Home · Book Reports · 2017 · Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

My five sentence synopsis can not do the depth of this book, at over 1100 pages, justice.

This was one of, if not the, best books I have ever read. It is easy to read while still digging into the issues it attempts to cover. The minutia of detail is sometimes overwhelming, the production numbers for the world wars for example, but are valid since they offer hard numbers as evidence for those that are looking for that.

Initially turned on to the book by John Taylor Gatto, I came in looking for details surrounding economic changes, education changes, Cecil Rhodes, the Round Table, and media manipulation. I was not disappointed. There is extensive coverage of each of these, often with the names and dates to accompany each claim that allow for further investigation.

Most of these conspiracies are born of economic roots. In several sections the evolution of economies are covered in great detail. By exploring each of the phases of this capitalist evolution, commercial, industrial, financial, monopolist, and pluralist, you can see a common thread through the ages that allows things like media manipulation and the fomenting of war to be controlled by a select group of individuals from their positions within influential organizations - primarily banks and sufficiently capitalized organizations.

The world wars and depressions are covered in great detail and are shown as turning points of cultural change. It is my opinion that these wars, specifically WW2 through the duplicitous Versailles Treaty, were concocted to usher in a new world order based on technocracy and division based in pleasure, ignorance and diversity. There is supporting coverage, although not as extensive, in how things like communication theory, cybernetics and similar technologies, spring forth from World War 2, were used as foundational concepts in the shaping of what Quigly calls the new age.

While this book is long and daunting, it truly is a must read for anyone wanting to understand where Western civilization has come from and where it might be headed. Though it is a bit dated since its 1966 publication, it is still timely enough to allow it to be compared with where we are as a society today and to see how the thread of manipulation and control persists. For more current works that expand on this idea of a new age, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s works are a good place to start.

As a final caveat, make sure to remember that Quigly himself was an “insider”. He proclaims his agreement for the manipulation and coercion documented within these pages, and so one must keep this bias in mind when reading. Also worth mentioning is that Quigly was a mentor to Rhodes Scholar William (Bill) Clinton. This, I think, adds even more credibility to the fact that Rhodes' Round Table group so often mentioned herein is still manipulating the world and it would be fool-hearted to think this book is the final word on anything nor is it free from manipulatory techniques.

• The listed page numbers are the pdf page numbers of the linked copy of the book. The actual page number is 15 less than the stated pdf page number.

Exceptional Excepts

• Money out of nothing
• Moksha
• Inflation
• Economics
• Global Education
• Cybernetics
• True Myth
• Foundations book
• Social Change
• Decentralize
• Decentralize 2
• Destroy Education
• Families

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Western Civilization in its Worldsetting
• Chapter 2: Western Civilization to 1914
• Chapter 3: The Russian Empire to 1917
• Chapter 4: The Buffer Fringe
• Chapter 5: The First World War 1914-1918
• Chapter 6: The Versailles System and the Return to "Normalcy" 1919-1929
• Chapter 7: Finance, Commercial Policy, and Business Activity, 1897-1947
• Chapter 8: International Socialism and the Soviet Challenge
• Chapter 9: Germany from Kaiser to Hitler, 1913-1945
• Chapter 10: Britain: the Background To Appeasement, 1900-1939
• Chapter 11: Changing Economic Patterns
• Chapter 12: The Policy of Appeasement, 1931-1936
• Chapter 13: The Disruption of Europe, 1937-1939
• Chapter 14: World War II: The Tide of Aggression, 1939-1941
• Chapter 15: World War II: The Ebb of Aggression, 1941-1945
• Chapter 16: The New Age
• Chapter 17: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: American Atomic Supremacy, 1945-1950
• Chapter 18: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: The Race for the H-Bomb, 1950-1957
• Chapter 19: The New Era, 1957-1964
• Chapter 20: Tragedy and Hope: The Future in Perspective

· Preface

page 14:

• the historical narrative ceases in 1964, not because the date of writing caught up with the march of historical events but because the period 1962-1964 seems to me to mark the end of an era of historical development and a period of pause before a quite different era with quite different problems begins.

· Chapter 1: Introduction: Western Civilization in its Worldsetting

page 19 (actual page -15):

• our own civilization, Western Civilization, we can see that certain modifications are needed.

page 20:

• Internal struggles during the age of conflict usually have no effect on the outcome. They may even hasten the demise by misallocating resource.

page 21:

• The core of the civilization is conquered by a semi-peripheral and then peripheral components of empire.

page 22:

page 25:

• Western Civilization, in approximately fifteen hundred years, has passed through eight periods, thus:

1. Mixture, 350-700 
2. Gestation, 700-970 
3A. First Expansion, 970-1270 
4A.First Conflict, 1270-1440 Core Empire: England, 1420
3B. Second Expansion, 1440-1690 
4B. Second Conflict, 1690-1815 Core Empire: France, 1810 3C. Third Expansion, 1770-1929 
4C. Third Conflict, 1893-? Core Empire: Germany, 1942

• The two possibilities which lie in the future can be listed as follows:

REORGANIZATION 
3D. Fourth Expansion, 1944-
CONTINUATION OF THE PROCESS 
5. Universal Empire (the United States) 
6. Decay 
7. Invasion (end of the civilization)

page 27:

• Much of the world’s history in the twentieth century has arisen from the interactions of these three factors (the continental heartland of Russian power, the shattered cultures of the Buffer Fringe of Asia, and the oceanic powers of Western Civilization).

• It is noteworthy that mate- rial elements of a culture, such as tools, weapons, vehicles, and such, diffuse [move from core to periphery] more readily and thus more rapidly than do the nonmaterial elements such as ideas, art forms, religious outlook, or patterns of social behavior.

• The periphery tends to be less hampered, by vested interests and non-material pursuits, than the core.

• Thus, such aspects of the Industrial Revolution as automobiles and radios are European rather than American inventions, but have been developed and utilized to a far greater extent in America because this area was not hampered in their use by surviving elements of feudalism, of church domination, of rigid class distinctions (for ex- ample, in education), or by widespread attention to music, poetry, art, or religion such as we find in Europe.

page 29:

• In general, importation of an element of material culture from one society to another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it is (a) productive, (b) can be made within the society itself, and (c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing society without demoralizing it. The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy them in a material sense with firearms.

• Think Indians and whiskey.

• Such people either perish or are incorporated as individuals and small groups into some other culture, whose ideology they adopt for themselves and, above all, for their children.

page 32:

• The agricultural and industrial revolutions made the world smaller and spread European culture at different paces.

page 34:

• Not only did the non-European world get industrialization before it got the revolution in food production; it also got the revolution in sanitation and medical services before it got a sufficient increase in food to take care of the resulting increase in population.

page 35:

page 36:

page 37:

• Moreover, private individuals could obtain good weapons because they had a high enough standard of living to afford it (as a result of the Agricultural Revolution) and such weapons were cheap (as a result of the Industrial Revolution).

page 38:

• As a result [of the different order revolutions], governments in Europe in 1830 hardly dared to oppress the people, and democracy was growing; but in the non-European world by 1930 (and even more by

1950. governments did dare to, and could, oppress their peoples, who could do little to prevent it.

page 39:

• The nineteenth century was marked by (1) belief in the innate goodness of man; (2) secular- ism; (3) belief in progress; (4) liberalism; (5) capitalism; (6) faith in science; (7) democracy; (8) nationalism.

· Chapter 2: Western Civilization to 1914

page 48:

• we can divide a society into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious, intellectual.

page 49:

• Amateur soldiers (associated with democracy) with cheap and effective weapons replaced specialized soldiers (associated with authoritarianism), such as gunpowder replacing knights.

• Before effective communications to control mass citizen-armies, plans would be drawn up in advanced and followed a timeline.

page 50:

• Specialist weapons once again took over with the advent of the bomber plane and culminated with the atomic bomb in 1945.

page 51:

• Thus the nineteenth century’s national state began to be replaced by the twentieth century’s ideological bloc. At the same time, the shift from amateur to specialist weapons made it likely that the new form of organization would be authoritarian rather than democratic as the earlier national state had been.

page 52:

• In order to simplify these [economic issues] somewhat, we may divide them into four aspects: (a) energy; (b) materials; (c) organization; and (d) control.

page 53:

• The third period we might call financial capitalism. It began about 1850, reached its peak about 1914, and ended about 1932. Its typical forms of economic organization were the limited-liability corporation and the holding company. It was a period of financial or banker management rather than one of owner management as in the earlier period of industrial capitalism. This period of financial capitalism was followed by a period of monopoly capitalism. In this fourth period, typical forms of economic organization were cartels and trade associations. This period began to appear about 1890, took over control of the economic system from the bankers about 1932, and is distinguished as a period of managerial dominance in contrast with the owner management and the financial management of the two periods immediately preceding it.

page 54:

• As late as 1925 there was a manor still functioning in England, and Cecil Rhodes’s chartered company which opened up Rhodesia (the British South Africa Company) was chartered as late as 1889.

• The commercial capitalist sought profits from the exchange of goods; the industrial capitalist sought profits from the manufacture of goods; the financial capitalist sought profits from the manipulation of claims on money; and the monopoly capitalist sought profits from manipulation of the market to make the market price and the amount sold such that his profits would be maximized.

page 55:

• The development of financial and monopoly capitalism provided a new group of managerial technicians. The distinction between industrial bourgeoisie and managers essentially rests on the fact that the former control industry and possess power because they are owners, while managers control industry (and also government or labor unions or public opinion) because they are skilled or trained in certain techniques. As we shall see later, the shift from one to the other was associated with a separation of control from owner- ship in economic life.

page 56:

• Marx’s ideas fall flat as energy starts coming from fossil fuels and not labor; In addition the consumer is now required.

page 58:

• We could indicate this by Pointing out that capitalism, because it seeks profits as its primary goal, is never primarily seeking to achieve prosperity, high production, high consumption, political power, patriotic improvement, or moral uplift. Any or these may be achieved under capitalism, and any (or all) of them may °e sacrificed and lost under capitalism, depending on this relationship to the primary goal of capitalist activity—the pursuit of profits.

page 59:

• The original stage, which we call commercial capitalism, sought profits by moving goods from one place to another. In this effort, goods went from places where they were less valuable to places where they were more valuable, while money, doing the same thing, moved in the opposite direction. This valuation, which determined the movement both of goods and of money and which made them move in opposite directions, was measured by the relationship between these two things. Thus the value of goods was expressed in money, and the value of money was expressed in goods. Goods moved from low-price areas to high-price areas, and money moved from high-price areas to low-price areas, because goods were more valuable where prices were high and money was more valuable where prices were low. Thus, clearly, money and goods are not the same thing but are, on the contrary, exactly opposite things. Most confusion in economic thinking arises from failure to recognize this fact. Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have. Thus goods are an asset; money is a debt.

• The value of goods, expressed in money, is called “prices,” while the value of money, expressed in goods, is called “value."

• Eventually, this stage of commercial capitalism became institutionalized into a restrictive system, sometimes called “mercantilism,” in which merchants sought to gain profits, not from the movements of goods but from restricting the movements of goods.

page 60:

• Where the merchant had been eager for high prices and was increasingly eager for low interest rates, the banker was eager tor a high value of money (that is, low prices) and high interest rates.

page 61:

• Unfortunately, however, three parts of the system, concerned with the production, transfer, and consumption of goods, were concrete and clearly visible so that almost anyone could grasp them simply by examining them, while the operations of banking and finance were concealed, scattered, and abstract so that they appeared to many to be difficult. To add to this, bankers themselves did everything they could to make their activities more secret and more esoteric.

• Such changes of prices, either inflationary or deflationary, have been major forces in history for the last six centuries at least.

page 62:

• This is why bankers, as creditors in money terms, have been obsessed with maintaining the value of money, although the reason they nave traditionally given for this obsession—that “sound money” maintains “business confidence”—has been propagandist rather than accurate.

• That changed at some point…

• they [bankers working for governments] used their power and influence to do two things: (1) to get all money and debts expressed in terms of a strictly limited commodity—ultimately gold; and (2) to get all monetary matters out of the control of governments and political authority, on the ground that they would be handled better by private banking interests in terms of such a stable value as gold.

• This was upset by wars and mercantilism.

page 63:

• Credit had been known to the Italians and Netherlanders long before it became one of the instruments of English world supremacy. Nevertheless, the founding of the Bank of England by William Paterson and his friends in 1694 is one of the great dates in world history. For generations men had sought to avoid the one drawback of gold, its heaviness, by using pieces of paper to represent specific pieces of gold. Today we call such pieces of paper gold certificates.

• Such an excess volume of paper claims against reserves we now call bank notes.

• !!! In effect, this creation of paper claims greater than the reserves available means that bankers were creating money out of nothing. The same thing could be done in another way, not by note-issuing banks but by deposit banks. Deposit bankers discovered that orders and checks drawn against deposits by depositors and given to third persons were often not cashed by the latter but were deposited to their own accounts. Thus there were no actual movements of funds, and payments were made simply by bookkeeping transactions on the accounts. Accordingly, it was necessary for the banker to keep on hand in actual money (gold, certificates, and notes) no more than the fraction of deposits likely to be drawn upon and cashed; the rest could be used for loans, and if these loans were made by creating a deposit for the borrower, who in turn would draw checks upon it rather than withdraw it in money, such “created deposits” or loans could also be covered adequately by retaining reserves to only a fraction of their value. Such created deposits also were a creation of money out of nothing, although bankers usually refused to express their actions, either note issuing or deposit lending, in these terms. William Paterson, however, on obtaining the chatter of the Bank of England in 1694, to use the moneys he had won in privateering, said, “The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” This was repeated by Sir Edward Holden, founder of the Midland Bank, on December 18, 1907, and is, of course, generally admitted today.

• Admitted today - maybe, understood - no.

page 64:

• [The system of credit] not invented by England but was developed by her to become one of her chief weapons in the victory over Napoleon in 1815. The emperor, as the last great mercantilist, could not see money in any but concrete terms, and was convinced that his efforts to fight wars on the basis of “sound money,” by avoiding the creation of credit, would ultimately win him a victory by bankrupting England. He was wrong, although the lesson has had to be relearned by modern financiers in the twentieth century.

page 65:

• FINANCIAL CAPITALISM, 185O-1931, This section is key to understanding the roots of out current financial system.

page 66:

• In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this, looking backward toward the period of dynastic monarchy in which they had their own roots, aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743—1811) of Frankfort, whose male descendants, for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even nieces. Rothschild’s five sons, established at branches in Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfort, cooperated together in ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely excelled.

page 67:

• They were usually highly civilized, cultured gentlemen, patrons of education and of the arts, so that today colleges, professorships, opera companies, symphonies, libraries, and museum collections still reflect their munificence. For these purposes they set a pattern of endowed foundations which still surround us today.

• The names of some of these banking families are familiar to all of us and should be more so. They include Baring, Lazard, Erlanger, Warburg, Schroder, Seligman, the Speyers, Mirabaud, Mallet, Fould, and above all Rothschild and Morgan.

page 68:

• Thus, people of considerable political knowledge might not associate the names Walter Burns, Clinton Dawkins, Edward Grenfell, Willard Straight, Thomas Lamont, Dwight Morrow, Nelson Perkins, Russell Leffingwell, Elihu Root, John W. Davis, John Foster Dulles, and S. Parker Gilbert with the name “Morgan,” yet all these and many others Were parts of the system of influence which centered on the J. P. Morgan office at 23 Wall Street.

• the sanctity of all values and the soundness of money must be protected in two ways: by basing the value of money on gold and by allowing bankers to control the supply of money. To do this it was necessary to conceal, or even to mislead, both governments and people about the nature of money and its methods of operation.

page 69:

• In each country the supply of money took the form of an inverted pyramid or cone balanced on its point. In the point was a supply of gold and its equivalent certificates; on the intermediate levels was a much larger supply of notes; and at the top, with an open and expandable upper surface, was an even greater supply of deposits. Each level used the levels below it as its reserves, and, since these lower levels had smaller quantities of money, they were “sounder.” A holder of claims on the middle or upper level could increase his confidence in his claims on wealth by reducing them to a lower level, although, of course, if everyone, or any considerable number of persons, tried to do this at the same time the volume of reserves would be totally inadequate.

• There were formerly many banks of issue, but this function is now generally restricted to a few or even to a single “central bank” in each country. Such banks, even central banks, were private institutions, owned by shareholders who profited by their operations.

page 70:

• Deposits on the upper level of the pyramid were called by this name, With typical bankers’ ambiguity, in spite of the fact that they consisted or two utterly different kinds of relationships: (1) “lodged deposits,” which were real claims left by a depositor in a bank, on which the depositor might receive interest, since such deposits were debts owed by he bank to the depositor; and (2) “created deposits,” which were claims created by the bank out of nothing as loans from the bank to “depositors” who had to pay interest on them, since these represented debt from them to the bank.

page 72:

• Only new supplies of gold, or the suspension of the gold standard in wartime, or the development of new kinds of money (like notes and checks) which economize the use of gold, have saved our civilization from steady price deflation over the last couple of centuries.

page 75:

• Moreover, if a government goes off the gold standard completely—that is, refuses to exchange certificates and notes for specie—the amount of notes and deposits can be increased indefinitely because these are no longer limited by limited amounts of gold reserves.

• As early as 1909, Walter Rathenau, who was in a position to know (since he had inherited from his father control of the German General Electric Company and held scores of directorships himself), said, “Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves."

page 76:

• As experts in government bonds, the international bankers not only handled the necessary advances but provided advice to government officials and, on many occasions, placed their own Members in official posts for varied periods to deal with special problems. This is so widely accepted even today that in 1961 a Republican investment banker became Secretary of the Treasury in a Democratic Administration in Washington without significant comment from any direction.

• In 1852 Gladstone, chancellor of the Exchequer, declared, “The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in Matters of Finance, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and ^questioned.” On September 26, 1921, The Financial Times wrote, “Half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the hole fabric of government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills.” In 1924 Sir Drummond Fraser, vice-president of the institute of Bankers, stated, “The Governor of the Bank of England must be the autocrat who dictates the terms upon which alone the Government can obtain borrowed money."

page 77:

• Montagu Norman and JP Morgan worked together. Norman was “the currency dictator of Europe” and said “I hold the hegemony of the world.” His brother was the head of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

• This page, 77, is wild…

page 78:

• When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be purchased by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser’s country, since these are of value only in the country of issue.

page 80:

• The whole process illustrates the subordination of internal price stability to stability of [foreign] exchanges. It ‘as this subordination which was rejected by most countries after 1931. This rejection was signified by (a) abandonment of the gold standard at least in part, (b) efforts at control of domestic prices, and (c) efforts exchange control. All these were done because of a desire to free the economic system from the restricting influence of a gold-dominated financial system.

page 81:

• [The automatic balancing system was] wiped away as a result of the economic changes brought about by the First World War. Because of these changes it became impossible to restore the financial system which had existed before 1914. Efforts to restore it were made with great determination, but by 1933 they had obviously failed, and all major countries had been forced to abandon the gold standard and automatic exchanges. When the gold standard is abandoned, gold flows between countries like any other commodity, and the value of foreign exchanges (no longer tied to gold) can fluctuate much more widely.

page 83:

• In all parts of the world people slept more securely, worked more productively, and lived more fully because Britain existed. British naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and the Far East suppressed slave raiders, pirates, and headhunters.

• Didn’t Britain use pirates to usurp the Spanish navy?

• Most of the world’s great commercial markets, even in commodities like cotton, rubber, and tin, which she did not produce in quantities herself, were in England, the world price being set from the auction bidding of skilled specialist traders there. If a man in Peru wished to send money to a man in Afghanistan, the final payment, as like as not, would be made by a bookkeeping transaction in London.

page 87:

• In the United States the number of billion-dollar corporations rose from one in 1909 (United States Steel, controlled by Morgan) to fifteen in 1930. The share of all corporation assets held by the 200 largest corporations rose from 32 percent in 1909 to 49 percent in 1930 and reached 57 percent in 1939. By 1930 these 200 largest corporations held 49.2 percent of the assets of all 40,000 corporations in the country ($81 billion out of $165 billion); they held 38 percent of all business wealth, incorporated or unincorporated (or $81 billion out of $212 billion); and they held 22 percent of all the wealth in the country (or $81 billion out of $367 billion). In fact, in 1930, one corporation (American Telephone and Telegraph, controlled by Morgan) had greater assets than the total wealth in twenty-one states of the Union.

• The influence of these business leaders was so great that the Morgan and Rockefeller groups acting together, or even Morgan acting alone, could have wrecked the economic system of the country merely by throwing securities on the stock market for sale, and, having precipitated a stock-market panic, could then have bought back the securities they had sold but at a lower price. Naturally, they were not so foolish as to do this, although Morgan came very close to it in precipitating the “panic of 1907,” but they did not hesitate to wreck individual corporations, at the expense of the holders of common stocks, by driving them to bankruptcy.

page 89:

• In fact on two occasions, in 1904 and in 1924, J. P. Morgan was able to sit back with a feeling of satisfaction to watch a presidential election in which the candidates of both parties were in his sphere of influence.

page 90:

• … Henrv Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt plotted how they could best get the United States into the fracas. They got the excuse they needed when the American battleship Maine was sunk by a mysterious explosion in Havana harbor in February 1898. TO two months the United States declared war on Spain to fight for Cuban independence.

• During this same period, there appeared a new movement for economic and political reform known as Progressivism. The Progressive movement resulted from a combination of forces, some new and some old. Its foundation rested on the remains of agrarian and labor discontent which had struggled so vainly before 1897. There was also, as a kind of afterthought on the part of successful business leaders, a weakening of acquisitive selfishness and a revival of the older sense of social obligation and idealism. to some extent this feeling was mixed with a realization that the position and privileges of the very wealthy could be preserved better with superficial concessions and increased opportunity for the discontented to blow off steam than from any policy of blind obstructionism on the part of the rich.

page 91:

• The Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act (1913) were soon tightly wrapped in litigation and futility. On the other hand, the direct election of senators, the establishment of an income tax and of the Federal Reserve System, and the creation of a Federal Farm Loan System (1916) and of rural delivery of mail and parcel post, as well as the first steps toward various laboring enactments, like minimum wages for merchant seamen, restrictions on child labor, and an eight-hour day for railroad workers, justified the support which Progressives had given to Wilson.

· Chapter 3: The Russian Empire to 1917

page 97:

• the state must include all human activities. In the days of Classical Greece this all-inclusive entity was called the polis, a term which meant both society and state; in the later Roman period this all-inclusive entity was called the imperium. The only difference was that the polis was sometimes (as in Pericles’s Athens about 450 B.C.) democratic, while the imperium was always a military autocracy. Both were totalitarian, so that religion and economic life were regarded as spheres of governmental activity.

page 98:

• In the West, the Roman Empire (which continued in the East as the Byzantine Empire) disappeared in 476; and, although many efforts were made to revive it, there was clearly a period, about 900, when there was no empire, no state, and no public authority in the West. The state disappeared, vet society continued. So also, religious and economic life continued. This clearly showed that the state and society were not the same thing, that society was the basic entity, and that the state was a crowning, but not essential, cap to the social structure. This experience had revolutionary effects. It was discovered that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western liberalism.

• This new faith came into Classical Civilization from Semitic society in its origin it was a this-worldly religion, believing that the world and the flesh were basically good, or at least filled with good potentialities, because both were made by God; the body was made in the image of God; God became Alan in this world with a human body, to save men as individuals, and to establish “Peace on earth.”

page 99:

• This optimistic, “this-worldly” religion was taken into Classical Civilization at a time when the philosophic outlook of that society was quite incompatible with the religious outlook of Christianity. The Classical philosophic outlook, which we might call Neoplatonic, was derived from the teachings of Persian Zoroastrianism, Pythagorean rationalism, and Platonism. It was dualistic, dividing the universe into two opposed worlds, the world of matter and flesh and the world of spirit and ideas. The former world was changeable, unknowable, illusionary, and evil; the latter world was eternal, knowable, real, and good. Truth, to these people, could be found by the use of reason and logic alone, not by use of the body or the senses, since these were prone to error, and must be spurned. The body, as Plato said, was the “tomb of the soul."

• A small minority, derived from Democritus and the early Ionian scientists through Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius, rejected the Platonic dualism, preferring materialism as an explanation of reality. These materialists were equally incompatible with the new Christian religion.

page 105:

• The intelligentsia class became “Slavophile” and insisted that Russia was completely different and superior to the West, citing “its urban slums, factory system, social disorganization, Middle-class money-grubbing and pettiness, its absolutist state, and its advanced weapons.” They adopted Germanic thinkers such as Hegel. They later moved into the villages, but the peasants rejected them. This gave rise to anarchism and nihilism.

-The nihilists were completely atheist, materialist, irrational, doctrinaire, despotic, and violent.

• they rejected all thought, all art, all idealism, all conventions, because these were superficial, unnecessary luxuries and therefore evil; they rejected marriage, because it was conventional bond- age on the freedom of love; they rejected private property, because it was a tool of individual oppression; some even rejected clothing as a corruption of natural innocence; they rejected vice and licentiousness as unnecessary upper-class luxuries; as Nikolai Berdyaev put it: “It is Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace. At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world . . . , the acknowledgment of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and in thought. . . . Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics, and spiritual values, but religion also. . . . Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping of oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of the natural man, . . . The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin. . . . Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically.”*

• • N. Berdyaev, Origin of Russian Communism (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1948), p.

page 106:

• This fantastic philosophy is of great significance because it prepared me ground for Bolshevism.

• After nihilism came anarchism and assassinations.

• The growth of industrialism settled the violent academic dispute between Westerners and Slavophiles as to whether Russia must follow the path of Western development or could escape it by falling back some native Slavic solutions hidden in the peasant commune; the growth of a proletariat gave the revolutionaries once again a social group on which to build; and Marxist theory gave the Intelligentsia an ideology which they could fanatically embrace.

page 107:

• Even the autocracy lifted the censorship to allow Marxist theory to circulate, in the belief that it would alleviate terrorist pressure since it eschewed direct political action, especially assassination, and postponed revolution until after industrialization had proceeded far enough to create a fully developed bourgeois class and a fully developed proletariat.

• This period of progress punctuated by violence which lasted from 1890 to 1914 has a number of aspects.

page 108:

• The first Russian railroad opened in 1838, but growth was slow until the establishment of a rational plan of development in 1857. This plan sought to penetrate the chief agricultural regions, especially the black- earth region of the south, in order to connect them with the chief cities of the north and the export ports.

page 110:

• The State Bank, which had increased its gold reserve from 475 million to 1,095 million rubles in the period 1890-1897, was made a bank of issue in 1897 and was required by law to redeem its notes in gold, thus placing Russia on the international gold standard.

page 112:

• The earliest Russian cartels were formed with the encouragement of the Russian government and in those activities where foreign interests were most prevalent. In 1887 a sugar cartel was formed in order to permit foreign dumping of this commodity. A similar agency was set up for kerosene in 1892, but the great period of formation of such organizations (usually in the form of joint-selling agencies) began after the crisis of 1901. In 1902 a cartel created by a dozen iron and steel firms handled almost three-fourths of all Russian sales of these products. It was controlled by four foreign banking groups. A similar cartel, ruled from Berlin, took over tne sales of almost all Russian production of iron pipe.

page 113:

• Czar Nicholas II (1894-1917). For about a decade Nicholas tried to combine ruthless civil repression, economic advance, and an imperialist foreign policv in the Balkans and the Far Fast, with pious worldwide publicity for peace and universal disarmament, domestic distractions like anti-Semitic massacres (pogroms), forged terroristic documents, and faked terroristic attempts on the lives of high officials, including himself.

• Every effort was made to Russify non-Russian national groups, especially on the western frontiers.

• Against the Russians themselves, unbelievable extremes of espionage, counterespionage, censorship, provocation, imprisonment without trial, and outright brutality were employed. The revolutionaries responded with similar measures crowned by assassination. No one could trust anyone else, because revolutionaries were in the police, and members of the police were in the highest ranks of the revolutionaries.

page 114:

• All dissatisfied groups began to agitate, culminating in a successful general strike in October 1905.

page 115:

• When Stolvpin demanded that the Social Democrats (Marxists) should be kicked out, the Duma referred the matter to a committee; the assembly was immediately dissolved, and new elections were fixed for a third Duma (June, 1908).

page 116:

• The influence of the old Orthodox religious attitude continued even in those who most emphatically rejected it. The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity. This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the “key” to life and to truth. Once this “key” has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity.

page 119:

• in many ways, Dostoevski was a precursor of the Bolsheviks.

· Chapter 4: The Buffer Fringe

page 131:

• Russia made war on Turkey five times in the nineteenth century. On the last two occasions the Great Powers intervened to prevent Russia from imposing its will on the sultan. The first intervention led to the Crimean War (i854-1856) and the Congress of Paris (1856), while the second intervention, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, rewrote a peace treaty which the czar had just imposed on the sultan (Treaty of San Stefano, 1877).

• Under British pressure the sultan declared war on Russia, and was supported by Britain, France, and Sardinia in the ensuing “Crimean War.” Under threat of joining the anti-Russian forces, Austria forced the czar to evacuate the principalities, and occupied them herself, thus exposing an Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans which continued for two generations and ultimately precipitated the World War of 1914-1918.

page 132:

• …the structure of Turkish society and the complete lack of trained administrators or even of literate people. The Turkish state was a theocratic state, and Turkish society was a patriarchal or even a tribal society.

page 133:

• the cheap machinery-made industrial products of the Western Powers began to pour into Turkey and to destroy the ability of the handicraft artisans of Turkey to make a living. This could not be prevented by tariff protection because the sultan was bound by inter- national agreements to keep his customs duties at a low level. At the same time, the appeal of Western ways of life began to be felt by some of the sultan’s subjects who knew them. These began to agitate for in- dustrialism or for railroad construction, for wider opportunities in edu- cation, especially technical education, for reforms in the Turkish language, and for new, less formal, kinds of Turkish literature, for honest and impersonal methods of administration in justice and public finance, ana for all those things which, by making the Western Powers strong, made them a danger to Turkey.

page 134:

• European diplomatic history from 1878 to 1919 is little more than a commentary on the mistakes of the Congress of Berlin.

page 135:

• Under Bismarck (1862-1890) Germany had avoided all non-European adventures. Under William II (1888-1918) any kind of adventure, especially a remote and uncertain one, was welcomed. In the earlier period Germany had concerned itself with the Near East Ques- tion only as a member of the European “concert of Powers” and with a few incidental issues such as the use of German officers to train the Turkish Army. After 1889 the situation was different. Economically, the Germans began to invade Anatolia by establishing trading agencies and banking facilities; politically, Germany sought to strengthen Turkey s international position in even’ way. This effort was symbolized by the German Kaiser’s two visits to the sultan in 1889 and

1898. On the latter occasion he solemnly promised his friendship to “the Sultan Abdul Hamid and the three hundred million Muhammadans who revere him as caliph.” Most important, perhaps, was the projected “Berlin to Baghdad” railway scheme which completed its main trunk line from the Austro-Hungarian border to Nusaybin in northern Mesopotamia by September 1918. This project was of the greatest economic, strategic, and political importance not only to the Ottoman Empire and the Near East but to the whole of Europe. Economically, it tapped a region of great mineral and agricul- tural resources, including the world’s greatest petroleum reserves. These were brought into contact with Constantinople and, beyond that, with central and northwestern Europe. Germany, which was industrialized late, had a great, unsatisfied demand for food and raw materials and a great capacity to manufacture industrial products which could be ex- ported to pay for such food and raw materials.

page 136:

• Banking facilities and a merchant marine were being established to encourage such trade relations. But the Germans, with their strong strategic sense, knew well that relations with the areas mentioned were at the mercy of the British fleet, which would, almost unquestionably, control the seas during wartime. The Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway solved these crucial problems. It put the German metallurgical industry in much with the great metal resources of Anatolia; it put the German textile industry in touch with the supplies of wool, cotton, and hemp of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia; in fact, it brought to almost every branch of German industry the possibility of finding a solution for its critical market and raw-material problems. Best of all, these connections, being almost entirely overland, would be within reach of the German Army and beyond the reach of the British Navy.

• The Great Powers showed mild approval of the Baghdad Railway until about 1900. Then, for more than ten years, Russia, Britain, and France showed violent disapproval, and did all they could to obstruct the project.

page 137:

• They described the Baghdad Railway as the entering wedge of German imperialist aggression seeking to weaken and destroy the Ottoman Empire and the stakes of the other Powers in the area. The evidence shows quite the contrary. Germany was the only Great Power which wanted the Ottoman Empire to be strong and intact.

• The Germans were not only favorably inclined toward Turkey; their conduct seems to have been completely fair in regard to the administration of the Baghdad Railway itself. At a time when American and other railways were practicing wholesale discrimination between customers in regard to rates and freight handling, the Germans had the same rates and same treatment for all, including Germans and non-Germans.

• Moreover, the Germans did not seek to monopolize control of the railroad, offering to share equally with France and England and eventually with other Powers. France accepted this offer in 1899, but Britain continued to refuse, and placed every obstacle in the path of the project.

page 138:

• By an agreement of June 1914, Britain withdrew her opposition to the Baghdad Railway, allowed Turkey to raise her customs from 11 percent to 15 percent, and accepted a German sphere of interest along the railway route in return for promises (1) that the railway would not be extended to the Persian Gulf but would stop at Basra on the Tigris River, (2) that British capitalists would be given monopoly on the navigation of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and exclusive control over irrigation projects based on these rivers, (3) that two British subjects would be given seats on the board of directors of the Baghdad Railway, (4) that Britain would have exclusive control over the Commercial activities of Kuwait, the only good port on the upper Persian Gulf;(5) that a monopoly over the oil resources of the area from Mosul to Baghdad would be given to a new corporation in which British finances would have a half-interest, Royal Dutch Shell Company a quarter-interest, and the Germans a quarter-interest; and (6) that both Powers would support the “open-door” policy in commercial activities in Asiatic Turkey. Unfortunately, this agreement, as well as the earlier ones with other Powers, became worthless with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. However, it is still important to recognize that the Entente Powers forced upon the Germans a settlement dividing Turkey into “spheres of interest” in place of the projected German settlement based on international cooperation in the economic reconstruction of the area.

page 142:

• At the same time, Britain’s insular position de- deprived her monarchy of any need for a large professional, mercenary army such as the kings on the Continent used as the chief bulwark of royal absolutism. As a result, the kings of England were unable to prevent the landed gentry from taking over the control of the government in the period 1642-1690, and the kings of England became constitutional monarchs, Britain’s security behind her navy allowed this struggle to go to a decision without any important outside interference, and permitted a rivalry between monarch and aristocracy which would have been suicidal on the insecure grounds of continental Europe.

• In fact this class became the landed class in England just because they obtained control of the bar and the bench and were, thus, in a position to judge all disputes about real property in their own favor. Control of the courts and of the Parliament made it possible for this ruling group in England to override the rights of the peasants in land, to eject them from the land, to enclose the open fields of the medieval system, to deprive the cultivators of their manorial rights and thus to reduce them to the condition of landless rural laborers or of tenants. This advance of the enclosure movement in England made possible the Agricultural Revolution, greatly depopulated the rural areas of England (as described in The Deserted Village of Oliver Goldsmith), and provided a surplus population for the cities, the mercantile and naval marine, and for overseas colonization.

page 143:

• The landed oligarchy which arose in England differed from the landed aristocracy of continental Europe in the three points already mentioned: (1) it got control of the government; (2) it was not opposed by a professional army, a bureaucracy, or a professional judicial system, but, on the contrary, it took over the control of these adjuncts of government it- self, generally serving without pay, and making access to these positions difficult for outsiders by making such access expensive; and (3) it obtained complete control of the land as well as political, religious, and social control of the villages. In addition, the landed oligarchy of England was different from that on the Continent because it was not a nobility.

• As a consequence of all these differences, the landed upper class in England was open to the influx of new talent, new money, and new blood, while the continental nobility was deprived of these valuable acquisitions.

page 145:

• Until 1870 there was no professorship of fine arts at Oxford, but in that year, thanks to the Slade bequest, John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He hit Oxford like an earthquake, not so much because he talked about fine arts, but because he talked also about the empire and Eng- land’s downtrodden masses, and above all because he talked about all three of these things as moral issues. Until the end of the nineteenth century the poverty-stricken masses in the cities of England lived in want, ignorance, and crime very much as they have been described by Charles Dickens. Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged, ruling class. He told them that they were the possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper-class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the empire.

• Ruskin’s message had a sensational impact. His inaugural lecture was copied out in longhand by one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, who kept it with him for thirty years. Rhodes (1853-1902) feverishly exploited the diamond and goldfields of South Africa, rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896), contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and in South Africa, and sought to win a strip of British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and ultimately with a Cape-to-Cairo Railway. Rhodes inspired devoted support for his goals from others in South Africa and in England. With financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa as De Beer Consolidated Mines and to build up a great gold mining enterprise as Consolidated Gold Fields. In the middle 1890’s Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year (then about five million dollars) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes that he was usually overdrawn on his account. These purposes centered on his desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control. For this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition throughout the English-speaking world as Ruskin had wanted.

• Among Ruskin’s most devoted disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends including Arnold Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttelton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry) Birchenough. These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out hls ideas. A similar group of Cambridge men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord Esher), Sir John B. Seeley, Albert (Lord) Grey, and Ed- mund Garrett were also aroused by Ruskin’s message and devoted their lives to extension of the British Empire and uplift of England’s urban masses as two parts of one project which they called “extension of the English-speaking idea.” They were remarkably successful in these aims because England’s most sensational journalist William T. Stead (1849- 1912), an ardent social reformer and imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society of which nodes had been dreaming for sixteen years. In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a “Circle of Initiates”; while there was to be an outer circle known as the “Association of Helpers” (later organized by Alilner as the Round Table organization). Brett was invited to join this organization the same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his return from Egypt. Botn accepted with enthusiasm. Thus the central part of the secret society was established bv March 1891. It continued to function as a formal group, although the outer circle was, apparently, not organized until 1909-1913. Tnis group was able to get access to Rhodes’s money after his death in 1902 and also to the funds of loyal Rhodes supporters like Alfred Beit (1853-1906) and Sir Abe Bailey (1864-1940). With this backing they sought to extend and execute the ideals that Rhodes had obtained from Ruskin and Stead. Milner was the chief Rhodes Trustee and Parkin was Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Trust after 1902, while Gell and Birchenough, as well as others with similar ideas, became officials of the British South Africa Company. They were joined in their efforts by other Ruskinite friends of Stead’s like Lord Grey, Lord Esher, and Flora Shaw (later Lady Lugard). In 1890, by a stratagem too elaborate to describe here, Miss Shaw became Head of the Colonial Department of The Times while still remaining on the payroll of Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. In this post she played a major role in the next ten years in carrying into execution the imperial schemes of Cecil Rhodes, to whom Stead had introduced her in 1889.

• In the meantime, in 1884, acting under Ruskin’s inspiration, a group which included Arnold Toynbee, Milner, Gell, Grey, Seeley, and Michael Glazebrook founded the first “settlement house,” an organization by which educated, upper-class people could live in’ the slums in order to assist, instruct, and guide the poor, with particular emphasis on social welfare and adult education. The new enterprise, set up in East London with P. L. Gell as chairman, was named Toynbee Hall after Arnold Toynbee who died, aged 31, in 1883. This was the original model for the thousands of settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago, now found throughout the world, and was one of the seeds from which the modern movement for adult education and university extension grew.

• As governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, Milner recruited a group of young men, chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and international finance and became the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner’s Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organized semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries. They kept in touch with each other by personal correspondence and frequent visits, and through an influential quarterly magazine, The Round Table, founded in 1910 and largely supported by Sir Abe Bailey’s money. In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners of The Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919-1927. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of organizations, known as the Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries holding territory in the Pacific area, the units in each British dominion existing on an interlocking basis with the Round Table Group and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the same country. In Canada the nucleus of this group consisted of Milner’s undergraduate friends at Oxford (such as Arthur Glazebrook and George Parkin), while in South Africa and India the nucleus was made up of former members of Milner’s Kindergarten. These included (Sir) Patrick Duncan, B. K. Long, Richard Feetham, and (Sir) Dougal Malcolm in South Africa and (Sir) William Marris, James (Lord) Meston, and their friend Malcolm (Lord) Hailev in India. The groups in Australia and New Zealand had been recruited by Stead (through his magazine The Review of Reviews) as early as 1890-1893; by Parkin, at Milner instigation, in the period 1889-1910, and by Lionel Curtis, also at Milner’s request, in 1910-1919. The power and influence of this Rhodes-.Milner group in British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889, although not widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated. We might mention as an example that this group dominated The Times from 1890 to 1912 and has controlled it completely since 1912 (except for the years 1919-1922). Because The Times has been owned by the Astor family since 1922, this Rhodes-.Milner group was sometimes spoken of as the “Cliveden Set,” named after the Astor country house where they sometimes assembled. Numerous other papers and journals have been under the control or influence of this group since 1889. They have also established and influenced numerous university and other chairs of imperial affairs and international relations. Some of these are the Beit chairs at Oxford, the .Montague Burton chair at Oxford, the Rhodes chair at London, the Stevenson chair at Chatham House, the Wilson chair at Aberystwyth, and others, as well as such important sources of influence as Rhodes House at Oxford,

• These previous few paragraphs are a WEALTH of insight.

page 151:

• In spite of the terms of the Rhodes wills, Rhodes himself was not a racist. Nor was he a political democrat. He worked as easily and as closely with Jews, black natives, or Boers as he did with English. But he had a passionate belief in the value of a liberal education, and was attached to a restricted suffrage and even to a nonsecret ballot. In South Africa he was a staunch friend of the Dutch and of the blacks, found his chief political support among the Boers, until at least 1895, and wanted restrictions on natives put on an educational rather than on a color basis. These ideas have generally been held by his group since and have played an important role in British imperial history. His greatest weakness rested on the fact that his passionate attachment to his goals made him overly tolerant in regard to methods. He did not hesitate to use either bribery or force to attain his ends if he judged they would be effective. This weakness led to his greatest errors, the Jameson Raid of 1895 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, errors which were disastrous for the future of the empire he loved.

page 152:

• At this point in 1895, Rhodes made his plans to overthrow Kruger’s government by an uprising in Johannesburg, financed by himself and Beit, and led by his brother Frank Rhodes, Abe Bailey, and other supporters, followed by an invasion of the Transvaal bv a force led by Jameson from Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Flora Shaw used The Times to prepare public opinion in England, while Albert Grey and others negotiated with Conial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for the official support that was necessary. Unfortunately, when the revolt fizzled out in Johannesburg, Jameson raided anyway in an effort to revive it, and was easily captured by the Boers. The public officials involved denounced the plot, loudly proclaimed their surprise at the event, and were able to whitewash most of the participants in the subsequent parliamentary inquiry. A telegram from the German Kaiser to President Kruger of the Transvaal, congratulating him on his success “in preserving the independence of his country without the need to call for aid from his friends,” was built up by The Times into an example of brazen German interference in British affairs, and almost eclipsed Jameson’s aggression.

• More examples of using the media to spin events.

page 153:

• The Boer War (1890-1902) was one of the most important events in British imperial history. The ability of 40,000 Boer farmers to hold off ten times as many British for three years, inflicting; a series of defeats on them over that period, destroyed faith in British power. Although the Boer republics were defeated and annexed in 1902, Britain’s confidence was so shaken that it made a treaty with Japan in the same year providing that if either signer became engaged in war with two enemies in the Far East the other signer would come to the rescue.

page 154:

• as men like Jameson (1917), Botha (1919), Duncan (1943), Long (1943), and Smuts (1950) died off, they were not replaced by men of equal loyalty and ability, with the result that the Boer extremists under D. F. Malan came to power in 1948.

page 156:

• By 1950 most of the native Workers of Johannesburg lived in a distant suburb where 90,000 Africans were crowded onto 600 acres of shacks with no sanitation, with most no running water, and with such inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get a bus into the city to work. In this way the natives were steadily “detribalized," abandoning allegiance to their own customs and beliefs (including religion) without assuming the customs or beliefs of the whites.

• Because white’s grew lazy and could not compete with black labor…

page 157:

• Accordingly, the Milner-Round Table group worked out a scheme to reserve the tropical portions of Africa north of the Zambezi River for natives under such attractive conditions that the blacks south of that river would be enticed to migrate northward. As Curtis envisioned this plan, an international state or administrative body “would take over the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese dependencies in tropical Africa…. Its policy would be to found north of the Zambezi a Negro Dominion in which Blacks could own land, enter professions, and stand on a footing of equality with Whites. The inevitable consequence would be that Black laborers south of the Zambezi would rapidly emigrate from South Africa and leave South African Whites to do their own drudgery which would be the salvation of the Whites." Although this project has not been achieved, it provides the key to Britain’s native central-African policies from 1917 onward. For example, in 1937- 1939 Britain made many vain efforts to negotiate a settlement of Germany’s colonial claims under which Germany would renounce forever its claims on Tanganyika and be allowed to participate as a member of an international administration of all tropical Africa (including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola as well as British and French territory) as a single unit in which native rights would be paramount.

page 158:

• Tribal ways were curtailed and replaced by working in the mines for a handful of years and using the savings to buy cattle and start a family. Instead of tribal war, the mines proved a way to become a man as the mines were deadly. This reminds me of M. Mead’s UNESCO Cultural Patterns and Technical Change.

page 159:

• As soon as South Africa was united in 1910, the Kindergarten returned to London to try to federate the whole empire by the same methods. They were in a hurry to achieve this before the war with Germany which they believed to be approaching. With Abe Baile)’ money they founded The Round Table under Kerr’s (Lothian’s) editor- ship, met in formal conclaves presided over by Milner to decide the fate of the empire, …

• This involved changing the name “British Empire to “Commonwealth of Nations," as in the title of Curtis’s book of 1916 giving the chief dependencies, including India and Ireland, their complete independence (but gradually and by free gift rather than under duress), working to bring the United States more closely into this same orientation, and seeking to solidify the intangible links of sentiment by propaganda among financial, educational, and political leaders in each country.

page 164:

• …writings of Coupland, Hailey, Curtis, Grigg, Amery, and Lothian, all Round Tablers. In 1938 Lord Hailey edited a gigantic volume of 1,837 pages called An African Survey. This work was first suggested by Smuts at Rhodes House, Oxford, in 1929, had a foreword by Lothian, and an editorial board of Lothian, Hailey, Coupland, Curtis, and others. It remains the greatest single book on modern Africa.

page 166:

• …the percentage of adult males working off the reservations increased from about 35 percent in 1925 to over 80 percent in 1940. This had very deleterious effects on tribal life, family life, native morality, and family discipline, although it seems to have had beneficial effects on native health and general education.

• Anthropology strikes again…

page 169:

• The population [of India], which increased from 284 million in 1901 to 389 million in 1941 and reached 530 million in 1961,…

page 170:

• For most peoples of India, caste was the most important fact of life, submerging their individuality into a group from which they could never escape, and regulating all their activities from birth to death.

• Seems much like the upper/middle/lower class seen today. Of course Huxley promoted this Indian way extensively.

page 171:

• The modern postal, telegraphic, and railroad systems all began in 1854. The first grew to such dimensions that by the outbreak of war in 1939 it handled over a billion pieces of mail and forty million rupees in money orders each year.

• From 1925 onward, these highways were used increasingly by passenger buses, crowded and ramshackle in many cases, but steadily breaking down the isolation of the villages.

page 176:

• to the ultimate goal of complete obliteration of personality (Nirvana) by ultimate mergence in the soul of the universe {Brahma). This release (moksha) from the endless cycle of existence could be achieved only by the suppression of all desire, of all individuality, and of all will to live.

• Moksha medicine in Huxley’s The Island was magic mushrooms.

page 177:

• …the idea that man was a part of nature and brother to the beasts,…

page 178:

• All these forces came to a head in 1904-1907 when the Congress, for the first time, demanded self-government within the empire for India and approved the use of economic pressures (boycott) against Britain.

page 182:

• Most of the Indians stayed [in Natal], after their contracts were fulfilled, and were so industrious and intelligent that they began to rise very rapidly in an economic sense, especially in the retail trades. The whites, who were often indolent, resented competition from dark-skinned persons and were generally indignant Indian economic success. As Lionel Curtis told Gandhi in the Transvaal in 1903, “It is not the vices of Indians that Europeans in this country fear but their virtues."

page 183:

• Gandhi’s methods were really derived from his own Hindu tradition, but certain elements in this tradition had been reinforced by reading Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and the Sermon on the Mount.

page 204:

• From this point of view the history of China in the twentieth century presents five phases, as follows:

1. The collapse of the imperial regime, to 1911 2. The failure of the Republic,
1911-1920 3. The struggle with warlordism, 1920-1941 a. Efforts to obtain
support abroad, 1920-1927 b. Efforts to obtain support from the propertied
groups, 1927-1941 4. The struggle with Japan, 1931-1945 5. The authoritarian
triumph, 1945-

page 207:

• The real reason for these differences probably rests in the ideological factor - that the Japanese, even the vigorous Westernizers, retained the older Japanese point of view and, as a consequence, were allied with the ol"Japanese political, economic, and social structure rather than opposition to it (as, for example, Westernizers were in India, in China, or in Turkey). The ability of the Japanese to westernize without going into opposition to the basic core of the older system gave a degree of discipline and a sense of unquestioning direction to their lives which allowed Japan to achieve a phenomenal amount of westernization without weakening the older structure or without disrupting it.

page 216:

page 219:

• In 1914 it was revealed that several high admirals had accepted bribes from foreign munitions firms such as German Siemens and British Vickers.

page 220:

• It Would be difficult to exaggerate the degree of concentration of power in Japan in the period covered by this chapter.

· Chapter 5: The First World War 1914-1918

page 226:

• The unification of Germany in the decade before 1871 ended a balance of power in Europe which had existed for 250 or even 300 years.

page 227:

• Fourteen German battleships were launched between 1900 and 1905. As a consequence of these activities Britain joined the anti-German coalition by 1907, the Powers of Europe became divided into two antagonistic coalitions, and a series of crisis began which led, step by step, to the catastrophe of 1914.

page 230:

• One influence which worked to create and strengthen the Triple Entente [England, France, Russia] was that of the international banking fraternity. These were largly excluded from the German economic development, but had growing links with France and Russia. Prosperous enterprises like the Suez Canal Company, the Rothschild copper enterprise, Rio Tinto, in Spain, and many newer joint activities in Morocco created numerous unobtrusive links which both preceded and strengthened the Triple Entente.

page 240:

• Since the German military timetable for a two-front war provided that France must be defeated before Russian mobilization was completed, France and Germany both ordered mobilization on August 1st, and Germany declared war on Russia. As the German armies began to pour westward, Germany declared war on France (August 3rd) and Belgium (August 4th).

• On August 4th Britain declared war on Germany, emphasizing the iniquity of her attack on Belgium, although in the Cabinet meeting of July 29th it had been agreed that such an attack would not legally obligate Britain to go to war. Although this issue was spread among the people, and endless* discussions ensued about Britain’s obligation to defend Belgian neutrality under the Treaty of 1839, those who made the decision saw clearly that the real reason for war was that Britain could not allow Germany to defeat France.

page 249:

• Looking back on the military history of the First World War, it is clear that the whole war was a siege operation against Germany.

page 252:

• The change from limited wars with limited objectives fought with mercenary troops to unlimited wars of economic attrition with unlimited objectives fought with national armies had far-reaching consequences,

• All these distinctions [between combatant and non-combatant] broke down in 1914-1915, with the result that both sides indulged in wholesale violations of existing international law. Probably on the whole these violations were more extensive (although less widely publicized) on the part of the Entente than on the part of the Central Powers. The reasons for this were that the Germans still maintained the older traditions of a professional army, and their position, both as an invader and as a “Central Power” with limited manpower and economic resources, made it to their advantage to maintain the distinctions between combatant and noncombatant and between belligerent and neutral.

page 253:

• When Belgian civilians shot at German soldiers, the latter took civilian hostages and practiced reprisals on civilians. These German actions were publicized throughout the world by the British propaganda machine as “atrocities” and violations of international law (which they were), while the Belgian civilian snipers were excused as loyal patriots (although their actions were even more clearly violations of international law and, as such, justified severe German reactions). These “atrocities” were used by the British to justify their own violations of international law.

• Britain blockaded Scotland to Iceland with mines. The Germans responded with submarines in the English channel. The British would fly under neutral flags to avoid the Germans while seizing German transport goods. Eventually the Germans started sinking any British ship. Even though the mines and illegal seizing of goods was essentially the same, The USA and Britain condemned the Germans via their propaganda machines.

page 265:

• The fact that the German submarines were acting in retaliation for the illegal British blockade of the continent of Europe and British violations of international law and neutral rights on the high seas, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States and the Anglophilism of its influential classes made it impossible for the average American to see world events except through the spectacles made by British propaganda; the fact that Americans had lent the Entente billions of dollars which would be jeopardized by a German victory, the fact that the enormous Entente purchases of war materiel had created a boom of prosperity and inflation which would collapse the very day that the Entente collapsed— …

• American protests reached a peak when the Lusitania was sunk in this way nine miles off the English coast on May 7, 1915. The Lusitania was a British merchant vessel “constructed with Government funds as [an] auxiliary cruiser, . . . expressly included in the navy list published by the British Admiralty,” with “bases laid for mounting guns of six-inch caliber,” carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack German submarines whenever possible. Seven hundred and eighty-five of 1,257 Passengers, including 128 of 197 Americans, lost their lives. The incompetence of the acting captain contributed to the heavy loss, as did also a mysterious “second explosion” after the German torpedo struck. The vessel, which had been declared “unsinkable,” went down in eighteen minutes. The captain was on a course he had orders to avoid; he was running at reduced speed; he had an inexperienced crew; the portholes had been left open; the lifeboats had not been swung out; and no lifeboat drills had been held.

page 266:

• The propaganda agencies of the Entente Powers made full use of the occasion. The Times of London announced that “four-fifths of her passengers were citizens of the United States” (the actual proportion was 15-6 percent); the British manufactured and distributed a medal which they pretended had been awarded to the submarine crew by the German government; a French paper published a picture of the crowds in Berlin at the outbreak of war in 1914 as a picture of Germans “rejoicing” at news of the sinking of the Lusitania.

page 271:

• There were profound modifications in finance, in economic life, in social relations, in intellectual outlook, and in emotional patterns. Nevertheless, two facts should be recognized. The war brought nothing really new into the world; rather it sped up processes of change which had been going on for a considerable period and would have continued anyway, with the result that changes which would have taken place over a period of thirty or even fifty years m peacetime were brought about in five years during the war. Also, the changes were much greater in objective facts and in the organization of society than they were in men’s ideas of these facts or organization. It was as if the changes were too rapid for men’s minds to accept them, or, what is more likely, that men, seeing the great changes which were occurring on all sides, recognized them, but assumed that they were merely temporary wartime aberrations, and that, when peace came, they would pass away and everyone could go back to the slow, pleasant world of 1913.

• Again reminded of Mead’s Cultural Patterns and Technical Change. Was the was a way to usher in a “New World Order”?

page 272:

• …financial resources of all states would be exhausted in six months. By “financial resources” they meant the gold reserves of the various nations. These were clearly limited; all the Great Powers were on the gold standard under which bank notes and paper money could be converted into gold on demand. However, each country suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of war. This removed the automatic limitation on the supply of paper money. Then each country proceeded to pay for the War by borrowing from the banks.

page 275:

• The high wages and shortage of labor brought into the labor market many persons who would not have been in it in peacetime, such as old persons, youths, clergy , and, above all, women. This flow of women from homes into factories or other services had the most profound effects on social life and modes of living, revolutionizing the relations of the sexes, bringing women up to a level of social, legal, and political equality closer than previously to that of men, obtaining for them the right to vote in some countries, the right to own or dispose of property in other more backward ones, changing the appearance and costume of women by such innovations as shorter skirts, shorter hair, less frills, and generally a drastic reduction in the amount of clothing they wore.

page 278:

• Parallel with the censorship Was the War Propaganda Bureau under Sir Charles Masterman, which had an American Bureau of Information under Sir Gilbert Parker Wellington House. This last agency was able to control almost all information going to the American press, and by 1916 was acting as an international news service itself, distributing European news to about 35 American papers which had no foreign reporters of their own.

• In general manufacture of outright lies by propaganda agencies was infrequent, and the desired picture of the enemy was built up by a process selection and distortion of evidence …

· Chapter 6: The Versailles System and the Return to “Normalcy” 1919-1929

page 283:

• The peoples of the victorious nations had taken to heart their war* time propaganda about the rights of small nations, making the world safe for democracy, and putting an end both to power politics and to secret diplomacy. These ideals had been given concrete form in Wilsons Fourteen Points. Whether the defeated Powers felt the same enthusiasm for these high ideals is subject to dispute, but they had been promised, on November 5, 1918, that the peace settlements would be negotiated and would be based on the Fourteen Points. When it became clear that the settlements were to be imposed rather than negotiated, that the Four- teen Points had been lost in the confusion, and that the terms of the settlements had been reached by a process of secret negotiations from which the small nations had been excluded and in which power politic played a much larger role than the safety of democracy, there was a revulsion of feeling against the treaties.

page 286:

• At all of these meetings, as at the Peace Conference itself, the political leaders Were assisted by groups of experts and interested persons, sometimes self~appointed. Many of these “experts” were members or associates of the international-banking fraternity. At the Paris Peace Conference the experts numbered thousands and were organized into official staffs by most countries, even before the war ended. These experts were of the greatest importance. They were formed into committees at Paris and given problem after problem, especially boundary problems, usually without any indication as to what principles should guide their decisions. The importance of these committees of experts can be seen in the fact that in every case but one where a committee of experts submitted a unanimous report, the Supreme Council accepted its recommendation and incorporated it in the treaty.

page 290:

• The Greeks and Italians, with Allied support, invaded Turkey and attempted to force the treaty on the Nationalists, but they were much weakened by dissension behind the facade of Entente solidarity. The French believed that greater economic concessions could be obtained from the Kemalist government, While the British felt that richer prospects were to be obtained from the Sultan. In particular, the French were prepared to support the claims of Standard Oil to such concessions, while the British were prepared to support Royal Dutch Shell.

page 291:

• The Treaty of Sevres, already in tatters, had to be discard A new conference at Lausanne in November 1922 produced a moderate and negotiated treaty which was signed by the Kemalist government on July 24, 1923. This act ended, in a formal way, the First World War.

page 296:

• The efforts of the Americans to establish some rational basis for reparations, either by an engineering survey of the actual damage to be repaired or an economic survey of Germany’s capacity to pay reparations, were shunted aside, largely because of French objections.

page 297:

• The British delegation was sharply divided. The chief British financial delegates, Lords Cunliffe and Sumner, were so astronomically unrealistic in their estimates of Germany’s ability to pay that they were called the “heavenly twins,” while many younger members of the delegate led by John Maynard (later Lord) Keynes, either saw important economic limits on Germany’s ability to pay or felt that a policy of fellowship and fraternity should incline Britain toward a low estimate of Germany’s obligations. Feeling was so high on this issue that it proved impossible to set an exact figure for Germany’s reparations in the treaty itself. Instead a compromise, originally suggested by the American John Foster Dulles, was adopted.

page 298:

• France, on the other hand, had not obtained the one thing it wanted: security.

page 305:

• The Covenant [in the League of Nations], especially the critical articles 10-16, had been worded by a skillful British lawyer, Cecil Hurst, who filled it with 1oopholes cleverly concealed under a mass of impressive verbiage, so no state’s freedom of action was vitally restricted by the document.

page 308:

• Thus, the Locarno Pacts,[British drawn up plans that gave France some security, but “allowed” Germany to attack its Easter neighbors] which were presented at the time throughout the English-speaking world as a sensational contribution to the peace and stability of Europe, really formed the background for the events of 1938 when Czechoslovakia was destroyed at Munich.

• …when the guarantee of Locarno became due in March 1936 Britain dishonored its agreement, the Rhine was remilitarized, and the way was opened for Germany to move eastward.

page 313:

page 315:

• This agreement, signed in July 1928, was revealed by pro-American employees of the French Foreign Ministry to William Randolph Hearst and published in his newspapers within two months of signature. France deported the Hearst reporter in Paris at once, deport Hearst himself on his next visit to France in 1930, and published the text of the agreement with Britain (October 1928).

page 317:

• …the disarmament of land and air forces can be divided into four periods: (a) a period of direct action, 1919-1922 (b) a period of indirect action, 1922-1926; (c) a new period of direct action, 1926-1934; and (d) a period of rearmament, 1934—1939.

page 320:

page 321:

• Germans were presented with the total reparations bill of 132,000 million marks. Under pressure of another ultimatum, Germany accepted this bill and gave the victors bonds of indebtedness to this amount. Of these, 82 billions were set aside and forgotten. Germany was to pay on the other 50 billion at a rate of 2.5 billion a year in interest and 0.5 billion a year to reduce the total debt.

• To do this German would have to import less and export more, but Germans did not want to import less, reducing standards of living, nor did other countries want increased German exports.

• Thus it can be said that the Germans were unwilling to pay reparations, and the creditors were unwilling to accept payment in the only way in which payments could honestly made, that is, by accepting German goods and services.

page 322:

• This lead to inflation via borrowing from the Reichsbank.

• The inflation was not injurious to the influential groups in German society, although it was generally ruinous to the middle classes, and thus encouraged extremist elements. Those groups whose property was in real wealth, either land or in industrial plant, were benefited by the inflation which increased the value of their properties and wiped away their debts (chiefly mortgages and industrial bonds).

• When German wasn’t paying, in 1923, France occupied the Ruhr. Germany declared a general strike in the area. Government supported this by printing more money. During the strike about 400 people were murdered, mostly German on German murders.

page 323:

• The Dawes Plan, which was largely a J.P. Morgan production, was drawn up by an international committee of financial experts presided over by the American banker Charles G. Dawes. It was concerned only with Germany’s ability to pay, and decided that this would reach a rate of 2.5 billion marks a year after four years of reconstruction. During the first four years Germany would be given a loan of $800 million, and would pay a total of only 5.17 billion marks in reparations. This plan did not supersede the German reparations obligation as established in 1921, and the difference between the Dawes payments and the payments due on the London Schedule were added to the total reparations debt. Thus Germany paid reparations for five years under the Dawes Plan (1924-1929) and owed more at the end than it had owed at the beginning.

• When the mark tended to fall, foreign agents would stop selling marks. This allowed Germany to act wildly in borrowing without the “natural” balance of free international exchange.

• It is worthy to note that this system was set up by the international bankers and that the subsequent lending of other people’s money to Germany was very profitable to these bankers.

page 324:

• In the period 1924-1931, Germany paid 10.5 billion marks in reparations but borrowed abroad a total of 18.6 billion marks. Nothing was settled by all this, but the international bankers sat in heaven, under a rain of fees and commissions.

page 325:

• the Young Plan, named after the America Owen D. Young (a Morgan agent), who served as chairman of the committee which drew up the new agreements (February to June 1929).

• The agreement with Germany provided for reparations to be paid for 59 years at rates rising from 1.7 billion marks in 1931 to a peak of 2.4 billion marks in 1966 and then declining to less than a billion marks in 1988. The earmarked sources of funds in Germany were abolished except for 660 million marks a year which could be “commercialized,” and all protection of Germany’s foreign-exchange position was ended by placing responsibility for transferring reparations from marks to foreign currencies squarely on Germany. To assist in this task a new private bank called the Bank for International Settlements was established in Switzerland at Basle. Owned by the chief central banks of the world and holding accounts for each of them, the Bank for International Settlements was to serve as “a Central Bankers’ Bank” and allow international payments to be made by merely shifting credits from one country’s account to another on the books of the bank.

• …by 1931 German and other had begun a “flight from the mark” selling this currency for other monies in which they had greater confidence. This created a great drain on the German gold reserves.

page 326:

• On May 8, 1931, the largest Austrian bank, the Credit-Anstalt (a Rothschild institution), with extensive interests, almost control, in 70 percent of Austria’s industry, announced that it had lost 140 million schillings (about $20 million). The true loss was over a billion schillings, and the bank had really been insolvent for years. The Rothschilds and the Austrian government gave the Credit-Anstalt 160 million to cover the loss, but public confidence had been destroyed. A run began on the bank. To meet this run the Austrian banks called in all the funds they had in German banks. The German banks began to collapse.

• These latter began to call in all their funds in London. The London banks began to fall, and gold flowed outward. On September 21st England was forced off the gold standard.

• “Interesting” that when banks and nations borrow too much they can simply change the rules of commerce. That is, actually paying for things. Also interesting how much attention is give to the “barbarous” relic of gold.

• When Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who was in Europe, reported to President Hoover that unless relief was given to German immediately on her public obligations, the whole financial system of the country would collapse with very great losses to holders of private claims against Germany, the President suggested a moratorium on intergovernmental debts for one year.

· Chapter 7: Finance, Commercial Policy, and Business Activity, 1897-1947

page 330:

• Collective security was destroyed by the world economic depression more than by any other single cause.

page 331:

• The outbreak of war on August 4, 1914, found the British banking system insolvent in the sense that its funds, created by the banking system for profit and rented out to the economic system to permit it to operate, could not be covered by the existing volume of gold reserves or by collateral which could be liquidated rapidly. Accordingly, the bankers secretly devised a scheme by which their obligations could be met by fiat money (so-called Treasury Notes), but, as soon as that crisis was over, they then insisted that the government must pay for the war without recourse to fiat money (which was always damned by bankers as immoral), but by taxation and by borrowing at high interest rates from bankers.

page 332:

• …the proper way to pay for the war was by a combination of bank loans with taxation of consumption.

page 333:

• While prices in most countries rose 200 to 300 percent and public debts rose 1,000 percent, the financial leaders tried to keep up the pretense that the money of each country was as valuable as it had ever been and that as soon as the war was ended the situation existing in 1914 would be restored. For this reason they did not openly abandon the gold standard. Instead, they suspended certain attributes of the gold standard and emphasized the other attributes which they tried to maintain. In most countries, payments in gold and export of gold were suspended, but every effort was made to keep gold reserves up to a respectable percentage of notes, and exchanges were controlled to keep them as near parity as possible. These attributes were achieved in some cases by deceptive methods. In Britain, for example, the gold reserve against notes fell from 52 percent to 18 percent in the month July-August 1914; then the situation was concealed, partly by moving assets of local banks into the Bank of England and using them as reserves for both partly by issuing a new kind of notes (called Currency Notes) which had no real reserve and little gold backing. In the United State the percentage of reserves required by law in commercial banks was reduced in 1914, and the reserve requirements both for notes and deposits were cut in June 1917; a new system of “depositary banks” was setup Which required no reserves against government deposits created in them in return for government bonds. Such efforts were made in all countries, but everywhere the ratio of gold reserves to notes fell drastically during the war: in France from 60 percent to 11 percent; in Germany from 59 percent to 10 percent; in Russia from 98 percent to 2 percent; in Italy from 60 percent to 13 percent; in Britain from 52 percent to 32 percent.

page 334:

• In the defeated and revolutionary countries (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Germany), the inflation went so far that the former monetary units became valueless, and ceased to exist. In a second group of countries (like France, Belgium, and Italy), the value of the monetary unit was so reduced that it became a different thing, although the same name was still used. In a third group of countries (Britain, United States, and Japan), the situation was kept under control.

• As far as Europe was concerned, the intensity of the inflation increased as on moved geographically from west to east. Of the three groups of countries above, the second (moderate inflation) group was the most fortunate. In the first (extreme inflation) group the inflation wiped out all public debts, all savings, and all claims on wealth, since the monetary unit became valueless. In the moderate-inflation group, the burden of the public debt was reduced, and private debts and savings were reduced by the same proportion. In the United States and Britain the effort to fight inflation took the form of a deliberate movement toward deflation. This preserved savings but increased the burden of the public debt and gave economic depression.

page 337:

• The only sensible solution to this problem of excessive[from industrialization and after the increased war production] productive capacity would have been a substantial rise in domestic standards of living, but this would have required a fundamental reapportionment of the national income so that claims to the product of the excess capacity would go to those masses eager to consume rather than continue to go to the minority desiring to save. Such a reform was rejected by the ruling groups in both “advanced” and “backward” countries, so that this solution was reached only to a relatively small degree in a relatively few countries (chiefly the United States and Germany in the period 1925-1929).

page 338:

• The chief result was a complete maldistribution of gold, a condition which became acute after 1918 and which by 1933 had forced most countries off the gold standard.

• Cui bono? Where was it maldistributed to?

page 339:

• …the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland…

• Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. In each country the power of the central bank rested largely on its control of credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and of gold flows.

page 340:

• It [BIS]was intended to be the world cartel of ever growing national financial powers by assembling the nominal heads of these national financial centers.

• The commander in chief of the world system of banking control was Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, who was built up by the private bankers to a position where he was regarded as an oracle in all matters of government and business.

• In 1852, Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer and later prime minister, declared, “The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in matters of Finance, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned."

• In January, 1924, Reginald McKenna, who had been chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915-1916, as chairman of the board of the Midland Bank told its stockholders: “I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money. . . . And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." In that same year, Sir Drummond Fraser, vice- president of the Institute of Bankers, stated, “The Governor of the Bank of England must be the autocrat who dictates the terms upon which alone the Government can obtain borrowed money." On September 26, 1921, The Financial Times wrote , “Half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of government by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills." Vincent Vickers, who had been the director of the bank for nine years, said, “Since 1919 the monetary policy of the Government has been the policy of the Bank of England and the policy of the Bank of England has been the policy of Mr. Montagu Norman.” On November 11, 1927, the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Norman “the currency dictator of Europe.” This fact was admitted by Mr. Norman himself before the court of the bank on March 21, 1930, and before the Macmillan Committee five days later.

• Montagu Norman’s position may be gathered from the fact that his predecessors in the governorship, almost a hundred of them, had served two-year terms, increased rarely, in times of crisis, to three or even four years. But Norman held the position for twenty-four years (1920-1944), during which he became the chief architect of the liquidation of Britain’s global preeminence.

• These pages are important to the gold standard. It seems the banks WANTED the gold standard and a return to pre-1914 economic ways that they were used to and powerful in.

page 343:

• …certain financial relationships would require adjustment before the gold standard could restored. There were three chief relationships involved. These were (1) the problem of inflation, or the relationship between money and goods; (2) the problem of public debts, or the relationship between governmental income and expenditure; and (3) the problem of price parities, or the relationship between price levels of different countries That these three problems existed was evidence of a fundamental disequilibrium between real wealth and claims on wealth, caused by a relative decrease in the former and increase in the latter.

page 347:

• In the long run, the situation had its drawbacks, since the fact that costs fell faster than prices and that prices of agricultural products and raw materials fell faster than prices of industrial products meant that in the long run the community would not have sufficient purchasing power to buy the products of the industrial organization- This problem was postponed for a considerable period by the application of easy credit and installment selling to the domestic market and by the extension to foreign countries of huge loans made it possible for these countries to buy the products of American industry without sending their own goods into the American market in return. Thus, from a most unusual group of circumstances, the United States obtained an unusual boom of prosperity. These circumstances were, however, in many ways a postponement of difficulties rather than a solution of them…

• In Britain, stabilization Mas reached by orthodox paths—that is, taxation as a cure for public debts and deflation as a cure for inflation.

• The results were horrible. Business activity fell drastically, and unemployment rose to well over a million and a half.

• The outcome was a great wave of strikes and industrial unrest.

page 348:

• The showdown on the deflationary policy came in the General Strike of 1926. The unions lost the strike—that is, they could not prevent the policy of deflation—but they made it impossible for the government to continue the reduction of costs to the extent necessary to restore business profits and the export trade,

page 350:

• In the whole period, about fifty countries stabilized their currencies on the gold standard. But because of the quantity of gold necessary to maintain the customary reserve ratios (that is the pre-1914 ratios) at the higher prices generally prevailing during the period of stabilization, no important country was able to go back on the gold standard as the term was understood in 1914. The chief change was the use of the “gold exchange standard” or the “gold bullion standard” in place of the old gold standard. Under the gold exchange standard, foreign exchange of gold standard countries could be used as reserves against notes or deposits in place of reserves in gold. In this way, the world’s limited supplies of gold could be used to support a much greater volume of fictitious wealth in the world as a whole since the same quantity of gold could act as bullion reserve for one country and as gold exchange reserve for another.

page 351:

• This would indicate that even in its most superficial aspects the international gold standard of 1914 was not reestablished by 1930. The legal provisions were different; the financial necessities and practices were quite different; the profound underlying economic and commercial conditions were entirely different, and becoming more so. Yet financiers, businessmen, and politicians tried to pretend to themselves and to the public that they had restored the financial system of 1914. They had created a facade of cardboard and tinsel which had a vague resemblance to the old system, and they hoped that, if they pretended vigorously enough, they could change this facade into the lost reality for which they yearned.

• Or was it a plan to gain even more control by convincing the people this new system worked long enough for the people to forget the old system?

• …financial capitalism had little interest in goods at all, but was concerned entirely with claims on wealth—stocks, bonds, mortgages,insurance, deposits, proxies, interest rates, and such.

• Corporations were built upon corporations in the form of holding companies,…

• …make killings out of the issuing of such securities, they could also make killings out of the bankruptcy of such corporations, through the fees and commissions of reorganization. A very pleasant cycle of flotation, bankruptcy, flotation, bankruptcy began to be practiced by these financial capitalists. The more excessive the notation, the greater the profits, and the more immediate the bankruptcy. The more frequent the bankruptcy, the greater the profits of reorganization and the sooner the opportunity of another excessive flotation with its accompanying profits.

page 352:

• The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and a use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups. This concentration of power, however, could be achieved only by using methods which planted the seeds which grew into monopoly capitalism.

• Again this seems to have been the plan, not some accidental side effect.

page 354:

• The chief symptom of the unsoundness of the underlying economic reality—the steady fall in prices was concealed in the later period (1925-1929) by a steady rise in security prices (which was erroneously regarded as a good sign) and by the excessive lending abroad of the United States (which amounted to almost 10 billion dollars in the period 1920-1931, bringing our total foreign investment to almost 27 billion dollars by the end of 1930). The foreign lending of the United States was the chief reason why the maladjusted economic conditions could be kept concealed for so many years. Before the World War, the United States had been a debtor nation and, to pay these debts, had developed an exporting economy. The combination of debtor and exporter is a feasible one. The war made the United States a creditor nation and also made her a greater exporter than ever by building up her acreage of cotton and wheat and her capacity to produce ships, steel, textiles, and so on. The resulting combination of creditor and exporter was not feasible.

page 357:

• When the French gold purchases became noticeable in 1928, the Federal Reserve Bank adopted open market operations to counterbalance them, buying securities to a value equal to the French purchases of gold. As a result there was no reduction in money in the United States. This money, however, was going increasingly into stock-market speculation rather than into production of real wealth.

page 361:

• [in Britain] To restore confidence among the wealthy (who were causing the panic) an effort was made to balance the budget by cutting public expenditures drastically. This, by reducing purchasing power, had injurious effects on business activity and increased unrest among the masses of the people. Mutiny broke out in the British fleet in protest against pay cuts. Various physical and extralegal restrictions were placed on export of gold (such as issuing gold bars of a low purity unacceptable to the Bank of France). The outflow of gold could not be stopped. It amounted to £200 million in two months. On September 18th New York and Paris refused further credits to the British Treasury, and three days later the gold standard was suspended.

page 362:

• As a result of the British abandonment of the gold standard the central core of the world’s financial system was disrupted. This core, which in 1914 was exclusively in London, in 1931 was divided among London, New York, and Paris. London’s share depended on financial skills and old habits; New York’s share depended on her position as the world’s great creditor; Paris’s share depended on a combination of a creditor position with an undervalued currency which attracted gold. From 1927 to 1931, these three had controlled the world’s financial system with payments flowing in to the three, credits flowing out, and stable exchanges between them. The events of September 1931 broke up this triangle.

page 363:

• The pound sterling appreciated in respect to the dollar from 3.27 on December 1, 1931, to 3.80 on March 31, 1932. To control this, the government, in May 1932, set up the Exchange Equalize Account with capital of £175 million. This fund was to be used to stabilize the exchange rates by buying and selling foreign exchange against the trend of the market. In this way, the old automatic regulation by the market of the internal credit structure through the international flow of funds was broken. Control of the credit structure was left to the Bank of England, while control of the exchanges went to the Exchange Equalization Fund.

page 366:

• The World Economic Conference, as Professor William Adams Brown wrote, broke up on four great negatives: the countries which had adopted trade restrictions refused to abandon them without currency stabilization; the countries on the gold standard refused to accept price increases as a road to recovery because of fear of inflation; Great Britain wanted price increases but refused to permit an unbalanced budget or a public works program; and the United States, which was seeking recovery through inflation and public works, refused to hamper the program by currency stabilization.

page 367:

• The conflicts between economic nationalisms were based on the fact that, viewed superficially the crisis took entirely different forms in the chief countries of the world. In the United States, the most obvious manifestation of the crisis was low prices, which by 1933 made the whole banking system insolvent. High prices became, thus, for the United States, the chief goal of debtors and creditors alike. In Britain, the most obvious manifestation of the crisis was the outflow of gold which jeopardized the gold standard. A rectification of the international balance of payments rather than a rise in prices thus became the chief immediate aim of British policy. In France, the crisis appeared chiefly as an unbalanced internal budget.

• Low prices are a terrible thing… if you “make” money on loans and interest…

• It is absolutely sickening how all these central planners engineered the whole thing - war and depression. Let business fail and people go broke, there will be winners and loses and let the people of your nation take care of themselves! It is blatantly obvious this was all done for the advantage of the moneyed class.

page 369:

• Eventually, all members of the gold bloc had to abandon gold to some extent because of the pressure from the dollar.

• This determination of France to defend the franc is to be explained by the fact that the great mass of Frenchmen were creditors in some way or other, and having lost four-fifths of their savings in the inflation of 1914-1926 did not view with any pleasure another dose of the same medicine.

• How were a “great mass of Frenchmen” creditors? To whom? Was the average bloke in 1920 a creditor?

page 370:

• France starts its Exchange Stabilization Fund the same way the US and UK did, revaluing gold. Again total centralized planning.

page 371:

• …devaluation law the government took punitive measures against gold hoarders and speculators, seeking to prevent them from reaping the profits they would obtain by converting their gold back into francs at the new value.

• That’s right use laws to punish people for not having faith in your paper. Same as US making private holdings of gold illegal.

• …the franc passed through a series of depreciations and partial devaluations which benefited no one except the speculators and left France for years torn by industrial unrest and class struggles. Unable to arm or give foreign affairs the attention they needed, the government was subjected to systematic blackmail by the well-to-do of the country because of the ability of these persons to prevent social reform, public spending, arming, or any policy of decision by selling francs.

• Surprise! The moneyed class runs the whole show!

page 372:

• Each country of the former gold bloc set up a stabilization fund to control exchange rates, and joined the Tripartite currency agreement of September 1963.

• The historical importance of the banker-engendered deflationary crisis of 1927-1940 can hardly be overestimated.

• …became a chief cause of World War II.

• The controversy between the bankers and the theorists of unorthodox finance arose over the proper way to deal with an economic depression, We shall analyze this problem later, but here we should say that the bankers’ formula for treating a depression was by clinging to the gold standard, by rising interest rates and seeking deflation, and by insisting on a reduction of public spending, a fiscal surplus, or at least a balanced budget. These ideas were rejected totally, on a point-by-point basis, by unorthodox economists (somewhat mistakenly called “Keynesian”).

• This makes my head spin. I am agreeing with the bankers. Maybe it was more a fight between banking factions, but this orthodox thinking sounds pretty great to me. 50+ years after this was published, I think Keynesian is the right thing to call them, given the dominance of Modern Monetary Theory.

page 374:

• Goes on about Kreuger committing fraud left and right, then calls his suicide the death of financial capitalism. Are you kidding me?! This guy was a FRAUD, not a financial capitalist.

page 377:

• In fact, to the surprise of many, the exact opposite resulted - as armaments grew, the standard of living improved because of the fact that the chief obstacle in the way of an improving standard of living - that is, lack of consumers* purchasing power, was remedied by the fact that armament manufacture supplied such purchasing power in the market without turning into the market any equivalent in goods which would use up purchasing power.

page 378:

• The interest of the United States in removing the restriction on world trade was to be found in the fact that she had productive capacity beyond that necessary to satisfy articulate domestic demand in almost every field of economic activity. As a result she had to export or find her hands full of surplus goods.

• Why not reduce hours worked once domestic needs/desires are satiated?

page 386:

• [After WW2] …“pluralist economy” because it operates from the shifting alignments of a number of organized interest blocs, such as labor, farmers, heavy industry, consumers, financial groups, and, above all, government.

· Chapter 8: International Socialism and the Soviet Challenge

page 396:

• The real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or water power, to production. This process increased man’s ability to make goods, and did so to an amazing degree. But mass production could exist only if it were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living. Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a de- ceasing demand for hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who are managers rather than laborers. And, in the longer run, this process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners and would have to be run by technically trained managers.

page 401:

• They [Bolsheviks] had no illusions about their position in Russia at the end of 1917. They knew that they formed an infinitesimal group that vast country and that they had been able to seize power because they were a decisive and ruthless minority among a great mass of persons who had been neutralized by propaganda.

· Chapter 9: Germany from Kaiser to Hitler, 1913-1945

page 424:

• The shattering of the Germanic tribe in the period of the migrations, fifteen hundred years ago, and the exposure of its members to a higher, but equally total and equally satisfying, social structure—the Roman imperial system, and the subsequent, almost immediately subsequent, shattering of that Roman system caused a double trauma from which the Germans have not recovered even today.

page 429:

• The Germans thirst for status is entirely different from the American Desire for status. The American is driven by the desire to get ahead, that is, to change his status; he wants status and status symbols to exist as clear evidence or even measures of the speed with which he is changing his status. The German wants status as a nexus of obvious relationships around himself so there will never be doubt in anyone’s mind where he stands, stationary, in the system. He wants status because he dislikes changes, because he abhors the need to make decisions. The American thrives on change, novelty, and decisions. «span class=“note”>Strangely enough, both react in this opposite fashion for somewhat similar reasons based on the inadequate maturation and integration of the individual’s personality. The American seeks change, as the German seeks external fixed relationships, as a distraction from the lack of integration, self-sufficiency, and internal resources of the individual himself.

page 437:

page 440:

• A direct challenge to the republic from the Right came in March 1920, when Captain Ehrhardt’s Brigade of the Free Corps marched into Berlin, forced the government to flee to Dresden, and set up a government under Wolfgang Kapp, an ultranationalist. Kapp was supported by the army commander in the Berlin area, Baron Walther von Liittwitz, who became Reichsivehr minister in Kapp’s government. Since General Hans von Seeckt, chief of staff, refused to support the legal government, it was helpless, and was saved only by a general strike of the workers in Berlin and a great proletarian rising in the industrial regions of western Germany.

page 445:

• Schacht, as president of the Reichsbank, was able to force the Socialist Rudolf Hilferding out of the position of minister of finance by refusing bank credit to the government until this was done.

page 446:

• …the Nazis had an advantage in that they were not clearly a party of the right but were ambiguous; in fact, a large group of Germans considered the Nazis a revolutionary Left party differing from the Communists only in being patriotic.

• The industrialists were taken into camp by Hitler during a three-hour speech which he made at the Industrial Club of Diisseldorf at the invitation of Fritz Thyssen (January 27, 1932).

page 452:

• … under circumstances which are still mysterious, a plot was worked out to burn the Reichstag building and blame the Communists. Most of the plotters were homosexuals and were able to persuade a degenerate moron from Holland named Van der Lubbe to go with them. After the building was set on fire, Lubbe was left wandering about in it and was arrested by the police. The government at once arrested four Communists, including the party leader in the Reichstag (Ernst Torgler).

page 457:

• Both Hitler and Goring also killed most of their personal enemies, … Two excuses were given for this violent action: that the murdered men were homosexuals (something which had been known for years) and that they were members of a conspiracy to murder Hitler.

page 458:

• Thus, by August 1934, the Nazi movement had reached its goal—the establishment of an authoritarian state in Germany. The word used here “authoritarian,” for, unlike the Fascist regime in Italy, the Nazi regime was not totalitarian. It was not totalitarian because two members of the Quartet were not coordinated, a third member was coordinated only incompletely and, unlike Italy or Soviet Russia, the economic system was not ruled by the state but was subject to “self-rule.” All this is not in accord with popular opinion about the nature of the Nazi system either at the time it was flourishing or since.

page 459:

page 464:

• The Nazi system was dictatorial capitalism - that is, a society organized that everything was subject to the benefit of capitalism; everything that is, compatible with two limiting factors: (a) that the Nazi party, which was not capitalist, was in control of the state, and (b) that war, which is not capitalist, could force curtailment of capitalist benefits (in the short run at least). In this judgment we must define our terms accurately. We define capitalism as “a system of economics in which production is based on profit for those who control the capital. In this definition one point must be noted: the expression “for those who control the capital” does not necessarily mean the owners. In modern economic conditions large-scale enterprise with widely dispersed stock ownership has made management more important than ownership. Accordingly, profits are not the same as dividends, and, in fact dividends become objectionable to management, since they take profits out of its control.

page 466:

• The danger form labor was not nearly so great as might seem at first glance. It was not labor itself which was dangerous, because labor itself did not come directly and immediately in conflict with the profit system; rather it was with labor getting the wrong ideas, especially Marxist ideas which did seek to put the laborer directly in conflict with the profit system and with private ownership. As a result, the Nazi system sought to control the ideas and the organization of labor, and was quite eager to control his free time and leisure activities as it was to control his working arrangements. For this reason it was not sufficient merely to smash the existing labor organizations. This would have left labor free and uncontrolled and able to pick up any kind of ideas. Nazism, therefore, did not try to destroy these organizations but to take them over. All the old unions were dissolved into the German Labor Front. This gave an amorphous body of 25 million in which the individual was lost.

• Its [Labor Front] chief functions were (1) to propagandize; (2) to absorb workers’ leisure time, especially by the “Strength through Joy” organization; (3) to tax workers for the party’s profit; (4) to provide jobs for reliable party members within the Labor Front itself; (5) to disrupt working-class solidarity.

page 468:

• A law of July 15, 1933, gave the minister of economics the right to make certain cartels compulsory, to regulate capacity of enterprises, and prohibit the creation of new enterprises. Hundreds of decrees were issued under this law. On the same day, the cartel statute of 1923 which prevented cartels from using boycotts against nonmembers was amended to permit this practice. As a result, cartels were able to prohibit new retail outlets, and frequently refused to supply wholesalers or retailers unless they did more than a minimum volume of business or had more than a minimum amount of capital. These actions were taken, or example, by the radio and the cigarette cartels.

• Note how boycotts were used to destroy other competing business interests. No reason why consumers can’t utilize the same tactic.

page 469:

• In this way competition of the old kind was largely eliminated, and that, not by the state but by industrial self-regulation, and not at the expense of profits, but to the benefit of profits, especially of those enterprises which had supported the Nazis—large units in heavy industry.

page 469:

page 470:

• The advent of war was the result of the fact that industry was not ruling Germany directly, but was ruling through an agent. It was not government of, by, and for industry, but government of and by the party and for industry.

• In the period 1936-1939 the policies of “rearmament for war” and “rearmament for profit” ran parallel courses.

page 471:

• At the head of the party was the Fiihrer; then came about twoscore Reichsleiter; below these was the party hierarchy, organized by dividing Germany into 40 districts (Gaue) each under a Gauleiter; each district was subdivided into circles (Kreise) of which there were 808, each under a Kreisleiter; each Kreis was divided into chapters (Ortsgruppen), each under an Ortsgruppenleiter; these chapters were divided into cells (Zellen) and subdivided into blocks under Zellenleiter and Blockleiter. The Blockleiter had to supervise and spy on 40 to 60 families; the Zellenleiter had to supervise 4 to 8 blocks (200 to 400 families); and the Ortsgruppenleiter had to supervise a town or district of up to 1,500 families through his 4 to 6 Zellenleiter.

· Chapter 10: Britain: the Background To Appeasement, 1900-1939

page 478:

• In truth, Cabinet is not controlled by the Commons, but the reverse. As W. I. Jennings says in more than one place in his book “Cabinet Government”, “It is the Government that controls the House of Commons.” This control ls exercised through the Cabinet’s control of the political party machinery. This power over the party machinery is exercised through control of party funds and above all by control of nominations to constituencies. The fact that there are no primary elections in Britain and that party candidates are named by the inner clique of the party is of tremendous importance and is the key to the control which the inner clique exercises over the House of Commons, yet it is rarely mentioned in books on the English political system.

page 479:

• The government can refuse to answer any question on the grounds of “public interest.” To this decision there is no appeal. In addition, when questions are not refused, they are frequently answered in an evasive fashion which provides no enlightenment whatever. This was the regular procedure in answering questions on foreign policy in the period 1935~1940. In that period, questions were even answered by outright falsehoods without any possible redress available to the questioners.

page 480:

• This educational system was based on three great negatives, not easily understood by Americans. These were (a) education must not be vocational - that is, aimed at assisting one to make living; (b) education is not aimed directly at creating or training the intelligence; and (c) education is not aimed at finding the “Truth." On its positive side, the system of education of the “classes” displayed its real nature on the school level rather than on the university level. It aimed at developing a moral outlook, a respect for traditions, qualities of leadership and cooperation, and above all, perhaps, that ability for cooperation in competition summed up in the English idea of “sport” and “playing the game. Because of the restricted numbers of the upper class in Britain, these attitudes applied chiefly to one another, and did not necessarily apply to foreigners or even to the masses. They applied to people who “belonged,” and not to all human beings.

page 484:

• There is also no separation of powers. The Cabinet is the government is expected to govern not only within the law, but, if necessary, without law or even against the law."

page 485:

• In Britain the restrictions were almost all based on one criterion, possession of wealth, and have been the occasion for relatively mild objections because in Britain the idea that wealth entitled its possessor to special privileges and special duties was generally accepted, even by the non-possessing masses.

page 486:

• In national politics the suffrage was wide and practically unrestricted, but the upper classes possessed a right to vote twice because they were allowed to vote at their place of business or their university as well as at their residence.

• Moreover, each candidate for Parliament must post a deposit of £150, which is forfeited if he does not receive over one-eighth of the total vote. This deposit amounted to more than the total annual income of about three-quarters of all English families 1930, and provided another barrier to the great majority if they aspired to run for Parliament.

• Until 1915 the two parties represented the same social class - the small group known as “society”.

page 487:

• At the beginning of the twentieth century the inner clique of tn Conservative Party was made up almost completely of the Cecil family and their relatives.

• In either case the ordinary voter in Britain, in 1960 as in 1900, was offered a choice between parties whose programs and candidates were largely the creations of two small self-perpetuating groups over which he (the ordinary voter) had no real control. The chief change from 1900 to 1960 was to be found in the fact that in 1900 the two parties represented a small and exclusive social class remote from the voters’ experience, while in 1960 the two parties represented two antithetical social classes which were both remote from the average voter.

page 491:

• In 1936 the Labour Party had support from one morning paper with a circulation of two million copies, while the Conservatives had the support of six morning papers with a circulation of over six million copies. Of three evening papers, two supported the Conservatives and one supported the Liberals. Of ten Sunday papers with an aggregate circulation of 13,130,000 copies, seven with a circulation of 6,330,000 supported the Conservatives, one with a circulation of 400,000 supported Labour, and the two largest, with a circulation of 6,300,000, were independent.

• Radio offers similarity skewed representation.

page 492:

• As Sir Cyril Norwood, headmaster of Harrow School, said, “The boy of ability from a poor home may get to Oxford - it is possible, though not easy - but he has no chance to enter Eton.”

page 497:

• …Taff Vale case of 1902, that labor unions could be sued for damages arising from the actions of their members in strikes. Deprived in this fashion of their chief economic weapon, the workers fell back on their chief political weapon, the ballot, with the result that the Labour membership of the House of Commons increased from three to forty-three seats in the election of 1906.

page 498:

• The new government started off at full tilt. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 overturned the Taff Vale decision and restored the strike as a weapon to the armory of the workers. In the same year a Working-men’s Compensation Act was put on the books, and in 1909 came an Old Age Pension system.

• Old age pension serve to reduce reliance on and disintegrate the family.

page 500:

• In the former [domestic affairs], the effort to deflate prices in order to go back the gold standard at the prewar parity was fatal to prosperity and domestic order. Unemployment and strikes increased, especially in the coal mines.

• This is a theme in this book, that the gold standard hampered prosperity. As far as I can tell, it was the printing of money to finance the war, and the waste of the war, that is what killed the economies. While I can see the gold standard restricting economies, it would seem to be a good thing, keeping them balanced - even if this was at the cost of living standard. Living above your means will be much more deleterious in the long run…

page 501:

• Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer carried out the stabilization policy which put England on the gold standard with the pound sterling at the prewar rate of parity.

• I think this is the issue, parity. A gold standard should not peg your fiat to gold, but all fiat should float freely against gold on the international market. This would incentive governments not to create too much fiat as it would “show up” in the increased cost of gold. You could not hide inflation the way is currently done (holding it in bank reserves or exporting it as in the case of the USA).

• The chief domestic event of the period was the General Strike of May 3-12, 1926. The General Strike developed from a strike in the coal mines and from the determination of both sides to bring the class struggle to a showdown.

page 502:

• The miners refused, went out on strike for three months (March-June 1921), and won a. promise of a government subsidy to raise wages in the worse-paid districts.

• Again, begging for subsidies when you can’t compete is utter nonsense. It is nothing more than stealing from your countrymen via taxation or worse printing fiat to steal from your countrymen through inflation. A tariff on imports would be a much more sensible answer, but still artificial. This all stems from people needing jobs to take care of them and not being able to take care of themselves coupled with the heavily marketed consumer culture. Maybe even all the way to division of labor. Was there unemployment when everyone was working on a family farm? Before enclosure in England?

  Among the results of the failure of the General Strike, two events mentioned. The Trades Dispute Act of 1927 forbade sympathy strikes, restricted picketing, prohibited state employees from affiliating with other workers, restored the Taff Vale decision, and changed the basis for collection of labor-union political funds from those who did not refuse to contribute to those who specifically agreed to contribute.

page 503:

• Liberals and Sir Oswald Mosley (then of the Labour Party) had worked out detailed plans based on public-works projects, Unemployment benefits were increased, with the result that the Insurance Fund had to be replenished by loans.

• …Sir Charles Trevelyan’s Education bill. The last of these provided free secondary education and raised the school-leaving age to fifteen years;

• Extend that adolescence!

page 504:

• In June the Macmillan Committee, after two years' study, reported that the whole financial structure of England was unsound and should be remedied by a managed currency, controlled by the Bank of England.

• Snowden, the “economic expert” of the cabinet, had financial views about the same as those of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England.

• As for bankers they were in control throughout the crisis. While publicly they insisted on a balanced budget, privately they refused to accept balancing by taxation and insisted on balancing by cuts in relief payments. Working in close cooperation with American bankers and Conservative leaders, they were in a position to overthrow any government …

· Chapter 11: Changing Economic Patterns

page 512:

• An economic system does not have to be expansive—that is, constantly increasing its production of wealth—and it might well be possible for people to be completely happy in a nonexpansive economic system if they were accustomed to it. In the twentieth century, however, the people of our culture have been living under expansive conditions for generations. Their minds are psychologically adjusted to expansion, and they feel deeply frustrated unless they are better off each year than they were in the preceding year. The economic system itself has become organized for expansion, and if it does not expand it tends to collapse,

• The basic reason for this maladjustment is that investment has become an essential part of the system, and if investment falls off, consumers have insufficient incomes to buy the consumers’ goods which are being produced in another part of the system because part of the flow of purchasing power created by the production of goods was diverted from purchasing the goods it had produced into savings, and all the goods produced could not be sold until those savings came back into the market by being invested. In the system as a whole, everyone sought to improve his own position in the short run, but this jeopardized the functioning of the system in the long run. The contrast here is not merely between the individual and the system, but also between the long run and the short run.

page 526:

• These cartels [ferrous metal] managed prices, production, and markets within Germany, enforcing their decisions by means of fines or boycotts.

page 540:

• The whole Paribas system in the twentieth century was headed by the Baron Edouard de Rothschild, but the active head was Rene Mayer, manager of the Rothschild bank and nephew by marriage of James Rothschild. …

• … ruled much of the section of The French economy controlled by this bloc. Included in this section were many foreign and colonial enterprises, utilities, ocean shipping, airlines, shipbuilding and, above all, communications. In this latter group were generate transatlantique, Cie. generale de telegraphie sans fils, Radio France, Cie. francaise de cables telegraphiques, Cie. internationale des wagon-lits, Havas, and Hachette.

• Mass communication is essential to global empire.

page 542:

• Price competition, which to an American always has seemed to be the first, and even the only, method of economic rivalry, has, in Europe, generally been regarded as the last possible method economic rivalry, a method so mutually destructive as to be tacitly avoided by both sides.

page 543:

• … in 1962 De Gaulle made the director of the Rothschild bank, George Pompidou, prime minister.

page 544:

• The United States of America’s “Changing Economic Patterns”

• The whole thing is worth a read if you are interested in the history of the USA.

page 546:

• It has been calculated that the 200 largest non-financial corporations in the United States, plus the fifty largest banks, in the mid-1930’s, owned 34 percent of the assets of all industrial corporations, 48 percent of the assets of all commercial banks, 75 percent of the assets of all public utilities, and 95 percent of the assets of all railroads.

page 549:

• One of the most significant facts about the New Deal was its orthodoxy on money. For the whole twelve years he was in the White House, Roosevelt had statutory power to issue fiat money in the form of greenbacks printed by the government without recourse to the banks. This authority was never used.

page 550:

• The inadequacy of this theory of the depression was shown in 1937 when the New Deal, after four years of pump priming and a victorious election in 1936, stopped its spending. Instead of taking off, the economy collapsed in the steepest recession in history. The New Deal had to resume its treatment of symptoms but now without hope that the spending program could ever be ended, a hopeless prospect since the administration lacked the knowledge of how to reform the system or even how to escape from borrowing bank credit with its mounting public debt, and the administration lacked the courage to adopt the really large-scale spending necessary to give full employment of resources. The administration was saved from this impasse by the need for the rearmament program followed by the war. Since 1947 the Cold War and the space program have allowed the same situation to continue, so that even today prosperity is not the result of a properly organized economic system but of government spending, and any drastic deduction in such spending would give rise to an acute depression.

page 551:

page 552:

page 553:

• The Industrial Revolution did not reach all parts of Europe, or even all pans of any single country, at the same moment. In general, it began in England late in the eighteenth century (about 1776) and spread slowly eastward and southward across Europe, reaching France after 1830, Germany after 1850, Italy and Russia after 1890.

page 554:

• As a result, by 1930 these 200 largest corporations had 49.2 percent of all corporate assets (or $81 billion out of $165 billion); they had 38 percent of all business wealth (or $81 billion out of $212 billion); they held 22 percent of all wealth in the country (or $81 billion out of $367 billion). In fact, in 1930, a single corporation (American Telephone and Telegraph) had greater assets than the total wealth in 21 states.

• As a result, in highly industrialized countries, the economic systems were dominated by a handful of industrial complexes. The French economy was dominated by three powers (Rothschild, Mirabaud, and Schneider); the German economy was dominated by two (I. G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahl Werke); the United States was dominated by two (Morgan and Rockefeller).

page 555:

• It [price competition] is caused not only by the activities of businessmen but also by the actions of labor unions, of governments, of private social welfare organizations, and even of the herdlike behavior of consumers themselves.

page 561:

• In order for all the goods to be sold, it is necessary for the savings to reappear in the market as purchasing power. The usual way in which this is done is by investment.

• This margin by which purchasing power is inadequate because excess of savings over investment may be called the “deflationary gap.” This “deflationary gap” is the key to the twentieth century economic crisis and one of the three central cores of the whole tragedy of the century.

• This is why a general boycott/consumers turning into savers is so powerful. If the consumers stop spending and don’t “invest”, there will be fewer dollars sloshing around. This will both increase the value of dollars (that the people now hold) and it would deprive the corporations of income. The resulting depression could be alleviated by the consumers-turned-savers using their now more valuable savings to jump start a people based economy, cutting out the leeches.

page 561:

• The deflationary gap arising from a failure of investment to reach the level of savings can be closed either by lowering the supply of goods to the level of the available purchasing power or by raising the supply of purchasing power to a level able to absorb the existing supply goods, or by a combination of both. The first solution will give a stabilized economy on a low level of economic activity; the second will give a stabilized economy on a high level of economic activity.

page 562:

• The existence of the deflationary gap (that is, available purchasing power less than aggregate prices of available goods and services) will result in falling prices, declining economic activity, and rising unemployment. All this will result in a fall in national income, and this in turn will result in an even more rapid decline in the volume of savings. This decline continues until the volume of savings reaches the level of investment, at which point the fall is arrested and the economy becomes stabilized at a low level.

• As a matter of fact, this process did not work itself out in any industrial country during the great depression of 1929-1934, because the disparity in the distribution of the national income was so great that a considerable portion of the population would have been driven to zero incomes and absolute want before the savings of the richer segment of the population fell to the level of investment. Moreover, as the depression deepened, the level of investment declined even more rapidly than the level of savings. There can be little doubt that under such conditions the masses of the population would have been driven to revolution before “automatic economic factors” were able to stabilize the economy, and stabilization, if reached, would have been on a level so low that a considerable portion of the population would have been in absolute want.

• A boycott pushes the savings from the rich to the poor. If necessities, like food from a garden, can be had outside the money system, the poor will suffer only in the temporary loss of luxuries.

• The methods used to deal with the depression and close the deflationary gap were of many different kinds, but all are reducible to two fundamental types: (a) those which destroy goods and (b) those which produce goods which do not enter the market.

• Like (a) cash for clunkers and (b) armaments. I suppose (b) also destroys goods in their use…

page 563:

• Outright destruction of goods already produced is not common, and occurred for the first time as a method of combating depression in the years 1930-1934. During this period, stores of coffee, sugar, and bananas were destroyed, corn was plowed under, and young livestock was slaughtered to reduce the supply on the market. The destruction of goods in warfare is another example of this method of overcoming deflationary conditions in the economic system.

page 564:

• Moreover, these programs of deficit spending are in jeopardy in a country with a private banking system. In such a system, the creation of money (or credit) is usually reserved for the private banking institutions, and is deprecated as a government action. The argument that the creation of funds by the government is bad while creation of funds by the banks is salutary is very persuasive in a system based on traditional laissez faire and in which the usual avenues of communications (such as newspapers radio) are under private, or even banker, control.

• How is monopoly via government capture/influence laissez faire? He spends great lengths describing how the moneyed class has control and then calls this laissez fair?

page 567:

• In general, however, the chief blocs [of the pluralist economy] or groups involved will be: (a) the defense forces, (b) labor, (c) the farmers, (d) heavy industry, (e) light industry, (f) transport and communication groups, (g) finance, fiscal, and banking groups, (h) commercial, real-estate, and construction interests, (i) scientific, educational, and intellectual groups, (j) political party and government workers, and (k) consumers in general.

• b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, and j all rely on k

page 569:

• (1) the skillful (and perhaps lucky) of financial and fiscal techniques which have encouraged both investment and willingness to consume;

• Techniques like “brainwashing” masquerading as advertising and credit.

· Chapter 12: The Policy of Appeasement, 1931-1936

page 574:

• From the broadest point of view, the aggressors of 1931-1941 were attacking the whole nineteenth century way of life and some of the most fundamental attributes of Western Civilization itself. They were in revolt against democracy, against the parliamentary system, against laissez faire and the liberal outlook, against nationalism (although in the name nationalism), against humanitarianism, against science, and against all respect for human dignity and human decency. It was an attempt to brutalize men into a mass of unthinking atoms whose reactions could be controlled by methods of mass communication and directed to increase the profits and power of an alliance of militarists, heavy-industrialists, landlords and a psychopathic political organizers recruited from the dregs of society.

• Funny, it feels like this is exactly what we have, no democracy (should be republic), brutalized men controlled by media, etc.

page 575:

• The speed of social change in the nineteenth century, by quickening transportation and communications and by gathering people in amorphous multitudes in the cities, had destroyed most of the older social relationships of the average man, and by leaving him emotionally unattached to neighborhood, parish, vocation, or even family, had left him isolated an frustrated.

• The methods of mass propaganda offered by the press and the radio provided the means by which these individuals could be reached and mobilized; …

• Goals were lost completely or were reduced to the most primitive level of obtaining more power and more wealth.

page 576:

• …Germany could have made no aggression without the acquiescence, and even in some cases the actual encouragement, of the “satisfied” Powers, especially Britain. The German documents captured since 1944 make this quite evident.

page 579: -… in 1927, the efforts of Mitsui and Mitsubishi to smash a smaller

competitor, Suzuki Company of Kobe, precipitated a financial panic which closed most of the banks in Japan.

page 581:

• Though the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in the autumn of 1931 was an independent action of the Japanese military forces, it had to be condoned by the civilian leaders. The Chinese retaliated by a boycott of Japanese goods which seriously reduced Japan’s exports. To force an end to this boycott, Japan landed forces at Shanghai (1932) and, after severe fighting in which much Japanese abuse was inflicted upon Europeans, the Chinese forces were driven from the city and compelled to agree to a termination of the economic boycott against Japan.

page 585:

• To the militarists, who controlled Japan both politically and economically after 1939, it seemed that the occupation of the Dutch Indies and Malaya could do much to alleviate these shortages. The occupation of the Netherlands itself by Hitler’s hordes in 1940 and the involvement of England in the European war since 1939 seemed to offer a golden opportunity for Japan to seize these southern regions. To do so would require long lines of communications from Japan to Indonesia. These lines would be exposed to attack from the American bases in the Philippines or from the British base at Singapore. Judging the American psychology as similar to their own, the Japanese militarists were sure that in such circumstances America would not hesitate to attack these vulnerable lines of communication. Thus, it seemed to them that a Japanese attack on the Dutch Indies would inevitably lead to an American war on Japan. Facing this problem, the Japanese militarists reached what seemed to their minds to be an inescapable decision. They decided to attack the United States first. From this decision came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

page 589:

• Britain and France secretly “allowed” Italy to invade Ethiopia while publicly supporting the League of Nations non-aggression standard which compelled them to enforce sanctions on Italy; they did so in a mild manner only. The USA stayed out of it and a new policy of non-intervention came forth. This encouraged aggression though, because the aggressor could arm at their leisure prior to invasion and once the invasion was underway both the aggressor and the yet armed victim would not be sold munitions.

page 594:

• Britain made clear from 1919-1939 that she would not support France with troops if Germany invaded. This is more evidence that the Treaty of Versailles was set up to fail - bringing the British competitor, Germany, to her knees in a dual front WW2.

• France was “surrounded” by non-friendly forces.

• This was exactly the position in which the British government wished France to be, a fact made completely clear by the recently published secret documents.

page 596:

• In Britain you had the anti-Bolsheviks and the “three- block-world” groups. These overlapped greatly and differed only in the former wanted to destroy the Soviet Union, while the latter wanted to use the Soviet Union to contain Germany. The latter was made up primarily of the Round Table members.

page 599:

• …it seemed to many that the only solution was to bring Germany into contact with, or even collision with, the Soviet Union.

• London was propagandized and led to panic by promotion of “no anti-aircraft defenses in London”, by building useless air-raid trenches in the streets and parks, and by daily warnings that everyone should have a gas mask.

· Chapter 13: The Disruption of Europe, 1937-1939

page 636:

• This propaganda [slowly revealing that the British were secretly negotiating with the Germans]first appeared in the effusions of the Round Table Group whose leader, Lord Lothian, has visited Hitler in January 1935, and had been pushing this seven-point program in The Times, in The Round Table, at Chatham House and All Souls, and with Lord Halifax.

page 638:

• The Chamberlain government made it clear to Germany both publicly and privately that they would not oppose Germany’s projects. As Dirksen wrote to Ribbentrop on June 8, 1938, “Anything which can be got without a shot being fired can count upon the agreement of the British."

page 650:

• The British government began to fit the people of London with gas masks;[in response to pre-WW2 Germany] the prime minister and the king called on the people to dig trenches in the parks and squares; schoolchildren began to be evacuated from the city; the Czechs were allowed to mobilize on September 24th; and three days later it was announced that the British fleet was at its war stations. In general, every report or rumor which could add to the panic and defeatism was played up, and everything that might contribute to a strong or a united resistance to Germany was played down. By the middle of September, Bonnet was broken, and Daladier was bending, while the British people were completely confused.

• Britain lied and panic her own people. They played up Germany’s forces and downplayed her own defenses. This seems like psychological warfare against her own people. More evidence WW2 was “planned” by the British elite; they wanted to run Germany into a war with France and Russia to destroy Britain’s only real competition.

• The evidence shows that the Chamberlain government knew these facts but consistently gave a contrary impression. Lord Halifax particularly distorted the facts.

page 654:

• All these events showed very clearly the chief result of Munich: Germany was supreme in central Europe, and any possibility of curtailing that power either by a joint policy of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union and Italy or by finding any openly anti-German resistance in central Europe itself was ended. Since this was exactly what Chamberlain and his friends had wanted, they should have been satisfied.

page 659:

• Moreover, £6,000,000 Czech gold reserves in London were turned over to Germany the puny, and untrue, excuse that the British government could no give orders to the Bank of England (May 1939). After Germany seized Czechoslovakia

page 660:

• …the British government, through the Federation of British Industries, began to negotiate with Germany to create a complete system of industrial cooperation, with cartels dividing the world’s markets and fixing prices for over fifty industrial groups.

page 661:

• It should perhaps be mentioned that France throughout this period was also negotiating trade agreements to send raw materials to Germany as a result of a preliminary agreement signed during Ribbentrop’s visit to Paris early in December 1938.

page 665:

• There was talk of a British loan to Poland of 100 million pounds in May; on August 1st Poland finally got a credit for $8,163,300 at a time when all London was buzzing about a secret loan of 1,000,000,000 pounds from Britain to Germany.

page 669:

• The first British suggestion [in an Anglo-Russian agreement]was that the Soviet Union should give unilateral guarantees to Poland and Romania similar to those given by Britain. The Russians probably regarded this as a trap to get them into a war with Germany in which Britain would do little or nothing or even give aid to Germany. That this last possibility was not completely beyond reality is clear from the fact that Britain did prepare an expeditionary forces to attack Russia in March 1940, when Britain was technically at war with Germany but was doing nothing to fight her.

· Chapter 14: World War II: The Tide of Aggression, 1939-1941

page 682:

• [While Germany was initially attacking Poland] Although France had three million men under arms and Hitler had left only eight regular divisions on his western border, no attack was made by France. Strict orders were issued to the British Air Force not to bomb any German land forces, and these orders were not modified until April 1940; similar orders by Hitler to the Luftwaffe Were maintained for part of this same period. When some British Members of Parliament, led by Amerv, put pressure on the government to drop bombs on German munition stores in the Black Forest, the air minster, Sir H. Kingsley Wood, rejected the suggestion with asperity, daring: “Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!” Essen was the home of the Krupp munitions factories.

page 683:

• The period from the end of the Polish campaign to the German attack on Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, is frequently called the Sitzkrieg (sitting war) or even the “phony war,” because the Western Powers made no real effort to fight Germany.

page 689:

• On the whole, the blockade had no decisive effect on Germany’s ability to wage war until 1945. After examining the evidence on this problem, the chiefs of the blockade of the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington wrote, “Germany’s war production and military operations were never seriously hampered by a shortage of any essential raw materials or industrial products, with the single exception of petroleum— and even that shortage resulted from the combined effect of the Soviet Army’s capture of Romanian oil fields and the concentrated bombing of Germany’s synthetic production rather than directly from economic warfare.” The same writers point out that Germany’s food supply, in calories per capita, was at the prewar level until the very last months of the war.

page 695:

• Although the League’s [of Nations] consideration of the Japanese aggression in China had required fifteen months and resulted in no punishment, Russia was condemned in eleven days in December 1939. The German aggressions of 1936-1939 had not even been submitted to the League of Nations, …

• German was doing what the British wanted, but Russia needed more incentive.

page 722:

• When the European war began in September 1939, American public opinion was united in its determination to stay out. The isolationist reaction following American intervention in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference in 1917-1919 had, if anything, become stronger in the 1930’s. Historians and publicists were writing extensively to show that Germany had not been solely guilty of beginning the war in 1914 and that the Entente Powers had made more than their share of secret treaties seeking selfish territorial aims, both before the war and during the fighting.

