Kooks Around the Corner
Buckley, Christopher
Kooks Around the Corner Why we just can't get enough of conspiracy theories, and what our obsession is costing us Christopher Buckley IN COLLEGE, I WAS A MEMBER OF a secret society. I worked...
...he’ll fill you in on all the details, though he’s rather busy these days establishing Mother Teresa’s villainy...
...How did the Jews come in for such special treatment...
...See the chapter entitled “Conspiraciism’s Costs...
...What a great board game it would make: Conspiracy...
...I married his daughter...
...Be honest: Which story did you read first...
...In Vietnam, his comracle-in-arms was Felix Rodriguez, the CIA officer who helped track down Che Guevara in Bolivia...
...What was it they used to say in Vietnam...
...As I write, the Rev...
...Or you can work in reverse, starting with the 30 gunmen in Dallas, or the glove-planting, DNA-squirting cops in Brentwood and work your way back to the Knights Templar...
...More than 70 percent of Americans think President Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy...
...The lawyer who drew up the documents incorporating NR was William Casey, who would go on to become director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan...
...Mark Fuhrman used the n-word, therefore he planted the glove...
...But it wasn’t until a French crusade to the Holy Land in 1096-99 that anti-Semitism coalesced around specific fears that this relatively tiny band of Israelites was systematically out to get the gentiles, by means of devious banking practices andkey word-secret societies...
...That crack cocaine you sold to the CIA to distribute in U.S...
...Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the little bastards aren’t out to get you.’’ Next time someone shrugs off the fevered rantings of Pat Robertson, Ellen Chenoweth, Ice T, Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, or the auteur ofJFKas so much innocuous nonsense, tell them you’ve got a book for them...
...Twenty-five percent of Americans think aliens are harvesting people’s eggs...
...It depends on your definition of a tabloid...
...The author is Daniel Pipes...
...One is its daring, or ballsiness...
...with George Bush to persuade the Iranians not to release the American hostages until after Reagan had been elected...
...The “Risk!“ of the ’90s...
...It might be funny if it weren’t for the dismal figure that Pipes cite...
...It was a forgery, sponsored by the head of the Paris office of the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police...
...Sorry, Oliver...
...He was Reagan’s top Soviet adviser...
...Hitler’s smoking gun was a tsarist police forgery...
...On the grandest scale, if Hitler represents conspiracism gone mad, Stalin stands for something altogether craftier...
...Conjure for a moment on the lurid reductios in that one...
...Quick, close those curtains, I hear a black helicopter...
...JFK’s former press secretary called a press conference to declare that he had proof that the U.S...
...Conspiracism consists of discerning motives in raw connective tissue, or in refusing to accept apparent syllogisms...
...As democracies mature, says Pipes, we have less and less need to fix blame on manipulative Hebrew bankers, calculating Jesuits, or pin-striped oneworlders sipping sherry at the Council on Foreign Relations...
...The Hellenistic writer Origen (185-254 AD) set the tone when he said that the Jews had formed akey word- “conspiracy against the Saviour of the human race...
...As German speakers (Hitler included) developed a longing for the time before Christianity, the Jewish conspiracy came to include Jesus, the Church fathers, and the popes I’ It takes dedication and hard work to turn the pope into an agent of Theodor Herzl...
...The day after Mother Teresa’s funeral, The New York Times devoted five column inches to coverage of her funeral...
...Now Princess Diana is dead and the New York Post says that she was thinking of becoming a Catholic...
...De Barruel was a French ex-Jesuit and abbot who wrote the four-volume Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, a best-selling masterwork of fear-mongering that blamed secret societies, Freemasons, and the Bavarian Illuminati for conspiring to overthrow Christianity and private property...
...The Germans, of course, were predisposed toward anti-Semitism, having what Pipes calls “a unique motive . . . the volkisch nostalgia for Wagner’s heroically pagan epoch of Siegfied, Tristan, and the Niebelung...
...Ironic to consider that Timothy McVeigh, conspiracist, devotee of The Turner Diaries, our generation’s Protocols, has just been convicted of-key word-conspiracy to murder a microcosm of that number, 169 human beings...
