Among the Truthers (8 page)

We
was directly inspired by Zamyatin's experience under Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But as the totalitarian virus spread to Nazi Germany and other parts of the West in the 1920s and 1930s, so did the fears he expressed. While Orwell and Aldous Huxley wrote their novels from democratic England, they shared Zamyatin's vision of a coming age in which every aspect of human existence—including the basic chemistry of our bodies, and the inner workings of our minds—would be subordinated to a power-hungry elite armed with frightening new technologies.

In Western high schools,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
Brave New World
are presented as cautionary political tales. But they also document an important shift in the human condition that transcends mere politics. For the entirety of man's existence leading up to the twentieth century, what humans feared most wasn't the dictatorship of Zamyatin's One State—it was the blood-soaked anarchy of the jungle beyond its walls. Reality was, as Thucydides put it, “a human race that escaped chaos and barbarism by preserving with difficulty a thin layer of civilization.” It was only with the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and their enabling technologies, that this fear was flipped on its head. The noble savages who live outside our gate are no longer the enemy—they are the salvation. The greatest threat to society is no longer that the flesh will be exterminated by war, disease, tribal warfare, or natural disaster; but that our
minds
will be lobotomized through state terror, propaganda, soma, or outright surgery. The publication of
We
marks the moment that basic fear switch was being toggled.

Because of their geographical isolation, Americans were insulated from these emerging fears to a certain extent. But as the century wore on, the rapid march of technology, the increasing bureaucratization of America's postwar society, and the rise to power of an anonymous, professional managerial class all conspired to create a generalized climate of anxiety. By the 1960s, Americans were confronted with a welter of agencies, think tanks, and international organizations that had popped into existence within the space of a generation—including, at the highest level, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the United Nations. Spies from both sides of the Iron Curtain—armed with hidden microphones and secret cameras—were believed to be everywhere. In 1958, the same year that the John Birch Society came into existence, J. Edgar Hoover was warning Americans that the communist “is in the market places of America: in organizations, on street corners, even at your front door. He is trying to influence and control your thoughts.”

The resulting paranoia produced a collective vision drawn straight out of the brain-surgery scene in
We
. Miami University scholar Timothy Melley calls it “agency panic”—“the conviction that one's actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed' by powerful external agents . . . This fear sometimes manifests itself in a belief that the world is full of ‘programmed' or ‘brainwashed' subjects, addicts, automatons, or ‘mass-produced' persons.”

The CIA in particular, an organization whose MK-ULTRA mind-control and chemical-interrogation experiments truly were something out of a conspiracist's nightmare, seemed to symbolize a world in which average citizens were targeted by their own government. In 1974, the
New York Times
published a blockbuster story by Seymour Hersh under the headline “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces,” claiming that the agency had generated surveillance files on at least ten thousand Americans. As author Arthur Herman wrote in the pages of
Commentary
magazine, describing the frenzied intellectual climate that resulted: “Once the process of blame and suspicion got underway, it was impossible to stop. If the CIA had killed Vietnamese citizens with impunity and without leaving a trace, then perhaps it had done the same to American citizens. If the CIA had been willing to plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, why not JFK? . . . For the New Left culture at its most feverish, there was no crime too heinous, no bugging too minor, no assassination too unjust, no Spanish Inquisition–style interrogation of some hapless prisoner too appalling that the CIA wasn't prepared to carry out at the behest of its corporate masters.”

In the realm of science, meanwhile, the postwar period witnessed a bewildering proliferation of groundbreaking technologies. New public-health innovations, such as compulsory vaccination, psychiatric treatment, and water fluoridation seemed especially threatening—since they transferred control of a citizen's own bodily integrity to strangers. Like USAF Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the
Dr. Strangelove
character who attacks the Soviet Union out of fear that enemies were trying to contaminate Americans' “precious bodily fluids,” millions of Americans reflexively connected such technological apprehensions to the Red menace. According to Dr. Charles Betts, president of the Anti-Cancer Club of America, fluoridation was “better than using the atom bomb [for the purposes of Communists] because the atom bomb has to be made, has to be transported to the place it is to be set off, while poisonous fluorine has been placed right beside the water supplies by the Americans themselves ready to be dumped into the water mains whenever a Communist desires!” (Antifluoridation activists no longer cite the communist menace, yet in municipal politics, they remain a force to be reckoned with in many North American jurisdictions. In late 2010, as this book was in its final edits, the Canadian city of Waterloo, Ontario, voted to end its water fluoridation program. When I criticized this decision in the
National Post
, I was met with a storm of email that was extraordinary, even by the standards I had come to expect from writing about the 9/11 Truth movement. Many correspondents passionately advocated the same discredited theories that sprang to life in the days of Charles Betts, such as the idea that water fluoridation had been invented by the aluminum industry as a means to dispose of its toxic, fluorine-containing waste products.)

Medical imaging technology that permitted doctors to peer inside our bodies also became a prominent motif in conspiracist fantasies—a trend that found lurid expression in the UFO cults of the postwar period.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans who reported encounters with aliens typically were anxious about the possibility of the earth being invaded or destroyed by an extraterrestrial army, à la
War of the Worlds
. But in the late 1960s, the trend changed: Americans began reporting that aliens (who, not by coincidence, often looked just like the fetuses depicted in the ultrasound scans that pregnant mothers now saw in their doctors' offices) were taking them on board their spaceships, and subjecting them to invasive sexual and medical procedures, with the ultimate goal of involving them in an interspecies breeding project (possibly located at Area 51 in Nevada). As researcher Bridget Brown concluded after interviewing numerous alien abductees and closely studying their accounts, the phenomenon seemed to reflect a widespread, subconscious anxiety about body integrity in a high-tech age, with the alien taking the role “as part medical technician, part bureaucrat, part fetus.”

