Our Establishment Church: Its Rules and Credo
by Charles A. Burris
Anders Mikkelsen has written
an excellent review of Andrew
Bacevich’s recent book,
Washington
Rules, which summarizes and lays out the "rules" and
"credo" of the American foreign policy Establishment. It is
another fine example of
power elite
analysis or
"establishment studies."
The concept of the Establishment was first used in England
referring to the established (or official) state church, the Anglican
Church or Church of England, created by the usurper and schismatic Henry
Tudor during
the Protestant Reformation.
Nineteenth-century writer
William
Cobbett later expanded the concept to include those networks of
financial institutions related to the Bank of England, elite public
schools and clubs, and publishing entities (such as "the bloody old
Times") the ruling aristocracy used to train and sustain its
oligarchic bureaucracy who manned
the British empire. Cobbett labeled this power elite as "the
Thing."
As Leonard and Mark Silk observed in their masterful book,
The American Establishment, twentieth century British
historian A. J. P. Taylor later adapted Cobbett’s "the Thing"
into "the Establishment" in a 1953 article in The New
Statesman, followed by journalist Henry Fairlie’s usage of the term
in The Spectator in 1955.
The broad concept was soon adopted by wide-ranging American analysts of
the powers-that-be, such as Richard H. Rovere, C. Wright Mills, Dan
Smoot, Phyllis Schlafly, Carroll Quigley, John Kenneth Galbraith, and G.
William Domhoff.
These authors recognized that while the First Amendment to the United
States Constitution prohibits an establishment of religion, our nation
does indeed have,
like its British cousins across the pond, an Establishment,
complete with its own
theological canon and
doxology of statecraft and
spy craft. Its "Vatican" is
the Council on Foreign Relations.
Its primary source of treasure and alms has been
the Morgan
and Rockefeller financial empires, which
created the Fed, the great enabler of the Welfare-Warfare
State. Many of its
elite seminarians have studied at Ivy League institutions such as
Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; some in particular,
at Yale where they were initiated into
Skull and Bones.
Bacevich concentrates on the immediate post-World War II period of
history, tracing the Establishment’s bipartisan "foreign policy
consensus" on the Cold War to the present Bush/Obama war on
terrorism. He see this as the crucial gestation period, a time
implementing "the American Century" of
Henry
Luce, of the Truman administration's creation of the National
Security State and its doctrine of Containment as a public rationale for
global intervention and the military-industrial complex (and George F.
Kennan’s, Robert A. Lovett’s, and the Dulles Brothers' clandestine policy
of Rollback or Liberation through covert operations of the OPC and
CIA).
But the Establishment’s rules and credo were sketched on papyrus long
before 1948. They were put forth by
visionary prophets of pelf, plunder and empire fifty years earlier,
during
the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection.
A central figure was the sinister
Elihu Root, later
founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, who like his
fellow interventionists and war criminals Theodore Roosevelt and Barack
Obama, was recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the archetype of
the Establishment’s much-abused "Wise Man" category, the
mainstream media’s designation of select servitors of power stretching
from Root to the recently departed
Richard Holbrooke – Special Representative for Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign
Relations, former managing director of Lehman Brothers, and board
director of AIG to July 2008 (just before the bailouts).
Before the acclaimed
"Wise
Men" of the Truman regime came the "Four Evangelists"
of an earlier era. Led by Elihu Root, his protégé
"Colonel" Henry L. Simpson, along with
"Colonel" Edward M. House and
Raymond B. Fosdick, these little-known four were the real architects
of the American Establishment and its interventionist gospel of the
Welfare-Warfare State. It is they who wrote its rules and drafted its
credo which has transformed the American republic into a squalid and
overstretched empire.
In a recent
LRC
article I wrote of how today’s libertarians must become the new
abolitionists.
We must also continue our role as non-interventionist heretics to the
CFR’s church, working for its disestablishment and demise.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/burris/burris17.1.html
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
