I wish the season of goodwill was at the beginning of the year rather than the end, tagged on merely as an afterthought. We will have a short break (a good time to bury bad news), then everything will be back to normal. The wars will continue, and so will the belligerence which could so easily lead to new wars. Not so long ago there was talk of bombing Iran, then the focus moved to Pakistan, until China warned the US that an attack on Pakistan would be considered an attack on China. Then it was Syria, and still is, though Russia has now placed two warships off the coast of Syria.
And then it was back to Iran. And in the meantime there was the matter of regime change in Libya, which had little to do with bringing democracy to the country, and everything to do with control of an area with huge oil assets and an independent banking system.
Suddenly the Werritty Affair blew up, as questions were asked why defence minister Liam Fox was being accompanied by his friend Adam Werritty in diplomatic meetings. Craig Murray, the whistleblowing former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has been investigating. Under the heading ' Liam Fox, Adam Werritty, and the curious case of Our Man in Tel Aviv' the Independent reported
on the involvement of the UK ambassador to Israel, and secret meetings between the three of them. Yet it has been left to the former UK ambassador Craig Murray to uncover four more similar meetings, they reported.
"I have no doubt that there is a 'separate policy' on Israel and Iran, different to that acknowledged in public. I have no doubt that the Fox/Gould/Werritty meetings – and the blanket cover-up of them from scrutiny in parliament, documents or the media – afford a key way into it".
But now we have disturbing reports of US troop activity in and around Syria. A report appeared on Russia Today's website headed 'US troops surround Syria on the eve of invasion?' stating:
"A former official from within the ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reporting that US and NATO forces have landed outside of Syria and are training militants to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, formerly a translator with the FBI, wrote over the weekend that American soldiers are among the NATO troops that have mysteriously and suddenly landed on the Jordanian and Syrian border. … Additionally, Edmonds says that American and NATO forces are training Turkish troops as well, to possibly launch a strike from the north of Syria".
Further details are given on her 'Boiling Frogs' website, which also contains an article reminding us that not long ago the US was sending people to Syria for torture.
But perhaps it won't be Syria after all. Or perhaps it will be Syria, and after that London. It's just been announced that 13 500 troops will occupy part of London for the Olympic Games, with the support of two warships, military helicopters, fighter jets and ground-to-air missiles.
Britain will provide up to 13,500 troops to protect next summer's London Olympics -- more than it has in Afghanistan -- after organisers said international uncertainty meant security for the event needed to be doubled.
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the military support would provide back-up for police and private staff already hired to secure the perimeters of the Olympic and Paralympic venues in what will be Britain's largest peacetime security operation.
The military presence will also include special forces and specialist bomb disposal units as well as a 1,000-strong contingency force "in the event of an Olympics-related civil emergency".
So perhaps when we've had a short break (a good time to bury bad news), we'll be told after the season of goodwill has ended, who we're going to be at war with in the new year. It's all supposed to be about bringing democracy to these countries, but democracy itself is the most easily undermined and destabilised form of government there is. With the best will in the world, how do run a democracy when you know how easily it can be usurped by a foreign power, especially if you're Iranian and have vivid memories of the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohamad Mosadeq? Is the fighting in Syria just a local rebellion, as we in the West are led to believe, or is it civil war fueled by a foreign power, as the Russians seem to believe?
There is now a war of words over the recent Russian elections between the US and Russia. Was Russia being destabilised by the CIA, as the Putin and Co seem to think, or were the protests merely internally generated amongst the Russian people, as Hilary Clinton seems to be suggesting? The best way to encourage a fledgling democracy is not to intervene subversively, but to let the people of the country get on with it. Otherwise clamp-downs become inevitable. Unfortunately, not everyone has the best will in the world, and constant destabilising foreign interventions will sooner or later lead to a return of Stalin and Hitler.
In the EU itself democracy seems to be being extinguished. Elected governments are being replaced by financial technocrats. In the UK we have a dramatically growing scepticism over the EU, starting with the Euro, which was clearly a project destined to failure.
The UKIP MEP Nigel Farage, who wants the UK to withdraw completely from the EU, is now becoming incredibly popular with the mainstream media.
