Footnote: None Dare Call It...the footnote on page 30.

Footnotes are fun things. When I first discovered that you could just toss in a footnote into a paper, you could essentially pad out the paper while at the same time being able to say just about anything.* I got a little footnote happy in grad school, and by the second time I was in grad school, I was cognizant of how to use them properly. The point of a footnote is to supplement the body of the work. The reader can read them or skip them, and it shouldn't make a bit of difference to the actual work. However, they should enlighten the reader if they have an obvious question about what they just read. The footnote addresses those, or they address an obvious objection that can be dealt with quickly. Sometimes you can get the idea that the author just wants to talk about something else for a bit. This footnote is none of these things, but it sure is enlightening about the author's beliefs. 

I recently wrote in the May/June issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (I'd link the article, but it's behind a paywall) that the January 6th anti-democracy riot roots were sown decades ago by extremist conservatives who were fringe then but basically mainstream now. This book is only proving that assertion, and this footnote is the final nail in that conclusion. 

In context, we are discussing "SOCIALISM" and the weird definition that Allen has for "COMMUNISM." "Communism" has no relation to the real world "communism." In this book, it's a plot to overthrow the world governments and seize power by the uber-rich. These people have no link to Marx and think of it as merely a list of the techniques of the grand conspiracy. This is interesting because it shows that Allen has never read Marx. The Communist Manifesto is not a list of techniques but a description of the struggle of the working class during the Industrial Revolution. I'm not going to offer a defense of Marx and Engles here, but only that you can't really criticize the work unless you know it--and the manifesto is about thirty pages long. Allen probably knows this, and he's banking on the fact that his readers not only will not have read it, but they also will not read it. 

On to the footnote itself. It's the first footnote in the book, so if you are reading along, that's the only thing we're talking about this week. It makes several historical claims. 1) Marx was hired by a mysterious group called the "League of Just Men" to write the book as "boob-bait to appeal to the mob." This is half-true. Marx was approached by the League, but he initially rejected them because of various political differences. Eventually, he joined them, but then the League was folded into the Communist League with a few other groups. The Communist League initially distributed the Manifesto as their official position. 

The second claim is that the Manifesto existed for years before Marx attached his name to it. He needed better name recognition, according to this book. This is absurd. Why would Marx need fame to publish a book with a guaranteed circulation amongst the various socialist groups in Europe? You get fame from publishing, and as a Ph.D. in philosophy, Marx would jump at the chance to publish under his name. 

Claim three is the one that when I read it, I realized that this was all I was writing about this week, "All Karl Marx really did was to update and codify the very same revolutionary plans and principles set down seventy years earlier by Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Order of [the-sic] Illuminati in Bavaria." 

Yep, there we have it. It took thirty pages, where something like "Behold a Pale Horse" has it in the opening pages. Like David Icke, Allen buries this claim after you've been sucked in. It's deceitful, but it works, and it's a footnote--one of those things academics use, so it must be true. There's a lot of "nope" in this sentence so let's get to dissecting it. 

Allen is claiming that Marx didn't write the Manifesto; he only updated it. This is wrong. There's no evidence that Marx and Engles adapted the work from an earlier document. You couldn't even toss the Protocols in there because the Manifesto predates it. So the best you can do is claim that Marx's version is an updated version of an earlier draft that he and Engles worked on. 

Communism and the Illuminati link is pretty ubiquitous now, but the Illuminati is an obscure group in the 1960s and 70s. This book might be the first time that the two are linked in a document, which excites me a bit, but then depresses me. 

The Illuminati was an organization that sought to propagate secular-rationalist values in 1776 Bavaria. It is a product of the Enlightenment, and that's it. Essentially they were a skeptic society with all of the infighting and petty jealousies that we have today. They also borrowed some of the rituals of the Freemasons. Ultimately their criticism of the Catholic church and the intertwining of religion and politics was their undoing, and all secret societies were banned in Bavaria by order of the state. The Illuminati existed for about twelve years total, and now they appear in Pokemon cards, dollar bills, and triangles shaped by pop singers' cleavage. 

Mentioning the Illuminati is "boob-bait to appeal to the mob" in Allen's own words. They seem dark and mysterious, so, therefore, they are evil. The only publication issued by the Illuminati and written by Adam Weishaupt is a book called "Diogenes' Lamp," which suggested forming a group dedicated to helping the poor, the downtrodden, and that would promote equality. 

While the earlier pages of this book could be claimed as an extremist firebrand conservative (re: today's modern, moderate conservative) pushing the panic button during the cold war, this footnote is one of those before/after things. After this footnote, this book is full-on conspiracism that would only be out of place on Alex Jones because of its coherence. 

The footnote ends: "And, it is widely acknowledged by serious scholars of the subject that the League of Just Men was simply an extension of the Illuminati which was forced to go deep underground after it was exposed by a raid in 1786 conducted by the Bavarian authorities."

The end of that sentence is roughly correct. The first part? Well, I'm a serious scholar on this subject, and I have never heard of this link before. Not just in the academic literature but in the conspiracy literature as well. A quick search through Icke's "The Biggest Secret," Cooper's "Behold a Pale Horse," Springmeier's "Bloodlines of the Illuminati" comes up with one acknowledgment of the League of the Just. In Springmeier's work, they are "an Illuminati front run mainly by Jews who were Satanists." 

At the bottom of any kind of conspiracy theory like this, we're going to find anti-semitism. It's almost a guarantee (Cooper was expressly anti-antisemitic, but still published the Protocols in his work while claiming that it was really about the NWO and not the Jewish people). 

So now, moving forward, we know that this book is not about politics. Instead, it's a right-wing extremist screed against a shapeless enemy that exists to push some kind of agenda.  

*Well, not anything, but see how this footnote is working? I pretty much offer a counterpoint to the initial sentence and then go on a short digression. In a word or google docs document, it adds three spaces to the bottom of it. Which, is why I used them in college/grad school, but I use a word count as a professor.