Agnostics and Gnostics
Bertrand Russell came to his position by birth. Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), who played Sancho Panza to Russell's Don Quixote, was a commoner, the son of a gardener and a house servant. Wells first gained access to the upper classes through the encouragement of Thomas Huxley, a biologist and prominent figure in the British intellectual elite. In 1884, the 18-year-old Wells received a scholarship from the London Department of Education to study at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. His chosen field was biology; his teacher Thomas Huxley. Here was Huxley's view of the science of biology, as described in an 1889 essay, "The Nineteenth Century":
I know of no study which is utterly saddening as that of the evolution of humanity. Man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, a victim to endless illusions, which makes his mental existence a burden, and fills his life with barren toil and battle.
Wells broke off his science education to pursue a writing career. Through Huxley, Wells gained entree to his first publisher, Astor's Pall Mall Gazette, and later to fellow Metaphysical Society member Lord Arthur Balfour. Ten years after leaving college, Wells wrote of Huxley, "I believed then he was the greatest man I was ever likely to meet, and I believe that all the more firmly today."
The key to the evil worldview of both Russell and Wells is already summarized in the philosophy of Huxley, an influential figure among avant garde intellectuals at the height of the British Empire. He was a leading member of the Metaphysical Society, which was founded in 1869 in an attempt to forge a more effective intellectual elite out of the membership of the Oxford Essayists and Cambridge Apostles. At a meeting of the society, Huxley coined the term agnosticism, an idea that would play out later in the conceptions of Wells, Russell, and the followers of the Reverend Moon. The atheist denied God exists. The agnostic left that question open. Instead, he denied the ability of man to actually know anything. Here in this conception, actually only a re-working of a metaphysics common to Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, was the "no-soul" doctrine which is at the heart of the Open Conspiracy. Huxley outlined the tenets of his agnosticism before a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874:
No evidence can be found for supposing that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of matter of the organism.... The mind stands relegated to the body as the bell of the clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck.
We will find this same view enunciated later by Wells, Russell, and the Ernst Mach-influenced Vienna Circle which gave rise to Russell's Unity of the Sciences movement in the mid-1930s. But agnosticism, is only Gnosticism in disguise, and in this form, as a reincarnation of the ancient cult heresy, we shall find it at the heart of the "theology" of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
The Coefficients
In his autobiographical account, written years later, Wells described the dilemma facing Britain at the time he was attending the monthly sessions of the elite Coefficients Club. The Coefficients was a cross between a diners club and a modern think-tank, which met monthly over dinners at London's St. Ermin's Hotel from 1902 to 1908.
Among the members of this unappetizing group was the powerful Lord Robert Cecil, elder statesman of Britain's most powerful family, and cousin to Arthur Balfour, then serving as Conservative Prime Minister. Lord Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner of South Africa, was a regular. A factional ally of Milner's in the serious debate that went on at these affairs was Halford Mackinder, the newly appointed head of the London School of Economics and originator of the doctrine of geopolitics, who Hitler's ghostwriter for Mein Kampf, Maj.-Gen. Karl Haushofer, acknowledged as his source. Another Milner ally was Leo Amery, later intimate of Winston Churchill. The Earl Bertrand Russell was there, sometimes making up a faction of one. The Viscount Edward Grey, a hereditary peer who was to play a crucial role in shaping the post World War I era, attended regularly. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Fabian socialists who would soon embrace Benito Mussolini, were regulars. The Webbs, who were solidly middle-class academics, were credited with having organized the group, most of whose members became part of a later formation, known variously as the Round Table, Milner's Kindergarten, and the Cliveden Set. The name Coefficients might have been a play on Mrs. Webb's incessant references to improving "efficiency" in government.
Here is how Wells recalled the situation facing the Coefficients at the beginning of the 20th Century:
The undeniable contraction of the British outlook in the opening decade of the new century is one that has exercised my mind very greatly.... Gradually, the belief in the possible world leadership of England had been deflated, by the economic development of America and the militant boldness of Germany. The long reign of Queen Victoria, so prosperous, progressive, and effortless, had produced habits of political indolence and cheap assurance. As a people we had got out of training, and when the challenge of these new rivals became open, it took our breath away at once. We did not know how to meet it....
