The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Michael Butter

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Acknowledgements

      It is a great pleasure to thank the many people who ‘conspired’ with me on this project in manifold ways over the past years. Daniel Graf planted the idea for this book in my mind many years ago and finally made me pursue it. Elise Heslinga and John Thompson at Polity were a pleasure to work with. So were Heinrich Geiselberger and Nora Mercurio at Suhrkamp, which published the original German version in 2018. Special thanks are due to Sharon Howe for not getting lost in my overly long German sentences while translating the book. That I felt that I had something to say at all is mostly due to the impact of a number of wonderful colleagues who shared their ideas with me over the years. I am thinking in particular of the members of the COST Action ‘Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories’, many of whom have become good friends over the past years. I am especially indebted to Peter Knight, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg and Claus Oberhauser. I would also like to acknowledge the impact that Andreas Anton has had on my thoughts about conspiracy theories. I mention him only in one endnote (and completely forgot to mention him in the German edition), but his take on conspiracy theories as a form of knowledge had a lasting effect on me. Finally, I would like to thank my research assistants Alexandra Dempe and Hannah Herrera for tracking down references, formatting endnotes and bearing with me when I decided to change something once again.

Introduction, or: What’s the plan?

      On 8 February 1920, the Illustrated Sunday Herald published a short speech by Winston Churchill with the title ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People’. In this speech, delivered to Churchill’s old regiment at Aldershot a few days earlier, the future British prime minister reflects on the role of the Jews in the Russian communist revolution of 1917, and the ongoing civil war it has sparked. Drawing on a plethora of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Churchill distinguishes between three types of Jews, ‘two of which’, he suggests, ‘are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree to humanity, and the third absolutely destructive’. The two groups of Jews that Churchill views positively – ‘“National” Jews’ and Zionists – have in common that they subscribe to the spirit of nationalism so prevalent in Europe at the time, and not only among conservatives. The ones he eyes suspiciously are the ‘International Jews’ who he aligns with the menace of communism.¹

Churchill expresses respect for those Jews who, ‘dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them’. Still, as the final words of this sentence – resonating with the idea of the Jews as homeless and wandering – make clear, Churchill cannot quite shed the idea that the Jews do not properly belong to the national body politic. In his view, they are guests in the nations that have offered them a place to live and should behave accordingly. He also has only praise for the attempts to create ‘by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown’, a project he presents as both significantly driven by British Jews and ‘in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire’.

      By contrast, he views the alleged activities of the third group – the ‘International Jews’ – as highly problematic and a threat to the stability of the global order in general and to Britain and its political system in particular. ‘Most, if not all’ of these Jews, he writes, ‘have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world’. In their minds, religion has been replaced with ideology. Having turned communist, they now want to abolish not only religion but also the nation state. Their goal, according to Churchill, is to establish ‘a world-wide communistic State’.

      Somewhat surprisingly at first sight, Churchill claims that this idea is much older than communism itself, and it is here that his text becomes truly relevant for a book on conspiracy theories:

      This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg [sic] (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

      According to Churchill, then, the rise of communism in Russia is the latest chapter in a ‘world-wide conspiracy’, led by ‘extraordinary personalities’, that has been going on since the eighteenth century.

It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars have not only labelled Churchill’s speech anti-Semitic but also classified it as a conspiracy theory.² Conspiracy theories have become a focus of public attention over the last two decades, and it is no longer just academics who are quick to discover them in the past and the present. Long ignored by the public, conspiracy theories have now been omnipresent for some time. The suspicions regarding Jews, Freemasons and the Illuminati perpetuated in Churchill’s speech remain all-pervasive. And they have been compounded ever since by a host of new allegations expanding on the older conspiracy theories, or in many cases even merging with them: that the USA carried out the 9/11 attacks itself; that we are being secretly controlled by a New World Order that keeps us docile via chemtrails; that the Ukrainian crisis was orchestrated by NATO; that Barack Obama was not born in the USA or that – along with Angela Merkel and George W. Bush – he belongs to an elite of extra-terrestrial reptilians that feeds upon our negative energy. Not to mention that the moon landing never happened, and that John F. Kennedy was murdered by the CIA.

      Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the emergence of a plethora of highly publicized conspiracist allegations. Some versions claim that the virus is either a Chinese or an American biological weapon which was, depending on the individual story, intentionally or accidentally released. Other versions hold that the virus does not exist or is completely harmless, and that dark forces – the ‘deep state’, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, the New World Order or others – are using the hysteria to hurt Donald Trump, reduce the world population, or achieve other malicious goals. For the most part, these coronavirus conspiracy theories are adaptations of much older conspiracy narratives. Quite frequently, the current crisis is imagined to be merely the latest chapter in an ongoing plot and is thus simply grafted onto long-existing narrative templates. At any rate, the popularity of these conspiracy theories shows that revelations concerning alleged plots by countries, intelligence services, international institutions or groups of powerful individuals are no longer confined to subcultures, but are now reaching a wider public.³

Accordingly, many observers have concluded that conspiracy theories are more socially acceptable today than ever before, and that there has been a surge in the number of people believing in them. This has in turn alarmed those who remain sceptical – still the greater part of the population and the overwhelming majority of the media. Hence, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has become a permanent fixture of everyday social discourse: barely a week goes by without it appearing in the evening news or the daily papers.