-Caveat Lector- <nettime> whatcha doing, Bilderberg?http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199912/msg00010.html Nettime archive: [Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: <nettime> whatcha doing, Bilderberg? From: Pit Schultz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 01 Dec 1999 20:15:46 +0900 >Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 21:07:10 +0900 Weblogs to the Bilderbergers Grammar, Rethorics, Cybernetic Folly or: Did you get your PhD in conspiracy theory yet? "You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. it would break the metaphor." (Neil Stevenson, Snow Crash, pp.33-4) Conspiracy; In common law, an agreement between two or more persons to commit an unlawful act or to accomplish a lawful end by unlawful means. Conspiracy is perhaps the most amorphous area in Anglo-American criminal law. [ http://www.britannica.com - free at last. ] For the sake of simple beginnings, the footnote where we agreed to start is in reference to a letter: The "Prince Barnard of The Netherlands Letter", by Marshall McLuhan, 14 May, 1969; sent to their Royal Highness, Prince Barnard, in appreciation for McLuhan's invitation to address the Bilderberg Conference. How did you characterize this letter? Well, it's the 'Ur' letter; for exposing people to thoughts of McLuhan that are not popularized through Wired Magazine, or any other media coverage that ever was done of McLuhan. This shows you a level of thinking that Marshall worked from, that's just not known. So, it always initiates people into a basic point of McLuhan; giving you a jumping off point for understanding why he said what he said. [ Bob Dobbs, http://anw.com/RK/natives.htm ] This problem has been discussed elsewhere. It is also clear that elite networks (possibly with an associative function of significance equal to, if not greater than, many formal bodies) escape attention. The tip of the iceberg is signalled, for example, by the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Club of Dakar, etc. The problem of associative networks within and between intergovernmental bodies [that] has not received attention. To what extent is the associative activity behind the "Inter-Agency Games" merely of anecdotal significance, given the problems of inter-agency coordination ? Why has the "good" associative activity received all the attention and never been related to the "bad": trade associations-cum-cartels, intelligence networks, subversive-cum-revolutionary "organisations", international crime "rings" and networks, etc ? [ http://www.uia.org/uiadocs/assfut.htm ] What goes on at Bilderberg? - It is important at the outset to distinguish the active, on-going membership from the various people who are occasionally invited to attend. Many of those invited to come along, perhaps to report on matters pertaining to their expertise, have little idea there is a formally constituted group at all, let alone one with its own *grand* agenda. [* added] Hence the rather dismissive remarks by people like sixties media guru Marshall McLuhan, who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1969 in Denmark, that he was 'nearly suffocated at the banality and irrelevance,' describing them as 'uniformly nineteenth century minds pretending to relate to the twentieth century'. Another of those who have attended, Christopher Price, then Labour MP for Lewisham West, found it 'all very fatuous.... icing on the cake with nothing to do with the cake.' (Eringer 1980, p. 26). Denis Healey, on the other hand, who was in from the beginning and later acted as British convenor, says that 'the most valuable [meetings] to me while I was in opposition were the Bilderberg Conferences'. (Healey 1990, p. 195) [ http://www.tlio.demon.co.uk/bildhist.htm ] "For 42 years," Deverell reported, "the secretive organization has devoted itself to strengthening the Atlantic military alliance and economies. [..] There are no massive indiscretions, but the exchanges can be quite heated." This is a polite way of saying that members can secretly speak their minds about whatever grandiose schemes of world conquest they envision themselves as having the divine right to execute, without fearing that their words will ever be heard by the public. This tactic is very similar to the Non-Attribution Rule used at Council on Foreign Relations meetings, which prevents statements made by attendees from being reported in the media. Many media CEOs, news anchors and influential members of the press fill seats in the CFR. [Not to speak about soon to become presidents] As far as global politics and finance go, the Bilderberg is the top of the pyramid, the all-seeing eye gazing upon the construction of a New World Order . This one-world system of governance, lurking in the shadows cast by flowery language about our new "global village," will transfer nearly all economic and political power into the hands of a small group of the world elite. [link got lost - search on google.com] A few weeks previously a journalist reporting for the Daily Mail was arrested in Ayrshire merely for knocking on a door. He was enquiring about the secret meeting of hugely influential