By Diego Garcia
“I call this lecture ‘From Versailles to Cybernetics,’ naming the two historic events of the twentieth century. The word ‘cybernetics’ is familiar, is it not? But how many of you know what happened at Versailles in 1919?”
Gregory Bateson, lecture at the Two Worlds Symposium, Sacramento State College, April 21, 1966.
On August 1, 1917 as the world was reeling from the horrors of its very first war, Pope Benedict XV published, A Note to the Heads of All Belligerent Peoples. Benedict’s message, published in every major paper around the world, called for an end to the prolonged ‘massacre’. Benedict proposing ‘more moderate forms of counsel’, ‘calm deliberations’, and a collective move towards a ‘just and lasting peace’. The Pope’s letter hoping to initiate a radical global shift away from the settling of disputes by the traditional, ‘material force of arms’, and towards a new international, ‘moral force of law’.
While the American president took almost a month to reply publicly, it was a much different story privately as three days later, on the third anniversary of Great Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Felix Frankfurter, special counsel for the State Department, sent his now infamous memorandum from London recommending, “a bureau be established for the study and preparation of those questions which appear likely to be proposed at the Peace Conference.” Wilson quickly forming an American bureau of international experts, hand-picked from the most prominent of Ivy League universities and charged with finding a solution to the traditional horrors of material war. A group soon to be known as the Inquiry. Their preparatory work beginning immediately in the back rooms of the New York Public Library and was to align with the work already being undertaken by the British and French.
Frankfurter, working hand in hand with the British and French foreign offices shows his involvement in the very earliest efforts to align American post war interests with that of her main allies. According to Inquiry historian Lawrence Gelfand, the Inquiry social engineers were creating more than a blueprint. They were building a foundation upon which the cyberneticians of the Macy Conferences would build an institution of mind control a generation later.
The Inquiry Intelligence Chiefs
“Treaty of Versailles was an attitudinal turning point.” Gregory Bateson
The Inquiry’s influence in Paris incalculable in that they are the authors of much of our modern-day one world monolith. The Inquiry representing the first ad hoc, interdisciplinary group of social science engineers, setting the stage in Paris for nothing less than what Bateson himself described as, “one of the great sell outs in the history of our civilization”. Bateson describing Wilson as a “pathologically trusting man” suggesting him a front who allowed himself to be swept up in the current of progressive idealism. Wilson allowing himself to become emotively persuaded by private scholars and diplomats – ‘entering wedges’ – used as tools to usurp the State Department’s own presidential advisory authority in one of history’s most obvious, yet oddly obscure, coup d’états.
“The Peace Treaty was not to be a return to the old diplomacy, but the establishment of a new world order.” James T. Shotwell, Inquiry member and author of, At the Paris Peace Conference, pg. 13.
“For five years, there has been no free play of public opinion in the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war, governments conscripted public opinion … They goose-stepped it. They taught it to stand at attention and salute … It sometimes seems that after the Armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a vow that they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They were willing to die for their country, but not willing to think for it.” Frank I. Cobb, editor New York World, excerpt from Liberty and the News, pg. 8.
The Manufacturing of Public Consent and The Entering Wedge
The story of the Inquiry certainly offering extraordinary historical precedent to anyone willing to think for themselves today as the quotes above sounding ominously reminiscent of our modern-day fake news reality. Just as today we may be forever waiting for a return to normal, those living then died waiting for a promised end to all war. The contemporary Western democratic world not led by election or choice, but by persuasion. All the men of the Inquiry, just as the members of the later Macy Conferences, were deliberately recruited for their political and social science backgrounds. Nearly every member with an Ivy League Master’s degree in the liberal arts, all holding an Atlanticist worldview, all with a cosmopolitan, liberally progressive social conscience, and all sharing a common belief that, the technical expert, in an ever more complex and changing world, was essential in the guidance of the Greater Society. This technique of manufacturing the public’s consent towards predetermined State goals already proven effective in persuading America into a war they had previously voted against. An astonishing American volte face the result of an extraordinarily well coordinated State sponsored propaganda campaign. A psychological operation on the minds of the American public.
