6
From Evil Others to Evil Elites
A Dominant Pattern in Conspiracy
Theories Today
Véronique Campion-Vincent
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
The notion of a conspiracy implies a group that threatens the very existence
of the society in which it is infiltrated. Americans have a long history
of conspiracy scares as described in The Paranoid Style of American Politics,
a classic 1960s work of scholarship (Hofstadter 1966). Conspiracy scares
and the fears of un-American subversion were central to the definition of
who or what was properly American. Attacks in the nineteenth century
against Mormons, Catholics, and Jews corresponded to fears of “the gradual
dilution of WASP identity.” (Knight 2002:4) Successive fears, of slave
revolts and of “the specter of the black rapist, and the formation of the Ku
Klux Klan” (ibid.) legitimated “an emerging sense of national consciousness
based on the ideology of white supremacy” (ibid.). These conspiracy
narratives served to enhance communal identity against enemies—foreigners
or deviants who no longer belonged in the national community
because of their evil thoughts or acts.
Conspiracy theories today can also be considered a folk social science or
folk history, as a “subculture of intellectual dissent” (Eliason 1996), aiming,
as do academic treatises, to provide meaningful and accurate explanations
of the world’s condition. Conspiracy thinking is part of an everyday struggle
to make sense of a rapidly changing world. This interpretative approach
is well defined by the expression “contemporary mythologies” suggested
by Ellis, who defines them as “scenarios made up of many beliefs and
narratives which are accepted on faith and used then to link and give meaning
to stressful events” (2000:5). These theories provide “a conspiratorial
sense of being the victim of invisible and indefatigable forces [that] is an
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everyday attitude in many countries” (Knight 2002:7) increasingly affected
by globalization.
Conspiracies are deeply rooted in the social fabric, tied to power and
secrecy. “The social contract is the deep-seated desire to be sure once
and for all, to know what we are doing together and where we are going;
human society is the impossibility to know and to be sure” (Poulat 1992:6).1
After the French Revolution, along with the expansion of democratic
societies, conspiracy theories changed. The aim of political conspiracies
was to destroy the social order and the nation, which had replaced the
monarch as the holder of sovereignty. Stable truth and certainty was gone.
The model of a scientifically conceived democratic society had not, however,
kept its promises and “existing society is adrift, without transcendence,
without universal positive values. With the Revolution, the era of
uncertainty and indecision began” (ibid.:9).
Contemporary conspiracies remain possible and plausible, but are
never proven. In their modern acceptance, conspiracies are characterized
by their utopian aim as they attempt to create (or oppose) “a new society
for a new man.” (ibid.:9) In a society that includes groups with competing
and exclusive aims, it is impossible to know fully one’s adversaries, so “we
are in the realm of the irrefutable and of the inexhaustible. The Great Conspiracy
. . . can be secularized without losing its Manicheism” (ibid.:9).2
In the last decades “a popular paranoia” has emerged: a paranoia that
questions—half-seriously, half-cynically—the version of events told by
science or government authorities. “Conspiracy theory has become the lingua
franca of a counter cultural opposition . . . from the committed to the
casual” (Knight 2002:6–7).
THE INTERNAL LOGIC OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES
In some ways, the surge of conspiracy theories seems paradoxical as it
coincides with an increased complexity of society. When power was concentrated
in a few hands, plots could be effective. Such is not the case
today when “power flows, changes hands, and affects opinion, which no
one controls and no one represents entirely” (Graumann 1987a:vii). Yet,
the paradox is only apparent, as these conspiracy theories help to cope
with the uncertainty accompanying this complexity. Looking for an explanation
for a nonroutine important public event, people adopt conspiracy
stories that present a set of cognitive attributes:
1. A specific agent(s) is named, with a clear motivation.
2. The agent is evil, the outcome is destructive, which is easy to understand—evil
results in evil—and not a complicated and probably
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more accurate explanation of complex events with unintended consequences
of multiple intersecting agents and actions.
3. The evil agent has the capacity for some big event—controls important
resources, acts united or with powerful allies, does it in secret,
and thus nobody stops it.
4. Conspiracies sometimes do happen, and everyone agrees that they
have at times.
5. Some learned, respected, prominent people, not just ignorant marginal
people, promote the conspiracy theory—they may be selfserving,
but they cannot be ignored (Anthony Oberschall, personal
communication, October 19, 2003).
Our uncertain societies seem to be drifting from one crisis to the next,
and a society of information—which will logically focus on its own dysfunctional
aspects—enhances this perception of a perpetual crisis. Revolutionary
leaders and international terrorists do exist and they use
conspiratorial intelligence and logistics to conceal their actions; but the
existence of conspirators with specific agendas does not fully explain
the adoption of all-encompassing conspiracy theories.