• …evidence before the committee [US Senate] was mobilized to show that American intervention in World War I had been pushed by bankers and munitions manufacturers (“merchants of death”) to protect their profits and their interests in an Entente Victory in the early years of the war.

• …widespread determination to keep out of Europe’s constant quarrels in the future and, above all, to avoid any repetition of what was regarded as the “error of 1917."

page 723:

• The isolationist point of view had been enacted into American statute law, not only in the 1920’s by restrictions on contact with the League of Nations and other international organizations…

• …curtailing loans and munition sales to belligerent countries.

• There goes a huge chunk of one of the few USA exports, Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, all dead with this kind of legislation.

• Any materials, including munitions, named by the President had to be sold on a “cash-and-carry” basis, with full payment and transfer of title before leaving the United States…

• There goes a huge chunk of the financial sector. Seriously, how did we get from these policies to the current MIC?

• …the Johnson Act of 1934, prevented loans to most European Powers by forbidding such loans to countries whose payments were in arrears on their war debts of World War I.

• …airplane manufacturers were asked not to sell planes to countries which had bombed civilians,…

• These policies actually favored aggressors as they could arm prior to invading and then once they invaded the USA would not sell munitions to the invaded.

• …revision of these acts, in November 1939, the embargo on munitions was repealed and all purchases by belligerents were placed on a “cash-and- carry” basis; loans to belligerent Powers were forbidden, …

page 725:

• In his [Roosevelt] own mind his role clearly was to act as a brake on his [interventionist] Cabinet colleagues while he used the prestige and publicity of his office to educate American public opinion in the belief that America could not stand alone, isolated, in the world and could not allow Britain to be defeated if any acts of ours could prevent it.

• Outside the Administration, American public opinion was being bombarded by paid and volunteer agitators of all shades of opinion from inside the country and from abroad. Many of these were organized into lobbying and pressure groups of which the most notable were, on the interventionist side, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and, on the isolationist side, the America First movement.

• in New York he [Roosevelt] said, “We will not send our army, navy or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack”; an in Boston he said most emphatically, “I have said this before, but shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." This “campaign oratory” on both sides was based on the general recognition that the overwhelming majority of Americans were determined to stay out of war,

page 726:

• …on October 5, 1940, when a Gallup Poll of public opinion showed that 70 percent of Americans felt it was more important to defeat Hitler than to keep out of war.

• Never would something like a Gallup poll lie!

• The priority of a German defeat over a Japanese defeat was so firmly entrenched in American strategic thinking that, as early as November, 1940, it was seriously considered that it might be necessary, if Japan attacked the United States, for the United States to make war on Germany in order to retain this order of priority. As events turned out, Germany’s declaration of war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack saved the United States from the need to attempt something which American public opinion would never have condoned—an attack on Germany after we had been attacked by Japan.

• How convenient…

page 737:

• This dispersal and shifting of geographic objectives [from Kiev and the Caucasus to Moscow], combined with German inability to destroy the Soviet armies completely, brought Germany to the point which Hitler had always insisted must be avoided above all else: a two-front war of attrition…

• Hitler insisted on targets that brought him to the exact place the British wanted him. Surely another mistake; there is no way Hitler was being manipulated by the British.

· Chapter 15: World War II: The Ebb of Aggression, 1941-1945

page 750:

• In the course of 1939 Japan was able to close all the routes from the outside into China except through Hong Kong, across French Indochina, and along the rocky and undeveloped route from Burma to Chungking. The American government retaliated with economic warfare. In June 1938 it established a “moral embargo” on the shipment of aircraft or their parts and bombs to Japan by simply requesting American citizens to refuse to sell these articles.

• In December this embargo was extended to cover light metals and all machinery or plans for making aviation gasoline.

page 757:

• On November 27th a war warning was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness.

• This force [the attacking Japanese], in complete radio silence and without encountering any other vessels, sailed in 11 days…

• The five midget submarines, dropped from larger submarines, were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were able to enter because the antitorpedo net was carelessly left open after 4:58 A.M. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at 3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54 after one had been attacked and sunk.

• About the same time, an army enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming down from the north 132 miles away but his report was disregarded. At 7:30 an enlisted sailor noticed two dozen planes about a mile over his ship but did not report it.

• The Japanese fleet was not found after the attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction through an error in interpretation.

• It is almost like the USA wanted the attack to happen as an excuse to get involved in WW2. It feels like 9/11 was a repeat of all these “mistakes”.

page 771:

• …rank them [signatures on the United Nations declaration] in two groups, with the four “Great Powers” of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China followed by twenty-two lesser states in alphabetical order, was an early indication of the similar division which still exists in the United Nations today. The inclusion of China, in spite of its obvious weakness, among the Great Powers was a concession made to the United States by the other Powers. The American leaders, from Roosevelt down, insisted that China was, or at least should be, a Great Power, although the only evidence they could find to support this argument was its larger population. The Americans seemed to hope that by encouragement and reiteration, or perhaps even by invocation, China could be made into a Great Power, able to dominate the Far East after the defeat of Japan.

• The USA, UK, and USSR were at odds as to what tactics to use in the war. USA wanted all out invasion. UK wanted to secure a buffer so the USSR would not “take over”. USSR wanted a second flank opened on the west to reduce the pressure on it. All 3, but primarily the UK, were positioning for the postwar era almost 2 years before the end of the war.

page 790:

• Roosevelt felt that only the four Great Powers would need to be armed in the postwar world and could keep the peace for all other states if they could agree among themselves. Other states, relieved of the burden of armaments, could devote all their resources to economic reconstruction. The four Great Powers would be helped in the task of keeping the peace for all by their joint possession of various strategic points throughout the world, like Dakar or Formosa, and could work together to instruct the public opinion of the world by a joint sponsorship of informational centers scattered about the globe. In such a system, in which lesser states did not have to defend themselves, there could be no objection, in Roosevelt’s thinking, to separating peoples, like the Serbs and Croats, who could not agree, or in providing independence for dependent areas, such Hong Kong.

• …conference, held in May and June 1943 at Hot Springs, Virginia, was of a technical nature, and discussed postwar food and agricultural problems. From this conference there emerged a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an advisory body to collect and disseminate agricultural information, as had been done previously by the League of Nations affiliate, the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome.

• …United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). At the first meeting of this international organization, at Atlantic City, New Jersey, in November 1943, forty-four nations agreed to contribute 1 percent of their national incomes to purchase relief supplies for war-devastated peoples. Herbert Lehman, former governor of New York, was elected director-general of the new organization.

page 791:

• Churchill had to accept Roosevelt’s projects [primarily a global association and China as a great power] for a postwar international organization for fear that resistance to these might lead revival of American isolationism following the Second World War, had happened after 1919.

page 811:

• [specialist conferences for postwar planning] (1) a conference on postwar economic problems at London in September 1941; (2) another on food and agriculture at Hot Springs, Virginia, in May-June 1943; (3) one on refugees and emergency postwar relief held at Atlantic City, New Jersey, in November 1943; (4) a conference on international monetary problems at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944; (5) the Conference of Ministers of Education of the Allied Governments, held in London in April 1944; and (6) the two conferences to establish an international security organization at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, in October 1944, and at San Francisco in April-June 1945.

• Why a conference on education on the global scale?

• These conferences were surrounded with preliminary and subsequent negotiations and gave rise to the basic international organizations of the postwar period. Among these were the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), now stationed in Rome; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Developmental (World Bank), now in Washington; the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), now in Pans; and the United Nations security organization now operating out or its glittering glass buildings along the East River, New York City.

• World government foundations in place…

page 812:

• The arguments and conflicts whose compromises and resolutions provided these postwar organizations of “one world” idealism will be discussed later; during the war itself they were largely lost under the din of world conflict.

page 815:

• Correctly, such strategic bombing should have been based on careful analysis of the German war economy to pick out the one or two critical items which were essential to the war effort. These items were probably ball bearings, aviation fuels, and chemicals, all of them essential and all of them concentrated. After the war German General Gotthard Heinrici said that the war would have ended a year earlier if Allied bombing had been concentrated on ammonia plants.

page 816:

• Much effort was expended on bombing almost wholly unrewarding targets, such as airfields, submarine pens, ports, railroad yards, tank factories, and others. For a variety of reasons, these targets could not be damaged sufficiently to make substitution or repair impossible.

page 817:

• Offensive at last turned, in May 1944, toward a vulnerable target: airplane-fuel production. To this was added, in October 1944, an attack on the general rail and canal transport system. The fuel attack incidentally disrupted the chemical industry, and this combination, along With transportation, brought the German economic base for war to its knees W February 1945.

page 819:

page 839:

• On the economic side, it was agreed that Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, with uniform control measures in all zones aimed at establishing a consumer-oriented economy,…

· Chapter 16: The New Age

page 846:

• [in war]changes which in peacetime might have occurred over decades are brought about in a few years.

• …from a world in which man still lived, as he had for a million years, surrounded by nature, to a situation where nature is dominated, transformed and, in a sense, totally destroyed by man; from a system where man’s greatest problems were the material ones of man’s helplessness in the face of the natural threats of disease, starvation, and the unpredictability of natural catastrophes to the totally different system of the 1960’s and 1970’s where the greatest threat to man is man himself, and where his greatest problems are the social (and nonmaterial) ones of what his true goals of existence are and what use he should make of his immense power over the universe, including his fellowmen.

page 847:

• …regard himself as obligated to act like an angel or even a god).

• …the attacks on inhibitions and discipline which we call “progressive” education as represented in the outpouring of such semipopular thinkers as Rousseau in the earliest stage of movement (in Emile) or John Dewey in the latest stage.

page 849:

• …seventeenth-century methods [hard work, delayed gratification] with nineteenth-century goals [materialistic], produced the immense physical achievements of the nineteenth century.

• A typical example might be John D. Rockefeller: great saver, great worker, and great postponer of any self-centered action, even death.

• Great worker as in “The Great Work”? Was not his manipulation of the masses totally self-centered? He wanted to create the world he envisioned. Postponer as in: his plans for world domination would take generations? A typical example of a sociopathic manic that anyone well read in history would likely despise…

page 851:

• As the novelist of these matters, Sir Charles P. Snow, has said, scientists increasingly play a vital role in those crucial, secret decisions “which determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die."

page 852:

• …before 1930, what Sir Charles Snow has called “Two Societies” in our one civilization. This meant that most men lived in an ignorance of science almost as great as that of a Hottentot and almost equally great among highly educated professors of literature at Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton.

• It is a method of dealing with problems and processes in an established sequence of steps, thus: (1) isolate the problem; (2) separate it into its most obvious stages or areas; (3) enumerate the factors which determine the outcome desired in each stage or area; (4) vary the factors in a conscious, systematic, and (if possible) quantitative way to maximize the outcome desired in the stage or area concerned; and (5) reassemble the stages or areas and check to see if the whole problem or process has been acceptably improved in the direction desired.

• Naturally, such a process serves to dehumanize the productive process and, since it also seeks to reduce every element in the process to a repetitive action, it leads eventually to an automation in which even supervision is electronic and mechanical.

• This mechanical outlook moved from assembly lines into the business world. It was also used in WW2 extensively, on things like anti-submarines and anti-aircraft techniques, called “Operational Research” - or how to utilize existing equipment more efficiently than to invent new equipment.

page 855:

• In 1938 Vannevar Bush, professor of electrical engineering and vice-president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an outstanding figure in applied mathematics and electronics, best known as the inventor of the differential analyzer (for mechanical solution of differential equations in calculus), became a member of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). The following year he became president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and chairman of NACA. As France fell. Bush persuaded President Roosevelt to create a National Defense Research Committee with Bush as chairman.

page 856:

• The NDRC in its first year gave over two hundred contracts to various universities, and thus established the pattern of relations between government and the universities which still exists.

• When money ran short, they [NDRC] found it from private sources as in 1941, when, simply by asking, they obtained half a million dollars from MIT and an equal sum from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to pay salaries when congressional appropriations ran short.

page 857:

• …with the arrival of peace, [Operations Research] became an established civilian profession. The best known example of this is the Rand Corporation, a private research and development firm, under contract to the United States Air Force, but numerous lesser organizations and enterprises are now concerned with rationalization techniques in political life, the study of war and strategy, in economic analysis, and elsewhere.

• A great impetus has been given to the rationalization of society in the postwar world by the application of mathematical methods to society to an unprecedented degree. Much of this used the tremendous advances in mathematics of the nineteenth century, but a good deal came from new developments. Among these have been applications of game theory, information theory, symbolic logic, cybernetics, and electronic computing.

page 858:

• [Game Theory] applied mathematical techniques to situations in which persons sought conflicting goals in a nexus of relationships governed by rules. Closely related to this were new mathematical methods for dealing with decision-making. The basic work in the new field was the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Princeton, 1944).

• Similar impetus to this whole development was provided by two other fields of mathematics in which the significant books in America [Claude] C.E. Shannon and W . Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois, 1949), and Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1949). A flood of books have amplified and modified these basic works, all seeking to apply mathematical methods to information, communications, and control systems. Closely related to this have been increased use of symbolic logic (as in Willard von Orman Quine, Mathematical Logic, Harvard, 1951), and the application , all these to electronic computers,

• These, and related techniques, are now transforming methods of operation and behavior in all aspects of life and bringing on a large-scale rationalization of human life which is becoming one of the most significant characteristics of Western Civilization in the twentieth century.

page 868:

• In July Szilard, driven once by Wigner and a second time by Teller, made two visits to Einstein and persuaded him to send a letter and memorandum to President Roosevelt through the banker Alexander Sachs. [ to alert him to the atomic research]

page 870:

• Since copper for electrical connections was in such short supply, 14,000 tons of silver from the Treasury reserve of American paper money was secretly taken from the Treasury vaults (although still carried publicly on the Treasury balance sheets) and made into wiring for the Y-12 plant.[Y-12 was Oak Ridge Uranium separator]

page 874:

• No one in July 1945 realized that all the significant information about making the bomb, notably the relative merits of different kinds of uranium, methods of plutonium separation, and the two kinds of trigger mechanisms, had been sent on to the Soviet Union, chiefly from Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass by way of Harry Gold and Anatoli A. Yakovlev in June

1945. Even today American “security” agents are trying to keep secret these facts which have been fully explained in easily available technical publications.

page 877:

• Alfred McCormack … Japanese surrender could have been obtained in a few weeks by blockade alone: “The Japanese had no longer enough food in stock, and their fuel reserves were practically exhausted. We had begun a secret process of mining all their harbors, which was steadily isolating them from the rest of the world. If we had brought this operation to its logical conclusion, the destruction of Japan’s cities with incendiary and other bombs would have been quite unnecessary. But General Norstad declared at Washington that this blockading action was a cowardly proceeding unworthy of the Air Force. It was therefore discontinued.”

page 880:

• But it must be clearly recognized that the particular stalemate of nuclear terror in which the world now lives derives directly from the two decisions made in 1945 to continue the project after the defeat of Germany and to use the bomb on Japan.

• …it [technical/rational advances] has also led to efforts to establish automatic electronic decision-making on the basis of the growing volume and complexity of such information. This renunciation of the basic “feature of being human—judgment and decision-making - is very dangerous and is a renunciation of the very faculty which gave man his success in the evolutionary struggle with other living creatures. If this whole process of human evolution is now to be abandoned in favor of some other, unconscious and mechanical, method of decision-making, in which the individual’s flexibility and awareness are to be subordinated to a rigid group process, then man must yield to those forms of life, such as the social insects, which have already carried this method to a high degree of perfection.

page 881:

• …in the twentieth century, the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the economic system even as he will replace the democratic voter in control of the political system. This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez faire…

• But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.

• Eventually, in two or three generations, as the ordinary individual who is not an expert or a skilled professional soldier or a prominent industrial executive becomes of less personal concern to the government, his contacts with the government will become less direct and will take place increasingly through intermediaries. Some movement in this direction may be seen already in those cases where taxpayers whose incomes are entirely from wages or salaries find that their whole tax is already paid by their employer…

• This section of the book is eye opening. It shows an understating that the technical advances of the 30-50s would lead to centralized planning.

page 882:

• The postwar balance of terror reached its peak of total disregard both of noncombatants and of neutrals in the policies of John Foster Dulles, who combined sanctimonious religion with “massive retaliation wherever and whenever we judge fit” to the complete destruction of any non-combatant or neutral status.

· Chapter 17: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: American Atomic Supremacy, 1945-1950

page 899:

• In this controversy, [if the nuclear bomb made all military but the air force obsolete] the scientists, most of whom were naively defending truth, were bound to be crushed. On the other hand, any dissident scientist could obtain access to money and support by making an alliance with the air force.

page 900:

• Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (American copy of All Souls College at Oxford)

page 901:

• … we can examine this whole period in the three stages: (1) American atomic supremacy, 1945-1950; (2) the race for the H-bomb, 1950-1957; and (3) the race for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (IBM) from 1957 to early 1963.

page 904:

• The discovery that ordinary Germans had watches, even wristwatches, was an astounding revelation to the Russian soldiers, who proceeded to seize these wherever they saw them.

page 917:

• The reform, which went into effect on June 1, 1948, drastically reduced the volume 0f money in western Germany bv exchanging new Deutschemarks for the current Reichsmarks on a one-to-one basis for the first 60 but on a 6.5 to-100 basis for all over 60. The new marks were blocked in banking accounts in complicated ways which encouraged their use for production.

page 925:

• The inability of the armed services to provide the country with a defense policy, because of inter-service rivalries, is a consequence of the fact that military leaders are specialists and technicians, concerned with means rather than with goals, and, like all technicians, need guidance (or goals) set by other persons with larger perspectives.

page 926:

• …National Security Act of 1947.

• …three major parts: (1) unification of the armed services; (2) creation of the National Security Council as an advisory board to the President; and (3) reorganization of the whole system of intelligence and spying, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the code-breaking National Security Agency (NSA).

page 930:

• …lesson for all organizational success: a clear-cut mission, leadership, and continuity.

page 931:

• Apparently, these anti-Communists, including the press, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), felt that a good cause [fighting communism] justified shoddy or misleading methods.

page 934:

• The whole purpose of secrecy in government should not be to keep information from other states (this is almost impossible) but to make it as difficult as possible for other states to get certain information, so that, when they do get such restricted information, it will be so intermingled with other information and misinformation that it cannot be evaluated promptly enough to do them much good. Any espionage system gets more information than it can handle rapidly. Any country should assume that the enemy has all its own secret information.

• Here is a cut and dry statement about the prevalence of mis- or disinformation. The so-called shills of the internet are likely nothing more than the open source intelligence version of these ideas.

page 935:

• In fact, the most successful kind of counterespionage work is achieved, not by preventing access to secrets, but by permitting access to information which is not true.

• Finally, it is not generally recognized by outsiders that almost all the information gathered by any espionage net is nonsecret material fully available to anyone as public information. Even in work against a supersecret area like the Soviet Union or in nuclear “secrets” this is true. Allen Dulles said that more than 90 percent of the information which the CIA gathers on the Soviet Union is nonsecret. Soviet espionage reports on the United States must contain at least 97 percent nonsecret material.

• Currently known as open-source intelligence.

page 936:

• Jordan’s other evidence, most of which was very discreditable to the New Deal (since he testified that he, Groves, and others were under direct pressure from Harry Hopkins and Vice President Henry Wallace to allow export of nuclear materials, radar, and other secrets to Russia) was subsequently shown to be false, yet all his statements were given nationwide publicity by news commentators like Fulton Lewis, Jr., by Life magazine, and by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and are still widely believed.

page 944:

• McCarthy was not a conservative, still less a reactionary. He was a fragment of elemental force, a throwback to primeval chaos. He was the enemy of all order and of all authority, with no respect, or even Understanding, for principles, laws, regulations, or rules. As such, he had nothing to do with rationality or generality. Concepts, logic, distinctions of categories were completely outside his world. It is, for example, perfectly clear that he did not have any idea of what a Communist was, still less of Communism itself, and he did not care. This was simply a term he used in his game of personal power. Most of the terms which have been applied to him, such as “truculent,” “brutal,” “ignorant,” “sadistic,” “foul-mouthed,” “brash,” are quite correct but not quite in the sense that his enemies applied them, because they assumed that these qualities and distinctions had meaning in his world as they did in their own. They did not, because his behavior was all an act, the things he did to gain the experience he wanted, that is, the feeling of power, of creating fear, of destroying the rules, and of winning attention and admiration for doing so. His act was that of Peck’s Bad Boy, but on a colossal scale, as the total rejection of everything he had come from in his first twenty years of life. He sought fame and acclaim by showing an admiring world of schoolmates what a tough guy he was, defying all the rules, even the rules of decency and ordinary civilized behavior. But like the bad boy of the schoolyard, he had no conception of time or anything established, and once he had found his act, it was necessary to demonstrate it every day. His thirst for power, the power of mass acclaim and of publicity, reached the public scene at the same moment as television, and he was the first to realize what could be done by using the new instrument for reaching millions.

• I think he was onto the deep state and their manipulations from within, but mistakenly identified the enemy as communist because that was in the foreground of that period. For such a generally even keeled book to lash out like this is suspicious in and of itself…

page 950:

• There is considerable truth in the China Lobby’s contention that the American experts on China were organized into a single interlocking group which had a general consensus of a Leftish character. It is also true that this group, from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research or publication opportunities, could favor persons Who accepted the established consensus and could injure, financially or in professional advancement, persons who did not accept it. It is also true that the established group, by its influence on book reviewing in The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Saturday Review, a few magazines, including the “liberal weeklies,” and in the professional journals, could advance or hamper any specialist’s career. It is also true that these things were done in the United States in regard to the Far East by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this organization had been infiltrated by Communists, and by Communist sympathizers, and that much of this group’s influence arose from its access to and control over the flow of funds from financial foundations to scholarly activities. All these things were true, but they would have been true of many other areas of American scholarly research and academic administration in the United States, such as Near East studies or anthropology or educational theory or political science.

