



Videodrome – Riot Control – Freemasons

Jack the Ripper – Illuminati – JFK Assassination

Mark Stewart – Robert Anton Wilson



‘Vague is an extremely intense, radical, funny, el cheapo, deep-biting English mag with indescribable assortment of subject matter. Ugly as sin, but invaluable.’ Ivan Stang Sub-Genius Foundation

‘Vague has slack; Vague has Sub-Genius brag; Vague has discord and anarchy; Vague has Situationism, psychic terrorism, helter skelter urban shamanism, conspiracy, paranoia and manipulation. It has captured, hi-jacked and bound the current that at times drove Oz in the 60s. Vague cries out for, and defies, censorship and suppression. Vague is the underground overground.’ Joel Biroco Kaos

Vague 18/19 Control Data Manual was a conspiracy theory greatest hits featuring JFK, Jack the Ripper, Freemasons, the Illuminati, the occult roots of Nazism, Neoism, Hassan i Sabbah, Charles Manson, Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, Scientology, Church of the Sub-Genius, Worldwide Alienation Inc by Mark Stewart, Videodrome – the hyper-Situationist theory of Mark Downham, etc, etc.

Videodrome Programming Phenomena The Thing In Room 101 by Mark Downham. In the Videodrome no one can hear you scream. “You asked me once”, said O’Blivion, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world… The Videodrome.” Video-spectacular life revolves around twin self-reflexive switches that activate us: Control (Authority and Obedience) and Behaviour (Production and Consumption). The Videodrome is the enigma of the thing: not simply as object and commodity, but as pure object and absolute commodity. The Videodrome is the point where the image is more concretised, more commodified than the commodity.

The Spectacle now has a new organisation of appearances – video DNA life, the hyperreal; more deadly than deadly, the vampiric carnage of virulent description; and yet it moves with seemingly purposive intelligence. Bending sound as the electron gun in the cathode ray tube scans the frequencies that put your brain in the alpha wave state, the relaxed state; and this totalitarianised electro-technic Oceania dredges the oceans of your subconscious in preparation for the embedding. The Spectacle is going through an evolutionary jump and is becoming more than the facility with which images can be detached and alienated from their sources and reorganised for representation in accord with initial stages of the Spectacle; where everything that was once directly experienced has already shifted in to its own representation.

The Spectacle has always been more than just a collection of images; and the Spectacular Videodrome is much more than just a social relation among people mediated by images, more than capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image – it is a video DNA gestalt. The Videodrome is Debordment overflow; it is hyper-visibility; here even terrorism is a neurosis – the violence of a society without secrets; totally media-transparent, a spectacular gesture from the see-through silent age. In the Videodrome there is nowhere to hide, there are only terminals, and we use the terminals for our alienated experiences – the spectacle of our deepest fears. It is so much television that it isn’t television at all… The Videodrome is your deepest secret fears played back to you, come back to plague you – it is the destruction of the autonomous imagination…

JFK Assassination ‘The motorcade passes the Texas School Book Depository and moves slowly toward the triple underpass. At the 6th floor window, Lee Harvey Oswald sights carefully through the Carcano-Mannlicher: his mouth is dry, desert dry. But his heart beat is normal; and no sweat stands out on his forehead. This is the moment, he is thinking, the one moment transcending time and hazard, heredity and environment, the final test and proof of free will and of my right to call myself a man. In this moment, now as I tighten the trigger, the tyrant dies, and with him all the lies of a cruel, mendacious epoch. It is a supreme exaltation, this moment and this knowledge: and yet his mouth is dry, dust-dry, dry as death, as if his salivary glands alone rebelled against the murder which his intellect pronounced necessary and just.

