48. European Union

Pan-European Union

After World War II, many of the Non-Conformists, such Robert Aron and Alexandre Marc—protégées of Otto Abetz, SS officer and German ambassador to France around whom gathered a circle of collaborationist intellectuals, known as the Sohlbergkreis—who founded Ordre Nouveau with de Rougemont, became activists of European federalist movements, participating in the European Movement, which contributed to the fulfilment of the synarchist dream, the creation of a European Union. Indeed, several of the same Europeans who had helped launch the EM were also present at the creation of Bilderberg, including that “eminence grise of Europe,” Joseph Retinger (1888 – 1960).[1] With the support of former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Retinger originated the idea for the founding of the infamous Bilderberg Group, who every year gather to discuss the world’s fate, in utter secrecy. A preparatory meeting was held on September 25, 1952, at Baron François de Nervo’s mansion in Paris, in the presence of Retinger, Van Zeeland, Prince Bernhard, Antoine Pinay and Guy Mollet and several foreign personalities.[2] When the original promoters of the Mouvement synarchique d’empire (MSE), the conspiracy behind the Vichy Regime, were named, they numbered seven, three of whom were identified as Baron François de Nervo, Maxime Renaudin, and Jean Coutrot.[3] Baron de Nervo (1912 – 1977) was a friend of Antoine Pinay (1891 – 1994), would go on to found Le Cercle, which would become the umbrella organization of the Fascist International.

Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont, who had also been a member of Sohlbeg Circle headed by Abetz, were key proponents of the “European Idea.” Jean Luchaire, a co-founder of the Sohlbeg Circle, attended the first Pan-European Congress of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894 – 1972), Austrian politician and philosopher, pioneer of European integration.[4] Abetz’ key disciples were Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (1899 – 1983), who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi even asked Fabre-Luce to head his movement’s French section, an offer he declined while assuring Coudenhove-Kalergi of his complete agreement on the need for propaganda for the European idea.[5] Richard was the great-grandson of Marie Kalergis, Franz Liszt’s contact to Napoleon III and an admirer of Otto von Bismarck.[6] With Emperor Franz Josef’s permission, Richard’s father, Heinrich von Coudenhove, was allowed to alter his surname to Coudenhove-Calergi, as a tribute to his famous grandmother. Richard’s mother was a Japanese noblewoman, Mitsuko Aoyama.

Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union (PEU) with Otto von Habsburg, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, and claimant of the title of King of Jerusalem, as head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, and sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Pierre Plantard—who formulated the Priory of Sion hoax, whose purpose is to install Nostradamus’ Grand Monarch as world leader—revised his assertions, claiming Otto von Habsburg was the real claimant of the bloodline of the Holy Grail.[7] Otto von Habsburg was also Opus Dei’s candidate as monarch to rule over a united Catholic Europe.[8]

Two years after its foundation in 1922, Karl Anton Prinz Rohan’s Deutscher Kulturbund became the Viennese outpost of the much larger Fédération des Unions Intellectuelles, established in Paris to promote European cultural unity after the World War I, and Rohan thereafter used the support of Coudenove-Kalergi’s PEU to launch the Europäische Revue, the key journal of the German Conservative Revolution.[9] Rohan’s postwar collection of essays, Österreichisch, Deutsch, Europäisch, Rohan revealed his sympathy for the Habsburg monarchy. Like others who were involved in PEU, Rohan considered a restored Habsburg imperium integral to his vision of a European federation of European states. Also expressing a sympathy for the Habsburg’s was another contributor to Rohan’s Europäische Revue, George-Kreis member Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The most widely-distributed book dealing with this interwar European cultural idea was Das Spektrum Europas (“The European Spectrum), by Hofmannsthal’s friend, Hermann von Keyserling, founder of the School of Wisdom, published in 1928, containing the phrase, “all of Europe is of one spirit.”[10] Essential to understanding Hofmannsthal’s vision is a speech he delivered at the University of Munich in 1927, entitled Das Schrifttum als Geistiger Raum der Nation (“Literature as the Spiritual Dimension of the Nation”), where he makes references to a “conservative revolution,” that he believes will be “of such magnitude that European history has not experienced anything of its kind until the present time. Its goal will be to form a new German reality in which the entire nation will participate.”[11]