A State sponsored psychological operation Walter Lippmann, James T. Shotwell, Felix Frankfurter, and the father of propaganda, Edward Bernays, all participated in. They worked directly with zero degrees of separation for the newly minted government propaganda division, the Committee on Public Information. The CPI founded by Executive Order 2594 on April 13, 1917 and under the direction of George Creel, Robert Lansing (Secretary of State), Newton D. Baker (Secretary of War), and Josephus Daniels (Secretary of Navy). Modern American propaganda is born from the embers of the first world war and George Creel, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, three faces of the Propagandists Mt. Rushmore were there, in Paris, working together, shaping public opinion on an international level.
So, as much as the credit for the invention of propaganda is often given to the likes of Joseph Goebbels, these three Americans, and most especially Lippmann and Bernays above all, became the actual masters of manufacturing consent. Interesting to note reader that both Lippmann’s ground-breaking Public Opinion (1922) and Bernays’, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), published within months of each other are currently enjoying their one-hundred-year anniversary. Together these two books set the direction of public relations for the next century and the manufacturing of consent a phrase as well known to the coiner of the term as it was to the pioneering cyberneticians of the 1940’s like Norbert Weiner and Gregory Bateson. It can not be overstated, as this concept the foundation upon which the entire scheme of public manipulation was made possible.
If you’ve been following our previous work, you know Walter Lippmann as a founding member of the Inquiry and a Council on Foreign Relations lifetime board member. He is also largely lauded by professors of media studies as “the father of modern American journalism.” Lippmann inventing the term, “manufacture of consent” in his, Liberty and the News, published in the year immediately following his involvement at the Paris peace conference:
“Everywhere to-day men must deal with questions more intricate than any church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise” pg. 4,5 Liberty and the News
“The Great Society had grown so furiously and to colossal dimensions by the application of technical knowledge. It was made by engineers who had learned to use exact measurements and quantitative analysis. It could not be governed, men began to discover, by men who thought deductively about rights and wrongs. It could be brought under human control only by the technic which had created it.” Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Chapter 25, pg. 370, The Entering Wedge,
The manufacturing of public consent by unregulated private enterprise certainly nothing new to us living in the 21st century – Lippmann and company’s, children of the future. The necessary business of steering public opinion towards a more noble, liberal vision of the future Lippmann often referred to throughout his career as, The Great Society. These social engineers had privately determined that an attitude change of the entire world was necessary while any public questioning of the scheme’s morality was not. This great reset of one hundred years ago the technological schemata to which Lippmann dedicated his entire sixty-year career. Lippmann the owner of one of the longest syndicated columns in the history of journalism entitled, Today and Tomorrow. Note the very progressive sounding name, and the subtle absence of Yesterday. The memory hole founded and Lippmann one of those most influential in the steering of society towards a tomorrow we today now see quickly approaching on the horizon.
In chapter 25 of Public Opinion Lippmann writes of applying the social science technical expert as the entering wedge – Driven deliberately “between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled”. An eminence grise man of letters with no moral agency wielding facts and statistics as if they were weapons. Members of the Inquiry pioneers in these fields of facts, stats, and numbers, many becoming immensely effective in Statecraft and are to be considered the very forefathers to the cybernetics breakthrough to follow. The story of the Inquiry and that of the initial Macy Conferences nearly identical. Both groups were made of social scientists hired as special aides to assist in the scientific management of society. Experts in their respective fields of human study: sociology, history, economics, anthropology, human geography, psychology. Both groups of social and political scientists heavily funded by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations. Although separated by two decades both served similarly as effective counsel in the government of government, the understanding of understanding and in discovering the human use of human beings. Here it becomes very important to take note of the definitions of both cybernetics and, government:
government: guvernere: to govern; to steer or control as a pilot would a ship.
mens or mentis: the mind.
cybernetics: from the Greek kubernetes: to steer as would the helmsman of a ship; a governor.
The Inquiry and the League of Nations
The Inquiry worked with several interests in forging the Covenant of the League of Nations. As we discuss these groups below we begin to uncover overlapping memberships between each of these groups and with several elite social clubs. These secretive relationships, made in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of Washington and New York at places like: the Century Club, the Metropolitan Club, the Cosmopolitan Club, and the broader, more internationally minded, Pilgrims Society, make clear just where foreign policy is first developed. These underreported memberships also prominent throughout the entire American Delegation, the Big Four Nations, and thus, the entire Peace Conference itself. This seemingly systemic unwillingness on the behalf of the media to report such important information a gross negligence of duty casting shade on every historians and journalist since.
2.The Bryce Group: founded in London, 1914. Named after its chairman, the Scottish liberal and 1st Viscount, James Bryce (privy council to the Queen, Royal Society fellow, British Academy, House of Lords). Bryce, the Ambassador to the United States and the author of the widely read, The American Commonwealth in 1888. Bryce aided in the book’s popularity throughout American academic circles by his close friendship with American aristocracy, including one of the most supportive in Harvard phi beta kappa president, Charles W. Eliot.
Bryce’s, The American Commonwealth important in the promotion of history told through an Anglo-American worldview and played an important role in a long awaited British and American alliance. Bryce, it should be noted, was the actual author of the very report that provoked the first world war in the first-place by publishing, The Committee on Alleged German Outrages – now seen as a highly suspect, largely fictitious example of black propaganda. The Bryce Group inspirational in the creation of The League of Nations Society. James Bryce and his committee, while willing the war into reality on made up field reports, were conveniently present to pick up the pieces. Problem, reaction, solution.
1st Viscount James Bryce
2. The League to Enforce Peace: founded in Philadelphia, 1915, based on Theodore Roosevelt’s much earlier call for an international “League of Peace”. Roosevelt himself phi beta kappa and a Freemason. Roosevelt’s very protégé William Howard Taft, was elected President of the League to Enforce Peace. Taft, the 27th president of the United States after Roosevelt and the son of the very founder of Skull and Bones, also tapped phi beta kappa, also a freemason.
Another founding member of the League to Enforce Peace was Elihu Root, Skull and Bones, phi beta kappa, Secretary of War at the turn of the century under both McKinley and Roosevelt. Root modernized the military, was a founder of the Preparedness movement and was president of Carnegie Endowment for World Peace.
Another founder of the LEP was Henry Stimson, strangely enough also Skull and Bones, also phi beta kappa, also a founder of the Preparedness Movement, and the most proficient Secretary of War holding portfolio under Taft, FDR, Truman, and Herbert Hoover.
Richard T. Ely, another founder of the LEP and very influential Progressive Era leader, an advocate for Preparedness and “father of land economics.”
LEP notables include founder and chairman of their executive committee, A. Lawrence Lowell. Lowell president of Harvard, and phi beta kappa. Alexander Graham Bell and Zionist delegate in Paris, Rabbi Stephen Wise also founders.
* Note how both the Pilgrims and the CFR have the word ‘ubique’, meaning everywhere, in their logo.
3. The League of Nations Union: founded in New York 1918, a merger between the League of Free Nations Association and the League of Nations Society. Here we see a confluence of leaders from both sides of the Atlantic merging into one entity led by its first president, British Foreign Office Secretary Sir Edward Grey. The League of Nations Society founded by the founder of the National Birth Control Association, Margery Spring-Rice and its membership filled with authors who were writing books, pamphlets and other literature promoting the ideas of the Bryce Group. Within this milieu we have identified as members of the Executive Committee an interesting array of representatives of those organizations most in control of our society today.
