From the Pulpit to the Podium: Cueing Conspiracies to Construct Memory Regimes

• In Event: Memory, Religion, and Conspiracy: The Politics of Narrative in East Europe

Abstract

From Russia to El Salvador, opinion leaders leverage conspiracy theories to construct false historical narratives and to solidify their power by constructing memory regimes. What online and offline strategies do these political and religious leaders embrace when using conspiracy theories to create these memory regimes?

In this paper, we analyze the politics of conspiracy theories and memory regimes through the case of Poland, where ruling party leaders propagate conspiracies surrounding a 2010 plane crash in the town of Smoleńsk that killed 96 top Polish political, religious, and military officials. This crash happened enroute to a commemoration of the Katyń massacre—a Soviet-era event in which the NKVD killed nearly 22,000 Polish POWs. The ruling party and other conservative actors discursively place the Katyń murder alongside the Smoleńsk plane crash, dog-whistling similarities between the two events.

We use three new sources of data: interviews with commemoration participants, a database of Smoleńsk memorials, and over 6,000 tweets referencing Smolensk across a one-year period. We find that online and offline strategies differ substantially. We find that online politicians invoke historical memory, paralleling the crash to Katyń instead of invoking explicit conspiracies. Surprisingly, offline politicians are also more willing to give speeches that explicitly endorse conspiracy theories surrounding the crash. While religious leaders rarely engage in Twitter discourse, offline they construct physical memorials commemorating the crash more often than politicians. Through our findings, we detail how political and religious leaders cooperate to infuse conspiracies into a constructed memory regime.

Authors

• Frances Cayton, Cornell University

• Courtney Blackington, University of Pittsburgh