The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for The New World
Book Description
Ask most Americans where the country’s origins lie and they’ll point to the Mayflower and its settlers—whom we often think of as the earliest arrivals to our shores. But something existed even before that: Jamestown. Its founders had thoroughly different values than the Puritans, and their Masonic beliefs indelibly shaped America’s future. This authoritative, accessible, and absorbing history takes a fresh look at the past to reveal the truth about why the United States is now run by Freemasons who are Christians, too. Drawing on original findings, and exhibiting a rich, in-depth understanding of the political and philosophical realities of the time, acclaimed author Nicholas Hagger argues that the new nation, conceived in liberty, was the Freemasons’ first step towards a new world order. He charts the connections between secret societies and libertarian ideals, explains how the influence of German Illuminati worked on the framers of the new republic, and shows the hand of Freemasonry at work at every turning point in America’s history—from the Civil War to the Cold War to today’s global struggles for democracy. It’s a fascinating subject, and one that will also be at the center of Dan Brown’s next book—so interest is sure to be high and the tie-in potential immense.
Alan Miller | OpEdNews | December 4, 2007 at 11:20:30
December 4, 2007 – Eight former senior Republican administration appointees have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and several have called for a new investigation. "I find the facts against the official story of the [WTC] buildings' collapse more compelling than the case that has been made in behalf of the official story. I would like to see the issue debated by independent scientists and engineers," wrote Paul Craig Roberts, PhD, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan. "A real investigation is needed to find an explanation consistent with the evidence, even if it doesn't reassure the public," said Dr. Roberts [1], frequently referred to as the "Father of Reagonomics."
"Over the past six years, the ranks of distinguished skeptics of the 9-11 storyline have grown enormously. The ranks include distinguished scientists, engineers and architects, intelligence officers, air traffic controllers, military officers and generals, including the former commanding general of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, former presidential appointees and members of the White House staff in Republican administrations, Top Gun fighter pilots and career airline pilots who say that the flying attributed to the 9-11 hijackers is beyond the skills of America's best pilots, and foreign dignitaries."
Dr. Roberts currently serves as Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. Previously he was the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. He also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and as Associate Editor of The Wall Street Journal. More...
Let’s hear it for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). After more than five years of effort, incorporating technologically advanced, exhaustive inspections of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities (and, to a lesser degree, some undeclared facilities as well), the fruit of its labor has been borne out in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced by the U.S. intelligence community that finds that Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program. While the analysis behind the NIE conclusion reflects the independent judgment of the 16 agencies which comprise the U.S. intelligence community, there is no doubt that the most influential information behind the assessment was that of the IAEA inspections, which had probed Iran’s nuclear program since November 2002. The IAEA had coordinated closely with the U.S. intelligence community in preparing for its inspections inside Iran, so much so that there was almost no stone left unturned and no major question left unanswered for U.S. analysts when it came to the nuclear facilities and activities of interest. The consensus-driven NIE puts to rest the notion that Iran represents any sort of imminent threat worthy of near-term pre-emptive military action.
Personally, the NIE (and its roots in the findings of the IAEA inspections) came as no surprise. In my 2006 book “Target Iran” I framed precisely the same argument using data virtually identical to that contained in the NIE. While I am tempted to utter the immortal words “I told you so,” such self-congratulation would not only reek of hubris but divert attention away from the fact that the NIE isn’t the final word on the framing and implementation of U.S.-Iran policy. It is but an empty document void of meaning unless life is breathed into its findings by an Executive rededicated to formulating policy founded in fact, not ideology, or a Congress awakened to its long-dormant status as a separate but equal branch of government.
Top Democratic and Republican leaders absolutely believe that Iran is planning to develop nuclear weapons. And one of their seemingly strongest arguments involves a process of deduction. Since Iran has so much oil, they argue, why develop nuclear power?
James Woolsey typifies the view. The director of the CIA under both George Bush (the elder) and Bill Clinton said, “There is no underlying reason for one of the greatest oil producers in the world to need to get into the nuclear [energy] business ... unless what they want to do is train and produce people and an infrastructure that can have highly enriched uranium or plutonium, fissionable material for nuclear weapons."¹
In an op-ed commentary, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote, “For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources,” a position later cited approvingly by the Bush administration.²
But U.S. leaders are engaging in a massive case of collective amnesia, or perhaps more accurately, intentional misdirection. In the 1970s the United States encouraged Iran to develop nuclear power precisely because Iran will eventually run out of oil.
A declassified document from President Gerald Ford’s administration, for which Kissinger was secretary of state, supported Iran’s push for nuclear power. The document noted that Tehran should “prepare against the time—about 15 years in the future—when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply."³
The United States ultimately planned to sell billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear reactors, spare parts, and nuclear fuel to Iran. Muhammad Sahimi, a professor and former department chair of the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department at the University of Southern California, told me that Kissinger thought “it was in the U.S. national interest, both economic and security interest, to have such close relations in terms of nuclear power.”4
The shah even periodically hinted that he wanted Iran to build nuclear weapons. In June 1974, the shah proclaimed that Iran would have nuclear weapons “without a doubt and sooner than one would think.”5 Iranian embassy officials in France later denied the shah made those remarks, and the shah disowned them. But a few months later, the shah noted that Iran “has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons but if small states began building them, then Iran might have to reconsider its policy.”6
If an Iranian leader made such statements today, the United States and Israel would denounce them as proof of nefarious intent. They might well threaten military action if Iran didn’t immediately halt its nuclear buildup. At the time, however, the comments caused no ripples in Washington or Tel Aviv because the shah was a staunch ally of both. Asked to comment on his contradictory views then and now, Kissinger said, “They were an allied country, and this was a commercial transaction. We didn’t address the question of them one day moving toward nuclear weapons.”7
Kissinger should have added that consistency has never been a strong point of U.S. foreign policy.
The Bush Administration is actively blocking Congress' investigation into the outing of once-covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman.
In a letter sent today to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Waxman notes that "White House objections are preventing Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from disclosing key information to investigating officials." Among the documents being withheld are interviews taken from White House officers during Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of Plame's identity.
"Over the summer, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to provide relevant documents to the Committee, including records of interviews with senior White House officials. Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the Committee," Waxman writes to newly appointed Mukasey. "I ask that you personally look into this matter and authorize the production of the documents to the Committee without any further delay."
Waxman's letter provides one of the first tests for Mukasey, who stressed during his confirmation hearings that he would operate independently from White House directive. The letter also provides greater insight into the extent of collaboration between Fitzgerald and the oversight committee.
Read the full letter here. Emptywheel has more here.
For decades, the Bush family has operated above the law, using powerful connections to brush aside evidence that would put lesser Americans in the slammer.
In the history of the American Republic, perhaps no political family has been more protected from scandal than the Bushes.
When the Bushes are involved in dirty deals or even criminal activity, standards of evidence change. Instead of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that would lock up an average citizen, the evidence must be perfect.
If there's any doubt at all, the Bushes must be presumed innocent. Even when their guilt is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it's their accusers and those who dare investigate who get the worst of it. Their motives are challenged and their own shortcomings are cast in the harshest possible light.
For decades -- arguably going back generations -- the Bushes have been protected by their unique position straddling two centers of national power, the family's blueblood Eastern Establishment ties and the Texas oil crowd with strong links to the Republican Right. [For details on this family phenomenon, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Speaking on the Alex Jones Show, Wolf said that she was first alerted to begin researching America's slide into fascism when her friend, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, warned her that the same events that laid the foundations for the rise of the Third Reich in early 1930's Germany, when it was still a Parliamentary democracy, were being mirrored in modern-day America.
"A small group of people began very systematically to use the law and dismantle the Constitution and put pressure on citizens to subvert the law - and that opened the door for everything that followed," said Wolf.
"When I started reading, not only are tactics and strategy being reproduced exactly right now by the Bush administration - but actual sound bytes and language and images and scenarios are being reproduced," she added.
Paul Craig Roberts | Online Journal | Tuesday November 27, 2007
Pat Buchanan is too patriotic to come right out and say it, but the message of his new book, Day of Reckoning, is that America as we have known her is finished. Moreover, Naomi Wolf agrees with him. These two writers of different political persuasions arrive at America’s demise from different directions.
Buchanan explains how hubris, ideology, and greed have torn America apart. A neoconservative cabal with an alien agenda captured the Bush administration and committed American blood, energy, and money to aggression against Muslim countries in the Middle East, while permitting America’s domestic borders to be overrun by immigrants and exporting the jobs that had made the US an opportunity society. War and offshoring have taken a savage economic toll while open borders and diversity have created social and political division.
In her new book, End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Wolf explains America’s demise in terms of the erosion of freedoms. She writes that the 10 classic steps that are used to close open societies are currently being taken in the US. Martial law is only a declaration away.
The Bush administration responded to September 11 by initiating military aggression in the Middle East and by using fear and the “war on terror” to implement police state measures at home with legislation, presidential directives, and executive orders.
Overnight the US became a tyranny in which people could be arrested and incarcerated on the basis of unsubstantiated accusation. Both US citizens and non-citizens were denied habeas corpus, due process, and access to attorneys and courts. Congress gave Bush legislation establishing military tribunals, the procedures of which permit people to be condemned to death on the basis of secret evidence, hearsay, and confessions extracted by torture. Nothing of the like has ever been seen before in the US.
"Suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq's a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can't have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world."
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: ElBaradei, is the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated quite definitively there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. The recent resolution—the Kyle-Lieberman amendment—and the recent U.S. sanctions against Iran, which one of the charges is that Iran has been helping what they call insurgents in Iraq. There's practically no evidence of that either. Based on what we know as evidence, there's not a lot of reasons for U.S. policy to be as aggressive right now towards Iran as it is, certainly not for the stated reason. What really does motivate U.S. policy towards Iran?
NOAM CHOMSKY, PROFESSOR OF LINGUISTICS, MIT: Well, if I can make a comment about the stated reasons, the very fact that we're discussing them tells us a lot about the sort of intellectual culture and moral culture in the United States. I mean, suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq's a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can't have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world. So if we invade and occupy another country, then it's a criminal act for anyone to interfere with it. What about the nuclear weapons? I mean, are there countries with nuclear weapons in the region? Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. The United States gives more support to it than any other country in the world. The Bush administration is trying very hard to push through an agreement that not only authorizes India's illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons but assists it. That's what the U.S.-Indo Nuclear Pact is about. And, furthermore, there happens to be an obligation of the states in the Security Council and elsewhere to move towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. Now that would include Iran and Israel and any U.S. forces deployed there. That's part of Resolution 687. Now to your question. The real reasons for the attack on Iran, the sanctions, and so on go back into history. I mean, we like to forget the history; Iranians don't. In 1953, the United States and Britain overthrew the parliamentary government and installed a brutal dictator, the Shah, who ruled until 1979. And during his rule, incidentally, the United States was strongly supporting the same programs they're objecting to today. In 1979, the population overthrew the dictator, and since then the United States has been essentially torturing Iran. First it tried a military coup. Then it supported Saddam Hussein during Iraq's invasion of Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Then, after that was over, the United States started imposing harsh sanctions on Iran. And now it's escalating that. The point is: Iran is out of control. You know, it's supposed to be a U.S.-client state, as it was under the Shah, and it's refusing to play that role.
JAY: The sanctions that were just issued recently [are] the beginnings of a kind of act of war, this ratcheting up of the rhetoric right at a time when the IAEA is saying, in fact, Iran's cooperating in the process. But it's all coming down to this question of does Iran even have its right to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear, which in fact it has, under the non-proliferation treaty. But Bush in his last press conference, where he had his famous World War III warning, has said even the knowledge of having nuclear weapons we won't permit, never mind a civilian program. This puts U.S. policy on a collision course with the IAEA, with international law.
CHOMSKY: Just a couple of years ago, from 2004 through 2006, Iran did agree to suspend all uranium enrichment, halt even what everyone agrees they're legally entitled to. That was an agreement with the European Union. They agreed to suspend all uranium enrichment. And in return, the European Union was to provide what were called full guarantees on security issues—that means getting the United States to call off its threats to attack and destroy Iran. Well, the European Union didn't live up to its obligation, [as] they couldn't get the U.S. to stop it. So the Iranians then also pulled out and began to return to uranium enrichment. The way that's described here is-- the Iranians broke the agreement.
JAY: The experts are saying, including ElBaradei and others, that if you can enrich uranium to something just under 5%, which is apparently what's needed for civilian purposes, you're most of the way there towards the technology of having a bomb, that once you have that enrichment technology, you're not that much further towards a bomb.
CHOMSKY: Yeah, but that's true of every developed country in the world. Why pick out Iran? It's true of Japan, it's true of Brazil, it's true of Egypt. And in fact, one could say—here I tend to agree with the Bush administration. In the non-proliferation treaty, there's an article, Article 4, which says that countries signing the NPT are allowed to develop nuclear energy. Well, okay, that made some sense in 1970, but by now technology has developed enough so that it has reached the point that you describe. When you've developed nuclear energy, you're not that far from nuclear weapons. So, yeah, I think something should be done about that. But that has nothing special to do with Iran. In fact, it's a much more serious problem for those nuclear weapons states who are obligated under that same treaty to make good faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. And, in fact, there are some solutions to that. ElBaradei had proposed a couple of years ago that no states should develop weapons-grade materials: all high enrichment should be done by an international agency, maybe the IAEA or something else, and then countries should apply to it. If they want enriched uranium for nuclear energy, the international agency should determine whether they're doing it for peaceful means. As far as I'm aware, there's only one country that formally agreed to ElBaradei's proposal. That was Iran. And there's more. I mean, there's an international treaty, called the Fissban, to ban production of fissile materials except under international control. The United States has been strongly opposed to that, to a verifiable treaty. Nevertheless, it did come to the General Assembly, the U.N. Disarmament Commission in the General Assembly, which overwhelmingly voted in favour of it. The disarmament commission vote was, I think, 147 to 1, the United States being the 1. Unless a verifiable fissile materials treaty is passed and implemented, the world very well may move towards nuclear disaster.
JAY: Do you think we're actually moving towards a military confrontation? Or are we seeing a game of brinksmanship?
CHOMSKY: Well, whether purposely or not, yes, we're moving towards a military confrontation.
Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT. He is the author of over 30 political books dissecting U.S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media.
Excerpted from Hegemony or Survival, Metropolitan Books, 2003
A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood for success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Mayr took exception to the conclusions of astrophysicists who confidently expected to find higher intelligence throughout the universe. He considered the prospects of success very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence," meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about 50 billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization." It did so very recently, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of which we are all descendants, apparently with very little genetic variation. What we call "civilizations" developed near the end of this brief moment of evolutionary time, and are "inevitably are short-lived."
Mayr speculates that higher intelligence may not be favored by selection. The history of life on Earth, he concluded, refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are far more successful than primates in these terms, and that is generally true of creatures that fill a specific niche or can undergo rapid genetic change. He also made the rather somber observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years."
We are entering a period of human life that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid -- whether there is intelligent life on earth, in some sense of "intelligence" that might be admired by a sensible extraterrestrial observer, could one exist. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and our hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might conclude that they have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well.
…the day stays grey and lonely for Little Orphan Annie and Sandy gets sent to the pound and eternal sleep!
Excerpt: “I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told further that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson where Senator Aldrich’s private car would be in readiness attached to the rear-end of a train to the south. Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as Ben, Paul, Nelson and Abe. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville after those two aviation pioneers the Wright brothers. The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all and it was the names of all printed together that would’ve made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery we knew simply must not happen.” (Frank Vanderlip, Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1935)
Nazism is usually depicted as the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated.In this explosive book, Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he demonstrates that Hitler's extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated -- and eventually financed -- by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I.
Through a close analysis of events in the Third Reich, Preparata unveils a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how the UK, through the Bank of England, came to exercise control over Weimar Germany and how Anglo-American financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power.
This controversial study shows that Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British and American establishment of the time, it was a convenient way of destabilising Europe and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia, thus preventing the formation of any rival continent power bloc.
Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler's meteoric rise.
