What is the conspiracy theory of history? Is it true? In this week’s column, I’m going to discuss the great Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the subject. As always, he is our best guide. Then, I’ll give examples of what Murray calls “good” conspiracy theories.
Murray begins his analysis by noting that the Establishment attacks the conspiracy theory: “Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a ‘conspiracy theory of history,’ ‘paranoid,’ ‘economic determinist,’ and even ‘Marxist.’ These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is ‘conspiracy theorist,’ almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the ‘conspiracy theorist’ himself.”
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Murray next points out that it is natural that the Establishment attack the conspiracy theory because it has an interest in saying that that the Deep State isn’t a plot to hold power but an inevitable development that it is futile to resist: “It is no wonder that usually these realistic analyses are spelled out by various ‘extremists’ who are outside the Establishment consensus. For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the ‘public good.’ Once let the cat out of the bag that these spirits are all too often grounded in the solid earth of advancing a set of economic interests through use of the State, and the basic mystique of government begins to collapse.”
Murray was a great teacher, and he gives us some simple example to show how to use conspiracy theories: “Let us take an easy example. Suppose we find that Congress has passed a law raising the steel tariff or imposing import quotas on steel? Surely only a moron will fail to realize that the tariff or quota was passed at the behest of lobbyists from the domestic steel industry, anxious to keep out efficient foreign competitors. No one would level a charge of ‘conspiracy theorist’ against such a conclusion. But what the conspiracy theorist is doing is simply to extend his analysis to more complex measures of government: say, to public works projects, the establishment of the ICC, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, or the entry of the United States into a war. In each of these cases, the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly?”
It’s a basic principle of Austrian economics that human beings act for a purpose, Rothbard says, and conspiracy theorists apply this principle: “Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of ‘conspiracy’ analysis who profess to believe that all events—at least in government—are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.”
It doesn’t follow that all conspiracy theories are right. Murray warns us against two fallacies: First, showing that someone benefits from a measure isn’t enough to show that he is behind the measure. That is a hypothesis that has to be investigated. Second, there isn’t One Big Conspiracy theory that explains all of history: “There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of ‘paranoia’ First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler’s policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, that therefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) Secondly, the bad conspiracy analyst seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several power blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume—again without evidence—that a small group of men controls them all and only seems to send them into conflict.”
Now that we have our basic framework for understanding the conspiracy theory. I’d like to give two examples of “good” conspiracy theories.
The first of these is the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. There is massive evidence that Franklin Roosevelt provoked the Japanese attack in order to get America into World War II. The great historian Robert Higgs summarizes the evidence: “A short comment is no place to settle the controversies that have raged ever since the attack about what Roosevelt and his chief subordinates knew in advance, but one thing has been known for a long time: however ‘dastardly’ the attack might have been, it was anything but ‘unprovoked.’ Indeed, even admirers and defenders of Roosevelt, such as Robert B. Stinnett and George Victor, have documented provocations aplenty. (See the former’s Day of Deceit: The Truth About Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor and the latter’s The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable.) On December 8, the same day that Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, former president Herbert Hoover wrote a private letter in which he remarked, ‘You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.’”
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Higgs presents his conclusion about what this evidence shows: “On the basis of facts accumulated over the past seven decades and available to anyone who cares to examine them, we are justified in saying that Hoover’s characterization of the war’s provocation was entirely accurate – both with regard to the Japanese imperial government as ‘rattlesnakes’ and with regard to the U.S. government’s ‘putting pins in.’ Indeed, we now have a much firmer basis for that characterization than Hoover could have had on December 8, 1941. Countless lies have been told, massive cover-ups have been staged, propaganda has flowed like a river, yet in this one regard, at least, the truth has undeniably been brought out.”
Higgs points out that some pro-Roosevelt historians praise him for his deception and make clear his own attitude toward this: “Most American historians, of course, no longer bother to deny this truth. They simply take it in stride, presuming that the Japanese attack, by giving Roosevelt the public support he needed to bring the United States into the war against Germany through the ‘the back door’ was a good thing for this country and for the world at large. Indeed, some actually shower the president with approbation for his mendacious maneuvering to wrench the American people away from their unsophisticated devotion to ‘isolationism.’ In no small part, Roosevelt’s unrelenting dishonesty with the American people (Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy tactfully refers to the president’s ‘frequently cagey misrepresentations’) in 1940 and 1941 – plain enough if one reads nothing more than his pre-Pearl Harbor correspondence with Winston Churchill – is counted among his principal qualifications for ‘greatness’ and for his (to my mind, incomprehensible) status as an American demigod.”
I’d like to turn to another “good” conspiracy theory: the string of political assassinations in the 1960s. Once more, let’s turn to Murray Rothbard; “John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on. In each of these atrocities, we are fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is supposed to have been performed, must have been performed, by ‘one lone nut’ – to which we can add the one lone nut who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement. One loner, a twisted psycho, whose motives are therefore of course puzzling and obscure, and who never, never acted in concert with anyone. (The only exception is the murder of Malcolm, where the evident conspiracy was foisted upon a few lowly members of the Black Muslims.) Even in the case of James Earl Ray, who was mysteriously showered with money, false passports, and double identities, and who vainly tried to claim that he was part of a conspiracy before he was shouted down by the judge and his own lawyer – even there the lone nut theory is stubbornly upheld. It is not enough that our intelligence is systematically insulted with me lone nut theory; we also have to be bombarded with the inevitable liberal hobby horses: a plea for gun control, Jeremiads about our ‘sick society’ and our ‘climate of violence’, and, a new gimmick, blaming the war in Vietnam for this climate and therefore for the assault on George Wallace. Without going into the myriad details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn’t anyone see a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what is more were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large sections of the populace against our rulers. All therefore constituted ‘populist’ threats against the ruling elite, especially if we focus on the mainstream ‘right-center’ wing of the ruling classes. Even as Establishmenty a figure as John F, Kennedy, the first of the victims, had the capacity to mobilize large segments of the public against the center-right Establishment.”
Let’s do everything we can to promote “good” conspiracy theories, following the path of the great Murray Rothbard!
