Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracies in American History and Culture

Conspiracy Playlists: Revolution

2009-09-29T08:26:00.009-05:00

Here's one of my playlists, to consider Bailyn and Wood by. You should be able to listen at least once for free. I am experimenting with this site, Lala.com, as a place to post playlists.

Conspiracy: Revolution

Links on past and upcoming topics: American Revolution, Antisemitism

2009-09-28T21:22:00.000-05:00

PRESENT-DAY CONSPIRACISTS AND MUSTACHIOED FORMER MARTIAL ARTS STARS CHANNEL THE FOUNDERS:

ANTISEMITISM IN THE "MODERN WORLD": Ahmadinejad Spews Raving Lunatic Anti-Semitism on "Jerusalem Day"

Message on class meeting for 9/15/09

2009-09-14T13:03:00.002-05:00

This is in response to some questions I have had about tomorrow's class, on Tuesday, Sept. 15.

Let me explain again in writing what I want to you to be ready to do in class: Make some notes for yourself, and be ready, verbally, to take a position for or against one of the interpretations of conspiracy theory you have encountered in the readings, using an example from the Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories as your evidence. The point is to start working with these various interpretations yourselves, rather just have me explain them to you.

It is best to think of the individual readings so far, besides Fenster’s survey (meaning Hofstadter and most of the individual chapters in Conspiracy Nation), as spinning out their own theories of why conspiracy theory appeals to people and how we should evaluate the phenomenon (especially, how dangerous we should think it is). Among the options would be “agency panic” from Timothy Melley, the “poor person’s cognitive mapping” explained by Fran Mason (based on the work of Frederic Jameson), and Jodi Dean’s defense of alien abduction mythology as (in effect), a perfectly valid and functional alternative belief system. Then there is Hofstadter, whose ideas we have not fully talked out yet. His interpretation applies the psychiatric concept of “paranoia,” to begin with, and then links conspiracy theory to the basically anti-democratic politics of the extreme Right (think Nazism or Fascism) and the fears of the old white, native-born middle classes, who feel their status as the dominant group in American society to be threatened by the changes of the modern world. (For an application of this idea to recent politics, see this post: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/09/entitled.php#more?ref=fpblg ). There are other interpretations in the reading, but these are probably the most eligible options to which you can apply your thinking right now.

As a way of getting some critical distance from these interpretations, consider some other ideas that have been floated concerning the conspiracy theories being floated about President Obama's health-care plan. Some articles linked earlier have seen them as examples of a persistent insanity in American politics, and/or as an example of popular political ignorance. The following article and video presents a kind of conspiracy theory of these conspiracy theories, that they are a political tool being used by conservative ideologues and the health insurance to distract a lot of middle- and working-class people from their own economic interests: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/get-the-government-out-of_b_285361.html . This one may well have some merit, considering that the public phase corporate lobbying campaigns are really all about selling hidden agendas.

See you tomorrow,
Jeff Pasley

P.S. I will be around my office most of the day Tuesday between 11AM and our class, so come and see me if you have questions.

Eisenhower's fears of militarism and right-wing extremism

2009-09-04T01:09:00.000-05:00

More background on Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style" and the ideas and fears (of fears!) behind Seven Days in May:

People did not seem familiar with President Eisenhower's warning against the "military-industrial complex." This clip from the film Why We Fight includes the good parts of that speech and also explains it. Watch it, and marvel that Ike was a Republican!
A New York Times column explains another Eisenhower warning, against people looking for answers from authoritarian leaders, like General Scott in the movie.

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Now playing: The Beatles - We Can Work It Out

Conspiracy Playlists -- The Adventure Begins

2009-09-01T23:23:00.004-05:00

The creation of my History of Conspiracy Theory course coincided with the onset of the mp3 era, so it was natural for a music fan like myself to make a CD to listen to while working on it. In putting that together, I realized that this music was an integral part of the whole subject for me. I vividly remember having originally picked up on the paranoia that pulsated through the culture of the 60s and 70s from the music I heard on the radio as a kid, including several of the songs on the list below, before I knew what any of it was about. Over time, this little amusement mushroomed into a lengthy series of conspiracy- and paranoia-themed CDs that I cannot seem to stop making. Having long wanted to share of these playlists without incurring the wrath of the RIAA, I am going to start posting a few of them here, along such links to versions of the songs themselves I happen across. Mp3s of most of these can be purchased from the usual outlets,

CONSPIRACY MUSIC: Paranoia (original CD)

1. Paranoid Larry and His Imaginary Band - Paranoid Larry Theme Song (2:08)

2. Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth (2:40)

3. Uncle Tupelo - We've Been Had (3:26)

4 .Radiohead - Black Star (4:07)

5. X - Someone's Watching (4:49)

6. The Kinks - Here Come The People In Grey (3:46)

7. The Undisputed Truth - Smiling Faces Sometimes (3:14)

8. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Bad Moon Rising (2:20)

9. Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through the Grapevine (3:15)

10. The Temptations - (I Know) I'm Losing You (2:28)

11. Four Tops - Reach Out (I'll Be There) (3:01)

12. Green Day - Basket Case (3:03)

13. The Kinks - Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues (3:32)

14. Harvey Danger - Flagpole Sitta (3:38)

15. Garbage - I Think I'm Paranoid (3:37)

16. Black Sabbath - Paranoid (2:47)

17. Clem Snide - The Ballad of David Icke (1:51)

18. Bob Dylan - Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues [Live] (4:25)

19. Soul Coughing - Unmarked Helicopters (3:22)

20. Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Imagination Is a Powerful Deceiver (3:40)

21. Offspring - Conspiracy Of One (2:18)

22. The Black Crowes - A Conspiracy (4:46)

23. The Kinks - Destroyer (3:47)

24. Radiohead - Paranoid Android (6:23)

Conspiracy Theory Today -- starters for 2009 students

2009-08-22T03:18:00.004-05:00

Deep Thoughts about Conspiracy Theory and "Right-Wing Rage"

Washington Post writer Rick Perlstein, "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage"
New York Times columnist Frank Rich invokes early 1960s "liberal consensus" scholars Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter: "The Guns of August"
Article cited by Rich, and a good companion to Hofstadter's Paranoid Style: Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed,"from The Radical Right (1962)

Continuity of anti-Obama groups back to McVeigh era:

Heavily-Armed '90s Militia, Linked To Anti-Obama Activist, Resisted 'New World Order' | TPMMuckraker

Death Panelists and Birthers

NYT blogger Timothy Egan on "Palin's Poison"
NYT on familiar source of "death panel" rumors
Jon Stewart grills the originator of the "death panel" charge -- a historian!
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Betsy McCaughey Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests
Conservative writer David Frum wonders whether Birthers are proof that our culture has lost its immunity to lunacy
Spencer Kornhaber, "Meet Orly Taitz, Queen Bee of People Obsessed With Barack Obama's Birth Certificate," OC Weekly

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Now playing: The Old Haunts - Poisonous Times
via FoxyTunes

Brainwashing in the News

2008-07-03T11:26:00.002-05:00

I just published a post on my Common-Place blog that coulda shoulda gone here as well, on the explicit use of Communist "brainwashing" techniques in the U.S. Phantom Zone prisaon at Guantanamo Bay. Read and enjoy.

Format of the test

2008-05-09T23:08:00.003-05:00

I am getting questions about the format of the test. It will be a pretty typical history test, but I gather a lot of you are new to history courses. It will be a written test rather than multiple choice, so you will need a blue book (available in Brady Commons at the bookstore or from the machine). Make sure you can explain and correctly use all the terms on the study sheet, and you will be fine. I am out of town right now, so I think the easiest way to reassure people is to provide a sample test, in the same format, but from a different course of mine. Same type of questions, different material, nothing fancy.

Term Sheet Updated -- all systems go for final

2008-05-09T01:26:00.004-05:00

I updated the term sheet for the final and posted the last lecture outline just now. The final exam is in our usual room next Tuesday at 8AM. It is a written exam, so you will need blue books, preferably the 81/2'' x 11'' kind. Post any last questions here.

Film clips shown in class, 24 April 2008

2008-04-24T14:21:00.003-05:00

I have to be out of town again today, once again thanks to our fair city's poor transportation links, so Marlin will be showing a couple of film clips. The first is a roughly 10-minute dramatization of one of the Salem witch trials, from the 1985 PBS film Three Sovereigns for Sarah. Vanessa Redgrave stars as Sarah Cloyce.

Then, looking forward to the last week of class when we will consider anti-Semitism and its attendant conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial, you will be seeing roughly the last half of Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a 1999 documentary. The films tells the sad of story of a self-taught engineer who made his living improving capital punishment equipment for various states. Then he made a big mistake. Leuchter claimed to have worked on gas chambers, and because of that, was tapped by Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel to investigate the site of the Auschwitz death camp, with the intent of "proving" that there were never any gas chambers there. Leuchter's surreptitious, comically inept investigation was used as evidence in defense of Zündel during a hate crimes trial in Canada. Naturally, Leuchter's business was ruined by the publicity from the trial, and most of the states he claims to have worked with now deny any association with him. The clip to be shown picks up with Leuchter talking about his work on capital punishment, and then turns to the story of the Auschwitz investigation.

Where we are going from here, and other announcements

2008-04-23T10:37:00.003-05:00

The lecture outlines page now has everything we have done up through the second witchcraft lecture yesterday. For the rest of the semester, you should be doing the readings listed for topics 12, 13, & 15 on the syllabus. The only textbook left is Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide. Please ask any current housekeeping questions, including ones about the paper, in this thread.

Also, office hours this week are going to be postponed until Monday afternoon, 4/28/08, 2-5PM. I have to go out of town Friday.

Term Paper Question Answered

2008-03-14T21:26:00.002-05:00

A question was posted about what kind of term paper we were looking for. I posted a long document about this in February. Please read that if you haven't, because you do have to write on one of those assignments. Also, please note that if you do topic #2, where you pick a conspiracy theory to write on, you need to get approval of the topic. That will involve talking to me and writing a short proposal describing the conspiracy theory you want to investigate, the questions you have about it, and listing the sources you plan to use. If at all possible, the sources should include some print materials as well as web sites.

Ask any general questions about the paper by commenting on this post.

Midterm questions -- ask here [UPDATED]

2008-03-02T21:10:00.005-06:00

If you have any questions about the midterm, I would appreciate it if you ask them as comments here rather than emailing. This way everyone can get the same answers. I will make sure this post stays on top on the blog through Thursday. I should also have pointed out that everything posted on this blog can be used as sources on the take-home midterm and the term paper.

While you are studying and writing, enjoy this BBC news item revealing that this year's Best Actress Oscar winner, Marion Cotillard, is also an avid conspiracy theorist. Because there is no better source on architectural engineering and astrophysics than a French actress!

UPDATE: Click here for emergency access to the key chapters in Conspiracy Nation.

UPDATE 2: Someone asked in class where there were examples of the Turabian citation style somewhere on the Internet. Yes there is.

Anti-Catholicism, Premillenial Dispensationalism, and the Republican Party

2008-03-01T14:39:00.008-06:00

You may remember Pastor John Hagee from the the PBS documentary Apocalypse! we watch clips from when we were discussing John Nelson Darby's "premillenial dispensationalism" in class last week. Hagee was and is one of America's leading preachers of Darby's prophetic system, which includes the Rapture, the Tribulation, and large doses of venom against the Catholic Church, a.k.a. "The Whore of Babylon." What you might not know is that Hagee is also major force in the Christian conservative wing of the Republican party, gladly embraced as a supporter even by not notably Christian figures such as likely GOP nominee John McCain.

Check out this item from the American Prospect's blog, and note the statistics on the levels of public belief in biblical and Bible-related (since that's all Darby's system is) prophecies:

Last fall, John Hagee gave a speech at the late Jerry Falwell's church, where he shared the stage with Tim LaHaye, co-author of the best-selling Left Behind series of novels. "How close are we to the second coming of Christ?" Hagee asked. "The Bible clearly states that heaven and earth shall pass away. … The signs of his coming are very clear in Scripture. If you listen closely, you can hear the hoofbeats of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, racing toward the battle of Armageddon."

For Hagee, the Bible prophesies that certain events will take place before the Second Coming. Hagee believes that many of these events have already occurred or are occurring. Referring to the Rapture, during which he believes Christians will be whisked away to heaven to wait for the Second Coming, Hagee said, "We’re going up in a twinkling of an eye. Jesus Christ could be here before you get home tonight."

While John McCain clearly doesn't believe this stuff, he knows that millions of Americans do. A 2002 Time magazine poll found that “fully 59% [of Americans] say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.” A 2007 AP/Ipsos poll found that one quarter of Americans believed that Jesus Christ would return in 2007 and 46% of evangelicals believed that it was “somewhat likely.” A comprehensive study of Pentecostals and charismatic evangelical Christians conducted by the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life in 2006 found that “Pentecostals have particularly strong views on 'the rapture of the church,' the teaching that before the world comes to an end the faithful will be saved and taken up to heaven.” According to the survey, 90% of American Pentecostals held that belief, while 69% of charismatics and 59% of other Christians did.

For video of the good pastor explaining the anti-Catholic aspects of his theology -- the proper word is actually "eschatology" -- see my history & politics blog.

The "Whore of Babylon" Achieving New Heights of Popularity

2008-03-01T14:00:00.000-06:00

I rather like this song but I wonder if Conor Oberst (spelling?) actually knows what the phrase "Whore of Babylon" actually refers to?

Conspiracy Theory Tactics Used against Barack Obama

2008-02-28T00:11:00.003-06:00

Pasted below is a story that I thought everyone should read, study, and send to their parents and relatives. Here we have conspiratorial thinking and prejudice being consciously deployed as political tools, right in front of us. A commentary on "Talking Points Memo" explains the strategy and I make a historical comparison on my main blog, "Publick Occurrences 2.0."

Obama Fights False Links to Islam, Denounces Views of Farrakhan Who Praised Him

JIM KUHNHENN
AP News

Feb 27, 2008 17:52 EST

For Barack Obama, it is an ember that he has doused time and again, only to see it flicker anew: links to Islam fanned by false rumors, innuendo and association.
Obama and his campaign reacted strongly this week when a photo of him in Kenyan tribal garb began spreading on the Internet. And the praise he received Sunday from Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan prompted pointed questions — during Tuesday night's presidential debate and also in a private meeting over the weekend with Jewish leaders in Cleveland.
During the debate, Obama repeated his denunciation of Farrakhan's views, which have included numerous anti-Semitic comments. And, after being pressed, he rejected Farrakhan's support in the presidential race.

The Democratic candidate says repeatedly that he's a Christian who took the oath of office on a family Bible. Yet on the Internet and on talk radio — and in a campaign introduction for John McCain this week — he is often depicted, falsely, as a Muslim with shadowy ties and his middle name, Hussein, is emphasized as a reminder of Iraq's former leader.

"If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim," he told the Jewish leaders in Cleveland, according to a transcript of the private session.

The photo of Obama wearing Kenyan tribal raiments — taken by an Associated Press photographer during his visit in 2006 to the country where his father was born — resurfaced on the Internet amid unsubstantiated claims that it was being circulated by members of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. Clinton and her aides said they had nothing to do with it. The Obama campaign accused them of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering."

On Tuesday Republican candidate McCain denounced the introduction he got in Cincinnati that criticized Obama in vivid terms. Talk show host Bill Cunningham referred to Obama three times as "Barack Hussein Obama" and called him a "hack, Chicago-style" politician during the introduction of McCain.

The Obama campaign is closely attuned to the rumors and insinuations. Information on Obama's Christian faith is prominently available on the "Know the facts" page of his Web site. The campaign has distributed flyers to churches in states with presidential contests. And it encourages supporters to flag any attack that may make its way into cyberspace.

"Our campaign is vigilant in quickly responding to any information about Senator Obama that surfaces, be it on the Internet, in the media or from our opponents," spokesman Bill Burton said Wednesday.

If there is confusion — and opportunity for political mischief — it derives at least in part from Obama's rich cultural background. His mother was a white woman from Kansas, his father was Kenyan and he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country.

"My grandfather, who was Kenyan, converted to Christianity, then converted to Islam," Obama said Sunday. "My father never practiced; he was basically agnostic. So, other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for four years when I was a child, I have very little connection to the Islamic religion."

Obama has become careful in denouncing the links, lately noting that some rumors about him also have been insulting to Muslims. Jim Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, said many Arab Americans are drawn to Obama because of his cultural background.

"It is clear he wants to have a broader relationship with the Muslim world," Zogby said. "He has a biography that connects him to the Muslim world."

Obama, though in the presidential limelight now for more than a year, is still introducing himself to voters. An AP-Yahoo poll in January asked people to volunteer the first few words that came to mind about each of the candidates, and 4 percent of the respondents, unprompted, mentioned the word Muslim when describing Obama.

Some of the rumors and allegations about Obama are clearly not true, yet still spread, often anonymously:

_ A debunked chain e-mail circulating widely on the Internet suggests he is hiding his Islamic roots. It says he was sworn into the Senate on the Quran and turns his back on the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance.

He took his Senate oath with his hand on a family Bible, and he says, "Whenever I'm in the United States Senate, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America." In fact, no candidate could survive if he publicly spurned the pledge.

_ Another false report says he attended a Muslim madrassa school as a child in Jakarta. Obama was born in Hawaii and moved to Indonesia when he was 6 to live with his mother and stepfather. He returned to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his maternal grandparents. Interviews last year by The Associated Press at the Catholic elementary school in Jakarta found that it is a public and secular institution and has been open to students of all faiths since before Obama attended in the late 1960s. Said vice principal Akmad Solichin: "Yes, most of our students are Muslim, but there are Christians as well. Everyone's welcome here."

_ Obama also has faced questions about his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he has been a member for 20 years. Trinity calls itself "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." But it accepts non-black congregants. The United Church of Christ's president and general minister, the Rev. John H. Thomas, was quoted in a church publication as pointing out that the Rev. Jane Fisler-Hoffman, Illinois Conference Minister, who is white, "has been a member of the congregation for years."

