I have long studied and taught history. I have been very good at seeing the details, but have often missed the broader themes which help one to better understand and interpret those details. I’ve seen the trees, but I have missed the forest. Recently I have begun to see the forest, and, seeing it, have begun to make some sense out of many things I had never before understood or had chosen to ignore.
The basic understanding is really quite simple: Rich and powerful people work hard to further their own interests. That is, they work hard to gain more riches and power. They collude with other rich and powerful people, and generally trample on the lives of those who are not rich and powerful. Some people call this a conspiracy view of history. For the sake of argument, I shall use the term conspiracy and attempt to show how it helps explain the major events of history. At the onset, I will note that some of these ideas are tentative and subject to clarification and correction. But the overall theme is, I believe, sound.
Let’s start with economic panics, recessions, and depressions, since we are currently (2010) in the midst of a serious one. I’ve never liked to study or even think about economics before, but I think one must, if one would understand the driving forces of history. I had in the past accepted the view that these evils were accidents, or part of impersonal cycles. They just happened, and there was nothing much anyone could do about them. I knew how J.P. Morgan had “rescued” the United States economy in the Panic of 1907, and that he had made a tidy fortune doing so. It never occurred to me that he might have been the one who caused the panic in the first place. Yet that is pretty much what happened. In fact, I would say now that every one of those economic disasters was to a large extent planned and promoted, because the same group of bankers and economic powerbrokers always came out richer than ever when things returned to “normal.”
So who has all this economic power? Bankers, mostly, and not just your little local bankers, but those who control the powerful banks whose clients are the nations which have borrowed from them to finance their wars, social programs, and anything else the bankers have contrived to drive them further into debt to themselves.
At this point I must introduce the Rothschild family, a name central to all modern conspiracy theories. The first ancestor of this banking dynasty, Meyer Amschel Bauer, discovered back in the 1700s that he could make far more money by lending to nations than he could by lending to farmers. Bauer, who later changed the family name to Rothschild for the Red Shield that hung over the door of his business, became good friends with a German prince and made a fortune handling his finances. He also made a fortune renting German soldiers to the British to help suppress the American Revolution. (The prince pocketed the money and left the soldiers dead, stranded in America, and/or unpaid.) Rothschild had five sons, and put each in charge of a large national bank in England, Austria, France, Italy, and Germany. It was Nathan Rothschild in England who made the most of this, though all the family continued to amass untold billions over the years.
During the wars of Napoleon in the early 1800s, Rothschild banks operated a courier service which was able to pass easily through enemy lines. This gave them access to crucial intelligence, often before the military or the governments knew what was going on. This was one key to their success. Another was that Rothschild banks were financing both sides of the war, and were obviously delighted the longer the war continued, and the more the belligerent nations piled up debts. But the economic coup for Nathan Rothschild came with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Rothschild couriers informed Nathan of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon a day or so before anyone else in London had any idea of the outcome. Nathan shrewdly walked into the financial exchange looking like he knew England had lost. The stock market plummeted. As stocks dropped in price, Rothschild agents quietly bought them at a fraction of their former prices. When the official couriers reported that Wellington had won and that Napoleon was finished, the stock market soared, and Rothschild made a fortune. I think today we would call that something akin to “insider trading,” which is both illegal and unethical. Whatever the case, he amassed a huge profit at the expense of other people whom he had duped.
That’s one key point about rich and powerful conspirators: They have no moral scruples. They answer to no higher authority, and they do whatever they can get away with to increase their wealth and power. What the history books usually ignore is the fact that their wealth comes from the impoverishment of other people. They don’t create wealth, they don’t make our lives better, they don’t provide work for people, except in a peripheral sense – they only transfer wealth from productive people to themselves.
Waterloo was a very good start for Rothschild banks, and they only got richer over the next two centuries. One sore spot was the United States. Rothschild tried to create a national bank in the U.S. under his control. Americans twice chartered a national bank, and twice they let its charter expire. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson vigorously fought the imposition of a national bank. Indeed, the first assassination attempt on a U.S. President was a failed attempt against Andrew Jackson. It is quite possible that the assassin was an agent of the banking interests. Abraham Lincoln later issued money without the use of a central bank, which certainly made the international bankers furious. Some serious scholars have suggested that the real reason for his assassination was his refusal to follow the dictates of the central banking interests, although this probably can never be proven one way or the other.
At one time we thought the massive J.P. Morgan interests were strictly American. Morgan supposedly never did business with Jews (Rothschilds were at least nominally Jewish, although I doubt if any of them ever took the fundamental tenets of Judaism seriously). That was a masterful hoax. We now know that Morgan was directly tied to Rothschild interests. Essentially he was one of a number of “front men” who operated secretly on behalf of the Rothschild banks. One thing historians have failed to do in American history is to “follow the money trail.” Apparently it is a taboo topic. No one will ever get tenure or retain any serious teaching position if he talks about Rothschild banking influences in European or American history. Yet that is precisely where the money trail leads. Of course, one can make a convincing case that our entire public education system is under their control, which explains the wall of silence. People with this much wealth and power rarely want the public to be aware of their wealth and power.
