Professor Quigley’s World
by
Elana Freeland
As
a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then,
as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a
professor I had named Carroll Quigley, who said America was the
greatest country in the history of the world because our people have
always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be
better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal, moral
responsibility to make it so. - William Jefferson Clinton, "A
New Covenant," Democratic Party acceptance speech, July 16, 1992
Preface
Perhaps
politics has always been reminiscent of old Punch and Judy shows,
with its theories and battles and trends bobbing around on the
curtained stage of history, while somewhere in back of the curtain
real people who wrote the script are manipulating the puppets and
props. With Punch and Judy, even the most naive of us know that they
are, after all, just puppets and do not just spring from the brow of
Zeus full-grown, like Athena. But with politics, the illusion is made
so real by historians like Toynbee or Spengler that great
historical Ideas like “the West” and “Being”
arose on the stage of history and just “happened.”
We,
however, are the inheritors of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic
pronouncement, The medium is the message, as well as fifty
years of sociology and psychology that have studied how the invisible
hands of the corporate media constantly manipulate our credibility,
our modern ersatz for truth. Even the military has gotten into
the act with its Psychological Operations or PSYOPS, as evidenced by
this quote from Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, put
out by U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM, the military entity
responsible for formulating U.S. nuclear policy): “The fact
that some elements [of the U.S. government] may appear to be
potentially ‘out of control’ can be beneficial to
creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an
adversary’s decision-makers...That the U.S. may become
irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should
be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries... It
hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed...”
Or this more blatant example reported by BBC:
American
intelligence specialists are reported to have “secretly”
sought advice on handling terrorist attacks from Hollywood
film-makers. According to the trade paper Variety, a
discussion group between movie and military representatives was held
at the University of Southern California last week. The group is said
to have been set up by the US Army to discuss future terrorist
activity in the wake of the attacks of 11 September.
Among
those reported to have been involved were Die Hard
screenwriter Steven E. De Souza and Joseph Zito, director of Delta
Force One and Missing in Action. Other, more conventional,
feature makers were also said to have been present, including Randal
Kleiser, who made Grease...2
With
credibility and not truth as the common denominator of news articles
and history texts, what and who can we believe? The student of
history is stuck not only with weighing evidentiary facts, but with a
vast, complex, whirling Dadaesque sea of talking heads and “experts”
who spin, censor, and dole out disinformation and half-truths by the
truckload. The art of persuasion has become psychological operations.
No longer is persuasion measured by logic and argumentation but by
who is speaking and what their agenda is. Perhaps it has
always been this way; perhaps it is only the sheer acceleration curve
of data that has finally sensitized us to the hypocrisy that goes by
the name of public opinion-making. But a book like Dr. Carroll
Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope is like a fresh and honest
wind blowing over the skeletal remains of the American dream. Dr.
Quigley takes off the make-nice credibility gloves and tells it like
it is – not all the names but at least the agenda. This offense
may have cost him his career at Georgetown, and it certainly
attracted a strange following of radical Right Bible- and
Constitution-thumpers. Whatever the price, Dr. Quigley offers a rare
look into Mnemosyne’s house of History.
Professor Quigley’s successors
Like
Samuel Phillips Huntington of Harvard’s Department of
Government who was recently featured in the Atlantic Monthly
(December 2001) – a good friend of both Zbigniew Brzezinski and
Henry Kissinger – Dr. Carroll Quigley (1911-77) was also a Cold
War political analyst who taught at Georgetown University’s
School of Foreign Service. Like Huntington, Brzezinski, and
Kissinger, Quigley too advised government, military, and industry.
Whereas two of Huntington’s undergraduate students, Francis
Fukuyama and Fareed Zakaria, went on to shape post-Cold War opinion –
Fukuyama in his “famous post-Cold War anthem The End of
History and the Last Man (1992)”3 and Zakaria as
managing editor of Foreign Affairs and editor of Newsweek
International4 – Quigley’s most famous
undergraduate student was probably William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd
President of the United States who praised his old professor not once
but innumerable times, the first of which was during the Democratic
Party acceptance speech quoted above. Why did Clinton’s praise
of Quigley strike pundits as odd? Because Quigley’s Tragedy
and Hope (1966) and The Anglo-American Establishment
(posthumously published from notes in 1978) had become bibles of
“patriot” conspiracy theorists, Catholic and otherwise5,
the boxed quote never far from their lips.
Tragedy
and Hope abounds with allusions to the existence of
behind-the-scenes power cliques, such as those who run
capitalism (“The Period of Stabilization, 1922-1930”):
In
addition to these pragmatic goals, the powers of financial capitalism
had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than 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. The apex of
the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle,
Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s
central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each
central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of
England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank,
Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the
Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to
control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence
the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence
cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the
business world. (324)
In
the same seminal Sixities, before becoming Director of the Trilateral
Commission (1973-76) and National Security Adviser for three
administrations and professor of American Foreign Policy at the
School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins
University, Washington, D.C., Zbigniew Brzezinski6 wrote
several Cold War books that were like extended versions of Foreign
Affairs or The Economist. Just before Watergate, Between
Two Ages: America’s Role in the Techtronic Age (New York:
Viking Press, 1971) came out in which he addresses with surprising
candor exactlyhow America should prepare for (read build) the future.
Just months before the Berlin Wall fell, The Grand Failure: The
Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Scribner, 1989) choreographed how the collapse of the USSR should
(read will) occur. While the naive marvel that men like Huntington
and Brzezinski are so prescient when it comes to world events,
but Quigley would not see them as prescient.
Finally,
in 1997 – just before NATO intercepted the “guerrilla
conflict [1996-99] between Albanian separatists and the Serbian and
Yugoslav security forces, which Albanians characterised as a national
liberation struggle and Serbs saw as terrorism” (wikipedia)
– Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy
and Its Geostrategic Imperatives arrived for the Americans who
still read, chock-full of reconfigured maps of “the Eurasian
chessboard,” carved up like a side of beef7. One map
of Atlantic European states (including Turkey) taunts, “Is This
Really ‘Europe’?” Brzezinski even proffers a
“speculative but cautiously realistic timetable” for
bringing Ukraine into the EU and NATO (~ 2005-2010) as a “Central
European country” in order to complete the
Poland-Germany-France bulwark between Europe and Eurasia (“Beyond
2010: The Critical Core of Europe’s Security”).
A few pages later, Brzezinski lumps
together the “-istan” countries (Afghanistan yes,
Pakistan no), renaming them “The Eurasian Balkans” –
needless to say, slated to be Muslim. Flip a few pages into the
future and there is a map showing how the crucial
Caspian-Mediterranean Oil Export Pipeline will cut right through
western Afghanistan on its way south from Turkmenistan, through
Pakistan and to the Arabian Sea. Finally, in the last chapter “The
Far Eastern Anchor” is a map that dashes Pakistani, Southeast
Asian, and Indonesian dreams of an American-style democracy. Entitled
“Potential Scope of China’s Sphere of Influence and
Collision Points,” it lays out the new boundaries of “Greater
China as a Global Power.”
Brzezinski’s books are neither
wish lists nor brown studies but the up-front moves of the biggest
game going, just as Quigley said.
Professor Quigley’s historical imperative
Before
publishing how an elite network was heading toward checkmate on the
global chessboard, Dr. Quigley had already espoused the historical
imperative that accompanies the rise and fall of civilizations in
The Evolution of Civilization: An Introduction to Historical
Analysis (New
York: The Macmillan Company/ London: Collier-Macmillan, 1961;
Indianapolis Liberty Press, 1979).
Imagine
a 3-fold life cycle of civilization endlessly circling back upon
itself: an Age of Expansion followed by an Age of Conflict (class
struggles), after which increasingly violent imperialist wars erupt,
with “growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions, and
other-worldliness”8; followed by an Age of the
Universal Empire that expands too far, with the peripheral ending up
as another Age of Expansion, etc.
According to Quigley, Western Civilization has passed through eight periods in its 1,500 years of existence:
|
1. Mixture, 350-700 CE
2. Gestation, 700-900
3A. First Expansion, 970-1270
4A. First Conflict, 1270-1440
Core Empire: England, 1420
3B. Second Expansion, 1440-1690
4B. Second Conflict, 1690-1815
Core Empire: France, 1810
3C. Third Expansion, 1770-1929
4C. Third Conflict, 1893-
Core Empire: Germany, 1942
3D. Fourth Expansion, 1944-
|
Finally, “possibilities for the future.” (Remember: Quigley was
writing in 1966.)
|
??
??
|
4D. [Fourth Conflict – 1953-]
5. [Universal Empire: the United States]
|
and/or
|
|
6. Decay
7. Invasion [end of the civilization]9
|
How
has Quigley’s theory impacted neocon zionists who espouse an
apocalyptic “clash of civilizations” or Hegelian
(Fukuyama) end-of-history scenario? The hindsight (and maps)
discussed above is being mirrored in the recent new imperialism and
pax Americana 10 presently unfolding in the
Balkans, Middle East, and Northern Africa. It is not luck or
prescient writers to comprehend which road “History” is
being dragged down. After acknowledging historian Matthew Melko
(in-box quote) and touting Quigley’s historical model as
“the most useful periodization of the evolution of historical
civilizations,” Samuel Huntington states:
...The
West is developing...its equivalent of a universal empire in the form
of a complex system of confederations, federations, regimes, and
other types of cooperative institutions that embody at the
civilizational level its commit-ment to democratic and pluralistic
politics. The West has, in short, become a mature society entering
into what future generations, in the recurring pattern of
civilizations, will look back to as a "golden age," a
period of peace resulting, in Quigley's terms, from "the absence
of any competing units within the area of the civilization itself,
and from the remoteness or even absence of struggles with other
societies outside." It is also a period of prosperity which
arises from "the ending of internal belligerent destruction, the
reduction of internal trade barriers, the establishment of a common
system of weights, measures, and coinage, and from the extensive
system of government spending associated with the establishment of a
universal empire."11
“Golden
age”? “Period of prosperity”? Has he looked at the
United States today? But then we read further:
In previous civilizations this
phase of blissful golden age with its visions of immortality has
ended either dramatically and quickly with the victory of an external
society or slowly and equally painfully by internal disintegration.
What happens within a civilization is as crucial to its ability to
resist destruction from external sources as it is to holding off
decay from within. Civilizations grow, Quigley argued in 1961,
because they have an "instrument of expansion" that is, a
military, religious, political, or economic organization that
accumulates surplus and invests it in productive innovations.
Civilizations decline when they stop the "application of surplus
to new ways of doing things. “In modern terms we say that the
rate of investment decreases." This happens because the social
groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for
"nonproductive but ego-satisfying purposes...which distribute
the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective
methods of production." People live off their capital and the
civilization moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage
of decay. This is a period of acute economic depression, declining
standards of living, civil wars between the various vested interests,
and growing illiteracy. The society grows weaker and weaker. Vain
efforts are made to stop the wastage by legislation. But the decline
continues. The religious, intellectual, social, and political levels
of the society begin to lose the allegiance of the masses of the
people on a large scale. New religious movements begin to sweep over
the society. There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society
or even to support it by paying taxes.
Decay
then leads to the stage of invasion "when the civilization, no
longer able to defend itself because it is no longer willing
to defend itself, lies wide open to 'barbarian invaders,' "
who often come from "another, younger, more powerful
civilization."12
Huntington
invokes Quigley’s ghost in order to warn someone,
perhaps an “instrument of expansion” that is tending to
rest on a 1990s American “golden age” laurels about how
readily Decay (step 6) follows Universal Empire (step 5) –
“acute economic depression, declining standards of living,
civil wars between the various vested interests, and growing
illiteracy.”
But
what guarantees that Pax Americana, the child of Pax
Britannica, will not last even a few hundred years, much less a
thousand? For both Quigley and Huntington, the cause lies not with
technology or historical imperative but with the “instrument of
expansion,” the “military, religious, political, or
economic organization,” the “social groups controlling
the surplus” who have become self-indulgent and use surplus not
for continued innovation and production but for "nonproductive
but ego-satisfying purposes.” Huntington shakes his finger at
them: “The overriding lesson of the history of civilizations,
however, is that many things are probable but nothing is inevitable.”
Historical imperatives do not cycle along mechanically like Newtonian
clocks set in motion by an absent God. Good decisions by those who
control surplus are needed. Surplus must be controlled by someone
– bankers, Round Table Groups13, Trilateralists,
Council of Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers, World Bank, IMF --
elitists whose names read like fiction, thanks to marginalizing and
discrediting those who have tried to bring the issue of ownership to
public attention. These are the someones who make the
decisions that determine “historical cycles.” Huntington
is not as forthcoming as Quigley, having learned from Quigley’s
turn of fortune that the devil is following the money trail, too.
Five
years after The Clash of Civilizations was published and three
months after the Trade Towers bombing, Huntington was invoking
Quigley’s ghost again in the Atlantic Monthly, though
this time without naming him. Apparently, someone had deemed that it
was time to move Hegelian Necessity on from Decay to Invasion. Robert
D. Kaplan extrapolates:
The subject that Huntington has
more recently put on the map is the “clash of civilizations”
that is occurring as Western, Islamic, and Asian systems of thought
and governments collide. His argument is more subtle than it is
usually given credit for, but some of the main points can be
summarized.
The fact that the world is
modernizing does not mean that it is Westernizing. The impact of
urbanization and mass communications, coupled with poverty and ethnic
divisions, will not lead to peoples everywhere thinking as we do.
* Asia, despite its ups and downs,
is expanding militarily and economically. Islam is exploding
demographically. The West may be declining in relative influence.
* Culture-consciousness is getting
stronger, not weaker, and states or peoples may band together because
of cultural similarities rather than because of ideological ones, as
in the past.
*
The Western belief that parliamentary democracy and free markets are
suitable for everyone will bring the West into conflict with
civilizations - notably, Islam and the Chinese that think
differently.
*
In a multi-polar world based loosely on civilizations rather than on
ideo-logies, Americans must reaffirm their Western identity.14
What
is “Western identity”? For Huntington, it has primarily
to do with a structuralism not unlike Fukuyama’s “liberal
democracy” (“parliamentary democracy and free
markets”15). For Quigley, it was embedded in and
nourished by both material and nonmaterial culture.
First, a deep, five centuries-old nonmaterial “nexus of ideas”:
|
*Christianity
*Scientific outlook
*Humanitarianism
*The idea of the unique value and rights of the individual
|
From these ideas arose a highly developed technological material culture:
|
|
*Ability to kill: development of weapons
*Ability to preserve life: development of sanitation and medical services
*Ability to produce both food and industrial goods
*Improvements in transportation and communication16
|
Western identity arises
from the delicate balance between nonmaterial and material culture,
which is why the tumultuous 20th century has been so
turbulent. Quigley calls this burdensome, high-stakes era of endless
war and economic plunder the“Age of Irrational Activism.”
It began in the 19th century:
The third generation of the
nineteenth century (1850-1895) was in an age of science and
rationalism whose typical figures were Darwin and Bismarck. While
emphasizing the empirical and rational aspects of science, it tried
to apply these to biology and to history in terms of a scientific
materialism that could explain biology and change as Newton’s
science had explained mechanics. By the end of the century, man was
frustrated and disillusioned with scientific method and materialism
and with emphasis on the nonhuman world and was turning once again to
the problems of man and society with a conviction that these problems
could be handled only by nonrational methods and by the clash of
contending forces, since the problems themselves were too complex,
too dynamic, too irrational to be settled by science or even by human
thought.
The result was a new period, the
Age of Irrational Activism. It began with men like Henri Bergson and
Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the nonrational nature of the universe
and of man, quickly shifted Darwin’s doctrines of struggle and
survival from nonhuman nature to human society, and rejected
rationalism as slow, superficial, and an inhibition on both action
and survival...This period felt that man, and nature, and human
society were all basically irrational...To the theorist of these
views, the thinker would always be divided, hesitant, and weak, while
the man of action would be unified, decisive, and strong.
This
point of view, nourished on Marx and Heinrich von Treitschke,
justified class conflicts and national warfare, and formed the
background for the cult of violence that was reflected in the
political assassinations of 1898-1914 and the imperialist aggressions
that began with Japan, Italy, and Britain in China, Ethiopia, and
South Africa in 1894 -1899. The explicit justification of this view
could be found in Georges Sorel Reflexions sur la Violence
(1908) or in the political events of the summer of 1914. From that
fateful summer, for more than forty years, higher levels of violence
became the solution of all problems, whether it was the question
of winning a war, Stalin’s efforts to industrialize Russia,
Hitler’s efforts to settle the “Jewish problem,”
Rupert Brooke’s effort to find meaning in life, Japan’s
desire to find a solution to economic depression, the
English-speaking nations’ search for security, Italy’s
search for glory, or Franco’s desire to preserve the status
quo in Spain. The culmination of the process in total
irrationalism and total violence was Nazism, “The Revolution of
Nihilism.” (1223-25) (Italics mine.)
Enter the Bush types
The Age of Irrational Activism – the
“disjointed malaise of the century” – continued for
twenty years beyond Hiroshima and well into the Cold War. Quigley
insists that by the late Sixties it had gradually been supplanted by
“the victory of rational analysis, operational research, and
organized scientific attitudes over irrationality, will, intuition,
and violence” (1226). The “Outlook of the West,”
the broad middle way of both-and instead of either-or, was making a
comeback. Its hoped-for return, however, would continue to experience
stormy weather, Quigley warned, due to a deep political shift taking
place in American politics. In the wake of a disintegrating middle
class and weakening Eastern Establishment was Godzilla – the
advent of a “virile and uninformed” new wealthy class:
...This new wealth [arising from
Southwest and Far West families], based on petroleum, natural gas,
ruthless exploitation of national resources, the aviation industry,
military bases in the South and West, and finally on space with all
its attendant activities, has centered in Texas and southern
California. Its existence, for the first time, made it possible for
the petty-bourgeois outlook to make itself felt in the political
nomination process instead of ain the unrewarding effort to influence
politics by voting for a Republication candidate nominated under
Eastern Establishment influence.
In
these terms the political struggle in the United States has shifted
in two ways, or even three. This struggle, in the minds of the ill
informed, had always been viewed as a struggle between Republicans
and Democrats at the ballot box in November. Wall Street, long ago,
however, had seen that the real struggle was in the nominating
conventions the preceding summer... [T]he new wealth appeared in the
political picture, sharing the petty bourgeoisie’s suspicions
of the East, big cities, Ivy League universities, foreigners,
intellectuals, workers, and aristocrats. By the 1964 election, the
major political issue in the country was the financial struggle
behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized and cultured in
foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed, arising from
the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations in the
Southwest and West.
At
issue here was the whole future face of America, for the older wealth
stood for values and aims close to the Western traditions of
diversity, tolerance, human rights and values, freedom, and the rest
of it, while the newer wealth stood for the narrow and fear-racked
aims of petty-bourgeois insecurity and egocentricity. The nominal
issues between them, such as that between internationalism and
unilateral isolationism (which its supporters preferred to rename
“nationalism”), were less fundamental than they seemed,
for the real issue was the control of the Federal government’s
tremendous power to influence the future of America by spending and
government funds. The petty bourgeois and new-wealth groups wanted to
continue that spending into the industrial-military complex, such as
defense and space, while the older wealth and non-bourgeois groups
wanted to direct it toward social diversity and social amelioration
for the aged and the young, for education, for social outcasts, and
for protecting national resources for future use. (1246) (Italics
mine.)
Buffeted by
the waning Age of Irrational Activism and political struggle over the
changing of the guard from old to new money, Western tradition was
also being shaken by a new type of warfare called the Cold War.
Quigley blames then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles [Eastern
Establishment] for almost single-handedly dividing the world into two
blocs (the USSR and United States) by means of a “paper
barrier” [NATO in Europe (1949), CENTRO in the Near and Middle
East (1955), and SEATO in the Far East (1954)]. Dulles’ policy
set in motion:
…the
almost total collapse of the system of international law that had
been formulated in the seventeenth century by the work of writers
like Grotius. That system of international law had regarded the state
as the embodiment of sovereignty, an organization of political power
on a territorial basis. The criteria for the existence of such a
sovereign state had been its ability to defend its boundaries against
external aggression and to maintain law and public order among its
inhabitants inside those boundaries. By 1964, as a consequence of the
power stalemate of the Cold War, dozens of “states” (such
as the Congo) which could perform neither of these actions were
recognized as states by the Superpowers [the USSR and United States]
and their allies, and achieved this recognition in international law
by being admitted to the United Nations. This development
culminated over fifty years of destruction of the old established
distinctions of international law such as the distinctions between
war and peace (destroyed by the Cold War, which was neither), between
belligerents and neutrals (destroyed by British economic warfare in
World War I), or between civilians and combatants (destroyed by
submarine warfare and city bombing). Nuclear stalemate in the
Cold War context made it possible for political organizations with
almost none of the traditional characteristics of a state not only to
be recognized as states but to act in irresponsible ways and to
survive on economic subsidies won from one bloc by threatening to
join (or merely to accept subsidies from) the other bloc.
As
a consequence of this situation, all the realities of international
affairs by 1964 had become covered with thick layers of law,
theories, practices, and agreements that had no relationship to
reality at all... (1092) (Italics mine.)
The
disappearance of a clear distinction between war and peace has
undermined the delicate balance of Western tradition. If we look back
at Quigley’s material and nonmaterial foundations of Western
tradition above, the only two that seem to be still thriving are
scientific outlook and the ability to kill (weaponry). Poor pickings,
indeed. The fact is that weapons production drives economics.
