© Terry Boardman  Feb. 1999         This essay first appeared in “New View” magazine March 1999

Those who pay attention to the currents of world events will have noticed that hard on the heels of the European Union (EU) is approaching another such organisation, also dedicated to free trade and a single market – the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). At present it consists, like the EU,  of rich and poor countries: the USA, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA was put together in 1993 by the Clinton administration (it will no doubt in time come to be seen as Clinton’s ‘greatest’ achievement and required a prodigious amount of energy and commitment from him). A major goal of Clinton’s current adminstration is to extend NAFTA to South America, thus creating the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005. This is in line with some long-held plans in the USA,  mooted by Nelson Rockefeller back in the 1930s for a full-blown hemispheric Union of American States .  Argentina is already considering replacing its currency by the US dollar, while Chile looks like becoming the first South American country to join NAFTA. US concern, not entirely disinterested, over the state of the Brazilian economy testifies to the extent of American investment in Brazil. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, America is doing its best to chivvy most of the countries round the Pacific Rim into the Asia Pacific Forum for Economic Cooperation (APEC). The goal there, first enunciated at Bogor, Indonesia in November 1994, is full free trade between all members by the year 2020. By then, FTAA will have gone the way of the EU, with a single currency for the whole American hemisphere.

This is not some bizarre conspiracy theory, but the working-out of a long-planned three-stage design for a new world order, a single world economy and ultimately a single world government. In 1991, 100 years after Cecil Rhodes set in train a secret society to bring about an Anglo-American world empire (of which more later),  President George Bush proclaimed the coming of a New World Order. The aim would seem to be for it to be well-established by the middle of the next century, 100 years after the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community which began the march towards the EU.  On 8th Dec. 1941 (the very day of US entry into World War II), Dr Quincy Wright, professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, wrote in the Baltimore News-Post that Hitler’s “new world order” would be replaced ‘by a  post-war world confederation in which Anglo-American sea power [would] insure peace and freedom of commerce’. Wright foresaw a world of several continental systems, subject to the world league…Among these…will be a “United States of Europe”, an Asian system and a Pan-American union. Russia  probably will remain outside of all the continental systems…[They]… probably will have a common airforce…Members of these airforces will owe sole allegiance to their respective system and to no nation. By means of its exclusive command of air power, each continental system will be able to preserve the independence of small nations adjoining large and powerful neighbours. Sovereignty and independence of individual nations will be retained, subject to operation of the continental and world systems…The  world confederation  will enforce peace among the continental systems.

This was no casual  idea spun from the wayward mind of  a dreaming academic. As British and American jets deny Iraq the freedom of its own air space and NATO prepares to send its forces to intervene in the affairs of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, it is clear that Wright’s vision is fast becoming reality in our time. Its realisation  is being coordinated in conditions of semi-secrecy by groups of  elite bureaucrats and businessmen whose thoughts circulate in a lofty empyrean far above the daily concerns of   lesser mortals. On the day I wrote these lines,  a representative of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, Chatham House) was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 “Today” programme about the Kosovo crisis and said that we are moving into uncharted waters with respect to sovereignty and that we would have to get used to the idea that countries’ national sovereignty was limited when it came to what they were allowed to do to their own citizens within their borders. This was disingenuous because these were hardly uncharted waters; such ideas have been circulating at Chatham House for decades.

The American sister organisation to the RIIA (founded 1919), which keeps in close touch with it, is the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR), the private thinktank founded in 1921 as an elite pressure group to exercise influence from outside the democratic process on the foreign policy of the United States. Quincy Wright’s views mirrored the thinking of its leading members, many of whom were drawn from or associated with major US corporations (notably those run by the Rockefellers), Wall St finance houses (originally J.P.Morgan) and legal firms. By the 1940s, CFR influence had become so great that it came to be regarded as the  de facto State Department. Its War and Peace Study Project was set up in Sept 1939 to advise the State Department and literally moved into the Department, which became  dependent on its ideas, just as Chatham House became the research section of the Foreign Office in 1938-9. This CFR unit was the group which was drawing up the architecture of the post-war world even before the USA had entered the conflict! The CFR continues to be the single greatest influence in the direction of US foreign policy today in that, no matter which party is in power, foreign policy remains in the hands of  administration  officials who are CFR members. The CFR has been able to deflect most of the criticism of its role because  its members also happen to own most of the mainstream US media organs.

The CFR’s Twenty-Fifth Annual Report tells us this of the CFR’s founding at Paris:

“… the Institute of International Affairs founded at Paris in 1919 was comprised, at the outset, of two branches, one in the United Kingdom and one in the US. . .”  

 Later the plan was changed to create an ostensible autonomy because

 ”… it seemed unwise to set up a single institute with branches.”  

It had to be made to appear that the CFR in America, and the RIIA in Britain, were really independent bodies, lest the American public become aware the CFR was in fact a subsidiary of the Round Table Group (set up by  Sir Alfred Milner and his acolytes in 1909) and reject it.

The CFR and Chatham House   were both founded after the First World War by a group of people who had a common goal – to secure world domination in the 20th century and beyond for the English-speaking people. The intention of the founders of these organisations to cooperate was confirmed at the Peace Conference of Paris in 1919 where they met at the Hotel Majestic. Discussions between two groups of British and US experts on 30th May led to the founding of the RIIA. The British ‘experts’ themselves consisted of two groups – members of  ‘the Milner Group’, led by Lionel Curtis, and of the ‘Cecil Bloc’ , led by Lord Robert Cecil . The US group, headed by General Tasker Bliss, called itself “The Inquiry” and mostly consisted of men connected with J.P.Morgan interests. The RIIA received considerable funding from US corporate sources, and later, already regarding the CFR as its ‘branch’, the RIIA placed members of the Milner Group on the boards of  the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), founded in Atlantic City in September 1924 to “study international relations in the Pacific region”. This group coordinated British and US thinking on policy in that region. The institute was always formally ndependent of the CFR but the influence of J.P.Morgan interests and later, of Rockefeller interests, were dominant in both. What then was the Milner Group? It was named after Alfred, Lord Milner (1854 – 1925) and consisted of the 23 well-placed members of the elite  who constituted  his ‘kindergarten’ or circle of assistants. Its leading lights were Philip Kerr (as Lloyd George’s secretary, he drafted the infamous “German war guilt clause” of Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles and was  later ennobled as Lord Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, later architect of the metamorphosis of the Empire into the Commonwealth. Milner set up the group to further the aims of the secret society of Cecil Rhodes, “The Society of the Elect”,  which he had joined as a founder  member in February 1891. The other members of its inner circle were: Rhodes, Lord Rothschild (Rhodes’ financial supporter), Harry H. Johnston (African explorer who ‘established’ British imperial rights in Africa), the campaigning journalist and occultist W.T.Stead (1849-1912), and Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher, (1852-1930), later closest personal adviser to King Edward VII. After Rhodes’ death Milner became the leader of the Society and the Trustee of Rhodes’ vast personal wealth . Indeed, Milner built up his power upon three pillars: the  ideology of ‘moral imperialism’ he had learned from Arnold Toynbee at Balliol College Oxford in the 1870s, the political connections of the Cecil family, and the economic resources of  Cecil Rhodes, gained in exploiting the human and material wealth of South Africa.

Milner joined Rhodes’ Society of the Elect’ because they shared a vision – of a world dominated by the British Empire, or rather, by the English-speaking peoples, because they were convinced that those peoples were the most moral and the most fit to rule and indeed were destined to do so.  Anglo-American unity was vital to bring this about and so, if necessary, Britain should join the United States. There would be an imperial federation based on home rule for all the white dominions and Ireland. In 1949, Professor Carroll Quigley (1910-1977), later Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University, wrote a detailed and incisive account of the activities of the Milner Group (“The Anglo-American Establishment”, 1949)  Although he himself was in broad agreement with the aims of the group, he came to this conclusion:

“No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner group accomplished – that is, that a small number of men would be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their action, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.”

