What Is a Breakaway Civilization?

An Essay on Joseph Farrell’s Extension of Richard Dolan’s Concept

Author’s Note

Parts of what follows are documented and verifiable. Other parts are interpretive reconstructions built on that documentation. And some parts, by the framework's own structure, cannot be adjudicated on evidence at all. I am not making a claim about which is which for every element of the argument. I am attempting something narrower: to produce a working definition of a term that has begun showing up with real frequency in podcasts, interviews, and long-form writing on hidden power, and that most readers who encounter it have no clear idea what to do with.

The framework is not mine. It belongs to Joseph Farrell, developed across roughly seven books and a long-running conversation with Catherine Austin Fitts on the Solari Report. My job here is to explain what he means so that the next time you hear the phrase used, you understand what is being pointed at. Whether the thing being pointed at exists, and in what form, is a separate question the essay does not adjudicate.

If you have never read Farrell, this is your entry point. If you have read some of him, this may organize what you already know. If you reject the framework, this may at least let you reject the version he actually holds rather than a caricature.

The essay brackets Farrell’s claims about exotic technology (the Bell, directed energy, weather engineering) so the definitional work stays clean. Those claims are important to his larger body of work and may get their own treatment separately.

A term that is used without being understood is a term that does work in the culture without accountability. This essay is an attempt to make one such term accountable to its actual meaning.

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The check was cleared in Buenos Aires. It was drawn on Manufacturers Hanover and on Chase Manhattan. The signature was Martin Bormann’s. The year was somewhere in the early 1960s.

Bormann is supposed to have died in a Berlin bunker on May 2, 1945. Remains recovered in Berlin were identified as his through dental records in 1972; mitochondrial DNA testing conducted in 1998 was, by German authorities, treated as final confirmation. On the standard account, the man was dust for two decades before the check was written.

Paul Manning, a CBS journalist who had worked closely with Edward R. Murrow, spent years investigating an alternative account. He published his findings in a book called Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. In it, he documented the check.¹

You may believe Manning was wrong. You may believe the check was cleared under a false signature or that Manning was deceived. Some other explanation is available if you want one. What the documentary evidence will not let you do, if you take it seriously, is treat the postwar period as settled history where the visible surface is the whole story.

The check is a small piece of evidence for a very large claim. The claim is that a substantial part of what actually happened after 1945 has never made it into the standard account. Joseph Farrell has spent roughly the last twenty years assembling the case for that claim, book by book, cross-reference by cross-reference. The framework he built to organize what he found borrows its central term from another writer: the UFO historian Richard Dolan, who in the second volume of UFOs and the National Security State used a phrase that has since escaped into the wider culture without most of the people using it knowing what it means.²

Dolan called it a breakaway civilization.

This essay explains what he meant, what Farrell built on top of it, and why the concept, once you have it, does not easily leave.

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What Dolan noticed

Dolan’s insight came near the end of a long historical study of the U.S. government’s postwar handling of the UFO phenomenon. He was working the archival record and reading the classified budget history. He noticed something the material forced on him whether or not he wanted it.

Continuous secret spending compounds.

Fund a black project for a year and you have a project. Fund it for a decade and you have a program. Fund it for two generations at scale, and you no longer have a program. You have institutions. Then facilities. Then personnel who spend their careers inside those facilities and never leave. Then their children, some of whom follow them in. Then a body of accumulated knowledge that exists nowhere else, held by people who cannot describe what they know.

At some point in this accumulation, the group ceases to be an offshoot of the society funding it. The technology it works with changes what its members consider possible. The information it has access to changes what its members consider real. The rules it operates under diverge from the rules its parent society thinks are in force. It becomes its own thing.

Dolan’s word for it was civilization. He chose the word carefully. He meant it literally.

Farrell’s question

Joseph Farrell read Dolan and took the concept as a hypothesis to test. His question was not whether the idea was aesthetically appealing. It was operational. If Dolan was right, what would such a thing have needed in order to come into existence? Where would those needs have been met? What footprints would it have left in the visible record?

The answer he arrived at, across a series of books published between 2004 and 2015, is what people are pointing to now when they use the term. The Nazi series (Reich of the Black Sun, SS Brotherhood of the Bell, Nazi International, The Third Way) traces the historical origins. The breakaway trilogy (Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops, Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, Covert Wars and the Clash of Civilizations) develops the framework and applies it.³

The core of the framework is this. A breakaway civilization, if it exists, requires a hidden system of finance sustained across decades and insulated from any political process that could shut it down. The origin of that system, in the western half of the postwar world, was the strategic situation the United States faced as the war closed. And the operational architecture that emerged from that situation is still running.

