1. Conspiracy Theories
2. Addendum to "Conspiracy Theories"

1.2 There's a widespread notion that coups are terribly simple, like poisoning pigeons in the park. Not so. A successful coup, especially in a developed country not already under military rule, is extremely complicated business that usually requires (a) that the existing civilian government have antagonized the traditional elite class, or (b) a pre-existing ideology with widespread currency and a long period of evolution. In a few cases, especially in Central Europe between the wars, coups were executed by an existing government. Coups typically require that entire divisions of soldiers replace civil servants, often forcibly, in synchronicity and across a large area. Large cross sections of the command must be in on the plot and trust each other.

I am amply familiar with silly conspiracy theories in which a crucial "detail" missing from the narrative is how the CIA staged a coup in another country. While foreign intelligence services often participate in coups, it's a common misapprehension that such things can be manufactured ex nihilo. The most famous CIA coup, that against Muhammad Mossadeqh (1953), involved huge segments of the Iranian merchant class and civil service that were eager to defeat him. The political class was tiny and murky; the main faction responsible for the coup was already in power (the Shah) and had a massive cadre of loyal officers, plus the loyalty of the nation's top clerics, Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani and Ayatollah Uzma Brujerdi. An excellent online history of Operation AJAX is "A short account of 1953 Coup" (Iran Chamber Society) and this lengthy review of Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men.

This is perhaps the most egregious example of perverse narcissism. "Theoretical foundations for anti-Semitism"? "[T]urning down Stalin’s offer to attack Germany jointly in 1938"? "[P]olicies of appeasement before the war"? In 1938, the US military was smaller than that of Romania; it seems highly improbable that Stalin would ever have entertained such a proposition. Moreover, there is no consistancy to the analysis; refusal to intervene is put on the same footing as intervening (as against Germany in WW2—go see, it's listed as another atrocity). The fact that a business in the USA had subsidiaries in Germany does not, of course, make Germany a client state of the USA and certainly does not make the USA responsible for the Holocaust.

This is not really conspiracy theory, just extremely poor logic and sloppy use of terminology. The allegations that anti-Communism originated in the USA, or anti-Semitism, are presumably very poorly-worded references to something more specific. Likewise, a lot of "conspiracy theories" often cite an influence as a cause (much like saying "She took her own life a few years after reading The Little Prince. That's why I hold Antoine de Saint-Exupéry responsible for her death" or even, "She might have read The Little Prince; certainly it was a famous book available in English before she died"). Obvious objections to this reasoning are: if humans have free will, then we must assume a person who reads The Little Prince can easily choose to refrain from suicide; indeed, the book is not an especially strong influence for suicide at all, since the Prince's motivations are fantastical; the idea of suicide is a familiar one, and unlikely to require introduction; a person is exposed to many countervailing influences, most far stronger than the experience of reading The Little Prince.

Students interested in history are often attracted to explanations based on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy applied to ideas or influences: the existence of an idea in country A must be the explanation for its mass adoption in B. Some people just have a terrible time accepting that an idea can emerge spontaneously in several places at once. Another fallacy is that a complicated idea with many parts—like, say, Nazism, which is an exotic form of Fascism—originated with one of its constituents, such as anti-Communism; or even, as the author of the page I'm criticizing appears to believe, amounts to the whole ideology (i.e., "anti-Communism = Nazism"). This may of course be a component of a conspiracy theory, but so far, is really just stunningly poor logic, or inflammatory polemics.

The page is hosted by "What Really Happened?", a web site that for several months was preoccupied chiefly with arguing that the 9-11 attacks were perpetrated by the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), a code name for the US government coined by the White Aryan Resistance (WAR). The WTC attack archives seem to have been relocated to Serendipity.li, which argues that the attacks were a Zionist plot (where Zionist is here assumed to include a simply connected Jewish community; "simply connected" is a term of art meaning everyone in the community knows a fact, and nobody outside the community does), and the US government is a universally evil entity controlled by this group of Zionists. This reflects a rather sordid corner of the web in which a faction of the "left" has dribbled off into a conspiratorial hate group with anarchist pretensions.

