Ze Germans: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 98-102

 Before we even delve into chapter IV, we have to get something straight. When people like Webster (and anyone in the conspiracy world today) talk about “Socialism” they do not mean the philosophical stance about resource allocation. They are not referring to a classless society, or any of the positions of 19th century industrial revolution philosophers. They mean something much different: a strawman of the position usually written by people who have no interest in reading what actual Socialism means. Do not get me wrong, I’m not a Socialist evangelical, I’m not saying that if they read it, they would agree; my position is that if they read it, or even just skimmed a proper definition, they might still disagree, but they wouldn’t be wrong about it.

What Webster and her kind mean by Socialism is this: “To achieve the SOCIALIST dictatorship of the proletariat, three things would have to be accomplished: (1) The elimination of all right to private property; (2) The dissolution of the family unit; and (3) Destruction of what Marx referred to as the “opiate of the people,” religion.”

That definition is from “None Dare Call it Conspiracy,” a depressingly influential book. The definition twists socialism into a “plan” and uses the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” to scare the reader who only has a few snippets in their brain. Allen tries to scare the reader with the claim that Marx is going to destroy religion. While it’s true that Marx did claim that religion is the opiate of the masses that quip loses its meaning. Marx, an atheist, was not religious this is true. Yet his disdain for religion was that it was used to keep the poor working classes in their place out of a sense of religious duty to those in charge.

I begin with this explanation because the chapter is titled, “Growth of Socialism,” and it’s not going to go well.

“The ‘German Union,’ inaugurated immediately on the suppression of the Illuminati in Bavaria.”

Webster leans on Robison way too much, and Robison wasn’t the best of writers for things like this. She claims that the German Union was just the Illuminati in another name. Which, maybe some members were of both, but if we remember Robison, the German Union was a group that wanted to print, sell, and loan books at cheap prices to anyone speaking the German language. That was their great crime—bringing literacy.

The other two groups she mentions, the Tugenbund, was an anti-Napoleonic society which ended in 1809. The Burschenshaft was a group that wanted to help student life and increase patriotism in Germany in response to the French conquest. They would be disbanded by the Nazis; but the title is now genericized to mean any student group. Webster says the former were made up of the most violent elements of the Illuminati.

We must remember that Webster hates Germans. Since the latter group argued for a unified Germany, this is quite the sin in her eyes. They wanted all German speaking people to be unified under a common banner, so Webster has to oppose this. I’ll claim this right now: the only reason that Webster doesn’t become an English Nazi is because she hates Germans so much.

This hatred colors the rest of the next two pages. What gets sloppy though is her citations. Webster has had a messy relationship so far with a pattern of citations that can be best described as “arbitrary.” She cites pretty well when it comes to slandering her foes, but when it comes to facts she’s much less vigilant. The problem then becomes placing the citations. She’s got a long quote from the Marquis de Constanza about wanting only one or two people in charge of the entirety of the German speaking people. Fine, the citation is from the trial of the Illuminati which could have come no later than 1789. She follows this with another call for a German Republic from Anarchasis Cloots (a German who went to France to support the revolution and would later be guillotined as a foreign agent) made in 1792; prior to these she’s got an attack on Frederick the Great made in 1807. Somehow these three disparate positions are all related only by a thin thread of German unification.

The chapter began on page 98 (PDF) and by page 101 we have not even the word socialism aside from the title of the chapter.

Our next stop is Italy. Webster has a fascination with the two countries that are going to become most known for their fascist periods. Her opponent here is the Italian “Carbonari.” Like her German groups that were so evil, the Carbonari opposed the carving up of the Italian states desiring instead, like Machiavelli, a unified Italian people under a common banner.

The common theme of this book so far is that if any group opposes despotic rule and is in favor of democratic rule free from theocratic interference—Webster thinks it’s run by the evil Illuminati. The only government she’s been in favor of so far has been the French monarchy, and then France under Napolean.

I’m not an expert in either German or Italian unification—but I do know that opposing this has to have more justification than “I think the Illuminati were behind it.” Even if one believed that, I would like to know why this is bad. The Illuminati weren’t even calling for ownership of the Italian or German states. The very worst you get is that they wanted leaders who held their views. Views, which again, are about democratic rule.

Webster then takes a hard right turn by bringing up the penetration that the Jews have achieved in European Masonry. In the beginning of the book Webster mentioned that she wanted to divorce European Masonry from English Masonry; the latter being full of upstanding British people while the former have fallen to corruption. In this, she has tracked with Robison who did the same thing. Robison, in Proofs of a Conspiracy…, claimed that friends of his brought him to English lodges where everything was fine, but in Europe there was talk of revolution. Robison never gets anti-Semitic, his problem is the political talk in Europe. However, his shock is because he ignores the context. Britain doesn’t get the same revolutionary period that Europe does, and we should also remember that one of Robison’s complaints was “the kids these days” who joined the Masonic lodges and wouldn’t stop talking about current events. Webster is explicitly anti-Semitic; she’s danced around it for a bit but now we are going to dive right in.