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THE
ROVING EYE
Bilderberg strikes again
By Pepe Escobar
"It would have been
quite impossible for us to develop our plan for
the world if we had been subjected to the lights
of publicity during those years. But, the world is
more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a
world government. The supranational sovereignty of
an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely
preferable to the national autodetermination
practiced in past centuries ..."
-
David Rockefeller, Bilderberg club
permanent member, 1991
This conversation
never happened. Well, it actually did. Date: March
5 to 8, 2005. Location: the isolated, fully-booked
Dorint Sofitel Seehotel Ueberfahrt in
Rottach-Egern, 60 kilometers east of Munich,
Germany. Essential amenities: luxury rooms, a
lake, a golf course, no suits - and no wives.
Participants: 120-odd Western movers and shakers -
politicians, tycoons, bankers, captains of
industry, so-called strategic thinkers - invited
for the 2005 meeting of the ultra-secretive
Bilderberg club. Security: absolutely draconian.
Global media coverage: non-existent.
Talk
about white man's burden: Bilderberg is strictly
"Western" elite, ie American-European. Bilderberg
resolutely excludes Asia, Latin America, the
Middle East and Africa. Bilderberg operates in
strictly master of the universe territory: what we
say goes. Only when events happen will corporate
media report them, even though selected media
people would have been aware of what has been
decided weeks or even months in advance. The New
York Times, the Big Three American networks, the
Financial Times have all been represented at many
Bilderbergs. But they are constrained by the
silence of the lambs (see Asia Times Online's
report on Bilderberg 2003 in Versailles The masters of
the universe May 22, 2003)
Bilderberg has an address - in Leiden,
Holland - and even a phone number - always on
female answering-machine mode. No website though.
In an annual ritual, Bilderberg meeting places and
agendas have to be painstakingly uncovered by a
small group of independent sleuths like Briton
Tony Gosling or American James Tucker - who has
been following Bilderberg for 30 years. Tucker is
publishing a book on Bilderberg later this year.
Historian Pierre de Villemarest and journalist
William Wolf have already published Facts and
Chronicles Denied to the Public, volumes 1 and
2, which include a secret history of Bilderberg.
Belgian sociologist Geoffrey Geuens from the
University of Liege has also included a full
chapter on Bilderberg in one of his books.
Although Geuens condemns Bilderberg's obsessive
secrecy, he does not subscribe to conspiracy
theories: he prefers to study how Bilderberg
unmasks the way power works and the incestuous
relations between politics, economics and the
media.
Whenever corporate media approaches
Bilderberg it mirrors the silence of the lambs. In
2005, the Financial Times released a classic
pre-emptive story downplaying what it qualifies as
conspiracy theories. In fact, anyone who questions
the most powerful club in the world is derided as
a conspiracy theorist. Bilderbergers like British
lords or American policy-makers meekly justify it
as "just a place to discuss ideas", an innocent
"forum" where anyone can "speak frankly", and
other assorted cliches.
Bilderberger
Etienne Davignon, a former vice president of the
European Commission, adamantly stresses "this is
not a capitalist plot to run the world". Thierry
de Montbrial, director of the French Institute of
International Relations and a Bilderberg member
for almost 30 years, says this is only "a club".
The official Bilderberg 2002 press release, for
instance, said that "Bilderberg's only activity is
its annual conference. At the meetings, no
resolutions are proposed, no votes taken and no
policy statements issued." Bilderberg is just "a
small flexible, informal and off-the-record
international forum in which different viewpoints
can be expressed and mutual understanding
enhanced". This is, in fact, what the much-lauded
"trans-Atlantic relationship" is all about.
Members only
The Bilderberg
group - which took its name from a Dutch hotel -
was founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard from the
Netherlands. German-born Bernhard was a
card-carrying Nazi and member of the SS. As it is
well-known, Prescott Bush was an officer of W A
Harriman & Co, which financed Adolf Hitler and
the Nazis with the help of Averell Harriman and
German tycoon Fritz Thyssen. Alden Hatch wrote a
biography of Prince Bernhard where he insists that
Bilderberg was the cradle of the European
Community - later rebranded European Union. He
describes Bilderberg's ultimate goal as a
one-world government.
Bilderberg's
membership is heavily crossed with the Council on
Foreign Relations, the Pilgrims Society, the
Trilateral Commission and the famous "Round Table"
- a British, Oxford-Cambridge elite group
crystallized in the homonymous journal of empire
founded in 1910. The Round Table - which also
denied its existence as a formal group - called
for a more efficient form of global empire so that
Anglo-American hegemony could be extended
throughout the 20th century.
Bilderberg
regulars include Henry Kissinger, David
Rockefeller (of JP Morgan's International
Council), Nelson Rockefeller, Prince Philip of
Great Britain, Robert McNamara (J F Kennedy's
secretary of defense and former president of the
World Bank), Margaret Thatcher, former French
president (and main redactor of the EU
constitution) Valery Giscard D'Estaing, US
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former
national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and
the chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan
Greenspan. The Rothschild family has hosted many
Bilderbergs. In 1962 and 1973, on the island
resort of Saltsjobaden, Sweden, the hosts were the
Wallenberg banking family.
Some of these
masters control more of the universe than others.
They are the members of the steering committee,
which includes Josef Ackermann (Deutsche Bank),
Jorma Ollila (Nokia), Jeurgen Schrempp
(DaimlerChrysler), Peter Sutherland (former North
Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO - general and
now with Goldman Sachs), James Wolfensohn (the
outgoing World Bank president) and the "Prince of
Darkness" Richard Perle. Iraq war conceptualist
and incoming World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz
is a also a Bilderberg permanent member. George W
Bush happened to be in the neighborhood - the
Netherlands, for the World War II commemorations -
during Bilderberg 2005. He may have dropped in.
