David Icke

David Icke
Icke in 2008
Born	David Vaughan Icke 29 April 1952 (1952-04-29) (age 57) Leicester, England
Residence	Ryde, Isle of Wight, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	writer and speaker
Years active	since 1990
Employer	David Icke Books Ltd.
Known for	Conspiracy theories, reptilian humanoids, problem-reaction-solution theory
Spouse(s)	Linda Atherton, Pamela Leigh Richards
Children	Gareth, Kerry, Jamie
Parents	Beric Vaughan Icke Barbara J. Icke (née Cooke)
Website DavidIcke.com

David Vaughan Icke (pronounced /aɪk/; born April 29, 1952) is an English writer and public speaker who has devoted himself since 1990 to researching what he calls "who and what is really controlling the world."^[1] Describing himself as "the most controversial speaker and author in the world," he has written 16 books explaining his views, characterized as New Age conspiracism, and has attracted a substantial following across the political spectrum.^[2] His books have been translated into eight languages, he runs a website that receives 600,000 hits a week, and his lecture tours, during which he speaks for up to eight hours at a time, attracted audiences of 30,000 between 2000 and 2006.^[3] His 533-page The Biggest Secret, reprinted six times between 1999 and 2005, has been called the Rosetta Stone for conspiracy theorists.^[4]

Icke was a well-known BBC television sports presenter and spokesman for the British Green Party, when at the age of 38, he had an encounter with a psychic who told him he was a healer and had been placed on Earth for a purpose.^[5] In April 1991, he announced on the BBC's Terry Wogan show that he was the son of God—though he argued later he had been misunderstood—and predicted that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.^[6] The show changed his life, turning him practically overnight from a respected household name into an object of public ridicule.^[3]

He nevertheless continued to develop his ideas, and in four books published over seven years—The Robots' Rebellion (1994), And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001)—set out a moral and political worldview that combines New-Age spiritualism with a passionate denunciation of what he sees as totalitarian trends in the modern world, the fantastic nature of some of it attracting a comparison with the satire of Jonathan Swift.^[7] At its heart lies the idea that a secret group of reptilian humanoids called the Babylonian Brotherhood created and controls humanity, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.^[8]

Icke has been criticized for linking his ideas to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903 that purported to be a plan by the Jewish people to achieve world domination. Icke argues that the Protocols was written by the "Global Elite," a group that stands at the apex of the Brotherhood. He strongly denies that this idea is in any way anti-Semitic, arguing that when he says reptilians rule the world, he means precisely that, but the linkage has nevertheless attracted the attention of the far right and the suspicion of Jewish groups.^[9] He was detained by Canadian immigration officials in 1999 when he tried to enter the country on a speaking tour, and was allowed to proceed only after persuading them that when he said lizards, he meant lizards, but his books were still removed from the shelves of Indigo Books after protests from the Canadian Jewish Congress.^[10] Icke and the Canadian tour became the focus in 2001 of a Channel 4 documentary by Jon Ronson, David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews.^[11]

Personal life and career

Icke was born in Leicester to Beric Vaughan Icke (born 1907) and Barbara J. Icke (née Cooke, died 2006), who were married in Leicester in 1951. Beric Icke had wanted to be a doctor, but his family had no money, so he joined the Royal Air Force instead, becoming a Leading Aircraftman and medical orderly. He was awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry in May 1943 after helping to save the crew of an aircraft that had crashed into the Chipping Warden air base in Oxfordshire. Along with a Squadron Leader, he ran into the burning aircraft, without protective clothing, and saved the life of a crew member who was trapped inside, sustaining burns to his hands and chest.^[12]

After the war, Beric got a job in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a slum terraced house on Lead Street, near Wharf Street in the centre of Leicester, and when Icke was three moved to a new council estate across the road from Leicester General Hospital. He remembers having to hide under a window or chair when the council man came to collect the rent. After knocking on the door, the rent man would walk round the house to peer through the windows. His mother never explained to him about the rent man; she just told him to hide when there was a knock on the door, and Icke writes that he still gets a fright when he hears that sound. He was always a loner, and felt different from other children, spending hours playing by himself, and preferring to cross the street rather than speak to anyone. He made no effort at school and failed at practically everything, but when he was nine, he was chosen for his primary school's football team, and he came to see football as the only way out of his poverty. He played in goal, which he writes suited the loner in him, and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.^[13]

Icke, top right, with the BBC's first Breakfast Time team. The show first aired on January 17, 1983, with Icke presenting the sports news until 1985. Clockwise from top left: Francis Wilson, Debbie Rix, David Icke, Nick Ross, Selina Scott, Frank Bough.

