Antony Sutton: The America's Secret Establishment. A review

24. October 2007

A review of:

Antony C. Sutton’s “America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (1983)

by Rolf Kenneth Aristos

When Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002) worked on America’s Secret Establishment, he at last found the answers to many of the puzzles in his earlier books, in which he had documented highly un-patriotic and “suicidal” behaviour of the US Government in their support and development of Marxist Soviet and Nazi Germany. Thus, “after 16 books and 25 years of basic research”, he considered this book to be his most important, his magnum opus.

Antony C. Sutton

General William Huntington Russell (1809-1885) and Alphonso Taft (1810-1891) [father of the 27. US President] founded in 1832 at Yale University the secret society The Order of Skull and Bones (“The Order”). In 1876 there was a break-in in their temple, a pamphlet was found and published. The pamphlet had some information about The Order’s origin:

"Bones is a chapter of a corps in a German University. It should properly be called, not Skull & Bones Society but Skull & Bones Chapter. General R------, its founder, was in Germany before Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college, authority to found a chapter here. Thus was Bones founded."

The logo of Skull & Bones

We know that general Russell went to Germany to study at a university in 1831-32. The German society certainly seems to have been inspired by some of the core ideas of the former The Order of the Illuminati (1776-1785). We don’t have to assume more affinity between the two orders than that. The Order of Skull and Bones is outwardly nothing more than a college fraternity, to which each year precisely 15 male students in their senior year are invited. If they accept the invitation and go through the initiation ritual, they become “knights” for the rest of their senior year, and afterwards they become lifelong members and “patriarchs”.

One Skull & Bones class of 15 students

The initiation ritual has some masonic “death-rebirth” and/or “satanic light” features. The student must lie naked in a coffin, wrestle naked in mud, and confess to the others the most intimate details of his sexual (or non-sexual) life. The Patriarchs are wearing skeleton suits and behave as possessed lunatics. Real human skulls and bones are used in the ritual, and maybe some satanic paraphernalia. The purpose of the ritual is apparently to create a strong bonding between the members, and a brainwashed loyalty to the Order.

The “college fraternity” aspect of The Order is just serving as a recruiting center. The real purpose of The Order is concerned with the future and the postgraduates. The Patriarchs have annual meetings at Deer Iland Club, and the Russell Trust Association is run entirely by Patriarchs. Each member receives a thick black leather-bound book where all the members, both dead and alive, back to 1833 are listed. Out in the society the initiated are supposed to help one another in their carriers; but their most important job is their mission to help to transform the American culture and society, indeed the whole world, towards what Sutton has chosen to call the “New World Order”. This New World Order will be totalitarian; the State will be Absolute and Supreme, and the individual will have no immanent value. This totalitarian view of the ideal relationship between the State and the individual is based on the works of the obscure German philosopher George Wilhem Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). The ideas of Hegel pervade The Order. Since their totalitarian view is clearly against the US Constitution, such a society would under normal circumstances be judged illegal in USA; hence their work must be done in secret.

George W. F. Hegel

Since 1833, active membership has evolved into a core group of perhaps 20-30 families. It seems that active members have enough influence to push their sons and relatives into the Order, and there is significant inter-marriage among the families. Since these 20-30 families have represented the core of the non-elected US Establishment for over a hundred years, the Order is just too powerful to ban or eliminate. Despite the fact that the Order has been and still is immensely powerful in American history and society, only two articles, in 1873 and 1977, had been written about the Order when Sutton got his book published in 1983.

The Order achieved control over the Yale University by 1870. They managed to transform (or pervert) academic psychology, modern educational theory [by John Dewey (1859-1952)], economics, history and several other subjects by basing them on the Hegelian ”State Supreme” foundation. Members of the Order either founded or achieved control over American Medical Association (founded in 1847), National Education Association (founded in 1857), American Historical Association (founded in 1884), American Economic Association (founded in 1885) and American Psychological Association (founded in 1892). The Hegelian foundation of these subjects means that the focus is not on individual freedom, or on the develoment of talents and the ability to think and act independently, but to be a cog in the wheel, “to go along if you want to get along”. The CIA recruits agents and operatives from this Order, and some have considered the Order to be the cradle of the CIA.

According to Sutton, the Order has not only been successful in the destruction of American culture, but also in orchestrating world history by the application of the Hegelian dialectical process. This process is well known among intellectuals and students of European philosophy. A Thesis (or Force A) always produces or results in its Antithesis (Force B). The conflict between these two results in a Synthesis (Force C). The Synthesis is identical with the new Thesis, and in this way the dialectical process goes on.

The application of the Hegelian dialectical process takes this form. If you have sufficient control of both Force A and Force B, you can intensify the conflict between them (to cold war, hot war…), and then direct this conflict or war towards a Synthesis which in reality is what you wanted to achieve in the first place. In real life, the masterminds behind this scheme may not only achieve the desired outcome, they will also make huge profits by the industrial and financial needs of both parties during the conflict and the war. So, in the aftermath of the war, both parties will have suffered great losses, and the masterminds will be more powerful than ever.

Of course, in order to manipulate the world events in this way, the NWO-plotters have to be an extremely powerful hidden player in the Global Chess Game, and they will need the very best intelligence organizations and networks to work for them. Once the world has unmasked them, they will become an ordinary, visual player like the others. What exactly the relationship was between the Rothschilds’ international bankers in the United States and the Order, I do not know, but it seems clear that around 1900, if not much earlier or even originally, these two fronts represented a New World Order union.

Sutton does not say much about the hidden power dynamics behind WW I, but in several of his books he has documented that the US Government and/or the non-elected Establishment in secret:

has supported and financed the Russian revolution.
has helped and supported Marxist Soviet financially, technologically and military both before and after WW II.
has helped and supported Nazi Germany financially and military both before and during WW II.

The russian revolution

Sutton (1983) writes:

“College textbooks present war and revolution as more or less accidental results of conflicting forces. The decay of political negotiation into physical conflict comes about, according to these books, after valiant efforts to avoid war. Unfortunately, this is nonsense. War is always a deliberate creative act by individuals. Western textbooks also have gigantic gaps. For example, after World War II the Tribunals set up to investigate Nazi war criminals were careful to censor any materials recording Western assistance to Hitler. By the same token, Western textbooks on Soviet economic development omit any description of the economic and financial aid given to the 1917 Revolution and subsequent economic development by Western firms and banks. Revolution is always recorded as a spontaneous event by the politically or economically deprived against an autocratic state. Never in Western textbooks will you find the evidence that revolutions need finance and the source of the finance in many cases traces back to Wall Street.

Consequently, it can be argued that our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored, and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union or Communist China. No Western foundation will award grants to investigate such topics, few Western academics can "survive" by researching such theses, and certainly no major publisher will easily accept manuscripts reflecting such arguments. In fact, there is another largely unrecorded history and it tells a story quite different than our sanitized textbooks. It tells a story of the deliberate creation of war, the knowing finance of revolution to change governments, and the use of conflict to create a New World Order.”

One application of the dialectical process was the build up of both Marxist Soviet and Nazi Germany, and then to instigate a war between them. Two banking firms served as a central connection between the Order/Establishment and Marxist Soviet on the one hand and Nazi Germany on the other hand: Chase National Bank (dominated by the Rockefellers since 1930) and Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (dominated by the Harriman and the Bush bloodlines). The synthesis of WW II was the United Nations, a step towards a totalitarian One World. After WW II, the two new dialectical arms were Capitalist USA and Marxist Soviet. Since Sutton has documented these conspiracy facts in his earlier books, the focus of America's Secret Establishment (1983) was to establish that Skull & Bones have had the central role in this chess game.

William Averell Harriman (1891-1986)

Sutton (1983) writes:

“The previously described official Harriman biography suggests that [William Averell] Harriman, given his decades on the political inside, must be well aware of the dependence of the Soviet Union on Western technology: that the Soviet Union can make no economic progress without Western enterprise technology. In fact, Stalin himself told Harriman as much back in 1944. Here's an extract from a report by Ambassador Harriman in Moscow to the State Department, dated June 30, 1944: "Stalin paid tribute to the assistance rendered by the United States to Soviet industry before and during the war. He said that about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance." Stalin could have added that the other one-third of Soviet industry had been built by British, German, French, Italian, Finnish, Czech and Japanese companies. In brief, Harriman knew first hand back in 1944 at least that the West had built the Soviet Union. Now examine Harriman's official biography with its string of appointments relating to NATO, Mutual Security Agency, State Department, foreign policy, and so on. In these posts Harriman actively pushed for a military build-up of the United States. But if the Soviet Union was seen to be an enemy in 1947, then we had no need to build a massive defense.”

“What we should have done was cut off technology. There was no Soviet technology, and HARRIMAN KNEW THERE WAS NO SOVIET TECHNOLOGY. Furthermore, Harriman has been in the forefront of the cry for "more trade" with the Soviet Union, and trade is the transfer vehicle for technology. In other words, Harriman has been pushing two CONFLICTING POLICIES SIMULTANEOUSLY: (a) a build-up of Soviet power by export of our technology, and (b) a Western defense against that power. Isn't this the Hegelian dialectic? Thesis versus antithesis, then conflict which leads to a new synthesis.”

How is the Order of Skull and Bones doing today? Just to give an indication: in the 2004 presidential election both the presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry, were “Bonesmen”. The father and the grandfather of George W. Bush were also Bonesmen.

From the 2004 election

George W. Bush became a "Bonesman" in 1968

Latest updates:

Millegan, Kris [editor] (2003): Fleshing out Skull & Bones: Investigations into America’s most powerful secret society. 720 pages. This is an anthology of 29 newer articles and 11 historical articles by various authors. The book is also a tribute to Sutton, who died a year before its publication. The main theme is The Order of Skull and Bones, but also related American conspiracy themes are discussed. A 15-pages autobiographical sketch by Sutton, Memoir concerning events at The Hoover Institution, Stanford University in the period 1968-1974, is most interesting and useful to understand the personal and professional background of Sutton.

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