More in the corporate destruction of British democracy. As Open Britain and other pro-democracy groups have made it abundantly clear, British democracy is under severe attack from dark money and the parties taking their cues and orders from the mega-rich corporate donors, rather than Mr and Mrs severely normal British public. They’re following Reagan’s America in this. Sometime in the 1980s the American Supreme Court or some other judicial body ruled that corporate donations constitute free speeches. Thereafter, the parties have eagerly gone after the rich donors giving to their parties and sponsoring individual politicians.
It’s undermined American politics to the point that a Harvard report declared that the Land of the Free was no longer a proper democracy. It was a quasi-oligarchy, because of the way the wishes and needs of ordinary American voters were ignored by the parties in favour of the big donors. And the voting American public know it. They found that while Americans overwhelmingly vote at elections, they very much are aware that it’s all ‘election promises’ as Mike Yarwood called political lies, and that the moment their man or woman gets in, they’d all be dumped in favour of what the money men and women want.
And even Republicans are disgusted with it. Over a decade ago a Republican businessman in California campaigned for politicians to be forced to wear sponsorship badges on their clothing like sportsmen and women.
Well good. Then we’d know who owned them. Perhaps it should be like the rings Roman slaves have to wear around their necks, giving the slave’s owner and directions for returning them. Among the slaves that worked in the fields and waited on their masters and mistresses, there were also public slaves serving as navvies, but also performing clerical work on cities’ public finances. Our politicos were fit in with the latter. Wouldn’t that be great! Starmer and Badenoch standing there at question times, thrall rings for the energy, water companies, private healthcare companies and big oil glinting in the lights.
Of course, where America leads, Britain has to follow. Tony Blair took it up with a vengeance, and the results were that British taxpayers were paying over the odds for much needed public works, as well as the construction of supermarkets that communities up and down the country didn’t need, and which would ruin the small business people at the heart of them.
Now Kemical, sorry, Kemi Badenoch has gone further and set up a ‘top table’ giving the biggest Tory donors increased access and influence with the party.
Tory Party PLC meeting its shareholders, perhaps.
Ordinary Tories don’t want it. From the ’90s onwards the Tory party, once easily the largest British party with something like a quarter of a million members, was shedding their grassroots membership. They resented the way they were being ignored in favour of the corporate donors.
Tump and Farage owe some of their success in having persuaded the American and British electorates that they stand outside this network of soft corruption. In fact, they epitomise it. Trump is corrupt, corporate America personified. One American official tasked with creating democracy in Afghanistan has written a book describing how she came back from that thankless, impossible task to find all the monumental corruption she’d had to fight there back in America in Trump’s White House.
Farage is Trump’s lickspittle and British counterpart. Whatever he says, Reform isn’t a political party. It’s a private company, though he’s no longer majority shareholder. As a plethora of internet commenters, including our own Mike at Vox Political, his bold plans for the economy actually won’t benefit it and the British public in the slightest. But it will benefit his corporate paymasters. So he’s another candidate for wearing sponsorship logos and a thrall ring.
More power to cross party groups like the All-Party Groups campaigning for PR and electoral reform, and down with the corrupt servants of corporate power.
The controversy over the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy continued this week with the publication of a book by activist and former comedian Lenny Henry calling for reparations for the slave trade. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that slavery was practised by nations and cultures right across the world, not just White Europeans and Americans. It existed in Africa from the period of the New Kingdom in Egypt and the expansion of the Bantus peoples across the continent 3000 years ago. It was African chiefs and states that captured the slaves and sold them to the European slave ships and merchants. The White slave merchants themselves were confined to ghettos in the cities of strong African kings and chiefs, who were determined to maintain their monopoly on this highly lucrative trade. Many of the slave trading kingdoms refused to give up slaving after it was outlawed by the British Empire and the British navy began patrolling the seas to enforce the ban. In 1827 one of these states attacked a British trading post in West Africa to force Britain to resume purchasing slaves. in the 1850s Britain went to war with Dahomey in order to end its participation in the trade. Britain also paid compensation to some African nations that had dealt in slaves as part of a deal to get to stop.
It wasn’t just African states and their rulers that saw nothing wrong in selling slaves. The British were also concerned by the ‘liberated Africans’ – Africans freed from slave ships by the royal navy, who kidnapped other Africans from their settlement in Sierra Leone to take them to sell further south outside the colony. And it Liberia, a colony set up for American freed slaves, appears to have maintained this attitude that Africans could continue to be enslaved and sold as late as the 1930s.
This short video from the @officialfeazypodcast briefly telling the story of a secret deal Liberia made with the Spanish in 1932, in which Liberians were sold into forced labour to work on Spanish plantations in Equatorial Guinea. People were round up, taken from their villages and marched to the coast for shipment across the ocean. Many never returned. When this came to light, it caused a massive scandal. It revealed massive corruption at the highest levels, going right up to the president himself. People were shocked that a nation founded for freed slaves should be selling its own people, and Liberia’s reputation was seriously tarnished. The video concludes that this is one of the hidden events in African history.