I suspect, though, that some of the big-wigs in Government want to return EU powers not to Westminster, but to The City, and so to the financial institutions that seem to be running this country. Others want to make the EU more democratic, but they are losing the battle. The 17 Eurozone countries have now accepted fiscal union. So who will now be running the Eurozone if not the financial institutions? These changes were not brought about my normal democratic processes, but by a project destined to failure, whose objective could only have been to consolidate power at the heart of Europe. Can the fiscal union work? In the short term it probably can, but in the long term I should have thought there would be a backlash from the far right, in particular in France, when they see themselves being taken over by German corporate interests. How will the union respond to that? Probably by a clamp-down, thus further consolidating power in the hands of the few; otherwise the whole union could break up.
I was amazed to see the film 'Inside Job' on BBC Four.
This film is the financial equivalent of 'ZERO: an investigation into 9/11', which has never been broadcast on mainstream television in the UK. That's why I was amazed that the BBC would broadcast it. Public interest into the economic meltdown is now so intense, that even the BBC must be under great pressure to admit that the whole thing was a set-up. That set-up was enabled by the 'light touch' of the regulators in the US and the UK. I would like to know what pressures the politicians were under to bring about that 'light touch'. Since this was international, it seems likely that those pressures would have been coming from financial corporate interests.
In the UK the government's Financial Services Authority has published a report into the failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Their press release reports that "RBS’s failure amid the systemic crisis ultimately resulted from poor decisions made by the RBS management and Board. But deficiencies in the global capital regime and liquidity regulations made the crisis much more likely". In addition, the press release says, "flaws in the FSA’s supervisory approach provided insufficient challenge to RBS".
However Craig Woodhouse in The London Evening Standard writing under the heading ' FSA blames Blair, Brown and Balls for RBS collapse' digs a little deeper, and states: "Labour's light-touch regulation of the City was a key factor in the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, a report by the financial watchdog found today. The Financial Services Authority said it came under 'sustained' political pressure to spare the Square Mile from red tape in the years before the banking crisis"
It seems that a 'light touch' has been the policy also in the regulation of the education system in the UK.
The Daily Telegraph carried out an investigation into the practices of school examination boards in the UK following commercialisation initiated by the Blair government.
They found that exam boards were secretly coaching teachers on how to increase pupils’ marks in GCSEs and A-Levels. They also found evidence that exam boards are actively boasting about the ease of their courses in an apparent attempt to try to secure valuable business. "The increasing commercialisation of exams has coincided with a sharp rise in the number of children achieving top grades", they stated. This survey led to concerns that exam boards are driving down standards by aggressively competing with one another to persuade schools to take their tests. A senior official of one board stated in a covert recording that she didn't know how they got their syllabus through the official regulation system that is supposed to ensure high standards in GCSEs and A-Levels.
As a result, the education secretary has ordered an inquiry
Could this have just been due to criminal neglect? Or could it be that politicians like to falsify reality if that makes things look good for them? Or could it be that somone is trying to dumb down the education of our kids in order to make them politically more compliant? From a sociopath's point of view, the purpose of the education system would be merely to provide skilled people for employment in the industries that would build up the strength of the corporations. Beyond that, education could be dangerous. Having trained physicists specialising in physics is fine, but the last thing you want is trained physicists enquiring too much into social issues and the power structures of the country. That would, as I discovered, be dangerous. In the UK, knowledge of foreign languages could undermine the push for linguistic hegemony, and we saw how Baroness Catherine Ashton, then an unelected politician under Tony Blair, brought about the collapse of an already faltering language teaching programme in England's schools. So could all this be part of an intentional dumbing down process?
Shortly before reading about the Telegraph's research, I had come across an Alex Jones video, called 'Charlotte Iserbyt: The Miseducation of America'. Charlotte Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long-term strategic plan to transform America from a nation of individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they're told.
She explains how conditioning and training under a corporate agenda has replaced traditional education, leading to a deliberate dumbing down of Americans.
She linked her own experiences to the financial and militaristic ambitions of those behind the New World Order, which she had read about in a book published in 1970 called 'None dare call it conspiracy'
Link to Amazon
which put together how financial institutions had been involved in political propaganda in controlling populations, even to the extent of initiating wars, in which they would finance both sides, so that when the wars came to and end both sides would be indebted to the banks that they had borrowed from. She had been sent that book by a friend, and by chance, I had been sent a copy by a friend and was reading it when I came across the video. Much of the book is based on the writings of Professor Carroll Quigley, who revealed much of the workings of the 'insiders'.
