The problem with conspiracy theories is so few have proved to be conspiracy facts. Photo / Getty Images
The problem with conspiracy theories is so few have proved to be conspiracy facts. Photo / Getty Images
Does an ancient race of reptilian psychos run the world? Paul Little goes inside the world of conspiracy theorists.
Mede in New Zealand
• An area of Northland's Waipoua forest has been sealed off by DoC because it contains megalithic structures that prove the existence of a pre-Maori civilisation, according to US-born archeo-astronomist Martin Doutre, who made the claims in his book Ancient Celtic New Zealand.
• Prime Minister Norman Kirk was assassinated by the Trilateralist Commission - a shadow world Government. Part of a much bigger global conspiracy you can read about in The Opal File on wakeupkiwi.com.
• The Rothschild cartel, a global banking organisation, attacked Christchurch with earthquake weaponry causing the Canterbury catastrophes, according to extensive exposition at contrail.com
• Mind control through TV broadcasts was trialled through a transmitter in Hawkes Bay, according to wakeupkiwi's Richard Montgomerie.
• Rapper Tupac Shakur was not killed in 1996 but escaped to New Zealand where he lives undercover. This was a hoax a hacker group managed to get on to the website of US broadcaster PBS.
• John Key wanted a new flag without the Union Jack because that would have concentrated more power in his hands by diminishing the authority of the Queen. See Due Authority: A Very Silent Coup at postmanproductions.org.
Confused? Feel like everything's falling part? Wondering why all this weird stuff keeps happening?
David Icke, the eminent conspiracy theorist - or truth seeker, as many who share his interests prefer to be called - is ready to help you make sense of it all, as part of his Worldwide Wakeup Tour, which plays at the Logan Campbell Centre in Auckland next Saturday.
He'll explain that despite the way things appear, our planet is run, as the New Statesman neatly summarised it, by the Archons - "an ancient race of reptilian psychopaths who have ... blinded humans to the real world". They are "creating a dystopian society" and an "inverted reality is being broadcast from Saturn via the Moon, which is hollow".
Which possibly raises more questions than it answers.
A conspiracy theory always requires, it should hardly need saying, some organisation. If, for instance, you believe in chemtrails, that's not a conspiracy theory. If you believe they are lines of chemicals laid in the sky for enigmatically evil reasons and there is an organised cover-up of the existence of chemtrails, that is a conspiracy theory.
Their impact can range from the relatively harmless - wondering if you'll bump into not-really-dead Elvis at the Ohope dairy - to downright dangerous, such as not vaccinating children because you believe it causes autism.
The problem with conspiracy theories is so few have proved to be conspiracy facts. But enough have to make the concept plausible. Nicky Hager wrote a bestselling book about some.
There was a Watergate cover-up. US authorities did leave 399 African-Americans with syphilis untreated without their knowledge to see what would happen.
But why should we pay good money to listen to Icke and his foreign conspiracy theories when we have perfectly good ones of our own (see right). We're not short of local truth seekers.
Richard Montgomerie runs wakeupkiwi.com, which contains details of numerous conspiracies, local and imported. He became interested in the area as a boy with an imagination fired by reading about dinosaurs and aliens.
He started his now labyrinthine site as a repository for documentaries and links he thought like-minded thinkers might be interested in.
"But because of the sheer volume of things that are transpiring it's turned into something it was never meant to be," says Montgomerie. "I get lost in it myself sometimes."
But he's no conspiracy theorist. That term, he says, was coined by the CIA to describe people who believed there was more to the Kennedy assassination than met the eye and "to make people sound like they were kooks before they opened their mouths".
Associate Professor Marc Wilson of Victoria University's School of Psychology notes that truth-seeking sounds active. Conspiracy theorist "could describe sitting in your mother's basement reading through dodgy websites for something nebulous like a conspiracy".
Astronaut Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. stands next to a U.S. flag planted on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Photo / AP
Wilson surveyed 6000 New Zealanders in 2008 and found people mentally put "conspiracy theorist" alongside "mental patient".
"This is due in no small part to the centrality of paranoia as part of the stereotype of the conspiracy theorist," says Wilson.
There's no such thing as a typical truth seeker, says Montgomerie. "The only common denominator is that they are people who go, 'Why should we just believe everything we are told?'."
But, adds Wilson, people are also more likely to endorse conspiracy theories if they feel anomie, hostility, paranoia, have less formal education, lower income, poorer health, distrust of authority and less happiness.
Radio host Vinny Eastwood is happy to be called a conspiracy theorist.
