# The World Since 1939: A History / None Dare Call It Conspiracy By Carroll Quigley / By Gary Allen **URL:** **By** John Hospers **Published:** June 1, 1974 --- “Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University is a work of immense scope—quite literally a history of the entire world during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.” Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University is a work of immense scope—quite literally a history of the entire world during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It is a tale superbly told, and it holds the reader spellbound throughout its 1,348 pages. Though it is filled with thousands of facts, including the most minute, it reads almost like a novel. Most works of history, especially scholarly ones, are ploddingly written and of interest only to the specialist; this one is not. There are plots and subplots, rhythms and counter-rhythms through the long and fascinating narrative. History truly comes alive under Professor Quigley’s pen. In _Tragedy and Hope_, Quigley does for the entire world what Vernon Parrington did for American intellectual history in his three-volume _Main Currents in American Thought_. Though, unfortunately, it contains not a single footnote, the recital of facts is detailed and—as far as one can tell from sample comparisons—accurate. It is obviously a work of tremendous labor and careful scholarship. Most histories are partial to Western Europe and the United States, but this one has long and fact-filled sections on the Soviet Union, the Far East, the Near East, and Latin America. Its scope is indeed the world, during the first two-thirds of our embattled century. Not only wars and the causes of wars are described in it: there are long discussions of economic issues, of the psychology of leaders, of literary trends and philosophical movements, and amazingly precise descriptions of scientific advances, such as the atomic bomb. Professor Quigley has a genuinely synoptic vision: one sees all the people and movements take their place in the vast panorama of history. It is only when Quigley goes into his own philosophical speculations that, in my opinion, he fails, particularly in the last chapter of the book. He is much better when tracing an historical narrative than when presenting abstract ideas, and when presenting ideas he appears to be better at expounding those of others rather than his own. It is impossible, of course, to be a specialist in everything all at once, even in the history of the twentieth century, but if there are gaps in Quigley’s knowledge, they are not particularly noticeable in this book. In each chapter, no matter what part of the world he is discussing, or which decade of history he is describing, he appears to be master of his material and reading every chapter is both enjoyable and rewarding, at least to the reader who is not already a specialist in the period under discussion. For the reader to whom it matters, it is just as well to indicate where Professor Quigley stands on several issues. (One must sometimes read these things between the lines, since he seldom allows his own opinions to obtrude into the narrative.) He is not really a “revisionist” historian. However, he is not all on the other side: he has no illusions, for example, about the _Lusitania_ incident and the conditions of the U.S. entry into World War I. Nor is he blind to the proximate causes of Pearl Harbor, or to the United States’ unnecessarily intransigent attitude toward certain reasonable Japanese requests, which made Pearl Harbor, at least from the Japanese point of view, inevitable. Whatever one may think of his views on the causes of the major historical events of this century, I would advise: do not short-change him; listen to him. He presents a rather thoroughly reasoned case. In domestic policy, he appears to be somewhat of a limited welfare-statist. He is certainly no libertarian, but neither is he a liberal “bleeding heart.” He is well aware of the disadvantages of even the limited welfare system which he, with reservations, approves. On the other hand, he is fully aware of the bloodthirsty nature of the Soviet regime, and returns to this point again and again. He quotes at length from Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s atrocities and documents the case that Khrushchev was just as guilty. “The fault,” he concludes, “was not merely with Stalin; it was with the system, and even wider than that, it was with Russia. Any system of human life which is based on autocracy and authority, as Russian life has always been, will turn up sadistic monsters, as Russia has throughout its history, again and again.” He also argues for a strong American defensive stance against the U.S.S.R., contending (among other things) that had it not been for the U.S. occupation of Western Europe after World War II, the Soviet armies would probably have occupied Continental Europe. He is always and everywhere brutally realistic about the government of the U.S.S.R. In my opinion, his very best sections are on the period between the two world wars. His description of conditions in Germany after World War I (including an interesting essay on the German temperament), the Weimar republic, and the rise of Nazism, though relatively familiar territory to many readers, is irresistible reading. Even in this well-combed area, surprising things come out: I had not known, for example, that in its earlier years Hitler’s regime was almost laissez-faire, and that Hitler left big business pretty much alone, at least well into World War II. Quigley’s account of the American developments in the invention of the atomic bomb is laid out with the care and fascination of a detective novel. And one reads page after page in total absorption as Quigley details the causes of the Bolshevik revolution and the horrors of life in the Soviet Union between the wars. Though most of his attempt lies in getting the facts before us, from time to time interesting hypotheses appear which cast new light on already known events. Not being a historian by profession (except of philosophy), I cannot often evaluate these hypotheses adequately, but at the very least they are thought-provoking and challenging. I have space for only one example: In his section on Latin America since World War II, having described the miserable economies of Latin American nations, Quigley concludes, “The solution to this problem is not to redistribute incomes in Latin America, but to change the pattern of character and personality formation so that excess incomes will be used constructively and not wasted (nor simply redistributed and consumed).” And then he advances the concept that he calls the “Peruvian-Pakistani axis,” concerning the personality characteristics of leaders and workers in Arabic as well as Latin American countries (the historical link being the Moorish influence in Spain immediately preceding the era of its colonization of Latin America): Arab life is characterized by male dominance: “sons are brought up in an atmosphere of whimsical, arbitrary personal rules where they are regarded as superior beings by their mother and sisters….” Arabic boys grow up “egocentric, self-indulgent, undisciplined, immature, spoiled, subject to waves of emotionalism, whims, passion, and pettiness.” This, combined with scorn of honest, steady manual work, has had a profound influence upon civilization wherever these personality patterns have had a chance to shape history: true affluence has never come into existence, or, once acquired, has been squandered by “conspicuous consumption,” as a child would squander it. In England and America during and after the Industrial Revolution, entrepreneurs lived rather unostentatiously, reinvested their profits in their physical plants, took on new workers, laboriously perfected new processes, and decade by decade raised the standard of living; whereas in Latin and Arabic countries instant consumption has prevented any such process from getting off the ground. Hence the perpetual poverty of these nations. The vast difference in development between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin cultures, says Quigley, lies chiefly in the ability of the one, as against the inability of the other, to postpone immediate rewards for the sake of greater but remoter ones. I have not yet mentioned the one thing for which Quigley’s book has become most famous, thanks to the recent popular books by Gary Allen and others (see below). Early on in the book we are given an unsparing account of the international bankers, the international banking system, and the creation of the Federal Reserve System under President Woodrow Wilson. To those who have not read other books on the subject—such as H. S. Kennan’s _The Federal Reserve Bank_ and Silas W. Adams’ _The Legalized Crime of Banking_—Quigley’s account, though not nearly as detailed as others, may come as a complete surprise. So will Quigley’s account of the Council on Foreign Relations and its influence upon international finance, trade, and war. The C.F.R. is very briefly described, but Quigley names names and traces the organization’s history and purpose, as well as revealing his own sympathy with these aims. This account is only a tiny portion of the entire book, and one gets the impression that the matter is of no greater relative importance than the space he allots to it. It is, in any case, unfortunate that later writers have seized upon these few paragraphs in Quigley’s book and paraded them forth as if they were the main content of the book or the chief message Quigley has to give us. Such distortion is quite unfair to Professor Quigley, whose book is so far from being a partisan tract that it, alone among books of history that I know of, is truly what its title indicates: a history of the world in our time. The only edition of Quigley’s book which is currently in print is the shortened paperback version entitled _The World Since 1939: A History_. Page one of the paperback edition is the same as page 661 of the cloth-bound edition. From that point on the text of the book is unchanged. This puts us, however, in the unfortunate position of having just half a book, although Quigley has written a new introductory essay for this edition. The new edition contains only the final seven of the original twenty chapters. We begin the shortened version with the outbreak of World War II, without the preceding material dealing with its causes and the history of the nations and peoples of the world prior to 1939. (Thus we get the C.F.R. but not the international bankers.) The new edition, though doubtless dictated by considerations of financial feasibility on the part of the publishers, is truncated, torn from its carefully nurtured roots, and lacking in developmental background (including, in my opinion, most of the book’s best chapters). In _None Dare Call It Conspiracy_, Gary Allen states many important truths which the general public desperately needs to know. Most important among these are: 1. The media of national television and radio are virtually controlled by a small group of “Eastern seaboard liberals” who slant the news, omit what they do not like or prefer one not to hear, and feed us the resulting mishmash as truth. In fact, what one hears on radio and television has very little to do with what is really going on in the world. Important history is being made, but only a few hints of it here and there are heard on the media, and then only if one listens carefully. 2. Once upon a time in this country people became millionaires largely by noncoercive means: for example, by manufacturing and mass-producing products which people wanted to buy in large enough quantities. Today, with a nearly omnipotent government, a man gets rich much more easily by getting “in” with the government; by getting special privileges, subsidies, and contracts, he can steal the wealth that has been taken from individual citizens as taxes. If you want power today, in Allen’s words, “Get into the government business! Become a politician and work for political power, or, better yet, get some politicians to front for you. That is where the real power, and the real money, is.” 3. Socialism, which has become the prevailing economic view in Washington, is not favored by “typical Tom” but by a comparatively small group of men at the top, who can use it to get their hands on the public till. They advocate socialism (though not by name) as a means toward their own power, not toward the equalization of wealth for the masses. Socialistic policies must be imposed by a strong central government, and one cannot obtain such a degree of centralization by sticking to constitutional means. One must bypass the Constitution—and corrupt the courts, which has been done—in order to achieve such a degree of power. The Rockefellers and the Kennedys are in practice (in spite of their false-front freeenterprise talk) socialists, who always favor the imposition of larger tax burdens and inflationary schemes on the taxpayers. In fact, says Allen, the politics of both Republican and Democratic parties today are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist Party than they are to their own platforms of the same year: “The idea that socialism is a share-the-wealth program is strictly a confidence game to get the people to surrender their freedom to an all-powerful collectivist government.” 4. The Federal Reserve System is one of the most destructive con-jobs ever imposed on an economically ignorant citizenry. Prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, if a bank lent more than it could return on demand, it went broke, and the individual depositors in that bank were ruined, but the entire national economy did not go down the drain as a result. With the creation of the Federal Reserve System, and with the member banks being bailed out of whatever troubles they got themselves into by infusions of unbacked paper money from the Fed, an enormous engine of inflation was created on a national scale, which leads inevitably to inflationary spirals and depressions—from which a nation always emerges with still more government controls “to handle the emergency.” 5. Less well known is the fact that the Federal Reserve is in the hands of a small number of men, who are not responsible to the electorate, and who (once they are in office) are independent even of the president of the United States, who appoints them for a 14-year period. They can inflate the currency as they choose; they can cause panics and depressions, as well as huge inflations, by their own independent decisions. The warning Allen gives in this connection is a most salutary one: > Karl Marx \[wrote\] a blueprint for conquest called _The Communist Manifesto_, \[of which\] the fifth plank read: ‘Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and exclusive monopoly.’ Lenin said that the establishment of a central bank was 90% of communizing a country. Such conspirators knew that you cannot take control of a nation without military force unless that nation has a central bank through which you can control its economy. Allen also cites the misgivings of senators and congressmen: Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. said of the Federal Reserve Bill, “It seems to me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency.... I do not like to think that any law can be passed which will make it possible to submerge the gold standard in a flood of irredeemable paper currency.” And Rep. Charles Lindbergh, Sr. said: “This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth The invisible government by the money power... will be legalized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation.” And Congressman Wright Patman has said, “In the U.S. today we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government... and then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the FRS, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution.” 1. Allen is also correct in his allegation that it was big business that wanted and agitated for the controls on the economy such as the Sherman Antitrust Act. Gabriel Kolko’s book _The Triumph of Conservatism_ has shown this once and for all. Kolko said (as quoted in Allen): “Despite the large numbers of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this century was toward growing competition. \[But\] competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests.” They wanted the field to themselves; those they could not put down through competition on the open market they put down by passing laws. By means of the income tax, for example, “a siphon was gradually inserted into the pocketbooks of the general public.” New competitors, hamstrung by government regulations and clobbered by new taxes which they could not afford during their early formative period, were forced under one by one—their imagination and ingenuity all for nothing in the face of everincreasing coercive measures by government. It is almost impossible now for newcomers to amass enough capital to survive and compete, whereas the big corporations already have the wealth and funnel much of it through tax-free organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation (always socialist in its selections and preferences), while the new competitor struggles against the state-favored giant and time after time is snuffed out. 2. The entrance of the United States into World War I was unjustified by facts available even at the time. The literature on the _Lusitania_ incident has now proliferated so that, 50 years after the event, the fact is obvious to anyone who cares to read about it. The effects of U.S. entry were also unfortunate: As Churchill said, if the U.S. had stayed out, “peace would have been made with Germany, there would have been no collapse in Russia leading to Communism, no breakdown of government in Italy followed by Fascism, and Nazism would never have gained ascendancy in Germany.” But now we come to the principal thesis of the book: all the events described above are the results of a Grand Conspiracy. Now conspiracies, by their very nature, desire to remain secret, and for that reason their existence is difficult to establish. But, at any rate, Allen’s thesis is that there is and has been for several generations now a conspiracy of “big money interests,” particularly in the United States and Western Europe, which is working to control the world by propelling its nations into socialism and bankrupting their governments through welfare-state spending and contrived wars, thus putting the governments at the mercy of the giants of finance such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, and, ultimately, causing them to unite into One Socialist World dominated by these few “international bankers.” According to Allen, the conspiracy has included most twentieth-century U.S. presidents. Woodrow Wilson was a part of the conspiracy, which he implemented by initiating the Federal Reserve System and by getting the U.S. involved in World War I. Wilson, “Colonel” House, and others encouraged and financed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, quashed most criticism of it in the American press, and when it was endangered in the early ’20s, supplied further funds to keep the Soviet regime alive. The current conspiratorial headquarters in the United States, says Allen, is the Council on Foreign Relations, which includes as members many U.S. secretaries of state (including Kissinger) and other high government officials, along with their co-conspirators, the leaders of industry and finance. Here Allen quotes from Quigley’s _Tragedy and Hope_, to show that there is such a conspiracy, that the C.F.R. is its chief locus, and that Quigley has at last publicly acknowledged its existence. If such a conspiracy exists, why has it not been exposed? Says Allen: > One might expect Walter Cronkite to be thundering in wrath about an elite clique meeting to plan our lives; or the _New York Times_ editorialists to be pounding their smoking typewriters, fuming about ‘the public’s right to know.’ But of course, the landscape painters merely brush the Bilderbergers right out of existence and focus the public’s attention on something like the conditions in the prisons or coke bottles littering the highways. Since the Bilderbergers are a group of the Left (or, as the liberals in the media might say, but don’t, “a group of progressives”), they are allowed to go on in peace and quiet planning for 1984. Apparently the media, too, are parties to the Grand Conspiracy. I have asked historians about all this and they say that the conspiracy theory is ridiculous paranoid nonsense. Twenty years ago the Big Bad Men were the Communists; today they are the Bilderbergers, the captains of banking and finance. The names change, the fashions change, but always they must have themselves a conspiracy. People find it satisfying to personalize evil: it is easiest to wreak hatred or envy or fear upon something personal, such as the devil, or those who who are allegedly conspiring to destroy us, but that which we find satisfying may not be true. Of course, Allen would reply that academic historians are either ignorant of the conspiracy or trying to cover it up. And there we are: if it is hard to prove a conspiracy, it is even harder to disprove it. If one denies its existence, one is told that this only proves that the conspiracy has been cunning and successful. At any rate, one can accept much, if not most, of what Allen says without having to invoke an international conspiracy to explain it. And even if one admits the existence of such a conspiracy, one need not conclude that it is so powerful that it can do all the things that this one has been charged with doing. (There are probably thousands of conspiracies going on all the time, but most of them are ineffective.) When one is presented with a new hypothesis which is as startling as this one—requiring the secret cooperation of businessmen, financiers, presidents, foreign ministers, and the media throughout a period of many years—one does cast about for other possible explanations. Could not, for example, a considerable portion of the facts cited by Allen be explained along the following lines: A large number of people, including Woodrow Wilson, thought (however mistakenly) that the U.S. should get into World War I and, afterward, that it should join the League of Nations “to make the world safe for democracy.” They were not conspirators; they may have influenced one another in some cases, but they arrived at their opinions, if not independently, at least nonconspiratorially. And after World War II, a very large number of people, appalled at the prospect of nuclear holocaust, opted in favor of “One World” under the guidance of the United Nations; even if the U.S. would have to give up some of its sovereignty in the process, they believed this would be preferable to nuclear annihilation. They also believed, though they did not like high taxes, that certain welfare measures were desirable for the needy, and and that large military expenditures were desirable for defense, although admittedly both of these got a bit out of hand. All of these views might be mistaken or even stupid, but they were—and are—held independently by a very large number of people—people who elect presidents to office on the basis of platforms and promises. Would this not explain the government spending programs, the annual deficits, the welfare state and the American Socialist State, the détente with the U.S.S.R. and China, and U.S. economic aid to the Soviet Union? I really do not see why the basic— and tragic—trends of our time cannot be explained without resort to a Grand Conspiracy. My counter-suggestion, however, does not explain every fact presented by Allen. But then one wants to know (1) whether all the alleged facts really are facts, and (2) whether, even if true, they establish his case. For example, I daresay there really was (as he alleges) a meeting of the Bilderbergers in Laurance Rockefeller’s Woodstock Inn on April 23, 1971, and that the proceedings were kept secret from the press. But because of this secrecy (whatever the reasons for it), we do not know what they discussed, nor whether they had the power, even if they had the wish, to dictate the shape of the world to come as a result of their deliberations. The facts presented may suggest such a hypothesis, but the facts do not by themselves entail or necessitate such a hypothesis. Again, it is perfectly possible that one of the Rockefeller brothers flew to Moscow on a Tuesday and that on the following Thursday Nikita Khrushchev was kicked out of office. But it does not follow from this that Rockefeller had Khrushchev fired because someone else in the U.S.S.R. was considered more capable of advancing the “One World” conspiracy. If Allen’s hypothesis is indeed true, it is the most shocking truth of our time: a handful of men in various countries are bringing about socialism and centralized government, bankrupting nations, fomenting wars, and (at the same time!) promoting international détente, in order to achieve, in Allen’s words, “a world government \[and\] a world police force to enforce the laws of the World Superstate and keep the slaves from rebelling.” If all this is true, it should be shouted from every housetop in the world, so that the people may know of this plot against their lives and liberties before it is too late. Yet precisely because it is such a vast and all-encompassing hypothesis, one wants more facts and more verification, lest one be caught with his pants down if the hypothesis turns out to be untrue. The aim of the conspiracy, according to Allen, is control of the world through a world government. And “you can’t do this if individual nations have sovereignty. And before you can facilitate the Great Merger \[of nations\], you must first centralize and control within each nation, destroy the local police, and remove the guns from the hands of the citizenry. You must replace our once free constitutional republic with an all-powerful central government. And that is exactly what is happening today with the Nixon Administration.” Now, we may grant that if one had such a plan, to carry it out one might well take just such measures as Allen describes—provided you have the power to bring it off. But what if you have no such conspiratorial plan, or what if you do, but lack the enormous power required to carry it out? The actions of the Nixon-Kissinger alliance (those I am familiar with) seem to me to be explainable rather common-sensically without bringing in a conspiracy—which is not to say that the allegation of conspiracy is false, only that it is unproved. Nixon and Kissinger (apparently) want international peace—at almost any price—both because they genuinely value peace and because they want to be honored in history. They are willing to get détente, even over the dead bodies of a thousand Solzhenitsyns. They believe that an armed United States will have deterrent effect on would-be conquerors, but at the same time they wish (however wrongly) to extend to the Soviets every possible favor in order to convince them of our peaceful intentions. Now what is so implausible about that? Is it not possible to explain each of these events without resorting to the hypothesis of a Grand Conspiracy which operates in utter secrecy decade after decade behind the scenes in order to bring about the demise of freedom in the U.S. and the rest of the world? Just possibly it is not, but in that case, I want to see much more hard evidence, and far fewer hasty inferences. _Reviewed by John Hospers / History / World Since 1939 (676 Pages) / BFL Price $3.95 / Conspiracy (141 Pages) / BFL Price $1_