American History

Identification Cards

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="Many" border="0" cards="" have="" idea="" identification="" of="" people="" seen="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc578vTOL8XtE0Rs8cMDIFjg3MFXNVYz2TUgRw1_nZt7eJIoNIdN1bvIHkqW5MJoKzBTqqp4_4VcQRqpx_NJFf53rYPUP13-EKhDgU6TX8RSmL7-RyH1-g-pNRYEK8hTmkRdh976f0H4k/s1600/identification-card.jpg" the="" title="Identification" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Identification Cards</td></tr> </tbody></table> Many people have seen the idea of identification (ID) cards as a conspiracy against the liberty of individuals; those on the Right have usually drawn on biblical prohesies to warn against ID cards, while those on the Left have feared the introduction of increasing government surveillance and control of workers. Opponents of mandatory or quasi-mandatory identification cards on the religious Right have pointed to the Bible’s warning against the “sin of David,” whom Satan incited to conduct a census and whom God punished for thus “numbering” the people (1 Chronicles 21). Caesar’s all-empire registration that took Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem (Luke 2) has similarly colored the view of many Americans that any government information collection for tax purposes is part of a wider conspiracy. Likewise, the introduction of a government-assigned number in order to take up a job was viewed as fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of the “mark of the beast” in Revelation 13: “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” The widening use of ID numbers is said to be mandated by international organizations such as <a href=" " target="_blank">the United Nations</a> (UN) and the European Community, as part of the <a href=" " target="_blank">New World Order</a> predicted in Daniel 7:23 and Revelation 13:4–8. The Social Security Administration’s “Enumeration at Birth” program, in which newborns are assigned Social Security Numbers (SSNs), is part of a “global plan for enumeration,” mandated by the UN. New identification technology is seen as particularly worrisome, with fears, for example, that kafe codes contain the number 666, the mark of the beast. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B1XFZUA/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=67533e494b75c0a55ca5fd4df4d3b427" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00B1XFZUA&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="Many" border="0" cards="" have="" height="1" idea="" identification="" of="" people="" seen="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B00B1XFZUA" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470844027/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=20145a90fdbdabe4c36d9f60c6b3fea6" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0470844027&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="Many" border="0" cards="" have="" height="1" idea="" identification="" of="" people="" seen="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0470844027" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> On the Left, the assignment of SSNs to workers in the 1930s produced concerns, for example by the United Mineworkers, of a potential employers’ “blacklist” of troublemaking laborers. However, much of the opposition to the SSN was fueled by opposition to President Roosevelt’s New Deal itself, and made use of conspiratorial accusations largely as a rhetorical flourish. Just before the 1936 election, Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon asked rhetorically if millions of Americans would now be fingerprinted and photographed and “opened for federal snooping.” The Hearst newspapers asked, “Do you want a tag and a number in the name of false security?” and spread the rumor that all workers would be required to wear dog tags displaying the SSN. Although the fears and conspiracy theories that met the introduction of the SSN can now seem farfetched, it is nevertheless the case that the numbers have become all-purpose identifiers, despite assurances at the time, and fears about the erosion of liberty and privacy are not unfounded. However, the United States does not have a national ID card as other countries do. The most-commonly checked government IDs are the driver’s licenses issued by the fifty states, but less than 20 percent of the population has a U.S. passport. More than 7,000 different jurisdictions issue all manner of birth certificates, which are the “breeder documents” upon which other IDs are based. Proponents of universal ID cards start from the observation that the United States already has a de facto national ID card, in the form of driver’s licenses, and a national ID number, in the form of the SSN. In the wake of the terrorist attack on September 11, for example, advocates for a national ID card