The “Hidden Hand” Notes on the Perpetuation of Jewish Conspiracy Theories

Contemporary “International Jewish Conspiracy” theories have their origin in the conspiracy theories which sought to explain the French Revolution. For those devastated by this successful attack on both King and Church, theories about an obscure Bavarian group, the Illuminati, provided an explanation for the impossible overthrow of a divinely-ordained political and social order. Founded by Adam Weishaupt (1747-1830) and lasting only a few years before being suppressed in 1784, the Illuminati vainly hoped to end government and religious corruption, and to establish a utopian society through secret activities and control of Freemasonry. The widespread introduction of Jews into these conspiracy theories was coincident with full Jewish emancipation and the movement of Jews from the ghetto into public life. Theories in which Jews and “Jewish money” were the “Hidden Hand” controlling the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the course of world history could thus be harnessed to explain the rise of socialism and the political unrest of the mid-19th century.

By the early 1900s, such theories were well-developed and relatively sophisticated, but always rested heavily on “secret” documents that revealed the alleged Jewish plan for world domination and the destruction of Christianity. The House of Rothschild was often featured as the center of the nefarious scheme, controlling world events through their powerful banking organization. The notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, forged by the Tsar’s secret police in the late 1890s, spread rapidly around the globe. The tract purports to reveal the plan for world domination, and serves as an effective legitimization for Jewish Conspiracy theories. The Protocols has shown remarkable longevity, despite repeated exposures of the fraud and despite Henry Ford’s rather flaccid retraction of his earlier endorsement.

For many Germans at the end of World War I, the claims of the Protocols were unnecessary to convince them of the Hidden Hand. The Bolshevik revolution, Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary Sparticist group in Berlin, and the short-lived Bolshevik republic in Munich in 1919 were viewed as evidence that the conspiracy was closing in, and action was required. It was simple enough to find Jews, real or imagined, among the Bolshevik leadership, as did Hitler and his associates. Although most Germans were relatively disinterested in these issues, the core of the SS promoted the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy as the greatest of all dangers to the Reich. A foundational belief (that has survived to the present among neo-Nazis) was that Roosevelt and Churchill started World War II at the behest of their Jewish masters, while Hitler wished only a “free hand” to deal with the Jewish-Bolsheviks to the East and thereby save

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Western Civilization.

Thus, International Jewish Conspiracy theories have always functioned to explain social turmoil and national disappointments, and to provide a sense of order in the midst of disorder. It is often assumed that such theories serve not only a longing for transcendent understanding and a need for simplicity, but also a deep personal pathology. Unfortunately, analysis of the psychological functions served by the idea of a Jewish Hidden Hand tends to direct attention away from two important issues.

First, such theories are created within and preserved by conspiracy communities, not individuals. For example, the Liberty Lobby, founded by Willis Carto in the late 1950s, became the leading purveyor of Jewish Conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, and neo-Nazi material in the United States. With great energy, Carto built an interlocking set of organizations with newsletters, magazines, books, a publishing house, a government lobbying organization, and even a pseudo-academic body, The Institute for Historical Review. But the success of the Liberty Lobby depended on collaboration with and enlistment of a wide range of apparently respectable public figures, such as Colonel Curtis Dall and novelist Taylor Caldwell. A steady stream of “news,” analysis, historical works, and commentary issued from this distinct intellectual community, providing a set of shared texts and shared meanings. The Liberty Lobby held rallies, lectures, and gatherings, as any other activist organization might do, including vacation trips to Rhodesia to view firsthand the benefits of Ian Smith’s white rule. To the extent that members were persuaded that the mainstream media was entirely “Jew-controlled,” the Liberty Lobby could preach that all outside sources must be distrusted and discounted. The community created a shared version of Western History, especially of World War II, thus providing a basis for group cohesion as well as political action. To outsiders, the Liberty Lobby cry of “Free Rudolf Hess!” during the 1960s might seem quite loony. To insiders, Hess was the “messenger of peace,” who flew to Scotland in 1941. His mission was to persuade England to allow Hitler to deal with the Jewish-Bolshevik menace for the benefit of all. Thus, an understanding of the shared narratives of conspiracy groups is essential for avoiding unjustified attributions of pathology.

