Lee Mellor - Conspiracies Uncovered

Written by
Dr. Lee Mellor

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Who is really running things? What are they keeping from us? What do they want? Questions such as these, crucial to every conspiracy theory, all imply the secret existence of a them, lurking in the shadows, pulling strings behind the scenes...

Just because youre paranoid doesnt
mean they arent after you.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

T he Oxford English Dictionary describes a conspiracy as: A combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible (especially in relation to treason, sedition, or murder); a plot.

Implicit in this definition is the notion of a plurality of people. We often use the term them or they in casual speech, as if knowledge of whomever we are referring to is a giveneg, Well, they just want to keep us lazy and stupid, so well sit at home and consume while they slowly take over the world. Given that hidden hierarchies have governed mankind since the first agrarian civilizations, there is no reason to think that the average person voicing suspicions about an ill-defined hidden hierarchy operating clandestinelya themis a novel phenomenon. Marketing companies have even picked up on this predilection, bombarding us with slogans such as the weight loss secret they dont want you to know about, implying there is a group who are concealing information from the general public because it would hurt their bottom line.

Thus, the existence of a them is, by necessity, indispensable to any conspiracy theory. And, throughout the ages, there have been no shortage of thems to whom secret actions and sinister motives have been ascribed.

In the Western world, perhaps the oldest them has been Jews, or, the Jews (in them-speak). The tragic irony is that this belief has repeatedly led to systematic persecution and murderous pogroms perpetrated against the Jewish peoplea cycle one would think an allegedly powerful tribe could and would have prevented. Instead, European Jews were brought to the brink of extermination by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the 1941-45 Holocaust, in which approximately six millionor two thirds of the Jewish populationwere annihilated. Though this should lead any reasonable person to conclude that their near-extermination constitutes startling evidence to the contrary, conspiracies involving a hidden Jewish cabal manipulating events persist to this day.

The roots of anti-Semitism in the West date back at least to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as depicted in the New Testament. According to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus ran afoul of Jewish elders in the Temple who questioned his authority and divinity. The elders presented him to the Roman governor of Judea Pontius Pilate as a man claiming to be the King of the Jews. This act of treason resulted in Jesus crucifixion.

Roughly one hundred years later, when the Jewish people were banned from Jerusalem by their Roman conquerors, the Jewish Diaspora began. Dreaming of a return to their ancestral homeland, exiled Jews migrated to kingdoms all over the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Eurasia. As Christians were forbidden from lending money and pawn-broking by the Catholic Church, Jews were encouraged to fulfill these roles, and prospered accordingly. They were also renowned for their acumen in the field of medicine.

Both this diaspora and monopoly on usury were double-edged swords. On the positive side, they allowed Jews to capitalize on far-flung connections that existed along tribal lines. Jewish merchants, already extremely competent, leveraged these connections alongside pawn-broking and money-lending to thrive financially. Tragically, this helped lay the groundwork for the Jewish world domination conspiracy theories that emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries with terrifying results.

Though Jews and Christians always viewed one another with suspicion, in the Early Middle Ages, they worked side by side in an array of professions with relatively little animosity. During the 6th century CE, Pope Gregory I issued a Papal Bull instructing Christians to protect the Jewish people. Moreover, he also opposed the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity.

With the onset of the Crusades, European attitudes toward Jews took a turn for the worse. Wild rumors that Jews were ritually sacrificing Christians, especially infants, proliferated across the continent. Jewish knowledge of medicine became linked to magic and alchemy, and Jewish spells were blamed for everything from plagues to birth defects. Widespread outbursts of anti-Semitic slaughter followed. Jews were prohibited from joining numerous guilds, which allowed members to practice trades and crafts. This left few options outside pawnbroking and money lending (which was now increasingly incorporated into banking): professions many Jews had mastered. By the Renaissance era, Jews found themselves largely segregated in specific areas of major cities called ghettosoriginating from the Venetian word gheta for the slag biproduct of iron foundries.

By the Industrial Revolution, animosity toward Jews reached an unprecedented level thanks to a confluence of events. During the late-1700s and early-1800s, a Jewish family consistently implicated by conspiracists rose to prominence: the Rothschilds. Ironically, their success was largely modeled on the gentile Habsburg monarchs who dominated Europe at the time. Realizing that it was advantageous to keep money and secrets in the family, patriarch Mayer Bauer Rothschild encouraged each of his five sons to marry within their own bloodline, sending them to open de Rothschild Frres banks in several major European cities. Upon Mayers death, his first son, Anselm Rothschild, took over as head of the Frankfurt bank; second son Salomon had already established a bank in Vienna; third son Nathan in London; fourth son Calmann in Naples; and youngest son Jacob in Paris. Profiting from wise investments they had made during the Napoleonic Wars, the Rothschild dynasty accumulated the largest private family fortune in the world, and to this day, remains a financial powerhouse. The familys success, more than any other Jewish banker or money lender, fueled the vile and pernicious conspiracy theory that the Jewsoriginally the five Rothschilds, but more recently updated to eight who supposedly run the US Federal Reservehave complete or near-complete control of banking all over the world.

In 1905, a fraudulent document began circulating in Tsarist Russia purporting to outline an international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world: