To this day, some historians and philosophers tend to explain high-profile political crimes, revolutions and coups d'état by the will of the almighty Freemasons. The correspondent begins a series of publications about the most famous conspiracy concepts.
The Orange Revolution was not at all a social protest - it is the result of a confrontation between two secret societies of the Masonic persuasion. This is how the events of 2004 in Ukraine are interpreted not by political scientists or historians, but by specialists in so-called conspiracy theories. In a similar way, they are ready to explain events at almost all sharp turns of history, including coups and revolutions.
However, experts are in no hurry to consider conspiracy a political science fairy tale and send them gathering dust on the shelf of unscientific fiction. Conspiracy theories are the fruit of the collective unconscious, a modern "processing" of ancient archetypes, believes the famous Russian philosopher, professor at Moscow State University Alexander Dugin, author of the book, which is called Conspiracy Theory.
The correspondent begins the cycle of publications on conspiracy concepts with the classics of the genre - the Masonic conspiracy. This hobby, widespread in the middle of the 18th century among wealthy people in Europe and Russia, has absorbed the fundamental features of conspiratorial paradigms that are diverse in plots.
The main source of any theory, as a rule, is literary. Thus, the persecution of the Freemasons began with the Illustrated Memoirs of the History of Jacobism, written in 1792 by the French abbot Augustin Barruel.
Freemasons are by no means an innocent society of philanthropists - scientists and humanitarians, which it was considered to be in the 18th century, but a secret organization of anti-Christian and satanic orientation, Barruel argued. Their goal is the destruction of the Church and European monarchical powers. The conspiracy theorists blame them for the main catastrophes of European Christian history, in particular the French Revolution and all subsequent ones.
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With the appearance in the 19th century of the most colorful work in the genre of conspiracy theory - the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - the Jews "joined" the Freemasons. The protocols, recognized by many researchers as a forgery created by the Russian special services of that time, "legitimized" a subspecies of the Masonic conspiracy concept, aimed at overthrowing or, conversely, establishing various political regimes.
Conspiracy theories went and go hand in hand with geopolitical processes and reached their peak of influence on the course of history in the 20th century - during the period of Stalinist terror or Nazi expansion.
"Anti-Semites do not appear out of thin air," the famous American political scientist and historian Daniel Pipes formulates his thought criticized by opponents. "Alfred Rosenberg, the future ideologist of Nazism, turned into a professional anti-Semite by reading the Protocols."
Pipes compares conspiracy theories to pornography: both genres became popular in the 18th century and are spread out under the counter.
"Entertainment conspiracy theories excites intellectuals as much as recreational sex," sums up the publicist.
However, Dugin is not inclined to underestimate the level of significance of conspiracy theories. If in the 1960-1980s they were the lot of marginal eccentrics and tabloids, he recalls, in the 1990s they entered popular culture along with the famous American television series The X-Files, where intelligence agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate all sorts of conspiracies and incidents of invasion The land of aliens.
“If for centuries many people have been and continue to be confident in the existence of a network of conspirators who want to impose their plans on humanity, then the subject for study is already there,” says Dugin.
Order of the Revolution
According to conspiracy theories, the Freemasons originate from the Templars - a kind of political party that was created in the 12th century by knights and monks from noble families of France who participated in the first crusade and recaptured Jerusalem from Muslims in 1099.
Gradually, the Templars grew into something like a separate sovereign state, which possessed a powerful financial system and conducted on an equal footing with the kings of Europe. In the end, the Templars, as they were also called, became the main contenders in the struggle for power on the continent, and 200 years later, the French king Philip the Fair defeated the order under the pretext that heresy, blasphemy and sodomy flourished in it.
In the 17th century, the Templars were reborn as a Masonic society, whose Grand Masters claimed to be descended from the families of ancient knights.
Ukraine also has its own Templar heritage - in the form of the ruins of the Serednyansky castle, allegedly built by members of the order between Uzhgorod and Mukachevo. According to the official history, the knights founded the castle as a customs point through which, in particular, salt was supplied from the Carpathian lands to Europe.
But the Templars came to the territory of modern Ukraine not only for this, the conspiracy theorists add, but also to leave their treasures and relics here - for example, the Holy Grail.
Moreover, historians believe that the leaders of the Third Reich believed in this legend, in particular, a big fan of mythology Adolf Hitler, therefore, during the Second World War, the Germans fought especially zealously for Ukrainian castles.
Some researchers go even further, suggesting that the templars gave part of their knowledge to the Zaporozhye Cossacks. And at the turn of the 1990-2000s, the incredible happened: the Order of the Templars, already as a completely legitimate public organization, reappeared in Ukraine. Membership in it was once attributed even to Viktor Yushchenko, who later became the president of Ukraine, and his wife. However, they, like other Ukrainian politicians, allegedly involved in Freemasonry, never confirmed this information.
Opposing the Orange Templars, another Catholic order, St. Stanislaus, in turn, was represented by Leonid Kuchma when he was president of Ukraine, and his closest circle. Two of them - the Minister of Transport and Communications Georgy Kirpa and the Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yuriy Kravchenko - were killed in 2005 under unclear circumstances.
And although none of them confirmed their Freemasonry and there is no real evidence of the involvement of these politicians in the movement, rumors did not hesitate to provide food for a conspiracy thesis: their own comrades-in-arms in the order got rid of the politicians.
