Marisa Linton - 19 APril 2016 - Conspiracy and Terror in the French Revolution

Speaker: Dr Keith Kahn-Harris - Sociologist and writer The term 'denialism' has come to be applied to a cluster of 'alternative' forms of knowledge, including Holocaust denial, global warming denial, anti-vaxxers, 911 conspiracism, creationism and more. In my forthcoming book Denial: The Unspeakable Truth, I argue that denialism arose in modernity as a result of a process in which, post-enlightenment, certain desires and political projects were rendered 'unspeakable' and impossible to legitimate publicly. Denialism is therefore a covert forms of advocating for and legitimating certain courses of action and ways of being in the world. The 'alternative' to denialism is , therefore, a dystopian prospect; a world in which the unspeakable becomes speakable again. This alternative is more than a hypothetical possibility. There are signs of a transition occurring from denialism to 'post-denialism'. Post-denialism, embodied in the discourse of Donald Trump, eschews the masquerade of science and scholarship that defines denialism, in favour of a visceral kind of quasi-acknowledgement of that which is denied. This may signal a weakening of the boundaries of the speakable and a concomitant shift in the language of political possibility. Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College an associate lecturer at Birkbeck College, and a Fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception in the Alison Richard Building foyer. This event is being hosted by the Conspiracy & Democracy research project, a five-year project funded by The Leverhulme Trust and based at CRASSH. For further details about the event, please contact the project administrator, Rachael Taylor, here.

A public lecture with Scott Radnitz (University of Washington) Abstract This talk asks how conspiracy theories operate in partially democratic or non-democratic settings. Elites in these political systems are believed to strategically use conspiracies to distract, confound, and demobilize the public, yet cynical citizens often independently suspect their own leaders of being complicit in conspiracies. Conspiracy theories in weakly institutionalized societies thus highlight a paradox of political trust: Conspiracy belief involves both credulousness (toward the claimant) and suspicion (of the putative villain). This analysis uses original surveys of Georgia and Kazakhstan to understand how people reconcile official conspiracy claims with distrust of the state. Survey experiments test how they weigh official claims or denials against preexisting biases in determining culpability, and whether exposure to official conspiracy claims motivates pro-regime or repressive policy preferences. The results suggest that people are influenced more by commonsense judgments than elite claims about conspiracy, and that conspiratorial rhetoric does not necessarily translate into political support. Biography Scott Radnitz is Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington. He does research on the post-Soviet region, covering topics such as protests, authoritarianism, informal networks, and identity. His book, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2010. Articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Policy commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Slate, and the Monkey Cage/Washington Post blog. He is currently writing a book on the political uses of conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet region. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. No registration required. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/. Enquiries - conspiracy@crassh.cam.ac.uk

A public lecture with Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (King's College London) Abstract Zia-Ebrahimi builds on recent comparative research on antisemitism and Islamophobia to argue that the two display similar dynamics in representing their target population as a different and antagonistic race (a process referred to as ‘racialization’). His research suggests that conspiracy theories of the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ type, and their Islamophobic equivalent, the ‘Islamisation of Europe’ type, are powerful enablers of racialization, something that the literature has so far neglected. To show the similar dynamics of what he calls ‘conspiratorial racialization’, Zia-Ebrahimi provides a textual comparison between The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab axis (2005). Biography Reza Zia-Ebrahimi is a Senior Lecturer in History at King’s College London. His work is situated at the juncture between global intellectual history and ethnic studies. He has worked on the development of dislocative nationalism in Iran in the period 1860-1979, focusing on the hybridisation of European ideas of nation and race by Iranian intellectuals. Currently, his research centres on a parallel study of antisemitism and Islamophobia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The incidence of conspiracy thinking on strategies of racialisation is at the heart of this new research agenda. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. No registration required. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/. Enquiries - conspiracy@crassh.cam.ac.uk

A public lecture with Ilya Yablokov (University of Leeds) This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/.

A public lecture with Dr Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania)

A public lecture with Dr Ieva Jusionyte (Harvard University) Abstract Guns and Mosquitoes: How Media Makes Emergency and Routine on the Argentine Border Drawing from ethnographic research with news journalists in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, this talk will examine the role of the media in producing, circulating, and contesting conspiracy narratives. From the 1990s, when securitization and militarization went hand-in-hand with sensationalist portrayals of the region as a haven of organized crime and terrorism, to the panics caused by the spread of tropical disease–first yellow fever, then dengue–over a decade later, local journalists in towns along the Argentina’s northern edge have remained mostly silent. Off the record, the media in the Province of Misiones has been fiercely criticizing the complicity of major Argentine news outlets in vilifying the border area–a process, which they saw as being driven by the interests of political and economic elites in Buenos Aires as well as in Washington, D.C. In this talk, I will discuss the disagreements about the events and their interpretations between local, national, and global media as a lens through which to understand social anxieties and insecurities in a historically marginalized and criminalized border region.