The
Protocols
and the conspiracy theories that followed it in the early part of the twentieth century were elaborately extrapolated folk tales based on tribal, anti-Semitic hatred. But during the Cold War era, conspiracy theories became more complex and technocratic—mirroring the modern society they sought to explain. Byzantine, acronym-littered organizational diagrams setting out the imagined hierarchy of society's all-powerful overlords increasingly became a staple of what I have called “flowchart conspiracism.”

The Emergence of “Flowchart Conspiracism”

This book cannot do justice to the bewildering range of flowchart conspiracy theories that have trafficked through the nether regions of American political culture in the postwar decades. But it is worth taking up at least one particular example from the genre as a case study—especially since its name tends to pop up often in conversations with Truthers: Daniel Estulin's breathless 2007 best seller,
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group
.

Even most educated readers are unlikely to know much about the Bilderberg Group. But in modern conspiracist lore, the organization ranks as nothing less than a modern-day Illuminati. And no one has done more to peddle Bilderbergian conspiracism than Estulin, a middle-aged Russian-born Canadian who's spent the last two decades stalking the group's organizers, skulking outside their meetings, and delivering paranoid reports on the proceedings, based on tidbits provided by people he calls “informants.”

The Bilderberg Group is named after a Dutch hotel where a group of fifty European and eleven American worthies, including David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, met in the spring of 1954 with the goal of strengthening trans-Atlantic understanding. By all available accounts, the event was a success, and follow-up meetings were organized. Over time, something called the “Bilderberg Group” evolved into a once-a-year, off-the-record talk shop for a rotating cast drawn from the world's foremost politicians, corporate leaders, and intellectuals—Davos without the cameras, essentially.

To no one's surprise, I have never received an invitation. But my
National Post
colleague Conrad Black has attended more than twenty Bilderberg conferences, and even sat on the group's Steering Committee for the better part of two decades. Through him, I've been able to form a fairly detailed picture of the annual proceedings. “In my time, starting at the end of the 70's, it had become a Western Alliance meeting place—with a few others, i.e., Swedes, Finns, Irish, Austrians, Swiss, and an Icelander—where attendees discussed how to deal with the Soviets, how to organize and manage Western economies,” he reported to me. “Beyond that, it was a meeting place for up and coming people from each of the countries, along with the venerable grandees who were among the founders and were then on the Advisory Council. There were also a bunch of wealthy Americans who did not participate too much in the discussions, but paid a lot and did socialize vigorously, such as Henry Kravis, Hank Greenberg, Dwayne Andreas, and Jack Heinz, and Evelyn de Rothschild from the UK. Rupert Murdoch came a few times . . . The atmosphere was very courteous, bonhomous, and open, and the social conversations were often very interesting, and the debates the best I have participated in, apart from the [British] House of Lords at its best. Some business arrangements were made there, including the beginning of my acquisition of [Britain's]
Daily Telegraph
[newspaper], but there was absolutely no continuous linkage or organizing principle. It was an atmosphere of earnest
hauts fonctionnaires
, altruistic businessmen, and self-important people, sufficient in what they fancied to be their influence and right-mindedness.”

All lies, says Estulin. In fact, he claims, the Bilderbergers are the top cell in a centrally coordinated global conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA, Mossad, Trilateral Commission, Aspen Institute, Freemasons, MI6, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Tavistock Institute for Behavioural Analysis, Brookings Institution, Institute for Policy Studies, RAND Corporation, European Union, United Nations, Gorbachev Foundation, Bill Gates Foundation, Club of Rome, the European monarchy, UNESCO, and (unnamed) drug-running aristocrats. “What today is called the Bilderberg Group already existed over 800 years ago,” he writes. “Back then, they were called the Venetian Black Nobility. In fact, Bilderberg is the creation of the Synarchist Movement of Empire, who are the plenipotentiary founders and financiers of Hitler—and Synarchist International, they in turn were founded by [the] Freemason Secret Society back in the 1770s as a sort of counterattack on the principles on which the United States was built.”

The Bilderbergers' true goal in orchestrating this
ne plus ultra
of flowchart conspiracies, Estulin argues, is to control the world money supply, create a single global currency, establish a “world army,” use “mind control” to “direct all humanity to obey [Bilderbergian] wishes,” eliminate economic growth, suppress “all scientific development,” and create a “New World Order” in which obedient slaves will be rewarded and nonconformists targeted for “extermination.”

Estulin sees himself as just such a “nonconformist,” and spends much of his book reciting adventure stories about Bilderberg agents trying to assassinate him in downtown Toronto (“In front of me, a chilling spectacle . . . an empty elevator shaft with certain death awaiting me 800 feet below”), or draw him into a deadly firefight on the streets of Rome (“I know my guns, and it wasn't difficult to see by the non-metallic polymer frame that I was staring at a Glock semiautomatic pistol”). His efforts to discover the truth about the Bilderberg plot, he writes in one particularly purple passage, have sent him hurtling into a “parallel world . . . a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortunes and mercenaries . . . I converted into one of them, a spook, a specter, a shade . . . dancing between raindrops and disappearing at the first sign of danger: a shadow dancer. In America, they simply called me ‘the Highlander.' ”

It's easy to laugh off Estulin's pulp-fiction style and mixed metaphors. (One cringes, in particular, at the notion of Estulin “dancing between raindrops” spilling forth from the aforementioned “cesspool of duplicity.”) Yet
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group
has become something of a sensation. As of 2010, the publisher claimed it had been translated into forty-eight languages and sold in sixty-seven countries. And in the best tradition of Dan Brown, it may soon be coming to the big screen: In 2009, rights to the book were purchased by the Los Angeles–based Halcyon Company, which also owns the
Terminator
franchise.