F. William ENGDAHL

ROCKEFELLER’S PARADIGM SHIFT

At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the influential international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included The Club of Rome; the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conferences; the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth; and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.

All of these were promoted massively in the media, particularly by select circles of the Atlantic establishment and its prominent news outlets. The Rockefellers used the 1973 oil crisis, a crisis they had deliberately created, to make forced reduction of general living standards appear credible, even necessary for the sake of, as they put it, “the survival of mankind.”

The problem these elite American circles faced at the beginning of the 1970s was a world that threatened entirely to slip out of their control, no minor matter for them. Western Europe was standing firmly on its own economic feet, while the in-dustrial base of the United States was disintegrating. Japan had recovered and rebuilt from the devastation of the war to become a major industrial power. The developing countries of Asia, including South Korea, were growing at an impressive pace, as were most of the economies of Latin America. Even the forgotten African Continent was moving forward, as were the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. They were all beginning to seek trade relations with one another – no longer exclusively, or even predominantly, with the United States.

Now a major new propaganda offensive was to be launched by the Anglo-Ame-rican establishment aimed at capturing the new young generation that had emerged from the radicalization of the 1968 “revolution” for their agenda of austerity and population reduction, all under the pretext that the world was about to run out of vital resources such as oil.

‘LIMITS TO GROWTH’

In 1972, only some months before their planned oil price shock, the circles around David Rockefeller and his Bilderberg group unveiled a major work that would quickly be translated into dozens of languages and debated as few books before it had been. Its main author was a 28-year-old student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston named Dennis Meadows. Working under Professor Jay Forrester, Meadows had obtained a grant of $200,000 from the German Volkswagen Foundation for development of a computer model of the planet’s economic growth. The book-length report was titled Limits to Growth.¹ It began with a dire warning:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity… All five elements basic to the study reported here–population, food production, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources–are increasing. The amount of their increase each year follows a pattern that mathematicians call exponential growth… Population finally decreases when the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services. The exact timing of these events is not meaningful, given the great aggregation and many uncertainties in the model. It is significant, however, that growth is stopped well before the year 2100.²

Those notions were little more than a souped-up computerized rehash of the basic Malthusian thesis of M. King Hubbert from 1956 and going back to his writings during the 1930s. It was also a reiteration of the writings of the long discredited Parson Thomas Malthus of England whose 1798 writing, An Essay on the Principle of Population, asserted that while population tends to expand exponentially, the food supply only expands arithmetically – meaning that, sooner or later, population gets checked by famine, disease, and widespread mortality. The warnings of Malthus could have been penned by the Club of Rome ideologues almost one hundred eighty years later:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce sub-sistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the pre-cursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.³

The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report went on to describe the beneficial effect to the world of stopping population growth, a favorite theme of the Rockefeller eugenics circles: “The result of stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital growth in 1985, with no other changes, is that population and capital reach constant values at a relatively high level of food, industrial output and services per person.” How a global freeze on human reproduction would take place was left to the imagination.

In 1974, amidst the global oil price shock of Henry Kissinger and his Bilderberg circles, the Club of Rome declared boldly, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” Then: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over population, food shortages, non-renewable resource [oil-w.e.] depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.”⁴ They argued that:

[A] ‘horizontal’ restructuring of the world system is needed, i.e., a change in relationships among nations and regions and as far as the ‘vertical’ structure of the world system is concerned, drastic changes in the norm stratum – that is, in the value system and the goals of man – are necessary in order to solve energy, food, and other crises, i.e., social changes and changes in individual attitudes are needed if the transition to organic growth is to take place.⁵

“Cooperation by definition connotes interdependence,” the group insisted. While that sounded logical, it in fact was a veil for a concerted attack on the notion of national sovereignty. It was to be a manifesto for what George H.W. Bush in 1990 on the collapse of the Soviet Union termed a New World Order, a new global top-down governance of the planet and its inhabitants – a global dictatorship imposed on the argument that oil and other resources were running out.

