by DrVolin » Tue Jul 19, 2011 11:09 pm
I think I've said this before here in broad outline. Maybe I'll go into a bit more detail this time. This needs editing and proof reading due to too much Newcastle Brown, but it is late already.
Even though my parents are not conspiracy theorists at all, in fact quite the opposite, I was raised in a Riginty home. My father had subscriptions to both Life and Soviet Union Today. In 68, when the Soviets invaded Czekoslovakia, he cancelled Soviet Union Today. In 69, when the Americans escalated in Viet Nam, he cancelled Life, which he called 'the American organ of propaganda' and explicitely saw as the equivalent of Soviet Union Today. I grew up reading back issues of both magazines, with that perspective in mind. My mother once had to drive back to the store because she had inadvertently purchased South African oranges, and my father came in one day, gathered the family around the kitchen table, and solemnly announced to us 5 and 7 year olds and such that there would be no Israeli products in the house until the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza ended. There are still no Israeli products in his house as far as I can determine.
Very early on, maybe around 4 or 5, I became fascinated with UFOs, extra-terrestrials, and cryptids. There was a massive seven storey used bookstore downtown back then, in a dangerously unsound old building, packed with shelves from floor to ceiling, with a multitude of small, hidden corners. My father used to collect us and often some of the neighbouring kids on weekends, and drive us down there. He would give us each a couple of dollars and let us loose. Most of the books in there were between 10 and 50 cents. I constantly scoured that place for any books and old magazines on UFOs and the mysterious. I remember getting an old paperback of Charles Fort's Lo! for 10 cents. On returning home, I would usually proceed to lock myself in my room until I had read through all my new acquisitions while wearing thin my Black Sabbath tapes. The place burned down in the late 80s in great conflagration of knowledge whose smoke rose straight up, accepted by the gods, and dominated the city for an afternoon. End of an era.
The first conspiracy I investigated came to me via a translated paperback of George Leonard's Somebody Else is on the Moon. I came home very excited and showed my father the picture of the alleged lunar mining machinery and buildings in the book's central pages. He looked dubious but amused, and importantly, instead of merely dismissing the idea, he directed me to his complete collection of National Geographic, many of which featured copious sets of lunar imagery. I set to work finding either the pictures Leonard had used, or other pictures of the same regions of the moon. I quickly discovered that the buildings in Leonard's book were quite plainly rocks and other natural features on the higher resolution photos in National Geographic. Downcast, having learned an important lesson in critical thinking and source criticism, magnifying glass in hand, I continued examining moon pictures for a few more months, but never found anything worthy of the name anomaly. I was about 8 at that time.
In seventh grade, in religion class, we were being taught Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. As the teacher was talking, I was reading ahead to some of his epistles, and noticed that unlike the letters we had read so far, these contained names and places. I also thought it odd that whenever Paul was about to be lynched by the locals, the Roman garisson would march in, arrest him for disturbing the peace, keep him in custody for a bit, and then release him. I asked the teacher about this. I don't quite remember the details of his answer, but it contained some handwaving about Paul's Roman citizenship. I remember that it didn't satisfy me. One lunch time, I lectured some of my colleagues on my theory that Paul was in fact a Roman agent, sent to keep tabs on the Christians, and to mold their doctrine into a non-threatening one. I laid out my evidence, chapter and verse, pointed to Paul's suspiciously pliant advice to the early Churches, and to his chillingly precise identification of their members and their meeting places. I made few converts. Only one guy, who went on to dabble in Laveyan Satanism, seemed to show an interest. Although I have since discovered that I was hardly an original thinker, this was the first conspiracy which I both discovered and investigated.
It was shortly afterwards, around the 20th anniversary of the JFK assassination, that I started seriously looking into it. But it took many years before I developed a properly critical view of both the coincidence and the conspiracy theories of the event. My view of the JFK assassination, interestingly, was heavily coloured by my reaction to the attempt on Reagan. On 30 March 1981, I happened to be home sick and watching television when on came the ABC News Special Report screen, followed by much backstage scrambling and audio and video adjusting, and finally, a slightly out of breath newsreader. Back then, those Special Report screens meant something. Breaking News was serious business. I immediately suspected that Bush might be behind it. I remember thinking, something I still think today, that Haig was trying to keep Bush from completing a coup. I was frustrated by my inability to investigate and get relevant information that would either confirm or rule out my hypothesis. So when I discovered the JFK assassination, 20 years after the fact, I displaced all my pent up Reagan frustration and dug into the available information with a vengeance, and with a bias, I must admit.
In the 20 years between the Reagan attempt and 9/11, I mostly bemoaned the passing of interest in nuts and bolts UFOs in favour of beings of light and abductees, and feverishly read on JFK, RFK, and MLK. I discovered Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Jethro Tull. I got degrees, jobs, started a family. There was one very strong moment that tempered my interest for Riginty material.
On 1 August 1990, Iraq invaded Koweit. On hearing the news, I rushed to my parent's place, acquired a few maps from my father's inestimable collection of National Geographics, went home, collected some unit counters from various appropriate issues of Strategy and Tactics and from some other wargames, and set up a war room on our kitchen table, to my wife's great displeasure. Looking up various figures in Janes and L'État du Monde, plotting positions and potential movements on the maps, I quickly determined that the Iraqis would be in control of the Saudi oilfields within about 48 hours. Then, the Americans would have to nuke them out of there, and who would really go ahead and do that? During the evening, it dawned on me that this would be the perfect moment for a reactionary coup in Moscow, and that this might very well be the plan. I didn't get very much sleep. In the morning, I was quite surprised to see that there had been no appreciable movement in the situation, either in Koweit or in Moscow. By the evening of the second, I was reduced to desperately wondering where my analysis had gone wrong. I had no way of knowing about April Glaspie's meeting with Saddam, and no reason to conclude that this had been an American sucker punch. It would be many years before I identified this as a possibility. I knew about the New World Order speech, of course, but didn't connect it with these events.
A year later, when the anticipated coup finally materialized in Moscow, I was even more puzzled at the timing. It seemed momentarily that perhaps incompetence was the best explanation for most significant events and that coincidence theory had the most purchase after all. But I was still bothered by the fact that history is mostly made up of acknowledged conspiracies for control of state power, but that the present is always made of incompetence and coincidence. I returned to UFOs and thought about Vallée's 4D theory, which I still think about quite a bit. This was largely my frame of mind on the eve of 9/11.
On 9/11, I knew that the world had changed. I was actually packing to return after an extended stay abroad. I was on the first plane home on the 15th. It was an eerie experience to say the least. Having learned from the summer of 1990, I was cautious about assuming that 'the enemy' would do what I would: hit hard and hit first. I deplored but supported the invasion of Afghanistan. I was increasingly uneasy in the lead up to the second invasion of Iraq.
I stayed home to watch Powell's WMD speech to the Security Council. That was the turning point. I concluded that the Americans knew that everyone else knew that they were lying about the WMD in Iraq, but that they expected everyone to behave as if they didn't know. I knew the invasion was on, and I started wondering about who might have been interested in a giant Casus Belli, a sort of universal Crowleyian Do What You Will For Free card, and who might have had the means to produce one out of thin air at the opportune moment. I discovered the New Pearl Harbor document and went from there. When Lehman Brothers lost 45% of its value on 9/11/08, I saw it as the natural progression of the 9/11 attacks.
I followed Jeff's Coincidence Theorist's guide to RI and have been here every since.
all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars
--Guns and Roses
