"I'm a member of a kind of consortium. We represent certain global interests."
We come to it at last. Tragedy and Hope. The most important book nobody has read. In no small part because it is actually quite dull -except for the parts that precisely describe the formation of a tiny power bloc that largely runs the west and why. Except for that.
But first, the author.
Carroll Quigley
- Graduated Harvard, worked as an historian at Georgetown.
- In order to write this book, he was given complete access to the Council on Foreign Relations archive for several years.
- According to F. William Engdahl, apparently Quigley could publish what he wanted as long as he did not mention the Rockefellers. Which he more or less sticks to. That's why, in Tragedy and Hope, it looks like the Morgans run everything. Obviously it is impossible to get a full view of the Atlanticists without mentioning one of their founding dynasties but, like with A Game of Nations, you still get something from reading the canonical texts of the archons.
- Engdahl again: Former students said, despite sticking to the rumoured rules, he was still genuinely worried he said 'too much'.
- Quigley mentored Bill Clinton.
- Tragedy: All the deaths in the 20th century wars. Hope: The inevitable victory of the Atlanticist agenda. That's where we get the title from. So we are dealing with someone who has drunk the Kool Aid.
As with the rest of the texts we will look out, I've pulled out the main points from Tragedy and Hope so that they can ultimately be compiled at the end.
Major points in Tragedy and Hope
- Control wielded by Atlanticists -emerging initially as a group of British elite- through the creation of private and/or supranational groups like the Royal Society, think tanks, the CFR, the UN, the IMF, etc to build out a British Commonwealth style model for the earth which is to be managed by them through these groups and arrangements. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is classic Atlanticist stuff, to take a modern example. But it need not be based in supranational documentation. Just prominence, prestige and influence will do it -an example being US entry into both world wars when, as Quigley writes, "the United States was influenced by subtle British propaganda" on the eastern coasts where this network was in operation.
- Internationalism: Quigley describes the concept emerging out of European banking powers multi-century plan to get all monetary control out of governments, away from kings and churches into private monetary hands. (Theirs.) This happens over several phases of capitalism, or through several monetary systems, that this group keeps themselves at the very top of. The belief system of the Atlanticists is internationalism.
- Liberal Imperium:
- A new way of doing empire by spreading democracy.
- Liberal imperialism is a belief in the innate goodness of mankind, progress, capitalism, scientism. It is furthered through charities, NGOs, media control, etc.
- The expansion and promotion of Liberalism by these groups is essentially a fraud. Liberalism ends in an illiberal order: a technocratic tyranny. (Look around you.)
- Liberal Imperium is the name of another of Quigley's books on the Anglo-American establishment.
- A privatised ‘balance of power’ achieved by keeping countries weak: The two world wars were the weakening of Russia and Germany so Eurasia can be more effectively controlled. Indian Partition and the creation of Israel are other 'good' examples.
- Governance by cartel is universal: Not only does he describe the 2 party system as a scam (part of the Liberal Imperium export) but, for example, by 1930, 75% of Japan’s economy was controlled by 8 families. This is supremely easy to manage by inclusion or exclusion. So the group may be trans-Atlantic, but their scope is not.
How to Read Quigley and Why
Obviously the biggest challenge in navigating Tragedy and Hope is that it has been picked up (in parts) by the likes of the John Birch Society and so on and marshalled as evidence for their various Jewish banker conspiracies about how a bunch of Zionists who are also international bankers and communists want to impose communism in their one world government.
And I suppose that challenge is also the reason to read Quigley. While he certainly wrote what his patrons wanted to hear and is thus an unreliable source, he definitively was not leaving out something about Zionist-communists and their one world government plans. That's not where the 'op' lies because that is nineteenth century, Anti-Semitic nonsense. (To his credit, Quigley goes to pains to describe the different factions of the European/international banking class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: English Protestant, French Catholic, Swiss Protestant -and only joined by a Jewish faction in the nineteenth century with the rise of the Rothschilds. I expect he was attempting to head off this sort of malarkey. Religious backgrounds are irrelevant to the shared belief about how the planet should be run.)
He was/is instead accurately describing the post-Empire softpower of an Anglophile network operating largely out of London and New York that has 'successfully' influenced world affairs more than we probably realise -and I suspect is at least partially responsible for our current pivot into free-range totalitarianism.
Burn this into your mind: In the twenty-first century, the opposite of internationalism is not nationalism, it is (probably) bioregional decentralism with clear, continuous communication with other centres of bioregional decentralism.
The second-biggest challenge is how we navigate 'illuminism'. The book clearly demonstrates that promoting Liberalism is a sham -as Miles Copeland's book also shows in the case of 'bringing democracy to the Middle East', for instance. Nevertheless, part of the tactics of this group -J.P. Morgan personally funding the rise of Progressivism in the US, for instance- has also come with some good things: improved workplace conditions and hours, women's rights, and so on. (Communism and Progressivism appealed to the Round Table groups because they promote allegiance to a global group or category -all women, all factory workers, etc- over allegiance to one's local area, government, church and so on. So they were useful for their internationalising aims.)
All of these achievements were tactics rather than goals -steps in promoting the ascent of scientism, technological and capitalistic progress- but I think the best approach is still to take the win, as long as you know you are doing it. If somebody drops fifty bucks because they're running for a cab to get to their billionaires club, I'm still going to pick it up. More fool them for giving me nice things on their way to trying to take everything from us.
Still, it's important we hang a lamp on this point. Because most of the criticisms of Quigley issue from groups that want to return to some preferred form of western society where things were better. Which I guess is women in the kitchen and Black Americans at the back of the bus? There is much to criticise about the worldview and aims of the group Quigley describes. And we should. It emphatically does not constitute an endorsement for any kind of golden age.
Other than that, it is really worth mentioning again that Tragedy and Hope is a difficult read. Quigley was a military historian so the World War II stuff is so boring your face will melt. He also has that weird racism of the mid-twentieth century that Miles Copeland expressed where there is page after page of hot takes about how certain cultures developed the way they did, versus how the west developed.
So that's the main reason it took me so long to read a book I had on kindle from back when I bought kindle books. The other reason was "so if Brits run the world, how come everything here is so shit?" (I was still in London.) The answer is the same as it is for the Washington/New York imperial establishment. They don't care about countries. They're not 'from' a country in the same way your flu virus is not 'from' you. It's just in you.
As for why the CFR would even embark on such a project in the first place, there are at least two reasons as far as I can tell.
- By all accounts he really was a good historian so they may have wanted a competent, sympathetic origin story for their plans once they were fulfilled?
- Also I think there's an anti-Soviet psy op in the picture Quigley paints of the world where this group's victory is essentially inevitable and their goals are noble.
Secondary Points in Tragedy and Hope
- Developments in Monetary Control:
- London Supremacy. Note this is more or less the exact same description Peter Zeihan gave of the the US today under Bretton Woods. Wonder where they got the idea from?
- Rhodes and the ideological origin of the group: bringing 'all habitable lands' under their control:
So this is 'the structure' of the Atlanticists, then. If you've ever wondered if there is a group that passes for the lurid description of the Illuminati today and what that might look like, it looks like this. And if you're also wondering if this is the 'top' of the so-called pyramid, that will have to wait for a later post. Suffice it for now to say it is part of the pyramid's capstone:
- Cliveden Set: 'Circle of Initiates': Rhodes, Milner, Morgan, Rockefeller (not mentioned), etc. Blue bloods, if you will.
- 'Association of Helpers': Tavistock, Royal Society, think tanks, academics and university departments, NGOs, Round Table Groups, the CFR, Institute for Pacific Relations. Believers, basically.
- The formation of Round Tables around the world. Yes, this is long, but if you don't read it you'll have to read the whole book. It's long in one sense, but it is also a really tight mid-twentieth century description of how various Atlanticist groups interlock around the world.
- Weaponising Ideology: Funding and supporting wars and revolutions:
The China example is particularly good at showing how these groups will support ideas or leaders that will support their own agendas, even if -especially if- it wrecks the place they have an interest in. We begin with an excerpt of how the British managed China so as to demonstrate the continuity (as well as giving a good example of Quigley's hot racial takes.):
What Quigley fails to mention in the description of China's collapse into multiple factions and the rise of warlordism over the political battle between Sun Yat-Sen (A Freemason, incidentally) and General Yüan is that one of Dr Sun's key priorities was an opium-free China. But it was General Yüan that got the money from the west for some reason.
By the time we get to Mao, we see a similar wrecking going on -this time including China's Soviet neighbours. Quigley doesn't mention it because he didn't know, but
- Mao ran the student magazine for Yale-in-China. (!)
- 'Wild Bill' Donovan, head of the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) trained Maoist guerillas. Why ever would... oh, nevermind.
Before we leave China, I'd just like to point out that in 1973 David Rockefeller called Mao's "experiment" the "greatest the world has ever seen." This is how these people describe the deaths of tens of millions of people.
- Wall Street and Progressivism and the rise of tax-exempt organisations used to further agendas.
- Russia:
- Bolsheviks were funded by London and Wall Street. Most people know that, just as a lot of people know that all is not above-board with the return of Lenin to Russia. It likely doesn't go so far as 'Sovietism is entirely an op' -because, again, none of these ideologies are the end game for the group- but it is nevertheless interesting. Particularly given the second point.
- As soon as the Bolsheviks take over, the British seize the oil fields in the Caspian Sea. Funny how that works out. Guess that was the collateral for the loan.
- Formulation of the world
- All these philosophies -capitalism, communism, liberalism- are ‘sons of the lodge’, or brainchildren of the Enlightenment that have their end goal in global governance rather than government. This is why there is tremendous funding for internationalist movements and NGOs. It is the underlying belief of the Atlanticists: technocratic, materialist, centralised, scientism. What 'flavour' it comes in -left or right- is irrelevant as they are temporary manifestations of the same underlying, centralised belief/control system.
- Formulation of League of Nations out of WWI and the breakup of the Hapsburg Empire. Each country paid for the war by borrowing from the banks, and it was banking experts involved in the war reparations and subsequent treaties, including the establishment of the BIS -a cornerstone in the long running goal of global governance.
- The end of WWII worked out even better, as it resulted in the creation of exactly the new world order the European bankers wanted: Today we have the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the ECB, NAFTA, NATO... had we got the TPP (and we may still get some variant of it), then we would have full-spectrum, supranational governance by a tiny group of private/public individuals.
- Quigley describes the persistent erosion of the traditional notion of international law that occurs with the state of play engineered by these groups. I daresay he could not have imagined the scale of private armies and private trade agreements we now have.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
I appreciate there is a lot to take in here. What will bake your noodle is that the group perpetrating these actions went out of their way to have a diligently-researched history of their perpetrations published. What to make of that, beyond archonic pridefulness? It will get caught in your head as follows: "that has to be wrong because a group this powerful wouldn't allow a story of a group this powerful to come out except that they did". It's not outsider speculation when you get to spend two years in the CFR archives. It's more like a corporate quarterly report -with the same relationship to truth that that entails: this is what we've done, this is who we are, this is what we hope to achieve. Aren't we great?
The Tragedy and Hope post had to wait until I had published last Friday's newsletter -which itself had to wait for tax reform to sail through the senate. Predictably twitter melted down over the Lear jet exemption, rather than spending even half a second considering the politico-economic implications of the changes to the inheritance tax -whose origins along with 'charitable' institutions Quigley describes above. Once again, I remind you our analysis needs to be less stupid than "bu.. bu... but I don't like poverty!" Yeah, no one does. And permanent wars on abstractions like 'poverty' are cynically used as power plays by groups like this. Consider that an inheritance tax change constitutes a downsizing of Quigley's Association of Helpers because they rely on a permanent supply of blood and blood money from the Society of the Elect which they may be less willing to give up now that they don't have to. Look at what happened to the Clinton Foundation after the election (heavily funded by the Saudis to 'help women' or something).
Quigley offers a biased view of the governance structure I've been saying is being downsized for the last 18 months. Given that it was written in the 60s, there are 'better' archonological books that offer us an updated view of this superstructure. For instance, unknown to Quigley because the Roswell op hadn't started running yet, the American side of the Society of the Elect has a 100% overlap with where the purported technology and implications for whatever Roswell was ended up. That might be a factor in the current rolling out of digital, free-range totalitarianism -which is a cost-effective way of running the world Rhodes conceived of. (The Secret Space Programme is Rhodes's world with electrogravitics. End of.)
We will come to that clearer view of the top of the governance structure in a later -unlikely- book. Before then we need to deep dive on how money and ideology have more recently been used to wreck the whole world to the Atlanticists' advantage.