Russian students are protesting the lowering of educational standards and the rise of anti-Semitism at Moscow University.
Somebody pinch me, I’m dreaming.
The accusations, many of them circulated to Western universities by a small group of students in an effort to gain support, also strongly suggested that official anti-Western attitudes and creeping nationalism were undermining the quality of the teaching.
The students said, for example, that extremist views had become institutionalized and that conspiracy theories had infiltrated the teaching.
“The dean’s office has distributed a brochure to all students that approvingly quotes the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ blames Freemasons and Zionists for the world wars, and claims that they control U.S. and British policy and the global financial system,†the students wrote in one of their public appeals. “Studying conditions at the department are unbearable.â€
Of course the official line is that there is no anti-Semitism in Russia. Uh-huh. Never was. Of course.
Vladimir I. Dobrenkov, the dean of the sociology department, dismissed the complaints about the curriculum in a telephone interview, saying that the student claims “are full of hints, rumors and half-truths†and that no anti-Semitism has been taught or tolerated on campus.
Now that’s the Russia we know and hate!
Of course, it’s a Russian classic.
The Freemasons? The hell?
Daniel Pipes, in his book “Conspiracy”, identified two main traditions of conspiracist thinking (if you can call it that) in Western culture since the French Revolution. One is antisemitic. The other he calls the Secret Society tradition. This is a strand that holds there is a secret conspiracy to rule the world but it is not the Jews who are the conspirators, but a secret society of secular people. They generally focus on the Freemasons as the perps, tracing them back to the Illuminati of the 18th Century as well as the Masons of that era, and further back into the dim mists of time to the Templars (the Masons themselves like to think their group goes back to the builders of Solomon’s Temple).
Pipes identified a good deal of overlap of course, in that somebody who is susceptible to conspiracy theories about Jews is often susceptible to those about Secret Societies. They are not the same, however. Pipes noted that Pat Robertson got dinged for antisemitism when he put out a conspiracy theory book which actually had nothing to do with Jews, but was anti Secret Society instead. We are so accustomed to Jewish World Conspiracy theories that it is hard today to recognize the other tradition separately. Robertson’s book was apparently considered to be hiding its antisemitsm by discussing the Masons (and others) but Pipes finds these are two different traditions.
I highly recommend Pipes’ two books “The Hidden Hand” on conspiracy theories in the Middle East (ehre they are the common currency of political discourse among Arabs, Iranians, Turks and others) and “Conspriacy” on the more general development of such theories.