VI.Belief

Although he clearly rejects the specific conspiracies cited as historical examples, as an American historian, Hofstader was concerned with demonstrating the existence of the paranoid style and its frequent reappearance in political movements in this country. His use of the term is intentionally pejorative since "the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good" (5). This explains why Hofstadter locates the paranoid style in minority movements, rather than the mainstream of American political thought. He is unable to see this style as representative of a norm. His list of what he calls minority political movements is so extensive that it begs the question: who is left in the mainstream, once he has presented his short list of the paranoid style? Hofstadter, like many others, is under the influence of American exceptionalism, the peculiar form of nationalistic ethnocentricism that infects much of American political thought. It represents America as a nation unique and apart. It is a country that has been the fairest, most just, most open, most progressive in history. It sees Americans (read:white) as a chosen people, and their ascension as preordained, inevitable. According to American exceptionalism, there is the only civil, rational discourse of two party democracy, not conflict. It certainly does not see the politics of this exceptional country as being capable of anything as tawdry as clandestine schemes, social injustice, imperialism or conspiracy.

Consequently, the anti-conspiratorial bias, whether said theory is the most far fetched of narratives or the simple assumption that conspiracy is a regular feature of political statecraft, obscures our view of how power is used. In "Popper Revisited, or What Is Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?" (1995) Charles Pigden challenges the conventional wisdom that conspiracy theories are wrong because"things just don't work that way". Taking a cue from Karl Popper's denunciation of "the conspiracy theory of society" in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Pigden examines the reasoning behind the blanket rejection of this idea.

To the contrary, Pigden argues that conspiracy is a reasonable explanation for many social and historical events, and that it is often appropriate to conclude that they have occurred. Using several historical examples, Pigden shows that conspiracies have happened, then asks why the idea that conspiracy is a feature of politics has become such a ridiculed notion. While he does not claim that conspiracy explains everything, he regards the argument that they never happen as equally suspect.

Popper defined the conspiracy theory of society as follows: "It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed) and who have planned and conspired to bring it about" (quoted in Pidgen, 6). As he examines the idea closely, Pigden finds that Popper's description of conspiracy is one that no one believes. According to Popper's definition the explanation of social events always consists of the discovery of men or groups who are interested in its occurrence; that the explanation of these events are due solely to the discovery of such groups; and that the outcome of these events are absolutely the result of the direct design of conspirators. Taking the argument to its logical conclusion, conspiracy theories cannot be true because there are examples of failed conspiracies (6-7). It is an idea which has given intellectual cover to right-wing conspirators because it asserts that conspiracies cannot be true under any circumstances.

In the end, Pigden argues that Popper's definition is false since conspiracies have often played a part in historical events, and their influence is dependent on both the historical circumstances and the power available to conspirators. After all, anyone can plot, but if they cannot implement their plans, it does not matter if they do. So, although some events are attributable to conspiracy, no one need argue that they always are in order to maintain a belief in conspiracy theories. Even if all social phenomena can't be attributed to conspiracy, it can be included as a social factor, along with the circumstances that permit men to engage in conspiracy. Pigden regards Popper's attitude toward conspiracy theories as being similar to superstition, an idea reinforced by Popper's claim that they are a secularized form of religious belief. "The idea that what goes on in the world is due to the machinations of the men in power is the secular successor to the view that events are controlled by the conspiracies of gods" (8).

Two problems present themselves in Pigden's critique. First, he uses superstition pejoratively, ironically, to defend the notion of conspiracy. If we recall Christiansen's observation that although the "implicit belief in the constant interference in everyday life by non-human powers has ceased to play a decisive part" in contemporary worldview, "traces of such belief may still color and influence the belief of individuals everywhere" (xx).

Second, he insists that Popper's definition is one that no one asserts. However, as we have seen, it is asserted explicitly and implicitly. If the logical conclusion of Popper's arguments are that conspiracy theories assert that events can always be explained in terms of successful conspiracies, then those who maintain to this day that the Illuminati are operating behind the scenes, or that the New World Order is trying to establish world dominance are arguing just as that. And Hofstadter's essential elements of conspiracy certainly follow Popper's reasoning.

Pigden is correct in arguing that the wholesale rejection of the concept of conspiracy is due to the bias that Popper and others exhibit, but he is doing a critique of dominant hegemonic readings of conspiracy. The official view in a democracy, where politics are supposedly conduct openly, is that conspiracies do not take place. Ever.

As this nation's experience with Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the current investigations of the Clinton administration demonstrate, this is far from true. Pigden is correct to be suspicious of the rejection of conspiracy theories, however, there has been a long folk tradition of defining conspiracies as Popper has done.

This does not mean that Popper was correct in providing support for the general skepticism that greets conspiracy. Curiously enough, Pigden's redefinition of conspiracy as "... my theory that it is often appropriate to cite conspiracies in the explanation of events" (9), puts him in agreement with the oppositional readings of power which support conspiracy theories, although it sometimes aligns him with people with which he would not wish to associate.

Which is precisely the point. Folk ideas can reflect dominant, subordinate or radical meaning systems, and in doing so, it becomes more and more difficult to claim that "the folk" believe one exclusively. Folk ideas compete and overlap; they can result in good or evil. Pigden concludes that despite the moral presumption against conspiracy, it is a widespread occurrence. We all do it: "... conspiracies can be innocent or even laudable. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with covert plans or covert action or, if there is, the ends can (sometimes) justify the means" (29). Some may blanch at this morally relative notion, but to do so misses the point that Pigden is trying to get across, which is that conspiring is behavior we all can potentially engage in, given the proper circumstances and the opportunity:

Even when the conspiracies are genuinely sinister, we tend to take too lurid a view. Don't think of stage villains and ranting Richard IIIs. Don't even think of the prawn dinner in Apocalypse Now with the clear if euphemistic order to halt the colonel's mission "with extreme prejudice." That is still a bit too overblown. Think, if you like, of Nixon or (if you must have a myth) of the scene in Robocop II in which the suave executives of Omni-Consumer Products conspire to murder the mayor of Detroit. They talk in oblique terms of their surveillance ability and of just how far with the plan they are prepared to go, and the scene ends with the nicely ambiguous instruction that there cannot be any witnesses. In real life, the language of conspiracy can be as understated as that. Once you understand what conspiracies are like, you will realize that there are a lot of them about and that you may even be a conspirator yourself. Whether this is good or bad depends on the details of the conspiracy. (29)

Pigden's position permits us to work from a presumption other than that of blind skepticism. As folklorists, we see that conspiracy theories are a complex phenomena that manifest themselves in many forms across genres: from ritual to song, from narrative to belief. What is important in this approach is not the truth of a particular conspiracy theory, but the effect it has on the behavior of people. Even Hofstader noted that "[st]yle has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content" (5).

An example from American history can demonstrate this point. Reinhard Gehlen was Adolph Hitler's chief of the Foreign Armies East, in effect the head of Nazi Intelligence as well as the most senior officer on the Russian Front. He conducted espionage against the Soviet Union, using torture and murder as interrogation techniques. on four million Russian prisoners. His methods resulted in a massive amount of information on the USSR.

By 1944, Gehlen and other high ranking members of the Nazi party realized that the Third Reich was headed for defeat. Gehlen decided to have all of the intelligence that he had gathered microfilmed, stored in steel drums and buried in the Austrian Alps. As the Allied armies approached, Gehlen made certain to surrender to the United States army. He was imprisoned as an internment camp at Salzburg. Within a month, his name was removed from all American lists of Nazi POWS and he was moved to Fort Hunt near Washington, D.C. Gehlen began to receive visits from U.S. army intelligence generals, President Truman's national security advisor and Allen Dulles, a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

One year later, Gehlen had returned to Germany.

Had the United States government followed the Yalta Accord, they would have been required to turn Gehlen over to the USSR. Instead, the American government made a deal with him. Not only would Gehlen turn over his massive cache of files on the Soviet Union to the U.S., he would also serve as an intelligence source on the Russians. In other words, the United States collaborated with a known Nazi who had committed mass murder in return for information. In doing so, the government permitted Gehlen to utilize a network of Nazi SS officers, fugitive war criminals and fascist sympathizers. In effect, they helped establish the post-war Organization of Former SS Members (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen), known as Odessa. And Gehlen wasn't the only high-ranking Nazi to make such a deal. Other Nazi war criminals were used for intelligence work: Klaus Barbie, Franz Alfred Six, Emil Augsburg and Otto Skorzeny were among the hundreds of fugitives on the payroll of the U.S. government.

Nazi scientists were secretly imported into the country through a project codenamed Paperclip by the U.S. War Department. According to their own intelligence reports, approximately seventy-five percent of the German scientists were "ardent Nazis". Many had conduct experiments on prisoners in concentration camps. Truman had approved "Paperclip" on the condition that no Nazis were brought into the country. This would have eliminated scientists such as Werner von Braun, who was an SS major, and Arthur Rudolph. Each had been assessed as security risks.

The War Department solved this problem by sanitizing their reports. Paperclipped reports were rewritten, allowing many Nazi veteran entrance into the United States.

