They're Out To Get Us
CONSPIRACY
DANIEL PIPES, the authority on Middle Eastern affairs and editor of Middle
East Quarterly, has written in this brief but dense volume a highly useful
primer on conspiracy theories, or the "set of fears" that produced a "body of
political ideas that I call conspiracism." Much of the ground he covers will
be familiar to students of history and politics -- the Crusades, the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the Illuminati, the French Revolution,
Leninism and Naziism, the American Red Scares -- but the neteffect of his
inquiry is larger; he makes clear that to a startling extent conspiracy
theories have "had a profound impact on European and world history."
"Like alchemy and astrology," Pipes writes, "conspiracism offers an
intellectual inquiry that has many facts right but goes wrong by locating
causal relationships where none exist; its is the `secret vice of the
rational mind.' " As a result "this book is the opposite of a study in
intellectual history," since it requires Pipes to "deal not with the cultural
elite but its rearguard, not with the finest mental creations but its dregs."
He warns that "so debased is the discourse ahead that even the Russiansecret
police and Hitler play important intellectual roles."
As a consequence there is a temptation to regard conspiracy theory as "a
minor phenomenon, even a laughable distraction," but this is a mistake.
Conspiracism has immense capacity for mischief; its "forces can move history -
- and have done so repeatedly." Pipes's summary of its chronology makes the
point succinctly:
Pipes begins with the present, offering a quick look at conspiracy theory
as it continues to thrive in the United States, albeit on a relatively minor
scale. It thrives among "the politically disaffected and the culturally
suspicious," and tends to be concentrated in "the black community and the
hard right." Among many blacks there are persistent fears that the federal
government "uses blacks as guinea pigs, imposes bad habits on them, targets
their leaders and decimates their population"; thus the widespread belief
that AIDs has been deliberately spread in order to kill off blacks, and that
crack cocaine has been underwritten and distributed by the government to
demoralize the black community.
By the same token, at the other end of the political spectrum the hard
right became convinced during the Cold War "that a conspiratorial body of
Americans, known variously as the Money Power, the Insiders, the Secret Team
or the High Cabal, were ready to sell out their country to the Soviet Union,
which would then establish a one-world government." This is rather more
difficult to maintain today, but its essential spirit lives, feeding on fears
of an invasion of the United States by United Nations forcesand on the many
fears that inspire the militia movement. As Pipes quite correctly notes in an
appendix, the Internet has proved to be an ideal medium for the promulgation
and dissemination of these fears, with unknown consequences for the future.
It is important to make the distinction, as Pipes does, between
"conspiracies, which are real, and conspiracy theories, which exist only in
the imagination." Actual conspiracies occur all the time, in both public and
private life; one of history's cruelest ironies is that the worst
conspiracies the world has known -- Soviet Communism and German Naziism --
were formed in order to combat imaginary conspiracies that Lenin, Stalin and
Hitler so deeply feared.
The great age of conspiracy theory -- "the core of the conspiracist
experience" -- took place between 1815 and 1945: "The secret society myth
spawned a great number of actual secret societies, it grew into a conspiracy
theory about Anglo-American imperialism, and anti-Jewish ideas evolved into
conspiratorial antisemitism." Though it is commonly assumed that conspiracy
theory is a pet obsession of the right -- when Pipes uses "right" and "left,"
he means not "conservative" and "liberal" but the extreme positions on both
ends of the spectrum -- in fact the left is equally hospitable to it. Naziism
was conspiracism on the right, its central fear being a Jewish conspiracy;
Leninism was conspiracism on the left, its hobgoblin being capitalist
imperialism. But both sides "engage in similar forms of conspiracism because
they share much with each other -- a temperament of hatred, a tendency toward
violence, a suspiciousness that encourages conspiracism -- and little with
the political center."
LOOKING TO the future of conspiracy theory, Pipes is relatively sanguine,
finding a "return to common sense . . . in North America and Western Europe."
He suggests, and there is reason to believe he is right, that "countries in
transition to democracy (the young United States, the Weimar Republic, post-
Soviet Russia)" are far more susceptible to fears of conspiracy than are
nations where "the rule of law, freedom of speech and minority rights" are in
place. Obviously the grievances in America's black community arise in great
measure out of fears that certain minority rights are as yet unsecured, but
overall the United States is a relatively tranquil society in which only
those on the fringes are likely to be haunted by fantasies of plots and
schemes by malign connivers. By the same token the prospect is less sunny in
places where the rule of law is shakier, so the outlook for some of these --
Pipes mentions the Philippines, India, Iran and Haiti -- may not be good, at
least for the short term.
Reading Pipes's survey and analysis, one cannot escape the conclusion that
conspiracism is a far more common and influential phenomenon than most of us
would like to admit. Most of us are not paranoid, but something of it seems
to lurk within us, to be an inextricable part of what we call human nature.
This is not exactly good news, but then good news is not the main business of
this first-rate book.
Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.
11/09/97
The Washington Post
How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and
Where It Comes From
By Daniel Pipes
Free Press. 258 pp. $25
"Conspiracy is a story in six acts. Suspicions about Jewish and secret
society conspiracies emerged during the Crusades. The Enlightenment period
saw petty conspiracy theories become a common tool of interpretation. The
French Revolution raised the stakes, stimulating conspiracy theories about
enemies who seek world hegemony. Through the 19th century, these ideas
acquired greater scope and depth, finding their classic expression in Russia
in the 1890s. The world wars saw such widespread acceptance of theparanoid
style that conspiracy theorists seized power in several major countries and
came close to global hegemony in 1940-41. In the next half-century,
conspiracism declined in the West while gaining importance in other parts of
the world. Summed up, conspiracy theories grew steadily in importance over a
period of nearly two centuries, culminating with the years around 1940, and
then they retreated."
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