| "The interviews that I have done previously were set-ups by CCRA or by CCRA interests to villify (sic) the concept of detax, and to villify (sic) those who have found out the truth about this massive scam by our de facto government, and who are willing to inform other Canadians about it.
"While you may be of good intent, experience has shown that editors and owners of the media have other designs not favourable to the exposure of the truth."
– Eldon Warman of Detax Canada
There you have it. The media is a conspiracy. In fact, so is everything else: the federal government, income taxes and a hidden throng of commies plotting the big takeover. And that ain’t the half of it, bub. Just ask any of Western Canada’s network of far-right conspiracy theorists.
To suggest there is a greater per capita proportion of them in our neck of the woods is misleading. Traditionally, though, they are attracted to mountainous regions for security reasons and on special occasions they come out of the woodwork in droves. Take the 1999 Calgary appearance of David Icke, the English-soccer-player-turned-BBC-sportscaster-turned-Green-Party-politician-turned-self-proclaimed-son-of-God-and-prophet-turned-conpiracy-theorist’s-conspiracy-theorist, which drew an estimated 800 people. In Vancouver, he draws 1,500 folks at $20 a pop.
Like their counterparts in the rest of the world, Alberta’s conspiracy theorists sport a bad case of paranoia, an obsession with blood lines and a belief that the Illuminati, an 18th century fraternal order, control the politics and economics of the world.
JEW BAITERS IN SPACE
The average conspiracy theorist takes a half-truth and launches it into the stratosphere. A prime example is Henry Kissinger, a former U.S. Secretary of State and a perennial favourite target of both the far-right fringe and the traditional political left. Both camps dislike Kissinger because they think he is one evil dude. For the left, journalist Christopher Hitchens’s book The Trial of Henry Kissinger argues that he should be indicted for war crimes based on evidence contained in U.S. government documents indicating he prolonged and escalated the Vietnam War and was complicit in the assassinations of a number of political figures, including Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende. Fair enough.
On the other side of the coin – the one with Queen Elizabeth, who heads an international drug dealing ring, according to jailed American conspiracy theorist Lyndon Larouche – Icke’s The Biggest Secret posits Kissinger is a member of the Illuminati. Not just any Illuminati, but one that has its origins in an extraterrestrial race of reptiles who cross-pollinated with humans 10,000 years ago in order to dominate this planet. That’s right. Kissinger is a lizard. That explains his funny accent. Icke’s evidence is the eyewitness reports from a self-proclaimed former priestess who conducted morbid black masses where Kissinger was present in both human and lizard form.
On a somewhat more earthly plane, former L.A. police officer Mike Ruppert brought his lecture The Truth About 9-11 to a sold-out crowd in Calgary in June 2002. He takes the believable premises that the CIA deals drugs and that corrupt rich businessmen manipulate the stock market, engage in shady activities like laundering money and wield disproportionately large political influence, then deduces that the September 11, 2001 attacks were intentionally planned and executed by the U.S. government to stimulate a stock market on the verge of collapse with drug money from revitalized Afghan opium crops. A bit of a stretch, perhaps.
Ruppert claims to represent neither right nor left and flaunts his background as a police detective to refute accusations that he gets a bit carried away in his conclusions (i.e., that he is a conspiracy theorist). Nonetheless, a quick look at the merchandise table outside the lecture hall helps put his credibility in question.
The co-presenters of his event were Individuals For Common Law (more on them next week) and The Preferred Network. The latter is a promotion and distribution company run by Wes Mann, a staunch advocate of secret society conspiracies that stretch across time and space. Though he currently lives on Vancouver Island, Mann resided in Edmonton last year. Before that, he based his operation out of Salmon Arm, B.C. and was active in Alberta, presenting the said Icke lectures among others by similarly minded speakers.
In addition to selling books on apocalyptic survivalism, outlawed esoteric science and government mind-control programs, Mann organized the Festival of the Ages, a yearly event near Salmon Arm where a few dozen paranoid citizens spent a weekend camping, eating health food and listening to guest speakers expound on One World Government and tax avoidance. At the 2000 gathering, one featured speaker was Eustace Mullins, a former member of an American neo-Nazi organization and author of The Biological Jew, Jews Mass Poison American Children and Mullins’ New History of the Jews.