Citizens appease a constant state of anxiety by consuming and working
to provide the endless millions of dollars or pounds or francs or
marks or yen that hawks say they need in order to constantly prepare
for “limited” warfare. As Quigley sets out emphatically
and clearly:
When weapons are of the “amateur”
type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they
are widely possessed by citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and
no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such
an “amateur weapons system” (if other conditions are not
totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a
relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a
period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a
few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a
situation where the minority who control such “specialist”
weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society,
sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the
inequality in control of weapons will be established.
At
the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the
specialist weapons of today will continue to dominate the military
picture into the foreseeable future. If so, there is little reason to
doubt that authoritarian rather than democratic political regimes
will dominate the world into the same foreseeable future. To be sure,
traditions and other factors may keep democratic systems, or at least
democratic forms, in many areas, such as the United States or
England. To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this
may seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in
this situation may well be considered... (1200-01)
Was
Quigley a globalist or “internationalist”? Whereas
conservatives attribute the modern ambiguity of war to two
Congressional Acts – the Trading with the Enemy Act of October
6, 1917 and the Farm Bill Act of March 9, 1933, neither of which has
been repealed17 – Quigley views the abuse of
constitutional powers as more of a mechanism or means than a cause.
For him, bisecting the world into two international camps was the
coup de grace that conditioned a generation of geopolitical
decision-makers to view individual nations – even their own –
as mere means to international ends, and conditioned the rest of us
to view our nations and communities through bifocals. He refers to
nationalism as an “attribute of the nineteenth century”
that has been so modified in the twentieth century “that it
might appear, at first glance, as if [the twentieth century] were
nothing more than the opposite of the former” (27). Quigley saw
it as inevitable that nation states would give way to alliances and
affiliations that superseded national boundaries and government
edicts. However, he would take exception to means or methods that
undermined time-honored Western traditions, no matter what ends were
served.
Conclusion
And
so what do we make of these unique islands of Professor Quigley’s
world?
His
influence as to how to view history has extended beyond his death to
a Democratic President and a globalist in the pages of today’s
Atlantic Monthly. His assumption that the historical
imperative of Expansion - Conflict - Empire - Decay - Invasion work
in tandem with the human intervention of elite factions is more
believable than the invisible Platonic Ideas of Spengler or Hegel.
Still, if what Quigley says is true, why do these powerful “social
groups” who control surplus insist on working incognito, even
to the extent of directing the public media? What reprisals do they
fear from the unwashed masses conditioned to believe that their
popular vote makes a difference? Their secrecy, if indeed it is as
Professor Quigley says, breeds suspicion and works counter to the
liberal society that Western tradition once espoused.
In fact,
secrecy is may be the greatest problem facing Western tradition –
greater by far than the oligarchies that always dog the trail of
democracies, doing what they can to keep the people asleep. The
Nuclear Age and Cold War may have justified passing the National
Security Act of 1947 – which, by the way, Professor Quigley
does not mention once in 1,300 pages – but the Cold War is over
and yet secrecy continues to abet the frightening consolidation of
power among defense corporations and intelligence- and
defense-related agencies (NSA, CIA, NRO, Echelon, etc.). In short,
the cure may be worse than the disease.
Perhaps
this is the modern form of “Invasion” Quigley was
alluding to – not enemies from without but enemies from within.
The Cold War, McCarthyism, the war on drugs, terror, all strange wars
buried up to their necks in “national security.” Is this
how invasions can be made to occur seamlessly – when secrecy
obscures all the boundaries?
Quigley’s
insight into the political struggle in America between old and new
money is on the mark, as is his judgment that new money, being
“virile and uninformed,” is not all that loyal to
traditional Western values. Nor do I praise old money and
“anglophile” values as Professor Quigley did; they did
turn on him in the end, didn’t they?
In
1996 – thirty years after McMillan let Tragedy and Hope
go out of print and destroyed half the plates – John F.
Kennedy, Jr. boldly published an article in his magazine George
entitled, “The Quigley Cult” by Scott McLemee. The
banner read, “What do President Bill Clinton and the militias
have in common? They both revere the weird theories of the late
Carroll Quigley.” George, whose tagliine was “Not
Just Politics As Usual,” was the first mainstream magazine to
put Quigley’s name front and center since he had been
marginalized. McLemee was working on a biography of Quigley, but
subsequently decided to abandon it for reasons he wouldn’t
say18. Then, a little while later, John John was no more.
Then, George folded. Case closed one more time.
Rallying
left, right or center, Democrat or Republican around Professor
Quigley’s flagpole does not seem to be in the forecast for the
near future. That’s the way it goes with Professor Quigley, one
mystery after another.
