Bilderberg group (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been pointed out to us that a passage on page 4 of the September Socialist Standard about the G8 leaders could have been misunderstood as saying that the "semi-mythological Bilderberg group" were the real rulers of the world. The Bilderberg group is a gathering of politicians and their paymasters in the ruling class and is not beholden to one or another government or state. Beyond the fact that its members and attendees are typically representative of ruling class opinion and powerful in their own right, their collective power as members of Bilderberg is certainly open to conjecture, though it won't extend to controlling governments. 

Editors.

Letters :The war goes on (2001)

Letters to the Editors from the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war goes on

Dear Editors,

The action of terrorists on America’s twin towers and Pentagon on 11 September and the subsequent bombing of Afghanistan by the USA and its allies is proof (if any was necessary) that there is no civilisation or democracy in this world.

As he accepted his Presidential nomination in 1988, George Bush (senior) had this to say, “This has been called the American century because in it we were the dominant force for good in the world. Now we are on the verge of a new century, and what country’s name will it bear? I say it will be anther American century.” However, there is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs.

As long as we live under the market system, the conditions that give rise to wars will always exist. War in the modern world has the potential for destruction of the whole human race. The working class – the propertyless majority – have no interest at stake in supporting any war at any time for any reason. Terrorism will only go with the collapse of capitalism and the coming of a new era – socialism.

It is clear that any solution resulting from violence or confrontation is not lasting. It is only through peaceful means that we can develop better understanding between peoples. Though lies and “spin” may deceive people temporarily and the use of force may control human beings physically, it is only through proper understanding, fairness and mutual respect that they can be genuinely satisfied and creative.

Human beings are capable of co-operating – the development of the human race has depended upon it. There are numerous examples of selfless behaviour and kindliness. But a system motivated by the quest for profit is bound to be competitive and ruthless. Otherwise how and why would people who are kind and caring support and even take part in deliberately causing death and destruction to strangers they have never met? The wheels of capitalism are oiled by human blood.

There are no bombs or bullets that select the guilty and spare the innocent. The pacifist is just as likely to get killed as the soldier. This is what is happening in Afghanistan and in all parts of the world that are ravaged by war. Though human life cannot be recovered, the energy and resources that are being put into the destruction of Afghanistan could be used to rebuild the destroyed twin towers. Destroying life and wealth in Afghanistan is not a solution – it will only aggravate the situation. Two wrongs cannot make a right. The USA is using misfortune to show the world its military might, using equipment sold to destroy human life elsewhere.

Socialists can only continue with propagating our case against capitalism. Sometimes we have to be careful not to provoke the sword of ignorance purposelessly. But to give up, to concede defeat, would be to allow the present disastrous and insane system to triumph.

To quote the words of a great scientist, Albert Einstein, “The significant problems we face cannot be resolved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Justus Weijagye, 

Uganda

The Bilderberg Group

Dear Editors

Just a short comment on the clarification on p. 18 of the November Socialist Standard.

The Bilderberg group may be “semi-mythological”, but there’s no doubt that such groupings do exist. For instance, in Captive State, George Monbiot discusses the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), an association of the bosses of forty-six of the biggest companies in Europe. They have long advocated the creation of a single market in Western Europe, and called for the improvement of transport links – including the building of the Channel Tunnel. The ERT does not control governments, but it certainly influences them.

Paul Bennett, 

Manchester

The Bilderberg Group (2002)

From the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of June the Bilderberg Group met for its 2002 conference in Chantilly, Virginia, USA. They met in secret, as always – but are they really ‘the secret rulers of the world’, as many contend?

The activities and meetings of the Bilderberg Group, or Bilderbergers as they have been called, are shrouded in mystery, not unlike the rituals of Masonic lodges. The lengths to which the organisers have gone to keep the press and public away, and their deliberations secret, are even by capitalist standards astounding. Very little has been reported even in the so-called quality newspapers. The political left has shown little real interest; indeed, about the only people interested in the Bilderbergers have been the “conspiracy theorists” of the far right, including the magazine The Spotlight in the United States and the journal of the Freedom Association Freedom Today in this country.

