The Sixty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time: History's Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals

Rating:
Summary: Good, could have been great
Review: 60 GREATEST CONSPIRACIES is an informal encyclopedia of a variety of conspiracy theories from the last two hundred years. It begins by dicsussing the nature of these theories, and why they are hated so much by the Establishment. Theorists tend to be against those in influence and authority, and frequently deal with the Dark Side of human nature, stuff most people do not want to discuss in polite conversation. One of the methods used to supress conspiracies are when the establishment circulates its own wacky stories that they themselves can easily refute in order to make independent researchers look like fools and thus discredit them easier. The authors are obviously liberals, and this hampers them to some degree, especially when viewing certain topics and summarizing them, but otherwise there is a multitude of useful information and speculation. Some of the material seems poorly edited, and I had trouble trying to find out what the possible motives were in certain events described, especially the chapters on political assassinations. Some things in here are not conspiracies, like the chapter on the eugenics movement which gleams with the authors' liberal bias, and some useless info is included on UFOs and Alien Autopsies. The editors reject the notions of a possible Jewish conspiracy, but instead think that some kind of Nazi-fascist group is calling the shots behind the scenes in spite of contrary evidence that can be researched elsewhere.

Most of the best chapters were about unified field theories and satanic/occult-ritual crimes. Enjoy the really good ones:

'The Royal Ripper': Jack the Ripper slayings in London could have been the work of Masonic Assassins, high ranking figures in British society to symbolically terrorize London's underclass population and intimidate possible snitches.

'Death Squad from the Desert': Charles Manson's connections to the Process Chruch of the Final Judgement.

'Hello from the Gutters': My second favorite, about a possible occult group perpetrating the Son of Sam killings and other ritualistic murders around the country and being involved in the snuff-film trade. Michael Hoffman II makes some connections to the Manson murders, and to the rape-death of Virginia Rappe (a virgin-rape ritual symbolizing the extension of the elephant trunk's power) by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in 1921. Son of Sam also connected to Illuminati and attack on Gerald Ford.

'Enlightened Ones': speculations on who the Illuminati are.

'THE SORCERERS': My personal favorite, it advances Downard's idea that the world's Masonic rulers do what they do not for power or money but to warp humanity in an Alchemical process. The three things that have to take place are killing of the divine king (JFK assassination), creation and destruction of primordial matter (nuclear bomb test) and "the making manifest of all that is hidden."

'Anglophobia': Theories that rock music concerts and dancing are a revival of Dionysian/Bacchic rituals, and that sex-degenerate cults, rock music, sixties counter-culture and drug trade are traced to the British crown and secret agents.

'Playing Those Mind Games': Stuff on mind control. Possibility that UFO "abductions" are part of government expirements.

All in all, well worth looking at if "the most controversial explanations" of well-known events happen to interest the reader.

Rating:
Summary: Trust No-One !!
Review: By writing this I'll probably now have a file opened in the CIA database. But hey, stuff 'em. This book is awesome. I dare you to read it and not then be skeptical about everything you see on the TV or read in newspapers (or should they be called "disinformationpapers"). Welcome to the New World Order people; Never has so much been owned, controlled, and covered up by so few.

Rating:
Summary: Vankin and Whalen are hot to plot!
Review: Conspiracy theories are like medicine. Taken properly, they can be a healthy antidote to unrelenting statism and the adoration of Big Brother. Taken improperly, they are a recipe for groovy leftist nihilism.

Given the fact that the United States government, as well as other governments, have indeed shown themselves to have an unhealthy predilection for secret mischief-making, the conspiracy industry is something that should interest both Left and Right, and to some extent, it does. But as is the case with so many things, the "mainstream" conservatives disdain interest in the cutting-edge and the controversial and as far as the "extremists" go, the voices of the Left simply outnumber and out-shriek the voices of the Right.

So most conspiracy authors have large left-handed axes to grind, and many of them produce entertaining but self-serving and un-edifying literary acid trips, such as Tom Miller's"Assassination Please" almanac and Shea and Wilson's "Illuminatus Trilogy".

Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, the authors of "The Greatest 60 Conspiracies of All Time", are ... and a little more restrained, and hence slightly more informative and slightly less entertaining.

Some of what's published here is old stuff, such as the horrible experiments in eugenics that took place in the early 20th century or the CIA plotting against Fidel Castro.

The most entertaining conspiracy theories discussed are the apolitical ones. The notion that aliens once crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico is fun, and there really aren't any serious political implications to it (the authors treat it skeptically, in any event).

Also kind of fun at this late date is the notion of some sort of connection between Jack the Ripper and England's royal family. But it's been done to death and has been largely disproven, as has been the "Lincoln Conspiracy" formulated by David Balsigier and Charles Sellier.

But as James Burnham once wrote about liberals and leftists, "Pas d'Ennemi a Gauche". For them, there is no enemy to the left. Whenever Vankin and Whalen are in doubt, they cast everything suspicious or dubious as "far-right" or "right-wing". For leftists who only chat with each other, the Left simply doesn't exist for them any more than a fish might be aware that he's always swimming in water.

Vankin and Whalen TRY to be restrained in their conclusions, but for them, there is always at least the POSSIBILITY of an underground right-wing cabal behind every major event. Just about every leftist conspiracy theorist disdains or ignores Lee Harvey Oswald's Marxist sympathies and distorts or ignores evidence linking him to the shooting of JFK.

But in another burst of creativity, Vankin and Whalen cast Mehmet Ali Agca's 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II as a fascist conspiracy instigated by a nationalistic Turkish group and they regard attempts to blame it on Soviet intelligence as a clumsy frame-up attempt by Western intelligence.

Mort Sahl once urged fellow conspiracy theorists to ask "cui bono? (who benefits?)" in order to come to appropriate conclusions about world events. Vankin and Whalen have obviously decided that at a time of unrest in a Soviet satellite country, inspired by the Polish pope, an "ultra-nationalist" Turkish group desiring to spread "terror and chaos" stood to gain more from the pope's death than did the Soviets.

That sort of mindset reminds me of Tom Miller's pointed use of the small letter "c", every time he had occasion to use the word "Communist" or "Communism" in his almanac. To remind us of what an insignificant role the Evil Empire played in world events.

Well, that sort of mindset is what probably accounts for the fact that the very real Soviet conspiracy to infiltrate high levels of the U.S. government in the post-war era through the use of spies such as Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and the Rosenbergs somehow doesn't even make Vankin and Whalen's Top 60 conspiracy list. Because, darn it all, there just isn't any enemy to the left. There just isn't.

They even suggest that if Vince Foster was murdered, he was murdered not by people close to the Clintons but by people conspiring against the Clintons. Oh, so THAT'S why the Clintons strained every nerve to make sure that no stone was left unturned in the investigation of his death.

It's a shame that the conspiracy industry is dominated by the acid heads and granola-eaters because I think there really is stuff out there that needs to be more thoroughly explored by credible authorities, stuff that really might necessitate the re-writing of history and the realignment of political factions. This might include the eerie connection between the Bush family and the family of John Hinckley, would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan, at the time that the elder Bush was next in line. That's just plain weird.

And what if some sort of triangulation between Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, involving drug deals and intersecting in Mena, Arkansas really could be found? Wouldn't THAT turn American politics on its ear? Wouldn't that just discolor the "red" and "blue" zones on the electoral map? Wouldn't mainstream conservatives and liberals just have a cow though? Wouldn't they just have a cow? That's why neither National Review nor the New Republic are likely to look too closely at such a possibility.

But if our world really is ultimately governed by shadowy right-wing overlords, they seem to have left popular culture untouched. Popular culture isn't a "right wing" conspiracy at all; it's more of a left-wing conformity. Popular culture is shrill and cacophonous and it's dominated by leftists, nihilists, androgynes, and multi-culturalists. The self-empowerment advocates. The diversity industry.

Vankin and Whalen are a small part of this, of course, and they might want to ask themselves why the fascists allow them and their peers to operate so freely and so destructively. Is it possible that the acid heads are pawns in a game played by forces that they suppose themselves to be in opposition to?