Chip Berlet wrote:
>
> Wanzala wrote:
>
> So you [Doug]
> > obviously have
> > no point other than to attack 'conspiracism' which as far as
> > I can tell, is
> > a phenomenon which occurs chiefly in the mind of Chip Berlet and his
> > dittoheads.
>
> The phenomenon of conspiracism has been studied in academia for decades.
> Norman Cohn and Michael Barkun are hardly my "dittoheads," but serious
> scholars who, along with scores of others, write about the phenomenon of
> conspiracy thinking and conspiracism.
What makes me sad is that conspiracy theories such as Joseph Wanzala's _lead away_ from awareness of the centers of power. They delude people into thinking that evil exists solely in the machinations of particular people rather than in the capitalist system. Joseph's arguments, that is, add up to an apology for capitalism and for u.s. imperialism. His theories also support racism, for the major form racist ideology takes today is the view that racist institutions are caused by the actions of racist individuals, making it more difficult to combat its structural sources.
Even in those cases where there _is_ an actual conspiracy (e.g., the Iran-Contra events) an exposure of that conspiracy is politically useless, and the effort spent in publicizing it would be better spent in showing that the fundamental policiies of the U.S. state (with or without any conspiracy) are destructive.
Carrol