Pawns in the game of elite power
Wed 9:41 pm +00:00, 22 Apr 2026
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Abstract
This essay argues that the mechanisms of elite control debt-based money, sovereign loans, war financing, and wealth concentration have remained structurally continuous from the medieval period to the present. While mainstream historians dismiss the conspiratorial framework of authors like William Guy Carr, the patterns Carr identified are now observable as normal, legal, and university-taught features of global governance.
The Bank of England model of 1694 has been replicated worldwide through the IMF, World Bank, and central banking systems. Sovereign debt entraps nations. Wars are financed by the same class that profits from them. Financial crises transfer wealth upward. The secrecy is gone. The power remains.
Drawing on historical evidence, contemporary political economy, and the recent moral witness of Pope Leo XIV, this essay argues that the question is no longer whether a transnational elite controls the global system, but what will be done about it.
I. Introduction: Beyond the Conspiracy Label
The modern intellectual establishment dismisses authors like William Guy Carr with reflexive contempt. Mainstream historians point to Carr’s reliance on unsubstantiated claims, fabricated evidence, and the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They are correct about the flaws in Carr’s methodology. But dismissal of the messenger does not require dismissal of the message.
Carr’s 1955 book Pawns in the Game described a world controlled by a transnational elite that orchestrates revolutions, finances both sides of wars, and reduces nations to debtors. The mechanism he proposed, a centuries-old Illuminati cabal is unsupported by evidence. But the patterns he identified are now observable in every major news outlet. The question is no longer whether such a system exists. The question is whether we have eyes to see it.
This essay adopts an incidental approach. It does not hunt for secret signatures or coded rituals. It examines the publicly visible outcomes that, when assembled, reveal a consistent direction. The fire is real. Whether the arsonist was a secret society or a convergence of self-interested elites matters less to the victim than the fact of the burning.
Il. The Medieval Blueprint: Usury, Expulsion, and the Birth of Debt (1290-1492)
The year 1290 marks a watershed. King Edward I of England, having failed to compel Jewish moneylenders to abandon usury through the Statute of the Jewry (1275), issued an edict of expulsion. Approximately 16,000 Jews were forced to leave England, their property confiscated, their debts transferred to the Crown.
The pattern repeated across Europe: France (1306), Saxony (1348), Hungary (1360), Belgium (1370), Slovakia (1380), Austria (1420), the Netherlands (1444), and most infamously Spain (1492). These expulsions are conventionally taught as discrete episodes of medieval anti-Semitism. This interpretation is not false, but it is incomplete. The expulsions were also financial operations. Jewish moneylenders had become indispensable to European monarchies and therefore dangerous. They held the debts of kings and nobles. They had established transnational networks of credit. To expel them was to seize their assets, cancel royal debts, and remove a rival power center.
The lesson of the medieval period is this: persecution and expropriation travel together. The same elites who invoked God to justify expulsion also collected the receipts.
IlI. The Institutional Revolution: The Bank of England Model (1694)
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 installed William of Orange, a Dutch monarch with deep ties to Amsterdam’s banking houses on the English throne. Six years later, in 1694, the Bank of England was established. Its structure would become the template for global financial control.
The Bank was founded by 1,268 original subscribers, many of them wealthy Anglo-Dutch financiers. It was granted a royal charter in exchange for a loan of £1.2 million to the government. The national debt has existed continuously since that moment.
The mechanism is simple and devastating:
1. A private bank is granted the right to create money
2. The government borrows that money into existence
3. The government spends the money, stimulating the economy
4. The public is taxed to pay interest on the debt to the private bank
5. The bank collects interest on money it created from nothing
6. The debt is never fully repaid; it is rolled over perpetually
As the 19th-century British banker and politician George Ward Hunt reportedly observed:
“The Bank of England lends money to the government, the government spends it, and the people pay the taxes. The Bank charges interest on money it creates out of nothing.”
Whether Hunt spoke these exact words matters less than the truth they convey. The mechanism is real. And it has been replicated across the globe.
IV. William Guy Carr: The Debunked Prophet (1955)
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William Guy Carr was a former Canadian naval intelligence officer. His 1955 book Pawns in the Game argued that a centuries-old Illuminati conspiracy working through secret societies, Jewish undergrounds, and money-barons controlled world events. Carr claimed that revolutions in England, France, and Russia were orchestrated by this hidden hand. He alleged that arms and underground personnel were moved from Eastern Europe to foment insurrection. He wrote of “money-barons” who developed revolutionary movements into “International Communism.”
Mainstream historians have thoroughly debunked Carr’s specific evidence. The famous “Pike letter” predicting three world wars cannot be located in the British Museum archives. Carr’s reliance on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a proven antisemitic forgery fatally compromises his credibility. His attribution of centuries-long continuity to a single secret organization is unsupported by any archival evidence.
But.
Carr described a world where:
- Systemic corruption blackmails leaders into submission
- Moral decay is weaponized to dismantle religious and social restraints
- Perpetual conflict exhausts nations and consolidates elite control
- Islam is targeted as the final obstacle to a secular, materialist world order
Whether Carr was a prophet or a fabulist matters less than this: we are now living inside the machine he described. The Jeffrey Epstein files revealed a global blackmail network where the very leaders steering the world were compromised by the rich. The CIA and Mossad openly conduct regime-change operations. Wars are financed by the same banking system that profits from them. The machinery is no longer secret. It is operational. It is taught in universities. It is called “economics,” “geopolitics,” and “international relations.”
V. The Long Shadow: From the Iran-Iraq War to the Present Cycle of Destruction (1980-Present)
The patterns of elite manipulation are not confined to the distant past or the recent war on Iran. To understand the present, one must trace the continuity of these methods across the decades-from the battlefields of the 1980s to the rubble of Libya, Syria, and Yemen today. Each conflict, viewed in isolation, appears as a discrete tragedy. Viewed in sequence, a coherent strategy emerges: the systematic weakening o f any nation that refuses to align with Western-Israeli interests.
The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988): Arming Both Sides
The eight-year war between Iran and Iraq was not a spontaneous eruption of regional rivalry. It was shaped, from its earliest days, by external powers who saw advantage in prolonging the slaughter.
The United States, despite its public condemnation of Irag’s use of chemical weapons, provided Saddam Hussein with crucial military intelligence. Declassified CIA documents reveal that US intelligence officials conveyed the precise locations of Iranian troop concentrations to Baghdad, fully aware that Iraq would respond with sarin and mustard gas attacks. President Ronald Reagan personally reviewed satellite imagery showing a strategic weakness in Iraqi defenses and wrote in the margins:
“An Iranian victory is unacceptable.”
Simultaneously, Israel played a double game. The Reagan administration secretly authorized Israel to sell several billion dollars’ worth of American-made arms, spare parts, and ammunition to Iran the very nation Iraq was fighting. Israeli officials openly acknowledged that their objective was to keep the war going, ensuring that “these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other.”
The same “Zionist Arab” allies who would later be portrayed as Iran’s natural enemies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies poured billions of dollars into Iraq’s war effort. The pattern was established: the same network of powers would arm, fund, and manipulate both sides of a conflict.
The Gulf War (1991): Establishing the American Beachhead
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was the logical culmination of a decade of Western encouragement and arming of Saddam Hussein. The US response was swift not to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty alone, but to establish a permanent American military presence in the heart of the Arab world.
Operation Desert Storm expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but the aftermath revealed the true objective. Defense Secretary Dick Cheneydeclared that the war had “increased greatly” Israel’s military superiority over its Arab neighbors. The war destroyed Iraq’s offensive capability, established permanent US bases in Saudi Arabia, and removed any serious military counterweight to Israeli power.
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The Iraq War (2003): The Pretext of WMDs
A decade later, the same coalition returned to finish the job. The stated justification that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was based on “scraps of unreliable information. None of them was true.” The Iraq Survey Group found nothing.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that the Bush administration’s case for war was “fundamentally misleading.”
