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[edit] If History Is a Lie

[edit] America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking

[FINAL Edition]

The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C.

Author: Charles Paul Freund

Date: Jan 19, 1992

Start Page: c.01

Section: OUTLOOK

Text Word Count: 2422

Massive conspiracies, sometimes extending over centuries, have been posited to control History itself: the conspiracy of Freemasons, of the Bavarian Illuminati, of the League of Just Men, of the Elders of Zion, of the Knights Templar. Some of these may be the same unimaginably powerful groups changing their identities over generations of secret warfare for the control of the world. Perhaps postwar American history is really the story of the secret Yankee-Cowboy War, as author Carl Oglesby has it; perhaps world history since the Enlightenment is really a struggle between the Knights Templar and the Illuminati, who may have perpetrated, among their other fraudulent gambits in the game, communism. In recent times, receptivity to this sort of thing in America has been limited to a conspiratorial underground. But the '90s are showing real promise as the decade of the conspiracist revival. We are seeing an international outburst of conspiracy-mongering and -theorizing of striking proportions. More important, we are witnessing a resurgent American receptivity to conspiracism. And we are already exhibiting an ability to shrug off the phenomenon of conspiracism, to allow it to go unremarked-upon. We are getting used to it; it's becoming a political reflex we are all coming to share.

That's the nature of the "JFK" controversy; not whether there was a conspiracy, but whether "JFK" is a case of classic conspiracist demagogy. [Oliver Stone] appears to have started out with no ideas of his own on the matter; if he had any he wouldn't have blundered into a $40-million glorification of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who is not only irrelevant to Stone's ultimate point, but who may have been the best thing that ever happened to the Warren Report. (Garrison's case against Clay Shaw was so preposterous, notes Jonathan Vankin in his book "Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes," that some skeptics of the Warren Report speculated at the time that Garrison was part of the cover-up, a sideshow intended to discredit the work of serious investigators.) But Stone did purchase the movie rights to the ideas of other people about the case's possible political implications, especially concerning the possible connection between the JFK murder and the war in Vietnam.

This is where Stone wants to take the debate over the film, and it is also where conspiracism meets politics. The rhetoric of the debate is already replete with many of the standard terms of conspiracist concern: You've Been Cheated (of Camelot); There's Widespread Conspiracy Against Us (in the press and elsewhere); The Conspirators Are Sexually Corrupt (New Orleans' gay underground); Our Present Government Is Corrupt (it's still covering up). This anticonspiracist typology was created in 1949 by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, and is based on their study of anticonspiracist speechmaking. Their full list is far longer, though most of the remaining appeals are nativist. Stone is not a nativist, and the accusations in his film may or may not turn out to be be provable; what matters here is the manner in which movie hype may affect political rhetoric. In the meantime, conspiratorial thinking has been intensifying notably within the black community, which has in the past been subject to numerous proven white conspiracies against it, and where the possibility that white America is now engaged in genocide is a matter of serious debate. Much of the current speculation centers around the AIDS virus, which, according to a view prominently treated in the black media, is believed by some to have been created as a weapon against blacks. A prominent statement of genocidal intention is a soliloquy in John Singleton's popular film, "Boyz 'N the Hood," in which the film's most enlightened character, Furious Styles, cites the presence in black neighborhoods of guns, alcohol and drugs as evidence of a plot to destroy black youth and make it impossible for the race to regenerate itself.

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"Let's say that everything you know is not only wrong, it is a carefully wrought lie. Let's say that your mind is filled with falsehoods - about yourself, about history, about the world around you - planted there by powerful forces so as to lull you into complacency. Your freedom is thus an illusion. You are in fact a pawn in a plot, and your role is that of a compliant dupe, if you're lucky."

Stel, dat alles wat je weet niet alleen onjuist is, maar dat het om nauwkeurig in elkaar gezette leugens gaat. Stel, datje geest gevuld is met onwaarheden – over jezelf, over de geschiedenis, over de wereld om je heen – door machtige krachten in je geest geplant als om je in zelfgenoegzaamheid in slaap te wiegen. Je vrijheid is zo een illusie. Je bent een pion in een complot en je rol is die van een willoos slachtoffer van bedrog, als je geluk hebt.

- Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie," Washington Post, January 19, 1992