Every time I return to the subject of the conspiracy syndrome I receive letters from indignant people who remind me that conspiracies actually exist. Of course they do. Every coup d’état was a conspiracy, people conspire to take over a company by gradually buying up shares, or they conspire to plant a bomb on the subway. There have always been conspiracies: some have failed without anyone knowing about them, others have succeeded, but what they have in common is that they are limited in their purposes and scope. When people refer to conspiracy syndrome, however, they are talking about the idea of a universal conspiracy, in certain theologies even of a cosmic dimension, so that all or almost all the events of history are moved by a single and mysterious power that operates in the shadows.
I’m sufficiently clearheaded to suspect at times that by complaining about conspiracy syndromes, I’m showing signs of paranoia, in that I’m displaying a syndrome in which I believe there are conspiracy theories everywhere. But to set my mind at rest, all it takes is a brief look at the Internet, where conspirators are legion and at times they reach the heights of subtle and unwitting humor. The other day I came across a site containing a long piece called Le monde malade des jésuites by Joël Labruyère. As the title suggests, it’s a broad survey of world events, not just recent events, brought about by the universal conspiracy of the Jesuits.
Nineteenth-century Jesuits were among the main instigators of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, from Abbé Augustin Barruel to the creation of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica and the novels of Father Antonio Bresciani, and it was fitting that they should be repaid in the same way by Italian liberals, Mazzinians, Freemasons, and anticlerical movements, with the theory of a Jesuit conspiracy popularized to some extent by satirical pamphlets or such famous books as Pascal’s Lettres provinciales, Vincenzo Gioberti’s Il gesuita moderno, or the writings of Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, but much more by two novels of Eugène Sue, Le Juif errant and Les Mystères du peuple.
Nothing new, therefore, but Labruyère’s site raises the Jesuit obsession to fever pitch. My list is just a bird’s-eye glimpse, since space here is limited, whereas Labruyère’s conspiratorial fantasy is Homeric. And so, according to him, the Jesuits had always intended to establish a world government, controlling the pope as well as the various European monarchies. Through the notorious Bavarian Illuminati, whom the Jesuits themselves had created before condemning them as Communists, they sought to bring down those monarchies that had outlawed the Company of Jesus. It was the Jesuits, he says, who had sunk the Titanic, because from that disaster they could set up the Federal Reserve Bank through the mediation of the Knights of Malta, whom they control, and it is no coincidence that three of the world’s richest Jews, John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus, who opposed the founding of the bank, were drowned on the Titanic. Along with the Federal Reserve Bank, the Jesuits funded the two world wars, which have clearly brought advantage only to the Vatican. As for the assassination of John F. Kennedy (and Oliver Stone has clearly been manipulated by the Jesuits), if we remember that the CIA was also created as a Jesuit program inspired by the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, and that the Jesuits controlled it through the Soviet KGB, then it’s clear, Labruyère concludes, that Kennedy was killed by those who had conspired to sink the Titanic.
Naturally, all neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups are of Jesuit inspiration. There were Jesuits behind Presidents Nixon and Clinton; the Jesuits brought about the Oklahoma City bombing; and the Jesuits inspired Cardinal Francis Spellman, who fomented the Vietnam War, which brought $220 million to the Jesuit Federal Bank. Nor, of course, can we forget the role of Opus Dei, which the Jesuits control through the Knights of Malta.
I have to pass over many other conspiracies. But you no longer need to ask why people read Dan Brown.
2008