Evolución histórica de las propuestas

In November 2014, Truthjuice Hull held an open mic night. It was my first open mic event at this venue, but I went with high expectations of a fascinating evening due to previous experiences of the same format in Birmingham and Blackpool. Instead of hearing one speaker for two hours, on a topic which may or may not appeal to my personal interests, you might hear four or five speakers, addressing different topics with interrelating tropes and themes, representing grassroots’

research.

The venue was a vast working man’s club; more specifically it was the large room towards the back, forcing you to navigate through the great ballroom (which hosted ballroom dancing, or bingo, for an elderly crowd), and a games room with a snooker table and television screens for sport, and finally a corridor. The logistics meant that while it was a public event, open to all, only those people who had purposefully come and paid the £4 (discounted to £2 for self-identified

“low earners”) would be present for the talks. The man at the desk advertised some new (copied) DVDs that were being sold for fifty pence each. I bought ‘“Abraham-Hicks” Collection’, “a more spiritual one,” he told me, and a UK Column one with Roger Hayes’s name on the front – which I knew, already, would be described as a more “political one”, with UK Column a staple part of the ‘alternative media’ which had a month’s worth of their daily YouTube news report looking at present-day corruption and events.¹⁸³ The event was well-attended with around forty people present, albeit less so than the previous week, which featured a well-known speaker called Andy Johnson giving a lecture entitled ‘Chemtrails – what is in our skies?’.

The introduction was made by the unofficial organiser, who welcomed everyone, and gave a brief introduction to seven talks lined up; she made further mention of an upcoming “expolitics”

conference for any who might have been interested.¹⁸⁴ The first speaker was a middle-aged man talking about psychedelics, giving his first-ever presentation. The main point was that

183 “Abraham-Hicks” talks about the ‘Law of Attraction’, where one’s positive intentions can change the external world around you. See the official website, Abraham Hicks Publications, ‘Law of Attraction – Official Site’ (2019) <http://www.abraham-hicks.com/lawofattractionsource/about_abraham.php>

[accessed 31/12/17]. For more on UK Column, including past meterials in a range of media formats, see their website at UK Column (2018) <http://www.ukcolumn.org/> [accessed 31/12/17].

The UK Column also publish a quarterly printed newspaper that is disseminated (for either £1 or a more affordable contribution) across all my fieldsites in Birmingham, Hull, and Blackpool.

184 I will briefly outline each talk, from fieldnotes.

66 psychedelics amount to much more than the hysterical and doom-laden hype that he thought was put out by the mainstream. It was largely a descriptive account from personal experience from when he went to stay in Peru for a 6-week initiation by a local shaman into their psychedelic rituals, using Ayahuasca. He was drawn to go because of a long interest in psychedelics rather than the cultural experience but, with the places on the shorter course booked up, he did the longer course that included learning traditions and “extra bits”. He spoke of “a presence” that appeared differently to people according to their personal, privately-held beliefs; for some it was God, or the devil, or as aliens; to him it was ambivalent, old, formless, genderless, but “possessing knowledge”.¹⁸⁵ He noted that those who take it seem to receive a message to spread further the use of ahayuasca; and to re-connect with the natural world – “that is ahayuasca’s message”. He recommended that everybody take “dragon’s blood”, an indigenous tree-sap available on Amazon, which is very healthy, especially for indigestion. In the following questions it turned out he would never take it again, since it was not blindly euphoric, as such, but almost too powerful, and extremely nauseating; he would stick to his magic mushrooms.

The second talk was introduced as about ‘the Bible and UFOs’. This speaker’s opening statement was that the Bible is not like the churches make out; it is not literal but allegorical. I noted that it was not the most systematic talk, but I personally enjoyed it greatly due to my background in theology, relishing the ways in which he sought to dig deeper into the Bible to uncover what it might really be saying.¹⁸⁶ He spoke about the bit on Revelation that mentions the number 666,

‘which the church tells you is bad’, but he had subsequently read ‘the whole verse’; in fact, he said, the number is said only to be important, to be solved, and he further noted that this number is very important within ideas about sound frequency today. He then jumped to Genesis 1, and asked who God is speaking to? Furthermore, God uses the 1^st person plural pronoun “us” – who are they? The “Annunaki”, perhaps, or the “Nephilim”; or a mixture of them all? He was in no position to say for sure.¹⁸⁷ As he began to talk about the tabernacle’s spatial arrangements, and designs, being to do with “energies”, a member of the audience interrupted him, stating that it had technology “like with the Mayans”. David said he ‘wasn’t sure’, that he ‘hadn’t read it’, rather than any principled rejection or refutation. Someone else in the crowd said it was a portable tent, and this David agreed with. He moved onto ‘the flying scroll’ in Zechariah, wondering what this

185 In brackets, here, in fieldnotes: ‘the truth-seeker’s ideal divinity?’

186 I spoke to him outside over a cigarette at the half-time interval, and had great sympathy with his experiences at church where he became disillusioned when he perceived incongruities in the Church’s position on certain portions of scriptures, switching between allegorical and literal treatments.