University of Michigan Press
Exploring the genesis of the German Nazis, Preparata (political economy, U. of Washington) makes the rather extraordinary argument that the Nazis and the war they so disastrously plunged Europe into were in fact the successful end product of long standing intrigue on the part of the elites of the British Empire to prevent a feared "Eurasian embrace" between Germany and Russia that would pose a great danger to British power. In sum, he argues that Britain began WWI as an attempt to break German political and economic structures. When this failed, Britain conspired to bring to power a reactionary regime that could be prodded into a two-front war in the West and against Russia, which itself had experienced British installation of the Bolsheviks in pursuit of this wider goal. The British and colluding American elites engaged in a complex economic gambit that had the premeditated purpose of providing the political preconditions necessary for the germination of the Nazis and their eventual rise to state power. The history of WWII, as well, is the result of this grand scheme, with the British feigning a lack of commitment to the Western Front (and keeping the Americans out) in order to lure the Germans into the trap of the Eastern Front, which allowed the Anglo- Americans to annihilate the German threat once and for all. Distributed in the US by the U. of Michigan Press.
"As a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And as a student at Georgetown, I heard the call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so."
When Bill Clinton spoke these stirring words to millions of Americans during his 1992 acceptance address before the Democratic National Convention upon receiving his party's nomination for President of the United States, the vast multitude of his television audience paused for a micro-second to reflect: Who is Carroll Quigley and why did he have such a dramatic effect on this young man before us who may become our country's leader?
Carroll Quigley was a legendary professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, and a former instructor at Princeton and Harvard.
He was a lecturer at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the Brookings Institution, the U. S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College.
Quigley was a closely connected elite "insider" to the American Establishment, with impeccable credentials and trappings of respectability.
But Carroll Quigley's most notable achievement was the authorship of one of the most important books of the 20th Century: Tragedy and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time.
No one can truly be cognizant of the intricate evolution of networks of power and influence which have played a crucial role in determining who and what we are as a civilization without being familiar with the contents of this 1,348-page tome.
It is the "Ur-text" of Establishment Studies, earning Quigley the epithet of "the professor who knew too much" in a Washington Post article published shortly after his 1977 death.
In Tragedy and Hope, as well as the posthumous The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley traces this network, in both its overt and covert manifestations, back to British racial imperialist and financial magnate Cecil Rhodes and his secret wills, outlining the clandestine master plan through seven decades of intrigue, spanning two world wars, to the assassination of John Kennedy.
Through an elaborate structure of banks, foundations, trusts, public-policy research groups, and publishing concerns (in addition to the prestigious scholarship program at Oxford), the initiates of what are described as the Round Table groups (and its offshoots such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations) came to dominate the political and financial affairs of the world.
For the ambitious young man from Hope, Arkansas, his mentor's visionary observations would provide the blueprint of how the world really worked as he made his ascendancy via Oxford through the elite corridors of power to the Oval Office.
The Conservatives Discover Carroll Quigley
Published in 1966, Tragedy and Hope lay virtually unnoticed by academic reviewers and the mainstream media establishment. Then Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, the noted conservative author of the 1961 national best-seller, The Naked Communist, discovered Quigley, and the serious implications of what Quigley had revealed. In 1970, Skousen published The Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley's Book Tragedy and Hope.
This was soon followed by None Dare Call It Conspiracy. This slim volume by Gary Allen (and Larry Abraham) provided the massive paradigm shift of grassroots, populist conservatives from mere anti-Communism to a much larger anti-elitist world-view.
Millions of copies of these books came into print, and the conservative movement changed forever.
Copies of Tragedy and Hope began disappearing from library shelves. A pirate edition was printed. Quigley came to believe that his publisher Macmillan had suppressed his book. Dr. Gary North, the esteemed writer well known to readers of LewRockwell.com, has an interesting discussion of these curious facts in the chapter, "Maverick 'Insider' Historians," in his book, Conspiracy: A Biblical View, available on-line.
However some persons believe Carroll Quigley was simply amplifying earlier research in conservative authors Emanuel Josephson's Rockefeller 'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules The World, and Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government, or that of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite, which had outlined these same elite networks of power.
I disagree with that narrow assessment. Although there is much to disagree with in interpretation in Quigley's book, the originality and titanic scope of the work cannot be doubted or disparaged.
In a book much praised by Murray Rothbard, author Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate, has a fascinating discussion of Quigley within a wider framework of American power politics and subterranean intrigue.
And in a volume hailed by Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, before he morphed from Trotskyist man of letters to Neocon mouthpiece, had some insightful musings along the line of Quigley in his Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.
YouTube Potpourri
I'm becoming convinced that every piece of film ever produced, no matter how small or insignificant, eventually ends up on YouTube. That site is simply amazing.
With this in mind, here is a YouTube potpourri of items I discovered that introduce the viewer to the incomparable Carroll Quigley and his book, Tragedy and Hope. These brief videos focus upon the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the North American Union.
After viewing them, I hope you will be prompted to read Quigley's book and unlock many mysteries that have puzzled your understandings of the world about you.
The first two clips are from an ancient documentary filmstrip, The Capitalist Conspiracy, by Fed critic and Ron Paul supporter, G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.
Carrol Quigley, part 1
Carrol Quigley, part 2
More on Carrol Quigley
The Roots of the U. N. and the Rockefellers
Presidential Candidates for the North American Union
The David Rockefeller and Dick Cheney Show
Lou Dobbs vs. the NAU, the CFR and David Rockefeller
On the morning of Jan. 24, 1848, millwright James Marshall spied a golden flash in the tailrace of the sawmill he was constructing for John Sutter on the American River, about 40 miles above Sutter’s Fort, the site of present-day Sacramento, Calif. “I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively,” Marshall later recalled. “Having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—sulphuret of iron [pyrite], very bright and brittle; and gold, bright, yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.” Gathering up a handful of nuggets, he went to William Scott, one of his carpenters. “I have found it!” Marshall exclaimed. What? asked Scott. “Gold,” declared Marshall. Scott couldn’t believe it. “Oh! No! That can’t be,” he insisted. “I know it to be nothing else,” Marshall replied. He took his discovery to Sutter, who immersed the nuggets in nitric acid, to no effect. Consulting a copy of the Encyclopedia Americana, Sutter improvised a density test. The nuggets, he concluded, were 23 karat, 99 percent pure gold. Sutter did what he could to keep the discovery secret, fearing the news would make it impossible to hire hands, but it proved impossible. Soon others had found similar deposits in the many streams draining the Sierras. By the late summer of 1848 an estimated 10,000 men were at work in “the diggings.” The Gold Rush had begun. Over the next decade some 200,000 hopeful argonauts made the overland journey to California.
In his fascinating new book, “Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail,” Keith Meldahl, professor of geology at CostaMira College in California, is concerned not so much with the miners in California as with the “hard road west” they took to get there. Yet he opens his book with the story of Marshall’s discovery, and it’s a telling choice, for it introduces us to the way 19th-century Americans interacted with their world. Marshall was no metallurgist, but he had the practical sensibility of a mechanic. The thousands of men and women on the overland trail to California were similarly practical and inquisitive about the formidable landscape they had to traverse. Passing Devil’s Gate in what’s now southern Wyoming, where the Sweetwater River unexpectedly slices straight through a great standing ridge of granite, perplexed overlanders proposed various explanations. Perhaps the ridge, one emigrant noted in his trail diary, “had been rent by an earthquake,” or, as a woman traveler thought, opened “by volcanic force.” Some considered it evidence of divine power. “One stands in awe of Him Who tore asunder the mountains and holds the winds in the hollow of His hands.” But nearly everyone searched for answers. “How I wish I was a geologist,” James Berry Brown scribbled in his journal in 1859, “then the rambles over rocks and hills would be of some benefit to me.” As if on cue, Meldahl seizes the opportunity presented by 19th-century curiosity to offer the explanation of 21st-century science. The Sweetwater was there first, draining the primeval eastern slope of the Rockies when the mountains were brand new, gradually eroding its way down through thousands of feet of sand and gravel, and finally even through that granite ridge, until it established its present course.
Jet travel, interstate highways and our general expectation of comfort make it difficult for most Americans today to realize just how dauntingly big and rugged the American West is, and how difficult it was to traverse. Meldahl recovers that truth by taking us along as he navigates the whole of the California trail. He escorts us along the valley of the Platte River in Nebraska, up the gradual ascent of the Rockies and over South Pass in Wyoming, across the treacherous calderas of the Snake River Plain into Idaho, through the deadly deserts of the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada, and finally up and over the sheer eastern escarpment of California’s Sierra Nevadas. The landscape is in many places little changed since 1849. Ancient wagon ruts still visibly scar the mountains and deserts. “The past becomes personal,” Meldahl writes, “when you stand in the old wagon ruts and read what men and women thought and wrote while looking out at the same scenes.” On the way he provides us with samplings from the emigrants, their expressions of awe and wonder as well as frustration and exhaustion, balancing those with his scientific account, which he offers in non-scientific prose.
This approach works not only because Meldahl’s so good at explaining geology, but because he has so many emigrant voices to work with. From the 1840s to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 at least a quarter-million Americans made the 2,000-mile trek across the continent. Moving at the pace of ox-drawn wagons or pack mules—12 to 15 miles a day—the journey took them six months or more. They departed from the “jumping off places” on the Missouri River as soon as spring grass was high enough to support grazing stock, and aimed to make it over the far western mountains before the first winter storms. Everyone knew the fate of the Donner Party of 1846, driven to cannibalism after it was stranded in the High Sierra by an October blizzard. Such tales dissuaded most people from even considering the journey. But for many others the danger was part of the allure. For the gold-seeking argonauts it was part of what they called “seeing the elephant,” an Americanism that came into wide use with the Gold Rush. It originated in the tale of the Western farmer who hitches his team and drives to town to see the circus, and on the way encounters the parade of exotic animals led by the elephant. The farmer’s terrified horses buck, pitch and overturn the wagon. When the disheveled husband returns home his wife asks him how he liked the show. “Didn’t get to the circus,” he replies with a crooked smile, “but I’ve seen the elephant!” The flirtation with deadly danger. Thousands of overland travelers wrote of seeing the elephant in letters, diaries or reminiscences. With the exception of the Civil War, no other 19th-century event inspired so many personal accounts from Americans.
In the many decades since the great overland trek of American pioneers in the mid-19th century, hundreds of writers have been inspired to tell the story. Francis Parkman’s classic “The California and Oregon Trail” became a best-seller in 1849. A century later A.B. Guthrie’s “The Way West” updated the epic for modern readers. In the past two decades scholars have produced a new generation of histories, including modern classics such as J.S. Holiday’s “The World Rushed In” (1983) and Malcolm Rohrbaugh’s “Days of Gold” (1997). And in the 21st century the overland trail remains surprisingly familiar to the undergraduates in my course in the history of the American West, thanks to the computer game “The Oregon Trail,” which since its commercial release in 1985 has become the single most successful educational software title. The library at Yale University, where I teach, lists 1,411 titles under the subject heading “Overland Journeys to the Pacific.” “Hard Road West” is No. 1,411, the most recent addition to this crowded field. But it will find its audience because of Keith Meldahl’s original approach and his engaging style.
