the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them’. Still, as the final words of this sentence – resonating with the idea of the Jews as homeless and wandering – make clear, Churchill cannot quite shed the idea that the Jews do not properly belong to the national body politic. In his view, they are guests in the nations that have offered them a place to live and should behave accordingly. He also has only praise for the attempts to create ‘by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown’, a project he presents as both significantly driven by British Jews and ‘in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire’.
By contrast, he views the alleged activities of the third group – the ‘International Jews’ – as highly problematic and a threat to the stability of the global order in general and to Britain and its political system in particular. ‘Most, if not all’ of these Jews, he writes, ‘have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world’. In their minds, religion has been replaced with ideology. Having turned communist, they now want to abolish not only religion but also the nation state. Their goal, according to Churchill, is to establish ‘a world-wide communistic State’.
Somewhat surprisingly at first sight, Churchill claims that this idea is much older than communism itself, and it is here that his text becomes truly relevant for a book on conspiracy theories:
This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg [sic] (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
According to Churchill, then, the rise of communism in Russia is the latest chapter in a ‘world-wide conspiracy’, led by ‘extraordinary personalities’, that has been going on since the eighteenth century.
It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars have not only labelled Churchill’s speech anti-Semitic but also classified it as a conspiracy theory.2 Conspiracy theories have become a focus of public attention over the last two decades, and it is no longer just academics who are quick to discover them in the past and the present. Long ignored by the public, conspiracy theories have now been omnipresent for some time. The suspicions regarding Jews, Freemasons and the Illuminati perpetuated in Churchill’s speech remain all-pervasive. And they have been compounded ever since by a host of new allegations expanding on the older conspiracy theories, or in many cases even merging with them: that the USA carried out the 9/11 attacks itself; that we are being secretly controlled by a New World Order that keeps us docile via chemtrails; that the Ukrainian crisis was orchestrated by NATO; that Barack Obama was not born in the USA or that – along with Angela Merkel and George W. Bush – he belongs to an elite of extra-terrestrial reptilians that feeds upon our negative energy. Not to mention that the moon landing never happened, and that John F. Kennedy was murdered by the CIA.
Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the emergence of a plethora of highly publicized conspiracist allegations. Some versions claim that the virus is either a Chinese or an American biological weapon which was, depending on the individual story, intentionally or accidentally released. Other versions hold that the virus does not exist or is completely harmless, and that dark forces – the ‘deep state’, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, the New World Order or others – are using the hysteria to hurt Donald Trump, reduce the world population, or achieve other malicious goals. For the most part, these coronavirus conspiracy theories are adaptations of much older conspiracy narratives. Quite frequently, the current crisis is imagined to be merely the latest chapter in an ongoing plot and is thus simply grafted onto long-existing narrative templates. At any rate, the popularity of these conspiracy theories shows that revelations concerning alleged plots by countries, intelligence services, international institutions or groups of powerful individuals are no longer confined to subcultures, but are now reaching a wider public.3
Accordingly, many observers have concluded that conspiracy theories are more socially acceptable today than ever before, and that there has been a surge in the number of people believing in them. This has in turn alarmed those who remain sceptical – still the greater part of the population and the overwhelming majority of the media. Hence, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has become a permanent fixture of everyday social discourse: barely a week goes by without it appearing in the evening news or the daily papers. Why a particular idea should be called a ‘conspiracy theory’ is never explained, however: apparently, this is something we all understand intuitively. ‘I know it when I see it’, an American judge once said about pornography, and the same applies to most of us when it comes to conspiracy theories. The present example is relatively clear-cut, and unless you subscribe to the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy and therefore believe Churchill to be simply stating a fact, you would probably describe his remarks as a conspiracy theory.
But what is it exactly about Churchill’s speech that earns it this label? What distinguishes his form of conspiracy theorizing from that of Nesta Webster, the source he draws on? And how does the open articulation of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory by perhaps the most important British politician of the twentieth century relate to the claim that conspiracy theories have recently been growing in popularity and influence? What role does the internet play in the spread of conspiracy theories, and how does it influence our belief in them? How long have conspiracy theories in general been around? What is the connection between conspiracy theories and populism? Who actually believes in them and why? Are they dangerous? And if so, what can we do about them?
The answers to these questions are much harder to find than conspiracy theories themselves. There is a glaring disparity between the heat with which the topic is currently discussed and the knowledge informing the vast majority of such discussions. All too often, ideas are described as conspiracy theories when they are not. Opponents of vaccination may be misguided, but not all of them are conspiracy theorists. Time and time again, different types of conspiracy theories are lumped together, whether they are directed against elites or minorities, and whether they are racist or not. And it is often assumed that that all conspiracy theories encourage violence, when their link with violence is in fact far more complex, as we shall see in the conclusion to this book.
Because of the upsurge of populism in Europe and the USA, and now the COVID-19 crisis, the concern about conspiracy theories has grown exponentially in recent years. In particular, the Brexit campaign and the election of Donald Trump as US president have rendered the public debate over conspiracy theories even more heated and unfocused, resulting for example in a blurring of boundaries between conspiracy theories and fake news. The coronavirus pandemic has done nothing to alleviate this conceptual confusion. But conspiracy theories and fake news are not the same. Conspiracy theories can be fake news – that is, false information deliberately circulated in order to discredit certain individuals and/or achieve some other objective. But not all conspiracy theories are fake news, and vice versa. Many conspiracy theorists are genuinely convinced that they have uncovered a plot; equally, not all deliberately circulated misinformation pertains to an alleged conspiracy. There is an important difference between claiming that concern about COVID-19 is exaggerated and contending that the panic is intentionally manufactured by dark forces in pursuit of some sinister goal.
The imprecise use of the term is not the only problem, however. Those who engage with conspiracy theories – and that goes for academics and journalists alike
