This article is the third part of a four-part series on Truthdig Read Part 1 and Part 2.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The odd, psychologically conflicted and politically divisive ideology referred to as Neoconservatism can claim many godfathers. Irving Kristol, father of William Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz and Sidney Hook come to mind and there are many others. But in both theory and its practice the title of founding-father of the neoconservative agenda of endless warfare that rules the thinking of America’s defense and foreign policies today might best be applied to James Burnham.

His writings in the 1930s provided a refined Oxford intellectual’s gloss to the Socialist Workers party and as a close advisor to Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International he learned the tactics and strategies of infiltration and political subversion first hand. Burnham reveled in his role as a “Trotskyist intellectual” pulling dirty tricks on his political foes in competing Marxist movements by turning their loyalties and looting their best talent.

Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxism in all its forms in1940 but he would take their tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion with him and would turn their method of dialectical materialism against them. His 1941book The Managerial Revolution would bring him fame and fortune and establish him as an astute, if not exactly accurate political prophet chronicling the rise of a new class of technocratic elite. His next book The Machiavellians would confirm his movement away from Marxist idealism to a very cynical and often cruel realism with his belief in the inevitable failure of democracy and the rise of the oligarch. In 1943 he would put it all to use in a memo for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services the OSS in which his Trotskyist anti-Stalinism would find its way into the agency’s thinking. And in his 1947 book The Struggle for the World, Burnham would expand his confrontational/adversarial dialectic toward the Soviet Union into a permanent, apocalyptic policy of endless war. By 1947 James Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical to New World Order American conservative was complete.  His Struggle for the World had done a French Turn on Trotsky’s permanent Communist revolution and turned it into a permanent battle plan for a global American empire. All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive for generations.

The rise of the Machiavellians

In 1939 Sidney Hook, Burnham’s colleague at NYU and fellow Marxist philosopher had helped to found an anti-Stalinist Committee for Cultural Freedom as part of a campaign against Moscow.  During the war Hook too had abandoned Marxism and like Burnham somehow found himself in the warm embrace of the right-wing of America’s intelligence community during and after World War II. Hook was viewed by the Communist Party as a traitor and “counter-revolutionary reptile” for his activities and by 1942 was informing on his fellow comrades to the FBI.

Selling impoverished and dispossessed European elites on the virtues of American culture was essential to building America’s empire after the war and Burnham’s early writings proved the inspiration from which a new counter-culture of “Freedom” would be built.  As veterans of internecine Trotskyist warfare both Burnham and Hook were practiced at the arts of infiltration and subversion and with Burnham’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom as their blueprint they set out to color anything the Soviets did or said with dark intent.

As Burnham articulated clearly in his Machiavellians, his version of Freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms defined by America’s Constitution. What it really meant was conformity and submission. Burnham’s Freedom only applied to those intellectuals (the Machiavellians) willing to tell people the hard truth about the unpopular political realities they faced. These were the realities that would usher in a brave new world of the managerial class who would set about denying Americans the very democracy they thought they already owned. As Orwell observed about Burnham’s Machiavellian beliefs in his 1946 Second Thoughts, “Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to use the masses…”

By 1949 the CIA was actively in the business of defrauding the masses by secretly supporting the so called non-Communist left and behaving as if it was just a spontaneous outgrowth of a free society. By turning the left to the service of its expanding empire the CIA was applying a French Turn of its own by picking the best and the brightest and the creation of the National Security State in 1947 institutionalized it. Assisted by Britain’s Information Research Department the IRD, the CIA recruited key former Soviet disinformation agents trained before the war who had managed non-Communist front groups for Moscow and put them to work. As Frances Stoner Saunders writes in her book, The Cultural Cold War, “these former propagandists for the Soviets were recycled, bleached of the stain of Communism, embraced by government strategists who saw in their conversion an irresistible opportunity to sabotage the Soviet propaganda machine which they had once oiled.”

By its own admission the CIA’s strategy of promoting the non-Communist left would become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism for over the next two decades. But the no holds barred cultural war against Soviet Communism began in earnest in March 1949 when a group of 800 prominent literary and artistic figures gathered at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a Soviet sponsored “Cultural and Scientific” conference that would sue for peace.  Both Sydney Hook and James Burnham were already actively involved in enlisting recruits to counter Moscow’s Communist Information Bureau’s (Cominform) efforts to influence Western Opinion. But the Waldorf conference gave them an opportunity for dirty tricks they could only have prayed for.

Demonstrators organized by a right-wing coalition of Catholic groups and the American legion heckled the guests as they arrived. Catholic nuns knelt in prayer for the souls of the Communist atheists in attendance. Gathered upstairs in a tenth floor bridal suite a gang of ex-Trotskyists and Communists led by Hook intercepted the conference’s mail, doctored official press releases and published pamphlets challenging speakers to admit their Communist past.

In the end the entire conference became a twisted theatre of the absurd and Hook and Burnham would use it to sell Frank Wisner at the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination on taking the show on the road.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom: By Hook or by Crook

Drawing on the untapped power of the Fourth International, the coming out party came on June 26, 1950 at the Titania Palace in occupied Berlin. Named for Hook’s 1939 concept for a cultural committee, The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s fourteen-point “Freedom Manifesto” was to identify the West with freedom. And since everything about the West was said to be free, free, free then it went without saying everything about the Soviet Union wasn’t.

Organized by Burnham and Hook, the American delegation represented a who’s who of America’s post war intellectuals. Tickets to Berlin were paid for by Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination through front organizations as well as the Department of State which helped arrange travel, expenses and publicity. According to CIA Historian Michael Warner the conference’s sponsor’s considered it money well spent with one Defense Department representative calling it “unconventional warfare at its best.”

Burnham functioned as a critical connection between Wisner’s office and the intelligentsia moving from the extreme left to the extreme right with ease. Burnham found the Congress to be a place to inveigh not just against Communism but against the non-communist left as well and left many wondering whether his views weren’t as dangerous to liberal democracy as Communism. According to Frances Stoner Saunders, members of the British delegation found the rhetoric coming out of the Congress to be a deeply troubling sign of things to come. “Hugh Trevor-Roper was appalled by the provocative tone… ‘There was a speech by Franz Borkenau which was very violent and indeed almost hysterical. He spoke in German and I regret to say that as I listened and I heard the baying voices of approval from the huge audiences, I felt, well, these are the same people who seven years ago were probably baying in the same way to similar German denunciations of Communism coming from Dr. Goebbels in the Sports Palast. And I felt, well, what sort of people are we identifying with? That was the greatest shock to me. There was a moment during the Congress when I felt that we were being invited to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Stalin.’”

The Congress for Cultural Freedom didn’t need Beelzebub, it already had him in the form of Burnham, Hook and Wisner and by 1952 the party was just getting started. Burnham worked overtime for Wisner legitimizing the Congress as a platform for the Machiavellians alongside ex-Communists and even Nazis, including SS General Reinhard Gehlen and his German Army intelligence unit which had been brought into the CIA after the war, intact. E. Howard Hunt, Watergate “plumber” famous as a CIA dirty trickster remembered Burnham in his memoirs, “Burnham was a consultant to OPC on virtually every subject of interest to our organization… He had extensive contacts in Europe and, by virtue of his Trotskyite background, was something of an authority on domestic and foreign Communist parties and front organizations.”

In 1953 Burnham was called upon again by Wisner to reach beyond Communism to help overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Teheran apparently because Wisner thought the plan needed “a touch of Machiavelli.” But Burnham’s greatest contribution as a Machiavellian was yet to come. His book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom would become the CIA’s manual for displacing Western culture with an alternative doctrine for endless conflict in a world of oligarchs and in the end open the gates to an Inferno from which there would be no return. ………………………………………………………………………………………………Join us next as we reach beyond Soviet Communism and into the creation of a sophisticated doctrinal campaign that would neutralize any political opposition (Communist or not) to the “planners” designs and make the world safe for the rise of the Machiavellian elite.

Copyright © 2017   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell

Part 2: How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books

Part 3 How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’

This article is Part II of a four-part series published on Truthdig. Read Part 1.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Most Americans outside of Washington policy circles don’t know about Team B, where it came from or what it did, nor are they aware of its roots in the Fourth International, the Trotskyist branch of the Communist International. Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985 attributed the intelligence failure represented by 9/11 to Team B and had this to say about it in a 2004 article for the Los Angeles Times.

“The roots of the problem go back to May 6, 1976, when the director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush, created the first Team B… The concept of a “competitive analysis” of the data done by an alternative team had been opposed by William Colby, Bush’s predecessor as CIA director and a career professional… Although the Team B report contained little factual data it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate… Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. But it was flawed in the other direction.”

Korb went on to explain that a 1978 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence review concluded; “that the selection of Team B members had yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. And a 1989 review concluded that the Soviet threat had been ‘substantially overestimated’ in the CIA’s annual intelligence estimates… Still, the failure of Team B in 1976 did not deter the hard-liners from challenging the CIA’s judgments for the next three decades.”

Now long forgotten, the origins of the Team B “problem” actually stretched back to the radical political views and biases of James Burnham, his association with the Communist Revolutionary Leon Trotsky  and the creation of powerful eastern establishment ad hoc groups; the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council. From the outset of the Cold War in the late 1940s an odd coalition of ex-Trotskyist radicals and right wing business associations had lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism. Vietnam was intended to prove the brilliance of their theories, but as described by author Fred Kaplan, “Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America’s national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action.” (Wizards of Armageddon page. 336) Kaplan ends by writing “The disillusionment for some became nearly total.” Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat for America’s defense intellectuals; it represented a conceptual failure in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism but for Team B, that disillusionment represented the opportunity of a lifetime.

Trotskyist Intellectuals become The New York Intellectuals become Defense Intellectuals

Populated by an inbred class of former Trotskyist intellectuals, the Team B approach represented a radical transformation of America’s national security bureaucracy into a new kind of elitist cult. In the 1960s Robert McNamara’s numbers and statistics justified bad policy decisions, now personal agendas and ethnic grudges would turn American foreign policy into an ideological crusade. Today those in control of that crusade fight desperately to maintain their grip, but only by de-encrypting the evolution of this secret “double government” can anyone understand America’s unrelenting post-Vietnam drift into despotism over the last 40 years.

Rooted in what can only be described as cult thinking, the Team B experiment tore down what was left of the CIA’s pre-Vietnam professional objectivity by subjecting it to politicization. Earlier in the decade, the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research (OSR) had been pressured by Nixon and Kissinger to corrupt their analysis to justify increased defense spending but the Team B’s ideological focus and partisan makeup so exaggerated the threat, the process could never return to normal.

The campaign was driven by the Russophobic neoconservative cabal which included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle and a handful of old anti-Soviet hardliners like Paul Nitze and General Danny Graham. It began with a 1974 article in the Wall Street Journal by the famed nuclear strategist and former Trotskyist Albert Wohlstetter decrying America’s supposed nuclear vulnerability. It ended 2 years later with a ritualistic bloodletting at the CIA, signaling that ideology and not fact-based analysis had gained an exclusive hold on America’s bureaucracy.

The ideology referred to as Neoconservatism can claim many godfathers if not godmothers. Roberta Wohlstetter’s reputation as one of RAND’s preeminent Cold Warriors was equal to her husband’s. The couple’s infamous parties at their Santa Monica home acted as a kind of initiation rite for the rising class of “defense intellectual”.  But the title of founding-father might best be applied to James Burnham.  A convert from Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s inner circle, Burnham’s 1941, The Managerial Revolution and 1943’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom championed the anti-democratic takeover then occurring in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy while in1945’s Lenin’s Heir he switched his admiration, if only tongue in cheek, from Trotsky to Stalin.

George Orwell criticized Burnham’s cynical elitist vision in his 1946 essay Second Thoughts on James Burnham, writing “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.”

