all major media, by continual low-intensity propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished through principles developed in the psychological-warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents and press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat. (2006, pp. 182–183)
“When I was young, my friends at Oxford consisted largely of Fabian Socialists, and not a few of the dons were themselves Socialists. Today, of course, they would not call themselves Fabian Socialists, but Marxian Communists.”
—G. K. Chesterton
A few more suggestive facts: Hubert Bland, cofounder of the Fabian Society and a bank employee-turned-journalist, worked for the London Sunday Chronicle, a paper owned by newspaper magnate Edward Hulton. It was allegedly Bland who recruited his friend and fellow journalist George Bernard Shaw to the Fabian Society (Cassivellaunus, 2013). Hulton's son, Edward G. Hulton, was the owner of Picture Post and “almost certainly a loyal agent of MI6's Section D” (Dorril & Ramsay, 1990).4 He was also the founder of the 1941 Committee, a think tank that recruited “star” writers J. B. Priestley and Tom Wintringham, and that also included David Astor (more on him soon), Sir Richard Acland, and my grandfather. Alec mentions Acland in his short memoir in reference to Acland and Priestley's Common Wealth, in which Alec “took a very active part.” Acland was also a Quaker, which Alec later became.
G. B. Shaw's friend, Fabian Society leader Sidney Webb, married Beatrice, daughter of Richard Potter, a wealthy financier with international connections who was chairman of the Great Western and Grand Trunk railways of England and Canada. Beatrice was also a close friend of Rothschild associate and Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Rothschild and Balfour were founding members of the Round Table. When I first wrote this chapter I included the data point that my grandfather was one of the two “Round Table's main British backers” during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.5 I found this startling, to say the least, since I understood the Round Table to be a massive, multinational organization and though my grandfather was rich, I didn't think he was that rich. Eventually I got ahold of the book that contained this quote, Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism, by Archie Potts, and discovered that Potts was referring to the East-West Round Table, an organization about which there is very little information but which had to do with peace negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, something my grandfather was apparently deeply involved in. Whether there was any connection between this Round Table and the Round Table of Rothschild and Balfour is something I have been unable to find out. At the very least, with my grandfather as the vesica piscis between the two, some of the same names and causes seem to crop up around both.
For example, the aforementioned David Astor, alleged MI6 agent and editor of the UK paper The Observer, was the grandson of William Waldorf (the first). He lobbied for the release of Myra Hindley in the 1970s along with Lord Longford. My grandfather visited Hindley in jail and my brother wrote letters to her. Astor was also affiliated with the Round Table Group. According to author and Lobster editor Stephen Dorril, Astor
created the Europe Study Group to look at the problems of Europe and the prospects for a non-nationalist Germany. At the core of the group were a number of emigré Germans destined to play a role in the European Movement, such as the future leader writer on the Observer, Richard “Rix” Lowenthal. Interviewed for recruitment by MI6, Astor was turned down for a full-time post but was subsequently used by MI6 officer Lionel Loewe to establish contact with the German opposition. Employed as the press officer in Lord Mountbatten's Combined Operations Headquarters in London, Astor continued with his group, which drew on the ideas of the Cecil Rhodes-inspired Round Table Group and its belief that “the British Empire should federate.” (Dorril, 2002, p. 456)
This places my grandfather squarely in the circles of the other Round Table Group—the one laying the groundwork for the European Union and a one world government—and, by inevitable extension, MI6. The shared interests alone (leaving aside the uses Alec was putting his money to) make it inevitable their paths would have crossed. Yet these interests appear to have little to do with socialism, at least as I grew up understanding it.
Meanwhile, Round Table founding member Lord Rothschild “was personally involved, with Sidney Webb, in the restructuring of the University of London into which the Fabians’ London School of Economics (LSE) was incorporated in 1898” (Cassivellaunus, 2013) (LSE was founded by the original Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw; Annie Besant and Bertrand Russell were early participants). Rothschild also provided funds for the LSE and served as its third president, “after his relative Lord Rosebery” (B. Webb, 1948, pp. 182, 214). LSE is connected, not just to the various Fabian groups, but also to Gay Liberation and PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange, a faction within the Labour government in the 1970s, more on which later. (Economist John Maynard Keynes was a key figure at LSE. The school's alumni include my grandfather's pal John Saville, Harold Laski—cofounder of the New School for Social Research, Nicholas Humphrey, Edwina Currie, David Rockefeller, Mick Jagger, Zecharia Sitchin, Naomi Klein, John F. Kennedy, and—the subject of my last book, Prisoner of Infinity—Whitley Strieber.)
In Fabian Freeway, Rose L. Martin describes Keynes as the “Spiritual heir and latter-day facsimile” of the occultist Count Cagliostro. Rather like my brother, Keynes cut
a magnificent figure: six feet three, and superbly tailored; an authority on wines, fine foods and beautiful women; patron of the arts, and master of the English language which he only distorted by design. He, too, posed as the possessor of elusive secrets, key to the Higher Mysteries of economics and public finance…. An alchemist who succeeded in substituting paper for gold, a mystifier who claimed that money multiplied itself in the spending, Keynes compelled bankers to do his bidding and imposed his schemes on the highest personages in an age of political unreason. (Martin, 1966, p. 323)
Keynes is known today as the father of deficit spending:
The system promulgated by Keynes, as even his most loyal disciples admit, was in reality no system at all. It was a rationale and a tool for achieving total political control, at a gradually increased tempo, over the economic life of a nation…. It is generally agreed today that there is hardly a political economist of prominence in America who—even when he appears critical of Keynes—has not been influenced by the Keynesian method. If he had resisted seriously, it is safe to say he would not be prominent.6
Another Fabian line of connection with industrial interests was apparently the chocolate manufacturers Rowntree's, which funded many Fabian projects (Cassivellaunus, 2013). The alliance between Northern Dairies and Rowntree Macintosh meant that (until our parents split) our house was always full of chocolates, and we even got to visit the Rowntree Macintosh factory as kids. One of my favorite books as a child was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl (with whom I corresponded briefly when I was young, though I don't think I ever met him; Dahl did propaganda work for British Intelligence in World War II7). Willy Wonka, as illustrated in the book and later depicted in the movies, wears a top hat and a purple jacket, like the infamous Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (and like my brother in his last years, though he preferred red). Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was based on the book by MI5 agent Ian Fleming and it was probably the movie that was most beloved in my early childhood. More recently, the Child Catcher has been compared to Jimmy Savile.
Savile's predations have been linked to those of an ice cream manufacturer and retailer, Peter Jaconelli (BBC News, 2014b), in Scarborough, Yorkshire, a town I visited as a child. Northern Dairies had its own ice cream products and also provided milk to other companies. (When I was an adolescent, we lived opposite a famous ice cream shop called Burgess's.)
