leaders of countries or commanders of armies have had their hands on the tiller of history for centuries their choices their actions and their deaths have profound consequences we are thoroughly convinced the case has never been solved many become Legends even in their own lifetime but can we ever really know the person behind the legend the reality behind the myth myths in general I think abide because they speak to us about certain sorts of issues the greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time all of these stories continue
to be powerful because they tell us important things not just about the world of around us but about ourselves these are the stories we need to hear and never forget they are the myths and legends of some of history's most famous or in some cases Infamous leaders his rendo with grim Destiny begins a little afternoon time as his plane lands in Dallas death is less than one short hour away November 22nd 1963 Dallas Texas a telegenic 46-year-old man and his wife elegant in a pink Chanel suit a riding in an open convertible the man is
President John F Kennedy the woman Jackie Kennedy as the car passes the Texas School Book Depository building shots ring out Kennedy is hit Mrs Kennedy frantically moves towards her husband nursing his head in her arms Millions now billions of people have watched the famous footage of the shooting an assassination for the television age shortly after the president was declared dead at 1:00 p.m. local time police arrested a single suspect Lee Harvey Oswald but his arrest immediately raised questions could one man have been responsible for gunning down one of the world's most powerful men or was
a larger conspiracy at play I'm just a president as the police investigated the available evidence the public looked for meaning in such a shocking event alternate theories quickly emerged feeding into myths about the circumstances of JFK's assassination it just doesn't compute we have this idea that the gravity of uh an event has to equal the gravity of the cause that causes it you couldn't possibly have just a single shooter with a certain kind of personal Grudge or Psychopathology there has to be a big thing behind this big effect Lee Harvey Oswald worked at the Texas
School Book Depository and it was from there Witnesses claim that he had fired on the president Oswald had been seen leaving the building how fitted the description of the Assassin Oswald shot a Dallas patrolman officer JD tippet with a pistol before attempting to hide in a movie theater he was arrested there still carrying said pistol you buy thatle that's as patch as you people have been given but I emphatically deny these Tri even after finding a high-powered rifle on the sixth floor door of The Book Depository with Oswald's palm print on it he continued to
protest his innocence the elevator bringing Oswald out to go to the armored car where he was to be transported to the county jail two days after his arrest while the president's body lay in state Oswald was being transferred to the county jail when Jack Ruby a local nightclub owner mused his way through the police escort and shot oswal dead on live television and then of course complete delirium and pandemonium breaks out Oswald so shockingly gunned down while in police custody coupled with Kennedy's popularity as a president further fueled the idea that there must have been
more to the story than what was being shared by the authorities conspir theories always around significant World issues and the JFK assassination is certainly a significant World issue when our political figures pass away people kind of think of them as Patriarchs or something or matriarchs depending on who it is there was a tremendous amount of grief surrounding it and so to work out their grief people might turn to conspiracy theories to make the event seem less senseless to elay the nation's fears president Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation into the events surrounding the assassination I ask
for for your help and God the subsequent investigation unofficially known as the Warren Commission after its chairman chief justice Earl Warren amassed evidence from 552 Witnesses and considered ballistic data medical evidence audio recordings and footage of the shooting they concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman he had acted alone and was not not part of a conspiracy but this would not be the end of the matter why are you still investigating the Kennedy assassination we are thoroughly convinced uh of the fact that the case has never been solved that the Warren Commission report
is basically a fairy story I think one of the things that makes JFK's assassination such fertile ground for conspiracy theorists is that the Warren Commission report rept that was thrown together pretty hastily after the assassination was filled with inconsistencies errors of fact contradictions and so on given that only one-third of the people Americans at least believe the Warren Commission report it made it very easy to accept the conspiracy theories right if the official line you're given doesn't ring true you will believe something else and that has carried forward there were many alternate theories contributing to
the myths surrounding who killed JFK one was that the Soviet Union was involved Lee Harvey Oswald had twice visited the Soviet Union and had married a Russian woman there Oswald had lived in Russia for a time and it ends up being theorized that maybe the KGB was involved the CIA was involved or maybe as another theory goes the mafia were involved racketeers have corrupted the authorities in many localities they have outgrown The Authority JFK's younger brother and US Attorney General Robert Kennedy was targeting organized crime and making life hard for the mob many of these
theories rested on the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't have been the sole gunman the proof that people referred to when they claimed that there was more than one shooter included iwitness testimony that involved hearing gunshots coming from different places I only heard it and I looked up and saw a man running up this hill but as we know now eyewitness testimony is notoriously [Music] unreliable another piece of evidence Skeptics of the Warren Commission point to is Warren Commission exhibit 39 99 the report found that Kennedy was struck by two bullets it is the first
of these that has caused the most controversy and is known as the single or magic bullet theory it holds that the number and pattern of wounds on Kennedy and the Texas governor John Connelly who was also wounded could not have been achieved with a single bullet if the single bullet it was false then could there have been a second shooter with a more than one shooter report came out to suggest that actually there could be a bullet from the front of the car so this color then suggested that there was a conspiracy involved the Warren
Commission looked into the allegations but concluded that neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy domestic or foreign to assassinate the president Oswald They concluded acted alone but that narrative again involved one individual gunman and that I think to many people just seemed too insignificant to be the real explanation of such a major world event one of the reasons for the growth of these myths was that the Warren Commission had seen evidence they hadn't shared with the public the zuda film 48 86 frames of 8 mm footage were captured by dress
maker Abraham zuda he was filming on a nearby grassy null when the president was shot then I had another shot or two I couldn't say it was one or two and I saw his head practically open up all blood and everything and I kept on shooting that's about all I'm just sick he gave the film to police who had it developed immediately he also sold it to Life Magazine but withheld one frame frame 313 shows the exact moment when the bullet strikes the president's head the Warren Commission saw the frame and could tell it had
come from the direction of the schoolbook depository building but because of its graphic nature the frame was Kept Secret for over a decade helping to perpetuate the myths that surrounded the assassination Congress undertook a further investigation in 1976 making its hearings and findings public but the release of these government records neither quashed The public's belief in a conspiracy nor did it lead to a greater trust in the government the government's going to release a bunch of documents and you might think great now we're going to get a whole bunch of new information but the people
that are dubious of the the government just think these are more things to be dubious of [Music] and so the conspiracy lives on the mythologies that have grown around JFK's life and death are among the most well-known of the modern era but the passage of time shows us that he was far from the first leader to be the subject of myth and mystery sometimes figures spring from myths that are larger than life and tell of the greatness of leaders lost none more so than than a great leader who emerged in ancient Britain in the Dark
Ages King Arthur of Camelot Britain 1500 years ago was divided Lawless leaderless Legend has it that the man who drew the sword Excalibur which had been magically placed within a stone would unite the country Gallant honorable Arthur pulled the sword from the stone and became became king reigning from his legendary Hall of Camelot Arthur Drew about him Valiant Knights the Knights of the Round Table who ventured on quests and sought the Holy Grail after a long and prosperous Reign Arthur was mortally wounded in battle by his traitorous nephew mrid Arthur threw Excalibur into a sacred
Lake where it was duly taken by the Lady of the Lake King Arthur himself traveled to the mystical Isle of Avalon he didn't die but sleeps and will one day return but was there a real man behind the myth with Legends like the legend of King Arthur you have the merging of a very distant historical past and legends are usually based on some element of historical reality but at times you're not getting all of the facts recorded in a logical or coherent way the Roman Empire occupied most of Great Britain from the 1st to the
