The most unknown work of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who styled himself "the unknown philosopher" (ie philosophe inconnu), was an epic drama entitled Le Crocodile, ou la guerre du bien et du mal arrivee sous le regne de Louis XV, which, was a commercial failure when it was first published in 1799 and was not reprinted until 1962. This epic, actually written in 1792, was published anonymously, as Saint-Martin himself described it as "a trifle," which he wanted to keep separate from his serious, philosophical works. Le Crocodile is certainly the strangest and most difficult of Saint-Martin's works to understand, because it is a wholly fantastic, clearly allegorical tale of struggle and ultimate deliverance. It can, at least to a certain degree, be taken to symbolize the struggles of the French Revolution (although the subtitle describes the events as taking place under Louis XV), and Stanislas de Guaita has seen it as an allegory of "a clash of titans between adepts of two different initiations," thereby linking it to the legend of a feud between Martinists and Illuminists in the rumors surrounding the Wilhelmsbad Masonic congress of 1782, which took place during the reign of Louis XVI.There are, however, few precise dates or references to specific political events in Le crocodile, and the tone and scope of the work suggest rather a timeless and transcendent struggle between the forces of light and those of darkness, which is to culminate in nothing less than the end of history and the coming of a post historical, purely spiritual golden age. Despite its opacity and fantastic character, Le crocodile may be seen as the key to Saint-Martin's thought, because it offers a vision of the apocalypse within the optimistic vision of the Martinist cosmology.
The title character, the Crocodile, is a demonic personage who represents the gross and selfish temptations of the material world and who seeks to deter the French people from their spiritual mission. At the start of the epic, it is announced, in an assembly of demons off Cape Horn, that the moment is coming in which the "mould of time" (Ie moule du temps), where humanity has been trapped since the Fall, is to be shattered and that the French nation has been chosen to begin this epochal transformation. The demons, who can exist only in the fallen world of historical time, are determined to prevent this from happening and so resolve to assist the English, "who are more bound to time than any other people" to "completely exterminate the French nation."l For this purpose, the Crocodile departs from his lair beneath the pyramids of Egypt to arrive in Paris, which is then being led into corruption by false philosophers and radical street agitators. The Crocodile appears before an assembly of academicians, whom he tells that "politics, over all the earth, is ... a game of chess which always recommences and can never end, because the powers that form the different pieces can capture one another, but they cannot capture me, I who am the king."2 After he has spoken, the academicians bow down before the Crocodile and honor him. The Crocodile, therefore, is revealed as master of the fallen material world and as the hidden, ultimate arbiter of earthly political and military contests.
In this apocalyptic vision, standing against the Crocodile is not a powerful last emperor or great pope but a small band of virtuous, humble individuals, who seek to vanquish him not through the force of arms but by the power of truth. The leader of the band is a Spanish Jew named Eleazar, who dearly represents Saint-Martin's first spiritual master, Martines de Pasqually. Eleazar tells one of his friends and collaborators, Sedir (a virtuous magistrate who likely represents Saint-Martin himself), that he had been forced to flee Spain by the Inquisition, and the latter responds with outrage that "these men who preach a religion of peace and charity pretend to serve God with ingratitude and by cruel and precipitous judgments!"3 Eleazar, however, also tells Sedir that his studies of "the fundamental truths that are within man before being in any book" have convinced him of the truth of Christianity, and he states that he plans to convert when the time is right. Eleazar and Sedir are assisted in their struggle with the powers of darkness by an association called the Societe des Independants, led by a Scandinavian mystic named Madame Jof and a former skeptic named Ourdeck, whose experiences with the Crocodile lead him to become a follower of Eleazar. The arrival of the Crocodile is accompanied by a strange phenomenon, which Saint-Martin calls the "plague of books." A mysterious plague strikes all of the books of Paris (by implication those of the philosophes), turning them into a grayish paste, which the starving people of the city eat, causing nausea and "such a confusion of thought and speech that the tower of Babel, in comparison, was a beacon of clarity. "4 Both commoners and academicians are driven mad by consuming this paste of books, but Madame Jof and her followers are able to cure them by means of a magic power.5 The Societe des Independants seems clearly to represent the mystical, esoteric branch of Freemasonry, and Martinism and the spiritual renewal it offered are thus presented, in a very literal sense, as the antidote to the unhealthy materialist philosophies of the Enlightenment.
The narrative of Le Crocodile is highly fantastic, and many of the events that occur make sense only in an allegorical manner. In the midst of a battle against the forces of evil, Ourdeck and his comrades are swallowed up by the Crocodile and journey for days within its apparently infinite interior. The innards of the Crocodile in fact appear as a sort of purgatory, in which Ourdeck encounters thousands of people of all nations and ages and is told by an old man that "all the people that are found here will soon be delivered, for ... the mould of time will be broken, and the empire of the evil one will be abolished."6 While inside the Crocodile, Ourdeck has a vision of a game of cards in which the cards bear the symbols of all the kingdoms of the world and declares, "I suddenly understood whence comes the perpetual upheaval of the empires of the earth.7 Ourdeck also witnesses, still inside the Crocodile, a Greek city of the fifth century BC, here identified as "Atalante," which had been destroyed by an earthquake, leaving all of its inhabitants "suspended by death in the same state in which they were found, so that one day their abominations would be known to all of those whom they thought to fool, and by that means hypocrisy, which devours the earth, would be covered in confusion, and could have no victory."8 Within the city, Ourdeck encounters an orator at the Temple of Truth, who speaks words that are pure and holy but from whose heart flows a visible "current of words," dark bronze in color, which are "impious, extravagant and blasphemous." By following this current of words, Ourdeck arrives at the house of an evil priest who has bewitched the orator and whose plans for world domination Ourdeck discovers in a book guarded by a pair of iron monkeys.9 This bizarre vision of a city frozen in time, like Pompeii, as the result of a natural disaster reflects the author's strong condemnation of a hypocritical society and its conventions and the longing for a completely transparent world, a sort of spiritual panopticon in which all evil intentions can be seen and met with proper scorn.
At this point, Ourdeck is suddenly returned to Paris, where the combat between the Crocodile and his adversaries continues to rage. As a result of magic rites performed by Eleazar, the two warring armies are expelled from the Crocodile and cast into the heavens. A mysterious visitor, who later is revealed to be the husband of Madame Jof, explains this turn of events to Sedir, telling him that Eleazar had "retraced the primitive deliverance of man," returning man from his fallen material state to reintegration with his divine origins. Finally, the Crocodile is unmasked, leading to the desertion of his army, and is forced to abandon Paris and return to his prior confinement beneath the Egyptian pyramids. A wise man then proclaims, "the mould of time is broken, we are delivered from the bonds which have held us for centuries, chained and deprived of the principle of our lives; from now on we will live in an eternal alliance."10 Following this happy turn of events, Ourdeck is rewarded for his service by marrying Eleazar's daughter Rachel, and Paris acclaims the victorious band as heroes. Compared to most of the apocalyptic visions offered by the political prophets of the post-revolutionary century, Saint-Martin's Le Crocodile is an optimistic work, for, true to the philosophical optimism of its author, it holds out the promise of salvation for all people, not just a small elect, and if the struggle against the Crocodile is carried out by a select band of initiates, their efforts are pursued for the good of all humankind. Nevertheless, Le Crocodile reflects many of the standard assumptions of the Christian apocalyptic tradition, as history is defined, circumscribed, and almost completely overshadowed by its beginning and endpoint; that is, by the Fall and the ultimate redemption of humanity.
The invented tradition of secret brotherhoods had, as we have seen, a sunny and optimistic side to it, a vision of tolerance and harmony in which all world religions were reflections of a single, primordial truth, which small communities of dedicated men constantly sought to preserve and to pass on for the benefit of all humanity. The tradition of secret brotherhoods had, however, a darker, more sinister side, particularly among the post-revolutionary Right, which interpreted the Revolution as the result of an evil Masonic conspiracy against all established order. The conspiracy theory of the French Revolution though present to some degree in counter revolutionary discourse from the very beginning, received its most complete and vitriolic articulation in the four-volume Memoires pour servir sur l'histoire du jacobinisme written by the abbe Augustin Barruel in exile in London in 1797 and republished in France under the Restoration. Barruel declared unambiguously that, within this French Revolution, everything up to the most shocking deeds, was planned, premeditated, conspired resolved; everything was the effect of the most profound villainy, because everything was prepared and led by men who had long woven the threads of conspiracy in the secret societies, and who chose and hastened the moments favorable to their plots."11 Barruel alleged that the Revolution had first been envisioned by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who were able to infiltrate the Masonic movement, more specifically the higher grades of the esoteric and Scottish Rite lodges, and utilize it for their dastardly purposes.