argued that the existing system had to be made more robust by combining the existing cards into one. In a similar vein, opponents of national ID cards suggest that the current scattered system is but the slippery slope to the introduction of a national ID. These skeptics assert that, because totalitarian systems rely on ID cards (Nazi Germany’s IBMsupplied ID system, the Soviet internal passport, and apartheid South Africa’s pass system being key examples), ID cards themselves represent the thin edge of the wedge of a Big Brother state apparatus, which could be introduced by stealth and in a piecemeal fashion, via small technological improvements and policy changes. Mainstream civil liberties and privacy advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Privacy Foundation do not see any conspiracy in this, although slippery-slope arguments can sometimes play the same role as conspiracy theory in viewing together what would otherwise be unrelated, disparate events. Sometimes privacy advocates will employ the hint of conspiracy to simplify the presentation of what is really an argument about incremental, technological determinism. A rather different group of ID opponents does see a literal conspiracy. In U.S. history there is a longstanding populist, right-wing fear of the encroachment of “big government” into the life of the average American, and ID cards are often seen as part of a larger conspiracy of the federal government (and the so-called New World Order) to control the private life of citizens. Members of the Patriot movement, in groups such as the Militia of Montana and the Posse Comitatus, have attempted to rescind or revoke their own driver’s licenses or SSNs, in a process called “asseveration.” For example, Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols had at one point attempted to back out of a $20,000 debt by attempting to repudiate his U.S. citzenship; he destroyed his driver’s license, passport, and voter registration card. Similar ID-revocation techniques have been used in attempts to avoid child-support payments, back taxes, gun registration, seatbelt laws, speed limits, and similar infringements on “sovereign” citizens. These groups describe ID cards as part of a conspiracy to hook citizens into rejecting their “sovereign” status. Even the ZIP code is feared as a form of “adhesion contract” to nullify sovereignty. The idea of ID cards as an antisovereign conspiracy is generally employed as part of a <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">strategy</a> for avoiding taxes or other financial burdens, although this kind of tax avoidance has been universally unsuccessful. There is, however, a thriving business in running seminars on the subject, at which attendees might pay several hundred dollars to acquire the appropriate paperwork, plus the ability to themselves hold similar seminars, forming a kind of multilevel-marketing campaign for the anti-ID card conspiracy theory. In the United States “liberty” is often a code word for guns, and even fairly mainstream opponents of gun registration sometimes see ID cards as part of a much larger pattern, in which “fascist” government agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) is targeting gun owners and the “politically incorrect.” The Brady Bill requires that ID such as a driver’s license be shown and checked against a federal database as part of a handgun sale, which has led the gun lobby to equate registration and ID cards with gun control. New forms of technology provoke similar responses from opponents of identification cards. “Smart” cards, which can carry several megabytes of data, are frequently described as the next step in bringing about one-world government tracking of all persons; the use of such smart cards on military bases has been described as a pilot project to move the entire civilian population to a trackable, cashless society. Biometrics such as facial recognition, and location tracking via GPS (Global Positioning Satellite), are seen as part of the same plan. The next step is implantable ID, such as the Digital Angel and Verichip products from Applied Digital Solutions. The religious Right note that these products in part fulfill the design specification of Revelation 13:16 that speaks of “a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.” Timothy McVeigh, the Oklohoma bomber, spoke of the army implanting a computer chip in his buttocks during the Gulf War, but more mainstream commentators now note that such <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">technology</a> is becoming more likely. For the conspiracyminded, high-tech ID systems are seen as systems not just for identification, but for mind control.

Identification Cards

Identification Cards Many people have seen the idea of identification (ID) cards as a conspiracy against the liberty of individuals; tho...

