Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Instead, I will begin by taking a step back, and focusing on the broad undercurrents reflected in Truther literature. While the 9/11 conspiracists I met exhibited a wide range of different personalities and niche obsessions, their claims about the people who control our planet consistently fell into the same basic template—a template that governs not just the Truth movement, but almost every major systemic conspiracy theory dating back to Europe’s Belle Époque.

  And so that is where this chapter’s investigation will begin.

  A Dark Fairy Tale

  In August 1897, Theodor Herzl and two hundred fellow activists convened at a concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, to attend the First Zionist Congress. The capstone of their deliberations was The Basel Program, a landmark manifesto aimed at “establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” The delegates also officially adopted Hatikvah, a song that, six decades later, would become the national anthem for the country we call Israel.

  But as legend has it, it was all an elaborate act—just a respectable set-piece to divert gentile journalists and spies from the real meeting taking place at a secret location nearby. There, Herzl delivered a clandestine twenty-four-part lecture series for Jewish ears only. In these speeches, “protocols” as Herzl called them, there was little talk of carving a small country out of the Middle Eastern desert. What he proposed was nothing less than a plan for total world domination.

  Europe’s gentiles—or goyim, as they were described in Yiddish—generally were a happy, earnest lot, Herzl told his audience. They worked their farms and small businesses assiduously, prayed to a benevolent Christian God, and prospered under the kindly, lawful aristocrats who rose up from among their ranks.

  But they were also gullible, lustful, greedy, and unstable in their attitudes—human frailties that the calculating, ascetic Jew could exploit in order to rob them of their entitlements.

  The Jewish strategy, Herzl explained, would target all strata of goyim. To corrupt the proles, Jewish smut merchants would provide pornography and “alcoholic liquors.” To ensnare middle-class farmers and merchants, Jewish moneylenders would practice usury. Ambitious gentile politicians would be co-opted through extortion and outright bribery; or else installed as quislings in Europe’s Masonic lodges, which Jews secretly controlled.

  Meanwhile, gentile intellectuals, such as they were, would be beguiled by democracy, liberalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, Darwinism, anarchism, “Nietzsche-ism,” and all the other fangled creeds the Jew had created.

  Ironically, the Jews’ most powerful weapon in the campaign to enslave gentiles would be none other than the lure of sweet liberty itself: “The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that . . . the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove,” Herzl explained to the assembled Elders. “It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and . . . given us the power of appointment.”

  Of course, God-fearing men would never willingly succumb to Jewish tyranny. But Herzl had an answer to that: Jews would not only annihilate Europe’s earthly rulers, but also “the very principle of God-head and the spirit,” whose presence in men’s souls shielded them from the “arithmetical calculations and material needs” upon which the Jew preyed. No longer would the peoples of the world “walk contentedly and humbly under the guiding hand of [their] spiritual pastor submitting to the dispositions of God upon earth.” Instead, “all nations will be swallowed up in the pursuit of gain, and in the race for it will not take note of their common foe [the Jew].”

  As his plan played out, Herzl explained, Jews would cycle the world through an endless series of bloody wars and economic depressions, which would serve both to enrich Jewish war profiteers and speculators, and cast the rest of the globe into poverty. Traumatized to the point of total despair, the peoples of the world would have no choice but to succumb.

  When Herzl was done with his twenty-four protocols, the conference disbanded, and the Jewish Elders returned to their homes in order to prepare their plots. The world might never have learned of the protocols’ existence—but for a single Russian police agent who, through means unknown, intercepted one of Herzl’s acolytes at a German Masonic lodge.

  In exchange for what one must assume to have been an extravagant sum, the Jew agreed to turn over his handwritten transcription of Herzl’s protocols—but only till the next morning. All through the night, a team of Russian scribes feverishly copied out the Hebrew text. When sunrise broke, the fruits of their labor were sent to translators in Moscow, who would go on to warn the world of the Jewish menace.

  Thus ends the fairy tale, known to history as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—a document that would become the most influential conspiracist tract since the era of the French Revolution. Millions of readers were taken in by this poisonous fraud following its widespread publication in 1919. Adolf Hitler and other war criminals would be inspired to act on it, setting in motion a wave of anti-Semitic hatred so intense that, by the end of the Second World War, Central and Eastern Europe were left virtually Judenrein.

  All this came to pass despite the fact the Protocols was debunked within months of its dissemination. As investigators revealed, the document was concocted by czarist anti-Semites who had not even taken the trouble to invent the lies themselves. Instead, they plagiarized Protocols from two sources: Biarritz, a lurid anti-Semitic novel published fifty years previously in Germany, and a French propaganda tract from the same era, Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly. (The influence of Joly’s book is particularly obvious: According to one scholar’s analysis, a full 40 percent of Protocols’ content is lifted word for word from Dialogues.)

  The Protocols was a lie. But like all successful conspiracy theories, it was a lie that people wanted to hear. This was a moment when Europe had just endured not one, but two epic upheavals, neither of which had a simple, comprehensible cause. The Russian Revolution had been sparked by an artificial, untested, schismatic ideology created by an impoverished eccentric living in England. The First World War was an accidental product of Great Power paranoia, miscalculation, and jingoism—all sparked into deadly reaction by an assassination in one of Europe’s most obscure backwaters (an event that is itself the subject of innumerable conspiracy theories). When it was over, the flower of European youth was dead, and two once-great empires had been destroyed. It’s not hard to understand why millions of shell-shocked survivors could become convinced that the leaders who’d sent these men to their deaths had somehow been tricked by a hidden, demonic force.

  For Europeans reading the Protocols in the 1920s and 1930s, the document offered something precious: the idea that only a single barrier—the Jewish race—blocked a return to the peaceful, pious, and socially ordered world that had been destroyed by war, revolution, mechanization, urbanization, radical political ideologies, secularization, and catastrophic inflation. The evil brilliance of the Protocols lay in the fact that it patched together a theory of Jewish conspiracy that covered every one of these upheavals—all the while enchanting the reader with backward glimpses of the noble, God-fearing milieu that the Jew allegedly had undermined.

  The Protocols did not arise out of the ether. As Norman Cohn illustrated in his 1967 classic Warrant for Genocide, the period between 1850 and World War I was a golden age of apocalyptic Judeo-Masonic4 propaganda. From France to Russia, all sorts of overlapping, mutually plagiarizing fraud manifestos became best sellers. Many of them even were structured like the Protocols, with a cackling rabbi instructing his Jewish brethren in his faith’s plans for world domination. But thanks to a series of historical accidents, the Protocols became the document that definitively popularized the conspiracist spirit that seized Western civilization during the early decades of the twentieth century, and which has survived, in the same basic form—albeit with an ever-changing cast of villain
s—to the present day.

  As noted in the previous chapter, ancient forms of conspiracism typically vilified one of two enemies: Jews and secret societies. The Protocols twisted these two venerable strands into one deadly skein: The Jews, by this hateful telling, were both a filthy religious sect seeking to exterminate Christendom and a secret society bent on adapting world trade, politics, media, and all the other secular pillars of civilization to their evil schemes.

  Even when the Third Reich lay in ruins, and anti-Semitism became widely detested in its bald-faced Nazi-style form, the Protocols would remain ensconced as a sort of universal blueprint for all the successor conspiracist ideologies that would come to infect Western societies over the next nine decades—right up to the modern-day Truther and Birther fantasies of the twenty-first century. In these conspiracy theories, the imagined evildoing cabal would come by many names—communist, globalist, neocon. But in most cases, it would exhibit the same five recurring traits that the Protocols fastened upon the Jewish elders in the shadow of World War I: singularity, evil, incumbency, greed, and hypercompetence.

