The Odd World of Royalist Conspiracy Theories

There is a man, probably unknown to most younger Americans today, named Lyndon LaRouche who was once fairly well known as someone who was constantly running for president without ever winning. He ran on his own at least once as I recall but usually as a Democrat though he never made any headway, never won a primary and thus was never actually nominated. An ardent socialist from a French-Canadian family, he was known for his many and diverse conspiracy theories and his, perhaps, most overriding conspiracy theory involved monarchism and, in particular, the most prominent monarchy in the world, namely the British monarchy. There have, of course, been numerous individuals throughout American history, and doubtless in other countries, who have portrayed the British as the villains of the world but I do not know of any who took it to such an extreme as Lyndon LaRouche or of any other who so particularly singled out the British Royal Family as the authors of this villainy.

To summarize the views of LaRouche and his movement, this man believed that the British Empire was and still is alive and well, despite all evidence to the contrary. He maintains that the supposed global super-power, the United States of America, is, in fact, not even an independent country but is, rather, simply one of the pawns of the British Empire which still dominates the world and that HM Queen Elizabeth II is the unquestioned and absolute ruler of this British Empire which secretly dominates the world. He has claimed that the Queen maintains her position by being at the top of a vast, global, drug cartel network and has never missed on opportunity to accuse the British Royal Family of being responsible for every tragedy and atrocity that has ever come about. Some of these have gained more traction than others, such as his assertion that Diana, Princess of Wales, did not die as a result of a drunk driving accident but was assassinated by British secret agents on orders from the Duke of Edinburgh.

However, while LaRouche insists that the British monarch is the mastermind of this sinister conspiracy, he by no means limits it to the British royals alone. He has often referred to an Anglo-Dutch empire of drug traffickers and, in fact, concludes that since 1688 the Dutch took over the British Empire and set all of this up, so while the House of Windsor is on top today, it is only thanks to their Dutch co-conspirators of days gone by. He, of course, has also played up the German ties of the British Royal Family, past and present, such as by portraying Prince Philip and the late consort of the Dutch monarch, Prince Bernhard, of being Nazis and that the Anglo-Dutch royals are still carrying on the Nazi campaign of genocide on a global scale. He also once made a point to write that Prince Philip was Danish as if this was equivalent to being a Nazi German so, presumably, the Danish Royal Family is implicated as well as the British, Dutch and German royal houses. So, the British Empire rules the world through drug trafficking, except it is actually the Dutch empire under another name and is run by German royals who are all Nazis. Are we clear now?

LaRouche was a very big fan of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but certainly all recent American presidents have simply been the puppets of this Anglo-Dutch British Empire in his view. All of this may seem quite entertaining for southern Europeans but, rest assured, LaRouche does not let you off the hook either. After all, he also asserts that the Anglo-Dutch empire, run by Germans, was established in order to supplant the Venetian empire which dominated European affairs and held all of Europe in its grip previously. So, in the annals of the secret history of the world according to Lyndon LaRouche, before the British Empire dominated the world through banks and drug cartels, it was the Venetian republic which did so, all of the supposedly powerful kings of Spain and France, the German and Italian princes simply being the powerless puppets of the villainous and all-powerful Doge of Venice!

Does this sort of thing happen in other parts of the world? Not to any great extent from what I can tell. I have never heard of any equivalent in Africa or the Islamic countries. In Japan the native monarchy is certainly not talked about in such a way though I have seen a few examples in Japanese entertainment of portrayals of the (again) British monarch being the one who secretly calls the shots, that the British royals and hereditary aristocracy are still the ones really in control of the country, they just do everything behind the scenes so as not to attract notice. That being said, I have to believe this is simply a tool of imaginative fiction and I doubt very seriously anyone in Japan actually believes that. The only non-western equivalent I have ever heard of is the conspiracy regarding the late Qing Dynasty which is prevalent among the more bizarre elements of the Han Chinese nationalists though, obviously, in a country like Communist China, it is hard to know how much of this to take seriously since it is all necessarily based on rumors and such. As conspiracy theories go, it is a fantastic one.

According to these Han-supremacists, depending on which version of the conspiracy you choose to believe, the Great Qing Empire is, like the British Empire, still alive and well and still ruling China secretly, behind the scenes. Some versions of the story say that the Manchu princes themselves are running the show, others that it is simply a conspiracy of Manchurians in general who maintain Manchu supremacy over the Han Chinese. This is quite an accomplishment considering that the Han account for about 92% of the population of China while the Manchurians are practically nonexistent. Even simply counting those with some Manchu ancestry would still be a statistically irrelevant number. Nonetheless, the Han-supremacists who push this conspiracy, carrying on the anti-Manchu sentiment of the late Qing period, believe that the Chinese government and military are riddled with Manchurians who manipulate policy, kill off Han Chinese rivals and guide national affairs. Probably their most well known accusation is that the former “one child policy” was actually a secret program of genocide by the Manchurians to wipe out the Han population.

The idea that there are anti-Han Manchurians in control of China at a time when non-Han minorities have been reduced to a miniscule fraction of the Chinese population is clearly absurd but hardly more absurd than LaRouche arguing that U.S. President Obama, the son of a man imprisoned by the British colonial authorities in Kenya, would be the pliant stooge of the British monarch. It is no less absurd than the conspiracy put forward by the recently deceased Jack Chick that the Islamic religion was created by the Pope as an instrument of the Catholic Church, that the Catholics, Muslims, Jews, pagans and Freemasons were all playing for the same team against his version of “true” Christianity. How can anyone possibly believe any of this?

A simple explanation is that they take certain actual facts and then build absurdities on top of them. The “one child policy” was real, after all. The British Empire did fight the Opium Wars with China and the Catholic Church did absorb many pre-Christian customs of pagan Europe. The Italian city-states and the Dutch republic were major banking centers and London today is one of the financial centers of the world. The conspiracy theories mentioned above take these facts, expand on them and the next thing you know, the Queen is running a drug cartel, Qing princes are ruling Communist China and the Jesuits are the papal assassination squad. As it stands, very few people believe these stories and those who do find them attractive, I think, because they allow people to believe themselves powerless and thus not responsible for the sad state of affairs in which they find themselves. It may reduce people to being powerless dupes but at least it means someone else is to blame, it is not your fault and all you have to do is believe it and support those who told you the “truth”. You do not have to actually take any action as these all-powerful forces would easily thwart you after all, so it is also extremely convenient and requires very little effort on your part, which is how most like it.

There a myriad of these types of conspiracies, aimed against various groups, large and small alike and they can be quite irritating. I find them irritating because, for one thing, secrets are hard to keep and most people with a sinister agenda are quite open about what they are doing because they do not think it is sinister. Focus on winning the game, not dissecting the motives of the other player. I also find it irritating because it gives permission for people to stop taking responsibility for their own actions or, more usually, their inaction. It encourages people to see themselves as victims and there are few things more destructive in the modern world than the victim mentality. It also leads to the same sort of thing that the tens of thousands of Christian denominations led to in western religion which was an ever increasing amount of skepticism. When people do not know what to believe, when there are so many different narratives that are being pushed, people simply give up, stop believing anything they hear and, again, become inactive.

Most intelligent people, I would think, can easily see that conspiracies such as the unseen, all-powerful British Empire or the secret society of Manchurian loyalists are complete and utter nonsense. However, conspiracies do exist. Many people, in America for example, said that all talk of the “Deep State” was a silly conspiracy theory but we now know it to be completely true. Conspiracies exist but they are rarely, if ever, secret or, at the very least, do not stay secret for long. It is also true that not everything that looks like a conspiracy actually is, often it is simply a group of like minded people, working toward the same goal who thus inadvertently assist each other and this can be easily portrayed as a conspiracy even when nothing of the sort was going on. Again, what matters is what they are doing, not who is doing it or how much they coordinate with each other. So, for a monarchist perspective, I would say it does not matter to me so much whether the French Revolution was a Masonic conspiracy, it only matters to me that I think the Revolution was horrible and should have been prevented or stopped. I would oppose anyone favoring the French Revolution whether they were a Freemason or not.

I would also add, frivolously, that these types of conspiracies do make me laugh in as much as the enemies of monarchy tend to have a loftier view of existing monarchs than many monarchists do. While monarchists lament the powerless state of western monarchs, the enemies of monarchy like LaRouche followers still think they are the most powerful people in the world, secretly dominating world affairs behind the scenes. Sometimes, one must simply appreciate the irony of the situation.