Noble Lies And Perpetual War: Leo Strauss, The Neo-Cons, And Iraq

Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq.

By Danny Postel

10/18/03: (openDemocracy) What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq.Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the war was “murky” and now says that weapons of mass destruction weren’t the crucial issue anyway (see the book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq (2003.)

By contrast, Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.

If Shadia Drury is right, then American policy-makers exercise deception with greater coherence than their British allies in Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street. In the UK, a public inquiry is currently underway into the death of the biological weapons expert David Kelly. A central theme is also whether the government deceived the public, as a BBC reporter suggested.

The inquiry has documented at least some of the ways the prime minister’s entourage ‘sexed up’ the presentation of intelligence on the Iraqi threat. But few doubt that in terms of their philosophy, if they have one, members of Blair’s staff believe they must be trusted as honest. Any apparent deceptions they may be involved in are for them matters of presentation or ‘spin’: attempts to project an honest gloss when surrounded by a dishonest media.

The deep influence of Leo Strauss’s ideas on the current architects of US foreign policy has been referred to, if sporadically, in the press (hence an insider witticism about the influence of “Leo-cons”). Christopher Hitchens, an ardent advocate of the war, wrote unashamedly in November 2002 (in an article felicitously titled Machiavelli in Mesopotamia) that:

“[p]art of the charm of the regime-change argument (from the point of view of its supporters) is that it depends on premises and objectives that cannot, at least by the administration, be publicly avowed. Since Paul Wolfowitz is from the intellectual school of Leo Strauss – and appears in fictional guise as such in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein – one may even suppose that he enjoys this arcane and occluded aspect of the debate.”

Perhaps no scholar has done as much to illuminate the Strauss phenomenon as Shadia Drury. For fifteen years she has been shining a heat lamp on the Straussians with such books as The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997). She is also the author of Alexandre Kojève: the Roots of Postmodern Politics (1994) and Terror and Civilization (forthcoming).She argues that the central claims of Straussian thought wield a crucial influence on men of power in the contemporary United States. She elaborates her argument in this interview.

A natural order of inequality

Danny Postel: You’ve argued that there is an important connection between the teachings of Leo Strauss and the Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq war. What is that connection?

Shadia Drury: Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States – the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the war party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.

So what were the real reasons? Reorganising the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel? Expanding American hegemony in the Arab world? Possibly. But these reasons would not have been sufficient in themselves to mobilise American support for the war. And the Straussian cabal in the administration realised that.

Danny Postel: The neo-conservative vision is commonly taken to be about spreading democracy and liberal values globally. And when Strauss is mentioned in the press, he is typically described as a great defender of liberal democracy against totalitarian tyranny. You’ve written, however, that Strauss had a “profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy.”

Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it.

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.

Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History. The cover of the book sports the American Declaration of Independence. But the book is a celebration of nature – not the natural rights of man (as the appearance of the book would lead one to believe) but the natural order of domination and subordination.

The necessity of lies

Danny Postel: What is the relevance of Strauss’s interpretation of Plato’s notion of the noble lie?

Shadia Drury: Strauss rarely spoke in his own name. He wrote as a commentator on the classical texts of political theory. But he was an extremely opinionated and dualistic commentator. The fundamental distinction that pervades and informs all of his work is that between the ancients and the moderns. Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients.

In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato’s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.

Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.

A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law (p. 70).

Now, the ancients were determined to keep this tyrannical teaching secret because the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination; indeed, they may very well turn their resentment against the superior few. Lies are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.

The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise.

Strauss justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie. But in truth, Strauss has a very impoverished conception of Plato’s noble lie. Plato thought that the noble lie is a story whose details are fictitious; but at the heart of it is a profound truth.

In the myth of metals, for example, some people have golden souls – meaning that they are more capable of resisting the temptations of power. And these morally trustworthy types are the ones who are most fit to rule. The details are fictitious, but the moral of the story is that not all human beings are morally equal.

In contrast to this reading of Plato, Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History, p. 151). For many commentators who (like Karl Popper) have read Plato as a totalitarian, the logical consequence is to doubt that philosophers can be trusted with political power. Those who read him this way invariably reject him. Strauss is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him.

The dialectic of fear and tyranny

Danny Postel: In the Straussian scheme of things, there are the wise few and the vulgar many. But there is also a third group – the gentlemen. Would you explain how they figure?

Shadia Drury: There are indeed three types of men: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the “higher” pleasures, which amount to consorting with their “puppies” or young initiates.

The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society – that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.

The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe.

Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, Plato realised this, and settled for the rule of law. But Strauss did not endorse this solution entirely. Nor did he think that it was Plato’s real solution – Strauss pointed to the “nocturnal council” in Plato’s Laws to illustrate his point.

The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise (see Strauss’s – The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws). This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them. Supposedly, Xenophon makes that clear to us.

For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed. It is the age in which they have come closest to having exactly what their hearts desire – wealth, pleasure, and endless entertainment. But in getting just what they desire, they have unwittingly been reduced to beasts.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more advanced than in America. And the global reach of American culture threatens to trivialise life and turn it into entertainment. This was as terrifying a spectre for Strauss as it was for Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt.

This is made clear in Strauss’s exchange with Kojève (reprinted in Strauss’s On Tyranny), and in his commentary on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (reprinted in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue). Kojève lamented the animalisation of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialisation of life. All three of them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and “creature comforts.” Life can be politicised once more, and man’s humanity can be restored.

This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory that the neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the religious sensibilities of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.

I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.

Danny Postel: You’ve described Strauss as a nihilist.

Shadia Drury: Strauss is a nihilist in the sense that he believes that there is no rational foundation for morality. He is an atheist, and he believes that in the absence of God, morality has no grounding. It’s all about benefiting others and oneself; there is no objective reason for doing so, only rewards and punishments in this life.

But Strauss is not a nihilist if we mean by the term a denial that there is any truth, a belief that everything is interpretation. He does not deny that there is an independent reality. On the contrary, he thinks that independent reality consists in nature and its “order of rank” – the high and the low, the superior and the inferior. Like Nietzsche, he believes that the history of western civilisation has led to the triumph of the inferior, the rabble – something they both lamented profoundly.

Danny Postel: This connection is curious, since Strauss is bedevilled by Nietzsche; and one of Strauss’s most famous students, Allan Bloom, fulminates profusely in his book The Closing of the American Mind against the influence of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

Shadia Drury: Strauss’s criticism of the existentialists, especially Heidegger, is that they tried to elicit an ethic out of the abyss. This was the ethic of resoluteness – choose whatever you like and be loyal to it to the death; its content does not matter. But Strauss’s reaction to moral nihilism was different. Nihilistic philosophers, he believes, should reinvent the Judæo-Christian God, but live like pagan gods themselves – taking pleasure in the games they play with each other as well as the games they play on ordinary mortals.

The question of nihilism is complicated, but there is no doubt that Strauss’s reading of Plato entails that the philosophers should return to the cave and manipulate the images (in the form of media, magazines, newspapers). They know full well that the line they espouse is mendacious, but they are convinced that theirs are noble lies.

The intoxication of perpetual war

Danny Postel: You characterise the outlook of the Bush administration as a kind of realism, in the spirit of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli. But isn’t the real divide within the administration (and on the American right more generally) more complex: between foreign policy realists, who are pragmatists, and neo-conservatives, who see themselves as idealists – even moralists – on a mission to topple tyrants, and therefore in a struggle against realism?

Shadia Drury: I think that the neo-conservatives are for the most part genuine in wanting to spread the American commercial model of liberal democracy around the globe. They are convinced that it is the best thing, not just for America, but for the world. Naturally, there is a tension between these “idealists” and the more hard-headed realists within the administration.

I contend that the tensions and conflicts within the current administration reflect the differences between the surface teaching, which is appropriate for gentlemen, and the ‘nocturnal’ or covert teaching, which the philosophers alone are privy to. It is very unlikely for an ideology inspired by a secret teaching to be entirely coherent.

The issue of nationalism is an example of this. The philosophers, wanting to secure the nation against its external enemies as well as its internal decadence, sloth, pleasure, and consumption, encourage a strong patriotic fervour among the honour-loving gentlemen who wield the reins of power. That strong nationalistic spirit consists in the belief that their nation and its values are the best in the world, and that all other cultures and their values are inferior in comparison.

Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism and a Strauss disciple, denounced nationalism in a 1973 essay; but in another essay written in 1983, he declared that the foreign policy of neo-conservatism must reflect its nationalist proclivities. A decade on, in a 1993 essay, he claimed that “religion, nationalism, and economic growth are the pillars of neoconservatism.” (See “The Coming ‘Conservative Century’”, in Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea, p. 365.)

In Reflections of a Neoconservative (p. xiii), Kristol wrote that:

“patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness…. Neoconservatives believe… that the goals of American foreign policy must go well beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security’. It is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny … not a myopic national security”.

The same sentiment was echoed by the doyen of contemporary Straussianism, Harry Jaffa, when he said that America is the “Zion that will light up all the world.”It is easy to see how this sort of thinking can get out of hand, and why hard-headed realists tend to find it naïve if not dangerous.

But Strauss’s worries about America’s global aspirations are entirely different. Like Heidegger, Schmitt, and Kojève, Strauss would be more concerned that America would succeed in this enterprise than that it would fail. In that case, the “last man” would extinguish all hope for humanity (Nietzsche); the “night of the world” would be at hand (Heidegger); the animalisation of man would be complete (Kojève); and the trivialisation of life would be accomplished (Schmitt). That is what the success of America’s global aspirations meant to them.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a popularisation of this viewpoint. It sees the coming catastrophe of American global power as inevitable, and seeks to make the best of a bad situation. It is far from a celebration of American dominance.

On this perverse view of the world, if America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.

To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognises that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully.

Among the Straussians

Danny Postel: Finally, I’d like to ask about your interesting reception among the Straussians. Many of them dismiss your interpretation of Strauss and denounce your work in the most adamant terms (“bizarre splenetic”). Yet one scholar, Laurence Lampert, has reprehended his fellow Straussians for this, writing in his Leo Strauss and Nietzsche that your book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss “contains many fine skeptical readings of Strauss’s texts and acute insights into Strauss’s real intentions.” Harry Jaffa has even made the provocative suggestion that you might be a “closet Straussian” yourself!

Shadia Drury: I have been publicly denounced and privately adored. Following the publication of my book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss in 1988, letters and gifts poured in from Straussian graduate students and professors all over North America – books, dissertations, tapes of Strauss’s Hillel House lectures in Chicago, transcripts of every course he ever taught at the university, and even a personally crafted Owl of Minerva with a letter declaring me a goddess of wisdom! They were amazed that an outsider could have penetrated the secret teaching. They sent me unpublished material marked with clear instructions not to distribute to “suspicious persons”.

I received letters from graduate students in Toronto, Chicago, Duke, Boston College, Claremont, Fordham, and other Straussian centres of “learning.” One of the students compared his experience in reading my work with “a person lost in the wilderness who suddenly happens on a map.” Some were led to abandon their schools in favour of fresher air; but others were delighted to discover what it was they were supposed to believe in order to belong to the charmed circle of future philosophers and initiates.

After my first book on Strauss came out, some of the Straussians in Canada dubbed me the “bitch from Calgary.” Of all the titles I hold, that is the one I cherish most. The hostility toward me was understandable. Nothing is more threatening to Strauss and his acolytes than the truth in general and the truth about Strauss in particular. His admirers are determined to conceal the truth about his ideas.

My intention in writing the book was to express Strauss’s ideas clearly and without obfuscation so that his views could become the subject of philosophical debate and criticism, and not the stuff of feverish conviction. I wanted to smoke the Straussians out of their caves and into the philosophical light of day. But instead of engaging me in philosophical debate, they denied that Strauss stood for any of the ideas I attributed to him.

Laurence Lampert is the only Straussian to declare valiantly that it is time to stop playing games and to admit that Strauss was indeed a Nietzschean thinker – that it is time to stop the denial and start defending Strauss’s ideas.

I suspect that Lampert’s honesty is threatening to those among the Straussians who are interested in philosophy but who seek power. There is no doubt that open and candid debate about Strauss is likely to undermine their prospects in Washington.

Who is Leo Strauss?Leo Strauss was born in 1899 in the region of Hessen, Germany, the son of a Jewish small businessman. He went to secondary school in Marburg and served as an interpreter in the German army in the first world war. He was awarded a doctorate at Hamburg University in 1921 for a thesis on philosophy that was supervised by Ernst Cassirer.

Strauss’s post-doctoral work involved study of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and in 1930 he published his first book, on Spinoza’s critique of religion; his second, on the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, was published in 1935. After a research period in London, he published The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes in 1936.

In 1937, he moved to Columbia University, and from 1938 to 1948 taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. During this period he wrote On Tyranny (1948) and Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952).

In 1949, he became professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, and remained there for twenty years. His works of this period include Natural Right and History (1953),Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), What is Political Philosophy? (1959), The City and Man (1964), Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968).

Between 1968 and 1973, Strauss taught in colleges in California and Maryland, and completed work on Xenophon’s Socratic discourses and Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws (1975). After his death in October 1973, the essay collection Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1983) was published.

Recommended articles on Leo Strauss, neo-conservatism, and Iraq

M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]

Stephen Holmes, “Truths for Philosophers Alone?”, Times Literary Supplement, 1-7 December 1989; reprinted in Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1996)

Robert B. Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory Vol. 20 No. 3 (August 1992) [affiliate only]

Gregory Bruce Smith, “Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-democratic Cult?”, PS: Political Science & Politics Vol. 30 No. 2 (June 1997) [affiliate only]

Michiko Kakutani, “How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy,” The New York Times, 5 April 2003 [paid-for only]

Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, “The Strategist and the Philosopher”, Le Monde, 15 April 2003

James Atlas, “A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” The New York Times, 4 May 2003 [paid-for only]

Jeet Heer, “The Philosopher,” The Boston Globe, 11 May 2003 [paid-for only]

Jim Lobe, “The Strong Must Rule the Weak: A Philosopher for an Empire,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 12 May 2003

Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, 12 May 2003

William Pfaff, “The long reach of Leo Strauss”, International Herald Tribune, 15 May 2003

Peter Berkowitz, “What Hath Strauss Wrought?”, Weekly Standard, 2 June 2003

“Philosophers and kings,” The Economist, 19 June 2003

Steven Lenzner & William Kristol, “What was Leo Strauss up to?”, The Public Interest, Fall 2003

Laura Rozen “Con Tract: the theory behind neocon self-deception”, Washington Monthly, October 2003

Copyright © Danny Postel, 2010 2003. Published by http://www.opendemocracy.net

Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope reveals a Call by Cecil Rhodes for an “American Union”

J.R. / Jones Report | May 30, 2008

Dr. Carroll Quigley, a highly respected professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University for 28-years, revealed in his 1348 page magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope (1966), the nefarious goal of Cecil Rhodes’ secret society calling for an American Union, coming to fruition today as the “North American Union.” From 1884 to about 1915, according Dr. Quigley, the members of The Rhodes Secret Society exhaustively worked at extending the British Empire and forming a federal system. The Rhodes Secret Society was “constantly harping on the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of the Canadian federation of 1867, and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire as seemed feasible, then confederate the whole of it, with the United Kingdom, into a single organization…(hoping) to bring the United States into this organization to whatever degree was possible…(making) Washington the capital of the whole organization or allow parts of the empire to become states of the American Union (emphasis added. Below see scan copy of page 133 of Tragedy and Hope).”

It is interesting to note that, despite an aversion by The Rhodes Secret Society towards the success of our American Revolution accentuating a victory for sovereignty and freedom predicated upon a Constitutional Republic, the Rhodes Secret Society was willing to adhere to diplomacy by deception in order to confederate independent nations into a single federation or union disregarding the sovereignty of nations. Diplomacy by deception continues to be adhered to by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) under the patronage and guidance of the Rockefellers. It is of utmost importance to understand the deeply rooted genesis in the world of foreign affairs as the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) headquartered at Chatham House, St. James Square, London, is the “mother” of the American Council of Foreign Relations (CFR).

Dr. Quigley attributes the success of The Rhodes Secret Society to their effectiveness in concealing its existence. Its members’ preference was to maintain a stealthy appearance with a series of overlapping circles or rings partly concealed by being hidden behind formally organized groups of no obvious political significance and avoiding an appearance of being an integrated group. Dr. Quigley provides a lengthy roster and structure of A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group in the “Appendix” of his book, The Anglo-American Establishment. The “front organization” for The Rhodes Secret Society was The Round Table Group in Great Britain which was working in concert with J. P. Morgan in the United States to establish its “front organization” in the United States. Dr. Quigley described the genesis of the Council on Foreign Relations as follows:

At the end of the war of 1914, it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended. . . . Lionel Curtis . . . established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the existing local Round Table Group…This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group…in New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J. P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group. The American organizers were dominated by the large number of Morgan ‘experts’… The Round Table for years (until 1961) was edited from the back door of Chatham House grounds in Ormond Yard, and its telephone came through the Chatham House switchboard (Tragedy and Hope: 951-952).

“Stealth” is the preferred “modus operandi” practiced by The Rhodes Secret Society, Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) in establishing the European Union (EU), the North American Community (AKA: North American Union – NAU), and last week’s Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). “Stealth” has enabled them to manipulate the American people by keeping us ignorant, uninformed, and confused from the days of Cecil Rhodes to today. Dr. Quigley described the manipulation of such tactics over our American political process visa-via the false left vs. right paradigm:

The chief problem of American political life for along time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international…(therefore) 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 (Tragedy and Hope: 1247-1248).

Such stealthy underhanded tactics have always been the means to an end, including but not limited to the eradication of the sovereignty of independent nations in order to achieve their ultimate goal of establishing a one world government, transcending from the inception of The Rhodes Secret Society to The Round Table Group in Great Britain to Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). Tragedy and Hope took Dr. Quigley over twenty years of researching the coveted archives of Cecil Rhodes secret society. Dr. Quigley dedicated his career “to training undergraduates in techniques of historical analysis which will help them to free their understanding of history from the accepted categories and cognitive classifications of the society in which we live, since these, however necessary they…nevertheless do often serve as barriers which shield us from recognition of the underlying realities themselves (Tragedy and Hope: ix).”

Dr. Quigley had a profound influence on numerous future diplomats and government officials. Amongst these individuals included former President Bill Clinton who commended Quigley during his Democratic Presidential Nomination Acceptance Address stating “as a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship…then, as a student at Georgetown I head that call clarified by a professor name Carol Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest nation in history because our people had always believed in two things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wjclinton1992dnc.htm).” Clinton specifically referenced Dr. Quigley in his autobiography, Bill Clinton- My Life, when he wrote, “Quigley’s insights had a particularly lasting impact… (so) from the 1992 campaign through my two terms in office, I quoted Professor Quigley’s line often (Clinton: 77-78).”

According to Dr. Quigley, “ by 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…his desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control…leaving part of his great fortune to fund the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition throughout the English-speaking world as (his mentor Professor at Oxford) Ruskin had wanted (Tragedy and Hope: 130-131).” It is interesting to note that former President Bill Clinton was a recipient of Rhodes Scholarship in 1968 along with extremely powerful and prominent individuals from predominantly the two political party paradigm including but not limited to Dean Rusk in 1931, U.S. Secretary of State, 1961-1969, in 1951 Richard N. Gardner U.S. Ambassador and CFR Director, in 1968 Strobe Talbott, American diplomat U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (1994-2001) and Time Magazine Editor-at-Large, Foreign Affairs journalist and President of the Brookings Institution, and in 1973 Richard N. Haass President of the Council on Foreign Relations and Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, 2001-2003 (http://www.americanrhodes.org/). All of these individuals are members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Quigley exposed their matrix of complete control over individuals and society:

It is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace … the democratic voter in control of the political system. Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another. 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 (Tragedy and Hope: 866).

