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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New World Order

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0MpAY41lP31K2ypX_D4j0xgcWUr5OH0i8MTiDCZUk2eodi0J02qi1PnlUFKwDHoKrO4cXsfNmaTe-EI2LTNYetUk-Kkuuc7MmXtIajJhSDpL82t-t0fpPMGz8Pwr2GczVZCQfq8X6SSE/s1600/New-World-Order.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0MpAY41lP31K2ypX_D4j0xgcWUr5OH0i8MTiDCZUk2eodi0J02qi1PnlUFKwDHoKrO4cXsfNmaTe-EI2LTNYetUk-Kkuuc7MmXtIajJhSDpL82t-t0fpPMGz8Pwr2GczVZCQfq8X6SSE/s1600/New-World-Order.jpg" /></a></div> On 29 January 1991, President George Bush gave his second State of the Union address. He spoke as the Gulf War was under way and he was keen to promote the new masa he claimed the conflict represented.<br /> <br /> Bush repeated a term he had already used in several speeches, claiming that abroad in the world was “a big idea, a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. Such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children’s future.”<br /> <br /> Bush was not the first policymaker of the 1990s to speak of a “New World Order,” but like the others his words rested on a generally held perception that with the ending of the cold war something transformational had begun.<br /> <br /> Other visions that saw the sunlit uplands as lying just ahead had already been offered, most obviously two years earlier when historian Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed that “the End of History” and the arrival of endless liberal democracy had arrived. However, while talk of the New World Order was heard frequently in the United States for the rest of the 1990s, this was not in the affirmative sense Bush had intended.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961413514/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=44128c110aae1e639046b37791532926" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0961413514&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img address="" alt="President" border="0" bush="" gave="" george="" height="1" his="" new="" of="" order="" second="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0961413514" state="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" union="" width="1" world="" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DTX88I6/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=82fca5a9491b9a1b9f5fbbe069ef1745" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00DTX88I6&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img address="" alt="President" border="0" bush="" gave="" george="" height="1" his="" new="" of="" order="" second="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B00DTX88I6" state="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" union="" width="1" world="" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Instead, it gained notoriety as a code-phrase for the conspiracy theories of global control that were being disseminated in print, over shortwave radio, and, most of all, the new medium of the World Wide Web. It very soon dropped out of use by U.S. policymakers.<br /> <br /> For the radical Right, the mere use of the phrase was enough, for these three words were already familiar to groups such as the John Birch Society. The preeminent right-wing conspiracy-mongers of the 1950s and 1960s (and the focus of Richard Hofstadter’s seminal analysis of the paranoid style in 1964), the Birchers popularized its use in their literature to describe the socialistic “One Worldism” they were convinced was being promoted by the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Soviet Union</a> via the United Nations. The vision was of a dedicated Communist conspiracy, working ceaselessly to overthrow U.S. liberties and incorporate the United States into a world state and world government.<br /> <br /> Conspiracy writers (such as the author writing under the name “Garudas”) have charted the term “New World Order” through <a href=" " target="_blank">Henry Kissinger</a>, Henry Wallace, the Versailles Peace Conference, Cecil Rhodes, and British imperialism, back to the traditional bogeymen of many U.S. conspiracy theories—the <a href=" " target="_blank">Elders of Zion</a>, the Freemasons, and the Bavarian Illuminati.<br /> <br /> Genuine organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the World Trade Organization, and the Bilderberger group are said to have conspired together to advance this goal. Needless to say, groups like the Birchers greeted Bush’s employment of it with the happy fear so typical of the vindicated conspiracy theorist.<br /> <br /> However, the key users of the term in the post–cold war 1990s were not the traditional radical or religious Right (although figures such as Pat Robertson did dabble), but instead were the new grassroots militias and other self-styled “patriot” groups that sprang up in the United States during the decade.<br /> <br /> The New World Order (often short-handed as “NWO”) became emblematic of their conspiracy theories about America’s slide toward global domination, with claims that made the Birchers look modest in comparison. The following is from “Operation Vampire Killer” by the “Police Against the New World Order”:<br /> <br /> Behind the scenes is a plan for an oligarchy of the world’s richest families to place 1/2 the masses of the earth in servitude under their complete control, administered from behind the false front of <a href=" " target="_blank">the United Nations</a>.<br /> <br /> To facilitate management capabilities, the plan calls for the elimination of the other 2.5 billion people through war, disease, abortion, and famine by the year 2000. As we can plainly see, their plan for population control (reduction) is well under way. (Mulloy, 426–427)<br /> <br /> Although the roots of this were often drawn from religious extremism such as the Christian Identity movement, the imagination was thoroughly postcold war. Treaties such as the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)</a>, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and various United Nations environmental agreements were seized upon as evidence of this super-plot.<br /> <br /> In the patriot/militia NWO scenario one thing is made clear: the threat was not subversion. This time the globalist forces are here (as the preferred term “Zionist Occupation Government,” or <a href=" " target="_blank">ZOG</a>, made clear), and are assisted in their plot to deprive Americans of their collective and individual sovereignty by a traitorous federal government and its many agencies.<br /> <br /> As a militia text asked in 1994: “Do you know there are more than a million among us who are trained as traitors to the American constitutional way of life [and] are slated to be our slave-masters under the New World Order?”<br /> <br /> In support of all this, a profligate mishmash of detail was put forward as “evidence.” This ranged from the very specific—that Highway Department notations on the back of road signs are in fact secret codes to enable foreign troops to find their way (with the typical excess logic of conspiracy theories, they are written on the back because foreign troops will prefer to drive on the wrong side of the road)—to the sweeping, such as the claim that a government agency such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), responsible for floods, hurricanes, and the like, is a cover story for the preparation of concentration camps for dissident U.S. patriots.<br /> <br /> Among still wilder claims made are that electronic implants can control individuals, the military can control the weather, and that hovering above the United States is the all-seeing, all-knowing black helicopter.<br /> <br /> Summing up all this, in 1994 Linda Thompson, an Indiana attorney but also the self-styled “Adjutant General of the Unorganized Militias of America,” devised a “Re-Declaration of Independence,” with this as its preamble: “The Federal Government, at this time, is transporting large Armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of Death, Desolation and Tyranny, already begun, often under the color of the law of the United Nations, and with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of a civilized Nation.”<br /> <br /> Although such views seem absurdly inconceivable (particularly for Europeans who have learned to have little faith in the abilities of the United Nations), such rhetoric does, of course, sometimes connect to action. Militia opinion and activity can easily be read as inevitably leading to the terrible events of 19 April 1995, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in <a href=" " target="_blank">Oklahoma City</a>.