Illuminati

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img a="" alt="The" border="0" illuminati="" of="" order="" short="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqZ3ZqwW3oukTfor1qGirDfAnsSBqUtnzl89F0hiS07UAbpEHWiMrQOnKmjuFwYAg6gGlu5zFRAYCqQ6eZHG06GY1ol9-6xFzFfbjBfywhAjwoHVWryXV-CN1KE1-cDvpoctnXC58qUYE/s1600/illuminati.jpg" the="" title="Illuminati" was="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illuminati</td></tr> </tbody></table> The Order of the Illuminati was a short-lived secret society in eighteenth-century Germany that became the linchpin of countless conspiracy theories and works of historical and religious speculation, ranging from reactionary attacks on the French Revolution to the counter-cultural writings of the 1960s and 1970s and through to the religious Right in the present. In terms of sheer longevity and versatility, few conspiracy theory “villains” can match the record of the Illuminati. Origins The legend began in the southwest German state of Bavaria, a militantly Catholic realm where the Reformation and the Enlightenment had been stoutly resisted by both the ruling family and the Jesuit clergy who controlled the cultural institutions. The Order of the Illuminati was born in the febrile brain of Dr. Adam Weishaupt, a professor of Canon Law at Bavaria’s most prestigious educational institution, the University of Ingolstadt. A leader of the liberal faction within the university that supported the introduction of non-Catholic books and scientific subjects into the university curriculum, Weishaupt felt that <a href=" " target="_blank">Jesuits</a> rivals were sabotaging his career, and determined that only a secret organization could ever succeed in spreading the secular, rationalistic ideas of the Enlightenment in such a hostile environment. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0692351310/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0692351310&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=WYJREOJX2KC6ZAHX"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0692351310&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="The" border="0" height="1" illuminati="" of="" order="" short="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0692351310" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" was="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967346657/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0967346657&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=2K53OKJXXRAJWFSX"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0967346657&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="The" border="0" height="1" illuminati="" of="" order="" short="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0967346657" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" was="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Secret societies and fraternal orders were something of a rage among the elites of Europe and America during the eighteenth century. Living in a world where traditional beliefs seemed increasingly inadequate and traditional society was decaying, many sought out deeper knowledge and new forms of sociability to go with them. The exotic rituals and quasi-pagan “mysteries” available to initiates in Freemasonry and similar institutions were immensely appealing, and at their best taught a more modern and open-minded value system than the official culture of the day. Membership was also an excellent way for ambitious men to make social and professional connections. Weishaupt’s new secret society was launched 1 May 1776, with five members. Loosely based on Masonic lodges, Illuminati chapters were intended to become “schools of wisdom” (Stauffer, 150), in which new ideas could be freely taught, away from the prying eyes of priests and public officials. Weishaupt originally planned three “grades” of Illuminati, Novice, Minerval, and Illuminated Minerval, promising higher grades to come. The order was structured in a hierarchical, cultlike fashion in which the higher-ranking members were supposed to control the actions and thinking of their subordinates. Each novice—young, rich, impressionable men were the preferred recruits—was to be instructed by a single Minerval who was to keep the identities of the other members secret. Advancement required the novitiate to prepare detailed reports on his life and character, including the books he owned and the names of his enemies, and to recruit new candidates. Then finally, after two years of study, the novice was elevated to Minerval status and got to attend Illuminati gatherings. Minervals were to form a kind of secret Enlightenment university hidden within the existing institutions of the society, where the order would work to see that its members were highly placed. This was a bold plan to spread an intellectual revolution through Catholic Europe, frightening in the degree to which it sought to control its agents, but it amounted to relatively little in practice. Intent on personal, dictatorial command of the order, Weishaupt quarreled frequently with other leading members, and the total number of Illuminati rose to no more than perhaps sixty in its first four years of existence. The order’s fortunes took a temporary turn for the better when Baron Adolf Franz Friederich Knigge, a well-connected diplomat and leading Mason from the north of Germany, joined in 1780. The accession of Knigge greatly increased the geographic reach and social prestige of Illuminism, and created an alliance with Freemasonry that proved the key to the order’s brief period of expansion. Knigge added a number of new grades, with cheeky, imposing titles like Priest, Prince, and Magus, and expanded the group’s recruitment to include not just impressionable young students but