At the heart of the darker side of this invented tradition of secret brotherhoods was the assumption that the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or at least some branches within these organizations, were the direct heirs of the Knights Templar, a medieval military-religious order that had gained tremendous wealth and influence during the Crusades, later to be condemned by the Vatican and brutally suppressed by the French monarchy. The Templar myth first won adherents among Masons on both sides of the Rhine in the 1750s and 1760s who sought a more distant and noble origin for their movement. Charles, baron of Hund, established the Rite of Strict Observance, which celebrated festivals in honor of Jacques Molay, the martyred last leader of the order, and declared in its rituals that the order had been maintained in secret for centuries. A manuscript published in Strasbourg in 1760 took this legend a step further, arguing that the Templars had restored the ancient Order of Hiram, which they took back from Jerusalem to Cyprus, until their destruction by Philippe Ie Bel. Jacques Molay, whom the manuscript described as "a virtuous man, of an exemplary life and irreproachable conduct," was said to have passed on the order's secrets to his nephew, the Comte de Beaujeu, just before his arrest and condemnation.12
Why did the (completely speculative) association of Freemasonry with the Knights Templar gain such rapid popularity in the eighteenth century? A.Faivre has remarked, "Why were the Masons so quickly intrigued by and drawn to this order in particular? Probably because it was more possible to make use of a long dead order or to claim to be its successor, since proof to the contrary will almost always be lacking."13 Rene Le Forestier has further observed that "the Templar flirtation gave Scottish Rite Masonry the historical genealogy that it lacked and the homogenous composition which it had hitherto been missing. Not only was the descent from the Templars more flattering than that from stonecutters, and justified the title of Chevalier which the Masons gave themselves, but furthermore the history of this illustrious order, destroyed as a result of a political and judicial drama which was present in all minds, was universally known."14 Auguste Viatte has observed that eighteenth-century Illuminists, deeply religious yet fundamentally opposed to the established churches, Were particularly attracted to beliefs and sects that had been condemned as heretical: The little which they knew of medieval heresies led the Illuminists to believe that there they could find kindred spirits. The duchess of Bourbon, who pleaded for the freedom of conscience, proclaims herself in agreement with the Frerots, the Albigensians, the Mennonites, and the poor Vaudois, lung Stilling went on, whom the Roman hierarchy persecuted 'like a ]ezebel.' Boehme no doubt inspired their Biblical curse, for, if we go to the sixteenth century, it is not Luther or Calvin whom the mystics admire, for they had soon built formal churches, but what praises do they sing to the shoemaker of Goerlitz! ... Paracelsus, Agrippa, Reuchlin, Guillaume Postel, Pico della Mirandola, Valentin Weigel, Von Helmont, Kircher, Fludd; their reveries occupy entire generations; magnetizers, prophets, visionaries claim to hold the key to their work.15
The Templar legend, though flattering in many ways, raised a number of problems for its adherents. Not the least of these, Le Forestier has remarked, is the fact that the Templars did not enjoy the best of reputations. The members of the order, after all, had been condemned of "heresy, idolatry, simony, magic, the worst of crimes and the most corrupt morals. It was said that they had, following their return to Europe, lived dissolute lives, and the phrase 'to drink like a Templar' had become a popular proverb."16 More serious, however, was the hint of subversion that inevitably associated itself with any effort to revive the long-abolished order, or even to rehabilitate its memory. Le Forestier remarks, "It is evident that the rehabilitation of the Templars of the fourteenth century implied the moral condemnation of Philippe Ie Bel and of Bernard Gui who, if the former had been innocent victims, their slanderers and executioners could only have been motivated by the most vile passions." For this reason, Le Forestier concludes, "following the logical consequences of the legend, Templar Freemasonry could be seen as the organ of a vast conspiracy against the established order, particularly against the institution of monarchy and the authority of the Holy See." Although, Le Forestier notes, "the German Brothers and the great majority of French Brothers who considered themselves, as Masons, the successors of the Templars never took literally a four hundred-year-old vendetta," the legend of a Templar-Masonic conspiracy to destroy both throne and altar gained currency among the anti-Masonic Right, especially once the French Revolution seemed to demonstrate the veracity of these charges. Barruel would later declare that "the same projects, the same means, the same horrors could not be more faithfully transmitted from fathers to their children" and that "the Templars were therefore what our Jacobin Masons are today."17
Even before the Revolution, the Templar legend gave rise to a great controversy within esoteric Freemasonry, as some enthusiastic Masons saw themselves as the heirs of the crusading order and proposed the reestablishment of the order and the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, while others considered such a project chimerical and dangerous. Ferdinand of Brunswick, a leading patron of esoteric Freemasonry and a frequent correspondent of Willermoz, rejected the Templar legend and threatened to withdraw his support unless it was dropped. At the suggestion of Ferdinand and of another German prince, Charles of Hesse, an international Masonic conference (though in practice limited to French and German esoteric lodges) was held in Wilhelmsbad in 1782 to discuss the question of the Templar filiation. This conference, which Le Forestier describes as a sort of "Estates General, or at least Assembly of Notables of continental European Freemasonry," was attended by thirty-five delegates and presided over by Ferdinand of Brunswick. It must have been a very strange assembly, because many different interest groups were present and many chimerical projects were considered. Support for the Templar filiation was strongest among the German delegates, particularly those from the petty nobility, some of whom sought to restore the Templar Order as a bulwark of feudal particularism in absolutist Europe and to recover the wealth that had been stolen from their putative forerunners in the fourteenth century. Others proposed raising an army to launch a new crusade against the Turks in the Mediterranean.18 The central French lodge, the Grand Orient, was not admitted to the conference, though it sought to send representatives, and the Bavarian Illuminati, repudiated as excessively radical by most attendees, were represented by just two delegates. The Illuminist delegate Christophe Bode, curiously, argued that the Templar legend was in fact a Jesuit conspiracy to return Protestant nations, notably England, to the Catholic faith, and he alleged (a charge that was not unique to him) that the unknown superior of the Strict Observance Order was in fact the Stuart pretender to the English throne.19 Willermoz was present to represent the Martinist Order and to seek to spread its cosmology and doctrines to the French and German lodges.
The Wilhelmsbad conference ended somewhat anticlimactically, with the delegates called upon to vote on a series of questions. By majority vote, they adopted a declaration that Freemasonry was not descended from the Knights Templar, though there existed an analogy between them, and that they had no goal to restore the Order of the Temple, to recover its lost possessions, or to trouble the existing political order. The conference then adopted a system of ranks and titles proposed by Willermoz, the sixth and highest of which was the rank of Chevalier Bienfaisant. Soon after the conference, however, new feuds prevented the adoption of a uniform system of high grades, and the different lodges went their separate ways.20
Although the reality of the Wilhelmsbad Conference of 1782 was quite benign and in some ways almost farcical, following the French Revolution it was to become the stuff of counterrevolutionary legend, as reactionaries, following the abbe Barruel, who saw the Revolution as the result of a Masonic conspiracy, presented the conference as a defining moment in its elaboration. Le Forestier remarks that, to make such a leap of interpretation, "it was sufficient to take seriously the grades of Vengeance, to reread the trial of the Templars, and to associate ancient eastern heresies with the mystic doctrines in vogue in the eighteenth century to, with the best faith in the world, transform the harmless distractions, speculations, and researches of peaceful dreamers into horrible conspiracies against the social order and established religion."21 This interpretation gained added strength when the legendary Italian magician and mountebank Balsamo Cagliostro was detained by the Inquisition in Rome in December 1789, and, under the pressures of a brutal interrogation, "confessed" to his participation in a vast Masonic conspiracy, according to which almost two hundred thousand Illuminists, organized in two thousand lodges around the world, had sworn an oath to destroy both the monarchy and the church. Le Forestier writes of Cagliostro that, "as he knew very little of the history of contemporary Freemasonry, he amalgamated the bits he had heard about the Bavarian Illuminati, the Templars and the Strict Observance, and he invented a novel which the investigators of the Holy Office took down with the greatest seriousness."22 This confession was later published and circulated throughout Europe, once the Terror and the execution of the French royal family seemed to confirm the truth of its allegations. These charges were later repeated in a 1797 pamphlet, Le Tombeau de Jacques Malay, which claimed that the ancient Templars had joined the Society of Assassins during their time in the East and had learned its evil secrets and alleged that many of the leading figures of the Revolution, from the duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau to Danton and Dumouriez, were part of this Masonic conspiracy.