The ‘apostle of internationalism’ Stephen Duggan. Harvard Law School handler of Frankfurter, Brandeis and Lippmann, Billings Learned Hand. JP Morgan counsel Thomas W. Lamont. Zionist leaders and fellow Harvard Law alumni, Felix Frankfurter and Julian Mack. Inquiry members David Hunter Miller, Edward Slosson, Edwin Gay and Alvin Johnson all members. Frank Walsh’s inclusion interesting in that he was chosen to head the failed investigation (the Walsh Commission), into the unlawful and inhumane labor relation practices of the tax-exempt foundations. The League of Nations Union was ultimately under the leadership of the Rhodes Round Table movement as its president was Round Table member Sir Edward Grey. Grey working with Lord Milner, Lionel Curtis, and Philip Kerr. All these men present in Paris 1919 and were prominent in the League’s creation.
4. 1917 Club founded in 1917 among the political salons of Soho London. Founded by Leonard Woolf and the British intelligence cryptographer, Oliver Strachey. Named after the February 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Membership was largely made up of Labour Party members, Liberal Party members of the Union of Democratic Control, and the Bloomsbury Set. And within the Bloomsbury Set we find the Cambridge Apostles. Making for an interesting collection of artists, authors, painters, and intellectuals indeed. Beginning with Leonard’s famous wife, one of the most influential modernist writers of the 20th century, Adeline Virginia Woolf.
Other notables include: Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Walter Rothschild. The British economist John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein all members as Cambridge Apostles. Russell and Wittgenstein considered two of the most influential of 20th century philosophers. Keynes one of the most influential economists an advocate of the Welfare State.
To find those most responsible for this international scheme we are forced to peel back several layers of the established historical narrative. There is no denying the complicit involvement in the creation of the League of Nations by the Taft, Grey, Woolf, and Bryce groups, but publicly it was Woodrow Wilson’s innermost circle of advisors that led the charge. Wilson’s advisory group of specially appointed political and social scientists, private professors, international lawyers and economists, while usurping in importance the president’s own administration, were intermingling with and serving the interests of the House of Morgan, Wall Street financers, American aristocrats, US Court Justices, Zionist world leaders, and members of the burgeoning US military intelligence community. And it is from this ominous circle of friends we find those most responsible for the writing of the Fourteen Points published on January 8, 1918, and its final draft, the Covenant of the League of Nations, signed on January 10, 1920.
Note the Inter-Allied Conferences were chaired by Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw an executive member. Also note on the same document how several delegates were confused as to why the word ‘socialist’ was included on their credentials. This is why we refer to these meetings as the Inter-Allied Socialist and Labor Conferences. These documents can be found in their entirety in our House of Applied Knowledge above.
A closer look revealing that it is here, within these obscure groups, and not in Paris, that we find the actual launch of the League. We see uncovered fraternal affiliations that transcend party affiliation, woven together through years of friendship into an incredibly eclectic mosaic. All these groups openly pacifist, but to varying degrees. All were considered progressives united in their search for a collective security.
A quick look through the memberships list of these various groups reveals distinct cross over as not only the most influential politicians, statesmen, diplomats, and scholars of our modern history are explicit in their involvement, so too their necessary compliment of popular Western authors, writers, poets, and painters.
Here we see how societal control and the manipulation of the masses really works. All these well-known social reformers working in parallel and employing all forms of propaganda in the manufacturing of the public’s consent as America transitioned from the last days of the Gilded Age to the bright promise of modernity and the establishment of a new world order.
There is no denying the complicit involvement in the creation of the League of Nations by the Taft, Grey, Woolf, and Bryce groups, but publicly it was Woodrow Wilson’s innermost circle of advisors that led the charge.
Wilson’s advisory group of specially appointed political and social scientists, private professors, international lawyers and economists, while usurping in importance the president’s own administration, were intermingling with and serving the interests of, not our lady liberty or the Constitution of the United States, but the financial interests of the House of Morgan, Wall Street financers, American aristocrats, US Court Justices, Zionist world leaders, and members of the burgeoning US military intelligence community.
The very first experts. And it is from this ominous circle of friends we find those most responsible for the writing of the Fourteen Points published on January 8, 1918, and its final draft titled the Covenant of the League of Nations, signed on January 10, 1920.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Felix Frankfurter
Wilson’s Inquiry, like Taft’s League to Enforce Peace, was predominantly made up of men of honours tapped phi beta kappa. Woodrow Wilson, Louis Brandeis, Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter all primary authors of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, all secretly PBK. As were Taft, Stimson, and Root. Even Wilson’s personal physician, Cary Grayson had to be phi beta kappa.
