The Vice of Kings. Jasun Horsley

defended Rome from Hannibal's mighty Carthaginian army. Fabius's tactics involved “gradualism” and “terrorism,” delaying tactics which were greatly disapproved of by his soldiers and the civilians, and which earned him the name of “the Delayer.” After these tactics triumphed, however, his skill and wisdom was more appreciated.

      Moving past the more or less established history of Fabianism, I found a compelling, and damning, description of the Fabian plan as central to the whole “New World Order” millennia-long Conspiracy (big “C”), in an archived essay called “Fabian Influence on Council Developments in New Zealand” (Christian, 2006). One premise of the information was that the Fabian Society was behind the various Labour movements in Britain and that it concealed elitist, and even capitalist, interests. This was something I could vouch for from direct experience, having grown up in a wealthy socialist family (we were called “champagne socialists”) who were above all business people but also actively involved in local (and, I was slowly discovering, global) politics, in seemingly reformist and New Left movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), all having, sometimes obvious sometimes less so, ties to the Fabian Society.

      According to another online source (Cassivellaunus, 2013), the Fabian Society has 7000 members, 80 percent (5,600) of whom are members of the Labour Party, amounting to about three percent of the general Labour Party membership (about 190,000 in 2010). The Fabian percentage increases dramatically in the higher reaches of the Labour Party.³ George Bernard Shaw declared the aim of Fabian educational reform as entailing the creation of a minister for education, with “control over the whole educational system, from the elementary school to the University, and over all educational endowments” (S. Webb, 1889, p. 55). This allegedly led to the creation of a wide range of interconnected organizations, societies, and movements. In education, councils like the London County Council, university societies, and schools like the London School of Economics, Imperial College, and London University. In culture, the New Age movement (Annie Besant was a founding Fabian), the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Leeds Arts Club, the Fabian Arts Group, and the Stage Society. In economics, the LSE again, the Royal Economic Society, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). In law, the Haldane Society (named after Fabian Society member Lord Haldane). In medicine: the Socialist Medical League. In religion, the Labour (later Socialist) Church movement, the Christian Socialist Crusade, the Christian Socialist League, the Christian Socialist Movement. And so on (you get the picture).

      Shaw expressed a desire to make the Fabians “the Jesuits of Socialism,” while H. G. Wells (number four on the Fabian executive after Webb, Pease, and Shaw) proposed to turn the whole Society into a ruling order, similar to the “Samurai” in his A Modern Utopia. That the Fabians consciously sought the company, collaboration, and support of the wealthy and powerful is evident from Fabian writings such as Beatrice Webb's Our Partnership, which abound in references to “catching millionaires,” “wire-pulling,” “moving all the forces we have control over,” while at the same time taking care to “appear disinterested” and claiming to be “humble folk whom nobody suspects of power” (B. Webb, 1948, p. 196).

      The reliable John Taylor Gatto affirms this view in Underground History of American Education:

      As the movement developed, Fabians became aristocratic friends of other social-efficiency vanguards like Taylorism or allies of the Methodist social gospel crowd of liberal Christian religionists busy substituting Works for Faith in one of the most noteworthy religious reversals of all time. Especially, they became friends and advisors of industrialists and financiers, travelers in the same direction. This cross-fertilization occurred naturally, not out of petty motives of profit, but because by Fabian lights evolution had progressed furthest among the international business and banking classes!…Fabian practitioners developed Hegelian principles which they co-taught alongside Morgan bankers and other important financial allies over the first half of the twentieth century. (2006, p. 182)

      Gatto trumps and essentially invalidates a large subculture of conspiracy theorists and right-wing, anti-socialist writers, by pointing out:

      One insightful Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently it was necessary first to co-opt both political Left and political Right. Adversarial politics—competition—was a loser's game. By infiltrating all major media, by continual low-intensity propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished through principles developed in the psychological-warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents and press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat. (2006, pp. 182–183)

      “When I was young, my friends at Oxford consisted largely of Fabian Socialists, and not a few of the dons were themselves Socialists. Today, of course, they would not call themselves Fabian Socialists, but Marxian Communists.”

      —G. K. Chesterton

      A few more suggestive facts: Hubert Bland, cofounder of the Fabian Society and a bank employee-turned-journalist, worked for the London Sunday Chronicle, a paper owned by newspaper magnate Edward Hulton. It was allegedly Bland who recruited his friend and fellow journalist George Bernard Shaw to the Fabian Society (Cassivellaunus, 2013). Hulton's son, Edward G. Hulton, was the owner of Picture Post and “almost certainly a loyal agent of MI6's Section D” (Dorril & Ramsay, 1990).⁴ He was also the founder of the 1941 Committee, a think tank that recruited “star” writers J. B. Priestley and Tom Wintringham, and that also included David Astor (more on him soon), Sir Richard Acland, and my grandfather. Alec mentions Acland in his short memoir in reference to Acland and Priestley's Common Wealth, in which Alec “took a very active part.” Acland was also a Quaker, which Alec later became.

      G. B. Shaw's friend, Fabian Society leader Sidney Webb, married Beatrice, daughter of Richard Potter, a wealthy financier with international connections who was chairman of the Great Western and Grand Trunk railways of England and Canada. Beatrice was also a close friend of Rothschild associate and Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Rothschild and Balfour were founding members of the Round Table. When I first wrote this chapter I included the data point that my grandfather was one of the two “Round Table's main British backers” during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.⁵ I found this startling, to say the least, since I understood the Round Table to be a massive, multinational organization and though my grandfather was rich, I didn't think he was that rich. Eventually I got ahold of the book that contained this quote, Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism, by Archie Potts, and discovered that Potts was referring to the East-West Round Table, an organization about which there is very little information but which had to do with peace negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, something my grandfather was apparently deeply involved in. Whether there was any connection between this Round Table and the Round Table of Rothschild and Balfour is something I have been unable to find out. At the very least, with my grandfather as the vesica piscis between the two, some of the same names and causes seem to crop up around both.

      For example, the aforementioned David Astor, alleged MI6 agent and editor of the UK paper The Observer, was the grandson of William Waldorf (the first). He lobbied for the release of Myra Hindley in the 1970s along with Lord Longford. My grandfather visited Hindley in jail and my brother wrote letters to her. Astor was also affiliated with the Round Table Group. According to author and Lobster editor Stephen Dorril, Astor

      created the Europe Study Group to look at the problems of Europe and the prospects for a non-nationalist Germany. At the core of the group were a number of emigré Germans destined to play a role in the European Movement, such as the future leader writer on the Observer, Richard “Rix” Lowenthal. Interviewed for recruitment by MI6, Astor was turned down for a full-time post but was subsequently used by MI6 officer Lionel Loewe to establish contact with the German opposition. Employed as the press officer in Lord Mountbatten's Combined Operations Headquarters in London, Astor continued with his group, which drew on the ideas of the Cecil Rhodes-inspired Round Table Group and its belief that “the British Empire should federate.” (Dorril, 2002, p. 456)

      This places