What is a "conspiracy theory"?

No, I'm not going to quote Alex Jones here. And I'm one of those 10 people who thinks that Lee Harvey Oswald actually was a lone gunman.

It's Robert Perry who gives a careful perspective on distinguishing actual conspiracies from "conspiracy theories" in Contra-Cocaine Was a Real Conspiracy Consortium News 12/02/2013. He's referring to a political crime story, but it's a good perspective for skeptics looking at pseudoscience, quack medicine or UFO reports:

In my view, a "conspiracy theory" is a case of fanciful, usually fact-free speculation positing some alternative explanation for an event. Typically, a “conspiracy theory” not only lacks any real evidence but often ignores compelling evidence that goes in other directions. For instance, the current conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama being born in Kenya despite birth certificates and birth notices of his birth in Hawaii.

By contrast, a real conspiracy can be defined as a collaboration among individuals to engage in criminal or scandalous behavior usually in a secretive manner. There are many such examples involving high government officials, including Richard Nixon’s Watergate and Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra Affair.

The difference between a “conspiracy theory” and a real conspiracy is that the latter is supported by substantial evidence and the former is reliant on someone simply thinking something up, often with partisan or ideological motivation.

There is, of course, much gray area between those two poles. There are cases in which some evidence exists indicating a conspiracy but it’s short of conclusive proof. In such cases of legitimate doubt, aggressive investigations are warranted – and the U.S. news media should welcome, not punish, these lines of inquiry.

Instead, the role of the mainstream press often has been to ridicule journalists and other investigators who venture into these murky waters. Often, that ridicule leads to serious cases of journalistic malfeasance as occurred with the mistreatment of Gary Webb and the Contra-cocaine story. ...

... each case is unique and should be treated as such. Each set of facts should be examined carefully.

Just because one conspiracy can be proven doesn’t substantiate every claim of conspiracy. And the opposite is also true, just because one fact-free conspiracy theory is nutty doesn’t mean all suspected conspiracies deserve ridicule. [my emphasis]

Tags: conspiracy theories

Republican Party conspiracy theories

Peter King's witch hunt hearings on Islamunofascistoliberalism are a reminder that the Republican Party is now a welcoming home to a number of crackpot conspiracy theories. Sarah Posner provides a primer on the anti-Muslim conspiracy theories current popular with the Republican right - and is there anything but the right remaining in the Republican Party? - in Welcome to the Shari'ah Conspiracy Theory Industry How the American right demonizes Islam for political gain Religion Dispatches 03/08/2011.

Alexander Zaitchik summarizes his research on the conspiracies that flow freely from Glenn Beck's feverish mind to his mouth to his FOX News audience in
Fringe Mormon Group Makes Myths with Glenn Beck’s Help Intelligence Report Spring 2011.

The invaluable Gene Lyons muses about the latter in Scrooge ain't broke and neither is the government Salon 03/09/2011:

Maybe instead of playing budgetary chicken with congressional Republicans, the White House should search carnival side shows and TV shopping channels for a Democratic Glenn Beck. Any glib pitchman could outline a Republican scheme to sabotage the U.S. economy to gain political power far more plausible than Beck's shaggy-dog conspiracies.

Posner's article calls attention to one of the stranger aspect of the scary-Muslims-are-coming-to-git-us conspiracy theory, the idea that Muslim jihadists are in cahoots with the left, however they conceive that term:

[Andrew] McCarthy [of National Review], author of the books The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda, links both President Obama and the American left to this supposed plot, claiming that they share collectivist goals. He told Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism in 2010 that "Islamists" and "leftists" share totalitarian goals, "totalitarian in the sense that they want to control every aspect of the individual’s life, and [are] virulently opposed to capitalism and individual liberty," adding that "even though they [Obama and Saudi King Abdullah] part company on the details of what they would transform it into, they both need to topple American constitutional republicanism in order to install their utopias."

Since the hard right sees "the left" - in which they include President Obama, of course - as anti-American and their enemies, this is largely about creating sort of unified theory of political evil to lump together "the left" and Muslim jihadists. While visions of the Black Panthers from the 1960s haunt their fantasies, what most American rightwingers call "the left" is really today's Democratic Party.