In their 1968 Synarchy and Power, André Ulmann and Henri Azeau interviewed one of the members of Jean Coutrot’s MSE, who claimed it had inspired the action of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and his pan-Europeanism.[12] Coudenhove-Kalergi was also involved a group called Les Veilleurs (“the Watchers”), founded by a French occultist René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, and which also included MSE founder Postel du Mas, author of the Synarchist Pact.[13] In conversation with Maurice Girodias, the founder of the Olympia Press, Postel du Mas named Coudenhove-Kalergi as one of the two major promoters of his and Canudo’s plans. Girodias said of Postel du Mas and Canudo’s magical salons: “I saw at his feet men of science, company directors, and bankers.”[14] Girodias was told they were “schismatic theosophists with political designs, and they are linked to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi… who is a champion of the United States of Europe… Their aim is to launch a pan-European political party and to institute in the entire world, commencing with Europe, a society obedient to a spiritualist idea.”[15]

In mid-1925, the master of the Viennese lodge, Richard Schlesinger, sent a circular to the masters of the great lodges of the world asking them to support Coudenhove-Kalergi’s political projects.[16] The Masonic newspaper The Beacon stated in March, 1925:

Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coudenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian Freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs: political honesty, social insight, the struggle against lies, striving for the recognition and cooperation of all those of good will. In this higher sense, Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi’s program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.[17]

Coudenhove-Kalergi’s father was also a close friend of Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism. Coudenhove-Kalergi writes in his Memoirs:

At the beginning of 1924, we received a call from Baron Louis de Rothschild; one of his friends, Max Warburg from Hamburg, had read my book and wanted to get to know us. To my great surprise, Warburg spontaneously offered us 60,000 gold marks, to tide the movement over for its first three years… Max Warburg, who was one of the most distinguished and wisest men that I have ever come into contact with, had a principle of financing these movements. He remained sincerely interested in Pan-Europe for his entire life. Max Warburg arranged his 1925 trip to the United States to introduce me to Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch.[18]

At its founding convention in Vienna in 1922, the PEU called for the creation of a single European state, modeled on the Roman and Napoleonic empires. At the opening of the first PEU Congress in 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s wife, the Jewish actress Ida Roland, recited Victor Hugo’s speech on European unification “in the service of propaganda for the Paneuropean idea.” The PEU congresses were decorated by large portraits of great Europeans: Kant, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Napoleon, Dante, and others.[19] Coudenhove-Kalergi believed that “Nietzsche’s Will to Power is where the foundational thoughts of fascist and Paneuropean politics stand side by side.”[20] Personalities attending included: Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Konrad Adenauer and Georges Pompidou.[21] In 1927, Aristide Briand, who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic, was elected honorary president. The first person to join the PEU was Hjalmar Schacht. Carl Haushofer was a guest lecturer at PEU events. When they met in Vienna, Haushofer suggested to Coudenhove-Kalergi that if they had met sooner, Hess would have been a supporter of Pan Europe instead of National Socialism. Coudenhove-Kalergi described Haushofer as, “A man of rare knowledge and culture.”[22] Coudenhove-Kalergi also collaborated with such politicians as Engelbert Dollfuss, Kurt Schuschnigg, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.

Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)

To support the cause for the creation of a united Europe, the CIA used the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). In 1951, President Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), headed by another OSS veteran C.D. Jackson (1902 – 1964, the first Deputy Director of Central Intelligence at CIA. C.D. Jackson and Georgetown Set member and OSS veteran Tom Braden collaborated on coordinating the efforts of the CIA’s front organization, the CCF, which according to Frances Stoner Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, was a plot to contain the influence of the Soviet Union through the recruitment of intellectuals from the “Non-Communist Left.”[23] For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin show trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into passionate anti-Communists eventually.[24] As communist or left-leaning intellectuals who were nevertheless opposed to the Stalinism of the Soviet Union, they could be used to steer the political debate away from support for the Soviets. Stonor Saunders revealed a broad list of intellectuals also on the CIA payroll, including Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel and Diana Trilling, Julian Huxley, Arthur Koestler, Robert Lowell, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Melvin J. Lasky, Tennessee Williams and Sidney Hook. The British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of Darkness at Noon, Koestler’s anti-Communist classic.[25] The president of the CCF’s Executive Committee was Swiss national Denis de Rougemont.

