William Engdahl
London: Pluto, 2004, £15.99, p/b
Google the author and you will find him listed as a senior member of the Lyndon LaRouche org in 1998, European Economic Editor of Executive Intelligence Review.([16]) Although I have been told by his publisher that he is no longer with LaRouche, the book’s first edition was published in 1992, when he was. The affiliation may have ended but some of LaRouche’s core ideas had not left the author when he wrote this. Namely:
- America is being manipulated, in secret, by the British. The first time I came across LaRouche’s ideas was in 1978, when I met one of his followers selling papers and magazines on the street in Bonn. I bought a copy of his newspaper New Solidarity, with the risible but irresistible banner: ‘Break British control of the US: put LaRouche on TV’. British control of the US? Wow, thought I, some of this I’ve got to have. ([17]) LaRouche took the Round Table-CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) connection the CFR began as the American Branch of a British elite network, circa 1920 and sees it still working today. Engdahl doesn’t quite talk of British control of the US but it remains one of his themes that the British are the master manipulators of those poor, naive Americans.
- All science and technology is good; nuclear power, in particular, is good, offering unlimited energy to mankind. Those who oppose nuclear power are luddites at best; at worst they herald the ‘new dark ages’.
- Everything is a conspiracy. Normal politics is entirely a sham; reality is faked for the moronic citizen-voters. (And, of course, only LaRouche has the key to unlock the mystery.) ([18])
Take the following sentence of the author’s:
‘Under a top-secret CIA research project, code-named MK-Ultra, British and American scientists began carrying out experiments using psychedelic and other mind-altering drugs.’
That bit is true (though the British role was tiny, and only as subcontractors). But the next paragraph states:
‘By the mid 1960s the project resulted in what was known as the Hippie movement…… mystic irrationality was replacing faith in scientific progress for millions of young Americans’ (emphasis added).
This suggests that the youth-drug culture of 1960s was a CIA project without quite stating it.
On the following page, discussing the trend in the US towards overseas investment in the 1960s, and the ensuing decline of American as a manufacturing economy, Engdahl writes:
‘Skilled white blue-collar workers in northern cities were pitted against increasingly desperate unskilled black and hispanic workers for a shrinking number of jobs. Riots were deliberately incited in industrial cities like Newark, Boston, Oakland and Philadelphia by government-backed “insurgents” such as Tom Hayden”‘ (emphasis added).
Huh? ‘Deliberately-incited’? But no evidence is offered for this. Tom Hayden was ‘government-backed’ and incited riots? Let’s hope no-one shows Hayden’s lawyer this section!
A few lines later we get this:
‘[President] Johnson’s War on Poverty was a government-financed operation aimed to exploit the economic decay created by the Anglo-American establishment’s policies…….The financial establishment was preparing to impose on the United States nineteenth cen-tury British colonial-style looting. And manufactured “race war” was to be their weapon.’ (p. 119)
Huh? To call a set of government policies (the so-called War on Poverty) ‘a government-financed operation’ is to add nothing. To call it ‘manipulated race war’ at the minimum we need some explanation and some evidence. We get neither.
On the decision made under President Nixon to end the post-war system of fixed currencies and float the dollar, he writes:
‘The real architects of the Nixon strategy were in the influential City of London merchant banks.’ (p.129)
It’s those sneaky Brits again but he offers no evidence.
The centrepiece of the book is a version of the thesis that the oil price rise in 1973/4 was the result of the 1973 Bilderberg meeting. In The Observer of 14 January 2002 Greg Palast quoted former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani to the effect that minutes of a secret meeting in 1973 show that the Americans and British planned the price rise. That meeting was Bilderberg and Engdahl quotes a couple of paragraphs from its minutes on page 133 which he thinks show that Bilderberg planned the price rise. Of course they show no such thing. The author reproduces two sections of the minutes and circles the following paragraphs.
‘The task of improving relations between energy importing countries should begin with consultations between Europe, the US and Japan. These three regions, which represented about 60% of world energy consumption, accounted for an even greater proportion of world trade in energy products, as they absorbed 80% of world energy exports.
Two other reasons for Cupertino were bound up with the world responsibilities of these countries. First an energy crisis or an increase in energy costs could irredeemably jeopardise the economic expansion of developing countries which had no resources of their own. Secondly, the misuse or inadequate control of the financial resources of the oil producing countries could completely disorganise and undermine the world monetary system…….
‘The costs of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries. Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.’
‘A complete change was underway in the political, economic, strategic and power relationships between the oil producing, importing and home countries of international oil companies and the national oil companies of producing and importing countries.’
These sections of the Bilderberg minutes merely record discussion of the fairly obvious consequences of a sharp rise in oil prices, nothing more.
Engdahl’s thesis was discussed in ‘Was the 1974 oil price hike engineered by the Bilderberg group?’ in Lobster 41 by Scott Newton. Newton quoted comments made before the price rises and before the Bilderberg meeting which showed that the geopolitical climate in the Middle East was already leading analysts to predict a big jump in oil prices.
After the oil price hike comes Engdahl’s explanation of the rise of the eco/green movement in the 1970s. Engdahl’s version goes off the rails in the first sentence.
‘It was no accident that, following the oil shock recession of 1974-5, a growing part of the population of western Europe, especially in Germany, began talking for the first time in the post-war period about ‘limits to growth’ or threats to the environment, and began to question their faith in the principle of economic growth and technological progress’ (emphases added).
This is simply false. The first ‘Earth Day’ in America was in 1970 and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1971. The first green/eco wave, exemplified in my memory by Paul Erhlich and Barry Commoner, was well under way by 1971. Ehrlich’s Population, Resources and Environment hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks in 1970 or 71. (I remember attending an eco conference in Buxton in the summer of 1971.) In the course of his next few pages Engdahl presents the green and anti-nuclear movement as a series of political campaigns organised and funded by the American oil industry to prevent the world adopting nuclear power. He also names without evidence the German green activist, the late Petra Kelly, as ‘a key operative in this new project’. (p. 147)
Did anyone at Pluto actually read this book?
Notes
[16] <www.larouchepub.com/tv/tlc_programs_1991-1995.html>
[17] In Bonn I also saw a shrink-wrapped copy of Larry Flynt’s Hustler whose lead story was ‘JFK assassination solved’. I couldn’t afford to buy it. Which was a lucky break: the ‘solution’ was the Gemstone File!
[18] LaRouche is a former left elitist, a democratic centralist, whose role was to lead the elite party which would reveal the truth to the masses. The elite impulse has been married to a conspiratorial world-view.