David Frum on the Bilderberg Group
The Bilderberg Conspiracy apparently met this weekend in Sitges, Spain. What? You’ve never heard of Sitges? That’s because the Bilderbergers made it up. It’s not a real city. They even went so far as to make up a Wikipedia page for it; there’s even one in Catalan! They also invented a backstory for it and got a whole bunch of gay people to claim that it’s a great destination for a beach vacation. Now that’s thorough, though it doesn’t fail the descamisados who know the truth.
Once again, I was not invited. However, David Frum spent some time at the Bilderberg Group in the 1990s as a guest of Conrad Black. (Presumably, Lord Black was not in attendance this year, as he’s currently in a federal prison in Colorado, where he seems to be having a fine old time.)
I don’t mean that Bilderberg meetings are boring. They aren’t, not especially. They are precisely as interesting as any other conference that focuses on global economic data, the urgency of European integration, and the ever-rising menace of populist conservatism in the United States. I cannot recall ever hearing anything said in off-the-record conversations that the person speaking would not have said on-the-record…. The idea of Bilderberg as a shadow world government is rather funny. Bilderberg itself demurs, on grounds that the group only hosts discussions, never adopts resolutions or anything like that. But that’s not the real rebuttal. Unlike Davos, Bilderberg is a membership organization: Most attendees return every year. Over time, this practice has given Bilderberg a distinct yesteryear quality. You were much more likely to meet an “ex” this or “former” that than anyone in office today. Guests too tended to reflect the interests and enthusiasms of prior decades. You wouldn’t meet Bono at Bilderberg. (Or rather – you wouldn’t have in the 1990s. Maybe you would now!) For this reason, already it was true in the 1990s that Bilderberg felt itself being overtaken by glitzier competitors, especially the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nobody would ever describe Bilderberg as glitzy. Meetings were decidedly low-tech: panel discussions, not powerpoints. The group met in comfortable but hardly sumptuous resort hotels. Meals were served buffet style, with the group’s patron, the Queen of the Netherlands, carrying her own plate and joining the queue. It was precisely the anachronistic quality of Bilderberg that always fascinated me most and that looms largest in my own memory. Scene: I’m in the hotel bar after a Bilderberg session in Belgium. I get into conversation with an elderly fellow-attendee, a wealthy German businessman. Then: “You know, I was a Nazi.” Weren’t a lot of people? “Oh yes. But I was especially ardent. I volunteered for service in Russia.” What happened? “My parents were aghast. They thought the war was madness. They were influential people – and so my father got me an assignment as military attaché in Portugal. That’s the only reason I’m alive now.”
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