Defending conspiracy "crackpots"

A few days ago, prompted by last week’s bombings in London and subsequent speculations, Sunni Maravillosa and then James Leroy Wilson launched into discussions of conspiracy theories on their blogs. What makes conspiracies plausible...or implausible? they asked. I recommend both of their posts.

Of course, today’s “conspiracy theory” is very often tomorrow’s historical fact. Two decades ago, if you’d suggested that FDR had prior knowledge of Japan’s plans to bomb Pearl Harbor, most people would have stuck a tinfoil hat on your head. Today, that bit of “crackpot theory” is treated as common knowledge on the History Channel. The Watergate scandals, which dethroned Nixon 30 years ago, were a network of conspiracies. The Third Reich’s Final Solution was a “conspiracy.” (Can you imagine politicians and media pundits, so quick to marginalize revisionist historians as “conspiracy buffs,” using the term “Holocaust buffs” to describe investigators of Hitler’s atrocities?)

One of the best defenses I’ve ever read of conspiracy theorists came from Michael Parenti, a left-wing political analyst, who wrote in his book Dirty Truths:

“Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: ‘Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?’ For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together — on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot — though they call it ‘planning’ and ‘strategizing’ — and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. ...

“Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not?”

I suggest that anyone who offhandedly dismisses conspiracy theories read:

Rick Wall’s “Conspiracy — Fact or Fiction?” series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Butler Shaffer’s “Will the Real Paranoids Please Raise Their Hands?”

Murray Rothbard’s “The Noble Task of Revisionism”

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