Ever since the war the Jewish power has been growing ... It was this which up to 1933 tried to turn us against France and since then against Germany ... As long as the Jews do not hold Germany they can never realise their final aim - world domination. Therefore, Hitler must be overthrown and the Jewish power restored. It is idle to say that this vast ambition has been falsely attributed to the Jewish race. The dream of a Messianic era when they shall rule the world runs all through their "sacred" writings.

One of the major disseminators of conspiracy theory in this era, and a great influence on later theorizing, was Nesta H. Webster, author of World Revolution; the Plot Against Civilisation and Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, published in the 1920s. In these books the themes of previous conspiracy theorists are put together in an extraordinary synthesis. The ultimate origin of twentieth-century revolutionary movements is alleged to be a mediaeval sect of fanatical Moslems known as the Order of Assassins. The Assassins succeeded in subverting the crusading Knights Templar who brought their ideas back to Europe, where they formed the basis of Freemasonry. The Masons and Weishaupt's Illuminati had led the French and Bolshevik revolutions. Socialists, the IRA and other radical movements were controlled by the same Satanic conspirators, together with their more recent allies the Zionists and the German General Staff.

One of the few recent writers on the subject to attempt to do more is Richard Gilman, the author of Behind World Revolution: The Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster. The subject of this biography is the English writer who, in the 1920s, propounded the idea that the real force behind the Russian Revolution was a conspiracy of Satanists, occultists and Freemasons dating back to the medieval Knights Templar. Mr Gilman shows in interesting detail how such ideas were widely taken seriously at the time and documents Nesta Webster's later career as an apologist for Hitler and her influence on later Fascist groupings such as the National Front.

A particularly interesting aspect of this book is the section that describes how Nesta Webster first became interested in conspiracy theory on a visit to Paris where she underwent a mystical experience that convinced her that she was the reincarnation of a French countess who had been a victim of the French Revolution, which she saw as being the work of the same occult forces as involved in the Russian Revolution. This is an interesting example of the point made earlier in Magonia that some believers in conspiracy have a super-historical perspective in which they see themselves as fighters against some eternal principle of evil, the reality of which is sometimes conveyed to them in a visionary experience.

In the mid 1960s the most important of the American conspiracy theory groups of the time, the John Birch Society, discovered the 1920s writing of a dead English writer called Nesta Webster. Webster had been quite widely read in Britain just after WW1 and she claimed to detect behind both French and Russian Revolutions the presence of an 18th century Masonic lodge called the Illuminati. On finding Webster, the Birchers looked as though they were about to move from being the most fervent exponents of the Great Communist Conspiracy Theory - Birch leader Robert Welch famously called President Eisenhower a ‘conscious agent of international communism’.