Comments on: A man bites dog moment https://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897 Cutting straight to the point Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:28:54 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.2 By: Michael Lonie https://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897/comment-page-1#comment-25384 Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:28:54 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897#comment-25384 Daniel Pipes, in his book “Conspiracy”, identified two main traditions of conspiracist thinking (if you can call it that) in Western culture since the French Revolution. One is antisemitic. The other he calls the Secret Society tradition. This is a strand that holds there is a secret conspiracy to rule the world but it is not the Jews who are the conspirators, but a secret society of secular people. They generally focus on the Freemasons as the perps, tracing them back to the Illuminati of the 18th Century as well as the Masons of that era, and further back into the dim mists of time to the Templars (the Masons themselves like to think their group goes back to the builders of Solomon’s Temple).

Pipes identified a good deal of overlap of course, in that somebody who is susceptible to conspiracy theories about Jews is often susceptible to those about Secret Societies. They are not the same, however. Pipes noted that Pat Robertson got dinged for antisemitism when he put out a conspiracy theory book which actually had nothing to do with Jews, but was anti Secret Society instead. We are so accustomed to Jewish World Conspiracy theories that it is hard today to recognize the other tradition separately. Robertson’s book was apparently considered to be hiding its antisemitsm by discussing the Masons (and others) but Pipes finds these are two different traditions.

I highly recommend Pipes’ two books “The Hidden Hand” on conspiracy theories in the Middle East (ehre they are the common currency of political discourse among Arabs, Iranians, Turks and others) and “Conspriacy” on the more general development of such theories.

]]> By: Andrew https://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897/comment-page-1#comment-25379 Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:40:26 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897#comment-25379 The Freemasons? The hell?

]]> By: Cynic https://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897/comment-page-1#comment-25377 Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:42:05 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/2007/03/22/2897#comment-25377 s office has distributed a brochure to all students that approvingly quotes the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’</blockquote> Of course, it's a Russian classic.]]>

“The dean’s office has distributed a brochure to all students that approvingly quotes the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’

Of course, it’s a Russian classic.

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