• So the experts on China were left leaning, used newspapers to push their agenda, were infiltrated by communists, and controlled funds flowing into scholarly activities but that is OK because other organizations, specifically those of anthropology and educational theory were the same?! Of all the comparisons… anthropology and education!

page 952:

• The significant influence of “Wall Street” (meaning Morgan) both in the Ivy League and in Washington, in the period of sixty or more years following 1880, explains the constant interchange between the Ivy League and the Federal government,…

page 953:

• ..this group [wall street] could not control the Federal government and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions thoroughly distasteful to the group. The chief of these were in taxation law, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but culminating above all else, in the inheritance tax. These tax laws drove the great private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-exempt foundations which became a major link in the Establishment network between Wall Street, the Ivy League, and the Federal government. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State after 1961, formerly president of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1931-1933), is as much a member of this nexus as Alger Hiss, the Dulles brothers, Jerome Greene, James T. Shotwell, John W, Davis, Elihu Root, or Philip Jessup.

• More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could “blow off steam” and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went “radical.”

page 954:

• The New Republic was founded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, using her money, in 1914, and continued to be supported by her financial contributions until .March 23, 1953. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide in quietly in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man, only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England’s foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. This new recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned by J. H. Whitney. It was these connections, as a link between Wall Street and the Round Table Group, which gave Lippmann the opportunity in 1918, while still in his twenties, to be the official interpreter of the meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to the British government,

• In 1937, apparently in preparation for her son’s return to America, Lady Elmhirst, sole owner of The New Republic, shifted this ownership to Westrim, Ltd., a dummy corporation created for the purpose in Montreal, Canada, and set up in New York, with a grant of $1.5 million, the William C. Whitney Foundation of which Mike [Straight]became president. This helped finance the family’s interest in modern art and dramatic theater, including sister Beatrix’s tours as a Shakespearean actress.

page 955:

• The role of “Mike” Straight in this situation in 1938-1948 is clear. He took charge of this family fief, abolished the editorial board, and carried on his father’s aims, in close cooperation with labor and Left-wing groups in American politics. In these efforts he was in close contact with his inherited Wall Street connections, especially his Whitney cousins and certain family agents like Bruce Bliven, Milton C. Rose, and Richard J. Walsh. They handled a variety of enterprises, including publications, corporations, and foundations, which operated out of the law office of Baldwin, Todd, and Lefferts of 120 Broadway, New York City. In this nexus were The New Republic, Asia, Theatre Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and others, all supported by a handful of foundations, including the William C. Whitney Foundation, the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Foundation, the J. H . Whitney Foundation, and others. An interesting addition was made to these enterprises in 1947 when Straight founded a new magazine, the United Nations World, to be devoted to the support of the UN. Its owners of record were The New Republic itself (under its corporate name), Nelson Rockefeller, J. H. Whitney, Max Ascoli (an anti-Fascist Italian who had married American wealth and used it to support a magazine of his own, The Reporter), and Beatrice S. Dolivet. The last lady, Mike Straight’s sister, made her husband, Louis Dolivet, “International Editor” of the new magazine.

page 956:

• In 1942, after Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney joined the government to take charge of American propaganda in Latin America in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Asia magazine changed its name to Asia and the Americas. In 1947, when Mike Straight began a drive to “sell” the United Nations, it was com- completely reorganized into United Nations World.

page 960:

• Like the Morgan interest in libraries, museums, and art, its inability to distinguish between loyalty to the United States and loyalty to England, its recognition of the need for social work among the poor, the multipartisan political views of the Morgan firm in domestic politics went back to the original founder of the firm, George Peabodv (1795-1869). To this same seminal figure may be attributed the use of tax-exempt foundations for controlling these activities, as may be observed in many parts of America to this day, in the use of Peabody foundations to support Peabody libraries and museums.

page 963:

• …Lionel Curtis, who was the original guide and parent of the IPR Institute of Pacific Relations…

• It must be confessed that the IPR had many of the marks of a fellow traveler or Communist “captive” organization.

page 965:

• This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements, operating from the White House itself and controlling all the chief avenues of publicity in the United States, to destroy the American way of life, based on private enterprise, laissez faire, and isolationism, in behalf of alien ideologies of Russian Socialism and British cosmopolitanism (or internationalism). This plot, if we are to believe the myth, worked through such avenues of publicity as The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine and had at its core the wild-eyed and bushy-haired theoreticians of Socialist Harvard and the London School of Economics. It was determined to bring the United States into World War II on the side of England (Roosevelt’s first love) and Soviet Russia (his second love) in order to destroy every finer element of American life and, as part of this consciously planned scheme, invited Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and destroyed Chiang Kai-shek, all the while undermining America’s real strength by excessive spending and unbalanced budgets.

• This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identity as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of 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. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

• Excellent summary of Round Table groups on these pages

page 969:

• The chief aims of this elaborate, semisecret organization were largely commendable: to coordinate the international activities and outlooks of all the English-speaking world into one (which would largely, it is true be that of the London group); to work to maintain the peace; to help backward, colonial, and underdeveloped areas to advance toward stability, law and order, and prosperity along lines somewhat similar to those taught at Oxford and the University of London (especially the School of Economics and the Schools of African and Oriental Studies).

• These organizations and their financial backers were in no sense reactionary or Fascistic persons, as Communist propaganda would like depict them. Quite the contrary. They were gracious and cultured gentlemen of somewhat limited social experience who were much concerned with the freedom of expression of minorities and the rule of law for all, who constantly thought in terms of Anglo-American solidarity, or political partition and federation, and who were convinced that they could gracefully civilize the Boers of South Africa, the Irish, the Arabs, and the Hindus, and who are largely responsible for the partitions of Ireland, Palestine, and India, as well as the federations of South Africa, Central Africa, and the West Indies. Their desire to win over the opposition by cooperation worked with Smuts but failed with Hertzog, worked with Gandhi but failed with Menon, worked with Stresemann but failed w Hitler, and has shown little chance of working with any Soviet leader.

• Change rule of law to their laws and change civilize to domesticate and it makes more sense. Given the state of the world today and how multi-culturalism is being pushed, they were either 180 degrees off the mark and failed utterly, or they wanted the multi-cultural terror world we have today. Seen as ruling by divide and conquer, it seems they were absolutely successful. Don’t even mention the power those in control of the monetary systems have. These assholes were not gentlemen, they were/are scoundrels.

page 970:

• …Reece committee’s general counsel, Rene A. Wormser, wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called Foundations: Their Power and Influence.

• Jerome D. Greene (1874-1959)

• early figures in the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations,

• As an investment banker, Greene is chiefly remembered for his sales millions of dollars of the fraudulent securities of the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger.

• Kreuger’s suicide in Paris in April 1932 left Greene with little money and no job. He wrote to Lionel Curtis, asking for help, and was given, for help, and was given, for two years, a professorship of international relations at Aberystwyth, Wales.

page 971:

• On his return to America in 1934, Greene also returned to his secretaryship of the Harvard Corporation and became, for the remainder of his life, practically a symbol of Yankee Boston, as trustee and officer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Gardner Museum in Fenway Court, the New England Conservatory of Music, the American Academy in Rome, the Brookings Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the General Education Board (only until 1939). He was also director of the Harvard Tercentenary Celebration in 1934-1937.

• Greene is of much greater significance in indicating the real influences within the Institute of Pacific Relations than any Communists or fellow travelers. He wrote the constitution for the IPR in 1926, was for years the chief conduit for Wall Street funds and influence into the organization, was treasurer of the American Council for three years, and chairman for three more, as well as chairman of the International Council for four years.

• Jerome Greene is a symbol of much more than the Wall Street influence in the IPR. He is also a symbol of the relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern United States which reflects one of the most powerful influences in twentieth-century American and world history.

• A fraudster and connected man is a great symbol indeed. Reminds me of modern times, bankers commit fraud, get promotions!

• It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the United States has been attacking for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communists.

• These misdirected attacks by the Radical Right did much to confuse the American people in the period 1948-1955, and left consequences which were still significant a decade later.

· Chapter 18: Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: The Race for the H-Bomb, 1950-1957

page 987:

• N. Korea attacked S. Korea in a Soviet operation, but did so when the Soviets were not at the U.N. to use their Security Council veto to stop USA intervention?

page 992:

• Senator William Jenner said from the Senate floor: “This country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction.”

page 1016:

• This is very much the whole story of Dulles’s foreign policy: eventual quiet adoption of the Truman line under cover of loud verbal denunciations of it.

page 1027:

• The “Belgrade Declaration” admitted that different countries could “walk different roads to Socialism” and that such “differences in the “concrete application of Socialism are the exclusive concern of individual countries.”

page 1058:

• Mao’s government was the first state to give Vietnam diplomatic recognition (January 1950), and at once began to send military supplies and guidance to Ho Chi Minh. Since the United States was granting extensive aid to France, the struggle in Vietnam thus became a struggle, through surrogates, between the United States and Red China.

page 1062:

• The American militarization pf both Thailand and South Vietnam was used by these countries to increase pressure on Cambodia, which, in spite of its pro-Western desires, was driven to seek support for its independence from China and Russia. This opened a wedge by which Communist pressure from North Vietnam could move across Laos and southward into Cambodia, between Thailand and South Vietnam, a possibility which would never have arisen if United States aid had not been used to corrupt and to militarize the two exterior states in the trio.

page 1074:

• The British, the AIOC, the world petroleum cartel, the American government, and the older Iranian elite led by the shah combined to crush Mossadegh. The chief effort came from the American supersecret intelligence agency (CIA) under the personal direction of its director, Allen W. Dulles, brother of the secretary of state. Dulles, as a former director of the Schroeder Bank in New York, was an old associate of Frank C. Tiarks, a partner in the Schroeder Bank in London since 1902, and a director of the Bank of England in 1912- 1945, as well as Lazard Brothers Bank, and the AIOC. It will be recalled that the Schroeder Bank in Cologne helped to arrange Hitler’s accession to power as chancellor in January 1933.

• But throughout the Near East, street mobs are easily roused and directed by those who are willing to pay, and Dulles had the unlimited secret funds of the CIA. From these he gave $10 Million to Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkopf, former head of the New Jersey State Police, who was in charge of training the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, and this was judiciously applied in ways which changed the mobs’ tune considerably from July to August 1953. The whole operation was directed by Dulles himself from Switzerland where he was visited by Schwartzkopf, the American ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, and messengers from the shah in the second week of August 1953.

• [Mossadegh] held a plebiscite in gust to approve his policies. The official vote in the plebiscite was out two million approvals against twelve hundred disapprovals,…

page 1075:

• Two weeks after the shah’s counter-coup, the United States gave Iran an emergency grant of $45 million, increased its annual economic aid payment to $23 million, and began to pay $5 million a month in Mutual Security Funds. These payments reached a total of a quarter of a billion dollars over five years. In return Iran became a firm member of the Western bloc,…

page 1079:

• …Hitler’s determination to annihilate the Jews of Europe and the conditions of World War II which made it seem that he would be successful. The Jews, their supporters, and allies tried to smuggle in any Jews who could be saved from Europe. Since there was nowhere else they could go, many were smuggled into Palestine.

• I understand there were several negotiations to get Jews out of Germany, but they were blocked (by Westerners and Zionists) until a state of Israel would be created.

· Chapter 19: The New Era, 1957-1964

page 1105:

• The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the American scientists, over the opposition of the Air Force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet Union in 1957-1962 had very large boosters which gave it a lead in the race to propel objects into space or into ballistic orbits around the earth, but these were very expensive, could not be made in large numbers, and were very awkward to install or to move The United States, on the other hand, soon found it had bombs in all sizes down to small ones capable of being used as tactical weapons by troops in ground combat and able to be moved about on jeeps.

• It was, strangely enough, just at that time (end of 1957) that two American studies (the Gaither Report and the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) suggested the existence of a missile gap or inferiority in missile capacity of the United States compared to the Soviet Union. This judgment, apparently based on overemphasis on _the size of Soviet rocket boosters, played a chief role in the American presidential campaign of 1960 and in the ebullient self-confidence of Khrushchev and his associates in 1957-1961.

page 1108:

• The two-power world of Dulles was being replaced by a multi-bloc world in which the two Superpowers, instead of being antithetical on all points, were finding large areas in which their interests were closer to each other than they were to those of some of the other, newer blocs, especially that growing up around Red China. Moreover, as we shall see, in some ways the aims, methods, and structures of the two Superpowers were converging on increasingly parallel courses.

page 1110:

• These American achievements [in space exploration] were seen on television by millions of viewers and roused considerable praise throughout the world at the courage of the American government in permitting live broadcasts of what could have turned into humiliating fiascos.

• Could any of it have been faked? The media is the most effective weapon for administering change.

page 1112:

• By 1964, after six years of its existence, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had sett down to an annual budget of over five billion dollars a year. Sums large were directed by government sources into research and development in science, medicine, and technology. As a consequence, the whole pattern of American education was changed and so was the relationship between government and education, as well as between the public and education. The educational system was brought into the tempestuous atmosphere of the frantic American marketplace and was being ransacked from the highest levels down to high school and even below for talented, trained, or merely eager people. As the demands for such people grew and their remunerations and opportunities increased, the substantial minority who were not talented, trained, or eager found fewer and fewer opportunities to make a living and began to sink downward toward a steadily growing lower class of social outcasts and underprivileged, the socially self-perpetuating group of the impoverished.

page 1115:

• During his visit, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko provided a curious glimpse into the intricacies of the Soviet system. At Camp David he tried to make a deal binding each party to limit its propaganda radio broadcasts to the other to three hours a day, with the unstated implication that Moscow might stop jamming the Voice of America if this agreement was reached. Although our broadcasts in Russian, at that time, were only three hours a day, we refused the offer by saying that we wished to increase, not reduce, the flow of information.

• …in June 1963, with the relaxation of the Cold War, jamming was stopped by the Russians without any agreement.

• The West German economic miracle was based, as we have said, on low wages, hard work, and vigorous pursuit of profits by private enterprises little hampered by the government or labor unions. It was in fact, the closest example of traditional nineteenth-century laissez faire that the mid-twentieth century had to offer. The government, under the influence of Minister of Economics (later Chancellor) Ludwig Erhard, operated in terms of what they called “a socially conscious free market economy” (soziale Marktivirtschaft), but the play of free economic forces was to be found in lack of interference by the government and competitive wage rates rather than in price competition among industrial producers.

page 1116:

• This surplus of labor in West Germany came from the influx of 13 million refugees into the area, chiefly from East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Once the boom started, the demand for labor was so great that refugees continued to be welcomed…

• We had tons of labor, but needed more, but we had to keep wages low?

• Some of the consequences of this system, besides the most obvious one of booming prosperity, were that the structure of monopolized industry with great rewards for the upper classes, with lesser rewards and little social mobility for workers, …

• What did matter was that the average West German had steady work at adequate wages and limitless hope for the future.

• Let them eat hope. This economic miracle seems nothing more than exploiting the excess labor (created from the war/refugees).

• …were eager to participate in it, were the East Germans. They continued to flee westward from poverty and despotism to plenty and freedom.

• Adequate wages and hope == freedom?

page 1118:

• …American economic and business circles were in favor of the continuation of large defense spending, the source of a major segment of America’s employment opportunities and industrial profits. Only at the beginning of 1964, when President Johnson astutely sought to combine reduced military expenditures with reduced taxes and a large-scale attack on American domestic poverty to expand demands in the consumers’ markets…

page 1120:

• The pattern for a classic diplomatic crisis has three stages: (1) confrontation; (2) recognition; and (3) settlement. The confrontation consists of a dispute, that is, a power challenge in some area of conflict; Stage 2 is recognition by both sides of the realities of the power relationship between them (always much easier when only two states are involved); and Stage 3 is a yielding by the weaker of the two accompanied by an effort by the stronger to cover that retreat by refusing to inflict a humiliation or obvious triumph over the weaker. As Metternich said, “A diplomat is a man who never allows himself the pleasure of a triumph,” and does so simply because it is to the interest of the stronger that an opponent who recognizes the victor’s strength and is reasonable in yielding to it not be overthrown or replaced by another ruler who is too ignorant or too unreasonable to do so.

page 1122:

• …the Administration recognized that its blockade was illegal, that the United States itself had once fought a war for free navigation of the seas, and that we recognized blockade only in connection with a declared war. As a concession to this, the American action was called a “quarantine” not a “blockade."

page 1123:

• The missile crisis, by stripping the Soviet-American rivalry down to its essential feature as a crude power rivalry, cleared up a number of ambiguities and opened a new era in twentieth-century history. It showed (1) that the power balance between the two Superpowers was clearly in America’s favor; (2) that the United States government, in spite of Khrushchev’s doubts, had the will power to face and begin atomic war if necessary; (3) that no one really wanted thermonuclear war and that Khrushchev was prepared to go to any reasonable point to avoid it; and (4) that deterrence actually does deter and, accordingly, that a modus vivendi might ultimately be achieved between the two Superpowers.

page 1125:

• …Latin America. These problems might be boiled down to four basic issues: (1) falling death rates, combined with continued high birthrates, are producing a population explosion unaccompanied by any comparable increase in the food supply; (2) the social disorganization resulting from such population increase, combined with a flooding of people from rural areas into urban slums, is reflected in disruption of family life, spreading crime and immorality, totally inadequate education and other social services, and growing despair; (3) the ideological patterns of Latin America, which were always unconstructive, are being replaced by newer, equally unconstructive but explosively violent, doctrines; and (4) there is simultaneously an unnecessary spreading of modern weapons and a growing disequilibrium between the control of such arms and the disintegrating social structure and the increasing social and political pressures just mentioned.

page 1126:

• The inadequacy of health protection in Latin America is as startling as the inadequacy of education, but may not, in a wider frame, be so objectionable. For if health were better protected, more people would survive, and the problems of scarce food and scarce jobs would have readied the explosive point long ago.

page 1127:

• We might sum up this general situation by saying that the salvation of our poor, harassed globe depends on structure and sequence (or on patterns and priorities).

page 1145:

• From 1931 to 1944 these were ruled by the dictator Jorge Ubico, the last of a long line of corrupt and ruthless tyrants. When he retired to die in New Orleans in 1944, free elections chose Juan Jose Arevalo (1945-1950) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1950-1954) as presidents. Reform was long overdue, and these two administrations tried to provide it, becoming increasingly anti-American and pro-Communist over their nine-year rule. When they began, civil or political rights were almost totally unknown, and i42 persons (including corporations) owned 98 percent of the arable land. Free speech and press, legalized unions, and free elections preceded the work of reform, but opposition from the United States began as soon as it became clear that the Land Reform Act of June 1952 would be applied to the United Fruit Company. This act called for redistribution of uncultivated holdings above a fixed acreage or lands of absentee owners, with compensation from twenty-year, 3 percent bonds, equal to the declared tax value of the lands. About 400,000 acres of United Fruit lands fell under this law and were distributed by the Arbenz Guzman government to 180,000 peasants. This and other evidence was declared to be Communist penetration of the Americas, and John Foster Dulles, in a brief visit to the OAS meeting at Caracas in 1954, forced through a declaration condemning Guatemala. The Secretary of State left the execution of this condemnation to his brother, Allen Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which soon found an American-trained and American-financed Guatemalan Colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, who was prepared to lead a revolt against Arbenz. With American money and equipment, and even some American “volunteers” to fly “surplus” American planes, Armas mounted an attack of Guatemalan exiles from bases in two adjacent dictatorships, Honduras and Nicaragua.

page 1156:

• The sole consequence of the Dulles efforts to do the wrong thing along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis has been to increase what he was seeking to reduce: local political instability, increased Communism and Soviet influence, neutralism, and hatred of the United States.

page 1165:

• Japan is no longer a backward, underdeveloped, or colonial area from any point of view. The marks of such a backward society are usually a high birthrate and death rate, a largely young, rural population, with the great majority in agriculture, and mostly illiterate. In Japan, all of these characteristics are untrue. Birth and death rates are very low; the population is aging rapidly, is almost totally literate, has below 29 percent in agriculture, and has over 60 percent resident in areas classified as urban.

• and 50 years later is facing a dire demographic implosion

page 1166:

• As might be expected, such rapid material advance and profound social change has given rise to all kinds of social problems. Family discipline has weakened, and the older Japanese morality and outlooks are now widely rejected. Marxism and existentialism vie for the allegiance of the educated, while the less esoterically informed are satisfied with the pursuit of material success and personal pleasures. The gap between these two groups is considerable, and much of the stability, both political and social, in Japanese society today seems to rise from the self-satisfaction of the new middle class and the eagerness of many peasants and workers to get into that class and enjoy its benefits. These benefits increasingly provide a life like that in American suburbia, with television, baseball, bulldozers, picture windows, neon-lighted department stores, mass advertising, instant foods, and weekly slick magazines.

• Traded family for consumer culture…

page 1170:

• China is pragmatic, focused on survival. Russia is dualistic, focused on authority to bring salvation. The West is pluralistic, seeing interconnect and multi paths between spirit and matter.

page 1174:

• The third stage of agrarian reform, constituting the basic feature of the “Great Leap Forward,” merged the 750 thousand collective farms into about 26,000 agrarian communes of about 5,000 families each. This was a social rather than simply an agrarian revolution, since its aims included the destruction of the family household and the peasant village. All activities of the members, including child rearing, education, entertainment, social life, the militia, and all economic and intellectual life came under the control of the commune.

• One purpose of this drastic change was to release large numbers of women from domestic activities so that they could labor in fields or factories.

• In contrast to the USA and feminism which tricked the women into the same end.

page 1175:

• …it was expected that the communes would totally shatter the resistant social structure of Chinese society, leaving isolated individuals to face the power of the state.

page 1182:

• Russia would fight internally, often with violent liquidation of comrades while putting on a show of unity to the outside world. China would argue, but come together and admitted their fallibility to the world.

page 1192:

• …the process of detribalization associated with the growth of cities and the development of commercial and craft activities that brought many diverse subjects of colonialism together in urban districts or trade Unions outside the stabilizing nexus of their previous tribal associations…

page 1193:

• …independence was granted, after a relatively moderate agitation, by a former ruling power which showed a certain relief to be rid of its colonial burden. This indicates a profound change in attitudes toward colonies within the imperialist countries.

• or was this the next step of empire toward commonwealth?

page 1198:

• The social consequences of decolonization are, in some ways, similar to those that have appeared recently in the poorer areas of Western cities. This has been called “anomie” (the shattering of stable social relationships), and arises from rapid social change rather than from decolonization. It gives rise to isolation of individuals, destruction of established social values and of stability, personal irresponsibility, shattered family relationships, irresponsible sexual and parental relationships, crime, juvenile delinquency, a greatly increased incidence of all social diseases (including alcoholism, use of narcotics, and neuroses), and personal isolation, loneliness, and susceptibility to mass hysterias.

page 1199:

• It is, for example, not usually recognized that the whole economic expansion of Western society rests upon a number of psychological attitudes that are prerequisites to the system as we have it but are not often stated explicitly. Two of these may be identified as (1) future preference and (2) infinitely expandable material demand.

• Today the average middle-class family of suburbia has a schedule of future material demands which is limitless: a second car is essential, often followed by a third; an elaborate reconstruction of the basement provides a recreation room, which must be followed in short order by an elaborate patio with outdoor cooking equipment and a swimming pool; almost immediately comes the need for an outboard motorboat and trailer to carry it, followed by the need for a summer residence by the water and a larger boat. And so it goes, in an endless expansion of insatiable demands spurred on by skilled advertising, the whole keeping the wheels of industry turning, and the purchasing power of the community racing around in an accelerating cycle.

• Without these two psychological assumptions, the Western economy would break down or would never have started. At present, future preference may be breaking down, and infinitely expanding material demand may soon follow it in the weakening process. If so, the American economy will collapse, unless it finds new psychological foundations.

page 1201:

• But our cognitive system is derived from our past heritage, such as our Hebrew ethical system,…

page 1202:

• …effort toward cooperation has been blocked by three influences: (1) the sensitivity of newly independent nations to preserve this independence intact as long as possible, even to the degree that particularist local interests and rivalries are dominant over common interests; (2) the fact that all these nations need economic aid and technical assistance from the advanced countries, and are, on the whole, in competition with each other to get it; and (3) the tendency of many of the newly independent areas (such as Indonesia or Egypt) to adopt pro- Soviet attitudes in the Cold War leading to efforts by the Soviet Union to infringe upon their basically neutralist policies to persuade them to make a commitment to the Communist side in the Cold War.

page 1203:

• …one of the most obvious problems brought to Africa by European influence has been the detachment of atomized individuals from the social nexus, based on blood and marriage, that previously guided their lives and determined their systems of values and obligations.

page 1205:

• The independence of Ghana was a personal achievement of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who returned to Accra from an educational process in Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics.

• Lots of Pan-African talk, why would you unite such a large area? More deracination in the form of blending the tribes into nations and nations into a union. Worked out great for Europe…

· Chapter 20: Tragedy and Hope: The Future in Perspective

page 1214:

• …Americans now have change built into the pat- tern of their lives, so that saving and investment and, in general, the flows of claims on wealth (what most of us call “money”) now go in directions that make constant change almost inevitable.

page 1215:

• Surely weapons will continue to be expensive and complex. This means that they will increasingly be the tools of professionalized, if not mercenary, forces. All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy.

• In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will be established.

page 1216:

• A period that is not democratic in its political structure is not necessarily bad,…

page 1220:

• A recent study of 29 crisis situations in foreign affairs involving the Soviet Union in the 1945-196 3 period shows that they were aggressive in only four, were cautious in eleven, and were more cautious than aggressive in fourteen. The four aggressive ones were concerned with Berlin, Hungary, the U-2 incident, and Cuba. The study showed that only 8 of the 29 crises were initiated by the Soviet Union, while 11 were initiated by the United States. The general conclusion of the study was that Soviet policy would grow increasingly conservative, since they were primarily concerned with state building and retaining what they have already achieved.

page 1221:

• …Superpower neutralization… 2. Continued disintegration of the two Superblocs, from the inability of. the chief Power in each to bring force against its allies because of the need to accept growing diversity within each bloc in order to retain as much as possible the appearance of unity within the bloc. This process is well illustrated by Moscow’s difficulties with China, Albania, and now Romania, or by Washington’s troubles with De Gaulle or with its Latin American allies.

• Accordingly, political organizations (such as the state) have been able to rule over larger areas, and thus have become larger in size and fewer in numbers in our Western world. In this way, the political development of Europe over the last millennium has seen thousands of feudal areas coalesce into hundreds of principalities, and these into scores of dynastic monarchies, and, finally, into a dozen or more national states.

page 1222:

• As the technology of weapons, transportation, communications, an propaganda continued to develop, it became possible to compel obedience over areas measured in thousands (rather than hundreds) of miles and thus over distances greater than those occupied by existing linguistic and cultural groups. It thus became necessary to appeal for allegiance to the state on grounds wider than nationalism. This gave rise, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, to the idea of continental blocs and the ideololgical state (replacing the national state).

• Moving from many small units to few large.

• The power was concentrated in 2 blocs in the 1950’s. This left a buffer fringe between the powers that ended up eroding the power within each block as more buffer fringe states wanted independence and nuclear weapons limited military compulsion. This is remnant of how a society can be change by focusing on the fringe as we saw with the hippie movement and more recently the LGBT movement. This fringe is where the thin end of the wedge is placed.

• Any organization is coordinated both by patterned relationships and by ideology and morale. If the former become increasingly threatened by weapons of destruction, the organization can survive by becoming decentralized, with less emphasis on organizational relationships and more emphasis on morale and outlook. They thus become increasingly amorphous and invulnerable to modern weapons of destruction.

page 1223:

• This process has not gone very far yet, but it is already observable, especially among the younger generation…

page 1224:

• …a shift from our present use of fossil fuels as a chief energy source to the use of the sun’s energy directly in many small local energy accumulators might provide a plentiful supply of decentralized energy. More remote might be use of the tides, or of differential ocean temperatures, or even of the winds. Possibly some development in the use of nuclear energy, or, above all, some method for cheap separation of the oxygen and hydrogen in ordinary water that could release energy, perhaps through fuel cells, as they recombine. Such a decentralized energy source, if developed, could be used to build up a decentralized industrial system using cellulose or silicon as raw materials to produce an economy of plastics and glass products (including fiber glass).

• On such a basis, with the proper development of guerrilla weapon tactics, the costs of enforcing centralized orders in local areas might rise so high that a considerable process of political decentralization and local autonomies (including local liberties) could arise, thus reversing the process of political centralization that has continued in the Western tradition for about a thousand years.

page 1225:

• The virus for wheat rust and rice blast, in varieties especially virulent on Chinese-type plants, can be produced in large amounts relatively easily at costs well below $40 a pound. Spread on the fields at the proper time in the annual growing cycle, these would destroy up to 75 percent of these crops. And there is no effective defense.

page 1228:

• 9. All this means a blurring of the distinction between war and peace, with the situation at all times one of closely controlled conflict. In this way endemic conflict is accepted in order to avoid, if possible, epidemic total war.

• (3) the fact that the American economy is unique, because it is the only economy that no longer operates in terms of scarce resources. It may be inside a framework of scarce re- sources, but this framework is so much wider than the other limiting features of the system (notably its fiscal and financial arrangements) that the system itself does not operate within any limits established by that wider framework.

• What? The subsystem is not limited to by the whole system? The USA economy is not limited by the finite resources of Earth? That is the craziest assertion in this entire book.

page 1229:

• In the Soviet economy “costs” are real costs, measurable in terms of the allotment of scarce resources that could have been used otherwise. In the American system “costs” are fiscal or financial limitations that have little connection with the use of scarce resources or even with the use of available (and therefore not scarce) resources. The reason for this is that in the American economy, the fiscal or financial limit is lower than the limit established by real resources and, therefore, since the financial limits act as the restraint on our economic activities, we do not get to the point where our activities encounter the restraints imposed by the limits of real resources (except rarely and briefly in terms of technically trained manpower, which is our most limited resource).

page 1235:

• While the economic life of Western society has been increasingly successful in satisfying our material needs, the social aspect has become increasingly frustrating. There was a time, not long ago, when the chief aims of most Western men was for greater material goods and for rising standards of living. This was achieved at great social costs, by the attrition or even destruction of much of social life, including the sense of community fellowship, leisure, and social amenities. Looking backward, we are fully aware of these costs in the original factory towns and urban slums, but looking about us today we are often not aware of the great, often intangible, costs of middle-class living in suburbia or in the dormitory environs that surround European cities: the destruction of social companionship and solidarity, the narrowing influence of exposure to persons from a restricted age group or from a narrow segment of social class, the horrors of commuting, the incessant need for constant driving about to satisfy the ordinary needs of the family for groceries, medical care, entertainment, religion, or social experience, the prohibitive cost and inconvenience of upkeep and repairs and, in general, the whole way of life of the suburban “rat race," including the large-scale need for providing artificial activities for children.

• The social costs of the contemporary economic system are staggering-

page 1236:

• The constantly narrowing range of possibilities for self-expression has given rise to deep frustrations with their concomitant growth of irrational compensating customs, such as the obsession with speed; vicarious combativeness, especially in sports; the use of alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and sex as stimulants, diversions, and sedatives; and the rapid appearance and disappearance of fads in dress, social customs, and leisure activities.

page 1237:

• …we can still look at the past and see a sequence of prevalent outlooks, often with rather confused periods of transition in between. Over the past two centuries, there have been five such stages: the Enlightenment in 1730-1790, the Romantic Movement in 1790-1850, the Age of Scientific Materialism in 1850-1895, the Period of Irrational Activism of 1895-1945, and our new Age of Inclusive Diversity since 1945.

• Inclusive diversity? That is straight out of a 21st century liberal mouth… in 1966!

page 1240:

• The semanticists rejected logic by rejecting the idea of general categories or even of definition of terms. According to them, because everything is constantly changing, no term can remain fixed without at once becoming irrelevant. The meaning of any word depended on the context in which it was used; since this was different every time it was used, the meaning, consisting of a series of connotations based on all previous uses of the term, is different at each use.

• The destruction of language and the inability to effectively communicate through time. This would lead to the loss of generationally passed down knowledge. How many times has someone, upset with my arguing their point, resorted to “that is not what I meant”. Well then, why did you say it and what do you mean? Which usually results in an insult and the end of the conversation. We have literally lost the ability to communicate in many cases.

page 1241:

• Speed, alcohol, sex, coffee, and tobacco screened man off from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to observe, or to enjoy life, without his realizing that these were the shields he adopted to conceal from himself the fact that he was no longer really capable of living, because he no longer knew what life was and could see no meaning or purpose in it.

• The result was mounting sensationalism. In time, nothing made much impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion, or distortion. Along with this, ability to communicate dwindled. The old idea of communication as an exchange of concepts represented by symbols was junked.

• Thus appeared private poetry, personal prose, and meaningless art in which the symbols used have ceased to be symbols because they do not reflect any common background of experience that could indicate their meaning as shared communication or experience. These productions, the fads the day, were acclaimed by many as works of genius. Those who questioned them and asked their meaning were airily waved aside as unforgivable philistines; they were told that no one any longer sought “meaning” in literature or art but rather sought “experiences." Thus to look at a meaningless painting became an experience. These fads followed one another, reflecting the same old pretenses, but under different names. Thus “Dada” following World War I eventually led to the “Absurd” following World War II.

page 1242:

• typical Western Way by fumbling cooperatively down a road paved with good intentions.

• it is clear that the West believes in diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism rather than in monism or dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion, in liberty rather than in authority, in truth rather than in power, in conversion rather than in annihilation, in the individual rather than in the organization, in reconciliation rather than in triumph, in heterogeneity rather than in homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in absolutes, and in approximations rather than in final answers.

page 1249:

• The character of any society is determined less by what it is actually like than by the picture it has of itself and of what it aspires to be.

• …looked forward to a not remote future in which everyone would be middle class, except for a small, shiftless minority of no importance.

• How can everyone be middle-class? He talks extensively in the previous pages about how Americans care for one another, are inclusive, and then talks about an unimportant shiftless minority. This book has a lot of contradictions in it.

page 1251:

• In that society prudence, discretion, conformity, moderation (except in acquisition), decorum, frugality, became the marks of a sound man. Credit became more important than intrinsic personal qualities, and credit was based on the appearances of things, especially the appearances of the external material accessories of life. The facts of a man’s personal qualities—such as kindness, affection, thoughtfulness, generosity, personal insight, and such, were increasingly irrelevant or even adverse to the middle-class evaluation of a man. Instead, the middle-class evaluation rested rather on nonpersonal attributes and on external accessories. Where personal qualities were admired, they were those that contributed to acquisition (often qualities opposed to the established values of the Christian outlook, such as love, charity, generosity, gentleness, or unselfishness). These middle-class qualities included decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy, and insatiable ambition.

page 1252:

• Thus middle-class status is a matter of outlook and not a matter of occupation or status.

• …the urge to seek truth or to help others are not really compatible with the middle-class values.

• …as long as parents continued to believe it [the middle class] themselves and disciplined their children to accept it. The minority of children who did not accept it were “disowned” and fell out of the middle classes. What is even more important, they were, until recently, pitied and rejected by their families.

page 1254:

page 1257:

• The kind of a car a person drove was, until very recently, one of the best guides to middle-class status, since a car to the middle classes was a status symbol, while to the other classes it was a means of getting some- where.

page 1259:

• …although the lower-middle-class groups had preferred Senator Taft as their leader. Eisenhower, however, had been preferred by the Eastern Establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League, semiaristocratic Anglophiles whose real strength rested in their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.

page 1262:

• The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method:…

page 1263:

• it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

• All these causes acted to destroy the middle classes by acting to destroy the middle-class outlook. And this outlook was destroyed, not by adult middle-class persons abandoning it, but by a failure or inability of parents to pass it on to their children.

page 1264:

• …the disintegration of the middle class arose from a failure to transfer its outlook to its children. This failure was thus a failure of education, and may seem, at first glance, to be all the more surprising, since our education system has been, consciously or unconsciously, organized as a mechanism for indoctrination of the young in middle-class ideology.

• As a reflection of this, it has been more concerned with instilling attitudes and behavior than with intellectual training.

page 1265:

• The chief external factor in the destruction of the middle-class outlook has been the relentless attack upon it in literature and drama through most of the twentieth century.

• …avidly welcomed by the petty bourgeoisie and by some middle-class housewives. Lending libraries and women’s magazines of the 1910’S, 1920’s, and 1930’s were full of them, but, by the 1950’s they were largely restricted to television soap dramas.

• After 1940, writers tended less and less to attack the bourgeois way of life; that job had been done. Instead they described situations, characters, and actions that were simply nonbourgeois: violence, social irresponsibility, sexual laxity and perversion, miscegenation, human weakness in relation to alcohol, narcotics, or sex, or domestic and business relationships conducted along completely nonbourgeois lines.

page 1268:

• The child who grows up in affluence is more difficult to instill with the frustrations and drives that were so basic in the middle-class outlook. For generations, even in fairly rich families, this indoctrination had continued because of continued emphasis on thrift and restraints on consumption. By 1937 the world depression showed that the basic economic problems were not saving and investment, but distribution and consumption. Thus there appeared a growing readiness to consume, spurred on by new sales techniques, installment selling, and the extension of credit from the productive side to the consumption side of the economic process.

• …increased emphasis, within the middle-class ideology, upon the elements of status and ostentatious display of wealth as status symbols rather than on the elements of frugality and prudence. Thus affluence weakened both future preference and self-denying self-discipline training.

page 1268:

• [The theory that] child maturation is an innate process not subject to modification by outside training. In educational theory this erroneous idea went back to the Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), which idealized the state of nature as equivalent to the Garden of Eden, and believed that education must consist in leaving a youth completely free so that his innate goodness could emerge and reveal itself.

• By 1910 or so, childrearing and educational theories had accepted the idea that man was a biological organism, like any animal, that his personality was a consequence of hereditary traits, and that each child had within him a rigid assortment of inherited talents and a natural rate of maturation in the development of these talents. These ideas were incorporated in a series of slogans of which two were: “Every child is different,” and “He’ll do it when he’s ready.”

page 1269:

• From all this came a wholesale ending of discipline, both in the home and in school, and the advent of “permissive education,” with all that it entailed. Children were encouraged to have opinions and to speak out on matters of which they were totally ignorant; acquisition of information and intellectual training were shoved into the background; and restrictions of time, place, and movement in schools and homes were reduced to a minimum. Every emphasis was placed on “spontaneity”; and fixed schedules of time periods or subject matter to be covered were belittled. All this greatly weakened the disciplinary influence of the educational process, leaving the new generation much less disciplined, less organized, and less aware of time than their parents.

• Several pages on marriage. Romantic versus status. Very insightful.

page 1272:

• The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and “fulfillment,”

• She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally.

• Oh no! Wives spending their lives focused on children! Woe is me… It is much better now that the children are abandoned and the wives are in the workforce…

• Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women’s clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed children. By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women’s magazines.

page 1273:

• …the acceptance of divorce as morally possible in bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the stage and cinema).

• One notable change in this whole process was a shift, over the past century, from the male-dominated family to a female-dominated family.

page 1274:

• Closely related to this confusion, or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was decreasing sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As recently as the 1920’s girl babies were reared differently from boys. They were dressed differently, treated differently, permitted to do different things, and admonished about different dangers. By 1960, children, regardless of sex, were all being brought up the same. Indeed, with short cropped hair and playsuits on both, it became impossible to be sure which was which. This led to a decrease in the personality differences of men and women, with males becoming more submissive and females more aggressive.

page 1277:

• There can be no doubt that the American child today, especially in a middle-class family, becomes aware of sex much earlier than he did a generation or two ago, and long before he is emotionally ready to face the fact of his own sexuality.

• There is a wealth of information here about marriage, sex, family relationships it warrants a closer look separate from the rest of the book

page 1278:

• America today, a radical and wholesale rejection of parental values, including middle-class values, because of the protracted emotional warfare which now goes on in the middle-class home with teen-age children. The chief damage in the situation lies in the pervasive destruction of the adolescent middle-class boy and his alienation from the achieving aspects of middle-class culture.

page 1279:

• By 1947 dance program (listing the dances in numbered order with the girl’s partner for each written down) was obsolete. “Going steady,” which meant dancing only with the boy who invited her, became established, a complete rejection of the middle-class dance whose purpose was to provide the girl with a maximum number of different partners in order to widen her acquaintance with matrimonial possibilities.

page 1281:

• They [youth] are engaged in a search for themselves as individuals, something they were called upon to do in the early grades of school, thanks to the misconceptions of John Dewey, and they are quite alien to any theory that the self is a creature of trained patterns and is not a creature of discovered secrets. Now, in the 1960’s, this opinion of man’s nature is changing and, as a consequence of George Orwell, mishmash conceptions of brainwashing, and the revival of Pavlovian psychology through the work of men like Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, the idea of personality as something trained under discipline to a desired pattern is being revived.

• While I agree humans are creatures of trained patterns, it is a leap to see Orwell, Pavlov, and Skinner as a counterbalance to finding oneself!

• How can you have future preference AND believe in infinitely expandable material living standards? Consider copper. If I have future preference I can see that mined copper is dwindling and will at some point be effectively exhausted. This runs totally counter to infinitely expandable material living standards.

page 1282:

• The shift from a destructive or negative to a positive view of the new American outlook is, to some extent, chronological; it may be seen in the former popularity of Elvis Presley and the newer enthusiasm for Joan Baez (or folk singers generally).

page 1284:

• They lack imagination also, an almost inevitable consequence of an outlook that concentrates on experiences without context. Their experiences are necessarily limited and personal and are never fitted into a larger picture or linked with the past or the future. As a result they find it almost impossible to picture anything different from what it is, or even to see what it is from any long-range perspective.

• How many times have I heard “It has always been this way”?

• They lack the desire to obtain experience vicariously from reading, and the vicarious experiences that they get from talk (usually with their fellows) are rarely much different from their own experiences. As a result, their lives, while erratic, are strangely dull and homogeneous.

page 1286:

• Such a boy [of aristocratic family] is re- moved from the smothering influence of “momism,” grows up relatively shy of girls, has more than his share of homosexual experiences (to which he may succumb completely), but, on the whole, usually grows up to be a very energetic, constructive, stable, and self-sacrificing citizen, prepared to inflict the same training process on his own sons.

page 1288:

• …the medical profession in the United States ceased, very largely, to be a profession of fatherly confessors and unprofessing humanitarians and became one of the largest groups of hardheaded petty-bourgeois hustlers in the United States, and their professional association became the most ruthlessly materialistic lobbying association of any professional group.

• [teachers] quickly abandoned the class- room for the more remunerative tasks of educational administration.

page 1289:

• In his farewell report the Chairman of Harvard’s Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender, summed up the problem this way: “The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents’ ambitions or a conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers’ prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn independence, with a vivid imagination and desire to explore fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to read the unrequired books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a rebel, may not conform to their stereotype, and may not get the top grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the highest level in the standard multiple choice admissions tests, which may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind."

page 1290:

• It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought of the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system would itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us.

page 1293:

• The effort of Teilhard de Chardin to do this [distinguish what is necessary from what is important] has won enormous interest in recent years, but its impact has been much blunted by the fact that his presentation contained, in reciprocal relationship, a deficiency of courage and a surplus of deliberate ambiguity.

• Interesting the Piltdown hoax figure, Teilhard, is described as deliberately ambiguous.

• The real value of any society rests in its ability to develop mature and responsible individuals prepared to stand on their own feet, make decisions, and be prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions and actions without whining or self-justification.

page 1296:

• …many of the elements of outlook and leadership of the new postwar Europe emerged from underground, and were unnoticed by those who had not been in active contact with the underground. Thus they were not observed by the leaders in Washington and in London, even by De Gaulle, and, above all, were unreported by Allen Dulles, who was sup- posed to be observing the underground for the OSS from Switzerland.

• In two words this new outlook was determined to make Europe more “unified” and more “spiritual.”

page 1297:

• Briefly the problem is this: no one concerned—the Soviet Union, the United States, or Europe itself—can permit Germany to be unified again in the foreseeable future. A united Germany would be a force of instability and danger to everyone, including the Germans, because it would be the most powerful nation in Europe and, balanced between East and West, might at any time fall into collaboration with one of these to the intense danger of the other; or, if the Russian-American antithesis remained irreparable, a united Germany could put extreme pressures on its lesser neighbors between the two Superpowers. The peace and stability of Europe thus require the permanent division of Germany…

page 1302:

• These organizations [European supranational] have some of the aspects of sovereignty from the fact that their decisions do not have to be unanimous, are binding on state and on citizens who have not agreed to them, and can be financed by funds that may be levied without current consent of the persons being taxed. On the whole, the supranational aspects of these institutions will be strengthened in the future from provisions in the treaties themselves. All this is very relevant to the remarks in the last chapter on the disintegration of the modern, unified sovereign state and the redistribution of its powers to multilevel hierarchical structures remotely resembling the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in the late medieval period.

page 1325:

• The historian has difficulty distinguishing the features of the present, and generally prefers to restrict his studies to the past, where the evidence is more freely available and where perspective helps him to interpret the evidence. Thus the historian speaks with decreasing assurance about the nature and significance of events as they approach his own day.

page 1326:

• The hope of the twentieth century rests on its recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless.

• We now know fairly well how to control the increase in population, …