The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders

Honorable Violet Gibson ( 1876-1956), daughter of the Anglo-Irish Lord Chancellor of Ireland, as a young woman, the consort of Royalty. Never-the-less, her education was circumscribed by domestic intent, to be passive helpmate of her prospective husband and bearer of many children; her upbringing conducted in the blaring light of Victorian social convention in which she was presumed to have no legitimate, private thoughts or ambitions of her own. Her thoughts on the matter in diaries and letters reflected the feelings of many women of the era, most notably Virginia Woolf. Rebelling from the Christian Science orientation of her immediate family, Violet turned to Theosophy, Anthroposophy, associated with various international women's suffrage alliances but eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and the veneration of self-mortifying female saints. This did not deter her from a keen and personal interest in public affairs and the progress of political and social reform in Ireland, England and Europe in general. In 1926 God told her to assassinate the dictator Benito Mussolini , who at that time was the toast of her own government - “just the person to set Italy right”- and The New York Times as well.

Her first shot glanced off the bridge of Mussolini's nose, her second shot misfired. Her ammunition was old. Acquitted on the grounds of insanity she was eventually deported and confined to St. Andrew's Hospital for Mental Diseases for the rest of her life, not an uncommon fate for 'disturbed' and 'difficult' individuals in those times including the daughter of James Joyce and, incredibly, several members of the Royal Family itself, some of who lived for decades after having been officially declared dead. 

…By mid-afternoon, just as the first interview with Violet was being concluded, Mussolini was back in his Lancia, still wearing the big plaster across his nose, heading for Palazzo Littorio, her designated assassination site. As scheduled, he appeared at the presentation of the provincial secretaries to the new directorate of the National Fascist Party, where he told them, “The Party must fascistize the nation from top to bottom and from bottom to top.”

Facistizzare- the clunking awfulness of the verb, the hissing sibilants pitched to a menace. What exactly does it mean? Does meaning matter, when Mussolini's every word is set to detonate euphoria, when a mere flick of his hand is enough to redesign the whole composition of the crowd? Wooing and winning. The applause tumbles like falling masonry. Il Duce lives, God save Il Duce! God preserve Italy's glittering destiny.

“The crowd loves strong men”, Mussolini once said. “The crowd is like a woman... Everything turns upon one's ability to control it.” Much of his crowd theory derived from the French writer Gustave Le Bon's Pychologie des foules (1865), which argued that crowds do not like kindly masters, but tyrants who oppress them; they trample down despots only when those despots have lost their strength and no longer inspire fear. Crowds, according to Le Bon, have conservative instincts, a fetish-like respect for traditions, and an unconscious horror of novelties that could change their way of life. They are not influenced by reason and their arguments are always of an inferior order.

Le Bon's theory has not survived the scorn of sociologists, but in 1921 Freud devoted several pages to it and called it a “brilliant” description of the collective mind (Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego). “Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act,” explains Umberto Eco, 'they are only called upon to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.”


When later that evening a crowd assembles outside Mussolini office at Palazzo Chigi, he emerges onto a balcony to address them. He wishes to show them, he says, that the ring of his voice has not changed one atom, and that the beat of his heart has not quickened. He thanks them for their spontaneous displays of enthusiasm and calls them to maintain discipline in the true fascist style. “No danger threatens the regime,” he bellows. Cries of “The foreigner! The foreigner!” rise up from below. “This danger, too, we shall face,” he replies. “I am one of your generation. That means that I am the newest sort of Italian, one who is never thrown by events, but rather always proceeds straight down the road assigned by destiny.” In a dramatic peroration, soon adopted as one of the slogans of the regime, he urges the need for all to “live dangerously. Indeed, I say to you like an old soldier: 'If I advance, follow me.” There was a second part to this lapidary sentence - “If I retreat, kill me”- which would come to pass in due time. Then, “If I die, avenge me.” “La forca, la forca!” ( the gallows, the gallows!) comes the answer.... For those involved- Il Duce and the people- the experience was not one of stand-up comedy but of sacramental Union.

Back at the Mantellate prison, Violet is taken to a cell, consisting of an iron bedstead, clothes stand, chamber pot, table, aluminum plate, a cup, wooden cutlery, a jug of drinking water, and a washbasin. “It is better not to lay up possessions,” she had written in her notebook, and her only request is for a crucifix, before which she prays on her knees for several hours. She then eats a meal and falls into a deep sleep, according to the nuns who have been instructed to watch her all night.

All over Italy, God is thanked. In the churches Te Deum ceremonies are held to celebrate Mussolini's miraculous escape. In Venice, the bells of St. Mark's are rung in sign of thanksgiving. The fact that he has shed his blood on the most ancient of Roman sites does not interfere with an interpretation of the event as a contemporary Calvary. From the Vatican, Pius XI has dispatched Cardinal Merry del Val to tell Mussolini in person that he is “clearly protected by God.” A strange God, this, who tells Violet Gibson to shoot Mussolini and then instructs the bullet not to kill him.

In Rome, expressions of worshipful adoration pour forth. A letter from Clara Petacci, aged fourteen, 8 April, 1926:

“Duce, my most beloved Duce, our life, our hope, our glory- how can there be a soul so wicked to try to deprive our beautiful Italy of her glittering destiny? Oh Duce, why wasn't I there? Why wasn't I able to strangle that woman assassin who wounded our Divine being... Duce, I would so love to rest my head on your chest, so that I might hear the living beats of Your great heart ...When I heard the news, I thought I would die because I love you deeply, like a little Fascist of the first hour...me, a small but ardent Fascist, with my favorite motto which sums up the love that my young feels for you: Duce, I offer my life to you!”

Unlike most schoolgirls, Clara Petacci will experience the realization of her heart-swelling fantasy. Six years after writing this letter, when she was just twenty, she will become Il Duce's lover. A decade later – after the premature deaths of one million Italians- on 28 April 1943, she offers up her life for him: slammed against a wall and shot. Her corpse is transported alongside her lover's to the Esso gas station at Paizzale Loreto in Milan- his head resting on her breast- before being strung up by the heels. Clara Petacci, the little Fascist, hanging like a prosciutto.