I used to think that our economic policies were the result of stupidity. I don’t think so any more. Nor do I see the real debate as between Democrats and Republicans or Liberals and Conservatives. The bankers appear to be in control of both political parties and both liberal and conservative think tanks. They created the great stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression, while the New Deal played perfectly into their hands by the government contracting billions of dollars of loans. This is a key point. Debt is good for the banks. The banks own the debt; hence, they own the country. The more debt, the better it is for the banks. Wars, deficit spending, and massive waste are all good for the banks. So the policies I formerly thought were the height of stupidity, I now believe to be brilliant – both brilliant, and evil. Massive waste means massive loans, and even greater power for the banks. So it’s no accident that we can spend tens of thousands of dollars for a toilet on an Air Force transport.
I think all of our modern wars have a Rothschild connection. I know that European interests were positively delighted when the War Between the States (popularly but erroneously called a “civil war”) threatened to break up the United States of America. Of course there were causes such as slavery which were pretty much unique to America, but there were also foreign bankers pushing things in the direction of war. Conspiracies are seldom perfect, and often are but one part of a bigger and more complicated picture. What I realize now is that they are a very big part of most major events, and that this particular conspiracy has continued to manipulate world events for more than two centuries.
The Boer War was quite obviously a Rothschild grab for the gold and diamonds of South Africa. The victims were the Dutch Boer farmers, to whom the official histories have not been particularly kind. As an aside here, the diamonds were not particularly valuable in themselves. They make excellent industrial cutters, but the demand for industrial diamonds is not all that high. So to make diamonds more valuable, the diamond merchants created a false need. Ivy Lee, who remanufactured the reputation of fellow Rothschild collaborator John D. Rockefeller from an avaricious monopolist into a benign uncle dispensing shiny dimes to poor children, is said to have been the genius behind the diamond hoax. He, or someone in the advertising agency working for De Beers diamond interests, engineered the campaign to make every woman in the world insist she had to have diamonds with such slogans as “diamonds are forever,” and “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” That campaign raised the demand for diamonds along with their price – that plus the fact that hoards of diamonds are intentionally kept off the market in order to maintain an artificial scarcity. If diamonds were sold on a free market with prices that reflect their intrinsic value, prices would fall drastically, along with the profits of jewelry dealers.
The two world wars, however, are probably the most egregious and flagrant examples of the exercise of raw power to serve the interests of the International Bankers and those of the arms manufacturers they control. Rather than continuing to focus on the Rothschilds as the villains of history, let’s broaden this to the World Order, or the New World Order. They are mainly different names for the same phenomenon, but I think World Order gives a better idea of their motives and ultimate plan for us. Rothschilds are key players, but by no means the only ones. Conspiracies evolve over time. Players come and go, and sometimes form rival conspiracies. I believe the idea of one all-powerful conspiracy in absolute control of all the major world events is probably a myth. But there is nevertheless a relatively well-defined group of families which have wielded considerable political and economic power throughout the western world for at least the last two centuries.
When I was a graduate student, my professor of European Diplomatic History taught me the “Galloping Gertie” model of the origins of the First World War. Galloping Gertie, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, was a suspension bridge which opened in 1940 and tended to rise and fall when caught in a crosswind. Four months after completion the wind got so bad that the bridge literally tore itself apart. Once the bridge had started to sway in the wind, internal forces caused the undulations to steadily increase in intensity until the final disaster. So it was in Europe in 1914 that secret treaties and mobilization plans set in motion a chain of events which no one could stop once the process had begun. Nonsense!
Again, follow the money trail. Rothschild banks financed both sides of the war. When Germany appeared exhausted and starving and threatened to end the war before America got involved, Herbert Hoover, who almost certainly was tied to the Rothschilds, was appointed to set up the Belgian Relief Commission, ostensibly to feed the starving Belgians, but in reality to feed the starving Germans (and apparently also, the Russians, at least after the Bolshevik Revolution). The war was deliberately prolonged to increase the profits of the arms merchants. The U.S. was enticed into the war through a series of frauds, though things did not always work according to plans. The Lusitania was sunk in 1915, but failed to arouse American pro-war sentiment to the point of commitment. The Zimmerman Telegram was almost certainly a British forgery (Rothschild agents, almost for certain). And, by the way, Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” was the height of hypocritical deceit. Wilson had long planned for the war, and for its hoped-for consequence of creating a One World Government. Therein lay the heart of the conspiracy. The war was managed to maximize profits, but even more so, to bring the world into a New World Order. That has been the primary goal of the conspiracy from the beginning. But this attempt failed, so a second world war was contrived.
I used to think that the Treaty of Versailles was one of the stupidest and most malevolent treaties ever perpetrated upon the world. I missed the big picture. The treaty guaranteed a second world war, but that was not an accident. It was all part of the plan. But back to the First World War.
