Look what I found :) pretty interesting...
A Millennium of Paranoia
by Daniel Pipes
Wall Street Journal
April 26, 1995
News reports about the Michigan Militia and other extreme-right groups belonging to the so-called Patriot Movement, allegedly connected to the bombing in Oklahoma City, portray them as a phenomenon of the past few years. A New York Times story, for instance, traces the groups back no further than 1983.
But their political views and psychology are part of a much longer history. The Patriot groups primarily see the world in terms of conspiracy theories: the Federal government is conspiring to deny Americans their constitutional freedoms; Zionists are conspiring to control the government, as are foreign states. Typical of this outlook, right-wing extremists claim that the Federal government staged the Oklahoma City blast, as a way of winning sympathy and justifying a crackdown on Patriot groups.
This obsession with conspiracies derives from a very old legacy of European and American thinking. Only by seeing the groups in this light can we understand who they are, what menace they pose, and how to deal with them.
The West hosts two main conspiracy theories: one, mainly right-wing, fears that Jews seek world hegemony; the other, mainly left-wing, worries about secret societies such as the Jesuits and the Freemasons. Each of these phobias, in its furthest, most murky reaches, goes back to the Crusades, the Christian wars between 1096 and 1291 that sought to conquer the Holy Land.
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http://www.danielpipes.org/267/a-millennium-of-paranoia
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