Among the Truthers (11 page)

As Jones' rant shows, modern conspiracy theorists have picked up this theme of “ineradicable destructiveness,” but placed it in a secular context. In describing the motives of the imagined evildoers, the one word that constantly pops up is “control”—of oil, gold, money, blood (as described in more detail later in this chapter). The villain is portrayed as the ultimate control freak, so pathologically freakish, in fact, that he slips the bindings of human morality. (In this regard, the villains may be a projection of conspiracy theorists' own frustrated drive to impose order on a chaotic world—but I'll admit that this is merely pop-psychological speculation on my part.)

In Truther mythology, it is assumed that the CIA and Pentagon will do literally anything to advance their dark plots—even the wholesale massacre of schoolchildren: Thierry Meyssan, the French Truther whose 2002
Pentagate
kicked off the conspiracy theory that no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, told me in a phone interview from his home in Lebanon that the terrorists who attacked an elementary school in Beslan, North Ossetia, were drugged dupes deployed by the CIA. As noted elsewhere, influential Truther Michael Ruppert believes the 9/11 plot is part of a long-term conspiracy aimed at exterminating most of humankind: “Who among us cannot picture the war criminal Henry Kissinger—protégé of David Rockefeller—sitting back in his chair and muttering with his German accent, ‘The problem is not that there is too little oil. The problem is just that there are too many people.' ”

On this point, Ruppert quotes CIA deputy director Higgins from the 1975 film
Three Days of the Condor
: “It's simple economics. Today it's oil. In 10 or 15 years . . . food. Maybe even sooner. Now what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then? . . . Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who've never known hunger start going hungry.” (Like a surprisingly large number of conspiracy theorists, Ruppert likes to prove his point by reference to Hollywood movies.) He also footnotes fellow conspiracy theorist Jay Hanson, who similarly sees the end of oil as the beginning of the apocalypse:

In less than 20 years, the self-regulating market system will have “run out of gas” and vanished. With the market system gone, the ruling elites will fall back on the good old-fashioned means of control: a police state. In the United States alone, 200 million guns in private ownership guarantee that this police state will quickly devolve into rebellion and anarchy. If the anarchy scenario were to reach its natural conclusion, the global elites would be eliminated by the angry masses. Those who managed to escape would die more miserably than the poor since they are unsuited for day-to-day survival because they lived their lives like queen bees. But when the above scenario seems inevitable, the elites will simply depopulate most of the planet with a bioweapon. When the time comes, it will be the only logical solution to their problem. It's a first-strike tactic that leaves the built-infrastructure and other species in place and allows the elites to perpetuate their own genes into the foreseeable future . . . The global genocide will be rationalized as a second chance for humanity—a new Garden of Eden—a new Genesis. The temptation will prove irresistible.

A prominent corollary to this line of thinking is the notion that our overlords are, even today, using the medical system to systematically “cull the herd” with exotic diseases and infected medications. One of the most famous AIDS conspiracy tracts of the 1980s—the so-called
Strecker Memorandum
—argued that the AIDS virus was developed jointly by the National Cancer Institute, World Health Organization, and U.S. military as part of a plot “to exhaust America with hatred, struggle, want, confusion, and inoculation of disease,” and thereby “speed the Soviet Union toward its goal of world domination.”

Many UFO conspiracists believe that AIDS is part of “the gray alien agenda,” whose goal is to clear away humankind in order to make way for a terrestrial alien colony. Other conspiracists believe that the H1N1 virus is a man-made disease, and that the vaccines we've been offered for it are actually poisons that will do nothing but increase the death toll. In the Arab world, conspiracy theorists imagine great legions of Mengele-like Jewish doctors roaming the world, committing an endless list of vile plots. Following Haiti's 2010 earthquake, for instance, a Syrian television feature about Israel's humanitarian mission to Port au Prince told viewers that the mission's real purpose was “to steal organs from the corpses of the Haitian dead.”

In all of these claims, one finds echoes of the
Protocols
, in which the mythical Herzl stalks Basel like a crazed sociopath, rhapsodizing about “the complete wrecking of that Christian religion,” and urging Jews to harness their “burning greediness, merciless vengeance, hatred and malice” to expedite “the killing out of the
Goyim
.” Like the conspiracy theories it inspired, the
Protocols
reads more like a satire of human evil than a catalog.

Incumbency

In Spring 1918, the end of the First World War was just months away. But in the United States, Washington's first Red Scare—which would climax with the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920—was just heating up. One target was former Minnesota congressman Charles August Lindbergh, a conspiracist firebrand who'd immigrated to the United States in the 1850s as the infant child of a Swedish bank embezzler on the lam.

In 1913, Lindbergh wrote
Banking
and Currency and the Money Trust
, a tract denouncing Wall Street as “a man-made god that controls [America's] social and industrial system.” Four years later, he produced
Why is your Country At War?
, an equally radical book arguing that America's soldiers were fighting in support of a corrupt international financial order, and that Washington needed to take back the commanding heights of the U.S. economy from Wall Street's clutches. The same year, Lindbergh brought articles of impeachment against members of the Federal Reserve Board, whom he accused of conspiring “to violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.” All this attracted the attention of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who branded
Why is your Country At War?
seditious. In June 1918 federal agents raided Lindbergh's Washington, D.C. printer, where they had the plates for the book destroyed.

Lindbergh
père
has lapsed into obscurity. (He died of brain cancer in 1924, three years before his more famous son, also named Charles, made his famous solo flight from Long Island to Paris.) But his story is worth dusting off: As University of California historian Kathryn Olmsted argued in her 2008 book
Real Enemies
, it contains a crucial lesson about the evolution of American conspiracism.

In 1913, when Lindbergh published
Banking and Currency and the Money Trust
, the federal government was tiny—with a budget of less than $1 billion. The FBI was smaller than the constabularies of many American towns, and largely confined itself to investigating prostitution. Its agents had neither the mandate nor manpower to police the nation's political literature. Likewise, conspiracists like Lindbergh tended to be less fearful of Washington than of Wall Street, international financial speculators, and other nongovernment actors.

The massive expansion of government that took place during World War I changed perceptions on both sides. By 1918, the federal government suddenly controlled a budget worth almost $13 billion and a network of agencies charged with fighting political subversion. “In the process, these federal agents elevated Charles Lindbergh from harmless critic to Enemy of the State,” Olmsted writes. Lindbergh and other conspiracy theorists immediately returned the favor: “Some Americans had worried for decades that malign forces might take over the government. Now, with the birth of the modern state, they worried that the government itself might be the most dangerous force of all.”

A similar phenomenon was taking place across the Atlantic. Prior to the twentieth century, most European conspiracy theories focused on the plots of Freemasons, Illuminati, Jews and the like to seize power from society's rightful aristocratic stewards. But in the radical conspiracist mythology of the
Protocols
, this changed: The evildoer was no longer the outsider, sneaking into villages under cover of darkness to poison wells and steal babies. He was now entrenched in the banks, the trading houses, the salons, the Masonic lodges, and all the rest of society's nerve centers.

As discussed in the next chapter, Truthers take a similar view about the “neocon” cabal that gained influence in George W. Bush's administration—a process of political infiltration that they claim began decades before 9/11.

Greed

Some historians consider it the greatest speech in the history of American politics. Certainly, it was among the most rapturously received. Audience members screamed and cheered “like one great burst of artillery,” wrote a journalist who covered the event. Others waved their arms in the air, flailing about “like demented things.” A day later, the man who'd thrilled the audience was nominated as the Democratic Party's candidate for president. The year was 1896, and the burning populist issue on which William Jennings Bryan had staked his political fortune was . . . the free coinage of silver to gold at a conversion rate of 16 to 1. Strange as it may seem to modern readers, the word “bimetallism” then stood among populists for “hope” and “change” rolled into one.

On the surface, the debate was about monetary policy: The coinage of silver would have inflated the money supply, and thereby permitted indebted farmers and other rural businessmen to repay their loans on more advantageous terms. But the undercurrent was far broader: To Bryan and other bimetallists, the word gold was a stand-in for the upper classes—the fat land speculators, urban businessmen, and financiers who counted out their fortunes in the currency of bullion. Silver, on the other hand, was imagined to be the currency of the farmer, the miner, and the rural yeoman.

There was an international dimension as well: In Bryan's conception, the gold standard was an English institution, and so America's continued reliance on it symbolized a shameful, quasicolonial continuation of American subservience toward a European master. “It is the issue of 1776 over again,” he declared in his closing flourish on July 9, 1896 (according to a surviving copy). “Our ancestors, when but 3 million, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation upon earth. Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to 70 million, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? . . . We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

At the heart of Bryan's vision is the standard rural populist's division of the world between (in his words) “the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, begins in the spring and toils all summer, and by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of this country creates wealth”; and, on the other hand, the “financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world.” But his special obsession with gold also captures an aspect of conspiracist thought that has remained timeless: the notion that evildoers' plots revolve around a campaign to control some crucial
substance
.

In many cases, that substance is in our bodies. Hitler believed Jews were conspiring to pollute the Aryan bloodline; modern European conspiracists claim Israel is harvesting the internal organs of murdered Palestinians; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Latin American conspiracy theorists alleged that Westerners were abducting local children to steal their innards for transplant. Many UFO buffs believe cosmic visitors have created a subterranean human-farming operation somewhere in the western United States so that they may harvest our vital fluids. Vaccine and AIDS conspiracy theorists imagine a global plot to contaminate us with infected blood. In most of these narratives, it is imagined that the evildoers have a special fondness for the life force of
children
. For instance, David Icke describes the secret plot hatched by humankind's Reptilian overlords this way: “Humans have a particular type of energy, and the Reptilians have structured human society to trawl that energy, especially from children when it is at its most ‘pure.' ”

From the nineteenth century onward, the hoarding of gold was an especially common theme in conspiracist tracts. References to the precious metal litter the
Protocols
, always in the context of the Jew as a greedy monopolist: “In our hands is the greatest power of our day—gold: In two days we can procure from our storehouses any quantity we may please.” By this period in history, the idea that a gold syndicate was behind the misfortune of farmers and laborers already had become a prominent theme in American conspiracist tracts, especially those authored by Greenbackers and free-silverites. A Populist manifesto circulated in 1895, a year before Bryan's speech, declared that “[in] 1865–66, a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being made use of to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people.” As late as 1934, amid the battle over silver remonentization in the United States, fascist radio host Charles Coughlin denounced (Jewish) Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and sang the praises of silver, which, he claimed, was a more “gentile” substance.

Since the rise of the automobile, and the Teapot Dome Scandal of the early 1920s—an instance in which petro-conspirators truly
did
seek to secretly commandeer America's ship of state—oil gradually has replaced gold as the mythical object of the conspirators' obsessions; just as, more recently, “neocons” have replaced Jews, “bankers,” and “gamblers” as a description for the conspirators themselves. In the case of the 9/11 Truth movement, certainly, it is hard to find any conspiracy theorist who does not put oil smack at the center of his mythology.