http://www.social-ecology.org/1996/01/l ... ctives-35/
From Green Messiah to New Age Nazi
by Matthew Kalman and John Murray
Matthew Kalman and John Murray are editors of the eco-political investigative magazine Open Eye, which has been uncovering and exposing David Icke and “New Age Nazism.” Address: BM Open Eye, London WC1N 3XX. Issue 3 is available for £1.70.
It has been hard in recent years to ignore the rising popularity of almost everything that comes under the heading New Age. Yoga, meditation, Kabbalah, Buddhism, alternative medicine, environmentalism, and self-improvement, as well as an array of New Age therapies, have all gained in popularity, as have other fringe interests like UFOs and the paranormal, which often appeal to the same people. Few will have avoided at least some contact.
The movement even has its own stars. In Britain, David Icke, the TV sports commentator turned Green Party national spokesman turned purple-robed “Son of God,” is the best-known leader. [See "British Green Party Cofounder Icke Goes New Age," Green Perspectives, no. 24, October 1991.] His books sell fast, and he pulls in the crowds as a charismatic speaker on a hectic schedule of speaking engagements and workshops. Though many see him as a figure of fun, his popularity is undimmed.
Icke has led a public life: from goalkeeper for the Coventry City and Hereford United teams, he then moved on to the BBC as a sports commentator. He later became national spokesperson for the Green Party before resigning in 1990, declaring himself to be “a Son of the Godhead,” wearing turquoise, and predicting catastrophic geological upheaval. His latest incarnation is more sinister.
In the summer of 1994 Icke wrote The Robots’ Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance, a book which indicated a convergence of New Age thinking with Nazi philosophy. Casting aside his pat concerns about the environment, Icke enthusiastically embraced the classic Nazi conspiracy theory, alleging that the world is controlled by a secret cadre of “The Elite.” He openly endorsed the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the tsarist anti-Semitic forgery that informed Hitler’s notion of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Icke seems oblivious to the fact that the Protocols were long ago exposed as a crude device to stir up hatred of Jews. Nor is he concerned about their popularity with Nazis from Hitler onwards. “Just because Hitler used knowledge for negative reasons doesn’t reflect on the knowledge,” says Icke.
The Robots’ Rebellion weaves a complex tapestry of extreme right-wing concerns about conspiracies to control the world through such diverse means as banking, the New World Order, freemasons, the FBI, the Waco siege, microchips, extraterrestrials, and gun control.
The anti-Semitism of the book is not concealed. Icke accuses Jewish bankers of funding both Hitler and the Bolsheviks,a classic piece of far-right propaganda. He attacks “Jehovah, the vengeful God of the Jews,” as “quite possibly an extraterrestrial.” He is unabashed in sourcing his material back to leading U.S. right-wing militia figures such as Bill Cooper, who believes in a UFO/world government conspiracy that includes aliens both good and bad: “blond Aryans” and large-nosed “Greys.”
Unfortunately, the publication of The Robots’ Rebellion aroused very little criticism of Icke, although many Green Party members began to realize the danger that their one-time figurehead now represented. Some began to picket meetings, with other antifascists later following their lead.
Now Icke has published a new book, . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free [Cambridge: Bridge of Love, 1995], which brings his anti-Semitic ideas to a chilling conclusion.
Following an Open Eye investigation and the resulting negative publicity, Icke’s publisher, Gateway, refused to handle the new book. Icke has been forced to produce it himself, with financial backing from a Jewish supporter named David Solomon. The book contains a desperate plea to readers to help sell copies.
Icke’s basic thesis is that “almost every major negative event of global significance has been part of the same long-term plan by the All-Seeing Eye cult to take over the planet via a centralized world government, central bank, currency and army.” Although Icke uses terms like Illuminati and Brotherhood to describe this elite, their true identity soon becomes apparent. “There is a global Jewish clique,” he writes, who “worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This . . . elite secured the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish state of Israel in Palestine.”
Icke says that, “given the genetic history of most Jewish people,” the Jews have no claim to Israel. This is a common argument among the far right, some of whom believe that the Anglo-Saxons of northern Europe are the true descendants of the “lost tribes of Israel.” Just in case readers have any doubts, Icke explains that the “Israeli government, its army, and its intelligence arm, Mossad, are neo-Nazi, terrorist organizations.”
Further revelations from Icke include the news that the same Jewish clique “financed Hitler to power in 1933,” and that an “Estonian Jew,” Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, gave Hitler a copy of the Protocols, thereby sealing the fate of the Jews by encouraging Hitler to embark on the Holocaust. Rosenberg was not, of course, Jewish but a viciously anti-Semitic Baltic German. In the meantime bankers like Max Warburg had already left Nazi Germany. “All this was coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite,” says Icke. The elite is “merciless . . . sick and diabolical,” as well as being controlled by the “Luciferic Consciousness.”
As if the suggestion that Jews orchestrated the Holocaust were not enough, Icke also condemns the Nuremberg trials. “Nuremberg was an insult to natural justice,” he sputters. He condemns the practice whereby free copies of Schindler’s List “are given to schools to indoctrinate children.” This is because Icke, like other neo-Nazis before him, has decided that the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is a myth.
He urges his readers to take Holocaust revisionism seriously and, without giving his name, describes and praises the French founding father of Holocaust revisionism, Paul Rassinier—a one-time French Resistance fighter who was himself incarcerated in a concentration camp. “You cannot, if you are interested in truth, just dismiss his findings and condemn him as a Nazi apologist,” says Icke. “But that is what happened to him and others too.”
What exactly are the views of Rassinier? He denies the existence of death camps and rubbishes the reports of survivors as “a collection of contradictory pieces of ill-natured gossip.” Rassinier contends that the gas chambers are an invention of the “Zionist establishment.” Why is it that the rest of us, including the Nazi perpetrators themselves, are so sure that the Holocaust did indeed happen? “The Jews have been able to dupe the world by relying on their mythic powers and conspiratorial abilities,” says Rassinier. “World Jewry has once again employed its inordinate powers to harness the world’s financial resources, media and political interests for their own purposes.”
Challenged about his endorsement of these Nazi apologists, Icke’s wife Linda dares to say things that her husband has not yet committed to print. While the book’s discussion of the Holocaust merely asserts tha the Revisionist version should at least be heard, Mrs. Icke denigrates the fact of the Holocaust itself. “We’ve had the figures come down from six million to two,” she claims, citing unnamed “Jewish” sources. “We’ve had a lifetime of one view and one story. Maybe if all things were laid out on the table the truth might come out, whatever it is.”
Icke promises that “much, much more” is yet to be revealed about the Holocaust. A flavor of what might be forthcoming is contained in a striking passage purporting to explain anti-Semitism. Like many neo-Nazis, Icke goes out of his way to deny being anti-Semitic, claiming that he is merely criticizing a “manipulating Jewish clique” who regard the mass of Jews as “cattle to be used and abused as required” in their quest for world domination.
“The Jewish people (who, like the rest of us, are evolving consciousnesses that happen to be working in a Jewish genetics spacesuit at this point), will never be free until they step out of the emotional and mental control of this tiny clique, which uses them in the most merciless ways to advance its own sick and diabolical ambitions.”
Following a common Nazi thread which goes back to Hitler, Icke blames the Jews themselves for anti-Semitism. “Thought patterns in the collective Jewish mind have repeatedly created that physical reality of oppression, prejudice and racism which matches the pattern—the expectation—programmed into their collective psyche. They expect it; they create it.”
For Further Reading . . .
In the light of the book’s content, it will come as little surprise that the further reading recommended in the back pages of . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free includes neo-Nazi and racist literature. One favorite source is the “excellent” Spotlight, an anti-Semitic tabloid published in the United States that promotes Holocaust denial as a major theme.