Orwell is said to have modelled his novel 1984 on Burnham’s vision of the coming totalitarian state which he described as “a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery.”

As a Princeton and Oxford educated English scholar (one of his professor’s at Balliol College was J.R.R Tolkien) Burnham landed a position as a writer and an instructor in the philosophy department at New York University just in time for the 1929 Wall Street crash. Although initially uninterested in politics and hostile to Marxism, by 1931Burnham had become radicalized by the Great Depression and alongside fellow NYU philosophy instructor Sidney Hook, drawn to Marxism.

Burnham found Trotsky’s use of “dialectical materialism” to explain the interplay between the human and the historical forces in his History of the Russian Revolution to be brilliant. His subsequent review of Trotsky’s book would bring the two men together and begin for Burnham a six year odyssey through America’s Communist left that would in this strange saga, ultimately transform him into the agent of its destruction.

As founder of the Red Army and a firebrand Marxist, Trotsky had dedicated his life to the spread of a worldwide Communist revolution. Stalin opposed Trotsky’s views as too ambitious and the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death splintered the party. By their very nature the Trotskyists were expert at infighting, infiltration and disruption. Burnham reveled in his role as a Trotskyist intellectual and the endless debates over the fundamental principle of Communism (dialectical materialism) behind Trotsky’s crusade. The Communist Manifesto approved the tactic of subverting larger and more populist political parties (entrism) and following Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist party in November 1927, his followers exploited it. The most well-known example of entrism was the so called “French Turn” when in 1934 the French Trotskyists entered the much larger French Socialist Party the SFIO with the intention of winning over the more militant elements to their side.

That same year the American followers of Trotsky in the Communist League of America, the CLA did a French turn on the American Workers Party, the AWP in a move that elevated the AWP’s James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief advisor.

Burnham liked the toughness of the Bolsheviks and despised the weakness of the liberals. According to his biographer Daniel Kelly, “He took great pride in what he saw as its hard-headed view of the world in contrast to philosophies rooted in ‘dreams and illusions.’” He also delighted in the tactics of infiltrating and subverting other leftist parties and in 1935 “fought tirelessly for the French turn” of another and far larger Socialist Party the SP some twenty thousand strong. The Trotskyists intended “to capture its left wing and its youth division, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL),” Kelly writes “and take the converts with them when they left.”

Burnham remained a “Trotskyist Intellectual” from 1934 until 1940. But although he labored six years for the party, it was said of him that he was never of the party and as the new decade began he renounced both Trotsky and “the ‘philosophy of Marxism’ dialectical materialism” altogether. He summed up his feelings in a letter of resignation on May 21, 1940. “Of the most important beliefs, which have been associated with the Marxist Movement, whether in its reformist, Leninist, Stalinist or Trotskyist variants, there is virtually none which I accept in its traditional form. I regard these beliefs as either false or obsolete or meaningless; or in a few cases, as at best true only in a form so restricted and modified as no longer properly to be called Marxist.”

In 1976 Burnham wrote to a legendary secret agent whom biographer Kelly referred to as “the British political analyst Brian Crozier” that he had never swallowed dialectical materialism or the ideology of Marxism but was merely being pragmatic given the rise of Hitler and the Depression.

But given the influential role Burnham would come to play in creating the new revolutionary class of neoconservatives, and their central role in using Trotsky’s tactics to lobby against any relationship with the Soviet Union, it’s hard to believe Burnham’s involvement with Trotsky’s Fourth International was only an intellectual exercise in pragmatism.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Join us next time as we explore how Burnham’s involvement with the OSS and the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom would set the stage for a sophisticated doctrinal campaign that would neutralize any political opposition (Communist or not) to Anglo/American culture and make the world safe for the rise of the Machiavellian elite.

Copyright © 2017   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

Part I –  American Neocon Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell

Part II – How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books

This article is the first part of a four-part series  on Truthdig..

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

“The Gate of Hell” by Gustave Doré for Dante’s “Inferno.” (Wikimedia) “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. (Abandon all hope ye who enter here.)”—Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno (Part I), Canto 3, Line 9

Before the Tomahawk missiles start flying between Moscow and New York, Americans had better educate themselves fast about the forces and the people who claim that Russia covered up a Syrian government gas attack on its own people. Proof no longer seems to matter in the rush to further transform the world into Dante’s vision of Hell. Accusations made by anonymous sources, spurious sources and outright frauds have become enough. Washington’s paranoia and confusion bear an uncanny resemblance to the final days of the Third Reich, when the leadership in Berlin became completely unglued.

Tensions have been building since fall with accusations that Russian media interfered with our presidential election and is a growing threat to America’s national security. The latest WikiLeaks release strongly suggested that it was the CIA’s own contract hackers behind Hillary Clinton’s email leaks and not Russians. The U.S. has a long reputation of accusing others of things they didn’t do and planting fake news stories to back it up in order to provide a cause for war. The work of secret counterintelligence services is to misinform the public in order to shape opinion, and that’s what this is.

The current U.S. government campaign to slander Russia over anything and everything it does bears all the earmarks of a classic disinformation campaign, but this time is even crazier. Considering that Washington has put Russia, China and Iran on its anti-globalist hit list from which no one is allowed to escape, drummed-up charges against them shouldn’t come as a surprise. But accusing the Russians of undermining American democracy and interfering in an election is tantamount to an act of war, and that simply is not going to wash.

This time, the United States is not demonizing an ideological enemy (USSR) or a religious one (al-Qaida, ISIS, etc.). It’s making this latest venture into the blackest of propaganda a race war, the way the Nazis made their invasion of Russia a race war in 1941, and that is not a war the United States can justify or win.

The level and shrillness of the latest disinformation campaign has been growing for some time. But the American public has lived in a culture of fake news (formerly known as propaganda) for so long many have grown to accept fake news as real news. George Orwell saw this coming, and here it is. As a big supporter of U.S. military intervention in Cuba and an avowed practitioner of “yellow journalism,” in 1897, William Randolph Hearst admonished the illustrator he’d sent to Cuba who’d found no war to illustrate: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst eventually got his war, and America’s experiment in imperialism was off and running.

Americans should know by now that their country’s wars are fertile ground for biased, one-sided, xenophobic, fake news, and the United States has been in a permanent state of war since 1941. Although the targets have shifted over the years, the purpose of the propaganda hasn’t. Most cultures are coerced, cajoled or simply threatened into accepting known falsehoods demonizing their enemies during wartime. But no matter how frequently repeated or cleverly told, no lie can hold if the war never ends. The legendary cold warrior, Time and Life magazines’ Henry Luce, considered his personal fight against Communism to be “a declaration of private war.” He’d even asked one of his executives whether or not the idea was probably “unlawful and probably mad?” Nonetheless, despite his doubts about his own sanity, Luce allowed the CIA to use his Time/Life magazines as a cover for the agency’s operations and to provide credentials to CIA personnel.

Luce was not alone in his service to the CIA’s propaganda wars. Recently declassified documents reveal the CIA’s propaganda extended to all the mainstream media outlets. Dozens of the most respected journalists and opinion makers during the Cold War considered it a privilege to keep American public opinion from straying away from CIA control.

Now that the new Cold War has turned hot, we are led to believe that the Russians have breached this wall of not-so-truthful journalists and rattled the foundation of everything we are supposed to hold dear about the purity of the U.S. election process and “freedom of the press” in America.

Black propaganda is all about lying. Authoritarian governments lie regularly. Totalitarian governments do it so often nobody believes them. A government based on democratic principles like the United States is supposed to speak the truth, but when the U.S. government’s own documents reveal it has been lying over and over again for decades, the jig is up.

Empires have been down this road before, and it doesn’t end well. Americans are now being told they should consider all Russian opinion as fake and ignore any information that challenges the mainstream media and U.S. government on what is truth and what is the lie. But for the first time in memory, Americans have become aware that the people Secretary of State Colin Powell once called “the crazies” have taken the country over the cliff.

The neoconservative hitmen and hit-ladies of Washington have a long list of targets that pass from generation to generation. Their influence on American government has been catastrophic, yet it never seems to end. Sen. J. William Fulbright identified their irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago in a New Yorker article titled “Reflections in Thrall to Fear.”

The truly remarkable thing about this Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them. … The Cold Warriors, instead of having to say how they knew that Vietnam was part of a plan for the Communization of the world, so manipulated the terms of the public discussion as to be able to demand that the skeptics prove that it was not. If the skeptics could not then the war must go on—to end it would be recklessly risking the national security.

Fulbright realized that Washington’s resident crazies had turned the world inside out and concluded, “We come to the ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never]–or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis.” But these were not rational men, and their need to further their irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.

Having long forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and after a tragic repeat in Iraq that the highly respected General William Odom considered “equivalent to the Germans at Stalingrad,” the crazies are at it again. With no one to stop them, they have kicked off an updated version of the Cold War against Russia as if nothing had changed since the last one ended in 1992. The original Cold War was immensely expensive to the United States and was conducted at the height of America’s military and financial power. The United States is no longer that country. Since the Cold War was supposedly about the ideological “threat” of Communism, Americans need to ask before it’s too late exactly what kind of threat does a Capitalist/Christian Russia pose to the leader of the “Free World” this time?

Muddying the waters in a way not seen since Sen. Joe McCarthy and the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” signed into law without fanfare by President Obama in December 2016 officially authorizes a government censorship bureaucracy comparable only to George Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in his novel “1984.” Referred to as “The Global Engagement Center,” the official purpose of the new bureaucracy will be to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”

But the real purpose of this totally Orwellian center will be to manage, eliminate or censor any dissenting views that challenge Washington’s newly manufactured version of the truth and to intimidate, harass or jail anyone who tries. Criminalizing dissent is nothing new in time of war, but after 16 years of ceaseless warfare in Afghanistan, a Stalingrad–like defeat in Iraq and with Henry Kissinger advising President Trump on foreign policy, the Global Engagement Center has already assumed the characteristics of a dangerous farce.

The brilliant American satirical songwriter of the 1950s and ’60s Tom Lehrer once attributed his early retirement to Henry Kissinger, saying “Political satire became obsolete [in 1973] when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Kissinger’s duplicitous attempts at securing an “honorable peace” in America’s war in Vietnam deserved at least ridicule. His long, drawn-out negotiations extended the war for four years at the cost of 22,000 American lives and countless Vietnamese. According to University of California researcher Larry Berman, author of 2001’s “No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam,” the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Kissinger were never even expected to work, but were only to serve as a justification for a brutal and permanent air war once they were violated. Berman writes, “Nixon recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. … [but] Watergate derailed the plan.”

The Vietnam War had broken the Eastern establishment’s hold over foreign policy long before Nixon and Kissinger’s entry onto the scene. Détente with the Soviet Union had come about during the Johnson administration in an effort to bring some order out of the chaos, and Kissinger had carried it through Nixon and Ford. But while dampening one crisis, détente created an even worse one by breaking open the longstanding internal-deep-state-struggle for control of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat; it represented a conceptual failure in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism. The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of the U.S. government’s deceit and incompetence, but rather than concede that defeat and chart a new course, its proponents fought back with a Machiavellian ideological campaign known as the “experiment in competitive analysis” or, for short, Team B.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times in August 2004 in an article titled “It’s Time to Bench ‘Team B,’ ” Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, came forward on what he knew to be the real tragedy represented by 9/11. “The reports of the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence missed the real problem facing the intelligence community, which is not organization or culture but something known as the ‘Team B’ concept. And the real villains are the hard-liners who created the concept out of an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals.”

Copyright © 2017   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

Part II will be published on Truthdig 4/25/17  and trace the origins of Team B’s hardliners back to their roots in the Fourth International, the Trotskyist branch of the Communist International and the Machiavellian culture of American philosopher and political theorist James Burnham as his present-day disciples threaten to ignite a Third World War..

A powerful Tarot card because its possibilities start in nothingness and reach into infinity Rider-Waite tarot deck, public domain

How the hatred for Catholic Rome in the 14th century would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep-state; and how this conflict would lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church, whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would complete its cycle on November 22, 1963 in the Anglo/Norman America of the present era.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Knights Templar, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets

Whether or not the Knights Templar practiced heretical beliefs as charged, the immolation of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the hands of the Pope’s Inquisitors in 1314 would serve as an inspiration to generations of people who did. Pope Innocent III’s brutal Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 against the powerful dualist Cathar movement pitted Northern France’s Catholic nobility against the lesser nobility of the south who were tolerant and supportive of it.

As a pre-Christian faith deeply rooted in the ancient world and spread by Rome’s legions through Mithraism to the four corners of the pagan Roman Empire, Catharism represented an old and powerful belief system which refused to be suppressed by the sterile and often contradictory doctrines of Rome’s Christian Empire.

As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword:

“To mention only its roots in Mithraism, its links with the Gnostics, its theological dualism, its asceticism, the ritual of life and death as cosmic mysteries, the appeal of the troubadours, Arthurian legends and the cult of the Holy Grail, the passions aroused for and against witchcraft, the intimate connection between sex and religion — all these things are sufficient testimony to the deep rooted vitality of a stream of religious consciousness which cannot be superciliously dismissed by rationalists and moralists.”

Writing on the heels of World War II, and with Europe still in ruins from the rise of an irrational and immoral pagan faith called Nazism, Demant feared that such a vital apocalyptic belief system with its “robust religiousness” and commitment to a struggle against an evil material world was bound to rise again, as it had so many times in the past.

Yet, he might not have been surprised to know that his own “Protestant” faith, of which he was a senior officer as the Canon of St. Paul’s, had its own roots in the same heresy.

Now lost in the cross weaves of history, Britain’s version of the heresy represented a new and far more dangerous version of life-denying Catharism than was ever imagined by the Templars, Bernard of Clairvaux or Jacques DeMolay._________

A Grudge that lasted through the Centuries

Much has been speculated about the survival of the Templars following their dissolution in 1312. Today’s popular fiction about their life as a secret society rests not on any particular historical accounting but mainly on 18^th century Masonic myth-making and Sir Walter Scott’s early 19^th century stories that romanticized the Templar Knighthood.

The 18^th century men of the Enlightenment found great interest in mystical illumination through Masonic rituals. To these men, the newly industrializing West needed a new prophetic tradition to anchor it in history. Rediscovery of the ancient world, as a result of imperial interventions in the Near East and Egypt, spawned a renewed interest in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Cabbalism and their roots in a life-denying Gnostic creed. In fact, the very act of returning in victory to the origin of these Gnostic beliefs was in itself proof that they had been chosen to fulfill a cosmic cycle, as prophesied by the ancients.

Bestowing the Templars with occult mystical powers fit neatly into the early Romantic Movement and helped to promote Enlightenment thinking as part of God’s plan for mankind.

But the ravages of the Inquisition and the growing anger over a corrupt Roman Catholic Church were anything but myth to those living in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.

As a military order of religious warriors responsible only to the Pope, the Templars and their Cathar backers in France and England represented a powerful autonomous deep-state within medieval society. In many ways orthodox Christianity was no match for the life-denying, dualist doctrine of the Cathars. Catharism’s simple focus on the cosmic battle between a spiritual good and a material evil, and its promise of a time-ending apocalypse in which the material world would be consumed in fire, was an extreme seduction.

Driven to ground by a corrupted Roman Catholic Church and greedy French King, “the heresy” appeared to have been trampled out by the middle of the 14^th century. But with the onset of the Reformation in the early 16^th century, Rome’s authority faced a new challenge and as it spread to Ireland, the old Anglo/Norman warlords like the Fitzgeralds, would face their own apocalypse.

The Protestant Reformation represented a heresy that was at once secular and religious. Martin Luther and John Calvin confronted a Papacy that claimed a material domain, as well as a spiritual one.  In 1534, the English Parliament’s Act of Supremacy solved that problem by declaring Henry VIII “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England”, and in 1559, his daughter Queen Elizabeth I became the Church’s “Supreme Governor.”

Cathar territory remained fertile ground for insurrection against the church and that insurrection came with the Protestant Reformation. The French Calvinist Huguenot movement of the late 16^th century grew from exactly the same ground in France, where 200 years earlier, the Cathars had been brutally suppressed by the Papal Crusade.

In England, Queen Elizabeth I’s deep-state, comprised of the Earl of Leicester Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Philip Sydney, found common cause with the Huguenots and supported them with soldiers, guns and money. Their armies waged holy war against the Papacy across Europe and in Catholic Ireland where they targeted the last visible threat to Elizabeth’s supremacy at home, the Fitzgeralds.

16^th Century deep-state competition

The Fitzgerald family had drawn their original power from France and Italy in the 11^th century as the muscle for the Cathar-friendly Anglo/Norman royals. They had clearly performed their duties well enough to be rewarded by their feudal lords with lands and titles, but when they came to Ireland, their paths diverged. Gerald of Wales makes clear in his book that, by 1170, this family of Anglo/Norman Samurai was fed up with royal excess and wanted to strike out on their own under their own banner.

But three centuries of the Fitzgerald family’s immersion in Irish culture transformed them. Forsaking the English language, English customs and English law, the Anglo/Normans married the land and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”. Known as the “Old English” (Seanghaill), their ongoing intermarriage with Irish clans produced furious resentment from London, while the coming of the Protestant Reformation produced outright hatred.

Known for their love of Ireland and their willingness to renounce their loyalty to England, the Fitzgerald family were feared and hated as representatives of a Roman Catholic deep-state bent on reversing the Reformation. On the other hand, the Sidney Circle represented a very old deep-state of its own; that “stream of religious consciousness,” that had been suppressed for centuries, had risen in rebellion and was committed to ridding the world of evil.

