Lyndon LaRouche

(This is the third of four blogs about the Club of Rome, which along with Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, is an important think tank in the Round Table network of world elites. Bill Clinton’s mentor Carroll Quigley describes their history and function in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope.)

Lyndon LaRouche seems to be the main source of claims that the Club of Rome (COR) is part of a 300 year old secret sect called the Illuminati and is responsible for a variety of depopulation schemes, as well as a plot to establish a one world government. As cult expert Dennis King describes in Lyndon Larouche and the New American Fascism, LaRouche began adulthood as a leftist and in the 1980s became a right wing fascist and would be FBI/CIA informant (see http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/review3.htm). Much of the inflammatory language on New World Order (NOW) sites is attributed to the Club of Rome but actually originates in LaRouche publications. This material is then repeated on numerous conspiracy websites, citing the COR, rather than LaRouche as the original source.

One example is the 1980 “Global Future: A Time to Act,” which stresses the importance of enacting population policies. Numerous New World Order websites claim this report calls for sterilization and abortion. The report, available from Law Digital Commons, makes no mention whatsoever of either sterilization or abortion (see Global Future: A Time to Act). This false claim actually originates from a 1982 article in LaRoche’s Intelligence Review called “Global 2000: Blueprint for Suicide.”

These right wing conspiracy sites also frequently misquote a 1980 report by Club of Rome member Harland Cleveland, a former US Ambassador to NATO, as calling for deliberate genocide of “useless eaters” in third world nations. The actual source of this statement isn’t the Club of Rome, but a 1984 publication by Hela Zepp and Lyndon LaRoche entitled The Hitler People.

Do Corporations Fund Right Wing Conspiracy Websites?

The owners of these right wing conspiracy websites are often dismissed as deluded paranoids. However the consistency of the messages promoted suggests a more sinister and coordinated propaganda agenda. In my view these sites play an important role in discrediting legitimate academic and journalistic research into genuine conspiracies (also known as SCADS or State Crimes Against Democracy). Moreover blaming all the ills of the world on secretive fraternal groups, be they the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Rothschilds or the Knights of Malta, is very effective in diverting attention from the far more important role corporate lobbies play in controlling the so-called democratic governments of industrialized countries. By making public the names of banks and corporations who are subverting democratic government, grassroots activists have the ability to organize and thwart their influence. However there isn’t a whole lot any of us can do about anonymous global elites who meet in secret. I have a strong hunch the sites that promote these cabalistic conspiracies, like the climate change denial sites, receive major support from right wing corporate types. Their intent, in my view, is to neutralize the growing anticorporate movement, which surely represents a major threat to their domination of Congress and the White House.

How Round Table Elites Exert Their Antidemocratic Influence

Obviously none of this negates the reality that the Club of Rome is predominantly an antidemocratic group run by corporate elites. Although the membership of the COR and their meetings is a matter of public record, there is no question that regular meetings between lawmakers and corporate elites have major influence on government policy. At the same time, we need to be really clear how the Club of Rome, like the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission exert this influence. As think tanks, they have major influence over the mainstream media and academic and government debate. Yet none of the Round Table groups has either the funding nor infrastructure to implement policy – whether related to population control, sustainability, or supranational government – that they advocate in their discussion documents and reports.

Owing to their published views on overpopulation, numerous conspiracy websites blame the Club of Rome for the creation of the AIDS virus as part of a deliberate depopulation strategy. Although a growing body of evidence suggests that HIV may have been created via accidental or deliberate genetic manipulation and that this may have occurred in a Pentagon biological warfare lab, the Club of Rome has never had either the political power or scientific or technical wherewithal to play any direct role in developing biological warfare agents.

To be continued.