Five Books on Conspiracy Theories

You’ve studied and written a great deal about conspiracy theories, perhaps the hottest of hot topics, and the five books you say one should read to understand this are narrative history books, case studies, as opposed to theoretical or sociological surveys of conspiratorial thinking. Why?

Firstly, just as a matter of personal preference, I like books that tell a story and all of the books I’ve chosen tell a story about a particular piece of history, and they also tell the story of how conspiracy theories have distorted the truth about these cases. So I think rather than read books which talk about conspiracy theory in the abstract, it’s better to read these case histories that zero in on one particular case. They tell you a very interesting narrative about these remarkable events that really happened in history. But at the same time, they’re also acting as a corrective to the conspiracy theories that have sprung up about these cases.

One is the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in the news again because of the release of additional government files. There must be thousands of books on JFK’s assassination. Why this particular book?

If you’re going to get to grips with conspiracy theory in general, the assassination of Kennedy is the Big Daddy of American conspiracy theories. More than 50% of the American population have always believed that there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s murder. So this is a case where conspiracy theory has really gone mainstream. And if you look at a lot of subsequent conspiracy theories, they really borrow from the techniques that the Kennedy conspiracy theorists used to keep their myths alive. If you can understand how conspiracy theorists have distorted history about the JFK case, you can apply the lessons that you learn to other more contemporary conspiracy theories. The book that I’ve chosen is Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, which is a monumental book. It’s about 1600 pages long, and it comes with a CD-ROM that contains about a thousand additional pages of endnotes. (A shorter book called Four Days in November, about 600 pages long, is essentially the first section of Bugliosi’s book, which tells you in meticulous detail what happened minute by minute on those four days in November, starting on the day of Kennedy’s assassination and finishing on the day after the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.)

It’s by far the most comprehensive book that’s been written on the Kennedy assassination. And it’s one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read on any subject. So if I was to recommend just one book to people to read about the Kennedy assassination, Bugliosi’s book is the one to read because, in a sense, it contains all the other books and answers the questions many of those books have raised. The other thing I like about Bugliosi’s book is it’s divided into two sections. The first is called Matters of Fact, What Really Happened? And the second is called Delusions of Conspiracy, What Didn’t Happen? Bugliosi, for the first half of his book, meticulously tells us the story of what did happen in Dallas, and he tells us how we know what happened. One of the things I find remarkable about the Kennedy assassination is people will say even today that we still don’t know what happened in Dallas. Bugliosi demonstrates that we do know what happened. It’s lavishly documented. And if you want to know what happened, you can read a book like Bugliosi’s and it will tell you almost down to the second what the movements of all the principal people were on the day of Kennedy’s assassination and then in the days following it. And then in the second section, Delusions of Conspiracy, What Didn’t Happen, he takes on all of the conspiracy theories that have been raised about the assassination – some of them quite plausible and deserving of attention – and he does give them thorough attention. Others are quite preposterous as he points out. So with almost any objection that you’ve heard raised by a conspiracy theorist about this case, if you go to Bugliosi’s book, somewhere in the text, Bugliosi addresses all of those conspiratorial complaints and questions and theories, and he demonstrates that there’s simply no grounds for believing in a conspiracy on that basis.

Don DeLillo in his book Libra referred to the endless amount of conspiracy conjecture as the “data spew.” He called it “an incredible haul of human utterance.” Is there something to be said there about the way conspiracy theories work?

There is. People say about the Kennedy case, there’s no smoke without fire. And there certainly has been a tremendous amount of smoke about this case. DeLillo picked up on that and his book, Libra, is a great work of fiction. But I think that in the case of conspiracy theory, there is such a thing as smoke without fire. And that’s what the conspiracy theories about this case have been. They are smoke without fire. They’ve been going on for 60 years and conspiracy theorists have never managed to construct an alternative explanation of what happened in Dallas. They’ve never come up with a conspiracy theory that stands up to scrutiny. But what they have done is created this smoke without fire that’s confused people and left the public with the impression that there’s no way people would have carried on with these conspiracy theories for 60 years unless there was something genuinely fishy about the Kennedy assassination.

“The assassination of Kennedy is the Big Daddy of American conspiracy theories”

We should recognise that it was legitimate at first to have doubts about what had happened because Oswald was shot in police custody by Jack Ruby, within 48 hours of his assassination of Kennedy. It was very legitimate for the American public to be concerned about how on earth the president’s assassin had been allowed to be murdered in custody by this guy who appeared to be a fairly shady, perhaps mob-connected character, Jack Ruby. It was rational for people to suspect that there may have been a conspiracy. And what Bugliosi demonstrates is that the rational suspicion that there had been a conspiracy was gradually corrected. People began to find out through investigation why Ruby had murdered Oswald and all of the conspiratorial suspicions about Ruby being a mob hitman eventually evaporated. Where conspiracy theory broke away from rational inquiry was that the conspiracy theorists clung to their theories even when the facts had demonstrated that there was no basis for their theories.

Right, of course actual conspiracies happen. Watergate, Iran-Contra, these are examples of real conspiracies – people conspiring to commit illegal or extra-legal acts in secret. But you use “conspiracy theory” to designate a way of thinking that ignores facts in favor of a narrative that people find hard to give up.

My favorite definition of “conspiracy theory” comes from the writer Daniel Pipes who said that a conspiracy theory is “the fear of a non-existent conspiracy.” I think the word “non-existent” is important there because real conspiracies do happen in the real world. What we call “conspiracy theory” is that body of thought which imagines conspiracies and sees conspiracies everywhere, even when they’re not really there. It clings to myths, it finds ways to sustain these myths, and the techniques that the Kennedy conspiracy theorists have used to sustain their myths keep recurring. You saw them again after 9-11, in the theories that arose after that. Time and again, you see this same style of thought applied to each new public tragedy or scandal that occurs. Something like Watergate was indeed a real conspiracy, but the way that it was uncovered was by reporters using old-school techniques and they didn’t let their theories get ahead of the evidence; they unearthed the evidence and let the evidence speak for itself.

And Bugliosi highlights incredibly damning facts about Oswald, facts I never knew and I don’t think most people know about.

One of the fascinating subplots that Bugliosi talks about is the fact that the reason Oswald bought his rifle in the first place was that in April, 1963, just six months before the Kennedy assassination, Oswald planned to shoot a man called General Edwin Walker, who was a former military general who’d become a rabble-rousing right winger in Dallas. Oswald’s original plan for glory was that he would become famous as a left-wing folk hero for shooting this right-wing bigot. He mail ordered the rifle, staked out Walker’s house, and in April 1963, he took up a position one night out the back of Walker’s house, aimed at Walker’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet just missed Walker’s head by an inch – it ricocheted off a window frame and penetrated the wall behind Walker. At the time, that was a big story in Dallas – someone took a shot at General Walker in his house and the gunman got away. They never found out who it was. In fact, only after the murder of John F. Kennedy was it revealed that the attempted assassin of General Walker in April 1963, six months before the Kennedy assassination, was Oswald. His wife Marina testified to this effect. As Bugliosi demonstrates, history could have been completely different if that bullet had been an inch the other way. It would have hit Walker, Walker would have died and Oswald would have either fled to Cuba as he was planning to do or more likely would have been apprehended before that and there never would have been a Kennedy assassination. Once you understand the Oswald story in sequence, going back even earlier than the Walker incident, you understand that Oswald had this hunger to assassinate public figures considerably before he decided that he was going to assassinate Kennedy. One of the reasons conspiracy theorists started talking about this case is because they thought that this sort of pipsqueak lone gunman, nut communist was not a sufficient assassin for such a powerful figure as Kennedy. What Bugliosi does by telling you the full rich story of Oswald is he fills out that story and makes you realise that the story of Oswald is enough once you understand all of its details.

There’s a terrific Norman Mailer line about that in his book, Oswald’s Tale, which you’ve quoted, can you read that?

Funnily enough, if I was allowed to choose six books today, I would have chosen Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale because it’s a tremendous book. Mailer changed his mind in the course of writing it. He began by believing that there had to be an explanation that was larger than Oswald. There had to be a conspiracy. And by the time he finished researching Oswald’s life, he realized that Oswald did have the capacity and the motive to kill Kennedy by himself. When he was describing his state of mind to begin with, Mailer wrote, “If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us and we live in a universe that is absurd.” I think many conspiracy theorists thought that way. They thought that it was just simply too absurd that this nobody with a cheap $20 rifle could have killed the most powerful man in the world and they set about constructing explanations that seemed to them less absurd.

That’s a good place to jump to your second book, which is about one of those theories that took on a life of its own and eventually became the basis for Oliver Stone’s JFK movie in the 1990s. The book is False Witness by Patricia Lambert.

She wrote this book specifically in response to Oliver Stone’s JFK. When JFK came out in 1991, it was a massive hit, and probably if people know just one book or movie about the assassination, it’s Oliver Stone’s JFK. So that is where people get their information from, and it’s been treated by some people as if it was an authentic depiction of what really happened. It started with a very real court case brought by Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who in 1967 decided that he was going to use his prosecutorial powers to try to deliver justice in the Kennedy case. To this day, the case that Jim Garrison brought against a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw is the only criminal prosecution that’s ever been brought in connection with the Kennedy assassination. In Stone’s film, Garrison was played by Kevin Costner as a sort of crusading white knight and all-round good guy. Clay Shaw was portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones as a sort of a mincing gay villain. One of the reasons that Jim Garrison prosecuted Shaw was because he was a closeted gay man, and according to Garrison that was almost good enough grounds to charge him with conspiring to murder Kennedy. In reality, Garrison was a delusional demagogue who picked an innocent man almost at random in New Orleans and prosecuted him for having conspired to murder Kennedy. In doing so, he destroyed Clay Shaw’s life. Shaw was found not guilty by the jury at his trial. It only took them 54 minutes to find him not guilty and one of the jurors said later that they would have been quicker but they needed a bathroom break before they started deliberating.

So Patricia Lambert was moved to write this book because like many Americans, she remembered what had really happened down in New Orleans when Clay Shaw was prosecuted. She remembered that it had been a great scandal and an outrageous abuse of prosecutorial power. And yet in Oliver Stone’s film, viewers are given the impression that Garrison was actually right to prosecute Clay Shaw and that he really had stumbled on the secret of Kennedy’s murder. So Patricia Lambert’s book, in my view, does what books should do: She conducts original research, she goes down to New Orleans, she talks to some of the people who were involved with the trial, and in a very meticulous, footnoted account, demonstrates that the Oliver Stone version of history was a complete distortion and more or less a completely upside down version of what really happened.

The next book is almost the mirror image, because it investigates the mind of the conspiracy theorist in a surprising way. It’s about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy – RFK senior, the brother of JFK – who had been Attorney General and was running for President. And the book begins really as an attempt to prove a conspiracy but then becomes a kind of confessional.

Moldea’s book is almost a unique artifact in conspiracy theory because it’s very rare for conspiracy theorists to change their minds and it’s exceedingly rare for a conspiracy theorist to do what Moldea did, which is change his mind in the middle of writing his book. In fact he left intact the first 27 chapters which he wrote when he believed that the official story about R.F.K.’s assassination was untrue and then he changed his mind very late in the piece and just pivoted and in the final three chapters of his book does a complete about turn and says I was wrong and here’s why I was wrong.

At first glance, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was a very straightforward affair in that it happened in the crowded hotel kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. There were 77 people crammed into this very small space and a guy named Sirhan Sirhan pulled out a gun and started firing and plenty of people who were at the scene saw this happen. Kennedy fell to the ground and he was fatally wounded. Sirhan was restrained on the spot by witnesses and he was disarmed, his gun was taken away. Eight bullets had been fired from it. It was an eight-shot revolver. So it appears to be a very straightforward case and you wouldn’t think that conspiracy theories would arise about this shooting since there were so many people who saw Sirhan do it. But in fact, there were conspiracy theories that arose about this case and Dan Moldea when he pitched his book to publishers said, I’m going to prove that the official story is untrue and that even though Sirhan did fire eight shots from his revolver that day all of them missed Kennedy and there was a second shooter in the kitchen who shot Kennedy. In his book proposal, Moldea said, I’ll not only demonstrate that Sirhan’s shots missed, I’ll demonstrate that this second shooter was a security guard named Eugene Cesar, who was seen to draw his gun that day. Moldea was going to prove that it was Cesar’s shots that killed Kennedy.

