I first published the following book in February 2022. You can buy a copy of it for just $10: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09RXBWLZ3/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Occult+Elite%3A+Anti-Communist+Paranoia+and+Other+Ruling-Class+Delusions&qid=1644257233&sr=8-1
Since November 2023 the influential conservative Muslim media platform, 5Pillars, have undertaken a series of long interviews with leading members of the far-right community on their “Blood Brothers Podcast.” The podcasts host, Dilly Hussain, appears to be using the interviews to demonstrate the main points of agreement between conservative Muslims and Christian fundamentalists concerning their opposition to the LGBTQ+ community, their promotion of traditional family families, and their hatred of the Israeli state (with Dilly opposing Zionism and the Christian nationalists promoting anti-semitism).[1] Relevant interviews include ones undertaken with the former leader of the British Nationalist Party, Nick Griffin (on November 29, 2023),[2] the head of Patriotic Alternative Mark Collett (on February 20, 2024), and another with the prominent far-right Christian preacher and the founder of Britain First, Jim Dowson (on January 9, 2024).
In introducing the first interview which was undertaken with Nick Griffin, Dilly explained that he, and others in the Muslim community, believed “that the wider strategic benefit outweighs the perceived harms of this engagement” with Griffin. He continued: “Why? Because for the last 51 days brothers and sisters we have seen politicians, faith leaders, media outlets alike, basically calling for the genocide – the continued genocide – of our brothers and sisters in Gaza.” Earlier this year Dilly also published an open letter addressed to “British patriotic and white nationalists” wherein he made the case against the “ills of secular liberal capitalist individualism” and reached out to them to unite with Muslims against the “ruling elites” dividing British communities.
This ongoing outreach was also evident in a podcast aired on December 13, 2022, wherein Dilly interviewed far-right mixed martial artist Jake Shields and asked him about his views on the “LGBT indoctrination agenda” and discussed how Christians can work with Muslims to oppose this agenda while also hinting at their joint opposition to the manipulative politics of the Israeli state. This outreach however remains extremely problematic because although it is true that Dilly has asked a few challenging questions to his far-right guests, the 5Pillars interviews largely served to give his guests an uncritical platform to spout their hate-speech. So, at the very least it would make sense for 5Pillars to provide follow-up podcasts or articles that dissect some of the many lies and distortions of reality propounded by their guests. 3]
Most recently Dilly’s largely uncritical approach to interviewing leading figures from Britain’s small anti-Zionist far-right community was highlighted during his three-hour podcast with Jayda Fransen, who was once one of the prominent leaders of Britain First.[4] This interview aired online on May 10, and soon became something of a viral sensation having already received more than 200,000 views. Unfortunately, not all viewers of this recent podcast will appreciate how truly reactionary Jayda’s views are, especially considering the overly accommodating way in which Dilly undertook his interview. But one of the highlights of the interview that illustrated Jayda’s reactionary approach became clear when Dilly questioned her about whether it would be feasible for British nationalists to create a white British state. Jayda responded:
“This is why the British Freedom Party was established. We were established to say: build communities, make them Christian. Keep them Christian, keep them white, keep them tight. Stick to your own people, marry your own people, breed with your own people. Form your own communities and keep everyone else out. And I know that sounds very hostile, but it’s not hostile. But if we don’t form our communities and breed like you guys are doing in our lands, then we won’t exist anymore.”
Trying vainly to extend a friendly hand to Muslims, Jayda however was keen to emphasise that she believed that white Brits should not direct hate towards those with different colour skin or faiths. Instead, she stated that white Brits should just worry about breeding more whites. Although in a strange irony, despite Jayda’s active belief in the need for such a fundamentalist Christian breeding program, she herself as 38-year-old women believes that she is too old to get married or have children, something that Dilly believed she could correct. Leaving this point of contention aside, Jayda explained:
“This is what I say to Christians: they’ve [the Muslims have] got it sussed. They are marrying, they are breeding, they are training, they are not drinking [alcohol], they are praying, they are living their life in the way they think is edifying to their God. What are we doing? We are getting drawn into this secular nonsense. We need to build Christian communities, have big families, have big communities, all based under the church, and make them a no-go zone. Put your flag up, mount your flag, [and say] this is a Christian area. You know, I think this country will eventually be divided into different areas. Not this country because Northern Ireland [where the interview was being conducted] already is. This [country, that is, Northern Ireland] is an example of what I think will happen on the mainland.”
Dilly then asked if she thought a “balkanised version” of society would ever happen in mainland England? and she replied yes, to which Dilly replied, that “would be a scary prospect.” Given his evident concern, Jayda bizarrely added, “but I don’t think it necessarily needs to be hostile, because I think you guys are already here and you are going to be a majority.” This is clearly not a very reassuring response to anyone who isn’t a white Christian nationalist. The same is true with Jayda’s other openly expressed conspiratorial beliefs which led her to assert that:
“The multi-cultural Britain we have today is by design… We have had our culture stripped away; we have had our faith stripped away and eroded; we have had all of our traditions and values eroded and replaced with liberalism, degeneracy, and a hatred for Christianity and for God. And I don’t want to sound like one of these tin-foil hats, everything is the Jews, but it’s the Zionist agenda that is doing all this. It is by design.”[5]
These vile conspiratorial ideas are the same as those propounded by the anti-semitic forgery that is known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This representing a line of conspiratorial thinking that is very much in line with Jayda’s enthusiastic promotion of the “Great Replacement Theory” and the anti-semitic so-called “Kalergi Plan.” The reactionary nature of these beliefs became particularly clear when Dilly describes to Jayda what he understands to be meant by the “Great Replacement Theory” and asks her if that is what she believes. Dilly therefore stated:
“If I have understood correctly, [the Great Replacement Theory] is something that is grounded on an agenda of a group of powerful Jews who want Muslims and Christians to be a perpetual state of war with each other. So therefore, the Jewish Zionist lobby are very influential in policy making in Western governments, primarily in the US and the UK and other nations. They will go bomb and invade the Middle East, that will then create refugees who will come into Europe, and they will basically, naturally, settle, marry, have kids, and convert, and that’s going to radically change the racial and cultural demographic of Europe – the Christian West – and all the whilst this powerful group of Western Jews are clapping their hands, making money, happy that the sons of Ishmael and Isaac are at war with each other, whilst all this madness is happening. That is a very simplified, caricatured version of what I have understood the Replacement Theory to be. So do you believe some or a lot of that is true?”
Jayda answered: “Yes absolutely, it is playing out in real time. It is playing out in real time.”
At another point Dilly asked “why do Zionists have to get the blame for something that Christian Europe did themselves, ie., they chose to have the [Christian] Reformation, they chose to have the Enlightenment, they chose to have the Industrial Revolution. So, it surely it was this succumbing to the secular order of the day centuries ago…” Jayda however could not answer this question. So, he asked her again: “Why is it okay to blame the Zionists, or the Zionist agenda, for a situation that appeared to come about organically in Europe?” Unable or unwilling to answer she replied by blaming “Zionist globalists” and said that “If you strip it all back, the root of all evil is a rejection of God.”
To further confirm her beliefs and to understand why she supports the Palestinian cause Dilly asked Jayda, “Are you an anti-Zionist or an anti-Semite?” She replied:
“The agenda is a Zionist agenda, and it is not just Jews. But if you look at who is behind all this, if you look at who owns the biggest porn hub, a Rabbi; who is behind the abortion industry, who is funding it, Jews; who is pushing the LGBTPQZ+ agenda. All of this is attributed to the Zionists. They are not all Jews, but it is irrefutable that there are a disproportionate number of Jews occupying positions of authority here in the UK — as in, in government — and we see the same in other parts of the West. And so there have been other things that have been created to push that agenda and that narrative like dispensationalism, that is a distortion of Christianity.”
There, of course, is a significant difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism,[6] but Jayda’s answer only confirms her anti-Semitism and active scapegoating of Jewish people. It may be true that last year one Jewish person happened to be a member of a diverse corporate leadership team that bought Pornhub, but there remains no evidence of any relationship between a Jewish religious affiliation and profiteering from the porn industry. Likewise, to spotlight Jews as being “behind the abortion industry” is nonsensical, and likewise it is an anti-semitic lie that a disproportionate number of Jews dominate Western governments.
Finally, it is worth highlighting the fact that nearly all the Christian nationalist talking points raised by Jayda in her three-hour interview were derivative of the ideas of her most famous far-right mentor, that is Nick Griffin. And like Jayda, Nick Griffin in his interview with Dilly, spotlighted his own anti-semitism while simultaneously pretending that he was only opposed to Zionism. In response to the question, “Are you supporting the Palestinians, or are you criticising the Zionists because of an inherent dislike for Jews?” Griffin answered:
“I am supporting the Palestinians, and I am criticising the Zionists, and I am also pointing out that Zionism doesn’t grow out of nothing, it is the political expression of a ruthlessly genocidally, xenophobia and racism that exists within Judaism particularly in the Talmud, in the Babylonian Talmud.”
This response provides a clear articulation of Griffin’s deeply held anti-semitism. His racist mischaracterisation of the Talmud is a merely a repetition of the same sort of nonsense that inspired writers at the turn of the twentieth century to write and promote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[7] Indeed, racist authors, for hundreds of years, have “deliberately distorted Jewish teachings to confirm their antisemitic views”– a highly problematic issue that was addressed in the 1903 book The History of the Talmud.
Either way, what is clear is that Griffin wants to make alliances with any group who he thinks are willing to oppose what he deems to be the genocidal nature of Judaism. But if things don’t go his way, Griffin predicts a race war or civil war is on the cards. So, while Griffin, like Jayda, remains adamantly opposed to the so-called multi-cultural plot they say is being pushed by Jews, Griffin says he remains willing to work with Muslims to…
“…build a multi-cultural society which does work. And one last thing on that, what we are sold by the Left, the BBC and so on, as a multi-cultural society, where all of us agree that LGBTQ+ is fine, and everybody marries across their boundaries, where all communities just merge, so we become a raceless, rootless, faithless, coffee-coloured population who consume Coca-Cola and McDonalds, that is my ultimate nightmare. I would actually rather have a civil war between us and you.”
This most certainly is not the sort of politics that is useful to overcoming any form of oppression.
NOTES
[1] The dangers of this approach to politics is addressed in my book The [Other] War: The Demonisation of British Muslims (2024).
[2] A useful political overview of Griffin’s reactionary politics is provided in Daniel Trilling’s book Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right (2012).
[3] In a short video posted on Twitter (on May 17) “Rob & Roshan review the recent Blood Brothers podcast discussion between Dilly Hussain and British Christian Nationalist Jayda Fransen.” They observe that despite Jayda’s problematic nationalist beliefs, they agree that deep down she appears to be a nice person. Roshan Muhammed Salih, who is 5Pillars’ Editor, concluded: “I find religious people interesting, and the fact is that Jayda Fransen, whatever she said about Islam in the past, she is someone who submits to Allah, she is someone who submits to God and who worships God. Now I would prefer to interact with a person like that, even if they had problematic views elsewhere. I can respect a person like that more than an atheist who says good things about Palestine, because an atheist is someone who has committed the worst sin, they have rejected God, and that is the worst arrogance. And there is a man I have in mind and his initials are JC [Jeremy Corbyn] who falls into that category.”
[4] Jayda Fransen is now working with fellow reactionary Jim Dowson in playing a leading role in running two Christian fundamentalist groups, these being the British Freedom Party and Knights Templar International.
[5] Elsewhere in the interview Jayda noted how she aims to “scrap the welfare state” and she highlights her belief in the conspiracy that the Covid pandemic was not real and that Western Christian men had been feminised because there is “too much estrogen in water”.
[6] Judy Beishon, “Anti-semitism: what it is and how to fight it,” Socialist Alternative, October 27, 2018.
[7] As Stephen Eric Bronner notes in his important book A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion (2000), the “work of a very different character and quality served as the basis for the Protocols. Sadly, A Dialogue in Hell: Conversations Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu about Power and Right by Maurice Joly was intended as a defense of republicanism and a critique of the authoritarianism instituted by Napoleon III. The plagiarizers used more than 160 paragraphs from this obscure work, more than half of nine different chapters, and even ordered most of them in the same way. The irony of employing a liberal work of this kind for reactionary purposes is striking. But choosing this work to plagiarize was not completely insane. Both Joly and his Dialogue had been completely forgotten at the time the Protocols was composed.” (p.69) According to Bronner, another precursor for the anti-semitism of the Protocols came in the form of Hippolytus Lutostansky’s text The Talmud and the Jews (1879–1880). (p.67)
Another useful introduction to this history is provided in the edited book The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2011).
Marxists understand what it’s like to have liberal intellectuals and hostile media pundits distort their ideas as if “refracted through a funhouse mirror”. Similarly in Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), the bestselling writer explains what it has been like to have her progressive ideas fed “into a bonkers blender” so they can be delivered to a mass audience as far-right “thought-puree” by her would-be doppelganger, Naomi Wolf.
But in writing about the relationship of her own ideas to Wolf’s paranoid contortions, Klein assures her readers that the point of her book’s mapping exercise “is not to stay trapped inside the house of mirrors, but to do what I sense many of us long to do: escape its mind-bending confines and find our way toward some kind of collective power and purpose.” This is a vital objective: hence this review will engage with the solutions that are proposed within Klein’s timely text.
Class Interests
Klein states that “the conspiracy… is capitalism.” And she is right that “one of the most battle-worn tactics used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power” is to dismiss such ideas as conspiracy theories. “Every serious left-wing analyst of power has faced this smear, from Marx onward,” she adds. This is an important point, and it is interesting to note that Klein’s discomforting confrontation with her darker alto ego has pushed her writings far closer to the ideas associated with revolutionary socialism than usual.[1]
Capitalism is designed to make profits for a small minority in society “no matter the human costs” because, as Klein puts it, it is a system that is “structurally designed to protect the propertied classes against any and all challenges from below.” This is why elites seek to pit ordinary people against one another in order to render “them less likely to unite based on common economic and class interests.” There can be no question about it, “most people are indeed getting screwed—but without a firm understanding of capitalism’s drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract,” Klein says, “many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.”
This is why socialists believe that attaining such a “firm understanding” of how capitalism exploits us is best achieved by embracing the types of revolutionary ideas that were popularized by Karl Marx. But it is important to highlight that in staking out this position, genuine socialists have always stood firmly opposed to the anti-democratic legacy of Stalin and his murderous cohorts.
As it turns out, just over 23 years ago a very partial acknowledgement of the relevance of this conflict between socialists and Stalin was featured on the opening page of Klein’s first bestselling book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Knopf, 1999). She did this, if only in passing, when she mentioned how garment workers living in her hometown (of Toronto) during the 1920s and 1930s would discuss the relevance of Leon Trotsky’s ideas to the ongoing fight to improve their lives.[2] Trotsky being one of the celebrated leaders of the successful Russian Revolution of 1917 who would go on to lead the socialist opposition against Stalin’s regime. (Note: Socialist Alternative, the group of which I am a member, traces its direct legacy to the socialist groups inspired by Trotsky that developed in opposition to Stalin during the 1920s.)
Anti-semitism as a Response to Revolutionary Struggle
With far-right conspiracies being the primary fare promoted by Klein’s troubling doppelganger, Klein explores the relationship of such reactionary theories to antisemitism. And while Naomi Wolf, her darker doppelganger, does not promote antisemitic theories herself, other individuals who are close to her do. A recent example is provided by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who suggested that Covid-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. While another antisemitic conspiracy booster who is a fellow traveller of both Wolf and Kennedy is the infamous host of Infowars, Alex Jones. Either way in summarizing some of the history of such vile conspiracies, Klein writes:
“Over the centuries, anti-Jewish conspiracy has played a very specific purpose for elite power: it acts as a buffer, a shock absorber. Before popular rage could reach the kings, queens, tsars, and old landed money, the conspiracies absorbed it, directing anger to the middle managers—to the court Jew, to the scheming Jew, possibly with horns hidden under his skullcap. To Shylock.”
