Conspiracy 101, Part II: More Secret Groups

In my last post, I discussed what a conspiracy theory was and began to talk about some of the members of the New World Order (NWO), or Secret Leaders as I call them, who most commonly appear in Web sites dedicated to uncovering the clandestine goings-on of those who rule us.

In my discussions and all of my blog posts from here on out, I will provide links directly to conspiracy theory sites from which I have drawn information, and a list of links to some of the most prominent sites will be started and constantly expanded on the right side of this blog page.

To recap, conspiracy theory may be linked to Christian millennialism or prophecy or be strictly secular in an analysis of politics, business and world economy. The NWO may be, according to the many different CT's, (1) all Jewish people/groups or Zionists; (2) Jews and supporting gentile families/societies; (3) a general collection of secret groups and families not defined or bound to religious or ethnic definitions; (4) an alliance of malicious aliens and ambitious humans; or (5) malicious aliens alone masquerading as humans. The fifth version of the NWO, I think, is the rarest and probably the material of Hollywood movies (another industry controlled by the SL's, the conspiracy theorists would say).

Millennialism is based on an interpretation of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. In general, a millennialist believes that first Christians will be taken up to heaven in a mass action called the Rapture; there will be seven years of hell on earth ruled by the Anti-Christ called the Tribulation; Jesus will come back to earth and defeat the Anti-Christ; and then He will reign over the earth for a thousand years (a millennium; thus the name of the belief).

A second definition: the term New World Order first appeared in print around 1939-40, in publications by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. Congressional Record, and British science fiction writer H.G. Wells in a book called -- The New World Order. To the CT, the NWO is not a concept of international cooperation, unity and peace, but a global plan for domination and exploitation of the common man by the clandestine families and related organizations.

I also mentioned the Masons and the Illuminati in my previous entry. I would be remiss if I don't mention the Order of the Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University in Connecticut that has existed since 1830. Among its members are the Bushes -- Sen. Prescott Bush of Maine (1895-1972), President George H.W. Bush (1924- ) and President George Walker Bush (1946- ). Among other members were President William Howard Taft, Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite, numerous university presidents, business magnates, bankers, politicians and government officials. If you want to see even more of who's who, Wikipedia offers this page.

Because Yale is an elite university, and the members of Skull and Bones often came from prominent and powerful families ... well, that explains it. The group exists as part of the network of NWO families and groups to provide support and lines of communication for the evil plotters. Secondly, it another organization that grooms all these young men (and recently women) to take their places in the NWO and continue to exploit and oppress us.

Simply being a secret society casts suspicion on the Skull and Bones. Some CT's believe that the Central Intelligence Agency was founded by Bonesmen (as members are called) and membership in the Order was a requirement in order join in on the spying fun. Some Bonesmen who shaped the CIA are Tracy Barnes, who oversaw the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion; McGeorge Bundy, advisor to John F. Kennedy; and George Bush Sr., CIA director in the 1970s. Many Yale alumni did go into the spy biz in the last half of the 20th century, which also could be presented as more evidence that the CIA and Skull and Bones are connected.

The Illuminati, the Bavarian group banned in the 1780s but is supposed to exist today, is commonly cited as a NWO group. One theorist, Fritz Springmeier, has written about the 13 Illuminati "bloodlines" of extremely old and wealthy families. They not only control everything -- global banking, major multinational corporations, media and government -- but worship Satan and practice horrifying rituals, such as human sacrifice and drinking blood. Names you ought to know: Rockefeller, Rothchild, Astor, Bundy, Freeman, Kennedy, Li, Onassis, Reynolds, Russell, Van Duyn and the Merovingians (a European royal family originating among the ancient Germanic tribe called the Franks).

Springmaier further contends that the Illuminati families founded the Jehovah's Witnesses (and its related Watchtower & Bible Tract Society) and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or "Mormons"). He also says they created the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group, which also come up on a lot of CT Web sites. It is obvious in reading his book online that Springmaier is of the Christian/millennialist theory school.

The Bilderberg Group is an annual meeting of elite of governments, business, mass media and finance. Just over a hundred people get to attend this invitation only gathering, held at five-star hotels in Europe or the Americas. All Bilderberg Group meetings are closed to the public and the general media. The Group gets its name from the first of its meetings in 1954 -- the Bilderberg Hotel in Arnhem, Netherlands. The group's strict secrecy, along with attendance limited to elites, makes it ripe for accusations for membership in the New World Order.

The Trilateral Commission has close ties to the Council on Foreign Relations, and both are cited as members of the Secret Leaders cabal. The TLC was founded in 1973 under the direction of banker David Rockefeller, head of the family's Chase Manhattan Bank and at the time chair of the CFR. On its own Web site, the TLC says its purpose is "to foster closer cooperation among ... core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system." He was assisted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, later national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.

The CFR dates back to 1921 and had its roots in a group of scholars commissioned by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as World War I ended to study the direction of global politics and international relations. That earliest group included future President Herbert Hoover and Paul Warburg, member of one of the infamous banking families you might meet on conspiracy Web sites, and early advocate for creation of the Federal Reserve (which is often looked upon as an NWO plot). Others involved in the 1920s included the Rockefellers, their PR manager, banker J.P. Morgan's lawyer and Averell Harriman and John Foster Dulles, two future members of presidential cabinets.

The CFR today says its purpose is to research, understand and improve the relation of the United States with the rest of the world. The council, essentially, bills itself as a think tank on international relations. But its push for global cooperation, along with meeting in secret and the council's birth among financiers and political leaders, makes it the perfect target for conspiracy theorists. To compare, look at the CFR's Web site, and then this description on the popular site Illuminati Conspiracy Archive.

Conspiracy 101, Part I: Conspiracy Defined; Secret Groups

To define "conspiracy theory," I like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary's little summary: a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.

In science you're told a theory is a carefully tested concept proven through rounds of countless experiments and proven hypotheses, a major effort constructed using the scientific method.

That isn't the case necessarily with conspiracy theory. Many of the sites throw massive amounts of facts at you and scream loudly about the diabolical Masons/Illuminati/Rockefellers/Rothschilds/aliens/reptile-human hybrids are trying to enslave us all and mwah-hah-hah ... rule the world!

But conspiracy theory can be summed up by another Merriam-Webster entry for just the word "theory": the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another. A lot of the Web site articles do try, amongst the rhetoric and fury against the Forces of Satan and other secret leaders, to figure out what the facts are and how they connect. Some are hampered by the ridiculous sounding theories or guesses at who is really ruling the earth, such as previously mentioned repitile-humans and other creatures from outer space who want to control us.

Conspiracy theorists (CT's) don't accept the official version of history, and they distrust the media's report on current events. The media, they say, are simply an extension of the secret world leaders and print/broadcast/post online whatever these dominators tell them to. The leaders' firm control of the press, banks, oil supply, major corporations and governments around the globe is how they are enslaving us. Some theorists say the plot has patiently been unfolding for centuries, as Secret Leaders (SL's) pass on the enslavement plan from father to son or old members to new members.

The theorists are surprisingly diverse, though politically they lean toward extreme left or right. Theorists also can be divided into secular and religious, with the latter often seeing Satan as the underlying cause for everything and possibly tying into the prophecies of the Book of Revelation. The non-religious theorists range from those who try to rationally claim bankers and other SL's pull all the strings, all the way to those who sound like something out of The X-Files: elite humans have joined up with aliens who want to conquer earth.

One of the more disturbing aspects of conspiracy theorists, most often to the Jews, is the accusation that some are anti-Semitic and fascist. The theory that Jews and/or Zionists are either the leaders of global domination or are a major part of it may mainly be traced back to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a pamphlet that appeared in 1905 and contained in 24 parts a plan for Jews to completely take over. Many today believe Protocols was actually written not by Jews, but by the Russian czar's secret police in the 1890s.

Just to give an example out of the Protocols:

The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that their government is nothing but the steward of the people who are the owners of the country, and that the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove. It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and, as it were, given us the power of appointment.

Zion is the Biblical name for the Israel of the Old Testament; it is derived from Hebrew for "highest point." That ties in with Mount Zion, on whicih there once was a Canaanite fortress that King David defeated and established his own city.

Zionists are people who wanted to re-establish a Jewish state in Palestine in the Middle East. The modern Zionist movement is credited to Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew who called for forming a Jewish state in the 1890s. Herzl was covering the court trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish captain accused of spying for Germany. Dreyfus was acquited, and Herzl believed his accusation in the first place was caused by anti-Jewish sentiment in France. Herzl believed the only way to get away from anti-Semitism in Europe was for Jews to create their own country in Palestine.

More recent example of Jewish involvement was cited on a number of sites of the 9/11 truth movement, whose stories may have appeared either once in the media or simply in those endlessly forwarded emails. One example was a report that someone saw agents from Mossad, the Israeli security agency, cheering on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River as the World Trade Center towers fell. Another claimed that all of the Jews who worked at the WTC were warned a couple days before 9/11 not to go to work that day because something was coming. A third accuses Larry Silverstein, owner of the WTC property, of using terrorist attacks as a cover for actually blowing up the buildings so he could get multi-billion dollar insurance settlements.

(Speaking of the 9/11 truth movement, I also will be doing a series of posts discussing the conspiracy theories around this terrorist attack and the sites and people who do not believe the official "al Qaeda did it--the jets hit the towers and collapsed them--a jet hit the Pentagon" version of history.)

Though there are the theorists who do include the Jews and/or Israelis in their writings, there are actually Jewish CT's as well. Their interpretations are often similar to other theorists about a band of secret societies; they just don't include Israel, Zionists or similar.

The two most commonly cited non-Jewish groups cited as SL's are the Masons and the Illuminati (sometimes they are cited as Jewish creations, other times as born from secret, ancient families). The former is famous as a "fraternal" society, with lodges all around the world and degrees of membership to which a man can attain (women join Order of the Eastern Star). Masons appeared in the 1500s or 1600s and have always had some set of secret rituals and beliefs. Nine signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence were Masons, as were 14 U.S. presidents, including George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Gerald Ford.

CT's have accused many of the world's leaders of being high-degree Masons who engage in Satanic ritual and physical and sexual abuse of women and chlidren, and Masons in general are part of the Great Overall Plot.

The Iluminati movement grew out of the Enlightenment in the 1700s, a movement that looked to reason, scientific method and questioning of the metaphysical. Adam Weishaupt is credited with founding the Illuminati in Bavaria in the 1770s. His chapter was supposed to have a huge cache of books on the occult, witchcraft and other "forbidden" subjects and were trying to either overthrow or infiltrate governments. The Bavarian government banned all Illuminati chapters by the mid-1780s, and CT's will say that organization didn't die, it simply went underground.

In my next entry, I will introduce you to even more Secret Leaders of the world domination and aspects of conspiracy theory.