The British government has been training a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”, leaked US embassy cables have revealed.

By Fariha Karim and Ian Cobain for the Guardian

Members of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), which has been held responsible for hundreds of extra-judicial killings in recent years and is said to routinely use torture, have received British training in “investigative interviewing techniques” and “rules of engagement”.

Details of the training were revealed in a number of cables, released by WikiLeaks, which address the counter-terrorism objectives of the US and UK governments in Bangladesh. One cable makes clear that the US would not offer any assistance other than human rights training to the RAB – and that it would be illegal under US law to do so – because its members commit gross human rights violations with impunity.

Since the RAB was established six years ago, it is estimated by some human rights activists to have been responsible for more than 1,000 extra-judicial killings, described euphemistically as “crossfire” deaths. In September last year the director general of the RAB said his men had killed 577 people in “crossfire”. In March this year he updated the figure, saying they had killed 622 people.

The RAB’s use of torture has also been exhaustively documented by human rights organisations. In addition, officers from the paramilitary force are alleged to have been involved in kidnap and extortion, and are frequently accused of taking large bribes in return for carrying out crossfire killings.

However, the cables reveal that both the British and the Americans, in their determination to strengthen counter-terrorism operations in Bangladesh, are in favour of bolstering the force, arguing that the “RAB enjoys a great deal of respect and admiration from a population scarred by decreasing law and order over the last decade”. In one cable, the US ambassador to Dhaka, James Moriarty, expresses the view that the RAB is the “enforcement organisation best positioned to one day become a Bangladeshi version of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation”.

In another cable, Moriarty quotes British officials as saying they have been “training RAB for 18 months in areas such as investigative interviewing techniques and rules of engagement”. Asked about the training assistance for the RAB, the Foreign Office said the UK government “provides a range of human rights assistance” in the country. However, the RAB’s head of training, Mejbah Uddin, told the Guardian that he was unaware of any human rights training since he was appointed last summer.

The cables make clear that British training for RAB officers began three years ago under the last Labour government.

However, RAB officials confirmed independently of the cables that they had taken part in a series of courses and workshops as recently as October, five months after the formation of the coalition government. Asked whether ministers had approved the training programme, the Foreign Office said only that William Hague, the foreign secretary, and other ministers, had been briefed on counter-terrorism spending.

The US ambassador explains in the cables that the US government is “constrained by RAB’s alleged human rights violations, which have rendered the organisation ineligible to receive training or assistance” under laws which prohibit American funding or training for overseas military units which abuse human rights with impunity.

Human rights organisations say the RAB cannot be reformed, noting that its human rights record has deterioriated still further in the last 12 months. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly described the RAB as a government death squad.

Brad Adams, the organisation’s Asia director, said: “RAB is a Latin American-style death squad dressed up as an anti-crime force. The British government has let its desire for a functional counter-terrorism partner in Bangladesh blind it to the risks of working with RAB, and the legitimacy that it gives to RAB inside Bangladesh. Furthermore, it is not clear that the British government has ever made it a priority at the highest levels to tell RAB that if it doesn’t change, it will not co-operate with it.”

Amnesty International has also repeatedly condemned the RAB, while the Bangladeshi human rights organisation Odhikar has painstakingly documented the RAB’s involvement in extra-judicial killings and torture since the creation of the force in March 2004.

Asked to comment on the rights groups’ concern about the RAB, the Foreign Office said: “We do not discuss the detail of operational counter-terrorism cooperation. Counter-terrorism assistance is fully in line with our laws and values.” At least some of the British training has been conducted by serving British police officers, working under the auspices of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), which was established in 2007 to build policing capacity and standards. Recent courses for RAB have been provided by officers from West Mercia and Humberside Police.

Asked whether it believed it was appropriate for British officers to be training members of an organisation condemned as “a government death squad”, and whether courses in investigative interviewing techniques might not render torture more effective, an NPIA spokesman said the courses had been approved by the government and by the Association of Chief Police Officers.