What such a thing has to eat

The financing requirement is more restrictive than it sounds. Ordinary appropriations turn over with elections. Even a classified budget under congressional oversight is exposed to periodic scrutiny. Congress writes checks and Congress can un-write them.

What a genuinely breakaway operation needs is money that is not subject to any of that. A pool sustained across decades, kept off the public books, insulated from the visible economy. The pool has to be large enough to build and maintain a hidden infrastructure. It has to be structured so that no elected official can find the string that unravels it. And it has to keep growing, because the operations it funds keep growing.

Farrell’s contention is that such a pool exists and has existed since 1945. His reconstruction of how it was built runs in three movements.

The three movements of the money

First movement: the seed capital, 1945 through the late 1950s

At the end of the war the United States confronted three problems simultaneously, each of which required secret means and none of which could be addressed publicly. The Communist bloc, against which American intelligence had almost no human network. The surviving Nazi apparatus, which had spent the last two years of the war planning a strategic evacuation of personnel, capital, and technology from Europe. And, in Farrell’s reading, a persistent phenomenon of unidentified craft over sensitive military installations severe enough to be one of the driving concerns behind the reorganization of the entire national security apparatus under the National Security Act of 1947.

Each problem demanded money that Congress could not know about. The Americans built the plumbing.

Nazi capital, laundered through the Bank for International Settlements and Swiss banks, flowed into major western banks after the war and gave them off-balance-sheet reserves large enough to underwrite the postwar credit expansion.⁴ Japanese plunder from occupied Asia, discovered by American forces at the end of the war, was authorized by Truman as a slush fund for the National Security Council.⁵ The Exchange Stabilization Fund at the New York Fed, sitting outside the normal budgetary bureaucracy, became one of the primary vehicles for postwar covert operations, including the rigging of the 1948 Italian elections. The National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 gave the American government the statutory ability to appropriate money for one purpose and shift it into unaccountable classified accounts. This is the origin of what is now called the black budget.

By the late 1950s the seed capital was in place. It was hidden. It was large. It answered to no one who could be voted out.

Second movement: industrialization, 1960s through 1980s

The seed money grew, and the machinery around it hardened. The postwar restructuring of the international narcotics trade in the 1960s and 1970s, documented by the Danish journalist Henrik Krüger, displaced the French Connection and inserted postwar fascist networks as on-the-ground operators for what became a joint enterprise with American intelligence in Latin America.⁶ Drug revenue fed the black budget. The black budget was laundered through mortgage securities and government securities fraud.

Then came the decisive institutional shift. Under the incoming Reagan administration, an executive order qualified private corporations to perform secret and highly classified functions paid for by the U.S. government.⁵ This turned the trillion-dollar black budget into a mechanism by which private corporations, not government agencies, could own and control the most advanced technology in the world on a non-transparent, non-accountable basis. The classified work moved outside the direct chain of command of the elected government. The corporations doing the work were themselves privately held, or subsidiaries of privately held entities, and answered to boards no voter had heard of.

By the end of the 1980s the breakaway civilization, if that is what it was, had a permanent industrial base. It was funded by a mixture of appropriated black budget, criminal revenue, and hidden financial reserves inherited from the war. It operated through private corporations under sovereign immunity. It employed hundreds of thousands of cleared personnel. And its output was, by design, indistinguishable from the outside from ordinary defense contracting.

Third movement: consolidation, 1990s to present

In the spring of 1995 a mortgage banker walked into Catherine Austin Fitts’ office in Washington carrying a database. His family had been in the mortgage banking business for three generations. His core competency was tracking every FHA-insured mortgage issued in the United States. He had a message. The number in the newly published federal financial statements, 400 billion dollars of outstanding FHA insurance, was wrong. The real figure, he said, was several multiples higher.⁷

Fitts, who had been Assistant Secretary of Housing under the first Bush administration, initially dismissed the claim. She refused to take his database, on the reasonable calculation that whoever accepted it would probably not live to publish it.

She was wrong to dismiss it. Her later litigation with the federal government forced her back to the numbers. Independent research by Professor Mark Skidmore at Michigan State, published in 2017, established that the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, JP Morgan Chase, and the New York Fed had been engaged in coordinated undocumentable adjustments to the federal accounts running to 21 trillion dollars between fiscal 1998 and fiscal 2015.⁸ The number has been revised upward since.

