Europe Confronts Conspiracy Theory

On an EU website about Europe's COVID response, there are pages about Fighting Disinformation and Identifying Conspiracy Theories. These latter are not just about Covid, but conspiracy theories in general.

I think the latter page is especially useful and both pages should be incorporated into every high school student's curriculum.  Now that an unnamed orange muppet with tiny hands has announced he will run for POTUS in 2024, the page may become a lot more useful to help young people navigate the increasingly murky info-sphere.

I say that half-kiddingly.  I genuinely applaud the fact that the EU finds conspiracy theory a serious enough topic that it needs to be confronted head on.

After the Stateside events of January 6th, (there's that sandy-haired orange muppet again), more people are taking note.  Conspiracy theory has been leading to moral panic, and even violence, since the Romans accused Christians of: plotting to bring down the empire; cannibalism: conducting ritual orgies....probably even before.  

Once Christendom had in effect supplanted the Roman Empire as the warp and woof of Europe (the Romans were right!), the unfortunate target of the conspiracy-fueled mob has more often than not been the Jews. Which is something the EU page notes; conspiracy theory is often crypto-antisemitism.

The name of the players may change, but the elements of moral panic have remained the same since the Middle Ages: medieval blood-libel, the "Rosicrucian furore", the Illuminati, anti-Masonry, Satanic Ritual Abuse, QAnon.  

These elements include powerful, hidden elites; black magic and/or Satanism; trafficking children for ritual sex and murder; an international or even global reach....

QAnon is a political force the orange muppet openly toys with.  Whether he believes it or not is irrelevant.  Many of his supporters do, and it's one reason he wins their votes.  

Democracy can't function when lies and conspiratorial thinking dominate the agora.  Or as the WaPo has put it since the reign of the muppet:  "Democracy Dies in Darkness.". D-D-i-D, yo!

I recommend reading the EU's pages and the downloadable PDFs they make available.  We really may need them in the run-up to 2024.  And maybe even beyond.

I know that global elites working behind the scenes for their own benefit do exist.  By definition, two or more people working illegally for their own ends is a conspiracy.  I would say that in the spheres of business and politics "conspiracy" in it's widest sense is as much the rule as it is the exception.  I also know, thanks to Epstein, that billionaire sex-trafficking exists.  But it ain't Squid Game.

One could say, with or without irony, that the diffusion of outlandish conspiracy theories is itself a kind of disinformation campaign to make people so leery of anything hinting at conspiracy that they just roll their eyes at the very mention of illegal shenanigans in high places; so their crimes are hidden in plain sight. 

I got that reaction when I wrote a paper about the connection between Freemasonry and Scouting.  It sounds so loony that some people refused to read beyond the title for what is a rather sober and well-documented paper.

Anyway, this started out as a simple link to the EU site and as usual has morphed into another LoS prolixity.  And there isn't even a photo!

Orange you glad I didn't say Europa?

 

Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa, Europa

 A.

• 

  The stars are upside down.

 
• 

  The stars point outwards instead of in one direction.

 
• 

  The stars should be arranged like a face of a clock, which is not the case in this flag.

 
• 

  Correct flag.

B.

A Circle of Stars

C.

The Flag of a US Foreign Service Officer

13 stars with jaunty alternating positions....

D.

XII

12 hours on a clock (often IIII not IV but IX, BTW)
12 months in a year 
12 symbols of the zodiac 
12 Apostles 
12 sons of Jacob 
12 semitones in an octave (western music)
12 days of Christmas
12 Caesars chronicled by Suetonius
12 Olympian gods
12 labors of Hercules
12 tables of Roman Law

12 Hues in the color wheel, star or sphere (western art)

The Shirt Makes the Man

Oswald Mosley stepping out with the Pentaverate

Cool. Back on 420 in 2020, Dr. Juan Francisco Fuentes Aragónes, Professor of History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, wrote an article which surveys the colored shirt movements in Europe of the interwar period. Not just fascists, but communists and even moderate groups like the Social Credit Party, even Scouting.

Shirt movements were....the expression of an old relationship between clothing and politics, body and power, but also the consequence of the dramatic circumstances of the interwar period, dominated by the mysticism of violence, the “brutalization of politics” (Mosse 1990, 159-81), the prominence of young people and masses, the charismatic power of the leader and the importance of “senso-propaganda” (Chakhotin 1940, 170) in the new political culture of the 1930s. Totalitarianisms that emerged at the time understood perfectly the enormous potential of these uniformed movements for the conquest or conservation of power and for training the masses, or their youthful and radical avant-gardes, in their regimented conception of life. This is why the history of the shirt movements is also that of totalitarianism in its golden age.

from Shirt Movements in Interwar Europe: A Totalitarian Fashion

Good stuff. I'm surprised I didn't run across this paper while I was looking up information for my previous posts.

Uniforms aren't as much in fashion now as in times past, but as we saw in our post about the Proud Boys, there is still a drive towards uniformity. The PB's prefer black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts (business casual Freitag?)

Skinheads have long favored Fred Perry or Lonsdale shirts and Doc Marten's boots. The color of the laces, at least in Florida circa 1990, meant something: red for leftists, so-called "redskins" or SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) skins; white laces were used by Neo-Nazi skins.

Skinheads, with their "look" and propensity for violence, are the less-organized heritors of the "shirt movements" of the 1930's.

Also worth a mention are the color codes of gang bandanas: eg blue for Crips, red for Bloods. Not political, but it is analogous in that a specific color of an article of clothing signifies an allegiance, and the wrong color in the wrong place could lead to an unpleasant and violent misadventure.

Anyway, the article probably means I won't need to do another post about fascist paramilitaries in Europe!

I actually came across Aragónes' article while looking up info on the Baeguisa (백의사), the fascist "White Shirts" or "White Clothes Society" of Korea. Ardently anti-Communist, they were funded by the CIC, or Counterintelligence Corps, a precursor to the CIA.  Not sure if this outfit predated, postdated, or same-dated the OSS.

NK News writes about the Baeguisa and their assassination campaign of the 1940's....US-financed fascist terrorists. Par for the course. Info in English about these guys is scarce, so enjoy Aragónes' article instead....