Nuclear Freeze Movement

<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 a="" alt="to" appeared="" beginning="" border="0" for="" freeze="" movement="" new="" nuclear="" offer="" presidency="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjQEmv6wQRLDybvJX9BbKApWXlJlscCaO1t2ZKpaqUWUZ77S4vi-I7_X8H293DmlAQMt-QCS3RMGf8VrR7cyqJTZ-Qoel2uycLIfEPnPwqNHvkw4zAHhuhtSpiVPxsOyLmmcoMwn8qqKLT/s1600/Nuclear-Movement.jpg" states="" the="" title="Nuclear" to="" united="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nuclear Freeze Movement</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> After <a href=" " target="_blank">Watergate</a>, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vietnam</a>, and the economic/cultural malaise of the 1970s, the election of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ronald Reagan</a> to the presidency appeared to offer a new beginning for the United States. Reagan promised to unleash U.S. business by reducing taxation and government regulation, while simultaneously calling for major increases in defense spending so that the United States could assume its role as the “arsenal of democracy” against the forces of aggression in the Soviet Union.<br /> <br /> Pointing to perceived Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Central America, Reagan reinvigorated the cold war. However, the rhetoric and policies of the Reagan administration also reenergized the U.S. peace movement with the call for a freeze on nuclear weapons by both the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Nuclear Freeze Movement>Soviet Union</a> and the United States.<br /> <br /> Many conservative supporters of the Reagan administration reacted to the nuclear freeze ajuan by labeling the peace movement as a conspiracy supported and financed by the Soviet Union. In a new guise, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">McCarthyism</a> had reentered U.S. politics.<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/0870235605/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=541873beeebc9fcdba5bc2ac1f378047" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0870235605&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="to" appeared="" beginning="" border="0" for="" freeze="" height="1" movement="" new="" nuclear="" offer="" presidency="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0870235605" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" to="" united="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0275933067/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=3461c0749719a4fcd836af6084a1bd33" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0275933067&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="to" appeared="" beginning="" border="0" for="" freeze="" height="1" movement="" new="" nuclear="" offer="" presidency="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0275933067" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" to="" united="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> The peace movement of the 1980s had its origins in the protest politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which had opposed deployment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile system and urged ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.<br /> <br /> This coalition of peace groups included the American Friends Services Committee (AFSC), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (CSNP), Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Mobilization for Survival (MfS), and Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC).<br /> <br /> In 1979, Randall Forsberg of the MfS published Halt the Arms Race, calling for a broad coalition to support a “bilateral freeze on the production, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles”.<br /> <br /> Forsberg’s appeal proved promising to many in the peace movement, for it was intelligible to the general public, as well as to arms control experts, and it provided a rallying point for a mass protest movement.<br /> <br /> However, tension was manifest in the nuclear freeze movement between those who perceived the issue as part of a larger social movement and those who pursued a more pragmatic political strategy. In November 1980 the freeze campaign was given impetus when three <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Nuclear Freeze Movement>Massachusetts</a> Senate districts endorsed a nonbonding freeze resolution.<br /> <br /> This successful campaign was followed by international protest against the deployment of cruise missiles by the Reagan administration in Western Europe, as well as the introduction, by Democratic Representative Jonathan Bingham of New York and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, of the nuclear freeze resolution into Congress.<br /> <br /> The apparent momentum of the freeze forces led opponents of the movement to question the motives of the peace alliance. For example, the State Department in 1981 charged that the World Peace Council was a Soviet-front organization that funneled money to the European peace movement, seeking to neutralize the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Nuclear Freeze Movement>North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)</a>.<br /> <br /> In March 1982, Secretary of State Alexander Haig called a news conference to denounce the congressional resolution for a freeze, asserting that the concept was bad defense, security, and arms control policy. Conservative groups and publications rallied behind the State Department and Haig.<br /> <br /> Writing in Commentary, Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who had been imprisoned for his political activities, asserted that the Soviets were behind the freeze movement, and he was shocked to observe “the ease with which presumably mature and intelligent people had by the thousands fallen into the Soviet booby-trap”. Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority organization issued fund-raising letters insisting that “freeze-niks” were undermining U.S. security.<br /> <br /> In a piece for the Reader’s Digest, Frank Chapple wrote, “Those nuclear disarmers who cry ‘Better Red than Dead’ should examine the record: since 1917, some 25 million people have died under Soviet repression inside Russia and its satellites ...”.<br /> <br /> Not to be left out of the debate, President Reagan stated during an <a href=" " target="_blank">October</a> 1982 press conference that nuclear freeze supporters were being manipulated and used by forces “who want the weakening of America”.<br /> <br /> Proponents of the nuclear freeze invested valuable time and resources defending the movement from the accusations of a Soviet conspiracy. Popular opinion against the Soviet Union was further galvanized by the Soviet downing of <a href=" " target="_blank">Korean Air Lines flight 007</a> in the fall of 1983.<br /> <br /> Meanwhile, the nuclear freeze movement moved increasingly from protest into electoral politics, only to be disappointed by the landslide reelection of President Reagan in 1984. Nuclear freeze proponents found it difficult to recapture momentum after the election and became increasingly marginalized, splintering into more narrow special-interest groups.<br /> <br /> Nevertheless, the nuclear freeze movement may be credited with placing the debate on nuclear weapons firmly within the political mainstream, and establishing the framework for the arms reduction talks of Reagan and Soviet General Secretary <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mikhail Gorbachev</a> in the late 1980s.

Nuclear Freeze Movement

Nuclear Freeze Movement After Watergate , Vietnam , and the economic/cultural malaise of the 1970s, the election of Ronald Reagan to t...

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Richard Nixon

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="The" border="0" career="" milhous="" nixon="" of="" political="" richard="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIMBsmIgHQ5-upHPdSKfZi87dypy_zZv2BAJJ-z5Lt2zQpIBldX6-Ky5Q_rJkeFgN-dRKQEp3l-l_5Px1SYlhPazGKwCm2TZ-HMrC-2BtqvCk26xLDCUIcbtuEah9jMwAjgJvrg9OQONI/s1600/Richard-Nixon.jpg" title="Richard" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Nixon</td></tr> </tbody></table> The political career of Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994), thirty-seventh president of the United States, was framed by suggestions of conspiracy, from his rapid rise to prominence as a result of his involvement with the Hiss case to <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watergate</a>, which ended his career.<br /> <br /> Furthermore, the frequent diagnosis of Nixon as “paranoid” placed him as both subject and object of numerous conspiracy theories. Nixon’s connection to the conspiratorial even predates the Hiss case, beginning with his response to the advertisement by the “Committee of 100” for a candidate to oppose Congressman Jerry Voorhis.<br /> <br /> The Committee was a group of local businessmen, sometimes considered to have sinister motives, who met at an elitist rural retreat, Bohemian Grove in <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">California</a>, itself connected to a set of conspiracy theories through groups such as the Bilderbergers.<br /> <br /> Mae Brussell insists that “That ad was typical, a covert method of pretending this was an open contest for office”. Brussell’s argument invokes an article of faith that frequently exceeds the “conspiracy research community”: that Nixon’s entire career constituted a form of conspiracy.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1627790837/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=9f37b749896c17c8244cfdb90ef1069b" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1627790837&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" career="" height="1" milhous="" nixon="" of="" political="" richard="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1627790837" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812995368/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=8d12332829fe1c4806d51ba40fabeb7a" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0812995368&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" career="" height="1" milhous="" nixon="" of="" political="" richard="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0812995368" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Nixon’s early political success was largely dependent on public recognition of his preeminent position on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), most notably in his investigation of espionage charges against Alger Hiss.<br /> <br /> Nixon coauthored the first piece of legislation produced by the HUAC, the Mundt-Nixon Bill, which was anticonspiracy legislation in that it would have forced “Communist front” organizations to reveal themselves by declaring Communist Party affiliation.<br /> <br /> While Nixon’s ensuing prominence can only be credited in a period in which the “international Communist conspiracy” or “red scare” was a widespread belief, his status as perceived conspirator and object of conspiracy exceeded the zeitgeist.<br /> <br /> Nixon not only responded to, but also contributed to, conspiratorial beliefs, intending, for example, to investigate “communistic art” in federal buildings and insisting that filmmakers make films that warn the American people about the dangers of communism.<br /> <br /> Throughout his career, Nixon was linked to financial corruption and to organized crime. As the journalist Jeff Gerth argued during Nixon’s presidency, Nixon was located at the center of a tangled web of conspiracy: “Somewhere within the classic alliance of money, power, and politics lies this particular sharp-edged triangle: the Teamsters Union ... ; the shadowy empire of organized crime and its power; and the political fiefdom of Richard Nixon”.<br /> <br /> This interconnection of a “shadow government” and organized crime, termed “deep politics” by Peter Dale Scott, is frequently aligned with Nixon in conspiracy theories. In the document “A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files,” for example, Nixon first appears in 1956, having been “bought” by Howard Hughes in his conspiratorial attempt to control the U.S. electoral process.<br /> <br /> Nixon’s significant financial dealings with Hughes inspired a number of conspiracy theories, including a purported Hughes involvement with Watergate. This contributed to a model for the perceived power structure of the Nixon <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">administration</a>, which “replaced public politics with the politics of secrecy”.<br /> <br /> <b>Watergate and Beyond</b><br /> <br /> While many of Nixon’s political actions have been considered to be conspiratorial, such as the secret bombing of Cambodia or his obstruction of the Paris peace talks to end the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vietnam War</a> before the 1968 presidential election (detailed by Anthony Summers), the latter part of Nixon’s political career coincided with shifting models of power, which tended to identify his power as overt and, therefore, largely symbolic. Some conspiracy theories correspondingly place Nixon as the victim of the covert “invisible government.”<br /> <br /> Some critics have argued that Watergate was a constitutional coup d’état against Nixon; Robert Altman’s Secret Honor (1984) presents it as an operation designed to finally remove him from the control of the “deep politics”—of the “Committee of 100.” But it was after the investigations into Watergate revealed the power operations of the Nixon administration that Nixon became linked, through conspiracy theory, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.<br /> <br /> On the White House audiotape of 23 June 1972, known as the “Smoking Gun” tape, Nixon instructs Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman to have the CIA pressure the FBI into dropping its Watergate investigation, because it would “open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again.” Haldeman would later write, “It seems that in all those references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination”.<br /> <br /> Some conspiracy researchers would specifically link the assassination to Watergate, arguing that White House burglar Frank Sturgis and fellow “Plumbers” unit member E. Howard Hunt were the assassins, a claim investigated by the U.S. President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, also known as the <a href=" " target="_blank">Rockefeller</a> Commission. While there is no substantial evidence to verify these theories, the perception of the conspiring Nixon revealed by Watergate was transposed onto many of his actions.<br /> <br /> For example, Nixon, who was revealed to have been in Dallas on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, told the Warren Commission that he had only been in Dallas on 20 and 21 November. Nixon gave varying explanations for this mistake, giving rise to jokes that Nixon was the only member of his generation who did not remember where he was when Kennedy was shot.<br /> <br /> Of the many reasons proffered for why Watergate occurred, one of the most enduring is that it was an extension of Nixon’s personal <a href=" " target="_blank">paranoia</a>. Both opponents and some administration members referred to this, either indirectly, by alluding to Nixon’s “isolation” or “bunker mentality,” or directly, by claiming he suffered from a form of persecutory paranoia.<br /> <br /> But whether or not Watergate was initiated as an attempt to preempt Nixon’s “enemies,” Nixon could never escape Watergate. The verified criminality and conspiracy of Watergate would forever conjoin Nixon, the “unindicted coconspirator” (in the legal jargon), to the realm of conspiracy theory, with the revelation of his actions and motivation projected onto his entire life and career.<br /> <br /> After Watergate forced the end of his official political career, Nixon spent the remainder of his life writing books on foreign policy and attempting to rehabilitate his public image. For many critics, the laudatory eulogies at his funeral—Senator Bob Dole said that the latter twentieth century would be known as the “age of Nixon”—testified to the <a href=" " target="_blank">success</a> of this, Nixon’s greatest conspiracy.

Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon The political career of Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994), thirty-seventh president of the United States, was framed by su...

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Newburgh Conspiracy

<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="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPdQd8Ytwor17TiZxvUqmnzzG4rKdgl5lXj4X0Oq-8wH_vdxumGGvgFIoymGq31a1Dw4TRxAZrsvjzGjZ3PeidPBFEJsiWN4wwNDpVEb6JqlDQrns5Xaa2Gzp7munHO36Uo3OG9FiLAG0/s1600/Newburgh-Conspiracy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="allegations" an="" attempted="" border="0" conspiracy="" coup="" d="" erupted="" newburgh="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPdQd8Ytwor17TiZxvUqmnzzG4rKdgl5lXj4X0Oq-8wH_vdxumGGvgFIoymGq31a1Dw4TRxAZrsvjzGjZ3PeidPBFEJsiWN4wwNDpVEb6JqlDQrns5Xaa2Gzp7munHO36Uo3OG9FiLAG0/s1600/Newburgh-Conspiracy.jpg" surrounding="" title="Newburgh" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Newburgh Conspiracy</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> In March 1783 allegations erupted surrounding an attempted coup d’état by Continental Army officers encamped at Newburgh, New York. The relationship between Congress and the Continental Army had been strained throughout the Revolutionary War.<br /> <br /> As Congress was notoriously short on cash, payments to soldiers and officers were insufficient and erratic; many went without remuneration for several consecutive years. Officers hoped for a recognition of their services in the form of pensions, and Congress had in 1780 voted to award them half pay for life.<br /> <br /> However, the impost tax of 1781, designed to finance pensions, failed to achieve ratification by the states. Furthermore, as the financial situation of many officers worsened, they started to call for a lump sum instead of a lifetime of small payments, a demand known as commutation.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0985387580/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=2523689c2784e2f2853aa834470b494b" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0985387580&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="allegations" an="" attempted="" border="0" conspiracy="" coup="" d="" erupted="" height="1" newburgh="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0985387580" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" surrounding="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rebellion-Ranks-Mutinies-American-Revolution/dp/1594160554/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&dpID=51j5rxA5ctL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR105%2C160_&refRID=0AATWJCH0ZW9HBAGDWS9&&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=b454e6522601b42cacbea796a07fe7ac" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1594160554&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="allegations" an="" attempted="" border="0" conspiracy="" coup="" d="" erupted="" height="1" newburgh="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1594160554" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" surrounding="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> In late 1782, the army sent a delegation under the leadership of General Alexander McDougall to Congress in order to demand a redress of their grievances. Despite the general’s vigorous and outspoken lobbying effort, Congress voted against commutation in January 1783.<br /> <br /> With commutation rejected, no feasible prospect of financing pensions, and a peace treaty with Britain imminent—which meant the subsequent disbanding of the Continental Army—discontent grew among officers who had sacrificed much for the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Revolution</a> and now feared being left out in the cold.<br /> <br /> A group of young officers connected to Major General Horatio Gates, an old rival of George Washington’s, started spreading a series of anonymous pamphlets around the Newburgh encampment in early March 1783.<br /> <br /> These Newburgh Addresses, written by Major John Armstrong, accused Congress of betraying the army, lambasted the ineffectiveness of McDougall’s petition, criticized Washington for undue moderation, and called for a meeting of officers on 11 March in order to decide on further measures. It was quite possible to see in the Newburgh Addresses a call for rebellion against civil authority, or even a full-scale coup d’état, but more moderate readings were also possible.<br /> <br /> At the very least the pamphlets proposed an ultimatum to Congress and advocated a refusal to disband the army until their demands were met. In any case, Washington stepped in to defuse the situation. Forbidding the meeting on 11 March, he called for another a few days later to discuss the results of McDougall’s petition.<br /> <br /> At this meeting, Washington condemned the Addresses and made an emotional appeal to remain loyal to Congress and the American Republic. Washington’s speech won over the officers, who passed a resolution asking Congress for redress, but also affirming their loyalty and condemning the Newburgh Addresses.<br /> <br /> The most controversial aspect of this crisis in military loyalty, which became known as the Newburgh conspiracy, did not involve the officers responsible for the Newburgh Addresses as much as a group of nationalist politicians, especially Robert Morris, the congressional superintendent of finance, as well as Gouverneur Morris and Alexander Hamilton.<br /> <br /> They hoped that lobbying efforts by the military would induce Congress to pass a second impost law, thus fulfilling their hope of securing the power of taxation for Congress. Robert Morris had been in touch with McDougall’s delegation and had urged the officers to impress upon Congress in no uncertain terms the level of discontent in the army.<br /> <br /> After Congress had rejected commutation, McDougall wrote to Major General Henry Knox under the pseudonym Brutus, suggesting that the army refuse to disband until its demands were met. Knox, however, refused to spearhead so blatant a defiance of civil authority.<br /> <br /> At this point, theories diverge considerably. One interpretation holds that, spurned by Knox and thoroughly discouraged with Congress, the Morrises and Hamilton turned to Gates and his followers to start a coup and finally consolidate national government in this way.<br /> <br /> Another theory argues that the nationalists did encourage Gates’s group to make their move, but that Hamilton warned Washington of the danger in a letter, thus making sure the coup was quelled before it really started.<br /> <br /> Some evidence exists to support the second claim, but much remains unclear and inconclusive. It seems doubtful that Washington actually needed a warning from his former aide Hamilton to be aware of trouble brewing in Newburgh, and there is some controversy over whether Gates was actually involved.<br /> <br /> Nevertheless, the impression of a narrowly averted rebellion shocked Congress into voting in favor of commutation as well as a new impost law designed to secure an independent income for Congress, endorsing central demands of both officers and nationalists. Eventually, however, this new impost failed to achieve ratification by the states, and thus the pension question remained unanswered.<br /> <br /> Distrust of the officer corps, nationalist politicians, and special privilege remained contentious throughout the early Republic; they figured prominently in the controversy surrounding the Society of the Cincinnati and the ratification of the Constitution.

Newburgh Conspiracy

Newburgh Conspiracy In March 1783 allegations erupted surrounding an attempted coup d’état by Continental Army officers encamped at New...

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Neo-Nazis

<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 alt="Nazis" analysis="" and="" border="0" conspiracy="" drawn="" frame="" global="" have="" neo-nazis="" of="" on="" rhetoric="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA1htjVXD5VIh78zBWe0fGUH_XIxYSVFP2zb5iCPUioRD0j7OjY86Et-pW7eJTUEDYclat4LtJeyqEIX4v7M5AaNii9zN0SPThV3lSxrNBKOFqOUiELKO3xTT3aGKPk24JhBcXdODUl4nR/s1600/Neo-Nazis.jpg" the="" their="" title="Neo-Nazis" to="" u="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Neo-Nazis</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Along with other right-wing hate groups, neo-Nazis have drawn on the rhetoric of conspiracy to frame their analysis of global and U.S. politics. Although overshadowed by the stronger tradition of the religious Right in the United States, various neo-Nazi organizations contributed to the wider cluster of antisemitic and white supremacist groups.<br /> <br /> <b>Early Nazi Propogandists</b><br /> <br /> During the 1920s the National Socialists asserted that the German military had been victorious on the battlefield in <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">World War I</a>, but that Jewish traitors in the government had stabbed Germany in the back, even as international <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jewish</a> financiers prepared to loot the German economy.<br /> <br /> According to the Nazi myth, the German Volk was engaged in a metaphysical struggle against materialist “Jew-Capitalists” and “Jew-Bolshevists,” both of which sought to destroy the Volkish community by fostering social inequalities and encouraging class conflict.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0700609415/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=eaf29588d26148f6340dd362a715e886" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0700609415&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="Nazis" analysis="" and="" border="0" conspiracy="" drawn="" frame="" global="" have="" height="1" neo-nazis="" of="" on="" rhetoric="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0700609415" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" their="" to="" u="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140234497/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=bca7525fe3f5622711f88f66afe8f238" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0140234497&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="Nazis" analysis="" and="" border="0" conspiracy="" drawn="" frame="" global="" have="" height="1" neo-nazis="" of="" on="" rhetoric="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0140234497" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" their="" to="" u="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> The cosmopolitan city was characterized as a cesspool, festering with immorality and crime, where Jewish conspirators poisoned the hearts and minds of the Volk. The Nazis promised to free German society from economic depression and class conflict by establishing a racialist community under the leadership of a divinely inspired leader.<br /> <br /> Nazi propagandists operating in the United States emphasized these same themes, but they met with little success. Appeals to isolationist, anticommunist, and racist sentiment failed to bring about any substantive alliance with U.S. antisemitic or white supremacist organizations.<br /> <br /> <b>Postwar Neo-Nazis</b><br /> <br /> After <a href=" " target="_blank">World War II</a>, most U.S. racists remained rooted in Republican and populist traditions, which rejected socialism and dictatorship. A number of very small Nazi groups did exist, however, with the American Nazi Party (ANP), founded by George Lincoln Rockwell in 1958, being the most influential.<br /> <br /> ANP conspiracy theory fused crude negrophobia with conspiratorial antisemitism: Jewish communists were believed to be spearheading the civil rights movement in the South and enticing black men to rape white women and riot in northern cities.<br /> <br /> Party publications were rife with crude jokes about African American culture and political aspirations, while providing detailed descriptions of conspiratorial machinations by Jews. Party activists drove through the U.S. South in their Hate Bus, and picketed screenings of Exodus and performances of The Deputy, which criticized papal policies during World War II.<br /> <br /> At antiwar rallies later in the decade, Rockwell’s Nazis threw paint, eggs, beer cans, and garbage at antiwar demonstrators, provoking violent confrontations. Such theatrics created notoriety unwarranted by any substantive threat that the ANP posed, either to democratic institutions or the advance of civil rights.<br /> <br /> Rockwell’s greatest success occurred in summer 1966, when the ANP agitated against Martin Luther King, Jr.’s housing desegregation marches in Chicago. For twenty-two days, ANP activists inflamed race relations, generating intense publicity. More than 1,000 local residents pelted civil rights marchers with bricks and bottles, shouting “White Power!” and waving Confederate and Nazi flags.<br /> <br /> Once the protests ended and tensions subsided, however, the Nazis lost what little support they had gained during the melee. Ignoring this fact, Rockwell shifted gears in 1967, renaming his party the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP).<br /> <br /> Attempting to broaden the appeal to non-Aryan whites, he abandoned Nazi iconography and launched a new magazine entitled White Power! Rockwell also became more militant, declaring that “every tendency towards degeneracy and subversion ... must be weeded out and utterly destroyed” (Rockwell).<br /> <br /> The Chicago emergence of Black Power and New Left militancy also provided a context for Rockwell’s increased militancy. Another reason, however, was that Rockwell feared for his safety and was suspicious of his own followers, believing many of them to be spies for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rinth.<br /> <br /> The ADL did investigate the ANP, and two other Jewish groups had discussed Rockwell’s commission with the naval reserve in 1961, before Rockwell was discharged. Rockwell was made understandably paranoid, however, by a highly effective FBI covert action jadwal entitled COINTELPRO-White Hate Groups.<br /> <br /> Between 1965–1971, FBI agents cut off financial support, even as informants sowed dissension. Federal, state, and local authorities also created disruption: the Internal Revenue Service conducted tax investigations, city inspectors closed Nazi offices, and local and state police made disorderly conduct arrests.<br /> <br /> On 25 August 1967 a sniper assassinated George Lincoln Rockwell. Former Stormtrooper editor John Patler was convicted of the murder, but in the context of an ensuing struggle for power, a number of conspiracy theories were put forth by Rockwell’s lieutenants.<br /> <br /> The victorious faction offered that Patler was an ADL agent and named California Nazi James K. Warner as his coconspirator. Warner alleged that Matt Koehl and William Pierce had engineered a coup to elevate Rockwell to martyrdom and seize control of the party.<br /> <br /> Accusations and counteraccusations even led to an internecine gunfight. Decrying “illegal FBI harassment,” Warner left the NSWPP, telling Nazis loyal to him to prepare for “Armageddon, the meeting of the forces of good and evil and the complete destruction and death of all the mongrel hordes and their Jewish masters”.<br /> <br /> Warner also charged that El Monte, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">California</a>, party organizer Ralph Forbes had used the NSWPP as a recruiting ground for religious cults. Rockwell, having met with Christian Identity minister Wesley Swift in June 1964, had recognized the power of theological antisemitism for recruitment purposes, and several of his close associates, including Forbes, later became Identity ministers.<br /> <br /> Even Warner came to recognize Identity’s potential, and established an Identity Church in 1975. He also organized a paramilitary group and helped former Nazi David Duke create the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.<br /> <br /> Matthias Koehl took over the NSWPP and in 1967 published a more militant ten-point platform calling for “revolution.” Quoting Adolph Hitler to the effect that the survival of the race had become more important than respect for law and order, NSWPP editor William Pierce and a group of younger Nazis launched a youth group, which became one of the most violent neo-Nazi groups of the early 1970s.<br /> <br /> The National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) called for a “militant struggle” against the “pigs” to “build a popular base.” The NSLF formulated an early version of the leaderless resistance tactics that would animate the violent neo-Nazi cells of the early 1980s. In 1971 William Pierce called for a revolution by “guerrilla fighters.” He published bomb-making instructions, discussions of urban warfare techniques, and lists of targets for political assassination.<br /> <br /> Later, Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries, an apocalyptic novel about race war. The plot inspired a white power cell called the Order, which committed armored car robberies and murdered a Jewish talk show host in the early 1980s. Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh also seems to have found the novel provocative.<br /> <br /> Pierce’s associate, Willis Carto, became active in the Holocaust denial movement, publishing essays that presented the Nazi genocide as a fabrication by Communist-Zionist plotters. His Spotlight newspaper, which dwelled on conspiratorial plots by international bankers and federal agents, would influence the militia movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s.<br /> <br /> Despite extensive propagandizing and publicity, Nazis have failed to gain a substantial following in the United States. This, combined with disruption by law enforcement during the 1960s, encouraged some of them to embrace terror, paramilitarism, alliances with other racist groups, and a revolutionary agenda.<br /> <br /> With his revolutionary call for white power, George Lincoln Rockwell had facilitated ideological crosspollination between National Socialism, white supremacy, and Christian Identity.<br /> <br /> Although membership in formal National Socialist groups declined after the late 1970s, militant hybrid associations such as the Aryan Nations, the White Aryan Resistance, the National Alliance, and the Mountain Church would all revere Adolph Hitler and George Lincoln Rockwell as founders of the White Power movement.

Neo-Nazis

Neo-Nazis Along with other right-wing hate groups, neo-Nazis have drawn on the rhetoric of conspiracy to frame their analysis of global...