Social psychologists and historians (Graumann and Moscovici 1987)
have emphasized the psychological benefits of conspiracy theories in
reducing uncertainty. Conspiracy theories describe intentional agency as
the root of social movement and change. In a state of crisis in which the
established value system of a group or society seems at stake, it is easier to
cope with anxiety if it becomes fear of someone who can be held responsible.
This enemy is camouflaged and masqueraded into a normal and inoffensive
character. Those who have discovered the conspiracy must fight
“both the malice of the conspirator and the ignorance and disbelief of their
own group” (Graumann 1987b:247–48). Embracing conspiracy theories
often implies a commitment to a group of counter-conspirators: “The
image of a devilish plot has as [its] opposite that of the holy conspiracy”
(Girardet 1986:16). The enemy is organized, not an individual, but a dark
power.
French philosopher Alain de Benoist insisted on the seductiveness of
simplification in an increasingly complex universe. Conspiracy theories
reduce uncertainty in proclaiming a mechanical and linear causality, dismissing
all reference to randomness or chance. Adopting conspiracy theories
seems to furnish a universal password: why try to explain the
meaning of events through complex historical, psychological, or sociological
inquiries, when a direct cause can be supposed. “If things are going
badly, those responsible are not the social actors but ‘occult forces’” (de
Benoist 1992:17). It is within us—in the universal tendencies of the human
mind—that the seductiveness of conspiracy theories resides. Such theories
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“seem unaffected by the passage of time, cultural diversity, or the nature
of the ideology upon which they are based” and cannot be opposed by
proofs and argument. “Belief in conspiracy is not based on fact or reason,
and is thus unaffected by them” (Graumann 1987a:ix).
Conspiracy theories were present throughout the nineteenth century in
the interpretations of revolutionary movements by threatened political
leaders and middle classes. Mass behavior was imagined as produced by
evil leaders, who “became the ‘negative’ antagonists of the ‘positive’ and
socially established respected leadership” (Graumann 1987b:246–47) and
were conceived as conspirators, acting against the whole of society.
Conspiracy theories are strongly linked to the concept of nation. Often
they targeted foreigners and other social deviants, demanding that they be
expelled from the national “body.” Conspiracy theories were effective in
mobilizing the masses, turning them against outsiders. However, this tendency
was only a first stage, and today’s conspiracy theories are likely to
target groups with political or social status rather than ethnic or religious
groups, who are protected by the prevailing rules of politically correct
speech. Social psychologist Serge Moscovici’s approach, which focused on
hostility toward minorities, especially alien minorities, is today no longer
totally pertinent. Yet, Moscovici’s text remains relevant in its vivid description
of the anguish and resentment, still widespread, that push people
to adopt conspiracy theories.
In his study, “The Conspiracy Mentality,” Moscovici stressed that most
accusations of conspiracy implied an alien minority and that “it is our century
which has established conspiracy as a system of thought and a
method of action.” He added that the “compulsion to explain things by
means of conspiracy” was a symptom, not of a delirium of persecution,
but of “a delirium of accusation and inquisition. Through it the group or
individual [the accusers] can prove their innocence and infallibility.”
Remarking that in such accusations “the possibility of antagonism within
the group is rejected by displacing the conflict from the inside to the outside”
(Moscovici 1987:153), he then discussed the roots of such hostile attitudes.
Moscovici suggests,
It is not necessary that a minority conspire. . . . The very existence of a minority
already constitutes a conspiracy. It is agreed that to maintain and unite its
members, society demands their consent to a certain number of beliefs and
practices. Society imposes conformity. . . . This consent is based on the consensus
of the majority. (ibid.:158)
Furthermore the consensus is reinforced by a prohibition on questioning
core beliefs and practices from which the minority dissents. Thus,
“Minorities represent a challenge, a walking, talking criticism of what
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must be beyond all criticism” (ibid.:160) since they transgress our taboos
through their differences. The minority allows itself to do things that the
majority forbids to themselves and this ability appears to be a privilege.
Transgression breeds resentment. Contempt for weak minorities is combined
with a feeling of inferiority and powerlessness. Viewed from the
outside, minorities are weak and at the mercy of the native dominant
group; viewed from the inside they are dominant and perverse. For
Moscovici, the hostility caused by feelings of inferiority and powerlessness
is thus focused on convenient scapegoat minorities, instead of being
directed at the dominant group in society.3 However in the twenty-first
century these minorities are no longer the only scapegoats, as hostility
toward the dominant group is more frequently openly expressed.
Studying the early formation of “a persecuting society” in Western
Europe, when the rise of centralized power was linked to the creation of
feared deviants in the minds of the power-holders (such as kings, and particularly
their auxiliaries and advisers, the literate clerks), historian R. I.
Moore has shown how in pre-1250 Europe a single deviant category,
accused of a total conspiracy, was created from heretics, lepers, and Jews.
He writes:
The images and nightmares are not always consistent, but they always feed
the same fear. For all imaginative purposes heretics, Jews and lepers were
interchangeable. They had the same qualities, from the same source, and
they presented the same threat: through them the Devil was at work to subvert
the Christian order and bring the world to chaos. (1987:64–65)
This categorization continued for centuries: witches replaced heretics,
and later disappeared themselves, to be replaced by revolutionaries and
subversives. Today drug addicts, serial killers, child abductors, and terrorists
are the main characters in the cast of evil deviants said to operate
among normal people.
Conspiracy theories try to explain a complex and seemingly random
environment through the adoption of a simple model of causality, but they
simultaneously reinforce the in-group’s cohesion through the designation
of enemies.
Conspiracy Theories as Play
Whole sectors of literature and media now draw their substance from
the prosperous industry of conspiracy theories. Personal involvement in
conspiracy theories often takes the form of play, mixing humor and distance
with paranoia and belief. It seems as if, renouncing the unattainable
goal of a reduction of uncertainty and settling for a playful attitude that
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will increase it, these people find satisfaction in emotional consumption,
even if the emotions consumed are negative.
Those who share this attitude appreciate, for example, book titles such
as Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission,
the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids (Marrs 2000),4 the complex synopsis
of The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files (Fenster 1999:117–20), or yet
the Google Conspiracy list, from
A Nation in Denial—http://www.angelfire.com/nj/jhgraf/anid.html. A
personal account about American government conspiracies by a whistle-
blower.
through
Illuminati Conspiracy Archive—http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/
News and analysis. Covers UFO, UN, and New World Order conspiracies.5
to
Weirdload—http://www.weirdload.com Essays from the edge, covering
secrets and conspiracies from those involving the Roman Catholic Church to
UFOs, space and metaphysics.
This hip attitude was initiated by the writings of Robert Anton Wilson,
who in 1975 authored the parodic trilogy Illuminatus! Generally stocked in
bookstores as science fiction and fantasy, this work has gained a cult status
among many readers and has a large audience among computer enthusiasts.
It is not only a book, but also was spun off into role-playing and
board games. Wilson has added fictional “prequels,” essays, and aphorisms.
Readers and players of the Illuminati games:
assume an ironic and almost mischievous distance from the “paranoid” situation
of the characters and role with which they identify. In this conception
and practice of conspiracy theory there is a delight in that which is constituted
as the marginal, the sick, the apocalyptic. (Fenster 1999:216)
A NEW TREND IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Rumors accusing elites of sinister plots are not new, but they are more
prominent, and especially more pervasive and complex, today. French historians
have noted the persistence and ubiquity of rumors accusing elites.
François Ploux, author of a study of political rumors in France during the
nineteenth century (Ploux 2003a) mentions several:
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• The famine plot, reported from the eighteenth century, accused the
authorities of creating a scarcity of grain. Such periods of scarcity
were recurrent, and the famine plot appeared in each of them.
• The aristocratic plot, sometimes combined with the famine plot,
asserted that aristocrats secretly planned large-scale murder of the
simple people, or intended to reestablish the privileges suppressed
by the French Revolution. It was equally recurrent (Ploux 2003b).
• Fear of the establishment of a “life-tax” that would entail fiscal inquisition
into the most personal areas of private life. It was said that the
treasury agents would tax linen, and count every piece of cloth in
homes. Yves Bercé, a specialist of popular revolts in prerevolutionary
France, counted more than twenty occurrences of this belief in the
region of Aquitaine during the seventeenth century (Bercé 2003). This
rumor reappeared in 1841, on the occasion of a census aiming at a
better assessment of a tax on doors and windows (Caron 2003).
• Epidemics of plague in prerevolutionary France and of cholera in the
nineteenth century regularly generated accusations of “voluntary
spreaders of the illness, poisoners of fountains, greasers of door
knobs, perverse doctors, nurses or grave diggers, killing vaccines”
(Bercé 2003).
These hostile rumors generally caused riots. Some more positive
rumors also circulated, revealing benevolent monarchism, opposing the
king (essentially kind to the people) to his personnel (marked by greed
and ferocity) and stating, for example, that a new tax would soon be
removed because of the king’s intervention.
More recently, conspiracy narratives have become all-encompassing,
suggesting “the far more scary anxiety that we can no longer tell the difference
between Them and Us” (Knight 2002:5). A pervading sense of
being surrounded by uncontrollable forces is very widespread and the fear
of being the object of “a complex conspiracy with vague but sinister intentions
has become deeply ingrained in the popular imagination” (ibid.:7).