Also prominent in the writing of the League was Inquiry members Isaiah Bowman, and David Hunter Miller, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, and (acording to Bateson, but not yet substantiated), chairman of the Committee on Public Information, George Creel.
So while, in the one hundred years following the events of Paris, the legacy of the Fourteen Points remains largely attached to Wilson, research herein shows that much credit must go to those surrounding him – especially those founders of the Efficiency and Preparedness movements.
Frankfurter living up to his moniker here as the ‘kochleffel‘ or ‘the stirring spoon’, by being the link connecting the New Republic/House of Truth Set with the Taft group.
And perhaps there was no more influential voice in the Progressive movement than that of the ‘sage advisor to all’, Frankfurter’s half-brother, half-father, mentor, and Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis.
Brandeis very influential in persuading Wilson to create from out of executive order the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. Brandeis was the soft touch, guiding hand while his protégé, the Judge Advocate General Felix Frankfurter, the heavy-handed iron fist representative of State justice.
Frankfurter supervising courts-martial cases for the War Department during the Great War on behalf of the government. Both Brandeis and Frankfurter massive in the implementation of the first international world order and both central in the creation of the nation of Israel.
In fact, Frankfurter, according to eyewitnesses had his foot in every delegation in Paris and, acting as a Brandeis conduit, was one of the conferences most influential figures. Frankfurter parlaying the key personal relationships made earlier at the House of Truth into world changing international policy in Paris.
The relationships forged at the House of Truth a decade prior proving priceless in Paris as Eustace Percy and Loring C. Christie, former flat mates of Frankfurter and Lippmann, held key positions within the British and Canadian Delegations. Percy, a diplomat and close advisor to, not only British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Paris, but former chief assistant to the British Ambassador, 1st Viscount Bryce and British Foreign Minister and Round Table member Sir Edward Grey in the British Foreign Office. Percy also staying at the House while accompanying Lord Balfour’s foreign mission to Washington in 1917 to discuss past secret imperial treaties mere days after America announced their inclusion in the war.
The Balfour Mission while in Washington stayed at Breckinridge Long’s mansion at 2829 16th St NW Washington, near the House of Truth. Loring C. Christie, another roommate at the House was another Harvard Law alum, editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review and graduated alongside Frankfurter.
Christie, despite being a Canadian, worked as an assistant to another House of Truth resident, Winfred Denison in the Department of Justice under Stimson. In fact Frankfurter, Denison and Christie all employed by the Taft government under Stimson years before Paris. Loring C. Christie was, during the peace talks, the personal legal advisor to Canadian Prime Minister, Robert Borden. The entire House of Truth fraternity massive in Paris.
Teddy Roosevelt helping to close this Progressive circle in that, besides being the reason for the creation of the House of Truth, Roosevelt an essential figure in the growth of internationalism.
Roosevelt himself recommending the 1907 meetings in the Hague and speaking of the idea of an international League of Peace as early as the Spanish American War before the turn of the century. Roosevelt also phi beta kappa, also a freemason and perhaps the founding father of Progressivism, running the very first progressive platform in 1912 called the Bull Moose Party.
The Century Club
So, when one interested in such things looks past the surface reasoning we witness an undeniable deep secret society association between all of these shapers of the League that transcends party affiliation but not social status. An additional, but no less important layer of secrecy is revealed when we see that all three members of the 1912 presidential election: Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt, were all members of The Century Association. Other notable Century Club members include the same milieu: Walter Lippmann, Henry Stimson, Elihu Root, Colonel Edward Mandel House, Thomas W. Lamont, Newton D. Baker, Billings Learned Hand, and Inquiry members Sidney Mezes, Charles Seymour, and James T. Shotwell. Just to name a few. This list, while not even fully unpacked goes a long way to making sense of our society today. The three successive presidencies of Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson representing a twenty-year period to begin the 20st century in which presidents and parties would change but not their progressive mission. While the helmsman may have changed, the general direction and destination of the ship remained the same. The Great Society.
