A Special Operation
Part II
The Existence of a High Cabal or Power Elite
Ratcliffe: You write in the Freedom magazine articles [which
became the initial "raw material" for the 1992 JFK book] about
this High Cabal (others have called them the Power Elite or the
Cryptocracy): this group that people like Buckminster Fuller and
Winston Churchill have referred to as very real and influential
existing largely behind the scenes. We were discussing the other
day the significance of the philosophy that derived from knowing
that the world was finite, with the explorations of Magellan, who
wanted to keep going west to see what he would find -- and how
such knowledge formed institutions like the Haileybury College and
then the British East India Trade Company. Can you reiterate that
marvelous description -- your sense of this changing world view
once it was known that the world was no longer flat, that it was a
closed unit.
Prouty: There is no shortage of experienced writers who, for
various reasons, allude repeatedly to, I like Churchill's term
best, a "High Cabal." This is attributed to Churchill by Lord
Denning in his very good book, A Family Affair. Lord Denning
corresponds to our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the senior
law officer in the United Kingdom. In the book he recounts a story
about World War II and the heavy bombardment in England and in
Europe. Denning states that his brother, who was an officer with
British Naval Intelligence, was working on duty late at night in
an underground subterranean area that was between Ten Downing
Street and an underground shelter where Churchill used to stay
during bombing attacks. The Navy, being as alert as ever, stocked
this area where Commander Denning was working, with a few
high-quality bottles of brandy.
When, on many occasions, Churchill would walk through their
office, the Commander would invite the Prime Minister to sit down
and have a brandy. One particular night, after there had been a
heavy bombardment on London, and they knew that Rotterdam was
under attack, Churchill was sitting there sipping his brandy and
he said, almost as if speaking to himself, "You know, an all-out
battle on land, and heavy battles in the sea, and this total
bombardment over Rotterdam and over London, the High Cabal is
operating here". And he referred to this being the wishes of the
High Cabal. Now unfortunately, Lord Denning doesn't go any further
with the reminiscences of his brother. But maybe they didn't go
any further. Maybe Churchill just said that much.
I was at the Cairo Conference, where Churchill was. I was in his
group; I was close enough to directly witness some of what was
going on. I flew the British staff officers back and forth from
where some of them stayed in Palestine during the Cairo Conference
and talked with them a lot about the progress of the conference.
Later I was at the Teheran Conference, where Churchill was. I
lived across the street from Churchill when he was convalescing.
(After these conferences he had a case of pneumonia in Marrakesh,
Morocco.) Now I can't say that Churchill was any intimate of mine,
but I was close enough to observe people that worked with him, and
the military people who worked for him. I talked with them a lot.
And we had the feeling that Churchill, certainly, is a senior
person (as was Roosevelt, as was Stalin) in the world, but that
there seems to be a level that maybe he listens to. Maybe this is
what Denning was referring to -- because Churchill describes a
High Cabal.
He's not the only one. Buckminster Fuller, a rare individual, has
spent more time, at the invitation of Congress, before
Congressional hearings than any other individual, with the
probable exception of Admiral Rickover, advising Congress on
different issues relating to the government. But interestingly
enough, he has spent more time in the Kremlin as an advisor to the
Soviets than he has in our own Congress. He worked with President
Kubitschek in setting up the new Brazil. A rare individual. A man
who knows the world and knows the leaders of the world. He writes
about a "power elite," and that the apparent leaders, as we see
them throughout the world, are certainly national leaders, but
they're not the top echelon, the High Cabal.
In history you will find that the Chinese, as far back as 2,000
years ago, speak of a High Cabal that they call the "Gentry" --
and that the Chinese seem to have accepted that as a fact of life.
Even though they had their emperors and their monarchs and
leaders, they realized there's an echelon above that which directs
some of the events that other people know nothing about. It's
Fuller who hits the nail on the head. He says that the secret of
the High Cabal is -- of course, it's control of power, but it is
also the understanding that their most valuable asset is
anonymity: that nobody can identify them. In that sense, you begin
to talk, you begin to think: maybe they're just like angels or
like ghosts, people say they're there, but, are they really?
I don't think it's that. In fact, I think that perhaps what people
think of in terms of ghosts or angels, may be the reality that
there is an echelon within our world, a small structure, that does
really determine how things go. And I wouldn't argue the point.
Because in my own experience in more than 80 countries -- and I
have talked directly to presidents of countries and people on
their level -- I have this feeling that they're taking their
instructions from some other place. Now that may be personal, but
I notice it in the writings of others as well.
Magellan's Circumnavigation of the Globe:
The Philosophy That Derived
From Knowing the World Was Finite
You wonder what is the source or the origin of this. I don't know
how long we want to say mankind has been on Earth, but let's say
30 or 40 thousand years -- maybe longer in certain manifestations,
but we'll settle for that. Over this 30 or 40 thousand years,
society has lived on an Earth that wasn't flat, wasn't round, all
it was was an expanse. Because there weren't enough people to fill
it up at any given location. They had no problem with space. They
didn't even think about the word "property," in the sense of real
property, real estate. They simply lived there.
If hostility grew between two communes, two villages, one or the
other would be forced to move a little bit. There's always some
more space over there. And they weren't bothered with our
retroactive view of that: that they had a flat-land approach and
that we know the world is round and therefore they were pretty
stupid. It wasn't that. It's just that they had another place to
go. If they had to graze cattle, they'd move a little further. And
if, on one of these moves, they ran into some other people they
had never met before, then they accepted there were other people
on Earth. But they were all on the same expanse. They didn't know
whether the expanse was flat or curved or what it was.
They did know that it came to a shoreline, that there were oceans.
And they were prone to follow shorelines, as the South Asians did
thousands of years ago as they progressed north across Bering
Straits (which at that time was a land bridge), down through North
America, and even into Central America. If you dig in the mummies'
tombs, in the burial grounds of Peru, you will find that on their
huacos -- the ancient bowls and jars that they made -- are figures
of people who have slant eyes, Oriental eyes. That meant, when a
person was making the jar, she made the jar in the image of the
people that she knew -- with slanted eyes. They didn't know there
were any other people.
But, in all of this civilizing of mankind over these 30 or 40
thousand years, there occurred finally an event that changed the
entire prospect of their history. And we can't always say, "Well,
they didn't have written history." Evidence from China is that
their written history goes way back -- far, far back -- much more
so than we think. But that's not all of it. History forms each
generation as they remember the important things it distills. In
the voyages around the world, navigators -- especially, we think,
in the area of the islands of the South Pacific and around
Indonesia and that area -- the navigators began to be able to find
their way across the Pacific to other islands, to other lands, and
then back again.
