Chapter Three The Identity Problem
The first requirement is to trace back to its source that vast historical phenomenon which we call "the Jews." Are they a people which has persisted down the ages, like the Chinese, or are the Jewish people only the vehicle of an idea capable of being carried by people of many different kinds?
Douglas Reed, in his monumental work The Controversy of Zion is emphatic about the time and place “where it all began":
The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 459 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On the day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master- race was set up as “the law.1' At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject people of the Persian king, and what today is known as the “West" could not even be imagined. Now the Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and "Western civilization," which grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.
There can be no doubt that the “small tribe" of which Reed writes has been dissipated to as near vanishing point as makes no difference by centuries of cross-breeding with host populations. As the anthropologists would say, “of the Judaic gene pool of 459 BC virtually nothing remains."
But, a Judaism traceable all the way back to 459 BC persists to this day.
However, as we now know with equal certainty, there is an even wider genealogical gulf than that caused by the progressive dilution of the decendants of the Jews of the Bible: the vast majority of those who today call themselves Jews are the much diluted decendants of a people called the Khazars, a people of Turkik origin who once held sway over a vast empire extending from the Black Sea to the Caspian and from the Caucasus to the Volga and whose rulers about 740 AD decided to accept Judaism as a state religion,1
It goes without saying that there can be no clarity of thought about the Jewish or Zionist presence in 20th century history unless we are clear in our minds about the meaning of the primary component of our field of inquiry, namely the concept “Jew.” What is a Jew, and who are the Jewish people? What is "Judaism"?
Dr, Nahum Goldmann, who, for some years, was president of both the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organization, remarks in his book The Jewish Paradox: “I remember giving a lecture when I was a student during which ] offered more than twenty definitions: Judaism is a religion, a people, a nation, a cultural community, etc. None of them was absolutely correct,"3 None of these definitions could be “absolutely correct" because all of them were aspects of a single reality—the Jewish reality. Dr. Goldmann admits that he ceased to be “orthodox in a religious sense” when he was 17 and that many modern Jews have ceased to be “believers." In fact “orthodox" or believing Jews today form only a small minority.
Dr, Goldmann rejects a definition by one of Jewry's most staunch defenders, Jean-Paul Sartre: "A Jew is anyone whom other people designate as such." Sartre, was a living contradiction of his own definition, himself a Jew, though not generally recognized as such. So how is the puzzle to be resolved? Short answer: Among the Jews themselves the identity problem is of minor significance; Jews can be of innumerable different kinds, some of them believers, most of them unbelievers, of different appearance, speaking different languages, and yet all mutually recognizable as Jews. And the authority that decides unhesitatingly in all local communities is an organization or group called Beth Din.
Today’s Jews thus fail into two main divisions: the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. The Sephardim can claim descent from those Jews of the “dispersion" who settled in North Africa, Spain and elsewhere around the Mediterranean, and the Ashkenazim are of East European origin. The Sephardim spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect called Ladino and the Ashkenazim a German-Hebrew dialect known as Yiddish,
The best modern summary of all the historical, anthropological and linguistic information on this subject is that provided by Arthur Koestler in his book The Thirteenth Tribe. He tells us that in the 1960s it was estimated that the Sephardim numbered 500,000, the rest of the Jewish population, numbered in millions, being Ash- kenazim. Since it would have needed some Jews of Palestinian origin to effect the conversion of the Khazar upper classes, it can be taken for granted that these could have made some slight contribution to the Khazar genetic inheritance.
The implications of the long-suppressed truth are of paramount importance: there is no such thing as a Jewish race," and all except a tiny minority of today’s Jews have no ancestral connection with the Jews of the Bible. Hence the word “anti-Semitism" has no meaning except as a weapon in modem political warfare. There can be no hostility towards Jews on grounds of race because they have no separate Western racial identity and certainly are not “Semites." There are Jews continuously disappearing into host populations never to be indentified again as Jews, a process of assimilation which produces very different results where a genuine difference of race exists.
It was because Shakespeare fully understood this that, in his play The Merchant of Venice, he was able to marry off Shylock’s daughter Jessica to one of Antonio’s companions without any risk of offending the susceptibilities of an English audience.
Lt is the writer's purpose in this book to explore and explain a Jewish "identity" which is not of race, but which throughout history has been liable to evoke among host populations reactions of antagonism and even hostility.
So how does Judaism relate to Zionism? There can be no more authoritative answer to that question than one provided by Dr. Chaim Weizmann who was present at the birth of Zionism, was for many years its principal spokesman and protagonist in the Western world, and who became the first president of the Zionist state of Israel.
Dr. Weizmann in his autobiography Trial and Error says that the Jews in Russia were divided into three groups. The first of these, whom he describes as “renegades," were the few who only wanted to be able to live in peace as Russian citizens. The rest, who formed a substantial majority, were split down the center, one half of them Communist activists bent on getting a world revolution started in Russia and the others Zionists who insisted on the setting up of a Jewish nation state as the first priority. Jewish households, including Dr. Weizmann’s own, could be sharply divided on this issue.
The apparent mutual antagonism of the two groups had an important part to play in the grand revolutionary drama, for it enabled Dr. Weizmann and his henchmen to persuade Western political leaders, Winston Churchill included, that support for Zionism was the best way of halting the threatened march of revolutionary Communism. We can now see more clearly that the two were directed from a single source and were designed to converge. It stands to reason that the destruction of nations, leaving only one to survive and rule, requires pressure from below (Communist revolution) and from above (Zionist exercise of the “power of the purse”).
