The Seduction of the Conspiracy Theory

There has been a spate of attacks on cell phone towers due to a coronavirus conspiracy theory. Engineers have been attacked verbally and physically, one stabbed, one falling ill with coronavirus after being spat at. What is causing this irrational behaviour?

These are not normal times, with our lives disrupted in a way that hasn’t been seen since the upheavals of the second world war. However, there are a few differences between our time and that one. Although a scan of British newspapers of the 1930s shows that Mr Hitler enjoyed quite a bit of praise before the war, once it has started, we knew who the enemy was. That provided a clear explanation for the disruption to ordinary life experienced here in the UK and many other countries. What we are experiencing now seems to have no clear origin, no obvious enemy to blame. A sense of chaos is all that is needed to create the fertile soil for the conspiracy theory.

No doubt the passage of time has glossed the experience of the 1930s and made it feel far more black and white than it truly was. Yet we know that with invasions of other countries and the stories that spread of Nazi atrocities, we were facing a genuine existential threat. Yet even before the war began there was a sense of chaos. The first world war was a genuine shock, compounded by the Spanish flu. Add to that economic recession and depression, chaos was rising. Into that fertile ground was planted the early example of the conspiracy theory- ‘ The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.

The Protocols is a work of fiction that describes a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Purportedly claiming to report minutes of meetings of Jewish leaders. These minutes contain plans to manipulate the economy, control the media and foster religious conflict. The origins of the Protocols appear in a 1903 publication in Russia, but their reproduction by Henry Ford’s newspaper in the 1920s ensured its distribution to a wider readership.

Debunking the Protocols came soon after, with the London Times exposing them as a work of ‘clumsy plagiarism’. They were cobbled together from an 1864 work of political satire from France, ‘Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and…

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