The impact of conspiracies and conspiracism

While many view the Jan 6, 2020 riots as the highwater mark of conspiracy thinking, in fact, conspiratorial thought has long ruled the intelligence community.

Some conspiracies remain with us as shadows of their former selves, their effects only present in fringe ideas and topics while others in some form exist still today. For example the Elders of the Protocols of Zion the infamous text has radically changed from its former Belle Epoque origins, the rantings against the introduction of the gold standard now replaced with ravings against reptilians, democrats and anti-fa.

Others still influence us. Russia continues to wage asymmetrical warfare using troll farms, paid agitators (complete with thirst trap Houthi rebel pirates) and other aspects of informational warfare. Mass surveillance, once a hot-button issue in the mid to late 2000s has now become the accepted norm and Gen Z seems to care little of internet privacy or security.

When I was growing up it was generally an accepted viewpoint that the West had won the Cold War. That the countercultural movements of the 1960s-70s had failed due to their ideological beliefs, that socialism or other radical notions were dying, and we would all fall into line with liberal market democracies.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ which argued that the ruling class creates and sustains culturally created values, ideas and norms as part of an ideology. I bring this up because there was a time where there seemed like no other opinion but that this society, capitalist democracy was the only viable or acceptable format. When the Occupy movement occurred it seemed like a breath of fresh air, as if we were ready to make a change to what was occurring. That movement like many others was torn apart from within and without. We might consider then that the cultural hegemony of liberal democracies is sustained through a vicious and often unseen fight by the state and corporations to ensure that the status quo is maintained. 

Through the study of conspiracies, I have begun to reach a point where I have begun to question my assumptions on many common ideas and notions, and I have a vague unease at modern interpretations of history.

This is explored by Timothy Melley, an American studies scholar in his phenomenal book The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. He argues the creation of the CIA within the Cold War has not only had a profound impact on democracy but how the modern West views the world and nature of things. He points out how many of those who worked in the intelligence sector during the Cold War describe it in a similar way to post-modern writing such as CIA counterintelligence veteran James Jesus Angleton who called Cold War espionage a “wilderness of mirrors”[i] which saw a blurring of the authentic and the fabricated, reality and representation.  Melley points to the emergence of literary postmodernism and writers who struggled with concepts of reality and simulation, they all suffered from “epistemological uncertainty, a feeling that Cold War secrecy has made it difficult to know what is true or to narrate events as history”[ii].

This uncertainty seems to have become a fact in our modern world. The 2000s saw revelations of CIA and KGB involvement in operations and a flurry of revisionist interpretations of the Cold War that has meant we have had to reinterpret the scope and scale of these events. A decade ago, newspapers declared that: ‘Modern art was CIA 'weapon' as revelations of the secretive funding and ties to CIA front organisations was uncovered. We have now since tempered such views [iii] but this demonstrates that the study and disclosure of declassified material produces a bewildering feeling that every facet of life could be constructed, fabricated and manufactured.

I often think of an episode from ‘The Last podcast on the Left’ which at one point covered the MKUltra experiments. The host Henry struggles with discerning what is a ‘PSY-OP’ and what is not, and I have asked the same question:

Is Alex Jones a psy-op to discredit true UFO investigators?

The Westborough Baptist Church are they plants to demoralise anti-military sentiment?  

Is there really true opposition to wind farms or is it all an astro-turfed simulation?

While Henry’s theatrics are embellished (though his paranoid cries of “It’s all an OP!” ring in my head while I research) there is a hint of the truthful anxiety and nihilism in studying these events. Melley’s work raises important questions regarding the role intelligence agencies have on democracy, public institution and knowledge. This is what this website also aims to do.

This website not only covers hostile actions by authoritarian governments but also by purported democracies. The very fact that Western intelligence agencies have infiltrated activists organisations, have manipulated the media, have concocted controversies and situations, have assassinated and tortured political opponents—this should make us pause to question their purpose and function within a democracy. On top of this is that the CIA seems to have fallen for its own propaganda or projected its own fears onto the enemy. Melley writes that it is no coincidence that the early CIA was full of literature students and writers, as throughout the Cold War the agency proliferated ‘strategic fictions’, stories about the agency that aimed to sway public opinion on the CIA’s effectiveness and necessity.  Because of the need for institutional secrecy the relationship between the CIA and the public led to what Melley terms the ‘covert sphere’ in which the only form of discourse on what the CIA truly did was in narrative fiction such as TV, movies, books and later video games.  He argues that U.S leaders have been caught up in “cultural imaginary of the covert sphere”, that is to say that the policies and discussion is done through referencing narrative works which are distorted interpretations of the truth. Can we actually say what it is the CIA or ASIO do without referring back to James Bond or a modern-day spy fiction series?

This has produced strange effects on democracy. As part of counterespionage and as a way to ensure ‘plausible deniability’ the covert state compartmentalises knowledge, that is to say, who knows what. This compartmentalisation has led to ironic instances where U.S power decried violence while its security services conducted it.

We find instances such as in 1953 when Eisenhower called for states sovereignty to be upheld while the CIA worked to overthrow the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq or in 1961 when JFK decried political violence such as assassination around the same time that the CIA plotted the murder of Cuban president Fidel Castro and Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Melley believes that the issue is not simply a monolithic covert state versus a duped public. In fact, the covert sphere means that public knowledge of covert operations is in the oxymoronic state of an open secret. This is a paradoxical arrangement with the democratic state: the covert state justifies itself as defender of democracy and freedom that is defended through undemocratic and repressive means. The public and administration choose to look away at what the covert state essentially telling themselves: “I can’t know, and I don’t want to know” or “I believed I knew, but I am shocked to discover”, this has the same effect of complicity despite the air of denial or disavowal as the outcome remains the same. The point being is that the covert state, whether ASIO or the CIA or MI5 are rarely if ever held accountable for what they have done, and we are caught up with a fiction that they themselves have created to mask what they truly do. Unaccountable power as you will see throughout this book often leads to terrible outcomes and we have seemingly given up this accountability as a trade-off for the illusion of security. Now if ever do we face a crossroads for society; the world slowly grows more authoritarian and far-right fuelled by war and the climate crisis.

While the situation may seem hopeless I point to you the stories in this website of everyday people who stood up to such immense and overwhelmingly hopeless situations: the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who resisted the Videla regime despite threats to their lives and families, the ordinary East German citizens who helped smuggle dissident literature and people out to the West or the American radicals who broke into the FBI headquarters to uncover their abuses, in the darkness a light shines brightest.

[i] Timothy Melley. The Covert Sphere : Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. 2013. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. P.39

[ii] Ibid page 40.

[iii] LucieLevine 2020. “Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?” JSTOR Daily. April 1, 2020. https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/.