The Lizard King?
Thanks a lot to the anonymous commentor who pointed us in the direction of the Wikipedia page on David Icke, in which it was claimed until recently that Icke believes that Decent Dave is a "high order reptilian" (ie a member of the hidden race of Annunaki lizards from the fourth dimension who have imprisoned our higher selves in a cage of negative vibrations in order to feed on our fear and hate. God it's frightening how much of this stuff comes back even three years after I last read an Icke book). It appears that this claim has been removed from the Wikipedia by an administrator called SlimVirgin (probably therefore not a pseudonym for Dave), but here is the version with the claim in it.
I have done a bit of research on the net and it is true, however. That is, it is true that Icke does claim it, you silly bastards. I am not linking to any pages on which the claim is made because all of them appear in the context of quite lurid and disgusting wild accusations made against a variety of people including Aaro and I am not in the business of linking to things like that (for the curious but not curious enough to do your own research, among Icke's conspiracy theories is that he's a believer in Satanic ritual abuse, and it appears that Dave crossed his radar screen a few years ago by writing something slightly sceptical about its existence). It is not exactly difficult to reproduce my results if you are feeling sceptical and have access to google and a brain.
In my opinion, Icke has gone long past the point at which he should be given the benefit of the doubt over whether his "lizards" are anti-Semitic code talk; either they are or he is being absolutely culpably negligent. If you don't believe me, look in "Tales from the Time Loop" in which it is much more blatant than his earlier books. And he is not actually insane; he just believes a lot of stupid things (which is of course not even a disqualification for winning the George Orwell prize). He's a bastard right enough.
So it is doubly, triply irresponsible of me to reproduce these pictures and invite readers to speculate on whether they can sort of see what Icke means:
Oooh gosh it's making my skin crawl. I am told by a friend in the psychology trade that it is not particularly uncommon to have hallucinations of animal faces in human beings, and lizards have always been among the most common animals to hallucinate. It has only happened to me once (with respect to BBC news presenter Gavin Esler, who I maintain does fucking look like a lizard even on a stone cold sober Sunday lunchtime) and it was really scary. Quick lads, post more material so we can drive those photos off the front page.
Dave is currently asking for suggestions for music to jog to. I have suggested the obvious Doors track but without any high hopes of surviving the moderation process.
I have done a bit of research on the net and it is true, however. That is, it is true that Icke does claim it, you silly bastards. I am not linking to any pages on which the claim is made because all of them appear in the context of quite lurid and disgusting wild accusations made against a variety of people including Aaro and I am not in the business of linking to things like that (for the curious but not curious enough to do your own research, among Icke's conspiracy theories is that he's a believer in Satanic ritual abuse, and it appears that Dave crossed his radar screen a few years ago by writing something slightly sceptical about its existence). It is not exactly difficult to reproduce my results if you are feeling sceptical and have access to google and a brain.
In my opinion, Icke has gone long past the point at which he should be given the benefit of the doubt over whether his "lizards" are anti-Semitic code talk; either they are or he is being absolutely culpably negligent. If you don't believe me, look in "Tales from the Time Loop" in which it is much more blatant than his earlier books. And he is not actually insane; he just believes a lot of stupid things (which is of course not even a disqualification for winning the George Orwell prize). He's a bastard right enough.
So it is doubly, triply irresponsible of me to reproduce these pictures and invite readers to speculate on whether they can sort of see what Icke means:
Oooh gosh it's making my skin crawl. I am told by a friend in the psychology trade that it is not particularly uncommon to have hallucinations of animal faces in human beings, and lizards have always been among the most common animals to hallucinate. It has only happened to me once (with respect to BBC news presenter Gavin Esler, who I maintain does fucking look like a lizard even on a stone cold sober Sunday lunchtime) and it was really scary. Quick lads, post more material so we can drive those photos off the front page.
