INCREASING INFLUENCE OF THE MOONIES:WWJD?

Reverend Moon

Reverend Moon, Alleged Drug Kingpin, Bush Family Benefactor and Rightwing Godfather

28-Oct-04Reverend Moon

BuzzFlash: "You wrote and researched a few chapters on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who publishes the right-wing newspaper, The Washington Times. Your research alleges that he has a very shady past, including evidence of some charges of his involvement in drug trafficking, among many other things...." Robert Parry: "Rev. Moon is perhaps the deepest pocket for the conservative infrastructure when looked at over the past quarter century. That money has been very important. We're not talking small sums - we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars, really into the billions of dollars. His sources of money have never been clarified, but... Moon's history goes back to an association with Japanese organized crime figures... His alliances with the conservatives have effectively given him political protection. And his alliances particularly with the Bush family have proven to be extremely important to him." Moon has paid the Bush family up to $10 million (enter 'Moon' in our search engine).

Rev. Moon Sells Submarines to North Korea, Raising Nuclear Threat

09-Aug-04

Reverend Moon

John Gorenfeld blogs, "Jane's Defense Weekly is reporting this week that Kim Jong-Il, unstable North Korean dictator may be able to target California with sea-launched missiles. His know-how, the Reuters story relates [I said his know-how, not actual launching platforms], comes from 12 ex-Soviet submarines that fell into his hands. They came with their original launch tubes and stabilizing gear intact. Where does Kim get those wonderful toys? Funny story: According to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents from 1994 (which you can browse here), they were furnished by Reverend Moon. Robert Parry, the ace reporter who broke the Iran-Contra story, obtained these files through the Freedom of Information Act while writing his 2000 story, 'Rev. Moon, North Korea and the Bushes,' about Moon's gifts to the Communist regime. Read on, if you dare. "

National Press Club Hosts Event Aimed at Giving Rev. 'I'm the Messiah' Moon a Chance to Explain Himself29-Jun-04Reverend Moon

US Newswire: "Intense media and public interest has arisen concerning an event held on March 23, 2004 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Questions and controversies have swirled regarding the purpose of the event, what happened, who attended and why. Were dignitaries 'duped' into attending? What about the provocative claims made by Rev. Moon? How did such an event take place on Capitol Hill? Are the charges of anti- semitism, homophobia, etc., true?" LOL!! The event, which they can't bring themselves to refer to in this press release: Moon crowned himself "Messiah" and waxed psychotic before an audence that included several Congressfolk. So now the Press Club is hosting an "explain yourself if you can" event. This oughta be good! Hopefully Moon will be back on his meds by then.

Sun Myung Moon Crowns Himself the Messiah in Halls of Congress, Claims Stalin and Hitler Support him24-Jun-04

Reverend Moon

Independent: "The US Senate was used for a bizarre ritual in which the Rev Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification church, was 'crowned' and declared himself the messiah in the presence of more than a dozen Republican and Democratic members of Congress, it was reported yesterday. 'Emperors, kings and presidents ... have declared to all heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's saviour, messiah, returning Lord and true parent,' the 85-year-old Korean 'Moonie' cult leader told several hundred guests at the meeting in one of the Senate's office buildings on March 23, according to the Washington Post. He also claimed endorsement from Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, who had all been reformed and reborn through his church's teachings - an idiosyncratic version of Christianity which rejects the use of the cross as a symbol and denounces homosexuals as 'dirty dung-eating dogs'. " How can ANYONE take the Washington Times seriously?

The Rev. Moon Honored at Hill Reception, Lawmakers say they were mislead

23-Jun-04

Reverend Moon

Washington Post:More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in which Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons." ...Moon has claimed to have spoken in "the spirit world" with all deceased U.S. presidents, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and others. At the March 23 event, he said: "The founders of five great religions and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin . . . and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons." The article did not mention the Bush family connections to Moon.

Rev. Moon Crowned Himself the Messiah - in the US Senate!

11-Jun-04Reverend Moon

John Gorenfeld writes, "Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah - with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?... Section 9 of the Constitution forbids giving out titles of nobility [but that didn't deter] conservatives, the traditional fans of Moon's newspaper: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA.), Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.). But there were also liberal Democrats like Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) and Danny Davis (D-IL)... Moon's groups have taken home grant money from the Bush Administration, which has given his anti-sex missionaries $475,000 in Abstinence-Only dollars to bring Moon's crusade against "free sex" to both black New Jersey high-schoolers and native Africans."

At 84, Rev. Moon Still Spreads His Eerie Influence

07-Jun-04Reverend Moon

"Having recently celebrated his 84th birthday, the Rev. Moon seems rejuvenated and desiring to increase his visibility, while at the same time the master of mixed and often convoluted messages appears to be preparing his final farewell to America. Along the way, however, he is trying to plant the seeds of his political legacy - with help from some powerful political friends.

On March 23, a group of the Rev. Moon's associates gathered at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. There, the Rev. presided over a ceremony presenting 'Crown of Peace' awards to a number of honored guests. Democrats Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Rep. Danny K. Davis of Illinois, Rep. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. of Georgia; Republicans Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland, Rep. Christopher B. Cannon of Utah, and Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania - received 'Ambassadors for Peace' awards. Decked-out in a campy floor-length cape, the Rev. Moon was presented with an ornate gold crown and a lifetime achievement award."

Rev. Moon: 'Homo Marriage' is Driving Me Out of the Country Until 2012

30-Mar-04Reverend Moon

John Gorenfeld writes, "The last time Moon said he was giving up on America, taking his ball, and going home was 1992. That was when the defeat of Bush Sr. soured his feelings for a country he henceforth denounced as 'Satan's harvest.' This weekend, he's announced he's jetting -- while rolling back the date of completion for his Taliban-esque 'Fatherland' to a Blade Runner-ish 2012. Is he envisioning a two-term John Kerry presidency as a long time out for Moonie access to the White House? From a Mar. 24 appearance of conservative media mogul Sun Myung Moon, the following disjointed ideas: 'True Father spent 34 years here in America to guide this country in the right way. Yesterday was the turning point. Now I'm going back to Korea.[...] Thirty years ago, Christianity agreed with Father how to save the world. Now it's right I received the crown...[...] The reality is, if America doesn't follow heavenly ideals, it will perish. Homo marriage abuses blood lineage.'"

Drudge and Andrew Sullivan's Double Standards on Homophobia, Especially Rev. Moon's

14-Jan-04Reverend Moon

Michelangelo Signorile writes: "Can you imagine the owners of the New York Times--or the Los Angeles Times or Cleveland's Plain-Dealer--pining out loud for the mass extinction of an entire group of people? Let's say they envisioned the incineration of all gays, claiming it was God's plan and had their words posted on the web. At the very least, sensation-stalker Matt Drudge would link to the comments immediately, rightly whipping it into a major story... Drudge's openly gay compatriot, Andrew Sullivan, would no doubt take up the cause as well, attacking those nasty homophobe publishers on the left, railing on his web site about what hypocrites liberals are. But if the paper in question is an influential conservative daily--one that pumps up both of these right-wing gasbags regularly, and one that publishes Sullivan's work--then the rantings and ravings of its demagogic owner don't seem to matter." Especially if it's rightwing sugardaddy Reverend Sun Myung Moon!

The Disturbing Political Influence of Rev. Moon

24-Nov-03Reverend Moon

From the Brown Daily Herald: "So Moon's clearly a problem, but how connected is he really to the Republican Party? Well, he's a major contributor to scores of conservative think tanks, including ones that aided the presidential campaigns of Reagan and both Bushes. The Heritage Foundation has even employed a good number of top-ranking Moonies. The elder Bush has, since his retirement, given a number of speeches at Moon's organizations, for which he received thousands of dollars in payment. Moon and Daddy Bush are apparently quite chummy... Admittedly, there's no smoking gun that would suggest Moon is behind the scenes, explicitly making policy in the Bush White House. Of course, there's no smoking gun that would suggest that Global Crossing or Halliburton are making decisions in the Bush White House either -- there's just a trail of money to the corporations, just like there's a trail of money to Moon."

Is the New UPI Editor a Starry-Eyed Devotee of Rev. Moon?

11-Nov-03Reverend Moon

John Gorenfield writes: "As you may recall, United Press International was the home of legendary reporter Helen Thomas until it was bought by the Moonies in 2000. Now, the editors of Rev. Moon's publications claim a Christian Science Monitor-ish separation between church and newspaper. But today, UPI has announced that its new editor is to be Michael J. Marshall, who used to run Moon's The World and I, and, well... Cut to May, 2003, in a 'Workshop on Journalism and Media.' Your host: media mogul Rev. Moon. The following scene, transcribed here at a Unification Church website, occurs. Moon is ticking off the seven reasons he's the Messiah, and talking about how to get the word out in the press, when suddenly... 'REV. MOON (addressing Marshall): Are you with World and I? Can you follow what I'm saying, do what I'm saying, the contents? For how long? MICHAEL MARSHALL, EDITOR: I will commit to follow forever. REV. MOON: Forever, for life. Great.'"

Gun that Killed Davis Designed by Rev. Moon's Son

28-Jul-03Reverend Moon

Michael Daly writes for NY Daily News: "The pistol Othniel Askew produced from the scant concealment of his light summer suit to kill Councilman James Davis was a Kahr MK-40 semiautomatic 'pocket rocket' designed and manufactured by the son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon to be at once 'super-compact' and super lethal. 'It's a unique design,' a spokesman for Kahr Arms of Blauvelt, Rockland County, said Friday. 'It's carved out its own niche.'"

Moonie Times Admits Publishing Fake State Dept. Letter

17-Jul-03Reverend Moon

From Reuters: "The Washington Times [owned by Rev. Moon] said Tuesday it regretted publishing what it said was a forged letter in the name of a U.S. ambassador and was working with the State Department to track the origin of the document. The letter, in the name of Stephan Minikes, ambassador to the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, accused U.S. career diplomats of disloyalty to the objectives of the Bush administration. We have been ... informed from the highest level at the State Department, and we accept as true that the ambassador was not the author of this letter,' editor in chief Wesley Pruden said in a written statement."

The Truth about William Bennett and Reverend Moon

08-Apr-03Reverend Moon

"Bennett's involvement with a 'megalomaniac cult leader' -- I was referring to none other than Sun Myung Moon. One of the things that makes Bennett a paragon of anti-virtue has been his role in the attempt by the American right to rehabilitate Sun Myung Moon -- a truly evil man.... That didn't prevent Bennett from giving credibility to Moon by accepting a generous speaking fee to appear before a Moonie front group. Let's discuss just a few of Moon's transgressions against humanity: ...he developed 'purification rituals'-which conveniently involved deflowering naive young women (Ironically, the Bush regime is paying $450,000 in taxpayer money to the depraved billionaire for abstinence education)... (Bush also named Josette Shiner, a Moonie and former head of Bennett's Empower America to the post of deputy U.S. trade representative; ...Bennett hired someone from an America-hating cult to run his group that has the name 'Empower America'?)." Moon has paid millions to Bush Sr. and Falwell.

'God-Given Christian President'? Cult-Leader Reverend 'I am the Reincarnation of Jesus Christ' Moon Influences Bush; Gave Millions to Bush Sr.23-Jan-03Reverend Moon

Wayne Madsen writes: "When Bush added North Korea to his list of 'Axis of Evil' nations, the influence of the self-declared reincarnation of Jesus Christ, the 'Reverend' Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, loomed largely over the White House decision-making process... Bush, a self-described 'born again Christian' who has maintained close links to Moon... In 1996, former President Bush, who has taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from Moon, spoke before a Moon audience in Argentina and declared Moon to be a 'man of vision'...Bush [Jr.] seems to value Moon's commitment to family values. Bush named David Caprara, the head of Moon's American Family Coalition, as the director of VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America)...It should be noted that while Bush [Sr.] was head of the CIA, Moon was organizing a number of pro-American and anti-communist rallies and front organizations around the world. Moon was a convenient agent of influence for the CIA and Mr. Bush."

Archconservative America-hater Moon owns Fallwell

10-Jul-02Reverend Moon

When the Rev. Jerry Falwell's university faced bankruptcy, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church bailed it out with millions in loans and grants. It is Moon who said he would "absorb" decadent American freedoms and that American women were whores. He's also a big backer of the Bush family, of course, and publishes the ultra rightwing Washington Times.

Moon's Speech at 'Washington Times' Anniversary Described as 'Embarrassing,' 'Humiliating,' and/or 'Painful to Watch'23-May-02Reverend Moon

The Washington Post Reports: "At Tuesday night's celebration of the Washington Times' 20th anniversary, its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon delivered an impassioned, hour-long evangelical sermon in Korean saying he established the newspaper "in response to heaven's direction...The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God." Later, he added: "The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world." By this point, several Times staffers had exited for the Hilton's bar, either because the party was alcohol-free or -- possibly -- because they needed a stiff drink." According to one staffer, many were "embarrassed," some "humiliated." Others described the speech as "painful to watch." In the wake of this performance, Phony-in Chief Welsey Pruden is still babbling to all who will listen about the paper's lack of rightwing religious bias!

Rev. Sun Myung Moon Throws a 20th Anniversary Party of His Washington Times, Complete with an Hour-Long Messianic Rant23-May-02Reverend Moon

Joke time! "What do you call a gathering of 3,000 people, a self-aggrandizing lecture by Dr. Laura Schlessinger and an hour-long sermon from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon? The Washington Times 20th-anniversary bash." (Washington Post) "What do Dr. Laura, the Washington Times, Enron, the Republican Party, and George Bush have in common? They've have all been keep artificially alive by regular huge infusions of corporate cash!" (Dems.com) "What does the Washington Times call a speech entitled 'The Life of Jesus as Seen From God's Will, and God's Warning to the Present Age, the Period of the Last Days'? A nonreligious editorial stance." (Unknown News). Biggest joke of the year: "The Washington Times" self-description as a "successful, unbiased" newspaper when it has only survived through billions in "religious aid."

The Moonie Times Says We Write 'Profanity-laced Vitriol'03-Jan-02Reverend Moon

Peter Roff writes in the Washington Times: "One only need surf over to a variety of web sites including Buzzflash, Bartcop, Democrats.com and others of the left-of-center variety to see the often-profanity laced vitriol, the derision with which the president and his administration are viewed. These web sites belong to individuals and groups that are generally anonymous, certainly not elected officials in the public eye. Perhaps they should be given some latitude for their abrasive style of communication, as they are not accustomed to the niceties of life and language inside the Washington Beltway." Oh, you mean like that displayed by Rev. Moon's Washington Times and Insight Magazine that served as conduits for illicit and destructive leaks by Ken Starr's office? You mean the disinformation and outright lies propagated by Moon's media outlets? Meanwhile, the rightwing rank-and-file are led around like good little Moonies.

Peter Roff Responds to Buzzflash's Editorial, but Roff Has a 'Latest' Error of Fact of his Own03-Jan-02Reverend Moon

In a response to Roff's criticism of Democrats.com, Bartcop and Buzzflash, Buzz featured a GOPAC training memo to show the kind of language GOPAC members have used against their opponents. In reply, Roff wrote to Buzzflash that "the document to which you refer was created long before I arrived at GOPAC and - until now - I do not believe I had ever seen a copy. It certainly was not part of the training materials provided by the group during my tenure as you suggest in your current commentary. Please correct these latest errors of fact." But in his original article, Roff made an "error of fact" about us. He wrote that we are among a group of "web sites [that] belong to individuals and groups that are generally anonymous." All Roff had to do was look under our "Company" menu item to find out who owns Democrats.com - try that at WashingtonTimes.com! Roff's own problem with facts belies his use of plausible deniability about the GOPAC memo.

An Open Letter to Peter Roff, Ace 'Moonie-Tunes' Propagandist03-Jan-02Reverend Moon

Veteran journalist Judith Haney writes, "Peter, let me ask you a question just between us 'peers'. Why are you working for the religious cult leader, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who owns UPI and The Washington Times? I know of no respectable journalists who will work for him or any of his companies and organizations. So why do you work for him Peter?" Indeed, Roff writes for the UPI, from which Helen Thomas resigned the day after Moon took over. Check out the truly disturbing quotes by this dangerous cult leader and rightwing benefactor. While Moon has expanded his power over the Republican Party during the past two decades, the Media has refrained from exposing Moon, so most Americans know nothing about his extreme views. It's up to us to tell them about Moon and why he is such a danger to our country. A good place to start is with the links below Haney's column. Moon has paid George and Barbara Bush up to $10 million. And he gave $3.5 million to bail Jerry Falwell out of debt.

Just when you think it can't get any weirder -- Bush benefactor Reverend Moon in middle of Vatican drama25-Aug-01Reverend Moon

From the Boston Globe. "The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church, has weighed into the bizarre tug-of-war between his church and the Vatican over the Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who was married by Moon in May. A Unification Church spokesman, the Rev. Philip Schanker, said yesterday he had spoken by telephone to Moon, who expressed his support for Milingo's wife Maria Sung after her husband dropped from public view Aug. 8...Milingo and Sung were paired up by Moon and married in a mass ceremony in New York, scandalizing the Catholic world, whose clergy are not allowed to marry…But after meeting Pope John Paul II and a flock of reporters, the African prelate vanished from public view, sparking a strange struggle between the Vatican, his wife and her entourage of Unification Church members." Moon is of course the cult leader and Bush/GOP sugar daddy who has paid Bush Sr. and Barbara up to $10 million (Enter 'moon' in our .Compass search engine).

