Review of Kerry Bolton’s “Revolution from Above”

Revolution from Above
by Kerry Bolton
Arktos Media 2011, 258 pages, $27
Available from Arktos Media and Amazon

Why is it that the ”Left” in its various guises — Communists, anti-fascists, feminists, advocates of multiculturalism and other enemies of traditional European civilization — have, as a rule, considerable resources at their disposal? Why are such people constantly awarded influential and prestigious posts in the media and in academia?

The answer is quite simple: the generic Left is the creature and protégé of the real power — “Big Money” — and the dissolution of the Western, Christian nations has been a primary goal for the cosmopolitan financial elite for a long time.

Hence the title of Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above. The author mainly focuses on the last century’s destruction of traditional values and social institutions, especially the family, through politics, academia and the mass media. The book also contains valuable chapters on Wall Street’s role behind many revolutions, from the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 to the heavily-subsidized and widely-covered coups of recent years, such as the “color revolutions” in the various former Soviet republics or the Arab Spring.

With this very well-documented work, New Zealander Bolton places himself in a proud Anglo-Saxon tradition of genuine contemporary history writing, in the line of Nesta Webster, Douglas Reed, A. K. Chesterton and Ivor Benson.

Bolton traces the beginning of the end of Western civilization back several centuries, when merchants and bankers started replacing the land-owning aristocracy as the ruling class, bringing about the birth of usury, industrialization, urbanization and social misery. The apparent paradox is that essentially the same forces created and nurtured socialism. As Bolton shows, however, socialism was never the actual enemy of Big Money — even if the vast majority of socialists have lived and died believing in that illusion.

Bolton notes that this development can be documented as far back as the French Revolution, but begins his narrative with the Russian Revolution of 1917. That the Communist takeover in Russia was heavily financed by Wall Street is an indisputable historical fact, but still systematically ignored in history textbooks and television documentaries.

The single most important financier of the Bolshevik Revolution was probably Jacob Schiff, head of the Jewish investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. It is worth noting that his partner in the firm, his brother-in-law Paul Warburg, was the architect of the Federal Reserve System. Warburg’s brother, Felix, was also married to Schiff’s daughter, Frieda.

Bolton writes:

The USA has pursued a foreign policy from the time of Pres. Woodrow Wilson that has been dictated by the international bankers primarily through the CFR. This foreign policy amounts to a “world revolution” as far-reaching and subversive as anything promulgated by Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. [p. 227]

The Council on Foreign Relations (the ”CFR”) was founded in 1921 in New York. This was only a formality, however, since the CFR was headed by the same camarilla of plutocrats who, with their academic and journalist henchmen, had been running American economic and foreign policy throughout Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, between 1913 and 1921.

CFR and its transatlantic twin, the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, were in fact conceived at the Hotel Majestic in Paris on May 30, 1919, during the peace negotiations at Versailles. These two institutions have been cornerstones of organized plutocracy’s global power structure ever since.

Remarkably little has changed since Wilson led the United States into war under the hypocritical slogan of “making the world safe for democracy.” His later successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, brought the country into the Second World War with the same duplicity and pompous rhetoric, and, de facto, inaugurated even friendlier relations with world Communism. They were both in the hands of the same cosmopolitan moneymen, such as Bernard Baruch, who was advisor to both.

Clearly, Senator Joseph McCarthy was not fighting windmills when he warned his nation about Communist infiltration at the highest levels of the apparatus of American power. Although he did not understand, at least initially, that this was no mere network of spies, but that he had stumbled across something far more powerful and malign. Bolton quotes the official historian of the CFR, Peter Grosse, as follows:

Concerns that seemed more pressing bore down at the turn of the 1950s. The nation was in danger of succumbing to a red-baiting frenzy, marked by the rise into the headlines of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Not surprisingly, the Council’s membership seemed solidly united in contempt for the Wisconsin demagogue; under his provocative rhetoric, after all, was a thinly veiled attack on the entire East Coast foreign policy establishment, whose members gathered regularly in the closed conference rooms of the Harold Pratt House. [p. 43]

This is the real reason why the brave Senator’s name continues to be dragged in the mud to this very day as being synonymous with political paranoia.

Bolton contends that if it had not been for Stalin, the rapid development of the world government that is now coming into being would probably have already taken place in the immediate aftermath of the war. The original purpose of the United Nations was for it to become a far more powerful and efficient institution than it in fact became. The Soviet tyrant had not eliminated all his domestic rivals in order to become merely a subordinate to an external, internationalist power. Thus, the Cold War was not entirely a fake conflict.

When the Soviet Union was finally dismantled, however, the same forces wasted no time in a new push for their age-old agenda: a global government that would make the world safe for financial exploitation.

Today, the Council on Foreign Relations operates through government-funded institutions masquerading as independent organizations acting to promote noble ideals, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and the International Republican Institute. One of the book’s merits is that it not only brings up infamous neoconservative warmongers like John Podhoretz, William Kristol, or Paul Wolfowitz, but also lesser-known figures such as Max Schachtman and his disciples such as Tom Kahn, who had considerable influence upon Reagan’s foreign policy, and Carl Gershman, the long-time boss of the National Endowment for Democracy.

All of these people were Trotskyists who, at some point, shifted strategy and draped themselves in the Stars and Stripes in order to more successfully further the ideal of world revolution, and almost all of them were Jews. Even though Jews are extremely overrepresented, not just in the American foreign policy apparatus, but also in general amongst the ideologues, politicians and financiers of the Russian Revolution, Bolton makes a point of ignoring this extremely important ethnic and cultural factor. Why he does this is not entirely clear. In an interview with Alex Kurtagic for Wermod and Wermod, he explains:

I also wanted to do this without being sidetracked by issues such as Jews and Zionism. Much material focuses on this, but it leaves no room for other factors. There are plenty of scholarly books on the Zionist and Jewish machinations, such as Kevin MacDonald’s volumes, and those of Israel Shahak. I have also written a lot about these matters in pamphlets and articles, so I cannot be accused of avoiding these issues, or “compromising” or “selling out.”

Indeed, people nowadays are conditioned to reject any information about Jews which is not positive and flattering to them, so it might be worthwhile to point out the fact that the “Left,” to a very large extent, is the creation of Big Money without sending the reader into a panic over “anti-Semitism.” Still, it is doubtful whether these matters can be understood at all if the Jewish factor is to be systematically ignored. For example, Jacob Schiff’s support of the Bolsheviks was primarily motivated by a typically Jewish hatred of the tsarist regime, and not just as a good investment. That being said, Bolton does not twist himself into the bizarre position of denying that the Jewish factor is at all relevant in this context, which so many have done, from Anthony Sutton and Gary Allen to Alex Jones.

There are, of course, several notable exceptions to the Jewish dominance in the international financial elite, most notably the Rockefellers, but there are others, such as the Wallenbergs of Sweden. However, both these families have had close business connections with their Jewish colleagues since the nineteenth century. More telling is the fact that these non-Jewish financial dynasties have never shown any sign of ethnic solidarity with their own peoples, while this is definitely not the case among the Jewish financial elite. On the contrary, they have often played prominent roles in Big Money’s internationalist network. David Rockefeller was one of the primary financiers of the CFR, and was the founding father of both the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, organizations in which the Wallenbergs, among others, have always been represented at the highest levels.

The global revolution that had its origins at the time of the Russian Revolution persisted in the Western world throughout the postwar era, even if not by violent means, and was backed by the same forces that had financed the Revolution of 1917. Since the Second World War, the revolutionary strategy pursued in the West has focused on seeding culturally destructive ideas and promoting anti-social behavior in order to break down the cultural, intellectual and moral fabric of society. This is always done in the name of — what else? — “liberation.”

The agenda of the gradual destruction of the White, Christian West was first expressed clearly and coherently by the Frankfurt School, in the form of “critical theory.” The explicit purpose of this purportedly scientific endeavor was the destructive criticism of morals, tradition, faith, family, and nation — in short: all the cornerstones of Western civilization. Bolton notes that political correctness, the intellectual disease which has infected the contemporary mentality in general and academia in particular for almost half a century, can be directly traced to the Frankfurt School.

As the name suggests, this neo-Marxist school of thought was developed at the University of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial capital. An organization affiliated with the university, the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), was founded there in 1924, funded by the wealthy Argentinian-German Jew, Felix Weil. It attracted young, almost exclusively Jewish, socialist intellectuals from all over Central Europe who, even if they remained Communists, had lost faith in the “revolutionary potential” of the working class. In the eyes of these academic revolutionaries, the workers were instinctively conservative. The destruction of the despicable civilization of Christianity demanded a more thorough revolution in mentality. That was the underlying notion that united Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and their ilk.

The first chapter in the history of the Frankfurt School ended in 1933, when Hitler came to power. Then, this entire group of Jewish Communist academics, humorously enough, relocated from the German capital of finance, Frankfurt, to the world capital of capitalism, New York, where the exiled Institute was hosted by Columbia University. Prominent members such as Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann spent the 1940s in dividing their time between the prestigious Ivy League university and the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Later, in the 1960s, Marcuse was to become the Grand Old Man of the “New Left” and on a par with his colleague Wilhelm Reich as the main ideologue of the “sexual revolution.” Bolton documents how abortion, homosexuality, feminism, psychedelic music, and degenerate art has been fostered by the CIA and lavishly funded by Big Money’s tax-exempt foundations such as Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller. The feminist icon Gloria Steinem has admitted to having worked with the CIA. Evidence has also been uncovered linking drug guru Timothy Leary, propagator of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” catch-phrase of the hippies, to the CIA.

Really, this should come as no surprise to anyone. It goes without saying that if these “subversives” had not had the approval and support of those truly in power, they would have remained in obscurity. It’s that simple.

Apart from the awkward, self-imposed blindness to the Jewish factor in all of this, the most striking flaw of Revolution from Above is that Bolton relies on the testimony of the late Aaron Russo in an interview with Alex Jones, which does not deserve to be dignified in such a manner. Russo was a successful Jewish entrepreneur in the entertainment business who had been Bette Midler’s manager, as well as the producer of films such as The Rose and Trading Places. In the interview with Jones from 2007, Russo, dying of cancer, talked about his friendship with one Nicholas Rockefeller, allegedly a scion of the illustrious family and an insider of the power elite. Even if most of what Russo pretends to remember from their conversations is in accordance with actual events, it falls flat when he claims that the world’s power elite has seriously considered moving the entire state of Israel to Arizona. Whether “Nick” Rockefeller was pulling Russo’s leg, or whether Russo was pulling Jones’, is irrelevant. In either case, it is beyond ludicrous.

In spite of these flaws, the book as a whole is a very well-documented exposé of the ongoing world revolution of cosmopolitan finance. Most of Bolton’s references are easy for the reader to access and consult, if he is inclined to verify them, and Bolton is generous with quotations. And it is especially valuable that he brings the reader up-to-date by covering the roots of the recent subversion in the nations of the former Soviet Union and the Muslim world.

All in all, this is a book that it is very worthwhile to read.

Jonas De Geer is a Swedish writer who lives in Orkney, Scotland. He was the editor of the Swedish conservative magazine Samtidsmagasinet Salt between 1999 and 2002, and has written extensively on nationalist subjects.