_ Obama has been asked about Farrakhan's words of praise and Farrakhan's receipt of an award from "Trumpet Newsmagazine," a Trinity church publication last month. Obama told Jewish leaders Sunday: "An award was given to Farrakhan for his work on behalf of ex-offenders completely unrelated to his controversial statements. And I believe that was a mistake and showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community and I said so."

Farrakhan did not endorse Obama but said Sunday: "This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better." Asked Tuesday night whether he would accept support from Farrakhan, Obama said: "I live in Chicago. He lives in Chicago. I've been very clear, in terms of me believing that what he has said is reprehensible and inappropriate. And I have consistently distanced myself from him."

Following an exchange with Clinton, he then added: "There's no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it. But if the word 'reject' Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word 'denounce,' then I'm happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce."

Source: AP News

Ron Paul and the Dark Secret of I-35

2008-02-22T01:00:00.003-06:00

Perhaps you have seen the signs around Columbia, or people holding the signs, for back-running presidential candidate Ron Paul. He is the only one of the GOP candidates who has questioned the Iraq War, Gitmo, or the Bush administration's internal security measures, and often comes off like a refreshingly candid fellow. Ron Paul is also, I am afraid, a believer and promoter of nativist (anti-immigrant) conspiracy theories. Along with CNN host Lou Dobbs and a surprising number of other legitimate figures, Paul believes that secret plans are afoot to create a North American Union out of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. I am especially partial to this theory, because part of it involves the Most Boring Freeway in the Universe, one which I have driven up and down 100s of times between Kansas City and Minnesota, Interstate 35.

As FactCheck.org reports,

"According to Paul, a secret organization run by unaccountable government figures is in league with foreign corporations who are all bent on usurping American sovereignty. That's not from the script for a new X-Files movie. (Or not that we know of.) It's the gist of Paul's description of a supposed 'NAFTA Superhighway.' Paul describes it on his Web site as 'a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields, with freight and rail lines, fiber-optic cable lines, and oil and natural gas pipelines running alongside.' And that's not all. According to Paul, the ultimate plan is to form a North American Union with a single currency and unlimited travel within its borders, all headed up by 'an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments' that together form the shadowy 'quasi-government organization called the ‘Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,’ or SPP.'

The problem with Paul's claim is that there are no plans to build a NAFTA Superhighway. Or a North American Union, for that matter. And while the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America does exist, it’s just a boring bureaucracy."

The rest of this story is very much worth reading.

Outlines up . . . at last

2008-02-19T15:10:00.002-06:00

Please notice that the outline link at the left now says 2008, meaning that this year's lecture outlines, up through today, have now been posted. As announced in class last week, please also note the fact that we will be going through the syllabus topics and readings out of order for a bit. We will be doing topic #6 starting today, then #5, then #4 (CIA), and then back to the regular schedule.

Progress report & a clarification

2008-01-30T20:40:00.000-06:00

I forgot to mention in class Tuesday, that we have moved on to topic #2 on the syllabus, so you should be starting the second block of reading by now. You will notice that the topics and associated reading blocks are each tied to a particular multi-day PowerPoint presentation. When I start a new one, with the theme music and title screen, you will know we are moving on even if I forget to say it.

Also, please note that "reserve" next to a reading indicates it is physically on reserve at the Ellis Library Circulation Desk, rather than available on ERes. My understanding is that we are not allowed to put whole books or even majority chunks of them on ERes. Chapters 2 & 3 in Knight, ed., Conspiracy Nation, by Fran Mason and Timothy Melley, are especially important among the reserve readings.

More campaign conspiracy theories: Barack Obama a "terrorist in disguise"?

2008-01-22T00:14:00.000-06:00

The Columbia Tribune helpfully headlined this one "Obama fighting Muslim rumor," as though it might possibly be true, the AP story they printed pretty straightforwardly gives the facts about Obama's Christianity:.

At a rally to kick off a weeklong campaign for the South Carolina primary, Obama tried to set the record straight from an attack widely circulating on the Internet that is designed to play into prejudices against Muslims and fears of terrorism.
"I’ve been to the same church - the same Christian church - for almost 20 years," Obama said, stressing the word Christian and drawing cheers from the faithful in reply. "I was sworn in with my hand on the family Bible. Whenever I’m in the United States Senate, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. So if you get some silly e-mail ... send it back to whoever sent it and tell them this is all crazy. Educate."
Obama is referring to a debunked chain e-mail widely circulating on the Internet that suggests he is hiding his Islamic roots and might be a terrorist in disguise. It says he was sworn into the Senate on the Quran and turns his back on the flag during the pledge.
There are some truths in the e-mail’s details. Obama’s middle name is Hussein. His father and stepfather were Muslim. And he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country. But he attended secular and Catholic schools, not a radical madrassa.

Of course, stories like this just give the rumors further publicity. And it does seem to be pretty widely believed, at least among people who equate non-English-sounding names with illegal immigration and/or terrorism.

Texas Town in UFO Sighting Frenzy!!

2008-01-19T18:51:00.000-06:00

Just in time for the start of classes, the town of Stephenville, Texas, has suddenly emerged as the new Roswell after a large number of people saw something large with lights on it in the sky, flying too low and fast to be a plane. It "was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts," said one local quoted in several stories and pictured in this one. The title link above will take you a list of different news stories and web pages on the sightings. Undoubtedly the best of these is a guy claiming that UFO conspiracy theorists are supporting Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, for reasons that I could not quite follow. Another reason to back Obama, I guess.

Also priceless is this MSNBC guide to what to do if you should see a UFO.

While I not sure this will work, I will also try to post MSNBC's smirking report in the sightings:

Campaign Conspiracy Theories Today

2008-01-16T12:56:00.000-06:00

Don't expect any of the updated course materials here until the first days of classes, but if you want to keep up to the minute on conspiracy theory, check out what a group called Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain is saying about the Republican presidential candidate in South Carolina, which has a primary election coming up: yep, he's the real "Manchurian Candidate ," brainwashed by his Vietnamese captors and set up as a war hero so he could become president . . . decades later, and do, well, something really evil. They're not sure. The plot details seem to be taken directly from the famous novel and Frank Sinatra film. (Via blogger Matt Yglesias.)

Another anti-McCain smear (pictured above) contains much of the same content, though apparently not the "brainwashing" charge, and amusingly comes from a different right-wing group pretending to be the group ("Swift Boat Veterans for Truth") that smeared John Kerry in the 2004 election. Here's the story.

Food for incoming History 2420 students' thought

2008-01-02T16:29:00.000-06:00

I doubt that many History of Conspiracy Theory students will be checking this space until the new semester starts, but I thought I would share a couple of conspiracy-related interesting items I have found recently:

"The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science," a little guide which applies as well to most conspiratorial and "paranormal" thinking as to pseudo-science particularly.
"The Golden Suicides," a long, brand-new Vanity Fair article about a (relatively) young New York art scene couple who committed suicide after a spiral into paranoiac dysfunction that seems to have been abetted by their growing attraction to the left-wing, "9/11 Truth Movement" brand of conspiracy theory.

You will hear more about both of these general topics in the early weeks of the course. Enjoy the rest of your break.

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Now playing: Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Poor Napoleon
via FoxyTunes

Remaining papers are available

2007-05-16T10:47:00.000-05:00

The papers that were not given back at the final are available in the box in the windowsill across from my office, 214A Read Hall. Department and university policy is not to return final exams but you can find out your grade by emailing me. Contact Will the Grader if you want to look your final over.

Have a good summer and feel free to check this space for more consiracy-related links. I post news articles here, especially, as I find them.

NYTimes.com: Wiccans Keep the Faith With a Religion Under Wraps

2007-05-16T09:52:00.000-05:00

Here's a New York Times article with an update on the "ending" of the witchcraft lectures: Modern witches can be suburban wives, but many of them are having to go undergound again for fear of being ostracized as satanists by their neighbors and relatives.

The North American Union: A hot new c.t. we missed

2007-05-15T11:01:00.000-05:00

As I said in class, it's hard work keeping up with new conspiracy theories as they appear and gain popularity. Last Sunday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch had an article about that is not enough to have gotten on CNN recently. Building on the recent flare up of conservative worries about immigration from Mexico and long-standing fears about the UN and other forms of international organization as threats to U.S. sovereignty and the possible beginning of the New World Order/"One World Government," various right-wing web sites, magazines, and columnists have been spreading rumors that a North American Union is about to be declared merging the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. One of the specifics in the rumor has a Missouri angle: a giant new superhighway and rail corridor (4 football fields wide) from Mexico to Canada that will run through Kansas City! Definitely a rumor to keep track of in the months and years ahead. Here's the story. The link above should work, too.

North American Union? Rumor sweeps the right
By Philip Dine
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
Sunday, May. 13 2007

North American Union? Rumor sweeps the right By Philip Dine POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU Sunday, May. 13 2007

WASHINGTON — Forget the conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination, the black helicopters, 9/11 or any others. This is the big one — as big, in fact, as the entire continent.

We're talking about the secret plan to build a superhighway, a giant 10- to 12-lane production, from the Yucatan to the Yukon, with an immigration and trade center in Missouri. This "SuperCorridor" is to allow the really big part of the plan to take place: the merging of the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico. Say goodbye to the dollar, and maybe even the English language.

The rumor is sweeping the Internet, radio and magazines, spread by bloggers, broadcasters and writers who cite the "proof" in the writings of a respected American University professor, in a task force put together by the ultra-establishment Council on Foreign Relations and in the workings of the U.S. Commerce Department.

As do many modern rumors, the fears of a North American Union begin with a few grains of truth and leap to an unsubstantiated conclusion.

"Nobody is proposing a North American Union," says Robert A. Pastor, a professor at American University to whom conspiracy theorists point as "the father of the NAU." They cite his 2001 book, "Towards a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New," as the basic text for the plan. They also point to his co-chairmanship of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that produced a report in 2005 on cooperation among the three countries.

This is no backwoods rumor, no small-time concern. Google "North American Union" on the Internet and you'll find 90,800,000 references. When a Commerce Department official appeared on a C-SPAN show a few weeks ago, most callers asked about the North American Union.

On one recent day alone, Pastor says, he got 100 e-mails on the topic. "They get turned on by (CNN's) Lou Dobbs and (Fox's) Bill O'Reilly, who are fearful that Mexicans and Canadians are about to take over our country," Pastor says, adding that such claims are a product of "the xenophobic or frightened right wing of America that is afraid of immigration and globalization."

Not that he doesn't think cooperation — short of a merger — is a good idea. He's testified before Congress on improving coordination within North America.

"The three governments are trying to grope toward a better way to relate to one another, but they are trying to do it under the radar screen, because they know any initiative would be both controversial and difficult to get approval of," he says. "But precisely because they're doing it so quietly, the conservative crowd is concerned that they're really doing something important. But they're not. The real problem is that the three governments are asleep on the issue."

Missouri hub

Missouri is a key element of the rumor. The state allegedly is to serve as a customs inspection station, described as "a huge hub of immigration and trade where Interstate 35 meets Kansas City."

The supposed superhighway is to be a monster, with high-speed passenger and freight rail lines attached to the many lanes, plus fuel pipelines, water, fiber optics and electric power, with gasoline and food concessions, stores, hotels and emergency services in the median. The whole thing would be as wide as four football fields and would carve up a number of states in the central United States.

Writing in the current edition of Range magazine, author Tom Findley explains: "Under the plan, more than 500 million people are meant to be literally incorporated into the North American Union as early as 2010. They are expected to share natural resources, military defense and a universal system of education that will alter long-held values, customs and traditions and even change their languages. Law enforcement, health care and cultural activities as well as virtually all trade will be financed with the new currency of the North Americans: the 'Amero.'"

The evidence? The article doesn't say.

Conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan writes that under the North American plan, "the illegal alien invasion would be solved by eliminating America's borders and legalizing the invasion."

Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, shares those concerns. "It looks like what (President George W.) Bush and his friends want is economic integration of the three North American countries, which is the only explanation I can see for his failure to close the border and obey the immigration laws," she said.

"We don't want to be integrated with any other country."

'Evolution by stealth'

Tom Fitton is president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that promotes accountability in government and that gained fame for going after then-President Bill Clinton. He said that his group was "investigating" the rumors and that although it hadn't uncovered proof positive, the Bush administration was fueling suspicion by the way it was handling the issue.

"You've got all these ministries in the three countries working trilaterally on transportation, energy, food safety, health, pandemics and border security," Fitton says. "The concern from some on the right is that the process is not as transparent as it ought to be, and that it is a threat to sovereignty in the sense that they're talking about integration instead of just cooperation."

Fitton says much of the activity dates to the establishment on March 23, 2005, of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America by Bush, then-Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Notes obtained from the U.S. government after a meeting in Canada in September 2006 contained the phrase "evolution by stealth," Fitton says, which he called "not exactly a phrase that inspires confidence coming from a government official. You see that kind of thing and you think the critics are right, or have reason to be concerned."

Chappell Lawson, an MIT political science professor with expertise in Mexico and political communications, said the efforts to coordinate among the three countries had merit — and problems.

"I think the three governments are going about this without a lot of input from civil groups and the general public, and I think there's not sufficient transparency in the process," he said. "The agenda isn't arrived at through a public and deliberative process. I think what they're doing is net beneficial, but it's probably going to have a pro-business bias to it."

'Standard diplomacy'

Matt Englehart, spokesman for the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration, said the North American partnership "is absolutely not a precursor" to a loss of American sovereignty.

"It's about smart and secure borders, promoting the safe and efficient movement of legitimate people and goods," Englehart said.

He described the work being done among the three governments as "standard intergovernmental diplomacy and coordination that occurs all the time on various issues."

What about that highway?

The federal government has no plans for a superhighway, Englehart said, but "there are private and state-level interests" pushing something similar. "They describe themselves as NAFTA corridors, but they're not federally driven initiatives, and they're not part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership."

Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Texas, who is chairman of the state's House Transportation Committee, says that he knows of no plans to build a superhighway through Texas and that those who think otherwise are "a bunch of nuts."

He alleges that commentators who talk of a NAFTA highway or the like are exploiting people's fears.

"It's jingoistic pandering," Krusee said. "Pat Buchanan can try to sell some newspapers and Lou Dobbs can try to get more people to watch his little shows, but I've never heard of it. Certainly, it has never been discussed at any level of government in Texas."

Merging anxieties

Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who specializes in conspiracy theories, says a major theme has long been "that schemes are being hatched to destroy American sovereignty."

"The only thing that's new here is that it appears in the guise of a North American Union," Barkun says. "Previously it appeared in the guise of UN domination. I think whatever appeal this has may derive from the fact that there are pre-existing concerns about trade that have been around since the creation of NAFTA, and even more strongly the immigration issue in the sense of border security. So in a way it becomes an issue onto which all kinds of anxieties and concerns can be projected."

Doug Thomas, professor of communications, technology and culture at the University of Southern California, says the advent of the Internet has made conspiracy theories widely available, helping those who believe in such things "validate their beliefs."

"It's the speed and the distribution. … People are able to join in and flush them out a little quicker, so everybody can add a piece to the puzzle," he says.

After a few columns were posted on the Human Events website raising concerns about the North American Union, others were posted that ridiculed the notion.

"There's a much wider dissemination of counter information because of the Internet," Thomas says, "so while urban myths spread faster, they also get debunked sooner."

pdine@post-dispatch.com | 202-298-6880

more final info

2007-05-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

I will also be available for office hours tomorrow from 10-11, and from 2-4:30, and then monday from 10-12. Also feel free to email. Good luck

Information on the final

2007-05-03T14:42:00.000-05:00

The final is next Monday in our usual room at the time listed on the syllabus. Please bring a blue book or loose notebook (with a paperclip or stapler). The test will cover the entire semester with identifications and short answer questions, with all except some of the extra credit drawn from the term sheet I have posted. (Check for an update tomorrow.) You will have lots of choices. Please come by office hours (tomorrow, Read 214A, 2-5PM) if you have any other questions.

Salem Witch trials

2007-04-17T23:05:00.000-05:00

Building off on the end of class today, here's a comic about modern Wiccans and their supposed relations to the Salem Witch trials.

Somethingpositive, 4/24/02

Also, from same comic, depicting Christian "Hell Houses" from earlier this semester

Somethingpositive, 10/4/06

Warning, the humor might be a little sharp, this is more social commentary, but it is portraying real occurances.

Last-minute proposals

2007-03-23T02:39:00.000-05:00

Partly because of an illness, I may not get back to everyone who sent into proposals after Wednesday night. I rarely reject them outright so assume you can get to work unless I tell you otherwise. If you are still planning to send in a paper proposal Friday (email is fine), here is what I am looking for, quoting an email I sent to several of you:

You need to write a proposal defining the topic (including some details on the conspiracy theory, the groups or events it concerns, its political or social context, and the time period you plan to look at) and giving your preliminary ideas about what you might argue. You should append a preliminary bibliography including at least some print sources from outside the course.

I do plan to try and keep office hours Friday if my health permits at all. UPDATE: Actually I will not be able to make it in today. Feel to give me a call this afternoon at 446-2724 if you have any questions.

Our sign at the Neo-Nazi protest, 3/10/2007

2007-03-22T12:56:00.000-05:00

Someone asked below about what the sign said that my son and I had at the neo-Nazi protest. Here's Owen modelling it:

Real ID as the Mark of the Beast

2007-03-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

There was a unusually good conspiracy-related story in the Metro section of today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It seems that the post-9/11 Real ID program has run into a roadblock in the form of our good friend premillenial dispensationalism, though that is not the term used in the story. Apparently there is a pretty widespread belief among Apocalypse-oriented Christians that a uniform national ID would fulfill the Biblical prophecy about the Antichrist forcing anyone who wants to buy or sell to accept his mark or number. Of course the number given in Revelations is 666, and Real ID is of course not the first time the population has been numbered. (Try functioning in modern society without a Social Security number or travelling abroad with a passport.) The real rub for dispensationalists is that, I understand it, the Mark of the Beast is part of the Tribulation that is supposed to come after all the good Christians have been Raptured. So anyone who gets a Real ID won't be joining Jesus in heaven anytime soon.

Conspiratorial thought in the Early American Republic

2007-03-22T11:45:00.000-05:00

Non-comprehensive bibliography on conspiratorial thought in the Early Republic

I am posting this more for my historian colleagues online than for the class, but some of you guys may find this useful too. Colleagues feel free to post additional citations in the comment section.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964.
Briceland, Alan V. "The Philadelphia Aurora, The New England Illuminati, and The Election of 1800." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 50 (January 1976): 3-36.
Carter II, Edward C. "A "Wild Irishman" Under Every Federalist's Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789-1906." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1970): 331-46.
Davis, David Brion, ed. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
________. The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style.The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
________. "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 2 (September 1960): 205-24.
Formisano, Ronald P. and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski. "Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826-1827." American Quarterly 29 (1977): 139-65.
Goodman, Paul. Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Howe Jr., John R. "Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790's." American Quarterly 19 (1967): 147-65.
Hünemörder, Markus. "The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy Theory in the Early American Republic." Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, no. 31 (Fall 2002): 65-80.
Knight, Peter, ed. Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
Kutolowski, Kathleen Smith. "Antimasonry Reexamined: Social Bases of a Grass-Roots Party." Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 269-93.
________. "Freemasonry and Community in the Early Republic: The Case for Antimasonic Anxieties." American Quarterly 34 (1982 ): 543-61.
Murrin, John M. "Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America." In Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1994.
Nash, Gary B. "The American Clergy and the French Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 22 (1965): 392-412.
Newman, Simon. "The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutionary Politics, Fries' and Gabriel's Rebellions, and the Fears of the Federalists." Pennsylvania History 67, no. 1 (2000): 5-20 .
Pasley, Jeffrey L. "Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism from the Revolution to Roswell." Unpublished conference paper, May 2000. Available at http://conspiracy.pasleybrothers.com/CT_and_American_Exceptionalism_web_version.htm.
Ratner, Lorman. Antimasonry: The Crusade and the Party. American Historical Sources Series: Research and Interpretation. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Ridgway, Whitman H. "Fries in the Federalist Imagination: A Crisis of Republican Society." Pennsylvania History 67, no. 1 (2000): 141-60.
Rohrs, Richard C. "Partisan Politics and the Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson ." Journal of the Early Republic 1 (Summer 1981): 149-63.
Schultz, Nancy Lusignan, ed. Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999.
Smelser, Marshall. "The Federalist Period As an Age of Passion." American Quarterly 10 (Winter 1958): 391-419.
Stauffer, Vernon. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. New York: Russell & Russell, [1967].
White, Ed. "The Value of Conspiracy Theory." American Literary History 14 (Spring 2002): 1-31.
Wood, Gordon S. "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 401-41.

I should also include a few works on early American freemasonry that I habitually recommend to my students even though they do not spend much time on Antimasonic conspiracy theories.

Brooke, John L. "Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic."In Launching the 'Extended Republic': The Federalist Era, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, 273-377. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996.
Bullock, Steven C. Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996.
Lipson, Dorothy Ann. Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789-1835. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Neo-Nazi aftermath

2007-03-16T10:13:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to post this all week. You may have seen below that our class web site has also had a visit from the Nazis, albeit from a different neo-Nazi group with nearly same name that hates the group that came to Columbia. This is the way it goes in the world of fringe politics -- lots of tiny splinter groups fighting as bitterly with each other as they do against anyone else. I thought the student comments below were quite good, and you probably already saw that my younger son and I made the papers last Sunday. Owen was the only little kid down there, that the reporter could see anyway.

Notes on Midterms

2007-03-15T12:36:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to say good job on the exams, overall they were sound, but a few notes I want everyone to be aware of:
1) citations: Do not only cite direct quotations. If you took an idea or fact from another author, you MUST cite, otherwise it's plagairism. There were far too many questionable statements, this might have been a take home midterm, but you were still expected to identify your source; no one will ever mark you down for citing too much (unless you are failing to understand the author).
2) quotations: use sparingly. A few will strengthen a paper, but too many weakens your authorial voice, to the point where the reader understands you're just rehasing someone else's arguement, and not necessarily demonstrating an understanding of the material. But by rephrasing, or even better, incorporating the author's arguement into your own, you demonstrate a true grasp of the material.
3) examples: Many papers either went too heavy into theory, or too lightly touched up on it. The best papers demonstrated an ability to encorporate theory with examples. If you say CTs come from distrust of the government, show it. Saying "Distrust of the government can be seen in the many conspiracy theories revolving around 9/11." While this is true, you are only telling the reader this fact, not showing it to them. A stronger way of stating that would be: "The conspiracy theories revolving around 9/11 demonstrate a basic distrust of the government, since people are unwilling to accept either the government reports, or statements from outside and qualified experts. Instead, the amateur investigator turns to their own resources, and anyone who counters his point of view becomes wrapped up in the conspiracy." In this second version, you have shown how distrust of the government created 9/11 conspiracies.
4) Just for my own gratification: MCCARTHY WAS A BLOODY DRUNK WHO DRAGGED UP THE RED SCARE TO PROP UP A FAILING POLITICAL CAREER. Perhaps he believed it, more likely he just enjoyed the attention. Yes, there were communists in America, yes we were at odds with the Soviet Union; this does not mean that McCarthy uncovered some grave scheme to overthrow American democracy. Rather, he was a failing politician who needed some sort of gimmick to attract attention, and more importantly, votes. This is Hofstadter's point. Hofstadter did not believe there was a communist conspiracy, instead he was using McCarthy as an example of a politician who used fears of CTs to gain political power, as he had been marganilized from the politics of the days.

mid terms

2007-03-12T08:47:00.000-05:00

Just to let you folks know, midterms should be back by Thursday, but for those who need them for sports teams and what not email me and I will be certain to have yours graded by tomorrow (You won't get them back, but I will give you the grade).

Conspiracism on parade in Columbia

2007-03-08T02:07:00.000-06:00

As you all know by now, Columbia is receiving a visit this Saturday from a racist hate group that has a lot in common with many of the groups we have been talking about this semester. The National Socialist Movement, or "America's Nazi Party," appears to be a sort of youth-oriented hate group that ties together older neo-Nazi and militia groups with a younger skinhead scene and mixes in some Christian Identity rhetoric (ZOG, etc.) and simulated Nazi uniforms . The youth orientation can be seen in the neo-Nazi hoodies, punk rock records, and video games ("ZOG's Nightmare") for sale on their web site. They even have their own record label. I will reproduce a couple of examples here to save you the skin-crawling experience of actually looking through their web site.

Lecture links 3/8: "Paul is Dead" and Carl Oglesby's "Yankee and Cowboy War"

2007-03-06T14:51:00.000-06:00

Here are some links that will give you access to more information on some topics to be mentioned in Thursday's lecture:

The "Paul is Dead" rumor (a Beatles-related conspiracy theory)

Carl Oglesby, Students for a Democratic Society leader turned JFK conspiracy theorist

Biography
Text (or summary) of The Yankee and Cowboy War

Fear of "Facebook"

2007-03-04T10:15:00.000-06:00

Just a quick link passed onto me by August King, demonstrating that conspiracy theories can emerge about anything, even Facebook.

JFK up next

2007-02-26T17:22:00.000-06:00

We are going to go straight to the Kennedy assassination next and defer UFOs until a little later. That means you should skip to the readings in the section 6 box of the reading schedule.

If you missed class last Thursday . . .

2007-02-26T16:43:00.000-06:00

The questions for the take-home midterm have been posted here on the site. I also just realized that I neglected to properly link to the supplementary web readings and web links pages for the early lectures. The pages for the introductory "Conspiracy Industry" lectures and for the recent section on race and religion have now been properly separated and linked to the readings page. Some of these web readings may help you with the midterm, but I would not call them vital if you have read most everything else.

Small Administrative details

2007-02-15T08:44:00.000-06:00

Hello, this is Will Burghart, the grader.

Since the first exam is coming up, I just wanted to let the students know that my office hours are 10-11 MTWR, and that my office (desk) is located in Read Basement room 1. Just go to the bottom of the stairs, through the door, take a right into the large common room, take another right into the small alcove partially blocked by screens, and my desk is the barest one of the five. The best way to contact me outside office hours is through email (wdburg@gmail.com), though I am normally in Read basement between 12 and 1 weekdays.

For something a little more fun, those who have looked at the Culture of Fear book (or watched Bowling for Columbine) know that the media tends to exagerate the dangers of certain events/substances/trends. Here is an amusing example, dealing with the Nintendo DS.

The politics of torture on Fox TV's "24"

2007-02-14T22:09:00.000-06:00

I believe I made a crack in lecture the other day about the way that that Fox's 24 , one of the currently most popular conspiracy-based entertainments, promotes the use of torture in the real world through conspiracy theory logic. Specifically, I was talking about the logic that paints a real or suspected enemy as a conspirator so sneaky, powerful, and monstrously evil that any means were justified in stopping them, immediately. It turns out I was more on target than I knew. Take a look at this article in the current New Yorker, where we discover that the creater of 24 is a Rush Limbaugh-type conservative ideologue who thinks that torture is a great idea and an effective technique even though technical advisors from the U.S. military have told him it isn't. And where do you think that most Americans, including people in politics and young military recruits, get their ideas about torture and the most effective means of fighting terrrorism? My money is on 24 rather than some dry Pentagon study.

9-11 Conspiracy web sites

2007-01-31T18:16:00.000-06:00

If you are unfamiliar with the common themes of the so-called 9-11 Truth Movement, here are some sites to look at:

Conspiracy motifs in the 9/11 "Truth" Movement

2007-01-31T17:20:00.000-06:00

To help you with our lecture/discussion tomorrow, here is my current list of conspiracy theory "motifs." Obviously many of these won't be clear just from the name, and you won't find all of them in the 9/11 conspiracy theories, but see what you can do. I will be adding to the list as I prepare for class over the next week:

Pseudo-academic debates
Suppressed miracles
Economic manipulation
Inversion
Sympathy for the Overdog
Disinformation
Proportionality: Huge, impressive event requires a huge, impressive cause
“Who benefits?”: beneficiaries of an event must have caused it
Institutions are Evil: Diabolical secret government experiments, plots, and research projects are the normal way that governments & corporations do business
The Provocation Motive: to justify war or repression
Legendary historical precedents
Negative subjunctive reasoning, or argument by anomaly
Occam’s Razor in Reverse: the most complicated explanation is best

Welcome 2007 Students

2007-01-16T14:51:00.000-06:00

Winter semester here at MU begins today, with appropriate levels of ice and cold. This web site and embedded blog will be your major source of information (besides the syllabus and actually attending class) on the doings of the course. I update this site as we go along so please check the date on anything you find in here. I just posted a pdf of the 2007 syllabus.

Beside announcements and readings, I will use the blog (and you should use the comments) to pass along conspiracy theory news and comment as it appears in the media and on the Internet during the semester. For instance, you can check out a local angle on something I will mention today in class, by reading this KC Pitch article on the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement" in Kansas City.

Final notes on the final exam

2005-12-14T10:18:00.000-06:00

The term sheet for the final exam has been finalized with relatively few changes from last week's original. If you have questions on particular terms, please post a comment here or give me a call. Those methods are better than email because they will prevent me from having to write many repetitive emails answering the same question.

The format for both take-home finals will be the same :

a section of identifications (or "explanations" as I call them) with terms taken directly from the most basic items on study sheet -- you will have to write a paragraph explaining the significance of the term within the course
a section of short answer questions on major points of interpretation in the course, which you will answer 2 or 3 paragraphs -- these will be questions with definite answers, not the sort of open-ended questions asked on the take-home test
a section of extra credit identifications taken from the more obscure corners of the course, and especially from material covered in the readings but not in the lectures

Students should bring blue books or loose notebook paper with them to the final. Both finals will be held in our usual classroom. The night class final at 7:30pm Thursday 12/15 in A&S 236. The day class final will be at 8am Friday 12/16 in GCB 204. Please make sure you get the correct test if you are one of the people taking the test with the other section.

A George Clooney Conspiracy Christmas

2005-12-11T18:38:00.000-06:00

As I indicated in class, anyone who has seen either of the two conspiracy-related George Clooney films out right may post a review here in the comments for a bit of extra credit/participation credit. Obviously your focus should be on the conspiratorial-political aspects of the films. They are: Good Night, and Good Luck (CBS News takes on Joe McCarthy), and Syriana (about business and politics in the modern Middle East -- tagline: "Everything is connected").

More on the Conspiracy against Christmas

2005-12-08T01:36:00.000-06:00

In addition to the article below, you may want to check out the new book (or its Amazon page) from one of the Fox News anchors, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. On all sides of this issue, there's scads of material on the Internet. For instance, ThinkProgress.org has a post explaining the long and sometimes explicitly antisemitic history of the radical right's claims abouts a secular conspiracy against Christmas and another post describing efforts to use the Christmas conspiracy to sell Bush's new Supreme Court nominee. Finally, here's a cartoon that actually comes from the 2004 edition of this controversy:

Study terms for final posted

2005-12-05T12:32:00.000-06:00

Per many requests, I have just posted a document listing terms you should study for the final exam. It is a long list, but you should keep in mind that many items are there as key details that will help you with larger concepts. Many of the listed presidents and elections fall into this category. Also, pay attention to what you are looking at: There are 3 sections to the document, one for both classes plus a "day only" and "night only" section.

Also, keep in mind that we still have some class left. The "both classes" list already includes the JFK stuff that we are just getting to in the night class. The "day class" list includes a number of terms related to the Lincoln assassination that we will be covering Tuesday.

Night students: Lecture outlines through Thanksgiving

2005-12-02T11:53:00.000-06:00

Here's an update on the availability of the various lecture outlines as we come to the end of the semester:

As most of you in the MU in the Evening version of History 2420 seem to know, you can find the outlines for the first month of the course here and here. Except for the pull-out sections, these are the same outlines used for the early weeks of the day course, and dated accordingly.
I just posted the lecture outline for the 1930s material we covered before Thanksgiving.
The Cold War material we are working on now is not up yet, but there is an old version available that is quite similar. It should serve you fine if you need an outline now.
The JFK material we will covering next week, in a somewhat abbreviated form, is already up (in two parts) here and here.

Look for term sheets (for both classes) this weekend.

A Conspiracy Against Christmas?

2005-12-01T13:47:00.000-06:00

As promised, here is an article from Salon detailing the conservative charges of a conspiracy against Christmas (especially Christian observances thereof) that have recurred over the past few holiday seasons. Read the article and share your own thoughts and experiences and observations, pro, con, or in-between.

Oh, and the New World Order wishes you a happy holiday.

How the secular humanist grinch didn't steal Christmas
The right-wing crusade against the liberal "war on Christmas" is great for rallying the troops. Too bad the war doesn't exist.
By Michelle Goldberg

Nov. 21, 2005 | In 1959, the recently formed John Birch Society issued an urgent alert: Christmas was under attack. In a JBS pamphlet titled "There Goes Christmas?!" a writer named Hubert Kregeloh warned, "One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas -- to denude the event of its religious meaning." The central front in this perfidious assault was American department stores, where the "Godless UN" was scheming to replace religious decorations with internationalist celebrations of universal brotherhood.

"The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand," the pamphlet explained. "They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations."

According to the JBS, this assault on yuletide iconography was "part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the UN, but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs." The pamphlet called on all Americans to fight back by informing department stores that those with improper ornamentation wouldn't be getting their business.

At the time, the campaign to save Christmas was not widely treated as a matter of great national import. The John Birch Society was generally regarded as a crank, far-right outfit whose paranoid conspiracy theories (it believed fluoridated water was part of an evil communist plot to poison America's brains) put it outside the pale of reasonable discourse. Staffers on the ultra-right 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign tried to prevent Birchers from volunteering because they carried the taint of extremism. The John Birch Society didn't have access to a major television network. But a lot has changed since then.

Last December, warnings about a war on Christmas -- a war whose central front was the nation's department stores -- once against emanated from the right, but this time, they were on national TV and talk radio. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly began running a regular segment called "Christmas Under Siege." "All over the country, Christmas is taking flak," O'Reilly declared on Dec. 7. "In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg unveiled the 'holiday tree,' and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores -- that's Macy's -- have done away with the Christmas greeting 'Merry Christmas.'" Instead, Macy's was using the malign phrase "Happy Holidays." Noting this, Pat Buchanan wrote, "What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity."

This year the war on Christmas canard has come early, and with it the latest opportunity for religious conservatives to cast themselves as the oppressed victims of secular tyrants. In October, Fox News anchor John Gibson published a book titled "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought," which envisions a vast conspiracy with tentacles reaching into many aspects of American life. "The plot to ban Christmas itself is anything but secret," writes Gibson. "It is embedded in the secular 'Humanist Manifesto' (in its three iterations from the American Humanist Association), in the philosophy of teaching of John Dewey, in the legal opinions of Laurence Tribe, in the rulings of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on which sits the most liberal jurist in the land, Stephen Reinhardt, who is married to Ramona Ripston, the southern California ACLU executive director and the national group's most liberal and effective leader."

As the holidays approach, the right is making ever more fevered preparations to thwart this ostensible conspiracy. Last week, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights launched a short-lived boycott of Wal-Mart, charging the megastore with "insulting Christians by effectively banning Christmas." The American Family Association called for a Thanksgiving-weekend boycott of Target because of the chain's purported refusal to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies having such a policy.) A few days later, Jerry Falwell announced he was joining with the Christian right legal group Liberty Counsel's "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign," which intends to sue officials who try to curb religious Christmas celebrations in schools or other public places. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "The 8,000 members of the Christian Educators Association International will be the campaign's 'eyes and ears' in the nation's public schools. They'll be reporting to 750 Liberty Counsel lawyers who are ready to pounce if, for example, a teacher is muzzled from leading the third-graders in 'Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.'" Meanwhile, the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian right legal outfit co-founded by James Dobson, has ramped up its three-year-old "Christmas project," organizing over 800 lawyers to defend the sacred holiday. "It's a sad day in America when you have to retain a lawyer to wish someone a merry Christmas," says Mike Johnson, senior legal counsel for ADF.

Despite Johnson's lamentations, one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

"You have a dynamic here, where you have the Christian right hysterically overrepresenting the problem, and then anecdotally you have some towns where lawyers restrict any kind of display or representation of religion, which is equally absurd," says Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates and one of the foremost experts on the religious right. "It's a closed loop. In that dynamic, neither the secular humanists or the ACLU are playing a role."

The myth of the war on Christmas has two parts. The first, echoing the John Birch Society, charges that department stores are trying to replace the celebration of Jesus' birthday with some secularized, universal winter holiday season, a switch encompassed by the godless greeting "Happy Holidays." The second asserts that the ACLU and other groups like the Anti-Defamation League and People for the American Way are trying to ban public Christmas displays. Like all conspiracy theories, there are a few grains of truth at the center of it -- some schools, in an overzealous attempt to promote inclusiveness, have taken silly steps like renaming their Christmas trees "friendship trees." Some have indeed infringed on religious students' First Amendment rights. Weaving these stories together, the myth of the war on Christmas claims that the ACLU has forced Christmas into hiding, and that Christians must therefore battle to reclaim their rightful place in the culture.

"Those who would ban Christmas and Christians should not mistake the signs on the horizon," writes Gibson in "The War on Christmas. "The Christians are coming to retake their place in the public square, and the most natural battleground in this war is Christmas."

Gibson's colleague O'Reilly seems to have made it his special mission to crusade against the phrase "Happy Holidays." On Nov. 9, he presented an "investigation" into department stores that don't use the phrase "Merry Christmas." Sears/Kmart, he reported, had a banner on its Web site that, rather than openly proclaiming Christmas, said, "Wish Book Holiday 2005." "They were the worst we had to deal with," O'Reilly said after the company's spokesman refused to answer questions about their Christ-free Web site.

"I think the backlash against stores that don't say 'Merry Christmas' is enormous because now people are aware of the issue," he continued. "I know everybody's hypersensitive about are they going to say 'Merry Christmas'? Are they going to say 'Happy Holidays'? They're hypersensitive. And when you walk into a secular environment, most Christians are looking around, and they're really aware of it."

This, in fact, might be true -- having heard that the bland phrase "Happy Holidays" is part of a war against Christmas, some shoppers may be especially attuned for signs of subtle seasonal disrespect. On Nov. 11, a woman sent an e-mail complaining about the use of the phrase "Happy Holidays" at Wal-Mart and received a reply from a cheekily impertinent customer service employee that seemed to confirm the right's worst fears. "Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses (sic), mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world," the Wal-Mart worker wrote. In response, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights launched its boycott, claiming Wal-Mart had "banned" Christmas. Wal-Mart quickly fired the offending employee and apologized. The boycott was called off, but the right remains unhappy about the store's continuing use of "Happy Holidays," leaving open the possibility of more teapot tempests as the Christmas season progresses.

Claims that Wal-Mart, of all places, is trying to ban Christmas resonate with some segments of the right because they're part of a larger, older story line about a giant, diabolical plot to rob God-fearing Americans of their traditions and erode their very identity. "The wagers of this war on Christmas are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians -- not just Jewish people," Gibson writes. Also involved are mainline churches whose congregants "vote for John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and Barney Frank. They are liberal by definition, and they proclaim their liberal values; I began to connect the dots and discerned the outlines of the conspiracy."

Gibson, of course, is not the first to connect the dots. The John Birch Society wasn't, either. As the Web site News Hounds pointed out last year, Henry Ford was sounding the alarm about the war on Christmas in his notorious 1921 tract "The International Jew." "The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of [their] attack," Ford wrote. He listed local outrages: "Christmas celebrations or carols in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Paul and New York met with strong Jewish opposition ... Local Council of Jewish Women of Baltimore petitions school board to prohibit Christmas exercises ... The Council of the University Settlement, at the request of the New York Kehillah [Jewish leadership], adopts this resolution: 'That in the holiday celebrations held annually by the Kindergarten Association at the University Settlement every feature of any sectarian character, including Christmas trees, Christmas programs and Christmas songs, shall be eliminated.'"

To compare today's "war on Christmas" demagogues to Henry Ford is not to call them anti-Semites. Rather, they are purveyors of a conspiracy theory that repeatedly crops up in America. The malefactors change -- Jews, the U.N., the ACLU -- but the outlines stay the same. The scheme is always massive, reaching up to the highest levels of power.

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy. Just as O'Reilly said, Faith Bible Church's religious float was indeed turned down for Denver's parade of lights -- since the parade is only an hour long, its organizers don't include any religious floats because they can't include all of them and don't want to show favoritism. Federated Department Stores did start using "Happy Holidays" in its national promotions, but left local stores free to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" in their advertising. In a statement responding to the war on Christmas hype, Federated wrote, "Our stores recognize and celebrate Christmas in a variety of ways, including Christmas decorations, Christmas music, Christmas-themed merchandise and Christmas trim-a-tree shops. And since our employees are free to wish any customer a Merry Christmas, you will frequently hear such expressions of holiday cheer in our stores as part of celebrating the season." Whether or not one agrees with these policies, they are not part of a campaign, a plot or a war. (If anything, they demonstrate that American business, hardly a bastion of godless communism or secular humanism, always plays it safe.)

The right's melding of concrete documentation and wild speculation is common to conspiracy theorists; as Richard Hofstadter wrote in his classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," "The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming 'proof' of the particular conspiracy that is to be established."

Not surprisingly, fair-minded outsiders who weigh the same facts come to quite different conclusions.

Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center and the author of "Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in the Public Schools," is one of the heroes of Gibson's book. Gibson writes about how he resolved a crisis that arose in Mustang, Okla., when, fearing a lawsuit, the superintendent of schools ordered a nativity scene cut from an elementary school Christmas pageant, infuriating many in the town. Haynes was eventually flown out to mediate. He had, writes Gibson, "made something of a career out of rushing in as if he were driving an ambulance, lights flashing and sirens blaring, after schools had made disastrous policy decisions on restricting religious liberty in schools."

According to Haynes, though, there is no war on Christmas. "I certainly wouldn't put it that way," he says. "The big picture is that there's more religion now in public schools than ever in modern history. There's no question about that. But it's not there in terms of the government imposing religion or sponsoring it, and that bothers some people on the right. They miss the good old days when public schools were semi-established Protestant schools."

In the last two decades, says Haynes, "religion has come into the public schools in all kinds of ways ... many schools now understand that students have religious liberty rights in a public school, so you can go to many public schools today and kids will be giving each other religious literature, they will be sharing their faith. You go to most public schools now and see kids praying around the flagpole before school."

The reason fights over Christmas iconography recur, says Haynes, is that "there are still some school administrators who are so afraid to deal with religion that they go too far in keeping it out, and it only takes a few bad stories in this era of the Internet for many conservative religious people across the country to think that public schools are hostile to their faith."

Ironically, when school officials do go too far, the ACLU is likely to challenge them, on the grounds that the government can neither promote nor restrict religious speech. "A lot of the things the ACLU does to help religious people and religious students are not high-profile cases; they don't get much attention," says Haynes. "The Christian student who is told she can't bring her Bible to school, the ACLU gets those kinds of calls, and often it doesn't become a lawsuit, but they will quietly tell the school you can't do this, you have to treat everyone fairly."

Indeed, one case that ACLU president Nadine Strossen loves to talk about is that of Rita Warren, a retired woman who calls herself the "Lone Ranger of the manger" and whose life mission is to put nativity scenes in public places. When she placed a plastic crèche on the lawn in front of the government building in Fairfax, Va., the government ordered her to remove it. Warren called the ACLU, and they discovered that the city of Fairfax had allowed others to erect displays on the property. "Once the government allows displays of any kind to be placed on public property, it can't then discriminate against some display because of the viewpoint," says Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia. "The government could not discriminate against her religious display any more than it could take specific action to promote her religious display. It has to treat us the same."

These stories rarely get much play, especially since the ACLU lacks a publicity apparatus that can compete with the religious right. "We're not in the business to defend ourselves as an organization," says Strossen.

Mike Johnson of the Alliance Defense Fund knows about the Warren case, but he dismisses it. "They always use this -- it's like their get out of jail card. This one case cannot change 80 years of history." Throughout those 80 years, he says, the ACLU's "ultimate and underlying agenda is to silence people of faith. They do not want God mentioned in the public square. If they could completely censor that out, they would ... The ACLU has a pretty sordid past. They were founded by a guy, Roger Baldwin, who was an avowed atheist, and he had a certain agenda. He wrote about being a socialist, and communism was his goal."

But Americans are catching on to the ACLU's malign influence and fighting back, says Johnson. Johnson's boss, ADF president Alan Sears, has just co-written a book with Craig Osten titled "The ALCU vs. America." The ACLU and its allies, they write, "terrorize local communities on an almost daily basis with letters, e-mails and telephone calls to silence Christmas and other religious activity." But the terrorists can be beaten: "It will take sacrifice, perseverance, and a concerted effort by millions of Americans to defeat the ACLU, its many allies, and their agenda. But with God's grace, we are confident it can and will be done."

As Johnson notes, O'Reilly invited Sears onto his show to talk about his book, catapulting it to No. 20 on Amazon. "You can only push the American people so far, and then there's a backlash," Johnson says. "The ACLU in recent years has just pushed Christian America to the limit. From its earliest stage, the ACLU has deliberately chipped away at the legal and moral and religious foundations of our republic."

The war on Christmas trope lets the right pretend to be playing defense when it's really on the offensive -- against the ACLU, separation of church and state, and pluralism, to name just a few targets. "The revolution against Christianity has been under way for a few years," writes Gibson, "and now the counterrevolution is gearing up."

-- By Michelle Goldberg

Please visit Salon's site and view their ads if you liked this article, which I post her for educational purposes only, of course.

Paranoia or Social Criticism? Robert Greenwald's Anti-Wal-Mart Documentary

2005-12-01T10:38:00.000-06:00

Just out on DVD and recently shown on the MU campus, the new anti-Wal-Mart documentary by left-wing filmmaker Robert Greenwald is regarded by the company and much of the media as essentially a conspiracy theory. Students are invited to see the film and give their impressions here for a bit of extra credit (up to 5% added to your mid-term grade.) Melissa Boerema starts us off below. Others should post their thoughts as comments on this post.

On November 16, 2005 the College Democrat Association presented the video Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, which was designed to show the audience the hypocritical nature of and the conspiracy behind the Wal-Mart chain. The video first presents the Hunter family in Middlefield, Ohio and their family owned business H & H Hardware Inc., which is forced out of business when a new Wal-Mart store comes to their town. In addition to closing the Hunter family business, the new Wal-Mart takes away numerous jobs in Middlefield leaving many families homeless and jobless, and it also knocks the value of various independent buildings down. These occurrences, found in the town of Middlefield, are notably inconsistent with the Wal-Mart commercials broadcasted to the American public everyday, which assert that Wal-Mart stores bring hundreds of jobs to every city that they are built in. After discussing the loss of jobs, the video next addressed the issues of employee wages and insurance. According to numerous present and past Wal-Mart employees, the wages are not large enough to pay their bills because each paycheck goes right back to Wal-Mart for things like insurance and groceries. These employees also assert that the insurance offered by Wal-Mart is too costly, and that Wal-Mart uses the system by encouraging its employees to join Medicaid, welfare, and state health care. These issues, just like the loss of jobs, are contradictory because Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, held the belief that working people should not have to worry about being sick or having sick family members, which is not the case for current Wal-Mart employees. Next, the video discussed the notion that Wal-Mart is anti-union because it fires people if they are conspiring to found a union, and because it teaches managers how to profile employees that might form a union. After discussing the union profiling, the video then introduces Wal-Mart’s history of discrimination against race and gender, and the various lawsuits brought up by past employees. The video also goes on to state that Wal-Mart believes that women are useless and will not be able to advance in the company, no matter their qualifications. Lastly, the video discussed Wal-Mart’s inability to follow environmental waste guidelines, sweat-shop like labor in China, Bangladesh, & Honduras, the number of crimes in Wal-Mart parking lots (which the makers of the video believe could have all been prevented with additional security cameras), and how towns like Inglewood, California and Chandler, Arizona stopped the addition of a Wal-Mart store in their towns.

After carefully examining the arguments presented by the Wal-Mart video, I find that the video was presented in a very incomplete way and could be true for almost any big corporation in the world. I feel that the makers of the video needed to compare Wal-Mart to other big corporations, in order to show the viewer that this conspiracy and contradictory nature is unique only to Wal-Mart. I also believe that the video only used employees that supported the video's cause, leaving the video extremely biased and opinionated.

Melissa Boerema

Night students: Take-home final questions

2005-11-23T13:02:00.000-06:00

The night students already know what their take-home final questions are, but I have posted a .pdf file of the questions that should print more nicely and also has the course number and dates corrected. I also wanted to say that while the stated due date is Dec. 8, knowing some of your schedules, I will accept them up until the day of the in-class final a week later. Keep in mind that that will leave you less time to study for the in-class final.

JFK Assassination Anniversary

2005-11-22T23:00:00.000-06:00

Today was the 42nd anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, but I don't think I have seen one of these anniversaries go so little remarked in the press. It may be a good thing when the media forget to do their typical rote anniversary stories, but I also wonder the country is turning some sort of corner on this issue, towards a point where the public will not care quite so much and historians will able to approach this event in a relatively rational way. Meanwhile the conspiracists soldier on. Here's the one piece I saw on the assassination today, from Joel Achenbach's Washington Post blog:

Kennedy Assassination 42 Years Later: Case Closed?
It was the Mafia. It was the CIA. It was anti-Castro Cubans. It was LBJ. It was the military. It was the Dallas police. It was Howard Hunt. It was the Umbrella Man. It was Marilyn Monroe. It was the Martians. In fact, they were all responsible -- the ultimate crossfire. The Single Conspiracy Theory doesn't wash. How could one conspiracy, by itself, explain the astonishing number of quirks,
inconsistencies, and evidentiary gaps in the crime that happened 42 years ago
today in Dallas?
Yesterday George Lardner, Jr., who knows more than any other Post eporter about the Kennedy Assassination, had a piece in the paper about a
weekend meeting of assassination researchers. Lardner's piece starts out with the poignant observation that a lot of these people have gotten gray and bald over the years as they've tried to crack the case. There was much talk at the meeting about bullet fragments, echoes in Dealey Plaza, the Zapruder Film, and the unhelpful schemings of CIA agents. "CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck said the agency had no immediate comment," the story reported, which was a let-down, because I was hoping for a line saying, "CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck admitted that the agency had murdered the president, and apologized profusely."

The Kennedy Assassination isn't like the Deep Throat mystery, where there was always the promise that, someday, we'd know the truth. Even if someone stepped forward and said, "I shot JFK," assassination buffs wouldn't be satisfied. There's always More To The Story.Reality gets fuzzier under closer scrutiny. It must be some kind of law of physics. (Actually, I think it's called quantum mechanics.) You would think that abundant evidence, steadily compiled, would make everything clearer, but the opposite is true. Partial knowledge gives us a simple picture of the world and its phenomena -- an extension of the ignorance-is-bliss rule. Look deeper and you wind up scratching your head. The world was simpler when it didn't move, when it stood firmly at the center of the universe. Since Copernicus, things have gotten a little crazy around here. One of the premier skeptics of our time, Carl Sagan, who vociferously argued against tales of alien abductions, telepathy, and all manner of anti-scientific thinking, and who believed that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, still believed that JFK was killed in some kind of conspiracy (or so he led me to think when I interviewed him not long before his death). According to Lardner, three out of four Americans believe JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and nearly as many think there was a cover-up.

For the record, I am among those crazy, goggle-eyed knuckleheads who think that Oswald shot Kennedy. Just a lone nut in the window. But I recognize that many intelligent and rational people have different thoughts on this, and I am willing, potentially, in theory, because of my great mental dexterity and openness, to ponder alternative scenarios, and perhaps even change my mind and admit that Oswald wasn't even there that day. Maybe there were two Oswalds. Maybe the real target that day in Dallas wasn't JFK, but, as one dingdong wrote a while back, the limo driver.

"History is bunk" and Donovan had it right

2005-11-22T12:34:00.000-06:00

Check out this priceless customer review of a truly go-for-broke "alternative" science & history book called Forbidden History : Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization , from the editor of a journal called Atlantis Rising ("Learn what the mainstream press & the tabloids won't tell you") :

Is history real? Do we even have a rough idea who we are and where we come from? This book is an ideal gift for anyone on your list who thinks Orthodox History is bunk but don't know what to do next. Collected from some excellent articles from New Atlantis Magazine, these essays are nicely arranged to build the case slowly, carefully and wisely. Contributors include Christopher Dunn and Peter Thomkins, and subject ranges from debunking Darwin to the Electric Universe. You've been warned! This is the place to start finding out Henry Ford didn't know the half of it. Bunk? Most of the history we get in school is FICTION! Rounded out with discussions of eclectic goodies available only with difficulty elsewhere, this is a must for any alternative science/history bookshelf.

Even the hot sheets are no longer hot enough, it seems.

Smedley Butler: "I was a gangster for capitalism"

2005-11-15T21:56:00.000-06:00

Click the title above for the quotation I mentioned in class, which is actually not part of War is a Racket, which you should also read.

Day students: Reading from week of Nov. 15-17

2005-11-15T13:53:00.000-06:00

We will be finishing up with the Revolution today and moving on to topic 8 on your syllabus, "Competing Conspiracy Theories in the Early American Republic." The Illuminati are finally here! The reading is as follows

Your choice: Marshall Smelser, "The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion" (web) OR John R. Howe, Jr., "Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790"
Pasley, Articles from Knight, ed., Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia: "Alien and Sedition Acts," "Jedidiah Morse," "Illuminati," "Meriwether Lewis" (web)
Davis, ed., Fear of Conspiracy (reserve), pp. 35-65
Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, chaps. 1-5
Selected documents (web)

9/11 video shown on campus

2005-11-14T21:52:00.000-06:00

Several of you asked if you could get some extra credit (1-5 points added to your midterm is what I have decided) for reporting on conspiracy-related events on campus. Here Melissa Boerema reviews a 9/11 conspiracy roadshow that came to Columbia last week. (I marked a classic bit of "negative subjunctive reasoning," on the part of the presenters, in bold type.) Others who saw this presentation can submit their own reviews and questions in the comments.

