The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Part II: Case Studies

Abstract

The transition to this empirical section is made with the question: To which historical situation is research into conspiracy theory indebted? One would perhaps expect that due to the fact that the core or decisive moment in the national-socialist world view was of a conspiratorial-theoretical nature, namely the thesis of the Jewish world conspiracy, this would have elicted a boom in scientific research after World War II. Yet in the first decades after 1945 there was little evidence of this. Mter more-or-less partial preparatory works, as far as I can see, Norman Cohn was the first to publish a scientifically adequate presentation of the genesis of the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the fabrication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his book Warrant for Genocide in 1967. A year later, Leon Poliakov followed suit in Volume 3 of his History of Antisemitism (1968, pp. 289–298) with a summary ofthe genesis ofthe modern conspiracy theory before and after the French Revolution, above all, of the thesis of the Freemason-Jewish world conspiracy. Then, in 1970, the works of Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939 and of Seymor Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason. Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 appeared. In 1976, Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein published a book in Germany with the promising title, The Thesis of Conspiracy, 1776–1945. However, basically he only dealt with one single conspiracy theory—that put forward by Abbe Barruel (1797/1798) and others after the French Revolution: Freemasons and Jews, Illuminati and Jacobins had conspired to bring about the revolution.