Engagement: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 137-139

 There is never a dialogue in which people like Webster attempt to understand the people that they vilify. She has no recognition of the principles that she is fighting against beyond the stereotypes of them. This is why reading this chapter becomes so difficult. Webster name drops all of these proto-socialist thinkers, calls them tools of the Illuminati, but she never explains what the ideology that they are professing is doing to harm society. We are missing the point where she explains what is so dangerous about these movements. In cases where she does say so and so did a bad thing—it’s difficult to say that it was because they were proto-socialists rather that they were like Robespierre and were Tyrants using their ideologies as an excuse to draw more power to themselves.

Our enemy in today’s section is trade unionism. She calls this a “new and mysterious power,” which is an odd take considering the origin of the Freemasons was as originally as a trade union. The problem in Webster’s writing about this is that she is going to discuss the actions of distinct individuals as being representative of the whole of the trade unions; but then she’s going to say that there are honest tradesmen in these unions who “indeed came forward to deny complicity and in some cases offered a reward for the detection of the criminals.”

So…it’s not the trade unions it’s just criminal elements in the trade unions. That’s not a revelation that’s just civilization. I wouldn’t want to admit that the entirety of interwar British writers are a bunch of conspiracy theorists simply because one of them is, we call this a fallacy of generalization.

Webster then says that “the truth is clear that Illuminism, following its usual course of insinuating itself into every organization framed for the benefit of humanity…was using trade unionism, which had been designed to liberate the workers, for their complete enslavement.”

This is the “everyone I don’t like is Hitler” gambit. There really isn’t an Illuminati, but if she can find any evidence of bad actors within a group, that’s the evidence she’s going to provide. She takes some extra liberties with long block quotes which do not make the case she thinks they make.

This is because her argument is undone by her own hand. If she’s going to admit that there are elements of bad actors within the trade unions who may have committed murder, who operate like despots over fiefdoms, and who terrorize other members of the unions—she can’t then impugn the entirety of the trade unions as being tools of the Illuminati. She could say that these actors were being manipulated but she never does. In fact, it would be easy to say that the entirety of the fighting within the Trade Unions were honest workers fighting back against the Illuminati—but she can’t do that because she needs to characterize the entire movement as the villain here.

This reasoning is why people like her shouldn’t be taken as honest actors. She has no idea what a trade union is, what it’s for, and why its necessary—she just knows that lefties like trade unions and they’re bad.

The most mysterious sentence in this book so far is this: “So socialist leaders and working-men alike played the part of the helpless puppets pulled by wires from behind, held in the hands of their sinister directors.”

There are two things wrong in that quote.

The first is that she’s letting the socialist leaders off the hook in a chapter about how the spread of socialism is part of the Illuminati plot. Why did she spend so much ink on telling us how bad the leaders of the socialist movements were if they were merely victims in the plot all along? They’re supposed to be the baddies.

Secondly, if they are being manipulated, who is doing the manipulation? There are now too many layers between the real masterminds and the leaders she can identify. By the mid 19th century Weishaupt and the actual members of the Illuminati will have all died, she can’t blame them anymore. There is no one she can point at as heir apparent because the only person, in France, that can claim power is Napolean whom she says was the great enemy of the Illuminati and champion of liberty.

All of the bad people she’s been telling us are villains have just been unwitting puppets. That still requires her to engage with them directly. She should be talking or citing from union writers or pamphlets that discuss the elusive force directing them against their own goals. It’s curious that the Socialist leaders, who have written so much about their own goals and movements fail to describe the unwanted violence and evil within their own groups.

Webster is carefully avoiding making claims that can be checked on. If you ask the Trade Unionists, they’ll say, ‘oh him? yeah, he was murderer we turned him in…” completely nullifying the position that they were in on the conspiracy. Any hard fact has to be avoided, any communication with members of her enemy has to be avoided, because this is all about stoking fear and not about addressing a real problem.