THE concerted and radically interventionist response to the Covid-19 pandemic has ignited speculative thinking on the plans of a putative global elite. Two movements have played a significant role in priming the political and cultural landscape for world government. In the first part of this essay which we published last Saturday, Niall McCrae and Roger Watson focused on the Moral Re-Armament, which was rooted in Christian philanthropy. In today’s second and last part, they discuss the Trilateral Commission.
In 1970 a book entitled Between the Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a counsellor to US President Lyndon Johnson, envisaged the emergence of a society ‘that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics’. He explained:
‘Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits.’
Thus no crisis would be wasted in the shift of power from democratically elected leaders to a global master class. Indeed, Brzezinski asserted that ‘national sovereignty is no longer a viable concept’. This treatise inspired David Rockefeller, industrial magnate and head of Chase Manhattan Bank, who expressed his grand designs for peace and prosperity as a leading figure in the Bilderberg Group and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rockefeller saw political debate as an obstacle to rational authority. He abhorred the policies of Richard Nixon and the isolationism of the Republican Party (a reaction to the Vietnam War).
By the 1970s it was apparent that multinational companies, particularly oil barons and bankers, held more power than most governments. Empires had crumbled, and the likes of Great Britain, France and Italy were languishing in internal strife, with strikes, inflation, rising debt, trade deficit, and friction caused by the identity politics of race and gender. Politically and economically, the world was changing fast, and traditional certainties were threatened like never before. Liberals were ascendant, but perhaps they should have been careful in what they wished for. While the progressive agenda, as propagandised in the education system, promised a world of social freedom and multiculturalism, globalisation threatened the opposite of a democratic, liberal polity.
Rockefeller wanted the best brains on his pet project to solve global problems of the present and future, including relations between capitalist and communist countries and the impact of population growth in the developing world. Many of these minds were from Columbia University (also the seat of cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse). On 23 and 24 July 1972, seventeen chosen experts in finance, international relations and political science met at the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, upstate New York, to create the Trilateral Commission. At a final planning meeting in Tokyo in January 1973, chairmen were appointed for the three regions of trilateralism: Western Europe, Japan and North America, with Brzezinski as director. Headquarters were sited in Manhattan.
In October 1973 the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission warned that while the threat of nuclear war had diminished, ‘new problems have emerged to heighten the vulnerability of the planet’, and that ‘humanity is faced with serious risks to the global environment’. The Trilateral Commission espoused supranational control of resources and population. Energy would be the currency. Cash, private ownership, elections, free speech and protests would be abolished, enabling a coterie of experts to reign unhindered by individual rights or elections.
In a 1974 article in Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, by economist and Trilateral Commission member Richard Gardner described the ‘hard road to world order’. The strategy would ensue not by sudden shock but by stealth: a frog would immediately jump out of hot water, but would not react to slowly heating water until too late. A gradual globalist coup would thrive on episodes of disorder, exploiting a ‘booming, buzzing confusion’.
An important objective was control of the media. Heads of national television networks and prestigious newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times were invited to join the Trilateral Commission, on condition that proceedings remain private. This ethically dubious practice has corrupted the mainstream media: journalists know on which side their bread is buttered. Approaching the 1976 presidential election, the Trilateral Commission exerted its considerable media influence in its determination to get the right man in the White House.
Jimmy Carter, an unremarkable politician hardly known outside Georgia, where he was senator from 1963 to 1967, was groomed for the presidency. The peanut farmer unexpectedly became the Democrat presidential nominee, and with a lavishly funded campaign and speeches written by Brzezinski, he defeated incumbent Gerald Ford. After Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, the Democrat administration was dominated by Trilateral Commission members, including vice-president Walter Mondale, secretary of state Cyrus Vance and chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker. Brzezinski was Carter’s national security adviser. Reputedly, whenever Carter faced a foreign policy dilemma, he asked ‘Has Brzezinski seen this?’ Since then, most occupants of the White House have been members (except Donald Trump).
