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“David Icke does not exist. That is just a name for what my infinite consciousness is experiencing”
More than a decade after David Icke proclaimed he was the Son of God, the former TV presenter has realised that ridicule is nothing to be scared of
The Sunday Herald (England), Dec. 1, 2002
http://www.sundayherald.com/
Words: Vicky Allan
‘By the way you’re not one of them,’ David Icke says as if he thinks maybe the question of whether I’m a reptilian or not has been preying on my mind. ‘You’re big time not. Totally different energy.’
Actually I would be a liar if I said it hadn’t occurred to me. Earlier that day, sitting at a lonely, windswept bus stop having travelled to the Isle of Wight on the understanding that he would pick me up when I rang, I found myself leaving more and more frantic messages on his phone, which was permanently on call minder, cursing his name and those of all conspiracy theorists. Icke, I began to assume, was avoiding me. He had, perhaps, had an intuition — from everything I knew about him, I understood this was the way he conducted his life — and had come to the conclusion I was in league with the reptilians.
Well, who knew? Maybe I was. In Icke’s alternative vision of reality, the planet is ruled by bloodline conspiracies in which the Queen, George Bush, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Kris Kristofferson and others, are really multi-dimensional shape-shifting reptilian entities who practise secret paedophilic satanic rituals.
This is not fiction; this, he says, is really happening (though the only real evidence he has is the testimonies of certain psychics, healers and mind-controlled slaves). And, while I’m not a great one for conspiracy theories, not long into reading his books, I found myself studying footage of George Dubya for reptilian shadows, reading newspapers in search of illuminati connections, and staring into the mirror for signs of the DNA corruption that would make me ‘one of them’. After all, who can really be sure of anything? And if you follow Icke’s logic we’re all mind-controlled and indoctrinated from birth anyway, we are all ‘children of the Matrix’.
Actually it turns out he had just got ‘a day out of sync’ and had been sitting with his laptop hooked up to the internet all morning, thinking he wasn’t meeting me till the following day.
‘I’ll come and get you,’ he says. ‘I’ll just be a few minutes. You wouldn’t like to see me in the state I’m in now. Just got out of the shower.’ Five minutes later, he turns up in a worn, old car, droplets of water still clinging to his slapped-down hair. He takes me back to his home and, to start with, shows me his steam engine pictures.
‘The trains are the reason I came here,’ he says, waving at a series of paintings. ‘I fell in love with them when I came on holiday here as a child. I used to stand on the pier just down there and I used to watch them go past, and it was like Thomas the tank engine.’
Apart from these, and the miniature rail track running round the living room, Icke’s flat is oddly characterless. There are framed photos on his mantlepiece of his three children, and of Pamela, his second wife, a fan he married two years ago. ‘Great, great friend,’ he says, when I ask about his first wife (of 29 years) Linda. ‘You know some people make better friends than lovers.’
At 50, Icke himself is no longer the fresh-faced BBC sports presenter he once was. While he has lost none of his charisma, the years of ridicule appear to have worn him down. His skin is pale and greyish, and his hands painfully contorted by years of rheumatoid arthritis. I could tell he was a little wary at first, aware that most journalists come to mock. ‘None of that Son of God crap!’ he said. These days he prefers to declare instead, ‘David Icke does not exist. My name is just a name for what my infinite consciousness is experiencing.’ His main concern is ‘the manipulation of humanity’s imagination of itself’.
But I’m not here to laugh at Icke. He’s had enough of that. The first few years after his revelation were played out to the continual soundtrack of distant laughter. ‘I had little kids taking the piss out of me because their parents said they should. I would stop at the traffic lights in my car and be laughed at by people in the next car. I’d come home and turn the television on and a comedian would only have to say my name to get a laugh. You know, they wouldn’t even have to say anything funny.’
During an appearance on Wogan, at the height of his revelatory period (when he was still wearing turquoise and declaring himself ‘Son of the Godhead’) the chat show host pointed out that the audience were laughing. ‘The best way of removing negativity,’ Icke said, ‘is to laugh and be joyous, Terry. So I am glad that there has been so much laughter in the audience tonight.’
‘They’re not laughing with you,’ Wogan famously replied. ‘They’re laughing at you.’
