We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, November 2, 2018

Ep. 1: The secret society that rules the world

Click here to access article by Bas Spliet from Scrutinised Minds. (I recommend that you follow the script instead of listening to the audio.)

The author leans heavily on the writings of Carrol Quigley about whom he accurately describes in this quote:
Quigley was no uncredentialled conspiracy theorist. He was a prominent Harvard-educated historian who taught at the Ivy League universities of Georgetown, Princeton and Harvard, in addition to working as an advisor to both the US Department of Defense and the US Navy.
Spliet introduces his essay with this insightful statement:
Since the dawn of civilisation [roughly 2% of the existence of humans], kings, emperors and other men and women of wealth have wanted to rule the world, but none has succeeded. Every empire that arose on the blood of the people it subjected and enslaved – the ancient kingdoms of Egypt and Assyria, the successive Persian and Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Islamic caliphates, the Ottoman empire, the various European colonial empires and even the communist regime of the Soviet Union – all eventually fell. Even the United States’ global primacy, a logic result of the end of the Cold War, is now being tested by re-emerging superpowers and increasing calls for a more multilateral world order. But these are all well-known attempts at establishing world supremacy. Since the rise of [fake] democracy, people – not tyrants – were suddenly said to be in charge. Therefore, if one wanted to obtain or maintain hegemony, one had to find a way to shape world order through hidden means while simultaneously convincing the people the gradual change was of their own making. [my inserts]
Here is a very useful webpage that has a list of Quigley's books, and some have PDF links where you can perform searches throughout each book. Look for these PDF links under the image of the books.