Robert Anton Wilson on Abbe Barruel's Jumbo Conspiracy theory said:
In 1797, an embittered French Jesuit, Abbe Barruel, set down in print his theory of why the French Revolution had occurred. Where other historians would attribute that social explosion to the sufferings of the poor, or the ambitions of the rising merchant class, or the alienation of the nobility (who mostly despised their king and called him “the fat boy” behind his back), or some combination of these forces aided by the new ideas of Reason and Democracy, the angry priest had a simpler theory: The revolution had resulted from the machinations of a literally Diabolical Conspiracy. The notions of this extremely reactionary priest might seem a matter of only historical interest, except that his Jumbo Conspiracy Theory, as developed ca. 1797—1808, gradually grew to include so much that it has directly or indirectly influenced almost all the conspiracy buffs who have written since Barruel’s day. First of all, the Abbe blamed the Revolution on the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society that had existed between 1776 and 1786,..
Eventually the Abbe encountered a mysterious Captain Simonini who told him “the Jews” as a fungible group were behind everything; the jumbo conspiracy theory emphasized the international bankers, especially the Rothschilds. By 1808, more or less, Barruel had made a permanent contribution to the ideology of the Far Right by his unified Conspiracy Theory in which everything right-wingers don’t like results from the machinations of Satanic/ Sodomite Knights Templar, godless Freemasons, Arabian hashish fiends, and sinister Hebrew bankers. A large part of this Fu Manchu—style mythos quickly infested New England, and some Federalists, especially among the clergy, used it against Thomas Jefferson, whom they claimed acted as the Illuminati’s top man in the then-new U.S. government
(John Adams, although titular head of the Federalist Party and personally at odds with Jefferson about the French Revolution—they had a reconciliation later—despised this labyrinthine horror story and tried to combat it. As a result, he—Adams himself—appears at the head of the U.S. Illuminati in the works of Matthew Josephson, a twentieth-century anti-Illuminati/antiRockefeller crusader.)
The whole Barruel Jewish-Masonic-Arab conspiracy appeared occasionally among the 1840s Anti-Masonic Party in this country, and has influenced all right-wing politics in Europe ever since, including Italian Fascism and German Nazism. A sanitized version, minus overt anti-semitism, currently circulates among that part of the Christian Right under the leadership of Rev. Pat Robertson. A very unsanitary version, including the anti-semitism, motivates a great deal of “militia” activity.
