A year or two ago, I saw the
much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and
although the plot wasn’t any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For
various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon
Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold
War by bankrupting
Russia
into fruitless space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality
was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that
Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as
“crazy conspiracy theorists.” This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature
to me.=
Obviously, a large fraction of everything
described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most
respectable newspapers—from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local
case of petty urban corruption—could objectively be categorized as a
“conspiracy theory” but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that
highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or
fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian
approval.
Put another way, there are good
“conspiracy theories” and bad “conspiracy theories,” with the former being the
ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never
described as such. I’ve sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control
of our television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the
new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to
totally invert all of our most famous “conspiracy theories” in the minds of the
gullible American public. The notion that nineteen Arabs armed with box-cutters
hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses, and reduced
several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridicule as the
most preposterous “conspiracy theory” ever to have gone straight from the comic
books into the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd “lone
gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.
Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American
public beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis
of implied association. In the initial weeks and months following the 2001
attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and vilify Osama
Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest national
enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print,
soon becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world. But as the Bush
Administration and its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images
of the Burning Towers were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos
of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden’s arch- enemy. As a consequence, by the
time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the
American public[1] believed that Saddam was personally involved
in the destruction of our World Trade Center. By that date I don’t doubt that
many millions of patriotic but low- information Americans would have angrily
denounced and vilified as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” anyone with the
temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind
9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a
fallacious claim.
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These factors of media
manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled
across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas
academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America[2] was
Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science
Association.
Based
on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the
CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy
theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a
deliberate means of influencing public opinion.
During
the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren
Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely
responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that
top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA
distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist
their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational
supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared
statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording,
arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The
result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread
throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down
to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this
particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks
on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.
But
although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in
order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of
ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical
ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around
the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused
a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of
historical events.
For decades prior to that
conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and publicintellectuals[3]
had been historian Charles Beard[4], whose influential writings had
heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping
American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his
examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the
nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major
historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted
that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities
was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However,
Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he
was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many
younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or
were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream
media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European
political philosophers, Karl Popper[5] and Leo Strauss[6],
gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas
became dominant in public life.
Popper,
the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to
the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that
these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of
human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual
actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial
beliefs” as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor
to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own
background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937
surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.
Meanwhile,
Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally
harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons.
In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a
crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their
effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes
of the ignorant masses. His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not
that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their
spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a
matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut
the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
Even for most educated Americans,
theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague
names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my
own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have
largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals.
Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern
liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal
financier George Soros claiming to be
his intellectual disciple[7]. Meanwhile, the neo-conservative
thinkers[8] who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the
Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their
ideas back to Strauss.
So,
through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional
American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of
our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or
politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable
discourse.
By
1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by
the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political
scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called “paranoid
style” in American politics[9], which he denounced as
the underlying cause of widespread popular belief in implausible conspiracy
theories. To a considerable extent, he seemed to be attacking straw men,
recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while
seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct. For example, he
described how some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of
thousands of Red Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on
San Diego, while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies
had indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government. Not even the most
conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged conspiracies are
true, merely that some of them might be.
Most of these shifts in public sentiment
occurred before I was born or when I was a very young child, and my own views
were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence,
for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the
so-called “conspiracy theories” as ridiculous, never once even considering that
any of them might possibly be true.
To
the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was simple and
based on what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any conspiracy responsible
for some important public event must surely have many separate “moving parts”
to it, whether actors or actions taken, let us say numbering at least 100 or
more. Now given the imperfect nature of all attempts at concealment, it would
surely be impossible for all of these to be kept entirely hidden. So even if a
conspiracy were initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major
clues would still be left in plain sight for investigators to find. And once
the buzzing cloud of journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of
conspiracy would certainly attract an additional swarm of energetic
investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with more pieces
gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely collapsed. Even if
not all the crucial facts were ever determined, at least the simple conclusion
that there had indeed been some sort of conspiracy would quickly become
established.
However,
there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since decided was
entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies either involve powerful
governmental officials or situations in which their disclosure would represent
a source of considerable embarrassment to such individuals. But I had always
assumed that even if government failed in its investigatory role, the dedicated
bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate would invariably come through, tirelessly
seeking truth, ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began
realizing
that the media was merely “Our American Pravda”[10] and perhaps had
been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in my logic. If those
five—or ten or twenty or fifty— initial clues were simply ignored by the media,
whether through laziness, incompetence, or much less venial sins, then there would
be absolutely nothing to prevent successful conspiracies from taking place and
remaining undetected, perhaps even the most blatant and careless ones.
In fact, I would extend this notion to
a general principle. Substantial control of the media is almost always an
absolute prerequisite for any successful conspiracy, the greater the degree of
control the better. So when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the
first matter to investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let us consider a simple
thought-experiment. For various reasons these days, the entire American media
is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was
toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Hence I would
argue that the likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place
within the operative zone of those media organs is virtually nil. Indeed, we
are constantly bombarded with stories of alleged Russian conspiracies that
appear to be “false positives,” dire allegations seemingly having little
factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous. Meanwhile, even the crudest
sort of anti- Russian conspiracy might easily occur
without receiving any serious mainstream media notice or investigation.
This
argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in
America’s renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky
Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian
officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal persecution and death of
an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund manager with large Russian
holdings. However, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence[11] that it
was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the
gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against
him and was therefore fearful of his life for that reason. Naturally, the American media has
provided scarcely a single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding
what might amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax[12]
of geopolitical significance.
To
some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of
alternative media outlets, including my own small
webzine[13], have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly
surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these
Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned
as “crazy conspiracy theories” by our mainstream media organs. Such unfiltered speculation must
surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials
who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow
their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several years
ago a senior Obama Administration official[14] argued
that the free discussion of various “conspiracy theories” on the Internet was
so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to
“cognitively infiltrate” and disrupt them, essentially proposing a
high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro[15]
operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Until just a few years ago I’d scarcely
even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures
of 20th century American intellectual life[16]. But the
more I’ve discovered the number of serious crimes and disasters that have
completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more I wonder what other
matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps Beard was correct all along in
recognizing the respectability of “conspiracy theories,” and we should return
to his traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless
conspiratorial propaganda campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that
we should dismiss such notions without any serious consideration.
Reprinted with permission
from The Unz
Review.
Ron
Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for
the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is
also the founder of RonUnz.org
Copyright
© 2019 The Unz
Review
