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Tarcher
November 1983
On Sale: November 1, 1983
252 pages
ISBN: 0874772753
EAN: 9780874772753
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
As a reporter for the defunct Minneapolis Star, Johnson
tracked down the story on America's leading political
paranoids - the types who think that all the world's ills
result from a giant global conspiracy. His leads took him
into some really loony territory, and there he found a
dubious connecting thread. Because Robert Welch, founder of
the John Birch Society, called the perpetrators of the
conspiracy he detected Illuminati, and because such
references can be read into (or appear in) other versions
of paranoid politics, Johnson goes off on a historical
exegesis of Gnosticism, the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, and
other secret societies of various degrees of occultism or
revealed knowledge. In Johnson's superficial treatment they
become the rationalists, and their opponents - first the
Catholic Church, then Protestant sects - become the
purveyors of faith. Johnson keeps the Illuminati thread
going throughout, stringing every manifestation of anti-
Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, or belief in the
special knowledge of a small group on it. In the 18th
century, many people pointed to the Freemasons as the force
behind the French Revolution, but such ideas never took
much hold here. Rather, anti-Catholicism has run deeper.
Johnson has chapters on both; then, when contemporary right-
wingers like Bob Jones attack the Pope as "Antichrist," or
the John Birch Society reprints anti-Freemasonry classics,
they wind up lumped together - though Freemasonry has long
been seen as a threat to Catholicism (not least because of
its alleged role in the French Revolution). Johnson, in
fact, cites works by Catholic traditionalists, followers of
the French prelate Marcel Lefevre, that claim Vatican II as
a Masonic conspiracy. The Birchers distribute those too,
which suggests a degree of confusion Johnson cannot dispel.
Other familiar paranoids covered are Lyndon LaRouche of the
US Labor Party, who sees a conspiracy by Zionists and the
British aristocracy to depopulate the world in the
interests of the rich, and the Liberty Lobby, which adheres
to the Communist-Jewish conspiracy with the familiar
Rothschild/Council on Foreign Relations/Trilateral
Commission nexus as its heart. Some worthwhile spot-
reports - but little other substance. (Kirkus Reviews)
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