by Floyd Webster Rudmin
WHO FEARS CONSPIRACY THEORY?
Should we be frightened that we find conspiracy theories in our book stores, movie theatres, and web-sites? It seems so. There are certainly many who say that conspiracy theorists are paranoid and irrational, that we suffer from fear, hysteria, anxiety, and projections, that our theories are too complex and too simplistic. High-priest historians, like Henry Commager, Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Pipes have disparaged conspiracy theory. Canadian journalist Robert Sibley has said that conspiracy theory is "a nihilistic vortex of delusion and superstition that negates reality itself."
Pretty heavy stuff. I am a conspiracy theorist. But I don't know what a nihilistic vortex looks like. In my experience, conspiracy theory is rather matter-of-fact and fun. A wide range of ordinary people, from many walks of life, take an interest in the political and economic events of their era. They think things through on their own, use the library, seek for evidence, articulate a theory, communicate with other people with similar interests. It's not scary at all.
But it certainly does seem that historians and journalists are quite frightened of conspiracy theory and its wide popularity. Those are the two professions whose job it is to interpret our world for us, to explain what is happening. When ordinary people take on the task of doing this themselves, that must mean that we don't believe what the authorities say we should. Maybe the professionals get emotional and talk about paranoia so much because they feel themselves threatened when amateurs think about political events for themselves.
It seems we are in the middle of a new Reformation. The high-priests are again losing their monopoly, and they see us sliding into cults and chaos. It must be scary for them. The same thing happened in 1517, when Martin Luther challenged the Church and translated the Bible into German so that ordinary people could think about theology for themselves. When put on trial, Luther said, "I cannot submit my faith either to the Pope or to the Councils, because it is clear as day they have frequently erred and contradicted each other." That is exactly what a JFK conspiracy theorist would say about the Warren Commission.
People take on the task of explaining things for themselves when the orthodox experts insist on saying nonsense, for example, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. A Reformation is a rebellion against arrogance. If historians and journalists want to understand why they are being displaced by conspiracy theory, it would be most reasonable to examine their own failings first.
But their real reaction is more fearful than reasoned. Name-calling is common. And they always emphasize the craziest products of free-thought, hoping to throw out babies with the bath water. They seem to say that such conspiracies as Columbia's loss of Panama, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the Cosa Nostra crimes, or the Bay of Pigs invasion, or Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or any coup d'etat or political assassination for that matter, didn't happen or shouldn't be thought about because alien autopsies, X-Files, and Elvis's lost diaries are also conspiracy theories. That is like saying Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists should be dismissed because the People's Temple and the Heaven's Gate cults were also Protestants. Conspiracy theory deserves a better critique than that.
WHAT IS CONSPIRACY THEORY?
The correct big-word label would be "naive deconstructive history." It is "history" because it explains events, but only after they have happened. Past-tense. Conspiracy theory, as a political act, is an after-the-fact complaint. To see conspiracies while they are happening would require the resources and powers of police forces and espionage agencies.
Conspiracy theory is "deconstructive history" because it is in rebellion against official explanations and against orthodox journalism and orthodox history. Conspiracy theorists cast out demography, market forces, technological development, social evolution, and other abstract, constructed categories of explanation. Conspiracy theory is radically empirical: tangible facts are the focus, especially facts that orthodox doctrine tries to make disappear. There is a ruthless reduction down to what is without doubt real, namely, persons. Conspiracy theory presumes that human events are caused by people acting as people do, including cooperating, planning, cheating, deceiving, and pursuing power.
To call conspiracy theory "naive" does not mean that it is uncritical or stupidly innocent. In fact, that is what conspiracy theorists might say about orthodox explanations of events promoted by government sources, by mainstream journalism, or by schoolbook history. For example, it is naive to believe the official line that JFK was assassinated by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, just as it was naive to have believed that the September 11, 1973, coup d'etat against Allende was not orchestrated by the United States. Rather, to here call deconstructive history "naive" means that conspiracy theorists are unaware that they are doing deconstructive history, and they are untrained in that.
