vtforeignpolicy.com

The Rhodes Colossus: Caricature of Cecil Rhodes 1892

by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

The first thing an academic tells you when you mention the mystical side of the Afghanistan story is that you shouldn’t talk about that. The study of foreign policy cannot be seen as having been motivated by anything other than rational and objective reasons and measured by the metrics of quantitative analysis.

– How then to explain ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the first director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the father of today’s CIA calling his agents Knights Templars?

– How then to explain the American military’s fascination with medieval knighthoods? How then to explain the use of New Testament biblical passages engraved on the gun-sights of American and British troops in Afghanistan?

– How then to explain American exceptionalism whereby the United States gets to do anything it pleases because America is right no matter what it does or how it does it?

Afghanistan’s most famous ‘Holy Warrior’ Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

People have heard about the holy warriors of the Muslim world, but what most Americans are unaware of is the mystical component of the warriors who fight for America and how that component has been setting the agenda for American politics from behind the scenes with no public scrutiny.

In Maine, they use the expression “You can’t get there from here,” to explain this sort of disconnect. It’s being used to make the point that you can’t get exoteric Afghanistan unless you understand the esoteric and you can’t understand the esoteric without accepting your own personal motivations.

In researching for our books, we discovered a trove of esoteric history surrounding the West’s attraction to Afghanistan starting with the British. It revolves around Mystical Imperialism, a term first used to describe 19th-century British imperial efforts to colonize the non-Christian world by applying Judeo-Christian ethics and philosophies.

Simply put, Mystical imperialism rationalizes the expansion of a nation’s authority by conquest over other nations by infusing a sense of the divine into the raw politics of empire-building. Today’s practitioners of American mystical imperialism are a hardened core of ideological defense intellectuals and military officers who combine their own esoteric and religious beliefs with Washington policymaking.

These individuals can trace their philosophical DNA back to 19th-century European secret esoteric societies that were known to be heavily involved in espionage on both the British and Russian sides. Reflected in the fictional quasi-Masonic exploits of Rudyard Kipling’s two soldiers in The Man Who Would be King, the “hidden” or occult game for control of Afghanistan and Central Asia was a factor in the foreign policy of the 19th century for the British and the Russians and continues to this day through the United States.

As the ancient home of Zoroaster and the Avesta, the foundation document for the Judeo/Christian war of light against dark, of good versus evil, 19th century Afghanistan and its surroundings provided a mystical underpinning to what today is dryly regarded as geopolitics.

Described as the “World-Island” by early 20th century British geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Russia’s geographic position at the center of the Eurasian landmass rivaled Britain’s as an island fortress. Mackinder foresaw Russia expanding with a ferocity beyond its borders. From the outset – Russian dominance of Central Asia spawned nightmares for the British of an apocalyptic horde sweeping from the Russian steppe across Europe which had to be stopped at any cost.

Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, supported an expedition in 1934 with the intention of establishing a spiritual settlement in the Himalayas. Wallace expressed his enthusiasm for the plan known as the Shambhala Project, stating that, “the political situation in this part of the world is always rendered especially intriguing by the effect on it, of ancient prophecies, traditions and the like.” Wallace anticipated that those prophecies were, at last, coming due.

Hidden to human eyes, Shambhala was said, by Tibetan Buddhists, to lie somewhere near Tibet and would finally be revealed at the end of time. Others believed it was hidden in the valleys of the Pamir mountain range in Northeastern Afghanistan. This was the Shambhala that concealed the lost wisdom, the secrets of immortality, and the beginnings of the human race. Adolph Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet and Afghanistan in 1939 in the hopes of uncovering proof of Aryan links to modern German society on the soil of Central Asia.

From Halford Mackinder at the beginning of the 20th century to the American Cold Warrior James Burnham, the godfather of Neo-conservatism to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Grand Master of Geostrategic American foreign policy, Eurasia represented the central basis for American global primacy, in a world defined by Manichean opposites.

In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical “reality of the One-of-Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable ” progression” descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter” towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through “Appeasement and Infiltration England and the United States.”