American elites are said to participate in a conspiratorial plan for global
domination uniting the Masons, the “Manhattan money powers,”6 the
Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Davos World Economic
Forum, and the United Nations to create a “New World Order[VCV1]”
that will rob the American people of freedom that had been granted them
by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Conspiracy fiction and denunciations
of conspiracies tell stories of people whose actions are determined
through mind control or implanted technology:
Alex Constantine claims that Sirhan Sirhan, like Lee Harvey Oswald, was a
“hypno-patsy”;7 Timothy McVeigh apparently had an implant placed in his
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buttocks by the army; and Cathy O’Brien tells of her “experience” as a CIAcontrolled
prostitute and drug courier in Trance: Formation of America.8 In
UFO stories the picture is the same. (Mason 2002:51)
These stories explain “a feeling of disempowerment within contemporary
society;” they also allow the narrators not to feel responsible for their
actions and “hypothesize the entry of the conspiracy into the subject”
(ibid.:51).
The evolution of conspiracy narratives to denounce the powerful within
society rather than to stigmatize outsiders, such as foreign powers or cultures,
is clear when we consider recent examples such as the Kennedy saga,
Marilyn Monroe’s sad fate, the conspiracies linking the government to evil
extraterrestrials, or Jack the Ripper’s identity.9
Today’s conspiracies also target organized crime, depicted as a confederation
of Mafia families whose power extends far beyond the control of
crime into the control of government and legitimate business (Best 1999).
In describing the Mafia, the accent is less on its specific ethnic origins, than
on its role as the real puppet-master. Already in 1960 Robert F. Kennedy
authored The Enemy Within, reporting the activities of the Select Committee
on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. Today, the
conspiracy theorists’ interpretations of the Iran-Contra scandal10 assert
control of government by the mafia: “Organized crime (actually a whitecollar
crime syndicate comprised of government bureaucrats, military officers,
intelligence officers and con men) has in essence taken over the U.S.
Government.”11
Lyndon LaRouche, who was being interviewed on the radio on September
11, 2001, during the World Trade Center attacks, exclaimed right
away, “This is a domestic covert operation.”12 By September 15, LaRouche
was asserting that the enemy (evil elements of the “military-security establishment”)
was within:
The United States has been surprised by a mass-murderous attack from
rogue forces deployed from within the U.S.A. itself. Since no foreign power
has the ability to do to us what was done this past Tuesday, some rogue element
operating within our military-security establishment is the only possible
principal author of what has just occurred. . . . Anything we do to shift
the blame to foreign forces . . . simply makes our nation more vulnerable to
the rogue from within who has just done this, and is lurking ready to do
more. (“Shoot the Neighbor’s Cat,” Lyndon LaRouche press release September
15, 2001)13
Thierry Meyssan’s essay, published in March 2002, picked up the
LaRouche thesis and asserted that “the United States war machine”14 was
the real cause of the 9/11 attacks. It met with a great and surprising suc-
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cess.15 In June 2002, Dasquié and Guisnel’s essay presented and explained
Meyssan’s sources, but their perceptive analysis met less success.16
OUR EVIL ELITES
The idea of the evil elite has links with three different but complementary
universes of meaning: the call to action of social protest movements, the
scary and funny realm of popular fiction, and the opinions of “the common
people” on the subject of their reactions to disasters.
Evil Elites in Social Protest Movements
In the literature linked to social protest movements denouncing globalization,
the national or cultural frontiers seem to have disappeared, as a
brotherhood of dissenters acts against elites—dominated by Western elites
but with agents in all nations. These elites are consistently depicted as
“enemies of the people,” linked through malevolent conspiracies, and
aiming to throw the powerless into the clutches of “the free market.” The
2002 article by sociologist Denis Duclos in the antiglobalization monthly
Le Monde Diplomatique under the provocative title “Capitalism of Lies.
Fraudulent Bosses and Mad Killers”17 is a clever example of these claims.
Asserting that the two groups of bosses and killers are close, as mad
killers18 amplify into a caricature of “the frenetic appetite for riches” of the
bosses, who are “the self-proclaimed world’s masters,” Duclos presents
“the frantic partisans of globalization” as a sort of “world-sect.” The financial
class, whose power is essentially to rob others
asserts its managerial power and challenges democracy. Playing on the
immense growth of capital for fifteen years, it has already appropriated huge
sections of the world-economy, and controls the rest through its capacity for
destructive raids.
Financial power is “searching for ecstasy within ruin” and the “liberal
daydream” is “delirious and suicidal.” The dissenters must master the
courage of assaulting
these “globalized” offices where—from London to Hong Kong through New
York—the plans are laid to systematically ruin the collective social and cultural
structures that help the people of the world or sustain their alliances on
bases of respect. (Duclos 2002)
The striking similarity of extremists from right and left has frequently
been pointed out and is common knowledge. One finds the same target of
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“financial capitalism” in the discourse of extreme leftist “alterglobalization”
militant Duclos and of LaRouche’s French disciple and friend
Jacques Cheminade:
We have established the link between what is happening now in the United
States and the international monetary and financial crisis. In a situation of
system collapse, the “financial cancer” spreads its political, military and
ideological metastases.19
In the last thirty years there has been a partial legitimization of conspiratorial
thought. One generally finds in this literature a strong criticism
of Hofstadter’s approach, which interpreted social phenomena through a
theory of individual pathology, posited the dominant society as normal,
and labeled those left outside by choice or force as pathological. It is
claimed that this approach served “as an excuse for neglecting, equating
and even repressing political protest of all sorts” (Fenster 1999:21).
The negation of randomness and chance that marks conspiracy theories
seems almost justified when the “contingency theory” that stresses the
role of chance and accident in many events is rejected as a social fantasy
negating the antagonisms that really split society: “Contingency theory
maintains the existing capitalist system by attributing any deviations from
the social equilibrium to chance and accident rather than immanent social
antagonisms or contradictions” (Willman 2002:28).
While these critics may seem extreme, it is certain that the sociopolitical
climate has dramatically changed since Hofstadter’s days. In the 1970s,
following the Watergate scandal and investigation, the “pervasive atmosphere
of mistrust and suspicion nurtured by startling realities” (Rosnow
and Fine 1976:58) made credible American conspiracy rumors whose plausibility
seems to have grown steadily since then.
Evil Elites in Popular Fiction
In popular fiction the theme of evil elites’ conspiracies is especially
widespread. Popular fiction has depicted mad scientists for over a hundred
years, and includes a thriving subgenre of the “medical thriller”
based on the portrayal of evil elites of doctors routinely killing patients
to maximize their gains. These popular fictions depict individuals, but
their characters are increasingly presented as servants or masters of vast
conspiracies.
In the United States, the 1960s and early 1970s were marked by assassinations,
of John and Robert Kennedy and of black political leaders,20 but
also by the revelations of covert and overt intervention against subversives
at home and throughout the world and of cases of corporate malfea-
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sance denounced by environmental movements. A widespread suspicion
of government and corporations developed, and was translated in a flourishing
of political conspiracy films such as Executive Action (1973), The Conversation
(1974), The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1974),
The Domino Principle (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), and Twilight’s
Last Gleaming (1979). These films suggested that the sources of evil were
the very U.S. institutions that had once been viewed positively (Kellner
2002:206–7). This emphasis continued into the late 1990s with such films
as Conspiracy Theory (1997), Mercury Rising (1998), and Enemy of the State
(1998).21
Conspiracies of the powerful and of evil extraterrestrials link the
episodes of the American television series “The X-Files,” whose “appeal
was confluence of two immensely attractive and primordial ideas: paranormalism
and conspiratorial thinking” (Goode 2002:48).
Mixing an irrational demonizing populist paranoia that “often projects
evil onto occult and supernatural figures” and a critical paranoia “that is
rationally suspicious of hegemonic institutions like the state, the military
or corporations” (Kellner 2002:205), “The X-Files” skillfully blended “science
fiction, horror, occult and fantasy genres” (ibid.:207) with conspiracy
genres. While “The X-Files” drew on 1950s science fiction movies and
1970s political conspiracy films, no previous television series had presented
such a negative appraisal of the U.S. government. Contrasted with
the standard television series that “instilled an attitude of trust toward the
existing social system and fears of those threatening forces outside it”
(ibid.:218), “The X-Files” inspired distrust. It participated in a hip attitude
in which playing with conspiracy theories adds to uncertainty rather than
dispelling it.22 Its episodes oscillated between depictions of classic occult
figures such as vampires, werewolves, and mutant monsters, often shown
as the consequences of human intervention, such as reckless experiments,
disturbance of nature’s equilibrium, evil policies—governmental or corporate—and
depictions of extraterrestrials and government conspiracies.
“The X-Files” alternately privileged the occult and supernatural explanations
and debunked them as “either the machinations of human agencies
and individuals or a natural phenomenon that just appears supernatural”
(Kellner 2002:223).
FOLK REACTIONS TO DISASTERS
Extremist views are ancient. What is new is the echo that stories of conspiracy
theorists produce in the general public today. Denunciations of evil
elites and of their conspiracies are numerous at the level of folklore. For
example, in food contamination stories, the villains are often the greedy
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corporations, which behave as enemies of the people in their unchecked
quest for profit. They have replaced the foreigners, lepers, and Jews who
used to be accused of poisoning water in the great epidemics of yesterday.