HOW DOES A CONSPIRACY THEORY ARISE?
Take the case of explaining the past two decades of US "free-trade" schemes: FTA, NAFTA, and soon FTAA. These schemes began with two nations holding hands, then three, and soon four and more. The beginning is the 1989 Canada-US Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) which set the subservient conditions of member nations to US economic dominance. The essence of the FTA is that US corporations gets unrestricted commercial rights and resource ownership in Canada, and in exchange, Canada gets to obey US trade laws.
Why would Canadians have agreed to this? Well, we didn't, but historians would explain it by saying something like, "Globalization made Canadians choose free-trade." Conspiracy theorists would say, "Don't be naive. Look at the facts." In a decade of political opinion polls, and in three consecutive national elections (1984, 1988, 1993), a strong majority of Canadians had consistently said that they do not want American "free-trade" schemes. How has it happened that such a clear, strong democratic decision by so many millions of Canadians could be overthrown?
There was deception. In the 1984 and 1993 federal elections in Canada, the successful parties had explicitly campaigned against free-trade, but when elected they then signed on to so-called "free-trade" treaties. The 1988 vote was also not straight: of the two anti-free-trade parties, the minor one in mid-campaign began to attack the leader of the major one. Deception and attacking an ally are characteristics of humans, not of demography, market forces, technological development, evolution, or other categories of historical explanation. It is reasonable to see such facts and then look for conspiracies. Let's look in the library to see what can be found.
From 1976 to 1979, more than a decade before the FTA, US Ambassador Thomas Enders was crisscrossing Canada promoting free-trade. Who was Thomas Enders? He was hired by the US government in 1958 as an "intelligence research specialist." In 1969, he was in Yugoslavia, in 1971 Cambodia. His jobs there were to rig Lon Nol's election and to use a local intelligence network to pick villages to be bombed by B52s in President Nixon's secret war. In 1976 to 1979, he was in Canada weaving a web of political and business connections to promote the American version of "free-trade." In 1981, Enders became President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, working on the invasion of Grenada and the illegal proxy wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador. One of his jobs, reportedly, was to coordinate operations with Oliver North and Duane Clarridge, head of the CIA's covert operations in Latin America.
Considering these facts, which is more likely or more believable, that Enders was in Canada promoting free-trade as some kind of personal hobby, or that he was under orders, promoting free-trade as one more operation in a career of covert operations? At the time, Quebec's populist premier, Rene Levesque, said of Enders, "He's the bum who launched the bombs in Vietnam. He's a damned spy. He must be working for the CIA" (quoted in Lisée, 1990, p. 207).
The idea of NAFTA first appeared in public in 1979, to everyone's surprise, as Ronald Reagan's core policy when he announced his candidacy for President. But, curiously, it was then never again mentioned in his campaign. In 1979, Reagan's campaign was run by Michael Deaver and Paul Hannaford, who reportedly also ran a public relations firm that represented the right-wing Guatemalan group Amigos del Pais and its leader Roberto Alejos. He reportedly had provided the ranch used for CIA training of Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion forces in 1961. In early 1980, William Casey became Reagan's campaign director. Casey began his career directing OSS espionage operations in Germany and China in the 1940s, and he ended his career as director of the CIA. It is not common for US presidential candidates to be so overtly managed by those so linked to covert operations.
The information in the preceding four paragraphs comes from library sources. "Free-trade" comes from the dark, lower bowels of Washington in the early 1970s. It seems to have been conceived, promoted, and enacted by conspiracy rather than by forthright democratic processes. This exemplifies how conspiracy theory arises: 1) contradictions are noticed; 2) concern and curiosity are aroused; 3) further information is sought under the presumption that power is being abused and deception is being deployed. "Free-trade" was definitely not the democratic choice of Canadians, and maybe not of Americans or Mexicans either. There is a history waiting to be written about these US "free-trade" schemes. Orthodox historians will probably not write that history, and orthodox journalists will not dig it out. It will be conspiracy theorists, if anyone, who figure out why we have these so-called "free-trade" agreements that in fact act like amendments to the constitutions of America's neighbours, making them into US colonies. Talking about constitutions and democratic processes, did anyone notice that the NAFTA treaty was not legally passed by Congress as a treaty?