The Sidney Circle and its primary operatives, Francis Walsingham, Edmund Spencer, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Dee, represented the militarized edge of Renaissance Neoplatonism, bent on establishing England not just as a global empire to rival Catholic Spain, but as a spiritual empire headed by Queen Elizabeth I that would cleanse the material world and restore its spiritual destiny.

The first step to that destiny was the conquest of Ireland. Inspired by the Hermetic-Cabbalist Neoplatonism of John Dee, the Sydney Circle would take on the Fitzgerald Earl of Desmond in a genocidal war of extermination. Viewed from the 21^st century, the idea of an all-or-nothing Manichean holy war between white Europeans seems bizarre.

But the feud between the European deep-state factions of the Counter-Reformation was a no-holds-barred fight to the death that embodied no less than the core principles of a cosmic war between light and dark.

In 1580, the prospect of this apocalyptic war of genocide coming to Ireland prompted the Holy See in Rome to send an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Fitzgeralds under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine.”

Dubbed by Richard Berleth, author of The Twilight Lords: Elizabeth I and the First Irish Holocaust as the “Twilight Lords”, the Fitzgeralds’ struggle against the Elizabethans and their Renaissance Neoplatonism offers a window into a thousand year old factional struggle of a European “deep-state” rooted in a Gnostic belief system. As allegorized in Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds satisfied the Manichean requirement for evil in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth and her Red Cross Templar knights represented Christian purity in the tradition of King Arthur and the Round Table.

It is of no small importance that the death of Gerald Fitzgerald, the last Earl of Desmond in 1583, marks the beginning of the British Empire. The eternal struggle of good against evil, the ancient Iranian war of light against dark by design required a victory over the darkness, and the Earl of Desmond filled that sacred role. As was the custom at the time, his decapitated head was sent to London where, legend has it, Queen Elizabeth sat with it for the morning before having it impaled on London Bridge.

With the incorporation of the British East India Company in 1600, Elizabeth’s victory would be spread around the world through imperial expansion. Elizabeth’s favorite courtier Walter Raleigh would sail to America and establish the colony that came to be named Virginia for the “Virgin Queen.”

The East India Company would establish trading posts from India to America and play a key role in the economic causes leading to the American Revolution.

It would make its founding families rich beyond dreams of avarice and make the English language universal and English culture the standard by which all other cultures would be judged. But the competition with Rome and the suspicion over its motives would never stop.

In the 400 plus years since Elizabeth I’s time, much of what was once deemed heretical by Church authorities has become commonplace. The Irish feudal society the Fitzgeralds died to preserve was already obsolete by Elizabethan times, and would have vanished with or without them.

The sexual practices of the “heretics”, forbidden by law as recently as a generation ago, have become accepted and even openly embraced. The perfection of the human race through magic and alchemy sought by John Dee and the Sidney Circle has been replaced by computer science, physics and biotechnology, but the final product of such perfection is far from clear or even desirable.

Unknown and often unseen, the bitter struggle for power within the Anglo/Norman deep-state has raged beneath the surface down through the centuries.

On November 22, 1963, Americans were shocked by the public execution of their President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the years since every manner of conspiracy theory has been advanced to explain what happened. But killing the only Roman Catholic President of the United States on the site of the first Masonic Temple in Dallas on the Masonic day of revenge for the destruction of the Knights Templar (November 22) bespeaks a ritual; and the ritual to which it bespeaks belongs to the Cathars and the De Clare family.

The discovery that George Bush was descended from Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow,” the same man who drew the Fitzgerald family en masse into Ireland in 1169 was one of those moments few may understand without access to the deep-state script.

If the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have been an act of retribution for an eight hundred year old vendetta, then we all must begin to view history from a much more complex perspective. In order to understand a “deep-state”, we must all begin to ask “deep-questions” and be willing to accept “deep-answers”, no matter where they lead.

But with some clues to our own past, with an understanding of the ancient cycles of revenge and retribution and a rudimentary knowledge of the ancient rituals of death and rebirth, we can move forward to enthusiastically greet whatever is about to come next in much better shape than we might have thought possible.

Copyright © 2016   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

COMMENTS  FROM OPEDNEWS                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Submitted by Bill Johnson Dec 16, 2016:  Playing games with the comments I see. Apparently a little truth bothers those who would otherwise misrepresent history.  Surely we can expect better than this???  I am a heretic.

Submitted by Paul and Liz Dec 13, 2016:  Is it really possible to move beyond the horrific stage of revenge and retribution that has trapped so many humans for millennia?

Submitted by Bill Johnson Dec 14, 2016: Again, a very interesting spin on history – even if one-sided. You neglected to mention why to this day there is a lasting historical dislike, disdain, contempt, and grudges against the Roman Catholic empire church leading to revenge carried out to this day.You failed to mention the seemingly endless tortures or murders the Roman Catholic killing machine engaged in all across Europe for centuries. We call it the Dark Ages today. “We will quote Catholic documents just as they were printed, so you can see the true face of this beast that slaughtered 75-100 million people over 1,200 years;” Millions of humans were tortured and murdered by “representatives”of the Roman Catholic empire church. In fact, that church tortured and killed in all corners of the world, even here in Florida their Jesuits were involved in killing thousands of Native Indians in their conquest of this new world.

So the backlash and revenge and reformation were a natural and much needed occurrence. And you seem to think everyone should just forgive and forget that bloody past? Even when it is our own families??? For you see, I am a living example of the Alta Vendita. My family and family history was caught up in all that inglorious past. In fact my entire homeland was excommunicated from the RC empire because of our choices.