<br /> <br /> However, to consider all conspiracy theories about a New World Order as potentially terrorist or held solely by a right-wing fringe would be a mistake. Suspicions about the order of the post–cold war world and the United States’ role in it have become legion and have served to mobilize public opinion in the 1990s.<br /> <br /> Any analysis of conspiracy theories and the New World Order must recognize that the term has had just as much employment on the Left as the Right, and so must question its conspiratorial alignment too. For the Left, the term came about as part of a process of counter-definition, for instance by use of the modifier “New World Disorder.”<br /> <br /> The name on the Left one comes across most often is Noam Chomsky—no other author is so associated with a coherent viewpoint on the post–cold war order of the world and the place of the United States within it.<br /> <br /> Chomsky offered a succinct definition in Deterring Democracy in 1992: “The Gulf War has torn aside the veil covering the post–Cold War era. It has revealed a world in which the United States enjoys unchallenged military supremacy and is prepared to exploit this advantage ruthlessly. The New World Order (in which the New World gives the orders) has arrived”.<br /> <br /> Writing on this subject (with titles such as World Orders, Old and New) and developing these ideas has been Chomsky’s work in the last ten years and by the end of the decade his use of the term was solidly fixed for the Left—unsurprisingly, it gained an outing again in criticism of the War on Iraq. Some of the debate about the New World Order has involved cross-talk between Left and Right, leading some to regard this as evidence of a new fusion of political belief.<br /> <br /> However, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Vietnam, COINTELPRO, and <a href=" " target="_blank">Watergate</a>, Iran-Contra, and the Tuskegee syphilis study had already offered the Left historical confirmation for overseas military adventurism, government surveillance, corporate conspiracies, clandestine intelligence agency dirty tricks, and even Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband. In other words, the New World Order as the Left saw it could not help but rest on a foundation of prior suspicion.<br /> <br /> Does this make the Left’s concept of the New World Order a conspiracy theory? Not if it is taken to mean that there is only one superpower left in the world, and it uses its power to satisfy its own interests. However, the larger edifice constructed on the foundation of Left conspiracy theories does go further.<br /> <br /> Daniel Pipes, author of Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, claims that Chomsky is the prime architect of a left-wing “conspiracy theory that blames the U.S. government for virtually every ill in the world, including environmental pollution, militarism, economic poverty, spiritual alienation, and the drug scourge.<br /> <br /> It manipulates the mainstream media (to divert the revolutionary potential of workers), sponsors academic postmodernism (to bewilder the uninitiated), and encourages professional sports (to distract attention from serious issues)”.<br /> <br /> Although this is a bowdlerized description of Chomsky, it does capture the totalizing tendency and the “can do no good” flavor of his writings. A perception that Chomsky offers a conspiracy-tinged analysis because he connects neglected issues together into a narrative, which operates by what it reveals, is suggested by his method, namely the exhaustive plotting of a mass of detail—a skill for which many on the Left have praised Chomsky a great deal.<br /> <br /> Alexander Cockburn recalled “the nights I’ve stayed at Noam and Carol Chomsky’s house in Lexington and I’ve watched him at even-tide working his way through a capacious box of the day’s intake of tripe—newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, learned journals, flimsy mimeo-ed mailers—while Carol Chomsky does the same thing on the other side of the room”.<br /> <br /> This does seem very reminiscent of the method classically employed by conspiracy theorists on the Right—the deep mining of the world’s detail for evidence. Chomsky might easily be defined as a guerrilla academic from MIT who mines for the “Truth.”<br /> <br /> The embrace, not of hard-edged conspiracy theories but of a softer conspiracy “mindedness,” bears upon the major source for New World Order conspiracy theories in the later 1990s, namely the anti-globalization movement.<br /> <br /> The protests in Seattle in late November–early December of 1999 brought together figures from Right and Left as different as Pat Buchanan (who a month before had quit the Republican Party, declaring himself against the New World Order) and Situationist Anarchists intent on trashing the home of Starbucks.<br /> <br /> Organized via the Internet and coordinated “live” via cellphones, the protests united for a few days over 50,000 demonstrators and led to the so-called “Battle of Seattle.” Follow-up protests have since taken place in at other meetings in Davos, Switzerland, Washington, D.C., London, and Venice. It is fair to say that these events were bred from a conspiratorial vision of the contemporary global order.<br /> <br /> Why else did this hardly very secretive meeting of the World Trade Organization, a bureaucratic body of 135 nations, whose membership was publicly known, serve as a focus for such protest? The concern came from the Left perspective that it was responsible for large corporations being set free to ruthlessly exploit Third World peoples and ruin the global environment, and this proved a significant motivation for many young people. As an explicitly titled “global” organization, the WTO therefore symbolized a great deal.<br /> <br /> The 1960s radical Tom Hayden claimed much for the protests: “For the first time in memory, the patriotism of the corporate globalizers is in question, not that of their opponents. Do the Clinton administration’s investor-based trade priorities benefit America’s interest in high-wage jobs, environmental protection and human rights? Are American democratic values and middle-class interests secondary to those of transnational corporations? As a grass-roots movement seeking the overthrow of what it sees as an oppressive system, Seattle 99 was more like the Boston Tea Party than the days of rage we knew in the late 60s”.<br /> <br /> At the heart of this seems to be less a defined conspiracy theory than a softer, diffuse suspicion that the post–cold war world is as not as it seems, or as it could be, or should be, and that somebody (the “corporate globalizers”) is responsible—a New World misordered, perhaps?<br /> <br /> As of 2003, the right-wing version of the New World Order seems to be tired and declining (as are the militias themselves), and the conspiracy theories of vitality about world order come from the Left.<br /> <br /> Focusing on corporate globalization, their foundation is more concerned with servicing a generalized mistrust and suspicion of the contemporary world order than with constructing baroque conspiracy theories like those of old. Of course, such servicing became much easier after the controversial election of the second President Bush in 2000, the attacks of <a href=" " target="_blank">September 11</a>, Enron and other corporate scandals, and the War on Iraq.<br /> <br /> From the evidence of sales of his book Stupid White Men, Michael Moore’s view that corporate America stole the election has considerable popularity. Indeed, Vice-President Cheney has assumed for many liberal-minded Americans a place in the Bush government every bit as conspiratorial as any Birchite view of Charles Wilson.<br /> <br /> Conspiracy theories about September 11 have not found the same appeal in the United States as in Europe (notably in France), but Gore Vidal’s contention that the attacks were suspiciously convenient for a business-oriented Bush administration anxious to secure oil pipelines in Afghanistan did meet with considerable attention after he wrote it up in a 7,000-word essay entitled, without irony, “The Enemy Within.” The war in Iraq and the tension between the Bush administration and the United Nations have acted largely to confirm what many seemed to suspect already.

