The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (70 page)

Even the Society’s enemies like Sue grudgingly acknowledged its remarkable internal cohesion. Loyola had been a soldier, and ran the Jesuits in military fashion; in their own eyes, the early Jesuits were “Soldiers of Christ” in the Counter-Reformation against the Protestantism sweeping sixteenth-century Europe.

In the twenty-first century, allegations about Catholic conspiracy have tended to shift onto Opus Dei, although voices of alarm are periodically raised over the “Jesuit Oath” taken by Society members. It is damning stuff:

I do … promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons … that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet.

Luckily for all heretics, Protestants and Masons – and their wives and children – the oath was a forgery by one Robert Ware, aimed at stymieing the accession of the Catholic James II in England in the seventeenth century. Today, the Society of Jesuits has 20,000 members, and announces on its website: “We are still men on the move, ready to change place, occupation, method – whatever will advance our mission in the Church of teaching Jesus Christ and preaching his Good News …” The website is a little less forthcoming about one conspiracy the Jesuits have unquestionably run: a conspiracy of silence about the paedophilia practised by the Society’s priests. The old Jesuit boast “Give us the child for seven years, and we will give you the man” took on a grim twist when child abuse by Jesuit priests was uncovered in America, Germany and Latin America. In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, the Jesuit branch was required in 2011 to pay $166.1 million in compensation to 450 victims who had been sexually abused by Jesuit priests over a fifty-year period.

Further Reading

Malachi Martin,
The Jesuits
,1988

Edmond Paris,
The Secret History of the Jesuits
,1986

SOCIETY OF THE ELECT

The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission,
le Cercle
– all are favourites for the title of “The Secret Society That Really Runs the World”. Most of the covert cabals are either fictions in paranoid nightmares or impotent talking shops, but there is one shadowy organization that really did want to take over the globe. This is the Society of the Elect, founded by Cecil Rhodes.

Born in 1853, Rhodes was the son of an English vicar who journeyed to Africa as a young man and made a mountain of money from diamond mining. He became a major force in African politics – Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named for him.

Now, Rhodes might have found fame and fortune on the Dark Continent but his heart belonged to Blighty – and to the expansion of Victoria’s empire so the whole map of the world would be coloured pink. In 1877, Rhodes wrote in his
Confessions of Faith
: “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire” (See Document, p.497).

Rhodes seems to have put his money where his belief was. One of his wills contains a provision for

… the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.

The resultant Society of the Elect was formed in 1891, and according to the respected American historian Carroll Quigley, the Society had an inner and outer membership structure. Rhodes himself was the “General” of the Society, and sitting on its executive committee was the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the journalist William T. Stead and the banker Nathan Rothschild. Serving alongside the committee in the heart of the Society were the “initiates”. The outer circle of backers was called the Association of Helpers.

Although Rhodes died in 1902 (one of his wills, incidentally, established the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, the recipients of which have included Bill Clinton), his vision was carried forward by Alfred Milner who founded the Round Table groups, also known as the Rhodes–Milner Round Table groups, a.k.a. the Moot. The Round Table groups – which were the Association of Helpers under another guise – spread across the English-speaking world, and gained great influence in the period after the First World War. According to historian of secret societies, Michael Streeter “They were closely associated with the establishment of the Union of South Africa, the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations.”

The Round Tables were also likely behind the 1917 “Balfour Declaration”, written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild (the son of Nathan Rothschild), stating Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Aside from Milner, the dominant figure in the Society of the Elect/Round Tables in the decades after Rhodes’s demise was Lionel Curtis, who founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1920, known today as “Chatham House” after its premises in London. Although Chatham House advertises itself as nothing more sinister than a think tank on international affairs, to a large number of conspiracists Chatham House is a front for the Society of the Elect. They take their cue from Professor Carroll Quigley’s
Tragedy and Hope
, in which he names Chatham House as Rhodes’s secret society, no bones about it.

The vast bulk of historians believe the Society folded long ago, and may never got off paper. Quigley himself rowed back from the allegation in private. What is beyond supposition is the close tie between Chatham House and the American Council on Foreign Relations, which is another organization owing its existence to Rhodes. In 1919, Edward Mandel House, wingman to US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace conference, met with members of the Round Tables, whose ideals he shared. However, House believed that Americans would not accept the leadership of a British-dominated organization, so constituted instead the Council on Foreign Relations.

As Professor Kees van der Pijl observed in
Transnational Classes and International Relations
, “As a structure of socialisation through which a momentary ruling class consensus is shaped, transmitted and transformed into policy, the Rhodes– Milner Group became the model for all subsequent groups.”

In other words, Rhodes failed dismally to create a secret society capable of taking over the world, but he did indirectly spawn the clubbable think tanks which seek to shape national and international policy. Unquestionably the NY-based CFR and Chatham House are major policy-making institutions, but to stretch their role to being the power behind the
New World Order
is breaking credibility.

If the Society of the Elect/CFR/Chatham House rule the world why, you might ask the edge-of-reason conspiracists, do they need a secret plot to take over what they already have?

Further Reading

Cecil J. Rhodes,
The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes
, ed. W.T. Stead, 1902

Carroll Quigley,
Tragedy and Hope
, 1966

www.moot.org.uk

DOCUMENT: CECIL RHODES,
CONFESSION OF FAITH,
1877

The spelling and grammar errors are as the the original.

It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, and as each seizes on his idea, for that he more or less works for the rest of his existence. To myself thinking over the same question the wish came to render myself useful to my country. I then asked myself how could I and after reviewing the various methods I have felt that at the present day we are actually limiting our children and perhaps bringing into the world half the human beings we might owing to the lack of country for them to inhabit that if we had retained America there would at this moment be millions more of English living. I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to this the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars, at this moment had we not lost America I believe we could have stopped the Russian-Turkish war by merely refusing money and supplies. Having these ideas what scheme could we think of to forward this object. I look into history and I read the story of the Jesuits I see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say under bad leaders.

At the present day I become a member of the Masonic order I see the wealth and power they possess the influence they hold and I think over their ceremonies and I wonder that a large body of men can devote themselves to what at times appear the most ridiculous and absurd rites without an object and without an end.

The idea gleaming and dancing before ones eyes like a will-of-the-wisp at last frames itself into a plan. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. What a dream, but yet it is probable, it is possible. I once heard it argued by a fellow in my own college, I am sorry to own it by an Englishman, that it was good thing for us that we have lost the United States. There are some subjects on which there can be no arguments, and to an Englishman this is one of them, but even from an American’s point of view just picture what they have lost, look at their government, are not the frauds that yearly come before the public view a disgrace to any country and especially their’s which is the finest in the world. Would they have occurred had they remained under English rule great as they have become how infinitely greater they would have been with the softening and elevating influences of English rule, think of those countless 000’s of Englishmen that during the last 100 years would have crossed the Atlantic and settled and populated the United States. Would they have not made without any prejudice a finer country of it than the low class Irish and German emigrants? All this we have lost and that country loses owing to whom? Owing to two or three ignorant pig-headed statesmen of the last century, at their door lies the blame. Do you ever feel mad? do you ever feel murderous. I think I do with those men. I bring facts to prove my assertion. Does an English father when his sons wish to emigrate ever think of suggesting emigration to a country under another flag, never – it would seem a disgrace to suggest such a thing I think that we all think that poverty is better under our own flag than wealth under a foreign one.