The leading, most important people in those countries in those
days were the navigators, because they could come and go, they
could find their way. They knew the stars, is what it amounted to;
they understood the winds. And gradually these navigators began to
say that, perhaps we could go further around the world and keep
going. This became a prospect -- something they could do -- like
we think we can put a man on Mars and we know we can do it.
In Portugal one of these navigators was named Magellan. He got in
trouble somehow with his own government, or else he couldn't be
supported by his own government and he went over to Spain. The
Spanish king decided he would support Magellan's expedition in
which he wanted to start out going to the west and keep going to
the west -- which seemed like a good idea -- he wanted to try it
anyway. Others had gone to the west, like Columbus, and they hit
shore and turned around and came back, so that we found "India,"
but he had only gone part way. But the people didn't have the idea
in those days that they could keep going except going in a flat
way, and when they hit land they figured they'd been there. They
didn't think of the Earth in terms of a sphere. It's quite
important.
So, not only did the royalty of Spain agree to finance Magellan's
voyage (it was several ships), but, interestingly enough, the
bankers of Antwerp, in Belgium, poured money into this because
they could see it as a means of taking over new lands, new wealth,
gold, tin, silver, and all those spices and other trade goods. So
they financed his trip, and three ships took off.
Years later, in the same harbor back in Spain, one single ship
named the Victoria returned. When the Victoria landed and they
told how Magellan was killed while they were in the Philippines,
they also reported that they had discovered new territories, all
the way along their voyage. That they had gone west all the time
and had completely circumnavigated the earth which must therefore
be a round globe. There's one fact about a sphere that everybody
knows: its surface is finite. If you have a basketball you can
measure to the nth degree how much surface area it has. And if you
have an 8,000-mile-diameter globe you can measure to the degree
how much surface it has.
This majestic realization changed the mind of man as a group, more
than any other single event that happened in the 40,000 years
we've been here. Because from that moment on, these bankers in
Antwerp, and their associates, and the kings and queens of Europe,
began to realize: If this earth is a sphere, it is then finite.
And if it's finite, there's only so much land, there's only so
much tin, so much gold, so much spice. And they looked at the
world as something that belonged to them -- if they got there
first.
The Development of the East India Companies
and "Proprietary" Colonies
This started a significant train of thought in the educated,
financial, politically powerful groups of the world, particularly
the European world. It was expressed most easily in the terms of
the East India Company development. They had the British East
India Company, the Dutch East India Company, there was a Spanish
East India Company -- I think there were eight of them -- and,
interestingly enough, there was a Russian East India Company. I
forget what they called it, but the Russians explored the coast of
Alaska and California. The Russians, in conjunction with shippers
from Boston in the China trade, carried out a sea otter business
(in the fur of sea otters) from California back to Canton, China,
and on into Europe. It was one of the most valuable, one of the
most profitable, sea ventures of the time.
So all of these countries were doing this together. They all
immediately set out to explore the world, to inventory it and to
own it. The leaders in this were the British. And the British East
India Company became dominant in this worldwide exploration. They
achieved this dominance by their view that anything they
discovered was theirs, and that the king could commission them to
set up a proprietary colony -- wherever they discovered land -- a
British proprietary colony. Now what that meant was, they could
introduce their religion to the colony and their armies to the
colony -- and then do business in the colony. But the word
"colony" was not exactly accurate, because they used everything
from total slaughter of the people they ran into to total
friendship, depending on how they got along with those people.
But their idea was whatever part of the world they went to was
theirs. Property for the other guy was zero and property for them
was total. As I said previously, in an earlier day the navigators
were the senior elite people in the country. The elite people now
became surveyors. If we think of history in that period, we ask
ourselves: What was George Washington's business here in the
United States? He was a trained surveyor. He worked for Lord
Fairfax and other landowners solely because the king had granted
them a charter, from London, to come to North America and take
over land between one fix on the beach and another. Then have men
like George Washington, with their surveying instruments, just
draw lines heading for the west, not knowing where the Pacific
Ocean was but going in that direction.
The concept that everything in the world belonged to the East
India Company (or, to the King of England, or the King of Holland,
or the King of Germany) was really a strange development, arising
from the realization that the Earth was spherical and therefore
finite and that they must acquire property. Mankind was beginning
to develop the concept of the ownership of property.
This continued for a century or more until it became an enormously
big business. These East India Companies were dominating countries
like India, even countries like China. They were dominating North
America, and so on, as they moved around the world. The British
again led the others in training people for these jobs. They
created a college, called Haileybury College, where they not only
trained the people in the financial aspects of all this business
work all over the world, but in military -- special military, you
might say. They weren't trained to be world conquerors in the
Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar mold; they were trained to
run a constabulary, to control these countries they took over, and
to help their business partners (in the East India Company) carry
out their business enterprises in those countries.
In addition to that, they trained missionaries. Because they soon
realized that, in the rest of the world there was, from their
point of view, no religion: they were all just pagans. This
reminds me of the Vietnam days -- that any Vietnamese was a mere
gook. Well here these people all over the world were mere pagans.
And of course, you can't live in a world with pagans. You have to
bring your missionaries and convert them to Christianity.
So this became a role. And they used to go into these "proprietary
colonies" with their missionary leaders first and try to
peacefully set up, their arrangements for living with these
people, for converting these people, and actually taking over
their land and taking over their businesses. But if the missionary
half of their business didn't work by itself (because they were
overwhelming these people anyway with their strength and their
power and their money and their imports), then they would bring in
their military. So, one way or the other, they just took over land
all over the world, took over business, took over people.
Inventorying Earth: Haileybury College
and the Roles of Malthus and Darwin
In the process, their masters (the top people, the governor of the
East India Company) realized that what they were really after was
to learn what the assets of the entire Earth were. And in a most
interesting development, they set up an economic studies
department in the Haileybury College. Economics is not an old
profession (not an old science, as some people want to call it).
For Head of the Economics Department they installed a man named
Thomas Malthus. The interesting fact was that Malthus was given
the job of inventorying Earth -- an absolutely incomprehensible
job when you figure that this happened at the turn of the century,
about 1800 (1800, 1805, somewhere in there). The East India
Company had been started around 1600. So for two centuries they'd
been doing this work, preparing themselves for this business. They
had become an extremely lucrative company. But now they were
getting serious: they wanted to inventory Earth. And Malthus was
given that job.
As he progressed in this study, Malthus came up with his theory
that the world was going to come to an end because mankind was
increasing at a geometric rate and food was increasing at an
arithmetic rate, and that mankind would overwhelm the production
of food quantities not too far in the future. That was a necessary
theory for these people in this East India Company because, as
they inventoried Earth, it made it an incentive for them to have
the food, to have the resources for themselves but not for the
other people. It began to create almost what we have in the Cold
War today: an "us or them" mentality. The more friction there is
in an "us or them" situation, the more motivation there is on your
side to get the job done, including armies, missionaries, and all
the rest of the powerful tools we have.
