An Argument. The Plot Against Civilization pp. 259—262

Engaging with ideas is beyond the capabilities of conspiracy theorists, that’s why they are conspiracy theorists. They’ll give lip service to wanting engagement but in the end they just have their misdirection, ad hominem, and non-sequiturs. This weeks’ section is all three.

Anyway Socialism/Anarchism is bad, so are Socialists/Anarchists. We have been reading a chapter that is supposed to be about the development of Socialist/Anarchist movements throughout the 19^th century but she really hasn’t delivered. What we have gotten are a list of petty squabbles, some gossip, and a list of bad things that her alleged enemies have done. She doesn’t address the arguments of these movements. It’s easier to raise the ire of people by discussing how they killed the Tsar of Russia.

The course of Socialism should take us to America, and it does for two sentences when she mentions that American Anarchists led by Johann Most “gave evidence of their presence by a dynamite explosion in the Haymarket of Chicago.”

She’s making a reference to infamous event where American labor gathered in Chicago to demand workers’ rights ran into Chicago law enforcement. The laborer were making a demand for an eight hour work day and like all labor movements in the history of the United States, government forces were called in to quell the demand. Johann Most was not there.

There’s a strained connection that she keeps trying to make between Socialist and the Illuminati; this time she is trying to link International Worker’s Day (May 1^st) with the original founding of the Perfectibilists (also May 1^st) by Weishaupt and four other people. Which, yes these two things happened on the same date, but that doesn’t mean we have a link. We have, at best, a coincidence.

Speaking of coincidences, we get the most tenuous of links here when Webster tells us that on May 1^st of 1891 the “periode tragique,” led by Ravachol begins. Who is Ravachol? Don’t know, she doesn’t tell us, only that his gang initiated a three-year terror campaign in France. She is the only one who calls it the Periode Tragique, I can find no other reference to this as a period. Ravachol, aka Francois Claudius Ravachol. Ravachol was a criminal, that cannot be denied. He murders a hermit in 1891 and commits a series of thefts, attacks, and bombings. Webster is writing about Ravachol the myth, rather than Ravachol the man. He reminds me of the type of criminal like John Dillinger or Bonne and Clyde—career criminals who would burn mortgage agreements and debt bonds when they robbed banks. Ravachol attacked police and judges who prosecuted anarchists and socialists but he never killed anyone with his bombings. Obviously tossing bombs around is a terrible thing to inflict on a population, but it’s an important fact that his only murder was an elderly hermit. The French Press turned him into a Robin Hood like figure. Webster, playing on the myth, links him to a larger movement, “Later on followed the attacks on crowned heads – the murder of the Empress of Austria in 1898, of King Humbert of Italy in 1900, of King Carlos and the Crown Prince of Portugal in 1908, of the King of Greece in 1914.”

Her list should omit the assassination of King Carlos as that was not conducted by Anarchists or Socialists—and all of these assassinations were people acting alone. Ravachol is long dead having been guillotined in 1892.

Webster then does something shocking; she attempts to address the actual cause. She cites a Professor Hunter (Robert Hunter) who wrote in “Violence and the Labor Movement” that society should begin addressing the cultural pressures that drove the perpetrators to such violent deeds. The path she gets there is weird as she again refrains from quoting the primary source, instead she claims that he is using Emma Goldman’s position about desperation and hopelessness creating the conditions for the people to become criminals. This is accurate, Hunter does make this reference in his book, but then she should be referencing Goldman not Hunter.

So, we have an argument, like an actual debate. This is good, and something that we should have been engaged with the entire time. Webster has always wanted to have it both ways—blaming the Illuminati for oppressing the common person than blaming the Illuminati for the response. Here she’s introduced a wall to run into—an academic claiming that the Labor movements actions are in response to the conditions impressed upon them by someone else. The protests, riots, bombings, and assassinations are not the result of a grand plan but chosen because of desperation.

Webster tackles this problem by simply denying people like Ravachol any agency. We get two standard conspiracy theorist arguments. The first is to claim that the perpetrators of the attacks are mentally damaged, purposefully chosen them: “The art of the secret societies has always been to seek out physical and mental degenerates and work upon their minds until they have roused them to the requisite degree of revolutionary fervor.” Alex Jones uses this kind of argument whenever we find out that some mass shooter or terrorist is a right-wing extremist.

The second argument is that the perpetrators aren’t really the problem, it’s the people like Professor Hunter: “hardly less guilty are the sane and responsible Socialists like Professor Hunter who, by their glorification of crime, impel other weak minds to follow the same course.”

We should pay attention that she did not accuse Hunter of glorifying crime. That doesn’t appear in what she has said, nor does it appear in his work. He merely attempts to explain the motivations of the people who commit them. Webster wants the illusion of having a debate but she lacks the will (and probably the ability) to actually handle such a debate. It’s a sociological debate that we have been having for decades now, but the answer has always been to punish the criminal and sometimes address the culture around them. She can’t deal with what they are saying because that would be to admit that not everyone wants the world that she wants.

The rest of the chapter is an attempt to claim that Marx and his ideas were unpopular by the end of his life. It’s a foolish claim to make because if it were true then Webster wouldn’t need to write this book.