Tragedy & Hope - Excerpts
Tragedy & Hope 101
Bonus Material
Prior to writing Tragedy and Hope 101, I went through Tragedy and Hope one more time and, in addition to noting where specific topics were discussed, I "typed out" many of the references that I'd highlighted in Quigley's book.
Although all of the information below was important enough to transcribe for future reference, I've placed a couple of asterisks ** next to some of the information that I felt was particularly important. (If you search this page for **, you'll find those entries.) Also, I transferred some of the comments I wrote in the margins of the book to this document as well.
- General summaries will be written in normal text: like this.
- Actual Text from Quigley's book will be presented in quotes: "like this."
- My comments will be presented within parentheses: (like this).
- All of the material below was typed out manually, so there may be some typos.
- This document is approximately 50,000 words long.
For a list of all additional bonus material, click here.
A PDF of Carroll Quigley's Tragedy & Hope is available here.
Page 3, paragraph 3, discusses the lifecycle of civilizations
Page 13, paragraph 1, discusses the fact that innovations at the "core" of a civilization do more to strengthen areas that surround the core "because the core is more hampered in the use of material innovations by the strength of past vested interests."
Pages 22 – 23, (begin paragraph 4) It is difficult for governments to oppress well-armed citizens.
Page 24: Nineteenth century ideas of secularism, liberalism, capitalism, democracy
**Page 34, paragraph 2: When citizens possess weapons that are comparable to their leaders, there is majority rule and democracy. When citizens are "outgunned" by their leaders, there is authoritarianism. Cheap guns gave rise to democracy– Also, page 187, paragraph 2: "We have already mentioned that effective weapons which are difficult to use or expensive to obtain encourage the development of authoritarian regimes in any society….In Western civilization…the Industrial Revolution so lowered the cost of firearms that the ordinary citizen of western Europe and of North American could acquire the most effective weapon existing (the musket). As a result of this, and other factors, democracy came to these areas along with mass armies of citizen-soldiers." Also, page 1200, paragraph 2: "When weapons are of the amateur type…they are widely possessed by citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an 'amateur weapons system'…we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford and possess or learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such "specialist" weapons can dominate the majority who lack them."
Page 39 "The commercial capitalist sought profits from the exchange of goods; the industrial capitalist sought profits from the manufacture of goods; the financial capitalist sought profits from the manipulation of claims on money; and the monopoly capitalist sought profits from manipulation of the market to make the market price and the amount sold such that his profits would be maximized."
Page 44, paragraph 4: Mercantilism "A restrictive system…in which merchants sought to gain profits, not from the movements of goods but from restricting the movements of goods.
**Summary of Pages 51 – 72 (individual page references below) Banking dynasties, Rothschild inbreeding, secrecy and deceit, controlling business and government, Morgan and Rockefeller control. Note to self: In this 21-page section of the book, Quigley admits that bankers "use deception." Unfortunately, it apparently didn't occur to Quigley that he too might have been deceived. He suggests that the banker's power peaked in the early 1930's (and moved toward "monopoly capitalism" controlled by the Rockefeller block, page 76.) But that's when they began transitioning the world over to a purely fiat, debt-based system. With that done, they could now create, destroy, and direct as much money as they wanted. The limits of gold were gone. This was a leap toward greater power, not less.) He bases his conclusion on an inaccurate assumption; that they were trying to keep, rather than destroy, the gold standard.
51, paragraph 2: "In time, they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers…as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this, looking backward toward the period of dynastic monarchy in which they had their own roots, aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743 – 1812) …whose male descendants, for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even nieces."
53, paragraph 2: To achieve their ends, "…it was necessary to conceal, or even to mislead, both governments and people about the nature of money and its methods of operation."
55, paragraph 3: "In most countries, the central bank was surrounded closely by the almost invisible private investment banking firms. These…could hardly be seen in the dazzle emitted by the central bank which they, in fact, often dominated. Yet a close observer could hardly fail to notice the close private associations between these private international bankers and the central bank itself." (Emphasis in original)
60, paragraph 3: "…the Money Power controlled by the international investment bankers, were able to dominate both business and government. They could dominate business, because investment bankers had the ability to supply or refuse (needed) capital. Thus, Rothschild interests came to dominate many of the railroads of Europe, while Morgan dominated at least 26,000 miles of American railroads. Such bankers went further than this. …they took seats on the boards of directors of industrial firms, as they had already done on commercial banks, saving banks, insurance firms and finance companies." They provided money to businesses that agreed to yield control and kept it from "those who resisted."
61, paragraph 1: "As early as 1909, Walther Rathenau, who was in a position to know…said 'Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves.'" Paragraph 3: "On September 26, 1921, The Financial Times wrote, "Half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills.'"
62, paragraph 2: "In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures. Since most government officials felt ignorant of finance, they sought advice from bankers whom they considered to be experts in the field. The history of the last century shows…that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally. Such advice could be enforced if necessary by manipulation of exchanges, gold flows, discount rates, and even levels of business activity."
72, paragraph 2: "The structure of financial controls created by the tycoons of "Big Banking" and "Big Business" in the period 1880 – 1933 was of extraordinary complexity, one business fief being built on another, allied with semi-independent associates, the whole rearing upward into two pinnacles of economic and financial power…one, centered in New York, headed by J.P. Morgan and Company, and the other, in Ohio, headed by the Rockefeller family. When these two cooperated, as they generally did, they could influence the economic life of the country to a large degree and could almost control its political life, at least on the Federal level." Paragraph 3: "The influence of these business leaders was so great that (they) could have wrecked the economic system of the country merely by throwing securities on the stock market for sale, and, having precipitated a stock-market panic, could then have bought back the securities…but at a lower price. Naturally, they were not so foolish as to do this, although Morgan came very close to it in precipitating the 'panic of 1907,' but they did not hesitate to wreck individual corporations…by driving them to bankruptcy."
Pages 73-74: Use money to control both sides in politics + Issue excessive securities (bonds / debt or equity flotations) bankrupt the company, move on.
73, paragraph 2 "…they expected that they would be able to control both political parties equally. Indeed, some of them intended to contribute to both and allow an alternation of the two parties in public office in order to conceal their own influence, inhibit any exhibition of independence by politicians, and allow the (voters) to believe that they were exercising their own free choice.
74, paragraph 2: Although they couldn't control the Democratic Party as much as the Republican Party "they continued to contribute to some extent to both parties and did not cease their efforts to control both. In fact on two occasions, in 1904 and in 1924, J.P. Morgan was able to sit back with a feeling of satisfaction to watch a presidential election in which the candidates of both parties were in his sphere of influence…Usually, Morgan had to share his political influence with other sectors of the business oligarchy, especially with Rockefeller interest (as was done, for example, by dividing the ticket between them in 1900 and in 1920.)" Note to self: Admits that they had the power to control elections and divide the ticket, misses the election of 1912 somehow.
Page 75: Hearst Publication, yellow journalism, paragraph 1: "In looking about for some issue which would distract public discontent from domestic economic issues, what better solution than a crisis in foreign affairs? …The great opportunity…came with the Cuban revolt against Spain in 1895. While the 'yellow press,' led by William Randolph Hearst, roused public opinion, Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt plotted how they could best get the United States into the fracas. They got the excuse they needed when the American battleship Maine was sunk by a mysterious explosion in Havana harbor in February 1898.
**Page 83, paragraph 2, society can exist without the state: "…there was clearly a period, about 900, when there was no empire, no state, and no public authority in the West. The state disappeared, yet society continued. So also, religious and economic life continued. This clearly showed that the state and society were not the same thing, that society was the basic entity, and that the state was a crowning, but not essential, cap to the social structure. This had revolutionary effects. It was discovered that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western liberalism. It was discovered that the state, if it exists, must serve men and that it is incorrect to believe that the purpose of men is to serve the state. It was discovered that economic life, religious life, law, and private property can all exist and function effectively without a state."
Page 84, paragraph 3, the birth of Christianity
Page 98, paragraph 4, Labor Unions as a tool to scare business owners, increase their dependence on government: "Georgi Gapon, a priest secretly in the pay of the government, was encouraged to form labor unions and lead workers' agitations in order to increase the employers' dependence on the autocracy, but when, in 1905, Gapon led a mass march of workers to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the czar, they were attacked by the troops and hundreds were shot. Gapon was murdered the following year by the revolutionaries as a traitor…"
Pages 102 – 103: Extremism in Russia and Tolstoi
Page 113, paragraph 4, Balance of Power, British want a weak Turkish Empire: "…British imperial policy considered that its interests would be safer with a weak, if corrupt, Turkey in the Near East than they would be with any Great Power in that area or with the area broken up into small independent states which might fall under the influence of the Great Powers."
Page 122, paragraph 1: "Germany was the only Great Power which wanted the Ottoman Empire to be strong and intact. Britain wanted it to be weak and intact."
Page 125: How the British Empire came to be
Page 126, paragraph 1: Balance of Power: In European disputes, England would provide just enough support to the weaker power to thwart the efforts of the stronger one "thus hampering the strongest power and making the second power temporarily the strongest, as long as it acted in accord with Britain's wishes. In this way, by following balance-of-power tactics, Britain was able to play a decisive role on the Continent, keep the Continent divided and embroiled in its own disputes, and do this with a limited commitment of Britain's own resources, leaving a considerable surplus of energy, manpower, and wealth available for acquiring an empire overseas."
Page 128, paragraph 2: English landed oligarchy takes control of British Government
Page 130, Gold and diamonds discovered in Africa, John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes, the new imperialism – paragraph 2: "The chief changes were that (new imperialism) was justified on grounds of moral duty and of social reform and not, as earlier, on grounds of missionary activity and material advantage. The man most responsible for this change was John Ruskin." Paragraph 4: "Ruskin's…inaugural lecture was copied out in longhand by one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes. …Rhodes feverishly exploited the diamond and goldfields of South Africa…contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and in South Africa…With Financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa…"
Page 131, Rhodes spent his wealth in pursuit of his life's goal, which was to "federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control. For this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition…" Paragraph 2: Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society…In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett, and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur Balfour, Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a 'Circle of Initiates'; while there was to be an outer circle known as the 'Association of Helpers' (later organized by Milner as the Round Table organization.)
Page 132, paragraph 2: Milner recruited a group of young men, chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall…Through his influence, these men were able to win influential positions in government and international finance and became the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs…In 1909 – 1913 they organized semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups…In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)…Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919 – 1927. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of organizations, known as the Institue of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries…" Note to self: (contradiction) says ten countries on page 953.
Page 133: "The power and influence of this Rhodes-Milner group in British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889, although not widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated. We might mention as an example that this group dominated The Times from 1890 – 1912 and has controlled it completely since 1912 (except for the years 1919-1922.)" Paragraph 4, good quote on imperial matters: "But in imperial matters one step leads to another, and every acquisition obtained to protect an earlier acquisition requires a new advance at a later date to protect it."
Page 136: Boer war, British nearly defeated
Page 141: South Africans 'detribalized' "…90,000 Africans were crowded into 600 acres of shacks with no sanitation, with almost no running water, and with such inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get a bus into the city to work….The result was that the natives were steadily ground downward to the point where they were denied all opportunity except for animal survival and reproduction."
Page 151, paragraph 2: In Kenya "The whites tried to increase pressure on natives to work on white farms rather than…on their own lands within the reserves, by forcing them to pay taxes in cash, by curtailing the size or quality of the reserves, by restricting improvements in native agricultural techniques, and by personal political pressure and compulsion."
Pages 153 – 154: East India Company, Unimaginable diversity in India, Outcasts
Page 157: Debt slavery -- Though slavery was abolished in India in 1843 "…many of the poor were reduced to peonage by contracting debts at unfair terms and binding themselves and their heirs to work for their creditors until the debt was paid. Such a debt could never be paid, in many cases, because the rate at which it was reduced was left to the creditor and could rarely be questioned by the illiterate debtor."
Page 167: Gandhi
Page 171, paragraph 3: "In Amritsar an Englishwoman was attacked in the street. The Congress Party leaders in the city were deported, and Brigadier R. E. H. Dyer was sent to restore order. On arrival he prohibited all processions and meetings; then, without waiting for the order to be publicized, went with fifty men to disperse with gunfire a meeting already in progress…He fired 1,650 bullets into a dense crowd packed in a square with inadequate exists, inflicting 1,516 casualties, of which 379 met death…Dyer returned to his office and issued an order that all Indians passing through the street where the Englishwoman had been assaulted a week before must do so by crawling on hands and knees…In his own words: 'I had made up my mind I would do all men to death.'"
Page 173: The British in Ireland
Page 176, paragraph 2: The hierarchy in China – "The traditional culture of China, as elsewhere in Asia, consisted of a military and bureaucratic hierarchy superimposed on a great mass of hardworking peasantry….At the bottom the peasantry, which was the only really productive group in the society, derived its incomes from the sweat of its collective brows, and had to survive on what was left to it after a substantial fraction of its product had gone to the two higher groups in the form of taxes, rents, interest, customary bribes and excessive profits…"
Page 180, paragraph 2: British forces China to legalize opium + China loses Burma, Indochina and other territory
Pages 193 - 205, Hierarchy in Japan, secret oligarchy
193, paragraph 2, In Japan "The emperor was of the highest level, being descended from the supreme sun goddess, while the lesser lords were descended from lesser gods of varying degrees of remoteness from the sun goddess." Paragraph 3: "…it was accepted by all Japanese that society was more important than any individual and could demand any sacrifice from him, that men were by nature unequal and should be prepared to serve loyally in the particular status into which each had been born…"
194, paragraph 4, a secret elite rule Japan from behind the scenes: "In theory what had occurred had been a restoration of Japan's rule from the hands of the shogun back into the hands of the emperor. In fact what occurred was a shift in power from the shogun to the leaders of four western Japanese clans who proceeded to rule Japan in the emperor's name and from the emperor's shadow."
195, paragraph 2: "These leaders, organized in a shadowy group known as the Meiji oligarchy, had obtained complete domination of Japan by 1889. To cover this fact with camouflage, they unleashed a vigorous propaganda of revived Shintoism and of abject submission to the emperor which culminated in the extreme emperor worship of 1941 – 1945." Paragraph 3: "…the oligarchy in 1889 drew up a constitution which would assure, and yet conceal, their political domination of the country." It was made to appear that the constitution was "an emission from the emperor, setting up a system in which all government would be in his name, and all officials would be personally responsible to him. It provided for a bicameral Diet as legislature…All legislation had to pass each house by majority vote and be signed by a minister of state."
196, paragraph 1: "Basically, the form and functioning of the constitution was of little significance, for the country continued to be run by the Meiji oligarchy through their domination of the army and navy, the bureaucracy, economic and social life, and the opinion-forming agencies such as education and religion." Paragraph 3: A plan was adopted "to control the elections to the Diet so that its membership would be docile to the wishes of the Meiji oligarchy." Paragraph 4: Elections could be controlled in three ways: restricted voting, campaign contributions, and by bureaucratic manipulation. Voting "was restricted for many years on a property basis, so that, in 1900, only one person in a hundred had the right to vote. The close alliance between the Meiji oligarchy and the richest members of the expanding economic system made it perfectly easy to control the flow of campaign contributions. And if these two methods failed, the Meiji oligarchy controlled both the police and the prefectural bureaucracy which supervised the elections and counted the returns."
200, paragraph 3: "The decision-making powers in this oligarchy were concentrated in a surprisingly small group of men, in all, no more than a dozen in number, and made up, chiefly, of the leaders of the four western clans which had led the movement against the shogun in 1867. These leaders came in time to form a formal, if extralegal, group known as the Genro (or Council of Elder Statesmen)."
205, paragraph 4, Japanese Militarism: "Not only did militarists control growing sectors of Japanese life; they had also succeeded in merging loyalty to the emperor and subservience to militarism into a single loyalty which no Japanese could reject without, at the same time, rejecting his country, his family, and his whole tradition."
Pages 209 - 264: The First World War
221, paragraph 2: "Beneath the surface each power was working to consolidate its own strength and its links with its allies in order to ensure that it would have better, or at least no worse, success in the next crisis, which everyone knew was bound to come. And come it did, with shattering suddenness, when the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was assassinated by Serb extremists in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo on the 28th of June, 1914. There followed a terrible month of fear, indecision, and hysteria before the World War was begun by and Austrian attack on Serbia on July 28, 1914."
222, paragraph 3: "The influence of democracy served to increase the tension of a crisis because the elected politicians felt it necessary to pander to the most irrational and crass motivations of the electorate in order to ensure future election, and did this by playing on hatred and fear of powerful neighbors…"
227, paragraph 3: Entrenched military leaders refused to adapt their tactics. They focused their attention on "three factors which were obsolete by 1914. These three were (a) cavalry, (b) the bayonet, and (c) the headlong infantry assault. These were obsolete in 1914 as the result of three technical innovations: (a) rapid-fire guns, especially machine guns; (b) barbed-wire entanglements, and (c) trench warfare…Although transport across the Atlantic was critically short throughout the war, one-third of all shipping space was in feed for horses."
231, paragraph 2, casualties: "At Verdun in 1916, the French lost over 350,000 and the Germans 300,000. On the Eastern Front the Russian General Aleksei Brusilov lost a million men…(June-August, 1916). On the Somme in the same year the British lost 410,000, the French lost 190,000, and the Germans lost 450,000 for a maximum gain of 7 miles of front about 25 miles wide. The following year, the slaughter continued…"
**236, paragraph 2: A shift from limited warfare to total warfare.
237, paragraph 3: "The change from limited wars with limited objectives fought with mercenary troops to unlimited wars of economic attrition with unlimited objectives fought with national armies had far-reaching consequences. The distinction between combatants and noncombatants and between belligerents and neutrals became blurred and ultimately undistinguishable. International law, which had grown up in the period of limited dynastic wars, made a great deal of these distinctions. Noncombatants had extensive rights which sought to protect their ways of life as much as possible during periods of warfare; neutrals had similar rights. In return, strict duties to remain both noncombatant and neutral rested on these 'outsiders.' All these distinctions broke down in 1914 – 1915, with the result that both sides indulged in wholesale violations of existing international law. Probably on the whole these violations were more extensive (although less widely publicized) on the part of the Entente than on the part of the Central Powers."
238, paragraph 2: Double standards + The distinction between combatant and noncombatant became academic. "When Belgian civilians shot at German soldiers, the latter took civilian hostages and practiced reprisals on civilians. These German actions were publicized throughout the world by the British propaganda machine as 'atrocities' and violations of international law (which they were), while the Belgian civilian snipers were excused as loyal patriots (although their actions were even more clearly violations of international law and, as such, justified severe German reactions). These 'atrocities' were used by the British to justify their own violations of international law…On November 5th, 1914, they declared the whole sea from Scotland to Iceland a 'war zone,' covered it with fields of explosive floating mines, and ordered all ships going to the Baltic, Scandinavia, or the Low Countries to go by way of the English Channel, where they were stopped, searched, and much of their cargoes seized, even when these cargoes could not be declared contraband…"
239, paragraph 1: Make it impossible for Germany to obey the law "…merchant ships could be stopped by a war vessel and inspected and could be sunk, if carrying contraband, after the passengers and the ships' papers were put in a place of safety…The merchant vessel…obtained these rights only if it made no act of hostility against the enemy war vessel." It was dangerous for German submarines to obey these laws concerning neutral vessels because "British merchant ships received instructions to attack German submarines at sight, by ramming if possible." Additionally, "British vessels, with these aggressive orders, frequently flew neutral flags and posed as neutrals as long as possible. Nevertheless, the United States continued to insist that the Germans obey the old laws, while condoning British violations of the same laws to the extent that the distinction between war vessels and merchant ships was blurred."
241, paragraph 2: Forcing Greece to join the fight
242, paragraph 2: Getting Italy to join the fight: "By skillful expenditure of money, the Entente governments were able to win considerable support. Their chief achievement was in splitting the normally pacifist Socialist Party by large money grants to Benito Mussolini."
246, paragraph 2, Dividing the spoils: The settlement "…partitioned the Ottoman Empire in such a way that little was left to the Turks except the area within 200 or 250 miles of Ankara. Russia was to get Constantinople and the Straits, as well as northeastern Anatolia, including the Black Sea coast; Italy was to get the southwestern coast of Anatolia…France was to get most of eastern Alexandretta, Syria, and northern Mesopotamia, including Mosul; Britain was to get the Levant from Gaza south to the Red Sea, Transjordan, most of the Syrian Desert, all of Mesopotamia south of Kirkuk (including Baghdad and Basra), and most of the Persian Gulf coast of Arabia…the Holy Land itself was to be internationalized."
246, paragraph 3, Israel / Jewish State proposed before World War 2: "The next document concerned with the disposition of the Ottoman Empire was the famous 'Balfour Declaration'…The Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, one of the leading figures in the British Zionist movement….Balfour's letter said, "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object…"
248, paragraph 3, King makers: "The British, who by this time were engaged in a rivalry (over petroleum resources and other issues) with the French, set Feisal up as king in Iraq under British protection (1921) and placed his brother Abdullah in a similar position as King of Transjordan (1923). The father of the two new kings, Hussein, was attacked by Ibn-Saud of Nejd and forced to abdicate in 1924. His kingdom of Hejaz was annexed by Ibn-Saud in 1926. After 1932 this whole area was known as Saudi Arabia."
Pages 249 – 251: What pulled the United States into the war
249, paragraph 2: “The most important diplomatic event of the latter part of the First World War was the intervention of the United States on the side of the Entente Powers in April 1917. The causes of this intervention have been analyzed at great length…These might be summarized as follows: (1) The German submarine attacks on neutral shipping made it necessary for the United States to go to war to secure ‘freedom of the seas’; (2) the United States was influenced by subtle British propaganda conducted in drawing rooms, universities, and the press of the eastern part of the country where Anglophilism was rampant among the more influential social groups; (3) the United States was inveigled into the war by a conspiracy of international bankers and munitions manufacturers eager to protect their loans to the Entente Powers or their wartime profits from sales to these Powers; and (4) Balance of Power principles made it impossible for the United States to allow Great Britain to be defeated by Germany.”
250, paragraph 1: “The fact that German submarines were acting in retaliation for the illegal British blockade of the continent of Europe and British violations of international law and neutral rights of the high seas, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States and the Anglophilism of its influential class made it impossible for the average American to see world events except through the spectacles made by British propaganda, the fact that Americans had lent the Entente billions of dollars which would be jeopardized by German victory, the fact that the enormous inflation which would collapse the very day that the Entente collapsed…all these factors were able to bring weight to bear on the American decision only because the balance-of-power issue laid a foundation on which they could work…The unconscious assumption by American leaders that an Entente victory was both necessary and inevitable was at the bottom of their failure to enforce the same rules of neutrality and international law against Britain as against Germany…..Since they could not admit this unconscious assumption or publicly defend the legitimate basis of international power politics on which it rested, they finally went to war on an excuse which was legally weak, although emotionally satisfying. As John Bassett Moore, America’s most famous international lawyer, put it, ‘What most decisively contributed to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels…’” Paragraph 2: “The Germans at first tried to use the established rules of international law regarding destruction of merchant vessels.” But because of the difficulty of doing so (note from page 239 above) “…most German submarines tended to attack without warning. American protests reached a peak when the Lusitania was sunk in this way nine miles off the English coast on May 7, 1915. The Lusitania was a British merchant vessel ‘constructed with Government funds as an auxiliary cruiser,…expressly included in the navy list published by the British Admiralty,’ with ‘bases laid for mounting guns of six-inch caliber,’ carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack German submarines whenever possible.”
