In
French, there are two words corresponding to conspiracy in English: conspiration
and conjuration. All analogy hunting is imperfect, and I will leave out a
third word, complot, to make a conceptual point: conspiration is
usually taken to refer to the machinations of an occult society from below,
seeking some purpose that dare not be pursued openly due to the forces of order
that would crush it. Conjuration
– a swearing-together – is usually taken to refer to a secret group on some
higher echelon of society – aristocrats, the king’s ministers, generals. A
cabal, the Littré says. Conjuration survives in English as conjure – to call up
spirits. In Greek, horkos is to swear, from which we derive the latin
exorcizo – exorcize. There is, in the semantic field of the oath, some further
connection with the spirits, with elemental powers. That’s a rich field, since
it encompasses not only the popular dread of secret policemen and the hidden
moves of power players, but also the notion of the unearthly, the uncanny.
Indeed, both of these themes have converged continually during the Cold War –
that war culture that began in 1945 and was declared over after the overthrow
of Soviet power in Russia in 1991. A war culture that gave birth to our own war
culture, which is continually searching for a general purpose and a demon
enemy.
Although
English does not make the same distinction between conspiration and conjuration
as French does, you can see that the concept works in any discussion of
conspiracy. Conspiracy is allowed, even used as a justification, if it is a
breathing together of the enemy, the Other. Thus, communists, the dangerous
working class, the Islamic terrorists, are targeted as conspirators, and have
been regularly shown to conspire by the establishment press in America, and the
political/academic establishment in general. Osama bin Laden’s band conspires.
On the other hand, hints of conjuration – of high levels working together as a
cabal – almost immediately drive the establishment crazy. The CIA would never
conspire to, say, bring narcotics into the country. The FBI would never be an
accomplice to the assassination of civil rights leaders. And if by some
happenstance we uncover, say, a scheme to sell arms to Iran to supply arms to
mercenaries in Nicaragua, this is an aberration and not something that the
American government would in any way regularly do. This is conspiracy theory
territory. In the post World War II period, the theory of conjuration has been
medicalized (as a paranoid delusion) and diabolized (as a myth akin to the
anti-semitism of the Nazis).
2.
Because
of this conceptual line, we still have an odd and unbalanced history of the
twentieth century. After the Soviet Union fell apart, for a brief period, the
records of the KGB became available on an unprecedented scale, as did the
secret police records of all the Eastern European states. These records have
been read naively by academics – mainly the ideologically hardcore among them –
as though they told the complete truth. From them, we can get a record of
subversives among us. Never mind that bureaucratic files overflow with
optimistic statements, obfuscations, lies and error in any organization, not to
speak of a secret one. But the records of the intelligence agencies on the
winning side – those of the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, etc. – are still a
matter of dribs and drabs, of troves of documents heavily redacted by the
intelligence agencies themselves, or of troves discovered accidentally and
revealed, usually, in hole-in-the-corner lefty publications. One would think
that the enormous expansion of police powers and the various “organs” of
intelligence should have, by now, achieved the kind of gravitas to deserve
serious historical treatment even given this hostile terrain, but as Alain
Dewerpe points out in Espion: une anthropologie historique du secret d’Etat
contemporaine, the historical profession has made investigation in
conjuration a no-go area, one that arouses suspicion of kookiness. Which is why
the literature on, say, the CIA during the postwar period is still driven by
journalists, sewing fact to fact, speculation to speculation. These journalists
are regularly jeered at by the “historians” of the CIA’s house journal, Studies
in Intelligence, for their use of anonymous sources and their method of
using associations and analogies to establish causes. Of course, the cynicism
of these in-house, bought off historians
is functional: after all, we use indirection and supposition because the CIA
has laws to protect the release of its records, and has long dodged any
uncensored release of the material around, for instance, even such an ancient
matter as the Kennedy assassination. It is important to see, too, that it
is ideological: in the twentieth
century, the right and its allies have long made their homes in spy agencies
and police departments. From taking the Soviet Union for an enemy to taking any
supposed “weakening” of attitude towards the Soviet Union for subversion is an
easy step. Similarly, these departments were, for most of the cold war, very
very white, and very very suspicious of black politicians and activists. Thus,
your average libertarian or far right group had little to fear from the cops or
the spies: but every leftist group offering even the mildest critique of the
war culture, capitalism, or the state of race relations was on the target list.
3.
These
are circumstances that have, as it were, blown back on the spirit of democracy
in many countries – the U.S. being one of them. If the population is largely
suspicious, as every poll shows it is, of the Warren Commission story about the
JFK assassination, and if the response of the establishment defenders is to
label such suspicions “paranoid”, it will soon become impossible to trust the
establishment defenders, and indeed the state itself, as an honest dialogue
partner. The historian Richard
Hofstadter, in 1964 (the year in which the Federal government lied about the
Tonkin Bay incident, thus pushing U.S. into the most active phase of the
Vietnam War), influentially cast the idea that conspiracy theory is a product
of a “paranoid” style in American culture. Distrust of the motives of the
governors, and their tendency to hide information and manipulate events to
their profit, which was common sense to the Founding fathers and is the premise
of any advertising campaign worth its retainer, is haughtily dismissed when it
is expressed by the groundlings. The
model, which has been followed to this day by such “influencers” as Cass
Sunstein, is to laugh at the notion that
something is rotten in a state in which agencies who are resourced with
hundreds of billions of dollars get to choose their level of transparency. The
problem of conspiracy beliefs, then, can be countered with clever practical
tricks. In Sunstein’s Conspiracy theories and Other Dangerous Idea), the suggest
is: “Our main policy claim here is that
government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy
theories.” This echoes the program followed by the CIA in the 1960s and 70s,
called Operation Chaos. It has, predictably, spawned conspiracy theories about
Sunstein himself, which then get turned around and used to show that look, all
notion that there is some occult collusion at high levels of the government is
nuts! – the last bit of the cycle falling to an article by Andrew Marantz at
the New Yorker, who portrays Sunstein and his enemies with zero historical
consciousness about the rich history of “cognitive infiltration” by the
government in marginal groups, mostly leftwing, throughout the twentieth
century.
4.
Marantz’s
lack of notice of the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and the infinite variety
of homegrown subversives divisions generated by urban police departments is in
contrast to pop culture’s hyper-attention: Netflix writers, for instance,
regularly so regularly use MKUltra as their muse that the heirs of Sidney Gottlieb
could probably sue for points. Conspiracy (or, as I will call it from now on, conjuration)
is a popular framework for films, tv,
and fiction, from Gravity’s Rainbow to the X files. For leftist
artists, it has resulted in the replacement of earnest socialist realism (in
which workers produce and are exploited) with glitzy assassination plots (in
which freelancers with guns and no pension plans are the vital political
players). JFK, here, is vaguely assimilated to King Arthur, just as the bogus
Camelot label promised, and the king is always being brought down by evil. Conjuration,
here, stands in contrast to your random
superhero film, where the enemy is more usually a conspirator of the old police
tradition – a criminal after the wealth of the wealthiest, in alliance, often,
with some vaguely leftist extremist – see Poison Ivy in the Batman films, a
veritable Earth Firster, for testimony.
Given
this pop richesse, you would think that there would be a rich social science
literature on the effect of the CIA and military secret programs on American democracy,
such as it is. I don’t mean by this just the study of the programs themselves –
I mean the study, as well, of the effect of them being blown, being known, and
being shown. American citizenship has been demoralized by all of this: by both
the disclosures and the refusal to disclose. We know more about, say, lab leaks
in China than we do about lab leaks in the U.S., and more about the KGB’s
agents in place in the states in the Cold War than about America’s agents in
place in the Soviet Union – which fell thirty years ago. Thus, our history is
in a curious state, rather like the cat in Schroedinger’s thought experiment. And
this is a scandal. Democracy has a past dimension – it requires clarity about
the past. And we haven’t got that yet, not by a longshot.
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