Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (6)

Concentric Circles

The Society of the Elect, the secret society founded and funded by Cecil Rhodes, was structured as follows:

1. General of the Society: Rhodes
2. Junta of the Three: Stead, Brett, Milner
3. Circle of Initiates: Cardinal Manning, General Booth, Bramwell Booth, "Little" Johnson, Albert Grey, Arthur Balfour
4. The Association of Helpers
5. A College, under Professor Seely, to be established "to train people in the English-speaking idea". [Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment,p. 39]

The structure was inspired by the structure of the Jesuits.

The fourth group, the Association of Helpers, were people who would be involved in promoting and implementing the policies of the group without being aware of the group's existence. For example, the Round Table groups organized in English-speaking countries around the globe were part of this Association of Helpers, but few of its members would have been aware of the secret group. The Round Table provided the official academic aura to the ideas, much the way the Israeli lobby groups like PNAC give legitimacy to the ideas of the neocons today. If public opinion needed to be turned for or against some idea, The Times could call in a member of the Round Table for the official justification of policy, just as the New York Times or the Washington Post, or Fox News or CNN can do the same today.

Back then, as today, the people who seel to influence the body politic know that if something is repeated often enough it will be believed by enough people that these policies can be justified, regardless of whether the arguments are nothing but a pack of lies. Just look at the repeated assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam was linked to al Quaeda.

So it seems clear that a small group of people, with access to larger numbers of people, can influence events and can play what W.T. Stead called, in the quote cited in the first post of this series, "so large a part in the history of the world". Rhodes, Stead, and Milner obviously thought so, and Quigley's book looks at their influence as individuals and as a group over a period of more than 50 years.

It is also obvious that the very rich have more influence than those who are poor. Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or David Rockefellar are heard in places that even people who are very comfortable are not. We also know that there are many people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Why, then, do so many people have trouble accepting that much of what happens in the world may well be the result of the influence of small groups of people?

And if one group were able to have members in several or many others, all without the knowledge of the other members, why could it not be able to influence a wide selection of these groups?