For people who want to be scammed by something this kooky to begin with, facts won't make any immediate difference. But here in the real world, it's absurd. In terms of ideology, Democrats in general and in particular people who see themselves as liberal or progressive Democrats have little at all in common with Muslim jihadists who support theocracy, oppose anything that looks like democracy or freedom of speech and press, oppose basic human rights for women and promote anti-Semitism. Not even the bitterest American critic of US foreign policy wants to be blown up by a terrorist bomber or plane hijacker acting in the name of what by any normal definitions is a rightwing political and religious ideology. And, to my knowledge, there aren't any cases in the US or Europe where groups that understand themselves as "left" have actively cooperated with Muslim jihadists.

Republicans oppose Muslim terrorism and, as Peter King is reminding us this week, hate Muslims and Islam much more generally. Simple patriotism and nationalism are involved. Political Christianism is all-but-universally accepted as an ideology in the Republican Party. And both history and "pro-Israel" Christian Zionist ideology make overt anti-Semitism far more problematic than promoting fear and hatred of Muslims. Still, there's a large religious (mainly Christian) component of the American Right's targeting of Islam and Islamism.

Muslim jihadist ideology as we know it today is ultra-conservative both in politics and within the Islamic religion. Less extreme forms of political Islam, from Hosni Mubarak's former ruling ideology to that of the ruling Islamist party in Turkey to the right's current bogeyman, the Muslim Brotherhood in its varied current incarnations tend toward conservative ideas: mixing politics and religion, a restrictive attitude toward women's rights, etc.

The Cheney-Bush Administration consistently voted with Muslim countries and the Vatican on family-planning programs in the UN, because Republicans like conservative Muslims and the Vatican don't want to promote abortion or birth control, and are dubious about the enhancements of women's status that accompany both. On issues of women's rights and other "culture war" issues in the American sense, Islamists are conspicuously conservative.

I'm not making a mirror-image point, i.e., "See? Its the Republicans who are in bed with Islamic extremists!" I'm just pointing out the reality that in terms of American politics, actual Islamism to the extent that it exists is political isolated from both Republicans and Democrats and from fringe groups of the left and the right. And on a broader scale, these are conservative movements. Reality still counts for something, even if you wouldn't think so from watching FOX News.

Tags: christian right, conspiracy theories, glenn beck, radical right, sarah posner

David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch (2010) by British journalist David Aaronovitch analyzes some older and more recent conspiracy theories and serves as a primer on how to analyze them. He takes on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s, anti-New Deal fanatics who developed the Roosevelt-planned-Pearl-Harbor story, the postwar Red Scare that has come to be described generally as McCarthyism, Kennedy assassination theories, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana murder theories, 9/11 Truthers.

For American readers, his chapter on conspiracy theories around the 1984 murder of a peace activist, Hilda Murrell, is not likely to be as familiar as some of the others. The 2003 death of David Kelly of the British Ministry of Defense in connection with the leak of materials around the fraudulent claims of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq will be more familiar to Americans who followed the story in connection with the Iraq War.

He takes a look at the hodgepodge of pseudohistory that went into the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), some of which were incorporated into the book and movie, The Da Vinci Code. He uses this as a lead-in discusses various pieces of pseudoscholarship such as Immanuel Velikovsky's catastrophism and Erich von Däniken's fanciful gods-from-the-sky archaeology. And since he was writing parts of the books after Obama became President, Aaronovitch also looks at the anti-Obama Birthers, using them as an introduction to the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that proliferated during the last Democratic Presidency.

Aaronovitch's book is particularly helpful in analyzing some of the ways in which scammers and the just plain credulous or careless can go wrong in evaluating evidence of some mysterious occurrence. Even a pro like Seymour Hersh can sometimes get conned, as Hersh did during the preparation of his embarrassing book The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), when he accepted as authentic a group of documents about Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe forged by a man name Lex Cusack. fortunately for Hersh, ABC did an investigation that determined them to be forgeries and "Hersh removed all reference to them from his book." Apparently the forgeries fit so well will Hersh' very dim view of JFK that he neglected to have them properly forensically analyzed before initially accepting them as authentic.

This example he gives is a good caution to keep in mind, because copious footnoting and misleading references to authorities as standard procedures for the Glenn Becks and Mad Annie Coulters of the world:

The conspiracists work hard to give their written evidence the veneer of scholarship. The approach has been described as death by footnote. Accompanying the exposition of the theory is a dense mass of detailed and often undifferentiated information, but laid out as an academic text. Often the theory is also supported by quotations from non-conspiracist sources that almost invariably turn out to be misleading and selective. To give one characteristic example, David Ray Griffin's book about 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor, describes Thierry Meyssan as the head of an organization "which the Guardian in April 2002 described as 'a respected independent think-tank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonableness and objectivity.' " This is a masterpiece in disingenuousness, given the full Guardian quote: "The French media has been quick to dismiss [Meyssan's] book's claims, despite the fact that Mr. Meyssan is president of the Voltaire Network, a respected independent think-tank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonablenessand objectivity. 'This theory suits everyone - there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality,' said Le Nouvel Observateur, while Liberation called the book 'The Frightening Confidence Trick ... a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation.'" Not the same thing at all.

