On the last Sunday of each month that most estimable of women and stalwart of the Bali community, Ibu Susan of Dijon fame, holds a book swap from 2.00 to 4.00 pm outside her store at Kuta Poleng. All you have to do is bring some books and choose an equivalent number to take away with you. She’s now included CVD/DVDs, so long as it’s clearly understood by one and all that she cannot be responsible for the quality of them.
Last weekend I went along and came away with a 500-page tome by David Icke called “The Biggest Secret”, just to catch up with what the conspiracy nuts were coming up with these days. I’ve had a go at reading one of Icke’s earlier books a few years back but given up on it because it was too silly for words and badly written. The reason I was prepared to revisit was threefold. First, I couldn’t find anything to really tempt me, second Icke had been through Los Angeles a few weeks before while I’d been there; got a lot of press and held sellout meetings. Why, I wondered, would any sane person part with good money to listen to such tripe? And third, I didn’t have to part with any money to satisfy of my idle curiosity. In a month or so I’ll just dump it right back where it came from. I can’t help wondering though, whom it was in Bali that did actually shell out good money on such a load of old cobblers.
David Icke (pronounced Ike) is an Englishman of little education who has been variously a footballer, journalist and ardent self-promoter, who went through some psychotic experience in 1990 which clearly sent him off his rocker - and the planet. At one stage he was claiming to be the son of God, but seems to have changed his mind about that. Is Icke just some likely lad who’s lucked onto the amazing credulity of so many people and finds he can make a good living at it? Or does he really believe this stuff? I suspect it’s a bit of both. In his facile autodidact mind I would say there is some part that does sort of believe what he’s saying. But in another, bigger part, it’s all about money and scoring women. Icke covers the gamut from tantra to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I read the first chapter, which was enough, and sped read the rest. Icke covers it all in a sort of proof by association, from homo habilis right up to the present day. At least until the death of Princess Di. His basic thesis is that we have been ruled and are in the ongoing process of the planet being taken over by shape-shifting saurians, who miscegenated with humans way back when and who, known as the Babylonian Brotherhood have been our rulers ever since Sumer up to the Queen of England and the Bushes. These people are in fact lizards and have revealed themselves as such, not only amongst themselves, but to ordinary people too because no one would believe them if they ever said such a thing. Well, Natch! The lizards are of course into power and money, but also pederasty, satanism, ritual killing and most anything unsavoury you’d care to name. Almost every famous person you can think of is either one of them or has been co-opted by them. Just like reptiles they are of course cold-blooded and fiendishly clever, but they have no heart. They fear Love. Love conquers all and is what will save us.
And that, my friends.....is why, Princess Di....... had to die.
One of the biggest Lizards-in-Chief was none other than the our dear departed Queen Mum. For did not Diana, Saint and Princess that she was, tell us the Royal Family weren’t human at all, they were lizards and reptiles and that the Queen Mum was the worst of them? Well, behind that bonhomie I’d wager the QM was a tough old bird and no doubt she’d got the measure of a sly minx like Diana from day one, but does that make her a Lizard Numero Uno? Elizabeth, lizard.....you get the picture.
But where’s the harm in it. None really, except there’s a nasty strain of anti-semitism that runs through it all, as indeed there is in so much of the esoteric nonsense down the ages. David Icke’s book is just a low rent boring re-hash of roundabout every conspiracy theory that’s out there, done at the gallop in 500 pages.
In fact Icke’s the book kept on putting in mind of my friend Babaji, at least that’s what he called himself. Born Vince Chataway, Babaji was the son of a wealthy New Zealand grazier, from somewhere up in that magical high plateau land of South Island, Erewhon country. Dad sent young Vince off to MIT in the 60’s to get a high-tech agricultural education. Vince fell hook line and sinker for all that good 60’s stuff and generally blew his mind, but did manage to return to NZ bursting with new hi-tech ideas for Dad’s broad acres. For the first two years the sheep station just boomed. Then the sheep began to ail and die. Within another 2 years the family faced ruin. Vince knew what to do. He did a complete about turn and went 100% holistic. He started with a few acres and a few sheep and Lo! Within a couple of years the place was thriving as it had never done before. Then, mission accomplished, Vince set off for India.
I first met Vince in Bali a dozen or so years ago. He was then in his late 50’s I’d say and with him was his new companion. She was a robust rubicund Norwegian girl of 22 just bursting with health. “Meet Mamaji” says Vince, and later shared “she’s a young soul, you know.”
The following year I again hooked up with Vince at the Centre he had created in NZ’s Northland. Here on a few hundred acres Vince had created his ecological statement and vision and pretty impressive it was too. Here he had crated a small community of people who interested him and had something to contribute to the place. It wasn’t all a rich man’s folly, more a latterday Kiwi version of an Hindu Tolstoy.
The reason I’m mentioning all this is, that while we sat in the kitchen of his wonderful eco house with him pressing delicious fruit juice (he was a fruitarian), he regaled my partner and I, whom he viewed as sufficiently along the path to be worthy recipients of his knowledge, with every conspiracy theory-as-fact that fills Icke’s book and then some. A small selection of them:
- The CIA has been in league with ET’s, who are amongst us, for years.
- They’ve made men with dog’s heads and vice versa, all sorts of strange creatures.
- The world is in fact controlled by “The Eight Families”, through their nominees.
- At a time in the near future the world rulers will seek to complete their power by blinding 9/10’s of the world’s population, who will be enslaved, by their orchestrating a solar flash. Watch for the sign (tba) and wear special sun glasses.
- the first sign of the impending takeover will be the US government banning guns. From that moment on. En garde! (Whoa! Babaji as NRA, that really was an eye opener).
It is only the wise and the chosen, who by creating and living in independent self-sufficient holistic communities, well above sea level, who will survive the political and ecological challenges in store for us. Most of us will either die or be enslaved.
This kind of stuff’s been going around since tract house A-Bomb shelters in the 50’s. People have been stocking up with cans & ammo and building rural redoubts since the 60’s, often with a violent hierarchical undercurrent and gun culture attached. Of late however, I have noticed that quite a number of Americans whom I would not call nutters and not politically abhorrent, are creating rural homes in holistically linked communities because they see the strong possibility of a breakdown of civil society. They speak of new sports arenas being built by Federal and State authorities as future holding pens for population control for when that time comes.
And it did actually happen, didn’t it ? And with US government involvement, not so very long ago, and not so very far away. Chile, Argentina, San Salvador, Nicaragua. With the kind of people in the current Bush administration such things previously unthinkable, do give one pause for thought.
But then that’s the thing about conspiracy theories isn’t it? It’s contagious.
Ed. Note : Occasionally the book swap is canceled. Please confirm ahead of time to avoid disappointment.
