- An online survey on the beliefs of 5700 New Zealanders
showed that 22% believe it "likely" that "a secret elite
cabal controls world affairs", with 21% responding that they don't
know, and 57% stating "unlikely". (Sunday Star Times, C2, 31
Aug. 08).
-
- Given the ridicule attached to "conspiracy theories"
the percentage is encouraging, indicating that a significant proportion
of New Zealanders are aware of political realities, or at least discern
intuitively that something is amiss.
-
- While such beliefs are lumped in by the Sunday Star
Times with superstitions and whether Elvis faked his own death (to which
very few responded positively) etc. the ongoing success of alternative
news -stand magazines such as Nexus and New Dawn from Australia, and in
particular Jon Eisen's Uncensored (NZ) show that many New Zealanders are
becoming increasingly dissatisfied with what had been described as the
'village idiot theory of history' - that stuff just happens at random -
as portrayed by the mass media.
-
- The following are two book reviews on conspiracy theories,
adapted from an article originally appearing in the first issue of Restoration
Magazine.
- Cyclicity of Conspiracy Theory
-
- The popularity of conspiracy theories follows cyclic
trends after periods of crises. The French Revolution gave rise to the
modern theory of conspiracies in general, ascribing the subversion and
breakdown of the traditional order to the influences of Masonic coteries,
including the Illuminati, from whence other conspiracy theories have followed,
often encompassing communism, Zionism, international finance, and such
groups as the Bilderbergers, Council, on Foreign Relations, Lodge 322 and
Trilateralists.
-
- The 1905 Russian Revolution popularised the hitherto
obscure Protocols of Zion, again with a Masonic theme, but with a Jewish
façade, although doctrine of the Protocols has nothing of the nature
of Zionism per se about it.
-
- Since such theories were generally of a 'right-wing
nature,' and often linked to 'anti-Semitism', World War II drove them into
disrepute.
-
- The Cold War revived conspiracy theories, and 9/11
has given impetus to a revival of interest in covert cabals such a Masonry
not seen since the Russia Revolution. Impetus has been added with the revival
of alternative religions and the questioning of mainstream religion, including
the popularity of books such as those about the alleged Prior de Sion by
Baigent, et al. They have also revived an interest in the role of the Illuminati.
-
- The best-selling novelist Dan Brown has contributed
greatly to the revival with his novel Angel & Demons. This is a thriller
about the Illuminati. Although the historical background has little resemblance
to fact, the novel has spawned two books which include chapters on Masonry
and the Illuminati.
-
- Secrets of Angels & Demons by Dan Burstein and
A Sura, includes a chapter titled The Illuminati Illuminated, comprising
an anthology of interviews with journalists and researchers regarding their
views on Illuminati conspiracy theories.
-
- The Dan Brown Companion by Simon Cox includes a chapter
titled Illuminati, in which Cox presents a succinct account of the society.
-
- Included in his references are Nesta Webster's Secret
Societies and Subversive Movements, and Prof. John Robison's Proofs of
a Conspiracy, conspiratorial classics among the "Right" but seldom
hitherto heard of by the larger public for decades.
-
- A major publishers has recently come out with a series
called "Conspiracy Books", no doubt to cash in on the renewed
interest in such theories. The publisher is Collins & Brown. The series
includes: Who Really Runs the World?, Who's Watching You?, What is Opus
Dei?, Who Really Won the Space Race?, Who Won the Oil Wars?, and Who Are
the Illuminati?
-
- Who Really Runs the World? and Who Are the Illuminati?
are the two books that are reviewed here.
-
-
- Who Really Runs the World?
-
- Thom Burnett and Alex Games, London, 2005.
-
- Burnett is the pseudonym for a British security and
military analyst. Games is a columnist for the Financial Times and former
associate media editor for the London Evening Standard.
-
- The book starts with several chapters looking at contenders
for the questions 'who really runs the world?' However, most of the book
thereafter becomes a fairly standard, although well researched work on
globalisation.
-
- Burnett considers the Illuminati, Lodge 322, Bilderbergers.,
Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Burnett disposes
of each until concluding that the CFR is the most likely culprit. In doing
so he too readily dismisses the Illuminati. Burnett's technique of reductio
ad absurdum in eliminating the Illuminati from the scene does not do justice
to the mostly well-researched bulk of the book.
