World-View Warfare

It’s a German neologism from the twentieth century: weltanschauungskrieg, or “world-view warfare”.  It’s what we English-speaking people refer to as “psychological warfare”, but the German is much more apt because it implies a “clash of civilizations” more than merely psyching someone out. 

And that’s what’s happening now.

I’ve been silent for a long time (again) due to many factors, among them preparations for the upcoming third – and final – volume of Sinister Forces.  This one is subtitled “The Manson Secret” and boasts a foreword by Paul Krassner.  This volume gives the show away, and ties together the various maddening threads of the previous two volumes.  Once you’ve read Volume Three, you can go back and re-read the first two volumes with a greater, and hopefully deeper, understanding.  It is a difficult theme, no question, because it calls into doubt our entire “world-view” concerning American history, the separation of Church and State (ha!), and the underlying campaign of psychological warfare that has been visited upon us by the very people we used to trust. 

Another factor has been the unexpected death of a close friend of mine, Judith McNally, to whom the third volume of Sinister Forces is dedicated.  I’d known Judith for more than 35 years, and her passing was a shock to all of us who knew her.  A former editor of Filmmakers Newsletter – who interviewed such luminaries as actor-director John Cassavetes, among others – she went on to greater glory as the personal assistant, researcher, and factotum for a famous American author, in which capacity she was notorious among the Manhattan publishing world.  She also briefly worked for Praeger Publishing, a company that has since been exposed as a CIA front; a revelation she considered amusing.  Considering that I worked for the Bendix Corporation (which trained troops in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and functioned as a CIA front for many years all over the world) as well as a certain Israeli banking firm – both companies which have been identified by the LaRouche people as tentacles of the world-wide British Intelligence-Jewish-Masonic-Satanic conspiracy, or something – we pretty much had the Illuminati nailed between the two of us.  Now I’ve got to control the world by myself.  It’s a dirty job, but … well, you know.

Another factor is the ongoing investigation of Colonia Dignidad.  I was privileged in the past few months to have been in contact with the family of Boris Weisfeiler, the American math professor who went missing in the Andes Mountains in 1985 after being taken to the Colony by Chilean security forces while he was on an innocent hike in the forest.  Eyewitness testimony reveals that he was tortured and killed at the Colony, reason unknown.  Due to a general physical similarity between Weisfeiler and myself, it is a possibility that he was initially mistaken for me: a possibility that now is being considered by the Chilean judge in charge of the case.  A cache of documents has been uncovered at the Colony, including dossiers on their “enemies”, but these documents are not being made public at this time … and may never be.  There may very well be evidence in those documents of American complicity in the torture and interrogation of Chilean political prisoners in the immediate aftermath of the Pinochet coup of September 11, 1973, hence the backpedaling by Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice on this issue. 

Yet another factor is the news.  How can I compete?  The National Security Agency has built a database of every phone call ever made in the United States in the last few years.  The man who oversaw that program is President Bush’s nominee for head of the CIA to replace Porter Goss.  There is an investigation underway of Porter Goss’s hires at CIA, since some of them seem to be implicated in all sorts of unsavory practices.  The Watergate Hotel has re-entered the picture, replete with poker-and-prostitute parties.  Hmmm … let me see.  Domestic spying, an unpopular war, a President who claims he is above the law of the land, and the Watergate Hotel.  Does anyone remember Richard Nixon? 

And now … The DaVinci Code. 

To my mind, a poorly-written cut-and-paste job that hobbled together all the best bits of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.  For those of us who have already been down that road, there was no suspense or surprise in Dan Brown’s book:  we knew the secret from the first page.  I confess I stopped reading after the first few chapters.  Truth, after all, is not only stranger than fiction it is a good deal more entertaining.  It’s the fallout from this movie that interests me, however.

There has been a rash of documentaries on the History Channel in the past week or so that detail some of the controversies surrounding the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, Opus Dei, and all the other heavy furniture of The DaVinci Code.   The programs were rather misleading; one had to watch all of them to understand how.  Interviews with Freemasons and Masonic historians would have us believe that there is no worldwide conspiracy of Masons;  fair enough.  They portray the Masonic Society as essentially a charitable organization with no hidden agenda.  Okay.  Then, they proudly discuss the history of the American Revolution and how the Freemasons were an essential element in the inspiration and success of that venture;  how Masonic lodges throughout the Colonies were a vital factor in bringing together the various factions of North and South in a concerted effort against the British;  how European Freemasons such as Lafayette and Pulaski were enlisted into the fight; etc. etc.   The dichotomy between the above two positions makes my head hurt.  It’s as if the Masons of today are saying, “Okay, we were a worldwide conspiracy then, but not now.” 

Actually, what is at stake here is something else, something far deeper which none of the documentaries dared to address.  The Freemasons who helped to found this nation included men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and even Paul Revere.  Their ideal – their dream – was to create a nation that owed no allegiance to kings or bishops but which was organized along scientific and rational lines (hence the separation of Church and State in our Constitution).  Ultimate authority in the new country would be reason and compromise – the rule of law and not of personalities.  They fought a revolution for these ideals and we have been fighting to preserve these ideals ever since. 

What we have now, however, is a spiritual and political crisis in this country.  We are being told that one religion takes precedence over all others and that Christianity – in particular a form of Evangelical Christianity – should determine the character and the laws of the land.  The current situation would make the Founding Fathers spin like grieving gyroscopes in their graves. 

What’s an American to do? 

Do we throw our support behind the Freemasonic ideal, or behind a questionable form of Christian conservatism?  Are these our only choices?

Are we truly witnessing a power struggle between the Christian Right and the secret society of Freemasonry … the latter which seems positively glorious by comparison? 

The central theme of The DaVinci Code is the purported marriage between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and the idea that they had a child and that this child and its offspring represent a bloodline that exists today.  The Catholic Church, and other Christian groups and Church historians, insist that there is no evidence that such a liaison ever occurred, and therefore ridicule and castigate the book and the film as blasphemous, at worst, or simply bad scholarship at best.  In all the interviews I’ve seen or read on this subject, no one asks the Church apologists what seems to me to be the ultimate question:

What evidence exists that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected a few days later?

You can’t have it both ways, ladies and gentlemen.  You can’t insist on hard evidence that Jesus and Mary had a child, but refuse to face the fact that there is no hard evidence for the core belief of your Church:  that Jesus rose from the dead.

It is said the Knights Templar denied the resurrection of Christ and that this may have happened as a result of their sojourn in the Muslim lands.  They either found evidence which proved this to their satisfaction during their habitation of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem … or they heard this from Islamic scholars … or they made contact with certain Gnostic and other heretical groups in the Middle East.  Whatever the reason, they were eventually destroyed by both Church and State and this alleged blasphemy was given as one count of the indictment.  The Freemasons are said to be descended, at least spiritually, from the Knights Templar and, indeed, there is a Templar degree in modern Freemasonry.

Did the Masonic insistence on a society of enlightened individuals who chose science over religion originate in the confrontation with the pagan impossibility of a dead and resurrected God? 

Is the conflict taking place in our own country today – and around the world, between Muslims and Jews, Muslims and Christians –  a reflection of this same conflict, a conflict between belief in the Resurrection and belief that it simply didn’t happen? 

Does the furor over The DaVinci Code mask a deeper, unspoken and unspeakable, conflict between oppposing spiritual forces at work in the world?  If so, must we take sides?

If so, which side to take?

Any … takers?