4th Century CE it is after this in a period known as the early medieval period or dark ages that most Scholars point to as the potential time of Arthur if there were a a a historical figure who is remembered to us as Arthur he probably would have lived sometime after the Roman Legions left Britain so that would be sometime in the late fth Century the early 6th Century the first mention of Arthur by name is said to have been in a Welsh poem dated between the 6th and the 11th century although he was only referred
to as a warrior not a king we have some early annals and Chronicles which talk about figures not always named and not always named Arthur by the way but these figures are often said to have fought a great battle and W a battle in which basically they stemmed the rising tide of the Saxon horde coming over to fill the vacuum left by the Romans the history of the kings of Britain written around 1136 is perhaps the most well-known early account of King Arthur and contains many of the story elements we now associate with with the
legend King Arthur is depicted both as a fierce Warrior and a noble King in the absence of any definitive proof of Arthur's existence historians have also suggested that Arthur may not have been one person but a composite of several medieval Heroes and warriors a symbol of Hope for those trying to survive in medieval Britain I'd love to believe Arthur is real but I have no real evidence of that but if we think of the entire Arthurian Cannon as this beautiful tapestry this beautiful woven tapestry that has all these stories on it and that there might
be a few threads of that tapester that are actually based in historical fact I don't see any reason why there couldn't be more than one thread that is the hero that becomes who we remember as Arthur perhaps the importance of the artherion legend is not whether Arthur himself lived or not but what it tells us about how to survive in these dangerous dark times and what it shows us like all good Legends should is how a heroic man should act so embedded within this very complex story you get ideals of masculinity and femininity so you
can be exposed to the story and take away how you are to live and I think that these stories in particular they challenge Us in that way and it makes us perhaps want to be those better selves and certainly know that to do that we have to be willing to strive in the face of certain loss and at times uh [Applause] failure whether there was a real King Arthur may be nice to know but the myth has outgrown the man and even where we know for a fact historical figures existed sometimes the details of their
stories take on a life of their own Joan of Arc was undoubtedly a real person a female leader amongst men at an unlikely moment in history but parts of her story remain shrouded in myth and [Music] mystery jonak is an extra ordinary figure she is a French heroine she is also one of the patron saints of France she's born around about 1412 and she lives a very short but Stellar Al born to Farmers in Don Remy Joan is only 17 years of age when she sets out from her home to meet and protect the Doan
the uncrowned king of France guided as she claimed by the voices of the archangel Michael St Catherine of Alexandria and St Margaret Joan believed it was her duty to help France in the fight against England this is during what we call the 100 Years War the English from the time of the Normans had had uh possessions in France and during this period the the French had been kind of pushed back and so the Doan had not been able to go to Reams to be Crown King by 1429 the armies of King Henry V 6 were
laying Siege to oron one of France's most heavily defended cities the Doan Charles was directing the French defense from nearby Shino but the fight was going badly if the city fell Charles's chances of being crowned King of France were Grim Joan arrived at Charles's Court the Doan was disguised but the girl who had never seen him before bowed to him and said God give you a happy life sweet King angels and Saints had appeared to her she said telling her to take charge of the French forces Charles agreed to her request and gave her a
suit of armor with her battle standard of Lies angels and Jesus Joan set out to oron now what gives her this role and this respect keep in mind France is a very religious very Catholic country is Jon of AR claims that from the age of 13 God is talking to her and so a king would never listen to a a silly young teenage girl but he would if she says God is speaking through her before her arrival the siege of oon had lasted almost 7 months within 7 Days of jonov AR's time on the battlefield
it was over many within France thought this was proof that she was indeed a divine Savior news quickly spread and volunteers joined the French army hoping to serve under the banner of the maid of oron and what is extraordinary about jonov AR is the fact that she breaks through the boundaries of established um feminine Behavior this is quite radical and in that sense she is an outsider right from the very beginning because she's breaking down these boundaries Joan had other military successes but in 1430 she was captured by forces loyal to the Duke of burgundy
