The Bilderberg Meeting is an annual conference established
in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands[1] "to foster dialogue between Europe
and North America".[2] Participants are European and North
American political leaders, expertsfrom industry, finance, academia,
and the media.[2] The meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule.[2] The Bilderberg meetings are also
unofficially called the "Bilderberg Group", "Bilderberg
conference" or "Bilderberg Club".
Contents
· 1Origin
The first conference was held at the Hotel de
Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands,
from 29 to 31 May 1954.[3] It was initiated by several people,
including Polishpolitician-in-exile Józef Retinger who,
concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism in
Western Europe, proposed an international conference at which leaders from
European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim
of promoting Atlanticism—better understanding between the cultures of the
United States and Western Europe to foster cooperation on political, economic,
and defense issues.[4]
Retinger approached Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who
agreed to promote the idea, together with former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland,
and the then-head of Unilever, Dutchman Paul Rijkens.
Bernhard in turn contacted Walter Bedell Smith, the then-head of the CIA, who asked Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson to deal with
the suggestion.[5] The guest list was to be drawn up by
inviting two attendees from each nation, one of each to represent
"conservative" and "liberal" points of view.[4] Fifty delegates from 11 countries in
Western Europe attended the first conference, along with 11 Americans.[6]
The success of the meeting led the organizers to arrange an
annual conference. A permanent steering committee was established with Retinger
appointed as permanent secretary. As well as organizing the conference, the
steering committee also maintained a register of attendee names and contact
details with the aim of creating an informal network of individuals who could
call upon one another in a private capacity.[7] Conferences were held in France,
Germany, and Denmark over the following three years. In 1957, the
first U.S. conference was held on St. Simons Island, Georgia, with $30,000 from
the Ford Foundation. The foundation also supplied
funding for the 1959 and 1963 conferences.[5]
Main article: List of Bilderberg participants
The participants are between 120 and 150 people composed
of political leaders, experts from industry, finance, academia and
the media.[2] 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.[2][3] Historically, attendee lists have been
weighted toward bankers, politicians, directors of large businesses[8] and board members from large publicly
traded corporations, including IBM, Xerox, Royal Dutch
Shell, Nokia and Daimler.[9] Heads of state, including former King Juan Carlos I of Spain and former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, have attended
meetings.[9][10] A source connected to the group
told The Daily Telegraph in 2013 that other
individuals, whose names are not publicly issued, sometimes turn up "just
for the day" at the group's meetings.[11]
Further
information: List of Bilderberg meetings
The group's original goal of promoting Atlanticism,
of strengthening U.S.–European relations and preventing another world war has
grown; according to Andrew Kakabadse the Bilderberg Group's theme is to
"bolster a consensus around free market Western capitalism and its
interests around the globe".[3] In 2001, Denis Healey,
a Bilderberg group founder and a steering committee member for 30 years, said,
"To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but
not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn't go on forever
fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions
homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a
good thing."[12]
According to the web page of the group, the meetings are
conducted under the Chatham House Rule, allowing the participants
to use any information they gained during the meeting, but not to disclose the
names of the speakers or any other participants. According to former
chairman Étienne Davignon in 2011, a major
attraction of Bilderberg group meetings is that they provide an opportunity for
participants to speak and debate candidly and to find out what major figures
really think, without the risk of off-the-cuff comments becoming fodder for
controversy in the media.[13] A 2008 press release from the
"American Friends of Bilderberg" stated that "Bilderberg's only
activity is its annual Conference and that at the meetings, no resolutions were
proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued."[14] However, in November 2009, the group
hosted a dinner meeting at the Château of Val-Duchesse in Brussels
outside its annual conference to promote the candidacy of Herman Van
Rompuy for President of the European Council.[15]
Meetings are organized by a steering committee with two members
from each of approximately 18 nations.[16] Official posts include a chairman and an
Honorary Secretary General.[9] The group's rules do not contain a
membership category but former participants receive the annual conference
reports.[17] The only category that exists is
"member of the steering committee."[18] Besides the committee, there is a
separate advisory group with overlapping membership.[19]
Dutch economist Ernst van der Beugel became permanent
secretary in 1960, upon Retinger's death. Prince Bernhard continued to serve as
the meeting's chairman until 1976, the year of his involvement in the Lockheed affair. The position of Honorary
American Secretary General has been held successively by Joseph E. Johnsonof
the Carnegie Endowment, William Bundy of Princeton, Theodore L. Eliot Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan,
and Casimir A. Yost of Georgetown University's Institute for the Study
of Diplomacy.[20]
According to James A. Bill, the "steering committee usually
met twice a year to plan programs and to discuss the participant list."[21]
In 2002, author Jon Ronson wrote
that the group has a small central office in Holland [sic] which each year
decides what country will host the forthcoming meeting. The host country then
has to book an entire hotel for four days, plus arrange catering, transport and
security. To fund this, the host solicits donations from sympathetic
corporations such as Barclays, Fiat Automobiles, GlaxoSmithKline, Heinz, Nokia and Xerox.[22]
Criticisms
and conspiracy theories[edit]
Partly
because of its working methods to ensure strict privacy, the Bilderberg Group
has been criticised for its lack of transparency and accountability.[31] The undisclosed nature of
the proceedings has given rise to several conspiracy theories.[32][13][33] This outlook has been
popular on both extremes of the political spectrum,
even if they disagree about the exact nature of the group's intentions. Some on
the left accuse the Bilderberg group of conspiring to impose capitalist
domination,[34]while some on the right have
accused the group of conspiring to impose a world government and planned economy.[35]
In
2005, Davignon discussed accusations of the group striving for a one-world
government with the BBC: "It is unavoidable and it doesn't
matter. There will always be people who believe in conspiracies but things
happen in a much more incoherent fashion. ... When people say this is a secret
government of the world I say that if we were a secret government of the world
we should be bloody ashamed of ourselves."[33]
One
of the most concise academic papers critical of Bilderberg's 'Deep State' role in influencing geopolitical
events out of the public spotlight was written in 1996 by Mike Peters of Leeds
Metropolitan University and published in Lobster. Entitled "The Bilderberg
Group and the Project for European Unification", Peters expresses
incredulity that so few academics have examined the Bilderberg Group's
international financial and political lobbying clout but closely examines links
between the post-war effort for a united Europe and specific individuals
connected with the Bilderberg Group.
To anticipate what will be said
later, I believe that one of the key assumptions often made by structural
Marxists, namely that the capitalist class is always divided into competing
fractions which have no mechanisms for co-ordination other than the state, is
not empirically sustainable. Part of this misconception, it could be said,
derives from an over-literal understanding of the concept of the 'market' as
constituting the only social relation amongst different fractions of capital.
At least as far as the very large, and above all, the international (or as we
would say in today's jargon, the 'global') corporations are concerned, this is
definitely not the case: very sophisticated organs do exist whereby these
capitalist interests can and do hammer out common lines of strategy. Bilderberg
is one of these mechanisms.[36]
In
a 1994 report Right Woos Left, published by the Political
Research Associates, investigative journalist Chip Berlet argued that right-wing populist conspiracy
theories about the Bilderberg group date back as early as 1964 and can be found
in Phyllis Schlafly's
self-published book A Choice, Not an Echo,[37] which promoted a conspiracy theory in which the Republican
Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals
dominated by members of the Bilderberg group, whose internationalistpolicies would pave the way
for world communism.[38]
In
August 2010, former Cuban president Fidel Castro wrote a controversial
article for the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma in
which he cited Daniel Estulin's
2006 book The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,[39] which, as quoted by Castro,
describes "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists"
manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no
borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."[34]
Proponents
of Bilderberg conspiracy theories in the United States include individuals and
groups such as the John Birch Society,[35][40] political activist Phyllis
Schlafly,[40] writer Jim Tucker,[41] political activist Lyndon LaRouche,[42] conspiracy theorist Alex Jones,[3][43][44] and politician Jesse Ventura, who made the Bilderberg group a
topic of a 2009 episode of his TruTV series Conspiracy
Theory with Jesse Ventura.[45] Non-American proponents
include Lithuanian writer Daniel Estulin[46]and British politician Nigel Farage.[47]
Concerns
about lobbying have arisen.[48][49] Ian Richardson sees
Bilderberg as the transnational power elite, "an integral, and to some
extent critical, part of the existing system of global governance", that is "not
acting in the interests of the whole".[50] An article in The Guardian in June 2017 criticized
the world view expressed in an agenda published by the Bilderberg group.[51]
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