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From "Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes."

New York: Paragon House, 1991.

By Jonathan Vankin.

Pages 237 to 250.

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Chapter 17

CONSPIRACY NATION

  Every thing secret degenerates ... nothing
  is safe that does not show how it can bear
  discussion and publicity.
                        Lord Acton

  Anyone who has seen Raiders of the Lost Ark has a notion of the ties
between Nazis and the occult. That flick and its second sequel,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Nazis scour Europe in
search of the Holy Grail, have some relation to reality. The Nazis did
perform strange excavations in France looking for mystical relics-
presumably the Grail, or maybe Templar treasure. Even people who don't
like cartoony adventure movies may be vaguely aware that the swastika
was an ancient magic symbol signifying light, which the Nazis reversed
to symbolize darkness.

  Nazi preoccupation with mythology is good Saturday matinee fare, but
the origins of nazism in Germany's occult underworld are not usually
looked upon as a legitimate topic for study by historians of the
Second World War. On the one hand, we have the sweeping but wholly
conventional poli-sci analysis a la William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich. On the other, there's the psycho-historical
outlook typified by The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which
attempted to explicate nazism with reference to Hitler's fifty percent
deficit in the testicle department--a new twist on the lone nut
theory.

  Academic minds tend to force the most irrational phenomena into the
frame of reference found in a college bookstore: politics, economics,
sociology, and, of course, abnormal psychology. All such approaches
seem almost designed to isolate Nazi Germany from the continuum of
history and confirm that it can't happen here. This is a comforting
notion, conducive to detached, scholarly analysis of the role of
secret societies peopled by true believers, whose motives were not
only irrational but antirational, which falls outside the spectrum of
temperate discourse on modern history's darkest period.

  I'm not arguing that Germany's rotting economy, its stratified class
structure, the impotence of its Weimar government, or even the mental
and genital abnormalities of the Nazi fhrer have no place in
understanding the Nazis. They have a big place. But with-out the
highly organized, perversely passionate, subterranean oc-cult movement
that gestated in Germany around the turn of the century, all of those
elements could not have congealed into nazism.

  More than a political party, the Nazi party was very much a cult.
Like most demagogic religious sects, its rank and file was spell-bound
with the courage of demented convictions, and its leadership was
financed and supported by powerful people whose main inter-est was
accumulating more power. The finely tuned machine of brainwashing,
fanaticism, and secrecy is perfect for that purpose.

  Germanic occultists, like the Ku Klux Klan, were in love with
religious warriors, holy knights. They were disgusted with even-keel,
post-enlightenment rationalism, which cut man off from his spiritual
nature and turned him into a timid species of accountants and clerks.
The Middle-Ages were their romantic ideal. Squalor, plague, ignorance,
and malnutrition--endemic to the Middle Ages--meant nothing to these
incipient Nazis. All they cared was that spirituality in those days
was transcendent. Templars and Teu-tonic Knights were their heroes. In
this German version of medieval mythos, the Grail was the pure blood
of prehistoric gods, and it was carried by only one race, the Aryan.
Everyone else was subhuman, Jews and nonwhites especially. The holy
knights, according to this lore, were guardians of the Aryan
bloodline. Aryans, the occultists believed, were descended from a race
of giants who ruled earth long before recorded time. The
supercivilization had a Great Fall. Only Aryans perpetuate the holy
heredity.

  Jorg Lanz von Liebenfelsand Guidovon List, two Austrian mystics,
were the ideological grandfathers of nazism. Lanz formed, in 1900, a
society called the Order of New Templars (ONT). The ONT, and the
societies that evolved from it, ultimately the Nazi party, was a core
for industrialists, lawyers, publishers, and other powerful
individuals who needed a means to consolidate control of German
society. Their security at the top of Germany's power structure was
threatened by insurgent communists.

  The ONT published Ostara, a magazine chronicling the eternal war
between godlike Aryans and the bestial subhumans. Comic book paintings
of luscious blonde bombshells in the clutches of furry ape men adorned
its pages. The psychosexual subtext of these quaint racial theories
was difficult to miss. Among the readers of Ostara was a young
Austrian painter and fan of the occult, Adolf Hitler.

  Eight years after Lanz founded his New Templars, List started a
group he called Armanen. He took the swastika as the Armanen emblem.
In 1912, the two societies merged to form the Germanen Orden, direct
forerunner to the Nazi party. While Hitler was still watercoloring
postcards in Vienna, this coven of wealthy occultists was incubating
the racial, nationalist, quasi-pagan theory that would become law in
the Third Reich.

  In 1918, members of the Orden started a new secret society, called
Thulegesellschaft, the Thule Society. The legend of "Thule" was a
variation on the Atlantis myth. Thule was supposed to be a nation of
superbeings with a utopian civilization. It flourished until 850,000
years ago, when it was wiped away by a cataclysmic flood. The flood
itself was symbolic of the "Fall," but the Thulians--or Atlantians--
had brought it upon themselves by mating with crea-tures of a lower
race.

  The Thulists appropriated this tale from the writings of Madame
Blavatsky, "theosophist" housewife-turned-guru who created a cult in
nineteenth-century New York City. Blavatsky's writings are gospel to
more recent "New Age" groups. The Thule Society adapted Blavatsky to
their own prejudices. The supermen, they believed, were forerunners of
the Aryan race. The subhuman crea-tures became Jews. To overcome their
own debased nature and become supermen once more, the Aryans must
overcome the Jews.

  Like apocalyptic movements for millennia before them, the Thulists
were fervently messianic. Unlike many of their precursors, they
weren't happy waiting for the messiah to appear. They went out and
found him.

  In 1913, Hitler moved out of Austria, settling in Munich for what he
said in Mein Kampf were "political reasons." Actually, he was avoiding
conscription--a draft dodger. Nonetheless, he ended up enlisting with
enthusiasm in the German military. Though a com-moner and a private,
Hitler received preferential treatment at every stage of his military
service. Perhaps he was an intelligence officer. He may already have
been an agent of the Thule Society. After a prolific stint as an
anticommunist informer, in which he sent scores of his army pals to
their executions, he was sent to university anticommunism seminars
paid for by the Thulists. He joined and eventually took over the
German Workers Party, which was founded, funded, and controlled by the
Thule Society.

  In 1919, Hitler met Dietrich Eckart, a drunkard, drug addict, small-
time playwright, and socialite. Despite his character flaws, Eckart
had a powerful mind and a powerful personality to go along with lots
of money. He published an anti-Semitic magazine and belonged to the
Thule Society's "inner circle, " the members most involved in the
Thule's political program.

  "Their meeting was probably more decisive than any other in Hitler's
life," writes Wulf Schwarzwaller in his biography, The Unknown Hitler.
"Eckart molded Hitler, completely changing his public persona." Under
the occultist's tutelage, Hitler transformed from a temperamental
painter, who spent more time pigging out on coffeehouse cake than at
his easel, to a shrewd, forceful orator--a dangerously persuasive
propagandist.

  From his deathbed in December, 1928, Dietrich Eckart issued a
command to his fellow adepts of the Thule Society: "Follow Hitler!" he
implored. "He will dance but it is I who have called the tune. Do not
mourn for me. I shall have influenced history more than any other
German."


  Hitler's 1941 pogrom against occult groups is often mistakenly taken
as evidence than the occult was at best an incidental influence on
nazism. The crackdown, in all likelihood, was damage control following
the famous flight of Rudolph Hess, one of Hitler's closest confidants.
Hess, for reasons still not entirely clear, stole a plane and made a
solo flight without Hitler's knowledge to Britain, where he was
captured. One story has Hess lured there by British intel-ligence in a
plot masterminded by Ian Fleming, the spy who later turned writer and
created James Bond.

  Hess belonged to the Thule Society. Reportedly, the British
intelligence service was interested in what he knew about the oc-
cult's hold on Hitler and the Nazis. Fleming allegedly wanted Aleister
Crowley to act as the interrogator. Crowley is undoubt-edly the most
notorious occultist of the twentieth century. His secret society, the
Ordo Temple Orientis, attracted, as so many of these groups do, people
from the top of society in any country where it set up shop. Crowley
himself was terribly decadent. A happily heroin-addicted, bisexual
Satan worshipper, he asked peo-ple to call him "The Beast 666."
Crowley believed that he was literally the antimessiah of the
apocalypse. Or at least he wanted people to believe that he believed
he was.

  Crowley was also an intelligence agent. He claimed to have worked
for the British Secret Service in the First World War. He may have
been working for Germany as well. He renounced his British citizenship
and took openly pro-German positions, even writing pro-German
propaganda. Though British intelligence offi-cials denounced him, he
was not prosecuted and developed (or continued) a relationship with
the British government between wars, feeding information to M16 (one
British spy outfit) about German occult activities.

