Among the Truthers (20 page)

Even in the case of conspiracists whose theories seemingly have little to do with any particular national or religious cause, I will discover during my interviews that their initial radicalization came through a specific geopolitical issue connected with their ethnic identity. This includes Serbian-Canadian conspiracist Lubo Zizakovic, the former football player profiled in the first chapter. While he now talks about the Bilderbergers and 9/11, his initial radicalization came during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, when the United States and its NATO allies took sides against the Serbs:

The demonization of the Serb people started with falsified images of a Serb-run Bosnian refugee camp that appeared on the front page of every paper in the world and on every television station as a Serb-run concentration death camp. In August 1992, millions of people were shocked to see photographs of a supposed Bosnian Serb “death camp.” Bush Sr, Clinton, and Blair used these images as justification for their involvement against the Serbs in Bosnia . . . The photos were produced by ITN, the British TV news giant, from footage shot by an ITN film crew which spent a long day in Bosnia. The film was shot in a refugee center in the town of Trnopolje. Most of the photographs featured a tall, emaciated man with a deformed chest, stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind barbed wire. Do you remember those pictures? They were a hoax. They were the start of the ‘demonization' of the Serb people . . . [In 1999] came the so-called ‘Racak Massacre.' Clinton and NATO used this staged event as [an] excuse to bomb Serbia into the stone age . . . Racak was a hoax, but then again, so were the Serb death camps and everything else that came from NATO press briefings . . . it made no sense that nineteen of the world's most powerful countries would gang up against such a small nation and bomb it for 78 days . . . Does the west care more for Kosovo Albanians that for Palestinians? Hardly. Let's not start on what is happening in Africa as well. The war on Serbia was not about Kosovo Albanians, but geopolitical goals. The pillaging of the resources of the former Yugoslavia was continuing. Insuring a Caspian and Black Sea pipeline through Yugoslavia to the Adriatic Sea and robbing Yugoslavia of its natural resources for the benefit of large corporations seems to always be the overriding goal . . . My rage grew fierce as I heard friends and coworkers regurgitate NATO propaganda. Over 100,000 dead and millions displaced by the Serbs
. .
. I [now] have a deep distrust when it comes to the [mainstream media's] reporting of international events.

T
he natural psychological alliance between conspiracism and radical identity politics is a phenomenon that George Orwell described in his landmark 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism.” While Orwell generally did not use the term “conspiracy theory” to describe this marriage, he did directly hit upon the manner by which ardent nationalists—a term he defined loosely to encompass political fanatics and religious bigots of every description—inevitably lapse into fantasy when history does not unfold as their parochial visions demand:

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should—in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918—and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible . . . Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within 10 years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn't count,' or perhaps had not happened . . . When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably, they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly . . . Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

Orwell's analysis helps explain why conspiracism always finds its way into the mythology of totalitarian movements, such as in North Korea or Iran, whose bellicosity and brutal domestic policies can be justified only by recourse to the claim that they are guiding the nation on some infallible historical project. When history defeats this claim of infallibility, as it always does, every despot requires some version of the Ministry of Truth—so it can blame society's problems on the schemes of an invented army of infidels and counterrevolutionaries.

In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Winston Smith goes about this intellectual project self-consciously as part of his professional duties as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth's Records Department. But for the subjects of real-life totalitarian regimes, the process often arises subconsciously, as a crutch to make life endurable. “Among the Russian masses there was . . . a certain level of self-hypnosis about their Great Helmsman,” journalist Robert Fulford wrote in a column summarizing Orlando Figes' 2007 book
The Whisperers
:
Private Life in Stalin's Russia
. “Figes introduces us to a man who grew up in a family of Soviet diplomats and believed all the Stalinist rhetoric about the necessity of imprisoning those who were ‘enemies of the people'—even though his father, his older sister, six of his uncles and an aunt were all arrested in the purges of the 1930s. But in 1944, when his mother was jailed, he began to question his faith. He decided that the secret police must have been penetrated by the ‘enemies of the people.' ”

The psychological reflex that Orwell describes applies equally to sixties-era American leftists, who, as already noted, refused to believe that one of their own killed JFK; Japanese historians who have averted their eyes to the rape of Nanking (rightly described by Iris Chang as “the forgotten holocaust of World War II”); and Serbs—such as former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic—who airily declare the Srebrenica massacre to be “a myth.” Holocaust deniers are invariably failed historians. As Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman concluded in their authoritative 2000 book
Denying History
:
Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It?
, these conspiracy theorists “find empowerment through the rehabilitation of those they admire and the denigration of those they perceive to be squelching their admiration. Many deniers seem to like the idea of a rigid, controlled, and powerful state. Some are fascinated with Nazism as a social/political organization and are impressed with the economic gains Germany made in the 1930s . . . The history of the Holocaust is a black eye for Nazism. Deny the veracity of the Holocaust, and Nazism begins to lose this stigma.”

Over the last decade, many Muslims followed this same pattern in regard to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Minnesota-based Muslim convert Kevin Barrett, for instance, tells his Truther audiences that Osama bin Laden could never have been behind 9/11 because the al-Qaeda leader embodies his religion's dedication to “peace and truth.” As described in Chapter 9, Barrett, like many other Muslim conspiracy theorists, identifies Jews and Zionists as the true perpetrators of the 9/11 plot. In this way, their conspiracy theory does double duty for psychological purposes: It absolves Islam of a terrible crime, while furthering the preferred narrative of murderous Israeli aggression. For related psycho-political reasons, many Muslims (including Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) also have joined the ranks of Holocaust deniers: Since the international movement to create a Jewish state gained strength and urgency following Hitler's extermination of six million Jews, it is imagined by militant anti-Semites that Israel's raison-d'être can somehow be undone by rewriting history to Hitler's advantage.

Many Westerners with no positive ethnic or religious attachments also fall into the failed historian category through their embrace of strident anti-Americanism. (As Orwell wrote in his essay, the nationalistic pathology “may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.”) According to this brand of thinking, which has come to dominate large swathes of the Western intelligentsia over the last half-century, the great engine of evil in the world is American hegemony—and so every epic tragedy the world suffers must somehow be laid at Washington's doorstep.

In this category, one finds antiwar and antinuclear activists of Cold War vintage, with political views steeped in the anti-American lore surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, and the covert wars of Latin America. Their ideological heroes are Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, whose fixation on American “state terrorism” encourages the notion that Washington is capable of boundless evil.

English professors, cultural-studies specialists, and modern-languages types are well represented in this conspiracist niche. So, too, are experts in “globalization studies”—such as Anthony J. Hall of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, one of Canada's most aggressive Truthers. One also tends to find a surprising number of poets (perhaps because their day jobs already require them to weave a self-invented reality from their own stream of consciousness). Rhyming conspiracists include British Columbia–based Truther Frank Moher, New York City's Jerry Mazza (who delivers poetry readings at 9/11 anniversary events in New York City), and black nationalist Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones), whose poem
Somebody Blew Up America
got him ejected from his job as New Jersey's poet laureate:

Who the Devil on the real side

Who got rich from Armenian genocide . . .

Who own the oil

Who want more oil

Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie . . .

Who knew the bomb was gonna blow

Who know why the terrorists

Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego . . .

Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother

Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?

Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln? . . .

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

Who, Who, Who

Unfortunately, Baraka is hardly an outlier within the field of black identity politics, which (for understandable historical reasons) comprises America's most consistently fertile breeding ground for failed-historian conspiracism. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, for instance, has suggested that the destruction of New Orleans' levee system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was part of a plot to kill the city's black population; and delivers speeches in which he blames the world's problems on the “Jew Rothschild” (“Four things were set up in the year 1913: First, the Federal Reserve Bank, the IRS, the FBI, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith. All were set up in the same year. Is that a coincidence, or is there a tie-in?”)

Following the financial crisis of late 2008, the failed historian began showing up in the form of shell-shocked free-market purists (often in Tea Party garb), who could not accept that the greatest recession of our time had been sparked by the recklessness of homeowners, overleveraged banks, greedy mortgage brokers, and other private actors. As discussed in the previous chapter, they have conquered their cognitive dissonance with the theory that the crisis actually was part of a secret plot hatched by Barack Obama and other liberals to destroy capitalism. This theory has become so common in Tea Party circles that it now goes by a commonly recognized shorthand—the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” named after two 1960s-era left-wing Columbia University sociologists. (As with many of the conspiracy theories I have described in this book, there was a real grain of truth in this one: In their now-infamous 1966 article in
The Nation
, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven truly did urge Americans to apply for welfare en masse so as to “produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments”—with the ultimate goal being “to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income.” This tactic was said to be necessary because “even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”)

“The undeniable and shocking truth is that Barack Obama (perhaps purposefully, perhaps unknowingly) is actually following a carefully laid-out strategy for destroying the United States of America that was initially proposed and published by two socialist faculty members at Columbia University (an institution that Barack Obama attended from 1981–83),” declared Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily website in a September 2010 email blast. “According to the strategy, the American way of life, as we know it, must be destroyed and discredited because the American people will not accept statism until the present system is destroyed and discredited. And how does one go about destroying and discrediting the system? If you need an example, look no further than the so-called economic stimulus schemes that the Obama Administration and Congress have implemented.”

The Damaged Survivor

On April 2, 2008, World Autism Awareness Day, Larry King devoted his nightly CNN program to “Jenny McCarthy's Autism Fight.” Anyone who'd followed the debate over the devastating neurological condition instantly knew what to expect from McCarthy that night: Since 2007, the former
Playboy
model had become the world's most influential spout of autism misinformation.

Sure enough, a few minutes into the broadcast, McCarthy began telling King about the miraculous autism discoveries she had made on alternative health websites, which, she claimed, had allowed her own son to “recover” from the incurable condition. She also launched into familiar, discredited theories linking autism to vaccines: