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Look, Ivan Kuzmich, if you can, for our common good, every letter that comes to you in the post office, incoming and outgoing, you know, slightly open and read: does it contain some reports or just correspondence? (Nikolai Gogol, Revizor [The Government Inspector])
Introduction
It is the view that whatever happens in society – including things which people as a rule dislike, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages – are the results of direct design by some powerful individuals or groups. This view is very widespread, although it is, I have no doubt, a somewhat primitive kind of superstition. It is older than historicism (which may even be said to be a derivative of the conspiracy theory); and in its modern form, it is the typical result of the secularization of religious superstitions. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies were responsible for the vicissitudes of the Trojan War is gone. But the place of the gods on Homer’s Olympus is now taken by the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists. 1
Conspiracy Theories: Definitions
While it may be hard to come to an agreed definition of conspiracy theories, there is some consensus on their basic features. As one well-established definition, a conspiracy theory can generally be counted as such if it implies an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role from the rest of the society. Within a conspiracy theory, every act and actor is understood in terms of the conspiracy, and all events are connected to a single plot and group of plotters, with neither contingency nor unintended consequences imaginable. A conspiracy narrative can also be defined as a hermeneutically closed arrangement of material to explain national misfortunes and to provide some sort of scapegoat assignment of responsibility. Conspiracy is a style of thought that reduces complex reality to a set of readily understandable black-and-white, us-and-them, propositions, and thus offers both causal explanation and attribution of guilt.
John Heathershaw identifies conspiracy theories according to their attempt to provide ‘a complete explanation of a significant military, political or economic event as being secretly planned and directed by a single...