Scott's comments ring true to me. Of course there are conspiracies. They are a fact of life and they happen in all social situations. Soap operas are absorbed with domestic conspiracies. Marxism space is not immune from its little conspiracies.
But the term conspiracy theory in the singular seems to me to be a healthy warning that at least from a marxist point of view there may well be a deeper explanation.
To take the situation described by Scott above, the question that comes to my mind is why was the US ruling class so divided in its different interest groups for contradictions to surface in this crude way. It implies either a degree of inefficiency in the way it reconciles its common class interests or a streak of fascism in American civil society.
[I do not want to imply there are not fascist tendencies in the UK but they are of a different nature.]
Without knowing the US culture really and deeply, I do get the impression that fascism is a continuing feature of US political life, and that people like Scott and Charles are right to warn against it.
After all it is only a matter of a few decades that there was apartheid in many of the states of the south. Certainly a documentary presented recently on UK television about the death of Martin Luther King makes it pretty obvious in a quiet way that the state was involved at least on the local level. His son seemed to me totally credible in his public comments.
Chris Burford
London