Is there an 'Anglophile conspiracy' seeking world domination?

The exceedingly well-informed American journalist Michael Collins Piper, a fearless critic of Zionist and US policies, stated in a recent report on the acquisition of Newsweek by “Zionist billionaire” Sidney Harman and his wife, Congresswoman Jane:

Now Newsweek falls into the hands of the Harmans, who, by the way, are both members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York-based affiliate of the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, which is the foreign policy arm of the Rothschild empire.[1]

I respectfully differ from Mr Piper in his description of the Anglophile link. The claim in regard to an “international Anglophile conspiracy,” which is a variant or often associated with other conspiracy theories, which include those of Jews, Zionists, E.T. Lizards, bankers, and/or the Illuminati, has quite a wide currency among political and foreign policy analysts. Among these might be counted Dr Henry Makow, David Icke,[2] and the LaRouche movement.

Hence Dr Makow, a courageous anti-Zionist Jew, writes for example:

Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University’s secret pagan “Skull and Bones” society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.[3]

Lyndon LaRouche seems to be the most avid in advocating the existence of a long-running conspiracy orchestrated by a British Establishment, with the British Monarch near the top, and involving in particular narcotics trading. A representative sampling of the British-orientated conspiracy theory from the LaRouche movement states in part:

…Yet few critics, with the exception of Lyndon LaRouche, have raised the specter of a foreign hand behind the Bush-Cheney wrecking operations. This is largely explained by the fact that the vast majority of Americans, including within the political class, have lost a true sense of history. They perceive the consequences of the government’s actions from the more limited standpoint of relatively near-term cause and effect, or from the vantage point of a specialist’s limited historical lens. Moreover, they all generally accept the false notion that the British hand in world affairs has been vastly reduced, and that the impulse towards empire has been abandoned or suppressed, due to England’s “diminished” condition. One need only read the inserted special report in the Feb. 3, 2007 edition of the Economist to recognize that the City of London is now celebrating “another British imperial moment,” centered around the successful promulgation of yet another devastating myth: that globalization is an irreversible, driving force in world economic and political affairs.

It is in this context that the present review of the Quigley book is written. For what Professor Quigley recounts, with impeccable documentation, is a more than 100-year assault upon the American Constitutional republic by a conspiracy of leading British imperialists, who saw the survival of the British Empire in apocalyptic terms: Either the United States would be coopted back under London domination, or the Empire would crumble. Based on this assessment, a tight-knit group of leading British oligarchs launched a series of projects, aimed at recasting the British Empire as a “Commonwealth of Nations” and drawing the United States, forever, back into the fold.

The project documented by Professor Quigley, involved the philosophical assault on the American republican outlook, and the gradual establishment of an alternative ideology, based on the “Anglo-American” or “English-speaking” vision of the world…[4]

The book Steinberg is referring to is The Anglo-American Established, written by the eminent Harvard historian Carroll Quigley in the 1940s, but published in 1981.[5]

The book that Quigley did have published during his lifetime was Tragedy and Hope, a wide-sweeping history that he used as a basic text for his classes at Harvard.[6] The few dozen pages of his 1300 page magnum opus has provided conspiracy theorists, particularly in the USA, with ongoing ammunition, and the theory was popularized by reviews from John Birch Society affiliated authors; in particular W Cleon Skousen’s book, The Naked Capitalist,[7] which was specifically devoted to analyzing Tragedy and Hope.

Quigley is of particular significance not only because of his eminence as a mainstream historian, but because of his admitted role as a so-called Establishment “Insider” (until he published the book) who states of an “Anglophile network”: “I know the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records.”[8] He described a worldwide network of international bankers that emerged, centered on the Rothschilds.[9] Establishing the center of international finance in the City of London, the firms “at the core of English financial life” were listed as being Baring Bros., N M Rothschild, J Henry Shroder, Morgan Grenfell, Hambros and Larzard Bros. It might be noted that there is a glaring lack of Anglo-Saxon names among the merchant banking families. In the USA there were Warburg, Lehman, Schiff, and among the few Anglo exceptions, J P Morgan and Rockefellers, these two being considered the focus of the Anglophile conspiracy in the USA.

Quigley traces the Anglophile conspiracy to the intellectual influence of John Ruskin of Oxford, who imbued with his ideals those who were to become prominent in the British Empire such as most significantly Cecil Rhodes.[10] Ruskin, like some other well-placed Victorians, did not like the Darwinistic system of laissez faire that operated in Britain and was indeed the basis of plutocracy. However, to many Americans any call for social justice and limitation of free trade is bolshevism-run-rampant, and this “socialistic” orientation has provided grist for the mill of some conservative conspiracy theorists such as Skousen.* Ruskin also had a vision of an imperialism that would pervade the world with social justice under the auspices of the British Empire.[11] Rhodes sought to fulfill this mission with others such as Lord Alfred Milner, by establishing a secret society, later called The Round Table Group, from which emerged the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). Lord Rothschild, as Rhodes’ banker, was in this from the start.[12] Quigley states that other similar think tanks were organized throughout the British Dominions, and in the USA, where it became known as the Council on Foreign Relations.

