Donations
Veridica.md
One of the most recently developed conspiracy theories is the one about the “Great Reset”, whereby the “World Government” is purportedly seeking to establish a totalitarian regime on a global scale. The pandemic was supposed to be the prelude of this operation, while the details of its final strategy were reportedly agreed upon at the World Economic Forum hosted by Davos in January 2021. The conspiracy narrative appears to be a reinterpretation of Doomsday prophecies, but how is it any different?
The signs have manifested - are ancient prophecies coming true?
In February 2022, an INSCOP survey showed that 65% of Romanians believed that the pandemic was caused by the Global Cabal. The figure is astounding. Considering 42% of Romania’s population had taken the first shot of the anti-COVID jab, we can assume those that refused the vaccine believed they were keeping themselves safe from the “World Government” plot known as the “Great Reset”.
According to this conspiracy theory, in order to achieve its ultimate goal of controlling mankind, the Cabal came up with several scenarios. Among other things, it wants to decimate the planet’s population, whose numbers are spiraling out of control (amidst limited resources), to eliminate any opponents who see the finality of this great plan (sovereigntists), to replace the white, Christian, educated population with black non-Christian immigrants with shabby education, and to impose the “LGBT agenda” with a view to perverting humanity and turning it away from God.
The first step was the careful planning of the pandemic: The “World Government” synthesized strains of the COVID-19 virus in secret laboratories and is now planning to impose a perpetual pandemic. A water crisis is imminent, people will be tied to the land and become totally dependent on a master. Digital currencies will become mandatory, food will be available only to owners of digital passports, children will be microchipped, people will have to pay even for the air they breathe and total censorship will be introduced. People won’t even be allowed to pray in silence!
We are told who is really behind this vague and mysterious word - “the Cabal”: Jews, Freemasons, Illuminati, New Age movements, Satanist sects, Reptilians, all sorts of secret societies. They conspire to establish a New World Order by staging the Great Reset, but also by means of coups, the creation of the “Parallel State”, mass surveillance, occultism, mind control, etc.
And for those who still refuse to embrace these beliefs (a small minority, according to the aforementioned survey), what better evidence is there than the document called “The Great Reset”, adopted on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in January 2021, under the guise of boosting post-pandemic recovery? The coining of this term produced an immediate ripple effect – over the next few months, “Great Reset” was mentioned 8 million times on Facebook and 2 million times on Twitter, according to BBC Monitoring.
Anthropologist Radu Umbreș, a lecturer at the National School of Political Science and Public Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest, says the “Great Reset” theory is based on a grain of truth: we have a global elite that pursues “more or less transparent and credible” goals, which in the current context of demographic decline and immigration from the Global South induces “fear”. The theory presses the “emotional buttons of cultural conservatism at odds with the growth of individual liberties in developed societies, and calls on the weak and many to join efforts against a common foe that threatens their well-being, despite being vaguely defined”.
"The reception and circulation of these theories is not necessarily an indicator that people fully believe them, or that they prompt a change in people's behavior. Rather, people circulate such theories in order to show they are vigilant and informed, despite the manipulative attempts of the “Cabal”, but also to convey their dissatisfaction and the fact that they are looking for support among the equally dissatisfied around them”, Umbreș argues.
The “Great Reset” theory appears to be a reinterpretation of Doomsday prophecies. How is it any different?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - the conspiracists’ “Bible”
One of the oldest and most enduring conspiracy theories is “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which describes how the Jews plotted to take over the world. According to the volume, the protocols were elaborated at the 1897 World Zionist Conference in Basel, as part of 24 secret meetings, with Theodor Herzl deciding on the final wording of the incriminated document. A Russian spy, however, was said to have attended the conference when Herzl presented the final document to a select audience of conspirators, and reported to Sergey A. Nilus, a professor from Moscow.
In the autumn of 1905, Nilus publishes the volume in Russian under the title “The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion”, as an appendix to the second edition of his volume, “The Great within the Small”, or the coming of the Antichrist and the Kingdom of Devil on Earth (the first edition had been published in 1901, without the Protocols). Nilus reprinted the book in 1911, 1912 and 1917, adding footnotes, an afterword and an introduction to each edition.
The text was circulated in various editions around the world in the early 20th century, but only started to make an impression after the Great War. Everyone needed a scapegoat: the White Russians for the outbreak of the Bolshevik insurrection and the loss of the Russian Civil War, the Germans for their defeat in the war, the Americans for their involvement in the conflict, the Austrians for the collapse of the Empire.
In the fall of 1919, the first edition of the Protocols was published in Germany, and from there it started spreading around the globe, being considered the most widely circulated book of its time after the Bible. The Protocols were reprinted in 1920 in England under the title “The Jewish Peril”.
Journalists with The Times then found an 1870 pamphlet that resembled Nilus’s text word for word. “Malignant madness”, The Spectator wrote after the plagiarism was confirmed. But it was already too late - the Nazi would adopt the conspiracy theory, and the Soviets followed suit. The Romanian Securitate helped spread the volume in the Middle East via its Foreign Intelligence Directorate (DIE).
Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former deputy head of the Securitate’s Foreign Intelligence Department, claimed that the primary disinformation mission of the political police was to “help Moscow rekindle anti-Semitism in Western Europe” by disseminating the Protocols. The Securitate translated, multiplied and circulated the book from 1951 until Pacepa's defection in 1978. Starting 1972, DIE circulated thousands of copies of the Protocols in the Middle East every month.
Conspiracy theories and paranoid narratives: the battle between Good and Evil
In a 1963 speech delivered at Oxford University, Richard Hofstadter, professor of history at Columbia University, defined American politics as “paranoid”. “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”, Hofstadter wrote.
People who are paranoid see the world as a life-and-death struggle between Good and Evil, in absolute terms, with no room for compromise. Since the enemy is Absolute Evil, the only way to achieve victory is to completely eliminate it. “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. […] He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced”, Hofstadter writes. This seems to be a portrait of George Soros, as envisaged by Moscow and Budapest.
Paranoid people are twice affected – they are impressed and deeply touched not only by the real world, like the rest of us, but also by the fantasy that shapes their reality. They will try to correct not just the present, but also the injustice of the past. History is their battlefield, which they navigate searching for the ghost of their enemies. To them, the past is heroic and failure is blamed on the scheming of foreigners. All historians who break with this paradigm are deemed traitors. As Orwell said, “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.
The first scientific study to examine the general public's perception of conspiracy theories was published in 2014 by E. J. Oliver and T. J. Wood. After four annual surveys conducted over 2006-2011, the two authors concluded that half of Americans consistently support at least one conspiracy theory. In spite of the general view that such theories are a byproduct of ignorance and authoritarianism, they are actually an effect of “the willingness to believe what cannot be seen, the appeal of Manichaeistic narratives”, the study reveals. Conspiracy theories seem to be the general reaction of people who are insecure, weak and cynical and have low self-esteem.
Conspiracy theories are not produced by people of modest intellectual ability. McCarthy's 96-page pamphlet, “McCarthyism”, has no less than 3,131 footnotes. Volume 1 of the Duginist ‘Bible’ of Eurasianists, “The Foundations of Geopolitics”, has 444 pages. Before it was disseminated by the Tsarist and Soviet secret police, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was the brainchild of a professor.
Conspiracy sells. Alex Jones – the Texan at the helm of InfoWars who claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax (for which, however, he was ordered by a court of law, after a decade of lawsuits, to pay over 1 billion USD in reparations to the victims’ families), that genetic engineering produces fish humanoid hybrids, that an elite of vampires, including the Clintons, practice satanic rituals whereby they abuse children, that Obama is a member of Al-Qaeda – produces a podcast with 5 million followers, as well as a video show with over 8 million viewers. Trump featured on Infowars, describing Jones as a guy with a “tremendous” reputation.
