Online conspiracy theorists through the decades

I was going to post this in the Loose Change thread, but I figured it might have wider appeal than just that. I was paging through the textfiles.com archive of old BBS text files from the '80s and early '90s and found an entire category of conspiracy-nut literature that was circulating online back then. These were local bulletin boards, often operated in one guy's basement on an early personal computer with a few modems hooked up to it, although the boards tended to link together and share content, so a file posted to one board would circulate to boards all over the world. Quite a bit of the text-file content was stuff typed in from books and magazine articles and such. As an example of some of the older stuff still circulating online in the '80s and '90s, I found one file called How the CIA Controls President Ford, written by noted conspiracy maven L. Fletcher Prouty in 1975, and another from 1975 about the shady evils of Aristotle Onassis and the Kennedy clan.

It's interesting to see how the CTs stay pretty much the same over the years, even as the casts of characters shift piece by piece as new faces move in and out of the political and cultural limelight.

You know I've meant to mention this before but the 9/11 CT threads get so huge I can't keep up with them.

I have had a fascination with fringe politics for decades and in the 80s and 90s used to attend all sorts of meeting rallys etc. It is indeed bizarre how many of these stories and theroies get endlessly recycled.

I can remember when Jimmy Carter, controlled by the tri-lateral commison was preparing labor camps all across the US that were going to be put in use any day. Funny thing is each subsequent administration has also been accused of building seceret internment camps so by now there should be a huge surplus of slave labor facilities just waiting for the government to put to use.

Saddest was a guy I knew who maxed out his credit to donate money to the Libertarian party in the Bush vs. Dukakis election. His rational? If the Libertarians didn't win the world domination plans were already in place and there would never be another US election.

Some of the stories you hear now go back at least to the John Birch Society days. Maybe even further.

valis said:

If the Libertarians didn't win the world domination plans were already in place and there would never be another US election.

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Do you think we have had a fair election since then? Diebold will decide the next presidential race. Being a citizen or having a pulse are no longer requirements to vote.

Anti_Hypeman said:

Do you think we have had a fair election since then? Diebold will decide the next presidential race. Being a citizen or having a pulse are no longer requirements to vote.

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Yes I do. I also think there is a 'noise level' below which the results become fuzzy. For instance when the Florida count is within a thousand votes you can pretty much come up with any result you want.

You can look at butterfly ballots that may have led people trying to vote for Gore to vote for someone else.

You could look at people mistakenly labeled as felons who tried to vote and were unjustly denied the chance.

You could look to supposed roadblocks in minority neighberhoods.

-OR-

You could look for people who are part time Florida residents that vote in their home state 'up north' and in Florida; a not unheard of phenomana.

You could look for people who are not legal citizens but still register and vote; easy to do and also not unheard of.

It just depends what outcome you want to belive in.

I don't approve of the way paperless voting machines work either; but. It is a long way from that to saying that Diebpld will somehow fix all future elections. Assuming that Diebold favors evil baby eating Republicans; the November election results should show 0 Democrate victories in areas that the Diebold machines are used, correct? I realize that is an oversimplification but if we know how things are going to be fixed we should be able to predict some races ahead of time no?

If you think elections are now more corrupt and that at some golden age in America's past they were pristine or at least much less corrupt than they are currently then I would suggest you are dead wrong and have a un-realistic idea of how things were done in the past.

tacodaemon said:

It's interesting to see how the CTs stay pretty much the same over the years, even as the casts of characters shift piece by piece as new faces move in and out of the political and cultural limelight.

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Forget online conspiracy theorists. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people in ancient Greece that liked to stand in the agora shouting, "The battle at Thermopylae was staged! The evil rich government Illuminatis are trying to get us to fight Persia!"

and some of the 'logic' used to generate 9/11 CT is now being applied to the Mumbai bombings - http://s15.invisionfree.com/Loose_Change_Forum/index.php?showtopic=7906

Found this appended to the end of that incomprehensible outline:

IF YOU FOUND THIS OUTLINE INTERESTING: -

You won't be reading it in the papers for quite some time. At present the
only way to spread this information here in America is hand to hand.

Your help is needed. Please make 1, 5, 10, 100 copies or whatever you can,
and give them to friends or politicians, groups, media. This game is
nearly up. Either the Mafia goes or AMERICA goes.

