Source:WilliamEngdahl.com
F. William Engdahl
December 17, 2016
The annual meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group took place this year in Dresden, Germany from June 9-12. Notable is their terminology in an official press release announcing topics for discussion. Point three (not necessarily in terms of importance) is curiously titled “Europe: migration, growth, reform, vision, unity.” Curious is the choice of the word “migration” for the EU refugee crisis that began in Spring 2015 as Turkey opened the detention centers and refugee camps from Syrian war refugees and pointed them to the EU. More about that later on. Here I want to concentrate on the little-known historical ties or links between the Bilderberg Meetings, founded in 1954, and the Vatican, and the role of both in heating up the current EU refugee instability.
In May, 1954 in Oosterbeek, near to the German border, a highly secret meeting was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg. The meeting was hosted by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, husband of Queen Juliana. It was called simply, “Bilderberg Conference,” from the name of the hotel where the first talks were held. Out of three days of private discussion, a new Trans-Atlantic think-tank was created. It was to become one of the most effective organizations for influencing world events after 1954 up to the present, and one of the most damaging and secretive.
German-born Prince Bernhard was a controversial figure, a notorious philanderer, who had been a member of the German NSDAP and Reiter SS. In 1976 Bernhard was accused of accepting a $1 million bribe from the US fighter aircraft maker, Lockheed, to influence jet purchases by the Dutch Air Force. When Bernhard was forced to resign because of the scandals, he was succeeded as Bilderberg Chairman by then German Bundespräsident, Walter Scheel, and then afterwards by Britain’s Lord Carrington, a confidante and later business partner of Henry Kissinger. From the beginning it was clear Bilderberg was not the Little League of world politics.
In 2014 the Bilderberg Group’s official website, with sparse information, stated its purpose as simply to, “foster dialogue between Europe and North America.” It adds that it meets once a year with around 120 select attendees from finance, politics, industry, media and academia. Its rules mandate that two-thirds come from Europe and the remainder from the USA and Canada, with one third of the total always from the world of politics. Bilderberg participants from the US are always members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Shadowy origins
The Bilderberg Group, in the words of the first Bilderberg Secretary General, a shadowy and enormously influential Polish exile, Joseph Retinger, came from an initiative Retinger made in 1952 to counter, “growing distrust of America which was making itself manifest in Western Europe and which was paralleled by a similar distrust of Western Europe in America.” In brief, its aim was to make certain that the strategic policy orientation of Western Europe and of the United States was in harmony. The decisive question to be asked was harmony in pursuit of which and whose geopolitical goals?
Joseph Retinger
Joseph Retinger was one of the most influential political figures shaping the pro-Atlanticist architecture of post-World War II Western Europe. He founded the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, to lobby for the Washington-backed plan for creation of a United States of Europe, today called the European Union. He created the CIA-funded European Movement, as well as the CIA-funded European Youth Campaign. By far his most influential project was bringing the Bilderberg Group into being, and serving as its key European director and Secretary General, all far away from the public eye, as he preferred.
At the time his Bilderberg project took form the Korean War was ending and US Marshall Plan aid to Europe as well. Józef Hieronim Retinger had spent the war years in London as adviser to the exile government of Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski. While Retinger’s name was virtually unknown to the world at large, he was one of the most influential string-pullers of the postwar period in Europe and the United States. He was able to get private audiences with the Pope as well as the American President at will. It was he who selected Prince Bernhard to act as figurehead host and who selected which Americans and which Europeans would be invited to Bilderberg.
The American Steering Committee for the first Bilderberg Meeting in 1954 consisted of USA chairman Joseph E. Johnson, president of the Rockefeller-tied Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Others included George Ball, who during the Second World War was in London serving as director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, to analyze the impact of British and American bombing of German cities and civilian populations.
The American Bilderberg Steering Committee also included H. J. Heinz II, of the food group and father-in-law of John Kerry’s current wife; George Nebolsine, a State Department consultant on the Marshall Plan; and Dean Rusk, then President of the Rockefeller Foundation, later Secretary of State.
The real guiding hand behind the American side of the Bilderberg Group, however, was the first head of the newly-established Central Intelligence Agency, General Walter Bedell Smith. In 1950 Smith became Director of the CIA. The CIA helped organize, and sponsored the formation, and operation of the Bilderberg Conferences.
In late 1952, Retinger went to America to test his Bilderberg idea on his American contacts, where he met with Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller, and Bedell Smith, then director of the CIA. After Retinger explained his proposal, Smith reportedly said, “Why the hell didn’t you come to me in the first place?” The CIA chief then told Retinger to go to C. D. Jackson, who was about to become President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Psychological Warfare, and Eisenhower’s liaison between the Pentagon and CIA. viii.
The attendees at the 1954 initial Bilderberg Meeting included David Rockefeller, who today is the only Bilderberg “Advisory Group” Member. It included State Department official, Paul Nitze. As well, Gardner Cowles, US media baron and founder of Look magazine, who had been the US Government deputy director of the Office of War Information, the US propaganda ministry that created the Voice of America (VOA). It included J.P. Morgan Bank director Nelson D. Jay, a close Rockefeller associate.
The first Bilderberg attendees also included C.D. Jackson, by then Eisenhower’s architect of the Cold War; Alcide de Gasperi, Italian Prime Minister; and Antoine Pinay, a former French Prime Minister. Pinay was to become, the decisive personality shaping the long-term agenda of Bilderberg.
In Retinger’s words he founded Bilderberg Group simply to, “foster dialogue between Europe and North America.” That was for public consumption. In reality he built a very dark agenda that drew in the most reactionary circles in postwar Europe and tied them to the most powerful of postwar American oligarch families, that of Rockefeller, Harriman and their emerging “American Century.” The Bilderberg Group was to insure that that Century would be heavily influenced by postwar Vatican geopolitics. Its first meeting in 1954 was funded by Walter Bedell Smith’s CIA, with subsequent meetings financed by the CIA’s close ally during the Cold War, the Ford Foundation.
Le Cercle—The Vatican-Rockefeller Alliance
The key to the extraordinary power and influence of the annual Bilderberg Meetings from 1954 laid in the unpublished role of the secretive pan-Europeanist organization then known as Le Cercle, sometimes referred to as Cercle Pinay, a reference to the pivotal role in shaping Bilderberg played by the network of French Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, an intimate friend of Bilderberg founder Retinger.
Pinay’s Le Cercle (The Group) was the link that covertly tied most European intelligence services including the German BND and BfV, MI-6 in Britain, France’s SDECE, Holland’s BVD, Belgium’s Surete de l’Etat and Swiss and later even Saudi intelligence and apartheid South Africa’s secret service, BOSS. Prominent politicians associated with Pinay and Le Cercle included Franz Josef Strauss, Otto von Habsburg, Konrad Adenauer, Julio Andreotti of Italy, General Antonio de Spinola of Portugal, a conservative who went on later to become President; Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Antoine Pinay’s group, Le Cercle, in turn was tied as well to the powerful and very right-wing Roman Catholic lay organization, Opus Dei, which had just been given final Catholic Church official approval in 1950, two years before plans for Bilderberg began, by Pope Pius XII. The organization was made well known, to its discomfort, as a subject of the 2003 Dan Brown historical novel, Da Vinci Code.
Among the later achievements of Le Cercle was the manipulation of the 1979 British elections that successfully brought in anti-labor right-wing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was done with Le Cercle leading members, Sir Brian Crozier, MI-6 head Sir Arthur Franks, and MI-6 division head, Nicholas Elliott.
The late Bavarian political czar, Franz Josef Strauss, “The Lion of Bavaria,” noted in his memoirs that he had held a friendship with Le Cercle’s Antoine Pinay since the two first met in 1953. Le Cercle networks in Germany promoted Strauss’s candidacy, unsuccessfully, to become German Chancellor. In 1955 Strauss also became a regular member of the Bilderberg Meetings.
Bilderberg founder, Josef Retinger, a Polish-born Roman Catholic, organized his European network of the Bilderberg through the mediation of an Italian CIA asset, Prof. Luigi Gedda, head of Azione Cattolica. Gedda was also medical adviser to Pope Pius XII, a very strong right-wing anti-communist pontiff, who before the Second World War, as Cardinal Eugenio Giovanni Pacelli, had been architect of the 1933 Reichskonkordat with Hitler’s Nazi Party. Already in 1932 Pacelli as Vatican Secretary of State had played a key role in convincing Roman Catholic German Chancellor Franz von Papen to steer his Catholic Center Party into an anti-left alliance and join with the NSDAP of Hitler.
Clerical fascism and Pius XII
As Pope, Pius XII had a clear political bias and it was towards support of clerical or nominally Roman Catholic fascist or extremely repressive right-wing regimes, a form of what some termed clerical fascism, the fusion of the Church with fascist or dictatorial political regimes, such as in Franco’s Spain or Spinola’s Portugal.
During the Second World War Pius XII refused to condemn the clerical fascist pro-Hitler regime of Roman Catholic Ante Pavelić, the leader of the newly proclaimed Croatian state. Informed by Catholic clergy of the genocidal murders of Orthodox Serbs who had refused to embrace the Catholic faith, Pius XII, even though he possessed a list of Croatian clergy members who had “joined in the slaughter,” did not condemn the Pavelić regime or take action against the clergy involved. Instead he elevated Aloysius Stepinac—a Croatian archbishop convicted of collaborating with the Ustaše—to Cardinal.
In effect, Retinger’s European Bilderberg networks linked the extreme right-wing European anti-communist networks—including the Vatican of Pius XII, of Opus Dei, of the Franco government in Spain, of Portugal’s General Spinola and numerous other right-wing European anti-communist networks—to the triumphant American elites around the powerful Rockefeller group, through the networks and person of David Rockefeller. It was a power marriage that was to have a profound effect on the development of postwar European society and politics.