-
- For e.g. Burnett ridicules the notion popularised during
eh 19th C. by the eminent scholar Prof. John Robison in Proofs of a Conspiracy
that the Illuminati survived its outlawing by the Elector of Bavaria, by
the expedient of simply re-organising as book societies. Burnett finds
it laughable that a sinister conspiracy for the establishment of a new
world order could continue via book clubs. However the importance of what
was at the time subversive literature was a feature not only of Weishaupt's
Illuminati but of other revolutionary societies, and it was this literature
that paved the way for the French Revolution. Books and pamphlets at the
time were as influential as TV, and Internet are today. The owner of a
printing press was as potentially subversive as today's Rupert Murdoch
and other media barons. One needs only recall Benjamin Franklin as a printer
for e.g. The French Revolution itself was fomented by a coterie of Masons
led by Diderot, called The Encyclopaedists. It is naïve to think that
the Illuminati was obliterated by a decree and police action, any more
than a communist party apparatus is eliminated by a mere state order and
police raids. It was the Illuminati that created the cell structure upon
which the communist parties were later modelled, as were numerous Masonic-type
revolutionary societies such as those of Babeuf, Blanqui, Mazinni, et al.
-
- Burnett then arrives at Lodge 322, aka The Order of
the Skull & Bones, of which both presidents Bush and rival presidential
contender John Kerry are initiates. Lodge 322 is widely believed by conspiratologists
to be a continuation of the Illuminati. Burnett again resorts to ridicule
to eliminate Lodge 322, not only as a continuation of the Illuminati but
even as a contender for world power rulership, despite the elite of industry,
banking, politics, education. among its initiates. He cites only one work
on Lodge 322, Ron Rosenbaum's 1977 article for Esquire, The Last Secrets
of Skull & Bones. Rosenbaum points to a common initiatory feature of
the Illuminati and Lodge 322, the initiation from a coffin and a reference
to a line from dramatist and Mason Lessing:
-
- "Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser?
Ob Arm, on Reich, in Tode gleich."
-
- "Who was the fool, who was the wise man, beggar
or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death."
-
- Burnett dismisses this as inconsequential, a coincidence,
while accepting a vague Masonic connection from Germany.
-
- He states that the skull and bones symbol of Lodge
322 probably represents a pirate symbol, seemingly not knowing of the importance
of the symbol in Masonry.
-
- As evidence of the unimportant nature of Lodge 322,
Burnett states that it's merely a Yale fraternity, ignoring the fact that
members aren't 'tapped' until their final year at Yale, and that the old
boy network continues to hold meeting for its 'patriarchs' on an island
resort, Deer Iland (sic), purchased for that purpose. It is not until after
Yale graduation that one becomes a "patriarch' of the Order.
-
- Of particular value is the chapter on the Council on
Foreign relations (CFR), entitled New Knights of the Round Table, (chapter
4). While the dominate theme of the book on globalisation has been dealt
with by many others, the conspiratorial nature of the CFR is described
particularly well in this book.
-
- The knowledge of the CFR was until the advent of the
Internet, publicised mainly by sections of the Right, in particular by
the John Birch Society. Burnett brings some classic Birchite books to the
attention of the general public, namely Gary Allen's underground best-seller
of the 1970s, None Dare Call it Treason, and W Cleon Skousen's The Naked
Capitalist. The latter is a review and commentary on the magnum opus of
the eminent US historian Prof Carroll Quigley, a mentor of Clinton at Harvard.
What makes Quigley unique is not only his importance as a 'mainstream'
historian but that he was on his own account intimately involved with a
conspiratorial apparatus he called 'the international network' which he
identified as stemming from banking dynasties which seek to create a world
state. Quigley as a liberal internationalist agreed with the ideal but
disputed the need for secrecy. His expose of the 'network' over a few dozen
pages of his 1300 page book Tragedy & Hope was sufficient to have him
marked for oblivion career wise, and the book was quietly dropped by publisher
MacMillan.