New World Order

On 29 January 1991, President George Bush gave his second State of the Union address. He spoke as the Gulf War was under way and he was ke...

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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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Marilyn Monroe

<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/AVvXsEhrz5baHZ2RwY_nt_Ux0HeH3J-yCoCNIDIjqQuIHsuDfHPYjqv6DfXU_a1toUSSSI725-AkoqVvll21fpVprq0nVv4xIhCuYwfJJxlwL0RyNG4Gx0Bnw8qjgLh2xqYnHm-1Jv-X1cGyHFGc/s1600/marlyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The" angeles="" border="0" coroner="" county="" death="" due="" her="" los="" marilyn="" monroe="" ruled="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrz5baHZ2RwY_nt_Ux0HeH3J-yCoCNIDIjqQuIHsuDfHPYjqv6DfXU_a1toUSSSI725-AkoqVvll21fpVprq0nVv4xIhCuYwfJJxlwL0RyNG4Gx0Bnw8qjgLh2xqYnHm-1Jv-X1cGyHFGc/s1600/marlyn.jpg" that="" title="Marilyn" to="" was="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marilyn Monroe</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker-Mortensen in Los Angeles on 1 June 1926, died during the night of 4 August 1962 in Brentwood, California. The Los Angeles County coroner ruled that her death was due to “acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose ... a probable suicide.”<br /> <br /> Despite official reassurances that Monroe had killed herself, her death sparked a host of conspiracy theories claiming that the Mafia, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Communists</a>, the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CIA</a>, John and Robert Kennedy, her doctor, or her housekeeper had murdered her.<br /> <br /> First spotted in an airplane factory, Monroe quickly became a famous cover girl, displaying her sex appeal in dozens of magazines, including <a href="http://amzn.to/2lj3exn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Playboy</a>. Her career as an actress took off with <a href="http://amzn.to/2mFuB5C" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Asphalt Jungle (1950)</a>, followed by <a href="http://amzn.to/2lj2s3t" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">All about Eve (1950)</a>, We’re Not Married! (1952), Niagara (1953), <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="B00EEFFGEM" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="6e052617d9c1573a39823a51a1961ffc" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Some Like it Hot" href="http://www.amazon.com/Forever-Marilyn-Collection-Gentlemen-Millionaire/dp/B00EEFFGEM/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=theconthist-20&linkId=6e052617d9c1573a39823a51a1961ffc&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_7265209" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Seven-Year Itch (1955), Some Like it Hot (1959)</a><img alt="The" angeles="" border="0" coroner="" county="" death="" due="" height="0" her="" id="amznPsBmPixel_7265209" los="" marilyn="" monroe="" ruled="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=theconthist-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=6e052617d9c1573a39823a51a1961ffc&_cb=1457437294035" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" that="" to="" was="" width="0" />, River of No Return (1954), and The Misfits (1961), among others.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589793161/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=e871fa8507d6d13c190845d34390f22a" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1589793161&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" angeles="" border="0" coroner="" county="" death="" due="" height="1" her="" los="" marilyn="" monroe="" ruled="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1589793161" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" to="" was="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0030CRK4E/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=c1e2c9fc1537653006645ea7217387f9" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B0030CRK4E&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" angeles="" border="0" coroner="" county="" death="" due="" height="1" her="" los="" marilyn="" monroe="" ruled="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B0030CRK4E" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" to="" was="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Despite her acting success, the official theory goes, Monroe was a troubled individual, with three failed marriages, the first to sailor James Dougherty, the second to baseball star Joe DiMaggio, and the third to playwright <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143107771/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0143107771&linkId=759db8d36f8507ee3d82161354976766" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Arthur Miller</a>, and with two miscarriages while married to Miller.<br /> <br /> There were also rumors that she had an abortion shortly before killing herself, and that she suffered from schizophrenia. Her attempts to escape her “dumb blonde” image failed when she was fired for chronic lateness from her leading role in George Cukor’s Something’s Got to Give.<br /> <br /> From 1955 on, Monroe started analytic sessions, first with Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, then with Dr. Marianne Kris, and finally with Dr. Ralph Greenson, all of whom pushed her into excessive introspection, then prescribed barbiturates to reduce her stress levels.<br /> <br /> Desperately switching from one lover to the next, including actors Yves Montand, Marlon Brando, and Frank Sinatra, and director Elia Kazan, and addicted to barbiturates that she took along with alcohol, she was still reeling from a difficult childhood spent in foster homes. On at least two previous occasions, she threatened to kill herself, first by throwing herself out of the window (1961), then by overdose (1962).<br /> <br /> On 4 August 1962, an extremely irritable Monroe bitterly complained that her publicist, Pat Newcomb, had slept through the night while Monroe had not; Monroe then spent most of the day making frantic calls to acquaintances, then took (accidentally or, more likely, willingly) twenty-five pills of Nembutal that, combined with chloral hydrate, provoked a fatal overdose.<br /> <br /> Odd events surrounding her death immediately sparked conspiracy theories. She was found lying naked on her bed, her hand clutched on the telephone, as if she had tried to call somebody as she lay dying (she usually put her phone back on the couch, under a pillow, when she went to sleep). A list of phone calls she placed that night was mysteriously clipped from her bill. Key samples from her autopsy disappeared.<br /> <br /> The diary she kept, along with handwritten notes from Robert Kennedy, were never found, suggesting that she had been murdered because she “knew too much” and that her assassins had conscientiously removed all incriminating evidence. Monroe lay flat on her bed with her legs stretched, an odd position for someone dying from an overdose, which suggests that the death scene was staged.<br /> <br /> Close friends who talked to or met Monroe in the days before she died described her as happy, not depressed, and for many the official suicide theory was therefore implausible. A winner of the female World Film Favorite award at the 1962 <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Marilyn Monroe>Golden</a> Globes ceremony and a world-renowned actress with thirty films to her credit, Monroe had nothing to fear about her career—although she had been fired, Twentieth Century Fox was negotiating Monroe’s return to the set of Something’s Got to Give.<br /> <br /> The image of a beautiful movie star, lying naked on silk sheets and struck dead in the prime of life immediately caught the public imagination and helped propagate conspiracy theories.<br /> <br /> The exact chronology of her death remains in doubt. Officially, Monroe, who had been invited to actor Peter Lawford’s beach house that night, retired to her bedroom around 8 P .M. instead.<br /> <br /> Eunice Murray, her housekeeper, woke up around 3:30 A.M. early on 5 August, noticed light in Monroe’s room, stepped in, found her in an odd position, and called her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who asked Dr. Hyman Engelberg to come. Engelberg pronounced Monroe dead and, at 4:25 A.M., he called West Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant Jack Clemmons to notify the police of Monroe’s demise.<br /> <br /> This chronology only appeared in later sworn testimonies by Greenson and Engelberg. According to Clemmons, when he arrived on the scene Murray, Greenson, and Engelberg told him that Murray had found Monroe’s body around midnight. Monroe intimates such as Lawford claim they were notified of her death before 3:30 A.M.<br /> <br /> Ambulance drivers who took Monroe’s body away claim she was already in a stage of rigor mortis and must have died around midnight. Should this alternative chronology be true, conspiracy theorists say, several hours elapsed between Monroe’s death and the arrival of the police, leaving plenty of time for murderers to remove evidence and to leave the scene.<br /> <br /> One theory, put forward by Donald H. Wolfe in his The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, argues that U.S. president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert both had affairs with Monroe. As a result, she knew intimate details about both brothers and about their family’s connections to the Mafia and, given Monroe’s history of mental illness, she might reveal embarrassing details to the media. Since Monroe was by then a world-famous actress, a tell-all interview would trigger a scandal able to shatter Kennedy’s presidency.<br /> <br /> When Monroe sang a sensuous “Happy Birthday” to the president in May 1962, Wolfe argues that Kennedy feared she was on the verge of going public about their affair and so had her killed. Robert Slatzer, in his The Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, specifically blamed Robert Kennedy, who allegedly used CIA operatives to carry out the murder.<br /> <br /> Monroe’s romantic involvement with <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John F. Kennedy</a> is well documented, and rumors that she started a relationship with Robert after John “dumped” her on his brother seem entirely plausible. Evidence directly implicating any of the Kennedys in Monroe’s alleged murder, however, is scarce.<br /> <br /> One lone coincidence in favor of this theory is that actor <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/162914780X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=inamerican-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=162914780X&linkId=03f1314c3d792b368518106ad7f12c91" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Peter Lawford</a>, who had married Kennedy’s sister Patricia Kennedy-Lawford, was the last person to talk to Marilyn before she died. However unsubstantiated, the Kennedy theory remains the most popular among conspiracy enthusiasts.<br /> <br /> Another theory, put forward by Chuck Giancana in Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America, suggests that Chuck’s older brother, mobster Sam Giancana, ordered Marilyn killed in order to punish Robert Kennedy for prosecuting Mafia leaders during his tenure as attorney general. Giancana hoped Marilyn’s murder would be attributed to Kennedy, but Kennedy managed to remove incriminating evidence before Los Angeles police officials reached the crime scene.<br /> <br /> Less believable theories abound. Frank Capell, in The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, blamed her death on a Communist conspiracy intent on sapping U.S. morale. Other theories involve Monroe’s psychiatrist, <a href="http://amzn.to/2lQDOJi" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ralph Greenson</a>, accused of giving her a lethal injection of barbiturates (either willingly, or by mistakenly pumping the drugs into her heart); her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who might have killed Monroe on Greenson’s orders; and even her publicist, Pat Newcomb, who spent the night of the death in Monroe’s home.

