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New World Order
A Strategy of Imperialism
By Sean Stone Trine Day LLC
Copyright © 2016 Sean Stone
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63424-091-8
CHAPTER 1
The Rhodes Scholarship for Imperialism
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.
– Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope
Thus begins a fascinating admission of the influence of a British-originated secret society on American political history, as recounted by Professor Carroll Quigley in his 1966 tome Tragedy and Hope, while he was Professor of History at the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University. The Round Table Group referred to by Quigley included the men working with Lord Alfred Milner, the head of the Rhodes Trust from 1902 till his death in 1925. The Group appears to have been an extension of Cecil Rhodes' own conception of a "secret society" to advance a project for the "extension of the English-speaking idea."
The idea of maintaining the integral mass of the British Empire was by no means certain after the loss of its American colony by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. In the nineteenth century a "Little England" movement evolved, which opposed the costs of maintaining the empire. "If the First Empire attracted traders and planters who left Britain to earn their fortunes in the far-flung corners of the imperial domain, its later incarnation is alleged to have appealed to investors who supported entrepreneurs in their attempts to open new markets for the products of British industry and who organized new sources of raw materials for the factories at home." Thus, Great Britain utilized its role as the world's banker, behind the sovereign Pound Sterling, to promote an "informal empire" beyond its physical colonies. Britain had previously used its business interests to gain political ground, as for instance with the British East India Company's trade ultimately leading to India's annexation into the Empire. The same would now occur in southern Africa, through the efforts of the entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, backed by Lord Nathan Rothschild.
By 1870 the momentum had shifted away from isolationism to a more "liberal imperialism," predicated on financial investments and "indirect rule" of the colonies via local proxies. Ideologically, that year marked the creation of a Chair of Fine Arts at Oxford, which was given to the pre-Raphaelite art professor John Ruskin, who commanded his students that the empire must "Reign or Die." Ruskin "hit Oxford like an earthquake" from the moment he diverted his inaugural lecture from art to empire, lecturing his students that England "must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men. ... she must guide the human arts, and gather the divine knowledge, of distant nations, transformed from savageness to manhood."
Ruskin's Inaugural lecture was circulated widely around the Oxford of the 1870s, amongst the likes of Cecil Rhodes (who adhered to Ruskin's call, becoming prime minister of the English Cape Colony in South Africa in 1890), and Rhodes' contemporaries Arnold Toynbee (who advocated social reforms for the working classes), and Lord Milner (whose Round Table Group operated by the principle "that the extension and integration of the Empire and the development of social welfare were essential to the continued existence of the British way of life; and that this British way of life was an instrument which unfolded all the best and highest capabilities of mankind").
Cecil Rhodes' fortune was built on the backs of diamond miners in Kimberley, South Africa, where Rhodes founded DeBeers in partnership with Lord Rothschild. While the legacy of DeBeers continues to this day on the international diamond cartel, Rhodes' impact upon South Africa may have been most felt in the system of apartheid which he institutionalized in the 1880s, first by housing all 10,000 black diamond miners in prison-like barracks, before decreeing that "no native shall work or be allowed to work in any mine, whether in open or underground mining, excepting under the responsible charge of some particular white man as his master or 'baas.'" Rhodes' other legacy would be found in the formation of what he referred to as a "secret society." In his 1877 "Confessions of Faith" he had alluded to it:
I look into history and I read the story of the Jesuits I see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say under bad leaders. At the present day I become a member of the Masonic order I see the wealth and power they possess the influence they hold and I think over their ceremonies and I wonder that a large body of men can devote themselves to what at times appear the most ridiculous and absurd rites without an object and without an end. The idea gleaming and dancing before ones eyes like a will-of-the-wisp at last frames itself into a plan. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. (emphasis added)
Whether or not Rhodes' secret society was ever formalized, Lord Milner was initiated into Rhodes' ultimate vision for the empire, becoming his heir apparent. At the time of Rhodes' death in 1902, Milner was still working as High Commissioner of South Africa, a position which Rhodes helped secure for Milner in 1897. As High Commissioner, Milner was perfectly placed to help incite the Boer War which Rhodes had been hoping to provoke in order to unite South Africa under British rule, thus thwarting the political independence of the Dutch Boer republics.
After the successful Boer War (1899-1902), Milner incorporated the Boers' Transvaal and Orange River Colony into South Africa with the aid of his political disciples called the "Kindergarten," who constituted the main body of the subsequent Round Table Group, which seems to have played the role of Rhodes' intended secret society. After Milner left a united South Africa under the leadership of his Round Table ally General Jan Smuts in 1910, Milner returned to England with his Kindergarten to pursue Rhodes' dream, by furthering the imperial federation of the Empire into a "Commonwealth." That year, the Rhodes Trust was used to launch The Round Table, a journal on Commonwealth Affairs.
According to John Buchan, one of Milner's disciples from South Africa and a peripheral member of the Round Table Group, he "dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace ... It was humanitarian and international; we believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world." Thus, the initial endeavor of Imperial Federation intended to retain the English loyalties of the expatriate white colonists in South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
These federalists were fundamentally Nationalistic Imperialists who believed that "the British State must follow that [Anglo-Saxon] race ...wherever it settles in appreciable numbers as an independent community." Thus Milner and his fellow federalists hoped that the "white man's burden" would serve to bind "the citizen[s] of the Empire" because their race would be more amicable to a common jurisdiction under the Crown. This emphasis on the federation of the Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations became the guiding mission of the Round Table Movement from its formation until the creation of independent Dominions for South Africa, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand in 1931. Yet a further, and more ambitious, elaboration for the Empire was also stirring by the early twentieth century.
Meeting between 1902 and 1908, Milner and his political protégé L.S. Amery engaged in discussions with Liberal Party members like Secretary of State Edward Grey and Round Table affiliate Lord Robert Cecil "to discuss the future of this perplexing, promising and frustrating Empire" of England. The direction of the Empire's long-term achievement of a federated global government was not yet clear to this group of "Coefficients," according to participant H.G. Wells, the Fabian Socialist writer. As Wells described the internal cleavages, Amery and Milner tended to accept Imperialist and "Monarchist forms" as a vehicle for achieving the "world commonweal," while Wells was disgruntled at the continuation of any sort of nationalism. Nevertheless, Milner "knew we had to make a new world," and though the Coefficients may have diverged on the means, they believed that a new international order was in the making. As Wells described the situation,
The British Empire ... had to be the precursor of a world-state or nothing. ... It was possible for the Germans and Austrians to hold together in their Zollverein (tariff and trade bloc) because they were placed like a clenched fist in the centre of Europe. But the British Empire was like an open hand all over the world. It had no natural economic unity and it could maintain no artificial economic unity. Its essential unity must be a unity of great ideas embodied in the English speech and literature."
While Milner may have differed from Wells as a "Nationalist" rather than a "Cosmopolitan" in his imperial outlook, his personal sentiments were insignificant to the ultimate destiny of the Empire, which would not rest with a unification of the English-speaking races and the creation of the British Commonwealth after 1926, or even an alliance with the lost colony of America. Instead, the English-speaking alliance was considered a mere precursor to the greater internationalist project of world governance through international financial controls and supranational legal agreements and treaties.
For instance, while Rhodes willed in 1877 the "colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates," the colonization of Africa and the Middle East did proceed through World War I, with the British adding mandates over Palestine and Iraq to their African interests. By the time the British laid claim to Palestine in 1920, Rhodes' disciple Lord Milner, and his secretary L.S. Amery, had already crafted the declaration committing Britain to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. "The document that emerges is handed to Baron Rothschild by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, and thus becomes known as the Balfour Declaration [of 1917]." As historian Robin Brown points out, Rhodes' Trustee and Biographer Lewis Michell had already amended Rhodes' wording for the empire in 1910 to envision "the Holy Land secured for the Zionists." Given Lord Rothschild's role as a Trustee of Rhodes' will, it seems he played a role in influencing the ultimate goal for Palestine, though custodianship would first need to pass through British hands before it could be turned into the Jewish state of Israel. Thus, despite Milner's commitment to his Anglo-Saxon race, he was not beyond alliances with groups like the Zionists to achieve the ultimate destiny of Britain's global empire. Yet as the 20th Century would prove, the empire would not stop with Britain.
A few years after Milner's death in 1925, H.G. Wells was as committed as ever to the goal of world commonwealth, but he believed that nationalism would have to be swept away first through revolutionary reconsiderations. Refining his idea on a global movement toward world socialism, he described the end-goal in The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1929). The "objective of the Open Conspiracy" would be met by increased socialization of international controls on raw materials, a centralized world banking system, "a world pax, a world economic control, and a restrained population." As Wells understood the openness of the conspiracy, though there may be "a convergence of many different sorts of people upon a common idea," the means of achieving this vision of managerial socialism would not be accomplished through any "sort of simple organization." It would require a "common spirit," but "between many of its contributory factors there may be very wide gaps of understanding and sympathy." Nonetheless, so long as the goal of a world commonwealth of laws under international governance remained the same, the endeavor could be described as an "open" conspiracy, transcending time and personnel.
Wells, for example, never met W.Y. Elliott, but their aims were still largely the same thanks to the "common spirit" guiding the conspiracy's agents and its various infrastructures (i.e. the Round Table Group, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations). Whilst in the context of the greater "open conspiracy" toward globalization Elliott is scarcely remembered by modern scholarship, he was certainly one of the agents reinforcing the paradigms that transformed the nationalistic political and economic structures of the nineteenth century into the supranational corporate and legal superstructures of the twentieth.
It would be at Oxford, while studying as a Rhodes Scholar, that Henry Kissinger's mentor William Yandell Elliott developed his sentiment for world law and international controls. He maintained his Anglophile connections while as a Harvard professor of politics and U.S. government official throughout his career. As he explained to his fellow Rhodes scholar W.E. Sikes in 1951, "I believe we strike a very happy balance in keeping up with what our British allies are doing and sometimes understanding it a little better than those who have not the exposure we had at Oxford and afterwards."
Although Elliott's policies were not always adopted in sum, his ideas usually correlated with that of the English and American internationalists promoting increased cooperation between the two nations to form an Atlantic bloc. Following the creation of this "special relationship" after World War II, the internationalists further proposed regional economic and military cooperation as a step toward increased cohesion of the world in the face of disintegrating empires.
CHAPTER 2
An Education on the "Informal" Empire After Versailles
Two centuries ago, the philosopher Kant predicted that perpetual peace would come about eventually – either as the creation of man's moral aspirations or as the consequence of physical necessity. What seemed utopian then looms as tomorrow's reality; soon there will be no alternative.
– Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Address to UN General Assembly, 1973
In 1919 W.Y. Elliott was selected to earn his doctorate in politics at Oxford University thanks to a Rhodes scholarship. Though still in his early twenties, he was already a veteran of World War I and held degrees from Vanderbilt University and the Sorbonne in France. Yet Elliott's subsequent education at Balliol College, particularly under his tutor Alexander Dunlop Lindsay, would integrally develop his philosophy of democratic government as an expression of individual freedom within pluralistic group organizations; the evolution of these ideas found formulation in his first book, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (1928), which spelled out a supra-national political theory that he would emphasize throughout his life.
The Rhodes Scholarship was established upon Cecil Rhodes' death in 1902 by the Rhodes Trust, the principal of whose Trustees was then Lord Milner. The Scholarships were intended "to be a kind of religious brotherhood like the Jesuits, 'a church for the extension of the British Empire'" by training young men to foster the aim of Rhodes' secret society and its imperial purpose. Consequently, "until the 1950s – perhaps later – its leading figures [amongst the Rhodes Trustees] showed a deep faith in the idea of the British Empire as a global community bound together by common loyalties and racial sympathies. ... They believed that they stood for a modern and enlightened imperialism, best disseminated through teaching, research, and other forms of 'public education.'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New World Order by Sean Stone. Copyright © 2016 Sean Stone. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
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