  The Nazi government may have been based on occult principles, but it
was not the only government with an interest in every secret thing.

  "We find it difficult to admit that Nazi Germany embodied the
concepts of a civilization bearing no relationship at all to our own,"
note Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. "And yet it was just that, and
nothing else, that justified this war."

  Pauwels and Bergier wrote Morning of the Magicians, a book that
aroused a fracas in the early 1960s by finding occultism seething
beneath every layer of modern life, particularly in the Nazi era.
While I'm not sure I endorse their view that "nothing else justified
this war," their point is well taken: the war against the Nazis was
not only a war for territory, money, or even power. It was a war to
decide whether a "humanist" or a "magical" view of the universe would
dominate planet earth. "This truth was hidden from us by German
technology, German science and German organization, comparable if not
superior to our own," says Morning of the Magicians. "The great
innovation of Nazi Germany was to mix magic with science and
technology."

  Both the American and Soviet governments wanted a taste of that
toothsome mix. Once Hitler was safely beaten, they competed fiercely
for the services of Nazi scientists. The U.S. seems to have been more
successful, winning commitments from Nazis like Wehrner Von Braun,
rocket scientist and SS major once described by Allied intelligence as
a "potential security threat." The govern-ment cleansed Von Braun's
wartime record, brought him into America, and put him to work on
projects that culminated in the Saturn V rocket--the booster that
lifted Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew to the moon.

  Von Braun was the most famous of the Nazi scientists imported after
the war. Most were described by the government as "ardent Nazis," but
those pejoratives were scratched from their files. Oper-ation
Paperclip (so named because secret files on the scientists were
denoted by a simple, everyday paperclip) employed seemingly
supernatural German expertise to construct the American war ma-chine.
The Paperclip Boys were the plasma of the military-industrial complex.

  Meanwhile, the newly formed CIA was busy recruiting SS spy-master
Reinhard Gehlen and "Hitler's favorite commando" Otto "Scarface"
Skorzeny. Under cover of U.S. intelligence, these two and their
minions did more than anyone to keep the ideals of the Third Reich
alive, and pave the way for a Fourth Reich. Gehlen manipulated
intelligence information to portray the Soviets in the worst possible
light. With his CIA collaborators, he started the Cold War and kept it
going.

  While Gehlen played the U.S. government--and American pub-lic
opinion--like a flute, Skorzeny globe-trotted. He established Nazi
power bases in South America that nurtured the continent's many
dictatorships.

  Skorzeny did a similar favor for the Middle East. Gamel Abdel Nasser
came to power in Egypt with help from Skorzeny and an elite corps of
former SS storm troopers. Always the good Nazi, Skorzeny never gave up
on the twisted dream of wiping out Jews. He set up the earliest
Palestinian terrorist groups, trained them, and sent them on commando
raids into Israel. Without the American-backed entrepreneurship of
this disfigured Nazi, the Middle East would probably be a much more
stable place than it has been for the past four decades.

  From the Order of New Templars to the Thule Society to the SS, the
CIA, and the PLO, the intersection between government and secret
societies continues to make our world an uncertain, terrify-ing place.
The Nazi conspiracy rolls on.


  Nazi Germany, impregnated with occultism, was a state founded in
conspiracy, by conspiracy, for conspiracy. A relatively small group of
people with hidden motives, using propaganda, mind control, and
terror, carried out a plan to take over a country and the world. The
German secret societies succeeded in conjuring up a massive social
transformation, at a staggering cost in human lives. The ever-present,
grim irony of secret society revolutions, nowhere more evident than
with the Nazis, is that the great transformation, while it may
overturn governments, makes conditions secure for the hidden powerful.
Secret society revolutions happen when the secret oligarchy feels
threatened.

  The Thule Society was a magnet for rich businessmen and aristo-
crats, who provided it with considerable financial wherewithal to
carry out its ambitious conspiratorial schemes.  Without funding from
big business, German and international, the Nazis never could have
sprung from the Thulists' loins. "It is even partly true that Hitler
was able to sell an evil idea like anti-Semitism simply because he had
the support of wealthy contributors," say the authors of Who financed
Hitler. Nazism was occultism, but it was also fascism; it carried out
Mussolini's dictum "Fascism is corporatism."

  Craven Jew-hater Henry Ford, inventor of the automobile com-pany if
not the automobile, was such a doting patron of Hitler's that the
fhrer once offered to import some shock troops to the U.S. to help
"Heinrich" run for president. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party's
sinister mystic laureate (his extreme racial theorizing was found by
the Nuremburg tribunal to be so instrumental in nazism that he was
hanged), was friends with petroleum magnate Henri Deterding--managing
director of Royal Dutch Shell and one of the world's richest men.
Almost every major industrial concern in Germany, oil companies,
agricultural firms, banks, and shipping companies, made sizable
donations to Heinrich Himmler's Schutz-staffel, the SS, the Nazis'
elite corps, which itself was fashioned as a secret society.

  I. G. Farben, the gargantuan chemical cartel, was one of the new
Reich's stolid financial supporters. There was plenary profit in
nazism for Farben, and all of Hitler's corporate investors. The
cartel's contributions were especially egregious. It manufactured
Zyklon-B, a poison gas, for use in the gas chambers. Auschwitz was a
slave-labor camp for an on-site Farben factory. I. G. Farben and its
associated companies were among the passel of Nazi corpo-rations that
did business with the most powerful Wall Street law firm of the 1930s
and 1940s, Sullivan and Cromwell. Their chief contact at the firm was
an attorney named John Foster Dulles, who became secretary of state in
the Eisenhower administration.

  "Sullivan and Cromwell thrived on its cartels and collusion with the
new Nazi regime," say the firm's chroniclers. In 1933 and 1934, when
the Nazi's brutal course was obvious, Dulles led off cables to his
German clients with the salutation "Heil Hitler." In 1935, he
scribbled a screed for Atlantic Monthly dismissing Nazi state ter-
rorism as "changes which we recognize to be inevitable." Dulles's
brother, Allen Dulles, was also a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell. He
later founded the ClA and recruited thousands of Nazi SS men into the
new "department of conspiracy." Much to Foster's con-sternation, he
never met Hitler, while little brother Allen was granted that thrill.

  Sosthenes Behn met Hitler, too. Behn was the founder of Inter-
national Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and virtual inventor of the
multinational corporation. He met Hitler in 1933. the first Ameri-can
businessman to receive an audience with der Fuhrer, while striking up
deals with German companies. At the same time, he filed classified
reports on their activities to the U.S. government. American spy or
not, Behn allowed his company to cover for Nazi spies in South
America,  and one of ITT's subsidiaries bought a hefty swath of stock
in the airplane company that built Nazi bombers.

  Behn recruited Nazis onto ITT's board. His closest Nazi friend,
Gerhard Westrick, visited New York at Behn's expense in 1940--when the
Nazis were conquering Europe without much resistance. The agenda of
Westrick's visit: to talk American corporate leaders into forging a
German-American business alliance. These sorts of activities could
easily be dubbed treason on Behn's part, but by 1944 and the Allied
liberation of France, he was celebrated as an American hero. Allen
Dulles--who supplemented his legal income as a U.S. intelligence
agent--appears to have been the magician behind this miracle rehab,
helping Behn set up his relationship with the U.S. military. Later,
Dulles was an originator of the idea that multinational corporations
are instruments of U. S. foreign policy and therefore exempt from
domestic laws--a theory that has been a secret government policy since
the mid-1950s. Behn also gave money to Himmler's SS.

  The Nazis were able to weld corporatism to occultism seam-lessly,
which may say something about the similarity between the two. "The
oligarchs of agricultural kingdoms wrapped themselves in witchcraft. .
. . As industrial capitalism accumulated power and wealth the old
mysteries were replaced and dwarfed by the new mysteries of high
finance, market manipulations, convoluted and lucrative legalisms,
pressure-group politics, and a labyrinth of new bureaucracies," writes
Bertram Gross.

  But it also says that for the Nazis, the occult served both
idealistic and pragmatic purposes. Himmler was immersed in occultism,
but though he believed the stuff, he also used it as a method of mind
control. When he began the corps, he needed a large membership to
consolidate power. He recruited about sixty thousand. Member-ship was
literally for sale to the wealthy, and "honorary" member-ship was
available for as little as a mark per year. There was no way to unify
such an unwieldy legion, so once the SS had established itself as the
most powerful faction of the Nazi state,  Himmler purged his rolls of
anyone ideologically impure, or racially suspect (members had to draw
up a family tree going back more than a century to prove their pure
Aryan, non-Jewish, lineage). He also banished or killed all the SS
homosexuals he could spot, and there were quite a few.

  The SS was still absent a coherent ideology to bind its remaining
members in strict obedience. Himmler found one in his own neo-pagan
beliefs. He renovated Wewelsburg Castle, a Westphalian fortress, and
made it his own Camelot. He installed an oaken round table where the
twelve "knights" of his inner circle would gather for initiations and
rites. Like all cult leaders, Himmler was skilled using ritual and
esoterica to strip away the individuality of his followers. Whatever
humanity the SS soldiers possessed was sub-sumed by their mission to
exterminate "lower races" and stand guard over the Reich. The storm
troopers became robots pro-grammed to kill.


  Himmlerian mind control didn't die when Himmler bit his cya-nide
capsule. While real live Nazis like Skorzeny and Gehlen frolicked
about the world causing merry mischief, their younger admirers kept
the occult spirit of nazism alive in right-wing hate groups and
Satanic cults.

  The popular image of right-wing "neo-Nazi" groups as Nean-derthal
thugs is somewhat misleading. The rank-and-file skinheads may be a
little on the slow side, but the movement's leaders tend to be
voracious readers, researchers, and theorists, after a fashion. Just
as they are, perhaps correctly, the subject of conspiracy theories,
they've developed anti-Jewish, anti-Masonic, Illuminati-style the-
ories of their own that display an unsettling level of detail--all in
the tradition of Thulian master-race paganism.

  White Aryan Resistance chieftain Tom Metzger--a regular on
"Geraldo"-style daytime talk shows--is anti-Christian as well as
predictably anti-Jewish. He and his skinhead disciples call them-
selves pagans, and adhere to the ancient Germanic religion. They find
affinity in the "Christian Identity" religion, which began in England
in the nineteenth century and now flourishes in cornfield churches of
the Midwest. The Identity churches are only "Chris-tian" in the sense
that they count Jesus as an Aryan. White Euro-peans, they say, are
therefore the true biblical "Jews," and the "race" that calls itself
Jewish is really a conspiracy of subhuman imposters.

  Unlike the conspiracy theorists profiled in the first part of this
book (with the possible exception of Lyndon LaRouche), Nazi and neo-
Nazi groups use their conspiracy theories, like Himmler, as a
technique of control, to mobilize a group to a common goal, to move
people to actions they might not otherwise carry out. More brazenly
occult variations on the same theory turn up in Satanic cults.

  The Manson family was portrayed in the mass media as a group of
crazed hippies, of flower children gone mad. In the mass mind, Charles
Manson is associated with the political left-ironic for a Hitler-
worshipping racist. Like Hitler, who learned his oratorical skills at
the knee of Dietrich Eckart, Manson picked up his powers of persuasion
in the occult underground of San Francisco circa 1967. His "I am
Christ, I am the devil, Christ is the devil" rants could have been
lifted from sermons by Robert DeGrimston, British emigre and leader of
the Process Church of the Final Judgement.

  The Process, which may have had Manson as member, was a Satanic cult
that sprung up in the 1960s and sputtered out by the early 1970s. But
does it still exist? Maury Terry's book The Ulti-mate Evil makes a
case that the Process didn't die. Instead it faded away in a Satanic
diaspora, forming offshoot cults that link into a loose nationwide
conglomerate of dope dealing, S&M porn, and ritual murder. The Son of
Sam killing spree that terrorized New York in the late 1970s was
Terry's focus. He alleges that the mur-ders were carried out by a
conspiracy of cultists based on Long Island with connections across
the country. One of the Sam mur-ders, Terry contends, was committed by
a character called "Man-son II," famous among Satanists as the occult
underworld's top hit man, a friend of Charles Manson himself.

  The Tate-LaBianca murders, crimes that won the original Man-son his
infamy, may not have been random "Helter Skelter" slay-ings, according
to Terry and to Manson biographer Ed Sanders. They appear to have been
murder for hire. But who would hire Manson and why? Could it have been
the same people who hired Manson disciple Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme to
shoot President Ford? Namely, someone in the U.S. government,
according to Michael Milan, who says he was once a hit man for J.
Edgar Hoover.

