Writing in the Telegraph, Iain Hollinghurst notes that this year’s Bilderberg…
…[is] thought to include Angela Merkel, Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, and Gustavo A Cisneros Rendiles, a Venezuelan media mogul.
Sneering at “conspiracy theorists“, he goes on to reflect that…
The reality of these conferences appears to boil down to a group of willy-waggling old men comparing their security details and dreaming of past glories.
The CEO of Deutsche Bank is “dreaming of past glories“? Angela Merkel is a “willy-waggling old m[a]n“? Was this piece stitched together by committee or what?
A similar piece in last week’s Times poured on disdain like maple syrup…
…the leaked invitation list reveals that the gathering is made up primarily of elderly white gents.
Only the possible attendance of George Osborne, 39, the British Chancellor, will reassure hotel staff that they are not dealing with a Saga Holidays tour.
Do Saga Holidays offer policemen, lockdowns and no-fly zones? Well, it’s good to be valued, but that must get a little — stifling, doesn’t it? And, besides, as “Hollinghurst” brings himself to admit, Blair, Clinton and Thatcher were guests of Bilderberg before their ascendance to power.
Could it be…that the Bilderbergers are simply having fun, away from their spouses, on their annual jamboree?
Perhaps it’s a failure of my imagination but I can’t see Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller nipping down to a local cash and carry, buying up the party rings.
It’s not a great reflection on our press that as some of the world’s most powerful, influential figures meet behind closed doors, they direct the spotlight onto some of its most enfeebled and least consequential. One doesn’t have to accept the fears of an “electronic global police state” to shudder at, retch over or just be interested in the Bilderberg. Even William Domhoff, who rejects “conspiracism“, sees it as a place for the elites to “reach consensus” and affirm “social cohesion“. With the artful, growing unity of state and business power-mongers this alone puts the Group’s Catalonian nest among the most portentous hotels since the Overlook. As activists and researchers are harassed by the fierce watchmen, and the media blinds itself with tears of helpless laughter, it’s also a quite vomitous spectacle.
June 30, 2010 at 11:05 am
[...] and other noxious enterprises far too artful to be mere “causal randomness“. They conspire; they influence; they set down patterns to be [...]
July 5, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I do admire your turn of phrase – and how wit and everyday observation sits comfortably alongside elucidation of the acerbic realities of geopolitics and media servitude.
“Perhaps it’s a failure of my imagination but I can’t see Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller nipping down to a local cash and carry, buying up the party rings.”
Sardonic, surreal and semiosis.
July 13, 2010 at 12:38 am
Why, thank you, Kit! Watch out, though: keep leaving comments as generous as these and people might suspect me of inventing you.
September 19, 2010 at 2:20 am
[...] at the Bilderburg Group, a discreet knitting bee for global brahmins. Happily the papers have informed me that the Bilderburg “boil[s] down to a group of willy-waggling old men” and so [...]
October 20, 2010 at 2:44 am
[...] who typically arise from kindred social and corporate spheres; forgive respective sins and meet in secretive and often wildly surreal collectives. Richard Hofstadter’s failure to note this in his fames [...]
June 4, 2011 at 2:35 am
[...] year the press acknowledged this by mocking anyone who thought such an event might be important. It’s just a bunch “willy-waggling old [...]
June 9, 2011 at 6:24 pm
[...] you don’t have to believe the Bilderberg is an omnipent elite to find its secretive union of power disquieting. You [...]
June 18, 2011 at 12:52 am
[...] giants of our media can’t actually think it’s just a camp for willy-waggling old men. If they were that stupid their newspapers would consist of finger paints on toilet roll and their [...]
June 2, 2012 at 1:16 am
[...] Bilderberg conference is taking place in Virginia in 2012. In the past couple of years we’ve been assured that it’s just “a group of willy-waggling old men…dreaming of past glories”. Given [...]