The human history of westering across the continent, Mehdahl tells us, was guided by the geological history of a continent itself drifting westward. For the past 200 million years North America has been sliding west a few inches a year, which adds up to several thousand miles. Pushing against the tectonic plates of the Pacific generated the monumental forces that spawned the great North American Cordillera, the mountain ranges that span the western third of the continent. Alternating processes of compression and expansion of the Earth’s crust produced the hard landscape that confronted the overland emigrants. Colliding plates created the land that would become California, and the maze of faults and fractures that made up the glue line, and hydrothermal expansion filled these gaps with dissolved silica and precious metals. They cooled to form the rich belt of gold-laden quartz, the Motherlode, that meanders from north to south along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada (a line that can be traced today by following California Highway 49 through the many famous old Gold Rush towns).
Meldahl is skilled at offering understandable explanations of scientific concepts. He writes very well, and in the tradition of the best 19th-century accounts he does not hesitate to put himself in the story. Deep in the desert of Nevada he drinks from an old well that saved the lives of many an emigrant. “The water tasted of salt and dish soap mixed with algae,” he writes. “It took a whole beer to take the flavor away—and then a second to toast the hapless souls who had to drink the stuff to survive—and then a third to toast the beauty of a cold beer on a hot day in the desert.” Here’s a book that not only informs but is fun to read.
John Mack Faragher teaches the history of the American West at Yale University and is the director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders. His books include “Women and Men on the Overland Trail” and “Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer.”
The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup.
Joseph E. Stiglitz | Vanity Fair | December 2007
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.
I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.
And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
President Bush, Karl Rove, and other top administration officials were "involved" in misleading the White House press corps about the outing of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame, a forthcoming book from former Press Secretary Scott McClellan alleges.
Entitled What Happened, the new tell-all features McClellan's account of his days as the White House's top spokesman -- including a behind-the-scenes look at the Bush administration's handling of the Plame affair, according to a tantalizing excerpt from the book released on its publisher's website.
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," writes McClellan. "So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."
But his press performances weren't based on the facts, McClellan continues.
Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson understood “The Monster”. But to most Americans today, Federal Reserve is just a name on the dollar bill. They have no idea of what the central bank does to the economy, or to their own economic lives; of how and why it was founded and operates; or of the sound money and banking that could end the statism, inflation, and business cycles that the Fed generates.
Dedicated to Murray N. Rothbard, steeped in American history and Austrian economics, and featuring Ron Paul, Joseph Salerno, Hans Hoppe, and Lew Rockwell, this extraordinary new film is the clearest, most compelling explanation ever offered of the Fed, and why curbing it must be our first priority.
Alan Greenspan is not, we’re told, happy about this 42-minute blockbuster. Watch it, and you’ll understand why. This is economics and history as they are meant to be: fascinating, informative, and motivating. This movie could change America.
Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 1 of 4)
Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 2 of 4)
Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 3 of 4)
Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 4 of 4)
For the first time ever in a single volume, Dandelion Books presents a selection of journalist-photographer, Kurt Nimmo's highly acclaimed articles first published in Counterpunch www.counterpunch.com. It takes tremendous courage to write truthfully about the rampages of an Empire, especially from within the belly of the beast. See the life and times of Tom Paine. Even Suetonius paid a price. Hadrian took offense at something the historian wrote about the Empress Sabina, stripped him of his position, burned the offensive text and exiled him to Asia Minor. --Jeffrey St. Clair From author, Kurt Nimmo: "You'd think intelligent people would be outraged, moved to action by the attorney general suggesting neighbors need to spy on each other . . . You'd think normal everyday folks would look at their own kids and break out sobbing realizing what's happened to kids in Iraq. Is there Soma in the drinking water? But this isn't some Aldous Huxley novel, it's the real deal up in your face 24/7."
11/14/07 "ICH" -- -- Experts in the West and ordinary people in Arab lands have understood for many years that the United States does not have an independent policy toward the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter, a man of good will, tried to use American influence to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the source of dangerous instability in the Middle East. However, Israel was able to block Carter’s attempt, while blaming Yasser Arafat. Carter’s plan would have given rise to a Palestinian state. Israel did not want any such state, because obvious military aggression is necessary in order to steal the territory of an official state with defined borders. It is much easier to steal land from a non-state.
By preventing the rise of a Palestinian state, Israel has been able to continue with its theft of the West Bank. Palestinians who have not been driven out have been forced into ghettos, cut off from schools, hospitals, water, and their olive groves and farmlands. In a recent book, President Carter called the existing situation “apartheid.” Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for his use of this word, but some experts consider Carter’s choice of words to be an euphemism for the continuation of what I. Pappe and N. G. Finkelstein call “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
That the vast majority of Americans know nothing of this is testimony to the power of the Israel Lobby.
Book Description A central player's account of the clash between the rule of law and the necessity of defending America.
Jack Goldsmith's duty as head of the Office of Legal Counsel was to advise President Bush what he could and could not do...legally. Goldsmith took the job in October 2003 and began to review the work of his predecessors. Their opinions were the legal framework governing the conduct of the military and intelligence agencies in the war on terror, and he found many—especially those regulating the treatment and interrogation of prisoners—that were deeply flawed.
Goldsmith is a conservative lawyer who understands the imperative of averting another 9/11. But his unflinching insistence that we abide by the law put him on a collision course with powerful figures in the administration. Goldsmith's fascinating analysis of parallel legal crises in the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations shows why Bush's apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency and, perhaps, his standing in history. 8 pages of photographs.
About the Author Jack L. Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University. From October 2003 to June 2004 he was assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Richard Wolffe
There are two questions any definitive account of George W. Bush's presidency must answer. One has dogged him from the very start of his presidential campaign in 1999: Is he as stupid as he seems? The other has dogged him for the last five years: Why did he decide to invade Iraq?