Quigley shows how the Milner Group proceeded to infiltrate the highest regions of the British elite and through its various organs of influence (including, but not exclusively, Chatham House) dominate British foreign policy during the 23 years from 1916 when it took over Lloyd George’s War Cabinet (5 of the 7 members were Milner’s men) until the Munich Crisis of 1938. Quigley in 1949 felt that the Labour victory in 1945 signalled the eclipse of the group, but in my book “Mapping the Millennium – Behind the Plans of the New World Order” , I have tried to show that its objectives for an Anglo-American world empire are still being determinedly followed today. Since 1945, other groups, still more secretive than the RIIA and the CFR, have emerged with the same agenda. In 1954, in the context of the Cold War division of Europe,  the Bilderberg Group was formed, ostensibly by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, to oversee the process of maintaining US commitment to Western Europe and to European unification. The Group – an international  gathering of  some 300 or so of  the most powerful politicians, business leaders, military officers and media representatives in the world  meets once a year in strict privacy; the meetings are never reported in the mainstream media. 20 years later, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski established the Trilateral Commission, a slightly more visible body, with the aim of bringing Japan and China (then becoming major world ‘players’)  under western control.  The stated aim of the Trilaterals is to work towards a new world order in three stages: Europe, America, Asia with the USA having the controlling interest in each of the three regions. As Zbigniew Brzezinski,  former Columbia University professor and National Security advisor to five U.S. presidents, said at the first State of the World Forum in 1995: “We cannot leap into world government in one quick step, (It) requires a process of gradually expanding the range of democratic cooperation.” What Brzezinski means by ‘democratic cooperation’ can perhaps be gleaned from what he wrote in his book “Between Two Ages – America’s Role In The Technetronic Era”:

 ”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 files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.”

With CCTV cameras in so many places in the developed world, orbiting spy satellites able to focus on individuals at ground level, and total surveillance of electronic communications almost in place, Brzezinski’s scenario has already been largely realised. Such a ‘technetronically’ controlled society run by an elite in the interests of big corporations sounds very much like the kind of societies Hitler and Mussolini were heading, and they, like Milner and Rhodes, believed their motives were “moral” and for “the benefit of the people”. Half a century after the defeat of fascist corporate totalitarianism, are we not seeing the creeping victory of the spirit of  totalitarianism which has wormed its way into the democratic body social?

The three economic groupings (EU, FTAA, APEC) are well on their way. The next aim is to weld them together in order to produce a single world state in which English will be the dominant language and American the dominant culture. In 1995, again largely ignored by the media, negotiations began between the EU and the NAFTA countries on a range of transatlantic measures ostensibly designed to boost trade between the two groupings. These were known as the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD)  and later formalised into something called the New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA). Stemming from this came the Transatlantic  Dialogue for Sutainable Development, the Transatlantic Labour Dialogue,  the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue and the Transatlantic Environment Dialogue. Month by month, year by year, innumerable committees of bureaucrats, politicians, businesspeople, and latterly, representatives from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been meeting away from the public gaze knitting together the EU and NAFTA. Major US corporations, like Monsanto and Dupont, have been eager to participate in and fund these dialogues.