251, paragraph 2: “The propaganda agencies of the Entente Powers made full use of the occasion. The Times of London announced that ‘four-fifths of her passengers were citizens of the United State’ (the actual proportion was 15.6 percent); the British manufactured and distributed a medal which they pretended had been awarded to the submarine crew by the German government; a French paper published a picture of the crowds in Berlin at the outbreak of war in 1914 as a picture of Germans ‘rejoicing’ at news of the sinking of the Lusitania.”
256, paragraph 3, Suspending the gold standard allowed the war to go on much longer: “The magnitude of the war and the fact that it might last for more than six months were quite unexpected for both sides…In July 1914, the military men were confident that a decision would be reached in six months…This belief was supported by the financial experts who, while greatly underestimating the cost of fighting, were confident that the financial resources of all states would be exhausted in six months. By ‘financial resources’ they meant the gold reserves of the various nations. These were clearly limited; all the Great Powers were on the gold standard under which bank notes and paper money could be converted into gold on demand. However, each country suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of war. This removed the automatic limitation on the supply of paper money…each country proceeded to pay for the war by borrowing from the banks. The banks created the money which they lent by merely giving the government a deposit of any size against which the government could draw checks. The banks were no longer limited in the amount of credit they could create because they no longer had to pay out gold for checks on demand.” As a result, “inflation became acute.”
258: Inflation wipes out the European middle class
258, paragraph 2, government intervention in the free market: “Before the war, the allotment of resources had been made by the automatic processes of the price system; labor and raw materials going, for example, to manufacture those goods which were most profitable rather than to those goods which were most serviceable…In wartime, however, governments had to have certain specific goods for military purposes…” Paragraph 3: “Situations such as these made it necessary for governments to intervene directly in the economic process to secure those results that could not be obtained by the free price system…They began to ration consumers’ goods which were in short supply, like articles of food. They began to monopolize essential raw materials and allot them to manufacturers who had war contracts rather than allow them to flow where prices were highest…Labor had to be regulated and directed into essential activities.”
262 – 264: Propaganda, censorship, restricting civil liberties
262: “In order to build up the morale of their own peoples and to lower that of their enemies, countries engaged in a variety of activities designed to regulate the flow of information to these peoples. This involved censorship, propaganda, and curtailment of civil liberties. These were established in all countries…The British censorship was established on August 5, 1914, and at once intercepted all cables and private mail which it could reach, including that of neutral countries…A Press Censorship Committee was set up in 1914 and replaced by the Press Bureau…in 1916…it was able to control all news printed in the press…”
263: “Parallel with the censorship was the War Propaganda Bureau…which had an American Bureau of Information…This last agency was able to control almost all information going to the American press, and by 1916 was acting as an international news service itself…” Paragraph 2: “The Censorship and Propaganda bureaus worked together in Britain as well as elsewhere. The former concealed all stories of Entente violations of the laws of war or of the rules of humanity…or their own war plans and less altruistic war aims, while the Propaganda Bureau widely publicized the violations and crudities of the Central Powers…In general, manufacture of outright lies by propaganda agencies was infrequent, and the desired picture of the enemy was built up by a process of selection and distortion of evidence…A great deal was made, especially by the British, of ‘atrocity’ propaganda; stories of German mutilation of bodies, violation of women, cutting off children’s hands, desecration of churches and shrines, and crucifixions of Belgians were widely believed in the West by 1916. Lord Bryce headed a committee which produced a volume of such stories in 1915, and it is quite evident that this well-educated man….was completely taken in by his own stories. Here, again, outright manufacture of falsehoods was infrequent, although General Henry Charteris in 1917 created a story that the Germans were cooking human bodies to extract glycerin, and produced pictures to prove it.”
268: End of World War 1, treaty negotiations: Citizens of the victorious nations sincerely believed the reasons they’d been given for the war. They believed they’d fought to secure the rights of small nations, to make the world safe for democracy, to put an end to power politics and do away with secret diplomacy. “These ideals had been given concrete form in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points…When it became clear that the settlements were to be imposed rather than negotiated…that the terms of the settlements had been reached by a process of secret negotiations from which the small nations had been excluded and in which power politics played a much larger role than the safety of democracy, there was a revulsion of feeling against the treaties.”
283, paragraph 3: “Britain, after 1918, felt secure, while France felt completely insecure in the face of Germany. As a consequence of the war, even before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, Britain had obtained all her chief ambitions in respect to Germany…and needed no treaty to obtain them.” Paragraph 3: “ France , on the other hand, had not obtained the one thing it wanted: security.”
287: Much of the British citizenry supported collective security and international cooperation. The British government did not support this. So the politicians pretended to support the peoples’ wishes, while secretly working toward their own aims. Paragraph 2: The government’s stated policy was: “…based on support of the League of Nations, of international cooperation, and of disarmament. Yet the real policy was quite different…After 1935, the contrast between the public policy and the secret policy became so sharp that the authorized biographer of Lord Halifax…coined the name ‘dyarchy’ for it.”
289: Britain forces its “appeasement” policy on France
291: Structure of the League of Nations
305 - 312 German reparations following World War 1 and the inflation / destruction of the currency that followed
**307, paragraph 1: “The inflation was not injurious to the influential groups in German society, although it was generally ruinous to the middle classes, and thus encouraged the extremist elements.” By August of 1921, it took 305 German marks to purchase 1 British pound. Three months later, it took 1,020. By January of 1923, it took 80,000 marks, by August it took 20 million and by December of 1923, it took 20 billion.
308, paragraph 2: The Dawes plan ($800 million loan) to “help” Germany get back on its feet “The Dawes Plan, which was largely a J.P. Morgan production, was drawn up by an international committee of financial experts…Germany paid reparations for five years under the Dawes Plan (1924 – 1929) and owed more at the end than it had owed at the beginning.” Paragraph 3: “It is worthy of note that this system was set up by the international bankers and that the subsequent lending of other people’s money to Germany was profitable to these bankers.” Paragraph 4: “With these American loans, Germany was able to rebuild her industrial system to make it the second best in the world by a wide margin, to keep up her prosperity and her standard of living in spite of the defeat and reparations, and to pay reparations without either a balanced budget or a favorable balance of trade…The only things wrong with the system were (a) that it would collapse as soon as the United States ceased to lend, and (b) in the meantime debts were merely being shifted from one account to another and no one was really getting any nearer to solvency. In the period 1924 – 1931, Germany paid 10.5 billion marks in reparations but borrowed abroad a total of 18.6 billion marks. Nothing was settled by all this, but the international bankers sat in heaven, under a rain of fees and commissions.”
Page 312, paragraph 3: There are a couple of typos: “56,577 billion” (56 .5 trillion) and “10,426 billion” (10.4 trillion.) I’m guessing this was supposed to be 56,577 million and 10,426 million. (56.5 billion and 10.4 billion respectively.)
318, paragraph 3, Hiding the depreciating value / gold backing of money: “While prices in most countries rose 200 to 300 percent and public debts rose 1,000 percent, the financial leaders tried to keep up the pretense that the money of each country was as valuable as it had ever been…In the United States the percentage of reserves required by law in commercial banks was reduced in 1914 and the reserve requirements both for notes and deposits were cut in June 1917; a new system of ‘depositary banks’ was set up which required no reserves against government deposits created in them in return for government bonds…everywhere the ratio of gold reserves to notes fell drastically during the war: in France from 60 percent to 11 percent; in Germany from 59 percent to 10 percent; in Russia from 98 percent to 2 percent; in Italy from 60 percent to 13 percent; in Britain from 52 percent to 32 percent.”
**324, paragraph 2: “…the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, in secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland , a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England (and) Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve…sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
325, paragraph 2: “The commander in chief of the world system of banking control was Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, who was built up by the private bankers to a position where he was regarded as an oracle in all matters of government and business.” **Paragraph 3: The power of the bank of England was “..admitted by most qualified observers…Reginald McKenna, who had been chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915 – 1916, as chairman of the board of Midland Bank told its stockholders: ‘I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money…And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.’”
326: Norman was a strange man whose mental outlook was one of successfully suppressed hysteria …He had no use for governments and feared democracy.” Paragraph 2: “Norman had a devoted colleague in Benjamin Strong, the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York . Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan Bank, especially of Henry P. Davison, who made him secretary of the Bankers Trust Company of New York…in 1904, used him as Morgan’s agent in the banking rearrangements following the crash of 1907, and made him vice-president of the Bankers Trust…in 1909. He became governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the joint nominee of Morgan and of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company in 1914. Two years later, Strong met Norman …and they at once made an agreement to work in cooperation for the financial practices they both revered.” **Paragraph 5: “It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of the investment bankers…who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks. This dominance of investment bankers was based on their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the financial and industrial systems of their own countries…; they could dominate governments by their control over current government loans and the play of the international exchange rates…In this system Rothschilds had been preeminent during much of the nineteenth century, but , at the end of that century, they were being replaced by J.P. Morgan whose central office was in New York, although it was always operated as if it were in London (where it had, indeed, originate as George Peabody and Company in 1838.)” Note to self: The name “Morgan” began as “Peabody” and Rothschild may have used Peabody/Morgan as a front man. In The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Eustace Mullins writes on page 49: “Soon after he arrived in London , George Peabody was surprised to be summoned to an audience with the gruff Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild. Without mincing words, Rothschild revealed to Peabody , that much of the London aristocracy openly disliked Rothschild and refused his invitations. He proposed that Peabody, a man of modest means, be established as a lavish host whose entertainments would soon be the talk of London . Rothschild would, of course, pay all the bills. Peabody accepted the offer, and soon became known as the most popular host in London . It’s hardly surprising that the most popular host in London would also become a very successful businessman, particularly with the House of Rothschild supporting him behind the scenes.”
335, paragraph 2: The world shifts from the “gold standard” to the “gold exchange standard.”
336, paragraph 2: “This would indicate that even in its most superficial aspects the international gold standard of 1914 was not reestablished by 1930…Yet financiers, businessmen, and politicians tried to pretend to themselves and to the public that they had restored the financial system of 1914. They had created a façade of cardboard and tinsel which had a vague resemblance to the old system, and they hoped that, if they pretended vigorously enough, they could change this façade into the lost reality for which they yearned.” ***Paragraph 3: Unlike industrial capitalists, financiers weren’t interested in producing goods and selling them for profit. Instead, they preferred to sell stocks and bonds. This way, they could make money regardless of how well the underlying business was doing. (If the business was strong, they earned fees selling its securities (stocks / bonds) and if it was destroyed, they still earned fees. Paragraph 4: Financial capitalism “…built railroads in order to sell securities, not in order to transport goods; it constructed great steel corporations to sell securities, not in order to make steel…the organization of financial capitalism had evolved to a highly sophisticated level of security promotion and speculation which did not require any productive investment as a basis. Corporations were built upon corporations in the form of holding companies, so that securities were issued in huge quantities, bringing profitable fees and commissions to financial capitalists without any increase in economic production whatever.” They discovered that “…they could not only make killings out of the issuing of such securities, they could also make killings out of the bankruptcy of such corporations, through the fees and commissions of reorganization. A very pleasant cycle of flotation, bankruptcy, flotation, bankruptcy began to be practiced by these financial capitalists. The more excessive the flotation, the greater the profits, and the more imminent the bankruptcy. The more frequent the bankruptcy, the greater the profits of reorganization and the sooner the opportunity of another excessive flotation with its accompanying profits.”
**337, paragraph 2, Financial capitalists seek to strengthen their control: “The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and a use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.” However, to strengthen their control further, they began molding modern corporate law and practice to suit their interests. Paragraph 4: First, they wanted to attract as many corporate investors as possible. Second, they wanted those investors to have as little control as possible. The first was achieved “…by stock splitting, issuing securities of low par value, and by high-pressure security salesmanship.” The second was achieved “…by plural-voting stock, nonvoting stock, pyramiding of holding companies, election of directors by cooptation, and similar techniques. The result of this was that larger and larger aggregates of wealth fell into the control of smaller and smaller groups of men.”
338, paragraph 2: “While financial capitalism was thus weaving the intricate pattern of modern corporation law and practice on one side, it was establishing monopolies and cartels on the other. Both helped to dig the grave of financial capitalism and pass the reins of economic control on to the newer monopoly capitalism.” Note to self: Quigley implies the death of financial capitalism…I think he drastically underestimates the power of creating debt-based money out of thin air, controlling the price, quantity and flow of money, and having sufficient influence to demand multi-trillion dollar bailouts from government. This power, from what I’ve seen, is only held by the heirs of his “financial capitalists.”
339: “Before the World War, the United States had been a debtor nation…The war made the United States a creditor nation…”
342, paragraph 2: To help London maintain its stock of gold, central bankers (including the New York Federal Reserve) decided to drain the United States of its gold instead. The NY Fed pumped money into the economy to prevent deflation and this helped fuel the stock-market boom that preceded the great crash of 1929. Paragraph 3: The money that the Fed created “…was going increasingly into stock-market speculation rather than into production of real wealth.”
343, paragraph 2: “In the United States credit was diverted from production to speculation, and increasing amounts of funds were being drained from the economic system into the stock market, where they circulated around and around, building up the prices of securities…In other countries, funds tended to flow to the United States where they could expect to roll up extraordinary earnings in capital gains in a relatively short time.”
349, paragraph 4: Britain goes off the gold standard and leaves France holding millions in pound sterling. The amount of gold lost was “…equal to about 30 percent of her foreign exchange holdings…The loss exceeded the total capital and surplus of the Bank of France. To avoid any similar experience in the future, France began to transfer her holdings of exchange into gold, much of it called from the United States.” The deflationary effects of losing gold were again offset by pumping money into the economy. It didn’t matter “…gold exports and gold hoarding continued…” (Note to self: Emphasis added…who would want to be the person holding a receipt for gold when the government officially declares the receipt will not be honored?)
350, paragraph 1: “…the American banking system began to collapse…From February 1st to March 4th the Federal Reserve Bank of New York lost $756 million in gold; it called in $709 million from other Federal Reserve Banks, which were also subject to runs.” Paragraph 2: “The banks of the whole United States were closed by executive order on March 4th to be reopened after March 12th if their condition was satisfactory.” U.S. citizens were not only told that they couldn’t convert their dollars into gold, they were informed that private holding of gold was now illegal. “… Washington left gold in 1933 voluntarily in order to follow an unorthodox financial program of inflation.” Note to self: I believe the bankers intentionally destroyed the gold standard. Why? Because it’s far more advantageous to create limitless piles of debt-money out of thin air than it is to be hindered by the limits of gold.
351, paragraph 1: The Thomas Amendment of 1933 “…gave the president the power to devaluate the dollar up to 50 percent, to issue up to $3 billion in fiat money, and to engage on an extensive program of public spending.”
**358, paragraph 3, example of using government to monopolize: Ivar Kreuger, the “Match King,” bribes governments with loans to secure monopolies. He created a holding company and “…sold millions of dollars worth of securities with no voting rights, while control was exercised through a small bloc of voting stock held by Kreuger and Toll. By granting loans to the governments of various countries, Kreuger obtained match monopolies which brought in substantial sums. In all, £330 million was lent to governments in this way…In return Kreuger obtained control of 80 percent of the worlds match industry, most of Europe's paper and wood-pulp production, fourteen telephone and telegraph companies in six countries, a considerable part of the farm-mortgage systems of Sweden, France and Germany, eight iron-ore mines, and numerous other enterprises, including a considerable group of banks and newspapers in various countries. The whole system was financed in a sumptuous fashion by selling worthless and fraudulent securities to investors through the most prominent investment bankers of the world. In all, about $750 million in such securities was sold, about one-third in the United States."
362, paragraph 2, Depression-era controls implemented to “help” continue long after the depression ends: “The recovery from depression after 1933 did not result in any marked reduction in the restrictions and controls which the depression had brought to commercial and financial activity. Since these controls had been established because of the depression, it might have been expected that such controls would have been relaxed as the depression lifted. Instead, they were maintained and, in some cases, extended.”
**364 – 365: The “atomistic world structure” of sovereign states no longer practical, integration of smaller states into large continental blocs “inevitable.”
370, paragraph 2: Britain controls inflation by forcing citizens to save and by using subsidies
375 – 405: International Socialism
**Paragraph 4: “The basic division within the Socialist movement after 1848 was between those who wished to abolish or reduce the functions of the state and those who wished to increase these functions by giving economic activities to the state. The former division came in time to include the anarchists and the syndicalists, while the latter division came to include the Socialists and the Communists. In general, the (anarchists) believed that man was innately good and that all coercive power was bad, with public authority the worst form of such coercive power. All of the world’s evil, according to the anarchists, arose because man’s innate goodness was corrupted and distorted by coercive power. The remedy, they felt, was to destroy the state….The simplest way to destroy the state, they felt, would be to assassinate the chief of the state; this would act as a spark to ignite a wholesale uprising of oppressed humanity…These views led to numerous assassinations of various political leaders, including a king of Italy and a president of the United States, in the period 1895 – 1905.”
Paragraph 4: “The second group wished to widen the power and scope of governments by giving them a dominant role in economic life…the group divided into two chief schools: the Socialists and the Communists…The strict interpreters of Karl Marx came to be known as Communists, while the more moderate revisionist group came to be known as Socialists.”
378, paragraph 2, Historical / Hegelian dialectic: “Marx derived from Hegel what has come to be known as the ‘historical dialectic.’ This theory maintained that all historical events were the result of a struggle between opposing forces which ultimately merged to create a situation which was different from either. Any existing organization of society or of ideas (thesis) calls forth, in time, an opposition (antithesis). These two struggle with each other and give rise to the events of history, until finally the two fuse into a new organization (synthesis).”
379, paragraph 2: Marx “…believed that ‘all history is the history of class struggles.’ …Each privileged group arises from opposition to an earlier privileged group, plays its necessary role in historical progress, and is, in time, successfully challenged by those it has been exploiting.”
Paragraph 3: Marx believed that the working masses would inevitably revolt and that their revolution would inevitably be successful. He believed that the exploitive class (the bourgeoisie) would continue to consolidate their wealth and power, taking more and more, until the working class was reduced to mere subsistence. “Eventually, the bourgeoisie would become so few and the proletariat would become so numerous that the latter could rise up in their wrath and take over the instruments of production and…society.”
380, paragraph 3: “In fact, the picture which Marx had drawn of more and more numerous workers reduced to lower and lower standards of living by fewer and fewer exploitative capitalists proved to be completely erroneous in the more advanced industrial countries in the twentieth century. Instead, what occurred could be pictured as a cooperative effort by unionized workers and monopolized industry to exploit unorganized consumers by raising prices higher and higher to provide both higher wages and profits. This whole process was advanced by the actions of governments which imposed such reforms as eight-hour days, minimum-wage laws, or compulsory accident, old age, and retirement insurance on whole industries at once. As a consequence, workers did not become worse off but became much better off with the advance of industrialism in the twentieth century.”
381, paragraph 3: “All these developments were quite contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx. Where he had expected impoverishment of the masses and concentration of ownership, with a great increase in the number of workers and a great decrease in the number of owners, with a gradual elimination of the middle class, there occurred instead (in highly industrialized countries) rising standards of living, dispersal of ownership, a relative decrease in the numbers of laborers, and a great increase in the middle classes.” The problem became “…not the exploitation of laborers by capitalists, but the exploitation of unorganized consumers (of the professional and lower-middle-class levels) by unionized labor and monopolized managers acting in concert.”
385, paragraph 2: The Bolshevik Revolution
386, paragraph 2: “On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik group seized the centers of government in St Petersburg …”
Paragraph 3: “The Bolsheviks had no illusions about their position in Russia at the end of 1917. They knew that they formed an infinitesimal group in that vast country and that they had been able to seize power because they were a decisive and ruthless minority among a great mass of persons who had been neutralized by propaganda. There was considerable doubt about how long this neutralized condition would continue. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were convinced, in obedience to Marxist theory, that no real Socialist system could be set up in a country as industrially backward as Russia. And finally, there was grave doubt if the Western Powers would stand idly by and permit the Bolsheviks to take Russia out of the war or attempt to establish a Socialist economic system.”
387, Industry collapses in Russia , inflation runs rampant, famine kills millions, the secret police help keep the Bolsheviks in power: “By 1920, industrial production in general was about 13 percent of the 1913 figure. At the same time, paper money was printed so freely…that prices rose rapidly and the ruble became almost worthless. The general index of prices was only three times the 1913 level in 1917 but rose to more than 16,000 times that level by the end of 1920.” Crop yields fell from “…74 million tons of grain in 1916 to 30 million tons in 1919 and to less than 20 million tons in 1920.” Drought made losses even worse. Between 1920 and 1921, 5 million died.
Paragraph 2: “In the course of this chaos and tragedy, the Bolshevik regime was able to survive, to crush counterrevolutionary movements, and to eliminate foreign interventionists. They were able to do this because their opponents were divided, indecisive, or neutralized, while they were vigorous, decisive, and completely ruthless. The chief sources of Bolshevik strength were to be found in the Red army and the secret police, the neutrality of the peasants, and the support of the proletariat workers in industry and transportation. The secret police (Cheka) was made up of fanatical and ruthless Communists who systematically murdered all real or potential opponents.”
389, paragraph 2, Bolsheviks employ a system of war Communism: “As part of this system not only were all agricultural crops considered to be government property but all private trade and commerce were also forbidden; the banks were nationalized, while all industrial plants of over five workers and all craft enterprises of over ten workers were nationalized (1920). This system of extreme Communism was far from being a success, and peasant opposition steadily increased in spite of the severe punishments inflicted for violations…This culminated in peasant uprisings, urban riots, and a mutiny of the sailors at Kronstadt…Within a week a turning point was passed; the whole system of “War Communism” and of peasant requisitioning was abandoned in favor of a “New Economic Policy” of free commercial activity in agricultural and other commodities, with the reestablishment of the profit motive and of private ownership…As a result of these tactics, there was a dramatic increase in economic prosperity and in political stability. This improvement continued for two years, until, by late 1923, political unrest and economic problems again became acute…the approaching death of Lenin complicated these problems with a struggle for power among Lenin’s successors.”