Funding for the CCF was provided by Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, both of which, explained Stonor Saunders, “were conscious instruments of covert US foreign policy, with directors and officers who were closely connected to, or even themselves, members of American intelligence.”[26] John Foster Dulles was a president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and his brother Allen was a close friend to David Rockefeller. As Stonor Saunders noted, “At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects.”[27] Richard Bissell, a Marshall Planner and Georgetown Set member, became president in 1952, and met often with Dulles and other CIA officials. Bissell became a special assistant to Allen Dulles in 1954. Under Bissell, the Ford Foundation was the “vanguard of Cold War thinking.”

John McCloy, who had been a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946-1949, also became president of the Ford Foundation, and created an administrative unit within it specifically to deal with the CIA. By that time, McCloy had already been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank and High Commissioner of Germany. At the time, McCloy was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), to be succeeded by David Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank.

Prior to the war, McCloy had been legal counsel to IG Farben. He became friendly with W. Averell Harriman, and worked as an advisor to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. In his dealings with Germany, McCloy worked closely with Paul Warburg, as well as his brother James in America. In 1936, he traveled to Berlin where he met with Rudolf Hess, and shared a box with Hitler and Göring at the Berlin Olympics. In 1941, Skull and Bones member Henry L. Stimson selected McCloy to become his assistant Secretary of War under President Roosevelt. McCoy forged a pact with the Vichy Regime of Darlan, displaced Japanese-Americans in California to internment camps, refused to recommend the bombing of Nazi concentration camps to spare the inmates on grounds that “the cost would be out of proportion to any possible benefits,” and refused Jewish refugees entry to the US.[28] In 1951, as German Chancellor, Adenauer met with McCloy to argue that executing the Landsberg prisoners would ruin forever any effort at having the Federal Republic play its role in the Cold War. In response, McCloy reduced the death sentences of most of the 102 men at Landsberg—hanging only seven of the prisoners while the rest of those condemned to death were spared.[29] McCloy commuted the death sentences of a number of Nazi war criminals, and gave early releases to others. This included Fritz Ter Meer, the senior executive of IG Farben.

Braden, who was placed in charge of the CCF, was the head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), a division of the CIA set up in 1950 to promote anti-communism by manipulating international psychological warfare operations. Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild, the United Auto Workers, National Council of Churches, the African-American Institute and the National Education Association. Braden also supported the work of Jay Lovestone, who had served as leader of the Communist Party USA and then as foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO.[30]

The chief activities of the CCF also involved festivals featuring American entertainers, as well as the promotion of the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock, in order to confront Soviet influence by countering prevailing impressions about the quality of American culture. In April of 1952, CCF held a month-long festival in Paris entitled Masterpieces of the 20th Century. To convince the world of the superiority of America’s culture to that of the Soviets, the CIA sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals and European tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The CIA also sponsored tours of African-American opera star Leontyne Price, who referred to herself as the Wisners’ “chocolate sister.”[31] The treasurer of the BSCF was Frederic Warburg, whose publishing company Secker & Warburg published Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and works by other leading figures such as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The CIA obtained the film rights to Animal Farm from Orwell’s widow, Sonia, after his death and covertly funded the production to the animated version of the book. Some sources assert that the ending of the story was altered by the CIA, where only the pigs remain, instead of joining forces with the humans, to emphasize an anti-communist message.[32]

Bilderberg Meetings

The principal group advocating for a united Europe in partnership with the United States was the European Movement, an umbrella organization focusing their efforts upon the Council of Europe, and counting the “founding fathers” of the European Union, Winston Churchill, Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, Leon Blum and Italian president Alcide de Gasperi, as its five Presidents of Honour. The cultural arm of the European Movement was the Centre européen de la culture, whose director was the CCF’s Denis de Rougemont.[33]

When the original promoters of the Mouvement synarchique d’empire (MSE), the conspiracy behind the Vichy Regime, were named, they numbered seven, three of whom were identified as Baron François de Nervo, Maxime Renaudin, and Jean Coutrot.[34] In 1952-53, a year before the founding of Bilderberg, Baron de Nervo’s friend of Antoine Pinay founded Le Cercle with Konrad Adenauer, Franz Josef Strauss, under the name Cercle Pinay. Pinay was also a friend of Raymond Abellio (1907 – 1986), an expert in occultism and the Cathars, and the leader of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule.[35] In 1940, Pinay had voted to give the Marshall Pétain’s regime full authority to draw up a new constitution, effectively ending the French Third Republic and establishing Vichy France. In 1941, Pinay was appointed to the Conseil National of the Vichy Regime, and also awarded the Order of the Francisque, an order and medal which was awarded by the Vichy Regime.

However, Pinay later resigned from the Conseil National and refused any official position with the Vichy regime, and an official commission in 1946 recognized his opposition to the Nazis and help to the Résistance and absolved him of blame. Pinay and Adenauer, the first chairmen, appointed former Cagoule member and SDECE and BND agent Jean Violet, who founded Le Cercle.[36] Violet was arrested after World War II for having collaborated with the Nazis, but was released “on orders from above.”[37] He helped create a conservative party, the National Center of Independents and Peasants (CNIP). He acquired the reputation as one of France’s more spirited politicians and in 1952 became prime minister by virtue of being the most popular elected CNIP official. Serving as Violet’s patron was Otto von Habsburg.[38]

Also included in Le Cercle were the founding fathers of the European Union: Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. Robert Shumann, a supernumerary member of Opus Dei.[39] According to Jonathan Marshall, writing for Lobster Magazine, Opus Dei “was said to have influenced Robert Schumann, Antoine Pinay and Paul Baudoin, former President of the Banque d’Indochine and Vichy Foreign Minister.[40] Baudoin, a major figure in Opus Dei, was identified as one of the original members of the MSE.[41] In 1955, Pinay was one of the participants of the Messina Conference, which would lead to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best known of the European Communities (EC). The original idea was conceived by Jean Monnet, and was announced by Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, in a declaration in 1950.

Schuman became the first president of the European Parliament in 1958. But it was Jean Monnet who became president of the new body, called the High Authority and who was the primary influence behind the movement. According to Vivien Postel du Mas, a purported author of the Synarchist Pact, along with Coudenhove-Kalergi, Monnet was an influential promoter of the synarchist agenda.[42] Another of Ulmann and Azeau’s MSE informants described Monnet as a “true synarch… whose membership of the movement was never in doubt for the true initiates.”[43] Monnet encouraged the creation of an international European bank to finance Third World projects by Hipolyte Worms—founder of Banque Worms that financed the MSE—and Jean-Pierre Francois, who had been introduced to Pinay by Raymond Abellio leader of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule.[44] Francois, whose real name was Joachim Pick Felberbaum, the son of a Romanian Jew, was inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi’s PEU.[45] Monnet was at the time the most influential businessman and economist in post-war Europe. Monnet has been called “The Father of Europe” as the key to establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the European Union.[46]

Retinger was also one of the founding members of the super-secret Bilderberg Group, an annual private conference of the world’s political, intellectual and industrial elite, including many members from the Round Table, RIIA and the CFR. In 1952, Retinger expressed his concern over the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, and proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism. Retinger approached former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland, and the then leader of the Unilever consumer goods group, the Dutch Paul Rijkens. Prince Bernhard in turn contacted his friend Walter Bedell Smith, the then-head of the CIA, who asked C.D. Jackson to execute the recommendation.[47]

One of Retinger’s key German partners in his efforts to set up the CIA-funded European Movement and the Bilderberg group was Hermann Abs, a leading figure in pursuing the preservation of Nazi power after the war, who had been a been a comrade of Walter Benjamin before joining the Nazis. The most powerful commercial banker of the Third Reich, Abs had joined the board of Deutsche Bank during the rise of the Nazis and also sat on the supervisory board of IG Farben. It was Abs who was put in charge of allocating Marshall Aid to German industry and by 1948 was effectively managing Germany’s economic recovery. When Konrad Adenauer took power in 1949, Abs was his most important financial adviser. Adenauer was considered one of the three “founding fathers of the European Union,” along with Robert Schuman and Henri Spaak. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reporting from declassified American government documents, “The leaders of the European Movement—Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian Prime Minister Henri Spaak—were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation.”[48]

Although Bernhard stated, “I was never a Nazi,” according to Stephen Dando-Collins, “He was lying. It was the convenient lie of many Germans who had joined the Nazi Party and Nazi organizations to further their careers in the 1930s.”[49] However, Bernhard’s membership in the Nazi Party, to SA, to the Reiter-SS (SS Cavalry Corps), and to the NSKK, are now well-documented. A 1976 Newsweek article reported that, during the Nuremberg Trial, it came out that Bernhard was a member a special secret Nazi overseas intelligence set up within IG Farben, in which he worked as a spy for the German government in Paris. In 1936, Bernhard paid a farewell visit to Hitler before setting off to Holland for the official announcement of his engagement to Princess Juliana of the Netherlands. Although Hitler later described Berhnard as “In the Führer’s opinion, the prince was “an absolute imbecile oaf,” Hitler gave his blessing, and the German Government would even claim the marriage cemented an alliance between Holland’s House of Orange and Germany, a claim that Queen Wilhelmina did not hesitate to publicly deny.[50]

A preparatory meeting was held on September 25, 1952, at MSE founder Baron François de Nervo’s mansion in Paris, in the presence of Retinger, Van Zeeland, Prince Bernhard, then French prime minister Antoine Pinay, and Guy Mollet, patron of the SFIO, and several foreign personalities. The inaugural meeting was held from May 29 to 31, 1954, at the Bilderberg Hotel, located in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands. Fifty delegates from eleven Western European countries attended, along with eleven Americans including David Rockefeller. [51] The founding group also included important European politicians like Alcide De Gasperi of ACUE, French Socialist politician Guy Mollet and later Prime Minster of France, and British Labour Party members Lord Denis Healy and Hugh Gaitskell, who were both associated with the CCF. In 2001, Healey, who remained a steering committee member of Bilderberg for 30 years, confessed, “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.”[52]

Mont Pelerin Society

The term “neoliberalism” was coined at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which inspired the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, a sister organization of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Union (PEU), which included Otto von Habsburg. Ludwig von Mises (1881 – 1973), an important exponent of the Geneva School, later economic adviser to Otto von Habsburg, and a member of the PEU.[53] In the inter-war period, von Mises was secretary of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and organizer of one of the most prominent Privatseminars, which included Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992), and attracted many foreign scholars, such as Lionel Robbins, Frank Knight, and John van Sickle. At that time, von Mises and Hayek earned their money at a research institute funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to supply economic data to Austrian firms.[54] In 1940 von Mises and his wife fled the German advance in Europe and emigrated to New York City under a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.[55]

The Lippmann Colloquium was a conference of intellectuals held in Paris in 1938, organized by French philosopher Louis Rougier. In 1934, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Rougier on a research trip on the situation of intellectuals in central Europe. He taught at the Frankfurt School’s New School for Social Research in New York from 1941–43. Rougier was initially refused membership in the Mont Pelerin Society because of his former association with the Vichy Regime. In 1940, Pétain had sent Rougier on a secret mission to London, and claimed to have brokered an agreement between Vichy and Churchill. Rougier was finally elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1957 through the personal intervention of Friedrich von Hayek.[56]

Another former Vichy collaborator involved in the Colloquium was Alexandre Marc, who had been a member of the Sohlberg Circle, founded by SS member Otto Abetz. Abetz’ key disciples were Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertrand de Jouvenel, who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe.[57] In his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler recalled that in 1934, Jouvenel was among a small number of French intellectuals who promised moral and financial support to the newly established Institut pour l'Étude du Fascisme. Israeli anti-fascist historian Zeev Sternhell published Neither Right nor Left, accusing De Jouvenel of fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel sued in 1983, claiming nine counts of libel, two of which the court upheld. Jouvenel was supported by friends he knew from the post-war period: prominent names like Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman and Raymond Aron, a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Leo Strauss.[58] However, Sternhell was neither required to publish a retraction nor to strike any passages from future printings of his book.

De Jouvenel was also among the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society, in 1947 with Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman, was funded by the Volker Fund.[59] After World War II, because of the excesses of fascism, the right had been largely discredited, and communism was gaining widespread popularity in Western Europe. Many considered the nationalization of industries as a positive direction. To counter these tendencies, Hayek derived his strategy from Carl Schmitt, to whom he openly acknowledged his debt. According to Hayek, “The conduct of Carl Schmitt under the Hitler regime does not alter the fact that, of the modern German writings on the subject, his are still among the most learned and perceptive.”[60] In Road to Serfdom, following Schmitt, Hayek characterized state intervention in the economy as tantamount to totalitarianism.[61] Hayek notes that the “flawed” conception of a welfare state “was very clearly seen by… Carl Schmitt, who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing form of [interventionist] government better than most people.”[62] Hayek therefore articulated the basis of neoliberal thought, which repudiated all forms of government involvement in economic affairs, calling for absolute free enterprise, deregulation of industry and the removal of social programs.