also experienced men who already occupied positions of influence, especially Knigge’s Masonic colleagues. Several of the new Illuminati grades corresponded to Masonic degrees and provided easy points of access for Masons into the higher ranks of the new order. Under Knigge’s guidance, the Order of the Illuminati enjoyed its only period of real prestige or influence. Membership climbed into the thousands, and reached outside Bavaria into a number of other German-speaking states. A number of German princes and nobles became Illuminati, as did such lions of German culture as Goethe and Herder. Suppression Then, beginning in 1784, just at the peak of the order’s popularity, the hammer came down. Duke Charles Theodore of Bavaria issued a series of edicts banning all voluntary associations and societies that had been created without government permission, in time naming the Illuminati specifically as one of the outlawed groups. An investigation was begun and Illuminati who held any kind of official position in the army, clergy, government, or educational system were forced to confess and recant their membership, promptly and sincerely, or lose their jobs. As in many cases where a government tries to suppress a conspiratorial <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">organization</a>, heavily embroidered confessions and lurid, semifictional tell-alls began appearing as the scandal mounted. Weishaupt and Knigge escaped, but a number of other leading Illuminati were arrested, including one Xavier Zwack, a disgraced member whose trove of letters and documents included plans for creating a secret organization for women, essays defending atheism and suicide, claims that the Illuminati had the power of life or death over their members, and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">information</a> on secret ink, counterfeiting, poison, and even abortion. Conspiratorial Interpretations of History A highly imaginative stew of prospective sin and projected skullduggery, Zwack’s papers became the basis for the Illuminati legend that mushroomed almost simultaneously with the Bavarian order’s selesai suppression in 1787. Its fame was first spread by a host of German-language works published attacking and defending the order, including several intemperate productions from founder Adam Weishaupt himself. Taking the seized documents and the controversial literature out of its original context, the embattled defenders of church and king came to see the Illuminati as both representatives of, and the prime movers behind, all the insidious forces of innovation, free thought, and revolution that seemed to threaten their world. European reactionaries simply refused to believe that such a diabolical organization could be killed, seeing its hand in the other major and minor political upheavals of the eighteenth century. The most notable and shocking of these developments, of course, was the French Revolution that began in 1789. Once the French Jacobins had pushed the country to regicide and mass murder in the early 1790s, apologists for the old regime cast about for explanations and many settled, improbably enough, on the Bavarian Illuminati as the culprits. The basics of the grand Illuminati conspiracy theory were first mapped out by University of Edinburgh scientist John Robison, a Mason who gradually became convinced that the secrecy provided by Masonic lodges and similar institutions “had been used in every country for venting and propagating sentiments in religion and politics, that could not have been circulated in public without exposing the author to great danger” (Robison). This protection encouraged free thinkers and libertines to “become more bold, and to teach doctrines subversive of all our notions of morality ... of all satisfaction and contentment with our present life, so long as we live in a state of civil subordination.” This insight might have had some merit as a description of Europe’s intellectual ferment during the eighteenth century, but Robison literalized it into the charge that “AN ASSOCIATION HAS BEEN FORMED for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE”. In his book Proofs of a Conspiracy, Robison outlined his theories in massive though often mistaken detail, tracing the origins of the conspiracy back to French Freemasons whose ideas had spread to Germany and allegedly spawned the Illuminati. Along with many of his contemporaries, Robison believed that the Illuminati had not really been suppressed in 1787, but had merely gone underground and assumed new and more dangerous guises. Robison labored for sixty pages to establish a link between the Bavarians and the French revolutionaries, relying on a few fleeting contacts between some mid-level Illuminati leaders and two well-connected French Masons who became prominent French politicians during the 1790s, Mirabeau and Talleyrand. Supposedly the French immediately adopted Weishaupt’s plan “in all its branches,” creating “illuminated” lodges all over France, including, Robison claimed, the infamous Jacobin club that produced the Revolution’s most radical and bloodthirsty faction. Almost simultaneously with Robison, a French writer was working out an even more elaborate version of the same theory. In Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism), the Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel described a “triple conspiracy” of “sophistes” specializing in “Impiety,” “Rebellion,” and “Anarchy.” According to Barruel, it all began with a conspiracy of philosophers, led by Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, whose anti-Christian writings sapped the intellectual and political prestige of the Catholic Church. At the same time, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau expounded the