The Rothschilds had long hated the Romanovs, the Russian royal family, whom they helped to overthrow in 1917. No informed person believes that the Russian Revolution was a spontaneous uprising of the downtrodden masses. What’s interesting about the Romanovs, though, is the enormous wealth they had deposited in Rothschild banks before the war. With the family wiped out, guess who got to keep those billions? And guess which banking family still has all of them? A couple of claimants to the Russian throne did arise some years later. If they could prove their family origins, they could claim those billions. The traditional view is that they were frauds. This is possible, and recent DNA testing seems to confirm this. But the British Lord Mountbatten, a relative of the Romanovs and a Rothschild agent, went to a lot of trouble to fight one of those claimants in a British court. This is not the conduct one would expect of a British lord toward an obvious fraud.
We have long known that American capitalists had financed the Bolshevik Revolution and had repeatedly bailed out the USSR when it was frequently on the verge of collapse. Most people – myself included – have just wondered why capitalists would spend their resources to preserve their avowed enemies, the communists. Again, follow the money trail. The Cold War was another managed conflict, where the real power behind both sides was the International Bankers. Since the ultimate goal is One World Government with them in control, communism provided a useful model of how to proceed. I don’t think any of the World Order ever actually believed in communism. But it proved useful to their ultimate ends. Not only did it provide a model for total control over a population, but it also provided another opportunity for massive rearmament and massive profits for the arms merchants.
While Liberals had been the most useful allies of the World Order in demanding increased government spending during the Great Depression, Conservatives proved their most useful allies during the Cold War. They took the leadership in demanding increased military spending and promoting military ventures around the world. I’m not so sure that the demise of communism was totally planned, though. I tend to think the system just did not work because it was based on bad economics and a faulty view of human nature, and that the World Order had not actually engineered its collapse. Conspiracies do not always go according to plan. What does seem to go according to plan is their amazing resiliency to change tactics when unforeseen changes do occur. We no longer have the fearsome specter of communism to terrify us into massive military spending and into giving up our liberties in the name of security. We now have Islamic terrorism. And while Islamic terrorism is real, it is also something that conspirators have played a major role in creating and encouraging.
The CIA has been a major player in all sorts of conspiracies. I was once courted by recruiters from the Intelligence Community, so I did some homework and asked a lot of questions. I believed they were genuinely patriotic cold warriors, which is probably generally true. What I didn’t know then, but know now, is that the predecessor OSS was largely a creation of British Intelligence in World War II, and that British Intelligence was largely managed by – no surprise here – Rothschild interests. I had long wondered why so many communists or “fellow travelers” served in the CIA in the early years. I think the answer is obvious now.
What I found particularly shocking was that General George Patton – one of my heroes – was assassinated by the CIA (technically, at that time, the OSS). Bill Donovan himself ordered Patton’s murder to – in Donovan’s words – “save him from himself.” Apparently Patton knew too much about Allied complicity in giving Eastern Europe over to the Russians, and about Eisenhower’s possible role in the matter. Had he retired, he would have been compelled to remain silent. So instead, Patton threatened to resign his commission and expose what he viewed as treason. To prevent this, Donovan ordered one of his top operatives, Douglas Bazata, to do the job. In 1979 Bazata publicly admitted before a banquet hosting several hundred people that he had set up the auto crash, which had actually been minor. Then he shot Patton with a low velocity round, breaking Patton’s neck. But Patton refused to die, and began to make a remarkable recovery. The murder itself took place in the military hospital, when an NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) agent was allowed inside to administer a fatal injection of cyanide. All this is readily verifiable – no conjecture on my part here. Bazata took a stress test, or polygraph, and passed with flying colors.
But the strange death of America’s first Secretary of Defense James Forrestal is a little more problematic. The official view says he committed suicide by jumping out a 16th floor window while confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for “mental illness.” Highly unlikely. He almost certainly was murdered. The only real question was who did the murder. Some think communist agents, while others think the Mossad, as Forrestal was an avowed enemy of both communism and Zionism. (Another view suggests a more personal motive.) Senator Joseph McCarthy, who also died in the same hospital, quite possibly was murdered as well. People in high places who know too much and threaten the World Order frequently end up dead. The rest are written off as cranks, mentally unstable, and “conspiracy nuts.” Once you can apply a label (like “racist” in other contexts), that pretty much ends all rational discussion.
I must now introduce Major General Smedley Butler, who coined the expression “gangster for Wall Street.” A Marine two-time Medal of Honor recipient, he should have become the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He had been involved in every U.S. Marine action from the Boxer Punitive Expedition (Eight Power Invasion) of 1900 to multiple invasions of Latin American countries which were about to default on their loans to International Bankers. He spoke out, and it cost him his career. Later in life he admitted that his military career had been one of mostly being an enforcer for Wall Street. He also noted that the Great War had largely been a war for the profits of arms merchants.
The Korean War introduced a new twist. For the first time American soldiers were fighting for an international organization, the United Nations (the next attempt at creating a World Order after the failure of the League of Nations). A major goal of the World Order is to break down loyalty to God, the family, and the nation, and replace it with unquestioned obedience to the new Masters. This was a major step. While American generals still directed the war effort, the groundwork was being laid for American soldiers to fight for an organization other than the United States of America. I had long thought that it was a fortunate coincidence that the Soviet Union had been boycotting the U.N. Security Council at the time the vote for war was taken, and that the Soviets had stupidly missed their opportunity to stop this war by using their veto power. Again, I missed the big picture. Their absence at that key vote was planned all along. The entire war was managed by the conspirators. No U.S. national interests were at stake here, and there was never a declaration of war by Congress. It wasn’t even a proxy war between communists and capitalists. It was a managed conflict controlled by the people who controlled both the communists and capitalists.
