In "Paranoid Style" Hofstadter openly declares the phrase is "meant to be" viewed pejoratively. After noting that "the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good", Hofstadter goes on to say that, "[the] style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content". As he said, he was
"... [more] interested in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent" [my emphasis].
Although clearly not a fan of the conspiracy construct as a useful guide to history then, it would still be interesting to speculate on what Hofstadter, if he was still on the right side of the grass that is, might have to say now about our "political psychology" and how it has evolved since his heyday. This might especially be so as it relates to our "political rhetoric" and, in fact, the whole nine yards of the global politico-economic zeitgeist. All of which is to say we know a hell of a lot more now about the crypto-statists predisposition for deception, duplicity, disinformation along with subterfuge, [and for] secretive, subversive behaviour and "institutional malfeasance" than we did back in 1964. In so many ways and on so many levels, we are where we are because of it!
And if we do indeed know more about this "predisposition" and its effects on the course of history, it would be then largely -- and thankfully we might say -- because of the "movements of suspicious discontent" that Hofstadter so easily and breezily derided. Two examples suffice to support this. It is precisely because of these "movements" that many more Americans believe there was a conspiracy to off President John Kennedy than don't, with those that still accept the official 'conspiracy theory' of 9/11 being in the minority.
In 1971, another iconic tome appeared on the scene that, to this day and for more reasons than space herein allows us to speculate on, still seems to attract attention. The book in question is None Dare Call it Conspiracy, written by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham. It's much more difficult to know where to begin with this book than it is to know when and where to 'end' with it. With the benefit of hindsight, given its genesis it is bordering on the incomprehensible that it was (and still is) a book that people take seriously.
This is not to suggest that Allen was totally off the mark in all of his assertions or his historical recollections of people and events. His accounts of international financiers and merchant bankers' involvement in the establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 (along with its indisputable status as a bona fide conspiracy, arguably the greatest one of them all), steering America's entry into World War One, and the bankrolling of both the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the Nazis, to name a few, are now generally accepted to be more or less on the money, no pun intended.
Moreover, his revelations about the degree to which American industry and capital effectively supported - from technological, intellectual and economic standpoints - the Soviet system prior to and even throughout much of the Cold War was also something that was possibly for its time revelatory. Such historical insights were certainly not what one would have expected to find in your stock-standard high school history text-book. But it should be noted herein Allen drew on much of the pioneering and meticulous research work of Anthony Sutton, with little it appears to offer by way of his own research.
One of the other major sources for Allen's book was Dr Carroll Quigley's work, in particular his seminal and oft-referenced 1966 book Tragedy and Hope. Yet even here Quigley himself reportedly repudiated much of what Allen has said in his name. (Quigley's biggest 'claim to fame' may be the much-touted influence he had on a young Rhodes scholar by the name of William Jefferson Clinton, an influence one suspects that if he was alive today, Quigley might ruefully disdain. A story for another time.)
Allen's book certainly put paid to any notion some people seem to hold that it is those of the left who have cornered the market on conspiracy theorising, yet it's here we might argue that Allen's book comes unstuck. He might have been right in being paranoid, but possibly painted an incomplete picture of the ideological motivations of those fueling the paranoia. In Allen's world it was those on the political left engaging in most if not all the conspiratorial behaviour, as distinct from theorising about others doing so.
In this respect, the collapse of the USSR provided for most objective observers enough evidence that the Soviets were never really as much of a threat as consistently portrayed. It was certainly not anywhere near enough to justify the trillions spent on 'fighting' the so-called Cold War and in the process bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. This, without taking into account the body count (itself unquantifiable, but easily in the tens of millions), and the massively deep-seated and widespread economic destruction and the social dislocation (incalculable, period). And whilst a story for another time, we're still suffering from the Cold War hangover, in more ways than one! That's generally what happens when conspiracy theories turn out to be real conspiracies. And the bigger the conspiracy, the bigger the hangover.
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