The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING

RATS.

Just one of the dirty tricks George W. Bush was accused of in the Stolen Elections of 2000 and 2004 was using subliminal messages—something near imperceptible to the eye, but which the brain records anyway. In a Republican advert dissing Al Gore the word “RATS” appeared for a second before morphing into “THE GORE PRESCRIPTION PLAN: BUREAUCRATS DECIDE”. You can pick out R-A-T-S from “BUREAUCRATS” yourself. The advert was shown 4,400 times.

Subliminal messages first hit the headlines, however, with another horror story, The Exorcist, back in 1973. When it was shown in cinemas, people flocked out vomiting and screaming. Eventually, the filmmakers confessed to having added single frames, lasting for a mere 1/48 of a second, with demon faces into the movie. Conversely, the images of a topless woman in Disney’s The Rescuers presumably had dads glued to their seats.

The power of subliminal messaging inevitably appealed to advertisers who, as Vance Packard’s classic The Hidden Persuaders recorded, manipulated customers by the million. A follow up tome by Dr Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction, contained even more lurid tales of advertising companies sticking in secret messages, mostly of sexual gratification if they want you to buy it. (Sex sells: Coca-Cola’s Australian ad which headlined “Feel the Curves” and had a drawing of a girl practising fellatio hidden in the ice cubes is now a collector’s item.) The ensuing public panic led the Federal Communications Commission to sit and stroke their chins before deciding on 29 January 1974:

Subliminal Programming. The FCC sometimes receives complaints regarding the alleged use of subliminal techniques in radio and television programming. Subliminal programming is designed to be perceived on a subconscious level only. The Commission has held that the use of subliminal perception is inconsistent with the obligations of a licensee and contrary to the public interest because, whether effective or not, such broadcasts are intended to be deceptive.

Under this regulation, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations are banned from knowingly broadcasting programming containing subliminal messages. The FCC issued its regulation in response to a 1974 TV commercial for the toy Husker Du which repeatedly flashed the phrase “Get It”.

End of story? Not quite. Because as the Gore case highlighted, hidden symbols can be dismissed by the accused as a mistake or as coincidence. And so everyone pretty much carried on as before.

But all this selling commodities or denigrating political opponents is penny ante stuff, because the truly important hidden messages are the symbols of the Bavarian Illuminati and its satanic project. Take a look at CBS’s logo with its ocular image, which conspiracists insist is the All-Seeing Eye, the emblem of Freemasonry, the middle-aged white men’s front for the Illuminati. Then turn McDonald’s golden arches clockwise by ninety degrees and you get the number three—a sacred number in Freemasonry, because it symbolizes the Deity. Adidas? Run and have a look at the sports manufacturer’s logo, it is a triangle—another form of three. Texaco’s logo is a pentagram (well, almost), the sign the Illuminati use to mark their territory in much the way a dog pees on a lamppost.

Freakiest of all subliminal messages is on US $20 bill. When folded in half there can be seen the image of the World Trade Center in flames. And so the evil Illuminati announced their intention to the world…

Mmm.

Further Reading

Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 1957

SYNARCHY

Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was a nineteenth-century French conservative philosophe who, looking at the world around him, believed that there was too much competition between the spheres of Economics, Politics, and Religion. Dire Anarchy was about to ensue. To avoid this dread fate, d’Alveydre prescribed a system of rule whereby the top men from all three spheres would work together in a secret circle for peace and prosperity. He lashed together the Greek “syn” (together) and “archy” (rule) to describe this system of harmonious governance by an elite. Come to think of it, he lashed bits of Plato together to make up the philosophy in the first place.

Anyway, so far so explicable; thereafter synarchism became a term that meant almost anything to any homme.

• Some theorists suggest that d’Alveydre was an occultist who telepathically communicated with “ascended masters” of the universe, whose HQ is a cave called Agarttha. For alternative historians Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince d’Alveydre’s occult synarchy is the big conspiratorial beast behind the Priory of Sion, the European Union… Umberto Eco treads similar ground in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum.;

• In 1922, or thereabouts, a Mouvement Synarchtique d’Empire was reportedly formed to replace French democracy with a right-wing dictatorship. The proto-fascists of the “Movement for a Synarchist Empire” were joined in the thirties by a military clique around Admiral Darlan and businessmen who wanted collaboration with Hitler. Vichy France has been defined as synarchy in action. The fullest account of the MSE is contained in a document entitled “Pacte Synarchique”. Which may well be a hoax. A number of academic studies, including Olivier Dard’s La synarchie, le mythe du complot permanent (1998), suggest that French synarchism was non-existent hooey, although the French fascist Cagoule group did draw for “inspiration” on d’Alveydre’s ideas.

• The Executive Intelligence Review of Lyndon LaRouche Jr has published copiously on synarchism, where it is defined as:

a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During the interval from the early 1920s through 1945, it was officially classed by U.S.A. and other nations’ intelligence services under the file name of “Synarchism: Nazi/Communist,” so defined because of its deploying simultaneously both ostensibly opposing pro-communist and extreme right-wing forces for encirclement of a targeted government. Twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creation… It is typified by the followers of the late Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve today… is found among both nominally left-wing and also extreme right-wing factions such as the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal… The underlying authority behind these cults is a contemporary network of private banks of that medieval Venetian model known as fondi.

The neo-Conservative thinker Leo Strauss has certainly wielded influence in the twentieth century, especially in America where economist Paul Wolfowitz and historian Francis Fukuyama might both be termed “Straussians”. Disappointingly, there is little verifiable evidence of an actual synarchist cabal, which is what you would expect from a super-shadowy super-elite. Or a fantasy.

Further Reading

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988

Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, La France vraie ou la Mission des Francais, 1887