Moon's Goals07-Jun-01Reverend Moon

Writes renowned cult watcher Steve Hassan: "Moon, a 77-year old Korean billionaire and convicted felon who served 13 months in federal prison for tax evasion and conspiracy in the 80s, owns the Washington Times newspaper, Insight magazine, The University of Bridgeport (CT), and The New Yorker Hotel. His empire was investigated in 1977-78 by Congress as part of Korean CIA activities in the U.S. Moon's stated ambitions include establishing a one-world government run by Moon and his leaders. His vision of Heaven on Earth includes absorbing all world religions into Unificationism as well as abolishing all languages except Korean. Members ritually pledge every Sunday morning, before an altar of Moon, to fight for the Fatherland (Korea)…The Rev. Al Sharpton recently had his vows renewed and was given the power to renew others' marriage vows." Moon is called a 'unifier' -- which is eerily similar to Bush's claims of being a 'uniter.' Moon has paid the Bush family up to $10 million after all!

It's A Moonie, Moonie, Moonie World! 28-May-01Reverend Moon

Moon told a lieutenant "part of our strategy in the U.S. must be to make friends in the FBI, the CIA and police forces, the military and business community . . . as a means of entering the political arena, influencing foreign policy, and ultimately establishing absolute dominion over the American people." Of course, these plans also include the US media. Representative Jim Leach of Iowa declared that the Unification Church has "infiltrated the New Right and the party it [the New Right] wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well." Moon not only owns the Washington Times, Insight Magazine and now UPI, but he has former employees (if not adherents) in other media positions, such as Fox News Tony Snow and allies like the stealthy Ralph Reed. Moon's Washington Times writers have authored right-wing hatchet books. The glassy-eyed Bill Sammon has just come out with the hilariously titled: "At Any Cost : How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election"!

More Evidence That Sharpton Is 'Being Used By Moon To Further Moon's Agenda'23-May-01Reverend Moon

According to counter-cult ministry New Covenant Publications, "Rev. Al Sharpton is another one also now being used by Sun Myung Moon to further Moon's agenda. He is very involved in seeking to persuade Christian Ministers to participate in this up-coming Unification Church 'Blessing Ceremony.' One of the main strategies of the Unification Church in promoting their 'Blessing Ceremony' is to target Christian Ministers hoping their influence would persuade whole congregations to participate." Also - from the Moonie 'True Parents' site (tparents.org): "Reverend Sharpton, father, husband, mayoral candidate and President of the National Action Network became Co-chairman of the Coalition for Harmony. The Coalition for Harmony was founded by [the Unification Church's] Rev. Joong Hyun Pak and Rev. Simon T. Levine in 1990."

Presidential Aspirant (?) Al Sharpton's Ties To Reverend Moon22-May-01Reverend Moon

Political websites are buzzing over a Time magazine interview of Reverend Al Sharpton, in which he ponders a run for the Presidency in 2004. Said Sharpton: "I feel that the Democratic Party must be challenged in 2004 because it didn't fight aggressively to protect our voting rights in Florida. I think we need to look at running a black in the primary. I have said I would be available to do it." Well, what do you know -- Sharpton criticizes the Democrats for the election theft by the Republicans! Could it be that Sharpton is part of a broader agenda that includes major Bush benefactor Reverend Moon? Check out this item from the Providence Journal: "The Rev. Al Sharpton, a national black political leader from New York City who is a Baptist minister, renewed his marriage vows in 1997 in a Unification Church ceremony [From the Providence Journal, Mar. 19, 2001]." This year Reverend Moon went on a 50-city speaking tour of mostly African-American congregations.

EXPORTING THE AMERICAN MODEL by Chalmers Johnson

by Chalmers Johnson

with introduction by Tom Engelhardt

in Tom Dispatch via Antiwar.com (May 3 2006)

After those weapons of mass destruction never appeared and Saddam's al-Qaeda connection proved but a figment of the overly vivid neocon (and vice-presidential) imagination, the Bush administration wheeled out the shiniest of American exports, democracy. It had worked for Ronald Reagan in Central America in the 1980s, why not in Iraq, too? Suddenly, actual democratic elections, which administration officials had headed off or tried to contain from the moment Baghdad fell, were de rigueur, the very essence of our mission in Iraq, the true reason that we Americans were placed on this Earth. Who even recalled (or now recalls) the tawdry history of the American occupation, of the way L Paul Bremer, our hapless viceroy in Baghdad, and his kleptomaniacal Coalition Provisional Authority did everything in their power, including canceling local elections, to ward off democracy or any significant expression of the popular will.

-
Here's how, back in 2005, Juan Cole described the administration's democratic urge for an electorate so restricted that it might have made Saudi Arabia look liberal:

-
"First they were going to turn Iraq over to [neocon favorite Ahmed] Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group."
Then, of course, Ayatollah Ali Sistani insisted; the Bush people caved; the Iraqis bravely turned out to vote in vast numbers; and those "purple fingers" proved just so useful on the American home front. Think of it as importing democracy. Unfortunately, the largely Shi'ite government elected proved awkward indeed and, via our ambassador in Baghdad, flights in by top officials, the power of the purse and the power of the gun, "pressure" has been constantly applied to restrain and thwart them. With Iraq now in chaos and seemingly at the edge of dismemberment, democracy restricted to Baghdad's Green Zone and once again anathema to the president's top officials, it seems the perfect moment to turn to the larger subject of exporting the American "model". Let Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2004) and a man with a memory, make some sense of the subject. Tom
-

Markets and Democracy

-
by Chalmers Johnson

-
There is something absurd and inherently false about one country trying to impose its system of government or its economic institutions on another. Such an enterprise amounts to a dictionary definition of imperialism. When what's at issue is "democracy", you have the fallacy of using the end to justify the means (making war on those to be democratized), and in the process the leaders of the missionary country are invariably infected with the sins of hubris, racism, and arrogance.

-
We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes". If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another thirty to forty years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.

-
We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us. In Iraq, bringing democracy became the default excuse for our warmongers - it would be perfectly plausible to call them "crusaders", if Osama bin Laden had not already appropriated the term -once the Bush lies about Iraq's alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological threats and its support for al-Qaeda melted away. Bush and his neocon supporters have prattled on endlessly about how "the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East", but the reality is much closer to what Noam Chomsky dubbed "deterring democracy" in a notable 1992 book of that name. We have done everything in our power to see that the Iraqis did not get a "free and fair election", one in which the Shia majority could come to power and ally Iraq with Iran. As Noah Feldman, the Coalition Provisional Authority's law adviser, put it in November 2003, "If you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected".

-
In the election of January 30 2005, the US military tried to engineer the outcome it wanted ("Operation Founding Fathers"), but the Shi'ites won anyway. Nearly a year later in the December 15 2005, elections for the national assembly, the Shi'ites won again, but Sunni, Kurdish, and American pressure has delayed the formation of a government to this moment. After a compromise candidate for prime minister was finally selected, two of the most ominous condottiere of the Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, flew into Baghdad to tell him what he had to do for "democracy" - leaving the unmistakable impression that the new prime minister is a puppet of the United States.

-
Hold the Economic Advice

-
After Latin America, East Asia is the area of the world longest under America's imperialist tutelage. If you want to know something about the US record in exporting its economic and political institutions, it's a good place to look. But first, some definitions.

-
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once argued that democracy is such an abused concept we should dismiss as a charlatan anyone who uses it in serious discourse without first clarifying what he or she means by it. Therefore, let me indicate what I mean by democracy. First, the acceptance within a society of the principle that public opinion matters. If it doesn't, as for example in Stalin's Russia, or present-day Saudi Arabia, or the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa under American military domination, then it hardly matters what rituals of American democracy, such as elections, may be practiced.

-
Second, there must be some internal balance of power or separation of powers, so that it is impossible for an individual leader to become a dictator. If power is concentrated in a single position and its occupant claims to be beyond legal restraints, as is true today with our president, then democracy becomes attenuated or only pro forma. In particular, I look for the existence and practice of administrative law - in other words, an independent, constitutional court with powers to declare null and void laws that contravene democratic safeguards.

-
Third, there must be some agreed-upon procedure for getting rid of unsatisfactory leaders. Periodic elections, parliamentary votes of no confidence, term limits, and impeachment are various well-known ways to do this, but the emphasis should be on shared institutions.

-
With that in mind, let's consider the export of the American economic, and then democratic, "model" to Asia. The countries stretching from Japan to Indonesia, with the exception of the former American colony of the Philippines, make up one of the richest regions on Earth today. They include the second most productive country in the world, Japan, with a per capita income well in excess of that of the United States, as well as the world's fastest growing large economy, China's, which has been expanding at a rate of over 9.5 percent per annum for the past two decades. These countries achieved their economic well-being by ignoring virtually every item of wisdom preached in American economics departments and business schools or propounded by various American administrations.

-
Japan established the regional model for East Asia. In no case did the other high-growth Asian economies follow Japan's path precisely, but they have all been inspired by the overarching characteristic of the Japanese economic system - namely, the combining of the private ownership of property as a genuine right, defensible in law and inheritable, with state control of economic goals, markets, and outcomes. I am referring to what the Japanese call "industrial policy" (sangyo seisaku). In American economic theory (if not in practice), industrial policy is anathema. It contradicts the idea of an unconstrained market guided by laissez faire. Nonetheless, the American military-industrial complex and our elaborate system of "military Keynesianism" rely on a Pentagon-run industrial policy - even as American theory denies that either the military-industrial complex or economic dependence on arms manufacturing are significant factors in our economic life. We continue to underestimate the high-growth economies of East Asia because of the power of our ideological blinders.

-
One particular form of American economic influence did greatly affect East Asian economic practice - namely, protectionism and the control of competition through high tariffs and other forms of state discrimination against foreign imports. This was the primary economic policy of the United States from its founding until 1940. Without it, American economic wealth of the sort to which we have become accustomed would have been inconceivable. The East Asian countries have emulated the US in this respect. They are interested in what the US does, not what it preaches. That is one of the ways they all got rich. China is today pursuing a variant of the basic Japanese development strategy, even though it does not, of course, acknowledge this.

-
Marketing Democracy

-
The gap between preaching and self-deception in the way we promote democracy abroad is even greater than in selling our economic ideology. Our record is one of continuous (sometimes unintended) failure, although most establishment pundits try to camouflage this fact.

-
The Federation of American Scientists has compiled a list of over 201 overseas military operations from the end of World War II until September 11 2001, in which we were involved and normally struck the first blow. [The list is reprinted by Gore Vidal in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated (Clairview Books, 2002), pages 22-41.] The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not included. In no instance did democratic governments come about as a direct result of any of these military activities.

-
The United States holds the unenviable record of having helped install and then supported such dictators as the Shah of Iran, General Suharto in Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Sese Seko Mobutu in Congo-Zaire, not to mention a series of American-backed militarists in Vietnam and Cambodia until we were finally expelled from Indochina. In addition, we ran among the most extensive international terrorist operations in history against Cuba and Nicaragua because their struggles for national independence produced outcomes that we did not like.

-
On the other hand, democracy did develop in some important cases as a result of opposition to our interference - for example, after the collapse of the CIA-installed Greek colonels in 1974; in both Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975 after the end of the US-supported fascist dictatorships; after the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986; following the ouster of General Chun Doo Hwan in South Korea in 1987; and following the ending of 38 years of martial law on the island of Taiwan in the same year.

-
One might well ask, however: What about the case of Japan? President Bush has repeatedly cited our allegedly successful installation of democracy there after World War II as evidence of our skill in this kind of activity. What this experience proved, he contended, was that we would have little difficulty implanting democracy in Iraq. As it happens though, General Douglas MacArthur, who headed the American occupation of defeated Japan from 1945 to 1951, was himself essentially a dictator, primarily concerned with blocking genuine democracy from below in favor of hand-picked puppets and collaborators from the prewar Japanese establishment.

-
When a country loses a war as crushingly as Japan did the war in the Pacific, it can expect a domestic revolution against its wartime leaders. In accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, which Japan accepted in surrendering, the State Department instructed MacArthur not to stand in the way of a popular revolution, but when it began to materialize he did so anyway. He chose to keep Hirohito, the wartime emperor, on the throne (where he remained until his death in 1989) and helped bring officials from the industrial and militarist classes that ruled wartime Japan back to power. Except for a few months in 1993 and 1994, those conservatives and their successors have ruled Japan continuously since 1949. Japan and China are today among the longest-lived single-party regimes on Earth, both parties - the nucleus of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party - having come to power in the same year.

-
Equally important in the Japanese case, General MacArthur's headquarters actually wrote the quite democratic constitution of 1947 and bestowed it on the Japanese people under circumstances in which they had no alternative but to accept it. In her 1963 book On Revolution (Viking Press, 1965) Hannah Arendt stresses "the enormous difference in power and authority between a constitution imposed by a government upon a people and the constitution by which a people constitutes its own government". She notes that, in post-World War I Europe, virtually every case of an imposed constitution led to dictatorship or to a lack of power, authority, and stability.

-
Although public opinion certainly matters in Japan, its democratic institutions have never been fully tested. The Japanese public knows that its constitution was bestowed by its conqueror, not generated from below by popular action. Japan's stability depends greatly on the ubiquitous presence of the United States, which supplies the national defense - and so, implicitly, the fairly evenly distributed wealth - that gives the public a stake in the regime. But the Japanese people, as well as those of the rest of East Asia, remain fearful of Japan's ever again being on its own in the world.

-
While more benign than the norm, Japan's government is typical of the US record abroad in one major respect. Successive American administrations have consistently favored oligarchies that stand in the way of broad popular aspirations - or movements toward nationalist independence from American control. In Asia, in the post-World War II period, we pursued such anti-democratic policies in South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), and Japan. In Japan, in order to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls, which seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party. We helped bring wartime Minister of Munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and financing a rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. Rather than developing as an independent democracy, Japan became a docile Cold War satellite of the United States - and one with an extremely inflexible political system at that.

-
The Korean Case

-
In South Korea, the United States resorted to far sterner measures. From the outset, we favored those who had collaborated with Japan, whereas North Korea built its regime on the foundation of former guerrilla fighters against Japanese rule. During the 1950s, we backed the aged exile Syngman Rhee as our puppet dictator. (He had actually been a student of Woodrow Wilson's at Princeton early in the century.) When, in 1960, a student movement overthrew Rhee's corrupt regime and attempted to introduce democracy, we instead supported the seizure of power by General Park Chung Hee.

-
Educated at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria during the colonial period, Park had been an officer in the Japanese army of occupation until 1945. He ruled Korea from 1961 until October 16 1979, when the chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency shot him to death over dinner. The South Korean public believed that the KCIA chief, known to be "close" to the Americans, had assassinated Park on US orders because he was attempting to develop a nuclear-weapons program which the US opposed. (Does this sound familiar?) After Park's death, Major General Chun Doo Hwan seized power and instituted yet another military dictatorship that lasted until 1987.

-
In 1980, a year after the Park assassination, Chun smashed a popular movement for democracy that broke out in the southwestern city of Kwangju and among students in the capital, Seoul. Backing Chun's policies, the US ambassador argued that "firm anti-riot measures were necessary". The American military then released to Chun's control Korean troops assigned to the UN Command to defend the country against a North Korean attack, and he used them to crush the movement in Kwangju. Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed. In 1981, Chun Doo Hwan would be the first foreign visitor welcomed to the White House by the newly elected Ronald Reagan.

-
After more than thirty postwar years, democracy finally began to come to South Korea in 1987 via a popular revolution from below. Chun Doo Hwan made a strategic mistake by winning the right to hold the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988. In the lead-up to the games, students from the many universities in Seoul, now openly backed by an increasingly prosperous middle class, began to protest American-backed military rule. Chun would normally have used his army to arrest, imprison, and probably shoot such demonstrators as he had done in Kwangju seven years earlier; but he was held back by the knowledge that, if he did so, the International Olympic Committee would move the games to some other country. In order to avoid such a national humiliation, Chun turned over power to his co-conspirator of 1979-80, General Roh Tae Woo. In order to allow the Olympics to go ahead, Roh instituted a measure of democratic reform, which led in 1993 to the holding of national elections and the victory of a civilian president, Kim Young Sam.

-
In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South Korea's maturing democracy, the government arrested generals Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo and charged them with having shaken down Korean big business for bribes - Chun Doo Hwan allegedly took $1.2 billion and Roh Tae Woo $630 million. President Kim then made a very popular decision, letting them be indicted for their military seizure of power in 1979 and for the Kwangju massacre as well. In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun and Roh guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to 22-and-a-half years in prison. In April 1997, the Korean Supreme Court upheld slightly less severe sentences, something that would have been simply unimaginable for the pro forma Japanese Supreme Court. In December 1997, after peace activist Kim Dae Jung was elected president, he pardoned them both despite the fact that Chun had repeatedly tried to have Kim killed.

-
The United States was always deeply involved in these events. In 1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought to investigate what happened at Kwangju on its own, the US government refused to cooperate and prohibited the former American ambassador to Seoul and the former general in command of US Forces Korea from testifying. The American press avoided reporting on these events (while focusing on the suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing in June 1989), and most Americans knew next to nothing about them. This cover-up of the costs of military rule and the suppression of democracy in South Korea, in turn, has contributed to the present growing hostility of South Koreans toward the United States.

-
Unlike American-installed or supported "democracies" elsewhere, South Korea has developed into a genuine democracy. Public opinion is a vital force in the society. A separation of powers has been institutionalized and is honored. Electoral competition for all political offices is intense, with high levels of participation by voters. These achievements came from below, from the Korean people themselves, who liberated their country from American-backed military dictatorship. Perhaps most important, the Korean National Assembly - the parliament - is a genuine forum for democratic debate. I have visited it often and find the contrast with the scripted and empty procedures encountered in the Japanese Diet or the Chinese National People's Congress striking indeed. Perhaps its only rival in terms of democratic vitality in East Asia is the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan. On some occasions, the Korean National Assembly is rowdy; fist fights are not uncommon. It is, however, a true school of democracy, one that came into being despite the resistance of the United States.

