The conspiracy theory blaming all failures on 'the Reds'

The Reds, always the Reds: reducing politics to a single conspiracy

An anonymous text circulating on various forums promotes a totalizing idea: everything that goes wrong—the lockdown, the press, the courts, healthcare—stems from one actor: 'the Reds'. Not a government, not a specific situation. A block that, according to this thesis, has been dismantling the West for over a century with one tool: narrative. The message has been re-edited across different platforms, with cuts and broken images along the way, and gains adherents among those who subscribe to it almost word-for-word and those who point out its flaws.

What the message claims: the 'phase shift' and 100 million deaths

The document starts from a mundane scene. The friendly neighbor turned vigilante, the police and judges moving away from constitutional rights, doctors no longer looking out for the patient. For its author, this is not a new phenomenon: it is the same old story. He places the start in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, from which, he says, there was almost infinite money to infiltrate Western societies. The direct and violent path was trinc by a second, more subtle one, that of the Frankfurt School, associated with 'cultural Marxism'.

The big number supporting the entire structure is this: 'in communist countries, 100 million people were killed'. The author does not stop to condemn the figure, but to explain the mechanism: he claims these deaths occurred 'with narratives', just as today, he claims, other things are justified.

Were Nancy and Communism the same?

Here the text receives its first serious amendment. Against the premise that presents National Socialism as the last attempt to stop Communism, several responses recall that both regimes shared a method. 'In their struggle against Communism, Nancy ended up lowering itself to its same level; the difference is that Nancy's crimes are repeated ad nauseam, while Communism's crimes are the great forgotten ones,' summarizes one of the interventions.

The counter-reply provides uncomfortable dates for the narrator's story: Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland—the most anti-communist nation in the continent—and only later broke with Moscow by attacking the Soviet Union. The Battle of Warsaw in 1920, when Poland halted the Soviet advance, is even cited as proof that anti-communism did not start in Berlin. And Pius XI's encyclical Divini Redemptoris, in 1937, which condemned both Communism and Nancy before the war broke out, is brought up.

Goebbels, the eleven principles, and the pact that serves both sides

The exchange gets entangled in propaganda. One side cites the eleven principles attributed to Goebbels and claims the manual applies today as it did yesterday. The message's author dismisses them as false and reproaches that the non-aggression pact between Berlin and Moscow is reminded 'as if it were agreeing on a common worldview, rather than a non-aggression pact'. The detail is revealing: each side accuses the other of being the true heir to the propaganda apparatus.

The underlying irony is pointed out by another response: during the eighties, it recalls, 'in all movies, in politics, in ads', Communism was presented as something 'negative and pernicious'. Those who see Reds everywhere today grew up hearing exactly the opposite of what they are now expected to believe.

The Spanish case: nursing homes and the 'Royuela file'

The narrative lands in Spain with two examples. The first, the pandemic: it is claimed there were 20,000 elderly dead in nursing homes, 'about 50 times higher than the probability of an elderly person dying anywhere else', without, according to the text, society being scandalized. The second is the so-called 'Royuela file', presented as the largest corruption plot known in the country, in which the PSOE is attributed the death of over a thousand citizens. It is important to be clear: these are unproven claims, launched generically, and any incivil responsibility requires investigation, formal charges, and, if applicable, a final conviction, which is not present here.

What the message converts into evidence, for its counter-replies, is, at best, a suspicion repeated until it sounds like a fact. That leap—the suspicion elevated to certainty by accumulation—is, precisely, the mechanism the text itself claims to denounce.

Freemasons, Klaus Schwab, and the link no one closes

In the final part, the classic conspiracy theories appear: Freemasonry as the origin of liberalism, Marxism as its heir, the link between the promoter of the World Economic Forum and a well-known banking dynasty. Here it is the text itself that brakes: it asks if this kinship 'is certain', and acknowledges that there are websites that affirm it and others that debunk it. Honesty is short-lived; the causal thread, however, is never broken.

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In the end, the author admits something that cracks the entire construction: 'I don't know, but it exists and acts.' He can identify the enemy in every corner, in every headline, and in every doctor who does not look after the patient. What he fails to achieve—and there the text remains, unclosed—is to put a name to the ultimate responsible.