THE BILDERBERG GROUP
by Rodney Atkinson
This is adapted from chapter 7 of my book Europe’s Full Circle published in 1997. I reproduce it here on the occasion of the 2013 meeting of Bilderberg in the United Kingdom, to which a number of Government figures including George Osborne and David Cameron were invited. There is no shortage of the wilder type of conspiracy theorist available on the web. The BBC has cleverly just interviewed one of the wilder elements on the Andrew Neill chaired Sunday Politics programme, but there is a very calm and analytical case to be put about the rise of anti democratic corporatism through vehicles like Bilderberg and its ultimate expression (the European Union) and I hope I put that case here. But I doubt whether the BBC will want a credible and rational exposure of Bilderberg!
Between 1973, when Edward Heath’s European Communities Act came into force and today legislation has passed through the House of Commons which has effectively destroyed the United Kingdom, its democracy, the jurisdiction of its courts and the sovereignty of its parliament. Such an enterprise did not happen without deliberate intent, secrecy and the active collaboration of leading British politicians and businessmen. It could also not have happened unless it had been:
1. In the interests of a powerful force (certain political and corporate interests in the United States bent on creating a United States of Europe)
2. Based on a well thought out scheme (the historical German and French plans for a corporatist Eurostate)
3. Implemented by undemocratic means (powers which allowed the executive to bypass Parliament); and
4. Supported by a clique of British establishment figures who have claimed that, since the Empire became a Commonwealth, the United Kingdom was finished and its political and economic influence of no account. Echoing similar attitudes in 1914 and 1939 they so appeased the demands of our enemies that they failed to protect either our national interest or even our constitution.
There is a secretive group which, in its foundation and in its core (if not in all those who have attended its meetings) has played a central role in this process – the Bilderberg Group, founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Bernhard was a Nazi party member from 1933 until 1937 who resigned one day after his controversial marriage to the future Queen of the Netherlands. The timing of his resignation letter (in order to marry into the Dutch royal family) tells us more than his later apparent support for the Allied cause. An unsigned copy of Prince Bernhard’s resignation letter was found in the National Archives, Washington. The letter ended “Heil Hitler” – hardly a renunciation of the Nazi party. In 1934 he was the subject of a report by a US Congress committee which identified him as an SS officer attached to the Nazi government’s principal industrial ally, I G Farben.
He resigned from Bilderberg in 1976, the year in which he was revealed by the Dutch Government’s Donner Commission as having accepted a US$lm bribe from the Lockheed Corporation.As reported in the Times of 10th and the 12th June 1976, one of the witnesses, on his way to the Commission with tapes and documents, was run over by a car and his briefcase stolen. That witness was a British zoologist, Tom Ravensdale, former PR officer with the World Wildlife Fund of which Prince Bernhard was president.
The origins of this secretive international group of businessmen, principally corporatist and socialist politicians, journalists (who conveniently forget their devotion to open democratic discussion when invited by Bilderberg) and a few misguided continental royals, lie in post-Second-World-War American-European relations.
Bilderberg apparently represents and attracts the kind of people who regard corporatist and state power as more “efficient” than the wishes of individuals, families and nations. The former American ambassador to Bonn, George McGhee, is on record as saying that, “The Treaty of Rome which brought the European Community into being was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings”. (McGhee was in fact my father’s tutor at Oxford in the late 1930s)
Richard Aldrich, a former CIA operative, wrote in Diplomacy and Statecraft, March 1997:
“Although Bilderberg and the European Movement shared the same founders, members and objectives arguably Bilderberg constituted the more effective mechanism….it is clear that the Rome Treaty was nurtured at Bilderberg in the proceeding year.”
Aldrich further asserts (and he should know) that the American Committee for a United Europe which shared so many “founders, members and objectives” with Bilderberg:
“…reveals the style of early covert actions, not least the reliance on private organisations – albeit coordinated by a close circle of friends”
The minutes of the first Bilderberg meeting declared their aim:
“… to evolve an international order which would look beyond the present day crisis. When the time is ripe our present concepts of world affairs should be extended to the whole world.”
