All Embracing But Underwhelming…

‘Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes,’ (First Edition) Jonathan Vanakin, Paragon House Publishers, New York, 1991, ISBN 1-55778-384-5

(Journalistic survey of contemporary American CTs; first half of the book is critical whilst the second half treats the official view critically.)

p. xii - ‘There is something about America that makes conspiracy theories inevitable. Something that makes them necessary. The word conspiracy derives from Latin roots which translate roughly as “breathing together.” Sounds healthy, but the idea is heresy. In America, the word used to conspiracy theories is “paranoid.” Conspiracies are delusions. Believe in them and you are mentally ill.’

Chapter 1 - Kevin Thornley (author of the Principia Discordia, p. 6) and Lee Harvey Oswald.

p. 24 - Example of the ‘If they can they will’ fallacy - Kenneth F. and his brother James Collier on the News Election Service, the computerised (and privately run) vote tabulating system used in the USA (the Votescam CT)
‘”I don’t know for sure that they’re all connected to one [master computer]. The immutable fact is that if they can do it, they will do it,” Collier explains. “Computers are all linked. If you have a telephone number, you can get into most computers.”’

p. 35 - ‘”The problem with most conspiracy buffs is Americans don’t know much about history, and they don’t understand historical processes. Therefore they come up with simplistic kinds of conspiracies and they don’t understand what the word conspiracy really means,” says LaRouche. “Since I had a philosophical background as a younf mn, I recognized what the problem was. It was philosophical. I always look at these things from a political, philosophical standpoint, rather than how most people look at them. So that takes me to the evidence a little more directly than most people.”
‘LaRouche’s “philosophical background” is like a pair of X-ray specs. It lets him see through the shroud of politics, history, and current affairs to the naked truth, which is an eternal struggle between two philosophies—rationalism (good) and empiricism (evil). Their adherents are united in two opposed conspiracies.
‘LaRouche starts with Kant’s “moral imperative,” that the only moral “maxim” is one that could be formulated as universal law. Stated simply, if an action is not right for everybody, it isn’t right for anybody. Or, to look at it another way, if something is morally right for anyone, then it must be right for everyone. Murder, to take an example, is morally wrong, because “Thou shalt murder” could never be a universal law.’

p. 35-6 - ‘Technology is also morality. As societied become technological, LaRouche believes, they place more cultural value on rational thinking. As they place more value on rationality, they become more moral. Kant says that all moral laws can be discovered through the rational process. LaRouche extrapolates from Kant: Technology is rationality in action; ergo technological development equals moral action.’

p. 36-7 - ‘The nay sayers to thesebrillant ideas, the “pessimists,” are the empiricists|: David Hume, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, Bertrand Russell. They and their philosophical ilk, in LaRouche’s interpretation, base their moral reasoning not on rationality but on experience (empirical facts, hence the term, “empiricism”).
‘Experience is a muddy thing. If we base our moral judgments on our experience, then we’ll confuse things that feel good with things that are good, morally. Empiricst morality, as LaRouche reads it, is governed by “irrational hedonism.”
‘…
‘Thus was born the LaRouchian conspiracy theory. History’s bad guys have been the “irrational hedonists” of empiricism, whose “pessimism” has spawned all of the evils mankind has endured in its nasty, brutish, and, so far, short existence. If their conspiracy succeeds, the human race will plunge into an anarchic abyss. The LaRouchian term is “New Dark Ages.” The tool they’ll use to cast us into darkness, he believes, just may be a nuclear holocaust.’

p. 42-3 - The Grateful Dead as part of the British Intelligence’s Secret Occult Bureau.

p. 44 - LaRouche defines CTs - ‘”Conspiracy essentially means either a common purpose, a common philosophical and practical purpose, or a set of common and conflicting purposes which cause people to work together for common ends as well as conflicting ones,” explains Lyndon LaRouche. “And conspiracy is a general term which can mean a great number of things. One can’t say, ‘There is a conspiracy.’ One has to say, ‘What do you mean by a conspiracy? What Kind?’”’

p. 49 - ‘Most conspiracy theories have their basis, at least, in something undeniably real: assignations, big banks, intelligence agencies, or whatever. With UFO theories, the footing is not so firm. Are they real? Are they a massive hoax? A delusion? If real, what are they? Spaceships from another world? Projections of the collective unconsciousness? Sinister and supersecret government experiments?
‘Whatever they are, or aren’t, UFOs always lead into the idea of conspiracy. While there are many serious students of, say, CIA malfeasance, who are not conspiracy theorists, anyone who approaches the UFO “problem” finds a conspiracy of some sort.’

p. 51 - ‘Cliches to the contrary, most conspiracy theories are born not of “paranoia” but from a kind of hopefull curiosity. Conspiracy theorists usually get started by trying to understand the inequities and horrors that have fogged the human spectacle for all recorded time. Why are things this way, they wonder, and why must they be this way?’
(Or, to make a more modest claim, they wonder why things are the way they are and are confronted by an official view that either doesn’t ring true or goes against their expectations.)

p. 52 - ‘”My idea [William Bramley, author of ‘The Gods of Eden,’ an Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis book] was to go through history and see where you have people profiting and benefiting from war who were not directly involved in it. Just do a sociological study of that problem and maybe offer a solution to resolving it—some way to take profit out of it.”
‘Applying the intellect of future lawyer, Bramley figured out that all wars must have some motive. There had to be something in it for someone. He quickly shot down his own preliminary hypothesis, however. He came across numerous wars in history that appeared to be motivated by no tangible objectives.’
(Where you find a CT because your assumptions don’t fit the data.)

p. 69 - The claim that CTs are not aberrations in American history but are the basis of American history (Actually, this is the claim of Chapter 5 in general).

p. 78 - Vanakin highlights a ‘packaging rather than product’ issue between fanatic right-wing CTs and conservative CTs; the extremists think the conspiracy is being pushed upon us deliberately whilst conservatives are worried by a general trend of outside values becoming mainstream with a few instances of a private agenda being involved.

p. 85 - In America there is a legal definition of Conspiracies.

p. 85 - Vanakin argues that the left/right distinction of CTs is meaningless because when you look at the whole picture (say, governmental operations) what you see is power play by powerful individuals or inquiries, all of which generate CTs and all of which can be either left or right.

p. 111 - Warren Report skeptic Edward Jay Epstein takes issue with Jim Garrison’s alleged ploy of making unsubstantiated allegations, claiming that the evidence was in the hands of the CIA who, when they don’t then provide said evidence is then said to be evidence of a cover-up, or second order conspiracy which then allowed Garrison to cite nonexistent evidence to support virtually any charge.

p. 114 - Some think that Garrison’s investigation of the JFK case, which ended with people decrying so-called government conspiracies, was a disinformation ploy by the government to discredit a conspiratorial explanation of JFKs death.

p. 120 - ‘Conspiracy theories should be approached skeptically. But there’s no fairness. Skepticism should apply equally to official and unofficial information.’

p. 124 - ‘As difficult as it would be to maintain a massive conspiracy to rule the world, a limited conspiracy against one person is easy to assemble. Yet eliminating one person can be a most powerful means of controlling a whole society of people. If President John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, this doesn’t necessarily mean there is a permanent, global conspiracy. But killing Kennedy was a good step toward ruling America, which rules a large part of the world.’
(Critics would argue that killing Kennedy would lead to a massive conspiracy that would be hard to hide but theorists would argue that is precisely the evidence they keep coming up with, but the growing conspiracy and public acceptance of official views keeps such evidence out of the spotlight.)

p. 125 - ‘The official mythology of American politics prefers a combination of two different theories of history. For lack of better labels, let’s call them the “process” and the “accident” theory.
‘The “accident” theory gave us the “lone nut” political assassin. If all assassinations are merely the work of crazies acting on their own, then there is no such thing as a coup d’état. When lone nuts appear, it’s the fault of pyschology, not politics. Such random occurrences may cause a few policies to shift, but they don’t affect the American system.’
…
‘The “lone nut” doctrine is dogmas, and assassination conspiracy theories heresy, because madmen have no political motives. “Lone nuts” strip assassinations of their meaning: Violence can change the American system.’

p. 128 - ‘It’s a logical fallacy to assume that outcome and motive are necessarily the same.’

p. 136 - ‘If the Kennedy assassination is a conspiracy, however, it suggests that the various factions of the power structure are capable of coalescing into a “central conspiracy” if the need arises. Once that possibility is granted, the difference between a faceless corporate machine and a conspiracy to run the country becomes merely semantic.’

p. 156 - ‘My reaction, when I first began research assassination conspiracy theories, was probably a typical one: “Doesn’t anybody just die?” I’ve heard conspiracy theories for every dead person from J. Edgar Hoover to Lenny Bruce. My instinctive reaction was always if not to scoff, then at least to look askance. But far be it from me to dismiss any theory out of hand. I’ve only been able to study a few, and most in less then the detail I would have liked. Inevitably, when I do a little digging, I find enough strange circumstances to make me dizzy.
‘The average human mind can handle a few conspiracies; the concept of conspiracies by the hundreds is harder to accept. Still there are premises; People are killed, and their deaths lead to political changes. These political changes benefit a few people at the expense of the great many. There are murky circumstances around many such deaths. The conclusion one can draw from those premises often cross the threshold of belief.
‘Assassination conspiracy theories are easy to write off as fantasy conceived in trauma—the desperate imagination of disappointed idealists grasping for reasons why their dreams are as dead as their heroes. But there is an upsetting logic to those theories. The dyspepsia is worsened by the unreal quality of “official versions” usually exude. Violence, murder, war and terror have restructured America’s social and political order over the past three decades.
‘Something is terribly wrong. No one can be blamed for asking what it is. We can blame only ourselves when we expect the answer to comfort us, and it does not.’

p. 172 - On secret societies (and in reference to the CIA) - ‘Secret societies stay secret by draping their affairs in myth. Some of the myth is beyond their control. Whenever something is secret, people are going to speculate about it. Some of the myth is deliberately concocted by the secret society itself, to mystify the uninitiated, or terrorize them. With all secret societies, it is difficult to demarcate where the myths end and truth begins. Often, the two are commingled.’

p. 183 - ‘Part of that problem of perception has to do with the American definition of “terrorism.” Somehow, terrorism has come to be firmly linked to left-wing insurgency, as if right-wing terrorism did not exist. Though the idea of terrorism as a leftish phenomena is certainly perpetuated by official sources, to say simply that the media or government propaganda invented this definition and made it stick would be too facile.
‘The meaning of terrorism comes down to the meaning of “us” and “them.” “They” are the poor, blacks, foreigners, and so on. “We” are the American mainstream, white folks with a little money in our pockets. The reason the “we” seem so eager to accept that terrorism is a threat only from the extreme left is that the extreme left threatens “us.” Since communism was concocted, Americans have been indoctrinated with the notion that the Left wants to take away all the things we treasure so deeply. The right wing, conversely and more comfortingly, is primarily concerned with them—and directs its violence away from us. Right-wing terrorism isn’t very terrifying because it doesn’t terrorize us.
‘At least, that’s how we’ve been instructed to think.’

p. 190 - ‘Right and left lose their meaning in the swirling eddy of global insurrection. The connections are dazzling. They set the legend of the CIA in the same light as legends of secret societies from the Illuminati to the Hashishim to the Freemasons. They are committed not to national aims, nor to explicitly ideological ones. They are devoted only to their own subversive, secret agenda.’

p. 216-7 - ‘The confluence of interests between the “Yankees” [the Eastern Establishment (Wall Street, et al)] and the “cowboys” [the Southwestern Establishment (Texas Oil barons, et al)] comes down to one thing: power. Which is more or less synonymous with money, because money is the most important tool with which humans control other humans. The “Establishment” conspiracy theory sees the raw pursuit of power by the wealthy as the only real motive for the conspiracy. …
‘The difference becomes almost semantic as the conspiracy theory becomes increasingly all consuming. The idea of powerful elites who conspire to control the masses is what Neil Wilgus calls the “Illuminoid” theory, the theory that sees secret societies behind all the major events of political history.’

p. 218 - ‘Contemporary American conspiracy theories tend to downplay the secret society angle. European conspiracy theories pay secret societies much more attention.’

p. 236 - ‘Of course, there can be no single, unimpeded conspiracy over thousands of years. But there have been secret societies for that long, and many of them claim a heritage going back that far. There’s a feeling, in secrecy, of being different, of being in possession of something sacred no one else has. There is a feeling of power. That is why secret societies, though ostensibly religious, mystical, or simply social, are by their nature political.’

p. 252 - ‘In most contemporary American conspiracy theories, there is no “single central conspiracy.” Instead, there is power and powerful people who will do anything to keep their power. Power is a fact of life in America, but most Americans are far removed from it. Secrecy is power’s chief tool. Government seems distant, yet somehow domineering. We are increasingly isolated from one another—stuck in front of computer and television screens, prisoners behind windshields. There is a frustrating feeling of disconnection to modern American life. Are our lives really absurd? Or are we just being deceived? Conspiracy theories try to put the pieces back together.’

p. 258 - ‘What I’ve come to believe is that the seeming “paranoia” of conspiracy theorists is not necessarily the result of some underlying mental dysfunction or of stupidity. The conspiracy theorists I interviewed for this book, with almost no exceptions, were nothing if not highly intelligent.
‘The dysfunction is with American society, maybe even civilization as a whole. The structure of civilization itself requires mass adherence to faith in the institutions that built civilization and made it run. The institutions are innumerable: science, politics, communications, education, arts, government, business—it all comes down to a faith in authority.
‘We have to believe the institutions are functioning in our best interests. We have to believe what the people within those institutions assure us to be true. If not, we’re sentenced to a life on the edge, filled with frustration, indignation, confusion, and perhaps what society calls insanity.
‘The conspiracy theorists I encountered question our authorities, and, because they do, they skirt the fringes of society.’

p. 259 - ‘To understand conspiracy theorists, I now believe, is to first understand that civilization is a conspiracy against reality.’