Parallels: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 202-210

 This chapter was supposed to be about the Internationale, the socialist workers association; but instead, it’s just been Webster telling us about her weird historical crush on Mikhail Bakunin. We left about here, “Bakunin and his chief disciple Netchaieff started a society on precisely the lines of the Illuminati.”

I know it’s pedantic, but the phrase “along the lines” seems like someone is trying too hard to sound smart. I’m being petty, but she’s a fascist and it’s something that makes them very mad.

She explains, “The plan of such conspirators has always been to envelop one secret society in another on the system of a nest of Chinese boxes, the outer one large and visible, the inner ones dwindling down to the tiny, almost invisible cell that contains the secret.”

I’ve never heard of this system before. I get what she’s going for and perhaps it’s just my cultural ignorance—but Russian nesting dolls is the more common analogy and one with much more accessibility. Plus, you she would have gotten to tie in some Russian communism too. Her point is that “They” shroud everything in secrecy; this way no one really knows who is in charge. This is a good plan, but the problem for Webster is that she can’t keep it straight. Is the plan of the Internationale the result of the Illuminati, the Socialists, or the Jews? If it’s the Illuminati, then is that an arm of international Judaism or is it the whole thing? Webster has answered those two previous questions in contradiction.

She wants us to know that the Illuminati and Bakunin’s organization are so similar that if you place their aims side by side they would be “Seen to be identical.”

Alright let’s see how we do.

Weishaupt: “The order of the Illuminati abjured Christianity…In the lodges death was declared the eternal sleep; patriotism and loyalty were called narrow-minded prejudices incompatible with universal benevolence;”

Bakunin: “The Alliance professes Atheism. It aims at the abolition of religious services, the replacement of belief by knowledge and divine by human justice, the abolition of marriage as a political, religious, and civic arrangement…the final aim of this society was to ‘accelerate the universal revolution.”

Now if you are going to say that two groups are the same, you might want to find some similarities between them. These two quotations are side by side in the original text. They each represent the first sentences where there is a quasi-similarity. Weishaupt’s group is claimed to be non-Christian, where Bakunin’s group is atheist. While non-Christian and Atheist can overlap on a Venn diagram, there are lots of overlaps with all of the other religions which aren’t Christian. While I’ve read the actual document of Weishaupt, he’s not advocating other religions and that is where the similarity ends. Bakunin’s group is advocating for complete atheism since socialists view religion as a form of social control.

Both columns are kind of similar. The problem is that neither of the columns are written by the groups she’s comparing. The Weishaupt column repeatedly uses the word “they” to describe the actions of the Illuminati. This wouldn’t be the case if Weishaupt was writing it, he would use the word “we.” The Bakunin column is a bit more ambiguous, it could have been written by him or Nethchaiff but that last comment is making me doubt it. Even if it is a Bakunin writing we can’t use it to compare with something that is not Weishaupt’s. And like always, the most damning documents are not given a citation. We have no idea where these came from.

She writes that the similarities between the two cannot be coincidence: a) yes, they can, and b) she’s only provided two similarities. The religion thing and they have a problem with accumulation of wealth. However, it’s interesting that her Weishaupt passage talks about abolishing laws which protect the accumulation of wealth from “long continued and successful industry” since Weishaupt’s Illuminati would vanish before anything like the industrial revolution existed. Bakunin’s piece is about placing wealth in the hands of the laborers rather than the capitalists. The two could easily be coincidental for us to say that the one is the imitation of the other we need the words of Weishaupt and Bakunin to compare.

More Bakunin and then more accusations about how monstrous Bakunin and his people were. Which, we have to remind Webster, is the reason that no one like Bakunin. Marx grew tired of him, the anarchist groups he was a member of kicked him out, the Russians exiled him. Yeah, he was a bad guy, no arguments there. She talks of his monstrous theories and that advocates of the World Revolution—a term she still hasn’t defined—all believe in; she cites the “Revolutionary Catechism” an interesting document that provides guidelines to forming Socialist revolutionary groups in 19th century Russia.

This isn’t a document for happy people. The first guideline is, “The Revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachment, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.” Webster will likely use this to claim that “they” want to erase our names.

More Bakunin…she’s got a thing for him. Then we get to the rupture between Bakunin and Netchaieff. Here is something odd, the Revolutionary Catechism was written by a Russian named Sergey Nechayev. I wonder if this is the same person. Bakunin calls Netchaieff a dangerous fanatic who is single minded in his approach to the revolution. So much so, that he is willing to spy and steal from confederates in order to bind them to the cause. Reading the catechism, it could be the same person. The author of the Catechism was known to Bakunin, and I think the issue is just the difference in how the names are anglicized. Either way focusing on Netchaieff and Bakunin is just odd. Bakunin was too much of an albatross for Marx and Netchaieff was too much for Bakunin. All Webster is giving us is the drama from late 19th century Socialist/Anarchist groups.

Well, we haven’t had anti-Semitism in a few pages, so Webster reminds us of who we are dealing with. She delivers an excerpt from Gougenot des Mousseaux, who claims that he was entertaining a “Jew” who confessed that they were responsible for all of the revolutionary activities of the Enlightenment. About a half-dozen people are solely responsible for it all. I’m rolling my eyes at this confession because I’ve heard it so many times. It’s the president telling us that all the “top people” tell him something, or Alex Jones’s top sources (when it isn’t god), this is the unnamed whistle blower. According to Webster’s theory the Jews are in control of the Illuminati (well, in one version anyway) and maintain perfect secrecy until they are being entertained at a party by a virulent anti-Semitic journalist and then it is full confession time.

Again, I beg the readers of these books to pay attention to them—they always begin to unravel themselves. Webster is going to tell us that Jewish control of the press in Germany was total. So much so that Bakunin ran afoul of them when he tried to get a book published that was supposedly going to criticize them. Why would Bakunin, a tool of the Jewish conspiracy, try and attack the Jewish conspiracy? I think Webster forgot that her boyfriend was supposed to be an integral part of the whole thing.

The chapter wraps up with the end of the Internationale—because it collapsed when people began to decide that it would be easier to have more locally focused socialist branches. The entire chapter has been about this grand Illuminati/Jewish plot that fizzled out on its own. I would say that she’s wasted our time, but reading this critically has been more enlightening as to how terrible her conspiracy theory is organized.

A final note. She attributes the constitution of the internationale to reproducing the points of Weishaupt about abolishing the family, religion, heredity, nations, and property. She claims that this is mentioned by two authors who have seen the document and reproduced it in their works; but she admits that the original document cannot be located either in the British Museum or elsewhere. This means that she’s taking their word for it but she has doubts about the original’s existence. Yeah, Webster, me too.