The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies by Jon E. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

in the world ... the cold and sober temperament of the Germans and their tranquil imagination enable them to combine the most daring opinions with the most servile conduct. That will explain to you … why so much combustible material accumulating for so many years beneath the political edifice of Germany has not yet damaged it. Most of the princes, accustomed to see their men of letters so constantly free in their writings and so constantly slavish in their hearts, have not thought it necessary to use severity against this sheeplike herd of modern Gracchi and Brutuses. Some of them [the princes] have even without difficulty adopted part of their opinions, and Illuminism having doubtless been presented to them as perfection, the complement of philosophy, they were easily persuaded to be initiated into it. But great care was taken not to let them know more than the interests of the sect demanded.
 
It was thus that Illuminism, unable to provoke a blaze in the home of its birth, spread, as before the French Revolution, to a more inflammable Latin race – this time the Italians. Six years after his interrogatory at Beyreuth, Witt Doehring published his book on the secret societies of France and Italy, in which he now realized he had played the part of dupe, and incidentally confirms the statement I have previously quoted, that the Alta Vendita was a further development of the Illuminati.
 

BIBLE CODE
     
    In 1997 Michael Drosnin published The Bible Code , in which he claimed that the holy book predicted events thousands of years before they occurred. Drosnin had decoded the Good Book to send a letter to Itzhak Rabin, the Israeli PM, warning him that he was going to be assassinated. Which he duly was.
    Drosnin himself was not the discoverer of the code, only its popularizer. Bible decoding could be said to start with Jewish Kabbalists in the fourteenth century, who believed that hidden truths in the Torah could be determined by manipulation of its letters, including geometric computation (known as “Gematra”). In the 1940s, Czech rabbi H. M. D. Weissmandel applied a “skip code” to the Bible, taking the letter from the start of Genesis, “skipping” fifty letters to take the next letter, then fifty more, and fifty more until the world spelled “Torah”. The word was also found in each of the other five books of Moses. Using the same system, the Jerusalem-based mathematician Eliyahu Rips, together with Yoav Rosenberg and Doron Witzum, unearthed the names of famous rabbis in the Book of Genesis in close proximity to the dates of their births and deaths, in a way that could not be explained by chance (allegedly), as outlined in their paper “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” in Statistical Science . Rips later used “Equidistant Letter Sequencing” (ELS) to turn up the date 18 January 1991 – the start of the Gulf War.
    Rips, however, was circumspect about the use of the Bible code to foretell the future. Drosnin showed no such caution. In Drosnin’s hands the ELS method gave the date of the atomic Armageddon which would end the world.
    2000. Or then again, 2006.
    Drosnin was clearly not on a fortune-telling roll. In The Bible Code II , his sequel to his 1997 bestseller, Drosnin asserted that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat would be shot to death by Hamas gunmen. (He wasn’t.)
    Faced with as much ridicule as respect, Drosnin defied anyone to find a message about the assassination of a national leader in Moby Dick . An Australian expert in probability theory, Brendan McKay, soon found “Kennedy” and “he shall be killed”.

     
    Further Reading
Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code , 1997

BIG BROTHER: INFRAGARD AND ECHELON
     
    George Orwell in his novel, 1984 , described a society in which civil liberties had gone out of the window and the government – with the help of snitches and electronic surveillance – monitored every aspect of its citizens’ lives. The said citizens were