This moved along for another 30 or 40 years, and among the men
that Malthus sent out to help inventory Earth was Charles Darwin.
Darwin went all over Latin America and beyond, studying birds,
butterflies, and everything he found and then he came back. He
began to report that there are all sorts of life growing in and on
this Earth. And he came back with picture books of all the
different birds he found, the fish that he found, and a great deal
else, from all over the world. Then he began to organize these
species of the world.
As he began to tell this to his colleagues in the East India
Company and at Haileybury, they began to get formulate the
question of what, after all, is the origin of species? Where do
they come from, and what keeps them going, and how do we get one
species here and another one there? We know that Darwin wrote this
book called The Origin of Species. The interesting point is that
he was rather reluctant to write this book. He was a true
professional. He saw his business in certain terms, but he knew he
hadn't proved anything about the origin of species; he didn't want
to call it Origin of Species. In fact if I remember, it's about
page 53 before he gets into that part of his book. But it's an
interesting point. He did proclaim that, among all the species, or
among the internal groupings within the species, those that were
fittest survived and those that weren't presumably didn't survive.
It was an interesting observation that he came up with.
Looking at the situation of the East India Company, these two men
played an important role -- a very important role for them in
their day and for us 150-200 years later. The first conclusion was
that mankind is increasing too fast and food is going to give out.
Second, in the event there is this conflict and that we can't all
live, the fittest are going to survive. If you put the two
together and think about it, what it means is if you have the
better army, the better business, more power, and your people can
conquer the others -- even to the point of genocide -- that's
perfectly all right. Because they're going to die anyway and,
because they died, they certainly weren't the fittest, we're the
fittest. What it did was to begin to inculcate in the minds of
these leaders, these top leaders and these extremely wealthy
people, that there's nothing wrong with genocide. Furthermore,
they had their own missionaries right along with them to show that
all this is perfectly all right: this was the plan, this was the
way the world was made.
It's startling to see what conclusions were drawn from the
realization that the Earth is spherical, therefore finite; that it
needed to be inventoried, that certain powers needed to control
all of the property of Earth. As we progress through the years,
we're talking about days that aren't too far behind us. In all the
thirty to forty thousand years of mankind, we're only talking
about that narrow little space between 1600 and 2000 -- 400 years.
And since new ideas spread very slowly, the first 200 of those 400
years really don't count for much. Those were the years when they
were exploring, finding the Earth they didn't even know existed,
getting used to the fact that you could go to the west coast of
California from England, and so on -- that there was a route, that
you could make the trip. That took about 200 years.
By the time they got that organized, then they got themselves
involved in the Napoleonic Wars of Europe, much of which had to do
with this business of conquering Earth, inventorying Earth. And
you're not too far from World War I, and you're not too far from
World War II. In other words, what I'm saying is: this cycle is
not over. We haven't finished the inventory of Earth, we haven't
finished who owns what.
But we have defined the idea of property. Property now, right down
to the last inch -- the middle of Tokyo, a square foot of ground
is selling for thousands of dollars. There are sections of this
that are quite interesting. I read in the newspaper not too long
ago that some property in Africa had been taken from native groups
and they decided to give some of it back. And the section of that
property was called the Jesuit Square. As I recall what I read
(and I wish I had the figures here), I think the Jesuit Square is
about 15,000 square miles. In other words, as these missionaries
moved ahead in this inventory process and just assumed ownership
of this land, they were taking over so much land that 15,000
square miles was just a square. Like, what do we call a square
mile? -- 640 acres is a square mile, a one-mile square, isn't it?
This figure is the same figure that was used when the Spanish East
India Company began to go into what we now call New Mexico,
Arizona, and Southern California. In the old land titles it still
speaks of Jesuit Square. This was a formal application of the
missionary role on into these so-called unexplored countries.
Everything was from the point of view of Europe. The fact that
there were hundreds of thousands of people living somewhere was
not acknowledged. It was called "unexplored." They simply ignored
the fact those people were there; it wasn't explored by British.
Like the discovery of America. We keep saying Columbus discovered
America -- and the British explorers came, and so on to the
Pilgrims coming to America. My god, America was overrun with
people! But the Europeans discovered America. That's part of the
overwhelming significance of this discovery that the Earth was a
sphere.
At present we are living in what might be called the apex of this
big curve. It certainly isn't over. We're still operating under
the principles of Haileybury College -- Malthus and Darwin -- even
though both of them are ridiculous. It's been proved today that
our ability to produce food is 70 times greater per farmer than it
was in the time of Malthus. It's been proved that Darwin never did
discover the origin of the species -- no scientist has ever
described the origin of any species. But those two doctrines were
implanted by the East India Company's mind-control techniques so
thoroughly that we still believe them.
It was in 1862 that Lord Oliphant came back from his job as the
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, imbued with the spirit
that something happens to men's minds in seances. In England he
then created the British Society of Psychic Research, which soon
took over most of the higher positions in the British government.
In fact Lord Balfour, for over 30 years, was either the head of
the British Society of Psychic Research or one of his relatives or
close associates was. And it's the American wing of the British
Society of Psychic Research which created Stanford University and
the University of Indiana among others. For instance, Leland
Stanford, the great railroad man on the West Coast, claims that he
was in a seance talking to his dead son when his dead son told him
to create a major university on the West Coast, and there we have
Stanford University.
That's something of a humorous little story until you put it in
this context. That these enormously powerful leaders, stemming
from the East India Company, got into this psychic research arena
and even began to impress upon the society of the United States,
South Africa -- other parts of the world -- their own beliefs in
the power of seances and in the power of mind control.
So to wind this up with a little anecdote: the governor of the
East India Company in Bombay, India, was a man named Elihu Yale --
Eli Yale. Yale heard that a small college in New England,
specifically in Connecticut, was having trouble getting started.
He donated something like $10,000 (which was a lot of money in
those days) to help found the college. And we have Yale University
(comparable to Harvard) as a result of a gift from the East India
Company, from Yale in Bombay, India. In his offices in Bombay
(which still exist), on the wall there is the flag of the British
East India Company. That flag has seven red bars and six white
bars. In the corner it has a blue square, and in that square (or
rectangle) is the emblem of the East India Company.
When the Bostonians attacked the ship Dartmouth and threw the tea
in Boston Harbor at the Boston Tea Party, they took the flag down
off the Dartmouth. It was the East India flag with the red and
white stripes and the blue rectangle. They saved it as a memento
of that battle. When George Washington went to Boston to assume
command of the armies of the rebellion against England, he asked
Betsy Ross to take the emblem off the flag and to put stars in its
place. All Betsy Ross did that night was not create a flag. She
simply snipped out the East India emblem and put in 13 little
white stars. And the American flag is the East India flag. So when
you hear people of what you might call "ancestral backgrounds" in
this country demanding that we pledge allegiance to the flag, you
may sometimes wonder if in their seances they don't see the East
India flag, instead of the American flag, as the driving force.
