by Joshua Levine

Magazines and newspapers all have stories they run in one form or another, year in, year out. The details may differ, but the stories are largely the same everywhere, striking universal chords of sex, health, and money. A few of these perennials, however, don’t travel. They drill deep into one country’s psyche while everyone else scratches their head and says, “Huh?”

In France, the story that keeps coming back is about Freemasons. It’s everywhere. Most big French magazines run at least one big Freemason cover a year. Books dissect the “state within a state,” to borrow from a recent title. Blogs abound.

“France has several of these marronniers—chestnuts,” says Alain Bauer, former grand master of France’s Grand Orient lodge and president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Masonic liaison. “There’s real estate prices and there’s how to cure headaches, and then there’s Freemasons. The ultimate French magazine story is a Freemason with a headache who’s moving. We don’t like these stories, but at the same time, we love them, because they make us feel like we’re still important.”

Full story

———-

With good reason.

Atheists would rather there were no summits with them or the churches

Leigh Phillips - 21.10.2010

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The first ever summit between representatives of secularist, atheist and masonic organisations and the leaders of the European Union’s three main institutions was “very odd,” Europe’s top unbeliever has said.

On Friday (15 October), leaders from what the European Commission describes as “philosophical non-confessional organisations” met with the presidents of the European Commission, Parliament and Council to discuss their views on poverty and social exclusion. The first meeting of its kind, it is the secular counterpart to the summits the three institutions are now obliged by the Lisbon Treaty to regularly have with religious leaders.

David Pollock, the president of the European Humanist Federation, told EUobserver that his organisation is against the idea of the meetings but went along to balance out a previous EU meeting with religious figures.

“There is no reason why we as atheists or freemasons, any more than religious leaders, have any particular expertise on poverty reduction strategies. There were a series of fairly predictable expressions of outrage that citizens remain in poverty and demands for greater solidarity but nothing especially specific in the way of any strategy. There was lots of good will and not a great deal else,” he said.

“It was all a bit odd.”

Full story

Leigh Phillips, 19.07.2010

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Brussels is to hold an EU summit with atheists and freemasons in the autumn, inviting them to a political dialogue parallel to the annual summit the bloc holds with Europe’s religious leaders.

While the EU is a secular body, the three European presidents, of the commission, parliament and EU Council, alongside two commissioners, on Monday met with 24 bishops, chief rabbis, and muftis as well as leaders from the Hindu and Sikh communities. The annual dialogue, which has taken place since 2005, is for the first time this year made legally obligatory under Article 17 of the Lisbon Treaty.

Under pressure from Belgium, which constitutionally protects and financially supports humanist organisations as well as churches, the EU has been forced to hold a mirror-image summit, but of atheists, scheduled for 15 October.

However, in a move that perplexed and annoyed humanist groups, the EU atheist summit will also welcome under the rubric of ‘non-religious groups’, the Freemasons, the secretive fraternal organisation, according to commission spokeswoman Katharina von Schnurbein.

Full story

—–

See also: The Masonic “Reconquista”

Sami Zubaida, 20 July 2010

[...] An important venue for this Ottoman cosmopolitanism were the Masonic lodges. Ottoman Muslims were admitted into these lodges in the 1860s and many intellectuals and public figures embraced Masonry with enthusiasm. The lodges they favoured followed the French Grand Orient, which, unlike its British counterparts, jettisoned the references to a Supreme Being, and the Immortality of the Soul, the deistic principle of earlier Masonry. It also embraced the slogan of the French Revolution of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity (to which the later Young Turks added Justice). In effect, those lodges favoured secular positivism and rationality, which was part of its attraction to Ottoman liberals. Membership included Greeks, Armenians and Jews, as well as European residents. Turkish was introduced as one of the languages of proceeding in some lodges. Many Ottoman intellectuals combined Masonry and positivism with heterodox Muslim mysticism, notably Bektashism, a historic Turkish Sufi order, outlawed in the 1820s and organised in secret societies. Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), the main reference of Muslim mysticism, was embraced alongside Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. What the two strands had in common was the rejection of religious authority and institutions. Masonry was equally prevalent in Egypt, where the Muslim reformer Jamal-ad-Din Al-Afghani (1838-1897) was the master of a lodge, which also embraced some of his followers, including Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905). It played an important part in the politics of the elites. The Iraqi poet, Ma`ruf al-Rusafi (d.1945) was recruited into a lodge when in Istanbul, but renounced that affiliation in statements in later life as an Iraqi and Arab nationalist.

The conspiracy which culminated in the Young Turk revolution of 1908 took place within the Italian Masonic lodge in Salonica. The legal immunities of the foreigners and their homes in that city offered protection for the military conspirators from Hamidian police and spies. In 1909 there was a counter-revolution in Istanbul, in support of the Sultan and the Islamic shari`a, led by religious figures. This was put down by army contingents from Salonica, and culminated in the deposition of the Sultan. The four member delegation which went to the Palace to inform Abdul-Hamid of his deposition were all from minority communities, including the Jew Emmanuel Karasso, a prominent Mason. Of course this fed into later conspiracy theories about Masons and Jews plotting to end the last Islamic caliphate. Karasso, in fact, was an Ottomanist, and explicitly rejected Zionist claims.

Temple of Man: Freemasonry, Civil Religion, and Education

Terry Melanson | 2010-05-20 - In Europe and North America, “culture war” was the socio-political preoccupation of the mid- to late-19th Century. However, the struggle for control of the educational establishment actually began a hundred years earlier during the Enlightenment.

Tr.: Every May 1st, a procession of Freemasons take place at the Père Lachaise cemetery in front of the Communards’ Wall, to pay tribute to the martyrs of the Paris Commune.

What did I tell ya?!

April 24, 2010, by Anonymous (for henrymakow.com)

(Read French? See This Blog “The Masonic Plot Against Quebec“)

It seems counterintuitive but both Canadian nationalism and Quebec Nationalism were born in the late 1960’s out of the globalist plan for North American “free trade.” Canadian nationalism was needed to repatriate the Constitution, a prerequisite for Free Trade; while, Quebec nationalism was needed to reassure French Canadians their rights would not be jeopardized by this action.

This illustrates how the Illuminati often get what they want by appearing to seek the opposite. In Arnold Toynbee’s words in 1931: “The harder we press our attack upon the idol [of national sovereignty], the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool’s paradise - lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol’s defense….”

Full story

Rather than being ostensibly concerned with charity, helping burn victims, or “chipping” children, Grand Orient masonry is presently consumed with exerting political influence; “reconquering,” and remoulding Europe in the name of secularism and humanism; in direct opposition with religion (sects of any kind) and the Vatican in particular.

T

Lesoir.be (Martin Pascal, 17 Feb 2010)

The influence of religion upon MEPs is considered too strong

Is the religious sphere strangling the work of the European Parliament? It’s a gradual but insistent question, as ethical issues (abortion, stem cells, etc.) become the subject of debate between supporters of a secular Europe and those who would like to see tomorrow’s society moulded by their religious beliefs. For some freemasons, it is time to reconquer lost ground.

In 2008, Marcel Conradt, Freemason and parliamentary assistant to the Socialist MEP Veronique De Keyser, denounced the assault of “religious lobbies and sects” on Europe (Le cheval de Troie. Sectes et lobbies religieux à l’assaut de l’Europe, in Editions du Grand Orient de Belgique). Their objective: influence legislation and decision makers, especially MEPs. Around 80% of the national legislation of member states is developed at the European level. The author described the influence of the churches, but also cults such as Scientology or the Raelian movement, and urged the secularists to maintain a Europe that would leave God out of politics.

(more…)

Lisa Pham - February 19, 2010

A once mysterious fraternal society continues to put itself in the public eye with the opening of the completely renovated Museum of Freemasonry, which opened in a newly renovated location in Paris last week. The Grand Orient de France, the oldest and largest Masonic organization in the country, has been collecting items dating from as far back as the 1720s, around the time that Freemasonry was established in France. It now has 10,000 objects in total, including a collection of 18th-century earthenware that was recently purchased with the help of the French government.

Full story

Powerful bankers, international financiers and mystics, join forces in Paris in the build up to the French Revolution:

“Lodge of Les Amis Réunis [The United Friends]” and “Karl R. H. Frick on The Philalèthes“

Tomorrow is the 233rd anniversary of the birth of the Order of the Illuminati in 1776. Their calendar was based upon the Zoroastrian religious calendar, commencing from the ascension to the throne of Yazdegerd III (1377 years ago), and is still in use today in Iran. (1377 and 233; posted at 7:44 pm? A synchromystic numerologist may have something to say about that.)

Adam Weishaupt had grand illusions about clothing the higher mysteries of his Order in fire worship. “The Order, in the higher grades, will be called again: the Cult of Fire, the Fire Order, or the Order of the Parsees,” he wrote to his disciple Cato-Zwack on 6 Pharavardin 1779. “The ultimate aim of the Order is for the Light [or Enlightenment] to blaze bright; we fight against the darkness; this is the Cult of Fire,” Weishaupt reiterated (Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens, pp. 330-1).

As I wrote before (and a bit more in Perfectibilists): that May 1st was chosen as the date for instituting the Illuminati is a semiotic stroke genius.

In hindsight, it’s obvious that, for the Illuminati May 1st had significance as the day in which the “cult of fire” was/is celebrated throughout Europe and Britain as Walpurgisnacht and Beltane. I don’t think it is accident that they chose the date. I also don’t think it is accident for May Day to have become a sacred revolutionary holiday for socialists, communists and anarchists. The Illuminati were the forebears of these, and acknowledged as such by the likes of Louis Blanc, Buonarroti and his secret societies (the Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits, Adelphi and Philadelphes), Speshnev and the Petrashevsky circle, and no doubt the Spartacist League as well.

(more…)

Foreground: Lenin statue, Fremont, Seattle, Washington; Background: Doric Lodge N. 92

In January last year, I read a post at conspiracycentral.info, that began…

I was driving home today and saw this huge mural with the masonic symbol and it freaked me out. I just got back from the midwest, and I saw a handful of masonic symbols, street signs, and temples all in the same area of Missouri. Imagine my surprise when I go back to Seattle and I see the biggest sign of masonic arrogance right in the middle of the most artsy fartsy area of the supposedly liberal and freedom-loving Emerald City.

Turns out the mural was part of a masonic temple/lodge that is in the middle of a shopping area, and totally out of place. Not only that, but it’s basically a block away from the HUGE statue of Lenin that haunts this area of the city.

I had almost forgotten about it, when I was reminded of it today at Nicene Truth. Jay Dyer links to a site with a good overview on the statue:

(more…)