‘Now: He recalls the military formula BASS: Breath, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. He breathes, he aims, he slacks, he starts to squeeze, as a dog barks suddenly – And his mouth falls open in astonishment as 3 shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the grassy knoll and triple underpass. “Son-of-a-bitch”, he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better – omniscience. That smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it: I know something you don’t know. That grimace only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped 2 bullets into Lee’s frail fanatic body, and its secret went with him to the grave.’ Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson Illuminatus volume 1 page 23

Illuminati/Hassan-i-Sabbah/Adam Weishaupt “Nothing is true. Everything is permissible.” Hassan-i-Sabbah. ‘Illuminati project memo 5: The nightmarish story begins in 1090AD in the middle east when Hassan-i-Sabbah founded the Ismaelian sect, or Hashishin, so called because of their use of hashish, a deadly drug derived from the hemp plant which is better known as the killer weed marijuana. The cult terrorised the Muslim world until Genghis Khan’s Mongols brought law and order to the area. Cornered in their mountain hideaway, the Hashishin dope fiends proved no match for the clean-living Mongol warriors, their fortress was destroyed, and their dancing girls shipped to Mongolia for rehabilitation. The heads of the cult fled westward. The Illuminati surfaced next in Bavaria in 1776. Adam Weishaupt, a student of the occult, studied the teachings of Hassan-i-Sabbah and grew hemp in his backyard. On February 2 1776 Weishaupt achieved illumination. Weishaupt officially founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria on May 1 1776.

‘Illuminati project memo 7: No historian knows what happened to Adam Weishaupt after he was exiled from Bavaria in 1785, and entries in Washington’s diary after that date frequently refer to the hemp crop at Mount Vernon. The possibility that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place, serving as first president for 2 terms, is now confirmed. The 2 main colours of the American flag are, excluding a small patch of blue in one corner, red and white; these are the colours of the Hashishin… Memo 16: The Nazi party was founded as an appendage of the Thule society, an extremist fringe of the Illuminated lodge of Berlin. This lodge in turn was made up of Rosicrucians – high freemasons – and its preoccupation was mourning the death of the feudal system. Masons at this time were, like the Federalist party in post-revolutionary America, working diligently to prevent anarchy and preserve the old values by bringing about Christian socialism…’

Jack the Ripper Murder By Decree by Tom Vague first published in Zigzag 1985; deservedly spoofed in the Jack the Crimper flyer by God Told Me To Do It: Although the reign of terror that swept the East End of London with the Whitechapel murders is not quite a hundred years ago, Jack the Ripper has become as much a part of British folklore as Guy Fawkes, Robin Hood and King Arthur. And despite his hideous acts, he’s shrouded in at least as much romance and mystery as the aforementioned. Not to mention Hammer house London smog. The Casebook on Jack the Ripper by Richard Whittington-Egan sets the scene thus: ‘The gas-lit, Holmesian period atmosphere, viewed from a comfortable distance, invests the entire affair and casts a romantic afterglow.’

In 1973 the factional BBC series, The Barlow and Watt Investigation into the Whitechapel murders was prompted by a new theory that emerged around 1970. As it seemed that there was nothing left to say on the subject, a sensational article had appeared accusing Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence of being Jack the Ripper, causing a revival of Ripper-mania. The BBC put a features and drama crew on the case to get ‘the final word on Jack the Ripper’. At New Scotland Yard they found the legendary closed file on the Whitechapel murders wasn’t to be opened until 1992. Instead they got a tip-off from a senior Yard man to contact one Joseph Sickert. He told them of a marriage between the Duke of Clarence and a commoner; the murder victims had been the witnesses and the whole affair a macabre cover up.

Stephen Knight, the author of Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, initially approached Joseph Sickert for a local press follow-up story after the Barlow and Watt TV series. His description of the old man on first sight was ‘rugged and aristocratic’. Joseph Sickert described his mother as a nervous woman who had spent her childhood in workhouses and gave the impression that she was burdened with some dreadful secret; adding that she would become particularly tense and nervous when she saw a policeman. According to Joseph, when he came of age, his father, the Impressionist painter Walter Sickert, told him the royal Ripper story.