The label “capitalist,” however, is not accurate here. The World Order is not made up of true capitalists. Capitalists thrive on competition. Competition forces capitalists to improve their products and sell at lower prices. Consumers benefit. The world bankers don’t want true competition. They want a monopoly, with themselves as the monopolists. That is why so much legislation in America today targets small businessmen, the only true capitalists. A major goal of the World Order is to destroy the middle class. So again, our anti-business laws are not just a matter of stupidity and corruption. They reflect a conscious attempt to destroy the nation’s only truly free enterprises and take them over by the powers of monopoly and World Government. [Update: This may partially account for the intense hatred leveled at Donald Trump, because he is not part of their system and has in fact been a major supporter of small businessmen and ordinary Americans.]
Vietnam was yet another controlled war in which no national interests were at stake, and where victory was not allowed. It represented a betrayal of America’s own heritage as a nation founded on the overthrow of colonialism. President Roosevelt, before he died*, stated that he had no intention of helping the French reclaim their old colonial empire after World War II. Yet within a year of his death United States ships ferried a French army back to Indochina and indelibly painted the U.S. as a bulwark of dying colonialism. [We agreed to support the French in Indochina in exchange for their support in creating NATO.] Over the next three decades, nearly everyone who knew anything about Southeast Asia counseled America to stay out of its internal affairs. To make matters even more interesting, our chief adversary, Ho Chi Minh, had been trained by the OSS during World War II.
Vietnam is probably too personal for me to write objectively about it. But for the sake of this essay I will resurrect two things which particularly bothered me at the time, apart from the whole business of killing people and making body counts. One was the tanker ships off Cam Ranh Bay. They came in riding high in the water, anchored off shore a few kilometers, and sat there. A day or two later they departed riding low in the water. I have always thought there were underwater pipelines filling the ships with oil, though I have never been able to confirm my suspicions. I think many of us believed at the time that the war had something to do with oil.
Even more sinister, though, were the shipments out of Long Chen Airbase in central Laos. I believe that Long Chen was the busiest airport in the world, though almost no one had ever heard of it. It was an Air America field, that is to say, a CIA operations base. Tons of “smack” (the word we used at the time for heroin) were shipped out of there on Air America transports. The explanation we heard was that opium was the cash crop of our Montagnard friends, whose help we needed in interdicting supplies shipped down the Ho Chi Minh trail to Viet Cong operating in the south. We needed their good will, so we graciously helped them market their “crops.” The result was a massive amount of drug use among American GI’s by the late 1960s. Though I personally never shot smack, I know a few guys who did, and roomed with one who became a severe addict.
So who profited from all this? Our Laotian allies. Probably the CIA. Certainly Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, the head of the government we were fighting for. But ultimately, I’d bet it was the bankers again. Back in the early 19th century those same families were reaping huge profits from the misery of the Chinese people. The Opium Wars were one consequence. President Franklin Roosevelt’s own father was born in China because FDR’s grandfather was an opium smuggler. A list of the major opium-smuggling companies reads like the list of directors of Rothschild-controlled enterprises. So the World Order has made drug trafficking a major part of its criminal operations. Small wonder that the big pharmaceutical companies are all controlled by the same gangsters.
The Gulf Wars – well, suffice it to say that the Bush family has for several generations been major players in the international World Order cartel. There is already much information available connecting three generations of Bushes with Arab oil, Halliburton Industries, and Planned Parenthood. This essay is not meant to be definitive. Many serious researchers have delved far deeper into this stuff than I have. I’m basically a history teacher who was looking for a deeper and more accurate understanding of the way things are. Since I’m interested in many more things than just historical conspiracies, I leave more in-depth study to the specialists.
There is one more area I wish to mention – foundations and education. The Foundations, that is, the tax-exempt “charitable” foundations, are central to the World Order’s recruitment and indoctrination. All such foundations, conservative or liberal, are run by the same elite group. This should tell you that the real issue in the world is not the battle between Democrat and Republican, between Liberal and Conservative, but, rather, between the World Order and those who would be free. None of the charitable foundations actually engage in charity. They are a means whereby the super rich can maintain their empires without paying the taxes they expect the rest of the people to pay. And they are a means of recruiting the next generation of technocrats who will carry out their orders. Quite possibly, an occasional bright star might even make his way into the inner circle of the ruling elite, someone heretofore unknown like, perhaps, an Obama.
But even more importantly, the foundations shape public policy and educational policy. It is not an accident that the most famous of these foundations – Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller – are all major contributors to Big Government organizations and scholars, and to those who advance the agenda of the World Order. It is all a matter of controlling populations.
