The Winner (?)

 The winner isn’t us, but the book we are going to read through next is Nesta Webster’s The Plot Against Civilization. The exact version that we are going to be reading is here at the Internet Archive.

Nesta Webster is interesting for a few reasons. The first is that she is the person who is most solely responsible for reviving the Illuminati conspiracy theories. I ask my course every semester: why does anyone in the contemporary age know anything about an 18th century club for skeptical nerds? The reason is Nesta Webster. If not for her, the very memory of the Illuminati would have faded with John Robison and Augustin Baurrell’s books. She brought it back, linked it to her anti-Semitic beliefs, and then it just never died.

Secondly, Nesta Webster is a woman (Feminism!). In all seriousness I think it’s important that we understand how rare this is. In recent times women have been sucked more into proper conspiracism, it was women that drove the anti-vaccination wave of 2008, but aside from Kari Lake and Laura Loomer there haven’t been any real women conspiracy theorists that stand as a pillar in the conspiracy theory movements. I think this is because they’ve all forgotten about Nesta Webster.

This book follows Webster’s “The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy,” which lays the blame/credit for the French Revolution on Continental Freemasonry. This is the exact type of Masonry that Robison wrote about, and indeed, the very lodges. Webster seems to be in support of the Revolution but wants to claim that the “Terror” and subsequent revolutionary government were all the results of machinations by the Masons. She’s going to make some references to this book in the one that we are going to start.

This book was published in 1921. The Great War is three years old and Europe is not going to recover from it until after WWII. The problem is economic which means the problem is banks, and Webster’s anti-Semitism is going to lead us down a path as familiar to conspiracy theories going back to the Middle Ages.

Webster also has a standard 1920s style British racism, that everyone else is of lesser pedigree with Europe and the United States being close, but not on the level. Once we get outside of the Caucasian races her views are going to nosedive into the racism that we recognize today. What’ll be interesting for us, is how she views the Russians as a people. A great focus of hers is, historically, Communism—but that’s an idea not an ethnic group.

For this week, I’ll briefly cover the Author’s Note and the Foreword.

The Author’s Note is odd. As I mentioned, the previous book concerned the French Revolution, but Webster isn’t a historian. She’s college educated, and by all accounts is a skilled writer. Her Author’s note is defensive. She notes the criticisms of her book with two defenses. The first is that she claims she never meant it to be the definitive work on the Revolution but rather the first which brings up her perspective (that the Illluminati were behind it), so calling it inaccurate is silly. The second defense is that no one is bringing up the specific parts where she’s wrong, so therefore she’s not wrong. She also points out the Socialist press is silent on her work, which she takes as confirmation of her story instead of the more obvious—the Socialist press just didn’t review it. The complaint reminds of times when Flat Earth conspiracy theorists wanted to know why people like Neil Degrasse Tyson wouldn’t appear on their podcasts, it’s not that astronomers are afraid it’s just that there’s nothing to gain from doing so.

The second thing she defends is accusations that she is anti-Masonic. Her defense here is that she only blames Continental Masonry; English Masons are fine, upstanding people, with a stories and honorable club. I mentioned this above, it’s the same claim that Robison made. The lodges he went to when invited by his friends were great, then he went to France and Germania.

The Foreword is her attempt to link the current book with her book on the French Revolution. She observes that revolution is “not the product of war, but a malady that a nation suffering from the after-effects of war is most likely to develop.” That’s a rather interesting observation to which I don’t know how true it is. The Russian revolution which finally toppled the Tsar wasn’t the product of WWI, but WWI did hasten an already decrepit state. Then again, the Japanese-Russian war which the Russians lost just prior to WWI didn’t help. Neither did the series of revolutionary upheavals…she may be right generally, but her point is that the French Revolution wasn’t caused by a war. In fact, the entire world of the 1920s is undergoing a universal revolution that doesn’t seem to have a cause at all but is everywhere.

Webster’s problem is that her world is changing. It has been changing, as she writes that the last 145 years have been full of change without the customary upheavals that usually presage those changes. It cannot be that as general populations become more literate, more educated, and more aware; they are beginning to demand more for themselves. There has to be some other cause. This book is going to tell us that cause.

We’ll begin reading the book next week