku Klux Klan founder James R. Crowe, had been Fleming's chief source on Klan history. In fact, the entire Crowe family were KKK, and Ransom cherished his childhood memories of mama Ella Crowe, and the other Crowe women, sitting around the family hearth, sewing sheets together for the rallies.
This was not an aberration. The core of the Fugitive circle, and their later literary and political collaborators, were descended from Tennessee Templars, officers of Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate Army "Critter Company." The small Fugitive circle, in addition to Ransom, included five others: William Yandell Elliott, Bill Frierson, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks. All but Tate were also to be Rhodes Scholars. And Warren, Brooks, and Tate, along with Ransom's younger students, John "Jack" Thompson, Robbie Macauley, and Robert Lowell, were all to play leading roles in the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The secret society of Cecil Rhodes is mentioned in the first five of his seven wills. In the fifth it was supplemented by the idea of an educational institution with scholarships, whose alumni would be bound together by common ideals — Rhodes's ideals. In the sixth and seventh wills the secret society was not mentioned, and the scholarships monopolized the estate. But Rhodes still had the same ideals and still believed that they could be carried out best by a secret society of men devoted to a common cause. The scholarships were merely a facade to conceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which the members of the secret society could carry out his purpose. This purpose, as expressed in the first will (1877), was:"The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, . . . the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire, the consolidation of the whole Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity."
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
At the time Ransom's Fugitive circle was formed, the main Fabian Society publication was a journal called The New Age, which was financed by the Fabian playwright, and promoter of Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw and published by a Theosophist, Alfred Richard Orage, who later became a disciple of the Russian mystic, Georg Gurdjieff. In The New Age, the works of Fabians Shaw, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, appeared alongside those of the leading Satanist of the 20th Century, the self-proclaimed "Great Beast", Aleister Crowley, and assorted other pornographers and mystics like William Butler Yeats, future Fascist spy Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence.
Chesterton and Belloc, though associated with the Fabian Society early in the 20th Century, were to become the leaders, along with Maurice Baring, of a Synarchist, pro-Spanish Inquisition, pro-Roman Empire, pro-Fascist Catholic grouping known as the Distributists. Fellow New Ager (and later Nobel Prize winner and major figure in CCF operations) T.S. Eliot, was to ally with them in this effort, as were Ransom and the Fugitives.
During the First World War, Chesterton, Wells, and others of the New Age crowd worked for Wellington House, Britain's propaganda unit under Charles Masterman, which was taken over by Lord Beaverbrook [aka Max Aitken] in 1917.
The alliance between the New Age crowd and the Fugitives was initially forged by William Yandell Elliott. During his Rhodes Scholarship term, 1922-24, at Oxford's Balliol College, he came under the influence of leading Round Table and Fabian Society figure, A.D. Lindsay. Elliott's subsequent professional career at Harvard's Government Department, and in various Congressional and Executive positions in Washington, centered on the idea that the United States Constitution should be scrapped, and the nation reorganized as a section of a "New British Empire," an idea derived from Lindsay's Round Table program.
At Oxford, Elliott had consorted with the occultist literary figures of The New Age. He was part of a late-night drinking circle including Aleister Crowley's one-time lodge brother, the Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, and long-time Fugitive intimate Robert Graves. Future CCF operative Graves is known today for his adoring history of the Roman Empire, I Claudius and his promotion of the cult of the White Goddess.
The God of Thunder (1930s)
In 1928, Fugitive and later CCF leader Allen Tate, began a two-year Guggenheim Fellowship term, which took him to London and Paris, where he worked on a biography of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. There, he became intimate with a most curious gentleman, Ford Madox Ford.
Ford had been born into a family of leaders of John Ruskin's pro-Medieval Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and had become a Fabian Society ally of H.G. Wells. Between 1908, when he was made editor of the English Review, and his death in 1939, he served as a manager and facilitator of the trans-Atlantic literary establishment. His duties included serving as unofficial Paris host to the expatriate American and British authors there, editing Transatlantic Review for them in the '20s, and serving as the European representative of the Fugitives. Significantly, Ford was responsible for forging ties between Tate and the other Fugitives, and the Distributists.
