III. Conspiracies

The following are brief examples of some topics that have generated conspiracy theories that I have come across during my research:

Rex 84

During the Reagan administration, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency drafted legislation that, in the event of a national emergency, would suspend the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, eliminate private property, and the detainment of citizens to one of twenty-three concentration camps. Code named Rex 84, its stated purpose was the apprehension and detainment of illegal aliens; its implications meant the implementation of martial law. Twenty-three sites detention facilities were authorized under Rex 84 in the United States.

AIDS

June 9, 1969. Dr. Donald MacArthur, the Department of Defense's Deputy Director for Research and Technology, appeared before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on DOD appropriations. Dr. MacArthur requested funding for Chemical-Biological warfare programs, and spoke about Synthetic Biological Agents: "Molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly, and eminent biologists believe that within a period of five to ten years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been required (quoted in Keith, 1993:241). MacArthur went on to predict that within that same five to ten years, it the creation of a new synthetic infective microorganism "which would differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms" (Vankin and Whalen 1995:295). The difference would be that it would destroy the human immune system.

When asked by Representative Robert L.F. Sikes if the U.S. government were already doing such research, MacArthur responded in the negative. When Sikes asked if this was due to lack of interest or lack of money, MacArthur replied, "Certainly not lack of interest" (Krupney: 241).

His requested for funding was granted. The first cases of AIDS appeared in Africa in 1977 and 1978.

Cannabis

Cannabis, or hemp, is a plant that was grown and cultivated in the United States for many purposes. Its fiber is a source of linen and cloth. It was used to make rope. Its medicinal uses include bronchial dilation, relief from pain and migraine headaches, and glaucoma treatment. It is a hallucinogen. It is also a fine source of high quality acid-free paper. Environmentally, it is a better method of production because it is non-polluting and it takes one acre to produce hemp paper. It takes four and a half acres to make paper from wood pulp. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp and the Declaration of Independence is written on Dutch hemp paper. Ninety percent of the world's paper was manufactured from hemp. However, it was a labor intensive crop, so with the advent of industrialization, wood pulp replaced hemp as a source of paper.

In the mid-nineteen thirties a device was invented that made hemp cheaper to produce. The newspaper owner and industrialist William Randolph Hearst had enormous holdings in paper mills. Cheap hemp would have sent him into bankruptcy. It was at this time that stories of the harmful effects of marijuana began to appear in the newspapers, Hearst's newspapers.

Concurrently, The DuPont family, who held the patent for the wood pulping process, developed rayon and nylon, synthetic fibers, which were in direct competition with natural hemp. Andrew Mellon, chairman of the Mellon Bank and the main financial backer of the DuPonts, also happened to be Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He appointed Harry J. Anslinger Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger testified before Congress about the dangers of cannabis, citing it as a violence inducing killer weed that would turn innocent young men into ax-murderers, push virginal young white girls into sexual relations with "Negroes", and drive all to commit suicide. Anslinger read most of his testimony from Hearst papers. He was also married to Andrew Mellon's niece.

The reefer madness scare of the nineteen thirties ignited a moral panic, turned public opinion against the safe use of cannabis and convinced Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, effectively banning cannabis for all uses.

Medical Experimentation

1932-1972. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted. Three hundred ninety-nine Black men suffering from the disease were invited to participate in the study at Tuskegee Institute's hospital. They were told that they had "bad blood" and were led to believe that they would receive medical treatment. The study was conducted by the Public Health Service, the forerunner of the Centers for Disease Control. The purpose of the study was to observe the course of the disease over time. Penicillin was developed as a treatment for syphilis while study was on-going. The men were not informed. Treatment was withheld.

1950. A U.S. Naval minesweeper sprayed a rare bacteria called serratia over the city of San Francisco. Eleven people were hospitalized; one died. The family of the victim filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, which found that three hundred open air germ tests were held between 1950 and 1969. Toxins had been released into the New York Subway system and the Pentagon air-conditioning system.

During World War Two, a Japanese military doctor named Shiro Ishii conducted experiments on prisoners. The Ishii Corps initially ran their tests on Koreans, Russians and Chinese POWS. When the U.S. entered the war, Americans, British and Australians were used. These men were sprayed with unknown substances, probed anally with glass rods and injected with serum. Those that died were dissected and autopsied.

The prisoners were infected with diseases such as anthrax, plague, botulism, meningitis, tetanus, and tuberculosis. They were forced to run until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some were forced to stand naked in weather reaching forty degrees below zero. The Ishii Corps developed toxins for use in germ warfare. The Japanese government was one of two that had abstained from signing the 1925 Geneva Convention treaty banning the use of biological weapons. Thousands were infected with the results of the Ishii Corps's research, including several Chinese cities.

After the defeat of Japan, the U.S. War Department and General Douglas MacArthur made a deal with Ishii. In exchange for his human experimentation files, Ishii and the other scientists would receive immunity prosecution for war crimes.

The United States was the other nation to abstain from the Geneva Convention treaty.