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker-Mortensen in Los Angeles on 1 June 1926, died during the night of 4 August 1962 i...

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Maria Monk

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img a="" alt="was" and="" author="" book="" border="0" but="" depicti="" fictional="" heroine="" maria="" monk="" mostly="" of="" popular="" putative="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQeNPM-hlYMvM8EjC2KyKqcHl2_kjYKx30rNKM2jrQA_u5a_32TGewRC_gddzBCwnXh_KWF1dBWPBDsz6yNxeEP9_H6erIIo1DYX4wf0E1MNHJuvaVmiU9fAn2pGX1w91bewNnbn8oPkw/s1600/maria-monk.jpg" the="" title="Maria" wildly="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maria Monk</td></tr> </tbody></table> Maria Monk (1816–?1849) was the heroine and putative author of a mostly fictional but wildly popular book depicting the secret crimes that many Protestants were sure took place behind the closed doors of Catholic convents.<br /> <br /> The book was first published in 1836 under the title <i>The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal</i>. By some estimates, it was surpassed among antebellum best-sellers only by the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, two other favorites of the northern middle classes and the evangelical Protestant reformers whose causes relied on them.<br /> <br /> <i>Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk</i> remains to this day one of the most influential of all anti-Catholic texts, illustrating the powerful role that exaggerated survivor/defector narratives have played in bolstering conspiracy fears.<br /> <br /> Many facts of Maria Monk’s life are sketchy and disputed, but it’s generally agreed that she grew up near Montreal, the wayward daughter of a soldier’s widow who supported her family by cleaning houses for the army. Raised as a Protestant, by some means or another Maria ended up under the care of Catholic nuns, escaped from their institution, and left for New York City in 1835, pregnant and in the company of Rev. William K. Hoyt, an anti-Catholic activist.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1522884580/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1522884580&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=GCM5RHYC55TFIHUA"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1522884580&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="was" and="" author="" book="" border="0" but="" depicti="" fictional="" height="1" heroine="" maria="" monk="" mostly="" of="" popular="" putative="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1522884580" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" wildly="" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1426425732/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1426425732&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=MHK5SAD7GHR3JB4Y"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1426425732&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="was" and="" author="" book="" border="0" but="" depicti="" fictional="" height="1" heroine="" maria="" monk="" mostly="" of="" popular="" putative="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1426425732" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" wildly="" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> Beyond those basic facts, the accounts differ dramatically. Her mother claimed that Maria had suffered brain damage in a grisly childhood accident involving a “slate pencil,” and became mentally unstable and sexually uncontrollable as a result.<br /> <br /> According to Mrs. Monk, the Catholic institution from which her daughter escaped was a “Magdalen asylum” for the redemption of prostitutes, and William Hoyt had paid Maria to blame her conditions on priests, when Hoyt himself was likely the guilty party.<br /> <br /> As described in <i>Awful Disclosures</i>, Maria’s own story was far more inspirational. She told of entering the Hotel Dieu convent for her education and converting to Catholicism. After a brief stint away from the convent, including an alleged marriage, Monk decided to become a nun herself. Upon taking the veil, she was initiated, if her account is to be believed, into a nightmare world of psychological manipulation, sexual exploitation, and mass murder.<br /> <br /> Taken aside by the Mother Superior, Maria was informed that one of a nun’s “great duties was to obey the priests in all things,” which included servicing them sexually. When Maria virtuously objected, the Superior explained to her that priests needed nuns for this purpose because they were “not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry.”<br /> <br /> Moreover, the Catholic clergy deserved some release, because they “lived secluded, laborious, self-denying lives for our salvation.” Finally, Maria was assured, priests could not sin, and whatever they wanted was both right and “pleasing in the sight of God”.<br /> <br /> The sisters at Hotel Dieu also had to assist with the horrifying measures required to hide the priests’ activities. When babies were born in the convent, they were “always baptized, and immediately strangled,” which was actually good for the children since they would never be tempted to sin and got to enjoy “everlasting happiness” immediately.<br /> <br /> In the <i>Awful Disclosures</i>, Maria reported her discovery of a pit in the convent cellar where the little bodies were thrown in and covered with lime to promote rapid decomposition. The same fate awaited any nuns who balked at their duties, or spoke openly of the crimes committed there.<br /> <br /> Monk claimed to have witnessed a recalcitrant sister condemned to death, and then summarily executed—in the presence of the bishop—by means of smothering between two feather mattresses. Priests and nuns jumped on top and trampled her for good measure.<br /> <br /> In its original form, the narrative ended with Maria, pregnant with the child of one “Father Phelan, Priest of the Parish Church of Montreal”, escaping from the convent and arriving, apparently unaided, at a New York almshouse.<br /> <br /> Pursued by agents of the church and deathly ill, she finally unburdened herself to a hospital chaplain, who gave her a Bible and introduced her to the joys of Protestantism, depicted as a form of Christianity based exclusively on the reading of God’s word and “the free exercise of ... reason”.<br /> <br /> Monk’s story (if indeed it was hers and not a tale invented by her promoters) dovetailed nicely with the accusations that Protestant extremists had been making in a then-current controversy over the alleged threat that convents posed to American girls, which was linked with a much broader anti-Catholic movement.<br /> <br /> <i>Awful Disclosures</i> documented the charges much more sensationally than the recent <i>Six Months in a Convent</i> (1835), the rather mild narrative of “escaped” nun Rebecca Reed, who had been a sister at the Ursuline convent in Charles Town, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Maria Monk>Massachusetts</a>, which anti-Catholic rioters had burned down in 1834.<br /> <br /> <i>Awful Disclosures</i> had the juicy details that Reed’s book lacked, and while it was not explicit by modern standards, some scholars consider it the first work of pornography published in the United States, for its frank appeal to prurient interests.<br /> <br /> It is unlikely that Maria Monk actually wrote the book that bears her name and it is difficult to know whether she concocted the tales within it, which became more extensive and detailed in subsequent editions that boasted numerous invented illustrations and even a floor plan of the convent.<br /> <br /> In New York, she fell in with a circle of anti-Catholic activists including Rev. John Jay Slocum, Arthur Tappan, Rev. George Bourne, and Theodore Dwight, Jr. (some of whom were actively involved in other more worthy evangelical causes such as temperance and abolitionism). The narrative has been credited to several different members of the group, but it is certain that they were all heavily involved in publicizing the ex-nun’s story.<br /> <br /> The <i>Awful Disclosures</i> first saw print in an anti-Catholic newspaper; New York’s leading publisher, Harper Brothers, working through a dummy corporation named after two of their employees, finally brought it out as a book in 1836. Immediately popular, it has remained in heavy circulation ever since.<br /> <br /> Unsurprisingly, Maria Monk’s book was controversial as well as widely read. The Protestant religious press promoted it as an absolutely truthful account of Catholic corruption and superstition, and Maria herself became a popular figure.<br /> <br /> At the same time, Catholics and other opponents of the evangelical activists responded vigorously. Posters denouncing Monk were distributed throughout New York, and a heavily documented book, <i>Awful Exposure of the Atrocious Plot Formed by Certain Individuals against the Clergy and Nuns of Lower Canada</i>, was published refuting her charges.<br /> <br /> The Democratic and, like its party, generally pro-Catholic newspaper, the New York Herald, attacked <i>Awful Disclosures</i> repeatedly as a “gross and atrocious fabrication”. Rev. Slocum rushed out with another book rebutting the refutations, and a public meeting was held in which Monk and her critics confronted each other.<br /> <br /> Inevitably the controversy produced calls for a public investigation of the Hotel Dieu convent, and the results of those investigations made it much more difficult for reasonable people to give Awful Disclosures any further credence.<br /> <br /> Catholic officials denied requests to allow Maria herself to come back with an investigating committee, but finally did allow two American Protestant ministers to visit and inspect the convent. They reported finding nothing at all that substantiated Monk’s accusations; even the physical layout of the Hotel Dieu failed to match her description.<br /> <br /> Not long after, New York editor and author William L. Stone conducted an even more thorough investigation. Combing through the convent almost inch by inch, even sniffing jars in the basement in search of dead babies, Stone grew to doubt that Maria Monk had ever lived there at all.<br /> <br /> Though he had been active in the anti-Catholic movement and predisposed to believe Monk’s story, Stone came away impressed with the cheerfulness and tranquility of life at the Montreal convent, and wrote a report aiming to liberate his countrymen from “the bondage of prejudice” against these particular Catholics.<br /> <br /> The hardcore anti-Catholic press denounced the investigations (along with another Monk pregnancy) as <a href=" " target="_blank">Jesuit</a> plots, even suggesting the possibility that the convent had been rapidly remodeled simply to cast doubt on Maria Monk’s account.<br /> <br /> Her public standing was nevertheless devastated by the investigation, and in 1837 she left New York and mostly dropped from view, her mental condition evidently deteriorating. She saw only a tiny fraction of the profits from her best-selling book, despite some lawsuits, and seemed to have drifted into petty crime, poverty, and possibly prostitution.<br /> <br /> Most accounts have her arrested for stealing from a customer at the Five Points brothel where she probably worked toward the end of her life, and then dying in jail on Riker’s Island in 1849. Her <i>Awful Disclosures</i> lived on, and on.

Maria Monk

Maria Monk Maria Monk (1816–?1849) was the heroine and putative author of a mostly fictional but wildly popular book depicting the secre...