-
The Democracy Peddlers

-
Given this history, why should we be surprised that in Baghdad, such figures as former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L Paul Bremer III, former Ambassador John Negroponte, and present Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as a continuously changing cohort of American major-generals fresh from PowerPoint lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, should have produced chaos and probable civil war? None of them has any qualifications at all for trying to "introduce democracy" or American-style capitalism in a highly nationalistic Muslim nation, and even if they did, they could not escape the onus of having terrorized the country through the use of unrestricted military force.

-
Bremer is a former assistant and employee of Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig. Negroponte was American ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85, when it had the world's largest CIA station and actively participated in the dirty war to suppress Nicaraguan democracy. Khalilzad, the most prominent official of Afghan ancestry in the Bush administration, is a member of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon pressure group that lobbied for a war of aggression against Iraq. The role of the American military in our war there has been an unmitigated disaster on every front, including the deployment of undisciplined, brutal troops at places like the Abu Ghraib prison. All the United States has achieved is to guarantee that Iraqis will hate us for years to come. The situation in Iraq today is worse than it was in Japan or Korea and comparable to our tenure in Vietnam. Perhaps it is worth reconsidering what exactly we are so intent on exporting to the world.

-
Chalmers Johnson is, most recently, the author of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, as well as of MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) and Japan: Who Governs? (1995) among other works. This piece originated as "remarks" presented at the East Asia panel of a workshop on "Transplanting Institutions" sponsored by the Department of Sociology of the University of California, San Diego, held on April 21 2006. The chairman of the workshop was Professor Richard Madsen.

-
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=8932

-
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Narcissistic Personality Disorder
by Robert Jensen
ZNet (April 22 2006)

Politicians and pundits in the United States love to talk about our "national character", typically in rapturous tones of triumphalism.

Often that character is asserted as a noble force but not defined: Earlier this year, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said our national character - presumed to be benevolent - requires us to be welcoming to legal immigrants.

Other times it must be defended against foreigners who just don't understand us: Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland last month explained that too many Middle Easterners fall prey to "depictions of Americans routinely raping, killing, firebombing mosques and torturing innocents as a function of national character".

And sometimes character is political destiny: In New Delhi last month, President Bush proclaimed that "democracy is more than a form of government, it is the central promise of our national character". Luckily for India, its national character shares the same feature, according to Bush.

Can a nation have a coherent character? If we take the question seriously - investigating reality rather than merely asserting nobility - we see in the US national character signs of pathology and decay as well as health and vigor. What if, for purposes of analysis, we treated the nation as a person? Scan the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the bible of mental-health professionals, now in its fourth edition) and one category jumps out: Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

DSM-IV describes the disorder as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy" that can be diagnosed when any five of these nine criteria are met:

1. a grandiose sense of self-importance.
2. preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. believes he or she is special and unique.
4. requires excessive admiration.
5. sense of entitlement.
6. interpersonally exploitative, taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. lacks empathy.
8. often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Narcissistic tendencies to self-aggrandize are not unique to the United States, of course. But given the predominance of US power in the world, we should worry most about the consequences of such narcissism here.

This disorder is bipartisan, and is virtually required of all mainstream politicians. When the House of Representatives held hearings about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, California Democrat Nancy Pelosi declared that America is "the greatest country that ever existed on the face of the earth". Texas Republican Dick Armey described the United States as "the greatest, most free nation the world has ever known". With a "grandiose sense of self-importance", politicians routinely ratchet up the rhetorical flourishes when asserting that the country is "special and unique".

As for arrogance and haughtiness: When asked at his pre-war news conference in March 2003 whether the United States would be defying the United Nations if it were to invade Iraq without legal authorization, Bush said, "if we need to act, we will act, and we really don't need United Nations approval to do so". Bush prefaced that promise to defy international and US law with the phrase "when it comes to our security", but since the invasion of Iraq had little or nothing to do with the security of the United States we can ignore that qualifier. Here the younger Bush was merely mimicking his father, who remarked in February 1991 as the United States was destroying Iraq a first time: "The US has a new credibility. What we say goes."

On the Gulf War and "lacks empathy": On February 13 1991, US planes hit a bunker in Baghdad. Whether military planners knew it was an air-raid shelter or thought it was a "command-and-control site", an estimated 300-400 civilians died. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to this as "one downside of airpower", and said the incident led him to discuss with General Norman Schwarzkopf the need "to look at the target list a little more closely". Was the goal of that review to discuss civilian casualties? No, it was to question the efficiency of bombing an already bombed-out Baghdad. In Powell's words: "I asked questions like, 'Why are we bombing the Baath Party headquarters for the eighth time? ... Why are we bouncing rubble with million-dollar missiles?'"

Powell, who went on to serve as secretary of state in George W Bush's first term, was often referred to as the "dove" of that administration. Perhaps we could call this level of empathy the mark of a "tough dove".

The unpleasant subject of the current Iraq war brings up "fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance". Though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged mistakes in the current Iraq war - "We've made tactical errors, thousands of them, I'm sure" - she made it clear that history will vindicate US officials for making "the right strategic decision" to invade. But that small concession to reality was too much for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who responded, "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest".

While it's easy to point at the narcissism of soulless and self-indulgent leaders, this diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder applies to the country as a whole. The belief that the United States is unique - a shining "city upon a hill" - is deeply rooted, and for many has divine origins; 48 percent of Americans believe the United States has "special protection from God", according to a 2002 survey.

The narcissism of the whole society also is evident in the widespread "sense of entitlement", defined as "unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations". This is difficult to confront, precisely because it takes root to some degree in all of us and can't be so easily displaced onto only the most overtly pathological. The vast majority of the US public - by comparison to the rest of the world -lives an extravagant lifestyle that we show few signs of being willing to give up.

We are five percent of the world's population and consume about a quarter of the world's energy. This state of affairs is clearly unjust, made possible by coercion and violence, not some natural superiority of Americans. Yet the vast majority of the US public, and even much of the left cum progressive political community, acts as if they expect this state of affairs to continue. That's real narcissism, and it's at the heart of the political problem of the United States. Even if we swept the halls of Congress and the White House clean of every corrupt and cruel politician, the deeper self-indulgence of an affluent culture would be untouched.

Political activism to derail the pathological policies of those politicians must go forward. Critique of the concentrated power of the corporate elites who support those policies is essential. But the critical self-reflection necessary at the collective level also must come home to each of us.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege (2005) and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (2004), both from City Lights Books. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu .

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-04/22jensen.cfm

George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

George Orwell Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder. Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence(3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs. 1946
_____
1) An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-awayfrom the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [back]

2) Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative ginting at a cruel, an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.) [back]

3) One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [back]

THE END
____BD____ George Orwell: ‘Politics and the English Language’ First published: Horizon. — GB, London. — April 1946.

Reprinted: — ‘Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays’. — 1950. — ‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956. — ‘Collected Essays’. — 1961. — ‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965. — ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968. ____ Machine-readable version: O. Dag Last modified on: 2004-07-24
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm

SKULL AND BONES: A FASCIST CULT

Skull and Bones
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search

This article or section contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please check for inaccuracies and modify as needed, citing sources.

This article is about a secret society. For the pirate flag see Jolly Roger; for the international poison symbol see skull and crossbones.

Skull and Bones is the most well known of the secret societies based at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft, two students who were not admitted into Phi Beta Kappa. [1] The first Skull and Bones class, or "cohort," was in 1833. The society's current membership rosters and activities are not disclosed to the public. It is a "senior society," which inducts only upcoming seniors, for the year prior to their graduation.

Skull and Bones is known by many names, including The Order of Death," The Order," The Eulogian Club," and Lodge 322. Initiates are most commonly known as Bonesmen, Knights of Eulogia, and Boodle Boys. The women who have recently become members would be known as Boneswomen, Ladies of Eulogia, and Boodle Girls.

Its corporate name is the Russell Trust Association. In 1999 it had assets of $4,133,246. It owns Deer Island, one of the Thousand Islands in the waterway between the United States and Canada, which was given to the Order by one of its early benefactor families.

The society sometimes inspires a fanatical loyalty. Members have been known to stab the Bones insignia into their flesh to keep it on them while showering or swimming.
Contents[hide]

1 Known members
2 The U.S. branch of a German secret society
3 Bones and U.S. Education
4 Bonesman socialization: core families of "Knights" versus "Barbarians"
5 Nicknames
5.1 Nicknames of selected Bonesmen
6 Deer Island
7 Skull and Bones members
8 Cultural references
9 References
10 External links
//
[edit]

Known members

Both two-term U.S. President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry (Democratic candidate who lost the 2004 U.S. Presidential election to Bush) are members of Skull and Bones. Bush declined to talk about their common membership in the Order of Death during his February 9, 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet The Press.

Bush: “It's so secret I can't talk about it.”
Tim Russert: “What does that mean for America? The conspiracy theorists are gonna go wild.”
Bush: “I'm sure they are, I don't know, I haven't seen their webpages yet. (laughs)”
In another interview, when Kerry was in turn asked what he could reveal about Skull and Bones, Kerry said: “Well not much, because it's a secret… Sorry, I wish there was something I could manifest…” and then changed the subject.
Bush reportedly appointed 11 Skull and Bones members to his Administration in his first term.[2]
[edit]

The U.S. branch of a German secret society

The Order has a private group portrait taken for every new cohort of fifteen. It is always posed in the same manner, showing human bones and a grandfather clock at 8 p.m.

Some people, like the first rigorous outside researcher of the secret society, the late Dr. Antony Sutton (PhD, Stanford, economics), say that Skull and Bones is a U.S. chapter of an early 1800s German secret society. Those who have broken into the Bones “Tomb” (or those members who are disaffected from the Bones experience and wanted to report on them) describe many German-language pictures and themes on the walls and in daily use. Several disaffected Bonesmen testimonies on this point can be read in Alexandra Robbins's book on Skull and Bones.
Co-founder of the order, William Huntington Russell spent some time studying in Germany. It has been suggested that while he was there he was initiated into a secret society with a skull and bones for its emblem. Some even claim that he was initiated into a continuation of the Illuminati, and granted authorization to start a Yale chapter. Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman, immediately upon returning from Europe himself in 1855, spent the next 14 years almost exclusively around Yale University. William Huntington Russell and Daniel Coit Gilman incorporated Skull and Bones in 1856 under the name of The Russell Trust, with Gilman as treasurer and Russell, the co-founder, as President. This is the period in which Bonesman benefactor Miller started funneling large funds, building projects, and real estate purchases all around New Haven and the "Tomb" for The Russell Trust.

On Skull and Bones being a branch of an international secret society, official material from Skull and Bones supports this theory. First, an invitation to a thirteenth-anniversary describes a “Jubilee Commemoration of the History of Our Establishment in New Haven”. Second, a historical address that has found its way from the tomb states “The Eulogian Club: An Historical Discourse Pronounced before our Venerable Order on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Foundation of our American Chapter in New Haven July 30th 1863 Thursday evening. By Timothy Dwight of 1849…” Third, mentioned in the Kris Millegan book on Skull and Bones, according to information acquired from a break-in to the “tomb” (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, “Bones is a chapter of a corps in a German University… General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college, authority to found a chapter here.” Fourth, a 1933 Bones document refers to the “birth of our Yale chapter”. It is also suggested that when Bonesmen refer to the order as “Lodge 322” they are acknowledging that they are but a chapter of a secret society.

On the particular German heritage of Skull and Bones, one could cite the Nazi memorbilia there as well. From a report published by Stephen M.L. Aronson in Fame magazine [Vol. 2(2), August 1989] discussing a "sort of a quick canter through the premises" in 1979 by Yale females invited by a "dissident" member:

"There were tons of rooms, a whole chain of them. They were a couple of bedrooms, and there was this monumental dining room with different rolls of Skull and Bones songs suspended from the ceiling. And there was a President Taft memorabilia room filled with flyers, posters, buttons -- the whole room was like a Miss Haversham's shrine. And a big living room with a beautiful rug. And this big, huge, expensive-looking ivory carving in the hallway. The whole thing was on a very medieval scale. The most shocking thing--and I say this because I do think it's sort of important--I mean, President Bush does belong to Skull and Bones, everyone knows that--there is, like a little Nazi shrine inside. One room on the second floor has a bunch of swastikas, kind of an SS macho Nazi iconography. Somebody should ask President Bush about the swastikas in there. I mean, I don't think he'll say they're not there. I think he'll say 'Oh, it wasn't a big deal, it was just a little room.' Which I don't think is true and which I wouldn't find terribly reassuring anyway. But I don't think he'd deny it altogether, because it's true. I mean, I think the Nazi stuff was no more serious than all the bones that were around, but I still find it a little disconcerting.
Other German heritage connections can be seen in Skull and Bones 'financing,' particularly in one of its early benefactors, Bonesman George Douglas Miller (1847-1932). Miller gave his inherited Deer Island to Skull and Bones. Miller was closely associate with a German connected Bonesman, William Walter Phelps (S&B, 1860), the son-in-law and estate trustee of John Sheffield, benefactor of Sheffield Scientific School (SSS) and later U.S. Ambassador to both Austria and Germany.

First, Phelps's connections were of a high financial nature. He was a Director of: the Rockefeller/oil linked National City Bank; the Second National Bank of New York; the U.S. Trust Company; nine railroads and several other firms. Researcher Kris Millegan surmises that Miller was a conduit of others' monies and property to the Skull and Bones organization because Miller's own claims to wealth are sketchy and hard to document in their origin. Additionally, Phelps's connections were of a high political nature: he was a U.S. Congressman from the age of 34 (1873-74, 1883-89), the original pick to organize the 1880 campaign for the Republican Party for President James A. Garfield (which is a study of high level odd shenanigans); U.S. Ambassador to Austria for a short while (1881-82), and U.S. Ambassador to Germany (1889-93). Phelps was later appointed as Judge for New Jersey Court Errors and Appeals (1893-94). Throughout his high political career he was simultaneously a member of the Yale Corporation (1872-92). Showing the continuous high level Austrian/German connections in Skull and Bones, there were back-to-back Bonesman in the Austrian ambassador position. It should be noted that co-founder of Skull and Bones, Alphonso Taft, was ambassador to Austria-Hungary in 1882--immediately after fellow Bonesman W. W. Phelps.

Another Germanic high political connection is Bonesman Charles Seymour (S&B, 1908), who served as chief of the Austro-Hungarian Division of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and as the U.S. delegate on the Romanian, Yugoslavian, and Czechoslovakian Territorial Commissions in 1919--which would put him only in his late 20s when he was redrawing the map of Europe. Additionally, after that high level position in World War I, he got the almost the same position in World War II: the same person was the Chairman of the U.S. Postwar Planning Commission (1943-45). Bonesman Seymour's high level positions may be due to him being a close friend of 'Colonel' Edward M. House. While at Yale as a history professor, Bonesman Seymour was the curator to the Edward M. House Collection.

Further evidence of the widespread chapter bases of Skull and Bones in the United States surfaced in a short history of the Penn State Chapter of Skull and Bones. The Penn State version started in 1912. It taps just like the Yale version, though only 12 juniors. There is additionally another tapping junior society of extreme secrecy at Brown University. According to the Penn State Chapter of Skull and Bones, "[i]n the 1947-48 academic year, under the leadership of President Lawrence G. Foster, Jr., Skull and Bones tried to establish a national governing body for the numerous local Active chapters extant in the United States. The Society sent letters to 30 colleges and universities with the proposed national as a goal. Their efforts were not successful due to the fact that other chapters did not want to conform to national guidelines on who could or would be tapped, how to initiate, and what would be the purpose of each local chapter. Thus today there are several similarly named chapters across the U.S. that are not affiliated." [3] The locations of the other 28 chapters of Skull and Bones in the U.S. are unknown at this time.
[edit]

Bones and U.S. Education

The connections that Bonesman George Miller had with high finance and high politics through Bonesman William Walter Phelps (S&B, 1860) helped 'steer' U.S. Education to take root in a German-Prussian vein as well. W. W. Phelps was son-in-law and estate trustee of John Sheffield, benefactor of Sheffield Scientific School (SSS), founded in 1854 as Yale Scientific School and renamed in 1861 after Joseph E. Sheffield. In the history of American education, SSS at Yale University was the origin of the "science departments" within the Calvinist religious origin of Yale, and furthermore is cited as a seed altering European classicial educational institutions toward German empirical, experimental, and materialist sciences education and liberal arts. SSS as a different model of education for the United States really expanded because of Skull and Bones memberships channelling a thirty year monopoly of all of Connecticut's Land-Grant College Act funds into SSS from 1862-1892, while other Connecticut instituitons were denied funding. It helped that Bonesman Augustus Brandegee (S&B, 1849) was speaker of the Connecticut State Legislature in 1861 when the state bill to accept the federal land grant script was aired and aimed at Bones-connected SSS exclusively afterwards. (His son, Bonesman Frank Bosworth Brandegee (S&B, 1885), like his Bonesman father, was another high Connecticut politican. He committed suicide. His appointed replacement was another Yalie Hiram Bingham III who had two Bonesmen in his family.[4]) No other educational institution in Connecticut was allowed Land Grand College Act funds until 1893. SSS was absorbed by Yale in the 1950s; the SSS trust still controls its "Yale" land however.

The same "land grant grab" occurred in the educational history of New York State, with federal land grant monopolies being steered exclusively toward Cornell University. There, Bonesman Andrew Dickson White (S&B, 1853), in the next Bones cohort after Daniel Coit Gilman (S&B, 1852)--thus Gilman had input in sponsoring White for Skull and Bones the next year--was a key activist in this connected operation. Bonesman White later became the first President of Cornell. (Continuing the Germanic connections of Skull and Bones, Bonesman White was Minister to Germany (1879–1881), followed consecutively by previously mentioned Bonesman W. W. Phelps [Ambassador to Austria (1881-82); then to Germany (1889-93)], then co-founder Bonesman Alphonso Taft [German Ambassador, 1882]. Later, after being Minister to Germany, Bonesman White was Ambassador to Germany (1897–1902) as well).