  Singularity

  Oliver Stone calls it the Beast—a single overarching power that controls history and punishes those who swim against its currents. “What I see from 1963, with Kennedy’s murder at high noon in Dallas, to 1974, with Nixon’s removal, is a pattern,” the filmmaker told an interviewer in 1996. “Call me wrong, but we have John Kennedy suspiciously killed, we have Robert Kennedy suspiciously killed, we have Martin Luther King suspiciously killed, and we have Nixon suspiciously ‘falling on his sword.’ These four men came from different political perspectives, but they were pushing the envelope, trying to lead America to new levels. We posit that, in some way, they pissed off what we call ‘the Beast,’ the Beast being a force, or forces, greater than the presidency . . . Between 1963 and 1974, these four men all ran up against the Beast and were removed or killed as a consequence.”

  It’s not clear who or what the Beast is. (Based on my reading of the full interview, I’d say Stone himself hadn’t quite figured it out.) But the details are beside the point. What is crucial to Stone is his conviction that Nixon, MLK, and the two Kennedys were somehow done in by the same people. As with the Protocols’ fixation on a few dozen Jewish Elders (a collective sometimes called “All-Judaan” by Henry Ford and other anti-Semites) the conspiracist mind unfailingly compresses life’s many random evils into a single, identifiable point-source of malign power. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, this tendency is one of conspiracism’s main psychological consolations.

  The label placed on this evil font varies. Modern conspiracist movements fixate on the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission or—in the case of the 9/11 Truth movement—some sort of Cheney-led “neocon” Star Chamber. Old-school conspiracists insist the real demons are the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jesuits, Opus Dei, Knights Templar, Philosophes, Carbonari, Prieuré de Sion, Rosicrucians, or the like. In extreme cases, the supposed evil masterminds aren’t even human: Influential British Truther David Icke, for instance, claims that ultimate power lies with extraterrestrial “Prison Warders”—who control events on earth (including 9/11) through a human clique known as “the Global Elite.” But insofar as a conspiracist’s psychic appetites are concerned, the evildoers’ actual identities are interchangeable.

  In some cases, quite literally interchangeable: Deceased right-wing UFO conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, author of the apocalyptic 1991 tract Behold a Pale Horse, explicitly endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and reprinted it for his readers . . . but warned them that the document “has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word ‘Zion’ should be ‘Sion’; any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’; and the word ‘goyim’ should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.’ ” Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln—the three pseudohistorians whose theories about Jesus Christ traveling to France as a husband and father became the basis for much of Dan Brown’s conspiracy fiction—have a similar theory about the Protocols: “There was an original text [of the Protocols]that was not a forgery. On the contrary, it was authentic. But it had nothing whatever to do with Judaism or an ‘international Jewish conspiracy.’ It issued, rather, from some Masonic organization or masonically oriented secret society that incorporated the word ‘Sion.’ ” (Icke, incidentally, believes the Protocols were written by lizard people as part of an intergalactic plan to impose reptilian control over Planet Earth.)

  This psychic need to impute all evil to a lone, omnipotent source inevitably requires the conspiracist to create larger and larger metaconspiracies that sweep together seemingly unconnected power centers. This is why, as discussed in the previous chapter, modern conspiracy theorists are so fond of flowcharts—in which all of society’s actors can systematically be grouped into cascading hierarchies that soar upwards to a single, ultimate puppetmaster.

  Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists couldn’t explain the origins of the First World War, which began when control of Europe was split up between a half-dozen major European powers—except by somehow imagining that all of them secretly answered to some common Jewish overlord. Likewise has the John Birch Society (JBS) declared Hillary Clinton and the world’s communists to be partners in an Illuminati-driven plot to conquer the world—along with coconspirators Dick Cheney and Wall Street. In his 1991 book New World Order, Pat Robertson pulled the same trick, arguing that America’s political and economic elites were in league with Bolsheviks to engineer a Soviet takeover of the United States. Intergalactic conspiracy theorist David Icke explained the power struggle between Israel and the Arab world this way: “Have you ever wondered why the ‘home’ of Islam, Saudi Arabia, says and does nothing in the face of what is being visited upon the Arab world? There is a reason for this. The House of Saud is a fake front for the House of Rothschild, and they are not ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’ at all. They are Rothschild Zionists who can be traced back to a Jewish man called Mordakhai bin Ibrahim bin Moshe. Researchers say this was in the year AD 851.”

  One leading 9/11 Truther, Washington, D.C.–based career conspiracist Webster Tarpley (profiled later in this book), provides a helpful flowchart on page 77 of his epic 2005 tract 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in U.S.A. demonstrating the hierarchical relationship between “paramilitary terror pros,” “big business,” and “corrupt private networks”—with everyone in the chart answering to the top cell, a cartoon octopus labeled with the single word “oligarchy.” Who this oligarchy is, Tarpley doesn’t tell us—except to hypothesize vaguely that it probably consists of “financier factions.” But again, the oligarchy’s exact identity isn’t the point. What matters is that it exists as a unified, malign presence.

  Many conspiracists will even project their fantasies backward through history—so that time itself does not compromise their protagonists’ monopoly on evil. Some 9/11 conspiracists implicate the Bush family in the murder of JFK and (as noted in Chapter 1) the Nazi war machine. Alex Jones goes back further—viewing 9/11 as just the latest barbarism inflicted by a satanic network that has been “steering planetary affairs for hundreds of years.” Lyndon LaRouche’s publishing house has promoted the theory that Jewish bankers and religious leaders have been involved in a massive conspiracy stretching back to ancient times—with an especially creepy emphasis on the role played by Shylockian “Venetian bankers” of the Renaissance era. Sergei Nilus, the original Russian publisher of the Protocols, went even further, tracing the Jewish conspiracy back three thousand years: “According to the records of secret Jewish Zionism, Solomon and other Jewish learned men already, in 929 B.C., thought out a scheme in theory for a peaceful conquest of the whole universe by Zion.” In an introduction to the Protocols, the author sketches the historical path of the “Symbolic Snake of Zion” through the great crises of Western civilization—Greece in 429 B.C., Augustan Rome, Madrid in the age of Charles V, and, of cour
se, that singular obsession of anti-Semites for more than two centuries, the French Revolution.

  The onset of this sort of obsessive historical monomania is often the canary in the intellectual coal mine when sober-minded pundits transmute into conspiracists. A good contemporary example is left-wing crusader Naomi Klein, who became a superstar of the antiglobalization circuit in 2000 with her anticorporate manifesto No Logo. Over the next seven years, Klein’s increasingly radicalized hunt for corporate demons launched her into the realm of full-fledged conspiratorial fantasy. By the time she’d published her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein had convinced herself that the world was controlled by a cabal of hypercapitalists who’d been personally recruited and indoctrinated by U.S. economist Milton Friedman. Like the European anti-Semites who believed that Jews supported both sides in Europe’s great wars, Klein casts her Friedmanite villains as equal-opportunity architects, enablers, and cheerleaders of all manner of human misery—from the 2005 Asian tsunami, to Hurricane Katrina, to slaughter in Iraq—motivated by the single goal of intimidating societies into accepting free trade and globalization. In one particularly far-fetched section, Klein even suggests that the state of Israel is a willing promoter of the terrorism campaign against its Jewish civilians—because the “continual and continuously expanding war on terror” helps inflate the profits of the country’s “high-tech security” industries.

  The 9/11 Truthers follow this reductionist tradition faithfully—theorizing that Washington and al-Qaeda’s jihadis secretly play on the same team. British-based Truther Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed—whose early published work set the stage for many of the American conspiracy theorists who emerged in the years after 9/11—argued that the term “al-Qaeda” was real, but only to the extent that it referred to “a database of [CIA-controlled] pseudo-Islamist covert operations recruits.” California-based Michael Ruppert, similarly argues that “there is a compelling case to be made that Osama bin Laden has long been a well-cultivated, protected, and valued asset of U.S. and British intelligence.”