On November 9, 2005, the SIJAC organization presented two videos which were designed to present the truth about the tragedy of September 11th. The first video, which featured an engineer named Jeff King, focused on the structural features of the World Trade Center buildings and examined their falling patterns. When investigating the structure of the buildings, King found that each building had 47 hermetically sealed, core steel beams whose main purpose was to withstand building trauma. King states that even with extreme trauma, such as a plane hitting a building, that at least some of the 47 core steel beams should have been left standing. He goes on to state that only with the use of explosives, could the complete destruction of these beams occurred, as was the case on September 11th. Along with the complete destruction of the beams, King contends that explosives must have been used because of the smoke patterns, the complete disintegration of the concrete & office supplies, and the way the buildings collapsed onto themselves.

In the second video, author David Ray Griffen presented two theories of what may have occurred on September 11th. Griffen’s reasoning behind each of these conspiracy theories is based on the United States’ greed for foreign oil and the United States’ need to continue imperialism & world domination. The first theory that Griffen presents, argues that the federal government knew of the terrorist attacks beforehand and did nothing to prevent them. Griffen supports this theory, by presenting the statistic that half of New York Residents believe that the U.S. government knew of the attacks beforehand, the example of attorney David Schipper who contends that FBI agents told him of the attacks in advance, and the example of reporter William Grigg who interviewed FBI agents which supposedly confessed that they knew of the attacks beforehand. The second theory, which Griffen presented, stated that the United States government performed the September 11th attacks itself. He contends that the U.S. government showed its guilt by having all of the steel beams immediately melted down and by having all of the building remains, except for 200 pieces, destroyed to prevent investigation. Griffen also supports the second theory by examining the Pentagon attacks. When looking at the Pentagon attacks, Griffen argues that we were given three different stories about the military response to the attacks. Griffen also argues, that the Pentagon should not have been hit because it has a radar system, it has an anti-aircraft defense system which is designed to launch missiles at any unauthorized aircrafts, and it has Andrews military base located close by for protection. Lastly, Griffen upheld this second theory by questioning why the pilot would hit the renovated west wing, which contained no important political officials at the time.

When examining these September 11th conspiracy theories, I felt that King and Griffen’s ideas were clearly articulated but relied much too heavily on information provided by other conspiracy theorists. I also felt that they played too much on the listener’s emotions because they made you feel as though it was your duty to believe these theories and spread this information to others, so that tragedies like this would not occur again. I also thought that like the JFK conspiracy theories, these September 11th conspiracy theories were much too complex and required too much planning & time to be truthful.

Melissa Boerema

Day students: Reading for week of November 8-10

2005-11-08T13:02:00.000-06:00

We will be finishing up with witchcraft today, so if you have not read the Hoffer book and look at the witchcraft documents page, where I recently fixed some of the links. Next we will skipping over the Indian topic and moving on to "Conspiracy Nation," on the role of conspiracy theory in the coming of the American Revolution. So you should get to work on the 7th set of readings in the syllabus, to wit:

Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 22-159
The Declaration of Independence and selected documents (web)
Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" (web)
Davis, ed., Fear of Conspiracy (reserve), pp. 23-34

The documentary "Hell House"

2005-11-07T18:51:00.000-06:00

The night class saw the documentary Hell House in its entirety last Thursday, unless there was some technical problem no one told me about. What did you guys think -- about the movie and the origins and impact of the thinking on display?

Marilyn Monroe conspiracy theories in the news

2005-11-05T16:39:00.000-06:00

This weekend I have happened to catch two different news reports with new and supposedly mysterious information about Marilyn Monroe's final days.

First, there's one from the Associated Press regarding notes Marilyn's psychiatrist took during what was possibly her final visit to the shrink.

Second, there was a thing on MSNBC that I can't find on their web site that had some woman who had talked to Joe DiMaggio's sister and claimed that Marilyn was really happy the day she died and planned to remarry Joltin' Joe. Here's an older MSNBC piece on MM until I find the one I am looking for.

I am not terribly interested in celebrity death CTs, as you know from class, but several people in class appear to be in to the Marilyn Monroe issue, so this one goes out to those students. Aging actress known to be a pill-abuser who overdoses seems like the simplest and most convincing explanation to me. The fact that she may have sounded happy to people who talked to her that day may have been driven by the kind of pill she was on at the moment, you know? It doesn't disprove the suicide theory. I think it's pretty unusual for people who plan to commit suicide to act openly suicidal to others beforehand.

New World Order rant

2005-11-02T12:15:00.000-06:00

Last night in the evening class I mentioned a speech from "Oklahoma Independent Media" giving one particular conspiracy theorist's views on the dangers of the New World Order. Read it through the link above and download the mp3 audio version here. Comment below if you can make heads or tails of it.

"Good Night and Good Luck": Discount tickets to a conspiracy-related film

2005-11-02T09:50:00.000-06:00

Here's a message from our History Department academic advisor about a film that will be playing at the Missouri Theatre downtown next week (and at Ragtag Cinemacafé on 10th St. throughout the month -- check their schedule.) The movie, Good Night and Good Luck, concerns CBS News's role in the downfall of Communist witch-hunter Joe McCarthy and, as such, is extremely relevant to this course. Go see it if you can and post your comments here.

The movie “Good Night & Good Luck” will be showing at the Missouri Theatre on November 10, 11 & 16^th. This is the movie about Edward R. Murrow’s showdown with Senator Joe McCarthy. Tickets are $7.00 for the public, however Ragtag is going to offer a discount to history majors, their tickets will be $5.00 and only good for certain shows.

If you would like to announce this in your classes, especially American history classes, that would be great, just be sure and emphasis that the students have to be history majors, undergrad or graduate, to take advantage of the discounted tickets. Students that want tickets need to come to 103 Read Hall to pick them up.

Thank you,

Jenny

Jenny Morton, M.Ed.

Senior Academic Advisor

Department of History

Satanic ritual abuse cases: McMartin witness apologizes

2005-10-29T23:26:00.000-05:00

Via The Washington Monthly's blog, I see that one of the child witnesses in the McMartin Family Preschool case has apologized to the defendants in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Kyle Zirpolo says he always knew he was lying, to please his parents and has some amazing details about his interrogation at a local clinic and the attitude taken by his mother. It seems that the situation was just what I imagined: a dysfunctional, stressed-out family eager to pin their troubles on an outside source: "We argued and fought all the time. My mother has always blamed anything negative on the idea that we went to that preschool and were molested." If you can't get to the LA Times piece (you might have to register), the Washington Monthly posting has a lot of the good stuff.

Night Students: Lecture outlines so far

2005-10-28T15:41:00.000-05:00

You can find the outline for what have covered so far, plus a little beyond, here. (That's a pdf [Adobe Acrobat] file and differs slightly from exactly what I was using in class because I changed a couple of minor points in giving it to your class.) The "cut-outs" in the Usual Suspects section are available seperately:

Lecture outlines posted

2005-10-28T01:54:00.000-05:00

I finally figured out a way to get the lecture outlines out of the Mac! The first and second JFK outlines, covering most of the past month, can be accessed through the page linked to the title above or individually through this message.

Politics in convenient thriller (or comic book) form

2005-10-26T21:06:00.000-05:00

A recent posting by Mark Schmitt at the blog TPM Cafe, "Video Game Politics," very much echoes a couple of our course themes: the affinity between conspiracism and extremist politics, and the tendency of conspiratorial thinking to render history and politics in movie thriller terms. In recent years, this latter trend has been in particular notable on the right, with hated figures like Saddam Hussein and Hillary Clinton depicted as something close to supervillains in terms of their amazing abilities and evil plans.

Lest anyone think I am exaggerating this conservative tendency to think in cartoonish terms, check out the "World's 1st conservative comic book," Liberality for All, in which a cyborg Sean Hannity of the future leads a band of high-tech conservative revolutionaries against a despotic liberal government:

LIBERALITY FOR ALL #1 It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City...And wake the world from an Orwellian nightmare of United Nations dominated ultra-liberalism.

I am not making this up, and it does not seem to be a joke. Read the preview.

Lecture outline -- JFK: History of the Conspiracy Theories

2005-10-25T17:17:00.000-05:00

JFK: History of the Conspiracy Theories

I. Overview and Analysis

JFK’s death began a new era in conspiracy theory:

“Broadened the base” of c.t. beyond the anticommunist far right-wing
Fears shifted from outside subversion to evil & corruption of the whole system

The Aftermath: Clips from Four Days in November

The Politics of JFK Assassination Investigations

Dual role of media: Hyping the mystery & tragedy while accepting official explanations.
Despite Cold War & LHO beliefs, communists rarely blamed for JFK murder, with exception of useful kooks such as Prof. Revilo P. Oliver.
The political and academic establishment of the mid-60s was heavily committed to the “liberal consensus” and thus had every reason to suppress conspiracy beliefs.
Establishment fears of the “politics of unreason,” the radical right (John Birch Society), and possibility of an irrational public overreacting to news of a conspiracy: Seven Days in May.

Close relationship between the rise of 1960s radicalism & the rise of JFK c.t.’s.

Left-wing origin of most theories. Argument that LHO was U.S. spy or the victime of a frame-up, not Commie.
Rise of protest after JFK: The Berkeley “Free Speech Movement,” 1964.
Deep distrust of established institutions pervaded both JFK c.t.’s and 60s radicalism. Example of Carl Oglesby, SDS leader & conspiracy theorist.
Paranoia in 60s/70s counterculture: “Paul is Dead,” Easy Rider, Texas Chainsaw Massacre

II. How the Theorizing Began

The Manchester thesis: Crime and criminal did not balance.

Truly, obviously bizarre/mysterious aspects of the case:

Jack Ruby’s mob background & police connections
Ruby’s murder of Oswald, entry & escape
Oswald’s “patsy” claim, plus failure to record what he said
Oswald’s strange, contradictory background
Communist in the Marines at sensitive posts
Defection to and undefection from Soviet Union
Communist and anti-communist associations (Russian émigrés)
Spy-like behavior: Post office boxes and aliases
Too-perfect evidence trail (photos, mail-order rifle, sightings)
Logical flaws & factual errors in the Oswald impersonator scenario

Early reactions:

Polls showed that most of the public believed in some conspiracy from the beginning, at least that Oswald did not act alone.
Left was most influential in suspecting conspiracies, blamed the Right
Site of shooting in Dallas, a hotbed of right-wing activity, strongly suggested a right-wing plot.
Left-wing lawyer Mark Lane appointed himself Oswald’s defense attorney, raised problems with evidence immediately after the assassination (Dec. 1963)
First fully developed c.t.s came from European Left, who saw Dallas as a violent coup d’etat such as commonly happened in world history
First book: Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?
Bertrand Russell and the “Who Killed Kennedy Committee?” Dreyfus affair comparison.
Left split over JFK conspiracy theories: I.F. Stone attacks “demonology.”
Soviets spread JFK c.t.’s through their official media

Lone Gunman theories as defense of “American exceptionalism”: US officials wanted to show that true political violence still could not happen here, that U.S. had its own tradition of assassination by deranged, paranoid loners.

III. The Warren Commission

Rushed, sloppy investigation caused more problems than it solved.

Warren Commission’s paternalism, emphasis on calming fears, quashing rumors & protecting “our institutions.”

Pressures due to 1964 election: Barry Goldwater won GOP nomination over liberal Nelson Rockefeller, challenged liberal consensus, offering “choice, not an echo.”

Members: Chief Justice Earl Warren, House leaders Hale Boggs & G. Ford, Senators R. Russell & J.S. Cooper, Chase Manhattan Pres. John McCloy, plus Allen Dulles (CIA director fired by JFK).

Problems with the investigation:

Non-cooperation of the CIA & FBI. Warren’s failure to press for more cooperation.
Members’ failure to attend meetings and generally political approach.
Set up as prosecution of Oswald, but Oswald was allowed no representation.
W.C. adopted “lone gunman” & “single bullet” theories despite contradictions in the evidence. Leads were not followed if they led to a possible c.t.

1964

Mainstream media and public largely accepted the lone gunman theory, at first. Warren Commission seemed to be a success.
Warren Report (intro) & non-c.t. JFK books were among 1964 bestsellers.
Wide, quick public acceptance of the liberal martyr view of JFK.
Playing on idea of Kennedy as liberal martyr, President Johnson got major civil rights legislation passed & crushed Goldwater in the election.

IV. The Rise of the Buffs and the Fall of the Lone Gunman

The collapse of faith in the Warren Commission’s work

Tracked with the rise of political turmoil in 60s: urban race riots, antiwar protests, etc. As liberal consensus broke up, so did belief in the lone gunman theory.
Early emergence of independent critics & lay researchers, or “buffs”: Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment –1966 bestseller), Sylvia Meagher, Harold Weisberg, Josiah Thompson, David Lifton, & others. Buff investigations (and c.t. in general) as “people’s scholarship.”
Doubts about Warren Commission raised by mainstream media (Life) by 1966, encouraged by Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, a Cornell MA thesis.

Conspiracy theory in left-leaning pop culture: play Macbird! (1967), film Greetings (1968) – draft-dodging hippies as conspiracy theorists.

The Rise of the Zapruder Film

Jim Garrison’s prosecution of businessman Clay Shaw, 1967-69: failed, homophobic, corrupt & baseless, but legitimated buffs & caused wide distribution of Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination. The Perry Russo problem.
Film became centerpiece of a traveling roadshow that spread views of conspiracy buffs to local audiences, especially at colleges.
Zapruder film lent great power to “common sense” arguments of buffs, especially for a second shooter in front of JFK on the Grassy Knoll. One reason: apparent snap of head back and to the left.
Most “popular” conspirators at this time were typical left-wing/Cold War villains, but researchers focused on technical investigations rather than “who” or “why.”

V. The Conspiratorial Legacy of 1968

Factors that allowed JFK c.t.s to go mainstream: Fear, shock, loss of faith in American society & institutions.

Generally distrustful spirit of times combined with rising crime, social change, fear of both.
Rapid escalation of Vietnam War despite promises & protests, growing “credibility gap” over how truthfully public & Congress were informed about the war.
“Operation Chaos”: Johnson administration asked CIA to investigate possibility that anti-war movement was a foreign-controlled conspiracy. Answer was no.

MLK & RFK assassinations, April & June 1968, both at times and under circumstances that suggested more right-wing plots. King as he was turning to economic issues, RFK on day he won California primary seemingly enroute to sure victory in November. Left-leanings CTs undermined by:

Lack of real mystery surrounding James Earl Ray or Sirhan Sirhan.
Violence against conservative targets that followed (Wallace, Ford).

Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated by Democrats as demonstrators and police rioted, followed by mutual conspiracy theories & conspiracy trial of the “Chicago 7.”

VI. Conspiracy A Go-Go: The 1970s

The Post-Watergate Interregnum, 1974-78

1974 elections as high point of liberal Democratic political power in recent history, artificial break from ongoing conservative trend.
1975, “The Year of Intelligence”: CIA becomes major political issue as Church Committee and press exposed CIA as “rogue elephant on a rampage”: domestic surveillance (incl. wiretaps & mail opening), foreign coups (Chile) & assassination attempts, drug experiments.
Secrets first came out because of CIA & FBI involvement in Watergate, internal “Family Jewels” report arising from post-Helms shakeup.
Led to closer oversight of, & sharp, but often ineffective, restrictions on covert intelligence activities.
Rogue CIA idea led to CTs such as Christic Institute’s “Secret Team.”

National broadcast of the Zapruder film in 1975 by Geraldo Rivera.

House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978) – a new, conspiracy-minded investigation found little that was new.

At last minute, endorsed conspiracy in general, based on discredited audio evidence of a 4th shot.
Other evidence mostly supported W.C. conclusions, but the committee’s work led to wide acceptance of a JFK conspiracy.

The Conservative 80s: Reagan elected in 1980

Emergence of the Mafia theory, growing from work of G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Select Committee
Made Kennedys complicit in own death, took in anti-JFK CTs like Marilyn
Took left-wing politics out of JFK CTs.
New conservative-leaning CTs: “stab in the back” view of Vietnam, POWs & MIAs, renewal of Cold War

VII. The Oliver Stone Era

Oliver Stone’s hit film JFK (1991): used some of the dumbest c.t.s.; mixed fact & fiction; brought Vietnam, military-industrial complex motive to the fore.

Huge controversy over the film led to creation of the Assassination Records Review Board and the release of most remained assassination-related records, 1992-98. Not much there.
Media increasingly dismissed political conspiracy theories after the controversy over Stone’s JFK.

Oliver’s Fallacies -- a sampling

As seen already: a conspiracy too immense and the head snap
The “Magic Bullet” (CE 399)
Smoke on the Grassy Knoll

CT as Science Fiction

They Stole Kennedy’s Brain: David Lifton’s “body alteration” theory
Umbrella Man and the Darts of Death

Final thoughts: The return of American exceptionalism and the depoliticization of the JFK narrative.

(Pull-out screen)
Right-Wing Extremism after McCarthy

During the era of the “liberal consensus” & post-McCarthy backlash, Communist conspiracy fears kept up by new “radical right”:

John Birch Society, founded 1958, organized like CPUSA: no democracy, fronts, etc.
Strong in TX, FL, southern Calif.
The Politician promoted idea that Eisenhower was communist agent.
Today: Robert Welch U. & summer camp.

Extreme anticommunists considered mentally ill by 60s liberals, but respected by conservatives opposed to social changes (civil rights) & out to “win” Cold War.

Beginnings of modern conservative movement. Example: Barry Goldwater campaign 1964.

Very active in early 1960s: 1964 best-seller None Dare Call It Treason by John H. Stormer.

Long-term influence: Lingering fear of red-baiting helped push Johnson into the Vietnam War.

Lecture outline: JFK The Assassination in Context

2005-10-25T17:11:00.000-05:00

JFK: The Assassination in Context

I. JFK and the Popular Imagination

The JFK assassination seen as one of history’s greatest and best-remembered events.

JFK as first celebrity president, last beloved president, inspiring intense feelings all over world.

Postwar popular culture & the origins of JFK’s lasting appeal

Youth
WWII veteran, hero of PT109
Young, idealized family man.
President as “sex symbol”
Media celebrity: Won first TV debates .
Camelot: Kennedys as royal family in era of American empire, associated

Kennedy’s political image: challenged voters and youth to service and sacrifice

Profiles in Courage
1960 Campaign: New Frontier, “Getting this country moving again.”
Best-loved Kennedy programs: Peace Corps, moon program.
JFK’s image as a liberal crusader: civil rights.
Contrast with conservatives & failures who followed him as president

II. The Myth of St. Jack, Liberal Martyr

Conspiracy theories as stories with characters, plot, motivation. Role of liberal myth in JFK theories.

A part of 1960s culture: “Abraham, Martin, and John”; “He Was A Friend Of Mine”

C.t. of Oliver Stone & others:
JFK tried to end the Cold War, stop Vietnam. He threatened the “military-industrial complex” & was murdered for it by the CIA, FBI, military, munitions industry, Cuban exiles, oil men, Mafia, &/or LBJ.

Reasons to doubt the liberal martyr myth:

Concern for southern support, poor civil rights record.
JFK as Cold Warrior: friend of Joe McCarthy, campaigned as stronger anticommunist than Nixon in 1960, Inaugural Address, Bay of Pigs, firing of Allen Dulles, assassination attempts against Fidel Castro in cooperation with Mafia. “Blowback”?
JFK and Vietnam: destabilization of Laos, NSAM 263, CBS interview, overthrow of Diem, NSAM 273.

Argument that was JFK moving to end the Cold War:

American University speech, June 1963
Limited Test Ban Treaty took effect October 1963.

III. The Assassination

Pre-campaign trip to Dallas, TX, where JFK appeared to be very unpopular.

Motorcade route through Dealey Plaza.

Background of the Zapruder Film.

Lee Oswald, Young Communist, and not without reason

Day students: Reading for Oct. 25-27

2005-10-25T10:40:00.000-05:00

We will be finishing up with JFK today, so please move on in your reading. The next topic to be covered in class will be witchcraft (we will come back to UFOs later), so please start Peter Charles Hoffer's The Devil's Disciples if you haven't already. Just in time for Halloween!

Local "Hell House"

2005-10-24T10:55:00.000-05:00

A student alerted me to this Missourian story about a "hell house" at a Baptist church in Centralia. At least based on what this reporter saw, this would seem to be a greatly toned down and less paranoid affair than what we saw in the documentary Hell House. (Night students: This topic will come up in the Satanism section of the course that will be coming up soon.) Someone should go check it out.

Day students: Term paper assignment posted

2005-10-20T01:22:00.000-05:00

For the day students, the details on the term paper assignment are finally available. I will be distributing these in class, but you can get now by clicking the title above or using the link at the left of the course home page. Please read the instructions carefully and follow them. I expect to be hearing from many of you soon. Ask general questions in the comment thread below.

Welcome MU in the Evening students

2005-10-19T01:05:00.000-05:00

I wanted to welcome the students in History 2420-2, the evening version of the course that just started last night. I have posted your syllabus on the site, and you can also get a preview of your take-home final by looking at the day students' take-home midterm. Some of the questions may get tweaked a bit but that is basically what you will be dealing with. From now on, everyone should be paying close attention to which class a particular announcement is addressed, the day (2420-1, at 3:30PM) or the evening (2420-2, at 7:30PM). Anyone can post comments or questions on the general interest items.

Exorcism and Satanism in Italy

2005-10-18T01:35:00.000-05:00

Some mixed signals at work in an article from the international edition of Newsweek. On the one hand, the article makes the Catholic Church look bad with an account of its continuing defense of the practice of exorcism in the face of scandals and the real story behind the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The tale concerned a young German epileptic:

Somehow, though, her parents convinced themselves that Satan had gotten hold of her soul. They called two local priests, who spent 10 months trying to exorcise the young woman's demons. To avoid interfering with the exorcism, the parents even halted her treatment for epilepsy. Michel finally died, in 1975, at the age of 23, withered and weakened to just 31 kilos from being denied food and water during the exorcism.

Several more recent cases of priests accidentally killing exorcism subjects are also included. Yet the article also contains this startling (and unattributed) statistic: "Interest in satanic worship has risen sharply across Europe recently; there are 5,000 Italians involved in 650 active satanic cults in operation in the country, more than double the number a decade ago." Does this mean Italian satanists are registering with the government? Presumably they are not the baby-killing type of satanists. This was a very strange passing remark to make, and one that makes me even more curious about Italy than I was already.

Levee bombing conspiracy theory gaining traction

2005-10-17T15:18:00.000-05:00

It looks to me as though the Hurricane Katrina conspiracy theory that students alerted me to, contending that whites or the government blew up the New Orleans levees to intentionally flood black neighborhoods, is getting some traction on its way to permanent inclusion in the list of crims "They" have committed. The Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan apparently endorsed it on CNN last week, citing as his source a neo-Nazi radio host called Hal Turner (picture), who thought the bombing was great and claimed to have killed some New Orleans blacks himself during the flood. To me it's always a sign that a conspiracy theory has arrived when you get groups that hate each other both citing it.

Reading for Oct. 11-13: JFK

2005-10-13T11:10:00.000-05:00

We are still on JFK, obviously, so see the previously posted assignment. Please note that I just revamped the JFK document page with a more varied and interesting set of materials that also happens to relate more closely to the lectures. Please go look again if you already checked that page, and do it again in a few days in case I locate something else. I will also paste some of the links below.

Let me also urge students again to rent and watch Oliver Stone's JFK if you haven't already. I say this not because it contains much in the way of accurate facts, but it is a fantastic distillation of 3 decades worth of conspiracy theory in which you will see many of our course themes reflected. I will be glad to loan out my VHS copy as long as I can get it back by Monday.

NEW MATERIAL FROM THE JFK DOCUMENT PAGE

Politics of the JFK Conspiracy Theories

Far Right reactions: Revilo P. Oliver, "Marksmanship
in Dallas" -- this is also excerpted in the Davis reserve
reading assignment

Liberal Consensus reactions: Editorial
from The New Yorker (7 December 1963)

Left-wing reactions
- Nation "The
  American Condition" (21 December 1963)
- Mark Lane, "Oswald
  Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief"
  ( December 1963)
- Edward Jay Epstein, "Who's
  Afraid of the Warren Report?" (December 1966)
- The British Left
  - M.S. Arnoni, "Who
    Killed Whom and Why?" (January
    1964)
  - Bertrand Russell, "16
    Questions On The Assassination"
    (September 1964)
- Split
  on the left: Radical journalist I.F.
  Stone defends the Warren Commission & responds to
  Russell
- Student radicals: Todd
  Gitlin remembers

JFK Assassination Music

2005-10-06T10:01:00.000-05:00

You have to love the Internet. Looking for the "P.T. 109" song this morning, I found a whole site devoted to JFK and assassination-related popular culture, including a lengthy list of songs about it. There's even a blues album on the subject that was recorded in 1964. Of the songs on the list that were new to me, I would have to recommend Ice Cube's "When Will They Shoot?," which combines a number of themes we have talked about in the course: "They killed JFK in '63/So what the fuck you think they'll do to me?"

Katrina blamed on "Satanic worship"

2005-10-05T23:09:00.000-05:00

From a New Orleans site called "BayouBuzz," and a link there to a CNN interview, I find the following:

According to Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist, Billy Graham, “"There´s been Satanic worship in New Orleans. There´s been sexual perversion. God is going to use that storm to bring a revival. God has a plan. God has a purpose."

And to think that the Grahams are generally regarded as pretty middle-of-the-road by conservative Christian standards. Read the rest by clicking the links above.

Reading for the week of Oct. 4-6

2005-10-04T21:20:00.000-05:00

We are all about the mid-term and JFK this week, so continue with the relatively short set of readings announced last week. If you are really fired up about the Kennedy assassination, you might want to consider reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed. As I suggested in class today, renting Oliver Stone's JFK sometime in the next week or so would probably improve your understanding and enjoyment of the Kennedy material we will be going over.

Reserve problem fixed

2005-09-30T16:15:00.000-05:00

Apparently the library did not get one of the reserve readings, Enemies Within by Robert Goldberg, on reserve as they were supposed to. I just placed my copy of the book on reserve at Ellis this afternoon, so it should be available now. Thanks to the student who reported the problem.

This week in Conspiracy TV

2005-09-30T11:07:00.000-05:00

Those of you who want to keep reviewing the new crop of conspiracy/alien invasion shows, please do so as comments on this post. It would be particularly interesting if you found any of the themes or motifs we have talked about in class being used in the shows. The earlier post introducing this assignment is here, along with a few student comments.

Lost and Found

2005-09-30T10:55:00.000-05:00

Jared Engles from our class wrote this morning looking for an item he left in class. I did not find anything, but if you did please let Jared know. His note and contact info appear below.

Dr. Pasley,

I left my Palm Tungsten E in class last night (around 5). I was wondering if you may have picked one up, or if someone found it and returned it to you.

Please let me know either way asap.

Sincerely,
Jared Michael Engles

410 Discovery Hall
906 Virginia Ave.
Columbia, MO 65201

Cell: 660-473-9620

Room: 573-771-4958

jmegxb@mizzou.edu

Take-Home Midterm Questions

2005-09-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

History 2420
Conspiracy Theories & Conspiracies in U.S. History
Sept. 29, 2005

INSTRUCTIONS: Write an essay answering ONE of the following questions. Your answer should be typed, proofread, and clearly expressed, just as in a conventional paper. You should use the course materials as fully as you can, documenting your arguments with examples from the readings and lectures. You are not required to do any research beyond the assigned course readings and other materials accessed through the course website and blog. This test is “open book,” but you are forbidden to use any secondary sources beyond what has been assigned or recommended in the syllabus, website, or blog. You may also refer to the music and film clips seen or heard in class or through the website.

References and quotations should be cited properly using your word processor's endnote or footnote function. For citations to the textbooks listed on the syllabus, the author's last name, a shortened version of the title, and page numbers will suffice. Example: Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy, 56. For the books that are document collections or anthologies, you should also include the author and title of the specific document or chapter, if they are different from the book as a whole. You do not need to create a bibliography beyond what appears in your notes. Citations to web pages must include the URL of the specific page you are citing, not just the whole site’s address.

There is no prescribed length, though more than 10-12 double-spaced pages or so would probably be excessive for undergraduates. 6-8 tightly-written, highly substantive pages might well be enough. Provide what you consider a thorough, well-supported answer. The essays are due in class on Thursday, October 6.
Essays will be graded primarily on the degree to which they reflect an accurate understanding and careful consideration of the course materials and concepts, including textbooks, reserve readings, web readings, visual materials, and lectures. The best answers will not simply regurgitate what was said in class, but will instead show an ability to deploy information and ideas from many different parts of the course, especially the reading, in support of a coherent argument. Please be specific and accurate, with regard to events, dates, names, and so on, but do not simply recite facts. Also, please avoid lengthy quotations. Anybody can cut and paste from web pages.

Please ask any questions you may have about the test or these instructions as a comment on this post. That way, everyone will get to see the answer.

1. Richard Hofstadter titled his influential work on American conspiracy theory “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Do you feel that “paranoid style” is the best and most accurate term that could be used? Why or why not? Are modern conspiracy theories extreme responses to the real problems of our times or merely dangerous fantasies of disturbed minds?

2. Giving specific examples, describe the sort of ideological work or political functions that conspiracy theory has performed at various points and for various groups in American history and culture.

3. What kinds of events, belief systems, and social situations seem most prone to the development of conspiracy theories? (You can choose among the three types if you wish.) Why?

4. In your view, based on what we have covered or you have read about so far in the course, what are the two or three most persistent themes or motifs found in U.S. conspiracy theories. Why do they seem to recur?

5. One might imagine that the widespread fears of conspiracy in American culture would have helped reduce the number of actual conspiracies mounted in or by the United States by putting people on their guard. Is this true? Have conspiracy theories performed as effective watchdogs against conspiracy, corruption, subversion, secrecy, and the excessive use of power, or have they had a different or even opposite effect?

6. Once when I was checking out books on UFOs in Ellis Library, the guy at the circulation counter asked me the Big Question regarding the subject of this course: Why does America seem to be so prone to conspiracy theory and other forms of political fantasy and extreme distrust? Construct your own answer to this question with reference (positive, negative, or in between) to the theories of at least two of the following authors: Richard Hofstadter, Chip Berlet, Timothy Melley, Patricia Turner, Frederic Jameson, Jodi Dean, Paul Boyer, Calvin Trillin, Michael Barkun, Robert Goldberg, Peter Knight, Gordon S. Wood, David Brion Davis,Fran Mason, or Corey Robin? You may also bring in another author from the assigned reading that I may have omitted.

Legends of Hurricane Katrina Exposed

2005-09-29T11:17:00.000-05:00

This not is a conspiracy theory, exactly, but certainly it counts as an urban legend or rumor. Here is an article from today's New York Times on what really did and DID NOT happen in New Orleans during and just after Hurricane Katrina. Keep in mind that the Bush administration is eager to convince its supporters that the big failure was a liberal media exaggeration, and to blame what did happen on the local Democratic officials. Nice to see we are all coming together in this time of crisis.

Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Sgt. Dan Anderson of the New Orleans Police Department inspected stolen car parts in the living room of a house used by looters.

By JIM DWYER and CHRISTOPHER DREW

Published: September 29, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 25 - After the storm came the siege. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, terror from crimes seen and unseen, real and rumored, gripped New Orleans. The fears changed troop deployments, delayed medical evacuations, drove police officers to quit, grounded helicopters. Edwin P. Compass III, the police superintendent, said that tourists - the core of the city's economy - were being robbed and raped on streets that had slid into anarchy.

The mass misery in the city's two unlit and uncooled primary shelters, the convention center and the Superdome, was compounded, officials said, by gangs that were raping women and children.

A month later, a review of the available evidence now shows that some, though not all, of the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations, the product of chaotic circumstances that included no reliable communications, and perhaps the residue of the longstanding raw relations between some police officers and members of the public.

Beyond doubt, the sense of menace had been ignited by genuine disorder and violence that week. Looting began at the moment the storm passed over New Orleans, and it ranged from base thievery to foraging for the necessities of life.

Police officers said shots were fired for at least two nights at a police station on the edge of the French Quarter. The manager of a hotel on Bourbon Street said he saw people running through the streets with guns. At least one person was killed by a gunshot at the convention center, and a second at the Superdome. A police officer was shot in Algiers during a confrontation with a looter.

It is still impossible to say if the city experienced a wave of murder because autopsies have been performed on slightly more than 10 percent of the 885 dead.

[On Wednesday, however, Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state's medical incident commander for Hurricane Katrina victims, said that only six or seven deaths appear to have been the result of homicides. He also said that people returning to homes in the damaged region have begun finding the bodies of relatives.

[Superintendent Compass, one of the few seemingly authoritative sources during the days after the storm, resigned Tuesday for reasons that remain unclear. His departure came just as he was coming under criticism from The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had questioned many of his public accounts of extreme violence.]

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Superintendent Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."

On Sept. 4, however, he was quoted in The Times about conditions at the convention center, saying: "The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they're being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets."

Those comments, Superintendent Compass now says, were based on secondhand reports. The tourists "were walking with their suitcases, and they would have their clothes and things taken," he said last week. "No rapes that we can quantify."

Rumors Affected Response

A full chronicle of the week's crimes, actual and reported, may never be possible because so many basic functions of government ceased early in the week, including most public safety record-keeping. The city's 911 operators left their phones when water began to rise around their building.

To assemble a picture of crime, both real and perceived, The New York Times interviewed dozens of evacuees in four cities, police officers, medical workers and city officials. Though many provided concrete, firsthand accounts, others passed along secondhand information or rumor that after multiple tellings had ossified into what became accepted as fact.

What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.

On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.

A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.

"It's part of human nature," General Mason said. "When you get one or two reports, it echoes around the community."

Faced with reports that 400 to 500 armed looters were advancing on the town of Westwego, two police officers quit on the spot. The looters never appeared, said the Westwego police chief, Dwayne Munch.

"Rumors could tear down an entire army," Chief Munch said.

During six days when the Superdome was used as a shelter, the head of the New Orleans Police Department's sex crimes unit, Lt. David Benelli, said he and his officers lived inside the dome and ran down every rumor of rape or atrocity. In the end, they made two arrests for attempted sexual assault, and concluded that the other attacks had not happened.

"I think it was urban myth," said Lieutenant Benelli, who also heads the police union. "Any time you put 25,000 people under one roof, with no running water, no electricity and no information, stories get told."

Crimes of Opportunity

The actual, serious crime began, in the recollection of many, before the catastrophic failure of the levees flooded the city, and much of it consisted of crimes of opportunity rather than assault. On the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, in the half hour or so that the eye of Hurricane Katrina fell on the city - an illusory moment of drawn breath, sunshine and fair breezes - the looters struck, said Capt. Anthony W. Canatella, the police commander in the Sixth District.

Using a chain hitched to a car, they tore open the steel doors at the back of a pawn shop called Cash America on Claiborne Avenue. "Payday Advances to 350," read a sign where the marquee would have been.

"There was nothing in there you could sustain your life with," Captain Canatella said. "There's nothing in there but guns and power tools."

The Sixth District - like most of New Orleans, a checkerboard of wealth and poverty - was the scene of heavy looting, with much of the stealing confined to the lower-income neighborhoods. A particular target was a Wal-Mart store on Tchoupitoulas Street, bordering the city's elegant Garden District and built on the site of a housing project that had been torn down.

The looters told a reporter from The Times that they followed police officers into the store after they broke it open, and police commanders said their officers had been given permission to take what they needed from the store to survive. A reporter from The Times-Picayune said he saw police officers grabbing DVD's.

A frenzy of stealing began, and the fruits of it could be seen last week in three containers parked outside the Sixth District police station. Inside were goods recovered from stashes placed by looters in homes throughout the neighborhood, said Captain Canatella, most but not all still bearing Wal-Mart stickers.

"Not one piece of educational material was taken - the best-selling books are all sitting right where they were left," Captain Canatella said. "But every $9 watch in the store is gone."

