Real conspiracies

References

American Heritage Dictionary, "Conspiracy theory"

Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520238052

Chase, Alston. 2003. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393020029

Fenster, Mark. 1999. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 081663243X

Goldberg, Robert Alan. 2001. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300090005

Hofstadter, Richard. 1965. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0674654617

Melley, Timothy. 1999. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801486068

Mintz, Frank P. 1985. The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 031324393X

Pipes, Daniel. 1997. Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes from. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0684871114

---. 1998. The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312176880

Popper, Karl R. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691019681

Posner, Gerald. 1993. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. New York: The Random House. ISBN 0385474466

Sagan, Carl. 1996. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House. ISBN 039453512X

Vankin, Jonathan, and John Whalen. 2004. The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. New York: Citadel Press. ISBN 0806525312

Dear Editor--I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there are no government conspiracies. Papa says, 'If you see it in What Really Happened, it's so.' Please tell me the truth, are there government conspiracies? Virginia   Virginia, your little friends are wrong.  They have been affected by the induced blindness of the mainstream media.  They do not believe except they see it on television or hear it over the radio.  They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.  Yes, Virginia, there are government conspiracies.  They exist as certainly as greed and ambition and lust for power exist. At the present time and for all to see, some of the highest officials of this land have agreed upon the telling of a lie. That agreement is a conspiracy by any definition or interpretation of the word. The Secretary of State told the lie to the United Nations. The Vice President pressured the CIA to go along with the lie. The President spoke the lie to the world. Others participated as well, particularly in that same mainstream media that blinds and deafens your little friends. They participated willingly, taking part in the conspiracy in exchange for favors from those same officials.   Nobody lies without reason. Nobody conspires with others to lie without reason. And the purpose of this particular conspiracy to lie was to start a war that nobody but a few rich and powerful leaders wanted, to spend our money and to send forth our children to invade an impoverished and helpless nation whose only worth was that it was, as a Defense Official described it, "swimming in oil". There can be be no more vile a lie than that used to send a nation to war, nor no more dark a war than that waged for profit. This conspiracy committed both crimes.   Yes, Virginia, there are government conspiracies.  And the biggest government conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no government conspiracies. Because government conspiracies are creatures of the dark places. They function best when invisible and deniable. But not this time. This time the conspiracy is in the light for all to see. The lie is known, the tellers of that lie identified, their cooperation and collusion plain for the world to see. The lie is beyond question. So too is the conspiracy to lie.   So for all those times you wondered if there was a government conspiracy and your friends shouted you down saying that there were no government conspiracies, now you know they were wrong. You know that if the claim that there are no government conspiracies was their sole argument, that they did not have any real argument at all. Knowing that government conspiracies unquestionable exist, your little-minded friends can no longer claim that there was no government conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy because government conspiracies don't exist. Your little-minded friends can no longer claim that there was no government conspiracy to kill Robert F. Kennedy because government conspiracies don't exist.  Your little-minded friends can no longer claim that there was no government conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King, or Vince Foster or Ron Brown  because government conspiracies don't exist. Your little-minded friends can no longer claim that there was no government conspiracy to cover-up the real cause of the TWA 800 crash because government conspiracies don't exist.   Your little-minded friends can no longer claim that there was no government conspiracy to blame Arabs for 9-11  because government conspiracies don't exist.    Because government conspiracies DO exist. Bush, Powell, Cheney, Blair, Rumsfeld, etc. et. al. have proved that reality before the world. And with that new awareness, every controversy that was ever dismissed solely on the claim that there are no government conspiracies can be, indeed must be, re-examined in the light of the knowledge that government conspiracies are a very real part of everyday life.   Yes, Virginia, there are government conspiracies.

