Will the Illuminati arrive in black helicopters or Nazi-designed UFO’s?
We are currently awash in dotty conspiracy theories. This is an interesting phenomenon even if the content of most of them is almost totally unreliable – at best. Some of this is the spin-off from the Oklahoma bombing and the media’s discovery of the militias. Only in America would the crazy conspiracy theorists be armed to the teeth and – it is said – actually planning to fight the Illuminati! Any minute now there will anti-Illuminati terrorism in the USA; the FBI will announce the creation of an Illuminati Task Force.
Hitherto this field had been pretty much an exclusively American set of conspiracy theories, but they are creeping in over here. The former television presenter and Green Party activist, David Icke – it is said; I haven’t read the offending book or heard him speak on his tour; or watched his video – is recycling a mish-mash of the American Right’s Illuminati-Trilateralism-New World Order nonsense.(1) The publicity for his ‘Robots Rebellion tour, and beyond’ speaking tour announces:
‘….humanity is being subjected to a gigantic contrick with fantastic human and environmental costs. The conspiracies behind religion and science are denying us the truth of who we really are …. this planet – your life – is being controlled by a tiny unelected elite who wish to complete their take over of the human race and create what they call the New World Order…… David Icke, who has survived massive ridicule, condemnation and misrepresentation, tells the story of this conspiracy and the connection with extra terrestrials and UFOs’.
Something there for all the family, David.
Icke sounds surprised at being ridiculed. He might find sympathy from William R. Lyne, the author of Space Aliens from the Pentagon. In a flyer for his excellent catalogue Flatland,(2) Jim Martin comments: ‘Whatta title. Lyne claims info on man-made saucers, Nazi tech, CIA disinfo on free energy motors that power them. Plausible premise, but announcing how he saw Adolf and Eva Hitler in San Antone with LBJ in ’67 may hurt his credibility.’ (Emphasis added.)
This stuff is even creeping into the British mainstream media. One of the militias’ spokespersons, the lawyer Linda Thompson, actually appeared on BBC2 television in September; a half hour interview, no less.(3) The Observer newspaper, a pillar of the rational, leftish middle class of Britain, ran a beginner’s guide to conspiracy theories,(4) including the first major media reference to Carroll Quigley in this country.(5)
The meaning of Mena?
Another current source of conspiracy theories is the Clinton-Whitewater-Mena-drugs-cocaine-CIA-contra story. Are there Clinton buffs out there now following the Clinton scandals the way there are Kennedy buffs? Maybe one would get in touch and explain to me how much of it is true. Mena, Contras, drugs in and guns out, Barry Seal, Lasater, CIA – youthful Governor Clinton taking pay-offs to turn a blind eye to…..That much seems to be true; some of it, anyway.(6) Most of the stuff I’ve seen is from the right with axes to grind and large appetites for recycling anti-Democratic Party disinformation. (They’ve got Watergate-Nixon-the CIA horrors-Iran-contra and the October Surprise to make up for.) Though there does appear to be evidence for much of this, when someone on the left has examined this material it seems to crumble pretty quickly and show distinct signs of deliberate disinformation.(7)
To know Bill Clinton and die?
There is an extraordinary 1994 pamphlet by the editor of something called The Wall Street Underground, titled Murder, Bank Fraud, Drugs and Sex, that links 21 deaths to Clinton and Arkansas.(8) My faith in the author, Nicholas A. Guarino, is not heightened by the bizarre autobiographical spiel about him prefacing the piece. Headlined ‘The Fastest Mind on Wall Street’, this begins by telling us that he got a speeding ticket at the age of seven, has an IQ of over 200, and concludes that ‘he reads ten thousand pages a week of economic and political intelligence per week – with near total comprehension.’
Bill Clinton, leader of the fascist New World Order?
The militias-New World-Order-Clinton strands overlap a good deal, most spectacularly that I have seen in Flashpoint, A Newsletter of Ministry of Texe Marrs (sic). The issue of June 1995 is headed ‘Fascist Terror Stalking the USA’. This bizarre amalgam is really difficult to summarise – and not worth the effort – but in the ad for the video, also called ‘Fascist Terror Stalking America’, Marrs claims that the video shows ‘a solid connection between the Gestapo of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Cheka and KGB of Stalinist Russia, and today’s fascist New World Order. Fascists such as Stalin, Hitler, Clinton and Reno have no conscience and feel no more remorse for their hideous criminal behaviour……..’ (his emphasis) He also asks: ‘Could you and your loved ones already be high up on their hit list of designated enemies of the State?'(9)
The New World Order theme is spun-off in another direction by Dr. Anthony C. Sutton whose June edition of his newsletter, The Phoenix Letter, is headed ‘New World Order and the Space Aliens’. In that, inter alia, Sutton tells us that the ‘U.S. has developed three dimensional holograms that can portray a scene in space i.e. a landing can be simulated.'(10)
The return of the Masons
Where once conspiracy theories were (roughly) classifiable – political, religious, racial – they are all starting to merge together in what Anthony Frewin has referred to as a ‘unified field theory’. The most striking recent example of this I have seen is John Daniel’s Scarlet and the Beast; the war between English and French Freemasonry, 3 volumes, 1300 pages in all.(11) The envelope in which the book’s flyer arrived proclaims it to be ‘Newest, most comprehensive and updated book on the CONSPIRACY THEORY OF HISTORY it covers all conspiracy theories in three volumes’. (Punctuation – or lack of it – in the original; emphasis added.) The flyer offers a flavour of the scope of this. Volume 2, with the same idiosyncratic grammar, includes the claim that ‘modern rock and roll used by English Freemasonry to promote revolution’, and ‘Volume 3 documents how English Freemasonry, from the great city of London, directs the forces which subvert civilization and culture, which forces include the Mafia and the South African drug cartels’.
It is almost nostalgic to see that the Masons are really behind everything.
Left-right convergence?
‘Fascist terror stalking America’ proclaims Texe Marrs, deep in the American backwoods, with a bible in his hand. What would you bet you could find that exact headline on one of the British or American New Left papers of the sixties or seventies? Does this rhetorical convergence suggest some wider meeting of left and right? At the end of his long and valuable look back at the covert operations against the American left and blacks,(12) Daniel Brandt makes a decent attempt to persuade us that something of that ilk may be happening. Without the “communists” to kick around any more, some of those who once underwrote Wall Street’s global interests by donating their first-born, are now describing themselves as patriots and populists. Many of them have taken a fresh look at the international ruling class, and resurrected a long but gnarly tradition of isolationism and anti-establishment nationalism.
‘Much of the political thinking among these new patriots is immature, and is short on both research and scholarship…… These patriots and populists have shed most of the racism and anti-Semitism that characterized the earlier survivalists. Now they’re expressing their opinions by fax, radio, and Internet, they have an ear to the ground, and – it must be said – they spread lots of rumours. But two out of three ain’t bad.’
In the midst of this boom it is striking that the traditional conspiracy theorists on the British right, the spectrum from the Western Goals (as was) end of the Tory Party out to the NF and its spin-offs, seem not to be making any headway. But then compared to the exotica now on display, their theories look stolid, almost dull; all that economics…..
Notes
- See the excellent piece by Murray and Kalman in Open Eye 3.
- PO Box 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437-2420, USA
- A couple of days later I received an inquiry about Lobster from the USA which began, ‘Dear supporting patriot….’.
- Life section, 12 February 1995, to which I contributed.
- The Observer, to my amusement, edited out a reference to the fact that Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Liberal-Democrats, had attended Bilderberg meetings. This act, for non-UK readers not aware of the nuances of the British media-politician relationship, was probably done to defend Ashdown from criticism (presumably from the radical wing of the Liberal Party; nobody else would care), not to conceal the Bilderbergers.
- Sean Mac Mathuna sent me pp. 4285-90 of the House of Representatives Proceedings, the Congressional Record, for June 9, 1994. In them three Democrat congressmen run some of the Lasater-Clinton-bonds-drugs allegations through the House. They express astonishment that these allegations have not been properly investigated. It may yet transpire that the reasons for official foot-dragging by the powers-that-be in the USA – including the major media – lies in the desire of the CIA et al not to have their contra supply operations through Arkansas revealed.
- See, for example, Robert Parry’s ‘The [Wall St.] Journal’s Quest for Conspiracy’ in the September/October Extra! The Magazine of FAIR, 130 West 25th Street, New York, NY 1001.
- Thanks to Chris Tame for this.
- $25 in the USA from Living Truth Ministries, 1708 Patterson Road, Austin, Texas 78733-6507. Thanks to Kevin McClure for this.
- Because people are making money at this – Dr. Sutton’s other newsletter, Future Technology Intelligence Report, is $150 for 12 issues (and the June ’95 issue is 8 pages, lots of white space and large type-faces) – it is difficult to know how much of this activity is cynical exploitation of people with more money than sense. Sutton also publishes Future Technology Intelligence Report. Both this and the Phoenix Letter are at PO Box 423652, Civic Centre Box Unit, San Francisco, CA 94142-3652.
- Published by Jon Kregel Inc., PO Box 131480, Tyler, TX75713; $39.95 in the US.
- ‘In Defense of Paranoia; the 1960s and Cointelpro’, NamesBase Newsline 10, PO Box 680635, San Antonio, TX 78268. This is free to NameBase subscribers but a donation of a few dollars should secure a copy from Daniel. Brandt’s essays in Newsline are just about the single best set of essays being produced on either side of the Atlantic.