‘A Book for Our Own Troubled Times’
A historic look at how conspiracies poison democracy, as detailed in Richard J. Evans book, “The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination”
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It’s okay to admit we got it wrong. We weren’t prepared for the Great Propaganda Wars.
How could we be? We who were raised in democratic nations relied on a shared narrative of truth. We relied on academic and scientific expertise. We put our trust in higher learning, and those who deviated from a fact-based world — the snake oil salesmen, who exploited fear and ignorance — well, there were repercussions for these criminal exploiters. Our fact-based world had punitive laws for the exploiters.
A fraud is a fraud is a fraud. No matter how fancy they dressed themselves up, underneath whatever they were delivering with a bible in one hand and a flag in the other, you’d generally find a criminal trying to avoid prosecution.
Our democracy in the US was always imperfect, yes, but we made improvements along the way and always, we had the possibility in front of us to do more and do better.
But a decade ago, when the Great Propaganda Wars bled onto the shores of America, we had no inoculation. We still don’t. My colleagues and I pleaded with former President Joe Biden to inform Americans that we were a target nation of information warfare and encouraged him to create modern departments to pushback.
Countries whose leaders acknowledge the attacks can inoculate their citizens against them — an informed citizenry can defend their nations from outside interference. Just look at Moldova.
In the US, we literally allowed — allow — hostile foreign powers direct access to our minds.
In 2016, when the leader of the US — installed with the help of these new warfighting techniques — began using propaganda against our minds full-time, it was weird and confusing.
Journalists were never meant to be front-line soldiers fighting the Russian war machine. We were supposed to have military departments set up to fight back, as we did in previous wars. But because the West was too timid to call it war, we were left alone to fend for ourselves, while all around us there were bodies fallen on the virtual battlefield, minds poisoned with narrative warfare — loved ones who no longer made sense to us.
So what happened?
We were attacked from within and without, and the attacks are ongoing.
Age-old techniques to mind control a population were detonated on us, and those delivering the attacks cynically know what they are doing.
There is a reason the Trump regime is trying to co-opt the word fascist, because they are using fascist conspiracies to demoralize and destroy our will to fight back, and they are in the process of succeeding.
I have written many articles on how this works, including this one, which explains how racist conspiracy is a weapon to seize power:
And here I wrote about how moral panic is weaponized in power grabs:
It seems so strange to normal people why Trump and Vance in the 2024 campaign would rant about immigrants eating pets, or currently in the UK, Nigel Farage is lying about immigrants eating the royal swans, but conspiracies are fanned to kill democracies. That’s how it works.
We keep treating them as aberrations, but they are lethal. They are designed to commit menticide, which can then lead to genocide.
The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination
Cambridge professor Richard J. Evans book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, is an exhaustive and important review of how conspiracies are weaponized.
Evans, a history professor who has written five books on the Third Reich, probes specific conspiracies — painstakingly separating fact from fiction. In so doing, he reveals how conspiracies when left unchallenged, then become as important as scientific fact, which then leads to the decline of Western civilization as we know it.
With forensic scrutiny, he investigates and debunks five Nazi-related conspiracy theories:
The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery describing a Jewish plot for world domination. Evans shows how high-ranking Nazis knew it was a forgery but exploited it for their own genocidal ends
The “stab-in-the-back” myth that claimed Germany lost World War I because it was betrayed by internal forces, giving the Nazis cover to put the blame primarily on socialists and Jews
The theory that the Reichstag Fire in 1933 was created by the Nazis, rather than one arsonist
The conspiracy that Rudolf Hess’s 1941 ‘peace deal’ flight to Scotland was instigated by Hitler, instead of Hess’ own desperate plan
The myth that Hitler escaped from his Berlin bunker and lived out his life in South America
While I appreciate Evans diligence, it sickened me to read these pages and the footnotes linked to historic archives. Within weaponized conspiracies you will find evil and cruelty, greed and charlatans, nihilism and amorality, offering utility for authoritarians to exploit and bend to their ends. Conspiracy enters one’s system upon review, and then has to be flushed out repeatedly with facts and scholarship and evidence.
Powered by the rise of the internet and anti-social media, and “enabled by the declining influence of traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper editors and book publishers,” writes Evans, conspiracy theories grow more popular, “encapsulated in the perverse concept of ‘alternative facts.’”
What his book reveals is that those in power perpetuating the lies do know fact from fiction, they just don’t want you to.
And if they have to use the occult, Nazi UFOs, Holocaust denialism, a global conspiracy of Jewish elites, and all things ‘weird Hitler’ to do it, they will. There is no bottom, just knocking from below.
Core tenets: always undermine academic, historic, and scientific expertise for pseudo-science; always undermine ‘the official’ version of events — only the conspiracy theorists “alone are privy to the truth.”
“Only I alone can fix it.”
“In Nazi Germany, the vast state-run propaganda apparatus controlled by Joseph Goebbels pumped out huge quantities of ‘fake news’ — or in other words, lies — and Hitler consistently tried to mislead people both inside and outside Germany about his real purposes, assuring Britain, France, and other European countries of his peaceful intentions even as he rearmed and carried out acts of international aggression.”—Richard J. Evans, “The Hitler Conspiracies”
How can we not read into that paragraph Putin and Trump’s true intentions when they talk of ‘peace?’
‘A Book for Our Own Troubled Times’
Evans describes this work as ‘a book for our own troubled times,’ and that is why I plowed through it.
