Global Research June 17, 2011
David Rockefeller
To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.[1] - Denis Healey, 30-year member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg GroupThe ‘Foundations’ of the Bilderberg Group
The Bilderberg Group, formed in 1954, was founded in the Netherlands as a secretive meeting held once a year, drawing roughly 130 of the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.”[2] Regular participants include the CEOs or Chairman of some of the largest corporations in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.[3] The Bilderberg Group acts as a “secretive global think-tank,” with an original intent to “to link governments and economies in Europe and North America amid the Cold War.”[4]
In the early 1950s, top European elites worked with selected American elites to form the Bilderberg Group in an effort to bring together the most influential people from both sides of the Atlantic to advance the cause of ‘Atlanticism’ and ‘globalism.’ The list of attendees were the usual suspects: top politicians, international businessmen, bankers, leaders of think tanks and foundations, top academics and university leaders, diplomats, media moguls, military officials, and Bilderberg also included several heads of state, monarchs, as well as senior intelligence officials, including top officials of the CIA, which was the main financier for the first meeting in 1954.[5]
The European founders of the Bilderberg Group included Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Prince Bernhard had, incidentally, been a member of the Nazi Party until 1934, three years prior to his marrying the Dutch Queen Juliana, and had also worked for the German industrial giant, I.G. Farben, the maker of Zyklon B, the gas used in concentration camps.[6] On the American side, those who were most prominent in the formation of the Bilderberg Group were David Rockefeller, Dean Rusk (a top official with the Council on Foreign Relations who was then the head of the Rockefeller Foundation), Joseph Johnson (another Council leader who was head of the Carnegie Endowment), and John J. McCloy (a top Council leader who became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1953 and was also Chairman of the Board of the Ford Foundation).[7]
David Rockefeller
The fact that the major American foundations– Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford – were so pivotal in the origins of the Bilderberg Group is not a mere coincidence. The foundations have, since their founding at the beginning of the 20th century, been the central institutions in constructing consensus among elites, and creating consent to power. They are, in short, the engines of social engineering: both for elite circles specifically, and society as a whole, more generally. As Professor of Education Robert F. Arnove wrote in his book Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: Foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society’s attention. They serve as “cooling-out” agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class interests of philanthropists and philanthropoids – a system which… has worked against the interests of minorities, the working class, and Third World peoples.[8]
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Notes
[1] Jon Ronson, Who pulls the strings?(part 3), The Guardian, 10 March 2001:
[2] CBC, Informal forum or global conspiracy? CBC News Online: June 13, 2006:
[3] Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management. (South End Press: 1980), 161-171
[4] Glen McGregor, Secretive power brokers meeting coming to Ottawa? Ottawa Citizen: May 24, 2006:
[5] Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1990), page 129.
[6] Bruno Waterfield, Dutch Prince Bernhard ‘was member of Nazi party’, The Telegraph, 5 March 2010:
[7] Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 52.
[8] Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press: Boston, 1980), page 1.
[1] Jon Ronson, Who pulls the strings?(part 3), The Guardian, 10 March 2001:
[2] CBC, Informal forum or global conspiracy? CBC News Online: June 13, 2006:
[3] Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management. (South End Press: 1980), 161-171
[4] Glen McGregor, Secretive power brokers meeting coming to Ottawa? Ottawa Citizen: May 24, 2006:
[5] Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1990), page 129.
[6] Bruno Waterfield, Dutch Prince Bernhard ‘was member of Nazi party’, The Telegraph, 5 March 2010:
[7] Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 52.
[8] Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press: Boston, 1980), page 1.