As he went about writing his book, he zeroed in on all the evidence that appeared to prove this contention. For example, there were minor discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony. Although the coroner said that Bobby Kennedy was shot from a distance of about one inch because he had a giant powder burn near the entrance wound, no witness who saw Sirhan pull the gun saw him put it that close to Kennedy. The witnesses tended to think that he’d fired the shots from about a foot away. To begin with, Moldea found all these discrepancies in the evidence compelling. But what happened as he neared the end of writing his book was that he interviewed the security guard Eugene Cesar and Sirhan Sirhan. And when he interviewed Eugene Cesar, Moldea found that he was very credible. He found that he liked him and he believed what he said, which was that he hadn’t fired any shots in the kitchen that day. He even gave him a lie detector test, which he passed. So at that point, Moldea’s mind is starting to change as he’s writing the book. He’s thinking I’ve been zeroing in on these discrepancies, which have led me to believe that there was a second shooter. But now that I’ve talked to the alleged second shooter, I’m starting to have my doubts.

So the final move in his book was to go to the prison that Sirhan was being held in and to interview Sirhan himself. It’s during one of these interviews with Sirhan, his third and final interview, that the scales finally fall from Moldea’s eyes. The way he puts it in the book, he says, “it was like a punch to the jaw and I realized in a flash that this fucking guy has been lying to me all along.” It took that moment of realization for Moldea’s entire perspective to shift and for him to realize that these theories that he’d been clinging to were actually baseless and that the simple explanation of the crime was that Sirhan not only shot Kennedy, but he’d been lying ever since when he claimed to not remember the moment of the shooting and when he claimed that perhaps he’d been brainwashed by somebody as a sort of a Manchurian Candidate to shoot Kennedy.

After deciding this in his final chapter, Moldea analyzes where he went wrong. And it’s a really fascinating confession because Moldea admits that he had been complicit in giving Sirhan an incentive to keep lying. Moldea says, as long as there were people like me willing to entertain the conspiratorial theories about the case, Sirhan had an incentive to keep lying. Moldea also realizes that he himself has more or less an economic incentive to deliver the book that he promised to his publishers, that is, a book which will sell well and spread the idea of conspiracy. But Moldea had the ethical decency to say, no, I’m going to write what the truth is, I’m going to renounce my former beliefs. There was a lot of pressure on him to do otherwise, but his publisher finally approved of the book that Moldea delivered. And I really think that readers owe a debt of gratitude to Moldea for not taking the easy path and continuing to perpetuate the conspiratorial narrative, but for writing what he finally realized was the truth.

Your next book, Raven, is a bit of a surprise in the context of conspiracy theories. It’s about Jonestown and the deaths of the hundreds of followers, including children and their families, the followers of the cult leader Jim Jones. For you, this story represents what can happen in the real world when people with power act on conspiratorial thinking.

One of the points that I’ve picked up from reading about conspiracy theory over the years is that despite what some people think, it is not a harmless parlor game. It’s a very dangerous form of belief that can have terrible consequences in the real world. We saw that when we were talking about Jim Garrison in New Orleans. He put Kennedy conspiracy theory into practice and the life of an innocent man was destroyed. Clay Shaw was outed as a gay man, which in the late 1960s was very problematic for him. His career as a businessman was destroyed. He was smeared forever as a possible conspirator against President Kennedy, which was absolutely not the case. And so he took to drinking and he died a broken man only a few years after the trial.

Jonestown is a far more terrible, large-scale tragedy. One of the beauties of Tim Reiterman’s book is that he demonstrates how conspiracy theory contributed to Jim Jones’s decline. To begin with, Jones was more or less a garden variety con man. He used to do simple confidence tricks to impress his followers. He used to pretend to have psychic powers and he used to have accomplices. He’d say, I’m gonna make that disabled woman stand up, and his accomplice would stand up and his flock would be duly impressed. And he used to do simple sort of faith-healing routines using chicken guts and pretend that he was pulling out people’s diseased organs. Reiterman explains how Jones degenerated over the years from a man who was perfectly well aware of the cons that he was pulling to a man who started to believe in his own hype and who became a very paranoid individual. Jones kept moving his church because he believed that the government authorities were persecuting him. He moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco to Guyana in South America and established the settlement that we know as Jonestown.