doctrines of liberty and equality, and Freemasons took up their cause, inculcating impressionable young men with the blasphemous notions that “all men are equals and brothers; all men are free.” The Illuminati then emerged to bring the philosophers and Masons together behind a kegiatan of cultural and political revolution, seeking to destroy not only the Christian churches and Christian monarchs of Europe, but “every religion natural or revealed ... every government ... all civil society ... all property whatsoever.” This “complete academy of Conspirators” brought their plans to fruition by creating the Jacobin clubs and fomenting the French Revolution. Arrival in the United States These Illuminati-based explanations of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">French Revolution</a> and the other radical movements of the time spread quickly to the United States, where war with the French Republic seemed to be looming and the Federalists in power were being severely criticized in the press. Many of these press critics were political refugees from suppressed radical movements in England, Scotland, and Ireland and strong sympathizers with the ideals of the French Revolution, adding fuel to a sense of alien subversion. The authors of the Illuminati conspiracy theory had warned the United States that it was in danger. Robison claimed that the Bavarian Illuminati had planted cells there before their official suppression, and Barruel cried that the Illumines were coming fresh from their successes in France: “As the plague flies on the wings of the wind, so do their triumphant legions infect America.... The immensity of the ocean is but a feeble barrier against the universal conspiracy of the Sect”. Robison and Barruel found eager readers among the Federalists, especially in New England, where the legatees of the old Puritan clergy wielded great political influence and deplored what they perceived as a declining level of religious belief since colonial times. Believing that Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were in cahoots with the French in any case, Federalists were all too prepared to believe that their political enemies might be part of a much broader and deeper conspiracy against not just <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">George Washington</a> and John Adams, but religion and morality in general. In the spring and summer of 1798, a full-fledged Illuminati scare broke out, turning the conspiracy theory into a leading topic of political debate and contributing to the paranoid atmosphere that produced the Alien and Sedition Acts. Robison and Barruel were endorsed in widely published and discussed sermons by some of New England’s most famous divines. Leading off was Rev. <a href=" " target="_blank">Jedidiah Morse</a>, pastor of First Church, Charlestown, Massachusetts, and also America’s leading authority on geography. Morse launched the controversy before a large audience in Boston on 9 May, declared a day of “solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer” by President John Adams. Morse published two other Illuminati sermons later that year, along with innumerable newspaper articles defending and trying to substantiate his charges. Pressed for specifics, he named Thomas Jefferson, the figurehead and presidential candidate of a rapidly coalescing opposition party, as the likely chief of the American Illuminati. Although by no means universally accepted, even by those of his own political persuasion, the Illuminati theory was given further sanction that summer by Rev. David Tappan, a Harvard professor of divinity, and especially by Rev. Timothy Dwight, who as president of Yale College was virtually the spiritual leader of New England’s Congregational-Federalist establishment. Having preached and written often against the rise of “infidelity,” Dwight fell hard for the Illuminati theory, lending his considerable prestige to one of the most histrionic of the attacks, addressed to the people of New Haven during their 1798 Fourth of July celebration. Speaking on the “The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis,” Dwight called upon his fellow citizens to stand against these enemies, who embodied “the cruelty and rapacity of the Beast,” lest their sons become “the dragoons of Marat” and their “daughters the concubines of the Illuminati”. Morse and Dwight were in deadly earnest, but some Federalist politicians and publicists tried to exploit the Illuminati fears for political gain. One of Jefferson’s nastiest critics, newspaper editor William Cobbett, helped oversee the publication of Robison’s book in America, and Dwight’s politician brother Theodore gave speeches and wrote articles purporting to show that Jefferson was “the very child of modern illumination, the foe of man, and the enemy of his country”. Despite the large amounts of ink and breath that Federalists expended on it, the Illuminati scare largely fizzled out as a political phenomenon. The opposition press ridiculed the charges and even many Federalists were openly skeptical. What was worse, Jeffersonian Republican journals such as the Boston Independent Chronicle and the Philadelphia Aurora, and clever Republican orators such New Haven’s Abraham Bishop, worked fairly successfully to turn the charges around. If there was any real conspiracy to suborn the nation’s religious, cultural, and political institutions, it was the one being mounted by the “political priests” of New England, who hoped to suppress the religious and political freedoms that Americans enjoyed, and protect the privileges of New England’s tax-supported Congregational churches, by smearing their political opponents and leading a witch-hunt for Illuminati and other subversives. Ranging back through the region’s history