This country (USA) was created by FreeMasons to escape the killing machinery of the Roman Catholic church. The United States of America exists as a place of refuge from the Catholic killing machinery. It was created as a safe haven from which to launch a counter war on that church hence separation of church and state along with religious freedom requirement. And yes, JFK, a Catholic, was taken out because of a history beyond his control. Who would allow a Catholic to run a Masonic refuge? The implementation of the Alta Vendita is the other way around- for a Mason to rule the Catholic empire from within. Success has been attained! Do unto others and it will be done unto them. And it has. Alta Vendita! So no, we will not forget and we do not forgive an evil institutional empire of conquest and profit and power. It is our work to bring it to a halt. That is no church of Jesus. Satan is more like it. Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriamNemo me impune lacessit

America, an Empire in Twilight Series

PART I: When America Became the Dark Force

PART II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant

PART III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire

PART IV: The End of Illusion

FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL

This excerpt from the Steiner lecture analyzed in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture alludes to why the strange Trump/Putin alliance may be its fulfillment

“When Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) reflected on the history of civilization, he envisioned a special role for Russia, because he considered Russia the country that could best embody the spirit of a new cultural epoch. In Russia, Anthroposophy developed beyond the mere study of an esoteric doctrine and its theory of knowledge. Anthroposophy sought to evaluate Russian and Soviet reality concretely, to interpret Russia’s historical development in the context of world history, and to become the basis of action for Russian cultural activities. Russian Anthroposophy is more than a variant of the Anthroposophical movement. Russia occupies a prominent place in the Anthroposophical conception of culture.

Steiner structured the history of civilzation in seven (post –Atlantean) periods: Indian, ancient Persia, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Roman, Central European, Slavic, and American. According to his scheme, humanity at the end of the fifth ,the central European period-that is, at the threshold of the end of the fifth, the Central European period-that is, at the threshold of the sixth period, the Slavic period. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch began in the first half of the fifteenth century among the Germanic peoples. It manifested itself through an increase in individualism and through a growing interest in the sciences and technology. Around the year 3500, this era of perception was to be succeeded by the sixth epoch, the epic of the “Spirit Self” the characteristics of the Slavic people were to prevail: a sense of community, selflessness, patience, and the ability to accept a higher truth. These qualities constitute the basis for the ’seed’ of the world spirit incarnation in the Russian people, according to Steiner, the broad Russian masses already carried in them the seed of the coming civilization. Steiner used the image of ’seed’ repeatedly to describe the state of Russia’s development, the embryonic, nuclear state of the East as opposed to the ‘hypertrophy’ of the West. The spirit of the Russian people was ‘young and fresh in it’s hopes’ and ‘yet to confront it’s task.’ This task, to suffuse all aspects of life with new meaning, would be realized only in the course of history. Steiner called the Russian a child, in whose very soul one could find the questions that must be answered if humanity was to master the future. From the Russian character traits Steiner derived the capability of holistic thinking. In the Russian way of thinking, as he saw it, two opposing concepts can hold sway simultaneously so that rationality was mysticism and mysticism is rationality. ‘The Russian does not have the slightest understanding of what Westerners call ‘reasonableness.’ He is accessible to what we term ‘revelation. Basically, he will accept and integrate into the content of his soul anything he owns to a kind of revelation.”

In Soloviev’s ideas Steiner saw the seed of the philosophy of the ‘Spirit Self’ of the sixth epoch, for here the religious and philosophical worldviews merged. Soloviev’s philosophy spoke the language of religion, while his religion strove a philosophical worldview.” According to Steiner, this was where the superiority of the Russian philosophy over the aging Western philosophy lay: it transcended the limits of reason and it built a basis for a new holistic understanding. In order to develop the capacities and to fulfill its mission, Steiner said, the Russian people needed contact with the West; the ‘female East’ should be impregnated by the ‘male West.’ Intellectuality and technology, the achievement and problem of the fifth epoch of civilization, had led the life force to stagnate in Europe. Meanwhile this life force was at work in Russia, but was so lacking in form that it could fall into chaos. That was why Steiner felt that Russia depended on a Western awareness of form and consciousness. ‘To imagine that the East, at its present state, would develop on its own would be comparable to the foolish hope of a woman who wanted to have a child without a man. In the past, Eastern Europe had proved its receptiveness to the West. Steiner pointed to the reception of the Byzantine religion in Russia. Thus the Slavic peoples showed that they were also capable of absorbing higher truths- that is, the spirit of the sixth epoch.”

Edgar Cayce’s 1945 prophecy also explains Russia’s similar role in the future of the West.

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516)
(image by The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.) License DMCA Details

Neoconservative pundits howled when Yale historian Paul Kennedy suggested in his 1987 study The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that America and its global Empire, like all empires before it, was in a process of decline. The disintegration of the Soviet Union just a few years later in 1991 seemed to undermine Kennedy’s thesis as the United States expanded its influence into the U.S.S.R’s former territories and moved on Moscow to bury the former communist economy. However, following the financial crash of 2008 and the chaos caused by Washington’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the illusion of American inevitability quickly vanished. Now, 30 years later, the idea that any empire facing unprecedented debt, political gridlock and military failure could somehow sustain itself purely on willpower and social media can only be described as delusional. Yet despite rising opposition to the costs and consequences at home and abroad, Washington’s demented imperialistsremain committed to Unipower dominance and are desperate to force the incoming Trump administration to obey its ghost.

Understanding the forces that drive Washington’s quest for empire may appear on the surface to be limited to money and power. But when it comes to the ultimate objectives of the so called Anglo/American “deep state” the foundations of today’s realities may be better explained by looking into the deep past.

The term Anglo/American itself bears within it a complex matrix of races, heterodox religious beliefs, families and family grudges that date back before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The army of Normans and mercenaries that gathered under William the Conqueror to invade England was drawn from across Europe but differed little from the population of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans that had already migrated there in previous centuries. The battle of Hastings established the nation of Britain as we know it today but what remains unappreciated is the degree to which those original Anglo/Norman warrior families continue to control decision-makingand remain at the epicenter of financial and political power nearly 1000 years later.

In its current expanded iteration consisting of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand; known as the “Five Eyes”, the Anglo/American “deep state” came to gain political hegemony over the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, although popularly known as the “Anglo/Saxon” nations, a more accurate description of the genetic legacy should read Anglo/Norman.

