Illuminati – From Bavarian Secret Society to Generational PsyOp to Card Game
Global Conspiracy Cabals & New World Order Belief Systems
- The Illuminati, Myth and Reality – Massimo Introvigne is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements.
- article 1, The Origins of the Bavarian Illuminati
- article 2, A Small Bavarian Secret Society Grows
- article 3, The Political Turn of the Bavarian Illuminati
- article 4, How the Legend Was Created
- article 5, The Lorber Connection
- article 6, The Second Illuminati
- article 7, The Golden Dawn and the World League of the Illuminati
- article 8, The End of the “Second” Illuminati
- article 9, “Illuminati” and Political Controversy, from Jefferson to Trump
“Those who see the Illuminati as a malevolent and even Satan-worshipping cult remains more numerous. Bill Clinton joined other presidents and former presidents when he was accused of being part of the Illuminati, who were accused of being connected with pedophile rituals allegedly organized at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. The mini-chain of restaurants East Side Pies in Austin, Texas, was also accused of being connected with the Illuminati and alluding to them in its publicity, and owner and employees received death threats.”
- The New World Order: The Historical Origins of a Dangerous Modern Conspiracy Theory – Middlebury.edu – 2022
- Did an Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Help Elect Thomas Jefferson? The 1800 election shows there is nothing new about conspiracy theories, and that they really take hold when we don’t trust each other. – Politico, 2020
“Welchian” Conspiracy Theories – The John Birch Society & Beyond
“Communist plots were alleged to be behind many things the Birchers opposed, from the U.N., to teaching sex education in schools and putting fluoride in the water supply. The group was founded in secret in 1958 by the wealthy, retired candy manufacturer Robert Welch, whose candies included Sugar Babies, Junior Mints and Pom Poms. The people Welch first invited to join the society were also wealthy, white businessmen, including the Koch brothers’ father Fred Koch.”
“As the years passed, Welch’s theories grew wilder. He eventually concluded that communism was just another name for the conspiracy begun by the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776. He also said that the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers (a group that sought to foster dialogue between Europe and North America) were the puppet masters of U.S. foreign and economic interests. The society also called for the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations and for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.”
- Op-Ed: Today’s right-wing conspiracy theory mentality can be traced back to the John Birch Society – LA Times – 2022
- The John Birch Society is still influencing American politics, 60 years after its founding – The Conversation – 2018
- Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy – W. Daniel Wilson, Goethe Yearbook, North American Goethe Society, Volume 5, 1990 pp. 163-186
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
“Adam Weishaupt is really the father of Bolshevism — not Karl Marx. […] Thejacobins of the French Revolution were controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati. […] The “Conspiracy” today controls communism.1 These wild notions were pronounced in an American right-wing journal in 1965. Equally bizarre are the claims by Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, that the German Illuminati of the eighteenth century were ultimately responsible for “everything in the way of ‘security’ legislation, from the first Workmen’s Compensation Acts under Bismarck to the latest Medicare monstrosity under Lyndon Johnson,” as well as centralized banking, a graduated personal income tax, both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the expansion of Communism, the breakup of colonial empires, and the formation of the United Nations.2 The seeds of this theory were sown in the period of the French Revolution itself; in the words of one of its most rabid adherents, in 1793: Nicht die Franzosen sind […] die eigentlichen Erfinder dieses großen Projects, die Welt umzukehren; diese Ehre kommt den Deutschen zu. […] [D]en Franzosen gehört nur die Ehre daß sie mit der Ausführung den Anfang gemacht haben. […] Aus dem in Deutschland entstandenen, und noch ganz und gar nicht erloschenen, sondern nur Verborgenen und um desto gefährlicher sein Wesen treibenden Illuminatismus sind also die Comités politiques entstanden, die dem Jacobinerclubb sein Daseyn gegeben haben.3 The Germans have been accused of many things, often with good reason, but the idea that they instigated the French Revolution evokes only ridicule in most of us today. But this idea stands out from the host of modern conspiracy theories because of its ideological impact: it played a major role in 164 W. Daniel Wilson nineteenth-century politics, and the Nazis were guided by it in their persecution of Freemasons.4 In fact, it can even be found haunting the pages of reputable modern scholarship, two hundred years after the beginning of the Revolution.5 More important for our purposes, it was one of the most important conservative discourses of the revolutionary period itself. My topic is the extent to which this theory infected and frightened the literary elite, some of whom had themselves been Illuminati, and what this phenomenon means for our understanding of subjectivity, especially in times of repression. Adam Weishaupt and his followers were the subject of intense debate in Germany in the late 1780s and the 1790s. He founded the secret society of Llluminaten at Ingolstadt in 1776; within a fewyears it had grown to over two thousand members, not only in Bavaria but in Northern Germany and the Rhineland. While generally the goals of the Illuminati were of a broadly Enlightened and moral-pedagogic nature, some of their writings pointed the way to an eradication of the state: “[…] Fürsten und Nationen werden ohne Gewaltthätigkeit von der Erde verschwinden,” Weishaupt wrote in a speech meant only for the highest ranks of the order. Such statements were less radical than they seemed to outsiders, since Illuminati tactics involved a very long-term process of moral improvement — their goals were not revolutionary , but rather an expression of the illusionary ideal of enlightened absolutism: moral influence on an absolutist ruler, resulting in reform (‘revolution from above’).7 Still, the Illuminati operated by infiltrating the government, clandestinely recruiting (often through Masonic lodges) the highest civil servants and even rulers, and this process seemed very conspiratory. When the Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian and other governments in 1784-1785, and when some confiscated documents were published in 1786 and 1787, most Germans were stunned at what they felt was a plot against the political and social order; some even predicted a revolution led by Illuminati.8 When the French Revolution did break out in 1789, conservatives and even moderates almost automatically associated the Illuminati with it.9 Two of the German conspiracy theorists later claimed that when they heard the news of the storming of the Bastille, they looked at each other and said in unison : “Das ist das Werk der 44 [= der llluminaten],”10 and such conclusions hardly…”
- The historian who uncovered the ADL’s spying operation against the far-right John Birch Society – Jewish Telegraphic Agency – 2023
RAWilson and the The Discordians
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