A Food Contamination Case: The La Colza Disaster (Spain, 1981). The first
example of assertions of elite groups’ guilt involves rumors in the case of
the colza oil poisoning known as the la colza disaster, which occurred in
Spain in 1981. The case was very serious as one thousand died and twentyfive
thousand were injured; in a trial that lasted two years (1987–1989),
several oil traders were found guilty of having knowingly sold, for human
consumption, cheap imported colza oil that had been adulterated to protect
domestic olive oil and restrict colza oil use to industrial applications.
An alternative version of these deaths and injuries suggested that the poisonings
were caused by tomatoes grown in the Almeria region that had
been accidentally poisoned with organophosphorous chemicals carelessly
used by the large agricultural firms then developing in that region. The
Spanish government, eager to protect agriculture and tourism, deliberately
chose as culprits the weak oil traders, who sold mostly on street markets,
rather than the powerful agriculture and chemical industry. This
alternative version is dominant on the Web. In a Google search of the terms
sindrome toxico and colza conducted on March 6, 2002, 267 Web pages from
Spain were found, of which roughly two-thirds expressed the belief that
the damage was caused by pesticides.
A network of ecological activists persuaded of the evils of pesticides
publicizes the alternative version. In a long article published by the
Guardian, investigative journalist Bob Woffinden (2001) passionately presented
this alternative version, which allowed him to generalize the accusation
of conspiracy to other alleged cases in which governments and science
had been concealing epidemics of mystery illnesses [one in New Mexico in
1989, and one—also according to protester Mark Purdey23—striking British
farmers (Woffinden 1994)] by blaming other substances (L-Tryptophan for
New Mexico) to cover the real culprits, the infamous OP pesticides:
There have now been several issues about which there is a general perception
that the truth is not being allowed to surface. These include, most obviously,
the effects of OPs on farmers in Britain. . . . All official inquiries
somehow fail to establish a link between pesticide exposure and the illness.
The WHO [World Health Organization], to its shame, continues to refer to
the Spanish epidemic as the “toxic oil syndrome”. . . . The world-wide
deception continues, automatically recycled by a compliant media. . . . Suppressing
the truth must be remarkably straightforward. All it takes is a series
of epidemiological reports, accredited by scientists of a similar persuasion
and then published in reputable scientific journals. There are, as Disraeli
might have said, lies, damned lies and peer-reviewed scientific papers.
(Woffinden 2001)24
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Such “crusaders” distort the facts. There is official preoccupation with
the safety of OP pesticides25 and the norms of evaluation are reviewed in
the light of cases that are not suppressed but evaluated and analyzed.
However, the technical language of the numerous Environmental Protection
Agency documents available on the Web concerning OP pesticides is
less accessible or exciting than the discovery of a universal and all-encompassing
conspiracy.
A Natural Disaster: The “Somme Flood Rumor” (France, 2001).26 The next
example is the “Somme Flood Rumor” as it was named by the media. The
rumor circulated among the inhabitants of Picardy, victims of an exceptional
flood of the river Somme that lasted from February 5 to May 24,
2001.27 This story explained the exceptional floods as the result of a government
(or elite) conspiracy:
What has been called the rumor of Abbeville28 tells of the sacrifice of a district
to the ambition and greed of the political class as, in its first narrative
form “someone” would have deviated the water of the Seine toward the
river Somme so as to protect the capital which was going to welcome
the Selection Committee of the Olympic Games.29 (Vialle 2002:28)
Other variants state that Abbeville was flooded to compel the inhabitants
to leave their houses so as to build a freeway without indemnity, or
that the flood had been organized “to demolish our houses and to set in
place bungalows and cottages for these Paris gentlemen and their acquaintances.”30
More affluent disaster victims judged that the flood was the
result of an “erroneous maneuver on the part of the technicians of
the waterways” (ibid.:29).
This story’s appearance was not spontaneous. Specific accusers, of
which the most influential, pensioner André Boulogne, had created a
Defense Association after the previous 1994 flood, promoted it. On April
11, Boulogne organized a demonstration under the banner “The Somme
River, Gutter of Paris.” The accusation was reinforced by the inquiry of
another pensioner, Christian Leleu, who filmed the water flowing into the
Somme from the Northern Canal.
The story was enthusiastically picked up by the mayor of Abbeville,
Joel Hart. He interrupted a meeting between local authorities, technicians,
and the prefect with the remark, “We came here to get money and to know:
when will you decide to close the taps?” (Davy 2001). Hart faced elections
in March 2001, and was reelected with 60 percent of the vote. The media
made great use of la rumeur to present a simplified version that they could
ridicule and dismiss.
