You are the only person that can clear this up once and for all. What exactly is the Bilderberg Group? There have been accusations on the Larry King show that it is some kind of secret organization that has a lot of influence in shaping world events today and in the past. According to one caller, Bill Clinton was at one of their meetings a few years ago. Is any of this true? What’s the deal? –J.D. Levine, Mount Royal, Quebec
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As for the Bilderbergers, they’re another one of those discussion groups for world leaders that have become a target of right wing crazy people. They’re a little more secretive than most. You may remember we had a similar question some years ago about the Trilateral Commission, which also sponsors meetings of international big shots. I was delighted to discover that this supposedly secret nerve center of the one-world conspiracy was listed in the New York phone book.
Turns out there isn’t really a Bilderberg “group” (although there is a 30-or-so-member steering committee), just an annual Bilderberg meeting, so named because it was first held in May 1954 in the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland. Why Holland? It was the tulips, surely, but also the fact that the thing was organized by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a devout internationalist who wanted to get selected leaders from Europe and North America together on a regular basis to talk about global problems. (The Japanese weren’t and aren’t invited–one of the reasons for the Trilateral Commission, in fact, was to cut the Japanese in on the world conspiracy action.) Typically there are about 100 attendees; apart from the core group, it’s usually different people from government, business, and labor each time. Bill Clinton made the cut a couple years ago.