Many of the individuals who supported by the Volker Fund saw themselves as a “remnant,” a term from Isaiah, coined by Albert Jay Nock (1870 – 1945) to refer to anti-statists who resisted the nation’s adherence to the socialism of the New Deal Era.[63] The William Volker Fund, which was founded in 1932 by businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker (1859 – 1947), was instrumental in bringing Friedrich Hayek to the University of Chicago, and also helped support many other classical liberal scholars who at the time could not obtain positions in American universities, such as Hayek and von Mises.[64]

Following Volker’s death in 1947, Volker’s nephew, Harold W. Luhnow (1895 – 1978) continued the fund’s philanthropic mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics. Luhnow also used Volker Fund assets to support bringing schools associated with the Austrian School of economics to US institutions. Under Luhnow’s management, the fund helped the then small minority of Old Right scholars to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, and Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty were all influenced by the ideas discussed at such meetings. Luhnow’s commitment to liberal economic ideas grew, he used the Volker Fund to give sizable contributions to libertarian and conservative causes. Through its subsidiary the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund distributed books by wide range of influential authors, including Hayek, von Mises, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and many others. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in America by subsidizing editions of his Road to Serfdom.[65]

[1] Hugh Wilford. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (Routledge, 2013), p. 242.

[2] Ibid., p. 243.

[3] “The People’s Front.” The Nation (November 16, 1946).

[4] Elana Passman. “The Cultivation of Friendship: French and German Cultural Cooperation, 1925-1954.” A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008)..

[5] Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, p. 56.

[6] Berita Paillard & Emile Haraszti’s article. “Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner in the Franco-German War of 1870.” The Musical Quarterly, 35 (1949). Cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 389.

[7] Pierre Jarnac. “Le Cercle: Rennes-le-Château et le Prieuré de Sion,” (December 2007) Pégase, No 5 hors série, Le Prieuré de Sion - Les Archives de Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair - Rennes-le-Chateau - Gisors - Stenay.

[8] Teacher. Rogue Agents.

[9] Paul Gottfried. “Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right.” Modern Age, 49: 4 (Fall, 2007), p. 508.

[10] Hermann Graf von Keyserling. Das Spektrum Europas (Berlin and Stuttgart, 1928); cited in Paul Gottfried. “Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right.” Modern Age, 49: 4 (Fall, 2007), p. 512.

[11] Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, 1980), Reden und Aufsätze 1925-1929, vol. 3, p. 41; cited in Paul Gottfried. “Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right,” p. 508.

[12] André Ulmann and Henri Azeau. Synarchie et pouvoir (Julliard, 1968), p. 64.

[13] Fr. L, “Esotericism and Espionage.”

[14] Maurice Girodias. Une journée sur le terre (Éditions de la Différence, 1990), vol. I, p. 411.

[15] Picknett & Prince. The Sion Revelation, p. 149.

[16] circular by Dr. Richard Schlesinger. Grossmeister der Grosslogen, 1925, Freimauerlogen, 1412.1.244, in OA; as cited in Dina Gusejnova. European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 85.

[17] Dieter Schwarz. “Freemasonry: Ideology, Organisation, And Policy.” Retrieved from http://thecensureofdemocracy.150m.com/masonry.htm

[18] R. Coudenhove-Kalergi. Eine Idee erobert Europa. Meine Lebenserinnerungen (Wien, 1958), p. 118.

[19] Ignaz Seipel opening the first Paneuropa Congress of 1926, Fond 554.7.470.343–416, Coudenhove-Kalergi papers, RGVA, Moscow; cited in Dina Gusejnova. European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 78.

[20] Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Antieuropa,” Paneuropa, 3 (1930), 92.

[21] “Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.” Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SPRINGcoudenhove.htm

[22] Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. An Idea Conquers the World, p. 1894-185.

[23] Frances Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, (London: Granta Books, 2000).

