(May 12, 1896 – Jan 9, 1979) Oxford-trained, British-allied Harvard history professor, CFR member, and political advisor (ie: handler) to six US presidents and would also serve as a mentor to Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Pierre Trudeau, McGeorge Bundy, among others. He, along with many of his star pupils, would serve as the key connectors between the American national security establishment and the British “Round Table” movement, embodied by organizations such as Chatham House in the UK and the Council on Foreign Relations in the US. They would also seek to impose global power structures shared by Big Business, the political elite and academia.
In writing The Open Conspiracy, the leading British Round Table strategist H.G. Wells set out to recruit a worldwide network of Open Conspirators, who would operate, within their national settings, on behalf of the global subversion of all nation-states, the “scientific” depopulating of the darker-skinned races of the planet, and the establishment of one-world oligarchical domination, under Anglo-American leadership.
Some of the American recruits to the Open Conspiracy were inducted via the “conventional” route of study at England’s major indoctrination centers — Oxford, Cambridge, etc. William Yandell Elliott, the Harvard Open Conspiracy recruiter of a succession of U.S. National Security Advisers, was a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford in the 1920s. He gained his Ph.D. at Baliol College, Oxford under the tutelage of the school’s leading Round Tabler, Alexander D. Lindsay, whose Wilton Park post-World War II indoctrination center was the model upon which Elliott created the Harvard Summer Institute. In published works like The New British Empire, The Need for Constitutional Reform and A Round Table for the Republic, Elliott, who was also a leading figure in the Nashville Agrarian literary circle of Confederacy apologists, made his loyalty to the Open Conspiracy clear.
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The intersecting careers of Strausz-Hupe and Elliott spanned the period from the 1930s through 2002 when Strausz-Hupe died – Elliott died in 1979. Strausz-Hupe wrote for the Harvard Summer Institute’s journal Confluence, and both Kissinger and Yandell Elliott were on the editorial advisory board of Orbis from the very outset. The combined impact of Strausz-Hupe and Elliott on such individuals as Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, and McGeorge Bundy establishes them as pivotal figures in the advancement of the Open Conspiracy.
Their proteges were all key figures in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Without their inside input (individuals like Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, Richard Perle, and Bernard Lewis), the attacks of Sept. 11 would have been impossible. This was the first component of the coup plot — the involvement of “secret teams” of figures from inside the American national security structures.
Family
William Yandell Elliott was the third by that name in a line of “Tennessee Templars,” closely associated with the Masonic founders of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. His grandfather (1827-93) was a Reconstruction-era “radical” Republican legislator who was reported to have provoked deadly racial violence. This “provocateur” charge against the first William Yandell Elliott is supported by the fact that, although ostensibly an anti-slavery Republican, he served under the Masonic command of Ku Klux Klan founding member James Daniel Richardson, who, as a Congress man in 1898, led the campaign for the construction of a memorial to Klan founder Albert Pike in the nation’s capital.
Throughout his life, Elliott operated in concert with an extended network of Nashville-centered cousins and friends descended from this same circle of Ku Klux Klan founders, which formed, variously, the “Fugitive” poets and the “Nashville Agrarians.” (See Stanley Ezrol, “Seduced From Victory: How the Lost Corpse Subverts the American Intellectual Tradition,” EIR, Aug. 3, 2001, for a full account of the ideas and activities of the Nashville Agrarians.)
Education
Webb School, Bell Buckle, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, B.A., 1917; M.A., 1920; Balliol College, Oxford University, London, England (Rhodes Scholar), Ph.D., 1923.
Career
Elliott’s entire career was dedicated to establishing a new “dark age” of globally extended medieval feudalism, built on the ruined remains of the United States and any nation which strove to establish itself on any approximation of American principles. From the Freemasonic elite of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Elliott went on to play a major role in shaping the Cold War predecessor to today’s “clash of civilizations” strategic policy from the period preceding World War II through at least the Johnson Administration. Despite his occasional colorful utterances of loyalty to the United States, he insisted throughout that the real enemy in the Cold War was not communism, but American-style “nationalism.”
Beyond his role in strategic policy, he was an FBI informant, and promoted “anti-communist” education in the public schools. In the 1930s, he pointed out that “left-wing socialists” were among the first to recognize the danger of communism, and later, in the 1950s and ’60s, he collaborated with leading socialists, including Sidney Hook and James Burnham, in the “anti-communist” crusade.
He served as an adviser to at least five Presidential administrations, was mentor to at least five National Security Advisers, the patron of two Secretaries of State, and educator of dozens of officials, including Parliamentary representatives, administrators, and heads of state from countries on every inhabited continent.
Throughout his career, he coordinated operations between his hometown crowd—the “Tennessee Templar” heirs of the Ku Klux Klan—and the Cecil Rhodes’ “Round Table” movement with which he became associated during his Rhodes Scholarship studies at Britain’s Balliol College at Oxford University. His speeches, published work, and private correspondence emphasize that he viewed his life’s work as extending the “Round Table” movement worldwide. His direction of the Harvard Summer School, including Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, and the International Seminar alumni associations which it spawned around the world, were all directed to this purpose. The affinity between the Round Tablers and the Fugitives is indicated by the fact that Fugitive John Crowe Ransom (the grand-nephew of Ku Klux Klan founder, James R. Crowe) preceded Elliott as a Rhodes Scholar, Fugitive, and “Templar”; Bill Frierson accompanied him; and Fugitive Robert Penn Warren succeeded him.
Both movements insisted that the mass of people naturally ought to live under the fixed rules of an oligarchy directed by their “betters.” Both movements hated the American Intellectual Tradition idea that all men and women ought to participate, through the institution of the sovereign nation-state, in the perpetual improvement of human capability over nature— and over stupidity.
Although it is often claimed that Elliott rejected his Agrarian brethren’s yearning for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, he reported publicly, in 1956, at the age of 62, when he was at the height of his Harvard career and an adviser to the National Security Council, that he thought brother Donald Davidson’s “Lee in the Mountains” was one of the finest pieces of Fugitive poetry. There, Davidson conjures up not only the spirit of Robert E. Lee, biding his time till the day of the great reconquest, but God Almighty, “Brooding within the certitude of time, to bring this lost forsaken valor . . . to flower among the hills to which we cleave, to fruit upon the mountains whither we flee, never forsaking, never denying His children and His children’s children forever.”
Also, in 1956, Elliott expressed his gratitude to Fugitive “guru” Sidney Mttron Hirsch, whom he described as a “mystic philosopher,” for teaching him that all of the great thinkers of history were special people with mystical powers, the “Epic Examplars,” who passed on knowledge from generation to generation through the occult meanings of words in their writings. While many thought he was a fat-headed, loud-mouthed pest, it would appear that Elliott viewed himself, and was accepted by some, as at least some sort of messenger to earth of these “Exemplars.” A basic theme in his work is that it’s necessary to develop myths (which is what he means when he speaks of true religion or spirituality) to control people.
His son and collaborator, Ward, for instance, eulogized him as “a true Eleatic, a man who could overarch time and place and deepen and enrich whatever time and place he might occupy.” He compared his mission to that of the Round Table of Arthurian legend (see “A Round Table for the Republic” below). In pursuit of this epic mission, Elliott was quite willing, as we shall see, to plunge all of humanity into a nuclear holocaust and dark age.
The Round Table movement, to which Elliott was recruited by his Oxford tutor, later Master of Balliol, A.D. Lindsay, and others, consisted of semi-secret Masonic or Masonic-like cells dedicated to smashing all nations and replacing them with a revamped British Empire. It was founded by Lindsay’s Oxford predecessors, John Ruskin and T.H. Green, and continued, most notably, by Cecil Rhodes and Lord Alfred Milner, managing director of the mammoth colonial mining cartel Rio Tinto Zinc. Ruskin was the founder of the “pre-Raphaelite” cultural movement, which viewed the Italian Golden Renaissance as the worst disaster of modern history, and strove to restore pre-Renaissance feudalism. They were obsessed with Britain’s loss of its major North American colonies, and determined to reorganize the British Empire into the collection of quasi-autonomous units now known as the “Commonwealth,” both to avoid pressure for further colonial independence, and to lure the United States back into the fold.
Elliott’s four-decade campaign to scrap the U.S. Constitution, based on invidious comparisons to Great Britain and its Canadian colony, is pure Round Table, as is the Royal Institute of International Affairs, headquartered at Chatham House, with which Elliott and his “kindergarten” have coordinated their efforts. Elliott’s Round Table contemporaries included a fellow Lindsay protege´, top British historian and intelligence director of Chatham House, Arnold Toynbee; Lord Lothian of the notoriously pro-Nazi “Cliveden Set”; Lord Leconsfield, later director of Britain’s Tavistock Institute psychological warfare center; and media magnate William Waldorf Astor. The whole intertwined complex of elite “British-American-Canadian” foreign policy think-tanks, councils, and conferences, including the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conferences, the Ditchley Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and dozens of other think-tanks, were founded and operate under the influence of the Round Tables.
Elliott’s tutor Lindsay was a Fabian socialist, and a top activist in the Workers’ Educational Association and the Christian Social movement, both outgrowths of the Round Tables’ “Settlement House” movement, which involved middle and upper class “intellectuals” going slumming to maintain lower-class solidarity with their schemes. In her biography of Lindsay, his daughter, Lady Drusilla Scott, characterized him with these statements from his Oxford associates, which (especially when you realize that Lady Drusilla thought these comments were quite flattering) give a sense of the duplicitous Fabian Round Tabler mentality:
“I have never been able to distinguish in my own mind between Lindsay and Oliver Cromwell. . . . Each of them had a sense of being one of the elect.” “By nature [he is] a lotos-eater [sic], a reactionary, and a believer in aristocracy, who has deluded himself and his friends into regarding him as an idealist, a radical, and a collectivist.”
From 1947 through 1950, after having been dubbed “Lord Lindsay of Birker” as a result of the British Labour Party’s 1946 election victory, Lindsay chaired the Academic Council of the Wilton Park center for “re-educating”Germans to virtually incorporate that nation as a dominion of the Commonwealth. Wilton Park had been founded by Sir Kenneth Strong, Director General of Political Intelligence of the British Foreign Office, later a director of the multinational financial giant, Eagle Star Insurance Co. Its student body, totalling 8,000 in its first decade, were mostly German POWs being re-educated to the Round Table cult. Lecturers included Lord and Lady Astor, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Toynbee, and it was directed by Heinz Koeppler, head of the Foreign Office’s Psychological Warfare Division. Leaders of all major German political parties, and other notables including Ralf Dahrendorf, longtime head of the London School of Economics, were Wilton Park graduates.
Elliott’s other recorded associates at Oxford include the mystic poets William Butler Yeats (the estranged lodge brother of the 20th Century’s top Satanist, Aleister Crowley) and “White Goddess” cultist Robert Graves. In his official capacity as “editor in absentia” of the Fugitive, he used these contacts to promote his “Templar” friends as an international literary phenomenon.
Returned with his Ph.D. from Oxford, Elliott used his base on the Harvard University Government faculty (1925-63) to establish the now familiar pattern of the private university and think-tank functionary, with connections to the highest level of high finance (Elliott’s personal contacts included the Rockefeller brothers, Paul Mellon, W. Averell Harriman, and the Richardson Foundation), serving, at the same time, as a high-level government policy adviser and official. This follows the Round Table insistence that government should be run by the “great interests,” not elected “amateurs.” His associates and protege´s, who developed this pattern to the point of dangerous absurdity, include National Security Advisers McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Richard Allen; Secretaries of State Kissinger and Dean Rusk; and foreign and domestic policy officials Samuel Huntington, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Paul Nitze, and Robert Bowie.
His government work promoted the Round Table “dark age” agenda, both through the internal reorganization of the government, and the development of strategic policies in support of the “New British Empire.” By the end of the 1930s, and increasingly through the 1950s and ’60s, he operated at the highest level of those strategic, quasi-military, quasi-intelligence coup-ist institutions, including the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the National Strategy Information Center, which have been dangerously successful in placing Round Table operatives in leading positions within the U.S. and other governments. He was a frequent lecturer at all sorts of strategic policy and “anti-communist” events, including at U.S. War Colleges and military academies, at least up through the late 1960s.
Influence
Elliott has become the recipient of recent attention, with historians Niall Ferguson and Sean Stone paying close interest to Elliott’s role as Kissinger’s mentor.
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