The New Eden

A NEW EDEN IS being built today, or perhaps it is merely a new face being put on the old Eden. Today’s Eden is characterized by sterile architecture and stylistic homogeneity. Inhabitants of modern Eden are offered many ways to cope with the stresses of living in Eden; among them are drugs that promise to change or control nearly every negative human attribute (and every positive one, too). The new Edenites are taught philosophies which promise a materialist Utopia within a spiritual wasteland. Despite all of these “advances,” Edenites still commit suicide at a surprisingly high rate.

Tragically, a great many suicide victims are young people. What are some of those victims telling us? Perhaps it is that today’s Eden is still Eden: a gilded cage, a pampered prison. Many young people sense it and rebel by changing clothing or hairstyle, but they find that they are still trapped not really understanding how or why. Like Adam and Eve, many individuals, no matter how successful or pampered they have been in life, find that they want to escape.

Today’s Eden continues to be strongly influenced by the Brotherhood network and its outgrowths. Any discussion of the Brotherhood in today’s world is, however, a delicate matter. We are no longer talking about people and groups that reside comfortably in the past, but we must now confront people and organizations that are very much a part of today’s world.

Please allow me to therefore reiterate two very important points:

1.  The vast majority of people who join movements and organizations do so for the right reasons, including those who join Brotherhood branches and Custodial religions. They have heard a bit of truth or they have seen a solution to a genuine problem. They work in those organizations to disseminate that truth or to solve that problem. As has been true throughout all of history, almost none of them, including most of their top leaders, are knowingly engaged in Machiavellian activities.

 

They only know that they have been given a just cause to pursue against some other human group, unaware that somewhere else, in similar organizations, other people have been given a just cause to pursue against them. The corruption within the Brotherhood network, and the violence emanating from it, are as upsetting to them as they are to everyone else.

2.  My purpose is correction, not condemnation. There are no saints on Earth, and probably nowhere else, for that matter. Yes, there are a great many very fine people who deserve to be helped, but there is probably no being on Earth who has not at some time, in some way, contributed to what we have discussed in this book.

 

To engage in blame, punishment, or recrimination at this stage of the game can only make affairs worse. I hope to encourage the idea that no matter what we have done in the past, it is the present and future that truly count. My purpose in writing this book is only to ask that we take a moment’s pause to step back and look at what we may all be caught up in.

 

Perhaps each of us can then carefully determine what we need to do (or stop doing) to help bring about the changes required to set things straight, without disrupting our lives or cherished institutions. What is needed now from everyone is cooperation, not recrimination.

As we survey the modern organizations and religions which arose out of the Brotherhood network, we discover something rather ironic. As the world continues its intellectual flirtation with materialism, Brotherhood organizations and Custodial religions are among the few sources which keep alive any idea that man might be a spiritual being. As a result, many Brotherhood organizations and Custodial religions attract some very fine people within whom the spiritual spark has not died. It is difficult to find a Jesuit father, an American Freemason, a Presbyterian minister, or a Jewish rabbi who is not a very decent person.

The overwhelming majority of them emphasize the truly benign and uplifting aspects of their theologies. It is equally difficult not to feel good at a Catholic mass on Christmas Eve, or to be stimulated by a conversation with an articulate Rosicrucian about the meaning of life. It is equally impossible not to appreciate the smile of a young child basking in the warmth of a successful family unit held together by the Hebrew religion, or to savor the aesthetics of an exceptional Hindu artwork.

Children and elderly people are helped every day through the kind works of Freemasons, Oddfellows, and Shriners. Fascinating political discussions can be had with an avowed Marxist and one can learn some of the most astonishing facts from a dyed-in-the-wool ”right-winger.” Nevertheless, most of the institutions that arose out of the Brotherhood network continue to cause serious problems today.

In this book, we looked closely at the inflatable paper money system. In the United States today, over 75% of the money supply is created by commercial banks. When you deposit a dollar in a commercial bank, that dollar becomes the bank’s to lend out, and the bank creates an additional dollar which becomes the dollar in your bank account. That dollar in your bank account, however, is not a guaranteed dollar. It is simply a debt owed by the bank to you. That debt, however, quickly turns into money because you can spend it right away, and the bank still has your original dollar. In this way, the bank has created money “out of nothing.”

Banks make most of their profit by being allowed to create money in this fashion. The interest banks charge on loans merely pays some of the administrative expenses and, more importantly, it compensates for the inflation that the banks inevitably cause by creating money in the manner that they do. There are, of course, legally-mandated limits to how many dollars a bank may create.

A commercial bank must maintain a minimum base of cash (central bank notes) for every dollar deposited, but it is only a small percentage. As long as people use their checking accounts and do not demand too much actual cash, a bank will be safe. A bank can go “broke,” however, if enough of its loans default or if too many depositors demand actual cash and thereby wipeout a bank’s small asset base.

The result of this whole system is massive debt at every level of society today. The banks are in debt to the depositors, and the depositors’ money is loaned out and creates indebtedness to the banks. Making this system even more akin to something out of a maniac’s delirium is the fact that banks, like other lenders, often have the right to seize physical property if its paper money is not repaid.

At the national and international levels, we read today of Third World nations staggering under huge debts. Most of those debts are “illusionary” in the sense that the bulk of the loans come from banks which generate or channel “created out-of-nothing” money. Some of those banks, such as some represented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have the right to dictate economic policies and demand austerity measures within the indebted nations to get the loans repaid. In Brazil, for example, the IMF imposed austerity measures in the early 1980’s.

The measures included large scale wage cuts for Brazilian workers, higher prices on all goods, devaluation of the currency, and increased exports—all to pay back a debt founded mainly on illusion. The result was a tremendous drop in the well-being of the Brazilian people, and riots. The destruction of Brazilian rain forests that we are witnessing today is being caused in large part by Brazil’s need to repay loans based on illusionary money. Studies prepared by the World Bank blame population growth for depletion of the rain forests, but conveniently leave out the major role that the World Bank itself has played in causing Brazil’s indebtedness.

Another example is the Dominican Republic, which had a $3 billion debt as of the mid-1980’s. The country would like to spend its scarce income on better housing for its people. In 1985, however, the nation was faced with having to expend more money to repay its loans than it could earn in foreign currency. The IMF nevertheless demanded strict austerity measures, including large price increases on basic goods, thereby triggering riots. The IMF also mandated a devaluation of the Dominican currency; this increased exports, but made imports much more expensive.

Who were the real losers in all of this? The Dominican people.

In the United States under the recent presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, the American national debt was doubled. Most of the loan money, of course, traces back to the “created-out-of-nothing” money of large banks. Nevertheless, interest on this money must now be paid. To pay it, federal social services were cut under Reagan, thereby hurting the standard of living of many Americans. What was much of this extra loan money used for? Military needs.

On a smaller scale, the inflatable paper money system causes farmers to lose farms. Most farmers do not lose their way of life because they fail to work hard or because they do not produce something of great value. They lose because they cannot meet the demands of the paper money system. This allows large agribusinesses to step in and buy up the farmland, resulting in the concentration of food production in an ever-dwindling number of hands.

