The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Michael Butter

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In a single paragraph, Churchill paints the picture of a global conspiracy that has been operating at least since 1776, when the Order of the Illuminati was founded by Adam Weishaupt – ‘Spartacus’ to his brethren within the secret society – in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt. According to Churchill, this ‘world-wide conspiracy’ secretly orchestrated the French Revolution, was behind various revolutions throughout the nineteenth century – he is surely thinking in particular of the series of failed and successful revolutions of 1848 – and is now, more successfully than ever, orchestrating events in Russia. Admittedly, Churchill is slightly more careful than other conspiracy theorists, as he does not entirely disregard other influences. Still, the conspirators ‘played … a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution’ and have ‘been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century’. In a manner characteristic of conspiracy theorizing since the eighteenth century, Churchill thus considers world history largely the result of a conspiracy. He denies that the revolutions in different countries were the result of a number of complex and interrelating factors, some local, some national, some transnational, and reduces history to the secret workings of a group of conspirators who are pursuing a single goal – ‘the overthrow of civilization’ – and have therefore plotted all of these events.

      Moreover, in the short vision of history that Churchill provides here, nothing is as it seems. Not only does he unveil a global conspiracy that has been operating for more than 200 years; without offering any kind of evidence for his claims, he also maintains that Adam Weishaupt, who in reality was raised as a Catholic but later rejected the more traditional versions of religion in favour of Deism, was a Jew, one of those who gave up ‘the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world’. In fact, in Churchill’s logic, the masterminds behind the various revolutionary efforts he considers are all either Jews who keep their real identities a secret or are controlled by Jews. These explicit and implicit claims allow him to construct a teleological historical narrative that spans from the Illuminati to the Bolshevists, from Ingolstadt to St Petersburg. What we see here in a nutshell, then, is how the characteristics of conspiracy theory identified by Barkun and Cubitt are interconnected. Once one looks beneath the surface of things, the hidden connections become apparent. Admittedly, not everything is connected in Churchill’s text – in that regard Barkun exaggerates slightly – but many links between events and people one would not have thought of as related are highlighted.

      The dualism of good and evil that Cubitt particularly emphasizes structures Churchill’s text in twofold fashion. On the one hand, there is the conflict between the malevolent conspirators, ‘schem[ing for] a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination’, and the innocent victims of their plot. On the other hand, there is the conflict that frames Churchill’s conspiracy narrative, the conflict between ‘Good and Bad Jews’, between those subscribing to nationalism and those plotting for international communism. As he claims early in his text, ‘The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race.’

When it comes to providing evidence of the alleged plot – a topic I discuss in detail in the next chapter – Churchill’s speech is rather untypical. It deviates from what we usually find in conspiracy theory texts in that he does not provide a lot of evidence for his claims. Because of the genre of the text – a short speech that simply does not allow for an in-depth analysis – he does not quote any sources to prove that there really is a plot. In fact, he places the burden of proof on another conspiracy theorist, ‘a modern writer, Mrs Webster, [who, he claims] has so ably shown’ that the conspirators orchestrated the French Revolution. Such a reference is quite typical of conspiracist discourse, however. Conspiracy theorists often back up their feeble assertions by referring to sources who have made the same claims, usually without offering any convincing evidence themselves. All too often, the conspiracy theorists thus quoted refer back to those who cited them, engaging in a circular logic that creates the impression of serious research and a foundation in facts.

      It is no coincidence that Churchill refers to Nesta Webster (1876–1960), a member of the British upper class and wife of Arthur Templer Webster, the Superintendent of the British Police in India. Webster is one of the most significant conspiracy theorists of the twentieth century, whose influence on contemporary conspiracist visions that merge suspicions about secret societies, Jews and communists cannot be overestimated. She single-handedly resuscitated the Illuminati conspiracy theory that had gone out of fashion by the second half of the nineteenth century, and is thus the most important link between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists like John Robison, Augustin Barruel and Johann August von Starck, who blamed the Illuminati and the Freemasons for the French Revolution, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers who do the same.²

The book by Webster that Churchill has in mind is The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, from 1919, in which she breathed new life into the allegations of Robison, Barruel and Starck. In the book’s epilogue, she also connected the alleged plots around the French Revolution to other revolutions in the nineteenth century and current events in Russia. Still, Webster did not (yet) explicitly argue that the same group of conspirators was behind all of these events. She rather highlighted what she perceived as the overarching structural parallel: all these upheavals were rooted in bottom-up conspiracies. Thus, Churchill is far more extreme in his claims about the reach and longevity of the conspiracy than the source he refers to. However, in subsequent writings Webster caught up with and surpassed Churchill. In The French Terror and Russian Bolshevism (1920), World Revolution: The Plot against Civilization (1921), Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924) and a number of other texts, she merged – as the titles of these books already indicate – allegations against Jews, communists, Freemasons and Illuminati far more aggressively. It is tempting to speculate that the way Churchill adopted her argument at least helped to push Webster in that direction.³

Typologies

      There are conspiracy theories that claim the moon landing was staged in a television studio by the American government, or that the CIA was behind the 9/11 attacks. Others accuse the Illuminati of secretly controlling the destiny of the world for centuries. The Nazis believed that a global Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy was at work. And in the nineteenth century large numbers of French people believed that the Jesuits were slowly but surely taking control of state institutions. Clearly, not all conspiracy theories are the same. There are significant differences in the scope and degree of advancement of the conspiracy, as well as the nature of the group of conspirators, and it is therefore necessary to introduce a few distinctions at this point. At the same time, we should bear in mind that typologies are heuristic instruments designed to sharpen our awareness of certain phenomena. Needless to say, there will always be hybrid forms that resist precise classification and call into question the choice of categories.

      One of the first key distinctions concerns the position in which the conspirators find themselves. Have they already gained control over the institution or country they are plotting against, or indeed over the entire world? Are their plots primarily about consolidating their power or increasing it? Or are they still in the process of assuming that power by infiltrating institutions and subverting society? In other words, is it a ‘top-down’ conspiracy or a ‘bottom-up’ one?⁴

The most popular conspiracy theories circulating in Germany between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries related exclusively to ‘bottom-up’ plots, as the German historian Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein has demonstrated. As the subtitle of his book indicates, not only Freemasons and Jews, but also socialists and liberals, were seen as ‘conspirators against the social order’ who, according to the authorities at the time, had to be prevented at all costs from seizing power.⁵ A similar attitude was displayed by the American senator Joseph McCarthy during the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s. Despite claiming to have discovered communists in schools, colleges and the State Department, McCarthy СКАЧАТЬ