who was French but opposed to Charles the burgundians ransomed Joan to the English who took her to their headquarters in Ruan the English put Joan on trial not for her military activities but for heresy walking around at this time claiming you're hearing voices is a very vulnerable position to put yourself in because if you're popular it's God and if you're unpopular it's the devil the voices she heard Joan insisted were Saints and possibly even God and this in the eyes of the church was heresy Joan was sentenced to death and burned at the stake on
the 30th of May 1431 she was 19 years old much of her life quickly became a mix of fact and myth the most heavily debated aspects relating to the nature of the voices and premonitions Joan described during her life whether or not her voices were real in the sense of whether or not they were actually disembodied voices is from Heaven to Me Joan of Arc is uh is an important figure because of what she accomplished modern medicine has offered other explanations for Jan's voices if you look at the case of having these voices today a
medical practitioner might diagnose her as having epilepsy a psychiatrist May diagnose her as having a form of psychosis that manifests in visual and auditory hallucinations 24 years after her execution Joan was retried by another ecclesiastical Court this time one loyal to Jan's Patron now King of France they overturned the heresy verdict the thing about Joon of Arc is from the time she dies almost immediately we see she's embraced even more than she was in life she was an icon during her lifetime but then she almost becomes more of an icon more of a symbol of
France and French Independence and fortitude and and spirituality Joan comes to represent all of that over 500 years later in 1920 Joan was canonized as a patron saint of France by Pope benedi the 15th circumstances around Jon ofar life and death her faith in religion and God have made her at times a heretic an icon and a saint hundreds of years later in another war that would sweep across Europe the circumstances of the life and death of another historical female figure would also lead to speculation and mythmaking a princess at the world's most opulent Royal
Court at the turn of the 20th century the grand duchess Anastasia ncna of Russia led a Charmed Life born to one of the richest men in the history of the world her future of comfort and prosperity was seemingly assured her father Nicholas II was the Zar of Russia and the head of the Romanov Empire a lineage that had begun three centuries earlier but with the outbreak of World War I and Russia's disastrous involvement in it the public began to show how they felt there were multiple problems for the Romanov families in relation to the war
and Nicholas II had a very personal idea about what power meant he represented himself as the sole undivided head of state and he reiterated that when in August 1915 he actually took charge of the Armed Forces so he became the symbolic head of the military now that is a very risky move because while um he's using his god-given power and rights to sort of assert his authority over the empire in a time of Crisis it also means that when the war goes badly and boy does the war go badly then he himself is Li to
personal blame the truly staggering losses by Russia's IL equipped Army coupled with the terrible food and fuel shortages highlighted just how disconnected the Zar was from his subjects and with the Zars refusal to seed significant authority to the Duma the Russian Parliament Revolution was in the air in March 1917 with rioting in St Petersburg and with the Army's support evaporating Nicholas was forced to abdicate this would be known as the February [Music] Revolution after Nicholas II had abdicated and he finally returned to the Summer Palace where his his wife and children were living after the
February Revolution they were then moved in the summer to tabol which is in Western Siberia but then finally they they were then moved to Y catarin Borg and this was after the bolic seizure of power in October 1917 and from then on their fate became extremely unpleasant really what happened in the Russian Royal Family's final residence in yatar ringberg is the source of the myths surrounding Princess Anastasia in the early hours of the 17th of July 1918 the Zar family and their servants were woken by the guards and taken to the basement the family was
told that the Bolshevik government had ordered their execution the guards immediately shot and killed the family using guns and bayonets the bodies were stripped and buried in unmarked graves in the forest however rumors persisted that one or more of the Romanov family had escaped execution speculation was deliberately fueled by the new government who did not want to reveal the truth of the killings the most common myth was that the Zar youngest daughter 17-year-old Anastasia had somehow escaped in the Years following the demise of the romanovs multiple women came forward claiming to be Princess Anastasia most
famously in the early 1920s won Anna Anderson Anna claimed she had been wounded when her royal parents and siblings were killed and that she had pretended to be dead and so escaped this captured the imagination of the entire world and for decades many hoped and believed it to be true but courts assessing her legal claim did not agree that she was the Princess Anastasia in the 1990s and early 2000s all romanov's burial location ations were finally discovered and excavated when the bodies were DNA tested all family members were there Anastasia too she had not escaped
but was killed in the basement along with her parents and four siblings in 1918 while history has shown us that Anastasia did die the myth of her miraculous Escape has persisted for many years perhaps this speculation helped to dull the horror of an entire family being cruy murdered 20 years after the demise of the romanovs Another World War would engulf the globe leading to another myth This Time underpinned by the fear that a reviled leader had somehow survived April 1945 Berlin as the Allied armies were closing in on the city Hitler and Eva Brawn slipped
out of the fura bunker leaving behind decoy dead bodies for the advancing Russian army to find they made their escape by plane or in the more dramatic version of the tale left in a submarine loaded with gold Hitler and Brawn would go on to have children together and the furer lived to the Agee of 73 frankly there are lots of great stories about Hitler's survival and how he escapes there's one account that has a pilot landing on a street in Berlin and a little feedler stalk aircraft Hitler hops on board and off they fly to
an Airfield in Northern Germany where they get on a big plane that takes him to Greenland and that eventually gets him on a submarine which takes him all the way down to Buenos Aris or somewhere in Argentina where he supposedly spends the rest of his days you know living and hiding planning a fourth Reich we can trace the origins of this myth to June 1945 when Stalin and other Soviet officials speculated that Hitler was either living in Spain or Argentina this was backed up by the Soviet Marshal Gori zukov who said that despite earlier reports
that the Red Army had discovered Hitler's remains in the grounds of the fura bunker Russian soldiers had not in fact removed Hitler's body the entrance to Hitler's Aid shelter it was just outside that the bodies of Hitler and Eva Brown are said to have been destroyed the German said petrol was poured over their bodies and they were burnt it might be true it might not you've got to imagine the immediate aftermath of the war in Europe you've got Berlin in rubble you've got Germany in chaos there are soldiers refugees prisoners of War spies you know
it's a chaotic situation and it suits Stalin really well to make out that the West the Western powers are hiding Hitler it's going to make it look as though the West are complicit with fascism the uncertainty over whether Hitler was really dead was enough to prompt British and American intelligence agencies to mount their own investigations the British gave the task to an intelligence officer Hugh Trevor Roper who drew on interviews with the staff of the fura bunker and Senior Nazi officials who witnessed the events of April 1945 what is very well documented by numerous accounts
is as Berlin you know was being ever encircled by the Soviet Red Army is that Hitler's mental state frankly was not good he was you know incandescent rage half the time or he was very melancholy you know he was out of control and and he really genuinely believed that the the German people didn't deserve him from his investigation Trevor Roper concluded that Hitler and Brawn had secretly married on the 29th of April and Hitler had drawn up his last will and testament the following day April the 30th at a little after 300 p.m. he and
Brawn swallowed cyanide capsules and Hitler shot himself in the head [Music] SS officers took the two dead bodies outside wrapped them in a swastika flag doused them in petrol and set them Al light the bodies were only partially burned so the soldiers buried the remains in the chancellory grounds in 1999 excavations took place in Berlin to uncover the remains of the fura bunker they're silently digging up Hitler's bunker the sandfill remains of the bottom 17 rooms the place where Adolf Hitler committed suicide is being exposed right now the discovery of Hitler's marriage record and will
confirmed that Hitler's last days had happened as Trevor Roper had concluded although the Russians had taken key evidence from the CHC burial site there was still ample evidence that Hitler was dead well there are two really important supporting pieces of evidence the first are simply the overwhelming amount of eyewitness testimony um that talks about burning Hitler's body uh you know if you're burning Hitler's body that does mean that Hitler is dead secondly there are also some remains of his Jawbone in the Moscow archives now that Jawbone has had a proper Dental identification it's been matched
with Hitler's dental records um it's got a very distinctive Bridge uh a telephone Bridge as it's known between two of the MERS and that is identical to what you see in Hitler's dental records so you know if Hitler survived he's missing most of his mouth and indeed most of his head so obviously he's dead eventually in 1973 a Norwegian team was given access by the USSR to the dental Remains Not only was there a perfect match between the remains and Hitler's dental records but also the teeth showed evidence of having been exposed to cyanide as
witness accounts of Hitler's death claimed but despite the evidence the myth that Hitler Got Away [Music] persists for decades authorities received reports from people claiming to have seen Hitler or even be Hitler there is a lot of nonsense even today that says that Hitler survived the second world war and somehow escaped often you know the story goes he went to Argentina you know it it's all nonsense and it's you know the product of of either junk historians or fantasists or [Music] both because of the manufactured uncertainty Hitler's death certificate was only issued in 1956 while
it has been proven that Hitler definitely died the inevitable disorder and instability at the end of this global conflict fueled speculation that transformed into myth this was also the case in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War and the myths that surround the unexpected and unexplained death of a prime minister in 1986 Olaf Palmer was Sweden's prime minister and head of its left-leaning Social Democratic party he was in his second term as the country's prime minister on February 28th Palmer and his wife Elizabeth caught the subway into Central Stockholm to meet their son and his
girlfriend to see a film together after the film they went their separate ways before midnight Palmer and his wife were walking home when an assassin shot Palmer from behind fatally wounding him Elizabeth was also wounded a taxi driver saw the attack and the murderer running from the scene police came quickly but the Assassin escaped just after midnight Palmer was declared dead Olaf Bama didn't have security detail that night because he quite often didn't um even if he was going out late at night because part of his identity as prime minister was a man of the
people and he didn't like having security people between him and the Swedish people this sort of violent crime just didn't happen in Sweden so Stockholm police had very little experience handling such a high-profile incident the initial stages of the investigation were botched they didn't managed to close the city off they didn't manage to search the streets although they have a system for doing so the scene was sort of trampled and improperly taken care of and I think there was just total panic because it seemed so unlikely that something like that could happen in Sweden the
failure to find the killer coupled with Palmer's International profile left a news vacuum which was quickly filled by speculation there are several theories around the death of Olaf Palmer some of which are more credible than others and the popular ones are that there was some connection with South Africa because Olaf paa was very critical of aparti and donated to Mandela's ANC in charge of Sweden's biggest murder hunt Stockholm's police chief Hans hmer who told the world's Press today he had no hot Clues no it's the typical situation for the moment when you start a big
murder case like this you you have to be patient and impatient in the sort of mixture and then there was a series of culprits that they identified who were quite random really they started looking at the pkk the Kurdistan Workers Party for no particular reason and then after that they identified a local alcoholic who they thought could have been near the scene at the time but again there was no forensic evidence that any point it was just kind of them casting around looking for anybody who could fit the profile after interviewing more than 10,000 people
and investigating 4,000 Vehicles police in 2020 announced that they were reasonably confident that they had found their lone assassin it took the police until 2020 to name St gangst as the likely suspect because there was so little forensic evidence for them to go back to they had no weapon they had no real idea of a motive so they've been working on it on and off for decades now and I think it reached the point where they felt they had to have an official solution angstrom worked at the Scandia insurance company and had been vocally critical
of the Prime Minister his Alibi for the night in question was weak and he fitted the description Witnesses gave of the Killer there's still no motive that's been presented for stenstrom but it's the best they can do so they kind of have to just go with it because it is unacceptable to have this open wound in society where their prime minister was murdered and they don't know who did it the investigation into Olaf Palmer's death was finally closed in 2020 after 34 years but angstrom had escaped Justice he had died by suicide in the year
2000 it's this great unsolved mystery and such an UNS Swedish thing to have happened and for somebody to have come out of nowhere and killed the prime minister is sort of Unthinkable still even though they've known it for 30 years our fascination with myth making around our leaders is not limited to specific individuals imagine a myth so Insidious so allc consuming that it connects world leaders throughout history one that poses the possibility that the leaders we know and have elected and not actually in charge who is really pulling the levers behind everything is there a