This is where Fitts and Farrell converge. Farrell had proposed the architecture. Fitts documented its footprint in the accounts. Twenty-one trillion dollars leaving the visible budget between 1998 and 2015 is the size of the entire U.S. economy for a year. It went somewhere. Whatever the breakaway civilization is, that is roughly what it has been paid.

In October 2018, the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board issued Statement 56, effective for federal fiscal year 2019 onward. Statement 56 permits federal entities to modify or omit financial information from their published reports on grounds of national security.⁹ In Fitts’ reading, this is the moment the hidden system stopped running alongside the visible one and began subsuming it. The books were legally darkened. The consolidation was complete.

Two constituencies

Farrell distinguishes two players in the western half of this arrangement, and refusing to collapse them into one is central to what he has been arguing.

The first he calls the Post-War Nazi International. His starting distinction is that the German government surrendered in 1945; the Nazi Party did not. During the last years of the war, senior party leadership had established a network of corporate fronts, moved capital through Switzerland and the Bank for International Settlements, and prepared operational continuity plans that included evacuation to Latin America and elsewhere. American counter-intelligence identified and shut down roughly 750 of these fronts. Farrell’s argument is that the operation was much larger than what was shut down, that it survived, and that it continued its wartime research programs as an extraterritorial entity using corporations and nations as cut-outs.

The evidence is specific. The postwar fusion project run in Argentina under Juan Perón by the German scientist Ronald Richter, the same Richter who had worked on the same physics inside the Third Reich. The 1945 deal, recorded in Reinhard Gehlen’s memoirs, in which the head of Nazi military intelligence for the East handed over his entire espionage network to Allen Dulles on terms that preserved German interests where they clashed with American interests, and kept Gehlen himself in operational command.¹⁰ The Gehlen organization became the Bundesnachrichtendienst, modern Germany’s federal intelligence service, which meant the CIA’s Soviet analysis on the day the agency was chartered was being produced by former Nazi intelligence officers. And the Bormann check, cleared in Buenos Aires over his own signature, sixteen years after his officially recorded death.

The second constituency is the American deep state. Not the phrase as it is used in mainstream political commentary, but the specific postwar nexus Farrell traces: Wall Street law firms, prime banks, intelligence agencies, defense contractors, and the corporations that had done business with IG Farben and its counterparts before the war. Sullivan & Cromwell, the Dulles brothers, Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller interests on the American side; Hermann Josef Abs at Deutsche Bank and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a wartime IG Farben manager and SS officer, on the European side. These names recur in the historical record with a frequency Farrell treats as diagnostic.

Operation Paperclip supplied the technical staff. Von Braun, Rudolph, Dornberger, and hundreds of others took positions across American universities, foundations, and defense contractors, their wartime records sanitized. Farrell notes that American counter-intelligence assessments in the late 1940s established that these scientists were maintaining contact with each other through Latin America. That is, they operated as a coherent network within the host country. Farrell’s term for what this implied is a Nazi extraterritorial state already functioning inside the American system by the late 1940s.

The two constituencies cooperated where cooperation served them. They competed where it did not. Together they constituted the western wing of what would become the breakaway.

Why the word “civilization”

Dolan chose the word carefully, and Farrell has been insistent that it be taken literally rather than as metaphor. Once you enumerate the properties a civilization has, the argument about whether one exists becomes tractable.

A civilization has infrastructure, hard and soft. The soft infrastructure is the hidden financial system already described. The hard infrastructure is a network of underground facilities. Fitts, working with a researcher and drawing on the published work of Richard Sauder, arrived at an estimate of over 140 such facilities in the United States alone. Add the tunnel systems Farrell attributes to the postwar Nazi presence in Latin America, the Soviet and Russian underground network, the Antarctic installations, and whatever exists under China, and the picture is of a global system of hidden physical plant under continuous construction for eighty years.

A civilization has borders. In this case the borders are security perimeters and cleared-access requirements that separate the classified world from the ordinary one.

A civilization has a legal system. Fitts’ term for it is sovereign immunity: the layered legal shields placing national security operations, intelligence agencies, central banking arrangements, and their contractor networks beyond the reach of ordinary courts. Members of the breakaway civilization are above the law with respect to the visible society and operate under their own internal system of adjudication with respect to each other.