As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian’s incantation throughout Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech which set the terms of the Cold War.

Twenty-six years later, Senator William Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness to reexamine the basic assumptions of the Cold War. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks known as SALT would spring from this rational re-assessment, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and eventually SALT II.

President Carter and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna.

But because of National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s unyielding hostility toward any compromise with the Soviet Union over Afghanistan, President Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the Treaty on the Senate floor. That treaty would never be passed and the United States would begin a long slow march into what Burnham described as the magnetic core of the World Island.

Our initiation into the realm of Mystical Imperialism began six months before the December 27, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan while we were producing Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance, a documentary for televangelist Pat Robertson‘s Christian Broadcast Network (CBN).

The station had been airing the American Security Council‘s The Salt Syndrome, a propaganda film railing against the passage of SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) that would limit defense spending. As host of CBN’s public affairs shows, our documentary was to be the rebuttal to The Salt Syndrome as required by the Fairness Doctrine. We were aware that Robertson’s proselytizing on his flagship 700 Club program was already engaged in a religious Crusade to change America.

While working on the documentary our eyes were opened to a merging of powerful pro war political, business, and religious interests that were using their combined influence to push America into a Holy War against the Soviet Union.

As we continued to work on the production, experts from the opposite side of the political spectrum such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith, informed us about the damage that a massive diversion of tax dollars would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending following the end of the Vietnam War-as the military-industrial complex was demanding-would destroy the civilian economy.

He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more like the Soviet Union, ideologically rigid, increasingly orthodox, and ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.

By the time our program aired, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. According to President Carter December 27, 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.

That statement instantly rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine, and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life. We realized that the powerful pro-war political, business, and religious interests calling for Holy War in The SALT Syndrome had just won the brass ring.

The point man for that campaign was Zbigniew Brzezinski. As an acolyte of geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Brzezinski believed the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and its pursuit of global dominance was foreordained and not subject to rational empirical observations.

Beginning in 1978, Brzezinski had been dialoguing with the Chinese and the Pakistanis over Soviet influence in Afghanistan and how to respond to it. In the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski had President Carter sign a finding enabling propaganda support to the insurgency that would help draw the Soviets into what Brzezinski referred to as “the Afghan trap.”

When the Kabul government expelled the Western media one month after the Soviet invasion, we jumped at the chance to get behind the propaganda and break the news blackout. Once we had secured the visas in the spring of 1981, a friend in local TV news connected us to CBS Foreign News Editor Peter Larkin. Larkin was an intense man-Saigon bureau chief during the Vietnam War and wanted the story immediately.

What we saw in Kabul was indeed in stark contrast to the picture playing on the evening news. After struggling with our footage for a month CBS finally aired a segment about the Soviet troops that we didn’t see. Our involvement with CBS News was the beginning of an education in the MSM’s fact-free restructuring of the Afghan narrative that continues to hold sway today.

Following the distribution of Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, a PBS documentary we produced in 1982, we got a call from Major Karen McKay of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan. She complained that we didn’t mention anything about the Soviet’s use of chemical weapons in the documentary.

We explained those charges hadn’t been proven. But the Major countered that since the New York Times and the Washington Post had accepted her evidence why wouldn’t we?

As we explained, the claims we’d reviewed came from second or third-hand sources or were based on hearsay evidence. Then we politely suggested what seemed like common sense, that the Major could make a better case if she had some hard evidence. Major McKay’s answer was revelatory as she snapped, “When it comes to the Russians we don’t need proof. We know they’re guilty.”

Once again, it was made very clear to us that when it came to the MSM narrative, facts REALLY didn’t matter.

When the third opportunity to challenge the MSM’s narrative arrived, we still had hope and again jumped at the chance. In the spring of 1983, we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline.

Our aim was to establish the credibility of the American claims that the Soviets had no intention of withdrawing from Afghanistan. We had a number of credible sources stating that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war, but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet.

From the moment they entered the White House the new administration had demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action so they couldn’t leave. Though lacking in factual backup, this hypocritical campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and our effort with Roger Fisher to further the negotiation process remained willfully unexamined by America’s mainstream media.

By 1987 we were so frustrated with getting nowhere at changing the official narrative with the facts on the ground we had to question all our assumptions about journalism. If facts did not matter, what did?

That’s when we looked at our story from a personal perspective and wondered what had called us to the Afghan story in the first place. We started writing screenplays out of our accumulated materials and research and by the end of the 1980s had completed four. But we had yet to find the right path to tell our story.

Then in September of 1991, our ten-year-old daughter Alissa told us about a dream she had with Paul’s deceased father whom she had never met. He was accompanied by a man wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottom trousers and a matching hat. The man told Alissa he was 800 years old. We already knew the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland as mercenaries for King Henry II 800 years before and decided to consider Alissa’s dream as a mystical encouragement to dig deeper into the past for answers.

President John F. Kennedy motorcade, Dallas, Texas, Friday, November 22, 1963

Three months later we saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, and found the inspiration we had been looking for. Stone’s decision to include the involvement of an esoteric secret society with deeper motives resonated with us.

In our research into the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170, an enterprise largely run by the Fitzgerald family, we discovered historical reasons why members of some secret societies might have been motivated to eliminate JFK in the modern era as retribution for past “crimes.” We then developed The Voice research paper with the hope that Stone would become interested in this esoteric perspective too, but he wanted our Afghanistan story instead.

Oliver Stone with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Once we began to work on the script, the mythic implications of the Afghan story began to emerge when many of the documents preceding the crisis were declassified. As we trailed the clues, we found pseudo-religious references in Washington’s official policy to the Manichean war of the light against the dark-whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan.

Maurice FitzGerald as shown in the Expugnatio Hibernica, written in 1189 by his nephew, Gerald of Wales

We then discovered a synchronistic connection that we could not have imagined. One of the books we had purchased was written by an ex-CIA agent about British efforts in the 19th century. In the book were many photos of prominent Brits and Afghans and of the battles they fought. But also included were photos of two Americans One of these men was dressed wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottomed trousers and a matching turban. The photo was of Alexander Gardner, a mercenary who’d found his way to Afghanistan in the 1820s.

He’d discovered the religion of Zoroaster settled in the mountains and married an Afghan Princess. He not only lived the real life of Rudyard Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, but it has also been said Gardner provided Kipling with essential information for his novel.  Alissa confirmed that day when she came home from school that the soldier in the photo wearing a clan uniform of his own design, was the man from her dream. Alissa had somehow tapped a synchronicity about our Afghan adventure that gave it a deeper meaning.

As we continued to develop The Voice as a novel, over time Stone became intrigued and asked us to connect its esoteric background with the fact-based Afghanistan script. Now titled Three Nights of Desmond, we found ourselves merging the past, present, and future into a very different kind of story.In writing the script, the antagonist (modeled after CBS Foreign News Editor Peter Larkin) emerged as a tragic archetype: an angry, wounded veteran who was determined to twist the Afghanistan story to get back at the Soviets for what he believed they had done to him in Vietnam. In The Voice, published in 2001, the character had matured as a victim of his own propaganda. Through that narrative, the character of Alissa, as Paul’s daughter, resolved the conflict between the “Larkin” character and Paul.

Even though Alissa had no involvement in our work, over the decades many of our Afghan contacts, whom she had never met, continued to cross into her life as if by magic. The most powerful synchronicity occurred when she came to meet the real Peter Larkin through her friendship with his daughter Brett. We had known nothing about this friendship until December 23, 2011, when Peter and Brett arrived at our home for a holiday party at 7:00 pm as guests of Alissa. Having the man who launched us into our Afghan saga join us for our holiday party was beyond surreal. It was as if a dream had materialized before our eyes. The novelized encounter between Paul and Peter through Alissa (which had been foreshadowed in The Voice) had been delivered to us through our front door. The reality of the script we struggled to write for Stone had finally written itself. It was a revelatory moment produced by our daughters that completed a journey begun 30 years before between two competing storytellers.

