Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay Page A

before the French Revolution—a limited scheme aimed at monetary gain—fears after 1789 are captured by a supposed . . . plot to eliminate the monarchy, the church, and private property,” wrote Pipes. “Just as the conspirators grew far more alarming, so did their goals—and the theories about them.”
    It is no coincidence that conspiracism took its modern form at the same time Edmund Burke was writing Reflections on the Revolution in France , which many historians identify as the original manifesto of conservative thought. Like the conspiracist creeds of the era, Burke’s influential ideology was rooted in a nostalgia—or at least a respect—for the old order, and a (justified) fear that the revolutionary, abstract doctrines animating Europe would lead to tyranny and chaos.
    The Freemasons and Jews figured prominently in conspiracy theories about the French Revolution that emerged in the early nineteenth century. But there was a new villain, as well—the Order of the Illuminati, a secret society founded on the precepts of humanitarian rationalism by an eccentric Bavarian law professor in 1776. Unlike the benign Masons, the Illuminati operated as a genuine cult, imposing secret rites on members, and forbidding interaction with outside society. Though the group would fizzle within a decade, and had only a few thousand members at its height, it remains an enduring fixation among conspiracists—including novelist Dan Brown, who put a lurid pseudo-Illuminati plot to destroy Vatican City at the center of his 2000 book, Angels & Demons .
    Even before the French Revolution, the Marquis de Luchet warned Europe that the Illuminati aimed to “govern the world.” Later on, in 1797, Scottish conspiracist John Robison wrote that the Illuminati had been formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” A year later, Augustin Barruel gave the Illuminati a starring role in his four-volume work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism —in which he argued that the French Revolution resulted from a “triple conspiracy” of Freemasons, Illuminati, and anti-Christians who aimed at achieving the “overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society.” His list of conspirators included many of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire, whom Barruel imagines to be the French Revolution’s true architect.
    Foreshadowing the New World Order paranoia of the John Birch Society and other twentieth-century conspiracist groups, Barruel warned of a godless world republic that would be built on the ashes of the Vatican and the world’s royal palaces. Within a few years, these dark rhapsodies were co-opted wholesale by anti-Semites (who simply replaced “Illuminati” with “Jews” in their propaganda), and would become the dominant theme of the anti-Semitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , whose enormous influence on modern conspiracism will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
    During the twentieth century, conspiracism became the animating creed at both extremes of Europe’s political spectrum.
    On the Far Right, fascists idealized the notion of a single-party state, infused with a single collective cultural identity, and launched murderous propaganda campaigns against any group that stood accused of thwarting this monolithic agenda. Adolf Hitler took this view to its defining extreme, basing his entire political philosophy on a delusional fear that Jews were conspiring to destroy not only the Aryan nation, but all of humanity. “Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through