The key phrases, indeed code words for this self-appointed elite, include “international order” – a phrase common to both naive modern-day corporatists and the pernicious leaders of Nazi Germany. “When the time is ripe” indicates both the long-term planning of their project (“our present concepts”) and an element of secrecy. The phrase “the whole world” reveals their supranational power cravings and the intention to eliminate untidy elements like national democracies.
Virtually all the leading Bilderberg figures are also members of the US-based Council on Foreign Relations which (despite the presence of many sound liberal and conservative inter-nationalists) was founded by the most fanatical of all “world government” proponents, Paul Warburg. Warburg’s activities included being a director of IG Farben America which, during the Second World War, entered into technology transfer agreements with the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil as well as benefiting from Standard Oil’s monopoly in synthetic rubber which greatly enhanced Nazi Germany’s foreign exchange earnings and its capacity to manufacture war materials. Iso-octane technology, essential for German aviation fuel was provided exclusively by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey.
It was Paul Warburg’s son James who, in evidence to a US Senate committee in 1950, best articulated the aims of the world collectivists:
“We shall have world government whether we like it or not The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent.”
So the principal European pillar of the Bilderberg group was a once well connected Nazi while the American pillar was a Rockefeller whose family company, Standard Oil, had been so helpful to the Nazi regime and had a joint venture from the 1920s to 1942 with the Nazis’ principal industrial ally (IG Farben).
James Stewart Martin, the former chief of the Economic Warfare Section of the Department of Justice, noted in his 1950 book “All Honourable Men”:
“a picture began to emerge of an enemy that did not need the services of spies and saboteurs. By agreement between German and American producers of magnesium (needed for aircraft) production in the United States before the war was limited to no more than 5,000 tons per year. In contrast, Germany in 1939 alone used 13,500 tons and during the next five years consumed magnesium at the rate of 33,000 tons per year.”
Reuters reported (5.10.96) on recently declassified American Intelligence documents which confirmed an August 1944 meeting between the SS and representatives of 7 German companies including Krupp, Rochling, Messerschmidt and Volkswagen. At this meeting in Strasbourg plans were made to build up wealth, power and industrial capacity abroad, “so that a strong German empire can be created after the defeat”. A US Treasury Department analysis of 1946 reported that the Germans had transferred $500m out of the country before the end of the war.
The aim was to prepare “for a post war commercial campaign” in other words the very kind of political-industrial planning which this book describes as “corporatist”. German companies were encouraged to make alliances with foreign companies and the SS referred to the kind of international patent sharing agreements which Krupp made with US companies – and of which the above mentioned IG Farben-Standard Oil agreement was a classic example.
What politicians forget today is that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the Soviet Communist invasion of Hungary and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Germany was pursuing the same nationalistic (i.e. aggressive national) aims as in the 1930s but using the “building of Europe” as the means to this end. The links between Nazi Germany’s Europe and Hitler’s “world order” and today’s crisis in Europe and the “New World Order” lie in this post-war period. This should not be surprising since 134 of von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office civil servants served under Adenauer and the same man appointed by Hitler as secretary of his “Europe Committee” (Heinz Twetschler von Falkenstein) was chosen by Adenauer in 1949 for a similar job as Director of the “European Division” of the West German Foreign Office. Consider the common theme in these three quotations from 1931, 1950 and 1951. First Dr Duisberg of IG Farben in 1931:
“Only an integrated trading block will enable Europe to gain innermost economic strength … the longing for a thousand year Reich cries for a new approach. For such a purpose we can use the mirage of a pan Europe.”
(From 1934 onwards IG Farben became the principal industrial vehicle for Hitler’s war preparations.) Notice here what modern German leaders suppress but which the Nazis did not disguise – that for many Germans “Europe” and “das Reich” are one and the same.
Konrad Adenauer himself (the German founder of the European Community and indeed of modern Germany) said in 1950:
“A federated Europe will be a third force … Germany has again become a factor with which others will have to reckon … If we Europeans colonise Africa we create at the same time a supplier of raw materials for Europe.”
