Category: Articles

From New Dawn 118 (Jan-Feb 2010)

In the “last times,” said the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, “You’ll be riding along in an automobile… When the trumpet sounds, you and other born-again believers in that automobile will be instantly caught away… the car suddenly crashes.… Other cars on the highways driven by believers will suddenly be out of control and stark pandemonium will occur.”¹

He was speaking of the Rapture, an integral part of his belief in Armageddon and the return of Christ. He spoke with confidence; did he have any reason to do so? 

Around AD 95 a Christian convert called John, exiled by the Roman authorities to the Greek island of Patmos, had a vision of Christ’s return: not the compassionate Christ of the Gospels but a violent one, stained with the blood of his enemies and about to battle against the Antichrist at Armageddon – a site in the Jezreel valley, northern Israel, beneath the brooding ruins of ancient Megiddo.

John wrote a furious and violent text, his Revelation, which after several hundred years was finally included in the New Testament as its final book. 

John was certain that the end was coming at any moment. Indeed, he believed that some who had witnessed the crucifixion would still be alive. John was wrong but his apocalyptic prediction of the last days has reverberated through the centuries. Even today there are those who think they will live to witness it.

Fifty-nine percent of all American Christians – according to polls in 2002 – believe that the events described in Revelation will occur in their lifetime; amongst fundamentalist Christians the figure reaches seventy-seven percent. In the last days, they believe, the Messiah – Jesus – will return, win the great battle against Satan (the Antichrist, the Beast) and convert the entire world to Christianity. Thereafter he will rule from Jerusalem.

Beliefs can create events. Ideas are powerful and linger well-entrenched and active in the cultural consciousness. And if those who share these beliefs are serving in an army in the Middle East and think that the ultimate enemy is Satan, what then?

“And the enemy is a guy called Satan”

US Lieutenant General William Boykin, in June 2003, during the Iraq war, laid out such an explanation at a church in Oregon. 

“We… are in a spiritual battle, not a physical battle… the battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it’s a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy called Satan.… Satan wants to destroy this nation.”²

Lieutenant General Boykin has a history: in 1980 he was in the Iranian desert as operations officer for the attempt to free the United States Embassy hostages; in 1989 he was in Panama with the operation to capture President Noriega; in 1993 he was in Colombia with Delta Force, chasing Pablo Escobar, the cocaine baron. That same year Boykin was an adviser on the confrontation with the Branch Davidian sect at Waco, Texas, and by October he was in Somalia, commanding the Delta Force group and was present during the battle of Mogadishu, the subject of Black Hawk Down.

He was appointed head of the Special Operations Division at the Pentagon, moved to the CIA as Deputy Director of Special Activities and then placed in charge of the United States Army Special Forces Command. In 2003–2004 he was involved with the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. 

Boykin was not a lone eccentric: when, in 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl was leading his men in an assault on Falluja, in mid-Iraq, he inspired them by proclaiming, “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. And we’re going to destroy him.”³

Of course, fundamentalist Christians have an escape card that they can play: the Rapture. It is a very simple concept, if you are on the side of Jesus, then you get whisked away by God before the troubles start. If you are somewhere else in the vast realm of religious aspiration then you don’t. 

When you get taken there is no warning that allows you to park your car or finish brushing your teeth. God grabs you and you are gone. Implicit in the story is that those left behind actually deserve whatever happens. They are sinners who must be punished. The Rapture does not “do” compassion.

But curiously the Rapture is not mentioned in Revelation. Neither is there any such teaching in Judaism. Islam too is silent on the subject. Nor does Roman Catholic, Orthodox or mainstream Protestant theology contain its story. 

In fact, the Rapture is a relatively recent spin on cherry-picked biblical extracts. It has its origins in two sources: the writings of John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), the founder of the Plymouth Brethren and in the commentaries of the Reverend Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921) in The Scofield Reference Bible, 1909. The modern picture of the Rapture with its crashing cars and aeroplanes dates from the 1950s and was first launched to a large public audience by fundamentalist preacher Hal Lindsey in 1970 with his book The Late Great Planet Earth. 

The Biblical Prophecy Industry

During the morning of 7 June 1967 the future of the Middle East changed dramatically. The Temple Mount was taken by Israeli forces. With the Old City and the Temple Mount in Jewish hands, the Christian fundamentalist prophecy industry went into overdrive. These events, they said, provided direct proof that their understanding of biblical prophecy was correct and that the last days were closing in.

