The Bilderberg meeting is an annual conference that began in 1954 at the exclusive Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands, to foster dialogue between Europe and North America. The group originally sought to prevent a third world war. Now they’re viewed as the central hub of Western global socio-political and business interests around the world.
The annual Bilderberg Meeting has been a forum for informal discussions to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.
Every year, approx. 130 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, labour, academia and the media are invited to take part in the Meeting. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields.
The Meeting is a forum for informal discussions about major issues. The Meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed.
Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity, and hence are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions.
As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights. There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.
Much like many other major gatherings around the world, the 2020 installment of the infamous Bilderberg Meeting will not take place as planned. The controversial confab of global power brokers was to be held in June at a location that had yet to be publicly revealed. However, a few weeks ago, the organization quietly updated its website with an announcement saying that “in line with worldwide travel constraints and prevention efforts the Meeting 2020 has been postponed.”
Considering that the group’s annual conversations concerning pressing global issues are highly secretive, it stands to reason that they would pass on holding a virtual version of the event and risk having the details of the meetings wind up leaking online. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be a 2020 edition of the gathering later this year or if the organization will simply opt to meet again in 2021 instead. Unfortunately, since we’re not on the Bilderberg invitation list, we’ll have to wait until they decide to tell the world what they plan to do.
Their purpose: to escape the “frontier culture,” or uncivilized interests, of common men.
The people that gather at Bohemian Grove — who have included prominent business leaders, former U.S. presidents, musicians, and oil barons — are told that “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” meaning business deals are to be left outside. One exception was in 1942, when a planning for the Manhattan Project took place at the grove, leading to the creation of the atom bomb.
A spokesperson for Bohemian Grove says the people that gather there “share a passion for the outdoors, music, and theater.”
Political provocateur Alex Jones infiltrated the campsite in the Summer 2000 with a hidden camera and filmed the Cremation of the Care ceremony in front of the Gove’s 40-foot-owl, in deference to the surrounding Redwood trees.
Jones and his followers need not worry, the Sonoma West Times & News report there will be no woodland gathering this year:
Along with the exclusive events being shuttered for the year, so too are the annual protests at the gates of the exclusive Bohemian Grove along the Russian River in Monte Rio. Staged off-and-on since 1980 by the Bohemian Grove Action Network, the protests will not be necessary this July. Also canceled is a controversial $150,000 security contract between the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department and the private all-male club.
Also not happening will be dozens of private jet landings at the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport when the wealthy Bohemians would usually land and get ferried by limousine to the west county retreat. Dozens of rounds of golf at Northwood Golf Club, nearby dinner outings and accidental sightings of Boho celebrities like Clint Eastwood, George W. Bush or Henry Kissinger won’t be happening, either.
The Bohemian Grove was established in 1870 by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. It was originally a club for literary, cultural and arts types such as Jack London and Ambrose Bierce. The club roster today totals about 2,700 men, including past heads of state, corporate titans, retired military officers and the newly rich of Silicon Valley.
The Trilateral Commission is a nonpartisan discussion group created in 1973 to strengthen relations between the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America.
The Trilateral Commission is a non-governmental, policy-oriented forum that brings together leaders in their individual capacity from the worlds of business, government, academia, press and media, as well as civil society.
The Commission offers a global platform for open dialogue, reaching out to those with different views and engaging with decision makers from around the world with the aim of finding solutions to the great geopolitical, economic and social challenges of our time. Its members share a firm belief in the values of rule of law, democratic government, human rights, freedom of speech and free enterprise that underpin human progress.
Members are also committed to supporting a rules-based international system, closer cooperation across borders and respect for the diversity of approaches to policy issues.
When the first triennium of the Trilateral Commission was launched in 1973, the most immediate purpose was to draw together—at a time of considerable friction among governments—the highest-level unofficial group possible to look together at the key common problems facing our three areas.
At a deeper level, there was a sense that the United States was no longer in such a singular leadership position as it had been in earlier post-World War II years, and that a more shared form of leadership—including Europe and Japan in particular—would be needed for the international system to navigate successfully the major challenges of the coming years.
As our conviction has strengthened that the Commission remains more important than ever in helping our countries fulfill their shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system, we too have changed.
