The Australian
The Times
May 28, 2020
May 28, 2020
Just when you thought there was nothing new to say about the Cummings affair, along comes a conspiracy theory. On Monday the British Labour MP and failed leadership candidate Clive Lewis tweeted “how interesting” about a quote from another tweeter, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. It read: “On 12 April Dominic Cummings was seen in Barnard Castle. Two days later GlaxoSmithKline of Barnard Castle signed an agreement to develop and manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine with Sanofi of France. Of course that could be coincidence.”
@CraigMurrayOrg
I see now. Mea culpa.
I am a raving lunatic for suggesting Cummings may have gone to the major factory and research centre of uber corrupt GlaxoSmithKline in Barnard Castle, whereas actually he was driving 30 miles as an eye test. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/05/why-barnard-castle/ …
Why Barnard Castle
UPDATED Dominic Cummings specifically stated now in the press briefing that he had been eager to "get back to work to get vaccine deals through, move regulations aside" and that is why he drove to Bar
GSK does indeed have a factory in Barnard Castle, although its headquarters is in London. But Mr Murray failed to spell out, in his tweet or his lengthy blogposts, what possible connection there could be between the now-notorious outing and a vaccine deal with France. I can’t think of one but obviously Murray and Lewis can.
Within a day this nebulous nonsense was popping up in WhatsApp groups and Facebook posts all over the place.
Murray is a serial “just saying” conspiracy theorist. When the Russians poisoned the Skripals in 2018, for example, Murray pointed a finger at the Israelis and suggested a British government cover-up. At the moment his big issue is the conspiracy he alleges to “fit up” the former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond on sexual assault charges (Mr Salmond was acquitted). In the past he has accused me and other Jewish writers of being “Zionist propagandists” for the sake of “available riches”. Perhaps if Clive Lewis had done his homework on Murray he’d have been more judicious, but the temptation of the extra, hidden explanation, that banishes the possibility of accident and error and replaces it with something far darker and cleverer, is always powerful.
The week before Lewis’s tweet, I recorded a Stories of Our Times podcast with Rosie Kinchen of The Sunday Times. Rosie had been looking into the case of an Australian cult called Universal Medicine, which has been running its British operation from a very swish guesthouse in Somerset. The story contained some of the classic features of cult encounters: divided families, court cases, bizarre rituals and so on.
This one was also slightly different. UM’s founder and guru is a fifty-something former Australian tennis coach called Serge Benhayon. We learn on UM’s website that in 1999 he “found himself under the impress of a series of unfoldments that led to a reconnection, or, ‘union of old’. As a result, he initiated these impresses via the expression of Esoteric Healing using the forum of his sessions to present the teachings that not long after became his vast collection and volume of service to many thousands.”
Not a few of these thousands have been suitably grateful and have made unfoldments of their own, by opening their wallets and bank accounts, by making bequests and donations, or by booking courses and buying various elements of UM’s “vast collections”. Not only does Mr Benhayon draw what seems to be a substantial income from UM’s activities, but so do his wife, his ex-wife and his children.
In 2018, after a long legal process, an Australian court decided that UM was a “socially harmful cult”. And recently in the British Court of Appeal Lord Justice Peter Jackson ordered a woman to make a “definitive break” with the group or else risk losing custody of her daughter.
What’s really fascinating is not the cult, but its adherents. Not least because a friend told me that he knew several of the leading lay members of UM. They were wealthy, privately educated, holding down professional or creative jobs, and often living in nice houses in the countryside. No robes, no strange tattoos. No secret signs. But on the other hand strict dietary restrictions based on the most improbable analysis of the body’s functioning (did you know that you were made up of 45,000 nadis, or energy centres, and that when bad energy runs across the top of your nadis you get ill?). And ways of dealing with this bad (or pranic) energy include turning things counterclockwise, and going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 3am.
Given that Benhayon’s own “philosophical” musings are the most ridiculous jumble of phrases, that he claims to channel Leonardo da Vinci among others, and that he apparently had his first epiphany sitting on the loo, you might have thought that any rational person’s sense of the absurd would have warned them off him, long before they got to other bits. Instead they go on to endorse the Ageless Wisdom, the esoteric chakra-puncture, the idea that all history is a conspiracy, and the ovarian reading.
When you start looking at the online testimony of adherents you begin to understand why. There’s the middle-class woman who had an abortion at 16 and has felt guilty about it ever since. There’s the wife of a successful film director who, having just given birth, has been taught to see that she and the child possessed all the wisdom they required, and that “I need not look outside for the answers but know that they are already within”. Or, “I am a young and attractive woman who has chronic hormone imbalance and hair loss,” but “the EBM session today has given me an opportunity to go even deeper, and with TRUE LOVE.” It’s where religion meets new age health fad, where the anti-vaxxer meets the Livingness. And what does that mean? “It means Taking Care of You. And, more deeply it means You Loving You.”
Like Serge loves them. Like all the Benhayons love them. They are all beautiful. None of them are disappointing. They are all the carriers of inner wisdom. Not only that but this inner wisdom is so easily achieved! The hugely complex, impossible, often arbitrary world doesn’t need your intellect to grapple painfully with it, because it’s a delusion. Leave off wheat, rise at 3am, get the prana massaged away from your nadis and all will be well.
People often believe what they do not because they choose to, but because they need to. A middle-class under-achiever whose focus is very much on themselves needs to be told that they’re actually very special. A failed Labour politician needs to think he may be necessary after all because he has the key to a great scandal. Very few people are so cynical that they espouse preposterous theories that they don’t believe. Though, looking across the Atlantic, it does sometimes happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment