The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (57 page)

Heenan Blaikie

The Honorable James R. Jones

Manatt Jones Global Strategies

Dr. Chappell H. Lawson (Task Force Director)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Honourable John P. Manley (Canadian co-chair)

McCarthy Tetrault

Mr. David McD. Mann

Cox Hanson O’Reilly Matheson

Ms. Doris M. Meissner

Migration Policy Institute

The Honorable Thomas M.T. Niles

Institute for International Economics

The Honorable William F. Weld (U.S. co-chair)

Leeds Weld & Co.

Mr. Raul H. Yzaguirre

Arizona State University

NOSTRADAMUS

Michael de Nostradame was born in Saint-Rémy, France, in 1503, to a prosperous grain trader. The family had originally been Jewish but had converted to Christianity, which may explain Nostradame’s lifelong interest in Kabbala, the mystical branch of Judaism and inspiration for the
Bible Code
. After an early grounding in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, maths, science and astrology, Nostradame left home in 1522 to study medicine at Montpellier. For nearly two decades he practised as an apothecary, reputedly formulating a pill that warded off the plague, but in the late 1540s moved to Salon-de-Provenance where he began writing prophecies, usually late at night through meditation, with help from astrology, hallucinogens, and an “angelic spirit”. The prophecies, later collected in a work known as “The Centuries”, were deliberately couched in a cryptic style to prevent the religious authorities from understanding them. He maintained that people in a more enlightened, rational future age would interpret their true meaning.

Could the seer Nostradamus see into the future? His followers insist that Nostradamus foretold Napoleon and Hitler, both of which he labelled the anti-Christ. An anagram “Pau, Nay, Loron” almost spells Napoleon, who was indeed “an Emperor … born near Italy. Who shall cost the Empire dear.” Century 2 Quatrain 24, meanwhile, predicted that:

Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers

The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister

Into a cage of iron will the great one be drawn,

When the child of Germany observes nothing.

Give or take a consonant, Nostradamus has Hitler to a T.

Actually, Nostradamus prophesied that three anti-Christs would beguile the world. Post-
9/11
speculation that the French seer had predicted the destruction of the World Trade Center and identified
Osama bin Laden
as Lucifer number
trois
was rife. After all, in Century 5 Quatrain 55 Nostradamus wrote:

Out of the country of Greater Arabia

Shall be born a strong master of Mohammed …

He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban.

He will be the terror of mankind.

Never more horror.

And in Century 6, Quatrain 97:

At forty-five degrees the sky will burn,

Fire to approach the great new city:

In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up,

When one will want to demand proof of the Normans.

The “Normans” are a bit inconvenient, but references to fire and terror from the sky fit with the aerial attack, argue Nostradamus’s followers, and New York city is around 40° 5’ N latitude (relatively close to “forty-five degrees”).

As with the earlier prophecies, Nostradamus purportedly hid the name of the last antichrist in an anagram. This was “Mabus”, which can be arranged as “Usamb”, a single letter off Usama. Which is quite like Osama. To put the fear of the devil into everyone, students of Nostradamus point out that the “Mabus” prophecy rounds off with global destruction courtesy of a comet crashing into Earth. Funnily enough comet Elenin
is
expected to pass close to Earth in October 2011, and doomsayers suggest its gravitational effect will cause tidal waves, while its magnetic pull will topple the Earth off its axis.

The sceptics’ argument against Nostradamus is that his writings are so voluminous – there are about a thousand four-line quatrains, many of which contain more than one prophecy – and so ambiguous that some actual events are bound to appear to align with the predictions simply through chance. Misinterpretations and mistranslations are also frequent; “Hister” might resemble “Hitler” but was actually a place near the Danube; “great new city” is a massacring of Villeneuve, outside Paris.

Further Reading

Henry C. Roberts,
The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus
, 1947

BARACK OBAMA

Some people, you get the feeling, do not want Barack Obama as President of the USA.

Whispers that Obama was not a US citizen first began to circulate during his run-off with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. If Obama was not born on American soil he would be ineligible to be President under Article Two of the Constitution. When Obama beat Hillary for the Democratic ticket, the “birthers” – as those who doubt Obama’s credentials are called – started to roar. As many level-headed commentators noted, the closer Obama – a black – got to the White House the louder the din about his citizenship ineligibility became.

In an attempt to end the birthers’ speculations, Obama preelection released his short-form birth certificate, which clearly showed that he was born in Hawaii on 4 August 1961. Hawaii is a state of the union, and the short form is accepted by the US Department as conclusive proof of citizenship. Obama’s aides also pointed out that the child’s birth had been announced in Hawaiian newspapers the
Honolulu Advertiser
and the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
in August 1961.

Unpersuaded, some birthers even tried to file (unsuccessfully) lawsuits seeking to disqualify Obama from running for the presidency, and when he won anyway they tried to re-file the suits to stop him being sworn in. To no avail. Although the most stubborn birthers belonged to the baying dog wing of the American right, they had a mass, sympathetic audience; one poll taken after Obama became the forty-fourth President of the United States found that 47 per cent of Republican voters believed that Mr Obama was not born in the US. Another 22 per cent said they were unsure.

If anything, Obama’s release of his short-form certificate in 2008 led to more questions than answers. Leading birther Jerome Corsi – he of the book
The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality –
informed any TV outlet that would listen that the birth certificate was ‘a fake … it’s been shown to have marks from Photoshop.’ Meanwhile, health officials in Hawaii were bombarded with requests to view the original certificate. This could only be released to someone with a tangible interest, but for clarification the departmental head man released a statement:

I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawai’i State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawai’i State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawai’i and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008, over eight months ago.

Undaunted, the birthers covered hoardings around America with a poster asking: “WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?”

Property tycoon Donald Trump upped the ante by announcing to a TV interviewer that he had doubts over Mr Obama’s account of his birth, adding that Obama’s paternal grandmother had said she witnessed his birth in Kenya (no she hadn’t) and that false birth notices could have been placed by Obama’s grandparents to secure his citizenship (no they couldn’t: the notices were sent to the newspapers by the Hawaiian health department).

In April 2011 President Obama bowed to the inevitable, and released the full-length version of his birth certificate. This confirmed the details of the short certificate released in 2008 that Barack Hussein Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.

The reaction of the birthers
?
The Drudge Reportproclaimed the certificate a fake concocted with image-editing software. And a stubborn whole quarter of the US population still believed that he was a foreigner.

Shoosh. They don’t know the half of it. According to www.davidicke.com Obama ain’t only from abroad, he’s from another universe, being a
Reptilian Humanoid
from a planet far, far away. Mind you, Obama once did a very good job of catching a fly in a TV studio.

When the president calls his press conference to protest that he is not actually a lizard in human form, he may wish to take the opportunity to knock on the head all the other paranoid anti-Obama conspiracies. In no particular order of unimportance, these include the theory that Obama is the love child of Malcolm X, that Obama killed his gay lover, is a covert Muslim intent on turning the Land of the Free into a theocratic dictatorship (check out the pres’s speeches backwards), is an Illuminati, is the anti-Christ, is the puppet of the
New World Order
…

All the Obama conspiracies have one thing in common. They are ways of saying that they don’t want a black in the White House without actually saying it.

OCTOBER SURPRISE

In January 1979, the Shah of Iran was forced to flee the country after mass streets protests. His place as ruler was taken by the Islamic opposition leader Ayatollah Khomeini, returned from exile in Paris.

The Shah had been America’s Man, the Ayatollah was most certainly not. Neither were his followers who in the following November seized the US embassy in Tehran, took more than sixty staff hostage and announced that they would only be released when the Shah was returned for trial and the US unfroze $12 billion in Iranian assets held in Stateside banks.

The plight of the hostages exercised the American public – but not as much as it exercised American politicians. The year 1980 was presidential election year, and the hostage crisis went to the top of the political agenda. White House incumbent Jimmy Carter faced a strong challenge from Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, and his VP running mate, George Bush, former head of the CIA. Polls put Reagan and Carter neck and neck, and Bush went on record that he feared an “October Surprise” whereby the Democrats suddenly achieved the release of the hostages and got a poll boost.

Alas for the hapless Carter he did not secure the hostages release. The spectacle of Uncle Sam looking powerless against an uppity country difficult to find on a map did not play well with the American electorate, so Governor Reagan took the prize of the White House.

In his inauguration speech on January 20, 1981, Reagan promised a patriotic new birth for America: “Let us begin an era of national renewal. Can we solve the problems confronting us? Well, the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic ‘yes’.”

The Great Communicator was not joking. Minutes later, it was announced that the hostages had been freed.

Reagan was clearly a more efficient, ass-kicking Pres than Carter … or had there been skulduggery? The “October Surprise” conspiracy theory alleges that it was the Republicans –
contra
George Bush – and not the Democrats who had done a deal with Iran to win the presidential election. Confused? You won’t be.

The conspiracy theory states that in October 1980, Bush and Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey, held negotiations with Iranian officials in Paris and Madrid to
delay
the release of the fifty-two hostages still held (some had been previously released on health and humanitarian grounds). Thus Carter was unable to profit from their release, and had to skulk off to a peanut farm in Georgia, while former B-movie actor Reagan saddled up for Washington DC. What did the Iranians get out of the deal? The handsome reward of arms for their war against Iraq.