...I also worked at the White House with C. Boyden Gray...
...You remember Felix...
...I worked at the White House for Vice President George Bush, who, in addition to being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, is also a member of that same secret society...
...And now Time hints that Diana may have been pregnant...
...A politics so trivialized is conducive to neither great decision making nor decisive leadership...
...Al Sharpton is all over the front pages, having turned out enough votes to complicate a Democratic New York mayoral primary...
...I later hired Liddy to write a column on security for the magazine that I edit...
...Forbes Inc.’s chairman is Caspar Weinberger, who worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan...
...is just another entertainment, another day at the movies...
...defector to Russia, friend of Castro’s Cuba-have been a poster boy for a left-wing conspiracy to kill Kennedy...
...How many bogeymen can you count in that paragraph...
...in case after case, conspiracism serves their goals...
...Go figure...
...military shot down an American civilian airliner...
...And what was the reaction of the Left, prime purveyors of conspiracy theory...
...The minds reels from that horrendous death tally that Pipes cites- 169 million...
...She worked for the CIA, too...
...Mixed Nuts At the end of this penetrating-and somewhat depressing-book, Pipes declares that “Conspiracism is a story in six acts.’’ Six degrees of separation, from the crusades to the modern era...
...Were it not for his way with words“bloodsucking Jews” is one of his boilerplate phrasesand a reputation built on a rather nasty hoathe Tawana Brawley affair-this humble man of the cloth might only be known to us as a fat, medallioned tax cheat...
...That wondrous age ended when the Jews imposed the effete outlook called Christianity, a variant of their own religion, on Germans...
...My father, another member of the secret society, founded National .Revam magazine...
...So, how optimistic are you feeling today about the demise of conspiracism in our mature democracy...
...At the White House, I worked closely with Donald I? Gregg, Bush‘s national security adviser...
...In the end, Oliver Stone...
...Anyway, Don survived and became ambassador to South Korea, where previously he had been CIA station chief...
...To ridicule the very idea of its existence...
...Don't you think I know the fix is in...
...He quotes Charles Krauthammer, who notes that the incessant, media-driven drumbeat of hairball notions is so unremitting as to “raise an eyebrow, but never a fist...
...There is a web site for those who think that the Holocaust was a hoax...
...Shouldn’t Lee Harvey Oswald -committed Marxist, US...
...The term is “democide,” new to us: “mass murder outside the context of warfare . . . 62 million in the Soviet Union, 35 million killed by Communist Chinese, 21 million by the Nazis, 10 million by the Chinese nationalists, and 6 million by the Japanese miltarists...
...His immediate boss was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to Watergate fame, along with his colleape, G. Gordon Liddy...
...Christian fundamentalists think that supermarket bar codes are an instrument of Satan...
...It was to remain the influential paranoid handbook until the appearance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Paris in the 1890s, about the time of the Dreyfus affair...
...Danger Everywhere Perhaps Pipes is right...
...Don had had a very distinguished career at the CIA for over 30 years...
...Close that window...
...leftist sophisticates lack that same veracity...
...Interestingly, his intent wasn’t so much to convince the world that the Jews had a secret master plan for world domination, but to prove to Tsar Nicholas I1 that Russian liberals were their agents...
...And yet Jim Garrison, Edward Jay Epstein, Mark Lane, Oliver Stone, and others managed successfully to decoct a right-wing conspiracy...
...Whoops...
...Kooks Around the Corner Why we just can't get enough of conspiracy theories, and what our obsession is costing us Christopher Buckley IN COLLEGE, I WAS A MEMBER OF a secret society...
...Pipes’ book, which should have been titled Conspiracism, could very well have been titled Cherchez LesJuij%, for the bulk of it is taken up by mankmd’s obsession with spotting Rothschilds and Cohens in every woodpile, from the Russian Revolution tostrange as it may sound-Hider’s rise to power, but then no leap of logic is too great for a committed conspiracist or anti-Semite...
...The shallowness of our political culture has a saving grace...
...Recently, a leading California newspaper, the San Jose Mercury Nfpws, reported that it was the CIA that initiated the crack epidemic in America’s inner cities-and then somewhat blandly recanted...
...Tabloid fodder...
...ghettos turns out to belong to the Rothschilds...
...Eighty percent of Americans think that the government is hiding information from them about flying saucers...
...Before he became a magazine editor, my father worked for the CIA...
...Our b i g p t worry now-and here we all agree-is the little green men in the UFOs with their fearsome rectal probes...
...France would make another significant contribution to conspiracism 800 years later, in the person of Augustin De Barruel (1741-1820), whom Pipes calls, “history’s most important conspiracy theorist...
...But after soaking in his study of 1,000 years of paranoia, I’m feeling a little clammy and twitchy...
...We sort of worked together at the White House...
...Lee Harvey Oswald was a nerd, therefore he could not have brought down King Arthur by himself...
...And yet Pipes is in the end optimistic, regarding conspiracist paranoia as a spent force in the West and Europe...
...Rather, they seemingly spread conspiracy theories as a means to further their political agenda...
...The same front page devoted twice that amount to a story announcing that women in New York were talking about Diana to their psychiatrists...
...Don’t you think I know the fix is in...
...Come to think of it, I knew his father, Richard Pipes, the eminent Russian scholar...
...A worldly, well-educated analyst does not fall prey to conspiracist demons with the same sincerity as does a janitor...
...Are you getting the picture...
...But then the Left is generally more sophisticated than the Right, giving it the upper hand in discerning the hidden hand...
...Quick, close those curtains, I hear a black helicopter...
...Muammar Khadafi, the Howard Stern of the North African littoral, went on the airwaves to announce that the Princess of Wales had obviously been offed by the Windsors so that the future King William would not be encumbered by a wog stepfather...
...She-well, I don’t have time to get into all that...
...Pipes notes that the only real world conspiracy was the one begun by Lenin and refined brilliantly by Stalin...
...The Left, Pipes notes, is better at incubating and promulgating conspiracy theories, for a number of reasons...
...The question remains:Does it matter what people believe...
...as conspiracism’s 20th century theoretical body count: 169 million...
...The Protocols, arguably the most poisonous racial document of the modern era, purported to be a transcript of the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897...
...The magazine is owned by Steve Forbes, past and future presidential candidate...
...Iran-Contra...
...Drink one gallon of fluoridated water and resubscribe to The Nation...
...Conspiracism is a wilderness of mirrors, an ironist’s Disneyland...
...The Senate and The PVashzngton Post, egged on by the Christic Institute and assorted people with the last name of Cockburn, tried very hard to nail Don for, among other things, helping to orchestrate the famous 1980 October Surprise-traveling in secret to Paris CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY's new book, God Is My Broker, written with John Tierney, will be published by Random House in April...
...Call up Christopher Hitchens at The Nation...
...I have to review this book for you called Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From...
...Yahoos on the Right appear almost universally heartfelt in their fears of Jews and Freemasons...
...It’s a fine, important, even invaluable book...
...Both totalitarian movements may have relied on semiclandestine structures and made-over plans for world hegemony, but they attracted less notice than empires put together in a fit of absent-mindedness (Great Britain), hardly existent (United States), or completely fantastical (Jews...
...When the real thing rears its ugly head, conspiracists refuse to acknowledge it: “. . . the cognoscenti pooh-pooh allegations about these pazi and Soviet] global ambitions: Winston Churchill met with much disdain in the 1930s when he talked of the ‘jackboots,’ as did Ronald Reagan in the 1980s with his one-time reference to the ‘evil empire...
...But it is also nicely immunized from the worst of political pathologies...
...Two thirds of Americans think that aliens crash-landed at Roswell...
...Mention the name of his father, Gordon Gray, to any serious UFOlogist and they will coo and stroke their chins and tell you that Gordon Gray was a member of the shadowy, ultra-secret group called Majestic-12 that ran the first flying-saucer cover up...
...Followers of Louis Farrakhan believe that the white race resulted from an experiment by a mad doctor named Yakub...
...There’s potting soil for a wowser conspiracy theory...
Vol. 29 • November 1997 • No. 11
