Among the Truthers (10 page)

It's not clear who or what the Beast is. (Based on my reading of the full interview, I'd say Stone himself hadn't quite figured it out.) But the details are beside the point. What is crucial to Stone is his conviction that Nixon, MLK, and the two Kennedys were somehow done in
by the same people
. As with the
Protocols
' fixation on a few dozen Jewish Elders (a collective sometimes called “All-Judaan” by Henry Ford and other anti-Semites) the conspiracist mind unfailingly compresses life's many random evils into a single, identifiable point-source of malign power. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, this tendency is one of conspiracism's main psychological consolations.

The label placed on this evil font varies. Modern conspiracist movements fixate on the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission or—in the case of the 9/11 Truth movement—some sort of Cheney-led “neocon” Star Chamber. Old-school conspiracists insist the real demons are the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jesuits, Opus Dei, Knights Templar,
Philosophes
, Carbonari, Prieuré de Sion, Rosicrucians, or the like. In extreme cases, the supposed evil masterminds aren't even human: Influential British Truther David Icke, for instance, claims that ultimate power lies with extraterrestrial “Prison Warders”—who control events on earth (including 9/11) through a human clique known as “the Global Elite.” But insofar as a conspiracist's psychic appetites are concerned, the evildoers' actual identities are interchangeable.

In some cases, quite
literally
interchangeable: Deceased right-wing UFO conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, author of the apocalyptic 1991 tract
Behold a Pale Horse
, explicitly endorsed the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, and reprinted it for his readers . . . but warned them that the document “has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word ‘Zion' should be ‘Sion'; any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati'; and the word ‘goyim' should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.' ” Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln—the three pseudohistorians whose theories about Jesus Christ traveling to France as a husband and father became the basis for much of Dan Brown's conspiracy fiction—have a similar theory about the
Protocols
: “There was an original text [of the
Protocols
]that was not a forgery. On the contrary, it was authentic. But it had nothing whatever to do with Judaism or an ‘international Jewish conspiracy.' It issued, rather, from some Masonic organization or masonically oriented secret society that incorporated the word ‘Sion.' ” (Icke, incidentally, believes the
Protocols
were written by lizard people as part of an intergalactic plan to impose reptilian control over Planet Earth.)

This psychic need to impute all evil to a lone, omnipotent source inevitably requires the conspiracist to create larger and larger metaconspiracies that sweep together seemingly unconnected power centers. This is why, as discussed in the previous chapter, modern conspiracy theorists are so fond of flowcharts—in which all of society's actors can systematically be grouped into cascading hierarchies that soar upwards to a single, ultimate puppetmaster.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists couldn't explain the origins of the First World War, which began when control of Europe was split up between a half-dozen major European powers—except by somehow imagining that all of them secretly answered to some common Jewish overlord. Likewise has the John Birch Society (JBS) declared Hillary Clinton and the world's communists to be partners in an Illuminati-driven plot to conquer the world—along with coconspirators Dick Cheney and Wall Street. In his 1991 book
New World Order
, Pat Robertson pulled the same trick, arguing that America's political and economic elites were in league with Bolsheviks to engineer a Soviet takeover of the United States. Intergalactic conspiracy theorist David Icke explained the power struggle between Israel and the Arab world this way: “Have you ever wondered why the ‘home' of Islam, Saudi Arabia, says and does nothing in the face of what is being visited upon the Arab world? There is a reason for this. The House of Saud is a fake front for the House of Rothschild, and they are not ‘Arabs' or ‘Muslims' at all. They are Rothschild Zionists who can be traced back to a Jewish man called Mordakhai bin Ibrahim bin Moshe. Researchers say this was in the year AD 851.”

