A Brief History of Fabianism (Occult Yorkshire Part 2)

To read the full article (& rest of this series), order The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse.

“To speak of scientific management in school and society without crediting the influence of the Fabians would do great disservice to truth, but the nature of Fabianism is so complex it raises questions this essay cannot answer. To deal with the Fabians in a brief compass as I’m going to do is to deal necessarily in simplifications in order to see a little how this charming group of scholars, writers, heirs, heiresses, scientists, philosophers, bombazines, gazebos, trust-fund babies, and successful men and women of affairs became the most potent force in the creation of the modern welfare state, distributors of its characteristically dumbed-down version of schooling.”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education

The first thing that really tipped me off that something was missing from my family’s “official” history was the Fabian link. In all the time I spent with my family, I don’t remember ever once hearing anyone mention the Fabian Society. I soon found out, or was reminded, that the Fabians are the conspiracy bugaboo of the right. This presented a problem so far as finding reliable information about them, because a great deal of the unofficial history of the Society seems to be confined to websites with axes to grind. Actually, what I was initially looking for was some sort of concrete evidence of sexual abuse in my family history, since all the signs seemed to point that way. The Jimmy Boyle/Kray connection certainly seemed to point in that general direction, so I began to wonder if the Fabian octopus might share a tentacle or two with that of organized crime and pedophilia.

The Fabian Society was initially an offshoot of The Fellowship of the New Life, which dissolved in 1898, after which the Fabian Society grew to become a preeminent academic society in the UK. After that, many of Fabians participated in the formation of England’s Labor Party in 1900. The party’s constitution, written by Sidney Webb, borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. As seen in the Labor Party Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate.

The Fabian society grew throughout 1930-1940 over many countries under the British rule, and many future leaders of these countries were influenced by the Fabians during their struggles for independence from the British. These leaders included India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Obafemi Awolowo, who later became the premier of Nigeria’s defunct Western Region, and the founder of Pakistan, Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, had a political philosophy strongly influenced by the Fabian Society. In the 21st century, the Fabian Society’s influence is felt through Labor Party leaders and former prime ministers of Great Britain, such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
The name Fabian was apparently suggested by the Spiritualist Frank Podmore, after the brilliant third century Roman general, Quintus Fabius (Maximus Verrucosus 303-203 BC).

Fabius was made a dictator in 221-217 BC, and, with a small band of fighting guerrillas and superior cunning, successfully defended Rome from Hannibal’s mighty Carthaginian army. Fabius’ tactics involved “gradualism” and “terrorism,” delaying tactics which were greatly disapproved of by his soldiers and the civilians, and which earned him the name of “the Delayer.” After these tactics triumphed, however, his skill and wisdom was highly appreciated.
Moving past Wikipedia and the more or less established history of Fabianism, I found a compelling, and damning, description of the Fabian plan as central to the whole “New World Order” millennia-long Conspiracy (big “C”), at a perhaps less than entirely reliable website. One premise of the information was that the Fabian Society was behind the various Labor movements in Britain and that it concealed elitist, and even capitalist, interests. This was something I could vouch for from direct experience, having grown up in a wealthy Socialist family (we were called “champagne socialists”) who were above all business people but also actively involved in local (and, I was slowly discovering, global) politics, in seemingly reformist and New Left movements such as the CND party, all having sometimes obvious, sometimes less so, ties to the Fabian Society.

According to another online source, the Fabian Society has 7000 members, 80 per cent (5,600) of whom are members of the Labor Party, amounting to about three percent of the general Labor Party membership (about 190,000 in 2010). The Fabian percentage increases dramatically in the higher reaches of the Labor Party.[1] George Bernard Shaw declared the aim of Fabian educational reform as entailing the creation of a Minister for Education, with “control over the whole educational system, from the elementary school to the University, and over all educational endowments” (Shaw, “Educational Reform,” 1889). This allegedly led to the creation of a wide range of interconnected organizations, societies and movements. In education, councils like the London County Council, university societies and schools like the London School of Economics, Imperial College, and London University. In culture, the New Age movement (Annie Besant was a founding Fabian), the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Leeds Arts Club, the Fabian Arts Group and the Stage Society. In economy, the London School of Economics, the Royal Economic Society, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). In law, the Haldane Society (named after Fabian Society member Lord Haldane). In medicine: the Socialist Medical League. In religion, the Labor (later Socialist) Church movement, the Christian Socialist Crusade, the Christian Socialist League, the Christian Socialist Movement. And so on (you get the picture).

