Conspiracy

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In a political sense, conspiracy refers to a group of persons united in the goal of usurping or overthrowing an established political power. Typically, the final goal is to gain power through a revolutionary coup d'état or through assassination.

A conspiracy is to be contrasted with a cabal. The two are similar but have quite different connotations; in contrast to a cabal, a conspiracy usually looks to overthrow a fixed power instead of usurping it from within.

Notable political conspiracies

• The Catiline conspiracies in the first century BC.
• A group of Roman senators, calling itself the Liberatores, hoped to restore the Roman Republic by killing Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
• The Pisonian conspiracy AD 65.
• The Pazzi conspiracy, which included the Pope, of the late 1400s.
• The Main Plot of 1603
• The Bye Plot of 1603
• The Gunpowder Plot of 1605
• The Anjala conspiracy of 1788
• The conspiracy of 1865 to assassinate U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and members of his cabinet
• The French government's attempted cover-up following Émile Zola's accusations in the Dreyfus Affair, starting in 1894.
• The 1903 efforts by the Tsar's secret police to foment anti-Semitism by presenting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic text.^[1]
• The 1939 Operation Himmler and its Gleiwitz incident
• Operation Mockingbird, from 1948. In 1976, then CIA director George H. W. Bush ordered that paid media recruiting would be prohibited.
• The 1945 Operation Paperclip, the extraction of top Nazi scientists.
• The MKULTRA mind control program, from 1953 to late 1960s
• The 1954 Lavon affair
• The 1962 Operation Northwoods
• The 1969 Manson Family murders
• The 1972 Watergate burglary and cover-up scandals
• The 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack
• The 1987 Iran-Contra Affair
• The 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway
• The Enron manipulation of the California Electricity Market during the California electricity crisis
• The Mafia
• Various CIA involvements in overseas coups d'état
• The 1991 Testimony of Nayirah before the U.S. Congress to rally the support of the U.S. public to launch the Gulf War
• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male^[2]
• The General Motors streetcar conspiracy^[3]
• The plot by some gaullists of the French Secret Service to destabilise future president Georges Pompidou, known as the Markovic affair
• The series of incidents in Italy connected to the so called "strategy of tension"
• Operation Gladio

See also

• Secrecy
• Conspiracy
• Conspiracy theory

References

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