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David Vaughan Icke (pronounced "IKE" /aɪk/) (born April 29, 1952) is a British
writer and public speaker who has devoted himself since 1990 to researching "who
and what is really controlling the world." A former professional football player,
reporter, television sports presenter, and spokesman for the Green Party, he is the
author of 20 books explaining his views.
Icke argues that he has developed 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, a position that has been described as "New Age
conspiracism."
At the heart of Icke's theories is the view that the world is ruled by a secret
group called the "Global Elite" or "Illuminati," which he has linked to The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax. In 1999, he published The
Biggest Secret, in which he wrote that the Illuminati are a race of reptilian
humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are
reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and
Boxcar Willie.
His son, Gareth Icke, is a musician and beach soccer player who has represented
England in international beach soccer.
According to Political Research Associates, Icke's speaking engagements can draw a
substantial audience in Canada, with his organizers claiming as many as 1000 people
attending one in Vancouver. During an October 1999 speaking tour there, he received
a standing ovation from students after a four-hour speech at the University of
Toronto, while his books were removed from the shelves of Indigo Books across
Ontario after protests from the Canadian Jewish Congress.
 Early
life
Icke was born in Leicester to Beric Vaughan Icke (born 1907, Leicester) and Barbara
J. Icke (née Cooke) (married 1951, Leicester), and was raised on a council estate,
or public housing, according to the biography on his website. He left school to
play football for Coventry City and Hereford United in the English league, playing
as a goalkeeper until forced to retire at the age of 21 because of arthritis.
He found a job with a local newspaper in Leicester and became a reporter, moving on
to local sports presenter for BBC South's Programme South Today. He appeared on the
first episode of British television's first national breakfast show BBC Breakfast
Time presenting the sports news and featured on the show until 1985. He would also
become strong part of BBC Sport's presentation team, often as a stand-in host on
Grandstand and snooker programmes. He was part of the BBC team at the 1988 Olympic
Games, but he left the BBC later that year to become an activist for the Green
Party. He rose swiftly to the position of national media spokesperson. In 1990, he
wrote It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment
and his political philosophy.
Contact with the
spirit world
In his online autobiography, Icke writes that, in March 1990, while he was a
national spokesperson for the Green Party, he received a message from the spirit
world through a medium, (video) identified by The Guardian as Betty Shine, a medium
from Brighton. She told him he was a healer who had been chosen for his courage and
sent to heal the earth, and that he had been directed into football to learn
discipline. He was going to leave politics and would become famous, she said,
writing five books in three years, and one day there would be a great earthquake,
and the "sea will reclaim land," because human beings were abusing the earth.
When Icke told the Green Party leadership what he had experienced, he was banned
from speaking at public meetings on their behalf. In 1991, after a trip to Peru, he
wrote Truth Vibrations, an autobiographical work which summarized his life
experiences up to that point, with an emphasis on his recent spiritual encounters.
He began to wear only turquoise and on March 27, 1991, held a press conference to
announce: "I am a channel for the Christ spirit. The title was given to me very
recently by the Godhead."
In an interview on the Terry Wogan show that year, he announced that he was "the
son of God," and that Britain would be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.
His statements were met with laughter and ridicule from the studio audience,
derision in the press, and suggestions that he was mentally ill. Icke later said
that he had been misinterpreted by the media. According to Icke, he used the term
"the son of God" "... in the sense of being an aspect, as I understood it at the
time, of the Infinite consciousness that is everything. As I have written before,
we are like droplets of water in an ocean of infinite consciousness" (Tales From
The Time Loop 2003).
After being widely ridiculed, he disappeared from public view. He has written that,
for several years, he was unable to walk down the street without people pointing
and laughing, and that this experience helped him find the courage to develop his
controversial ideas, because he was no longer afraid of what people thought of him.
He 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."
Conspiracy
writings
Icke has published at least 20 books outlining his views, a mixture of New Age
philosophy and apocalyptic conspiracism. American political scientist Michael
Barkun, in a 2003 study of conspiracy theory subculture, writes that Icke is "the
most fluent of conspiracy authors, which gives his writings a clarity rarely found
in the genre." His talent for communicating with people led The Observer to call
him "the Greens' Tony Blair."
Icke's core ideas are outlined in four books written over seven years: 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). The
basic conspiracy theory is that the world is controlled by a network of secret
societies referred to as the "Brotherhood," at the apex of which stand the
"Illuminati" or "Global Elite." The goal of the Brotherhood is a world government,
a plan that Icke says was laid out in the anti-semitic hoax, The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, which Icke says are really the revealed plans of the Illuminati.
Icke, in common with many other conspiracy theorists, says the methods of these
conspirators include control of the world's economies and the use of mind-control
techniques.
The Global Elite controls the Brotherhood and the world using what Icke calls a
"pyramid of manipulation," consisting of sets of hierarchical structures involving
banking, business, the military, education, the media, religion, drug companies,
intelligence agencies, and organized crime. At the very top of the pyramid are what
Icke calls the "Prison Warders," who are not human. He writes that: "A pyramidal
structure of human beings has been created under the influence and design of the
extraterrestrial Prison Warders and their overall master, the Luciferic
Consciousness. They control the human clique at the top of the pyramid, which I
have dubbed the Global Elite."
Icke cites the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the September 11, 2001
attacks as examples of events financed and organized by the Global Elite. British
journalist Simon Jones writes that, according to Icke, "Ordinary people are being
massively duped into believing that the ordinary course of world events are the
consequence of known political forces and random, uncontrollable events. However,
the course of humanity is being manipulated at every level. These individuals
arrange for incidents to occur around the world, which then elicit a response from
the public ('something must be done'), and in turn allows those in power to do
whatever they had planned to do in the first place." Icke refers to this as
problem-reaction-solution, a variation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Hegelian
Dialectic".
Reptilian
humanoids
In 1999, Icke wrote and published The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the
World, in which he identified the extraterrestrial Prison Warders as reptilians
from the constellation Draco. They walk erect and appear to be human, living not
only on the planets they come from, but also in caverns and tunnels under the
earth. They have cross-bred with humans, which has created "hybrids" who are
"possessed" by the full-blooded reptilians. The reptiles' hybrid reptilian-human
DNA allows them to change from reptilian to human form if they consume human blood.
Icke has drawn parallels with the 1980s science-fiction series V, in which the
earth is taken over by reptiloid aliens disguised as humans.
According to Icke, the reptilian group includes many prominent people and
practically every world leader from Britain's late Queen Mother to George H.W.
Bush, Hillary Clinton, Harold Wilson, and Tony Blair. These people are either
themselves reptilian, or work for the reptiles as what Icke calls slave-like
victims of multiple personality disorder: "The Rothschilds, Rockefellers, the
British royal family, and the ruling political and economic families of the U.S.
and the rest of the world come from these SAME bloodlines. It is not because of
snobbery, it is to hold as best they can a genetic structure — the
reptilian-mammalian DNA combination which allows them to 'shape-shift'."
Icke has since published additional books on the same theme. His latest work sees
George W. Bush, also a reptilian, playing a key role in what Icke alleges is a 9/11
conspiracy. In Tales From The Time Loop and other works, Icke states that most
organized religions, especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are Illuminati
creations designed to divide and conquer the human race through endless conflicts.
In a similar vein, Icke believes racial and ethnic divisions are an illusion
promoted by the reptilians, and that racism fuels the Illuminati agenda.
Relationship
with the far right
Michael Barkun, Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School, Syracuse
University, writes that Icke has moved aggressively to increase the size of his
audience with the use of an elaborate website, by arranging speaking tours in the
UK, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and by selling books
and videotapes.
Barkun writes that Icke has "clearly sought to cultivate the extreme right," but
that the relationship is tense because of the New Age "baggage" that Icke brings
with him. Barkun cites the London Evening Standard, which wrote in 1995 that:
"uncanny parallels are emerging between Icke's thoughts ... and the writings of
senior figures in the armed militia movement in America." Barkun writes that Icke's
relationship with militias and Christian Patriots is complex. On the one hand, Icke
believes the Christian patriots to be the only Americans who understand the truth
about the New World Order, but on the other, he allegedly 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."
Allegations
of anti-Semitism
Icke's theories have been attacked as anti-Semitic because of his references to a
secret elite that rules the world, which includes prominent Jewish banking
families, who he says planned the Holocaust and financed Adolf Hitler, and his use
of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In ... And the Truth Shall Set You Free he
wrote:
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. 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."
In 1995, Alick Bartholomew of Gateway, at that time Icke's publisher, told the
London Evening Standard that an early draft of ... And the Truth Shall Set You Free
contained "revisionist Holocaust material."
Icke has cited white supremacist, neo-Nazi and other far-right publications in his
books. British journalist Simon Jones notes that the bibliography of ... And the
Truth Shall Set You Free lists The Spotlight, formerly published by the now-defunct
Liberty Lobby, and which Icke calls "excellent," and On Target, published by the
Australian League of Rights, which has organized speaking tours for Holocaust
denier David Irving. Jones writes: "It's tempting to dismiss David Icke as a
confused and ignorant man, manipulated by extremists in order to present their
philosophy in a socially acceptable format. But Icke clearly understands the
implications of his words."
Mark Honigsbaum has written about the apparent link between the more extreme New
Age proponents and the far-right armed militia movement in the U.S. Icke's books
contain multiple references to the "Illuminati," which Icke and the militia
movement believe constitutes the secret government they call the "New World Order".
In 1995, Honigsbaum wrote in the London Evening Standard that Combat 18, the
British neo-Nazi group, was publicizing Icke's speaking tour of the UK in its
internal magazine, Putsch. The magazine wrote that Icke spoke about "'the sheep'
and how the 'illuminati', uses them for its own ends". The story continued: " began
to talk 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."
Icke believes that Combat 18 is a front for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which
in turn is an "Illuminati front." The role of the ADL, he says, is to "brand as
anti-Semitic" anyone who gets close to "the truth." In ... And the Truth Shall Set
You Free, he wrote: "In Britain, I am told by an extremely reliable source very
close to the intelligence organisations that the "far-right" group, Combat 18, is a
front for the sinister Anti-Defamation League, the United States arm of the
Israeli/Rothschild secret service, Mossad. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has
been operating in Britain and Europe since at least 1991 and its role is to brand
as anti-Semitic anyone who is getting close to the truth of what is going on. What
better way to discredit an investigator than to have a "far-Right" group like
Combat 18 to praise them?"
Icke has strongly denied that his reptiles represent Jews, calling it "friggin'
nonsense." "I am not an anti-Semite!", he told The Guardian, "I have a great
respect for the Jewish people." He maintains that the reptilians are not human, and
therefore not Jewish, but are "extra-dimensional entities" that enter and control
human minds. "This is not a Jewish plot. This is not a plot on the world by Jewish
people," he told Jon Ronson.
During a question-and-answer session after one of his lectures, Icke told Jones: "I
believe that people have a right to believe, to read, and have access to all
information, so that they can then make up their own minds what to think. If
something is a nonsense, and if something doesn't stand up, it will be shown to be
a nonsense in the spotlight of the public arena."
British journalist Louis Theroux, reviewing Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with
Extremists, cautioned against accusing Icke of anti-Semitism: "Icke's 'theory' is
basically The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a new cast and a few script
changes. Not surprisingly, Icke has come under suspicion of anti-Semitism.... 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."
Protests in
Canada
In 1999, Icke's books were removed from Indigo stores across Ontario, and several
venues on his speaking tour were cancelled, after protests from the Canadian Jewish
Congress. The University of Toronto allowed his planned speech there to go ahead,
despite the presence of 70 protesters, including the Green Party of Ontario,
outside the Hart House Theatre. Icke received a standing ovation from the audience
after speaking for five hours.
University of Toronto law professor Edward Morgan wrote on September 30, 1999 to
the university's president, Robert Pritchard: "Having been involved in a number of
the more renowned cases in Canada dealing with hate literature, it is my view that
this is precisely the type of vilifying material with which the Supreme Court was
concerned in its decision regarding the Criminal Code 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. The material
which I have reviewed finds no place in the Canadian marketplace of ideas."
Sumari Communications, which hosted Icke's tour, denied the allegations: "I dispute
the anti-Semite issue because the Jewish community has chosen to isolate
anti-Semitic quotes in David's books which he himself uses quotes from Jewish
authors to prove his theories. No one is forcing these people to be here, but what
is important is that they have the choice. It is called freedom and David doesn't
even mention the Jews in his talks."
Icke himself addressed the concerns during his speech: "Is this a Jewish plot? No,
No, No. Is it a plot? Yes, Yes, Yes. We are being manipulated, and I do not care if
you are Jewish, Chinese, Catholic, etc. We are all being manipulated. And those
people that are offended by what I have to say, they should choose not to be
offended."
Current
activities
Icke lives in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where he makes occasional public
appearances.
In January 2003, he travelled to Brazil, and later talked about having used
Ayahuasca: " is a plant – a rain forest plant – which they turn in to what they
call a turn and Shaman in South America have been using it for centuries at least
to take people into other realms of reality.... I took it twice and it was an
experience – particularly on the 2nd night – that completely transformed my view of
life. What it did was take my intellectual understanding that the world is an
illusion into the realms of knowing it’s an illusion and there’s a difference
between intellectually understanding it’s an illusion and this level of knowing it
because you’ve experienced it. I got to the age of 50 without taking a single magic
mushroom and I never even had one smoke of pot or anything."
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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David
Icke - Generator - Biography
