"No Such Thing as Paranoia"

[pynchonoid]

Paranoid Nation
by Gary Indiana
No Such Thing as Paranoia
On the culture of conspiracism
May 25th, 2004 10:30 AM

[...] Our mass media, its ownership consolidated among
a handful of billionaires whose interests are
identical with those of corporate cronies (globalized
"free trade" for the wealthy nations, peonage for the
third world, Chomsky's "manufacture of consent" via a
constant torrent of propaganda for the status quo),
reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible
explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid
fantasy of "conspiracy cranks"—for instance, the idea
that successive "preemptive" wars might be launched
against demonized enemies in order to award
reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly
helmed by, say, the vice president of the United
States and other exalted government employees, or that
the strategic purpose of one such war might be the
economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich
in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a
secure pipeline for the exploitation of said
resources. Instead, the altruism and
democracy-spreading goodness of the American power
elite are portrayed as self-evident, taking all other
motives off the media table.

The necessary proof of such a conspiracy, if we choose
to call it that, often turns up 25 or 50 years after
the fact, when the release of classified documents
churns up no public outcry or indictments. Such was
the recent case with the declassified revelation that
the late Connecticut senator Prescott Bush,
grandfather of the current president, along with his
law partner W. Averill Harriman, a former governor of
New York, managed a number of concerns on behalf of
Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen. These included the
Union Banking Corporation, seized under the Trading
With the Enemy Act on October 20, 1942 (Office of
Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248),
Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (Vesting Order
No. 259), and the Holland-American Trading Corporation
(Vesting Order No. 261).

The Union Banking Corporation financed Hitler after
his electoral losses in 1932; the other Bush-managed
concerns have been characterized as "a shipping line
which imported German spies; an energy company that
supplied the Luftwaffe with high-ethyl fuel; and a
steel company that employed Jewish slave labour from
the Auschwitz concentration camp." Fuller details are
documented in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,
by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin; in Kevin
Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and
the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush; as well
as in the colorful, conspiracist history Fleshing Out
Skull & Bones, by Anthony Sutton et al., and further
confirmed by John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the
Justice Department's Nazi War Crimes Unit. Since only
the Nazi partners in the Bush-Harriman interests were
permanently deprived of their frozen stock, Prescott
Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker,
waltzed off with $1.5 million when the Union Banking
Corp. was liquidated in 1951. (This was, in effect,
the foundation of the Bush family fortune: once a
Snopes, always a Snopes.) Briefly picked up by the
Associated Press and buried deep in the pages of
American newspapers, this half-century-late disclosure
led to no media follow-up and left no impression on
the potential electorate for the 2004 U.S.
presidential contest. Contingency theorists would
declare that the activities of one Bush 50-some years
ago have nothing to do with those of subsequent
Bushes. Yet the story confirms a pattern of corrupt
profiteering through abuse of power that runs
continuously through the Bush family dynasty. 

[...] Hofstadter's essay, written in the aftermath of
the McCarthy witch hunts and the Kennedy
assassination, with an eye on the then marginal but
scary realm of right-wing plot-weavers, has been
eerily assimilated by a certain idling pedantry, which
rummages through the historical debris of arcane
conspiracist subjects (the Knights Templar, Jesuit
intrigues, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, alien
abductions, the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg meetings,
the Knights of Malta), often recounting the same
narratives at numbing length, with little fresh
insight. Only a few contemporary writers drastically
depart from Hofstadter's historical itinerary, or his
parochial vision of America as a "pluralist democracy"
whose institutional framework is essentially benign
and immutably fair, rational, and systemically
mistrusted only by paranoid schizophrenics. "One need
only think of the response to President Kennedy's
assassination in Europe to be reminded that Americans
have no monopoly on the gift for paranoid
improvisation," Hofstadter declared, 15 years before
the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on
Assassinations concluded that Kennedy's murder was
indeed the result of a conspiracy.

Hofstadter's prescience is amply evidenced in Michael
Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions
in Contemporary America (2003). Barkun has ingested
Hofstadter's imperious tome whole, and his book does
little more than regurgitate its polemical eurekas.
Barkun informs us that the "essence of conspiracy
beliefs lies in attempts to delineate and explain
evil." Ergo Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most
other organized religions qualify as conspiracy
beliefs, though Barkun neglects to say so. Barkun
identifies three principles "found in virtually every
conspiracy theory," to wit: Nothing happens by
accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is
connected. Clearly Freud, Plato, Leibniz, and Einstein
all suffered from at least one symptom of
conspiracism; fortuitously, without mentioning any of
them, someone has finally exposed these thinkers as
mentally ill. [...] 

...read it all:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0421/indiana.php




	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/