A recent meeting of the world’s elite figures heard an interesting pitch on climate change.
WHO was last century’s third most significant Pole?
State Scene asks because it’s Sydney-to-a-brick that Lech Walesa and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) take the two top spots since they together helped topple Bolshevism, something experts thought impossible.
But it’s tough naming the third.
The one I’m sometimes tempted to place third ahead of dual Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie-Skodowska (1867–1934), is Józef Hieronim Retinger (1888-1960), who’s largely unknown in the Anglo-sphere.
Therefore, firstly, a brief Retinger CV followed by why he shouldn’t be forgotten.
He was born in Austro-Hungarian controlled Krakow, and attended the same college as Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, aka Joseph Conrad, (1857-1924), with whom he became friends in pre-WWI England.
Retinger was a brilliant student at the Sorbonne and Munich University.
He worked as an agent of influence for a Krakow-based pro-independence group, basing himself in London to gain British backing for Poland, then a three-part colony of Prussia, Russia and Austro-Hungary.
During WWI he had clandestine links to influential Austrian, Vatican, British and French leaders, and throughout 1915-16 worked as an emissary to end that war.
French intelligence blacklisted him in 1917 because of his undercover work, so he departed for Mexico, via the US, where he became adviser to union leader, Luis Morones, and later president Plutarco Elías Calles.
He resurfaced in England in the 1930s, married the daughter of Edmund Morel, British Labour’s foreign affairs supremo, who, in 1922, had defeated Winston Churchill in the seat of Dundee.
Early in WWII Retinger arranged for Poland’s prime minister-in-exile and head of military, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, then fighting in France, to be secretly flown to London to sign a treaty with Churchill for all Polish troops to be evacuated from the collapsing western front to Britain.
During the war Retinger, as General Sikorski’s cabinet secretary, was linkman between the Churchill-Clement Attlee coalition government, plus senior British intelligence establishment officials.
In 1944, Churchill had him secretly parachuted into German-occupied Poland to assess Poland’s anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground army and secret state network.
A British DC-3 secretly landed in Nazi-controlled Poland to fly Retinger out to liberated Italy.
After the war he emerged as a key player in convening a range of influential European and American politicians plus advisers to develop clear-minded policies that helped thwart Moscow’s bid to take over Western Europe.
In other words, he worked to ensure Western Europe didn’t go down Poland’s post-1944 Bolshevised path.
Why is the Retinger legacy important today?
In the early 1950s he organised an ongoing series of confidential conferences between what’s best described as Atlanticists – highly placed Europeans and Americans – to canvass common problems confronting them.
The first was held in the Hotel de Bilderberg, Oosterbeek, Netherlands, in 1954, and to this day crackpot conspiracy theorists contend such high level get-togethers were sinister and aimed at, of all things, controlling the world.
That’s why such cranks use the term, the Bilderbergs – portraying it as a secret society – to help embellish their fantasies.
In fact it’s nothing of the sort. Bilderberg meetings are simply regular brainstorming sessions hosting experts to discuss important issues.
Retinger’s legacy is that such high level meetings are now regular events.
Bilderberg sessions are purely intellectual and informational meetings designed to help policy makers engage important issues of state.
A key understanding is that those attending don’t publicly discuss or comment on what was said, and by whom. Wisely, Chatham House rules strictly apply.
Why recall all this in 2010?
The answer is that London Daily Telegraph columnist, James Delingpole, recently got quite a little scoop.
He somehow obtained some details on the last Bilderberg meeting.
Here’s what he quoted from a rare written leak: “The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3-6 June 2010. The conference will deal mainly with financial reform, security, cyber technology, energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, world food problem, global cooling, social networking, medical science, EU-US relations.”
“Yes, you read it right, ‘global cooling’.”
Now, precisely what was said during the various presentations at Sitges State Scene cannot recount, because that much wasn’t leaked to Delingpole.
But it’s nevertheless interesting that those at the Bilderberg meeting were exposed not merely to climate scepticism, but quite the opposite, since at least one lecture contended planet earth is or may soon be cooling, not warming, as our dear Greens brethren and Prime Minister Julia Gillard so confidently contend.
Here’s more of Delingpole’s report.
“Bilderberg. Whether you believe it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which will lead inexorably to one world government or whether you think it’s just an innocent high-level talking shop, there’s one thing that can’t be denied: it knows which way the wind is blowing.
“At its June meeting in Sitges, Spain (unreported and held in camera, as is Bilderberg’s way), some of the world’s most powerful CEOs rubbed shoulders with notable academics and leading politicians.
“They included: the chairman of Fiat; the Irish attorney general, Paul Gallagher; the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke; Henry Kissinger; Bill Gates; Dick Perle; the Queen of the Netherlands; and the editor of The Economist.
“Definitely not Z-list, in other words.”
Delingpole then quoted the agenda shown above that he’d somehow obtained.
“Yep, that’s right. Global cooling,” he continued.
“Which means one of two things.
“Either it was a printing error.
“Or the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming, but is so far unwilling to admit it except behind closed doors.
“Let me explain briefly why this is a bombshell waiting to explode.
“Almost every government in the Western world from the US to Britain to all the other EU states to Australia and New Zealand is currently committed to a policy of ‘decarbonisation’.
“This in turn is justified to (increasingly sceptical) electorates on the grounds that man-made CO2 is a prime driver of dangerous global warming and must therefore be reduced drastically, at no matter what social, economic and environmental cost.”
Delingpole named some of the guilty and gullible, including three Australians.
“Al Gore, George Soros, Bill Gates, Carol Browner, John Holdren, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Tim Yeo, Michael Mann, Ted Turner, Robert Redford, Phil Jones, Chris Huhne, John Howard (yes really, he was supposed to be a conservative, but he was the man who kicked-off Australia’s emissions trading scheme), Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Yvo de Boer, Rajendra Pachauri ...
“Each in his own way – and whether through ignorance, naivety, idealism or cynicism, it really doesn’t matter for the result has been the same – has done his bit to push the greatest con-trick in the history of science, forcing on global consumers the biggest bill in the history of taxation, using ‘global warming’ as an excuse to extend the reach of government further than it has ever gone before.”
What State Scene wonders is, if the Bilderberg climate cooling speaker(s) hadn’t somehow bought Perth scientist David Archibald’s book: The Past and Future of Climate – Why the world is cooling and why carbon dioxide won’t make a detectable difference.
If so, Józef Retinger would be pleased.
