[APPLAUSE]. Goodbye Norma Jean. No, I never knew what I have read to hold yourself as author. >> As author, David Aaronavich points out Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana have a connection through a song. Elton John and Bernie Taupins moving composition, candle in the wind. >> It seems to me you lived your life like a candle and you never know who they claim to when the rain said >> Originally written for Monroe and then repurposed for Princess Diana, the chorus goes, seems like you lived your whole life as a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in. But with all due respect, I think that the central fight struggle, if you will for Marilyn Monroe and Diana, princess of Wales wasn't figuring out who to cling to, but finding themselves. I think that that's what they both really sought. Diana's death in a Paris car accident on August 31, 1997 was obviously shocking. But what was also surprising was how many people suddenly realized how much they cared about her, Buckingham Palace literally became buried in bouquets. TV hosts cried on the air for weeks. The op ed sections of newspapers in the UK and everywhere else were filled with passionate remembrances of her, who knew how much we cared about this person, everybody exclaimed until she died. But now lots of observers also remembered and interviewed that Diana did 21 months earlier on a BBC TV show called Panorama hosted by Martin Bashir in which he asked her if she wanted to be queen. I picked up this rather strangely formatted version of the interview from YouTube? Let's watch it. >> Do you think you will ever be queen? >> No, I don't no >> Why do you think tat? >> I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts? But I don't see myself being queen this country. I don't think many people would want me to be queen. Actually, when I say many people, I mean the establishment that I'm married into because they have decided that I'm a nonstarter. Why do you think they've decided that? Because I do things differently, because I don't go by a rule book because I lead from my heart, not the head and Albeit that's got me into trouble in my work. I understand that, but someone's gotta guard there and love people and show it. >> And do you think that because of the way you behave, that's precluded you effectively from becoming queen? >> Well not precluded me. I wouldn't say that. I just don't think I have as many supporters in that environment that I did. >> You mean within the royal household? >> Mm-hm. They see me as a threat of some kind and I'm here to good, I'm not a destructive person. >> Why do they see you as a threat? I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path and I think it's the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong, where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it? Why do the public still support her? >> I'm not sure I get the choice of background music. Were they expecting Diana to carry the ring to Mordor? That aside later, it was revealed that Diana deeply regretted the interview, in which he questioned the strength of her husband, Prince Charles and rather strongly suggested that beyond being the bearer of his two children, he didn't care for her very much. And cared for others quite a bit more. But once she died, the commentary provided the perfect setup for conspiracy theories, theories that somehow managed to leap over the total implausibility of some kind of coordinated assassination. Diana died because of a last minute car switch at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The plan was to divert the army of paparazzi photographers following her around with a decoy automobile while she and her lover Dodi Al Fayed escaped in another car, but that car stalled. It failed to start, so they jumped into another car staffed by a Ritz hotel driver who was drunk and who crashed the vehicle under the famous Alma bridge killing Diana and Fayed. Given the last minuteness of the circumstances of this tragedy, a plot to deliberately kill Diana would be very difficult to pull off. But of course that doesn't discourage your typical conspiracy fan. So let's go through some of the crucial theories which ironic, which notes come from? Two sources primarily Dodi Al Fayed's father and the late celebrated third party weirdo Lyndon Larouche. Let's start with Larouche because I sort of knew the guy or at least I knew a lot of his followers. Back when I lived in New York City, Lyndon Larouche and his followers were ubiquitous. He was born in 1922 when he died in 2019. And he started out as a member of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party and he lived in New York city and he worked and wandered around the factional politics of the far left. Joining a Trotskyite splinter group called the Spartacus League and then quitting it. And during the 1960s Larouche became very involved in the huge mass student group, students for a democratic society and he was very intellectual and very charismatic and his apartment became a sort of informal academic department. And a cult emerged around him and back in the day, I knew a lot of kids who just glommed onto his orbit and lost their minds and lives for any number of years. At first, Larouche started a newspaper called New Solidarity, which called for students to work with trade unions. But as the sixties subsided, Larouche's organization basically devolved into a network of scam artists. It became a sort of privatized version of a national Security State, cultivating a network of far left and far right activists who traded and sold information to corporations and government agencies. Much of it disclosed in Larouche's most famous publication, the Executive Intelligence Review. For a while in the 1970's, I lived in a tenement building in Upper Manhattan, around Washington Heights, which was filled with Larouche supporters or Larouchies as we call them. Often from their apartments, I could hear the sound of Beethoven's late string quartets playing because Larouche told him apparently that they must listen to Beethoven's late string quartets for wisdom. I of course I had no problem with that. I love Beethoven's music. But there was this suggestion that if you listen to these quartets in the correct way your political consciousness would somehow be expanded or something. Then one day I listened and the Larousse sell apartments were now playing Bela Bartok's late string quartets, which I also love. Speaking personally, I asked why the change and Larouche told me quite plainly that Mr. Larouche had told everybody that now they had to listen to Bartok's late string quartets. So that's what they were doing now, which was very cultish behavior. I thought Larouche became a big supporter of nuclear power in the 1980's and back when I was a radio reporter for a listener supported radio station in Berkeley KPFA in Berkeley, about which I've written two books. I had a funny experience with his organization, Larouche was now running for President, he had qualified for the ballot in California 1984. And this meant that his US Labor Party as it was called had signed up seven delegates apiece in all 58 counties of California for the Democratic primary. And my boss at the KPFA News department asked me to call these delegates, many of whom lived in conservative California districts and ask them why on earth the became delegates for Lyndon Larouche? So I got out the phone books for these counties and I called these people and they asked them why did you become delegates for this guy? And all of them responded that they didn't know that they had become delegates. But after talking to them for a while I pieced together the following as best I could figure out that they had encountered a Lyndon Larouche political table at some airport and it had some literature that they liked. The anti nuclear power movement was very big in the 1980's and their slogan was no nukes. So Lyndon Larouche's counter slogan was yes nukes. And these people, many of whom were older and more conservative were encouraged to sign up for Lyndon Larouche's newspaper or activities list. Except what they'd actually signed where papers signing them up to become delegates for Larouche in the California Democratic primary or once they'd signed something perhaps their signature was just grafted onto the Democratic Party papers anyway. They had no idea that they were delegates, as the 1980s progressed. Larouche did a lot of stuff like this it seems. And eventually in 1989 he received a 15 year prison sentence for scheming to defraud the IRS. And defrauding his supporters by deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans that they had paid to him. Six of his aides were also convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy. Larouche was by this point 66 years old, undaunted. He served out a third of his present term for five years filed for the presidential election for 1996 and ran again. The Larouche man was back more or less running on what had morphed into a rather weird set of beliefs that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a soviet agent. And Queen Elizabeth was the leader of a world narcotics network backed by various global banks. Not surprisingly then, as soon as Princess Diana died, Larouche was all over the thing. And he had an ally in this burgeoning conspiracy theory in Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi Fayed's grieving father and the owner of the Ritz Hotel in Paris and Harrods department stores. And the next thing you knew all. There are all these Executive Intelligence Review articles and TV shows in which Larouche TV hosts. Yes there was a Larouche TV. We're talking about disturbing questions and troubling anomalies with Mr Fayed and Mr. Fayed was telling everybody that he was sure it was a plot because Executive Intelligence Review quote one of the world's leading magazines said it was a plot. There are a variety of theories about the assassination of Diana. One is that she was pregnant with Dodi al Fayed's child and that she was bumped off by the Mossad. The Israeli intelligence agency. Apparently the source for this was one Ari Ben Menashe an Israeli writer who claimed to be part of the Mossad and told Mohamed Al Fayed said that he would confirm the Mossad link for the tidy sum of $75,000 which he never did. But as allegations were published and made newspaper headlines in 2002, this morphed into a theory that Diana was killed because she was on the verge of speaking out for the Palestinians. They in a war over land with Israel. And I must confess that of all the Diana related conspiracy theories, I wish that one was true. I mean there's no evidence for it, but the thought of Diana speaking out for the Palestinians had tremendous appeal to at least to me. Less so the arguments of pop psychologist David Cohen, who decided that a strange cult called the Order of the Solar Temple was responsible for her death. It was sort of an early Christianity and free mason ritual cult started in Geneva Switzerland. Eventually the order went downhill and 53 of its members immolated themselves. Yes way Cohen had already come up with the theory that Princess Grace Kelly had joined the order and given it eight million and then been murdered by them and now he with various confidants. Mr Cohen cooked up the idea that British intelligence agents had bumped off Diana. This has been accomplished by having a transvestite named Belinda Cozy up to on re poll the drunken rich driver. And they planted on poor Mr Paul, a tiny gadget that was time to poison him with the nerve agent VX, which is apparently a quote synaptic disrupter. So when Paul drove into the Alma tunnel, the synaptic disrupter went off and well, presumably disrupted his synapses, I guess, causing the fatal accident. In Cohen's book on the Diana assassination, he insisted that he remained uncertain whether this happened, quote, I cannot prove it's untrue, I remain unsure he wrote, but he piled on all the typical logical fallacy bloviation that we associate with such theories. For example, a solar order affiliated dry cleaning store had once clean Prince Charles's dressing gown. Prince Charles shared similar spiritual interests with the Solar Temple like interest in spirituality and hadn't British intelligence tried to assassinate people like Egypt's President Gamal Nasser, it's all coming together. Now, I guess David, Iranovic goes on and on about this stuff in his chapter on Princess Diana. But towards the end of the chapter, he has a very interesting discussion about the impact of media and how media was evolving on all this stuff and I want to take a look at that in the next segment on Princess Diana.
