Tag: mollison

Cecil Rhodes Channeled by Karl Mollison 19Mar2019

From: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_roundtable_1.htm

CECIL RHODES AND HIS IMPERIAL VISION The Round Table was the product of two people: Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925).

This was not to be a living partnership, given Rhodes’s untimely death well before the Round Table was founded and their limited contacts while he was alive, but more of a posthumous association in which Milner sought to realize Rhodes’s dream of a unified British Empire.

As prominent Round Table member Leopold Amery (1873-1955) later observed, “If the vision was Rhodes’, it was Milner who over some twenty years laid securely the foundations of a system whose power … throughout the English-speaking world … would be difficult to exaggerate”.

While his claims of the Round Table’s power can be forgiven as wishful thinking, Amery by no means overstates the importance of Rhodes and Milner.

Cecil Rhodes is better known as the founder and primary owner of the famous diamond company, De Beers; as creator of the colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe); and as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.

Compelled by a life-threatening heart condition to leave Britain, Rhodes had travelled in the 1870s to southern Africa where he made his fortune in the diamond-mining boom in the Kimberley region. It was there that Rhodes first demonstrated his desire for centralized control. 

In 1888 Rhodes realized his vision, collaborating with share dealer Alfred Beit and the London bankers Nathaniel M. Rothschild and Sons to buy out rival mining companies throughout the Kimberley region. The product of this collusion was a single diamond mining company, De Beers Consolidated Mines. Trans-African railway stretching from the Cape to Cairo, were for him personally costly and conspicuous failures. 

Rhodes was using the plans of others to fulfill his broader vision. As one historian observed: “Rhodes was not a thinker; he was doer. He appropriated the ideas of others rather than conceiving ideas himself.”

Significantly, the only exception to this rule was his most ambitious grand design of all: imperial federation.

This is not an accepted fact in most accounts, including in Quigley’s book where the famous British artist John Ruskin is cited as the sole source of Rhodes’s enthusiasm for imperial federation. Rhodes is said to have attended the inaugural lecture given at Oxford in 1870 by Ruskin, then Professor of Fine Arts, and to have been so inspired that he kept a copy of the lecture with him for the next 30 years, regarding it as “one of his greatest possessions” (Quigley).

The problem with this version of events is that Rhodes did not attend Oxford until September 1873, thus obviously missing Ruskin’s lecture; more importantly, as Rotberg notes, there is “absolutely no evidence…that Rhodes was ever affected by Ruskin’s popularity and the cult which helped spread his message of light, right and duty”.

There are certainly good grounds for supposing that Rhodes would have agreed with most of Ruskin’s message that Britain’s destiny, “the highest ever set before a nation”, was to make it “for all the world a source of light” by founding colonies “as far and as fast as she is able to”.18 There is, however, no single source of inspiration for Rhodes’s dream of unifying the British Empire.

See https://www.corbettreport.com/wwi/ &

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes & https://spartacus-educational.com/Jstead.htm & 

https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com/ & https://www.clearnfo.com/tag/cecil-rhodes/