The first question about Bush's intelligence is relatively easy to dodge but exceptionally hard to answer. No, he's not stupid, but he is simplistic and sometimes sloppy. He has a sharp strategic mind when it comes to politics, and he can delve into policy details when he wants to. However, everyone who knows the president realizes that is only a partial answer. The deeper question boils down to this: How does he apply his intelligence? Why does he disdain the policy experts and the nuance in favor of his gut judgment?
It's not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. The author deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life. (A final chapter and epilogue on the 2006–2007 term, with new justices Roberts and Alito, was unavailable to PW.) (Sept. 18)
American observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995 occasioned bitter controversy. An uncomfortable Clinton administration canceled a mushroom cloud postage stamp and tentatively suggested that it might be kinder to Japan to talk of V-P Day instead of V-J Day. An angry dispute over the viewpoint of the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibition culminated in a purge at the nation's greatest cultural institution. These books all deal in one fashion or another with the Enola Gay, that mushroom cloud, and its enduring implications.
Gar Alperovitz has been a presence of major significance in the study of the bomb and the endgame of World War II for a generation. His latest project, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, has drawn wide attention. A critical review of it by John Bonnett that appeared on the H-Net diplomatic history service, H-Diplo, was followed by a protracted and tempestuous controversy (http: / h-net 2. msu. edu / - diplo / balp.htm). Alperovitz's thesis basically repeats the one pressed in his earlier Atomic Diplomacy (1965, 1985, 1994) but is stated at much greater length, much more elaborately, and with the help of no less than seven collaborators listed under his name on the title page. Extensively researched and documented by 112 pages of endnotes, this book is the end result of a long joint effort beyond the capabilities of most scholars. Financing came from no less than ten foundations or funds and "several individuals who traditionally have preferred to remain anonymous in their various philanthropic efforts."
Alperovitz argues that the atomic bomb was unnecessary to end World War II for the following reasons:
1. The Japanese government wanted to surrender; its leaders, military as well as civilian, rationally understood that the war was lost. But they had a determined attachment (irrational?) to the emperor. Japan would have surrendered, very possibly as early as June 1945, had its ruling establishment received guarantees of the emperor's personal safety and continuance on the throne. This should have been the first step in an American surrender strategy.
2. Any remaining Japanese reluctance to quit the war would have been quickly overcome by the second step, entry of the Soviet Union in August 1945.
3. American failure to accept and implement this "two-step logic" for an expeditious end to World War II was largely a result of the emerging Cold War and especially American concern over Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe and northeast Asia.
4. The American public would have accepted some modification of the unconditional surrender policy in order to avoid prolongation of the war. The Washington Post and Time magazine advocated its abandonment; so did some United States senators. Many military leaders and diplomats-British as well as Americanconcurred.
5. President Harry S. Truman seemed inclined to give assurances on the emperor, then pulled back. He did so out of concern with Soviet behavior and with increasingly firm knowledge that the United States would soon have atomic weapons available. Coming to believe that the bomb would be decisive and anxious to keep the Soviet Union out of Manchuria, he dropped modification of unconditional surrender; moreover, he sought to prevent a Soviet declaration of war against Japan by encouraging China not to yield to Soviet demands beyond those granted at Yalta. In so doing, he acted primarily at the urging of James F. Byrnes, the archvillain in the plot.
6. Truman also refused to move on Japanese peace feelers, apparently in the belief that it was necessary to prevent a Japanese surrender before the bomb could be demonstrated to the world, and especially to the Soviet Union. The result was the needless destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and many allied casualties that need not have happened.
7. In subsequent years, the American decision makers of 1945 devoted considerable energy to the construction of a misleading "myth" that attempted to vindicate the use of the bomb by denying Japanese efforts at peace and by asserting grossly inflated estimates of American casualties that would have been sustained in an invasion of Japan.
After our push to vault Endgame up the Amazon rankings in order to expose the vital information contained on the DVD to new people, Endgame is now sitting pretty at number three on the most popular documentaries list.
Endgame is now outselling the likes of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, and Michael Moore's Sicko.
The DVD is also surging up in the general category rankings and our aim is to push it right to the top in order to expose the information to new people who browse the bestseller lists.
Please buy a copy of Endgame at a heavily discounted price from Amazon, or buy several and give them as gifts for Christmas.
We barely make anything from heavily promoting Amazon sales at knock-down prices but our mission is to spread the message to as many new people as possible and help wake up America and the world to the Globalist's master plan.
by Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | September 17, 2007
The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor? The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough, is currently serving as Adams’s Vice-President?
Consider your vote carefully. This is the most important election in American history. What Jefferson dubbed “the revolution of 1800” marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. (Before that, whoever placed second became the Vice-President, which is what happened to Jefferson in 1796.) It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College. At the time, many people, not all of them members of the Adams family, thought that it might spell the end of the American experiment. As Edward J. Larson observes in his new book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” (Free Press; $27), “Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.”
To size up the candidates, what you need, for starters, is the word on the street—or, since the United States in 1800 is an agrarian nation, the word on the cow path. Adams: a Harvard graduate and Massachusetts lawyer who helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and served two terms as Washington’s Vice-President before his election to the Presidency in 1796. Distinguished, disputatious, short, ugly, hot-tempered, upstanding, provincial, learned (president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). Very clever wife. Suspected of wanting to be king. Loves England. Thinks his diplomats have to tread carefully with Napoleon. Signed into law the Sedition Act in 1798; depending on your point of view, this was either so that he could have anyone who disagreed with him thrown in jail or so that he could protect the country from dangerous anarchists.
Jefferson: former governor of Virginia, onetime Ambassador to France, Washington’s Secretary of State. Eminent, brilliant (president of the American Philosophical Society), surpassing prose stylist, author of the Declaration of Independence (with help from Adams), unrivalled champion of liberty, slave owner, grieving widower, rumored to have fathered children by one of his slaves. Tall, humorless, moody, zealous, cosmopolitan. Artistic. Loves France, not so worried about Bonaparte. Ardently opposes the Sedition Act. Reputed atheist.
Are you still on the fence? You’re out of luck: there will be no Presidential debates, and precious few speeches. (In 1800, Americans considered politicians’ putting themselves so far forward to be unforgivably tacky.) No campaign managers, no Web sites, no television ads, no YouTube interviews, not so much as a Horse and Cart Across America tour.
The narrow margin of the last presidential election left those on the losing side second-guessing themselves. Many of them blamed the loss on the opposition's appeals to Christian voters and their own candidate's failure to answer basic questions about his personal faith. Determined to win the next election, party strategists mapped plans to neutralize the religion issue. Those plans included buffing their candidate's image as a believer, condemning the other party's ties to evangelical extremists and hailing their side's devotion to religious liberty.
It may sound like the current presidential campaign, but the year was 1800 and the beleaguered candidate was Thomas Jefferson. Four years earlier, he had lost the presidency to John Adams in an election fraught with religious angst. Jacobin revolutionaries had taken over France, closed its churches and threatened to export their reign of terror. Supporters of Adams' Federalist Party linked Jefferson to the French secularists through his defense of revolutionary France and support for the separation of church and state. Adams, in contrast, they argued, was a man of God who opposed radical French ideas, and under his rule America had launched a naval war with France and mobilized against a rumored Jacobin invasion.
As the election of 1800 approached, a boldface notice appeared in leading Federalist newspapers. "At the present solemn and momentous epoch," it declared, "the only question to be asked by every American, laying his hand on his heart, is, 'Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD--AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON--AND NO GOD!!!'"
Such tactics had worked in 1796, but this time Jefferson's supporters rushed to his defense. In their party publications, they characterized Jefferson as "an adorer of our God" and "a real Christian." They wooed disaffected Protestants, Catholics and Jews by contrasting their candidate's defense of religious pluralism with Adams' purported support for an evangelical establishment. And turning the tables on their accusers, they also questioned Adams' faith. Despite his bow to civil religion by invoking God's name on public occasions, Adams differed little from Jefferson in his personal beliefs. Both men inclined toward Deism or Unitarianism, though Adams kept it under wraps better than Jefferson did. With both candidates sullied, their partisans debated the relative merits of a pious hypocrite vs. a reputed infidel as President.
Then, as now, many Christians saw biblical beliefs as the foundation for law and liberty. "If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it," declared Jefferson's chief evangelical critic, Yale president Timothy Dwight. The Jeffersonians bit back. "Now I don't know that John Adams is a hypocrite, or Jefferson a Deist," one wrote, "yet supposing they are, I am of the opinion the last ought to be preferred to the first [because] a secret enemy is worse than an open and avowed one."
The dueling charges largely neutralized the religion issue, which was all Jefferson needed, given public concerns over other Federalist policies. Both political parties reached out to Christian voters. Federalists praised Adams' public support for religious institutions; their opponents trumpeted Jefferson's passion for religious liberty. Each side claimed its candidate was a Christian--or at least as good a Christian as the other guy. By all accounts, Evangelicals still voted overwhelmingly for Adams but not in sufficient numbers to overcome the popular surge for Jefferson's party, which captured the presidency and both houses of Congress. Adams later blamed his defeat on fears that he was too tied to Evangelicals.
Today's Democratic Party appears to be taking a page from Jefferson's playbook by contesting the religious vote. In 2006 Democrats successfully ran an ordained minister for Ohio Governor against Ken Blackwell, a darling of the religious right, and a pro-life Catholic for Senator in Pennsylvania against fellow Catholic Rick Santorum. Now, as the numerous public declarations of faith made during this campaign season suggest, the party's leading candidates for President seem to have learned this lesson too and are, no doubt, praying for a similar outcome.
This delightful book is a collection of incidental pieces that reveal little-known aspects of the life and personality of Benjamin Franklin. Written by the doyenne of Franklin scholars, it conveys Franklin’s humor, resiliency, courage, and intelligence, and his faith in a better future.
The selections are based on Claude-Anne Lopez’s research in the treasure trove of nearly thirty thousand documents on Franklin assembled at Yale University. They include a detailed refutation of an anti-Semitic forgery attributed to Franklin and currently circulating on the Internet; three mini-detective stories showing Franklin on the fringes of the espionage world; discussions of Franklin’s efforts to outfit Washington’s army and to choose the first dinner set for the Foreign Service; and the tale of the misadventures of a French utopian scheme he sponsored. The only piece of fiction in the book is an imaginary party during which, on the first anniversary of his death, six illustrious Frenchmen discuss Franklin’s influence on their country. Lopez has provided brief personal introductions to each of the pieces, giving her reasons for writing them and in the process threading the essays together.
Claude-Anne Lopez, for many years an editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, is also the author of Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris, published by Yale University Press, as well as many other books and articles about Franklin.
Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
Lindbergh
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Hardcover)
The Strange Death of Republican America
Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
The Road to 9/11
Building a North American Community
A Game as Old as Empire
The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order
Jaded Tasks
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
Torture Team
The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money
Kafka Comes to America
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Towards a New Cold War
Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship
On Language
The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
Failed States
Understanding Power
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
The Essential Chomsky
Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire
Friends of the American Revolution
Please visit Friends of the American Revolution to read more articles on themes related to the American Revolution and the ongoing destruction of the ideals of the Founding Fathers
John Adams in Patriotic Mode
“What do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” John Adams
