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Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History QUOTES

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History QUOTES

1 " But progressive as it could be, American populism also lent itself to more reactionary impulses. Suspicious of big capital, it was equally hostile to the big state; and much as it claimed to champion the little man, it often took up cudgels against those seen as the conscript army of unwanted change—immigrants. Who these immigrants were depended on the most recent wave of arrivals. In the 1840s, it was the Irish and thus the Catholics; in the 1850s, the Germans; in the 1890s, the Italians—and therefore the Catholics again. It was also a fairly natural step from anti-big-business populism to protectionism, and almost as natural to progress from there to isolationism. "

― David Aaronovitch , Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

2 " If all narratives are relative, then we are lost. Widespread anti-Semitic fantasies may have reflected the plight of Germans, may even have been their “soul’s version of the truth” in the post-1918 period, but they were still fantasies, and the failure to counter them, or to see the fantasies as themselves creating terrible political realities, proved totally catastrophic. Relativism doesn’t care to distinguish between the scholarly and the slap-dash, the committed researcher and the careless loudmouth, the scrupulous and the demagogic. For that reason, it is hard to see how an insistence on “proper events” can ever be said to be dogmatic, or a refusal to insist can be anything other than treacherous. Spike "

― David Aaronovitch , Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

3 " A new technique had been unveiled,” comments David Oshinsky, “guilt by disassociation.”h “Owen Lattimore had not been proved a Communist,” Time commented on the case, “but he had not proved that he was not one.” And how could he? Any more than he could prove that the Daily Worker wasn’t criticizing him as part of a secret Communist strategy? The comment illustrates how the ground had shifted. At the outset of the Red Scare, Communists might have been people with whom one absolutely disagreed but whose actions were broadly legal and acceptable. Then Communists per se came to be seen as disloyal and their activities semicriminal. Then people who might have been Communists were added to that category, or people whose arguments were sometimes the same as the Communists. Assumption was piled on assumption, until you could have someone as nonrevolutionary as Lattimore, whose calvary could be justified because “he had not proved he was not” a Communist. One feature of widely believed conspiracy theories may be that even those who do not accept them often cease to examine them properly; something that would otherwise be quickly seen as absurd is instead treated as if it were one genuine possibility among several. "

― David Aaronovitch , Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

4 " Carto’s other legacy to American politics, the Barnes Review, named for his hero, is available for purchase on the Internet. Leading Review articles have included items such as “Of Teutonic Blood: German and German-American Contributions to Civilization as We Know It Have Been Massive,” and the intriguing-sounding “Adolf Hitler: An Overlooked Candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Carto’s erstwhile publishing company, Noontide Press, was responsible for publishing, among other books, The Myth of the Six Million, by a David Hoggan, which, as the title suggests, was a rejection of the historical truth of the Holocaust. "

― David Aaronovitch , Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

5 " Norman Cohn, in his book Warrant for Genocide, quotes the postwar testimony of SS captain Dieter Wisliceny, who was tried and executed in 1947 for his part in killing Hungarian, Greek, and Slovak Jews. A straight line, said Wisliceny, ran from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the precepts of the Nazis, and from there to the attempted murder of a race. The straightness of this line is evident from the activities of the Nazi academic Professor von Leers, last seen propagating the “Rabbi’s Speech” at the University of Jena, but by 1942 publishing The Criminal Nature of the Jews. As the Holocaust moved from improvisation to industrial organization, von Leers wrote, “Not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals—but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offense against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs. "

― David Aaronovitch , Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History