The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Michael Butter

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The Nature of Conspiracy Theories - Michael Butter


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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

      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

      A very different view was taken a hundred years earlier by opponents of the so-called Slave Power Conspiracy. In their eyes, the state was already completely under the control of a conspiracy of radical pro-slavery campaigners who they believed wanted to make the practice compulsory throughout the land. In this case, the conspiracy theorists identified a ‘top-down’ plot. In 1858, for example, the future president Abraham Lincoln – in one of his most famous speeches, in which he described the USA as a ‘house divided’ – accused the then president James Buchanan, his predecessor Franklin Pierce, the Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney and the influential congressman Stephen Douglas of heading up a giant conspiracy of slave owners. These conspirators, Lincoln argued, had orchestrated all the crises of recent years in order to achieve their true objective: the introduction of slavery across the whole of the United States.6

      One example of a conspiracy theory involving an external, bottom-up plot was the widespread claim in the USA in the 1830s and 1840s that the Pope and the crowned heads of Europe were secretly directing Catholic migration to America. According to many influential Protestant ministers and intellectuals at the time, the ultimate aim was to instigate a takeover that would destroy the shining example of freedom and democracy set by a country that sided with the oppressed masses of Europe and was hence a thorn in the side of absolutist monarchs. In much the same fashion, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad consistently blamed all ills, disasters and attacks in his country on US and Israeli plots throughout his eight years in office (2005–13). In both instances, the spectre of an external conspiracy served – consciously or unconsciously – to defuse internal tensions. In most conspiracy theories directed against external adversaries, the nation appears as an organic unit whose real enemies can only come from outside.

      The various groups of alleged conspirators mentioned earlier as being feared by nineteenth-century German conservatives are a different story. While they may have been influenced by foreign ideologues, they were not – at least according to the prevailing view – controlled from outside the country. This type of conspiracy was therefore an internal, bottom-up one. The conspiracy scenarios popular in the West in recent decades revolve around internal, top-down conspiracies. As far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moon landing or the 9/11 attacks are concerned, most conspiracy theorists assume the involvement of the US government or at least large parts of it. The tendency to regard the elites of one’s own country as conspirators already suggests the close relationship between conspiracy theories and populism, which I discuss in Chapter 4.

      Event conspiracy theories, as the name implies, centre on a specific, relatively clear-cut event which is claimed to be the result of a plot. The Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, 9/11 or the death of the Polish president Lech Kaczyński when his plane crashed in Smolensk in April 2010 – all these events have given rise to such theories. Systemic conspiracy theories, on the other hand, focus on a particular group of conspirators who are accused of engineering a whole series of events in order to achieve their dark purposes or hold on to power. Such theories have sprung up around groups such as communists, the Illuminati, Jews or the CIA.


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