"The author, Arrigo Levi, is an interesting man. If your town has a library, and don’t forget your local community college, you will probably be able to get a better sense of who was Mr. Levi. For the purposes of the next few posts I’ve considered, one thing about his past I’d like to bring to your attention is his role in the Trilateral Commission."
I mention several times in this post, and highlighted this mention in resultant posts (like this one!) that I am not a Conspiracy Theorist.
Not one. Don't think they're possible. I think intellectual fadism is possible. Believing in stupid is possible, if only for a little while. Much like Keats--although I am by nature a Yeats guy--I believe in:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know." (John Keats, Ode on a Grecain Urn", George Keats, 1819.)
Truth is, by its very nature, robust. It, truth, has been the bain of every tyrant, every dictator. You can't trump truth. You can attempt to conceal it. You can run from it. You can deny it. But truth, by her very nature, is irrepressible and uncontrollable. Ask
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Ask
Natan Scharansky. Men of our time, and not of our time.
What happens when free speech becomes illegal? The free speech exists. It simply goes underground. Any system that represses speech runs afoul of the necessity for man to find and exhalt truth.
This is why many on the Right are criticized; for allowing the ranting and looney ideas of the Left to take voice and gain popularity. Treasonous ideas have been and are promulgated by the Left. Anti-patriotic sentiment is protected by us of the Right. Treasonous actions--such as the visit by former President James Carter to Syria recently--are unchallenged by law enforcement under the liberties granted by our respect for freedom of speech.
Because this anti-patriotic speech, this anti-American speech must be protected. But, it must also be exposed as wrong. And just as what we refer to as the Mainstream Media is suppressing the truth--not simply promulgating propaganda--the need to speak the truth has found a mouthpiece in the internet. I seek to change peoples minds and their opinions. Not by shouting them down, nor by stifling dissent. I seek to change people's opinions by simply stating the truth. I rely upon the basic nature of man to seek the truth, robust truth. Simple truth.
So, why return to the Trilateral Commission? It is necessary to examine the Trilateral Commission to understand how views on necessary prescriptions for national economic and cultural vitality can vary, and how substantive agreement among some parties or groups doesn't create sufficient or necessary conditions for this "substantive agreement" to generate the prescribed outcome.
In other words, just because you say a thing is true, doesn't mean it is true. No matter how many times you repeat it. If an argument is true, it will reveal itself as being true. No matter how much lipstick you put on it.
The Trilateral Commission began with good intentions. David Rockefeller is as good example of what you and I aren't as can be found. Born into a billionaire's family in 1915--back when a billion dollars was a lot of money--the grandson of Standard Oil founder John Rockefeller led a simple life. Stuck in a nine-story mansion in New York City, Dave Rockefeller had the advantage of the latest fads in education. Including the quaint social custom he referred to as "networking".
An amusing review of Dave can be
found here. (Just hit "esc" when the password screen comes up.) Complete with reference to "conspiracy". While it is not my intention to suggest that the lifework of Dave Rockefeller was puerile, insipid or mawkish, it is easy to point out that having billions of dollars tends to insulate one from the downside of bad decisions. (For a humourous look at the New York elitist, I recommend Tom Wolfe's "
Bonfire of the Vanities"
(Tom Wolfe,
Bonfire of the Vanities, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1987)
. I think there was a movie. DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE. Please. Do yourself a favour, and read a book.
So, when Dave asked
Zbigniew Brezinski to set up a group to look out for the interests of the world, Zbiggy did.
It is toward the end of the Levi article that one receives the policy prescription of Levi:
"Therefore, instead of spending too much time wondering about Eurocommunists (they may be a mystery even to themselves), the democratic West ought to concentrate its attention on the hasty construction and completion of Western and worldwide institutions, in order to strengthen our economies and our societies and to contain within a more stable framework the great risks of Euro-communism."
Seemingly, innocuous and perhaps, self-evident. But the reader is to be cautioned. The statement above is fraught with
implicature. And it is in divining and exposing that implicature which will profit us in our current policy connundrum here in the State of Oregon.
This is the issue of trust, which I introduced
here.