As might be expected, as a leading revolutionary Trotsky was “routinely portrayed as a Jewish devil (horns and all) by his political adversaries,” Kleins explains. Thus, she says we can see how the active propagation of antisemitic conspiracies have served as “a reliable means of blasting apart nascent alliances and coalitions of working people and safeguarding the interests of the wealthy and powerful.” Klein argues that it is partly for this reason that many individuals of Jewish heritage (including her own family) have tended to maintain an active “interest in the theoretical side of what we now call Marxism” as “an attempt to compete with those conspiracy theories that have dogged our people through the ages.”
In explicating how antisemitism has been turned against revolutionary struggle in the past, Klein makes the point that:
“The failed Russian Revolution of 1905 was a particularly tragic case. In January of that year, workers and peasants across the Russian empire staged a wave of strikes and revolts, including inside the military, challenging the monarchy and the rule of Nicholas II. The revolution was led by a multiethnic and diverse alliance, with one of its key factions being the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist party with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of local councils and defense militias…”
Incidentally, here the history of the Jewish Labor Bund’s militant activism touches directly upon Klein’s own life, as her husband’s great-grandfather had been a local leader of the Bund in Poland.[3] But as Klein goes on to explain: the failure of the 1905 revolution was indeed “particularly tragic” because Russia’s elites responded “by unleashing a virulent campaign of anti-Semitic hate that painted the 1905 revolt as a plot by seditious Jews to rule over Christians.” This is true, but Klein neglects to highlight the important fact that Trotsky was one of the leaders of this 1905 revolt. She omits the leading role he played in this early revolutionary struggle and simply reported how “Trotsky, in his early career as a journalist, was shaped by covering outbreaks of anti-Semitic mob violence, describing scenes of gangs ‘drunk on vodka and the smell of blood.’” It is perhaps ironic that this quote is derived from Trotsky’s book 1905, which was first published in 1907 as an early history of this vital revolutionary struggle.
Models For Socialist Change
Nevertheless, in maintaining her focus on class-based struggle, Klein asks: “Where do we find models for a society” beyond capitalism? And so in addition to highlighting the aforementioned Jewish Labor Bund, she draws attention to the model of “democratic socialism that Rosa Luxemburg imagined as the only alternative to barbarism.” Luxemburg having been assassinated in 1919 by her primary political opponents on the Left precisely because of her commitment to revolutionary Marxism, with her murderers acting at the behest of the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party. A tragic murder indeed.
Klein, in discussing other models to capitalism also says, “I think about Abram Leon, writing his book The Jewish Question as the Nazis closed in, carefully explaining how racist conspiracies change the subject from capitalism to cabals.” And this model is particularly important because Leon was a little-known Trotskyist who had been organising in Belgium amongst the working class, that is, before he was hunted down and liquidated by the Nazis in 1944.
But the model which apparently most inspires Klein remains the example set by Red Vienna, a socialist model which saw the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party hold “power in Vienna for over a decade” before eventually being physically exterminated by the Austrofascists in 1933.
Klein is correct that “Red Vienna’s soaring vision transformed an impoverished, disease-ridden city into a beacon of another way of living,” but, that being said, we should be mindful of the major limitations of this famous experiment in socialism. This is because the Social Democrats had pushed forward their “third way” socialist experiment in direct opposition to the revolutionary method of organizing that had been popularized by the Communists in Russia. Thus, the most serious problem that was inherent to the Austrians reformist model of organizing was that they adopted a pacifist approach to combatting the violence of fascism. Tragically the leaders of the Social Democrats only belatedly came to understand the merits of the type of revolutionary analysis that had been promoted by Trotsky when it was too late, that is, in 1934 after the fascists had already assumed power.
Another significant limitation concerning the case of Red Vienna owed to the fact that the socialist leaders of this socialist movement — many of whom were Jewish — failed to firmly counter the threat posed by a weaponized anti-Semitism. This issue was raised by Helmut Gruber in his important book Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919-1934 (Oxford University Press, 1991). Gruber explained that while the Austrian Social Democratic Party did “formally” oppose anti-Semitism, they chose to adopt a “passive approach [which] simply allowed their opponents to make the wildest charges and associations — ‘Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy’ — without being confronted as hatemongers.” As if this weakness was not bad enough, the Austrian Social Democrats even went so far as to “attempt to fight anti-Semitism with anti-Semitism in socialist pamphlets and broadsides.”[4] The socialists did this by targeting Jewish bankers in some of their propaganda!
Building Democratic and Socialist Mass Movements
But despite the confusion evident in Klein’s visions for building a socialist alternative to capitalism, when it comes to answers it remains the case that she is still pointing in the right direction. This is become she is unwavering in promoting efforts to unite the entire working-class in the fight against our common capitalist oppressors.
Highlighting some of the Left’s weaknesses, Klein reminds her readers that “every story of triumph for the fascist right is also a story of fragmentation, sectarianism, and stubborn refusal to make strategic alliances on the anti-fascist left.” And here many vital historical lessons should be learned from the needless mistakes of the past, like those that were made in the 1920s and 1930s by both the Stalinists and by the Social Democrats (not just those in Austria) – tragic mistakes that Trotsky and other Marxists had warned them about at the time.
Klein, in contrast to the leaders of the Austrian Social Democrats of Red Vienna, appreciates that the primary way that our class will build new mass movements for socialism is not by reading books — no matter how useful they are — but by taking collective action together. As “When individuals organize toward a goal, they discover not only that they share interests with people who might look (and vote) very differently from them but also that a new sense of power flows from this alliance.” So, Klein remains hopeful that ordinary people can overcome our fragmentation “to weave ourselves together in new ways.” She adds: “The wave of unconventional union organizing at corporations like Amazon and Starbucks shows that many young workers are already figuring out those new ways.”
This faith in ordinary people to unite and fight back was again confirmed by Klein in a recent interview she gave on Democracy Now! As when asked by the host of the news-show “what is the main takeaway from your book” Klein stated that people need to “collectively organize and rebuild our social movements so they can offer people material improvements to their lives. That is the only way we fight this surge in conspiracies; it’s not going to be factcheckers or content moderators, it’s going to be a robust Left.”
No one has ever said that rebuilding working class social movement will be easy, but it is vital, nevertheless. And one way of joining this global struggle for socialism would be to consider getting involved with a revolutionary organisation, with a good example being a group like Socialist Alternative, the group of which I am a member.
[1] For socialist reviews of Klein’s two earlier books, see Bill Hopwood, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein,” Socialist Alternative, October 1, 2014; and Laura Fitzgerald, “Review: No Is Not Enough – Defeating the New Shock Politics,” Socialist Alternative, July 14, 2017. In 2010 I also published an article that touched upon some of the issues covered in Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine in my article “The Ford Foundation and the Co-option of Dissent.”
[2] On the opening page of No Logo Klein wrote: “In the twenties and thirties, Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these [Toronto] streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.”
For details about the conflicts between Stalinists and others on the left in Toronto (including Trotskyists), see Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939 (University of Toronto Press, 1992).
[3] For a useful introduction to the history of the Bund, see Sai Englert, “The rise and fall of the Jewish Labour Bund Issue,” International Socialism, June 2012. In the acknowledgements section of Doppelganger Klein explains that “A conversation with Molly Crabapple about the Jewish Labor Bund had a profound impact on the text at a crucial point, as did her smaller interventions later on.” Crabapple is currently writing a book about the history of the Jewish Labor Bund.
[4] Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919-1934 (Oxford University Press, 1991), p.26, p.27. The Social Democrat’s suffered from another major problem in that they asserted that the written word (and books) could have a transformative effect on mass movements. Gruber writes: “For the party’s chief educational reformer, Otto Glockel, ‘the book is the strongest weapon in the class struggle… It raises the question of why… and the why is the means to intellectual development and knowledge… Once people have the courage to gain knowledge, they must become socialists.’ Such innocent idealism echoes the special importance accorded to the printed word by German liberalism.” (p.87)
The promotion of illusionary conspiracies remains a vital means by which the ruling-class throw sand in the eyes of ordinary people – a history taken up in Colin Dickey’s enlightening book Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (2023). In introducing this legacy of elite-backed paranoia Dickey argues that:
“At nearly every crucial juncture of American history… conspiracy theories about secret groups were deployed out of anxiety about those transitions and developments. At key moments when we have undergone major cultural or political shifts, fears of secret groups with hidden agendas are stoked to stymie and blunt the effects of those shifts. Conspiracy theories have also been a regular tool in maintaining and regulating how America will accept and integrate new populations, from religious to ethnic groups. Every time a traditionally marginalized segment of America has attempted to fight for equity, conspiracy theories have been used to suppress or curtail that fight.”
This weaponization of conspiracies serves to atomize and disorientate the working class. Conspiracies, instead of helping people understand the world, serve to occlude reality and erect scapegoating smokescreens that inhibit workers from uniting against their real institutionalized oppressor, capitalism. For this reason, “many… conspiracy theories originate on the right of the political spectrum—and are used to sabotage progressive change in favor of conservative, reactionary, and often outright racist, sexist, and homophobic ideals”. [1]
Yet conspiracy theories “exist on the left as well,” and Dickey says that such leftish theories are defined by their tendency “to exaggerate existing power structures rather than inventing new ones.” And while it is true that some, less democratic, elements of the left lean towards a conspiratorial view of history, it remains the case that socialists have always had to oppose the lie that a simple class-based analysis of society represents a conspiracy theory in and of itself.
Secrecy Amongst Workers
Despite the existence of conspiracies, human history can be largely defined by the resistance of ordinary people to exploitation waged upon the by conspiratorial elites. For much of human existence people have been debarred from organizing independently and collectively to defend their own interests and were expected to accept the divine rule of their appointed rulers. Democratic reforms therefore had to be forcibly extracted from our ruling elites by the militant struggles of the working class. This meant that when workers did get organized, they had to do so secretly to avoid persecution. And it is this need for secrecy that ruling elites and their supporters have used as the raw material for spinning all manner of lurid conspiracies.
A case in point is the ruling-classes fixation upon the secretive rites associated with freemasons, a group of what were initially skilled stoneworkers whose clandestine organizing practices evolved as a means of forming “what were essentially illegal trade unions”. Organizing from the mid-14th century onwards, these early freemasons united to take advantage of the labor shortages caused by the Black Death. As Dickey explains:
“The true origin of the secrecy of the Freemasons originated from an attempt to secure better paying wages among the working class. The outlawing and vilification of such meetings came from the government acting on behalf of the church and the aristocracy. The foundation, then, is set here: when the public world is controlled by the elite, working openly to ensure an unjust world, those who want a more equitably distributed world meet in secret. And they are often demonized for this reason.”
As centuries passed, freemasonry of course adapted to meet the changing needs of its members, and by the eighteenth century it “had completed its transition from being a guild of laborers and artisans to a fraternal organization defined primarily by its secrecy and a love of esoteric symbolism and rituals.” And so it was that in a world dominated by kings and serfs, the secrecy associated with freemasonry meant they were well positioned to incubate new movements of (mostly wealthier) workers seeking to transform society in a more rational and democratic direction.
But freemasonry’s secrecy also meant that their furtively organized fraternities could easily be scapegoated for causing every revolt or uprising that upset the status quo. This was particularly true in the wake of the momentous French Revolution, which was quickly blamed on evil freemasons, or as George Washington put it, on “the nefarious and dangerous plan and doctrines of the Illuminati”.
By 1798 this handy excuse for belittling popular discontent had spread to the United States in what became known as “the Illuminati panic” – a panic which…
“…was born largely of a concern that the masses could not be trusted with philosophy. Those in power feared what would happen if the traditional loci of power were abandoned, and they saw in the possibility of radical democracy not progress but conspiracy. It was a panic of the elites.”
At first these elite-driven panics focused on foreign freemasons, and so homegrown masonic lodges (which were filled out by many members of the ruling class) “continued to grow and flourish through the early decades of the nineteenth century, and they were still seen as a well-respected cornerstone of American society.” But an exclusive obsession with foreign, mainly European, freemasons changed in the lates 1820s as popular anger, inspired by the unfulfilled promises of democracy, was turned more broadly against all masons. A widespread anger led directly to the creation of America’s first genuine third party – the Anti-Masonic Party. As Dickey puts it: “It was the first major populist crusade, spurred not by politically connected men but in opposition to them.”
Not coincidentally the Anti-Masonic Party’s crusade in defence of Christian Republicanism mainly spread throughout the northern industrial states, that is, in the part of the country where people’s lives were most degraded by new and disruptive capitalist forms of exploitation. And as part of this new populist insurgency, the intensification of anti-masonic propaganda served to fuel nativist trends by fixating on the existence of so-called devilish papal conspiracies: conspiracies which were further popularized in the 1850s by the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party — a secretive movement “whose general demographic profile skewed slightly more well-off than the general population” (much like Donald Trump’s supporters today). In later years the combined forces of these anti-masonic popularists and anti-Catholic “Know Nothing” conspiracists would join forces with abolitionists of all political persuasions in the fight to end slavery in those southern states where freemasonry had previously had something of a free ride.
The Slavocracy: Capitalism as Conspiracy
At this point, Dickey, in arguing that conspiracies shaped American history then overreaches somewhat when he asserts that the American Civil War was driven by what was known as the “Slave Power conspiracy”.[2] In setting out his case for a conspiracy, he asks three rhetorical questions:
“Was the Slave Power conspiracy really a conspiracy? Was there, in other words, a secret, organized plot by enslavers that operated behind the scenes to dominate and control American politics and shape the nation’s history? And was such a belief driven by paranoia, or was it a simple recognition of the structure of the antebellum United States?”
And socialists, like many other well-informed commentators would answer no to the first two questions but yes to the last one – i.e., socialists (including myself) would affirm that the belief that slave owners exerted a decisive influence over American democracy should be interpreted not as a conspiracy but as the simple recognition of the structure of the antebellum United States.
Later, Dickey asks a few more questions. He writes, is the…
“…Slavocracy conspiracy just another term for capitalism? People with power are able to affect legislation and increase their power and wealth. Democracy is imperfect, and money buys lobbyists and public relations campaigns, and can sway the votes of politicians. This is distasteful, often corrupt—but is it a conspiracy in the same way as Watergate or Iran–Contra? Were slave-owning interests in the first half of the nineteenth century an aberrant intrusion into the workings of democracy, or was it just awful business as usual?”
And it seems clear that, yes, the Slavocracy conspiracy was just the type of “awful business as usual” that characterizes capitalist exploitation. Nevertheless, despite his informative questions Dickey continues to interpret the Slave Power thesis as a conspiracy instead of the belief of ordinary people that a slaveholding oligarchy ran their country.
Of course, without the benefit of applying a class-based analysis to society, many Americans did end up adopting a more conspiratorial understanding of Slave Power. A misunderstanding that was actively encouraged by the racist establishment who were happy to use this issue to undermine the ongoing efforts of the working class to overcome ethnic divisions by organizing together in trade unions. As Dickey makes clear, this attack upon working class unity is intimately related to the prosecution of two particularly famous conspiracy trials that followed in the wake of the American Civil War — trials that were “used to blunt progressive change at a crucial moment in America’s labor history.”[3]
Demonizing Resistance
The first of these conspiracies revolved around the 1876 trial of the Molly Maguires and the second concerned the Haymarket Trials of 1886. In both cases militant workers, fighting in defence of their lives, were maligned as engaging in anti-democratic secret societies. The Molly’s engaging in militant organizing efforts in their fight for fair pay and an end to their boss’s extreme violence within the coal mining industry. And the Haymarket Trials occurring at the peak of the labor movements first “Great Upheaval” which represented as an effort by the ruling class “to destroy the labor movement” – a movement which at the time was at the forefront of the fight for an eight-hour workday.
