Turbulent times tend to produce turbulent voices—some of them insidiously persuasive. In particular, such times offer a fertile breeding ground for peddlers of conspiracy theories. Adducing supposedly definitive evidence of hidden hands, secret cabals, and sinister machinations, they feed the suspicion that unseen forces operating in the background of events are acting to undermine settled arrangements, pervert sane policy, scramble and transform political reality in order to promote their own diabolical aims—if not, indeed, to achieve total domination.
Easy to dismiss as the ravings of paranoid crackpots, such theories have, in some places at some times, infected the minds of both elites and multitudes of ordinary people at every level of society. Perhaps the most notorious textbook case is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a pamphlet that, appearing early in the 20th century and summoning “proof” of a monstrous Jewish conspiracy to enslave all of humanity, would become one of the most famous and important political documents in world history.
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