June 5, 1995

Dear Kenn,

Regarding the Oklahoma City bombing and conspiracy culture, I do
indeed have a few thoughts. Some of these have been percolating
for some time (see "The Conspiracy Conspiracy" ). I think the
Oklahoma City bombing is very relevant to current conspiracy
culture, pointing up perhaps all too vividly its attendant
problems and dangers.

It boils down to this, as I see it: conspiracy for conspiracy's
sake won't do. As Parenti points out, conspiracy per se isn't the
point--political understanding, in the pursuit of justice and
democracy, is the point. Given this goal, conspiracy
thinking/theory/research can be and, in many cases, has indeed
been, hugley important and instructive. However, in other cases,
conspiracy theory--or what sometimes passes for conspiracy
"research"--is itself part of the problem, because it's either
mistaken fantasy, distracting bullshit or blatant, pernicious
propaganda; that is, mis- or disinformation.

Not all conspiracy theories are equal; not all conspiracy talk is
worthwhile, or even interesting as gibberish. In fact,
"conspiracy theory" does indeed have a checkered history, which
those of us who are interested in it must acknowledge. Down
through the centuries, various well-publicized conspiracy
scenarios--all of them fictions-have been used to justify the
most reprehensible acts. Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover had a
conspiracy theory, a completely spurious one, but it nonetheless
helped ruin a lot of people's lives. The Spanish Inquisition had
a conspiracy theory, basically a psychotic fantasy, but it got
thousands of men and, notably, women burned at the stake. And the
Nazis had a conspiracy theory-that Jews, in league with
Bolsheviks, were plotting to take over the world; this too was a
scapegoating fantasy, but it provided the rationale for a very
real holocaust.

Of course, apologists for the mainstream always seize on these
points as a way to discredit any talk of political conspiracy, as
if all conspiracy theories were as bankrupt and oppressive as
those above. This position is itself idiotic and obfuscatory,
part of the political mythology--"It can't happen here"--that
helps disguise how things really get done in American politics.
It too is a version of the notion that all conspiracies are
equal--in this case, equally false.

But the fact that some conspiracy theories are lies meant to
advance fascist agendas of course doesn't discredit all
conspiracy theories. In fact, all of the above instances involve
real conspiracies; it's just that the conspiracies in question do
not involve communists, witches or Jews, but rather their
persecutors-those who, in the particular instances, were the
"conspiracy theorists." That is, the Elders of Zion myth was
racist bullshit, but it helped justify the holocaust, which was
nothing if not a conspiracy .

The Oklahoma City bombing is a case in point. If the official
accounts are at all accurate and the bombing is indeed the work
of ultra-right "patriot" types, then we have a clear--and, to me,
quite believable--conspiracy. On the other hand, it also seems
clear that the bombing, like most patriot activity, was, so to
speak, fueled by conspiracy theory, of the most infantile and
right-wing sort (all that new-world-order-black helicopter-Janet
Reno's-gonna-take our-guns-away crap.) So, the incident is a
clear rebuke to mainstream apologists who would say that
conspiracies never occur in American politics. But it's also
suggestive of the harm that can come from a naive, uncritical
emphasis on conspiracy mythology. Yes, conspiracy theories--some
of them--are reprehensible; they are racist, scapegoating
bullshit. On the other hand, political conspiracies--often
empowered by such "theories"--do happen.

And such harm almost always comes from the right in this country.
I think you're inaccurate when you say that the militias have
been around a long time. In fact, Waco and the Brady bill
virtually created the movement as we know it. (Also, I take
slight issue with your point about the media being full of
stories about the militias Prior to the bombing. The mainstream
media completely ignored the phenomenon and are still not
treating it in any depth. There were a few articles--prescient
ones, in my view--in magazines like The Proaressive and Covert
Action, but given the marginal status of such publications, I
don't count this as an abundance of coverage. Of course on the
Internet there was a lot of militia hooha, but that was almost
all posted by the militia-oids themselves, who obviously knew
something was coming down April 19.)

While the militias per se are, as I see it, relatively new,
you're correct that this kind of thing--right-wing
paramiliatrism--has been around a long time. And, it's been
violent and conspiratorial--and driven by conspiracy
theories--for a long time. States Rights groups with agendas very
similar to the "patriots" (i.e., an emphasis on
"constitutionalism" and white supremacy) blew up churches full of
black children and civil rights workers in the early sixties and
justified such actions with the claim that the civil rights
movement was part of the international communist conspiracy. If
we are to believe the movie JFK, to say nothing of numerous
serious researchers, then the Kennedy assassination was basically
the work of gung-ho paramilitary types very much in the "patriot"
mold. Moreover, as JFK and other sources suggest, such people
probably saw the murder of Kennedy as a necessary step to "saving
the country." This is precisely the sort of twisted logic that
appears to have motivated Timothy McVeigh.

Given this history of right-wing violence and conspiracy, I am
not very tolerant of "the gun-toting right." I mean, they can do
their thing and spout their spew, but I see no need to aid them
in this by giving them a platform. As I see it, there is an
overabundance of their sort of speech out there already. Truly
critical examinations of their claims are fine and indeed
necessary, but to uncritically feature--and thereby validate and
legitimize--the neofascist views of someone like Linda Thompson
the way Paranoia has done is idiotic and appalling.

Steamshovel is to be commended for having avoided this trap, but
the Paranoia folks are suckers. Whether they realize it or not,
they're being used. Their magazine is basically a conduit for
right-wing propaganda. Paranoia might as well be written by
Lyndon LaRouche, given the amount of space it devotes to
patriot-oriented spew, press releases from the Schiller
Foundation (a LaRouchie front) and Bircher-style demonization
scenarios. (Hell, it may be a LaRouchie publication. Why isn't
someone researching that?)

However, the problem with Paranoia is, I suspect, simpler, and
again it has to do with people who think all conspiracy theories
are equal. It's just that unlike the mainstreamers who think that
all conspiracy theories are equally false, the folks who publish
Paranoia think that all conspiracy theories are equally valid--or
equally sexy or equally cute or at least equally postmodern.

But if the Paranoia kids think they're providing an open forum,
they're kidding themselves. What they're doing (most of the time,
anyway) is reproducing right-wing disinformation--as if, in the
age of Reagan and Rambo, Limbaugh and Liddv, we needed more of
that. Their hippy dippy postmodern interest in High Weirdness
(believe me, I can relate) is being exploited big time--by
serious motherfuckers with serious agendas, bank accounts and
battle plans. And--this is America, after all--the people with
the megabucks propaganda machinery are not, to put it mildly, on
the left. A well-financed right-wing campaign to exploit
conspiracy culture is the real conspiracy here, and we all have
to be careful to avoid helping it along.

And, if the Paranoia folks are so interested in conspiracies, why
are they satisfied with the comic book blather of people like
Thompson or LaRouche? There are very real conspiracies out
there-the abortion doctor murder spree, for instance, by all
indications the work of a nationwide network of Christian/patriot
zealots--that some enterprising researcher should be looking
into. But at Paranoia it's apparently easier to just reprint,
without commentary, a press release from the Spotliaht about Jews
and the UN.

As I see it, Paranoia has got it all wrong. Prevailina Winds, on
the other hand, has got it right, by avoiding being a tool of the
Right. I'm sure people like Parenti and Oglesby would agree with
this assessment. Steamshovel is much closer to the Prevailing
Winds Pole than the Paranoia one, and I hope it will continue to
be so.

About hate-talk radio: No, I very much see it as reinforcing the
right-wing stranglehold on political discussion in the country
and, to that extent, helping create the atmosphere in which
patriot groups flourish and people like McVeigh feel it's
OK--indeed, necessary--to murder people wholesale. In fact, hate
talk radio is part of the conspiracy I'm talking about. That is,
it's part of a well-financed right-wing campaign to utterly
dominate the mass media and thereby limit and control what we can
say or think. And finding scapegoats and then aggressively
demonizing them is a big part of such a program. Moreover, such
demonization campaigns are designed to incite violence, and to do
so with plausible deniablity. ("Who, me?" say North, Liddy and
all the others, while draping themselves in the first amendment
they've spent their lives trying to undermine.)