Who, then, are the Bilderberg Group, and do they really rule the world as the conspiracists assert?

Hôtel de Bilderberg

The Bilderberg Group takes its name from the Hôtel de Bilderberg in the small Dutch town of Oosterbeekat near Arnhem, owned by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, where in May 1954, the first formal meeting or conference was held. while the name has persisted, its meetings are held in different locations and countries.

The initiative for the first meeting came from Jozef Ritinger, a Polish émigré said to be “a compulsive intriguer and behind-the-scenes political wheeler-dealer”, Prince Bernhard and Paul Rijkens, President of the giant Anglo-Dutch corporation, Unilever, following a visit by Prince Bernhard to his friend, Bedell Smith, in America in 1952. Smith put the organisation in the US into the hands of Charles D Jackson, who was President of the Committee for a Free Europe. The first meeting was, however, a European initiative. Young Labour MP Denis Healey was invited to that meeting as convenor of the British delegation, which also included Hugh Gaitskell, Robert Boothy and Sir Colin Gubbins, whose expenses were covered by the British Foreign Office. Prince Bernhard was appointed chairman, a position he held until 1976, when he was forced to resign because of his involvement in the Lockheed bribery scandal. Representing France were Guy Mollet, the “socialist” leader, and Antoine Pinay the right-wing Prime Minister. The Americans included George Ball of Lehman Brothers, David Rockefeller and Dean Rusk, President of the Rockefeller Foundation and, later, US Secretary of State.

The participants at Bilderberg meetings are not elected by governments, corporations or, in fact, anyone. They are selected by a small core of administrators, constituted as a Steering Committee consisting of a permanent chair, European and North American secretaries and a treasurer. Invitations are only sent to “important and generally respected” businessmen, politicians and others, “through their special knowledge or experience”, and their personal contacts and influence in national and international circles.

Essentially, discussion and the names of participants are kept out of the public sphere. In 1967, for example, Cecil King, the then chair of the International Publishing Corporation, and also chair of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, formally requested fellow newspaper proprietors to see that “on no account should any report or even speculation about the content of the (Bilderberg) conferences be printed”. And on both sides of the Atlantic, for many years, they weren’t.

One journalists, Gordon Tether, the “Lombard” columnist of the Financial Times, wrote on 6 May 1975, “If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.” In an article he wrote for the paper on 3 March 1976 he returned to the subject of Bilderberg secrecy. It never appeared, and Tether was dismissed from the “Lombard” column August of that year.

In the last year or two, following stories about the Bilderbergers on the internet, the Group has been just a shade less secretive. In late 1999, for the first time in its existence, the minutes of that year’s meeting were leaked (presumably by someone within the Group), and extracts were published in the Big Issue and the whole document was posted on the Internet.

Participants

One of the participants at Bilderberg meetings who has attempted to conceal his attendances is the former Prime Minister, Edward Heath. Asked if he had attended any he replied vaguely that he may have “about 20 years ago”. In fact, US Congressional records reveal that he had attended meetings in 1963, 1964 and 1967 at least.

Asked in 1998 by the Conservative MP, Christopher Gill which members of the Labour government had attended meetings of the Bilderberg Group, Tony Blair replied in a written answer on 16 March 1998, “none”. In fact, Blair, Gordon Brown, George Robertson, Peter Mandelson and the late John Smith had all attended meetings at some time. Indeed, John Smith was said to have been on the Bilderberg Steering Group from 1989 to 1992. Another well-known figure to have attended a Bilderberg meeting, this time in Canada in 1996, and reported in the Toronto Star, was the General Secretary of the British TUC, John Monks.

Most participants, however, for instance at the 45th meeting held near Atlanta, Georgia, in the US in June 1997, appear to have been directors of large companies, corporations and international banks. They included: Conrad Black, the media tycoon, John Brown, chief executive of BP, Maarten A van der Bergh, managing director of Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands, William J McDonough, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Colin Powell. Will Hutton, editor of the Observer was also in attendance.

Rulers of the world?