Perhaps, this is the reason why a third party candidate has never won a presidential election in the history of the United States. Just as importantly, Dr. Quigley attested to the forces that have controlled and continue to control England and the United States:

The Liberal Party was not so closely controlled as was the Conservative Party, but its chief leaders were on intimate relations of friendship and cooperation with the Cecil Rhodes crowd… which was especially true of Lord Rosebery, who was prime minister in 1894-1895, and H. H. Asquith, who was prime minister in 1905-1915. Asquith married Margot Tennant . . . in 1894, and had Balfour as his chief witness at the ceremony. . . . In later years Balfour was the closest friend of the Asquiths even when they were leaders of two opposing parties (Tragedy and Hope: 475).…(likewise) There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the … 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 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims…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 (Tragedy and Hope: 950).

Dr. Quigley taught at Harvard where he received his undergraduate degrees and his doctorate. He also taught at Princeton and at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in 1951. Moreover, he also taught in Africa at the Brookings Institution in 1961, and lectured at many other places, including the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College at Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958, Dr. Quigley was both a consultant to the Congressional Select Committee that established the national space agency. Also, he was a collaborator in history to the Smithsonian Institution after 1957 assisting in the establishment of the Museum of History and Technology and in the summer of 1964 he served at the Navy Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California, as consultant to “Project Seabed,” a visualization and future design program of what American weapons systems would like in the 1970’s. In short, Dr. Quigley’s Circum Vitae is unequivocally scholarly, impressive, and indicative of the confidence by the Eastern Establishment and the security clearance from both the United States government during the Cold War.

Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope is loaded with far more revelations than this article can possibly cover here. However, Dr. Quigley’s provocative revelations may account for his “fall from grace” amongst the circles of the intellectual elite, the British Establishment, and the American Eastern Establishment all of which had trusted him to the extent of allowing him to access to their most coveted archives and inner workings. In fact, a few thousand copies of Tragedy and Hope were sold prior to the “accidental destruction” of the plates in an attempt to suppress subsequent editions from being printed according to a taped interview discovered in Quigley’s archives at Georgetown University by Dr. Stanley Montieth (http://www.radioliberty.com/newbkvd.htm).

Exposing the truth about their nefarious “Great Plan, the Great Work, the Lost Word” is the most effective weapon each and every American patriot must utilize in restoring our Constitutional Republic.

The video, uploaded by new YouTube user Dauphinish and caught first by IvyGate, looks like it could belong the vaunted secret society that counts three generations of Bushes as its members. Unfortunately, vaunted secret societies don’t really have publicists, so it’s hard to confirm. (Yalies, take a stab in comments?) There are gothic arches, dust, skull imagery, and a stray coffin lying around. Dauphinish has tracked his video with what can only be described as conspiracy theory electronica:

But here’s the rub: Though Dauphinish claims he is a 58-year-old Syrian, he sounds an awful lot like a certain Yale frosh who used to call himself the Dauphin. A Yale Daily News article from November 2007 says a mysterious Branford frosh—thought to be responsible for vandalism, death threats, and vehicular assault—”withdrew from the University for medical reasons.” This paragraph, however, becomes the money shot, in retrospect:

Those who considered the student a friend said he told them he had broken into the tomb of Skull and Bones and shown them video footage to prove it. He also showed them books he had stolen from Scroll and Key and had chalked the word “Dauphin” on walls throughout Yale’s campus.

The Dauphin’s identity was never confirmed or made public. His YouTube upload was on December 4, 2009. Points of query:

• 1. Is the Dauphin back?
• 2. Who was the Dauphin, anyway? Did his paranoid Yale fantasies exist before he got there? And, does admissions screen for that?
• 3. Unless, of course, Dauphinish is actually a 58-year-old Syrian, which could actually be a good thing: If the Skull & Bones mythos has reached the Muslim world, perhaps we can convince them that the failed international policies of the Presidents Bush were not symptomatic of an actual strain of political thought in America, but some peculiar Skull & Bones mating ritual. (Little known hazing task: Destroy the economy of a third-world nation of your choosing.) Then all we have to do is nuke the tomb, and radical Islam will go away. Hooray, Dauphin solved terrorism!
• 4. Or, what if Dauphin was actually innocent, and it was all a frame, because he knew too much? Check out this commenter at the Yale Herald:
  
  Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.
• 5. Should someone alert the Dauphin’s parents that their kid might be in the midst of a second manic episode or something?