According to Pipes's interpretation, such ideas were to be a significant factor in shaping the next century and a half, after which they began to recede. Pipes recounts the major events of the period from 1815 until 1945 in a chapter he appealingly calls "Florescence," addressing such familiar developments as the composition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fear and distrust of the Jesuits, and of "Perfidious Albion" (the sobriquet Britain earned through real and imagined backstage machinations), and the rise of Adolph Hitler on a foundation of conspiracist paranoia.
But he also does something relatively unfamiliar in the course of this discussion: He identifies Leninism as a conspiracist conceit. "The Leninist corpus contains a conspiracy theory at its heart," he writes. Financiers and manufacturers group together not only to control the working class but to control the government, too. That control extends to foreign policy, because of this powerful group's need for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and monopolistic control of markets. This case was laid out in a 1902 study by English economist John Atkinson Hobson, notes Pipes, and was a major influence on Lenin.
Of course, it may be argued that Hobson's thesis is at least sometimes borne out by history, that the British themselves regarded their empire as a byproduct of their mercantilism, and that Pipes may seem to be whitewashing such things as America's ugly record in Central America. But Pipes is not necessarily denying--or even addressing--any of this. His point is that Leninism regarded the needs of monopoly capitalism as the sole motive force behind Western actions, a piece of political paranoia that was to meld seamlessly with Stalinist insanity.
"The Left thus reinterprets some of the oldest activities of governments as conspiracies," argues Pipes. "Beginning with collusion among manufacturers, the Left ended up by postulating that all the governments of Europe engaged in conspiracies....Since about 1900, conspirators are thought already to be in power."
By the 1930s, Europe's politics were dominated by conspiracist obsessions, and Pipes introduces the quite useful term of "operational conspiracism" to describe those states, such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and now Revolutionary Iran, that are or have been governed by conspiracist beliefs. In 1939, the conspiracisms of the "anti-imperialist" left and anti-Semitic right challenged each other for world control, but since 1945, writes Pipes, the power of the idea has ebbed. Though still exerting influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and among the disaffected of all societies, Pipes writes that no great state is any longer endangered by the irrationalities such beliefs can let loose. Democracy and affluence stifle their growth, he argues, maintaining that the whole subject is receding into a historical, rather than a political, matter.
Pipes winds down with a review of the remnants of the tradition, including a chapter in which he argues that contemporary left-wing conspiracism (JFK assassinologists, "October Surprise" believers, Afrocentrism, etc.) has been getting off easy in perceptual terms, because, among other reasons, "The liberal orientation of most scholars and journalists means that they treat comparable phenomena in different ways." His final chapter addresses what Pipes tallies as "Conspiracism's Costs," including a poisoned public discourse and the encouragement of national self-hatred. He also argues, interestingly, that conspiracy fantasists, when in power, end up encouraging the multiplication of real conspiracies.
This is an impressive performance, going beyond historical narrative and attempting to get an interpretative handle on a subject very much in need of discussion and understanding. Pipes has certainly advanced that understanding, particularly in his reconsideration of the left's own conspiratorial reflex, something few of his predecessors have had much interest in doing.
But by characterizing conspiracism in totally mundane terms, as Pipes does throughout his book, he may be understating its essential appeal. I earlier took issue with his comparison of the phenomenon to pornography; there are some related issues worth raising.
Pipes describes his book as "the opposite of a study in intellectual history. I deal not with the cultural elite but its rearguard, not with the finest mental creations, but its dregs....So debased is the discourse ahead that even the Russian secret police and Hitler play important intellectual roles." As an intellectual history, it is indeed a debased discourse. But considered as a history of a kind of occultist thought, it is much more normal. Occultism, throughout its long history, has been concerned with the seeking out of powers otherwise beyond human awareness, and with exploiting or combating those powers. Conspiracism does not equal occultism, of course, but I would argue that the two are closely related. Indeed, they appear to be intimately intertwined, and they intersect at numerous points, from an obsession with the Templars to the ultimate foundation of Nazism itself.
What the two have most in common is a dualist outlook and an understanding of how power is exerted in the world, which is to say that they share a belief in the vast potential power of evil. Full-blown contemporary conspiracists are beyond left and right (Pipes addresses this "fusion paranoia"), positing a Power able to exert its will in virtually any manner. This includes not only such common criminality as murder and financial manipulation, but even such extraordinary abilities as command of the weather and effective daily mind control. What matters to such believers is not the obvious implausibility of establishing and controlling the necessary organization to achieve such limitless power. What matters is that bad things keep happening, that all such events may be said to benefit somebody, and that therefore somebody of great power must be capable of performing evil acts at will. That somebody must be studied and identified to be revealed and opposed. Otherwise, the world and its injustices would threaten to make no sense.
Who is that somebody? At various times it has been the Illuminati, the Masons, the Elders of Zion, the Bilderbergers, the Insiders, the Trilateralists, the Jesuits, the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.N., FEMA, the CIA, the World Bank, Wall Street, the cultists of the All-Seeing Eye. These are secular identifications, founded on an Enlightenment-derived awareness of the world and darkly mirroring that epoch's belief in the clockwork nature of the forces governing existence. But these identifications have ancient antecedents. They have much the same teleological role in the mentalities of modern conspiracists as the Demiurge (the imperfect creator of this world) had for the Gnostics of antiquity, and that the Anti-Christ still has for believing Christians.
Pipes's interpretation of conspiracism is not mistaken, but it may be incomplete. He takes pains to argue that conspiracism's history is a self-contained one, without antecedents. And it is true that this particular set of conspiratorial forms has a specific 18th-century origin, from which it proceeds to the present day. The question is whether the frame of mind from which conspiracism itself proceeds has a heritage. And the answer to that question has a direct impact on another matter: whether conspiracism has a future.
Pipes says the phenomenon is receding. In fact, one could argue that conspiracism is a larger factor in the American national discourse today than it has been at any time since the end of World War II, or perhaps ever. No national event of significance--from plane crashes to political suicides to violent federal acts to murder trials to the spread of infectious disease--occurs without broadly disseminated conspiracy theories attaching themselves to it. But Pipes knows that; his case is that it is receding as a political factor, thriving only among slumming sophisticates and the disaffected poor and powerless.
Is even this so? The fear of conspiracy is arguably a domestic
political factor now. In Washington, D.C., for example, the
infamous Marion Barry is back in office thanks in part to the
belief in two conspiracies held by many of his constituents: a
national conspiracy theory that white prosecutors unfairly targeted
black officeholders like Barry (who spent time in jail for
drug use), and a local conviction that whites have been conspiring
to "take back" control of the city from its black majority.
This concentration on conspiratorial factors (regularly validated
by local newspaper columnists), rather than on the real failings of
the city's leadership, has contributed heavily to the appalling
condition in which Washington finds itself. (Recently, the growing
number of Spanish-speaking Washingtonians has raised a new specter:
a Latino Conspiracy to take over the schools.)
Conspiracism is a marked feature in our national politics as well, with national politicians regularly courting conspiracy-minded constituencies. President Bill Clinton's shameless exploitation of such issues as the burning of black churches and Gulf War Syndrome, after both of these were determined to be chimeras, is evidence of how democracy can accommodate conspiracy: Believers in plots can simply become another voting bloc to capture.
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