  Here we get into the grayest of conspiratorial speculations, foggy
even by the standards of conspiracy theory. Contentions that the
intelligence community is somehow aligned with Satanism, using cults
as indoctrination for mind-controlled robot assassins, are backed up
by only gossamer strips of information. Milan's claim that the Manson
family "took the  contract" on Ford; Maury Terry's implication that
New York police may have been in on the Son of Sam murders (taken
together with known facts about the CIA's infiltration of big-city
police departments); and the name of the drug dealer who led the
Matamoros death cult, the nasty devil worshippers who murdered a med-
school student in a Mexican shack a few years ago, allegedly turning
up in the address book of downed contra pilot, Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA
contractor.

  The most curious case, to my mind, is that of Michael Aquino,
another frequent talk-show guest who bears an uncanny resem-blance to
Mark Lenard, Mr. Spock's father on "Star Trek. " Aguino founded and
leads the Temple of Set, an offshoot of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan,
which was the first Satanic church ever to receive tax exemption. The
Temple of Set takes a dour turn on LaVey's dime-store pseudopagan
buffoonery. Unlike LaVey, Aquino never sought publicity. He got it
anyway, when he was accused of mo-lesting children at a military day
care center on San Francisco's Presidio base.

  Aquino was never tried on any charge, and he vehemently denies any
crimes. He sued the city of San Francisco for defamation of character
after an investigation failed to turn up any evidence that he or his
"Temple" was involved in child molestation. Aquino is nonetheless an
odd bird with thought-provoking connections.

  Aquino is always careful to distance himself publicly from naz-ism,
but he is so fascinated by Hitler and Himmler that he once made a
pilgrimage to Wewelsburg Castle, the site Himmler planned as home to
his mystical order. He carried out some form of black magic ceremony
there, amidst the SS relics. When the Presidio scandal became news and
Aquino's name surfaced, the Pentagon denied that he was in the Army.
This was in 1981, at the same time that the Army was granting Aquino
his Top Secret security clear-ance. In reality, Aquino is an Army
specialist in psychological warfare. He wrote an article on "MindWar"
and PSYOPS (psycho-logical operations) and their use in controlling
mass populations. America's failure in Vietnam, he believes, was a
failure to apply the effects of "MindWar."

  In the conspiracy theory, the epidemic of Satanism across Amer-ica
stems from the U.S. government deploying MindWar against its own
people.


  "Some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some
because they are not fit to utter. We see all governments as obscure
and invisible." So declared Francis Bacon, founder of his own school
of Masonry, and of the inductive "scientific method." Ba-con didn't
issue that utterance with any intention of condemning government
secrecy. The governance of men, he believed, was necessarily a secret
affair. People are incapable of understanding what government does.
And some things that government does, it is best that the governed
never know.

  When governments are involved in terror and murder, it is not hard
to understand why they keep secrets from their people. Nor is it
surprising that Francis Bacon, given his immersion in secret
societies, would feel the way he did. If Bacon's reasoning holds true,
it might be better to have no government at all.

  A government that is obscure and invisible will inevitably, like the
Nazis, be a government based on conspiracy. The very act of keeping
government secrets is a conspiracy.

  Secret government--and by Bacon's cold logic, all governments are
secret--divorces everyone in society except the secret keepers from
any genuine understanding of the circumstances that govern their own
lives. Conspiracy theory is an attempt by a few minds to reclaim some
understanding.

  In this part of the book, I've tried to piece together as many slabs
and slices of information that I could find to support the kinds of
conspiracy theories that got me interested in the subject. These are
American conspiracy theories, many with long historical roots, but,
nonetheless, distinctively contemporary conspiracy theories. These are
theories born in a country too big and diverse to govern, but
permeated totally by government. A country whose basic ideal is
individual freedom, where daily life is dominated by authority. From
the runaway power of the presidency to the tyranny of workplace
management, liberty is strangely difficult to come by. We've
substituted the multicolored spectacle of consumerism for control over
our own lives, and we're supposed to think that be-cause we have so
much stuff available for purchase we have the freedom to choose. But
you can't fool everyone. Conspiracy theor-ists may not always be
right, but they are not fooled.

  The information in this section is not supposed to be an argument
for any particular conspiracy theory, although there seem to be plenty
in here. I've been trying to present a way of thinking about a society
where information is controlled, ergo, understanding is impossible.
Conspiracy theories are a guide to life in a strange and threatening
America: a conspiracy nation.

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