powerful cabal controlling governments around the world Puppet Masters behind the political curtain that is the premise of the illumin Manti myth that there is a secret society whose members hold positions of power and a masterminding world events the Illuminati which people may not realize is actually a real group that existed 250 years ago it was the late 1700s and their goal really was to take over the world they were there to try and mess things up with the monarchy really kind of push their own agenda the Illuminati was established in 1776 in Bavaria Southeastern Germany
publicly the Illuminati was a charitable and philanthropic organization some of the members were admitted to the order's secret to gain power over religious and governmental institutions by putting illuminatus in charge the society like many Cults was very hierar Aral with a single leader at the top of the pyramid a law professor named Adam Vice initially it was just a small handful of them that met on a regular basis but their their numbers eventually grew and they thought that Christianity um is a problem right it's a problem in the way that it influences governments it is
estimated that a number of prominent wealthy figures including ministers doctors lawyers and noblemen were illuminatus perhaps as many as 2,000 in german-speaking States they were often recruited from and sometimes in concert with another secret society the Freemasons so in promoting the the Illuminati story weop also mentioned the Freemason and he said that that uh people who are in his organization should also be Freemasons and so that's the connection to the Freemasons so in both cases you have sort of secretive fraternal organizations and they sort of split off the order of the Illuminati was in reality
surprisingly shortlived following pressure from the Catholic Church the Illuminati along with other secret societies were outlawed in Bavaria in 1785 yet the myth of the all powerful Illuminati persisted by 1797 8 years after the French Revolution conservative thinkers John Roberson and the ex Jesuit Abe Augustine barell put forward the idea that the Illuminati were responsible for the conflict the two authors pushed the myth even further describing how the Illuminati were now responsible for an international conspiracy to overthrow throw established governments and religions this idea spread to the United States in 1798 former US President George
Washington who was known to be a Freemason also worried about the possible influence of the Illuminati he wrote to a colleague that the Illuminati had a nefarious and dangerous plan to overthrow the government and put its members in power a popular symbol associated with the Illuminati is that of the Eye of Providence the eye surrounded by a triangle and Rays of light is featured on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States and was used to illustrate being watched over by God you can mistake anything as evidence of the Illuminati if you
believe that the Illuminati is still existing today and controlling world events then you can point to Any Given world event and say they did that in the absence of irrefutable proof that they don't exist the Illuminati remains a pervasive myth even to this day the myth of a secret all powerful Society pulling the strings also persists under a new name the New World Order the Illuminati conspiracy morphed into the New World Order conspiracy theory pretty easily because they both involve this general idea that there's a pervasive evil force that's controlling everything the right-wing Theory goes
that a global cabal of Jews and atheists are using the United Nations and the banking system to overthrow Christianity and democratically elected leaders and install a global totalitarian government a new world order the Contemporary myth of the Illuminati is that the Illuminati is this group of powerful businessmen that control everything that they've served to bring about a new world order and that they're behind most of the recent historical events that they're behind 9/11 that they're behind Watergate I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow that they're behind the Kennedy assassination and so forth one
of the reasons why of course it's so evocative why people still talk about it the fictional Illuminati and the original one was that people want to know what's behind the curtain people are inherently drawn to conspiracies we want to be in the know history's leaders changed the global map and the way we live our lives sometimes for better sometimes For Worse the people who shape those events become Larger than Life these stories lasts for generations and generations centuries sometimes Millennia why is that because it's a good story that tells us something that we need to
hear leaders from history inevitably become the stuff of Legend because it's our only way of rationalizing their dramatic rise and fall and the impact both good and evil they have had on all our lives whose mythologies outlive their real influence and action and whose Legend remains with us despite the passing of time [Music]
