This is just a short addendum to an earlier blog article: Freedom and Structure in Human Life — What is a Conspiracy?.
At the time I wrote that earlier article, I was looking unsuccessfully on the Internet for some overview articles I’d read, articles written by Murray Rothbard, a good, thorough, and reliable scholar so far as I can tell. This is the specific article which had impressed me most: Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy . Professor Rothbard also wrote a short update: The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited.
This is my summary of the lesson to be learned by a clear-eyed view of matters:
The powerful and the wealthy form a ‘class’ of sorts which simply excludes the rest of us from their struggles for power, one criminal family or gang in this class fighting against another criminal operation, gathering into a united force only to protect their general realm from any possibility of reform or of ‘invasion’ by the common folk.
For a very compatible treatment of this issue by another reliable historian, you can read Gore Vidal’s series of novels going from Burr to The Golden Age. These novels deal with various issues but give a good overview of the growth of the American elite of bankers and politicians — true industrialists, producers of wealth, such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford were despised for their biases against imperialism and foreign adventures in general. In particular, Vidal’s novel “Empire” gives an interesting account of the partially successful effort to convert McKinley from a hard-headed locally-biased politician into a proto-emperor and the coming to power of the uninhibited Emperor Teddy. The House of Morgan and the House of Rockefeller were on the rise along with the more ephemerally occupied House of White. Even the feisty Teddy took banker money while still talking the talk of a reformer.
I repeat that the great conspiracy of the modern world isn’t really a conspiracy. It’s not secret if you read serious histories of the library-bound or journalistic sort. It’s not unified in the way of an super- or sub-human conspiracy run by Satan or the Jesuits or the Freemasons or the Communist Party or Hitler-cloning Nazis in South America or selfish genes. This conspiracy is really just an indirect way of separating the citizens of the modern world into haves and have-nots. We don’t have an official aristocracy, at least not in the United States. As a consequence, there has been no conservative and publicly recognized class to man the bulwarks against the barbarians named Morgan or Rockefeller or Walker or Soros. The barbarians often bring fresh blood, but they should be taught some sense of public honor until the generation arrives when we know how to form polities without some sort of aristocracy forming, by one process or another.
The great non-conspiracy of the modern world has been the conversion of the prosperous countries of the West into ganglands where the House of Morgan once waged war against the House of Rockefeller and now… Now, the situation is more complex and probably more unstable. The West as we know it is falling. Maybe China and India will replace the countries of the West as the dominant powers. Maybe the West will recover in some way. In any case, the up-and-coming leaders of the human race, whoever they will prove to be, should take note of the way in which a self-seeking and self-defined aristocracy formed in the United States in the way of a cancer or a parasite rather than forming in the way of an organ of that public body.
Cancers. Parasites. Criminal gangs. Take your pick, but don’t romanticize the disgusting mass as a superhuman conspiracy. And don’t dismiss it because of the nervous laughter of establishment thinkers.