by Jon E. Lewis
We do not know what this society will be like or how it will work. We must from now on learn to manage this period of fundamental transition, which may last several decades or become a permanent process, and prepare for a future in which humanity can develop in well-being and prosperity.
The times in which we live demand both individual and collective efforts to build systems and societies in which the human being, respect for others and compassion are key values; “competition” should be directed not to dominate and consume, but to stimulate and participate.
We must move towards a society that honours those who do the most to promote human happiness and well-being, not those who wield the greatest destructive power or indulge in the most profligate forms of consumption. Towards this end, education geared to the whole person, and to developing each individual’s unique potential and abilities for the greater good of the community, acquires an ever more crucial role.
We believe in the need to stimulate general debates on the major issues that have global implications for all aspects of the human condition, taking a holistic approach that covers their moral, material, cultural, social and scientific aspects. To this end, we publish works that will encourage governments, international agencies, business leaders and non-governmental organizations, youth movements and the positive forces in societies throughout the world, to adopt policies and take strategic decisions that are appropriate to constantly changing circumstances. It is clear that public opinion must play an increasingly critical role in this growth of awareness.
We, the members of the Club of Rome, are one hundred individuals, at present drawn from 52 countries and five continents. We represent different educations, philosophies, religions and cultures; we have different professional backgrounds and expertises. Naturally we often have different visions of the future. Yet we are united by a common concern – the future of humankind – and we therefore study the major issues affecting the world which we all share.
For as long as each member of the Club of Rome is able to fulfil his or her responsibilities, each of us undertakes to devote a significant proportion of his or her time and talents to working on behalf of humankind, and in particular helping to build societies that are more humane, more sustainable, more equitable and more peaceful.
With a view to serving humanity, the Club of Rome wishes to strengthen its role as a catalyst of change and as a centre of innovation and initiative; it can do this thanks to its wealth of ideas and energies, to the diversity of its membership and the ability of its members to act acquired as a result of their past or present positions and experience.
We trust in the ultimate capacity of men and women to express and to live in accordance with their ethical and spiritual values, while respecting the diversity of humankind.
We call upon men and women of good will, especially the young people of today, to share with us this work of reflection and action.
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
The Council on Foreign Relations is a secretive – its members would say “private” – think-tank of the masters of America. In the worst-case conspiracy scenario, the CFR is directly linked to the Bilderberg Group, the CIA and the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs in a plot to instal the New World Order.
Founded in 1921, the remit of the Council is to debate and develop “American internationalism based on American interests”. Although its proceedings are held in camera, its journal, Foreign Affairs, is publicly available, and has been contributed to by political figures as diverse as Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev and US national security adviser Henry Kissinger.
The Council on Foreign Relations does not deny that it seeks to influence the US elite, or that it embodies a good proportion of said elite. FBI boss John Foster Dulles was an early member, and the Andrew Carnegie Foundation its sometime banker. What is surprising about the Council is its agenda. Far from promoting the usual monetarist, hawkish fare typical of elite institutes, the Council’s politics are decidedly liberal. The Council early denounced Adolf Hitler and was among the first influential think-tanks to allow black members.
Cabal of capitalist one-worlders masquerades as US think-tank: ALERT LEVEL 3
Further Reading
James Perloff, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and American Decline, 1985
Robin Ramsay, Conspiracy Theories, 2006
R. D. Schulzinger., The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs, 1984
CROP CIRCLES
A crop “circle” is a geometric pattern, often intricate, appearing in a field, usually a wheat field and usually in Britain. Evidence of crop circles is said to exist in the ancient folklore of Northern Europe, and a 1678 woodcut shows a “Mowing Devil” making a circle in a field of oats. The phenomenon, however, first came to widespread attention in the 1970s.
Conspiracy theorists believe the designs are messages from aliens, attempting to communicate with Earthlings via symbols; or maybe the patterns are made inadvertently by UFOs as they touch down. In either case, the government does not want you to know about it. You might panic. You might wonder what the aliens are doing here (see Alien Abduction).
Almost all crop circles are known to have been caused by pranksters. In 1991 UFOlogists and artists Doug Bower and David Chorley admitted to faking 250 circles in England, including the first to appear in the 1970s. To make the circles, they used their feet, string and a board. There remain a small number of puzzling circles in which the biological structure of the flattened plants has changed. Sometimes in these circles the local magnetic field appears to have been affected, resulting in electrical equipment failure, even in airplanes flying overhead.