As we can see, the modern monetary system has had the effect of destroying many benefits that mass production and advances in science and technology would have offered the human race. By now, the need for all-consuming toil for physical existence should be largely ended; but the inflatable paper money system has helped to preserve that need by creating massive debt, chronic inflation, and general economic instability. The vast majority of people in all nations today must still continue to spend the major portion of their prime waking hours working to meet their financial needs. The Custodial goal expressed in the Biblical Adam and Eve story of making people toil from birth until death is still being fulfilled.

Another significant by-product of the modern money system is taxation. Most Americans believe that the U.S. government creates its own money. If that is true, then why would the government need to tax anyone? Why does not the government simply allocate to itself the money it needs to operate? That would obviously be far more sensible than erecting enormous tax-collecting bureaucracies which can drive people to despair and greatly diminished productivity.

The answer is that the U.S. government does not create money—the Federal Reserve and commercial banks do, and they are not public entities. To obtain some of the money those banking entities create, the government must either tax or borrow. It does both, and the citizens pay. Taxation, especially in nations with graduated income tax schemes, makes it harder for people to save money and thereby contributes to the need for most people to spend the majority of their lives toiling for physical existence.

Despite the welcome political reforms now transforming Russia and the Eastern bloc, communism remains a power in other nations where it has inspired fearful oppressions in recent decades, as the people of Ethiopia and Kampuchea have learned to their great sorrow:

On September 12, 1974, the monarchy of Ethiopia was overthrown in a military coup. Six months later, the monarchy was entirely abolished by the revolutionary government and Ethiopia was made a Marxist state complete with collective farms and government-owned industry. The new Marxist rulers soon found themselves opposed by an independence movement in the Ethiopian provinces of Eritrea and Tigre. That independence movement was, and still is, kept alive to a large extent by another Marxist group: the Popular Liberation Front. The resulting battles between the Marxist regime and the Marxist liberation have brought about a great loss of life.

 

The Ethiopian famines we hear so much about today have been caused primarily by the Ethiopian government’s attempt to squelch the Eritrean liberation movement by hindering relief shipments to drought regions. This amounts to an act of genocide. People have died horrible deaths as they found themselves caught between two equally brutal factions. Behind all of this we find once again evidence of the Brotherhood network: the emblem of the Marxist regime prominently features the Brotherhood symbol of the “All-Seeing Eye.”

On April 17, 1975, the capital of Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia) fell to communist revolutionary forces. A virtual news blackout followed. The stories that leaked out were horrifying beyond description. After the election of communist leader Pol Pot as premier in April 1976, Kampuchea suffered what some experts believe to have been the worst genocide since World War II. At least one million, and as many as three million, Kampucheans died. Out of a population of 7.5 million, that represents a substantial portion.

 

This genocide was part of a grand economic plan formulated by highly-educated Kampuchean leaders who boasted advanced degrees in economics and social science from universities in France. Those leaders decided that their nation should have an agrarian economy ... immediately.

 

The capital of Kampuchea, Phnom Penh, was forcibly evacuated and its residents were compelled to enter the countryside where rural “production cooperatives” awaited them. Private property was abolished. Citizens who were perceived as standing in the way of the new Kampuchean Utopia by virtue of their occupations or education, and those people who objected to being forced into slavery, were murdered. Children were often recruited to carryout the murders, thereby helping to breed in the young generation of Kampuchea a higher than normal incidence of psychopathology.

 

This grand Kampuchean scheme under Pol Pot was a virtual carbon copy of the brutal programs launched earlier in history by the revolutionary council of 18th-century France, by the regime of Joseph Stalin in Russia, and by the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-Tung in China. The Pol Pot regime collapsed in January 1979 when Kampuchea was invaded by the communist North Vietnamese, who were hardly models of civility themselves. By 1990, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge re-emerged. They were part of a coalition seeking to retake power by military force. The coalition was supported by the United States and, according to several eyewitnesses, CIA-provided weapons continued to reach the still-brutal Khmer Rouge troops.

 

Prior to the dismantling of the Soviet Union, many communist movements in the world were supported by the Soviet KGB and other Eastern bloc secret services as part of their mission to foment wars of “liberation” around the world. Interestingly, Western intelligence services had also assisted in the establishment of communist regimes just as the German military had done in 1917.

 

The United States initially backed Fidel Castro in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, both of whom afterwards established communist regimes in their respective nations. Both nations still remain communist as of this writing. The United States had also initially backed Pol Pot and helped him achieve power in Kampuchea. The Communist world, both past and present, was very much a product of Western activity.

Behind today’s political factionalism we continue to find evidence of direct Brotherhood network involvement. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), for example, was strongly anti-Communist and instilled anti-Communism in its adherents as a spiritual goal. There is nothing wrong with that until it becomes another justification to breed more violence, oppression and strife. One of SMOM’s Knights in America, the late William Casey, headed the American CIA from January 28, 1981 until January 29, 1987. During his tenure as CIA chief, Casey did much to increase CIA covert operations, especially in Central America.

There, CIA-backed “Contra” rebels and right-wing “death squads” committed horrible atrocities against civilians in the name of fighting communism. Other SMOM Knights in national intelligence organizations have included James Buckley of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, John McCone (former director of the CIA under President John Kennedy), and Alexandre de Marenches (chief of French Intelligence under President Giscard d’Estaing, who was also an SMOM Knight).

The American CIA is also influenced by Mormonism, Freemasonry, and other lesser known Brotherhood organizations. Mormons are often sought by CIA recruiters due to the overseas experience many Mormons receive in their missionary work, and a few have reached very high positions within the American intelligence community. Some Masonic groups provide special scholarships for young members to attend the Foreign Service School in Washington, D.C. That school provides the nation with many of its State Department personnel, diplomats, and spies. All of these Brotherhood influences have combined to create an ideological hotbed in American foreign policy. The result has been the maintenance of the United States as an effective political faction for keeping conflict alive around the world.

“Lone assassins” continue to be significant today. Earlier in the book, we looked at the origin of the lone assassin phenomenon as a political tool. The substantial “conspiracy” evidence surrounding modern-day assassinations indicates that such killings continue to be crude political weapons. The primary difference today is that some “lone assassins” appear to be a cover for a second hidden assassin, and a pretense is made that the “lone assassin” really did act alone. In all other important respects, modern “lone assassins” are nearly identical to those programmed by the Brotherhood’s Ismaili organization centuries ago in the Middle East.

To illustrate, let us review some of the evidence behind recent assassinations.

A great deal has already been written about the November 22, 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, so I will only summarize the events here. President Kennedy was killed by rifle fire while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Almost immediately after the shooting, suspicions of a conspiracy arose. The alleged “lone assassin,” Lee Harvey Oswald, publicly proclaimed that he was only a “patsy.”

The ballistics and physical evidence strongly suggested that Kennedy was hit by bullets fired from in front of him, not from behind where Oswald was positioned. Oswald never had a chance to elaborate on his claim that he was a patsy or go to trial because, two days after his arrest, he was murdered while in police custody by a night club owner, Jack Ruby—a man with known Mafia connections. Ruby went to prison and died there less than four years later.

An official government panel was convened to investigate the JFK assassination. Known as the “Warren Commission” after its chairman, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, the panel concluded that Oswald had acted entirely alone. Years later, a U.S. House of Representatives panel spent 26 months re-investigating the murders of John F. Kennedy and black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was slain in 1968 by an alleged “lone assassin”). The House panel concluded that the “lone assassins” did not act alone and that conspiracies lay behind the Kennedy and King killings. The panel felt that further police investigation was warranted. Despite rumors and evidence of CIA and Mafia involvements in the Kennedy shooting, no convictions of any co-conspirators have ever occurred.

John Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated almost five years later on June 5, 1968 inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. RFK was running for president at the time he was shot and he was almost certain to win the Democratic nomination.

He had just finished delivering a speech to enthused campaign workers and began to walk through the back pantry area surrounded by a throng of well-wishers and reporters. It was in the pantry area that the convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, opened fire at close range with a .22 caliber pistol. A number of people were hit and Kennedy fell to the floor with head and body wounds. Sirhan was immediately apprehended.

Kennedy died the next day and Sirhan went onto be convicted as the sole assassin. Despite the conviction, a great deal of controversy remained. In an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism, researcher Theodore Charach compiled a large body of evidence indicating that a second hidden gunman, not Sirhan Sirhan, had fired the shot which killed Kennedy.

Mr. Charach used his evidence to create an astonishing feature-length documentary film entitled The Second Gun. The movie enjoyed a short theatrical release in the 1970’s and has recently been made available on home videotape.* Mr. Charach’s research was picked up by others and it eventually brought about the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors hearings into the assassination.

* The Second Gun videotape was released by Video Cassette Sales, Inc. Please see Bibliography for address.

The RFK “second gun” case rests on a great deal of fascinating ballistics evidence and eyewitness testimony. For example, the Los Angeles coroner performed an analysis of the gunpowder burns on Kennedy’s head and clothing. The burns revealed that the muzzle of the gun was not more than one to three inches from Kennedy’s head when it fired the fatal bullets; i.e., the muzzle was at point blank range. All eyewitnesses, however, reported that Sirhan’s weapon was never closer than twelve inches; a significant difference as far as powder burns are concerned.

The Second Gun suggests that the fatal bullet may have been fired from the gun of a uniformed security guard who was holding Kennedy by the right arm when the shooting started. The guard admitted pulling out his gun during the melee, but denied firing it. An eyewitness on the scene, however, did testify to seeing the guard fire. There is no record that the police ever examined the guard’s pistol.

A bizarre diary reportedly written by Sirhan, and discovered in his apartment after the shooting, seems to lend weight to the conspiracy theory. In that diary, Sirhan wrote several times of the need for Robert Kennedy to die in connection with Sirhan receiving large sums of money. One entry mentioned $100,000. The most interesting diary entry is that one in which Sirhan, who seemed to relish the thought of receiving large checks made payable to him, appears to repeat an instruction that he has never heard a promise that he would receive money for Kennedy’s death, which needed to happen by June 5, 1968—the date of the California primary.

Sirhan’s diary contained the following words:

Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June ‘68 Robert
F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of of.¹

The LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) considered the diary entries to be nothing more than the rantings of a mentally-deranged lone assassin. If that truly was Sirhan’s writing, his references to money would certainly provide an additional motive for him to take shots at Kennedy, whom he greatly disliked anyway. The question is: who offered Sirhan the apparent money and does Sirhan believe that he will still receive it when he is finally released from prison? To this day, Sirhan maintains that he acted entirely alone, and the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department are content to agree with him.

If a security guard fired the shot which killed RFK, it is possible that he did it accidentally. The guard may have drawn his gun from his holster in an effort to defend Kennedy without even realizing it. The police, however, never even considered this possibility despite the powerful evidence that Sirhan’s gun did not fire the fatal bullet. The LAPD was instead very one-minded in its “lone assassin” theory and, as pointed out by a Los Angeles Times article, badly mishandled some of the key physical evidence.*

*The mishandled evidence included ceiling panels from the pantry area that may have contained bullet holes indicating the presence of a second gun. Incredibly, the panels were destroyed by the police. According to LAPD chief Daryl Gates, the destruction of the panels had been done routinely. Mr. Gates said that this did not constitute destruction of evidence because the panels had not been introduced as evidence at Sirhan’s trial. He added, however:

... I just think that it [destroying the panels] was lack of judgment. It was a lack of common sense and inexcusable because the case had worldwide magnitude. More importantly, Sirhan had been convicted and his appeal was not even in prospect yet. Potential evidence should never be destroyed until the entire case has run out. What the hell were these things destroyed for? That borders on Catch 22 insanity. It was just like they were opening up the doors to total criticism and doubt. There’s no way it can be explained.2

Rumors again abounded of a possible Mafia and/or CIA involvement in the Robert Kennedy shooting, but no coconspirators were ever arrested in the case.

In the early afternoon of March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan finished giving a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Surrounded by his entourage and Secret Service agents, Reagan walked out to the driveway where a limousine awaited him. As in the Robert Kennedy shooting, an apparently crazed young man emerged from the crowd firing a pistol. Reagan was pushed into the limousine by a Secret Service agent, rushed to a hospital and underwent surgery to remove a single bullet which had struck him in the left rib cage and pierced his left lung. It is fortunate that the wound was not fatal.

The “lone assassin,” John Hinckley, Jr., went on to be convicted of the crime. According to a newspaper columnist, the FBI did all it could to prove that Hinckley had been the sole assassin on the scene. Some people, however, have expressed doubts about the FBI’s conclusion. In a press conference held a month after his recovery, Mr. Reagan answered questions indicating that he did not feel the impact of the bullet that struck him until he was all the way inside the limousine:

Q: What were your first thoughts when you realized you had been hit?

A: Actually, I can’t recall too clearly. I knew I’d been hurt, but I thought that I’d been hurt by the Secret Service man landing on me in the car, and it was, I must say, it was the most paralyzing pain. I’ve described it as if someone had hit you with a hammer.

 

But that sensation, it seemed to me, came after I was in the car, and so I thought that maybe his gun or something, when he [the Secret Service agent] had come down on me, had broken a rib.

But when I sat up on the seat and the pain wouldn’t go away, and suddenly I found that I was coughing up blood, we both decided that maybe I’d broken a rib and punctured a lung.3

In a later, interview, Mr. Reagan’s wife, Nancy, confirmed the President’s impression.

Had Mr. Reagan simply suffered a delayed reaction to a bullet fired from Hinckley’s gun, or had he actually been shot, perhaps accidentally, inside the car by a Secret Service agent, as the above testimony would suggest? According to the FBI, the bullet that wounded Mr. Reagan had ricocheted off the limousine door just as Mr. Reagan was being pushed into the vehicle. If the FBI explanation is true, why did the bullet not explode upon impact with the door since it was an exploding bullet? Perhaps the bullet was a “dud”?