This is somewhat of a Bones theme: the Order using public monies and positions for its own objectives.

Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman helped to found the institutions and frame the curricula for the University of California system. Other Bonesman were connected with the organizing of the University of Michigan System, and the University of Wisconsin system. (At the link, note the decidely Masonic 'all seeing eye' seal of the University of Wisconsin.) More educational details are available in the Antony Sutton book on Skull and Bones.

The treasurer of the Russell Trust, Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman, had a brother who married the daughter of another Bonesman--Chemistry Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (S&B, 1837) of SSS at Yale, who invented petroleum cracking. His father, Benjamin Silliman Sr. was a Chemistry Professor (like his son, who took his father's place at Yale) who had earlier established a high marriage alliance into the last British appointed Governorship family of Connecticut, the Trumbulls. Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman's uncle Bonesman Henry Coit Kingsley (S&B, 1834) was Yale Treasurer, appointed from 1862-1886--capable immediately of further rarifying Bones-steered Land-Grand College Act funds toward preferred projects the moment it was passed, after it was written up by Gilman for the purpose.

From the start of 1862 and the steered windfall of the Land Grant funds, Bonesman have dominated the funding frameworks of the Yale Treasury. Starting with Bonesman Gilman's Bonesman uncle Kingsley in 1862, the period of Yale University Treasurers from 1862-1978, except for two who served 36 years, was exclusively occupied by members of Skull and Bones--a 116 year stretch. However, the one non-Bonesman serving longest, 32 years, hailed from a top Bones family.

The Skull and Bones Treasurers of Yale, 1862-1978

1. Henry Coit Kingley, S&B 1834, Treasurer 1862-87 (D. G. Gilman's uncle; Gilman even wrote the land grant application for Yale, which was quickly authorized; monies passed to his uncle, treasurer of Yale.)
2. Timothy Dwight, S&B 1849, acting Treasurer 1887-89, Yale Pres. 1886-99
3. Morris Tyler, not Bones, Treasurer 1900-03, Yale grad. 1870 with G. D. Miller
4. Thomas Lee McClung, S&B 1892, Treasurer 1904-09 (Bones U.S. Treas as well 1909-12, appointed by Bones U.S. President Taft)
5. Arthur T. Hadley, S&B 1876, acting Treas. 1909-10, Yale Pres. 1899-1921
6. George Parmly Day, not Bones, Treasurer 1910-42 [9 members of Day family in S&B though]
7. Lawrence G. Tithe, S&B 1916, Treasurer 1942-54, Director/Partner Brown Brothers Harriman
8. Charles Stafford Gage, S&B 1925, Treasurer 1954-66, and with Bones family firm Mathiesson Chemical
9. John E. Ecklund, S&B 1938, Treasurer 1966-78, Partner in Bones-dominanted New Haven lawfirm Dana & Wiggin
[edit]

Bonesman socialization: core families of "Knights" versus "Barbarians"

The Skull and Bones tomb

Starting in 1833, each year one of the responsibilities of the cohort of fifteen seniors is to select fifteen new junior members to replace them. This is called being "tapped" (selected) for the society. To be tapped for Skull and Bones is seen by many Yale students as the highest honor that can be attained, though some occasionally refuse. For a year, Bones members meet at least weekly and conduct long self-analysis of each other and critique. This is aimed at creating a long term bond between them as they leave the university instead of during their stay at the university. Kris Millegan writes that one of the rooms is uncannily arranged like a room arranged for an entrance into an higher level of the Bavarian Illuminati [5]. There are human skulls and bones in the "tomb", which is illegal under Connecticut law. Bones members are reported to be forced to reveal their innermost secrets and their "sexual biography" to one another. It has been suggested that this may be used for blackmailing. In the tomb with each other for one year, members dine off a set of Hitler's silverware according to "dissident" Bones members interviewed by Alexandra Robbins for her book Secrets of The Tomb [p. 5], consuming expensive gourmet meals. Members are given new code names. The members call themselves "Knights," and simultaneously call everyone else in the world at large "barbarians". Another dissociation is that clocks in the Bones "tomb" run intentionally five minutes ahead of the rest of the world, to give the members an ongoing sense that the Bonesmen's space is a totally separate world--and a world just a bit ahead of the curve of the rest of the "barbarians" outside.

Partially, "tapping" is a response to visible or anticipated excellence, thus it could be considered meritocratic. However, since a great many members of the membership in this secret society are drawn over and over from the same families as the "core" of the group, it is a typical nested secret society with "porch brethren" on the outside making a power network for those in the inner administrative levels of the secret society. The top repetitive families in Skull and Bones are known because in 1985 a disgruntled Skull and Bones member leaked rosters to a private researcher, Antony C. Sutton. Many people believe that the membership of Skull and Bones had been totally secret. However the membership for each year is held in the Yale University archives.

The membership rosters cover the years 1833-1985, with some additional years. This original leaked 1985 data was kept privately for over 15 years, as Sutton feared that the xeroxed pages could somehow identify the member who leaked it. The information was finally reformatted as an appendix in the book Fleshing out Skull and Bones by editor, researcher, and writer Kris Millegan, who published it in 2003.

The data shows that certain families have been well represented, and that these happen to be related to each other as well—such as the Cheney family, Taft family, Whitney family, Walker family, and Adams family. Other subordinate members are often related to these families. Other core family names are common. However, not all initiates in these families are as interrelated as the above group. This second category of core families covers such names as Smith, Allen, Brown, Clark, White, Day, Johnson, Jones, Miller, Stewart, Thompson, Cheney, Taft, Williams.
For an example of the predilection of certain core families being embedded in Skull and Bones (or vice versa), here are the top 15 families in Skull and Bones with 10+ Members (over 1833-1985, with occasional later years available):
Smith (15)
Walker (15)
Allen (13)
Brown (13)
Clark (12)
White (12)
Day (11)
Johnson (11)
Jones (11)
Miller (11)
Stewart (11)
Thompson (11)
Cheney (10)
Taft (10)
Williams (10)

Their house is located on Yale's campus at 64 High Street. The property is registered under RTA Incorporated. A search of the records of the state of Connecticut shows that the officers of RTA Incorporated all appear on lists of Skull and Bones members from the 1960's and 1970's. The building itself has no windows on the outside and the exterior walls are made of concrete. The inside walls are drywall/plaster and the floors are carpeted. It has a heating system, but no air conditioning.

The building itself is about 5,968 square feet on the first floor. There is also a basement of similar size. It was built in 1900. New Haven police, as mentioned in the Robbins' book, say that the Bones tomb has an underground entrance connected to Yale University's steam tunnel system, allowing covert entrance or escape unobserved.
[edit]

Nicknames

On an initiate's first day in Bones they are assigned a name, which they will be known as for the rest of their life. Names that are regularly used are: Magog, which is assigned to the initiate with the most experience with the opposite sex; Gog, which is assigned to the least sexually experienced; Long Devil, for the tallest; Boaz, for varsity American football captains; and Little Devil for the shortest. Bonesmen have often assumed names of mythological and legendary figures.
[edit]

Nicknames of selected Bonesmen
William Howard Taft: Magog
F. O. Matthiessen: Little Devil
Averell Harriman: Thor
Henry Luce: Baal
Briton Hadden: Caliban
Archibald MacLeish: Gigadibs
McGeorge Bundy: Odin
Potter Stewart: Crappo
George W. Bush: Temporary
William F. Buckley: Cheevy
Anson Phelps Stokes: Achilles
Reuben Holden: McQuilp
Charles Seymour: Machiavelli
Donald Ogden Stewart: Hellbender
John Kerry: Long Devil
[edit]

Deer Island

Deer Island (44°21′41″N, 75°54′24″W) is a privately owned island retreat owned by Skull and Bones' Russell Trust Association. It is on the Saint Lawrence River two miles (3 km) north of Alexandria Bay. Among the island's facilities are two tennis courts, two houses, a bungalow, a boathouse, and an amphitheater. It serves as a getaway for the present members of Skull and Bones, and is often used to host reunions to which family members of Bonesmen are welcome. It can also be hired out for personal use, but membership of Skull and Bones as well as upkeep is required. The island is governed and maintained by the Deer Island Club, membership of which is only available for initiates of Skull and Bones. They say in their articles of association, the purpose of the club is: to promote the social intercourse of its members, and to provide for them facilities for recreation and social enjoyment; and to this end, to purchase, hold and convey any property, real or personal, which may be necessary or convenient therefor; to maintain a Club House for the use and benefit of its members; and to adopt by-laws and generally to exercise all the usual powers of corporations not prohibited by said statutes.

According to Skull and Bones researcher (and member of Scroll and Key, another secret society at Yale) Alexandra Robbins, who interviewed many Bonesmen in her book about the group:
The forty-acre [162,000 m²] retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to "get together and rekindle old friendships." A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals. But although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. "Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings," a patriarch sighs. "It's basically ruins." Another Bonesman says that to call the island "rustic" would be to glorify it. "It's a dump, but it's beautiful." [6]

One factor which may explain the change would be the arrival of increasingly widespread airplane travel by the 1930s. Thus, there was an increase of spatial choices given for "escaping from the summer heat". However, in the mid 19th century through the early 20th century, it was certainly a much more prevalent and elegant Bones "getaway" private island. There are many pictures of the island and its buildings in Kris Millegan's edited book Fleshing out Skull and Bones (2003).
[edit]

Skull and Bones members

The Skull and Bones published membership lists until 1971, which were kept at the Yale Library. The following list of noteworthy Bonesmen is compiled from those lists.

List of Known Members
William Huntington Russell (1832), Founder of the Skull and Bones
Alphonso Taft (1832), Co-Founder of the Skull and Bones
Simeon Eben Baldwin (1861), Governor and Chief Justice, State of Connecticut (son of Roger Sherman Baldwin)
Jonathan Brewster Bingham (1936), U.S. Senator
David Boren (1963), U.S. Senator
Amory Howe Bradford (1934), general manager for the New York Times
Augustus Brandegee (1849), Speaker of the Connecticut State Legislature in 1861
Frank Bosworth Brandegee (1885), U.S. Senator
James Buckley (1944), U.S. Senator
William F. Buckley
William F. Buckley, Jr. (1950), founder of National Review, author, CIA covert agent
McGeorge Bundy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs under Kennedy and Johnson, National Security Advisor, Professor of History
George Herbert Walker Bush (1948), 41st President of the United States, Vice President under President Ronald Reagan, Director of the CIA, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to China
George W. Bush (1968), 43rd President of the United States, Governor of Texas
Prescott Bush (1916), father of George H.W. Bush
John Chafee (1947), U.S. Senator, Secretary of the Navy and Governor of Rhode Island; father of U.S. Senator Lincoln Chafee
Thomas Cochran (1904), JP Morgan partner
John Sherman Cooper (1923), U.S. Senator and member of the Warren Commission
Alfred Cowles (1913), Cowles Communication
John Thomas Daniels (1914), founder of Archer Daniels Midland
Russell W. Davenport (1923), editor of Fortune Magazine, created Fortune 500 list
F. Trubee Davison (1918), Director of Personnel at the Central Intelligence Agency
Henry P. Davison (1920), senior partner, JP Morgan's Guaranty Trust
William Henry Draper III (1950), chair of United Nations Development Programme and Import-Export Bank of the United States
Timothy Dwight (1849), Yale acting Treasurer 1887-89, Yale Pres. 1886-99
Timothy Dwight V (1849), President of Yale College
John E. Ecklund (1938), Treasurer 1966-78, Partner in Bones-dominanted New Haven lawfirm Dana & Wiggin
William Maxwell Evarts (1837), U.S. Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Senator (grandson of Roger Sherman)
Robert D. French (1910)
Charles Stafford Gage (1925), Yale Treasurer 1954-66, and with Bones family firm Mathiesson Chemical
Evan G. Galbraith (1950), Ambassador to France and managing director of Morgan Stanley
Artemus Gates (1918), President of New York Trust Company, Union Pacific Railroad, TIME-Life and Boeing Company
Daniel Coit Gilman (1852), Attache to the American legation at St. Petersburg; President of the University of California, and of John Hopkins University
William Henry Gleason (1853), Lt. Governor of Florida, founder of Eau Gallie, Florida, lawyer and land speculator
Robert Gow (1955), president of Zapata Oil
Briton Hadden (1920), Cofounder of Time-Life Enterprises
Arthur T. Hadley (1876), Yale acting Treas. 1909-10, Yale Pres. 1899-1921
Averell Harriman (1913), U.S. Ambassador and Secretary of Commerce, Governor of New York, Chairman and CEO of the Union Pacific Railroad, Brown Brothers & Harriman and the Southern Pacific Railroad
John Heinz II (1931), heir to H. J. Heinz Company, father of U.S. Senator John Heinz
Reuben Holden
Pierre Jay (1892), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
John Kerry (1966) U.S. Senator and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee
Henry Coit Kingsley (1834), Yale Treasurer 1862-87 (D. G. Gilman's uncle; Gilman even wrote the land grant application for Yale, which was quickly authorized; monies passed to his uncle, treasurer of Yale.)
Charles Edwin Lord (1949), U.S. Comptroller of the Currency
Winston Lord (1959), Chairman of Council on Foreign Relations, Ambassador to China, and Assistant U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Luce (1920), Cofounder of Time-Life Enterprises
Archibald MacLeish (1915), poet and author
F. O. Matthiessen
Thomas Lee McClung (1892), Yale Treasurer 1904-09 (Bones U.S. Treas as well 1909-12, appointed by Bones U.S. President Taft)
David McCullough (1955), U.S. historian
George Douglas Miller
William Walter Phelps
Gifford Pinchot (1889), first Chief of U.S. Forest Service, under President Theodore Roosevelt
Dino Pionzio (1950), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow
John Rockefeller Prentice (1928), grandson of John D. Rockefeller, pioneer of artificial insemination in farm animals as a means of improving their genetic pool
Percy Rockefeller (1900), Director of Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil and Remington Arms
Charles Seymour
Benjamin Silliman, Jr
Frederick W. Smith (1966), founder of FedEx
Harold Stanley (1908), founder of investment house of Morgan Stanley
Donald Ogden Stewart
Potter Stewart (1936), U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Anson Phelps Stokes
William Howard Taft (1878), 27th President of the United States, Chief Justice of the United States, Secretary of War
Lawrence G. Tithe (1916), Yale Treasurer 1942-54, Director/Partner Brown Brothers Harriman
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt (1898), son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and brother of Gertude Vanderbilt Whitney
Morrison R. Waite (1837), U.S. Supreme Court Justice
George Herbert Walker, Jr. (1927), financier and co-founder of the New York Mets
Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser (1896), scion of the Weyerhaeuser Paper Co.
Andrew Dickson White (1853), first President of Cornell University
Edward Baldwin Whitney (1878), New York Supreme Court Justice
Harry Payne Whitney (1894), husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, investment banker
William Collins Whitney (1863), U.S. Secretary of the Navy and New York City financier
Hugh Wilson (1909)
Dean Witter, Jr. (1944), founder of the investment house Dean Witter & Co.
[edit]

Cultural references

In 2000, Universal Pictures released The Skulls starring Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker capitalizing on the conspiracy theory element surrounding the organization. Rising seniors at Yale are inducted into the secret society and, after witnessing a cover-up of a murder, one character tries to defect from the group. The society is portrayed as having intergroup tensions, cover-ups, lavish lifestyles, and corrupt business deals.

Fictional character Charles Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons was supposedly a member of the Skull and Bones before his graduation from Yale in 1914. In The Canine Mutiny, an episode from the eighth Simpsons season, Burns identifies Laddie the collie as a potential Boneshound.
[edit]

References

Millegan, Kris, ed. Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society. Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003. ISBN 0972020721
Sutton, Antony C. America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003. ISBN 0972020705
Tarpley, Webster, et al. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992. ISBN 0943235057. Available free on the web: http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
Robbins, Alexandra. Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Back Bay Books, 2003. ISBN 0316735612
[edit]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Skull and bones

Wikinews has news related to this article:
Apaches accuse Prescott Bush of robbing Geronimo's grave
Audio and transcript of the April 23, 2001 ABC News television report on hidden video caught of a Skull and Bones ritual by New York Observer reporter Ron Rosenbaum
Fleshing Out Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones: an intimate look at the US Ruling Class
Skull and Bones video
Another Skull and Bones video
Major Skullduggery Revealed
Peru wants stolen Machu Picchu grave goods back from Skull & Bones--I mean, Yale University
Chapter entitled "Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale," in the book George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
Video of CBS "60 Minutes" on Skull and Bones and the text, as well as a later 60 Minutes report
MSNBC Video on the history of Skull and Bones
John Kerry on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert confirming Skull and Bones membership
George W. Bush on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert confirming Skull and Bones membership
FOX News Live story on Skull & Bones
Bipartisan Bonesmen
White House 'Bonesman' leads nation into the dark (USA Today Opinion/Editorial)
The Skulls, the Bell, and Skull & Bones
A rare look inside Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society and sometime haunt of the presumptive Republican nominee for President: Parts 1 and 2
Secrets of the Tomb
Video of an alleged Skull and Bones ritual
Skull and Bones documentary
The Order of Skull and Bone
The Bohemian Grove Is an Offshoot of Skull and Bones
A Roster (Who's Who) of Bonesmen
Skull & Bones: The Secret Society That Unites John Kerry and President Bush
Skull & Bones Article from Esquire Magazine Sept. 1977
How the Secret Societies Got That Way (Yale Alumni Magazine)