In between visits to the hashish-scented salon of later CCF associates Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, where he hobnobbed with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nelson Rockefeller's later publicist John Peale Bishop, and others, Tate coordinated the launching of a new political movement, the "Nashville Agrarians", under the leadership of Ransom, himself, and the other Fugitives. Eight years after Mussolini's March on Rome, the Agrarians promoted an American brand of Fascism, ideologically based on a nostalgic return to the culture of the Confederacy, and an embrace of the Fundamentalist religious movements, which had been simmering for decades, but catapulted to public prominence by the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
The Nashville Agrarians (1930s)
The Agrarian movement was launched with the publication of two books in 1930, and one in 1931. The first was a formal symposium prefaced by a joint manifesto, titled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners -- the Fugitives plus a few additional allies. This was wildly publicized nationally and internationally, and became the subject for mass radio broadcast debates. Its companion, John Crowe Ransom's God Without Thunder, was his bestial religious manifesto of the movement.
The third in the series, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company, by Oxford-trained scholar Andrew Nelson Lytle, who alternated with Allen Tate in editing the later CCF-funded Episcopal literary magazine, Sewanee Review, was an unabashed homage to Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, which lied that Europeans had come to America, not for freedom from European oppression and religious warfare, but out of "nostalgia for feudalism," of which he declared that Forrest's Ku Klux Klan was the highest expression.
I'll Take my Stand was an anti-American, anti-industrial, pro-Confederate, pro-slavery, environmentalist tract. One of its authors, John Gould Fletcher, was associated with The New Age's Orage, and had been since 1924 an enthusiastic promoter of Mussolini's "New Caesarism." The Agrarians' joint manifesto attested, "All tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way.... Agrarian versus Industrial."
Ransom added,
"In most societies man has adapted himself to the environment with plenty of intelligence to secure easily his material necessities from the graceful bounty of nature. And then, ordinarily, he concludes a truce with nature.... But the latter-day societies have been seized -- none quite so violently as our American one -- with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.
"This is simply to say that Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine ... is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace...."
He went on to explain:
"Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice.... Industrialism is an insidious spirit, full of false promises and generally fatal to establishments. The attitude that needs artificial respiration is the attitude of resistance on the part of the natives to the salesmen of industrialism. It will be fiercest and most effective if industrialism is represented to the Southern people as -- what it undoubtedly is for the most part -- a foreign invasion of Southern soil, which is capable of doing more devastation than was wrought when Sherman marched to the sea."
The concluding statement of the Agrarian manifesto was by Stark Young, then the best-known of the group. Young had not been associated with Fugitive magazine, but he was a Mississippi gentleman, a notorious homosexual, and the son of one of Forrest's Critter Company. He was then 18 years into what was to be a lifelong friendship with H.G. Wells' student and collaborator, the top British cultural warrior, and later head of UNESCO, Julian Huxley. During the First World War, Young had taught at the University of Texas, where he became intimate with the circles of Woodrow Wilson's controller, Colonel Edward M. House, and, after his academic career was ended by the revelation of his sexual preference, he had joined the editorial board of the New Republic.
In his essay, Young bluntly promoted the Confederacy:
"There was a Southern civilization whose course was halted with those conventions of 1867 by which the negro suffrage in the South -- not in the North -- was planned, and the pillaging began. At the outset we must make it clear that in talking of Southern characteristics we are talking largely of a certain life in the old South, a life founded on land and the ownership of slaves.
The aristocratic implied with us a certain long responsibility for others; a habit of domination; a certain arbitrariness; certain ideas of personal honor, with varying degrees of ethics, amour propre ('self-love'), and the fantastic. And it implied the possession of no little leisure. Whether that was a good system or not is debatable. I myself think it ... better than a society of bankers and bankers' clerks, department-store communities, manufacturers and their henchmen and their semi-slaves, and miserable little middle-class cities.... Good system or not, from this Southern conception of aristocracy, certain ideas arose."
In God Without Thunder, Ransom issued a call to organize an inter-denominational fundamentalist super-cult, along the lines of what would shortly be launched as the Fellowship, and later as the Promise Keepers.
"We wanted a God who wouldn't hurt us; who would let us understand him; who would agree to scrap all the wicked thunderbolts in his armament," he complained, "And this is just the God that has developed popularly out of the Christ of the New Testament: the embodiment mostly of the principle of social benevolence and of physical welfare.... It is the religion proposed by the scientific party."
It is this, he said, which led to "original sin," which he described as "strife between the animal species, when man began to enforce the fact of his superiority by militant aggression." He attacked the "race" of Israel, for its commitment to "cities and industrialism" and its "scorn of nature and the pastoral and agrarian life." His ire, was, however, soon directed away from Israel, and toward "Americanism," charging, "Science as a cult is something of an Americanism." In this, he attacked Franklin's student, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as the "prophet of the new God," who talks about "the triumphs of their science."
