So-called “Conspiracy Theories” in Perspective [View All]

Note to mods: I hope and I believe that I am not going against DU rules by posting this in GD. This post does not tout any specific conspiracy theories, but rather it is, in my opinion, a well reasoned discussion of so-called “conspiracy theories” in general, which I hope will help to clarify some important issues. If I am wrong about that and this post is locked or moved, I will be disappointed, but I apologize for breaking the rules.


I have long been fascinated by so-called “conspiracy theories”, and have subsequently posted about them on DU on a number of occasions. Recent vigorous controversy over this issue on DU, including Skinner’s post requesting us to “stop posting baseless conspiracy stuff about Senator Johnson”, has caused me to think about this issue some more, and I would like to share some of my thoughts.

First I want to say that I understand and respect our administrators’ point of view on this issue. Skinner has pointed out that one reason for asking us not to post baseless conspiracy stuff is that he is afraid that doing so will make it less likely that sensible people will choose to join DU. That is certainly a legitimate issue IMO, since we should always welcome the addition of sensible people to our community.

I can think of at least one other very good reason to discourage “baseless conspiracy stuff” from being posted on DU, and I am not aware whether this has been previously voiced by our DU administrators: DU is a political organization, one of its main purposes being (in addition to providing enjoyment, education, and mental health benefits to its members) to support the Democratic Party. I hope and I DO believe that we have made a significant contribution in that regard. I believe that we have made a contribution because large numbers of articles and discussions that are posted here provide powerful arguments for our beliefs, our values, and our reasons for supporting the Democratic Party. Just as our corporate national news media provides information and arguments that influence people’s opinions, so do we, and people pick up our messages and transmit them to their friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers all over the world.

So, to the extent that DUers post baseless assertions (and I’m sure that we can all agree that that happens from time to time here), that tends to weaken our message by making us seem less credible in the eyes of many Americans, and consequently impedes our goal of supporting the Democratic Party. And I’m sure that that is one very good reason why our administrators exert some control over this issue. Yet at the same time, they recognize that censoring discussion on DU is a two edged sword, since it entails the possibility of censoring useful discussion and argument as well as baseless assertions. So they attempt to strike a balance, which I believe is in general a very good balance.

Having said all that, I also believe that in the United States in general, and even among some DUers, there is an excessive prejudice against so-called “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists”. I believe that that prejudice is very unhealthy to our country, and that is what I wish to address in the remainder of this post:


Today’s accepted history is often yesterday’s “Conspiracy Theory”

The formal definition of a conspiracy is two or more people getting together to plan a crime. Not only does that happen all the time, but history if full of examples of large conspiracies involving national governments, with monumental consequences. And our country is no exception to that. Moreover, many of those conspiracies, which are today well accepted as historical fact, were at the time of their occurrence and for many years or decades afterwards, considered to be in the realm of so-called “conspiracy theories”, with a pejorative connotation that would invite ridicule of those who voiced them. Here are five brief examples from American history:

The violent disenfranchisement of Blacks in the 19th Century American South
From the end of the American Civil War in 1865, through 1875, three Constitutional amendments and Reconstruction had operated to provide former slaves with voting and other rights, which they used to elect numerous Black men to high public office. As this state of affairs was intolerable to many southern Whites, several White racist organizations were formed, which coordinated efforts with the Democratic Party (Yes, in those days the Democratic Party was the racist Party, and Republicans were considerably less racist) to intimidate and murder politically active Black men and their families, with the main goal of disenfranchising them and regaining political power in the South. The plan was highly successful, and southern Blacks in the United remained mostly disenfranchised for about 90 years, until voting rights legislation in 1965 did much to address the problem. Nicholas Lemann, in “Redemption – The Last Battle of the Civil War”, discusses this issue in great detail.

The CIA overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953
In 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles convinced President Eisenhower to accede to a CIA plot to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohmmad Mosaddeq. Reasons included Mosaddeq’s recent nationalization of Iran’s oil industry and fear that his leftist leanings would make him susceptible to Communist influence. The CIA-led coup was successful, and Mosaddeq was replaced by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran with an iron fist for the next 26 years, to the great detriment of the Iranian people. That coup has been a major factor in anti-American feeling in Iran and in the Middle East in general, ever since.

Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods was a 1962 plan by the American military, led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, to incite a war against Cuba. It involved various false flag actions, including such terrorist activities as the shooting down of an American passenger plane by the U.S. military, which would be blamed on Cuba. Fortunately, the American Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, vetoed the plan. The documentation of this plan was first published in 1998. Prior to public publishing of Operation Northwoods, you can be sure that anyone proclaiming knowledge of it would have been excoriated as a “conspiracy theorist”.

The American invasion of Iraq
It is now fairly well known that the Bush administration, in an effort to drum up public and Congressional support for an invasion of Iraq, concocted a bunch of lies, based on “evidence” that was vigorously contradicted by knowledgeable high level officials. However, prior to the start of the war, Americans who contradicted the Bush administration’s excuses for war were excoriated as unpatriotic or “conspiracy theorists”.

Torture at Guantanamo Bay
It is also now fairly well known that torture of detained prisoners by American military or contracting personnel has been a regular occurrence at Guantanamo Bay and other American detention facilities since the onset of our “War on Terror”. But when Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) gave a straight forward accounting on the Senate floor of eye-witness testimony of such torture, which he had heard from an FBI agent, he was excoriated by the Republican attack machine for doing so. Purportedly, the vicious criticism directed against him was incited by his comparing our torture of Muslims with Nazi torture during World War II. But his description of the torture was accurate, and the comparison that he made was appropriate (He did not say or imply that American and Nazi torture were equivalent in scope). The concentrated attacks against Senator Durbin were due to a fundamental abhorrence that too many Americans have towards hearing their country severely criticized, even when actions by their government warrant severe criticism.


The denigration and marginalization of so-called “conspiracy theorists”

Needless to say, when a national government gets involved in a major conspiracy to commit a serious crime, very powerful interests are often involved. Therefore, it is in their interest to make “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theorist” into pejorative terms and terms of abuse – just as has been done with the word “liberal”.

And not only do they seek to belittle “conspiracy theories” that involve them directly. The wealthy and the powerful have an interest in maintaining the status quo. To the extent that citizens develop an awareness of nefarious acts conducted by their government and other powerful individuals, the status quo is threatened. And with our country’s national news media now being largely in the hands of wealthy and powerful corporations, that means that much of our news media has a vested interest in avoiding issues that shed a bad light on our government. Hence the avoidance of such crucial issues as the Bush lies that led us into war and the objections to the 2004 Presidential election Ohio vote count.

When I see someone like Tucker Carlson talking about “grassy knoll conspiracy theorists” with that contemptuous, snotty attitude of his, I just want to scream. The irony of that is that the medical evidence that JFK’s assassination was planned by a conspiracy (i.e., he was shot twice from the front, in the direction of the grassy knoll, whereas the book depository where Lee Harvey Oswald was allegedly present at the time of the shooting was in back of Kennedy) is overwhelming, and 70% of Americans believe it was a conspiracy. No matter. Anyone who believes that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy is a “conspiracy theorist”.


The importance of “conspiracy theorists”

Given the tendency of government to participate in grave conspiracies, especially with regard to attempts to increase its own power, our country and the world need people who have the capability of being suspicious of government actions. Indeed, that is the main reason why our Founding Fathers created the First Amendment to our Constitution. We need a free and independent press who refuse to take government at its word, but rather who will routinely take what government says with a grain of salt. In short, we need conspiracy theorists in our national press corps. For the first step towards investigation of government malfeasance is to develop an evidence based theory as to what might have occurred. No conspiracy theory, no well guided investigation.

William Rivers Pitt made a similar point in his book, “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence”. In that book he discusses a grave conspiracy theory (not to be discussed in this post) that involves the U.S. government. He notes that people who voice conspiracy theories like that tend to be excoriated as unpatriotic, but in reality it is those who are willing to question our government when it is wrong who are the real patriots. Real patriots want to improve their country when they see their government doing bad things. False patriots would rather sit by silently and maintain the pretense that their country is infallible, rather than challenge it or even admit when it is wrong.

A similar principle applies to police investigations. To investigate a serious crime, police detectives must first look at the evidence available to them and follow certain standard policies. But often, further investigation must be guided by evidence based theories in order to stand the best chance of solving the crime. Without a well developed theory as to why and how the crime was committed, an investigation of the crime has little to guide it.


Motive and capacity

It is a well known principle of police investigative work that “means, motive, and opportunity” are and should be prominently considered in attempts to identify suspects for a crime. That is a major reason why spouses are so frequently considered to be suspects in murder cases; they often have ample opportunity and motive for the murder.

“Capacity” is another important issue to consider. We must ask who has the psychological capacity to have committed a crime. For example, if a person or group of persons who have the motive and opportunity to have committed a crime also have demonstrated serious anti-social behavior in the past (such as rape or lying to Congress to justify a war), then that should justify added suspicion of that person or group of persons.

Now, lets consider Senator Johnson’s recent episode of an arteriovenous malformation bleeding into his brain. I’m a physician, and I can’t even imagine that anyone would have the ability to produce an arteriovenous malformation (or a stroke) in another person, let alone do so without being detected. Therefore, any theory of foul play in this instance would have to involve the Senator’s doctors making up a false diagnosis, which also seems extremely unlikely to me at this time.

But what about people who have no special medical knowledge, who are considering the event at a time when little information is available? What do they have to go on? Number one, they know for a fact that a great many powerful people in our country have great motivation for having a Republican Congress. They also have reason to believe that a certain unknown proportion of those people would be willing to kill to attain that result. And last but not least, they have good reason to believe that our corporate news media might not report evidence of such a crime if it was available to them. After all, much of our corporate news media had evidence of Bush administration lies in leading us into war, and they failed to report on those lies for a very long time.

The motive alone constitutes evidence. It’s not solid evidence, and it’s not evidence that could alone lead to a conviction. But it is evidence nonetheless.

By saying this I am certainly not suggesting that it is right for people to make assertions that aren’t true. Nor am I suggesting that it is wrong of our DU administrators to vigorously discourage discussion on DU of foul play related to Senator Johnson’s illness – for reasons that I discussed at the beginning of this post.

All I am saying is that I understand why people speculate about things like this, and I believe that that kind of speculation is usually neither ill intentioned nor stupid. Rather, I consider it to be a perfectly normal and even admirable reaction to a terrible and scary event of potentially monumental importance, taking place in a nation where the news we get from our national press corps is rightfully considered to be highly suspect.