Hello everyone, thank you for the interview Alex, it was timely for me as it’s approaching twenty years since I first encountered David Icke (and alternative views in general) and I’ve been trying for some time to collect my thoughts. For anyone who’s interested I’m going to copy in a draft of an essay I’m working on, perhaps the first in a series, exploring the different aspects of conspiracy theory.
Even our most basic assumptions
Our most solid beliefs
Our most conclusive arguments
Can be changed
Improved
Defused
Or shown to be irrelevant
By a comparison
With what at first looks like undiluted madness
Quote adapted from Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyerabend
I first encountered David Icke when I was eighteen and had just left school. I’d also just become interested in spirituality and was in that section of a bookshop. The title
The Biggest Secret leapt out at me—’What is ‘the biggest secret?’ I thought. Faces of world leaders adorned the cover in a way that suggested a deeper reality was concealed behind them—that the world we occupied was but a covering of that. I picked it off the shelf and flipped over to the back cover; within one paragraph I’d been initiated into the knowledge of the Babylonian Brotherhood, the secret force behind all the empires that have risen and fallen through the centuries and millennia.
I was intrigued. Was it possible to write an alternative account of history that would both hold up to scrutiny and have explanatory power? Or would it fall down at the first hurdle. I also instantly had a sense of paranoia, were agents of this Babylonian Brotherhood already aware that I knew of them?
Looking back now I think all this spoke to my sense that the world as it had been presented to me didn’t make sense. My trust in received wisdom had been breaking down for a while. I’d gone all the way through the schooling system only to find the emperor had no clothes. Then, George W. Bush was elected the leader of the free world—that was the final nail in the coffin.
I have a few standout memories from reading the book. There were outrageous claims, like the one about the CIA being involved in global narcotics trafficking. There was a critique of the absurdities of religion—standard stuff—but what really caught my attention was the chapter on science. I was expecting Mr. Icke to be a materialist and talk about the wonders of the scientific revolution. Instead he pointed out that materialist science was another kind of a trap, which like religion suppressed our spiritual identity. After being a true believer I was only just coming to see the emptiness of materialism, to hear somebody else express it was incredible.
Beyond conspiracies; Mr. Icke finished the book with two chapters on a kind of gnositc/non-dual spirituality. The way out of global enslavement was not stockpiling weapons and forming militias, it was to recognise our essential nature as an infinite ocean of love, dreaming the cosmos into existence. I cannot convey how radical this was to me as an eighteen year old who had never been exposed to an alternative view—in fact up until that point I didn’t even know alternative views existed.
Then, two months later, 9/11 happened.
Had it only a little bit earlier I would have been completely absorbed in the conventional narrative. Without question. Now however, in addition to that, I also had an alternative point of view and could ask ‘what am I seeing here?’ The same day David Icke posted this quote to his website, it became more prophetic as the months went on:
‘Don’t be surprised if the U.S. finds itself in another manipulated war during this administration. You will see monsters being created in the public mind to justify such action.’
David Icke, January 2001
I found I lacked the knowledge and research abilities to verify any of Mr. Icke’s conspiracy claims. The internet was in a much earlier phase then (no videos) and after much effort I found I was floundering. I also realised that absolutely no one around me found any of this information in the least bit interesting or worthy of any consideration. It took me quite some time to accept that—and far longer to understand it.
I set conspiracy research aside for a number of years, until being drawn back in at the end of the decade by a series of synchronicities. In those few short years the internet had become a different place, more information was available (in a digestible form) than could be consumed in a lifetime. After a brief period of floundering, I opted to begin by reading about events indisputable in the historical record. It’s hard for me to convey the shock I felt in learning that Iran had been a secularizing democracy in the 1950s, before the CIA initiated a coup to install a dictator that ultimately paved the way for today’s Islamic State. The most shocking aspect was finding that this wasn’t even a disputed event, it was a matter of historical record. More shocking again—neither was it an anomaly, but rather standard practice. The CIA had succeeded in destroying democracy in favour of compliant dictatorships the world over. The real conspiracy—this drive for global hegemony—was right out in the open, the media just refuses to acknowledge it or join the dots.
In time it became abundantly clear to me that events from the Kennedy assassination (either of them) to 9/11 have deeper and concealed aspects to them. To say the very least, they are never what meets the eye. I would conclude David Icke is then broadly correct—
as compared to news outlets that do not report from this perspective. Where I perhaps start to part from him is in that the more deeply I look into this darkness, the greater sense of mystery I find. It seems to me David Icke simplifies the world to create a kind of gnostic model of a grand conspiracy. Complex data is then made to fit this model. All the diverse motives of those who occupy positions of power are reduced to a reptilian plot to control the world. This strikes me as a kind of reductionism, a movement away from acknowledging the complexity of the world we inhabit.
By contrast, the deeper down the rabbit hole I delve the more mystery I find. I don’t know who, if anyone, is really pulling the strings. I see a movement towards global hegemonic dominance, but I don’t know who, if anyone, is driving that train. In researching this, I am stepping into a mixture of both increased knowledge and an increased sense of mystery.
David Icke’s work was a sledge hammer that cracked open my existing world view.