Politics and the Art of Confusion: Perverse Strategies and Collective Paranoia

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, we have witnessed “conspiracy theories,” and their attendant extremist positions, spread throughout ever-wider fringes of public opinion.1 1  - Guillaume Dasquié and Jean Guisnel, L’effroyable mensonge, thèse et foutaises sur le 11 septembre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). Thierry Meyssan’s book 9/11: The Big Lie is no doubt the most striking example of this new wave of ­conspiracy theories. According to Meyssan, the September 11 attacks were not the work of the international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, but a coup d’État carried out by a secret group within the U.S. administration in an attempt to impose a hard line on President Bush. Proof of this conspiracy: it was not an airplane which struck the Pentagon but an American missile, as several details make clear, such as the size of the hole in the building’s exterior and the absence of debris on the lawn. This thesis spread on the Internet and then in the form of a book, which sold 300,000 copies in its French edition before being published in 27 languages around the world.

Conspiracy myths began to appear with the modern exercising of power. They are politics’ negative side, their shadow in a sense. The appearance of conspiracy thinking dates to the birth of a socio-political order which is no longer immutable and traditional but subject instead to the transformative activities of the human will. It took shape in ­counter-revolutionary circles soon after the French Revolution: in 1797, the Abbé Barruel interpreted those events as the product of a Masonic conspiracy.² 2 - Pierre-André Taguieff, Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion. Faux et usages d’un faux (Paris: Fayard, 1987). This rhetoric is still visible in today’s far-right wing: in this view, ­modernity is the result of a conspiracy and all groups who hold any sort of power, in reality or not, are liable to seeing others fantasize about their influence. These conspiracy theories are tied to history; even if new hidden powers appear (Jews, capitalists, Americans, etc.), the shape of the conspiratorial narrative remains essentially the same. This is the domain of extremists, whether from the right or the left. For several years now, various people who study such phenomena have drawn attention to this renewed ­fashion for conspiracy theories and alerted the public. The ­distress caused by globalization feeds conspiratorial interpretations: the proliferating anti-globalization (and anti-American) discourses, travelling back and forth between one extreme and the other, often take the form of conspiracy theories and are full of dangers for political thinking. This proliferation concerns those who work in the field, because conspiratorial ideas are loaded with violence: by accrediting a group with a powerful and ­disproportionately malign influence, they use a projection mechanism to justify passing to action. Far-right ideologies are typically conspiracy ­theories, with the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy being the best known because it was the model for Nazism.