Carroll Quigley

Who is he: Although Carroll Quigley was a top American historian and theorist on the change and evolution of civilizations – and known for research on secret societies – Quigley is best remembered for his 1,348 page book, Tragedy and Hope. It basically took Quigley 20 years to write this  tome, which includes a history of the Anglo-American establishment.

The John Birch Society and other supposed rightwing conspiracy theorists seized on this book of scholarly history as proof that a hidden, highly centralized, top-down secret society ran a global network of conspirators, which caused and directed every war, political movement, election and financial crisis in the Western world. This simplistic view of a far more hidden agenda of what we today describe as the Anglo-American Axis appealed to conservatives seeking easy answers to what had happened to the original patriot vision of the American republic.

Few adherents to this view, which was promoted by conservative leaders like Cleon Skousen or Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, authors of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, had ever worked at major banking institutions and high finance. Neither had they moved at the top levels of international business or the American and European political establishment, so these rather simplistic conspiracy theories were successfully promoted in conservative circles during the 1970s. We know that all large structured organizations and businesses develop centers of influence and competing factions, which make their views of zombies and cult-like behavior simply impossible.

Background: Carroll Quigley was born on November 9, 1910 in Boston. Quigley attended Harvard University and earned undergraduate, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in history. Quigley taught first at Princeton University, followed by Harvard and finally at Georgetown University at the School of Foreign Service from 1941 to 1976.

Quigley's simple and correct assertion in the very long book was that secret societies in the past until today had played a hidden but major role in world history. This was unusual at the time, before the Internet Reformation and the enlightened information age, because an elite conspiracy did in fact control the political leadership, media and financial resources of the West – but this fact was never reported in the establishment media or mentioned by well-known historians for obvious reasons.

Quigley, on the other hand, working inside the conspiracy, thought it was a good idea for the wealthiest, best and the brightest to make most of the decisions, as the common people could not be trusted to govern correctly. Quigley wanted more of the world to be aware of the leadership, which had the world's best interests at heart – even if we were too undereducated to know what was best for us.

Carroll Quigley considered himself a fierce conservative defender of the best liberal traditions of the West. In addition, Quigley was a fierce critic of the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex in general. In his study of secret society influence, Quigley reported that much of the control and manipulation began with Cecil Rhodes and his Round Table groups and that this continued through the CFR and other organizations today. Bill Clinton was a major fan of Quigley's views on history and government.

Every person who loves liberty and believes that free-market solutions offer the best alternatives for the prosperity and future of mankind should read Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, as well as his The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, written in the late 1940s but published posthumously, in 1981.

Quigley has much of the last 100 years of elite and secret society control and manipulation correct. But we believe the actual history of attempts by a few wealthy families to use the world as their economic plantation – and each nation's citizens as serfs to be worked and constantly relieved of their excess wealth and profits by taxation and depreciating currencies – goes back many centuries earlier.

There isn't a secret conspiracy, but rather competing groups of wealthy families and their financial and central banking components – sometimes working together but often competing – with evolving power structures and constantly shifting alliances. Their goal is just more power and money to be used by them to advance their own interests and ultimately their perception of what is best for the rest of the world under their leadership.

They have controlled finance, government debt, central banking and most of the political actions in the world in a modern-day operation since Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo. Wars, revolutions and conflicts create vast profits for the power elite; this is just how they do business. For centuries they had been able to do all of this mostly in secret while those involved in their conflicts – losing their wealth, property and children, used as cannon fodder in the process – simply believed the turmoil around them was accidental or based on evil political leaders or competing nations on the "other side."

Carroll Quigley died in 1977.