Prince Albert Victor, known as Eddy, was showing no inclination towards his royal duties and was a big disappointment to his father Prince Edward (later Edward VII). His doting mother, Princess Alexandra decided that he would be better suited to artistic circles than the academic world. So she asked Walter Sickert to take him under his artistic wing. He introduced him to Cleveland Street, which runs parallel with Tottenham Court Road, then a thriving Bohemian community of artists, writers and revolutionaries including William Morris and Bernard Shaw. There Prince Eddy met and fell in love with Annie Elizabeth Crook, an occasional model for Sickert. He’s more commonly thought to have been involved in the gay Cleveland Street scandal, though that doesn’t rule him out as a Ripper suspect.

In 1885 Annie Crook gave birth to a baby girl, Alice Margaret. Shortly after Eddy and Annie were married at a Catholic ceremony. The witnesses were Walter Sickert and the Irish nanny Mary Kelly. Sickert himself married that year and began to travel back and forth to Dieppe, where he painted some of his finest works. In due course news of Prince Eddy’s dangerous liaison reached the Queen, who wrote to the prime minister Lord Salisbury commanding him to deal with the situation. As Stephen Knight puts it, Lord Salisbury ‘could see that Eddy had been sowing not only wild oats, but the seeds of revolution.’ In Ireland Victoria was known as ‘the famine queen’, there had been bombings and assassination attempts and in 1887 the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riot in Trafalgar Square.

In Walter Sickert’s story recalled by his son, in early 1888 a raid was staged under the cover of a street brawl in which Prince Eddy and Annie Crook were bundled into separate cabs, never to see each other again. Annie was certified insane and ended up in an asylum. But somehow Mary Kelly escaped from Cleveland Street with their child and hid her in the East End. She got the child to Sickert, who put her in the care of poor relatives and she eventually became his ward in Dieppe. Meanwhile Mary Kelly had confided in a group of Whitechapel prostitutes that she had fallen in with and a blackmail plot was hatched. According to the Sickert story, this set in motion a masonic conspiracy to silence the women orchestrated by the queen’s physician Sir William Gull.

In the autumn of 1888 the gruesome murders were committed according to time honoured masonic ritual, with the assistance of Prince Eddy’s former coachman John Netley. Mary Ann Nichols (in Buck’s Row), Annie Chapman (in Hanbury Street) and Long Liz Stride (in Berner Street) were enticed into Netley’s cab, where Gull would be waiting for them. Thus explaining the short space of time in which the murders and the complicated gory finishing touches took place. Sickert claimed there was a third party in the conspiracy, none other than Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who deliberately fuelled the terror and panic to confirm masonic supremacy. But something went wrong and Catherine Eddowes became the 4th victim in Mitre Square, instead of the original target Mary Kelly. So there was a lull in the proceedings until the day of the Lord Mayor’s show, when Mary Kelly became the final victim in Dorset Street and Jack the Ripper disappeared.

The best evidence of the masonic Ripper theory is the writing on the wall. As re-enacted in Murder by Decree (and From Hell), a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ blood-soaked apron was found in the passageway of 108-119 Wentworth Buildings on Goulston Street off Petticoat Lane (Middlesex Street). Above it on the wall was chalked: ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ This wasn’t a miss-spelt incitement to anti-Semitism, as was originally thought, but an incriminating reference to the mythical mason murder during the construction of Solomon’s temple around which all masonic ritual is based. The Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Charles Warren, another high-ranking freemason, came to the scene to wipe away the only piece of evidence the Ripper left. The passageway, opposite the Last Resort skinhead shop, is one of the few remaining Ripper sites, albeit boarded-up and about to be demolished by the looks of it.

In Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Stephen Knight dismissed the other Ripper theories; Leather Apron – the mad pork butcher, the mad Russian doctor, an escaped gorilla, Jill the Ripper, and Montague Druitt – the sexually insane doctor. ‘I’m not a butcher, nor a Yid, nor yet a foreign skipper, but I’m your own light-hearted friend, yours truly, Jack the Ripper.’





Tom Vague

(Vague Publishing, 1987)



now out of print

