Op-Ed: Bilderberg – some dare call it conspiracy

Strasbourg - Thirty years ago, only ‘right wing extremists’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ dared to mention the Bilderberg Group. Earlier this month, it was openly accused in the European Parliament of colluding with the media.

One would have thought when powerful politicians, bankers, CEOs of major corporations, academics and others fly off to Switzerland to meet in secret, the media would be, well, interested. The ongoing phone hacking scandal started when a handful of celebrities became suspicious. Although it has recently developed into something far more scandalous and sinister, with revelations of the mobile phones of one, possibly two, murder victims being hacked, for years it was purely a matter of titillating gossip. Yet the same media that has been scrutinising this intensely has been and continues to be curiously incurious about the Bilderberg Group, not though, thankfully, as incurious as it used to be. Earlier this month, the UK Indepedence Party MEP Gerard Batten raised the issue of Bilderberg in the European Parliament; last Friday, a video and transcript were posted to a blog, here. A search of Hansard for the term “Bilderberg” made this afternoon resulted in 329 hits; it is not possible at present to limit searches by date, but the overwhelming majority of them appear to relate to recent entries, ie this Millennium! Curiously, a search of the Morning Star website reveals only two articles, both of them published last year, one of them which alludes to Bilderberg as a club for the rich and powerful, the other taking a distinctly anti-conspiracy line. The Socialist Workers Party is even worse; there is one mention on all their websites, an article from November 2004 makes a passing reference. Why so incurious Mr Avowed Anti-Capitalist? Probably for the same reason the bankrolling of Trotsky and the rest of the workers’ vanguard has been written out of red history, because these people who make so much noise about opposing the forces of international capitalism who are spreading “racism and Sectarianism” to divide the workers as the SWP used to put it, are in reality doing no such thing. You can search in vain through any of their websites or theoretical publications for any meaningful opposition to usury, or to reforming the banking system. This is hardly surprising, because Karl Marx himself as good as ignored it; there is one reference to usury in the index to Volume 1 of Das Kapital, a single page, and absolutely no discussion of its mechanism. The most curious allusion to Bilderberg though appears on the website of the ADL under the heading Debunking the Bilderberg Myth. This short article doesn’t actually debunk or even attempt to debunk anything, rather it simply points out what certain people say or think about the group along with a few non-contentious facts. Even more curiously, there is no attempt to link it with the Protocols Of Zion, as there has been in the past in articles and books emanating from the ADL and its fellow travellers. Perhaps even they are waking up at long last, as are the mostly young people who are currently occupying Wall Street.