ni.chol.as

I remember the furore surrounding David Icke when he first came out as a “bit different”. In 1991, after a career in football and as a sports commentator on the BBC, Icke was interviewed on Terry Wogan’s chat show and later quoted as saying that he was the “Son of God”. Although his meaning was twisted to meet the ends of the tabloid headlines that followed, he was essentially finished as far as the mainstream was concerned. What credible person can claim to be the Son of God without some considerable evidence to back it up? Since his public fall from grace, Icke has only really popped into my consciousness occasionally and usually as the result of someone else accusing him of some other mind-bending insanity. He is a prolific author and the most recent occasion for me to pay him any attention was when he was attacked by Jewish groups for being anti semitic. Why? Because in a book about the secret cabals he believes are running the world, he’d named a number of powerful Jewish business leaders as part of the lizard conspiracy. The WHAT? Yes, David Icke believes that lizards are literally controlling the way the world is run.

Last weekend I went to see David Icke speak live at the Brixton Academy, cashing in on a whim that had led to me purchasing a ticket a good few months ago. If I’d been hoping to find out more about the lizards conspiracy I was to be disappointed. Icke did, however, talk for over five hours about his beliefs which are absolutely incredible. Over 2300 people sat there and listened to him talking fluidly and without reference to notes for this entire time. I’ll give him this much: he can talk and talk and talk and is quite engaging to listen to. The theme of this talk was about, broadly speaking, the “new world order”. His own interpretation of the idea that everything is run by an ancient secret cabal, the Illuminati. Although everything stems from this fundamental belief, his talk took in an awful lot of other conspiracies from round the world. The whole thing felt a bit like being lost in one of those banner-laden conspiracy websites. A bit like his own, really.

It’s safe to say that, to protect my sanity, I drank an awful lot of beer during the 8 hours we were at the Academy. I took notes, too! I didn’t want to leave without a good record of just what we were subject to.

A couple of weeks ago I finished a book called “How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic“. It’s a catalog of logical fallacies that you see deployed every day by people both deliberately and mistakenly. I’m not sure whether Icke knows what he’s doing is so utterly wrong but it’s a fantastic ride down the fallacy hall of fame taking in all manner of bizarre conclusions that are utterly devoid of evidence or arguments to support them. He covers a full half of the sections in my book and in spite of this, there was no lack of people in the audience totally willing to absorb everything he said.

During one of the breaks, we got talking to a Scottish chap who’d come all the way down from Glasgow to see David Icke talk in person. Personally, I’d travelled all of two stops on the Victoria line on a whim so I was quite excited to listen to what a real Icke devotee had to say. Here are some quotes I noted down from him as I listened to my companion talking to him about the nature of life. Kelvin was playing devil’s advocate to his rather painful efforts to explain his belief in the soul.

“The soul exists but it’s very small.” *clicks fingers* “It exists!”
“I know where I came from, and I know where I’m going!”
“It’s impossible to put into words”
“I’ve been shot down in flames by your science.”

We might have been a little unfair but, to our credit, we left knowing that the soul is very small. A Scottish man told us.

Here’s a few of the things that came up during Icke’s marathon declamation, illustrated with excerpts from my notes[1,2,3], scribbled in darkness. Drunkenly.

As I said, virtually everything is controlled by the secret world (lizard) government. Even Blair and Bush are miles away from the true locus of control: they are merely pawns placed into positions of power by virtue of their bloodlines. Examples of the secret world government’s influence in the world? Hidden messages in advertising and media, of course! We were shown a couple; a McDonald’s advert for chicken nuggets that looked like a penis, and a Time front cover that appeared to have the words “Kill” and “Sex” embedded in a picture of Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi. For what it’s worth I couldn’t verify either of these; not even Snopes could help!

Genetically modified foods apparently preempts genetically modified humans. Flouride, vaccines, aspartame (nutrasweet), HAARP, “electroexcitotoxins”, RFID tags which exist to control us through manipulating our magnetic fields… All these are apparently evidence of high level control of the world by secret rulers. He punctuates us at this point with a rather worthy mention of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the Superbowl. Whilst thousands are dying in wars, of hunger, disease; America is obsessed with someone flashing their tit on national TV. Of course this is no more evidence for a global conspiracy than my left testicle, but you can nod sagely at the wisdom imparted and forget to notice the gaping chasm between the facts and the conjecture. It’s ok though, it’s a fun jump: if you suspend your disbelief he makes surprisingly satisfying arguments!

Why do these secret rulers want us to believe the world is so benign and have us under their control? Well, apparently this is where watching a few too many Hollywood movies comes in. We’re all stuck in a world reminiscent of the Matrix in which we are only perceiving a subset of the reality that exists. He talked a lot about how we only perceive a tiny fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum through our eyes and then used this as a jumping-off point to explain that what we don’t see and perceive makes up the vast majority of the world around us. He’s kinda right on a philosophical level but he doesn’t go on to explain why being blind to so much of the electromagnetic spectrum means that lizards are running the world.

I scribbled down an excellent representation of the matrix. It might have lost something in translation. Also, DNA is a computer. Yup. And the pic at the bottom is one big brain with brain waves coming off of it and lots of little brains radiating off too. This was an actual slide. No shit.

I honestly have no idea what I was taking notes on with this last page. Vagina eggshells? What? That kinda sums up the whole experience for me. After 8 hours I think my brain was starting to feel the combination of conspiracy and strong Dutch beer. Maybe the vagina eggshells thing was written by me whilst attaining enlightenment. Now I’m back down to earth, I’ve entirely forgotten what it meant.

Eight hours have passed. Despite being bombarded by so many conspiracies and so little explanation of the details of them Icke does make a remarkably emotional case. He paints a picture from the bottom up, starting plausibly and building into spiralling towers of nonsense before bringing all his threads together, positing grand spiritual connections to everything. His final statements are beautifully acceptible to anyone with the slightest revolutionary bone in their bodies. Throwing out quotes from Orwell, Ghandi and Martin Luther King to rouse everyone to a crescendo of adulation and applause: “Their power is in your acquiescence!” It could have been a meeting of revolutionaries at any number of points in history. Sadly, though, I don’t think this was one of them.