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Nativism

<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="At" border="0" century="" height="" in="" its="" nativism="" nineteenth="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv1gEAqSOqi80sQRi75JSWMHGtKzqshusHkE_ILHyZFvrQOQIbSzVlfipiL2cGAXTY0go5c2bU1oKQhq-bYMSbE1hAetzDq9syWAd2XIJ9-BymZNMxCzPG2FtDX6BpcmFhq39XSzXkmbiO/s1600/nativists.jpg" the="" title="Nativism" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nativism</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> At its height in the nineteenth century, nativism was the often conspiratorial hostility of white, native-born, Protestant Americans to European immigrants that, at times, was embodied in political movements and evolved into genuinely exclusionist policies.<br /> <br /> In the 1850s, a burgeoning coalition of self-proclaimed nativists swept into office and called for radical change. During the nineteenth century, the perception of immigrants shifted from welcome to demonization, usually depending on whether the United States was going through economic expansion or stagnation.<br /> <br /> From the start, immigration and the resulting competition, whether religious, class, or racial, between ethnic groups became a key issue in the development of the United States, and one that was frequently expressed in the rhetoric of conspiracy theory.<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/0520269918/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=25ab0d8d652d100899992e03fdc382ed" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0520269918&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="At" border="0" century="" height="1" in="" its="" nativism="" nineteenth="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0520269918" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813531233/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=e236541af4d0a0a58d08f874e82cd0ff" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0813531233&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="At" border="0" century="" height="1" in="" its="" nativism="" nineteenth="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0813531233" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Historically, immigration falls into three periods: colonial and eighteenth century; “Old” in the first half of the nineteenth century; and “New” starting in the 1880s. The decade from 1845 to 1854 saw the greatest proportionate influx of immigrants in U.S. history. By 1860 more than one out of every eight Americans was foreign-born, with the most numerous being Irish, German, and English immigrants.<br /> <br /> Each period generated its own kind of nativist reaction, from Know-Nothingism (the openly nativist political party of the 1840s and 1850s), to anti-immigration laws (the first being the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, culminating in the closing of the gates through the National Origins Acts of 1921 and 1924).<br /> <br /> It is important to note, however, that openness to immigration has remained the majority opinion, for in Tom Paine’s words, the United States was to be “an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty” from all parts of the world.<br /> <br /> In the colonial period, although ethnic mixture was the reality, with a majority white population living alongside an Indian and a black group of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Nativism>African</a> origin, the white group was very heterogeneous in its composition. The majority were of English origin but many were Dutch, French Huguenots, German, and Scots-Irish, which created frictions.<br /> <br /> For instance, in the Massachusetts colony, the Puritans did all they could not to admit non-English settlers. In spite of the reality of ethnic plurality, the global perception was that of Englishness. Hence, after the Revolution, the 60 percent of English origin in the white community took political power and set the tune culturally.<br /> <br /> Early nativism was marked by a belief in total assimilation, the giving up of one’s former culture, language, and behavior to be blended into a new identity, that of an American, as celebrated by Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur, who glorified the land of limitless opportunities to all newcomers (the “melting-pot” theory).<br /> <br /> The asylum tradition was promoted through the 1790 Naturalization Act, which made it possible for virtually anybody to be admitted and naturalized into a citizen. However, this “generous” act contained limitations; only “free white persons” who had resided in the United States for at least two years were eligible for naturalization. Hence, from the start, the reality of social and political exclusion—of blacks and Indians—paved the way for <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">future</a> exclusions.<br /> <br /> The self-image of hospitality was seriously tested at the time of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which gave the president arbitrary countersubversive powers to exclude or deport any foreigner deemed to be dangerous, and to prosecute anybody publishing or writing in “a false, scandalous and malicious nature” about the president or Congress.<br /> <br /> The government was reacting against European radicals whose political activities were considered subversive. The Naturalization Act was amended to provide for a fourteen-year residency requirement for prospective citizens; in 1802, Congress reduced the waiting period to five years, a provision that remains in effect today.<br /> <br /> <b>Anti-Catholicism</b><br /> <br /> In the following decades, most immigrants entering the United States were Roman Catholics (one-third of all immigrants between 1830 and 1840 were from Catholic Ireland), and so ethnic prejudice against immigrants was also usually accompanied by conspiracy-mongering against Catholicism.<br /> <br /> Since the colonial period, Americans had come to identify themselves as a Protestant nation, and many leading Protestant clergymen had cautioned the country against a papal plot to destroy U.S. liberty and society.<br /> <br /> In the nineteenth century this conspiratorial tradition fed into nativism in a variety of forms: exclusive nativist clubs and fraternities such as the Order of United Americans or the United Sons of America; and political parties, especially when the social and economic situation was bleak, as in the late 1830s, the early 1840s, and the mid-1850s.<br /> <br /> These groups attracted middle-class Protestants, members of the two “traditional” parties (Democratic and Whig), and working-class voters who resented what they considered to be the job competition from immigrants, the increase in crime, public drunkenness, and pauperism, and the manipulation of immigrant voters.<br /> <br /> More significant was the proliferation of nativist propaganda. Prompted by the news of an Austrian Catholic missionary society sending money and men to the United States, Samuel F. B. Morse, a distinguished professor of sculpture and painting at New York University, wrote A Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (1834) and he went on to publish The Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States (1835), both of which involved denunciations of the Catholic conspiracy against the United States.<br /> <br /> Lyman Beecher, a seventh-generation clergyman and president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, published A Plea for the West in 1835, in which he exposed the alleged plot by the pope to build a “Vatican” in the West by sending hordes of Catholic settlers there. However, perhaps the most effective was the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of nativism, the <i>Awful Disclosures</i> of Maria Monk, which sold 300,000 in 1836.<br /> <br /> Monk told of her alleged experiences with Catholicism, which involved forced sexual intercourse with priests and the murdering of nuns and children. Although her mother denied the legitimacy of her work, stating that Maria never belonged to the nunnery and that a brain injury her daughter received as a child could be the cause of her stories, the book was widely accepted as truth.<br /> <br /> In 1841, the Vindicator was published by Rev. W. C. Brownlee, the leader of the New York Protestant Association. In the same year, there was growing concern in New York State that Catholics were gaining influence in schools because of the action of Archbishop John Hughes of New York.<br /> <br /> He was seeking to obtain state aid for Catholic schools, which was interpreted as both a subversive plot against the First Amendment, and a refusal by Catholics to attend public schools and be assimilated. In 1842, the American Protestant Association was founded by 100 Clergymen in Philadelphia to oppose Catholics.<br /> <br /> This propaganda led to agitation, rioting, and mobbing. Although Catholics occasionally reacted to the nativist movement with violence, nativists instigated the greater part of those violent acts. In Boston, there were numerous riots in 1823, 1826, and 1829. In May 1832, these potentially explosive conditions produced a riot at a New York Protestant Association meeting.<br /> <br /> Further, while addressing a Baltimore Baptist audience in 1834, a group of Catholics attacked a Baptist speaker. On 10 August 1834 a mob of forty to fifty people gathered outside of the Ursuline Convent School at Charlestown, near Boston, and burned it to the ground. Although eight people were arrested and tried, only one was sentenced to life imprisonment.<br /> <br /> This rather lenient sentence, together with the lack of condemnation in moderate Protestant circles, shows how widespread hostility to Catholics had become. The violence continued into the following decade when, for example, thirty people were killed and hundreds injured during nativist riots in Philadelphia in 1844.<br /> <br /> <b>Political Nativism</b><br /> <br /> Anti-Catholicism gradually evolved into a political crusade. In 1844, James Harper founded the American Republican Party in order to break the deadlock between the Whig and Democratic Parties in New York State, and offer another approach to politics.<br /> <br /> It allied with the Whigs, which resulted in the defeat of the Democratic Party. The American Republican Party demonstrated the political relevance of the nativist movement and paved the way for the entrance of the Know-Nothings into the national political scene as the only coherent organization to rest its political action on hostility to immigration and to Catholics.<br /> <br /> The American Party had its origins in 1849 in New York. At first a secret society called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, it became a formal party in 1853, and its members were dubbed the Know-Nothings (after their refusal to answer questions about their involvement) by Horace Greeley, a famous newspaper editor. By the middle of the 1850s the party ranked over a million members across the country.<br /> <br /> At the local level, in the 1854 election, the Know-Nothings won six governorships and controlled legislatures in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Nativism>California</a>, where they passed discriminatory laws against immigrants, including the first literacy tests for voting, in order to disenfranchise the Irish.<br /> <br /> The party’s platform focused on voting rights, stretching the residency period before naturalization from five to twenty-one years, and requiring the exclusion of foreigners and Catholics from public office. After the defeat of their candidate in the presidential election of 1856, the Know-Nothings were split by their inability to overcome the slavery issue.<br /> <br /> They lost influence and were absorbed into the expanding Republican Party, formed in 1854. However, another important factor in their decline was that not all Americans opposed the arrival of new immigrants because they were much needed by industrialists, railroad builders, and other businessmen as unskilled labor willing to accept lower wages.<br /> <br /> <b>Exclusion or Americanization?</b><br /> <br /> After the Civil War, “new immigrants” from southern and central Europe, even more numerous and alien, increased the demonological anxiety of the native-born, which led to numerous conflicts and a radical reexamination of the country’s immigration policy.<br /> <br /> From 1880 to 1930 a total of 25 million newcomers entered the United States. The more numerous were Italians, Jews, and Slavs—totaling more than 9 million—who brought in new customs, manners, languages, and religions.<br /> <br /> To this flow of immigration one should add the massive black migration to the North. All these groups were scattered throughout the country but they tended to flock together in big cities, especially in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England.<br /> <br /> In this kurun of laissez-faire capitalism, nativism evolved into the fear that class conflict would destroy the social fabric of the United States. Mounting labor organization, and the importation of socialist and anarchist ideologies by immigrants, rekindled the conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> The violent strikes of the 1870s and 1880s were therefore seen as signs of forthcoming disaster. In this climate, the American Protective Association was organized as a secret society dedicated to eradicating “foreign despotism,” which included Catholics. One of its aims was to ban German-language instruction.<br /> <br /> Nativism took on a special coloring in the West, where the fear was of Chinese immigrants, considered a threat to white workers because they accepted lower wages. The Workingmen’s Party led a movement for a new state constitution in California in 1878 and 1879 that included stringent discriminatory measures.<br /> <br /> At the national level, riots and mobbing, especially in Wyoming and New York, led to mounting pressure by California and other western states on Congress to pass the nation’s first immigration restriction, which some commentators have viewed as the institutionalization of racial paranoia. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act excluded the Chinese from naturalization and immigration.<br /> <br /> More restrictions were introduced in 1892, and Chinese immigration was banned permanently in 1902. In 1906 the first English language requirements for naturalization were enacted. The U.S. government legislated gradually to close the doors by limiting Japanese immigration through the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–1908.<br /> <br /> In the 1917 Immigration Law, Congress enacted a literacy requirement for all new immigrants and designated Asia as a “barred zone” (excepting Japan and the Philippines). The 1921 National Origins Act inaugurated the quota system, by which admissions from each European country was limited to 3 percent of each foreign-born nationality in the 1910 census.<br /> <br /> It effectively favored northern Europeans at the expense of southern and eastern Europeans and Asians. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act can be considered as a perfect application of nativist concerns for racial homogeneity since it confirmed that immigration quotas were based on the ethnic makeup of the U.S. population as a whole in 1920.<br /> <br /> It was not until 1965 that racial criteria were removed from U.S. immigration legislation. An annual quota of 20,000 was awarded to each country, regardless of ethnicity, under a ceiling of 170,000. Up to 120,000 were allowed to immigrate from Western Hemisphere nations, not subject to quotas (until 1976).<br /> <br /> Meanwhile, at the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of the Progressive movement, the muckrakers, social workers, and social reformers drew the public’s attention to the poverty, disease, and crime rates of immigrant ghettos.<br /> <br /> Moreover, they sought to bridge the gap between newcomers and native-born Americans. The “new immigrants” were less skilled, less educated, more clannish, and slower to learn English. However, in order to cope with their new life, immigrants tended to organize into minority societies, trying to preserve as much of the group’s culture as possible.<br /> <br /> But growing concern for national homogeneity urged many to think that a campaign to “Americanize”—meaning assimilation—was necessary. Thus the Bureau of Americanization was created to encourage employers to make English classes compulsory for their foreign-born workers.<br /> <br /> For example, in the Ford Motor Company School, the first thing an immigrant was asked to learn to say was, “I am an American.” Most states banned schooling in other tongues; some even prohibited the study of foreign languages in the elementary grades, in the belief that public schools were the major tool for Americanization.<br /> <br /> <b>English Only?</b><br /> <br /> The global demam isu since Word War II has been to diminish discrimination, at least by statute, and to reduce prejudice against immigrants and members of ethnic minorities. Hostility certainly lost much of its conspiracy-minded intensity, with the combined effects of the civil rights movement and the struggle by Hispanics and Native Americans for equal rights.<br /> <br /> However, the end of racial quotas in 1965 led many Third World people to enter the United States, especially those coming from Central and South America, which alarmed many Americans and gave new targets to nativism, especially in the states where those immigrants tended to flock together. The question of bilingualism then became the central issue of nativists.<br /> <br /> In the 1980s the “English only” movement was launched to restrict the language of government to English and encourage immigrants to learn English. Illegal immigration was another element that encouraged nativist anxieties, as encapsulated in President Ronald Reagan’s declaration in 1984 that “we have lost control of our own borders.”<br /> <br /> Illegal immigrants were seen as a threat to native-born workers and an obstacle to unions, as they were enjoying all the advantages of living in America (schools, hospitals, welfare benefits) while escaping all the drawbacks, like taxes.<br /> <br /> However, no legislation managed to curb the number of “undocumented” aliens on U.S. territory. In California, another upsurge of activism took place in the 1990s due to economic stagnation, rising racial tensions, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor.<br /> <br /> Voters approved Proposition 187, which was meant to force public agencies (schools, police, and social and health services) to find out the immigration status of supposedly undocumented aliens, and report them to the immigration authorities. The initiative was judged unconstitutional. However, a direct consequence was the enactment by Congress of legislation toughening immigration enforcement laws.

Nativism

Nativism At its height in the nineteenth century, nativism was the often conspiratorial hostility of white, native-born, Protestant Ame...

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Operation Paperclip

<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="German" and="" austrian="" border="0" brought="" operation="" paperclip="" scientists="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEUhdGFiiE15NclYk-TVoBPFN7GICUBdvpSc5JJXOtnbMYPd0CiBDARe9zqp-WTQbhz2jCxNx4_MwxDhbnnXyJdx8Mf0HTvzGKHI81c1g2cG0OdGzKKsuDhL2kQlf_zyIl4xElJKETGIO6/s1600/operation-paperclip.jpg" states="" technicians="" the="" through="" title="Operation" to="" united="" were="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Operation Paperclip</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Between 1945 and 1955, more than 1,600 German and Austrian technicians and scientists were brought to the United States through a project codenamed Operation Paperclip and a series of sister programs.<br /> <br /> Despite the fact that many of those scientists—among them Wernher von Braun, the father of the U.S. rocket program—were rumored to be Nazi war criminals, U.S. government and military officials allegedly concealed <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">information</a> about many of them in a major cover-up effort aimed at facilitating their legal entry into the United States. U.S. officers identified the chosen German scientists by attaching a paperclip to their personal file.<br /> <br /> Even before the end of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">World War II</a>, U.S. scientists and military personnel had begun the search for German scientists under Operation Paperclip’s predecessor, Project Overcast. They felt the need for German expertise because outstanding German design and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">technology</a> had often offset Allied advantages of manpower during the war.<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/0316221031/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=46d5c85c5fc08fb90457d9fc7b9f82d4" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0316221031&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="German" and="" austrian="" border="0" brought="" height="1" operation="" paperclip="" scientists="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0316221031" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" technicians="" the="" through="" to="" united="" were="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316371769/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=3b24169baf4835f42a2780b7dd0dedfd" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0316371769&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="German" and="" austrian="" border="0" brought="" height="1" operation="" paperclip="" scientists="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0316371769" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" technicians="" the="" through="" to="" united="" were="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Therefore, they were particularly interested in locating experts in rocketry, aircraft design, and aviation medicine, to use their capabilities to shorten the war against Japan. Hundreds of Germans were taken to interrogation centers, among them many of the scientists who had been engaged in developing the V2 rocket at the Peenemünde missile base on the Baltic Sea under Wernher von Braun.<br /> <br /> Other prominent German scientists included von Braun’s close associate, General Walter Dornberger; the latter’s wartime chief of staff, Herbert Axter; the deputy technical director, Arthur Rudolph; and an aviation doctor, Hubertus Strughold.<br /> <br /> The group included other scientists not involved in rocketry, such as infectious diseases expert Walter Schreiber, desalinization specialist Konrad Schaefer, and Kurt Blome, who was engaged in biological warfare research.<br /> <br /> U.S. government agencies decided that the United States should secure their services permanently and allow them to immigrate. The reasons for the apparent willingness of government and army officials to overlook and actively conceal information about German scientists’ active involvement in war crimes were manifold.<br /> <br /> In addition to exploiting German technical know-how, the process assured that Germany could not use its scientists and their knowledge to rebuild its forces. Finally, an intense competition for German technical expertise, not only with the Soviet Union, but also with France and Great Britain, triggered a policy of denial born out of the fear that America’s competitors could tip the strategic balance in their favor.<br /> <br /> Therefore, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee formulated the policy paper SWNCC 257/5, which allowed the admittance of specialists from Germany in the national interest. This required a special policy as U.S. immigration law forbade the entry of members of fascist organizations. Official Paperclip policy prohibited the utilization of war criminals or active Nazis, but did not explicitly rule out nominal party members.<br /> <br /> According to Linda Hunt, a former CNN investigative reporter, who was the first researcher to have access to formerly closed material, the first background checks of possible candidates for Project Paperclip by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA)—the agency under the Joint Chiefs of Staff responsible for the implementation of the operation—revealed that many had participated in brutalized slave labor and experiments on humans, and had committed other crimes.<br /> <br /> Therefore, State Department officials, especially the liaison to the JIOA, Samuel Klaus, refused to accept many of the applicants, believing that Nazi war criminals constituted a threat to U.S. security.<br /> <br /> In reaction to this deadlock between the State Department and the JIOA, the latter apparently advised the army to withhold or change incriminating dossiers about German scientists. The report on Wernher von Braun from September 1948, for example, described him as a potential security threat. Five months later the army had upgraded his classification to the role of a mere opportunist.<br /> <br /> The expertise the Germans brought with them played a vital role in the U.S. space program, in particular in the development of the Saturn rockets and the astronauts’ preparation for high-altitude flying. For decades, government agencies and the public were not concerned that alleged Nazi war criminals lived in the United States and were employed in government programs and private corporations.<br /> <br /> The mid-1970s saw the first legislative investigations into the matter, partly due to a growing awareness that the last survivors of the Holocaust and slave labor would die soon. A subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee under the leadership of Joshua Eilberg (D-PA) held hearings in 1977 and 1978.<br /> <br /> Its members concluded that government agencies had been more concerned about Communist propaganda than bringing these criminals to justice. Partly as a result of these deliberations, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was founded in 1979, with the goal to locate and try Nazi war criminals living in the United States.<br /> <br /> It renewed its efforts after the opening of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Russian</a> archives to U.S. OSI researchers in the early 1990s, but due to the death of most suspects their investigations are destined to be short lived. As most Germans who participated in Operation Paperclip entered the United States legally, none of them have been prosecuted.

Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip Between 1945 and 1955, more than 1,600 German and Austrian technicians and scientists were brought to the United St...

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Jedidiah Morse

<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="serving" as="" border="0" charlestown="" church="" congregational="" first="" jedidiah="" morse="" of="" pastor="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLgP66ixZyQb4RaLRopCbtanaoh6_GpTtEYvghK4Roa77kO_ObFi3tRezVQAC_zaUnVKLbjtLNVJFr2blRpzQ29f2ESJK9qfmnsbV2eCCZfZvKn8JXcNdJp95Li6KAs-RsV5WZewAWqNDX/s1600/Jedidiah-Morse.jpg" the="" title="Jedidiah" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jedidiah Morse</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Rev. Jedidiah Morse (1761–1826) was one of the early American Republic’s best-known authors and clergymen, serving as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Massachusetts</a> (now part of Boston) for thirty years. Perhaps counterbalancing his other accomplishments, Morse was also one of the forerunners in the field of U.S. conspiracy theory.<br /> <br /> Besides his pastoral duties and frequent service as an orator on civic and political occasions, Morse was a pioneer in American geography, producing one of the first popular books on the subject, Geography Made Easy (1784), just a year after his graduation from Yale College.<br /> <br /> This was followed by a series of other works, most notably the two-volume American Universal Geography (1793), which altogether went through hundreds of editions. In an age when travel was still difficult, expensive, and infrequent, it is not too much to say that Jedidiah Morse taught most Americans of his day most of what they knew of the country beyond their own immediate horizons.<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/0870498681/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=4d67b1263c660b7b4d3adfee14f0e4fb" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0870498681&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="serving" as="" border="0" charlestown="" church="" congregational="" first="" height="1" jedidiah="" morse="" of="" pastor="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0870498681" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813509823/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=dde747bd3530591aaba9fa40eec6e471" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0813509823&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="serving" as="" border="0" charlestown="" church="" congregational="" first="" height="1" jedidiah="" morse="" of="" pastor="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0813509823" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Morse also made a name for himself as a prominent purveyor of anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories. In the hysterical kala of the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>XYZ Affair</a> and the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s, Morse lent his considerable energy and prestige to the project of turning the Bavarian Illuminati into a mainstream political issue. Joined by many other prominent New England divines, including Yale College president Timothy Dwight, Morse almost succeeded.<br /> <br /> Like many other old-fashioned New England Calvinists, Morse was deeply alarmed at the seeming rise of “infidelity” in the 1790s, a category into which he put not just the outright rejection of Christian belief, but also its liberalization into less supernatural, more rational forms such as Unitarianism and deism. Besides mankind’s innate wickedness, Morse and his colleagues blamed radical politics, especially the French Revolution and its American sympathizers, for the decline of faith, and vice versa.<br /> <br /> The year 1794 was a turning point. Robespierre’s reign of terror raged in France, while the Democratic Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion disturbed the political peace at home. That same year, deist speaker and organizer Elihu Palmer toured the United States, and Thomas Paine’s attack on revealed religion, The Age of Reason, first arrived on U.S. shores.<br /> <br /> Under the infidels’ influence, Morse believed, “uncleanness, Sabbath breaking & all the flood of iniquity which springs from these” ran riot among the people. To pillars of New England’s Federalist/Congregationalist “Standing Order,” under which the churches were supported by taxes and ministers used their pulpits to support the ruling political elite, it seemed that a “mental epidemic” was sweeping the country.<br /> <br /> It only got worse as the 1790s wore on. <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Criticism</a> of the government, and political activism against it, grew more intense during the battles over the Jay Treaty with England in 1796 and the presidency in the 1796 election. The pious Federalist John Adams beat the free-thinking Jefferson in that election, but with war against the French looming, Federalist hysteria came to a fever pitch.<br /> <br /> It was in this atmosphere, in 1797, that Jedidiah Morse, Timothy Dwight, and their colleagues discovered John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, finding in its account of the Illuminati campaign to destroy all religions and governments a ready explanation for many political and cultural trends that disturbed them.<br /> <br /> Morse launched his personal campaign against the Illuminati by giving two sermons on the national fast day proclaimed by President Adams for 9 May 1798, one at his own church and one at North Church, Boston. Following New England tradition, where sermons were popular reading matter and often served as political tracts, Morse’s effort was published soon afterwards.<br /> <br /> In his Sermon on the National Fast Day, Morse attacked the “deep-laid plan” of the French Republic “to destroy the confidence of the [American] people” in the men and institutions that governed them, a plan being implemented not just by the French themselves, but also by their local minions, the Democratic Republicans.<br /> <br /> What was worse, they had criticized the clergy, too, suggesting that some secret, even deeper design was “in operation, hostile to true liberty and religion,” preparing the way “for the spread” here of “that atheistical philosophy” that was “deluging the Old World in misery and blood.” Morse recommended Robison’s book as a judicious explanation of everything that was happening, attributing it all to “the dark conspiracies of the Illuminati”.<br /> <br /> Initially the response was less sensational than Morse must have hoped, but the controversy kept him and the Illuminati in the public eye for most of the next two years. Democratic Republican newspapers questioned Robison’s veracity, printing negative reviews of the book from the British press, and demanded proof of the charges.<br /> <br /> Not much proof was to be had, but Morse gamely struck back with newspaper articles and clippings defending Robison and attacking their critics. At the same, <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Salem</a> minister William Bentley, a rare Jeffersonian among the Massachusetts clergy, supplied equal amounts of material damning Morse’s position and his sources.<br /> <br /> The controversy was renewed and expanded with a round of published Thanksgiving sermons from Morse and many other New England ministers over the winter of 1798–1799. Morse’s included an appendix that tried to document a view of American events closely following the pattern of Robison’s and the Abbé Barruel’s accounts of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">French Revolution</a>.<br /> <br /> The Democratic Republican Societies of 1793–1794 were not mere debating clubs, he tried to show, but extensions of the Illuminati. They had been founded by a French agent, “Citizen” Edmond Genet, and merely went underground and reappeared under other names after President Washington had publicly blamed them for the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Whiskey Rebellion</a>.<br /> <br /> Morse finally seemed to get his Illuminati witch-hunt on firm ground with a third published sermon, originally given on another national fast day, 25 April 1799. This time a triumphant Morse claimed finally to have “complete and indubitable proof that such societies do exist, and have for many years existed, in the United States”.<br /> <br /> The smoking gun was a letter detailing the membership and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>organization</a> (all the way back in 1786) of a somewhat irregular Masonic organization called Wisdom Lodge in Portsmouth, Virginia, made up chiefly of immigrants from St. Domingue and France.<br /> <br /> There were suggestions of other U.S. lodges being in contact with Wisdom Lodge, and a mother club in France, but the connection to the Bavarian Illuminati was tenuous at best and the evidence of any real influence nonexistent.<br /> <br /> Nevertheless, Morse felt the case was sealed, and the Illuminati theory gained some ground, until it was derailed by a new controversy over Morse’s own integrity. It happened that both Morse and his antagonist William Bentley were in correspondence with the German geographer Christoph Ebeling.<br /> <br /> To both men, Ebeling had written letters castigating Robison’s book, contradicting many of the alleged facts it cited, and dismissing the idea that the Bavarian Illuminati still existed in any form. Rumors of the letters began to circulate in the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>summer</a> of 1799.<br /> <br /> The following autumn, Bentley saw to it that the text of his Ebeling letter appeared in several newspapers, anonymously but describing the writer and recipient in such a way that readers might assume the Massachusetts man who received the letter was Morse himself.<br /> <br /> The Illuminati theory’s chief U.S. backer was forced on the defensive, unable to come clean without admitting that he had covered up incriminating <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>information</a> even though it was provided by a respected colleague.<br /> <br /> By the end of 1799, Republican newspapers were openly ridiculing Morse and his ideas, and building a sort of satirical conspiracy theory about the “New England Illuminati,” an oligarchy of “political priests” of which Morse was said to be a ringleader.<br /> <br /> Morse soon had to drop the Illuminati theory from his repertoire, although he continued to fight for the old-time Puritan religion in other ways over the rest of his life.<br /> <br /> His skills as a controversialist and publishing entrepreneur were put to good use resisting the teaching of liberal theology at Harvard, promoting missions to the Indians and western migrants, and helping establish Andover Theological Seminary, the New England Tract Society, the American Bible Society, and the American Tract Society.<br /> <br /> The family tradition of scientific and artistic achievement mixed with conspiracy was carried on by Jedidiah’s son, Samuel F. B. Morse.