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Ku Klux Klan

<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 across="" alt="activity" and="" border="0" fluctuated="" geography="" has="" history="" its="" klan="" klux="" ku="" nature="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbXq34vQYIsIob3WLyHa0aHECSTuLnj56ugsMK4l61sHl2soTZKTkBE0Zyuk6SGvLp8gIHUALvRS7yDCO0l9JCzFuWmejMxijNaeO5WsC8yhMduxwfnbYTJMaNwFXQ9oTDdJH-fvWKRDk/s1600/Ku-Klux-Klan.jpg" through="" title="Ku" varied="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ku Klux Klan</td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> While the scale of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activity has fluctuated through history and its nature has varied across geography, Klansmen have always framed their enemies in conspiratorial terms. Accordingly, the character, methods, and motivation of the Klan’s enemies have varied in the conspiracy theories that Klansmen have promulgated during different historical periods and in different places. Nevertheless, logical patterns in the historical development of their conspiratorial theories are evident.<br /> <br /> Beginning with the first Klan groups of the 1860s, KKK conspiracy theories have repeatedly opposed economic, social, and political changes that threatened, undermined, or overturned the power of white supremacy in U.S. society.<br /> <br /> <b>Diabolical Republicans: Reconstruction-Era Klan Ideology</b><br /> <br /> During 1866–1871, a faction of “Radical Republicans” adopted the political strategy of granting citizenship, legal protection, militia membership, and voting rights to the recently freed slaves, in order to create an electorate that would support their nationalistic and liberal-capitalist project.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544225821/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0544225821&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=3ESRFRYSZHUW55NW"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0544225821&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img across="" alt="activity" and="" border="0" fluctuated="" geography="" has="" height="1" history="" its="" klan="" klux="" ku="" nature="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0544225821" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" through="" varied="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822307723/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0822307723&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=WPQFU33UVHMIWBAB"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0822307723&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img across="" alt="activity" and="" border="0" fluctuated="" geography="" has="" height="1" history="" its="" klan="" klux="" ku="" nature="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0822307723" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" through="" varied="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br /> To southern Democrats, black enfranchisement meant that intelligent, virtuous, and patriotic government was succumbing to ignorance, stupidity, thievery, and vice. To counter the Republicans, agents of the Democratic Party revived the tradition of the prewar “regulators” and slave patrols.<br /> <br /> Secretive ritual fraternities, quickly subsumed under the label Ku Klux Klan, endeavored to destroy the Republican Party infrastructure and reestablish control over credit, the transportation of cotton, and black labor. More generally, they aimed to restore racial subordination in all aspects of political, economic, and social life.<br /> <br /> The Ku Klux Klans, as well as the Democratic Party mouthpieces that supported their terrorist operations, raised alarms that “diabolical” Union Leagues were conspiring to reduce the South to “Negro domination” (Trelease, xxx). Enfranchisement of blacks undertaken by a “New England conclave ... lorded over by Beelzebub of the fallen” had brought the state “under the domain of Negro supremacy”.<br /> <br /> Founded upon “malice and cowardly hatred ... for the white inhabitants of the South” and a “desire to maintain power at the cost of principal and honor,” the Republicans were inflicting an “outrage on liberty and free government.” They were implementing “despotic” measures to “supercede State authority with the government of the bayonet”.<br /> <br /> Breaches of deferential behavior and decorum threatened to disrupt the entire fabric of white supremacy. The arrival of Yankee troops in the South had aroused “insolence, impertinence, impudence and ingratitude” among the former slaves. Black parades were deemed “outrageous spectacles.” Petty theft and consumption of alcohol prepared the way for insurrection.<br /> <br /> Exceptional and isolated cases of violence against former masters were sensationalized: black assassins had killed overseers and armed groups of slaves had terrorized the white populace, seizing plantations to parcel out among themselves. Insubordination and disregard of curfews were characterized as “insurrection” and refusal to work was defined as “mutiny”. Blacks were being incited to rape and rapine at Republican meetings.<br /> <br /> Klansmen proclaimed that Republican Party Union Leagues were responsible for stimulating a bloody and terrible wave of assault, arson, and murder. The South was being reduced to anarchy because vindictive Republican judges dealt lightly with Union League criminals. Open talk of acquiring land and voting became incitement to race war.<br /> <br /> The Democratic press also printed lurid tales that Republicans who lived on terms of equality with blacks were engaging in “cohabitation ... accompanied by the most unbridled and groveling licentiousness”. Tales of Republican depravity were linked to images of threatening black men and, through metaphors of theft, violence, and putrefaction, to the financial decline of southern towns.<br /> <br /> Complex changes in transportation, credit, and shipping technology were transformed into a simple, racist explanation for southern poverty. Yankee speculators, like a horde of locusts, had descended to prey upon the South through the political manipulation of gullible freemen.<br /> <br /> The “invasion” of Republican-sponsored interstate railroads were likened to political “machines” and “rings”. The new railroad lines that passed from Virginia to Georgia were seen as engines of corruption whereby Yankee speculators who had bought black votes imported women and liquor to influence legislators.<br /> <br /> The greatest ambition of enfranchised blacks, Klansmen claimed, was to coerce white women into sexual favors and intermarriage. The ensuing “amalgamation” of the races, it was claimed, would create a race of mulattos.<br /> <br /> The South would “be ruled out of the family of white nations”. Conflating sexual fear and partisan politics, Klansmen posed as chivalrous avengers: vindictive Republicans were represented as unleashing lust-crazed savages upon war widows and defenseless virgins.<br /> <br /> Since white womanhood symbolized the heart of culture and refinement, their ravishment by animalistic black men represented in the minds of the Klan the destruction of the South as a whole: an assault on either connoted an implicit carnal attack on the other.<br /> <br /> Although localized and lacking synchronization, Ku Klux Klan violence, including uncounted whippings, beatings and rapes, murders, and massacres, played a major role in disarming black militia and preventing black voting in at least eight states. Republican parties were destroyed at the local level and in many cities, while Georgia and Louisiana were entirely “redeemed.”<br /> <br /> The Republican Congress, in turn, passed a series of Federal Enforcement Acts enabling military intervention, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and enough indictments and convictions to break the back of the Klans in 1872. By this point, however, the Klans had served their purpose.<br /> <br /> After 1863 the federal government lost the will to maintain Reconstruction. Interracial state governments steadily collapsed in the face of intimidation at the polls by white paramilitaries, open intimidation by mobs, and pogroms against black communities.<br /> <br /> Although paramilitary groups—such as the “whitecappers” who drove off independent black farmers in Mississippi during 1892–1893 and again a decade later—were occasionally revived, lynching and the implementation of legal segregation served to maintain a rigid <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Ku Klux Klan>caste</a> system in the South.<br /> <br /> <b>The Second Ku Klux Klan: A Catholic Conspiracy</b><br /> <br /> Claiming to have received a mystical vision that had instructed him to unite native-born white Protestant men in battle against aliens, radicals, political corruption, prostitution, and religious infidelity, William Simmons revived the KKK in 1915.