They certainly did in the case of Cecil Rhodes, who became the
controller of all of the South African area, and a
multimillionaire in his day. It was Cecil Rhodes who decided to
send emissaries of his own to this country so that he could be
sure that the teachings of the East India Company, and of
Haileybury College, and of Malthus and Darwin, would be properly
inculcated into the minds of Americans, by selecting Rhodes
scholars year after year, and having them go to British colleges
where they could then come back into our society and become
leaders of the events.
All you have to do is look at the historical record to see that
Cecil Rhodes's plans were carried out very well. Cecil Rhodes,
again, was motivated by the same East India Company philosophy
that since the world was a sphere, you had to get property. If you
could get the property you would then own the world. And that is
their driving force.
Ratcliffe: Pursuing one more step -- and wrapping this all up in
the next hour -- your last discussions on the British East India
trade company and their way of influencing thought exerted a
central influence on the way people thought about things and
continue to think about things.
Two Books: The End of Economic Man
and The Road To Teheran
We were talking about some books the other day and I'd like to
touch on two that seem particularly relevant. One you mentioned is
by Peter Drucker called The End of Economic Man, written in the
early thirties but not published until 1938 or '39. Since then he
has become synonymous with the idea of management and capitalistic
economics. Could you talk a bit about that?
Prouty: This is very interesting because most of us know Peter
Drucker as an advisor and consultant to the biggest businesses in
this country. He's synonymous with big business, with free
enterprise, with multinational corporations and he just has a new
book out and the New York Times scrupulously reviews many of the
books he has written and overlooks entirely his first book which
is The End of Economic Man.
Peter Drucker I believe is an Austrian, schooled in Germany and
Austria, who grew up in the years during the growth of the Nazi
Party in Germany, and I believe -- I'm not absolutely sure -- but
I believe his family was Jewish. During that era, as a student in
their major universities, he began to put together his idea that
this Nazism that was growing under Hitler would destroy forever
economic man. And his family left Germany and Austria, as many
did, and went to England where he published this book, The End of
Economic Man.
His premise has been made by others as well, but I don't think any
have stated it as clearly as he has: that what the Germans were
doing was taking the German society of post World War I (when most
people wanted no more war) and the Germany of the Weimar Republic
-- reasonably democratic in terms of Germany anyway -- and this
Nazism began to turn the German people into various classes of
society most resembling a military structure, captains, majors,
colonels, generals and so on. So that everything in Germany was
being militarized -- boy scouts were militarized, girl scouts were
militarized, everything was militarized, and it was all being done
with the money and the approval of the very powerful and wealthy
people.
He goes into this in great detail. I can't recommend the book
highly enough. Everybody should read it because he not only says
this is what destroyed Germany, but that it's replication in any
other country, England or the United States, would destroy those
countries. I think anyone who reads The End of Economic Man today
is going to think Peter Drucker was writing about the last decade
of the United States as though next year was going to be the
beginning of American Nazism or the equal of it. The two things
fit hand in glove, but his book was written in 1939 not 1989.
Difference in years notwithstanding, no one should omit that book.
It's most important and so many things we are doing today appear
to be running along that same current. We have war on poverty, we
have war in the streets, we have war against AIDS, we have battles
of this, we have everybody carrying automatic weapons up and down
the streets -- that's what he was talking about. So read the book.
Ratcliffe: Militarize even the war on drugs which seems to
threaten so much of our --
Prouty: Everything is a war, not just a program to try to promote
an anti-drug mind-set -- everything is a war, as though war was
exactly the way we ought to organize druggists and policemen and
school teachers as majors and colonels and generals. And the
students ought to all wear uniforms. This is what it was all about
but I shouldn't talk too much about this because Drucker says this
so well I want you to read Drucker's words and not my copy of his
words. He describes it best; it becomes frightening when you read
the book, there is only one way to think about it.
Ratcliffe: The other book we discussed was something written by
Foster Rhea Dulles, another one of the Dulles brothers.
Prouty: No, this is a mystery to me. I have a very good book about
the Dulles family that speaks about everybody in the current
Dulles family that we know of: John Foster, Allen Dulles, his
sister Eleanor, their father and mother and her family and all
that sort of thing. This man Foster Rhea Dulles is not mentioned
anywhere and I have cross-referenced through every book I can
locate, including Who's Who and Writers in America, and I don't
find Foster Rhea Dulles. Even as a pseudonym, a nom de plume type
of identity, I don't find that.
But the book is remarkable because it is entitled The Road To
Teheran. It was written in either '45 or '46 and Teheran is the
Teheran Conference of December '43. In this writer's mind he
starts with American history back in the Revolutionary War, shows
how closely Americans and Russians were related. For instance,
John Quincy Adams was our ambassador, or at least our designate,
to the court of Catherine the Great and Alexander back in Russia.
They travelled to Leningrad, or Petrograd then, and their
objectives were to open trade between United States and the Soviet
Union and we did have an elaborate trade system. The shipping
interests of Boston were widespread -- one of the most important
trade routes they had was to the Soviet Union, or to then Russia,
old Mother Russia.
Dulles follows this through in a very interesting section in the
book regarding the fact that the Russians had moved across the
Bering Straits into Alaska (only along the coast, they had no
interest apparently in Alaska at that time), down the coast of
Western Canada as it is now, and down into what is today
California. On the coast of California you can still see old
Russian buildings preserved in some of the Park areas. He points
out that the Russians who had come to those places were doing
exactly as Jacob Astor's people were: they were hunting for fur
and they were becoming as wealthy in their area as Jacob Astor was
here in the United States as a great fur trader. The fur they
traded in was the sea otter.
Interestingly the Russians who went down the California coast went
there by dog sled and walking, and their trade was carried out by
the shipping firms all the way from Boston. The ships would travel
from Boston to the California coast, pick up the sea otter skins
by the boat load and move them into the markets, some in Asia and
mostly in Europe. He puts in the book that in one ship load they
would make between $300,000 and $400,000 profit. Of course three
or four hundred thousand dollars in the 1700's is the same as tens
of millions of dollars today.
The interesting point was that the Americans and the Russians were
working in complete harmony. There was no contest between them.
The Russians lived on the west coast, Americans lived and hunted
on the west coast, and they were for all intents and purposes
friendly.
The point here is that our history with the Russians has been
friendly for years. He brings this history back into Civil War,
when the Russians refused -- no first of all during the
Revolutionary War when the Russians refused to help the British.
They would not provide Cossacks (their cavalry) to help the
British against the Americans. Which means they were friendly to
America. In the Civil War, the same thing. They would not play a
role. In fact, the Russians tried to provide equipment to American
ships to support the Union forces in the Civil War. Then up to
modern times he has some interesting views of our relationship
with Russia initially during the Bolshevik revolution which was
then overthrown when Lenin began to take power.
The views as he presents them as history don't exactly coincide
with this strong Communist bias that we've had. But remember he
writes this in the forties when the Soviets were our allies during
the war. As he carries this up to the Teheran Conference he more
or less draws the conclusion that the agreements at Teheran were
natural agreements -- that America and Russia had more frequently
been allies or friends or business associates than adversaries.
And he leaves the book at 1944, the war ended in 1945, and we had
the anti-communist brainwashing era in the late forties, but
that's after his book.
So this is a very necessary book for people who want to understand
the relationship between our two countries as we come into the
present era and begin to understand each other more closely. It's
not the equivalent of the book called The Great Conspiracy written
by Alfred Kahn but it is as important. I think The Great
Conspiracy in 1946, with a rousing introduction by Senator Pepper,
is an even better explanation of American and Russian interests
with an unusual understanding of the intrigues from England and
Germany that were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and the
fighting after that, even to the days after World War I when we
had American troops in Vladivostok and events like that and what
it was all about.
If we don't read books like The Great Conspiracy or The Road to
Teheran , it is very difficult to understand this whole era of
anti-communism which was more or less impressed upon the American
people. There was no evidence that this was really the state of
affairs except it is the traditional situation that any group in
power in any nation has to have an enemy. For reasons that are not
clearly understood, immediately after World War II it was decided
that we had to have an enemy and that communism was it. Since the
enemy was communism Russia and China without any other definition,
became the enemy. And we've been brainwashed since. That may be
changing today or it may not be changing, but I think it is
because we also realize that military-type war is probably
outdated now on account of nuclear weapons and that warfare from
here on will be economic warfare. It will be just as tough, it
will kill just as many people, it will cost just as much money,
but it will be economic warfare.
The Changing Nature of Warfare:
From a Military to an Economic Basis
Ratcliffe: A question occurred to me the other day regarding this
sense of yours about the change of warfare. As you indicated, you
feel the military industrial complexes' influence and
pervasiveness will lessen as the new economic warfare intensifies.
Particularly in the area of energy as it's currently going now, as
well as in the area of food where you feel will become prevalent.
What do you think will happen with respect to the organization
currently in place that you define as the Secret Team that seems
to operate in the industry of military production and trade.
Prouty: I think we have seen an absolutely perfect example of what
we're talking about in what is called Arab oil embargo. In the
decade leading up to 1973, the price of a barrel of oil that was
more or less worldwide had been $1.70. If you wanted to buy a
100,000 barrels of oil you paid 100,000 times a $1.70. And you got
the oil. At that price oil was profitable and the oil companies
were making enormous profits. The producers like Saudi Arabia and
Iraq and Iran and Russia were making profits with their oil. And
then all of a sudden they decided they were going to increase the
price of oil and by "they" I mean the High Cabal, the people in
great money.
It's nothing but a money deal, its nothing but a war, a war like
that fought in Vietnam -- it's for money, there's nothing else. We
didn't gain a thing except we spent between $250 -- $500 billion
dollars fighting a war in Vietnam.
And overnight, the price of oil went up. There was a battle
between the Israelis and the Arabs. The story goes that the Arabs
as a result of that war declared an embargo on a shipment of oil
from the Middle East to the rest of the world and that made the
shortage of gasoline in the streets and we could not get gasoline
at our favorite gas pumps and we had to pay more and more and
more.
We should look back at that carefully. The Arab-Israeli war was
not conclusive. The Arabs gained on the first few days way into
Israeli territory and then a couple of weeks later the Israelis
came back and went quite a way into the Egyptian territory and
then the war just ended. It was inconclusive. But all of a sudden
the Arabs, according to the press, signalled an embargo on oil.
Now that's the most ridiculous thing in the world because the only
income these Arabs have is the sale of oil, and furthermore the
oil that they produce comes from the ground all by itself under
pressure from the earth. They don't have to pump it, they had no
great big problem with supplying oil.
As a matter of fact I can show you copies of the Congressional
Record in which oil experts from the Middle East reported that
exactly at this time of the Arab oil embargo, the storage tanks at
the Arab facilities whether it was Kuwait, or Iraq, or Saudi
Arabia were overloaded and bursting with oil waiting for ships to
come.
A few years later I was asked as a representative of American
Railroad System to attend a conference in London at the Chartered
Institute of Transport. Among the seminar groups that I met with
there was one on petroleum transportation. A gentleman came into
that room and lectured to only 8 of us who had come to that class
-- I was very glad I went to it -- and one of the Englishmen in
the room nudged me as the speaker was coming into the room and
said, do you know this gentleman? I said no. He said, this man is
a multi-billionaire ship owner.
It occurred to me and has since then, why would a
multi-billionaire (in pounds by the way, more than dollars), want
to come into a room with 8 people and lecture on petroleum
transportation? Though of course a very good reason was that it
was all being recorded and would be printed in a book later and so
his words would become part of the record and he was very proud of
what he had been doing.
What he told us was the same thing as these people reporting to
the Congress: that there was no shortage of oil. That what
happened was a very well planned system was applied through the
tanker industry, and they arbitrarily and absolutely controlled
the movement of oil by not picking it up, until the price was
right.
Now in 1973, the Middle East produced and sold 15 billion dollars
worth of oil. By 1980, the same Middle East produced and sold 300
billion dollars worth of oil. The quantity of oil they produced
was not much different. The cost of producing it was not much
different. But the sale price was 15 billion dollars in '73 and 7
years later it was 300 billion dollars. I think anyone can
understand that for $285 billion profit it's worth doing almost
anything in this world today. And that accounts for the Arab oil
embargo, the shortage at the fuel pumps, and the fact that we
Americans are paying $1.30 a gallon for gas when we used to pay 29
cents a gallon for gas.
This kind of control is the new form of warfare. Now petroleum is
not an absolute necessity of life. Energy is, and petroleum is a
major factor in energy, but it is close enough to being a
necessity so that this shortage of oil, this control of oil,
really hurt people all over the world. And especially in the
leading nations like ours because overnight they increased one of
the major expenses we have in the cost of running an automobile.
So this kind of war has as its battlefield the streets of America,
the streets of Paris, the streets of London, where our automobiles
are; where our trains run; where our airplanes fly.
It is a completely different battle for enormous profits and the
control that those profits produce. Because once the price of oil
goes up, the price of coal goes up, the price of natural gas goes
up, the price of food goes up, and everything else. The cost of
trucking becomes higher, and most of our food is moved by trucks.