He failed his Eleven plus exam, which was used at the time to divide children between grammar schools, supposedly for the brightest, and secondary moderns or technical schools for the rest, so Icke was sent to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern.^[13] He left at 15 after being talent-spotted while playing football, and was signed up as a goalkeeper for Coventry City. Every Saturday when he wasn't playing himself, he would travel the 60 kms to Nottingham to watch Peter Shilton, one of England's legendary goalkeepers.^[14] Arthritis in his left knee—which later spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists, and hands—stopped him making a career out of football, but as well as playing for Coventry, he managed to play for Oxford United, Northampton Town, and Hereford United, before he had to give it up completely at the age of 21.^[15]

He married Linda Atherton in 1977, with whom he went on to have two sons and a daughter.^[16] He found a job as a reporter with the Leicester Mercury, saying he got the job because he was the only applicant.^[1] He advanced quickly through local radio to television, and became a regional sports presenter for the BBC's South Today in 1982, the same year his first son was born, and the year he moved to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, somewhere he had always wanted to live. He appeared on the first edition of British television's first national breakfast show, BBC Breakfast Time, on January 17, 1983, presenting the sports news for them until 1985.^[17] He published his first book in 1983, It's a tough game, son! about football and how to break into it. He worked for BBC Sport until August 1990, often as a stand-in host on Grandstand and snooker programmes, and also at the 1988 Olympic Games, but a career in television began to lose its appeal for him—he wrote in Tales from the Time Loop that he found the people working in television to be insincere, shallow, and vicious, with rare exceptions.^[18]

His contract with the BBC was terminated in 1990 when he refused to pay his poll tax, a new local tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher that was controversial because the same payment was required by everyone, regardless of income. He ended up paying it in November 1990, but his initial announcement that he was willing to go to jail rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.^[19]

Green Party

At some point during the 1980s, he began to flirt with fringe medicine and New Age philosophies in an effort to find relief from his arthritis.^[20] He wrote his second book in 1989, It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment, and became involved with the Green Party from 1988 to 1991, rising to the position of one of their four national Speakers, a position the party had created in lieu of a leader. He soon became the party's most alluring speaker, The Observer calling him "the Greens' Tony Blair." He became a household name, appearing on talk shows and in debates.^[21] He was invited in 1989 to debate whether animals should have rights at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, alongside Tom Regan, Richard Ryder, Andrew Linzey, Mary Warnock, Steven Rose, and Germaine Greer,^[22] and in September 1990, his name appeared on advertisements in national newspapers for the children's charity, Children's Vigils, alongside a cast of American and British celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Woody Allen, Cher, and Whoopi Goldberg.^[23]

Sessions with a psychic healer

Icke writes that it was when he was working for the Green Party, and particularly while he was writing the book in 1989, that he began to feel a presence around him, as though there was always someone else in the room even when he was alone. He writes in Days of Decision (1993) that it was a time of considerable personal despair for him, though he gives no details.^[24] In March 1990, he had an experience in a newsagent's that felt as though a magnetic force was pulling his feet to the ground, and he heard a voice tell him to look at a particular section of books. One of the books was by a psychic healer, identified by The Guardian as Betty Shine, a psychic healer in Brighton.^[25] He decided to visit her to ask for help with his arthritis. She told him she had a message for him. He was a healer who had been sent to heal the Earth, she said, and would become world famous, but would face enormous opposition. The spirit world was going to pass on ideas to him, which he would then speak to others about, sometimes not understanding the words himself. He was told he would write five books in three years; that in 20 years there will be a different kind of flying machine, where we can go wherever we want and time will have no meaning; and that there will be great earthquakes in unusual places, because the inner earth is being destabilized by having oil taken from the seabed.^[1]

What followed became what Icks calls his "turquoise period." He began to wear only turquoise because, he explained, it is a conduit of positive energy. During the same month he met the psychic, he met Deborah Shaw, another psychic from Canada, at a Green Party exhibition. She changed her name to Mari Schawsun,^[26] as the "daughter of Christ," while Icke's wife became Michaela, as an aspect of the Archangel Michael, and the three of them started living together. Invariably wearing turquoise tracksuits, they became known as the "turquoise triangle," Icke insisting that he and Schawsun were just friends. He answered reporters' questions about it with, "if you resonate on this higher level then you see not two ladies, but two bodies with energy patterns," but when Shawsun became pregnant, his wife asked her to leave.^[27][20]

It was near this pre-Inca burial site in Sillustani, Peru, that Icke said he had a pivotal mystic experience in February 1991.

In February 1991, Icke decided to travel to Peru, where he visited the pre-Inca Sillustani burial ground near Puno. He writes that he felt drawn to a large mound of earth, at the top of which lay a circle of waist-high stones. As he stood in the circle, he felt his feet pulled to the earth as if by a magnet, just as he had experienced in the newsagent's in Ryde, and an urge to outstrech his arms. His feet started to vibrate and burn, his head felt as though a drill was passing through it, and he felt two thoughts enter his mind: first, that people will be talking about this in 100 years, and then, "it will be over when you feel the rain." He said his body started shaking as though plugged into an electrical socket and new ideas began to pour into him. Time became meaningless, he writes, and he has no idea how long he stood there, arms outstretched. Then it started raining, and the experience ended as suddenly as it had begun. He described it later as the "kundalini"—a term from Indian yoga describing a libidinal force that lies coiled at the base of the spine—exploding up through his spine, activating his brain and his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.^[28]

He returned to England and began to write a book about the experience, Truth Vibrations, published in May that year. At a Green Party conference in Wolverhampton on March 20, 1991, before the book appeared, he resigned as one of the party's four prospective parliamentary candidates and Speakers—a position the party had adopted instead of leader—telling them he was about to be at the centre of "tremendous and increasing controversy," and winning a standing ovation from them after the announcement.^[29] A week later, he, his wife, and Deborah/Mari held a press conference to announce that he had become a "channel for the Christ spirit," a title conferred on him by "the Godhead." He said the world would end in 1997, preceded by a number of disasters. There would be a severe hurricane around the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, eruptions in Cuba, disruption in China, a hurricane in Derry, and an earthquake on the Isle of Arran. Los Angeles would become an island, New Zealand would disappear, and the cliffs of Kent would be under water by Christmas 1991. He said the information was being given to the three of them by voices and automatic writing.^[30][20]

Terry Wogan interview

Icke, wearing a turquoise shellsuit, is greeted by Terry Wogan for an interview on April 29, 1991, during which Icke declared that he was the son of God. He said his children were devastated afterwards, because their dad had become a figure of ridicule.^[31]

The press conference and book attracted an invitation from the BBC's prime-time Terry Wogan talk show on April 29, 1991. Icke told Wogan, amid howls of laughter from the studio audience, that he was "the son of God," and that Britain would be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.^[32] He later said that he had been misinterpreted, and that he had used the term "the son of God" to mean an "aspect" of the Infinite consciousness.^[33] The interview proved devastating for him. As the audience laughed, Wogan memorably pointed out that they were laughing at him, not with him, and his humiliation seemed complete. He disappeared from public life, and for several years was unable to walk down the street without people pointing and howling. His children were followed to school by journalists. His wife said she would open the back door to get the washing in, only to find a camera crew filming her. Icke told Jon Ronson:

One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into "Icke's a nutter." I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.^[31]

The BBC was criticized for allowing the interview to go ahead, Des Christy in The Guardian calling it a "media crucifixion."^[34] Wogan interviewed Icke again in 2006, acknowledging that his comments had been a bit sharp,^[32] but Icke said the situation had been the making of him in the end. "What life tends to do," he told a Channel Five documentary in 2006, "is hide its greatest gifts, and present them as your worst nightmare." He said the laughter set him free from the prison most people live in, where they're afraid to live the lives they want for fear of disapproval. Every bridge back to his past was now ablaze, and it gave him the courage to develop his ideas without caring what anyone thought of him; he wrote later that the ridicule had opened the prison door.^[3][35]

Key ideas

Icke's core ideas are put forward in four books, each of them around 500 pages long: The Robots' Rebellion (1994), And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the World (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001). Much of his work is published by his Bridge of Love Publications or David Icke Books. Discussion of serious philosophical issues is intermingled with contentious and unsourced allegations against named individuals, including that senior politicians and other public figures are Satanic pedophiles, or that the Swine flu vaccinations are a deliberate attempt to cull the world's population.