391, paragraph 2: “In May 1922, Lenin had a cerebral stroke and, after a series of such strokes, died in January 1924. This long-drawn illness gave rise to a struggle, for control of the party and the state apparatus, within the party itself. This struggle, at first, took the form of a union of the lesser leaders against Trotsky (the second most important leader, after Lenin). But eventually this developed into a struggle of Stalin against Trotsky and, finally, of Stalin against the rest. By 1927 Stalin had won a decisive victory over Trotsky and all opposition.”
Paragraph 4, The communist party dominated the government: “…the fact that there was only one legal party and that elections to positions in the state were by ballots containing only one party, and even one name for each office, gave the party complete control of the state. This control was neither weakened nor threatened by a new constitution, of democratic appearance and form, which came into existence in 1936.”
392, paragraph 4 “By reestablishing a new monetary system based on gold, in which one of the new gold rubles was equal to 50,000 of the old, inflated paper rubles, a firm financial basis was provided for recovery…Agricultural production rose, commercial activities flourished, and the lighter industrial activities devoted to consumers’ goods began to recover. Distinctions of wealth began to reappear among the peasants…”
394, paragraph 2: “…Such a system might provide a high standard of living for the peasants, but it could never provide the highly industrialized basis necessary to support ‘Socialism in a single country.’”
Paragraph 3: “The new direction which Russia’s development took after 1927 and which we call ‘Stalinism’ is a consequence of numerous factors. Three of these factors were (1) the bloodthirsty and paranoiac ambitions of Stalin and his associates, (2) a return of Russia to its older traditions, but on a new level and a new intensity, and (3) a theory of social, political, and economic developments which is included under the phrase ‘Socialism in a single country.’”
396, paragraph 3, The Bolsheviks believed that, in order for communism to work in Russia , the country had to be “…industrialized at breakneck speed, whatever the waste and hardships, and must emphasize heavy industry and armaments rather than rising standards of living. This meant that the goods produced by the peasants must be taken from them…without any economic return, and that the ultimate in authoritarian terror must be used to prevent the peasants from reducing their level of production to their own consumption needs, as they had done in the period of ‘War Communism’ in 1918 – 1921…the first step required that the peasantry be broken by terror and reorganized from a capitalistic basis of private farms to a Socialistic system of collective farms…it was necessary to crush all kinds of foreign espionage, resistance to the Bolshevik state, independent thought, or public discontent. These must be crushed by terror so that the whole of Russia could be formed into a monolithic structure of disciplined proletariat who would obey their leaders with such unquestioning obedience that it would strike fear in the hearts of every potential aggressor.”
397, paragraph 2: “It should be…evident that a new regime, such as Bolshevism…would have no traditional methods of social recruitment or circulation of elites; these would be based on intrigue and violence and would inevitably bring to the top the most decisive, most merciless, most unprincipled, and most violent of its members.”
398, paragraph 1: “All peasants who resisted were treated with violence; their property was confiscated, they were beaten or sent into exile…many were killed. This process, known as ‘the liquidation of the kulaks’…affected five million kulak families. Rather than give up their animals to the collective farms, many peasants killed them. As a result, the number of cattle was reduced from 30.7 million in 1928 to 19.6 million in 1933, while, in the same five years, sheep and goats fell from 146.7 million to 50.2 million, hogs from 26 to 12.1 million, and horses from 33.5 to 16.6 million.”
400, paragraph 3: “The ordinary Russian had inadequate food and housing, was subject to extended rationing, having to stand in line for scarce consumers’ items or even to go without them for long periods, and was reduced to living, with his family, in a single room, or even…to a corner of a single room shared with other families. The privileged rulers and their favorites had the best of everything, including foods and wines, the use of vacation villas in the country…the use of official cars in the city, the right to live in old czarist palaces and mansions, and the right to obtain tickets to the best seats at the musical or dramatic performances. These privileges of the ruling group, however, were obtained at a terrible price: at the cost of complete insecurity, for even the highest party officials were under constant surveillance by the secret police and inevitably would be purged, sooner or later, to exile or to death.”
402, paragraph 2: “As public discontent and social tensions grew in the period of the Five-Year plans and the collectivization of agriculture, the use of spying, purges, torture, and murder increased out of all proportion…By the middle 1930’s the search for ‘saboteurs’ and for ‘enemies of the state’ became an all-enveloping mania which left hardly a family untouched. Hundreds of thousands were killed, frequently on completely false charges, while millions were arrested and exiled to Siberia or put into huge slave-labor camps. In these camps, under conditions of semi-starvation and incredible cruelty, millions toiled…Estimates of the number of persons (prior to 1941) vary from as low as two million to as high as twenty million. The majority of these prisoners had done nothing against the Soviet state or the Communist system, but consisted of relatives, associates, and friends of persons who had been arrested on more serious charges. Many of these charges were completely false, having been trumped up to provide labor in remote areas, scapegoats for administrative breakdowns, and to eliminate possible rivals in the control of the Soviet system…in a few cases, spectacular public trials were staged in which the accused, usually famous Soviet leaders, were berated and reviled, volubly confessed their own dastardly activities, and, after conviction, were taken out and shot.”
403, paragraph 2: “For every leader who was publicly eliminated…thousands were eliminated in secret. By 1939 all of the older leaders of Bolshevism had been driven from public life and most had died violent deaths, leaving only Stalin and his younger collaborators….”
**Paragraph 3: “Under Stalinism all Russia was dominated by three huge bureaucracies: of the government, of the party, and of the secret police…[Inside the factories] There were two networks of secret-police spies, unknown to each other, one serving the special department of the factory, while the other reported to a high level of the secret police outside. Most of these spies were unpaid and served under threats of blackmail or liquidation. Such ‘liquidations’ could range from wage reductions (which went to the secret police), through beatings or torture, to exile, imprisonment, expulsion from the party (if a member), to murder. The secret police had enormous funds, since it collected wage deductions from large numbers and had millions of slave laborers in its camps to be rented out, like draft animals on a contract basis, for state construction projects. Whenever the secret police needed more money it could sweep large numbers of persons, without trial or notice, into its wage deduction system or into its labor camps…”
404, paragraph 2: As an example of the system’s irrationality “…we might point out that policy was subject to sudden reversals, which not only were pursued with ruthless severity, but under which, once policy had shifted, those who had been most active in the earlier official policy were liquidated as saboteurs or enemies of the state for their earlier activities…”
410: Germans long for totalitarianism, fear the independent thought of too many choices
412, paragraph 3: Richelieu uses “divide and conquer” against the Germans: “Germany’s misfortunes culminated in the disasters of the seventeenth century when Richelieu, on behalf of France, used the internal problems of Germany in the Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648) to play off one group against another, ensuring that Habsburgs would never unify Germany, and dooming the Germanies to another two hundred years of disunity. Hitler, Bismarck, and even Kaiser William II could well be regarded as Germany’s revenge on France for Richelieu , Louis XIV, and Napoleon.”
414 - 415: Germans need status, are egocentric and narrow minded
416, paragraph 3: Bismarck divides Germans, plays them off one another: “By 1890, when he retired from office, Bismarck had built up an unstable balance of forces within Germany…His cynical and materialistic view of human motivations had driven all idealistic and humanitarian forces from the German political scene and had remodeled the political parties almost completely into economic and social pressure groups which he played off, one against another. The chief of these forces were the landlords (Conservative Party), the industrialists (National Liberal Party), the Catholics (Center Party), and the workers (Social Democratic Party)…Thus there existed a precarious and dangerous balance of forces which only a genius could manipulate. Bismarck was followed by no genius. The Kaiser, William II (1888 – 1918), was an incapable neurotic, and the system of recruitment to government service was such as to exclude any but mediocrities.”
418, paragraph 3: Weimar Republic, there was no real revolution in Germany post ww1: “The essence of German history from 1918 to 1933 can be found in the statement There was no revolution in 1918. For there to have been a revolution it would have been necessary to liquidate the Quartet or, at least, subject them to democratic control. The Quartet represented the real power in German society because they represented the forces of public order (army and bureaucracy) and of economic production (landlords and industrialists).”
419, paragraph 3: “…many Germans were satisfied with the creation of a government which was democratic in form and made little effort to examine the underlying reality…”
424, paragraph 3: “The chief weaknesses of the constitution were the provisions for proportional representation and other provisions, by articles 25 and 48, which allowed the president to suspend constitutional guarantees and rule by decree, in periods of ‘national emergency.’ As early as 1925 the parties of the Right were planning to destroy the republic by the use of these powers.”
427, paragraph 3: “The Quartet were secretly strengthened and consolidated by reorganization of the tax structure, by utilization of government subsidies, and by the training of rearrangement of personnel. Alfred Hugenberg, the most violent and irreconcilable member of the Nationalist Party, built up a propaganda system through his ownership of scores of newspapers and controlling interest in Ufa, the great motion-picture corporation. By such avenues as this, a pervasive propaganda campaign…sought to show that all Germany’s problems and misfortunes were caused by the democratic and laboring groups, by the internationalists, and by the Jews.”
430, paragraph 3: A deflationary policy is enacted by presidential decree and this essentially marked “the end of the Weimar Republic.”
431, paragraph 1: “Bruning’s policy of deflation was a disaster. The suffering of the people was terrible, with almost eight million unemployed out of twenty-five million employable.”
Paragraph 2: “In the crisis of 1929 – 1933, the bourgeois parties tended to dissolve to the profit of the extreme Left and the extreme Right. In this the Nazi Party profited more than the Communists…”
432, paragraph 2: The presidential election of 1932 “…offered a fantastic sight of a nominally democratic republic forced to choose its president from among four antidemocratic, anti-republican figures of which one (Hitler) had become a German citizen only a month previously by a legal trick.” Hindenburg wins the election and puts Von Papen in as Chancellor.
433, paragraph 2: After feeling that he’d taught Hitler a lesson, Papen arranged for Hitler to be put in power “as the figurehead of a Right government…” The deal was “sealed in an agreement made at the home of the Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schroder, on January 4, 1933.”
434, paragraph 1: “The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave Hitler the first real motivation of his life. He became a superpatriot, joined the Sixteenth Volunteer Bavarian Infantry, and served on the front for four years. In his own way he was an excellent soldier…Although his relations with his superiors were excellent…he was never promoted beyond Private, First Class, because he was incapable of having any real relationships with his fellow soldiers…” After the war, “…he stayed with the army and eventually became a political spy for the Reichswehr, stationed near Munich . In the course of spying on the numerous political groups in Munich , Hitler became fascinated by the rantings of Gottfried Feder against the ‘interest slavery of the Jews.’”
435, paragraph 2: “…Hitler became convinced that he must come to power by legal methods rather than by force; he broke with Ludendorff and ceased to be supported by the Reichswehr; he began to receive his chief financial support from the industrialists…Hitler formed a new armed militia (the SS) to protect himself against Rohm’s control of the old militia (the SA).”
436, paragraph 1: Hitler and his supporters weren’t seeking to create a mass movement in the early years. “That did not come until 1930…in January 1932 came one of his greatest triumphs when he spoke for 3 hours to the Industrial Club of Dusseldorf and won support and financial contributions from that powerful group. By that date he was seeking to build his movement into a mass political party capable of sweeping him into office.”
437, paragraph 2: In July of 1932, by presidential decree, Papen was appointed commissioner of Prussia and immediately replaced the Prussian parliamentary Cabinet with his own men. (Nazis had been forbidden from holding power in Prussia, but no longer.) After some additional maneuvering, Hermann Goring was given control of the police administration. The Nazis already controlled the national police powers through Wilhelm Frick. “Thus Hitler, by February 7th had control of the police powers both of the Reich and of Prussia.”
438, paragraph 2: “The day following the fire, (February 28th, 1933) Hindenburg signed a decree suspending all civil liberties and giving the government power to invade any personal privacy, including the right to search private homes or confiscate property. At once all Communist members of the Reichstag, as well as thousands of others, were arrested…”
439, paragraph 4: “A decree of April 7th gave the Reich government the right to name a governor of each German state. This was a new official empowered to enforce the policies of the Reich government even to the point of dismissing the state governments, including the prime ministers, diets, and the hitherto irremovable judges. This right was used in each state to make a Nazi governor and a Nazi prime minister…the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich…”
440, paragraph 1: “Finally, on July 14th 1933, the Nazi Party was declared to be the only recognized party in Germany.”
442, paragraph 2: A power struggle between Hitler’s Nazis and the SA leadership prompted Hitler to call a meeting of SA leaders for June 30, 1934. “The SS, under Hitler’s personal command, arrested the SA leaders in the middle of the night and shot most of them at once. In Berlin , Goring did the same to the SA leaders there. Both Hitler and Goring also killed most of their personal enemies... In all, several thousands were eliminated in this ‘blood purge.’”
443, paragraph 2: In return for Hitler destroying the threat of the SA “…the army permitted Hitler to become president following Hindenburg’s death in August. By combining the offices of president and chancellor, Hitler obtained the president’s legal right to rule by decree, and obtained as well the supreme command of the army…From this time on, in the minds of the Reichswehr and the bureaucracy, it was both legally and morally impossible to resist Hitler’s orders.”
448, paragraph 1, The Nazi party established its own system to circumvent the normal bureaucracy: “More important was the influence of party terrorism, through the SA, the SS, and the secret police (Gestapo). Even more important was the growth, outside of the bureaucracy, of a party organization which countermanded and evaded the decisions and actions of the regular bureaucracy. The regular police were circumvented by the party police; the regular avenues of justice were bypassed by the party courts; the regular prisons were eclipsed by the party’s concentration camps.”
451, paragraph 2, The Nazis didn’t want laborers to pick up any Marxist ideas: “As a result, the Nazi system sought to control the ideas and the organization of labor” as well as the worker’s leisure time... “For this reason, it was not sufficient merely to smash the existing labor organizations. This would have left labor free and uncontrolled and able to pick up any kind of ideas. Nazism, therefore, did not try to destroy these organizations but to take them over. Al the old unions were dissolved into the German Labor Front….This Labor Front was a party organization and its finances were under control of the party treasurer…”
452, paragraph 4: “Business hates competition. Such competition might appear in various forms: (a) price; (b) for raw materials; (c) for markets; (d) potential competition (creation of new enterprises in the same activity); (e) for labor. All these make planning difficult, and jeopardize profits. Businessmen prefer to get together with competitors so that they can cooperate to exploit consumers to the benefit of profits instead of competing with each other to the injury of profits. In Germany this was done by three kinds of arrangements: (1) cartels, (2) trade associations, and (3) employers’ associations. The cartels regulated prices, production, and markets. The trade associations were political groups organized as chambers of commerce or agriculture. The employers’ associations sought to control labor.”
453 – 454, discusses the policies that protected cartels in Nazi Germany and aided their expansion
456, paragraph 3, discusses the structure of the Nazi Party: “At the head of the party was the Fuhrer; then came about twoscore Reichsleiter; below these was the party hierarchy, organized by dividing Germany into 40 districts each under a Gauleiter; each district was subdivided into circles of which there were 808, each under a Kreisleiter; each Kreis was divided into chapters, each under an Ortsgruppenleiter; these chapters were divided into cells and subdivided into blocks under Zellenleiter and Blockleiter. The Blockleiter had to supervise and spy on 40 to 60 families; the Zellenleiter had to supervise 4 to 8 blocks (200 to 400 families); and the Ortsgruppenleiter had to supervise a town or district of up to 1,500 families through his 4 to 6 Zellenleiter.”
462 – 464: How the British government regularly violates “conventions” it claims to respect
464, paragraph 4, discusses the difference between the classes and the masses: “Britain was regarded as divided into two groups the ‘classes’ and the ‘masses.’ The ‘classes’ were the ones who had leisure. This meant that they had property and income. On this basis, they did not need to work for a living; they obtained an education in a separate and expensive system; they married within their own class, they had a distinctive accent; and, above all, they had a distinctive attitude. This attitude was based on the training provided in the special educational system of the ‘classes.’”
465, paragraph 2: “This educational system was based on three great negatives, not easily understood by Americans. These were (a) education must not be…aimed at assisting one to make a living; (b) education is not aimed directly at creating or training the intelligence; and (c) education is not aimed at finding the ‘Truth.’ On its positive side, the system of education of the ‘classes’…aimed at developing a moral outlook, a respect for traditions, qualities of leadership and cooperation, and above all, perhaps, that ability for cooperation in competition summed up in the English idea of ‘sport’ and ‘playing the game.’” These attitudes “did not necessarily apply to foreigners or even to the masses. They applied to people who ‘belonged,’ and not to all human beings.”
468, paragraph 4: Members in British Parliament can’t possibly know much about the bills they vote on, but that’s OK because “Voting in Parliament is on strict party lines, and members are expected to vote as their party whips tell them to, and are not expected to understand the contents of the bills for which they are voting.”
469, paragraph 3: “The Commons, rather than a legislative body, is the public forum in which the party announces the decisions it has made in secret party and Cabinet meetings and allows the opposition to criticize in order to test public reactions.”
470, paragraph 3: “…Britain, until 1945, was the world’s greatest plutocracy.”
471, paragraph 2: “In national politics the suffrage was wide and practically unrestricted, but the upper classes possessed a right to vote twice…Members of Parliament were, for years, restricted to the well-to-do by the expenses of office and by the fact that Members of Parliament were unpaid.”
**472, paragraph 3: “…the ordinary voter in Britain, in 1960 as in 1900, was offered a choice between parties whose programs and candidates were largely the creations of two small self-perpetuating groups over which he (the ordinary voter) had no real control.”
474 – 475: Nepotism and Cronyism in British government
476, paragraph 3: “Because of its working-class basis, the Labour Party was generally short of funds.”
477, paragraphs 2 and 3: Expensive private schools referred to as “public schools” in Britain
Paragraph 4: “The educational system of Britain has been the chief bottleneck by which the masses of the people are excluded from positions of power and responsibility. It acts as a restriction because the type of education which leads to such positions is far too expensive for any but an insignificant fraction of Englishmen to be able to afford it.”
478, paragraph 2: “The use of educational restrictions as a method for reserving the upper ranks of the civil service to the well-to-do was clearly deliberate and was, on the whole, successful in achieving the purpose intended.”
479, paragraph 1: “The clergy of the Established Church represented the same social class…the upper ranks of the clergy were named by the government, and the lower acquired their appointments by purchase.”
486, paragraph 2: Officials of the Foreign Office, four days before an election, issue a fake letter (supposedly written by communists) to scare voters into voting for Conservatives. It worked.
489, paragraph 6: During the financial crisis of the early 1930’s, the Labour Party had very little power, while the bankers held all the cards. “As for the bankers they were in control throughout the crisis. While publicly they insisted on a balanced budget, privately they refused to accept balancing by taxation and insisted on balancing by cuts in relief payments. Working in close cooperation with American bankers and Conservative leaders, they were in a position to overthrow any government which was not willing to crush them completely.”
**491, paragraph 3: “The police of London, with jurisdiction over one-sixth the population of England, were reorganized in 1933 to destroy their obvious sympathy with the working classes. This was done by restricting all ranks above inspector to persons with an upper-class education, by training them in a newly created police college, and by forbidding them to join the Police Federation (a kind of union).
493, paragraph 4, the public is deceived: “…Samuel Hoare replaced the Liberal, Sir John Simon, at the Foreign Office, to make people believe that the past program of appeasement would be reversed. In September, Hoare made a vigorous speech at Geneva in which he pledged Britain’s support of collective security to stop the Italian aggression against Ethiopia . The public did not know that he had stopped off in Paris en route to Geneva to arrange a secret deal by which Italy would be given two-thirds of Ethiopia .”
499, paragraph 2: “Although this situation is changing slowly, the inner circle of English financial life remains a matter of ‘whom one knows,’ rather than ‘what one knows.’ Jobs are still obtained by family, marriage, or school connections; character is considered far more important than knowledge or skill; and important positions, on this basis, are given to men who have no training, experience, or knowledge to qualify them.”
501, paragraph 1, “Financial capitalism in Britain, as elsewhere, was marked not only by a growing financial control of industry but also…by an increasing banking control of government. As we have seen, this influence of the Bank of England over the government was an almost unmitigated disaster for Britain. The power of the bank in business circles was never as complete as it was in government, because British business remained self-financing to a greater extent than those of other countries.” Note to self: If the bankers control the government, then they also control regulation. If that doesn’t amount to “power in business circles” then nothing does.
502, paragraph 2, Note to self on gold standard / financial capitalists: Quigley repeats his belief that the bankers lost their dominant position when they “went off gold.” Once again, I question his understanding of the current debt-money system. As it stands, bankers “create” every single dollar that exists. They then “loan” those created dollars into the economy, earning interest on the entire money supply. They can also create bubbles and then pop them (making a fortune on the way up, then buying up assets at pennies on the dollar during the crash), direct the flow of money to favored interests (corporate / government / non-profit organizations), manipulate interest rates and economic activity…seems to me that the “financial capitalists” are still at the top of the financial food chain. Additionally, there is the issue of the same powerful people being involved in the giant, competition-killing industries.
**503, paragraph 1, monopoly capitalists intentionally destroy productivity to keep prices high: “The old monopolies and cartels increased in strength and new ones were formed, usually with the blessing of the government. These groups enforced restrictive practices on their members and on outsiders even to the extent of buying up and destroying productive capacity in their own lines….By economic and social pressure individuals who refused to adopt the restrictive practices favored by the industry as a whole were forced to yield or were ruined.”
507, In exchange for making loans to a business, banks acquire sufficient stock to appoint their own men to the board of directors of the borrower’s business (gaining control.)
508, paragraph 2: “By methods such as these, a highly centralized financial capitalism was built up in Germany. The period begins with the founding of the Darmstadter Bank in 1853. This was the first bank to establish a permanent, systematic control of the corporations it floated. It also was the first to use promotion syndicates (in 1859). Other banks followed this example, and the outburst of promotion reached a peak of activity and corruption in the four years 1870 – 1874. In these four years, 857 stock companies with 3.3 billion marks of assets were floated, compared to 295 companies with 2.4 billion in assets in the preceding nineteen years.”
510, paragraph 3: “The beginnings of monopoly capitalism in Germany goes back…before the First World War. As early as 1870 the financial capitalists, using direct financial pressure as well as their system of interlocking directors, were working to integrate enterprise and reduce competition. In the older lines of activity, such as coal, iron, and steel, they tended to use cartels. In the newer lines, like electrical supplies and chemicals, they tended to use great monopolistic firms for this purpose.”
511, paragraph 2: “Similar concentration existed in most other lines of economic activity…In 1943, one firm (United Steel Works) produced 40 percent of all German steel production, while 12 firms produced over 90 percent. Competition could never exist with concentration as complete as this, but in addition the steel industry was organized into a series of steel cartels (one for each product). These cartels…had control of 100 percent of the German output of ferrous metal products…These cartels managed prices, production, and markets within Germany, enforcing their decisions by means of fines or boycotts…It is very likely that the steel industry of Germany in 1937 was controlled by no more than five men of whom Flick was the most important.”
512, paragraph 1, I.G. Farben: “It had been said that Germany could not have fought either of the world wars without I.G. Farben…This company by the Second World War was the largest enterprise in Germany. It had over 2.3 billion reichsmarks in assets and 1.1 billion in capitalization in 1942…It had interests in about 700 corporations outside Germany and had entered into over 500 restrictive agreements with foreign concerns.”
513, paragraph 2: The Kilgore Committee of the United States Senate in 1945 decided, after a study of captured German records, that I.G. Farben and United Steel Works together could dominate the whole Germany industrial system. Since so much of this domination was based on personal friendships and relationships, on secret agreements and contracts, on economic pressures and duress as well as on property and other obvious control rights, it is not something which can be demonstrated by statistics.”
515, paragraph 1, West Germany: “…the West German currency reform of 1950…encouraged investment and offered entrepreneurs the possibility of large profits from the state’s tax policies. The whole developed into a great boom when the establishment of the European Common Market of seven western European states offered Germany a mass market for mass production just as the rebuilding of German industry was well organized. The combination of low wages, a docile labor force, new equipment, and a system of low taxes on producers, plus the absence of any need for several years to assume the expense of defense expenditures, all contributed to make German production costs low on the world’s markets and allowed Germany to build up a flourishing and profitable export trade. The German example was copied in Japan and in Italy, and, on a different basis, in France…”
516, paragraph 2: “In the course of the nineteenth century, a second group was added to French banking circles. This second group, largely Jewish, was also of non-French origin, the majority Germanic (like Rothschild, Heine, Fould, Stern, and Worms )…A rivalry soon grew up between the older Protestant bankers and the newer Jewish bankers. This rivalry was largely political rather than religious…”
**517, paragraph 5: “…the greatest private bankers, like the Rothschilds or Mallets, had intimate connections with governments and relatively weak connections with the economic life of the country. It was the advent of the railroad in the period 1830 – 1870 which changed this situation. The railroads required capital far beyond the ability of any private banker to supply from his own resources. The difficulty was met by establishing investment banks, deposit banks, saving banks, and insurance companies which gathered the small savings of a multitude of persons and made these available for the private banker to direct wherever he thought fitting. Thus the private banker became a manager of other persons’ funds rather than a lender of his own….He now controlled billions where formerly he had controlled millions, and he did it unobtrusively, no longer in the open in his own name, but…concealed from public view by the plethora of financial and credit institutions which had been set up to tap private savings. The public did not notice that the names of the private bankers and their agents still graced the list of directors of the new financial enterprises.”
520, paragraph 2: Private banks, not the Bank of France, were the center of economic power in France. “There were over a hundred of these private banks, but only about a score were of significance, and even in this restricted group two (Rothschild and Mirabaud) were more powerful than all the others combined. These private banks…acted as the High Command of the French economic system. Their stock was closely held in the hands of about forty families, and they issued no reports on their financial activities. They were, with a few exceptions, the same private banks which had set up the Bank of France.”
**521, paragraph 3: “…the investment banks…were dominated by two banks.” (One set up by the Rothschilds and another set up by a rival.) “These investment banks supplied long-term capital to industry, and took stock and directorships in return. Much of the stock was resold to the public, but the directorships were held indefinitely for control purposes…The control was frequently made easier by the use of nonvoting stock, multiple-voting stock, cooptative directorships, and other refinements of financial capitalism.”
523, paragraph 2: “Outside the banking system which we have sketched, the French economy was organized in a series of trade associations, industrial monopolies, and cartels. These were usually controlled by the Catholic-Protestant block of private bankers, since the Jewish group continued to use the older methods of financial capitalism while their rivals moved forward to the more obvious methods of monopoly capitalism.”
525, paragraph 2: “The whole Paribas system in the twentieth century was headed by the Baron Edouard de Rothschild, but the active head was Rene Mayer, manager of the Rothschild bank and nephew by marriage of James Rothschild. The chief center of operations for the system was in the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, which was managed, until 1937, by Horace Finaly of a Hungarian-Jewish family brought to France by Rothschild in 1880. From this bank was ruled much of the section of the French economy controlled by this block. Included in this section were many foreign and colonial enterprises, utilities, ocean shipping, airlines, shipbuilding and, above all, communications. In this latter group were….Havas and Hachette.”
527, paragraph 3: “Price competition, which to an American always has seemed to be the first, and even the only, method of economic rivalry, has, in Europe, generally been regarded as…a method so mutually destructive as to be tacitly avoided by both sides. In fact, in France, as in most European countries, competing economic groups saw nothing inconsistent in joining together to use the power of the state to enforce joint policies of such groups toward prices and labor.”
528, paragraph 3: The European Common Market is established in 1957
**529, paragraph 4: “By the 1880s the techniques of financial capitalism were well developed in New York and northern New Jersey, and reached levels of corruption which were never approached in any European country. This corruption sought to cheat the ordinary investor by flotations and manipulations of securities for the benefit of ‘insiders.’ Success in this was its own justification, and the practitioners of these dishonesties were as socially acceptable as their wealth entitled them to be, without any animadversions on how that wealth had been obtained.”
530, paragraph 2: “Any reform of Wall Street practices came from pressure from the hinterlands, especially from the farming West, and was long delayed by the close alliance of Wall Street with the two major political parties…The influence of Morgan in the Republican Party was dominant, his chief rivalry coming from the influence of a monopoly capitalist, Rockefeller of Ohio…the Rockefeller family (shifted) from the monopoly fields of petroleum to New York banking circles by way of the Chase National Bank. Soon family as well as financial alliances grew up among the Morgans, Whitneys, and Rockefellers, chiefly through Payne and Aldrich family connections.”
531, paragraph 2: More on the Rockefeller Group
***532, paragraph 2: “The economic power represented by these figures is almost beyond imagination to grasp, and was increased by the active role which these financial titans took in politics.”
533, paragraph 2: FDR and the “New Deal”
536, paragraph 1, “A rising standard of living, except in its earliest stages, does not involve any increase in consumption of necessities but instead involves an increase in the consumption of luxuries…As average incomes rise, people do not, after a certain level, eat more and more black bread, potatoes, and cabbage, or wear more and more clothing. Instead, they replace black bread with wheaten bread and add meat to their diet and replace coarse clothing by finer apparel…”
539, paragraph 4: “The concentration of control was inevitable in the long run…in highly industrialized countries, the economic systems were dominated by a handful of industrial complexes. The French economy was dominated by three powers (Rothschild, Mirabaud, and Schneider); the German economy was dominated by two (I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahl Werke); the United States was dominated by two (Morgan and Rockefeller).”
540, paragraph 1, as power shifts from group to group “the concentration of control becomes greater.” Also says that Morgan yielded gracefully.
545, paragraph 3, capital creation equals capital destruction: “The creation by investment, for example, of shipyards for making iron-hull steam vessels not only created this new capital but at the same time destroyed the value of the existing yards equipped to make wooden-hull sailing ships. In the past, new investment was made in only one of two cases: (a) if an old investor believed that the new capital would yield sufficient profit to pay for itself and for the old investment now made obsolete, or (b) if the new investor was completely free of the old one, so that the latter could do nothing to prevent the destruction of his existing capital holdings by the new investor.”
**547, paragraph 4, not using productive capacity and / or destroying goods to fight falling prices: “The destruction of goods will close the deflationary gap by reducing the supply of unsold goods through lowering the supply of goods to the level of the supply of purchasing power. It is not generally realized that this method is one of the chief ways in which the gap is closed in a normal business cycle. In such a cycle, goods are destroyed by the simple expedient of not producing the goods which the system is capable of producing.” In 1930 – 1934, failing to match 1929 output levels “…represented a loss of goods worth $100 billion in the United States, Britain, and Germany alone. This loss was equivalent to the destruction of such goods.” (Note to self: I disagree…it would be more costly to first produce and then destroy than to simply not produce.) “Destruction of goods by failure to gather the harvest is a common phenomenon under modern conditions, especially in respect to fruits, berries, and vegetables. When a farmer leaves his crop of oranges, peaches, or strawberries unharvested because the selling price is too low to cover the expense of harvesting, he is destroying the goods. Outright destruction of goods already produced is not common, and occurred for the first time as a method of combating depression in the years 1930 – 1934. During this period, stores of coffee, sugar, and bananas were destroyed, corn was plowed under, and young livestock was slaughtered to reduce the supply on the market.”
548, paragraph 4: “…ideas on the role of government spending in combating depression have been formally organized into the ‘theory of the compensatory economy.’ This theory advocates that government spending and fiscal policies be organized so that they work exactly contrary to the business cycle, with lower taxes and larger spending in a deflationary period and higher taxes with reduced spending in a boom period, the fiscal deficits of the down cycle being counterbalanced in the national budget by the surpluses of the up cycle.”
549, paragraph 3: “Public spending as a method of counteracting depression can vary very greatly in character, depending on the purposes of the spending. Spending for destruction of goods or for restriction of output, as under the early New Deal agricultural program, cannot be justified easily in a democratic country with freedom of communications, because it obviously results in a decline in national income and living standards. Spending for nonproductive monuments is somewhat easier to justify but is hardly a long-run solution. Spending for investment in productive equipment is obviously the best solution, since it leads to an increase in national wealth and standards of living and is a long-run solution…” (Note to self: What about when it distorts the pricing and productive structure in the economy? What happens when it creates unsustainable jobs and too much “product” for existing demand? Do we then destroy the excess goods, or just lay the people off and stop producing? If the latter, what about all of the industries that have grown up around the artificially created demand? Why even entertain the idea of a “government-managed economy” when, in the end, it always leads to excess waste regardless of which way it is being “managed”? It seems the only people who truly profit from this approach are politically and financially well-connected special interests. They cash in while citizens pick up the tab.)
Paragraph 4: “A program of public expenditure on armaments is a method for filling the deflationary gap and overcoming depression because it adds purchasing power to the market without drawing it out again later (since the armaments, once produced, are not put up for sale.) From an economic point of view, this method of combating depression is not much different from…destruction of goods, for, in this case also, economic resources are diverted from constructive activities or idleness to production for destruction.”
559, paragraph 2, the aggressor’s of 1931 – 1941 were attempting to “…brutalize men into a mass of unthinking atoms whose reactions could be controlled by methods of mass communication and directed to increase the profits and power of an alliance of militarists, heavy-industrialists, landlords, and psychopathic political organizers recruited from the dregs of society.”
560, paragraph 2: “The methods of mass propaganda offered by the press and the radio provided the means by which these individuals could be reached and mobilized; the determination of the militarists, landlords, and industrialists to expand their own power and extend their own interests even to the destruction of society itself provided the motive; the world depression provided the occasion. The materials (frustrated men in the mass), the methods (mass communications), and the occasion (the depression) were all available by 1931.”
564: Japanese military assassinates civilians in Japan, militarists unite with industrialists “All their acts, they said, were in the name of the emperor, for the glory of Japan, to free the nation from corruption…”
574, paragraph 1, British dual policy: “On this basis was erected one of the most astonishing examples of British ‘dual’ policy in the appeasement period. While publicly supporting collective security and sanctions against Italian aggression, the government privately negotiated to destroy the League and to yield Ethiopia to Italy. They were completely successful in this secret policy.”
**581,paragraph 2, the Round Table Group and its role in World War 2: “This group wielded great influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table…and it dominated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called ‘Chatham House’…the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford. This Round Table Group formed the core of the three-block-world supporters, and differed from the anti-Bolsheviks…in that they sought to contain the Soviet Union between a German-dominated Europe and an English-speaking bloc rather than to destroy it as the anti-Bolsheviks wanted.”
**582, paragraph 3: “Ultimately, the inner circle of this group arrived at the idea of the ‘three-block world.’ It was believed that this system could force Germany to keep the peace (after it absorbed Europe) because it would be squeezed between the Atlantic bloc and the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union could be forced to keep the peace because it would be squeezed between Japan and Germany. This plan would work only if Germany and the Soviet Union could be brought into contact with each other by abandoning to Germany Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Polish Corridor. This became the aim of both the anti-Bolsheviks and the three-block people from the early part of 1937 to the end of 1939 (or even early 1940). These two cooperated and dominated the government in that period.”
584, paragraph 2: The government worked to scare its citizens away from the idea of confronting Germany by “…steadily exaggerating Germany’s armed might and belittling their own, by calculated indiscretions (like the statement in September 1938 that there were no real antiaircraft defenses in London) by constant hammering at the danger of an overwhelming air attack without warning, by building ostentatious and quite useless air-raid trenches in the streets and parks of London, and by insisting through daily warnings that everyone must be fitted with a gas mask immediately (although the danger of a gas attack was nil).”
590, paragraph 2, Spanish military wastes / steals millions: “The army was the poorest in Europe and relatively the most expensive. There was a commissioned officer for every six men and a general for every 250 men. The men were miserably underpaid and mistreated, while the officers squandered fortunes. The Ministry of War took about a third of the national budget, and most of that went to the officers. Money was wasted or stolen, especially in Morocco, in lumps of millions at a time for the benefit of officers and monarchist politicians.”
591, paragraph 2: “While other peoples expressed turbulent outburst of antigovernmental feeling in attacks on prisons, post offices, banks, or radio stations, the Spaniards invariably burn churches, and have done so for at least a century.”
594, paragraph 4: Mussolini throws his support behind revolution in Spain
599, Britain violates international law, aids Spanish rebels
**602, paragraph 3, more British dual policy: “Although the evidence for Axis intervention in Spain was overwhelming and was admitted by the Powers themselves early in 1937, the British refused to admit it and refused to modify the nonintervention policy…Britain’s attitude was so devious that it can hardly be untangled, although the results are clear enough. The chief result was that in Spain a Left government friendly to France was replaced by a Right government unfriendly to France and deeply obligated to Italy and Germany. The evidence is clear that the real sympathies of the London government favored the rebels, although it had to conceal the fact from public opinion in Britain (since this opinion favored the Loyalists over Franco by 57 percent to 7 percent, according to a public-opinion poll of March 1938)”
603, paragraph 1: “The nonintervention agreement, as practiced, was neither an aid to peace nor an example of neutrality, but was clearly enforced in such a way as to give aid to the rebels and place all possible obstacles in the way of the Loyalist government suppressing the Rebellion.”
608, paragraph 4, Social Democrats reform social welfare in Vienna: “The Social Democrats in control of the city and state of Vienna embarked upon an amazing program of social welfare. The old monarchical system of indirect taxes was replaced by a system of direct taxes which bore heavily on the well-to-do. With an honest, efficient administration and a balanced budget, the living conditions of the poor were transformed.”
609, paragraph 2: “By 1933 they had built almost 60,000 dwellings, mostly in huge apartment houses…These were built so efficiently that the average cost per apartment was only about $1,650 each…the average rent was less than $2.00 per month. Thus the poor of Vienna spend only a fraction of their income for rent, less than 3 percent, compared to the 25 percent in Berlin and about 20 percent in Vienna before the war.”
610, paragraph 1: “This project failed in 1929…As a result, it became necessary to use illegal methods, a task which was carried out by Seipel’s successor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in 1932 – 1934.”
611: “The Heimwehr militia would attack the Socialists in the industrial parts of the cities…and the Christian Socialist government would then suppress the Social Democrats for these ‘disorders.’ After one such affair, Dollfuss appointed the Heimwehr leader, Ernst Fey, as state secretary (later minister)…with command of all the police in Austria….Fey at once prohibited all meetings except by the Heimwehr. From that point on, the police systematically raided and destroyed Social Democrat and labor-union property-‘searching for arms,’ they said.”
612, paragraph 2: “Dollfuss ruled by decree, using a law of the Habsburg Empire of 1917…The first decrees ended all meetings, censored the press, suspended local elections, created concentration camps, wrecked the finances of the city of Vienna by arbitrary interference with tax collections and expenditures, wrecked the supreme constitutional court to prevent it from reviewing the government’s acts, and reestablished the death penalty. These decrees were generally enforced only against the Social Democrats and not against either the Nazis or the Heimwehr, who were reducing the country to chaos.”
613, paragraph 1: “Dollfuss outlawed the Nazis, arrested their leaders, and deported Hitler’s ‘Inspector General for Austria.’ The Nazi Party went underground but continued its outrages…”
614, paragraph 2: “A new constitution was declared, under the emergency economic decree power of 1917…”
615, paragraph 2: “…corruption spread through the government until finally a point was reached where, as Starhemberg put it, ‘No one knew whom he could trust…’ Outrages by the Nazis increased…to the point where bombings were averaging fifteen a day. On July 12th, by decree, the government fixed the death penalty for such bombings. The Nazis threatened a Putsch at the first such sentence…This first sentence was carried out on July 24th…(July 25th) About 1:00 P.M. 154 Nazis in eight trucks rushed into the chancellery without a shot being fired. They at once murdered Dollfuss and locked themselves in. Another group of Nazis seized the radio station of Vienna and announced a new government with Rintelen as chancellor.”
617, paragraph 3: “The secret documents published since 1945 make it quite clear that Germany had no carefully laid plan to annex Austria, and was not encouraging violence by the Nazis in Austria. Instead, every effort was made to restrict the Austrian Nazis to propaganda in order to win places in the Cabinet and a gradual peaceful extension of Nazi influence…To be sure, wild men on the lower levels of the Nazi Party in Germany were encouraging all kinds of violence in Austria, but this was not true of the real leaders.”
618, paragraph 2: “The invasion of Austria as early as March 12, 1938, and the immediate annexation of Austria were a pleasant surprise, even for the Nazi leaders in Germany…the decision to invade was not made before March 10, 1938, and even then was conditional, while the decision to annex was not made until noon on March 12 by Hitler personally and was unknown to both Ribbentrop and Goring as late as 10:30 P.M. on March 12th.”
619, paragraph 4: “In the meantime the British government, especially the small group controlling foreign policy, had reached a seven-point decision regarding their attitude toward Germany. (1) Hitler Germany was the front-line bulwark against the spread of Communism in Europe (2) A four-Power pack of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany…was the ultimate aim…(3) Britain had no objection to German acquisition of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig (4) Germany must not use force to achieve its aims in Europe…with patience, Germany could get its aims without using force (5) Britain wanted an agreement with Germany restricting the numbers and the use of bombing planes (6) Britain was prepared to give Germany colonial areas in south-central Africa, including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola if Germany would renounce its desire to recover Tanganyika…and if Germany would sign an international agreement to govern with due regard for the rights of the natives, an ‘open –door’ commercial policy, and under some mechanism of international supervision like the mandates (7) Britain would use pressure on Czechoslovakia and Poland to negotiate with Germany and to be conciliatory to Germany’s desires.”
620, paragraph 4: “To these seven points we should add an eighth: Britain must rearm in order to maintain its position in a ‘three-block world’ and to deter Germany from using force in creating its block in Europe.”
621, paragraph 3: “…the British government could not publicly admit to its own people these ‘seven points’ because they were not acceptable to British public opinion. Accordingly, these points had to remain secret, except for various ‘trial balloons’ issued through The Times, in speeches in the House of Commons or in Chatham House, in articles in The Round Table and by calculated indiscretions to prepare the ground for what was being done. In order to persuade the British people to accept these points, one by one…the British government spread the tale that Germany was armed to the teeth and that the opposition to Germany was insignificant.”
630, paragraph 4, Hitler shifts gears and decides to attack Czechoslovakia: “This draft was entirely rewritten by Hitler and signed on May 30, 1938. Its opening sentence then read, ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.’ It then went on to say that in case of war with Czechoslovakia, whether France intervened or not, all forces would be concentrated on the Czechs in order to achieve an impressive success in the first three days. The general strategic plan based on this order provided that forces would be transferred to the French frontier only after a ‘decisive’ blow against Czechoslovakia . No Provision was made for war against the Soviet Union…and all regular forces were to be withdrawn from East Prussia in order to speed up the defeat of the Czechs.”
631, paragraph 1: “X-day was set for October 1st, with deployment of troops to begin on September 28th.”
**Paragraph 2: “These orders were so unrealistic that the German military leaders were aghast…the reality was so different from Hitler’s picture of it that Germany would be defeated fairly readily in any war likely to arise over Czechoslovakia. All their efforts to make Hitler see the reality were completely unsuccessful and, as the crisis continued, they became more desperate until, by the end of August, they were in a panic.”
631, paragraph 3, the German generals tried to talk Hitler out of his plans, but when they were unsuccessful “The generals and several important civil leaders then formed a conspiracy led by General Ludwig Beck (chief of the General Staff)…Their plot had three stages in it: (1) to exert every effort to make Hitler see the truth; (2) to inform the British of their efforts and beg them to stand firm on the Czechoslovak issue and to tell the German government that Britain would fight if Hitler made war on Czechoslovakia; (3) to assassinate Hitler if he nevertheless issued the order to attack Czechoslovakia. Although message after message was sent to Britain in the first two weeks of September…the British refused to cooperate. As a result, the plan was made to assassinate Hitler as soon as the attack was ordered.”
634, paragraph 2, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the British government, under Chamberlain, continued to intentionally deceive its citizens into believing Germany was far too strong to resist and that Czechoslovakia could not be saved.
635, paragraph 1: “In general, every report or rumor which could add to the panic and defeatism was played up, and everything that might contribute to a strong or united resistance to Germany was played down.”
638, paragraph 5: “Benes resigned as president of Czechoslovakia under the threat of a German ultimatum on October 5th…The Soviet alliance was ended and…The anti-Nazi refuges from the Sudetenland were rounded up by the Prague government and handed over to the Germans to be destroyed….Germany was supreme in central Europe, and any possibility of curtailing that power either by a joint policy of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union and Italy or by finding any openly anti-German resistance in central Europe itself was ended. Since this was exactly what Chamberlain and his friends had wanted, they should have been satisfied.”
641, paragraph 5: Hitler’s “real nature” and ambitions become clear to the British public, making the sale of “appeasement” nearly impossible.
643, paragraph 3, Britain’s “dualistic policy” with Germany: “…there were not only two policies, but two groups carrying them out. The Foreign Office under Lord Halifax tried to satisfy the public demand for an end to appeasement and the construction of a united front against Germany. Chamberlain with his own personal group…sought to make secret concessions to Hitler in order to achieve a general Anglo-German settlement on the basis of the seven points. The one policy was public; the other was secret. Since the Foreign Office knew of both, it tried to build up the ‘peace front’ against Germany…to satisfy public opinion in England and to drive Hitler to seek his desire by negotiation…so that public opinion in England would not force the government to declare a war…”
646, paragraph 4, in spite of concessions “…Hitler was thirsting for war, and replied to every concession with a new bombshell which disturbed British public opinion once more. In November 1938 the Germans engaged in several days of sustained atrocities against the Jews, destroying their property, razing their temples, assaulting their persons, and concluded by imposing on the Jews of Germany a collective fine or assessment of one billion reichsmarks. This was followed by a series of laws excluding the Jews from the economic life of Germany.”
648, paragraph 6, Hitler decides to attack Poland: “If the chief purpose of the unilateral guarantee to Poland was to frighten Germany, it had precisely the opposite effect. On hearing of it, Hitler made his decision: to attack Poland by September 1” 1939.
**654, paragraph 4: “The negotiations for an Anglo-Russian agreement were opened by Britain on April 15th, probably with the double purpose of satisfying the demand in Britain and warning Hitler not to use force against Poland. The first British suggestion was that the Soviet Union should give unilateral guarantees to Poland and Romania similar to those given by Britain . The Russians probably regarded this as a trap to get them into a war with Germany in which Britain would do little or nothing or even give aid to Germany. That this last possibility was not completely beyond reality is clear from the fact that Britain did prepare an expeditionary force to attack Russia in March 1940, when Britain was technically at war with Germany but was doing nothing to fight her.”
657, paragraph 4, Hitler’s false-flag attack, blamed on Poland: “…Hitler was determined on war. Most of his attention in the last few days was devoted to manufacturing incidents to justify his approaching attack. Political prisoners were taken from concentration camps, dressed in German uniforms, and killed on the Polish frontier as ‘evidence’ of Polish aggression.”
**661, paragraph 2, the effects of total war: “The total nature of the Second World War can be seen from the fact that deaths of civilians exceeded deaths of combatants and that many of both were killed without any military justification, as victims of sheer sadism and brutality, largely through cold-blooded savagery by Germans, and, to a lesser extent, by Japanese and Russians, although British and American attacks from the air on civilian populations and on non-military targets contributed to the total. The distinctions between civilians and military personnel and between neutrals and combatants, which had been blurred in the First World War, were almost completely lost in the second. This is clear from a few figures. The number of civilians killed reached 17 million, of which 5.4 million were Polish; while Poland had less than 100,000 soldiers killed or missing in the Battle of Poland in 1939, Polish civilians to the number of 3.9 million were executed, or murdered in the ghetto, subsequently.”
703, paragraph 3: In November of 1940 “…Germany offered the Soviet Union a worldwide division of spheres of influence among the aggressor states: Italy would take North and East Africa; Germany would take western Europe, western and central Africa; Japan could have Malaya and Indonesia; while the Soviet Union could have Iran and India; Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union would pursue a cooperative policy in the Near East to free Turkey from its British connections and obtain for Russia freer access to the Mediterranean…”
**710, paragraph 3, FDR violates “the constitutional precedent against a third term” as president and promises to keep the U.S. out of the war. “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
711, paragraph 3: “As events turned out, Germany’s declaration of war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack saved the United States from the need to attempt something which American public opinion would never have condoned – an attack on Germany after we had been attacked by Japan.”
717, paragraph 2: Quigley’s bias against “anti-war isolationists” becoming progressively more obvious.
718, paragraph 1, Churchill wanted “…some statement of preference for a long-range postwar plan for an international organization to replace the League of Nations.” Roosevelt preferred “..an immediate postwar system based on police action by the few Great Powers, or even by a simple Anglo-American partnership. At any rate, Roosevelt was too reluctant to rouse the unsleeping dogs of isolationism to allow the Atlantic Conference to issue any public statement on international organization.”
721: The Nazi’s attack Soviet Russia (1941 – 1942)
735, paragraph 3, U.S. sanctions prior to Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Note to self: Contrary to what Quigley suggests, the McCollum memo provides evidence that U.S. policy was meant to provoke a Japanese attack.” From Wikipedia: The McCollum memo “…recommended an eight-part course of action for the United States to take in regards to the Japanese Empire…suggesting the United States provoke Japan into committing an ‘overt act of war’. The memo illustrates several people in the Office of Naval intelligence promoted the idea of goading Japan into war: ‘It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado…If by [the elucidated eight-point plan] Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.” Additionally, on page 919, paragraph 2, Quigley again asserts that Pearl Harbor was a “total surprise,” despite conceding that the “…United States had available all the Japanese coded messages, knew that war was about to begin, and that a Japanese fleet with at least four large carriers was loose (and lost) in the Pacific...” He says anyone who claims that “Roosevelt expected and wanted Pearl Harbor” has based their beliefs on “gigantic ignorance…about the nature of intelligence.” I think Quigley might have suffered a bout of “gigantic ignorance” regarding the nature of realpolitik and FDRs desire for a pretext to enter ww2.)
738, paragraph 2, Japanese decide to attack Malaysia and Indonesia to obtain needed resources for war.
741, paragraph 3, Quigley admits that U.S. leaders had broken secret Japanese codes and knew that war was imminent if the economic embargo was not lifted. However, he claims the U.S. did not “…have any details of the Japanese military plans…and they did not realize that these plans included an attack on Pearl Harbor.”
742, paragraph 2, “mistakes” abound leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor: “On November 27th a war warning was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness….The Japanese attack force…of six carriers with 450 planes escorted by two battleships, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, twenty regular submarines, and five midget submarines” traveled in “…complete radio silence and without encountering any other vessels” until it reached its “275 miles north of Pearl Harbor. From that point, at 6:00 A.M. on December 7, 1941, was launched an air strike of 360 planes, including 40 torpedo planes, 100 bombers, 130 dive-bombers, and 90 fighters. The five midget submarines…were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were able to enter because the antitorpedo net was carelessly left open after 4:58 A.M. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at 3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54 after one had been attacked and sunk.”
Paragraph 3: “About the same time, an army enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming down from the north 132 miles away, but his report was disregarded…the Japanese fleet was not found after the attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction through an error in interpretation.”
743, paragraph 1, the Japanese attacked other targets on December 7th – 10th, but “…carelessness by higher officers transformed the defenders’ situations from critical to hopeless...”
**744, paragraph 4, However, less than 5 months after the attack (mid April 1942) the US government suddenly gains access to Japanese war plans: “During this period of the war the United States had amazingly correct information regarding Japanese war plans. Some of this came from our control of Japanese codes, but much of the most critical intelligence came from other sources which have never been revealed.” (emphasis added)
751, paragraph 4: “The controversy over unconditional surrender is based on the belief that the expression itself is largely meaningless and had an adverse influence…”
752, paragraph 1: “…the demand for unconditional surrender was incompatible with earlier statements that we were fighting the German, Japanese, and Italian governments rather than the German, Japanese, and Italian peoples and that this demand, by destroying this distinction, to some extent solidified our enemies and prolonged their resistance, especially in Italy and Japan, where opposition to the war was widespread and active. Even in Germany the demand for unconditional surrender discouraged those more moderate and peace-loving Germans…”
755, paragraph 3: “…at what was called the Arcadia Conference (December 22, 1941 – January 14,
1942)…Roosevelt presented…a public ‘Declaration of the United Nations.’ This document declared that the twenty-six signatory states were fighting ‘to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.”
756, paragraph 2: U.S. favors admitting China as a “Great Power”
757, paragraph 2 “In Moscow there was fear that the West wished to protract the war in order to bleed both Germany and the Soviet Union to death. It was feared that this end could be obtained if American supplies to Russia were placed at a level sufficiently high to keep Russia fighting but insufficiently high to allow her to defeat Hitler.” (Note to self: I’m guessing that they realized the Stalinist / Communist system would do a fine job of destroying Russia.)
769, paragraph 2: “While the military efforts of the Anglo-Americans were, in full public view, passing from victory to victory in the early months of 1943, a very ominous situation had arisen behind the scenes in respect to their relations with the Soviet Union…The decision in Moscow seems to have been that the Anglo-American Powers could not be trusted and that the Soviet Union must seek to endure its postwar security by creation of a series of satellite and buffer states on its western frontier…these points of view gave rise to the Polish crisis of May 1943.”
**770, paragraph 5, the Soviet led Katyn Massacres: “The Katyn massacres were a subject of controversy for years. Today there is no doubt…that these victims, numbering 4,243, met their deaths by being shot through the back of the neck in the early spring of 1940 and not August 1941 (or later), when the area was in German possession. This evidence…clearly indicates Soviet guilt...There is much other evidence showing Soviet guilt in this affair, but it must not be forgotten that both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were determined to exterminate all Polish leaders and the Polish nation by reducing the leaderless Poles to the status of slave laborers and that Germany also would have killed these Polish officers if they had captured them, since the Germans did exterminate 4,000,000 Poles in this way during the war. Although the number of bodies at Katyn was less than 5,000, the number of officers murdered was almost twice this figure, the rest, apparently, having been drowned in the White Sea.”
**786, paragraph 4, attempted assassination of Hitler with briefcase bomb: “…success seemed near when Colonel Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg…made his daily report to Hitler, and left the conference without picking up his briefcase, which rested against the leg of Der Fuhrer’s chair…When the bomb exploded, Stauffenberg gave the signal for the military units in Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere to seize control of these areas from the fanatical Nazi SS units.”
**792, paragraph 2, Stalin’s plan for establishing a western “buffer of states” under Communist control: “The technique to be used to get Communist control over these states was similar to that used by Hitler in Austria: (1) to establish a coalition government containing Communists; (2) to get in Communist hands the ministries of Defense (the army), Interior (the police), and, if possible, Justice (the courts); (3) to use administrative decrees to take over education and the press and to cripple opposition political parties; and (4) to establish, finally, a completely Communist regime, under the protection of Soviet military forces if necessary.”
794, paragraph 4, Russians betray Polish underground forces: “Polish ministers hurried from London to Moscow to negotiate. While they were still talking there, and when the Soviet Army was only six miles from Warsaw , the Polish underground forces in the city, at a Soviet invitation, rose up against the Germans. A force of 40,000 responded to the suggestion, but the Russian armies stopped their advance and obstructed supplies to the rebels, in spite of appeals from all parts of the world. On October 3, 1944, after sixty-three days of hopeless fighting, the Polish Home Army had to surrender to the Germans. This Soviet treachery removed the chief obstacle to Communist rule in Poland…”
**797, paragraph 2, Nazi desperation and brutality: “By September 1943, no objective person in Germany could expect a German victory; by September 1944, every German military leader saw that defeat was imminent. Yet the Nazi hierarchy and its jackal collaborators, isolated from reality by their obsessive delusions, only increased the violence of their insane frenzies. This violence was turned increasingly inward in a determination to destroy everything in one vast holocaust if Hitler’s New Order could not be achieved. Efforts to destroy entirely those peoples, such as Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and the ‘politically unreliable,’ who were special targets of the Nazi psychosis, were accelerated…Eager subordinates worked overtime to slaughter the emaciated prisoners in concentration camps before the whole system collapsed.”
798, paragraph 3: “…95 percent of the total bombs dropped on Germany in the war fell after January 1943.”
799, paragraphs 1 and 2, lists Douhet’s claims.
802, paragraph 3, Douhet’s theory of “total collapse of civilian morale under minimal aerial bombardment” fails; slaughter of civilians ensues: “The British effort to break German civilian morale by area night bombing was an almost complete failure. In fact, one of the inspiring and amazing events of the war was the unflinching spirit under unbearable attack shown by ordinary working people in industrial cities. This was as true in Russia (in Moscow and above all in Leningrad) as it was in German or Britain (above all in the dock areas of East London.)”
803, paragraph 1: “Nevertheless, the supply of oxygen could not keep up with the combustion, and great layers of carbon monoxide settled in the shelters and basements, killing the people huddled there. Those who tried to escape through the streets were enveloped in flames as if they were walking through the searing jet of a blowtorch…No final figures for the destruction were possible until 1951, when they were set by German authorities at 40,000 dead (including 5,000 children), 250,000 houses destroyed (about half the city), with over 1,000,000 persons made homeless. This was the greatest destruction by air attacks on a city until the fire raid on Tokyo of March 9, 1945, which still stands today as the most devastating air attack in human history.”
806, paragraph 3, Hitler and his new wife commit suicide “With Russian shells falling about the Chancellery, he married Eva Braun, ordered Goring and Himmler arrested for treachery, and drew up a ‘Political Testament’ which blamed the war and all Germany’s misfortunes on the Jews…On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, with the Russian soldier only a block away, Eva Braun took poison and Hitler shot himself through the mouth. Subordinates, in accord with their instructions, flooded the bodies with gasoline and burned them in a Russian shellhole in the Chancellery garden.”
807, paragraph 1, Germany surrenders
815, paragraph 3, fire bombing of Tokyo kills more people than the atomic bomb: “On March 9th, 1945…1,900 tons of fire bombs, were sent on a low-level attack on Tokyo. The result was the most devastating air attack in all history. With a loss of only 3 planes, 16 square miles of central Tokyo were burned out; 250,000 houses were destroyed, over a million persons were made homeless and 84,793 were killed. This was more destructive than the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima five months later.”
820, paragraph 4, despite a cost of $2 billion and involvement of about 150,000 people, the atomic bomb was built in secrecy: “After September 1942, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, U.S.A., was in charge of the whole project and, in an atmosphere of fanatical secrecy, brought it to a successful conclusion with an expenditure of about $2 billion and the work of about 150,000 persons.”
822, paragraph 1, 12 pounds of plutonium yields the explosive force of 35 million pounds of TNT: “At the scene, General Thomas F. Farrell said to General Groves, ‘The war is over,’ but the scientists, stricken with horror at their success in releasing a force equivalent to 17,500 tons of TNT from about 12 pounds of plutonium, had had a glimpse of hell.”
823, paragraph 6, lists the plans for postwar Germany
827, paragraph 2, World War 2 body count: “Thus ended six years of world war in which 70 million men had been mobilized and 17 million killed in battle. At least 18 million civilians had been killed.”
837, paragraph 2, using “rationalization” to deal with problems: “It is a method of dealing with problems and processes in an established sequence of steps, thus: (1) isolate the problem; (2) separate it into its most obvious stages or areas; (3) enumerate the factors which determine the outcome desired in each stage or area; (4) vary the factors in a conscious , systematic, and (if possible) quantitative way to maximize the outcome desired in the stage or area concerned; and (5) reassemble the stages or areas and check to see if the whole problem or process has been acceptably improved in the direction desired.” (Note to self: Plenty of emphasis on effecting “desired” change, not much emphasis – not any emphasis – on “moral” considerations.)
838, paragraph 2: “…rationalization gradually spread into the more dominant problem of business. From maximizing production, it shifted to maximizing profits. This gave rise to ‘efficiency experts’ such as Frederick Winslow Taylor (whose The Principles of Scientific Management appeared in 1911) and, eventually, to management consultants, like Arthur D. Little, inc. ”
840, paragraphs 2 and 3, government and university relationships: In 1940, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Vannevar Bush) “…persuaded President Roosevelt to create a National Defense Research Committee with Bush as chairman. The twelve members served without pay, and consisted of two each from the army, the navy, and the National Academy of Sciences, with six others. Bush named Frank B. Jewett, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories and the NAS; Karl T. Compton, president of MIT; James B. Conant, president of Harvard; Richard C. Tolman, of California Institute of Technology; and others. They set up headquarters at the Carnegie Institution and Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard Byzantine research center in Washington .”
841, paragraph 2: “The NDRC in its first year gave over two hundred contracts to various universities, and thus established the pattern of relations between government and the universities which still exists. In that first year it spent only 6.5 million, but in the six years 1940 – 1946 it spent almost $454 million…In May 1941 a higher and wider organization was created, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with Bush as chairman and Conant as his deputy…These groups were the supreme influence in America in introducing rationalization and science into government and war in 1940 – 1946, fostering hundreds of new technical developments and inventions, including the atom bomb. One of their earliest acts was to make a census of research facilities and a National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel (with 690,000 names); they did not hesitate to call upon the services of both as needed. When money ran short, they found it from private sources, as in June 1941, when, simply by asking, they obtained half a million dollars from MIT and an equal sum from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to pay salaries when congressional appropriations ran short.”
842, paragraph 4: “A great impetus has been given to the rationalization of society…by the application of mathematical methods to society to an unprecedented degree…The newest of these was probably game theory, worked out by a Hungarian refugee mathematician, John von Neumann, at the Institute for Advanced Study. This applied mathematical techniques to situations in which persons sought conflicting goals in a nexus of relationships governed by rules. Closely related to this were new mathematical methods for dealing with decision-making.”
843, paragraph 1: “These, and related techniques, are now transforming methods of operation and behavior in all aspects of life and bringing on a large-scale rationalization of human life which is becoming one of the most significant characteristics of Western Civilization in the twentieth century.” (Note to self: So, we learn on 837, paragraph 3, that rationalization naturally leads to “dehumanization” and an automated system of control. Now we learn that all of human life is to be “rationalized.” …I’m guessing there isn’t a lot of room for “free-thinking individuals” in a game theory based, rationalization-organized society.)
**848, paragraph 3, The atom bomb was a great scientific achievement, but it was not needed to win the war: “Its contribution to victory was secondary, since it had nothing to do with the victory over Germany and, at most, shortened the war with the Japanese only by weeks.” (emphasis added)
848 + covers a great deal of information regarding the creation of the atom bomb
855, paragraph 1 “Since copper for electrical connections was in such short supply, 14,000 tons of silver from the Treasury reserve of American paper money was secretly taken from the Treasury vaults (although still carried publicly on the Treasury balance sheets) and made into wiring for the Y-12 plant. From this plant came much of the U-235 used in the Hiroshima A-bomb.”
856, paragraph 4, secrecy surrounding the atom bomb: “For security reasons General Groves ‘compartmentalized’ the work, and allowed only about a dozen persons to see the project as a whole. Consequently, the vast majority of those working on the project were not allowed to know what they were really doing or why, and this lack of perspective greatly delayed the solution of problems. The whole project of about 150,000 persons were segregated from their fellow citizens; all communications were cut off or censored; and the project was overrun with guards and security officials who did not hesitate to eavesdrop, read mail, monitor telephones, record conversations, and isolate individuals. These activities significantly delayed American achievement of the atom bomb without achieving their ostensible purpose, since there is no evidence either that the three enemy Powers could have made the bomb or that Russia’s making of the bomb was significantly delayed by General Grove’s extreme degree of secrecy.”
862, paragraph 2, justifying the use of the atom bomb: “Some people, like General Groves, wanted it to be used to justify the $2 billion they had spent. A large group sided with him because the Democratic leaders in Congress had authorized these expenditures outside proper congressional procedures and had cooperated in keeping them from almost all members of both houses by concealing them under misleading appropriation headings. Majority Leader John W. McCormack (later Speaker) once told me, half joking, that if the bomb had not worked he expected to face penal charges….Jack Madigan said: ‘If the project succeeds, there won’t be any investigation. If it doesn’t, they won’t investigate anything else.’ Moreover, some air-force officers were eager to protect the relative position of their service in the postwar demobilization and drastic reduction of financial appropriations by using a successful A-bomb drop as an argument that Japan had been defeated by air power rather than by naval or ground forces.”
***866, paragraph 2, experts will replace the role of the voter: "...it is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace...the democratic voter in control of the political system. ...Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even though these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) ...But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives...he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits."
**867, paragraph 1, total war: “…old international law was based on a number of sharp rational distinctions which no longer exist; these include the distinction between war and peace, the rights of neutrals, the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, the nature of the state, and the distinction between public and private authority. These are now either destroyed or in great confusion. We have already seen the obliteration of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants and between neutrals and belligerents brought on by British actions in World War 1….These kinds of actions continued in World War 2 with the British night-bombing effort aimed at destroying civilian morale by the destruction of workers’ housing…and the American fire raids against Tokyo. It is generally stated in American accounts of the use of the first atom bomb that target planning was based on selection of military targets, and it is not generally known even today that the official orders from Cabinet level on this matter specifically said ‘military objectives surrounded by workers’ housing.’ The postwar balance of terror reached its peak of total disregard both of noncombatants and of neutrals in the policies of John Foster Dulles, who combined sanctimonious religion with ‘massive retaliation wherever and whenever we judge fit’ to the complete destruction of any noncombatant or neutral status.”
875, paragraph 1, cobalt bomb: “…a madman such as Hitler might decide to destroy the human race as revenge for the frustration of his insane ambitions. This could be done in a number of ways, of which the simplest would be to encase a large number of thermonuclear bombs in thick layers of cobalt; the ensuing fallout of radioactive cobalt 60 could extinguish all animal life on earth (excluding most plants, insects, and other invertebrates).”
876, paragraph 2, first Soviet atom bomb and hydrogen bomb
877, paragraph 3, largest Soviet bomb was 58 megatons (Note to self: If I’m doing my math right, that’s equal to 116 BILLION pounds of TNT)
878, paragraph 1, “…the State Department engaged in what Dulles himself called, in January 1956, ‘going to the brink’ of war. This policy sought to…base our strategy and our foreign policy on the threat that any Soviet advance of any kind anywhere of which we disapproved would be stopped by our ‘massive retaliation’ with all-out nuclear attack anywhere we judged appropriate, on a unilateral (without consultation with our allies) and on a ‘first–strike’ basis (that is, we would do this even if the Soviet Union had not attacked us and had not used nuclear weapons). This policy was hopelessly irresponsible and not only alienated allies (such as France) and neutrals (such as India), but could not be used, since we would never adopt such suicidal and ineffective tactics to reply to a Communist local advance in Korea, southeast Asia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Yugoslavia, or most other places on the periphery of the Soviet bloc…The Dulles doctrine was not a doctrine of action but solely a doctrine of threats…”
880, paragraph 2, Quigley begins a pretty good tirade against “neo-isolationists…”
883, paragraph 3, air force special interests, not happy: “The German survey…did not, on the whole, support the claims of the air enthusiasts, but rather showed that the air-force contribution was much less than had been anticipated or hoped…”
**884, paragraph 2: “Accordingly, it became urgent for these two groups and their supporters to convince the country (1) that the atom bomb was not ‘just another’ weapon but was the final, ‘absolute,’ weapon; (2) that the atom bomb had been the decisive factor in the Japanese surrender; and (3) that nuclear weapons were fitted only for air-force use and could not be, or should not be, adapted for naval or ground-force use….All three points were largely untrue…but those who used them were defending interests, not truth.”
885, paragraph 2: “In spite of Oppenheimer’s exalted positions in 1947 – 1953, which included the directorship of the great Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (American copy of All Souls College at Oxford), there was a shadow on Oppenheimer’s past. In his younger and more naïve days he had been closely associated with Communists. Certainly never a Communist himself, and never, at any time, disloyal to the United States, he had, nonetheless, had long associations with Communists...At any rate, his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, and the latter’s wife were Communist Party workers in San Francisco at least from 1937 to 1941, while Oppenheimer’s own wife, whom he married in 1940, was an ex-Communist, widow of a Communist who had been killed fighting Fascism in Spain in 1937.”
888, paragraph 2, Russia in Germany: “We have already noted the Soviet subversion of Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria by native Communists returning from Russia under protection of the Soviet armies. The same thing occurred, but more gradually, in eastern Germany . There the Communists at first pretended to cooperate with any ‘anti-Fascist’ groups, but their unwillingness to cooperate with the Western Powers in the administration of Germany appeared almost at once. They gradually closed off their occupation zone and refused to carry out the earlier agreements to treat Germany as a single administrative and economic unit….East German food was drained to the Soviet Union. To prevent starvation of the West Germans, the United States and Britain had to send in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of food and other supplies.”
889, paragraph 2, little support for Russia in buffer states: “A third factor guiding Soviet behavior was the discovery that there was no mass support for Russia or for Communist ideology in eastern and central Europe, especially among the peasants, and that the buffer of Communist states along Russia’s western border would have to be built on force and not on consent. The governments of these states could be recruited from men of the respective nations who had been living in the Soviet Union for years under endless Communist indoctrination, but the unindoctrinated masses in each country would have to be held in bondage by Soviet military forces, at least until local Communist parties and local secret-police organizations subservient to Moscow’s orders could be built up. The urgent need for this, from the Kremlin’s point of view, was shown, when Austria and Hungary, although under Soviet military occupation, were permitted relatively free elections in November of 1945. Both resulted in sharp defeats for the local Communist parties.” (Note to self: Elite’s imposing their will on others via deception and outright force…this seems to be the underlying nature of all history.)
890, paragraph 3, economic aid to Russia
**893, paragraph 2, scientists concerned about the atomic bomb “Long before the test at Alamogordo, some of the nuclear scientists, spurred on once again by Szilard, were trying to warn American political leaders of the unique character of the dangers from this source. Centered in the Chicago Argonne Laboratories, this group wished to prevent the use of the bomb on Japan, slow up bomb (but not general nuclear) research, establish some kind of international control of the bomb, and reduce secrecy to a minimum. …the new President Truman soon set up an ‘interim’ Committee to give advice on nuclear problems. This committee…was dependent on its scientific members, Bush, Conant, and Karl T. Compton, for relevant facts or could call on its ‘scientific panel’ of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, and E. O. Lawrence for advice. All these scientists except Fermi were ‘official’ scientists, deeply involved in governmental administrative problems involving large budgets and possible grants to their pet projects and universities, and were regarded with some suspicion by the agitated, largely refugee, scientists in the Manhattan District laboratories. These suspicions deepened as the ‘official’ scientists recommended use of the bomb on Japan ‘near workers’ houses.’”
894, paragraph 2, the Atomic Energy Commission is a disappointment to the BAS scientists
896, paragraph 2, Soviet “pressure” on Tito and others “Even the friends of Russia suffered from Stalin’s pressure and his insistence that the Kremlin must remain the center for Communist decisions throughout the world. In Yugoslavia, where Tito was originally as anti-Western as Stalin himself, Moscow’s efforts to dominate Yugoslavia alienated Tito completely by a combination of economic, diplomatic, and propaganda pressure. The rivalry between the two Slavs came to a head at the end of 1947, when Tito tried to build up a non-Russian Communist bloc by signing friendship treaties with Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. By March 1948, a complete break between Belgrade and Moscow was reached. Tito took his place next to Trotsky in Stalin’s list of the damned, and the next few years were filled with efforts to overthrow Tito, and the purging of Tito sympathizers by Stalin’s cooperative jackals in the other Communist satellites.”
900, paragraph 2, Harry Dexter White and the plan to “…reduce Germany’s industry, and thus her warmaking capacity, as close to nothing as possible. The resulting chaos, inflation, and misery would be but slight repayment for the horrors Germany had inflicted on others over many years.”
905, paragraph 1, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung: “At first glance the Communist success in ejecting the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek from China does not seem to support these remarks, but it must be recognized that the Communist victory in China was not a victory for Stalin and was not regarded as one by Stalin himself. In fact, the victory of Mao Tse-tung in China was not encouraged, expected, or notably assisted by Moscow .”
907, paragraph 3, destruction of Chinese Juan from inflation, plus a typo “The printing of paper money from the government’s expenses continued until the Chinese paper dollar became almost valueless. In August 1948, a new yuan currency replaced the previous Chinese dollar at a rate of one yuan to $3 million, but the new money was decreased in value by deflation as the old had been. (Emphasis added, Note to self: Quigley must have meant “inflation.”)
909, paragraph 3, armed forces / vested interests fighting to defend their piece of the post war budget: “Truman could not get any constructive help from the leaders of the armed forces in establishing a new strategy (they were much too busy fighting each other in protection of the vested interests surviving from World War 2)…”
***911, paragraph 2: “Basically, rivalry among the American armed services was a rivalry for congressional appropriations, a struggle over slicing the annual budget. In this struggle each service sought to convince congressmen that its particular weapons provided the best defense for the United States.”
Paragraph 3: “In these struggles between the services, the clashes are particularly bitter in a period of demobilization, and this bitterness is accentuated by the fact that each service has alliances with the industrial complexes which supply their equipment. These complexes not only supply funds, such as advertising, for each service to carry its message to the Congress and the people, but also exert every influence to retain equipment and tactics in obsolescent modes and types (but newer models) by dangling, before the high officers who can influence contracts, offers of future well-paying consultant positions with the industrial firms concerned. Most high officers of the American armed forces in the war and postwar period retired before the fixed age of sixty-two, often on a disability basis (which exempted retirement pay from income taxes), and then took consultant jobs with industrial firms whose chief business was in war contracts.”
912, paragraph 2: “Thus, four-star general Brehon B. Somervell, chief of Army Service Forces in World War 2, retired on a disability salary of $16,000 a year at the age of fifty four to join a number of industrial firms, including Koppers, which paid him $125,000 a year.” (Note to self: Somervell retired in 1946. Using the government’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics inflation calculator, his tax-free disability payment of $16,000 in 1946 would equal $188,000 in the year 2012 and Kopper’s payment of $125,000 would equal $1,471,000 per year, for a combined total of $1,659,000 per year or $138,250 per month.) “…three-star general L.H. Campbell, chief of ordnance in World War 2, retired on disability at $9,000 per year and became an executive, at $50,000 a year, of firms from whom he had previously purchased $3 billion in armaments. Four-star General Clay retired at fifty-two on $16,000 a year, but signed up at once with General Motors and Continental Can at over $100,000 a year…”
916, paragraph 2, Communist influence in the United States: “Throughout this period, fear of communism was growing within the United States. The real threat, if any, behind this fear is still uncertain. The Soviet and Communist hatred of the American way of life is well established, and the existence of the American Communist Party as a wiling tool of an international Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow is also beyond dispute. Such Communists were undoubtedly engaged in subversion and espionage, and were assisted in these efforts by ‘fellow travelers’ and other sympathizers. Moreover, some Communists and fellow travelers were undoubtedly present in government and, to a greater degree, in some other areas, notably certain labor unions, higher education and especially in the more creative end of the entertainment field, such as the theater, writing, and Hollywood scenario production.”
918, “…anti-Communists, some of them professionals, tried to demonstrate that the CPUS, by its penetration into the Federal government under the New Deal, into labor unions or education, and into entertainment, especially Hollywood, had gravely endangered the nation. On the whole, from the perspective of decades, these charges, concerned with the period before 1945, seem grossly exaggerated….The influence of Communists, within or outside government, had been slight. It is, for example, almost impossible to find a single motion picture, book, or play which can be identified as having had influence in leading Americans to feel favorably toward a Communist system for this country.” (Note to self: What was it then, if not the main tenets of Socialism and Communism, that so drastically changed the accepted role of government in the United States? What suddenly made the idea of an ever-expanding and more-intrusive federal government palatable to U.S. citizens? …A central bank, income taxes, standing armies, centralized control of education, agriculture, destruction of property rights (asset forfeiture, abuse of eminent domain, etc.), blatant disregard of the Bill of Rights and Constitution, etc…Should we believe that all of these things just “happened” organically? In The Creature from Jekyll Island, Ed Griffin offers some insight on page 87: “The Fabians were an elite group of intellectuals who formed a semi-secret society for the purpose of bringing socialism to the world. Whereas Communists wanted to establish socialism quickly through violence and revolution, the Fabians preferred to do it slowly through propaganda and legislation. The word socialism was not to be used. Instead, they would speak of benefits for the people such as welfare, medical care, higher wages, and better working conditions. In this way, they planned to accomplish their objective without bloodshed and even without serious opposition. They scorned the Communists, not because they dislike their goals, but because they disagreed with their methods. To emphasize the importance of gradualism, they adopted the turtle as the symbol of their movement.”
921, paragraph 1: “Finally, it is evident that a great deal of nuclear information (whether secret or not is unknown), as well as uranium metal, went to the Soviet Union as part of Lend-Lease in 1943. Major George Racey Jordan, USAAF, tried in vain to disrupt these shipment at the time. While most of Jordan’s evidence is unreliable, the shipment of uranium to Russia is corroborated from other sources. The significance of such shipments is still unknown, since the export license permitting them was granted at the request of General Groves.” Note to self: General Groves, the same man who “was in charge of the whole [atomic bomb] project and [maintained] an atmosphere of fanatical secrecy” requested shipments of uranium be sent to our “sworn enemies” in Russia. Isn’t that interesting?
928, paragraph 4, Joseph McCarthy set out to prove “…that the State Department and the army were widely infiltrated with Communists and from the efforts of the neo-isolationists and the ‘China lobby’ to demonstrate that Mao conquest of China was entirely due to the treasonable acts of Communists and fellow travelers in the State Department and the White House.” (Note to self: Quigley refers to McCarthy as a power hungry “sadist.”)
934, paragraph 3, the “China Lobby” and Mao’s victory in China: “For a while, the new Administration tried to outdo McCarthy, chiefly by demonstrating in committee hearings that China had been ‘lost’ to the Communists because of the careful planning and intrigue of Communists in the State Department. The chief effort in this direction was done by a well-organized and well-financed ‘China Lobby’ radiating from the activities of Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy exporter who had had business interests in China . This group, with its allies, such as McCarthy, mobilized a good deal of evidence that Communists had infiltrated into various academic, journalistic, and research groups concerned with the Far East. But they failed to prove their contention that a conspiracy of these Communists and fellow travelers, acting through the State Department, had given China to Mao. Mao won out in China because of the incompetence and corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek, and he won out in spite of any aid the United States gave, or could give, to Chiang, because the latter’s regime was incapable of holding out against Mao, without drastic reforms, whatever the scale of American aid (without American military intervention to make war on Mao, which very few desired).
***935, paragraph 2: “There is considerable truth in the China Lobby’s contention that the American experts on China were organized into a single interlocking group which had a general consensus of a Leftish character. It is also true that this group, from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research or publication opportunities, could favor persons who accepted the established consensus and could injure, financially or in professional advancement, persons who did not accept it. It is also true that the established group, by its influence on book reviewing in The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Saturday Review, a few magazines, including the ‘liberal weeklies,’ and in the professional journals, could advance or hamper any specialist’s career. It is also true that these things were done in the United States in regard to the Far East by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this organization had been infiltrated by Communists, and by Communist sympathizers, and that much of this group’s influence arose from its access to and control over the flow of funds from financial foundations to scholarly activities. All these things were true, but they would have been true of any other areas of American scholarly research and academic administration in the United States…” Note to self: I wonder if Quigley’s open disgust for McCarthy and the “radical Right” and “neo-isolationists” blinded him to the weakness of his own argument. How can he admit that this group had a great deal of power, a specific agenda, and actually achieved what it hoped for, but then dismiss it all as a lucky break due to Chiang Kai-shek’s “incompetence?” I think the question of what Washington decided to with China answers itself.
936, paragraph 3, Tax-exempt foundations and Wall Street’s influence “Behind this unfortunate situation lies another, more profound, relationship, which influences matters much broader than Far Eastern policy. It involves the organization of tax-exempt fortunes of international financiers into foundations to be used for educational, scientific, ‘and other public purposes.’ Sixty or more years ago, public life in the West was dominated by the influence of ‘Wall Street.’ This term has nothing to do with its use by the Communists to mean monopolistic industrialism, but, on the contrary, refers to international financial capitalism deeply involved in the gold standard, foreign-exchange fluctuations, floating of fixed-interest securities and, to a lesser extent, flotation of industrial shares for stock-exchange markets.”
**937, paragraph 1 “This group, which in the United States, was completely dominated by J.P. Morgan and Company from the 1880’s to the 1930’s was cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern seaboard, high Episcopalian, and European-culture conscious. Their connection with the Ivy League colleges rested on the fact that the large endowments of these institutions required constant consultations with the financiers of Wall Street…and was reflected in the fact that these endowments, even in 1930, were largely in bonds rather than in real estate or common stocks. As a consequence of these influences, as late as the 1930’s, J. P. Morgan and his associates were the most significant figures in policy making at Harvard, Columbia, and to a lesser extent Yale, while the Whitneys were significant at Yale, and the Prudential Insurance Company (through Edward D. Duffield) dominated Princeton.”
***938,
paragraph 2: “More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate
the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy
to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach
the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate,
or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking
of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that
they could ‘blow off steam,’ and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and
possibly on their actions if they ever went ‘radical.’”
**939, paragraph 2: “The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man, only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England ’s foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. This new recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs.”
**940, paragraph 2: “The first editor of The New Republic, the well-known ‘liberal’ Herbert Croly, was always aware of the situation. After ten years in the job, he explained the relationship in the ‘official’ biography of Willard Straight which he wrote for a payment of $25,000. ‘Of course they [the Straights] could always withdraw their financial support if they ceased to approve of the policy of the paper; and, in that event, it would go out of existence as a consequence of their disapproval.’ Croly’s biography of Straight, published in 1924, makes perfectly clear that Straight was in no sense a liberal or a progressive, but was, indeed, a typical international banker and that The New Republic was simply a medium for advancing certain designs of such international bankers…The chief achievement of The New Republic, however, in 1914 – 1918 and again in 1938 – 1948, was for interventionism in Europe and support of Great Britain.” (emphasis added)
**945, paragraph 2: “The association between Wall Street and the Left, of which Mike Straight is a fair example, are really survivals of the associations between the Morgan Bank and the Left. To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow, and other partners were allied with Republicans; Russell C. Leffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont was allied with the Left…the multipartisan political views of the Morgan firm in domestic politics went back to the original founder of the firm, George Peabody (1795 – 1869).”
946, paragraph 4, “In 1951 the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the so-called McCarran Committee, sought to show that China had been lost to the Communists by the deliberate actions of a group of academic experts on the Far East and Communist fellow travelers whose work in that direction was controlled and coordinated by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The influence of the Communists in IPR is well established, but the patronage of Wall Street is less well known.”
947, paragraph 2, “…large sums of money each year were directed to private individuals for research and travel expenses…chiefly (from) the great financial foundations.”
Paragraph 3: “Most of these awards for work in the Far Eastern area required approval or recommendation from members of IPR. Moreover, access to publication and recommendations to academic positions in the handful of great American universities concerned with the Far East required similar sponsorship. And, finally, there can be little doubt that consultant jobs on Far Eastern matters in the State Department or other government agencies were largely restricted to IPR-approved people. The individuals who published, who had money, found jobs, were consulted, and who were appointed intermittently to government missions were those who were tolerant of the IPR line. The fact that all these lines of communication passed through the Ivy League universities or their scattered equivalents west of the Appalachians, such as Chicago, Stanford, or California , unquestionably went back to Morgan’s influence in handling large academic endowments.”
***950, paragraph 1: “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
950 – 956 discuses “the network” of roundtable groups and some of the more important players
paragraph 2: “One of the most interesting members of this Anglo-American power structure was Jerome D. Green (1874 – 1959. [Green was]…one of the early figures in the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations, which served as the New York branch of Lionel Curtis’s Institute of International Affairs.”
959: The hydrogen bomb
965, paragraph 4: “The first American thermonuclear bomb had a trigger of two A-bombs exploded simultaneously to detonate a second stage consisting of Lithium 6 deuteride…with the blast was released a vast quantity of deadly radioactive isotopes, including the dangerous Strontium-90, which, like calcium, is readily absorbed into human bones, where its deadly radiations may easily engender cancer.”
966, paragraph 2: “The test of this inhuman weapon (called ‘Bravo’) was announced to the world by the Atomic Energy Commission as the test of an H-bomb (it was really a U-bomb, or a ‘fission-fusion-fission bomb’), and for almost a year…its real nature was concealed by the AEC…”
**968, paragraph 3: “To prepare public opinion to accept use of the U-bomb, if it became necessary, Strauss sponsored a study of radioactive fallout whose conclusion was prejudged by calling it ‘Project Sunshine.’ By selective release of some evidence and strict secrecy of other information, the Strauss group tried to establish in public opinion that there was no real danger to anyone from nuclear fallout even in all-out nuclear war.”
992, paragraph 2, Dulles’s 2-block world, either you’re with us or against us: Dulles refused “…to accept anything but a two-bloc world, by his resolute refusal to recognize any right to anyone to be neutral.”
**1001, paragraph 3, Eisenhower cuts military budget in 1954: “When Eisenhower came to office he found the budget already set by Truman for Fiscal Year 1954 (FY 1954) at $78.6 billion, of which 46.3 billion was military….On March 4, 1953, the NSC cut Eisenhower’s new FY 1954 budget by $5.1 billion. When the Joint Chiefs (JCS) protested that any cuts would seriously endanger national security, they were ignored.” (Note to self: Perhaps this was Eisenhower expressing his disapproval of the “military industrial complex” long before he left office…)
**1005, paragraphs 3 and 4: Stalin kills 10 million people from 1929 – 1934: “Stalin nullified possible opposition by encouraging division and rivalry not only among the diverse hierarchies of power radiating downward from his own position in government, in party, army, police, and economic life, but also within each hierarchy, by encouraging the ambitious to seek to rise, step by step, through vacancies created by his periodic purges. These purges not only opened the way upward for younger and more ruthless men, but served as justifications for Stalin’s growing paranoia. Within the party, the purges of 1924 – 1929 had eliminated, usually by death, most of the “Old Bolsheviks” (those who had been party members before the 1917 Revolution). In 1929 – 1934, using a new and younger group, Stalin had killed 10,000,000 Russians (his own estimate) in the drive to establish collective farms. The second great purge of 1934 – 1939 had killed off a large part of the Stalinists who had assisted Stalin’s rise to power and about 5,000 officers of the armed forces. The third great purge, which was shaping up at the end of 1952, was intended to eliminate the rest of the Stalinists who had come to positions of power, in succession to the Old Bolsheviks, in 1929 – 1935.”
1006: Khrushchev
1008, paragraph 4, Stalin dies
1012, paragraph 1, Khrushchev visits Yugoslavia and accepts “Titoism”: “ The most significant of these visits, because it marked a sharp reversal both of Stalin and of Molotov, was a six-day visit to Tito in Yugoslavia in May 1955. This acceptance of Titoism is of great importance because it showed Russia in an apologetic role for a major past error and because it reversed Stalin’s rule that all Communist parties everywhere must follow the Kremlin’s leadership.”
**1016, paragraph 3, more attacks on Stalin’s policies: “The chief surprise of the general sessions of the party congress was the speech from that old party chameleon, Anastas Mikoyan. It openly criticized Stalin for his disregard of party democracy and his ‘cult of personality’ which insisted on personal adulation and on the constant rewriting of party records and Russian history so that Stalin would always appear as the infallible and clairvoyant leader.”
***1017, paragraph 2: “But all the rest, which the fellow travelers throughout the world had been denying for a generation, poured out: the enormous slave-labor camps, the murder of innocent persons by tens of thousands, the wholesale violation of law, the use of fiendishly planned torture to exact (sic) confessions for acts never done or to involve persons who were completely innocent, the ruthless elimination of whole classes and whole nations (such as the army officers, the Kulaks, and the Kalmuck, Chechen, Ingush and Balkar minority groups). The servility of writers, artists, and everyone else, including all party members, to the tyrant was revealed, along with the total failure of his agricultural schemes, his cowardice and incompetence in the war, his insignificance in the early history of the party, and his constant rewriting of history to conceal these things. A few passages from this speech will indicate its tone:” (Note to self: A few pages of the speech are available in the book, 1017 – 1021.)
**1022, paragraph 4: “A study of Khrushchev’s own life shows that he supported Stalin’s atrocities fully at the time, often anticipated them, benefited personally from them, and egged Stalin on to greater ones. In fact, even as Khrushchev in his speech condemned Stalin’s acts which caused the deaths of thousands in the party, he defended Stalin’s acts which caused the deaths of millions in the country. The fault was not merely with Stalin; it was with the system; and, even wider than that, it was with Russia . Any system of human life which is based on autocracy and authority, as Russian life has always been, will turn up sadistic monsters…And the more completely total and irresponsible power is concentrated in one man’s hands, the more frequently will a monster of sadism be produced.”
1025, paragraph 1, unfair trade agreements, designed to benefit Russia at its satellite’s expense.
**1036, paragraph 3, no neutrals, you’re with us or against us: “Stalin and Dulles saw the world largely in black-and-white terms: who was not with them was obviously against them. Accordingly, the world must be either slave or free, each man applying the former adjective to his opponent’s side and the more favorable, latter term, to his own group. They were enemies but they agreed basically that the world must be a two-Power system. This meant that each was aggressive in terms of the ‘uncommitted nations’ because each insisted these must either join his own side or be regarded (and treated) as an enemy.”
1038, paragraph 2, Soviet softens its attitude on neutralism: “This shift in the Soviet attitude toward neutralism was helped by Dulles’s refusal to accept the existence of neutralism. His rebuffs tended to drive those areas which wanted to be neutral into the arms of Russia , because the new nations of the developing Buffer Fringe valued their independence above all else. The Russian acceptance of neutralism may be dated about 1954, while Dulles still felt strongly adverse to neutralism four or even five years later. This gave the Soviet Union a chronological advantage which served in some small degree to compensate for its many disadvantages in the basic struggle to win the favor of the neutrals.”
1041, paragraph 2, Western “dominance” in Southeast Asia
1043, paragraph 2: “Indochina brought considerable wealth to France…After the Japanese withdrawal in 1945, the Paris government was reluctant to see this wealth, chiefly from the tin mines, fall into the hands of Japanese-sponsored native groups, and, by 1949, decided to use force to recover the area.”
Paragraph 3: “Opposed to the French effort was Ho Chi Minh…Ho sought support from the United States and from Chiang Kai-shek, but, after the establishment of Red China in 1949, he turned to that new Communist state for help. Mao’s government was the first state to give Vietnam diplomatic recognition (January 1950), and at once began to send military supplies and guidance to Ho Chi Minh. Since the United States was granting extensive aid to France, the struggle in Vietnam thus became a struggle, through surrogates, between the United States and Red China. In world opinion this made the United States a defender of European imperialism against anticolonial native nationalism.”
1045, paragraph 2: “In Paris, public outrage was rising over Indochina where the French had expended 19,000 lives and $8 billion without improving matters a particle.”