"Everything is the opposite of what you think it is to a large degree," says Eastwood. "If you think it's a conspiracy theory it's a fact. If you think it's a fact it's made-up nonsense."
Since 2010, Eastwood, who sounds delighted to have been born in conspiracy-significant 1984, has been the Auckland-based host of an eponymous radio show that live-streams here and in the US on American Freedom Radio for two hours twice a week.
Topics in the archive include: "Elites in Fear of White Dragon Society & Gold Standard" and "Psychopaths Infest Every Major Institution! Can We Get Them Out?"
He got into the area in 2004, when introduced to "the comedy of Bill Hicks. And the usage of cannabis. And to conspiracy theories - the first thing I watched was Fahrenheit 9/11", Michael Moore's Bush presidency documentary.
But it was a 300-hour community service sentence for a minor cannabis charge that destroyed his faith in government and authorities and set him on a new course. Eastwood doesn't think issues here are very different from those elsewhere, which is why his show goes down well in the US, where similar challenges are being faced.
"For example, right now there's a big fluoride thing going on where local district councils will have the ability to decide whether we have fluoride put in our water taken out of their hands and put in the hands of the DHBs, which are more or less in the pocket of the Ministry of Health, which are more or less in the pocket of the big pharmaceutical industry, which is more or less in the pocket of the phosphate fertiliser industry which makes the fluoride."
A scarily small number of younger people think the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by agents of a foreign power.
Wakeupkiwi's Montgomerie, however, believes we are special because our size makes us an ideal testing ground, for example, with Eftpos. "That's why we had it 20 years before it was rolled out in the States."
Jonathan Eisen, editor of Uncensored, which proclaims itself "the best-selling English-language 'alternative' news magazine in the Southern Hemisphere", says New Zealand is like most other countries because we are built the same. "I discovered a few years ago that New Zealand was a corporation much the same as the US is," says Eisen.
"If you go on the Securities and Exchange Commission website you can find the corporation is owned by another entity - Her Majesty the Queen in right of New Zealand."
The mainstream media, says Eisen, do their bit by self-censoring. When he worked with a flagship TV current affairs series and presented it with research showing the Aids virus was man-made, the journalist he was working with told him: "We can't touch that."
Eisen is 73 and has been seeking the truth from an early age. "When I was a boy my father was the first one to connect smoking and heart disease and was censored essentially by the Journal of the American Medical Association. And he found out after he published in the Canadian Medical Journal that the AMA journal was financed in large part by the American Tobacco Institute."
Wilson thinks we have a fairly boring conspiracy landscape. Forty per cent have endorsed the All Black poisoning [at the 1995 World Cup], 45 per cent say New Zealand is manipulated by Big Business, and a scarily small number - about 60 per cent - of younger people think the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by agents of a foreign power. He found right wingers think there is a political conspiracy to advantage Maori and left wingers think there is one to disadvantage them.
As for Icke, the likes of Montgomerie and Eisen are circumspect when it comes to endorsing his claims the Queen is a reptilian shape-shifter, among other things.
But, says Eisen, "rather than disparage him I celebrate that he can open up new avenues for discussion that are sometimes way outside the dominant paradigm and our comfort zone, my own included, but that doesn't mean I don't take him seriously".
"So much of his work, especially with regard to the power of the so-called elites, has borne fruit."
Writing in The Guardian, New York-based psychologist and science writer Rob Bretherton says Icke's view of things "as wild as it sounds, is kind of a hopeful message in that it is saying: 'Yes, there is a lot of stuff wrong with the world but we can put our finger on who's responsible and what's responsible for it and then we can do something about it'."
Frank (not his real name), a 33-year-old IT worker, whose conspiracy consciousness was raised by the documentary 9/11: In Plane Sight, worries that's not good enough. "There's a subset of people within the truth-seeking community that will grab hold of anything with both hands," says Frank.
"They play into the hands of the elite. When those wacky theories get momentum it makes it easy to discredit the rest."
Nevertheless, says Montgomerie, "the cat's out of the bag. A lot of people have put their lives on the line to expose the bigger picture. There is a big push for disclosure of everything. It's going to be messy for a while, but it's inevitable."
As well as the idea conspiracy theories offer hope things will be remedied, they also provide comfort by absolving us from feeling we should be in control. How can we be if we don't know what forces are secretly controlling that world?
But for some it's all too hard. Frank has stopped thinking about it so much. "If you follow the money far enough you'll come to the people pulling the strings. And if you think about that too much and the decisions those people make and the world they've created. I got to a point where I was starting to get depressed thinking about this.
