I generally feel you can trace these things back to political/economic things.<p>So the original illuminati were the bad guys because they believed in modern liberal democracy basically. Similarly the Protocol of the elders of Zion can be traced back to monarchists defending the royalty by defaming their opponents.<p>So the claim that it's mostly about 1969s US hippies trying to wake people up and that the more recent stuff is the anomoly seems to run against my intuition.<p>The UN, EU, George Soros and Bill Gates being the big bogeymen today seem to fit a similar pattern.<p>Some interesting threads to follow:<p>Umberto Eco's books Foucault's Pendulum, The Prague Graveyard, and Numero Zero touch on these themes.<p>One of the guys mentioned in this who wrote for Playboy actually served with Lee Harvey Oswald. The connections are explored in Adam Curtis's latest series.