I’d like to paraphrase Edward Albee and ask who’s afraid of David Icke, but the truth is Icke is not so much a victim of his childhood as of a British medium (Betty Shine) and a Brazilian rainforest hallucinogenic called Ayahuasca.
At least, I assume these are the causes of his unique paranoia.
Icke, a proponent of various conspiracy theories from the Illuminati to the lizard people (apparently one and the same), has written a number of books and attracted a significant following. In one appearance in Vancouver, Canada, a thousand people showed up.
Icke also has his own website, though in an era when every other individual has a either a personal web page or a blog, this is hardly significant. What is significant is Icke’s increasing identification (by others, if not himself) with far right militia groups, particularly in the United States. This crowd of far-right, gun-toting, tinfoil-hat groupies is alarming in its firepower, and is matched – if not joined – by the far left, who make up for in volume what they lack in weapons.
Icke has also earned a reputation as an anti-Semite, and he is particularly suspicious of Zionists and wealthy Jewish banking families like the Rockefellers. These, he maintains, form the core of the Illuminati, whose plans for world domination culminate in the New World Order, a plan under which most of us will become little more than indentured servants of the Elite (another name for the Illuminati).
What motivates Icke? He himself admits to a fear, as a child, of being ridiculed in public, a fear that culminated in a public television interview at the age of 39, which subjected Icke to such scorn he withdrew from public life for several years. When he re-emerged, self-described as "fearless," he began promoting his strange and sometimes almost unbelievable ideas.
Icke is, above all, insidious. His most peculiar imaginings (lizard people) are couched in such calm terms, and so equably rationalized, they attain a modicum of believability. In Icke’s dialogues and books, a combination of New Age spiritualism (i.e., Infinite consciousness) and wacko politics (reptiles rule the world) mesh so seamlessly it’s difficult to reject any part of the whole. This, in fact, is Icke’s greatest appeal to the disenfranchised; namely that the worst they can imagine about the "rulers" is likely true.
In Icke’s worldview, the current economic crisis can be laid whole at the doorstep of these Illuminati, who reportedly want to collapse the American economy to institute the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), or North American Union, combining Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into one trading zone and presumably replacing a devalued dollar with a fiat currency known as the Amero. This Amero will be the coin of the realm, its value falling somewhere between the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso.
The SPP is real. The Illuminati are an historical question mark. The lizard people are a disturbing fantasy. By combining these elements in a seamless conspiracy – which is simply explained as reducing the majority of mankind to slave status – Icke and his ilk do a disservice to the real truth, which is that reducing trade borders provides a modicum of prosperity to all, though the most prosperous ultimately lose their favored status. This is what happened to Britain when the EU came into being, and this is what will happen to the U.S. On the other hand, citizens of the U.S. have more toys than any grownup child really needs – a fact well recognized in other Western countries, where such conspicuous consumption has earned us scorn, if not outright hatred.
It’s a fact of history that the rich get richer and the poor get children, or at least more debt. Only socialism has managed, to some extent, to reverse this natural rule, but socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive and, at this point, capitalists rule the economies of most countries, including Russia and China, in spite of their professed communist (or socialist) leanings. But I digress.
Icke, who declares himself a prophet of the future, delivers a stealthy and ultimately sinister message tangling truth, half-truths and lies (or imaginings) that prevent both meaningful rebellion and meaningful progress. The Dow, at 8,500, represents the true (non-inflationary) value of representative stocks; the amount of U.S. credit card debt must be reduced to insure a healthy economy; and raping the third world to provide goodies for the first must end if we recognize the common humanity of all.
While I recognize the likelihood of the SPP, the dangers inherent in giving all the power to a few, the social deprivation likely to ensue when a few elite own almost all the wealth, and the fact (expressed by our forefathers) that government can become the enemy, I don’t see George Bush as a lizard, merely a somewhat illiterate and uneducated man who rose to a position of power through wealth and extreme political maneuvering. That his predecessors had ties to Hitler’s regime is undeniable. That he may be related to royalty and 15 other American presidents is not surprising, given the six degrees of separation theory and the fact that wealth equates power. That he drinks human blood and changes his appearance at will is beyond ridiculous.
Please don’t embellish the truth with fantasies, Mr. Icke. The truth is a bitter enough pill to swallow.