I’ve read before now that the Afro-American descendants of the freed slaves form an elite governing class in Liberia which traditional has looked down up and oppressed the country’s indigenous people. Also, it wasn’t just the Spanish who were using Black forced labour in this decade. It was introduced by the British in Malawi as part of an initiative to develop the country and make it pay for itself. Nevertheless, it caused indigenous Malawians to question the British claim that they had conquered the country in order to save its people from enslavement by the Arabs and surrounding tribes.
Slavery has still not been eradicated from Africa, and there are several serious academic books dealing with the issue. On the issue of reparations, it has been said that they should really be paid by Africans to the descendants of the people they sold in the Americas and Caribbean. This video from an African woman from @THEUNITEDFRONT777 states this very clearly.
Whatever one feels about reparations and historical slavery, it is monstrous that it still exists in the 21st century.
Here’s a short video from the Washington Examiner discussing the radical gay and trans group, Armed Queers, who are now being investigated by the FBI for possible connections to Tyler Robinson and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I think the Armed Queers of SLC – which stands for ‘Salt Lake City’ may be the same group I discussed in a previous article, where I called them ‘Queer Resistance’ following an image on the EDI Jester’s video about them. Armed Queers are a radical Marxist group combining the militant defence of gays and trans people with revolutionary politics. They practice on gun ranges, and have been to Cuba to study how socialism works there. They’re also part of a network calling for the country to be taken off the US black list. They have also been associated with the Pink Pistols, a gay gun organisation. The FBI is also investigating the possibility that they have links to other armed, left-wing militant organisations, such as the John Brown Gun Club,, which carried out an armed raid on an ICE facility.
This is all extremely bizarre from a British perspective. I don’t think any other country in the world except America would tolerate private, armed paramilitary groups of either the left or the right. From what I gather, Britain passed its laws severely curtailing gun ownership in the UK in the 1920s due to fears of Communist revolution following the Russian revolution. I think most European countries have similar legislation, especially following the wave of terrorism across Britain, Northern Ireland, France, Germany and Italy in the ’60s and 70s, and in Britain and Ulster up to the Good Friday Agreement in the ’90s.
Back in the 1970s, the very idea of a militant, armed gay group was a joke. One of the jokes by the Two Ronnies from that decade went ‘News Flash. Today a sailor at Portsmouth had his wrist slapped. Police are hunting a hitman for Gay Lib.’ Now it’s become real, partly due to Herbert Marcuse’s recommendation that Communists, now that the working class were no longer interested in it, should appeal instead to the people of the ghetto – Blacks, gays and women. Regarding the Pink Pistols, I can understand why some gays would wish to come together and learn to shoot for self-defence. Although homosexuality is legal under federal law, I’ve been told by American friends that many states still retain legislation outlawing it. And despite considerable progress in making gays viewed as respectable members of society, there’s still considerable hatred of them in some quarters. As there probably is over here. But armed Communist revolutionary groups go far beyond self-protection. I’ve never heard of the John Brown Gun Club, which makes me wonder just how many other armed radical left groups there are out there running around in the Land of the Free.
The video below comes from the Silver Fox of the Silver Fox Hot Takes YouTube channel. The eponymous Silver Fox is very definitely a man of the Tory right. His posts generally attack the Left, and at one time particularly the SNP in Scotland. He particularly concentrated not just on their weird financial affairs and determination to push independence at the expense of tackling more immediate problems such as the NHS and education, but also their support for Trans Rights. But here he talks about a very strange, offensive and just plain wrong recommendation from Ofsted about autistic children.
Apparently they have issued a statement that autistic children should be monitored, not to help their academic performance, but because their trusting nature makes them particularly vulnerable to radicalisation and being turned into terrorists.
The Silver Fox is personally offended by this, as he is on the autistic spectrum. So is the comic actor Paul Whitehouse, who was in the classic BBC sketch show, The Fast Show, and Bloody Hell, It’s Harry and Paul with Harry Enfield. Whitehouse’s missus is an educationalist, and she’s definitely unimpressed with this ruling.
And so am I. This is pure baloney.
Our mother was a primary school teacher. One of the books we used to have on the shelf at home when I was a child was the classic study of an autistic child, Dibs – In Search of Self. One of her friends and colleagues worked in a class as an assistant helping to teach autistic chiildren. It was very hard, but the idea of one of those kids becoming a terrorist or even a mass murderer never crossed anyone’s mind for a single moment. A few years ago I also did an online course training to be a teaching assistant, but had to go give up that goal due to health issues. One of the lessons was on how to teach children with autism and ADHD. Autism is a condition that covers a wide-range of severity. There are autistic people who are severely mentally disabled and need a lot of support, even institutionalisation, as they can’t look after themselves. At the opposite ends there are high-functioning autists with what at one time was called Asperger’s, who may be intelligent but because of their condition don’t see the world quite as we do. Speaking generally, one of the features of the condition is that autistic people don’t handle change very well, and may get extremely upset if their routine is broken. They may want everything around them to be just so, in its accustomed place and autistic children may play and act according to set routines. The condition takes its name for the Greek for self, auto, as their sense of self is radically different. They’re not narcissists or ego-maniacs, but the conditioned is marked by a pervasive sense of self – or its absence – that means that they have genuine difficulty understanding others’ point of view, and how anyone could thein differently to them. Autistic kids can also become upset if they get overstimulated in the classroom and it just comes too much for them. Which is we were taught on the course that there should be a special area of the class room set aside for them as a special quiet space, where they could go to cool down. The Right went after the Labour party a few years ago when they set up such spaces at one of their gatherings for people with similar needs. Julia Hearty-Farter, or Hartley-Brewer as she’s properly known, flatulated about this on GB New or Talk TV, how it was more pandering leftie nonsense, but all I saw was a genuine concern for people with a potentially debilitating form of neurodiversity. You shouldn’t cavil at public spaces making efforts to provide wheelchair access for people with mobility problems, so there should be no criticism of organisations concerned to help people with genuine mental challenges which could be similarly life-limiting.
The Silver Fox interprets this bizarre diktat about autistic children to be an attempt by the authorities to spread the responsibility for terrorism around so that it isn’t just ‘a certain demographic’, meaning Muslims. White extremists must also be found to balance out the racial statistics. Thus we have Prevent, under the influence of its Muslim members, some of whom were the very groups and individuals it was set up to combat, changing its focus to White nationalism instead of Islamism. There have also been cases of people arrested under the terrorism act for reading right-wing literature and posting their obnoxious views online, like a Nazi who was jailed a few years ago. Among his crimes was that he had a copy of Mein Kampf. He was unpleasant, certainly, but not a terrorist. Teal terrorism is politically motivated intimidation, wounding and killing, like strapping on suicide vests to kill schoolgirls at Ariana Grande concerts, running amok with knives to kill the infidel, or trying to run them over in cars. And since the outbreak of peace in Ulster through the Good Friday Agreement, it’s only been Islamists doing this. Throwing paint at warplanes due to be sent off to help Israel in its ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza, as Palestine Action protesters did, ain’t terrorism and the organisation should not have been proscribed as one. It’s just a form of protest from a group 100 Per Cent Zionist Starmer and Yvette Couper don’t like.
The Silver Fox also suggests that this new regulation breaks the equality law as it discriminates against the disabled, and his favoured target is Bridget Phillopson, the education secretary, gunning for the job as deputy leader of the Labour party. I think he’s right, especially when he says that autistic people have enough on their plate without the authorities spreading grossly unfounded fears about them.
There has, to my certain knowledge, never been an autistic terrorist. Get rid of this highly offensive and dangerous governmental order now!
I gate a little talk on Thursday about the real and fake history behind the 1980s book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, which inspired the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code. This claimed that Jesus had secretly married Mary Magdalene, and the holy couple had moved to France and had children. This holy blood line became the Merovingian kings of early medieval France. Guarding this secret were the Cathars, the Knights Templars and a mysterious monastic organisation, the Priory of Sion. It’s nonsense, as the Cathars and their predecessors the ancient Gnostics and the Bogomil heretics in the Balkans certainly did not believe in any such thing, and the material about the Priory of Sion came from the bizarre fantasies of Pierre Plantard. Plantard was a strange figure who self-published a series of tracts proclaiming the existence of a series of secret monastic organisations with himself as their leader. At one time he claimed to be a count, as well as putting himself forward to be king, not just of France, but of a united Europe. Despite being pseudohistory and conspiratorial fantasy, Holy Blood, Holy Grail was massively popular, spawning a number of books continuing and expanding on its ideas, while the Dan Brown novel was filmed. The Cathars themselves are interesting, and there have been a number of serious historical works on them. Here are my notes for the talk, in which I demolish Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent’s pseudohistory and talk about the reality behind it.
From Ancient Gnostics to the Cathars and the Priory of Zion: Disentangling History from Conspiracy Theories and Neo-Feudal Fantasies
Many of us can still remember the controversy from the 1980s to the beginning years of this century about Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This claimed that orthodox Christianity was a lie, and that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and moved to Gaul, where His children then went on to found the Merovingian dynasty of early medieval Frankish kings. This secret was known and preserved by the Cathars,, a heretical Christian sect attacked and wiped out in the Albigensian Crusades of the 13th century, the Knights Templars and a mysterious modern secret society, the Priory of Zion. It also included speculation about the activities of a French priest, Berengere Sauniere, who decorated his north door with a sculpture of the demon Asmodeus. The Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh alleged that he had got his money from buried Visigothic treasure and was the leader, perhaps, of a Satanist coven.
Henry Lincoln
Michael Baigent
Henry Lincoln
None of this is true. The Cathars were a dualist sect who believed that matter was evil and the creation of an evil god, and so Christ and the Virgin were both spiritual beings. Their beliefs are very well known to scholars, having been studied for decades. One of the earliest works on them is Sir Stephen Runciman’s The Medieval Manichee. They are ultimately derived from ancient Graeco-Roman Gnosticism. The ideas about a secret feudal organisation, the Priory of Zion, ultimately comes from the bizarre fantasies of Pierre Plantard. Plantard wrote a series of self-published books claiming the existence of a series of secret monastic orders, of which he was, naturally, one of the leading members. The interpretation of the head of the demon over the de Sauniere’s north porch door as indicating Satanic allegiance is also completely mistaken, and ignores the function of this part of the church in orthodox, catholic Christian belief and practise. And the stuff about Christ’s bloodline is just something that the three made up themselves in order to make the conspiracy hang together.
Pierre Plantard
Gnosticism
Ancient religious system mixing Platonic and Zoroastrian elements. Zoroastrianism ancient religion of Persia, founded by Zoroaster/Zarathustra. Faith still survives in Iran and India, where Zoroastrians known as Parsees. Zoroastrians now seen as monotheists, but previously regarded by religious scholars as dualists. Believed in two gods: Ahura Mazda, a god of good and light, and Ahriman or the Druj, the god of darkness, and evil. Ahriman responsible for evil in the world and created the evil or unpleasant animals, like scorpions. At the end of time the saviour, the Saoshyant, will come and there will be an apocalyptic war between good and evil in which evil will be vanquished.
Different sects of Gnosticism, some Christian – Marcion, Valentinus, or include Christian elements, such as Manichaeanism after Mani of Babylon. Others pagan, such as Simon Magus, Poimandres. Gnostic gospels and scriptures discovered in 1947, but these already known about through writings of early Christian church fathers.
Gnosticism states 2 gods – one of world of light, spirit and good; other of matter, darkness and evil. Humanity’s true home is in the world of spirit. However, war between good and evil gods, humans fall from world of spirit into prison of material world, where ruled by the evil archons. Good god sends prophet, such as Mani or Jesus, to instruct people in the teachings and rituals through which they can escape world of matter after death and return to the world of light. Dualist Christian sects continued to appear – Messalians in 4th century Edessa and Armenia; Priscillianists in Spain; Paulicians in 6th century Armenia, enter Byzantine Empire 640. Formed warrior class between Byzantines and Arabs.
Ancient Gems depicting the Gnostic Demiurge, the creator of the world of matter.
The Bogomils, The Cathars’ Precursors
10th century emergence of Bogomils. Founded by priest Bogomil, ‘Beloved of God’ or ‘Worthy of God’s Pity’ or ‘One Who entreats God’, founds sect in Macedonia. Believed world created by Satan, who was the rebellious elder son of God. Satan also author of the Old Testament and Mosaic Law. The good God sent his younger son, Jesus, to redeem humanity. However, Christ only human in appearance, performed no miracles. Only New Testament and Gospels true word of God. Reject Church ritual, including feast days, veneration of the Cross and saints, use of vestments. Meat and wine forbidden, along with marriage. Bogomil community divided into two classes, ordinary believers and the Elect. Only prayer used Lord’s Prayer. Bulgaria conquered by Byzantium 1018, heresy spreads into Byzantine Empire. Second Bulgarian Empire founded 1218, Bogomils prosper, becomes state religion in Bosnia.
Question of connection between Gnostic sects, Bogomils and Cathars. Possible that Cathars result of independent Dualist speculation in West following general tendencies towards asceticism and belief in the evil of this world in Christianity. Groups of heretics begin appearing in 10th century onwards. First group that are recognisably Cathar, although not called that, appear in Cologne in 1143. Cathars not just in France, but spread to Lombardy and Tuscany in Italy. 1163 apprehension of another group of Cathars in Cologne, doctrines described by monk Eckbert of Schonau in 13 sermons, describes them as ‘Cathars’, ‘Piphles’ or ‘Weavers’. During Albigensian Crusade allegations of devil worship and orgies, including homosexuality. Connection with Bulgaria resulted in them being called Bougres in France, which became Buggers in English.
Cathar beliefs and practices known through series of works by churchmen and lay people, such as The Higher Star of Salvo Burci of Piacnza, A Debate Between a Catholic and a Patarene, Summa Against Manichaean Heretics, also works by James Capelli, Moneta of Cremona, Rainerius of Sacconi, heretic who converted to Catholicism, Anselm of Alessandria, Bernard Gui, In 13th and 14th centuries Cathars adopt a numb er of Bogomil books: The Ascension/Vision of Isaiah, The Secret Supper, Cathar ritual texts in Latin and Provencal, A ‘Manichaean’ Treatise, The Book of the Two Principles, A Vindication of the Church of God and A Gloss on the Lord’s Prayer.
Different sects of Cathars with different names, but generally Cathars believed in two spiritual powers: the good God, the God of Jesus Christ and the spiritual world, and evil god, the god of matter. One group believed that only one God, the son of whom was Satan. Lucifer rebels, is cast out of heaven, and creates world of matter. Places in this world bodies of Adam and Eve, and imprisons angel in the body of Adam. Human souls either spirits derived from first prisoner, or souls which had already been created and introduced into human bodies as these created. Good God sent Jesus with message of salvation. But possibility all would be saved, as people repeatedly reincarnated. Rejection of the Old Testament as work of evil god, viewed John the Baptist as agent of Satan.
Absolute Dualists believed two distinct gods ruling separate universes, spirit and matter, good and evil. Lucifer, son of the evil god, made way to universe of good god, becomes steward over the angels, urges them to rebel against God. Battle in heaven, resulting in expulsion of souls of angels, although their bodies remain in heaven. Christ comes to save the souls of the fallen angels on Earth, which Cathars viewed as hell. Events of Christ’s life happened in other world, Christ never appeared in this world except, perhaps, as St. Paul. Souls could be reincarnated to achieve final salvation. Some Cathars objected to killing of animals, as these could contain reincarnated souls. God of Old Testament seen as evil, but this mixed with respect for Prophets. Absolute Dualists saw Christ, Mary and John the Baptist as angels, mitigated Dualists saw her as human woman. Also believed Christ really incarnate.Community divided between ‘perfecti’ and ordinary believers. Perfecti extremely austere, vegetarians abstaining from meat, milk, eggs, cheese and sex. Reject sacraments as matter evil, replaced by the consolamentum, the laying on of hands. Fasted on certain days of the week, and for three forty day periods during the year. Cathars led by bishops, aided by elder and younger sons, who would succeed him. Below them deacons, responsible for hospices for the perfecti, general pastoral care and ritual confessions of believers.