George Orwell’s classic book, 1984, is an excellent study in totalitarian world orders. Ironically, I had always thought he was warning people what their future would be like in the hands of the World Order so that they might resist it. Maybe this is at least partly true, but in fact, Orwell seems to have been somewhat sympathetic to their motives and methodologies. His book may not have been so much a warning of how to avoid but rather, was a statement of how things will be under the Order. The unspoken advice is that we had all better submit because there is nothing we can do about it.
But is there nothing we can do? As I understand it, one of the biggest obstacles to the World Order’s plan to control the world, is America’s Second Amendment and some 300,000,000 firearms in private hands. America’s Founding Fathers had created the Second Amendment as the basis for the protection of the liberties of the First Amendment. Government was created by the people in the interest of the people, and was to be severely limited in scope and power. Knowing that government would sooner or later abuse its power, responsible citizens were to be armed so that the government would fear to take away the liberties of the people. This is the greatest single obstacle to the World Order, and the reason why gun control is so prominent in their agenda. [Note that the strictest gun control laws in the world were passed by the NSDAP shortly after coming to power in Germany in 1934. They claimed it was “for the children.” That satisfied the “useful idiots,” to borrow a term from Lenin. So when they came for the political dissenters, the handicapped and the retarded, the “useless eaters,” Christians, homosexuals, Gypsies, and especially the Jews, those who had been disarmed had no way to defend themselves. Some of those victims of Nazi concentration camps were my relatives!]
Population control. Planned Parenthood is heavily subsidized by the World Order. It was created out of the Eugenics Movement in the early 20th century. Margaret Sanger, its founder and close collaborator with Prescott Bush, promoted birth control in order to limit the size of the population of the “lower races.” It’s no accident that today Planned Parenthood does most of its business in African-American neighborhoods. What is frightening is the often-repeated goal of the World Order to reduce the world’s population to about one billion, about what it was in the early days of the Rothschild Empire. Some sources say a half billion, while Bill Gates, I believe, stated he thought that the goal should be two billion. While Gates said he merely wanted to let the population decline through non-replacement of existing people, one frequently encounters speculation about genetically-engineered diseases, experiments on controlling weather, volcanoes, and earthquakes, and the likelihood of a third world war. Some World Order folks apparently don’t want to wait for natural attrition.
I always used to list Rachel Carson among the great mass murderers of the 20th century. Of course, that was mostly hyperbole to emphasize a point. The author of Silent Spring certainly had no desire to murder millions. Carson’s premise that thin-shelled eggs would lead to the ultimate extinction of birds was largely “junk science,” but was a major factor in the U.S. campaign to eliminate DDT. As a direct consequence of its worldwide ban, millions have died needlessly from malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses. Scientists themselves are now arguing for a re-evaluation of DDT policy. Again, I used to think this was merely another example of monumental stupidity, or greed on the part of manufacturers of the inferior and expensive chemicals which replaced DDT. I missed the point. Most of the victims come from Africa, a main location of the more “expendable” of the world’s surplus population. I think this also explains why world leaders generally sit by idly while Africans commit genocide upon each other. It fits the agenda. (I’m aware also that some people think AIDS was engineered similarly to reduce the supply of Africans. Maybe, but I’m still somewhat skeptical.)
Needless to say the whole Global Warming scare is a scam. There is no Global Warming, or at least nothing which can be proven to result from human causes. There are only the natural fluctuations of the world’s climate. One of the biggest problems for Global Warmers is the fact that the earth’s temperature was considerably higher from about 800 to about 1300 AD than it is today. There were no hydrocarbon emissions to blame then. Recent winters and the exposure of the East Anglia Climate Research Center internal memos have helped to demonstrate the fraud here. Global Warming is not about science. Global Warming is about control and about wealth transfer. Frightened people readily give up their liberties to those who promise to take care of them and/or protect them from real or imagined dangers. When I started college as a geology major, we were all taught that the earth was entering a new Ice Age. Naturally, if people are the reason why we have destroyed the environment, then limiting the number of people is essential to the preservation of the environment.
Problems. People who understand something of the conspiratorial nature of the New World Order, or whatever it is called at any given time, will be marginalized. Educators, academics, and those with vested interests will ridicule such people as “conspiracy nuts,” or perhaps as mentally unstable. That is the external threat. The internal threat is that many people who study conspiracies are genuinely nutty. Moreover, there is often an overlap between genuine understanding of the machinations of the ruling elites, and racist reductionism. Anti-Semitism runs rampant through the conspiracy writings. This is almost certainly because the Rothschilds and many of their allied banking partners are Jews and major supporters of Israel. But I doubt if many of them are real Jews in the sense that they read and follow the Torah. It is grossly wrong and unfair to paint all Jews as contributors to the World Order because many of its leaders are nominally Jewish. Websites which feature generally accurate studies of the World Order all too frequently contain racist diatribes and Holocaust-denying theories. It’s difficult for the uneducated, or the barely educated, to make the distinction between unorthodox views of history which are accurate or at least reasonable, and unorthodox views of history which serve no greater purpose than hate-mongering.
What makes matters more confusing is that the Holocaust-denial industry and many of the conspiracy theories are being promoted by radical Islamists. During World War II the Nazis recruited their SS Handschar Divisions from Muslim communities by appealing to a common hatred of the Jews. Former Nazis and their sympathizers led the way in trying to deny that Germany had murdered millions of Jews (the exact number murdered, does, however, remain a legitimate ground for discussion and difference of opinion). But today, when one navigates the labyrinth of conspiracy and Holocaust-denying theories the trail almost invariably leads back to the Middle East. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is one of the more public deniers of the Holocaust and one of the most eager to place the blame for all the ills of the world on the International Jewish Conspiracy. This should serve as a serious warning about conspiracy theories in general. But guilt by association does not negate the fundamental premise that genuine conspiracies exist in the world. It should come as no surprise that one of the more popular conspiracy scenarios of the 9-11 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon portrays the perpetrators as agents of Israel’s Mossad. One group claims that Mossad agents murdered the 19 Muslims before the hijacking and used their own agents or drugged dupes to take over the four airliners and crash them into the buildings. While this is theoretically possible, it is highly improbable.
What, then, should we think about 9-11? I used to think that those who believed in the theory of thermite-induced destruction of the World Trade Towers were a bunch of wackos. But answer this question: Who has benefitted from 9-11? The Patriot Act was a massive step away from freedom and toward the consolidation of power by the World Order. Either they were extremely lucky in being able to capitalize so quickly upon a tragedy which just happened to take place without warning, or some of them were complicit in one way or another. Certainly there are issues demanding a genuine explanation. One curious piece of evidence which does lend credibility to the Mossad theory of Twin Tower destruction is the film of Israeli agents dancing in glee and pointing to the burning Twin Towers. After that film was made they were quickly whisked out of the country. Perhaps this has been already explained – I am not obsessed with conspiracies and have not done an exhaustive analysis. By itself this episode probably means nothing, but I remember the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty which was deliberate, pre-meditated, and repeated, and resulted in the deaths of dozens of American sailors. Cover-up would be a euphemism.
It is certainly possible that a fuel-laden jumbo jet could bring down a skyscraper. But the collapse of all three buildings really did look more like controlled demolition than anything resulting from a plane crash. I think some engineers have given a satisfactory explanation regarding the collapse of the two Twin Towers, but then there is the troubling issue of the collapse of WTC #7. This was not even hit by an airplane. Many other skyscrapers have burned without collapsing, and yet 3 WTC towers collapsed after being hit by 2 aircraft. I’m not satisfied with official explanations. Some years ago I stumbled upon the wreckage of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing. It was a gutted mess, thoroughly burned from top to bottom. Yet it is still structurally stable and has been restored. Are the Chinese much better engineers than Americans, or is the explanation to be found elsewhere? I understand, though, that some of the fault may be of our own doing, in that EPA regulations prohibiting the use of asbestos in construction may have been a major contributing factor in the buildings’ collapse. Even if events transpired exactly the way the official version claims, the government is certainly doing a poor job of making accurate information available, and thereby lending credibility to the most extreme of the conspiracy theories.
This essay is not meant to be definitive. It raises more questions than it answers. Far more detailed information and analysis can be found on a multitude of websites and in dozens of books. My purpose is mostly to stimulate thinking and questioning of the traditional and/or official explanations. This is partly a confession of my own past gullibility in accepting uncritically the “facts” I was taught in school. My considered opinion is that understanding the conspiratorial nature of powerful elites goes a lot farther toward understanding the workings of history than does the alternative view that most everything happens by chance.
A final observation: Conspiracy enthusiasts often talk about the satanic nature of the World Order. The Illuminati and the Masons figure prominently into most conspiracy theories, and generally in the context of some satanic plot. Some theories trace the World Order back several thousand years to ancient Babylon. Whatever is the precise role of the Evil One, the Illuminati and Freemasonry are historical organizations with a track record of secrecy and intrigue. At least some of what has been written about their role in World Order conspiracy intrigue is true. Some, however, is problematic. But one thing that I read about the Great Deceiver in a different context struck me as profoundly relevant. When Jesus was fasting in the wilderness, Satan tempted Him with worldly power and wealth. “All these kingdoms of the world I will give you,” he said, “if you will only bow down and worship me.” Jesus refused. Maybe, just maybe, the New World Order elites have so much wealth and power today because they accepted the offer.
Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D.
Professor of History
Sias International University
Xinzheng, Henan, China
www.WorldHistoryPics.com (free photographic resource for historical study)
*It appears that Franklin Roosevelt did not die of a stroke as reported in the press and repeated in all the textbooks. He shot himself. Word of his suicide went out over Armed Forces radio almost as soon as the body was discovered. A number of people very clearly heard that FDR had shot himself. I first learned of this from a colleague at the university in China where I teach. She told me her grandfather, a tank commander in WWII, had sworn to his dying day that he heard on a military channel that Roosevelt had committed suicide, but that within an hour or so the story had changed to him suffering a stroke. I decided to research that shocking revelation and discovered a number of other people who heard the same thing. One was a naval officer who heard it aboard his ship in the Philippines. Another was a lady who heard it on a public address system at a New York department store. And there were others. Not one of these witnesses had any motive to lie, and each one maintained until the day they died that they had heard the announcement of suicide, but that within 30 minutes to an hour the story was changed and no one ever again repeated the original announcement. By the way, FDR lay in state in a closed casket.
