FT266

Recently, I Googled ‘Bilderberg’ and got 2,700,000 hits, a moderately impressive number for one of the key elements in the English-language conspirasphere. [1] Why am I looking at Bilderberg again? Because among those 2.7 million Google hits is the organisation’s own new Website – bilderbergmeetings.org.

In the 1970s, when I first became interested in the Bilderberg Group, the major media accepted the organisation’s request for zero publicity and information was scarce. The first article about it in the UK, by Robert Eringer, didn’t appear until 1976, 22 years after Bilderberg’s foundation.

Over the next 20 years there was a trickle of information, and when I wrote to Bilderberg’s Dutch office in 1999 asking if the late John Smith, leader of the Labour Party before Tony Blair, had been on their steering committee, they replied, giving me the dates of Smith’s membership. That trickle grew steadily, climaxing in 2007 with the leaking of the minutes of the 1999 meeting. As minutes of meetings usually are, these were dull. Former George Bush speechwriter David Frum, who attended several Bilderberg meetings, commented recently: “I well understand the group’s intense need for secrecy: if Bilderberg meetings were open to the public – if they were carried live on C-SPAN – the intense global fascination with the mysterious group would vanish at a puff. I don’t mean that Bilderberg meetings are boring. They aren’t, not especially. They are precisely as interesting as any other conference that focuses on global economic data, the urgency of European integration, and the ever-rising menace of populist conservatism in the United States. [2]

So, why the secrecy? My guess would be that it was originally to protect left-of-centre attendees from their political opponents. Denis Healey, for example, who went to several meetings, may have written about them in his autobiography after his retirement from politics, but what use could his left-wing opponents in the Labour Party of the 1970s have made with the information that he was hugger-mugger with the big players of international capitalism? Even Prime Minister Blair, with no ‘left’ opponents to worry about, initially tried to conceal his presence at the 1993 meeting.

The appearance of bilderbergmeetings.org appears to be a victory for the Bilderberg-hunters like Jim Tucker, who has been pursuing them for over 20 years, and Daniel Estulin, who has written a multimillion-selling book about them. [3] But, these days, even parts of the major British media are reporting on their activities [4] and it may be that, as David Frum suggests in his piece, the meetings' significance has simply declined.

And if, as you were reading the previous sentence, you found yourself thinking, “Then the power has moved to another forum”, then welcome to the conspirasphere!

Notes
1 Moderate compared with, say, 'mind control', which has 50 times as many. I thought I'd coined the word 'conspirasphere' but there are a few Google hits for that too!
2 Google "Frum + national post + bilderberg"
3 The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, Trineday, USA, 2007.
4 For example, Google "Daily Telegraph + Bilderberg Group".