All of the actions taken from then until now point to the goal of acquiring the oil reserves of which Everette Lee DeGolyer, the singular guru of oil they regarded as the preeminent world expert, had said, “No such galaxy of fields of the first magnitude over such a wide area has been developed previously in the history of the oil industry.” DeGolyer had returned from a survey of the Middle East.
The corporate interests, now merged with government in the US, were following through with a strategy intended to lower the costs of corporations in obtaining oil. Oil was the life's blood that pumped through their veins. The fact that Communism was no threat was irrelevant; the corporations needed a threat so they could continue to justify control just as they do today with threats of extremist Muslims.
The individuals who then were organizing to oppose them were gulled by the threats of Communism; they believed the people who they thought of as fellow Americans. The real Conservatives were naive but honest. They included men like Taft and Barry Goldwater; Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. They came from diverse background but they shared a belief in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the free market that America had never really had. They believed in individual freedom and the sovereignty of the individual before the existence of government. They dreams of freedom.
To men like Buckley, operating in the 50s and 60s, it must have been like stealing candy from a baby. Buckley's motives went deep. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., had been an oil man in Venezuela whose interests were truncated by the move in that country to take control of that resource.
Buckley had very personal motives.
Now it is clear that all of those closely associated with the small group who worked to eviscerate the role of the United Nations, manicure the political environment in the United States, and weld the corporations to government had ties to Big Oil. The small group included George H. W. Bush, Sr., Maurice Strong, and Robert O. Anderson. Big Oil understood how much they had to lose if Americans had real choices. This period is also marked by the disappearance of various better carburetors and other innovations that improved gas and oil efficiency. These patents were typically bought up by oil companies and never used.
Communism was a distraction that kept the eyes of Americans off the ball and allowed for the continued plundering of oil reserves in the Middle East – and elsewhere as they were discovered.
Back home, Buckley made sure that the use of the military as an adjunct for corporate leveraging against other countries continued by destroying the potential objections from within the Conservative Movement.
Using government in this way gave rise to a very different attitude about their own mis gotten wealth and about people who lived simple, decent lives. You see the fully developed attitude in this Straussianism, which expressed this as, “if you are destined to rule then you may rightly ignore the rules made for lesser men.” This is self serving and ugly and it is possible that the hyper intellectual rationalizations used by Buckley and the others came from their unconscious knowledge that their actions were morally and ethically bankrupt.
Many of Buckley's fellow CIA recruits shared his affiliation with Skull and Bones, where who you know and how, provides yet another layer of artificial elitism. Members of that fellowship guaranteed a lifetime of easy times paid for by those whose long term associations have made them rich at the expense of ordinary Americans. Few are inclined to bite the hand that holds the caviar.
Those who employed Bush, Buckley and their cronies are the descendants of the mercantilists either by genes or by practice.
No matter where they come from they share that they are the inheritors of the devious practices of those who see government as an extension of their power. Today we know them as Corporatists, Oil Barons, the 28,000 Elite. Their moral ancestors were the ship owners who ignored the disgust of other New Englanders, making their services available to slavers and dealing in slaves themselves.
Earlier generations knew them as the people who moved in on the profits to be made from the Civil War, a war fought to establish a more powerful Federal State and not to end slavery. A generation later John D. Rockefeller would establish his own line of avarice using the same techniques.
William F. Buckley was never a Conservative any more than Monica Lewinsky was an innocent virgin when she met Bill Clinton. And examination of his actions over a life time reveals no nuance of action that affirmed the principles of Conservatism. His stock in trade was deceptive rhetoric. Debunking the ideas of Conservatism by his failure to defend them over and over again, he continued to claim the mantle. He could never have accomplished that if he had not gone after the real leaders of that movement.
Buckley's 1957 attack on Ayn Rand came in the form of a bizarre review of “Atlas Shrugged,” her most prominent novel, put out under the imprimatur of National Review. National Review would follow the strategy of later publications that are used in serial to excoriate individuals and reframe issues while continuing to carry enough unexceptional material so as to keep philosophical adherents oblivious to the real agenda, puzzled but not moved to attack.
Also essential was to control the youth. In 1960 Buckley used his estate in Sharon, Connecticut for the founding meeting of the Young Americans for Freedom. This did not work out as planned. The group immediately broke into two factions, reflecting two viewpoints that continue to drive politics today. The Rockefeller wing was a simple political extension of corporatism. The Conservative wing eventually dominating, representing the principles of small government, individual rights, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. These had been the principles of Robert Taft, who Buckley sought to displace in the minds of young Americans by promoting the candidacy of Barry Goldwater.