CONCLUSION

Back in 1979 when we first encountered the MSM’s propaganda Afghan narrative we could not have imagined that narrative would still be presented as fact over four decades later. The science is very clear; a narrative built with no facts is still more powerful at changing minds than facts alone. From the ancient oral to the modern written tradition humans have always been drawn to stories.

The power of narratives to transform people’s views is well documented. Like a recipe being offered as food, presenting even solid facts without framing it in a narrative is not enough to motivate most people to action. Our big breakthrough came when we realized that the power to win hearts and minds was not by trying to change the MSM’s empty narrative; it was by creating a new narrative with our own facts. When you create a good story out of solid facts that are truly food for thought!

We’ve often wondered what would have changed in the American dialogue on the JFK assassination if Oliver Stone had created a film based on the concept we gave him in 1992; going back to the origin of the Fitzgerald family and their dicey relationship with London. What Stone did do for us was put us back on the Afghan course we had walked away from, and in that process crossed us over into the mystical telling of our own story. We came to see that the weaving back and forth of the screenplay and the novel had become a way of understanding the multi-dimensional nature of narrative creation. Although our three years of work with Stone did produce the Three Nights of Desmond script concept, it was never fulfilled. Thirty years in the making; we finally brought the script concept created for Stone to fruition as the heart and soul of our 2 part memoir, The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond and The Valediction Resurrection.

Copyright © 2023 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

Roundtable 18: From the Crusades to the Death of JFK, What Does It All Mean? A message to King Charles  from his “Birthdate Soulmate”

Join with  us to hear Earth Rights Visionary Alanna Hartzok read her letter to King Charles for his May 6th coronation (to be released to the mainstream media). Having been born five hours apart on November 14, 1948, they’re “Birthdate Soulmates,” a mystical connection of great power we can all access. It’s packed with deeply researched knowledge on why the time is right for King Charles to get on the Earth Rights bandwagon. Economic justice will be created when land and natural resource values – Commons Rent – become the primary source for raising public revenue. That will lead the way to lasting world peace

A FREE Zoom Event  Wed. April 5, 2023  3:00 to 4:30 pm/EST    RSVP Required Click HERE ( If you lose the Zoom-link email just re-RSVP)    

Featuring Kris Millegan, Paul Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gould and Earth Rights visionaries Alanna Hartzok and Wendell Fitzgerald

-R.A. Kris Millegan, publisher at TrineDay and host of THE JOURNEY podcast

-Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are husband and wife co-authors of INVISIBLE HISTORY: Afghanistan’s Untold Story; CROSSING ZERO: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire; VALEDICTION: Three Nights of Desmond, and VALEDICTION: Resurrection.

-Alanna Hartzok is the author of The Earth Belongs to Everyone, an educator; activist and lecturer on economic justice, land rights, and commons rent public finance. Watch her SACRED RULE ECONOMICS presentation here.

– Wendell Fitzgerald was the Executive Director of the Northern California Henry George School of Social Science 1976-1979 and president of the board until 2019. He was elected from 2019-2020 to the Board of Schalkenbach Foundation, publisher of Henry George’s books. 

Host Johnny Punish welcomes Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould for a fascinating conversation that starts with The Norman conquest of England in 1066, traveling up to the rebellious outpost of Ireland, and ends with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK).  Our interview can be viewed here.

Read the article for more background here: From the Jerusalem Crusade to the Holy Grail to the death of JFK

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould    February 18, 2023

President John F. Kennedy motorcade, Dallas, Texas, Friday, November 22, 1963  

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, ordered the powerful Catholic military order known as the Knights Templar arrested and charged with heretical practices and a month later, on November 22, under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize the Templar’s extensive assets. Deeply in debt to the Templars for their military service in his war against England it has long been suspected that the charges against them derived more from the king’s depleted treasury than actual acts of heresy. But following an extensive inquisition and trial including torture, the Templars and their Grand Master Jacques De Molay were found guilty and on March 18, 1314 were burned at the stake outside the Cathedral at Notre Dame de Paris.

