Michael Pugliese :
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Sticking to Protocols
In the early 1900s, Czar Nicholas II's Okhranka (secret police) in Russia promoted a hoax document called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion - claimed to be the minutes of a secret 'cabal' of Jews who manipulated world events through the Freemasons and other groups. The Protocols were translated into many languages and circulated around the world...
^^^^^ CB: One note: These "secret" police were _not_ involved in a conspiracy themselves, of course :>). Their actions were "structural". Otherwise, anti-conspiracy theory would be in the inconsistent position of attributing the origin of fake conspiracy theory to , uh...a conspiracy !
Actually, the rightwing does engage in secret plots, as demonstrated by the above, wherein the Russian police lied and conspired to frame the fictional group, Elders of Zion. The rightwing in the US today does it.
The fact that there are conspiracy hoaxes does not mean that the rightwing does not actually engage in conspiracies. Therefore, it is not ok to just make a generalization that all discussion of conspiracy hypotheses are politically incorrect.
The difficult problem is that conspiracy hypotheses have to be examined on a case by case basis as to whether they are valid or not. The fact that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a hoax does not mean it is a hoax that the assassination of JFK was a coup d'etat, for example. And the fact that it was a coup d'etat is politically and historically significant, because, the US is always making a big deal that its "democracy" doesn't have coup d'etats. The theft of the 2000 presidential election is of similar import. It is a concrete example of the hypocracy of American democratic practice. It is the responsibility of leftists to preserve the memory of these incidents, collect them, and archive them for teaching the real history of this capitalist state.
The general effort to censor from left analysis and dialogue all discussions of conspiracy hypotheses, often as part of anti-Semitism, is very often political slander, and I denounce it as one of the growing right wing Trojan horses on the left today.