Copied in full below, but without endnotes.
Dear Readers,
The recent domination of mainstream US and European media by a tight group of actors enforcing a common script, many of them former intelligence professionals, is nothing new, sadly. Here I want to share the efforts of a little known Anglo-American organization, the Round Table, a product of the will of British mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, to discreetly advance what Rhodes and allies called a “union of the English-speaking peoples” to dominate world politics. Their goal was to bring America’s elites into creation of a World Federal State after the world war. This group recruited America’s most famous wartime reporter, Edward R. Murrow and used his message to orchestrate a fictional “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in October, 1938 on the eve of the war. The following is a chapter from an unfinished manuscript which I share due to its relevance today.
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I thank you for your interest and support,
William Engdahl
www.williamengdahl.com
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A NEW WORLD ORDER BUILT ON THE ASHES OF WAR
Securing the English-speaking Union
H.G. Wells, intimate of Lord Lothian’s circles in Britain’s foreign policy establishment, and, without doubt the most effective propagandist for the political outlook they represented, had summed it up well before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Utter destruction of the present world order would be a necessary precondition for creating a new world order, an order in which “yapping about nationality,” as Wells contemptuously termed it, would be eliminated in favor of a World State. That World State had to be built on the ashes of war, a project which Wells preferred to call, “the Open Conspiracy.”
Lord Lothian had echoed Wells’ vision in a remarkable address to a 1937 conference of the World Council of Churches. The conference had taken place in Lothian’s alma mater of Oxford University, at the very time Lothian himself had been involved in the intense back-channel diplomatic initiatives between Chamberlain and Hitler.
“Only a few persons appear to comprehend what far-reaching and daemoniacal consequences result from the fact that national sovereignty is the unquestioned foundation of the present international order,” Lothian argued to the members of the World Council of Churches assembled.
“One does not exaggerate when one says, that the catastrophe vividly described by H.G. Wells in his book, ‘The Shape of Things to Come,’ cannot be averted unless we escape from this present state of affairs.” Lothian proceeded to outline his proposal for achieving this escape from national sovereignty.
“No system of simple cooperation is able to rid the world of the extraordinary power of national sovereignty. There is no other effective cure for the daemoniacal and evil consequences of national sovereignty, than through the creation of a single common sovereignty, a world federal state. At the beginning, such a World State does not need to encompass the entire world. It can begin with a smaller group of nations which grasp the real purpose of the idea, and then, proceed to expand.” A union of the English-speaking nations, which would include the U.S., was uppermost in his mind.
What Wells and Lothian left unstated was that for all the noble democratic rhetoric, theirs was to be a selective world order, in all crucial respects modeled on the same racially elitist old world order of the Anglo-Saxon world, or, as Wells termed it, an order dominated by a “great English-speaking English-thinking synthesis, leading mankind by sheer force of numbers, wealth, equipment and scope.”
Agreeing with Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the Round Table’s elite fraternity, Wells stressed that the coming world order must be based on a cooperation, “between all the western peoples and, more particularly, between all the Nordic peoples,” by which he meant Anglo-Saxon and racially kindred peoples. He insisted that “The British Empire had to be the precursor of a world-state or nothing,” and that that world state must also be one in which, “Britain must draw the United States into a closer accord,” into a new great English-speaking union.
A great war would be necessary for organizing such a new order. Since the first strategic alliance in the 1580’s between the British monarchy and the King of Portugal, against Phillip II’s Spain, one axiom had been fundamental to British geopolitics. Whenever England had been threatened with a decisive strategic loss of power or influence, or saw an opportunity for greater power and influence, she initiated a war to reassert or extend her hegemony. But a war using the armies, the territories and the blood of her allies, never her own, if it could at all be avoided. This alliance strategy had in no way changed at the time England declared war against Germany in 1939.
Leading figures of the Round Table group were many things, but they were not stupid. They were well aware that England had emerged from the Great War in 1919, as a deeply indebted former world financial power, even if still the largest colonial power. To continue to exercise predominant influence over the course of world developments, Lothian and others knew all too well, that Britain must forge a unique new alliance relationship.
Of necessity, this time it had to be an alliance with the only economic giant on the world stage sufficiently powerful and pliable to establish a new world order in accord with their design. It would be the first time in her history where England had forged a strategic alliance with a partner economically stronger. It helped the task immensely, that that economic giant was at the time relatively naive and inexperienced in the ways of British geopolitics, as the decade of the 1940’s opened, and the war in Europe began to widen. A decade of economic depression appeared to have humbled America sufficiently to warrant the new try at alliance.
Lothian and Wells’ post-war world order was to be centered around an “Atlantic Partnership,” of England with the United States. This Anglo-American Special Relationship as it came to be known, in their conception, must come to dominate or control an array of new institutions of world order-- military, political and monetary.
In the December 1941 issue of their *“Round Table”*magazine, in a piece written only days before Japanese bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, they elaborated the goals of their postwar Anglo-American cooperation. The central role would be played, of course, by Britain in the postwar world, even if discreetly: “The British nation has generations of experience in co-operating with other free peoples in far distant parts of the world, and in governing dependent countries not able to stand by themselves. The American nation,” they argued, “has practically no such experience at all, and has neither the institutions nor the political outlook to fit it very well for either task.” This was their trump card as they saw it.
That being the case, they demanded “everything to foster the closest collaboration with the United States, by the same means which have been found successful between the British nations.” The Round Table call emphasized that, “if disaster is not to overtake the world again, the United States must, however reluctantly, now take its full share of this responsibility.” Responsibility, however, for an agenda made in London, not in Washington.
British Foreign Office policy circles needed, above all, to win the United States to their idea of postwar world order. To do that required bringing America once again into a war in alliance with England, and in the process, to overcome deep American suspicion, distrust, remaining anger at unpaid Versailles debts, and other broken promises left from 1919.
America had been significantly weakened through the Great Depression, and, they reasoned, would be more amenable than in 1919 to agree the English view of world responsibility for a great power. The method was an old one in British foreign policy practice. As soon as France had been humiliated by the showdown with Kitchner at Fashoda on the Nile in 1898, England began to organize France into the anti-German Entente Cordiale. Similarly, as soon as Czarist Russia had its naval fleet in the Pacific destroyed by Japan in the war of 1904-5, England began to negotiate a strategic Anglo-Russian alliance with a weakened Russia against Germany. It mattered not that in 1905 Britain had had an alliance with Japan. British interests dictated the shifting alliance strategy.
Now at the onset of the second great war of the century, Round Table circles knew painfully well, their new postwar order had to be built on a foundation which would avoid the primary defect of the failed League of Nations. Britain’s principal adversary of the 1920’s must become her principal ally. This time around, the United States would remain not on the periphery, but at the very center of their new global world order. However, she would be bound inextricably, through a spider’s web of carefully-crafted alliances, to Britain’s larger geopolitical agenda.
The reason for their emphasis on winning America over was clear. To maintain “peace” in the postwar world would require, “a complete supremacy of Anglo-American military forces, and particularly naval and air forces,” as they put it in the December 1941 writing. This military supremacy, in turn, “requires the maintenance at all costs of the stability of exchanges, currencies and prices in the main trading countries of the world.” In short, before the United States had even declared war against Japan and the Axis powers, the Round Table group had elaborated what was to emerge after the war as NATO, as the United Nations Organization, as the Bretton Woods monetary control agencies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
This new world order was to be the crowning point of the lifelong efforts of Halifax, Lord Lothian and their select Round Table group. To secure it, however, first required them to participate in and try to shape the greatest carnage in human history, the Second World War. Their design for the postwar order above all dictated decisive, and otherwise inexplicable events of World War II, including the unimaginable, gruesome destruction of more than sixty million lives in the six years of war between 1939 and 1945.
Only a war on such a grand global scale, Lothian and the others were convinced, one involving Russia, Germany, Japan and China, would be sufficient in its extent and horror to galvanize the public sentiment of the Allied nations, above all the United States, behind their scheme for world federalism.[i]
The Round World of Halford Mackinder
For their part, neither Hitler, nor his internal opposition within the German General Staff and Foreign Ministry, comprehended how they were being used as grotesque pawns in a global chess game to advance a greater geopolitical design. They fully misunderstood the basis of British strategy, and above all, ignored the explicit axioms of British geopolitics. They were far from the only ones.
Sir Halford John Mackinder, Royal Geographer, a member of the King’s Privy Council, who served long years as chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee, was the acknowledged architect of what came to be called, “British geopolitics.”
Mackinder had formulated his core doctrine already in 1904, well before the First World War. In essence, he argued, there existed “a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations…a formula which shall express certain aspects of geographical causation in universal history. That formula should have a practical value, as setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.”
For Mackinder, the “geographical pivot” of all world history was what he termed the Russian, or Eurasian “Heartland.” Control over this Eurasian Heartland determined who would control the totality of Europe, Asia and Africa, designated by Mackinder as the “World Island.”
In a text he had written in 1919, as a guide for the victors at the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder described the region centered in Germany, Austro-Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, as East Europe. “Who rules East Europe,” he insisted, “commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland, commands the World-Island.” He took his geopolitical conclusion one step further: “Who rules the World-Island commands the World.” It was meant as a stern warning to the Versailles negotiators, as well as to later generations of British policymakers.
Mackinder himself was a member of a close-knit circle of “new Empire” advocates, which included leading Round Table figures such as Leopold Amery, Lord Milner, Lord Cecil and H.G. Wells. Defending the supremacy of the British Empire, Mackinder argued vehemently that Britain must never allow any genuine alliance, economic or otherwise, between Germany and Russia. Were such a continental alliance between Central Europe and the Heartland ever to emerge, Mackinder warned, “the empire of the world would then be in sight.”
To prevent emergence of that rival “empire of the world,” Round Table policy, as executed first by the Chamberlain government, and after May 1940, by Churchill, was to orchestrate events for a bloody war of mutual destruction between Russia and Germany, one which would also bring Japan into battle against China and Russia in the Pacific Theater.
That global conflagration was to form the basis for convincing America to overcome her skepticism about the war, and, more importantly, skepticism about a permanent postwar alliance with Britain.
Such an Anglo-American alliance in a war against the German Axis powers was necessary, in order to “save the human civilization,” as the Round Table’s magazine described it in December 1939. Of course, the theater of this war was to be as far from British shores as possible, fought by others, and ultimately won by the Round Table policy elite in Britain.
In 1943, in the heat of battle, the London foreign policy establishment had determined that the task of organizing the American establishment to their postwar order was so vital that they asked Mackinder, then 82 years old, personally to outline for a special American audience, the blueprint for the Round Table’s postwar world order. Now that America was fully in the war on England’s side, the shaping of what British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden termed the “After-War,” had begun to assume urgency. Only if America were convinced of the British postwar agenda, would Churchill be able to direct the theaters of conflict to maximum advantage for Britain’s postwar design.
Very few in the United States, beyond the elite circles of the New York banking and business world with its close ties to London, had the slightest appreciation who Halford Mackinder was, let alone, the awesome importance of his system of geopolitics, for the shaping of strategy among leading British circles. Only a handful of American scholars were aware that Hitler’s own teacher, Karl Haushofer, was also a disciple of Mackinder’s geopolitics, even if viewing the process from a German, rather than British perspective.
Mackinder argued that Britain, as the world’s leading sea-power, must prevent, at all costs, consolidation of an alliance between Germany and Russia. Haushofer agreed with Mackinder that Germany, as the dominant land power in central Europe, were she to control the Heartland of Russia and Ukraine, would indeed be in a position to control the entire Eurasian landmass.
However, Haushofer argued, and Hitler repeated his argument in “Mein Kampf,” Germany, when once in control of the Heartland, as the hegemonic land power of Eurasia, must then propose to England a bi-polar division of the world. The British Empire would be the hegemonic sea power, and the German Reich, the hegemonic Eurasian land power.
Pursuit of Mackinder’s geopolitical doctrine of Heartland and World Island, was to shape the world for the entirety of the Second World War, and for almost five decades after, despite the fact that most of mankind would never realize who had been the architect of that order.
To further his geopolitical design, in the summer of 1943 Mackinder turned to an elite New York journal, a most influential forum to address the American establishment. It was “Foreign Affairs,” the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. The Council itself was the sister organization to Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), or Chatham House, as it was known. Both the New York Council and Chatham House had been created as a joint project of the Round Table, with the backing of the J.P. Morgan banking group, in Paris, in private negotiations during the 1919 Versailles Peace talks.
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