The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (30 page)

Another Disney short featuring Donald Duck,
The Spirit of ’43
, kept the money coming in. The Victory Tax Act was renewed in 1944 and was set to expire when the war was over. However, it remains in effect today, codified under the Internal Revenue Code at code section 3402 in subtitle C – Wage and Employment Tax. When WWII was over, Washington was simply unable to relinquish its new-found riches – the payroll tax the public had become accustomed to.

Tax, it may be said, is not a popular issue in the USA. On the morning of 18 February 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his single-engine Piper Dakota airplane at full speed into the IRS collections office in Austin, killing himself and one worker. Stack was on the libertarian right of American politics, but the Tax Protest movement spans the political spectrum: what binds it is the belief that income tax and the IRS are illegal. The words of the Tea Party Patriots will stand for the movement as a whole: “The Tea Party argues that even if the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution was properly ratified, which is debatable, the IRS still has no legal right to tax the income of American citizens.”

This is why Disney’s duck is a conspirator. He was part of a plot to persuade Americans to do something mandatory that should be something voluntary.

Actually, the two main claims of the tax protestors are dubious. Article 1 of the Constitution states unambiguously: “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.”

It was Article I that allowed Lincoln to raise the money to fight the South. Furthermore, the16th Amendment, signed into law in 1913, declares: “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

Amendments to the US Constitution require the approval of 75 per cent of the States before they can become law. Officially, 79 per cent ratified the Amendment. Tax protestors, however, claim the ratification was invalid because the unhappily named Secretary, Philander Knox, ignored errors in the relevant documents, meaning the returns from these states were invalidated.

The documents do have errors; however, in the 1986 ruling on
US
v.
Thomas
, the Court ruled that the “deviations” were trivial and so “the [Solicitor of the Dept of State] authorized [Knox] to declare the amendment adopted”.

Where the tax protestors have firmer ground under their feet is on the matter of subsequent revisions to the tax process. As one former IRS commissioner, Shirley Peterson, noted, “Eight decades of amendments … to (the) code have produced a virtually impenetrable maze … The rules are … mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing the law.”

Even the IRS cannot understand the IRS. Legitimate questions can also be raised about the IRS’s behaviour and competence. In
Unbridled Power
, Shelley L. Davis, the IRS’s first and last historian, laid bare a secretive organization which compiled lists of “enemies” and routinely destroyed records – a federal offence – which might prove incriminating or embarrassing. Before a Senate Finance Committee hearing, she testified that crucial IRS records, pertaining to government, states and individuals, “have been destroyed. Gone. Shredded. Tossed. They no longer exist … No other agency of our government could get away with this … Our fear of suffering a personal attack from the IRS generally keeps most of us in check … This ensures that it can never be held accountable for its actions. How can you prove any wrongdoing when the evidence is already destroyed?”

How indeed? Fortunately, a few whistle-blowers, such as Davis herself, have done the right thing and spoken out. Some of the IRS’s wrongdoing is staggering. At Nixon’s request, it launched investigations of his opponents for his purely political purposes and no other reason at all. One such “enemy” was the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which funded Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai massacre. In the words of Nixon’s aide John Dean, the idea was to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies”.

Further Reading

John A. Andrew III,
The Power to Destroy
, 2002

Shelley L. Davis,
Unbridled Power
, 1998

www.freedomclubusa.com/donald_duck_tax

ISRAELI BUBBLEGUM

In spring 1997, the Palestinian Authority reported on an Israeli plot fiendish in its machinations and consequences: to infiltrate into the West Bank and Gaza bubblegum laced with sex hormones to be sold at a discounted rate outside schools. The bubblegum aroused the sexual appetite of girls, but simultaneously sterilized them, suppressing Arab population growth. Worst of all, according to Palestinian Supply Minister Abdel Aziz Shaheen, it was capable of “completely destroying the genetic system of young boys”.

According to Palestinian tests, the strawberry-flavoured gum was spiked with progesterone, one of the two hormones of femaleness. That Israel, an essentially Western society, should try to undermine Islamic morals with sex pills played on deep Palestinian fears.

The
Washington Post
commissioned tests on allegedly contaminated bubblegum. These tests were done by Dan Gibson, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at Hebrew University and a member of the left-wing lobby group Peace Now (thus no Zionist). Using a mass spectrometer capable of detecting as little as a microgram of progesterone, he found no trace of the hormone in the gum.

In fairness, a story of adulterated food was not entirely implausible. Shady Israeli merchants, working in collaboration with Palestinian profiteers, had shipped canned baby food to Gaza which turned out to be soy formula past its sell by date. But weighing against the Palestinian bubblegum claim – aside from the
Washington Post
’s spectrometer test – was its timing: Israel and Palestine were in the middle of a propaganda war, with both sides making things up.

So, pop went the great Israeli bubblegum conspiracy. It blew up again in 2009 when Hamas charged Israeli intelligence operatives with distributing libido-increasing gum in the Gaza enclave. A Hamas police spokesman in the Gaza Strip, Islam Shahwan, announced: “The Israelis seek to destroy the Palestinians’ social infrastructure with these products and to hurt the young generation by distributing drugs and sex stimulants.”