Cerealogists (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture) speculate on a number of origins for these non-prankster circles. The favoured theories are that they are caused by eddies in the Earth’s magnetic field or by “plasma vortices”, mini-tornadoes of electrically charged gas. The plasma vortices theory, propounded by meteorologist Dr Terence Meaden, would account for the apparent heat burst in a crop circle which causes nodes on affected plants to burst. Meaden also hypothesized that a plasma vortex would create a whining sound. When, in 1991, a couple claimed they’d been standing in the middle of a crop circle as it formed, a whining sound is exactly what they said they’d heard.
Crop circles are caused by aliens: ALERT LEVEL 4
Further Reading
Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews, Circular Evidence^ 1989
Jim Schnabel, Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers, 1994
DEAD SEA SCROLLS
In early 1947, near Qumran on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin herder named Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed (or el-Dhib, “the Wolf”) tossed a stone into a cave in an attempt to flush out a missing goat. To his surprise there came back not the bleat of a goat but the sound of pottery breaking. Entering the cave, he found an ancient jar containing scrolls wrapped in linen. Later, through the offices of a local cobbler and antiquities dealer, Khalil Eskander Shahin (“Kando”), el-Dhib managed to sell some of the scrolls he’d discovered, and word slowly spread about the discoveries in the desert. The first archaeological excavations took place in February 1949. In 1952, another series of caves was found, and eventually over 800 scrolls were recovered from 11 caves around Wadi Qumran. The scrolls – many of which exist only as fragments – include versions of all but one book of the Old Testament, along with Biblical commentaries, non-Biblical texts on religious conduct, and oddities such as the Copper Scroll, which lists the hiding places for treasure in Israel. Mostly written in Hebrew, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon-dated to as early as 200 BC. The scrolls thus include the earliest edition of the Bible; before Mohammed el-Dhib tossed his stone into that cave, the oldest known Bible was the Ben Asher text, written in ad 1008.
Most of the discovered scrolls were published promptly, the notable exception being the scrolls and fragments found in Cave 4, which repres
ented nearly 40 per cent of the total Qumran material. The publication of the Cave 4 documents was entrusted to an “International Team” led by Father Roland de Vaux, a Domincan scholar from Jerusalem, and all others were barred from even viewing the material by the so-called “secrecy rule”. Even after de Vaux’s death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to allow publication even of photographs of the Cave 4 finds. Speculation began that the “International Team”, predominantly Catholic, had found something in the Cave 4 that it sought to hide. Fanning the fires of surmise were the academics Andre Dupont-Sommer and John Allegro, who noted that the “Teacher of Righteousness” described in some of the Qumran documents strangely paralleled Jesus the Messiah. Then Professor Robert Eisenman, another Scrolls scholar, pumped pure oxygen into the blazing speculations: he mooted that the “Teacher of Righteousness” was actually James, Jesus’s brother, and that James was the true founder of Christianity. Paul (Saul), in Eisenman’s theory, was a Roman fink seeking to bring James’s true Word into disrepute.
All the Dead Sea Scrolls controversy needed in order to flare up into a full-scale conspiracy theory was a couple of savvy writers on the look-out for a religious story to follow their hit book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh energetically purpled up the musings of Dupont-Sommer, Allegro and Eisenman into the theory that de Vaux was a Vatican fixer who sought to bury (literally) texts found in Cave 4 which proved that Jesus’s life was mythicized by Paul, a Roman agent who faked his “conversion” in order to undermine anti-Roman messianic cults. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, in other words, suggested that the Vatican, Paul’s church, was illegitimate – and that Christianity pre-dated Christ. Small wonder, if this were true, that de Vaux worked overtime in Cave 4 burying the evidence. Baigent and Leigh’s book became a bestseller.
Among Old Testament scholars there was no consensus on the Qumran documents. Some believed them to have been produced on site by a Jewish apocalyptic cult, the Essenes, while Karl Rengstorf of the University of Minister asserted that the Qumran scrolls had been taken from the Jewish temple in Jerusalem for safekeeping during the siege of AD 67–70, a view supported by Professor Norman Golb of Chicago. In a sense the strength of Baigent and Leigh’s case was the weakness and uncertainty of the alternatives.
Even on its publication, however, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception looked a shaky proposition, and time has tumbled it to ruin. Far from being a Vatican hit-squad, the “International Team” comprised scholars of several Christian denominations, one of whom, Millar Burrows, wrote:
It is quite true that as a liberal Protestant I do not share all the beliefs of my more conservative brethren. It is my considered conclusion, however, that if one will go through any of the historic statements of Christian faith he will find nothing that has been or can be disproved by the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is as true of things that I myself do not believe as it is of my most firm and cherished convictions. If I were so rash as to undertake a theological debate with a professor from either the Moody Bible Institute or Fordham University [a Catholic University] – which God forbid – I fear I should find no ammunition in the Dead Sea Scrolls to use against them.
