Читать книгу The Nature of Conspiracy Theories - Michael Butter - Страница 6

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. Why a particular idea should be called a ‘conspiracy theory’ is never explained, however: apparently, this is something we all understand intuitively. ‘I know it when I see it’, an American judge once said about pornography, and the same applies to most of us when it comes to conspiracy theories. The present example is relatively clear-cut, and unless you subscribe to the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy and therefore believe Churchill to be simply stating a fact, you would probably describe his remarks as a conspiracy theory.

But what is it exactly about Churchill’s speech that earns it this label? What distinguishes his form of conspiracy theorizing from that of Nesta Webster, the source he draws on? And how does the open articulation of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory by perhaps the most important British politician of the twentieth century relate to the claim that conspiracy theories have recently been growing in popularity and influence? What role does the internet play in the spread of conspiracy theories, and how does it influence our belief in them? How long have conspiracy theories in general been around? What is the connection between conspiracy theories and populism? Who actually believes in them and why? Are they dangerous? And if so, what can we do about them?

The answers to these questions are much harder to find than conspiracy theories themselves. There is a glaring disparity between the heat with which the topic is currently discussed and the knowledge informing the vast majority of such discussions. All too often, ideas are described as conspiracy theories when they are not. Opponents of vaccination may be misguided, but not all of them are conspiracy theorists. Time and time again, different types of conspiracy theories are lumped together, whether they are directed against elites or minorities, and whether they are racist or not. And it is often assumed that that all conspiracy theories encourage violence, when their link with violence is in fact far more complex, as we shall see in the conclusion to this book.

Because of the upsurge of populism in Europe and the USA, and now the COVID-19 crisis, the concern about conspiracy theories has grown exponentially in recent years. In particular, the Brexit campaign and the election of Donald Trump as US president have rendered the public debate over conspiracy theories even more heated and unfocused, resulting for example in a blurring of boundaries between conspiracy theories and fake news. The coronavirus pandemic has done nothing to alleviate this conceptual confusion. But conspiracy theories and fake news are not the same. Conspiracy theories can be fake news – that is, false information deliberately circulated in order to discredit certain individuals and/or achieve some other objective. But not all conspiracy theories are fake news, and vice versa. Many conspiracy theorists are genuinely convinced that they have uncovered a plot; equally, not all deliberately circulated misinformation pertains to an alleged conspiracy. There is an important difference between claiming that concern about COVID-19 is exaggerated and contending that the panic is intentionally manufactured by dark forces in pursuit of some sinister goal.

The imprecise use of the term is not the only problem, however. Those who engage with conspiracy theories – and that goes for academics and journalists alike – often lack an adequate understanding of how they arise, what they do for those who believe in them, and what their potential consequences may be. This is due not least to the fact that only one study on the subject has so far had any notable and lasting impact on public perception: Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay on the ‘paranoid style in American politics’.⁴ Even in the USA, where some dozen compelling books on the subject have been published since the 1990s, few in the media have yet come up with a response to Donald Trump’s daily flirtation with conspiracism that doesn’t refer to Hofstadter’s essay.

Hofstadter, one of the most respected historians of his time, saw belief in conspiracy theories as bordering on clinical paranoia. By the same token, he claimed that, in the USA, the tendency to see conspiracies everywhere had always been confined to a minority on the margins of society. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon.com, the New Republic and many other media outlets used Hofstadter’s terminology to characterize Trump, and to some extent they still do. Even Hillary Clinton made reference to Hofstadter on one of the rare occasions when she commented directly on Trump’s conspiracy theories. At a hustings in Reno, Nevada in August 2016, she accused Trump of exploiting prejudices and paranoia, and appealed to moderate Republicans to resist the takeover of their party by the radical fringe.⁵ Outside the USA, too, Hofstadter’s text is still the most influential analysis of conspiracy theories to date. German media such as Die Zeit or Die Welt for example have also drawn on it in an attempt to understand the Trump phenomenon. Nor are things any better when it comes to other conspiracy theories: writing in August 2018, for instance, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde accused the followers of Jeremy Corbyn of ‘do[ing] politics in the paranoid style’.⁶

Scholars who study conspiracy theories, however, have long since come to regard Hofstadter’s text as outdated. While he makes many valid points, his pathologization of conspiracy theorists as paranoid is highly problematic. Moreover, given that – according to the latest empirical studies – half of the population of the USA, and nearly as many in most European countries, believe in at least one conspiracy theory, it is also completely meaningless.⁷ Other aspects of Hofstadter’s argument have proved wrong, too. In short, when it comes to understanding what conspiracy theories are and how they work, neither our intuition nor the one study which has shaped the public understanding of the subject are of any help.