to Puritan witch trials and blue laws, Democratic Republican critics depicted Federalist New England as a benighted place where a “union of church and state” labored to keep the people misinformed and docile. Timothy Dwight was labeled the “Pope” of New England, a cutting epithet in a country where the Catholic Church was widely and deeply disdained. Many of the articles and pamphlets were written from the viewpoint of New England clergymen or politicians who had been ostracized and sometimes forced from their positions for their liberal political opinions. The general tenor and strategy of the attacks are captured in the title of John C. Ogden’s pamphlet, A View of the New England Illuminati: Who are Indefatigably Engaged in Destroying the Religion and Government of the United States; under a Feigned Regard for Their Safety. Along with hundreds of newspaper articles by Ogden and others, Abraham Bishop’s widely reprinted speech and pamphlet on “the extent and power of political delusion,” emanating from Dwight’s own stomping grounds, proved highly popular and effective. Although hysterical attacks on the Republicans continued, the specific charge that they were part of an Illuminati conspiracy dropped out of Federalist use once Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801. Jefferson’s own allies kept up the countercharge for several more years as they tried unsuccessfully to gain power within the New England states. Occasionally they came close to building a conspiracy theory of their own, revolving around the alleged “union of church and state.” In 1802, Bishop published a kind of parody of Robison’s book, also titled Proofs of a Conspiracy, that documented the means by which New England’s Federalist elite clung to power and repressed dissent. Aftermath Although never mainstream again after 1800, the Robison-Barruel theory of the Illuminati as secret prime movers in world events has figured in the beliefs of many, if not most, major conservative conspiracy theorists since that time. Antisemites, Christian Identity, Nesta Webster, the <a href=" " target="_blank">John Birch Society</a>, and the far Right, whose warnings about the New World Order pervade the Internet—all find Robison’s material too good to pass up and assign a major role to the Illuminati as progenitors or allies of whatever group each particular writer fears. Religious reactionaries have been especially attracted to the Illuminati legend, which makes the forces of secularism seem so efficient, powerful, and dangerous. By the same token, but from the other end of the political spectrum, many Americans influenced by the 1960s counterculture have embraced belief in the Illuminati, sometimes tongue-in-cheek or only imaginatively, out of an attraction for the idea of a secret network of enlightened individuals who might be able to spread hidden knowledge and bring about sweeping cultural, social, and political change.

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Holocaust Denial

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="The" border="0" denial="" events="" greatest="" has="" height="320" history="" holocaust="" is="" nazi="" of="" one="" received="" scrutin="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzd1ltnWo16ECk6BcaXha8oEJJKvuiCPdky7O6qbj1iTJox6ZbbmvlCiV7rX1-H_IL8v_ZogpohGPVDWPtdqEp4Gp8dTHdcrq8nePuGioe_KkHe4uk26jSGlLzMLPmyOrxdpBiBzaDHjA/s320/Holocaust-Denial.jpg" that="" the="" title="Holocaust" width="219" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holocaust Denial</td></tr> </tbody></table> The Nazi Holocaust is one of the events of history that has received the greatest scrutiny. While historians disagree on different aspects of this phenomenon, it is basically agreed on that the Holocaust may be correctly defined as follows: <ol> <li>the Holocaust was the intentional murder of European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">World War II</a> as a matter of state policy;</li> <li>this mass murder employed gas chambers, among other methods, as a method of killing; and</li> <li>the death toll of European Jews by the end of World War II was roughly 6 million. </li> </ol> Not surprisingly, with a group of historical events as laboriously studied as the Holocaust, conspiracy theories about this period abound. However, the most prominent U.S. conspiracy theory regarding the Holocaust is its denial. Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term “Holocaust denial.” Holocaust deniers, or “revisionists,” as they call themselves, question all three major points of definition of the Nazi Holocaust. First, they contend that, while mass murders of Jews did occur (although they dispute both the intentionality of such murders as well as the supposed deservedness of these killings), there was no official Nazi policy to murder Jews. Second, and perhaps most prominently, they contend that there were no homicidal gas chambers, particularly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where mainstream historians believe over 1 million Jews were murdered, primarily in gas chambers. And third, Holocaust deniers contend that the death toll of European Jews during World War II was well below 6 million. Deniers float numbers anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million, as a general rule. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062659650/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=83a0a01993823d5d67234bfd7ef1bfc7" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0062659650&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" denial="" events="" greatest="" has="" height="1" history="" holocaust="" is="" nazi="" of="" one="" received="" scrutin="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0062659650" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" width="1" /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452272742/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=6cebf2a34069e787c6b6ded8be03a0b0" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0452272742&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" denial="" events="" greatest="" has="" height="1" history="" holocaust="" is="" nazi="" of="" one="" received="" scrutin="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0452272742" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> While Holocaust denial began as a German and French conspiracy theory, its antecedents are both specifically American and an encapsulation of 2,000 years of European antisemitism. Addressing the latter point first, the conspiracy theory that Jews have manipulated non-Jews in many ways, shapes, and forms is nearly as old as Judaism itself. According to antisemites, Jews (not just the ruling Jewish elite of the first century, but all Jews) killed Jesus, poisoned wells, spread the Black Death, murdered Christian children to make Passover matzohs with their blood, and were the prime movers behind the Communist movement in Eastern Europe. If a single text encapsulates European antisemitism, it is the anonymous <a href=" " target="_blank">Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion</a>, the purported minutes of a meeting of leaders of international Jewry in which the destruction of non-Jewish culture is discussed. Originating in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Protocols were, in fact, an altered plagiarism of Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel (A Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli), written in the 1860s as an attack against <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Louis Napoleon III</a> (Ridgeway, 50). Oddly, despite the present connections between some Holocaust deniers and violent extremists, it was via the anti-war movement of World War I that the seeds of Holocaust denial were planted in the United States. This process was twofold. First, the antisemitic U.S. industrialist Henry Ford brought the Protocols to the United States after a visit to Europe during World War I designed to promote a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Ford read them and became convinced that the “Jewish industrialists” were primarily responsible for the war. The introduction of this document to a nation where <a href=" " target="_blank">Ku Klux Klan</a> membership was on the rise added antisemitism to the current nativist, racist, anti-Catholic sentiment. <a href=" " target="_blank">Ford</a> published the Protocols in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, over a seven-year period between the two world wars, giving legitimacy to a conspiracy of a Jewish cabal that sought to propagate war as a moneymaking operation. At the same time, antiwar historians, notably Harry Elmer Barnes, began to suggest conspiratorial motivations on the part of the major powers at war. As historian Deborah Lipstadt has noted, Barnes and his colleagues were correct in many of their assumptions, for example, Germany was not solely at fault for the war (Serbia had, after all, fired the opening salvo); much anti-German propaganda spread during and after the war was, in fact, false; and there were war profiteers who made fortunes on the slaughter of the war. However, this did not change the essentially imperial nature of the war itself. Nevertheless, with the doubts of Barnes and his cohorts borne out through historical method, reports of German atrocities committed during World War II (this time true) would be treated with even greater skepticism. Barnes, who lived into the late 1960s, was among the first Americans to embrace Holocaust denial. Aside from the obvious denial of Nazi atrocities by the perpetrators themselves, the Frenchman Paul Rassinier, a leftist who had been interned at Buchenwald and Dora, first promoted Holocaust denial most vociferously. (Rassinier’s influence on the culture of Holocaust denial is still felt today, with his disciple Robert Faurisson leading the denial movement in France.) It did not take denial long to reach the United States, however. The first major Holocaust denier was Austin App, a Pennsylvania based literary scholar. Beginning almost immediately after the war, App began a media campaign to expose what he believed were exaggerations in the Nazi treatment of Jews. While his own German ethnicity was likely a prime attraction for him to denial, App’s own antisemitism and susceptibility to conspiracy theories informed much of his writing. For instance, App frequently used any combination of the terms “Talmudist,” “Bolshevik,” and “Zionist” in his writings as indicators that Jews were behind what he deemed a hoax that the Nazis had murdered 6 million Jews. In this way, he was able to imply that religious Jews, atheistic Communist Jews, and nationalist Jews were all conspiring together to spread belief in a mass murder against Jews. Furthermore, App blamed Jewish media control for the continued belief in this hoax, and this continues to be a theme in antisemitic and denial writings. If, as John <a href=" " target="_blank">Zimmerman</a> and other observers have noted, the aim of Holocaust denial is to rehabilitate National Socialism, then it is fitting that App et al. would reiterate most of Hitler’s own antisemitic themes in their writings. The title of App’s major work on the Holocaust, The Six Million Swindle, is informative because it implies on its very own the existence of a conspiracy of Jews to perpetrate a hoax against non-Jews for monetary gain. This monetary gain, specificically, would be reparations paid by West Germany for crimes committed against Jews during the war. What App and later deniers fail to address is a simple fact: reparations have been paid out since the 1950s based not on the number of deaths of Jews during World War II, but rather on the number of Jews who survived and whose costs of being settled elsewhere (primarily Israel) needed to be paid. Historian Michael Shermer has pointed out that, were the Holocaust truly a hoax designed by Zionists to gain cash for the fledgling state of Israel, then Zionists would have inflated the number of survivors and not the number of dead. Nevertheless, the Zionist angle of the conspiracy continued to be played by deniers and continues to this day. After App, U.S. Holocaust denial was carried on by Arthur Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University outside Chicago. In his 1976 book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Butz reiterates the notion that the Holocaust is a consciously perpetrated falsification of history. While Butz is more subtle than App in blaming Jews for this hoax (he does not attack the Jewish religion in the manner of App, nor does he depict all Jews as Communists), he does target Zionists specifically as the hoaxsters, along with the governments of the Allies (particularly the Soviet Union), refugee and survivor organizations, and even the International Committee of the Red Cross (Lipstadt, 126). What Butz and other deniers fail to realize is the relative weakness of the Zionist movement before, during, and even after World War II. Zionism was considered heretical by most Jewish religious movements, and those Jews that did settle in Palestine before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 were largely refugees with nowhere else to go, rather than political ideologues bent on creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Indeed, much recent research from Israel on the Holocaust has shown that some major figures in the Zionist movement cared very little about the dire situation of Jews in Europe during World War II. For instance, Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983, was jailed by Soviet authorities for Zionist activities until the Nazi invasion in 1941. However, rather than stay in Europe to fight the Nazis, Begin left for Palestine, where he waged guerrilla war for five years in the name of Zionism. Begin was not alone in his decision to fight for Zionism rather than the survival of European Jews. Notably, the antisemitism of most deniers leads them to denounce Begin’s choice while, at the same time, choosing to continue to believe that this fractious movement called Zionism could perpetrate a worldwide hoax. Nearly all major deniers, in fact, share a dual obsession with the Holocaust and with Zionism and the State of Israel. The chief purveyor of denier propaganda in the United States is the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), which sells not only Holocaust denial books and pamphlets but also critiques of Zionism and religious Judaism. Willis Carto, head of the Liberty Lobby, an anti-Israel political action group based in Washington, D.C., founded the IHR. While there has been much internecine fighting over the last two decades at the IHR over money, Carto’s views and those of the present directors (who include Mark Weber, a formerly overtly neo-Nazi propagandist) are not far from each other. In another twist, over the course of his battle with the current IHR leaders, Carto conspiratorially accused Weber of being a Zionist agent. Weber also bangs the drum of equating Jews with the Bolshevik Revolution, a practice begun by App among U.S. deniers but going back to the revolution itself among observers in both Europe and the United States. While Weber is able to seize on certain truths about the Bolshevik Party that can tie it, at least on the surface, to Jews (such as that many prominent Bolshevik leaders, including Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigori Zinoviev, were Jewish by birth), Zimmerman has pointed out that the average Russian Jew was more attracted to Jewish nationalist, Zionist, or democratic socialist parties than to Communist radicals such as the Bolsheviks. Weber also repeats App’s error of equating Zionism and communism. While there did exist Marxist-Zionist parties, particularly in the early days of the Israeli state, the backing of the Soviet Union for countries hostile to Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was a coup de grâce for any alliance between two ideologies that are, by nature, diametrically opposed (Zionism is a form of nationalism, while communism is international in its aims). It can thus be seen that Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory that seeks to place Jews behind an international movement to promote a falsehood for monetary gain. In this way, Holocaust denial is no different than many other previous forms of antisemitism, which imputed to Jews monetary greed as well as a conspiratorial air. Besides the haphazard manner in which deniers have chosen to lump all Jews together, regardless of religious or political orientation, as perpetrators of this “hoax,” deniers also engage in efforts at pseudoscience to try to prove their point of view regarding the Holocaust. To date, none of their efforts has made any lasting impression on Holocaust historiography. While the rational observer will conclude that this is a testament to the truth of the history of the Holocaust, for the Holocaust deniers, it is merely one more piece of evidence of a conspiracy to quash what they believe to be the “real truth” about the fate of Jews during World War II.

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Denial The Nazi Holocaust is one of the events of history that has received the greatest scrutiny. While historians disagree o...