Dave is currently asking for suggestions for music to jog to. I have suggested the obvious Doors track but without any high hopes of surviving the moderation process.
posted by The Rioja Kid at 1/24/2006 11:37:00 PM
14 Comments:
by the way, I don't understand why people shell out all that money for Photoshop. Microsoft Paint is just as good.
I'm with Jon Ronson on David Icke.
His view is that Icke's talk of lizards etc is not code, but he is actually talking about lizards.
I think Ronson's view is that Icke is not anti-semitic, although some of his followers may be.
(See Ronson's book:'Them')
Mind you, unlike Bruschetta Boy, I have not read his later stuff - so I could be wrong.
Hi,
Having checked the page on Wiki, you are quite right, it has been deleted since I posted last night. One wonders if they are scared of being sued. I was astonished to see Icke has supposedly listed Aaronovitch as a reptilian and I thought it was hilarious. I have never read Icke's books, the last I had heard of him was his 'Son of God' pronouncements until a few years back when i seen the Jon Ronson series on Channel 4. Since then, I've read up a bit on the net about his writings and considered him, by and large, to be a fairly harmless wingnut. He certainly makes me laugh. I'd never bought into the allegations of anti-semetism made against him but nowadays I am not so sure. On that same Wiki page, it says Icke has identified 'blue-eyed whites' as the group most prone
to 'reptilian influence'. If you check out Icke's own website, there are plenty of articles he or his webmaster puts up there (many not written by Icke himself, but even so, and I'm not talking about message board posts but actual articles) which have references to 'Aryans' being taken over by 'reptilian parasites' and so on. He also has described the far-right American magazine Spotlight as excellent. If Icke really isn't an anti-semite writing in code, he's doing a good impression of one. Either that, or he is being fed this stuff by anti-semites and is stupid enough to fall for it.
Still, I can't help feeling that Icke really is talking about lizards at times and that he is serious about some kind of alien connection but that there is also a real anti-semetic element in there as well.
It did worry me that Icke may have picked on Aaronovitch because of his Jewish heritage. On the other hand, Littlejohn isn't Jewish, but he is a staunch defender of Israel, as is Melanie Philips. But even if Icke was picking on Jews and pro-Zionists, it dosen't explain why he would pick on the others. Jim Davidson is certainly a right-wing Tory but a Zionist? Kris Kristopherson and Boxcar Willie? I heard Icke traces people's bloodlines and that he found that all 40-odd US presidents are from the same bloodlines (mostly not Jewish bloodlines I should say) and are related to many royal and aristocratic families in Europe. Supposedly there is a great deal of truth in this, although Icke was by means the first person to discover most of this and he introduces his theory that these bloodlines are 'reptilian'. Icke presumably finds certain other famous people to also have the same ancestors and so the likes of Kristopherson, Jim Davidson and Boxcar Willie get accused of being shape-shifting lizards and even Satanists and child abusers purely on the basis of that they are distant cousins of Prince Philip. However, if Icke has indeed done Aaronovitch's genelogy and that is why he has picked on him, this may indicate that Aaro might be some kind of minor Royal without him knowing it. I think in Aaro's case though, it's more likely that Icke picked on him because he has attacked him quite a bit in the past in his Guardian columns (although you could be right about the ritual abuse article arousing Icke's suspicions).
I'm curious to see if Aaro will write anything in response since he has a predictably low opinion of Icke and has sometimes mentioned his reptoid conspiracy theories in his columns. It may come as something of a surprise to learn that Icke has actually implicated him as being an alien shape-shifter.
looking at the guy's wikipedia history of edits, it looks to me as if he just doesn't like great big long lists of alleged lizards, which is arguably fair enough. I daresay if someone added it to the Aaro page it might stick although I don't propose to do this myself
I'll disagree with your assertion that Icke isn't insane. He plainly is. That he has episodes of lucidity and competence, that he can stay coherent long enough to speechify for a couple of hours and even apply a sort of charm or charisma doesn't disqualify him from being mad. He believes in things which aren't there, and does so consistently, and not under the effects of intoxication, delerium, fever, or any sort of poisoning. These delusions impact him emotionally and render him incapable of calm interactions with other people. (Lots of religious people believe in things which aren't there; but most of them are in control of their moods.)
As Louis Theroux says in tehgrauiad (quoted in Wikipedia):
Not only might [accusations of anti-semitism] be unfair to Icke, but by implying that he is so dangerous that he has to be censored, the watchdogs are giving a patina of seriousness to ideas that are - let's face it - very, very silly.
In Jon Ronson's "Them", IIRC, Icke was accused by a genuine anti-Semite conspiracy theorist of being part of the conspiracy and sent to discredit him. The other thing about Icke (and I've read none of his books) is that there isn't anyone he actually likes when it comes down to it.
It's an interesting question which is unlikely to ever be answered as Icke is frankly unlikely to seek the assistance of a proper psychologist.
I think that in the legal sense he's clearly not mad; if David Icke killed someone tomorrow he would stand trial for murder as it is clear that he knows what he is doing. Otoh you are right that he has had at least one serious episode in which he got a lot of his funny beliefs - there are some references in one of his books, I forget which, to something very odd having happened to him while doing kundalini yoga.
But in his everyday weirdoing about town I don't think one can call him mad in the normal sense. He doesn't hear voices except when taking psychedelic drugs and his paranoia doesn't have the usual edge one would associate with a paranoid schizophrenic; he does believe that lizards are out to kill him, but he thinks they will do it in a reasonably normal manner rather than say by sending cancer through invisible beams that travel through doorknobs.
It's sort of like a Philip K Dick story (I realise I am not helping my case that he isn't a loony here). If it was actually true that there were Annunaki lizards infiltrating our bloodlines etc etc, and you found out this fact, then presumably you'd try to do something about it, and you might end up saying things that a lot of people thought were insane. Is Doctor Who mad? (I remember seeing someone once argue that Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes on a whole new level of meaning when you realise it's actually a program about a young woman who is a serious paranoid schizophrenic, drug user and serial killer). There have been a hell of a lot of sane people who believed in more or less everything contained in "And the truth will set you free ..." (Icke's first book, pre-lizards) and the lizard thing only really adds a few bits and pieces of African myth to it, which are also believed by a lot of sane people.
I think it was Alex Jones the Texan conspiracist who made the "turd in a punchbowl" comment about Icke quoted in the Ronson book and it's a common opinion among conspiracists that Icke is in some way a plant. Alex Jones is another of those guys who I consider to be sane, although you would not necessarily guess this from either his radio show or his behaviour on a couple of email lists.
Well the tenets of lizardarianism are neither more provable nor more irrational than those of Christianity and Islam, to name a couple. What it lacks is theological maturity - a way of accommodating the fact that most people aren't true beleievers or enemies, but neither here nor there. To give an example, since Aaro once criticized something that Icke believes in, he is therefore a supernumiary of the big lizard in the sky.
What David Icke needs to do is to develop a more rounded picture by getting to grips with the day to day realities of the education system. Perhaps he could join the legions of social entrepreneurs that Aaro tells us are gagging to take our children in hand once the government has freed our schools.
That way, too, Icke could learn that in supporting his efforts, Aaro has revealed hismelf to be non-reptilian, and a heartwarming understanding could be reached between two passionate idealists.
It's a win-win situation.
