Conspiracy paranoia: retro-European
Elizabeth Jeenx
[=Islamist extremists believe in a worldwide conspiracy not just of
Jews, but also of Freemasons. They thus echo the rantings of Europe's
extreme right in the 19th and 20th centuries.=]
by Nick Cohen -- Ever since 11 September 2001 reasonable people in
liberal democracies have concluded that their enemies must at some
level be reasonable, too. Surely such hatred must have been provoked
by the west. Surely the solution must be for western governments to
stop being provocative.
Their rational opponents would then have no reason to commit homicidal
attacks, and we would be safe.
Unfortunately the belief in a rational motive is an illusion. To
sustain the rationalist fallacy, you must ignore vast amounts of
evidence. In the Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and Algeria, millions have
died in Islamist wars and massacres that make Srebrenica and the World
Trade Center appear paltry affairs.
Islamist movements dedicated to persecuting Muslims who believe in the
separation of church and state or the emancipation of women are not
rational on any terms but their own. This seems a simple point to
make. If you pay al-Qaeda and its imitators the compliment of reading
what their leaders say, you find a cosmic dream of an Islamic empire
dominating the world.
But the point is rarely taken, in part because Afghanistan and the
Sudan are faraway countries of which we know little. How many people,
for instance, have heard of the slaughter of the "heretical" Shia
Muslims in central Afghanistan by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, let alone
asked themselves what foul ideology drove them to do it? Yet there is
a link closer to home which ties Islamism to the mass irrationalist
movements of the west. You can hear it like a faint drumbeat, a
background noise behind the bombings and the propaganda that alerts
the listener to Europe's baleful history.
On 9 March, to take the most recent example, two suicide bombers blew
themselves up at a restaurant in Istanbul. If their victims had been
British, American or Jewish, right-thinking people would have said
that the overthrow of the Taliban or the invasion of Iraq or the
humiliation of the Palestinians was the "root cause" of the murders.
As it was, the dead were members of a party of diners from a Masonic
lodge, and the story died as quickly as they did.
In November 2003, 32 people were killed and more than 400 injured when
the British consulate in Istanbul and the (Brit-ish) HSBC bank were
attacked. Every right-thinking person agreed that the suicidal
assaults were a punishment for the war on Iraq, and no one dwelt on
the oddity of the statement given by the caller who claimed
responsibility on behalf of a Turkish Islamist group and al-Qaeda. "We
will continue to attack Masonic targets," he said. "The Muslims are
not alone."
Type "Masons" and "Islam" into Google and you get about 14,000 hits.
The Masons, you learn, hide subliminal messages in The Simpsons as
well as the music of the Eagles, Michael Jackson and Madonna, the
better to brainwash the world. (Should you be inclined to play "Hotel
California" backwards, you will hear "yeah Satan", apparently.) Abu
Hamza, who extolled the glories of martyrdom from the Finsbury Park
mosque in London, told the Independent: "I am not saying every
American government figure knew about [11 September 2001]. But there
are a few people [in the US government] who want to trigger a third
world war. They are sponsored by the business lobby. Most of them are
Freemasons, and they have loyalty to the Zionists."
The Saudi-educated London preacher Abdullah el-Faisal, who was jailed
for inciting racial hatred, ranted about "cabals of Jews and
Freemasons plotting to take over the world". Hamas said that its
enemies "formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, the Rotary Club,
the Lions and others". Saddam Hussein's Iraq announced that the
penalty for "who-ever promotes or incites Zionist principles including
Freemasonry" was death. Islamist Iran executed 200 Masons after the
clerics seized power in 1979. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the
country that has done most to pump money to fundamentalists, announced
in the 1970s that the Freemasons were "a very evil and dark
fraternity".
To British eyes this is all howling mad. Every now and again,
journalists receive unprovable accusations that the Masons have tied
up a plum job or fixed a planning decision, but on the whole British
Freemasonry has become a Pythonesque joke - "the mafia of the
mediocre", as a character in Our Friends in the North exclaimed. Men
who roll up their trouser legs and exchange silly handshakes are many
things, but a conspiracy for world domination they are not. That
tyrants and religious fanatics see them as such is revealing. It shows
that the paranoias of fascist Europe have spread to many of the third
world's reactionary movements.
The term "Islamofascism" is popular with American neoconservatives but
has never caught on in Britain, mainly, I suspect, because of Israel.
The classic fascist-conspiracy theory was "anti-Semitism". Mention
those words and you are shot at from both sides. "You can't say
anything for or against the Jews without getting into trouble," said
George Orwell in the 1930s. If it was troublesome then, it is
near-impossible now.
In a series of learned articles, Daniel Seymour, a historian of
Freemasonry, has argued that it helps cut through the confusion if you
take a look at Islamist theocrats' paranoia about Freemasons. It was
the original paranoia of Europe's ultra right.
In the 1790s, a French Jesuit, the Abbe Barruel, tried to explain how
it was that so many of his countrymen had overthrown their sacred
monarch, executed the aristocrats who had cared for them and turned on
the Catholic Church, which had saved their souls. In a four-volume
book he explained that the French had been brainwashed and manipulated
by Freemasons - the successors of the crusader Knights Templar of the
Middle Ages - who formed a secret conspiracy to achieve a world
republic.
The Enlightenment philosophers Diderot, d'Alembert, Condorcet and
Helvetius were Masons. So were Benjamin Franklin, George Washington
and many of the other founders of the American republic. QED.
Representative government, the secular state - indeed, modernity
itself - were nothing more than a devilish plot.
Jews were added to the conspiracy in the 19th century. Tsarist Russia
used anti-Semitism to distract its subjects from the misery of their
lives, in much the same way as the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Syria and
Egypt do today. The tsar's secret police fabricated the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, which were meant to reveal the Jewish conspiracy
to control humanity.
They were and are the essential fascist document. Freemasons were in
there. "Gentile Masonry blindly serves as a screen for us and our
objects," the secret police had the Jewish plotters saying at the turn
of the 20th century. And it is worth noting that at the turn of the
21st, Syrian and Egyptian television have shown themselves worthy
successors of the tsarist propagandists by dramatising the Protocols
and putting them on air.
After the German defeat of 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, controller
of the Kaiser's armies, decided that the First World War and the
German revolution that followed the Allied victory were the work of
Freemasons. He declared that Freemasonry was a Jewish device intended
to make "artificial Jews": "It is cheating the people to fight the Jew
while allowing his auxiliary troop, Freemasonry, to function."
All European fascist leaders persecuted Freemasonry. About 9,000
Masons were executed in Franco's Spain. Franco was consumed by
fantasies about their plots, and his goons collected rooms full of
surveillance reports to pacify his apocalyptic fears. Mussolini banned
Freemasonry, as did Hitler. The Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg
said its association with liberalism was intolerable: "Without doubt
the Masonic dogma of Humanity is a relapse into worlds of the most
primitive conceptions; everywhere where it is put into practice it is
accompanied by decadence, because it conflicts with the aristocratic
laws of Nature."
I am not arguing that Islamism and Ba'athism are simple replicas of
European thinking in the 1930s, however tightly they have embraced
fascist ideas. History never repeats itself perfectly. But after what
Europe has been through in the 20th century, Europeans ought to be
able to diagnose the disease. There exists a people uniquely blessed
by history (the proletariat) or by blood (the Germans, the Spanish,
the Italians) or by God (Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu
fundamentalists).
These people are destined to inherit the earth. When they do, all
modern troubles will vanish. Men will be heroes. Women will bring
forth contented children. Yet when the vanguard of those chosen by
history, blood or God look around them, they find that the blessed are
not marching towards Utopia. How can this be?
The only acceptable answer is: "them". The people who work in the
dark. The conspirators who corrupt the blessed, spread disorder in
society, who turn women against men and children against their
parents. No violence is too great to free the blessed from those who
pervert them, for when they are freed an earthly paradise awaits them.
It's an insane story, and one that has produced tens of millions of
corpses. To think it died with the 20th century is pure folly.
© New Statesman 1913 - 2004
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