capitalists known as the Bilderbergs. [ http://www.undercurrents.org/articles2.htm ] History (small "h") is a kind of chaos. Within history are embedded other chaoses, if one can use such a term. Late "democratic" Capitalism is one such chaos, in which power and control have become exceedingly subtle, almost alchemical, hard to locate, perhaps impossible to define. The writings of Debord, Foucault, and Baudrillard, have broached the possibility that "power itself" is empty, "disappeared", and been replaced by the mere violence of the spectacle. But if history is a chaos the spectacle can only be seen as a "strange attractor" rather than as some sort of causative force. The idea of "force" belongs to classical physics and has little role to play in chaos theory. And if capitalism is a chaos and the spectacle is a strange attractor, then the metaphor can be extended: -- we can say that the "Republican" conspiracies are like the actual patterns generated by the strange attractor. The conspiracies are not causal- but, then, nothing is really "causal" in the old classical sense of the term. One useful way in which we can, so to speak, see into the chaos that is history, is to look through the lens provided by the conspiracies. We may or may not believe that conspiracies are mere simulations of power, mere symptoms of the spectacle-but we cannot dismiss them as empty of all significance. Conspiracies rise and fall, spring up and decay, migrate from one group to another, compete, collude, collide, implode, explode, fail, succeed, erase, forge, forget, vanish. Conspiracies are symptoms of the great "blind forces" (and hence useful as metaphors if nothing else), but they also feed back into those forces and sometimes even affect or effect or infect them. Rather than speak of conspiracy theory we might instead try to construct a poetics of conspiracy. A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text. [...] [ http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/conspire.htm ] To attract donors, large and small, as well as media attention, Nicholson, Scott and the founding fathers of WWF wanted the royal family to lend their name. They approached Prince Philip to be president. Philip was an avid outdoorsman and hunter—in January 1961 he had bagged a Bengal tiger in India—and he and Queen Elizabeth had been to Kenya, on a safari best remembered because King George VI died while they were watching wild animals and Princess Elizabeth had become Queen. [ http://www.tlio.demon.co.uk/bernhard.htm#Hand ] The most provocative presentation was by Kevin Dowling, an investigative journalist from the UK who had traced the ties between the senior board of the World Wildlife Fund [WWF] and major intelligence agencies. He contended that the slaughter of elephants in southern Africa helped finance wars in that part of the continent while it was blamed on locals serving the needs of Asian and Arab traders and consumers. People from Greenpeace who were in the audience objected to his damning the work of a conservation group because of the links and actions from many years ago. Dowling showed slides of the links between the different people in the org. charts of various companies and organizations. Given what we can find out about most people, whether they sit on the board of Shell or work in the streets of Paris trying to smash capitalism, I think it is relatively easy to pull together network diagrams of the interests and links within different strata of society. As Ted Nelson commented, "Everything is deeply intertwingled." Because we move in so many different networks, they are not necessarily deeply linked. Because many military brass are bird watchers (as Dowling claimed), that does not mean the Audubon Society is a paramilitary group. In fact, other kinds of activists use "bird watching" as a front for observing industrial and military practices.Dowling met in the Salon later to talk more fully about his ideas. He claimed not to be trying to besmirch the reputation of the World Wildlife Fund but a number in the room thought he was just using his open sources to make up a conspiracy. [ http://home.inreach.com/cisler/n5m3.htm ] "the Order of the Quest, the Jason Society, the Roshaniya, the Qabbalah, the Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Knights of Columbus, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Ancient and Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis, the Illuminati, the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Executive Members of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Group, the Brotherhood of the Dragon, the Rosicrucians, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Open Friendly Secret Society (the Vatican), the Russell Trust, the Skull & Bones, the Scroll & Key, the Order - they are all the same and all work toward the same ultimate goal, a New World Order." [ http://a-albionic.com/lloyd/conspnation2/v3n67.txt ] The formula "They have the power" may have its value politically; it does not do for an historical analysis. Power is not posessed, it acts in the very body and over the whole surface of the social field according to a system of