Whether or not the Knights Templar maintained heretical beliefs, the immolation of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the hands of the Pope’s Inquisitors would serve as an inspiration for generations to seek revenge on the Roman Church. And so begins the legend that winds its way from Jerusalem to Paris to the Holy Grail, to Rosslyn Chapel and Scottish Rite Freemasonry and from there to the death of JFK.

Pope Innocent III’s brutal Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 against the powerful dualist Cathar movement pitted Northern France’s Catholic nobility against the lesser nobility of the south who were tolerant and supportive of it.

As a pre-Christian faith deeply rooted in the pagan world and spread by Rome’s legions through Mithraism to the four corners of the Roman Empire, Catharism represented an old and powerful expression of Gnostic belief which refused to be suppressed by the sterile and often contradictory doctrines of Rome’s Christianized Empire.

As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword:

“To mention only its roots in Mithraism, its links with the Gnostics, its theological dualism, its asceticism, the ritual of life and death as cosmic mysteries, the appeal of the troubadours, Arthurian legends and the cult of the Holy Grail, the passions aroused for and against witchcraft, the intimate connection between sex and religion — all these things are sufficient testimony to the deep rooted vitality of a stream of religious consciousness which cannot be superciliously dismissed by rationalists and moralists.”

Writing on the heels of World War II, and with Europe still in ruins from the rise of an irrational and immoral pagan faith called Nazism, Demant feared that such a vital apocalyptic belief system with its “robust religiousness” and commitment to a struggle against an evil material world was bound to rise again, as it had so many times in the past.

Yet, he might not have been surprised to know that his own “Protestant” faith, of which he was a senior officer as the Canon of St. Paul’s, had its own roots in the same heresy.

Much has been speculated about the revival of Catharism and the survival of the Templars following their dissolution in 1312. Today’s popular fiction about their role as guardians of the Holy Grail rests not on any particular historical accounting but mainly on 18^th century Masonic myth-making and Sir Walter Scott’s early 19^th century stories that romanticized the Templar Knighthood. A deeply researched 2017 book by British Ambassador Craig Murray about the first Anglo/Afghan war (Sikunder Burnes: Master of the Great Game) not only connects Afghanistan to the Grail legend but maintains that the legendary Alexander Burnes and his brother James are the source of the Templar connection to Scottish Freemasonry and that – not surprisingly – they invented it.

The men of the Enlightenment found great interest in mystical illumination through Masonic rituals. To these men, the newly industrializing West needed a new prophetic tradition to anchor it in history. Rediscovery of the ancient world, as a result of imperial interventions into Asia and Egypt, spawned a renewed interest in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Hermetic Cabbalism and their roots in a life-denying Gnostic creed. In fact, the very act of returning in victory to the origin of these Gnostic beliefs was in itself proof that they had been chosen to fulfill a cosmic cycle, as prophesied by the ancients.

Bestowing the Templars with occult mystical powers fit neatly into the early Romantic Movement and helped to promote Enlightenment thinking as part of God’s plan for mankind.

As a military order of religious warriors responsible only to the Pope, the Templars and their Cathar backers in France and England represented a powerful autonomous deep-state within medieval society. In many ways orthodox Christianity was no match for the life-denying, dualist doctrine of the Cathars. Catharism’s simple focus on the cosmic battle between a spiritual good and a material evil, and its promise of a time-ending apocalypse in which the material world would be consumed in fire, was an extreme seduction.

Driven to ground by a corrupted Roman Catholic Church and greedy French King, “the heresy” appeared to have been trampled out by the middle of the 14^th century. But with the onset of the Reformation two centuries later, Rome’s authority faced a new challenge. And as it spread to Ireland, the old Catholic Anglo/Norman warlords like the Fitzgeralds, would be drawn into a struggle for their existence.

To Rome, the Protestant Reformation represented a heresy that was at once secular and religious. Martin Luther and John Calvin confronted a Papacy that claimed an earthly kingdom, as well as a spiritual one.  In 1534, the English Parliament’s Act of Supremacy answered that claim by declaring Henry VIII “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England”, and in 1559, his daughter Queen Elizabeth I became the Church’s “Supreme Governor.”

Cathar territory remained fertile ground for insurrection against the church. The French Calvinist Huguenot movement of the late 16^th century grew from exactly the same ground in France, where 300 years earlier, the Cathars had been brutally suppressed by the Papal Crusade.

In England, Queen Elizabeth I’s deep-state, comprised of the Earl of Leicester, Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Philip Sydney, found common cause with the Huguenots and supported them with soldiers, guns and money. Their armies waged holy war against the Papacy across Europe and in Catholic Ireland where they targeted the last visible threats to Elizabeth’s authority, with the Fitzgeralds a prime target.

The Irish Fitzgeralds had drawn their original power from France and Italy in the 11^th century as Castellans and enforcers for the Cathar-friendly French royals under William the Conqueror and Henry II. They had performed their duties well enough to be rewarded with lands and titles, but when they came to Ireland in 1169, their paths diverged. Gerald of Wales, a prelate and member of the Fitzgerald clan makes clear in his 12^th century account of the Irish invasion, the Expugnatio Hibernica that by 1170, his family was fed up with royal excess and willing to strike out under their own banner.

And after three centuries of immersion in Irish culture they had become transformed. Forsaking the English language, English customs and English law, the Catholic Anglo/Normans had become Irish, but the coming of the Protestant Reformation put them indirect opposition to the British crown. Known as the “Old English” and more recently as “The Twilight Lords” their ongoing intermarriage with Irish clans placed them between two worlds.

Known for their willingness to renounce their loyalty to England, the Fitzgeralds were feared and hated by London as representatives of a Roman Catholic deep-state bent on reversing the Reformation. On the other hand, the Sidney Circle represented a very old deep-state of its own; that “stream of Gnostic religious consciousness,” that had been suppressed for centuries, had risen in rebellion and was committed to ridding the world of evil.

The Sidney Circle and its primary operatives, Francis Walsingham, Edmund Spencer, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Dee, represented the militarized edge of Renaissance Neoplatonism, bent on establishing England not just as a global empire to rival Catholic Spain, but as a spiritual empire headed by Queen Elizabeth I that would cleanse the material world and restore a lost spiritual destiny.

Inspired by the Hermetic-Cabbalist Neoplatonism of John Dee, the Sydney Circle would take on the Fitzgerald Earl of Desmond in a genocidal war of extermination. Unknown to most people today, the feud between the European deep-state factions of the Counter-Reformation was a life and death struggle that embodied no less than the core principles of a cosmic war between light and dark.

In 1580, the prospect of this apocalypse coming to Ireland was so serious it prompted the Holy See in Rome to send an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Fitzgeralds under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine.”

As described by Richard Berleth, author of  The Twilight Lords: Elizabeth I and the First Irish Holocaust the Fitzgeralds’ struggle against Renaissance Neoplatonism offers a window into a thousand year old factional struggle of a European “deep-state” rooted in a Gnostic belief system with the Fitzgerald family providing the required Manichean evil of the day and Elizabeth I and her Red Cross Templar knights the Christian purity in the tradition of King Arthur and the Round Table.

It is of no small importance that the assassination of Gerald Fitzgerald, the last Earl of Desmond in 1583, marked the beginning of the British Empire. The eternal struggle of good against evil, the ancient Iranian war of light against dark by design required a victory over the darkness, and the Earl of Desmond filled that sacred role. As was the custom at the time, his decapitated head was sent to London where legend has it Queen Elizabeth sat with it for the morning before having it impaled on London Bridge.

With the incorporation of the Public/Private partnership known as the British East India Company in 1600, Elizabeth’s victory would be spread around the world. Elizabeth’s favorite courtier Walter Raleigh would sail to America and establish the colony that came to be named Virginia for the “Virgin Queen.”

The East India Company would establish trading posts from India to America and create such economic oppression it would trigger the American Revolution. Despite its loss of American colonies, the company would make its founding families rich beyond dreams of avarice and make the English language universal and English culture the standard by which all other cultures would be judged. But the competition with Rome and the suspicion over its motives would never stop.

In the 400 plus years since Elizabeth I’s time, much of what was once deemed heretical by Church authorities has become commonplace. The feudal society that the Irish Twilight Lords died to preserve was already obsolete by Elizabethan times and would have vanished with or without them. The empire created by Elizabeth’s courtiers ruled much of the earth for four centuries and was passed on to the United States for a brief reprise before losing its purpose. But the eternal struggle of good against evil, the war of light against dark continues and whether real or imagined, the revenge for the Templars sacrifice lingers on, periodically revealing itself through correspondences and coincidences that can’t be denied.

On November 22, 1963, Americans were shocked by the public execution of their President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the years since every manner of conspiracy theory has been advanced to explain what happened. But killing the first Roman Catholic President of the United States on the site of the first Masonic Temple in Dallas on the anniversary of the Papal destruction of the Knights Templar on November 22, 1307, bespeaks a ritual of revenge and retribution fulfilled. And if it was a ritual of revenge and retribution based on a story fabricated by Alexander Burnes and his brother James seeking fame and fortune, then what it means to us today poses a deeply philosophical question that must be answered.

The legacy of fighting a Manichean enemy is writ large across history. If we dare to read the signs, the ancient cycle of revenge and retribution has brought us to the end of the line. For, when you’ve defined everyone as an enemy and there’s no one left to blame, when you look into the mirror there will only be one choice. And that is self-annihilation.

Copyright © 2023 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

February 15, 2023

Join us to finalize our letter to King Charles (for his May 6th Coronation) and organize the PR package of teaching materials for media distribution.                                                   

A FREE Zoom Event Wed. March 1, 2023    3:00 – 4:30 pm/EST      RSVP REQUIRED HERE

(If you lose the Zoom access link re-RSVP to get a new email sent)

More and more people are convinced that the only way to a just, prosperous and ecologically sustainable future is to share the value of Earth’s resources more fairly.

It’s called “Earth rights democracy,” and it’s based on the idea that everyone has a right to the planet as a birthright.

Fundamental yet practical reforms in public finance policy based on “land rent for the people” will let us create a world of peace and plenty for all. There are many successful examples of the Earth rights approach to public finance throughout the world.

Learn how the Earth rights ethic can be realized and how we are using the interregnum from the Sept 4th death of Queen Elizabeth to the May 6th coronation of “King Charles” – and the June 10th 60th Anniversary of JFK’s Peace Speech – to promote the economics of peace, culminating with a musical celebration in Ireland.

Watch Alanna Hartzok’s excellent presentation SACRED RULE ECONOMICS in Roundtable 16 HERE.

Read our World Peace and Economic Justice Proposal HERE.

Featuring:

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife co-authors of INVISIBLE HISTORY: Afghanistan’s Untold Story; CROSSING ZERO: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire; THE VALEDICTION: Three Nights of Desmond, and THE VALEDICTION: Resurrection.

RA “Kris” Millegan,  publisher at TrineDay, author and editor of FLESHING OUT SKULL AND BONES: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society.

Bruce de Torres, the Moderator  and author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK

veteranstoday.com

VT RADIO Host Johnny Punish welcomes Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould to discuss their latest book The Valediction: Resurrection. In the book, they go far back to Norman Invasions of England to the Elizabethan Era to connect the dots between what’s happening now with Endless Wars and the mission creep pursuit of a One World Government.  Listen to the interview here.

VT RADIO Host Johnny Punish welcomes Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould to discuss ‘Who Controls The World?” and ‘Will the American Empire remain on the loose?’    The 11/20/22 VT  interview     YouTubeVIDEO    BuzzsprountAUDIO