LaRouche: The Enemy Is Oligarchism

Fact Sheet: The Enemy Is Oligarchism

by Jeffrey Steinberg

In November 1940, the Coordinator of Information (COI), the predecessor to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), prepared a classified report titled "Synarchie and the policy of the Banque Worms group." The three-page confidential document began, "In recent reports, there have been several references to the growing political power of the Banque Worms group in France, which includes amongst its members such ardent [Nazi] collaborationists as Pucheu, Benoist-Mechin, Leroy-Ladurie, Bouthillier, and representatives of the big French industrial organizations." The report continued, "The reactionary movement known as 'Synarchie' has been in existence in France for nearly a century. Its aim has always been to carry out a bloodless revolution, inspired by the upper classes, aimed at producing a form of government by 'technicians' (the founder of the movement was a 'polytechnician'), under which home and foreign policy would be subordinated to international economy. The aims of the Banque Worms group are the same as those of 'Synarchie,' and the leaders of the two groups are, in most cases, identical."

The COI report then went on to detail the political agenda of the international Synarchy, as of August 1940:

"(a) to check the 'Revolution Nationale' insofar as its development might entail the creation of a new social order [At the time, France was under the "social order" of the Nazis, following the Spring 1940 invasion and occupation—ed.];

"(b) to check any new social schemes which might tend to weaken the power of the international financiers and industrialists;

"(c) to work for the ultimate complete control of all industry by international finance and industry;

"(d) to protect Jewish and Anglo-Saxon interests."

The document went on to note that there is sympathy for this Synarchist scheme among some key Nazi circles in Germany including "both Goering and Dr. Funk [Walther Funk, who was Nazi Minister of Economics, president of the Reichsbank, and Nazi Germany's representative on the Bank for International Settlements, following Hjalmar Schacht—ed.]... It is alleged that certain industrial circles in Great Britain are also in sympathy with the movement. Some headway is claimed to have been made in securing the adhesion of big U.S. industry to the movement."

The document also identified Synarchist plans towards Great Britain: "To bring about the fall of the Churchill government by creating the belief in the country that a more energetic government is needed to prosecute the war ... and to bring about the formation of a new Government including Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Hore-Belisha. (Note. The source has added that in the Worms group it is believed that those circles in Great Britain who are favorably disposed to their plans, are most critical of Mr. Churchill, Lord Halifax and Captain Margesson.); and through the medium of Sir Samuel Hoare to bring about an agreeement between British industry and the Franco-German 'bloc;' and to protect Anglo-Saxon interests on the continent."

The document concluded, "In regard to Germany, it is hoped ultimately to eliminate Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler with his Gestapo, from the political scene, thus facilitating the formation of an Anglo-Franco-German economic bloc."

Another insightful snapshot of the trans-Atlantic Synarchist banking apparatus on the eve of World War II appeared, ironically, in Time magazine on July 3, 1939, under the headline, "Insider from Overseas." The article reported on the arrival in New York City of German banker Otto Jeidels, who was named a partner in the New York City branch of Lazard Frères & Co. According to Time : "Lazard Brothers & Co. of London is Aryan and aristocratic, a member of the Bank of England coterie, helps back the appeasment movement in London, favors the theory that concessions to Hitler will bring Dr. Schacht and his orthodox economics back to Berlin. It has a highly lucrative and increasingly important sideline in helping frightened European capitalists put their money into good safe American dollars. On the receiving end of this flood of gold from Europe is Lazard Freres of Manhattan, not entirely Aryan, not a Wall Street insider, still correspondent (but no longer a partner) of the highly political London and Paris Lazard banks. Lazard's of Manhattan underwrites securities and above all, does a big business in foreign exchange. Invaluable to this clearing house of new bullion and foreign capital will be Jeidels, who is a friend of Montagu Norman, has access to choice continental pipelines into Hitlerland.... In Germany there is a cynical saying that Schacht has managed to doublecross all save two of his intimates: one of the two is Hitler, the other is Jeidels. Schacht gave Jeidels the high sign in time for him to leave Germany with his family before the great pogrom of 1938 began.... Schacht was able to protect Jeidels because his contact with British Bank Boss Montagu Norman was useful to Hitler.... Until the spring of 1938, Jeidels functioned perfectly, as much of an insider as Hitler could let any Jewish banker be. He satisfied the British by keeping the debts unrepudiated, the Nazis by keeping them frozen, served as middleman between the Nazis and the British."

These two reports, one, a classified wartime U.S. intelligence dossier, and the other, a widely circulated news magazine story, represented two exemplary pieces from a voluminous archive of documents—public and classified—from the 1930-45 period, that detailed the role of the international banking and industrial cartel, known then—and still, today—as "the Synarchist International."

Wartime OSS Research and Analysis Branch Director William Langer detailed the role of the Synarchy in Vichy France in his 1947 book Our Vichy Gamble . Three years later, James Stewart Martin, a U.S. Justice Department Anti-Trust Division lawyer, who, from 1944-47, headed the de-cartelization unit of the U.S. occupation government in Germany, published his own stunning exposé of the same international Synarchist cartel in his 1950 book, All Honorable Men .

These and other contemporaneous accounts, reflected a deep understanding, within the FDR-led U.S. governing institutions of the time, that a top-down international financial oligarchy had been the chief sponsors of the Nazi and Fascist regimes that brought war and devastation to the Eurasian continent, in a failed effort to create a post-Westphalian world without sovereign nation-states, run by an international bankers dictatorship. But for Franklin Roosevelt's mobilization of the moral and industrial might of the United States, these Synarchists may very well have succeeded in bringing the planet to the abyss of a new Dark Age.

Then and Now

These penetrating wartime intelligence assessments of global Synarchy are of the greatest relevance today. In effect, the COI/OSS and related evaluations of the situation on the European continent were that an Anglo-Saxon and Franco-German cartel of international financiers and industrialists, who comprised a powerful faction financing and controlling the Nazi/Fascist axis, was steering European governments, through agents with little or no loyalty to their nations, but the greatest loyalty to the international Synarchy. As Langer quoted U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Biddle from London, "This group should be regarded not as Frenchmen, any more than their corresponding members in Germany should be regarded as Germans, for the interests of both groups are so intermingled as to be indistinguishable; their whole interest is focussed upon furtherance of their industrial and financial stakes."

It was this combination of international bankers, then, who had financed Mussolini and then Hitler, and had steered Eurasia on a path of war and near self-annihilation, in order to secure their own dominance over global economic and financial affairs, no matter what the outcome of the war.

This apparatus was aligned, in the United States, with the very JP Morgan and DuPont interests that had been foiled in their several coup d'état attempts against President Roosevelt. The more extended network of FDR enemies included the Brown Brothers Harriman interests—including Prescott Bush, Sr., the grandfather of the current President of the United States—that had openly bankrolled the Nazi Party, and the Dillon Reed and Sullivan and Cromwell Wall Street axis that had structured the international steel, coal, and petroleum cartels, which included such key Nazi institutions as IG Farben, the Keppler Circle, and the Cologne Stein Bank of Algemeine SS financier Kurt von Schröder. The head of Dillon Reed during the interwar period, William Draper, became chief of the economic division of the postwar U.S. occupation government in Germany, and crushed James Stewart Martin's effort, promoting Martin's resignation and his writing of All Honorable Men . As Martin discovered, the intention of the Synarchists was to assure the survival and prosperity of their cartel no matter what the outcome of the war.

Upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt, in April 1945, the Synachist vise-grip on the White House was soon, albeit temporarily, established, with the swearing in of Harry S Truman as President, and Truman's 1946 embrace of Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" declaration of war against FDR's wartime ally, the Soviet Union. By 1948, most of the French and German financiers at the heart of the wartime Synarchy were freed from jail, acquitted from charges of treason. The Banque Worms group emerged among the principal French financiers and stalwarts of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the post-war cultural warfare front at the heart of the trans-Atlantic "Red scare." Hjalmar Schacht, himself, acquitted at Nuremberg, resumed his role as a leading financial "wizard." André Meyer, the Paris Lazard banker who relocated to Manhattan's Lazard Brothers a year after Jeidels' arrival in New York, perpetuated the London-Paris-New York Synarchy, and soon designated Felix Rohatyn as his hand-picked successor, whom he considered "as my son." Thus, the Synarchy has maintained a continuity through to the present day. Through individuals like Felix Rohatyn and George Pratt Shultz, the Synarchy has penetrated both of the major U.S. political parties, and through this penetration, has planted Synarchist agents, witting and unwitting, into the pores of the Federal government, from the Oval Office to the halls of Congress, to the courts, and virtually every Cabinet agency.

The neo-conservative movement, with its roots in the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, and Carl Schmitt, is one major spore of the present-day Synarchist International. But in some respects, the case of George Shultz provides the most clinical profile of the Synarchy in action today.

The Economic Hit Men

In 2004, a book was published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., which caused a significant stir. John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man provided a first-hand account of the role of the present-day international cartel of banks and multinational corporations, which work in concert to loot the developing sector of its strategic raw-materials wealth and other national patrimony. The principal strategy employed by the Economic Hit Men (EHM), according to Perkins' first-hand account, was to build up massive debt by developing-sector governments, to trap them in a straitjacket of World Bank and IMF diktats, while multinational corporations such as Bechtel and Halliburton loot them blind, under the guise of "development."

Perkins identified George Shultz, former Bechtel president, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State, as the reigning Economic Hit Man—the Capo dei Tutti Capi of the very Synarchist apparatus that earlier brought the world to the brink of self-annihilation from 1922-45.

Whether or not Perkins was 100% accurate about Shultz's formal title as the reigning boss of the EHM, Shultz definitely represents the embodiment of the Synarchy. Shultz's ultimate allegiances are suggested by his close relationship to Jacob Rothschild of Great Britain, to whom he, along with Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, delivered the California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, for inspection and approval. Shultz is also one of the leading proponents in the United States of the radical free-trade dogmas of the Synarchists' Mont Pelerin Society. His University of Chicago mentor, W. Allen Wallis, was the founding treasurer of Mont Pelerin. Shultz is still a director of the Bechtel Group, chairman of the JP Morgan Chase International Council, a director of the Fremont Group and Accenture Energy, a company involved in mega-mergers and acquisitions in the oil and gas sector, with close ties to Anglo-American Corp.

Today, Shultz is not only the "godfather" of the Bush-Cheney Administration, having hand-picked the Vulcans, the team of initial George W. Bush tutors and Executive Branch moles, responsible for the Iraq War disaster. He, along with R. James Woolsey, revived the Committee on the Present Danger, to promote a post-Westphalia world of preventive wars, suited to the fulfillment of the Synarchist agenda. In partnership with Felix Rohatyn, Shultz has promoted the privatization of war, through the proliferation of Private Military Corporations (PMCs), which, they openly boasted at an October 2004 Middlebury College conference, represented a return to the "neo-feudal" system, represented by the 18th- and 19th-Century British East India Company.

Shultz and Rohatyn typify the mid-level Synarchist operative, who works within and around government institutions, on behalf of a thoroughly alien agenda and ideology. Their allegiances are to the Anglo-Dutch/Venetian system of usury, globalization, population reduction, and slavery.

December 1971

George Shultz was Labor Secretary, head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Secretary under President Richard Nixon. He personally pulled the plug on the Bretton Woods system of FDR. When Lyndon LaRouche labelled the dumping of Bretton Woods as the beginning of a descent into a fascist Hell, he was branded a "potential danger" to the newly launched global tyranny. In a December 1971 debate at Queens College in New York City, the last such event in which he would ever be invited to participate, LaRouche induced his opponent, Prof. Abba Lerner, to unmask himself as a proponent of Schachtian economics. Confronted by LaRouche with the evidence of the lawful consequences of ending the system of global fixed exchange rates, and opening the world's currencies to speculative manipulation, Lerner had blurted out, "If they had listened to Schacht, we wouldn't have needed Hitler."

If there is a phrase that best describes the current Synarchist agenda being promoted by the likes of Shultz and Rohatyn, it is: "Schacht without Hitler." And if anyone thinks that this is an improvement on the earlier experience with Nazism and Fascism, they are about to experience a rude awakening, if Synarchy is not stopped.