The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  Irving’s version of Hitler and the Holocaust was challenged by author Deborah Lipstadt in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, which accused Irving of “distorting evidence” and anti-Semitism. Irving sued Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin, for libel. Lipstadt and Penguin hired Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, who read Irving’s works and found that Irving had knowingly used suspect documentation, including the infamous Leuchter Report. (A builder of execution equipment, Fred Leuchter found no significant deposits of cyanide at Auschwitz; however, this was in 1988, nearly 40 years after the camp was used, and Leuchter had no forensic training.) Irving’s books contained such phrases as: “Jews are among the scum of humanity.” The judge found that Irving “is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semite and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism”.

  As far as the participation of Hitler in the Final Solution is concerned, the Fuhrer may have been preoccupied by his disastrous generalship yet he clearly knew the scope of the Final Solution if not the particulars of every train of victims sent to Sobibor. Hitler set the agenda for the Holocaust. One excerpt from one speech in 1939 will serve: “If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Other senior Third Reich figures are incriminated by the 1942 Wannsee Protocol, which minutes a meeting held outside Berlin by 15 Nazi officials on how to best expedite the Final Solution.

  The Holocaust happened. Most reputable historians put the lower limit of Jews, gypsies, Romanies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled and the mentally ill exterminated by the Nazis at five million. The upper limit is as high as 11 million.

  In 1979 the Institute for Historical Review offered a $50,000 reward to anybody who “could prove that the Nazis operated gas chambers to terminate Jews”. Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor, forwarded to the IHR affidavits concerning the fate of his family in Auschwitz plus other documentation, and duly claimed his money. When the IHR failed to give him the $50,000 he sued. The court awarded him the $50,000 plus an extra $40,000 for distress. In other words, the leading outfit for Holocaust denial, giving it its best shot, could not convince a neutral jury of its case.

  The Holocaust was a hoax invented by Jews to gain money and justify the creation of Israel: ALERT LEVEL 0

  Further Reading

  Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, 1992

  Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 1993

  Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman and Arthur Hertzberg, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, 2002

  http://www.ihr.org/main/about.shtml

  ILLUMINATI

  A diabolical and Satanic . . . scheme has been designed and is being prepared for global implementation by anti-Christ agents of an organization called “The Illuminati”.

  An “Alert” on the Christian Science

  University website, 2000

  In the pyramid of covert power, few rank higher than the Illuminati. Through infiltrated organizations such as the Freemasons, the Bohemian Grove, the Skull & Bones, the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, to name but a handful, the Illuminati are poised to usher in the New World Order.

  They’ve come a long way since their foundation in 1776 as a philosophical society in a hick Bavarian town by one Professor Adam Weishaupt. Like many similar groups that sprang up during the 18th-century Enlightenment, the Illuminati, or “Order of Perfectabilists”, flirted with counter-establishment ideas, including atheism and anti-monarchism. Again, it was not atypical that they adopted esoteric rituals and signs, partly for reasons of security, partly for the glamour of exclusivity. And they shared the same fate as many compatriot groups: they attracted the attention of the autocratic ruler of Bavaria, the Elector Prince Karl-Theodor, who in 1784 banned all secret societies in an attempt to halt the growing tide of Jacobinism (republicanism). In the following year the Illuminati were disbanded and Weishaupt quit Bavaria in a hurry.

  Rumours that the Illuminati lived on were rife, however, and were boosted by the arrest of the occultist “Count” Cagliostro in Rome in 1789. Under interrogation by the Inquisition, Cagliostro loquaciously confessed the secrets of the Masons and the Knights Templar and, warming to his theme, declared that the Illuminati were plotting to oust both the Holy See and the Bourbons. At overthrowing the ancien régime of France the Illuminati were, according to the Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) by Abbe Augustin Barruel, 1797, successful; the French Revolution was an experiment in “Illuminism”. Within a decade, the Illumanti had become premier bogeymen in the fetid, fevered minds of conservative Europe: Professor John Robison fingered them in his Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies (1798), while Johann August Starck, in his Triumph der Philosophie in Achtzenten Jahrhundert (1803), considered the Illuminati the poisonous bloom of a conspiracy that could trace its roots to the Ancient Greeks.

  That there was no evidence for the continued existence of the Illuminati bothered none of these writers, just as it failed to trouble the British writer Nesta H. Webster, whose Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924) detected the hands of the Illuminati in the recent Russian Revolution. Webster’s book enjoyed some influence in her home country, but was really taken to be conspiracy gospel by the US far right. Today, the Illuminati are Public Enemy Number One for the John Birch Society, the militias and the Christian fundamentalists, who claim to have detected the Illuminati’s real goal: a single, authoritarian, Satanic global government – the New World Order.

  There is a secret sign of America’s special role for the Illuminati: the motto Novus Ordo Seclorum (to be translated as “New World Order”) on the US dollar bill. Alas, a better translation is “New Order of the Ages” or even just “fresh new start”. This is typical of the evidence posited for the Illuminati’s existence beyond the 18th century by Robison, Starck, Webster and modern epigones such as William Cooper, which is without exception either specious or self-referential.

  There is, then, only a difference of degree between “exposes” of the Illuminati and pure fictional potboilers such as Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and the Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson Illuminatus! Trilogy. In both genres, the Illuminati are useful stock bad guys.

  Secret society the Illuminati is intent on global control: ALERT LEVEL 2

  Further Reading

  William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse, 1991

  Arkon Daraul, A History of Secret Societies, 1961

  John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, 1798

  http://www.conspiracyarchive.com

  DOCUMENT: THE FOUNDATION OF THE ILLUMINATI, FROM CHAPTER 2 OF JOHN ROBISON’S PROOF OF A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ALL THE RELIGIONS AND GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE

  [. . .] Of the zealous members of the Lodge Theodore [in Munich, Bavaria] the most conspicuous was Dr Adam Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law in the university of Ingolstadt. This person had been educated among the Jesuits; but the abolition of their order made him change his views, and from being their pupil, he became their most bitter enemy. He had acquired a high reputation in his profession, and was attended not only by those intended for the practice in the law-courts, but also by the young gentlemen at large, in their course of general education; and he brought numbers from the neighbouring states to this university, and gave a ton to the studies of the place. He embraced with great keenness this opportunity of spreading the favorite doctrines of the Lodge, and his auditory became the seminary of Cosmopolitism. The engaging picture of the possible felicity of a society where every office is held by a man of talents and virtue, and where every talent is set in a place fitted f
or its exertion, forcibly catches the generous and unsuspecting minds of youth, and in a Roman Catholic state, far advanced in the habits of gross superstition (a character given to Bavaria by its neighbours) and abounding in monks and idle dignitaries, the opportunities must be frequent for observing the inconsiderate dominion of the clergy, and the abject and indolent submission of the laity. Accordingly Professor Weishaupt says, in his Apology for Illuminatism, that Deism, Infidelity, and Atheism are more prevalent in Bavaria than in any country he was acquainted with. Discourses, therefore, in which the absurdity and horrors of superstition and spiritual tyranny were strongly painted, could not fail of making a deep impression. And during this state of the minds of the auditory the transition to general infidelity and irreligion is so easy, and so inviting to sanguine youth, prompted perhaps by a latent wish that the restraints which religion imposes on the expectants of a future state might be found, on enquiry, to be nothing but groundless terrors, that I imagine it requires the most anxious care of the public teacher to keep the minds of his audience impressed with the reality and importance of the great truths of religion, while he frees them from the shackles of blind and absurd superstition. I fear that this celebrated instructor had none of this anxiety, but was satisfied with his great success in the last part of this task, the emancipation of his young hearers from the terrors of superstition. I suppose also that this was the more agreeable to him, as it procured him the triumph over the Jesuits, with whom he had long struggled for the direction of the university.

  This was in 1777. Weishaupt had long been scheming the establishment of an Association or Order which, in time, should govern the world. In his first fervour and high expectations, he hinted to several ex-Jesuits the probability of their recovering, under a new name, the influence which they formerly possessed, and of being again of great service to society, by directing the education of youth of distinction, now emancipated from all civil and religious prejudices. He prevailed on some to join him, but they all retracted but two. After this disappointment Weishaupt became the implacable enemy of the Jesuits; and his sanguine temper made him frequently lay himself open to their piercing eye, and drew on him their keenest resentment, and at last made him the victim of their enmity.

  The Lodge Theodore was the place where the above-mentioned doctrines were most zealously propagated. [. . . It] became remarkable for the very bold sentiments in politics and religion which were frequently uttered in their harangues; and its members were noted for their zeal in making proselytes. Many bitter pasquinades, satires, and other offensive pamphlets were in secret circulation, and even larger works of very dangerous tendency, and several of them were traced to that Lodge. The Elector often expressed his disapprobation of such proceedings, and sent them kind messages, desiring them to be careful not to disturb the peace of the country, and particularly to recollect the solemn declaration made to every entrant into the Fraternity of Free Masons, “That no subject of religion or politics shall ever be touched on in the Lodge”; a declaration which alone could have procured his permission of any secret assembly whatever, and on the sincerity and honour of which he had reckoned when he gave his sanction to their establishment. But repeated accounts of the same kind increased the alarm, and the Elector ordered a judicial enquiry into the proceedings of the Lodge Theodore.

  It was then discovered that this and several associated Lodges were the nursery or preparation-school for another Order of Masons, who called themselves the ILLUMINATED, and that the express aim of this Order was to abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government. But the result of the enquiry was very imperfect and unsatisfactory. No Illuminati were to be found. They were unknown in the Lodge. Some of the members occasionally heard of certain candidates for illumination called MINERVALS, who were sometimes seen among them. But whether these had been admitted, or who received them, was known only to themselves. Some of these were examined in private by the Elector himself. They said that they were bound by honour to secrecy: But they assured the Elector, on their honour, that the aim of the Order was in the highest degree praiseworthy, and useful both to church and state: But this could not allay the anxiety of the profane public; and it was repeatedly stated to the Elector, that members of the Lodge Theodore had unguardedly spoken of this Order as one that in time must rule the world. He therefore issued an order forbidding, during his pleasure, all secret assemblies, and shutting up the Mason Lodges. It was not meant to be rigorously enforced, but was intended as a trial of the deference of these Associations for civil authority. The Lodge Theodore distinguished itself by pointed opposition, continuing its meetings; and the members, out of doors, openly reprobated the prohibition as an absurd and unjustifiable tyranny.

  In the beginning of 1783, four professors of the Marianen Academy, founded by the widow of the late Elector, viz. Utschneider, Cossandey, Renner, and Grunberger, with two others, were summoned before the Court of Enquiry, and questioned, on their allegiance, respecting the Order of the Illuminati. They acknowledged that they belonged to it, and when more closely examined, they related several circumstances of its constitution and principles. Their declarations were immediately published, and were very unfavourable. The Order was said to abjure Christianity, and to refuse admission into the higher degrees to all who adhered to any of the three confessions. Sensual pleasures were restored to the rank they held in the Epicurean philosophy. Self-murder was justified on Stoical principles. In the Lodges death was declared an eternal sleep; patriotism and loyalty were called narrow-minded prejudices, and incompatible with universal benevolence; continual declamations were made on liberty and equality as the unalienable rights of man. The baneful influence of accumulated property was declared an insurmountable obstacle to the happiness of any nation whose chief laws were framed for its protection and increase. Nothing was so frequently discoursed of as the propriety of employing, for a good purpose, the means which the wicked employed for evil purposes; and it was taught, that the preponderancy of good in the ultimate result consecrated every means employed; and that wisdom and virtue consisted in properly determining this balance. [. . .] They concluded by saying that the method of education made them all spies on each other and on all around them. But all this was denied by the Illuminati. Some of them were said to be absolutely false; and the rest were said to be mistakes. The apostate professors had acknowledged their ignorance of many things. Two of them were only Minervals, another was an Illuminatus of the lowest class, and the fourth was but one step farther advanced. Pamphlets appeared on both sides, with very little effect. The Elector called before him one of the superiors, a young nobleman, who denied these injurious charges, and said that they were ready to lay before his Highness their whole archives and all constitutional papers.

  Notwithstanding all this, the government had received such an impression of the dangerous tendency of the Order, that the Elector issued another edict, forbidding all hidden assemblies; and a third, expressly abolishing the Order of Illuminati. It was followed by a search after their papers. The Lodge Theodore was immediately searched, but none were to be found. They said now that they had burnt them all, as of no use, since that Order was at an end.

  It was now discovered, that Weishaupt was the head and founder of the Order. He was deprived of his Professor’s chair, and banished from the Bavarian States; but with a pension of 800 florins, which he refused. He went to Regensburg, on the confines of Switzerland. Two Italians, the Marquis Constanza and Marquis Savioli, were also banished, with equal pensions (about L. 40) which they accepted. One Zwack, a counsellor, holding some law-office, was also banished. Others were imprisoned for some time. Weishaupt went afterwards into the service of the D. of Saxe Gotha, a person of a romantic turn of mind, and whom we shall again meet with. Zwack went into the service of the Pr. de Salms, who soon after had so great a hand in the disturbances in Holland.

  By destroying the papers, all opportunity was lost for authenticating the innocence and usefulness of the Order. After muc
h altercation and paper war, Weishaupt, now safe in Regensburg, published an account of the Order, namely, the account which was given to every Novice in a discourse read at his reception. To this were added, the statutes and the rules proceeding, as far as the degree of Illuminatus Minor, inclusive. This account he affirmed to be conformant to the real practice of the Order. But this publication did by no means satisfy the public mind. It differed exceedingly from the accounts given by the four professors. It made no mention of the higher degrees, which had been most blamed by them. Besides, it was alleged, that it was all a fiction, written in order to lull the suspicions which had been raised (and this was found to be the case, except in respect of the very lowest degree). The real constitution was brought to light by degrees, and shall be laid before the reader, in the order in which it was gradually discovered, that we may be the better judge of things not fully known by the conduct of the leaders during the detection. The first account given by Weishaupt is correct, as far as I shall make use of it, and shows clearly the methods that were taken to recommend the Order to strangers.

  The Order of ILLUMINATI appears as an accessory to Free Masonry. It is in the Lodges of Free Masons that the Minervals are found, and there they are prepared for Illumination. They must have previously obtained the three English degrees. The founder says more. He says that his doctrines are the only true Free Masonry. He was the chief promoter of the Eclectic System. This he urged as the best method for getting information of all the explanations which have been given of the Masonic Mysteries. He was also a Strict Observant, and an adept Rosycrucian. The result of all his knowledge is worthy of particular remark, and shall therefore be given at large.