In 2005 when a historian in Wexford Ireland discovered that President George W. Bush was a descendent of the 12^th century Anglo/Norman Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow” it caused something of a commotion in the British press not to mention our own personal shock. I’d first heard the name Strongbow at the age of ten when my family-historian-aunt told me our branch of the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland with him. During the 1990s I’d written a novel about his influence on the family and here he was again staring out from the imperial White House of George W. Bush.

As Strongbow’s vassals and veterans of the conquest of Wales, the Fitzgeralds had done their share of the dirty work of empire building. After taking part in the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the family and their extended clans had become deeply entwined in Angevin family politics as part of King William I’s invasion force of South Wales. The marriage (arranged by Henry I) of the patriarch of the Fitzgerald family, Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor to Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys Ap Tewdwr (Tudor) the last king of the Britons, cemented the Fitzgeralds to an ancient British dynasty of kings and the Arthurian legends surrounding them. But our discovery of an old book titled Strongbow’s Conquest of Ireland forced us to realize that the standard historical accounts we were accustomed to have never included the deeper inside forces at work that made a true understanding of the past, possible.

The first Crusade to Jerusalem in 1099 came at a time of deep social unrest in Europe. Muslims occupied Portugal, Spain, Sicily and Southern Italy. Pagans warred with Christian Crusaders throughout Eastern Europe. Pope Urban II’s call for a Crusade to the holy land began a movement that would last until the failed Crusade of the Spanish Armada against Elizabeth I’s English heretics in 1588. Unlike most dry, bowdlerized accounts of the origins of British history, Strongbow’s Conquest offered up a personal account by a family prelate named Gerald de Barry (Gerald of Wales). Gerald was also the personal tutor to the future Angevin King John and offered plenty of insight into dealing with Henry II’s internecine warfare with and between his three sons. For us, the family feuds surrounding the conquest of Ireland detailed by Gerald of Wales personalized our understanding of an historical event and the beginnings of British history. Now with the Bush connection to Strongbow came a chance to take those family feuds and track them a thousand years into the future.

Ever since John Fitzgerald Kennedy, tracing a presidential candidate’s lineage to Ireland is a common pastime. But the Guardian’s description of Strongbow as “a desperate land-grabbing warlord whose calamitous foreign adventure led to the suffering of generations” was a sadly deficient twist on what had really happened. Strongbow was an Anglo-Norman Earl with a long Viking lineage from one of the most powerful Norman/French families in 12^th century England. His grandfather Gilbert and great uncle Roger were closely affiliated with William the conqueror’s son King William Rufus and were among the few intimates present at his mysterious murder by Walter Tyrell in the New Forest in 1100. The de Clare brothers were never implicated in Rufus’s death but along with a select handful of Norman barons gained great wealth and prominence from backing the rise of his successor, Henry I.

Evidence of heretical cult practices swirls around the 11^th century court of William Rufus and his ruling nobles. William Rufus regarded himself as divine, was an avowed pagan, openly homosexual and fiercely anti-Christian. He surrounded himself with long haired, clean shaven “effeminati”, compared himself to Alexander the Great and acted as a patron to the Troubadours. The conquest of Wales brought him into contact with a Prince of Dyfed named Bledri, author of the original Grail romances who remained friendly to William Rufus throughout the wars against the Welsh. Norman mercenaries who’d fought Muslims in southern Italy were no strangers to dualist life-denying heresies and neither were the courts of France from where the new English royalty drew its political base.

The threat to the Roman Church by these heresies was not a simple challenge. As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword, “It was in fact a rival religion and almost succeeded in being a counter-Church with its own rival and ritual system.”

By 1170 the struggle for power within that system extended to Strongbow’s challenge to the authority of King Henry II’s House of Anjou and his threat to set himself up as a rival Norman King of Ireland. Upon his death in 1176 the challenge extended to the Fitzgerald antecedents of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. At the behest of Strongbow a number of Fitzgerald vassals married directly into the de Clare family line shortly after coming to Ireland and to the horror of the Angevin royal court, proceeded to establish themselves as a competing dynasty. With political and military independence and with religious connections to Rome, the Fitzgerald’s ambitions were viewed from London as dangerous from the very beginning and as the medieval Catholic Church evolved that danger would grow in bitter hatred.

Strongbow had been a Crusader, served in the Holy Land and was known to be a generous supporter of both the Knights Hospitaller and the infamous Knights Templar, the warrior monks for whom the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux penned De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) thereby redefining the very nature of murder when done in the name of Christ.

The early Catholic Church was riven with multiple dualist heresies left over from the conversion of the Roman Empire from pagan to Christian. Much has been romanticized in the past decades about the Knights Templar and their supposed dedication to the divine feminine as represented by the Holy Grail. Credited with magical powers of prophecy and divination, popular mythology such as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code has them guarding the secrets of the Messianic Grail lineage, i.e. the royal descendants of the House of David from the marriage of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.

Other supposed Templar secrets link them to life-denying Gnostic cults like the Paulicians, Manicheansand Cathars. But less has been said about the Templar’s central role as bankers to Europe’s royalty and their practice of financing wars between Europe’s rival kings and princes.

The Templar Knighthood walked a fine line between two worlds in their role as bankers and “warrior monks” and often failed to maintain a balance between them. The Knights Templar’s circular “Temple” in the very center of the city of London still echoes their primary military and financial role as a prototype multinational bank opening trade routes between Europe and the Middle East. But their internecine political rivalries with the other Christian knighthoods, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights and their long string of military defeats causing them to lose Jerusalem, precipitated their downfall.

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Templars, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets.

Instead of capping a feud between the rival knighthoods and their benefactors, the dissolution of the Templars and the subsequent transfer of their vast assets to the Hospitallers by Pope Clement in 1312 would create an anti-Catholic firestorm. The repercussions from November 22, 1307 would set the stage for the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Britain’s empire and the destruction of the competing dynasties, especially the Fitzgeralds.

Join us for the finale of this saga as we explain how this hatred for Catholic Rome would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep state. This conflict would in turn lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church, whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would finally come to fruition in the Anglo/Norman America of the present day.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould.