The Establishment Game
Christopher Sykes, Lord Boothby.
Shoppers' Guide P. L. Garbutt, J. C. Pritchard
About Mr. Forster J. B. Beer
Recognition for the Good Driver Giles. Playfair
Rates and Officials' Expenses Alec Spoor Science Fiction Kingsley Antis Refugees H. Sltaw Le Son du Cor Paul Lewis Noise L. E. S. Leese THE ESTABLISHMENT GAME
SIR,—Allow me to make a point 'which I have already made in print in the distant past, but with no apparent effect. The Establishment Game is a dangerous one. It has an ugly ancestry. A better name for the game is the Conspiracy-Theory of history, a theory which no serious historian has accepted and which is the joy of many crank- historians and cranks. The founder of the game— your spiritual ancestor; I fear—was the worthy Abbe Barruel, who flourished at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He wrote a once-famous book, called AV moires pour .servir it l'histoire du Jacobinisme, in which he set forth a convincing and utterly preposterous argument that the French Revolution had come about from the secret work of Freemasons. His book is comic to read now, but was once hailed as masterly. It had a lasting influence on political ideas.
Before Barruel there had been plenty of over- estimates of the importance of various conspiracies, but no one before him, I believe, had suggested that world events could proceed from a world- embracing, secret and organised conspiracy, indeed that the Goddess Conspiratio herself was the grand historical driving force. This was something new and all his own. It was the work of an obsessed but not feeble mind. People who today lie awake at night in fear of a perennial big banking conspiracy, or a perennial oil company conspiracy, or a perennial Roman Catholic conspiracy, or, as is still the case with many Eastern people, lie through the night watches paralysed with horror at the thought of the whole world helpless in the unseen grip of M.I.6; these unhappy souls are all the victims of the reverend and now forgotten scaremonger.
I have not mentioned Barruel's greatest result, which was in anti-Semitism. He was not an anti- Semite himself, to his honour, but after his time his ideas opened up new roads to anti-Semitic thought. It was Barruelism which gave its colour, in the late nineteenth century, to French political anti-Semitism, which in turn saw the Jews as a huge secretly conspiring clandestine nation. This political :inti-Semitism gave new and decisive strength to the older racial anti-Semitism of Germany. Edouard Drumont and the anti-Dreyfusards were classic Barruelists, and so in our own time was Hilaire Belloc (alas!). Taking a known conspiracy as his starting point, the late Senator McCarthy organised a new and extremely effective form of Barruelism in the US.
Your own variety of the conspiracy-theory is likely to be successful, if you choose to keep it up, because you enjoy a singular advantage. Most of the bogeys have been part-nebulous, but your own bogey is so indefinable that it is hardly open to any known process of debunking. Who and what are and is the Establishment? Nobody can quite answer that question. It was once thought to be led by Lady Violet Bonham Carter. The Warden of All Souls seems under constant suspicion. The position of Lord Beaverbrook is reported in contradictory terms. Those veteran victims of the Barruel game, the bankers, make frequent return appearances to the pillory. The Establishment version is the only form of Barruelism, 1 believe, in which the par- ticipants can construct their bogey entirely accord- ing to individual taste. Sir Norman Angell once blew the Establishment-bogey to smithereens, or seemed to do so, but, perhaps for the reasons sug- gested at the beginning of this paragraph, the bogey seems to have survived unhurt. Sir Norman is never mentioned in the argument. Does he belong to the Establishment or not? I suppose it depends how one feeN.
I believe that only one thing can be known for certain about the Establishment, this latest 'pestilence that walketh in darkness,' namely that it is innocent of the main charge against it. History asserts that, with the possible and highly doubtful exception of the Old Man of the Mountain and his Assassins, conspiracies on the scale alleged are impossible of organisation and incapable of achieving their sup- posed global objectives.—Yours faithfully, 14 Moore Street, SW7
CHRISTOPHER SYKES
[This letter is referred to in 'A Spectator's Note- book.'—Editor, Spectator.] *
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