The Club of Rome, in their second major report, Mankind at the Turning Point, further argued:

Increasing interdependence between nations and regions must then translate as a decrease in independence. Nations cannot be interdependent without each of them giving up some of, or at least acknowledging limits to, its own independence. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system.⁶

The very notion “global allocation of all finite resources” in the context of their call to surrender national independence begs the question, who would be ‘The Global Allocator’? David Rockefeller? MIT computer nerds? Oil technocrats like M. King Hubbert? The Club of Rome preferred to gloss over that fine detail.

In short, it was a blueprint for a totalitarian form of a world government, using a purported ecological catastrophe as the driver for the extreme change, “drastic changes in the value system and the goals of man,” as the Club of Rome saw it. Naturally many people were rightly concerned with the unbridled destruction of the environ-ment, the polluting of rivers by chemical and other industrial factories, the fouling of the air, wanton deforestation by large agribusiness concerns, dumping of vast volumes of toxins into the oceans. The circles backing the Club of Rome used this rational concern for quite different ends.

At the time the MIT report was commissioned, the Club of Rome was a rela-tively new organization. The task assigned to the MIT students was to analyse and formulate what the Club founders elegantly termed the “world problematique.” Using a computer model called World3 developed at MIT, they allegedly programmed the interaction of five giant parameters – population, food production, industrial produc-tion, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources. The result, Limits to Growth, was the first volley fired by the new Club of Rome.

THE REAL ENEMY: HUMANITY

The Club of Rome’s various predictions of the doom of human civilization were based on complex, “expert”-generated and entirely unverifiable computer models of World3.

The MIT computer modelling group doing the calculations for the Club of Rome used different scenarios to estimate that the world would run out of available petroleum somewhere between 1992 and 2022. It was a rehash of the M. King Hubbert thesis of 1956 dressed up with fancy computer language and terms like ‘Systems Dynamics.’ This did not make the predictions any more scientific or accurate. Any computer model is only as good as the assumptions underlying the data entered into it. Here, not only were arbitrary and unproven assumptions the basis of the doomsday ‘Limits to Growth’ scenario, but the conclusions were premised on a key variable that was grossly wrong: the world was nowhere near to running out of petroleum.

The report had been produced by a group of MIT students who simply arbi-trarily adopted Hubbert’s and related estimates of resources. The report sent a chilling message: business-as-usual was no longer an option if the human species expected to sustain itself into the future. The world population would have to radically change its patterns of “unbridled consumption.” Curtailing resource consumption by military forces was not mentioned.

As a way to give Limits to Growth maximum press attention, the book was published with great fanfare at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to lend it an aura of scientific credibility and gravitas. Limits to Growth became the most suc-cessful environmental publication ever produced. It was translated into more than forty languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Throughout the 1970s, the idea that humanity itself was irreparably damaging the earth, thereby gained popularity.

The explicit underlying assumptions on which MIT’s computer model operated were formulated to create a scenario that would result in a general reduction of living standards of the overall world population, but not, of course, its ruling elites. The study’s director, Jay Forrester, openly declared this in his 1971 book, World Dynamics:

Rising pressures are necessary to hasten the day when population is stabilized. Pressures can be increased by reducing food production, reducing health services, and reducing industrialization.⁷

The Club of Rome was a Rockefeller project from the outset, though for political reasons the family that controlled world oil flows and much of its money preferred to remain discreetly in the background. The Club was actually founded in 1968 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s private retreat, Villa Serbelloni, a secluded conference center in Bellagio on Italy’s Lake Como. Dean Rusk, later Secretary of State, had acquired the estate on behalf of the Foundation in 1959 when Rusk was President of the Rockefeller Foundation. ⁸

The initial founder of the Club of Rome was Aurelio Peccei, a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family. The Agnelli Foun-dation financed the initial work of the group. Foundation Chairman, Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli, was an intimate friend of David Rockefeller and a member of the International Advisory Committee of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Agnelli and David Rockefeller had been close friends since 1957 and Agnelli became a founding member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission in 1973, the year Rockefeller instigated the oil shock. ⁹

The Club was anything but an innocent gathering of free-thinking academics. Like Bilderberg group meetings, the Club of Rome gatherings were ‘behind closed doors,’ with no public records kept. Membership in the international body was limited to one hundred.¹⁰

The people who initiated the Club of Rome were in significant part the same people who, months later, would shape the dimensions of the October 1973 oil shock at the Bilderberg conference in Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. The list included MIT professor Carroll Wilson and Max Kohnstamm, a former Private Secretary to Netherlands’ Queen Wilhelmina, both of whom were present at Bilderberg and also in the original Club of Rome group creating the Limits to Growth project. NATO played a key role in propagating the new ideology of scarcity through the Club of Rome. Eduard Pestel of Institute for Systems Analysis in Hannover, who was a member of the NATO Science Committee, was part of the original Club of Rome inner circle. Club of Rome co-founder, Alexander King, head of the OECD Science Program was also tied to NATO.

The initiators of the Club of Rome, though discreetly in the background, included David Rockefeller; Wall Street banker and diplomat, Averell Harriman; New York Manufacturers Hanover Trust banker Gabriel Hague; David Rockefeller’s mentor and former head of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy; as well as Katherine Meyer Graham, owner of the Washington Post, one of the most influential American newspapers, useful in publicizing the project’s goals and perspectives. Club of Rome founding member Harlan Cleveland was also US Ambassador to NATO.

PARADIGM SHIFT VIA NGOs

The circles around Rockefeller’s think-tanks and banking interests did not stop with creation of the Club of Rome. They spawned a flood of neo-Malthusian non-governmental organizations – NGOs as they came to be called – all allegedly committed to ‘nature conservancy’ and propagating the idea that “people pollute.” Hence, to cut pollution, the world must cut population, and drastically, especially of the fast-growing Third World countries of Africa, Latin American and Asia. This was the focus of John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council and of Henry Kissinger’s 1974 National Security Memorandum, NSSM200, which made global population control a US foreign policy priority for the first time.¹¹

The creation of numerous NGOs in the early 1970s was part of a deliberate stra–tegy. The idea was to use civilian organizations, which their tax-exempt foundation money created or controlled via grants, to give the appearance of broad-based, spon-taneous public support behind select policies which, if directly associated with the name Rockefeller or their corporations, would be suspect in the public eye.

The NGO strategy was to prove one of the most effective weapons of these elite circles in advancing their private agenda. For the powerful elite families around the Rockefellers and Agnellis and their like, a dominating fear was that a healthy, growing and prosperous population one day could come to the idea they had no need of such powerful elite families. For them a population scrambling for their shrinking daily income and literally in debt for their daily bread was less likely to have time and energy to think of serious revolt.

Just as the circles around David Rockefeller were launching their Club of Rome Malthusian ideology into world prominence, the same circles created two more highly effective vehicles to impose a global Malthusian reduction of living standards.

One such vehicle was the first so-called Earth Summit – the Stockholm Confe-rence on the Human Environment – held in 1972 just months before the oil shock. The second was a little known and enormously influential elite group calling itself The 1001: A Nature Trust, created in 1971 by Bilderberg founder and chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

The 1001: A Nature Trust was an invitation-only club enlisting 1001 of the world’s wealthiest people to pledge to an annual endowment for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, today called the World Wide Fund for Nature). Prince Bernhard, former Nazi party member, was President at the time. Bernhard gathered only the creme-de-la-creme of the international elite – princes, lords, barons, billionaires. The select list included, of course, David Rockefeller and Rockefeller’s friend Gianni Agnelli; Robert O. Anderson of ARCO oil, Rockefeller’s close business associate and financier of the Aspen Institute; Viscount Astor from Britain; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; Dr. Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome; and Krupp’s Berthold Beitz from Germany.

It included high-ranking members of the European aristocracy: Count Clemens von Stauffenberg; Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis; Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza; Prince Franz Joseph II von Liechtenstein and his son, Prince Hans-Adam. Throw in the Prince Aga Khan, Gianni Bulgari, Henry Ford II, John Loudon of Royal Dutch Shell, Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos, Baron Edmound de Rothschild of France, Baron Edmund Rothschild of England and Saudi Sheikh Salim bin Laden – and it became clear that the agenda of Rockefeller’s “nature trust” was a select club for only the richest and most powerful of the world’s plunderers.¹²

