Free The illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson

domination of the world, and they were Rhodes Scholars—according to the Birchers.
That
idea, obviously, belonged with Saul’s own whimsey about a worldwide Shriner conspiracy. What then? The Italian Illuminati, under Fra Dolcino, wanted to redistribute the wealth—but the International Bankers, mentioned in the
Playboy
letter, presumably wanted to hold onto their wealth. Weishaupt was a “freethinker” according to the
Britannica
, and so were Washington and Jefferson— but Sabbah and Joachim of Florence were evidently heretical mystics of the Islamic and Catholic traditions respectively.
    Saul picked up the ninth memo, deciding to get more facts (or pretended facts) before analyzing further—and then it hit him.
    Whatever the Illuminati were aiming at had not been accomplished. Proof: If it had, they would not still be conspiring in secret.
    Since almost everything has been tried in the course of human history, find out what hasn’t been tried (at least not on a large scale)—and that will be the condition towhich the Illuminati are trying to move the rest of mankind.
    Capitalism had been tried. Communism has been tried. Even Henry George’s Single Tax has been tried, in Australia. Fascism, feudalism and mysticism have been tried.
    Anarchism has never been tried
.
    Anarchism was frequently associated with assassinations. It had an appeal for freethinkers, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also for religious idealists, like Tolstoy and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. Most anarchists hoped, Joachim-like, to redistribute the wealth, but Rebecca had once told him about a classic of anarchist literature, Max Stirner’s
The Ego and His Own
, which had been called “the Billionaire’s Bible” because it stressed the advantages the rugged individualist would gain in a stateless society—and Cecil Rhodes was an adventurer before he was a banker. The Illuminati were anarchists.
    It all fit: the pieces of the puzzle slipped together smoothly.
    Saul was convinced.
    He was also wrong.
    “We’ll just get our troops out of Fernando Too,” the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party said on April 1. “A place that size isn’t worth world war.”
    “But we don’t have any troops there,” an aide told him, “it’s the Russians who do.”
    “Oh?” the Chairman quoted a proverb to the effect that there was urine in the rosewater. “I wonder what the hell the Russians want with Fernando Poo?” he added thoughtfully.
    He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almostgodly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and Russia.
    (“And it’s not only a sin against God,” Mr. Mocenigo shouts, “but it gives you germs, too.” It is 1950, early spring on Mulberry Street, and young Charlie Mocenigo raises terrified eyes. “Look, look,”