Specifically, he brought them a verse from Proverbs that glorified the suffering of labour, and they said ‘it wasn’t scriptural’. For him, this response was both suspicious and intolerable, and he left the

congregation. On reflection, if you are not familiar with biblical hermeneutics such a response smacks of double-speak.

187 Note that the ‘Annunaki’ feature in David Icke’s works; the ‘Nephilim’ is a Hebrew word found in Gen. 6.4, and Numbers 13.33, but also feature heavily in Zechariah Sitchin’s works, as the extra-terrestrial “fallen ones” or ancient astronauts. See the full series of his words, Zechariah Sitchin, The 12^th Planet: Book One of the Earth Chronicles (New York: Harper, 1976).

67 might refer to, before closing his talk by reiterating his central point: that we need to be wary of the bible because it is allegorical.

In the questions following, a woman talked further about some other astro-theological allegories;

she claimed that the twelve zodiacs refer to the twelve disciples and that the “three wise men”

actually refer to a solar constellation; or that the entire bible sequence might be understood in terms of the procession of the equinoxes. This latter point provoked disagreement from other audience members about this, including what the Zodiac even means; one kept on repeating, “it’s about the procession of the equinoxes!”

The host for the evening brought the exchange to an abrupt end, and the third talk began, on the subject of ‘Big Pharma: What’s going on’.¹⁸⁸ This talk focussed on the dangers inherent in the dominant biomedical approach that places too much trust in pharmaceutical drugs. The question the speaker raised for discussion was why attendees thought this was going on: the speaker saw this as a heartless and immoral economic conspiracy, but motivated primarily by money; or was this part of an extra-economic agenda? Someone shouted out “Agenda 21” and half of the audience appeared to nod and murmur in agreement.¹⁸⁹

The fourth speaker was a woman talking about her personal experience of curing her lymphoma using cannabis oil. She first heard a speaker talk on the subject at a Truthjuice event; she spoke to him afterwards, and he gave her some cannabis oil “the size of a seed” – taking it, the pain went away immediately, after months of trying larger and larger amounts of morphine to little effect. She noted that this anti-pain aspect had not been mentioned in the initial talk explicitly.

She was also on chemotherapy, telling the group that she had kids, and had to be seen to be trying everything to cure herself, despite her own reservations about the treatment. After using this three times daily, from January to July, she received the “all clear”; the audience cheered and applauded. Someone asked what I thought was an interesting question, whether this was placebo, or faith-healing. The woman said yes, quite possibly; but the pain being remedied so instantaneously remained as the imponderable. The topic of hemp came up, somewhat predictably given how often it arises during informal conversations, with the idea that it is suppressed since it can do everything from making rope, to building houses, so naturally it is kept from the populace by whichever powers-that-be.

After the interval – time enough for someone to buy a drink, have a cigarette, and talk generally about alternative topics – we would hear three more talks.¹⁹⁰ First, the “white genocide project”, about the effects of mass immigration in white countries and on the motivations of the politicians

188 This talk is mentioned in the chapter on health.

189 Again, see health chapter for more detail on Agenda 21.

190 Discussed in more detail in a later section.

68 behind that.¹⁹¹ The organiser predicted that it might provoke a bit of a discussion, “have an argument about that, a bit of argy-barg”’. The final talk was thankfully on ‘how to be happy’, by the self-confessed “happiest man in the world”; he would come to tell us that he had come across the concept of “synchronicity” in the work of David Icke, but only later, after a spiritual experience, could he see for himself all the connections permeating the everyday.¹⁹²

Amidst the wide range of subjects already addressed, however, the penultimate talk returns us to the chief focus of this chapter: “how we can stop people fighting each other; how to stop infighting within the truth movement”. The audience laughed at this announcement, at the ironic appropriateness that this topic would follow the disputes that many of “us” – “we” the truth movement – anticipated in the preceding talk on white genocide theory. Far away from Manchester, I found myself among another audience that were intuitively familiar with this so-called “truth movement”. Let us now take stock and return to this chapter’s central question: to what extent, then, can this so-called “truth movement” be considered a movement?