scruples about Scruples

Do you remember the game Scruples? For a while, back in the 1980s, the board game based around ethical dilemmas was pretty popular and heavily advertised. Even if you never played the game, you may recall the TV commercials. This is the US version, but the UK one (which does not seem to be available on YouTube) was pretty similar:



By the late 1980s, a short-lived BBC1 Scruples TV game show was on the air, hosted by Simon Mayo, then at the peak of his popularity as the presenter of Radio 1's Breakfast Show. The game had also been adapted for the hot home computer formats of the time:

What you may not know about this once-popular game is that it was invented by a strange and unpleasant person by the name of Henry Makow.

Makow, a Swiss-born Canadian, is an avowed opponent of feminism. So much so that in 2002 he alleged that Gloria Steinem was recruited by the CIA in the late 1950s and employed as part of a plot to use feminism to destabilise society. For Makow, the CIA is just one tool of an international cabal seeking to weaken America and integrate it into a global state directed by the United Nations. Makow puts the banking and oil dynasties of Rothschild, Rockefeller and Morgan at the heart of this conspiracy and contends that feminism was not the only great social movement directed by the CIA. He asserts that "the 60s drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement" were all catalysed by the US Government intelligence agency.

By the age of forty-eight, Makow had decided that marriage to a woman from his home country would not work due to his female compatriots having been, in his view, brainwashed by feminism, thereby destroying the viability of the kind of relationship he wanted. So, in an adventure recounted in his slim 2001 work A Long Way to Go for a Date, Makow set off on what the book's jacket blurb describes as "a quest for masculine identity". This quest took him to the Philippines, in search of the kind of compliant creature unavailable to him in North America. She was thirty years his junior - a teenage Filipina named Cecilia. It didn't work out. 

Makow is still a very active writer. He has published two books on the idea that a "depraved satanic cult called the Illuminati is waging a covert war against humanity", following a plan outlined in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Unless Makow intends his works on the Illuminati to be read as fiction, it says something about his research methods that he cites an anti-Semitic document which had already been exposed as fraudulent by the time Germany's Nazis were distributing it in schools and having its contents taught as fact. When you drive your Focus, your Galaxy or your Fiesta, you may prefer not to reflect on the fact that a certain Henry Ford funded the printing of half a million copies in the USA in the 1920s.

Still blogging prolifically, Makow wrote only only yesterday to complain about occasions when white Christians have been assaulted in America and this has not been dealt with a hate crime. The term hate crime, asserts Makow, pertains only "to crimes against Illuminati-sponsored minorities. They are used to advance the Illuminati's satanic, homosexual and "multicultural" agenda."

Should you be in any doubt about Henry Makow's world-view, consider the titles of some of the articles written by others to which his blog provides links: "Obama's Gay Bathhouse", "Mossad and 9-11", "Marilyn Munroe (sic) and Jewish Hollywood". A man shall be known by the company he keeps...

Turn all that over the next time you feel like a nostalgic game of Scruples...