The Conspiracy “Theory” Conspiracy Revisited

The Conspiracy “Theory” Conspiracy

Former Communist Richard Hofstadter, author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, became one of America’s premier establishment “court historians.” He was largely responsible for forging the disingenuous concept of the establishment (academics, journalists, politicians) to marginalize and demonize their intellectual opponents as “paranoid” or “conspiracy theorists” rather than engage in honest and open debate, as if the entire world had become Trotskyites to be treated with derision and contempt.

Although he formally left the Communist Party, Hofstadter continued his life-long hatred of capitalism. His disgraceful legacy of vilification, smear, and attack continues with his ideological descendants.

“Court historians” are the intellectual bodyguards of the State. They shape and defend the “official line” or interpretation on the State’s wars, its presidential regimes, or other key historical events and public policies. As a result, they enjoy high esteem and recognition in the mainstream media and academia. As defenders of the status quo, they frequently attack and label their critics as “conspiracy theorists,” “revisionists,” “isolationists,” “appeasers,” “anti-vaxers,” “racists,” “anti-intellectuals,” or other boogie men, rather than engage in civil discourse or discussion.

As the late economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard noted:

“All States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative burden upon the rest of society. Since its rule is exploitative and parasitic, the State must purchase the alliance of a group of “Court Intellectuals,” whose task is to bamboozle the public into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State. The Court Intellectuals have their work cut out for them. In exchange for their continuing work of apologetics and bamboozlement, the Court Intellectuals win their place as junior partners in the power, prestige, and loot extracted by the State apparatus from the deluded public. The noble task of Revisionism is to de-bamboozle: to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals, and to present to the public the true history of the motivation, the nature, and the consequences of State activity. By working past the fog of State deception to penetrate to the truth, to the reality behind the false appearances, the Revisionist works to delegitimize, to desanctify, the State in the eyes of the previously deceived public.”

The conceptualization of (and fruitless efforts to debunk) “conspiracy theories” has a long history in America. This vilification continues today.

Ironically sometimes elaborate faux “conspiracy theories” such as Russiagate/Spygate are packaged by the compliant and complacent regime media itself as disinformation or cover-ups for nefarious deep state criminality. That has certainly been the spurious narrative of the Warren Commission and its defense by the establishment media.

Here is CIA Document 1035-960 to this effect. It is often cited as the weaponized directive opening widespread use of the pejorative marginalizing term “conspiracy theorist” to discredit and vilify persons investigating government malfeasance, corruption, and state acts of terrorism against its citizens.

The 1968 Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by the distinguished Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn, is one of the most lauded, respected and influential studies of the American Revolution published in the 20th Century. It made a seminal impact upon Murray Rothbard in composing his five volume series on the Revolution, Conceived in Liberty.

(See “A Note on Conspiracy,” beginning on page 148 in this online text of Bailyn’s masterwork).

The United States of America was born or conceived in a sophisticated conspiracy theory put forth by the Founders. Just read the Declaration of Independence.

The great historian Dr. Alfred W. McCoy elucidates on this theme of how conventional academic court historians have treated the State, neglecting its true exploitative and criminal nature:

“If the fruits of this fusion are so rich, one might ask why scholars have been so slow to incorporate the criminal and covert margins of society into the history of modern nation-states. Here we can only speculate. Most fundamentally, historians need sources to study. History is thus shaped to a surprising degree by the randomness of the documents that survive war and revolution, fire and flood. Armies usually preserve their papers for posterity while police and secret services tend to conceal or destroy their records. Military histories can quote first-person sources, battlefield dispatches, and staff studies while the far fewer police histories often rely on secondary sources, many of a critical or even adversarial provenance such as court cases or commissions of inquiry. Military history, with its heroism and accessible archives, fills academic journals and library shelves with tens of thousands of volumes; the police, with their sordid aura and sealed dossiers, are thus much less studied.

“By ignoring the substantial role of criminal syndicates and clandestine services in modern political life, academic historians have often relegated these unseemly matters, by default, to the lower registers of vocational education or popular entertainment in film, pulp fiction, or tabloid expose’. Soldiers and sailors are integral to national narratives; police, prison guards, syndicate bosses, informers, and spies are much less so. Workers who strike are carefully studied, but the private detectives and secret services that plot their defeat and even their deaths receive brief mention at best. In the writing of national history, society’s shadowy interstices and those who inhabit them often remain obscure.

“Certainly, there are serious scholarly studies of the criminal and clandestine milieu. In recent years, as the study of globalization and its borderlands has drawn social scientists to the transnational trafficking in illicit goods, their insights have been hampered by what the editors of a seminal volume call “the difficulty of thinking outside the conceptual and material grasp of the modern state.” Even this research is still, at this writing, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of dissertations, monographs, histories, textbooks, documentaries, monuments, and museums whose unstated, unwilling air is to affirm state authority. Through the sum of these endeavors, historians have encircled the nation-state with a sacral barrier that precludes cognizance of its profane margins: systemic violence, institutional corruption, extralegal security operations, and, most important, syndicated vice. Many social historians have escaped the nation-state’s hegemony through studies of popular movements among workers, women, or minorities. But few have looked at the state long and hard from its sordid underside – an interstice that is the sum of addiction, avarice, blackmail, cowardice, scandal, torture, venality, and violence. As acolytes of the nation-state, conventional historians turn away from such a disconcerting dimension and often adopt a positive, at times celebratory view of their polity that discourages consideration of the influence of the informal on the formal, the criminal on the powerful, or, in some cases, the colonized on the colonizer.

“Understanding how the state operates is a problem of critical import for ordinary citizens who have to function in a social rather than represented reality. These topics omitted from formal scholarship have become subjects of endless popular fascination in fiction and films, from D. W. Griffith’s racist epic Birth of a Nation to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Academic historians usually find their carefully crafted monographs read in graduate seminars with perhaps a dozen students, while historical films about America’s dark underside have become a revisionist curriculum for a worldwide audience of millions.”