Second, a focus on the peculiar aspects of conspiratorial thinking tends to encourage the view that Jewish Conspiracy theories are likely to appeal only to the uneducated or the simple-minded. But careful study of the wider community in which Willis Carto and his co-workers produced and distributed their material suggests otherwise. A number of academics from psychology, history, political science, anthropology, and other fields became active contributors to Carto’s groups. Most notable was Henry E. Garrett (1894-1973), the 1946 President of the American Psychological Association and Chair of the Psychology Department at Columbia University from 1941-1955. (See Andrew S. Winston, “Science in the Service of the Far Right: Henry E. Garrett, the IAAEE, and the Liberty Lobby,” Journal of Social Issues, 54, No. 1, 1998, pp. 179-210.) For Garrett and others, the International Jewish Conspiracy had penetrated deeply into academia. He and his circle, founders of the journal Mankind Quarterly, tended to see Franz Boas and his followers as having effected a Jewish takeover of anthropology and the social sciences. In their view, the Franz Boas-Otto Klineberg-Ashley Montagu influence had disastrous effects on the study of race and ultimately encouraged racial intermarriage, which Garrett believed would destroy Western Civilization. He saw integrated schools, which he fought against vigorously, as leading to intermarriage, and thus introducing genetic predispositions to low IQ and high crime into the white population. With a bit of effort, it was possible to believe that the civil rights movement was an essential part of the plan for Jewish world domination, through the fatal weakening of the genetic health of the nation. In this sense, Jewish Conspiracy theories often required complex analysis of historical and contemporary events. What was common to those academics who embraced a conspiratorial Weltanschauung, in contrast to their colleagues, was their sense that social change signalled an immediate threat to the “natural order.”

Other academic members of 1960s Communist-Jewish Conspiracy theory circles produced speeches, articles, and longer works that helped sustain the early 20th-century ideas of a Jewish plan for world domination, recast within a Cold War framework. Classics Professor Revilo P. Oliver (1908-1994) of the University of Illinois was a leader in this regard, and his work had a tremendous influence on later neo-Nazi groups, such as William Pierce’s National Alliance. Analysis of Jews was not a “side interest” for Oliver, but was integrated with his scholarly interests in ancient civilizations and their decline. The development of

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the Internet has permitted the preservation and redistribution of his extensive writings. For example, Stormfront, a leading neo-Nazi Web site, features no less than 174 of Oliver’s articles at <www.stormfront.org>. The notion of an important academic contribution to antisemitism and to National Socialism is hardly new. Nevertheless, it is hard to accept that post-World War II academia, suffused with liberalism, could still be the source of such views. Although no single academic figure now fills Oliver’s role, neo-Nazi movements can effectively draw support from a variety of contemporary academic writings, such as the trilogy on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy of Kevin MacDonald (California State University, Long Beach).

I do not mean to minimize the distinct features of conspiratorial thinking and the paranoid style, emphasized by Hofstadter (The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1965), Pipes (Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, 1997), Robins and Post (Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred, 1997), and many others. My argument here is that analysis of the psychological features and functions of conspiracy theories must be supplemented by detailed analysis of conspiracy theory communities, including careful analysis of their histories. With sufficient organization, funding, publishing, and recruitment, a conspiracy theory community may be quite self-sustaining. Thus, International Jewish Conspiracy theories may survive long past the social unrest that gave them their original force.

The Protocols is still distributed around the globe, now by Internet. For its modern audience, the Protocols maintains the power to explain history as an unfolding struggle, although Zionism is now invoked more frequently than Bolshevism as the fountainhead of evil. Contemporary conspiratorial versions of the Jews in Clinton’s administration who are said to “rule America” (e.g., see <www.abba.com>) provide the “evidence” for the prophetic veracity of the Protocols. In turn, the Protocols provides the interpretive framework for explaining why a Madeleine Albright or a Joseph Lieberman is in a position of influence. Although mainstream antisemitism declined steadily in the second half of the 20th century, conspiratorial antisemitism is unlikely to disappear in the 21st. Increased migration, the globalization of commerce, and electronic interconnectedness might be thought to diminish the sense of the alien “Other” that pervades International Jewish Conspiracy tracts, and therefore to diminish the need for such beliefs. Instead, it is likely that globalized economies and corporate culture will nourish the belief in a Hidden Hand guiding us toward a New World Order.

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