So that when the price of oil went up from 30 cents a gallon up to
$1.50 a gallon, all the rest of the price levels went up on the
tide of oil. All escalated with the price of oil. And the cost of
just plain living, day by day, escalated with the price of oil,
and that price of oil was controlled by superpowers -- superpowers
control those industries. The catalytic force in that was
something as simple as the shipping industry. There is no way to
get around the shipping industry.
This was also being explained at these meetings in London. That
traditionally, oil from Iraq, the old oil fields of Kirkuk and
Mosul, had travelled through a huge system of pipelines that went
from Iraq, through Jordan, and to the port of Haifa in what was
then Palestine. When the country of Israel was formed, one of the
first things the Israelis did, for reasons that are not recorded,
is close the pipeline terminus at Haifa. And Iraqi oil could not
leave Iraq for the Mediterranean coast and for Europe. Most Iraqi
oil is sold and consumed in Europe.
There are 8 other pipelines that extend from Iraq to the
Mediterranean. They go to the Port of Sidon in Lebanon, and other
ports northward all the way up to Syrian ports. We have seen those
pipelines made dry by the Israeli attack on Lebanon. And we wonder
why Israel should even bother to attack Lebanon, why Syria should
be attacking Lebanon, and why poor old neutral Lebanon, which is
nothing but the market garden basket of Europe, is brought to its
knees by a perpetual war until we realize that war causes the
pipelines from the Middle East to Europe to go dry. This forces
the oil onto the ships and under the controls that have been
devised by the shipping cartels. This is a fact of life. This is
happening right now today.
The fighting in Lebanon is to keep the pipelines dry. The fighting
between the Arabs and the Israelis is to keep the oil pipelines
dry. Its not religious, it's not political, the Arabs have no
choice. The Israelis receive 2-1/2 -- 3 billion dollars aid money
from us a year, which is perhaps payment for their assistance. The
Egyptians receive 2-1/2 -- 3 billion dollars from us -- the most
foreign aid money we pay to any countries in the world, are to
Israel and to Egypt. How does Egypt earn its money? It meters the
Suez canal to oil and no oil goes through the Suez canal. So the
movement of oil causes the tide of prices to rise all over the
world, and part of the device is to keep the pipelines of the
Middle East dry.
During the Iraq-Iran war, the Iraqis even attempted to build a
pipeline through Turkey. They were forced so much to export oil,
that they were exporting, I believe, almost a million barrels of
oil a day by truck through Turkey. Now, that's not profitable.
That adds a terrible cost to oil. They couldn't get it down the
river through Abadan because their Persian Gulf ports had been
destroyed. The Iranians couldn't get oil out of Iran, their ports
had been destroyed. They were bargaining with Turkey to run a
pipeline across Turkey out of Iran, and again billions of dollars
being spent on that pipeline, which raises the price of oil beyond
its economic levels. So the war between Iraq and Iran was simply
to create a shortage of oil from those two countries which would
create a higher price because of the lesser amount of oil
available around the world.
It's this kind of economic control of a major commodity, oil, that
is the new type of warfare between nations on earth and we are
going to see more of this because it produces such enormous
profits. When the Middle East was making $300 billion in 1980 on
the oil it exported, that represented about 40% of the world's
total, meaning the rest of the world was getting maybe $400
billion for selling its oil. Oil that only 7 years earlier would
have sold for $16 to $18 billion. The profits are enormous. They
are unbelievable.
Human History and the Composition of the High Cabal
Ratcliffe: I'd like you to discuss more of what you mentioned
before regarding your sense of the High Cabal as a unit or group
originating perhaps more from an Oriental base of historical roots
rather than from a European base. You were telling me the other
day about this story of the Chinese travellers who went to the
Middle East to study the knowledge of the Arabic people and their
whole approach in the way they ran their exploration and your
sense of the High Cabal originating in an Oriental cultural basis.
Prouty: We are so prone to study history in a linear fashion from
the United States we go back to England, we go back to France and
Germany. We go to Rome, we go to Greece, back to the Middle East
and to Babylon. And it ends there as though the world began there.
If you asked 90 out of 100 Americans where Adam and Eve were born,
or appeared, they would say the Middle East. Because almost every
formal study of history trickles back that way as though Asia, or
Russia, or Indonesia didn't exist. There were no people there.
Africa is a great big nothing in terms of history.
Just as a little clue, I was in Kano, in the heart of Nigeria one
day. It happened to be one of their celebration days, and there
were black men, leaders of Kano, riding horses with coats of
linked mail on the horses. And the men were wearing coats of mail
armor just like the old medieval knights of yore, like King
Arthur's men. I asked some of the people standing there as this
parade went by, "Where did these come from, Hollywood, or
something like that?" And they said, "No, don't you know?" And a
very fine young man sat me down and told me that hundreds and
hundreds of years before, the remnants of a lost Crusade, medieval
people from Europe, had wandered into Africa and were defeated and
captured and that these natives had these original old coats of
mail of the horses and of their riders. Now, in Nigeria, they
never had horses, they wouldn't need coats of mail because they
didn't have horses.
This proves that in Africa, way back in the time of the Crusades,
there were people strong enough to defeat the Crusaders, and also
to recognize that the loot they captured from those people was
worth keeping as historic evidence. In other words, Africa existed
in history. In fact another thing I learned from this man I was
talking with is that their language is the original language of
the Rosetta stone. And the Rosetta stone which was used to
translate the hieroglyphics of Egypt had been unfathomable to
European scholars until all of a sudden a group of Nigerians
travelling in Cairo saw the Rosetta stone and although they
couldn't read the hieroglyphics they could read the language on
the other side. And they read the language, told the scholars
about it, the scholars translated it into English, and then they
decoded the hieroglyphics. That's how they solved the story of the
Rosetta Stone, and were able to decipher the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics.
The people from Nigeria had this ancient culture which produced
the language which is on the Rosetta Stone and for centuries
nobody could translate the Rosetta stone forgetting that the
Africans had that history and that culture and our history books
leave them out with a big zero. We don't know anything about
Africans in history. Well, this is true even more so, even to a
greater degree when we think about China, and India, and
Indonesia, and southeast Asia. They have ancient history.
The history we study through Europe, and back to the Middle East,
runs back what? 1000 years before Christ, 2000 years before
Christ. Easily the history of India and southeast Asia goes back
eleven or twelve thousand years. Easily the history of Indonesia
goes back thousands of years and the history of China is almost
limitless. It is quite obvious that the Chinese culture, to
include the manufacture of such things as cast iron, or the
ability to print on paper, goes back long before such things were
even contemplated by anyone in even the Middle East or in India.
