Show me the money: Conspiracy theories and distant wealth

ABSTRACT

This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of (un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis. Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our) understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions, according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy theory
• wealth
• Greece
• crisis
• anti-Semitism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These were stories told by my main interlocutors, often experts in the field, but also tropes that some other Greeks would share when debating the austerity-related crisis. Conspiracy theories have been circulated and popularized in the public domain long before the crisis, not least through TV shows by pundit ‘experts’ such as Nikos Konstantinidis and Stefanos Chios. Such theories are mostly associated with, and have led to the escalation of, aspects of the far-right.

2 Fieldwork took place for 20 months in Thessaloniki, the country’s second largest city, one of the oldest settlements of continuous urban activity in Europe, and the only major city in the continent with a Jewish majority for centuries. The research leading to this essay was partly carried out in relation to and supported by the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons’ (project code 340673) running from 2014 to 2019 and led by Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen. Fieldwork was also partly funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (fund no 8856).

3 All names and toponyms in this essay are pseudonyms, apart from that of Artemis Sorras, who is a public figure.

4 The Golden Dawn is the renowned organization turned political party that since the 1980s has been operating as a neo-Nazi formation in Greece. Their appeal since 2010 has been phenomenal: they have skyrocketed to occupying the third place in the country’s parliament twice, after the elections of 2012 and 2015, averaging a 6.5% of the national vote and somehow ostensibly toning down their Nazism onto more conventionally far-right discourses.

5 EEE stands for Ethniki Enosis Ellas, National Union Hellas.

6 Aktis has the widest array of publications of Classic Greek texts (more than 700 books in its list) in the world. Like Zitros, the publishing house is widely considered to be the utmost authority in the genre. The house was led, until his death in 2014, by an inspiring yet reclusive man who was a fervent conspiracy theorist: he chose to publish, outside the list of the Classics, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

7 Using the term ‘facts’ or ‘factual history’ might not sound entirely in vogue with much contemporary anthropological debate. However, and as Latour himself admitted in an article that touches on conspiracy theory (2004), resituating historical discourse in different places is laudable, but it can also be potentially slippery and indeed dangerous. We live in such dangerous times. The Latour article was published quite early – long before the idea of ‘alternative facts’ became hegemonic and found a seat in the White House and other spaces of power. Importantly, Latour’s concern should reach a cross-over audience in the discipline, as he is the anti-positivist scholar par excellence, considered the mastermind of rethinking and debunking any attempt towards taking facts at face value. It might be time to listen to his concern about dangerous slippage, and, most importantly, to start listening to our informants’ own distinctions between historical reality and personal truth. This is particularly important when among some of these informants, there are people – like those selling the Protocols book – willing to suspend the factual reality they recognize as existing, in order to engage in alternative historicities. Such alternative narratives, in this case, negate the killing of millions of people in Nazi extermination camps, including 45,000 Jews from Salonica, the erstwhile Jerusalem of the Balkans. Paying historical tribute to that non-negotiable fact, I cannot but insist in using the term ‘facts’, albeit making careful usage of it.

8 Pelkmans and Machold are concerned principally with how truth and untruth are produced in such asymmetrical fields of power: for them, while some conspiracy theories are nonsense, others correctly identify secretly colluding powers (2011, 73). We need to interrogate systematically the links between power and truth (2011, 68) in this process, as the classificatory mechanisms of valid knowledge are certainly, to a good extent, products of asymmetrical power plays. The power of labeling has specific normative effects that can render a valid theory obsolete by the classificatory mark of ‘conspiracy’ (Pelkmans and Machold 2011, 74–75). In effect, conspiracy theories are distinguished from ‘valid’, scholarly theories, by mechanisms of epistemic power. This is the source of Pelkmans and Machold’s critique to Sanders and West’s (2003) generally relativist position that recognizes an inner truthfulness to both the epistemic and the conspiratorial worlds. This is done through a partial recognition of conspiracy as a form of magical thinking, akin to Evans-Pritchard’s witchcraft (Sanders and West 2003, 12 and 16; Marcus 2003, 327).

9 As noted, pondering on the phenomenon, Latour points out that as social scientists we have struggled to make knowledge situated – and now it is situated in places we feel uncomfortable with (2004). The idea of hyperrationality (Sampson 2010) is rooted in conspiratorial claims to – and juxtapositions with – epistemic knowledge. Mixing legend and myth, conspiracists over-rationalize symbols and over-think actual reality (Fritze 2009, 15).