Secret Societies of the Privileged
Secret societies are often considered a phenomenon of the past and no longer significant. However they still exist, and exist in varying degrees of visibility and wielding varying amounts of clandestine power.
A good example is Cecil Rhodes, the supposed hero of Britain’s colonising of Africa.
Cecil Rhodes made a vast fortune out of diamonds and gold dug out of the south African ground by impoverished barefoot Africans. It was rumoured to be the largest personal fortune of his time. He was the Bezos/Gates of his day.
However, he bequeathed nothing to family. Rhodes’ will bequeathed his fortune to a series of trusts and enterprises committed to protecting, at all costs, the great “British Empire”. Some of the trusts and entities were known to the public (eg the “Rhodes Scholarship”). Others were not.
To protect his wilful posthumous investments, Rhodes apparently reverted to a form of organisation espoused by a German philosophy professor by the name of Adam Weishaupt. The guiding principle of this was the creation of “rings within rings”, augmented by the strict rule that very very few of the people in any of the rings should be aware of any inner rings at all. Only the very central ring should have an inkling of the size and scale of the subservient outer rings.
With all this in mind Rhodes first established the secret “Society of the Elect”. This consisted of three classes of membership. At its core was the “Junta of Three”, consisting of: “Lord” Alfred Milner, Rhodes’ right hand man, confidante, and gofer; “Sir” William Stead, an early press magnate; and “Viscount” Esher who effectively represented “King” Edward 7. Then came the “Elect” which was broadened to include, among others, “Lord” Nathaniel Rothschild the banker, and possibly Alfred Beit, a co-founder with Rhodes of deBeers – the global diamond monopolist.
Then, according to the wills, came the “Helpers” – the B list of the privileged, carefully chosen from the realms of politics and commerce for their contacts and pliability. Each of the “Elect” had their own networks of privilege and they encouraged the development of lower level Helpers who were then encouraged to use their contacts to create yet more outer rings among the pliable privileged and “influencers”, without ever letting on that there was an inner ring. None of the Helpers could know of the Elect or the Junta. And the members of these outer rings would in turn, believing themselves to be the inner ring, seek to form yet more outer rings whilst, again, assuring that none of these recruits knew anything of other rings but believed themselves to be at the centre.
And so on, right down to your friendly “Round Table” do-gooders raising charitable funds for people unknowingly being impoverished by policies being pushed from the very top of the self same organisation.
This is just an example. We cannot know how many other such “Trusts” have been set up by capital hoarders to carry on their obsessions posthumously.