The disaster victims, who developed the rumor into a political belief,
reacted by protesting. The region’s economical backwardness and history
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of hardships during previous wars affected the inhabitants. They felt that
they had been “sacrificed” in the First World War—which entailed a complete
destruction of Picardy to protect Paris from an invasion. These memories
were mobilized and revived through the “conspiracy” explanation of
the floods as a means of saving Parisian elites. As one observer noted,
“Our interviews have shown that the memory of war was an outline that
helped to ‘think’ the floods and had sustained belief in the rumor. . . . The
floods functioned as a social scheme reactivating the war’s memories”
(Vialle 2002:52, 63).
The disaster victims interviewed by Vialle strongly rejected the label
“rumor” and emphasized that it was through enquiry and reason, not
hearsay, that they now knew the real truth, the cause of the floods:
It’s several facts that coincided and the fact that we went to see the overflows
because we went up the whole canal [ . . . ]. It was not at all a rumor. It’s been
called like that, but for us it was a concrete fact, it was truth. It was made into
a rumor because one didn’t want it to be the truth but for us, who were
Abbevillians, the mayor himself had launched an enquiry with process
server affidavit [ . . . ] we had been there. We went to check [ . . . ]. We saw
that there were overflows wide open when we were told it didn’t exist.
When you are told it does not exist and that you see it with your own eyes.
When the interviewer reminds the accusing victim that official inquiries
have contradicted her version (that voluntary overflow into the river
Somme had been arranged using the Northern Canal that links the
river Seine to the Northern Somme), she expresses strong distrust toward
this official truth:
The problem is that they have been told not to talk. He told me (because I met
one of the investigators) that the “reason of State” (Raison d’Etat = National
Security) was stronger than simple reason. . . . The official version is all that
counts. (Vialle 2002:second interview of DP, female worker, 50)31
“The official version” was that underground water reserves, filled by
the pervasive rains of former years, overflowed naturally and were unable
to absorb the exceptional precipitation of 2001.
The couple interviewed by Vialle expresses a generalized conspiracy
hypothesis, denouncing recurrent floods caused by the action of Paris
authorities:
JLB: For us the State did nothing. They rather are the ones who flooded
us. . . . Anyhow, they will do it again each time Paris has water.
FLB: Look at all these floods now. There have been floods in Brittany and in
the East, there are floods everywhere. . . . Each time they have a little water,
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they send it in small places, it’s easier that way. It’s all a question of
dough. . . . Not Parisians themselves. . . . It’s the chiefs, the government. It’s
them who decide, no? (Vialle 2002 interview of JLB and his wife FLB, both
workers, 43 and 45)
The adoption of this alternative version by many of the flood victims is
an indicator of the growth in the French public of an attitude of distrust
toward political authorities.32 However, the Somme folks remain matterof-fact
and their accusations are closer to the classic rumors of the earlier
centuries, as the plots denounced are limited and with fairly clear objectives.
The generalized accusations of conspiracies are more present in the
denunciations of the ecological activists, who assert that the alliance
between political authorities and greedy powerful pesticides producers
was the real cause of the la colza food contamination and of other mysterious
epidemics.
CONCLUSION
While accusers spreading contemporary conspiracy theories, who are
boosted by a general loosening of repression in Western societies, coupled
with the rise of the Internet, are today more visible, their numbers may not
have increased from a century ago. In fact, the recent targeting of our own
evil elites does not rule out the old evil “others”—aliens or minorities.33
For the social sciences, these accusers matter less than the other segments
of the public, the disaster victims of the Somme floods, for example,
who pick up these theories. What is most meaningful is that the theme of
the evil elites as incarnation of the enemy within has spilled from the specialized
conspiracy theories circles into the general public.
Already salient in the 1970s, the developments of mass communication
that have created a “universal awareness of world events . . . a global village
of gossip” (Rosnow and Fine 1976:95) are one of the main explanatory
factors of this adoption. It is evident that the volume of information has
grown considerably with the development of the fax and the Internet,
causing an outpouring of information that paradoxically may lead to an
increased suspicion of legitimate sources of information (Gladwell
2002:99, 271–75).
It seems that, at the grass-roots level, people of the rich countries have
abandoned faith in continuous progress and adopted the poor countries’
attitude of distrust toward government and society.
While the distrust is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, it is hazardous
to predict that the general public will continue to endorse conspiracy
theories. The author’s analysis of organ theft narratives (CampionVincent
1997, 2001) has revealed that—even as social conditions connected
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to the narratives have remained constant—the scary tales disappear,
become less topical, and are restricted to limited circles. The same process
has been observed in the case of satanic abuse, where the accusations now
operate in small subcultures and no longer raise concern in society at large
(La Fontaine 1997). Rumors are dynamic and can be considered as “shortterm
enthusiasms” (Best, Chapter 10 in this volume). Thus, the existence
of conspiratorial beliefs need not suggest that such fantastic claims will
always be with us, certainly not in the form in which we know them today.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Bill Ellis, Gary Alan Fine, Chip Heath, Anthony Oberschall and JeanBruno
Renard for their helpful comments. Gary Alan Fine also kindly reviewed this paper’s
English.