relays, modes of connection, transmission, distribution, etc. [lost link... Michel Foucault, from lecture notes as summarized in "Power and Norm" in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (1979). ] Power is the condition and limit of politics, culture, and authority. Cyberpower aims not at the immediately obvious forms of politics, culture, and authority that course through cyberspace but at the structures that condition and limit these. A certain complex form of power that operates on the three levels of the individual, the social, and the imaginary now careens through the virtual lands, directing conflict and consensus toward certain distinctive issues and social structures. [http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/3i/3i_1.htm ] Prince Bernhard gave the go-ahead, but the idea for the Bilderberg belonged to Joseph H. Retinger, a man who could make an appointment with the President of the United States just by picking up the telephone. In 1952, Retinger proposed a secret conference to Prince Bernhard which would involve the NATO leaders in an open and frank discussion on international affairs behind closed doors. The Prince thought it was a grand idea, and they formed a committee to plan the conference. Berhhard briefed the Truman administration about the meeting in 1952, and although the idea was warmly embraced in the U.S., the first American counterpart group was not formed until the Eisenhower administration. CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith and C.D. Jackson were key players in organizing the American counterpart group, heavily influenced by the Rockefeller dynasty, whose Standard Oil holdings competed with Bernhard's Royal Dutch Petroleum. Hence, the interests of the oil industry were well-represented at Bilderberg meetings. [ http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8425/BILDER.HTM ] I got that feeling again this afternoon. For the last few months, in amongst my official duties, I have been reading the literature on apocalytic social movements. I was originally inspired in this by David Noble's book "The Religion of Technology". Noble observes, for example, that many of the important early engineers, particularly in the United States, were Masons, and he describes the development of a particular kind of millennialism -- or at least a secularized form of religious utopianism -- among engineers that became secularized and formed the outlines of technical movements such as artificial intelligence and -- he might as well have added -- cyberspace. [Phil Agre on RRE, http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0554.html] The Royal Consort, Prince Bernhardt, Husband of Juliana since 1937, was previous to their marriage an active card-carrying member of Hitler's black-shirted SS. Prince Consort Bernhardt was employed prior to, during, and after the war by I.G.Farben's Industrial Espionage Unit "NW-7" which, needless to say, placed him under great suspicions by both the British and American intelligence communities. The mere fact of his employment as an "industrial spy" for Farben places him squarely within the sphere of the German Industrial community, links for which have already been established with the Type XI-B U-Boat. [ http://www.mallofmaine.com/ca35/ ] Prince Bernhard is the founder and a governor of the Prince Bernhard Fund, which was set up in London in 1940. The original aim of the Fund was to collect financial contributions for the Allied war effort. After the war, it became a vehicle for the advancement of culture, science and nature conservation in the Netherlands. The Prince's leisure pursuits include photography and film-making. From 1954 to 1976, the Prince was Chair of the Bilderberg Group, a debating forum for politicians, businesspeople and other prominent figures from Europe, the United States and Canada. The Group meets informally once a year at different venues to discuss current political, economic and social developments. It takes its name from the venue of its first meeting, the Bilderberg Hotel in Arnhem. Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus still attend these meetings. [ http://www.koninklijkhuis.nl/UK/royal_house/members.html?prinsbernhard.html ] The name "Bilderberg" came from the group's first meeting place, the Hotel de Bilderberg of Oosterbeek, Holland, in May 1954. Over the next 38 years the secret meetings have included most of the top ruling-class players from Western Europe and America. Until he was implicated in the Lockheed bribery scandal in 1976, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands served as chairman. By now Bilderberg is a symbol of world management by Atlanticist elites. Some observers, particularly those on the Right, feel that it borders on the conspiratorial, while the Left is primarily interested in its implications for what they call "power structure research." The Bilderberg participants from the U.S. are almost always members of the Council on Foreign Relations, and since 1973 Japanese elites have been brought into the fold through a third overlapping group, the Trilateral Commission. [ http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin1.cgi/RB ] The ideological confrontations conveniently hide fundamental secular societal transformations; in particular the emergence of the class of meaning- producers and legitimators who attempt to gain power by controlling the consciousness of others. A new caste of priests (the class of 'Sinn und Heilsvermittler') is evolving in industrial societies and, with it, new forms of authority relations, modes of organization and, most importantly, a new message or doctrine of secular salvation. Because of the effect on the deep structure of thought the new class is said to have, the notion of ideology, we are told, is much too superficial to capture the nature of these developments.