Professional Documents
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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.
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 to 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 is strategically parallel to that of the
Illuminati. The Protocols has scant similarity to what became Herzlian
Zionism. There is however a direct link between The Protocols, the Illuminati,
and Memphis-Mizraim-Martinist Masonry via de Pasquales, an Illuminatist and
founder of Martinist Masonry. This in turn connects to Adolphe Cremieux, head
of Grand Orient Masonry, Mizraim-Martinist Masonry and the Universal Israelite
Alliance, who was significantly mentor of Maurice Joly. Joly’s satire on Napoleon
III, Dialogues in Hell, we are continually told, is the document from which
The Protocols were supposedly ‘plagiarised’ by Czarist agents; but the
Cremieux-Joly connection is not 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.