For reference I would recommend everyone read and study the books
of Dr. Joseph Needham of Cambridge University in England. There is
a whole series of books and they are absolutely indispensable to
an understanding of the true history of man on earth. One of the
interesting areas of Needham's work, and some of the other studies
of the Chinese people in those days, was that the Chinese had
mastered the ability to sail in the oceans as the Portuguese had
later on. And the Chinese would follow the coastline down from
China, down around southeast Asia, down around Malaysia, and back
up to the Burmese coast, across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta,
down the east coat of India, past Ceylon and around the tip of
India and on up to Bombay and even around to Arabia and East
Africa.
And the story goes that as the Chinese visited port cities on
their trips along, it was like a party. As they pulled into port
they would stand out there and waive banners and hold gifts in
their hands. They would sing songs and they would dance. They
wouldn't carry firearms. And the people there met them the same
way. They were welcome to stay for years or to stay whatever
length of time they wanted, and they opened up trade, and sailed
back and forth between these places.
Until one day they arrived in a certain area of the east coast of
Africa and they were treated with hostility. And they found out
that was as far as the Portuguese had gotten coming around from
Portugal around Africa and using guns every time they went ashore,
burning villages, stealing whatever they wanted.
And it showed that the Chinese method of exploration had been a
party with official ambassadors with presents for the local rulers
and all, and the Portuguese system was to use guns and shoot the
people.
So we see quite a difference in these cultures and this has led
even to a better understanding of their overland exploration. The
Chinese having this enormous land mass to their west, had the same
interest in exploring the west as we did, wondering how far the
west went. The Chinese actually travelled with ambassadors,
official people from their government, in parties of 15 or 20, as
far as Bagdad. And there such parties would meet the leaders of
Bagdad, they would talk and understand each other. The Chinese
seem to be very adept at languages and if they didn't know the
language, they would sit down and study it and study everything
these people had.
There was a very intriguing story of a party that the rulers of
China sent back to Bagdad with a very learned leader and some 15
or 20 scholars with him. He would sit and listen to the
intelligent people of Bagdad as they explained how they did this,
how they did that. Like arithmetic -- the Chinese had not learned
the Arabic base for arithmetic, or for mathematics that spread all
over the world. And the Chinese were taking notes in shorthand and
they would listen and take notes in shorthand and as fast as the
Arabs could talk to them they would transcribe it.
This had been going on for a while -- a while meaning years --
when another group of Chinese came and reported that the King, or
the emperor, wanted the first group to come back -- for some
reason they had to go back. By this time the elderly Chinaman had
become good friends with the leader in Bagdad and he said, "Look,
I have to return to my country, but I know there is much that we
haven't finished studying." He said, "I would like you to give me
7 of your best scholars, each in their own trade, their own
specialty, and ask them to dictate to me from their books". And he
said, "I want to write it down and take this back to my emperor."
And the Arab chief said, "You mean, you are going to write down
what 7 men tell you simultaneously?" He said, "yes."
And he did. And after he had been copying for 3 or 4 hours the
chief stopped his people and then he asked the Chinaman, "this man
from section 3 over here, read back what he told you." He turned
his pages, read it back perfectly. "OK, this man, No. 5, read it
back." The Chinaman without fault had been taking down the
shorthand listening to 7 people simultaneously. I use the figure
7, it might have been 8 or 10. Dr. Needham tells the story with
great thoroughness.
What this says is that the Chinese had perfected, and we believe
today, they retained this even more so than they had in those
days, the ability to write a shorthand that could translate
simultaneous lectures, not just one. And simultaneously probably
to the number 7, 8, or 9. Dr. Needham gives the exact figure
because he has seen it done.
What this means is that when you put all these together -- their
culture, their art, their trading, their ability to make cast
iron, and bronze, they drilled for oil at 2,000 feet using bamboo
pipe -- they were not backward people. This without any question
puts the Chinese at a level in history certainly equal to, but
probably higher than, the levels of Europe and the Middle East.
Now when we educate ourselves enough to understand that, and as we
have said earlier when we also understand that leaders of this
world recognize a High Cabal, I think it is ridiculous, since I
myself cannot disbelieve the existence of a High Cabal, that the
High Cabal very probably includes Asians and more probably is led
by Asians. I wouldn't argue that, I don't know how to explain it,
except if you watch rain fall, you notice it all runs in
accordance with gravity. Well, if you study mankind, you notice
there is a sort of gravity in the day-to-day world of mankind, and
I don't think it is all happenstance. I think that there is
direction from, as Churchill says, the High Cabal. But I also
believe that the High Cabal, which can include people from of
course any region of the world -- I don't think they recognize
countries -- I think the world is just the world for those people,
and I believe that it would be strongly manned with Chinese or
even probably led by Chinese.
Building a Bridge: Trusting Ourselves
to Know How to Work and Live Together
Ratcliffe: Fascinating. One last item (we have about 20 minutes
here), is the story you told me on the first day I arrived which I
found so fascinating of yourself in a class of young officers and
this assignment you were given to build a bridge. I'd like you to
recount that for us now.
Prouty: It has interested me for many decades, this idea of
politics, and this idea of leadership that is thrust upon us, and
whether or not this idea is the same as actual human experience
and understanding of true leadership. If people are stranded on a
desert island, they don't hold an election. They suddenly realize
a certain person has a little more experience, a little more gift
than the others and they follow him.
The armies of the world are traditionally pretty well trained,
pretty well disciplined. Before World War II we saw in the U.S.
Army certain things that I'm afraid we don't see today. It got
diluted in the great mass movements of World War II and since. But
there were people there who tried to impress this previous
understanding upon those of us who had been called in before World
War II -- when the Army was small. I think the military forces of
the U.S. before World War II were about 116,000 if I remember --
and when you figure that 10 million men were flown to Vietnam
during the Vietnam War and at any one time we had as many 550,000
you can see what I am talking about.
115,000 in the Armed Forces were not many people. But they were
very skilled. And when a new officer, regardless of age, rank or
so on, was assigned to a division, the Army had a custom of
division officer training. And this division officer training was
rather unique as we look back today. Although you'll find such
training at Harvard Business School or other places where men are
taught how to govern, how to lead people, and so on, how to run a
business.
One of the events I have never forgotten because it was so
effective, it was just absolutely effective and what we saw deeply
impressed us, was that after this group of about 60 men had been
together for a week or so, listening to lectures from some of the
old time colonels and sergeants and warrant officers, one of the
courses they taught us rather superficially, but very interesting,
was how to put together a trestle bridge.