Then a story broke about a row in the City of Stoke-on-Trent. The Council had published a proposed budget for the following year, which included quite severe cuts, and had announced a consultation period, to end on 23 December.
However, a local independent news website published an article under the heading 'Are We Really Being Consulted On The 2012 Budget?' It stated:
"It seems that the decision to close the Wedgwood Memorial College has already been taken and just needs to be rubber-stamped by the Cabinet at their meeting on 15 December which is a day before the last public consultation event and over a week before the consultation closes on 23 December".
The Wedgwood Memorial College is an adult residential college offering short courses. I had understood that the college had, until some time in the 1990s been run by the Workers' Education Association, and that the Principal was in their employ. When it was taken over by Stoke-on-Trent Council, the Council became his new employer. Following his retirement the new Principal managed to make the College pay its own way, but then in 2007 she resigned, and was not replaced. The Friends of the College believed that there was an intent to close the college down, but since it was breaking even, they concluded that the motive could not have been to save money, but to gain money by selling the assets off. They campaigned to save the college. An inquiry by Staffordshire County Council concluded that the college was viable. Stoke-on-Trent Council reacted by changing its use so that it wasn't viable, and is now proposing to close the college to save money. So here we have a viable educational establishment being taken over by a local authority which is now attempting to close it down.
The Wedgwood College is also the location of the headquarters of Esperanto Association of Britain, which moved there in 2002, following a grand opening of Esperanto House.That building had been payed for and built on the college premises by the Esperanto Association for the College, and so for the City of Stoke-on-Trent Council. Members were led to believe that the association had a 99 year lease on the property, whereas in fact they had a lease only for one room of the house, used as their office, with separate arrangements for the use of other parts of college property and the hire of an office administrator from the City of Stoke-on-Trent Council. The long-standing Principal of the College had not been an Esperantist, but learned Esperanto and entered the Management Committee of Esperanto Association of Britain in 2000, taking on a leading role in the negotiations to relocate to the college.
Members had in 1999 voted for the sale of their London premises on the basis of three factors put to them by the Management Committee:
(1) the falling capital of the association
(2) the decrepit state of their own property
(3) professional advice received
I have to say that in my studies I could not substantiate any of those claims. Furthermore, I found that the capital had actually been rising dramatically over that period. It took more than five years for the treasurer to finally admit that my figures were correct (See my October newsletter). The current treasurer has now acknowledged that the association did not have exclusive occupancy of the whole house, and that they took legal advice on the situation which would arise if the college were to close. She reported that the association would receive occupancy of the whole house, but would have to pay more for the maintenance costs. Taking legal advice would of course not have been necessary had the association simply had a lease for the whole house as they had led members to believe.
A letter of mine, calling for a public inquiry, appeared in the Staffordshire Newsletter.
It seems that in one foul swoop, antidemocratic forces in Stoke-on-Trent were dumbing down the educational activities of two registered charities.
Next year should be an interesting year (A medical practitioner once told me what 'interesting' meant!). It is the year for which I had in 2005 forecast the demise of the Esperanto association. My colleague thought that they would keep it running as a token group, in order to block anyone else who might want to set up a new national association. Perhaps we were both right. I was amazed later to find that 2012 was being forecast as the year in which the New World Order takes over. All sorts of justifications were being put forward, ranging from astrology to the Book of Revelations. Looking back on that, it now looks quite simple; it looks as if there may have been a twenty-year programme starting in 1992, the year after the fall of Communism, which comes to completion in 2012. It was around that time that we saw the appearance of Demos, the New Labour group in the Labour Party, Common Purpose, which according to Brian Gerrish's researches has been 'messing up' in local government and other institutions, and Academic Cooperation Association, which looks as if it may may be a front for pushing for the hegemony of English in the EU. It was also the year of an otherwise unexplained sudden linear decline in membership of Esperanto Association of Britain.
Next year will also see the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, and with it the extinction of a leading light in investigative journalism, as well as founder of the then 'Stop the War' campaign. William T Stead was the most famous passenger on the Titanic, and he had acquired a phenominal reputation in the UK for his highlighting of social injustices. He also had ideas of bringing peace to the world by benevolent use of capital raised by entrepreneurs.
There was a television programme on BBC2 on 22 November called 'When bankers were good' (Youtube link) narrated by Ian Hislop who explained about the growth of the banking industry following the industrial revolution, and how some of those leading bankers, being members of religious communities, left huge fortunes in trust for the public good. He finished by explaining the ideas of nineteenth century Oxford don John Ruskin, who developed the idea, distinguishing between what he called 'wealth' and 'illth'.
I had just finished reading the book 'None dare call it conspiracy', which explains how John Ruskin's ideas were subsequently developed, I think not quite in the direction that John Ruskin would have hoped.
Before reading that, I had just read a more recent book, also based largely on the writings of Carroll Quigley, called 'Brotherhood of Darkness' by Stanley Monteith.
This book, too, had just been sent to me by a friend. It concentrated more on the personalities involved, and how they operated internally.
One student at the time of John Ruskin was Cecil Rhodes, who was so taken with Ruskin's idea of using huge fortunes to bring peace to the world, that he himself gained huge fortunes in Southern Africa, and became a strong force in colonisation. In the name of peace, he recruited two other very influential people. In 'The Anglo-American Establishment ' Carroll Quigley writes: "One wintry afternoon in 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance to the British Empire and to the world as a whole. For these men were organizing a secret society that was, for more than 50 years, to be one of the most important forces in the formulation and execution of British imperial and foreign policy. "The three men thus engaged were already well known in England. The leader was Cecil Rhodes, fabulously wealthy empire builder and the most important person in South Africa. The second was William T. Stead, the most famous, and probably also the most sensational, journalist of the day. The third was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V." It emerged that Rhodes' idea of bringing peace to the world included further colonisation. Of course, the main military opposition would come not from the natives, but from other Europeans. When Rhodes used his position to provoke the Boer War, Stead objected. Rhodes insisted on absolute loyalty, and that caused a bitter schism in the movement for a New World Order. Stead was marginalised, but campaigned hard against the Boer War. In 1904 he suffered a nervous breakdown, which I can well understand. He wanted to pursue the way of co-operation between ethnic groups, rather than to impose hegemony on them. As part of that, he supported the idea of an easily learned auxiliary language, and in 1904 became the first President of the newly formed British Esperantists Association (Inc).
That schism still exists today. Carroll Quigley was one of Bill Clinton's professors at Georgetown University, before Bill Clinton became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He paid homage to Carroll Quigley in his 1992 nomination acceptance speech for the US Presidency. Quigley wrote in 'The Anglo-American Establishment': "The Rhodes scholarship established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes’ seventh will are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes, in five previous wills, left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire". In another book, 'Tragedy and Hope' Quigley wrote that the aim of this secret society was “…nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole".
Carroll Quigley wrote that he knew of the operation of this network because he had been permitted to study it for two years in the 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. "I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have for much of my life been close to it and to many of its instruments", he wrote, "In general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown". That sounds to me a bit like the Demos people, who have been advocating 'open infiltration', presumably because people have become so accepting of what is going on that the public would just become acquiescent. So we can trace Rhodes' ideas on a militaristic hegemonic New World Order through Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair, and through to the present-day wars. The Stead side of the schism was marginalised. A strong pacifist movement grew up. I knew one or two pacifists from the First World War, including the concert pianist Frank Merrick, whom I interviewed on his 90th birthday in 1976 when he was Honorary President of The London Esperanto Club. Belatedly, I now find I can understand their pacifism. I still think we have the right to defend ourselves, but this wasn't about defence, unless, of course, 'defence' is interpreted in the Orwellian sense. Since 9/11, these values have been revived. There is now a huge truth movement throughout the Western world, consisting of thousands of individuals who want to know the truth about the real sources of terrorism in all its forms, including financial terrorism and the use of 'illth'. But governments and the mainstream media are overwhelmingly controlled by corporate interests, to such an extent, as George Orwell put it in his introduction to 'Animal Farm' that "anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness".
The world has to decide which way to go. Will it take the route of Cecil Rhodes, Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, towards a hegemonic New World Order controlled by huge corporate financial interests, or will it take the route of democratic peaceful co-existence, respecting each others' human rights, their cultures and their languages, and turning the huge financial resources available into wealth rather than illth?
We need to spread that question far and wide. Whatever language you do it in, keep talking.
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