The Craft Quotes

“The America that emerged victorious from the Revolutionary War was a laboratory of political communication. By shaking off monarchical rule, the Republic had also forsaken all the rituals and emblems that created the aura surrounding the European thrones. No more sceptres and crowns; no more cathedral coronations and Te deums. To fill that vacuum, the United States created the cult of George Washington; and George Washington, in his turn, made Freemasonry into a patriotic liturgy.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“If Freemasonry has helped make the modern world, it is in part because it offers a refuge from the turmoil outside.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“It should hardly need saying that German Freemasonry could not wield remotely the kind of influence that Ludendorff and Hitler alleged.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Hitler’s anti-Masonry exemplified his ability to combine fanaticism with pragmatism: his overarching, obsessive hatred of ‘the Jew’ allowed other components of his ideology, notably anti-Communism, to be deployed when they would be most popular and have most impact.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“He needed to make the phantasmagorical threat to his equally phantasmagorical Aryan race seem real, biological. There could be no excuses, no margin of doubt, no fiddly process of sorting out the innocent from the guilty. He hated Freemasonry, but to let any attack on it clutter the call for a war on Jews would be to rob his ideology of its brutal simplicity.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“The anti-Masonic conspiracy theory become a model for modern anti-Semitism. Belief in a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy spread to non-Catholics. In German-speaking countries, for example, it was incorporated into a local variant of extreme nationalism known as the völkisch ideology (from Volk – people, or soul of the people): it combined anti-Semitism, a hatred of democracy and ‘Jewish capitalism’, and nostalgia for a fairy-tale Teutonic past.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“there was a profoundly arrogant assumption at work in the white Masonic mind: the Craft, as the highest expression of human wisdom, came to the Americas in fulfilment of the natives’ deepest spiritual inclinations.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“What is less obvious is why Freemasonry, on highly charged occasions such as the cornerstone ceremony at the Capitol, should have been picked to provide the Republic’s ceremonial language. An international secret society that had never been too far from suspicion and controversy during its short history now had a public role in bringing credibility to the institutions of the United States.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism was idiotic. It has nothing to contribute to our understanding of the causes of the French Revolution. Yet it does still have much to teach us about how conspiracy-thinking makes complex events seem simple, and makes us feel clever for oversimplifying them.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World