SOME weeks ago I had the notion that I would write a piece or a series of pieces on the roots of the attempted technocratic globalist coup and cultural revolution which we are living through. The November 16 article in TCW by Niall McCrae about Elon Musk pre-empted me as I had been trying to decide at what point to make a start. The problem is that the more one reads about the histories of revolutions the further back go the roots through 1968, Mao’s China, the Bolshevik Revolution, the 1871 Paris Commune, Karl Marx, 1848, 1832 until one ends up at the 1789 French Revolution. This was the first in which a world was turned upside down with suppression of free speech and thought, class war, murderous terror and a year-zero approach to re-ordering society which has been the hallmark of all revolutions and attempted revolutions ever since. The current one lacks only the murderous terror; it seems happy to make do with cancellation, restriction and censorship while it kills quietly and surreptitiously.
Popular histories record revolutions as uprisings of peasants or workers rebelling against their masters in the hope that they will secure for themselves freedom and a fair return for their labour which will lead to a better life and a fair stake in the societies in which they live. It is a misconception. Revolutions are top-down, not bottom-up. They are started by groups of thinkers, philosophers and writers who are convinced they have the answer to the miserable existence of the great bulk of humanity if only the people would defer to their greater knowledge and wisdom and let them make all the decisions. All that is expected of the masses is blind obedience. And, of course, a goodly number of useful idiots to do the fighting and dying.
Revolutionary ideas don’t emanate from the very top of hierarchies; why would they? They tend to come from a dissatisfied second tier. From where do these thinkers, philosophers and writers arise if not from among those with the leisure time to think, philosophise and scribble unfettered by the necessity to toil to ensure there are roofs over heads, clothes on backs and food on tables? So it was with Karl Marx. Apart from being a thinker, philosophiser, writer, drunkard and an indigent sponger Karl was the son of Heinrich Marx, a lawyer and owner of several vineyards, and Henriette Pressburg from a prosperous family in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The Marxes had a very comfortable upper middle-class life in Trier in the Moselle and were able to send their son to study law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin.
A quick roll-call of subsequent revolutionaries reveals that Vladimir Lenin was upper middle class and a lawyer, Mao Zedong was the son of a wealthy farmer, Fidel Castro a lawyer and also the son of a wealthy farmer, Che Guevara was a medical doctor from an upper-class Argentine family. Pol Pot came from a prosperous Cambodian agrarian family rich enough to send him to study at the Sorbonne. These were not the occupations and paths of progress generally open to the peasantry.
As Niall McCrae reported, the Technocracy Movement arose in the aftermath of the Great War, the Wall Street crash and the great depression of the 1930s although its gestation period had been much earlier. Science was rapidly advancing and adherents of technocracy came to believe that now was their chance. They thought that capitalism and free enterprise were dead and that they alone possessed the knowledge to make society run efficiently to ensure sufficient goods for all. They thought they could end depressions, war and poverty.
In early 1932 while living a bohemian life in Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan, Howard Scott met Walter Rautenstrauch, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. Both men shared a common interest in establishing a technocratic government in North America and Scott, an academic fraud, was able to breathe new life into this earlier failed Technical Alliance and get it established in the university. Later that year, when a Committee on Technocracy had been established at Columbia, M King Hubbert was one of the other academics who became involved. Niall McCrae described how the movement didn’t become established in the American imagination, how it was pushed aside during the Second World War and how it briefly sparked in 1947 before fading way.
It may just be a coincidence but it is interesting to note that in 1935 the technocrats were followed at Columbia by the Frankfurt School of Marxist academics who had fled Nazi Germany. Did they meet and exchange ideas? We’ll never know. They certainly saw to it that Columbia University became a hotbed of leftism.
After its 1947 motorcade and rally in Vancouver the technocracy movement faded away but Technocracy Incorporated continued to linger on.
It might have ended there but for the creation of the Trilateral Commission. The idea was presented to the Bilderberg Group, an annual meeting established in 1954 to foster dialogue between Europe and North America, in 1972 by David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Professor of Public Law and Government at Columbia University. Encouraged by the response they got from that elite group they formed the Trilateral Commission in 1973 with the Governor of Georgia and soon-to-be 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, as the third founder. Brzezinski had already identified Carter as presidential material and Rockefeller considered him easily manipulable. The membership was made up of about 300 people from governments, corporate magnates and academia, roughly 100 each from North America, Europe and Japan with the aim of co-ordinating ideas and working together towards a New International Economic Order which has since morphed into the New World Order.
There was a significant trilateral influence on the Carter administration (1977-81) with up to 20 of its members holding positions in the Federal Government. This was a time when the USA continued the normalisation of relations with communist China begun under Henry Kissinger’s tenure first as National Security Advisor then Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford presidencies. Carter and Brzezinski turned away from traditional allies and clients such as Taiwan and Rhodesia towards the communist countries China and Vietnam among others but, significantly, not the Soviet Union despite the detente that had been started earlier by Nixon and Kissinger.
In his 1970 piece Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, Brzezinski argued that a co-ordinated policy among developed nations was necessary to counter global instability erupting from increasing economic inequality. He was an advocate of ‘one-world idealism’ and the author of several books which have provided policy guidelines for the Trilateral Commission. (The word ‘Commission’ in the organisation’s title makes it sound as if it was officially appointed to a task by governments when in reality it was a grouping of self-selecting private individuals.) Brzezinski defined the technetronic era thus: ‘The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.’
For the complete history and explanation of technocracy the best source is Patrick M Wood and two of his books, Technocracy Rising and Technocracy – The Hard Road to World Order. He keeps matters updated regularly in Technocracy News & Trends.
Tomorrow: The birth of depopulation