A civilization has personnel: the cleared workforce that lives and works inside the security perimeter and whose work cannot be described outside it.

And a civilization, Dolan argued, eventually has its own way of thinking. Access to technology no one else has changes what its holders consider possible and necessary. Decisions get made inside the perimeter that make no sense outside it, because they are being made on the basis of information the outside does not have. This is the specific sense in which the group ceases to be an offshoot and becomes something distinct.

Farrell’s larger body of work extends into claims about what the classified research has actually produced: exotic propulsion systems, directed-energy weapons, technologies for manipulating weather and seismic events, and physics derived from Nazi wartime research on a device called the Bell. Those claims are outside the scope of this essay. Readers who want to pursue them can begin with Reich of the Black Sun and SS Brotherhood of the Bell.³ For present purposes the point is narrower: money on the documented scale, sustained across decades within the institutional architecture already described, produces something. Whatever that something turns out to be, it exists.

The mafia war

Farrell is careful not to describe this as a single unified entity. If the model is correct, every major power that has run significant black research over the postwar period has developed some version of it. Russia has one. China has one. Farrell suspects France and India do as well. The Nazi International was itself extraterritorial rather than tied to any single state.

What sits at the top, in his current framing, is a set of factions in intermittent cooperation and increasingly open conflict. He calls it the mafia war. The postwar arrangement between the surviving Nazi structure and the American financial oligarchy is coming apart. Markers are being called in. Bank bailouts function as signals between factions. Recent disruptions of the visible international order, including the move toward multipolarity and the visible decay of American institutional capacity, Farrell reads as surface manifestations of a struggle among hidden formations for control of what remains.

The mafia war framing is not metaphorical. In Farrell’s account, the factions have real weapons developed with the hidden money, and they use them. Insider positions taken against a country’s sovereign debt in the week before a natural disaster wipes out its territory. Bank bailouts demanded with the specific stipulation that there be no oversight, which in Farrell’s reading looks like the behavior of someone acting under duress. When these factions fight each other, they do not use conventional weapons. They use what the classified research has produced. The collateral damage falls on the visible civilization, on the people who did not know the hidden one existed.

Fitts has extended the framework with a historical parallel. In the feudal system, a serf or minor noble owed allegiance to a local lord, but might also owe allegiance to another lord higher up. When two lords demanded his obedience against each other, the concept of ligeancy determined which loyalty was ultimate. In Fitts’ reading, we have not quite reached the stage where the modern equivalent has crystallized. But the visible signs are there: sovereign immunity claims multiplying, and a widening gap between what officials say and what officials do as different classes of decision-maker respond to different sets of orders. When ligeancy becomes explicit, the mafia war stops being a phrase and becomes a fact on the ground.

What the concept lets you see

There is a moment in Fitts’ account of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that is worth stopping on.

She had been managing a portfolio for a private client. She had put a portion of it into a world bond fund, and 15 percent of the fund’s holdings were in Indonesian sovereign debt. In the week after her client bought in, the fund dropped 15 percent overnight on massive insider selling. There was no interest rate move. There was no news. Nothing in the visible information environment explained what she was seeing.

A week later the tsunami arrived. It killed at least 227,000 people across fourteen countries.

Someone had known. Not by luck. Not by market intuition. They had known specifically enough, and confidently enough, to move a significant amount of capital against a specific country’s debt with a specific timing that only made sense if they knew, in advance, what was about to happen to that country’s coastline.

You can dismiss this observation as anecdotal. You can construct alternative explanations. What you cannot do, once you have looked at it seriously, is put it back where you found it. Because if what Fitts saw was what it looks like, then some things follow.

If some party can induce a tsunami, that party has a weapon no elected government has publicly disclosed. If that weapon exists, the money to develop it has been spent. If the money has been spent, it left a trail. And the trail, when you look for it, is where Fitts and Farrell have been telling you to look.

Once the concept of a breakaway civilization is in your working vocabulary, certain features of the visible world become legible that were not before.

Missing federal money in the tens of trillions is not an accounting error and is not evidence that the government is broke. It is the visible footprint of a hidden system of finance funding something.

Political leadership that appears to be following orders no ordinary voter would recognize as coming from any electoral mandate is not a mystery. It is the visible footprint of a hidden actor whose decisions are made inside the security perimeter and communicated outward.

The persistent inability of qualified financial analysts to make sense of the visible economy, the “nothing about this makes sense from any angle” reaction Farrell has described repeatedly in his conversations with Fitts, is not their failure of analysis. It is what happens when you try to reconcile a set of accounts that has, by design, been separated from another set of accounts you do not know exists.

What you have to decide

None of this requires accepting the specific technology claims Farrell makes elsewhere. The structural argument stands independently. If a hidden system of finance of the documented scale has been operating for eighty years, it has bought something. Something has been built. Someone runs what has been built. Those people, across decades, become distinct from the people funding them in their information, their assumptions, their loyalties, their sense of what is possible.

That distinctness, accumulated across generations, is what the term breakaway civilization names.

The reason the term does not easily leave once you have it is that the alternative is worse. The alternative is to keep reading the news as if the visible surface is the whole story. To treat the missing trillions as a curiosity that will presumably be reconciled at some future audit. To treat the odd trades before disasters as coincidences. To treat leadership decisions that make no visible sense as the ordinary confusion of politics. To treat the widening gap between what the world officially is and what the world actually seems to be doing as, essentially, nothing.

Once you have the concept, that reading is no longer available. Every anomaly you notice is either evidence that the concept applies or evidence that it does not, and the ordinary tools for adjudicating which is which are, by the concept’s own logic, the ones that have been captured.

One further thing the reader should know before deciding. The framework has structural features that make it partially self-sealing. Once you have it, evidence for it accumulates and evidence against it can be reinterpreted as successful concealment. Absence of documentation becomes evidence of effective secrecy. Rejection by credentialed historians becomes evidence of the institutional capture the framework predicts. This is a feature of the framework you should hold in mind whether you accept it or reject it. It does not by itself refute the framework — real hidden systems would produce exactly this epistemic shape — but it does mean the framework cannot be adjudicated purely on evidence, and any reader who tells you otherwise, in either direction, is selling you something.

This is not a problem the essay can solve for you. Farrell built the framework. Fitts documented the footprint. What is on the table, now that you have looked at it, is on you.

How to explain it to a 6 year old

Imagine your parents give you a small allowance every week for eighty years. Most of it you spend on things everyone can see. But some of it you put in a secret jar in the garage that no one ever looks in.

After a very long time there is enough in the jar to buy a bicycle. Then a shed. Then a small workshop, because you have started to build things. Then you hire a friend. Then a bigger workshop, then another friend, then a fence, then rules about who is allowed inside the fence.

Your parents still think you are the kid who buys candy. They do not know about the workshop or the fence. When they ask what you did with the money, you say “not much.” They believe you, because the jar has been in the garage the whole time and they have never looked.

After eighty years the workshop is bigger than your parents’ house. The kids inside the fence do not follow your parents’ rules anymore. They have their own school, their own kitchen, and things your parents do not know exist. They are still your parents’ kids, technically. But if your parents called them in for dinner, they would ignore it, because they have their own dinner, in their own kitchen, in the workshop your parents do not know is there.

That is what a breakaway civilization is. The parents are the ordinary country. The kids behind the fence are the people who spent the secret money. The fence is why we cannot see what they built.

In Print

Seven of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.

Two more take up what the first five leave out — the remedies the first five explain why you need. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence.

A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

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References

1. Paul Manning, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, Lyle Stuart, 1981.

2. Richard M. Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973–1991 (Volume II), Keyhole Publishing, 2009.

3. Joseph P. Farrell, the “Nazi series”: Reich of the Black Sun (2004), SS Brotherhood of the Bell (2006), Nazi International (2008), The Third Way (2015); and Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops (2011), Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations (2012), Covert Wars and the Clash of Civilizations (2013). Adventures Unlimited Press.

4. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

5. Joseph P. Farrell and Catherine Austin Fitts, Solari Report interview, “Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations,” September 6, 2012; and Solari Report, “Who Is Mr. Global?” with Joseph P. Farrell, November 11, 2021.

6. Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism, South End Press, 1980.

7. Catherine Austin Fitts, Solari Report publications and presentations on federal finance, missing money, and the hidden system of finance. Primary source of the FHA mortgage insurance fraud documentation and the 2004 Indonesian sovereign debt insider trading observation. See in particular the Missing Money archive at solari.com.

8. Mark Skidmore et al., research on undocumentable adjustments in U.S. federal financial reporting, Michigan State University, 2017; and subsequent Solari Report documentation.

9. Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56, “Classified National Security Activities,” issued October 2018.

10. Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, World Publishing, 1972.