The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Michael Butter

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 saw the real centres of power – Congress and the White House – as remaining in the hands of ‘real’, patriotic Americans.

      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

The distinction between bottom-up and top-down conspiracies is often closely linked to that between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conspiracies. Are the conspirators outsiders who have merely wormed their way into the country or organization they are seeking to undermine? Or have they always belonged to it and simply begun at some point to pursue their own ends instead? External conspiracies almost always tend to be imagined as bottom-up operations, since the state and its key institutions are obviously not yet in the hands of the conspirators. Internal conspiracies, on the other hand, can operate either from the top down or from the bottom up. The government can manipulate the population, and sections of the population can mount secret attempts to seize power. In recent decades, however, there has been a growing tendency in the Western world to identify internal and top-down conspiracies.

      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.

Needless to say, categories such as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ or ‘external’ and ‘internal’ are not always as clearly distinguishable in practice as the previous paragraphs perhaps suggest. This is because any assessment of a conspiracy tends to depend on when – i.e. in which phase of its development – we make that assessment. After all, the aim of the conspirators according to all these theories is to achieve power and hold on to it. Thus, the communist conspiracy uncovered by Senator McCarthy is a bottom-up one, since the White House has not yet been conquered. By contrast, the communist conspiracy that Robert W. Welch, the founder of the far-right John Birch Society, claimed to have exposed a few years later in his book The Politician, is a top-down one, since President Eisenhower was, in his view, part of the conspiracy; in this case, the conspirators have already taken control of the White House. One reason why the assassination of John F. Kennedy plays such a key role in so many conspiracy theories is that it is viewed by many conspiracy theorists as the tipping point when the conspirators finally took over power and the bottom-up conspiracy became a top-down one. In Churchill’s text, on the other hand, the conspirators – typically for the time of writing – have not yet assumed power in Russia, although the originally ‘bottom-up’ plot is already well advanced outside the UK. Even so, Churchill is ahead of his time in propagating – to use Michael Barkun’s terminology – a superconspiracy theory in which various event and systemic conspiracy theories converge.⁷

      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.

Finally,