Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories & 21st Century Culture Wars (pt. 3)-Richard Landes

Historically speaking, there are close links between certain forms of apocalyptic belief and world conspiracies in which the Jews are Antichrist's puppet masters. These Judeophoic conspiracy theories mixed with anxieties about modernity at the dawn of the 20th century, to produce The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text that haunted the catastrophic early 20th century in Europe, the late 20th century in the Muslim world, and now threatens, once again, and completely unexpectedly, to invade Western culture at the dawn of the 21st century. In particular, the proliferation of conspiracy theories around the 9-11 attacks has permitted the wildest claims of a Zionist-Occupied (American) Government (ZOG) perpetrating this attack on American citizens, to make inroads especially in left-wing circles. The talk will address the psychology of conspiracy theory, its function within the current Western "culture wars," the dangers to polities taken up in conspiracy theories, and the role of the Jews in these dynamics, in particular since the Judeophobic "turn" of 2000.