Reprinted from the March 26, 2003 edition of The University of Alberta's student newspaper The Gateway.
You see, it’s like this. Everything going on these days (well, all the bad things anyways) are because of these twelve-foot-tall reptilian aliens from another dimension who came to earth about 200, 000 years ago. They wanted to control the world, so they bred with our ancient human ancestors to produce this shape-shifting, half-reptile, half-human race to rule us, and that’s what they’ve been doing ever since. It’s not our fault that everything’s so screwed up these days; it’s all because of the half-reptilian aliens! Every single President of the United States has been one, as well as all of the British Royal Family, the leaders of every major religion, Hitler, the Rothschilds, the Freemasons, and Tony Blair. You name it, they’re all lizards!
What the hell am I talking about, you must surely be asking? Well welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of one of the premier demagogues of our times, the conspiracy theorist to end all conspiracy theorists, “the most controversial speaker in the world” (well, that’s what the publicity blurb on his website says anyways): David Icke. And who is this nutcase? A former professional football (soccer) player, sports commentator, spokesperson for the British Green Party, and self-proclaimed son of God (in the Jesus sense) who is now a quite popular speaker on the extreme fringes, strangely enough, of the Left and the Right. Mixing right-wing paranoia of a secret cabal trying to control the world (insisting that the infamous anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is actually true) with an appeal to the nascent New Age and anti-globalization/corporate/war movements he has helped bring about a frightening merging of cultures the result of which could perhaps be called eco-fascism.
Icke has since disavowed his Messiah status—people (for a reason I can’t understand) didn’t take him seriously enough, I guess—but still claims to be a secular "prophet" of sorts. His website opens with the oh-so-humble claim, “Remember, all that I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.” But hey, every wannabe prophet has to have a shtick, right? For Charles Manson it was seeing a prophecy of a racial Armageddon in the Beatles’ White Album (especially the song “Helter-Skelter”). Jim Jones figured it out by moving all his followers from California to Guyana and then having them all drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Hitler blamed the Jews for the entirety of Germany’s problems while Marx saw the consummation of the inevitable Proletarian Revolution (and the necessary elimination of those nasty Bourgeois Capitalists) as justification for any means on the path towards his idea of the supposed End of History. Icke, on the other hand, insists nothing is actually the way it seems; everything is being manipulated by the evil reptilian Illuminati.
This conspiratorial solipsism, however, leads to some rather obvious logical difficulties. First, if shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptiles really were controlling the world to the extent he claims, why haven’t the reptiles blown up one of the innumerable airplanes he’s flown in over the years on his lecture tours around the world? Second, if we really should be doubting everything, then why not Icke himself? Why couldn’t he just as much be a part of the conspiracy as well? When you think about it, him telling us all these things about what’s supposedly going on is the perfect way to distract us from what’s really going on. But then again, maybe I’m part of the conspiracy as well; providing yet another diversion (and so on and so on)...
So, no, I actually don’t think all of our political and religious leaders are shape-shifting reptiles trying to control the world. Nor do I believe that David Icke has figured out the explanation for the last 200, 000 years of human history. An answer exists for why the world’s so screwed up, but it’s not on account of any scapegoat, whether that be alien-reptiles, the Jews, the Bourgeoisie or anything else “outside.” It is us - the evil within - and until we each start to take responsibility for it in the little pocket of the world in which we live, things just aren’t going to get any better.
And via www.damianpenny.com a very interesting article about Icke in The Guardian: http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,457988,00.html
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