-Caveat Lector- Vol. 12, No. 19 September 16, 1996 More on Conspiracy http://thenewamerican.com/focus/conspiracy/ Conspiracy: Where's the Proof? by William F. Jasper Is there any hard evidence of an Insider plot for a "new world order"? Conspiracy theory is doing America real harm. Long incubating underground, it has grown into the greatest enslaver of human minds since communism. It irrationalizes thinking on every issue. It kills. It turns millions of Americans against their own country. It undermines foreign policy by vilifying our government's every effort. - Ira Straus Christian Science Monitor "What is the milieu in which criminal groups of 'freemen' and Oklahoma City bombers grow?" asked Ira Straus in a May 13, 1996 op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor. His answer: "It is the underworld of conspiracy theory, a subculture in which people share fantasies of fighting heroically against a huge Conspiracy that is taking over the world." The Straus essay, "When Conspiracy Theory Replaces Thought," is subtitled, "The U.S. is threatened by Americans who believe Washington is part of a plot to enslave us in a 'New World Order,'" and it is but one of the latest and most blatant volleys in an ongoing campaign by the establishment media to paint in blackest terms anyone who uses the dread "C" word. Crackpots and False Patriots In his Monitor piece, Straus defines the "problem" further: "For decades, the John Birch Society has spread word of the Conspiracy: The international bankers who pull all the strings. The ones who really control both the Communist conspiracy and the United States government. The Trilateral Commission. The Federal Reserve, which is ruining our money. The Council on Foreign Relations - psst, they're out to destroy the Constitution, take away our guns, and enslave us in a United Nations One-World Communist government. Their code words: 'New World Order.'" According to Straus, who is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, "Once a mind is trapped in the circular logic of conspiracy theory, it rarely finds a way out on its own." And this is a very "dangerous" thing indeed, he assures us, because "crackpots" infected with such "Birchist fantasy" are "capable of blowing up federal buildings." Similar rantings spill out of False Patriots: The Threat of Anti-Government Extremists, a slick, 72-page smear by the Southern Poverty Law Center/Klanwatch, which is widely quoted in the media as an authoritative source on "right-wing" fanatics. "The Patriot movement," claims the SPLC diatribe, "is a potpourri of the American right, from members of the Christian Coalition to the Ku Klux Klan - people united by their hatred of the federal government." After thus employing the most rancid of tactics to unfairly associate everyone to the right of Bill and Hillary with violent KKK racists, the SPLC tract darkly warns: "If America is to be saved, Patriots believe, our government must be destroyed." Like Straus' screeching monitory, the SPLC tirade warns that "Conspiracy theories fuel the [Patriot] movement": theories of a "New World Order," a "United Nations-dominated global government," and "an end to American sovereignty." By now it is a tiresomely familiar theme redundantly shrieked by the usual cacophonous chorus: Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, Louis Freeh, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Anthony Lewis, Molly Ivins, Frank Rich, Morris Dees, the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU, etc. According to the frantic refrains of this querulous choir, those who mention "conspiracy" or oppose the "new world order" and the United Nations share culpability with those terrorists who bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. They are, shrills the choir, "dangerous," "irrational," and "paranoid." Those who take a principled, courageous stand for limited, constitutional government, who seek change through legitimate, honorable means, and who speak out against the abuses and usurpations of big government, are denounced as "anti-government." Drawing the most practiced tactic from their slimy smear arsenal, the "liberals" attempt to silence all opposition and debate by falsely and cowardly tagging their adversaries with "fascist," "racist," "anti-Semite," "Neo-Nazi," "KKK" labels. It is a performance worthy of Lenin, who wrote: "We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us." And the most intense hate, revulsion, and scorn seems always reserved for anti-communists who see conspiracy. Attacks From "Conservatives" The liberal-left, to be sure, holds no monopoly on hysterical antagonism to "conspiracy theory." Many conservatives likewise erupt in paroxysms of pique at the mention of anything that may sound even remotely related to conspiracy. Or they roll their eyes and smirk in ostentatious displays of smug superiority to the poor unsophisticated fools who "fall for grossly simplistic answers to complex problems." Radio maestro Rush Limbaugh epitomizes this type of pseudo-sophisticate. The grand poohbah of broadcast blather and bombast reserves his most vitriolic ridicule for those who express belief in power politics, ruling elites, and the drive for world government, calling them "conspiracy wackos." Engaging in the kind of reductio ad absurdum for which "liberals" are infamous, Limbaugh offers his listeners a "pop quiz": "If Trilateralist A is driving West at 60 miles per hour and Trilateralist B is driving East at 75 miles per hour, how long will it take to control the country?" Or, even more typical of the liberal-left he claims to hate, he fabricates a straw man, falsely attributing positions to those he wishes to discredit, as in his repeated false claim that the John Birch Society has called "[William F.] Buckley a communist." A similar but more highbrow approach is found among conservative intellectuals such as Robert James Bidinotto, a