MUSIC AND SOCIAL CONSPIRACY

A couple of music writing performances turn up on the 29^th May.

On the 29^th May 1913 Igor Stravinsky's ballet score The Rite of Spring receives its premiere performance in Paris, provoking a riot, would you believe.

On the 29^th May 1942 , Bing Crosby, the Ken Darby Singers and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra record Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", the best-selling Christmas single in history. But why released in May?

 

Something mildly sinister began fifty-eight years ago today on the 29^th May 1954.

The Bilderberg Group, Bilderberg conference, or Bilderberg Club is an annual, unofficial, invitation-only conference of approximately 120 to 140 guests from North America and Western Europe, most of whom are people of influence. About one-third are from government and politics, and two-thirds from finance, industry, labour, education and communications. Meetings are closed to the public.

The original conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg, near Arnhem in the Netherlands, from 29^th May to 31^st May 1954. It was initiated by several people, including Polish politicians Józef Retinger and Andrew Nielsen, concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, who proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism – better understanding between the cultures of the United States and Western Europe to foster cooperation on political, economic, and defence issues. Retinger approached Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who agreed to promote the idea, together with former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland, and the head of Unilever at that time, Dutchman Paul Rijkens. Bernhard in turn contacted Walter Bedell Smith, then head of the CIA, who asked Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson to deal with the suggestion. The guest list was to be drawn up by inviting two attendees from each nation, one of each to represent conservative and liberal points of view. Fifty delegates from 11 countries in Western Europe attended the first conference, along with 11 Americans.

The current membership of the Bilderberg group is drawn largely from West European and North American countries. Writing in 1980, policy analyst Holly Sklar noted that, from the 1950s, elites in the West became concerned that the United Nations was no longer controlled by Western powers, and that this concern was expressed in the participant selection process of the Bilderberg group. Sklar also quoted observations from human rights journalist Caroline Moorehead in a 1977 article critical of the Bilderberg group's membership, who in turn quoted an unnamed member of the group: "No invitations go out to representatives of the developing countries. 'Otherwise you simply turn us into a mini-United-Nations, said one person [a Bilderberger] with scorn. And more revealingly, 'we are looking for like-thinking people and compatible people. It would be worse to have a club of dopes.'" In her article, Moorehead characterized the group as "heavily biased towards politics of moderate conservatism and big business" and claims that the "farthest left is represented by a scattering of central social democrats".

The next conference begins on Thursday 31^st May 2012 until 3^rd June 2012 at Westfields Marriott hotel in Chantilly, Virginia, USA.