Alfred Milner and his ‘Group’: some myths about the ‘Anglo-American conspiracy’
American conservative writer Steve Sailer has written a balanced critique of what is widely termed the Rhodes/Milner ‘secret society’, ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’, or the ‘Round Table Group’ among ‘conspiracy theorists’.[1] Mr. Sailer provides an objective examination that is often missing, especially from American writers. The review is based on Quigley’s 1949 book The Anglo-American Establishment, detailing the conspiratorial apparatus of an imperialist coterie founded by Cecil Rhodes, and Lord Alfred Milner, to extend the influence of the British race over the world, including the reclaiming of the USA.[2] Quigley also wrote of ‘The Group’ in his magnum opus Tragedy & Hope,[3] used as the primary text for his classes as Harvard. Although a certain class of ‘American patriots’ draw heavily on Tragedy & Hope, of the 1300 pages only a few dozen deal with what Quigley calls an ‘international Anglophile network’ of financiers, whose aims, more so than methods, Quigley supported, and whose ‘secret papers’ he was permitted to examine during the 1960s.[4] Hence Quigley’s comments are of particular value to ‘conspiracy theorists’, because he was what The John Birch Society refers to as an ‘Insider’.
That is not to say that the rest of Quigley’s book has much of interest. It does, but a lot of it does not confirm the biases of many conspiratologists; namely that there remained a permanent link between the USSR and the financial cabal and that the ‘cold war’ was a ruse; or that ‘Wall Street backed Hitler’.[5] Quigley claims rather that the use of debt-finance loans by this ‘network’ worked with the early Bolsheviks but failed with subsequent Soviet leaders, and worked with the Weimar politicians but failed with Hitler.[6] Quigley also explains quite a bit about the origins of the ‘cold war’ which should otherwise be of interest to conservatives, except that he shows that it was Stalin who stymied a U.S. –sponsored U.N. world state;[7] the reverse of the wide-spread conservative contention that the U.N.O. was a commie plot in cahoots with the ‘Anglo-American Establishment’.
What is notable about The Anglo-American Establishment is that the ‘American’ part is barely discernible. Of the Milner Group Quigley has much to say. Of an alliance with Wall Street, very little among over three hundred pages. The title of the book is a misnomer. Given the course the USA took towards Britain (along with the other European empires) it is an oxymoron.
Quigley was an Anglophile liberal-internationalist. He was certainly no conservative, directing his contempt towards such conservative manifestations in the USA as that of Barry Goldwater.[8] He also stated (1949) in The Anglo-American Establishment that he hopes his views would not be exploited by ‘Anglophobe isolationists’ such as those of The Chicago Tribune.[9]
However, Quigley’s expose has struck a particular cord with sundry Americans of an otherwise very heterogeneous ‘patriot’ movement. This is unsurprising since the bedrock of U.S. patriotism is homage to the American rebellion against the British Empire, or ‘the spirit of ‘76’. Hence without understanding the character of international finance – i.e., that it is international – the ‘international conspiracy’ takes on a British focus, although those using Quigley’s work are at pains to point out that names such as Rothschild and Lazard do not show that this ‘conspiracy’ is Jewish. For this purpose, it seems that the conspiracy is international, other than when its alleged Anglophile purposes are being emphasised. The American ‘patriots’ of today might then claim the mantle of their forefathers in continuing to rebel against this British imperialism centred at The City of London. By extension the British Royal family is also often implicated. Another variation is that these plutocrats, including the British Royal Family, are not even human, but are reptilian shape-shifters.
Quigley writes in Tragedy & Hope that the cabal he is discussing is based around international bankers, its purpose being to create an international financial system.[10] As will be seen, this is far removed, and indeed antithetical, to the Rhodes/Milner vision. The most well known representatives of the new ‘financial capitalism’ were the House of Rothschild.[11] But the link between Rothschild and the Rhodes-Milner Group is exaggerated by many commentators, with Milner routinely called a ‘Rothschild agent’.[12] For the purpose of emphasising an ‘Anglo-American’ bloc the focus is changed to that of J. P. Morgan, a staunch Episcopalian, although J.P. had died in 1913, and there seems little reason to believe that J. P. Morgan Co. remained Anglophile.
Anglo-Boer War
It is hardly surprising that the Rhodes-Milner Group was involved in trying to usurp the Afrikaner government in the Transvaal. A common assumption is that the Boers were fighting a Rothschild-Rhodes combine. Mr. Sailer writes of this:
‘In the early versions of Rhodes’ Secret Society in the 1890s, the finances were to be controlled by Lord Rothschild while the propaganda was to be handled by the titanic newspaper editor William T. Stead… But Stead opposed the Boer War of 1899 and was replaced in Rhodes’ affections by Milner. A stumbling block to Rhodes’ plan for an English Cape-to-Cairo railroad through East Africa were the Boer Republics of Afrikaners who had fled the English takeover of Cape Town and established their own countries, where gold had now been discovered. In late 1895, Rhodes and his business partner in De Beers, Alfred Beit, financed (with the foreknowledge of British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain) the Jameson Raid out of Rhodesia into the independent Transvaal… Milner, a career government official, was sent out from London in 1897 to run South Africa. He soon engineered the Boer War of 1899, which Britain eventually, after a much harder fight than expected, won in 1902, taking control of the vast mineral deposits that Rhodes and Chamberlain had tried to seize in Jameson’s Raid…. The South African connection is also reminiscent of the large but now largely ignored Jewish role in British Empire politics. Neither Rhodes nor Milner were Jewish, but their allies such as Beit often were.[13]
Firstly Lord Nathan Rothschild was not a significant factor in The Rhodes-Milner Group, and indeed was not in accord with their British imperial vision; secondly, President Kruger of the Transvaal Republic was also funded by Lord Rothschild. It is reminiscent of the also widespread belief that the Confederacy, through ‘Rothschild agent’ Judah P. Benjamin, was a tool of ‘Jewish finance’; also based on nonsense.[14]
Derek Wilson, a sympathetic Rothschild biographer, writes that while Lord Rothschild was critical of Gladstone’s ‘flabby’ foreign policy, he was ‘not an unbridled expansionist’, and cites his uneasy relationship with Rhodes.[15] When diamonds were discovered in South Africa Rothschild bought into the Anglo-African Diamond Mining Co., which was amalgamated with DeBeers. In 1887 Rhodes asked Lord Rothschild for financial backing. Rothschild saw this as a means of getting into Africa in rivalry with the Barnato Diamond Mining Co., which ended up merging with DeBeers.[16]
For Rhodes money was a means for expanding British influence. Not so for Rothschild, although Rhodes persuaded himself that the banker was a kindred spirit. Wilson remarks of Rhodes: ‘He was wrong. Lord Rothschild was not an unreserved imperialist, as Rhodes gradually discovered’. In 1888 Rhodes nominated Rothschild his executor to administer his estate for funding The Round Table Groups, a secret society to be modelled on the Jesuit constitution, but promoting the British empire. It is here that much hokum is written about Rhodes and Milner being ‘agents’ for Rothschild. Wilson writes:
‘In response to Rhodes’ suggestion that company funds be used to finance territorial expansion, his banker advised: “ if… you require money to finance territorial expansion, you will have to obtain it from other sources than the cash reserves of the De Beers Company.” And Rhodes cannot have been very pleased to learn, in 1892, that Rothschild had floated a loan for the Boer government of Transvaal’. [17]
By the time of the abortive Jameson Raid against the Transvaal in 1895, close and cordial relations between Rothschild and Rhodes had long gone. This reflects a dichotomy existing between imperialism and international finance. While for obvious reasons the likes of Rothschild, Sassoon, et al supported British imperialism, like their counterparts in Germany, France and The Netherlands, supported the imperialism of those states, that was the means by which international finance was able to spread in those times. When the old imperialism had become redundant as the most effective means of expanding financial capital, it was scuttled in short order, largely via the USA. The anti-imperialism of Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and of Roosevelt’s ‘Atlantic Charter’ set the course for the destruction of the European empires, and the primacy of Wall Street.
What Quigley in The Anglo-American Establishment states of Rothschild is significant, insofar as the link with the Rhodes-Milner Group was not of the nature insisted on by many ‘conspiracists’. The most important element of a Rhodes-Rothschild association is his being an executor of Rhodes’ estate. Of the seven wills made by Rhodes, Rothschild was involved with three. Although Nathan Rothschild died in 1915, with Rhodes death in 1902 his board of trustees comprised seven, but did not include Rothschild.[18] While Quigley believed Rothschild to have been one of seven members of an inner core of the Group, he ‘was largely indifferent and participated in the work of the group only casually’.[19] Also significant is that when Rhodes drew up his fourth will in 1891, although Rothschild was made one of two trustees, ‘it is perfectly clear from the evidence that he expected Rothschild to handle the financial investments associated with the trust, while Stead was to have full charge of the methods by which the funds were used’.[20] Rothschild was not part of the original ‘Circle of initiates’ of the society formed that year.[21]
Breach Between U.S. and Britain
In 2005, a mainstream publishing company produced a series of small volumes called ‘Conspiracy Books’. Who Really Runs the World? by Thom Burnett and Alex Games, is particularly well researched.[22] After considering numerous candidates including the Illuminati, Lodge 322, Bilderbergers and Trilateral Commission, the authors settle for the Council on Foreign Relations. Whether the reader agrees with the choice by Burnett and Games of the CFR as being at the apex of world control, they do nonetheless provide a well-documented history of the CFR. They also provide a valuable discussion on the relationship between the American and British delegations at the 1919 Peace Conference in regard to the hatching of the alleged Anglophile conspiracy.
Burnett and Games state that the idea of a think tank on foreign policy in the USA was mooted in 1917 by Col. Edward M House, Wilson’s key adviser, with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,[23] who was inclined towards Bolshevism rather than British imperialism. This think tank became The Inquiry. Another group, comprising ‘New York financiers and international lawyers’ had established the CFR in 1918. Both groups went to the Paris Peace Conference as Pres. Wilson’s advisers. Both British and U.S. groups met after the peace conference at the Hotel Majestic with the aim of establishing a joint Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs. By 1921 the CFR had dwindled to insignificance and merged with The Inquiry in 1921, but by this time the idea of a U.S. Institute of International Affairs, the British section having been established, was no longer in favour. Whitney Shepardson, aide to Col. House, was sent to Britain to inform the RIIA that the U.S. branch would not now eventuate. However, the British group had already decided to also reject a joint project with the U.S. group. Burnett and Games conclude from their study of CFR documents that:
‘Conspiracy theorists who claim that the Council on Foreign Relations is controlled by the Round Table through the Institute of International Affairs are wrong and haven’t done their research. This lack of agreement, and definite desire not to be linked, forces an enormous rift between these secret groups. Theorists tend to concentrate on the wishful thinking voiced at the Hotel Majestic without following the actual subsequent developments. Any sentence that combines the CFR and the IIA as co-conspirators must be viewed a false.’[24]
‘Peter Grose, CFR historian, confirms this early Anglo-U.S. breach in the official CFR history:
‘…To Shepardson fell the task of informing the British colleagues of this unfortunate reality. Crossing to London, he recalled thinking that “it might be quite unpleasant to have to say for the first time that the Paris Group of British colleagues could not be members” of the American branch. “The explanation to the British was begun (shall we say?) haltingly. However, instead of the frigid look which had been feared, the faces of the British governing body showed slightly red and very happy. They had reached the same conclusion in reverse, but had not yet found a good way of getting word to the other side of the Atlantic!’[25]
Games and Burnett state, and the history by Grose concurs, that the CFR was anxious to try and create a new world order with the USSR rather than with Britain following World War II. However, when the CFR approached the Soviet Embassy in 1944 with an offer of co-operation they were firmly rejected by Gromyko. ‘The new world order, as envisaged by the CFR, did involve co-existence with the USSR. The demise of world power for the British was evident by this action’.[26]
It so happened that the aim of eliminating the European empires after World War II converged with the aims of the USSR. As the primary winners of World War II both wanted to fill the vacuum of imperial scuttled that was imposed on the European powers, much more so by the USA than the USSR.[27] Again, it is a convergence of aims of this type, between the USA and the USSR, which has been mistaken for conspiratorial collusion between the two, even by analysts as acute as Ivor Benson and Douglas Reed. That the USA, including Wall Street interests, led the pressure to scuttle the old empires, should give pause to reconsider whether the push for a ‘world state’, now called ‘globalisation’, has anything of an Anglophile nature about it, and how it could relate to the British imperial dreams of Rhodes, Milner and ‘The Group’. Indeed as Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt both said in their post war manifestos for a new world order, the post-war world must be shaped by free trade on the ruins of imperial trade. The scuttling of the British and the French empires was followed along the same path by the Portuguese.[28]
Bolshevism
It is of note that at the Paris peace conference Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The London Times which, as stated by Quigley, worked in tandem with Oxford academics and Faber & Faber to influence British public opinion, critically observed the activities of the financial coterie that was to form the CFR. Steed described this as representing ‘German-Jewish financial interests’, headed by Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In those days, the talk among British ruling circles was not of ‘Anglo-American interests, but of ‘German-Jewish’. In a first-hand account of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Wickham Steed stated that proceedings were interrupted by the return from Moscow of William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens, ‘who had been sent to Russia towards the middle of February by Colonel House and Mr. Lansing, for the purpose of studying conditions, political and economic, therein for the benefit of the American Commissioners plenipotentiary to negotiate peace’.[29]
Reading the memoirs of Maj. Gen. William S. Graves,[30] head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia, it is apparent that whatever the Americans were doing in Russia during the Civil War, it was not for the purposes of fighting Bolshevism. Shortly before his execution by the Bolsheviks Admiral Kolchak asked the same question as to what exactly the Allies had been doing in Russia?[31]
Steed also refers to British Prime Minister Lloyd George as being likely to have known of the Bullitt Mission and its purpose. This coterie was in particular eager to secure the recognition of the Bolshevik regime in Russia, despite its fate still being far from certain. Steed wrote:
‘Potent international financial interests were at work in favour of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists. Those influences had been largely responsible for the Anglo-American proposal in January to call Bolshevist representatives to Paris at the beginning of the Peace Conference — a proposal which had failed after having been transformed into a suggestion for a Conference with the Bolshevists at Prinkipo… The well-known American Jewish banker, Mr. Jacob Schiff, was known to be anxious to secure recognition for the Bolshevists…’[32]
On the same basis that the German General Staff facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia, British rep. R. H. Bruce Lockhart focused on the Trotsky faction among the revolutionists. Lenin sought peace with Germany at any price, and the dispute led Trotsky to resign as commissar for foreign affairs, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk being concluded without him. This is one of the variables that often confuses motives in regard to conspiracy theories: there were influential factions in the USA and Britain which sought the Bolsheviks as war allies; while others looked on the business concessions that might be had from the ‘anti-capitalists’, while those such a American financier William Boyce Thompson saw possibilities for both aims.[33]
It is into this imbroglio that Alfred Milner is accused by some conspiratologists of being in Russia to provide funds for the Bolsheviks. Gary Allen, in his best-seller None Dare Call It Conspiracy, wrote that Milner was ‘an important financier of the Bolshevik Revolution’. Allen like many other conspiratologists proceeds from the claim that Milner was a Rothschild ‘agent’. He quotes the Czarist General, Arsene de Goulevitch[34] on the subject of funding revolutionaries, and cites him as stating that at the time Petrograd was ‘teeming with English’, including Milner. (There is no such impression of Russia ’teeming’ with British agents in Lockhart’s detailed memoirs). De Goulevitch claims that he learned in ‘private interviews’ that Milner had given eleven million roubles to revolutionaries.[35] No primary sources are cited by either Allen or de Goulevitch. There does not seem to be a distinction made between the February revolutionaries that brought Kerensky to power, and the Bolshevik revolt of October 1917.
Milner had been sent to Russia as part of an Allied conference in January 1917.[36] The visit cast a ‘gloom’ over him as to what he found in Russia. Lockhart quoted a letter from Milner to ‘Benji’ Bruce of the Embassy Chancery in Russia, shortly after Milner had returned to Britain: ‘Alas, alsas! I fear all the Missions of British Labour leaders and all the compliments we have showered on the Russian revolution – “triumph of democracy,” “the union of free peoples against tyrants,” etc., etc., are perfectly futile’. Milner foresaw that Russia would soon be out of the war, and that there was a ‘catastrophe’, a ‘typhoon’, approaching.[37] Lockhart was in Russia, mostly alone, to try and salvage whatever he could for British interests, which included cultivating primarily Trotsky, as the most likely of the Bolsheviks to resist a settlement with Germany.
So far from being pro-Bolshevik, Lockhart states that while Milner had arranged for Lockhart’s mission to Russia, as the best qualified, ‘my own conduct must have tried him highly’. Milner had a ‘profound abhorrence for Bolshevism… He was probably disappointed that I seemed to go over body and soul to the Bolsheviks’.[38]
Milner’s Social Ethos
Milner’s ‘Socialist’ ideas are anathema to many particularly in the American ‘Right’ which is influenced by the Austrian and Manchester schools of economics and regards anything with the word ‘social’ as incipient Marxism. Hence, ‘American patriots’ could readily associate Milner even with Bolshevism because he rejected unbridled capitalism. W. Cleon Skousen, whose book The Naked Capitalist, is subtitled “A review and commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley’s book Tragedy & Hope’, wrote that Quigley ‘bluntly confesses’ that the ‘International Bankers’ who set out to ‘remake the world’ were ‘perfectly confident that they could use their money’ to control ‘the Communist-Socialist conspiratorial groups’. This is traced back to Rhodes and others at Oxford under the tutelage of John Ruskin, who had persuaded them to become ‘socialists’.[39]
Ruskin, to the contrary, possessed a social ethos, that has widely been called ‘socialist’ by friend and foe, but which is more a forerunner of what Spengler called, in its German form ‘Prussian socialism’. That is to say, Ruskin, like Spengler, saw ‘socialism’ of the class war type not as transcending capitalism but as a product of it. He regarded socialism as ‘simply chaos,’ towards which economists were tending and from which he was attempting to save them. He described himself as ‘illiberal’, but thought that revolution might be required when there is nothing much left worth conserving. He eschewed the description ‘socialist’, and never so much as alluded to Marx. [40] Christianity remained the centre of Ruskin’s ideas.[41]
Milner’s ideas on political economy reflect those of Ruskin. Milner, in contrast to some others in the Group, stated that finance must be subordinated to economics, and the latter to politics.[42] Subordination of economic and financial questions to statesmanship is an idea that was predominant in the German conservative revolutionary movement of the same period. Oswald Spengler for example wrote a text called Prussianism and Socialism,[43] which contrasted the English notion of ‘socialism’ embodied by Marxism, with that of the ‘Prussian’ idea which meant the duty of all classes to the State.