The choice item in Mann’s catalogue is The Phoenix Journals, a series of books published in the ’80s and early ’90s out of Tehachapi, California. Near Edwards Air Force Base, Tehachapi is one of the epicentres of activity for UFO-ologists and black helicopter enthusiasts. Purported to be "the Dead Sea Scrolls of our time" by its publishers, The Phoenix Journals were the words of Commander Hatonn, a space creature orbiting the earth in his Pleiadian Fleet Command Ship.
Hatonn, for all his knowledge of the universe, has a special pre-occupation with Zionist One World Government conspiracies, holocaust revision and the illegality of American income tax laws. The spaceman was wont to rant about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document devised by the Russian secret police, coincidentally around the time of the formation of the Zionist movement, to induce public frenzy for a pogrom or two, and the International Jew, Henry Ford’s tract about why he wasn’t too fond of Jewish folks.
At this point, the obvious question is: "How do his otherworldly observations make it into book form on planet earth?" Glad you asked. Hatonn transmitted his messages to his terrestrial channeler, Doris Ekkers, via shortwave radio. UFO-ologist George Green, who originally published The Phoenix Journals through his company, American West Publishers, made his break with Hatonn when he was confronted about Ekkers’s plagiarism. Green, now residing in Hayden, Idaho, still distributes conspiracy literature, including The Protocols. If contacted about The Phoenix Journals, he will send a pamphlet detailing where Ekkers copied her Hatonn material from. That comes in handy, say, if the reader wants to go straight to the source and check out holocaust revision literature like Did Six Million Really Die?.
The cross-section of information Mann distributes, ranging from political conspiracy to new age spirituality, is an example of the new brand of far-right political thought. Not only are they paranoid about the "internationalists," but they take the time to embrace environmentalism, organic food and alternative medicine. Mann did not return a request for an interview.
Not all of the conspiracy theorists still residing in the province are as out-there as Mann – at least, not on the surface.
A FULL LIABILITY MAN
In 1999, a hot-headed Calgarian named Eldon Warman was working as a tour bus driver when he got into a shoving match with an overzealous B.C. highway traffic patrol officer outside Revelstoke, B.C. He was charged with assaulting a peace officer and eventually spent three-and-a-half weeks in jail. Why? The conspiracy was out get him.
Warman is considered Canada’s godfather of the detax movement. Its adherents believe paying income tax is voluntary and collecting it is illegal. Warman claims he has not paid taxes since the mid-1980s and Canada Customs and Revenue cannot stop him or the 30,000 Canadians he estimates have opted out of the tax system using his methods. Even the National Post’s Jonathan Chevreau has given him props in his financial column, along with other conspiracy-theorist authors like Icke. How else could the authorities shut him up, except to throw him in jail after he refused to show up in court to face charges for assaulting a B.C. peace officer?
To semi-succinctly organize the arcane theories promulgated on his Web site (www.detaxcanada.org), individuals should use the same shifty accounting tactics some less-than-ethical big corporations do. The spin, though, is asserting that the legal arguments have their basis in archaic British treaties. To wit:
1. The word "person" is a fictitious entity designating a party in contract law. When dealing with legal authorities, claim you are not a "person" but an "unlimited liability man" or a "flesh and blood man" subject only to God’s and nature’s laws. (Probably the most famous example of this argument was put forth by Patrick McGoohan in the 1960s British TV series The Prisoner. "I am not a number. I am a free man.").
2. Send the federal Minister of National Revenue a letter stating you are not a "person" and are no longer under contract with the government of Canada to pay income taxes.
3. Return any letters from the CCRA after marking them "void." If a CCRA representative comes to your door, do not answer it.
4. Put assets in offshore accounts, convert them to cash or gold, and hide them.
5. Start spelling your name with unconventional punctuation to throw off the authorities. (Warman, for instance, spells his name Eldon-Gerald:Warman.)
6. When the courts finally catch up with you, prolong the case for as long as possible by acting as your own legal counsel and basing the defence on England’s Magna Carta of 1215, Petition of Rights of 1628 and Bill of Rights of 1689.
Ergo, Warman chooses not to recognize the Canadian legal and political system despite the fact he resides within its territory. Really, paying income tax is voluntary, though the only true way to opt out is to never apply for a Social Insurance Number, take cash-only jobs and never open a bank account. Some drug dealers use this strategy. If there is a sensible message in Warman’s theories, it is to not carry a large debt load.
On the other side of the law, there are only a few thousand CCRA employees and millions of working Canadians. The math reveals that the ratio in not in favour of the taxman. Therefore, it can take years to catch up with Canadians who do not file their taxes – detaxers who gloat over their success at dodging taxes are probably riding the law of averages rather than displaying constitutional expertise.
"The detax method and court procedures discussed here have worked well; however, there are no guarantees," states the disclaimer at the beginning of Warman’s course. This is a vague way of saying that tax protestors using the Magna Carta as their defense often get nailed in court. The CCRA cites an Ontario Superior Court decision that ruled against Thomas Kennedy (a.k.a. Tommy No Usury, another of Canada’s leading detax activists), who argued he was exempt from income tax.
What makes Warman’s thesis unsettling is its similarity to those of American right-wing tax protesters who have theorized the illegality of income tax since the 1950s. According to their doctrine, the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – the section instituting income tax – was never properly ratified, thus the government has no grounds to collect it. When the Posse Comitatus, a forerunner to the right-wing anarchist militia movement in the ’90s, emerged in the ’70s, they consolidated those theories with an Old English common law philosophy citing the superiority of the Magna Carta over domestic statutes.
In the early ’80s, Warman – a Canadian by birth – was living in the San Francisco suburb of Benicia. While working as a pilot for American Airlines, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service audited him and determined he owed a substantial amount of unreported tax dollars. Things went downhill fast.
Allegedly, Warman threatened the IRS agents with violence if they tried to collect. This was an imprudent action – around the same time, Gordon Kahl, a member of the Posse, made headlines for getting in a deadly shootout with U.S. federal marshals when they tried to arrest him for violating his parole. Kahl did time for not paying his taxes. Suffice to say, the authorities may have been a bit touchy. Warman was arrested, lost his pilot’s licence, was fired from his job and found his wife had committed suicide (Warman maintains IRS agents murdered her). The trauma and legal problems caused him to hightail it back to Canada.
In an appeal of his B.C. assault conviction, Warman told the court he studied his common law principles with Roger Elvick, a midwestern U.S. farmer who spent six years in a U.S. prison for fraud by filing bogus liens and tax statements against government and legal officials, a harassment tactic used and promoted by the Posse. Elvick also had a dubious track record for dealing with business partners. In the 1980s, he lost a civil lawsuit to another farmer whom Elvick conned out of his farm machinery and stuck with debts in excess of $200,000.
Now out of jail, Elvick teaches his phony lien schemes in a bizarre mix of esoteric economics and evangelical Christian eschatology he calls Redemption. Hidden messages in the Bible are interpreted for the U.S. economic system, which is, of course, run by a secret society.
Warman’s dubious sources for his common law theories raise red flags about his other socio-political views. They can be found on a variety of tax discussion sites on the Internet. This rant was posted in a tax discussion forum at The Wealthy Boomer, a magazine/ Web site published by Jonathan Chevreau:
"The truth about the present Canadian "red rag" is that it is a Zionist emblem (Zion blood red) – the colour of 56 million Russian's (sic) and Ukranian's (sic) Zionist spilled blood, plus the spilled blood of millions of unborn babies by the Zionist controlled abortion thugs, and the many more millions of peoples' blood spilled by Nazi/Zionist controlled pharmaceutical companies and their poisoned vaccines and drugs. That is what the ‘dead maple leaf’ represents."
This was even too much for Chevreau, who banned him from the discussion group.
Go figure why Warman is afraid he comes across as wacky in the media.
Part 2 of Bob Keelaghan’s look at Alberta’s conspiracy theorists will run in the Thursday, August 14 issue. |
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