His ontology amounts to neo-Hegelian idealism with an extraterrestrial twist. Human beings are the result of a genetic experiment conducted by a race of reptilians called Anunnaki from the planet Draco.^[36] He argues that human life is a "five-sense illusion," or holographic experience, and that the only reality is the realm of the Absolute. He believes in some form of collective consciousness that has intentionality, in reincarnation, in other possible worlds that exist alongside ours on other frequencies, and in Lamarckian acquired characteristics, arguing that our experiences change our DNA by downloading new information and overwriting the software. We are also able to attract experiences to ourselves, via good or bad thoughts.

Global Elite

The basic argument is that humanity was created, and is controlled, by a network of secret societies run by a race of interbreeding bloodlines originating in the Middle and Near East in the ancient world. Icke calls them the "Babylonian Brotherhood." The Illuminati, Round Table, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the IMF, United Nations, the media, military, science, religion, and the Internet are all Brotherhood created and controlled.^[37]

The Brotherhood is mostly male. Their children are raised from an early age to understand the mission; those who don't are pushed aside. Key Brotherhood bloodlines are the British House of Windsor, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, European royalty and aristocracy, and the Eastern establishment families of the United States. The origin of the bloodlines is extra-terrestrial. At the apex of the Brotherhood stands the "Global Elite," the same group identified throughout history as the "Illuminati"; at the top of the Global Elite stand the "Prison Wardens." The goal of the Brotherhood—their "Great Work of Ages," or the "Brotherhood Agenda"—is world domination and a micro-chipped population.^[38]

Icke introduced the idea in The Robot's Rebellion that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was first laid out in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, which supposedly presented a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. The Protocols is the most influential piece of anti-Semitic material of modern times, portraying the Jewish people as cackling villains from a Saturday matinee, as Ronson puts it, widely drawn on by the far right and neo-Nazi groups.^[39] Mark Honigsbaum writes that Icke refers to it 25 times in the book, calling it the "Illuminati protocols," and it is the first of a number of examples of Icke moving dangerously close to anti-Semitism, according to Michael Barkun—see below for a discussion of the anti-Semitism controversy.^[40]

Reptilians and shape-shifting

The Draco constellation from Uranographia by Johannes Hevelius, 1690

In The Biggest Secret (1999), Icke introduced the "Reptoid Hypothesis." He identifies the Brotherhood as originating from reptilians from the constellation Draco, who walk on two legs and appear human, and who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. They are the same race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš.^[41] Lewis and Kahn write that Icke has taken his "ancient astronaut" narrative from the Israeli-American writer, Zecharia Sitchin. Icke's idea of "inner-earth reptilians" is also not new, though Barkun writes that Icke has done more than most to expand on it.^[42]

Sitchin writes that the reptilians came to Earth for its precious metals. Icke argues that the Anunnaki came specifically for "monoatomic gold," a mineral he says can increase the carrying capacity of the nervous system ten thousand fold. After ingesting it, the Anunnaki are able to process vast amounts of information, speed up trans-dimensional travel, and shapeshift from reptilian to human form. They use human fear, guilt, and aggression as energy in a similar way, part of the reason they organize human conflict.^[43] The more negative emotion we emit, the more the reptilians absorb:

Thus we have the encouragement of wars, human genocide, the mass slaughter of animals, sexual perversions which create highly charged negative energy, and black magic ritual and sacrifice which takes place on a scale that will stagger those who have not studied the subject.^[44]

