David Icke

Conspiracy nut or astute observer?

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

7/24/05

http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

Back about two years ago, one of my friends loaned me a videotape about the Illuminati. My interest level wasn’t very high, but television being what it is, I found time to plug it into the VCR and give it a watch.

It consisted of this blond-headed limey wandering around downtown London and prattling on about the Illuminati and the New World Order and bank conspiracies and the like. But he had an engaging style, and sounded a bit more intelligent than your typical conspiracy nutter.

But then he started talking about how the Bushes and the Queen of England and others were all secretly extraterrestrial lizards, and how that was why there were so many statues of dragons scattered about London. At that point, I turned the TV off, and went and wrote an essay, successfully managing, once again, to not allege that the Queen of England had a problem with her tail dropping off when molested by a house cat. Well, after all, I have to have some sort of standards.

I returned the tape to my friend the next day, and he was slightly hangdog over my negative response. "But the man is talking about extraterrestrial lizards," I complained.

"But he’s also talking about some very important things that tie everything we’re seeing all together."

"Extraterrestrial lizards." That pretty well ended the discussion. My friend continued to lend me conspiracy tapes which ranged from interesting but not very convincing, to the compelling "9/11: In Plane Site." I wrote an essay about that one; zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/conspiracy.htm. I think my friend entertained a vague hope that I would convert to someone who was very concerned about the Illuminati, and begin to devote my essays to that topic. I figured there were enough malevolent conspiracies and power hungry nasties around already, and that the conspiracy theories were just gilding the lily. Plenty of sinister and visible cabals around without having to worry about sinister and invisible ones, I figured. We already had the Arkansas Project and what Bartcop calls the BFEE (Bush Family Evil Empire), plus, of course, Hilary’s VRWC. That left me with no shortage of conspiracy topics to write about.

Having seen that video of David Icke’s (E.T. Lizard), when the President of Shalomar Productions came into my office and asked me to design tickets and flyers for a David Icke presentation, I didn’t have to ask who Icke was, or what the nature of the presentation might be. He asked if I would be interested in being comped for a pair of tickets in partial payment. I considered. On one hand, it would be the type of job I like, one in which I get to use my design skills, and which would also pay well, even after comping.. I asked what the price of a ticket would be, and he told me. I blinked. It was pretty spendy by local standards. Two tickets would cut pretty steeply into profits. And . . .extraterrestrial lizards. You may have noticed I was having trouble getting past that one.

In the end, I decided to take the job, comp tickets and all. I figured that if nothing else, I would get an amusing essay about extraterrestrial lizards out of it, and since there was absolutely nothing else going on in my life that might lead me to write about extraterrestrial lizards, I decided I just had to carpe that old diem. Talking lizards worked out pretty well for that insurance company, after all.

As the day approached, I had second thoughts. The presentation was for eight hours, and I was dubious about spending eight hours of a day off in an un-air-conditioned theater that was jam packed with people wearing tin foil hats and Spock ears. The tin-foil hats and Spock ears I could deal with. This is Mount Shasta after all. But we’ve been in the grip of a record heat wave here, like all of the west, and that meant that some of the larger buildings were getting noticeably stuffy. I resolved to cut out early if it was as dreadful as I feared, especially since my wife, laid up with a cold all week, had work she needed to catch up on and couldn’t attend.

So when I went, I admit that the best I was hoping for was a column about the human freak show. It didn’t quite work out that way.

For one thing, I had underestimated Icke’s incredible popularity. Our county is 4,000 square miles, larger than some eastern states, and only has 43,000 people. It’s not the sort of place where you have to stand in line to get tickets for the latest Harry Potter movie, or spend more than thirty seconds waiting to make a left turn. The place was sold out, standing room only, and there was a sizeable queue of people hoping to get tickets somehow.

Further, the crowd was NORMAL. Granted, I wasn’t really expecting to see any tin-foil hats or Spock ears (the literary term for that assertion is "persiflage," which is academia for "bullshit"), but the percentage of evident woos and geeks was no higher than what one might find at a movie. Nor did there seem to be any particular age group that dominated. There were some stable and well-known community people there (I am happily unknown and unstable). I spotted two friends, a retired psychologist and a retired psychiatrist, in the audience. The psychologist had a front row seat, perhaps watching for lizards.

Icke himself was engaging, humorous, and knew his subject material. In fact, that was why I was so frustrated with his videotape; I had just reached the point where I thought that this was a guy who deserved careful consideration when he started talking about the reptiles of London. The first three hours of his presentation concerned the symbols of the Illuminati, and if you’ve done even casual reading, you know what those are: the sun symbol (particularly the rising sun) the pyramid, the all-seeing eye, the pentagram/pentagon, plus various artifices of the Masons and the Knights of Columbus and so on. And of course, the fleur-de-lis. Pyramids are probably THE symbol. He spoke about how the members of the malevolent elite had a visceral need to mark everything with these devices, and offered examples of how they appear everywhere from the street map of Washington, DC to fringes on flags. Most of it was stuff I had seen before, and wasn’t particularly convinced by. As Icke himself observed, "Don’t be mad – there is such a thing as coincidence." There’s also the phenomenon of what I call "tractor art" – artwork done by committees, for the state, tends to adhere blindly to customs and use well-trodden insignia. Soviet artists used the color red a lot, and featured noble-visaged workers with bulging forearms, indicating strength and determination. American tractor artists tend to go with eagles, dead presidents, pyramids and all-seeing eyes because that’s what’s expected of them. Although even here, Icke startled me by observing that one example of American tractor art (my term, not his) was the sheath of bound faggots or arrows, called the fascia. Which, he claims, is the root for the term fascism, and indicates a desire to bind individuals into a collective entity. Which I found mildly interesting. What startled me was the revelation that the chamber of the House of Representatives has two huge inlay depictions of such to the left and right of the Speaker’s podium, just outside of camera range during the SOTU. That seemed to be stretching coincidence a bit far, I agreed.