[...]Thus, any sociological analysis of these phenomena will have to reckon with the metaphysical dimension of these intellectual and social transformations of modern society. From a social evolutionary perspective, these changes represent a step backwards in history because the accomplishments of the age of the enlightenment are distinctly threatened by the new 'intellectual clergy'. These arguments [...] are based on an extension and combination of Max Weber's theory of authority and power relations and his sociology of religion (as well as certain assumptions about the nature of human nature adapted from Helmut Plessner and Arnold Gehlen's philosophical anthropology). Schelsky maintains that there is a strict parallel between authority/power ultimately derived from the threat of physical coercion and authority/power, based on intellectual means, namely the creation and control of meaning (telos) for individual or collective self- conceptions. This kind of influence over others is but another manifestation of control and engenders its own peculiar forms of organization and legitimation. But 'Machtausuebung durch Sinngebung' is by no means a phenomenon peculiar to the historical epoch of the dark ages. In its most recent historical manifestation it takes on the form of a secular 'doctrine of salvation' (Heilslehre) authored by the new class of meaning-producers in contemporary society. [ http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/fest/files/giersch.htm ] The pure interest of the bureaucracy in power, however, is efficacious far beyond those areas where purely functional interests make for secrecy. The concept of the `official secret' is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and nothing is so fantastically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude, which cannot be substantially defended beyond these specifically qualified areas. (Max Weber) INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1999 http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/s981008-intell.htm The human predispositions toward hierarchy and mimicry create needs for compliance and conformity. These were studied prior to World War II by German sociologist Max Weber, a proponent of bureaucracies and charismatic leadership. More recent work has identified four motivators common within organizations: affiliation (loyalty cliques), personal (positional) power, institution-building power, and achievement [4]. Because the ``institutional manager'' prefers activity to reflection, but the ``achievement manager'' abhors centralization, a hybrid of these two would be most likely to support enterprise-wide reuse of a carefully designed and thought-out software framework. http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~ftp/wisr/wisr8/papers/price/price.html To a very particular degree today, the need for leadership is widely felt, and the sense of being bereft of it is the cause of uncertainty and instability. It contributes to a sense of drift and powerlessness. It is at the heart of the tendency everywhere to turn inwards. That is why we have attached so much importance to values in this report, to the substance of leadership and the compulsions of an ethical basis for global governance. A neighbourhood without leadership is a neighbourhood endangered. [ http://www.cgg.ch/ch7.htm ] related books (please give a short review if you like/can): Who's Who of the Elite : Members of the Bilderbergs, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Skull & Bones Society by Robert Gaylon Ross Tragedy & Hope : A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley Foundations: Their Power & Influence by G. William Domhoff Friendly Fascism (this one i started to read ) by Bertram Gross Wall Street and the rise of Hitler by Sutton, Antony C. CLICK HERE: name base social network graph: http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi?_BILDERBERG_GROUP_ http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin1.cgi?_MCLUHAN_MARSHALL_ the kooks museum (frozen): http://www.teleport.com/~dkossy/kooksmus.html "The action is where the gap is" (McLuhan) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Prev by Date: <nettime> WTO declares hatred for RTMark (and [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Next by Date: <nettime> Hegelian Dialectics 101 Index(es): Chronological Thread DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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