metapunk

I love the irony of that headline—because today’s post is all about a similarly sensational headline on YouTube. “Did the Vatican Create Islam?” the video’s title asks, enticing, provoking you to watch—whose curiosity can resist such a bold claim?

So watch I did, and after enduring the painfully slow text, slideshow, and ominious music (and the second and third part videos), I was informed that the Roman Catholic Church had secretly trained and guided Mohammed to create a social movement that would wipe out the “true” Christians that the church hated, and re-take Jerusalem from the Jews and deliver it to the Vatican with minimal effort.

The Vatican is credited with having their missionaries plant rumours among the Arab nations that they would soon have a new prophet to rival the likes of Jesus and Moses.  Meanwhile, they educated Mohammed, and later manipulated him through his first wife, Khadijah, and her cousin (whom the video claims were Catholic converts), making him ready to fulfil prophecy.

At first the plan was successful, and Mohammed raised an army and marched across the middle east.  But the plan backfired when the Muslim generals, enboldened by their conquests, decided to keep Jerusalem for themselves and set their sights on Europe, and then the world. The Vatican obviously didn’t like this, because it had world domination plans of its own.

The whole thing is a summary of an account by one Alberto Rivera, a staunch Protestant fundamentalist who claimed that he had once been a Jesuit agent, ordered to undermine Protestant churches.  While a Jesuit he is supposed to have heard stories and read secret documents detailing the Vatican-Islam connection, before denouncing the Catholic church (which Rivera claimed was the Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelations) and eventually moving to the U.S. Rivera inspired a number of Jack Chick’s comic tracts, which just tells you he must have been a real winner. The story goes that the Vatican made several assassination attempts before finally succeeding in poisoning Rivera in 1997.

Now, apart from being a Wild Conspiracy Theory,* and racist at that (What, Arabs can’t create their own religion without help?), Rivera’s story also makes for a striking adventure tale. Large authoritarian organization creates pawn to dupe the masses and take over the world, only to have the pawn rebel and lead the masses against his former masters? Great stuff! I was thinking of using it as a story seed, and heck, I still might. But I realized I had kind of read that story before, when I read Dune.

Of course, it’s no secret that Islam (presumably the version not created by the Vatican) is the inspiration for much of Dune—Herbert even uses Arabic words throughout the book. But throw in the Bene Gesserit conspiracy angle, and it sounds a lot more like Rivera’s ramblings.

In Dune, Paul Atreides is a subject of the Bene Gesserit breeding program, designed to create a superbeing as a tool they will use to dominate the universe. Against orders, Paul’s mother trains him in the Bene Gesserit ways. Later, after a brutal attack by enemies of his family, Paul finds himself lost among the Fremen, who had been conditioned generations earlier by the Bene Gesserit to expect a prophet. Paul, of course, becomes this prophet (and the superbeing), but instead of allowing himself to be used by the Bene Gesserit, he turns on them, and leads the Fremen in a bloody jihad against the Empire.

Again, great stuff! (Man, I freaking love Dune!) But is the similarity between Herbert’s book and Rivera’s conspiracy theory just a coincidence? Or did one borrow from the other? Dune was published in 1965. According to this unsourced article, Rivera didn’t establish himself in the U.S. as an anti-Catholic evangelist until after 1969. Then again, it seems fairly unlikely that Rivera was a big reader of science fiction (the genre most likely being a tool of Satan and whatnot). I guess this is just a strange example of life imitating art. I prefer the art over the, uh, “reality”—in this case the art is much better written.

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* Here we observe the Wild Conspiracy Theory in its natural environment, the Internet. Notice its adaptable plumage, which can be made colourful to entice prey, or camouflaged like the skin of a chameleon. The elusive nature of the Wild Conspiracy Theory sometimes makes it difficult to identify, however it can be recognized by the plaintive call it uses to attract a mate: “Fnord!”