by Jonathan Kay
Medical imaging technology that permitted doctors to peer inside our bodies also became a prominent motif in conspiracist fantasies—a trend that found lurid expression in the UFO cults of the postwar period.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans who reported encounters with aliens typically were anxious about the possibility of the earth being invaded or destroyed by an extraterrestrial army, à la War of the Worlds. But in the late 1960s, the trend changed: Americans began reporting that aliens (who, not by coincidence, often looked just like the fetuses depicted in the ultrasound scans that pregnant mothers now saw in their doctors’ offices) were taking them on board their spaceships, and subjecting them to invasive sexual and medical procedures, with the ultimate goal of involving them in an interspecies breeding project (possibly located at Area 51 in Nevada). As researcher Bridget Brown concluded after interviewing numerous alien abductees and closely studying their accounts, the phenomenon seemed to reflect a widespread, subconscious anxiety about body integrity in a high-tech age, with the alien taking the role “as part medical technician, part bureaucrat, part fetus.”
The Protocols and the conspiracy theories that followed it in the early part of the twentieth century were elaborately extrapolated folk tales based on tribal, anti-Semitic hatred. But during the Cold War era, conspiracy theories became more complex and technocratic—mirroring the modern society they sought to explain. Byzantine, acronym-littered organizational diagrams setting out the imagined hierarchy of society’s all-powerful overlords increasingly became a staple of what I have called “flowchart conspiracism.”
The Emergence of “Flowchart Conspiracism”
This book cannot do justice to the bewildering range of flowchart conspiracy theories that have trafficked through the nether regions of American political culture in the postwar decades. But it is worth taking up at least one particular example from the genre as a case study—especially since its name tends to pop up often in conversations with Truthers: Daniel Estulin’s breathless 2007 best seller, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group.
Even most educated readers are unlikely to know much about the Bilderberg Group. But in modern conspiracist lore, the organization ranks as nothing less than a modern-day Illuminati. And no one has done more to peddle Bilderbergian conspiracism than Estulin, a middle-aged Russian-born Canadian who’s spent the last two decades stalking the group’s organizers, skulking outside their meetings, and delivering paranoid reports on the proceedings, based on tidbits provided by people he calls “informants.”
The Bilderberg Group is named after a Dutch hotel where a group of fifty European and eleven American worthies, including David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, met in the spring of 1954 with the goal of strengthening trans-Atlantic understanding. By all available accounts, the event was a success, and follow-up meetings were organized. Over time, something called the “Bilderberg Group” evolved into a once-a-year, off-the-record talk shop for a rotating cast drawn from the world’s foremost politicians, corporate leaders, and intellectuals—Davos without the cameras, essentially.
To no one’s surprise, I have never received an invitation. But my National Post colleague Conrad Black has attended more than twenty Bilderberg conferences, and even sat on the group’s Steering Committee for the better part of two decades. Through him, I’ve been able to form a fairly detailed picture of the annual proceedings. “In my time, starting at the end of the 70’s, it had become a Western Alliance meeting place—with a few others, i.e., Swedes, Finns, Irish, Austrians, Swiss, and an Icelander—where attendees discussed how to deal with the Soviets, how to organize and manage Western economies,” he reported to me. “Beyond that, it was a meeting place for up and coming people from each of the countries, along with the venerable grandees who were among the founders and were then on the Advisory Council. There were also a bunch of wealthy Americans who did not participate too much in the discussions, but paid a lot and did socialize vigorously, such as Henry Kravis, Hank Greenberg, Dwayne Andreas, and Jack Heinz, and Evelyn de Rothschild from the UK. Rupert Murdoch came a few times . . . The atmosphere was very courteous, bonhomous, and open, and the social conversations were often very interesting, and the debates the best I have participated in, apart from the [British] House of Lords at its best. Some business arrangements were made there, including the beginning of my acquisition of [Britain’s] Daily Telegraph [newspaper], but there was absolutely no continuous linkage or organizing principle. It was an atmosphere of earnest hauts fonctionnaires, altruistic businessmen, and self-important people, sufficient in what they fancied to be their influence and right-mindedness.”
All lies, says Estulin. In fact, he claims, the Bilderbergers are the top cell in a centrally coordinated global conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA, Mossad, Trilateral Commission, Aspen Institute, Freemasons, MI6, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Tavistock Institute for Behavioural Analysis, Brookings Institution, Institute for Policy Studies, RAND Corporation, European Union, United Nations, Gorbachev Foundation, Bill Gates Foundation, Club of Rome, the European monarchy, UNESCO, and (unnamed) drug-running aristocrats. “What today is called the Bilderberg Group already existed over 800 years ago,” he writes. “Back then, they were called the Venetian Black Nobility. In fact, Bilderberg is the creation of the Synarchist Movement of Empire, who are the plenipotentiary founders and financiers of Hitler—and Synarchist International, they in turn were founded by [the] Freemason Secret Society back in the 1770s as a sort of counterattack on the principles on which the United States was built.”
