Power of the Secret Societies (Poll)

[ska invita]

Did you ever think that this thread would be taken serriously?

This is not about conspiracy and ludicrous claims - it is about Class analysis and class based instituions and intruments of power.

Freemasonry, Skull and Bones (Lodge 322), Trilateral Commsion, the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove etc., all exist and all play a role in American upper class civil society - this is beyond doubt.

The question is how much power do these groups yield, and what is known of them. They are secret not because they are alien beings who use mind control to rule the world, but becasue they are a level of instituion at a remove from transparent democracy.

Class analysis must be aware of all power bases, from the monarchy to industrialists, and it must be aware of their mechanisms. Such organisations are a clear manifestation of this, and that is why they have been banned at different times and places (such as the Soviet Union). Likewise the Jesuits have been banned throughout history for their meddling and subverting of more apparent and visible political power.

It wold be naive, for example, to ignor the fact that the French Revoultion 1789 was funded and orchestrated by Freemasons (as they are proud to admit), and used the proleteriat to remove the monarchy and leave themselves in power. The Freemasons in this case is just an organisation for Bourgeois power politics...and thats all these organisations ever are.

I couldnt give a shit if they pray to an Owl in the Bohemian Grove - symoblism tells us some things about these groups, but ultimately what is important is the power these groups wield and their agendas, and how far back their agendas go, and what are their motivating principles etc, etc, etc,.

Yes, I think that is a matter to be taken seriously.

 

[ska invita]

OK, I respect that - but is this a realistic goal? Subversion, possibly - you'd have to become a Mason yourself - but deconstruction?

[looking for masonic handshake smiley...]
point taken - a bad choice of words - you know what Im getting at though. Lets know our enemy, and expose covert power politics.

I am curious in this thread to hear from people (the majority according to the poll) who claim that they have investigated these organisations AND DO NOT find them to be a significant source of power in global politics - I find it hard to see how this conclusion has been reached by them: please share it with us!

 

[zArk]

I couldnt give a shit if they pray to an Owl in the Bohemian Grove - symoblism tells us some things about these groups, but ultimately what is important is the power these groups wield and their agendas, and how far back their agendas go, and what are their motivating principles etc, etc, etc,.

I am interested 'if' groups like Opus Dei would be infavour of inflicting pain upon the general population in order to help them become purer of mind and spirit.

eg. Is torture valid in their minds and philosophy or do they only accept torture/pain inflicted if the person is doing it to themselves?

 

[ska invita]

Intersting piece by Chomsky on the Trilateral Commision -

http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm

Is it ( the Trilateral Commision) a secret organisation? well it makes decisions of global power in secret, even though the organisation is kind of known about (never reported though).

This is what we are dealing with - undemocratic forums in which decisions are made, never published, never announced, and acted on in a covert manner.

 

[frogwoman]

i think opus dei, p2 and the other weird organisations created by the catholic church have quite a lot of power ... but i dont think they could influence something like foreign policy and they're not really influential upon the general population outside of catholic countries

the illuminati etc aren't really secret because everyone knows about them and there are dozens of conspiracy theories floating around, its practically a joke

yeah there are groups with power but not in the way people think ... they would be likely to be small groups of people or world leaders/people behind the scenes discussing things one on one and they wouldn't always exactly agree with each other either

i think conspiracy theories have become like a cult for some people ... this secret society crap is bullshit, its appealing and interesting to think about but at the end of the day if you think about it logically there is no way that some secret society magically possesses all the power ... people earn power through influence or through talent or through money or just plain greed and there are too many power struggles and conflicts of interests for one single group to be in control of everything

 

[Idris2002]

This thread is a wind-up, right?

Whatever the Jesuits are, they are not a secret society analogous to the Freemasons.

They were set up in the 16th century by the former soldier Ignatius Loyola, to act as the intellectual shock-troops of the counter-reformation.

Over the years they've acquired a reputation for casuistry, but they've also consistently attracted some of the best and brightest (male) minds of the catholic world.

I knew one of them, when I was an undergrad - he'd been a sergeant in the Irish army, then left after the Hungarian revolution. He was also one of the organisers of the anti-Vietnam protests at Kent state university in 1970, the one that was fired on by US government troops.

Is that the act of a conspirator? I suppose in the lunatic world of the conspiracy theorist it is.

As for the Bilderberg group, I reckon it's like the scene in the Godfather where they have the meeting of the commission and one of the other dons starts whining about how 'Don Corleone had all the congressmen in his pocket and he wouldn't share'. As Mark's Tortoise, the ruling class are a band of warring brothers.

Now I think of it, wasn't Salvador Allende a freemason of some sort? Didn't do him much good in the end, did it?

 

[david dissadent]

Not all secret societies are total guff. It is now a widely accepted fact of history that the Afrikaaner Broederbond was a secret society that broke South Africa from the british empire and imposed its extreme race laws on the country.

Several times in various nations histories secret societies have gained control of governments.

 

[ska invita]

This thread is a wind-up, right?

Whatever the Jesuits are, they are not a secret society analogous to the Freemasons.

Not sure if you've read all the posts on this thread but you have hugely mischaracterised what is being said:

The Jesuits were at the time a secret society, or more accurately a society that acted covertly - by their very oath they were duty bound to enter positions of power and subvert them for the greater good of the Pope and the Vatican. - The Jesuits were banned at different time in history (banned because they effectively uindermined traditinal forms of power, often monarchic, and generaly caused war and upheavel), and then continued to operate undergound.

The general point of this thread is what are the power structures that are undemocratic and untransparent that exist to influence global power struggles - what role do small "secret" groups have in this - secret because they meet in private and what is said is never published or open to the public.

Secret societies clearly play a crucial role in any class analysis of power.