It is possible that two coincidences did occur at the Reagan shooting: a dud bullet followed by a delayed pain reaction. Another explanation which does not require a coincidence is that Reagan was shot, perhaps accidentally, by the Secret Service agent inside the car: this would explain both the failure of the exploding bullet to explode (it did not hit an intervening metal door) and Mr. Reagan’s own recollection.

The FBI did not pursue the “second gun” angle in the Reagan shooting. This is troubling because the convicted assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., claimed that there was a conspiracy involved in the shooting. In its October 21, 1981 issue, the New York Times reported:

A Justice Department source late tonight confirmed a report that John W. Hinckley, Jr. had written in papers confiscated from his cell in July that he was part of a conspiracy when he shot President Reagan and three other men March 30.⁴

Hinckley’s allegation should have set in motion an intensive conspiracy investigation. After all, John Hinckley, Jr., was not just a random individual out of the American melting pot. He was the son of a wealthy personal friend and political supporter of the then-Vice President who, of course, would have become President if Reagan had died. This is not to say that a conspiracy necessarily existed, only that such circumstances typically trigger a much more intensive investigation.

The New York Times states that the FBI seized Hinckley’s papers, followed up on the leads, and concluded that Hinckley’s conspiracy claim was untrue. The judge hearing the case ordered attorneys and witnesses not to divulge the contents of Hinckley’s papers to the public. The prison guards who had seized and read the papers gave their testimony in secret to the judge. At Hinckley’s trial, neither defense nor prosecuting attorneys ever raised the issue of a “conspiracy,” nor the second gun possibility. Instead, the entire trial centered around Mr. Hinckley’s very visible mental problems.

Perhaps the three shootings just discussed really were committed by lone assassins, with two of the shootings involving the accidental discharge of a firearm by a security agent. An assassination in the Philippines proved, however, that such scenarios may sometimes be the cover for a murder committed by an intelligence organization.

The year was 1983. Benigno Aquino was a popular opposition leader in the Philippine Islands. The Philippines were then under the dictatorial rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos had declared martial law in the 1960’s and never saw fit to lift it. After three years of voluntary exile from his homeland, Aquino made a decision to return to his country even though six years earlier he had been sentenced to death by firing squad for his political activities.

Aquino’s airplane landed at Manila Airport on August21, 1983. Surrounded by Filipino security officers, Aquino had just descended the stairs from the airplane when shots rang out. A bullet hit him in the back of the head and killed him. The “lone assassin,” Rolando Galman y Dawang, was on the tarmac (runway area) and was instantly shot dead by a security man near him. The government immediately declared Galman the “lone assassin” and tried to close the case.

Suspicions arose immediately.

President Marcos had a motive for killing Aquino and Aquino had already been sentenced to death. To quash these suspicions, Marcos convened an official panel to investigate the killing, similar to the Warren Commission impaneled twenty years earlier in the United States to investigate the John Kennedy assassination. Critics charged that the Marcos panel was one-sided and pro-Marcos. Many doubted that the panel would come to any conclusion other than the official one. Something unexpected occurred, however. The panel pursued the investigation objectively. It heard evidence about the powder burn on Aquino’s head indicating that the fatal bullet was fired from 12 to 18 inches away.

The government claimed Galman had come that close, but eyewitnesses did not confirm this. A journalist on the plane testified that two security men standing right next to Aquino had pulled out their revolvers and had pointed them at the back of Aquino’s head just before the shots rang out. Overwhelming forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony indicated that Aquino was shot by one of the security men assigned to “protect” him. The “lone assassin” was nothing more than a crude cover. The Marcos commission issued a finding to that effect.

The panel findings resulted in .the criminal indictments of several high-ranking military officers. At trial, however, all were acquitted. The vagaries of the Filipino justice system did not permit a great deal of crucial testimony acquired by the commission to be introduced at trial. A number of important witnesses for the prosecution did not appear. Several witnesses had reported being intimidated. After Marcos was ousted from office and sent into a plush Hawaiian exile by Benigno Aquino’s wife, Corazon Aquino, witnesses came forward testifying that the trial had been rigged by Marcos. Other eyewitnesses to the shooting also came forward with further evidence corroborating that Benigno Aquino had been shot by a security man.

The significance of the Aquino killing is that the scenario of the shooting is virtually identical to other “lone assassin” episodes. If, for example, there existed a conspiracy behind either the RFK or Ronald Reagan shooting, then the modus operanti! would appear to be identical to the modus operand in the Aquino shooting: a mentally-disturbed or politically-fanatical “lone assassin” is used as a cover for the true assassin who is on the scene as a security escort for the victim. This is important because the Filipino officers indicted for masterminding the Aquino shooting included General Fabian Ver and men under his command.

Ver not only led the nation’s military forces, but also its intelligence network. In other words, the “lone assassin” shooting of Benigno Aquino was a military/intelligence operation. This is significant because the Philippine Republic was a major U.S. ally at the time of the shooting, and the U.S. still has large naval and air bases there. The Philippines receive a great deal of aid from the United States, along with U.S. military and intelligence advisors. The Filipino intelligence apparatus therefore owes much to the American CIA and U.S. military intelligence. This is not to say that American sources were necessarily involved in the Aquino shooting.

It simply shows how an important Western intelligence service recently utilized the “lone assassin” technique, but used it so crudely that people saw through it immediately. Even U.S. newspapers which have been quick to accept “loneassassin” verdicts in American assassinations ran editorials condemning the acquittal of the Filipino military men. Our hats should go off to those brave panel members who had the courage to look behind the “lone assassin” myth, and to those eyewitnesses who were brave enough to testify. Such integrity is a precious commodity.

Modern “lone assassins” are not just American-related phenomena; they remain international in scope. On May13, 1981 during his public appearance in St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II was shot. He survived and still holds the Papacy today. The convicted “lone assassin,” Mehmet Ali Acga, had fired from a crowd that surrounded the Papal automobile. Interestingly, the Italian police also arrested a second gunman in connection with the shooting and accused Bulgarian intelligence agents of being involved in a plot to kill the Pope.

Bulgaria was still a communist nation at the time. Russia accused the American CIA of manufacturing this so-called “Bulgarian Connection” for propaganda purposes; however, Western newspapers reported that the CIA had actually stepped in and put pressure on the Italian police to drop the “Bulgarian Connection” and the “second gun” case. The Italians succumbed to CIA demands after the accused assassin, Mehmet Acga, destroyed his own credibility by flip-flopping on his story and by engaging in bizarre behavior.

In Sweden, a significant “lone assassin” episode involved the killing of the very popular Swedish Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, on February 28, 1986. Mr. Palme was strolling home with his wife from a movie when a gunman ran up to the Prime Minister, fired twice, and fled into the night. Suspicions of a conspiracy arose immediately, but the word was quickly put out that the killing was the work of a “lunatic.” A suspect was eventually arrested, but he denied responsibility and was acquitted. In 1990, the Swedish government even paid him restitution for the time he spent in jail. As of this writing, no other suspect is due to go to trial.