A Trawl through the Cultic Milieu   Damian Thompson 5 March 1997 Kingston University   At the end of 1995 the radical Jewish magazine New Moon printed a long and disturbing news feature under the inspired headline "The Icke Man Cometh". The article, billed as a "special investigation", began as follows: "It is has been hard in recent years to ignore the popularity of almost everything that comes under the heading New Age. Yoga, meditation, Kabbalah, Buddhism, alternative medicine, environmentalism, self-improvement and New Age therapies have all gained in popularity, as have all other fringe interests like UFOS and the paranormal. But during the past year, a dark side to the New Age message of sweetness and light has become increasingly clear." According to the authors of the piece, Matthew Kalman and John Murray, a small number of influential New Age leaders are embracing conspiracy theories which are heavily influenced by the racist ideology of the far right. The article singled out David Icke, the former Coventry City goalkeeper and BBC sports commentator whose public declaration in 1990 that he was a son of God, and henceforth would dress only in turquoise, furnished the media with perhaps the most hilarious news story of the year. Well, you can stop laughing, said Kalman and Murray: for in the course of his eccentric spiritual pilgrimage, David Icke has turned into a fully fledged New Age Nazi. Kalman and Murray went on to quote from a book published by Icke in 1994 called The Robot's Rebellion in which his well-established Green views are overlaid by a fantastical tapestry of far-right conspiracy theories. Icke's villains are Jews, Freemasons, bankers, the FBI, the gun control lobby and aliens; indeed, he describes "Jehovah, the vengeful God of the Jews" as "quite possibly an extra-terrestrial." The Robot's Rebellion sold so well in New Age circles that it went into three editions; a year later Icke followed it up with a book called ...and the truth shall set you free, advertised as "the most explosive book of the 20th century", in which he proclaims that "almost every major negative event of global significance has been part of the same plan by the All-Seeing Eye cult to take over the planet via a centralized world government, central bank, currency [Eurosceptics please note] and army." Icke also describes this cult as "the Illuminati" and "the Brotherhood", but it soon becomes clear that he is most interested in its incarnation as "a global Jewish clique". Icke's antisemitism is of an exotic variety, increasingly well entrenched on the far right, which in addition to blaming the Jews for the First World War and the Russian Revolution, also holds them responsible for the worst excesses of Third Reich, including the Holocaust. Icke accuses Jewish bankers of funding Hitler's rise to power; he urges his readers to take Holocaust revisionism seriously; and explains how anti-semitic persecution is the creation of "thought patterns in the collective Jewish mind... They expect it; they create it."   Kalman and Murray's purpose in writing their article, which they followed up with a cover story in the New Statesman, was not just to expose the egregious Icke as a Neo-Nazi. Their point was that his views are representative of a significant strand of thought on the New Age movement. In his books, Icke enthusiastically plugs and Australian New Age magazine called Nexus which carries article by US militia leaders and dabbles in Holocaust revisionism; its circulation is 130,000, more than four times that of the New Statesman. Compare, too, Icke's distinctive brand of antisemitism with an article in the British New Age journal Rainbow Ark on the subject of modern Israel. "When a person has a strong hatred of another race," it says, "their higher self often (karmically) makes sure they incarnate in that race to balance them out, thus many of the worst kind of Nazis have already incarnated in Jewish bodies, explaining therefore some of the fireworks which are going on in Israel." Rainbow Ark, incidentally, often held public meetings at the Battlebridge New Age centre in London's Kings Cross. When interviewed by Kalman and Murray, the centre's organiser, Julie Lowe, said she personally believed in the authenticity of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As she explained: "I met two old Jewish men at Hyde Park Corner one evening who told me...that if they didn't get their way in the things they wanted, they were able through Philadelphia in America to pull the money out of every city in the world. I've seen it happen in Sheffield, so I believe it."   New Age Nazis, as New Moon calls them, might seem too contemptible and ridiculous to merit serious attention. In fact, they go to the very heart of what I want to discuss in this lecture, which is the astonishing capacity of ideas rejected by society at large to make connections with other ideas with which they appear to have nothing in common, but which, for one reason or another, are regarded as beyond the pale by the dominant forces in society. On the face of it, Neo-Nazis and the New Age movement are poles apart, politically and culturally; dig below the surface, however, and we discover that the alignment of the poles is not what we imagine it to be. (As we shall see, I use these terms advisedly.)   It is well known, I think, that Hitler was a vegetarian non-smoker, and that his regime's obsession with a Teutonic mythic past of forests and mountains, together with its distrust of capitalism, made it Europe's first environmentally-aware government. For the most part, this fact is treated by commentators as little more than an unhappy coincidence: it hardly tars the Green movement with the Nazi brush, and it certainly does not explain why Green New Agers should be susceptible to theories of racial supremacy. But the bizarre correspondence between the views of Icke, Nexus and Rainbow Ark on the one hand and supporters of the Third Reich on the other is not a matter of simple coincidence; and it cannot be dismissed as the sudden and inexplicable collective insanity of a few members of an otherwise entirely beneficent movement.   A few years ago Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's book The Occult Roots of Nazism argued, as its title implies, that the origins of the Third Reich lay partly in esoteric speculation. Many leading Nazis are thought to have belonged to secret societies which tapped into the West's occult tradition; indeed, some of the racial theorists who inspired the Nazis relied as much on occult fantasy as they did on pseudo-science or Nordic myth. To give just one example: Lanz von Liebenfels, a renegade Catholic monk who as an old man was visited by Hitler, believed that there were originally two breeds of people, heroes and apemen, the one blond, athletic and clever, the other cruel, greedy and stupid. As a result of miscegenation, the human race now consisted mostly of mongrel mixtures of hero and animal: the Jews, predictably, were virtually pure apeman, while Aryans were the closest thing to pure hero.   The notion of races of men who existed before the dawn of history, or even conventional pre-history, is (to use a metaphor which would appeal to the far right) one of the great leitmotifs of alternative science and history. "Alternative", in this context, refers to theories which lie outside established orthodoxy. In other words, we are dealing with information that society rejects; and later in this lecture I will explain what I mean by this rather loosely-defined concept. But before moving on from the New Age Nazis, I want to turn to a remarkable piece of research which, by following the trail of one particular "alternative" idea, gives us a very clear picture of the strange cultural environment in which New Agers and National Socialists overlap and mingle.   In his book Arktos, published in 1993, Joscelyn Godwin, a British historian of esoteric thought who teaches in America, reveals the extraordinary persistence of the "polar myth" in various exotic subcultures. This myth appears in many different versions, ranging from the sophisticated to the sub-literate; but what unites most of them is the striking idea that at some time in the distant past the earth's poles have dramatically shifted. As a result, a section of the globe which was once not only habitable but, in some versions of the myth, a fertile paradise called Hyperborea, has become the Arctic wasteland.   