In each of these historic trials, the capitalist class used their power over the legal system to insist that it was ordinary workers and not the owning class who were the real purveyors of violence in society. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Furthermore, as Sidney Lens explained in his book The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit Downs (1973), we should remember that at the time when the Irish mine workers who stood accused of organizing as the Molly’s were found guilty in the courts “union leaders and unions were still subject to prosecution under the doctrine of ‘conspiracy’” such that the mine workers own leader (John Siney) “was indicted for this ‘crime’ in 1875.”[4]
Instead of exploited workers’ focusing their anger upon their bosses, the ruling class have always preferred that workers do anything else other than organize (preferably nothing) and for these same workers to put their faith in anything else… ideally conspiracies. Here a prime example of the ruling class using conspiracies to deflect the working class away from organizing is provided by the activities of Henry Ford, an immensely powerful man who throughout the 1920s helped turn the Jewish community into the scapegoat for all the world’s problems. Notably, Ford’s paranoid ravings also helped popularize newly hatched anti-Semitic conspiracies that were swirling around the formation of the Federation Reserve — a troubling financial conspiracy which remains a mainstay of the far-right to this day. Dickey reminds us that:
“This increasing turn to a racialized form of anti-Semitism [at the turn of the twentieth century] coincided with two other rising forms of paranoia: fears of socialists and anarchists on the one hand, and a distrust of bankers and the financial system on the other. Both of these involved fears of internationalism. International anarchists and international banking both invoke a series of subterranean networks (one nominally subversive, the other nominally legal) that run through the United States (and other countries, for that matter), ignoring boundaries. And for American anti-Semites, increasingly it became the Jews, and not the Catholics, who best exemplified this.”
As part of this propaganda effort, Ford’s prolific publishing empire felt at ease popularizing the elite conspiracy that was imported from Russia as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here Dickey surmizes:
“Written for an audience of Russian aristocrats who benefited under the Russian imperial government, the Protocols is pro-aristocracy, and pro-monarchy; it attempts to not only identify Judaism with democracy, but also argue that there are worse things than authoritarianism. If we allow democracy to take its course, the Protocols suggests, it will degenerate into a perverse autocracy. We’re better off, paradoxically, by putting our faith in the repressive authoritarian governments that are fighting against democracy.”
In America these anti-democratic ideas proved immensely serviceable to the ruling class who remained enamoured by the anti-worker ideology of the growing fascist movements in Europe. “Populist nativism had been building for decades,” Dickey writes, “coalescing around various conspiracy theories involving Catholics and Jews, as well as international finance and foreign Bolsheviks.” This then led to a revival of reactionary ideas which were amplified by secretive paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan who acted “to brutally enforce the status quo” for the powers that be. [5]
State Driven Paranoia
With the conclusion of World War II and the eventual defeat of the Nazis, the capitalist class were now able to return their full attention to their ingrained fear of the power of the organized working class. Dickey explains:
“The fear of subversive Communists infiltrating the country would… enable two organizations that would—far more than anything else this country has seen—embody our fear of secret societies. These two groups were well funded, extremely powerful, and possessed vast secret networks that covered every square mile of the country. They operated with near impunity, they broke laws and attempted to manipulate the consciousnesses of law-abiding Americans. They sought techniques of mind control and saw the human mind as a battlefield to be dominated. And these two organizations, each in their own way, sought to undermine the basic principles and values of America, in pursuit of ends that were kept obscured from the American public.
“And while they used code names, dummy corporations, and front organizations, neither went by any names as baroque as ‘The Illuminati’ or ‘Freemasons.’ They were known simply as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Little wonder then that the eventual exposure (in the 1970s) of the CIA and FBI’s anti-democratic intrigues would make the working class paranoid, further contributing toward a generalized climate of fear that prepared the way for the Satanic Panics of the 1980s that served as a recent pre-cursor to the QAnon phenomena.
And here it is worth noting that in the case of the unwarranted public panic revolving around the alleged Satanic abuse of children, it is significant (although overlooked by Dickey) that a former leading member of the FBI who was obsessed by the Illuminati would play a leading role in the McMartin Pre-School trials. These trials revolving around the case which “would become one of the longest and most sensationalized legal battles in American history and would come to stand in for a whole series of occult conspiracies and allegations about day-care workers that swept through the country like a virus.”
The guilty individual in question in this case was the former Bureau Chief for the FBI in Los Angeles, a man named Ted Gunderson, who famously organized an archaeological dig beneath the McMartin Pre-School buildings in order to “prove” the existence of Satanic torture chambers. Needless-to-say no secret torture chambers were ever found because no children were being sacrificed. (This lack of evidence however didn’t stop talk shows hosts like Oprah Winfrey from continuing to promote this satanic conspiracy even after it had been thoroughly debunked.)[6]
Solutions and a Question of Democracy
In terms of combatting the serious democratic problems identified in Under the Eye of Power, Dickey says society must focus on “understanding the psychological need that drives the conspiracist to seek out alternative stories.” And at various points Dickey succeeds in highlighting how alienation from the current political system can push people towards believing in conspiracies as “a simplified narrative to dispel chaos in one’s life.” This type of analysis makes a lot of sense, as certainly capitalism is quite adept at inflicting chaos on ordinary people’s lives.
But leaving aside explanations that tend to individualize the institutional causes of mass paranoia, the primary value in Dickey’s book lies in his ability to show how the widespread belief in conspiracies (particularly right-wing ones) owes much to the fact that the ruling class benefit from the promotion of such fictions. With this process of anti-democratic interference being aided by establishment politicians and capitalist media outlets who work symbiotically to allow political confusion to wreak havoc in our communities.
Now with the ascendance of widely held baby-eating conspiracies like QAnon and the far-reaching influence of far-right populists like Donald Trump, the “problem of conspiracy belief and paranoia has taken on a renewed urgency in the past few years”. But as Dickey correctly affirms…
“…these eruptions are never new; rather, they are part of a long-standing continuum. But for such moral panics surrounding secret groups to be successful, each one must be treated as singular and unlike anything that’s come before it, which is why they are allowed to be quickly forgotten as soon as the moment has passed. The history of American democracy involves a kind of deliberate historical amnesia, such that each generation can be free to imagine that the moral panic that grips them in their time is a new singularity.”
Elite-driven moral panics are therefore “allowed” to be forgotten by elite propagandists precisely because it serves the interests of the powerful.[7] As Dickey adds, this process of forgetting is “an almost state-sponsored amnesia designed to treat each emerging moral panic as entirely new.” In this way each “new” conspiracy can be used “to moderate or prohibit social change, to resolve tensions inherent in the democratic process in the most regressive way possible.” This leads Dickey to conclude that this deep-seated problem needs to “be attacked not in terms of technical fixes by the media or Facebook, but in a wholesale awareness of how we approach the question of democracy.”
In searching for a solution to this problem Dickey states that “The point, to paraphrase Karl Marx, is not just to describe the world, but to change it.” This is something that Marxists would agree with. But Dickey unfortunately only calls upon his readers to hold on to hope and reject despair, because as he continues, “radical hope… is the only thing that has ever changed anything in this country.” This of course is partly true, but passive hope without a commitment to active organizing will get us no-where, especially if we are serious about changing the world by following Marx in striving to expunge capitalism from our lives.
So, in addition to radical hope, let’s do everything in our power to ensure that workers are prepared to strike back against the ruling class in the epic fight that lies ahead of us all. And let’s hope that ordinary people will succeed in dispelling all fear and conspiracies from our collective lives, so we can succeed in bringing about the necessary transition to a democratic and socialist world that is devoid of paranoia.