Even for Adenauer therefore “Europe” was a grand imperial ambition rather than just a national interest. And from 1951, Adenauer’s Minister of Commerce, Dr Seebohm (anticipating the British Government’s favourite phrase “Britain at the heart of Europe”!):’Does free Europe want to join Germany? Germany is the heart of Europe and the limbs must adjust themselves to the heart not the heart to the limbs.”
So some of the more naive cold war policies of the USA and the activities of Bilderberg have brought about the aims of aggressive German nationalism but have done so in the name of a “new international order” – and, of course, corporatism. The same names (Ford and Rockefeller) whose companies had US directors on the board of American IG Farben (which used its funds to finance Nazi propaganda and three of whose German directors were found guilty at Nuremburg) also part-financed both the major “new world order”, corporatist institutions established after the First World War (the Council on Foreign Relations and the London based Royal Institute of International Affairs). Henry Ford (personally on the board of American I.G.) wrote The International Jew, a favourite book of Hitler whose activities Ford financed in the 1920s. In 1938 Ford received Germany’s highest medal for non-Germans – the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.
The supranational/collectivist and anti-nation attitude of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London is best demonstrated by Professor Arnold Toynbee (Director of Studies at that institute) at the Fourth Annual Conference for the Scientific Study of International Relations in 1931 when he presented his paper “Prophecy in the Twentieth Century”:
“If we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate, sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and independence of the sovereign independent states which at present… divide the political allegiance of mankind.”
It is of course not so much “dividing” the allegiance that worries these “world government” elitists but the fact that they themselves cannot attract such allegiance. The duplicitous Toynbee continues:
“And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty or the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which statesman or a publicist can be ostracised and discredited.”
Observers of incompetent and treasonous foreign policies pursued by British governments will not be surprised to hear that Toynbee had important intelligence and research posts in the British Foreign Office in both world wars.
But it was following the Second World War that the Polish-born Dr Josef Retinger, who had long intrigued to establish a Eurostate, set up the European Movement and with American CIA funds, the “American Committee on a United Europe” -the latter funding the former. Retinger interested (the native-German) Prince Bemhard of the Netherlands (see Appendix I for details of his Nazi Party membership) in his schemes and it was Bernhard who set up the Bilderberg Group named after the Hotel in Oosterbeek in Holland where the first meeting was held on 29-31st May 1954.
The early post-war CIA recruited many idealistic young veterans of the Pacific and European struggles. They sought to counter communism with an anti-Soviet conglomerate of European states. Even as late as 1975, by which time many of these were in senior positions there was pressure from the CIA for a “United States of Europe”. As Vice-Chairman of the “No Campaign” in the 1975 UK referendum on European Community membership, Sir Richard Body MP was approached by two CIA officials who were unhappy about the anti-British and pro-European Community propaganda which the London CIA office had been told to disseminate. The then head of station in London was a certain Cord Meyer Junior who in 1954 was responsible for the funding of the European Youth Campaign. The campaign (for “European Unity”) was the most active part of the European Movement between 1951 and 1959, not least because thanks to Meyer and others the CIA funded it to the tune of £1.34m. Needless to say no leading British newspaper published Sir Richard Body’s evidence but a piece did appear in Time Out! Like the BBC today any serious analysis of anti democratic corporatism is condemned to the entertainment sphere!
Can the Bilderberg Group be described as a “conspiracy”? The core “Europhiles” who comprise the steering committee seem to be bent on a strategy which they conceal from voters and for which they have no democratic mandate – these few may perhaps be described at the very least as anti-democratic. Some attendees are just natural corporatists and socialists eager to attack national democracies while others attend because they are impressed by finding themselves part of a conclave of the “famous”. For the sake of appearances other guests are invited, who totally reject their “one world” or even “one Europe” philosophy (Enoch Powell, Norman Lamont and Margaret Thatcher for example each attended only once).
But in general they are a group of the kind of people who believe in collectivist policies within nation states, the “organisation” of capital and labour by superior brains (like their own) and who, failing to convince voters at home, gravitate to the supra-national collectivism of larger and therefore more distant and less democratically accountable power bases. No wonder Margaret Thatcher (whose downfall was reportedly discussed and anticipated with such prescience at the 1989 Bilderberg conference)said, “It is an honour to be criticised by the Bilderberg Group”.
