| Today, when most Christians think of the "Illuminist Plot" they link it to material which seems to swirl around the John Birch Society; more specifically, they connect it to a book the Society published in 1972 called None Dare Call It Treason by John Stormer. Using a watered-down version of the Illuminist Myth, Stormer's book identified the Rockefeller family, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission as pro-communist and as part of a massive intrigue designed to subvert Western Civilization and Christianity from within. The significance of Stormer's book lay in the fact that it presented a "secularized" and somewhat "sanitized" version of the Illuminist Plot which could be accepted more readily by people who were not pre-disposed to accept as reality an intrigue which reached back into the shadowy obscurity of the Dark Ages and encompassed Freemasonry, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, the Hospitalers, etc., and one which was so openly anti-Semitic and could so easily be linked to the insanity of Hitler and Nazi Germany - thus gaining for the myth a greater acceptability than it could otherwise command, especially in "moderate" circles. Nonetheless, Stormer's sanitized conspiracy contained all the elements dear to the heart of those who heretofore had subscribed to the Illuminist Plot: belief in a world-wide conspiracy (the "Communist Conspiracy") which aimed at the destruction of Western Civilization (particularly the United States), Christianity, and the "free enterprise system" (i.e., capitalism). But the fact remained that Stormer's thesis was really nothing more than a "cleaned-up" version of the older myth. Indeed, the ability of this myth to cloak itself in "acceptable garb" is mind-boggling; at one moment and in one set of circumstances it's the Jewish-Bolshevist Conspiracy; in another, it's the Illuminist Plot; then it's the Communist Conspiracy; and now that communism is gone, it's the Secular-Humanist Conspiracy - but in the end, it's all the same. It's like watching three or four old grade B "cowboy" or "detective" films in a row. By the time one sees the fourth movie, one has a sneaking suspicion he's seen it all before - the plot's the same, the villains are the same, the heros are the same - the only things that have been changed are the names. |