[24] Bertram David Wolfe. “Breaking with communism,” p. 10; Arthur Koestler. Darkness of Noon, p. 258.

[25] Laurence Zuckerman. “How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture.” New York Times (March 18, 2000).

[26] Ibid., p. 116.

[27] Ibid., p. 116.

[28] Mae Brussell, “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” The Rebel, (January 1984).

[29] Norbert Frei. Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 157.

[30] Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper.

[31] Ibid., p. 118.

[32] Laurence Zuckerman. “How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture.” New York Times (March 18, 2000).

[33] Ibid., p. 226.

[34] “The People’s Front.” The Nation (November 16, 1946).

[35] Patton. Masters of Deception, p. 174.

[36] Adrian Hänni. “A Global Crusade against Communism: The Cercle in the ‘Second Cold War’.” In Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. ed. Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin and Giles Scott-Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 161.

[37] Joël van der Heijden. “Le Cercle and the Struggle for the European Continent: Private Bridge Between Opus Dei and Anglo-American Intelligence.” Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (November 18, 2016).

[38] Adrian Hänni. “A Global Crusade against Communism: The Cercle in the ‘Second Cold War’.” In Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. ed. Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin and Giles Scott-Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 161.

[39] Thierry Meyssan. “The European Union’s Secret History.” VoltaireNet.org (June 28, 2004).

[40] Jonathan Marshall. “Brief Notes On The Political Importance Of Secret Societies.” Lobster Magazine (August 1984, Issue 5).

[41] “The People’s Front.” The Nation (November 16, 1946).

[42] Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. “Synarchy: The Hidden Hand Behind the European Union.” New Dawn (Special Issue 18).

[43] André Ulmann and Henri Azeau. Synarchie et pouvoir (Julliard, 1968), p. 63.

[44] Patton. Masters of Deception, p. 174.

[45] Guy Patton. “Jean-Pierre Francois (J-PF) Connections.” Retrieved from http://www.arcadia7.com/jpfcontactsdiag.pdf; Marie-Dominique Lelièvre. “Jean-Pierre François, 75 ans. Résident suisse aux identités multiples, il passe, sans preuve, pour le banquier occulte de Mitterrand. L’argent double.” Libération (December 3, 1998). Retrieved from https://www.liberation.fr/portrait/1998/12/03/jean-pierre-francois-75-ans-resident-suisse-aux-identites-multiples-il-passe-sans-preuve-pour-le-ban_255048/

[46] University of Denver, Educational Technology, Sturm College of Law. “Jean Monnet: Father of Europe - Sturm College of Law.” Retrieved from https://www.law.du.edu/index.php/jean-monnet-father-of-europe

[47] Valerie Aubourg. “Organizing Atlanticism: the Bilderberg Group and the Atlantic Institute 1952–63.” Intelligence & National Security. June 2003, 18 (2): 92–105.

[48] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs.” The Telegraph (September 19, 2000).

[49] Stephen Dando-Collins. Operation Chowhound: The Most Risky, Most Glorious US Bomber Mission of WWII (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[50] Ibid.

[51] Madeline Bunting. “Weekend break for the global elite.” The Guardian (May 25, 2001).

[52] Jon Ronson. “Who pulls the strings? (part 3).” The Guardian (March 10, 2001).

[53] Coudenhove-Kalergi. An idea conquers the world (London: Hutchinson, 1953). p. 247.

[54] Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 11.

[55] Edmund W. Kitch. “The Fire of Truth: A Remembrance of Law and Economics at Chicago, 1932–1970.” Journal of Law and Economics (April 1983). 26 (1): 163–234.

[56] Yves Steiner. “Louis Rougier et la Mont Pèlerin Society : une contribution en demi-teinte1.” Philosophia Scientiæ (CS 7, 2007), p. 66.

[57] Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, p. 56.

[58] Ibid., p. 20.

[59] Robert Van Horn & Philip Mirowski. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” Cited in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 139–178.

[60] Hayek. Constitution and Liberty, p. 485.

[61] William E. Scheuerman. “The unholy alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations, Volume 4, Issue 2, (October 1997), pp. 172–188.

[62] Hayek. Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. III, 194–95.

[63] Michael J. McVicar. Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

[64] Robert Van Horn & Philip Mirowski. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” In Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 139–178.

[65] Sharlet. The Family. pp. 190-191.