Have
you ever been at a party, taking part in a lively discussion about politics and
world affairs when, suddenly, someone seems to have it all figured out? He or
she proceeds to unravel a huge plot involving the Trilateral Commission, the
Masons and the New World Order. And, by the way, it’s no coincidence that the
government has sealed off an area in New Mexico where aliens…
Conspiracy
theories abound in popular culture, spreading from one “enlightened” person to
another with the speed of an urban legend.
Michael
Barkun, professor of political science at the Maxwell School, Syracuse
University, has studied these ideas for years and, as he points out in his
recent book, A Culture of Conspiracy:
Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California
Press), they are no longer confined to the edges of society.
I
first saw Barkun on C-SPAN, where he and host Brian Lamb fielded call after
call from people who just knew some outlandish notion was the absolute truth no
matter how much evidence could be cited to the contrary. Barkun’s book, which
offers a meticulous, scholarly approach to the subject, shows how conspiracy
theories can have serious implications in our media-driven age.
In
the past, Barkun’s research had dealt with a variety of subcultures. Among his
books are Religion and the Racist Right:
The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement and Disaster and the Millennium. In a recent discussion, we began by
asking Barkun what led to his interest in conspiracy theories. Following is an
edited transcript of that interview.
Barkun: My
longstanding interest has been in millenarian and apocalyptic movements, and
I’ve done a number of things dealing with those. I did a book on the groups in
Central New York in the 1840s. I was not oriented toward conspiracy theories
per se but, in fact, a lot of apocalyptic groups tend to make dramatic
distinctions between good and evil and tend not to talk about any gradations in
between, so I have run across conspiracy theories of one sort or another in the
course of working on millennialism. Then, in the 1990s, I did a book on certain
aspects of the racist right, and obviously that milieu is packed with
conspiracy ideas. It became clear there was more there.
City: It’s a fascinating subject because these ideas seem to
remain in subcultures until, once in a while, they clash with the real world.
As you point out in the book,the
summer before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building he
visited Area 51, a secret government site in Nevada rumored to house captured
UFOs. He was also enamored of the racist novel, “The Turner Diaries.”
Barkun: One of the
things that I found interesting working on this book [A Culture of Conspiracy] is the phenomenon of mainstreaming, the
emergence of these ideas from fairly insular subcultures into something like
mainstream media. I suppose the example that comes to mind is The X-Files. Certainly a lot of ideas
that originated in a sort of fringe subculture have gone into popular culture
via TV and film, and, of course, in a different way, in the case of McVeigh, we
find tied to an act of great violence.
City: I first became conscious of conspiracy theories soon after
the [John F.] Kennedy assassination, but they seem to have really taken off in
recent years. Why do you think people are so susceptible to falling for
conspiracy theories?
Barkun: For a couple
of reasons. I also became aware of them in the context of the Kennedy
assassination conspiracy theories. In that case you’re talking about an event
that was almost inevitably surrounded by ambiguity. If you look at virtually
any event closely enough you find areas of doubt or uncertainty about what
happened. Witnesses may give conflicting statements; records may be incomplete
and so on.
So,
I think the combination of the psychological trauma of the assassination and
the fact that there wasn’t, and I suppose in some ultimate sense probably can’t
be, a definitive account of what happened, the conspiracy theories began to
attract support. And there’s an important third factor: conspiracy theories
often are psychologically reassuring because they provide an explanation for
events or circumstances that may trouble people and therefore they reduce our
sense that the world is a random or meaningless place. They make sense of
things.
City: And the media and popular culture fan the flames. I
recently saw the Broadway show “Assassins” and John Weidman, who wrote the
book, stuck pretty close to the facts when it came to most of the assassins,
but when it came to Lee Harvey Oswald, it seemed like there was a lot of
revisionist history going on. I could tell this was poetic license, but I kept
thinking that my son sitting next to me, who didn’t live thought this event,
might take it as truth just as some people left the movie “JFK” with the
impression that Lyndon Johnson was somehow behind the JFK assassination.
Barkun: A lot of
events become encrusted in myth, but I think in the case of conspiracy theories
like the ones that were generated by the Kennedy assassination, in almost every
instance, they have a life span. In other words, they flourish for a generation
or so and then, when the generation that experienced the event begins to die
out and other things happen in the meantime, those conspiracy theories are
forgotten or at least they become footnotes. They don’t have great longevity
because they speak to a particular event or a particular set of circumstances.
City: So things kind of shake out on the side of somewhat true
history?
Barkun: Historians
are better placed to answer the question of whether an accepted or official
version of events begins to take shape. After all, there were conspiracy
theories about Pearl Harbor and now, except in really a fringe literature,
these theories have not become part of, let’s say, the accepted version of what
happened.
City: Why does the term “New World Order” provoke such strong
reactions in people?
Barkun: Actually, the
phrase appears to have predated George H.W. Bush’s use of it, which I think was
in 1991. This is one of these strange kinds of historical coincidences in which
I’m certain that his speechwriters had no conception of the baggage that the
phrase carried. They were simply looking for something catchy that would
describe a post-Cold War system of collective security.
Obviously
a conspiracist would say, “Well, of course that’s not true, he knew exactly
what it connoted and used it intentionally,” but my feeling is it was totally
coincidental on his part.
It
seems to go back to at least the 1970s in a kind of conspiracist sense, and in
that earlier sense it is taken to represent, or be a shorthand phrase for, some
coming global dictatorship. There’s a certain amount of disagreement among
conspiracy theories on who would be running it, but essentially that’s the
conspiracist meaning of it, which is not what the president had in mind when he
used it.
City: So it’s one of those unfortunate choices of words, like
when the current President Bush said we would have a crusade.
Barkun: Exactly, and
when the elder Bush used it conspiracy theorists pounced on it and said, “Aha,
see here’s someone who was a member of Skull and Bones and was director of
Central Intelligence and he’s using the term, which shows how emboldened the
conspiracy has become.” They took it as something validating the beliefs they
already held.
City: When the millennium passed without incident, you’d think
people would be a bit less gullible, but I suppose September 11 has given
conspiracists a boost.
Barkun: But I think
too, in retrospect, a lot of anxieties that were evident around late 1999 about
the millennium were misplaced. For example, law enforcement agencies were very
much concerned that there would be acts of violence, which obviously didn’t
occur and I think the reason they didn’t occur is that not all millennialists
are date driven.
In
other words, the significance of the date, January 1, 2000, was a lot less than
many people had assumed. There were millennial expectations and conspiracy
theories long before that point in the calendar and there will be afterward. I
think that this kind of thinking is more driven by perceptions of events than
dates, and in that way 9/11 was a greater generator of conspiracy theories.
City: One new aspect of all of this that you discuss in your book
is a fusion of some of the political and religious conspiracies with UFO
sightings.
Barkun: One of the
things that intrigued me when I started working on the book was the strange
mixture of ideas that I was finding. I had, for example, assumed that certain
kinds of conspiracy theories would only be held by people with particular
political positions or ideologies.
I
was therefore initially unprepared for cases in which conspiracy theories that
might have originated in a particular political position got fused with things
that seemed on surface unrelated, whether they were UFO sightings or legends
about Atlantis or other motifs that didn’t have any political content at all.
It seems to me this kind of seemingly indiscriminate mixing of ideas and
symbols combining often the political, the religious, the occult, crank
science, and all sorts of other elements is relatively novel.
City: Hollywood seems to have an obsession with movies about wild
conspiracy theories that turn out to be true. A short list would include
“Rosemary’s Baby,” “Men In Black,” and “Enemy of the State.”
Barkun: And, of
course, the movie called Conspiracy
Theory. The question that’s out there is: do films like this have the
result of making conspiracy theories either more credible or more broadly
based, or does their inclusion in things like entertainment films trivialize
them such that people in an audience say this is just a story and it’s not to
be taken seriously; it’s only a movie.
City: I thought “Men In Black” provided a particularly strong
illustration of how conspiracy theories are reinforced because the movie had
such strong inner logic — the aliens are here but anyone who finds out has
their memory erased — that it could logically be true. The idea is that you
could have witnessed an alien abduction, but you’d never know it.
Barkun: That really
is the case of the closed character of many conspiracy theories. They become
impossible to disprove.
City: “Conspiracy Theory” is a conspiracy theorist’s dream
because it basically says, we’re not crazy.
Barkun: That’s right,
because for much of the film the audience is led to believe that [Mel Gibson’s
character] is delusional. He’s certainly socially marginal and the kindest
thing one could say about him is that he’s highly eccentric. And with that shot
where the camera pulls away and there are black helicopters, everything he says
is now validated.
Beyond
the point the film appears to be making — that he was right all along —
there are two other things. One is in the scene in which he takes Julia Roberts
into his apartment, this warren of rooms filled with file cabinets. He’s
constantly clipping articles, making charts, putting marks on maps, and so on.
What you’ve got there is kind of a dramatization of broad-scale conspiracy
theories, namely that everything is interconnected, nothing is as it seems, and
that nothing happens by accident. His life in the apartment is one of constant
attempts at correlation, at finding the hidden relationships among seemingly
disparate events.
That
suggests the second point that the filmmakers appear to be making, and that is
portraying the conspiracy theorist as someone who possesses special knowledge,
who knows things other people don’t know, that, in principle, they could know,
but they’ve been deceived or brainwashed so they don’t see it. And it’s this
message — that we have a deeper level of perception — that in a way gives
to the conspiricist a sense of being part of an elite.
City: The theme that you mentioned — that everything happens
for a reason — is also the theme of another movie starring Mel Gibson,
“Signs.”
Barkun: Even in
conspiracy theories in which the conspiracy is represented as irremediably
evil, which of course occurs a lot of the time, that still is oddly reassuring
for believers in the theories, because even though the bad things can then be
attributed to bad people or bad organizations, there is a sense that they
happen for a reason, that the world is not random or arbitrary.
City: To believe in some of these conspiracies theories, it seems
you’d have to have a willful suspension of disbelief like we have when we go to
the movies. But sometimes it seems more insidious. For instance, “The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion” (purportedly revealing how Jews conspire to subvert
governments and institutions) has resurfaced and been exposed as a forgery
several times in its history. But as you point out, it recently formed the
basis of a 41-part television series that played throughout the Arab world.
Barkun: I think next
year marks the centennial of its first publication. It’s been extraordinarily
long-lived despite the fact that within a year or two of the English language
publication, it was exposed as a forgery.
City: So the people publishing it know it’s a complete fraud but
they’re using it as propaganda?
Barkun: What you’re
saying is that it can be used opportunistically by people who know that there
is no factual basis, and I’m sure that occurs. The unfortunate thing is that
large numbers of people who have been associated with its dissemination do
believe it, and they will often have elaborate kinds of rationalizations and
explanations for the forgery story.
Again,
this is one of these cases of conspiracy theories as closed systems. If you
believe the conspiracy is almost all-powerful you can invest it with the power
to mislead and therefore try to explain away evidence of its own existence. One
of the now relatively common variations on the Protocols that you find in contemporary conspiracy literature is
that this isn’t really a document about Jews; it’s a document about the
Illuminati [a Masonic organization supposedly behind the French Revolution and
other upheavals around the world] and that the mention of Jews in it was a kind
of a subterfuge to hide its true origin. There are a lot of people who simply
do not want to let go of it.
City: What about the political use of conspiracies? After
September 11 I remember reading many interviews with people in the Middle East.
On one hand they were praising Osama Bin Laden; at the same time they were
saying Bush or the Israeli Mossad was behind the attack.
Barkun: This gets
into a somewhat different area and that is the ability for people to hold
sometimes contradictory views simultaneously without experiencing a lot of
psychic discomfort.
City: There’s a conspiracy theory I’m sure you’ve heard that
white people introduced AIDS into Africa to kill off the black population.
There was a recent news story that polio is spreading in Nigeria and people are
refusing to have their children vaccinated because they suspect a sterilization
plot. Both of these ideas seem far-fetched, but, to play devil’s advocate, if
someone had described to you in detail the Tuskegee experiments involving black
men and syphilis while this was going on, would you have believed it?
Barkun: No, probably
not. There has been a brilliant examination of conspiracy beliefs in the
African-American community by an African-American folklorist, Patricia Turner,
in a book called I Heard It Through the
Grapevine. My recollection is she deals with that [AIDS] story among
others. She analyses it as a form of urban legend. I talk about urban legends
in the book and I think a lot of these ideas are really of that sort. The
classic urban legend is the story that passes by word of mouth from one person
to another. Now the internet is out there and the ideas can consequently spread
more rapidly and far more rapidly than any contrary information can overtake
them.
City: And with an aura of authenticity.
Barkun: Yes, because
everything looks the same. There’s no gatekeeper and one website looks pretty
much like another.
City: Sometimes these fringe ideas actually enter the mainstream.
I met a man recently who seemed perfectly rational until he started assuring me
that George Bush was behind the September 11 attacks so that he could impose
martial law, and the Patriot Act was the first step.
Barkun: There’s
nothing to suggest that conspiracy believers are not normal.
City: Michael Moore’s latest film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” doesn’t go
that far, but it does reinforce some ideas about the motivation for the war in
Afghanistan involving oil pipelines, etc. Apparently there are a lot of shaky
facts and this is called a documentary.
Barkun: I found it a
very strong film. On the other hand the first third or half of the film implied
conspiracies of one sort or another for which I think the evidence is tenuous,
particularly some of the suggestions that economic motives trumped all
political considerations. This was much less in evidence in the sections about
the Iraq War but certainly in some of the things about Afghanistan, for
example.
The
matter of the relationship with the Saud family, which I gather is very close
to the treatment by Craig Unger in his book, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret
Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties, which I have not read, is one of the situations
where there are inferences based on circumstantial evidence and the inferences
may well turn out to be true, we just don’t have enough direct evidence one way
or the other.
City: Do you see a trend here?
Barkun: One of the
things that surprised and disturbed me in looking at the conspiracy literature
in general was that a lot of the people who contribute to it seem to have
erased the boundary between fact and fiction and, in fact, as I say in the
book, they’ve often reversed it so that you get claims made that what is
supposed to be fact is really fiction and what’s presented as fiction is really
thinly disguised fact.
I
have the sense that there is increasing circulation of ideas and assertions
with very questionable factual backing. And the reason for this is there are
fewer and fewer gatekeepers. After all, there are more and more media, they are
more and more dependent on each other or at least interlinked in complex ways.
So what may start as a rumor or an urban legend very quickly ends up in other
places, whether mass circulation newspapers or television news channels or
Hollywood films.
When
there were simply three major television networks and two or three major news
magazines and not very much else, alternative conceptualizations of the world
and accounts of the news were much harder to find. On the plus side you could
say that the present situation is pluralistic in the sense that there are
alternative interpretations available and there are stories that some media
might not choose to cover that can be found now in other places. But the
downside is it also allows the circulation of accounts that may not be
credible.
City: After the election in the fall, no matter who wins, we will
have a president who is a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones society. Should we
be concerned?
Barkun: [Laughs]
Well, I’m not, but certainly it will reinforce the view that’s prevalent in
many conspiracist circles, namely that party difference is irrelevant. They’ll
say it shows that it doesn’t make any difference if it’s a Republican or a
Democrat because it’s going to be the same people — them.
City: What is the danger in believing some of these conspiracy
theories?
Barkun: I think they
can be completely harmless. The question is: to what extent might they be
turned into action? For the vast majority of conspiracists, that does not seem
to be an issue. They don’t appear to act on their beliefs. But if you, in fact,
believe that the world is about to be taken over by an evil power, that may
well lead you to want to do something about it. That can be a problem, and
certainly people in paramilitary organizations are often believers in
conspiracy theories. So I think there is some potential danger.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2004.
