Definitions? Or Whoops! A paradigm
An American magazine called Mondo 2000 ran an amusing piece called ‘The Conspiracy Top Ten’. In it ‘Zarkov’ offered this definition: ‘Conspiracies may be better understood as organizations pursuing their own ends, who desire no publicity as to their true objectives and methods.’ Which sounds interesting at first then dissolves into mush. This was in the preface to an interview with Jonathan Vankin, author of what sounds like a kind of compendium of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (Paragon Books). Vankin offered this:
‘The accepted paradigm — the established view that the conspiracy theorists are struggling to overthrow — might be called the ‘whoopsy-daisy’ theory. According to this view, things just progress through policy decisions that are made by the official leaders, the president, Congress. But every once in a while…. whoops!… the President gets assassinated, or…whoops!…the Jonestown Massacre.’
Mondo 2000, PO Box 10171, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA: sorry, don’t know which issue this appeared in as it isn’t shown on the photocopy I was sent.
Meanwhile, back at what’s left of the British Left
Analysis (27 Old Gloucester St, London, WC1N 3XX) is a new magazine ‘committed to the revival of the classical Marxist tradition’. In issue 2 there is a long and inaccurate review of the Dorril/Ramsay book Smear!, at the end of which the author offers a (presumably classical Marxist) explanation of the growth of interest on the British Left in things spooky and conspiratorial. He suggests ‘the timing of this is not fortuitous: ….the Conservative Victories in 1979 and 1983, the defeat of the miners in 1985 (in which the security services played an intelligence gathering role)….. [and] the collapse of cherished beliefs….. led inescapably to the conclusion that there was a right-wing conspiracy which had hoodwinked the entire nation….’
There has been an increase of interest in the state in general and the secret state in particular in the 1980s in Britain, but the author is simply wrong to attribute this to the arrival of the Tory Party in 1979. On the British non-Trotskyist Left its origins lie in the 1975-78 period, and the ‘national security’ scares that were run against the Labour Government — the Agee-Hosenball expulsions and the Aubery, Berry and Campbell (ABC) trial for example. And these were mostly triggered by the fall-out from Watergate and Vietnam in the United States. The people in London who went spook hunting in 1975/6 did so because the idea had been suggested to them by the example of spook hunters in the United States, notably John Marks.
But since the Arabs believe in conspiracies….
For the first time I can remember an academic journal has printed an essay about conspiracy theories. ‘Dealing with Middle Eastern Conspiracy Theories’, an essay by Daniel Pipes in the journal Orbis, Winter 92, has been ‘adapted from a study prepared for the Central Intelligence Agency’. Mr Pipes is director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Mr Pipes is chiefly concerned to make American foreign policy people pay more attention to what their equivalents in the Middle East are saying. Because ‘[w]hile American officials are nearly blind to conspiracy theories — the belief that complex plots are planned out by shadowy but omnipotent forces — Middle Easterners discern them in the merest accidents….. [and thus] neglecting conspiracy theories can lead to a profound misreading of that region….’. He declares that ‘The shah of Iran and Anwar as-Sadat lost their countrymen’s respect because both were (wrongly) seen as agents of Washington.’
Wrongly, huh? Depends on how he is using ‘agent’. Do I think either the shah or Sadat was an actual case officer-run U.S. intelligence ‘agent’ — no, I don’t. But neither, I’m pretty sure, do the people Mr Pipes is disparaging. In the wider sense of course they were agents of the U.S.. Doing his best to simultaneously deal with the subject while resisting any idea at all that there is something to these pesky ‘conspiracy theories’, poor old Pipes acknowledges ten lines later that ‘the shah of Iran, for example, came to depend deeply on the U.S government’: for weapons, spooks, police, military and counter insurgency training and advice, intelligence from NSA etc. etc.
Pipes continues, stuffing his other foot into his mouth. On the one hand: ‘Much of the region’s anti-Western, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, anti-moderate and anti-modern behavior results from fears of clandestine forces….’ On the other hand: ‘Western leaders have to act with special propriety to shed a long-established — and deserved — reputation for deviousness.’ [‘Deviousness’!] …’Living in a political culture ignorant of secret police, a political underground and coups d’etat [Americans] often find it hard to imagine that plots do play a role in other countries.’
This is pretty staggering — and not a little puzzling — even for somebody writing for the U.S. intelligence community during the Reagan-Bush years. What about the FBI, loyalty programs, Cointelpro, McCarthyism, Operations Chaos, Minaret et al at home; the CIA abroad? A ‘fear of clandestine forces’ on the part of the ruling elites of ‘the Middle East’ is entirely rational.
Pipes concludes, absurdly: ‘Twofold recommendations. As a rule, do not play games; but be aware of vulnerabilities created by the conspiracy mentality and, on special occasions, exploit these to the maximum.’
No/yes. Of course nobody in the Middle East ever reads Orbis.
Now Uncle Brian will tell us a story
Another academically respectable sighting of the ‘C’ word is in Peter Coleman’s The Liberal Conspiracy (Free Press, Macmillan, 1989), a history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which should have been mentioned before now. CCF was one of the CIA’s most successful operations. Running virtually world-wide, undetected for almost 20 years, the CCF was both a propaganda operation and a rich source of recruitment access to a wide range of the political and cultural elites of other countries (This latter point is generally omitted — and is from Coleman’s book.)
This was reviewed in the December 1990 edition of the conservative British journal The Salisbury Review by Brian Crozier, who would only be flattered to be described as one of our leading cold warriors. Declaring an interest, Crozier describes how he was appointed by the CCF in 1965 to develop the CCF news services. Crozier has always maintained he knew nothing of the CIA connection at the time and describes here how CCF hired (or recruited) him; how, after initially declining the offer to take over and run CCF’s three press agencies, he was offered an 8 week trip round Latin America to write a report on how the CCF Spanish language press agency El Mundo en Espanol was being received. At the end of the tour he changed his mind. Or so he says.
Crozier refers to the 1966/67 crisis when the CIA funding of CCF was revealed in the United States. He says ‘the decisive blow was struck by…. Ramparts. … which had got its material from the Czechoslovak StB operation on behalf of the KGB.’ Even if this is true — and there is no particular reason to believe it; and Crozier offers none — the point Crozier thinks he is making fails. For the information Ramparts published about CCF was true, and the origins of true information are of no consequence. It is disinformation whose origins are interesting.
That conspiracy mentality
In his essay Pipes has a stab at pinning down what distinguishes ‘the conspiracy mentality’ from ‘more conventional patterns of thought’. He thinks the ‘conspiracy mentality’ is characterised by the following beliefs: ‘appearances deceive; conspiracies drive history; nothing is haphazard; the enemy always gains; power, fame, money, and sex account for all’. Pipes finds the ‘conspiracy mentality’ very strange. But every belief Pipes attributes to it is true — but not always. Therein lies the problem — and the intellectual interest. Brian Crozier’s views on the role of the Soviet Communist Party and KGB would certainly score on the first four of Pipes’ list, but not the fifth.
I score about 50% on Mr Pipes list. Appearances deceive — yes, but only sometimes. Nothing is haphazard — nonsense, of course, but in politics and international relations rather less is haphazard than the conventional Anglo-American whoops-a-daisy paradigm would have us believe. Fame, money and sex do account for a lot for most people: it is only a minority that are motivated by concepts.
The best response I heard of to the ‘conspiracy theorist’ charge was from Anthony Summers who said something like: I don’t have an interest in conspiracy thories but I do have an interest in theories about conspiracies. Summers is about mid-way on a continuum with ‘no conspiracy’ ideologues like Pipes at one end. Pretty close to the other end is Lloyd Miller at A-Albionic. Now Lloyd Miller is a conspiracy theorist loud and proud. He collects conspiracy theories the way other people collect beer mats. He just loves them in all shapes and sizes. Are any of them true? Mr Miller doesn’t seem to care, so long as they are interesting.
A-Albionic
A-Albionic is the ‘on-going research of a private network dedicated to applying the scientific method to conspiracy theories of history.’ For ‘private network’ I suspect we should read Mr Miller. Scientific method, eh? Watch out.
‘Current issues of the [A-Albionic] Project revolve around clarifying, elaborating, and testing the hypothesis that a traditionally London-centred world money cartel, under the patronage of the British Crown, vies for dominion of world affairs on multiple levels with the Vatican, the Empire of the City (of London)’s ancient enemy and competing social organic heir to the mantle of Rome.’
Yes, it’s almost intelligible; but that’s only part of it. Try these for example.
- ‘Was Reagan a Catholic Hollywood/GE Asset via Gambino?’. (Back issue, Fall 88)
Or this, from the Summer 1988 summary:
- ‘The Real Star Wars: a review of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. .. Hawkings — a self-revealed agent of the Judeo-Masonic- Anglophile/Royalist Cabal in its confict with the Vatican’…..’
Or this from a letter to me recently:
- ‘the hypothesis that the Vatican/SMOM crowd ran a coup in Britain via pro American elements of British intelligence against the Judeo-Masonic forces best represented by the Queen and, in the City, Lord Rothschild.’
Or…
- The Geneva Bible?
- The Testimony of Albert Rhys Williams?
- World Conservation Bank in the light of Kontradiev and Conspiracy?
- Thatcher and Reagan fold before wrath of Royalty and Rhodes scholars?
A-Albionic is seriously weird (in the complimentary sense) and it/they has/have an extremely exotic mail order book list. For example, for a mere $5.00 you can buy ‘Report on the Conspiracy to Rule the World’ – by ‘Anonymous’. Yes, well that’s about stripped it all down to its essentials, I guess. They’re at PO Box 20273, Ferndale, Michigan 48220. Send a couple of dollars along when you write: the most recent mail-shot mentioned financial had times.
And in Japan, too.
An unlikely source of contemporary anti-Jewish conspiracy theories is Japan (where there are no Jews). Terry McCarthy reported in The Independent (4 July ’92) that a Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Post, with a circulation of 750,000 ‘attempts to persuade its reader that a full-scale Jewish conspiracy that aims to undermine the Japanese economy is being played out in Tokyo’s financial markets.’
At the back of this are the activities of American banks — Saloman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — playing currency speculation games in Japan (‘arbitrage’) now that the Japanese government has made the fatal mistake of opening up its financial markets to ‘competition’. (The announcement of which appeared in the Guardian on 24 February ’92.) The Shukan Post is wrong, of course, to see this as a Jewish plot ‘to destroy the strong financial structure of Japan with arbitrage and futures contracts’. But that might be the consequence, if the British experience of opening their economy to the players in the ‘global casino’ is anything to go on.