UPDATE: 2013
Since writing this essay in 2010, I have largely ignored conspiracies, at least until recently. Several things have happened to modify my thinking about this. For one, too many people with excellent credentials have thrown their weight behind the idea that 9-11 was an “inside job.” Also, I’ve seen some photos I had not previously seen, and listened to some convincing theorists and eyewitnesses.
I am now entertaining the notion that 9-11 was indeed masterminded by forces within the U.S. government, probably as a means of preparing Americans for protracted war in the Middle East. There are many parallels between this and FDR’s efforts to provoke the Japanese to attack America in order to arouse the American public and get the U.S. into the European War through the back door. Robert Stinnett has pretty convincingly argued this in Day of Deceit.
While I believe two jumbo jets did strike the two World Trade Towers, I am pretty much convinced it was ultimately planted explosives which actually brought the three World Trade Towers crashing to the ground. I think the roof was deliberately locked shut in order to drive up the casualty rates. However, I am also convinced that no jumbo jet hit the Pentagon. Rather, it was probably struck by one or two drones, or missiles, or perhaps a remotely controlled jet fighter. But also there were a number of internal explosions, certainly planted ahead of time. There has never been found at the site any identifiable parts of a jumbo jet (I did see a photo of a piece which could easily have been planted after the explosion), nor did any of the human remains exhibit Arab DNA. Interestingly, the day before the bombing it was announced that 2.3 trillion dollars was unaccounted for at the Pentagon. The auditors working on this problem were killed in an explosion in an area that could not have been hit by a plane, if indeed there had actually been a plane that crashed into the Pentagon. This is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, but I think the reader will get the general idea. I was not looking for government conspiracy here, but it’s there for anyone who does the research. If the reader cannot believe the U.S. government would commit such a crime against its own citizens, then he should look up “Operation Northwoods” on the Internet.
As I edit this in 2018 I still have never seen any footage from the multitude of security cameras which surround the Pentagon. I saw one clip posted on YouTube which showed a blur, and which I was told was a photo of a jumbo jet. It takes faith, and a lot of it, to believe that is a photo of a jumbo jet about to crash into the Pentagon. So why has the government persistently refused to release the photos which should be able to confirm the official conspiracy theory proposed by the government? Could it be because they actually contradict the official narrative? Multiple eyewitnesses do in fact contradict the government’s story.
Something else has happened which I think is related. Back in 2008 candidate Obama said he wanted to create a civilian paramilitary organization with as much power as the Army. Well, today that is a reality. Our DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and specifically the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), a product of 9-11, is now armed with dozens of attack helicopters, hundreds of MRAPs, and enough stockpiled ammunition to carry on a 5-20 year war at the ammo consumption rate of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why does an organization which operates entirely within the U.S. border need so much firepower? And why are IRS agents armed with military assault rifles? All of this has been made possible by legislation stemming from 9-11. Coincidence? Think about it. We have given up our Constitutional liberties in exchange for “protection” from an international terrorist organization which in all probability did not exist before we helped create it.
One other minor point. While I still believe that Global Warming is at least partly a scam designed to gain more power and wealth for certain elites, I do see some genuine scientific evidence to support the idea that our practice of trashing our environment actually is having some effect on our climate. I’ve talked with a few honest scientists about this, and some of what they told me did make sense. One should always keep an open mind. But I must remind the reader that most of what I’m writing about cannot be absolutely proven or disproven. It’s basically a matter of probability. When the government withholds pertinent information, or gets caught in a lie, it increases the probability that the conspiratorial interpretation of the events is the correct one. On the other hand, if you bring space aliens into the story, the probability drops drastically.
President Kennedy’s Assassination Revisited
For years I have uncritically accepted the government fiction that President Kennedy was killed by a “lone gunman” named Lee Harvey Oswald. Professional historians, after all, don’t buy into “conspiracy theories.” But while I have largely ignored the issue for over three decades, dozens of witnesses have come forth, sometimes after hiding for 30 years or more for fear of their lives, and finally agreed to tell their stories. Also the government declassified thousands of documents in the 1990s which have shed light on things previously hidden.
The turning point in my own consciousness came after I learned what David Atlee Phillips said shortly before he died of lung cancer in 1988. Phillips had been a hero of mine when I was contemplating a career in the Intelligence World. Back in 1954, as head of psychological operations in Central America, Phillips had almost single-handedly overthrown the regime of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala using an offshore radio station and lots of disinformation. It was one of three operations of 1953-54 which cemented the image of the CIA as being almost omnipotent, and I was thrilled to be considered worthy to be part of this culture. Of course I hadn’t thought about the disastrous long-term consequences of our meddling in the internal affairs of Guatemala or Iran (referring to the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh at about the same time).