I will update this old joke by pointing out that while David Icke asks us to believe in things like lizards where there is no evidence at all that they exist, there are plenty of Aaro's mates who want us to believe in things like Iraqi nuclear weapons where there is plenty of evidence that they don't
I would add it to Aaro's own page but I imagine it would be deleted within a week or so. Somehow I think the moderators would prefer to keep Icke's reptilian allegations about various individuals to Icke's own page. Besides, I have an account with Wikipedia so if I edit a page, my name comes up and I don't particularly want to be accused of vandalism or of spreading dubious conspiracy theories by other users. Besides, if you add the reptoid allegations to Aaro's page I suppose it's only fair to do the same with everyone else he accuses and adding 'cold-blooded reptile who feeds off negative human emotions and ignorance' to Richard Littlejohn's biography is probably just stating the obvious. Still, if anyone without an account at Wiki wants to go and add something along the lines of 'Aaronovitch has recently been accused of being an extraterrestrial shape-shifting reptile by world-renowned political commentator and author David Icke' to his biography, I suppose it would be quite amusing.
I don't know about Icke's sanity. I remember reading at the time of his famous appearance on Wogan that a gentleman claiming to be Icke's psychiatrist telephoned Wogan's producer a few hours prior to Icke's scheduled appearance and demanded that they did not let Icke appear on the show as he was in the midst of emerging psychosis, on the verge of a breakdown and was delusional. Supposedly the producer put this to Icke and he admitted he was seeing a psychiatrist but that he didn't know what he was talking about as he was assuming his very real spiritual awakening was the symptom of a psychosis. No psychiatrist would state that it is to be assumed that anybody who considers themselves to have had real spiritual or mystical experiences is in some way mentally ill so I assume the psychiatrist had more serious grounds for claiming Icke was in a psychosis. Possibly Icke's claims that voices in his hotel room were telling him he was 'chosen' and the 'Son of God' and that Armageddon was just around the corner, coupled with Icke's rather nervous and jumpy behaviour, helped him to draw his conclusions. I have no idea whether this account is true, but if it is in any way true, then I think it would be pretty disgraceful that the Wogan team allowed Icke to go on the show and make a complete fool of himself and wreck his career.
I do suspect something is not right with Icke. His behaviour on the Ronson documentary was very alarming, for instance at the airport in Canada when he starts yelling at airport attendants about lizards and about how it 'isn'nt a Jewish Plot! No, No, No!' and his screaming matches started by the least provocation and paranoid accusations against various radio and TV interviewers that are probably part of the lizard conspiracy simply because they don't want to interview him or disagree with him, is all pretty disturbing. The intensity of his bizarre beliefs and his paranoid fixations are worrying. I don't think he is 'insane' in the true sense, but you can't help feeling that something isn't quite right and that he really is at least slightly unbalanced. Alex Jones certainly believes weird things (at times patently absurd things), though nowhere near as weird as Icke, but he dosent strike me as anything more than a conspiracy theorist and a fantasist, he seems in no way unbalanced or 'delusional' in the true psychiatric sense.
I suppose whether Icke is really insane depends on your definition of insanity. If R.D Laing was still here he would probably assert that nobody has a right to label Icke 'insane' because of his beliefs or his view of reality because there are millions of people who would be labeled 'normal' by common consent who believe things which are probably at least as irrational as Icke's lizard theories. As the last poster pointed out, Aaro is something of case in point, at least to some extent. He seems to honestly believe that Blair's foreign policy is guided by concern for the oppressed and that he wants to 'liberate' such people from their evil tyranical rulers, and conflicting evidence simply dosent have any impact an Aaro's irrational and fantasy prone thought processes, such as the fact that Blair's government enthusiastically promotes British weapons sales to other, more favoured tyrannies (including one which boils it's political opponents to death) and that Blair himself has said that objections to Saudi human rights abuses, most notably beheadings, are misunderstandings based on our lack of respect for Saudi culture (if he were PM 20 years ago he'd probably have been saying much the same about Saddam's Iraq). Doubtless he also entertains the idea that Bush and Cheney sit around discussing which oppressed people they can spend billions of dollars liberating next, purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. Blair himself, of course, is capable of watching news footage of Hurricane Katrina and convincing himself that the fact he is seeing pictures of poor black people having their lives devastated by a natural disaster is in fact evidence of an anti-American propaganda conspiracy at the BBC. He also moves the furniture around in Downing Street occasionally in order to enhance the 'vibrations' in the room and improve the chances of him having a successful premiership, or at least he did when Carole Caplin was advising him. I'll bet Alex James dosen't do that was his furniture.
