Americans.
A very different view was taken a hundred years earlier by opponents of the so-called Slave Power Conspiracy. In their eyes, the state was already completely under the control of a conspiracy of radical pro-slavery campaigners who they believed wanted to make the practice compulsory throughout the land. In this case, the conspiracy theorists identified a ‘top-down’ plot. In 1858, for example, the future president Abraham Lincoln – in one of his most famous speeches, in which he described the USA as a ‘house divided’ – accused the then president James Buchanan, his predecessor Franklin Pierce, the Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney and the influential congressman Stephen Douglas of heading up a giant conspiracy of slave owners. These conspirators, Lincoln argued, had orchestrated all the crises of recent years in order to achieve their true objective: the introduction of slavery across the whole of the United States.6
The distinction between bottom-up and top-down conspiracies is often closely linked to that between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conspiracies. Are the conspirators outsiders who have merely wormed their way into the country or organization they are seeking to undermine? Or have they always belonged to it and simply begun at some point to pursue their own ends instead? External conspiracies almost always tend to be imagined as bottom-up operations, since the state and its key institutions are obviously not yet in the hands of the conspirators. Internal conspiracies, on the other hand, can operate either from the top down or from the bottom up. The government can manipulate the population, and sections of the population can mount secret attempts to seize power. In recent decades, however, there has been a growing tendency in the Western world to identify internal and top-down conspiracies.
One example of a conspiracy theory involving an external, bottom-up plot was the widespread claim in the USA in the 1830s and 1840s that the Pope and the crowned heads of Europe were secretly directing Catholic migration to America. According to many influential Protestant ministers and intellectuals at the time, the ultimate aim was to instigate a takeover that would destroy the shining example of freedom and democracy set by a country that sided with the oppressed masses of Europe and was hence a thorn in the side of absolutist monarchs. In much the same fashion, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad consistently blamed all ills, disasters and attacks in his country on US and Israeli plots throughout his eight years in office (2005–13). In both instances, the spectre of an external conspiracy served – consciously or unconsciously – to defuse internal tensions. In most conspiracy theories directed against external adversaries, the nation appears as an organic unit whose real enemies can only come from outside.
The various groups of alleged conspirators mentioned earlier as being feared by nineteenth-century German conservatives are a different story. While they may have been influenced by foreign ideologues, they were not – at least according to the prevailing view – controlled from outside the country. This type of conspiracy was therefore an internal, bottom-up one. The conspiracy scenarios popular in the West in recent decades revolve around internal, top-down conspiracies. As far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moon landing or the 9/11 attacks are concerned, most conspiracy theorists assume the involvement of the US government or at least large parts of it. The tendency to regard the elites of one’s own country as conspirators already suggests the close relationship between conspiracy theories and populism, which I discuss in Chapter 4.
Needless to say, categories such as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ or ‘external’ and ‘internal’ are not always as clearly distinguishable in practice as the previous paragraphs perhaps suggest. This is because any assessment of a conspiracy tends to depend on when – i.e. in which phase of its development – we make that assessment. After all, the aim of the conspirators according to all these theories is to achieve power and hold on to it. Thus, the communist conspiracy uncovered by Senator McCarthy is a bottom-up one, since the White House has not yet been conquered. By contrast, the communist conspiracy that Robert W. Welch, the founder of the far-right John Birch Society, claimed to have exposed a few years later in his book The Politician, is a top-down one, since President Eisenhower was, in his view, part of the conspiracy; in this case, the conspirators have already taken control of the White House. One reason why the assassination of John F. Kennedy plays such a key role in so many conspiracy theories is that it is viewed by many conspiracy theorists as the tipping point when the conspirators finally took over power and the bottom-up conspiracy became a top-down one. In Churchill’s text, on the other hand, the conspirators – typically for the time of writing – have not yet assumed power in Russia, although the originally ‘bottom-up’ plot is already well advanced outside the UK. Even so, Churchill is ahead of his time in propagating – to use Michael Barkun’s terminology – a superconspiracy theory in which various event and systemic conspiracy theories converge.7
Event conspiracy theories, as the name implies, centre on a specific, relatively clear-cut event which is claimed to be the result of a plot. The Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, 9/11 or the death of the Polish president Lech Kaczyński when his plane crashed in Smolensk in April 2010 – all these events have given rise to such theories. Systemic conspiracy theories, on the other hand, focus on a particular group of conspirators who are accused of engineering a whole series of events in order to achieve their dark purposes or hold on to power. Such theories have sprung up around groups such as communists, the Illuminati, Jews or the CIA.
Finally, superconspiracy theories are a conglomeration of event and systemic conspiracy theories. The Nazi theory of the global Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy is a superconspiracy theory because it amalgamates two systemic conspiracy theories, the Jewish one and the communist one. The scenario presented by Robert W. Welch in The Politician is quite similar. He traces the global communist conspiracy all the way back to the Illuminati. Even more extreme is the conspiracy theory of the former footballer David Icke, which has many followers, mostly in the English-speaking world. Icke believes that the world is ruled by an elite class of reptiles who landed on Earth from outer space in prehistoric times and feed on the negative energy of human beings. In his view, these extra-terrestrial conspirators are behind almost every event and group around which conspiracy theories are woven. Here we have a particularly striking illustration of the idea that everything is connected. The huge scale involved – something that Welch’s and Icke’s theories share with those of Churchill and many others – is an important criterion for distinguishing imaginary conspiracies from real ones.
Conspiracy theories and real conspiracies
Up to now, I have omitted to discuss – at least explicitly – the question of whether conspiracy theories are true or not. At the same time, the wording I used at the beginning of this chapter – namely, that conspiracy theories ‘assert’ the existence of a plot – and, above all, the examples I have chosen so far, point to the fact that I, like the vast majority of academics, view them with a great deal of scepticism. That is not to say, of course, that conspiracies do not occur. From the Catilinarian conspiracy through to the by now widely documented attempt by the Kremlin to influence the 2016 American presidential elections, there have always been secret plots, and it is highly unlikely that this will ever change. But real conspiracies are very different from those that conspiracy theorists claim to have uncovered. And there has never been, to the best of my knowledge, a conspiracy theory as defined in the first part of this chapter that has subsequently turned out to be true.
The first difference between real conspiracies and conspiracy theories concerns the timescale of the alleged plot. According to the extremism expert Armin Pfahl-Traughber, the overwhelming majority of proven conspiracies are ‘relatively short-term projects with a concrete objective’, such as an assassination or a coup. By contrast, conspiracy theories nearly always posit a ‘much larger timeframe of conspiratorial action’ associated with far more ambitious but at the same time vaguer objectives ranging through to world domination.8 Accordingly, in order to achieve their sinister ends, the conspirators – real or imaginary groups such as Jews, communists, Illuminati or aliens – are generally alleged