I see that what may be the mother ship of conservative conspiracy theories, the John Birch Society, has a review of Voodoo Histories in their publication The New American, No, Sir, That Ain't History: A Review of David Aaronovitch's "Voodoo Histories" by Joe Wolverton II 02/09/10. As of this writing, the Web site with the article prominently features an advertisement asking "Who Really Runs America?" with the logo "The John Birch Society - Standing for Family and Freedom". It's advertising a book called, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations And The American Decline by James Perloff. The Council of Foreign Relations has always been a favorite bogeyman for the Birchers. Wolverton concentrates the first several paragraphs assuring us that Aaronovich is a snotty know-it-all who looks down at reglur folks who don't agree with him. Apparently for the Birchers, working at Rupert Murdoch's paper The Times of London, as Aaronovich currently does, is prima facie evidence that he's part of the Insiders conspiracy to keep the truth from reglur white folks.

And, hey, doesn't "Aaronovich" sound kind of, you know, Jewish? Wolverton finds it suspiciously notable that Aaronovich devotes the attention he does to the fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Woverton calls "a text that describes a reputed plan by Jews to dominate the world". Warning: reading Bircher material can send your head spinning at the convoluted double-reverse brand of argumentation you find there.

Wolverton advises his readers:

Those who are truly steeped in the historical record of the rise and fall of the grand republics and empires of history realize that the powerful conspiracies contrived to enslave mankind are not concocted in advertised meetings attended by secretaries transcribing the minutes. Those confabs and the plots hatched therein are more secretive, surreptitious, and ultimately Satanic than any of the fantastical fiction ever produced by the penny press.
[my emphasis]

Tags: conspiracy theories, voodoo histories

How did I miss this for the last 15 years?

"This" being Paranoia magazine, which apparently has been published since 1992.


I saw it on Saturday in Whole Foods and flipped through it. I'm pretty such it's not meant to be a satire publication.

Where else would you be likely to find articles like "Tuesday Weld: High Priestess of the Illuminati?" (part of the evidence: one of the characters on The Addams Family comedy series of back when was named "Wednesday"), or "Mothman: Angel of Conspiracy?".

What do you mean, who is Mothman? Surely you jest! This is a statue of him:

Paranoia magazine has its own Web site, of course. It doesn't seem to have the text of the articles from the current issue as of this writing. But what would a conspiracy theory Web site be without some Kennedy assassination features? Like The Kennedy Assassination and the Current Political Moment by Joan Mellen (u.d., 2007; accessed 04/12/08).

This kind of thing is so much a part of our intellectual landscape that it's hard not to be occasionally amused by some of it. But I'm probably the only person in the US who doesn't believe that JFK had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and one of the few who believe the "single assassin" theory (Oswald, in the Book Depository, with the rifle).

This Illuminati conspiracy theory is probably the ur-conspiracy theory for the United States. It was a key piece of the dogma of the Anti-Masonic Party and the somewhat later Know-Nothing Party in the first half of the 19th century. Radical cleric Pat Robertson made the Illuminati conspiracy a central feature in his anti-Semitic theory of history in his books The New World Order (1991) and The Turning Tide (1993).

Tags: conspiracy theories, paranoia magazine

The Illuminati, or, Wingnuts of the world, unite!

Graphic from the John Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion - notice the hammer-and-sickle in the left eye and what seems to be Congress in the right

Continuing the theme of historical background on current rightwing trends, I've been looking at a collection edited by historian David Brion Davis published in 1971 called, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present. It thought of this theme today when I saw Atrios post, They're All Birchers Now 04/21/07, which references this Glenn Greenwald post about the amazing capacity of our Republicans to swallow preposterous conspiracy theories, Right-wing blogs discover massive conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq Salon 04/21/07.

One of the longest-running conspiracy theories on which Davis gives some background is that of the Illuminati. Pat Robertson, whose Regent University alumni we've learned in the current US Attorneys scandal apparently now has a decisive say over who gets appointed to be the chief federal prosecutors, used this concept as part of his grand conspiratorial theory of history espoused in books like The New World Order (1991) and The Turning Tide (1993).