Shaw expressed a desire to make the Fabians “the Jesuits of Socialism,” while H. G. Wells (number four on the Fabian Executive after Webb, Pease and Shaw) proposed to turn the whole Society into a ruling order, similar to the “Samurai” in his A Modern Utopia. “That the Fabians consciously sought the company, collaboration and support of the wealthy and powerful is evident from Fabian writings such as Beatrice Webb’s Our Partnership, which abound in references to ‘catching millionaires,’ ‘wire-pulling,’ ‘moving all the forces we have control over,’ while at the same time taking care to ‘appear disinterested’ and claiming to be ‘humble folk whom nobody suspects of power’ (Webb, 1948).”

The reliable John Taylor Gatto affirms this view in Underground History of American Education:

“As the movement developed, Fabians became aristocratic friends of other social-efficiency vanguards like Taylorism or allies of the Methodist social gospel crowd of liberal Christian religionists busy substituting Works for Faith in one of the most noteworthy religious reversals of all time. Especially, they became friends and advisors of industrialists and financiers, travelers in the same direction. This cross-fertilization occurred naturally, not out of petty motives of profit, but because by Fabian lights evolution had progressed furthest among the international business and banking classes! . . . Fabian practitioners developed Hegelian principles which they co-taught alongside Morgan bankers and other important financial allies over the first half of the twentieth century.”

Gatto trumps and essentially invalidates a large subculture of conspiracy theorists and right-wing, anti-socialist writers, by pointing out:

“One insightful Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently it was necessary first to co-opt both political Left and political Right. Adversarial politics–competition–was a loser’s game. By infiltrating all major media, by continual low-intensity propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished through principles developed in the psychological-warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents and press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat.”

*

A few more suggestive facts: Hubert Bland, co-founder of the Fabian Society and a bank-employee-turned-journalist, worked for the London Sunday Chronicle, a paper owned by newspaper magnate Edward Hulton. It was allegedly Bland who recruited his friend and fellow journalist George Bernard Shaw to the Fabian Society. Hulton’s son, Edward G. Hulton, was the owner of Picture Post and (according to a Lobster magazine article[2]) “almost certainly a loyal agent of MI6’s Section D”). He was also the founder of the 1941 Committee, a think tank that recruited “star” writers J. B. Priestley and Tom Wintringham, and that also included David Astor (more on him soon), Sir Richard Acland, and my grandfather. Alec mentions Acland in his short memoir in reference to Acland and Priestley’s Common Wealth, in which Alec “took a very active part.” Like Alec, Acland was a Quaker.

G. B. Shaw’s friend, Fabian Society leader Sidney Webb, married Beatrice, daughter of Richard Potter, a wealthy financier with international connections who was chairman of the Great Western and Grand Trunk Railways of England and Canada. Beatrice was also a close friend of Rothschild associate and Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Rothschild and Balfour were founding members of the Round Table, of which my grandfather was reputedly one of the two leading financial backers in Britain, during the 1930s, ’40s, & ’50s.[3]

Afore-mentioned David Astor, alleged MI6 agent and editor of the UK paper The Observer, was the grandson of William Waldorf (the first). He lobbied for the release of Myra Hindley in the 1970s along with Lord Longford. My grandfather visited Hindley in jail and my brother wrote letters to her. Astor was also affiliated with the Round Table Group. According to author Stephen Dorril, Astor

“created the Europe Study Group to look at the problems of Europe and the prospects for a non-nationalist Germany. At the core of the group were a number of emigré Germans destined to play a role in the European Movement, such as the future leader [sic] writer on the Observer, Richard ‘Rix’ Lowenthal. Interviewed for recruitment by MI6, Astor was turned down for a full-time post but was subsequently used by MI6 officer Lionel Loewe to establish contact with the German opposition. Employed as the press officer in Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters in London, Astor continued with his group, which drew on the ideas of the Cecil Rhodes-inspired Round Table Group and its belief that ‘the British Empire should federate.’”[4]

This places my grandfather squarely in the circles of the Round Table Group, and, by inevitable extension, MI6. The shared interests alone (leaving aside the uses Alec was putting his money to) make them inevitable bedfellows. Yet these interests appear to have little to do with socialism, at least as I grew up understanding it.

