Reply #18: "Conspiracy Theory" plays a different role...

[anaxarchos]

...in politics than it does in the popular culture. Typically, it is an act of the disenfranchised who know "something" happened or is happening but do not have access to the details or the power to make those details accessible. I suppose UFO theorists could claim the same but the distinction is easy to make.

Every popular movement which is locked out of power is riddled with a very different kind of "conspiracy theory". And those theories in turn, accurate and not, understate the actual events transpiring below the surface. In the recent past, during the sixties, the truth of this became strikingly clear. Everyone I knew believed that the Anti-War movement, that the Panthers, that many others were routinely targeted by the government. Nevertheless, very few had any inkling of the extent of Cointelpro, etc. (and those that did, we typically regarded as truly crazy). So it went on a very broad range of issues. To talk about just one example:

When I was growing up, there were elaborate theories on how "drugs" were being used by "the man" to control the "black community". In turn, conservative commentators would use the widespread acceptance of these to attack "black paranoia", and worse. This was before the secrecy around the Vietnam War unraveled and the politics of heroin in Laos was revealed. It was before Panama and before Iran-Contra. It was before the revelations that will eventually come from Afghanistan. It was before uneven drug laws, unevenly applied, swelled the prison population in America by a factor of 8 and black prison population by a factor of 15. It was before one out of three black men were disenfranchised, effectively undoing the Voting Rights Act.

Looking back on the conspiracy theories of the sixties, you see a mixed bag. Some of the theories were obviously insane, some were remarkably accurate, and some simply attributed to individuals what in truth was anonymous and "systemic". But overall, the imagination of the theorists pales in comparison to the actual events that have since been revealed...

The responsibility for "conspiracy theory" rests squarely at the foot of authority. It is a direct result of the lack of power to establish conspiracy fact. Attacking the "theorists" is just another case of "blaming the victim".