One of the officers who went to the Wal-Mart said the police did not try to stop people from taking food and water. "People sitting outside the Wal-Mart with groceries waiting for a ride, I just let them sit there," said Sgt. Dan Anderson of the Sixth District. "If they had electronics, I just threw it back in there."

Three auto parts stores were also looted. In a house on Clara Street, Sergeant Anderson picked his way through a soggy living room, where car parts, still in their boxes, were strewn about. On the wall above a couch, someone had written "Looters" with spray paint.

"The nation's realizing what kind of criminals we have here," Sergeant Anderson said.

Among the evacuees, there was gratitude for efforts by the police and others to help them get out of town, but it was clear that some members of the public did not have a high opinion of the New Orleans Police Department, with numerous people citing cases of corruption and violence a decade ago.

"Don't get me wrong, there was bad stuff going on in the streets, but the police is dirty," said Michael Young, who had worked as a waiter in the Riverwalk development.

French Quarter Is Spared

As the storm winds died down that Monday, small groups that had evacuated from poor neighborhoods as far away as the Lower Ninth Ward passed through the historic French Quarter, heading for shelter at the convention center.

"Some were pushing little carts with their belongings and holding onto their kids," said Capt. Kevin B. Anderson, the French Quarter's police commander. He said his officers gave food, water and rides. "That also served another purpose," he said. "That when they came through, they didn't cause any problems."

The jewelry and antique shops in the French Quarter were basically left untouched, though squatters moved into a few of the hotels. Only a small grocery store and drugstores at the edge of the quarter were hit by looters, he said. From behind the locked doors of the Royal Sonesta hotel on Bourbon Street, Hans Wandfluh, the general manager, said he had watched passers-by who seemed to be up to no good. "We heard gunshots fired," Mr. Wandfluh said. "We saw people running with guns."

At dusk on Aug. 29, looters broke windows along Canal Street and swarmed into drugstores, shoe stores and electronics shops, Captain Anderson said. Some tried, without success, to break into banks, and others sought to take money from A.T.M.'s.

The convention center, without water, air-conditioning, light or any authority figures, was recalled by many as a place of great suffering. Many heard rumors of crime, and saw sinister behavior, but few had firsthand knowledge of violence, which they often said they believed had taken place in another part of the half-mile-long center.

"I saw Coke machines being torn up - each and every one of them was busted on the second floor," said Percy McCormick, a security guard who spent four nights in the convention center and was interviewed in Austin, Tex.

Capt. Jeffrey Winn, the commander of the SWAT team, said its members rushed into the convention center to chase muzzle flashes from weapons to root out groups of men who had taken over some of the halls. No guns were recovered.

State officials have said that 10 people died at the Superdome and 24 died around the convention center - 4 inside and 20 nearby. While autopsies have not been completed, so far only one person appears to have died from gunshot wounds at each facility.

In another incident, Captain Winn and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann, the assistant SWAT commander, said they both shot and wounded a man brandishing a gun near people who had taken refuge on an Interstate highway. Captain Winn said the SWAT team also exchanged gunfire with looters on Tchoupitoulas Street.

The violence that seemed hardest to explain were the reports of shots being fired at rescue and repair workers, including police officers and firefighters, construction and utility workers.

Cellphone repair workers had to abandon work after shots from the Fischer housing project in Algiers, Captain Winn said. His team swept the area three times. On one sweep, federal agents found an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle, Captain Winn said.

For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken. "We investigated one incident and it turned out to have been shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter," said Maj. Mike Young of the Air Force.

Nathan Levy contributed reporting from Austin, Tex., for this article.

Enlarge This Image

Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Officer Herbert Patterson of the New Orleans police looking through a looted store on Sept. 5 while on patrol through the Garden District.

L. M. Otero/Associated Press

"The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they’re being preyed upon."
EDWIN P. COMPASS III
Police Superintendent, on Sept. 1

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Evacuees at the Superdome have been "watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
C. RAY NAGIN
Mayor, on Sept. 6

Satanic conspiracies at your local public library

2005-09-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

Check out this list of the 100 books most frequently challenged at public libraries. Notice how many of them would seem to be on the list solely because someone thought a book had “occult theme or promot[ed] the occult or Satanism.” This appears to include a Halloween alphabet book, Harry Potter, and Roald Dahl's The Witches.

Rapture visuals

2005-09-27T17:53:00.000-05:00

Most of you should be able to see the 1941 film on the Rapture I attempted to show in class today through this link. For your further edification you also check out the Rapture comic I showed, from Jack Chick. The charts I showed should appear below (click to see them full size). If you find yourself hazy on on the details of J.N. Darby's system, see this helpful page from the web site of the PBS documentary Apocalypse that we saw part of in class today.

Midterm/Reading for week of Sept. 27-29

2005-09-27T12:58:00.000-05:00

We will need another day to finish up with the Satanism/religious paranoia section, but you should be moving on to the next set of readings, on the JFK conspiracy theories, right away:

•Goldberg, Enemies Within, Ch. 4 (reserve)
•David B. Davis, ed., Fear of Conspiracy (reserve), pp.341-54
•Calvin Trillin, “The Buffs” (web)
•Selected documents (web)

The takehome midterm questions will be posted here on Thursday, Sept. 29, giving you a week to complete them.

Invasion of the TV alien invasions -- an extra credit opportunity

2005-09-21T00:13:00.000-05:00

As I said in class today, the new TV season provides us with some evidence that the X-Files style of conspiracy show is not going away. There are at least 3 new shows premiering this month involving alien invasions or conspiracies. I won't have time to watch them myself, but if someone in the class wants to report on them here on the blog, I would be happy to dole out some extra credit. The point to focus on would not be so much whether the shows are any good, as how they deploy various conspiracy motifs, how they compare and contrast in their use of conspiracy & paranoia with other shows and other conspiracy stories in other media.

The three shows are:

Invasion (ABC, Wednesdays)
Threshold (CBS, Fridays)
Surface (NBC, Mondays) -- this seems to involve a sea monster that may be extraterrestrial, an idea stolen from James Cameron's The Abyss and doubtless other places

There is another set of ghost-hunting shows that might be relevant, too. One of them is a super-lame looking revival of one of my childhood favorites, The Night Stalker, about a reporter tracking down vampires, satanists, crazed computers, and such. Compare the two versions here.

Please post a comment here or email me if you would like to participate in this. If someone wants to do this over several weeks of a show or do a thorough a job of it, I would probably let you post directly on the blog ran than just through the comments.

Reading for week of Sept. 20-22

2005-09-20T19:06:00.000-05:00

We will wrapping up the material connected to the second set of readings, or almost. Please be sure to check the documents page again as I have updated it and given you some choices.

Article on the Church of Satan, circa 1998

2005-09-20T17:59:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post

August 30, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; Pg. F01

LENGTH: 3612 words

HEADLINE: A DEVIL OF A TIME; How Is the Church of Satan Getting Along? Not So Hot.

BYLINE: Jack Boulware, Special to The Washington Post

DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO

BODY:
Banners proclaiming "666" hang from either side of the stage. Five shapes appear in the blackness, to the taped strains of the theme from "The Exorcist." Somebody cues the smoke machine. The lights blaze up to reveal an almost comically sinister guitar assault and a singer screaming throaty, unintelligible lyrics. Each member of the band wears at least one spiked wristband. The group calls itself Infestation.

In the bar, a handful of heads twitch to the speed-metal rhythms. The patrons all seem to wear a band logo: Altamont, Nausea, Iron Maiden, Metallica. After one song chugs to a halt, the drummer flashes the Devil-horn salute to the assembled. Somebody yells, "Rock on with a violent fury!"

Every Tuesday night, the Covered Wagon nightclub transforms itself into a death-rock scene known as Lucifer's Hammer. Recently, a party for the authors of the new book "Lords of Chaos," a compendium of the satanic music movement in Scandinavia, drew hundreds of sweaty kids wearing pentagrams and goat's head symbols, Baphomets.

But if Satan seems well represented in this trendy club, across the fog-shrouded city, in a Victorian home with black peeling paint, Lucifer's reign is in question. There, at the home of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, the organization he started in 1966 now stands at a fork in the tail, so to speak.

Ten months after LaVey died of heart failure at age 67, a protracted, nasty divorce settlement has left his scions little in the way of a legacy. LaVey's longtime lover and one of his daughters are wrestling in court over remnants of his estate. The infamous black house -- the headquarters for world Satanism -- is for sale, and could be demolished.

And down in the flaming bowels of the netherworld, having finally claimed the soul of Anton Szandor LaVey, Satan himself is no doubt wondering what in the hell happened to the first public church in history to bear his name.

While a portion of America's youth migrated to Haight-Ashbury in the mid- and late 1960s to seek enlightenment from a tab of acid, other young people were making a very different pilgrimage to the living room of a home on California Street. On April 30, 1966 -- the occult holiday of Walpurgis Night -- Anton LaVey signed away his soul forever and became leader of the most feared -- and perhaps the most entertaining -- religion in the world.

The news media quickly accepted LaVey into the pantheon of great San Francisco characters, at least in part because of the background he claimed. Before founding the church, LaVey asserted, he had worked as a psychic investigator, a police photographer, a burlesque organist and a lion tamer for the Clyde Beatty Circus. He was, he said, briefly a lover of Marilyn Monroe's. As a child, the legend went, he played oboe with the San Francisco Ballet Symphony. And for a long time, no one questioned the legend.

In the late '50s and early '60s he gave weekly lectures at his home on eccentric topics, among them vampires, cannibalism and lycanthropy, as in wolf men. The building itself, he claimed, was once a brothel operated by Barbary Coast madam Mammy Pleasant. Regulars called themselves the "Magic Circle," a group that included science-fiction writer Forrest J. Ackerman, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, an heiress to the Chock Full o' Nuts coffee fortune and a dildo manufacturer. Some members of the group once claimed to have sampled portions of a human leg, obtained from a doctor acquaintance and prepared by LaVey's wife, Diane.

Local journalists helped LaVey crank out press releases and stage ever-wilder publicity stunts. In the church's first year, LaVey conducted a satanic wedding, a satanic funeral on Treasure Island (in cooperation with the U.S. Navy) and a satanic baptism of his young daughter, Zeena. His pet 700-pound lion appeared regularly in Herb Caen's column. He ran ads in newspapers for a Witches' Workshop that taught women how to manipulate the opposite sex. To boost the ranks, church members scattered phony dollar bills around the city, with an invitation to join the Infernal Empire printed on the reverse sides.

The church was brazenly and publicly devoted to selfish hedonism. In 1968, LaVey opened up his home to a documentary film crew. Satanic rituals were staged for the cameras, with a nude woman serving as the altar. LaVey sat in his lair, cocktail clinking in one hand, and announced slyly:

"It occurred to me for many, many years that there was a large gray area between psychiatry and religion that was untapped. And no religion had ever been based on man's carnal needs or his fleshly pursuits. All religions are based on abstinence, rather than indulgence. And all religions therefore have to be based on fear. Well, we don't feel that fear is necessary to base a religion on."

In 1969, LaVey published "The Satanic Bible," a collection of Nietzschean philosophies and repudiations of Christian teachings: "Hate your enemies with a whole heart, and if a man smite you on one cheek, SMASH him on the other"; "Say unto thine own heart, 'I am mine own redeemer' "; "There is no heaven of glory bright, and no hell where sinners roast."

The canon has gone on to sell nearly a million copies. (Sales remain steady, with a noticeable rise every Halloween, according to an Avon Books publicist.) A copy of "The Satanic Bible" is exhibited under glass in Moscow's Russian Museum of Atheism. LaVey's follow-up texts, "The Satanic Rituals" and "The Compleat Witch," also remain in print.

Hollywood celebrities joined the fun. Jayne Mansfield enlisted as a satanic "priestess"; Sammy Davis Jr., another member, proudly wore a Baphomet medallion on stage. LaVey consulted on Hollywood horror films. Supposedly, he owned a fleet of automobiles, luxurious estates in Italy, Bavaria and Switzerland, and three oceangoing salvage ships.

The church eventually expanded into a network of grottoes across the United States, but LaVey -- feeling that members were treating the organization as a meeting lodge, rather than living their lives according to satanic principles -- shut the entire system down. Several followers left to form the rival Temple of Set (named for an Egyptian god), and LaVey went into seclusion for many years.

He resurfaced in the 1990s, granting media interviews and hosting young cognoscenti at his home for late-night discussions. To them he was known simply as "Doctor." While on tour here in 1994, shock-rocker Marilyn Manson received an invitation to meet with LaVey at his home. At the end of the visit, Manson was made a priest in the Church of Satan; he would later dedicate his autobiography to LaVey. This next generation of the curious gobbled up new releases of the Doctor's books and albums, on which he plays organ.

After years of heart problems, LaVey died last year on Oct. 29, though his death certificate, for unexplained reasons, was dated Oct. 31, Halloween. Three months and a day after her father's death, Karla LaVey -- his daughter from his first marriage -- filed a petition for probate, seeking to administer his estate, such as it was. Despite all the talk of mansions and ships, at his death the total value of Anton LaVey's holdings -- the legacy of the Black Pope, the most evil and materialistic man in the world -- came to $ 60,000, including book royalties. Several years of divorce proceedings and an ensuing bankruptcy had cleaned him out.

Less than two weeks later, Blanche Barton -- a zaftig blonde in her mid-thirties who was LaVey's lover, biographer and mother of his young son -- filed an objection to Karla's petition, providing the court with a copy of a handwritten will with LaVey's distinctive forked-tail signature. Dated 1995, the one-paragraph document appointed Barton as executor of the estate and designated their toddler, Xerxes Satan LaVey, as sole beneficiary.

Karla LaVey, 46, filed an objection to Barton's objection. Karla claimed, essentially, that the alleged will was a fraud. Karla's filing noted that the will was dated a few days after her father left the hospital where he had lain in a coma for three days. She suggested that Barton had falsely told LaVey that his daughter had abandoned him. Karla's filing also alleged that Barton had exerted undue pressure on LaVey to make the 1995 will, which, she asserted, contradicted her father's long-stated opposition to the very notion of wills. (Barton has denied all of Karla LaVey's allegations.)

The case reflects a long-running feud over the future direction of American Satanism. LaVey's church has been besieged for years by bickering former adherents who insist that he was a fraud and that his institution does not worship the Devil properly. A key element of the ongoing spat seems to involve the complete discrediting of Anton LaVey, who appears to have fabricated much of his past.

The people who seek to debunk LaVey have come to these basic conclusions: The church had its heyday in the late '60s and early '70s, and has been going downhill ever since. It has been in financial straits for years. And it may not, in fact, survive.

Oddly, the Church of Satan's decline has paralleled a sharp rise in warnings by Christian church leaders about Beelzebub's sway over American society -- from the early '70s, when heavy metal musicians like Black Sabbath started singing the praises of Old Scratch, to the era of Marilyn Manson and schoolroom shootings, when twisted, gun-toting teens would claim the Devil made them do it. All of which seems to beg a question: If the Devil is so damned powerful, how come he can't even hold together one little church?

Michael Aquino began corresponding with Anton LaVey while a psychological operative for the U.S. Army, stationed in the jungles of Vietnam. Aquino returned to the States and was soon made a high-ranking priest and editor of the church's Cloven Hoof newsletter. His distinctive appearance -- he sported a prominent widow's peak and darkly accented eyebrows -- was further enhanced by a small 666 tattooed on his scalp.

As the years passed, Aquino grew more and more frustrated by LaVey's policies. In Aquino's eyes, LaVey had always refused to believe in Satan as an actual supernatural being. Now, the high priest was selling priesthoods in the church for cold cash. This undermined the true purpose of Satanism, Aquino thought, and reinforced the reputation of the church as a farcical sideshow.

In 1975, Aquino left with many church members and priests (some say 28, he claims 100) to form the Temple of Set, a tightly organized religion that revolved around an Egyptian deity on whom the Hebraic Satan supposedly was based.

Church of Satan members snort at Aquino's accusations, and describe the detail-oriented Aquino as emblematic of the type of person Anton LaVey was more than happy to get rid of.

An Oregon painter and sculptor who goes by the name Rex Church is one of the oldest and highest-ranking officials in the Church of Satan. To him, Aquino is inconsequential. "This guy's greatest curse was that Anton LaVey completely ignored him," Church maintains. "And he couldn't stand that. Even to this day."

While declaring the Church of Satan extinct, Aquino has kept an abnormally keen interest in the life of Anton LaVey. His own biographical history of LaVey, which he mails out to interested parties, runs to more than 800 pages.

"My estrangement from Anton LaVey caused me intense personal pain," Aquino writes. "For six years I had regarded him as a friend, mentor, and ultimately 'Devil-father' -- a bond of affection and respect clearly as profound and meaningful to him as to me. That an impasse of principles should have brought about the destruction of this bond, replacing it with an almost pathological hatred on his part and an impatient exasperation on mine, seemed the harshest of ironies."

Anton LaVey's daughter Zeena, now 35, is sultry and erudite, and, like her father, stubborn as a goat. She is also his cruelest critic.

The platinum blonde had an unusual childhood, to say the least. She was baptized in a satanic ceremony at age 3 and had given birth to a son before she was old enough to drive. In the mid-1980s, when she was in her early twenties, she began acting as high priestess and spokeswoman for the church, appearing on many talk shows and contributing a new introduction for a reprint of her father's book "The Satanic Witch." She considered a career in Hollywood. It seemed she might succeed her father as leader of the religion, but in 1990 she renounced all association with the church and LaVey.

"While I have no regrets in my battle with the forces of ignorance, and my own unswerving dedication of my religion has only grown," she wrote in a letter to Michael Aquino, "I could no longer defend such an ungrateful and unworthy individual as the so-called Black Pope. . . . The cosmic cards are stacked against him."

After her father's death, Zeena and her husband, Nikolas Schreck, now both priests in the Temple of Set, prepared a volatile document called "Anton LaVey: Legend and Reality." The screed is most persuasive when it refers to the research of Lawrence Wright, a veteran reporter for Texas Monthly and the New Yorker who investigated LaVey's life in 1991.

