If you could touch our lizard skin
Infinite Thought wrote a little while ago about Philip K Dick’s revelation that “the empire never ended.” Interestingly, this is a claim that Dick shares with right-wing American conspiracy theorists, although they differ over which empire they think hasn’t ended. For the American fash, it is the British Empire that continues to exist. In it’s most sensible form, this theory proposes that the British royal family continue to rule America through their ownership of the Federal Reserve. This is an instance of the hatred of fiat money which fascists and libertarians share (there’s a shop in Berkeley which specializes in varied memorobilia and anti-fiat-money literature. I’m sure the first time I saw it it had a big display of Nazi uniforms in its window, but when I returned to take a picture the Nazi stuff had disappeared; obviously they were on to me).
Anyway, this Federal Reserve nonsense shares a common trait of a lot of conspiracy theorising, which is an obsessive focus on formal patterns of ownership and legal contracts; as with the claim that all American courts are somehow “secretly” military courts, because they supposedly display the military, rather than the civilian, seal. Or, another version of the claim that the British Empire still rules America is the claim that the royal family still owns America in the form of the “Virginia Company”:
The book points out that in 1203, King John of England, in his capacity as Crown Corporation Sole, granted the Vatican Corporation Sole ownership of England and her dominions in perpetuity. In return, the Vatican Corporation Sole granted England’s Crown Corporation Sole administrative rights over England and her dominions, in perpetuity. This renders the United States of America, a private corporation and body politic formerly known as the Virginia Company, a satrapy of the Vatican. If readers care to study the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which absolves King George III of England of future indebtedness to the United States, e.g. picking up the tab for a standing army on American soil, they will observe that King George is presented as Arch Treasurer and Prince Elector of the Holy Roman Empire and the United States of America. By signing the treaty two years after the Revolutionary War ended, the American signatories (Ben Franklin and John Adams) were acknowledging that King George was still the ruler of America. Total Vatican control over America did not occurr until the 19th century when the treacherous Jesuits initiated passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which rendered the laws of the individual sovereign states subservient to those of the United States of America
This story takes one into more exciting realms of conpsiranology. The Virginia Company, it turns out is just the tip of an iceberg involving Nazis, Illuminati, Knights Templar, Freemasons, the NSA, aliens, and so on. I found somewhere on the internet a document which gave exhaustive detail about the legal arrangements by which aliens had taken ownership of the Earth (I can’t re-google it, must be the CIA). There’s something extra wierd about phrasing ones discussion of alien influence in this legalistic way. If aliens have taken over Earth, surely the question of whether they have done so legally or not is not really of utmost importance. Of course, this serves to naturalize property, as if ownership were something that made sense outside of a particular legal and political context, as if it were a galactic universal.
For the full-bore alien conspiracy madness, how about a comment posted on this site, detailing the different levels of conspiracy, from the top (God), to the bottom (inevitably, the Jews). This comment is hardly unusual in its reactionary bent; alien conspiracy theories usually overlap with older right-wing conspiracism, see for instance the “Gnostic Liberation Front,” who big up holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by that, particularly those of us who really are members of a world-wide Jewish communist conspiracy. But this form of conspiracism is deeply opposed to revolutionary politics: they begin with hostility to the Freemasons, who were, after all, a radical bourgeois-liberal organization.
Benjamin points out in the Arcades that secret societies were a significant feature of the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century, and this form of organization was initially adopted by the workers’ movement, too (he quotes at length an article by Marx on working-class conspirators, and he discusses Blanqui in various sections). According to the conspiracy theorists, the Illuminati are servants of Lucifer, engaged in a struggle against God-given ignorance and for world communism. Very Paradise Lost; sounds good to me. If there is an anti-human extra-terrestrial conspiracy, communists should probably be part of it.
Bonus: The Sparts and Freemasonry (is the Bolshevik Tendency a plot by the Bavarian Illuminati? It probably is the most logical explanation); A conspiracy theory quiz (Featuring such gems as the occult messages in Super Mario. Although they’re probably right about Kissinger funding the New Age movement).
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yeah, that store is hella weird. but calling it a “store” gives it way too much credit. it’s a storefront, which for some reason always has a small table out on the sidewalk, and on this table is said propaganda about the inevitable collapse of “paper money” as well as, for some inexplicable reason, a telephone. tim, you should pick up the receiver, it’s for you…
Comment by geo @ 6/25/2006 8:44 am
Another Kenickie reference. Good work, Tim.
Comment by Stefan @ 6/26/2006 3:21 am