We broke for lunch, and after lunch, Icke really hit his stride. As I said, he’s a very engaging speaker, funny and intelligent (in case you didn’t notice, I sat through three hours of talk about the Illuminati in a dark, somewhat stuffy auditorium without dozing off or leaving in disgust), and it was here, talking about 9/11, the Bush administration, Blair, the London bombings, and various other topical things, that he really took off.

The various official government accounts about 9/11 and the war on terror and all of that are shot full of holes, and Icke had no shortage of material to discuss. But, being a proper Londoner, he brought to the lecture that peculiar combination of outrage and hilarity that the English manage so well when faced with absurdity and / or stupidity. (Think John Cleese in the "Dead Parrot" sketch: "‘VOOM’?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't ‘voom’ if you put four million volts through it!" )

Icke discussed many of the more glaring discrepancies in the official stories on 9/11 without launching into any fanciful inventions about what might have actually happened. He noted a couple that I hadn’t considered. For example, if the hijackers had, as claimed, studied America’s air defense capabilities for a year and a half prior, they would have to know that NORAD boasted that it could intercept any plane in North America within 15 minutes of the transponder going down. So why did they wait until they were 45 minutes from Washington before seizing flight 77? Why were there two time stamps on the footage of them arriving for their connecting flight in Portland, ME, and why does the second set of numbers – the ones that jibe with the official story on the sequence of events – appear in the center of the image, where it is most likely to obscure the most critical visual information – the faces of the people being videoed?

There are a lot of questions about 9/11 that have never been answered, or even addressed, and Icke covered most of them. Why did Building #7 collapse the next day? Why are four of the nineteen hijackers reportedly still alive? Why hasn’t Osama bin Laden been caught, especially given the close ties between Putsch and the bin Ladens, who you would think would want to assuage a family stain? Where the hell was NORAD? If Flight 77 didn’t hit the Pentagon, what did happen to it and its passengers?

These aren’t paranoid conspiracy nutball questions. They are questions that logic demands answers for – and the answers aren’t there. 9/11 was the biggest single crime in American history, and now, almost four years later, we don’t have answers or even good guesses to most of the most basic elements of the story. And this administration is doing all it can to dissuade any such questions from being raised in the corporate press.

Icke blames this, in part, on the use by the powers that be of Hegelian dialectic. Originally described as thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Icke describes it as problem-reaction-solution, in which the powers create the problem, guide the reaction of the people, and then propose a solution that invariably favors the powers that be. That’s why, instead of tracking down the people behind 9/11 and trying them, and working to prevent such attempts in the future, we have a worthless "war on terror" that does little or nothing to stop terrorists but DOES allow the government to monitor the rest of us, and a war in Iraq that was originally presented to the American people as a response to 9/11. We now know that is a lie, but it stands as a good example of Icke’s "problem-reaction-solution" in action.

I left after the second part of the show, with two hours remaining. I simply had other things to do. But I had caught the part that was of interest to me.

At eight hours, Icke’s presentation is far too long, and because of the broad nature of his philosophy, chance are good that the average attendee found, like me, that portions of the show were riveting, and the rest was a crashing bore. Not surprisingly, Icke has indicated that he won’t be doing any more such live shows, but instead will work on ways of targeting specific segments of his ever-growing audience in ways that will keep them engaged without alienating the rest and wasting Icke’s time.

One thing that Icke has that sets him apart from most conspiracy theorists is his sense of optimism. He feels that the powers that be fear a general awakening among humanity, and are in an absolute frenzy to try to prevent that. To that end, they will arrange more crises, more terror, more apprehension to use to try and extend their control over people’s lives. Unlike most who believe such, he believes they are certain to fail.

Icke has about a half dozen books out (and each one sells better than the one prior), and I recommend picking one or more of them up and acquainting yourself with his overall philosophy. "Infinite Love is the Only Truth; All Else is Illusion" is his most recent. We create our own realities, he argues, but now that reality is being manipulated to the wants of others. He believes we can stop that. He perceives human DNA as having properties of a kind of receiver/transmitter, and that as knowledge expands among a population, it reaches a critical point where it spreads to the entire population through this "DNA internet" – what he calls "The Hundredth Monkey Syndrome" in which once a certain number of individuals in a troupe of monkeys has been taught a new thing, the new knowledge suddenly and inexplicably spreads through the entire troupe. He believes humans are at that point vis a vis awareness of the Illuminati manipulation of our realities.

A lot of his stuff strikes me as problematical at best. But he is at least asking the right questions, and more importantly, getting millions of other people to start asking the same questions after four years of numbed shock. And he’s doing it with courage, wit and humor.

Another good thing about this presentation: he didn’t mention extraterrestrial lizards once. Thus costing me what will surely be my only chance to write about extraterrestrial lizards, barring alien invasion of the earth.