The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (76 page)

We have summarized below the circumstances that have led us to this conclusion. This is is not a case where undue scrutiny or a heightened standard is being imposed on a complainant. Instead, we are confronted with a situation in which it has become increasingly clear that the complainant’s credibility cannot withstand the most basic evaluation. In short, the complainant has provided shifting and inconsistent versions of the events surrounding the alleged assault, and as a result, we cannot be sufficiently certain of what actually happened on May 14, 2011, or what account of these events the complainant would give at trial. In virtually every substantive interview with prosecutors, despite entreaties to simply be truthful, she has not been truthful, on matters great and small, many pertaining to her background and some relating to the circumstances of the incident itself. Over the course of two interviews, for example, the complainant gave a vivid, highly detailed, and convincing account of having been raped in her native country, which she now admits is entirely false. She also gave prosecutors and the grand jury accounts of her actions immediately after the encounter with the defendant that she now admits are false. This longstanding pattern of untruthfulness predates the complainant’s contact with this Office. Our investigation revealed that the complainant has made numerous prior false statements, including ones contained in government filings, some of which were made under oath or penalty of perjury. All of these falsehoods would, of course, need to be disclosed to a jury at trial, and their cumulative effect would be devastating. Finally, we have conducted a thorough investigation in an effort to uncover any evidence that might speak to the nature of the sexual encounter between the complainant and the defendant. All of the evidence that might be relevant to the contested issues of force and lack of consent is simply inconclusive. We do not make this recommendation lightly. Our grave concerns about the complainant’s reliability make it impossible to resolve the question of what exactly happened in the defendant’s hotel suite on May 14, 2011, and therefore preclude further prosecution of this case. Accordingly, we respectfully recommend that the indictment be dismissed.

SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING

RATS.

Just one of the dirty tricks George W. Bush was accused of in the
Stolen Elections
of 2000 and 2004 was using subliminal messages – something near imperceptible to the eye, but which the brain records anyway. In a Republican advert dissing Al Gore the word “RATS” appeared for a second before morphing into “THE GORE PRESCRIPTION PLAN: BUREAUCRATS DECIDE”. You can pick out R-A-T-S from “BUREAUCRATS” yourself. The advert was shown 4,400 times.

Subliminal messages first hit the headlines, however, with another horror story,
The Exorcist
, back in 1973. When it was shown in cinemas, people flocked out vomiting and screaming. Eventually, the filmmakers confessed to having added single frames, lasting for a mere 1/48 of a second, with demon faces into the movie. Conversely, the images of a topless woman in Disney’s
The Rescuers
presumably had dads glued to their seats.

The power of subliminal messaging inevitably appealed to advertisers who, as Vance Packard’s classic
The Hidden Persuaders
recorded, manipulated customers by the million. A follow up tome by Dr Wilson Bryan Key,
Subliminal Seduction
, contained even more lurid tales of advertising companies sticking in secret messages, mostly of sexual gratification if they want you to buy it. (Sex sells: Coca-Cola’s Australian ad which headlined “Feel the Curves” and had a drawing of a girl practising fellatio hidden in the ice cubes is now a collector’s item.) The ensuing public panic led the Federal Communications Commission to sit and stroke their chins before deciding on 29 January 1974:

Subliminal Programming.
The FCC sometimes receives complaints regarding the alleged use of subliminal techniques in radio and television programming. Subliminal programming is designed to be perceived on a subconscious level only. The Commission has held that the use of subliminal perception is inconsistent with the obligations of a licensee and contrary to the public interest because, whether effective or not, such broadcasts are intended to be deceptive.

Under this regulation, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations are banned from knowingly broadcasting programming containing subliminal messages. The FCC issued its regulation in response to a 1974 TV commercial for the toy Husker Du which repeatedly flashed the phrase “Get It”.

End of story? Not quite. Because as the Gore case highlighted, hidden symbols can be dismissed by the accused as a mistake or as coincidence. And so everyone pretty much carried on as before.

But all this selling commodities or denigrating political opponents is penny ante stuff, because the truly important hidden messages are the symbols of the
Bavarian Illuminati
and its satanic project. Take a look at CBS’s logo with its ocular image, which conspiracists insist is the All-Seeing Eye, the emblem of Freemasonry, the middle-aged white men’s front for the Illuminati. Then turn McDonald’s golden arches clockwise by ninety degrees and you get the number three – a sacred number in Freemasonry, because it symbolizes the Deity. Adidas? Run and have a look at the sports manufacturer’s logo, it is a triangle – another form of three. Texaco’s logo is a pentagram (well, almost), the sign the Illuminati use to mark their territory in much the way a dog pees on a lamppost.

Freakiest of all subliminal messages is on US $20 bill. When folded in half there can be seen the image of the World Trade Center in flames. And so the evil Illuminati announced their intention to the world …

Mmm.

Further Reading

Vance Packard,
The Hidden Persuaders
, 1957

SYNARCHY

Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was a nineteenth-century French conservative
philosophe
who, looking at the world around him, believed that there was too much competition between the spheres of Economics, Politics, and Religion. Dire Anarchy was about to ensue. To avoid this dread fate, d’Alveydre prescribed a system of rule whereby the top men from all three spheres would work together in a secret circle for peace and prosperity. He lashed together the Greek “syn” (together) and “archy” (rule) to describe this system of harmonious governance by an elite. Come to think of it, he lashed bits of Plato together to make up the philosophy in the first place.

Anyway, so far so explicable; thereafter synarchism became a term that meant almost anything to any
homme.

a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During the interval from the early 1920s through 1945, it was officially classed by U.S.A. and other nations’ intelligence services under the file name of “Synarchism: Nazi/Communist,” so defined because of its deploying simultaneously both ostensibly opposing pro-communist and extreme right-wing forces for encirclement of a targeted government. Twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creation … It is typified by the followers of the late Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève today … is found among both nominally left-wing and also extreme right-wing factions such as the editorial board of the
Wall Street Journal
… The underlying authority behind these cults is a contemporary network of private banks of that medieval Venetian model known as
fondi
.

The neo-Conservative thinker Leo Strauss has certainly wielded influence in the twentieth century, especially in America where economist Paul Wolfowitz and historian Francis Fukuyama might both be termed “Straussians”. Disappointingly, there is little verifiable evidence of an actual synarchist cabal, which is what you would expect from a super-shadowy super-elite. Or a fantasy.

Further Reading

Umberto Eco,
Foucault’s Pendulum
, 1988

Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre,
La France vraie ou la Mission des Français
, 1887

THE THIRD SECRET OF FÁTIMA

On 13 July 1917, at around noon, a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared (allegedly) before three young shepherd girls at Fátima in Portugal. It was not the first or last time the Madonna revealed herself to the children, Lucia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, but on this occasion She entrusted them with three secrets. Although the Roman Catholic Church generally pooh-poohs visions, the children were so convincing that their account received Vatican approval and the site where “Our Lady of Fátima” had descended became a holy shrine. Of course, authentication was helped by the fact that 50,000 people also saw the Marian visions, and the sun was said to dance in the sky.

The Marto children both died in the great flu pandemic of 1919, but Lucia went on to become a nun, and in 1941 was prevailed upon by the Bishop of Leira, Jose da Silva, to reveal the first two prophecies to assist with the canonization of Francisco and Marta. The first secret was a vision of Hell, complete with demons and blackened human souls; the second prophecy predicted the end of World War I and the start-up of World War II (which of course was already well under way by 1941); the third secret revealed … Well, Lucia on considered reflection decided that this was a secret not to be told.

Two years later, however, as Lucia teetered on the edge of death, da Silva persuaded her to write down the third secret so it could be known in case of her death. She did so, and the written prophecy was dispatched forthwith to the Vatican with the proviso that 1960 was the earliest year in which it could be opened for general gaze. Before then, the secret was for the pope’s eyes only.

The year 1960 came – and the Vatican failed to release the text of the third vision. Then, 1961 passed with no release of the secret text, 1962, 1963 … Not until 2000 was the Third Secret of Fátima revealed, by which time suspicions about what it foretold had gone into overdrive. The publication of the text (see Document, p.543) did little to quell the queries. According to the official Vatican line, the text foretold the attempted assassination of
Pope John Paul II
, centring as it did on “a man clothed in white who falls to the ground apparently dead”. (John Paul II had a special affinity with Our Lady of Fátima; Mehmet Ağca tried to whack him on the 13 July, the anniversary of the Madonna granting the secrets to the girls, and the pontiff believed that Mary’s hand guided the bullets away from his vital organs.) Admittedly an attempted assassination of a pope is a Bad Thing, but Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, had once stated on the record that the third secret dealt with nothing less than “the End Times”. And why had Sister Lucia – who was still alive in 2000, having recovered from her illness in the 1940s – been sworn to secrecy about a secret that was now no longer secret? And was a prophecy about a papal whacking really worth hiding for forty years?