Book Review of: The Master Game

Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World

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Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 6,000 articles.

Seriously interesting, but the point is?

This book provides extensive research and detail on, as far as I can tell, two topics:

1. The brutalities of the Catholic Church in suppressing dissent, truth, heresy, and knowledge. It covers this story from the beginnings of the Catholic Church in the fourth century AD until the ascent of England as the dominant world power.
    
2. The Masons and a litany of architectural anomalies and coincidences. It covers this story from the time of the Knights Templar (presumably, the forerunners of the Masons) to such modern architecture as I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre.

If you have an interest in this kind of history, this book will be a page turner for you. You'll turn about 600 pages. Unfortunately, this book obviously was not proofread. So as you turn those pages, you can't help but notice that typos and misspellings abound. To me, that's a serious defect.

Another defect is the book doesn't seem to be written with a point in mind. While I enjoyed reading the history, I finished the book not understanding why the authors wrote it or what point they were trying to make. Yes, they did state a concluding point but it didn't seem to derive from the rest of the book.

This is really several books in one, or at least several themes that appear to stand separately. For example, there's a book that gives you some history of the Cathars, another book that gives you some history of the Knights Templar, and another book that discusses writings of Hermes Trismegistus. The authors don't explain how these tie together. That said, it is some seriously interesting material to read.

The Master Game ends with a 20-page chapter that talks about Masonry and jihads, concluding that the secular leaders need to get the Muslims and Christians to set aside their animosity toward each other. That's a good sentiment as far as it goes. But it ignores the fact that most of the Western world isn't Christian (non-Muslim Europeans tend to be agnostic), even if we lump Catholics into that category.

Only at the end of the book did it dawn on me that the authors were positing that the folks running the world are the Masons. But they don't make a case for that theory.  Yes, many prominent people have been Masons. But they also probably ate peas. So what?

With so much detail in the history of Catholic suppression, the Cathars, etc., we suddenly leap into "these people were Masons, so Masons must be running the world." But the evidence the authors provide of Mason influence is in architecture, not politics or banking. As the Masons came out of the building trades, their influence in architecture is a given.

So I don't see that this book answers the question posed by its title and subtitle. There is a conclusion, but I don't see its relevance to the rest of the book.

Except for loosely arguing that the Masons rule the world, this book doesn't reveal who the "secret rulers" are. I had expected to read something about Goldman Sachs or another of today's powerful criminal enterprises, but this book spends most of its time hundreds of years in the past and then rapidly moves through the American and French Revolutionary times and on to today. But it spends very little time on anything that's happened in this century or even the previous one.

Consider what would happen if a researcher decided to answer the following two questions:

1. How did Obama, who had the worst federal spending record in the US Senate, manage to get put on the Presidential ballot in the middle of an economic crisis made worse by federal spending?
2. Why are so many of Obama's top folks, and nearly all with any financial oversight, from Goldman Sachs?

Or consider how research into those two questions would lead us into looking at how the massive stealing (they call it "spending") of the Obama, Bush, and Clinton Presidencies has produced a national debt greater now than $200 trillion (far above the official figures) or why the USA now spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

Yet, none of this was even hinted at in the book. And I don't see how today's gangsta government has anything to do with Catholic popes who died fifteen or sixteen centuries ago on another continent.

This book provides an interesting ride through history. But to see who the secret rulers of the world are, you just need to follow the money. The master game is one of stealing, and those who run the game are accumulating the money. The alignments of buildings in London and Paris aren't explained by the greed and destruction we see from today's elite.