One leading 9/11 Truther, Washington, D.C.–based career conspiracist Webster Tarpley (profiled later in this book), provides a helpful flowchart on page 77 of his epic 2005 tract
9/11 Synthetic Terror
:
Made in U.S.A
. demonstrating the hierarchical relationship between “paramilitary terror pros,” “big business,” and “corrupt private networks”—with everyone in the chart answering to the top cell, a cartoon octopus labeled with the single word “oligarchy.” Who this oligarchy is, Tarpley doesn't tell us—except to hypothesize vaguely that it probably consists of “financier factions.” But again, the oligarchy's exact identity isn't the point. What matters is that it exists as a unified, malign presence.

Many conspiracists will even project their fantasies backward through history—so that time itself does not compromise their protagonists' monopoly on evil. Some 9/11 conspiracists implicate the Bush family in the murder of JFK and (as noted in Chapter 1) the Nazi war machine. Alex Jones goes back further—viewing 9/11 as just the latest barbarism inflicted by a satanic network that has been “steering planetary affairs for hundreds of years.” Lyndon LaRouche's publishing house has promoted the theory that Jewish bankers and religious leaders have been involved in a massive conspiracy stretching back to ancient times—with an especially creepy emphasis on the role played by Shylockian “Venetian bankers” of the Renaissance era. Sergei Nilus, the original Russian publisher of the
Protocols
, went even further, tracing the Jewish conspiracy back three thousand years: “According to the records of secret Jewish Zionism, Solomon and other Jewish learned men already, in 929 B.C., thought out a scheme in theory for a peaceful conquest of the whole universe by Zion.” In an introduction to the
Protocols
, the author sketches the historical path of the “Symbolic Snake of Zion” through the great crises of Western civilization—Greece in 429 B.C., Augustan Rome, Madrid in the age of Charles V, and, of course, that singular obsession of anti-Semites for more than two centuries, the French Revolution.

The onset of this sort of obsessive historical monomania is often the canary in the intellectual coal mine when sober-minded pundits transmute into conspiracists. A good contemporary example is left-wing crusader Naomi Klein, who became a superstar of the antiglobalization circuit in 2000 with her anticorporate manifesto
No Logo
. Over the next seven years, Klein's increasingly radicalized hunt for corporate demons launched her into the realm of full-fledged conspiratorial fantasy. By the time she'd published her 2007 book
The Shock Doctrine
:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
, Klein had convinced herself that the world was controlled by a cabal of hypercapitalists who'd been personally recruited and indoctrinated by U.S. economist Milton Friedman. Like the European anti-Semites who believed that Jews supported both sides in Europe's great wars, Klein casts her Friedmanite villains as equal-opportunity architects, enablers, and cheerleaders of all manner of human misery—from the 2005 Asian tsunami, to Hurricane Katrina, to slaughter in Iraq—motivated by the single goal of intimidating societies into accepting free trade and globalization. In one particularly far-fetched section, Klein even suggests that the state of Israel is a willing promoter of the terrorism campaign against its Jewish civilians—because the “continual and continuously expanding war on terror” helps inflate the profits of the country's “high-tech security” industries.

The 9/11 Truthers follow this reductionist tradition faithfully—theorizing that Washington and al-Qaeda's jihadis secretly play on the same team. British-based Truther Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed—whose early published work set the stage for many of the American conspiracy theorists who emerged in the years after 9/11—argued that the term “al-Qaeda” was real, but only to the extent that it referred to “a database of [CIA-controlled] pseudo-Islamist covert operations recruits.” California-based Michael Ruppert, similarly argues that “there is a compelling case to be made that Osama bin Laden has long been a well-cultivated, protected, and valued asset of U.S. and British intelligence.”

And why didn't Barack Obama spill the beans about all this when he took power in 2010? The answer is obvious: America's major parties are both bought-and-paid subsidiaries of the same all-controlling Beast.

Boundless Evil

Right-wing conspiracists traditionally have railed against the international campaign to reduce global warming, which they regard as a pretext to destroy national sovereignty and impose a world government. Even so, the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change stood out as a subject of special agitation. This time, the world leaders meeting in Denmark weren't seeking merely to create a hyperenvironmentalist UN dictatorship, conspiracist websites claimed: They actually were plotting to annihilate whole swathes of humanity.