It was partially true that the United States government was interested in Jones’s activities because some of his parishioners, or it’s probably more accurate to say members of his cult, left the church and formed a group called the Concerned Relatives. They took up their case with a congressman from San Francisco called Leo Ryan who decided that he was going to go down to Guyana and see what was going on and see if anybody wanted to leave Jonestown. And if they did, he was going to take them back to the United States with him.

“It’s a very dangerous form of belief”

By this time, Jim Jones was becoming increasingly paranoid. He was addicted to amphetamines. He was an insomniac. He was becoming an increasingly sick man. As Reiterman explains, Jones had hired an attorney named Mark Lane to act on behalf of the People’s Temple and to uncover real documentary evidence of the conspiracy that Jones believed was occurring against him. Lane had a long history in American conspiracy theory. He features in Bugliosi’s book as one of the godfathers of the original JFK conspiracy theories. He helped Jim Garrison prosecute Clay Shaw. Subsequent to that, Lane became more or less an attorney for hire for anyone who was interested in finding so-called “proof” of conspiracy theories against them. After the Clay Shaw case, Lane co-wrote the screenplay for a movie called Executive Action, which was one of those paranoid thrillers that came out in the early 70s. It showed a fictional conspiracy on the part of rogue government agents against the President of the United States to murder him. It became one of the Reverend Jim Jones’s favorite films and he used to screen it fairly regularly for his flock. When he invited Mark Lane down to Jonestown to be his guest he asked Lane if he would want to write a similar film about Jonestown and the conspiracy against Jones and Lane said: Well I’ve got a better idea, why don’t you hire me as your attorney and I will find documentary proof of this vast government conspiracy against you? Of course there was no documentary proof of the vast government conspiracy against Jones because there was no conspiracy. But Lane told Jones what he wanted to hear because he knew that this was the best way of continuing on in his role as Jones’ attorney. So Mark Lane was feeding Jones these conspiracy theories, but this was far from harmless. This was deepening Jones’ very dangerous paranoia, and this paranoia culminated in an orgy of violence in Jonestown – what we call the Jonestown Massacre.

Some people think of it as a mass suicide and, you know, the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” has become famous ever since because Jones’ followers supposedly queued up and voluntarily drank. (It was actually Flavor Aid, the drink that he prepared in vats, and he poisoned it with potassium cyanide.) As Reiterman shows, it was actually a mass homicide. Jones forced his followers to drink that poison. If they didn’t voluntarily drink it, he forced them at gunpoint. Some he injected with cyanide. When the 900 dead of Jonestown were discovered, some had injection marks, which proved that they’d been forcibly injected. And of course, many of the victims were children and babies, and they had no choice in the matter.

When Congressman Ryan flew down to Jonestown to investigate what was going on, there were several journalists who accompanied him there, and one of them was Tim Reiterman. He was also accompanied by an NBC News crew, which took some footage down there. The Jonestown massacre began because Jones had sent gunmen out to the airstrip to shoot Congressman Ryan dead before he could leave. They fatally wounded Ryan and they also shot Reiterman. They wounded him, and he and others escaped into the jungle. Partly Reiterman’s book is an eyewitness account of what happened on the airstrip, but it’s also an account of how that event triggered the mass homicide of Jones’ followers that occurred later that night in the Jonestown pavilion. And it’s in a sense Reiterman’s attempt to explain by going back in Jones’s personal history and talking about his younger years and how he degenerated into this paranoid lunatic who was capable of doing this.

One of the things that strikes me in Reiterman’s book is how conspiracy theory not only gets the world upside down in a factual sense, but also as a consequence of that, it gets the world upside down morally. Jones was apparently honestly convinced that the government was actually on their way to Jonestown to kill Jones and his followers – this is the story that Jones told his followers during his final sermon, which was taped like all of his sermons so we can listen to the actual massacre occurring as it happens with Jones’ sort of running commentary on why it’s necessary. The way Jones is framing it is that these government forces from Guyana are on their way here to torture our seniors and kill our children, so we must preempt that by committing this act of what he calls “revolutionary suicide.” You can hear him on the tapes saying to parents: Any parent who wants to die with their child, you can line up here and you can die together, because that’s humane. He keeps using this word “humane” and he says that we’re committing suicide to protest the conditions of an inhumane world. In reality, of course, the only danger that was posed to Jones’ followers and the only inhumanity that was being inflicted on them was by Jones, the cult leader himself. But in Jones’ sort of twisted, upside-down view, it was “humane” to preempt the authorities by conducting this act of revolutionary suicide. I just think it’s very interesting how when you take this incorrect, upside-down view of the world, then very atrocious, immoral acts can be framed as moral, decent acts.

That’s the perfect transition to your final book, Warrant for Genocide by Norman Cohn, which is about one of the oldest and deadliest conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitic myth that Jews control the world, and the infamous, fraudulent document at the center of this myth called ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’

Norman Cohn was by training a medieval historian rather than a modern historian, but he served in World War II and after the war he was prompted to ask himself how Germany, this advanced, apparently civilized modern nation, had degenerated into this incredible barbarism and had perpetrated this mass genocide, the Holocaust. And the answer he came up with is that what enabled this atrocity was conspiracy theory. It was the myth of Jewish control of the world, which was believed in by the Nazis. Cohn focuses on this document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was the central document of anti-Semitic literature. The German historian, Golo Mann, said that the Holocaust was a crime committed because of bad literature. As Cohn demonstrates, the Protocols was this central document that the Nazis used as a warrant for genocide. Even today, if you go online, you see people talking about the Protocols as if it were an authentic document. This document was in fact an abject forgery or hoax or fraud. And Cohn’s book traces the history of this document, how it originated in Russia in the 1890s and how it was used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s as a warrant for genocide.

As Cohn shows, this document was a pretty obvious fraud even from its early days in Russia. It originated and was first published in a Russian text in the early 1900s, put together by the secret police of the Tsar, Nicholas II. At the time, Nicholas II was facing a lot of opposition within Russia from liberal forces and also from revolutionary forces. The early signs of the Russian Revolution were already apparent, so Nicholas II needed an external scapegoat to blame for the dysfunction of his Russia. In reality, what was wrong in Russia was despotism and it was Nicholas II’s fault. His secret police created many documents – there was sort of almost a fad for creating documents that blamed Russia’s ills on the Jews – and the Protocols was one such document. It had a short-term effect in Russia, but almost by the First World War, people in Russia had stopped believing that the Protocols was an authentic document. It’s a very strange document. What it purports to be is the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish elders that occurs at some point in the 1890s. But any literate person who looks at the document is immediately going to see that it doesn’t look like a real historical record of a real historical meeting. There are no dates specified, there are no names specified, there are no places specified. It’s a fairly obvious fabrication. After World War I, it had ceased to have an effect in Russia, but it had certainly instigated many pogroms against the Jewish population of Russia before World War I. So already it was a blood soaked document that had been used as a warrant for murder.

But after the First World War, translations of this spurious document began to appear in the West, in England, in France, and particularly in Germany, and there was a new audience for this kind of anti-Semitism, a new rising movement that needed this kind of document to justify what it was going to do. It does happen again and again in conspiracy theory that people latch on to pieces of evidence or documents that are quite spurious – these people have a need for these documents. In 1921, the Times of London published a sensational article in which one of their reporters demonstrated that the Protocols was not only a fraudulent document, but it was a plagiarism. The reporter had unearthed the book that was used as the basis for this plagiarism, a quite obscure book written in 1864 called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written in French by Maurice Joly, and it was a satire on the regime of Napoleon III. Napoleon III put Joly in jail and seized all the copies of the book that were circulating in public, which meant that this book had almost vanished from people’s memory. But in 1921 a reporter for the Times found this old book and realised that approximately two fifths of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was simply lifted from that earlier book and just put into the mouths of the Elders of Zion. It was a flat out piece of plagiarism and fabrication from a 50-year-old book. At that point in 1921, all literate people knew that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a junk document. It was a cheap fabrication and plagiarism that had been put together in Russia for political purposes. Nobody serious still believed that this was really the record of a meeting of Jewish elders planning to take over the world.