Medieval illustration of Knights Templars fighting Saracens
The Knights Templars
Military order of warrior monks founded during the First Crusade with sister order, the Knights Hospitallers. Dissolved on the orders of the Franch king on charges of homosexuality and worshipping demonic idol, Baphomet. But Knights Templars rich and unpopular. Did not pay taxes on their land to the king, rich from banking. Lived as country gentlemen after expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land. French monarchy bankrupt and needed money. Edward II also pressured into dissolving the order, but originally did not believe the charges against them.
Templars acted as a law unto themselves. One of the Kings of Jerusalem had also demanded their dissolution after defeat by Muslims in battle caused by Templars attacking too early.Possible that Templars had picked up weird Gnostic beliefs in Holy Land, but unlikely. Reported activities do not sound similar to Mandaeans, surviving Gnostic sect in Iraq, or Yezidis, for example
Pierre Plantard
Born 1920.1942 editor of free magazine, Vaincre claiming to be organ of neo-medieval chivalric order, the Alpha Galantes, dedicating to creating true socialism, 1st issues discusses Atlantis, Celtic wisdom and other esoteric subjects. 1941 police report stating that ‘Plantard, who boasts of having links with numerous politicians, seems to be one of those dotty, pretentious young men who run more or less fictitious groups in an effort to look important and who are taking advantage of the present trend towards taking a greater interest in young people in order to attract the government’s attention.’ Plantard arrested and tortured by Gestapo 1943, but released 1944. Married Anne-Lea Hisler 1946, 1947 moves near Lake Leman in Switzerland. Possible at this time joined Masonic Grande Loge Alpina. 1956 starts publishing Circuit and details of the constitution of future Priory of Zion. June 1956 public announcement of the existence of Priory of Zion to sub-prefecture of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois. No evidence that it has any members apart from Plantard. 1958 – Plantard writes letter on behalf of Paris Central Committee of Public Safety urging people to vote for de Gaulle. Circuit resumes publication with articles on Atlantis, Astrology etc. 196os Plantard and wife publish large number of books and pamphlets, although possible that these only exist as the copies in the Bibliotheteque National. Possible Plantard owned land around Rennes-le-Chateau. Comes into contact with Gerard de Sede, writer of popular non-fiction books, publish The Templars Are Among Us in 1942.
Berengere Sauniere, Rennes-le-Chateau’s priest
1962 publication of Robert Charroux’s Treasures of the World. This had chapter on Berengere Sauniere and Rennes-le-Chateau. Question of where Sauniere got his immense wealth – Charroux concluded he had probably uncovered trove of medieval Treasure. Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and Sauniere first appeared in Depeche du Midi in 1956. From the end of 50s Plantard visiting the area. 1960s Plantard publishes A Merovingian Treasure at Rennes-le-Chateau, but this plagiarised from Charroux’s book. Plantard also claimed Sauniere had found parchments and Biblical texts with encoded genealogies, Rennes-le-Chateau major town in Middle Ages, and home to Dagobert II, king of Austrasia. Dagobert regained throne, but assassinated in 679 with no descendants. Plantard then claimed Dagobert’s son, Sigisbert, had survived, and bloodline continued to present day. This intended to promote Plantard as king of France and United States of Europe. Plantard deposits folder Dossiers Secrets d’Henri Lobineau, complied by Phillippe Toscan du Plantier, at Bibliotheque National, claiming that Priory of Zion founded 1099 as group within Knights Templars, from whom they separated in 1188. Grand Masters included Robert Fludd, Leonardo da Vinci, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. Comparison with Plantard’s other publications and works suggest common authorship with Lobineau. Further publications by Plantard claiming that series of deaths connected with Rennes-le-Chateau, but Plantard alters times and other details to make it all fit.
Enter Henry Lincoln.
Lincoln BBC scriptwriter, read de Sede’s book on Rennes-le-Chateau, decided it would make good 20 minute feature, intrigued by hidden message about Dagobert. Contacted de Sede, who supplied him with photographs from Plantard, introduces Lincoln to Bibliotheque National, reads La Vraie Langue Celtique by Sauniere’s friend Henri Boudet, work of eccentric philology, claimed Adam and Eve spoke English. Plantard writes preface to 1978 reprint, claims that this contained hidden message about Rennes-le-Chateau. De Sede deciphered hidden message of second coded parthment, which is anagram of inscription on 18th century tomb at Rennes-le-Chateau. 1979 Lincoln meets Plantard, who tells him that parchments faked by his friend and collaborator Phillippe de Cherisey for a TV programme.
First documentary by Lincoln, The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?, broadcast 1972 simply argues Templars had taken treasure from Holy Land to France, where it was later discovered by Sauniere. 1974 Lincoln follows this up with The Priest, The Painter and The Devil, claims proportions of tomb used in Poussin’s Les Bergers d’ Arcadie showing tomb similar to one at Rennes-le-Chateau the same as inverted pentagram, Sauniere therefore leader of Satanic sect. Lincoln later met Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who were interested in the Templars. For 3rd film, The Shadow of Templars, try to contact the Priory of Zion and Plantard, but researcher got contradictory and conflicting results. Eventually got meeting with Plantard and his entourage in Paris cinema. About same time Plantard gives himself fake feudal titles Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, count of Saint-Clair and Count of Rhedae. About this time Lincoln formed idea that real treasure was Christ’s bloodline, as described in 1982 Holy Blood, Holy Grail – ‘San Greal’ really referred to Sang Real, holy blood. This taken up by other paranormal writers and researchers. Lionel Fanthorpe speculated that the Grail could be alienated artefact, David Wood thought that geometry around Rennes-le-Chateau showed alien race, the Elohim, who came from Sirius, had established base on Mars. Had interbred with ape-like human females to creature modern humans as slave race. The inscription ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ can be translated as ‘Even in Arcadia I, death, am present’ – reminder of omnipresence of death.
1977 appearance of the tract, The Circle of Ulysses by Jean Delaude claiming that after Cocteau’s death, he was succeeded as Grand Master by Abbe Ducaud-Bourget, French traditional bishop and opponent of reform.
From April 1982 onwards Lincoln had meetings with Plantard in Paris. At May 1983 meeting Plantard claimed that three very distinguished Englishmen had imported into England in 1956 Sauniere’s parchments showing that the House of Plantard was the descendants of Dagobert II. Supplied photos, which were found to be forgeries. January 1984 Plantard sent Lincoln copy of official Priory of Zion document accusing Jan-Luc Chaumeil, author of critical work on Priory of Zion which attacked Plantard, of receiving documents about the Priory stolen from de Cherisey in 1967. This supposedly signed by four directors of the First National Bank of Chicago. But one of them was dead, and another one had never heard of the Priory. Further research indicated that their signatures had come from an official stamp from the Bank that had somehow got in the possession of Plantard. Three weeks later Plantard sent Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh letters to the Priory announcing that he was resigning because of ill health. This later followed by tract, The Scandals of the Priory of Zion by ‘Cornelius’, linking Plantard to Italian Mafia, the P2 Fascist Masonic lodge and the assassination of Roberto Calvi of the Banco Abrosiano.
Not the end of stories about Priory of Zion. In the trio’s second book, The Messianic Legacy, they talk about reception of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and questions by readers about possible connections to Shroud of Turin. October 1988 carbon 14 dating suggested the Shroud late medieval forgery, interviews given about this on radio by Lynn Picknett, who was having affair with Ian Wilson, best known of Shroud’s supporters. Picknett then received series of letters from ‘Giovanni’ claiming Shroud really pioneering alchemical daguerreotype by Leonard da Vinci.’Giovanni’ claimed to be member of dissident faction of Priory de Zion, advised her to read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Hints that ‘Giovanni’ connected to Plantard. Idea that da Vinci forged the Shroud suggested a few month earlier by Anthony Harris in The Sacred Virgin and the Holy Whore, who claimed Christ really a woman. Picknett eventually met Giovanni, who wanted research passed to Ian Wilson. But affair had ended. Nevertheless it was included in book she wrote with Clive Prince, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?
2003 appearance of Dan Brown’s thriller based on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code. This filmed, and Brown also sued by Lincoln Baigent and Leigh for plagiarism. But spawns series of books supporting the Da Vinci Code, with names like Breaking the Da Vinci Code, Cracking the Da Vinci Code, The Da Vinci Code Decoded.
The statue of the demon Asmodeus in Rennes-le-Chateau’s church
Conspiracy theory also sent up in Private Eye with skit asking ‘What is the connection between the inscription in Poussin’s Les Folles de Engleterre, ‘Et in Burlington Arcadia Ego’, and a sect of Merovingian Templars who drank the blood of gerbils?Question of figure of demon Asmodeus over north door of the church at Rennes-le-Chateau, with inscription ‘Terribilis est locus iste’ ‘This place is terrible’. In church architecture, north seat of Satan and demons, as stated in Isaiah 14: 13. During baptism children traditionally exorcised, during which small north door opened to let the Devil out. Medieval clerestory windows at Fairford in Gloucestershire how tyrants and demons on north side, saints and angels on the south. Continental Catholic churches often have figure of demon over north doors. Latin phrase ‘terribilis est locus iste’ said by Jacob after dream in which he saw angels going up and down ladder to heaven. Used as Introit to the benediction consecrating a church
Conclusion
Conspiracy and claims about bloodline of Christ in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and related books has zero to do with what the Cathars and the Knights Templars actually believed. TV series and book part of general trend in western culture after the War of scepticism towards traditional society and religion. Interest in Gnosticism as alternative forms of Christianity suppressed by Roman Catholic church. Interest also in the Cathars through Arthur Guirdham and his book about group of people remembering having been Cathars in a previous life. Holy Blood, Holy Grail also become part of wider conspiracy speculation about aliens, though these also influenced by ideas of Erich von Daniken about alien gods creating human race.However intriguing, and whatever the value of Dan Brown’s book as a thriller, this is all very much pseudo-history and archaeology, based essentially on Plantard’s weird fantasies. The Cathars and the Gnostics are interesting in themselves, and should be studied for what they were, not because of the conspiracy theories of late 20th and early 21st century writers. Their books tell us more about the paranoia and spiritual needs and urges of our time than theirs.
I’ve been watching a lot of folk songs on YouTube these past few weeks. This one is in Welsh, and it comes from the Cymru Newydd channel. Don’t worry – there are English subtitles. It’s a tuneful attack on the Leaderene, who baleful shadow and destructive policies still haunt this Sceptred Isle. I’m putting this up for everyone across Offas’s Dyke, who despises her and what she and her wretched successors have done, not just to Wales but to all of Britain.
Looking on YouTube today, I found a number of videos speculating that after Kweer Harmerwas forced to make a compromise with a sizable chunk of the Labour back bench on his abominable cuts to disability benefit, and the rise of rebels who still object to it because it isn’t Labour, Rachel Reeves May be facing the chop. She’s supposed to have shed a couple of tears about it in parliament today. Well, I always thought that the time a politician should be really worried about his or her place in cabinet was when the Prime Minister declared that they stood by him or her and that he gave them his full confidence. This usually came after there was some kind of scandal, like they were caught committing adultery with a secret mistress, or were using rent boys, or else had committed some financial irregularities. This would get into the press, the PM would make a statement that he fully supported the erring MP, and he’d be out by the end of the week. Where it was sex scandal, they usually resigned ‘to spend more time with their family’. In some cases they ended up having a holiday at the late Her Majesty’s pleasure. Like Thatcher’s lad, Jonathan Aitkin, who was caught making dodgy deals and supplying prostitutes to rich Arabs.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for Reeves. None at all. In fact, part of me is glad that she feels that way. Yeah, I know it’s nasty and mean, but as the late, great comedian Bill Hicks once quipped, ‘That’s how I am, so that’s how it comes out’.
Just remember what Reeves was doing. She was cutting benefit to some of the poorest people in society. According to Mike at Vox Political, This would see three million or so sick and disabled people have their income drastically cut or removed altogether. No impact assessment had been done, and the disability groups weren’t consulted. Although the ratbags have said they’ll talk to them after they’ve made the cuts.
I honestly can’t express my loathing for Starmer and the Labour MPs who support this policy in decent words.
When Dodgy Dave Cameron the Pig Porker and his band of profiteers and the vindictive rich did this about a decade ago, it lead to hundreds, perhaps even thousand of deaths. Elderly couples without food committed suicide; so did a young mum with her baby. Diabetics died because they could not afford to pay for electricity to keep their insulin refrigerated. This happened to a young Black bloke with mental health problems. He was also found to have starved to death.
Disgraceful.
And what really annoys me about Stalin and his bunch of Neolib clowns is the moralising cant. ‘Oh, the welfare budget is unsustainable!’ I don’t believe it is. ‘We have a moral duty to get people into work!’ You do, but not by cutting their money without giving them any other means of getting into properly paid and supported employment. I’m still furious over the condescending face Liz Kendall pulled when she pretended to be listening to a member of the public about this. It was entirely take concern, and the expression she had while she feigned interest and sympathy was one of a constipated camel. This isn’t any kind of genuine sympathy, it’s more Thatcherite vindictiveness and a desire to give more tax cuts to the super-rich.
Labour South MP Karin Smyth backs the party motion.
Some of the sites and videos reporting this have links so that you can check which way your local MP voted. I live in South Bristol, and my local MP is Karin Smyth. I’ve some respect for her, as I genuinely think she works hard for her constituents. But she’s a Starmer fangirl, and checking up on her it seems she voted ‘Aye’ to the government’s motion.
I’ve already decided that I was going to vote Labour. I didn’t at the last set of elections, and that just confirms it. I’m sick of Starmer’s Labour and with the exception of the Labour rebels, I want the lot of them out.
This comes from the Working Class Patriot channel on YouTube. This channel is solidly anti-immigrant and anti-immigration, and posts messages from Tory MP Robert Jenrick and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe. Apart from demanding the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, Lowe also wants the privatisation of the NHS, but doesn’t want it replaced by the American system. Whatever way he wants it privatised, it’s still going to leave people paying for their medical care with the consequent increase in costs and poverty, as well as being denied it if they are unable to pay.
But this time the two have a point. They have been alarmed by the attempt by the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute a man for burning a Quran outside the Turkish embassy. The man was arrested by two South Asian looking officers, and the CPS then charged him with ‘harassing… the institution of Islam’. A day ago Lowe posted on the Patriot’s channel that he had ‘tabled a motion in Parliament defending freedom of speech – including the right to reject, mock, or criticise religious ideas, Islam included.’ And yesterday Jenrick also posted that he had written this letter to the CPS criticising their decision.
According to a later post by Jenrick, the CPS have dropped the charge, but unfortunately are seeking to prosecute the man under a more suitable one.
Patrick West, one of the inmates at the Speccie, posted this piece on the Spectator website giving a few more details of the affair and stating very clearly that blasphemy laws have no place in modern Britain and are leading to fears that Britain is becoming an Islamic theocracy.
We now live in a country where, once more, it appears to be a crime to commit blasphemy. This is the inevitable and justifiable conclusion many have made following the news yesterday that a man who burnt a copy of the Koran was charged with ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ against ‘the religious institution of Islam’. The charge made against Hamit Coskun, who allegedly performed the act outside the Turkish Consulate in London in February, is thought to be the first time anybody has been prosecuted for harassing an ‘institution’, in the form of Islam, under the Public Order Act. Following a backlash to the news, the Crown Prosecution Service has since sought to clarify that the wording of the charge was ‘incorrectly applied’. It has now ‘substituted a new charge.’ The National Secular Society has been volubly alarmed at the case, suggesting it could presage ‘the reinstatement of an offence of blasphemy in English law by the back door’. Others have raised concerns to the same effect. Akua Reindorf KC said that the original charge was ‘tantamount’ to blasphemy, an act abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales in 2008. Comedian and GB News presenter Leo Kearse articulated a vein of popular disquiet more tersely: ‘Is Britain now an Islamic theocracy?’’
There have been a series of attempts by Muslims to introduce laws against blasphemy against Islam, beginning with the demonstrations against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the 1980s. The last one was by the Birmingham MP Tahir Ali, who wanted to introduce a law against the desecration of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These attempts follow the blasphemy laws of Muslim countries such as Pakistan, which are used to persecute non-Muslims and Muslims belonging to heretical sects, such as the Shia and Ahmadis.
The framing of the charge against Hamit for ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ also follows the rhetoric of Muslim firebrands that secularism and the criticism of Islam constitute ‘terrorism to Muslims’. A few years ago there were placards held by demonstrators at a Muslim protest denouncing ‘man-made law’ in such terms. And way back in 1990 Kalim Saddiqui, one of the imams organising the protests against Rushdie in Bradford, was filmed by the Beeb in his mosque preaching that ‘Britain is a monstrous killing machine and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ When Saddiqui was challenged over this bigoted, sectarian and racist statement, he whined about the publication of the Verses being some kind of preparation for ‘a holocaust of Muslims’.
Well, it’s 35 years later, Saddiqui boy, and no such genocide has occurred. But there has been mass rioting in places such as Pakistan over people in the West burning the Quran, such as when a bloke in Sweden did it outside the Turkish embassy in protest at the Turks voting against admitting Sweden to the EU. It looks very much to me that a Muslim organisation was involved in the drafting of the charge against Hamit, and attempts to bring that and similar charges against people who have supposedly desecrated the Quran, like the 15 year old autistic schoolboy in Keithley, are motivated by the authorities’ fears that similar rioting could break out against the UK.
Such blasphemy laws should not be tolerated. Jenrick and Lowe are right in that no religious or ideology should be exempt from criticism or mockery, and that attempts to make them so are attacks on free speech.
Okay, like many others I’ve been referring to Trump satirically as an orangutan for a long time. This is obviously based on his weird orange complexion, a skin tone so strange that Bill Maher on American TV suggested he might be part orangutan. Showing the good humour and self-deprecation he is known, Trump went berserk and threatened the American talk show host with a libel writ and appeared in public waving around his birth certificate to show that his father was definitely human.
Well, yesterday I decided to amuse myself by making this sketch of Trump as an orangutan. I hope you can make it out. I’ve drawn him with the cheek flaps of a dominant male. That’s certainly how Trump thinks of himself, but perhaps I should have left these off to really take him down a peg. People have been making jokes about certain individual’s supposed resemblance to the ape since the 18th century. There was a debate among the early anthropologists about the position of the ape amongst the other primates. Was it the lowest type of human, or the highest of the apes? There was also a novel published in the 18th or 19th century about a mysterious businessman, a Mr Hourang Haut-Ton, (say it with a French accent) who arrives from the East Indies. He succeeds in business, becomes an MP by buying himself a rotten borough and is finally rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Surely a forerunner of Trump, but in monarchical Britain rather than republican America.
That’s the headline I read in the Guardian, which also stated that Ukrainians were outraged. I’m afraid I didn’t read the article, as I felt I didn’t need to: it’s another instance of ‘America First’ Trump bullying other countries and demanding they surrender their resources to him. Like his stupid offer to buy Greenland from the Danes, use economic force to make Canada surrender its sovereign nationhood and unite with America and invade Panama to steal their canal back. People have already been commenting that Trump shouldn’t be allying America with its enemy, Putin. One of the right-wing YouTubers, John del Arroz, who blogs about science fiction and comics, took exception to a tweet by Stephen King dissing his homeboy. King called Trump a traitorous dipshit, and that this went double for Musk. That pretty much sound exactly right to me. Trump is trying to make this peace deal above Zelensky’s and his country’s heads, as if he already owned the place. It looks less like a piece of international diplomacy than international gangsterism. ‘Nice country, you’ve got here Mr. Zelensky. Shame if something happened to it.’
Remember the memes and jokes that were flying round the internet a few years ago speculating on Trump and Putin’s sexuality as Putin used to enjoy posing with his top off with Trump as his best bud? Here’s one I found on the Net of the two riding a horse.
It does seem to describe their relationship: a pair of mounted marauders about to despoil another country.
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