It is the purpose of this book to provide a more accurate account of conspiracy theories. By examining the underlying principles, functions, effects and history of conspiracist thinking, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon. Naturally, I focus on current developments, in particular the association of conspiracy theories with populist rhetoric, as well as the role of the internet in their dissemination. In order to make sense of the present, however, we need a historical perspective. After all, the history of conspiracy theories is also inevitably that of the changing public spheres in which they circulate, and of the media environments that shape them. If we want to understand how the internet – where counterpublics are formed so much more easily than outside the virtual environment, and where conspiracy theories can be continuously updated – influences the forms and functions of conspiracist suspicions, we need to know what things were like before: that is, what influence other media regimes exerted in earlier times.

The crux of my argument is that it is, above all, the status of conspiracy theories in public discourse that has changed most radically over time, and that it is now changing once again. Even if it might feel like it at times, we are not living in a golden age of conspiracy theories. It is not true that conspiracism is more popular and influential now than ever before. On the contrary: conspiracy theories are currently generating so much discussion precisely because they are still a stigmatized form of knowledge whose premises are regarded with extreme scepticism by many people. And therein lies the difference between past and present. Up to the 1950s, the Western world regarded conspiracy theories as a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge whose underlying assumptions were beyond question. It was therefore normal to believe in them. Only after the Second World War did conspiracy theories begin to undergo a complex process of delegitimization in the USA and Europe, causing conspiracist knowledge to be banished from public discourse and relegated to the realm of subcultures.

On the one hand, the current ‘renaissance’ of conspiracy theories is partly connected with the rise of populist movements, in that there are structural parallels between populist and conspiracist arguments. On the other hand, the internet plays a key role because it has made conspiracy theories – which had flown under most people’s radar for a while – highly visible and easily available again. In addition, the internet has been a catalyst for the fragmentation of the public sphere. What we are experiencing now is a situation where conspiracy theories are still stigmatized in some domains – particularly those we continue to regard as mainstream – but are being accepted once again as legitimate knowledge in others. It is the clash between these domains and their different conceptions of truth that is fuelling the current debate over such theories. While some people are fearful (once again) of conspiracies, others are (or remain) more concerned with the dire consequences of conspiracy theories. In this respect, you could say we are entering a third phase in the history of conspiracism. After the long period of widespread acceptance and the short one of complete stigmatization, we in the West are now living in a world where conspiracy theories are simultaneously legitimate and illegitimate knowledge. Everything that is currently discussed regarding these theories – who believes in them and why and to what effects – needs to be understood against this background.

In what follows, I develop this argument in six chapters, arranged in such a way that they can also be read in isolation or in a different order. In Chapter 1, I discuss various definitions and typologies of conspiracy theories, noting in particular that the term is not merely a neutral description but always implies – at least in everyday discourse – a value judgement. Chapter 2 deals with the evidence used in conspiracy theories. What arguments are put forward by believers, and how do they tell the story of the plots they believe they have discovered? In Chapter 3, I analyse the different functions of conspiracy theories for individuals and groups, and discuss the question of whether some people are more receptive to such theories than others. Chapter 4 traces the historical development of conspiracy theories from antiquity to the present, and ends with a discussion of the relationship between conspiracy theories and populism. Chapter 5 is devoted to the impact of the internet on the visibility and status, as well as the rhetoric and argumentation, of conspiracy theories. Using the coronavirus crisis as a point of departure, the book concludes by examining whether and in what circumstances conspiracy theories are dangerous, and tackles the current controversy over what to do about them.

As a German Americanist, I draw most of my examples from the USA, the UK and the German-speaking countries, but my analysis is not limited to these cultures. Due to my systematic approach, my observations also apply to conspiracy theories and cultures that I do not mention at all. However, my perspective on conspiracy theories is that of a scholar trained in literary and cultural studies. Much of what follows is the consensus view across academic disciplines; on some issues, though, opinions are divided, and a quantitative psychologist would come to very different conclusions. I also raise questions at various points which no discipline is currently able to answer due to the fact that little or no research has been done in these areas. In this respect, my book merely marks, if anything, the end of the beginning of the study of conspiracy theories. What goes for conspiracy theorists goes for conspiracy theory researchers too: there is always more to learn.