Violet Gibson died, 2 May, 1956, at 12:45 a.m. “She did not have much suffering and her passing was a peaceful one' Dr. Tennent wrote to the new Lord Ashbourne who had assumed the role of legal petitioner for her continued confinement at St. Andrews. There were, he added, “no matters outstanding with the accounting department.” When the National Health Service agreed to assume the financial burden of her care several years previously, she had lost the privilege of a private room and moved to a public ward. But even in death, her wishes- the disposal of her estate, her body, and her memory- were denied. Violet left money for a Requiem Mass at the Catholic cathedral of Northhampton but it was given in the far humbler surroundings of St. Gregory's, a local Catholic Church. She requested to be buried in the Catholic party of the Cemetery at St. Andrew's “with all the rights of the Catholic Mass." She was in fact interred at Kingsthorpe Cemetery, a dreary expanse of flatland butting up against a noisy through street of Northhampton.

There was no public announcement of Violet's death. There was no friend, no member of the family present at the burial. In her will, Violet set had set aside one hundred pounds for the erection of a gravestone. In this, as in everything else, she was short-changed. Above her grave, plot number 12411, is a bland cross in cheap gray quarry stone. It's inscription- “Violet Gibson, 1876-1956” is equally parsimonious: the punctuation is highly unusual, the result of the stonecutter following Ashbourne's text, which was communicated by telegram. Nothing follows the comma on Violet's gravestone, except the dates of her birth and death. Full Stop. Set in Stone. Her extraordinary story lies between the comma and the period.

The Honorable Violet Gibson deserved better.

Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport

London, 1902: In April Lenin and his wife persuaded the landlady of 30 Holford Square into taking them in as tenants. Although just a couple of minutes walk from the choking smoke and din of the slums of Kings Cross, the house was one in a row of respectable brick-built Victorian terraced houses fronted by iron railings and faced a communal garden square. In return for a shilling a week Lenin and Nadya had two small rooms on the first floor. The back room served as both kitchen and dining room and was where Nadya's mother slept when she joined them later that year. The front room was where Lenin worked and he and Nadya slept, crammed in with their books and writing materials. They bought some cheap furniture: two tables, two iron bedsteads, a couple of chairs and a few pieces of cutlery and crockery. They bought linoleum to cover the floors, but no pictures or decorations. They had to bring their coal and water up from the basement and dispose of their dirty dishwater in the yard out back. Nadya cooked as best she could on the open fire in their rooms or a tiny primus stove.

Their landlady was a paragon of bourgeois respectability; Where was "Mrs. Richter" (aka Nadya)'s wedding ring?, she asked. Whatever was "Dr. Richter" doing hanging curtains on a Sunday, or walking across Holford Square with an unwrapped loaf of French bread under his arm? She wasted no time telling them such things were not done in England. "Though completely unused to English ways", the Yeo's later insisted, they kept to themselves and were "good, quiet tenants", always respectful and paid their rent on time. "Mrs. Richter" was a sweet, kind lady who became very fond of their tabby cat, talked to it often, taught it to shake hands and meow good morning. As for the studious Dr. Richter, one could not fail to notice his highly educated manner and quickness of thought and action. "His face was alive with great intelligence," though in every other respect he seemed a "most ordinary little man."

As time went on, however, Mrs. Yeo became increasingly alarmed at the procession of foreigners with peculiar black beards coming in heavy topcoats for meetings in Dr. Richter's rooms. To her horror, they sat on the floor. Even more perplexing was the fact that they were all too poor to eat or drink and did nothing but sit and talk late into the night. Her neighbors didn't like all the comings and goings of suspicious foreigners in their neighborhood. Soon Lenin and his compatriots rented five rooms close by to serve as an editorial office for Iskra and for agents visiting from Europe. It served as a clearing house for illegal propaganda and a shop for producing illegal passports; an untidy and shambolic "crash-pad" with the smell of boiling soup and the stink of cigarettes pervading the air. Lenin visited every day for meetings but was quick to retreat to the Spartan and orderly conditions back at Holford Square.

On arriving in London, Lenin immediately accessed the facilities of the "richest library in the world", the domed reading room at the British Museum in Bloomsbury. It was his lifeline. His daily visits gave shape and routine to his life. Marx, Blanc, and Mazzini had all resorted to this oasis of peace and scholarship during their time in London. Officials at the British museum would come to remember the modest Russian as well. He had "an amazing capacity for work and simply swallowed books." No one else. they asserted, asked for such vast quantities.

A problem that made itself felt as soon as they arrived in London was the quality of Lenin and Nadya's English. They had problems attuning their ears to the peculiar cadences of the spoken language, especially as spoken by the working classes. He found three people- a clerk, a workman and an employee of the publishers George Bell and Sons to exchange Russian lessons for English. But the best way of learning the language was to go out and about and hear it spoken. The best place to do this, in Lenin's opinion, was Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park on a Sunday morning, an area designated for anyone desiring to speak in front of an impromptu audience. There Lenin listened intently to speakers at the atheist and socialist platforms, as well as the Christian evidence and Salvation Army ones. He may well have heard the young George Bernard Shaw who spoke often in defense of civil liberties in Hyde Park at that time but often he paid more attention to the crowds than speakers.

Contemporary London and its working people were of far more interest to Lenin that its museums and galleries, which he found tedious. After studying detailed maps of the city, he and Nadya went out exploring working class areas on foot; the filthy, winding back streets with washing strung across them, where pale, sickly children played in the gutter and drunken workmen consorted with prostitutes outside cheap public houses. When they got hungry and afford it, they ate in cheap restaurants and came to like fish and chips from the Little Inn or Adam's Chop House on Gray's Inn Road. He went to Whitechapel to see first hand how the immigrant Russo-Jewish poor lived. The traffic was extraordinary, the energy and vitality of London life - albeit capitalistic - thrilling. All round him Lenin could grasp at the raw material of socialist argument and mold it to his own purpose.

Although Lenin was not a drinker, he realized that the public house culture of London and its music halls was an important facet of working class life. It's culture intrigued him - not just in London but also in Munich, Paris, Zurich, and many of the other cities he visited. There was something about the subversiveness of the British music hall - in its use of innuendo and often savage satire to make fun of public figures and issues in the news- that particularly appealed.

Getting into the countryside was also important for Lenin in Nadya through-out their seventeen years of exile. Whenever the weather was fine, they sought out their favorite haunt, Primrose Hill. It was only sixpence on the bus from Kings Cross, and they could visit Karl Marx's grave in nearby Highgate cemetery before standing on the hilltop to view the "smoke wreathed city" stretched out below them. Sometimes they took sandwiches and went beyond the suburbs in search of field paths into the real English countryside.

Another essential component of Lenin's life in London was seeking out political debate. There was no shortage of clubs and discussion groups for foreign immigrants in the East End. He spoke once after a speech by the journalist and politician John Morley on foreign policy at the Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel:

"What is the use of you coming to the East End and talking about foreign policy? Go down to Limehouse or Shadwell and see how the people live. Their slums, bad food, low wages, impoverishment, degradation, and prostitution - that's where your foreign policy should lie. They are the victims of your capitalist organization."

By the time Lenin finished delivering an extended criticism of the English social system, everyone had taken notice of him and a heated but friendly debate ensued. But wherever he went around London, Lenin was scathing about speakers who "talked rot". To his mind, many educated British socialists were in fact supporters of the liberal bourgeoisie, isolated from the mass of proletariat. He dismissed trade unionism in Britain as parochial and petty but he was impressed by the class instincts of the British workers. Although he dad some contact with two members of the British Social Democratic Federation, he made no attempt to mix with other British socialists while he was in London. They remained largely oblivious to his presence in London. "Richter" was just one of many shadowy Russians who came and went at that time.
..........................................................................

Zurich, 1915-17: Lenin's mother died in Petrograd on July 25, 1915. Letters expressing his grief have not survived. Eventually he received a small share of what was left of his mother's estate, but now both he and Nadya had both lost the crucial financial support they had intermittently recieved from their mothers and their personal emotional links to Russia were now broken. Life in Zurich that winter became even more cheerless and impoverished. Lenin did not enjoy hanging around in cafes full of revolutionary wing-bags any more than he had elsewhere. He avoided emigrant clubs and stuck to a small circle of a dozen or so people. But he felt fettered. His circle seemed to be growing smaller by the day, the political life around him less and less intense with his Bolshevik group scattered in small pockets across Europe. Sometimes he ventured forth from the library to take part in discussions at the Zur Eintracht, where he could read the free newspapers and hold meetings in its lecture room. The Cafe Adler was another haunt. But perhaps the most famous venue favored by the eclectic mix of bohemians, exiles and emigres who haunted Zurich during the war years was the Cafe Odeon on Limmatquai. Here James Joyce, Albert Einstein, the young Benito Mussolini and even the legendary Mata Hari had savored the coffee and cake. Lenin went there to catch the latest of the six daily editions of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung and the international magazines.

Their new front rooms at 14 Spiegelgasse faced the Cabaret Voltaire, home since February to a new and anarchic form of entertainment, Dada. While he had no truck with futurism and cubism and other isms currently considered to be "the highest revelations of the artistic genius", the subversive nature of Dadas performance aroused Lenin's curiosity. "He must have heard our music and tirades every evening from across the street" wrote Hugo Ball. Richard Huelsenbeck recalled a visit by Lenin and Romanian painter Marcel Janko. Tristan Zara claimed to have exchanged ideas and played chess with Lenin. Hans Richter saw him often in the central library on Zahringerplatz.

Hans Richter recalled that the Swiss authorities seemed much more suspicious of the Dadists than they were of the "quiet, studious Russians." The Dadists, with their anarchic principles, "were capable of perpetrating some new enormity at any moment," whereas the Russians, in their own unostentatious little way, were merely "planning a world revolution".

It was hard for the Swiss police to keep tabs on them all, for by 1917 Switzerland was swarming with artists, revolutionaries, bohemians, and spies - from professionals based at the embassies to waiters, serving maids, and domestic staff in the hotels. They were bribed to watch, look and listen. Everything was reported, everything was supervised as agents circulated their daily reports, telephones were tapped, and "wastepaper baskets and blotting pad correspondence was sedulously reconstructed". No one, however, was taking much notice of Lenin; his deliberately inconspicuous lifestyle near a sausage maker on Spielelgassee was part of his tried and trusted conspiratorial method of blending into the background. The Austrian playwright Stefan Zweig who saw Lenin from time to time at the Cafe Odeon, later recalled wondering how this obstinate little man ever became so important

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

First published in 1934 and in print ever since, this book is considered to be one of the finest memoirs of the Great War. After an initial term at Somerville College (Oxford) in 1914, the author served as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse at home, on the island of Malta and in France for the rest of the war, during the course of which her fiance, brother and two of her closest male companions were annihilated. "Only a short time ago," she writes about half-way through the book, "sitting in the elegant offices of the British Red Cross Society in Grosvenor Court, I read in the official Report by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St. John the following words - - a little pompous, perhaps, like the report itself, but doubtless written with the laudable intention of reassuring the anxious nursing profession:

'The V.A.D. members were not...trained nurses; nor were they entrusted with trained nurses except on occasions when the emergency was so great that no other course was open."