Bilderberg has always discussed and promoted its power politics and designs behind closed doors. It has invited journalists of repute who never report their activities, and it invites leading politicians not as individuals but because they enjoy or are likely soon to enjoy positions of power. Both Heath and Blair were invited before they became leaders of their parties.
Bilderberg contends that individuals are invited for discussions, not men of power to decide or follow an agenda. But their meetings are shrouded in secrecy and are policed often by the armed forces of the countries in which they meet. Special security measures are taken, official cars meet leading participants at airports, special telephone and other communication links are provided direct to government and corporate headquarters. Only participants are allowed in the hotels they take over, delegates arrive anonymously, no agenda for the meetings are published and no delegate lists or communiques are issued.
David Rockefeller expressed his gratitude to the “free press” of the democratic nations for their silence when he addressed a secretive reunion of Bilderberg in Sand, Germany in June 1991. The following is a translation from the French journal “Minute” of June 19th 1991. “We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our re-union and have respected their promises of discretion for almost four decades.”
The definition of a “great publication” is evidently one which publishes nothing of great significance. It is certainly one which realises that the “freedom of the press” is not the freedom of the people and the right to know is a right of governments, not of the governed. Rockefeller continued:
“It would not have been possible to develop our world project if we bad been subjected to the full fire of publicity all these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and disposed to move towards a world government which will not know war but only peace and prosperity for all mankind.”
Those who meet behind closed doors, plotting the end of nation states, defying democracy and emphasising the elite nature of their group and the inadequacy of everyone else – such people are of course outraged if the democratic will does not fall in with their schemes. They also believe that their skills are precisely those which are indispensable to a governing elite. The banker Rockefeller therefore naturally asserts:
“The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and of world bankers is surely preferable to the self-determination which has been practised for centuries past.”
It is of course just because they fear that the world will reject their ideas that the Bilderberg elite meet in secret, seeking to establish their fantastic “new world” before the people can wake up and prevent its realisation. Those attending are often financed out of Bilderberg funds and some are asked by their governments to attend officially (confirmed by Dr David Owen and Tony Blair), thus disproving the Bilderberg claim that everyone attends as a “private individual”. Some have rather hazy memories about who paid for what and fail to enter their paid-for trips in the parliamentary register of members interests. Kenneth Clarke, like most politicians attending these meetings, claims complete ignorance of the background of the founder of Bilderberg. Many will wish to know why those who owe their positions to national electorates should attend (at the expense of taxpayers or a secret group) meetings of an organisation founded by a former Nazi party member and SS officer, to pursue a secret agenda with leading international businessmen and selected members of the press committed to secrecy which, as we have seen in the “European Union”, can have serious consequences for their own unconsulted electorates. Every MP is elected openly on a manifesto, democratically debated, to sit in his national parliament to make decisions solely in the interests of his own national electorate. Attending secret meetings of groups with a covert agenda, most of whose members were never elected, in well guarded locations is not at all what their voters had in mind.
The book Treason at Maastricht (Atkinson McWhirter 1994 see www.freenations.freeuk.com/publications) lists those who attended the 1993 Bilderberg meeting in Greece. They included three Britons – Kenneth Clarke, Tony Blair and Sir Patrick Sheehy (the then Chairman of BAT, the same post later occupied by Kenneth Clarke!) who within a few weeks of each other in early 1995 all wrote articles in British newspapers in support of the abolition of the Pound and of the Bank of England as a central bank – i.e. in favour of a European Single Currency. In 1995 and 1996 a new British name started to appear on the Bilderberg list of guests – John Monks, the President of the Trade Union Congress. A leading trade unionist fits Bilderberg’s corporatist politics. Like corporate executives, civil servants and politicians, trade unionists believe in “organising” capital, labour, prices, parliaments and ultimately, of course, nations. Monks is now also advocating the abolition of the Pound.
And today in 2013 as the economic and democratic results of their ideas bear their poisoned fruit for all to see Bilderberg meets again – in Britain.
