by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
May 30, 2014
Adapted from remarks delivered to the We The People Anti-Bilderberg Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on May 30, 2014. Watch the original presentation in the video below:
Now I know what you’re thinking. “Why we must oppose the Bilderberg Group?” Really? Do we need a lecture on this? If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the ones who don’t even have to be told what the Bilderberg Group is, much less why it must be opposed. And if you do consider yourself in that group, then I salute you. You are clearly one of the more tuned-in members of the public, one who has dared look beyond the veil of normality at the rotten core of corruption at the heart of our political and economic world.
But I dare say that even if everyone who is reading this is part of that group, there are still many hundreds more out there for each one of us who are not so clued-in. The unfortunate victims of the propaganda and the brainwashing, the 24/7 exhortations to go home as there’s nothing to see here. We all know people like this; the ones who don’t know what the Bilderburger with Cheese Group is and don’t want to know. After all, why should they care?
All else aside, then, there are at least two reasons why we should have a decent answer to the question of “Why we must oppose the Bilderberg Group.” Firstly, it’s so that we have a clear, well-reasoned, cogent argument to those who ask us that question in all sincerity. Even the most propagandized can be coaxed out of their reality inversion bubble with a well-reasoned argument, after all. It worked on you at some point, didn’t it? And secondly, even those of us who are aware that the Bilderberg Group is something to be opposed should have a clear idea of why it must be opposed, because the answer to that question will help us to answer the second and more important question, “How must we oppose the Bilderberg Group?”
So, then, to the question itself. If we are attempting to communicate with those who cover their ears and hum loudly at the first sign of something that might be construed as “conspiracy theory,” maybe we should start with something they can relate to: their political overlords! We can point them to candidate Obama on the 2008 campaign trail, for example, promising that his government will be one of the most transparent in history. After all, as Obama himself noted, “it’s no coincidence that one of the most secretive administrations in our history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight.” And Hillary Clinton, delivering remarks at the Transparency International-USA’s Annual Integrity Award Dinner: “Before government officials spoke as openly and loudly about these issues, Transparency International was already bringing corruption out of the shadows, sunlight being the best disinfectant.” Or then-newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron: “It is our ambition to be one of the most transparent governments in the world, open about what we do and, crucially, about what we spend.”
Yes! Of course! Transparency! Obama, Clinton, Cameron; they are all so dedicated to the cause of transparency, so concerned about the dangerous collusion of business, finance, media and government, that the very thought of the Bilderberg Group must be repugnant to them, right? It must so rankle them to learn that politicians are meeting behind closed doors with corporate lobbyists and…wait…What’s that? They’ve all attended Bilderberg? Oh, never mind then.
Yes, sadly for those who still believe their politicians when their lips are moving, it is true. Cameron attended Bilderberg last year, just one week after he had the effrontery to address a then-brewing transparency scandal in the House of Lords. Obama met Clinton at the 2008 conference while both were on the campaign trail. Obama even had to ditch his press corp to do so; he literally rounded them up into his plane and sent them flying off to Chicago on the pretense that he was with them, but instead he snuck off down the road from Washington to Chantilly, Virginia where the Bilderberg Group was meeting to engage in closed-door negotiations with Clinton. It is widely believed that the hotly-contested Democratic primary was really decided then and there at Bilderberg, with Hillary dropping out of the race shortly thereafter. So in other words, we can at the very least point to the discrepancy between these political puppets’ high-minded ideals and their actual actions. Hopefully even the most deluded of the head-in-the-sand crowd will understand that these people can’t be trusted behind closed doors.
Of course, it isn’t just about trust (although they frame it that way). These meetings are actually illegal in the US. As Global Research points out:
“Under the Logan Act, a US law passed during the infancy of the country by President John Adams, American citizens cannot negotiate with foreign officials without the authorization of the country. According to the text of the Logan Act of 1799, ‘Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.’”