Bush did meet Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands,
who must be present at every Bilderberg.
To whose advantage?
Bilderberg
certainly is not an executive council. British
economist Will Hutton may have gotten closer to
the truth when he said that the consensus reached
at each Bilderberg meeting "is the backdrop
against which policy is made worldwide". What
Bilderberg decides can be expected to be later
implemented by a G-8 meeting, and International
Monetary Fund and World Bank decisions.
No
matter what, for innumerable, serious critics in
Europe as well as the US, Bilderberg is everything
from a Zionist plot to a megalomaniac secret cult.
Serbs, not without some reason, blamed Bilderberg
for the 1999 Balkan war and the fall of Slobodan
Milosevic: after all, the US needed to control
vital, Balkan pipeline routes. Bilderberg 2002 -
although not without controversy - is thought to
have cemented the invasion and conquest of Iraq.
In his seminal A Century of War: Anglo-American
oil politics and the New World War, F William
Engdahl details what happened at Bilderberg 1973
in Sweden. An American outlined a scenario for an
imminent 400% hike in the oil prices of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Bilderberg did not prevent the oil shock; instead
it planned how to manage with mega-profits - what
Kissinger described as "recycling the petrodollar
flows". Everyone that mattered was present at this
Bilderberg: oil majors and major banks. Engdahl's
conclusion:
What the powerful men grouped around
Bilderberg had evidently decided that May was to
launch a colossal assault against industrial
growth in the world, in order to tilt the
balance of power back to the advantage of
Anglo-American financial interests and the
dollar. In order to do this, they determined to
use their most prized weapon - control of the
world's oil flows. Bilderberg policy was to
trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force
a dramatic increase in world oil prices. Since
1945, world oil had by international custom been
priced in dollars, since American oil companies
dominated the post-war market. A sudden sharp
increase in the world price of oil, therefore,
meant an equally dramatic increase in world
demand for US dollars to pay for that necessary
oil. Saudi petrodollars then moved to
the "right" banks in London in New York to finance
US government deficits. Game, set, match to
Bilderberg - where the mandarins of global finance
always win.
Plutocracy
international
Although not a single word
uttered inside the Bilderberg vaults is allowed to
reach public opinion, it's possible to take an
educated guess as to what they're talking about.
Last week, the ubiquitous Kissinger started the
proceedings by illuminating the meaning of
"freedom" - the Bush version. Natan Sharansky,
Bush's democratic guru, was a participant.
Issues that would logically have
interested Bilderberg 2005 include the role of
NATO and the necessary approval in 2005 of the
European constitution by all 25 members of the EU
- the consequences of a French "no" in the
upcoming May 29 referendum to approve the
constitution need to be considered. Widespread job
outsourcing in Europe to the Ukraine, China and
India may sound the death knell to the
constitution: French protesters - who have
awakened the German and the Dutch - are insisting
that what is good for big corporations may not be
necessarily good for Western European workers.
Critics say that chapter III of the constitution
in fact details the way free trade may effectively
kill the European welfare state.
They have
their reasons to be concerned. In his book The
Great Chessboard, Bilderberger Zbigniew
Brzezinski hails "a Western Europe ... staying in
a large measure an American protectorate".
Brzezinski also insists that "Europe has to solve
the problem caused by its social redistribution
system", which "prevents European initiative". The
father of the European constitution is none other
than Bilderberger Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who
happens to be very close to Kissinger.
From a geopolitical perspective, the heart
of the whole matter is that the constitution
legally confirms that Europe cannot have a defense
force apart from NATO, ie outside the control of
the US. Bilderberg beliefs would point to only one
direction: an ever-expanding, US-controlled NATO,
an ever-eastward-expanding EU, mass
delocalization, mass corporate profits and
unchallenged US military supremacy. No wonder this
is the focus of a bitter debate inside EU
corridors in Brussels, where scores of diplomats
and commission officials openly complain of
Washington's bullying and accuse their governments
of selling out. Gunther Verheugen, the European
commissioner in charge of expanding the EU,
happens to be a Bilderberger. When members of the
European Commission go to a Bilderberg, their
travel expenses and their daily allowance is
provided by the commission. This certainly
disqualifies Bilderberg's self-presentation as a
"private club".
Bilderberg 2005 has -
coincidentally? - merged with Bush's tour among
his Baltic friends and the tense meeting with
Russian President Vladimir Putin. The containment
of Russia was likely top of the agenda for
Bilderberg. Russia is very much worried about its
"near abroad" and sees no reason to remove its
army from bases in Georgia or its navy from
Sebastopol, in Ukrainian Crimea - no matter how
many color-coded revolutions happen at its
doorstep.
European Commission sources
assure that Brzezinski remains an extremely
influential figure. The Bilderberg discussion on
the control of Eurasia still refers to The
Grand Chessboard. Washington is such an avid
cheerleader of Turkey's accession to the EU
because this means increased American influence
near the Caspian and over the eastern
Mediterranean. And it also works towards the
containment of Iran, Russia and China - which,
according to Brzezinski, may not be allowed to
emerge as rival powers to the US in Eurasia.
Another contentious issue that must have
occupied the minds of those at Bilderberg 2005 is
preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon -
this is just a detail: the point is how to prevent
Iran from becoming a first-rate Eurasian power.
Some in Brussels do not discount the possibility
of a scenario of massive propaganda buildup to try
to convince American and European public opinion
of the necessity of a strike against Iran. How to
force Beijing to appreciate the yuan must also
have been a topic.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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