<br /> <br /> His Klansmen harassed presumed slackers, enemy aliens, and immoral women. By the mid-1920s, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had become a national, predominantly urban, mainstream social movement of 4 million members who represented a generally balanced cross section of white Protestant denominations and social classes.<br /> <br /> While racist ideology and vigilante violence continued to characterize Klaverns in the South and Southwest, as the order moved into regions and communities with no history of vigilantism or in which the black population was small, different concerns shaped Klavern activity.<br /> <br /> In the context of the time, these Klansmen were not more reactionary, racist, ethnocentric, religiously bigoted, or socially alienated than the general white Protestant population. United by a commitment to civic activism and social order, however, Klansmen were more likely to express and act upon their concerns: curtailment of vice; open and honest government; modern roads, sewage systems, and schools; enforcement of conservative Protestant morality, especially Prohibition; and Protestant control of the public schools.<br /> <br /> What differentiated the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from other reactions to disruptive change was the conspiratorial outlook and bellicosity that continued to permeate their worldview. While Klansmen had employed conspiracy theory and countersubversive rhetoric during Reconstruction, the primary enemy whom many deemed responsible for subverting their world had changed, probably because of the new geographical contexts in which the Klan was now operating. Akin to the carpetbaggers of Reconstruction lore, Catholics and, to a lesser extent, Jews now played the role of concrete, alien conspirators in the Second Ku Klux Klan’s ideology.<br /> <br /> Enough Americans agreed with Klan leader Hiram Evans that “We must teach alien peoples the fundamental principals of human liberty before we can permit further masses of ignorant, superstitious religious devotees to come within our borders” that Congress would pass a highly restrictive immigration bill in 1924. They may also have agreed that Catholics owned houses of prostitution and committed a disproportionate number of crimes.<br /> <br /> Non-Klansmen probably gave less credence, however, to Evans’s warnings that “the Dago on the Tiber,” Jesuit assassins, and the Knights of Columbus were stockpiling arms in Catholic churches, in preparation for a merciless massacre of U.S. Protestants and a papist takeover of the federal government.<br /> <br /> Klansmen distributed phony literature that endorsed candidates seeking to “Catholicize” the United States (Rhomberg). Using spurious statistics, they argued that increasing Catholic power threatened the separation of church and state. Catholic priests were adjudged to be “foreign emissaries operating in the United States”.<br /> <br /> Catholic control of the press, organized labor, and the public schools, combined with the control of “polyglot peoples” by Catholic political machines, was enabling the “hierarchical church [to spread] its tentacles, like an octopus, into the very vitals of the body politic”.<br /> <br /> Klansmen declared that they were fighting “to maintain a free republican form of government against the subtle political encroachments of the self arrogated, infallible, universal autocracy known as the Roman Catholic hierarchy”. Catholics, they maintained, were imbued with the “monarchical ideal of the individual as subject instead of citizen.”<br /> <br /> The Knights of Columbus was charged with training and equipping an army bent on conquest for Rome. Papist agents, Klansmen warned, had poisoned President Warren G. Harding and put hidden religious symbols on the dollar bill, in preparation for the pope’s arrival in the United States.<br /> <br /> Klan recruiters displayed photographs of the Episcopal church on Mount Alban, in Washington, D.C., to claim that a new Vatican was under construction. Indiana Klansmen asserted that every time a male child was born, the congregation buried a rifle beneath a Catholic church and that church steeples were built high so that Catholics could “rain down fire on cities after the Pope declared war on Protestants”.<br /> <br /> The sewer system under Notre Dame University was said to contain an arsenal of heavy artillery and explosives. The KKK circulated a phony Knights of Columbus Oath, a pledge to “hang, burn, boil, flay, and bury alive” all non-Catholics. Such propagandizing was effective in rousing public vigilance.<br /> <br /> KKK anti-Catholicism also focused on the theme of lechery. In North Manchester, Indiana, nearly 1,500 people turned out to ambush the pope, said to be arriving by train. Catholic stores were boycotted and Catholics were dismissed from schools and hospital boards in other parts of the state.<br /> <br /> While the Klan decried Jewish violation of the Sabbath and accused Jews of trying to take the Bible out of the public schools, the Klan’s antisemitism dwelled on economic and social themes more than religious ones.<br /> <br /> Depending on local economy and tangible property, Klansmen charged the “International Jew” with “cosmopolitanism”. Portraying exploitation, destructive competition, and economic concentration as unnatural anomalies caused by the perfidy of a small minority, Klansmen upheld “good,” small-scale capitalism.<br /> <br /> Enlisting the infamous czarist police forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Klansmen, like other antisemites of the 1920s, described bolshevism as Jewish controlled and Jewish financed. The regime, in promoting female equality, divorce, and “free love,” had in their view nationalized women. “Hebrew libertines” were deemed the secret force behind the white slave trade and a popular culture that was bringing budbahasa ruin upon the nation’s youth.<br /> <br /> Although the specific enemies were different from those of their Reconstruction-era ancestors, 1920s Klansmen also attacked alien outsiders in woman’s name. They employed a similar rhetoric concerning gender and sexuality to illustrate political concerns. Recitations of sexual subversion by Communists, Catholics, and Jews centered on charges that each would recast the family and morality, destroying civilization.<br /> <br /> The Klan’s appeal to middle-class fears about female sexuality was a highly effective recruiting technique, yet it ultimately proved precarious. The irony of the Second Ku Klux Klan is that its leadership fell victim to same type of scandal that had motivated rank-and-file Klansmen to join the order. In 1925, Indiana Klan leader D. C. Stephenson, in an alcoholic frenzy, raped, bit, and brutalized a twenty-eight-year-old neighbor whom he had been courting.<br /> <br /> During his trial another woman sued Stephenson for desertion and child support. Throughout the nation, Klansmen resigned in disgust. Scandal also rocked other realms. In LaGrande, Oregon, a Klansman was convicted of performing an illegal abortion on a clerical assistant with whom he had been engaging in sexual relations.<br /> <br /> In Denver, members of the American Legion raided the offices of the Klan vice squad and uncovered a complex network of tip-offs, graft, and protection. More generally, the Klan’s ultimate failure to enforce Prohibition led to disillusionment throughout the nation.<br /> <br /> In the South, however, Klan activity never disappeared. Here, racist rhetoric remained apocalyptic, since it was believed that the slightest concession would embolden blacks to undermine the whole apparatus of white supremacy. Klansmen continued to warn of “indigestible races,” “mongrel populations,” “defiled blood,” and “racial pollution” as threats to the body politic.<br /> <br /> Here too, where Klansmen saw themselves as an army in training for a war between the races, there was pervasive extralegal coercion and violence. Lynching, flogging with rawhide straps, and other forms of vigilante violence were employed to terrorize African Americans, labor organizers, and people who broke budbahasa codes.<br /> <br /> <b>From Anticommunism to Antisemitism: The Klan after World War II</b><br /> <br /> As economic destitution, unionization, and New Deal programs combined to undermine white supremacy in the South during the 1930s, Klansmen fused racism with anticommunism and antifederal government rhetoric. As Franklin D. Roosevelt redefined U.S. liberalism in terms of active government and a welfare state, Klansmen charged that he was subverting U.S. principles and destroying the foundations of states’ rights.<br /> <br /> The political alliance forged between the New Deal and the labor movement provided Communists with an opportunity to establish a legitimate role, providing ammunition for the administration’s enemies. Anticipating the anticommunism of the early cold war, Klan Wizard Evans was one of the first to charge that the Congress of Industrial Organizations “is infested with communists”.