AIDS

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img acquired="" aids="" alt="and" border="0" conspiracy="" contentious="" emergence="" has="" highly="" immun="" of="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYPoseNAVStSI3GQVb-7aX9PwGhvJCC2fEMatoizqWNbThm5FaUpyfYkpNU2bMexRNObK9NBLEq2sZbQIMdyutM70-tPmUPCy8RzGOz1WvmHgEo3ckHqv0ovDfUnekqZHLmaglv1bGo7eg/s1600/aids.jpg" surrounded="" the="" theories="" title="AIDS" /></a></div> <br /> In the last twenty years, one of the most well-known, enduring, and highly contentious conspiracy theories has surrounded the emergence of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).<br /> <br /> Essentially, this theory proposes that HIV was a human-made virus and was either accidentally, or more likely deliberately, introduced into the human population. But beyond this consensus, AIDS conspiracy theories come in a wide variety of forms, especially around the objectives and targets of the conspiracy.<br /> <br /> Among the issues raised by AIDS conspiracy theories are the relation between science and politics, the history of chemical and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812966538/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0812966538&linkId=c64cc0dd9ab63dd6ec183ea049a4240d" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">biological warfare</a>, race and genocide, and the effects of conspiracy theories in general on health, behavior, and politics.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312374631/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=a912a61f6c91198d607f63d5cb6448dc" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0312374631&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img acquired="" aids="" alt="and" border="0" conspiracy="" contentious="" emergence="" has="" height="1" highly="" immun="" of="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0312374631" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" surrounded="" the="" theories="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008XV5S7I/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=5a3d3ce232792062e59e61714b1a0746" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B008XV5S7I&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img acquired="" aids="" alt="and" border="0" conspiracy="" contentious="" emergence="" has="" height="1" highly="" immun="" of="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B008XV5S7I" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" surrounded="" the="" theories="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Almost since the beginning of the AIDS crisis, conspiracy theories were among the explanations that were used to try to account for this new <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0985811803/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0985811803&linkId=d763de40532b7e700b1350944f1182e1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mysterious disease</a>. While official virologists and others were isolating the HIV/HTLV virus in France and the United States, the account of its origin was (and still is) debated.<br /> <br /> The Green Monkey Hypothesis (the belief that the virus jumped species in Africa) was becoming dominant during late 1980s. Also receiving publicity at this time was the conspiracytinged conservative moralism that blamed the victims of AIDS for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DC3C5YQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B00DC3C5YQ&linkId=a138c7cb7540f2c41ee64ff5885f9c6a" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sinful behavior</a>.<br /> <br /> But as far back as 1983 stickers appeared in gay urban districts (like the Castro area in San Francisco) proclaiming that AIDS emerged from a government laboratory, not the gay community. Helped along by the gay press and word of mouth, the theory that AIDS was human-made began to receive attention.<br /> <br /> In 1984, the Indian newspaper the New Delhi Patriot charged that AIDS was a genetically engineered agent. Citing an anonymous U.S. anthropologist as well as U.S. Army research literature, the article asserted that HIV was created at the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. About a year later, a Soviet journal picked up the story and began to cover the allegations regularly.<br /> <br /> This series, along with a Pravda cartoon depicting a U.S. scientist exchanging a vial containing the AIDS virus for money from a U.S. military man, made the AIDS conspiracy theory vulnerable to the charge of being Soviet disinformation. But soon a number of researchers and doctors on both sides of the Iron Curtain began to investigate the murky origins of AIDS. The following sections elaborate the variety of conspiracy theories that emerged from these investigations.<br /> <br /> <b>The Early Researchers</b><br /> <br /> In 1986 East German scientists Jakob and Lilli Segal self-published a fifty-two-page pamphlet titled AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil. In it they introduce the splice theory of HIV, which most subsequent conspiracy theories adopt.<br /> <br /> In essence, the splice theory argues that HIV is a result of the scientifically engineered, artificial splicing of two or more already existing viruses (both human and other animal). In the Segals’ account, an artificial splice between a visna (sheep) virus and a human one (HTLV-1) produced HIV.<br /> <br /> The Segals claimed that this splice was performed at Fort Detrick, Maryland (the U.S. military base for chemical and biological weapons research and development), thereby introducing the chemical-biological warfare (CBW) context to explain AIDS. However, the Segals did not promote the idea that the virus was deliberately introduced into the general populace.<br /> <br /> They argued that the virus was tested on some U.S. prison inmates, who accidentally spread it to New York’s gay community. The Segals blamed the epidemic on general U.S. malfeasance, especially the unethical use of scientific experiments, and called for more scientific research into the matter.<br /> <br /> The Segals’ claims were dismissed by some as KGB disinformation and embraced by others who used the research for their own theories. Perhaps the most infamous of these followers is Dr. William C. Douglass. His book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1881316009/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1881316009&linkId=261b62068ea3c4ccdb810e4e6d557375" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">AIDS: The End of Civilization</a>, accepted the visna/HTLV splice theory and its origin at Fort Detrick, but asserted that the virus was deliberately introduced into the populace.<br /> <br /> Douglass believed that AIDS was a Communist plot to destroy Western civilization, and that Soviet agents in the U.S. scientific and military communities were responsible for its creation.<br /> <br /> In addition, Douglass added the claim (which others subsequently picked up) that the World Health Organization (WHO) orchestrated HIV’s spread in Africa, while the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was responsible for its spread in the United States. He also asserted that AIDS could be contracted through casual contact (e.g., mosquitoes and saliva).<br /> <br /> Douglass’s work concludes with a call to boost law-and-order measures in the United States (including quarantining HIV-positive people), dismantling the WHO and <a href=" " target="_blank">the United Nations</a>, and fighting communism in general. In an ironic twist, the Segals’ theory, which was labeled KGB propaganda by some, was turned into an anticommunist conspiracy theory.<br /> <br /> Another influential conspiracy theorist in this vein is Dr. Robert Strecker, head of the Strecker Group. Strecker’s major work is a low-budget video titled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I16V1GC/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B00I16V1GC&linkId=c1de49dd820f81d3bb160885633e0b13" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Strecker Memorandum</a>, which was made available via mail-order. The video primarily consists of Strecker lecturing to a handful of people (including the video’s producer) and explaining his theory on a chalkboard.<br /> <br /> Strecker argues there that HIV is a result of a visna virus being spliced with a bovine (cow) virus, and that this new virus was deliberately introduced into the populace via vaccine programs by the WHO in Africa and the CDC in the United States. Strecker also promoted the casual contact model of the virus, believing that AIDS was contagious—a kind of viral cancer (and that there were at least six different varieties of AIDS).<br /> <br /> Strecker only insinuated that a Communist plot was behind AIDS, instead placing the history of unethical experimentation on humans in a CBW context. Strecker called for research into electromagnetic cures and a curtailing of intravenous drug use, sexual promiscuity, and blood products.<br /> <br /> Both Strecker and Jakob Segal were interviewed for a Sunday Express (London) story on 26 October 1986. This British tabloid story was the first time a prominent Western paper had published an AIDS-as-biowarfare theory without ridicule, and it engendered a hostile response by the U.S. State Department (which accused the New Delhi newspaper that published the earlier AIDS biowarfare story of being a Communist front). Six months later, on 11 May 1987, the Times (London) carried a cover story linking AIDS to the WHO’s African smallpox vaccine programs.<br /> <br /> Strecker and the Segals influenced Dr. Alan Cantwell, who gave this conspiracy theory a new political angle. Cantwell is perhaps the most prolific of AIDS conspiracy theorists, beginning with the books AIDS: The Mystery and the Solution, AIDS and the Doctors of Death, and The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot and continuing into the twenty-first century with numerous articles in publications such as Paranoia and Steamshovel Press.<br /> <br /> While Cantwell agrees that HIV was human-made (though he leaves the possibility open that it is an old virus), deliberately introduced into humans, and spread via the WHO and the CDC, he does not agree with the right-wing politics of some of his colleagues.<br /> <br /> Instead, Cantwell claims that the “military-medical industrial complex” involved in CBW is responsible for AIDS. Cantwell introduces the idea that the objective of AIDS is genocide, especially against gays. He also adds that one of the side effects of this genocidal aktivitas is the introduction of a <a href=" " rel="" target="_blank">New World Order</a>.<br /> <br /> Cantwell calls for better education, better health practitioners, and fighting back against power to stop the epidemic. In a similar vein, G. J. Krupey (whose conspiracy research does not focus primarily on AIDS) has perhaps the hypothesis closest to a left-wing AIDS conspiracy theory. In his article “AIDS: Act of God or the Pentagon?”<br /> <br /> Krupey follows Cantwell’s model, but adds that an AIDS panic could potentially justify the suspension of civil liberties and the installation of martial law. Krupey states that a radical cure is needed, one that is not just medical, but political. A structural change in governing practices is required in which access and participation are opened up on a far more democratic scale.<br /> <br /> While the early researchers came from a variety of medical professions, geographical locations, and political positions, what unites them is the fact that they criticize science’s connection to corruption and military research (CBW) yet rely on scientific evidence to prove their own conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> In addition, most of the conspiracy theories cite the 1969 congressional testimony of Dr. Donald MacAruthur, deputy director for the Department of Defense’s research and technology. Speaking to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations with regard to military chemical and biological warfare programs, MacArthur was speaking on the subject of synthetic biological agents.<br /> <br /> Asked about the feasibility, time, and cost of producing a synthetic biological agent, MacArthur responded: “Within the next five to ten years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.” For the conspiracy researchers, MacArthur was essentially calling for a new synthetic virus that would attack the human immune system, and his words predated the AIDS epidemic by ten years.<br /> <br /> This testimony, along with the general history of overt and covert biowarfare research (which became officially banned in the early 1970s, while becoming privatized for defense purposes), of scientific experimentation on unwitting subjects, and of calls for global population control, brings together the early conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> <b>The Nonviral Theories</b><br /> <br /> Another set of theories emerged in the 1980s that have been classified as conspiracy theories, even though they share little with the above theories. These are the nonviral theories of AIDS, whose most well-known proponents are Dr. Peter Duesberg (Why We Will Never Win the War on AIDS, 1994, and Inventing the AIDS Virus, 1996), Jon Lauritsen (The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical Industrial Complex, 1993), Jad Adams (AIDS: The HIV Myth, 1989), and Jon Rappaport (AIDS, Incorporated: The Scandal of the Century, 1988).<br /> <br /> Nonviral theories posit multifactorial causes of AIDS (combination of drugs, behavioral practices, social factors—malnutrition, pollution) and even multi-diseases (that AIDS is often a misdiagnosis of various other conditions).<br /> <br /> Purposeful targeting of groups is not usually a major component of nonviral theories. Rather than conspiracy, they emphasize collusion (medical, pharmaceutical, and governmental institutions) and coverup (countervailing evidence is ignored and suppressed because it might threaten research funding and careers of mainstream scientists).<br /> <br /> These nonviral theories concern the origins of AIDS, while AIDS conspiracy theories concern the origins of HIV. They often get lumped together with conspiracy theories because of their marginal, dissident status in the scientific community, along with their critical stance toward the corruption of that community.<br /> <b><br /> </b> <b>African American Genocide Theories</b><br /> <br /> Probably the most publicized of AIDS conspiracy theories is the African American genocide theory. This theory in general claims that AIDS was created to exterminate blacks, both African Americans as well as Africans.<br /> <br /> It is a theory espoused by the Nation of Islam’s medical director, by celebrities Spike Lee, Bill Cosby, and John Singleton, and by numerous radio talk-shows such as Black Liberation Radio. Representative texts of this theory include Haki R. Madhubuti’s essay, “AIDS: the Purposeful Destruction of the Black World?” which appears in his 1990 book Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?<br /> <br /> Here Madhubuti uses the work of Douglass and Strecker, placing it in the context of the history of scientific experimentation on blacks (especially the Tuskegee experiment). In this version, CBW is linked to the systematic oppression of Africans around the world, and HIV is the latest weapon in this deliberate genocide.<br /> <br /> African American genocide theories of AIDS have engendered the largest response to AIDS conspiracy theories. Health educators have cited these conspiracy theories as an obstacle to trust in their efforts. Most disturbing for the educators is the link between conspiracy theories and a belief in casual contact.<br /> <br /> A study on how suspicion of government activities regarding AIDS impacts on behavior was carried out by social psychologists Gregory M. Herek and John P. Capitanio. The study correlates AIDS-related distrust to beliefs about casual-contact transmission and to personalrisk reduction behaviors.<br /> <br /> It found that beliefs about casual contact were not related to beliefs in the genocidal purpose of AIDS, but the authors still speculated that the lack of trust in health educators springs from suspicions about malicious intent on the part of the government.<br /> <br /> In a separate study, Stephen Thomas and Sandra Crouse Quinn argue that public health professionals must recognize that African Americans’ belief in AIDS-asgenocide is a legitimate attitudinal barrier with an understandable basis in history (including the Tuskegee experiment). The authors call for a dialogue in order to develop and implement HIV education programs that are scientifically sound, culturally sensitive, and ethnically sensitive.<br /> <br /> Health behavior has not been the only concern when it comes to African American conspiracy theories. Coupled with the CIA-crack conspiracy theory, the AIDS conspiracy account has been defined as part of “black paranoia,” whether as a collective psychological state of mind or an “understandable” historical and social phenomenon.<br /> <br /> One politically inflected version of this approach is David Gilbert’s 1996 cover story in Covert Action Quarterly, “Tracking the Real Genocide: AIDS—Conspiracy or Unnatural Disaster?” Gilbert’s article makes the provocative claim that conspiracy theories are both politically disabling and health endangering.<br /> <br /> He provides a two-tiered critique of these beliefs—scientific and political (but focusing on the latter). By diverting attention from the social conditions and economic structures that shape the contemporary AIDS crisis, conspiracy theories perform a disservice to their promoters.<br /> <br /> Gilbert essentially argues that conspiracy theories contribute to the toll of unnecessary AIDS deaths. Unlike more mainstream criticisms of African American AIDS conspiracy theories, Gilbert’s argument does not dismiss them as paranoid. He depicts them as misguided, but with deadly effects.<br /> <br /> The responses to African American AIDS conspiracy theories demonstrate the response to AIDS conspiracy theories more generally. David Gilbert follows other political progressives’ and activists’ perspective in their concern over conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> John S. James, an AIDS activist, argued in 1986 that germ warfare conspiracy theories were not useful. Even if the theories were proven true, according to James, the result would be punishing the guilty, not saving lives.<br /> <br /> Conspiracy theory distracts from a better use of political and educational activism, which is to inform the public about the neglect and mismanagement of treatment research. When the New York Native folded in 1997, the gay news magazine was credited with pioneering AIDS coverage in the early 1980s, as well as criticized as a forum for conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> For James, as for many others, the conspiracy is a conspiracy of silence, a pattern of ignorance about and mismanagement of AIDS treatment research by scientists, government officials, doctors, and journalists.<br /> <br /> Cultural theorist and activist Simon Watney echoes this sentiment when he argues that AIDS may not be a conscious policy to exterminate gay men, but the long-term consequences of government action and inaction may have the same effects as if it were intentional. Watney suggests that origin stories may be irrelevant to the crisis. Moreover, for many activists, alternative origin stories have a strong link to oppressive reactionary agendas (e.g., Duesberg).<br /> <b><br /> </b> <b>Recent Developments</b><br /> <br /> In the past few years, AIDS conspiracy theories have connected with other conspiracy theories, influenced political activism, and have gone global. Dr. Leonard Horowitz’s tome Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola—Nature, Accident, or Intentional? represents a synthesis of previous theories.<br /> <br /> Horowitz links the CBW context to black genocide, but the overall context is a history of U.S. political wrongdoing (including the Nazi roots of the CIA, intimidation of domestic dissenters, global populationcontrol programs, and foreign-policy misconduct leading to a New World Order).<br /> <br /> Horowitz also founded and heads Tetrahedron, Inc., a nonprofit educational corporation, which provides employee assistance and education, professional development seminars, and health education products and programs, and organizes Horowitz’s extensive lecture tours. He has implemented his conspiracy theory into an organization devoted to educational reform, political activism, and health awareness.<br /> <br /> Another example of conspiracy theories affecting political activism is the case of the Brotherly Lovers, an AIDS activist group based in Pittsburgh, who have attempted to spearhead a classaction petition for a government investigation into the possible artificial, biowarfare origin of HIV.<br /> <br /> AIDS conspiracy theories have also been integrated into other popular conspiracy theories. In an article entitled “The AIDS-ET Connection” Phillip S. Duke claims to furnish a unifying hypothesis about AIDS—the gray alien agenda. The goal of this aktivitas is to rid the earth of human life and establish an alien settlement.<br /> <br /> In this theory, AIDS has been deliberately introduced into the human population by these aliens as a way of freeing up space for colonization. Bill Cooper, prominent late U.S. conspiracy theorist, has also suggested that CBW may be part of an alien agenda.<br /> <br /> Cooper’s work is even more significant because in 2000 it was cited as an influence on a South African health minister’s account of AIDS in Africa. At the same time, the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, controversially suggested that Duesberg’s nonviral theory should be studied as a possible explanation for the continuing tragedy in Africa.<br /> <br /> Most recently, Edward Hooper’s best-selling The River has created newfound controversy with its claims that HIV originated in the 1950s with the vaccination of over a million African children. Hooper does not claim that AIDS was deliberately created and spread by humans, but that an experimental form of oral polio vaccine was contaminated with SIV (the ancient simian equivalent of HIV), and this negligence led to the current AIDS epidemic.<br /> <br /> <b>Responses</b><br /> <br /> AIDS conspiracy theories raise the general issue of science in relation to both conspiracy theories and their critics. When is science questioned, and when is it cited as evidence? Such AIDS conspiracy theorists as Cantwell, Strecker, Douglass, and Horowitz have drifted away from conventional science to the marginal status of “renegade” scientists, but their narratives retain scientific techniques.<br /> <br /> They seek authority through their own pedigrees, they conduct research, and their reports contain the language and styles of citation and evidence employed in mainstream AIDS science. The most recent debates over Edward Hooper’s The River revive the question of how alternative or dissident scientific accounts challenge and/or support conventional science.<br /> <br /> In general, AIDS conspiracy theories are typically positioned as a distraction from real research and activism. But just as there are a variety of accounts that can be grouped under the term AIDS conspiracy theory, so are there a variety of responses to them.<br /> <br /> Some of the preceding sections have demonstrated a few of those responses (Gilbert, Fiske, James, Watney, the studies on behavior). Others include cultural analyst Peter Knight’s analysis of AIDS conspiracy theories as they are related to cultural panics over the body in the 1980s and 1990s, and John Fiske’s controversially sympathetic assessment of the AIDS-asblack-genocide account.<br /> <br /> Fiske calls the account a “counterknowledge,” which involves reworking facts, events, and information the dominant knowledge has repressed or dismissed as insignificant. Above all, according to Fiske, a counterknowledge must be socially and politically motivated. Fiske proceeds with a series of close readings of radio talk-show dialogues, primarily culled from Black Liberation Radio.<br /> <br /> In these accounts, AIDS is folded into a genocidal framework, and it is this resonance with African American history and lived experience that Fiske argues is lacking among mainstream whites, and thus produces an aversion to the concept of genocide. Fiske does not simply affirm the truth of the genocide account. Ultimately he argues that when it comes to AIDS conspiracy theories, people need to examine their strategies of disbelief.<br /> <br /> As cultural theorist Paula Treichler argues, conspiracy theories are part of the larger “epidemic of signification” that the AIDS epidemic has generated—an epidemic that must be examined, not ignored or casually dismissed. AIDS conspiracy theories crystallize the stakes involved in the overall problematization of conspiracy theories, especially with regard to the behavioral and political effects of conspiracy theories.

AIDS

In the last twenty years, one of the most well-known, enduring, and highly contentious conspiracy theories has surrounded the emergence o...

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MOVE

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXixprt-AfB7XrozJtyx177D_PhzveNOk5qG21kiBjlhiOkKiQHAXabhtd6EhP9HW6Fb80pIaWeVVq50DXaQRuMI0ZhO1XYlIG1eIsjlmAPoq1id15TsmyezrypA2VhP-dMNiYZcZ_goB/s1600/move.jpg" width="470" /></a></div> <br /> A radical African American activist organization, MOVE was influenced by many of the Left’s turn to paranoia and conspiratorial thinking in the counter-cultural years of the late 1960s and early 1970s.<br /> <br /> Like those that made up the Weathermen and the Black Panther Party, MOVE members saw mainstream U.S. culture as beyond repair, and sought to form a counterconspiracy to create an alternative society in which its members could live.<br /> <br /> MOVE—it is unclear if the name of the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>organization</a> has ever acted as a specific acronym—was founded in 1972 in the Powelton Village neighborhood of Philadelphia by African American handyman Vincent Leaphart. With the assistance of white graduate-student activist Donald Glassey, Leaphart (now calling himself John Africa; all MOVE members took the last name of Africa) wrote the Guidelines, a manifesto detailing the beliefs of MOVE.<br /> <br /> This document, clearly influenced by the counter-cultural New Left, Black Power, and environmental movements of the late 1960s/early 1970s, attempted to establish MOVE as a viable political organization, touching upon such themes as racism, police brutality, vegetarianism, <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>technology</a>, and political representation. In fact, much of MOVE’s early writings and rhetoric attempted to revive and build upon these earlier movements and, in the process, cure them of their excesses.<br /> <br /> Africa stressed the importance of cleansing one’s body, insisting that his followers abstain from all drugs and medicines, alcohol, meat, and ostentatious clothing. Science was “a trick” that only served to inculcate people into the “addictions” of the “System lifestyle” (Anderson and Hevenor, 9). What was needed, Africa stressed, was a back-to-nature manner of living.<br /> <br /> There would therefore be no birth control practiced within the MOVE organization, and members’ diets would consist almost exclusively of raw fruits and vegetables. Trash, human <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>waste</a>, and even dead animals were left to “cycle” back to the earth on MOVE property, leading to run-ins with both neighbors and the Philadelphia police.<br /> <br /> At the same time, MOVE children were to be naked in the summer and only lightly clothed in the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>winter</a>, while adult males and females were commanded to grow their hair into unwashed dreadlocks and dress alike in blue jeans, blue denim jackets, and heavy-soled men’s boots.<br /> <br /> MOVE saw schools, political parties and leaders, and all branches of the law as corrupt and enslaving. Moreover, the forces that controlled such institutions were viewed as actively conspiring against MOVE members and their allies.<br /> <br /> For example, as MOVE member Jeanne Africa explained, “drugs were in the black community for a long time, but they didn’t have [drug rehabilitation] programs until it got into the white community .... The hierarchy would give you drugs to control you”.<br /> <br /> To MOVE, the most concrete representatives of this hierarchy were the police, and MOVE held many demonstrations aimed at focusing attention on issues of police abuse and brutality (Philadelphia, under law-and-order Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, had a national reputation for police misconduct during much of the 1970s).<br /> <br /> In a seven-month period in 1975, MOVE members were arrested on misdemeanor charges more than 150 times, fined $15,000, and sentenced to several lengthy prison sentences. Seeing the court system as perhaps the most oppressive tool of the “System” conspiracy, MOVE members made it a point to interrupt these sentencing hearings, often turning MOVE trials into veritable sideshows.<br /> <br /> As the 1970s drew to a close, MOVE’s rhetoric became more fiery and condemnatory, while their political activities became more confrontational— with members often seen brandishing firearms. Such trends were intensified after an 8 August 1978 confrontation with the police, which resulted in one officer dead and nine MOVE members sentenced to 30–100 years for their roles in the melee.<br /> <br /> Seeing themselves once again as victims of unwarranted oppression, MOVE made it their mission—from their new headquarters on Osage Avenue in west Philadelphia—to continuously call for the release of the “MOVE 9,” whom they saw as political prisoners in their struggle against the tyrannical Philadelphia government.<br /> <br /> This campaign, often carried out through megaphones and speakers from inside the increasingly fortified MOVE compound, reached its violent conclusion on 13 May 1985, when a showdown between the organization and the Philadelphia city government left eleven members dead (six adults and five children) and sixty-one homes destroyed. MOVE member Ramona Africa was convicted on riot and conspiracy charges in connection with the conflict, and served seven years in prison.<br /> <br /> MOVE continued to stay in the news throughout the remaining years of the 1980s, and even into the twenty-first century. In the aftermath of the tremendous destruction on Osage Avenue, then-Mayor Wilson W. Goode appointed the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission to examine the events leading up to, and including, the attack on MOVE.<br /> <br /> In March 1986, the commission issued a report condemning the actions of the city government, concluding that “dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable”. In June 1996, a jury ordered the city of Philadelphia and two former city officials—then-Police Commissioner Gregor Sambor and then-Fire Commissioner William Richard—to pay $1.5 million to a survivor and relatives of two members who died in the May 1985 confrontation.<br /> <br /> To many MOVE members and supporters, such findings vindicated their belief that the city had actively conspired against them throughout the previous two decades, and was now being made to pay for such actions.<br /> <br /> During the 1990s, many supporters of convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal—who had written extensively on the 1978 MOVE confrontation and resulting trials—argued that Abu-Jamal had received an unjust sentence based in part on his association with MOVE.<br /> <br /> Finally, in September 2002 a man involved in a bitter custody dispute with a member of MOVE was found shot to death in a car in New Jersey, the same day he was to pick up the boy for an unsupervised visit.<br /> <br /> While there was no evidence tying the organization to the murder, MOVE representatives quickly denied any involvement in the crime, and in fact argued that the government was setting up MOVE for the killing. A steadfast belief in a vast conspiracy against them has clearly followed MOVE into the new millennium.

MOVE

A radical African American activist organization, MOVE was influenced by many of the Left’s turn to paranoia and conspiratorial thinking ...

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Film and Conspiracy Theory

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6A5GNEiMVgRFZTUDSwRnMH5FUrTINjCOfR7ckNH-5ohaM9KQs8x8Is4z1L8HhcedLXLcEXTjWfvktJnempzW4OIjxgFnFZJNrpMWs2Pcrb2R9J19M0SvqSXSXUlmfqnNCj6juxgkaDlA/s1600/Conspiracy-theory.jpg" that="" theory="" title="Film" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Film and Conspiracy Theory</td></tr> </tbody></table> Films that center on or significantly include a conspiracy have been around as long as most other genres of fiction films. To take one notorious early example, The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith 1915) portrays the original Ku Klux Klan (KKK), positively, as a conspiracy by Southern whites to overturn gains made by African Americans during the post–<a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Civil War Reconstruction</a>. <br /> <br /> Generally, though, traditional “secret societies” such as the KKK have appeared in films only sporadically. (Two recent examples are the organization based on Yale University’s <a href=" " target="_blank">Skull and Bones society</a> in The Skulls [dir. Rob Cohen 2000], and the legendary <a href=" " target="_blank">Illuminati</a> in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider [dir. Simon West 2001].) As in many conspiracy theories, conspiracies in films tend to be amorphous. <br /> <br /> And as with all genres of popular film, conspiracy movies follow cycles that vary with changing trends in the wider culture (Altman). There have been three major cycles: from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s during the cold war, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s in the postVietnam, post-Watergate era, and from the early 1990s to the present.<br /> <br /> <b>The Cold War and the “International Communist Conspiracy”</b><br /> <br /> The first important cycle of conspiracy films begins in the late 1940s with the start of the cold war and concern over the so-called international Communist conspiracy. Some of these films follow the efforts of federal agents to combat Communist spy rings and fifth columns, such as <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B002DQQ96S" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="9569b4b0dba424d4fb198d6d6cae8137" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="I Was a Communist for the FBI" href="http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Philip-Carey-Dorothy-Lovejoy/dp/B002DQQ96S/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=9569b4b0dba424d4fb198d6d6cae8137&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_2167553" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">I Was a Communist for the FBI</a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_2167553" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=9569b4b0dba424d4fb198d6d6cae8137&_cb=1457003036848" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="0" /> (dir. Gordon Douglas 1951); the similarly premised TV series I Led Three Lives (1953– 1956), scripts for which were vetted in advance by the FBI; Walk East on Beacon (dir. Alfred Werker 1952); and the perfectly ludicrous Big Jim McClain (dir. Edward Ludwig 1952), featuring western stars John Wayne and James Arness as agents of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) foiling a Soviet plot to take control of Hawaiian ports by infiltrating waterfront labor unions.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006WWE2BI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B006WWE2BI&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=KJJYYYLKZE6R2A2C"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B006WWE2BI&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="1" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B006WWE2BI" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KG2S00O/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=94dd16991593881846c177e07ef7a467" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00KG2S00O&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="1" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B00KG2S00O" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Another group of Communist conspiracy films concerns the protagonists’ discovery that people close to them are secretly Communists: a woman’s husband in Conspirator (dir. Arthur Hornblow 1949) and I Married a Communist (a.k.a. Woman on Pier 13) (dir. Robert Stevenson 1950); a war veteran’s girlfriend in <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B00AOO5OSK" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="c71903a30107da108229ad0e7fa1c548" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="The Red Menace" href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Red-Menace-Robert-Rockwell/dp/B00AOO5OSK/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=c71903a30107da108229ad0e7fa1c548&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_197478" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Red Menace</a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_197478" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=c71903a30107da108229ad0e7fa1c548&_cb=1457003106786" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="0" /> (dir. R. G. Springsteen 1949); a couple’s son in My Son John (dir. Leo McCarey 1952); and a man’s coworkers in The Fearmakers (dir. Jacques Tourneur 1958). <br /> <br /> These and dozens more along the same lines, none of them successful at the box office, were probably released to allay suspicions about the patriotism of people in the film industry (Leab, 26) at a time when it was widely alleged that Hollywood had been infiltrated by clandestine subversives, and many film workers, especially writers, were blacklisted by the studios and some (the “Hollywood 10”) were even jailed by the government. Unsurprisingly, no real effort to understand the Communists and their aims is made in these “red” conspiracy films, except to suggest that they are motivated by greed, hunger for power, and so on. <br /> <br /> A pastiche with a clever twist is The House on Carroll Street (dir. Peter Yates 1988), written by Walter Bernstein, who had himself been put on the blacklist, about a leftist writer persecuted for refusing to cooperate with the HUAC who teams up with an FBI agent to uncover a government conspiracy to smuggle Nazi war criminals into the United States to aid in the cold war. Blacklisted screenwriters feature in The Front (dir. Martin Ritt 1976), also scripted by Bernstein, and in The Majestic (dir. Frank Darabont 2001).<br /> <br /> The classic Communist conspiracy film <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B00AEFYLBU" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="410691d742429c9c74eb45b19bbf78e3" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="The Manchurian Candidate" href="http://www.amazon.com/Manchurian-Candidate-The-Blu-ray-Various/dp/B00AEFYLBU/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=410691d742429c9c74eb45b19bbf78e3&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_7496969" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Manchurian Candidate</a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_7496969" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=410691d742429c9c74eb45b19bbf78e3&_cb=1457003141630" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="0" /> (dir. John Frankenheimer 1962) was released at a time when relations with the Communist bloc were already beginning to move toward détente and the fear of communist subversion within the United States had greatly diminished. In consequence, films began openly critiquing cold war paranoia, as in Seven Days in May (dir. John Frankenheimer 1964), in which opposition to U.S.<br /> <br /> Soviet nuclear disarmament inspires a plot to overthrow the government and install a military regime. (The generals’ coup concept was more recently, and prophetically, recycled in <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B000OT6V0K" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="5bc7c5c1ab2864e9b35dc0a07ac8853f" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="The Siege" href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Siege-Martial-Law-Edition/dp/B000OT6V0K/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=5bc7c5c1ab2864e9b35dc0a07ac8853f&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_1221605" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Siege</a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_1221605" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=5bc7c5c1ab2864e9b35dc0a07ac8853f&_cb=1457003172357" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="0" /> [dir. Edward Zwick 1998], in which a terrorist campaign by Arab fundamentalists in New York provides the military an excuse to impose martial law.) By the late 1960s, international conspiracy paranoia had become spoof material in The President’s Analyst (dir. Theodore J. Flicker 1967) and in James Bond movies. <br /> <br /> Subsequent “straight” cold war conspiracy suspense films usually seem like throwbacks to a distant past, although a few are quite well made, such as Telefon (dir. Don Siegel 1977), with its Soviet agents preprogrammed to blow up military installations, and The Package (dir. Andrew Davis 1989), in which rogue U.S. and Soviet spies conspire to undermine progress toward peace.<br /> <br /> <b>Alien Invasions and Body Snatchers</b><br /> <br /> Three excellent alien invasion films from the early cold war period, Invaders from Mars (dir. William Cameron Menzies 1953), It Came from Outer Space (dir. Jack Arnold 1953)—in which, however, it turns out that the intruders are not invading but only want to repair their spaceship—and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel 1956), along with less memorable knockoffs like The Brain Eaters (dir. Bruno VeSota 1958) and Invisible Invaders (dir. Edward L. Cahn 1959), are often regarded as commentary on the Communist witch-hunting hysteria of the time. <br /> <br /> They were freer to criticize or even ridicule this anticommunism owing to their fantastic plot lines, involving ordinary people whose identities are “taken over” by extraterrestrials in a conspiracy to wrest control of the earth from humans. Siegel’s film in particular lends itself to complementary interpretations as both a metaphoric, perhaps even satiric exaggeration of the internal Communist menace and as a critique of the rigid conformity to traditional “American values” that was seen as a sign of loyalty (Bartholomew, 374). <br /> <br /> Also worth mentioning in this context is the archly titled Red Planet Mars (dir. Harry Horner 1952), which, before descending into vacuous spiritualism, flirts with the intriguing idea of the Soviets faking an alien contact in order to destabilize the West.<br /> <br /> The body-snatching concept—whether the aliens appropriate real people’s bodies or disguise themselves to resemble humans—reappears not only in two remakes of Siegel’s film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Philip Kaufman 1978) and <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B000HF0IMI" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="12455b2a540435c1231d590970e7da9b" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Body Snatchers" href="http://www.amazon.com/Body-Snatchers-Gabrielle-Anwar/dp/B000HF0IMI/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=12455b2a540435c1231d590970e7da9b&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_9533241" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Body Snatchers</a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_9533241" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=12455b2a540435c1231d590970e7da9b&_cb=1457003237459" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="0" /> (dir. Abel Ferrara 1993), and in more or less direct imitations such as two TV series, The Invaders (1967–1968) and Dark Skies (1996–1997), the miniseries V (dir. Kenneth Johnson 1983), and The Puppet Masters (dir. Stuart Orme 1994), and the made-for-TV Target Earth (dir. Philip Markle 1998), but also in several other films, in each case with a different angle in keeping with the changing zeitgeist. <br /> <br /> The Stepford Wives (dir. Bryan Forbes 1975) echoes—or perhaps the word should be confirms—feminist critiques of the patriarchal nuclear family in a “male fantasy” about men in a small town turning their wives into docile automatons, “living dolls” (Borzello, Kuhn, Pack, and Wedd, 14). The 1990s resurgence of environmental activism is reflected in The Arrival (dir. David Twohy 1996) when aliens from a hot planet who have assumed human identities plot to replace us by hastening the global warming that we instigated. <br /> <br /> Young “slackers” are targeted for takeover by aliens who have bodysnatched their teachers in The Faculty (dir. Robert Rodriguez 1998), and in Disturbing Behavior (dir. David Nutter 1998) a similar contingent from Generation X is mind-controlled through brain implants administered by a mad scientist in collusion with the teenagers’ own parents. <br /> <br /> Late-twentieth-century anxiety about illegal immigrants is humorously played upon in Men in Black (dir. Barry Sonnenfeld 1997) (Dean, 155), in which an ultrasecret agency polices extraterrestrial “aliens” who have been living on earth for decades in the guise of humans, domesticated animals, and even celebrities such as Newt Gingrich, Dennis Rodman, and Sylvester Stallone. (Elvis too, but he has since returned to his home planet.)