A public lecture with Ute Caumanns (University of Düsseldorf) Abstract The lecture considers the relevance of visuality and visual sources in conspiracy theory research. It argues that conspiracy theories are meant to be disseminated amongst a given public. To achieve this, they are communicated not only through written texts, but also with the help of speech and visualization. It is open to question, whether graphic images and visual representation can contribute to a chronological classification of conspiracy theory including pre-modern history. The presentation focusses on post-war Eastern Europe, where to – following the Moscow Purge Trials of the late 1930s – the model of Stalinist show trials was transferred. Against the background of historical case studies from Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Poland and Eastern Germany, show trials are presented as performative acts as well as (multi)media events. Onstage, they offer an elaborate and refined narrative – in order to destroy someone politically and morally by means of fabricated recriminations, but also as a means to reinterpret history in conspiratorial terms. Biography Ute Caumanns teaches History at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany (Dep. of History and Cultures in Eastern Europe). She holds a PhD in East European History from the University of Düsseldorf. For her dissertation she focused on political Catholicism in interwar Poland analysing the Jesuit press. Between 1996 and 2000 she was Researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, working on a case study on Public Health in the Russian Part of partitioned Poland, 1815-1915. Since 1999 she focuses also on conspiracy theories (Verschwörungstheorien. Anthropologische Konstanten – historische Varianten, coed. Mathias Niendorf, Osnabrück 2001; „Der Teufel in Rot. Trockij und die Ikonographie des „jüdischen Bolschewismus“ im polnisch-sowjetischen Krieg, 1919/1920“ in: zeitenblicke 10, 2 [22.12.2011], online available at http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2011/2/Caumanns/index_html [last access 04/01/2017]; Wer zog die Drähte? Verschwörungstheorien im Bild, coed. Lars Gronau, Christian Lange, Tim Mörsch, Düsseldorf 2012). Her present project on show trials in East Central Europe deals with conspiratorial narrative, performative and media aspects (“Der Feind im Innern. Stalinistische Schauprozesse und Verschwörungsdenken im Kalten Krieg“ in INDES. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 2015, 4, 80-87; „Verschwörungsdenken in der politischen Führung Polens im Kalten Krieg. Bierut, Berman, Werfel und der ‚Prozess der Generäle’“ in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2016, 181-194). In 2014/2015 she was heading the student project Schauprozesse. Inszenierung und Medialisierung politischer Justiz in Osteuropa, online-exhibition available December 2015-December 2018 at http://www.schauprozesse.de.

A public lecture with Dr Federico Finchelstein (The New School, New York). Abstract Dr Finchelstein will analyze the history and memories of the Dirty War in Argentina after 1983. He will especially focus on the 'dictatorial memories' of the right and the extreme right. These memories were essentially defined by its conspiratorial takes on the recent history of violence in the country. Dr Finchelstein will stress how transnational and transcontextual histories of genocide played a key in first defining the ideology of the perpetrators during the Dirty War and then in the post-dictatorial conspiratorial reformulations of the past. Biography Professor Finchelstein is the author of five books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His forthcoming book is: From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017). His last book, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War (2014), focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascism and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. His previous book, Transatlantic Fascism (2010), studies the global connections between Italian and Argentine fascism.More than 50 academic articles and reviews by Mr. Finchelstein, on subjects including fascism, Latin American, American and European populism, genocide, and anti-Semitism, have been published in books and specialized peer-reviewed journals in a number of languages. He has been a contributor to major American, European, and Latin American newspapers and news media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Reuters, Mediapart (France), El Diario (NYC) Clarin (Argentina) and Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil).

A public lecture with Dr James Harris (University of Leeds). Abstract Between the winter of 1936 and the autumn of 1938, approximately three quarters of a million Soviet citizens were subject to summary execution. More than a million others were sentenced to lengthy terms in labour camps. Commonly known as 'Stalin's Great Terror', it is also among the most misunderstood moments in the history of the twentieth century. The Terror gutted the ranks of factory directors and engineers after three years in which all major plan targets were met. It raged through the armed forces on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The wholesale slaughter of party and state officials was in danger of making the Soviet state ungovernable. The majority of these victims of state repression in this period were accused of participating in counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Almost without exception, there was no substance to the claims and no material evidence to support them. By the time the terror was brought to a close, most of its victims were ordinary Soviet citizens for whom 'counter-revolution' was an unfathomable abstraction. In short, the Terror was wholly destructive, not merely in terms of the incalculable human cost, but also in terms of the interests of the Soviet leaders, principally Joseph Stalin, who directed and managed it. The Great Fear presents a new and original explanation of the Stalin's Terror based on intelligence materials in Russian archives. It shows how Soviet leaders developed a grossly exaggerated fear of conspiracy and foreign invasion and lashed out at enemies largely of their own making. Biography James Harris is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (1999) and co-author (with Sarah Davies) of Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order (2015). He co-edited (with Sarah Davies) Stalin: A New History (2005), and edited Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin (2013). He is currently writing a book on the origins of the Communist dictatorship

A public lecture by Professor Sir Richard Evans. Abstract After Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the conservative regimes of the Restoration quickly developed a paranoid suspicion of conspiracies which, they feared, were being hatched to overthrow them. For their part, democrats across Europe formed secret societies like the carbonari, while groups of junior army officers from Spain to Russia plotted to remove Restoration governments and drive the programme of the French Revolution forward. This lecture asks why the politics of the 1820s were so dominated by conspiracy, and attempts to fit the dynamics of plot and counter-plot into the larger framework of the history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the modern age. Biography Sir Richard Evans FBA is Regius Professor Emeritus of History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. He is Principal Investigator in the Leverhulme Programme Grant 'Conspiracy and Democrary' at CRASSH. His latest book, 'The Politics of Power: Europe 1815-1914', will be published by Penguin Books on 1 September 2016.