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The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Michael ButterЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Nature of Conspiracy Theories - Michael Butter


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that is used to discredit the ideas of others – even if they do not display the typical characteristics of conspiracy theories. That said, it is in my view nevertheless possible to use the term neutrally, as I argue in the fourth part of this chapter. Finally, I examine calls to replace the term ‘conspiracy theory’ with ‘conspiracy ideology’. This discussion is limited to German-speaking countries; elsewhere, scholars seem either to have no problem with it or to accept that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is already so well established that an alternative would fail to catch on anyway. The debate is, notwithstanding, of general interest, since it highlights the question of how far conspiracy theories are in fact theories, and what distinguishes them from scientific theories.

      According to the American political scientist Michael Barkun, conspiracy theories are characterized – in addition to the premise of a group of conspirators – by three basic assumptions: 1) Nothing happens by accident; 2) Nothing is as it seems; 3) Everything is connected. The English historian Geoffrey Cubitt, who formulated another influential definition of conspiracism, takes a very similar view. For him, intentionality, secrecy (which he refers to as occultism) and the dualism of good and evil constitute the essence of conspiracy theory. Intentionality and secrecy correspond almost exactly to Barkun’s first two components in that the conspirators follow a plan and act in secret, while dualism is highlighted elsewhere by Barkun. The conspirators are invariably imagined as evil, and their actions as causing harm to the wider mass of innocent people.1

      All these characteristics can indeed be found in Churchill’s short text, especially in the paragraph on ‘International Jews’, which I will therefore cite again at greater length:

      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.’

      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


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