taxil may be dead, but his hoax lives on

Even more than a century after Taxil exposed his revelations about our shadowy Satanic overlords as nothing more than a hoax played on the Catholic Church, conspiracy theorists have been recycling it without a second thought.

Illustration by Coke Navarro

You would think that after the legendary Leo Taxil hoax which managed to endure and become the backbone of most modern conspiracy theories, bloggers wouldn’t either fall for the same exact thing, or try to recreate it. Then again, in the world of conspiracies, every hoax or tall tale is just a suppressed truth just struggling to get out and even if a particular line of evidence has been debunked by just about everyone, including their friends’ pet goldfish, it’s still fair game with enough layers of supposed cover-ups layered on top. And it’s in this spirit that a French blog presents the confessions of an anonymous Illuminati defector which follow so closely in Taxil’s footsteps, you can practically hear this detailed and graphic post stepping on the dead writer’s heels.

One of the biggest questions about the Illuminati conspiracies is why they seem to be so popular and find the kind of audience willing to accept the notion that the world is ruled by mysterious, sinister forces. I suppose a vast, organized New World Order pulling strings in the background may be slightly easier to stomach than the idea that today’s big problems are caused by mediocre governing and short-sightedness of politicians along with bad decisions by those in charge of banks and government committees.

At least with nefarious agendas you don’t have to worry about random bouts of mistakes sending us spiraling into war or economic turmoil. If something bad happens, you know it was planned this way by the Illuminati to further their worldwide control. Forget disease outbreaks which experts warned would happen for years, greedy banks plunging economies into chaos and demanding bailouts, acts of terrorism, and spectacular human achievements which could have redefined the future of our entire species. Everything can be tied together and explained as the plans of a hidden order bent on dominating the planet and in those plans lie all the answers to human history.

This round of supposed confessions from an Illuminati defector follows the tradition of attributing all events to those mysterious plans by the shadow government. The text doesn’t get too exotic and it’s more along the line of Jim Marrs’ global Nazi conspiracy potboiler than David Icke’s race of alien lizards controlling the human population with vaccines. Apparently the Illuminati are Satanists with a heavy Occult bent, loathe Israel and in their white supremacist leadership their Jewish members are looked down upon.

And as always, they occupy the boards of banks, high positions in the government and are just waiting to destroy social order as we know it to instill a military takeover of the planet and reshape it in their image. Why they would want to deal with a big mess on their hands and take over using military power instead of international trade unions and using a very quiet and widely accepted phenomenon of globalization to calmly connect the world and reshape cultures is a mystery to me. Aren’t bloodless takeovers much less expensive and far more politically advantageous? That’s one of the biggest reasons why most Illuminati theories smack of outright fear-mongering to me. The plans of those supposedly wise secret rulers of the world seem too strenuous and overcomplicated.

Of course since shock and fear are the kind of reactions conspiracy theorists seek, there’s a very graphic and disturbing description of how the Illuminati train children by putting them in cages and electrocuting them until they’re ready to kill on command to avoid the torture. There are declarations that Satanic ritual abuse is being ignored by the media staffed by journalists handpicked and appointed by the Illuminati.

There are descriptions of how the United States is divided into seven military zones for future conquest. There are references to quite a few dark documents constantly being discussed on InfoWars, Prison Planet and Above Top Secret as being ignored by Illuminati agents in the media. And finally, there’s a declaration that the UN is being used as a tool to rob nations of their independence in a way highly reminiscent of radical right wing conspiracies which paint the UN as using the climate change issue to conquer the world with laws and taxes which it would be able to collect by some mysterious means which seem to be missing from today’s international law and could be ignored quite safely if your nation chooses not to agree to them. Basically, this is the more conservative tale of the Illuminati in contrast to the more liberal take on the Freemasons by Taxil well over a century ago.

It seems odd that the real Illuminati of history actually didn’t do anything before going their separate ways and there are far more tenuous links between the Freemasons and the American Revolution than of the Illuminati to just about any event outside of a Dan Brown novel, but yet, the name Illuminati still endures despite lacking any serious evidence of any concrete actions taken by them in the last 400 years. Even exaggerated stories or historical anecdotes which imply that membership in a group means that a person’s actions must be in strict accordance to the group’s desires, are very difficult to come by when looking into the history of their mythos.

It seems that once you find a splashy enough name to use for a cabal of secretive world leaders the facts of the matter are no longer important and considering that New World Order conspiracies have been thrown around since the Inquisition, they, and the Taxil-esque confessions from the Orders’ supposed defectors, aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, they seem to spread like a virus with every major, groundbreaking event.