Chip Berlet
This 63-page essay describes a wide range of contacts between what in a British context would be described as right-wing conspiracy theorists and the left. Berlet documents a range of contacts between the far-right Liberty Lobby, followers of LaRouche, Bo Gritz and the Populist Party, the Christic Institute, Radio Free America and a number of individuals, notably Victor Marchetti, Mark Lane, L. Fletcher Prouty, Dave Amory, Sherman Skolnick, and one Craig Hulet. (Rather than use ‘the left’, Berlet refers to ‘Progressives’, the use of which in a British context used to signify a kind of naive, pro-Soviet Communism. I don’t know if it does in a U.S. context.)
Prouty, Lane and Marchetti are attacked for their association with the Liberty Lobby. Lane and Marchetti worked for a Liberty-published anti-Zionist newsletter; Prouty allowed the Liberty front, the Institute for Historical Review, part of the Holocaust denial lobby, to republish his book The Secret Team. (Lane presents, without comment, Liberty Lobby founder Willis Carto’s denial of anti-semitism in his recent book, Plausible Denial, reviewed elsewhere in this issue.) Almost everyone else is attacked for contacts with LaRouche’s organisation.
This is all very interesting to me, but it is very small beer. With the exception of Spotlight, which apparently sells 200,000 copies, these are all groups scratching around on the margins of U.S. political life. In U.K. terms these groups are about as politically significant as, say, the Socialist Workers’ Party.
Berlet’s complaint is that ‘[s]ince the early 1980s, persons from far-right and fascist political groups in the United States have attempted to convince progressive activists to join forces to oppose certain government policies’. They have done this by the propagation of ‘conspiracism and demagoguery’ which ‘feature simplistic answers to complex problems’ — the conventional left hostility to talk of conspiracies. (Another example is Michael Albert’s ‘Conspiracy Theory’ in Z, January 1992.) He contrasts ‘the Christic [Institute] theme that Iran-Contragate was caused by a long-standing conspiracy of individual agents’ with the ‘systemic failure’ of the American political system. But is this alleged contrast justified? It certainly is true that the Christic’s central document, The Affidavit of Daniel Sheehan, is seriously flawed by his cavalier handling of evidence: Mae Brussel was the ‘source’ for the ridiculous section on the events of 22 November 1963, for example. But Sheehan is not the whole of the story. In a fund-raising letter of 30 November 1990, for example, Christic Executive Director Sara Nelson writes of ‘the first time since the mid-1970s that Congress had genuinely wrestled with the fundamental incompatibility between covert operations and constitutional democracy’; and, later on the same page, of ‘the dangerous consequences of unchecked Presidential war-making power’. This, surely, is not the view of someone who is interested solely in the conspiracy of individual agents and rejects what Berlet calls ‘the systemic view’.
There need be no conflict between research into conspiracies and ‘the systemic view’. What Berlet seems unwilling to acknowledge is that within a ‘systemic view’ of the United States (or the CIA, or the Congress-Presidency relationship, or whatever) there are going be conspiracies of individuals: and when the individuals are as powerful as, say, senior CIA personnel, the conspiracies are also going to be significant. The trouble is that since the demise of Ramparts magazine, the American left (progressives) has rarely been much interested in conspiracies and has thus left the field open for the right, who are. Would Marchetti and Lane have been sucked into the Liberty Lobby’s operations if they had been taken seriously by the American left in the past 15 years? Did Prouty get any other offers from the left to republish his book before the one from Liberty Lobby?
Berlet’s interesting paper is available from Political Research Associates, Suite 205, 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA, $6.50 in the U.S. If ordering outside the U.S. the price is $9.00 airmail and $7.00 by sea. Outside the U.S. send International Money Orders only.
Berlet also discusses these ideas in an extended interview in the January 1992 edition of Z magazine, 150 West Canton St, Boston MA 02118.