Although the notion that the earth once sat upright in its orbit around the sun dates back to the ancient world, the myth of a polar paradise did not really take shape until the 19th century. It appears in its most baroque form in one of the most influential of all esoteric works, The Secret Doctrine by the indefatigable Helena Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky, an enormously stout dowager descended from Russian aristocrats, thrilled Victorian society with her tales of deepest Tibet, which she claimed to have spent seven years exploring armed only with an umbrella. She was the founder of the movement known as Theosophy, which aims to create a universal brotherhood by disseminating the wisdom of a hierarchy of Hidden Masters living in Tibet. Theosophical ideas lie behind much of what is now classified as New Age, including David Icke's effusions; but what concerns us here is Blavatsky's belief that for many millions of years the North Pole was covered by "an Imperishable Sacred Land". This was the home of the First Race of men, who had colourless ethereal bodies and knew neither sickness nor death. But, during millions of years of slow degeneration, successive races of man gradually took on corporeal form and colour; continents, including Atlantis, rose and sank; and the Sacred Land became an icy fastness.   Madame Blavatsky's fanciful scheme was obviously intended for her followers; no-one else could be expected to take it seriously. Yet her insistence on a northern homeland for humanity was neither original nor entirely controversial. During the 19th century, many German scholars had developed a hearty contempt for the Hebrew scriptures as a source of information about man's origins. The fashionable orientalism of the period drew them towards Sanskrit and the Hindu tradition; as Godwin points out, "if the Germans could link their origins to India, then they would be forever free from their Semitic and Mediterranean bondage". Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) was convinced that Indian veneration for a mythical northern mountain must imply a tribal memory of the North Pole. Furthermore, their language proved that they shared common origins with Nordic peoples. They were, in short, one race, and Schlegel even provided a name for it: borrowing an obscure term which was previously applied to the ancient Persians, he said that Indians and northern Europeans were all "Aryans".   It was not long before this classification acquired racialist overtones, in which the intellectual superiority of the Aryan race was contrasted with the degeneracy and sloth of other races (and various convoluted explanations were offered as to why modern Indians are not white). We should bear in mind, I think, the uncomfortable fact that until the early years of this century, racialist theory represented scientific orthodoxy; it appealed to enlightened people searching for a reasonable - "non-judgemental", in modern jargon - explanation for inequalities between peoples. But it is also the case that whenever an intellectual discipline produces what appears to be an important breakthrough in our understanding of the world, whether it be racial theory or chaos theory, the chances are that it will be appropriated by people whose most striking characteristic is their lack of intellectual discipline. So it was that ultra-nationalist Germans took the notion of Aryan race and inserted it into a mythology largely of their own invention in which the polar homeland was identified with "Thule", a mysterious land visited by Pytheas of Massilia in his voyages north of Scotland in the third century BC. The violently racist Thule Society, an aristocratic secret order based in Munich after the First World War, urged its members to fight the Jewish enemy "until the swastika rises victoriously out of the icy darkness"; its working-class equivalent was the German Worker's Party, which in 1920 became the Nazi Party. Meanwhile, less sinister esoteric societies continued to build vast imaginative edifices using the imagery of both Hyperborea and Thule; the distinction between the two polar sanctuaries was never clear, and indeed as the century progressed and the mythology developed, the distinction between supporters and opponents of Nazism among the myth-makers was also blurred.   I want to make two points at this stage. First, that when we try to follow the twists and turns of an esoteric idea, particularly in the 20th century, we quickly realise that the milieu in which is moves is inclusive to a quite extraordinary degree. No conspiracy theory is so complete that it cannot accommodate a new villain; no map of a forgotten country is so detailed that it cannot squeeze in an extra subterranean city or two; no scientific discovery is so limited in its application that it cannot be given a New Age gloss. Secondly, we are moving in an environment in which the boundary between fact and fiction, to which the world at large ascribes such importance, matters very little. We all know that the history of literature is littered with products of the imagination (such as Gulliver's Travels) whose authors have given them the form of eyewitness narratives. In esoteric circles, however, the equation is often inverted: outlandish works of fantasy are treated (or presented) as true stories which for safety's sake have been dressed up as fiction.   Godwin produces a classic example of this: Wilhelm Landig's 1971 novel Götzen gegen Thule (Gods against Thule), a "fiction full of facts" in which it is suggested that after the destruction of the polar paradise of Thule, its cosmic spirit survived in the hearts of a few scattered people - of different races, interestingly - who are mysteriously transported back to the Arctic after the German defeat in 1945. Their role is to prepare for a new age, the Age of Aquarius, whose harbingers are UFOs called Manisolas which begin life as discs of pure light and then crystallise into metallic form. The allies of the Thuleans include the medieval Cathars, guardians of the Holy Grail; their enemies are the Catholic Church, Freemasons, the United Nations and the Jews, whose Ark of the Covenant was, it is revealed, an astral accumulator designed to steal the energy of the Aryans by filtering it through something called the Hebraic Pole.   Landig stops just short of eulogising Hitler; he concedes that the noble Thulean aims of the Third Reich were perverted by the forces of evil. But the same cannot be said of another Polar fantasist, Miguel Serrano, who during the 1950s and 60s was one of Chile's most senior diplomats. For Serrano, Hitler is the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu, who is destined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and usher in the New Age. I say "is", for Serrano reports that at the end of the Second World War Hitler escaped in a flying saucer and entered a hollow world inside the earth, in whose secret cities the first Hyperboreans had taken refuge from the disaster that reversed the Poles. This hollow world was discovered by the Nazis during an expedition to Antarctica, says Serrano; very much his own theory, you might imagine, but in fact the theme of Hitler's survival at the South Pole has flourished on the fringes of the New Age for many years, ornamented by reports of disappearing submarines, secret weapons, subterranean headquarters and, it goes without saying, UFOs.   It also goes without saying, I think, that the people who enjoy this sort of thing are as far removed from the intellectual mainstream as it is possible to be. The world of conspiracy theories is one we associate with cranks, some of them well-educated but nearly all them personally disturbed, and with people of little or no formal education. That said, however, when we stare at the sort of bubbling cultic soup cooked up by the likes of Miguel Serrano, we can see, in addition to many poisonous creatures floating around, remnants and strands of ideas which are still considered respectable - such as yoga, a great enthusiasm of Serrano's - or have only gradually become disreputable.   Take the hollow earth, for example. We can follow the trail of this idea from the entirely reasonable speculation of medieval monks, to the rather more daring conjectures of the 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher, who based his theory of a whirlpool at the centre of the earth on an analogy with human anatomy; from there we can follow it into the overheated imagination of the 19th-century American eccentric John Cleves Symmes, whose petition to Congress for an expedition to the lands inside the earth was greeted with nationwide hilarity; and from there to Serrano. (I have no idea if David Icke believes in a hollow earth, but I am sure he would not rule it out). In the same way, modern scientific theories often undergo a journey from academia or the laboratory to the wilder shores of sanity, a process which, in our information-hungry age, can occur virtually overnight. For example: within months of the scientist James Lovelock outlining his Gaia hypothesis, in which he introduced the idea of the planet as a living organism, books had appeared which built highly speculative philosophies on his thesis; and not long after that, an angry earth-goddess called Gaia began to crop up in every variety of New Age fantasy (including David Icke's).   