So I'm reading Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust and it covers the right winger's conspiracy theorizing around the usual supects of Bolsheviks/Jews and Freemasons and it occured to me that Freemasons seem to have got out of the whole undermining nation-states business. The last vaguely masonic association I recall was when Roberto Calvi turned up hanging under Blackfriars Bridge, although others may have just passed me by I suppose. When did they lose their sinister undertone?
Freemasonry isn’t a uniform or unified organization. Each country has one or multiple Grand Lodges (or Orients) that manage lodges in their territory. And in the case of the US, Mexico, and Canada, each state has its own Grand Lodge.
This is important because you have to understand the concept of Masonic Recognition. Grand Lodges and therefor their members only recognize the legitimacy of other Freemasons by what amounts to a treaty system. And loosely a Grand Lodge will only Recognize another Grandlodge if they feel they meet a series of “landmarks” that are similar throughout the Masonic tradition around the world.
Those landmarks include things like not being involved in politics, not admitting women, and other things. When the Grandlodge fails to meet these common landmarks most of the time other Grand Lodges refuse to recognize them. And the big reason this happens is participating in politics. In America a good example is when the state of Georgia issued a decree stating that Gay members could no longer be in the organization. That led the Grandlodge of California to remove their recognition of Georgia Masons as recognized members of the fraternity. This was shortly after gay marriage was legalized in the US.
At this point you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about all this. It’s because your question assume there is a larger organizational structure within freemasonry that allows planning and plotting against world government to exist. There is not. At best there is a loose confederation of different fraternal organizations that all call them selves freemasonry and at the end of the day of agree they freemasons because they agree on certain tenets.