Extremism in the Pursuit of Historical Truth
This week, The New Yorker published an article on the John Birch Society.
It goes into the background of the forgotten missionary to China, John Birch. For this reason alone, the article deserves to be archived in your Evernote files. The article also provides a reasonable summary of the influence of the JBS on the conservative movement, especially in the 1960’s.
The author is a professor. He says that he keeps a poster of the Goldwater campaign on his office wall at the university.
I have several reasons for keeping a half-century-old “Goldwater for President” poster on a wall of my university office. It serves as a reminder of youthful political passion (I turned thirteen the day before Lyndon Johnson crushed the Arizona senator at the polls), and it pays tribute to the plainspoken candidate’s libertarian anti-Communism. It also, I suppose, offers my own bit of micro-aggression toward those colleagues–which would be all of them–who find Goldwater’s world view, if they know it, even more abhorrent than antique. establishment was attempting to cash in on the Communists. (The dots to connect here are found in the secretive publications of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council [USTEC] The biggest corporations in America were involved. Few research libraries have ever had its publications on the shelves.)
The far Right, represented by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, believed that there was in fact an underlying conspiracy on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In other words, there was something in the back of both sides of the Iron Curtain. There were, to put it in familiar terms, little men behind the curtain, except these little men were not so little. They were powerful, rich, and influential. They were, to use the phrase, the powers that be, or the powers behind the throne.
This is the essence of all conspiracy theories. There is always a hidden hand behind the events of the day. It is like a series of marionettes.
The danger of conspiracy theories is not that they undermine consensus. The danger is this: they can become secular or occult variations of Augustinianism and Calvinism. They substitute various conspiracies for God. They divinize some group. This leads to what R. J. Rushdoony called the grave-diggers’ mentality. Like the victims who are told to dig their graves before they are shot, standing in front of the grave, so are conspiracy buffs who divinize their enemies. They give up hope.
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