The brutal retribution for divulging secret knowledge or leaving the game - according to conspiracy theory, one of the fundamental principles of any secret organization, which remain unshakable for centuries.
At the same time, Pipes emphasizes the inattention of conspiracy theorists to the passage of time. Centuries and generations change, but everything remains the same.
"The most extreme example is the Templars, a militant Christian order that arose around 1119 and was destroyed in 1314: no one has seen a single Templar for almost seven centuries, but the mystery of this long-liver among secret societies is still alive," says the historian …
However, their "heirs" the Masons are indeed more alive than all the living, as is their motto Freedom, equality and fraternity, written in the constitution of the Grand Lodge of France, and later became the common slogan of all revolutions, starting with the French. It is not surprising, because its main leaders belonged to Freemasonry - Jean-Paul Marat, Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilian Robespierre.
"Masons are 30% of famous personalities whom we study from literature or history," recalls the Ukrainian historian Viktor Savchenko.
So, in the Masonic lodges were the rulers of the thoughts of the XVIII and XIX centuries - Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Gordon Byron, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Victor Hugo and Isaac Newton.
In the formation of Taras Shevchenko as a great poet and symbol of Ukraine, his release from the serfs, only Masons participated - the Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky and the artist Karl Bryullov, says Savchenko. This is not surprising: the entire intellectual elite of the Russian Empire are members of Masonic lodges, ranging from almost all Decembrists to outstanding writers, including Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Griboyedov. In addition, the revolutionary thinkers Mikhail Bakunin and Mikhail Speransky are called Masons.
Since there were many prominent statesmen among the Masons, some historians began to explain it by their secret activity that certain conflicts and even wars - in particular the Crimean War, the 1917 revolution, the assassination of Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, World War I, as well as perestroika and collapse THE USSR.
New faith
Freemasonry is the socio-political expression of Satanism, the Freemason is a murderer, a lecher, an atheist and a God-fighter. These are the typical postulates outlined in the first anti-Masonic books, explains Professor Dugin.
The book is the main source of knowledge of a conspiracy theorist, experts emphasize, and, for example, the media are inferior to it.
"Only books have the ability to transform a person's life, showing him the world in a fundamentally new light, and only books have the volume necessary to build an alternative picture of the world," explains Pipes.
Conspiracy theories differ from the usual plots of history in that it tries not to change. The creators of the Masonic theory lack imagination, as if something forces them to repeat old explanations and rely on the authority of their predecessors, Pipes believes.
"So, Barruel remains the most prominent authority on the Illuminati [secret societies of an occult-philosophical and mystical nature, often oppositional to political and church authorities, according to conspiracy theory, one of the predecessors of the Freemasons], just like [Vladimir] Lenin - on imperialism", - compares the American.
However, in his opinion, in this regard, one should not underestimate the role of the media. For example, the Nazis used cartoons to introduce conspiracy ideas, and later the USSR - television.
Ukrainian social psychologist and writer Oleg Pokalchuk connects the emergence and growing popularity of conspiracy theories with the development of information networks, which began with the creation of the printing press and literacy in the 1440s by German inventor Johann Gutenberg, and continues with the development of the Internet and IT.
“The faster and more we learn about the state of affairs, the more we need a kind of quasi-religion,” says Pokalchuk. "The interest in conspiracies is a consequence of the secular [liberated from religiosity] consciousness, in which the questions of why God allows evil or how many angels fit on the tip of a needle are replaced by others - who is behind all this, who benefits from it, why is it needed."
According to the psychologist, traditional churches are losing their influence, but religious thinking has been and remains a part of human consciousness, regardless of the state of confessions - as a result, sects, all kinds of religions and mystical movements (new age) or conspiracy theories appear.
“Breaking with traditional culture, the collective unconscious preserves everything that is rejected. And this abandoned thing returns to our reality in the form of well-sold secrets - conspiracies, witchcraft, psychic battles and the like,”says Mikhail Minakov, Ukrainian philosopher and political analyst.
By the way, the Freemasons, "standing" at the heart of many conspiracies, themselves had a hand in this desacralization. They became the vanguard of the Age of Enlightenment, catalysts for the transformation of a traditional religious society into a modern rationalistic one.
Freemasonry pretended to accept Christianity, only in order to destroy it, voices one of the theses of the conspiracy theorists Pipes. In their opinion, for the conspirators, all human values without exception are illusory, except for money and power.
The 300-year-old polemic of anti-Masons and defenders of Freemasonry with a series of exposures, forgeries and noisy campaigns in the press did not convince anyone of anything, Dugin is sure, because the paradigms in them do not change.
“The anti-Masonic thesis is remarkably stable,” the philosopher notes, “which testifies to its conformity to some actual psycho-political archetypes, which not only awaken similar intuitive fears in people who lived in different eras, but also, possibly, affect the Masonic world itself, revealing a real presence second bottom in this strange political and cultural movement."
Minakov calls belief in conspiracy theory a psychopathological diagnosis, but it always concerns both, the expert specifies, - the diagnosed and the diagnostician. Belief in the presence of at least some kind of organizing principle in this world is an important psychological compensation that, on a personal level, makes the life of a believer easier and more acceptable.
“Therefore, to condemn such a belief is the sin of a censurer,” concludes Minakov. - But if a conspiracy theory becomes the basis for collective action, then it is very difficult to predict its social destructiveness.