However, in Germany there were people who had a use for this document. As Norman Cohn points out, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924, he actually refers to the Protocols. Hitler nervously acknowledges that some liberal newspapers have suggested that it’s a fraud, but he says, all you need to do is look around you in the world today and see what’s happening to realize that the liberal papers are wrong. This document is not a fraud, Hitler says, it’s a real description of what is really going on. Hitler and the Nazis need documentary evidence to justify their program of anti-Semitism and the best they can do is this exploded and ridiculous document, the Protocols, so it’s given a second very sinister reboot when the Nazis come to power. It’s prescribed as a textbook in schools and it’s used as a warrant for the terrible genocide that’s to come.

It’s like Jim Jones “saving” his followers by having them commit mass suicide at gunpoint, mass murder in service of this “humane” end in his twisted mind. Hitler uses and appropriates this document that purports to prove Jewish conspiracy as a reason for the elimination of Jews. Up is down and down is up and the Nazis’ act of incredible immorality is presented as a moral and justifiable response to an immoral threat.

Exactly. It’s completely upside down. Hitler in 1939 was obviously moving the world towards war. But Hitler was portraying this as the Jews moving the world towards war. He said the Jews were orchestrating and creating the conditions for a vast Second World War and if they get their way and start this war, I’m going to do what is only just and that is to eliminate them because they’re the ones who are starting this conflict. Of course, that was a completely upside down view of what was really happening. It was the Nazis who were pushing the world inexorably to war, and the Jews, far from being an all-powerful, sinister group of people who were more powerful than the Nazis, were in fact a group of powerless victims who were being increasingly mistreated. First their shops were boycotted, then they were being deported, and of course the so-called final solution was underway once the war began. There’s a fascinating quote from Heinrich Himmler, who addressed a meeting of the SS and said to them: What we are doing is we’re exterminating this race of people who were planning to exterminate us, the good Aryan people of Europe, so what we’re doing is a just act. And he said to the SS, what’s really remarkable is that we have all remained decent people, even as we’re carrying out what he called this “moral duty” to exterminate the Jewish race. The Protocols were used by the Nazis to reposition themselves as the victims or the possible victims of this vastly powerful race of people and the Holocaust was really just a preemptive act of self-defense. I mean, it’s obscene, it’s a complete inversion of factual reality and of moral reality and that is the kind of consequence that conspiracy theory can lead to when it’s used and abused by people with ultimate political power.

In an age as inundated with information as ours do you think books like these can be an antidote to conspiratorial thinking?

I think they are and I think we have to keep reading books like these. They not only tell us what really happened in the past, but they provide us with a kind of warning about what can happen again in the future if we’re not careful. One of the revelations in Cohn’s book that really haunts me is the research that showed that during the Nazi period, even despite the Nazis’ use of anti-Semitic propaganda, there was no huge increase in rabid anti-Semitism among the German people. The level of anti-Semitism remained more or less the same from the start of the Nazi era to the end. But what did change radically was the level of indifference, public indifference, to the fate of the Jewish people. The German people were so heavily bombarded with propaganda that they just became increasingly indifferent to what was happening to the Jews. They turned a blind eye, they were weary, they were apathetic, they were looking out for themselves. That was the effect that this conspiratorial propaganda had on the German population. And I think in our own day, we do have to stay on our toes and avoid the temptation to become indifferent and apathetic. We need to insist that there is such a thing as objective truth and that people who repeatedly avoid telling the objective truth and keep turning the truth on its head are doing great damage to society and may do further damage by eroding our sense that the truth matters. So I think we have to remain on our toes against conspiracy theory all the time. Another quote that haunts me is from Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” This was amply demonstrated in Jonestown, it was demonstrated horribly during the Nazi era, and I think that we should be alert to anybody who attempts to make us believe absurdities today, not just because we should believe in reality, but because people have a political agenda. When you look at the way the Nazis used this propaganda to consolidate their own power and to render their population docile, I think we have to be very suspicious of any leader anywhere who even flirts with this style of thought.