rigorousintuition.ca

I've always heard that CTers like this book. I think it's written by a pretty run of the mill academic historian. A professor that Bill Clinton had in college! So theres that...

I started, but didn't get very far (I have a pdf and was reading it on a e-book reader which didn't help). It's 1 000 pages long so it does feel like a slog. I got a lot out of another, shorter text of Quigley's though, The Anglo-American Establishment. At 60 pages it's a quick read and very enlightening.

I've got it on pdf now also. Thanks for mentioning that, it didn't come across my mind to look for it....

I've read most it; in the early '90s I had a copy for a few months on interlibrary loan. It's well worth reading, in my opinion. And Quigley is no run-of-the-mill professor; a lot of foreign service people took his classes at Georgetown. (Along with Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi was one of his students.) I've told friends that if they read only one history book, "T & H" might be the one.

I had to give it back before I could read it all, but I photocopied large chunks. I've been meaning to get my own copy ever since, so thanks for the .pdf idea; last time I looked for it free online I could only find abridged versions where someone had snipped out parts that seemed to serve some one-issue "confirmation bias." I still want to get a physical copy so I can laze in bed with it (ain't got no fancy e-readers or laptops).

I'd say Quigley pulls few punches, and covers a lot of stuff that just isn't found in the usual academic history books. After all, he says he was privy to the insiders' "network" and "studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years in the early 1960s to examine its papers and secret records." His conclusions at the end might be a little nutty ('we need to return to 15th century mores'? wtf?) but the history itself seems solid.

And yes, 'conspiracy nuts' (usually far-right JBS sorts) often cite a couple of interesting passages. I first heard of it in another book, Gary Allen's "None Dare Call It Conspiracy," a fascinating but stinky book which I might write about here someday.

Thing is, there really is a long-term conspiracy and Quigley lays it out pretty explicitly. The "Round Table group" is a thread running through much of the book, and he spells out how the American two-party sham was planned long ago. Apparently his "insider network" friends weren't happy about his spilling the beans, but he says he objected to their secrecy about their aims.

What I meant by run of the mill was simply that he was not in the deep political/para-political field at all. But I guess with the material he gave credence to in studying and writing about he was de facto if not de jure deep political (for lack of a better way of putting it).

p.s. Of course, those terms (deep political, para-political) did not exist at his time.

Montag wrote:What I meant by run of the mill was simply that he was not in the deep political/para-political field at all. But I guess with the material he gave credence to in studying and writing about he was de facto if not de jure deep political (for lack of a better way of putting it).

Okay, I see. Yeah, I think he certainly went deeper than other academic historians of his day. And as far as I can tell, mainstream historians today pretty much ignore his work. I guess it would be stepping off the deep end a liitle too far for them, a can of worms they just don't want to open.