Zionism can also be defined as a form of Talmudic Judaism transformed into a chauvinistic secular nationalism, with the religious factor excluded except for what use can be made of it in the conduct of modern political warfare, Like Dr. Weizmann, nearly all Zionist leaders have been "unbelievers."
So much for the identity of Jews in general and of Zionism as a modem Jewish nationalist movement; what now needs to be explored, if history is to be rendered intelligible, is the issue of personal or individual Jewish identity.
The subject has been deliberately shrouded with mystification, for a reason which can be stated quite simply: a nationalism which lacks a substantial territorial base, a nationalism which largely exists and is promoted by a people thinly dispersed among other populations, must operate in secrecy, It only needs Zionism to be clearly identified and its long-term aims known, and that would be the end of the great Communist-Zionist twentieth century adventure. Therefore always a pressing need to conceal the identity of those who have their hands on the levers of great power.
*****
So let us begin with Lenin and Stalin, two of the most influential figures in twentieth century power politics.
How genuine was the non-Jewish image which these two men bore and which proved so advantageous in masking the essentially Jewish character of the Bolshevik Revolution and of Communism in general?
What we do know for sure is that while the Soviet government and Communist spokesmen abroad have continued to exhibit both leaders as Russians, it has always been the policy to discourage any exploration of their antecedents. Consequently, we have no thoroughly trustworthy source material about the parentage of either man, but must depend on information acquired from persons who might reasonably have been expected to know the truth, supported by inferences to be drawn from these leaders’ own actions and utterances.
That information we have about Lenin can be summed up as follows: he was bom and christened at Simbirsk in 1870; his father Elias {or Ilya) Ulyanov was a Russian with some Tatar or Kalmuck blood, a mixture not uncommon in the Volga region in those days; his mother, born Marie Blank, was certainly Jewish on her father's side and may have been Jewish on her mother’s side as well.
There has been complete frankness about Lenin's father, possibly because here there was nothing to hide. Lenin’s paternal grandfather Nicholas was smart enough, like many others in his situation, to buy himself out of serfdom and set himself up as a tailor in the Volga town of Astrakhan. Nicholas’s eldest son also did well in commerce, making it possible for a younger brother, Elias (Lenin’s father), to gain a good education and graduate in mathematics and natural sciences at the Kazan University; this son of a former serf had a brilliant career in the public service, attaining the rank of "actual state councillor,” equivalent to the rank of major- general in the army, and access to the ranks of the hereditary nobility.
It is over Lenin’s mother, born Maria Blank, that a heavy fog of official reticence has fallen. There is evidence to support the statement that Maria's father, Alexander Blank, was a Jew from Odessa who prospered considerably after his conversion to Christianity.3
Here is a sample of the kind of evidence about Alexander Blank that is now available in the West: The French monthly Lectures Française (No. 163, November 1970) cited from the Jewish periodical Review de Fonds Social Juif (No. 161, 1970) a report to the effect that Marietta Shaguinian, a well known Soviet novelist of Armenian descent, has been prevented from publishing some new material about one Alexander Blank which she had come upon by chance while carrying out research at the archives at Simbirsk about the early days of the famous annual trade fair at Nizhni Novgorod (Gorky); named among the entrepreneurs involved in the fair, including her own grandfather, she found mention of one Sender Blank, a Jewish merchant, who later appeared as Alexander Blank after having accepted conversion the Christianity, together with his family. This Blank had a daughter Miriam, born Simbirsk in 1835, whose name on conversion was changed to Maria. There has never been any secret about the place and date of the birth of Lenin’s mother: Simbirsk, 1835.
The statement that Alexander Blank, together with his family accepted conversion and that the name of their daughter was then changed from Miriam to Maria implies that both parents were Jewish.
Marietta Shaguinian prepared all her findings for publication in the Soviet historical monthly Veprosy Istorii (Problems of History) in the summer of 1964. But then the local Soviet censorship “considering the matter of serious importance, alerted the Politbureau which requested the Russian Patriarchy to present information about Blank's conversion. Having examined the file, the Politbureau refused permission for the publication of Marietta Shaguinian’s discoveries."
Stalin’s Jewish biographer, Isaac Deutscher, described Lenin as “a slightly Russified German or Balt," but Jewish biographer David Shub (Lenin: a Biography, New York, 1948) declared emphatically in a letter to the Russian emigre paper Novyi Zhumal (No. 63, 1961) that Alexander Blank was a baptized Jew from Odessa. Shub wrote further that a Soviet Jewish historian, Sau! Ginsburg, found the Alexander Blank file in the archives of the former Holy Synod and that it was promptly taken away from him, after which one of his research colleagues told him that this “Alexander Blank* was Lenin's grandfather.
That document would, of course, have settled the question of the identity of Lenin's maternal grandmother. What is known is that her maiden name was Anna Grosschopf and that she was the daughter of a wealthy Petersburg merchant. Professor Georg von Rauch of Munich wrote in Osteuropa (No. 4, 1970) that Anna’s father was a German, Johann Gottlieb Grosschopf, bom in Lubeck in 1766 who went to St. Petersburg in 1790 where he became a prosperous merchant. On the other hand, Lenin's wife Krupskaya, of Russified Polish descent, wrote in 1938 in the Soviet party monthly Bolshevik that Anna’s father was a German bom in Ukraine.
The question, then, is whether or not Lenin's maternal grandmother, Anna Grosschopf, was also of Jewish parentage like her husband. Certainly she brought a good deal of money into the marriage, making it possible for Alexander Blank, her husband, to buy an estate at Kokushkine and to be received into the lesser nobility.
