Welcome to "Meet the Conspiracies", a devlog series in which I'll be introducing the six playable factions of Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. I'll be discussing the history of the real-world conspiracy theory, how they'll be depicted in the game itself, and how reasonable I personally think it is to believe in the underlying conspiracy theory.

HEADS UP: THIS ONE CONTAINS IMAGES WITH SOME LIGHT HATE SPEECH AGAINST CATHOLICS AND MUSLIMS. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

Meet the Conspiracies, Part 3:

The Jesuits

The Real Jesuits

I'm not going to spend any time retelling the history of the actual Society of Jesus, because my thesis on Jesuit conspiracy theories is that, in the conspiratorial mind, they function purely as a stand-in for the Catholic Church as an institution. You've got Google, if you want to learn about the real world Jesuits, Wikipedia is there for you. Hell, they probably have their own websites, I'm sure they would love to tell you all about themselves. If you literally don't know anything about them, they started out as a missionary order of priests, which they remain to this day, but also branched out into being one of the major scholastic arms of the Church. 

There have been legitimate (non conspiracy theory) controversies over their activities, including a 50 year period where they were banned from most of Europe and officially condemned by the Vatican. Suspicions about Jesuit activity, particularly their active involvement in politics and close associations with many powerful leaders, are a clear predecessor to the modern form of the conspiracy theory. 

You could draw a straight line from the suppression of the Jesuits to modern conspiracy culture, but based on my own casual research, there is a critical gap, it's not a smooth transition. There's good reason to believe that secret societies are a recurring feature of life everywhere, throughout all of history, and wherever those exist, people will have suspicions about the people involved. My assessment is that concerns about the Jesuits fall into that category, what might be called "proto conspiracy theories". In my opinion, the critical aspect of a modern conspiracy theory is that it manifests not as concerns or suspicious about an institution which indisputably exists, but as a belief in such an institution despite evidence to the contrary. To be sure, there are grey areas there, but I believe that the leap from having suspicions about Jesuits to having suspicions about Jews is a difference of kind, not of degree.

Perhaps the event that set the Jesuits in the crosshairs of so many modern conspiracy theories, at least in the English-speaking world, was that they happened to play a role in the origin story of the actual historical Illuminati. Not in a way that makes any sense for imagining that they were involved with it, but conspiracy theories don't have to make sense.

I'm not going to get into too much detail, since this is ground that I'll be covering in the Meet the Conspiracies entry for the Illuminati, but to make a long story short, the Bavarian Illuminati was founded as, essentially, an anti-Jesuit organization. Not in a conspiracy theory way, no, the Jesuits were actually responsible for censoring Enlightenment texts in Bavaria, which the men in the Illuminati wanted to read. The whole organization started as a book-smuggling operation, but things immediately got out of hand with the founder having fantasies of becoming the Bavarian George Washington, but like I said, that will be covered in the Illuminati's entry. The important thing is that, while modern conspiracy theories inevitably imagine the Jesuits and the Illuminati as entangled, or one even being the creation of the other, the reality is the exact opposite, the two organizations absolutely hated and wanted to destroy each other.

Of course, like I explained in the first sentence of this section, I don't think that the reality of the Jesuits is particularly relevant to understanding the conspiracy theories about them. 

(Quick aside: I'm strictly talking about conspiracy theories in the English-speaking world here, and by a quirk of history, there's only one English-speaking country (Ireland) where Catholics are in the majority. I am not knowledgeable at all on conspiracy cultures outside the anglosphere, where I imagine the cultural context would be very different in, say, Latin America, where the Church is in fact a dominant cultural institution, and not merely the bureaucratic aspect of a minority religion)

The Jesuits have found themselves at the centre of so many conspiracy theories, I believe, for very boring reasons: they're an institution that is exclusive enough to be mysterious, but not so exclusive that you'd go your whole life without meeting one, and that tantalizing twilight zone is where conspiracy theories flourish. They can be used as a stand-in for the Church as a whole without necessarily being totally synonymous with it; it's an easy target if you buy in to anti-Catholic conspiracy theories but can't or don't want to blame the church in its entirety. They also have one of the strongest scholarly traditions of any Church organization, so there's good old anti-intellectualism in the mix.

The Jesuits in SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS

The Jesuits in the game, like the Jesuits in conspiracy theories, bear only a coincidental resemblance to the real life institution. The Jesuits of Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars are a mix of the superficial trappings of Hollywood Catholicism and the absolute insane worldview of Chick Tracts. 

(Image courtesy of Vox Media)

Chick Tracts, if you're not familiar with them, are works of deranged hate speech and conspiracism which could probably have provided enough material for this entire game, if I were willing to expose myself to that much toxic filth. Chick Tracts are a major influence on Silent Weapons, but I have definitely toned it down because, just, look at it. This stuff is indistinguishable from actual Nazi propaganda. And yes I see the Nazi in the upper left being a bad guy; the fact that Jack T. Chick was no fan of the NSDAP as a historical institution does not change the fact that, aside from the handful of tracts that incidentally disapprove of (anti-black) racism, there is very little of his writing and art that would have been out of place on the pages of Der Sturmer.

(As an aside, I think there might be something interesting in analyzing Chick Tracts as the archetype of a particular kind of American cultural product: simultaneously both on the lunatic fringe of the extreme right, and completely mainstream; but I also think that the practical reality of the matter is less sensational: Chick Publications makes its money off of bulk orders of specific tracts, not random assortments. By their records, their bestsellers by far are their most anodyne "you should be a Christian" pamphlets, not the hardcore conspiratorial hate-screeds. Nearly all Americans will have at least heard of Chick Tracts, but probably almost nobody has ever seen the images above and below without searching for them. Not to minimize their horrendousness, but I think that trying to argue that because Chick Tracts are ubiquitous in certain parts of America, and many many Chick Tracts are Nazi propaganda, that therefore America is awash in literal Nazi propaganda, would simply not be factually correct. I'd bet that even among people who have purchased Chick Tracts for distribution, most would be horrified, or at least critical, of the images in this blog post.)

In case the image link ever breaks, the tract above, on one page alone, makes the claim that the Catholic Church was responsible for the creation of both the Nazi party and Freemasonry, which it believes is secretly a Muslim organization. Indeed, Chick Tracts advance the remarkable theory that the Catholic Church directly and intentionally created Islam itself, in order to... ???

(Image courtesy of Vox M- wait, did he just say that the Vatican finances Islamic terrorism?)

Oh, never mind, apparently creating Islam was an accident? A part of me wants to psychoanalyze this as being, like, a projection of how the USA's support for Afghani rebels "created" al Qaeda, but I'm not going to think that hard about it because it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This is canon in Silent Weapons, obviously.

The predominant flavour they have as a faction, though, is derived from Hollywood Catholicism. They have unique access to Exorcist agents who can remove demonic possessions (a gameplay mechanic we'll cover when we get to the Church of Satan). Exorcists can also detect Human-Alien hybrids because why not, did you see the part up there where Jack Chick said the Vatican is in league with Hamas to destroy Israel? Nothing I can come up with will be as dumb as any randomly chosen Chick Tract.

I was going to write a section here about the inspiration for their unique victory, which involves cloning Jesus. I'm pretty sure that I was first introduced to the notion either by reading about the Christ Clone Trilogy on TV Tropes, or the Second Coming Project on Snopes. Either way, I have not read the Christ Clone books, and apparently it's a pretty common trope in the first place? Basically, calling out any specific influences on the Jesuit endgame would be inaccurate, but also claiming that it's a pure product of my own creativity would be nonsense. 

Really, the biggest influence on how their endgame actually plays out, more than any depiction of literally cloning Jesus, is Humperdoo from Preacher. Specifically, the idea that there is this project to engineer the second coming, but the twist isn't that it produces the Antichrist by mistake, it's that the intended end product is a figurehead Christ who can be manipulated by his creators to justify their autocracy. (besides, they can't create the Antichrist, the Satanists already called dibs on that endgame.)

Plausibility Rating: 3/10

Just take the plausibility rating for the Freemasons and do a find/replace. The Jesuits exist, are a collection of influential individuals, and unlike the Freemasons they even have a degree of central authority. On the other hand, unlike the Freemasons, the Jesuits are pretty open about what they do and how they operate, and there's no reason to imagine them as an especially nefarious arm of the Catholic Church. In that regard, it's barely a conspiracy theory to begin with, but the ways in which it is a conspiracy theory are deeply dumb.

Who do you want to learn about next?

Post a comment and let me know which conspiracy should be highlighted next:

• The Illuminati
• The Communist International
• The Church of Satan