Numerous teenage boys reportedly asked, “Where can I buy some of that gum?”

Further Reading

Barton Gellman, “Pop! Went the Tale of the Bubblegum Spiked with Sex Hormones”,
Washington Post
, 28 July 1997

JACK THE RIPPER

Between August and November 1888, the Whitechapel district in the East End of London was the scene of five – possibly six – slayings by a serial killer, dubbed by the press “Jack the Ripper”. The murdered were all female prostitutes, and all – except for Elizabeth Stride – were mutilated.

The first slaying, that of Polly Nicholls, took place on 31 August. Annie Chapman was murdered on 8 September. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were both killed on 30 September and Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November. These are the “canonical five” Ripper victims, although some “Ripperologists” consider that Martha Tabram, fatally stabbed on 6 August 1888, should also be included on the butcher’s slate.

The identity of the perpetrator was, and is, a mystery. It is widely assumed that he (maybe she) had some medical training, based on the scalpel-like weapon used and the mutilations of the corpses, which showed a knowledge of anatomy. More than one hundred individuals have at some stage been proposed as the Ripper, but the most sensational suspect remains Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence – the son of the Prince of Wales, third in line to the throne. Dr Thomas Stowell nominated Eddy as the Ripper in an article in
The Criminologist
in 1970, suggesting that Eddy’s syphilis drove him insane, thus homicidal. Clearly a homicidal duke with a habit of mutilation was not good PR for the Royal Family, so they quickly bundled Eddy off to a private mental hospital, from which he briefly escaped to murder Mary Kelly, before being re-incarcerated. According to Stowell, Eddy died in the asylum of syphilitic “softening of the brain”, and not of flu as the Palace claimed. The Duke of Clarence supposedly learned disembowelling techniques on hunting expeditions. The Prince Eddy accusation was substantially repeated by Frank Spiering in
Prince Jack
. Like Stowell, Spiering claims to have found the necessary proofs in the private papers of Sir William Withey Gull, the royal physician. Ripperologists, however, point out that royal court records show that Eddy was not in London on the dates of the murders.

As cause, rather than perpetrator, Prince Eddy figures in
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
by Stephen Knight, which posits a mass homicidal conspiracy instigated by the Royal Family to cover up Eddy’s secret marriage to a commoner named Alice Mary Crook. And not just any old commoner, but a Catholic one, thus violating the 1701 Act of Settlement. In brief, Knight has Prince Eddy slumming it down the East End accompanied by artist Walter Sickert, where he meets, beds and marries Alice Crook. When Grandmama – who happens to be Queen Victoria – hears about the marriage and its issue, a baby girl, she is not only scandalized but fearful that the news that a Catholic is in line to the throne will cause riots in the streets of Britain. To keep the kingdom safe, Victoria orders Lord Salisbury to deal with the matter; in turn he enlists help of Sir William Gull (yes, him again) and Salisbury/Gull have Eddy and Alice kidnapped from their love nest on Cleveland Street, with Eddy hospitalized under Gull’s care and Alice put in an asylum. Eddy dies from syphilis in 1892, and Alice dies insane in 1920. What about the Ripper murders? According to Knight, Eddy and Alice’s daughter was being nannied by one Mary Kelly when the love nest was raided. She then committed the child to the care of nuns, before returning to the East End and falling into drink and prostitution. At the behest of her friends, Mary Kelly began blackmailing the Royal Family – their royal money for her silence over the Eddy and Alice tryst. To make absolutely certain Mary and her chums – Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman and Liz Stride – kept their mouths shut, Gull and his coachman, John Netley, murdered them all, plus Catherine Eddowes, whom they mistook for Kelly.

As a physician, Gull certainly had the knowledge to perform the spectacular dissection of Mary Kelly, who was skinned, her abdomen emptied, her womb placed at her feet. One of her hands was placed in the evacuated abdominal cavity. Her intestines were placed over her left shoulder. Her heart was missing, as was the foetus she was known to be carrying.

Gull, who died fifteen months after Kelly, escaped detection, Knight believes, because the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Anderson, was a member of the conspiracy. What bound the principal conspirators, aside from their desire to carry out the royal will, was that they – Gull, Salisbury, Anderson – were all Freemasons. Knight discloses that the murders were actually re-enactments of the murder of Mason Hirem Abiff in Solomon’s Temple by Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. The real evidence of the Masonic connection comes in the placing of the victims in specific locations, most dramatically that of Mitre Square, a “Mitre” and “Square” both being Masonic tools.

Does Knight’s book live up to its subtitle,
The Final Solution
? Alas not. Knight’s principal source of information was Joseph Sickert, the artist’s grandson. Joseph Sickert later recanted some of his most sensational claims. William Gull was also six foot tall, much taller than the eyewitness accounts of the Ripper. He was also seventy years old at the time of the murders.

Additionally, there is nothing to suggest that Gull (or Anderson) were Masons. It is also difficult to believe that the Crown would have resorted to serial killing to protect itself when invocation of the Royal Marriages Act would have set aside a marriage between Eddy and Annie because it was illegal, Eddy being underage and not having obtained the Queen’s consent. Lastly, almost all experts agree that the Ripper was insane. And Dr Gull does not fit the profile.