Dedicated to Gary Webb (RIP 2004)
If a conspiracy
theory is simply a theory which posits a conspiracy, then every politically and
historically literate person is a big-time conspiracy theorist, since every
such person subscribes to a vast range of conspiracy theories. That is,
historically literate people believe organised bodies of propositions that
explain alleged facts by positing conspiracies. [T]here are many facts which
admit of no non-conspiratorial explanation and many conspiracy theories that
are well established to qualify as knowledge. This affords us a deductive
argument for the claim that it is not irrational to believe in some conspiracy
theories, an argument that proceeds from premises that it is difficult to
rationally deny.
Extract from: Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom Revisited - Charles Pigden 2014
An examination of history reveals a persistent thread of convenient tragedy linked to the turning points of the fates of nations. And, in the smoke of the funeral pyre, not all the faces are crying. Filmmaker Oliver Stone
Some circumstantial evidence does exist, such as when you find a trout in the milk. Henry David Thoreau
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The Movements of Suspicious Discontent
Although possibly in the minority, history is littered with the mortal remains of outliers who courageously defied the 'received ignorance' of the era and/or rejected the rigid beliefs and entrenched prejudices of their contemporaries, only to have the passage of time vindicate, elevate and then revere them on the one hand and -- on the other -- relegate and condemn their detractors and persecutors to the trash bin of that same history. Oh what might have been then for humanity and the civilised world had the 'history' of the era listened more closely to the "outliers" and paid less attention to their detractors and defended them from their persecutors.
Doubtless these "outliers" included many a derided, put-upon, loony-toon conspiracy theorist.
With this opening in mind, a word or three about conspiracies in the context of the overarching American historical narrative and ongoing geo-political discourse is apposite. At the outset, no discussion of conspiracy would be complete without reference to U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter, a man who, as far back as 1964, famously identified what he called the 'Paranoid Style in American Politics'.
First published in Harper's Magazine in 1964, this article is considered one of the most influential in the iconic magazine's history, which, in and of itself, is a significant pointer to the centrality and endurance of conspiracy in the American political narrative. In this seminal work, Hofstadter defined conspiracy theory pejoratively and attached negative connotations to those predisposed to theorizing about all manner of institutional and political malfeasance, even before the spooks at Langley began tinkering with it.
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