Also, Aaro has a tendency nowaydays to dismiss certain versions of events that contradict his views as a 'conspiracy theory'. He is started to use the term reflexively, rather like the Prime Minister himself. It has struck me at times that, like Blair, he uses the term to try and ridicule and quickly dismiss arguments he dosent like without having to actually argue against them. Of course Aaro seems keen to believe in what is certainly the most famous, genuine paranoid conspiracy theory of recent years - that Saddam's Iraq was developing WMD and had extensive ties with their his idealogical arch enemy, Osama bin Laden.
Very sensible, anonymous (btw you can pick the "Other" option and give yourself a nickname on our site without using a Blogger account, it really does help to keep track of who's saying what). I'd forgotten that at the time of the turqoise suits he was hearing voices, but as I say today he appears to run a pretty successful publishing business. I am inclined not to regard his behaviour in the Ronson doco as particularly evident of insanity; he was being provoked and baited to a quite extraordinary degree. I think that, like Alex James, he might have got so far into the whole Protocols/Illuminati/Rothschilds thing that he no longer has a clear concept of what anti-Semitism means. Rather like the current management of Harry's Place who put up like a million posts about how Muslims oppress women and threaten democracy, and how Muslims are getting preferential treatment while Christians get screwed by dhimmi PC fascists and then say "how come my site is full of BNP members?". And that's about as much benefit of doubt as I'm prepared to give.
I like this line from Anon's link
"David Icke...bringing up the possibility that a group of people who act all the time as if they were cold-blooded power-mad reptiles who thrive on creating fear and hostility, might actually be cold-blooded power-mad reptiles who thrive on creating fear and hostility."
I take your point, I'll use lots of imagination and simply use my first name. Incidentally, I'm not the anon who posted the link to the old joke, I'm the other anon on here, just so you know.
Having checked his site out again, Icke's got an article on there written by someone else informing him that while he is quite right to assert that it isn't a 'Jewish Plot', he dosen't make enough of the fact that many of the people involved in the upper echelons of the conspiracy 'just happen to be Jewish'. Having asserted that he isn't most definately anti-semetic, this person then goes on to list all the Jews he can think of in positions of power in the US and UK and even Jewish celebrities who he suspects of being Illuminati (for no other reason then they are famous and Jewish, as far as I can tell). He mentions our very own Aaro, and asserts that Alexei Sayle and 'anti-British comedian Mark Thomas' are Jews who are definate members of the conspiracy. Alexei Sayle?! Now I didn't even know Mark Thomas was Jewish, but presumably he is 'anti-British' because he criticises what he views as Britain's imperialist foreign policy, so while this guy complains about the label anti-semetism getting casually thrown around to silence critics of Israel, he's happy to do the same when it comes to terms like anti-British and probably anti-American as well. Strangely, his friend David Icke, who he seems to so admire, also criticises British foreign policy and goes much further by accusing virtually the entire British ruling elite of being Satanists and child abusers. So why isn't Icke 'anti-British'? Because he isn't left-wing and isn't Jewish perhaps?
The fact that Icke will allow such blatantly racist nonsense to be put up on his site suggests to me one of two things. Either Icke has finally lost the last
vestiges of his critical faculties and is so niave that he cannot see where this person is coming from (which I find rather hard to believe), or Icke himself is an anti-semite. I still have little doubt that Icke really does believe in his alien lizard fantasies to at least some extent, but I'm not sure how much benefit of the doubt can be given to someone who will happily put classic anti-semetic conspiracy propaganda like this on his website.
Incidentally, he also has pages on his webpage suggesting that Hitler may have been a Rothschild and another asking, predictably, 'How Much Did Jim Morrison Know'?
Er... Jim Morrison?
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