Paranoia

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="The" ancient="" border="0" commonly="" concept="" is="" of="" paranoia="" psychiatric="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDDIAU-atM47W2T3Gyau2uVz6L1MJC2x5GnX8ovlwRlZ2QblzechEaGzVnYAv6YKsh8OmKqXtfOhdoZvHBq8PLNSLjiJK0QEirHgMKv3w5Y4OseYLv1-VpzZ0nm6a14MKhARkeNss6RYeG/s1600/paranoia.jpg" title="Paranoia" to="" traced="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paranoia</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> The psychiatric concept of paranoia is commonly traced to ancient <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Greece</a>, where Hippocrates inaugurated it among several other mental maladies, coining the term from the Greek para (meaning “beside,” or “changed”) and nous (signifying “mind,” or “reason”).<br /> <br /> Its etymology can also be traced back to Plato’s and Aretaeus’s identifications of “religious madness” and “divine mania,” or citations in the work of Francois Boissier de Sauvages (Pathologie Methodica, 1759) to transformative delusions in which patients believed they were being transformed into either animals or the opposite sex.<br /> <br /> It was not until Etienne Esquirol’s Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (1845) and, later, Emil Kraepelin’s Textbook of Psychiatry (1883–1915) that the concept of paranoia, as it is understood today, began to take shape.<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/0062135562/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=d4956c167930644875ea582f559c4a86" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0062135562&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" ancient="" border="0" commonly="" concept="" height="1" is="" of="" paranoia="" psychiatric="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0062135562" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" to="" traced="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801486068/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=a83893950f6ed8713cb86e70b79af76d" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0801486068&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" ancient="" border="0" commonly="" concept="" height="1" is="" of="" paranoia="" psychiatric="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0801486068" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" to="" traced="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Esquirol’s descriptivist account catalogued, among others, erotic, reasoning, theomaniacal, incendiary, and homicidal monomanias. Paranoia was identified as a délire partiel (monomania), a folie raisonante (a reasoning madness).<br /> <br /> Kraepelin’s influential definition of dementia praecox (early-onset dementia, now classed under the broad category of schizophrenia) most deeply informs the contemporary understanding of the concept as a delusional disorder that builds a highly organized, grandiose system that is held with great conviction.<br /> <br /> From this tradition and that which followed, paranoia has come to be characterized by symptoms such as projective thinking, hostility, suspicion, centrality, delusions, fear of the loss of autonomy, and grandiosity. Even though paranoids are often able to achieve a high level of occupational functioning, unlike other psychoses, there is no pharmaceutical or therapeutic “cure” for paranoia.<br /> <br /> The most famous case of paranoia, which has served as the basis for most of the major contributions on the study of the subject as well as being a remarkable autobiography of paranoia, is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [1903]).<br /> <br /> Schreber, a high-ranking German judge, describes the slow and torturous process of being transformed into a woman by God in order to bring forth a new race of men; being made into God’s sexual slave; and being the victim of a “soul murder” at the hands of Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig, the director of the psychiatric hospital in which he first stayed.<br /> <br /> Sigmund Freud’s influential study of the case read paranoia as a defense against (unconscious) homosexuality, or homosexual attack. Although this theory has largely been cast aside, it is notable for Freud’s first theorization of projection.<br /> <br /> Freud also argued that paranoia is a recuperative process, one in which the paranoid attempts to rebuild his or her world after a psychotic break through delusion. Interestingly, “paranoia” as a discrete medicalpsychiatric definition no longer exists. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) instead classifies it as an aspect of other psychoses, such as schizophrenia.<br /> <br /> The category of paranoia gradually moved beyond the psychiatric domain and began to be used by philosophers and social theorists to explain literary texts, social formations, and historical epochs.<br /> <br /> The discourse of heroic “enlightenment”—which seeks to uncover, reveal, and disclose knowledges that are otherwise concealed, shrouded, and hidden—is firmly entrenched in Western philosophical traditions. The notion of “suspicion” as an interpretive <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">strategy</a> can be traced from academic and Pyrrhonian skepticism through to the work of Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Hobbes.<br /> <br /> Paul Ricouer identifies Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as the key proponents of a tradition that sought to redirect its Cartesian doubt from a regard of things, to doubt consciousness itself. In Crowds and Power (1962), Elias Canetti describes paranoia as an “illness of power” that can help to explain the nature of political power in general.<br /> <br /> Canetti establishes an equivalence between paranoids like Schreber and despots and rulers such as Adolph Hitler and Genghis Khan. Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” continues this genealogy by theorizing paranoia as a political style, rather than a pathological category.<br /> <br /> Conducted under the banner of “Studies on the American Right,” it charted the paranoid style in U.S. political life since independence, through the central characteristic of persecution and its systematization in conspiracy theory.<br /> <br /> Hofstadter sought to describe a generally right-wing style of mind, and chose to refer to it as “paranoid” because “no other word evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that characterizes this mindset.<br /> <br /> The concept of paranoia has dispersed into popular culture in a vast array of forms including films such as JFK (dir. Oliver Stone 1991) and Conspiracy Theory (dir. Richard Donner 1997), television programs such as The X-Files and Nowhere Man, pamphlets, rants, and tracts of every political color, magazines such as Paranoia, and books such as Jim Keith’s Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (1993).<br /> <br /> Rhetorics of paranoia can be identified in popular music, from Black Sabbath’s classic anthem “Paranoid” to Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, and Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid.” The paranoid ethic of hypervigilance even extends to managerial advice books such as Andrew S. Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career (1999).<br /> <br /> The cultural sensibility expressed in these works, one that has wholly digested Delmore Schwartz’s adage that “even paranoids have real enemies,” suggests that there is less danger in being paranoid than in not being paranoid enough.<br /> <br /> Like the term “conspiracy theorist,” “paranoid” represents a heavily loaded political and epistemological description, one that is used at certain times as an ironic form of self-identification, and at others, as a condemnatory indictment.<br /> <br /> In a fashion similar to the way “conspiracy theory” is used as a description of false history, the accusation of paranoia has become a powerful tactic in the marginalization of one’s ideological opponents.<br /> <br /> Cultural critics and pop psychologists have in recent years taken up the psychiatric history of paranoia, and (consciously or not) Freud’s contribution to it, in their attempts to delegitimize those they consider conspiracy theorists.<br /> <br /> The conspiracy theorist (or paranoid), it is argued, takes an object or figure that was once revered and transforms it into the focus of persecutory anxiety, so that their conspiracy theories tell us more about the subject’s own desire and fear than they do about anything in the world.<br /> <br /> Paranoia, so the story goes, is a disease of disaffection: the WASP patriot, the militant feminist, and the Islamic fundamentalist are united by their marginality, one which organizes their thinking in a paranoid or conspiratorial fashion.<br /> <br /> Other critics have argued that such theories form appropriate responses to actual circumstances: for example, the widespread belief in the African American community of the early 1990s that the government was spreading drugs such as crack cocaine in poor black communities should not be read simply as “paranoid,” but as a dramatization of very real fears of an institutionally sponsored kegiatan of genocidal neglect, one that is based on the historical revelation of actual conspiracies such as COINTELPRO and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Paranoia

Paranoia The psychiatric concept of paranoia is commonly traced to ancient Greece , where Hippocrates inaugurated it among several othe...

Read more »

William L Pierce

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img a="" alt="An" and="" arch="" as="" border="0" conspiracy="" l="" leader="" pierce="" publisher="" racial="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilItdk-0o4_5OPAH6CfbA3eM_yxJosGoGRF6etGVDh25HTzUb5oT7aVI8R64q6X8rYFFCy7YrKdHELgOIbn4NoIWFY70b3gYjXxvQ8zHGaJJyhJgGul5yiivtNpxwgptoPQOzl7TpOMqZQ/s1600/William-Pierce.jpg" supremacist="" theorist="" title="William" well="" white="" width="470" william="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William L Pierce</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> An arch racial conspiracy theorist as well as a white supremacist leader and publisher, William Pierce is most widely known for his novel <b>The Turner Diaries</b>. The novel, like most of Pierce’s writings, depicts a racial revolution to overcome a national, multicultural conspiracy against Anglo-Saxon Americans in the late twentieth century.<br /> <br /> The Turner Diaries generally had an underground existence as a magazine serial among many white supremacist movements until its publication as a book in 1978, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation denounced it as the most dangerous book in the United States.<br /> <br /> Pierce’s pseudonymous novel became notorious, however, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the <a href=" " target="_blank">Oklahoma City</a> Murrah Federal Building in April 1995, killing 168 people in an enactment of one of the novel’s key scenes. An excerpt from The Turner Diaries was found with McVeigh at the time of his arrest and has since propelled Pierce’s name as well as his organization, National Alliance, into the mainstream media.<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/1569800863/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=1e4f3bafcdca1c3b526a459adf2b612f" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1569800863&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="An" and="" arch="" as="" border="0" conspiracy="" height="1" l="" leader="" pierce="" publisher="" racial="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1569800863" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" supremacist="" theorist="" well="" white="" width="1" william="" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1291388575/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=df8a9ecb7696863b9daea6b801af0b19" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1291388575&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="An" and="" arch="" as="" border="0" conspiracy="" height="1" l="" leader="" pierce="" publisher="" racial="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1291388575" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" supremacist="" theorist="" well="" white="" width="1" william="" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Pierce justifies his extremist writings with a conspiracy theorist’s fear of ethnic diversity; in his writing, the liberal conspiracy to pollute the United States with multiculturalism represents the end of the white race. Ironically, Pierce’s work depicts and even exhorts a conspiracy of its own: the targeting and killing of those who represent or support racial diversity in the United States.<br /> <br /> While his fiction depicts the political strife of war in an imagined social transition from a multicultural to a white United States, Pierce also expresses his extremist politics through other political modes such as Libertarian and militia ideologies.<br /> <br /> Pierce’s incendiary rhetoric has been effective with some of his readers; The Turner Diaries is known to have inspired other crimes. In the early 1980s, a group named for The Turner Diaries’ highest echelon of resistance fighters (the Order) committed murder, robbery, and counterfeiting, and bombed a synagogue in Colorado.<br /> <br /> In the early 1990s, a group calling itself the Aryan Republican Army committed bank robberies and bombings across the Midwest. Later in the 1990s, members of the New Order in St. Louis were arrested for plotting to bomb the Anti-Defamation League’s New York headquarters, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.<br /> <br /> Although Pierce denies the influence of The Turner Diaries or any other of his many publications and broadcasts in inspiring violent acts, he has a history of generating conspiracy rhetoric that exhorts those who would seek a white United States to take action.<br /> <br /> Pierce has been active in right-wing extremist movements since the 1960s. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, 11 September 1933, he holds a B.Sc. from Rice University (1955), and an M.A. (1958) and a Ph.D. (1962) in physics from the University of Colorado. Pierce was an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.<br /> <br /> He then became a senior research scientist at the Advanced Materials Research Development Laboratory of United Aircraft’s Pratt and Whitney Division in 1965–1966. During this time he was involved with the John Birch Society. By 1966, Pierce left his employment and the John Birch Society for full-time neo-Nazi activism with the American Nazi Party, run by George Lincoln Rockwell.<br /> <br /> There, he edited the National Socialist World, a quarterly journal for academics and intellectuals. When Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce became one of the leaders of the National Socialist White People’s Party, which succeeded the American Nazi Party.<br /> <br /> By 1970, Pierce left the National Socialist White People’s Party to join the National Youth Alliance, a far-right political group whose aim was to disrupt liberal causes on college campuses. Infighting between Pierce and the Nazi Youth Party’s founder, Willis Carto, split the group into factions. Pierce’s wing came to be known as the National Alliance, a group he has run since 1974.<br /> <br /> Pierce relocated the National Alliance from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346-acre farm in Mill Point, West Virginia. In many ways, Pierce is the National Alliance; he runs all aspects of the organization and writes most of and entirely oversees all its media. Pierce edits and writes for its magazine, National Vanguard (originally Attack!), and an internal newsletter, National Alliance Bulletin (formerly titled Action), as well as Resistancemagazine.<br /> <br /> He also oversees several businesses as part of the National Alliance: National Vanguard Books, Resistance Records, and Cymaphane Records. Additionally, Pierce broadcasts a weekly radio program, American Dissident Voices on AM/FM and shortwave radio and writes articles for Free Speech, the program’s newsletter.<br /> <br /> The National Alliance aims to become the world’s largest umbrella organization for white supremacy and is well on its way to meeting that goal. Domestically, Pierce created affiliations with the antigovernment Patriot movement during its rise in the 1990s.<br /> <br /> A decade later, he reached out to neo-Nazi youth groups, once again, through his record labels. With chapters in twenty-three states and a web page that is translatable into eight languages, the National Alliance has become well established.<br /> <br /> The use of technology has driven Pierce’s outreach efforts and allows for unique associations: in 2002, a large excerpt from one of his radio speeches, downloaded to a National Alliance listserv, ended up on a Hezbollah website two weeks later. The National Alliance provides a range of literature, radio, and music targeting both general and specific audiences that disseminate white supremacist conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> Specifically, Pierce’s work describes a national crisis for white racial purism—a conspiracy of multiculturalism—and urges political activism and the recruitment of new members to build a political movement.<br /> <br /> However, National Alliance’s ideology frequently describes force as the means to this reclamation of a white ancestry and a commitment to building a white nation. Pierce’s fiction, written under the name Andrew Macdonald, depicts con- spiracy theorists reacting to a perceived conspiracy of racial treason.<br /> <br /> Largely critical of Jewish media and business in the United States, these novels also focus on miscegenation and other racial “pollution” of the Anglo-Saxon bloodline. In these imagined scenarios, race patriots intend to provoke a racial war that will allow for armed rebellion and the creation of a white nation.<br /> <br /> In The Turner Diaries, the United States is represented as severely intolerant of a specific “racism”—defined as acts perpetrated by whites against people of color—and has created a climate in which white people are under scrutiny for racist transgressions while people of color exploit the situation. The seemingly liberal government extends its oppressive influence with a law that repeals the Second Amendment right to own firearms.<br /> <br /> The consequent insurrection—which eventually becomes a global race war—is chronicled by one of its unassuming heroes, Earl Turner, whose fellow patriotic, militant white supremacists have prepared to fight “the System’s” despotism. Turner’s diary describes his experiences as he organizes small resistance cells and goes about the daily labor of domestic terrorism in the conspiracy to overthrow the government.<br /> <br /> Some of the novel’s major scenes include a mortar attack on Washington, D.C., and a truck bombing of FBI headquarters (which McVeigh borrowed for his terrorism in Oklahoma City). One of the most graphic scenes is “the Day of the Rope,” in which the group publicly hangs tens of thousands of race traitors with placards describing their treason.<br /> <br /> Turner’s heroic acts lead to his induction into the group’s inner circle (the Order)—a transcendence that concludes with Turner’s suicide mission and subsequent martyrdom as the group’s savior. By the novel’s end, the New Era of white dominance has overcome the racial conspiracy.<br /> <br /> Pierce’s second novel, Hunter, published in 1989, reaches out to a different readership, moving away from the working-class emphasis of The Turner Diaries and focusing on a highly educated audience. The conspiracy of multiculturalism is the same, but the focus is the Jewish-owned media’s social role.<br /> <br /> Protagonist Oscar Yeager is a talented engineer who, although highly educated and extremely rational, is being uncharacteristically reactionary—literally hunting black and white “miscegenating” couples in his disgust about the decline of the race.<br /> <br /> Unlike Turner, however, Yeager seeks a deeper, intellectual contextualization of his white supremacism as well as a solution that speaks to the social ambiguities he perceives. Hunter chronicles Yeager’s hunt for a philosophy, his subsequent education about the Jewish media conspiracy, and his own answer to the racial conspiracy of a multicultural United States.<br /> <br /> In the novel’s solution, Yeager becomes a media mogul who educates the U.S. public about white supremacism with a fundamentalist television preacher and deposes the Jewish media monopoly by gaining the largest market share of the viewing audience.<br /> <br /> The novel depicts Yeager’s media counterconspiracy as a success both in reaching white America and beginning the transition to a racially pure nation with less large-scale bloodshed but, rather, key behind-the-scene assassinations at high levels.<br /> <br /> In addition to his two novels, Pierce published Serpent’s Walk, another racial conspiracy text, in 1991, under the name Randolph D. Calverhall, and has two other books published with National Vanguard Books: The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid (1984) and Gun Control in Germany, 1928–1945 (1994).<br /> <br /> Pierce’s organization has reached out to other spheres of influence: from the purchase of AT&T stock in order to use the share-holder meetings as a platform for antisemitic speech, to the targeting of youth markets in his newest ventures.<br /> <br /> The most diverse products in his catalog include the 1993 comic title, New World Order Comix #1, The Saga of ... White Will! and a computer game depicting a virtual race war: “Ethnic Cleansing: The Game!” In 1999, Pierce became involved in the music industry through white power music labels Resistance and Cymophane Records.<br /> <br /> Pierce finds conspiracy everywhere he looks: organizations working against hate-speech have targeted Pierce’s various businesses and have worked to discredit his tax-exempt status (through his Church of the Creator organization) as well as to direct attention toward his enterprise.<br /> <br /> In 1996, the Southern Poverty Law Center won an $85,000 judgment against Pierce for his role in an effort to keep Church of the Creator assets from the family of a murdered member, Harold Mansfield. Pierce continues to refer to these groups as part of the conspiracy against white values and white supremacism, just as he continues to find ways to bring his extremist politics to mainstream media.

William L Pierce

William L Pierce An arch racial conspiracy theorist as well as a white supremacist leader and publisher, William Pierce is most widely ...

Read more »

Chief Pontiac

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="was" as="" border="0" british="" by="" chief="" colonial="" contemporary="" identified="" instigator="" many="" of="" officials="" pontiac="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPmM00EzUV2gWWZ_6Fr-BbG613aXOrgoVCVYig4mGgtlP_2EavK-6QGXTRierw5Og7k2ueRoaJGUpxTP6xyNaKld7jYys6BN1bT_vzsfqQCYT_DC5_HWjeNgJpVkgoe72XC2ZXmpxENAlq/s1600/Chief-Pontiac.jpg" the="" title="Chief" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chief Pontiac</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> A war leader of the Odawa tribe, Pontiac (often called Chief Pontiac) was identified by many contemporary British colonial officials as the chief instigator of a devastating succession of military attacks against Anglo-American forts and settlements throughout the Great Lakes region during the summer of 1763. As rumor and speculation grew, the British feared that his actions were part of a wider French conspiracy, but it is more likely that Pontiac was pursuing his own plot.<br /> <br /> His reputation as the architect of one of the most substantial Native American military actions in North American history was cemented by the prolific U.S. historian Francis Parkman.<br /> <br /> In his History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), Parkman credited Pontiac’s intellect and bravery in executing the plot, but characterized his actions as a doomed effort on the part of “savages” to stave off the inevitable advance of Anglo-Saxon civilization across the continent.<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/0140234632/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=c20d5801203f49604ed7f9b087283cf2" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0140234632&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="was" as="" border="0" british="" by="" chief="" colonial="" contemporary="" height="1" identified="" instigator="" many="" of="" officials="" pontiac="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0140234632" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1330734114/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=e0d7a4f24952494446289fe532327341" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1330734114&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="was" as="" border="0" british="" by="" chief="" colonial="" contemporary="" height="1" identified="" instigator="" many="" of="" officials="" pontiac="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1330734114" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> While subsequent historians have disputed the extent of Pontiac’s political influence and military organizing beyond his home settlement near Detroit, he was undoubtedly the principal catalyst for a Native American resistance movement unprecedented in both its geographic scope and its ultimate diplomatic success.<br /> <br /> An active partisan on behalf of the French during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Pontiac remained loyal to his allies after the conquest of Canada by Great Britain on 8 September 1760. Many of his subsequent activities were devoted to trying to bring about a return to the relationship his people experienced with the French civil and military officials.<br /> <br /> Following the takeover of former French forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley by British Army troops (1760–1761), many of the local Native American nations grew aggrieved by the parsimony of British officials in diplomatic negotiations, as well as by the failure of the British to fulfill an earlier promise to ban settlement west of the Appalachian mountains.<br /> <br /> Pontiac worked to meld this growing anti-English sentiment among the region’s native peoples with nativist messages of spiritual revival emanating from Delaware villages in the Ohio country. Pontiac also collaborated with the local French population at Detroit, some of whom promoted the notion of the defeated French king sending an army up the Mississippi River to join with the natives against the British.<br /> <br /> Jittery British traders and officers, upon hearing this news, proved all too ready to believe that the ensuing war was the product of a French conspiracy, but in fact Pontiac and his followers fought for their own ends.<br /> <br /> Pontiac commenced his siege of the key British fort at Detroit on 9 May 1763. Within a month, he had nearly 1,000 Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Huron warriors fighting with him. Pontiac followed up his initial attack by sending wampum belts with encoded messages encouraging similar attacks against other British posts.<br /> <br /> For this reason, he has been characterized as the orchestrator of the entire conflict. Yet while other native nations followed Pontiac’s lead, a lack of unity in timing and an emphasis on local tribal objectives proved the rule for the duration of the war.<br /> <br /> This did not, however, compromise the overall impact of Native American military actions. Their well-conceived ruses, gunfire from entrenched positions, and flaming arrows had, by the end of June 1763, destroyed or forced the abandonment of nine British-occupied forts between western Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.<br /> <br /> The troops at Detroit held out until reinforcements arrived on 3 October 1763. On 30 October 1763 Pontiac learned that his appeals for assistance from French troops still posted in Illinois had been categorically rejected, and he raised his siege.<br /> <br /> Hostilities in Pontiac’s War continued intermittently for the next two years, and during that time Pontiac visited Native American communities throughout modern Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, urging continued resistance to the British regime.<br /> <br /> With most of the interior forts razed, Native American warriors turned their attention to frontier settlements. Ultimately, historians have estimated that native attacks in Pontiac’s War accounted for the deaths of 2,000 Anglo-American settlers and 400 British soldiers.<br /> <br /> As Pontiac’s notoriety grew, he came to be seen by the British authorities as crucial to prospects for ending the conflict. Despite the success of two military expeditions sent to the Great Lakes region over the summer of 1764 in securing the submission of many of the principal combatants, Pontiac remained elusive.<br /> <br /> Fearing that the war would continue unless he was dead or conciliated, the British pursued him relentlessly. In talks with British negotiators at Fort Ouiatanon (near modern Lafayette, Indiana) in July 1765, Pontiac agreed to preliminary terms of peace.<br /> <br /> Pontiac’s principal demand that the British make clear purchases of land in the Great Lakes region in advance of any settlement was endorsed in the July 1766 Treaty of Oswego, which ended Pontiac’s War.<br /> <br /> After fighting the British to a military stalemate and securing a key diplomatic victory for his native allies, Pontiac attempted to live a peaceful life of hunting. Yet his reputation attracted attention and fear, and he was murdered under suspicious circumstances by a Peoria Indian in the Illinois village of Cahokia on 20 April 1769.

Chief Pontiac

Chief Pontiac A war leader of the Odawa tribe, Pontiac (often called Chief Pontiac) was identified by many contemporary British colonia...

Read more »

Populism

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="and" border="0" century="" in="" late="" mountain="" nineteenth="" of="" populism="" regions="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCVxLCJ7IpQLMKUlHlGpIwI_UrCJE4e7-kBcjWJWY8_baYAREFh9X_CUjWxPjt_1669iSPv4gDfsyaylfMCuCdmVFivMWzhN_m8FUO2zvfPFnX_FCm_UCpyNihMl594n0EwNYv_vizX-3z/s1600/Populism.jpg" states="" the="" title="Populism" united="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Populism</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> The agrarian movement in the West, South, and mountain regions of the United States in the late nineteenth century, known as Populism, contained several elements of conspiracy thinking directed at New York City, politicians, and the railroads.<br /> <br /> Although mainstream Populists did not generally embrace the notion of a “New York money power,” many nevertheless were convinced that powerful forces had united to oppress farmers, miners, and industrial workers.<br /> <br /> This sentiment was epitomized in the 1896 speech at the Democratic convention in which William Jennings Bryan, the party’s nominee for president, warned that these forces “will not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”<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/0374522642/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=729c34c062c8dddda47faa987d645d79" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0374522642&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="and" border="0" century="" height="1" in="" late="" mountain="" nineteenth="" of="" populism="" regions="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0374522642" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801485584/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=61701bad7e0ce6ac3c46857945bc9167" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0801485584&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="and" border="0" century="" height="1" in="" late="" mountain="" nineteenth="" of="" populism="" regions="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0801485584" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Following the Civil War, a general price deflation set in that especially hurt farmers who had long-term (five- to fifteen-year) mortgages by making the dollars they repaid much more valuable than the dollars they borrowed. At the same time, new silver discoveries in the West unleashed a torrent of silver onto the market.<br /> <br /> Advocates for farmers and debtors saw a way to combine the blessings of silver and the plight of the farmers by monetizing silver at a fixed rate of 16:1 (or sixteen silver ounces for one ounce of gold). In fact, the market rate was closer to 17:1, but the “silverites” hoped to force the government to purchase the silver at inflated prices, thus putting more money into the economy, especially in the West.<br /> <br /> At the same time, agrarians became concerned about the level of prosperity in railroads and banking while agriculture—the backbone of the Republic since Jefferson’s time—languished. As the historian of the Populist movement, John D. Hicks, noted, the farmer believed that he “worked longer hours, under more adverse conditions, and with smaller compensation for his labor than any other man on earth.”<br /> <br /> Farmers also felt exploited by the railroads and grain elevators, which they deemed to have a “<a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B002JSM3KQ" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="17c0e23df2470a1aec520a92584a3e67" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="monopoly" href="http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Moves-Games-1126-Monopoly/dp/B002JSM3KQ/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=17c0e23df2470a1aec520a92584a3e67&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_6422104" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">monopoly</a><img alt="and" border="0" century="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_6422104" in="" late="" mountain="" nineteenth="" of="" populism="" regions="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=17c0e23df2470a1aec520a92584a3e67&_cb=1481973732363" states="" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="0" />” over local shipping and storage. In truth, few rural areas in states such as Kansas lacked access to at least two railroads, but the inconvenience of hauling grain to sites farther away was deemed unprofitable by many farmers.<br /> <br /> Complaints about the railroads were preeminent within the young Populist Party. The party originated with various farmers’ organizations, such as the National Farmers’ Alliance and the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union, as well as local antimonopoly parties, such as the People’s Anti-monopoly Party in Minnesota, the National Greenback Party, and the local Grange organizations.<br /> <br /> Various groups met in 1889, and the national convention of the “People’s Party of the U.S.A.,” known as the “Populists,” met in May 1891 to draw up a platform and nominate a candidate.<br /> <br /> Key leaders of the agrarian movement were present, including <a href=" " target="_blank">Ignatius Donnelly</a> of Minnesota, “Sockless Jerry” Simpson of Kansas, Tom Watson of Georgia, and James Weaver of Iowa. The convention nominated Weaver to run on a platform that demanded “free and unlimited coinage of silver at 16:1,” an income tax, and restrictions on immigrants.<br /> <br /> Although the platform did not specify government ownership of the railroads, mainstream Populists all agreed on that measure as well, but most agreed it was not likely in the near future, and they therefore settled for government regulation of the railroads.<br /> <br /> Weaver, of course, had no impact on the 1892 election. Congress had already passed the <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="1356336116" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="608d1fb2fb6943530dc4cb6a1f2132af" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Sherman Silver Purchase Act" href="http://www.amazon.com/Purchase-Clause-Sherman-Repealed-Coinage/dp/1356336116/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=608d1fb2fb6943530dc4cb6a1f2132af&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_9398666" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sherman Silver Purchase Act</a><img alt="and" border="0" century="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_9398666" in="" late="" mountain="" nineteenth="" of="" populism="" regions="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=608d1fb2fb6943530dc4cb6a1f2132af&_cb=1481973853811" states="" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="0" />, which was a half-measure in which the government planned to purchase large amounts of silver—not at 16:1, but at 16¹/₂:1.<br /> <br /> This created a window for arbitrage among speculators, resulting in a massive outflow of gold from the United States Treasury and major banks and triggering the panic of 1893. Although Congress repealed the act that year, the damage had been done and the erosion of the gold reserve undermined the nation’s banking system.<br /> <br /> The panic gave the Republicans a campaign issue—the gold standard—and the Democrats took the bait by nominating William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat with strong populist leanings, as their presidential standard bearer. Bryan’s positions so closely paralleled those of the Populist Party that it did not nominate its own candidate, but supported Bryan.<br /> <br /> At the convention, Bryan delivered his famous speech in which he railed at those who would impose the gold standard and “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The Populists did gain control of some legislatures and judgeships, passing a law in Nebraska that imposed a cut in railroad freight rates.<br /> <br /> But railroad and elevator freight rates had taken a backseat to the silver issue. Moreover, as reform elements within the Republican Party gained momentum, the Populists lost ground.<br /> <br /> Unable to win at the ballot box with any regularity, they faced either fusion into the Democratic Party or allying themselves with the hated Republicans, who were actually enacting reforms. And despite the original lofty goals of a party that had no discrimination between races, the southern Populists had much different attitudes than those in the Midwest.<br /> <br /> The Populists embodied the late-nineteenth-century agrarian anxiety about the declining status of the farmer in U.S. society. Farmers had gone into the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Civil War</a> kala as a majority, and had controlled the electoral college through the votes of the South, West, and Midwest—all essentially hinging on the power of the farm bloc.<br /> <br /> But after the Civil War, the United States shifted to a manufacturing society, and farm states lost their electoral clout. While literature and culture still held the farmer in high esteem, neither his income nor his political power seemed to confirm that status.<br /> <br /> This produced an anxiety noted by Richard Hofstadter in his <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B002H2EPK0" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="9bd1073d9c951f901ed86ac1e9356f36" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Age of Reform (1955)" href="http://www.amazon.com/THE-AGE-OF-REFORM/dp/B002H2EPK0/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=9bd1073d9c951f901ed86ac1e9356f36&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_5699753" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Age of Reform (1955)</a><img alt="and" border="0" century="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_5699753" in="" late="" mountain="" nineteenth="" of="" populism="" regions="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=9bd1073d9c951f901ed86ac1e9356f36&_cb=1481973939573" states="" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="0" />, where, despite the fact that falling prices across the board actually made most farmers better off, they in general perceived they were losing ground in the economy.<br /> <br /> Along with railroads, banks increasingly became targets for agrarian attacks. The unwillingness to permit branch banking ensured that in the Midwest especially, small country banks relied ever more heavily on big-city banks, particularly those in New York City. This, in turn, magnified conspiracy theories involving a “money trust” or “Jewish bankers” who controlled the nation’s finances.<br /> <br /> Publications such as William “Coin” Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School (1894) contributed to such views. Like other third parties in U.S. history, however, the Populists melted into one or the other of the two established parties, and had largely disappeared by 1900... except in the fictional account of Frank Baum.

Populism

Populism The agrarian movement in the West, South, and mountain regions of the United States in the late nineteenth century, known as P...

Read more »

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

<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" rel="nofollow" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="sometimes" border="0" elders="" entitled="" learned="" men="" o="" of="" or="" protocols="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNg_lGdI47ve9Ont-Lja20a5ysGXtG4UOmTfi-QqWNBpTBPVbJdFYMsI_PGPhekAGuEfK-_urCFG7rKKyikX497zeI3ANIC62xxxWJ-AfTO5OSNctcPL1C3MxWE5qEBJ3wgnP69RSXAYJv/s1600/Protocols-Zion.jpg" the="" title="Protocols" width="250" wise="" zion="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Protocols of the Elders of Zion</td></tr> </tbody></table> Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sometimes entitled Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, are a collection of statements supposedly made at a meeting of a secret, conspiratorial Jewish cabal. The statements of the “elders” are taken to reveal the cabal’s plans for dominating the entire world.<br /> <br /> Through their secret government, it is alleged, they will ultimately succeed in overthrowing nations, introducing a single world economic system, and preparing the way for a King of the Jews who will be “the real Pope of the Universe, the patriarch of an international Church” (Protocols, 58).<br /> <br /> For many believers in the Protocols, this King of the Jews is none other than the Antichrist; for more secular conspiracy theorists, the outcome is a “one-world government” or “<a href=" " target="_blank">New World Order</a>” run by international (Jewish) bankers (although these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive).<br /> <br /> The Protocols were first proven to be a forgery in 1921 and are now almost universally recognized as such. Yet their dubious authenticity has never substantially reduced their effectiveness as antisemitic propaganda, and they have been used to support anti-Jewish conspiracy theories from their first appearance around 1900 right up until the present day, perhaps most famously and most tragically in Nazi Germany.<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/1502304880/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=128ae4fabcb5d635f844df84a135a9fe" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1502304880&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="sometimes" border="0" elders="" entitled="" height="1" learned="" men="" o="" of="" or="" protocols="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1502304880" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" wise="" zion="" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1930004567/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=10def783e6ab13c9d17c7f25f9ad31ea" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1930004567&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="sometimes" border="0" elders="" entitled="" height="1" learned="" men="" o="" of="" or="" protocols="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1930004567" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" wise="" zion="" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> <b>The Composition of the Protocols</b><br /> <br /> Although the “writer” of the Protocols is unknown, much of the text is derived from a nineteenth-century political satire written in France by Maurice Joly. In Joly’s Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel (1864), the political philosophers <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Montesquieu</a> and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Machiavelli</a> are engaged in debate, with Montesquieu (the jagoan of the piece) arguing the case for liberalism and Machiavelli (the villain and standin for <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Napoleon III</a>) arguing the case for cynical despotism.<br /> <br /> As Norman Cohn points out in his indispensable Warrant for Genocide (1981), whoever compiled the text of the Protocols seemed to do so “in a hurry” because the elders can be found offering the arguments of both Montesquieu and Machiavelli.<br /> <br /> Yet, ironically and tragically, this apparent mistake resulted in one of the text’s great “strengths” as right-wing propaganda, for the apparent contradiction between the two political philosophies is resolved as follows: the elders’ “true” goals for world conquest through sinister political machinations are revealed in the Machiavelli passages, while the Enlightenment liberalism advocated in the Montesquieu passages is merely a ploy the elders use to delude the “goy cattle.”<br /> <br /> Whether by accident or by intention, the compiler of the Protocols managed to forge the conceptual matrix that would allow generations of antisemitic conspiracy theorists to view every liberal-progressive development in politics (e.g., the formation of the UN, the development of labor unions, the liberalization of trade, secularization, etc.) as merely a ploy of the international Jewish conspiracy.<br /> <br /> The rampant forces of globalized capitalism were indeed causing many changes throughout Europe, and the Protocols are quite clearly offering a distorted—and ultimately deadly—metaphor for the new economic world order.<br /> <br /> The elders want wars, for instance, to be fought “on economic ground” (Protocols, 17), which is, of course, the sphere of their power, for, as they remind us throughout the text, they control the world’s gold.<br /> <br /> When nations subsume their own sovereignty under the general rule of international economy, they are playing right into the elders’ hands. Money knows no national boundaries; it is the international force par excellence.<br /> <br /> The elders speak of capital in awed tones as an entity “which possesses millions of eyes ever on the watch and unhampered by any limitations whatsoever,” and it is this that provides a clue about what lies behind the antisemitic conspiracy theories the Protocols generate. As the U.S. literary scholar Frederic Jameson points out, conspiracy theory can be understood as a flawed attempt to comprehend a social totality that is, ultimately, beyond comprehension.<br /> <br /> In this case, the awesome power of globalization (i.e., global capitalism) itself is misunderstood as somehow being the conscious scheme of a few individuals, rather than as an impersonal force driven on by markets and banal, everyday consumer self-interest. This particular flawed understanding of the social totality is distinguished by its cruel scapegoating and its ability to generate violence.<br /> <br /> <b>The History of the Protocols from Nineteenth-Century Russia to the Holocaust</b><br /> <br /> Though the origin of the Protocols is a complex subject, the general consensus is that the text resulted at least in part from labors of Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, the head of foreign operations for the czarist secret police force, Okhrana.<br /> <br /> Rachkovsky may well have commissioned the work as an attempt to create support for a Franco-Russian league, ostensibly to counter the international Jewish conspiracy, but no doubt more practically to offset other European military powers.<br /> <br /> While references within the text to the French political scene cause scholars to argue that the text was produced in France in 1897 or 1898, the Protocols first appear in print in Russia (as early as 1903), with their “canonical” formulation coming in the mystical writer Sergey Nilus’s ominously titled work, The Great in the Small: Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility (1905).<br /> <br /> Nilus revised and expanded his work for publication just in time for the revolution, and it was predominantly the 1917 version, entitled He Is Near, at the Door ... Here Comes the Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth, that furnished the world with what was to become a startlingly popular explanation of both the October Revolution and World War I.<br /> <br /> Very quickly, the Bolsheviks’ opponents, the White Russian forces, seized upon the Protocols as a foreign policy tool. They believed, or at least wanted others to believe, that the revolution was the work of the elders.<br /> <br /> By distributing copies of the Protocols to delegates at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and to government officials throughout Europe and the United States, the White forces hoped to persuade foreign powers to intervene in their civil war against the Bolsheviks. In 1920 the Protocols were being taken quite seriously in mainstream newspapers such as the London Times.<br /> <br /> Editions began to appear in many languages throughout Europe. Then Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent published a series of ninety-one articles “explaining” the mysterious power of Jews in the United States and introducing the Protocols to a wide U.S. audience (the journal had a readership that often neared 500,000).<br /> <br /> Reprinted as The International Jew, Ford’s particularly U.S. version of the antisemitic conspiracy theory was shipped back to Europe and ultimately, in the words of Norman Cohn, did “more than any other work to make the Protocols world famous” (Cohn, 159).<br /> <br /> One of the many inconsistencies in the worldwide dissemination of the Protocols is the ways in which the conspiracy theory was subtly warped within each nation to fit the national strategic interests.<br /> <br /> While antisemites in each country believed the Jews to be behind a secret world government or conspiracy, they were in wild disagreement as to who exactly was supposed to be in league with the international Jewish conspiracy. In Germany, it was believed that the City of London was the elders’ center of operations, and that the English actually financed the Bolsheviks.<br /> <br /> In England, on the other hand, it was supposed that Germany was in league with the Bolsheviks and the elders. In both cases is quite clear that the Jews were being made a scapegoat in order to drum up opposition to each country’s strategic military and economic rivals.<br /> <br /> Interest in the Protocols dramatically tapered off in Britain when the London Times proved them to be a forgery in August 1921. Yet certain radical elements in Germany refused to believe this. In Mein Kampf, Hitler perversely argued that even if the Protocols turned out to be a forgery, that did not mean that the contents were untrue.<br /> <br /> In fact, for Hitler, all of the public denunciations of the Protocols in the British papers and elsewhere proved all the more that the Protocols represented things the way they really are; after all, the elders themselves announce in the Protocols that they already control the press (Protocols, 30).<br /> <br /> In the end, the Protocols formed one of the pillars of the Nazi ideology. Yet not only did the Nazis found their antisemitism on the Protocols, they also seemed entranced and profoundly influenced by the elders’ conspiracy.<br /> <br /> The great irony of the situation has been pointed out by Hannah Arendt: “the Nazis started with the fiction of conspiracy and modeled themselves, more or less consciously, after the secret society of the Elders of Zion.”<br /> <br /> As is too often the case, the conspiracy theorists end up mirroring the very conspiracy they ostensibly hope to eradicate (perhaps revealing the psychological “projection” that all along formed the basis of the racial hatred). The tragic result of this ideology is well known—at least 6 million lives destroyed in the Holocaust.<br /> <br /> <b>The Protocols Today</b><br /> <br /> Though the Holocaust is the obscene climax of the Protocols’ history, it is far from the end of the story. To this day the Protocols are still used effectively in anti-Israeli propaganda in the Middle East.<br /> <br /> The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) refers to the Protocols in its “Covenant” as evidence of Zionist expansionist policy. It suggests that the Protocols are “the best proof” of its claim that Israel intends to “expand from the Nile to the Euphrates.”<br /> <br /> The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) keeps a running record of positive references to the Protocols in more mainstream Middle Eastern media as well (particularly those references found in Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, the official newspaper of the Palestinian authority).<br /> <br /> In the United States, Neo-Nazi groups, right-wing separatists, and the Nation of Islam have all distributed (or been accused of distributing) copies of the Protocols (these groups are also tracked by the ADL). The Internet has provided a cheaply accessible forum for such groups to publicize their views, and no doubt ensures that Protocols of the Elders of Zion are more widely accessible today than ever.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Protocols of the Elders of Zion Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sometimes entitled Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or Protocols...

Read more »

Puritans

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="More" border="0" commentator="" england="" has="" irony="" new="" noted="" of="" one="" puritan="" puritans="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqXye3lZbCFFkS3xvt1jAgx_0FTmtYm91cHNiJzw4LzJB6sPWd32nhAWljL_vu2HHtd40xcIMEMaa0wBVY9bH4jIaiAbUVvw_T_opT0W28M4YrP5MqfLo2t5RrRZuilJLeavsMdzfjWalF/s1600/puritans.jpg" than="" the="" title="Puritans" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Puritans</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> More than one commentator has noted the irony of Puritan New England: that a society founded so idealistically as a haven of religious liberty would in turn persecute religious dissenters.<br /> <br /> This observation reflects significant misunderstandings about Puritan beliefs, ideology, and identity. The existence of a royal conspiracy to suppress the Puritan movement in England was a key element in New England’s founding mythology.<br /> <br /> However, the Puritans fled to New England not to permit unfettered religious liberty but to acquire the “gospel liberty” to erect a godly society—a “New Israel”—in accordance with their specific beliefs.<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/184871470X/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=37f5ea7e066cec7ec6cc86120c9d51b4" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=184871470X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="More" border="0" commentator="" england="" has="" height="1" irony="" new="" noted="" of="" one="" puritan="" puritans="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=184871470X" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" than="" the="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601781660/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=02617a09fcede73e9e8471d56e545068" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1601781660&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="More" border="0" commentator="" england="" has="" height="1" irony="" new="" noted="" of="" one="" puritan="" puritans="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1601781660" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" than="" the="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> The Puritans saw themselves as a righteous remnant surrounded by enemies, and, admonished by the knowledge that God’s blessing on their society was predicated on its order and obedience, their religious and political psychology was reflexively defensive.<br /> <br /> Tracing the New England Puritans’ obsession with conspiracy theories helps clarify the motivations for fleeing England and the rationale for some of the acts of intolerance that still give them a bad reputation.<br /> <br /> The Puritans who began to arrive in America in the 1630s were but a small portion of the participants in a fifty-year-old reform movement that originated in the Elizabethan <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Church of England</a>. Best understood as a loose, incomplete alliance of progressive Protestants composed of both clergy and laypeople of middling and gentry status, the Puritans worked to extend the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Protestant Reformation</a> in England.<br /> <br /> Forsaking the “papist” rituals of the established Church of England, Puritans gathered in autonomous congregations or “conventicles,” in which membership was only extended to demonstrably pure individuals, called “saints” or the “elect.” Moral legislation was also a key strategy to remedying England’s “halfly reformed” society.<br /> <br /> Distressed by what they saw as Anglicanism’s turn back to Roman Catholic practices, they agitated vociferously in their parishes and in Parliament for religious purity in ways that earned them their name, a derogatory epithet hurled by their many detractors.<br /> <br /> Opposition to Puritan reforms from the monarchy and the moderate elements in the Church of England was unending, but increased particularly under the Stuarts, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">James I</a> and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Charles I</a>, and through the efforts of the bishop of London, William Laud, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.<br /> <br /> James I, who believed that abolishing the national church would represent a threat to royal prerogative, famously declared of the Puritans that “I will harry them out of the land.” Laud, meanwhile, harassed Puritan clergy by manipulating the Church of England bureaucracy. A climactic development occurred in 1629, when Charles I suspended the Puritan-dominated Parliament.<br /> <br /> This effectively ended Puritan efforts by putting out of reach the only possible avenue for legislating religious reform within the Church of England, and hinted at a more menacing and repressive royal posture toward nonconformity.<br /> <br /> <b>The City on a Hill</b><br /> <br /> Frustrated by these defeats, and fearful of more persecution, a sizeable cohort of Puritans made the difficult decision to leave an England they now found intractably corrupt. A small vanguard left in the late 1620s, founding Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629. What became known as the “Great Migration” began in 1630, when a flotilla of ships carrying the colony’s first governor, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Winthrop</a>, left England for the New World.<br /> <br /> In a defining sermon that set out the ideological and religious foundations for the new colony, Winthrop declared that the emigrants were a covenant people of God, a “New Israel” whose purpose was to create a godly “City on a Hill” that would be a Christian beacon for a lost and corrupt England.<br /> <br /> The Puritan attempt to create a model society in New England depended on a unique and durable synthesis of church and state that came to be known as the “Congregational Way.” Godly life was ordered collectively, and the pillars of social purity were the clergyman and the “godly magistrate.” Church and state were separate, unlike the state-supported Anglican Church, but their roles were complementary.<br /> <br /> At the center of each town was the church, or meeting house, which often doubled as the local court or town hall. Membership to the congregation was carefully limited to those who could demonstrate evidence of their conversion or sanctification. Electoral franchise in local politics, meanwhile, was only offered to church members.<br /> <br /> Further, although they were not allowed to hold public office, clergymen performed valuable civic functions by preaching election sermons, or presiding over days of fasting in times of trouble. Moral codes, such as New Haven’s famous “blue laws,” were legislated and enforced to maintain order and purity.<br /> <br /> <b>Maintaining Orthodoxy</b><br /> <br /> While Puritan society was notable for the cohesiveness of its governing institutions, its divine mandate and its precarious place on the American frontier made it deeply susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories. Particularly troubling was the duduk perkara of religious sectarianism.<br /> <br /> As a last enclave of true Christianity, it was easy for Puritans to see conspiracies of heretics arrayed against them, plots that ultimately were of satanic derivation. Samuel Sewall, a prominent Boston merchant, like many of his compatriots, was deeply fearful of “the plots of papists, Atheists, &c.” (Sewall, 10).<br /> <br /> That New Englanders dealt with heterodoxy in ways that often were immoderate reflected their belief that conspiracies to gospel liberty—real and imagined—lay behind religious dissent and diversity.<br /> <br /> The first challenges to New England’s religious orthodoxy emerged in the first decade of settlement, and were led by two brilliant and charismatic individuals, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Roger Williams</a> and <a href=" " rel="" target="_blank">Anne Hutchinson</a>.<br /> <br /> Beginning in 1634 Williams rocked the still evolving orthodox Puritan establishment in New England by arguing that the colony’s church-state matrix was contrary to scriptural law. He objected to the idea that civil authorities should suppress religious dissent, enforce church attendance, or protect the practice of religion.<br /> <br /> His views advocating “soul liberty” and the strict separation of church and state seem to anticipate the ideas of <a href=" " target="_blank">Thomas Jefferson</a> and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">James Madison</a>, but his intention was quite different: he believed that any church-state alliance invariably corrupted the church.<br /> <br /> Since gospel liberty depended on submission to proper civil and religious authority, his ideas and popularity attacked the nexus of Puritan social order and raised fears of a wider sectarian conspiracy. He was banished from <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Massachusetts</a> in 1636 and settled in Rhode Island.<br /> <br /> Anne Hutchinson’s challenge to New England’s religious order, meanwhile, incited what came to be known as the Antinomian Crisis (1636–1638). A brilliant woman, she expressed dissatisfaction with the theology and preaching of many of the colony’s ministers.<br /> <br /> She held meetings in her Boston home that attracted crowds of men and women, in which she discussed and criticized the weekly sermons she had heard. While the Puritan movement encouraged lay participation in theological debate, her dissent, gender, and large following made her ministry particularly controversial.<br /> <br /> As a threat to the clerical establishment, she was, like Williams, banished from the colony—but not without a significant political struggle, because many of her male supporters included a number of powerful merchants.<br /> <br /> Having quelled dissent from within, New England Puritans next faced a sectarian invasion from without. Beginning in the 1650s, members of the Quaker sect—an offshoot of radical Protestantism in England—began to arrive in Massachusetts, settling mainly in Salem and Boston.<br /> <br /> Beyond significant theological differences, the Quakers were a threat to Puritan society because they recognized the authority of no civil government, refused to pay taxes and serve in the militia, and acknowledged no hierarchy of political leadership.<br /> <br /> They publicly denounced the Puritan ministers as a bunch of hacks or “hirelings.” Aggressive in their proselytizing, the most radical form of Quaker witness was called “going naked for a sign,” when Quaker women would run naked through Puritan churches and civic courts.<br /> <br /> In the words of a Puritan broadside, Quakerism was “destructive to fundamental trueths [sic] of religion” (Pestana, 33). But New England’s leaders, who were not amused by the accusations of ungodliness, ultimately failed to quell the threat to their godly commonwealth.<br /> <br /> Faced with Puritan repression—beatings, imprisonment, and even executions—the Quakers would not desist. The most famous Quaker “martyr,” Mary Dyer, was a former follower of Anne Hutchinson who converted to Quakerism in the 1650s.<br /> <br /> In 1659 she and two comrades were convicted for apostasy in Boston and sentenced to death. Because the Puritan magistrates feared a public outcry or possibly even an attack on the town by other Quakers, her sentence was commuted and she was banished from Boston with the threat of death should she return.<br /> <br /> She did, and she was hanged on 1 June 1 1660 along with three other Quakers. News of these executions spread to England and attracted the negative attention of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">King Charles II</a>, and the Puritans were gradually forced to amend their repressive tactics.<br /> <br /> Unable to enforce religious uniformity, Puritan clergy and magistrates resorted to persuasion to maintain the godliness of New England society. While Quakers were the most visible challenge to Puritan society, a more insidious threat came from vice and disorder within New England.<br /> <br /> Puritan fear of “declension,” or the perception that New England was falling away from its divinely ordained mission, was the impetus for the pastorled “Reformation of Manners,” a moral-reform campaign that began in 1679.<br /> <br /> In sermons and laws, authorities targeted a whole host of practices and behaviors as immoral: folk magic and witchcraft, harvest revels, tavern culture, and sexual vice. Resisting immorality required vigilance, since pastors and magistrates believed that disorder was not simply the random expression of human nature, but was part of a satanic plot to undermine the last enclave of true Christianity.<br /> <br /> <b>From Colony to Province</b><br /> <br /> If fears of heterodox conspiracies and etika laxity preoccupied the Puritan ruling class, New England’s vulnerable position as an isolated colonial outpost was also a source of conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> The Puritans fancied that they had founded their “City on a Hill” in a “howling wilderness,” surrounded by real and imagined enemies. Their <a href=" " target="_blank">Native American</a> neighbors were objects of suspicion and fear, and New England fought two vicious wars against them, the Pequot War (1637) and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">King Philip’s War</a> (1675–1676).<br /> <br /> Rumors of imminent Indian attack were constant throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The “Eastern Indians” allied with the French in Quebec and began attacking New England in the 1680s, initiating a cycle of warfare that would not cease until the 1760s.<br /> <br /> This combined French and Indian threat had special connotations in the Puritan religious and political imagination. As a powerful Catholic nation, France and its imperial ambitions represented nothing less than the temporal instrument of the papal Antichrist.<br /> <br /> Thus Puritans refracted geopolitical developments and imperial adversaries through the lens of their collective identity as a people with a divine mission. More complicated, however, were New England’s increasingly contentious relations with England.<br /> <br /> While the Puritans had fled persecution, they had never disavowed the mother country, nor had they formally rejected the Church of England. The founding charter signed by Charles I gave the first Puritan colonists unprecedented powers of self-rule, allowing them to select their own governor and erect the institutions that supported their godly identity.<br /> <br /> Events in England—the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the rule of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660—meant that New England was effectively independent for the first thirty years of its existence.<br /> <br /> Displeased with New England’s commercial and religious independence, Charles II began to reassert English control over the colonies. Historians debate when Puritan New England can be said to have “ended,” but certainly a pivotal transition occurred when Charles II revoked Massachusetts’s charter in 1684.<br /> <br /> Authority was wrested from the Puritan-elected governor and handed to a new royal appointee, Governor Edmund Andros. This inaugurated a decade of the politics of conspiracy as the established Puritan leadership and the newly arrived royal representatives struggled for power.<br /> <br /> Andros arrived in Boston in 1686 and immediately alienated the Puritan leadership. A devout Anglican, he deliberately flouted Puritan religious sensibilities and refused to defer to the deposed Puritan elite in colonial decision-making.<br /> <br /> Fearing their religious liberties were at risk, the Puritans retaliated in two ways: they spread rumors about Andros’s corruption and incompetence, and they sent Increase Mather, the colony’s most important clergyman, to London in 1688 to renegotiate the charter with the new king, James II.<br /> <br /> However, in another outbreak in the conflict between monarch and Commons, James II—a Catholic advocate of absolute monarchy—was overthrown in 1688 and replaced by <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">William III</a>, a Protestant who was much more conciliatory to parliamentary powers.<br /> <br /> This “<a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Glorious Revolution</a>” had significant effects in the American colonies. Hearing this news, the New England Puritans acted preemptively. Declaring that Andros, as the appointee of James II, was no longer the legitimate ruler, on 18 April 1689 the leadership of Puritan Boston rose up and overthrew Andros.<br /> <br /> In documents justifying this coup, they argued that Puritan New England had been oppressed by Andros’s tyranny; he had led the colony to disaster since the revocation of the old charter in 1684. “[A]ll our concerns both Civil and Sacred, have suffered by the Arbitrary Oppressions of UnreasonableMen,” they wrote, and produced an often hyperbolic litany of grievances and conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> They accused Andros of bungling a military campaign against the Eastern Indians, which resulted in great loss of life to New Englanders, and of willfully suppressing news of the Glorious Revolution in England—which they characterized as “the rescue [of] the English nation from imminent POPERY and SLAVERY”—in order to stay in power.<br /> <br /> Implausibly, they also believed Andros to be complicit in an imminent attack on New England by Catholic France, and claimed that the French planned to kidnap the last Puritan governor of the colony, Simon Bradstreet (A. B., 48–53).<br /> <br /> In short, the Puritan leaders constructed from a potent stew of rumor and conspiracy theories an ideological justification for overthrowing Andros, by which they hoped to reconstitute the authority and political institutions they had enjoyed under the old charter.<br /> <br /> Significantly, however, the political rhetoric they employed did not invoke so much the religious idioms of godly liberty but reflected a new, more secular vocabulary and claimed—in a premonition of the American Revolution—that they acted in defense of their “English liberties.”<br /> <br /> This was a fleeting victory, however, since William III was unwilling to restore the old charter. In 1691 Mather returned to New England with a new charter that irrevocably reshaped Puritan political life.<br /> <br /> Electoral franchise based on church membership and a government elected entirely within the colony was replaced by a franchise based on property and a government supervised from London.<br /> <br /> Mather was convinced that this new charter was the best he could have obtained, but from then on New England was governed through the language of English constitutionalism, not the spiritual vision of the Puritan founders.

Puritans

Puritans More than one commentator has noted the irony of Puritan New England: that a society founded so idealistically as a haven of r...

Read more »

Thomas Pynchon

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="The" been="" border="0" called="" defining="" figure="" has="" of="" pynchon="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV9uWbWhuFDCCRKRFf0h8NJHf08Q8HCSPaFnYsQclLptmuS7X2QbLfuFkISHmsvLT9YelCXja2n56lLWHVXC59uVgu36JLWdYnXqscgc7znaP9JxunMui1iDnGGYFr2jtofL_OVxi9ZxbB/s1600/Thomas-Pynchon.jpg" the="" thomas="" title="Thomas" what="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Pynchon</td></tr> </tbody></table><br /> The defining figure of what has been called the “paranoid style” of U.S. fiction, Thomas Pynchon is also the most reclusive and mysterious U.S. novelist of the 1960s generation.<br /> <br /> Using paranoia and conspiracy to shape both the form and content of much of his work, Pynchon’s fiction is, like conspiracy theory itself, huge and seemingly uncontrollable in scope, exceptionally complex, consistently abstrak and surreal, and quite possibly (or possibly not) totally interconnected. His novels include V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a collection of short stories, Slow Learner (1984), Vineland (1990), and Mason & Dixon (1997).<br /> <br /> Pynchon’s novels defy any effort at easy summary and freely combine complex scientific concepts with dirty limericks, philosophical ruminations on historical causality and theological predestination, and investigations of clandestine mail-delivery services and sentient lightbulbs, and like to pit dopesmoking freaks against military cabals, fascist corporate syndicates, and competing mind-control cliques.<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/0143039946/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=06bbf8f2558c992796d831c142171394" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0143039946&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" been="" border="0" called="" defining="" figure="" has="" height="1" of="" pynchon="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0143039946" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" thomas="" what="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143125753/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=228a7f559b00e3870cc4acc75d279216" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0143125753&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" been="" border="0" called="" defining="" figure="" has="" height="1" of="" pynchon="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0143125753" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" thomas="" what="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table><br /> Pynchon fills his novels with hundreds of strange characters bearing stranger names like Meatball Mulligan, Genghis Cohen, Mike Fallopian, Brock Vond, and the Revd Wicks Cherrycoke. Although meticulously precise, his prose has the outward appearance of being loose and uncontainable, deluging the reader with a textual excess that brilliantly embodies the collision of seemingly self-contained conceptual universes in postmodern U.S. culture.<br /> <br /> The reader is faced with the delightful if paranoia-inducing task of searching out meaningful connections within the narrative’s frenetically multiplying plots, wild conspiracies, and allegorical details. Pynchon’s distinctively nonlinear and fragmented stories are nonetheless built around a quest for knowledge or to uncover some “plot,” but, as he writes in V., “in this search motive is part of the quarry.”<br /> <br /> Yet every quest and every plot seems too complex, too interconnected for the protagonists to unravel, let alone take control of. The result is a series of novels and meanings that are, as he writes in Gravity’s Rainbow, “not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into.”<br /> <br /> Unlike his novels, what is known of Pynchon’s biography can be easily summarized. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born on 8 May 1937 on Long Island, New York. He attended Oyster Bay High School and won a scholarship to Cornell University.<br /> <br /> There he began as a student of engineering physics, but after leaving to join the Navy Signal Corps for two years, Pynchon returned to Cornell where he graduated with a degree in English in 1959. While at Cornell, Pynchon is known to have taken a class from Vladimir Nabokov, befriended the novelist Richard Fariña, and edited the Cornell Writer, where he published his first short story.<br /> <br /> In a rare personal essay, Pynchon wrote about the highly contradictory literary and cultural influences of the late 1950s that, in retrospect, are flawlessly synthesized in his mature style: Kerouac and Henry Adams, surrealism and Spike Jones, the Evergreen Review and Cybernetics, jazz clubs and British spy thrillers, marijuana and Edmund Wilson.<br /> <br /> After college, Pynchon moved to Greenwich Village where he began writing his first novel. In 1960 he moved to Seattle and worked for Boeing as a writer of technical manuals. Two years later, Pynchon moved to southern California and on to Mexico where he finished V. A picaresque novel of two deeply opposite men and “the whole sick crew,” V. is ostensibly centered around a search for conspiratorial meaning, which animates the novel’s movement.<br /> <br /> Unlike the perfect “schlemihl,” Benny Profane, Herbert Stencil is a joyless adventurer dedicated to searching for V., a woman who may or may not exist, but who he nonetheless believes is connected to the “century’s great cabals” that periodically reappear during moments of rebellion around the world.<br /> <br /> V. may embody the secret history of the twentieth century or she may simply be the paranoid’s conspiracy theory incarnate. V. received the William Faulkner award for the best first novel of the year, and the New York Times said of V.’s “recluse” of an author, “no matter what his circumstances, or where he’s doing it, there is at work a young writer of staggering promise.”<br /> <br /> The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon’s second novel and by virtue of its brevity and linear plot, it continues to be his most widely read and least Pynchonesque work. Lot 49 tells the story of Oedipa Maas and her quest to unravel the estate of her fabulously wealthy former lover Pierce Inverarity.<br /> <br /> In her pursuit, Oedipa encounters a broad range of southern California subcultures including LSD-experimenting doctors, right-wing nuts, a rock band called the Paranoids, and a gang of engineers at Yoyodyne Aerospace.<br /> <br /> Across the highways and undergrounds of San Narcisco, Oedipa learns to read the signs and experience “revelations which now seemed to come crowding in exponentially, as if the more she collected the more would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero.”<br /> <br /> Indeed, Oedipa finds evidence for the Tristero—a sinister alternative postal delivery system—in everything from a sixteenth-century Jacobean revenge tragedy to a machine based on Maxwell’s Demon.<br /> <br /> After reaching the point of exhaustion, Oedipa realizes that either the Trystero is real (i.e., an actual conspiracy), or Pierce has been playing a joke on her (which would fuel her paranoia), or, most unsettling of all, everything is just random and meaningless in a universe devoid of coherence.<br /> <br /> Or, perhaps, she, like everyone around her, is just losing her mind. But in the end, Oedipa, like Stencil, realizes that she would rather believe in the connection—no matter how abstrak or cruel—than in no connection at all. But, of course, the selesai revelation in this parodic detective novel is ultimately withheld.<br /> <br /> Gravity’s Rainbow is Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece, an 800-page blend of rocket science with B-movies, organic chemistry with Rilke, and German history with silly songs and innuendoes, which many critics believe to be postmodernism’s equal to Moby Dick and Ulysses.<br /> <br /> When it is discovered that Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop’s erections can predict the impact sites of V-2 rockets falling on London, the quest is on to uncover the mystery of Rocket 00000. What follows, or more properly, what is woven into this ostensible plot is a wild series of adventures across war-torn Europe.<br /> <br /> Gravity’s Rainbow features a strange collection of slobs, lovers, and “preterite” wanderers foolishly led by Slothrop—including a submarine full of Argentine anarchists and an army of suicidal African “Schwarzkommandos”—who eventually merge into a motley “Counterforce” to do battle with the international intelligence agencies and corporate conspiracies of the elect.<br /> <br /> In the course of his adventures, Slothrop comes across five “Proverbs for Paranoids” that, like unreliable signposts, guide Slothrop and the reader alike through “the Zone”:<br /> <ol><li>“You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures,”</li> <li>“The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportions to the immorality of the Master,”</li> <li>“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers,”</li> <li>“You hide, they seek,” and</li> <li>“Paranoids are not paranoids because they are paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”</li> </ol>Gravity’s Rainbow is encyclopedic in scope, and probably more frequently abandoned than actually read cover to cover. The experience of reading it is perhaps best described in a passage from the book itself: “Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those ... who are held at the edge.”<br /> <br /> While in V. and Lot 49 conspiracy and paranoia are the ideas of a single character, Gravity’s Rainbow turns this into a universal logic, and not just of individual psychology or political organization, but as a metaphysical category behind technology and the physics of gravity itself.<br /> <br /> In 1990 Pynchon returned with Vineland, a novel set in 1984 amidst the forests of northern California and structured around a young woman’s effort to understand her parents’ lives as 1960s hippies and (counter)revolutionaries.<br /> <br /> Seven years later, Pynchon published his own eighteenth-century novel, Mason & Dixon, about two friends whose efforts at imposing a scientific order upon the world through measuring the transom of Venus or surveying the southern border of Pennsylvania find only mayhem and chaos in the Age of Reason.<br /> <br /> As of 2002, Thomas Pynchon is believed to live in New York City and continues to refuse any offer to be photographed or interviewed. Of course, this obsessive privacy has generated a kind of cult of personality around Pynchon, suggesting that the paranoia of his novels is also a factor in his own life.<br /> <br /> But whatever his reasons, Pynchon’s friends evidently do a good job of protecting his anonymity, for he is neither a loner nor hermit, but rejects the kind of public personality that he could easily claim as one of most important living novelists in the English language.

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon The defining figure of what has been called the “paranoid style” of U.S. fiction, Thomas Pynchon is also the most reclusi...

Read more »

