Conspiracy

Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From by Daniel Pipes, Free Press, 1997. 

Summary

This book describes the history of political conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking. Ironically, imaginary political conspiracies preceded actual political conspiracies, and, in fact, helped create them. 

Christian Military Orders

There were several Christian Military Orders during the Middle Ages, including: (a) Knights Hospitallers of St. John, (b) Teutonic Knights © Order of Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon (Knights Templar). They existed but were not a conspiratorial organization. The Knights Templar were a banking system stretching between Europe and the Middle East that enabled people to transfer money over great distances. The King of France envied their wealth, stole it, and imprisoned their leaders. Many people believed that they continued to exist for centuries afterwards, but in hiding.

Freemasons

The Freemasons existed, and were a secret organization, but they had no plan to take over the world. The Grand lodge in London was founded in 1717. The Masons were reformists who spread Enlightenment ideas.

Order of the Illuminati

The Order of the Illuminati was real, founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt. They lasted only 10-15 years. Their goal was political reform for Germany.

French Revolution

Pipes goes into detail regarding the history of conspiratorial thinking, tracing it back to the French revolution of 1789. The French Revolution lead to a great increase in conspiratorial thinking. Some intellectuals saw the French Revolution not as a revival of the secular, classical era of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but rather as the result of a secret conspiracy. It was hard to understand how the powerful French monarchy had been overthrown by such apparently weak forces. The French suspected Great Britain (Perfidious Albion) and British Freemasons. A Scottish physicist wrote a book seeing the origins of the French Revolution in the Bavarian Illuminati and the continental Freemasons. Johann August Starck, a theologian from Königsberg, wrote books blaming the Illuminati and Freemasons for the French Revolution. At the time of the French Revolution, the Jews were not blamed for it, because they had too little power. But in later years, after the Jews of Europe became emancipated, they were retrospectively blamed for the French Revolution.  A French ex-Jesuit named Augustin de Barruel wrote books claiming that the French Revolution was the result of plotting by secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati. Augustin de Barruel also accused Voltaire of plotting to destroy Christianity. The books of Augustin de Barruel had a wide and lasting impact.

Conspiracy of Equals

The first example of an actual conspiratorial organization of political Leftists was the Conspiracy of Equals of Gracchus Babeuf (1796). In 1828, the Italian utopian socialist, Filippo Buonarroti, wrote History of Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of Equals’. Buonarroti believed that mass uprisings would not be able to overthrow governments, so instead he turned to the creation of secret societies.

People’s Will

The first political terrorist organization was Russia’s People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) of 1879. They were intellectuals who believed that they were representing the working class.

The Political Left and the Political Right

During the late 19th and first half of the twentieth century, fear of secret societies was largely replaced by (a) left-wing fear of British imperialism, and (b) right-wing fear of Jews. Pipes writes that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conspiratorial fears of Great Britain. In 1902, John Atkinson Hobson published a book called Imperialism: A Study, which greatly influenced V. I. Lenin. Lenin was a left-wing conspiratorial thinker, who feared Anglo-American capitalism, which he called imperialism. The Knights Templar, Freemasons and Illuminati are also part of left-wing conspiratorial thinking. The right-wing conspiratorial thinkers, such as Adolf Hitler, feared the Jews.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Pipes writes about the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was forged by the secret police of Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Many Muslim Arabs in the Middle East still believe in the authenticity of this work, which claims that there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Napoleon’s revival of the Great Sanhedrin of historical Judaism was one of the sources of the theory of an international Zionist organization that plotted to take over the world. In Biblical times, the Great Sanhedrin was a kind of rabbinical supreme court.

Louis Farrakhan

Farrakhan proclaims that AIDS, drug addiction, birth control, and abortion are parts of a plot by white people to kill black people. He also exaggerates the role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade.

Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche has created a conspiracy theory that is a blend of left-wing and right-wing paranoia. In particular, he makes accusations against the following: British aristocracy, Zionists, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Freemasons. 

Common Themes of Conspiracy Theorists

• Creating forgeries to support their assertions

• Asking: Who benefits? Those who benefit are accused of being behind it

• Nothing is accidental or coincidental

The Double Doctrine

Secret societies have both public beliefs and secret beliefs. New recruits are not informed of the true goals of the organization. A modern example is Britain’s National Front, which publicly opposes immigrants, but secretly opposes Jews.