During his research of millenarian sects, British historian Norman Cohn claimed to have discovered a persistent psychic complex that largely corresponds to the paranoid style: “To see oneself as the Chosen One, deified, abominably oppressed, and yet to be certain of one’s ultimate triumph, to ascribe tremendous and demonic powers to one’s adversary, [...] systematically misinterpreting the facts”. Such was how Cohn portrayed millenarians, the present day’s version of conspiracy mongers, who regard themselves as impoverished and persecuted by the political system of their time.
Putin’s Book of the Apocalypse
Most of the narratives that talk about a secretive World Government that seeks to establish a totalitarian society have been around for some time. Similar ideas have circulated since the 1960s under the term New World Order, which in turn borrows ideas from older conspiracy theories, some going as far back as the 18th century.
In October 2022, at the 24th World Council of the Russian People, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church echoed Putin's statement of September, when he claimed the West had embraced satanism. The battle against the West, Kiril prophesied, could eventually trigger the Apocalypse. Salvation could only be delivered by Vladimir Putin, who became the world’s “chief exorcist”, “a fighter against the Antichrist”.
The same day, Aleksei Pavlov, Deputy Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, called for the “de-satanization” of Ukraine. Pavlov spoke of the proliferation of satanic neo-pagan cults in Ukraine, which were “brewed in a witch's cauldron”. Ramzan Kadyrov also spoke about the "de-satanization" of Ukraine, and Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia, indicated that the objective of the war was to “stop the supreme ruler of Hell, whatever name he goes by - Satan, Lucifer or Iblis”.
Obscuring knowledge with the thick smokescreen of conspiracy theories
Romanians felt the Orthodox breath of the “Third Rome” like an ice-cold wind of propaganda blowing from the east, but can we truly blame it all on Moscow? Are Romanians more susceptible to conspiracy theories in general, and to the “Great Reset” in particular?
Radu Umbreș says that certain particularities can provide an explanation: the high degree of “persistent mistrust” in institutional authorities such as the Government, the Presidency, the judiciary or local administration, and an “even higher” degree of mistrust in politicians, the communist past in which “false propaganda and systemic double standards eroded citizens' trust in the state and made them turn to alternative sources of information”, the “very low” reputation of the mass media and other official communication channels, which are perceived as “manipulative, biased and serving obscure interests”, as well as the accelerated evolution of Romania “into a richer but less equal society”.
“One can thus grasp a mass of Romanians who see their own social position downgraded compared to the elites, and who are faced with international strategies that do not seem to address their most stringent problems. Such expressions of frustration and distrust can make certain people more susceptible to conspiracy theories that “raise awareness” about dangerous occult forces that manipulate the politics to the detriment of ordinary citizens lacking power and information”, Umbreș also argues.
But why do some politicians, especially populists and the far right, choose to amplify or capitalize on such conspiracy theories? Is it just a pragmatic electoral strategy, a power play, or do they truly embrace the beliefs they prophesize?
Radu Umbreș believes that, by upholding these conspiracy theories, populist leaders want to strengthen their persona as “champions of the common people, fighting the manipulative and abusive elites”, and rally the whole of society to their cause. Anyone who stands against them are immediately declared “traitors on the payroll of ‘foreigners’”, when, in fact, their real target are enemies both domestic and foreign: “Whereas the appeal of conspiracy theories at society level creates a thick smokescreen that clouds public knowledge, somewhere behind it there’s a fire that causes a great deal of mistrust and frustration”, Umbreș points out.
“The Great Reset” and Veridica
Veridica has investigated three narratives that are part of the wider “Great Reset” meta-narrative: 1) The “World Government” wants to decimate the world's population through a perpetual pandemic and keep it on a leash through vaccination; 2) Moscow is waging a holy war against Globalists, represented by fascists, Muslims, LGBTQ, NATO – in short, the Antichrist himself; 3) In the Republic of Moldova, the World Government is conspiring to destroy Moldovans’ national identity by imposing homosexuality, banning the Moldovan language and taking over the true Orthodox faith, represented by Moscow.
Were we to believe the “world’s chief exorcist”, V.V. Putin, the “Great Reset”, or the Apocalypse, has already begun in the East. All you’re required to do is believe.
Supported by Science+
