Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506060011
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL FELDMAN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The nefarious scenario is spelled out in ``Proofs of a Conspiracy,'' a 304-page book on sale at the John Birch Society bookstore in North Hollywood, Calif. It's tucked among similar exposes on Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and the United Nations.
But there is a twist. The lengthy tract, focusing on a secretive German group known as the Illuminati Order, was first published nearly 200 years ago and was used to attack the presidential candidacy of Thomas Jefferson.
Long before right-wing militia leaders fulminated about the threat of a ``New World Order,'' global conspiracy theories were a fixture of the American political firmament. Despite the failure of most to pan out, new theories routinely surface, old ones are periodically revitalized and hopelessly out-of-date ones, such as the threat of worldwide communism, have transmogrified into updated theories about the impending takeover of the United States by the United Nations.
Jews, Communists, Catholics, Freemasons, Mormons, international bankers, the CIA, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations - all have been accused of plotting takeovers or pulling strings that control political or economic decision-making.
``If you look at American history, you'll see that conspiracies are a recurrent theme,'' said Seymour Martin Lipset, a leading political sociologist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
``You get conspiratorial theories coming from the left and from the right,'' he said. ``One of the oldest and continuing conspiracy theories is the Illuminati. The Birch Society pushes the Illuminati conspiracy idea and so does Pat Robertson.''
Indeed, the televangelist and founder of the politically influential Christian Coalition repeatedly refers to the grand design of the Illuminati in his 1991 best seller, ``The New World Order.'' Robertson also charges in the book that Abraham Lincoln's assassin was hired by European bankers angered by his plans to print interest-free currency rather than issue war bonds.
Experts say conspiracy theories generally revolve around secretive plots, often foreign in origin, involving grand designs to control the nation or the world. Many have racist underpinnings. Some are driven by specific tragedies such as the Kennedy or Lincoln assassinations.
Fueling these conspiracies are social discord.
``You can't have a conspiracy theory unless you have a cleavage in the society,'' said UCLA history professor Joyce Appleby.
The strongest theories usually hinge on a kernel of truth and an instinctive craving to explain all circumstances - including those that might ordinarily be attributed to coincidence - as part of an overarching master plan. Conspiracy theories take on a life of their own in large part because there is no way to refute them with 100 percent certainty.
Since the Oklahoma City bombing - and the arrest of suspects with links to right-wing extremist thinking - a spotlight has been cast on the latest round of anti-government conspiracy theories.
Some seem wild enough to make Oliver Stone salivate. Foreign troops massed at the borders for an imminent invasion. Massive concentration camps being readied for the imprisonment of patriotic Americans. Secret codes implanted on interstate highway signs to help the invaders carry out battle plans. All with the cooperation of leading federal government officials.
In Palm Springs, Calif., a crowd of more than 600 jammed a posh downtown hotel in early May to hear militia advocate Mark Koernke urge armed resistance to a ``globalist'' plot to their liberty and constitutional rights, allegedly aided and abetted by the federal government and the mass media.
Koernke, a University of Michigan janitor who has achieved prominence in extremist circles as a shortwave radio broadcaster, said plans are under way to abolish the 50 states and replace them with 10 superstates. Citizens will be given national ID cards in the form of ``dog collars around their necks.''
``Become militiamen now, because you have no more time,'' asserted Koernke. ``This is the most crucial time in American history, going all the way back to the American Revolution.''
Other speakers at the conspiracy confab - including a former FBI agent - went even further, charging that the federal government actually bombed itself to help pave the way for anti-terrorist laws designed to erode individual rights.
About 50 demonstrators peacefully protested the holding of the conference in Palm Springs, but many in the overflow audience eagerly picked up on the speakers' theme.
Wilma Fields, who was distributing leaflets for an upcoming ``Preparedness Expo '95'' in Anaheim, Calif., swore that the Oklahoma City bombing was just the latest perfidy in a century-long federal plot to take over the country.
``They've been working at this for 100 years and they're on a roll now,'' said the 60ish Fields, who said she once worked as a personnel manager for the Defense Department.
In his seminal 1965 book, ``The Paranoid Style in American Politics,'' the late historian Richard Hofstadter argued that America has run rampant with citizens who view history as ``a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.''
Hofstadter conceded that individual plots are sometimes true and that conspiracy theories are also prevalent in foreign cultures. But the avid American political paranoid, he added, sees history itself as a conspiracy ``set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power.''
The 1798 ``Proofs of a Conspiracy,'' written by Scottish scientist John Robison and reprinted by the Birch Society, focused on the Illuminati, a secretive group of Bavarian Freemasons. Using intellectual means, the plotters aimed to take over the world by overthrowing monarchies with the promise of universal happiness for the human race, Robison wrote.
``The theory was picked up and put into circulation by a prominent clergyman, Jedidiah Morse, who said you could see them in a group around Thomas Jefferson,'' said Appleby, a scholar of early American history. ``It was an organized political attack on Jefferson that failed. But it certainly had political significance.''
It's still around today in Robertson's ``The New World Order.'' The 1988 contender for the Republican presidential nomination writes of ``a single thread that runs from the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers.''
He links the Illuminati, and their goal of abolishing nationalism, to the French Revolution, the creation of communism and other significant world events. ``The New Age religions, the beliefs of the Illuminati and Illuminated Freemasonry all seem to move along parallel tracks with world communism and world finance,'' Robertson declared.
The most striking political conspiracy theories these days come from the right, where fears of a New World Order - ironically, a term used by President Bush to describe his vision of a kinder, gentler post-Cold War civilization - resonate from sources ranging from the Birchers to Robertson to leaders of the mushrooming militia movement.
The Birch Society, which still sells maps showing the virulent spread of communism, now targets its toughest invective against an impending one-world government. In a blurb for its recent text, ``Global Tyranny ... Step by Step,'' Americans are warned that the United Nations intends to terminate ``your God-given rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution'' and impose ``Communist-style dictatorship and ruthless terror, torture and extermination to cow all peoples into submission.''
Robertson, who questions whether the Cold War was actually an insiders' hoax to prompt rampant arms spending and money-borrowing, agrees that conspirators are plotting to establish a world police force, banking system and government that would eliminate families and Christianity.
Militia advocates, employing talk radio, computer bulletin boards and public forums, warn that the one-world takeover is imminent.
``You better be armed,'' asserted militia advocate Mark Koernke, who, upon concluding a recent 90-minute monologue, punched the air with his fist and led the audience in a militant shout: ``God bless the Republic. Death to the New World Order. We shall prevail.''
by CNB