Icke also recommends On Target, the magazine of the British League of Rights, a racist group committed to preventing the immigration of “alien peoples” and maintaining a “homogenous” (read: whites only) society. Its editor, Donald Martin, also contributes to Spearhead, the organ of the National Front now controlled by the British National Party. Martin, whom the BNP regards as a “friend and ally,” runs Britain’s leading book-supply service for the extreme right. Among the seven hundred or so titles are Did Six Million Really Die?, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.
Donald Martin now appears to be using Icke and others in the New Age movement as fronts to soft-sell his hard anti-Semitism. As far right-watcher Larry O’Hara points out, “Icke is in many ways a more dangerous figure than Holocaust Revisionist David Irving, for he has the capacity to entice new people onto the anti-Semitic treadmill.”
The neo-Nazis have certainly picked up on Icke. Street-fighting group Combat 18 have mingled with New Agers at Icke’s lectures and favorably reviewed one of his appearances in their bulletin, Putsch.
Though Icke has now largely dropped his New Age and green message, his supporters have yet to desert him. . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free sold out its initial print run of 4,000 in just two and a half weeks, good going for a book that has—thankfully—been sold mainly by mail order so far. The glossy New Age magazines Kindred Spirit and Vision, widely available at on newsstands, continue to promote Icke’s work.
New Age Magazines
Nexus, an Australia-based New Age/conspiracy magazine that Icke commends as “excellent,” has carried extracts of Holocaust Revisionism articles from Spotlight. It recently published a four-part history of banking that identified Hitler and Mussolini as the last two people who could have stopped the usurious bankers.
The magazine, which is hoping to build on its current 130,000-plus circulation with a special British edition due out this month, carries regular advertisements for catalogues of neo-Nazi publications and videos.
Closer to home, David Icke is not alone in pushing extreme right-wing and racist ideas within the New Age movement. The London-based magazine Rainbow Ark has a New Age appearance but has long been closely associated with both David Icke and Donald Martin, who has written articles under a pseudonym as well as lecturing at meetings organized by the magazine. Articles in Rainbow Ark attack Jewish bankers, the “Illuminati,” and Zionism. The magazine also has a strange theory about modern Israel:
“When a person has a strong hatred of another race, their higher self often (karmically) makes sure they incarnate in that race to balance them out. Thus many of the worst kind of Nazis have already incarnated in Jewish bodies, explaining therefore some of the fireworks which are going on and will go on in Israel.”
Investigations by Open Eye have revealed that Rainbow Ark has been funded by people with a long history of extreme right and racist activity and was initially based in the apartment of Mary Stanton, a prominent racist campaigner who had previously lent it out to the National Front for an election campaign. When Rainbow Ark held a public meeting at the Battlebridge New Age center in Kings Cross on September 13, a Jewish researcher who attended was physically assaulted by a Rainbow Ark editor. The researcher was mistakenly accused of helping with an exposé by Open Eye of “New Age Nazism. [See Matthew Kalman and John Murray, "New Age Nazism," New Statesman and Society, June 23, 1995.]
Despite the assault, Rainbow Ark continues to hold public meetings at the Battlebridge Center, which was originally set up to help homeless people. When the center’s organizer Julie Lowe was asked about Rainbow Ark, she explained that she believed that the Jewish conspiracy described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is true and ought to be investigated. “I met two old Jewish men at Hyde Park Corner one evening who told me they were true,” says Lowe. “They were saying that if they didn’t get their way in the things they wanted, they were able through Philadelphia in America to pull the money out of every city in the world.
“I’ve seen it happen in Sheffield, so I believe it. It depends who’s actually doing the controlling and who’s go the money. The connection between freemasonry and Jewry is very important.”
Nor are the deluded management of the Battlebridge Center the only people to welcome Icke and give him a platform. During a twenty-minute interview on BBC Greater London Radio on October 15, 1995, publicizing his new book, Icke was given free rein to describe the global conspiracy and how he was now addressing audiences of up to three hundred a night who no longer come to laugh at him but to really listen.