The ideology of the World Wildlife Fund, like that of the Club of Rome and the other leading newly-created ‘environment-focused’ NGOs, was summed up by WWF’s founding chairman Sir Peter Markham Scott: “If we look at things causally, the bigger problem in the world is population. We must set a ceiling to human numbers. All development aid should be made dependent on the existence of strong family planning programs.”¹³

The underlying, unspoken perspective here was that too many people were too poor to be spending money; therefore, they were a drain on profitability. But genocide could not be promoted, obviously. Some acceptable, even desirable, cover was needed. The driving ideology now being promoted was that corporate profitability was no longer compatible with continuing growth of consumer populations and their incomes – as had been the case in the postwar period until then. Instead, large corporations were exemplars of the new paradigm, demonstrating that company profit best came from downsizing, firing personnel and “cutting costs”.

In a speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos Switzerland, England’s Prince Philip, then President of the World Wildlife Fund International, told an elite gathering of the world’s most influential business and political leaders that the human population must be treated like so many sheep that must be “culled” to desired size:

You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words, conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realize that it is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world and the apparently unending growth of the world’s human population can only end in a crisis for all life on earth.¹⁴

Prince Philip omitted to say who would carry the awesome responsibility to decide on behalf of the entire human species who got culled and who was allowed to survive. He clearly had an unspoken idea who.

A definite pattern was evident in all the Rockefeller-backed NGOs using their supposed environmental concerns and the alleged ‘energy crisis’ as their theme in the early 1970s. They were used to impose an agenda of resource control – calling it ‘conservation’ – especially of energy. ‘Conservation,’ in turn, was to be used to demand reduction of overall living standards – austerity.

In addition, the cover of ‘stabilization’ was to be used to advance the negative eugenics agenda of the wealthy and powerful backers of population control. And no family was more prominent in that area in 1972 than the Rockefeller family. In 1972, the year of the Earth Day conference, John D. Rockefeller III, founder of the Population Council, issued a report to President Nixon as head of ‘The Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth.’ Rockefeller’s report concluded on an eerie and ominous note:

After two years of concentrated effort, we have concluded that, in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from further growth of the Nation’s population, rather, that the gradual stabilization of our population through voluntary means would con-tribute significantly to the Nation’s ability to solve its problems. We have looked for, and have not found, any convincing economic argument for continued population growth. The health of our country does not depend on it, nor does the vitality of business, nor the welfare of the average person. By its very nature, population is a continuing concern and should receive continuing attention. Later generations, and later commissions, will be able to see the right path into the future. In any case, no generation needs to know the ultimate goal or the final means, only the direction in which they will be found.¹⁵

A MYSTERIOUS CANADIAN INSIDER

One key organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller’s long-time friend, a successful oilman named Maurice Strong. Canadian Maurice Strong was one of the key early propagators of the scientifically unfounded theory that man-made emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens civilization, so-called Global Warming.

As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to “save the environment”. Some years later the same Strong restated his radical ecologist stance: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”¹⁶

As preparation for his 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong com-missioned Rene Jules Dubos of Rockefeller University and Barbara Ward, an English conservationist working with the Carnegie Foundation, to write a book, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet.¹⁷ The book was hailed as the world’s first “state of the environment” report. It was, not surprisingly, modelled on the same lines as Limits to Growth and other Club of Rome and World Wildlife Fund polemics: ‘people pollute’ and therefore, to reduce pollution, we must reduce the number of people.

It was raw eugenics dressed in ecological garb. No mention of corporate eco-logical destruction. ‘People’ were entirely to blame.

Strong was a curious choice to head a major UN initiative to mobilize action on the environment, as his career and his considerable fortune had been built on exploitation of oil, like an unusual number of the new advocates of ‘ecological purity,’ such as David Rockefeller or Robert O. Anderson or Shell’s John Loudon.

Strong had met David Rockefeller in 1947 as a young Canadian of seventeen and from that point his career became tied to the vast fortune and network of the Rockefeller family.¹⁸ In the 1960s Strong had become president of the huge Montreal energy conglomerate and oil company known as Power Corporation, then owned by the influential Paul Desmarais. Power Corporation was reportedly also used as a political slush fund to finance campaigns of select Canadian politicians. Prime ministers such as Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Brian Mulroney all had ties at one time or another to Power Corporation, according to Canadian investigative researcher, Elaine Dewar.¹⁹

By 1971 Strong was named Undersecretary of the United Nations in New York and Secretary General of the upcoming Stockholm Earth Day conference. He was also named that year as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation – that financed his launch of the Stockholm Earth Day project.²⁰ It was a small cozy world Strong moved in. It was also filled with friends who were incredibly powerful.