NOTES
1. Author’s translation, as for the other quotations not originally in English.
2. Dualism, after the Manichean religious system (third to fifth century) representing
Satan in a state of everlasting conflict with God. The term is common, and
unflattering, among French contemporary political commentators.
3. Discussing the origins of Christian crusades against Jewish communities,
similar concepts were developed by historian Norman Cohn (1967), who talks of
“subversion myths,” and folklorist Alan Dundes (1991), who calls this psychological
process “projective inversion” (Ellis 2000:121–25).
4. Jim Marrs authored Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1989) one of the
source’s of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK.
5. Ellis has convincingly shown how the Illuminati scare, based on the denunciation
of the authentic subversive Order of the Illuminati created in 1770 in
Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt and suppressed in 1785, has influenced conspiracy
circles and evolved from the targeting of outsiders (Jews and Masons presented as
worshippers of Satan) to that of elites (bankers and liberals). (Ellis 2000:120–42; Bill
Ellis, personal communication, January 15).
6. The phrase is used by Pat Buchanan (Knight 2002:5).
7. Constantine (1995:11); see also Keith (1997:151–54). Sirhan Sirhan murdered
Robert F. Kennedy.
8. O’Brien and Phillips (1995).
9. In the last twenty years, the steady flow of books and films on the subject has
consistently presented various elite characters as the real Jack the Ripper, for example,
the Duke of Clarence and the painter Sickert, asserting that they were generally
protected by a tightly knitted establishment.
10. The sale of guns to Iran was covertly organized by the U.S. government
during Reagan’s presidency, to get resources to support the Nicaraguan contras
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without House or Senate approval. The operation was orchestrated by Oliver
North.
11. Uri Dowbenko on http://www.conspiracydigest.com 2001, review of The
Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider.
12. Interview conducted with Jack Stockwell on K-TALK radio in Salt
Lake City, Utah. Available at http://www.larouchepub.com/pr_lar/2001/
010911stockwell.html.
13. Available at http://www.larouchepub.com/pr_lar/2001/010915_shoot_
cat.html.
14. Expression used in the online page of the book’s English version, available
on http://www.carnot.fr
15. It sold 164,100 copies and was third in sales of French essays for 2002 (Salles
2003:x). Meyssan’s French publisher http://www.carnot.fr announced in March
2003 that the book was available in fifty countries and had been translated into
twenty-five languages.
16. Twenty thousand copies sold, translation into Arabic and Italian (information
supplied by Marion Staub, information officer of the publisher, February 26,
2003).
17. Duclos, who has a good knowledge of popular culture, is the author of The
Werewolf Complex. America’s Fascination with Violence ([1994] 1998).
18. Duclos’s examples refer to mass killers shooting indiscriminately into
crowds before their suicide.
19. http://solidariteetprogres.online.fr/Jacques/Livrecomplot.html text date
June 19, 2002.
20. “Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and leaders of the Black Panther Party”
Kellner 2002: 206.
21. This revived the hero of The Conversation (1974).
22. “The ‘X-Files’ made us question whether we really understand the world,
since there are all these unknown malevolent things lurking underneath the surface.”(Chip
Heath personal communication October 21, 2003)
23. Mark Purdey’s website, subtitled “Seeking the Truth through Science,” is at
http://www.markpurdey.com/
24. These accusations are echoed on the web site http://www.getipm.com/
sitemap.htm .
25. For example, 24,100 answers to a Google search (conducted October 13,
2003) on: OP Pesticides Safety.
26. The author thanks Aurélie Vialle, for the loan of her 2002 DEA thesis in
political sociology on the Somme Rumor (Vialle 2002).
27. The claim of rumor, raised by the media very early, is somewhat overstretched
and corresponds to a contemporary tendency to qualify as “rumor” all
explanations with which one does not agree. The two students who researched this
case talk, respectively, of “media creation” (Davy 2001) and of “political belief”
(Vialle 2002). The author’s preferred phrase is “successful alternative version.”
28. Abbeville, the flooded city of the Somme Département (the district named
after the Somme river) was the hotbed of these stories.
29. Paris was a candidate for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.
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30. Quotation of Jasmine, retired seamstress, seventy-five years old (Vialle
2002:29).
31. Source for both quotations.
32. “A systematic and radical negation of politics characterizes French youth
today, which expresses an anti-political discourse, not only a-political or expressing
disinterest. The universe of politics is the utmost of abjection said to mark the
adult world” (Aldrin 2001:551–52).
33. For example, conspiracy theorists today often present “the hand of Israel”
as the ultimate “real cause” of the September 11 attacks.
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