<br /> <br /> <b>The Post-Vietnam, Post-Watergate Era</b><br /> <br /> Given the cinematic obsolescence of the international Communist conspiracy, the next significant cycle of conspiracy films, which begins in the early 1970s, can be attributed to a variety of causes, domestic and international, cultural and commercial. First, the assassinations, ghetto rebellions, and other upheavals of the 1960s had left a legacy of disappointed hopes, cynicism, and pessimism, which was further augmented by the lightless tunnel that was the war in Vietnam. <br /> <br /> Then, as the new decade wore on, there were additional blows to national self-confidence: Watergate and other political scandals, the energy crisis and resulting recession, the ignominious fall of Saigon, and the Iran hostage crisis. The early to mid-1970s also saw a downturn in movie attendance, leading the studios, uncharacteristically, to take chances. <br /> <br /> One result was the “Hollywood renaissance” sparked by the emergence of “movie brats” (young, sophisticated directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola) who were given unprecedented freedom to pursue their visions, and another was an opportunity for African Americans to make films for the major studios in the so-called blaxploitation boom. <br /> <br /> Hollywood’s unaccustomed risk-taking, combined with the mood of the times, also helped make it possible to bring forth a slew of darkly antiestablishment films involving evil conspiracies, often perpetrated by forces within the government. Fredric Jameson perceptively characterizes these films as “an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are ... in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality” (Jameson, 3).<br /> <br /> <b>Governmental, Corporate, and Police Conspiracies</b><br /> <br /> A few of the films are directly inspired by the political assassinations of the 1960s. Executive Action (dir. David Miller 1973) anticipates Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) in dramatizing a conspiracy theory of the <a href=" " target="_blank">Kennedy assassination</a>, while Winter Kills (dir. William Richert 1979, reedited 1983) is about the cover-up of a conspiracy in the assassination of a fictional president, and more recently the made-forTV First Target (dir. Armand Mastroianni 2000) also concerns a presidential assassination conspiracy. <br /> <br /> The Parallax View (dir. Alan J. Pakula 1974), which follows a reporter’s investigation of a shadowy corporation that carries out assassinations, is more representative of the decade’s pessimistic new demam isu as Jameson describes it. A similar aura of sinister hidden power pervades the conspiratorial Nixon White House in Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976). <br /> <br /> The president’s paranoid personality is explored in Secret Honor (a.k.a. Lords of Treason) (dir. Robert Altman 1984) and Nixon (dir. Oliver Stone 1995); the intelligence community in Three Days of the Condor (dir. Sydney Pollack 1975), The Killer Elite (dir. Sam Peckinpah 1975), and The Osterman Weekend (dir. Sam Peckinpah 1983); and the nuclear power industry in The China Syndrome (dir. James Bridges 1979) and Silkwood (dir. Mike Nichols 1983), in which a brave woman dies while trying to expose practices that could lead to environmental disaster. (Although both stories are based on fact, it is in keeping with their respective timeframes that in Erin Brockovich [dir. Steven Soderbergh 2000] another female whistle-blower is successful in exposing a corporate conspiracy to cover up an environmental disaster. <br /> <br /> By contrast, in the barely coherent Chain Reaction [dir. Andrew Davis 1996], the conspiracy, which is connected to the CIA, rather than causing or covering up an environmental disaster, seeks to prevent the development of an environmental panacea: a cheap, nonpolluting energy source.)<br /> <br /> In more recent reworkings of this dark motif, the tobacco industry is in collusion with a major television network to hide the truth about nicotine addiction in The Insider (dir. Michael Mann 1999); the United Nations is the locus of a murky plot (in both senses) to sabotage a global free-trade agreement in The Art of War (dir. Christian Duguay 2000); a Microsoft-like software company secretively but ruthlessly pursues worldwide domination of electronic communications in AntiTrust (dir. Peter Howitt 2001); and in the conspiracy film parody Zoolander (dir. Ben Stiller 2001) the clothing industry maintains a healthy profit margin by washing the unimposing brains of male fashion models until they become supporters of child labor and Manchurian Candidate–like assassins of would-be reformers. (The Insider also inspired an ingenious antismoking public service short designed to resemble a trailer for a fictitious conspiracy film.) There should also be mentioned in this context three films from African American filmmakers that concern deep-rooted racist conspiracies in law enforcement. <br /> <br /> In Deep Cover (dir. Bill Duke 1992) an undercover black policeman discovers that his Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) handlers are permitting corrupt Latin American governments to saturate his own community with hard drugs, while in both The Glass Shield (dir. Charles Burnett 1995) and the made-for-cable Gang in Blue (dir. Mario van Peebles and Melvin van Peebles 1996), other young black officers uncover white vigilante organizations within the police force. <br /> <br /> In view of the widespread currency of similar conspiracy theories, regarding, for instance, the origin of AIDS/HIV, in African American culture (Turner), which some call “black paranoia,” it is strange, perhaps suspiciously so, that there have not been many more such films.<br /> <br /> <b>Surveillance and Control</b><br /> <br /> In keeping with Watergate-era revelations of secret tape recordings and government surveillance regimes, high technology in such areas as media manipulation, advanced weaponry, and above all surveillance quickly became a prominent fixture in conspiracy films. <br /> <br /> A sound surveillance specialist unwittingly becomes an accomplice to a murderous conspiracy in The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola 1974), and another soundman accidentally discovers a politically motivated conspiracy in Blow Out (dir. Brian De Palma 1981), while a high-tech helicopter with a secret aktivitas of surveillance and crowd control is at the center of Blue Thunder (dir. John Badham 1983). <br /> <br /> NASA conspires to deceive the public with a faked Mars mission in Capricorn One (dir. Peter Hyams 1978), and in Alien (dir. Ridley Scott 1979) a faceless organization called “The Company” with vast, apparently quasi-governmental powers surreptitiously arranges for the crew of a deep-space mining ship to sacrifice themselves in retrieving a lethal life form for development as a weapon. Similarly, and in anticipation of <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B016YVK31Y" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="4143734454e147dd8f9e0f318ee2e320" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="The X-Files" href="http://www.amazon.com/X-files-Season-Blu-ray-David-Duchovny/dp/B016YVK31Y/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=4143734454e147dd8f9e0f318ee2e320&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_5052267" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The X-Files</a><img a="" alt="Films" and="" around="" as="" been="" border="0" center="" conspiracy="" film="" have="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_5052267" include="" long="" mo="" on="" or="" significantly="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=4143734454e147dd8f9e0f318ee2e320&_cb=1457003306104" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" theory="" width="0" />, politicians plot to keep secret a captured UFO in Hangar 18 (dir. James L. Conway 1980). <br /> <br /> Two additional science fiction films of the 1980s anticipate another conspiracy demam isu of the 1990s, of surveillance and media manipulation becoming almost literally ubiquitous: in Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg 1983), television signals exert strange powers over viewers, while aliens disguised as humans keep the population under constant surveillance and control through nonstop subliminal advertising in They Live (dir. John Carpenter 1988). A more recent variation on Cronenberg’s idea about mind-destroying video signals occurs in Batman Forever (dir. Joel Schumacher 1995), in which The Riddler distributes a set-top box in order to assimilate viewers’ brainwaves. <br /> <br /> Carpenter’s idea about hidden commercials is echoed in the teenpic Josie and the Pussycats (dir. Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan 2001), as the music industry inserts subliminal messages in pop tunes in order to further, in the words of the film’s title character, a “conspiracy to brainwash the youth of America.”<br /> <br /> <b>The Contemporary Period</b><br /> <br /> Several significant trends of the 1990s show little sign of abating in the new century. First, the number of films (and TV programs) with a conspiracy angle has grown enormously. Second, the nature of film conspiracies has moved beyond the normal channels of politics, whether traditionally left or right, cold war international or Watergate domestic. <br /> <br /> Now film conspiracies are not only vast in size and/or in power and could be unfolding anywhere at any time, but the participants, rather than individuals implementing perfidious but intelligible left- or right-wing schemes, seem to have no goals except expanding the conspiracy. Moreover, the conspirators seem to be discrete individuals in appearance only but in fact are part of a seamless whole, in some films even to the extent of having a collective mind, like the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact. <br /> <br /> Finally, rather than merely projecting an illusion of innocuous normality in order to mask its subversive reality, the new-style conspiracy so pervades every facet of existence, from the universal to the singular, as to cast doubt on the reality/illusion distinction itself.<br /> <br /> Observers are divided on how to explain these developments. Jonathan Romney, interestingly, sees the demam isu as a consequence of new cinema technology such as CGI (computer graphics imaging), which has disrupted the relationship between what we are actually seeing (computer simulations) and what we think we are seeing (physical objects that have been photographed), instilling a paranoia that is more epistemological or even existential than political. <br /> <br /> “The new paranoia movies,” he writes, “have less to do with political anxieties, more to do with the feeling that there is little verifiable reality in the screen image itself and, by extension, in the world we know through visual media”. Other commentators adopt a more analytical approach. <br /> <br /> Mark Fenster follows Fredric Jameson in attributing it to an unthought-out but justified discontent with the status quo among the general population, while Peter Knight argues that globalization has made conspiracy theory less a political position than a “default mode” of experiencing culture in the New World Order, and Timothy Melley points to what he calls “agency panic,” which he describes as “a feeling that individuals cannot effect meaningful social action, and, in extreme cases, may not be able to control their behavior” (Melley, 11). <br /> <br /> Unquestionably, whatever the specific cause of the increased preoccupation with conspiracy, it is fed by the realization that more and more aspects of daily life, and not only in the popular culture, are being subsumed into regimes of manipulation, surveillance, and control, for no obvious reason, unless merely as an end in itself (Garfinkel, Rushkoff).<br /> <br /> <b>Obscurity and Inscrutability</b><br /> <br /> A rogue intelligence group that not even its enemies can identify exerts mind control to jadwal assassins and even uses the space shuttle to cause earthquakes in Conspiracy Theory (dir. Richard Donner 1997). The film’s protagonist, a taxi driver who is also a conspiracy theorist, conceives of the entire world as dominated by two “opposing factions” that “at some levels [are] at war but at other levels [are] the same.” He learns that the extent to which he is under constant surveillance exceeds his wildest paranoid nightmares, which is a common experience in these films. <br /> <br /> In The End of Violence (dir. Wim Wenders 1997) the government (or some unspecified part of it) seeks to suppress street crime by secretly installing satellitecoordinated hidden cameras in all public places, and in Enemy of the State (dir. Tony Scott 1998) a similar but even more omnipresent surveillance regime has been instituted by the <a href=" " target="_blank">National Security Agency</a> (NSA), apparently to no purpose other than for the sake of having it. (The story is premised on covering up the murder of a congressman who opposes a Telecommunications Security and Privacy Act that would give the NSA greater power to violate the latter in the name of the former. Such is their electronic reach that they wipe out all traces of the hero’s identity, as had happened to the heroine in an earlier film, The Net [dir. Irwin Winkler 1995]). <br /> <br /> There is a similar obscurity or even inscrutability about the plotters’ true goals in a spate of White House coverup films that all appeared in 1997, inspired perhaps by the cumulative effect of years of pre–Monica Lewinsky Clinton rumors: Shadow Conspiracy (dir. George P. Cosmatos), Absolute Power (dir. Clint Eastwood), Murder at 1600 (dir. Dwight Little), and the best of the lot, the brilliant satire Wag the Dog (dir. Barry Levinson), in which a war is manufactured in order to divert attention from sex allegations concerning the president and an underage girl.<br /> <br /> <b>Antiestablishment Conspiracies: Beyond “Left” and “Right”</b><br /> <br /> In several films the source of the conspiracy is found not in the establishment or some part of it, but comes from the opposition to the establishment. The nature of the conspiracy is nevertheless the same: it is usually vast, has sweeping but (at best) only vaguely defined goals, and can operate anywhere at any time, with everyone potentially a secret adherent of it. In political terms, these antiestablishment conspiracies resist ascription to traditional categories like right- and left-wing. <br /> <br /> The all male and almost all white members of the aptly named Project Mayhem conspiracy in Fight Club (dir. David Fincher 1999) seek to blow up corporate buildings, but not so much to subvert capitalism as to restore their masculinity, which they believe they have forfeited in the empty consumerism of modern life. <br /> <br /> Threatening a police commissioner with (appropriately enough) castration for trying to shut down the “fight clubs” from which he recruits volunteers, their charismatic leader boasts that “we know everything about you ... We control every part of your life.”<br /> <br /> Going one better than The Parallax View’s Joseph Frady, who was blamed for the political assassination he died trying to prevent, Michael Faraday in Arlington Road (dir. Mark Pellington 1999) unwittingly delivers the explosives that blow up the FBI building, for which he also takes the blame posthumously, rather than the antigovernment conspirators, who appear to be ordinary middle-class suburbanites with no interest in politics of any kind. <br /> <br /> Similarly opposed to the status quo is the eponymous conspiracy in Twelve Monkeys (dir. Terry Gilliam 1995), which plans to return the planet to the animals, a goal that is accomplished by releasing a plague virus that affects only humans.<br /> <b><br /> </b> <b>Epidemics, Medical Experiments, and the Unexplainable</b><br /> <br /> The epidemic motif has featured in other conspiracy films, notably The Andromeda Strain (dir. Robert Wise 1971) and Outbreak (dir. Wolfgang Petersen 1995), in both of which scientists are co-opted by the military into developing as weapons new disease organisms, from outer space in the former film and from Africa in the latter. (The cold war masa film The Satan Bug [dir. John Sturges 1965] also has a secret government lab experimenting with deadly microorganisms, one of which is stolen for use in an extortion plot.) Sometimes the government experiments on people directly, but without their knowledge, to alter them in desired ways. <br /> <br /> This happens during the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vietnam War</a> to the protagonists of both Jacob’s Ladder (dir. Adrian Lyne 1990) and the Roger Corman-produced The Capitol Conspiracy (a.k.a. The Prophet) (dir. Fred Olen Ray 1999). In the former the purpose is to enhance soldiers’ will to fight and in the latter to endow orphaned children with extrasensory powers. <br /> <br /> Paranormal children are also created by the government in the miniseries Sole Survivor (dir. Mikael Salomon 2000), while a conspiracy of mutant teenagers to take over the world is opposed by pro-human mutants in X-Men (dir. Bryan Singer 2000), and a conspiracy to use massproduced human clones to do the same features in The 6th Day (dir. Roger Spottiswoode 2000).<br /> <br /> In four eerie films from the mid-1990s, so little is revealed about what seems like a conspiracy that it is left uncertain whether there even is one. In Safe (dir. Todd Haynes 1995) and The Trigger Effect (dir. David Koepp 1996), something in the environment causes mysterious allergic reactions in the former film and a general breakdown of the entire social fabric in the latter. <br /> <br /> The prisoners in Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali 1997) are unacquainted with each other and have no idea who imprisoned them or why, while the mathematician protagonist of Pi: Faith in Chaos (dir. Darren Aronofsky 1997) finds himself pursued by stockbrokers and Orthodox Jews because he may possess a secret that no one can begin to explain rationally. These are so-called independent films and their quirkiness might be dismissed as typical of “indies,” but in the late 1990s conspiracy films more in the mainstream displayed comparable characteristics.<br /> <br /> <b>Conspiracies of Infinite Regress</b><br /> <br /> As billionaire Nicholas Van Orton learns in The Game (dir. David Fincher 1997), the employees of Consumer Recreation Services (CRS) could be anyone and everyone he might encounter, and therefore what he takes to be the real world populated by real people could be just that, but then again it might also be an elaborate fiction engineered as a birthday present from his brother for making his life more exhilarating; or as a scheme for stealing his money in which his brother may or may not be complicit; or as a benign plot to help him overcome the childhood stress berat of his father’s suicide; or as a malign plot to induce him into following in his father’s footsteps (i.e., off a roof); or as something the film cagily refuses to reveal, inasmuch as the ending leaves open the possibility that the “game” is still being played, or even that there has never been a time when it wasn’t. <br /> <br /> In other words, the real world/game world distinction is in an infinite regress that doesn’t need to be sustained by resorting to more obvious devices like “virtual reality” (VR)—although the VR concept can be intelligently exploited, as in The Thirteenth Floor (dir. Josef Rusnak 1999), in which the solution to a murder in “our” world must be sought in a VR world inhabited by virtual “people” whose motivations, despite their preprogramming, are ultimately as indeterminable as those of the CRS employees in The Game.<br /> <br /> <b>The Truman Show, Dark City, and The Matrix</b><br /> <br /> Three important conspiracy films from the last years of the last century add a further twist. Not only is the conspiracy vast, beyond politics and existential in its implications, but all of us are made to feel a part of it, actually or potentially.<br /> <br /> Truman Burbank in The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir 1998) lives in an artificial world, but for him, and for him alone, there is no other world, because everyone except him is complicit in a conspiracy to sustain his belief that his world is the only one. <br /> <br /> This is because the town in which he has been raised since birth and subtly prevented ever escaping from is really a giant television studio equipped with countless hidden cameras and microphones, and all the people he has ever known whether intimately or casually are, unknown to him, actors in the employ of a director with the sacrilegious name of Christof. <br /> <br /> At the same time, everyone in the world Truman has never met is a voyeur of his life as Christof arranges it to unfold in his round-the-clock TV show, the popularity of which implies acceptance of the ever-increasing surveillance and control in their own daily lives on the part of the television audience and, by extension, of the film’s audience. As Christof says of Truman, he “prefers his cell.”<br /> <br /> In Dark City (dir. Alex Proyas 1998) another artificial world has been created in space and populated with kidnapped humans by a dying race of aliens, the Strangers, who possess “the ability to alter physical reality by will alone,” as explained in the opening voice-over narration from Daniel Paul Schreber, a psychiatrist ironically named after a turn-of-the-last-century paranoid whose delusions were studied by Sigmund Freud. <br /> <br /> Every night, while the Strangers are altering physical reality, Schreber rearranges the entire population’s memories so that the aliens can experiment on them. One human, Murdoch, discovers that he has the same powers. But after defeating the Strangers he simply takes their place, instituting a regime that, although presumably more benign, is no less total in its control over the malleable populace.<br /> <br /> So total and all enveloping is the conspiracy in The Matrix (dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski 1999) that it has a name that evokes the womb. In the far future renegade computers have imprisoned most of the human race in pods in order to harvest their bodies’ electrical energy, while keeping them pacified with the cybernetically induced illusion that they are in 1999 New York. <br /> <br /> As Agent Smith puts it (he is part of a special jadwal that hunts down members of the human resistance who have escaped their pods and reentered the VR environment of the Matrix to carry out sabotage), in their own minds they are merely “billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious.” <br /> <br /> But unfortunately for them (or so it would seem), the contentment they experience in their “prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch,” as the rebel leader Morpheus describes the Matrix, is so great that “they will fight to protect it.” This means that, in order to prevail, Morpheus’s people, who of course also constitute a conspiracy, would need to destroy all those oblivious billions.<br /> <br /> <b>Freedom versus Security?</b><br /> <br /> In these films, ordinary people’s acceptance of and complicity in a conspiracy against their own autonomy, their privacy, their individuality and even their existence leave a depressing aftertaste despite saccharine romantic endings. <br /> <br /> Perhaps the message is one of resignation: the emerging regime of surveillance and control is inexorably eroding what remains of our freedom, and many of us, if not all, are resigned to accept this, and, perhaps in hope of greater security as a trade-off, even to embrace it.

