Conspiracy theories play a central role in extremist politics of all type,
and antisemitism has a very strong traditional role within conspiracy theories,
and this is why repeatedly we see antisemitism cropping up in the language,
in the discourse, of extremist movements of all types - whether they are
far-right, far-left, radical Islamist movements, and even New Age movements,
we often find antisemitic conspiracy theories. There is a British think tank
called demos, which has done a lot of research on conspiracy theories, they
looked at the the literature and the arguments of a full range of extremist
movements, and they found antisemitic conspiracy theories cropping up in all
their literature. The idea of ZOG - the Zionist Occupation Government, that there
are Zionists or Jewish hidden powers behind our governments, was the most
common one they found in the literature of all different extremist movements,
and there's reasons for this. Antisemitism was the dominant type of conspiracy theory
in that conspiracy world, pretty much from the middle of the 19th century to
the middle of the 20th century, so any conspiracy theory that came out of that
period, or that harks back to that period from today, will inevitably bring
antisemitism into it, and this has been facilitated to a large extent by
the growth of social media on the Internet. If you wanted to come across
these antisemitic ideas 20 years ago you would have to go and actually find
an extremist movement, persuade them to let you into their meetings, and these
are not trusting people, get to read their magazines, which would not really look
like professional magazines or send off to their book lists, and then you'd start
to see these ideas. Ten years ago you could find them on the Internet on
extremist message boards, like Stormfront and other far-right groups, but again it
was people talking to like-minded people, it was far-right people gathering
together making networks and connections, but not really
reaching out of those boundaries. Nowadays with social media these
extremist ideas, these conspiracy theories, this antisemitism is on all of
our phones in all of our pockets in our children's bedrooms and it looks as
professional and as believable as something from the BBC or from CNN,
all you need is a Facebook page or a Twitter account or an Instagram account and there it is.
So these ideas spread and what we're
hearing from teachers in schools is that increasingly their students are bringing in
material that they found on the Internet, that they do not have the
critical powers to assess and to challenge and to debunk, and increasingly
teachers are having to argue against conspiracy theories in the classroom.
So this is a new problem, we hear a lot about fake news nowadays, people talk
about fake news and post-truth politics all the time.
Of course antisemitism is the original fake news. Antisemitism has always
relied on lies and libels and myths about Jews, that unscrupulous political
and religious leaders have used to mobilize their own supporters or to whip up a mob.
George Orwell, one of the great British political writers, wrote a famous
essay on antisemitism in 1945, where he wrote words to the effect of
one of the striking things about antisemitism is that you have to be able to believe
things that could not possibly be true. So conspiracy theories, antisemitism,
what is now being called fake news, they all live together in a world and it's
given a new lease of life to some quite nasty antisemitic ideas.
Holocaust denial for example has really failed as a political project, it's something that
neo-Nazis tried 20-25 years ago to use to revive National Socialism, no one
bought it, but in the conspiracy world where you're not supposed to believe any
official story about anything, you shouldn't believe anything that any
establishment authority tells you, Holocaust denial
has a home, and it has a home alongside conspiracy theories about 9/11 or about
the 7th of July tube bombings here in Britain or about the moon landings or
about, you know Princess Diana's death, and all these things just fit into
this mix together, and the old barriers between what is far-left and what is
far-right, what is fascist and what is anti-fascist, get completely blurred
and broken down, because you get the same conspiracy theories in all different
parts of the political spectrum, and as ever, as I said, when conspiracy theories
are the main way of understanding politics and of viewing the world,
antisemitism will always have, not just a place, but a central place.
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