I keep hearing people talking about conspiracies, and they are obviously something they are fond of – they give the powerless the illusion of having power, in a sense of at least understanding what’s going on in the world. However, since their reasoning power and understanding of the world are usually poor, the “conspiracies” they come up with are invariably false. No, the Earth is not flat, and people really did land on the Moon, and two planes did indeed crash into the WTC. However, there are some conspiracies that turn out to be true – covid is an American bioweapon, for instance. America blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Some “conspiracy theories” are branded as such probably only because the official history is counterfeit for political reasons.
However, I think people have a fundamentally mistaken view of conspiracies. They think the conspirators must be some powerful elites, the invisible secret societies that pull the strings of history, and it’s either the Illuminati, or the Templars, or the Freemasons, or the Jews. They think the conspirators manipulate the events to their benefit, and to the detriment of others. I think this view is fundamentally mistaken.
Yes, there are conspiracies and conspirators. They do make plans and execute them. They frequently manage to do great harm and change the course of history. However, even when their plans are successful, I don’t think they fundamentally change the conspirators’ strategic position.
I will cite two examples – the assassination of Julius Caesar and Lenin’s revolutionary movement. The conspirators against Caesar wanted to stop Caesar from concentrating power in his person. They succeeded and Caesar was killed. The civil war ensued, and ended when Octavian, the ultimate winner, proclaimed himself emperor and concentrated all the power of the state in his person. Caesar was killed, lots of other people were killed, and nothing strategically changed for the Roman state, because concentration of power in the Emperor was actually the logical solution for the problem of the state’s fragmentation of power at that point, which Marius, Sulla, Caesar and ultimately Octavian merely had taken advantage of and solved.
Lenin’s success in spreading the communist propaganda in the Russian empire was the result of a conspiracy of the German political leadership to finance Lenin, whom they saw as a disruptive element that would destabilise Russia and make it exit the war. They gave him tens of millions of marks, which was sufficient to finance the huge and ultimately successful propaganda effort. The conspiracy was successful, and Russia surrendered and exited the war, had a terrible internecine civil war, and its historic progress was degraded. However, none of this helped Germany – it still lost the war, had a terrible period of poverty that caused the meteoric rise of Hitler, which caused the second world war and Germany’s ultimate destruction by the hand of those very Russian communists they helped create.
Basically, what we see are two examples of conspiracies that are a tactical success and a strategic failure – they accomplished the immediate goal, but failed to achieve the actual goal.
What does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that people are mistaken in their view that great historic trends can be changed by influencing one thing – for instance, if you killed Hitler in time, there would be no WW2. This is the mistake the Caesar’s assassins made, thinking their problem was Caesar, and all they did was get themselves eliminated, get a lot of people killed, and promote Octavian to Caesar. If you killed Hitler, the problems that made him rise to power would make someone else rise to power, and that one might not have had Hitler’s weaknesses, making the problem potentially worse. What we see is that conspirators are often successful, but short-sighted, and with a flawed understanding of the issues at hand. They are not some all-powerful, all-knowing cabal ruling mankind from the shadows; they are just men with flawed understanding, who use their power to succeed tactically, get many people killed and often cause terrible suffering for many more, and still fail to accomplish their actual goal.
An example of this are the Jews, with their Zionist efforts. Every single move they made seems to have been successful – get the state of Israel, move there, protect it using the power of America, make it modern and powerful. However, strategically they painted themselves into a corner. They have the worst piece of real estate in the Middle East, which is mostly desert and doesn’t even have oil. They don’t have the majority there because they couldn’t get rid of the Arabs, who hate them and perpetually conspire to destroy them. Their international protection is America, whose power is waning. Essentially, they managed to all move to a single place and make their collective destruction more likely, while still failing to accomplish a Jewish-religious state populated only by Jews, that would be safe for them and allow them to practice their religion and maintain their society, and not assimilate.
Sure, we must be mindful of conspiracies, as history teaches us that they exist, and can produce great harm. However, history also teaches us that conspirators don’t really benefit from their actions, and often succeed tactically only to be doomed strategically.
The ultimate lesson is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, being able to actually do it successfully can be more of a curse than a blessing.