Are the Bilderbergers the rulers of the world? No, not at least in the way the conspiracy theorists of the far right claim. The Bilderberg Group is not an all-embracing totalitarian organisation, imposing a World Order on all of its citizens. But many of its participants are, or may become, powerful nationally and/or internationally and they represent powerful interests even if some, like Peter Mandelson, may have fallen by the wayside.

The Bilderberg Group emerged, in the view of author Stephen Dorrill:

“In an effort to cement western co-operation in the midst of the Cold War . . . It was seen as an opportunity for shapers of opinion among elite groups in Europe to speak with one voice to their counterparts in the United States, who feared that differences over European integration and eastern Europe would create misunderstandings” (MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, p508).

The objective was to prevent divergences among the participants of the meetings “by working through consensus rather than any formal procedure”. Yet during the first conference “sparks flew” between the two main groups over the possible threat of “communist infiltration”. Again, during the Suez crisis, in 1956, “sparks flew” between the Europeans and the Americans, when the British and the French almost “came to blows” with the US participants.

Of the Bilderbergers, Mike Peters comments:

“. . . the membership comprises those individuals who would, on most definitions, be regarded as members of the ‘ruling class’ in Western Europe and North America. In particular, the conferences brought together important figures in most of the largest international corporations with leading politicians and prominent intellectuals” (“The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unifications”, Lobster, December 1996).

He adds that virtually all the European institutions we take for granted today were conceived, designed and brought into existence through the agency of people involved in Bilderberg.

Nevertheless, because of the anarchic, competitive and contradictory nature of capitalism in Europe, the United States and worldwide, and the fact that many capitalists and opinion-shapers in such countries as Japan and Russia have not participated in Bilderberg activities, a conflict-free “New World Order”, ruled by the Bilderbergers is practically impossible.

Peter E. Newell

Denis Healey on Bilderberg (2002)

From the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Of all these meetings, the most valuable to me while I was in opposition were the Bilderberg Conferences . . . They were the brain-child of Joseph Retinger, a Pole who had settled in England after the Great War . . . he organised the Congress of the Hague, which launched the European Movement. Convinced of the need for a similar forum to strengthen unity between Europe and North America, he approached Hugh Gaitskell, General Colin Gubbins, who had commanded SOE during the war, and several leading politicians and businessmen who were concerned to strengthen Atlantic cooperation. They asked Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to act as Chairman, because they rightly thought it would be difficult to find a politician whose objectivity would be above suspicion, and who could call Cabinet ministers from any country without causing offence.

I was invited to the first meeting and later acted as convenor of the British who attended . . . The Bilderberg conferences inevitably aroused jealousy because they were exclusive, and suspicion, because they were private . . . I wrote a paper for most conferences . . .

My years at the Bilderberg meetings also brought me many contacts in the financial world which now proved of great value. David Rockefeller, whom I had known since the very first Bilderberg meeting at Arnhem, was now head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and particularly active in the international field . . . I still managed to get to several Bilderberg meetings as Chancellor. At Mégève in April, 1974, I met Helmut Schmidt, who was now once again my colleague, as Germany’s Finance Minister.

(The Time of My Life, 1989, pp195-6, 414-5)

The Plot Thickens (2005)

TV Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conspiracies – The Illuminati (Sky Mix, Fri, 9.00pm, Dec 10)

“They’re all enslaving you. They call us cattle, but they’re just scum”. So goes one of Alex Jones’ weekly Texas radio rants against that supersecret sect of the centuries, the Illuminati (Enlightened). Established in 1776 in Bavaria as a secular intellectual club but driven underground by the Church, this mysterious society has by now infiltrated into every government organisation including the media. Its aim is nothing less than the dumbing down of a helpless population and then global dictatorship. Apparently. 

We follow the narrator Danny Wallace on a wild-goose chase round industrial estates, hoping to meet a real-life Illuminatus, who evidently bottles out of the encounter (or didn’t exist in the first place), and sundry interviews with paranoid amateur journalists who say things like: “They are monitoring my every move. It’s a wonder I’m still alive” (a wonder you’re not locked up, more like).

Conspiracy theorists often gain plausibility by taking established fact and embellishing it, so that one can’t tell where truth ends and fiction begins. There are undoubtedly shadowy societies of the super-rich which are well-documented. The Skull and Bones in America includes many senators, three past presidents, and both George Bush and John Kerry, while in Britain we have the Masonic Lodge. The Bilderberg Group is also given lavish treatment in the programme. But of course, they can’t be very secret or we wouldn’t know about them. The point is, say the neurotic campaigners, they’re all just fronts for the Illuminati.

What’s really interesting – more than the unlikely tales of mock human sacrifices under a giant stone owl – is why some people need to believe the world is really controlled by a secret society, when it is fairly obviously controlled by the not-very-secret capitalist class. Perhaps that’s just too mundane an explanation, or too public, when what is required by conspiracy theorists is something akin to demonic global possession, something so unearthly and powerful that it is quite beyond our ability to exorcise it. Why do they need to believe in this absolute evil? Perhaps in order to cast themselves as holy crusaders.

There are conspiracies all the time, little ones. Big ones tend to spring leaks however, and few are likely to believe in one that has lasted 250 years without being ‘outed’. The capitalist class is not a conspiracy, not because it is open and, more or less, above board, but because it is not united, as the Illuminati presumably are. The disunity of the capitalist class is their Achilles heel, a weakness workers could use. If you believe your enslavers have no weaknesses, you won’t struggle against them. The crusaders against the Illuminati could do with some illumination on that point.

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: A high priest speaks (1998)

The Voice From The Back column from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A high priest speaks

"Markets are surely one of God’s great gifts to mankind. But alas, man is conceited. Nowhere is this more manifest than in politics". Sir Alan Walters, Financial Mail on Sunday, 5 July.

A worshipper sings

"Americans have been experiencing the heartiest bull market in history. The Dow Jones average of 30 blue-chip allegedly representative industrials has more than doubled, from 3,760 in June 1994 to flirting with 9,000 today. Unemployment is 4.3 percent while inflation and interest rates have inexplicably remained low . . . With the computer revolution at full throttle, the strictures of classical economics appear no longer relevant for the US. And the economic chattering classes-from the stately John Kenneth Galbraith through the cryptic Alan Greenspan to the trendy Esther Dyson can only anticipate millennium market madness. Let the good times roll". Crocker Snow Jr, World Times, Boston, 5 July.

Hunger persuades

"American legislation to put a time limit on welfare payments is proving a success as more people find jobs. Figures show that people are moving off the unemployment register twice as quickly now than before 1996, when Congress imposed the limits. The Republican law, which went much further than reforms being tried in Britain, was denounced as inhumane because it laid down that no one could receive more than a total of five years of welfare payments from the federal government during their lifetime". Telegraph, 20 June.

Sacrificial victim protests

"[G]rowing evidence suggest that the larger the income gap, the wider the health gap. For example, infant mortality in social classes IV and V in the UK is twice as high as in Sweden. In America’s booming economy, the gap has now reached the point where a child born in Bangladesh has a greater life expectancy than a child born in Harlem". Donald Read, Chief Executive, Association for Public Health, letter in Guardian, 23 July.

Noblesse oblige

"Land reforms proposed for Scotland could destroy traditional family estates, according to the Duke of Buccleuch, Britain’s largest landowner. The duke, 74, who owns more than 400 square miles, mainly in the Borders, said that the system of land ownership most [people] sought to preserve was falling apart . . . . In a 17-page document, the duke said that only 80 years ago nearly 90 percent of the countryside in Scotland was managed by traditional family run estates. Today it is less than 30 percent, due mainly, he said to a wealth tax in the form of estate duty". Daily Telegraph, 20 June.

Dirty neighbours

"The governments of Norway, Sweden and Denmark are demanding that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria stops reprocessing after it was found that radioactive seaweed collected on their countries’ coasts is a result of new discharges from the site. An analysis by Southampton University shows that levels of Technetium-99-a rare radioactive element which is a waste product of reprocessing plutonium-has increased 15-fold in Norwegian seaweed since the early 1990s. A new plant that discharges Technetium-99 was opened in 1994 at Sellafield and the increases are linked to that". Guardian, 18 June.

Ssh-not a word!

" “Well, all this is a sanitised area,” he said, gesturing at the hotel atop the ridge, the manicured lawns, the trimmed shrubs, the tennis courts, the winding driveway up to the front door, the police checkpoint, more police again in the woods. “Really, you’re wasting your time,” he said. “Really, you are-there’s no one booked to play today.” He was a plain clothes member of Operation Orchid, the codename given by Strathclyde police to the impenetrable security ring surrounding this year’s Bilderberg meetings; a highly exclusive, little known and barely reported annual conference which has been held since 1954 at grand hotels across Europe and the USA. Attendees debate the state of the world and, critics insist, manipulate global politics and economics from behind the scenes. At Turnberry last month, the 120-strong guest list made intriguing reading . . . There was Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, billionaire chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank; Giovanni Agnelli, head of the Fiat empire; Javier Solana, secretary general of Nato; Jurgen Schrempp, chairman of Daimler-Benz; the chairmen or chief execs of the Xerox Corporation, BP, Reuters and a bunch of big-league banks and law firms; John Deutch, former head of the CIA; Tory leader William Hague, Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan; Defence Secretary George Robertson; assorted other politicos . . . No reporters are admitted, no press conferences held, and no record of what was said is published". Night & Day, 14 June.

Cooking the Books: Who Controls the World? (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some people think that a sinister elite controls the world from behind the scenes. Candidates for this role range from the Bilderberg Group (which does exist) to the Elders of Zion (who don’t). These conspiracy theorists would be heartened by a recent headline in the New Scientist: “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world.”

A study of 43,000 transnational corporations (TNCs) by a team of systems theorists from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich  revealed: ‘a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1,318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "rear economy” - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues. When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity'' of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cert of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cert of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network".’ (newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500)

‘Runs the world’ is too strong as it implies that the ‘super-entity’ is actually in control of the economy whereas its components have to operate within and accept the constraints of the uncontrollable world market.

Nor is any conspiracy implied. It is rather a description of the structure of the world economy. Systems theorists see it as a typical pattern of complex systems. For Marxists, it’s confirmation of Marx’s view that the tendency of capitalism is for the concentration and centralisation of production and ownership.

The researchers claim a practical outcome from their research: that, as the New Scientist put it, it could help identify ways of making capitalism more stable’.

The assumption seems to be that if one of the 1,318 gets into financial trouble this will affect all those others within the network with which it has links. But the links that are relevant for the workings of the economy are not so much ownership and control as suppliers (sellers) and buyers (users). If, for instance, because of overproduction in the industry, a steel plant has to close, then the suppliers of all its materials will be affected; as will its workers and those of its suppliers and the stores and shops which sell them consumer goods. That’s the way overproduction in one key industry spreads to the rest of the economy.

The researchers’ proposal – ‘global anti-trust rules … to limit over-connection amongst TNCs’ – wouldn’t solve this problem. In fact it might make it worse by encouraging more, inevitably chaotic competition. In any event, it is only intended to prevent the initial shock spreading so fast and so far. Since capitalist production proceeds by way of series stops and starts such shocks are inevitable from time to time. There’s nothing governments can do to prevent this. Conspiracy theorists misread this as showing that governments are beholden to a shadowy elite.

They can relax. The world economy is not controlled by an elite (even if there is an easily identifiable elite that benefits from it). It is not controlled by anybody. It’s an uncontrollable economic mechanism that can only be ended by making the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, the common heritage of all.  A ‘New World Order’, if you like, but a democratic one.

Is The Truth Stranger Than Fiction? (2002)

From the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever heard the rumour that Paul McCartney was killed in a road crash in 1966? Apparently he was replaced by a double and surreptitious references to this are included on the cover - and in the songs - of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. If not, perhaps you've heard that the moon landings were really shot in the Nevada desert? Or that Elvis faked his death and was seen, a few years back, working in a Burger King in Kalamazoo?