Assassinations

John Hinckley, Jr. was under a psychiatrist's care and had been prescribed psychoactive drugs. He had reportedly stalked Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. He had previously been arrested in Nashville when three handguns were found in his luggage. Although he had transported weapons across state lines to a city to be visited by Jimmy Carter, who was still president at the time, he was fined and released after five hours in custody.

An interesting fact went uncommented on in the mainstream press at the time, and even to this day. The Bush and Hinckley families were long time friends. George Bush and John Hinckley, Sr. met in Texas during the nineteen sixties. They were both in the oil business. On the date of the attempted assassination, John Hinckley's older brother, Scott had a dinner date with George Bush's son, Neil.

George Bush had a long list of membership's in secret societies, and had lengthy connections to the "Eastern Establishment", and was head of the C.I.A. The C.I.A. has admitted conducting mind control experiments, known as MK-ULTRA. < Psychoactive drugs were used on mind controlled assassins.

IV. Emergence

Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Their names both consist of seven letters. Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy had one named Lincoln. Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated by John Wilkes Booth and (allegedly) Lee Harvey Oswald, respectively, men who went by three names and who advocated unpopular political positions. Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a warehouse; Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater" (Paulos 1995: 51).

Mathematician John Allen Paulos used a version of this item in A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper to demonstrate his general thesis; that the mathematical ignorance of the general public contributes to general social ignorance and gullibility on a variety of subjects. Paulos applies mathematical knowledge to the ways that information is conveyed in newspapers and provides a typical example of the common skepticism that the very idea of conspiracy engenders:

There are so many ways in which events, organizations, and we ourselves may be linked that it's almost impossible to believe in the significance of all of them. Yet many do, sometimes arguing that the probability of this or that coincidence is so low that it must mean something. Such people fail to realize that though it is unlikely that any particular sequence of events specified beforehand will occur, there is a high probability that some remarkable sequence will be observed subsequently. This is especially so when is inundated with so much decontextualized information (49-50).

For Paulos, conspiracy theories are outside the bounds of acceptable thought and are evidence of irrational, unsophisticated minds. This is understandable. For a mathematician, belief in conspiracy must represent the antithesis of scientific thought. Instead of generating and validating hypotheses, conspiracy theorists haphazardly string together coincidence, clumsily arriving at preconceived notions: "In the throes of obsession, the conspiracy theorist searches not for arbitrary coincidences but only for those that support his beliefs--and because of the myriad connections among items in the paper, he is almost always successful" (50).

He is not alone in this attitude. There is an almost universal scorn for conspiracy theories and their advocates, which accounts for the involuntary charge of paranoia when the very idea is raised. This automatic rejection extends itself to scholarship. Jeffrey Bales observes that "[v]ery few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility, and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies" (1). And by large, conspiracy theories are political.

The problem with this criticism is that it violates the very logic of scientific and scholarly inquiry. The bias against conspiracy leads one to present assertion rather than proof. It utilizes ad hominem argument rather than falsifying a specific theory. In fact, because there is such a social taboo against conspiracy theories, they are suppressed. This makes it impossible to test any theory, regardless of its source.

It is obvious that Paulos never bothered to speak to anyone who believed in a specific conspiracy. In fact, were we to re-examine his example, the synchrony between Lincoln and Kennedy, we would be hard pressed to understand how this particular item disproves the existence of conspiracies. Paulos lists a number of common incidents in the lives of two slain American presidents, but these are coincidences, not a theory that explains why they were murdered. Where's the conspiracy? What is the conspiracy? Who is behind it? What is the significance connecting incidents that occurred over a one hundred year period? More important, where is the narrative?

Paulos does not provide one. What he does present is a series of short nonnarrative statements. When they are passed on in face-to-face interactions then linked to some explanation, they meet Gordon Allport's and Leo Postman's definition of rumor: "a specific proposition for belief, passed along from person to person, usually by word of mouth, without secure standards of evidence being present" (cited in Turner,1993: 4). Paulos's logical rationalism demands secure standards of evidence, and he presumes that the notion of conspiracy is wrong on its face, and so he does not bother to examine how conspiracy theories are researched or generated. He just asserts that it is done through casual glances through newspapers and the stringing together of coincidences to support a predetermined position. A true conspiracy theory might allege that a secret society was behind both assassinations. Their purpose would be to seize control of the United States government or the world (which, in some minds, means the same thing). Said secret society would be opposed to "our" way of life. As such, they would be alien or foreign (which is not always the same thing). They would be a different religion, have values others than those "we" value. They are ruthless, corrupt, depraved. They are almost omniscient in their knowledge of events, omnipotent in their ability to manipulate them, almost omnipresent in human history and human affairs.

Although Paulos does not present a conspiracy theory, to be fair, the idea is implicit in the Lincoln-Kennedy synchrony. Establishing connections between two martyred presidents suggests that there is some underlying significance to them. However, the mere existence of this item does not prove that conspiracy theories are, a priori, false. It is interesting to note that Paulos refers to Oswald parenthetically as Kennedy's alleged assassin. It is an expression of doubt that, as opinion polls consistently show, he shares with the majority of Americans.

Still, the conclusion that Paulos reached is obvious. Only kooks and paranoids could possibly believe in conspiracies. Everyone knows, for example, that Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth. That's what our history books say. And everyone knows that Booth had made an earlier attempt to kidnap Lincoln. And everyone knows that Booth had taken a shot at Lincoln during that attempt. And that eight other men were charged and tried with conspiring to kill Lincoln. And, of course, everyone knows that four of these co-conspirators were hung for their part in the assassination.

In fact, given the atrocious manner in which history is taught in this country, it is possible that most everyone does not know these details of the Lincoln assassination. What is most frightening is that the same can be said about any historical occurrence. Historical ignorance is much greater than the mathematical ignorance Paulos decries.

Bales notes that the few scholars who seriously examine conspiracy as a subject find it necessary to speak cautiously, to qualify and justify their interest and to make it clear that they don't believe in conspiracy theories generally. As a result, most academic studies tend to adhere to a presumption against conspiracy.

Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" set the standard for modern academic analyses of conspiracy theories which, as we have seen, is consistently and decidedly anti-conspiratorial. What is often overlooked by those who casually invoke Hofstadter is that he is analyzing a specific style of American political thought, not the truth or falsity of conspiracy theories. Hofstadter takes care to distinguish between what he termed the paranoid style and clinical paranoia: "... the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others" (4).

There certainly are conspiracy theories that are preposterous, nonsensical, wrong, even dangerous. This does not justify a blanket dismissal of the entire phenomenon. In fact, it is necessary to distinguish between passive and active bearers of conspiracy theories. The former could be anyone who has heard one and passes it one, either as factual or for entertainment. The latter are engaged in researching and uncovering conspiracies. These are the ones who are labeled conspiracy theorists. Paulos's depiction of conspiracy theorists as obsessed, irrational, uninformed kooks who get most of their information from newspapers and generate predetermined theories is a caricature that is easily dispelled by the simplest ethnographic investigation. Whether one agrees or disagrees with them, whether one likes them or not, conspiracy theorists tend to follow the rules of empirical logic, not depart from them. Many of them conduct research, interview informants, search historical archives, explore databases, read histories and scholarly studies as well as incalculable numbers of newspapers and magazines. They just reach conclusions that are socially unacceptable.

John Whalen, a free-lance journalist became fascinated with the men and women who researched conspiracies. Consequently, he became interested in conspiracies and in the people labeled conspiracy theorists. Contrary to the stereotype, he found them to be "... a group of citizens trying to read between the lines, seeking out alternate sources of information, basically doing what informed citizens are supposed to do" (1997:2). After two years researching conspiracy theories Jonathan Vankin came to distrust the easy caricature of conspiracy researchers as simple minded paranoids. Instead of dogmatic clods he found, "with almost no exceptions", highly intelligent, surprisingly normal people free of mental pathology (1991:257-259).

People who come to believe in conspiracies are not "paranoids" either clinically or as the term is popularly used. They are people who led quiet, ordinary lives who had an experience that "turned" them. It could have been an assassination, a plane crash, the sighting of an UFO, or the threat of a foreign power imposing its ideology on the world. Or it could be simply discovering how the world really works. This is well-known occurrence, like solving an equation or understanding a joke. There is a sudden shift, a jump from one level to another, like a light switch being turned on. An abrupt, discontinuous transition from one state of understanding to another occurs--we "get it".

This is commonly referred to as a conversion experience. One of the features that mark this is suddenness of onset, a class of phenomena that includes abrupt changes in religion, politics, ideology or personality. Suddenness of onset shares several of the preconditions necessary to bring about a conversion:

(a) a state of "preparedness," in which the individual's system of core personal constructs (ways of construing and responding to events) are unstable, either because they are highly fluid or overly rigid but fragile; (b) a motivation (not necessarily conscious) to change, or at least a positive attitude toward change; (c) an immediate environment, sometimes including a specific triggering event, that is conducive to change; and (d) an ideology that helps legitimize the change, and that lends social support for its maintenance. (Averill 1985:102-103).

This is part of the power of conspiracy theories. They can inspire believers with an almost evangelical zeal. Conspiracy theories clarify all. They are the motive force in history, provide explanations for traumatic events. They divide the world into good and evil, simplify events, identify those responsible and alert the unsuspecting masses to danger, providing a call to arms or a come to Jesus summons. The "They" of conspiracy theories are Evil Incarnate and failure to oppose them can result in the collapse of all that one holds dear. And when the latter happens, it happens because belief in conspiracies are arrived at through some experience. Conspiracies are affecting, they have emotional content and influence. They are felt and that affect is disturbing. Encountering a conspiracy theory and examining it in depth draws you into a different world, one that is no longer safe, warm, closed and secure. The narrative logic of conspiracy theories disrupt conventional wisdom, for good and for ill.

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