Saddam Hussein, once the West’s favored proxy against Iran, was transformed overnight into a “lesson.” His overthrow and execution sent a clear message: defy the Western-Israeli axis, and you will meet the same fate.
Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan (2001-Present)
- Afghanistan (2001-2021): Even a month before the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration had “finalized a strategy to overthrow the Taliban regime.” The 20-year war resulted in regime change and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
- Libya (2011): A UN Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone was “manipulated into an authorization to topple Muammar Gaddafi.” Libya collapsed into a failed state.
- Syria (2011-present): The US government “decided to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime” in 2011. The CIA’s covert arming of Syrian rebels prolonged a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
- Yemen (2015-present): A Saudi-led coalition, armed by the United States, intervened against Houthi rebels. By 2025, US airstrikes were costing over one billion dollars per month.
The Unbroken Thread
What connects these conflicts is not a secret society meeting in a bunker. It is a visible, predictable, and relentless system of power: intelligence agencies, defense contractors, lobbyists, and allied monarchies manipulating regional conflicts to maintain control. The same powers that armed Saddam against Iran in the 1980s destroyed him in 2003. The script does not change.
VI. The Intellectual Frameworks: Fukuyama, Huntington, and Brzezinski (1992-1997)
To understand the present, we must engage with three mainstream thinkers who, despite their disagreements, all recognized that the post-Cold War world would be shaped by forces larger than individual nations.
Francis Fukuyama: The End of History as Ideological Cover (1992)
Fukuyama’s thesis-that the end of the Cold War marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” has proven catastrophically wrong. But its function was never purely descriptive. The “End of History” narrative provided moral and intellectual justification for Western expansion: the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, NATO’s eastward enlargement, and the invasion of Iraq.
Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1996)
Huntington argued that post-Cold War conflict would occur along civilizational fault lines. By framing the West and Islam as inevitable adversaries, Huntington’s framework provided intellectual cover for the wars that followed: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: The Grand Chessboard as Confession (1997)
Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard is the most honest of the three. The former National Security Advisor explicitly argued that the United States must prevent any single power from dominating Eurasia, using a combination of military alliances, economic pressure, and covert action. He wrote for policymakers, in plain English, that geopolitics is a game of power. Brzezinski’s “conspiracy” was not secret. It was published by Basic Books.
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VIl. The Modern Machinery: How the World Is Netted and Entrenched
The medieval world had kings, popes, and moneylenders. The modern world has presidents, central banks, and multinational corporations. The names have changed. The structure has not.
Institution Function Medieval Analogue International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Controls credit to nations, imposes austerity Church control of usury World Bank Funds development on Western terms Royal charters for trade monopolies
SWIFT Global payment system
Weaponized through sanctions Papal interdict
United Nations Security Council Legalizes
war through veto power Papal arbitration AIPAC / WINEP Lobbying shaping US Israel policy Jewish courtiers advising monarchs Credit rating agencies Determine borrowing costs for nations Moneylenders assessing creditworthiness
The genius of the modern system is that does not require secrecy. The IMF publishes its lending terms. AIPAC discloses its lobbying expenditures. Everything is visible. Nothing is accountable.
The world is netted in five ways:
1. Financial netting: SWIFT allows the US to cut off any country from global transactions.
2. Military netting: US bases in over 80 countries create a global security architecture.
3. Legal netting: The ICC and ICJ lack enforcement power; rulings against Israel or the US are ignored.
4. Ideological netting: The “rules-based international order” is invoked selectively.
5. Debt netting: Every country is entrenched in sovereign debt that is never fully repaid.
VIII. The War on Iran: Covert Operations and Open Warfare (2025-2026)
The covert operations against Iran did not remain in the shadows. They culminated in open warfare.
The December 2025 Protests
In December 2025, widespread protests erupted across Iran, triggered by the collapse of the Iranian rial, soaring inflation, and a national water crisis. Within days, what began as economic protests escalated into organized, commando-style armed attacks targeting mosques, security forces, and public institutions.
A former CIA officer publicly explained that the intelligence agencies had “concocted a crash of the Iranian currency knowing that that would ignite protests.” He further stated that Starlink terminals had been “purchased through the intelligence community and distributed through intelligence networks to individuals inside Iran.”
The Mossad made no effort to hide its involvement. On December 29, 2025, what is widely recognized as the Mossad’s Twitter account in Farsi encouraged Iranians to protest, declaring:
“We are with you in the field.”
Mike Pompeo, former CIA director, posted:
“Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”
As one commentator observed:
“They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.“
The June 2025 12-Day War
On June 13, 2025, Israel began a major military operation against Iran, including air strikes and covert action. The United States carried out strikes against three key Iranian nuclear sites, including Fordow, using GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapons. At least 1,060 Iranians were killed. In Tehran alone, 3,600 residential units were damaged. Seven hospitals and 11 ambulances were directly hit.
The February 28, 2026, Joint Offensive
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated series of military strikes across Iran. The attack was initiated with a strike on an elementary girls’ school in Minab, killing at least 170 people, most of them girls aged between seven and 12. Several independent investigations concluded that the attack was likely deliberate, using a US-manufactured Tomahawk missile.
Iran reports that over 90,000 civilian sites have been damaged or destroyed. Up to 3.2 million people have been displaced. The cumulative death toll in Gaza since October 2023 now exceeds 72,000.
Violations of International Law
More than 100 international law experts signed an open letter stating that the US-Israeli decision to attack Iran was a “clear breach of the United Nations Charter.” The attack on the school in Minab “likely violates international humanitarian law, and if evidence is found that those responsible were reckless, it could also be a war crime.”
IX. The Transition from Pax Americana to Pax Judaica
Carr warned that the ultimate objective was a transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana, and eventually to Pax Judaica a world order dominated by Zionist interests. What was once dismissed as conspiracy theory is now openly discussed.
The current war on Iran has revealed the extent of US subordination to Israeli interests. The US has provided Israel with nearly $4 billion in annual military aid for decades. Following the June 2025 conflict, the US approved an additional $510 million sale of bomb guidance kits to Israel. The US military provided air-to-air refueling for Israeli jets striking Iran.
As Carr predicted, the war against “Muhammadans” has become the central organizing principle of Western foreign policy. The “Clash of Civilizations” is no longer a theory it is operational doctrine.
X. Greater Israel: From Vision to Genocide
The phrase “Greater Israel” has been used for decades by religious Zionists to describe a Jewish state from the Euphrates River to the Nile. It is no longer fringe.
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Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have openly called for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. The current war on Gaza has killed over 72,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children. The International Court of Justice has ruled that there is a “plausible risk of genocide.” The United Nations has called it a “graveyard for children.’
The medieval evictions expelled Jews. The modern evictions expel Palestinians. The mechanism has been perfected: bombardment, starvation, siege, and then the slow erasure of memory through the destruction of archives, universities, and cultural heritage.
XI. The Current Upheaval as Reflection of History
The social and political upheavals of the present —the rise of authoritarianism, the collapse of democratic norms, the normalization of war crimes— are not unprecedented. They are the return of the medieval, dressed in modern clothes.
Then Now
Kings ruled by divine right Presidents rule by executive order.
The Church suppressed heresy through inquisitions States suppress dissent through surveillance and “counterterrorism” laws.
Usury was the sin of outsiders.
Debt binds nations to the IMF.
Expulsion was the solution.
Genocide and “voluntary emigration” serve the same function.
Moneylenders financed royal wars.
Central banks and bond markets finance modern warfare.
A small class of elites accumulated wealth.
The 0.1% control most global wealth.
The difference is not one of kind but of technology. The medieval world had swords and fire. The modern world has precision-guided munitions, Al-targeting systems, and economic sanctions that kill silently.
XII. The Normalization o f the Machine
Perhaps the most significant development is this: the machine is no longer hidden. It is taught in universities as normal, rational, and inevitable.
- Economics departments teach that central banks should be independent, that inflation is the greatest evil, that debt is necessary for growth.
- Political science departments teach that the US-Israeli alliance is strategic, that regime change is sometimes necessary.
- Business schools teach that maximizing shareholder value is the only duty, that derivatives are efficient, that the wealthy deserve their wealth.