Lenin's friend, N. Valentinov, who wrote in friendly tones about Lenin in émigré periodicals after his own break with the Bolsheviks, makes a statement which may throw some light on this question, remarking that Lenin’s father, in contrast with his wife Maria, was deeply religious and attended church regularly, accompanied by his children; in other words, it would seem that Lenin’s mother, Maria Blank, avoided going to church. And Lenin claimed to have been an atheist from the age of 16 years.
If Lenin’s genealogical background was of such kind that he could be received and accepted as a Jew and yet retain all the outward appearance and known background of a Russian, that would have made him most valuable political property, all the more so because of his great skill as a proponent of the doctrines of Karl Marx.
Stalin, real name Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, falls into another category. The son of a shoemaker, born in Tiflis, his identity as an ethnic Georgian has never been questioned and he has been castigated ever since his death as an ardent anti-Semite. However, his Jewish wife Rosa Kaganovich, was the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, for many years the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union, whose three brothers were commissars. His son married a Jewess and his daughter married a Jew. What effect all this has in turning Stalin into some kind of “Jew" will be explained below.
Those who are most securely harnessed to Jewish political, and especially revolutionary, purposes fall into three main classes:
1. The person with mother and father, both Jewish.
2. The product of a mixed marriage, but only where the mother is Jewish.
3. The surrogate Jew, a gentile married to a Jewish woman and whose children are brought up as Jews.
The only kind of concealment of identity available to those in the first category was name-changing; and so Apfelbaum became the more Russian-sounding Zinoviev; Sobelsohn became Radek; Helphand, Parvus; Finkelstein, Litvinov; Rosenfeld, Kamenev; Bronstein, Trotsky; Sennenschein, Malik; Ulbricht, Ustinov; Katz, Gromyko; and so on. It is only the last two categories which call for any explanation.
The London Jewish Chronicle of December 22, 1989, reported under the heading "New Jew Checks In'* that Nigel Davies, a well known chess player, had recently discovered that he was Jewish, and was off to a new start in Israel. He had evidently mentioned to some Jewish acquaintance that his maternal grandmother was Jewish; that meant that his mother and her children were technically Jewish, in spite of the fact that both his father and maternal grandfather were not. In a word, all that matters is having a Jewish mother; a Jewish father otherwise counts for nothing, as many of the products of mixed marriage have discovered to their chagrin. It is therefore possible, nay, even probable, that many of those apparent “non-Jews" who figured prominently in the Russian revolution, and afterwards down the years in the Soviet regime, listed as Russians, Latvians, Finns, Georgians, Poles, etc, were in fact Jews hiding their identity behind that of their fathers.
Even harder to detect is the surrogate Jew, the gentile who acquires a Jewish wife and, although himself never accepted as a Jew, is tied to the Jewish interest through children who are accepted as Jews. There are good reasons to believe that very many Soviet leaders up to recent times have belonged to this category. Stalin is one of these, and he could hardly have promoted the Jewish nationalist cause with more zeal and consistency if he had belonged to the first category.
"To the end he was obviously not anti-Jewish," writes Douglas Reed of Stalin . .
Mr. Kaganovich remained at his right hand. A few days before he died Stalin ordered one of the most pompous funerals ever seen in Soviet Moscow to be given to Lev Mechlis, one of the most feared and hated Jewish commissars of the 35 years, Mechlis’s coffin was carried by all the surviving grandees of the Bolshevik revolution, who also shared the watch at his lying in state so that this was plainly a warning to the captive Russian masses, if any were still needed, that the law against ‘‘anti-Semitism” was still in full force. Immediately after Mechlis's funeral Gan. 27, 1953) the “Stalin Peace Prize’ was with great public ostentation presented to the apostle of Talmudic vengeance, Mr. Ilya Ehrenburg, whose broadcasts to the Red armies as they advanced into Europe incited them not to spare “even unborn Fascists."3
It was for being unable to see eye-to-eye with the Kremlin leadership over the role of Zionism that Stalin fell into disfavor. As a leading American correspondent, Harrison Salisbury remarked at the time, “If Stalin just happened to be struck down by a ruptured artery on March 2nd, it must be recorded as one of the most fortuitous occurrences in history.” The release of the Jewish doctors who had been accused of trying to poison him, followed immediately afterwards. Moreover, as recorded in the chapter on the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist regime was responsible for the Bpread of the Jewish nationalist revolutionary plague all over Eastern Europe and elsewhere after the end of World War II,
The list of Soviet leaders who can be described as crypto-Jews is interminable. Time magazine on May 5,1958, reported that Nikita Krushchev admitted to the Israeli ambassador, Joseph Avidar,that Soviet President Klementi Voroshilov and half of the Presidium had Jewish wives. Time magazine stated that Krushchev had a Jewish daughter-in-law and the Canadian Jewish Press said that Leonid Brezhnev was married to a Jewess. “Andropov speaks fluent Yiddish,” reported the London Times in November 1982.
This would indicate that in a European context the Jews do not feel themselves to be of separate race and cheerfully marry some of their daughters into the upper echelons of the host population, gathering the offspring, if they can, into the Jewish community. It is only the Jew who marries a gentile and produces children who cannot be accepted as Jew who is wholly written off.
The Jews discriminate on grounds of race only in respect of populations which are obviously of different race; their daughters keep clear of the newly emerging "upper classes" in most parts of the so-called Third World - in Africa or India, for example - nor are they offered as marriage partners to Black politicians in the United States.
The subject of race is, of course, very complex. The fact that all the peoples of Europe are of the so-called Caucasian race does not mean that there are no perceptible “racial” differences among them. Broadly speaking, for example, the Sephardim are noticeably different from the Ashkenazim, as the English are different from the Irish. The concept of race has another connotation: any inbreeding or endogamous community acquires some of the characteristics of an evolving race, as Professor Keith had explained.4 In this sense the Jews, even if they have no heritage of race purity to preserve, are inclined to behave like an evolving race, evoking a racial response from host populations which are not permitted to assimilate them.
Notes
1. Sea Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe; Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion; R, Gayre, The Syro-Mesopotamian Ethnology.
2. Nahum Goktaoann, The Jewish Paradox.
3. According to a report in the London Jewish Chronicle of July 26,1991, the Moscow weekly Ogonyok confirmed that a grandfather of Lenin was Israel Blank, a Ukranlan Jew who converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
4. Doughs Reed, The Controversy of Zion.
6. Sir Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Human Evolution,
Chapter Four
High Finance and a New World Order
The West has been crippled by a corrosive and corrupt ideology-momlity that causes our political-intellectual elites to declare themselves in sympathy with, and in support of, the very elements that boldly proclaim their goat to be the destruction of the West
Richard Clark,
Technological Terrorism
The Jewish role in the West is for most people juet as much "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma* As in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution, an enigma rendered virtually impenetrable by a sophisticated system of intellectual terrorism which excludes the subject from public debate.
The consequences, however, are everywhere to be seen, and have been chronicled from time to time, as by Wilmot Robertson in his book The Dispossessed Majority, the "majority” being, of course, the "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants" who pioneered and created America.
Two facts of major importance have been established beyond reasonable doubt:
1. The “ideaF of a “new world order* promoted in the Soviet Union ever since the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia in 1917, has had an almost exact counterpart in the West, the two together being like wheels at the opposite ends of one and the same axle shaft.
2. The Jewish presence in the West everywhere exhibits a marvelous unity and continuity of purpose In the promotion of a Jewish national or Zionist ideal, symbolized by and geographically centered in the state of Israel.
The question to be answered is this: What role, if any, does Zionism play in helping to turn the Western wheel of a one-world ambition?
There can be no answer to that question except one that can be drawn out of a unified interpretation of the history of our country; for how can the Jewish role be properly examined and discussed except in the context of that "storm center of events" of which Professor Arendt writes?1
Knowledge can be of two kinds: knowledge of the world outside ourselves, the macrocosm, and knowledge of the kingdom within, the microcosm, both of them boundless.
The better we know ourselves, the easier it will be to know the world; alternatively, the better we know the world, so much easier it will be to know ourselves and our deepest and most enduring needs.
It is not more and more knowledge that we need for the purposes of strengthening our position as individuals, but only knowledge of a kind that holds together and makes sense, We need a coherent interpretation of the history of the age in which we live and an insight into what it is that we must have if we are to be physically well and in good spirits.
The following paragraph from a book by three university historians, published in 1949, will serve as a starting point for an exploration of what they describe as “this age of conflict”:
Two world wars and their intervening wars, revolutions, and crises are now generally recognized to be episodes in a single age of conflict which began in 1914 and has not yet run its course, It is an age that has brought to the world more change and tragedy than any other in recorded history, Yet, whatever may be its ultimate meaning and consequence, we can already think of it and write of it as a historic whole.2 (Emphasis added),
An age of conflict that must be thought of "as a whole" must also be capable of being explained and understood as a whole; therefore, it is a highly condensed and simplified synopsis of the history of our century that we must have if the seemingly interminable succession of "episodes" of conflict and tragedy is to be seen as a whole and understood.
The method I have chosen is to begin with a list of categorical statements which can be developed and expanded and supported with an extensive bibliography; here they are:
1. Our century of conflict is the product of an alliance of money and intellect, with intellect almost invariably subordinate to, and at the service of, money; money being in the 20th century the primary source of great power.
2. We need to find and identify the changes which have occurred in the realms of money and of intellect, changes which have made this century so different from all others in recorded history.
3. The change which has occured in the realm of money is this: Constellations of finance-capitalism which had been separate and nationally oriented were absorbed into a greater constellation of finance-capitalism serving a different set of long-term interests.
4. The change which occurred in the realm of intellect is this: Christian orthodoxy was replaced by an ideology of socialism at the basis of a consensus intellectual frame of reference and system of values. This socialism or secular religion has given rise to what the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung has described as a "psychic epidemic* now afflicting the educated classes in the West.
5. The changes which heralded our century of conflict were first clearly visible in South Africa in the late 1890s, producing the Anglo-Boer War (the first of three great fratricidal wars in the West), the beginning of the end of the British Empire, and the beginning of a new and unprecedented kind of world imperium- money-powered, race-oriented, Zionist national-socialist.
6. These changes in money and intellect have drawn the peoples of the West into a dialectical trap, with money as thesis, socialism as antithesis, and the new imperium as synthesis; money incessantly concentrates power, socialism promises the total dispersal and distribution of power; the resolution of this contradiction supplies the new imperium with its dynamic.
7. The process of the transference of financial power to the new imperium was only completed in the 1930s when J.P. Morgan and the great American pioneering families lost their dominance in Wall Street.
8. The immediate cause of the great increase in conflict all over the world: External interference with the natural hierarchical system or "pecking order” within and among ethnic groups, as everywhere states were set up, and regimes established, which have no local or natural right to exist. This interference by third parties is what makes episodes of conflict in the 20th century quite different from conflicts in other ages, conferring on all of diem a shared meaning.
9. All these developments are linked to the further evil of a system of money creation and debt in which the nations of the West are at the same time offenders and victims.
We can think of our age of conflict as a historic whole, but what reason do we have to believe that it is the product of a uniform and continuous set of identifiable causes?