Free trade and financial capitalism dominated The Group’s thinking from 1919-1931 according to Quigley. For a society committed to Empire unity, the embrace of Free Trade doctrine even for a decade is of long duration, and seems to reflect the influence that bankers such as Lazards were able to exercise in The Group through some key individuals.[44] This however does not equate with the assumption that The Group was or is a ‘conspiracy of international bankers’. Milner’s economic views again had the upper hand in 1931, according to Quigley.[45]
Milner believed in imperial autarchy and was a key campaigner for tariff reform in the Unionist Party, despite his deep misgivings about party politics. In 1907 a series of Milner’s speeches on tariff reform were published as a book. Much of what Milner said remains a better source of real Conservatism than the Whiggery that now predominates. Milner admitted to having previously been a Free Trader. He saw that one does not have a strong nation or a strong empire without a healthy people and it was imperative that no class should be relegated to the economic and social dump. Milner explained what really amounts to a return of noblesse oblige:
‘There can be no adequate prosperity for the forty or fifty million people in these islands without the Empire and all that it provides; there can be no enduring Empire without a healthy, thriving, manly people at the centre. Stunted, overcrowded town populations, irregular employment, sweated industries, these things are as detestable to true Imperialism as they are to philanthropy, and they are detestable to the Tariff Reformer. His aim is to improve the condition of the people at home, and to improve it concurrently with strengthening the foundations of the Empire. Mind you, I do not say that Tariff Reform alone is going to do all this. I make no such preposterous claim for it. What I do say is that it fits in better alike with a policy of social reform at home and with a policy directed to the consolidation of the Empire than our existing fiscal system does’.[46]
He addressed the issue raised still to justify Free Trade to the masses, that of cheapness of imports for the home market, showing how little has changed over a century in regard to Free Trade arguments. To Milner this was reducing the great questions of economics and politics as a matter of shopping:
‘Talking of cheapness, however, I must make a confession which I hope will not be misunderstood by ladies present who are fond of shopping—I wish we could get out of the way of discussing national economics so much from the shopping point of view. Surely what matters, from the point of view of the general well-being, is the productive capacity of the people, and the actual amount of their production of articles of necessity, use, or beauty. Everything we consume might be cheaper, and yet if the total amount of things which were ours to consume was less we should be not richer but poorer. It is, I think, one of the first duties of Tariff Reformers to keep people’s eyes fixed upon this vital point—the amount of our national production. It is that which constitutes the real income of the nation, on which wages and profits alike depend’.[47]
However, trade protection must work in tandem with imperial preferences, and Milner foresaw by several decades that others outside the Empire would seek to detach the Dominions from Britain through free trade. Milner and his colleagues were imperialists, not little-Englanders, let alone willing to sell-out to the anti-imperialist free trade objectives of the USA, reflected in the Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Milner was thoroughly opposed to internationalism.
