The Politics of Fear by Arthur Goldwag

Author:Arthur Goldwag [Goldwag, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

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Picture this classic conspiracist tableau: in a dungeon beneath a gloomy mansion, a group of immensely rich and powerful men, draped in silk robes, utter incantations in a strange tongue while sipping libations of human blood. Clouds of incense hang in the air.

Whether those celebrants are believed to be Elders of Zion, Illuminated Masons, billionaire apparatchiks of the New World Order, the elites of the QAnon believers’ imagination, or all of them working together, the image’s ur-source is Roman Catholic priests celebrating the Mass, as refracted through the distorting lenses of biblical End Times prophecies, the geopolitics of the Reformation, middle-class Americans’ resentments of the opaque and sometimes questionable practices of bankers and financiers, and, ironically, Catholicism’s own long-standing fears of Illuminism and Freemasonry.

For the Puritans, Catholics were the Romans, the ancient enemy the early Christians defined themselves in opposition to (along with the pharisaical Jews). For the Catholics, the enemy was not just the Jews who rejected Christ, but the heterodox Christians who denied that the Catholic Church is the body of Christ, and the forces of Marxism, scientism, nihilism, atheism, secularism, and all of the other isms that have been eating away at the one true church’s authority and power.

Of course, real Jews and Masons, as opposed to the Jews and Masons of the conspiracist imagination, don’t practice magic or worship Satan, because most Jews don’t believe in the literal Devil, and while many Masons are Christians, few are superstitious.[*8] Neither drinks blood—figurative, real, or transubstantiated—in their ceremonials. But conspiracists nonetheless imagine that their enemies celebrate Black Masses, because they think in Manichaean binaries—good versus evil, Christian versus Jew, Protestant versus Catholic, American versus non-American, civilization versus barbarism—and perhaps because they guiltily project the aspects of themselves that they are ashamed of onto their enemies. The Christian blood that Jews were accused of mixing into their Passover matzos, the adrenochrome that Q believers say the elites extract from children, is the Eucharist defiled.

Protestant conspiracy theorists look at their enemies and see Catholics. So do Catholic conspiracy theorists, at least when they are looking at the Masons. And it’s no wonder, because so many of the Masons’ secret rituals evoke their society’s fanciful connections with medieval Catholicism.

Beyond the Masons’ specific references to the Knights Templar and Jacques de Molay, the Templars’ last grand master (he was burned at the stake in 1314), the Gothic cosplay that figures in so many of their rituals is also characteristic of a lot of the Romantic art, architecture, landscape design, and literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Ku Klux Klan, which recruited many of its members from Masonic lodges, also adapted Catholic ritual and robes. The capirote, the pointed hood that Spanish and Italian penitents have worn since the Inquisition, was the likely source for the headpieces the Klan riders wore in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and that the revived KKK then adopted (the regalia of Reconstruction-era Klansmen was less formalized).[38][*9]

Unlike the Klan, the Freemasons were never organized around exclusion and hatred; their ideal was and is enlightenment.

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