Daniel Estulin
Waterville (Oregon): TrineDay, 2007, $24.95, p/b
To use an old word which has recently reentered my vocabulary, this is complete tosh. When it arrived I opened it at random and my eye fell on this, from a list of Bilderberg’s aims on p. 43:
‘One Socialist Welfare State. The Bilderbergers envision a socialist welfare state, where obedient slaves will be rewarded and non-conformism targeted for exter-mination’.
This told me that the author was somewhere over on the Right and that he had some difficulty separating fact from fiction. I didn’t read all of this. I gave up after about 60 pages. It is strewn with errors, misinterpretations and inventions. Here are some examples.
- p. 20 ‘Prince Bernhard drew on his Nazi history in corporate management to encourage the “super secret policy-making groups” to call themselves the Bilderbergers after Farben Bilder, in memory of the Farben executives’ initiative to organise Heinrich Himmler’s “Circle of Friends.” ’Actually the group was named after the hotel in which they had their first meeting. You can visit the hotel’s website at <www.bilderberg.nl/uk/>.
- p. 22 ‘the Group wields economic control over world trade.’ Ha! (And no evidence offered.)
- p. 27 ‘the Royal Institute of International Affairs is the foreign policy executive arm of the British monarchy.’(11) Ha! (And no evidence offered.)
- p. 29 ‘Lady Thatcher had been dumped as head of state by her own Conservative Party on Bilderberg orders and replaced with trapeze artist (sic) John Major.’
Not only is there no evidence that Thatcher was dumped on the orders of Bilderberg – and Esulin offers none – he has confused John Major with his father, who did work in a circus for a time.
On page 58 we are told that Watergate was an anti-Nixon operation run by ‘the combined forces of Bilderberg/RIIA/Tavistock Institute under the direction of the British MI6.’ Didn’t you just know that Tavistock would be chucked in as well?
Prominent among the author’s sources are Anthony Sutton, Gary Allen, of None Dare Call It Conspiracy fame, John Coleman, the Brit claiming to have been an MI6 officer, whose Committee of 300 – more utter tosh – is regularly quoted, and Eustace Mullins, an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist and the last surviving student of Ezra Pound.
In other words, this presents much of the extant real documentation – leaked agendas, minutes, letters etc. – on the Bilderberg group within a particularly crude and slapdash version of the familiar framework of the nativist American Right. The author interprets Bilderberg not only as the executive committee of global capital, but also as a global conspiracy to introduce a socialist world government. As a belief this is only a little more sensible than David Icke’s view that most of them are alien shape-shifters.
On the plus side you do get the Bilderberg documentation in one place; and you also get about 30 pages of photographs of attendees at the Bilderberg meeting in Canada taken by the author. See them stand! See them drink! See them talk! See them leave buildings!
The author’s Website tells us that it has been published in 42 countries in 24 languages and has sold over 150,000 copies. So what do I know?
Notes
- This idiocy makes the author sound like a follower of Lyndon La Rouche, as does his use of the La Rouchian phrase ‘new Dark Ages’ in the introduction; and you do get some hits if you Google ‘Daniel Estulin + EIR’.