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The War on Terrorism
The Mistaken Means of Social Change - Part 2

THE HIDDEN AGENDA OF TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS

Lets start our time machine. We turn the dial to the year 1954 and, suddenly, we find ourselves in the plush offices of the Ford Foundation in New York. We see two men seated at a large, Mahogany desk, and they are talking. They cannot see or hear us. These men are Roland Gaither, who was the President of the Ford Foundation at that time, and Mr. Norman Dodd. Mr. Dodd was the newly appointed chief investigator of what was called the Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The Ford Foundation was one of them, so he was there as part of his Congressional responsibilities.

So, back to our time machine. The year is 1954, and we hear Mr. Gaither say to Mr. Dodd, "Would you be interested in knowing what we do here at the Ford Foundation?" And, of course, Mr. Dodd says, "Yes! That’s exactly why I’m here. I would be very interested, sir." Then, without any prodding at all, Gaither says, "Mr. Dodd, we operate in response to directives, the substance of which is that we shall use our grant making power to alter life in the United States so that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union."

Dodd almost falls off of his chair when he hears that. Then he says to Gaither, "Well, sir, you can do anything you please with your grant making powers, but don’t you think you have an obligation to make a disclosure to the American people? You enjoy tax exemption, which is an indirect way of saying you are subsidized by the taxpayer, so, why don’t you tell the Congress and the American people what you just told me?" And Gaither replies, "We would never dream of doing such a thing."

A STRATEGY TO CONTROL THE TEACHING OF HISTORY

There is much more to be learned from this conversation, but our time is limited, so let’s move on. The question that logically arises is, "How would it be possible for people in these prestigious organizations to even dream that they could alter life in the United States so it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union?" What an absurd thought that would be! The answer, however, is not absurd at all. To bring this about, all that needs to be done is to alter the attitude of the American people to accept such a move. How could that be done?

The answer to this second question was provided by another powerful and prestigious tax-exempt foundation, the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace. When Dodd visited the President of that organization and began asking about their activities, the President said, "Mr. Dodd, you have a lot of questions. It would be very tedious and time consuming for us to answer those questions, so I have a counter proposal. Why don’t you send a member of your staff to our facilities, and we will open our minute books from the very first meeting of the Carnegie Fund, and your staff can go through them and copy whatever you find there. Then you will know everything we are doing."

A gain, Mr. Dodd was totally amazed. He observed that the President was a young man at the Carnegie Fund and assumed he had never actually read the minutes himself. So he accepted without hesitation and sent a member of his staff to the Carnegie Endowment facilities. Her name was Mrs. Catherine Casey who was, by the way, hostile to the activity of the Congressional Committee. She was placed on the staff by political opponents of the Committee to be a watchdog and a damper on the operation. Her attitude was: "What could possibly be wrong with tax-exempt foundations? They do so much good." So that was the view of Mrs. Casey when she went to the boardroom of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. She took her Dictaphone machine (they used magnetic belts in those days) and recorded, word for word, many of the key passages from the minutes of this organization starting with the very first meeting. What she found in those minutes was so shocking, Mr. Dodd said she almost lost her mind, and she became very ineffective in her work after that.

Basically, this is what those minutes revealed: From the very beginning, the members of the board discussed how to alter life in the United States, how to change the attitudes of Americans to give up their cherished principles and concepts of government and be more receptive to what we will call the collectivist model of society. I will talk more about what the word collectivist means in a moment, but they used that word quite often. And they discussed this in a very scholarly fashion. After many months of deliberation, they came to the conclusion that, out all of the options available for altering the attitudes of people in the United States, there was only one that was really dependable. That option was > war. In times of war, they reasoned, only then would people be willing to give up things they cherish in return for the desperate need and desire for security against a deadly enemy. And so the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International > Peace declared in its minutes that it must do whatever it can to manipulate the United States into war.

They also said there were other things needed, and these were their words: "We must control education in the United States." They realized that was a pretty big order, so they teamed up with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation to pool their financial resources to control education in America - in particular, to control the teaching of history. They assigned those areas of responsibility that involved issues relating to domestic affairs to the Rockefeller Foundation, and those issues related to international affairs were taken on as the responsibility of the Carnegie Endowment. Their first goal was to rewrite the history books, and they discussed how to do that at great length. They approached some of the more prominent historians of the time and presented to them the proposition that they rewrite history to favor the concept of collectivism, but they were turned down flat. Then they decided - and these are their own words, "We must create our own stable of historians."

They selected twenty candidates at the university level who were seeking doctorates in American History. Then they went to the Guggenheim Foundation and said, "If we provide the money, would you grant fellowships to candidates selected by us, who are of the right frame of mind, those who see the value of collectivism as we do? Would you grant them doctorates so we can then propel them into positions of prominence and leadership in the academic world and in professional historical associations?" And the answer was "Yes."

So they gathered a list of young men who were seeking their doctorate degrees. They interviewed them, analyzed their thinking processes, and chose the twenty they thought were best suited for their purpose. They sent them to London for a briefing. (In a moment I will explain why London is so significant.) At this meeting, they were told what would be expected if and when they win the doctorates they were seeking. They were told they would have to view history, write history, and teach history from the perspective that collectivism was a positive force in the world and was the wave of the future.

Now lets go back to the words of Mr. Dodd, himself. He said: "This group of twenty historians eventually formed the nucleus of the American Historical Association. Then toward the end of the 1920’s the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 [a huge amount of money in those days] for a study of history in a manner that points to what this country can look forward to in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is a summary of the contents of the other six. And the essence of the last volume is, the future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with characteristic American efficiency."

COLLECTIVISM VS INDIVIDUALISM

Now we must turn off our time machine for a moment and deal with this word collectivism. You are going to hear it a lot. Especially if you delve into the historical papers of the individuals and groups we are discussing, you will find them using the word over and over. Although most people have only a vague concept of what collectivism is, the advocates of collectivism have a very definite understanding of it, so let’s deal with that now.

In order to appreciate the essence of collectivism, we need to step backward and look at the larger picture encompassing the political ideologies that divide people in this age. You find those who claim they are conservatives, and they will debate wildly with those who think of themselves as liberals. Left-wingers disagree with right-wingers. You find people who say they are Socialists or Communists or Fascists or whatever words they choose to identify their point of view. But, when you ask them to explain what those words mean, very few can agree. For the most part, they are merely labels without clear or precise definitions.

Let’s put some meaning to them. I think that all of the great political issues, the ideological issues at least, can be divided into two viewpoints. All of the rest is fluff. Basically, a person is either a collectivist or an individualist. We are talking about collectivism vs. individualism. What do these words mean?

First of all I should tell you that, from my observation, collectivists and individualist, for the most part, are all good people. They want the best life possible for their families, for their countrymen, and for the world - for mankind. They all want peace, prosperity, and justice. They want freedom. Sometime they disagree over what the tradeoff should be for freedom; but, still, they all want the good things for their fellow man. Where they disagree is how to bring those things about.

THE DANGER OF GROUP SUPREMACY

The collectivist believes the group is the most important element of society; that all solutions to problems are better solved at the group level than at the individual level; and that, the larger the problem is, the larger the group should be to solve the problem. And so they believe in collective action. They believe in organizing group activities to provide for all of the advantages they want people to have. They want to protect people. They want to make sure they don’t suffer, that they are well clothed and fed, and that they are treated justly. The solution to all of these problems is a collective solution. "We shall do it through group action." The more complex the problem, the larger the group should be, until finally the most complex problems of all can be solved only by the largest groups of all.

The collectivist sees government as the solution, because government is the ultimate group, and so the collectivist mind can be easily recognized. It always has an affinity to government as the solver of problems. The individualist, by the way, is more skeptical. He tends to look at government as the creator of problems. But that’s another issue. We will get to the individualist in a moment. The collectivist sees government as the solver of problems; and, of course, the larger the unit of government, the better. Collectivist solutions gravitate from local government to state government to national government and finally to world government. If there is a really big problem, such as the environmental issue involving the whole planet, the collectivist is convinced that it cannot be solved except through the action of world government.

The collectivist believes that the group is more important than the individual and, if necessary, the individual must be sacrificed for the group. Sometimes that is expressed in terms of "the greater good for the greater number." It’s a very appealing concept.

The individualist on the other hand says, "Wait a minute. Group? What is group? That’s just a word. You cannot touch a group. You cannot see a group. All you can touch and see are individuals. They make up the group. But the real substance of the group is the individual within it. It’s like a forest. Forest doesn’t exist. It’s a word concept. There are only trees." So the individualist sees that, if you sacrifice the individual for the group, you have made a huge mistake. The individual is the essence of the group. He is the core of the group. The group has no claim to sacrifice its own essence.

Collectivists are often critics of religious and family values, because collectivism demands unquestioning obedience to the state. Since loyalty to family or religious codes often conflict with the concept of group supremacy, they cannot be tolerated in a collectivist system.

C ontinue
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