![]() Protocols still circulates in many countries today, and underpins many contemporary conspiracy theories directed against “elites”, “globalists” and “financiers” – often code words for Jews. By 1921, it was shown to be a forgery, but that did not stop it from becoming part of the Nazis’ justification for the Holocaust. This forged document was first published in 1903 in Russia, and was presented as the record of a secret meeting of Jewish elders who are plotting world domination. The most significant example of a fabricated conspiracy text being taken for real is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ![]() Intrigued by the endless letters to the magazine asserting all manner of unbelievable conspiracy theories, Shea’s and Wilson’s starting premise for the novel was imagining what if “all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists”. Forged document with tragic consequencesĪlthough conspiracy theories about the Illuminati date back to the 1790s, many of the most fantastical versions of this story circulating on the internet today are unwittingly derived from The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), a madcap, counter-cultural novel written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, two editors at Playboy magazine. That anti-government novel also influenced Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. The storming of the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, for example, was in part inspired by The Turner Diaries, a conspiracy-infused novel from 1978 that imagines an apocalyptic, white supremacist uprising. ![]() While many conspiracy fictions merely provide entertainment, they can sometimes have a surprising effect on the real world. Conspiracy theories create a narrative that promises to make sense of otherwise random events, seeing them as part of one vast, overarching plot. A good conspiracy by definition leaves no traces, and so a conspiracy theory is an imaginative speculation about the existence of a secret group behind the scenes, cunningly manipulating events. Literature has long had a fascination with esoteric knowledge, secret societies and conspiracies – from Euripides’ Bacchae to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. He is the author of Conspiracy Culture (2000) and The Kennedy Assassination (2007), and co-editor, with Michael Butter, of the Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020). Professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and visiting professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. ![]() But these fictitious notions – often created under the guise of making sense of the world around us – can sometimes have very real, even tragic, consequences on our lives, the author explains. Literary plots have long been connected to conspiracy theories, which are, in essence, acts of the imagination. UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.MGIEP - Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development.IESALC - International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.IITE - Institute for Information Technologies in Education. ![]()
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