It was a tough time. He recalls delivering a lecture at the University of Nottingham. ‘It was 15 minutes before I could start to speak because of the noise and things being thrown. And I remember that night, when it all died down, I said to them, ‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’ And it was all, ‘Yeah! Woah!’ And I said, ‘You think I’m mentally ill, don’t you? What does that say about you? You’ve paid to come and take the piss out of someone you think is mentally ill.” It’s a story that reveals a lot about how our society treats the independent-thinking and eccentric. The way, rather than simply argue with their assertions, we ostracise and discredit with claims of madness. If you don’t believe this, broach a few of his ideas with your friends and see what happens.
I tried, and gained a small insight into what it was like for him. Icke is not a subject for polite dinner parties. After the laughter comes the silence. It blows out like a huge echoey bubble. Often it was the reptilians that brought it on: just a mention of the fact the Queen Mum might have been a shape-shifting lizard who would be driven into a frenzy by the smell of baby’s blood, was enough to freeze the air.
But sometimes, it would just be a little tentative exploration of the idea that some of the official stories of world events might not be the full truth. Any suggestion that you might be taking him seriously, any uncertainty as to Icke’s state of insanity was greeted with a flicker of fear. Was I one of them? Had I been brainwashed by the loony brigade?
The same thing happened over and over again. I just interviewed David Icke, I would say. What you mean David Icke, BBC presenter, Son of God, David Icke? Yes, that’s the one.
‘He’s clearly mad isn’t he?’
‘Well,’ I would begin. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But I mean, he’s got some kind of mental illness, hasn’t he?’
‘He’s quite lucid, actually.’
Icke, in fact, is philosophical about his treatment. ‘The ridicule,’ he said, ‘was necessary. It made me what I’ve become.’ To him everything we experience is part of our journey in this world. For his family, however, he wishes it had been easier. ‘I’m a very emotional person. When people are hurt around me, I feel it, and so some of the things my children had to go through, the ridicule at school and stuff hurt me dearly.’
No one experienced the ordeal of those first few years more acutely than his first wife, Linda. ‘Nightmare, nightmare,’ he says — and I suspect it must have been. In three months, not only did she lose the husband she knew to messianic fervour, but he ran off with his BBC assistant. This journey that he thrust her into, was, he reflects, as important for her as it was for him.
‘Before this happened, Linda was 2.4 children, mother, housewife, off the peg. Since, she’s changed. She’s just got back from India. Last year she was in South Africa.’
All this sounds reasonable, but, as ever, Icke pushes his theory that bit further. It was, he said, precisely his affair that liberated Linda. ‘If your greatest fear is that the person you love would have a relationship with someone else, how are you going to release yourself from it? Do you know what the biggest kind of fear I had before 1990? Being laughed at. Now I don’t have that.’
It’s natural, perhaps, to look back over his life and attempt to find a reason, to look for something that pushed him over the edge. Could it have been the death of his father, which occurred around the time of his revelation, that precipitated the visions? Unlikely, given, as he says, he knew his father’s death was coming, and was relieved. Or was it the pain of his arthritis, which had dogged him since the age of 15? Was it the strain of his sacking by the BBC? Or did he, perhaps, always exhibit schizophrenic tendencies?
What, I ask, would he say is the difference between what he has experienced and mental illness? ‘I think throughout history, people who were accessing other frequencies of existence and getting communications from them, without understanding what was happening have been dismissed as mentally ill, when all they were was open to a connection beyond this world.’ Icke grew up on an estate in Leicester. His mother, he says, is a ‘straight up and down’ practical woman: ‘She never really had any education, not an intellectual, watches all the soaps.’ Now 80, she has read none of his books, watched none of his videos and barely has a clue what any of his theories are. When journalists used to ring up and ask for his phone number, she would lie, saying ‘sorry me duck, haven’t seen him for years’.
His father died during those three key months in 1990, a staunch atheist, having rejected religion on the grounds that he had seen the wealth collected by churches. Icke shares this view. ‘Ironically, given what most people believe about me in this country, I have always rejected religion. Religion for me was the greatest mind control system ever invented.’
AT 15 years old, Icke developed arthritis, yet continued to love football, and went on to play professionally, first as goalkeeper for Coventry and then Hereford United, never telling any of his teams, always making excuses for his stiffness: a blister, a twisted ankle. Finally, the pain was too much, and, he retired from the game. ‘Arthritis,’ he says, ‘has been an important thing in my life. It has brought me many good things.’
In fact, it was the arthritis that started him on a path that led him first to alternative medicine, then to the Green Party, and finally to his own particular brand of esoteric spiritualism. The change started with the feeling that he was not alone. He remembers one occasion when he was sitting in his room, and he said, ‘Look if there’s something there, would you contact me? Because you’re driving me up the wall.’
A series of coincidences followed, leading him inexorably towards his messiah moment. While in a newsagent, he felt drawn to a copy of a book by a psychic healer, read it and immediately booked to see her. It was this woman who, while placing on her healing hands on his arthritic joints, gave him the message that he was not there to be healed, but to learn that there was a shadow over the world and he was there to pull it back. Not long after, he travelled on impulse to Peru, and standing on a mound in a small stone circle, felt a surge of energy drilling down through his head and through his feet, and that was it; he then knew — he was the messenger. What’s so interesting about Icke’s career since then, is that he has not just been dismissed as crazy, but dangerous. It’s as if we are so puzzled by the reptilians (surely, no sane person could suggest anything that ridiculous?) we have to interpret them as a code for something else.
In Jon Ronson’s series of documentaries, Them: Adventures with Extremists, he trailed Icke in an attempt to determine if there was any truth in the Canadian Green Party’s claim that Icke was an anti-semite, that when he said lizards he meant Jews. But Icke, Ronson concluded, is sincere. I agree. His reptilians are reptilians.
‘I actually went through my books just out of interest,’ Icke said to me, ‘and I counted all the names that I mention in relation to the conspiracy. The number that are Jewish are a fraction. Definitely less than ten per cent. The vast majority are white Americans and white Europeans. Now, why aren’t I called racist against white Europeans? Because I’m a white European and therefore it wouldn’t stand up?’
His current book, Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Centre Disaster: Why the official story about the 9/11 is a monumental lie, outlines an elaborate conspiracy theory about the events of 9/11, espousing that it was carefully staged by the illuminati (reptilian bloodline), including George Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair. Icke is not alone in entertaining theories about 9/11. Gore Vidal in a recent article in the Observer, suggested that not only was the American government guilty of a huge neglect of security, but that they saw it coming and chose to let it happen and it was all about oil and power. Yet Icke’s are clearly the most extreme.
These days, he is the king of conspiracy theorists — the one that takes them further than anyone else. His eight-hour lecture events sell out weeks in advance. His self-published books have reached contemporary affairs bestseller lists. Often his writings seem to draw together every single crackpot theory you’ve ever encountered: human-inseminating alien visitations a la Eric von Daniken, masonic plots, psychic visitations and anti-globalisation theories from John Pilger, Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky, all blended in one thick paranoiac soup.
‘I don’t care,’ he says, ‘if people say I’m just pulling together other theories. I’ve got no interest in them. One of he things we forget is that what people think of us is none of our business. I have no problem with these prats saying I’m anti-semitic. I have a problem when they seek to stop me having the public platform on which I speak my truth. That fact that I am anti-semitic might be complete bollocks — it is — but I support their right to say it. Was it Voltaire who said, I may disagree with what you say but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it?’
But Icke doesn’t stop just with conspiracy. Just when you think you’ve gone far enough into his labyrinth, he seems to come up with a whole new esoteric realm. At the moment it’s multi-dimensionality and he picks up a pencil and starts drawing a scheme of universal dimensions. ‘It’s not about contacting aliens in bloody spaceships. We’re multi-dimensional consciousness. Even conventional psychology talks about the fact we have a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. Okay — well how far out does the subconscious go?’
In the end I’m not really a believer. The Queen Mum a reptilian — seems a long shot. But that doesn’t matter. What’s more important about Icke is the kind of breakneck lack of inhibition he embodies. It’s that spirit of irreverence that led him to stalk Prince Philip (a top-rank reptilian) throughout a recent visit to the island, turning up repeatedly at each of his stops, and smilingly delivering a two-fingered wave, according to Icke, an illuminati symbol. Or to creep up to the gates of Gatcombe house, with his American wife, while the Spanish royal family were staying and erect yellow signs bearing the words ‘Reptile House’. It’s the declarations that he wants ‘no followers’ that he ‘turns deaf’ whenever anyone asks him what to do and believes everyone should find ‘their own truth’.
He’s a reminder if the idea that, as Karl Popper put it, all our theories about the world are ‘free creations of our own minds, the result of an almost poetic intuition’. If this is madness, then it’s a creative madness that contains within it the possibility of real discoveries. Entertain the idea, he seems to be saying, at least do that and then we might start to loosen things up.
‘It’s okay to talk about it, all right. It’s no problem.’ And that’s when it all begins. You start to laugh with him, not at himu
Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Centre Disaster: Why the official story about the 9/11 is a monumental lie, Bridge of Love publications, £16
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