Students of history can provide innumerable examples of major influences, baffling to all at the time of their occurrence, which yielded finally to quite simple elucidation and explanation.
It is not only in history that events widely separated in space and time can be found to have a combined meaning; for example, a few years ago when over a period of many months there were visitations of freak weather all around the world, in many cases with disastrous consequences, the meteorologists were soon able to trace them all to a single cause or set of causes: they were able at least to show that the storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts, etc. belonged together and had an intelligible combined meaning. Needless to say, the meteorologists were not hindered in their investigations by “no-go" areas of inquiry of the kind to be expected by those who seek to understand worldwide visitations of freak political weather.
We have no reason to suppose that we shall find an explanation of our age of conflict as easy to present and understand as spells of freak weather, but we are encouraged to hope that where we see in many parts of the globe, over many decades, a recognizable pattern of evil consequences, we can expect to find evidence of a uniform pattern of causes.
What is required is an interpretation of the history of our century which will explain and render mutually intelligible the major changes which have occurred-those changes which brought more conflict and tragedy than ever before in recorded history. Among the few books of history in which any attempt has been made to interpret the history of our century as a whole are Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope.
Spengler's main contribution to historiography is his theory of the morphology of history in which he assigns to our present civilization in the West a condition of irreversible decline. Paradoxically, he does not regard this as a pessimistic view, One fact emerges very clearly in Spengler's analysis: What has happened in the 20th century must be seen and studied as an alliance of money and intellect with money, rather than pure politics, as the main moving power in world affairs.
Quigley leaves many things unexplained—he may have done so intentionally-but he supports with a good deal of documentary evidence the thesis that much of what has happened in our century has been deliberately made to happen. What he offers is, in fact, a conspiratorial theory of history involving a number of secret and semisecret organizations like the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, the Round Table Movement, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the American Council on Foreign Relations, all under the umbrella of what he calls an "Anglo-American network” of businessmen, educationists, politicians, and journalists.
Quigley, who was Professor of History and of International Relations at the Georgetown Foreign Service School, Washington DC, supplies much other well documented information which no one has yet tried to fit into a general interpretation of the history of our century. Tragedy and Hope was hastily withdrawn by its publishers, the Macmillan Company, arguably because it was found to have contributed too much to a fully coherent interpretation of the history of our century—to the embarrassment of those who prefer to work under the cloak of secrecy. He writes in Tragedy and Hope:
1 know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 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 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.
The theory that much of what has happened has been made to happen is further endorsed by another consensus historian, Arnold Toynbee, not in his monumental A Study of History, but in his other public utterances, of which the following is an example, from a paper read at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Institute for the Scientific Study of International Relations at Copenhagen in June 1931 (published in International Affairs, December 1931):
We are at present working discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be. perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited,
Quite clearly, the denudation of the national states of much of their sovereignty during the 20th century represented to Quigley and Toynbee part of the progressive fulfillment of their ideal of an elaborately planned “brave new world" to be raised on the flattened ruins of the old-for Quigley a world of “hope" with which to replace a world of “tragedy,” a world of planned revolutionary change to replace a disorderly world of slow evolutionary change.
Where and when did this age of conflict begin? The three coauthors quoted above3 say that it began in 1914 with World War I; but there are good reasons to believe that it began with the Anglo- Boer War of 1898-1902, which we can now see quite clearly as the beginning of the end of the British world imperium and as marking the inauguration of another imperium of a mysterious kind.
If our century of conflict can be said to have begun with the Anglo-Boer War, then it is in South Africa that we may have the best chance of seeing more clearly the crucial historical change that was to spark off a great chain-reaction of change involving the whole world.
Until that time the record of the British Empire had been one of continuous progress, marred only by the hiving off of the American colonies. Britain had outpaced ail rivals in last century’s scramble for colonial possessions, and could boast by the turn of the century to possess an "empire on which the sun never set."
However, by a mere accident of history, Afrikaners-Boers, as they were called-who had trekked away from Britain's Cape Colony into South Africa’s virtually unpopulated hinterland, suddenly found themselves to be the owners of the world's richest gold fields. The eagerness of race-nationalists like Cecil John Rhodes and Alfred Milner to add the new Boer Republic of the TranBvaal to the British empire is understandable. In the climate of thought and sentiment then prevailing, not to have tried to grab so valuable a prize would have been virtually unthinkable.
After a war that proved unexpectedly costly both in lives and money, Britain succeeded in adding to its empire both the Transvaal and its ally in the struggle, the Orange Free State republic, but all this happened in circumstances mysteriously different from those that had attended all previous imperial conquests. It was a war over which the British people were themselves sharply divided until the first shots were fired by the Boers; it was a war against which the British Government had been sternly warned by one of the empire's most loyal servants,
General Sir William Butler, then Commander-in-Chief of British forces in South Africa; it was a war which gave rise to a greater outpouring of false communication than any other in British colonial history,3
There was something decidedly different about this tempting opportunity for further imperial expansion, which that prominent writer J. A. Hobson explained thus in his book, The War in South Africa, while that war was still in progress:
We are fighting in order to place a small international oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power in Pretoria. Englishmen would do well to recognize that the economic and political destinies of South Africa are, and seem likely to remain, in the hands of men most of whom are foreigners by origin whose trade is finance and whose trade interests are not British.
There can be no doubt today about the correctness of that assessment, Thomas Pakenham, in his book The Boer War, published in 1979, has this to say about the causes of that war:
First there is a thin golden thread woven by the "gold bugs,” the Rand millionaires who controlled the richest mines in the world. It has been hitherto assumed by historians that none of the "gold bugs" was directly concerned in making the war. But directly concerned they were ... I have found evidence of an informal alliance between Sir Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner, and the firm of Wemher-Beit, the dominant Rand mining house. It was this alliance, I believe, that gave Milner the strength to precipitate the war. (Emphasis added).
Hobson devotes an entire chapter of his book to mine- ownership in the Transvaal. A few of the financial pioneers were Englishmen; he names among these Rhodes, Rudd and J.B. Robinson. These had all made their fortunes in South Africa, but the others, “the small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race," were wealthy when they arrived in the country and had access to seemingly boundless funds in Europe, including the German Dresdner Bank, which Hobson believes to be largely owned by Wemher and Beit. Rhodes, too, had to go to an international banking dynasty, the London Rothschild’s, for money with which to buy out his rivals and gain complete control of the diamond industry in Kimberley.
General Sir William Butler was even more emphatic about the sources of power and motivation which were decisive in precipitating the war, “the train-iayers setting the political gunpowder," as he called them. In a dispatch to the War Office in June 1899 he wrote:
If the Jews were out of the question, it would be easy enough to come to an agreement, but they are apparently intent upon plunging the country into civil strife ... indications are too evident here to allow one to doubt the existence of strong undercurrents, the movers of which are bent upon war at all costs for their own selfish ends.
Noticed by few, and by even fewer understood, effective control of the British Empire at a decisive point in history had passed, if only momentarily, out of essentially British hands, Or, to put it differently, the center of gravity of real power in the world had shifted significantly. That was the mysterious change that was to inaugurate a chain reaction of more change, first for the British Empire and then for the whole world. More precisely, it was the first clear sign of the commencement of a process of change in the realm of finance-capitalism which was not to be completed before the middle of the 1930s.
Other changes are less readily noticeable, one of the most important of these being radical changes in the methodology of warfare—the human mind itself has become a battleground for warring interests as never before in recorded history. Political warfare—Von Clausewitz's “war by other means"-there has always been but never before on the scale practiced after the turn of the century. Persuasion there always was as a means of readying a population for war; but the world was to encounter in the late 1890s something unprecedented in the quantity and audacity of the lying propaganda that was used in drawing the British people into the Anglo-Boer War.
This new evil, or recurrence of an old evil on a gigantic scale, came as a great shock to General Butler, wno wrote as follows to the Colonial Secretary on December 18, 1898:
All the political questions in South Africa and nearly all the information sent from Cape Town are being worked by what I have already described as a colossal syndicate for the spread of false information.
Hobson wrote in his book The War in South Africa:
South Africa presents a unique example of a large press, owed, controlled and operated by a small body of men with the direct aim of bringing about a conflict which shall serve their business interests.
With prophetic insight, Hobson wrote a book, The Psychology of Jingoism which, as an analysis of the dishonest uses of propaganda, bears comparison with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Only a few of the major historic changes which ensued need be mentioned for our present purposes: the Anglo-Boer War; two World Wars; the Bolshevik Revolution and setting up of the Soviet Union as an industrial and military superpower; the dismantling of the colonial empires and conversion of the former colonies into new nations, few of them economically viable; the delivery of mainland China and other vast areas in the Far East to totalitarian socialist rule; the setting up of the United Nations with its innumerable agencies as the prototype of some form of world government; and the progressive undermining of the national sovereignty of all the Western nations.
It is significant that the first years of the 20th century also ushered in a phenomenon that was to remain a conspicuous feature of the ensuing age of conflict, namely the concentration camp, symbol of an expanded barbarity in which civilians join the soldiers in the front line of every major conflict.
We need to know what were the deep-seated changes in human affairs which gave rise to a worldwide chain-reaction of conflict and tragedy. As we shall try to show, these deep-rooted changes occurred in two quite separate realms, money and intellect. So, let us begin with an examination of the great change which took place in the world of money.
Toward the end of the 19th century money began to acquire a new role and meaning in human affairs as economics began to prevail over politics. The two need to be clearly distinguished as sources of value, motivation, and control at the level of leadership.
Politics is a social function concerned with the total welfare of a community, long-term as well as short-term, in which the requirements of economics, although always important, have only a supportive or secondary role. Economic thinking, a mere department of political thinking, is concerned exclusively with the requirements of economic prosperity and progress. It assumes automatically that whatever is good for business is good for the community as a whole, an attitude of mind that excludes virtually all other considerations.
What happened towards the end of the 19th century was, therefore, not something of sudden occurrence; it must be seen rather as a crucial state having been reached in a process which had continued slowly during most of the preceding century. Not only did the Anglo-Boer Wax signalize the beginning of the end of the British Empire, it also signalized the beginning of the end of national financial sovereignities all over the Western world, a process that was to reach its culmination only in the 1930s when the great American pioneering families, headed by J.P. Morgan, were finally edged out of their dominating position in Wall Street.
In the relations of politics and high finance there subsisted a very complex state of affairs until shortly before the commencement of World War II, which can be briefly explained as follows.
There had always existed within the national states of the Western world families or dynasties of bankers, like the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Montefiores, etc., who lent to governments and specialized in transactions across national frontiers, but these were never fully integrated as an international system capable of controlling politics on an international basis.
These concentrations of high finance, although always influential, lacked the power wholly to control the politics of the national states, but each remained an important part of a nationally oriented constellation of financial power. This was a situation that suited them well enough in the circumstances prevailing until the turn of the century, Enormous influence they could exert, both nationally and internationally, but not the dominating power they were later to acquire.