That seems pretty cut and dry. Every American official talking about politically sensitive subjects behind closed doors with other nations’ officials in non-official capacities should be paying hefty fines if not spending time behind bars. Of course, the Logan Act has never been used in the modern era and isn’t likely to be enforced now, but it is important to note that what they are doing is still technically a felony under US law. And for those countries that don’t have a similar law forbidding their government officials from doing the same might want to ask themselves why that is.
But still some will argue, “So what? Why should we care about these meetings? So a couple of deals get made between the old boys club members. What else is new?”
In order to understand this, we need to look at the roots of the Bilderberg Group. We could go back as far as the Second World War, when the CFR used the disarray caused by war to set up their War and Peace Study Group. The group sought to advise the State Department on foreign policy issues and advocated the creation of a State Department committee (to be supplied with research by the CFR, of course) to work on the issue. In March 1942, they got their wish: the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy was born. In their capacity as official advisors to the government, the CFR’s War and Peace Studies Group successfully argued for the creation of a number of institutions, including the World Bank and IMF, which were set up after the war. The group also argued for the creation of a trans-Atlantic talking shop to foster dialogue (and, eventually, forge a common foreign policy) between the US and Europe. This is one of the kernels for what ultimately became the Bilderberg Group.
The group itself was initiated by a number of people in 1954. Perhaps the best known of the Bilderberg founders was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He was long accused of having dark Nazi ties in his past, and he dutifully denied those allegations all his life. But in 2010 a Dutch historian uncovered documents proving he was a member of the Nazi fraternity Deutsche Studentenschaft, the Nazi NSDAP and its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung. These connections have been downplayed by those who point to his wartime record, but in 2007 a major scandal erupted when Dutch journalists uncovered documents showing that he used his position on the board of KLM to petition Switzerland to help Nazis escape to South America after the war. It’s also significant that he resigned his Nazi memberships in 1934 when he joined German chemical giant, IG Farben. This is significant because in 2009 it was revealed that in August of 1944 the Nazis convened a meeting in the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg with their top industrial and business leaders, including representatives for IG Farben, to detail a plan for Nazi survival in a post-WWII Europe and the eventual rise of a Fourth Reich, which was to be a pan-European financial empire. This was at least one of the roots for the European Union.
Another key Bilderberg founder was the otherwise obscure Polish diplomat Józef Retinger. Retinger, meanwhile, was a key member of the European movement that spawned the European Union. He was one of the people who initiated the first Bilderberg meeting in 1954 and brought Prince Bernhard on board with the idea, along with then-CIA head Walter Bedell Smith, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland and others.
From its very inception at the first meeting at the hotel Bilderberg in 1954, there was absolutely no question what this conference was aiming at: the merging of the political, economic and social institutions of the Atlantic nations in a fascistic corporate regional governmental structure. At first the topic was broached tentatively, as when American representative Gardner Cowles complained in the first ever Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands in 1954 that America and Europe had divergent foreign policy stances toward Asia.
It did not take long before the Bilderbergers began raising these tentative points in a more forceful manner, however. In 1955, they laid out an even more ambitious agenda. Leaked documents show the attendees talked frankly about the “Pressing need to bring the German people, together with the other peoples of Europe, into a common market.” Note the reference to Germany, a call back to the Nazi Red House meeting in 1944 for the creation of a pan-European Fourth Reich in the creation of a common European market. The leaked documents also show that at that 1955 meeting the Bilderbergers discussed a plan “To arrive in the shortest possible time at the highest degree of integration, beginning with a common European market.” Just two years after that meeting the Treaty of Rome was signed, creating the European Economic Community, an event which is now officially considered by the European Union as the formative event of the European Union. Lest there be any doubt what group was influential in bringing this about, many of the signers and negotiators of that document, including Paul-Henri Spaak, were Bilderberg members.