In those days, a trestle bridge in the army was all prefabricated
including the posts that hold it up, the pilings at the side of
the river to hold it up, and the planks on the top, and how they
all fit together. The bolts and the nuts and the whole structure
was prefabricated but it had to be put together precisely, or it
wouldn't work. And every brook or river isn't the same width so
you had to be able to lengthen the bridge and sometimes the banks
were higher than others so you had to raise the bridge. The bridge
could do that -- the prefab's structure was such that it would
accomplish that.
There was about a week of courses on the trestle bridge where most
of it was taught on paper. Every once in a while they would take
us out to a shed and show us the pieces that it consisted of, but
we had never worked on it, we just knew what was what. One evening
just before sundown, they picked up the whole class, about 60 men,
piled us into a couple of army buses and began driving us
somewhere without saying where we were going. We had no idea what
we were going to do. And they drove us, and drove us (their only
objective was to wait until it was dark) and finally stopped in
the countryside somewhere beside a rather large field.
We all got out of the buses and a sergeant said, "Gentlemen, your
exercise for the evening lies in that field. Its a trestle
bridge." We were all with an armored division. He said, "there are
two tanks in the field. You are going to build that trestle bridge
across a river that is on the other side of this field. You are
going to drive the tanks across that bridge and your dinner for
the evening is over there, on the other side of the river. You are
not to swim over and get dinner. You won't have dinner unless you
drive the tanks across the trestle bridge." Then he said, "Now I
have one more request. Any of you people that smoke, I want you to
give me your matches and your cigarette lighters. You are to have
no flashlights. Hand it all in right now." And he collected
everything. He said, "Anybody who wants to light up a cigarette,
come see me."
Then he sat down quietly with another sergeant and never said
another word. He didn't say who was in charge. He didn't say
anything. He just walked off. So there was 60 people standing by
the side of the road, and he had mentioned "trestle bridge," so
some of us went out into the grass and sure enough we stumbled
over a couple of pieces here, and a couple of pieces there. They
were very neatly packed up, there was no problem with that. And a
few others walked over to see what the river looked like and it
would be my estimate that it was about 40 feet across, something
like that, and the banks were 7 or 8 feet on either side. We could
see a bonfire on the other side and a tent was pitched so we knew
that our dinner was over there.
Nothing happened very quickly except a little commotion. People
talking to each other, "But how do we get this bridge out there?"
Then finally 3 or 4 men who knew each other said, "Hey, well at
least we got to get this stuff over to the river. Let's start
carrying it over there." And another group said, "Well we'll carry
these things over there." And gradually some action just sort of
came.
But then from among the group, all of a sudden one man began to
say, "Look, when you're carrying this over, put this here because
this is the piling for the beginning of the bridge." And then,
"Look, you 5 fellers swim across and we'll get the other piling
over to you by" -- the river wasn't all that deep and you could
carry it over there -- "but you get on the other side and work
over there while we're working on this side." And finally one man
was just saying to each group, "Okay, put it here, do this, let's
do this."
Everybody was cooperating beautifully. There was no problem and in
an unbelievably short time we had actually got that bridge across
the river. We had men beginning to lay the planks on the top, and
the cross beams that hold those planks, and the bolts to tighten
them down. And gradually we started walking across it with men
carrying the planks and the bridge held them up fine.
Once we got the planks down more men started going across with
other things and finally this man who had been more or less
leading these just nondescript people -- there were chaplains
there, there were doctors, we weren't engineers, in fact there
wasn't an engineer in the crowd -- finally said, "Well let's take
a look at the strength of this thing." So we all stood on one
side, it didn't tip, we all went to one end, it didn't tip. We all
walked around using our weight to try to decide. We knew tanks
were very heavy.
Finally we said okay. It took one man to drive a tank but there
was a place for another man to handle the radio and things like
that (which you'd ordinarily call the gunner), and we used a third
man in the turret to direct the tank because the people inside
can't see very much. So we got two crews of 3 men who could handle
the tanks. The first crew drove the first one around and with
great care we aimed the first tank across the bridge and it went.
Nothing happened. The second crew took the second tank, drove it
across, and all the rest of the fellows went over with it and we
had an absolutely magnificent dinner.
The next day in class the old colonel that was running this school
came in and he said, `Gentlemen, I want to tell you something
about yesterday's exercise.' He said, people have lived in
communities ever since the dawn of time. They never had an
election, they never had politics, they never had a religious
hierarchy. What they had was themselves, usually the elder led the
village because he obviously had experience. If he had been
disabled or if he wasn't quite as bright as others, they could
push him aside, but usually the elder led the community and he
would get things done. But if it came time to go on the hunt and
the village was hungry and they really needed some animals, some
food, a certain group would break off and among that group they
knew who was the best hunter, they knew who was the best tracker,
they didn't stop and have an election. There was no boy scout
captain, there was no election, they just did the job. The women
the same way. Some women could build the houses better than others
or some could make cloth better than others.
And he said, that's the way communities -- that's the way armies
-- really run. He said the group will find its leader inevitably.
He said sometimes when an army is in a terrible battle, and the
colonel has been killed and the major has been killed, probably a
sergeant will get up and say, Follow me. After citing examples of
this from history he said, Gentlemen, what we did yesterday was to
prove to you that an absolutely nondescript, untrained group will
follow that fact without any agreement, without any election,
without any assignment. We didn't assign the leader, we didn't ask
you to elect the leader, we didn't say that so and so was an
engineer and he has the experience. We left you in the dark and
told you come over there and have dinner with us. He said, `Don't
ever forget that because military organizations as well as
ordinary civil organizations follow those rules. The other rules
are more or less applied to our society but these are the basic
rules. You need to know that in a war.'
I have never been through a class that had quite the impact on me
as that one did and I guess not reluctantly but it did surprise me
as I was the officer that led the group across the bridge. Simply
because I said to these people who were already beginning to go,
Let's put it here and then let's do this, and the group wanted
some kind of instruction.
I would gladly have yielded to somebody else, but it wasn't
necessary. The bridge got built. I think as I look back at it that
much of the problem we have in society is that we don't trust
ourselves. The people we elect are most likely not the people that
can do the job anyway. Or the people that we might even follow as
to quote religious leaders, don't necessarily know all the things
that are best for us.
As Buckminster Fuller says the two most powerfully disruptive
forces in mankind are politics and religion. Now he doesn't mean
politics as I have described it in the village, and he doesn't
mean religion as in the basic facts of religion. He means these
structured systems we call politics and call religion that really
are a form of mind control. In this century I think that as much
effort has been applied in certain areas of our leadership to gain
mind control over the people of the world as they have over any
other kind of control. I think that the very history of an
organization we call the British Society of Psychic Research (and
its very strong American offshoot) is evidence of the fact that
today people are not asked to think. They are told what to think,
whether it makes sense or not. I think this is a most fundamental
fact of our life today.
Ratcliffe: Thank you very much Fletcher Prouty.
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