Whose conspiracy theory?

 Happy is the country where conspiracy theory is a mere fantasy to amuse teenagers.

You could not write a history of Guatemala, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, etc. without including a heavy dose of conspiracy, mainly conspiracies hatched by a nation’s far right class and the United States intelligence services. Reading American liberals bemoan “Russia’s” interference in the elections in the U.S., citizens in these among other nations must think: payback’s a bitch.

Russia is, in fact, ruled by the direct result of the U.S. interfering majorly to re-elect Yeltsin in 1996. For the Clinton administration, it was a no-brainer – they were never going to allow the democratic election of a Communist president.

Payback’s a bitch, even if in the case of Trump, the Russian interference, if there was such, was in no way as decisive as, say, the American interference in the foreclosure of the administration of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, or even in Italy in the election of the first Christian government in 1948. One can draw a pretty straight line from the U.S. interference in 1948 to the triumph of the fascists under Meloni in 2022. Meloni is James Jesus Angleton's secret love child - if anybody is.
This is a history of “stopping communism” that was not only supported by the Cold War liberal community, but was planned by its most illustrious members, who staffed the intelligence agencies, the state department, and the Pentagon. When illustrious members of the American liberal community today dismiss conspiracy as a non-starter to explain political events – a bone to chew on for the rubes out there, but not sophisticates! – they are trying to bury the entire history of American foreign policy for the last eighty years. Which means they have no tools to understand how blowback can happen to even the most super of the super-powers.
I am less fascinated by conspiracy, myself – except as a very nifty narrative strategy – as I am in what Alan A. Block, in his book about corruption in the Bahamas, Masters of Paradise, calls “the serious crime community.” Block, in his preface, traces the discussion of the junction of Under and Upperworlds to Edwin M. Sutherland’s coinage of the term “white collar criminal” in 1939. It is a term that, as Block points out, has its uses:
“By bringing the “ ‘upper-world’ ” crimes of business and government into a field of study that traditionally focused on the crimes of the poor and the underprivileged “ ‘underworld,’ ” Sutherland creatively enlarged the breadth of his discipline.”
Block, however, sees the term as insufficiently sociological – undermined by its individualistic presuppositions:
“My quarrel with the term lies in its imprecision when differentiating white-collar crime and criminals from organized crime …”
Block means organized crime by people who exist in a community that they influence by going over the line from licit to illicit activity. In the case of Bahama, much of the history of the de-colonization of the Bahamas was interlocked with the corruption of the government in order to allow the islands to host vast money laundering and gambling operations.
Block’s book was published in 1998, but it does have a certain relevance today. The serious criminals that ran Bahaman casinos and produced corporate fronts like Resorts International, which came out of a crooked, Meyer Lansky connected company named Mary Carter Paint Company. After Resorts International, in conjunction with various grifters and outliers of the Mafia, had debauched the Bahamas, they turned their eyes to Vegas and to Atlantic City. Anyone who has seen Casino knows some part of the Vegas story. In Atlantic City, Resorts had trouble with the vast overruns involved in building the Taj Mahal casino; now, this was a Resorts special. Overruns were really operations for draining money from investors and putting it into the pocket of some core of gangsters, but in New Jersey the corporation really seemed to be drowning – so it was taken over in a bid by Donald Trump. Trump’s final destination – not D.C., but Mar-a-Lago – is an extension of the Bahamas story.
Block’s book is straight up sociology of crooked businesses in the Bahama setting. So he does not go into another, shadow side of the story very much, which is that the CIA used Bahama banks, too, as depots of laundered money that they could put to use, originally, in trying to overthrow Castro. Douglas Valentine, who examines the CIA in terms of organized crime (which is a surprisingly tight fit) presents some of the story of Florida. One remembers that Richard Nixon (who was a bit like Donald Trump with less libido and more brain) had a sort of home away from home in Coral Gables, staying with his best friend Bebe Rebozo, who had a hand in various shady banks in the Bahamas. In fact, CREEP, Nixon’s reelection committee, probably used shell banks to distribute money, which led to Watergate as much as anything else.
The Bahamas have played, I would say, a miniature, a tiny, a small small small role in the Big Books about American Foreign Policy, written from a perspective that excludes, a priori, the very idea that the American intelligence community and the community of serious criminals overlap.
Perhaps this is a mistake.