[O]ur ruling class, protected in its advantages by a universal snobbery, was broad-minded, easy-going, and profoundly lazy.... Our liberalism was no longer a larger enterprise, it had become a generous indolence. But minds were waking up to this. Over our table at St. Ermin's Hotel wrangled Maxse, Bellairs, Hewins, Amery, and Mackinder, all stung by the small but humiliating tale of disasters in the South Africa war, all sensitive to the threat of business recession, and all profoundly alarmed by the naval and military aggressiveness of Germany, arguing chiefly against the liberalism of Reeves and Russell and myself, and pulling us down, whether we liked it or not, from large generalities to concrete problems.[4]
There were genuine differences as to how the defeat of the "new rivals" was to be accomplished, but no dispute as to the goal. The majority opinion converged on war, to set the European powers at each other's throats. The seeds of that war, pitting France against Germany, Germany against Russia, and Russia against Japan, had already been sown in the decade of the 1890s. Russell took issue with that view, at least ostensibly. During World War I he played the part of pacifist. Russell argued that England could achieve the same goals without being drawn into a world war: It could be done by clever intelligence techniques—psychological warfare and manipulation. Thus began his career as a "pacifist."
2. The Uses of Peace
We move ahead now to November 1918. The terrible war is over, England saved by the last-minute military intervention of the United States. Much of Europe is in ruins. The total dead on all sides number 8.5 million. Casualties number 37 million (9 million Russians, 7 million Germans, 7 million from Austro-Hungary, 6 million French, 3 million from the British Empire, 2 million Italians). Famine and disease are everywhere. Influenza, typhus, cholera, diphtheria, and other scourges kill more people in the immediate post-war period than died in battle. The seeds of Hitler have already been sown in the unpayable burden of reparations imposed upon defeated Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.
The idea of peace makes sense to people. But how shall it be accomplished? Even as he wrote anti-German hate propaganda for the War Office, Wells had been working with a team of old cronies from the Coefficients Club on a new version of an old scheme: Subjugate the sovereignty of individual nations to a supra-national government, with its own army, navy, and air force, possessing a monopoly on modern weaponry. His first writing on the subject dates to 1916. In January 1919, as Chairman of the League of Free Nations Association, he publishes his call for world peace, titled "The Idea of a League of Nations."
The argument, as Wells describes it: Modern war is total war; the economic and human cost has become so great, it is intolerable. So long as the threat of war exists, nations must expend an increasing portion of their wealth on the maintenance of armies, navies, and air services, and on scientific research to keep even with the potential enemy. Only outmoded thinking and prejudices, such as appeals to national patriotism, cause people to oppose his plan. If they would only think about it, they would see that the British Empire is already partially a world government:
What is there in common between an Australian native, a London freethinker, a Bengali villager, a Uganda gentleman, a Rand negro, an Egyptian merchant, and a Singapore Chinaman, that they should all be capable of living as they do under one rule and one peace, and with a common collective policy, and yet be incapable of a slightly larger cooperation with a Frenchman, a New Englander, or a Russian?
The argument appears strikingly modern, only because the present-day world is organized around the continued attempt to implement this plan which originated in the needs of the British aristocracy a century ago. Yet, as Wells admits in his draft, it is not modern at all. It is an attempt to return to periods of weak nation-states such as the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire. It was only with the Italian Renaissance, Wells argues, that the idea of powerful nation-states threatened unity. Wells will attempt to destroy the nation-state in order to create a new world empire.
Moral Re-Armament: The Moon's Beginning
Wells' League of Nations proved a failure. The American people, among others, did not buy it, and the Senate could not be brought to ratify it. But the war for world empire, under the guise of "universal peace," had only just begun.
In 1921, an international arms-control conference took place in Washington, D.C., the first of a series known as the Washington Disarmament Conferences. Frank Buchman, by outward appearance an insignificant American Lutheran preacher, was invited to attend and given an audience with two Englishmen. One was Arthur James Balfour, head of the British Empire delegation and Lord President of the King's Privy Council, who would sign the treaty twice, once for the King and once for the Union of South Africa. The other was Balfour's longtime associate from the days of the Coefficients Club, H.G. Wells, who was attending the conference as reporter for an international array of press syndicates.
Out of this meeting within a meeting came the founding of an organization to be headed by Buchman, that came to be known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Moral Re-Armament was, and remains to this day, an influence-peddling and control operation, run as a pseudo-Christian religious cult, much like the later Moon cult which it spawned. In more ways than one, Frank Buchman was the Reverend Moon of the 1920s and 1930s.
Frank Buchman's Rise
Born in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania in 1878, Buchman graduated from Muhlenburg College, and later attended Pennsylvania State College. As a Lutheran minister in a poor part of Philadelphia, he came into contact with the American Friends Service Society. His entree into intelligence circles appears to have originated on a trip to England in 1908. There, in a small church, he claims he saw "a vision of the cross" which changed his life. Whatever else happened on that trip, Buchman on his return to the U.S.A., began moving in high circles, and was soon a friend of the national chairman of the Democratic Party.
In 1915, Buchman began a tour of the Far East, sponsored by the Young Men's Christian Association, one of many do-gooder organizations which serve as a cover for international intelligence operations. (The friendly YMCA had already been linked through the Moody Bible School in Chicago, to the the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield, the Civil War general and Lincoln admirer who vowed in his inaugural address to enforce the Constitution against a racist reign of terror in the South.) The Buchman itinerary included India, Korea, Japan, and finally China. In Japan, he was personally greeted by Baron Mitsui, head of Japan's largest cartel, and hosted by Baron Shibusawa, founder of the Japanese Finance Ministry. Throughout his life, Buchman would maintain extremely close ties with the powerful Mitsui, Shibusawa, and Sumitomo families.
In 1917, Buchman arrived in China in the midst of a revolutionary epoch during which Sun Yat Sen had briefly held power. It was here, Buchman reports, that he perfected his method of influence-peddling and control. Buchman's technique was a shade more subtle than Moon's. Moon promises to satisfy his victim's craving for sexual satisfaction in the obvious way. Buchman wins the confidence of his victim, in order to control and manipulate his guilt. He called it his personal, "confessional approach" for "remaking man." He had already begun developing it while a graduate student at Penn State. Buchman put forth a public posture of moral probity and abstinence, inviting people to talk to him about their personal problems. Probing for the issues on which they felt the most guilt, he would persuade them that they could overcome their perceived weakness by confessing it to him, and becoming a faithful follower. Buchman won over many people with his technique, which became the trademark of Moral Re-Armament recruitment tactics, aimed generally at people of power and influence. Later, he also developed an ego-stripping technique, for mass recruitment in larger social settings.
In China, Buchman and his two friends drew up a list of 15 of the most influential Christians in Beijing. Sun Yat Sen was at the top of the list. He got as far as the Vice Minister of Justice, later acting Prime Minister, Hsu Ch'ien. Through Hsu, Buchman started a friendship with Sun. "If sin is the disease," he told an audience of missionaries, "we must deal with sin. Sin first of all in ourselves, the 'little sins' that rob us of power and keep us from being able to go out in deep sympathy to men in sin.'Â " But stories began to spread about Buchman's own pecadilloes, and he was forced to leave China. Still, Sherwood Eddy, the missionary who had brought Buchman to Asia, wrote: "Buchman's work in China has developed by a growth of evolution into a movement of immense proportions."
From China, Buchman made his way again to England. He arrived at Oxford in 1921-22, and began to work his magic on a circle of professors and students who were later to become known as the Oxford Group. Most were veterans of the recent war, who gathered for philosophical debate. Buchman would attempt to steer them into discussions of their personal problems. Again scandal arose. There was talk of exhibitionism occurring at the meetings, and the ever-present suspicion of homosexuality, the bane of the British boarding school system. Buchman himself never married, saying that God had not chosen a partner for him.
His slogans, which became the "four pillars" of Moral Re-Armament, were: 1) Absolute honesty; 2) Absolute purity; 3) Absolute love; 4) Absolute unselfishness. Buchman's self-advertisement for his cause sounded convincing enough:
Unless we deal with human nature thoroughly and drastically on a national scale, nations will follow their historic road to violence and destruction. You can plan a new world on paper, but you've got to build it out of people.
We shall see in a moment what he means by this.
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