longtime contributor to The Freeman and a lecturer for the respected Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). In a Freeman piece entitled "Conspiracy or Consensus?" Bidinotto takes issue with those who see "deliberate direction" in "a kind of powerful force dragging modern society down," or who "deduce that the world is in the grip of a powerful, malevolently directed conspiracy." "Conspiracy theory" is wrong, Bidinotto explains, because it is based on "false logic," "naïveté," and "explanatory elasticity." "Yes - there is a powerful force dragging society down," he writes. "But that undertow is not an international conspiracy; it's an intellectual consensus. What conspiratorialists fail to appreciate is the power of ideas." Being a "conspiratorialist" who was once (long ago) an unwitting dupe of collectivist ideology and false "intellectual consensus," this writer fully appreciates the "power of ideas." However, what Bidinotto and his fellow "intellectual consensusists" fail to appreciate is the idea of power, and the will to power of evil men - men who combine and conspire to further their evil purposes, often using and promoting a fallacious "intellectual consensus." Yes, there are certifiably "wacko" conspiratorialists out there today promoting a dizzying array of theories about invasions by extraterrestrial creatures, UFO abductions, CIA assassination schemes, papal plots for world domination, Hitler clones in the Brazilian rain forest, etc. But are these any more "wacko" than this offering from Mr. Bidinotto: In the 1950s, the puppeteers of world events were supposedly the "international Communist conspiracy." The conspiracy was centrally directed from Moscow, from which it extended globally like the arms of an octopus. Iron discipline held the conspirators together; highly publicized feuds among various communist nations were merely clever propaganda, meant to lull the West into complacency. Recent Revelations Amazing! Absolutely amazing! Mr. Bidinotto's mocking jab at the supposed anti-communist paranoia and hysteria of the 1950s is an incredibly oddly timed capitulation to the lies, innuendos, and treacherous deceits of the liberal-left - incredibly oddly timed because even many of the arch-avatars of the liberal-left pantheon are today acknowledging as true precisely what anti-communists were saying for decades and what Bidinotto now ridicules. Recently released documents from the Soviet archives and from the files of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) prove (as if more proof were necessary) far more than these charges. The documents released in 1995 from the Soviet archives, published in The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University), and the NSA's "VENONA Project" show, for instance: The American Communist Party (CPUSA) operated a clandestine apparatus called the "Brother-Sun" network which worked directly with Stalin's NKVD to penetrate the Manhattan Project, steal U.S. atom bomb secrets, and pass them to the Soviets. Much of the testimony of Whittaker Chambers about the huge Soviet secret underground apparatus in the U.S. was true. Chambers' credibility had been bitterly disputed by Alger Hiss' supporters for decades. Moscow heavily subsidized the CPUSA in its early years. Millionaire industrialist Armand Hammer laundered Soviet subsidies to the CPUSA. Red "martyrs" Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were indeed Soviet spies and guilty of atomic espionage. As we have said, even many liberals have been forced to acknowledge these truths. In a lengthy article in the Washington Post (of all places) earlier this year, liberal columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman confessed: "The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught." Likewise, ABC correspondent and syndicated columnist Jeff Greenfield has noted: "The problem, of course, was that there were real witches - not in Salem, but in America. That is, there were people who believed that communism was the one true cause … and believed that in serving Moscow by spying on the United States they were serving a 'higher good.'" However, today - as in decades past - American high school and college students are still subjected to the rabidly pro-Marxist, anti-anti-communist propaganda of subversive textbooks. When it comes to reading about communism, the Cold War, and related topics, their resources are still likely to be The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Columbia University Professor Richard Hofstadter; The Politics of Unreason: Right-wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab; The Fear of Conspiracy, by Cornell University Professor David Brion Davis; Danger on the Right, by Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster of the Anti-Defamation League; The Great Fear, by David Caute; and other left-wing fare that has misguided the "intellectual consensus" of the past two generations. Communist Phenomenon Yes, Mr. Bidinotto, there was a communist conspiracy. And there is a communist conspiracy. Communism has been, and remains, the single most dramatically significant phenomenon of our century. It has enslaved billions of souls across our globe and has murdered between 100 million and 300 million. Even if one accepts the notion that "the Soviet Empire disintegrated" (and we do not: see the article on page 59), Communist China, Cuba, North Korea, and other militant "Peoples Republics" continue as before. And why should we now accept the received "wisdom" of Sovietologists, Sinologists, and other so-called "experts" who were terribly, dangerously, obstinately wrong for so many decades? In a 195l decision upholding the convictions of U.S. Communist Party leaders, the U.S. Supreme Court correctly labeled communism "a conspiracy." This was exactly the same conclusion arrived at by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in its