During March and April of 1967 Hal Lindsey was lecturing on college campuses throughout California on the apocalyptic events prophesied in the Bible. His talks centred on the three great events concerning the Jews that would be signs of the return of Jesus and the final defeat of the Antichrist: firstly, the gathering of Jews together to reform their ancient nation; secondly, the possession of Jerusalem and the holy places by Israel; thirdly, the rebuilding of the Temple.⁴

The first sign was fulfilled on May 14, 1948, with the creation of the modern state of Israel. One can imagine Lindsey’s excitement when Israel took Jerusalem and its holy places, thereby fulfilling the second sign. Would the third event take place? Lindsey had no doubt at all that it would despite his admission that the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount was an “obstacle.” 

When the Israeli paratroopers took the Temple Mount they assigned one of their young brigade chaplains, Yisrael Ariel, to guard the entrance to the Dome of the Rock. He later recalled thinking that he was simply minding the site until army engineers could come and tear the structure down.⁵ 

The expectation of the hard-line fundamentalists was that the Israeli state would take this opportunity to return the Temple Mount to Jewish worship. But the engineers never arrived; the site was maintained as an Islamic place of worship. 

Ariel had studied under a messianic teacher, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who saw the influx of Jews into Israel as part of a divine plan and opposed any Arabs holding land that was once Jewish. Kook felt that the time of the Messiah was coming closer; the events in the world about him were a prelude to the last days.

In 1974 a number of Rabbi Kook’s followers organised the West Bank settler movement, the Gush Emunim, whose members flooded into the West Bank and built heavily defended communities. Ariel, by then a rabbi, moved to the hard right of religious Zionism joining the violent and racist Kach political party; in the 1981 elections Ariel was on the Party list. He despised those Jews who did not want to rebuild the Temple and he stated his belief that Christians and Muslims were idol worshippers who, by Jewish law, were forbidden to live in Israel. Then, in 1984, Ariel founded the Temple Institute. Its registration documents state that its long-term aim is to rebuild the Temple. 

I first encountered the Temple Institute in January 1992 while on a break from cave-exploration in the high cliffs bordering the Dead Sea. I decided to visit them and hear what they had to say.

There, Rabbi Chaim Richman told a story that left me shaken: members of the Institute wished to remove the Dome of the Rock and the al-AqsaMosque so that the Temple of Solomon could be rebuilt. And to serve the Temple they were training priests in the tradition of blood sacrifice. Richman carefully explained the Institute’s mission: 

“The Temple represents harmony; it will bring harmony to the world.”⁶

He later wrote that Jerusalem would be recognised “as the spiritual centre of all humanity.”⁷ 

“Israel,” he added, has the divine mission of being a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”⁸

And this brings us to their interest in the “red heifer.”

A Perfect Red Heifer

Of the many enigmatic stories in the Old Testament, there are few stranger than that related in Numbers 19:1–22 which concerns the sacrifice of, “a red heifer without fault or blemish.” This animal was slaughtered and burned, its ashes gathered and kept in a ritually clean location. These ashes were the most powerful substance known in ancient Judaism to ensure ritual purity. 

The orthodox Jews wishing to build the Third Temple today cannot risk entering the Temple Mount in case they inadvertently step upon the site once occupied by the Holy of Holies. Since no one knows exactly where this stood there is only one way of proceeding: to purify the site using the ashes of the red heifer. 

As they enter the Temple Mount they will sprinkle sacred water mixed with the ashes of the red heifer to ensure that they do not lose their ritual purity. In this way they can begin the demolition of the Islamic structures.

No such perfect red heifers exist today but Rabbi Richman mentioned a cattle-breeding programme being conducted in the United States with the help of fundamentalist Christian groups that also await the Messiah – for them, Jesus. But Richman was adamant that there was no possibility of Jesus being the Jewish Messiah.

A key figure in this breeding programme was a Christian Pentecostal rancher, the Rev. Clyde Lott of Canton, Mississippi. In 1989 he realised that the Red Angus breed might produce the required animal. Lott and Richman quickly joined forces. During 1991 and 1992 they instituted the breeding program, initially on ranches in the United States but later in Israel. However, producing a perfect heifer proved difficult. 

In 1996 a red heifer – named Melody – was finally born on a farm near Haifa though by 1997 she was pronounced unworthy of sacrifice. Since that time a number of others have been born but all have proved less than perfect. 

Nevertheless, the Temple Institute presses on. In 2007 they gave an explanation of the importance of the red heifer, commenting that, “A perfect heifer, born and raised under a controlled environment, would be fit to be used for the Temple. And that is precisely what is being done today.”⁹

I returned to the Temple Institute in 2007, paid my fee and slipped down to join the small group of US Christians. Next to me was Mark from Texas. We were taken to a room containing a large model of the Temple. Our lecturer began explaining the various elements. I noted, leaning against the rear wall of the room, a framed colour photograph of a red heifer. I wondered why it was not hanging on the wall. It seemed oddly disrespectful. And curiously, our lecturer didn’t mention it at all.

As we exited the Temple Institute and were walking up the street, I approached Mark from Texas and asked, “Didn’t Jesus’ death remove the need for animal sacrifices in the Temple?”

“Yes,” replied Mark from Texas with a knowing smile, “He was the sacrificial Lamb of God and stopped animal sacrifice for all time. The Jews don’t recognise that Jesus stopped the animal sacrifices.”

Mark from Texas had touched upon a major difficulty that accompanies Christian support for those Jewish groups wishing to rebuild the Temple. The Christians want the Temple rebuilt because this brings the second coming of Jesus closer. The Jewish groups are happy to accept their patronage since it represents backing for Israel as well as significant financial aid. In addition, of course, both groups are also choosing to ignore that the fundamentalist Christians are intent upon convincing all the Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. 

And there is more to worry about: in ancient times there was a Jewish religious authority operating in parallel to the Roman administration, the Sanhedrin, the ultimate authority in matters of the interpretation of Mosaic law and which had the power to impose the death penalty. 

After the Temple’s destruction in AD 70, the Sanhedrin moved through a series of sites, the last being Tiberius, around AD 425. And so it was in Tiberius, in 2004, that the new Sanhedrin was convened. 

One of the Sanhedrin’s aims is to influence the political direction of Israel, seeking power to veto any laws that it deems incompatible with biblical Jewish law. A leadership council of seven prominent members was formed; this included Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, the founder of the Temple Institute along with his colleague Rabbi Chaim Richman.¹⁰ It is no surprise to find that “the Sanhedrin is researching ways to renew the deepest roots of our faith – to renew Temple service.”¹¹

The Mahdi and Jesus Return for the Last Days

The relevance of events of June 1967 was not missed by the Muslims. Their traditional enemies were now in possession of the third most sacred site in Islam. The defeat of the Arab armies ushered in radical Islam which believes the only solution is a world united in a great Islamic state under a Caliph based in Jerusalem ruling by sharia law. 

For most Muslims who await the caliphate its appearance would be the sign of the last days when the Messiah – the Mahdi – will appear. And at his side, they believe, will stand Jesus.

But before the Day of Judgment can begin, according to one widely accepted hadith dating from the ninth century AD, all Jews must be slaughtered. This has become an integral part of Middle Eastern politics: the 1988 foundation charter of Hamasstates explicitly that the organisation seeks “to implement Allah’s promise” that the Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims have killed all the Jews.¹²

The aim is to ensure that not a single member of the Jewish race survives, then to seize Jerusalem which will become the messianic capital of Islam; to take over all the technology developed by the West and put it in the hands of the true believers and finally, to convert the whole world to Islam, placing Allah’s people into their rightful position – in charge. That, in essence, is the Islamic apocalyptic vision of the last days.

But the Mahdi and his armies are not just fighting a coalition of disparate races; there is a single directing force acting behind them – the Antichrist, the Dajjal.

Modern Islamic writers have gone far beyond traditional texts in the search for material to justify their last days prophecies and the Christian book of Revelation has proved a rich mine to plunder. Material has also been drawn from many other sources, ranging from early Gnostic texts through the prophecies of Nostradamus to modern Western UFO literature.

Best-selling Egyptian author Muhammad Isa Da’ud would have us believe in the existence of, “the Antichrist army of Jinn [spirits] and demons, which kidnap unfortunates who wander into the area of the Bermuda Triangle. Those who are kidnapped are taken down into his fortress castle far beneath the waters.”¹³

In 1997 Muhammad Izzat Arif, who considered rather more plausibly that this Bermuda Triangle base was above water, explained that, “The truth is that the Antichrist is a power chained on a remote island, sending his orders through demons subordinated to him, and working before him as servants,”¹⁴ adding that, “They inspire Jews, and their slaves the Masons.”