And about Waco: of course it's a horror and a scandal, and of
course it is a huge part of the mythology of the ultra-rightists.
However, Waco is important to the patriots not because it
represents a crime against humanity, but because it combines, in
a convenient image, their favorite themes: guns, fascism and
patriarchy, or Armed White Men in Control. These guys don't give
a shit about babies, or religious freedom; if they did, they'd be
concerned about the Move group in Philadelphia (dead black
children) or the Solar Temple Lodge. They just wanna be David
Koresh--the white alpha male who has all the guns and the jealous
father god on his side, and all the women under his thumb. The
patriots' interest in Waco shouldn't be romanticized. For that
matter, neither should the Branch Davidian society, which appears
to have been an authoritarian nightmare, though this of course
does not justify the siege and destruction of the compound, an
act which was indeed an outrage and a crime.

And about El Gordo: G. Gordon Liddy couldn't care less about
Whitewater or wrongdoing per se; are you kidding? This is a guy
who, if his boasts are to be believed, gleefully conspired to
undermine the law, the constitution and the public interest. Do
you think he's bothered by a banking scam or even alleged foul
play? These are the sorts of things that, if a right-wing
Republican president were involved in them, Liddy would kill to
defend. Moreover, these are the sorts of things--the financial
stuff, anyway--that moneyed Republicans do on a daily basis (it's
part of their class entitlement), yet no one bats an eye.

Liddy is only interested in Whitewater because he's an
ultra-right winger, a founding member of the National Security
Party and, like all such neofascists, he sees Clinton (don't ask
me why) as someone who must be disappeared. Whitewater makes a
good club with which to bludgeon the Clintons, as if, at its
worst, it could hold a candle to something like Iran-Contra
(which Liddy and co. never talk about, except in terms of glowing
reverence). Of course, Clinton is no bargain if you're a
progressive or even a traditional liberal, but he and his wife do
give lip service to things like equal opportunity for minorities,
and even gestures of that sort are apparently, in these
enlightened end times, verboten.

I think there is valid investigatory work to be done on
Whitewater, and I gather that you're doing a lot of it. But
Liddy, the Washington Post and the Powers That Be are not
interested in the subject for the reasons you are--if they were,
they'd share your interest in other conspiracies; but in fact
they're quite selective about the scandals they publicize, and
the pattern is obvious: those which can be spun to undermine the
left will be hammered; those perpetrated by the right will be
downplayed.

It's all reminiscent of JFK, who, the Camelot hagiography aside,
was no bargain either, as a progressive or a liberal. This,
however, did not stop the ultra-right from demonizing him, first
as the tool of a Papist conspiracy, then as a puppet of the
Communists, then as a nigger lover and, finally--Hoover's
words--as a "moral degenerate" unfit to run the country or to
tell anyone else how to behave. Furthermore, they used all their
propaganda machinery to hammer the message that patriotism needed
a friend here--i.e., that someone needed to stand up and do the
white thing, and doggone if bullets just didn't start flying.

In other words, the ultra-right has a history of using terror to
get its way, even with moderate, middle-of-the-road presidents in
power. Such terror is fomented all too often by conspiracies,
very real agreements to kill people, etc. But it's also
justified, in the minds of the those who carry it out, by
conspiracy scenarios-simplistic scapegoating myths which cast
certain groups as demons
and which make the terrorists, by contrast, the servants of the
Lord.

Again, not all conspiracy talk is of this type, but Oklahoma City
illustrates once again that some conspiracy talk is of this sort,
and that it is all too widely disseminated these days, with
little or no criticism to counterbalance it. Both
positions--nothing's a conspiracy, everything is--are irrational.
It's crazy to think that everything is a conspiracy, and equally
crazy to think that nothing ever could be. Our job, as I see it,
is to do the scrupulous research and rational analysis that will
show that, contrary to the mainstream myth, conspiracies do
occur. But it is also our task to show how some conspiracy
theories are bullshit, and how, more often than not, such
conspiracy myths help advance very real--and very
hurtful--agendas. And that, as I've said elsewhere is a real
conspiracy, one that needs exposing.

Cheers.

Jack Burden