“The NPIA has given limited support to the Bangladeshi Police and the RAB in technical areas of policing such as forensic awareness, management of crime scenes and recovery of evidence. Throughout the training we have emphasised the importance of respecting the human rights of witnesses, suspects and victims.”The purpose of our sanctioned engagement is to support the development and improvement of professional policing that supports democratic, human rights-based practices linked to the rule of law in countries that may have different laws, faiths and policing practices from our own.”

It is understood that there have been disagreements within the Foreign Office about the British government’s involvement with the RAB. Some officials have argued that the partnership with the RAB is an essential component of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy in the region, while others have expressed concern that the relationship could prove damaging to Britain’s reputation.

Successive Bangladeshi governments have promised to end the RAB’s use of murder. The current government promised in its manifesto that it would end all extra-judicial killings, but they have continued following its election two years ago.In October last year, the shipping minister, Shahjahan Khan, speaking in a discussion organised by the BBC, said: “There are incidents of trials that are not possible under the laws of the land. The government will need to continue with extra-judicial killings, commonly called crossfire, until terrorist activities and extortion are uprooted.”

In December last year the high court in Dhaka ruled that such killings must be brought to a halt following litigation by victims’ familes and human rights groups, but they continue on an almost weekly basis. Most of the victims are young men, some are alleged to be petty criminals or are said to be left-wing activists, and the killings invariably take place in the middle of the night.

In the most recent “crossfire” killings, the RAB reported that it had shot dead Mohammad Mamun, 25, in the town of Tangail, shortly after midnight on Monday, and that 90 minutes later its officers in Dhaka, 50 miles to the south, had shot dead a second man, Taku Alam, 30. Today the RAB announced it had shot dead a 45-year-old man, Anisur Rahman, said to be a member of the Communist party in the west of the country.

See the paper: State and Terrorist Conspiracies

For additional analysis, see here.

By Michel Bauwens for the P2P Foundation

Analysis:

(nearly quoted in full)

“Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy:

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.

His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.

He illustrates this theoretical model by the analogy of a board with nails hammered into it and then tied together with twine:

First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails…Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy… Conspirators are often discerning, for some trust and depend each other, while others say little. Important information flows frequently through some links, trivial information through others. So we expand our simple connected graph model to include not only links, but their “importance.” … Return to our board-and-nails analogy. Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The “importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies in general won’t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes from conspiracy to conspiracy.

Such a network will not be organized by a flow chart, nor would it ever produce a single coherent map of itself (without thereby hastening its own collapse). It is probably fairly acephalous, as a matter of course: if it had a single head (or a singular organizing mind which could survey and map the entirety), then every conspirator would be one step from the boss and a short two steps away from every other member of the conspiracy. A certain amount of centralization is necessary, in other words (otherwise there is no conspiracy), but too much centralization makes the system vulnerable.

To use The Wire as a ready-to-hand example, imagine if Avon Barksdale was communicating directly with Bodie. All you would ever have to do is turn one person — any person — and you would be one step away from the boss, whose direct connection to everyone else in the conspiracy would allow you to sweep them all up at once. Obviously, no effective conspiracy would ever function this way. Remember Stringer Bell’s “is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?” To function effectively, the primary authority has to be disassociated from all other members of the conspiracy, layers of mediation which have to be as opaque as possible to everyone concerned (which a paper trail unhelpfully clarifies). But while the complexity of these linkages shield the directing authority from exposure, they also limit Avon Barksdale’s ability to control what’s going on around him. Businesses run on their paperwork! And the more walls you build around him, the less he might be able to trust his lieutenants, and the less they’ll require (or tolerate) him.

This, Assange reasons, is a way to turn a feature into a bug. And his underlying insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker theorizing).

His thinking is not quite as abstract as all that, of course; as he quite explicitly notes, he is also understanding the functioning of the US state by analogy with successful terrorist organizations. If you’ve seen The Battle of Algiers, for example, think of how the French counter-terrorist people work to produce an organizational flow chart of the Algerian resistance movement: since they had overwhelming military superiority, their inability to crush the FLN resided in their inability to find it, an inability which the FLN strategically works to impede by decentralizing itself. Cutting off one leg of the octopus, the FLN realized, wouldn’t degrade the system as a whole if the legs all operated independently. The links between the units were the vulnerable spots for the system as a whole, so those were most closely and carefully guarded and most hotly pursued by the French. And while the French won the battle of Algiers, they lost the war, because they adopted the tactics Assange briefly mentions only to put aside:

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?…We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to.

This is the US’s counterterrorism strategy — find the men in charge and get ’em — but it’s not what Assange wants to do: such a program would isolate a specific version of the conspiracy and attempt to destroy the form of it that already exists, which he argues will have two important limitations. For one thing, by the time such a conspiracy has a form which can be targeted, its ability to function will be quite advanced. As he notes:

“A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence the actions of the state is near its end. To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with.”

By the time a cancer has metastasized, in other words, antioxidents are no longer effective, and even violent chemotherapy is difficult. It’s better, then, to think about how conspiracies come into existence so as to prevent them from forming in the first place (whereas if you isolate the carcinogen early enough, you don’t need to remove the tumor after the fact). Instead, he wants to address the aggregative process itself, by impeding the principle of its reproduction: rather than trying to expose and cut particular links between particular conspirators (which does little to prevent new links from forming and may not disturb the actual functioning of the system as a whole), he wants to attack the “total conspiratorial power” of the entire system by figuring out how to reduce its total ability to share and exchange information among itself, in effect, to slow down its processing power. As he puts it:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an aside that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the quality of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.

I’m not sure this is what he means, but it’s worth reflecting that the conspiracy’s ability to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy’s tendency to deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the Kool-Aid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn’t, basically, believe their own line of propaganda, if they didn’t convince themselves — even provisionally — that we actually are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD’s, this doesn’t mean that the people talking about ticking time bombs don’t actually believe that they are. It just means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometimes this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanistan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of his advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the banks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the death-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy choice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs might have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public service. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.

This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

Early responses seem to indicate that Wikileaks is well on its way to accomplishing some of its goals. As Simon Jenkins put it (in a great piece in its own right) “The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets.” And if the diplomats quoted by Le Monde are right that, “we will never again be able to practice diplomacy like before,” this is exactly what Wikileaks was trying to do. It’s sort of pathetic hearing diplomats and government shills lament that the normal work of “diplomacy” will now be impossible, like complaining that that the guy boxing you out is making it hard to get rebounds. Poor dears. If Assange is right to point out that his organization has accomplished more state scrutiny than the entire rest of the journalistic apparatus combined, he’s right but he’s also deflecting the issue: if Wikileaks does some of the things that journalists do, it also does some very different things. Assange, as his introductory remarks indicate quite clearly, is in the business of “radically shift[ing] regime behavior.”

If Wikileaks is a different kind of organization than anything we’ve ever seen before, it’s interesting to see him put himself in line with more conventional progressivism. Assange isn’t off base, after all, when he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,” and it was true, then too, that “To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.” Assange is trying to shit all over this unholy alliance in ways that the later and more radical Roosevelt would likely have commended.

It’s worth closing, then, by recalling that Roosevelt also coined the term “muckraker,” and that he did so as a term of disparagement. Quoting from Pilgrim’s Progress, he cited the example of the “Muck-Raker” who could only look down, whose perspective was so totally limited to the “muck” that it was his job to rake, he had lost all ability to see anything higher. Roosevelt, as always, is worth quoting:

In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor…the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is s vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are, in the body politic, economic, and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful…

Roosevelt was many things when he uttered those words, but he was not wrong. There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists “expose” secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary”.

Follow this amazing interactive slide-show while you listen to the talk (below):

The Talk:

‘DARKNESS OVER ALL’ – JOHN ROBISON AND THE BIRTH OF THE ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY

By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/

At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-standing reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics, and had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would eventually contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year, his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world and co-opting them into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of ‘darkness over all’. (1)

Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer, plausible to many, to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and had there been any plan behind its bloody and tumultuous progress?

The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days, and within a year it had been republished many times, not only in Edinburgh but in London, Dublin and New York. Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer, plausible to many, to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and had there been any plan behind its bloody and tumultuous progress? From his vantage point in Edinburgh he had, along with millions of others, followed with horror the lurid press reports of France dismembering its monarchy, dispossessing its church and transforming its downtrodden and brutalised population into the most ruthless fighting force Europe had ever seen – and now, under the rising star of the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, attempting to export the same carnage and destruction to its surrounding monarchies, not least Britain itself. But Robison believed that he alone had identified the hidden hand responsible for the apparently senseless eruption of terror and war that appeared to be consuming the world.

Many had located the roots of the revolution in the ideas of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and D’Alembert, who had exalted reason and progress over authority and tradition; but none of these mostly aristocratic philosophes had advocated a revolution of the masses, and indeed several of them had ended their lives on the guillotine. In the early 1790s, it had been possible to believe that the power-hungry lawyers and journalists of the Jacobin Club had whipped up the Paris mob into their destructive frenzy as a means to their own ends, but by 1794 Danton, Robespierre and the rest of the Jacobin leaders had followed their victims to the guillotine: how could they have been the puppet-masters when they had had their own strings so brutally cut? What Robison was proposing in the densely-argued and meticulously documented pages of Proofs of a Conspiracy was that all these agents of revolution had been pawns in a much bigger game, whose ambitions were only just beginning to make themselves visible.

The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within this buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single protagonist, a single ideology and a single overarching plot that crystallised the chaos into a concerted drama and elevated it into an epic struggle between good and evil,

The French Revolution, like all convulsive world events before and since, had been full of conspiracies, bred by the speed of events, the panic of those caught up in them and the limited information available to them as they unfolded. The Paris mobs, cut off from the outside world by their heavily guarded city walls, had been convinced that counter-revolutionary forces had joined together in a pacte de famine to starve their communes to death. The French aristocracy, in turn, were convinced from the beginning that the King was to be kidnapped and murdered. Rumours swept the army that they were being betrayed by their high command. The cities of surrounding countries hummed with allegations of plots to incite their own peasants to revolt against them. In Britain, enemies of the revolution such as Edmund Burke had claimed from the beginning that ‘already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries’,(2) and by 1797 most believed – and with good reason – that secret societies in Ireland were plotting with Napoleon to overthrow the British government and invade the mainland. The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within this buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single protagonist, a single ideology and a single overarching plot that crystallised the chaos into a concerted drama and elevated it into an epic struggle between good and evil, whose outcome would define the future of world politics.

Robison’s vast conspiracy needed an imposing and terrifying figurehead, a role for which Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, seemed on the surface of things to be an unpromising candidate. Obsessive and domineering, Weishaupt had from the beginning found difficulty in attracting members to his secret society, where they were expected to adopt mystical pseudonyms chosen by him, jump through the hoops of his strict initiatic grades and take up subservient roles in his messianic but unfocused crusade for world domination. Nor did the appeal of his Order translate easily into the world beyond his small provincial network. Catholic Bavaria was held tightly in the grip of the Jesuits, under whom Weishaupt had been educated and whose influence his Illuminati aimed to counter and subvert; but the ‘secret knowledge’ of enlightenment with which he lured initiates was mostly secret only in Bavaria, where the philsophies of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were still suppressed. Elsewhere, and particularly in France, their works had long been freely available: French Masonic lodges, particularly the Grand Orient, already offered congenial surroundings and company for discussing such ideas, and had shown little interest in the Bavarian Illuminati’s attempts to infiltrate them. After 1784, when the Order had been exposed and banned by the Elector of Bavaria, Weishaupt had exiled himself to Gotha in central Germany, since when he appeared to have done little beyond producing a series of morose and self-justifying memoirs of his adventures.

Weishaupt’s exposure, and with it his cloak-and-dagger strategy of covert infiltration and his doctrine of the perfection of human nature by the destruction of government and religion, offered dramatic confirmation of the traditionalists’ deepest fears

Yet there was also much in the career of the Illuminati that offered, to Robison at least, a view of a far more expansive and sinister scheme. Weishaupt’s grandiose sense of his own mission and the Order’s extravagant structures – its nested grades of Novice and Minerval, Illuminatus Minor and Major, Dirigens and Magus, and the portentous pseudonyms of members such as Spartacus, Cato and Pythagoras – all hinted at a far larger organisation than that which had been exposed. Weishaupt’s subsequent publications had also revealed an ideology more extreme and politically reckless than most of the enlightened philosophies of his day. While most of the leading apostles of reason, such as Voltaire, had envisaged that their programme would eventually generate benign rule by an educated elite, Weishaupt had espoused a radical programme of egalitarian reforms, including the abolition of all private property, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that the exercise of reason would free humanity from its chains of servitude and restore the natural life of the ‘noble savage’. This was perhaps, in the 1780s, not so much a revolutionary plan for the future of politics as a wistful, even reactionary hope of a return to an idealised and imaginary past; but since the French Revolution had erupted, it had begun to read ever more suggestively as a prophecy of the anarchy and bloodshed that had followed.

The suppression of the Illuminati, too, had generated a furore quite out of proportion to the danger it represented. It had become a lightning-rod for pervasive anxieties among the supporters of church and monarchy about the project of reason and progress that was being seeded across Europe by the confident vanguard of philosophers and scientists, and the members-only network of Masonic lodges through which it was being propagated. Most representatives of this world were discreet about their activities and conciliatory about their beliefs, but Weishaupt’s exposure, and with it his cloak-and-dagger strategy of covert infiltration and his doctrine of the perfection of human nature by the destruction of government and religion, offered dramatic confirmation of the traditionalists’ deepest fears. It was not in the interests of Weishaupt’s enemies to play down his ambitions or take a sceptical look at the threat that he actually represented, and the Illuminati furore had generated hundreds of screeds, polemics, handbills and scandal sheets, all competing to file the most damning charges of godless infamy. It was these sources that Robison had spent years perusing intently for scraps, anecdotes and telling details to mould into the proofs of the conspiracy that he now presented. To the dispassionate observer, Weishaupt and his Illuminati might have been a suggestive precursor or an eloquent symbol of the forces that were now reconfiguring Europe; but for Robison they had become the literal cause: the centre, thus far invisible, of the web of events that had consumed the world.

Robison may have been a distant spectator of the Illuminati furore, but he was no dispassionate observer. While Proofs of a Conspiracy came as a surprise (and in most cases an embarrassing one) to his friends and scientific colleagues, there were many reasons why the Illuminati had presented itself to him in particular in the form that it did. It was a discovery that resolved long-standing suspicions and conflicts in both his private and professional life, and one that chimed in particular with his own curious adventures in freemasonry.

Robison, however, found Black’s capitulation humiliating: he had never accepted the new French theories, and by 1797 he had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminatist plot

By 1797, Robison’s character had taken a grave and saturnine turn, far removed from the cheerful and convivial temperament of his youth. In 1785 he had begun to suffer from a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin: it seemed to emanate from behind his testicles, but its precise origin baffled the most distinguished doctors of Edinburgh and London. Racked with pain and frequently bed-ridden, by the late 1790s he had become a withdrawn and isolated figure; he was using opium liberally, a regime which according to some of his acquaintances made him vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia. As the successive crises of the French Revolution shook Britain, with rumours of massacres and threats of invasion following relentlessly upon one another, the nation was gripped by a panic that was particularly intense in Scotland, where ministers and judges whipped up constant rumours of fifth columnists, traitors and secret Jacobin cells. Tormented, heavily medicated and constantly assailed by terrifying news from the outside world, Robison had all too many dark thoughts to elaborate into the plot that came to consume him.

Political events had also thrown a deep shadow across his professional life. The physical sciences, too, were in the grip of a French revolution, led in this case by Antoine Lavoisier. During the 1780s, Lavoisier had overthrown the chemical theories of the previous century with his discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier’s revolution had split British chemistry: some recognised that his elegantly conceived and minutely recorded experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was, like the French metric system and the revolutionary Year Zero, an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of God in the physical world. The old system of chemistry, with its mysterious forms of energy and its languages of essences and principles, had readily contained the idea of a life-force and the mysterious breath of the divine; but in Lavoisier’s cold new world, matter was being stripped of all such imponderable properties and reduced to inert building-blocks manipulated by the measurable forces of pressure and temperature.

He had been a member of the Scottish Rite for decades without ever regarding its lodges as more than ‘a pretext for passing an hour or two in a fort of decent conviviality, not altogether void of some rational occupation’;(5) but his career had frequently taken him abroad, where he had been shocked to discover that not all masonic orders were so innocent

This was a conflict that had not spared the University of Edinburgh. Its professor of chemistry, Joseph Black, had long been the most distinguished chemist in Britain: in 1754 he had been the first to isolate and identify ‘fixed air’, or carbon dioxide, and his subsequent study of gases had enabled his friend James Watt to develop the steam engine. Lavoisier had built on Black’s discoveries to formulate his new chemistry, and Black had been quick to recognise its validity. Robison, however, found Black’s capitulation humiliating: he had never accepted the new French theories, and by 1797 he had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminatist plot.(3) For him, Lavoisier – along with Britain’s most famous experimental chemist, the dissenting minister Joseph Priestley – was a master Illuminist, working in concert with infiltrated Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism that would underlie the new atheist world order. Madame Lavoisier’s famous salons, at which the leading Continental philosophes met to discuss the new theories, were now revealed by Robison to have been the venues for sacreligious rites where the hostess, dressed in the ceremonial robes of an occult priestess, ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry.(4) Implausible though this image might seem, it was all of a piece with other proofs that Robison had assembled in his book – for example, the anonymous German pamphlet that claimed that, at the great philosophe Baron d’Holbach’s salons, the brains of living children bought from poor parents were dissected in an attempt to isolate their life-force.

But if the Illuminati seemed to be crowding into Robison’s profesional life, his most personal connection with their conspiracy came through Masonry itself. He had been a member of the Scottish Rite for decades without ever regarding its lodges as more than ‘a pretext for passing an hour or two in a fort of decent conviviality, not altogether void of some rational occupation’;(5) but his career had frequently taken him abroad, where he had been shocked to discover that not all masonic orders were so innocent. In 1770 Catherine the Great had requested the British government to supply some technically-minded naval officers to modernise her fleet and Robison, who had previously supervised a trial of John Harrison’s longitude chronometer on a voyage to the West Indies, was offered the chance of secondment. He spent a year at Catherine’s court in St. Petersburg, learning Russian and lecturing on navigation, and during the course of his travels he had met with other masons and visited lodges in France, Belgium, Germany and Russia.

What he saw had shocked him: by comparison with the Scottish Rite, the Continental lodges were ‘schools of irreligion and licentiousness’. Their members seemed to him consumed by ‘zeal and fanaticism’, and their religious views ‘much disturbed by the mystical whims of J. Behmen [Jacob Boehme] and Swedenborg – by the fanatical and knavish doctrines of the modern Rosycrucians – by Magicians – Magnetisers – Exorcists, &c.’. He had returned to Edinburgh with the chilling conviction that ‘the homely Free Masonry imported from England has been totally changed in every country of Europe’;(6) now, thirty years later, as he recalled the occultism and freethinking to which he had been briefly but unforgettably exposed, he had no doubt as to the source of the destruction that had engulfed the Continent.

Shortly after the publication of Proofs of a Conspiracy, Robison’s theory received striking corroboration from the first volumes of the Jesuit Abbé Augustin de Barruel’s monumental Memoires pour Servir a l’Histoire de Jacobinisme, published in French in 1797 and swiftly translated into English, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Portugese. Barruel had fled to London after the dissolution of the Jesuit order during the French Revolution and had, like Robison, spent years assembling the most lurid denunciations of the Illuminati into a polemic arguing that the apparent chaos of the revolution had in fact all been ‘foreseen, premeditated, plotted, planned, resolved; everything that happened was the result of the deepest wickedness, because everything was prepared and managed by men who alone held the threads of long-settled conspiracies’.(7) Even the guillotine had been designed (by Dr. Guillotine, the well-known Freemason) in the shape of the Masonic triangle. Adam Weishaupt, according to Barruel, had pulled together the threads of atheism and anarchy that had emerged over the previous century – the sceptical philosophy of Spinoza, the demonic conjuring of Mesmer and Caglostro, the godless fact-gathering of the French philosophes – and injected them into French masonry and the Jacobin clubs, from where they had radiated out to the ignorant and mesmerised French masses. Robison regarded Barruel’s synthesis as ‘a very remarkable work indeed’,(8) and added a postscript to the second edition of his book that spelt out the extraordinary similarities between them.

Barruel’s work rolled out in volume after volume, each wilder and more vituperative than the last, and rapidly established itself as a founding text of conspiracy theory for the nineteenth century and beyond. In almost every way, he and Adam Weishaupt were perfect foils for one another: Weishaupt the lapsed Jesuit whose Illuminati were established in the image of his nemesis as shock troops for reason and liberty, and Barruel the attack-dog for the deposed ancien régime who sought to turn the ‘black legend’ of Jesuit conspiracy and brutality back on the enlightened forces that had generated it. The power of each depended on ramping up the threat that the other represented; each colluded in concocting and feeding fantasies of secrecy and potency; but each also saw deep into the hidden heart of his adversary, externalising and parading his secret dreams.

However, this was a drama that had less potency in Britain, and though Proofs of a Conspiracy became a handsome bestseller, the Illuminati conspiracy never gripped the imagination of the British political class as it did in Continental Europe. Edmund Burke, for example, though he welcomed Barruel cordially to London and deplored the persecution of Catholics and Jesuits in revolutionary France, was careful not to endorse his extravagant theories. Although some conservative voices would later attribute this to superior British common sense, the fact was that Britain at the time had more serious threats and conspiracies to contend with. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, a far more incendiary and radicalising work than any of the Bavarian Illuminati’s ‘secret texts’, had sold over two hundred thousand copies in its cheap sixpenny edition, a number that far exceeded what until that point had been considered the entire book-buying public. Nor was the existence of malign conspiracies a matter to be theorised about or argued over. By the winter of 1797, the British government had estimated that the United Irishmen, an illegal society recruited by the swearing of a secret oath, had 279,896 men recruited and armed with home-made pikes: by May 1798, when the Great Rebellion broke, the conspiracy would erupt all too visibly from the shadows. With the British fleet convulsed by mutinies and the government struggling to contain mass protests and riots, it was hardly surprising that the doings of a long-disbanded Bavarian lodge seemed less than a pressing concern.

But the nation where Robison’s book had a profound and enduring impact was the United States of America. Here, the polarised forces of revolution and reaction that had swept Europe were playing out in a form that threatened to split the Founding Fathers and destroy their fledgling Constitution. While the likes of Thomas Jefferson saw themselves as cousins of a French republic that had thrown off the shackles of monarchy and with whom they traded amid British naval blockades, other founders such as Alexander Hamilton, whose Federalist party favoured a powerful state geared towards protecting the interests of its wealthy citizens, feared the infiltration of the radical ideals of the French revolution. In an overheated political milieu where accusations of conspiracy and treason were hurled from both sides, Proofs of a Conspiracy was siezed on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, anti-slavery and the rights of man. Robison’s words were repeated endlessly in New England pulpits and pamphlets through 1798 and 1799, and Jefferson was publicly accused of being a member of Weishaupt’s Order, but the substance of the charges failed to stand up to political scrutiny.

The ‘Illuminati Scare’ petered out and the Federalists lost power, never to regain it; yet the scare had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset, and it has been woven into many subsequent paranoias and panics. Many on the isolationist right continue to believe Robison’s theory to this day: the official John Birch Society line, for example, remains that Weishaupt’s Illuminati ‘was the ancestor of the Communist movement and the model for modern subversive conspiratorial movements’.(9)

Robison’s ideas would continue to flourish, to be rediscovered and reinvented, and to influence modern politics in curious ways. In 1919 the doyenne of modern conspiracy theory, Nesta Webster, published the first of her many polemics against the ongoing ‘world revolution’. This had begun, she claimed, in the Bavarian lodge of the Illuminati; its first act had been the French revolution, the second the Soviet, with the third waiting in the wings. For Webster, however, the Illuminati were in turn a smokescreen: the true conspirators were the ‘Jewish peril’ whose agenda had, she believed, been accurately exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although Webster later consigned herself to the margins by joining the British Union of Fascists, her support at the time was more broadly based, and she even won admiring citations in the journalism of Winston Churchill. ‘The conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt’, Churchill wrote for the Sunday Herald in 1920; ‘as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role in the French revolution’.(10)