Rap

<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 border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-3S9ezz3ccEilGn3od73qd-zLnmD5s0IOoqlodN1w9uThX9UxSSoYtSuzga2-xgLfadEDo91Fi9ZQ05W5Wc_AnSifSsa8nZyi6y2OvKKs18PN3cIGVd-e20z6_-BKHssWCqvRx-cSEwCh/s1600/rap.gif" /></a></div> <br /> It should come as little surprise that conspiracy thinking circulates in rap music. This black musical form—comprising rapping MCs, record-spinning DJs, and studio producers—first emerged in America’s deteriorating urban centers in the late 1970s. From these subcultural beginnings, it has developed and diversified into a mass market form, while sustaining vital connections to black lived experience.<br /> <br /> Reasons why rap music, which has deep roots in black oral culture, should include conspiracy motifs extend all the way back to the first coordinated conspiracy directed against black people in the United States: the slavery system of race-based labor exploitation.<br /> <br /> In the contemporary era, white supremacism is of course less state-sanctioned, following gains made by blacks culminating in the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. However, though often harder to identify, institutional discrimination and race-based prejudice are still widespread in contemporary America.<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/B00N9OL7NI/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=049b86656f11bf63b885b27f3f5fa7e0" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00N9OL7NI&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="It" as="" border="0" circulates="" come="" conspiracy="" height="1" in="" little="" music="" rap="" should="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B00N9OL7NI" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" surprise="" that="" thinking="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419718185/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1419718185&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=8ea7b0d142d3f4d3752bdfa09085abae" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&MarketPlace=US&ASIN=1419718185&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL250_&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="It" as="" border="0" circulates="" come="" conspiracy="" height="1" in="" little="" music="" rap="" should="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=am2&o=1&a=1419718185" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" surprise="" that="" thinking="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Many black and working-class Americans have lost ground economically over the past thirty years, casualties of rising inequality and free-market fundamentalism. These social conditions have given rise to new kinds of conspiracy stories and “<a href="http://amzn.to/2kFPE6B" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">urban legends</a>” (Turner), which found rich and varied expression in rap music.<br /> <br /> Rap’s conspiracy mode was often highly politicized. Black nationalist rap, peaking in the years around the turn of the 1990s, compellingly critiqued white power structures, often construed as a vast conspiracy. The highly influential group Public Enemy released <a href="http://amzn.to/2kQSDdA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Fear of a Black Planet</a> (1990), the title playing with white fears about black power.<br /> <br /> The title of the group’s follow-up album, Apocalypse 91: <a href="http://amzn.to/2kFKS9n" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Enemy Strikes Black</a> (1991), sensationally casts political struggle as a global race conflict. Other groups aestheticized their distrust of official knowledge and dominant structures in less pointedly political ways.<br /> <br /> East Coast ghettocentric rapper Prodigy, from Mobb Deep, among many others, fashioned images about clandestine power elites: “Illuminati wants my mind, soul, and my body / Secret society, trying to keep an eye on me” (rapping on LL Cool J’s “<a href="http://amzn.to/2kx0BfT" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">I Shot Ya Remix</a>,” 1995).<br /> <br /> In more pedagogic and religious terms, <a href="http://amzn.to/2lSHqx6" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Poor Righteous Teachers</a> released an album entitled New World Order (1995). These artists shift between fantastical, other-worldly visions and more socially driven expositions of frightening actual world order developments: technologized surveillance and exploding incarceration rates (Smith and Fiske).<br /> <br /> For rapper Coolio, the neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles became a “penitentiary culture” in the 1980s, its bounds traveling well beyond the many actual prisons located in “Fortress LA” (Davis).<br /> <br /> Of the more psychologized and hallucinatory rap portrayals, <a href="http://amzn.to/2kR3e8o" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tupac Shakur</a>, Geto Boys, and Wu-Tang Clan are notably inventive. Houston’s Geto Boys are best known for their 1991 hit “<a href="http://amzn.to/2lqwFSd" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">My Mind Is Playing Tricks on Me</a>,” which, according to Source magazine, “took us on a terrifying trip through the mind of a gangster under the gun.”<br /> <br /> Tapping into the masculinist paranoia of “ghetto survival,” such tracks were highly compelling, telling tales of insomnia, heavy alcohol consumption, suicidal thoughts, and paranoid delusions.<br /> <br /> Wu-Tang Clan’s hallucinatory journeys, by contrast, were much more expansive and surreal. This nine-strong collective from Staten Island, New York, launched its esoteric, black-nationalist philosophy of “living mathematics” on its debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993).<br /> <br /> Adopting a dizzying array of personas and monikers (leading rapper Method Man is aka Johnny Blaze, Iron Lung, Johnny Dangerous, etc.), Wu-Tang combines Five Percent philosophy (an off-shoot of the Nation of Islam religion) with manifold pop-cultural references taken from Mafia lore, ufology, children’s television, and above all martial arts.<br /> <br /> The recipe produces paradoxically gritty but trippy albums and a full-blown but coded conspiracist mode. Notable examples include the age-old mysticism of GZA’s <a href="http://amzn.to/2kFRG71" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Liquid Swords</a> (1995) and Method Man’s mentally claustrophobic and apocalyptically titled <a href="http://amzn.to/2lSHhd5" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tical 2000: Judgement Day</a> (1998).<br /> <br /> As rap flooded the mainstream in the mid-1990s, rap stars continued to mobilize apocalyptic, conspiracy-laced images to less political ends. Busta Rhymes, for instance, offers Armageddon-style prophesies on his best-selling albums, When Disaster Strikes (1997) and Extinction Level Event (1998)—usually amounting to high-decibel boasts about his own vocal prowess.<br /> <br /> The style and themes of celebrated video director Hype Williams are also decidedly futuristic, including his award-winning clip for Tupac and Dr. Dre’s “<a href="http://amzn.to/2kx0AIE" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">California Love</a>” (1996), which depicts a dystopian future-desert of campfires and rusty cyber-technology reminiscent of the Mad Max films.<br /> <br /> Although politically conscious and alternative rappers continue to deploy conspiracy themes to express and explain the confounding experiences of America’s black youth, mainstream acts more routinely explore the grandiose, explosive, and marketable dimensions of power, conspiracy, and paranoia.

Rap

It should come as little surprise that conspiracy thinking circulates in rap music. This black musical form—comprising rapping MCs, recor...

Read more »

John Robison

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="A" at="" border="0" edinburgh="" in="" john="" natural="" of="" philosophy="" professor="" robison="" scotland="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0d_8NY3XLTvTNAaW3tsIgmpeNjAmhuH4efwYWyk_MV79NMt4y60K367HR5PDhYWJxppG4-5h9mcHyr5FFtNIVdPVjUoKPprCR1PMoP31fswq1jRi26IFBd84IeCSSA87HoWm82qTqlyVX/s1600/John-Robison.jpg" the="" title="John" university="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Robison</td></tr> </tbody></table><br /> A professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, John Robison (1739–1805) was a distinguished scientist and writer. He was also author of Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried On in the Secret Meetings of the Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, Collected from Good Authorities (1797), which alleged that the Illuminati (a secret society originally founded in Bavaria in 1776) were behind many of the major events of the day, and the French Revolution in particular.<br /> <br /> Robison’s exposé was widely circulated and much discussed in the conspiratorial climate of the late 1790s (not least among New England leaders fearful of foreign threats to the fledgling American republic), and, remarkably, it is still much cited and remains in print today.<br /> <br /> The son of a Scottish merchant, Robison was born in 1739 and attended the University of Glasgow while in his teens. After serving as tutor to the son of Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, he was next commissioned to conduct sea trials of the newly invented nautical chronometer, before accompanying Sir Charles to Russia. Returning to Scotland, Robison took up the chair of natural philosophy (what would now be termed physics) at the University of Edinburgh in 1773.<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/1502306387/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=d645bf229e7d51337e6fb9000b7bacc4" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1502306387&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="A" at="" border="0" edinburgh="" height="1" in="" john="" natural="" of="" philosophy="" professor="" robison="" scotland="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1502306387" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" university="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-World-Order-Ralph-Epperson/dp/0961413514/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&dpID=71S9N7KQ7FL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR99%2C160_&refRID=1XQYAPW79J2DHEWDM89W&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=d079ef437e6f08d9e76e27dd2ad1d833" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0961413514&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="A" at="" border="0" edinburgh="" height="1" in="" john="" natural="" of="" philosophy="" professor="" robison="" scotland="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0961413514" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" university="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table><br /> He developed a reputation as a distinguished scientist, and was invited to write entries for the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on topics such as electricity, fluid dynamics, and magnetism. In 1783 he was elected general secretary of the newly formed Royal Society of Edinburgh (an organization, like its London counterpart, devoted to furthering scientific knowledge).<br /> <br /> Like many leading figures in eighteenth-century society Robison was a Mason, and Proofs of a Conspiracy was careful to make a distinction between the respectable, charitable activities of British freemasons, and the dangers of what the author saw as an immoral, godless, and secretive, corrupt version of masonry that had flourished on the continent.<br /> <br /> In his lengthy book, Robison alleged that the <a href=" " target="_blank">Illuminati</a> had merely gone underground after they had been disbanded by the Elector of Bavaria in 1787, and had then plotted to overthrow the Christian religion and all established governments.<br /> <br /> He argued that the French Revolution could only be explained by such a theory, since the eruption of revolutionary agitation right across the country could not have been the result of a spontaneous uprising, but must have been the result of a secret, concerted plan.<br /> <br /> His proof of the connection between the banned German secret society and the leaders of the French Revolution was some rather slim evidence of an association between some middle-ranking Illuminati and Mirabeau and Talleyrand, French freemasons who went on to become important politicians in the 1790s.<br /> <br /> Robison’s book also warned that cells of the suppressed Illuminati had been set up in America. Along with Augustin de Barruel’s four-volume exposé of the dangerous reach of freemasonry (the first two voumes of which just beat Proofs of a Conspiracy to the press), Robison’s book caused a stir in the fevered climate of the late 1790s in America.<br /> <br /> His claims were widely reported in the press, and influential figures such as Jedidiah Morse expanded on Robison’s theory in sermons and speeches. The scare stories about the dangers of an underground Illuminati conspiracy plotting to undermine America’s liberties fed into the Federalist agitation that resulted in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.<br /> <br /> Although Robison’s book fell into obscurity once the immediate political climate changed in the later nineteenth century, it has continued to be cited as a major source on the existence of an all-powerful ultrasecretive conspiracy ever since.<br /> <br /> Since the 1960s the work has become a mainstay of, on the one hand, right-wing diatribes against the power of shadowy, power-hungry, atheistic globalists (the Illuminati in this view become forerunners of Communism) and, on the hand, anti-authoritarian versions of conspiracy theory that create an account of a long-running, semimystical conspiracy of the elite that its unmaskers believe dates back to beyond even the eighteenth century.

John Robison

John Robison A professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, John Robison (1739–1805) was a distinguished ...

Read more »