These demons under the control of the Antichrist have another specific role: they pilot the UFOs the Antichrist uses. In 1996 writer Hisham Kamal ‘Abd al-Hamidexplained that the flying saucers were not from extraterrestrial sources but rather from the earth, which he reminds us is inhabited by both humans and jinns. He concludes, as we noted earlier, that the “people of flying saucers are demons in human form.”¹⁵ 

Perversely, as noted, much of the material comes from Christian sources, which seem well known to the Islamic writers. Jerry Falwell’s writings are frequently referred to by Muslim apocalyptic writers and he is considered an authority on the end of the world. 

Others who receive a mention in the Islamic sources are Caspar Weinberger, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, Richard De Haan, Billy Graham, and, surprisingly, the Scofield Bible.¹⁶

These radical Muslims assume that the world will convert to Islam; the extremist Christians assume the world will convert to Christianity; the Jewish fundamentalists care only that Jews serve on the Temple Mount, they don’t seem to be concerned how the rest of the world shakes out. But all three religions claim Jerusalem as the centre for their Messiah’s rule. 

It appears that these apocalyptic writers from the three Abrahamic religions have more in common with each other than with the moderate majority within their own traditions, a majority who generally have no great arguments with each other. 

The certainty, self-confidence, and aggressiveness of the fundamentalists is shifting their faith’s centre of gravity toward the rigid and intolerant edges. The hardliners are deliberately encouraging a focus upon differences instead of seeking points of similarity, accord, and mutual understanding. A separation is being created, which, in time, may become too wide to bridge.

Fundamentalist Arrogance and Ignorance

What worries me about all this is the breathtaking arrogance and willful ignorance of spirituality by the fundamentalists of the three faiths. There is no room for any other spiritual systems, no room for Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or the many other perfectly valid paths by which spiritually minded people journey toward knowledge of matters divine.

Fundamentalist Christian authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are blunt, “The idea that all religions point to the same god is blasphemy. So is the idea that there are many ways to God. Buddha, Mary, Gaia, Muhammad, and Christ are not in the same category.… Just one was God’s ‘only begotten Son’, and only He gives us access to God through prayer.”¹⁷

The concept of a divine Jesus is a problem for Judaism and Islam. For Muslims, the failure of the other two religions to recognise Mohammed as the last prophet represents an additional conflict point. For the Jews, the failure to recognise the importance of the Temple and its priesthood as a conduit between God and earth is a crucial difficulty. The three positions seem irreconcilable. 

Can we continue to live with this or should we reconsider our position towards the anthropomorphic god of the Abrahamic religions? Should we really accept all authority deriving from a vengeful and jealous god who claims to be unique? Should we just sit back and watch as the fundamentalist religious teachings leak inexorably and dangerously into our politics? 

We have found ourselves across the Rubicon, by default rather than design. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 118.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. Ronnie Dugger, “Reagan’s Apocalypse Now,” Guardian (reprinted from Washington Post), April 21, 1984, 19.

2. Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side, New Press, New York, 2005, 21.

3. Paul Wood, “Hunting ‘Satan’ in Falluja Hell,” BBC News, November 23, 2004, quoted in John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Penguin, London, 2007, 28. 

4. Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 1970, 50–51.

5. Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days, Free Press, New York, 2000, 100.

6. Richman, personal communication, January, 1992.

7. Chaim Richman, A House of Prayer for all Nations: The Holy Temple of Jerusalem, Temple Institute, Jerusalem, 1997, 7.

8. Chaim Richman, “Rosh HaShana Blessings from the Temple Institute”, September 21, 2006, www.templeinstitute.org/news.htm. 

9. The Temple Institute, “The Red Heifer: The Original Ashes”, www.templeinstitute.org/red_heifer/original_ashes.htm.

10. “Current members of the Sanhedrin”, www.thesanhedrin.org/en/main/officers.html.

11. “Reestablished Sanhedrin Convenes to Discuss Temple”, Arutz-7 IsraelNationalNews.com, February 9, 2005, www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/76624.

12. Noted in a submission by the World Union for Progressive Judaism to the fifty-ninth session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, February 18, 2003, 5. File No. E/CN.4/2003/NGO/226.

13. David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2005, 78.

14. Ibid, 188.

15. Ibid, 81.

16. Ibid, 92nn9,10, 11.

17. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, Tyndale, Wheaton, 1999,176.

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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 16 No 6 (Dec 2022)

Terrorism has largely dropped off the radar. Instead, climate change, the pandemic, war in Ukraine, and the global financial crisis dominate headlines. The kind of terrorism that our self-imposed rulers want us to think is terrorism is when groups attack civilians for ideological, political, or financial purposes. When we hear “terrorist,” we tend to think of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and white supremacists like Brenton Tarrant. But the biggest terrorists are nation-states.

STATES AS TERRORISTS

There is a simple principle: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; to quote a clichéd but true statement. Nation-states are the most powerful institutions that have ever existed. They are run by a relatively small elite consisting of financiers, secret agents, militaries, and political frontpeople. They force complicated communities, municipalities, regions, and even countries into monolithic, homogenous systems and brainwash their populations with nationalism. They erect arbitrary and artificial borders to maintain that phony homogeneity. They indoctrinate their populations from the cradle to the grave with schooling and propaganda. Laws and law enforcement are imposed in case the conditioning doesn’t fully work.

The public are terrorised by their local authorities into paying taxes, lest they go to prison: even though the quality of their local services progressively declines, and local debts are often owed by councils to foreign corporations and serviced by the captive taxpayer.¹ Federal authorities terrorise with the threat of imprisonment for not paying national taxes that buy governments weapons to blow children to bits in foreign countries. Private tyrannies that monopolise energy supplies and water threaten to take non-payers to court or even break into homes and seize property (bailiffs) for failing to pay utility bills. These are the actions of gangsters who demand “protection money” from shop owners, or else they come and set fire to the store.

Modern society is little more than the subjugation of the populace by thugs in suits who attend top schools and universities; thugs whose ancestors succeeded in brutalising their opponents into submission so that they could be king, lord, etc. When people try to alert the public as to what is taking place, they are removed or murdered in the name of national security. Their convenient deaths are labelled accident, ill-health, or suicide by the propaganda machine that denigrates as conspiracy theorists those who dare to challenge the conventional narrative. Made to look silly, people internalise the lies and come to hate the truth-tellers, deriding them as fringe lunatics. As Bertrand Russell once wrote in The Impact of Science on Society, successful mind control is convincing the public that snow is black.

SILENCING DISSENTERS

Examples include Gough Whitlam, who in the 1970s was dismissed as Australian PM by the Governor General, supposedly over a House and Senate gridlock. The more realistic reason was that Whitlam was threatening not to renew the license for Pine Gap, the American spy base that listens in on communications across Asia.²

The state also murders dissidents. In 2003, a British Ministry of Defence contractor, Dr David Kelly, was accused of being the sole source for a BBC journalist, who said that the source confirmed that the Tony Blair government knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction – the lie on which the invasion was predicated. The more likely scenario is that a very high-level member of government inside Blair’s cabinet had been speaking to the media and that Kelly was blackmailed into being a “fall-guy” so that the government member could enjoy protection.³ (Kelly had likely been having an affair with an American spy.) To protect the source, or shut Kelly up, or send a warning to other would-be whistleblowers, Kelly was murdered and his death ruled suicide.

In the US, a young hot-shot journalist who drove around in a Mercedes, Michael Hastings, had hit upon a major story for Rolling Stone about US military and intelligence activities in Afghanistan. Hastings emailed friends saying that he had uncovered something big and needed “to go off the radar for a bit.”⁴ His car was seen speeding down a residential street very early one morning in 2013 before hitting a tree and bursting into flames, as luxury cars tend to do on impact. Not. Rumours abound that Hastings had uncovered top-level links to heroin smuggling or child trafficking, but we’ll never know. WikiLeaks later released information that the CIA has the capacity to remotely hack the computer chips in cars,⁵ leading many to suspect that Hastings was murdered using this method.

PUBLIC AS GUINEA PIGS

There’s also a long history of governments testing biological and chemical weapons on the public. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, the British used South Australia’s Maralinga to conduct nuclear tests. The environmental reports claimed that the areas were terra nullius, no one’s land, and that the only inhabitants were rabbits. But different Aboriginal communities lived there. Some, like Yami Lester, went blind as a result of the tests.⁶

In more recent years, the evidence has tipped in favour of SARS-CoV-2 being a human-engineered virus by EcoHealth Alliance scientists working under US government grants at a lab in Wuhan, China.⁷ Having killed millions of people with a likely-human-made virus, governments of the world used violence to enforce draconian lockdowns instead of dealing with the pandemic in a logical and humane way.⁸

In many countries, governments terrorised their populations with the threat of joblessness, which means homelessness and inability to buy food and pay bills. They demanded that their publics take an experimental “vaccine,” which has been linked by federal reporting systems to excess mortality and does not work like a normal vaccine: it doesn’t prevent transmission or infection; i.e., it’s not a vaccine.

KILLING FOREIGNERS

But we should always spare more than a thought for the poor people abroad. The terrorisation of domestic populations is small compared to the “shock and awe” bombing of states’ foreign policies.

With US-British weapons and organisation, the Saudi elites have murdered tens of thousands of Yemenis and tortured millions of babies, toddlers, and children, as well as their desperate mothers, by starving them; many to death.⁹ Having created the Taliban indirectly in the 1980s and then empowering them briefly in the ‘90s,¹⁰ the US withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation in such a way that has enabled the regime to return back to where it left off.

In Iraq, the US and Britain shell-shocked the entire nation and surreptitiously fomented a civil war¹¹ to blame Iraqis, not themselves, for the massive death toll. When monsters in the form of ISIS emerged from this monstrous situation, the US and Britain bombed Iraq again, killing tens of thousands more people.

Never lose sight of the fact that the nation-state, regardless of who controls it, is the biggest terrorist of all.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 16 No 6.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. www.bbc.com/news/business-17396175

2. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence

3. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmfaff/uc1025-i/uc102502.htm

4. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/06/michael-hastings-sent-panicked-email-hours-before-car-crash.html

5. https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/

6. https://johnpilger.com/articles/making-the-world-a-more-dangerous-place-the-eager-role-of-julia-gillard

7. https://news.yahoo.com/nih-admits-funding-gain-function-125103852.html

8. See my Capitalism and Coronavirus (2020), Ursa Major

9. https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/torture-slow-motion-economic-blockade-yemen-and-its-grave-humanitarian-consequences

10. Ahmed Rashid (2010 edition) Taliban, IB Tauris

11. Patrick Cockburn (2006) The Occupation, Verso

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From New Dawn 197 (Mar-Apr 2023)

Once reviled and publicly excoriated, now vindicated. Who knew the proverbial tin foil would suddenly be upgraded to a state-of-art cultural mainframe and keeper of advanced knowledge.

In truth, the great unravelling has been unfolding for years, but it’s during the era of COVID that we’ve witnessed successive feverish waves of revelatory epiphanies, one after another, and before we knew it, the conspiracy theorists had been proven right.

Long regarded as a disparate and marginalised section of the populace, the tin foil hat community have finally reached the promised land – a veritable oasis of welcome respite from mainstream persecution.

But it comes at a cost: the red pill revelations are still deeply disconcerting, not least of all because of the stark realisation that we’re in the throes of a full-blown global fascist power grab – a lurid connivance hatched during the so-called ‘global pandemic’ and population-wide roll-out of the experimental mRNA gene-jab.

While the general public is slow to come to grips with the gravity of this new reality, the foils know the scale of the global tumult. To be sure, the implications are nothing shy of biblical, with the modest consolation being that alternative and independent voices have now been afforded a credible platform for exposing the perennial lies of governments and shadow state cabals, such as the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group and the transnational pharmaceutical industrial complex.

The plethora of once-maligned but now validated conspiracies have effectively defanged the establishment epithet typically used to ridicule, defame and marginalise anyone accused of being a ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theorist – as if positing an alternative opinion or speculating outside the depressingly narrow constraints of the Overton Window de jour… was somehow dangerous.

Perhaps the late American gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson said it best: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

That hour is now upon us. Only the truly open-minded are equipped to navigate the maelstrom of baseness. This might be the golden age of conspiracies.

The disparaging label “conspiracy theorist” has been weaponised by authorities and mainstream media for decades. It turns out the term was utilised by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ward off any challenge to the official story of what really happened on that fateful day on 22 November 1963at Dealey Plaza.

Ever since the Warren Commission concluded on 24 September 1964that an unlikely lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinated President John F. Kennedy, authorities have used the term “conspiracy theory” to attack and discredit anyone proffering an alternative view of who might be responsible for that awful murder. In fact, the CIA practically invented the term – a shrewd but highly adept move by the American Deep State and detailed in Lance DeHaven-Smith’s excellent book Conspiracy Theory in America.¹ Even back in the 60s, mainstream sceptics believed there was enough credible evidence to make the case that rogue elements in the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service, together with factions of the mafia and organised crime, had conspired to kill JFK. Then, one by one, dissenting voices were systematically slapped down with the newly-minted and powerful pejorative – that’s a conspiracy theory.

The lid blew off this ageing can of worms after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the unsayable on US national television in December 2022. He announced that a credible government source, familiar with the trove of classified documents scheduled to be handed over to the National Archives, had confirmed to Carlson that the unredacted files contain evidence that the CIA was directly involved in JFK’s assassination.

Regarding the motivation for the execution, take your pick: the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy’s hesitation in escalating the Vietnam War, or the controversy surrounding the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the State of Israel. It’s hard to pin it down to a single reason, but Carlson’s public admission is profoundly significant and maybe the first time in US history that a leading mainstream media outlet has dared such a bold reveal in front of millions of primetime viewers.

Interestingly, Carlson also exposed how Donald Trump’s former CIA Director and US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was involved in blocking the release of this information. This is especially interesting, as Pompeo, the consummate Deep State actor, is preparing his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination for US President. At the very least, Pompeo will be auditioned for a Vice Presidential role, seemingly following in the footsteps of Dick Cheney and Joe Biden as Deep State operatives running clandestine affairs from Number One Observatory Circle in north-western Washington, D.C.

Tucker’s revelations didn’t end there. Early in the new year, he dropped a corresponding addendum to the JFK bombshell when he explained what many researchers suspected for decades – that the Watergate scandal which took down the reign of Richard M. Nixon, 37^th President of the United States (1969–1974), was a coup d’état hiding in plain sight; a well-crafted distraction, courtesy of the intelligence community, designed to deflect from revelations that threatened to destabilise the Deep State.

Among other tradecraft secrets, this likely included the truth about the assassination of JFK, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and perhaps even Martin Luther King. All above Nixon’s ‘pay grade’ and security clearance. Tucker even fingered legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward as an intelligence plant who helped orchestrate the deception.

More telling was that Tucker’s highly controversial comments went practically unchallenged by the mainstream media and its various gatekeepers, who never seem to miss an opportunity to shoot down anyone challenging the sacred cows of prescribed 20th-century history. In other words: that massive domino fell right before our eyes, but only a relative few seem to have understood its significance, for now.

Was this merely a glitch in the matrix, or is it more consequential than that? If the JFK and Watergate narratives collapse, what does that mean for the Establishment’s ability to control and moderate consensus reality? Are we, at last, witnessing the great unravelling happening in real-time? If these key dominos fall, what next? 9/11? 7/7?

Such a loss of faith on the part of the public could threaten the entire infrastructure of control. That is no exaggeration, either. It’s akin to Christian scholars rewriting the holy gospel. Our whole edifice of modern governance and authority is built on these paradigmatic narratives, cascading through time to form the lattice of future hierarchies. To tamper with the modern scriptures would be as disruptive to the control grid as a time traveller being hurled into the past (or catapulting into the future) and interfering with the delicate fabric of reality, only to trigger a paradox somewhere else along the space-time continuum.

Bond-like Plots & Epic Denials

Are we ready for a great awakening, having now been acclimated to outrageous Bond-level plots involving plans for world domination by real-life Blofeld antagonists?

Consider the World Economic Forum’s doppelganger for Ian Fleming’s Blofeld character from his James Bond novels: Klaus Schwab. His Great Reset masterplan for global digital enslavement and the A.I.-driven fourth industrial Brave New World aggressively pushed by the billionaire luminaries in Davos.

Schwab and Western governments blatantly attempted to use a contrived ‘global pandemic’ crisis and the vaccine roll-out to fast-track their program of digital enslavement. Schwab laid out his conspiracy in his COVID-19: The Great Reset manifesto in July 2020. What followed was every G7 leader taking to their respective pulpits adorned with identical backdrops emblazoned with the ominous globalist strapline and mantra, “Build Back Better.”

Truly remarkable and more than enough to send any self-respecting tin foil hatter fleeing to the hills with their bug-out bag, or at least into psychological paralysis.

Running concurrently with this Great Reset theme has been a massive media push to demonise meat and accelerate a new ‘zero carbon’ future to ‘save’ the planet from man-made global warming. Suddenly we have a global push to promote fake meat and celebrities promoting insects as a delectable protein replacement. Meanwhile, we see one report after another of food production and distribution facilities catching fire or being taken offline due to ‘random’ incidents. And quietly stewing in the background with the grin of a Cheshire cat is one of the planet’s wealthiest oligarchs buying up every available acre of farmland in North America and just happens to have cornered the market in ‘sustainable’ synthetic meat production.

