When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
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Opinion
When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure — and their inherent falsehood.
By Yuval Noah Harari
Mr. Harari is a historian and author.
Nov. 20, 2020
Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the global cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”
Thirty-seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.
Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.
But at its heart, Nazism was a global cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”
Understanding the common structure of such global cabal theories can explain both their attractiveness — and their inherent falsehood.
The Structure
Global cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface of the world lurks a single sinister group. The identity of this group may change: Some believe the world is secretly ruled by Freemasons, witches or Satanists; others think it’s aliens, reptilian lizard people or sundry other cliques.
But the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control.
Global cabal theories take particular delight in uniting opposites. Thus the Nazi conspiracy theory said that on the surface, communism and capitalism look like irreconcilable enemies, right? Wrong! That’s exactly what the Jewish cabal wants you to think! And you might think that the Bush family and the Clinton family are sworn rivals, but they’re just putting on a show — behind closed doors, they all go to the same Tupperware parties.
From these premises, a working theory of the world emerges. Events in the news are a cunningly designed smoke screen aimed at deceiving us, and the famous leaders that distract our attention are mere puppets in the hands of the real rulers.
The Lure
Global cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything.
The war in Syria? I don’t need to study Middle Eastern history to comprehend what’s happening there. It’s part of the big conspiracy. The development of 5G technology? I don’t need to do any research on the physics of radio waves. It’s the conspiracy. The Covid-19 pandemic? It has nothing to do with ecosystems, bats and viruses. It’s obviously part of the conspiracy.
The skeleton key of global cabal theory unlocks all the world’s mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.
The Flaw
Global cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that history is very simple. The key premise of global cabal theories is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics.
Particularly remarkable is this group’s ability to see 10 moves ahead on the global board game. When they release a virus somewhere, they can predict not only how it will spread through the world, but also how it will affect the global economy a year later. When they unleash a political revolution, they can control its course. When they start a war, they know how it will end.
ImageConspiracy theories weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years.
Conspiracy theories weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years.Credit...Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
But of course, the world is much more complicated. Consider the American invasion of Iraq, for example. In 2003, the world’s sole superpower invaded a medium-size Middle Eastern country, claiming it wanted to eliminate the country’s weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some suspected that it also wouldn’t have minded the chance to gain hegemony over the region and dominate the vital Iraqi oil fields. In pursuit of its goals, the United States deployed the best army in the world and spent trillions of dollars.
Fast forward a few years, and what were the results of this tremendous effort? A complete debacle. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the country was plunged into chaos. The big winner of the war was actually Iran, which became the dominant power in the region.
So should we conclude that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were actually undercover Iranian moles, executing a devilishly clever Iranian plot? Not at all. Instead, the conclusion is that it is incredibly difficult to predict and control human affairs.
You don’t need to invade a Middle Eastern country to learn this lesson. Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a surprise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control humans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. You conspire with a trusted friend, and at the crucial moment he stabs you in the back.
Global cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and control the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to puppet master nearly eight billion.
The Reality
There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pursuing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union really was conspiring to ignite communist revolutions throughout the world; capitalist banks were employing all kinds of dodgy strategies; the Roosevelt administration was planning to re-engineer American society in the New Deal; and the Zionist movement pursued its plan to establish a homeland in Palestine. But these and countless other plans often collided, and there wasn’t a single group of people running the whole show.
Today, too, you are probably the target of many conspiracies. Your co-workers may be plotting to turn the boss against you. A big pharmaceutical corporation may be bribing your doctor to give you harmful opioids. Another big corporation may be pressuring politicians to block environmental regulations and allow it to pollute the air you breathe. Some tech giant may be busy hacking your private data. A political party may be gerrymandering election districts in your state. A foreign government may be trying to foment extremism in your country. These could all be real conspiracies, but they are not part of a single global plot.
Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictatorship does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush. With great power comes great publicity.
Indeed, in many cases great publicity is a prerequisite for gaining great power. Lenin, for example, would never have won power in Russia by avoiding the public gaze. And Stalin at first was much fonder of scheming behind closed doors, but by the time he monopolized power in the Soviet Union, his portrait was hanging in every office, school and home from the Baltic to the Pacific. Stalin’s power depended on this personality cult. The idea that Lenin and Stalin were just a front for the real behind-the-scenes rulers contradicts all historical evidence.
Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and the author of “Sapiens: A Graphic History.”
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Yuval Noah Harari writes in the New York Times
Quote:
“Global cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything….
"Global cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that history is very simple. The key premise of global cabal theories is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics….”
Yuval Noah Harari is right on one point : History itself is not simple. Unfortunately, most Amerkans these days {and that includes some of the college-educated denizens of the West County} have been dumbed down to the point that they neither know nor remember the details of significant aspects of Amerikan History.
For instance, the Wall Street Panic of 1907, and the common {and accurate} perception in the aftermath of that Crash that it had been engineered by the financial machinations of the Money Markets by J.P. Morgan.{Senior)
Senator Robert LaFollette (Senior) of Wisconsin, subsequently stated that a "Money Trust of fifty men" controlled the financial markets in the United States. When queried by reporters about the truth of this allegation, George F. Baker - one of the Men on the Board of Directors of J.P. Morgan & Co. - replied that Senator LaFollette's statement was "absolutely in error." He knew from personal knowledge that not more than eight men - all of whom were known to him on a personal basis - controlled the financial markets of the country.
Subsequently two journalists, John Moody & George Kibby Turner, wrote a series of articles that were published in McClure's Magazine, the Journal that initiated the school of Journalism that came to be known as "Muckraking"
From McClure’s Magazine, August 1911, "The Seven Men" by John Moody & George Kibby Turner :
"Seven men in Wall Street now control a great share of the fundamental industry and resources of the United States. Three of the seven men, J.P. Morgan, James J. Hill, and George F. Baker, head of the First National Bank of New York belong to the so-called Morgan group; four of them, John D. and William Rockefeller, James Stillman, head of the National City Bank, and Jacob H. Schiff of the private banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb Company, to the so-called Standard Oil City Bank group... the central machine of capital extends its control over the United States... The process is not only economically logical; it is now practically automatic."
Unfortunately, there is no free pdf of the text of that particular article on the world wide web. As Dylan said, "look out kid, they keep it all hid." You can, however download a copy of the book, "Masters of Capital - A Chronicle of Wall Street" by John Moody as an eBook from Barnes and Noble for a mere 99 centavos.
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Yuval Noah Harari writes in the New York Times :
Quote:
Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.
But at its heart, Nazism was a global cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”
Here we have the old canard of the "Jewish Bankers Conspiracy" turned on its head and posed as a sly insinuation that "at its core" if any one believes that Jewish capitalists financed the Bolshevik Revolution, that thought, ipso ergo, makes one the equivalent of a {Neo-}Nazi.
This is the way that disinformation works. Yuval Noah Harari presents us with a half-truth: Hitler did stridently blame the "Jewish Bankers" for financing the Bolsheviks. The irony is this: the same Jewish Bankers who put money behind Lenin and Trotsky also financed Hitler himself. Case in point: Max Warburg, who remained the head of the Reichsbank in Germany until he left Hamburg in 1938 in the aftermath of Kristallnacht.
So you see, Harari's technique is "at its core" dishonest. It is the old technique -used by the House of Un-Amerikan Activities Committee, and Joseph McCarthy and many others- of guilt-by-association.
Here is a little reality sandwich for all of you: Capitalists in the West did finance the Bolshevik Revolution. Some of them were Jewish. That is the thesis of a very important, ground-breaking book published in the 'Seventies by the late Antony C. Sutton, who was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The book is entitled "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution."
That book is a part of his Opus, the "Wall Street Trilogy" - in which he stresses the fact that there were many capitalists who financed the Bolshevik Revolution - by no means all Jewish - and that these same Capitalists also financed the Rise of Hitler, and the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Antony C. Sutton was a serious scholar and an authentic academic, and he by no means framed his argument in these books as an exposition of the errant "Jewish Bankers Conspiracy" (i.e., that the Bolshevik Revolution was exclusively a "Jewish Bankers" project.) Previously to writing his "Wall Street Trilogy", Anthony Sutton had authored another trilogy, entitled "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development".
Those three volumes were published by the Hoover Institution {on the Campus of Stanford University} in very limited editions, and were intended to be read by a very limited audience - the denizens of the Think Tanks - a class of cognoscenti who are privy to the way that the Real world works.
Today, if you will do a Search with the words "financed Bolshevik Revolution" @ the in-house Search engine on the website "Global Research", you will find that 888 items come up. It is worth investigating.
There is also this:
Monsanto/Bayer Merger: Shady Historical Origins, I.G. Farben, Hitler’s Chemical Genetic Engineering Cartel
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Yuval Noah Harari writes in the New York Times :
"Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictatorship does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush. With great power comes great publicity."
Spot on, Yuval !
And I would concur that the power elite - the ruling / owning class - and the 'elite' of all such, are not some "shadowy" "Cabal" at all. In point of fact, they are "hiding in the open" - in full accord with the famous Buddhist Maxim, "If you wish to hide something, hide it out in the Open."
But I would suggest that Yuval himself is not so 'clean' with regards to his real relationship with these "elitists". Indeed, he is a useful tool and shill for them. Indeed, he has been a featured speaker to the Outer Circle of the power elite - the Men's Club of Globalist Billionaires who are known as the World Economic Forum; volken, who meet annually in Davos, Switzerland, every January.
Within the Circle of the Membership of the World Economic Forum - the Union of the World’s Billionaires - is a Smaller Circle, who are collectively known as the Bilderburg Group. Here is a dandy Chart{Click on the Link} on the Business Insider website, regarding those Cadre - roughly one hundred twenty to one hundred & forty World Class Billionaires, who sit on the Boards of Directorates of every Multinational Corporation on the Planet - All of which incidentally - and by a certain symmetry of Design - have their Global Headquarters in Switzerland @ Geneva.