The final episode worth looking at occurred in West Germany on April 25, 1990 against Oskar Lafontaine. Mr.Lafontaine was premier of the Saarland state and running as the Social Democratic candidate for the office of Chancellor of Germany. He was on stage with another leading Social Democrat, Johannes Rau, during a political rally. A person who appeared to be a security guard led a woman up on stage; the woman was carrying a bouquet of flowers. When she reached Mr. Lafontaine, she calmly whipped out a butcher knife and slashed his throat.

Fortunately, Mr. Lafontaine survived despite a significant loss of blood and he went on to finish his unsuccessful campaign. The assailant, Adelheid Streidel, was immediately apprehended and labeled a mentally-deranged “lone assassin.” The attack, however, has the hallmarks of several previous “lone assassin” episodes we just looked at: involvement of apparent security personnel, the so-called “lone assassin” showing signs of severe mental tampering, and the act committed openly. The use of the butcher knife instead of a gun makes Ms. Streidel even more like the Assassins of medieval Persia, who used bladed weapons.

This assassination attempt occurred at a politically crucial time: Mr. Lafontaine was running against Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Mr. Kohl was a prime advocate for rapid German reunification and European unity, which would involve major shifts in world economics, politics, and military matters. Mr. Lafontaine and the Social Democrats were running on a platform of slowing down the German reunification process.

As in the case of Adelheid Streidel, a significant element of nearly all recent “lone assassin” cases is the mental state of the “lone assassins” at the time of the assassinations. The apparent “mental illness” exhibited by so many of them may very well be evidence of mental tampering. Sirhan Sirhan was known to have been repeatedly hypnotized by “friends” whom the police inadequately investigated. Eyewitnesses reported that Sirhan seemed to be almost in a trance on the night he fired at Robert Kennedy. John Hinckley, Jr., had had a great deal of psychiatric intervention during his pre-assassination days, and we still do not know what all of it consisted of.

Did Hinckley receive any visionary implants similar to the ones that Adolph Hitler had received as a psychiatric patient at Pasewalk? Like the ancient assassins of Persia, Hinckley was motivated by a crazed notion that he would attain to heaven by killing Reagan, except that Hinckley’s heaven was the unattainable love of a certain female movie star. Hinckley thought that he would win that love by killing the President. The peculiar mental states of Mehmet Ali Acga and other modem assassins (such as ”Squeaky” Fromme who tried to murder President Gerald Ford in 1975) are further indications that mental tampering may be a significant factor in most modern “lone assassin” episodes, just as it had been in medieval Persia.

In light of the above, it is perhaps not surprising to discover evidence of the Brotherhood network directly or indirectly linked to some modern assassinations. John Hinckley, Jr., for example, belonged for a while to an American Nazi organization. Modern American Nazism, through such organizations as the Aryan Nations, is as deeply influenced by Brotherhood-style mysticism as was original German Nazism. “Squeaky” Fromme was a follower of Charles Manson, who preached a bizarre apocalyptic mysticism in a small California commune. Manson and his “Family” were the ones who committed the horrific Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles in 1969. Interestingly, Manson was once a police informer.

As long as the “lone assassin” technique continues to go unopposed, those nations victimized by it will never rise above the level of a banana republic. That includes the United States and nations in Europe. One need only look at the way in which such assassinations have influenced the succession of American Presidents to appreciate just how damaging the technique is to a democracy. The problem with American leadership today is not so much a difficulty caused by the electoral process or by shortcomings in the Constitution. The problem is that the electoral process and Constitution have been severely undermined by the assassination of leaders and candidates. When police organizations contribute to this by ignoring and suppressing evidence, and by otherwise hindering proper investigations, those police organizations become accessories to the crimes in a very real and legal sense. That is when democracy dies.

Throughout this book, we have noted the role of the Brotherhood network in perpetuating revolution. Revolutions and armed resistance movements are expensive to run, and so we find that most of them are financed today by intelligence organizations. One unfortunate by-product of this activity is terrorism.

Terrorist groups are an effective way to keep conflict alive. An interesting book entitled, The Terror Network by Claire Sterling, reveals the strong interconnections that have existed between seemingly unrelated terrorist groups. Terrorist organizations from around the world and of conflicting ideologies have been supported by mutual “safe houses” and suppliers. The Terror Network reveals that many of those mutual supply sources had connections to the Russian KGB, although the book fails to mention the role of Western intelligence services in supporting various forms of terrorism.

The goal of some terrorist groups is to maintain a so-called ”Permanent Revolution,” i.e., a violent revolution that never ends. This goal is rooted in the Marxist concept that class struggle is inevitable and must continuously occur for a Utopia to emerge. As we recall, this idea has its ultimate roots in the Calvinist teaching that a world at war is a world closer to God. The “Permanent Revolution” is therefore designed to keep people fighting constantly so that we will all be able to enjoy a future Utopia. This sounds crazy, you say? Of course it is. The “Permanent Revolution,” which has been financed by various intelligence services and is inspired by concepts that came out of the Brotherhood network, is yet one more way to keep mankind in a constant state of war and disunity.

Efforts to generate nonstop strife on Earth have apparently been so successful that they threatened to wipe out most of humanity. Powerful atomic weapons were built in preparation for yet another “Final Battle” between the forces of “good” and “evil.” To those who believe that nuclear war is unthinkable: think again. In the climate of endless confrontation we share on Earth, rarely have weapons gone unused. Two atomic bombs were already dropped during World War II and, if we are to believe some evidence, they may have been used to wipe out human civilizations in the ancient past. There is a great irony in this.

If manipulations by a Custodial society do indeed ultimately lie behind human turmoil, the Custodial society could soon find itself owning a very damaged piece of real estate. It is true that nuclear weapons are notoriously unstable so that many atomic warheads will not explode if launched, but there has been enough of an “overkill” built to ensure that considerable damage would result from a nuclear exchange. Happily, the end of the Cold War brought about pledges for significant reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. There is irony in this, too, in light of the factions and hostilities that have replaced those of the Cold War. Once nuclear arsenals are reduced far enough, large-scale warfare will be possible again without the threat that such warfare would render Earth useless to apparent Custodial owners.

The lingering danger from remaining nuclear weaponry and proliferation would not come from unstable flying missiles, but from stationary bombs hidden at their target locations. The Pentagon expressed concern about such a possibility in a top secret military report produced in 1945. This concern was expressed again in more recent years when efforts were under way to develop a so-called “Star Wars” anti-missile defense system which utilizes laser beams to shoot down enemy missiles.*

* Star Wars can also be converted to an offensive weapon for rapidly destroying enemy cities with laser beams. Such laser weapons would be far deadlier than a nuclear arsenal and could, if developed, replace our atomic stockpiles. In 1992, the president of the new Russian Republic suggested a joint venture with the United States to create such a weapons system.

Some strategists were afraid that a successful “Star Wars” system would encourage a hostile foreign power to smuggle and plant atomic bombs in the United States if it felt that its missiles would be ineffective. Such bombs can be easily stored and kept mobile in trucks or vans.