Paradoxically, in spite of the enormous lead which the Jewish banking dynasties had gained in international commerce, it was the gentile financiers with their ownership and access to the cornucopia of new wealth, plus their control of national politics, who first established high finance on a fully internationalized basis. The facts are supplied by Dr. Carroll Quigley:
The apex of the system was to be the Bank of International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks were themselves private corporations. Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England. Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury bonds, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. {Tragedy and Hope).
Quigley explains further that the Rothschilds had been preeminent during much of the 19th 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 operated as if it were in London 'where it had indeed originated as George Peabody and Company in 1838.”
The process by which the separate national concentrations of financial power were absorbed into a global concentration was only completed in the 1930s, producing among other historical consequences, the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, the outbreak of World War II and subsequent involvement of the United States and Japan, and the setting up of a Marxist-Leninist People’s Republic of China.
Professor Quigley supplies many of the facts about the final shift in the center of gravity of financial power, and his story begins with these ominous words:
The third state of capitalism is of such overwhelming significance in the history of the twentieth century, and its ramifications and influences have been so subterranean and even occult, that we may be excused if we devote considerable attention to its organization and methods.
It is the story, assembled from a vast accumulation of documented facts, of a process of change in the United States, beginning before World War I, which Wilmot Robertson was later to describe as the "dispossession of the American majority,” culminating in what Quigley calls “a shift on all levels, from changing tastes in newspaper comic strips ... to profound change in the power nexus of the ‘American Establishment'."
From the 1880s the United States had been ruled from behind the scenes by a plutocracy supported by the fortunes of the great American pioneering families-Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbult, Mellon, Duke, Whitney, Ford, DuPont, etc.-a power constellation with J.P. Morgan as its banking center. This “Eastern Establishment” is described by Quigley as “high Episcopalian, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, and European-culture- conscious ,* and was matched with a similar establishment on the other side of the Atlantic with Montagu Norman as its banking head. The two worked closely together and came to be known as the "Anglo-American Establishment."
Quigley tells us of the . . .
, .. decline of J.P. Morgan itself from its deeply anonymous status as a partnership (founded in 1861) to its transformation into an incorporated public company in 1940 to its final disappearance by absorption into its chief banking subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company, in 1959.
Quigley says that the less obvious implication of the shift in Wall Street was the realization by the Morgan group that it no longer had the votes on the Board of Trustees of Columbia University to nominate a successor to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, the retiring president.
In a word, the control of American higher eduction had quietly been taken out of the hands of America’s great pioneering families, described by Quigley as “high Episcopalian, Anglophile and Europeaa-culture-conscious"—a studiously discreet way of saying they they were not Jewish.
Wall Street fell into the hands of the international financiers like a ripe plum, their real battle having been fought and won in the realm of parliamentary politics by methods which are still standard practice in the Western world; theBe include the financing of party politics, the manipulation of the public opinion through the medium of newspapers, radio, the cinema, the boob trade, etc., plus the penetration, financing and manipulation of trade union movements.
This was a takeover exercise in which America's emerging secret rulers could draw on centuries of accumulated expertise and experience as a nation struggling to survive in dispersion.
The eclipse of the power of the great American families first took the form of taxation laws, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913 and culminating in the inheritance tax, which drove all the great family fortunes into the refuge of tax-exempt foundations, Morgan and his circle lost control of the Federal Government as one money-and-intellect alliance was subtly replaced by another. And the fact that a money-and-intellect alliance behaves in much the same way no matter who controls it made the change hard to detect.
The Morgan groups dabbled in the politics of the radical left and lost no time in trying to get a foothold in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. But at this game they were no match for their Jewish rivals. The rival Wall Street elites were both fired by the ideal and ambition of a “new world order," but there the similarity ended.
The original American establishment, like its British opposite number, was for containing the Soviet Union with its socialist rulers with a view to the ultimate absorption of the Russian empire into a new world order to be raised on the foundations of the British Empire and which theyj as inheritors of the Rhodes dream, would control. The other, the new Eastern Establishment, was for building up the Soviet Union as an industrial and military giant which would replace the British Empire as the foundation of a new world order,
These developments in the realm of finance capitalism and power politics came to a climax towards the end of the 1930s, coinciding with a considerable eruption all over the Western world of a social phenomenon misleadingly described as “anti-Semitism.” Professor Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism puts it frankly and succinctly:
Twentieth century political developments have driven the Jewish people into the storm center of events .,. the Jewish question and anti-Semitism ,., became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement and the establishment of the organizational structure of the Third Reich . . . then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity.
Henry Ford, who for many years had roundly condemned all the big bankers as the natural enemies of private enterprise industry, now drew a clear distinction between the house of Morgan, which he described as "constructive," and its rivals, whom he described as “warmongers," Morgan himself, like his opposite number in London, Montagu Norman, was known to dislike the Jews. The radio talks of Father Coughlin and writings of Father Denis Fahey, the frantic efforts of Charles Lindbergh to keep America out of the war, and the activities of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts in Britain, were all reactions to the appearance of the Jewish people in “the storm center" of 20th century politics.
What all these alarming developments mean is that a highly concentrated Jewish financial power was suddenly seen to be gaining ascendancy in the West.
Another layer in the prevailing political reality during the last decades of the 19th century must now be studied separately-namely, the thoughts about the future that were then circulating in the English ruling classes.
Cecil John Rhodes was one of the most potent men of action in English history, but he was also a visionary and dreamer, pictured by friend and foe as a colossus bestriding the continent of Africa. His ability to inspire activity and loyalty in others was proverbial. In the realm of pure thought, however, the unifying and energizing agent was not Rhodes but John Ruskin, at one time Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University, who had armed a generation of young Englishmen with an ideology of service having as its object the creation of a better and happier world. This was to be imagined as an extended application of the civilizing and humanizing concept of the British Empire; it was to be a fellowship of free and independent states held together by an abstract principle which came to be labelled the “English Idea."