<br /> <br /> In Alabama and Georgia, urban police, rural sheriffs, and Klansmen worked together to terrorize Communist Party organizers. Northern anti-union corporations also employed vigilantes to flog union men. World War II, however, provided a new context for activism in the South as African Americans, liberals, and labor organizers linked white supremacy to Nazi racial policies.<br /> <br /> Nevertheless, Klansmen posed as guardians against Communist subversion, in a context where the term “communism” was used by many southerners to describe almost anyone who did not exhibit strict orthodoxy on the racial issue. Southern segregationists continued to maintain that civil rights activists intended intermarriage and destruction of the white race through “mongrelization.”<br /> <br /> Klansmen, however, concluded that the real force behind these changes was the international Communist conspiracy. Klansmen labeled Martin Luther King, Jr., a “rabble rousing nigger Communist,” and asserted that Rosa Parks was a Communist agent.<br /> <br /> They believed that the ultimate aim of these Communists was the destruction of tradition in order to pave the way for their takeover of the United States. Their plan involved the gradual weakening of the budbahasa fiber of the nation until it disintegrated from within.<br /> <br /> Antisemitism played an ambiguous role in KKK anticommunist rhetoric: Jews formed a sort of continuum between the racial threat of blacks and the ideological threat of Communists. As Alabama Klansman E. L. Edwards put it, “The good niggers don’t want this integration any more than we do. It is the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] that is trying to jam it down our throats and it is backed by Jew money.”<br /> <br /> It was, he said, “Russia’s intention to Mongrelize the world, to mix the white race with the black so as to bring it under Communist control.” Jewish Communists were credited with providing the brains and the driving force behind integration, yet most Klansmen still adhered to a religious view of Jewish difference.<br /> <br /> Robert Shelton, leader of the largest Klan organization of the 1960s, blamed international Jewish financiers for World War I and the Great Depression, but he also went so far as to say that if Jews converted to Christianity, they would be welcomed into the Klan. Other Klansmen declared that <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Ku Klux Klan>Jewish</a> biology expressed itself through the “Jewish” ideology of communism.<br /> <br /> Some postwar Klan leaders, however, would come to view Jews as an enemy of the white race because of who they were and not only for what they did. Elaborating upon the themes of <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Ku Klux Klan>Protocols of the Elders of Zion</a>, a number of postwar Klan organizations would expand and develop antisemitism in such a way that it eventually emerged as an all-encompassing conspiracy theory in Klan ideology.<br /> <br /> The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the most violent Klan organization of the 1960s, saw the Jews as the major destructive force in the United States. White Knights leader Samuel Bowers delivered religious sermons lambasting Jews as the “anti-Christ” and “Demons of the Synagogue of Satan”. For him, the preservation of a constitutional republic was a means to an end: the preservation of Christian civilization.<br /> <br /> It was this sort of dualistic antisemitism that would help create a revolutionary impulse during the late 1960s. Some of the most militant White Knights, as well as members of the United Florida Ku Klux Klan, also joined the National States Rights Party (NSRP), a small but active group of vehement antisemites who excoriated the “Federal Bureau of Integration” as a tool of the Jews. Influenced by the Christian Identity preaching of Weseley Swift, NSRP ideology was “forward looking” in the context of ideological development on the racist right.<br /> <br /> In the 1970s, many Klansmen would be converted to the ideas of historical revisionism and Christian Identity. Historical revisionism held that the Holocaust was a figment of the Jewish imagination, a lie that had been concocted to gain the necessary sympathy for the creation of the State of Israel.<br /> <br /> Christian Identity theology provided Klansmen with an eschatology that viewed Aryans as the true Israelites, as God’s chosen people. According to the “seedline” interpretation of Genesis, blacks and other “mud people” were the result of a separate creation, given to whites by God as “beasts of the fields”.<br /> <br /> Jews, however, were quite literally evil personified, having sprung from sexual intercourse between Eve and Satan in the Garden of Eden. Convinced of the inherent evil of Jews, and believing that Jews had taken over the United States, some Klansmen concluded they must wage a holy war to reclaim their nation from the “<a href=" " target="_blank" title=Ku Klux Klan>Zionist Occupation Government</a>”.<br /> <br /> In the 1960s, although some tiny groups of Klansmen in northeastern states affiliated with George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, the great majority of Klansmen, many of whom would have fought in World War II, rejected Nazism as a totalitarian, anticapitalist, un-Christian form of tyranny.<br /> <br /> Before the mid-1960s, moreover, the largest Ku Klux Klan organization in the United States, Robert Shelton’s UKA (United Klans of America) respected, identified with, and even revered the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Klansmen presumed that the FBI was a meritorious ally in a common battle against un-American subversion.<br /> <br /> In 1965–1966, however, the House Un-American Activities Committee declared the Ku Klux Klan to be un-American and exposed its terrorist activities. In response, Robert Shelton asserted that “left-wing elements” were “using the Klan as bait to destroy the Committee itself because of its Southern membership”.<br /> <br /> Alluding to aggressive interviews by FBI agents pursuing Klan murders in Alabama, Shelton also declared that “the FBI and Justice Department have harassed members of this Klan and other right-wing organizations, causing them to lose their jobs”.<br /> <br /> Yet he also reached out, offering that “it’s not necessary for them to infiltrate. If they fill out an application, they can do so and we’ll welcome them into the Klan and have fraternal unionism”.<br /> <br /> The United Klans, unlike the NSRP and the White Knights, thus remained supportive of the system in that they presented illegitimate infiltration of the government rather than the national security state itself as the cause of their woes.<br /> <br /> Between 1966 and 1971, however, the FBI accelerated its COINTELPRO–White Hate Groups kegiatan against the Klans. Using prosecution under federal law, media exposure, selective enforcement of misdemeanor law, tax audits, poison pen letters, informants, “snitch-jackets,” and other disruptive covert action techniques, the FBI discredited a number of top Klan leaders and replaced them with informants, created and aggravated internecine factionalism, and scared off most rank-and-file members, thereby neutralizing Klan activity throughout the South. By 1972, the UKA newspaper would declare:<br /> <br /> “[The United States government] has been transformed [in]to a corrupt, unnatural and degenerate monstrosity.... we need to put a bullet into its brain and hammer a stake through its heart. If that means blood and chaos and battling the alien enemy from house to house in burning cities throughout the land, then by God it is better that we get on with it now than later” (United Klans of America).<br /> <br /> A prelude to the so-called Nazification of the KKK in the late 1970s, such statements marked a significant transition in KKK conspiracy theory. By the mid-1970s, conservative notions of nationalism and masculinity had been challenged by the defeat in Vietnam, economic decline, rising crime rates, and feminism.<br /> <br /> According to the KKK, Jewish teachers had repressed expression of Christian faith in public life and Jewish women had promoted feminism and lesbianism in a conspiracy to limit the white birthrate. The welfare state, meanwhile, was said to pay minorities to give birth to illegitimate offspring, who would grow up to a life of crime, even as the Jewish media promoted immorality among all Americans.<br /> <br /> This view held that the Zionist Occupation Government—a Jewish cabal that controlled the intelligence community, finances and banking, the media, and foreign policy—had brought war in Vietnam, budbahasa decay at home, and, through their promotion of feminism, homosexuality, abortion, the welfare state, and racial miscegenation, would bring about the genocide of the white race.

Ku Klux Klan

Ku Klux Klan While the scale of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activity has fluctuated through history and its nature has varied across geography, ...

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