ARE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS IRRATIONAL?
No, the methods we use we learned in school and college. If a teacher tells the class, "These are the five causes of WWII. Memorize them for a quiz tomorrow," that kills curiosity. But if the teacher says, "Try to figure out why WWII happened," well, that is training the basics of conspiracy theory: curiosity, self-confidence, how to have hunches, how to find facts and make arguments.
Conspiracy theory has a special focus on facts that do not fit the orthodox explanations. We look for contradictions, for discrepancies, for what has been left out. The natural sciences similarly seek to find faulty explanations by focussing on those facts that are uncomfortable, that sit there unexplained. If we want more truthful explanations of events, whether of scientific events or of political, economic, and historical events, then we must understand and accept that mis-explanations are possible, even likely. Mis-explanations may be made by mistake or by intention. We can dismiss bad explanations and find better ones by focussing on the facts that don't fit. For example, Galileo concluded that moons around Jupiter are facts that don't fit the then orthodox geocentric theory. He was called a heretic for writing that.
Certainly, it is not irrational to notice and wonder about errors and contradictions in official edicts. My own entry into conspiracy theory began when reading a newspaper report about the new military base at Fort Drum in Up-State New York on the Canadian border. According to the official explanation, the base was to garrison troops training to be surprise attack specialists for winter, urban assault, in order to serve as counterinsurgency forces in Third World countries. What? Winter urban warfare in the tropics? That doesn't make sense. I became curious and concerned. I went to the library. I began to separate facts from official fiction.
However, we should remember that conspiracy theorists are ordinary people and will show ordinary failings of rationality, for example, the confirmation bias. This means that people are biassed to look for evidence that their ideas are right rather than for evidence that their ideas are wrong. This bias has been demonstrated and replicated in many different contexts and countries. Confirmation bias is a common mistake made by conspiracy theorists, as well as by historians, journalists, and everyone else.
But many conspiracy theories correctly begin with an effort at disproof. For example, Mark Lane's book, Rush to Judgement, discredits the Warren Commission. Lane had no theory of who did kill JFK, but the evidence showed that it could not have been Oswald. Similarly, my own book, Bordering on Aggression, discredits the official rationale for Fort Drum. If there was a conspiracy behind Fort Drum, it may have been nested some place in the very early years of the Reagan-Bush administration.
ARE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS PARANOID?
No, not if you consider that over 80% of the US population believes that a conspiracy, not a lone gunman, killed JFK. A society could not function if that many people were "paranoid." That word is pure pejorative. In earlier eras, we would have been called "heretics" or "witches" or "communists" in order to discredit a theory by discrediting the persons proposing the theory. Real paranoia includes: 1) fear, 2) of a prominent person, 3) whom you think threatens you personally, 4) using invisible means, like the evil-eye, x-rays, or laser beams. For example, I believe the Iran-Contra conspiracy theory, but I have no emotion of fear, certainly no fear that Oliver North is out to get me, using invisible rays of some kind. That's what "paranoid" would mean.
Conspiracy theory is more thoughtful than emotional. The motivations of most conspiracy theorists are cognitive and social. It is very much like doing family genealogy. You begin with a few facts. Then you puzzle out the story, using your own Sherlock-Holmes-sense. With help from other people, with good luck, you discover information that is sometimes difficult to find. A story emerges, suggesting new facts that should be sought. It's elementary. It's fun. The pleasure is in finding the facts, constructing the story, and sharing the process and discoveries with other people.
