Ted Goertzel points out conspiracy is a meme that is easy to propagate and difficult to refute. Having long flourished in politics and religion, they have also spread into science and medicine. The central logic of the conspiracy meme is to question, often on speculative grounds, everything the establishment says or does and to demand immediate, comprehensive, and convincing answers to all questions.
Unconvincing answers are taken as proof of conspiratorial deception. When an alleged fact is debunked, the conspiracy meme often just replaces it with another fact. When the conspiracy meme is reinforced by a regular diet of alternative videos and one-sided literature, it can become a habitual way of thinking. People who believe in one conspiracy are more likely to believe in others. http://venitism.blogspot.com
According to reputable scholars, including Professor Norman Cohn in his noted book, Warrant for Genocide, the world-control myth of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was actually lifted from a 19th century French political satire in which the alleged plotters weren't even Jewish!
The Protocols served to rationalize anti-Semitism and genocide in Hitler's Germany. The myth of the Jewish world conspiracy permeated Hitler's thinking, and he linked Germany's economic hardship during the 1920s to the secret plot. Once in power, Hitler invoked the Protocols to justify anti-Semitic legislation and suppression of all opposition to the Third Reich. For example, the first anti-Semitic measure in April of 1933, a one-day boycott of Jewish stores, was deemed a defense against the Plan of Basel (another name for the Protocols).
Anti-Semites around the globe still actively circulate the Protocols. It has appeared in Japan - where bestsellers by antisemite Masami Uno cite them as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate
the world. The document is also favored by such U.S. right-wing extremists as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. The most common U.S. edition was published by hatemonger Gerald L. K. Smith's Christian Nationalist Crusade.
The Protocols have become a major source of Arab and Islamic propaganda. Between 1965 and 1967 alone, approximately 50 books on political subjects published in Arabic were either based on the Protocols or quoted from them. In 1980, Hazern Nuseibeh, the Jordanian delegate to the United Nations, spoke about the Protocols as a genuine document. In October of 1987 the Iranian Embassy in Brazil circulated copies of the Protocols, which it said belongs to the history of the world.
During the 1980s Muslim groups peddled the forgery worldwide. The Muslim Student Associations at Wayne State University in Michigan and at the University of California at Berkeley disseminated the document. American Black Muslim groups have sold it. The Protocols were for sale at an Islamic exhibition in Stockholm and in London's Park Mosque, and during a 1986 conference sponsored by the Islamic Center of Southern California the Protocols were prominently displayed. Based on a perverse interpretation of the Protocols, the Saudi Arabian government blamed Israel for an attack on a synagogue in Istanbul in 1986.
The conspiracy meme flourishes best in politics, religion, and journalism, where practitioners can succeed by attracting followers from the general public. It isn't essential that practitioners actually believe the theory; they may just find it plausible and useful to raise doubts and discredit their competitors. But this strategy should not be enough for scientists. Scientific findings are just that - findings, not speculations about undiscovered goings-on. These findings must be replicable by other scientists.
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