Ever think maybe it's a left-wing conspiracy
of Rhodes scholars?

By Charley Reese
Commentary

You remember, of course, Hillary Clinton going on national television and asserting that there was a right-wing conspiracy out to get her poor, innocent husband. Well, suppose there is a left-wing conspiracy of Rhodes scholars out to "get" Americans?

Oh, pshaw, you say. What kind of nonsense is that? Well, recall again that Bill Clinton, at about the time of his first inauguration, mentioned that a man who had great influence on him was Carroll Quigley, professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University. Quigley, who died some years ago, was a certified liberal elitist, but he said something quite intriguing in his excellent book Tragedy and Hope, a 1,348-page history of modern times. [published in 1966 – TYSK]

On page 950, after mocking conservative theories of international influence, Quigley wrote:

"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 identify 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 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records.

"I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims," he wrote, "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 . . . 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."

The italics in the above quotes are mine. Poor Dr. Quigley didn't know, when his book was published in 1965, just how much "it" wished to remain unknown. The publisher, not long afterward, took the unusual step of taking the book out of print and destroying the plates without consulting Quigley. I verified this myself in a telephone interview with his widow. She said he had been extremely upset when he learned of it. He died not long afterward.

Betcha a beer you've never heard much about Round Table Groups operating secretly in the United States to influence public policy.

All of this started, according to Quigley, with John Ruskin, professor at Oxford, who developed this strange and frankly racist notion that the English upper classes were possessors of a magnificent tradition but, in order to save themselves, must uplift the downtrodden masses -- both in England and around the world. Cecil Rhodes became one of Ruskin's ardent disciples.

Rhodes was also, of course, a dirty, rotten imperialist who, with financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, monopolized South Africa's diamond mines as DeBeers Consolidated Mines and built up Consolidated Gold Fields. Let Quigley take it from here:

"These purposes centered on his [Rhodes] 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 to spread the English ruling class tradition . . . as Ruskin had wanted."

Thus was born country-club liberalism and from these Round Table Groups came the Council on Foreign Relations and what is called in America "the Eastern Establishment." Shucks, folks, I think that this tony, high-class conspiracy is a lot more interesting than those blue-collar, right-wing conspiracies. I wonder if anybody has ever been called a racist for speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations.


Published in The Orlando Sentinel, Jan 26 1999

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February 1999