It was no accident that also in 1995 the Multilateral Agreement On Investments (MAI) got underway. This complex structure of rules for international investment, described by World Trade Organisation Director General Renato Ruggerio as “the constitution for a single global economy” would have made it illegal for national governments in the developed world to block foreign corporate investment on the grounds of special national customs or conditions, protection of the environment etc.  – a major assault on the principle of national sovereignty. MAI was kept away from the eyes of the media for two years until it was leaked in Canada. The consequent furious barrage of criticism from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) worldwide, independently-minded politicians and private citizens forced the retreat of the MAI globalisers in September 1998. They are currently reconsidering tactics and may well reintroduce MAI via the World Trade Organisation, in which case it would be binding on developing countries as well as the rich. Meanwhile, soon after Britain began its six-month Presidency of the EU in January 1998, the British EU Comission Vice-President Leon Brittan put forward his brainchild the New Transatlantic Marketplace (NTM) which would have brought about a “big bang” free trade deal between the EU and the USA by 2010. It was swiftly rebuffed by France, incensed that Brittan, although supposedly a Eurocrat, had opened discussions with the US government on NTM before the EU member states had consented. Whose interests is Brittan really serving, the French felt entitled to ask? Equally swiftly, however, the NTM was reintroduced in moderated form by Clinton and Blair at the EU-US Summit in May 1998 dressed up as the New Transatlantic Economic Partnership (NTEP), which in September dropped the “New” to become plain TEP.

All this may seem like laudable progress on the way towards the single world economy that Rudolf Steiner saw as inevitable in the modern age, but it should be obvious from what has already been said in this article that there is more at stake here than free trade. In the winter of 1916-17 Steiner gave a series of lectures in which he laid bare the deeper reasons for the cataclysm of the World War.  One of the factors he brought forward was the change in British foreign policy that had taken place in the 1890s when what he called ‘the puritan stream’ in British politics (by which he meant the  progressive even if straitlaced stream of British liberalism with a small ‘l’, non-conformism etc) had been replaced by a newer, more aggressive imperialistic stream. This infected the Liberal Party also, which split into Liberal Imperialist and Old Liberal  wings. The New Imperialists took control and at their head were men like Lord Rosebery, Herbert Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, who were all close to the Milner Group (Rosebery was a member of the Society of the Elect, while Grey and Asquith were close associates of Milner’s).

This new imperialistic stream saw itself as ‘modernising’, and wished to make Britain, already a declining power, a more ‘efficient’ corporate state that could compete effectively with Germany, France and Russia. An elitist and an oligarch, Milner and many of his generation, while contemptuous of political parties,  were drawn to socialism, either because they genuinely cared (noblesse oblige) for the downtrodden masses or because they wished to raise the standard of the masses so that they would be better servants of the state. It was such sentiments that brought people like Milner and Grey together with ‘scientific socialists’ like the Webbs and H.G.Wells as well as gung-ho Tory imperialists such as Leo Amery in a dining club called The Coefficients which met for several years in the first decade of the century. It might be said that the vision of a new techno-corporate federated state, streamlined and efficient, conjured up by these aristocrats of the mind, has certain parallels with the  vision for the 21st century we hear so much about today from Tony Blair.

Behind this imperialistic stream which was prepared to risk world war with Germany for the sake of world hegemony, Steiner saw real occult secret societies in Britain, which remained invisible but were deeply connected to the British Establishment and the lodge tradition. The 300 year-old Cecil family tradition and connections may have been significant here. It is well-known that the first visionary of the British Empire, John Dee -  magus, secret agent, astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and the original James Bond in that his personal code number when writing to the Queen was 007 -  worked closely with the Cecil family’s great ancestor William Burghley, who was Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State. The Milner Group may have been but the instruments of such an occult brotherhood, active in public society. Rhodes’ secret society, which he modelled on the Jesuits and the Freemasons, was a kind of halfway house between a real occult society and a more publicly active one, especially since he collaborated until his death with the journalist W.T. Stead (of the Pall Mall Gazette and the The Review of Reviews),  occultist, social radical  and ardent imperialist. In a letter to the trustee of his third will in 1890, Rhodes wrote: “In considering questions suggested take Constitution of the Jesuits if obtainable and insert ‘English Empire’ for ‘Roman Catholic Religion’” . At first he and Stead were all for secret initiation ceremonies, oaths, signs of recognition, all on masonic lines, but Milner and Brett were against such things; “the criteria for membership in the Society of the Elect became knowledge of the secret society and readiness to cooperate with the other initiates  to the common goal.”   Stead’s new Review made an appeal “To All English-Speaking Folk”:

“There exists at this moment no institution which even aspires to be for the English-speaking world what the Catholic Church in its prime was to the intelligence of Christendom. To…enlist the cooperaton of all those who will work towards the creation of some such common centre…this Review has been established.”

