LEAPIN’ LIZARDS, FAITH
English author and public speaker David “The Dot Connector” Icke earnestly promulgates that all the world’s woes are the result of an ancient reptilian race from outer space that’s genetically manipulated humans and is dominating Earth. All from a hollow moon, no less. Seriously.
And he’s keen on naming names. The Queens of England are lizards. The Rothschild ‘ohana are lizards. Barack Obama’s a lizard. Al Gore’s a lizard. Mauian Kris Kristofferson’s a lizard. George Bush Jr. and Sr. are lizards (though I think even “paedophilic reptile” is too kind for the likes of Dubya). Big Brother, coverups, UFOs, Anunnaki aliens, the Illumninati, Freemasonry, Satanism–it’s all in Icke’s books, videos and lectures, hailed by the writer Richard Kahn as a “Rosetta stone for conspiracy junkies.”
Seeing as that’s just the sort of stuff that many Mauians love to like, Icke will be on the isle next Saturday for an all-day lecture event at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s Castle Theater (Mar. 31, 10am-10pm; $39/$69/$99), promoting his latest book, Remember Who You Are. It’s the 18th treatise he’s published in 22 years. “The key is in the title,” Icke writes. “To breach the perceptual walls of the Saturn-Moon Matrix and bring an end to mass human enslavement, we need to awaken to our true identity.” (I know that sounds like a typical Valley Isle viewpoint, but outside our mercurial little rock, that’s controversial shit.)
Shape-shifting reptiles and all, Icke’s supporters–and there’s lots of them on Maui–say he’s a fearless truth-seeker. Meanwhile his opponents accuse him of being a madman–or worse, an anti-semite. In a recent interview, Icke told me that “racism is so ludicrous and is the ultimate confirmation of ignorance.” And when I asked–to be absolutely clear–if the lizards and the lot are meant to be taking literally (and not as some metaphor), Icke said, “Absolutely it’s meant to be taken literally.”
But his critics argue that much of Icke’s work cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a contemptible anti-semitic hoax first published in 1903, and of which Adolf Hitler was a proponent.
“Icke vehemently repudiates the accusations,” writes gonzo documentarian Louis Theroux, for The Guardian, in an review of Jon Ronson’s 2001 book Them: Adventures with Extremists (a chapter of which “examines the strange history of David Icke”). And that’s true in every example of retort against racism by Icke. “[R]eading Ronson’s account it is difficult not to conclude that, while we are right to be on our guard against paranoid anti-semitism, we should also be on our guard against the paranoid excesses of anti-anti-semitism,” writes Theroux. “Not only might it be unfair to Icke, but by implying that he is so dangerous that he has to be censored, the watchdogs are giving a patina of seriousness to ideas that are–let’s face it–very, very silly.”
Ronson, in a related piece for The Guardian (“Beset by Lizards”) wrote, “’You know, I’ve been trying to keep an open mind, but now I’m pretty certain that David Icke really does mean lizards when he says lizards.’”
Silly though they may be, Icke’s ideas have garnered a burgeoning global fan base. Last year alone, this former footballer and BBC presenter-turned-professional conspiracy theorist logged (as he told me) “about 45,000 [air] miles… across Australia, New Zealand, America and back to Europe again,” giving six-to eight-hour presentations–much like the ones slated here in Hawaii.
Such a schedule is par for the course for this self-described “most controversial speaker in the world,” whose “journey, consciously anyway,” started more than two decades ago with a “synchronistic” series of “beyond-paranormal” events which he says were “fundamental to how the information’s come to me over the years” and why he’s developed his eccentric ideas (more on that later).
But in 2012, Icke–rather unusually–has booked just two American appearances (the other’s at Oahu’s Blaisdell Arena on Sat., Mar. 24); with the only other international date scheduled in October, at London’s massive Wembley Arena. Why so few events–and why Hawaii, of all places? “I do everything by intuition,” Icke says.
Whatever your opinions on Icke, if nothing else, his theory–and moreover, the man himself–is undeniably fascinating. So what does all this say about our penchant for belief and how far we’re willing to take it? Further, how does it–for better or worse–affect our lives in the real world?
So ahead of his Maui lecture, I had a two-hour talk story session with Icke (joined by my good friends–and fans of Icke–Shawn Michael and Clive Tucker; local celeb musicians both), to hear his ideas first-hand and share his quotes, plus my maundering musings about it all. Speaking of the latter especially…
* * *
SMOKE AND MIRRORS: BELIEVE, BROV!