The allegations were finally repeated and elaborated to their greatest extent in the abbe Barruel's Memoires pour servir a l'histoire du jacobinisme, which also included the Martinists as part of the conspiracy. Barruel denounced Saint-Martin as a hypocrite and (rather inaccurately) as a Manichean and declared that "of the sects which conspired against the Empire and all civil government, the adepts of the Martinist lodges are the worst of all."23 This charge led Joseph de Maistre, certainly no friend to the Jacobins, to come to the defense of Saint-Martin. In the eleventh dialogue of de Maistre's Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, one of the participants laments that the same term, Illuminism, is used indiscriminately both for revolutionaries who conceived "the frightful project of killing off Christianity and sovereignty in Europe and for "the virtuous followers of Saint-Martin, who not only profess Christianity but who work only to raise themselves to the most sublime heights of this divine law."24 De Maistre's defense of SaintMartin, which was rather half-hearted, merely modified rather than refuted the conspiracy theory, because it would give rise to a subsequent legend a struggle between rival factions within Freemasonry, upon whose outcome would turn the history of the world.
In the end one could correctly argue that in stark contrast to the conspiracy theories of LaRoche, the Martinists failed to achieve their vision because they were fundamentally out of step with the tenor of their times. They envisioned an order of peace and harmony, with France playing the central role, in an age of rising nationalism and militarism, in which France had irrevocably lost its former position of European hegemony. If, as Bismarck famously declared, even the most powerful leaders could not reverse the tides of history, but could only seek to pilot the ship of state through the stormy waters, the Martinist political and social project was doomed from the outset. Martinist doctrines of politics and society, which were inseparable from the broader philosophical and spiritual aims of the movement, were essentially eighteenth century in character. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Martinists sought to discover abstract, alleged timeless principles of social harmony, identifying the fundamental principles behind the forms of government, began their inquiries into the nature of society with speculative dissertations on the nature of man, and emphasized the cultivation of particular virtues as the key to social well-being. This philosophic idealism and attachment to abstract universal principles reflected Martinism's origins in late Enlightenment France, but it made Martinist doctrines appear increasingly quaint and out of touch with the more empirical, positivist science of society that began to emerge in the nineteenth century.
But the social vision of Martinism was not only timeless and idealized but also largely preindustrial. Economic matters rarely figure into Martinist discussions of society, and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who at least included an economic council in his blueprint for the synarchy, offered little discussion of economics in his writings. His few specific references to how this council would work recall a rather idealized vision of the medieval guild system, similar in this regard to the paternalist, social Catholic doctrines of fin de siecle Legitimists, who were arguably almost as out of touch with contemporary French realities as were the Martinists themselves. In their efforts to assert the moral superiority of the ancients over the moderns, Martinist writers such as Guaita and Papus tended to dismiss the significance of nineteenthcentury industrial innovations, and there is no sense that the Martinists understood the degree to which industrialization, urbanization, the reshaping of the class structure, and the emergence of mass society had changed the political and social equation.
In addition to being out of step with the broader development of French society, Martinism also notably lacked a theory of praxis by means of which its ambitious program could have been realized. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, broadly influenced by Fabre d'Olivet and Levi, produced thousands of pages on the structure and purposes of the synarchy but precious little on how it was to be enacted. The empire of Ram, the organization of the tribes of Israel, the lost sanctuary of Agarttha, and even the medieval French Estates General are presented as simply existing, or appearing suddenly and completely formed as the product of divine inspiration. SaintMartin's writings from the revolutionary decade of the 1790s praise the Revolution as a means of purifying and renewing French society, but SaintMartin did not affiliate with any political faction during this period, nor did he take positions with regard to specific issues or conflicts within the Revolution. As a defrocked clergyman and romantic socialist, the young Alphonse-Louis Constant actively opposed the July Monarchy and sought to playa political role in the spring of 1848, but in his mature years, the newly christened magus Levi maintained an Olympian disdain for pel political squabbles. Similarly, neither Guaita nor Papus was actively en gaged in electoral politics or political associations in the fin de siecle years, although both men had substantial personal ties to the antidemocratic new Right of Maurice Barres and Gaston Mery.