Wright specialized in writing about American religions. On assignment for Rolling Stone to profile LaVey, Wright discovered a host of inconsistencies in the legend LaVey had woven around himself. The reporter was unable to confirm, among other claims, Anton LaVey's rendezvous with Marilyn Monroe, his Clyde Beatty circus affiliation, his job as a police photographer, or the existence of any ballet symphony that LaVey might have played for.

Wright did document that LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey. His parents were Mike and Gertrude, who moved from Chicago to the Bay Area, where his father worked as a liquor distributor. And he was definitely not wealthy. According to 1962 divorce paperwork, Anton LaVey's sole income at that time was the $ 29.91 a week he earned playing organ at the Lost Weekend club in San Francisco.

Speaking from his home in Texas, Wright says he found LaVey intriguing, but was stunned at the blatant embellishments: "Being such a conspicuous and widely hated figure as he was, it surprised the hell out of me that nobody'd ever checked up on him. He had gotten very careless. When I met him, he had been essentially gulling journalists for years, without any consequences."

Wright recalls that the Church of Satan appeared to be largely finished as an organization even by 1991. "Whatever it had been in the past, it certainly wasn't when I went to meet him," he says. "I think he was very glad to meet my expense account."

LaVey's daughter Zeena combines Wright's conclusions with Aquino's findings and her own investigations to list some blistering allegations about her father. For instance, she says, the infamous black house on California Street was not a former brothel at all, but merely the home of LaVey's parents, who transferred ownership to him and his then-wife Diane in 1971.

The myth-busting continues: "The Satanic Bible" was conceived by Avon Books to cash in on the occult faddism of the 1960s, and LaVey paraphrased much of it from books by Aleister Crowley and Ayn Rand, and an obscure 1896 work, "Might Is Right."

According to an interview with the original producer of the film "Rosemary's Baby," LaVey was not technical adviser, as he claimed, and not a single member of the cast or crew has ever mentioned LaVey's involvement. The church's boast of having hundreds of thousands of members was wildly exaggerated; membership was never more than 300.

And LaVey's supposed affair with Jayne Mansfield was a stunt arranged by publicists.

When it comes to debunking her father, Zeena spares not a single grisly detail. She insists that he forced many of his female disciples into prostitution. She even attempts to discredit his reputation as an animal lover, describing one night from her childhood when she woke to discover LaVey beating the bloodied face of her German shepherd puppy with a board.

And as a final anti-tribute to her father, the day after his death, Zeena Schreck appeared on Bob Larson's radio program, a daily religious broadcast syndicated nationwide from Denver.

Larson figures into the Church of Satan in an odd way. For years, he has boosted his ratings by inviting its members onto his programs. In 1995, he even hosted a Satanic Summit, flying several priests to Denver for a series of one-on-one television interviews. Larson's debates with Satanists have served both to scare his Christian audience and to promote the Church of Satan, which tapes the same programs and distributes copies for its own use.

Zeena Schreck had been a frequent guest on Larson's show. On the day after her father died, she took to the air once again, this time giving Larson's listeners a startling bit of information: She had performed a ritual and put a death curse on her father, and it had finally killed him.

Despite the legal wrangling over the LaVey estate and the almost ritualistic attacks of detractors, the Church of Satan's governing Council of Nine remains supremely confident of the organization's future. They are also supremely dismissive of his daughter Zeena.

"She's an ass," declares Jeff Nagy, a Stockton, Calif., businessman and Church of Satan priest. Like many in the church, Nagy believes Zeena turned on LaVey in hopes of making herself famous. "He was definitely saddened by it, don't let anybody kid you. That's flesh and blood."

Church members contend it will take more than negative publicity and the death of the founder to derail the 32-year momentum of Anton LaVey. Los Angeles rock poster artist Chris "Coop" Cooper, himself a priest, insists that as long as LaVey's books are still in print, the religion will never die: "All that 'Who's gonna take over?' Honestly, who cares? I really don't think that's important. It's a portable feast, man. All you have to do is to go to B. Dalton's and buy 'The Satanic Bible.' It's all there."

But simple realities -- financial and otherwise -- suggest the Church of Satan may be headed south, so to speak.

"There's no future for that church," journalist Lawrence Wright says. "Unless some other person comes along who can spin out the same kind of charisma that LaVey was able to do."

That someone, many church officials hope, will be LaVey's companion and biographer, Blanche Barton.

The black Victorian stands out as if it were the Addams Family mansion, a rude interruption in the rows of pastel-colored homes that are its neighbors. An eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, intended to discourage vandals, seals the house from the sidewalk. The windows are completely shuttered.

Since 1993 the home has been owned by hotelier Donald Werby, a longtime LaVey friend from the old days of the Magic Circle. Werby paid $ 240,000 for the building as part of LaVey's bankruptcy arrangement; the money was used to satisfy a divorce settlement of nearly a half million dollars.

In a city that cherishes its eccentric tradition, the structure may have value as a historical landmark. Rumors have circulated that church priest Marilyn Manson might purchase the building to preserve its legacy, but they remain unconfirmed. To church members, the black house constitutes a shrine, a monument of ultimate religious rebellion.

On the local real estate market, though, the black house is just a dump.

According to court documents, the 1905 building has deteriorated beyond repair. It has no heat. All plumbing and wiring is original and substandard. The owner's representative informs potential buyers that renovation is out of the question. It's more cost-effective to demolish the house and build something new.

But the Black Pope's home is not history yet. On a recent Friday evening, Blanche Barton answers the door and ushers a visitor into the former living room, long since converted into a satanic ritual chamber. Under a blood-red ceiling are pieces of antique furniture, including a grand piano, a church organ, a coffin and a rocking chair that supposedly belonged to Rasputin. The brick fireplace altar, upon which nude women once reclined, now displays a small photograph of Anton LaVey. It seems a shame that the occult artifacts and black walls and the strange energy that emanates from them could soon be leveled.

Barton offers a sofa and sits in a chair, reportedly once owned by Benjamin Franklin. Wearing a small Baphomet pin on her white blouse, she appears as relaxed as any mother of an energetic 4-year-old can be.

She says she discovered "The Satanic Bible" as a teenager living in San Diego, and kept it in mind through college. She met Anton LaVey while vacationing in the Bay Area with her family in 1984 and, she says, has been with him and the church ever since.

Court documents list Karla LaVey as a resident of the house, but Barton says Karla recently moved out, and she would rather not discuss it any further.

On the efforts of Michael Aquino and Zeena Schreck to discredit LaVey, Barton can only chuckle: "All you can really do is laugh at them. It's what the Doctor used to call 'satanic dismay.' "

Blanche Barton learned from the best, and she insists the Church of Satan is here to stay. And it's hard not to believe her. God knows, we'll always need the Devil -- if not as a scapegoat and excuse, then as something to strike fear in sinners' hearts.

Jack Boulware is a staff writer for SF Weekly, where a version of this article originally appeared.

GRAPHIC: PH,,JAY BALKESBERG; PH,,SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/BRANT WARD; PH,, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/LIZ HAFALIA; PH,,ANTHONY PIDGEON

, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan: "No religion had ever been based on man's carnal needs or his fleshly pursuits." Clockwise from top: Karla LaVey holds a wax statue of her father at a news conference announcing his death; Anton LaVey at the organ; LaVey in 1986; the Church of Satan headquarters; and LaVey's "Satanic Bible."

LOAD-DATE: August 30, 1998

Red Dawn!

2005-09-20T00:42:00.000-05:00

Here's link to the Red Dawn trailer I tried and failed to show in class last week. Below you should see a couple of alternate poster images for this most cretinous piece of 80s neo-Cold War schlock.

Date of the Columbine massacre

2005-09-15T17:39:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to clear up a fact that was disputed in class today. The Columbine massacre was indeed on April 20, 1999, the day after my younger son was born, as I said. The attack probably was originally scheduled for April 19, but the choice of date may or may not have been related to the Waco/OKC anniversary. The Hitler's birthday suggestion for April 20 has also been made, but it is also just a suggestion.

9/11 conspiracy video: "Pentagon strike"

2005-09-15T12:30:00.000-05:00

Steve Schuckmann from our class has helpfully supplied me with the link to the 9/11 conspiracy video everyone but me has apparently seen. (Click the title of the post to access it directly.) It's very professionally done, with the appropriate jarring cuts and an appropriately disquieting industrial/techno soundtrack. At the same time, the presentation pulls the usual conspiracy theory tricks, offering a particularly puzzling* example of the provocation motif and trying to sow doubt through the use of early, conflicting news reports and superficially mysterious photos and eyewitness accounts that rely on the uninformed person's "common sense" (Ohmygod, where are the wings?) to mislead them. There is a lot of emphasis on what people think they saw and heard. How many people have heard or seen a commercial jet flying full speed a few yards off the ground? I am guessing not many.

Do look at the video if you haven't seen it, but then also read the "Urban Legends Reference Page" entry on this theory. Here is the beginning and the end:

The notion that the Pentagon was not damaged by terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and crashed it into the military office complex, but that the whole affair was staged by the U.S. government, has been promulgated by French author Thierry Meyssan in his book, The Frightening Fraud. Meyssan offers no real explanation for what did cause the extensive damage to the Pentagon, asserting only that Flight 77 did not exist, no plane crashed into the Pentagon, and that "the American government is lying."

Unfortunately, the appeal of conspiracy theories has resulted in widespread dissemination of Meyssan's "theory" in France and the USA, particularly in web sites that mirror his work. As Le Nouvel Observateur noted: "This theory suits everyone - there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality." . . .

Update: A video presentation unleashed on the Internet in August 2004 rehashes the same conspiracy claims. It can be found at a number of locations, including:

http://www.elchulo.net/files/pentagon.swf
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sperna/omgkool.swf
http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php

Please do read the whole, very detailed entry if you find the video convincing.

*I say puzzling because if the idea was to motivate the Iraq war, which Rumsfeld was arguing for as early as 9/12/01, I would have thought that framing some actual Iraqis, rather than a bunch of Saudis, would have been the better plan.

Food for thought: The catastrophe that walks like a man

2005-09-15T09:58:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE: I will be happy to remove this post if people in the class would prefer that. This blog appears on my personal webspace, so this obviously represents only my sense of humor and not the opinion of MU or the History Department.]

If may be permitted to indulge in a tiny bit of third-hand political commentary, I have to agree with Eric Alterman, the writer of the blog I took this from, about Bill Maher and the fact that this is too good not to post:

I’ve never been much of a fan of Bill Maher, he who helped spawn Ann Coulter, but this is so good I can’t help it:

Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's speaking to you. Mission accomplished.

Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're saying: there's so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.

On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.'

On a related note, check out this photo of President Bush taking notes at his recent UN appearance, and look closely to see what important matters of state he is writing about, to the Secretary of State. This photo is real. Click here for a version where you can more easily read the note.

Conspiracy theory, Tony Blair, and the Iraq War

2005-09-14T09:56:00.000-05:00

For those of us puzzled about British Prime Minister Tony Blair's motivations for joining the Iraq War, conspiracy theory now has an answer: "Jews and Freemasons controlled war on Iraq, says No 10 adviser." The British newspaper the Telegraph reports that the adviser in question is one Ahmad (born Martin) Thomson, a lawyer and convert to Islam who wrote a 1994 book, The Next World Order, claiming that the Holocaust never happened among many other offensive remarks. The liberal blogger Billmon has more, including a quotation from Thomson's book.

Even More Cattle Mutilation

2005-09-14T01:17:00.000-05:00

Well, the student of conspiracy theory's work is never done. Apparently I completely missed a mid-90s scare (another one that became an X-Files episode) blaming cattle mutilations on the legendary bloodsucking Mexican monsters, the Chupacabras. Chupacabras are sort of a cross between vampires and Bigfoot. Click the link and read all about it.

Those who don't buy the Chupacabra theory can turn to the NIDS research on cattle mutilation mentioned in class, and find the specific study I showed, making the unexpected link between cattle mutilations and Alzheimer's, here.

After class Tuesday, a student told me a great cattle mutilation story from an actual Missouri farm. I hope he will post that as a comment. [Update: Thanks, Jared]

Reading for week of Sept. 13-15

2005-09-14T00:13:00.000-05:00

You should still be working through the second admittedly rather lengthy set of readings. We won't be ready to move on to the next set until next Thursday (Sept. 22) at the earliest.

AIDS hoax crusader Christine Maggiore

2005-09-12T16:05:00.000-05:00

In answer some of the questions last Thursday about the anti-HIV campaigner Christine Maggiore, here are a few more facts and links:

She first test positive in 1992, and is apparently still going strong today. She published a book in 2000, What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong?, and her filmmaker husband has made a documentary about her,
Documentary: "The Other Side of AIDS," featuring, among other celebrity supporters, the band Foo Fighters. I have pasted the skeptical Newsweek story seen in class below, but more positive coverage of Maggiore can be found at Virus Myth and Gadfly. I haven't been able to determine Maggiore's status as of right now, but she was apparently diagnosed with actual AIDS in 2002, a development she tries to 'splain away here.

The Foo Fighters apparently have other conspiracy interests besides AIDS denial. They recently played a concert at Roswell's abandoned Air Force base and their band name is taken from the term used by World War II fighter pilots for strange balls of light they saw in the skies over the Pacific.

From Newsweek online, 2000:

The HIV Disbelievers

Christine Maggiore is a different kind of AIDS activist—one who tells people to forget safe sex and stop taking their lifesaving drugs. Why?

One sweltering California afternoon a few weeks ago, Christine Maggiore was sitting in her cramped office, still jet-lagged from the long flight home from South Africa, where she’d attended the International AIDS Conference.

SHE HADN’T YET found time to answer the “hundreds and hundreds, perhaps literally thousands” of e-mail messages she’d received from people she’d met there who were looking for AIDS literature or doctor referrals, or simply wanting to pat her on the back. “All your work and dedication is appreciated!!!” a typical message declared. She doesn’t know when she’ll find time to catch up—her whole life is behind schedule because of her AIDS work. “My fiancé and I have been trying to find time to get married for years!” she says.

But Maggiore, who heads Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives in Burbank, Calif., is not your typical AIDS activist. In South Africa, some scientists spit nasty epithets at her. Protesters marching outside the meeting hall threatened to plug her and her galvanized followers with bullets. Why? Because Maggiore takes the strange contrarian stance that HIV, which has been blamed in the deaths of 18.8 million people worldwide, doesn’t cause AIDS at all. She exhorts people to stop taking their medications and stop worrying about spreading their virus.

Today Maggiore is the most prominent foe of what she calls “the HIV equals AIDS equals death paradigm,” having sold or given away 28,500 copies of her self-published booklet since 1995, in addition to the copies in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. She founded Alive & Well, which has spun off chapters around the globe and is affiliated with dozens of like-minded groups representing perhaps tens of thousands of followers.

Their message has resonated among a number of gay men who, exhausted by 20 years of medical vigilance and daily toxic drug regimens, are increasingly receptive to Maggiore’s exhortation to “live in wellness... without fear of AIDS.” And they have reinvigorated long-simmering AIDS conspiracy theories. According to a 1995 survey of 1,000 African-American churchgoers, one third believed HIV was concocted by the government for racial genocide. When she spoke before a crowded room in Harlem in 1998, spellbound members of the audience likened her to the abolitionists, interrupting her with cries of “John Brown lives!”

“If you told me five years ago I would be promoting the notion that HIV does not cause AIDS, I would have said you were nuts. I believed adamantly that HIV was a killer and these drugs were saving lives,” says Michael Bellefountaine, 34, a friend of Maggiore’s who decided against taking anti-HIV medication years ago. Now he attributes his survival to being drug-free. Last month he attended a protest in San Francisco and chanted, “HIV is a lie! It’s toxic pills that made them die!”

AIDS educators already hold Maggiore and her acolytes responsible for an upswing in new infections. San Francisco authorities just announced that new HIV cases in 1999 were nearly twice as high as in 1997. “People are focusing on the wrong thing. They’re focusing on conspiracies rather than protecting themselves, rather than getting tested and seeking out appropriate care and treatment,” says Stephen Thomas, who directs the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Minority Health.

HIV renegades sometimes seem as if their main goal is mayhem, not constructive discourse. For instance, the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP, once a major force lobbying for more money for AIDS research, is now run by dissenters who stage protests against other AIDS leaders—regularly bathing them in cat-box litter or spit. On Aug. 9, police charged two ACT UP members with assault and battery for allegedly striking city health department director Mitchell H. Katz and covering him with Silly String during a public meeting. Similar antics now prevail among a half-dozen ACT UP branches. “They’re crazy,” says Larry Kramer, who founded ACT UP in 1987. “They’re undoing all we’ve fought for.”

Picking over a black-bean wrap at her kitchen counter recently, Maggiore described herself simply as a person who asks questions others are overlooking. The fact that she provokes hostility only emboldens her. She sees only intolerance and recalcitrance among her detractors—they “smack of parental authority and religious authority,” she said. Her brother Steven, 41, calls her a modern-day Copernicus.

But she soon made it clear that her disregard for HIV is not just an intellectual gambit when her talkative 3-year-old son, Charlie, wandered into the kitchen after a midday nap. She talked about how she conceived him naturally and gave birth without drugs routinely given to prevent transmission. She continues to breast-feed him today, according to the family’s pediatrician. Her family supports her in this, even though HIV can be transmitted through breast milk and judges have charged mothers in similar cases with child endangerment.

Maggiore and Scovill, Charlie’s father, say they’ve never been curious to test the child for HIV (Scovill does not know his own status). Their pediatrician is not as sanguine. “I would not be opposed to testing his blood,” admits Dr. Paul Fleiss, who says the boy has been very healthy. “But she is.”

“He’s a perfectly healthy little boy,” says Scovill, bending to offer his son a macaroon. Charlie was skeptical. “They’re really good,” the father insisted patiently. “And for some reason they decrease viral load!” With that, both parents had a good laugh at the silly AIDS goblin. Such is the power of belief.

© 2000 Newsweek, Inc.

Change of commenting system

2005-09-12T11:29:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the old comments doing this. There were only a few, but I was sad to see a couple of them go. The new system has a few more features, including permanent links in comments so that they can be found again. As before, students in the class should use their real names or at least something recognizable when commenting.