Bartholomew's Notes

Daniel Estulin, whom I blogged in my previous post, has now given his press conference at the European Parliament, at the invitation of UKIP and its far-right European allies; WorldNetDaily has the details:

“The idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what they themselves call the aristocracy of purpose between European and North American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other words, the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity, obviously from their vantage point, for our own good and in our benefit – the great unwashed as they call us,” he said.

Sometimes, he said, this comes through the destruction of economies.

“They are destroying the world economy on purpose,” he explained. “This isn’t the first time either. This was done in the 14th century New Dark Age: 30 percent of the population wiped out.”

This, of course, is a reference to the Black Death, which was spread by fleas on rats – it was not done “on purpose”, although at the time Jews were widely blamed and massacred. What group does Estulin see behind the Black Death? He doesn’t say, but if he doesn’t mean Jews then why doesn’t he make that clear, since that’s the first thing anyone would think he’s hinting at? [UPDATE: In the interview posted below from Russia Today, he explains that the Bilderbergers descend from the “Venetian Black Nobility”; this appears to be an original crank notion of his own.]

According to the EU website, Estulin’s presentation was given as a press conference in “PHS building, Room 0A50”, although WND and Estulin try to give the impression that he was addressing the entire European Parliament (“He compared his address there to an invitation to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, a rare honor for anyone outside the ranks of the government”). The website also makes clear that Nigel Farage was himself involved in Estulin’s invitation (he doesn’t feature in the poster advertising the event), although the Independent‘s Diary column suggests UKIP is now trying to minimise its involvement:

The blog Liberal Conspiracy joined the dots: secretive international groups, fascists, UKIP… Can the famously reasonable Farage really be consorting with these cranks? Well, yeah but no but. A call to Ukip spokesman Gawain Towler confirms Farage is still in bed with broken ribs following that plane crash, while [Godfrey] Bloom was at a meeting in London when the conference took place. “The hosting was a question of good manners to a group member… to ensure good relations internally in the EFD [Europe of Freedom and Democracy] group.” So Lega Nord are in the same European grouping as UKIP? “There are interesting coves in every group,” Towler says, “as the Tories know.”

(Ahem – actually, I joined most of the dots, as Sunny’s Liberal Conspiracy piece makes clear)

“PHS building, Room 0A50” is named after Anna Politkovskaya. Is it not particularly disgusting that a space named after a journalist who gave her life exposing corruption in Russia should be used to promote a man whose conspiracy-mongering is a parody of investigative journalism?

Conspiracy theorists do sometimes “de-anti-Semitize” old theories that were originally anti-Jewish; the same sources are used, but instead of exposing Jewish machinations they are used as evidence of supposed secret societies – Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order did this with writers such as Nesta Webster, while the authors of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail saw the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence of the “Priory of Sion”. The 1995 Christian Century essay “New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism” by Ephraim Radner overviews the phenomenon.

UPDATE: Estulin has been interviewed on Russia Today. He panders to the paranoid end of Russian nationalism, declaring that the Bilderbergers are responsible for attacking the Russian economy, and he boasts that his talk has resulted in Italian media making “hundreds” of calls to Lega Norda for more information.

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