The Bilderbergers’ true goal in orchestrating this ne plus ultra of flowchart conspiracies, Estulin argues, is to control the world money supply, create a single global currency, establish a “world army,” use “mind control” to “direct all humanity to obey [Bilderbergian] wishes,” eliminate economic growth, suppress “all scientific development,” and create a “New World Order” in which obedient slaves will be rewarded and nonconformists targeted for “extermination.”
Estulin sees himself as just such a “nonconformist,” and spends much of his book reciting adventure stories about Bilderberg agents trying to assassinate him in downtown Toronto (“In front of me, a chilling spectacle . . . an empty elevator shaft with certain death awaiting me 800 feet below”), or draw him into a deadly firefight on the streets of Rome (“I know my guns, and it wasn’t difficult to see by the non-metallic polymer frame that I was staring at a Glock semiautomatic pistol”). His efforts to discover the truth about the Bilderberg plot, he writes in one particularly purple passage, have sent him hurtling into a “parallel world . . . a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortunes and mercenaries . . . I converted into one of them, a spook, a specter, a shade . . . dancing between raindrops and disappearing at the first sign of danger: a shadow dancer. In America, they simply called me ‘the Highlander.’ ”
It’s easy to laugh off Estulin’s pulp-fiction style and mixed metaphors. (One cringes, in particular, at the notion of Estulin “dancing between raindrops” spilling forth from the aforementioned “cesspool of duplicity.”) Yet The True Story of the Bilderberg Group has become something of a sensation. As of 2010, the publisher claimed it had been translated into forty-eight languages and sold in sixty-seven countries. And in the best tradition of Dan Brown, it may soon be coming to the big screen: In 2009, rights to the book were purchased by the Los Angeles–based Halcyon Company, which also owns the Terminator franchise.
In regard to its political orientation, Estulin’s theory betrays an interesting political shift on display in the conspiracist literature of the last two decades: Though he rails against the CIA, the RAND Corporation, the military-industrial complex, and all the traditional bugbears of post-JFK left-wing conspiracists, Estulin is—like Al
ex Jones, the Texas-based radio host profiled in the previous chapter—very much a libertarian conservative. And the dystopia he sketches out looks a lot like the communist USSR of his youth (not to mention the “Super-Government Administration” detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the One State of We, and the Oligarchy of Caesar’s Column—but more on this similitude in the next chapter).
Far from being enemies of communism, Estulin argues, today’s corporate oligarchs are its admiring successors: “The fact is that members of the Establishment operating through ‘private’ organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the CFR and the Trilateral Commission understand socialism as the ultimate power system for control, and understand its psychology better than the Marxists do . . . Socialism to them . . . is not a system to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Rather, it’s a mechanism for gaining a greater and greater concentration of power and control.”
Estulin and Jones are not alone: Beginning in the 1980s, and accelerating throughout the 1990s, the politics of conspiracism began to become an equal opportunity affair, as fringes on both sides of the ideological spectrum increasingly began promoting the same basic type of New World Order conspiracy theories. In 1991, for instance, no less a mainstream conservative than televangelist (and former presidential aspirant) Pat Robertson published an odd book arguing that a satanic network of Illuminati, Masons, and “international bankers” is conspiring to create an Antichrist-inspired world government that will rob Americans of their freedoms, promote pedophilia—and, of course, destroy Christianity.
Lurid as all this may sound, Robertson’s book tapped into the deep resurgence in right-wing populism that had vaulted Ronald Reagan to power. The sexual revolution, on-demand abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, forced busing, and the end of school prayer all had a traumatizing effect on American social conservatives during the 1970s and 1980s. But during these battles, the bulk of their hostility was directed overseas—at the Soviet Union, whose godless creed was blamed for secular humanism and other evils afflicting the world. When the Berlin Wall fell, and George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” (he actually did use those words), right-wing paranoia suddenly became directed inward, at an imagined conspiracy by America’s elites to roll back basic liberties—especially regarding guns, and the loosely defined constellation of powers known as “states’ rights”—while surrendering the nation’s sovereignty to some global overlord. On the extreme fringes, Americans began organizing armed militias to fight back against a feared “occupation” of America—a movement centered in the tristate region of eastern Washington, Montana, and the Idaho Panhandle.