The Pilgrims Society
Incredibly, an even more amazing third level of secrecy is uncovered that proves without a doubt a shared interest within these groups for an international order. When one peruses the members list of the Pilgrims Society, the international conspiracy becomes obvious: James Bryce, Elihu Root, Henry Stimson, Robert Cecil, Arthur Balfour, Lord Rothschild, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Sr., John D. Rockefeller Jr., Andrew Carnegie, John W. Davis, Charles Dawes, Chauncey Depew, John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, Jacob H. Schiff, Richard T. Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, Andrew Mellon, King Charles III and his wife, the recently diseased, Queen Elizabeth II.
The Fabians Society
All the planning may have officially culminated in Paris, but the work was done in London at meetings held during the war at the Inter-Allied Socialist Labor Conferences held in London from 1915 to September of 1918. The British Labor Party and the Fabians heavily represented at the London based Inter-Allied meetings most notably by two very founders of the Fabian movement, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb. Webb head of the Procedure Committee, a member of the Permanent Inter-Allied Executive Committee, and a chairman of the final meetings in September of 1918. When tracing the creation of the League back to source, it is in these London labor and socialist meetings and not the gilded golden hall of mirrors at the Palace of Versailles that the League was first formalized. And it is here, during these far more obscure meetings, that we see an amazing confluence of interests.
These socialist meetings, clearly dominated by a syndicate of internationally minded men brought together the Fabians, the British Labor Party, the American Progressive movement, with the leaders of international labor. It amazes this historian to know that it was this handful of liberally progressive men and woman who were chosen to shape the League. A far cry from what we are told in school. If we are told of this incredibly important epoch at all. Intellectuals, popular authors, famous poets and painters joined with Wall Street financiers, Supreme Court judges, tax-free foundations, Ivy League scholars, the modern US intelligence community, international Zionism, through secret society memberships in clubs like the Cambridge Apostles, Phi Beta Kappa, Skull and Bones fraternity, the Gentlemen’s Clubs of New York and Washington, Freemasonry, and the Pilgrims Society and more.
Many of these people are the biggest names in their field of work. Many of them pioneers and founders of the professions that most and a vast majority bonded by common fraternal brotherhoods.
Conclusion
What happened at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 – to answer Gregory Bateson’s question – is more than just the signing of a treaty. The meetings in Paris profoundly shifted world hegemony westward. And when the Paris peace conference of 1919 is taken in its broadest sense, we can clearly see, without a doubt, that this is where nearly everything we struggle to navigate today found its modern origins. Its where the US formally becomes the new world post graduate understudy to the old-world British imperial emeritus. Its where America makes its grand debut on the world stage as the preeminent international power. Its where, in less than a year, the American president went from pacifist to interventionalist to internationalist. And in less than six months, Wilson went from declaring war on Germany to secretly planning a coordinated exit strategy. Almost as if the war itself was a cog of something bigger turning.
When looking at the promise of Paris through the established mainstream narrative nothing about it seems to make sense. Despite claiming Paris was the end to war, war is now perpetual and world peace remains, as it always has, an unattainable ideal. But, when overlapping the circles of these secret organizations we all of a sudden find commonality. This the modern beginnings to the networking of power that dominates our society today. As we overlap those shared membership circles we find within the vesica pisces, an exclusive group of men, almost as if the new world order can be distilled down to its purity. Found within the vesica pisces those common to all circles and at the center of these clubs we find the men most influential and responsible for our present-day conundrum. Those engineers of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles named above are now preserved for future historians and the general public to consider.
We look forward to publishing the follow up article, The Future Perfect Part 2 the Cybernetics Revolution soon. In it we make amazing historical connections between the founders of the Inquiry and the cyberneticians of the 1940’s. A definite trail of evidence connecting the “two most historic events of the 20th century” almost as if one was the natural transgression of the other.
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