The Internet is full of conspiracy theories. The library is full of books about conspiracies (real and imagined) and it certainly is a favorite topic for directors/producers of films. An article caught my eye and I thought I would discuss this topic. You can’t imagine the weird email I get when I write about this and other related topics.
Gary Indiana (I have no idea if this is his real name or a pseudo) writes in his article No Such Thing as Paranoia, [Village Voice] …
Like conspiracies themselves, conspiracy theories are as old as gossip and politics. To understand the world one inhabits, it is impossible to credit the idea of contingency or chance as the root of all weirdness. Just as any psychotic tends to utter something true in the process of saying something crazy, there is usually a kernel of reality in even the most far-fetched conspiracy theory. While it is easy to distinguish a belief that aluminum foil wrapped around one’s head filters out alien brain waves from rational but dissident ideas, some modern writers on conspiracy theory tend to conflate nonconformity with the most bizarre and cognitively defective extremes of it. So-called “consensus historians,” following the lead of Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” have effectively pathologized any suspicion of active conspiracies, however defined, into a synonym for “nut job” in public discourse.
Our mass media, its ownership consolidated among a handful of billionaires whose interests are identical with those of corporate cronies (globalized “free trade” for the wealthy nations, peonage for the third world, Chomsky’s “manufacture of consent” via a constant torrent of propaganda for the status quo), reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid fantasy of “conspiracy cranks”—for instance, the idea that successive “preemptive” wars might be launched against demonized enemies in order to award reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly helmed by, say, the vice president of the United States and other exalted government employees, or that the strategic purpose of one such war might be the economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a secure pipeline for the exploitation of said resources. Instead, the altruism and democracy-spreading goodness of the American power elite are portrayed as self-evident, taking all other motives off the media table.[i]
The necessary proof of such a conspiracy, if we choose to call it that, often turns up 25 or 50 years after the fact, when the release of classified documents churns up no public outcry or indictments.[ii] Such was the recent case with the declassified revelation that the late Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current president, along with his law partner W. Averill Harriman, a former governor of New York, managed a number of concerns on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen. These included the Union Banking Corporation, seized under the Trading With the Enemy Act on October 20, 1942 (Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248), Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (Vesting Order No. 259), and the Holland-American Trading Corporation (Vesting Order No. 261).
The Union Banking Corporation financed Hitler after his electoral losses in 1932; the other Bush-managed concerns have been characterized as “a shipping line which imported German spies; an energy company that supplied the Luftwaffe with high-ethyl fuel; and a steel company that employed Jewish slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp.”[iii] Fuller details are documented in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin; in Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush; as well as in the colorful, conspiracist history Fleshing Out Skull & Bones, by Anthony Sutton et al., and further confirmed by John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit. Since only the Nazi partners in the Bush-Harriman interests were permanently deprived of their frozen stock, Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, waltzed off with $1.5 million when the Union Banking Corp. was liquidated in 1951. (This was, in effect, the foundation of the Bush family fortune: once a Snopes, always a Snopes.) Briefly picked up by the Associated Press and buried deep in the pages of American newspapers, this half-century-late disclosure led to no media follow-up and left no impression on the potential electorate for the 2004 U.S. presidential contest. …
Hofstadter’s essay, written in the aftermath of the McCarthy witch hunts and the Kennedy assassination, with an eye on the then marginal but scary realm of right-wing plot-weavers, has been eerily assimilated by a certain idling pedantry, which rummages through the historical debris of arcane conspiracist subjects (the Knights Templar, Jesuit intrigues, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, alien abductions, the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg meetings, the Knights of Malta), often recounting the same narratives at numbing length, with little fresh insight. Only a few contemporary writers drastically depart from Hofstadter’s historical itinerary or his parochial vision of America as a “pluralist democracy” whose institutional framework is essentially benign and immutably fair, rational, and systemically mistrusted only by paranoid schizophrenics. “One need only think of the response to President Kennedy’s assassination in Europe to be reminded that Americans have no monopoly on the gift for paranoid improvisation,” Hofstadter declared, 15 years before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Kennedy’s murder was indeed the result of a conspiracy.
Hofstadter’s prescience is amply evidenced in Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003). Barkun has ingested Hofstadter’s imperious tome whole, and his book does little more than regurgitate its polemical eurekas. Barkun informs us that the “essence of conspiracy beliefs lies in attempts to delineate and explain evil.” Ergo Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most other organized religions qualify as conspiracy beliefs, though Barkun neglects to say so. Barkun identifies three principles “found in virtually every conspiracy theory,” to wit: Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected. Clearly Freud, Plato, Leibniz, and Einstein all suffered from at least one symptom of conspiracism; fortuitously, without mentioning any of them, someone has finally exposed these thinkers as mentally ill.
Writers like Barkun are fond of inventing buzz concepts like “improvisational millennialism,” “the cultic milieu,” “agency panic,” and “stigmatized knowledge claims.” The latter, according to Barkun, are “claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error—universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like.” Few besides the amply tenured and remuneratively institutionalized would be likely to endorse Barkun’s tweedy self-flattery as descriptive of American academia—as Jane Jacobs points out in her new book Dark Age Ahead, our colleges and universities have largely degenerated into mere credentialing factories—and what political scientists consider a science tends to be more a recruitment pool for think tanks, few of which trouble to separate knowledge from error, but simply bend data to suit the particular tank’s ideological orientation.
he same impossibly murky entities are combed over in most books on conspiracism, though some of the literature and related nonfiction have begun to deviate considerably from consensus historicism and the Hofstadter school. The traditional conspiracist books look backward through the jumbled mythologies of nebulously interwoven secret societies, usually beginning with the Bavarian Illuminati (currently a hit topic with the re-release of Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 2000 novel Angels & Demons), though some point back to the Knights Templar, an order of monks and knights founded by Hugh de Payens in 1118. The Templars originally occupied the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and later went in for money lending; in October 1307, on Friday the 13th (a charged date ever since), the Inquisition arrested the leader and 123 other Knights Templar, who were promptly tortured into confessing blasphemy, black magic, devil worship, and homosexual sodomy. It’s believed by some that rather than disbanding, the Knights reorganized themselves sub rosa and continued to influence events and the activities of other cults.
Early fears of an Illuminati conspiracy were widely disseminated via Abbé Barruél’s four-volume Mémoires Pour Servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme of 1797, in which the author, a Jesuit expelled from France with the rest of his order, claimed the French Revolution had emanated from a conspiracy of Masons, Illuminati, and “anti-Christians.” A contemporaneous screed by a Scottish scientist, John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, advanced the same idea. The book became wildly popular in America, where, it is often pointed out, several Founding Fathers belonged to the Masonic order.
Hofstadter cites Federalist fears of “a Jacob-inical plot touched off by Illuminism” in the early years of Jeffersonian democracy[iv]. An anti-Masonic movement swept the country in the late 1820s and early 1830s, slightly overlapping a wave of anti-Jesuit hysteria. “It is an ascertained fact,” one Protestant minister wrote in 1836, “that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery.”
Freemasonry, whose date of origin is somewhere in the 16th or 17th century, purports to be (according to its adherents) a benign organization, albeit with a mystical element, which served for much of the 19th century to disseminate rationalist learning among its members in the days before public education: geometry, architecture, astronomy, and similar subjects. Its members aren’t allowed to discuss politics or religion within the Lodge. As Brother Roscoe Pound, a Mason and current professor of jurisprudence at Harvard, puts it, “Every lodge ought to be a center of light from which men go forth filled with new ideas of social justice, cosmopolitan justice and internationality.” All the same, Masons have been periodically accused of Satanism, manipulation of global finance, and secret influence among the world’s movers and shakers. Robert Anton Wilson, in Everything Is Under Control, reports that the P2 society in Italy, founded in the 1970s (purportedly as a subject of the CIA’s Gladio operation), which allegedly engineered the Bologna railway bombing in 1980 and financed itself by fraud and drug running, “recruited exclusively among third-degree members of the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the death row activist, reports in his column that the “CIA hid massive stockpiles of weapons and explosives throughout Italy. They amassed an army of 15,000 troops in something called Operation Gladio . . . to strike vital targets and overthrow the elected Italian government if they dared to vote against Washington’s will.” Well, who knows?
Yes, indeed, who does know? Too often these things have been brought up by the Democratic-Socialist Left in America – but most of the time it is found they are guilty of that which they accuse the other side of the political fence of doing. And, this is one of the reasons why so many third parties have tried and failed to match the power and money of the two main political entities who are both guilty of monopoly of American politics. And, isn’t it ironic that the DNC so selfishly guards their political heritage bestowed upon them and the GOP, not too much longer after the establishment of the American Republic, to become a political entity (Democratic Party) that is bent in destroying the true heritage of the American Republic and forming into their own twisted agenda that dreams of a utopian America where everyone is the same (no “class” jealousy), no one is “overly” wealthy to the government’s taste – never realizing that this has been tried and strived for before in human history, and failed. Village idiots just don’t learn. Useful idiots continue to strengthen their chained bondage to a government who makes promises it can’t keep and/or don’t keep.