The numinosity, or sense of magic, evoked by these ideas can be traced to a single cause: the ideology of a "brave new world,” with order and welfare for all mankind, was offered as a replacement for a religious orthodoxy that had long since begun to crumble under the impact of a scientific “enlightenment’’; here was something to restore to the existence of the educated and energetic a keen sense of meaning, purpose and direction, an ideology, moreover, which sanctified imperial expansion and the personal advancement of all its servants.
So potent was this ideology as a secular religion that it won converts all over the Western world; even former leaders of the conquered Boers, including General Louis Botha, who was to be South Africa’s first Prime Minister, and General Jan Christian Smuts, yielded to its psychic charm.
Practical measures to give effect to this political idealism took the form of a range of operations including the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, the semisecret Round Table movement, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the American Council on Foreign Relations, etc.
This was definitely a racial affair, invoking on both sides of the Atlantic a genteel racial response. Ralph Durand, in a book about Oxford University published in 1909, wrote of:
Cecil Rhodes of Oriel, the dreamer of great dreams ... Believing that the preservation of the peace of the world lay in the hands of men of Teuton blood, he made provision in his will for the founding at Oxford of scholarships that would be open to citizens of the British Empire, the German Empire and the United States. (Oxford: Its Buildings and Cardens, published by Grant Richards, London).
The fatal flaw in this ideology does not belong to the art or science of politics, nor that of high finance, but to an area of knowledge less readily accessible to exploration and discussion, namely, metaphysics. Quigley puts his hand on the key to that riddle: each of the central banks in the different national states, he says, “sought to dominate its government” and to “influence cooperative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world."
What this means is that something had already gone wrong in the West’s different national power structures-all had incorporated a system of money creation and debt, a corrupting influence with implications of infinite complexity.
Money had become progressively the measure of all things, with a ruling elite drawn less and less from the land and more and more from the factory and the counting house. The nations had, in fact, become plutocracies, capable of maintaining themselves In power with a public opinion not sought and consulted as before but created as required by newspapers, patronage and other "rewards in the business world."
Such a conversion of money into public opinion and support was accomplished in Britain by Rhodes and Milner and their “gold bug” partners, with a total disregard for all moral considerations. Money had shown what money could do.
There was, thus, an iron inevitability about the outcome of a struggle which the gentile financiers did not even see as a struggle: an alien high finance firmly united by long-range political aims, increasingly influenced the politics of the different national states and finally displaced the gentile financiers as managers of the new international banking structure.
And educated minds, conditioned by John Ruskin’s secular ideology calling for a "new world" to be raised on the foundations of the British Empire, seem to have had no difficulty in transferring their attachment and enthusiasm to a new ideology worked out by Marx and Engel’s.
Anthony Sutton's trilogy, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, and Wall Street and FDR, contains a vast quantity of information but is more remarkable for what it omits. For that which is omitted is precisely what Professor Hannah Arendt correctly describes as the "catalytic agent” in the "storm center of events,” namely, the role of the Jewish people in 20th century power politics.
So far as Sutton is concerned there is and always was only one “Wall Street Establishment,” which is made to carry the main blame for the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution and later for the financing of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
That is a misleading oversimplification of the story.
In fact, Wall Street during the two preceding decades has a sort of split personality, one half of it symbolized by Morgan and the other by Warburg, It is true, as alleged, that “Wall Street” helped to finance the Bolshevik Revolution, but in this exercise the Warburg faction Jacob Schiff in particular) took the initiative, with the Morgan faction getting all the bad publicity as they belatedly tried to get a share of the action. There is much evidence also to support the contention that “Wall Street,” this time clearly the
Morgan interests, supported Hitler's rise to power. But at the same time who, if not the internationalists, were funding the Communist Party in these crucial elections in Germany in 1930 in which the Communists gained spectacular successes?
The fiercest political struggles in the 1930s all over the West can now be more clearly seen as so many proxy battles on behalf of rival concentrations of financial power, culminating in World War II and the triumph of the internationalists.
In Britain opposition to World War II came from what remained of the British end of the original Anglo-American establishment, labeled the “Cliveden set" - Cliveden being the name of the home of Lord As tor.
This interpretation will also help to explain one of the weirdest and most mysterious episodes in American history-a reported attempt, with the assistance of the American Legion and armed forces, to set up a "fascist style" dictatorship in the White House.
News of the plot was given brief front-page treatment in the New York Times on November 21, 1934; a congressional committee was set up to investigate the allegations; but then all news of the plot faded out of the press. Those involved included a few leading personalities in the American Legion and another organization known as Liberty League, which together seem to have undertaken to make available a force of 500,000 men. Leadership of the operation was offered to Major-General Smedley D. Butler, a much decorated military hero, but there is no real evidence that he ever agreed to go along with the plotters.
Significantly, it is exclusively the gentile power-wielders of high finance and big business who were identified as the culprits behind the scene, all linked in one way or another with J.P. Morgan: Grayson Murphy, a director of the Guaranty Company; Jackson Martindell, associated with Stone and Webster, allied to the Morgans; the Du Pont Company; the Remington Arms Company, controlled by Du Pont; and the Morgan-Harriman financial interests. It would seem, therefore, that the Morganite financiers and industrialists, finding themselves at last outmaneuvered and outgunned in Wall Street, were tempted to take desperate measures against the international financiers-as has been done with some success in Italy and Germany,
As the rivalry of separate national constellations of financial power gave rise to last century’s scramble for colonial