The review called for representation of the self-governing British colonies in Parliament, Anglo-American reunion, and votes for women. Stead called for an “Association of Helpers” to work for these aims and perform social service. His appeal elicited offers of support from all over the world and subsequent issues of the review carried news of its good works and lists of members.

Whatever the Milner Group may have been, and whatever its occult connections, it certainly was not interested in freedom for all, but rather with a warped spiritual purpose – world domination by the English-speaking elite. Its methods were secretive, hierarchical and oligarchic. In that sense, they were certainly in line with those of the Jesuits and Freemasons. Such methods are  continued today by the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and other such groups – and for the same purpose, despite the fact that they may include members whose mother tongue is not English. Rudolf Steiner was in no doubt that the occult groups of the West “do not work out of any particular British patriotism, but out of the desire to bring the whole world under the yoke of pure materialism…Their aim is to send a wave of materialism over the earth and make the physical plane the only valid one. A spiritual world is only to be recognised in terms of what the physical plane has to offer.”  This wave of materialism, which we call consumerism today, is not hard to recognise, as stemming primarily from the USA. Many Americans recognise that there are those in their elites who are not working in the service of America’s true spirit but rather in the service of the technetronic ‘soft fascism’ of the New World Order, and a groundswell of considerable resentment at this betrayal of what is perceived to be the American spirit is building up, some of it dangerously violent and unhealthy. Most Britons, it seems, have yet to wake up to the part their own elites have been playing in this process, or if they have, they are not too bothered about it. What we all need to do in the face of this gigantic historical process that is now unfolding is to inform ourselves and seriously seek to understand what is going on behind the scenes of what we call ‘the news’. If we fail to do this and then act on it, then we will deserve whatever the aristocrats of the New World Order have in store for us.

NOTES

1.    Nelson Rockefeller and friends at Chase Manhattan bank produced a 3-page memorandum on hemispheric unity which he gave to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close advisor in 1940; Rockefeller was soon appointed head of a new government body to coordinate pan-American affairs. By 1944 Rockefeller had spent $140 million promoting  his  project and US influence in Latin America; his original budget was $3.5 million. In 1944 Hopkins assured Rockefeller that Roosevelt was fully committed to [Rockefeller's] ideas on hemispheric unity. See Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers – An American Dynasty, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976
2.  CFR members were prominent in the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Time, Fortune, Look, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Denver Post, Louisville Courier Journal, Minneapolis Tribune, the Knight papers, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Harper Bros., Random House, Little Brown & Co., Macmillan Co., Viking Press, Saturday Review, Business Week and Book of the Month Club
3. Named after the great 18th century architect of imperialism, William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham
4.  The terms ‘Milner Group’ and ‘Cecil Bloc’ are those of Carroll Quigley. See note 6 below.
5.  Rhodes intended the Rhodes Scholarships to bind together the elite of the English-speaking countries by bringing  promising young men to Oxford to imbibe the English imperial ethos. Successive US administrations (not least Bill Clinton’s) have been stuffed with Rhodes’ Scholars.
6.  Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, (Books In Focus, New York 1981) p. 6. Toynbee was the uncle of the historian Arnold Toynbee.
7.  Quigley, ibid. p. 197
8.  Terry Boardman, Mapping The Millennium – Behind The Plans Of The New World Order (Temple Lodge Publishing, London).
9.  Greenwood Press, New York 1970
10.   See Corporate Europe Observatory at http://www.xs4all.nl/~ceo/observer2/tep.html
11.   Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness Vols 1 and 2, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1988 and 1992
12.   Quigley, op. cit. p. 34
13.   ibid. p 39-40
14.   Steiner, op. cit. Vol 2 15 Jan 1917

    © Terry Boardman  Feb. 1999

    This page was created Dec 1999  Last updated 21.7.2012