And there, in that secure, well-equipped room, the incongruous picture came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle of hell during the 'emergency' of March 22nd, 1918, and gazing, half hypnotized, at the disheveled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy khaki, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splits by filthy blood-stained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited me - and all the equipment I had for attacking it was one pair of forceps standing in a potted-meat glass half full of methylated spirits,. For a moment my sword of Damocles, the ever-brooding panic, came perilously near to descending on my head. And then, unexpectedly, I laughed, and the danger disappeared... I had to bombard the half-frantic dispensary for nearly an hour for surgical instruments, tourniquets, bandages, splints, wool, gauze, peroxide, eusal and saline. When I returned to the ward and its forty desperately wounded men I found to my relief that a Sister had been sent to help me. Though only recently out from England she was level-headed and competent and together we started on the daily battle against time and death which was to continue, uninterrupted for weeks, for what seemed an eternity."

For Vera Brittain the war was a shattering experience- senseless and incompetent slaughter on a massive scale- its conclusion no cause for celebration, but of infinitely renewable anguish, anger, sleeplessness and despair. But she returned to Somerville, obtained her degree in History and embarked haphazardly into a life of journalism and political action.

By the end of 1922, after three months in Kensington, I had had more than enough of being the unmarried daughter at home. It was not, certainly, as an exasperating experience as it would have been in the provincial town of Buxton where I grew up, where my mother's acquaintances would have expressed an endless patronizing solicitude for my failure to achieve marriage ten years after 'coming out', combined with charitable references to the fortunate compensation of my literary interests. But I was clearly enough aware that parents brought up in the nineteenth century tradition would have preferred, not unnaturally, a happily married daughter producing grandchildren to a none-too-triumphant Oxford graduate floundering unsuccessfully in that slough of despond which lies just inside the gateway of every path to a literary life. So I welcomed the late December day when I could remove my disappointing spinsterhood, together with my typewriter and rejected manuscripts, to the penurious but un-humiliating independence of Bloomsbury.

The Doughty Street studio consisted of one large room lighted only by windows in the roof, and divided by thin matchboard partitions into two tiny bedrooms, a minute sitting room, and a 'kitchen' so small that two of us and the gas-cooker could not comfortably inhabit it at the same moment. As the partitions reached only just above our heads, every sound made in one room was completely audible in all the others, so that when I coached my Welsh graduate in the sitting room, Winifred, temporarily banished to her bedroom, had to sit perfectly still for an hour without rustling her papers, sneezing or coughing. As the roof was so high, and the sunless rooms were fitted only with infinitesimal penny - in - the - slot gas stoves, the studio was always freezing cold unless we lighted a fire in the huge 'passage' grate, which consumed a sackful of coal in an afternoon and emitted volumes of smoke that covered ourselves and everything else with a black layer of sooty dust.

Each morning a scanty breakfast was brought to us on a tray by the blowsy, henna-haired housekeeper from the lodging-house off which the studio was built. Luncheon was always 'eaten out' in a restaurant in Theobald's Road, but we bought and prepared our own supper and tea. Every moment not required for meals or cleaning was strenuously devoted to work, and hour after hour, for weeks on end, we crouched with cold feet and red noses on either side of the flickering, sitting-room gas-fire, drafting the final sections of our novels, getting up for speeches, preparing classes, correcting childish essays, and writing scores of permanently home-less articles.

Superficially it was a supremely uncomfortable existence- and yet I felt that I had never before known what comfort was. For the first time, I knew the luxury of privacy, the tranquil happiness of being able to come and go just as I wished without interference or supervision. There had been no privacy in Victorian or Edwardian childhood, and from the age of thirteen to that of twenty-seven, I seemed to have lived in public. At school I had gone to bed and got up in dormitories, walked in 'crocodiles', read and worked in the company of others; nothing, perhaps, is still so oppressive in traditional boarding-school life as the inability of a boy or girl ever to be quite alone.

Buxton, no doubt, could hardly have been called community life, for I had the physical seclusion of a bedroom to myself, but it certainly did not allow privacy of any other kind; no member of that pre-war provincial 'set' could hope to live to herself even if adult, and local and family searchlights had played upon the dearest hopes, the most intimate relationships, of every 'young person.' As for the next seven years, four in the Army and three in college, they had represented community life at its most complete. Astonished relatives who occasionally dropped by to see me wondered 'how on earth I could stand' such 'Bohemian' discomfort, but to me it was Paradise.

.....................

It was, ironically enough, as much my experience in the Bethnal Green constituency as my trip to Central Europe which was responsible for our decision to quit the Liberal Party. For the first time, during those elections of 1922 and 1923, I came into contact with the homes of the poor, and learnt, as my provincial middle-class upbringing had never permitted me to learn, the semi-barbarous condition - - intensified beyond calculation by the War and its consequences- under which four-fifths of the population are obliged to lie in a confused and suffering world. I saw the men fighting one losing battle against economic depression and increasing unemployment, while to women waged another against excessive procreation combined with an accumulation of wasteful, interminable domestic detail, and the babies fought yet a third against under-nourishment, over-clothing, perpetual dirt and inadequate fresh air and sunshine.

I realized, with a shock of poignant revelation, the kinship between the men and women in these wretched homes, and the Tommies whom I had nursed for four calamitous years. The same brave, uncomplaining endurance were there, the same rough, compassionate kindness to one another in circumstances under which a complete absence of courage and humor and compassion might well have been understood and forgiven.

This new knowledge did not make me philanthropically minded - the attempt to alleviate such anxious misery with soup and blankets seemed to me mere self-deception, an endeavor to delude one's intelligence into a sense of having done one's duty and being thenceforth absolved from further responsibility. But it made me politically minded once and for all; I knew that for the rest of my life I could never again feel free from the obligation of working with those who were trying to change the social system that made this grim chaos possible, and I began to turn more definitely towards the Party which represented [ in those days] the spirit as well as the substance of that democracy to whose future I was forever bound by the common experiences of War.

Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch

Mr. Aaronovitch reports and exposes the fallacies of a great number of conspiracy theories beginning with what is perhaps the grand-daddy of them all in modern times, The Protocols of the Elder's of Zion and which remains in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways a foundation for subsequent theories such as FDR's supposed foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the activities of the HUAC committees and Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1940s and in certain "9/11 Truther" circles today. Here is a limited representation of his concluding analysis.


