Perloff, James. The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and
the American Decline. Appleton WI: Western Islands, 1988. 264 pages.
This is a John Birch Society publication. In other words, the author
takes a worthy notion, supports it with rather good research, and then runs
with it for the goalpost on the wrong end of the field. Perloff, who is also
a contributing editor for JBS's "The New American," claims to have once been
a campus radical, until he realized that leftist students were tools of a
very clever Establishment. So far, so good -- a case can be made for this.
Perloff makes a stronger case for earlier elitist machinations -- such as
those that gave us the Federal Reserve, or that got us into the world wars
and Vietnam. But his research starts taking some curious turns in the 1950s
-- a decade that started with McCarthy, and ended with the founding of JBS.
The JBS line infects a couple dozen pages in this book, and it can be
easily spotted and bracketed, now that the Cold War is over. The weirdness
has to do with JBS's theory that CFR elites are really closet communists,
and that they are consciously bringing America into decline for the sake of
the new world communist order. Oops, fast-forward ten years, when globalism
rules while communism is dead. Now it's clear that while communism had its
own global ambitions, it was never in cahoots with the globalism practiced
by Atlantic elites. If only JBS could find it within themselves to give up
the ghost of communism, they might yet have something to contribute.
ISBN 0-88279-134-6
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