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Share Religion Zog Ate My Brains 2 October 2004 By the New Internationalist team Never miss another story! Sign up to NI weekly Our free, weekly newsletter with the best of our journalism. Enter your email address Conspiracy theories about Jews abound. Chip Berlet unpacks their appeal. If you surf the web, you may have encountered the claim that the Israeli spy agency Mossad warned 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Centre to stay home on 11 September 2001; or that a handful of Jewish lobbyists control US foreign policy; or the world is run by the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG). All these claims are patently false, yet they have devoted defenders.The idea that a secret group of powerful people is conspiring to control world events is centuries old, and it is seeing a troubling resurgence on the political Left. Unlike most progressive theories about political power that stress systemic, institutional or structural analyses, conspiracy theories claim a handful of sinister plotters are mucking things up. This often devolves into charges that ‘The Jews’ are behind some sinister plan for global subversion. Where do these ideas come from? Sticking to ProtocolsIn the early 1900s, Czar Nicholas II’s Okhranka (secret police) in Russia promoted a hoax document called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion – claimed to be the minutes of a secret ‘cabal’ of Jews who manipulated world events through the Freemasons and other groups. The Protocols were translated into many languages and circulated around the world. Author Norman Cohn titled his study on this fake Warrant for Genocide, because it was used to justify pogroms in Russia and the scapegoating and murder of Jews in Nazi Germany. Advert The specific allegations change based on time and place, but the basic elements of destructive conspiracy theories remain the same:Dualistic division The world is divided into a good ‘Us’ and a bad ‘Them’.Demonizing rhetoric Our opponents are evil and subversive... maybe subhuman.Targeting scapegoats ‘They’ are causing all our troubles – we are blameless.Apocalyptic timetable Time is running out and we must act immediately to stave off a cataclysmic event.Brenda Brasher, a sociologist at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, notes that in this model, ‘People are cast in their roles as either enemy or friend, and there is no such thing as middle ground. In the battle with evil, can you really say you are neutral?’ Advert Conspiracy theory is sometimes called conspiracism. Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, contends that conspiracism attracts people because conspiracy theorists ‘claim to explain what others can’t. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.’ There is an appealing simplicity in dividing the world sharply into good and bad and tracing ‘all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents’. Barkun notes that ‘conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others’. For conspiracists, ‘the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters’ deceptions’.Conspiracism often gains a mass following in times of social, cultural, economic, or political stress. Immigration, demands for racial or gender equality, gay rights, power struggles between nations, and war can all can be viewed through a conspiracist lens. Conspiracism started as a way to defend the status quo, but it spawned a flipside where the conspiracy is perceived as controlling the government. This was a central motif of the 1950s ‘Red Scare’ when fears of global communist subversion were a common conspiracist script. Today, Arabs and Muslims are portrayed in a similar demonizing way as conspiring against Western culture. Sadly, as tensions in the Middle East have boiled over, an increasing number of Arabs and Muslims have grabbed onto antisemitic conspiracy theories to explain devastating struggles over land and power. This is evidenced by the popularity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the region where they have been repackaged into television series broadcast from Lebanon and Egypt.Antisemitic conspiracism is aggressively peddled to progressives by several rightwing groups including the international network run by Lyndon LaRouche, a frequently unsuccessful US presidential candidate. While LaRouche rhetoric can seem bonkers, his followers are successful in recruiting students on college campuses and in networking with some Black Nationalist groups. Sometimes Arab publications circulate articles from LaRouche group analysts. When LaRouche publications condemn the neoconservative policy advisers to President Bush as the ‘Children of Satan’, it echoes historic antisemitic rhetoric about evil Jewish conspiracies tracing back to medieval Europe. Lobby libelWhy would progressives embrace conspiracism? In the 1980s, isolati...