In the 1990s the final cherry was placed on the EU Sunday with the creation of the Euro itself. We do not have to go far to discover the Bilderberg hand in this process, either. In 2009, former EU Commissioner Etienne Davignon told the EUObserver: “When we were having debates on the euro, people [at Bilderberg events] could explain why it was worth taking risks and the others, for whom the formal policy was not to believe in it, were not obliged not to listen and had to stand up and come up with real arguments.”
Now the next logical step is being taken to connect the regional government that the Bilderberg helped to create, the European Union, with its Trans-Atlantic partner, the US. This next step is being called the TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a Trans-Atlantic counterpart to the equally secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership that is seeking to create a free trade pact in the Asia-Pacific region. The TTIP has been called by Bilderberg attendee David Cameron as “the biggest bilateral trade deal in history” and it is being hammered out, naturally, at meetings like the Bilderberg, where some of the key players in this alliance are gathering behind closed doors as we speak.
Are there still those arguing, “So what?” Are they still pointing out that boys will be boys and wheelers and dealers will be wheelers and dealers? Stating that it’s obvious that meetings like the Bilderberg Group take place all the time, so what’s so special about them?
We could answer these people in two ways: Firstly, the agenda of the Bilderberg group is aggressively and explicitly corporate fascist in nature. Not only are there the disturbing Nazi connections to the founding of the group, but there are also the actually fascistic aims and agenda of the group and its members. At the 1968 Bilderberg conference in Canada, George Ball gave a talk entitled “Internationalization of Business.” Ball knew of where he spoke; he was an Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs under Kennedy and Johnson, a Senior Managing Director for Lehman Bros and Kuhn Loeb Inc, and a member of the exclusive Bilderberg Steering Committee. The speech was chilling in its scope and implications, laying out a concept of a new world economic order based on the concept of a world company. It required the elimination of the nation state as a prerequisite to the implementation of the plan. As Ball himself asked, according to the meeting’s transcripts: “Where does one find a legitimate base for the power of corporate managements to make decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they have only limited responsibility?” This is the Bilderberg vision of globalization; not the friendly trade and cooperation that they like to sell it as, but as the global fascistic takeover of the world’s resources by the rich and powerful that it really is.
The other thing to note about this process is that it is aggressively and unashamedly conspiratorial. 150 of the wealthiest and richest people in the Western world are meeting in total secrecy right now, insisting that they have the right (in contravention of law, even) to wheel, deal and come to agreements behind closed doors. This secrecy has been essential to the Bilderberg group since its founding. Prince Bernhard spoke passionately about the topic of secrecy at the first ever Bilderberg meeting in 1954. He stressed how important it was to what the group wanted to accomplish that secrecy be maintained.
This is where we come to the real answer of today’s presentation. Not just WHY we should oppose Bilderberg, but HOW we can do it. Their existence is predicated on secrecy. Their downfall hinges on exposure.
We have made great strides in that regard in recent years, thanks in large part to the work of the pioneers who reported on the Bilderberg group tirelessly, relentlessly and thanklessly for decades. Thanks to the legwork of journalists like the late Westbrook Pegler and Jim Tucker, we were able to find out not only about the group’s existence, but, thanks to well-cultivated sources within the group, details of what was being discussed in those meetings.
Now, the burden falls to a new generation of activists. Charlie Skelton, Dan Dicks, Luke Rudkowski. You might have seen that Dicks and Rudkowski were arrested for daring to approach some of the Bilderbergers in the days before this conference began. Skelton had a life-changing experience being hounded by police and secret service agents when he first went to cover the conference in Greece. The group continues to persecute those who try to expose what they are doing.
But we have a secret weapon: You. Me. All of us. They may be able to take us down individually, and they likely will be able to marginalize our dissent if we remain small, isolated, in a state of powerlessness. But they cannot stop all of us working in our own way to contribute to the exposure of their agenda. Singly, we are divided and powerless. But together we are stronger than they could ever be.
There are billions of us, 150 of them. What are we really scared of, anyway? Won’t you join us in moving beyond the question of why we are opposing Bilderberg to the question of how?