Davis traces the Illuminati conspiracy theory to a book by one 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, published in Scotland in 1797. He was inspired in turn by a Frenchman name Abbé Barruel who, Davis writes, "helped to popularize the view that every stage of the [French] Revolution had been planned and implemented by secret societies, largely Freemasonic in origin, as part of a master conspiracy to overthrow Christianity and legitimate government." But he thinks that Robinson's book was probably more responsibible for popularizing the notion.

This conspiracy theory was deeply reactionary in its origins and intent. It opposed not only the bloody excesses of the French Revolution but the very notion of democracy and the Enlightenment, a reactionary viewpoint that is at the heart of the Christian dominionist viewpoint of which Pat Robertson is one of the best-known advocates today (though most of them don't describe themselves as "dominionists").

Davis describes the background of Robison's tract this way:

Robison had become alarmed by Masonic "innovations" and by supposed evidence that many lodges had been infiltrated by Jesuits, deists, and heretical sectarians. After a close study of various obscure documents, he concluded in 1797 that Freemasonry had finally been taken over and exploited by the secret Order of Illuminati who sought to destroy Christianity and overturn all the governments of Europe, and who had in fact engineered the French Revolution. In Robison's inflamed mind, the Illuminati appeared as the most dangerous conceivable enemy to British Protestantism: they combined the secular rationalism of the left-wing Enlightenment with all the diabolical traits once ascribed to the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

He summarizes the book and its impact this way:

Although John Robison was not an American, he served as a bridge between English and American concepts of conspiracy, and had an enormous influence on Federalist writers and on the later anti-Masonic movement. Robison was anything but an ignorant fanatic. He was a professor of science (natural philosophy) at the University of Edinburg and secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His book exhibits the careful massing of evidence, the plausible scholarship, and the quick jump to breathtaking conclusions which Richard Hofstadter has described as among the hallmarks of the paranoid style. There is a note of modernity to Robison's protest against a movement governed by the belief that a noble end justifies any means. He also anticipated later patterns of thought when he sensed that systems of ethics could become ideological weapons, and that tests of loyalty should concern one's commitment to "approved principles" rather than to specific leaders or groups.

There is actually no evidence that the Order of the Illuminati was anything more than a short-lived organization dedicated to the humanitarian and rationalistic principles of the Enlightenment. It was certainly not responsible for the French Revolution. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in the years preceding Robison's book, the repressive measures of the British government had provoked conspiratorial movements among pro-French radicals and oppressed English workers. By defining all social protest as subversive, the Pitt administration drove protest under ground. Pitt's spies and informers gathered extensive evidence on some of the "Secret Assemblies" that worried John Robison. Robison's theories must therefore be understood as a somewhat hysterical and reactionary response to genuine social unrest. It is significant that Robison, as a defender of the existing order, was especially fearful that revolutionary ideas were contaminating the young. The same apprehension would later be shared by American anti-abolitionists and anti-Communists. (my emphasis)

Davis includes a selection from a speech of 06/04/1964 by Robert Welch, the head of the far-right John Birch Society. Welch wasn't satisfied with going back to the 18th-century Enlightenment to find the root of all social evil. He took it back to the dawn of Western civilization in ancient Greece. But he works the Illuminati into his grand theory of an immense conspiracy against good Christian white folks:

The precedent had been set, however [by the collectivism of Sparta], and the vision obviously reoccurred to many evil men during those two thousand years. There were many small sects and heresies and societies and associations of which we catch fleeting glimpses now and then from the early centuries of the Christian era until they proliferated into numerous clumps of unsightly or even poisonous intellectual weeds after 1700. How many of them there were, each of which intended to be the embryo of an organization that would grow in power until it ruled the world, we do not know. How many revolutionary coups or insurrections, or how many more gradual and more peaceful impositions of tyrannical power by ambitious criminals mouthing the hypocrisies of collectivism, may have been "masterminded" by such esoteric groups, we do not know. How extensive or long lasting was the once well-established cult of Satanism, which incorporated into its beliefs, methods, and purposes practically all of the foulness now associated with our contemporary tyranny, Communism, we do not know. For a high degree of secrecy was not only essential to any even temporary success on the part of any of these nefarious collections of criminal con men, but the thrill of belonging to some mysterious and powerful inner circle was one of the strongest appeals any such group could offer to prospective recruits.