The media-publicized “nuclear terrorism” scare of the 1970’s indicates that some stationary bombs may already be in place in the United States. It is also important to keep in mind that the source of such bombs may not always be an enemy government or hostile terrorist group. There always exists the danger that a nation’s own government may secretly plant nuclear bombs within its own cities as part of a “scorched earth” contingency war plan, in the same way that Switzerland has placed mines on all of its own bridges in the event an enemy invades and tries to use the bridges. In xenophobic nations, an internal nuclear threat of this kind can become very real. It is something that the people of every country with atomic weapons should remain wary of.

The Cold War between the United States and former Soviet Union affected us in many ways still felt today. Higher taxes, intrusive military and intelligence agencies, and a host of other ills were imposed upon human populations in the name of protecting against the enemy. We have been affected in other ways which are less well-known, but equally significant.

During the second half of the 1970’s, revelations of American military and CIA germ warfare experiments emerged in the public press. Surprisingly, many of those experiments were conducted in U.S. cities and were directed against U.S. citizens. In the 1950’s, for example, a “germ fog” had been sprayed by a Navy ship at San Francisco.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

In an experiment designed to determine both attack and defense capabilities of biological weapons, a Navy ship blanketed San Francisco and its neighboring communities with a bacteria-laden fog for six days in1950, according to U.S. military records.

 

The records contain the conclusion that nearly everyone of San Francisco’s 800,000 residents was exposed to the cloud released by a Navy ship steaming up and down just outside the Golden Gate.

The aerosol substance released by the ship contained a bacteria known as serratia, which was believed harmless by the military at the time but which has been found since to cause a type of pneumonia that can be fatal.5

The LA. Times added that at least twelve people were hospitalized around that time for serratia pneumonia. One of them died. That was just the beginning. The army disclosed that it had conducted 239 open-air tests between 1949 and 1969! Of those, 80 were admitted to have contained actual germs. The tests were directed against Washington, D.C., New York City, Key West, Panama City (Florida), and San Francisco. If we accept the army’s figure of 80 live-disease experiments, we discover an average of four “germ attacks” against U.S. cities every year for twenty years!

Other government documents have revealed additional CIA germ warfare experiments carried out in the same manner. This means that several major U.S. population areas were under fairly intensive germ bombardment for an admitted twenty-year period, all by the nation’s own military and intelligence organizations!

These germ “experiments” reportedly ended in 1969. However, justified suspicions have arisen about sudden outbreaks of more recent diseases, especially those which do not seem to conform to our understanding of epidemiology. The most recent of such diseases is AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). After the AIDS epidemic broke, the Soviet Union published charges in its official newspapers that AIDS was a biological weapon developed by the United States military. The charges have been generally dismissed as false propaganda and the Soviet Union later publicly retracted the statements after pressure from the United States. Despite the retraction, a number of researchers in the United States contend that there is evidence to support the original claim.

U.S. citizens have not only been hit by germs, but also by another type of bombardment. An intriguing segment of the television program, NBC Magazine with David Brinkley, aired July 16, 1981, revealed that the northwestern United States was continuously bombarded by the Soviet Union with low frequency radio waves. The radio waves are set at the approximate level of biological electronic frequencies.

Mr. Brinkley stated:

As I say I find it hard to believe, it is crazy and none of us here knows what to make of it: the Russian Government is known to be trying to change human behavior by external electronic influences. We do know that much. And we know that some kind of Russian transmitter is bombarding this country with extreme low frequency radiowaves.6

A U.S. government spokesperson stated that the radio beams were a kind of low-frequency radar system, but he was at a loss to explain how such a “radar system” worked. The fact is, low-frequency waves of that type will affect neurological and physiological functioning, usually by reducing mental functioning and by making people more suggestive. That is apparently the intent. A May 20, 1983 newspaper article from the Associated Press reported that a machine known as the Lida has been used by the Soviet Union since at least 1960 to influence human behavior with a 40 Megahertz radio wave. The Lida is used in Russia as a tranquilizer and it produces a trancelike state.

The Russian “owner’s manual” calls the Lida a “distant pulse treatment apparatus” for dealing with psychological problems, hypertension, and neurosis. The machine has been offered as a possible substitute for psychotropic drugs. When the AP article appeared, a Lida machine was on loan to the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial Veterans Hospital in the United States through a medical exchange program. According to the chief of research at the hospital, the machine may eventually be used in American classrooms to control the behavior of disturbed or retarded children. The Lida is apparently a small-scale version of the very same type of machine described in the David Brinkley show, as the AP article reveals:

[The chief of research] said some people theorize that the Soviets may be using an advanced version of the machine clandestinely to seek a change in behavior in the United States through signals beamed from the U.S.S.R.7

It appears that Americans were receiving electronic tranquilizing treatments courtesy of the Soviet government. It is incredible that the United States did not loudly demand an immediate stop to the intervention. Ironically, but not surprisingly, America appeared to have become more militant during the “treatments.” Anti-Soviet sentiment increased and so did the military build-up. Certainly the increased militancy of the United States cannot all be attributed to the Russian machines, but, at best, the Soviet treatments were ineffective in making America calmer. In actual fact, electronic tranquilizers appear to be deep irritants which will ultimately contribute to heightened aggression. The Russians, and anyone else still operating such devices, would do well to shut them off and keep them off.

As the evidence has shown, major military and intelligence organizations have taken over doing to human populations precisely what UFOs and some “Ascended Masters” reportedly did earlier: they have spread dangerous germs and have bombarded human populations with behavior-altering electronic radiation. When we consider these facts, it might be significant that military and intelligence organizations, at least in the United States, were foremost in debunking UFOs for many years.

The first known official American government investigation into the UFO phenomenon was begun on January 22, 1948 by the U.S. Air Force. The investigation was known as “Project Sign.” The startling conclusion of Project Sign, as announced in its “Estimate of the Situation,” was that UFOs were craft from “another world.” This conclusion was immediately rejected by the Chief of Staff, General Hoy S. Vandenberg, who dismissed the evidence as “insufficient.”

A new study group called Project Grudge was subsequently launched on February 11, 1949. The purpose of “Grudge” was to investigate the UFO phenomenon from the basic premise that extraterrestrial aircraft could not exist. Project Grudge pursued its work for several years and was eventually upgraded to the famous “Project Bluebook” in 1952—a year in which there was a dramatic increase in UFO reports. Project Bluebook concluded (not surprisingly, considering the basic premise upon which its predecessor, Project Grudge, was founded) that UFOs were all explainable natural phenomena.

In the year after “Project Bluebook” was established, the CIA entered the UFO controversy with an investigation of its own. In 1953, the CIA established a panel of eminent scientists known as the “Robertson Panel.” The CIA Panel quickly rubber-stamped the official view that UFOs did not represent an extraterrestrial race. The Panel added that UFOs were not a direct physical threat to national security, and were therefore of no interest. The Panel did state, however, that reporting UFOs could be a threat to national security!

