The Largest Empire In the History of the World

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Printed in The American Almanac, August 25, 1997.


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"Before she set out on her Diamond Jubilee procession, on the morning of 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria of England went to the telegraph-room at Buckingham Palace.... It was a few minutes after eleven o'clock. She pressed an electric button, an impulse was transmitted to the Central Telegraph Office in St. Martin's le Grand; in a matter of seconds, her Jubilee message was on its way to every corner of her Empire. It was the largest Empire in the history of the world, comprising nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth, and a quarter of its population. Victoria herself was a Queen-Empress of such aged majesty that some of her simpler subjects considered her divine, and slaughtered propitiatory goats before her image.''
--James Morris, in Pax Britannica (London: The Folio Society: 1992)
In the minds of the political, industrial, and intellectual elites of the overwhelming majority of nations of the world today, there exists a deadly dangerous myth: that the British Empire has disappeared from the face of the Earth; and that Great Britain, the United Kingdom, is of little consequence in world affairs.

According to this fairy tale, Britain's royal family is a powerless relic of days gone by, collecting its modest pension, fulfilling its ceremonial obligations, and, perhaps, drawing in a few tourist dollars, to justify its upkeep. In the extreme version of this Big Lie, today's Britain is cast in the role of a benign force in world affairs, a ``friend of the downtrodden,'' and ``diligent defender of human rights.''

Even the recent, shameless public displays of marital infidelities by Queen Elizabeth II's ``Baby Boomer'' offspring, and the voluminous ``soap opera'' news coverage that they have generated, have only added to this mis-evaluation. (When dealing with hereditary monarchies, decadence can never be reliably used as an indicator of decline. Rather, it must be understood as a way of life. See, for example, 18th Century British intelligence figure Jeremy Bentham's ``In Defense of Pederasty,'' the companion piece to his more widely known ``In Defense of Usury.'' These two documents convey an efficient definition of the monarchical-oligarchical outlook.)

In the minds of many leading world figures, including in Russia, the ``enemy image'' of the British Empire of old, has been replaced by that of a modern ``imperial power,'' the United States of America.

The authorship of both of these complementary hoaxes--the demise of the British Empire, and its replacement by the U.S.A. as the new ``Great Satan''--is traceable to Britain's own vast propaganda and intelligence apparatus, associated with such institutions as British Broadcasting Corp., Reuters News Service, the Hollinger Corp., the Tavistock Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Oxford and Cambridge universities, the British Commonwealth, and His Royal Highness Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund. With the recent enthusiastic revival of the century-old Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, French intelligence agents and propagandists have joined in the America-trashing campaign, especially inside Russia.

From Khartoum, to Moscow, to Buenos Aires, among policymakers and culture-shapers, this British-orchestrated game of historical revisionism has taken deep root. Its disorienting effect has opened the door to possibly grave and irreversible policy blunders.

Hence, this EIR strategic study.


Strategic Importance of Debunking the Myth

If the human race is to survive the coming global financial and monetary blowout, without going through a protracted New Dark Age, in which billions needlessly die, it will be necessary for the United States, Russia, and China--as the three great world powers today--to revive the World War II alliance against the British Empire, which was the cornerstone of the late U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's post-colonial strategic vision.

The first order of business of such a revived ``FDR Coalition,'' is to dump the International Monetary Fund (IMF) system and organize a new set of global financial and monetary agreements, based on sound principles of national banking and scientific and technological progress. These principles formed the basis for the U.S. Constitution and what came to be known, during the nineteenth century, as the American System of Political Economy.

Although neither Russia nor China ever achieved the full status of nation-statehood, there are powerful forces inside both countries today, that aspire to such a circumstance. They are potential natural allies of the United States in an anti-world government, anti-British Empire, anti-IMF concert.

To achieve that goal, the circumstances of the collapse of that Roosevelt policy must be grasped.

With the untimely death of FDR on April 12, 1945, a great moment found a little man, FDR's successor and Winston Churchill's willing dupe, Harry S Truman. Truman succumbed to Sir Winston's vision of a postwar Anglo-American strategic partnership--the proverbial ``British brains,'' joined with ``American brawn.'' He approved the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the Japanese emperor had sent clear signals (via the Vatican and certain reliable U.S. Office of Strategic Services personnel) that Japan was prepared to surrender, and even though American military strategists were aware that Japan had already been effectively defeated, largely through the effects of a successful U.S. naval embargo.

With Churchill's 1947 ``Iron Curtain'' speech in Fulton, Missouri, the last prospects of Russian-American and Sino-American cooperation were scotched, and the Cold War was on.

Under Cold War conditions, and, as the result of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Lord Bertrand Russell's scheme for using thermonuclear terror (``mutually assured destruction,'' or MAD) as a battering ram against the nation-state, and as a weapon for forging a one-world government, under United Nations rubric, proceeded apace.

At only one point during the Cold War era, during the John F. Kennedy Presidency, was there a glimmer of hope of the United States breaking from the Russellite paradigm. Twenty years before Ronald Reagan, President Kennedy invoked the idea of ``peace through strength'' and strategic defense, launched the Apollo program to put a man on the Moon, and revived facets of the American System of Political Economy, through investment tax credits, and the printing of U.S. Treasury bills, the first step in a move that, had he lived, would have likely led to a severe curtailment of the independent power of the Federal Reserve System. Kennedy paid with his life for this break with Britain and with the Russellite one-world empire. Lord Russell and British intelligence figure Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper, in 1964, launched the ``British Who Killed Kennedy Committee,'' the first ``critique'' of the Warren Commission report, to ensure that London's hand in the JFK murder and coverup was never exposed.

With a very few exceptions, the United States, and the world, have been in an accelerated economic and cultural decline ever since the Kennedy assassination.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, bringing to an end the Cold War, defined a moment of great opportunity. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and her obedient lap-dog, U.S. President George Bush, instead accelerated the drive to implement Lord Russell's ``world government,'' calling it ``the new world order.'' They set about imposing, upon the states of the former Warsaw Pact, IMF conditionalities, as harsh as those which spread genocide in Africa, Asia, and Ibero-America over the previous 15 years. With the 1991 ``coalition'' war against Iraq, the precedent was set for the final implementation of the new empire.

These plans were disrupted, however, with the 1992 election of William Jefferson Clinton as President of the United States. President Clinton, with some institutional backing, has broken the Anglo-American ``special relationship,'' and gotten into what Lyndon LaRouche has described as ``a war and a half'' with the British....

The first step is to bust up the prevailing mythology that the British Empire is a thing of the past.


Alive and prospering

The British Empire is very much alive and well today. Behind closed doors at such locations as Chatham House, the London headquarters of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), blueprints for the consolidation of one-world empire, drawing upon the resources of the British Commonwealth and the United Nations Organization (UNO), have already been drawn up, and construction is under way.

The fact that the most powerful nations on Earth (not including the British Empire, which is not a nation)--the United States; a temporarily impaired, but thermonuclear-armed Russia; and China--have, so far, stood impotent in the face of IMF diktats, and made no effort to prevent the formation of the World Trade Organization, the ``third leg'' of the United Nations world financial dictatorship, illustrates the extent to which supranational world government is already a reality.

The United Kingdom itself has very little to do with the new British Empire. England, Scotland, Wales, and, especially, Northern Ireland, are today little more than slave plantations and social engineering laboratories, serving the needs of a collection of families, numbering no more than 3,000-5,000 people, who live and work in and around the City of London, a one-mile-square financial and corporate district, which represents the greatest concentration of financial power ever assembled in one location.

These families constitute a financier oligarchy; they are the power behind the Windsor throne. They view themselves as the heirs to the Venetian oligarchy, which infiltrated and subverted England from the period 1509-1715, and established a new, more virulent, Anglo-Dutch-Swiss strain of the oligarchic system of imperial Babylon, Persia, Rome, and Byzantium.

Among their own ranks, these financier oligarchs refer to themselves as the Club of the Isles, after the original ``Prince of the Isles,'' Edward Albert (King Edward VII), the son of Queen Victoria, who orchestrated the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I, to consolidate Britain as the primus inter pares (first among equals) of the European monarchies and feudal families. The Club of the Isles, under the direction of the British monarchy, draws in resources and personalities from the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Italy, and orchestrates the actions of a caste of terminally Anglophilic Americans, typified by Henry Kissinger and former President George Bush.

To begin to understand the breadth and scope of the British Empire today, it is necessary to look first at the British Commonwealth, as the Club of the Isles is itself looking at it.

In 1995, the RIIA published Discussion Paper 60, by Katharine West, titled ``Economic Opportunities for Britain and the Commonwealth.'' West, an Australian professor and business consultant on retainer with Chatham House, made a compelling case, that the 52 nations that comprise the British Commonwealth have the potential to dominate every regional economic bloc in the world, from the Group of 77, to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), to the Organization of African Unity (OAU), to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and, even the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Commonwealth, which includes one of every three nations on this planet, comprises the largest single voting bloc in the UN General Assembly, making the Warsaw Pact at the height of Soviet Russian power, pale by comparison (see Figure 1).

The City of London dominates the world's speculative markets (see (Table 1). A tightly interlocking group of corporations, involved in raw materials extraction, finance, insurance, transportation, and food production, controls the lion's share of the world market, and exerts virtual ``choke point'' control over world industry.

In a recent column in the Club of the Isles' flagship publication, the London Times, Washington, D.C. Sunday Times bureau chief James Adams candidly admitted that the banking houses in the City of London are now laundering $400 billion per annum in illegal narcotics profits. The British Commonwealth subsumes many of the world's most notorious flight-capital and hot-money havens. The Mont Pelerin Society, the radical-free market secret organization founded in 1947 by Friedrich von Hayek, and patronized today by Prince Philip, maintains the most accurate accounting ledgers on the world's underground economy. How is that possible? Because the Club of the Isles, since the era of the Opium Wars against China, and the escapades of Lord Palmerston's personal agent Giuseppe Mazzini in the last century, has been the leading sponsor and controller of global organized crime.

The importance of Club of the Isles control over organized crime cannot be understated. Lord William Rees-Mogg, a life peer in the House of Lords, a former editor-in-chief of the London Times, and British intelligence's current chief case officer for the propaganda war against U.S. President Clinton, has written recently that the world is moving into a post-industrial ``Third Wave'' paradigm, which will see the erosion of nation-states, and their replacement by a form of one-world ``electronic feudalism.'' In Rees-Mogg's Brave New World, only 5% of the population, the ``cognitive elite'' or what he calls the ``Brain Lords,'' will prosper and enjoy the fruits of modern technology. The vast majority of peoples of the world are doomed to a life of misery.

To prevent social unrest under these brutal conditions, the British financier oligarchy has gone to great lengths, since the Kennedy assassination, to foster a drug-rock-sex counterculture, that creates, in the words of Aldous Huxley, as ``a concentration camp of the mind.'' From the ranks of that counterculture, Prince Philip, his World Wildlife Fund, and its ``1,001 Club'' adjunct, have recruited a radical environmentalist movement, a neo-pagan gang like the Hitler Youth of the 1920s.

To achieve world empire, as Prince Philip has admitted, 80% of the world population must be eliminated within two generations. Over 4 billion people are to die to realize the Windsor/Club of the Isles New Dark Age!

Treat this report as a combat manual for a war against the British Empire. The survival of all nations, and billions of human beings, depends on victory over this new empire, and that victory begins with knowledge of the nature of the enemy.


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The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac.


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