Was The Pike-Mazzini Letter About WW3 and The NWO Really A "Hoax?"
A Dizzying Dive Into The Surprising Answer Behind The Internet's And Alt Media's Ostensible
I noticed an important reader comment, a challenge to a fact I had reported, and also based all my recent analysis of things on:
“That too-good-to-be-true, amazing letter from Confederate General Albert Pike to Freemason Mazzini which describes 3 world wars w/ remarkable prescience has turned out to be a fake. It was concocted by charlatan Leo Taxil and picked up and promoted by sincere but lazy conspiracy researchers like William Guy Carr and David Icke. No record of it exists at its purported repository, the British Museum. Read all about it [link; link].”
—Billy Thistle, comment section, here.
I started researching, with an urgent need to understand this. If it was a hoax, how had the hoax come to pass?
My instincts said: “There’s something else going on.”
It consumed me for almost six hours.
At first glance, numerous internet searched will turn up a spray of articles, written in varying tones of indignation (not Billy’s comment) about the alleged “hoax” of the Pike-Mazzini letter.
Here’s James Corbett, virtually purple with irritation over the alleged laziness of the conspiracy theorists who spread the “hoax:”
“OK, so I added the exclamation marks. But they do seem to be implied here, don't they? (Besides, I only borrowed them from some of the Star's other headlines, like the one about the Coronation Street star spilling out of her "devilishly daring low-cut number"(!). Truly, journalism at its finest).
“So what do we make of these remarkable predictions? How did Albert Pike make such incredibly precise forecasts of events that were still decades in the future? And what can we learn from his prescient warning about World War III, living as we are in the shadow of the War of Terror and its incipient Clash of Civilizations?
“Absolutely nothing, that's what. Why? Because the letter is complete and utter hogwash, made up by admitted hoaxers and perpetuated by unscrupulous "researchers" who are more interested in getting clicks than telling the truth.
“So do you want the real story of this (non-existent) letter? Here it is:
"Michael Haupt said that William Guy Carr said that Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago, Chile said that The Cause of World Unrest said that the confessed hoaxer Gabriel Jogand-Pagès aka Dr. Bataille aka Leo Taxil said that Albert Pike wrote Giuseppe Mazzini in Le diable au XIXe siècle, v. II, 1892-1894, p. 605 (but actually pp. 594-606)."
I searched on multiple search engines, and initially came to a dead end of sorts, or so it seemed.
Here’s one source from The Internet Archive that claims the letter was on display at a British museum, until 1977 but had since been removed. The claimed source (the museum) meanwhile, denied it had ever existed. I found that a bit odd.
“The following is a letter, that speculation claimed that Albert Pike wrote to Giuseppe Mazzini in 1871 regarding a conspiracy involving three world wars, that were planned in an attempt to take over the world. The Pike letter to Giuseppe Mazzini was on display in the British Museum Library in London until 1977. This letter has been claimed by many internet sites to reside in the British Library in London, which denies the letter exists.”
But, as per Corbett’s supposed debunk, the matter did not rest with taking the word of the British Museum Library, or not, but with a committed hoax author named Leo Taxil.
My sense was: