Conspiracies and Conspiracism

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jim - thank you for that finely argued rebuttal of Berlet's nonsense.

There have been persistent attempts to demonize anyone attempting to investigate or challenge officially sanctioned history as a "conspiracy theorist", "toxic to democracy", and sharing "some portion of moral responsibility for irresponsible acts".

In parallel, there have been attempts to describe anyone with an account contrary to officially sanctioned history as mentally ill.

A classic example is Elaine Showalter's ridiculous 1997 text, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media: Alien abduction, Chronic fatigue syndrome, Satanic ritual abuse, Recovered memory, Gulf War syndrome, Multiple Personality Syndrome_ (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997)

Showalter's thesis has been summarized as follows:

Hysteria, Elaine Showalter writes, is the psychosomatic expression of an internal conflict that can only be resolved through psychoanalysis. The patient who rejects this solution, out of false shame or a failure to understand the "true nature of hysteria," spins a tale of physical illness with origins external to the individual. These narratives make up the "hystories" of this book: explanations of apparent physical symptoms created from the surrounding social texts available to all, and hence familiar to all. The telling and retelling of "hystories" through talk shows, popular magazines, self-help books, patient- created support groups, patient-recruited doctors, and the new medium of Internet, causes others to become "infected" and develop the physical symptoms themselves. The result is "infectious epidemics of hysterical diseases."

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), according to Elaine Showalter, is a prime example of an "infectious hysterical disease." Five other case studies comprise the remainder of the book: Satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, and multiple personality syndrome. This review will focus only on CFS.

http://www.cfids-me.org/marys/elaine.html

As anyone who has worked with, or knows, victims of Gulf War Syndrome and CFS, these are - in the vast majority of cases - not "infectious hysterical diseases".

It's also the case that governments around the world display an attitude of resentment and indifference towards victims of Gulf War Syndrome (a costly embarrassment to defence depts) and CFS (which remains essentially uninvestigated and untreated by the medical profession).

However, the situation regarding memory and dissociative phenomena is even more sinister.

The historical record regarding "MK-ULTRA", in its umbrella sense as shorthand for the numerous covert mind-control programmes - partial and redacted as it is - makes it absolutely clear that huge efforts were made to manipulate and erase memory (eg shock therapy to erase; implantation of false memories and screen memories to mislead), and to exploit natural dissociative phenomena to "split" and "compartmentalize" the human mind (eg the work of George Estabrooks and Robert G Heath).

Historian and investigator Walter Bowart worked with very many individuals who claimed to have been victims of such experimentation and started remembering their childhood and youth in the 1990s. I worked with many such individuals too.

There were charlatans and probable COINTELPRO operatives amongst these people. However, there were also individuals of great courage, whose memories were capable of a substantial level of corroboration and whose accounts contained details which were not "infected" or "contaminated" by open source literature.

It is abundantly clear that what is genuinely "toxic" to truth and knowledge is not "conspiracy theorists" or "hysterics".

The toxicity comes from those, such as Berlet and Showalter, who seek to categorize all who challenge official history as fantasists, morally complicit with "evildoers", or mentally ill.