Ironically, this anti-Jewish hate group hosts a page blaming the USA for the Holocaust.

The problem with such entities is obvious: the conspiracy or ideological narrative (here, of the "United States" as a historically cohesive entity that is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened in human history) becomes itself the basis of community. Believers are "set apart" from "unbelievers," and violence against the unbelievers or the conspiracy are always acceptable. This, I humbly submit, was the essence of the Ward Churchill quote that aroused so much controvery:

Chickens Coming Home to Roost: As to those [killed] in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Denver Post: Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

Unfortunately for all of us, Churchill probably meant the outcome he received. In this case, I'm indulging in a little conspiracy thinking of my own: I think Churchill understood his remarks would be a sweeptakes prize for the political right. He is associated—wrongly—with the left, perhaps because of social connections and some misleading associations. Like all such polemicists, however, his main object of hatred is not the actual perpetrators of the history crimes for which he waves the bloody shirt; it's those who really do espouse nonviolence. Look again at his original essay:

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand niggers" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed – nay, empowered – their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans.

Unfortunately for his argument—the "I am not an advocate of genocide" one, that is—Churchill is not mocking or illustrating the inverse logic; he's embraced it as the fundamental analysis of his paper. His characterization of American views about the Middle East, or German views about the invasion of Poland, are of course his own rant, not a fair or even plausible summary. The Germans of course supported Hitler because they were frightened and misinformed. There are complex reasons for why they accepted the Third Reich; but Churchill prefers the "evil German" theory. In a way, Churchill is a mirror of George W Bush: evil exists because of evil people, and is resolved by killing large numbers of the evil people—in this case, evil ethnos, evil genus, evil national population... Bush, of course, doesn't openly espouse this belief, so Churchill appeals to the results of military actions past and present. The people he believes deserve to die en masse, in point of fact, are unlikely to believe these facts, or else, regard them as inevitable.

Hence, the "little Eichmanns" trope—each of the WTC employees was, he says, part of a "...technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly." Very well; in his view, they deserved to die. "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

So how can he then say this?

Denver Post statement: I am not a "defender"of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy.

Perhaps this offers a clue:

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less "enlightened" – or perhaps more outraged – than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."

Property before people, it seems – or at least the equation of property to people – is a value by no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Seattle Diary: In the end, what was vandalized? Mainly the boutiques of Sweatshop Row: Nordstrom's, Adidas, the Gap, Bank of America, Niketown, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Starbucks. The expressions of destructive outrage weren't anarchic, but extremely well-targeted. The manager of Starbucks whined about how "mindless vandals" destroyed his window and tossed bags of French Roast onto the street. [...] These minor acts of retribution served as a kind of Gulf of Tonkin incident. They were used to justify the repressive and violent onslaughts by the police and the National Guard. Predictably, the leaders of the NGO's were fast to condemn the protesters. The World Trade Observer is a daily tabloid produced during the convention by the mainstream environmental groups and the Nader shop. It's Wednesday morning edition contained a stern denunciation of the direct action protests that had shut down the WTO the day before. Pope repudiated the violence of the protests, saying it delegitimized the position of the NGOs. He did not see fit to criticize the actions of the police.

But even Carl Pope was outdone by Medea Benjamin, the diminutive head of Global Exchange, who her sent her troops out to protect the facades of Niketown and the Gap from being defaced by protesters.

This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world.^2.1

While Churchill then proceeds to villify those who "misunderstood" him, I think he's deeply attached to the political right. He calls for a massacre of the actual left, and many scramble to his defense out of reflex: they see another hatchet job underway. The left's chance at some benevolent influence in society is obliterated, Churchill's name-recognition is enhanced, and people like me wonder why anyone takes this fellow any more seriously than Jeff Gannon.