‘Preference is vital to the future growth of British trade, but it is not only trade which is affected by it. The idea which lies at the root of it is that the scattered communities, which all own allegiance to the British Crown, should regard and treat one another not as strangers but as kinsmen, that, while each thinks first of its own interests, it should think next of the interests of the family, and of the rest of the world only after the family. That idea is the very corner-stone of Imperial unity’.[48]
Milner also pointed out a matter that was raised several decades later by the British conservative philosopher Antony Ludovici, that it was the Tories who were responsible for advanced social reforms:
‘…Socialism is not necessarily synonymous with robbery. Correctly used, the word only signifies a particular view of the proper relation of the State to its citizens—a tendency to substitute public for private ownership, or to restrict the freedom of individual enterprise in the interests of the public. But there are some forms of property which we all admit should be public and not private, and the freedom of individual enterprise is already limited by a hundred laws. Socialism and Individualism are opposing principles, which enter in various proportions into the constitution of every civilised society; it is merely a question of degree. One community is more Socialistic than another. The same community is more Socialistic at one time than at another. This country is far more Socialistic than it was fifty years ago, and for most of the changes in that direction the Unionist and the Tory party are responsible. The Factory Acts are one instance; free education is another. The danger, as it seems to me, of the Unionist party going off on a crusade against Socialism is that in the heat of that crusade it may neglect, or appear to neglect, those social evils of which honest Socialism is striving, often, no doubt, by unwise means, to effect a cure…
‘The true antidote to revolutionary Socialism is practical social reform. That is no claptrap phrase—although it may sound so; there is a great historical truth behind it. The revolutionary Socialist—I call him revolutionary because he wants to alter the whole basis of society—would like to get rid of all private property, except, perhaps, our domestic pots and pans. He is averse from private enterprise. He is going absurdly too far; but what gave birth to his doctrine? The abuse of the rights of private property, the cruelty and the failure of the scramble for gain, which mark the reign of a one-sided Individualism. If we had not gone much too far in one direction, we should not have had this extravagant reaction in the other. But do not let us lose our heads in face of that reaction. While resisting the revolutionary propaganda, let us be more, and not less, strenuous in removing the causes of it’.[49]
Compare such ‘socialist’ views of Milner with those of the later Conservative philosopher, Ludovici, and one might see a Tory tradition altogether different from that which has been pursued for decades and is falsely called ‘right-wing’ by pundits particularly in the Anglophone world:
‘Dealing with the question of Health first, it appears fairly obvious from the facts known about the Middle Ages, and from our knowledge of the minute care of the health and welfare of the community taken by the governing classes of that period, that mediæval society would have been much better able to handle the problems created by the Industrial Revolution than were the statesmen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. … The statesmen of the Middle Ages, and above all the King at their head, were perfectly well aware that the health and happiness of the individual subject were questions which it was incumbent upon the State to study and understand. By the time that Charles I was beheaded, however, this doctrine had become almost obsolete. Individual happiness and health, were regarded as beyond the sphere of government, and it was left to Socialism in the nineteenth century to revive the mediæval and wholly Conservative view that the State had a direct interest — nay an urgent duty, in caring for the health and happiness of the people.
‘Against those who still think this view purely Socialistic, it is idle to argue that you cannot preserve a nation’s identity throughout change without caring for its health and its happiness, and therefore that sound Conservative politics must be concerned with the national health. The fact that Tories and Conservatives long neglected this part of their political doctrine, and that by so doing they created the breach which Socialism fills, is one too historical to influence the cogitations of the average modern journalist or politician’.[50]
- H. Bruce Lockhart summarised the character of Milner as, so far from being machiavellian, not having any ‘of the tricks of the politician’, there was ‘the complete absence of ambitious scheming or of anything approaching self-conceit in his character, and his broad and vigorous patriotism made him the ideal inspirer of youth’, a man with ‘nobleness of mind’ and’ lofty idealism’. Of his social ethos Lockhart stated that Milner had little respect for the aristocrat, who had become ‘effete’, ‘and none at all for the financier, who had made his money not by production but by the manipulation of the market’.[51]
A ‘Jewish Conspiracy’?
While conspiratologists such as W. Cleon Skousen,[52] Gary Allen[53] and Dr. Antony Sutton[54] have been at pains to state that the ‘international conspiracy’ is not Jewish, others have seen the presence of Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit among The Group as proving that the ‘Anglo-American Establishment’ is just a front for Jewish bankers.
Indeed, it transpired, although still not well known, that Milner was the actual drafter of the Balfour Declaration,[55] which was a very cautious British measure of support for a Jewish home within Palestine so long as this did not encroach upon the Palestinians. Milner and most of The Group however were not supporters of Zionism beyond this modest concession. Moreover, while it might be difficult to understand today, the predominant attitude among the British ‘ruling class’ was one of pro-Arab sentiment, based on the personal experiences of many with Arab civility and honour. We can get something of the sentiment in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
The Milner Group took little part in the administration of the Palestine Mandate, but did influence British policy. Quigley states that the group did not push a pro-Zionist policy because they foresaw Zionist settlers pushing out the Arabs, and that they were concerned about alienating the Arabs from Western and particularly British culture. Quigley considers that in the long run The Group policy was pro-Arab. Members of The Group seem to have naively believed that a settlement of Jews into a ‘national home’ within a pro-western Arab federation could coexist to the benefit of both Arabs and Jews.[56] Milner speaking to Parliament in 1923 believed that the Balfour Declaration he had drafted was ‘completely different’ from the policy of the ‘extreme Zionists’.[57] Milner stated that Palestine should remain a permanent mandate for Britain, and that it ‘must never become a Jewish state’.[58] The Group seemed very naïve as to the situation with the Zionists. It seems that they were trying to do the decent thing by both the Arabs and the Jews, and there was discord among The Group as to Partition.[59] This however is not the same as ‘Jewish conspiracy’. However, Milner died in 1925, and The Group later pursued a more pro-Zionist policy via the part-Jewish Leopold Amery.