The Anunnaki have crossbred with human beings, the breeding lines carefully chosen for political reasons. He believes they are the Watchers, the fallen angels, or "Grigori," who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha. Their first reptilian-human hybrid, possibly Adam, was created 200,000–300,000 years ago. There was a second breeding program around 30,000 years ago, and a third 7,000 years ago. It is the half-bloods of the third breeding program who today control the world, more Anunnaki than human. They have an extremely powerful, hypnotic stare, the origin of the phrase to "give someone the evil eye," and their hybrid DNA allows them to shapeshift when they consume human blood.^[45] In Children of the Matrix, he expanded his description of those in charge, adding that the Anunnaki also bred with another extraterrestrial race called the "Nordics," on account of their blond hair and blue eyes, to produce a race of human slave masters, the Aryans. The Aryans retain many reptilian traits, including cold-blooded attitudes, a desire for top-down control, and an obsession with ritual, lending them a tendency toward fascistic militarism, rationalism, and racism.^[46]

Lewis and Kahn write that the Nordic hypothesis means Icke is mirroring standard claims by the far right that the Aryan bloodline has ruled the Earth throughout history; for Icke, Sumerian Kings and Egyptian pharoahs have all been Aryan reptilian humanoids, as have 43 American presidents and the Queen Mother, who was "seriously reptilian." All have taken part in Satanic rituals, paedophilia, kidnapping of children, drug parties and murder, needed to satisfy their reptilian blood lust, which allows them to retain their temporary human form.^[47]

Dimensions

The reptilians not only come from another planet, but are also from another dimension, the lower level of the fourth dimension, the one nearest the physical world. Barkun argues that the introduction of different dimensions allows Icke to skip awkward questions about which part of the universe the reptilians come from and how they got here.^[48] Icke writes that the universe consists of an infinite number of frequencies or dimensions of life that share the same space, just as television and radio frequencies do. Some people can tune their consciousness to other wavelengths, which is what psychic power consists of, and it is from one of these other dimensions that the Anunnaki are controlling this world by possessing certain bloodlines—though just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they are controlled, in turn, by a fifth dimension.^[49] The lower level of the fourth dimension is what others call the "lower astral dimension." Icke argues that it is where demons live, the entities Satanists summon during their rituals. They are, in fact, summoning the reptilians.^[49]

Problem-reaction-solution

In Tales From The Time Loop (2003), Icke argues that most organized religions, especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are Illuminati creations designed to divide and conquer the human race through endless conflicts, as are racial, ethnic, and sexual divisions. He cites the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, and 9/11 as examples of events organized by the Global Elite.^[50] The incidents allow the Elite to respond in whatever way they intended to act in the first place, a concept Icke calls "order out of chaos," or "problem-reaction-solution," his version of the Hegelian dialectic. There are few, if any, public events that are not engineered, or at least used, by the Brotherhood in their bid to sow division and centralize power. He suggested that the 1996 Dunblane massacre, for example, was organized by the Elite to strengthen gun laws.^[27]

You want to introduce something you know the people won't like. This may be more power to the police, a further erosion of basic freedoms, even a war. You know that if you offer these policies openly the people will react against them. So you first create a PROBLEM, a rising crime rate, more violence, a terrorist bomb, a government collapse, or you get one of your Illuminati puppets like Saddam Hussein to go to war.

You make sure someone else is blamed for this problem and not you, the real people behind it all. So you create a "patsy," as they call them in America, a Timothy McVeigh or a Lee Harvey Oswald. You then use your media to tell people what they should think about your manufactured event and who they should blame for it. This brings us to stage two, the REACTION from the people—"This can't go on; what are THEY going to do about it?"

This allows THEM to then openly offer the SOLUTION to the problems they have created—new legislation which advances their agenda of centralisation of global power or the erosion of more basic freedoms.^[51]

Red Dresses

An image by Neil Hague from Icke's Infinite Love is the Only Answer (2005). Icke argues that the "Red Dress" reptilian hybrids have no consciousness.

Infinite Love is the Only Truth (2005) introduces the idea of "reptilian software." There are three kinds of people. The highest level of the Brotherhood are the "Red Dresses." These are "software people," elsewhere called "reptilian software," or "constructs of mind," without consciousness, without free will. Their human bodies are holographic veils.

A second group, the so-called "sheeple"—the vast majority of humanity—have what Icke calls "back seat consciousness." They are conscious, but they do whatever they are told and are the main source of energy for the Brotherhood. They include the "repeaters," the people in positions of influence who simply repeat what other people have told them. Doctors repeat what they are told in medical school and by drug companies, teachers repeat what they learned at teacher training college, and journalists are the greatest repeaters of all.

The third group, by far the smallest, are those who see through the illusion; they are people like Neo from the film, The Matrix. They are usually dubbed dangerous or mad. The "Red Dress" genetic lines keep obsessively interbreeding to make sure their bloodlines are not weakened by the second or third levels of consciousness, because consciousness can rewrite the software.^[52][3]

Reception

Place within the conspiracism genre

Michael Barkun writes that Icke has become the most fluent of the conspiracy writers, with a clarity rarely found in the genre.^[53] According to Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn, he has dipped into conspiracy theory subculture to produce an extraordinary, all-inclusive narrative, a consolidation of all conspiracy theories into one massive project with unlimited explanatory power.^[54]

His work cuts across political, religious, cultural, and socio-economic divisions, uniting the political left and right. Lewis and Kahn write that his lectures might see neo-Nazis and Christian Patriots sitting next to 60-something UFO buffs and New Age earth goddesses. They argue that it would be a mistake to relegate him to fringe status, because he represents a global counter-cultural trend.^[4] He has lectured in 25 countries, his books have been translated into eight languages, his website gets 600,000 hits a week, and his lecture tours attract thousands.^[3] The Biggest Secret has gone through six reprintings since 1999, and Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster is a top-five seller in South Africa.^[4]

Barkun writes that Icke's work falls into the category of "improvisational millennialism," an end-of-history scenario involving a final battle between good and evil. Because everything is connected in the conspiracist world view, every source can be mined for links. The greater the stigma attached to an idea, the more attractive it becomes, because the vehemence with which the mainstream rejects it becomes a measure of its validity. For Icke, the widespread ridiculing of the lizard theory is a guarantee that there's something to it, Barkun argues.^[55]

His work feeds into the fascination with what Lewis and Kahn call "exoculture," the post-Cold War, postmodern paranoia about extra-terrestrials. Following the Roswell UFO Incident in 1947, where a UFO supposedly crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, a new genre of "contactee" literature emerged, including stories about alien abductions, the aliens playing the role of the communists, or saviors come to help humankind survive a nuclear holocaust. Alien (1979), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Thing (1982), Enemy Mine (1985), They Live (1988), Communion (1989), and the television series, Star Trek from 1966 onwards, V (1983-1985), Dark Skies (1996-1997) and the X-files (1993-2002) continued the theme that we are watched or even controlled by aliens, and that human freedom may be an illusion. Other movies suggested a New World Order might be imminent: Fire in the Sky (1993), Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997), Contact (1997), Alien Resurrection (1997), and The Faculty (1998). From 1999, 15 million people listened every night on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM radio program to stories about alien abductees and crop circles. In the late 1990s, websites such Icke's and UFOU, Earth's first UFO University, sprang up to spread the conspiracies wider than had been possible before.^[4]

According to Barkun, Icke has actively tried to cultivate the far right. In 1996, he spoke to a conference in Reno, Nevada, alongside opponents of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act—which mandates background checks on people who buy guns in the U.S.—including Kirk Lyons, a white nationalist lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan.^[48] Barkun argues that the relationship between Icke, the militias, and the Christian Patriots is complex because of the New Age baggage Icke brings with him, and he stresses that Icke is not actually a member of any of these groups, but it is nevertheless true that Icke has absorbed the world view of the radical right virtually intact. "There is no fuller explication of its beliefs about ruling elites than Icke's," he writes.^[55] Icke regards Christian patriots as the only Americans who understand the truth about the New World Order, but he also told a Christian patriot group: "I don't know which I dislike more, the world controlled by the Brotherhood, or the one you want to replace it with."^[56]

Icke himself has problems coping with the sheer volume of conspiracy theories that fill the Web, and has stopped using the term "New World Order" because, he says, its overuse has rendered it meaningless. "About 90 percent of the people who come to me," he complained to the New Statesman in 2008, "are talking nonsense."^[57]

Anti-Semitism controversy

Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Holocaust

"Rothschild," a cartoon by C. Léandre, France, 1898. Jon Ronson writes that Jews have long been depicted as lizard-like creatures out to control the world.^[58]

Icke is highly critical of any ideology that serves to categorize and divide human beings, including racism, sexism, and religion. He is particularly critical of Judaism and Christianity. His criticism of the former, and his reliance on the Protocols, his questioning of the Holocaust, and his claims about Jewish involvement in the "Global Elite," have attracted the attention of Jewish groups, who fear that his talk of lizards wanting to rule the world is a smokescreen for the kind of classic anti-Semitic claims about Jews that have long been made by the far-right. The argument is that Icke may be anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.^[59] Journalist Louis Theroux cautions against accusing Icke of anti-Semitism, arguing that it might not only be unfair, but may also lend a patina of seriousness to Icke's ideas.^[60]

Icke introduced the idea in The Robot's Rebellion that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was first laid out in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, which supposedly presented a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. The Protocols was written around 1897, probably under the direction of the Russian secret police in Paris, and purports to be transcripts of 24 addresses given to a group of Jewish elders.^[61] It was exposed as a hoax in 1920 by The Times of London, which showed it was a work of plagiarism derived from two sources: The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) by a French satirist, Maurice Joly, which had nothing to do with Jews,^[62] and Biarritz (1868), an anti-Semitic novel by a German writer, Hermann Goedsche.^[63] Parts of it were serialized in a Russian newspaper in 1903, and it was published in English throughout the U.S. in 1920 by The Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford's weekly newspaper, becoming mixed up with conspiracy theories about anti-Christian Illuminati, international financiers, and the Rothschilds, a powerful Jewish dynasty involved in banking. After it was exposed as a hoax, Michael Barkun writes that it disappeared from mainstream discourse until interest in it was renewed by the American far right in the 1950s.^[63]

Front cover of the Protocols, 1920.

Icke's use of the Protocols in The Robots' Rebellion was greeted with dismay by the Green Party's executive, who argued that his book promoted "fascist and anti-Semitic" views. They had allowed Icke to address the party's annual conference in 1992, despite the controversy over his "son of God" interview, but in September 1994 they decided to deny him a platform.^[64] Icke wrote to The Guardian protesting their decision, denying the book was anti-Semitic, and arguing that racism, sexism and prejudice of any kind were both horrific and ridiculous, but in the same letter, he insisted that whoever wrote the Protocols "knew the game plan" for the 20th century.^[65] Barkun argues that Icke is trying to have it both ways—offended by the allegation of anti-Semitism, while "hinting at the dark activities of Jewish elites,"^[66] but Icke strongly denies that his reptiles represent Jews in any way, calling the claim "friggin' nonsense."^[67] "There is a tribe of people interbreeding," he told Jon Ronson in 2001, "which do not, do not, relate to any earth race ... This is not a Jewish plot. This is not a plot on the world by Jewish people.^[68]

During one of Icke's speaking tours to Canada in 1999, when there was debate about whether to allow him to speak at the University of Toronto, law professor Edward Morgan wrote to Robert Prichard, the university's president, arguing that Icke's views should have "no place in the Canadian marketplace of ideas." He described Icke's work as "precisely the type of vilifying material with which the Supreme Court was concerned in its decision regarding the Criminal Code of Canada ban. The publications praise classic anti-Semitic tracts, and are replete with references to a secret society carrying on a global conspiracy led by a manipulating Jewish clique."^[69] Icke explicitly blames such a clique for the first and second world wars, and the rise of Hitler, and indeed writes that Hitler's father was a Rothschild:

I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This Jewish/non-Jewish Elite used the First World War to secure the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish State of Israel in Palestine (for which, given the genetic history of most Jewish people, there is absolutely no justification on historical grounds or any other). They then dominated the Versailles Peace Conference and created the circumstances which made the Second World War inevitable. They financed Hitler to power in 1933 and made the funds available for his rearmament.^[70]

In chapter seven of And the Truth Shall Set You Free, Icke appears to flirt openly with Holocaust denial. Alick Bartholomew of Gateway, a Icke's former New Age publisher in Bath, told journalist Mark Honigsbaum in 1995 that an early draft of And the Truth Shall Set You Free contained material questioning the Holocaust, and that Icke was allegedly dropped because of it.^[71] The September 2004 edition still contains material that is arguably revisionist. Sam Taylor writes in The Observer that, having read that chapter, he does not believe Icke is anti-Semitic, but argues that he is "tapping into a seriously paranoid, aggressive strain in U.S. society."^[27] Icke insists that "[t]he way the Nazis treated many Jewish people is unspeakable," but while doing research for his book, he stumbled upon information that questioned the "the official holocaust [sic] line": "[T]here were the most terrible atrocities against Jewish people, as there were against others in Germany, the Soviet Union, and in Japanese-occupied countries. The whole war was a holocaust ... But I also concluded from the evidence I came across that the official line has a vast number of questions to answer and enormous tracts of documented information to explain before we can really know what happened ... Why is such information suppressed?"^[72]

Mark Honigsbaum writes that Combat 18, the British neo-Nazi group, publicized a 1995 talk Icke gave at Glastonbury in its internal magazine, Putsch. The talk was understood as anti-Semitic both by Combat 18 and by the Isle of Avalon Foundation, the New Age group that had promoted Icke's tour, which not only disowned him, but started handing out leaflets in protest at his presence.^[73] Perhaps unfairly projecting its own views onto Icke, Putsch wrote that Icke had talked about "the big conspiracy by a group of bankers, media moguls etc.—always being clever enough not to mention what all these had in common."^[74] Icke dismisses Combat 18's attentions, writing that it is a front for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Mossad. The role of the ADL, he says, is to brand as anti-Semitic anyone who gets close to the truth. "What better way to discredit an investigator than to have a 'far Right' group like Combat 18 to praise them?" he asks.^[75]

Protests in Canada

Protesters outside the University of Toronto during Icke's lecture there in October 1999

Icke was detained by immigration officials when he tried to enter Canada in 1999, after Ontario's Hate Crime Unit had his name added to an all-ports watch list because of complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress. The officers combed his luggage and reading material for evidence of anti-Semitic material. Jon Ronson writes: "Finally, after four hours of questioning, they concluded that when David Icke said lizards, lizards was what he meant."^[59]

While his lecture in a downtown Vancouver theatre attracted an audience of 1,200—attended, according to Icke, by the head of the Hate Crimes Unit himself—his books were removed from Indigo Books and Music stores, and several venues on his speaking tour were cancelled.^[76] Human rights lawyer Richard Warman, working at the time for the Canadian Green Party and later for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, took credit for much of this in an interview with Jon Ronson for the latter's documentary about the Canadian tour, David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews (2001), in which Ronson catalogues the cancelled radio interviews and book signings that Warman appears to have engineered.^[77] Warman told The Independent on Sunday in October 2000: "His writings may be the work of a madman, or of a genuine racist. Either way, they are very dangerous. There is an unpleasant anti-Semitic undercurrent in his work that must be brought to people's attention. If he's unstable, then so are his followers, who hang on to his every word. What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?"^[78]

In response, Icke's Children of the Matrix (2001) reportedly accused Warman of being an Illuminati "gatekeeper," and of working to stop the exposure of child abuse, which triggered a lawsuit from Warman.^[79] According to Maclean's magazine, Warman issued libel notices to Canadian public libraries that he would include them in his action if they did not remove Children of the Matrix from their shelves. The B.C. Libraries Association cited the notices on an Internet database of censorship attempts, which attracted another libel warning from Warman. To settle it, the Association agreed to remove quotes from Icke's book from its website.^[80] Canadian writer Mark Steyn defended Icke's right to free speech. "Icke isn't a racist," he wrote in January 2008, "he's a kook who believes the world is run by shape-shifting space lizards. Why should it be illegal to advance that theory? Has the Queen or any other shape-shifter filed a Human Rights Commission complaint alleging that Icke has exposed her to 'hatred or contempt'? No. I should imagine Her Majesty is laughing the socks off her sinister reptilian feet over it."^[81]

Works

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: David Icke

• Erich von Däniken
• Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa
• Zecharia Sitchin

Notes

References

Further reading