***1048, paragraph 2, balance of power…playing chess: “From the broadest point of view the situation was this: The rivalry between the two super-Powers could be balanced and its tensions reduced only by the coming into existence of another Great Power on the land mass of Eurasia. There were three possibilities of this: a federated and prosperous western Europe, India, or China. The first was essential; one of the others was highly desirable; and possibly all three might be achievable, but in no case was it essential, or even desirable, for the new Great Power to be allied with the United States.”
1049, paragraph 2, Round Table Group provides the “impetus” to partition Ireland, Palestine and India: “The necessity for choice…arose from the partition of India before independence in 1947. In India, as in Palestine and earlier in Ireland , partition before independence received a strong impetus from the Round Table Group and in all three cases it led to horrors of violence.”
1050, paragraph 1, in 1958, martial law declared in Pakistan to help deteriorating situation: “In October 1958, martial law was established and the commander in chief, General Muhammad Ayub Khan, became president and quasi-dictator as martial-law administrator.”
Paragraph 2: “In the next four years (October 1958 – June 1962) under military rule, Pakistan was put on a more hopeful course. A sweeping land-reform program restricted owners to 500 acres of irrigated, or 1,000 acres of nonirrigated, land, with the surplus distributed to existing tenants or other peasants. Former landlords received compensation for lost lands in long-term bonds. Extensive efforts were made to establish cooperative villages…and reduce the birthrate.”
Paragraph 4, building up Pakistan increases tension: “The growing militarization of Pakistan, not only from its domestic instability but from the advent of American arms, led to a growing Indian concentration of its military forces in the west. This in turn was interpreted in Pakistan as a threat to Kashmir, and drove tension upward.”
1052, paragraph 4, Iran’s unique history: “Until recent years Iran remained a fairly typical underdeveloped Muslim country, but with distinctive features of its own from the fact that it was not an Arab but an Indo-European country and had an ancient heroic cultural tradition of Persian origin which was distinctly different from the Arab traditions of the Near East.”
1054, paragraph 4: “In the days of his autocratic power, before 1914, the shah sought to raise funds for his personal use by selling concessions and monopolies to foreign groups. Most of these…were exploitative of the Iranian peoples and were very unpopular. Of these concessions the most significant was one granted in 1901 to William Knox D’Arcy for the exclusive right to exploit all stages of the petroleum business in all Iran except the five provinces bordering on Russia. The control of this concession shuffled from one corporate entity to another until, in 1909, it came into possession of the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This company established the world’s largest refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf and, by 1914, signed an agreement with the British government which made it the chief source of fuel for the British Navy. It gradually extended its activities, through a myriad of subsidiary corporations, throughout the world and simultaneously came to be controlled, through secret stock ownership, by the British government.”
**1056, paragraph 4, Britain rips off Iran with fraudulent accounting, (The Anglo-Persian Oil Company came to be called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, or AIOC) and it: “…had reduced its payments to Iran, which were based on its profits, by reducing the amount of its profits by bookkeeping tricks.” AIOC achieved this by selling oil, below its real value, to companies that AIOC owned. Royalty payments, owed to Iran, were based on this initial transaction. Then, AIOC would turn around and sell the oil again at true market value and keep the much larger profits of the second transaction for itself. “Iran believed that the profits of such wholly owned subsidiaries were really part of AIOC and should fall under the consolidated balance sheet of AIOC and thus make payments to Iran, but as late as 1950 AIOC admitted that the accounts of 59 such dummy corporations were not included in the AIOC accounts.” (Note to self: Quigley lists a handful of other ways that Britain cheated Iran.)
1057, paragraph 8: “As a consequence of all these activities, the Iranian nationalists of 1952 felt angered to think that Iran had given up 300 million tons of oil over fifty years and received £105 million, while Britain had invested only £20 million and obtained £800 million in profits."
Paragraph 9, the Iranians nationalize AIOC: "The nationalization law was passed the following month and, at the same time, at the request of the Majlis, the shah appointed Mossadegh prime minister to carry it out." AIOC appealed to the International Court of Justice, but the court refused jurisdiction.
1058, paragraph 2, the "international petroleum cartel" put pressure on the U.S. government to intervene.
Paragraph 3: "This world oil cartel had developed from a tripartite agreement signed on September 17, 1928 by Royal Dutch-Shell, Anglo-Iranian, and Standard Oil…These agreed to manage oil prices on the world market by charging an agreed fixed price plus freight costs, and to store surplus oil which might weaken the fixed price level. By 1949 the cartel had as members the seven greatest oil companies of the world…Excluding the United States domestic market, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, it controlled 92 percent of the world's reserves of oil, 88 percent of the world's production, 77 percent of the world's refining capacity, and 70 percent of the world's tonnage in ocean tankers."
**Paragraph 4: "As soon as Britain lost its case in the International Court of Justice and it became clear that Iran would go ahead with its nationalization, Britain put into effect a series of reprisals against Iran which rapidly crippled the country. Iranian funds in Britain were blocked; its purchases in British-controlled markets were interrupted; and its efforts to sell oil abroad were frustrated by a combination of the British Navy and the world oil cartel (which closed its sales and distribution facilities to Iranian oil.)"
1059, paragraph 1: "Mossadegh obtained dictatorial power for six months. He broke off diplomatic relations with the British, closed down nine British consular offices, deported various British economic and cultural groups, and dismissed both the Senate and the Iranian Supreme Court, which were beginning to question his actions."
Paragraph 2, Operation Ajax: "By that time (summer, 1953) almost irresistible forces were building up against Mossadegh, since lack of Soviet interference gave the West full freedom of action…The chief effort came from the American supersecret intelligence agency (CIA) under the personal direction of its director, Allen W. Dulles, brother of the secretary of state. Dulles, as a former director of the Schroeder Bank in New York, was an old associate of Frank C. Tiarks, a partner in the Schroeder Bank in London since 1902, and a director of the Bank of England in 1912 - 1945, as well as Lazard Brothers Bank, and the AIOC. It will be recalled that the Schroeder Bank in Cologne helped to arrange Hitler's accession to power as chancellor in January 1933."
Paragraph 3: "…throughout the Near East, street mobs are easily roused and directed by those who are willing to pay, and Dulles had the unlimited secret funds of the CIA. From these he gave $10 million to Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkopf, former head of the New Jersey State Police, who was in charge of training the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, and this was judiciously applied in ways which changed the mobs' tune considerably from July to August 1953. The whole operation was directed by Dulles himself from Switzerland where he was visited by Schwartzkopf, the American ambassador to Tehran , Loy Henderson, and messengers from the shah in the second week of August 1953."
Paragraph 4: "On August 13th the shah precipitated the planned anti-Mossadegh coup by naming General Fazlollah Zehedi as prime minister, and sent a messenger dismissing Mossadegh. The latter refused to yield, and called his supporters into the streets, where they rioted against the shah, who fled with his family to Rome . Two days later, anti-Mossadegh mobs, supported by the army, defeated Mossadegh's supporters in Theran, killing several hundred. Mossadegh was forced out of office and replaced by General Azhedi. The shah returned from Italy on August 22nd.
1060, paragraph 2: "Two weeks after the shah's countercoup, the United States gave Iran an emergency grant of $45 million, increased its annual economic aid payment to $23 million, and began to pay $5 million a month in Mutual Security Funds. These payment reached a total of a quarter of a billion dollars over five years. In return Iran became a firm member of the Western bloc…" (Note to self: And everyone lived happily ever after…except for the Iranians terrorized and brutalized by the shah's CIA-trained "SAVAK" which tortured and murdered at will…Seems like there should have been some mention of that in the book. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia: "The Federation of American Scientists also found SAVAK guilty of 'the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners' and symbolizing 'the Shah's rule from 1963-79.' The FAS list of SAVAK torture methods included 'electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails.' [26] According to a former CIA analyst on Iran ,[27][28] Jesse J. Leaf, SAVAK was trained in torture techniques by the CIA.)"
1063, paragraph: "The whole range of human and universal relations of the Arabs was monistic, personal, and extralegal, in contrast to that of the West, which was pluralistic, impersonal, and subject to rules. As a result, constitutional and two-party politics were incomprehensible to the Near East, and the parliamentary system, where it existed, was only a façade for an autocratic system of personal intrigues." (Note to self: There's a good quote in paragraph 3 that discusses the meaninglessness of the Near-East political system…sounds a bit like what's happening in the so-called "West" these days. To paraphrase: The system turns into a single amorphous and meaningless party whose sole purpose is propaganda…" Also, Quigley mentions all of the coups in the near east, but doesn't bother to suggest who might have been acting behind the scenes to foster the chaos.)
Paragraph 4 Quigley says all the problems of the Arabs can be blamed on organizational and morale factors rather than on "such objective obstacles as limited natural resources" and this is proven by the success of Israel. Note to self: Really? How many billions in financial, technological, political and military aid has Israel received? This isn't even worth mentioning as a factor? Quigley writes: "…the Zionist movement has constructed the strongest, most stable, most progressive, most democratic, and most hopeful state in the Near East. This was possible because of the morale of the Israeli, which was based on outlooks antithetical to the attitudes of the Arabs. The Israeli were full of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, social solidarity, readiness to work, cooperation, and hopes for the future. Their Ideology was largely Western, with a devotion to science, democracy, Individual respect, technology, and the future which could match or exceed the best periods of the Western past." At least, on page 1081, paragraph 2, Quigley admits that the U.S. was able to pressure Israel using "severe economic and financial threats of an unofficial nature from Washington . The effectiveness of such threats rested on the fact that the whole Israeli economy was dependent on the flow of private funds from the United States…"
1064, paragraph 2: "The precarious balance the British had tried to keep in Palestine between their promises to the Zionists and their efforts to placate the Arabs were destroyed by Hitler's determination to annihilate the Jews of Europe…The Jews, their supporters, and allies tried to smuggle in any Jews who could be saved from Europe. Since there was nowhere else they could go, many were smuggled into Palestine . British efforts to prevent this, in fulfillment of their obligations to the Arabs under the League of Nations Mandate, led to a kind of guerilla warfare between Jews and British…This problem reached acute form when the conquest of Germany opened the doors for surviving Jews to escape from the horrors of Nazism. In August 1945, President Truman asked British permission to admit 100,000 European Jews into Palestine , but his repeated requests were refused. Ignoring such permission, large-scale efforts were made to smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine , where they could be cared for by Jewish groups. Many of these were transported under frightful conditions in overcrowded, leaky ships, which were often intercepted by the British, who took their passengers to concentration camps in Cyprus. From such actions came reprisals and counter-reprisals."
**Paragraph 4: "British raids on Zionist centers to arrest illegal immigrants or to seize hidden arms…soon led to…the creation of violent and bitter splinter groups within the Zionist effort. The Jewish Agency did not have absolute control over the Haganah and had decreasingly less over a number of minute reprisal groups of which the chief were the extremist Irgun Zvai Le'umi, with several thousand members, or the terrorist 'Stern Gang' of less than two hundred. The latter group had murdered the British high commissioner, Lord Moyne, in November 1944, and later assassinated the United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden , in September 1948.
**1065, paragraph 3: "When the Labour government in June 1946 refused the Zionist request for admission of the 100,000 refugees, and, instead, sought to arrest the members of the Jewish Agency, the Irgun Zvai Le'umi in reprisal exploded 500 pounds of TNT under the British headquarters in the east wing of the luxurious King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing almost a hundred persons. The world Zionist Congress elections of December showed decreasing support for more moderate figures like Dr. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion…This increase in the extremist influence within the Zionist movement made it clear to Britain that peace in Palestine could be maintained only at a great cost which the Labour government was unable and unwilling to pay. Support from the United States was unobtainable, since Washington generally tended to favor the Jewish side, while the British, in spite of their valiant efforts to appear impartial, clearly favored the Arabs. Death sentences on Jewish terrorists, first carried out by the British in 1947, merely intensified the violence, with the British armed forces suffering about three casualties a week, one-third fatal."
1066, paragraph 2: "The British withdrawal from Palestine was but one aspect of the general withdrawal of Britain from its prewar world and imperial position."
1067, paragraph 3: "The new state of Israel was proclaimed by Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, and was recognized by President Truman sixteen minutes later, in a race to beat the Soviet Union (whose recognition came on May 17th)."
Paragraph 4, "A truce imposed by the UN on June 11th was violated by both sides and broke down with a resumption of fighting in July…Ten days of renewed fighting from July 8 - 18, 1948, mostly favorable to Israel, were ended by a three-day UN ultimatum threatening sanctions against any state which continued fighting. This curtailment of Israeli successes by United Nations actions and the UN mediator's suggestion that Jerusalem be given to the Arabs led directly to his assassination by Israeli extremists in September."
1069, paragraph 5, Quigley discusses the exploitive land rents charged to sharecroppers in Egypt where "…rents were equal to about three-quarters of the net yield." (Note to self: No doubt people can see the "exploitive nature" of this arrangement, and yet somehow they miss that they too give up roughly the same percentage of the "net yield" of their efforts in taxes and inflation.)
1076, paragraph 3, Suez Canal and Nasser: "In this tense situation Dulles suddenly upset the balance by withdrawing the United States offer of financial aid for the Aswan Dam. This decision of July 19, 1956, was answered on July 26th…by Nasser with the sudden nationalization of the Suez Canal Company so that its profits could be used by Egypt to finance the High Dam."
**1092, paragraph 2, collapse of international law and the criteria establishing "sovereignty.": "The criteria for the existence of such a sovereign state had been its ability to defend its boundaries against external aggression and to maintain law and public order among its inhabitants inside those boundaries. By 1946, as a consequence of the power stalemate of the Cold War, dozens of 'states' (such as the Congo) which could perform neither of these actions were recognized as states by the Superpowers and their allies, and achieved this recognition in international law by being admitted to the United Nations. This development culminated over fifty years of destruction of the old establishment distinctions of international law such as the distinctions between war and peace (destroyed by the Cold War, which was neither), between belligerents and neutrals (destroyed by British economic warfare in World War 1), or between civilians and combatants (destroyed by submarine warfare and city bombing)."
**1094, paragraph 3, the difference between "private" and "collective" farms: "The state and collective farms used such quantities of equipment and manpower, and gave such limited production in return, that they became the chief limiting factor in the Soviet efforts to raise standards of living, to maintain the size and power of the defense forces, to win over third states by economic and technical assistance, and to lead the Unites States in the conquest of outer space. The output of food from the small private plots of the Soviet peasantry, which were presumably worked only in their owners' spare time, produced four or five times the output per acre of the state and collective farms. This was, of course, an indication of the success of private enterprise as a spur in the productive process, a fact which was specifically recognized by Khrushchev in a series of speeches early in 1964."
> Paragraph 4, Soviet space superiority: "But in 1957 - 1959, this meaning of the change in the Soviet economic plan was unrecognized, or at least disputable, and the world's attention became riveted instead on the Soviet success with its rocket boosters. From October 1957, over a period of five years, the Russians showed the way in outer space to the United States."
1100, paragraph 3, the difference between the East and West German economies: "In the 1950's and early 1960's, the contrast between the (East) German Democratic Republic and the (West) German Federal Republic were as between night and day. The West, with about 55 million persons, was booming, while the East, with less than 17 million, was grim and depressed. The West German economic miracle was based…on low wages, hard work, and vigorous pursuit of profits by private enterprises little hampered by the government or labor unions. It was, in fact, the closest example of traditional nineteenth-century laissez faire that the mid-twentieth century had to offer."
1101, paragraph 3: "To the outside world, and to most Germans, especially East Germans, the inner nature and structure of the West German 'economic miracle' was of little significance. What did matter was the average West German had steady work at adequate wages and limitless hope for the future. The 10 percent increase each year in the West German gross national product was something that could not be denied or belittled."
Paragraph 4: "Among those who had no desire to ignore it or to belittle it, but, on the contrary, were eager to participate in it, were the East Germans. They continued to flee westward from poverty and despotism to plenty and freedom. Every effort made by the Communist regime to stem that flow merely served to increase it. The more police who were sent to guard the frontier between East and West Germany, the more police there were to flee westward with the others."
1105, discusses the Cuban missile crisis, plus the nature of "diplomatic conflict" between powers, paragraph 5: "The pattern for a classic diplomatic crisis has three stages: (1) confrontation; (2) recognition; and (3) settlement. The confrontation consists of a dispute, that is, a power challenge in some area of conflict; Stage 2 is recognized by both sides of the realities of the power relationship between them (always much easier when only two states are involved); and stage 3 is a yielding by the weaker of the two accompanied by an effort by the stronger to cover that retreat by refusing to inflict a humiliation or obvious triumph over the weaker. As Metternich said, 'A diplomat is a man who never allows himself the pleasure of a triumph,' and does so simply because it is to the interest of the stronger that an opponent who recognizes the victor's strength and is reasonable in yielding to it not be overthrown or replaced by another ruler who is too ignorant or to unreasonable to do so."
***1111, paragraph 3, "The inadequacy of health protection in Latin American is as startling as the inadequacy of education, but may not, in a wider frame, be so objectionable. For if health were better protected, more people would survive, and the problems of scarce food and scarce jobs would have reached the explosive point long ago. Unfortunately, this problem of health and death rates has a very great impact on humanitarian North American observers, with the consequence that a considerable portion of the funds for the development provided by the Alliance for Progress since 1961 are aimed at reducing these evils of disease and death. Since this effort is bound to be more successful than the much smaller funds aimed at increasing the food supply, the net consequence of these efforts will be to give Latin America more and hungrier people." (Emphasis added.)
**1115, paragraph 3, Asiatic despotism "We have already indicated the nature of Asiatic despotism in connection with traditional China, the old Ottoman Empire, and czarist Russia. It goes back to the archaic Bronze Age empires, which first appeared in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and northern China before 1,000 B.C. Basically such an Asiatic despotism is a two-class society in which a lower class, consisting of at least nine-tenths of the population, supports an upper, ruling class consisting of several interlocking groups. These ruling groups are a governing bureaucracy of scribes and priests associated with army leaders, landlords, and moneylenders. Such an upper class accumulated great quantities of wealth as taxes, rents, interest on loans, fees for services, or simply as financial extortions. The social consequences were either progressive or reactionary, depending on whether this accumulated wealth in the possession of the ruling class was invested in more productive utilization of resources or was simply hoarded and wasted. The essential character of such an Asiatic despotism rests on the fact that the ruling class has legal claims on the working masses, and possess the power (from its control of arms and the political structure) to enforce these claims."
1120, paragraph 1, Christ's teachings
1129, paragraph 2, Guatemala "banana republic" and United Fruit Company's dominance: "The retail value of Latin America's part of the world's trade in bananas is several billion dollars a year, but Latin America gets less than 7 percent of that value. One reason for this is the existence of the United Fruit Company, which owns two million acres of plantations in six Latin American countries…"
**1130, paragraph 2, the 1952 Land Reform Act in Guatemala was to be applied to 400,000 acres of United Fruit's land, the U.S. government, acting through the CIA, overthrows the Guatemalan government: The Land Reform Act "…called for the redistribution of uncultivated holdings above a fixed acreage or lands of absentee owners, with compensation from twenty-year, 3 percent bonds, equal to the declared tax value of the lands. About 400,000 acres of United Fruit lands fell under this law and were distributed by the Arbenz Guzman government to 180,000 peasants….Allen Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency…soon found an American-trained and American-financed Guatemalan Colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, who was prepared to lead a revolt against Arbenz."
Paragraph 3: "…the CIA-directed assault of Colonel Armas overthrew Arbenz Guzman in 1954 and established in Guatemala a regime similar to that of the Somozas. All civil and political freedoms were overthrown, the land reforms were undone, and corruption reigned."
1134, paragraph 2: Bay of Pigs: "At the end of 1960, the Eisenhower Administration decided to use force to remove Castro. This decision was a major error and led to a totally shameful fiasco. The error apparently arose in the Central Intelligence Agency and was based on a complete misjudgment of the apparent ease with which that agency had overthrown the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954…" (Note to self: Well, the Network overthrew the Iranian government in 1953, the Guatemalan government in 1954, why should it have doubted its ability to overthrow Cuba too?"
**1144, paragraph 5, using "aid" as a weapon: "The failure of the Alliance for Progress to achieve what it was touted to achieve has many causes, the chief is undoubtedly that it was not intended primarily to be a method for achieving a better life for Latin Americans but was intended to be a means of implementing American policy in the Cold War. This became clearly evident at the second Punta del Este Conference of January 22 - 31, 1962, where Washington's exclusive control over the granting of funds for the Alliance was used as a club to force the Latin American states to exclude Cuba from the Organization of American States. The original plan was to cut off Cuba's trade with all Western Hemisphere countries and to break off diplomatic relations as well. A two-thirds vote by countries was needed to make the recommendations official; it was obtained only by the minimum margin (14 votes out f the 21 members) and only after the most intense American 'diplomatic' pressure and bribery involving the granting and withholding of American aid to the Alliance . Even at that, six countries, representing 75 percent of Latin America's area and 70 percent of its population, refused to vote for the American motions. These six were Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador."
1145, paragraph 2: "The aid, as we have said, is entirely under the control of the United States; it generally takes the form, not of money which can be used to buy the best goods in the cheapest market, but as credits which can be used only in the United States. Much of these credits goes either to fill gaps in the budgets or the foreign-exchange balances of Latin American countries, which provides a maximum leverage in getting these governments to follow America's lead in world affairs but provides little or no benefit to the impoverished peoples of the hemisphere. Moreover, the grants, which provide dollars to these countries, are often counterbalanced by contrary influences, such as increased tariffs or other restrictions on the flow of Latin American goods to the United States, or decreases in the prices of Latin American primary products…"
1158, paragraph 5, landlord purges in china, millions executed: "The first stage in agrarian reform had been the 'elimination of landlordism' in 1950 - 1952."
***1159, paragraph 1: "The landlords were eliminated with great brutality in a series of spectacular public trials in which landlords were accused of every crime in the book. At least three million were executed and several times that number were imprisoned, according to the official figures, but the total of both groups may have been much higher. The land thus obtained was distributed to poor peasant families, with each obtaining about one-third of an acre."
Paragraph 2: "The second stage in the agrarian reform (1955) sought to establish cooperative farming. In effect it took away from the peasants the lands they had just obtained…the peasants were forced into cooperatives. By the end of 1956, 83 percent of the peasants, or 125 million families, had joined into 750 thousand cooperatives." (emphasis added)
***Paragraph 3: "The third stage of agrarian reform, constituting the basic feature of the 'Great Leap Forward," merged the 750 thousand collective farms into about 26,000 agrarian communes of about 5,000 families each. This was a social rather than simply an agrarian revolution since its aims included the destruction of the family household and the peasant village. All activities of the members, including child rearing, education, entertainment, social life, the militia, and all economic and intellectual life came under the control of the commune. In some areas the previous villages were destroyed and the peasants were housed in dormitories, with communal kitchens and mess halls, nurseries for the children, and separation of these children under the communes' control in isolation for their parents at an early age."
**1160, paragraph 1: "..it was expected that the communes would totally shatter the resistant social structure of Chinese society, leaving isolated individuals to face the power of the state."
1165, paragraph 5, Mao Tse-tung's childhood
1172, paragraph 2, South Vietnam under Diem rule
1173, paragraph 4: The "final crisis in the story of the Diem family and its henchmen arose from religious persecution of the Buddhists under the guise of maintaining political order. Restrictions on Buddhist ceremonies led to Buddhist protests, and these in turn led to violent police action. The Buddhists struck back in a typically Asiatic fashion, which because it was Asiatic proved to be very effective in the Asiatic context: individuals or small groups of Buddhists committed suicide in some crowded public place near a government center. The favorite mode of suicide was to drench the victim's long yellow robes with gasoline and ignite these with a match as he knelt in a public square or street. The calloused reaction of the Diem family, especially of Madame Nhu, shocked the world, and outraged feeling rose rapidly in the summer of 1963."
1178, paragraph 2: “…it must be recognized that in very few cases did native peoples achieve independence as a consequence of a successful revolt by force. On the contrary, in case after case, independence was granted, after a relatively moderate agitation, by a former ruling power which showed a certain relief to be rid of its colonial burden.”
**1181, paragraph 5, Public display of uniformity: “Really, it is a mechanism for keeping diverse opinions behind the scene, out of public view, and force the reconciliation of differences to take place in some concealed area of backstage intrigue and discussion rather than out in the public arena…”
1184, paragraph 3, ever-expanding material desires: “The mass production of this new industrial system was able to continue and to accelerate to the fantastic rate of the twentieth century because Western man placed no limits on his ambition to create a secularized earthly paradise. Today the average middle-class family of suburbia has a schedule of future material demands which is limitless: a second car is essential, often followed by a third; an elaborate reconstruction of the basement provides a recreation room, which must be followed in short order by an elaborate patio with outdoor cooking equipment and a swimming pool; almost immediately comes the need for an outboard motorboat and trailer to carry it, followed by the need for a summer residence by the water and a larger boat. And so it goes, in an endless expansion of insatiable demands spurred on by skilled advertising, the whole keeping the wheels of industry turning, and the purchasing power of the community racing around in an accelerating cycle.”
**1187, paragraph 2, 3 and 4, difficulty of exploiting the masses in Africa: “In many ways the problems of independence have a distinctly different character in Africa from Asia. In Asia, as is traditional along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, the structure of societies has been one in which a coalition of army, bureaucracy, landlords, and moneylenders have exploited a great mass of peasants by extortion of taxes, rents, low wages and high interest rates in a system of such persistence that its basic structure goes back to the Bronze age empires before 1000 B.C.” (Emphasis added)
***1200, paragraph 2: “The political conditions of the latter half of the twentieth century will continue to be dominated by the weapons situation, for, while politics consists of much more than weapons, the nature, organization, and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determine what happens in political life….All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy.”
Paragraph 3: “When weapons are of the amateur type…they are widely possessed by citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an ‘amateur weapons system’…we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford and possess or learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such ‘specialist’ weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will be established.” (Note to self: The term “weapon” should not be limited to simply guns and bombs. Surveillance is a weapon, control of the monetary system is a weapon, the media is a weapon, control of food is a weapon, etc.)
**Paragraph 4: “At the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the specialist weapons of today will continue to dominate the military picture into the foreseeable future. If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian rather than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into the same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many areas, such as the United States or England . To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this may seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in this situation may well be considered.” (emphasis added)
1201, paragraph 2: “For one, our society, Western Civilization, is almost fifteen hundred years old, and was democratic on political action for less than two hundred of these years (or even half of that, in strict truth). A period that is not democratic in its political structure is not necessarily bad, and may well be one in which people can live a rich and full social or intellectual life whose value may be even more significant than a democratic political or military structure.” Note to self: Sure, or it “may” become an absolute technocratic nightmare; a tyranny unlike anything ever dreamed of or experienced in human history. Consolidate the modern “specialist” weapons of today into the hands of a tiny elite, and then ask yourself: what’s the most likely outcome?
Paragraph 4, “Controlled conflict” in future wars: “The rather naïve American idea that war aims involve the destruction of the enemy’s regime and the imposition on the defeated people of a democratic system with a prosperous economy…will undoubtedly be replaced by the idea that the enemy regime must be maintained, perhaps in a modified form, so that we have some government with whom we can negotiate in order to obtain our more limited aims (which caused the conflict) and thus to lower the level of conflict as rapidly as possible consistent with the achievement of our aims.”
***1206, paragraph 3: “For many centuries, from the ninth century to the twentieth, the increasing offensive power of the Western weapons systems has made it possible to compel obedience over wider and wider areas and over larger numbers of peoples. Accordingly, political organizations (such as the state) have been able to rule over larger areas, and thus have become larger in size and fewer in numbers in our Western world. In this way, the political development of Europe over the last millennium has seen thousands of feudal areas coalesce into hundreds of principalities, and these into scores of dynastic monarchies, and, finally, into a dozen or more national states. The national state, its size measured in hundreds of miles, was based, to a considerable extent, on the fact that the weapons system of the nineteenth century…could apply force over hundreds of miles.”
1207, paragraph 2: “…power in the 1950’s being concentrated in two centers…the Superpowers could compel obedience over distances in the range of 6,000 to 8,000 miles, leaving a considerable zone between them….In this power gap between the less than hemispherical Superpowers appeared the neutrals of the Buffer Fringe.”
1208, paragraph 2: “This process has not gone very far yet, but it is already observable, especially among the younger generation of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. To the young in all three of these areas there is a growing, if quiet, skepticism of any general abstract appeal to allegiance and loyalty, and a growing concern with concrete, interpersonal relationships with local groups of friends and intimates.”
1209, paragraph 1: “For example, a shift from our present use of fossil fuels as a chief energy source to the use of the sun’s energy directly in many small local energy accumulators might provide a plentiful supply of decentralized energy.”
1210, paragraph 1, biological warfare, destroy food supplies then offer to feed the starving masses in exchange for overthrowing their government
1211, paragraph 3, behind-the-scenes lobbying is driving the convergence of the U.S. and Soviet Union: “(1) in spite of the great difference in the theories and the appearances of political life in the two countries, each is increasingly reaching its most fundamental decisions, not through party politics or by decision in a political assembly, but by the shifting pressures of great lobbying blocs acting upon each other by largely hidden contacts carried on behind the scenes. (2) These pressures are chiefly concerned with the allotment of economic resources, through fiscal and budgetary mechanisms, among three competing sectors of the economy concerned with consumption, governmental expenditures (chiefly defense), and capital investment. (3) Socially, both societies are undergoing a similar circulation of elites in which education is the chief doorway to social advancement and is crowded with applicants from the lower (but not lowest) stratum of society (equivalent to the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle classes) but is receiving relatively fewer successful applicants from the upper (but not uppermost) group whose parents are already established in the prevalent structure. (4) In both countries trained experts and technicians, as a consequence of this educational process, are replacing political figures or other social groups, especially political specialists. In both, the military leaders, although qualified for supreme influence by their possession of power, are held at secondary levels by personal manipulations. (5) In both countries there is a growing intellectual skepticism toward authority, accepted ideologies, and established slogans, replaced by a rising emphasis upon the need for satisfactory small-group, interpersonal relations.”
1212, paragraph 1, controlled conflict: “…it seems very likely that the international relations of the future will shift from the world we have known, in which war was epidemic and total, to one in which conflict is endemic and controlled. The ending of total warfare means the ending of war for unlimited aims (unconditional surrender, total victory, destruction of the opponent’s regime and social system), fought with weapons of total destruction and a total mobilization of resources, including men, to a condition of constant, flexible, controlled conflict with limited, specific, and shifting aims, sought by limited application of diverse pressures applied against any other state whose behavior we wish to influence.”
**1213, paragraph 2: “9. All this means a blurring of the distinction between war and peace, with the situation at all times one of closely controlled conflict. In this way endemic conflict is accepted in order to avoid, if possible, epidemic total war. The change will become possible because the ultimate policy of all states will become the preservation of their way of life and existing regime, with the largest possible freedom of action. These aims can be retained under controlled conflict but will be lost by all concerned in total war.”
1218, paragraph 1: “On the whole, the history of federalism has not been a happy one. Even in the United States , the most significant example of a successful federalist structure in modern history, the federalist principle has yielded ground to the unitary government for 150 years or so. Moreover, in our own time a number of efforts, chiefly British, to set up federal unions have failed. Thus the Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland broke up after a few years, and the West Indies Federation was even less viable.”
1219, paragraph 3: “And on the seventh level are the individual states which in theory (like the states of the United States) will continue to hold full sovereignty. But when two-third votes on higher levels can make binding decisions on member states, or when states intend to vote as a bloc in the United Nations, or when states have reduced their military and police forces so that they are dependent on forces from higher levels to defend their territories or to maintain order, or when states look to higher levels for funds for investment or to restore their annual foreign-exchange imbalances, the realities of sovereign power become dispersed and some areas of the world begin to look more like the Germanies of the late medieval period than like the nationalist sovereign states of the nineteenth century.” (emphasis added)
1220, backlash against the modern “rat race”
1221, paragraph 3, discusses the problem of children raised by “…disorganized, undisciplined, present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social conditions. [These parents are the]…most unlikely to train their children in the organized, disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic system requires in its workers…” (Note to self: Quigley pins this poor parenting mostly on inner-city “Negroes” and “Latin Americans,” but I’ve seen plenty of it in “middle-class white America.”
1222, paragraph 1 “In every society there are certain groups, perhaps an intellectual elite, who think new thoughts, new at least in comparison with what went just before. In time, some of these thoughts spread and become familiar, until it may seem that everybody is thinking them. Of course, everybody is not, because in every society there are three other groups: the large group who do not think at all, the substantial group who are not aware of anything new and who retain the same outlook for years and even generations, and the small group who are always opposed to the consensus simply because opposition has become an end in itself.” Note to self: So, just to be clear: apparently only one group (the “intellectual elite”) will think “new thoughts.”
***1224, paragraph 3, the Age of Irrational Activism: “This period felt that man, and nature, and human society were all basically irrational. Reason, regarded as a late and rather superficial accretion in the process of human evolution, was considered inadequate to plumb the real nature of man’s problems, and was regarded as an inhibitor on the full intensity of his actions, an obstacle to the survival of himself as an individual and of his group (the nation)…To the theorist of these views, the thinker would always be divided, hesitant, and weak, while the man of action would be unified, decisive, and strong.”
1225, paragraph 2: “Expressed explicitly this cult of Irrational Activism was based on the belief that the universe was dynamic and largely nonrational. As such, any effort to deal with it by rational means will be futile and superficial. Moreover, rationalism, by paralyzing man’s ability to act decisively, will expose him to destruction in a world whose chief features include struggle and conflict. Men came to believe that only violence had survival value.” (Note to self: If these “intellectual elite” had the sense to look two steps ahead, they would have recognized that their approach for averting “exposure to destruction” was incapable of producing anything other than destruction.”
1226, paragraph 2, “…the disjointed malaise of the century, permeated the outlook of the period and left it hungry for meaning, for identity, for some structure or purpose in human experience. Insanity, neurosis, suicide, and all kinds of irrational obsessions and reactions filled increasing roles in human life. Most of these were not even recognized as being irrational or obsessive. Speed, alcohol, sex, coffee, and tobacco screened man off from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to observe, or to enjoy life, without his realizing that these were the shields he adopted to conceal from himself the fact that he was no longer really capable of living, because he no longer knew what life was and could see no meaning or purpose in it…In time, nothing made much impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion, or distortion.”
**1231, paragraph 1: “To the West, in spite of all its aberrations, the greatest sin, from Lucifer to Hitler, has been pride, especially in the form of intellectual arrogance; and the greatest virtue has been humility, especially in the intellectual form which concedes that opinions are always subject to modification by new experiences, new evidence, and the opinions of our fellow men.”
1232, paragraph 2: “In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.”
1233, paragraph 4: “Today, young persons spend increasing time in argument and thought on how diverse things, all of which seem necessary, can be arranged in a hierarchy of importance or priority: military service, preparation for a vocation, love and marriage, personal development, desire to help others – all these compete for energy, time, and attention. In what order should they be arranged? This is quite different from the successful young man of yesteryear who had one clearly perceived goal – to prepare for a career in moneymaking. The road to that career was marked by materialism, selfishness, and pride, all attitudes of low favor in the outlook of the West, not because they are absolutely wrong but because they indicate a failure to see the place of things in the general structure of the universe. Even pride, either in Lucifer or in Soames Forsyte, is a failure to realize one’s own position in the whole picture. And today, especially in America , increasing numbers of people are trying to see the whole picture.”
1237, paragraph 2, “This middle-class character…At its basis is psychic insecurity founded on lack of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable material acquisition. From this flowed a large number of attributes of which we shall list only five: future preference, self-discipline, social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and a general emphasis on externalized, impersonal values.”
1239: Orthodox VS Puritanical view of man
1240: Darwinism, Nazism and Fascism – Political despotism in line with Puritanism
**1241, The religious VS the intellectuals + middle class and non middle class America: “Strangely enough, the non-middle classes had more characteristics in common with each other than they did with the middle classes in their midst. The chief reason for this was that all other groups had value systems different from the middle classes and, above all, placed no emphasis on display of material affluence as proof of social status…For example, all placed much more emphasis on real personal qualities and much less on such things as clothing, residence, academic background, or kind of transportation used (all of which were important in determining middle-class reactions to people). In a sense all were more sincere, personally more secure…and less hypocritical than the middle class, and accordingly were much more inclined to judge any new acquaintance on his merits.”
1243: Aristocrats and the working class
1244: Eastern Establishment and elections – endowments and tax exempt influence, paragraph 4: “Eisenhower…had been preferred by the Eastern Establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League, semiaristocratic Anglophiles whose real strength rested in their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.”
1246, paragraph 2: “By the 1964 election, the major political issue in the country was the financial struggle behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized and cultured in foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed, arising from the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations in the Southwest and West.” (Emphasis added)
***1247, paragraph 3: "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."
**1249, paragraph 2: “Our education system has been, consciously or unconsciously, organized as a mechanism for indoctrination of the young in middle-class ideology. In fact, rather surprisingly, it would appear that our education system, unlike those of continental Europe, has been more concerned with indoctrination of middle-class outlook than with teaching patriotism or nationalism. As a reflection of this, it has been more concerned with instilling attitudes and behavior than with intellectual training.”
1251: Postponing life for material gain – tactic for enslaving man, paragraph 2: “Its argument was that the individual who constantly postpones living from the present (with living taken to mean real personal relationships with individuals) to a hypothetical future eventually finds that the years have gone by, death is approaching, he has not yet lived, and is, in most cases, no longer able to do so. If the central figure in such a work has achieved his materialist ambitions, the implication is that these achievements, which looked so attractive from a distance, are but encumbrances to the real values of personal living when achieved. This theme, which goes back at least to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or to George Eliot’s Silas Marner, continued to be presented into the twentieth century.”
1252, paragraph 3, mentions George Orwell’s 1984 “This point of view…now may be used…to justify a new despotism to preserve, by force instead of conviction, petty-bourgeois values in a system of compulsory conformity. George Orwell’s 1984 has given us the picture of this system as Hitler’s Germany showed us its practical operation.”
1253: Spoiling kids, weakening moral fiber, paragraph 2: “They rarely saw that their efforts to make things easy for their children in the 1950’s as a reaction against the hardships they had suffered themselves in the 1930’s were removing from their children’s training process the difficulties that had helped to make them achieving men and successful middle-class persons and that their efforts to do this were weakening the moral fiber of their children.”
1256, three types of marriage, including “Romantic” marriages, paragraph 1: “Romantic marriage, based on the ‘shock of recognition,’ has in fact come to be based very largely on sexual attraction, since this is the chief form that love at first sight can take. Such marriages often fail, since even sex requires practice and mutual adjustment and is too momentary a human relationship to sustain a permanent union unless many other common interests accumulate around it.” (Emphasis added, Note to self: Nicely stated.)
**1260, some pretty bizarre theories about children’s sexual attraction to parents and how this, and other factors, affect family relationships
1263, paragraph 3, the “Africanization” of American society: “In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scanty clothing, its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time.”
1264, paragraph 1: “This Africanization of American society is gradually spreading with the passing years to higher age levels in our culture and is having profound and damaging effects on the transfer of middle-class values to the rising generation.”
1266, paragraph 2, mentions Pavlov and B. F. Skinner
1269, increasing lack of responsibility, paragraph 2: “This skepticism about meaning, closely allied with their rejection of organizations and of abstractions, is also closely related with a failure of responsibility. Since consequences are divorced from the act or experience itself, the youth is not bound by any relationship between the two. The result is a large-scale irresponsibility. If a young person makes an appointment, he may or may not keep it. He may come very late or not at all. In any case, he feels no shame at failure to carry out what he had said he would do. In fact, the young people of today constantly speak of what they are going to do – after lunch, tonight, tomorrow, next week – but they rarely do what they say. To them it was always very tentative, a hope rather than a statement, and binding on no one.”
1270, paragraph 1: “Girls who are pressured by their parent to conform resist by sexual delinquencies more often than boys, and in extreme cases get pregnant or have sexual experiences with Negro boys.” (Note to self: This is wrong in so many ways…where to start? The girls can’t honestly be attracted to the “Negro boys?” Sleeping with Negroes makes them delinquent? The Negro boys aren’t middle class?)
1271, paragraph 1, an Aristocratic boy has more than his fair share of “…homosexual experiences (to which he may succumb completely), but, on the whole, usually grows up to be a very energetic, constructive, stable, and self-sacrificing citizen, prepared to inflict the same training process on his own sons.”
1273, paragraph 1: “The steps up that ladder of success were clearly marked – to be the outstanding boy student and graduate in school, to win entrance to and graduation from ‘the best’ university possible (naturally an Ivy League one), and then the final years of specialized application in a professional school.”
***1274, paragraph 2, excellent quote from the former Chairman of Harvard’s Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender: “The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents’ ambitions or a conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers’ prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn independence, with a vivid imagination and a desire to explore fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to read the unrequired books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a rebel, may not conform to the stereotype, and may not get the top grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the highest level in the standard multiple choice admission tests, which may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind.”
1282: Keep Germany separate – can’t allow unification, paragraph 4: “Briefly the problem is this: no one concerned – the Soviet Union, the United States, or Europe itself – can permit Germany to be unified again in the foreseeable future. A united Germany would be a force of instability and danger to everyone, including the Germans, because it would be the most powerful nation in Europe and, balanced between East and West, might at any time fall into collaboration with one of these to the intense danger of the other…”
1283, the European Coal and Steel Community and the integration of Europe, paragraph 4 “In 1950, Robert Schuman, then French foreign minister and later prime minister…suggested that a first step be taken toward a federation of Europe by putting the entire coal and steel production of France and Germany under a common High Authority.”
1284, paragraph 1: “From this came the European Coal and Steel Community. This was a truly revolutionary organization, since it had sovereign powers, including the authority to raise funds outside any existing state’s power. This treaty, which came into force in July 1952, brought the steel and coal industries of six countries (France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux) under a single High Authority of nine members. This ‘supranational’ body had the right to control prices, channel investment, raise funds, allocate coal and steel during shortages, and fix production in times of surplus. Its power to raise funds for its own use by taxing each ton produced made it independent of governments. Moreover, its decisions were binding, and could be reached by majority vote without the unanimity required in most international organizations of sovereign states.”
1285, paragraph 4, in 1955, the six countries decided “…the next step toward West European integration must be economic rather than political. From this flowed the Rome Treaty of March 1957, which established the European Economic Community, better known as the Common Market…Both agreements went into effect at the beginning of 1958.
1286, paragraph 4: “These organizations have some of the aspects of sovereignty from the fact that their decisions do not have to be unanimous, are binding on states and on citizens who have not agreed to them, and can be financed by funds that may be levied without current consent of the person being taxed. On the whole, the supranational aspects of these institutions will be strengthened in the future from provisions in the treaties themselves. All this is very relevant to the remarks in the last chapter on the disintegration of the modern, unified sovereign state and the redistribution of its powers to multilevel hierarchical structures remotely resembling the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in the late medieval period.” (Emphasis added)
**1295, paragraph 1, nuclear bomb “unacceptable-damage” deterrence: “At first glance, the idea of modest French nuclear armaments serving as deterrence to the mighty Soviet threat to Europe, either conventional or nuclear, seems even less credible. But De Gaulle was one of the first to recognize, as a feasible policy, an idea that was subsequently adopted by the Soviet Union itself. This was the idea that a nuclear deterrence does not require the possession of overwhelming nuclear power or even the nuclear superiority in which Washington long believed, but may be based on the capacity to inflict unacceptable nuclear damage. In De Gaulle’s mind, the explosion of French Hydrogen bombs over three or four major Soviet cities, including Moscow , would constitute unacceptable damage in the Kremlin’s eyes and would thus provide effective deterrence against a soviet aggression…without any need for France to rely on any uncertain American response.”
1301, paragraph 3, when members of “the establishment” turn on the establishment: “These most obvious examples of rebellion against English conformity are, however, not nearly so significant as the less obvious, but much more significant, rejections of the established system by men whose training and positions would lead us to expect that they would be firm supporters of it. This includes men like the following: (1) John Grigg, who disclaimed his title of Lord Altrincham in 1963, was educated at Eton and New College, was in the Grenadier Guards, edited the National Review (which had been acquired from Lady Milner), and was close to the Establishment from his father’s long-time associations with the Milner Group, the Times, the Round Table, and his intimate friendship with Lord Brand; the son shocked the Court by his open criticism of the Queen’s social associations as undemocratic; and his weekly articles for the Guardian advocated among other things, abolition of the hereditary House of Lords; or (2) Goronwy Rees of New College and All Souls who had denounced the English amateur tradition in government and business as a ‘cult of incompetence,’ and demanded, to replace it, a system of training and recruitment that will provide a British managerial class marked by professional competence rather than by what he regards as ‘frivolity’; or (3) John Vaizey, one-time Scholar of Queens College, Cambridge and now Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, who denounces the whole English educational system as inadequate and misguided and would replace it with something more like the French openly competitive system of free education.”
1311, paragraph 1: “The hope of the twentieth century rests on its recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning…back to other characteristics that our Western society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline. We now know fairly well how to control the increase in population, how to produce wealth and reduce poverty or disease; we may, in the near future, know how to postpone senility and death; it certainly should be clear to those who have their eyes open that violence, extermination, and despotism do not solve problems for anyone and that victory and conquest are delusions as long as they are merely physical and materialistic.”