If only the movie ended there. When it comes to nefarious Hollywood plots, how about a Malthusian tale of an evil elite cabal claiming to save humanity from a deadly virus, only to mislead the world’s population into injecting an untested genetic substance that ended up injuring and killing millions before plunging humanity into a global fertility crisis? How’s that for a wild conspiracy theory? It’s almost too horrific even to contemplate. The only part missing is Drax and his secret breakaway master race colony waiting out the calamity in upper Earth orbit. But, space colonies aside, the first part is pretty close to what’s already transpired since the COVID-19 drama began in early 2020 and a near-matching script to the 2004 dystopian thriller Children of Men.

It’s right there in front of our eyes, but how many people can see it? With much of the world languishing in a mental swamp of cognitive dissonance, it’s worth asking if the peculiar dot-connecting analytical dexterity of a full-blown ‘conspiracy theorist’ is now a prerequisite for survival in the 21^st century. How else can one fathom what’s really going on?

Last Orders: Armageddon

As you advance down the gestalt of dystopian storylines, you will eventually arrive at World War III and the total annihilation of the human race following a thermal nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. It is the mother of all conspiracy theories, and the final chapter in any doomsday story, including the Book of Revelations, depending on how you read it.

Western society was practically marinated in this Armageddon story during the Cold War era. The well-worn plot line has been the subject of so many novels and films that we’ve almost been desensitised to it. In the modern context, its only true saving grace seemed to be the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which neutralised any Machiavellian motivation one side might have in believing they could gain the upper hand when wargaming a first-strike scenario. Cooler, rational heads would prevail, we were told. That was then, and this is now.

When scanning the playing field in 2023, it’s not easy to find those cooler heads anymore, at least not on the western side of this Orwellian Iron Curtain – especially amid a chorus of war hawks opining for an endless proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Instead of seasoned diplomatic talk of de-escalation and negotiated ceasefires, we hear even more unhinged rhetoric, with cock-sure Western political leaders and mainstream media experts all doubling and tripling down on their stated pledge – to defeat Russia in Ukraine, destroy the Russian economy and oust Vladimir Putin from power in Moscow.

Subsequently, veiled and indirect threats of nuclear strikes have been going back and forth for the last year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in high office willing to step up and calm the situation. Instead, we get more puffed chests and festooning following the recent sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines. While it’s glaringly evident that the United States and its NATO allies carried out the attack on the joint German-Russian energy infrastructure project, disingenuous politicos and media mavens play coy, pretending the rest of the world is as ignorant and aloof to the clear and present danger as they unfortunately are. Suddenly, oil and gas pipelines are fair game, and Russia’s national security interests are dismissed out of hand as the crazed ravings of an ‘autocratic Russian regime’. That’s international relations through the current Western lens – a dire situation indeed.

The outlook is so worrying that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set their Doomsday Clock to “90 seconds to midnight,” the closest it’s ever been to nuclear war in the organisation’s near 80-year history.

One can’t help but wonder how much of the Western animus towards Russia and enthusiasm for war is a direct result of years of priming the public with the official “Russiagate” conspiracy theory, which we now know turned out to be a wholly fabricated hoax. To this day, many Americans, British and Europeans falsely believe that Russia meddled or ‘interfered’ in their elections or that Donald Trump was put into office through some clandestine Russian military intelligence operation. Sure, it might have been total fantasy fiction, but enough people believe it, and that’s what matters.

The release of the Twitter Files further blew the lid off the cover-ups. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, these files are going viral as new instalments show how Big Tech and the US government conspired to suppress, censor, and shadow-ban. Anyone on social media who went against the official disinformation storylines promulgated by the Establishment was tracked, censored, and ultimately de-platformed (banned from using Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) by government agencies working hand-in-hand with Big Tech firms and third-sector intelligence cut-out operations like Hamilton68, Newsguard, and ‘fact-checking’ soft censorships cartels like the Trusted News Initiative and First Draft Coalition, to name just a few.

It’s ironic that with all the endless blathering about “extremist speech” and “dangerous disinformation” or “harmful conspiracy talk” online, the really dangerous conspiracy theories – the ones that threaten the safety and welfare of populations – are not found in the bowels of 4Chan or Reddit, nor on QAnon forums, or any alternative media websites, and certainly not in magazines such as this one. No, the real threat to life on Earth is the deceptive conspiracy theories and fake news pushed by governments and the corporate mainstream media. That’s right – the same crazed official narrative conspiracies mindlessly repeated by what they call ‘normal’ folk.

Something to think about when the missiles start flying.

Although, I sincerely hope that never happens.

Stay vigilant, and be sure to keep a fresh roll of foil in the kitchen drawer :-).

Long may the foils reign.

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Footnote

1. Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance de Haven-Smith, University of Texas Press, 2014.

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