Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  “I fear Obama more than I fear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” he says. “Obama is the one who’s going to let Iran go nuclear. It’s the same instinct that causes him to bow down to the Saudis, and shake hands with Hugo Chavez. His thinking is Far Left—very anti-Israeli. You can’t listen to Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not be an anti-Semite. And do we even know where he was born? He hasn’t even released his school transcripts from Occidental College [in California]. Until proven otherwise, I believe the reason he won’t release those transcripts is because they’re marked with the fact that he’s a foreign student.

  “I still haven’t seen a facsimile of his original birth certificate despite diligent searching for almost two years now and, in point of fact, no one else has,” he tells me. “Again, there is only hearsay about its existence—from a Hawaiian official, Robert Gibbs, and Obama himself, and a short form certificate of live birth with no specific information, which actually doesn’t count. Draw your own conclusions . . . We know next to nothing about this man’s inscrutable past, his academic records are under seal, his financial statements from his time as a senator are lacking, and even his Columbia thesis has gone missing . . . Deep down, we all know something’s terribly wrong, but we’re too afraid to risk ridicule and animadversion, or to be lumped in with conspiracy mongers and denounced as fruitcakes, so we steer our attention to other problems and issues involving this most disastrous of presidents, which is fine since there are so many of them. Myself, I don’t know for sure whether Obama is a ‘natural born American citizen’ or not, but I have my strong suspicions, which have yet to be allayed. And I’m not afraid to write about or air my doubts.”

  These days, Solway spends his time in front of a computer, exchanging information about Obama with Birthers, and writing more essays about the Islamist threat. Once a poet whose name was known only to a few thousand literati, his articles now get tens of thousands of hits on websites such as FrontPage Magazine and Pajamas Media. While much of what he writes consists of stock anti-Islamist polemics, he also produces genuinely insightful flourishes that reveal his deep knowledge of literary culture, such as this gem from a FrontPage article, explaining why the Left is drawn to make common cause with Islamists: “The eloquent Imam, the jihadist [and] even the Palestinian gunman are only the latest incarnation of the [West’s] anthropological romance with the ‘pure primitive’ who redeems us from our own evolved complexities and etiolated belief-systems. The new aborigine, as the contemporary embodiment of the Noble Savage invented by European exploration, thus acts as the counterfoil to our own repressed and guilt-ridden civilization. The enemy who commands our sympathies becomes the heroicizing projection of our own bad conscience. Because he possesses what we lack and desire, we are willing to live in a state of contradiction and hasten to pardon his atrocities. Thus feminists will wink at the monstrous usage of infibrilation.”

  As Solway ticks off the many corners of the world from which he gets fan mail, his tone is exhilarated, triumphant. His only regret, he tells me, is that he wasted all those years before waking up to the truth: “I’ve been a poet all my life. My first poem was published at the age of twelve. It’s all I ever wanted to be. But that’s changed. As Auden said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ ”

  On the spectrum of geopolitics, Truther Richard Gage and quasi-Birther David Solway lie at opposite ends. The former views the war on terrorism as a fraud. The latter views it as the defining struggle of our time. But in their psychology, the two activists appear to have been set down the road of radical politics by the same psychological impulse.

  To understand these two men is to understand the strangely sudden, strangely radicalizing effects that middle age can impose upon the male psyche. This is a time when life can lose its luster. The children grow up, the hair falls out, careers plateau, physical powers ebb. Amidst the resulting ennui, the prospect of overturning the familiar patterns of life and starting over from scratch seems tempting. Some men do this by joining an ashram, moving to Tuscany, or reuniting with childhood sweethearts. Gage and Solway have done it through conspiracism. In their new role as radical truth-seekers, they have an opportunity to reinvent themselves in front of a new audience of strangers who have little knowledge of their past lives, and who evaluate them entirely on the basis of their newly created identity.

  Like all forms of midlife crisis, this sudden lurch into conspiracism offers middle-aged men a sense of revitalization and adventure. In some ways, in fact, it offers an even more complete escape than the proverbial mistress and sports car. For a middle-aged man who’s grown tired of life’s familiar patterns, conspiracism provides more than just fresh surroundings: It offers an entirely new reality.

  The Failed Historian

  Many things that do amount to tampering with the effects of logic do not in our field necessarily present themselves as dishonesty to the man who practices such tampering. He may be so fundamentally convinced of the truths of what he is standing for that he would rather die than give new weight to contradicting facts or pieces of analysis. The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

  —History of Economic Analysis, Joseph A. Schumpeter

  A good starting point for understanding the psychology of conspiracism’s “failed historian” is Sigmund Freud. Not his theories, but his actual life: To the great embarrassment of many dedicated Freudians, it turns out that the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry spent years of his life pursuing the most durable and ambitious literary conspiracy theory of the twentieth century.

  In 1898, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published William Shakespeare, a book described as “perhaps the most authoritative work on Shakespeare, not principally intended for an English-speaking audience, which had been published in any country.” Like many Shakespeare scholars of the age, Brandes was interested in the connections between Shakespeare’s life and fiction. The creation of Hamlet, in particular, Brandes argued, grew out of Shakespeare’s grief for his own father’s passing in 1601.

  As contemporary Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has observed, Freud became fascinated by Brandes’ theory at a critical point in his life—his own father had died in 1896—and incorporated its claims into The Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud argued that Hamlet “is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex.”

  “It can, of course, be only the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet,” Freud concluded. “He was still mourning his loss, and [wrote the play] during a revival, as we may fairly assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father.”

  In chapter 5 of his great work, Freud not only put forward Prince Hamlet as a foundational case study in his Oedpial theory, but wound into it an ambitious explanation for the protagonist’s hesitation in killing his uncle: “What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his father’s ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father’s place with his mother—the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood . . . If anyone wishes to call Hamlet an hysterical subject I cannot but admit that this is the deduction to be drawn from my interpretation.” Over the next twenty years, the play would become a central part of the psychoanalytic canon.

  Then, in 1919, tragedy struck: Brandes repudiated his theory about Hamlet, citing the discovery of marginal notes, by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, showing that the play actually had been written between early 1599 and early 1601—before Shakespeare père died in September 1601. In an instant, Freud’s elaborate claims about Hamlet went up in smoke. More than that, the revelation implicitly cast Oedipal theory itself into doubt: If Freud’s elaborate diagnosis of Prince Hamlet were this wildly off the mark, what did that say about the legions of flesh-and-blood patients who’d become convinced by Freud to trace their problems to similar intrafamilial causes
?

  Unless . . . and this was Freud’s unconscious taking the reins—unless Shakespeare’s life could somehow be altered in the eyes of history. Could it be that the man who wrote Hamlet somehow was other than the son of that Stratford-upon-Avon glover and borough ale taster?

  As it happens, Freud seems to have dabbled casually in Shakespearean conspiracism since early days. But in the 1920s and 1930s—right up to his death in 1939—he became fixated on the emerging theory that Shakespeare’s plays and poems had been written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford—a spoiled, hysterical, and violent man who, as Freud later described him, “lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband’s death.” What a coincidence.

  Many of the writers who’ve pronounced the Bard of Avon a fraud (“anti-Stratfordians” is how they sometimes refer to themselves) expanded their theories into elaborate political narratives. Some nineteenth-century anti-Stratfordians, for instance, believed that the works attributed to Shakespeare were in fact coded manifestos written by a group of closet protorepublicans led by Francis Bacon as a means to undermine Elizabethan tyranny. In the most ambitious version of this fantasy, it is imagined that Shakespeare’s plays actually created the template for the United States Constitution—and that Bacon’s plot against the monarchy, had it succeeded, might have preempted the need for an American Revolution. Nevertheless, even the most far-fetched claims about the origins of Shakespeare’s writings do not fall into the classic Protocols-type conspiracy-theory template outlined in Chapter 2.

  Even so, biographer Ernest Jones’ reflection that Freud’s theories about Shakespeare suggest a wish that “a certain part of reality could be changed” applies to the many conspiracists who fall into the category I call “failed historian.” For this group, conspiracy theories are a tool to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that arises when the course of human events doesn’t cooperate with the results demanded by their ideology.

  Often, this type of conspiracism arises on the militant fringes of nationalist, religious, or identity-politics movements whose membership must explain away their failure to dominate their enemies, gain power and influence, or fulfill some ordained purpose embedded in their scripture or dogma. Radical Islam—with its obsessive focus on the Jews’ role in thwarting Allah’s will—supplies an example. So does Afrocentrism, a pseudohistorical movement that confers an expanded dignity on troubled African American communities through the conceit that they are heir to a black civilization that once created the guiding forms of Western culture.

  (Afrocentrism itself is not a conspiracy theory per se—even though it is often wrapped up with ancillary theories that accuse white historians of conspiring to suppress the Afrocentric truth. But on street corners and disreputable websites, it sometimes can be found side by side with the teachings of Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam, which are genuinely anti-Semitic and conspiracist—not to mention bizarre, in that they declare the white race to have been the creation of a mad scientist named Yakub 6,600 years ago. Yet this conspiracist strain in American black nationalism is rarely discussed in polite American society—much as we avert our eyes from the copies of the Protocols openly on display at black bookstores. Thanks to lingering guilt regarding America’s appalling treatment of blacks until relatively recently in the country’s history, there is an implicit assumption among whites that such conspiracism is more understandable, and perhaps even less reprehensible, than other varieties.)

  Even in the case of conspiracists whose theories seemingly have little to do with any particular national or religious cause, I will discover during my interviews that their initial radicalization came through a specific geopolitical issue connected with their ethnic identity. This includes Serbian-Canadian conspiracist Lubo Zizakovic, the former football player profiled in the first chapter. While he now talks about the Bilderbergers and 9/11, his initial radicalization came during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, when the United States and its NATO allies took sides against the Serbs:

  The demonization of the Serb people started with falsified images of a Serb-run Bosnian refugee camp that appeared on the front page of every paper in the world and on every television station as a Serb-run concentration death camp. In August 1992, millions of people were shocked to see photographs of a supposed Bosnian Serb “death camp.” Bush Sr, Clinton, and Blair used these images as justification for their involvement against the Serbs in Bosnia . . . The photos were produced by ITN, the British TV news giant, from footage shot by an ITN film crew which spent a long day in Bosnia. The film was shot in a refugee center in the town of Trnopolje. Most of the photographs featured a tall, emaciated man with a deformed chest, stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind barbed wire. Do you remember those pictures? They were a hoax. They were the start of the ‘demonization’ of the Serb people . . . [In 1999] came the so-called ‘Racak Massacre.’ Clinton and NATO used this staged event as [an] excuse to bomb Serbia into the stone age . . . Racak was a hoax, but then again, so were the Serb death camps and everything else that came from NATO press briefings . . . it made no sense that nineteen of the world’s most powerful countries would gang up against such a small nation and bomb it for 78 days . . . Does the west care more for Kosovo Albanians that for Palestinians? Hardly. Let’s not start on what is happening in Africa as well. The war on Serbia was not about Kosovo Albanians, but geopolitical goals. The pillaging of the resources of the former Yugoslavia was continuing. Insuring a Caspian and Black Sea pipeline through Yugoslavia to the Adriatic Sea and robbing Yugoslavia of its natural resources for the benefit of large corporations seems to always be the overriding goal . . . My rage grew fierce as I heard friends and coworkers regurgitate NATO propaganda. Over 100,000 dead and millions displaced by the Serbs . . . I [now] have a deep distrust when it comes to the [mainstream media’s] reporting of international events.

  The natural psychological alliance between conspiracism and radical identity politics is a phenomenon that George Orwell described in his landmark 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism.” While Orwell generally did not use the term “conspiracy theory” to describe this marriage, he did directly hit upon the manner by which ardent nationalists—a term he defined loosely to encompass political fanatics and religious bigots of every description—inevitably lapse into fantasy when history does not unfold as their parochial visions demand:

  Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should—in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918—and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible . . . Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within 10 years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count,’ or perhaps had not happened . . . When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably, they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly . . . Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

  Orwell’s analysis helps explain why conspiracism always finds its way into the mythology of totalitarian movements, such as in North Korea or Iran, whose bellicosity and brutal domestic policies can be justified only by recourse to the claim that they are guiding the nation on some infallible historical project. When history defeats this claim of infallibility, as it always does, every despo
t requires some version of the Ministry of Truth—so it can blame society’s problems on the schemes of an invented army of infidels and counterrevolutionaries.

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith goes about this intellectual project self-consciously as part of his professional duties as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. But for the subjects of real-life totalitarian regimes, the process often arises subconsciously, as a crutch to make life endurable. “Among the Russian masses there was . . . a certain level of self-hypnosis about their Great Helmsman,” journalist Robert Fulford wrote in a column summarizing Orlando Figes’ 2007 book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. “Figes introduces us to a man who grew up in a family of Soviet diplomats and believed all the Stalinist rhetoric about the necessity of imprisoning those who were ‘enemies of the people’—even though his father, his older sister, six of his uncles and an aunt were all arrested in the purges of the 1930s. But in 1944, when his mother was jailed, he began to question his faith. He decided that the secret police must have been penetrated by the ‘enemies of the people.’ ”

  The psychological reflex that Orwell describes applies equally to sixties-era American leftists, who, as already noted, refused to believe that one of their own killed JFK; Japanese historians who have averted their eyes to the rape of Nanking (rightly described by Iris Chang as “the forgotten holocaust of World War II”); and Serbs—such as former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic—who airily declare the Srebrenica massacre to be “a myth.” Holocaust deniers are invariably failed historians. As Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman concluded in their authoritative 2000 book Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It?, these conspiracy theorists “find empowerment through the rehabilitation of those they admire and the denigration of those they perceive to be squelching their admiration. Many deniers seem to like the idea of a rigid, controlled, and powerful state. Some are fascinated with Nazism as a social/political organization and are impressed with the economic gains Germany made in the 1930s . . . The history of the Holocaust is a black eye for Nazism. Deny the veracity of the Holocaust, and Nazism begins to lose this stigma.”