Much of the work of modernity involved escaping the conspiracy of history itself, in which people are damned and doomed from the start. What they strove to become, instead, were people with a future; persons, bearers of rights, of sovereignty, with control over their destinies; citizens in secular nation states. They also understood themselves as objects and organisms, subject to natural laws. Nineteenth-century intellectuals offered all manner of secular explanations for misfortune in the realm of the physical and biological sciences, from the modelling of the weather to the germ theory of disease, and in the realm of the emerging social sciences, from economics to eugenics. This change coincided with rising rates of literacy and the growth of public schooling: the democratization of knowledge. By 1881, when Guiteau shot Garfield, rules of evidence – ideas about the relationship between facts and arguments, ideas once confined to courts of law and chemical laboratories – had spilled out to the new profession of journalism and the new popular genre of detective fiction. Suddenly, everyone had a theory, about almost everything. The misery of humanity became a crime everyone could solve.I have comments moderation on, and its wildly unlikely that any of Graeme's ones will get through.
The most popular scapegoat, it turns out, is other people. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a period during which emerging nation states sorted the world’s peoples into “nationalities”, most conspiracy theories in the US and Western Europe involved threats to the nation by people who weren’t so easily sorted. The most notorious of these theories concerned an alleged international conspiracy of Jews, people with ties across national borders. “Pulling the strings behind the scenes, dominating the new system of modernity, the Jew becomes the cause of every catastrophe”, claimed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in Russia in 1903, was distributed throughout the US by Henry Ford in the 1920s, and assigned as a textbook in German schools from 1933. Much the same claim appeared in The Jewish Peril, a pamphlet issued by the British government in 1920 and written, in part, by Nesta Webster, who tied the Jewish conspiracy to the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth century.
Arguably, there is just this one conspiracy theory, an endlessly recycled version of antisemitism, as the political scientist Thomas Milan Konda suggests in Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How delusions have overrun America. The Jewish conspiracy theory served as the template for nearly all that followed, from anti-communist and anti-homosexual panics and purges to race-based nationalism and xenophobia of every stripe, down to Islamophobia, the demonization of refugees, and the detention of immigrants. In the 1930s, the American fascist and disciple of Nesta Webster, Elizabeth Dilling – the founder of the Patriotic Research Bureau and author of the Red Network (which branded even the YMCA a communist front) – delighted audiences with her fake Yiddish accent, at a time when critics of FDR denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”. By way of a mysterious “hidden hand”, the theory alleges, Illuminati or Jews or Bolsheviks or communists or gay people, or whoever, secretly run most national governments and aspire to world domination. “There are 200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country”, the housewife and America Firster Agnes Waters announced in 1942. “If they are admitted they will rape every woman that is left unprotected.”
Friday, August 23, 2019
About conspiracy theories
The TLS looks at the rise of modern conspiracy theory belief:
Its really a pretty simple story. The oligarchy does evil things. People notice this. And then they talk about it. Its not complicated.
ReplyDeleteBut I can now mostly clear a certain ethnic group of helping to spread the black plague. I had thought that this could have been done at the behest of the Venetian banking oligarchy since a couple of related banking families had gone under a few years beforehand. A run on the banks would have brought all the money-lenders down. The strategy could have been to reduce the demand for silver and gold for holding and to create a massive distraction. The reason such a complicated theory needed to be had for the plague was that it was implausible for sick black tropical rats to move across the land in such a way as to kill everyone like that.
ReplyDeleteBut new information has emerged. From 1341 to 1354 tree ring growth fell down to almost zero. This is not associated with a solar minimum. But ice core work from Paul Laviolette had him mentioning a long time ago that there had been in his view a core galactic explosion of what he would say was a minor sort about 800 years ago. Now we finally have corroborating tree ring information with exact dates and corresponding to the exact time period of the acceleration of the Black Plague.
Some sort of space activity that leads to the trees struggling like this, at the exact same time when the immune systems of the Europeans appears to have turned rather pathetic ....... Well that cannot be a coincidence. What it does is it brings the natural causes hypothesis up much higher and the biological warfare theory is correspondingly diminished.
It rather seems that the persecution at the time was in error. Now it must be understood that without the information that has only just been received, the natural infection theory wasn't a real good theory. Without the new data biological warfare was almost a certainty.
Its only science but I like it.
What is wrong with my black plague analysis? I was getting the barely reconstructed hillbillies off the hook? The loss of effective immune function in our ancestors and the 13 years of trees barely being able to grow at all .... this smacks of relentless cosmic rays penetration. Or perhaps sustained X-ray pollution or something of this nature. Its too good a fit for it to be a coincidence and so it would be even more of a coincidence to allege a conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteImagine getting a sick black rat with sick fleas to invade Europe. You lay him down on the shore and slap the sand behind him. And all he wants to do is lie down. Its not a credible story and in most other situations plagues are more local and often associated with sieges. They aren't so constructed as to be able to travel that far and that fast.
Its a bit disappointing when a fantastic historian writes such a lame article like the one Jill Lepore writes here. You see this discrepancy often and its usually when they turn their hand to recent history, some of which they have lived through. Usually you link complete losers and Southern Poverty Law Centre Spivs but at least this time you linked someone serious. Someone with real brains.
ReplyDeleteWhen they go to the old stuff they not only have to read what everyone else has written, but they have to get down in the archives rummaging through boxes and working with primary source documents.
Paul Johnsons "Birth Of The Modern" is superior to his later books like the History of the twentieth century and his history of the Americans which are pretty much all based on secondary sources. Great reads these later books. But not always fully accurate. Geoffrey Blainey's The Causes Of War is brilliant and pathbreaking. If we want to prevent or survive wars we ought to be all reading this book. One of the most valuable books written ever. His short history of the twentieth century is a bit ho hum.
Jill falls down badly here. If you cannot take a subject seriously for professional reasons you should leave it alone.
Very thoughtful comments by Jill on the misuse of the idea of "creative disruption." Just goes to show that even the most brilliant people can write foolish articles if they get lazy.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KlnmfZnilY
Gee, Graeme, you were on a run there with resisting temptation to name the You Know Whos as the source of considerable evil, but that last comment is going to remain in moderation.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could let this one through. Deeply interesting conspiracy theory. Yet there is no sign that I can see of anyone trying to put the blame on our brothers and sisters of the rabbinical persuasion.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-BFmn2S_jU