Lance De Haven - Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America

[Magda Hassan]

I forgot to mention one other very important set of observations De Haven - Smith makes concerning the effect of the "conspiracy theory" meme. It is that of disconnectedness. How often do you hear about "The Kennedy Assassinations" anywhere outside the community? Certainly we have COPA, Probe, the Eugenio/Pease volume, and, from long ago, Scott, P.D., P.L. Hoch, and R. Stetler. The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond. A Guide to Cover-Ups and Investigations. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. But, at large, the term encourages one to treat each event as sui generis, an unicum with its own "theory", with the final implication of its being aberrant or unusual. Now of course I would not deny that the context and circumstances of each crime are indeed historically specific and determinate, but I would nonetheless concur that the term does have the power to deflect investigation of similarities and patterns by a subtle crippling of the analytic faculties. It also stops one from having suspicions about synchronicities, or sequences of events, that one would quite naturally be led to question. One of the author's favorite examples is how MSM have managed to avoid the obvious (or what at least appeared to me as obvious) connection between the Twin Towers/Pentagon attack and the anthrax scares that soon followed. Another example of this kind of blindness -- willful or imposed -- I sensed for many years but thought I was just being "paranoid" about, until I read Jim DiEugenio's two-part "Posthumous Assassination" essay: the waves of defamatory ordure dumped into the news-stream about the Kennedys seemed to me very often curiously timed to coincide with (and distract from) other revelations about the parallel government (when it was made clear in that article how closely tied these authors were to intelligence, I at last felt vindicated in my suspicions). How this terminological usage codifies the isolation of events this way is another canny perception offered by the author.

Yes, the 'disconnectedness'. It is the way most history is taught or presented and understood by most people. Each event is discreet and unique and made by powerful individuals acting according to their will.

On the other hand "Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1858