The Founding Fathers, one of them being Thomas Jefferson warned about the pitfalls of having a democracy – a pure democracy, so to speak. That is why they chose the form of government known as the democratic republic. Thomas Jefferson wrote:[v]
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
But politics grew and it also became smarter, and soon, as is today, the minority ends up ruling, which was one of the reasons why 56 men decided to declare independence from British rule.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
Thomas Jefferson
And, today, we still have the most unfair tax in the history of government since the feudal lords ruled over the serf population – the income tax.
And the media, like the government, was once the servant of the people – but that role has been reversed, and in the case of the media, has become a tool for the left side of the political house and in some cases for the GOP. Even the mobsters that had any brains knew if one had the judges and the newspapers in their pocket they would expand their operation and be less likely to get “busted”.
So while in an election the majority decides, Thomas Jefferson also reminded Americans:
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
The American political left, in their endeavor to weaken honor, tradition and distort American history, have stated that Jefferson was a hypocrite and thus shouldn’t be so revered as a statesman because he owned slaves while writing a document that declared that all men are created equal.
Several sources explain the slave issue which troubled Thomas Jefferson to his dying day, this source coming from the Monticello site featuring Thomas Jefferson’s biography based upon documented history:
Jefferson inherited slaves from both his father and father-in-law. In a typical year, he owned about 200, almost half of them under the age of sixteen. About eighty of these lived at Monticello; the others lived on adjacent Albemarle County plantations, and on his Poplar Forest estate in Bedford County, Virginia. Jefferson freed two slaves in his lifetime and five in his will and chose not to pursue two others who ran away. All were members of the Hemings family; the seven he eventually freed were skilled tradesmen.
He did free his slaves. Some sources, mostly political claptrap, states that
T. Harriet Hemings was the only female slave freed by Thomas Jefferson.
This looks like a Myth Blaster article brewing concerning this “relative” of Thomas Jefferson, because supposedly Hemings had Jefferson’s child sometime during that period. But records, letters, documents prove otherwise, when it comes to the question about freedom of the Jefferson slaves. They were just not all freed at once. If one studies the character of Mr. Jefferson, founder and former President of the United States, one can easily surmise that he wrestled with his conscience, but also relied heavily upon his logical mind. If he haphazardly freed the slaves – where would they go and what would they do? How would they make a living? What jobs could be available for a free slave when one could obtain an unfree slave within the slave market? Did the slaves want to be dumped out into society when all they knew was the life on the Jefferson family plantation? Here is another source to check out in examining this point of view concerning the issue.
Then, of course, the scandal of the allegation that the reason why Harriet Hemings was not freed because she was a consort of Thomas Jefferson. This occurred during the Clinton administration, a period that full of real and imagined scandals, just as other administrations have had their share, history will show that the Clinton administration topped even the Taft administration when it came to corruption and ethical crimes in government. And how is this for coincidence? President Taft’s descendent, William Howard Taft IV was involved with the Clinton administration!
Odd things about people like these, they tell lies over and over and distort truth to fit their needs in order to brainwash the people into believing them in their sincerity, and after a time they actually believe their own propaganda.
Conspiracy theories usually end up as discussions on the Art Bell radio show, in a book or subject material for an entertaining film – but then once in a while there is a real conspiracy, and sometimes true life conspiracy can be more dramatic, more alarming and detrimental in the faith of the people who are elected to govern us than any book or film could depict. An example of a real conspiracy would be the Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy Jr assassinations and then there is the mysterious Martin Luther King Jr. assassination where the killer to his dying day denied ever killing Martin – so his widow and family want to know who did because after an interview before James Earl Ray’s death, she was convinced he was telling the truth. Was he a fall guy like Lee Harvey Oswald? And final thought in the vein of thought of conspiracy – why do assassins almost always have or the media uses the full three names: first, middle and surname? Coincidence? {subject brought up in the film starring Mel Gibson and Julie Roberts in Conspiracy Theory.
Do you see how easily a conspiracy theory can start?
Further Reading and Links of Interest:
Conspiracy Theories – Carpenoctem
The White House Putsch – Carpenoctem
Top Ten Wackiest Conspiracy Theories – 2Spare
The Best Conspiracy Theories – Lizard People Are Running the World
Who Are the Real Men in Black? – Wise Geek
The Real Men in Black – Alien Crossing
Meet the “Real” Men in Black – Unexplained Mysteries
The Real Men in Black – Forbidden Knowledge
Lee Harvey Oswald – Lone Assassin or Patsy? – McAdams
Dueling for Dollars – GOP ‘Scandal” and Democrat ‘defeatists’ – Swamp Politics
Who’s Profiting From the Iraq War? – MSN Money
Contract Scandal – Guardian, UK [Note: Usually prints anti-American rhetoric]
[i] Here the author is referring to the idea that there was a conspiracy, which many once believed, and some are so blind or stubborn still do, that the Bush administration created a scenario for an excuse to invade Iraq (something Bush I didn’t or couldn’t do after the Liberation of Kuwait), and then further the conspiracy theory to state that it was all about oil (some of the strategy was because according to his actions and records his full intent was to take over as the chief supplier of the major part of the world’s oil) and become occupiers instead of liberators. Well, the facts were presented and the truth came out. Yes, some intelligence reports were incorrect. But these incorrect intelligence reports came from not just America but international sources. It is strange to me, however, that the American presidential administration of Carter, G.H. Bush, Clinton and G.W. Bush all ignored the clear facts presented by civilian and military intelligence that Osama bin Laden was more than just an international criminal wanted for crimes with a $25 million price on his head, but in fact, a despotic and fanatical leader of an organization that was and is still powerful that they organized a physical attack upon the shores of America in New York and Washington, DC. I know one particular US Army officer serving in the main command of operation in Hawaii who had been on the team to determine the structure of this world-wide organization. It looked something like the FBI uses when trying to figure out a mob family’s structure in the hopes of getting the key figures and thus destroying the organized crime entity. Well, when completed and all arrows pointed to Osama bin Laden, the senior officers and officials said merely “Nice chart” in so many words and that information never reached the proper level of command as well in any report to the President of the United States – their ultimate boss in the chain of command. The circumstances points to many faults, too many and too complex to get into this article, and would take probably a two volume book to show the tracking and history of this that led to September 11th 2001. The main thing is that 95% of the information was merely political innuendo on the part of the American Democratic Party for reasons strictly political. The DNC does not adapt nor like to be “second fiddle” to any other political organization. They can’t fill their political treasury in this way, among other things. The main point is that they want government to control our lives from cradle to grave – and those individuals considering themselves the “elite” want to be the ones orchestrating that government.
[ii] And even then it is not really a conspiracy – it becomes an interesting footnote in the history of a personage or fodder, like in the case of Thomas Jefferson, that their life’s accomplishments and contribution to history is not relevant because of that particular allegation or truth about an incident or event in that person’s life. Nonsense. How many of us made “errors” or did something we are not exactly proud of, purposely or not, but yet learned from this that made them determined to do better in life. In the case of Thomas Jefferson, the inner wrestling match between his logic, his conscience and the general acceptance of having slaves in a democratic republic was evident in his letters to friends (with whom he confided in) and some statements made in public. In the end, he physically did what was right – during this lifetime he freed two slaves and the other five were written in his will to be given certification of freedom which left the plantation slave-free.
[iii] American business men, even during the Great Depression were seeking to expand their interests overseas to rebuild the collapsed economy – the economic disaster that spread not only in America, but in Europe as well. This was even before the Nazi came to power politically in Germany headed by the tyrant mass murderer, Adolf Hitler. And as a side note of interest: In Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime that caused what became known as the “Killing Fields” where mass graves were everywhere. It is estimated that between 2 and 6 million people were murdered. While Hitler and his henchmen paid the price – the despot leader of Cambodia – Pol Pot, died a natural death and never stood before an international tribune for a trial for the crimes against humanity he wrought. So much for the usefulness of the world body trying to be the world government called the United Nations.
[iv] This is an interesting political and social history of America topic that I would like to address sometime.
[v] Many authors have written about these secret organizations and the controversy surrounding them, mostly because of the fact that they were secret. It has been the subject material for films as much as books. It does make a good suspense-drama-mystery tale, thus films like The Da Vinci Code, Enemy of the State, and several others are good tales of entertainment. The problem is that people sometimes think they are watching a film based upon factual data or history. This is another topic to cover in a separate posting.
