Name: The Anglo-American establishment
ISBN: 9780945001010

What Hacker News says

BirAdamDec 2022

I've been reading the Foundation series, and it's quite good.

Aside from that:

"The New Right" by Michael Malice

"The Storm Before the Storm" by Mike Duncan

"The Anglo-American Establishment" by Carroll Quigley

"Numbers Don't Lie" by Vaclav Smil

Books that weren't good:

"A Short History of Man" by Hans-Herman Hopper

"The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil

"After Evangelicalism" by David P. Gushee

thread

raintreesJan 2022

If interested, for more data including names and dates, try Carroll Quigley's Anglo-American Establishment or his Tragedy and Hope. For a shorter version, try Joe Plummer's Tragedy and Hope 101.

If true, not all is as it appears. But then, in the day and age of propaganda, when is it?

thread

arminiusreturnsJan 2022

I strongly disagree. Look, I understand that it is a safe line to take that the government is just inept, apathetic, etc, but that simply doesn't match the facts, and it has nothing to do with whats an easier explanation. Don't get me wrong, having been inside the system first hand there is quite a bit of ineptitude, lumbering bureaucratic systems, etc. I'm not saying thats not also true, but when you say there is no evidence this is part of some coordinated effort you are absolutely wrong. I really try hard not to get into "conspiracy theory territory" too much on HN because the conversation usually devolves, so I really don't want to get into a long list of evidence, but I could recommend The Anglo-American Establishment by Carrol Quigley as a good starting point for understanding how over-time agendas can be propagated and enacted. Perhaps the interview by Norman Dodd with G Edward Griffin about the tax exempt foundations.

You are correct however when you say the powers that be don't have complete influence, but I would say that influence has grown vastly, mostly through consolidation of media and banking, and that to say it is extremely powerful influence is still an understatement. Also I would say it's a mischaracterization to say "Why would corporate execs hand pick officials that would break them up", one, because they aren't the real oligarchs behind the scenes, and two, because I highly doubt that any rhetoric about anti-trust/monopoly is real given the track record in that arena. [1]

I strongly dislike this far too often used rhetorical clip used to dismiss any conspiracy you use: "form narratives that don’t exist to explain the world in a way that makes sense." How about we follow the evidence to the truth however ugly it may be. It often feels to me rather like when presented with darker narratives that do exist people would rather dismiss this like this as a way of burying their head in the sand to pretend things are better than they are.

You aren't looking very hard then to be frank when you say "the only conspiracy I really see is..."

Also, while I do think the voters take a large amount of responsibility, I don't think that is a good analysis of how entrenched the oligarchy are in electoral systems via the two party duopoly they control. Just take a look at your secretary of states website and look at how asinine the rules are for any party or person not a part of the duopoly. If the oligarchs control both parties, which they do, then the real threat would be from anybody outside that system and thats why you can see the evidence of how hard they have worked to stop the people from having any real mechanisms of influence themselves. Voting in primaries can help if another person gets on the ballot, but good luck actually doing that.

Look, one of the most powerful tools the oligarchs have is that they think and operate on much longer timelines than the rest of us. They setup mechanisms, plans, etc that don't come to fruition until their children or grandchildren are at the helm. Until the people interested in this topic understand that, much of what is going on the world won't make much sense. In that note, I will leave you with a quote from Michael Parenti about this idea of absent minded empire.

"Empires are even sometimes represented as unintentional. That's when it really starts to get cute. This should have been called maybe the funnier myths of empire, this part of it. The product of unconcious circumstance. When I was a youth, ... I used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a fit of absent mindedness. ... In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I think a moments reflection would tell you that empires are products of deliberate contrivance, of deliberate confection, planning, calculation, and manipulation. No social order can maintain itself in the long run, no social order can maintain itself without concious human agency. In fact that's why you have a state, the state is the concious human agency of coercion to maintain that particular set of interests and order, which don't necessarily always look out for our interests." - Michael Parenti

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YTrqq0HwXc

thread

arminiusreturnsSep 2021

I don't think it is, but I think I understand your point. Of course there is no denyng there is a huge amount of cultural blurring of lines, primarily through the common language, but what I'm talking about goes far beyond just "but a few aristos have ties so why would they hate us" and more towards the systemic setup that has created much of the current mess we are in today. For example, there is a strong body of evidence supporting that Wilsonianism, which I credit as the primary turning point of US foreign policy, was very much entertwined with the upper establishment types in the UK. I could cite many similar examples (the banking system) that continue this narrative. These arent inherently bad per se, but the naive way Americans think of them makes them vulnerable to manipulation and deception.

Carroll Quigley's Anglo-American Establishment is a must read for background knowledge on this topic.

thread

arminiusreturnsNov 2020

Talbot's book is top notch, if you've read it you have a huge head start. I haven't read "The Mighty Wurlitzer", so thank you for the addition to the "to read" list. I would probably suggest Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World". Another more superficial but still useful one is "The Brothers". To understand the OSS-MI6 connection, I like to suggest Carrol Quigleys "The Anglo-American Establishment", and for particulars about things you devolve into certain authors, the list is long, but an example would be Doug Valentine's work about Operation Phoenix. For a more unorthodox look into the Bush connection, the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush by Webster Tarpley is quite illuminating about the Brown Brothers Harriman stuff.

The point I made previously still stands though. Some of these are really good books (and we just barely scratched the surface) but I have found that there is no "one great book" that explains the history or current state of things.

I tend to lean these days towards thinking much of the abuses are due to the 1947 NatSec act. For the other commenter, I would like to specify that my point is that the compartmentalization is abused just to that purpose (so that the middle men who have good intentions can be used in ways beyond their understanding that they would not like if they understood), combined with a top down series of compromise operations... that's the main weakness in such a compartmentalized but centralized structure.

thread

arca_voragoSep 2017

The ones that cut through the stale version taught in schools.

Mostly Carroll Quigley's works like Tragedy and Hope, Anglo-American Establishment, or The Evolution of Civilizations.

Another I consider at the level of Quigley is Anthony Sutton.

There are quite a few less academically accurate books that are good eye openers anyway like Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States. As a combat vet a couple that speak to the issue of war are God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman and The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbitt (some really good stuff about the future of nation-states in a post nuclear world.)

Those are just a few key ones off the top of my head. Personally, what I find one of the best ways is to find a more narrow interest and find books written by or about the key players at the top. I often find that tidbits across various sources add up to very interesting insights.

Also, a must in my opinion for an American is the Norman Dodd interview about his investigations on the Reece Committee and how history was targeted as being needed to be controlled.

thread