From here the Anglophile conspiracy proceeded to map out a lineal conspiracy of British imperialism that continues to seek world domination, of which the CFR is merely a flunky, with Queen Elizabeth II being among the top of the conspiratorial hierarchy. Such a British conspiracy operating against the interests of the USA would have an appeal to “American patriots”, considering America’s founding as a rebellion against British rule.

BANKERS’ “PATRIOTISM”

What Quigley somehow managed to overlook, and what has distorted the views of theorists of the Anglophile conspiracy, is that the internationalists of the American delegation at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference and the British imperialists who considered a joint project for a post-war ‘new world order’ decided from before the beginning not to proceed in conjunction. Therefore it is balderdash to consider the CFR and all that that implies, to have been a veritable “branch” of the RIIA with a commitment to push the USA into pursuing a renewal of British imperialism.

The insistence by sundry students of history that there is an Anglophile conspiracy among bankers to restore the Empire seems oddly naïve, and a fundamental misunderstanding as to the nature of globalist capital. The theory implies that international plutocrats can be or are loyal to anything other than their own greed-driven motives, with a possible exception being the tribal loyalty owed by some to Israel.

Bankers such as the Rothschilds were “loyal” to empires as long as those empires were the most effective power blocs for extending their economic control further afield. It should be recalled that the original Meyer Amschel Rothschild sent four of his five sons out to the leading economic centers of the day: Vienna, London, Paris, and Naples. If he did not do so to establish the House of Rothschild as international – as distinct from specifically national of even imperial – bankers – then what? Just as the British branch became supposedly ardent imperialists for the British, the Rothschild branches in France and Germany became ardent for the French and German Empires.

Were the brothers of the House of Rothschild then at war among themselves because they had decided to become jingoists for whatever states and empires in which they happened to reside? Hardly. Their loyalty was, and presumably remains to this day, with their dynasty, like all the other international banking dynasties, which are no longer constricted by nation-states let alone empires, but now embrace a global financial empire.

It would be foolish to believe that these, and other leading plutocrats such as Soros, et al, have formed a cheering squad for any particular nation-state out of a sense of intense national loyalties. One might expect many of them to present themselves as “American patriots” because the USA provides the guns to protect and expand the international financial empire, just as the European empires provided the cannon fodder in prior centuries.

If one seeks a British connection, the obvious examples here are the Opium Wars at the behest of the House of Sassoon, and the Anglo-Boer Wars, for the benefit of Alfred Beit, et al. One might also consider another prominent banking dynasty, the Warburgs; brother Max being the financial adviser to the Kaiser during the world war, while Paul came to the USA. Did Max and Paul thereby become enemies as the result of hostilities between the USA and Germany? Where were their localities? With Germany and the USA respectively, or with the House of Warburg?

There was a time, during and immediately following World War I when many prominent British figures regarded the financial network as part of a German-Jewish alliance, London Times editor Wickham Steed, commenting on this when he observed at the Peace Conference the lobbying by the Schiff, Warburg, et al, for the recognition of Bolshevik Russia.[13] American Labor leader Samuel Gompers, observing a similar pro-Bolshevik phenomenon among the international bankers described them as “the American-Anglo-German financing combinations.”[14]

EARLY U.S., BRITISH BREACH

What then of the supposed joining of the US and “British” branches” of international finance after World War I to work for a revived British Empire?

In 2005, a mainstream publishing company produced a series of small volumes called “Conspiracy Books.” Who Really Runs the World? by Thom Burnett and Alex Games,[15] is particularly well researched. After considering numerous candidates indulging the Illuminati, Lodge 322, Bilderbergers and Trilateral Commission, the authors settle for the Council on Foreign Relations.[16] Whether the reader agrees with the choice by Burnett and Games of the CFR as being at the apex of world control, they do nonetheless provide a well-documented history of the CFR. They also provide a valuable discussion on the relationship between the American and British delegations at the Versailles Peace Conference in regard to the hatching of the alleged Anglophile conspiracy.

Burnett and Games state that the idea of a think tank on foreign policy was mooted in 1917 by Col. Edward M House, Wilson’s key adviser, who was an Anglophile, along with his friend Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,[17] who was of course not inclined to British imperialism, but was suspected later of having Bolshevik sympathies. This think tank became The Inquiry. Another group, comprising “New York financiers and international lawyers” had established the CFR in 1918. Both groups went to the Versailles Peace Conference as Pres. Wilson’s advisers.[18] Both British and US groups met after the peace conference at Versailles at the Hotel Majestic with the aim of establishing a joint Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs.[19] BY 1921 the CFR had dwindled to insignificance and merged with The Inquiry in 1921, but by this time the idea of a US Institute of International Affairs, the British section having been established, was no longer in favor. Whitney Shepardson, the aide to Col. House, was sent to Britain to inform the RIIA that the US branch would not now eventuate. However, the British group had already decided to also reject a joint project with the US.[20] Burnett and Games conclude from their study of CFR documents that:

Conspiracy theorists who claim that the Council on Foreign Relations is controlled by the Round Table through the Institute of International Affairs are wrong and haven’t done their research. This lack of agreement, and definite desire not to be linked, forces an enormous rift between these secret groups. Theorists tend to concentrate on the wishful thinking voiced at the Hotel Majestic without following the actual subsequent developments. Any sentence that combines the CFR and the IIA as co-conspirators must be viewed a false.[21]

Peter Grosse, the official CFR historian, confirms this early Anglo-US breach in the official CFR history:

…To Shepardson fell the task of informing the British colleagues of this unfortunate reality. Crossing to London, he recalled thinking that “it might be quite unpleasant to have to say for the first time that the Paris Group of British colleagues could not be members” of the American branch. “The explanation to the British was begun (shall we say?) haltingly. However, instead of the frigid look which had been feared, the faces of the British governing body showed slightly red and very happy. They had reached the same conclusion in reverse, but had not yet found a good way of getting word to the other side of the Atlantic!”[22]

Games and Burnett state, and the history by Grosse concurs, that the CFR was anxious to try and create a new world order with the USSR rather than with Britain following World War II. However, when the CFR approached the Soviet Embassy in 1944 with an offer of co-operation they were firmly rejected by Gromyko. “The new world order, as envisaged by the CFR, did involve co-existence with the USSR. The demise of world power for the British was evident by this action.”[23]

SUBVERSION OF EMPIRES

After World War I international finance was requiring an international financial system beyond the confines of the empires. World War II finalized the process of dismantling the empires started by the First World War. The powers that emerged over the ashes of the European imperial powers were the USA and the USSR. Both pursued anti-colonialist policies, or one might say, neo-colonialist policies of their own, competing to fill the void of European colonial scuttle.

As has been related, certain conspiracy theorists state that the aim of international plutocracy is to reassert British imperial interests. Post-war history does not accord with this theory.

Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko notes in his autobiography Memories that:

Washington tended to view colonial empires as an anachronism and made no secret that it would shed no tears were they to be disabled… In any case it was time for the old masters to move aside.[24]

Please read the above passage again if it has not sunken in to consciousness, as it provides a key to understanding post-war US foreign policy. Note that Gromyko states that Washington, i.e. the globalist elite that runs the place, regarded empires as “anachronistic,” meaning that they were now too constrictive for the global ramifications of banking and industry.

An example of the subversive agendas of the USA-plutocratic nexus in regard to Africa was the creation in 1953 – at a time when only Ethiopia and Liberia were self-governing – of the Africa-America Institute, spanning 50 states, the aim being to bring together US and African policy-makers, to provide training programs in order to “build relations with the new African leadership.” When the USSR did this with Patrice Lumumba University, American conservatives considered them to be subverting Africa for the benefit of “world communism.” What should then be made of the AAI? Its educational program has resulted in a US-trained African elite, virtually all of who have returned to Africa.[25] The Board of AAI is instructive:[26]

  • Kofi Appenteng, AAI Chair, Co-Founder and partner of The West Africa Fund; formerly a partner with Thacher Proffitt,[27] one of the big Wall Street law firms; life member of the CFR, and a board member of the Ford Foundation, etc.
  • Mora McLean, AAI President and CEO, came to AAI from the Ford Foundation where she had been Deputy Director for Africa and Middle East Programs; she is a CFR member.
  • William Asiko, AAI board member; President of The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation & Director of Public Affairs and Communications for The Coca-Cola Company in Africa.
  • Rosalind Kainyah, Vice President of External Affairs, Tullow Oil plc; formerly Director of Public Affairs, USA for the De Beers Group, part of the Oppenheimer mining conglomerate.
  • George Kirkland is Executive Vice President, Chevron Corporation.
  • Carlton Masters, CFR, among other bodies.
  • Steven B. Pfeiffer, Chair of the Executive Committee of Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.

Maurice Tempelsman, Senior Partner, Leon Tempelsman & Son. Tempelsman does not have a profile on the AAI website, which is not to say that his background is not rather interesting. He is a major actor in the exploitation of minerals in Africa. An informative article on the African diamond trade states of Tempelsman:

…Angola’s state firm Endiama is tied to the Lazare Kaplan diamond company owned by the Israeli-American Tempelsman diamond cartel. Maurice Tempelsman’s diamond interests were established in the Congo in the early 1960’s with the help of the CIA.

Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first Premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth back to the newly independent Congo in the early 60’s, Tempelsman, who began with De Beers in the 1950’s, helped engineer the coup d’etat that consolidated the dictatorship of 29 year-old Colonel Mobutu, and the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah; diamonds were at stake in each.

“I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert and investigative journalist Janine Roberts, author of the book Glitter and Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression and dictatorships, in Africa.”

The Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International—supplier of Tiffany’s and Cartier’s diamonds.

… Tempelsman shared a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations with people like Walter Kansteiner, National Security under Bill Clinton and current director of a gold company involved in Congo’s bloody eastern zone.[28]

Tempelsman is also profiled by the Eurasia Foundation, where he described as chairman of the board of Lazare Kaplan International, “one of the nation’s foremost diamond houses.” It is further stated that Tempelsman is on the board of trustees of AI and was “immediate past chairman.” “Mr. Tempelsman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.”[29]

Are we supposed to conclude that Tempelsman, and all the other corporate executives and CFR members on the AAI board are there for no other reason than philanthropy?

The Empires, including of course the British, were considered primary obstacles, as “anachronisms” as Gromyko explained, by international finance after World War II. To claim that there is an international bankers’ conspiracy centered around the British Monarchy and aiming for the extension of British influence throughout the world, is a significant error that results in flawed historical analyses.


* This is not to say that I regard Skousen el al as totally hopeless as historians.

[1] Michael Collins Piper, “Influential Newsweek Magazine Sold for $1To CFR’s Super-Rich, Pro-Israel Harman Couple,” American Free Press, August 6, 2010, http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/newsweek_magazine_sold_232.html (Accessed on August 7, 2010).

[2] Joel van der Reijden, The Pilgrims Society: A Study of the Anglo-American Establishment, featured by David Icke: http://www.davidicke.com/articles/secret-societies-mainmenu-56/14735–the-pilgrims-society-a-study-of-the-anglo-american-establishment

[3] Henry Makow, “Gloria Steinem: How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society,” http://www.henrymakow.com/180302.html

[4] Jeffrey Steinberg, “Britain’s Assault on American Revisited,” Executive Intelligence Review, February 23, 2007, http://www.larouchepub.com/other/book_reviews/2007/3408quigley_jeff.html

[5] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in Focus, Inc., 1981).

[6] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1966).

[7] W Cleon Skousen , The Naked Capitalist: a review and commentary on Dr Carroll Quigley’s book Tragedy and Hope (Salt Lake City: privately published, 1970).

[8] C Quigley, 1966, op.cit., 950.

[9] Ibid., 51-52.

[10] Ibid., 130.

[11] Ibid., 130.

[12] Ibid., 131.

[13] Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years 1892-1922 A personal narrative, The Peace Conference, The Bullitt Mission, Vol. II.  (New York: Doubleday Page and Co., 1924), 301.

[14] “Soviet Bribe Found Here, Says Gompers,” New York Times, May 1, 1922.

[15] Thom Burnett and Alex Games, Who Really Runs the World? (London: Collins and Brown, 2005).

[16] Ibid., Chapter 4, “The New Knights of the Round Table.”

[17] Ibid., 99-100.

[18] Quigley, op.cit, 1966, 951-952.

[19] Burnett and Games, op.cit., 101.

[20] Ibid., 102.

[21] Ibid., 103.

[22] Peter Grosse, Continuing The Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, “Continuing the Inquiry.” (New York: CFR, 1996). http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/

[23] Burnett and Games, op.cit., 107. For the origins of the Cold War and the failure of the globalist policy to incorporate the USSR into the “new world order” see: K R Bolton, “Origins of the Cold War: How Stalin Foiled a ‘New World Order’ Relevance for the Present,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 31, 2010,

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/31/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/all/1

[24] Andrei Gromyko, Memories (London: Hutchinson, 1989).

[25] Africa-America Institute, http://www.aaionline.org/About.aspx

[26] http://www.aaionline.org/About/Board.aspx

[27] Closed in 2009, after 160 years.

[28] Keith Harmon Snow, Chloe’s Blood Diamond: Angola Rock sold for $16 million to GUESS Jeans Founder, http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=7423

The full article is well worth reading.

[29] “Maurice Tempelsman,” Eurasia Foundation, http://www.eurasia.org/about/bio_tempelsman.aspx

The Eurasia Foundation sounds like a duplicate of the Soros Open Society Institute.