Hello, Paranoia. You creepy bastard. No surprise seeing you here on this blighted night. I guess you saw my smoke signal invitation? My exhalations against a Hawaiian breeze sieved through squalid windowpanes, from an ancient valley?
But listen, Paranoia. Me n’ Skepticism have had a longtime love affair. I’m cuckoo over Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens is my hero. You get the idea. But just this once, I suppose you might as well c’mon in, Paranoia–seeing as I’ve got what you like. Fury, fatigue and the worldwide web on a big screen. A lead finger soldered to an electric mouse and plenty of liquor and candy. And best of all, a barrage of Maui Wowie bong rips augmenting an illegal download double feature: Attack the Block and The Rum Diary, both of which are freaking me the fuck out right now (thanks to you, I presume).
Like the fur of the “big, alien gorilla-wolf monsters” in the former British sci-fi flick, it’s “blacker than black” tonight–and later than a promiscuous high school girl. I’ve slept, what? Four hours in the last four days? But winks won’t come my way, though just today I’ve been “up before God” (as one also-early rising friend put it), working since 4am. Oh, island logistics. See, London is 10 hours ahead of Hawaii, so with the crack of dawn came a phone interview with in/famous conspiracy theorist David Icke. Yeah, I know you know him well.
I thought I had it all figured out–’til you showed up, Paranoia. I thought I knew what and how I was gonna write about Icke’s irrational ideas about some Anunnaki reptilian race controlling humanity for aeons from a spaceship disguised as the Moon; about his climate change denial (although he’s a former Green Party spokesman); about the accusations against him of anti-semitism; about cloak-and-dagger, blood-chugging Illuminati Satanist shit and so on. I thought…
Everything suddenly feels all serendipitous and shit. I hate those feelings of what lots (Icke included) like to call “synchronicity,” ‘cause I love chaos’s comeliness. I think no one’s in control but us, like it or not.
But the British keiki on the telly are battling big, bad aliens, begging, “Believe, brov!” Then there’s Hunter S. Thompson’s Paul Kemp character, a journo clickety clacking in Puerto Rico, witnessing the same shit we Hawaiians have been dished since our 19th century American annexation: fuck Brown People, this land’s now my land. Let’s build some hotels and roll around in the spoils! The “Great White” just said something about Satanists…
Shit. Shivers up my spine. Is all this trying to tell me something?
This morning, Icke shared an anecdote with me about how in “1989 and 1990, I started having very, very strange experiences… pushing me very clearly in a certain direction.” He was in a news shop with his then-young son Gareth, when suddenly, he says, “My feet wouldn’t move.
They started to burn, like there were magnets pulling my feet to the ground… I wouldn’t say it was a voice, but it was a very strong thought form which went through my mind and said, ‘Go and look through the books on the far side.’ What? In a daze, I started to walk toward these books–’cause I knew this news shop well and I knew the books they sold and they were romantic novels… where perfectly formed English roses fall in love with perfectly formed English soldiers and stuff. So I thought, ‘What the heck am I walking across here for?’ When I got across to these books, they were all these books that I just described, but right in the middle was one called Mind to Mind… It was so different from all the other books and I picked it up and I turned it over and read the blurb and I saw the word ‘psychic.’”
Icke went on to explain how after reading the book, he contacted its author, Betty Shine, and received energetic “hands-on healing” for his rheumatoid arthritis, but said nothing of his strange experiences. Then just as he began to feel “like a spider’s web on my face… what I know now [to be] electromagnetic energy… [and] that’s how the connection between dimensions is done, by these electromagnetic projections,” he says Shine “launched her head back and said, ‘My God, I’ve got to close my eyes for this one.’ And she started saying that she was seeing this figure in her mind who was giving messages to tell me,” said Icke. “Basically it said that I was going to go out on a world stage an reveal great secrets. There was a story that had to be told. “There was a vibrational change coming that was going to act like a spiritual alarm clock to wake humanity up from from its coma, its slumber, its hypnotic state; and it’d bring to the surface all that had been hidden.”
When I asked, “Why him?” Icke said, “It’s not that I’m some bloody genius. It’s that I’m just listening to my intuition as anyone else can bloody do so. I’ve got me mind out of the way, got my head out of the way so that it serves my intuition instead of dominates and dictates it. It’s all I’ve done… It seemed crazy at the time… but all that’s been said has happened or is happening.”
Uh, so is that happening to me now? I’ve been talking with a few friends who’ve voraciously consumed Icke’s work for years on end. They’re smart, talented men I admire. A few of them have some interesting ideas about how Icke’s ideas relate to Hawaiian history… Our creation myths and lizard lore; how King Kalakaua (the last king of Hawaii before his succeeding sister was overthrown by American businessmen), was a 32nd degree Freemason–as were The Big Five… The list goes on and I find my mind runs easily with it. Never mind not a week goes without someone saying, “Your name’s really Anu Yagi? …Hey, have you heard of the Anunnaki?” Maybe all this has been leading me to this moment of reckoning?
A fat female mo’o wriggles into my sightline. Geckos are lucky, goes the local lore. The lighted windows are always crawling with them, but her translucent body’s a milk and honey x-ray standing out in the crowd; a pair of eggs glowing in her belly like oblong eyes. What the? Did the eggs just bat their lashes?! Oh, no. That’s just my own eyes reflected in the window against them. I play with the illusion, blinking and squinting a few more times. What fun.
Still, I can’t help but think of the 35 mo’o-related words in the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian dictionary, meaning “lizard… dragon, serpent; water spirit” and “legend or tale concerning the gods; god-like lizard” and “epithet for a sorcerer who practices black magic” and “genealogy of chiefs… chiefly line of succession… Lit. royal lizard.”
I take a few more huge hits, watching smoke wisps trundle like twisted fingers. I stare at the egg-laden gecko for a long time with a half-notion she’s going to say something to me.
Of course, she doesn’t.
* * *
“It would be nice, while I’m in Hawaii, if I could find Obama’s birth certificate. I shall be looking, as best I can, but I’m not confident.”
– David Icke on The Alex Jones Show, Mar. 6, 2012 (infowars.com)
* * *
ICKE, ICKE BABY! STOP, COLLABORATE AND LIZARD…
Icke isn’t all about blood and guts, gloom and doom. He talks a lot about peace, love and unity, and about how race and religion should no longer divide us. These are ideas I’m on board with (of course), but have a hard time reconciling when it concurrently involves dehumanizing our fellow man as “hybrid bloodlines” subject to an evil, alien puppeteer.
Presented with this, Icke responded candidly. “Basically, if it doesn’t make sense to you, then leave it. That’s the whole thing about what I’m saying… The information that I’m putting out there, I’m not asking anyone to believe it,” Icke said. “Because the last thing this world needs is someone else standing up and saying, ‘I’ve got all the answers and if you don’t believe me, you’re wrong.’ I’m putting out information which is suggesting another explanation for what’s going on in the world. People should take what feels right, leave what doesn’t–leave it all if none of it feels right–and take their own power to decide what to accept and what not to accept. This isn’t a belief system for sale, this is just information… It’s none of my business how people perceive and say and write, it’s their business. It’s their right to decide their own reality. That’s one of the things I’m pushing all the time. Don’t let anyone tell you what to think. Make your own mind up. Come to your own conclusions rather than take it off the peg from someone else… As the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is supposed to have said, ‘wisdom is knowing how little we know.’ That keeps your mind open.”
I guess that’s what I like about Icke–about all conspiracy theorists, really. Their thoughts demonstrate an eagerness to question everything– albeit, I think, an incomplete query. And shit’s undoubtedly fucked up, and I sympathize with people who are pissed and want answers. Icke’s ideas aren’t all that more outlandish than say, any religious idea about how the world works and who controls it.
But where those ideas are liable to become messy might be best evidenced in the post-World War II cargo cults of the southwest Pacific islands. Take for example the John Frum cult of Vanuatu; a group which worships an American man (against his will) as their messiah.
“The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world,” wrote Paul Raffaele for Smithsonian. “To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: Jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.” John Frum Day is celebrated to this day, every February 15.
If a whole island’s religious bent can shift like that in a single generation, what happens a generation from now–when Icke’s long gone and posthumously venerated, criticisms washed (as we’re so fond of doing of our late celebrities)? Will what’s thought-provoking today become dogma tomorrow?
But such speculation isn’t grounds for censorship. If anything, there’s something to be celebrated about ideas that have legs (two or four or however). So whether you think David Icke’s a truth seeker–or totally psycho–he certainly proves our capacity to create. And what are humans (half-lizard or no), if not imaginative?
Comments
comments