Internationalism
Cospiratology posits the CFR at the centre of internationalism. After World War I this new international order was to be predicated on President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and a League of Nations. Ironically, it was the U.S. Senate that rejected the League, indicating that the internationalists were not all-powerful.
As for the Milner Group they unequivocally rejected any notion of the League as a basis for ‘world government’, despite the involvement of Group luminaries such as General Smuts in the creation of the League. Quigley empathised that The Group never intended the League as an enforcer of ‘collective security’, or to have the option of sanctions. From the start The Group expected that the League would be a centre of co-operation in ‘non-political matters’, and ‘as a centre for consultation in political matters’. The states would retain full sovereignty and voluntarily cooperate on ‘social matters’. Already in 1919 The Group’s support for a League of Nations was dampened by the strident internationalism promoted by France and by President Wilson. The Group preferred to destroy the League than to empower it with the option of economic and political sanctions.[60]
The Group was not sufficiently confident in the judgement of non-British to subject Britain to an international body. It had been the British navy that had secured order in the world. A statement in the Group’s journal, The Round Table, asserted that if the League became an instrument for ‘world government’ it would ‘crash’. Another article in the same issue stated that the League should increase ‘national sovereignty’. In 1991 The Round Table was advocating the League as nothing more than a ‘clearing house for non-contentious business’ among bureaucrats. [61] The Group even praised the refusal of the U.S. Senate to ratify the League, and the principles of ‘world-interest’, an ‘international code’ and ‘an international ideal’. The U.S. Senate had rightly shown the flaws in the League.[62] In September 1920 The Round Table criticised President Wilson for wanting the League to become a ‘pseudo-world government’.[63]
Ultimately, Quigley states that The Group, so far from being a pervasive conspiracy over the world, was by late 1945 ‘in eclipse’, and it is ‘not clear what is happening’. Their centres of influence at Oxford University had already finished, and the new generation that took over from the founders lacked purpose, influence and drive. Quigley’s final words were that ‘it would seem that the great idealistic adventure which began with Toynbee and Milner in 1875 had slowly ground its way to a finish of bitterness and ashes’.[64]
Conclusion
- There is no ‘Anglo-American Establishment’ for world rule, serving a ‘network of international bankers’. What there is, is a ‘network of international bankers’, situated at both Wall Street and The City, and elsewhere, who are not duty-bound towards any nationality or citizenship, British or otherwise. The exception is that some such as Jacob Schiff, David Sassoon, Warburgs, and Rothschilds have had a loyalty to Judaism.
- Lord Rothschild was not the controlling influence behind the Rhodes/Milner Group, much less either one being a ‘Rothschild agent’. Rothschild, like other international bankers, worked within the imperialism of the times, and when expedient they scuttled the empires in favour of global Free Trade. There was rivalry between Free Trade and Imperial factions within ‘The Group’, Milner representing the latter.
- The Group, so far from promoting world government, or even world law, actively opposed any such notions.
- The alliance between the CFR and The Round Table Group was still-born in 1919.
- Milner was opposed to both financial capital and to what today is recognised as Zionism. He would have made the most unlikely ‘Rothschild agent’.
- Milner opposed Bolshevism and all forms of class-war socialism, in favour of an ethical socialism that is intrinsic to conservatism as the basis for national unity and a healthy people.
[1] Steve Sailer, ‘Carroll Quigley’s Conspiracy Theory: The Milner Group’, The Unz Review, 25 July, 2015, http://www.unz.com/isteve/
[2] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf
[3] Quigley, Tragedy & Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
[4] Ibid., p. 950.
[5] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street & the Rise of Hitler (Suffolk: Broomfield Books, 1976).
[6] Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, op. cit., p. 954.
[7] Ibid., pp. 892-895.
[8] Ibid., p. 1248.
[9] Quigley, Establishment, op. cit., xi.
[10] Quigley, Tragedy…, op. cit., p. 51.
[11] Ibid., pp. 51-56.
[12] A cursory google search for Milner will show this.
[13] S. Sailer, op. cit.
[14] Benjamin was Jewish albeit raised very casually in Reform Judaism and marrying a Catholic, but that is incriminating enough for many. Of the supposed funding of the Confederacy by the Rothschilds, this comprised one loan not by Rothschild but by Erlanger, which Benjamin regarded as usurious, although he had whittled the interest on the loan down after considerable haggling. Rather, after that, the Confederacy was largely funded by fiat money, the Graybacks, based on a cotton standard. Benjamin’s inspiration for the Confederate ethos were the British Cavaliers. See: Bolton, The Banking Swindle (London, 2013) pp. 129-143.
Bolton, ‘Banking and the Confederacy’, Radix Journal, July 26 2011, http://www.radixjournal.com/altright-archive/altright-archive/main/the-magazine/banking-and-the-confederacy
[15] Derek Wilson, Rothschild (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988), p. 303.
[16] Ibid., p. 304.
[17] Ibid., pp 305.
[18] Quigley, Establishment, op. cit., p. 34.
[19] Ibid., p. 40.
[20] Ibid., p. 38.
[21] Ibid., p. 39.
[22] Thom Burnett and Alex Games, Who Really Runs the World? (London: Collins & Brown, 2005).
[23] Ibid., p. 100.
[24] Ibid., p. 103.
[25] Peter Grose, Continuing The Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, ‘ ‘The Inquiry’, www.cfr.org/content/publications/…/Continuing_The_Inquiry.pdf
[26] Bolton, ‘Don’t Blame the Brits’, Foreign Policy Journal, August 8 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/08/08/dont-blame-the-brits/
[27] Bolton, ‘The Geopolitics of White Dispossession’, Radix, Washington, Vol. 1, 2012, pp. 105-130.
[28] Bolton, ‘Last Empire: How Europe Lost Africa’, Quarterly Review, http://www.quarterly-review.org/last-empire-how-europe-lost-africa/
[29] Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years 1892-1922 A personal narrative, ‘The Peace Conference, The Bullitt Mission’, Vol. II (New York: Doubleday Page and Co., 1924), p. 301.
[30] William S. Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure 1918-1920 (Peter Smith Publishers, New York: 1931).
[31] Bolton, ‘Lessons from America’s Intervention in Russia’, Foreign Policy Journal, 13 January 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/01/13/lessons-from-americas-intervention-in-russia-1918-1920/
[32] Henry Wickham Steed, op. cit.
[33] Thompson was head of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia, which comprised significantly more Wall Street than medical personnel. See: Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street & the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Arlington House, 1974), pp. 71-88.
For Thompson’s views on the Bolsheviks see: ‘Bolsheviki will not make separate peace; only those who make up privileged class under the Czar would do so, says Col. W. B. Thompson, just back from Red Cross Mission’, New York Times, 27 January 1918.
[34] Arsene de Goulevitch, Czarism and Revolution (Hawthorne, Ca.: Omni Publications, 1962).
[35] Gary Allen, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, (Seal Breach, Ca.: 1972), pp. 79-83.
[36] R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London: Putnam 1934), pp. 162-163.
[37] Ibid., p. 169.
[38] Ibid., p. 208.
[39] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Capitalist (Salt Lake City, 1970), p. 38.
[40] Peter Anthony, John Ruskin’s Labour: A Study of Ruskin’s Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 173.
[41] Ibid., p. 11.
[42] Quigley, Establishment, op. cit., p. 122.
[43] Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism, 1920, https://archive.org/details/PrussianismAndSocialism
[44] Quigley, Establishment, op. cit., p. 123.
[45] Ibid., p. 123.
[46] Milner, Constructive Imperialism: Five Lectures (1907), Tunbridge Wells, October 24, 1907, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15681/15681-h/15681-h.htm
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Milner, ibid., Guildford, October 29, 1907.
[50] Anthony Ludovici, A Defence of Conservatism: A Further Text-Book for Tories (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927) http://www.anthonymludovici.com/dc_04.htm
[51] Lockkhart, op. cit., p. 207.
[52] Skousen, op. cit., p. 8.
[53] Allen, op. cit., p. 47.
[54] Sutton, Wall St. & The Bolshevik Revolution, op., cit., p. 185.
[55] Quigley, Establishment, op. cit., p. 169.
[56] Ibid., p. 171.
[57] Ibid., p. 172.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., p. 175.
[60] Ibid., pp. 248-250.
[61] ‘Windows of Freedom’, The Round Table, December 1918, cited by Quigley, ibid., p. 252.
[62] Cited by Quigley, ibid., p. 255.
[63] Ibid., p. 256.
[64] Ibid., p. 310.