The Necessity of Power Elite Analysis in Understanding our World

August 14, 2025

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-necessity-of-power-elite-analysis-in-understanding-our-world/

From ancient Sumer to the present, all governments have been composed of elites. All states originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, exercise a monopoly of crime over their subjects through war and taxation, indoctrination and propaganda, and the conscription of resources and persons.

The subject matter of “Establishment Studies” or “Power Elite Analysis” is understanding this struggle for power in its diverse open and covert forms between the rulers and the ruled, between the elite and the non-elite, between “the ins” and “the outs.”

The primary object of every ruling elite is to maintain its own power and privilege. The rule of the elite is based on force or fraud. This force may be hidden or threatened, and the fraud sustained by a political formula, usually expressed as a generally accepted state religion, ideology, or series of myths. But it is the physical force of the gun that lay behind it all. And it is at your mind that every government gun is ultimately aimed.

Respected observers such as Robert Barnes, Murray N. Rothbard, Ferdinand Lundberg, John McConaughy, Phillip H. Burch, Jr., Thomas R. Dye, Matthew Josephson, Kevin Phillips, Thomas Ferguson, and Carroll Quigley have detailed and cataloged the specific elite criminal elements behind previous presidential administrations.

After 50 years of intense study I believe the biggest critical issue confronting the American people is the elite’s New World Order of a corporatist Social Credit economy (based upon the Chinese model) with centralized political control in a totalitarian technocratic entity, with all pervasive mass surveillance by facial recognition databases and coercive regimentation. These invasive actions are running parallel with the transition to a cashless society with all financial transactions monitored through digitalized biometric identification using such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning — ultimately a microchip electronic device implanted subcutaneously (subdermally). This is the global governance of the Great Reset.

An understanding of Power Elite Analysis is the “litmus test” separating real libertarians and populists from alternative lifestyle dilettantes dabbling in free market theory.

Sometimes labeled “Power Elite Analysis” or “Establishment Studies,” this examination of causal relationships regarding the nature and scope of political power, who has it and how it is exercised, is crucial to understanding the nexus of the State as organized crime.

Note the similarity between this analysis and what researcher Peter Dale Scott calls “Deep Politics,” the critical examination of the sub-rosa reality behind surface events, an attempt to unmask the true face of power, exposing the elite social, economic, and financial groups and individuals who benefit from the exercise of State coercion.

Contemporary events and the persons involved in them are not isolated random or static occurrences. There is a crucial backstory or history to them, the actual story behind the spurious or propagandist accounts put forth by the establishment “fake news” regime media or court academia.

Understanding the dynamics and interplay of power relationships is often not easy for it requires diligence and tenacious research in order to seek authoritative and definitive answers to what is going on in these events.

Fortunately, there are dedicated scholarly researchers who trace the often arcane and internecine networks and interlocking relationships of these actors – their backgrounds, conspiratorial action, mentors and criminal associates, who flesh out these events.

Let us examine the important question of American intervention in war over the past century.

As I pointed out above, history is not static but a dynamic course of study. Events, particularly surrounding savage wars and their origins, are not frozen in time but are constantly being reinterpreted, analyzed, and reassessed by new knowledge and archival revelations.

The question for someone in the present is not whether the US should have intervened in these conflicts but what have we learned from this previous century of war, destruction, and the needless death of millions?

What we now know concerning the horrific wars of the previous century, as well as 21st century conflicts such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, and Syria, provides us with a historical template to guide us in making future principled decisions concerning intervention or non-intervention.

Briefly, working backwards, how has the exposed linkage of the insidious relationship behind the creation, recruiting, funding and enabling of the Taliban by Pakistani ISI intelligence (which in turn was funded and enabled by the US government), impact upon the willfully ignorant inhabitants of the United States of Amnesia’s cognitive dissonance narcosis of unreality, that both sides of the disastrous 20 year Afghanistan narco-state proxy war was waged and financed by the US — and yet once again they have been played as naïve suckers and rubes?

What have revelations concerning non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, deliberately falsified intelligence from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, and an elaborately coordinated media disinformation campaign done for the case for US intervention in Iraq in 2003? For falsified (and/or still classified) information concerning the September 11th attacks leading to intervention against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan?

What has declassified revelations from the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Venona files in the United States done to totally reshape the narrative story of espionage and the Cold War?

What has archival revelations concerning the Pentagon Papers and the deliberately contrived Gulf of Tonkin Incident done to spurious justification for the massive intervention in the Vietnam conflict?

What has fifty years of revelations concerning the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State done to totally reassess the dynamic behind the change in US policy toward Vietnam within days of JFK’s assassination? How have the powerful behind-the-scenes revelations concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 aided in seeing a more complete picture regarding Kennedy’s murder and the subsequent change of policy toward Vietnam?

How have incisive revelations concerning the birth of the National Security State in 1947 impacted the story of the Cold War? How have revelations concerning the use of former Nazi intelligence officers in the Reinhard Gehlen organization grafted upon US military intelligence and the CIA, been shown to have provided unreliable and provocative disinformation which fueled early Cold War tensions?

How have decisive revelations concerning the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor reshaped the narrative of US intervention into WWII?

How have revelations concerning the Hitler/Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 affected our historical portrait of the larger story of how the Second World War began?

How have revelations concerning American and British financial, corporate, and political elites substantially aiding and building the Nazi war machine in the years prior to WWII as a bulwark against the Soviets change our view of the deep historical background?

How have revelations of the decades of joint military training and cooperation by intelligence services between Germany (during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich) and the Soviet Union impact upon the lead up to WWII?

How did the Treaty of Versailles and agreements such as Sykes-Picot affect the interwar course of events leading to the Second World War?

How did the internecine network of secret treaties, ententes cordiale, and clandestine military alliances drawn up prior to the First World War lead to this conflagration?

These are the type of interrogatives or pointed questions we must each ask and seek the answers to in order to understand the world at large.

Who Rules America: Power Elite Analysis, the Deep State, and American History — Article by Charles A. Burris
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/rules-america-power-elite-analysis-deep-state-american-history/

Hidden History: Where Organized Crime and Government Meet — Article by Charles A. Burris
https://archive.lewrockwell.com/burris/burris10.html

Our Establishment Church: Its Rules and Credo — Article by Charles A. Birris
https://archive.lewrockwell.com/burris/burris17.1.html

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy — Book by Murray N. Rothbard
https://www.lewrockwell.com/assets/2015/08/Wall-Street-Banks-and-American-Foreign-Policy_2.pdf

A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, Book by Murray N. Rothbard
https://cdn.mises.org/History%20of%20Money%20and%20Banking%20in%20the%20United%20States%20The%20Colonial%20Era%20to%20World%20War%20II_2.pdf

Elites in American History: The Federalist Years to the Civil War — Book by Phillip H. Burch
https://www.amazon.com/Elites-American-History-Federalist-Years/dp/0841905940

Elites in American History: From the Civil War to the New Deal — Book by Phillip H. Burch
https://www.amazon.com/Elites-American-History-Civil-Deal/dp/0841907056/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.UugC11WA-WURtal3cJMcVw.J6ONt9xEVQtmOV8EeVsZBf_h_R1Rcm0PqIM2cnc5iFQ&qid=1755172976&sr=8-1

Elites in American History: From the New Deal to the Carter Administration — Book by Phillip H. Burch
https://www.amazon.com/Elites-American-History-Carter-Administration/dp/0841905657

The Progressive Era — Book by Murray N. Rothbard
https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Progressive%20Era_0.pdf

The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden — Book by Carrol Quigley
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time — Book by Carrol Quigley
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf