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Conspiracies of Hate

Reviewed by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer


Conspiracies: Real Grievances,
Paranoia, and Mass Movements
Edited by Eric Ward
Peanut Butter Publishing, 1996
217 pages, paperback - $14.95


In conjunction with its 1995 annual conference, the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment held a one-day symposium on conspiracy thinking among hate groups. Conspiracies: Real Grievances, Paranoia, and Mass Movements is a compilation of the five expert reports given at that symposium, along with critiques of each report by another expert. The book provides a detailed analysis of the conspiratorial world views that lie at the heart of the racist right and offers some suggestions on ways progressives and human rights advocates can best oppose those views.
Contributors Leonard Zeskind, the president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, and Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, both begin their analyses with discussions of Richard Hofstadter's influential 1965 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
For Hofstader a key element in the paranoid political style was a belief in "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character." Hofstadter explained that conspiracy thinking creates a world that is "far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures or ambiguities." Conspiracy thinkers have a complete explanation for all that they see wrong with the world - history itself "is set in motion by demonic forces."
Zeskind differs from Hofstader, though, in arguing that conspiratorial thinking is not primarily a manifestation of individuals' economic distress or mental instability, but is a chosen political belief and worldview. Zeskind marshals convincing examples of this point, noting wryly that when Henry Ford published his imitation of the notoriously anti-Semitic hoax, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, in 1920 he was not suffering economically. During the Depression the Klu Klux Klan virtually disappeared. Sociologist James Aho, in his 1990 book The Politics of Righteousness, reported that Idahoan Christian patriots, a racist and anti-Semitic group, were "slightly better educated than Idahoans generally, were more likely to have stable families and maintained middle class (though slightly isolated) economic lives."
Zeskind does make a factual slip that needs correcting. In contrasting the theological characteristics of conspiracy thinking with the actual historical record of crimes and conspiracies, he mistakenly says that in the infamous Tuskegee study of syphilis black men were "deliberately infected." What actually occurred, almost as horrofically, was that 400 black men who had independently contracted syphilis were intentionally denied treatment while researchers tracked the progress of the disease. This federally-funded crime began in 1932 and was not stopped until forty years later.
Berlet also disagrees with Hofstadter in his contribution to this collection, "Three Models for Analyzing Conspiracist Mass Movements of the Right." Among others, Hofstadter had developed the pluralist/extremist theory of dissident movements that recommended viewing dissidents as politically marginal extremists "outside the legitimate political process, which is located at the center where pluralists conduct democratic debates." Berlet argues that the pluralist/extremist embraced by liberal elites incorrectly categorized populist movements as extremist and sanctioned government repression.
Countersubversion theory is a second inadequate model, according to Berlet, which sees individual ringleaders and outside agitators as the main culprits in social unrest and believes that neutralizing the leaders will end the unrest. Berlet, however, sees right wing hate groups more as a social movement, not just as misguided people mislead by demagogues, which need to be confronted as a movement fueled by unresolved grievances and bitter frustration.
Kathleen Blee, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, presents in her paper an insightful portrait of the women involved in white supremacist groups, who now often constitute twenty-five percent of the membership. The women she interviewed generally had anti-Semitic and one-world government conspiratorial fears. Their conspiratorial fears were usually based on pragmatic and personal issues, "over and over, women explained their activism as a necessary sacrifice for the future of their children." These women found an identity within their supremacist group, as one described, "It is not so much that I am in the Klan, it is the fact that the Klan is in me! By the Klan being in me I have no choice other than to remain."
In his paper, "Holocaust Denial: The Vanguard Conspiracy Theory of the Contemporary Hate Movement," Jeffrey A. Ross, director of Campus Affairs/Higher Education for the Anti-Defamation League, tracks the sophisticated tactics of those challenging the historical record of Nazi genocide. A 1990s tactic perfected by Bradley Smith is to submit Holocaust denial paid advertisements for publication in student newspapers. "Smith counted on the on-campus controversy produced by his ads, whether published or not, to generate a news story that would be covered in the mainstream press and on TV, giving him a multiplier of free publicity."
Steven M. Wasserstrom, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and the Humanities at Reed College, a respondent to Jeffrey A. Ross's paper, asked why Holocaust denial is the vanguard theory of the contemporary hate movement?" Because, Wasserstrom answers, this common feature of international neofacism is at its base a rejection of the real world with its humbling sense of guilt and sorrow.
Conspiracy thinking is popular in American culture, and not just within the extreme right-wing, as Oliver Stone and the X-Files regularly reveal. The Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment's daily work is opposing the efforts of our regional hate groups, all of which currently are on the far right of the political spectrum. But separated from the context of the Northwest Coalition's annual conference, the almost exclusive concentration in Conspiracies: Real Grievances, Paranoia, and Mass Movements on right wing groups limits the value of its analysis and blurs the distinction between moral opposition and political opposition. This is especially problematic in Tarso Ramos's paper on "An Environmental Wedge: The 'Wise Use' Movement and the Insurgent Right Wing."
Ramos, the director of the Wise Use Public Exposure Project for Western States Center, presents a thorough and fascinating history of the development of the Wise Use movement from a series of timber management articles written by Seattle-area public relations consultant Ron Arnold in 1979 to the 1994 political success of Wise Use congressional candidates like Idaho's Helen Chenoweth. But the Wise Use movement is not a conspiratorial hate group, even though militia groups have "adopted Wise Use themes as a means of mainstreaming themselves." Ramos exposes the connection of some Wise Use leaders to racists and anti-Semites like Louis Beam and Martin "Red" Beckman as a way of criticizing the movement as a whole. But that is an expedient use of guilt by association. Ramos has no interest in seeing the Wise Use leaders repudiate the militia movement; he wants to see the Wise Use movement checked and defeated, and exposing its unsavory fellow travelers is an effective tactic.
For progressives to be intellectually honest and politically successful we need to clearly distinguish our moral values and our political agenda. In opposing right wing hate groups we maintain the effective moral high ground as long as our efforts are to stop violence, end discrimination, undermine racism, educate against prejudice, encourage tolerance, promote pluralism and secure democratic culture. Those are democratic values, not partisan positions, which many conservatives share and we will be more successful if we encourage their cooperation in common efforts like the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. But to the extent that progressives cast public policy debates, whether Wise Use county rights initiatives or resource industries' land grabs, as moral issues, we alienate political moderates, cheapen our own values and become true believers, mirror images of the self-righteous we froth against on the right.

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Contents on this page were published in the January/February, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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