Albert Pike to Mazzini, August 15, 1871: Three World Wars?

by Terry Melanson

Or, how 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 about Albert Pike and Giuseppe Mazzini in Le diable au XIXe siècle, v. II, 1894, p. 605 (but actually pp. 594-606). Got it?

I don’t derive any satisfaction from a debunking. I really don’t. Discovering the truth is a reward in itself.

Having a knack for getting to the bottom of a thing also helps with maintaining credibility. Historiography is among other things concerned with source criticism. And while I’m not an academically trained historian, I am quite aware that one should strive to consult the primary source as opposed to relying on the word of secondary or even tertiary accounts.

The matter at hand deals with an alleged “three world war” prediction from famed Mason, Scottish Rite Sovereign Grand Commander Albert Pike. William Guy Carr was the key purveyor, or rather (as we’ll see), the inventor of the tale, which, to me, was suspicious at the least.

Off and on I’ve been working at it. And I’ve finally cracked the case.
The “Three World Wars” website and Carr

Let’s begin with the modern populariser of the Pike/Mazzini, 1871 “letter.”

In 2003, an Englishman by the name of Michael Haupt [fig 1] launched [fig 2] his website threeworldwars.com in response to Jihadist terrorism and the American invasion of Iraq. Backed by the knowledge gleaned from a conspiratorial view of history and an obvious impending cataclysm, the words of William Guy Carr, attributed to Albert Pike, seemed to precisely predict the dire circumstances unfolding in the Middle East.

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