I had never taken all that much interest in the Kennedy assassination, even though it had profoundly affected me. I believed the government. Even after I realized the government had spewed forth gargantuan lies about our involvement in Vietnam, I still never thought to question the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” theory. After I got in academia, I knew it was academic suicide to dabble in supposedly-discredited conspiracy theories. So it was with great interest that I learned that Phillips had pretty much admitted that the government was involved in Kennedy’s demise. I believe he attributed it to “rogue elements” within the Company, but years later I’m fairly convinced that Phillips knew much more than he revealed. He was always a loyal Company man (he founded and led the AFIO to defend the Intelligence community when it came under heavy criticism in the 1970s), and quite possibly was involved in the conspiracy himself. It took me a long time to come to that conclusion – that Phillips may have been personally involved – and I actually hate myself for saying it. But it seems to be what is most consistent with the facts.
So sometime after 1988 and probably near the end of the 1990s I lost faith in the “lone gunman” story and began to seriously look at the evidence with an open mind. I won’t give all the arguments here. I will cite one source at the end which contains much documentation and a far more thorough presentation than I could make. Instead, I will merely state the conclusions. I believe every one of them will stand up under serious scrutiny.
JFK was NOT killed by a lone gunman. At least two and possibly more assassins shot at him on November 22, 1963. But it’s not likely that any of them was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald actually admired Kennedy. He was a CIA asset whose sojourn in Russia was part of his work as a double agent. However, after he returned to America James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, put him on a watch list of assets whose reliability might be questioned. The fact that his name was on this list is proof positive that Oswald worked for the CIA and was not the Marine Corps deserter that the official story alleges. Thus he was the perfect person to set up as a patsy. And that is exactly what happened, aided by a look-alike whose identity is unknown, but whose presence has been verified by many different witnesses.
The assassination was carried out by the CIA. Some of the conspirators were anti-Castro Cubans (from Alpha 66), along with some complicity by organized crime, or by CIA assets with mafia connections. The FBI and the Dallas Police Department (and possibly others) participated in the cover up. The Warren Commission concluded exactly what it was told to conclude, that there was no conspiracy and that Oswald acted alone. But they refused to ask fundamental questions or follow up promising leads, while the FBI and others actively destroyed evidence, intimidated witnesses, and killed a number of people who knew too much.
While Oswald was set up to take the blame, the Cubans and Russians were also implicated by the conspirators. To his credit, President Johnson refused to follow that trail to its logical conclusion. That is why the Warren Commission had to adopt the “lone gunman” fiction. However, Johnson also failed to follow the evidence leading to the U.S. government itself and thus destroyed both the life and the reputation of an innocent man.
So why did portions of the United States government execute its own President in what was in fact a coup d’état? Put simply, Kennedy had become a liability to certain interests – the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Military-Industrial-Political Complex, and all those for whom the Cold War had become an economic necessity and a political religion. Kennedy had failed to be sucked into starting a broader war against Castro’s Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and incurred the wrath of the CIA and the Cuban refugee community. But in 1962 he brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That action made a profound impression on Kennedy, and started him on the road to giving up his Cold War ideology to pursue peace. In the eyes of the conspirators this was nothing short of treason.
Kennedy carried on a secret correspondence with both Nikita Khrushchev and later Fidel Castro. Ironically, the Soviet Premier faced the same problem with his own generals and arms merchants. Kennedy and Khrushchev became secret partners in trying to prevent nuclear holocaust and end the Cold War, actions deemed intolerable to those committed to victory at all costs and for whom compromise was tantamount to treason. Worse, Kennedy was actually planning a total withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. So he had to go. Imagine how different modern history would have been had Kennedy lived long enough to put into practice the new ideas he was beginning to embrace.
The best single treatment of all this is a book by James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable. The subtitle is Why He Died and Why It Matters. I read the 2008 edition which corrected several unsupported statements in the earlier hardbound edition. The book is well-reasoned and heavily documented. The author has avoided speculation and confined himself to statements which can be supported by the evidence. One reason why I recommend this book is that its fairly recent origin has allowed the author to digest information made available only after many eyewitnesses began telling their stories late in life, and after the declassification of thousands of pages of documents by the government. The author is a Catholic theologian who admits his admiration of the monk Thomas Merton, but personal biases are few and handled in a professional and honest manner. I give my highest recommendation to this book despite the fact I may not agree 100% with all the author’s personal beliefs. For example, I am not and never have been a pacifist. Before deciding to recommend this book I checked out many of the footnotes and references, which is why I can state that if you can only read one book about the crime of the century, this should be that book.
In 2017 I attended my 50th high school class reunion in Rockford, Illinois, the town where I was beaten by the police many years ago, causing me to require a plate to be inserted into my skull. On my way there my wife and I visited a number of old friends, people who knew at least a little of my somewhat colorful past. Every single one of them told me I needed to put into writing for future generations my life story, my insights, my ideas, and the things I have learned in living almost 70 years and having become a reluctant world traveler. My 155,000+ photos posted on www.WorldHistoryPics.com is part of my answer to their advice. The three Art of Ancient China books posted on the website take some of the best of those photos and add a little history along with the pictures. And this essay attempting to explain an important dynamic in history is going to be the start of posting some of my “life lessons.” Expect more to follow when I find the time to write more.
Gary Lee Todd
Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D. 