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Well it's 2006....I guess "quite some time" was no joke! 30 years and it's still hush-hush eh?? The internet clearly has been a vehicle for CT loonies!! Back in the bad old days they had to spread wrinkled copies hand to hand....

-z

Senor_Pointy said:

Forget online conspiracy theorists. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people in ancient Greece that liked to stand in the agora shouting, "The battle at Thermopylae was staged! The evil rich government Illuminatis are trying to get us to fight Persia!"

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*sssssss*

You are forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because God doesn't want you to know the truth...

Government: able to have secret organizations, secret plots against the citizens, secret ways to plant explosives in the WTC, secret ways of rigging elections, and able to hide this from everyone except for sedentary internet geeks with lots of spare time.

Luke T. said:

*sssssss*

You are forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because God doesn't want you to know the truth...

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Dang, Luke!
You are a heck of a lot older than I thought!
Happy 6000th!

Luke T. said:

*sssssss*

You are forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because God doesn't want you to know the truth...

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Are you suggesting that the Serpent was the original conspiracy theorist? It is worrysome that that is the entire basis of all Abrahamic religions. Wanting to know the truth and reaching for it is the Original Sin. Knowledge is forbidden unless offered to you. Who controls knowledge controls people. I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of the religious beliefs of CTs, though because by rights, they should all be atheists, yet it's probably skeptics who tend more toward atheism than CTs.

Conspiracy Theories through the ages

I get a kick out of reading the stuff from the early 1960s, which warned us of imminent destruction at the hands of the Communists, the civil rights marchers, and Castro. John A. Stormer told us in "None Dare Call It Treason" that the Soviets would take us over by 1968. They invaded Czechoslovakia instead. I guess it was a lot easier than crossing the Atlantic.

I remember similar stuff during the late 1970s, when I was in high school, usually from Communist nutters at my high school, trying to recruit 16-year-olds to their parties and get them to sign petitions to get on the ballots (so much for legality). They wer obsessed with nuclear war and Ronald Reagan, convinced that the latter would launch the former. We had guys telling us that the ruling powers were launching a genocide against blacks and Latinos.

All these leaders, about to install a permanent and bloodthirsty dictatorship. And it never seems to happen. And the conspiracy theorists (except for egregious nuts like David Irving and Ernst Zundel) are all free as birds.

As Andy Rooney tartly observed, "Amazing how long we've been going to hell without getting there."

Kiwiwriter said:

As Andy Rooney tartly observed, "Amazing how long we've been going to hell without getting there."

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And as some unsung advertising copywriter once reminded us, "getting there is half the fun".

I'm inclined to suspect that paranoid conspiracy theories serve the same psychological needs that led the ancients to spin yarns about Olympus, or Enlil, or snakes and gardens. They provide simple, pat, just-so explanations for events in a very complex and only partially understood world, and they give us Someone To Blame (who, conveniently, is part of a group which is outside the pale of ordinary humanity) when bad things happen.

What online conspiracism shows is that modern communications technology has opened the field of myth and epic to the terminally untalented.

Psi Baba said:

Are you suggesting that the Serpent was the original conspiracy theorist? It is worrysome that that is the entire basis of all Abrahamic religions. Wanting to know the truth and reaching for it is the Original Sin. Knowledge is forbidden unless offered to you. Who controls knowledge controls people. I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of the religious beliefs of CTs, though because by rights, they should all be atheists, yet it's probably skeptics who tend more toward atheism than CTs.

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This reminds me of something my friend once pitched to me. His argument was that the serpent was the ideal of a rational, right thinking human being. He based it on the ideas that:

He persuaded humans to take their own knowledge, and their own morals (the knowledge was supposed to be "of good and evil"), not from god, but from nature.

Also, that he opposed "god's truth," which is the "truth" you are told without evidence and need faith to believe.

Now, I'd like to say that I'm a stalwart atheist, so I really have no idea about much of this.

Senor_Pointy said:

Forget online conspiracy theorists. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people in ancient Greece that liked to stand in the agora shouting, "The battle at Thermopylae was staged! The evil rich government Illuminatis are trying to get us to fight Persia!"

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I wonder if they all had British accents like in the movies.