If the preceding chapters have demonstrated anything, it must be that conspiracy theories originate and are largely circulated among the educated and the middle class. The imagined model of an ignorant, priest-ridden peasantry or proletariat, replacing religious or superstitious belief with equally far-fetched notions of how society works, turns out to be completely wrong. It has typically been the professors, the university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants who have concocted and disseminated the conspiracies. One thinks here of the readers of the New York Review of Books settling down with Professor Richard H. Popkin's theory of the two Oswalds, the BBC's Chronicle programs about the lost blood-lines of the Merovingian descendants of Jesus Christ ( and Dan Brown's phenomenal best seller The Da Vicinci Code) or British MP's breathless retailing of anonymous insider tip-offs about murderous British intelligence agencies. Suburban backyard barbecues in America are often apt to sound like a convention of spooks!


Once, while I was writing this book, I dined with a senior member of the drama department at the University of Winchester. I told him that one of the things I found interesting about conspiracy theories was the need for a narrative that they suggested. "Ah, yes," he said "You should read Mamet."

"It is in our nature to dramatize," Mamet wrote in his fourth collection of essays. We need to construct, or have constructed, dramas and stories for ourselves. Therapists and psychoanalysts know the truth of this. Their patients, like the rest of us, invariably have a story about the inexplicable or mundane aspects of their lives. As Mamet points out, ' we will have a story even if it means giving characteristics to the elemental. So even the weather is personal and we both understand it and exploit it as dramatic, i.e., having a plot, in order to understand its meaning for the hero, which is to say, for ourselves.'

This is not some kind of occasional preference, done merely to keep ourselves entertained. Mamet observes that just as children use up the last of the day's energy jumping around, "the adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama - which is to say to order the universe into a comprehensible form. Our sundown play/film/gossip is the day's last exercise of that survival mechanism...We will have drama in that spot, and if it's not forthcoming we will cobble it together out of nothing." Biologists have suggested that the compulsion to create a story is a "cognitive imperative", creating indispensable explanations even when the causal beliefs that construct those explanations are mutually incompatible.

So we need a story and may even be programed to create it. But why are certain types and structures of story more successful, more satisfying than others? One possible answer is that a successful story either represents the way we think things should happen, or is the best explanation we can get of why they didn't. A New York fire chief asked to account for the various theories surrounding the collapse of the World Trade Center attributed them to the disappointment of people's belief in the omnipotence of the emergency services. "In the movies," he said, "its always wrapped up in the end." Or, As Norman Cohen puts it when discussing paranoid thought in his history of apocalyptic movements, people cannot accept "the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissension, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral".

The paradox is that, seen in this way, conspiracy theories are actually reassuring. They suggest that there is an explanation, that human agencies are powerful, and that there is order rather than chaos.... what if paranoia - classically viewed as the unwarranted belief that one is being persecuted - is actually the sticking plaster that we fix to a very different kind of wound? That of feeling ourselves to be of no importance whatsoever, and our lives (and especially our deaths) are of little real significance except to ourselves. Conspiracy theories may replace what the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz calls "the catastrophe of indifference."


There is a plausible argument to be made that, very often, conspiracy theories take root among the casualties of political, social or economic change. That they are derived from the concrete experience of modernity by losers who will not go softly into the night but instead rage against it. If it can be proved that there has been a conspiracy, which has transformed politics and society, then their defeat is not the product of their own inherent weakness or unpopularity, let alone their mistakes; it is due to the almost demonic ruthlessness of their enemy. The theories represent, in the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, "psychological opportunity for conspiracists to project and freely express unacceptable aspects of their own minds, making "the enemy" into a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensuous and luxury loving." This is certainly true of the character of many conspiracy theorists themselves and of the way in which, at various times, they have depicted Jews, Communists, Trotskyites and big corporations.

While the opponent has magic powers, the hero must match these powers or else be inevitably doomed to defeat. If its the later, then forces of good, though overwhelmed, have their excuse: we were robbed.

This psychic cop-out has always irritated dissidents who are not conspiracists, with writers like I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky in the United States and George Monbiot in the United Kingdom urging fellow radicals not to effectively rule themselves out of the great leftist struggle by following the false trails of the theorists. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 were a "coward's fantasy", wrote Monbiot, "an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights." The response from various corners of the conspiracist world was that Chomsky and Monbiot had become self-appointed "gatekeepers" whose purpose was to police the dissident movement so that it didn't do too much damage to the corrupt Establishment.

The argument of conspiracists often suggests that the truth or otherwise of conspiracy theories is less important than their existence, because they are, properly analyzed, an expression of an underlying reality, representing "a not entirely unfounded suspicion that the normal order of things itself amounts to a conspiracy. So they are valid and 'true' even if they are themselves actually false." ( Peter Knight). They may be " an ideological mis-recognition of power relations but just because the theories are wrong does not mean they are not on to something; they ideologically address real structural inequities, and constitute a response to a withering civil society and the concentration of the ownership of the means of production." ( Mark Fenster).

Such relativism is fine as long as the conspiracist fantasy is concocted by the "right" side and aimed, more or less, at people of whom you disapprove. It becomes much more problematic when the theorist is someone who is seen as being repulsive or dangerous and/or whose targets are people like yourself.

If all narratives are relative, then we are lost. Widespread anti-Semitic fantasies may have reflected the plight of the Germans, may even have been their "soul's version of the truth" in the post 1918 period, but they were still fantasies, and the failure to counter them, or to see the fantasies as themselves creating terrible political realities, proved totally catastrophic. The "soul's version of the truth" doesn't care to distinguish between the scholarly and the slap-dash, the committed researcher and the careless loudmouth, the scrupulous and the demagogic. For that reason, it is hard to see how an insistence on "proper events" can ever be said to be dogmatic, or the refusal to insist can be anything other than treacherous.

A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson

Through-out World War II nearly one million Soviet citizens of several faiths and ethnicities- deserters from the Red Army or enlisted from conquered territories- served the Germans, most in non-military roles. The best estimate for Muslim participation is 250,000, with most in military roles; Dagestanis, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ossetians, men from the North Caucasus who felt loyal to their homeland and religion rather than to the Soviet Empire. Nazi ambitions in this region were simple. The cities of Baku and Grozny were then key centers of oil production and Germany had plans to take them over but not in the form of a colony. That let the Nazis play the role of liberators and many locals, glad to see someone stand up to their communist oppressors, treated them as such.


The preference for enlisting Muslims- styled "Turkic peoples"- in the Wehrmacht was clear from the start. Hitler himself backed the policy. He warned the military leadership to be careful in setting up military units of subjected peoples but allowed for an exception: "I don't see any risk if one actually sets up pure Mohammedan units." Soon the SS wanted these non-German troops and established the East Turkestani Armed Formation which fought partisan groups in Ukraine, Greece, Italy as well as putting down the Warsaw city uprising in 1994.

A Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, or Ostministerium, was established in Berlin, headed by Gerhard von Mende, a remarkable linguist from Latvia, one of the world's authorities on Soviet and Central Asian politics. He wrote The National Struggle of the Turkic Peoples of Russia: A Contribution to the Nationalities Question in Soviet Russia. After some opposition to his appointment as a adjunct professor at Berlin University in 1937, he had embraced Nazis ideology and became a leading light in the articulation of anticommunist propaganda for various Nazis organizations. The Ostministerium represented itself a kind of shadow government of the Central Republics, laid out frameworks for the future, recruited the 'brightest and the best', all of which helped to secure the loyalties of the Muslim soldiers serving in the German Army.

Gerhard von Mende survived the war and, in fact, managed to arrange for thousands of Muslim soldiers and employees of his Ministry to surrender to the European allied forces rather than to the Russians and subsequently helped get them out of post-war detention and to find them jobs, principally in the CIA front Radio Liberty where he continued his anticommunist propaganda (directed at the Central Asian Soviet Republics) though mostly in the interests of the new government of West Germany whose policy diverged on a few points from that of the Americans. Gerhard thought that truth was the best propaganda with respect to the peoples of Central Asia while many operatives from the CIA were more interested in confrontation and sabotage, aggressive rather than passive measures to overthrow the Soviet Empire.

Von Menke was the first to try to establish the Mosque in Munich as a cultural and religious center for the many "Turkic People" stranded in Germany after the war. However, once a clear and public understanding of the Holocaust, and the role of the Ostministerium in it was exposed in the United States by the work of the noted scholar Raul Hilberg, Gerhard's position at Radio Liberty and his control of the Mosque project was seriously undermined. Radio Liberty was merged with Radio Free Europe, the control of the Mosque in Munich and various over-arching institutes, conferences, councils and publishing houses representing Muslim religion and culture in Germany, and through-out Europe for that matter, fell into the hands of various ambitious and largely independent elite groups loosely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and funded by the government of Saudi Arabia.

Today, roughly 2 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, most of them Muslim. Another 1.5 million Muslims from other parts of the world, especially Bosnia and North Africa, also make their home there. 10% of all the people in France are Muslim. Between fifteen to twenty million Muslims live in Western Europe as a whole, about four times the number living in the United States, which has roughly the same size population.

...............

In a small hotel on the edge of London in 2004, Mohammad Hawari was addressing a panel of men practicing the ancient art of Islamic jurisprudence. The men were helping European Muslims integrate into the West by reconciling the demands of Islam with the secular laws of their host countries. Because Islam regulates many temporal matters - such as finances, times for prayer, and food - the need for concrete advice is arguably greater than it is in most other religions. Questions range from the complex to the practical and the mundane. Hawari and the scholars were ready to provide the answers.

At this session, the panel had decided to tackle family life. Hawari, a prosperous scientist from the German city of Aachen, was addressing a key problem familiar to any modern parent or grandparent: sex. Muslim children, the sixty-three-year-old said, were being waylaid by the West's sexual revolution. They had to stay pure and chaste, saving sexual relations for marriage. It was a normal plea for traditional values, one that can be heard countless times a week in mosques, churches, and temples around the world.

Then came a disturbing turn in the discussion. The cause of the sexual revolution, Hawari informed the group, was Jews. They had a secret plan to takeover the world by weakening families of other faiths. This was no idle speculation on his part, Hawari told the scholars, all of them taking notes and listening attentively. He had found the proof: minutes of a meeting, which he now read aloud to the group.

"We should seek to collapse morals everywhere to facilitate our control. Freud is one of us. He will continue to high-light sexual relations in order for them to cease to be sacred in the eyes of youth, until their major concern becomes satisfying their sexual desire and then their morals collapse."

The citation came from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most notorious works of anti-Semitism in Western History. The protocols are purported to be an account of Jewish conspirators plotting to take over the world by undermining Western civilization. The book was the creation of czarist agents in the nineteenth century, who were at the forefront of a new, more dangerous form of anti-Semitism. Maybe more stunning than Hawari's use of the book was the response it elicited: nothing.

It was a meeting of the European Council for Fatwa and Research. The council is the most influential body involved in shaping Muslim religious opinion in Europe and, through a sister organization, in the United States. Its opinions are not binding, but they are available online and published in books, which are distributed to mosques throughout Europe. Imams take courses in the council's thinking and are advised to use its methods of argumentation when local worshipers raise questions. The council's role in Europe might seem like a bit of bad luck - perhaps a typical case of immigrants bringing with them the regressive social mores or traditions of their homeland. But that view would be mistaken. The council is a creation of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, a direct descendant of the Munich mosque.

Given the council's makeup, its members acceptance of such ideas is not surprising. Of its thirty-five members, two thirds are Muslim Brotherhood activists from the Middle East or Africa. Its head is Youssef Qaradawi, the man who helped rebuild the Brotherhood in the 1970s, considered the most influential and charismatic imam with a popular website and television show. His views are often considered mainstream or even progressive by Middle Eastern standards; he encourages women to work and permits music, which fundamentalist frown upon. But he also sanctions suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and the stoning of homosexuals.

For years, the Brotherhood pushed this kind of Islam in Europe, not only through the fatwa council but also at scores of conventions, seminars, and workshops. In most European countries Brotherhood groups are among the most influential - the Union of French Islamic Organizations, the Muslim Association of Britain, and the Islamic Community of Germany, with its ideological Turkish twin, Milli Gorus.

During his presidential campaign the Obama team appointed Mazen Asbahi as its Muslim outreach coordinator, although Asbahi had extensive contacts with Brotherhood organizations and was even the head of the Muslim Student Association, which was founded by people with ties to the Munich mosque. He resigned in 2008 only when the facts had been dug up by an online newsletter and published in a national newspaper. In power, the Obama administration has continued its predecessor's endorsement of Islamists. In January 2009, for example, the State Department sponsored a visit of German Muslim leaders to one of the bastions of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Like many Brotherhood-related groups, IIIT faded from public view after the 9/11 attacks but has experienced a renaissance recently. IIIT had been closely associated with a raft of Islamist organizations in northern Virginia that were raided by federal agents because of their suspected ties to extremist Islam. The groups in question were primarily problematic for ideological reasons- for trying to push the Brotherhood's vision of an Islamicized society, which clearly cannot work in a pluralistic culture. But instead of being challenged on the field of ideas, where they could easily be shown to hold beliefs antithetical to democratic ideals, they were accused of supporting criminal activities and were raided.

This had a double effect: it created the strange spectacle of the legal arm of the government trying desperately to prosecute these groups while, at the same time, the diplomatic arm held them up as models of integration. In addition, the failure to convict the Muslims was seen as an exoneration, almost a seal of approval!

Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown

In March 1871, Versailles, once the seat of the Sun King, became the capital of a defeated nation. France had declared war against Prussia on July 19, 1870. Six weeks later, Napoleon III had abdicated the imperial throne after surrendering his battered army to General von Moltke at Sedan. A treaty signed on February 26 in the grandly baroque Hall of Mirrors forced France to cede Alsace, the border province Louis XIV had annexed in 1697, and Lorraine, formerly known as Lothringen.


It was there at Versailles that France's provisional government established itself. A newly elected legislature, dominated by conservative gentry and provincial nobles, had no sooner convened that the Parisian populace, led by two hundred armed National Guard battalions, rose up against it, disputing its legitimacy and creating a rival government, in the Paris Commune. Civil war followed. Troops who had recently fought against Germany were now mustered against their countrymen, and ordered to besiege Paris only two months after the Germans had withdrawn their own batteries. They would reconquer the city for Versailles during a week of slaughter - May 21 through 28, 1871 - commemorated as la semaine sanglante.

Had France's defeat been a fortunate fall? Men prominent in the ranks of Napoleon III's left-wing opposition felt that the country had indeed been brought to its senses when brought to its knees. The beheld the future as an opportunity for France, freed from the shackles of Bonapartism, to leap forward, secularize civic institutions, and confer upon science the prestige in enjoyed across the Rhine. Germany's military success, according to Ernest Renan, an eminence at the College de France, was the product of "Germanic science, Germanic virtue, protestantism, philosophy, Luther, Kant." Higher educational institutions in France, he wrote, "have been too influenced by the Jesuits, their latin verse, and stale orations." Renan's Moral and Intellectual Reform validated the agenda of politicians who went on to found the Third Republic and, at eleven- year intervals - in 1887, 1889, 1900 - organized universal expositions that presented France as the champion of liberty, the impresario of science and technology, the genial host clasping nations in a spirit of exuberant cosmopolitanism. Those republicans known as "opportunists" who made policy in the late nineteenth century set their sights beyond Alsace-Lorraine. Their aim was to regain French stature on a world stage.

In other quarters, cosmopolitanism, far from reflecting well upon the State, was seen as profanity or treason. The many for whom military defeat followed by civil war had opened an abyss found safe purchase in the ideas of transcendence or innateness; in fervent celebration of Christ's bleeding heart, miracles, and saints relics (which multiplied), or in race. Pilgrims who assembled at sites sanctified by visitations from Mary heard bishop after bishop insist that France wanted salvation, not enlightenment. She had lost the war for having strayed from godliness and would find her way home again only as a penitent determined to right wrongs that descended from the original sin of eighteenth-century regicides. Salvation was also the cry and promise of nationalists, whose eloquent voices argued the sacredness of the soil, the virtue of roots, the infallibility of instinct, and the subversiveness of intellect. To them "fin - de - siecle" in most of its cultural manifestations signified decadence.

Although nativist gospel and a religion proclaiming its universality did not always occupy common ground, both the politics of bereavement embraced by the Church and the reverence for ancestral Frenchness exemplified by the witers Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras orientated believers of one kind or another toward the past. The past was, above all, a refuge from the dangerous mobility of the people and things.. It was stillness, order, containment. "The qualities I love in the past are its sadness, its silence, and most especially its fixity. Everything that moves disconcerts me, " wrote Barres (who must have reconciled his aversion to movement with his cut of " national energy").

The ideal of a guarded, self-referential nation schooled in the imperative of war flourished outside the pale of universal expositions. Among the subscribers to that ideal, revanchism* was synonymous with patriotism and Germany was an indispensable threat. But no less indispensable than the ogre next door was the alien within. Like Catholicism, nationalism had its ritual Judas. And these two forces converged as never before during the tumultuous nineties, in the Dreyfus Affair.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revanchism

The Ogre of Modernity by Frederick Brown

1889

Public comment on the Eiffel Tower did not argue a neat correlation between taste and politics. Some political conservatives liked it, some republicans found it abhorrent. Among the latter, for example, was Guy de Maupassant, one of whose characters ( in "La Vie errante") claims that he fled Paris because of the tower:

'... an unavoidable and tormenting nightmare... this tall, skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this disgraceful giant skeleton with a base that seems to support a formidable monument of Cyclops, an odious column of bolted metal which aborts into a thin, ridiculous profile of a factory smokestack.'

Maupassant joined forty-six artists and writers - "passionate lovers of the heretofore intact beauty of Paris" - in an open letter to the minister of public works protesting the flouting of French taste, art and history by the useless, monstrous Eiffel tower. The sacred city was being profaned by Mammon, the "mercantile fantasies" of an engineer fouling Paris's noble mind.


But like Joan of Arc, the Eiffel Tower came to reflect even more sharply the ideological rift in fin -de -siecle Paris. While republican newspapers published panegyrics, L'Univers , the Catholic daily inveighed against it: "the ill-proportioned tower would, like an arriviste forever climbing, always find true height beyond its reach. Naked and pointless, it was dwarfed in every respect by the Gothic church. And unlike republican engineers, medieval architects eschewed the worksite on Sundays... Had not the Prime Minister Pierre Tirard inaugurated the tower on Sunday? The ceremony was entirely civil: no benediction, not the least little prayer, not the least homage to the God of Heaven and Earth." Such hubris would not go unpunished, the paper prophesied. The vainglorious tower erected as a symbol of the Revolution would eventually fall or be eclipsed by a taller structure crowned with the sign of Redemption.

In Remarques sur l'exposition du centenaire, Melchior de Vogue imagined a dispute between Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower, with an ethereal moderator trying to reconcile the adversaries. "Things down below, heavy things," his moderator says to the cathedral towers, "your words are unjust and your view short-sighted. You, pious Gothic towers, why do you forbid your young sister to be beautiful? The Athenian Greek would have said what you say to her today, treating you as barbaric monsters, an insult to the sacred lines of the Parthenon." Then, addressing the Eiffel Tower: "And you, daughter of knowledge, curb your pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart. Your elder has been giving mankind what it needs: charity and hope. If you aspire to succeed her, arrange to found a temple of the new alliance, the accord of science and faith."

But the argument for rational cohabitation could hardly make itself heard. Scorn spoke too loudly, in too many voices. For aesthetes, Eiffel's towers was the grotesque child of the industrial age, desecrating a museological city. For Catholics, it was the sport of revolutionary Nimrods expounding their secularism in Notre-Dame's parish with phallic arrogance. And for nationalist zealots, who joined the chorus, the wrought-iron tower incommensurate with everything else in Paris was a tyrannical mutant, a foreigner lording it over the French past and future, a cosmopolite aspiring to universality, a potential instrument of treason. As such, it could only be the invention of "Israel".

"I am dismayed, but hardly surprised," wrote Jacques de Biez in The Jewish Question: France Cannot Be Their Promised Land, "Only a Jew could have submitted such a project. Touted as a sentinel guarding the homeland, the tower would, on the contrary, operated as a spy betraying Paris to "hordes from the East." The Jew who brought it with him from Germany" entered France in the bowels of a Trojan horse.

Master and disciple, co-founders of the National Anti-Semitic League of France, took turns decrying the tower. Eduouard Drumont drew a parallel between its erection and the trappings of victory worn by Byzantine emperors marching back to Constantinople after disastrous defeats at the hands of the Bulgars and Goths. With France's economy in shambles, the three-hundred-meter tower was a comparable deception. And whose interests did it serve? Those of the cosmopolite ( a codeword for 'Jew").

"We sons of France would like our mother to face our trials with dignity," wrote Drumont, whose nostalgia for the 'organic" city - the higgledy-piggledy of pre-industrial centuries sacrificed to Napoleaon III's abstractly conceived capital inspired his first book:


The Cosmopolites, who have substituted themselves for us, don't see things the same way. They absolutely insist that France appear before the universe covered in ridicule. Having been cruelly humiliated ( by Germany in 1871) isn't enough; it must make itself a laughing-stock by declaring that it has never been so great, so daunting, and rich. In all its imbecility, bad taste and foolish arrogance, the Eiffel Tower has risen for the express purpose of braying this message to heaven. It is the symbol of industrialized France. Its mission is to be insolent and stupid, like modern life, and to crush under its mindless height the Paris of our fathers, the Paris of memories, old houses and churches, Notre-Dame and the Arc de Triomphe, prayer and glory. This delirium of vanity signals the death throes of a society.


Drumont agreed with de Biez that the misbegotten tower sprang from the mind of a Semitic race that reflected not only its lust for money and power, but its natural penchant for deformity.

"With its instinctual hatred of all that has inspired our respect and enthusiasm, with its need to blaspheme, this race is incontestably gifted with eyes for perceiving the grotesque side of everything moving and beautiful. Jewish artists and writers show us the world through lenses that are dirty or askew, lenses that conform to their astigmatic brains and make everything on earth seem deformed, ill-fitted, incoherent, extravagant, and baroque."


Several years later, Drumont presented much the same argument, applying "modern" to Jews as a term of abuse. "In reality, Jews - these Moderns, these ultra-civilized people with their excesses, their fevers, their constant hungering - wreak more havoc wherever they go than Goths and Vandals." * Powerful beyond his numbers, the Jew, like Faust, rode on the devil.


The journalist who had predicted that hubris would not go unpunished was to credit himself with having been half right. He would see punishment inflicted four years later after Eiffel (who was not Jewish) unfurled a flag over the tower. The tower didn't fall, but its creator did, in a scandal that tainted not only him but the visionary whose accomplishment at Suez had inspired him to undertake epic tasks of his own - Ferdinand de Lesseps, both drowned in the red ink of the Panama Canal fiasco.


*It is ironic that the allegedly "Jewish" features of modernism in Drumont's portrait reappeared four years later as symptoms of degeneracy in Max Nordau's famous disquisition on modernism in art, literature, and mores, Degeneration. Nordau was a founder of the Zionist movement.