comprehensive 1953 report entitled "Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments." In 1956, the House Committee on Un-American Activities issued a 1,997-page document entitled The Communist Conspiracy: Strategy and Tactics of World Communism, which substantiated in meticulous detail the terrible enormity, nature, and deeds of the global communist criminal operation. That same year, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated that in confronting communism, "the individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." But we need not harken only to "right-wing" sources to establish this point. V.I. Lenin himself, in his famous instructions What Is to Be Done?, confirmed with his words what was obvious from his deeds: "According to its form a strong revolutionary organization may also be described as a conspirative organization … and we must have the utmost conspiracy for an organization of that kind. Secrecy is such a necessary condition … that all other conditions (number, and selection of members, functions, etc.) must all be subordinated to it." Why is this so important to understand? Because in fighting the evils of communism (and its many collectivist permutations) it is imperative - as in any battle - to know one's enemy. It has been said that "communism is not an ideology in which men believe, but a conspiracy in which men participate." That being an amply proven fact, it is the height of folly to persist in the belief that it is solely "on the battlefield of ideas that the fate of the world will be decided." Honest dupes and misguided idealists may be intellectually converted, that is true, but those who have consciously chosen evil are not likely to be converted by "ideas." They must be morally and spiritually converted, or restrained by force. Sending missionaries into troubled areas to help keep youngsters from going into a life of crime may be a wise preventive measure, but without an essential police presence with adequate investigation and enforcement efforts, common hoods and organized criminal elements will soon overwhelm the unprotected. Defining the Terms In his instructions to the jury in the trial of Soviet atom bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Judge Irving R. Kaufman gave this important explanation of conspiracy: For two or more persons to conspire, confederate or combine together to commit or cause to be committed a breach of the criminal law of the United States is an offense of grave character which involves a plotting to subvert the law. It is almost always characterized by secrecy, rendering detection difficult and requiring much time for its discovery. Because of this the statute has made a conspiracy to commit a crime a distinct offense from the crime itself. From the point of view of the law there is danger to the public when two or more people conspire to do something that is unlawful because by virtue of the aggregation of numbers the intent assumes a more formidable disadvantageous aspect to the public. The "aggregation of numbers" acting in secret to carry out unlawful acts does indeed multiply the danger, making it far more formidable. "What is a conspiracy?" Judge Kaufman asked, and then answered, "A conspiracy may be defined as a combination of two or more persons, by concerted action, to accomplish a criminal and unlawful purpose, or some purpose not in itself unlawful or criminal, by criminal or unlawful means...." "However," he pointed out, "it is not necessary in order to constitute a conspiracy that two or more persons should meet together and enter into an explicit or formal agreement for an unlawful scheme, or that they should directly, by words or in writing, state what the unlawful scheme was to be, and the details of the plan or means by which the unlawful scheme was to be made effective." Kaufman explained: It is sufficient if two or more persons, in any manner, or through any contrivance, impliedly or tacitly, come to a mutual understanding to accomplish a common and unlawful design, knowing its object, and that one or more of them commit an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. In other words, where an unlawful end is sought to be effected and two or more persons, actuated by the common purpose of accomplishing that end, knowingly work together in any way in furtherance of the unlawful scheme, every one of said persons becomes a member of the conspiracy, although his part therein be a subordinate one, or be executed at a remote distance from the other conspirators. Notice that it is not necessary that all members of a conspiracy be on the same level, have the same motives, or the same knowledge of all operations, plans, and goals of the conspiracy. In fact, rarely is that the case. There is almost always a hierarchy in conspiracies of any size. Conspiracies are a fact of human nature, present throughout all of recorded history. Pick up a newspaper in virtually any city on almost any day of the week and you will find a story about a grand jury issuing indictments for conspiracy. Most people have no difficulty understanding and accepting this idea of conspiracy. However, the idea of a global, self-perpetuating conspiracy - a conspiracy immense enough to manipulate and control governments and economies - seems to many a bit farfetched. Historical Precedents But it will not seem at all a foreign concept to those familiar with history, for there are ample precedents recorded of vast, powerful, transcontinental, transgenerational conspiracies. The diabolical cult of Thugee, for example, was as vile and dangerous a criminal conspiracy as has ever existed. The Thugs were a criminal secret society in India which combined robbery with religious devotion that involved ritual murder (usually by strangulation) and human sacrifice to the goddess Kali. This transgenerational criminal conspiracy thrived during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but