Like Robertson, many of the most influential conspiracists tied their theories directly to America’s tradition of apocalyptic End Times millennialism. But even among purely secular conspiracy theorists, there was clearly a casting about for some epochal, Manichean struggle to replace the comforting, good-versus-evil organizing principle of the Cold War. The result was a hodgepodge of different groups and movements, embracing creeds as diverse as Christian Identity, Aryan Pride, militant libertarianism, states’ rights, anti-Semitism, crank monetary theories, and nativist xenophobia.
During this transitional period, American conspiracist culture grew very dark. Linda Milligan, an Ohio-based researcher who had first studied UFO conspiracists in the 1980s, told me she was shocked at the transformation she observed when she revisited the same people a decade later. “Aquarian-age optimism has been transformed into a dark new-age despair,” she reported in a 1994 essay. “Interest in the mind, for example, has shifted from speculation about the mind’s as yet unrealized powers (ESP, for example) to absorption in the belief that evil beings, UFO aliens referred to as the Grays, are implanting mind control devices in the brains of thousands of Americans. And they are doing this, my informants believe, with the cooperation of elements of the U.S. government along with the internationalists bent on creating a one world government.”
As another UFO-conspiracist expert, Michael Barkun, notes, the words “new world order” became a sort of “unifying conspiracy theory,” drawing in a huge range of angry prophets with a narrative containing some or all of the following elements: “the systematic subversion of republican institutions by a federal government utilizing emergency powers; the gradual subordination of the United States to a world government operating through the United Nations; the creation of sinister new military and paramilitary forces . . . the permanent stationing of foreign troops on U.S. soil; the widespread use of black helicopters to transport the tyranny’s operatives; the confiscation of privately owned guns; the incarceration of so-called patriots in concentration camps run by FEMA; the implantation of microchips and other advanced technology for surveillance and mind control; the replacement of Christianity with a New Age world religion; and, finally, the manipulation of the entire apparatus by a hidden hierarchy of conspirators.”
The right-wing militia movements withered in the late 1990s—largely as a result of the stepped-up investigation and prosecution that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. But the radical habits of mind the movement epitomized—extreme hatred of government, hostility toward foreign and multilateral entities, and an expectation of an apocalyptic confrontation with the forces of evil—persisted, and have been taken up by a new generation of Internet-savvy activists—Alex Jones now being the most famous and influential.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this right-wing conspiracist movement is the manner in which its fantasies came to mesh almost exactly with those propagated on the opposite, university-educated, anti-American, left-wing side of the political spectrum.
Some articles of faith divide the two camps: Radical leftists believe that the totalitarian and cryptocratic forces plotting to take over the world are oil magnates, uniformed Dr. Strangeloves, CIA spooks, and the like, while radical rightists imagine a world run by the United Nations, the European Union, the International Criminal Court, and NAFTA tribunals. But at both poles, the vision of the totalitarian hell to come is otherwise identical—as are the 9/11 conspiracy theories the two camps came to embrace.
Chapter Two
Warrant for Genocide, Blueprint for Paranoia
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
—Woodrow Wilson
There exists a subterranean world where psychological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a historical power and changes the course of history.
—Norman Cohn, preface to 1996 British edition of Warrant for Genocide
In the previous chapter, I wrote about the broad political, religious, and technological trends that have shaped American conspiracism. In this chapter, I will focus on the actual mythology of the most popular conspiracy theories, especially the 9/11 Truth movement.
Nailing down this mythology proved surprisingly difficult. That’s because few of the Truthers I interviewed presented any sort of coherent narrative about what they believe actually happened on 9/11. While almost all of them embraced the general idea that explosives brought down the World Trade Center, and that Dick Cheney and his CIA friends were in on it, that’s generally as far as they’d go. None offered any kind of detailed theory about how such a massive plot might have been organized, financed, and executed, let alone the identity of the hundreds of demolitions exper
ts, engineers, and spies who would be needed to staff it. “[This website] critically examines the official government explanation of the attack and concludes that many of its key assertions are impossible,” asserts one typical Truther website, 9/11 Research. “We do not pretend to know exactly how the attack was carried out or exactly who the perpetrators are.”
Following in the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s famous essay about JFK, most Truthers prefer to focus on questions. Among the “10 reasons for starting a new 9/11 investigation” listed on the leaflets they distribute at Ground Zero, for instance, are such entries as, “What force pulverized most of the concrete and office material of the Twin Towers into dust, and was able to eject steel beams into buildings over 400 feet away?” and, “Why was there no mention in the 9/11 Commission Report of WTC Building 7?”
The result is that any author setting out to describe the Truthers’ take on 9/11 has a difficult time putting together a coherent narrative. Instead, he has notebooks full of esoteric debating points about avionics, building demolition, NORAD flight-tracking procedures, and a dozen other scattered subjects. Though I will summarize some of this material in the next chapter, I don’t believe it is the best way to introduce the uninitiated to the Truther worldview.