We do know, however, from hundreds of small leaks and published accounts that the doctrines which gave many of these secret groups their cohesiveness and continuity would fall clearly, and bv the most tolerant classification, into the category of evil. Also, that by the eighteenth century A.D. these various doctrines had pretty much coalesced into a uniformly Satanic creed and program, which was to establish the power of the sect through the destruction of all governments, all religion, all morality, all economic systems; and to substitute the sheer physical force of the lash and the bayonet for all other means by which previous governments, good or bad, had contrived to rule mankind. And a most important one of these groups, which is now generally meant when we use the term Illuminati - although many others had called themselves by that same name - was founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt.

Despite the extreme secrecy with which this group cloaked itself from the very beginning, one early raid by the Bavarian government, another raid about three years later, the partial confessions at one arraignment of four men fairly high up in the conspiracy-all of whom, incidentally, were professors - and a few more or less accidental discoveries or disclosures from other sources have made the original nature, purposes, and methods of the Illuminati quite well known. Since by 1800 they were able to pull the veil of secrecy over themselves almost completely and permanently, we do not know to what extent Weishaupt's group became the central core or even one of the main components of a continuing organization with increasing reach and control over all collectivist activities after 1776. But that there have been one or more such organizations, which have now been absorbed into the top echelons of the Communist conspiracy - or vice versa - is supported by too much evidence of too many kinds to permit much doubt. (my emphasis)

One thing to keep in mind about this, although conservative hero Barry Goldwater famously repudiated the John Birch Society in 1964 during his Presidential run, the Birchers' ideas play more than a small part in the thinking of today's Republican Party, especially among the activists of the Christian Right.

Also, where John Robison in 1797 may have really feared the Freemasons and the Illuminati, those are terms which among the far right today are commonly used as synomyms for "the Jews". In Germany and Austria, where overt expressions of support for Nazism or anti-Semitism carry legal jeopardy, it is common for the extreme right to complain about the evildoings of the "Freemasons".

The John Birch Society in its official publications has always tried to avoid overt anti-Semitism, though that was clearly part of their schtick. A closely affiliated organization, the Liberty Lobby, wasn't nearly so discreet about its attitude toward Jews. It's easy to guess that one of the Birchers' main objections to Barry Goldwater, maybe even the main one, is that he parents had been Jewish before they converted to Protestant Christianity.

Welch goes on at length about the sinister designs and actions of the Illuminati-Satanist-Communist-Spartan conspiracy. He traced this evil thread from the French Revolution to the civil right March on Washington of 1963, the one that is remembered today for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

The further truth is that the French people under Louis XVI had as little cause to let themselves be led by conspiratorial destructiv-ists into insane horrors and a murderous clamor for "liberty" as the Negroes in America have today in a demand for "freedom." Both are being stirred and led into the same kind
of cruel idiocy by exactly the same kind of revolutionary criminals, for exactly the same megalomaniacal purposes on the part of the real instigators of these monstrous crimes against God and country. If the march on Washington had been more successful from the point of view of the Communists; if the common sense and basic morality of the American people - white and black - had already been sufficiently eroded by Communist "wiles and propaganda so that the marchers could have been whipped up into the same kind of frenzy as were a smaller contingent of three hundred such marchers recently in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania; and if carefully planted armed goons of the Communists within the ranks of the marchers on Washington could have arranged for the burning of the city, and for murders and atrocities to be perpetuated on a number of loyal congressmen and senators, all to look like the spontaneous actions of an infuriated, resentful mob seeking freedom, then you might easily have seen the date of that great lie established in due course as the new national holiday of a "liberated" United States. And at least you would have seen an almost exact parallel to the sack of the Bastille. The French Revolution turned out to be, in fact, a rehearsal in almost every particular of what the whole world is facing today. Compressed into one city and a period of six years, 1789 through 1794, were all of the lies and crimes and horror and propaganda and destructiveness which are now being applied to the whole world over a period of about six decades. (my emphasis in bold)

The Birchers were never as influential among Southern segregationists as were other extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or (especially in Mississippi) the White Citizens Council. The Birchers were more literate, though hardly more enlightened. But this kind of thinking was considered within the respectable range of opinion about Southern whites in the segregation days, and much of that thinking has carried into today's Republican Party and the Christian Right, especially the radical clerics.

Tags: conspiracy theories, david brion davis, illuminati, john birch society, paranoid style, robert welch