After Robison’s death following a final medical crisis in 1805, John Playfair, mathematician and pioneer of modern geology, succeeded him to Edinburgh’s chair of natural philosophy. Playfair later wrote a respectful memoir of his predecessor that focused on his scientific achievements, but was unable to avoid mention of the work for which he was best remembered. ‘The alarm excited by the French revolution’, he suggested tactfully, ‘had produced in Mr. Robison a degree of credulity which was not natural to him’.(11) It was a credulity, Playfair stressed, that had been shared by many who were unable to believe that the revolution had been a genuine mass movement reacting to the oppression of a tyrannical regime; they had clung to their belief that it must have been orchestrated by a small cell of fanatics, and that the lack of evidence for any such conspiracy was itself evidence for the conspirators’ cunning in concealing their operations from public view.

There was much plain sense in Playfair’s analysis, and it could equally be applied to many who subsequently came to believe in Robison’s theories, and who continue to believe them today. Indeed, in the postscript to Proofs of a Conspiracy, Robison explicitly argues for his conviction that the social order is not broken, and has no need of any revolutionary scheme to fix it. ‘There is something that we call the behaviour of a gentleman’, he insists, that ‘the plainest peasant or labourer will say of a man whom he esteems in a certain way’. Despite the mass protests, riots and mutinies of 1790s Britain, and the draconian emergency laws drafted to suppress dissent and free speech, he maintains that ‘I do not recollect hearing the lower ranks of the state venting much of their discontent against the Peers, and they seem to percieve pretty clearly the advantages arising from their prerogatives’. While Britain had become to many an oppressive, militarised state, waging war for profit abroad and gagging the protests of its own citizens at home, for Robison it remained a beacon of the ancient system of noblesse oblige, ‘the happy land, where the wisest use has been made of this propensity of the human heart’.(12)

But if the shock of the modern world erupting into existence before his eyes had unbalanced Robison’s judgement, it had also given him a vivid, even visionary perspective on the new dangers that might result from wresting politics away from the church and monarchy and placing it in the hands of the people. Forged in the same crucible as every modern political ideology from nihilism to conservatism, anarchy to military dictatorship, the Illuminati conspiracy has become a modern myth – not just in the dismissive sense that its factual basis evaporates under scrutiny, but in the more potent form of a shapeshifting narrative capable of adapting its meaning to accomodate new and unforeseen scenarios. Since the 1970s, it has been gleefully satirised as a baroque folly of conservative thought by counterculture figures from Robert Anton Wilson onwards, yet this has only increased its fame and mystique: Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons demonstrates that today’s readers will still lap up unreconstructed versions of Robison’s theory in their millions. In popular culture and old-time religion, satire and nationalist politics, the Illuminati conspiracy still resonates with its timeless warning that the light of reason has its shadows, and even the most open and enlightened democracy can be manipulated by hidden hands.

Footnotes:
(1) John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy (Americanist Classics 1967 [1797]), p.131
(2) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
(3) J.R.R.Christie, Joseph Black and John Robison, in Simpson, A.D.C. (ed.), Joseph Black 1728-1799: A Commemorative Symposium (The Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh 1982)
(4) J.B.Morrell, Professors Robison and Playfair, and the Theophobica Gallica: Natural Philosophy, Religion and Politics at Edinburgh 1789-1815, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol.27, 1972-3, p.51
(5) Robison p.1
(6) Robison pp. 3-5
(7) J.M.Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (Paladin 1974 [1972]) p.204
(8) Robison p.297
(9) http://jbs.org/node/107
(10) Winston Churchill, Zionism vs. Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People (Illustrated Sunday Herald, Feb 8th 1902)
(11) Works of John Playfair Esq. (Archibald Constable & Co, 1822), Vol. 4, p.163
(12) Robison pp. 291-4