Suppression of ‘most important book ever written’
THE “MOST important book ever written” is one few would have heard of, let alone read.
Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: A history of the world in our time was published in 1966 and sold about 8 800 copies. The publisher then destroyed the printing plates and for many years prevented further publication.
Distinguished American scholar Michael L Chadwick, author of a 24-volume study entitled Global Governance in the Twenty-First Century, published in 1996, said Quigley “should have received a Nobel Prize for his work”. Tragedy and Hope, he said, “is clearly one of the most important books ever written”.
Quigley, an eminent American professor of history, who taught at Georgetown, Harvard and Princeton universities, explained why the publisher destroyed the plates.
”Powerful influences in this country want me, or at least my work, suppressed.”
Why would anyone want to destroy one of the most important books ever written?
One distinctive feature of Quigley’s historical writings was his assertion that secret societies had played a significant role in recent world history.
In his book he tells the strange tale of the semi-secret world-wide money cartel, the Rhodes-Milner Group, which aimed to make democracy nothing more than a tool of control for global market planning. He said: “Secrecy in government exists for only one reason: to prevent the American people from knowing what’s going on.”
Quigley had noticed that many prominent Englishmen and outstanding British scholars were members of an honorary society called the Fellows of All Souls College. While Quigley was studying the 149 members, a former fellow visited Washington and Quigley talked to him about the society. The fellow mentioned the Round Table Group.
Quigley later said: “I learned the Round Table Group was very influential. I knew they were the real founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and I knew they were the founders of the Institute of Pacific Relations. I knew that they were the godfathers of the Council on Foreign Relations. So I began to put this thing together and I found that this group was working for a number of things. It was a secret group. Its members were working to federate the English-speaking world. They were closely linked to international bankers.”
Quigley said: “The founding of the Bank of England by William Paterson and his friends in 1694 is one of the great dates in world history.” The “creation of paper claims greater than the reserves available means that bankers were creating money out of nothing”.
Paterson admitted this, saying: “The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”
This amounted to legalised counterfeiting as the government decreed that any banknotes had to be accepted as legal tender.
When large sums of money were required to build roads, factories and railways, the huge amounts generated by this process were used.
Quigley said it “was the skill in financial manipulation, especially on the international scene, which the small group of merchant bankers of London had acquired in the period of commercial and industrial capitalism… which lay ready for use when the need for financial capitalist innovation became urgent”.
He said it was “quite impossible to understand the history of the 20th century without some understanding of the role played by money in domestic affairs and in foreign affairs, as well as the role played by bankers in economic life and in political life”. It is well known that bankers JP Morgan and the Rothschilds were financial backers for De Beers and the Anglo American empire.
The passage that best captures Quigley’s disturbing message relates to “the real aims of financial capitalism to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences”.
Recent Oxfam studies show that eight people own 50% of the wealth of the world and that that will get worse.
In August 1967, Quigley wrote a little piece entitled “LIFE”, which encapsulated his philosophy. He said: “Important things are those which can be made ends in themselves, worth seeking and worth having… Thus, material wealth, power, popularity, and prestige should never be ends but only means to ends, because however necessary they may be they are never important… Thus the chief immediate aim in life of each individual must be to help others realise their potentialities.
“Thus the man who seeks only wealth for himself never feels rich, as the man who seeks power never feels secure, and the man who seeks pleasure never feels satisfied. But the man who seeks important things for others often feels rich, secure, and satisfied.”
Nicholson is a retired judge of the High Court in KwaZulu-Natal.