Fetzer's Onion - Half Baked

[Charles Drago]

Bill, the "onion" metaphor predates John Judge -- unless John, whose work I admire, was appearing in print during the late '60s. I'll try to determine where and when I first read the comparison, but I'm absolutely certain that it happened when I was in my teens.

I knew if I hit myself in the forehead with a small hammer often enough that eventually I'd remember ...

It was Hannah Arendt in "Authority in the Twentieth Century," published in The Review of Politics, Vol. 18, No. 4 in 1956 by Cambridge University Press, who gave us the earliest use of the onion layers metaphor I can find.

"In contradistinction to both tyrannical and authoritarian regimes, the proper image of totalitarian rule and organization seems to me to be the structure of the onion, in whose center, in a kind of empty space, the leader is located; whatever he does ... he does it from within, and not from without or above."

While Arendt was not writing about political conspiracies as we define the term narrowly on this thread, her language clearly made an impact upon most who study deep politics seriously and, well, deeply. The onion metaphor was in our zeitgeist to stay and to be utilized.