Jedidiah Morse

Jedidiah Morse Rev. Jedidiah Morse (1761–1826) was one of the early American Republic’s best-known authors and clergymen, serving as pa...

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MOVE

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

MOVE

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

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Opinion Polls about Conspiracy Theories

<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 about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFCihOhifxggEFDYcn1I04uIkesIsCTvYpQ1rTrgPxQluNh8Rjsx1xfKr6q6bqv1rNyiKQLOLqEh-NcQWjAxDzlaIUXeP6OgiHnsQCbyBFBk72rPYX9lc9ligL99Eem8ho6iRjWiMiAAoj/s1600/conspiracy.jpg" that="" the="" theories="" title="Opinion" today="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Conspiracy Theories</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> According to polls, most Americans today agree that the scenario posed by at least one popular conspiracy theory is very likely or somewhat likely.<br /> <br /> On 25–29 June 1997, a survey was conducted of 1,009 people nationwide, with participants from every state and the District of Columbia. Guido H. Stempel III, distinguished professor of the EW Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and Thomas Hargrove of the Scripps Howard News Service conducted the survey.<br /> <br /> The results have a 4 percent margin of error with a 95 percent confidence interval, meaning that the results are projectable to all U.S. households 95 times out of 100 plus or minus 4 percentage points. At that time:<br /> <ul> <li>More than half (51 percent) believe it is very likely or somewhat likely that government officials were “directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.”</li> <li>More than half (60 percent) believe is likely that military officials covered up the dangers of the Agent Orange chemical.</li> <li>Four-fifths (80 percent) believe it is likely that military officials are covering up information about U.S. soldiers’ exposure to nerve gas or germ warfare in the Gulf War.</li> <li>More than one-third (40 percent) believe it is likely that the FBI burned down the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.</li> <li>More than half (52 percent) believe it is likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African Americans in U.S. inner cities.</li> <li>More than one-third believe it is likely the navy shot down <a href=" " target="_blank">TWA Flight 800</a> either intentionally or accidentally.</li> </ul> <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578593689/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=7d6bcbc0215260af131a733c07131956" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1578593689&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=theconthist-20" /></a><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" height="1" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theconthist-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1578593689" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" theories="" today="" width="1" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786719680/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=b1bf4319d1e6c7fc761b5d2964ed3fd2" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0786719680&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=theconthist-20" /></a><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" height="1" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theconthist-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0786719680" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" theories="" today="" width="1" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Respondents were asked if the above situations were likely to some degree. The above responses included the “very likely” and “somewhat likely” answers. Note that believing that something is “somewhat likely” may be the admission of possibility, not a firm belief.<br /> <br /> <b>JFK Assassination</b><br /> <br /> <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 about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsn4qEiL785825z2aTGvEQcQUFLX7Xaojl06qvtMptmwl17McTAkCaVtd0mZ3QLWEtCLSeDzwfouDh_B3w3cSlK9SORs0179IAimutRHB-CelC7qUPTfPN3RhakCa2lSJx9EfczRlYO3WT/s1600/jfk.jpg" that="" the="" theories="" title="Opinion" today="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">JFK before assassination</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Most Americans say that more than one person was involved in the JFK assassination. A Gallup Poll was conducted 26–28 March 2001 with telephone interviews of a randomly selected sample of 1,024 adults aged 18 and older. The results are projectable to all U.S. households with a 95 percent confidence and 3 percent margin of error. At that time, when asked, “Do you think that one man was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or do you think that others were involved in a conspiracy?”—with the possible answers “one man,” “others involved” and “no opinion”:<br /> <blockquote> Fourth-fifths (81 percent) responded that they believed that other people were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, an all-time high.</blockquote> In the 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll, the question concerned not more than one person, but government officials with direct involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The poll discovered:<br /> <blockquote> More than half (51 percent) of Americans believe it is very likely or somewhat likely that government officials were “directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.”</blockquote> <b>AIDS and Drugs</b><br /> <br /> <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 about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6uKwOHMrouow84ASp2aBM2fMw3p6AJMepMWrfG482XSREl4nK4W4Hb3S1MusiGcvy2LiyKaMTnz7rbugUnPbVokObBrxgHmTA5-e-ksoAAZUF-0P5GiY-VwHCWV3r0u85w04Cb3SDEXbz/s1600/aids.jpg" that="" the="" theories="" title="Opinion" today="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aids</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> A sizable number of people would agree with at least one of the accusations that the government manufactured AIDS or made drugs available in inner cities to attack African Americans. In a 1990 poll, reported in the 29 October 1990 edition of the New York Times:<br /> <ul> <li>Nearly one-third (29 percent) of black New Yorkers indicated belief that AIDS was “deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people,” versus one in twenty (5 percent) among white New Yorkers.</li> <li>More than half (60 percent) of black New Yorkers indicated belief that the government “deliberately” made drugs available to poor black people, versus a little more than one in ten (12 percent) among white New Yorkers.</li> </ul> In another 1990 survey, reported in the 2 November 1995 edition of the Boston Globe:<br /> <blockquote> More than one-third (34 percent) of black churchgoers polled in five cities agreed “the AIDS virus was produced in a germ warfare laboratory.”</blockquote> The 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll discovered:<br /> <blockquote> More than half (52 percent) of Americans believe it likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African Americans in U.S. inner cities.</blockquote> <b>Pearl Harbor</b><br /> <br /> About one in three Americans say that <a href=" " target="_blank">President Roosevelt</a> knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance. The Gallup Organization reports that in December 1941, 84 percent of Americans said the president had done “everything he should have to prevent war with Japan,” with only 9 percent disagreeing.<br /> <br /> Fifty years later, in 1991, Gallup found that nearly one-third of Americans (31 percent) agreed with the statement, “Roosevelt knew about Japanese plans to bomb <a href=" " target="_blank">Pearl Harbor</a> but did nothing about it because he wanted an excuse to involve the United States on the side of the Allies in the war,” with 47 percent disagreeing and 22 percent with no opinion. As an interesting side note, 19 percent said they still have not forgiven the Japanese.<br /> <br /> <b>Moon Landings</b><br /> <br /> The conspiracy theory that the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">moon</a> landings were a fake is less popular. A Gallup Poll was conducted 13–14 July 1999 with telephone interviews of a randomly selected sample of 1,061 adults aged 18 and older. The results are projectable to all U.S. households with a 95 percent confidence and a 3 percent margin of error. When asked, “Thinking about the space exploration, do you think the government staged or faked the Apollo moon landing, or don’t you feel that way?”—with answers being, “Yes, staged,” “No,” and “No opinion”:<br /> <blockquote> Less than one in ten (6 percent) believes that the landing was faked while nearly nine in ten (89 percent) do not believe that the lunar landing was faked or staged.</blockquote> Time/CNN/Yakelovich Partners, Inc., conducted a similar poll 19–20 July 1995, with virtually identical wording, and produced similar results:<br /> <blockquote> Less than one in ten (6 percent) believes that the landing was faked while more than four-fifths (83 percent) do not believe that the lunar landing was faked or staged.</blockquote> <b>UFOs</b><br /> <br /> Many Americans say that the government is hiding information about <a href=" " target="_blank">UFOs</a>. In the 1997 survey conducted by Guido H. Stempel III of the EW Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and Thomas Hargrove of the Scripps Howard News Service mentioned above, nearly half of Americans (47 percent) indicated that it is very likely or somewhat likely that “The U.S. Air Force is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets.”<br /> <br /> Another study, sponsored by the SCI FI Channel and conducted 23–25 August by RoperASW, found that 72 percent of Americans believe the “government is not telling the public everything it knows about UFO activity,” and 68 percent believe the “government knows more about extraterrestrial life” than it says. The study was conducted among a representative example of 1,021 adults aged 18 and over, with a margin of error of +3 percent.<br /> <br /> Further, 60 percent of respondents in the RoperASW poll said the government “should not withhold information about UFO sightings,” while 58 percent said the government shouldn’t conceal information about “potential encounters with extraterrestrial life.”<br /> <br /> <b>Trust in Government</b><br /> <br /> The above RoperASW study also discussed the issue of trust in government. The same poll found that about half of Americans (53 percent) say their “level of trust in the government has remained stable over the past five years,” while 29 percent say they trust the government “less than they did five years ago.” More than half of Americans (55 percent) said the government “does not share enough information with the public in general.”<br /> <br /> After the Oklahoma City bombing, a poll was conducted by the Gallup <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">organization</a> that found that 39 percent of Americans believed that the federal government had become too powerful and large and therefore was a threat to the freedoms and rights of average citizens.<br /> <br /> In 2000, this number increased to 45 percent, with 51 percent disagreeing that the federal government poses such a threat. The 2000 study was conducted 7–9 April 2000 among a randomly selected national sample of 1,006 adults aged 18 and over, with a margin of error of +3 percent.

Opinion Polls about Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories According to polls, most Americans today agree that the scenario posed by at least one popular conspiracy theory is...

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Pan Am 103

<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 after="" alt="Scotland" am="" an="" departure="" half="" hour="" just="" pan="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pan Am 103</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland just half an hour after departure, killing 259 passengers and crew and 9 people on the ground. A bomb was suspected, and authorities recovered the “black box” (the flight voice recorder and data recorder) and examined radar evidence.<br /> <br /> Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) and Scottish detectives collected 35,000 photographs and interviewed 15,000 people, but it was the discovery of an electronic timer circuit board, which had been placed in a Toshiba cassette player and then loaded into a piece of Samsonite luggage, that provided the necessary clues as to the source of the plane’s destruction.<br /> <br /> The subsequent investigation, as with the later crash of <a href=" " target="_blank">TWA Flight 800</a>, produced endless analysis, suspicion, claims, and counterclaims. Victims’ families wanted someone to blame; politicians wanted to establish whether the event was an attack; and conspiracy theorists tried to insert the event into existing theories of global politics.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0836865669/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=4689d071f5dbc30f65feff5774afbe88" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0836865669&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img after="" alt="Scotland" am="" an="" departure="" half="" hour="" just="" pan="" /></span><span style="padding-left: 7px; padding-right: 7px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595299474/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=28a9e9ed115a0a3447a39fea4f378b5d" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0595299474&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img after="" alt="Scotland" am="" an="" departure="" half="" hour="" just="" pan="" /></span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Although the explosion occurred while George Bush was president, links were quickly made to President <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ronald Reagan</a>, and then, during the investigation and trial, to President Bill Clinton. Ultimately, a vast array of individuals and organizations were implicated in some way or another to the explosion.<br /> <br /> The AAIB, led by forensic expert James Thomas Thurman, found the small circuit board in the debris, and could trace the scrap of the circuit board to a Swiss manufacturer. This, in association with specimens from two types of chemicals used to manufacture Semtex, a plastic explosive, convinced authorities there was a bomb aboard the plane that was triggered by a timing device.<br /> <br /> In 1989, the 350 tons of debris was reassembled at an army base near Carlisle. Investigators then examined the evidence and concluded that it was a bomb, or, in their words, an “intentional explosive device.” The cockpit voice recorder verified a tremendous sound just prior to the aircraft going down, and burn marks on luggage indicated that something exploded in the luggage compartment.<br /> <br /> Although at first Iran was suspected of what the authorities viewed as a bombing—although the word “bomb” did not appear in the actual report, but rather “improvised explosive device”—the timer shifted the investigation to two Libyan intelligence agents, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Lameen “The Egg” Fhima, who were indicted in 1991 and named by both British and U.S. governments as the culprits.<br /> <br /> There were, however, numerous other theories and suspects:<br /> <ul> <li>Ahmed Jibril, head of the General Command of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC). Supported by Syria, the PFLP hated Israel and wanted to punish the United States for its support of the Jewish State. Conspiracy theorists claim that Jibril, however, could not be brought to justice because Palestine is not a sovereign state or a member of the United Nations. This conspiracy theory is also tied to Iran, which supposedly bankrolled the operation, but Syria could not be implicated because, by the time the United States learned all the details, it was involved in the Gulf War and President George Bush needed Syria as part of the coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein.</li> <li>Iran. One of the most widely held conspiracy theories is that Iranian agents blew Pan Am 103 out of the skies in retaliation for an incident that occurred in July 1988 when the USS Vincennes, mistaking an Iranian passenger aircraft for a hostile plane over the Straits of Hormuz, shot down the Iranian plane filled with civilians, killing 290. Iranian leaders vowed to “avenge the blood of our martyrs.”</li> <li>Drug runners and/or the CIA. In this version of events, “rogue” CIA agents in the Reagan administration, working through Oliver North, were attempting to free U.S. hostages in the Middle East. The middlemen in the operation were heroin runners from Syria who transported drugs to the United States through Frankfurt, Germany. According to one “informant,” a smuggler (with the CIA’s knowledge) would check luggage onto a plane and an accomplice in the baggage department would substitute an identical bag containing narcotics. (There is no explanation for the need for two people here, or why anyone with access to the baggage department would not be able to just plant the bogus bag himself.) At any rate, Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian drug smuggler, who was behind the operation, learned that a hostage rescue team had discovered the smuggling operation, and that the team was aboard Pan Am 103. PBS’s television aktivitas Frontline claimed in January 1990 that these “intelligence officials” were a “strong secondary target.” At that point, the various theories reach a confluence of sorts, with Jibril handling the actual details of the bombing, switching a suitcase bomb for the drug luggage.</li> <li>Yet another version involved Oliver North and the CIA, especially as it related to another aircraft explosion, over Gander, Newfoundland, in December 1985. In this iteration, a group of special operations forces smuggled a small nuclear “backpack” bomb aboard the aircraft in Cairo, which they originally were to have transported to Iraq to blow up the Iraqi nuclear weapons development facility under the guise of a nuclear accident. Supposedly, when these soldiers understood that their mission was a suicide mission, they backed out, but to keep them quiet, the government ordered their Arrow Air DC-8 destroyed by a bomb, which caused the aircraft to crash at Gander, killing 248. The connection to Pan Am 103 is that supposedly the same timing device was found at each site, and in a letter to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in 1998, the president of the firm that made the timers claimed that the circuit board in both explosions was made for the CIA.</li> <li>There was no bomb at all. As in the case of TWA 800, which exploded in 1996, one theory maintains that there was no bomb at all. This theory suggests that there was an explosion, which has been attributed to, among other things, a shotgun or a flare gun going off, a structural defect in the airplane causing the cabin door to rip free, or an electrical fault. Like other theories, this theory hinges on the absence of bomb fragments at the crash site, and, as with TWA 800, this version mostly arose from passengers in litigation who wanted to prove negligence by the aircraft manufacturers. In particular, rapid decom- pression theories emphasized the location in both Pan Am 103 and TWA 800 of the nose section as having fallen off before the aircraft finally crashed, indicating an explosion separated the front section of the aircraft from the aft. Carl A. Davies, author of Plane Truth, and John Berry Smith, a British investigator, comparing tests of Pan Am 103, TWA 800, and Air India 182, found no evidence of bombtype explosions that totally demolished the section in which a bomb was located in controlled bomb tests. Other “explanations” have included an “electromagnetic high-energy slug” either deliberately or accidentally fired from Alaska.</li> <li>The Mossad. A view popular with antisemites, this version maintains that the Mossad planted a bomb to kill Americans so as to “discredit” Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yassir Arafat’s “peace initiative.” This version lacks the details of most of the other explanations, but still manages to place blame on President George Bush.</li> <li>The Palestinians. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered aktivitas produced a “confession” in 1994 by Youssef Shaaban, a Palestinian who was standing trial for the killing of a Jordanian diplomat. Many observers, however, considered his confession a desperate attempt to gain a stay on a sure death sentence.</li> <li>In addition to possible guilty individuals or groups, charges were also leveled at Pan Am and/or airport security for weak security measures in England.</li> </ul> Due to the fact that the incident occurred over Scottish airspace, the trial took place under Scottish law, but because of the international nature of the bombing, with multiple possible locations and passengers of all nationalities, the trial was held at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands by way of treaty agreement between Libya, the United Kingdom, and the United States.<br /> <br /> In May 2000, the court under Scottish High Court judge Lord Ranald Sutherland convened. The following January, the court delivered a mixed verdict of guilty for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and an acquittal for Lameen Fhima. Al-Megrahi immediately appealed. Meanwhile, the families of the Pan Am 103 flight had begun a long quest to sue Libya for damages, overturning a traditional principle of international law.<br /> <br /> Allan Gerson, a former diplomat, took the case for the families and, partly as a result of changes in antiterrorism legislation following the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1996 the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act was amended to permit lawsuits like Gerson’s to proceed. In 1998, a federal appeals court ruled that lawsuits against Libya could proceed.<br /> <br /> Among the victims was twenty-year-old Theodora Cohen, whose parents waged a campaign to sue Libya, calling the attack a “ghastly act of war.” Susan and Daniel Cohen, Theodora’s parents, who wrote Pan Am 103, claimed that Clinton administration efforts at “normalizing” relations with Khaddafi’s Libya had interfered with prosecution of the case against the terrorist state.

Pan Am 103

Pan Am 103 On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland just half an hou...

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