Repeated carbon testing of the scrolls dates them to the last two centuries BC, a dating which agrees with archaeological and palaeographic evidence. Unless all the carbon-testing machines used have faulty meters, or the test results were faked, the scrolls pre-date Christ and have no bearing on the foundation of Christianity at all.
In the same year that The Dead Sea Deception hit the shelves, so began the publishing of all the scrolls so far found – and the claim that the Vatican was suppressing controversial scrolls was dealt a sledgehammer blow. The delay in publishing the contents of Cave 4 was largely due to innocent factors. As Florentine Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera write in The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices:
The real explanations for the delay in the publication of the texts are many and varied. The war, a tangled political situation and the premature death of the first two directors of the editorial project (Roland de Vaux and Pierre Benoit); also, several of the editors (Patrick Skehan, Yigael Yadin and Jean Starky) died before finishing their work. These are some of the factors which have influenced the present situation. However, the most important factor is the actual condition of the still unpublished texts, hundreds of minute fragments, with pathetic remains of incomplete works.
When the texts in question have been preserved in relatively large fragments, the task of reading, translation and interpretation is not extremely complicated. Even texts previously unknown can be published with relative speed. However, even in such cases, the speed of publication can have disastrous results, as the publication of the first set of texts from Cave 4 proves. Their publication in the official series, under John Allegro, appeared with great speed in 1968. However, this hasty edition (of only 90 pages of text) is so flawed that it cannot be used without the corrections (of over 100 pages) published in 1971 by the later director of the international team for the edition of the texts, John Strugnell, of the University of Harvard.
Martinez and Barrera might have added that academic jealousies also played their role in delay. At one juncture a dispute over which academic team had the right to publish went to court.
Debate over whether the Essenes authored the Dead Sea Scrolls still continues, warmed by archaeological evidence found in 2004, but few outside Baigent and Leigh’s publishing house continue to seriously suggest that the Vatican has hidden scrolls damaging to its faith. The Dead Sea Scrolls is one alleged cover-up that can have the last rites read over it.
The Vatican suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls which rocked the foundations of the Catholic faith: ALERT LEVEL 1
Further Reading
John Allegro, “The Untold Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls”, Harper’s, August 1966
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception: Why a Handful of Religious Scholars Conspired to Suppress the Revolutionary Contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1991
Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for over 35 Years, 1992
Florentino Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera, The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices, tr Wilfred G. E. Watson, 1995
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
It was news that shocked the world. In the early hours (GMT) of Sunday 31 August 1997, reports started coming from Paris that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been injured in a car accident. Then came updates reporting she was dead. Also killed in the car crash in the tunnel beneath Pont de l’Alma were Diana’s lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul. Dodi’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured.
The cause of the crash seemed clear. Chased by paparazzi on motorcycles, Paul had driven too fast – 75 mph (120kph) according to one French police estimate – into the tunnel, clipped a white Fiat Uno and, in overcorrecting, had swerved the Mercedes S280 into the thirteenth pillar. There were also reports that he had been drinking. None of the occupants had been wearing seatbelts.
Autumn seemed to come early to Britain that year, as a stunned nation shed tears for “the Queen of Hearts”. As the sorrow subsided, people began to wonder how the female icon of the latter half of the 20th century, the most famous and photographed woman on the planet, could have died in something so mundane as a car crash.
Perhaps, people began to say, it wasn’t an accident. The loudest voice of suspicion belonged to Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of the Harrods department store. According to Al-Fayed, Diana and his son were assassinated. Al-Fayed even named the guilty party: Prince Philip of the British Royal Family. Naturally, Philip didn’t dirty his hands personally – he ordered the security service MI6 to carry out the hit on his 36-year-old daughter-in-law. There are legion other Diana co
nspiracies (it was the IRA whatdunnit, it was Le Cercle who sponsored her death because of her opposition to wealth-generating landmines, she was a ritual sacrifice by Satanists, she faked her death to live a paparazzi-free life . . .) but Al-Fayed’s retains the pole position.
In his view, the British Royal Family needed Diana eliminated because she had become pregnant by Dodi and intended to marry him. Their child would be a Muslim half-brother to the second and third in line to throne, an impossible embarrassment to the white, Anglican Windsors. Al-Fayed claims that Diana told him personally that her life had been threatened. “The person who is spearheading these threats,” she said, “is Prince Philip.” Diana also told a number of other people that she feared for her life. In his account of life as Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty (2003), Paul Burrell recorded that ten months before her death she wrote to him claiming that “XXXX is planning an ’accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.” She also told her voice coach Peter Settelen that she thought that her former lover, bodyguard Barry Mannakee, had been murdered in a faked motorcycle crash. Evidently, Diana had concerns over safety. And the Windsors had a motive of sorts.