Meanwhile, Round Table founding member Lord Rothschild “was personally involved, with Sidney Webb, in the restructuring of the University of London into which the Fabians’ London School of Economics (LSE) was incorporated in 1898 (LSE was founded by the original Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw; Annie Besant and Bertrand Russell were early participants). Rothschild also provided funds for the LSE and served as its third president, after his relative Lord Rosebery.”[5] LSE is connected, not just to the various Fabian groups, but also to Gay Liberation and PIE, the Pedophilia Information Exchange, a faction within the Labor government in the 1970s (more on whom later).[6]

Another Fabian line of connection with industrial interests was apparently the chocolate manufacturers Rowntree’s, who funded many Fabian projects. Because of the alliance between Northern Dairies and Rowntree Macintosh, our house (until our parents split) was always full of chocolate products. We even got to visit the Rowntree Macintosh chocolate factory as kids. One of the books I grew up on was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl (with whom I corresponded briefly as a child, though I don’t think I ever met him; Dahl did propaganda work for British Intelligence in World War II[7]). Willy Wonka, as illustrated in the book and later depicted in the movies, wears a top hat and a purple jacket, like the infamous Child-Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (and like my brother in his last years, though he preferred red to purple). Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was based on the book by MI5 agent Ian Fleming, and it was probably the movie that impressed me most strongly in my childhood. More recently, of course, the Child Catcher has been compared to Jimmy Savile.

Savile’s predations have been linked to those of an ice-cream manufacturer and retailer, Peter Jaconelli, in Scarborough, Yorkshire (a town I visited as a child). Northern Dairies had its own ice cream products and also provided milk to other companies. When I was an adolescent, we lived opposite a famous ice cream shop, called Burgesses. The link between ice cream, chocolate, and predatory pedophile rings would seem to pertain not only to works of popular (children’s) fiction.


Moving on. The Fabian Society has also apparently been particularly close to the Rockefellers—David Rockefeller did his senior thesis on Fabian Socialism at Harvard (“Destitution Through Fabian Eyes,” 1936), and studied left-wing economics at LSE. The Rockefellers have allegedly funded many Fabian projects, including the LSE, which “in the late 1920s and 1930s received millions of dollars from the Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Foundations, becoming known as ‘Rockefellers baby.’” The International Monetary Fund (IMF), established in 1944 along with the World Bank, was also reputedly a Rockefellers project, and IMF provided several loans to Labor governments in 1947, 1969, and 1976.

“Another important loan of $4.34 billion was negotiated in 1946 by Fabian economist John Maynard Keynes and facilitated by his friend and collaborator Harry Dexter White who operated within the US Treasury as well as the IMF. All these loans were organised under successive Fabian Chancellors Hugh Dalton, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey.” (citation)

$4.34 billion was an astronomical amount in 1946, so if these facts are accurate, it is easy to imagine how far-reaching and pervasive the Fabian influence might have become via the organizations and agendas fueled by such monies.

John Maynard Keynes is linked directly to two close associates of my grandfather, including John Boyd Orr, whom my grandfather met in the USSR in the 1950s. Boyd Orr was the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the co-founder and first President (1960–1971) of the World Academy of Art and Science. He gave an address to the Fabian society on “food policy” in 1940, three years after my grandfather founded his own company.[8] In the 1950s he became president of Northern Dairies.

The funny thing about all this material is that, as a child and teenager attending private school, I never had any time for history. I hated school with a passion and experienced its regimentations as suffocating and oppressive. Every class was an ordeal to be endured, and my overall ambition was simply to avoid as much as possible being in any way influenced, shaped or in-formed by the “masters” and their regimens to which we were forced to submit. In terms of historical facts, I retained almost nothing of what we were taught in history (just a bit about Mussolini getting the trains to run on time). So now to be writing a historical work overflowing with names, dates, and events, all of which I fear may be numbing to the reader, yet to find my own interest so keen, is ironic to say the least. But then, a large part of my ennui at school related to my felt sense that what I was being taught was not the real truth. Another, even deeper reason was that the methods of teaching—which as we’ll see directly relate to Fabian methods of social engineering—were very much meant to be soul-deadening and mind-crushing. It was only that I would not, or could not, submit to them.

Returning to the anti-Fabian tract (having given the reader momentary respite), it describes how the Fabian Society “developed an obsession with economics” early on and “its members met regularly to study and discuss Karl Marx and his economic theories.”[9] Literally dozens of different organizations sprung up over the decades leading up to the sixties, including the Social Science Research Council, some of whose documents are held at London School of Economics Library, under such titles as “Outline proposals for development of Albany Trust, 1967-1978” and “Study of Human Sexuality in Britain: proposals for establishing an institute of social behaviour.” The Albany Trust was founded the same year homosexuality was legalized, in the apartment of one of my grandfather’s (seemingly) close associates, J. B. Priestley, the chairman of the afore-mentioned 1941 Committee, and with whom my grandfather started the CND party. The Albany Trust is generally associated with civil liberties and gay rights, hence is seen as being left-leaning. Yet there’s evidence to suggest it may have been funding the right too, such as its involvement with the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality (CGHE).

The abuse research blog The Needle implies that the CGHE was implicated in the promotion of Elm Guest House, a now-notorious child brothel in Barnes, London. The CGHE was founded in 1975 by Professor Peter Campbell, of Reading University, who was chairman or vice-president through most of the Thatcher years. Campbell also edited the newsletter and has been named as a visitor to the Elm Guest House. According to the Needle, “The minutes from the founding meeting clearly show that, despite being labelled as an organization that promoted gay equality, it was from inception a ‘pro-pedophile organization.’”

During my childhood, homosexuality was openly advocated, even championed, by my liberal father and grandparents. I was fully aware of the fact that some of the guests who visited us were practicing homosexuals. I even stayed on occasion overnight in the house of a homosexual couple who worked at Northern Foods. Embracing homosexuality as a lifestyle choice was central—along with racial tolerance and pacifism—to the liberal value-set I was raised with.

There was no equivalent talk of pedophilia that I recall, though there were jokes about it.
****

To read the full article (& rest of this series), order The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse.

[1] “From inception, Labour candidates standing for parliament included a fair number of Fabian Society members and the Society has retained a large proportion—about 50 percent—among Labour candidates since the 1940s. In 1945, 393 Labor candidates were elected to Parliament, out of whom 229 were Fabian Society members. In 1997, 418 Labour candidates were elected, out of whom 200 were Fabian Society members. By the time we come to the Labour Party leadership, the proportion of Fabians comes close to 100 per cent.” http://www.freebritainnow.org/0/fabiansociety.htm
[2] “In a Common Cause: the Anti-Communist Crusade in Britain 1945-60,” by Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay. “In 1939 [Hulton] helped set up the bogus news agency Britanova and, in 1941, used the Picture Post as a front for another intelligence creation, the Arab News Agency (ANA). Both news agencies were resurrected after the war by IRD. Tom Clarke, who was Deputy Director of News in the Ministry of Information, went onto become Hulton’s representative in Latin America and head of another front news agency. Also on the Committee was Christopher Mayhew, at the time working for ANA’s controlling body, the Special Operations Executive. ‘Teddy Hulton . . . . has a mania,’ Mayhew wrote at the time, for ‘getting key people together and starting a new nation-wide political movement.’” http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue19.php
[3] “Chairman of Booker Brothers, and Alec Horsley, Chairman of Northern Dairies, were the Round Table’s main British backers.” Archie Potts, Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism, Merlin, 2002, p. 178.
[4] MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, by Stephen Dorril, Touchstone, 2002, p. 456.
[5] Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, Drake, B. and Cole, M. eds., London, 1948, p. 182, 214.
[6] Economist John Maynard Keynes was a key figure at LSE. The school’s alumni include my grandfather’s pal John Saville, Harold Laski (cofounder of the New School), Nicholas Humphrey, Edwina Currie, David Rockefeller, Mick Jagger, Zecharia Sitchin, Naomi Klein, and Whitley Strieber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_London_School_of_Economics_people
[7] “During the desperate winter of 1940, as the threat of German invasion hung over England, the British government mounted a massive, secret campaign of propaganda to weaken the isolationist sentiment in America and manipulate the country into entering the war on England’s behalf. Under the command of the now legendary INTREPID, the British planted propaganda in American newspapers, covertly influenced radio stations and wire services, and plotted against American corporations doing business with the Third Reich. They also pushed President Roosevelt to create a similar covert intelligence agency in the US, and played a role in the selection of William Donovan as its head. Now for the first time, with great research and reporting, Jennet Conant reveals that the beloved author Roald Dahl was a member of Churchill’s infamous dirty tricks squad, and tells the full story of how he was recruited to spy on the Americans during World War II.” Description of The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant. http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Irregulars-British-Wartime-Washington/dp/0743294580/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342545577&sr=1-1-spell
[8] Hugh Dalton is mentioned in The Dust Has Never Settled by Robin Bryans (a very oblique exposé on government corruption, occult secret societies, and child abuse), with reference to his title as “the Minister of Economic Warfare,” as a possible procurer of children for sexual use (it’s hard to tell with Bryans’ cryptic phrasings). Roy Jenkins is a lot easier to nail down, but I’ll get to him later.
[9] This led to the creation of institutions like the British Economic Association (later Royal Economic Society) and LSE. Economic theories were seen as a “scientific” backing for their Socialist ideology, just as Marx had used them earlier. Educational institutions teaching Fabian economics was a means to “create whole generations of professional economists—a new ruling class—who, working as civil servants and other government officials, would implement Fabian policies (M. Cole, p. 88).” According to this same source, there was an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) founded in 1965 under the government of former Fabian Society chairman Harold Wilson. The chief executive of the ESRC was a Fabian called Michael (later Lord) Young, who allegedly “was responsible for the creation of over sixty like-minded organizations.” The ESRC was originally known as Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and evidently a branch of the US organization of the same name.