I would surmise (just guessing, ha ha) that there is a Inner Circle of the Bilderburg Group, which could be termed or regarded as the "Central Committee" =OR= the "Board of Directors". This is precisely the CABAL, and These are precisely the Volks that ol' Yuval Noah Harari wishes to deny the reality of - for the benefit of his hearers & sponsors in Davos - and to the bewilderment & confusion of the rest of Us : >Plebes-in-General< and local, Dear Benighted Waccovians.
But it stands to reason, If you think about it : That a Group like the Bilderburg Group would have a "Board of Directors," =A "Central Committee"=. As for their specific Names, I confess my own Research has not proceeded that far. But I would suggest that one look no further than the top fifteen Volks that Klaus Schwab "follows" on his Twitter Account. Yes, it's probably just that simple. Among those fifteen one would probably uncover the "Cabal" that "Runs the World." There they are - "hiding in the Open" - for all the World to see...
Furthermore, I suggest that even as in the early twentieth Century, there were "Seven Men" who controlled "a great share of the fundamental industry and resources of the United States" that these days, when there is a truly 'Global Economy' the control has not diminished, but instead has been Centralized & consolidated... Lenin wrote about the inevitability of this amalgamation, consolidation & merger mania in "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"...
--Confirming what John Moody & George Kibby Turner had stated in their series of articles published in McClure's Magazine : "The process is not only economically logical; it is now practically automatic..."
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Mayacaman:
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Q. Who Owns the New York Times Company? ?!
Lest some might think that this one { i } am an 'anti-Semite' or that I was insidiously making a Jewish slur when I asked the Question I posed above, let me just inform you all that I am a Jew myself, according to Rabinic Law, and that my mother's maternal uncle, a certain gentleman by the name of Walter Fletcher{née Fleischer) worked for the New York Times for over fifty years. In the 'Thirties he became the Photograph Editor - a position that he held all during World War Two. Every single photograph that appeared in the New York Times during the War was a picture that passed over his Desk.
After the War, when the Sulzberger family bought the New York Times from the Ochs family, they brought in their own people, and sacked most of the staff. But they did not sack Walter Fletcher. He was too valuable. Instead he was shifted over to be the Pet Column Editor and cover the Dog & Pony shows. He enjoyed his new position immensely - even though it was a demotion, of sorts. It was more fun to attend horse races and dog shows in his white seersucker suit than labor at his desk about which picture to place in conjunction with each story in the Times.
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
I have wondered why this article gleaned so much approval from the WaccoBBites and yet none have risen to answer or contest my statements of demurral. I can see that it is fashionable in some circles to show oneself front and center on the lines of politically correct conformity - and to 'virtue signal' to the crowd that one is free from "conspiracy thinking."
This is psychological. As I wrote in my protest on another thread here@ WaccoBB, It has become the custom to denigrate dissenters from the two-party paradigm as "conspiracy theorists" - who of course are 'crazy' -or- at the very least, psychologically maladjusted. Madness, as we all know is catching - like the flu or those damned covid viruses - and everyone should rightfully be on their guard against the germs of Madness.
I am, too. But I do not consider myself a "conspiracy theorist." I allow the existence of conspiracies; but I do not hunt them out. They show up on their own - usually when certain ideas are being 'debunked' by the fact-checkers. My 'problem' - if I may condescend to call it such - is that I was taught about the Class War at the tender age of three and four, by my little socialist grandmother from Flatbush.
And, whatever one may think or say about 'socialism' - or how the Soviet system, in practice, did not work - the Class War is Real. You can take that home with you. You can bank on it.
Furthermore, you can bank on the fact that there are conspiracies in politics. A famous line in the 1990 Movie "HIDDEN AGENDA" spoken by a well connected Horse-Prot on his rural Estate outside Belfast, to the anti-hero of the flic, the British investigator who has been sent from London (supposedly to get to the bottom of who killed an American lawyer) runs "My dear man, conspiracy is the essence of politics."
Perhaps those WaccoBBites to gave Larry Robinson & Yuval Noah Harari gratitude for this article feel "empowered" by the last paragraph :
"Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about."
But I would advise them against that. Noam Chompsky {"America's foremost public intellectual"} himself has lectured on the phenomenon of the "controlled dialectic" - and it would certainly be a point of wisdom to consider the fact that the two major parties in Amerika are the "two wings of the same bird of prey." Yes, Children, THEM, Inc. have got 'politics' all sewed up. The whole "spectrum" is wired for sound.
Beyond that, it would be another point of wisdom to identify the Davos Elite = the World Economic Forum - the group before WhomYuval Noah Harari has lectured - as one of the "competing factions in our world". -And to consider the fact that the WEF are the Outer Circle of the Men's Club of World-Class Billionaires; the Middle Circle being the Bilderberg Group; & the Inner Circle being the Board of Directors of Said Bilderbergers. One doesn't have to get all esoteric and wingey about it and speak of the fabled "Illuminati" - THEM, Inc. are "hiding in the open".
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Re: When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