The Martinist and synarchist political project is, therefore, a utopian one, following Georgii Plekhanov's definition of a utopian as "one who seeks a perfect social organization departing from an abstract principle."lo Metahistorical writers such as Saint-Yves d' Alveydre and his predecessors, Delisle de Sales and Fabre d'Olivet, were also "utopians" in another, more literal sense, as they located their models for the ideal society in places which never existed: the primordial civilization of the Caucasus, the prehistoric empire of Ram, or the secret shrine of Agarttha. Citizens of a postrevolutionary society polarized, as many commentators have noted, between defenders of the Old Regime and those of the Revolution, and unable to accept either alternative, Martinists and their kindred spirits sought to transcend this impasse by appeal to a distant, ideal civilization that existed only in their imaginations, in which the best elements of both Old Regime and revolutionary France (the principles of divine right and of human right, as Wronski called them) would be integrated into a durable synthesis inspired by divine providence.
The political vision of Martinism, from Fabre d'Olivet to Levi to SaintYves d' Alveydre and his admirers in the fin de siècle, was an elitist, organicist utopia, but significantly one that was not limited to a particular race or nationality, but that, it was hoped, would lead to a new golden age of world peace and harmony. France was to play the role of initiator and model, the sage among nations, but was not to dominate the rest by force of arms. The distant past that Saint-Yves d'Alveydre longed to recover was not an age of racially pure, warrior tribesmen, but rather a highly civilized, pacific global federation of peoples. Both men hoped to see nineteenth century France's record of foreign wars and domestic strife give way to what they imagined as a more truly enlightened age. Their vision, however, was a utopian one, and their deep and sincere (if unorthodox) spirituality, their rejection of materialism, their horror of violence in any form, and their disdain for mass society put them fundamentally out of step with their society. The generous, universalist ideals of nineteenth-century French occultists may, in my opinion, absolve them of complicity in the emergence of fascism (which in France had Catholic and Legitimist roots that, if they at times overlapped with the occult community, were nonetheless distinct from it), but it also condemned them to growing irrelevance to the political debates of their time and ultimately to being forgotten by all but the devoted but tiny circle of their admirers. But regardless the claim by Denis King that LaRouche belongs to the extreme right, based on the analysis of political scientist Olivier Dard in “La Synarchie”(1993)we can now say with certainty that La Rouche’s occult conspiracy theory belongs to the ‘left wing’ spectrum. This said there is an overlap in the use of certain scapegoat (culprit) terminology in both right and left wing conspiracy theories as evidenced by for example LaRouche’s reference to the Synarchists' "Bilderberger."
Reference to "the Bilderbergers" generally means those who have attended at least one of the meetings' but there is no set list of members as such. Rather, the group's steering committee (including figures such as the former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Canadian media-mogul Conrad Black) is in charge of deciding who will attend the meeting in any given year. The list of those who have attended Bilderberger meetings is impressive, including leading politicians and military figures, businessmen and bankers, and lawyers and academics (see conspiracistfor complete lists). The first meeting was allegdly not only attended by high-ranking CIA officials, but was financed in part by the CIA as well. Also, which is important for a certain strain of anti-old world conspiracy theory, the group allowed members of Western European royal families to reclaim the political power they had abdicated through constitutional reform. The Bilderbergers claim that their limitation of press coverage and overall secrecy is necessary in order to ensure an environment ot,openness and freedom of speech during the meetings. In this age of media proliferation, it is truly stunning that they manage to retain such a low profile, with nearly none of the members ever agreeing to be interviewed on the subject of the meetings. Many antiBilderbergers see this high level of secrecy as sure evidence of a conspiracy. In the minds of some, further evidence of conspiracy can be found in the Bilderbergers' ties to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)-an extremely high percentage of u.s. Bilderbergers are also members of the CFR-and to the Trilateral Commission, which was founded from within the Bilderberg meetings by David Rockefeller (Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 137). Even mainstream writers often suggest that u.s. Bilderbergers may well be contravening the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for u.s. citizens to negotiate with foreign powers without being granted the authority to do so by the U.S. government.