Film and Conspiracy Theory

Film and Conspiracy Theory Films that center on or significantly include a conspiracy have been around as long as most other genres of f...

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Science In Addition To Technology: African Inventors Inward The Americas

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <i>We acquire rattling piddling well-nigh inventors of African descent. The inventors highlighted here do non stand upward for an exhaustive list. It includes roughly of the early on inventors inwards the Americas, whether  independent, corporate or authorities inventors. Notably, the displace to brand the nutrient production procedure  more efficient after the abolition of slavery inwards the <a href="https://conaircurlingiron.blogspot.com//search?q=olmec-society-of-mexico-americans-and" target="_blank">Americas</a> was non lost on many of these innovators.  </i><br /> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /> <br /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD1z4fpzs6ksS5TFrtL2rGB4juvVeNI0EiVXgQk_7ky1ZByXnITponAINhfXliUOeL-pWtuzKob0ThMbKNoFPkuUiBvH5EKfqjCcglovYBbSU2sD-KgoBCQPQw7GOiVqVepTLfjY7VyFo/s1600/Thomas+Jennings+was+the+first+African+American+to+receive+a+patent,+on+March+3,+1821+His+patent+was+for+a+dry-cleaning+process+called+dry+scouring.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD1z4fpzs6ksS5TFrtL2rGB4juvVeNI0EiVXgQk_7ky1ZByXnITponAINhfXliUOeL-pWtuzKob0ThMbKNoFPkuUiBvH5EKfqjCcglovYBbSU2sD-KgoBCQPQw7GOiVqVepTLfjY7VyFo/s1600/Thomas+Jennings+was+the+first+African+American+to+receive+a+patent,+on+March+3,+1821+His+patent+was+for+a+dry-cleaning+process+called+dry+scouring.jpg" width="172" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Thomas L. Jennings<br /> (1791–1856)</td></tr> </tbody></table> <strong>Thomas L. Jennings </strong>was the showtime African to have a patent inwards the United States of America of America of America. On March 3, 1821 he secured US Patent 3306x for discovering a procedure called dry-scouring. Jennings lived inwards New York equally a costless man. He owned as well as operated tailoring as well as wearable cleaners business. Dry-scouring is a procedure he developed for cleaning wearable through a dry out procedure instead of a moisture process. Yes,  the successful dry-cleaners tin give notice give cheers Mr. Jennings for his early on innovation published to the the world inwards 1821. Jennings used the profits secured from his patent to costless members of his theatre unit of measurement who were all the same nether slavery systems in roughly of the U.S. Jennings also used his wealth equally a line of piece of job concern human and inventor to financially back upward the abolition displace that was growing inwards many areas throughout the U.S. during his time. </div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /> <br /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoScxl8qtLqrh34zQa95tnf9eGHq8aKlEtlK46UPUh5r5zKEP-vnlmTNebdTyOb8TX_TX3WjsrOmAtFCWggcyH_UXao3mZfaJwdsHbzQv0uKZ9IGJ-QWt04vj7OHPoOHP2fTy7nM6Nv6M/s1600/Photo+of+Jan+Ernst+Matzeliger.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoScxl8qtLqrh34zQa95tnf9eGHq8aKlEtlK46UPUh5r5zKEP-vnlmTNebdTyOb8TX_TX3WjsrOmAtFCWggcyH_UXao3mZfaJwdsHbzQv0uKZ9IGJ-QWt04vj7OHPoOHP2fTy7nM6Nv6M/s1600/Photo+of+Jan+Ernst+Matzeliger.gif" width="145" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo of inventor January Ernst Matzeliger<br /> (b. 9/15/1852 – d. 8/24/1889)</td></tr> </tbody></table> <strong>Jan Ernst Matzeliger</strong> was born inwards Paramaribo, <a href="https://conaircurlingiron.blogspot.com//search?q=olmec-society-of-mexico-americans-and" target="_blank">Suriname</a> (then Dutch Guyana). Matzeliger's woman nurture was an Afrian born woman  into the <a href="https://conaircurlingiron.blogspot.com//search?q=olmec-society-of-mexico-americans-and" target="_blank">Dutch slave society</a> of Dutch Guyana. His manly somebody nurture was a wealthy Dutch engineer.  Matzeliger came to the United States of America of America as well as settled into the New England part where he developed the shoe-lasting machine innovation that assembled the upper shoe to the sole, receiving U.S. Patent No. 459,899 on September 22, 1891 -- an innovation that greatly increased efficiency inwards the shoe production process. Additional U.S. patents received past times Matzeliger include the following: 274,207, 3/20/1883, Automatic method for lasting shoe; 421,954, 2/25/1890, Nailing machine; 423,937, 3/25/1890, Tack separating as well as distributing mechanism; 415,726, 11/26/1899, Mechanism for distributing tacks, nails, etc.</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /> <br /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqGiEuFgzLOy1GfwdVU8TmX9PULQehKEKLIqC3g-BxQtw53BAnfLsB5ZRrutPMjvr499Xz_2WjRIkmoPoegW7p6rKirWe2hDqWSjaODwWNa0CGWIx_rZj2GDyTnDRy2ywowQhF7CSe9JM/s1600/Norbert+Rillieux.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqGiEuFgzLOy1GfwdVU8TmX9PULQehKEKLIqC3g-BxQtw53BAnfLsB5ZRrutPMjvr499Xz_2WjRIkmoPoegW7p6rKirWe2hDqWSjaODwWNa0CGWIx_rZj2GDyTnDRy2ywowQhF7CSe9JM/s1600/Norbert+Rillieux.jpg" width="135" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Norbert Rillieux <br /> (b. 3/17/1806 - d. 10/8/1894)</td></tr> </tbody></table> <strong>Norbert Rillieux</strong> was born into privilege inwards New Orleans, Louisiana, the boy of a wealthy Creole woman nurture as well as a white manly somebody nurture who was an engineer. Rillieux as well as his blood brother were educated inwards France. By 1830, Rillieux was instruction applied mechanics at the École Centrale inwards Paris. When Rillieux returned to Louisiana, in that location was a growing demand to supersede the unsafe "Jamaica Train" saccharide manufacturing process. Rillieux developed a steam-driven procedure for making the sugariness grainy substance. His U.S. patents include the following:<br /> <br /> * 3,237, 8/26/1843, Improvement inwards saccharide works</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> * 4,879, 12/10/1846, Sugar processing evaporator</div> <br /> <br /> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>Shelby J. Davidson</strong> was born inwards Lexington, Kentucky inwards 1868 as well as graduated from Howard University as well as would read constabulary as well as croak admitted into the DC bar as well as Kentucky bar. Davidson became a authorities inventor as well as worked amongst the United States of America of America Treasury Department where he invented adding machine automations that increased the postal division's efficiency. Davidson received U.S. Patent No. 884,721 on Apr 14, 1908 for what is described equally a paper-rewind machinery for adding machines. In 1912, Davidson resigned amongst the authorities amidst disputes arising from Davidson's rights to the adding machine. He adept constabulary as well as entered into the existent estate market.<br /> <br /> <strong>Alexander P. Ashbourne</strong> received patent no. 170,460 for designing a unique biscuit cutter on Nov 30, 1875. Ashbourne's cookie cutter innovated on the diversity of shapes available for biscuits, cakes or cookies. The innovation involved a plate, roller as well as springs organisation whereby the cutters presses downwards on the dough or batter into optional shapes. Ashbourne also obtained U.S. patents for diverse agricultural related patents described below: </div> <ul style="text-align: left;"> * 163,962 (1875), Process for preparing kokosnoot for domestic use; 194,287 (1877), Process of treating coconut; 230,518 (1880), Refining kokosnoot oil</ul> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZrlnoS0UktnXGGn6d26XNvIr8dDG8QEbjyNzcyxuK92rJIMYbVBawP6qSLx_t28xlqIIrDsjr-JD0R9IAEljctA6J_H3rfDjp-owY9Dvhyphenhyphen-gfkcn1BRCwqGgwy3Z-D7ZKXcGQgXLlMbs/s1600/Granville-Woods.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZrlnoS0UktnXGGn6d26XNvIr8dDG8QEbjyNzcyxuK92rJIMYbVBawP6qSLx_t28xlqIIrDsjr-JD0R9IAEljctA6J_H3rfDjp-owY9Dvhyphenhyphen-gfkcn1BRCwqGgwy3Z-D7ZKXcGQgXLlMbs/s320/Granville-Woods.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13.33px; text-align: center;">Drawing of Inventor Granville T. Woods<br /> (b. 4/23/1856 - d. 1/30/1910)</td></tr> </tbody></table> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b></b><br /> <b>Granville T. Woods</b> focused his innovation inwards the surface area of railway electronic communication systems. On June 3, 1884, Woods received his showtime patent. This was for an improved steam-boiler furnace, U.S. Patent No. 299,894. Subsequently, Alexander Graham Bell's companionship would buy the rights to his telegraphony patent, a device that allowed a telegraph station to shipping vox as well as telegraph messages over a unmarried wire. The human relationship amongst the Bell companionship enabled Woods to croak a full-time inventor. Woods would croak along to have a patent for an automatic air brake, which is used to irksome as well as halt trains. </div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>John Standard</b> obtained U.S. Patent No. 455,891. Born July 1891, John Standard was born inwards New Jersey. He improved on the master icebox past times putting mutual depression temperature air-ducts or holds inwards special areas to assist the air circulate within the icebox inwards monastic tell to maintain foods fresher. His innovation also provided a special house to maintain the drinking H2O as well as other drinks split from the food. This avoided liquids picking upward the flavors as well as smells of other foods. </div> <br /> <br /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_0gR8Q0DBAGmF0U5dWY3ZighIpRvKQ5r0NBefy28Mao0ZMueDh8LPHV6WZNttR5IuGlvxU2-fzojmEiL8petCGce62BH1m0y7DtEWMsS52ZzgKEiucpbxLNHQJ9k4cP4dzWTlfZ2de7g/s1600/Photo+Lewis+T.+Latimer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_0gR8Q0DBAGmF0U5dWY3ZighIpRvKQ5r0NBefy28Mao0ZMueDh8LPHV6WZNttR5IuGlvxU2-fzojmEiL8petCGce62BH1m0y7DtEWMsS52ZzgKEiucpbxLNHQJ9k4cP4dzWTlfZ2de7g/s320/Photo+Lewis+T.+Latimer.jpg" width="144" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo of inventor Lewis H. Latimer<br /> (b. 9/4/1848 - d. 12/11/1928)</td></tr> </tbody></table> <div style="text-align: justify;"> As a teenager, <b>Lewis H. Latimer</b> received an chance to operate for the Boston patent line of piece of job solid Crosby, Halstead & Gould. He worked his agency upward to principal patent drawing draftsman where he began drafting for Alexander Graham Bell's patent application for the telephone. In 1874, Latimer secured his showtime patent for an "improvement inwards water-closet for railroad-cars". He moved from Boston surface area to Connecticut where he joined the United States of America of America Electric Lighting Company, working on electrical lighting innovations spell he worked on his owned light designs. He would afterward bring together Thomas Edison's company, which would croak General Electric, as well as croak a fellow member of the legal department.</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> On Feb 17, 1891, <b>Albert C. Richardson</b> received Patent 446,470 for his  innovations inwards the nutrient production, peculiarly improved churning processes. The American churn was traditionally a wooden appliance for making butter from cream skimmed from constabulary milk. It was shaped similar a barrel amongst a long wooden stick coming through a hole inwards the oculus top. Richardson's improvements included installing drinking glass panels on both sides of the churn to come across the butter. This helped preps hit upward one's hear whether it was ready. He also included a plate within the churn for the butter to live placed for easier removal. Richardson's U.S. patents include the following:</div> <ul style="text-align: left;"> <li style="text-align: justify;">255,022, 3/14/1882, Hame fastener</li> <li style="text-align: justify;">446,470, 2/17/1891, Churn</li> <li style="text-align: justify;">529,311, 11/13/1894, Casket-lowering device</li> <li style="text-align: justify;">620,362, 2/28/1899, Insect destroyer</li> <li style="text-align: justify;">638,811, 12/12/1899, Bottle</li> </ul> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuCW_iQXRrHFrZl2aYj_mzBdkiE8mSEfUs2MmaaBbssxQwL2Uo0mBzRPRZYPlNycGuJVUmzD03RJcLqQBYVUG26O03Bko8xp1YdfhrvN8u7zLu8tTg0PEERkm_6Xo-Crn1qGQxVDBRHss/s1600/Judy+W.+Reed+African+American+Inventor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuCW_iQXRrHFrZl2aYj_mzBdkiE8mSEfUs2MmaaBbssxQwL2Uo0mBzRPRZYPlNycGuJVUmzD03RJcLqQBYVUG26O03Bko8xp1YdfhrvN8u7zLu8tTg0PEERkm_6Xo-Crn1qGQxVDBRHss/s400/Judy+W.+Reed+African+American+Inventor.jpg" width="185" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Judy W. Reed 1884 patent for dough kneading </td></tr> </tbody></table> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>Judy W. Reed</b> received U.S. Patent No. 305,474, received September 23, 1884, for a hand-operated dough kneader as well as roller that allowed for improved mixing that was to a greater extent than evenly distributed when processed through the rollers amongst corrugated slates. Little is written well-nigh Reed's life, but she has garnered the championship of existence the showtime African-American adult woman to have a U.S. patent.</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>Joseph Lee</b> received U.S. Patent No. 524,042 for a kneading machine innovation on August 7, 1894. Lee's fourth dimension saving innovation mixed as well as kneaded the dough as well as also replaced the demand to manus curlicue dough.</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>Robert P. Scott</b> invented the corn silker as well as obtained U.S. Patent No. 524,223 on August 7, 1894. Corn silk is the silk-like thread fibers on the within of the light-green husks removed from corn-on-the-cob. Removing corn silk proved both fourth dimension consuming as well as difficult. The R.P. Scott Corn Silker helped to brand this procedure faster as well as to a greater extent than efficient. </div> <br /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOCObiKk7RnSzRtR3RCnZEIjrFfrxK1lAVOnYF1Cgqw_iyaRL7024D_Mrv8Mhrm6vaQ0ZKgdNUegbqH36VqTVY5jrWQbyhMPh9Ypo70h5IbCcuUPzR5lzO1pjO4xh45xYIkzwnUEhVxqk/s1600/garrett-morgan-inventor-black-history.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOCObiKk7RnSzRtR3RCnZEIjrFfrxK1lAVOnYF1Cgqw_iyaRL7024D_Mrv8Mhrm6vaQ0ZKgdNUegbqH36VqTVY5jrWQbyhMPh9Ypo70h5IbCcuUPzR5lzO1pjO4xh45xYIkzwnUEhVxqk/s1600/garrett-morgan-inventor-black-history.jpg" width="153" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inventor Garrett A. Morgan, Sr.</td></tr> </tbody></table> <strong>Garrett A. Morgan, Sr.</strong> filed his patent application inwards 1922 and obtained U.S. Patent No. 1,475,024 on Nov. xx 1923 for an electrical traffic dot to live used at street intersections equally a tool to control for the menstruum of safe traffic from automobiles, bicycles as well as pedestrians. In 1912, Morgan also obtained U.S. Patent No. 109,936 for a breathing device to live used to halt the menstruum of injurious gases to persons, afterward called the gas mask. <br /> <br /> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>John T. White</b> obtained U.S. Patent No. 572,849 on Dec 8, 1896 for the showtime commercial lemon squeezer.White's innovation made it easier to mash all of the juice out of a lemon. It also separated the seeds as well as pulp from the juice, as well as prevented squirting. </div> <br /> <br /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHiaMpej65WchUNqHcy5zjEkuI9KbRK0bHAuEg6BiPMB04M-zHUxamXtM0bIVrKhQ8OjKeEQN1M_XlIg3piQ7-dU69bE7QFI4-HQ1v07vqC9yGTO_OpkWiieoizskE3LvZhgurxZvz8xw/s1600/photo+of+dustpan+invention.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHiaMpej65WchUNqHcy5zjEkuI9KbRK0bHAuEg6BiPMB04M-zHUxamXtM0bIVrKhQ8OjKeEQN1M_XlIg3piQ7-dU69bE7QFI4-HQ1v07vqC9yGTO_OpkWiieoizskE3LvZhgurxZvz8xw/s400/photo+of+dustpan+invention.gif" width="200" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">African-American inventor: Lloyd Ray dustpan </td></tr> </tbody></table> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>Lloyd P. Ray </b>received U.S. Patent No. 587,607 on August 3, 1897 for a novel as well as useful improvement inwards dust pans. Ray's device included a metallic collection plate that trash could live swept into, attached to a curt wooden handle. </div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>Alfred L. Cralle</b> received U.S. Patent No. 576,395 on Feb 2, 1897 for an H2O ice cream mold as well as H2O ice cream scooper (disher). This made serving H2O ice cream inwards perfect circular portions to agree on cones. </div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <div>  </div> </div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>Elbert R. Robinson</b> received U.S. Patent Nos. 505,370, September 19, 1893, electrical railway trolley as well as 594,286, Nov 23, 1897, casting composite or other machine wheels.</div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"> <b>FURTHER RESOURCES: </b>Ohio State University's Knowledge Bank: <a href="https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/5941/Black_Inventors.pdf;jsessionid=F7B8BA473F03A96E48AE3590AF1519A8?sequence=3" target="_blank">African American Patent Holders Database</a></div> </div>

Science In Addition To Technology: African Inventors Inward The Americas

We acquire rattling piddling well-nigh inventors of African descent. The inventors highlighted here do non stand upward for an exhaustive l...

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