None of this is taught as conspiracy. It is taught as science, as rationality. But the outcome is identical to the “conspiratorial” system described by Carr. Whether you call it conspiracy or curriculum, the result is the same.
XIII. The Moral Witness: Pope Leo XIV (April 2026)
In a significant development that underscores the visibility of this struggle, the current Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, has abandoned diplomatic ambiguity to directly confront the machinery of elite power.
During his April 2026 apostolic journey to Cameroon, Pope Leo XIV delivered a series of unusually forceful addresses. Standing in the presence of President Paul Biya, a leader who has held power for over four decades, the Pope issued a stark warning against structural corruption.
“The chains of corruption which disfigure authority and strip it of its credibility must be broken,” the Pope declared.
He called for hearts to be set free from “an idolatrous thirst for profit” and warned that authentic peace requires the law to serve as a safeguard against “the whims of the rich and powerful.”
The Pope explicitly condemned the global economic order, stating that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” and decried violations of international law by “neocolonial” world powers. In a direct echo of Carr’s thesis, the Pontiff criticized leaders who spend billions on wars while neglecting the poor, insisting that “God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
The fact that the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics is using his pulpit to denounce the “whims of the rich and powerful” is not a coincidence. It is a recognition that the mechanisms of control Carr described are no longer hidden. They are the open, operating system of global governance. Even the Pope is bearing witness.
XIV. The Continuity of Ideology
The reader may object:
“You have not proven that the same families or organizations control the world across centuries. You have only shown patterns.”
This objection misunderstands the argument. The argument is not about bloodlines or secret handshakes. It is about ideological continuity.
The ideology is this:
- Debt should be the foundation of money
- Interest is legitimate wealth transfer from the many to the few
- Wars are profitable and therefore justifiable
- Financial crises are natural and should be managed, not prevented
- The wealthy should rule, either openly or through proxies
In the 13th century, this ideology was held by moneylenders and kings. In the 18th century, by bankers and aristocrats. In the 21st century, by hedge fund managers, central bankers, defense contractors, and the politicians they fund.
The faces change. The ideology does not.
XV. Conclusion: The Fire and the Witness
This essay has argued three propositions:
1. Historical continuity: The mechanisms of elite control debt-based money, sovereign loans, war financing, and wealth concentration have remained structurally continuous from the medieval period to the present.
2. Institutional transformation: The modern world is netted by legal, visible institutions that perform the same functions as their medieval predecessors without requiring secrecy.
3. Current verification: The genocide in Gaza, the open pursuit of Greater Israel, the documented regime-change operations of the CIA and Mossad now openly admitted are the predicted outcomes of a system that has evolved to serve the same interests for centuries.
What certain historians once dismissed as conspiracies the orchestration of revolutions, the arming of opposition forces, the coordination of currency collapses, the financing of wars by the same class that profits from them are now realities unfolding before our eyes. The Mossad openly tweets its presence inside Iran. Former CIA directors publicly salute Mossad agents. The US and Israel launch joint military strikes on a sovereign nation, destroying schools and hospitals. Over 100 international law experts declare these acts war crimes. The world watches. The world does nothing.
The incidental approach watching outcomes rather than hunting hidden signatures reveals a world that behaves as if a centuries-old conspiracy were real.
Whether such a conspiracy exists is, finally, irrelevant. The fire is visible. The victims are counting. Even the Pope is bearing witness.
The medieval world expelled its Jews. The modern world is expelling its Palestinians.
The names have changed. The machinery has been perfected. The thread remains unbroken.
The question is not whether this system exists. The question is: What will you do with this understanding?
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Kamran Qureshi is a legal professional and academic based in the United Kingdom. He combines extensive training in law and political science with practical experience as an Advocate of the High Court in Pakistan. He holds an LL.M. from the University of Sheffield, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Law from the University of Peshawar. Currently engaged in advanced research in England, his work focuses on the historical and interdisciplinary forces shaping modern political systems, aiming to contribute to academic discourse and deepen understanding of contemporary global politics.