Public awareness of this shadowy but highly influential organisation was minimal but for the investigative work of Anthony Sutton and Patrick M Wood, who produced the twin-volume Trilaterals over Washington (1979, 1981). However, the Trilateral Commission has successfully stayed out of the limelight. To most ordinary people, its role in American politics is an untold story; neither the organisation nor Brzezinski are mentioned in standard texts on modern US history, despite their seminal role.
Any concerns raised about the undue influence of international organisations with no democratic mandate were tactically ridiculed in the establishment media, which portrayed the Trilateral Commission as merely a think-tank. Popular books on conspiracy theories have featured several of these entities, from the Bilderberg Group to the enigmatic Illuminati, deriding the notion of a global cabal running a shadow world government. A classic case of cooling public interest when the heat was rising was the article ‘Beware the Trilateral Commission!’ in the Washington Post in 1992. With a ‘Reds under the bed’ theme, David Mills wrote:
‘Depending on which conspiracy theory you subscribe to, this 19-year-old organization is anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Christian or anti-worker, and is scheming ultimately to abolish the sovereignty of nations and establish one world government!’
Mills targeted libertarian Lyndon LaRouche, and evangelical Christian and Republican politician Pat Buchanan, whose followers were defined as mostly far-right (alongside some hard-leftists). Continuing in his satirical flow, Mills exclaimed:
‘Now the truth can be told about the 325 people on the Trilateral Commission, and the many previous members.
‘They do run the world!
‘The thing is, it has nothing to do with the Trilateral Commission. The TC is like a club for people who run the world anyway.’
The Trilateral Commission, Mills assured, ‘seeks only to promote international cooperation, for the betterment of everybody – nothing sinister’. Time magazine editor Strobe Talbott, a member for six years, told Mills that there was nothing of interest in the most powerful people in the world meeting in private: ‘These are people who don’t have to go halfway around the world for a good meal or a good bottle of wine. They come for something else, and that’s the content of the discussion.’
Scoffing at the notion of secrecy, Mills disingenuously stated that the Trilateral Commission’s annual reports were publicly available. In fact, the meetings were held behind closed doors, with no minutes available to outsiders. The writer also failed to declare a conflict of interest: the Washington Post was gravitationally pulled by the Trilateral Commission’s orbit.
Pat Buchanan’s trenchant criticism of a ‘new world order’ struck a chord with millions of American people. He stood unsuccessfully as Republican candidate for the 1996 presidential election, later joining Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Buchanan’s invective was ridiculed by Democrat-leaning media, as exemplified by Charles Krauthammer: ‘When I was a psychiatrist, I had patients with similar fantasies. Some even thought they were president. Not one, however, actually stood for office.’
In the UK, the Trilateral Commission worked behind the scenes on foreign policy, hastening the transition of Rhodesia to independent Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. Prime Minister Jim Callaghan became a member, as did his foreign secretary David Owen, and his counterpart in Margaret Thatcher’s government, Lord Carrington. Several Tory ministers have contributed to the Trilateral Commission’s pursuit of an ‘international rules-based order’. Of particular interest is Sir Keir Starmer, a Trilateral Commission member for many years, who became Labour Party leader after only one term as a member of parliament. Since legacy leftist Jeremy Corbyn was ousted, Starmer has resumed the centrist progressive policies of arch-globalist Tony Blair.
The Trilateral Commission has had considerable influence on the United Nations by pushing the doctrine of ‘sustainable development’, which really means global control of food, fuel and other resources. However, while members continue to occupy positions in the Washington ‘deep state’, the Trilateral Commission has been overshadowed by the World Economic Forum. Led by Klaus Schwab, a German financier of Rothschild lineage, the World Economic Forum is less shy of publicity, holding annual conferences at Davos in Switzerland.
Like the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum is tightly engaged with the United Nations, promoting Agenda 21 and calling for urgent action to counter anthropogenic climate change. The World Health Organisation, a previously unremarkable UN agency, suddenly become powerful in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, directing national governments in imposing an unprecedented ‘lockdown’ regime and mass vaccination with digital certification. Draconian restrictions on livelihood and liberty were fully supported by opposition parties; indeed, Sir Keir Starmer regularly urged stricter measures, despite these disproportionately affecting the socio-economically disadvantaged constituency that Labour was founded to represent.
Exploiting the emergency, the World Economic Forum has called for a ‘great reset’, as described by Schwab and Thierry Malleret in a book of that title[18]. The abrupt ‘new normal’ envisaged by the globalists consolidates gains for the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, a concept promoted for many years by Schwab with striking similarities to the tentative plans of Technocracy Inc almost a hundred years ago. Indeed, technocracy, the replacement of elected government by social engineering, is being realised by stealth. Artificial intelligence, a cashless society and digital passports for everyday activities have been introduced with little resistance, as people are duped into accepting encroachments on privacy and freedom for convenience and safety.
A command-and-control system, technocracy is easily confused with either communism or mega-capitalism. But it has no interest in political ideology or a free market. China, under its notionally communist regime, is at an advanced stage of technocracy. Klaus Schwab speaks positively of China despite the obvious human rights abuses of its social credit system. In the West, the UN network of Smart Cities will redesign urban life, restricting our freedom to gather socially, to speak freely or to protest, while obliterating privacy. Implanted microchips are already used in Sweden. Development of a central digital currency, proposed ‘online safety’ laws and the permanence of some covid-19 regulations demonstrate further progress.
At best, the global technocrats are the town planners of the mid-twentieth century on a grander scale. Concrete housing estates were meant to shape a new society in defiance of individualist traditions (‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ and ‘good fences make good neighbours’), but these schemes failed miserably. There is nothing inherently wrong with collectivisation, but the social engineering: of technocrats eschews the time-honoured identities of faith, flag and family. At worst, they are forging an almighty superstate that brings to life Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s imagined technocracy. In the 1940s, with the internet a distant dream, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four presciently described a society controlled by video surveillance, while The Abolition of Man by C S Lewis warned: ‘What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as their instrument.’
Whatever the origins of the outbreak (some suspect it was planned), Covid-19 has certainly been exploited by globalists. In 2017, Klaus Schwab boasted that the World Economic Forum was infiltrating governments around the world with its leadership programme. He specifically mentioned Canadian prime minster Justin Trudeau, adding that ‘we penetrate the cabinet’; indeed, ‘more than half of his cabinet are actually Young Global Leaders’.
Indeed, Trudeau imposed one of the strictest Covid-19 regimes in the world, and when a truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates camped outside the parliament in Ottawa, he invoked a state of emergency. His deputy Chrystia Freeland (whose grandfather was a prominent Nazi), declared the freezing of protestors’ bank accounts without trial. After riot police and army were deployed to brutally quash the peaceful protest, member of parliament Colin Carrie asked whether the World Economic Forum had too much influence on Canada. The speaker of the House of Commons said that he couldn’t hear the question, before a minister stood up and accused the questioner of peddling conspiracy theory. Both of these appointees are members of the World Economic Forum, for whom there is apparently a conspiracy of silence.
From a current perspective, the ‘jaw, jaw not war, war’ approach of Moral Re-Armament seems quaint. Globalists have exploited the mantra of ‘following the science’, a catchphrase of the Covid-19 regime. Science tells us what can be done, not what should be done; the latter is the domain of ethics, a concern sadly lacking in technocrats. ’Lockstep’, as described by a Rockefeller Foundation document in 2010, enables a steady progression to global control, with every advance secured against backsliding. It was defined as ‘a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback’.
At the age of 87, David Rockefeller wrote in his memoirs about the idea that he was ‘part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterising my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – One World – if you will’. Instead of rebuttal, Rockefeller exclaimed: ‘If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.’
There has been much smearing of conspiracy theorists. But as we have witnessed with Covid-19, with all governments following the same radical plan, to believe that leaders are acting independently is to waddle in coincidence theory. The existence of the globalist organisations we have described is a matter of fact. As for their plans for now and the future, they are hiding in plain view.
A longer version of this article, with full references, appeared in The New Conservative and is republished by kind permission.
