Who Rules?

Andrew Gavin Marshall says it's the bankers who rule, and in particular the dynastic banking families and their network of think tanks that have:

socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting – of major social-political movements.

This is the New World Order conspiracy founded by Cecil Rhodes, his financier friends, Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, the journalist and long-time Editor of the Times, William Stead, and Alfred Milner, who played a central role in the shaping of British foreign policy in the post-WW1 era.

Carroll Quigley's account of this so-called Rhodes-Milner group, completed in 1949 although not published until 1981, leaves the reader to understand that by the onset of WW2 the project was dead. But we know that the Council on Foreign Relations, one of many public faces of Rhodes' project for global empire, remains very much alive and that the successors to the bankers such as J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller who funded Rhodes' project in its earlier days, remain as committed as ever to global governance.

Aangirfan, in Our Secret Government, offers a different perspective. The West is ruled by a US-NATO controlled secret government that uses terror and assassination to eradicate opponents and to compel public submission to an increasingly totalitarian system of control.

These two views of the world are not necessarily incompatible. A secretive plutocratic elite, employing the media it owns, the financial resources it controls, can dictate the outcome of most elections with money and propaganda. What's more, they can heavily influence the actions of most elected officials through bribes, paid in the traditional way after the candidate leaves offices. Thus, for example, Tony Blair, a key enabler of the Iraq war is the recipient of, among many interesting income streams, an annual director's fee of more than $2 million from JP Morgan.

Thus is plutocratic control concealed by a facade of democracy. But the success of the Western system of control depends entirely on its appearance of spontaneity. Unlike the Soviets who absurdly insisted on elections in which everyone voted for the government's own candidate or went to jail, Western states have elections that can still generate excitement. Many an election looks like a cliff-hanger. Thus is preserved the illusion that the little guy has his say.

But sometimes things go wrong. The Kennedy's, with the help of Richard Daly, the resourceful mayor of Chicago, managed to stuff more ballots than Nixon's team and JFK was elected. Then Kennedy seemed to think that, as President, he could make his own decisions, not just front for someone else's. He failed to back the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Then he wimped out of a head on nuclear show-down with the Ruskies over Soviet missiles in Cuba, preferring instead to make a deal with Kruschev behind the backs of Joint Chiefs.

But Kennedy was soon gone, shot from behind in the front of the head, at near impossible range with a crap WW1 Italian rifle by a patsie befriended by an associate of George H. W. Bush who committed suicide the day, in 1977, he was to be interviewed by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Soon things were back on track. LBJ, with a wink from a friend, stepped up to the Presidency and set about sending 600,000 US troops to Vietnam.

But if LBJ was complicit in the actions of elements of a secret government, he was no fool. He was a real politician with a program of his own:

The purpose of protecting the life of our nation, and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is a test of our success as a nation. ... The challenge of the next half century is to determine whether we have the wisdom to use [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life and to advance the quality of our American civilization. ...The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice...

Not quite the plutocrat's dream. And what's that about the success of the American nation? Mentioned four times in two sentences. That ain't the politically correct empire we're aiming for.

Which suggests that at some point, the agents of plutocracy determined to get control of the process by which individuals are vaulted into leadership at a stage much earlier than the election campaign.

Does that explain the emergence of the PR flack as national leader? The Quisling non-entities, Tony Blair, Dubya, David Cameron: men with no real work experience; men who have risen without trace; men who pursue the war for global empire without hesitation; men who pursue the genocide of their own people through the destruction of their nation as a racial, cultural and religious entity; men so unerringly setting the world on course for an economic disaster that will precipitate massive global depopulation?

And if the whole apparatus of democratic government is now a charade, how has that be accomplished other than by means of a secret apparatus engaging in the most ruthless manipulation of events, including the resort to terrorism?

But how does a secret government, elements of which clearly exist, function in relation to the more or less legal and relatively transparent application of the money power to the drive for global governance?

The answer is that the two are coordinated via the security services of the various states. The security services are created by the state, but they are not necessarily subject to legitimate state authority. Mrs. Gandhi was murdered by her own bodyguard. President Sadat was murdered by his own military despite four layers of security and eight bodyguards. President Kennedy's murder depended on blatant treachery by his Secret Service bodyguard.

But if the state does not control the security services, who does?

In the answer to that question is the truth of who rules. But whoever the puppet-masters may be, of one thing we can be sure, the West is now subject to a tyranny no less evil, no less destructive of the people, and no less brutal than any that has preceded it.