Conspiracy theorists think they are serving the public good. Often their motivations are patriotic, and with good reason. Democracy is built on distrust of the king and all the king's men. Democratic safeguards like habeas corpus, jury trial, independent courts, secret ballots, constitutional separation of powers within a federal government, and division of jurisdictions between levels of local, regional, state, national, and international governments, all these presume that we should not trust people with power. Because of distrust, opposition parties (plural) and an independent press (plural) are expected to question and criticize the government, and the government is expected to answer. The free press were called the fourth-estate, in opposition to the first-estate (the Church), the second-estate (those who live off capital), and the third-estate (those who work for income). Since orthodox journalism has become an instrument of power, investigative journalism is now called the fifth-estate. Conspiracy theory, too, fits the fifth-estate in this balance of powers. The independent oppositional thinking that underlies conspiracy theory is not paranoia; it is the very foundation of freedom and democracy.
WHY ARE THERE NOW MORE CONSPIRACY THEORIES?
The people who do the conspiracies –the CIAs, the Mafias, the corporations, the politicians– they probably don't think there are too many conspiracy theories and probably don't mind them because there is a chorus of journalists and historians who will always chant, "conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory, spoof, spoof, untruth." For the chanters, this litany is true by definition: "Conspiracy theory," Sibley said, refers to "a non-existent conspiracy." People who use "conspiracy theory" as a synonym for "untruth" seem to naively believe that there are no conspiracies.
But the question remains open, why are there now more conspiracy theories than in the past? Wouldn't it be ironic if the people who do the conspiracies were also promoting conspiracy theories, as part of their deceptions and cover-ups? The crazier the better. These agencies probably have special units that sponsor and disseminate conspiracy theories.
For example, on April 7, 1992, the PBS show, "Frontline," aired the report, "Investigating the October Surprise." This is a conspiracy theory that CIA director Casey, when campaign manager for Ronald Reagan, arranged that Iran would hold US hostages until Reagan and Bush won the 1980 election. In September, 1988, a Mr. Razim called into a Los Angeles open-line radio talk show and later to Der Spiegel magazine and identified a list of people at a meeting between the Reagan-Bush campaign and the Iranians. One of those identified confirmed the meeting, but reporters found that another was on live TV in the US at the time of the alleged meeting. Der Spiegel later determined that Mr. Razim was actually Oswald LeWinter. He was an expatriate teacher in Germany, who admitted to PBS that he was indeed Razim. He explained that he had been hired by four American intelligence operatives to "salt October Surprise allegations with enough false information to discredit the whole story."
But such deceptions could probably not explain the current popularity of conspiracy theory. A search of the New York Times archives shows that the term "conspiracy theory" was used 3 or 4 times per decade in news reports prior to 1960. After the JFK, RFK, and King assassinations, the Gulf of Tonkin conspiracy, the Watergate conspiracy, etc, the Times now uses "conspiracy theory" nearly 100 per decade. A search of the JSTOR archives of academic writing shows a similar pattern of increased usage after 1960. One of the first uses of "conspiracy theory" on record was at the 1927 meeting of the American Political Science Association, in a report of "Government and the Press": Dr. Robert D. Leigh of Williams College argued that "conspiracy theory" refers to biased reporting caused by external pressures on editors.
Thus there are now more conspiracy theories for three reasons: 1) There are in fact more conspiracies to find as political and economic power become ever more concentrated and as our democracy declines; 2)Orthodox, mainstream journalism and schoolbook history now serve the state and corporate interests more than in the past so we now we hear more nonsense that motivates us to look for our own explanations; and 3) With internet, more people have the resources to look for conspiracies and to make their thinking public.
Conspiracy theory will certainly be a growth industry for the foreseeable future. Within days after the horrific September 11 events, it is possible that enterprising publishers, speakers' bureaus, conference organizers, web designers, and screen writers could have been busy preparing for the new burst of conspiracy theories that would predictably follow from the predictably inadequate explanations of those events (which in fact had been predicted by several national intelligence agencies). Conspiracy theory will decrease when conspiracies decrease and when journalists and historians increase their efforts to explain events rather than explain them away.
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