-
- Quigley, Allen and Skousen identify the conspiratorial
apparatus as centred around the CFR. Burnett follows this in pointing out
the influential role of the CFR in filling Administrations of both Democrats
and Republicans, since its founding in 1921, and the role it played in
planning the UNO and in formulating post-war foreign policy.
-
- However, Burnett provides an added contribution that
is of particular significance. Whereas US conservatives such as Allen and
Skousen and even Quigley have sought to identify this 'international network'
as being 'Anglophile' and as having descended directly from the Round Table
Group of Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner et al, who planned a new world order
around the British Empire, Burnett points out that this is a misinterpretation.
-
- Indeed the misinterpretation of this as a "British
imperial conspiracy' in origin, has generated other theories about the
eminence of the British Royal Family in alleged conspiracies. It has led
to fundamental misinterpretations of history and the role of the CRE and
other cabals which were pivotal in eliminating the British and all the
other European colonial empires, so that the Money Power could fill the
vacuum. (See for e.g. this writer's Building the New Babel, Renaissance
Press, NZ, on how the Money Power eliminated the colonial empires).
-
- The CFR was joined by a prior US group The Inquiry,
founded in 1917 in the aftermath of World War I for promoting the establishment
of a world government via the League of Nations. The intentions of these
internationalist bankers, industrialists and intellectuals were to unite
with the British Round Table Group which became the Royal Institute of
International Affairs. However, as Burnett shows the globalists around
the CFR were willing to co-operate with the USSR in establishing a post-war
new world order, but they would concede nothing to British imperial interests.
-
- While Burnett alludes to the role of Pres. Woodrow
Wilson's chief adviser, Edward House, the organiser of both The Inquiry
ands the CFR, and mentions the Wilsonian/internationalist agenda, of which
the League of Nations was pivotal, he fails to follow through with the
pro-Bolshevik activities of this coterie, although mentioning that House's
novel Philip Dru: Administrator was described by House as advocating "socialism
as dreamed of by Marx." Burnett mentions that House went to a socialist
publisher for his novel. It was this cabal for which House fronted (much
in the manner that Kissinger fronted for Rockefeller interests during his
public service career) that pursued a pro-Bolshevik policy during a time
in which the Bolshevik hold on Russia was precarious. It was this influence
that secured Trotsky's release from detention at Nova Scotia, Canada, as
a 'German agent', so that he could proceed to Russia to help foment the
Revolution. Wickham Steed, editor of The London Times, reported on the
role of House, and bankers such as Schiff and the Warburgs in trying to
secure the diplomatic recognition of the Bolsheviks at the Paris Peace
Conference. Samuel Gompers, the US trade union leader, himself a Mason,
wrote of this also at the time, stating that there was a criminal nexus
between the Bolsheviks and international bankers for the mutual exploitation
of Russia. It was left to Prof. Antony Sutton of Stanford to write the
definitive account on the funding of the Bolsheviks in his Wall Street
and the Bolshevik Revolution. It was also Sutton who wrote a series of
booklets exposing Lodge 322, and showing its lineage to the Illuminati.
Sutton was no fool or yokel, but a Stanford Research specialist, yet he
receives no mention from Burnett, nor from the author discussed below.
-
- Who Are the Illuminati? Exploring the Myth of the Secret
Society.
-
- Lindsay Porter, London, 2005.
-
- If Burnett provides a convincing case for a globalist
conspiracy centred round the CFR, then Porter takes the position that not
only is the Illuminati a myth outside a brief existence as a harmless society
of intellectuals who didn't outlast the 18th C., but that any notion of
a long running political conspiracy is mere paranoia or the simplification
of history by yokels.
-
- Porter is described as an author and researcher who
specialises in secret societies. Frankly, her research methodology is shoddy.
-
- Porter's book is possibly one of the few, which actually
reads like an apologia for Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati. While
drawing on accounts that show Weishaupt to have been paranoid, dictatorial,
and amoral, Porter like Thomas Jefferson during the anti-Illuminati scare
in American in the 18th and 19th C., nonetheless portrays Weishaupt in
sympathetic terms as a misunderstood philanthropist persecuted by reactionaries.
Likewise, the Illuminati are portrayed as professing ideals that are nothing
more than the democracy now taken for granted.