History so near you can touch it.
Forged texts become a ‘warrant for genocide’ — subversive conspiracy to undermine the social and political order dating back to the ‘wake of the French Revolution.’ Blaming the Enlightenment, secret societies, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons, whoever. ‘Gothic flummery’ came later. But always, a Jewish world conspiracy, ‘inspired by Satan,’ that was a standard weapon that continued through centuries. So in 1902, when the Russians forge the ‘Protocols’ — chaotic and slapdash — it doesn’t matter that it’s debunked as ‘vulgar libel’ which ‘sows in confused and immature minds the urge to murder’ — the conspiracy has utility. Henry Ford embraces its anti-semitism, publishes a bound copy in 1920. A German translation makes its way to Goebbels in 1924. By then, Hitler is already using it in his speeches. It’s a forgery. The Nazis knew this.
Goebbels wrote in his diary:
“I believe The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is forgery… I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.”
Nazi propaganda leaders knew The Protocols “was not what it purported to be. But that did not seem to trouble them too much,” writes Evans.
By the time Henry Ford withdraws his support for the claims of authenticity, it’s too late. By then, Goebbels — “that raging dwarf” as journalist Bella Fromm dubbed him — was calling Jewish people words that I will not reprint here. Words that led to genocide.
Forgery becomes bible — a testament to a “higher truth” for those who want to place their hatred on the “other.”
“In the end, what mattered was the Protocols existed.”
“A fundamental reason for the failure of the First World War to bring peace and stability to Europe and the wider world lay in the Germans’ refusal to accept the fact that they had lost.”—Richard J. Evans
And so the “stab in the back” theory proved invaluable. The Nazi regime could use it to “stigmatize anyone,” a way to blame their political enemies — both real and imagined — while simultaneously ginning up hatred against them.
The Reichstag Fire in 1933, although evidenced to be the work of one man, was used by Nazi leaders to seize complete control of the government. They ordered mass arrests of Communists.
“The Nazis’ violent seizure of power was under way.”
Evans writes: “The Enabling Act, passed by the Reichstag under massive Nazi intimidation and in the absence of Communist deputies on 23 March 1933, assigned legislative power to Hitler and his ministers, thus bypassing the President and the Reichstag. By the summer of 1933, all opposition had been crushed.”
200,000 Nazi opponents “had passed through the brutal regime’s concentration camps,” all independent political parties dissolved, and “Hitler’s dictatorial regime had been firmly established.”
The other two conspiracies that Evans investigates — Rudolf Hess’ flight to Scotland in 1941 and Hitler’s escape from the bunker — cement how “conspiracism” dismisses professional scholarship.
Hitler’s escape is part of a “flourishing Hitler survival industry.”
One conspiracist, who writes Nazi UFOs’ horseshit, confessed:
“I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained.”
He absolved himself of pesky facts, he said, by putting a question mark at the end of his UFOs: Nazis Secret Weapons? title.
As Evans explains, one thing all conspiracists have in common is contempt for what they call “official knowledge.”
So instead of believing in professional scholarship, they’ve got “occultists, UFOs, birthers, truthers, JFK and 9/11 conspiracies, antisemites, Holocaust deniers, and neo-Nazi” communities to keep them warm at night.
Through conspiracy, they can control their own reality and not have to deal with such complexities as intractable truth.
“Conspiracy theories pollute the well of knowledge.”
As writer Roger Clark noted about Hitler’s survival myth:
“Conspiracy theorists pollute the wells of knowledge - exploiting and patronising the poorly educated and intensifying their ignorance. They encourage people to disbelieve works of scholarship and drag down the reputations of legitimate historians... If we damage the credibility of properly researched books and films then we substitue myths for reality. If serious historians are wrong about Hitler’s death - and he really did survive for years after 1945 - then perhaps they're wrong about everything else, including the Holocaust. It’s disturbing to see how many Hitler survivalists are also antisemitic and Holocaust deniers. Bogus history does harm. It offends war veterans and millions of victims of the Nazis. To suggest Hitler retired to some hideaway with the connivance of the western allies is insulting. It trivialises and negates the hard-won victory over the Nazis. It depicts Hitler and his henchmen as shrewd and skilful supermen outwitting their enemies. The Fuehrer, we are led to believe, was never defeated.”
And so, each time Putin or Trump or Vance or Farage or any of their amoral mouthpieces substitute myth for reality, they do so knowingly, in order to continue bleeding out any chance for democracy.
A century ago, Russians forged a document that is still used to bleed out decency and empathy today.
A decade ago, Russians committed war on my country, resulting in its pending death.
They do so knowingly, aided and abetted by traitors within.
Is it now time to fight fire with fire?
“Putin steals babies.”
“Trump is a rapist.”
Oh wait, those aren’t conspiracies.
Those are facts.
We need them if we’re gonna survive.
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The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination by Richard J Evans (Allen Lane).
About the book’s author:
Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2010 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.
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I've read every one of Evans's books. I've read Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. I rear The Destruction of the European Jews. I read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I read Who Voted for Hitler. I read They Thought They Were Free. As I read these books I knew that I'd already learned what facts they contained yet I couldn't stop reading until the books ended, not because I thought there was one more thing in any of them that would logically explain why it all happened. But there is no sane logic to any of it. Hate and evil are the mirror of love and goodness and they will never be erased from human life because we're human. What I realized is that I was looking for an answer that doesn't exist