Whether it takes centuries or months, the movement of ideas I have described so far is very clearly in one direction: away from the mainstream of intellectual life. This is important, not least because rejection of intellectual orthodoxy so often reflects (or causes) alienation from society in general; but I don't want to give the impression that all irrational beliefs gravitate automatically towards a lunatic fringe, or that movement is in only one direction. The American sociologist of religion Robert Ellwood, while accepting that there is much that is plainly ridiculous in the New Age movement, argues that it is "a contemporary manifestation of a western alternative spirituality tradition going back at least to the Greco-Roman world. The current flows like an underground river through the Christian centuries, breaking into high visibility in the Renaissance occultism of the so-called 'Rosicrucian Enlightenment', eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and nineteenth-century Spiritualism and Theosophy."   Ellwood is right, I think, to emphasise the historical continuity of esoteric thought. I don't want to deny the existence or even the validity of this tradition; on the other hand, it is not the whole story. At this stage I want to introduce the useful, if slightly cumbersome, term "cultic milieu", which was coined by the sociologist Colin Campbell to describe the highly eclectic (and constantly shifting) cultural environment in which the New Age movement operates. As I see it, this cultic milieu extends well beyond the New Age, however broadly we define it: it has the capacity to take in and transform almost any piece of information that society rejects. Instead of an underground river, it is more like a vast metaphorical lake which is fed by many different sources. If we trawl the waters of this lake, we will certainly pick up many life forms which have been carried along by Ellwood's esoteric and occult stream; but there will also be many others, perhaps equally strange, which have been transported there by much more familiar currents, such as Christianity and Hollywood.   Consider, for example, one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas known to man: the belief that the world (or the world as we know it) is about to come to an end. For well over 2,000 years, apocalyptic believers of one sort or another have lived in the shadow of the End. Each prophet, and each sect, has outlined a different scenario, in which the apocalypse is brought about by every conceivable agent of transformation: earthquakes, tidal waves, nuclear Armageddon, alien invasion and, yes, polar shift. Yet despite this variety, it does not take a genius to work out that most of these fantasies share a common structure and dynamic. In almost every case, the End is heralded by worldwide catastrophe, which may be natural, supernatural or man-made; but however many millions perish in the cataclysm, a group of believers is spared so that it can populate either an earthly paradise or a heavenly kingdom (and usually a mixture of both).   A couple of years ago I began work on a book called The End of Time which compares three categories of modern apocalyptic belief: fundamentalist Christian, ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, and New Age. Up to a point, I found what I was expecting to find: that is to say, striking similarities in the way in which all three groups interpret current affairs as evidence of the coming apocalypse, and in the way in which their scenarios dispose of the unrighteous. Gory fundamentalist images of unbelievers roasting at Armageddon are no more blood-curdling, it seems to me, than the prophecies of the Native American author Sun Bear, in which the planet "shakes itself like a shaggy dog full of fleas", and tens of millions die in the resulting tidal waves; or those of the New Age priestess Ruth Montgomery, whose New World is littered with the bodies of those unfortunate people "not adequately prepared in spirit".   What I did not expect to find, and what really persuaded me of the reality of the cultic milieu, was pieces of information that seemed to belong exclusively to one tradition turning up in another. So, for example, it came as a surprise to encounter the figure of the Antichrist, the satanic figure who for two millennia has dominated Christian apocalyptic, in so many New Age prophecies. Ruth Montgomery believes the Antichrist is a young man presently being educated in an American college. The couturier Paco Rabanne, author of a wonderfully batty book called Has the Countdown Begun? (answer: yes) has another candidate. "I have seen the face of a young man now living in London," he says, "who has surprised important people with his 'magic' gifts. He is already extending his psychic undertaking and his personal fortune. Is he no more than a sorcerer with extraordinary powers, or is he the Antichrist, already in ambush awaiting his hour?"   Everywhere I looked, I found evidence of cross-fertilisation between traditions which are openly hostile to one another. Ultra-conservative Catholics, for whom the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary signal the End, borrow biblical arithmetic from fiercely anti-Catholic fundamentalists in order to demonstrate that time is running out. Even more surprisingly, fundamentalists, who ostensibly regard the New Age as the province of Satan, cannot resist the lure of some of its ideas. For instance: back in 1982, there was terrific excitement in New Age circles at the approach of something called the "Jupiter effect", an alignment of the planets which a couple of maverick scientists predicted would slow down the earth's rotation, leading to an earthquake which would destroy Los Angeles. Leading fundamentalists might be expected to scoff at this; instead, they jumped straight on the bandwagon. Hal Lindsey, author of The Late, Great Planet Earth, wrote that "what we can expect in 1982 is the largest outbreak of killer quakes ever seen in the history of planet earth along with radical changes in climate". Not to be outdone, Pat Robertson suggested that the chaos caused by the Jupiter Effect might prove the perfect cover for a Soviet strike against the US. But this prospect did not worry the Southwestern Radio Church: it suggested that the Rapture might occur just before the planetary alignment, that the earth would be righted on its axis, and that pre-Flood conditions would be restored.   How do we account for this cross-fertilisation? There is broad agreement between social scientists that apocalyptic beliefs of every variety are a response to disorientation and stress. Moreover, although New Agers and fundamentalist Christians tend to come from different social backgrounds, they share a readiness to identify themselves as "outsiders", people who consciously reject the values of the society around them, often as a result of a life-changing spiritual experience. There was a time, of course, when fundamentalist Christianity in America was simply the dominant religious creed of vast areas of the country; but with the passage of time it is acquiring more and more of the characteristics of a counter-culture.   I do not think we should be misled by the traditional image of fundamentalists as blazer-wearing conservatives in crew-cuts. When the New York lifestyle magazine Details sent a feature writer to follow the trail of the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh through the Bible belt, he reported back that "die-hard redneck bigots now look like the long-haired biker hippies killed by diehard redneck bigots in movies like Easy Rider." Furthermore, individual fundamentalists are often tremendously receptive to unorthodox ideas, even those condemned as the work of the Devil by their church leaders. Just as New Agers are often fascinated by the biblical number 666, so born-again Christians are more likely to believe in UFOs than the population at large; and, like Ronald and Nancy Reagan, they are more likely to interested in astrology. Even supposedly conservative figures such as Pat Robertson flirt with conspiracy theories of the most colourful variety: in his book The New World Order he introduces us to "a small secret society called the Order of the Illuminati" who first gained control of the freemasons and then proceeded, through the agency of Jewish bankers, to set in motion both the French and Russian Revolutions. Now where have we heard that before?   Perhaps the reason so many fundamentalist Christians are so deeply immersed in the cultic milieu is that their religion is far more radical and "alternative" than it first appears. After all, most of them are required to believe that within a few years the entire Church on earth will be carried up to heaven in the Rapture (a doctrine which, incidentally, dates back no further than the 19th century). Anyone who believes that they will be plucked skywards while their unbelieving neighbours die in the agony of Armageddon is likely to feel that they are therefore set apart from the bulk of mankind. Yet American fundamentalists do not live in a vacuum; they watch television (and lots of it). The cultic milieu is not a closed environment, in which only elements of religious or esoteric belief combine and mingle. I've already mentioned UFOs and science fiction; I want to conclude this lecture by looking at the implications of living in a world in which religion is increasingly the poor relation of mass entertainment.   I should say immediately that I am entirely convinced by the growing body of research, such as Jim Schnabel's excellent book Dark White, which establishes a direct correlation between reports of UFO encounters and the treatment of the subject by popular literature and Hollywood, Invariably, the fictional representation has always preceded a wave of sightings. I don't think this should surprise us. There are strong reasons to believe that the esoteric secret societies which flourished at the turn of the century borrowed their cosmology from early science fiction; and it also seems likely that some of the "moral panics" of the past, such as the evangelical crusade against the white slave trade in the 1920s, originated either in sensationalist fiction or in those fascinating oral traditions we now call urban myths.   The transformation of fiction into quasi-religious beliefs raises many complex questions; and unfortunately there isn't time to address them all here. Let me just say that I don't think we are dealing with a single, easily identifiable psychological mechanism. Just as the sources of these beliefs are extremely varied, so are the forms in which they manifest themselves: simple credulity, profound religious belief and serious mental disturbance. On the other hand, this process of transformation confirms everything we know about the cultic milieu, and in particular the way in which openness to one piece of unorthodox information (fictional or otherwise) can produce a new mind-set in which a vast range of information rejected by society is potentially accessible.   Of course, this isn't the purpose of mass entertainment, which is directed not at New Agers, or fundamentalists, or the feeble-minded, but at the general public. What, then, are we to make of the fact that so many of the entertainment's industry's most successful products deal with what might be called "the unexplained"? The 1990s have seen the development of an apparently insatiable public appetite for films, television series and books which explore mysteries and mystical traditions. It is not easy to say whether this reflects deliberate manipulation of a market or a response to a deep-seated spiritual yearning: probably a bit of both. What is abundantly clear is that Hollywood, the television companies and publishers everywhere do not need to be told about the cultic milieu; they may not have heard of it, but they seem to have a pretty good idea of how it works, and how to make it work for them. There is no better illustration of this than The X-Files, which in the course of three series has trawled one stretch after another of our metaphorical lake, collecting pieces of folklore, urban myth, religious tradition and pseudo-science and joining them together to form patterns which are not only immensely entertaining, but which are immediately recognisable to conspiracy theorists everywhere - and, perhaps, to the conspiracy theorist who lurks inside all of us.   I am sorry if this sounds disapproving and puritanical. In fact, I'm not remotely offended by television shows which draw on the cultic milieu; but I do think we should recognise the dangers of becoming addicted to forms of entertainment in which the strands of myth, fiction and fact are so difficult to disentangle. In America, for example, one has to wonder about the effect of television series built round an imaginary government conspiracy on a culture where the paranoid tradition is still so influential: just look at Pat Robertson. We can only guess what David Koresh would have made of the X-Files or Dark Skies; but what we do know is that in reinventing himself as the messiah of Waco he drew heavily on popular culture, and particularly on a sci-fi movie called The Lawnmower Man, in which computer software is fed into a retarded man's brain and he becomes a power-crazed genius. The Branch Davidians at Waco were forced to watch this film many times over by Koresh, who used it as the text for day-long sermons; in the end, it was as much a part of their religion as the Book of Revelation.   As it happens, I don't believe that the Branch Davidians bear most of the responsibility for the Waco tragedy. I do believe, however, that apocalyptic cults pose a growing threat to law and order throughout the world; and that the cultic milieu is absolutely central to this threat. There are, for example, literally thousands of new religious movements in Japan which not only build on local traditions of evil spirits, but reach out to elements of Western culture which one might think were entirely foreign to them. For example: almost none of these cults are Christian, but that does not stop many of them borrowing bloody psychedelic images from the last book of the bible. I am thinking of one group in particular whose theology incorporated the following elements: the Book of Revelation, Tantric yoga, Nostradamus, the Age of Aquarius, nuclear physics and the Roman Catholic prophecies of St Malachi. A comically eclectic mixture, I am sure you will agree; but when I tell you the group was called Aum Shinrikyo you will understand why such beliefs need to be taken seriously.   What about the implications for this country? It is true, I think, that Britain's political culture is so stable, and its apocalyptic tradition so marginalized, that the potential for violent disorder is limited. In our post-religious society, part of the appeal of material based on "the unexplained" lies in the fact that it invites us to toy with highly unorthodox and subversive ideas without requiring us to incorporate them into our belief system. On the other hand, are we perhaps too confident of our ability to distinguish truth from fantasy? Fictional TV dramas are one thing; quite another are books such as Fingerprints of the Gods which explain the configuration of the pyramids in terms of a long-lost Antarctic civilization and then go on to top Britain's non-fiction bestseller lists for months.   The popularity of such perniciously trashy works can only mean that we have lost faith in the ability of orthodox history and science to describe the world in which we live. The same goes for many New Age therapies for serious illnesses, which undoubtedly shorten the lives of some sufferers and which recently provoked the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph to issue an impassioned denunciation of what he called the "X-Files mentality".   Let me end with a cautionary tale. About ten years ago, extremely distressing reports of Satanic activity began to circulate among Britain's born-again Christians. It appeared that an organised network of Satanists were holding covens in which small children were sexually abused; in some cases, women were being impregnated so that they could give birth to foetuses which could then be sacrificed in gruesome rituals. As the stories spread from church to church, "survivors" of this Ritual Satanic Abuse came forward, just as they had in America a couple of years earlier. Their evidence was tantalisingly insubstantial: it mostly consisted of memories which had been "recovered" in therapy. But it was enough to win over significant numbers of social workers, who began to receive specialist training from so-called experts in Satanic Abuse - experts who, on closer inspection, turned out to be fundamentalist Christians. The rest of the story is no doubt familiar to you: small children were removed from their families and effectively forced to incriminate their parents or other adults. A terrible fiction was created; lives and families were destroyed. All this could have been avoided, I would argue, if society at large - the professions, the press, the churches - knew anything about the way in which similar moral panics have arisen in the past, or knew their way round the territory we have been exploring today. They might then have spotted that the recovered memories of Satanic abuse survivors bore an extraordinary resemblance to the testimonies of victims of alien abduction, even down to the smallest anatomical details of the alleged abuse. A coincidence? If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

From "Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes." New York: Paragon House, 1991. By Jonathan Vankin. Pages 237 to 250.   CONSPIRACY NATION Every thing secret degenerates ... nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. ~Lord Acton Anyone who has seen Raiders of the Lost Ark has a notion of the ties between Nazis and the occult. That flick and its second sequel, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Nazis scour Europe in search of the Holy Grail, have some relation to reality. The Nazis did perform strange excavations in France looking for mystical relics- presumably the Grail, or maybe Templar treasure. Even people who don't like cartoony adventure movies may be vaguely aware that the swastika was an ancient magic symbol signifying light, which the Nazis reversed to symbolize darkness. Nazi preoccupation with mythology is good Saturday matinee fare, but the origins of Nazism in Germany's occult underworld are not usually looked upon as a legitimate topic for study by historians of the Second World War. On the one hand, we have the sweeping but wholly conventional poli-sci analysis a la William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. On the other, there's the psycho-historical outlook typified by The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which attempted to explicate Nazism with reference to Hitler's fifty percent deficit in the testicle department--a new twist on the lone nut theory. Academic minds tend to force the most irrational phenomena into the frame of reference found in a college bookstore: politics, economics, sociology, and, of course, abnormal psychology. All such approaches seem almost designed to isolate Nazi Germany from the continuum of history and confirm that it can't happen here. This is a comforting notion, conducive to detached, scholarly analysis of the role of secret societies peopled by true believers, whose motives were not only irrational but antirational, which falls outside the spectrum of temperate discourse on modern history's darkest period. I'm not arguing that Germany's rotting economy, its stratified class structure, the impotence of its Weimar government, or even the mental and genital abnormalities of the Nazi Führer have no place in understanding the Nazis. They have a big place. But without the highly organized, perversely passionate, subterranean occult movement that gestated in Germany around the turn of the century, all of those elements could not have congealed into Nazism. More than a political party, the Nazi party was very much a cult. Like most demagogic religious sects, its rank and file was spell-bound with the courage of demented convictions, and its leadership was financed and supported by powerful people whose main interest was accumulating more power. The finely tuned machine of brainwashing, fanaticism, and secrecy is perfect for that purpose.   Germanic occultists, like the Ku Klux Klan, were in love with religious warriors, holy knights. They were disgusted with even-keel, post-enlightenment rationalism, which cut man off from his spiritual nature and turned him into a timid species of accountants and clerks. The Middle-Ages were their romantic ideal. Squalor, plague, ignorance, and malnutrition--endemic to the Middle Ages--meant nothing to these incipient Nazis. All they cared was that spirituality in those days was transcendent. Templars and Teutonic Knights were their heroes. In this German version of medieval mythos, the Grail was the pure blood of prehistoric gods, and it was carried by only one race, the Aryan. Everyone else was subhuman, Jews and nonwhites especially. The holy knights, according to this lore, were guardians of the Aryan bloodline. Aryans, the occultists believed, were descended from a race of giants who ruled earth long before recorded time. The super civilization had a Great Fall. Only Aryans perpetuate the holy heredity. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, two Austrian mystics, were the ideological grandfathers of Nazism. Lanz formed, in 1900, a society called the Order of New Templars (ONT). The ONT, and the societies that evolved from it, ultimately the Nazi party, was a core for industrialists, lawyers, publishers, and other powerful individuals who needed a means to consolidate control of German society. Their security at the top of Germany's power structure was threatened by insurgent communists. The ONT published Ostara, a magazine chronicling the eternal war between godlike Aryans and the bestial subhumans. Comic book paintings of luscious blonde bombshells in the clutches of furry ape men adorned its pages. The psychosexual subtext of these quaint racial theories was difficult to miss. Among the readers of Ostara was a young Austrian painter and fan of the occult, Adolf Hitler.   Eight years after Lanz founded his New Templars, List started a group he called Armanen. He took the swastika as the Armanen emblem. In 1912, the two societies merged to form the Germanen Orden, direct forerunner to the Nazi party. While Hitler was still watercoloring postcards in Vienna, this coven of wealthy occultists was incubating the racial, nationalist, quasi-pagan theory that would become law in the Third Reich. In 1918, members of the Orden started a new secret society, called Thulegesellschaft, the Thule Society. The legend of "Thule" was a variation on the Atlantis myth. Thule was supposed to be a nation of superbeings with a utopian civilization. It flourished until 850,000 years ago, when it was wiped away by a cataclysmic flood. The flood itself was symbolic of the "Fall," but the Thulians--or Atlantians-- had brought it upon themselves by mating with creatures of a lower race. The Thulists appropriated this tale from the writings of Madame Blavatsky, "theosophist" housewife-turned-guru who created a cult in nineteenth-century New York City. Blavatsky's writings are gospel to more recent "New Age" groups. The Thule Society adapted Blavatsky to their own prejudices. The supermen, they believed, were forerunners of the Aryan race. The subhuman creatures became Jews. To overcome their own debased nature and become supermen once more, the Aryans must overcome the Jews.  Like apocalyptic movements for millennia before them, the Thulists were fervently messianic. Unlike many of their precursors, they weren't happy waiting for the messiah to appear. They went out and found him. In 1913, Hitler moved out of Austria, settling in Munich for what he said in Mein Kampf were "political reasons." Actually, he was avoiding conscription--a draft dodger. Nonetheless, he ended up enlisting with enthusiasm in the German military. Though a commoner and a private, Hitler received preferential treatment at every stage of his military service. Perhaps he was an intelligence officer. He may already have been an agent of the Thule Society. After a prolific stint as an anticommunist informer, in which he sent scores of his army pals to their executions, he was sent to university anticommunism seminars paid for by the Thulists. He joined and eventually took over the German Workers Party, which was founded, funded, and controlled by the Thule Society. In 1919, Hitler met Dietrich Eckart, a drunkard, drug addict, small- time playwright, and socialite. Despite his character flaws, Eckart had a powerful mind and a powerful personality to go along with lots of money. He published an anti-Semitic magazine and belonged to the Thule Society's "inner circle, " the members most involved in the Thule's political program. "Their meeting was probably more decisive than any other in Hitler's life," writes Wulf Schwarzwaller in his biography, The Unknown Hitler. "Eckart molded Hitler, completely changing his public persona." Under the occultist's tutelage, Hitler transformed from a temperamental painter, who spent more time pigging out on coffeehouse cake than at his easel, to a shrewd, forceful orator--a dangerously persuasive propagandist. From his deathbed in December, 1928, Dietrich Eckart issued a command to his fellow adepts of the Thule Society: "Follow Hitler!" he implored. "He will dance but it is I who have called the tune. Do not mourn for me. I shall have influenced history more than any other German."   Hitler's 1941 pogrom against occult groups is often mistakenly taken as evidence than the occult was at best an incidental influence on Nazism. The crackdown, in all likelihood, was damage control following the famous flight of Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's closest confidants. Hess, for reasons still not entirely clear, stole a plane and made a solo flight without Hitler's knowledge to Britain, where he was captured. One story has Hess lured there by British inteligence in a plot masterminded by Ian Fleming, the spy who later turned writer and created James Bond. Hess belonged to the Thule Society. Reportedly, the British intelligence service was interested in what he knew about the occult's hold on Hitler and the Nazis. Fleming allegedly wanted Aleister Crowley to act as the interrogator. Crowley is undoubtedly the most notorious occultist of the twentieth century. His secret society, the Ordo Temple Orientis, attracted, as so many of these groups do, people from the top of society in any country where it set up shop. Crowley himself was terribly decadent. A happily heroin-addicted, bisexual Satan worshipper, he asked people to call him "The Beast 666." Crowley believed that he was literally the anti-messiah of the apocalypse. Or at least he wanted people to believe that he believed he was. Crowley was also an intelligence agent. He claimed to have worked for the British Secret Service in the First World War. He may have been working for Germany as well. He renounced his British citizenship and took openly pro-German positions, even writing pro-German propaganda. Though British intelligence officials denounced him, he was not prosecuted and developed (or continued) a relationship with the British government between wars, feeding information to M16 (one British spy outfit) about German occult activities.   The Nazi government may have been based on occult principles, but it was not the only government with an interest in every secret thing. "We find it difficult to admit that Nazi Germany embodied the concepts of a civilization bearing no relationship at all to our own," note Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. "And yet it was just that, and nothing else, that justified this war." Pauwels and Bergier wrote Morning of the Magicians, a book that aroused a fracas in the early 1960s by finding occultism seething beneath every layer of modern life, particularly in the Nazi era. While I'm not sure I endorse their view that "nothing else justified this war," their point is well taken: the war against the Nazis was not only a war for territory, money, or even power. It was a war to decide whether a "humanist" or a "magical" view of the universe would dominate planet earth. "This truth was hidden from us by German technology, German science and German organization, comparable if not superior to our own," says Morning of the Magicians. "The great innovation of Nazi Germany was to mix magic with science and technology."   Both the American and Soviet governments wanted a taste of that toothsome mix. Once Hitler was safely beaten, they competed fiercely for the services of Nazi scientists. The U.S. seems to have been more successful, winning commitments from Nazis like Wehrner von Braun, rocket scientist and SS major once described by Allied intelligence as a "potential security threat." The government cleansed Von Braun's wartime record, brought him into America, and put him to work on projects that culminated in the Saturn V rocket--the booster that lifted Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew to the moon. Von Braun was the most famous of the Nazi scientists imported after the war. Most were described by the government as "ardent Nazis," but those pejoratives were scratched from their files. Operation Paperclip (so named because secret files on the scientists were denoted by a simple, everyday paperclip) employed seemingly supernatural German expertise to construct the American war machine.   The Paperclip Boys were the plasma of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the newly formed CIA was busy recruiting SS spy-master Reinhard Gehlen and "Hitler's favorite commando" Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny. Under cover of U.S. intelligence, these two and their minions did more than anyone to keep the ideals of the Third Reich alive, and pave the way for a Fourth Reich. Gehlen manipulated intelligence information to portray the Soviets in the worst possible light. With his CIA collaborators, he started the Cold War and kept it going. While Gehlen played the U.S. government--and American public opinion--like a flute, Skorzeny globe-trotted. He established Nazi power bases in South America that nurtured the continent's many dictatorships. Skorzeny did a similar favor for the Middle East. Gamel Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt with help from Skorzeny and an elite corps of former SS storm troopers.   Always the good Nazi, Skorzeny never gave up on the twisted dream of wiping out Jews. He set up the earliest Palestinian terrorist groups, trained them, and sent them on commando raids into Israel. Without the American-backed entrepreneurship of this disfigured Nazi, the Middle East would probably be a much more stable place than it has been for the past four decades. From the Order of New Templars to the Thule Society to the SS, the CIA, and the PLO, the intersection between government and secret societies continues to make our world an uncertain, terrifying place.   The Nazi conspiracy rolls on. Nazi Germany, impregnated with occultism, was a state founded in conspiracy, by conspiracy, for conspiracy. A relatively small group of people with hidden motives, using propaganda, mind control, and terror, carried out a plan to take over a country and the world. The German secret societies succeeded in conjuring up a massive social transformation, at a staggering cost in human lives. The ever-present, grim irony of secret society revolutions, nowhere more evident than with the Nazis, is that the great transformation, while it may overturn governments, makes conditions secure for the hidden powerful. Secret society revolutions happen when the secret oligarchy feels threatened. The Thule Society was a magnet for rich businessmen and aristocrats, who provided it with considerable financial wherewithal to carry out its ambitious conspiratorial schemes. Without funding from big business, German and international, the Nazis never could have sprung from the Thulists' loins. "It is even partly true that Hitler was able to sell an evil idea like anti-Semitism simply because he had the support of wealthy contributors," say the authors of Who financed Hitler.   Nazism was occultism, but it was also fascism; it carried out Mussolini's dictum "Fascism is corporatism." Craven Jew-hater Henry Ford, inventor of the automobile company if not the automobile, was such a doting patron of Hitler's that the Führer once offered to import some shock troops to the U.S. to help "Heinrich" run for president. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party's sinister mystic laureate (his extreme racial theorizing was found by the Nuremburg tribunal to be so instrumental in Nazism that he was hanged), was friends with petroleum magnate Henri Deterding--managing director of Royal Dutch Shell and one of the world's richest men. Almost every major industrial concern in Germany, oil companies, agricultural firms, banks, and shipping companies, made sizable donations to Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel, the SS, the Nazis' elite corps, which itself was fashioned as a secret society. I. G. Farben, the gargantuan chemical cartel, was one of the new Reich's stolid financial supporters.   There was plenary profit in Nazism for Farben, and all of Hitler's corporate investors. The cartel's contributions were especially egregious. It manufactured Zyklon-B, a poison gas, for use in the gas chambers. Auschwitz was a slave-labor camp for an on-site Farben factory. I. G. Farben and its associated companies were among the passel of Nazi corporations that did business with the most powerful Wall Street law firm of the 1930s and 1940s, Sullivan and Cromwell. Their chief contact at the firm was an attorney named John Foster Dulles, who became secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration. "Sullivan and Cromwell thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime," say the firm's chroniclers. In 1933 and 1934, when the Nazi's brutal course was obvious, Dulles led off cables to his German clients with the salutation "Heil Hitler." In 1935, he scribbled a screed for Atlantic Monthly dismissing Nazi state terrorism as "changes which we recognize to be inevitable." Dulles's brother, Allen Dulles, was also a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell. He later founded the ClA and recruited thousands of Nazi SS men into the new "department of conspiracy." Much to Foster's con-sternation, he never met Hitler, while little brother Allen was granted that thrill. Sosthenes Behn met Hitler, too. Behn was the founder of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and virtual inventor of the multinational corporation. He met Hitler in 1933. the first American businessman to receive an audience with der Führer, while striking up deals with German companies. At the same time, he filed classified reports on their activities to the U.S. government. American spy or not, Behn allowed his company to cover for Nazi spies in South America, and one of ITT's subsidiaries bought a hefty swath of stock in the airplane company that built Nazi bombers. Behn recruited Nazis onto ITT's board. His closest Nazi friend, Gerhard Westrick, visited New York at Behn's expense in 1940 -when the Nazis were conquering Europe without much resistance. The agenda of Westrick's visit: to talk American corporate leaders into forging a German-American business alliance. These sorts of activities could easily be dubbed treason on Behn's part, but by 1944 and the Allied liberation of France, he was celebrated as an American hero.   Allen Dulles--who supplemented his legal income as a U.S. intelligence agent--appears to have been the magician behind this miracle rehab, helping Behn set up his relationship with the U.S. military. Later, Dulles was an originator of the idea that multinational corporations are instruments of U. S. foreign policy and therefore exempt from domestic laws--a theory that has been a secret government policy since the mid-1950s. Behn also gave money to Himmler's SS. The Nazis were able to weld corporatism to occultism seamlessly, which may say something about the similarity between the two. "The oligarchs of agricultural kingdoms wrapped themselves in witchcraft. . . . As industrial capitalism accumulated power and wealth the old mysteries were replaced and dwarfed by the new mysteries of high finance, market manipulations, convoluted and lucrative legalisms, pressure-group politics, and a labyrinth of new bureaucracies," writes Bertram Gross. But it also says that for the Nazis, the occult served both idealistic and pragmatic purposes.   Himmler was immersed in occultism, but though he believed the stuff, he also used it as a method of mind control. When he began the corps, he needed a large membership to consolidate power. He recruited about sixty thousand. Membership was literally for sale to the wealthy, and "honorary" member-ship was available for as little as a mark per year. There was no way to unify such an unwieldy legion, so once the SS had established itself as the most powerful faction of the Nazi state, Himmler purged his rolls of anyone ideologically impure, or racially suspect (members had to draw up a family tree going back more than a century to prove their pure Aryan, non-Jewish, lineage). He also banished or killed all the SS homosexuals he could spot, and there were quite a few. The SS was still absent a coherent ideology to bind its remaining members in strict obedience. Himmler found one in his own neo-pagan beliefs. He renovated Wewelsburg Castle, a Westphalian fortress, and made it his own Camelot. He installed an oaken round table where the twelve "knights" of his inner circle would gather for initiations and rites. Like all cult leaders, Himmler was skilled using ritual and esoterica to strip away the individuality of his followers. Whatever humanity the SS soldiers possessed was subsumed by their mission to exterminate "lower races" and stand guard over the Reich. The storm troopers became robots programmed to kill.   Himmlerian mind control didn't die when Himmler bit his cyanide capsule. While real live Nazis like Skorzeny and Gehlen frolicked about the world causing merry mischief, their younger admirers kept the occult spirit of Nazism alive in right-wing hate groups and Satanic cults. The popular image of right-wing "neo-Nazi" groups as Neanderthal thugs is somewhat misleading. The rank-and-file skinheads may be a little on the slow side, but the movement's leaders tend to be voracious readers, researchers, and theorists, after a fashion. Just as they are, perhaps correctly, the subject of conspiracy theories, they've developed anti-Jewish, anti-Masonic, Illuminati-style theories of their own that display an unsettling level of detail--all in the tradition of Thulian master-race paganism. White Aryan Resistance chieftain Tom Metzger--a regular on "Geraldo"-style daytime talk shows--is anti-Christian as well as predictably anti-Jewish. He and his skinhead disciples call themselves pagans, and adhere to the ancient Germanic religion. They find affinity in the "Christian Identity" religion, which began in England in the nineteenth century and now flourishes in cornfield churches of the Midwest. The Identity churches are only "Christian" in the sense that they count Jesus as an Aryan. White Europeans, they say, are therefore the true biblical "Jews," and the "race" that calls itself Jewish is really a conspiracy of subhuman imposters.   Unlike the conspiracy theorists profiled in the first part of this book (with the possible exception of Lyndon LaRouche), Nazi and neo- Nazi groups use their conspiracy theories, like Himmler, as a technique of control, to mobilize a group to a common goal, to move people to actions they might not otherwise carry out. More brazenly occult variations on the same theory turn up in Satanic cults. The Manson family was portrayed in the mass media as a group of crazed hippies, of flower children gone mad. In the mass mind, Charles Manson is associated with the political left-ironic for a Hitler- worshipping racist. Like Hitler, who learned his oratorical skills at the knee of Dietrich Eckart, Manson picked up his powers of persuasion in the occult underground of San Francisco circa 1967. His "I am Christ, I am the devil, Christ is the devil" rants could have been lifted from sermons by Robert DeGrimston, British emigre and leader of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. The Process, which may have had Manson as member, was a Satanic cult that sprung up in the 1960s and sputtered out by the early 1970s. But does it still exist?   Maury Terry's book The Ultimate Evil makes a case that the Process didn't die. Instead it faded away in a Satanic diaspora, forming offshoot cults that link into a loose nationwide conglomerate of dope dealing, S&M porn, and ritual murder. The Son of Sam killing spree that terrorized New York in the late 1970s was Terry's focus. He alleges that the murders were carried out by a conspiracy of cultists based on Long Island with connections across the country. One of the Sam murders, Terry contends, was committed by a character called "Manson II," famous among Satanists as the occult underworld's top hit man, a friend of Charles Manson himself. The Tate-LaBianca murders, crimes that won the original Manson his infamy, may not have been random "Helter Skelter" slay-ings, according to Terry and to Manson biographer Ed Sanders. They appear to have been murder for hire. But who would hire Manson an why? Could it have been the same people who hired Manson disciple Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme to shoot President Ford? Namely, someone in the U.S. government, according to Michael Milan, who says he was once a hit man for J. Edgar Hoover.   Here we get into the grayest of conspiratorial speculations, foggy even by the standards of conspiracy theory. Contentions that the intelligence community is somehow aligned with Satanism, using cults as indoctrination for mind-controlled robot assassins, are backed up by only gossamer strips of information. Milan's claim that the Manson family "took the contract" on Ford; Maury Terry's implication that New York police may have been in on the Son of Sam murders (taken together with known facts about the CIA's infiltration of big-city police departments); and the name of the drug dealer who led the Matamoros death cult, the nasty devil worshippers who murdered a med- school student in a Mexican shack a few years ago, allegedly turning up in the address book of downed contra pilot, Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA contractor.   The most curious case, to my mind, is that of Michael Aquino, another frequent talk-show guest who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mark Lenard, Mr. Spock's father on "Star Trek. " Aguino founded and leads the Temple of Set, an offshoot of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, which was the first Satanic church ever to receive tax exemption. The Temple of Set takes a dour turn on LaVey's dime-store pseudo pagan buffoonery. Unlike LaVey, Aquino never sought publicity. He got it anyway, when he was accused of molesting children at a military day care center on San Francisco's Presidio base. Aquino was never tried on any charge, and he vehemently denies any crimes. He sued the city of San Francisco for defamation of character after an investigation failed to turn up any evidence that he or his "Temple" was involved in child molestation. Aquino is nonetheless an odd bird with thought-provoking connections. Aquino is always careful to distance himself publicly from naz-ism, but he is so fascinated by Hitler and Himmler that he once made a pilgrimage to Wewelsburg Castle, the site Himmler planned as home to his mystical order. He carried out some form of black magic ceremony there, amidst the SS relics. When the Presidio scandal became news and Aquino's name surfaced, the Pentagon denied that he was in the Army. This was in 1981, at the same time that the Army was granting Aquino his Top Secret security clearance. In reality, Aquino is an Army specialist in psychological warfare. He wrote an article on "MindWar" and PSYOPS (psycho-logical operations) and their use in controlling mass populations. America's failure in Vietnam, he believes, was a failure to apply the effects of "MindWar." In the conspiracy theory, the epidemic of Satanism across America stems from the U.S. government deploying MindWar against its own people. "Some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some because they are not fit to utter. We see all governments as obscure and invisible." So declared Francis Bacon, founder of his own school of Masonry, and of the inductive "scientific method." Ba-con didn't issue that utterance with any intention of condemning government secrecy. The governance of men, he believed, was necessarily a secret affair. People are incapable of understanding what government does. And some things that government does, it is best that the governed never know. When governments are involved in terror and murder, it is not hard to understand why they keep secrets from their people. Nor is it surprising that Francis Bacon, given his immersion in secret societies, would feel the way he did. If Bacon's reasoning holds true, it might be better to have no government at all. A government that is obscure and invisible will inevitably, like the Nazis, be a government based on conspiracy. The very act of keeping government secrets is a conspiracy. Secret government--and by Bacon's cold logic, all governments are secret--divorces everyone in society except the secret keepers from any genuine understanding of the circumstances that govern their own lives. Conspiracy theory is an attempt by a few minds to reclaim some understanding.   In this part of the book, I've tried to piece together as many slabs and slices of information that I could find to support the kinds of conspiracy theories that got me interested in the subject. These are American conspiracy theories, many with long historical roots, but, nonetheless, distinctively contemporary conspiracy theories. These are theories born in a country too big and diverse to govern, but permeated totally by government. A country whose basic ideal is individual freedom, where daily life is dominated by authority. From the runaway power of the presidency to the tyranny of workplace management, liberty is strangely difficult to come by. We've substituted the multicolored spectacle of consumerism for control over our own lives, and we're supposed to think that be-cause we have so much stuff available for purchase we have the freedom to choose. But you can't fool everyone. Conspiracy theorists may not always be right, but they are not fooled. The information in this section is not supposed to be an argument for any particular conspiracy theory, although there seem to be plenty in here. I've been trying to present a way of thinking about a society where information is controlled, ergo, understanding is impossible. Conspiracy theories are a guide to life in a strange and threatening America: a conspiracy nation.