The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

With its potent amalgamation of secrecy, money and power, the Bohemian Grove has been a target for investigative exposés. In Trance Formation of America (1995) Grove worker Cathy O’Brien recorded lurid tales of sex slaves, although no such torrid goings-on were found by British reporter Jon Ronson when he crashed the Grove for his book Them. Ronson similarly failed to find the Babylonian Brotherhood transforming themselves into giant lizards, as David Icke insisted he would, and nor did he find the New World Order there. «My lasting impression,» wrote Ronson, «was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking … emotionally they [the Grovers] seemed trapped in their college years.»

Many of the liberal-left political protests against the Grove are co-ordinated by the Bohemian Grove Action Network. According to BGAN:

When powerful people work together, they become even more powerful. The Grove membership is wealthy, and becoming more so, while the middle class is steadily becoming poorer. This close-knit group determines whether prices rise or fall (by their control of the banking system, money supply, and markets), and they make money whichever way markets fluctuate. They determine what our rights are and which laws have effect, by appointing judges. They decide who our highest officials shall be by consensus among themselves, and then selling candidates to us via the media which they own. Important issues and facts are omitted from discussion in the press, or slanted to suit their goals, but they are discussed frankly at the Grove. Is there true democracy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands? Is there any real difference between the public and private sectors when cabinet members come from the boardrooms of large corporations? Is the spending of billions on weapons, which are by consensus no longer needed, really the will of the people? Or is it the will of General Electric, General Dynamics, and the other weapons contractors represented at the Grove?

The BGAN overstates the case: the Grove is too unwieldy to rule America and thus the world. Aside from injecting an annual morale-boosting shot in the arm to the US Eurocentric male elite, the Grove is a good ole boys’ networking opportunity. It is the place in America to win friends (and contracts, jobs …) and influence people in high places.

Bohemian Gravers rule America as invisible dictators: ALERT LEVEL 4

Further Reading

Peter Martin Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, PhD thesis, University of California Davis, 1994

Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures Among Extremists, 2001

Martin Bormann

Old Nazis never die. They go to Antarctica or, in the case of Adolf Hitler, to the Nazi Moon Base. Or, more plausibly, in the case of Martin Bormann they go to the Soviet Union.

In May 1941 Bormann was made Nazi Party Chancellor, a position he used to become the Third Reich’s main bureaucrat. He was also Hitler’s right-hand man, his personal secretary and his sounding board, and remained with the Führer until the end. The last incontestable sighting of Bormann was in the early hours of 2 May 1945, on Invalidenstrasse Bridge in Berlin, as he sought to escape from encircling Russian troops. Post-war investigation by the Allies surmised that Bormann had committed suicide or been killed near the bridge, but in the absence of a body there could be no confirmation. For two decades rumours flew that Bormann was alive and well and living in (variously) Germany, South America and Spain. Then, in 1971, Reinhard Gehlen published his memoirs, The Service, which stated as fact that Bormann had survived the war and hidden from view in the unlikeliest place of all, the USSR, where he had only recently died.

Unlike other Bormann spotters, Gehlen had pedigree. He was the former head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front and, with the help of the CIA and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had taken on the job of spy chief in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Gehlen asserted that there existed film of Bormann watching sports with Soviet bigwigs. And he made another sensational claim: Bormann was the Russian spy code-named Werther who had infiltrated Hitler’s military planning sessions, and passed on the top-secret knowledge to Moscow that Russia needed to win Stalingrad, Kursk and other battles on the Eastern Front.