If you're familiar with any of these rumours then you've come across a major contributory factor in the persistent blurring of truth and fiction now prevalent throughout society: the conspiracy theory. From the Latin word conspirare, conspiracy means literally "to breathe together", but its most common interpretation is more pejorative than that, hinting at secret plots, clandestine illegal activities and mysterious doings away from the public gaze.

It has been a feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics that conspiracy theories have been given more prominence and credence than almost ever before. Indeed, not since the Nazi rise to power in 1930s Germany, with their scare-mongering about "Jewish international finance capital", has the conspiratorial view of the world been in such vogue.

There's someone looking at you
It's not that conspiracy theories are in any way a novel phenomenon - far from it. They can be traced back to biblical times and beyond, with widespread and pervasive conspiracy theories probably arising for the first time during the Crusades. The difference between previous times in history and the modern era is twofold - firstly in the extent to which baseless conspiracy theories have recently proliferated and taken hold even amongst otherwise sophisticated and well-educated sections of the population, secondly because of the way in which virtually no major event or phenomenon can currently unfold without someone crying "conspiracy!" from the rooftops and finding a ready audience. Name a recent historical event - and it was a "conspiracy". Diana's death? A conspiracy, of course. European monetary union? A fiendish conspiracy hatched by un-elected, shadowy forces. September 11? Quite an obvious conspiracy (though by the US government itself apparently, not Al Qaeda).

Indeed, in recent times we seem to have entered an era of paranoid politics. For a whole series of complex reasons that have been charted previously in the pages of this journal, interest in real political ideas seems to have declined in the last ten or twenty years, especially in the so-called "advanced" capitalist states, and hand-in-hand with this has gone a suspicion of all those engaged in the political process.

We live in a technologically complex, sophisticated and supposedly "meritocratic" society and these are influences which have helped strip away much of the mystique previously surrounding our supposed elders and betters in the political elite, in the royal family and among others in the public spotlight. This distrust, which has been fuelled by very real revelations of wrong-doing in high places, has tainted the popular perception of not just the individuals involved but of the entire political process - and this is not just a phenomenon confined to Britain either. Mainland Europe, Japan and the United States (not to mention many of the more developing industrial states) have been gripped by the same distrust. And as any pop psychologist knows, distrust - in the right environment - breeds paranoia.

Postmodernist junk
The "right environment" in question is the one presented by postmodernism, that loose body of thought which contends that interpretation is everything and the truth an ephemera, and that science and reason are merely particular interpretations of events, being "narratives" with no more claim to validity than any other. It is postmodernism and the parallel distrust of science and progress that has arisen in recent years that has opened the way for conspiracy theories to multiply - whether they have a basis in reality or not. At the same time - and without coincidence - various New Age and occultist ideas and practices have gained ground. Postmodernism, irrationality and conspiracy theories now unite to form a bizarre trinity that informs much popular interpretation of historical events and processes.

Given this, it comes as no surprise that those most attracted to New Age and occultist theories are typically those who also give most credence to conspiracism as a systematic way of interpreting events. These are people who do not merely contend that conspiracies of some sort have taken place or have been uncovered (whether it be the JFK assassination or the Roswell UFO crash) but whose entire worldview is a conspiratorial one.

The Nazis, whose worldview was one drenched in anti-semitism to the extent that they thought the world dominated by a cabal of Jewish bankers, were steeped in a mysticism and occultism that had been handed down to them by fellow initiates of secret societies like the Vril Society and Thule Society in the period after the First World War. Modern day paranoid conspiracists are typically little different, blending the irrational theories and practices of the New Age with their conspiracist worldview.

In fact many have gone one step further than the Nazis and earlier conspiracists in thinking that all major conspiracies - real or imagined - together with all secret societies, are intrinsically linked, being but different aspects of the same age-old conspiracy. The current favourite is that they are all linked to the Illuminated Ones or "Illuminati" who were, amongst many other things, allegedly behind the founding of the United States (and its Federal Government), the United Nations, the European Union and other supposedly "centralising", "controlling" bodies.

So it is that in this theory, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, etc are all slowly working towards the achievement of some kind of centralised, totalitarian New World Order, and the clues - as always - lie in their occultist practices. For instance, here's the late William Cooper, a former US naval intelligence operative in his conspiracy-lovers' bible Behold A Pale Horse, illustrating the psychological tie-up beautifully:

"The numbers 3,7, 9,11,13 39 and any multiple of these numbers have special meaning to the Illuminati. Notice that the Bilderberg Group has a core of 39 members who are broken into 3 groups of 13 members in each group. Notice that the core of 39 answers to the 13 who make up the Policy Committee. Take special notice that the 13 members of the Policy Committee answer to the Round Table of Nine. You know that the original number of states in the United States of America was 13. The Constitution has 7 Articles and was signed by 39 members of the Constitutional Convention. The United States was born on July 4, 1776. July is the 7th month of the year. Add 7 (for July) and 4 and you have 11; 1+7+7+6 =21, which is a multiple of 3 and 7. Add 2+1 and you get 3. Look at the numbers in 1776 and you see two 7s and a 6, which is a multiple of 3. Coincidence, you say? I say "Baloney!" and I'd really like to say something a lot stronger". (pp.92-3).

In a similar vein, David Icke's recent works (notably The Robots' Rebellion and The Biggest Secret) are a case study of how spiritualist, astrological, numerological and conspiracist ideas (with a bit of "hollow earth", gaia and ufology thrown in for good measure) can interlock and reinforce one another. He too has jumped on the Illuminati bandwagon, upping-the-ante as only he knows how, claiming that the initiates of this secret group of "controllers" are really shape-shifting reptilians, notably including Ted Heath and the British royal family. And lest anyone think that David Icke and others of his ilk are an irrelevant political joke, his books sell tens of thousands of copies and his public meetings across the world are full and booked-up often months in advance - this being fairly typically of the genre.

Strange world
In some respects, we do indeed live in strange, puzzling and disconcerting times. Mass starvation exists amongst plenty. Wars constantly rage across the globe even though everyone says they want peace. And when "too much" is produced by the factories and farms, people get made unemployed and are plunged into dire poverty, presumably for being too successful.

In this environment, it is no wonder that people look for irrational explanations for seemingly irrational problems. Conspiracy theorists take the view that such a complex organism as modern world society must be controlled from the top - someone, somewhere must be pulling the strings. For instance, unfamiliar with the analysis of Marxian economics, they are yet to realise that at the heart of the capitalist economy is a genuine "anarchy of production" based on ruthless competition, where firms produce goods with only profit in mind and not the needs of other firms or the limits for their particular market - and without an overall external controlling force. This particular blind spot in their conspiracists' perspective can lead them to make ridiculous, unsupported claims like the following, quite typical of its kind:

"In 1929, the Brotherhood [Illuminati] bankers crashed the Wall Street stock-market and caused the Great Depression. From this problem came the solution, the 'New Deal' economic package offered by Roosevelt which won him the Presidential election of 1933. The 'New Deal' was a replica of the economic package offered by Hitler to the German people to solve their manufactured economic problems . . . Soon afterwards, with the American economy now completely under Brotherhood control, Roosevelt put their symbol, the pyramid and all-seeing eye, on the dollar bill. He was saying to the American people 'Gotch-yer'" (The Biggest Secret by David Icke, pp.230-1).

No explanation of this type of argument is ever put forward beyond a re-iteration of the inter-connectedness of some sections of the capitalists class (the Rothschilds and Rockefellers usually attracting particular attention) combined with the hoary old myth about the "mystical" power of the banks being able to create multiples of credit from a given deposit base. And needless to say, while all the evidence points to the economy being essentially beyond the control of politicians, bankers and economic forecasters too, the conspiracy theorists interpret every event (even contradictory ones) as being evidence that everything is under political control to the last detail and that the forecasters are just "playing the game".

In truth, very little concrete evidence is ever put forward for the more far-reaching conspiracy theories that imply a conspiratorial worldview. The stock-in-trade of the conspiracy writers is rumour, innuendo, guilt-by-association and half-knowledge passed off as fact. Take Bilderberg and its ilk as an example. Yes, there is plentiful evidence that organisations like the Bilderberg group exist. Yes, there is evidence that their members are rich and powerful people with their own agendas and quite some influence. But no, there is no evidence that such organisations "rule the world" and carefully manipulate states and economies at will - and no-one has yet provided any.

The dispossessed and disenchanted
Who are the real believers in conspiracy theories like these anyway? Conspiracy theorists are fond of quoting selected people "in the know" to show that the conspirators themselves occasionally admit what they are up to. Carroll Quigley, renowned expert on Anglo-US relations and mentor to Bill Clinton is a favourite, especially his book Tragedy and Hope, though in reality it is a weighty tome that says plenty about cross-Atlantic ruling class networks (The Round Table, Royal Institute for International Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations) but little about global conspiracies. Former British Tory Prime Minister Disraeli is another favourite, especially his statement that "the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes" (Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Crimes by Jonathan Vankin, p.265) but that is a quote that is familiar due to overuse more than anything else that there is to commend it. Disraeli had in fact been intrigued by conspiracy theories and secret societies from his youth and was apt to make phrases like this whether he really believed them or not.

Most conspiracy theories are really believed not by those who come into closest contact with the conspirators but by those at the bottom of the pile who are typically furthest away from them, metaphorically speaking - the disenfranchised and dispossessed. They are most likely to be found on the extreme fringes of capitalism's political spectrum, on the far left and the far right, whether they be anti-globalisation crusties of J-18 fame or the US militiamen polishing their guns in the hills of Montana and Arizona.

Interestingly, many if not most of the famous real-life conspiracies that have been documented beyond reasonable dispute have been hatched not by large, elaborate networks of the rich and powerful (who have a tendency and opportunity to use more subtle means, at least on the whole) but by comparatively small, well-organised groups of political dissenters, from those behind the Gunpowder Plot through to the Bolsheviks and in recent times the perpetrators of 11 September. That can be no surprise - the fewer people that know of a secret, the more chance there is of it being kept under wraps until the appropriate moment arrives.

Conspiracies everywhere?
So do conspiracies actually exist at present? Of course - from minor political conspiracies and plots (e.g. the Tory Party plot a few years ago to depose Margaret Thatcher) to the more renowned activities of political dissenters meeting in secret (the actual origin of most secret societies). There are of course plots and conspiracies by the rich and powerful to cover-up their misdeeds too on occasion (like Watergate) and it almost goes without saying that there have been well-documented clandestine activities by the ruling class and its agents against the organised labour movement, even from before the days of the First International. But we can also say with a fair degree of certainty that:

1. No reliable evidence has ever been furnished in support of a conspiracy "worldview".
2. Such views are typically the product of misplaced theories and perspectives that interlock with, and reinforce, other erroneous ideas (such as with the Illuminati and numerology; anti-semitism and the occult).
3. Postmodernist culture has helped open the floodgates to a swathe of unsound conspiracy theories that seek to systematically interpret world events in a non-rational and unscientific manner.
4. Conspiracy theorists' assertions that a complex, technologically advanced society like capitalism cannot be at root "anarchic" in many of its operations, are misplaced.

So the conspiratorial worldview is certainly not helpful in promoting an understanding of modern society and is itself, in large part, a product of the times we live in.

The organisation of society as it currently exists - capitalism - is certainly not a conspiracy, even if its structure means that conspiracies exist from time to time within it. And for those interested in overthrowing the system which now seemingly leads to secrecy and paranoia almost like night leads to day, a more fundamental approach is needed than that exhibited by the conspiracy theorists. A truly democratic society, where power no longer resides in the hands of a few, and where the incentive for power struggles and subterfuge will decrease accordingly, cannot be built within capitalism, by its very nature. Instead, a democratic socialist revolution, carried out by the majority and in the interests of the majority, will be the time in history when the conspiracy worldview is finally put to bed.

Meanwhile, for those struggling with the complexities and contradictions of life in capitalist society we can certainly say this: the truth is out there somewhere. It is just that it is not generally to be found in the New Age literature and conspiracy quackery currently invading the shelves of high street book stores across much of the western world. And there's definitely no mystery about that.

Dave Perrin