Many argue that future heads of state are handpicked by the Bilderbergers. It is no coincidence, they charge, that Bill Clinton attended the 1991 meeting and went on to become president the following year, or that Tony Blair attended in1993 and became the Labour Party's leader a year later, ultimately becoming Britain's prime minister in the 1997 election. Furthermore, the policies made by the parties of the left in both Britain and the United States during the 1990s-policies that proved highly successful in capturing "moderate" voters-seem to be in line with the policies of the Bilderberger group, particularly those that favor the promotion of economic globalization (i.e., the New World Order). When faced with the impressive list of attendees, no one would dispute the fact that the Bilderbergers wield immense political and economic power; the question is, rather, whether or not this obvious power is best described as a conspiracy or secret world government. The forces of international capitalism are indeed powerful, and, as even mainstream theorists have argued, the forces of globalization create interconnected networks of power that operate just the way a conspiracy to create a New World Order would (see, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri's book, Empire). Furthermore, by their own admission, the Bilderbergers are out to promote the advance of global capitalism. So it is fair to ask exactly what makes anti- Bilderbergers "merely" conspiracy theorists. For many, anti-Bilderbergers are designated conspiracy theorists because of their reliance on an array of concepts, rhetorical figures, and, perhaps most importantly, targets that are often to be found in other "extremist" theories. As with other conspiracy theories, anti- Bilderberger rhetoric focuses on an international cabal run by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, and many would argue that the choice of these two families as targets is no accident. Critics of these "international bankers" and "secret governments" tend to draw their metaphors, figures, and arguments from a vast conceptual reservoir that includes, among other things, attacks on the so-called Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy. Whether or not anti-Bilderberger writings are manifestly antisemitic groups highly attuned to the language of antsemitism (such as the Anti-Defamation League) often detect antisemitism in certain code words (i.e., the Rothschilds, "international bankers," etc.). When labeled antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the conspiracy theorists ask: if there were a conspiracy of international bankers that was orchestrating world events, how on earth are we to investigate it and critique it other than by using terms such as "international bankers"? In the eyes of the antiBilderbergers, the ADL may be unwittingly (or wittingly) playing into the hands of the Bilderbergers. Yet in the very virulence of their attacks on the ADL and international Jewish bankers, the right -wing antiBilderbergers often seem to betray their true intentions. Most recently promishing the "True Story of The Bilderberggroup"(2007) by Daniel Estulin is no more then a re-hash of the conspiracy theory described above.
But where LaRouche et Co. accuses leading White House staff members like for example Vice President Cheney to be part of a “fascist” (Martinist/Synarchist freemasonry) conspiracy, Daniel Estulin in “The Bilderberg Group” (2007) does the same with Hillary Clinton whom he accuses of attending the latter’s equally “fascist,” objectives. (Estulin,The True Story of The Bilderberg Group, 2007, p. 318). Thus Daniel Estulin appears to belong to the 'right-wing' spectrum. It also once more confirms our assesment that LaRouche's belongs to the left-wing spectrum, for example see: Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy At It Again, With a New Twist perhaps the only name that sends the VRWC gang more into orbit than either Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the name Lyndon LaRouche.
1.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 5-6.
2.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 70.
3.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 40-41.
4.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 74-75.
5.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 75, 88-89.
6.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 118.
7.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 116.
8.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 132.
9.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 180-81.
10.Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, 220.
11. Abbe Augustin Barruel, Memoires pour servir it l'histoire du jacobinisme (Chire en Montreuil: Diffusion de la Pensee Francaise, 1973 [reprint of 1818 ed.], Vol. 1, 42.
12.Le Forestier, La Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 111-12, 69.
13.Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 187.
14.Le Forestier, La Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 80.
15.Auguste Viatte, Les sources occultes du romantisme francais: Illuminisme, Theosophie, 1770-1820 (Paris: Honore Champion, 1928), Vol. 1,28-29.
16.Le Forestier, La Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 76.
17.Barruel, Memoires, Vol. 1,474,476.
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