The Panel wrote the following words to suggest that suppressing UFO reports was desirable in the national interest:

... continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena, in these parlous [dangerous] times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.8

As a result, the CIA and FBI investigated many people who reported UFOs. The U.S. Air Force cooperated by issuing regulations in 1958 instructing Air Force investigators to give the FBI the names of people who claimed to have contacted UFOs in some way, on the grounds that such people were “illegally or deceptively bringing the subject to public attention.”9 Although these regulations have been eased and the FBI reportedly no longer investigates UFO cases, there existed back in the 1950’s and early ‘60’s a definite intention within the American government to inhibit public reporting and discussion of the UFO phenomenon.

Today, the U.S. government is publicly out of the UFO business. Most of the debunking torch has been passed to a private group called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (“CSICOP”). CSICOP boasts an impressive roster of scientific and technical consultants, many of whom hold professorships at prestigious universities. CSICOP has inspired the creation of local branches usually known as “skeptical societies.” CSICOP publishes a quarterly journal called The Skeptical Inquirer.

A basic premise upon which CSICOP operates is that UFOs are not proven to be extraterrestrial craft. CSICOP also debunks all other phenomena that it considers phony or “pseudoscientific,” such as clairvoyance, spiritualism, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness monster, and all spiritual phenomena. It brands any effort to seriously study UFOs or spiritual phenomena as “pseudoscience”—a term it bandies about freely. CSICOP naturally practices only “real” science. Many CSICOP and local skeptic members are quite energetic and some of them appear regularly on radio and television shows.

The influence of CSICOP today is quite strong.

In addition to its presence in universities through CSICOP-affiliated faculty, CSICOP has exerted influence in the media. Celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, is listed as a Fellow of CSICOP. Other Fellows have included,

• Bernard Dixon, European editor of Omni magazine

• Paul Edwards, editor of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Leon Jaroff, managing editor of Discover magazine

• Phillip Klass, senior avionics editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine

• the late B. F. Skinner, author and famous behaviorist who did so much to promote the stimulus-response model of human behavior in our own generation.

CSICOP has gained a following primarily because the organization successfully promotes an image of objectivity. In CSICOP’s statement of purpose, for example, we read the following words:

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal attempts to encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and to disseminate factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public.
The Committee is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization.10

The Committee sounds like a wonderful organization. The world can greatly benefit from objective research into UFOs and paranormal claims. It is especially important for serious researchers to sort out the legitimate from the fraud, and that is not always easy to do. Sadly, CSICOP does not provide the objectivity needed to accomplish that task. The result of a CSICOP investigation has always been, to my knowledge, an utter debunking. This has puzzled those people who cannot understand how some evidence can possibly be rejected if it is looked at objectively. The solution to this puzzle comes by discovering who started CSICOP and why.

CSICOP was founded in 1976 under the sponsorship of the American Humanist Association. The American Humanist Association is, of course, dedicated to advancing the philosophy of “humanism.” “Humanism” itself is difficult to define because it often means different things to different people. Essentially, humanism is a school of thought concerned with human interests and human values as opposed to religious interests and values. It deals with questions of ethics and existence from the perspective of human beings as physical entities on Earth. “Religious humanists” will have spiritual and theological concerns, but will approach them from a human-centered focus as opposed to the God-centered or spirit-centered orientation of most religions.

The best-known form of organized humanism in the United States today is called “secular [non-religious] humanism.” Secular humanism admits only the reality of physical existence and rejects spiritual and theological reality. It is a philosophy of strict materialism. Many secular humanists adhere to the stimulus-response model of human behavior.

The founding and current chairman of CSICOP is Paul Kurtz, professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. For many years, Mr. Kurtz had served as the editor of The Humanist magazine. He was one of the drafters of the Humanist Manifesto II and authored a book entitled In Defense of Secular Humanism. His book is interesting because it expresses some of the doctrines and goals of the organized secular humanist movement. Those doctrines and goals are significant in light of the role that Professor Kurtz and other secular humanists have played in founding CSICOP.

On the subject of spiritual existence, Professor Kurtz wrote:

Humanists reject the thesis that the soul is separable from the body or that life persists in some form after
the death of the body.”

According to the Humanist Manifesto II:

Rather, science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context.12

Such ideas are fine for those people who choose to believe them. The point I am making is this: individuals and organizations which actively promote such ideas will find it difficult to be genuinely objective when they investigate evidence which flatly contradicts their established view.

They have already declared what they believe and what they reject.

Objectivity is even more difficult when those same people actively seek to spread their way of thinking as a social goal. According to the Humanist Manifesto II:

We affirm a set of common principles that can serve as a basis for united action—positive principles relevant to the present human condition. They are a design for a secular society on a planetary scale.13

We see in this quote that there exists a united intention among many secular humanists to create a worldwide secular society. The founding chairman of CSICOP, Professor Kurtz, helped draft the document which announces that intention. There is nothing wrong per se with having such a goal. It is common for activist religions and philosophies to try to shape the world in their own images. There is, however, a price to be paid for such activism: CSICOP and its affiliated skeptic groups lose their credibility. They have to be viewed as advocates for a certain point of view, not as disinterested investigators. They are prosecutors in the courts of inquiry, not the judges or juries.

We see in groups like CSICOP a problem that has existed for centuries. Most ideological battles are fought by extremists. Secular humanists, for example, represent a materialist extreme and they often do battle with modern ”Christian fundamentalists” who represent the “religious” extreme. Both sides are extremist in that they hold views which can only be kept alive by ignoring large bodies of evidence. They make easy targets for one another because they both have so many flaws; yet people are encouraged to side with one or the other on the basis that because one side is so wrong, the other side pointing out those wrongs must be right.

This can be dangerous logic to follow. It happens frequently that two people will passionately debate a fact, each certain that he or she is correct, but when they finally learn the truth, they discover that they were both wrong. Two lunatics can argue endlessly over which of them is the real Napoleon Bonaparte, but woe to the outsider who takes sides and swears allegiance to either one of them!

As extremists fight, the truth often lies ignored in a completely different direction.

Despite the efforts of secular humanists and others of similar ideological inclination to negate religion and theology, religion continues to be a powerful force inhuman society. If all of the surviving truths from all of the long-established religions and mystical systems were to be brought together today, they would be insufficient to get a person over the formidable barriers which stand in the way of full spiritual recovery. At best, those accumulated truths would only offer clues to assist in wholly new research. This is not to disparage the genuine rewards that a great many individuals still receive as a result of following various religious paths. Most theologies do have something of value to enrich a person’s life.

It is as true today as it has been throughout all of history that new religions come and go in great numbers. Very few of them survive very long, let alone become major religions. Despite this, new religions are attacked as frequently today as they were in the past. Modern attacks take the same form as they have for centuries: new religions are labeled mysterious evils that undermine everything good. The word “cult” is tossed around quite a bit today to label new religions, even though a great many of those religions are not “cults” in the true sense of the word. Properly used, “cult” refers to a subgroup of a larger religion, such as a Christian cult or a Moslem cult. Any completely new or autonomous religion is properly called a “sect,” or better yet, simply a new religion. The word “cult” has apparently become popular because of its phonetic qualities. It also fits well into newspaper headlines.

The greatest danger from new religions is not that they represent anything especially new or different, it is that they can be effective tools for breaking people into factions, just as religions did in the past. This can be accomplished even through no fault of the religion itself. Just by existing and being attacked, a modern religion may become an embattled faction when it finds itself operating in a social climate of “cult hysteria.” This type of social climate is easily generated today because most educated people fancy themselves knowledgeable about human psychology.

By appealing to that vanity, it is easy to breed animosity against new religions in otherwise-tolerant people by couching religious intolerance in psychological terms. Ironically, most of the anti-cult activism today comes from the so-called Christian “right-wing” in its effort to stamp out the “works of Satan,” which includes all religions not adhering to fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Christian bookstores are the primary outlets for anti-cult books in the United States today. These Christians have found strange allies in groups like CSICOP and in those other strict materialists (e.g., some psychiatrists) who view all religion as unhealthy and find easy targets in the newer religions.

The key to analyzing new religions, therefore, is not to lump them all into an ill-defined category called “cults” and then spout out generalities about them. The proper approach is to look at each new religion individually, to recognize the unique features of each, and to analyze the good and the bad within them according to the specific characteristics of each. Some will be found to be but an unhappy continuation of all that we have looked at in this book, others will be sincere attempts at spiritual enlightenment. The reason it is important to try to remain objective about new religions is that genuine spiritual knowledge will probably only come about through a newer religion. The older theologies will not stray far from their established doctrines and most modern sciences will not even consider evidence of a spiritual reality.

There is one recent religious movement worth mentioning. It is the loosely-knit “New Age” movement. The New Age movement is called that because it seeks the dawn of a New Age on Earth in which spiritual freedom, physical health, and world peace will prevail. Some of the unique music associated with the New Age movement is quite nice and the New Age emphasis on eating natural, healthy foods is a very positive element of the movement. Some New Age doctrines contain maverick ideas about the nature of the spiritual being, but like Hinduism, most New Age systems destroy the full benefits of those maverick ideas by mixing in large doses of mysticism, Custodial doctrine (e.g. some holistic doctrines that preach the desirability of a union of mind, body, and spirit instead of a separateness), and self-help methods that include hypnosis and subliminal programming (neither of which should be recommended).

Of primary interest to us are some New Age ideas about UFOs. A great many people throughout the world have been exposed to the “ancient astronauts” theory with its postulate that some ancient religious events were the doings of a space age extraterrestrial society. This has caused the veil of myth that once surrounded UFOs to partially fall. Perhaps as a result, an effort has been made through the New Age movement to re-establish the old religious beliefs that the extraterrestrial race seen flying about in our skies is composed of enlightened almost-Godlike beings who should be accorded reverential awe and looked to as a source of salvation.

This worshipful attitude has certainly been promoted through some New Age literature and in recent American motion pictures like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cocoon. Many other Custodial doctrines, including End-of-the-World messages, are now being promulgated with a modern twist in the New Age movement by people who claim to be getting messages from UFOs (and perhaps a few of them are). Instead of “angels,” however, the New Age offers us “Space Brothers.” If history is any indication, our nearby “Space Brothers” appear to have little to offer us but oppression and genocide unless they can be convinced to change their ways. It seems that it is the human race that must teach the extraterrestrial race compassion, and not vice versa.

The reported Custodial humanitarians who may occasionally visit Earth and do nice things for human witnesses and abductees would seem to be a distinct minority which is powerless to do anything truly meaningful for the human race. Like the doctors, social workers, and priests who enter prisons to give comfort to inmates, Custodial humanitarians have never broken down the prison walls. It would appear that the only “angels” and “Space Brothers” available to you are you and your very down-to-Earth neighbors.

As this edition of the book goes to press, the world is witnessing many changes. Some are extremely welcome, such as the dismantling of communism in many nations, the current efforts of the South African government to ease apartheid, and the increase of democratic elections around the world. These events show that conditions can be improved, perhaps even enough to eventually bring amend to the human plight suggested by this book.

Unfortunately, ethnic strife and the continuation of the inflatable paper money system in changing Europe are signs that something is still amiss. As the world passes through the 1990’s, we appear to be in an era much like the one that existed two hundred years ago (see pages 294 and 295) when republican-style governments were established around the world.

As back then, factions with Brotherhood roots are still active in breeding war and social ills today:

Ballistic weapons are proliferating rapidly in Islamic and Third World nations, aided by China and Western countries; meanwhile, Islamic radicalism continues to cause upheaval in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 1990, a radical Islamic sect called the Muslim Brotherhood swept to victory in municipal elections in the Jordanian cities of Zarqa and Aqaba.

 

As of this writing, Marxist revolutionaries are still killing people in Peru and the Philippines. In Peru, the most feared Maoist guerrillas are members of a secret society called the Sendero Luminoso which, roughly translated, means, “Luminous (Shining) Path,” or “Way of Illumination.”

Drug cartels have become political powers unto themselves; as in Colombia where a cocaine cartel waged a violent war against the Colombian government. Evidence of Brotherhood involvement in the shadow of the world of drugs may be seen in the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, which has been involved in coca growing, and in the heroin trade where powerful Asian heroin-dealing triads are presently formed by secret societies with roots in the 17th century.

Rightist nationalist organizations, although generally unpopular in the world, still receive support from government entities, such as a current Russian alliance called the People’s Russian Orthodox Movement which uses a cross symbol against a yellow background reminiscent of a swastika. In 1990, people affiliated with the movement were sponsored by the United States Information Agency to give talks in the United States, despite protests that the speakers were anti-Semitic.

In May 1990, the widely-publicized desecration of Jewish graves in Haifa, Israel was discovered to have been carried out by a secretive Jewish millenarian sect. A member of the sect admitted that his group perpetrated the desecration with the Machiavellian intent of heightening conflict between Jews and anti-Semitic forces.

New AIDS-like immune-destroying viral diseases are being predicted by the World Bank, and a group of doctors from the United States was sent on a five-year mission to Africa in March 1990 to find new viral diseases and conduct other activities.

 

The grant money for this mission was provided by the U.S. government’s principle AIDS research agency: the Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. One of the doctors, Nicholas Lerche from the University of California at Davis, is quoted on page A8 of the March 15, 1990 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle:

“This is the problem of what we’re beginning to recognize as emerging viral diseases, and there may well be other animal viruses waiting in the wings to move into humans and ultimately to cause new diseases.”

In light of allegations and evidence that AIDS may have been induced deliberately into human populations, there are some legitimate concerns about how the new diseases discovered by the doctors may be used by some of those people sponsoring the research.

By the time you read this, many new events will have occurred. Leaders, political personalities, and institutions will come and go from the world scene; warring factions will continue to arise and disappear. I hope that the long-term historical patterns described in this book will provide an interesting, and perhaps useful, tool for investigating the causes of future conflicts as they occur.

Better yet, we can hope that this book will one day become nothing more than a reminder of a bad dream from which we have all managed to awaken ourselves.

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