Our membership has widened to reflect broader changes in the world. Thus, the Japan Group has become a Pacific Asian Group, including in 2009 both Chinese and Indian members. Mexican members have been added to the North American Group. The European Group continues to widen in line with the enlargement of the EU.
We are also continuing in this triennium our practice of inviting a number of participants from other key areas.
“A skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power: political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical…
in the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved.”
Nevertheless, all can rest easy. For no world domination is on-tap in 2020. The Commission’s annual meeting that had been scheduled to meet in the Yucatan, has too been postponed.
However, the Trilateral Commission recently held a ‘virtual conversation’ forthe first time, on race and racism in late June 2020.
CFR is an American foreign policy think tank. Its membership rolls include senior politicians, former secretaries of state, CIA heads, bankers, lawyers, professors, and leading journalists.
The organization publishes the bi-monthly Foreign Affairsjournal, operate the David Rockefeller Studies Program, influence foreign policy by making recommendations to the presidential administrations, the diplomatic community, offer testimony before Congress, interact with the media, and write op-ed articles on foreign policy issues.
CFR has been for awhile moving away from in-person meetings in favor of the social distant conference calls.
The End of the NWO?
Image courtesy: Medium
Yet of all of the groups, CFR was the only group to raise concerns about Covid’s impact on the New World Order’s ability to operate in a rapidly changing 21st Century:
In a new Council Special Report, The End of World Order and American Foreign Policy, Robert D. Blackwill and Thomas Wright seek to “place the plague in global context,” by analyzing the evolution of world order before COVID-19, and offer a roadmap for U.S. foreign policy in the face of “radical international uncertainty.”
The authors contend that world order “weakened after 9/11 and ended over the past decade, driven by a combination of great power ambition, American withdrawal, and transformational changes that left many nations unmoored from old certainties.”
“The fundamental strategic problem the United States faces with respect to world order is how it should respond to the breakdown in agreed arrangements between the major powers,” say Blackwill and Wright.
“With COVID-19, the reordering moment is here,” Blackwill and Wright conclude. “Avoiding dangerous confrontations with rivals is possible, but only if the United States is up to that diplomatic challenge, based on U.S. national interests and democratic values.
Through wise and steady international leadership, Washington can also implement adroit and consistent policies that substantially shape international order in line with its preferences.”
The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush, and since then the paranoia and the facts have always existed symbiotically. The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”
But unlike in the 1990s or 2000s, when New World Order paranoia exaggerated real developments and trends, in the current moment the reality is the opposite of what is feared. Instead of leading to some sort of globalist consolidation, the rule of the coronavirus is unraveling internationalism everywhere you look.
The virus has exposed global entities as either weak and politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or all-but-irrelevant, in the case of the United Nations. It has restored or hardened borders, impeded migration, devolved power from the international to national and the national to local. And it has spurred renewed great power rivalry, with “Chimerica” dissolving and a trans-Pacific Cold War looming.
On the other hand, the Rand Corporation argues for the necessity of these cloaked organizations:
The roots of the order run back to the mid-1940s, when U.S. officials concluded that the United States should work to shape the postwar settlement in more structured, collaborative and rule-bound ways. They conceived of global organizations to promote collective problem-solving, avert protectionist impulses, and stabilize the world economy.
The resulting global institutions, processes, habits, rules, and norms inspired the rise of regional organizations and became what we now know as the postwar international order. The essential approach it reflects—nesting U.S. power in a shared multilateral order—has provided the basis for U.S. national security strategies since the 1950s.
Image courtesy: Rand
Today, however, that order is under unprecedented strain, both within the societies of its leading members and from revisionist countries determined to change some aspects of how the order functions.
The question is whether the order retains strategic value, and whether such a vision can or should continue to shape U.S. strategy.
Perhaps our most important conclusion emphasizes the value of the postwar order. It has boosted the effectiveness of other instruments of U.S. statecraft, we found, such as diplomacy and military strength, and helped to advance specific U.S. interests in identifiable and sometimes measurable ways.
While there have been makes in the years since the end of World War II, the defeat of Communism during the Cold War, the containment of Islamic radicalism in the War on Terror, and technological advancements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution were all possible because of the American century.