Texas-based syndicated radio host Alex Jones led the charge on his December 11 broadcast:

Do you understand how diabolical this is? It isn't a bunch of idiot tree-huggers that mean well and just got their science wrong. These are vicious
Nazis—
it's the only way to describe them. But in truth, they're
worse
than the Nazis . . . They [the Malthusians] came up with this idea to exterminate, and reduce births . . . It is life and death! These people are taking over right now! . . . Did you get the memo not to drink the water. Did you get the memo not to take the inoculations . . . ? Do you
like
being sterilized? Do you like being
killed
?! You better grow up, ladies and gentlemen. You better realize that we're facing a threat far more dangerous than Mao Tse Tung and Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin! . . . This is the New World Order crashing the gates. They're spilling over the wall. If this was the Alamo . . . Those of us fighting the globalists, we're like Davey Crockett, we're out of ammo, we're swinging our muskets. A lot of us are going to get killed, we're going to get imprisoned. This is only going to get worse in the years to come. But, you take my life, I take yours, too.

This tirade captures many of the modern conspiracist obsessions—vaccines, mass sterilization, apocalyptic confrontation. But the aspect that jumps out more immediately is the manner in which Jones describes his imagined “globalist” enemies: as foes who are not merely as evil as the totalitarian monsters of the twentieth century, but somehow worse. What Jones has in mind isn't just evil on the scale of a mass murderer or a terrorist, or even a genocidal sociopath, but rather on the science-fiction scale of Sauron from
Lord of the Rings
, Darth Vader (
Star Wars
), or SkyNet (
The Terminator
). In his 2007 film
Endgame
, Jones claims that “a world government is just the beginning. Once in place, [the New World Order] can engage their plan to exterminate 80 percent of the world's population, while enabling the ‘elites' to live forever with the aid of advanced technology.”

In support of such claims, Truthers tick off a long list of episodes in which the U.S. government has killed innocents on a large scale: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, the proxy wars of Central America, sanctions in Iraq. The death toll of 9/11, by this telling, is a mere rounding error for our utterly amoral leaders. Toronto-based conspiracy theorists Terry Burrows and Ian Woods explain the elites' mindset this way:

Such perpetrators are not normal. They are psychopaths—individuals lacking both empathy and conscience, self-centered to the extreme, driven by their insatiable lust for power and control. [Their] New World Order is intended to be a totalitarian feudal dictatorship where a super-wealthy and over-privileged few will completely dominate and control an entire planet of impoverished serfs, imprisoned by a high-tech global surveillance matrix . . . This ‘Diaboligarchy' uses wars and catastrophes (which the members themselves instigate) to break down natural human resistance to their corrupt enterprise, which is now approaching its endgame. The predominance of individuals devoid of empathy for the feelings and sufferings of others—operating without conscience at the very centers of corrupt power and intending to dominate the human race totally—makes them mankind's greatest natural predators.

The notion of some sort of “diaboligarchy” pops up in almost every corner of the conspiracist universe, dating back all the way to the earliest forms of Christian anti-Jewish propaganda, in which unconverted Jews were portrayed as demonic servants of the Antichrist; and the campaign of extermination against them, by corollary, a form of existential human obligation that became the jihad of the Nazi religion. “The Jewish world-conspiracy was seen as the product of an ineradicable destructiveness, a will to evil which was believed to be inborn in every Jew,” Norman Cohn wrote. “A peculiar breed of sub-human beings, dark, earthbound, was working conspiratorially to destroy these sons of light, the ‘Aryan' or Germanic ‘race,' and the
Protocols
contained their plan of campaign . . . When the
Protocols
came into contact with the
völkisch-
racist outlook the result was an apocalyptic vision not only of contemporary politics but all history and indeed of all human existence on the planet.”