The horrible "critical moment" he identified, when "Occidentalism emerged ... to glorify the rational principle and deny the irrational principle," thereby leading to "Western empire," "Western science," and "Western business," was "the moment when the Roman Church sanctioned the doctrine of Filioque." Ransom repudiated the central doctrine of the Christian faith, in favor of an irrational God, unintelligible to man.
After dismissing the possibility that all men will unite under a single Thunder Cult -- either a new religion, or one of the existing ones hijacked for this purpose -- Ransom concludes with the following appeal, which echoes in many fundamentalist religious denominations today:
"With whatever religious institution a modern man may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards orthodoxy.
"Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no Principle as a substitute.
"Let him restore to God the thunderer. Let him resist the usurpation of the Godhead by the soft modern version of the Christ, and try to keep the Christ for what he professed to be: the Demigod who came to do honor to the God."
What the CCF recruiters liked about Ransom was his insistence that the purpose of poetry and all art was to re-direct any impulse toward this human quality back to the appetites which man shares with the beasts. In his 1938 book of literary criticism, The World's Body, he wrote,
"We have elected to know the world through science, but science is only the cognitive department of our animal life.... What we cannot know constitutionally as scientists is the world which is made up of whole and indefeasible objects, and this is the world which poetry recovers for us.
"The aesthetic moment appears as a curious moment of suspension: between the Platonism in us, which is militant, always sciencing and devouring.... Science gratifies a rational practical impulse and exhibits the minimum of perception. Art gratifies a perceptual impulse and exhibits the minimum of reason."
He was even more direct in a 1926 letter to his life-long friend, CCF leader Allen Tate:
"Biologically man is peculiar in that he must record and use his successive experiences; the beasts are not under this necessity; with them the experience is an end in itself, and takes care of itself."
Decades later, Fugitive William Yandell Elliott, the trainer of Drs. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel Huntington, amongst others, was even more direct. In a discussion including Tate and Fugitive Andrew Nelson Lytle, at his 1963 Harvard retirement conference, Elliott explained why he had always wanted the Fugitives to write epic poetry and create new myths. "Some uses of myths and symbols," he said, "are employed to condition people as you train animals, as you train a dog" (Elliott Archives, Hoover Institution, Box 1). In the same period, he was attempting to rouse military leaders against the Kennedy Administration, saying that although the leaders he needed had to be "tough", "If they are bred properly they are gentle, just like a good race horse, or a good game cock, or a good dog" (Box 63).
A flavor of Ransom's religious view is provided by his friend Andrew Nelson Lytle's remark, "Prophets do not come from cities.... They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice."
Joining the Synarchists (1930s)
On launching their movement, the Agrarians entered into a formal, pro-Fascist alliance with the Chesterton-Belloc New Age Distributist movement, and an implicit alliance, through William Yandell Elliott, with the Round Tables, whose ideas he promoted from his new position at Harvard's School of Government with a series of books including The New British Empire, and The Need for Constitutional Reform.
Stark Young was immediately invited to tour Italy, with stipend, by Count Volpi di Misurata, the Venetian oligarch who served as the Synarchist controller of Italy's Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. During what he told friends was his "mission to Italy," he met Il Duce and the other Fascist leadership, received a knighthood (the Order of the Crown of Italy), and sent back propaganda, "Notes on Fascism in Italy Today," to the Wellesian New Republic.
The alliance of Agrarian and Distributist groups was managed by Allen Tate; Chesterton's leading American disciple, Herbert Agar; and Seward Collins, a follower of sex psychologist and free-love propagandist Havelock Ellis. Collins wished to turn the Bookman quarterly, which he had purchased, into a Fascist propaganda outlet, and he brought on Tate and Agar as co-editors for this purpose. Between 1932 and 1937, the newly named American Review became what Collins called a forum for "Revolutionary Conservatives," including Ransom, Tate, Brooks, Warren, and the other Agrarians, as well as Agar, Belloc, and the Distributists, to provide a "sympathetic exposition ... of Fascist economics."
The Agrarian-Distributist alliance culminated with the 1936 publication of Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence, edited by Tate and Agar, and including essays by Belloc, Warren, Ransom, Brooks, and others, including Distributist Douglas Jerrold, whom Belloc identified as Francisco Franco's leading publicist. Jerrold wrote in defense of the military conquests by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Agrarian Donald Davidson wrote in support of Elliott's The Need for Constitutional Reform, which advocated replacing the American Constitutional Presidency with a parliamentary system, under the control of a permanent bureaucracy.
The Churchill Shift and "The City of Man" (1940s)
When, as the 1930s drew to a close and many British Synarchists, notably Winston Churchill, decided that they had to stop Hitler, the Anglophile Agrarians and some of the Distributists joined them.
This support for the war, however, came with terms. The terms were set forth in a 1940 joint manifesto titled The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy, which, after France had surrendered and Italy had entered the war, urged the United States to join Churchill's Britain in the fight, but only for the purpose of establishing a global Empire, under a single "Thunder" cult, renamed the "Religion of Democracy".
The effort was coordinated by Bertrand Russell's top American agent and later CCF collaborator, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins. The Executive Committee included Elliott and Agar. Other signers were:
* Thomas Mann and his son-in-law, G.A. Borgese. The German emigre novelist and the Italian refugee were part of a tightly knit circle including Hutchins; Agnes [Meyer], the wife of Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer [Jr.] of Lazard Freres; their daughter Katharine, who, as Katherine Graham, would lead the Post to the powerful position it holds today; and Mann's daughter, Elisabeth [Mann], who was to become a top United Nations official and Club of Rome member.
* Alvin Johnson, an old Texas friend of Stark Young and the Colonel House crowd, and a leading figure in The New Republic and the associated New School for Social Research. He set up the New School's University in Exile and Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes with Rockefeller Foundation grants, which provided a base of operations for the entire Frankfurt School emigre apparatus, as well as for fascist ideologue Leo Strauss, who openly promoted "official" Nazi Party theoreticians Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. The Ecole Libre was home to Raymond Aron, Denis de Rougemont, and others later in the CCF orbit.
Appealing to the new millenarian cult outlook, the manifesto declared:
"In an era of Apocalypse we call for a Millennium. Universal peace can be founded only on the unity of man under one law and one government."
This effort, they insisted, must include conquering the "heresy of nationalism" and dismantling "the absurd architecture of the present world." These, they would replace with "A Universal Parliament"; "a fundamental body of law prevailing throughout the planet"; and "a federal force ready to strike at anarchy and felony."
This Empire, they insisted, is to be governed by English law. Calling for a "New Testament of Americanism," they say, "Here, more precious than all the gold in Kentucky, the treasure of English culture is guarded."
This New Order requires a re-shaping of "family, educational association, neighborhood, and church" under the direction of "a new religion ... the universal religion of democracy." They charge that all existing churches have "meddled in the anarchy of the nations and bowed to the powers that be," and that "Therefore the hour has struck when we must know that limits are set by the religion of freedom, which is democracy, to the freedom of worship." These ideas, if not the verbatim words, came from the pages of H.G. Wells' The Open Conspiracy (1928) and Russell's The Future of Science (1931).
"The pruning of this tree of freedom will not make it less fruitful," the Manifesto continued. "The organization of learning" to train "democratic aristocracies" requires "a firm footing in inflexible principles and unshakable values." All of this, they say, requires not only judges, but "sheriffs." Their prescription for enforcement of this universal terror, is to start with a coalition of the willing, "entrusted to the good will of those groups and communities that are progressively disposed to adopt it," as they say, "then enforced on the rebels, finally to become the common peace and freedom of all the peoples of the Earth."
The City of Man manifesto led directly to the formation of the Fight for Freedom Committee, involving Agar and others, including James Warburg of the Synarchist banking family. Debates were arranged between Warburg of the Hutchins-inspired Fight for Freedom Committee and Charles Lindbergh of Hutchins' America First Committee. Agar served in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and helped found Freedom House, an organization that is, to this day, devoted to the idea of "imposing democracy by force."
Nashville Agrarian William Yandell Elliott remained, until his death, a proponent of this Churchillian "English-Speaking" world empire. Immediately after the war, in the Virginia Quarterly Review and in the Western Political Heritage textbook he edited for Harvard along with Kissinger, he advocated an English-speaking monopoly on nuclear weapons, for the purpose of imposing a world order of the type proposed in The City of Man.
'Warfare Theology' and the 'Fellowship' of Fascists (1940s- )
Yet another Anglo-American Synarchist operation was launched in the immediate aftermath of the "Churchill tilt" against Hitler and the Eurasian Fascist bloc. This operation aimed at penetrating Western military and political circles through the promotion of a sophisticated "God of Thunder" cult.
The ostensible initiator of this effort was Abraham Vereide, a fundamentalist Christian who had been a leading agitator in Seattle, Washington against the so-called 'Red Menace' during the 1920s and early 1930s. One of the weapons Vereide had introduced into the West Coast Palmer Raid psychosis was the prayer breakfast, a vehicle for bringing together business, finance, and government leaders, under a broad anti-communist umbrella.
In fact, the idea of such prayer-centered networks was first launched in the 1850s by British military officers posted in colonial India. They established the British Officers' Christian Union and, later, the Soldiers' and Airmen's Scripture Readers Association.
In 1930, delegates from four nations, Germany, Britain, Holland, and Sweden, met for the first time in Zuylen Castle in Holland and founded the Association of Military Christian Fellowship (AMCF). The first president of the group was a Dutchman, Baron Von Tuyll. The founders' aim was to establish a "non-political" international fellowship with no visible central organization, no budget, and no staff, except for the president. The AMCF, over the ensuing decades, would establish branches in 120 nations. The American branch, the Officers' Christian Fellowship, was headed, for years, by Marine Lt. Col. Tom Hemmingway, who had been Oliver North's commanding officer in Vietnam, and who recruited North to the group.
Vereide arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1942 and, in collusion with the British Air Attache and officials of the Anglican Church, launched the International Christian Leadership organization, later to be renamed The Fellowship Foundation. The group would directly promote the careers of such Christian Zionist fundamentalists as Harald Bredesen and his protege, Pat Robertson, and would heavily penetrate the U.S. military, the U.S. Congress, and other powerful institutions.
International Christian Leadership was fully unfurled as a project of the postwar Anglo-Dutch Synarchists, when Vereide was insinuated as the "spiritual advisor" to the Dutch Royal Consort, Prince Bernhard, founder of both the Bilderberg Group and, with Britain's Royal Consort, Prince Philip, the World Wildlife Fund.
As Vereide's leading protege Bredesen wrote, Vereide had "won Prince Bernhard for Christ" -- quite a claim, given that Bernhard had been a leading wartime Nazi, who had served as secretary to the board of directors of I.G. Farben, the Nazi chemical cartel. Upon marrying the Dutch monarch, Queen Juliana, Bernhard had purged the Court and installed another "former" Nazi as personal secretary to the Queen, Baron van der Hoeven. This Baron's son, Jan Willem van der Hoeven, obtained his degree in divinity from London University, and, in 1980, founded the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, along with Jerry Falwell and other American and British rabid Christian Zionist promoters of the imminent Armageddon.
Baron von Tuyll, who was to head the Association of Military Christian Fellowships, was also tapped by Prince Bernhard as the Lord Chamberlain for Queen Juliana.
The International Christian Leadership organization of Vereide, today known as the Fellowship Foundation, runs an international series of prayer breakfasts, maintains safehouse residences in world capitals including Washington and London, and claims a global membership of 20,000, and an official annual budget of $10 million. In both the United States and Britain, the Fellowship also runs the Prison Fellowship Ministries of convicted Watergate felon Charles Colson.
The British branch, closely aligned with the Conservative Party, also maintains close working ties with another longstanding Fabian Society "religious" front, the Christian Socialist Movement, with which Tony Blair is closely affiliated.
Washington sources have identified both current Speaker of the House Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, the current Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, as leading members of the Fellowship. Boykin is under Pentagon investigation for comments he made in 2003 at a fundamentalist church, calling for a "crusade" against Islam, which he called a "Satanic" religion.
In March 2003, Harper's magazine published an eyewitness account by Jeffrey Sharlet of his tenure as a resident at the Fellowship communal mansion in Arlington, Va. Sharlet described a Fellowship session, led by the group's current leader, Vereide protege Douglas Coe. Coe described the "covenant" of secrecy made between members of the group, who operate in cell structures. Coe asked the participating Fellowship members for an example of such a covenant, and he received an immediate reply: "Hitler." Coe answered, "Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing."
Hillary Clinton described meeting the leader of the Fellowship in 1993: "Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship to God."[29]
-- The Fellowship (Christian organization), by Wikipedia
Coe's son later gave the disciples a brief class on the life of Genghis Khan, describing a particularly bloody incident in which he beheaded his enemies, stuffed the heads into a crate, and all the while devoured his dinner. Sharlet quoted the young Coe: If you are a known friend of Jesus,
"You can go and do anything. When you leave here," he continued, "you're not only going to know the value of Jesus. You're going to know the people who rule the world."