APPENDIX: Sorry, I can't let this drop: there are several types of "leftists"; one variety favors an immediate end to bad policies and the introduction of healthy ones. They want universal health care, sex education, more equal distribution of pay, environmental protection, and possibly some form of socialism (but not necessarily). Perhaps they don't object strenuously to the use of revolution to get these things, but the ultimate goal is a better life for everyone. They do not object to life-enhancing technologies like electric motors, running water, hospitals, public transit, or heavy industry.

Most members of the Green Party, and Dennis Kucinich are examples of this.

Another group calls for the destruction of the state. They may believe this will lead to a better life through libertarian communalism (Noam Chomsky), but the main object is to abolish modern industrial organization. I disagree with this way of thinking, but some very wise people do not.

A third form has no coherent ideology; they are apocalyptic and dream not merely of post-industrial society, but a catastrophic repudiation of the entire developed world, where they live with other survivalists. Alex Stephen (World Changing) has a fantastic, beautifully-written essay I'd urge everyone to read:

Tear it down. Blow it up. Let it all go smash. "When the cities lie at the monster's feet, there are yet the mountains." Light out to the territories. Clear out to someplace far and safe, watch it burn and build something newer, stronger, cleaner on the ashes. Screw the book, start the stockpile.

I could do it. It'd be a world for the strong then, for the unhesitating, and that was a sweet strong dram. And before I knew it, I was off on the whole Apocalypse trip: I'd pull together some of hardass guys and butch women; we'd grab some remote parcel, and cut the roads nearby with explosives and blocked culverts; I'd learn hunting, and triage medicine, the hotwiring of cars and solar panels; we'd have caches, night vision goggles, camouflage outfits, and mark out fields of fire, strongpoints and perimeters; there'd be a rusty windmill and row after row of canned food on the shelves in our bunker — it'd be like the Whole Earth Catalog, circa 1974, run backwards through a filter of the Anarchist Cookbook and 2600. It'd be fun, good clean rough living. In time, we'd move back into the cities and hunt deer on the abandoned overpasses, like Chuck Pahalniuk's Space Monkeys. We'd do fine. I knew it.

I knew it because I'd dreamed it hundreds of times before. I'd grown up reading stories of life after the Apocolypse, starting with the comic book Kamandi: the Last Boy on Earth (where a blond youth such as myself wandered a post-nuclear world where the animals had mutated, taken over and rebuilt a surreal mimic of our civilization) and moving on to watching Road Warrior and running role-playing-games set in a ruined future.

I realized that I'd been hiding underneath the skirts of the apocalypse for decades now. I'd daydreamed disasters as a way of not wanting too much, not caring too much; keeping safe from the fear too much knowledge of current events tends to tattoo on your brain.

But real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, they present not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and dust everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars which accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society.

Churchill never gave up this fantasy; and sullen adolescent lad that he is, he has managed to pull off one devastating prank on those who actually do struggle for peace.

APPENDIX 2 (29 October 2007): While I am not quite ready to retract my remarks about Churchill, I am much more conflicted than I was at the time. I was recently directed to his essay "An American Holocaust? The Structure of Denial", which suggests that my interpretation of his remarks might actually be wrong. Churchill's essay is oddly different in tone from the one quoted above, or any other writing of his I've read. In other writings, he seemed to speak of the USA as a single being, committing crimes like a supernaturally monstrous and supernaturally hypocritical entity utterly unique, and therefore alien to, human experience. His style normally has a flippant tone that I found insidious (for one thing, he says a lot of extreme things, like the claim that "Americans took the lead" in blaming the Germans collectively for the crimes of the Third Reich and therefore deserve to have the same thing done to them, in the form of random massacres). Here, he was more thoughtful and patient with his reader.

More significantly, it seemed that I had perhaps misread Churchill because I assumed he classed people along a continuum of radicalism, with the WTC victims at that extreme of support for the state's behavior, and the anti-WTO demonstrators at the other; and, so to speak, cast all into hell. That is a reasonable conclusion, based on the essays I've quoted in the main article, but it's not necessarily so.