Francis and the ‘Migrants’-Words are all I have…
Now against this background of Bilderberg true history, the question to be asked is whether the first Jesuit Pope in history, Francis, is following in the heavy footsteps of Pius XII? Is he deliberately trying to stir things up in Europe through his support of the huge influx of war refugees from Syria and North Africa in the past year?
Words are an essential form of human communication, quite complex in the energy they convey to others. Depending on the word and its context, it can convey negative energy, hate energy; it can convey neutral energy, neither here nor there; it can also convey love, harmony, peace energy. If there is any organized group on the face of this Earth that is master of such word use precision it is the Society of Jesus, Pope Francis’ mother organization. This is relevant in reading his numerous missives on the population disruptions of the Middle East and Africa and the EU in the past three years.
There are three words being loosely thrown about today in regard to the EU crisis, and crisis it is. There is the word, “refugee,” legally defined as “a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.” Then there is the related term, “asylum-seeker” defined as “a person who has left their home country as a political refugee and is seeking asylum in another.” Third there is the entirely different concept behind the word used both by Pope Francis and by the 2016 Bilderberg Meeting in Dresden, namely the word “migrant.” Migrant is precisely defined as “a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions.” Here there is no mention of war, political persecution or life-endangering calamity.
By calling it what it clearly is not, a migration into the EU from the south, the word completely blunts the causes behind that migration, namely a US-UK-France-instigated series of wars, wars for control of oil and now gas, wars in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, initially called by Hillary Clinton the Arab Spring. The million-plus human beings streaming into the EU from Turkey over the past fifteen months are no migrants. They are refugees from wars.
In calling them migrants it implicitly makes either racist or bigot anyone questioning the legal procedures employed by the Merkel government and the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). According to reliable investigative reports conveyed to this author, the German Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF) since November 2014 has abandoned the rules and legal directives for refugees (not asylum seekers) for no public reason and without any notice to the public. Interesting.
“Structural Reality?”
In a Papal Message of January 17, 2016, the Pope declared, “In our time, migration is growing worldwide…Migration movements are now a structural reality, and our primary issue must be to deal with the present emergency phase by providing programmes which address the causes of migration and the changes it entails, including its effect on the makeup of societies and peoples.” He goes on, “Biblical revelation urges us to welcome the stranger; it tells us that in so doing, we open our doors to God, and that in the faces of others we see the face of Christ himself.” What if that stranger wants to kill you and to rape your daughters?
Nice words these are indeed. It ignores entirely the actual disruptive reality of the flood of war refugees into Germany and the rest of the EU. Rather than to focus his immense influence on bringing about peace and reconciliation of all domestic parties in Syria and condemning the terrorism of ISIS, Al Qaeda/Al-Nusra Front and the others destroying one of the oldest cultures in the world, a poly-religious one, Francis chooses to tell Europeans to open their hearts and even homes to the “migrants.” In this context, as I noted at the start, it is highly significant that this year’s Dresden Bilderberg Meeting referred in their discussion to “Migration” not Refugee Crisis. It appears both the Pope and Bilderberg planners are singing from the same sheet of music on this at least.
On January 6, in his message on the feast of Epiphany, the same Pope released a Papal video in which he called for creating a one world religion in effect: “Many think differently, feel differently, seeking God or meeting God in different ways. In this crowd, in this range of religions, there is only one certainty that we have for all: we are all children of God.”
Some days later, January 11, 2016 in an address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, Francis insisted that Europe has the means to absorb migrants without sacrificing its security or culture. He criticized the distinction made by the international community between refugees fleeing persecution and those fleeing poverty, referring to “the grave crisis of migration which we are facing.” He condemned various EU national attempts to find their own national solutions to this crisis of migration: “…there is no place for autonomous solutions pursued by individual states, since the consequences of the decisions made by each inevitably have repercussions on the entire international community. Indeed, migrations, more than ever before, will play a pivotal role in the future of our world.”
Unlike Francis, I firmly believe that borders DO matter, that national autonomy, like individual autonomy, does matter, is in fact, an essential component of our existence, our individual sovereignty our national sovereignty. We human beings are unique individuals every one. We are not some amorphous blob with no individuality. These differences are sacred in my view. Not according to the words of the Jesuit Pope. Our world with all its wars and deep disturbances is not at the state of nirvana which Pope Francis would like us to believe where peace and Christian charity overcome every obstacle. It well may be in the future but to pretend it already is belies in my view a hidden agenda.
David Rockefeller is an open partisan of a one world order where he and his ilk would sit atop all mankind, a disgusting idea. For such a one economic world, we must dissolve national borders. This, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is designed to do in large part, if, that is, EU leaders are suicidal enough to agree. Then to control an entire world, it needs a synthetic new religion. The forced refugee crisis is designed to blur national borders and historical ethnic or national culture. There is far more behind all the nice speeches of the Pope and the talks of Bilderberg than we are being told. It’s not without reason that the word “Jesuitical” in ordinary usage means “one using subtle or oversubtle reasoning; crafty; sly; intriguing.”
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
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