is believed by some historians to date back as far as the 12th century. During their long reign of terror, the Thugs claimed countless victims and it took an all-out "war" by the British colonial government in the 1830s to finally deliver India from this terrible scourge. As notorious and fiendish as the Thugee was the secret and infamous order of the Assassins, whose very name posterity identifies with the most vile criminality. Founded by Hasan Saba in 1090 in Persia, the Assassins, or Hashishiyin (derived from their use of the narcotic hashish to ensnare and inculcate fanatical adepts) soon spread their malefic influence throughout Asia and the Middle East. While professing fidelity to orthodox Islam and maintaining an outward facade of piety, Saba's sect, through which initiates graduated in hierarchical degrees, was, in fact, an atheist-materialist cabal motivated by an insatiable lust for power. This sect perfected the use of murder, deception, corruption, and subversion to achieve its nefarious ends. Remember Capone? Closer to our own time, we are all somewhat familiar with the huge criminal conspiracy run by Al Capone. According to the World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime: "Capone was a murderous thug without remorse.... He was responsible for perhaps as many as one thousand or more murders, certainly hundreds. Worse, for a decade the city of Chicago embraced this bragging, boasting, strutting killer, its newspapers paying homage to him and quoting his every cretinous statement, its citizens - a goodly portion of the population - nodding tolerantly, if not approvingly, in his direction." With the fabulous wealth gained from his criminal enterprises, Capone bribed cops, judges, jurors, prosecutors, and reporters - and "gave generously to charity." Notes the Encyclopedia, "Capone spent money lavishly on himself and those about him, projecting the image of generosity, of a philanthropist to the common man. Old-timers in Chicago still pay his bloody memory offhand compliments about the so-called soup kitchens Capone established in Chicago during the Depression to feed the hungry, little realizing that the crime boss did this at the suggestion of attorneys attempting to improve his horrible reputation when he was being tried for income-tax evasion." Much of the public and many politicians were willfully blind, refusing to believe that Capone was in fact the evil crime lord his accusers made him out to be. So it was also with the crime bosses who followed after him. It wasn't until after the New York State Police discovered a meeting of 61 top Mafia figures on November 14, 1957 at a house in Apalachin, New York, that the FBI, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and many others in law enforcement even acknowledged the existence of the Mafia. Even J. Edgar Hoover had frequently denied that such an organized crime entity existed. "They're just a bunch of hoodlums," he would comment. Likewise, politicians, prosecutors, and journalists would dismiss talk of a Mafia with international ties, blood oaths, and family structure as the product of the lurid imaginings of pulp fiction writers. This writer once interviewed a chief of police who had pioneered in the investigation of the U.S. Mafia and who told of his exasperation over the years at trying to convince his IACP colleagues of the existence of the Mob, and of his equal frustration with those who admitted to knowledge of the Mafia but would not publicly say so, nor launch a concerted law enforcement drive against these organized forces of evil. Not until 1963, when Mafia defector Joseph Valachi testified before the Senate Rackets Committee, did we even learn the name the mafiosi themselves applied to their criminal syndicate: Cosa Nostra - "Our Thing." The most infamous mobster since Capone is John Gotti. Even though his rise to the top of New York's Gambino crime family left behind a trail of corpses, the "Teflon Don," as he was glamorized in the press, seemed untouchable. Time after time he skated free, basking in the glory of his celebrity and mockingly protesting his total innocence. His attorneys and defenders sneered at charges that he was involved in any criminal enterprise. Gotti was merely a hardworking plumbing salesman and garment center entrepreneur, a family man who lived by modest means, they argued. "He's only on trial because the government hates it that people love him," declared Carlo Vaccarrezza, his loyal adman. When Gotti was finally convicted on RICO charges in 1992, throngs of supporters "spontaneously" materialized outside the courthouse with "Free John Gotti" and "We Love You, John" placards. When the verdict was announced, the thousand-or-so "demonstrators" rioted on cue, overturning police cars, smashing shop windows, and battling the police. Perhaps this made-to-order mayhem was the product of mere "consensus," but conspiratorialists couldn't help noticing that this rioting mob had been transported to the site on chartered buses, provided with pre-made signs, and received direction from Gotti street hoods with walkie talkies and cellular phones. Mob/Red Partnership The point is that the Mafia is a massive, transcontinental, transgenerational, self-perpetuating criminal conspiracy that has operated in this country since at least the turn of the century, and in Italy and Sicily for perhaps three-quarters of a century before that. Yet only recently has law enforcement succeeded in penetrating the surface of this dark menace. It is important to note also that this criminal conspiracy has long worked in concert with the communist conspiracy. Much of what we know of the Mafia-communist symbiotic relationship has come from communist defectors such as Maurice Malkin, a member of the Communist Party's inner circle who had managed the Daily Worker and kept the Party membership lists. Malkin, a founding member of the Communist Party, USA, revealed details of this connection in his powerful autobiography, Return to My Father's House: The Communist Party of the United States has had an agreement with the Mafia since 1924, with the arrival in the United States of Eneo Sormenti, alias Vidali Contreras Victorio.... Upon his arrival he reestablished the understanding between the Mafia and the Communists that was made in Italy by Bordiga, a leader of the Italian Communist Party, and by Ercoli Palmieri Togliatti, alias Ercoli. The agreement called for the Mafia to do work for the Communist International, such as murdering opponents, distributing counterfeit currency and dope, stealing government documents such as seals and stamps for foreign passports, and other jobs which Communist agents could not carry out, but which the Mafia and its connections could. According to General Major Jan Sejna of Communist Czechoslovakia, one of the highest-ranking defectors ever from the Soviet bloc, the Kremlin launched a major global effort in the 1950s to more thoroughly penetrate organized crime in all countries. As told in Red Cocaine, by Dr. Joseph Douglas, General Sejna explained the plan: "The Soviets reasoned that if they could successfully infiltrate organized crime, they would have unusually good possibilities to control many politicians and would have access to the best information on drugs, money, weapons, and corruption of many kinds. A secondary reason was to use organized crime as a covert mechanism for distributing drugs." "Rescued" by the West Working hand in hand, these two globe-straddling conspiracies wield enormous power. But this convergence of criminal interests and cooperation does not alone begin to explain the incredible totalitarian communist advances during the decades after World War II. The communists were relentlessly carrying out their comprehensive plan for global conquest, as detailed in the Programme of the Communist International, adopted at its 6th Congress in Moscow, September 1, 1928. But, incredibly, they were also advancing their diabolical design with indispensable help from the capitalist West (see page 39). More and more Americans began coming to the realization in the 1950s that the advances of communism abroad and socialism at home had more to do with policies and programs emanating from New York and Washington than from Moscow. It was the vast transfusion of Western technology and money taken from American taxpayers that time after time saved communism from collapse. It was repeated betrayal by American diplomats, bureaucrats, and politicians that turned scores of nations and hundreds of millions of souls over to brutal tyranny. It was American officials who time after time appointed communists and communist sympathizers to sensitive government posts and then fought their removal when they were discovered. It was many of America's top financiers, bankers, and industrialists who were arranging loans and financial aid to the Kremlin. Informed Americans became alarmed at the key role that several of the large tax-exempt foundations - Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, particularly - had been playing in providing funds to individuals and organizations identified with communism and socialism. Even worse, some of the foundations had communists and subversives on their staffs and boards of directors (one of the most egregious examples being the appointment of notorious Soviet spy Alger Hiss to head the Carnegie Endowment). In 1952, the U.S. House of Representatives established a formal committee to investigate the foundations. In 1953, the committee's top researcher, Norman Dodd, visited the New York City headquarters of the Ford Foundation at the invitation of Ford President H. Rowan Gaither. At that meeting, Dodd later recounted, Gaither brazenly told him that he and others who had worked for the State Department and other federal agencies had for years "operated under directives issued by the White House, the substance of which was to the effect that we should make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union." The Seat of Power It was growing obvious to many that that was exactly the course which our government was following. Dr. Bella Dodd, a former member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA, who left the Party and became a committed anti-communist, recounted that on occasion top orders for the Party came not from Moscow but from any one of three designated men at the Waldorf Towers in New York - all of whom were extremely wealthy American capitalists. "I think the Communist conspiracy is merely a branch of a much bigger conspiracy," said Dr. Dodd. "I would certainly like to find out who is really running things." An important clue concerning "who is really running things" was revealed in 1966 when Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University published his massive history, Tragedy and Hope. Professor Quigley, who had access to the secret records of the international network of moneyed power elites who have formed much of our governmental policies for decades, averred that "this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so." That same year, Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, published his important essay entitled The Truth movement is only a tool of the total conspiracy," and pointed to the West as the real seat of the conspiracy's power. It is our intention, in the following pages, to present the truth about the Conspiracy and the Conspirators, and their goals, strategy, and tactics, in the hope that a sufficient number of Americans can be awakened and moved to proper action - in time. © Copyright 1999 American Opinion Publishing Incorporated http://thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no19/vo12no19_proof.htm Bard DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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