‘SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS’

By 1976, the new ‘ecology movement,’ which was attracting a growing number of college-age youth looking for a worthy cause after the end of the Vietnam War, was becoming mainstream. No less an establishment magazine than Foreign Affairs, the quarterly of the Council on Foreign Relations, opened its pages to a long essay from Amory Lovins, a 29-year old from Washington D.C. who was head of the British Friends of the Earth. Lovins argued that business as-usual in energy was not possible and that alternative energy technologies to oil, especially solar energy, were the “soft path” out of the crisis. Lovins thesis was a warmed over version of the energy-income model developed years before by M. King Hubbert.²¹ At the time, David Rockefeller was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Rockefeller circles were almost frenetic in spawning new environment related NGO lobby in the early 1970s. In 1974, amid the debate over oil ‘vulnerability’ (relative percent of income spent on gasoline by individual drivers), the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund gave $500,000, together with funds from Robert O. Anderson – whose ARCO oil company led the development of Alaskan oil the same year – to former Rockefeller employee, Lester Brown.

The purpose of this grant was to create yet another new NGO, or advocacy think-tank, the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, which would be dedicated to the new ‘environmental activism.’ It called itself the first research institute devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. Brown advocated a new version of 18^th Century Malthusian theory – namely, that the world population “explosion” was far outstripping the ability of the planet to feed itself, hence population reduction was a priority, a favorite Rockefeller theme. Brown was also an adherent of the Rockefellers’ ‘Green Revolution’ and supported King Hubbert’s ‘peak oil’ idea.

The NGOs – from the Club of Rome to the Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, Aspen Institute, and Worldwatch Institute – all began a concerted international campaign, especially among university students, to attack industrial society as evil and population growth as a cancer, and to demand a shift to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind as the “solution” to the end of the era of oil. By maintaining control of the grassroots environmental movement’s agenda, the NGOs could maintain control of the outcome, making sure it didn’t threaten fundamental oil interests. The motive of the Rockefellers’ new concern for the planet’s ecology was that only they – and not the general population – would define what was meant by ‘ecology’ and identify who was to blame for problems linked to it.

As part of their “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” agenda of global social engi-neering, they began propagandizing the scientifically-unsubstantiated notion that carbon emissions such as from oil-fueled cars or coal power plants – manmade emis–sions of CO2 – were creating a new threat to the future of the planet – ‘Global Warming.’ It was the same Malthusian austerity agenda of the wealthy circles around the Rockefeller circles and the circles of the 1001 A Nature Trust, dressed up in new guise.

While pollution remained a genuine problem, the idea that it was ‘warming’ the climate was a fabrication.

The co-founder of the Club of Rome and founding member of 1001 A Nature Trust, Dr Alexander King admitted the essential fraud some years later in his book, The First Global Revolution. He stated:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.²²

The question one had to ask was, why would the leading figures in the world of Anglo-American oil and the banking establishment create and finance a movement ostensibly aimed at reducing industrial growth and ultimately lowering consumption of petroleum?

The answer was not so obvious. As then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger purportedly said at the time of the launch of the global ecology NGOs during the mid-1970s, “If you control the oil you can control entire nations or groups of nations.”²³ It is also worth noting that by hammering away the message of “humanity” as “the real enemy,” the corporate world, by sleight of hand, effectively diverted attention away from itself and onto ordinary people.

For David Rockefeller’s circles, oil had become far more than a source of personal or even corporate riches. It had become the effective throttle or controller of the entire world economy. If certain powerful interests were able to control that throttle – either turning on the fuel, or shutting it down – they essentially would be able to control the fate of nations and of world geopolitics. That was the Rockefeller agenda in the 1970s. How it unfolded in the ensuing decades would define wars and world economic crises in ways few could even dimly perceive. Crises and perceptions were being deliberately manipulated by a powerful few, using oil or lack of it as the throttle of their world power.