What. No Rosicrucians? No bilderbergers? No Zionists? No marxists? What kind of two-bit conspiracy theory is this, anyway?

The Rosicrucians are the real Illuminati. Didn't you know that? You're so naive...

Kind of makes you pine for the good old days of the early-to-mid 1990s when it was the right that was really noticeably full of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, rather than the left (which just wasn't really noticeable unless you count the Michael Stipes of the world). I still remember that little neighborhood newspaper that was always delivered to my mother's house back then -- the one that started out as an ordinary community shopper but eventually started carrying these bizarre front-page rants about how, for example, Bill Clinton was backing mandatory childhood inoculations solely because they would allow him to send his agents out to pump kids full of mind-control drugs.

Of course, in 1993 the right already had talk radio to spread its memes whereas the left hadn't invented Counterpunch.org yet. Probably we can start gauging the future shifts in the body politic by watching whether the most prominent conspiracy theories are the ones that show up first on Indymedia or the ones that show up first on Free Republic.

I'm with you on that, Combustible Boy.

Except I'll point out that part of the problem is that the fruit loops of the Left have also been taken more seriously. Chomsky is still a mostly-respected figure. You'll still hear it spoken openly in universities that the CIA was helping the Contras sell drugs to fuel an imperialist war, or that America's support of Pinochet's Chilean coup was without justification and for the purely imperialist motives of the CIA which is the most frightening organization in the world that routinely assassinates people in order to help American corporations make profits and...

The thing is that during the 1980s, the left-wing whackjobs got taken seriously.

I frankly think we're in a much more healthy place in our politics these days, at least in this sense: information flows much faster in all direction, and debunking information to refute nutjobs flies out faster than the nutjobs can put it out.

The real issues are still overwhelmingly big, but I guess I'm an optimist by nature. More information and more perspectives are healthy things.

Well, as someone who has an uncle who was a CIA contractor, they are pretty scary. Didn't know WHY he was always flying off to 3rd world places when I was a child, and found out after he'd retired, but of course not exactly what he did in them.

They were all places that the U.S. had no official involvment, and the Company Contractors got paid in gold foil diplomatic customs stamps, so they could bring ANYTHING in and out of the country. Training revolutionaries and fomenting coups seems to be about the size of what he was up to.

And that's all that grandpa would say about his brother's 'career'. Which was more than enough to at least stoke up any conspiracy theory leanings I may have (or have had...much more so at the time, early 90s).

Which merely goes to show that there is usually SOMETHING originally underlying most conspiracy theories, but not necessarily anything like what their proponents make them out to be, either in kind or what they are connected to.

No doubt, Dave. There's no question that the U.S. has been involved in coups.

The problem underlying that discussion goes into the where, when, how, and why. For example, there are many who act as if our actions in Chile were completely inexcusable, but in fact you can build a very rational and decent case--including on human rights grounds--for that action. But if you start with the a prior, aximatic assumption that the CIA is fundamentally evil and out to dominate the world for imperialist purposes, that discussion becomes nearly impossible to even have. People start frothing at the mouth and acting like you're right-wing extremist apologizing for fascism and the eville Amerikan Corporate State, and... well, the discussion is basically fruitless.

Anti-CIA conspiracism is just as troubling as any other form. To me, anyway.

Where were all our expensive, super-organized, super-secret all-encroaching CIA-based conspiracies when 19 ragheads armed with box cutters destroyed the World Trade Center, almost destroyed the Pentagon, and would have destroyed either the United States Capitol or the White House if the fourth plane had not been brought down by the untrained civilian passengers?

(There are times when I wish all the pro-American conspiracies were as real as they look on the Hollywood screenfillers.)

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI