The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"The puppets in the Kremlin have no idea that they and the puppets in the White House are working for the same people. The Illuminati control all sorts of organizations and national governments without any of them being aware that others are also controlled. Each group thinks it is competing with the others, while actually each is playing its part in the Illuminati plan. Even the Morituri- the six-person affinity groups which splintered from the SDS Weathermen, because the Weathermen seemed too cautious- are under the control of the Illuminati. They think they're working to bring down the government, but actually they are strengthening its hand. The Black Panthers are also infiltrated. Everything is infiltrated. At present rate, within the next few years the Illuminati will have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip."

George shrugged. Hagbard sounded like a typical paranoid, but there was this submarine and the strange events of the past few days. "So the Illuminati are conspiring to tyrannize the world, is that it? Do you trace them back to the First International?"

"No. They're what happened when the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century collided with German mysticism. The correct name for the organization is Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria. According to their own traditions they were founded or revived in seventeen seventy-six on May first by a man named Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt was an unfrocked Jesuit and a Mason. He taught that religions and national governments had to be overthrown and the world ruled by an elite of scientifically-minded materialistic atheists, to be held in trust for the masses of mankind who would eventually rule themselves when enlightenment became universal. But this was only Weishaupt's 'Outer Doctrine.' There was also an 'Inner Doctrine,' which was that power is an end in itself, and that Weishaupt and his closest followers would make use of the new knowledge being developed by scientists and engineers to seize control of the world. Back in seventeen seventy-six, things were run largely by the Church and the feudal nobility, with the capitalists slowly getting a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Weishaupt declared that these groups were obsolete, and it was time for an elite with a monopoly on scientific and technological knowledge to seize power. Instead of eventually producing a democratic society, as the 'Outer Doctrine' promised, the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria would saddle mankind with a dictatorship that would last forever."

"Well, it would be logical enough that someone around that time would think of that," said George. "And who more likely than a Mason who was an unfrocked Jesuit?"

"You recognize that what I tell you is relatively plausible," said Hagbard. "That's a good sign."

"A sign that it's plausible." laughed George.

"No, a sign that you're the kind of person I'm always looking for. Well, the Illuminati, after staying above ground long enough to recruit a hard-core membership from Masons and freethinkers and to establish international contacts, allowed it to seem that the Bavarian government had suppressed them. Subsequently, the Illuminati launched their first experimental revolution, in France. Here they suckered the middle class, whose true interests lay in laissez faire free enterprise, to follow the Weishaupt slogan of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' The catch, of course, is that where equality and fraternity rule, there is no liberty. After the career of Napoleon, whose rise and fall was purely the result of Illuminati manipulations, they started planting the seeds of European socialism, leading to the revolutions of eighteen forty-eight, to Marxism, finally to the seizure of Russia, one-sixth of the earth's land mass. Of course, they had to engineer a world war to make the Russian Revolution possible, but by nineteen seventeen they had become quite good at that. World War Two was an even more clever job and resulted in more gains for them."

"Another thing this explains," George said, "is why orthodox Marxism-Leninism, in spite of all its ideals, always turns out to be not worth a shit. Why it's always betrayed the people wherever it established itself. And it explains why there's such an inevitable quality about America's drift toward totalitarianism."