The obvious question to ask is why? Gehlen was considered a valuable asset because of the intelligence he gathered on the Soviet Union. During the post-war years, American anti-communism had reached a new pitch, and Gehlen took advantage of it. Nazis were fervent anti-communists as well and as Allen Dulles said of Gehlen, "He's on our side, and that's all that matters" (quoted in Vankin and Whalen, 305). The German scientists who were smuggled in became essential to American research in fields such rocket science. Von Braun, one of the developers of the V-2 rocket used to bomb England during the war, turned his invention into the Saturn-5 for NASA.

Gehlen's spy network, called the Org, was funded by over 200 million dollars from the U.S. government. He gained tremendous influence over American foreign policy during the Cold War. The Org submitted reports on Russian military strength, which Allen Dulles passed on without change. These reports greatly exaggerated Soviet military preparedness, once claiming that they were massing to attack West Germany by 1946 with a ten to one troop advantage over Western forces. At this time, Soviet forces were, in fact, recovering from the losses they incurred fighting the Nazis. They were miltarily underequipped and had no combat troop advantages. Additionally, Gehlen often advised the United States to launch a first strike assault against the Russians, advice they came perilously close to taking. By providing the U.S. government with erroneous information about the Soviet military buildup, Gehlen's Org helped to increase hostilities between the U.S. and the USSR, and escalate the Cold War. His intelligence reports contributed to the decision to engage in an arms race that lasted over forty years.

Finally, Gehlen's Org helped to establish the C.I.A. He managed the agency's anti-Soviet assets in Eastern Europe in the postwar era. In this position, he had incredible influence on NATO's policy regarding the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Europe. Some have estimated that Gehlen's Org was responsible for seventy percent of the information regarding these areas.

Many claim that Gehlen's true purpose was to re-establish the Third Reich. Odessa was the organization used to help high-ranking Nazis escape during the collapse of Germany. Three things were done to help accomplish this: 1) the founding of the Org from the Nazi wartime intelligence network; 2) creating "Ratlines", which would relocate high-ranking officials to South America, Central America, Mexico, the Middle East and Indonesia and; 3) the transfer of Third Reich assets, which were used to establish front companies. Many of these companies are respectable businesses today.

The question why rears it head. Martin A. Lee supplied the following answer: "Gehlen's strategy was based on a rudimentary equation--the colder the Cold War conditions got, the more political space for Hitler's heirs to maneuver. He realized that the Org could flourish only under Cold War conditions; as an institution it was therefore committed to perpetuating the Soviet-American conflict" (37:1997).

This is the stuff of conspiracy. Those unfamiliar with these details may reject them immediately, and this is understandable. After all, we are taught that we live in a free society, that such things are not in the national character of this country. And, of course, this is the type of thing we are never taught in high school history classes. This particular narrative, however, has been written about many times, in several books of varying quality, all of which can be found in a library. There have been two biographies published on Reinhard Gehlen in this country: Gehlen, Spy of the Century by E.H. Cookridge and Gehlen: Germany's Master Spy by Charles Whiting. There are Gehlen's memoirs, which were published in 1972. Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling published The General was a Spy the same year. Within the last decade Christopher Simpson (Blowback,1988), Mary Ellen Reese (General Reinhard Gehlen and the CIA,1990) and Martin A. Lee (The Beast Reawakens, 1997) have all examined the Gehlen case. All corroborate a central fact. The United States government collaborated with a Nazi mass murderer because they believed that it was in their interest. In doing so, tens of thousands of Nazi officials escaped prosecution for war crimes, and many of those who were tried had their sentences reduced or commuted. Former Nazis were returned to postions of power in the West German government as the U.S. shifted from a policy of denazification to re-armament. All this was accomplished in large part with millions of U.S. tax dollars. This, in turn led to the reestablishment of fascist organizations in the post war era, one that chronically reemerges throughout the world today. However, this is not the type of information that people want to know, so they don't seek it out. It is the type of information that lays bare how nations make decisions and use power in what they conceive to be their interests. As someone once said, "Power corrupts. What the hell else is it for?"

I mentioned previously that conspiracy researchers come to their beliefs through a conversion experience. They experience an abrupt, discontinuous transition from one state of understanding to another. This experience can be frightening because it throws you into conflict . When incompatible, competing ideas are confronted, worldviews are challenged, and in some cases, destroyed.

And the destruction of a worldview can lead you to a terrifying idea. Reality is a construction. Worldviews are not universal. They are symbolic representations of global concerns that have been locally manifested by specific cultures. Challenges to established worldviews are seen as threats to order and met with resistance and sometimes with violence. There are sanctions for daring to challenging a system's conventions and traditions and beliefs. These sanctions are often official and carried out by the formal institutions of power, but there can be unofficial sanctions, carried out by other members with which one has social interaction.

Why this is so has been explained by noncontingent reward experiments. Noncontingency results when contexts are established which require one to find order where there actually is none. A task is established for a group of people in which a reward or punishment is part of the outcome. The subjects proceed on the assumption that the outcome is contingent upon their performance. A correct response will be rewarded, an incorrect one will be punished.

The tasks are complicated, and solving them requires a great investment of mental and emotional resources on the part of those involved. There is, however, no actual connection between the subject's performance of the task and the reward or punishment received.

When informed of the true nature of the experiment, the subject's initial reaction is disbelief, that it cannot be true. The solutions that they have constructed are so elaborate that they are convinced that their solutions must be right.

As we know, it is extremely disturbing to be made aware that our worldviews are just that. They are perspectives, not universals, and there is no objective relationship between the world and how we perceive it. The cultural values that people construct are patterns used to organize and constrain the system they live in. Realizing that the world is noncontingent with our perceptions is disorienting. Our worldviews do not just become ungrounded, they are known to be so.

Real world encounters noncontingent experiences occur all the time. Information and ideas that we hold true are disproved. The most common response when people are confronted with contrary information is to reject the information and cling to the construction. In fact, the constructions will be elaborated upon, made more complex to account for the contradictory information.

I began this article with a quotation from Isaiah to illustrate this point. These lines were taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Christian Bible, one that has met with much resistance by many because its method of translation has called many preferred Christian readings into question. One of the aims of the NRSV was to replace much of the archaic language of the KJV. For example, Isaiah 7:14, which is rendered in English in the KJV as "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel", reads "Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel", in the NRSV. This has been a source of great controversy because this passage has often been invoked as a prophecy of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The NRSV translation, which used Hebrew texts as a primary source, removes the Christian reading of a Hebrew text.

Yet strangely, the English translation of Isaiah 45:7 remains unchanged in the KJV and the NRSV. Isaiah 45:7 is spoken by the god Yahweh, who says: "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things". The archaic words, weal and woe, are retained in both versions. In Hebrew, however, the words are neither weal nor woe. The actual lines read:

I form light and create darkness,
I cause good and I cause evil
I the Lord do all these things".

Isaiah 45:7 is an example of the everyday conspiring that many of us engage in, especially when belief is in question. In contemporary monotheistic religions, god is absolute good. In fact, the deity is incapable of evil. Good and evil are absolute opposites, set apart by a rigid, clear dividing line for all to see. The original Hebrew rendering of Isaiah reveals a more complex idea of god, a more ambiguous one who is capable and responsible for good and evil in the world. In the past, before the emergence of devils and demons, god was the source of both good and evil. The KJV and the NRSV translations share a Manichean view of the universe, and one would guess, a fear of conceiving of a deity as both god and devil.

In this, the translators of both the King James and New Revised Standard versions conspired to create a particular reality. It presents the Manichean view of the world as the only possible one. This tendency shows itself in many areas where ideology is at stake. This is obvious in the case of religion, and also in concepts such as race, gender, class or nation.

Conspiracy theories usually are founded on part of what I've come to call grand master narratives. Like unified field theories, master narratives explain everything. Human beings hate uncertainty; this is why totalizing explanations are culturally constructed. The example of biblical translation demonstrates this. Biblical texts are sacred narratives that become organizationally closed, especially with the power of the state behind them. Once people come to accept the idea that one god exists and that god is all good and all loving, it becomes a fact. Pointing out the many inconsistencies there are between the original Hebrew and the subsequent English versions is likely to infuriate one who literally believes it, and who have never noticed those inconsistencies. It also frightens them because it disrupts the belief that the questions the myths address have been settled. Uncertainty enters again.

People die in car accidents everyday. When a celebrity dies in a car crash, she becomes like the rest of us, subject to randomness. For many, this is intolerable. Instead of being blessed, charmed, special, a princess, Diana Spencer was revealed to be just another poor sucker who never saw it coming.

The desire to cling to a belief in a contingent, ordered universe has, for a long time, suppressed the open expression of contrary notions. Folklore genres provide outlets for the expression of such ideas. Jokes, anecdotes, song parodies and rumors are examples; conspiracy theories are an under-examined genre that can be seen as a response to the recognition that we live in a noncontingent, relative social world. Some conspiracy theories permit us to maintain a belief in a comfortable reality. And others don't.

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