| | | Suppose that we and our wealthy, highly-educated, upper-class male friends want to have a bit of a hoot out in the woods. We like to think of ourselves as great romatic figures, so we something that Byron would be proud of. Except that the rules of the house forbid Greek peasent girls, which is a shame. But then we all went to private schools, so, (ahem!) we're used to the company of men. And that's the funny thing about men, you get a bunch of them together, all liquored up, and things get a bit...tribal.
Anyway, the classicists amongst us are fond of set-piece theater, with masks and a chorus (so there's a Greek influence after all), and a bit of neo-Wagnerian musik theater never goes amiss amongst the aesthetes, nicely cathartic too. Because we all do work so hard, keeping civilization on the right track, as we do, don't we?
And what better to generate a frisson amongst the torch-lit woods, my dear, than the merest whiff of The Occult?
Being men, of course we are prone to taking this sort of thing a mite too seriously, get a little bit too wrapped up in the drama of it all, but not to worry. And yes, this does all look a little odd in the light of day, be we are all very discreet, aren't we, so we can let our hair down a little in safety, can't we. Even pee on the trees! If we want. Very Thoreau. -- Keith Braithwaite
A good cue for one of the revelations last week at Strange Attractor that a lot of us found particularly shocking. For Jon Ronson rather unwillingly disclosed a strange, hitherto untold part of his tale of being chased by the Bilderberg Group through the lanes of Portugal. Something which did little to increase his credibility with the audience. I don't think it would be right for me to pass on what was a particularly embarassing disclosure by Jon. I may let him do that in person.
Of course some groups don't even achieve the maturity level of Undergraduate Shenanigans. See Tory Party Shenanigans. -- Richard Drake
Forty months on
The revelation from Jon Ronson was this. He was genuinely scared by the big black secret service vehicle that chased the one he and Jim Tucker were in after they tried to do their legitimate job as reporters on the Bilderberg Group in Portugal. So much so that Jon rang the UK embassy in some panic (I think perhaps from a phone box with the vehicle in question waiting menacingly nearby). He tried to explain that he was a TV journalist trying to make this programme about this strange group called Bilderberg ...
"And who are you?" they inquired. The name Ronson clearly meant nothing to them. Jon felt the only way to explain was: "I make programmes very like er, Louis Theroux." Suddenly all was clear to the man at the embassy.
This really stuck in the throat though, for Jon's contention is that he began the genre and Theroux deliberately and definitely copied it from him, only to become much more famous for doing so. He had never admitted this moment of weakness before.
Strange, perhaps sobering
This page has always brought to mind two matters in addition to the reports of Bohemian Grove that triggered it. One being the very topical year-on-year shenanigans of students, senators and seers, this election time, of Skull And Bones at Yale. But Harvard is surely not to be outdone. Here's an extraordinary couple of sentences from AntonySutton that I first read in the 1980s, on another "wealthy, highly-educated, upper-class" German-American of Sixty Years before, Putzi Hanfstaengl:
As if it is not surprising enough to find both Heinrich Himmler and Franklin D Roosevelt prominent in Putzi's life, we also discover that the Nazi Stormtrooper marching songs were composed by Hanfstaengl, "including the one that was played by the brownshirt columns as they marched through the Brandenburger Tor on the day Hitler took over power." To top this eye-opener, Putzi averred that the genesis of the Nazi chant "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil," used in the Nazi mass rallies, was none other than "Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, rah, rah, rah."
-- Wall Street And The Rise Of Hitler, chapter_08.htm
There is an amusing and ridiculous side to all this, as this last quote shows. But big oaks from little acorns grow. Himmler and Hitler had only managed to murder a handful of human beings when they became so intimate with the precocious Harvard man who did so much to open up their appeal to the mass audience. The fact they ultimately probably tried to murder him through an aeroplane "accident", triggering his flight back to the USA and later assistance to FDR, seems an almost incidental point in the wider sweep of things. -- Richard Drake
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