-
- While authors who refer to long range conspiracies,
often traced back to the Knights Templar (see this writer's thesis From
Knights Templar to New World Order, Renaissance Press, NZ) are ridiculed
by Porter, she attempts to form a lineage of her own of "conspiracists"
(sic), starting with the French exiled Jesuit the Abbe Barruel, who first
wrote of the Illuminati and the French Revolution; closely followed by
Dr John Robison, to British historian Nesta Webster, who was the first
and most prominent to revive the idea in the early 20th C., then on to
Robert Welch of the John Birch Society during the 1960s, whom she claims
was the first to revive the Illuminati theory after World War II to explain
the rise of communism. Into this she mixes anyone and everyone who ever
so much as mentioned the Illuminati, along with many who didn't but just
opposed some subversive tendency such as communism. Hence lumped together
are Sen. Joe McCarthy, always good to slander; Father Charles Coughlin
the popular Depression era "radio priest' who challenged Roosevelt;
and Henry Ford the auto manufacturer, who published articles on the Protocols
of Zion.
-
- But Porter particularly relishes the chance to include
special attention to David Icke who has added an extraterrestrial dimension
by claiming that the Illuminati are hybrid humanoid-reptilian aliens, that
include the Bush, Rothschild and Rockefeller families.
-
- While Porter scathingly attacks Robison's Proofs of
a Conspiracy, the foundation of modern conspiracy theory, republished by
the Birch Society in 19867, she yet has recourse to quote him where she
actually attempts to describe the working of the Illuminati. She therefore
concedes that Robison is the definitive authority.
-
- In a chapter on what Porter calls the anti-Illuminati
'hysteria' in the USA during the 18th and 19th centuries, when the doctrines
of the French Revolution were being introduced via Jefferson's Democrats,
she claims that Robison's work was finally repudiated when a letter arrived
from a certain, unidentified Dr Ebeling from Germany, claiming that Robison
had been exposed in Europe as a fraud and a bankrupt. Yet this is far from
the case. Robison was one of the foremost scientists of his day, the first
general secretary of the Scottish Royal Society, who was eulogised by James
Watt. Robison was the victim of smear-mongering, including the allegation
that he had a form of insanity where he believed that his backside was
made of glass. Porter claims that Robison was not sufficiently acquainted
with German to translate the Illuminati papers found by the Bavarian authorities.
Yet the website of Edinburgh University describes Robison as an eminent
linguist. No mention is made of the denigration of his reputation. Robison
had himself been a Mason and was concerned at the bad reputation being
given to English UGL Masonry by Grand Orient, Illuminati and other forms
of Continental Masonry. Porter also quotes George Washington, himself a
high ranking Mason, who fully realised the danger of Illuminati doctrines
spreading to America.
-
- Particular venom is reserved for Nesta Webster, whose
influence on "conspiracists' continues. Webster is scorned as "pseudo-scholarly",
and as having been little heeded in her own time. Porter does concede that
Webster received commendation from Lord Kitchener as a great historian.
Yet one can also add Winston Churchill, and even H G Wells, the famed historian
and novelist, who as a Fabian socialist and internationalist on the opposite
spectrum to that of Webster, commended Webster's 1924 book Secret Societies
& Subversive Movements as being "a book that all serious people
interested in the British situation should to read and think about. I believe
that Mrs Webster's influence has spread beyond the circle of her actual
readers."
-
- Other tributes at the time came form The Daily Express,
Chicago Tribune, NY Herald Tribune, Daily Mail, The Spectator and many
others. Webster was asked to lecture to the British Military on subversion,
and these lectures formed the basis of her book World Revolution.
-
- William Guy Carr, author of Red Fog Over America and
Pawns in the Game, is dismissed as a crank that 'spent much of his life
writing about the Illuminati'. There is no mention of Carr as a distinguished
Commander of the Canadian Royal Navy, nor as an acclaimed author on naval
subjects as well as subversion, who lectured 1944-45 on subversion to the
Navy. Porter fails to mention Carr's books in her Bibliography, which presumably
means she ridicules him without ever having bothered to read what he wrote.
-
- Porter seems to have a lot to say about authors whose
books she does not appear to have read. At one point in attempting o associate
Illuminati conspiracy theories with The Protocols of Zion and ipso facto
with "anti-Semitism" Porter claims that The Protocols purport
to show "secret Jewish rituals." This is hogwash, despite the
book being listed in the bibliography. Indeed, as this writer has shown
in my Protocols in Context (Renaissance Press, NZ), the Protocols doctrine
are strategy parallel that of the Illuminati, and have scant evidence of
what became Herzlian Zionism. There is a direct link between The Protocols,
the Illuminati, and Memphis-Mizraim-Martinist Masonry via de Pasquales,
an Illuminatist and founder of Martinist Masonry, Adolphe Cremieux, head
of Grand Orient Masonry, Mizraim-Martinist Masonry and the Universal Israelite
Alliance, whop was significantly mentor of Maurice Joly, whose novel, Dialogues
in Hell, The Protocols were supposedly 'plagiarised' from; but none of
this is mentioned by supposed authorities such as Norman Cohn (Warrant
for Genocide).
-
- Robert Welch who founded the once formidable anti-communist
lobby the John Birch Society, comes in for much condemnation as an individual
who revived the Illuminati conspiracy theory after World War II to explain
communism. Porter quotes from Welch's booklet The Truth In Time, yet again
we find that according to the Bibliography, not only has Porter apparently
not even read The Truth In Time, but the only book she records there by
Welch is The Blue Book of the JBS, the founding document which does not
even deal with conspiracy themes. .
-
- Others brought together into a 'conspiracist' conspiracy
of Porter's imagination include KKK, Pat Robertson, the evangelist; , the
Militias, UFOlogy, along with Webster, McCarthy, Ford, Welch, Robison et
al.
-
- Porter seems to be correct in stating that conspiracy
theories on the Eye and Triangle/Pyramid being the symbol of the Illuminati
are not correct, despite the widespread belief among 'conspiracists'. Yet
she goes too far in attempting to ridicule the other major 'conspiracist'
contention regarding the symbol, i.e. that it is incorporated into eh Great
Seal of the USA as a Masonic contrivance. She mentions that the symbol
is depicted on the US Dollar Bill due to the influence of Roosevelt's Secretary
of Agriculture, Henry Wallace. Yet she seems oblivious as to both Wallace
and Roosevelt being 32nd Degree Masons, both of whom saw great significance
in the Masonic symbolism of the Great Seal. Wallace referred to the Masonic
doctrine of the completion of the pyramid as placing the USA in a mission
to lead in establishing a 'New Order of the Ages', the slogan of the US
Great Seal, and one used with frequency by both presidents Bush. As for
the Eye and Triangle, although not apparently being Illuminati per se,
it is an important Masonic symbol, prominently depicted by the Grand Orient
of France for e.g., and adorning the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen, by the French Revolutionaries, along with other occult, Masonic
symbols (see Bolton, From Knights Templar, op.cit.).
-
- It is also significant that the Eye and Pyramid adorn
the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem, and that the whole building is
replete with Masonic symbolism. The building was funded by the Rothschilds
and a plaque, also with an eye and pyramid sign, commemorates their contribution.
-
- If the neglect of Burnett to mention Dr Sutton's booklets
on Lodge 322 is a bad oversight, then Porter's neglect is outright poor
scholarship, and that's to err on the side of charity. For a book that
purports to trace theories on the Illuminati not to mention Sutton's research,
even for the ;purposes of scorn, is unforgivable; especially his final
booklet in the series, The Secret Cult of the Order, which was specifically
written to show the link between the Illuminati and Lodge 322.
-
- However, Porter does reserve praise for Robert Anton
Wilson and Robert Shea, whose 1970s Illuminatus Trilogy lampoons Illuminati
and other conspiracy theories. Ironically what Porter does not mention
is that Wilson is an avid and well known admirer of and advocate for British
occultist and Mason A leister Crowley, who took over leadership of the
Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) from the well-connected German spy Theodor Reuss.
Reuss himself claimed to have re-established the Illuminati on the basis
of family connections. Crowley claimed Illuminati founder Weishaupt, as
a "saint" (sic) for his OTO. Hence we come to something of a
cycle in which we find Porter lauding Wilson who is an apologist for occultist
who claimed the mantle of Weishaupt himself.
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