Michael Barker is the author of The Occult Elite: Anti-Communist Paranoia and Other Ruling-Class Delusions (2022).
[1] While Dickey’s book mainly focuses on the problems caused by right wing conspiracies, other than the so-called “Slave Power conspiracy” Dickey does mention several other conspiracies promoted by those on the left. One of these apparent conspiracies is the idea that “the Iraq War was not launched to fight terrorism but was driven instead by oil companies”. However, later in his own book Dickey admits that this belief can hardly be countered as conspiracy theorizing. He writes: “It is fairly undeniable by now that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was driven by a conspiracy: a group of powerful individuals made a decision to invade Iraq and then set about concocting reasons—almost entirely based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence—to justify it.”
Dickey also takes aim at another left-wing conspiracy when he discusses the case of Gary Webb’s famous revelations that “the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early ’90s was connected—directly or indirectly—to the CIA”. Dickey follows the corporate media line in referring to this as a conspiracy, but it seems more likely that the real conspiracy was the one waged by the mainstream media against Webb himself. For more on this see Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (Verso, 1998); Webb’s story is dramatized in the excellent 2014 film Kill the Messenger.
[2] Having based his own analysis on David Brion Davis’s influential text The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid (1969) Dickey ignores other more recent research that disputes a conspiratorial interpretation of slavery with an important example being Leonard Richards book The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)
[3] Leonard Richards explains in The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), that the Slave Power thesis “also enjoyed wide support among the lunatic fringe” and it was “for that reason many discredited it.” Richards continued: “Of these [lunatic] eccentrics, probably the most determined was John Smith Dye.” (p.2) And low and behold as it turns out, Dye’s first 1864 book The Adder’s Den; Or, Secrets of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America, was held in esteem by the establishment press.As libertarian conspiracy expert Jesse Walker has pointed out: “The New York Times gave it a good review. The Chicago Tribune excerpted it. Republican papers in a bunch of cities around Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York praised it. Even The Easton Express, which was a Democratic paper in Pennsylvania, called it, quote, ‘The most powerful book of this century.’”
[4] This class war has not gone away, and the threat posed by workers getting organized to defend their own interests continues to haunt the ruling class to this day. This is amply demonstrated by the ongoing efforts of Amazon workers based at Jeff Bezos’ Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Air Hub (KCVG), where workers are still fighting for their basic democratic rights by trying to secure a trade union recognition agreement and a pay rise for all.
[5] For a review of how anti-Semitism was weaponized against revolutionary socialists, see Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (2018). It is worth acknowledging that Marxists have a proud history of openly organizing amongst the working class, and unlike anarchists those following in Mikhail Bakunin’s conspiratorial footsteps, Marxists are opposed to the formation of secret societies. This however has not stopped the ruling class and their media from attempting to smear all revolutionaries as somehow being in league with the Illuminati. For example Marx famously did an interview with the New York World newspaper in 1871 wherein he ridiculed the questioning of his conspiratorially-minded interviewer.
Stalin’s eventual assumption of power in the Soviet Union marked the end of genuine democracy, and Stalin (who went on to systematically butcher Marxist theory) proceeded to consolidate his authoritarian regime by promoting all sorts of vile conspiracies. Some of this history is covered in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal’s The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (1997), and in Chapter 2 of my own book The Occult Elite: Anti-Communist Paranoia and Other Ruling-Class Delusions (2023).
[6] It is noteworthy that a leading liberal feminist played an important role in fuelling the Satanic Panics. Dickey writes “When the McMartin Pre-School was finally raised to the ground, it was Gloria Steinem who paid for the excavation in search of hidden tunnels beneath the building.” For a discussion relating to Steinem’s role in this panic, see Alexander Cockburn, “Katha’s Silence,” CounterPunch, October 26, 1999.
Ted Gunderson’s belief in the Illuminati owes to his own readings of William Guy Carr’s conspiracy theories. As Bill Ellis writes in Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (University Press of Kentucky, 2000), “The most influential source in creating the American Illuminati demonology was Canadian William Guy Carr, founder and leading propagandist for the Federation of Christian Laymen, a Catholic auxiliary based in Willowdale, Ontario. Carr, a career military person in the Canadian Navy, capped a lifetime of minor conspiracy theorizing with his 1958 book Pawns in the Game. This book relies heavily on the arguments of the British Fascisti [like Nesta Webster] in arguing that the world’s troubles were being secretly orchestrated by a small group of ‘International Bankers’ led by the Rothschild family.” (p.128) He later explains: “Despite Carr’s distaste for U.S. politics, his book had a huge influence among the extreme right wing of American anti-Communists, particularly Robert Welch of the John Birch Society. By 1966, Welch had paraphrased the Illuminati theme in American Opinion, his Society’s widely distributed magazine.” (p.132)
[7] Conspiracies, especially of the right-wing variety (the most dominant sort), all too often end up being system-supportive, because as Dickey puts it: “[T]he attempt to turn the ultra-rich and powerful into actual child-sacrificing Satanists becomes a means of preserving attitudes toward capitalism itself. Rather than accept that men like George W. Bush and Mark Zuckerberg are rather predictable examples of the ultra-rich’s hoarding of resources, they are treated as exceptional, aberrant, and abnormal. And it explains why many conspiracists can be filled with spite and vitriol toward some elites (Soros, Gates, Clinton, etc.) while simultaneously championing other, equally powerful elites (Trump).”
The following is an interview that Jarrod Shanahan recently conducted with me for the April 2023 edition of The Brooklyn Rail newspaper.
“Under the Mask of Philanthropy: Michael Barker with Jarrod Shanahan“
The following are the footnotes for the essay “Curating George Soros or Exhibiting the Occult?”
[1] Michael Barker, “Why we all suffer from George Soros’ bets on liberal democracy,” Thoughts of a Leicester Socialist, July 22, 2018. A useful critical overview of Soros’s philanthropy is provided in Nicolas Guilhot’s article “Reforming the world: George Soros, global capitalism and the philanthropic management of the social sciences,” Critical Sociology, 33(3), 2007, pp.447-77. In introducing his essay Guilhot explains: “In many respects, the Central European University (CEU) founded by the United States financier George Soros appears as the last chapter of this philanthropic history of promoting the social sciences as a tool for democratic social reform – not least because it has built upon previous experiences and tapped existing networks of academic intermediaries and activists involved in the “cultural cold wars.” Th e idea of an East-West academic center was not novel. In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation was already contemplating the creation of a regional university center that would bring Eastern and Western intellectual elites closer together with a shared conception of social modernization under social scientific guidance. The Eastern European policy of the foundation was to take advantage of the détente “to institute research, exchange and educational efforts important for democratic objectives” and to target intellectual and academic elites through fellowships to foster the emergence of “scholarly critiques of Communist declarations and policies”. The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences that the Ford Foundation helped to establish in Vienna in 1962 (also nicknamed “the Ford Institute”) was also supposed to be an intellectual bridge between the East and the West. More directly related to the immediate origins of the CEU, the Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Européenne (Foundation for European Intellectual Solidarity, FEIE) acted for twenty five years as an informal channel of communication between Western and Eastern academic and intellectual circles.
“The FEIE was created in 1966 as an off-shoot of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the organization led by American and European intellectuals belonging to the non-communist left, first backed by the CIA and, later, by the Ford Foundation. Until 1990, when it was literally merged into Soros’ network of foundations as its last director, Annette Laborey, went to head the Paris office of the Open Society Institute, the FEIE used to send books and publications to Eastern Europe and to invite intellectuals, academics or dissidents to conferences and meetings organized in Western Europe. In fact, many of the intellectual designers and contributors to the foundation of the CEU would come out of these informal networks woven throughout the 1970s and 1980s.” (pp.455-6)
[2] Robert Brustein actually first published his philanthropic analysis in a New York Times opinion piece in 1994 titled “Culture by Coercion,” an essay that expressed concern for the way in which philanthropic grants for the arts (in the US context) were increasingly being used to fund groups to service a multicultural agenda to help make up for basic political shortcomings like providing “arts education in the schools, an area that has been unconscionably neglected.” He concluded his essay by noting:
“Given such pressing needs at home, it is understandable why philanthropy should rush to the aid of minority groups clamoring for recognition through creative expression. But to ask the impoverished agencies of culture to compensate for the failures of society is to divert attention from the systemic inertia and mismanaged social programs of our legislators.
“By forcing artistic expression to become a conduit for social justice and equal opportunity instead of achieving these goals through basic humane legislation, we are distracting our artists and absolving our politicians.”
[3] One video that was being shown by Moulton in the exhibit was “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” which appears to be a spin-off from an alleged secret document known as “Quiet warfare with silent weapons.” Another piece replays, as Moulton observes, “…a propaganda video from the Iranian Intelligence Ministry’s Public Service Broadcast. It shows a secret meeting [made with digital cartoons] somewhere inside the White House. Sitting around a table are purported puppetmasters introduced by a sinister voice: John McCain, who creates conspiracies against Iran; the Architect of Color Revolutions Gene Sharp, and George Soros, “a Jewish tycoon and mastermind of ultra-modern colonialism. He uses his wealth and slogans like liberty, democracy and human rights to bring the supporters of America to power.”” (p.196)
Yet another piece of art then promotes the right-wing conspiracies of S.U.S. (Shifting Uncertain Situations). Moulton writes: “Can avant-gardes be scripted? The group known as S.U.S. (Shifting Uncertain Situations) gives thought and form to an idea that would previously only ever be labeled as conspiracy theory. From floor to ceiling, a large mindmap infects half of the gallery providing a tour through the manufacturing of dissent for the movement of controlled political activism known as ‘astroturfing’. In a world where the notion of crisis actors is continually ‘debunked’ by the media as an exclusively Right Wing fantasy, one can here connect very logical dots between an agent provocateur, crowds on demand and the creation of spectacle for political influence. This is a dangerous artwork because it gives holistic agency to taboo thinking and demands the question of who is determining our taboos and why is it taboo if it is also an historic cultural practice to manipulate crowds and free will.”
[4] The points made in Davis’ book were first discussed in his excellent two-part essay “How art history can help explain the stunning rise of conspiracy theories that is defining our time,” artnews, May 20, 2020.
[5] Later during this 2019 lecture that was paid for by the US Department of State, Moulton stated: “We live in a very confusing time, obviously. The bureaucracy of reality has become exhausting in terms of how you are allowed to believe what is real and what is not. I think something really incredible happened the moment that we started calling things fake news because it meant all bets are off, or, maybe, all bets are on. All realities are now potentially real, as soon as you are saying ‘that reality is not real, but this one is’? It comes back to this entropy of this idea of the absolute notion of truth, and more to an open place of accepting a plurality of truth.”
In terms of a brief overview of Moulton’s occultist history, it is reported that he “didn’t begin to explore the connection between art and religion in earnest until he moved to Salt Lake City, where he was senior curator at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art from 2012 to 2013. There he began to work with Jason Metcalf, an artist and former Mormon whose practice is informed by, according to Moulton, “a perfect cocktail of religion, spirituality, folklore, superstition, anthropology and contemporary art.”… “With CLEAR, his first Gagosian Beverly Hills show in 2014, Moulton took the revered Light and Space movement as a starting point, exploring potential aesthetic links to Scientology and astral projection… And per Moulton, the show’s Easter egg was a vividly colorful painting by Ingo Swann, who, in addition to being an artist, was also a psychic who developed the practice of remote viewing, and worked with the CIA on several secret surveillance projects.”
For the past decade Moulton has continued to work closely with Jason Metcalf, who since then changed his artist’s name to Lazslo and then simply L. In his biography for the A.S.T.R.A.L.O.R.A.C.L.E.S exhibit that was funded by the US Embassy in Bulgaria, L described himself as “a starseed, alchemist, and healer with training and experience in numerous magical traditions and energy modalities.”
[6] Another occult artist whose bust of George Soros features in The Influencing Machine exhibit is Mi Kafchin, whose 2019 ‘Chemtrails’ exhibition was curated by Moulton – an earlier show that happened to be heavily influenced by the conspiracies of David Icke, who bust featured prominently in the Nicodem Gallery.
[7] The overlap between the wellness industry and far-right health conspiracies goes back decades; and for an article that discusses this problem in relation to David Icke’s conspiracy mongering, see Matthew Kalman and John Murray, “From green messiah to new age nazi,” Left Green Perspectives, 1996. This troubling history however eludes the corporate media, who in an otherwise useful article argue that this damaging trend is just a recent one, see Sophie Aubrey, “‘Playing with fire’: The curious marriage of QAnon and wellness,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 27, 2020.
In recent years the newly coined term “conspirituality” has gained in popularity with the mainstream media as an attempt to understand the cojoining of conspiracy theorists and New Age spirituality. Yet contrary to the surprise expressed by the initial academic proponents of conspirituality (Charlotte Ward and David Voas), whose work focused on the rise of conspirituality through the likes of charismatic gurus like David Icke, conservative conspiracies have always flowed through occult and New Age circles. This point is well made in Egil Asprem and Asbjørn Dyrendal’s 2015 article “Conspirituality reconsidered: how surprising and how new is the confluence of spirituality and conspiracy theory?” To take just one example, the responding authors explain: “Transnational occult networks have also been important for the dissemination of central conspiratorial motifs across Europe. The basic text of what was later to become the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appears to have been brought from France to Russia by Yuliana Glinka, who, besides being an unsuccessful agent of the Russian secret police, was also a Theosophist with connections to Blavatsky’s circle.” (p.376)
Despite his willingness to embrace right-wing conspiracists whose work helps popularize conspiracies linked to the Protocols, Aaron Moulton, in his own 2022 book, does provide a fairly useful overview of the way in which the Protocols were manufactured as a piece of “black propaganda” and he even includes a mention of the link to Glinka. (p.89)
[8] Hind, The Threat to Reason, p.152.
These are the footnotes for an excerpt from two chapters of The Occult Elite: Anti-Communist Paranoia and Other Ruling-Class Delusions (2022).
[1] Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Belknap Press, 2018).
[2] “Already after the collapse of the Soviet Union yet another, probably more important work of [Vladimir] Shmakov that had survived in Samizdat was published: The Law of Synarchy and the Teaching about the Dual Hierarchy of Monads and Multitudes (Zakon sinarkhii i uchenie o dvoistvennoi iearkhii monad i mnozhestv, Kiev: Sofiia, 1994).” The New Age of Russia, p.67. Anthroposophists who worked alongside Shmakov in the early 1920s included M.I. Sizov.
One might add that in the period between 1905 and 1917, the famous Symbolist anthroposophist Andrei Bely wrote many novels that reflected his own occult-induced paranoia. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal observes how: “His understanding of Anthroposophy led Bely to believe that the Bolshevik Revolution was a negative apocalypse and that a positive apocalypse, a ‘revolution of the spirit,’ would follow and complete the political and social revolution.” Rosenthal, “Political implications of the early twentieth century occult revival,” in: Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Cornell University Press, 1997), p.392. Bely’s decadent literature was subject to withering scorn in Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1924), Chapter 1.
[3] Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (HarperCollins, 1993), pp.16-7. For an overview of Russian émigré collaboration with the evolution of right-wing politics in Germany, see Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Russians and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). (A critical review of this book, undertaken by Annemarie Sammartino, points out some of the limitations of Kellogg’s sometimes overdetermined analysis.) For early examinations of the cooperation between the Russian émigré community and Nazis in Germany, see Robert Williams, Culture in Exile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881-1941 (Cornell University Press, 1972), and for a similar study based upon the actions of Russian émigrés in France, see Robert Johnston, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles, 1920-1945 (McGill-Queen’s Press, 1988).
[4] Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism, p.143. During the Russian civil war, interventionist armies led by Nikolai Markov were influenced his pro-French proclivities which put fuelled internecine struggles with Germanic-influenced white emigres.
[5] Laqueur, Black Hundred, p.17. Dmitry Shlapentokh, “Implementation of an ideological paradigm: early Duginian Eurasianism and Russia’s post-Crimean discourse,” Contemporary Security Policy, 35 (3), 2014. The most significant group on the extreme right arising during the 1990s was Alexander Barkashov’s Russian National Unity. This neo-Nazi paramilitary group was formed by Barkashov in 1990 as a split from the far-right anti-Semitic nationalist movement Pamyat (the National-Patriotic Front ‘Memory’). Pamyat was the first political movement that Alexander Dugin joined (in 1987) although he was viewed as an ideological competitor by a faction led by Barkashov who succeeded in having Dugin expelled from Pamyat. For further details, see Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (Routledge, 2018). Despite Pamyat’s rising political influence from 1987 onwards, it is noteworthy that the “attitude of the [Communist] party’s central organs during this period was ambiguous.” This is probably because “Pamyat was regarded as an important (if somewhat misguided) counterweight to the liberals, and above all to the radical dissidents, whose activities became more bothersome at precisely this time.” Laqueur, Black Hundred, p.207.
[6] Alexander Dugin, “Dugin’s guideline – The birthday of Baron Ungern-Sternberg,” The Forth Revolutionary War, January 9, 2017.
[7] In working to popularize Baron Ungern’s mysticism, Anton Ferdynand Ossendowski falsely presented Ungern as a mystic whose vision was not clouded by anti-Semitism. James Webb makes this point in The Occult Establishment (Open Court, 1976). Webb notes that Ossendowski “doubtless mythical account of Ingern takes pains to make the point that the baron, after all, had ‘many Jewish agents’ — in other words, that the accusations against him are not true. Yet Ossendowski undoubtedly believed in the myth that there was a conspiracy against right order; and it is quite probable that he agreed with the baron’s definition of who was responsible.” (p.203)
[8] “Ideas of Shambhala were common among the Russian occultist intelligentsia. Theosophy drew heavily from second- or third-hand notions of Tibetan theology, especially the mystical Kalachakra scriptures, so the Shambhala legend featured heavily in Blavatsky’s writings as one of the Hidden Masters’ bases of operation. Importantly, Shambhala was traditionally associated with the north, and so with Russia. The Russians were aware of this, and in the 1900s the Russian secret agent Agvan Dorjiev, a Buriat monk with strong political links to Tibet, attempted to spread the belief among Tibetans and Mongols that the Romanovs were the descendants of the rulers of Shambhala. Dorjiev claimed that the ‘White Tsar’ Nicolas II was a reincarnation of Tsongkapa, the founder of the dominant Tibetan Gelugpa tradition, pointing to the tsarist patronage of Buddhism among the Buriats and Kalmyks as evidence. He managed to get a Kalachakra temple opened in St Petersburg in 1913, which was inaugurated with a celebration of the Romanovs’ 300th anniversary.” Palmer, The Bloody White Baron, p.65.
[9] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York University Press, 2001), p.57. Fascist theorist Julius Evola “felt a deep affinity with Guénon’s esoteric pessimism. Here, in sparse outline, he found all the reasons for the decay of a primordial heroic world based on sacred authority and metaphysical absolutes. He applauded Guénon’s scathing attack on the vacuous relativism and chaotic liberalism of the modern world. Forthwith he began work on his own anti-modernist text, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno [Revolt against the Modern World] (1934), which remains his best-known and most important book.” (p.57)
[10] Vladimir Bekhterev “was one of the leading figures in the Russian human, medical, and behavioral sciences at the turn of the twentieth century”; who “was not only an authoritative and innovative neurologist and psychiatrist, but also a charismatic public figure, tireless organizer, and successful fundraiser, both before and after 1917.” But despite his commitment to objectivity, Bekhterev, in his diverse research efforts – which ranged over many research institutions and fields of enquiry – also developed what he thought was a scientific basis for comprehending telepathy. He was in fact the “most prominent scientist to investigate occult aspects of mental activity,” although this paranormal research was subsequently banned after 1930. Andy Byford, “V. M. Bekhterev in Russian child science, 1900s-1920s: ‘objective psychology’ / ‘refexology’ as a scientific movement,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 52(2), 2016, p.99. As Byford explains, for most of the twentieth century Bekhterev’s scientific contributions were overshadowed by his “arch rival” Ivan Pavlov, whose theories were apparently considered more useful in maintaining Stalin’s undemocratic regime. For more on this, see Daniel Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp.319-36. And for a useful introduction to the advance of science after 1917, at least until Stalin’s reign of terror was consolidated, see James Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917-1934 (Texas A&M University Press, 2003).
[11] Oleg Shishkin, “The occultist Aleksandr Barchenko and the Soviet secret police (1923-1938),” in: Menzel et al. (eds.), The New Age of Russia, p.89, p.95, p.96. For a contextual overview of Barchenko’s interests in Shamanism and its relevance to antimodern sentiments that rose to a fore after the 1960s, see Andrei Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.329-61.
Also of note, in the “early 1930s, Bekhterev’s disciple Leonid Vasil’ev (1891–1966) founded a five-person commission for the ‘Study of secret phenomena of the human psyche’ by order of Leningrad party officials”. Leonid Vasil’ev evidently pursued such esoteric interests as a devout spiritual seeker — much like “some of the authors and editors” contributing to the journal Nauka i Religia (Science and Religion) were able to do in the 1970s. Menzel, “Occult and esoteric movements in Russia from the 1960s to the 1980s,” p.170. (Not everyone on the five-person commission wished to promote occult interests, with one significant example being provided by Mikhail Shakhnovich (1911–1992).)
[12] When the theosophically-inclined Maxim Gorky returned from exile in 1932 he ensured that Bekhterev’s occult contributions played “an integral role in the creation of the theory of Socialist Realism,” which was then utilised by Stalin to force artists and writers into a cultural straitjacket. Birgit Menzel, “Occult and esoteric movements in Russia from the 1960s to the 1980s,” in: Menzel et al. (eds.), The New Age of Russia, p.169. For more details, see Mihhail Agursky, “The occult source of socialist realism: Gorky and early twentieth-century theories of thought transference,” in: Bernice Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Cornell University Press, 1997), pp.247-72. In sharp contrast to revolutionary socialists who believe that a truly democratic society is premised upon the self-activity and action of the working class: “As one of the major formulators of Socialist Realism, Gorky taught that writers and artists must cultivate optimism among the people, who he thought had a natural inclination to passivity. He believed that optimism (and pessimism) can be transmitted not only on the cogitative level but also, and more important, unconsciously, through its direct influence on the human mind and with no involvement of will on the part of the recipient.” In summary: “Gorky’s version of Socialist Realism can be considered a quasi-occult and politicized application of ideas of thought transference and hypnotic suggestion pioneered by Bekhterev and other early twentieth-century Russian scientists.” Agursky, “The occult source of socialist realism,” pp.249-50, p.263.
[13] Edgard Sissons arrived in Russia on the day of the October Revolution as a part of his duties for the US government’s main wartime propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information.
[14] For instance, when Russian historian George F. Kennan presented a thorough case against Anton Ferdynand Ossendowski and his falsification of the Sisson documents in the Journal of Modern History in 1956 he concluded: “It is doubtful whether the history of journalism could produce another instance of such a violent and prolonged personal vendetta” than that campaign that Ossendowski had waged against the owners of the company, Kunst & Albers. Ossendowski’s lies were unmasked at the time in a variety of publications (including Sven Hedin’s 1925 book Ossendowski and the Truth) but such writings seem to have had little effect upon belief in his scurrilous attacks upon his class enemies; and in 1931 Dutton published Ossendowski’s last book which was titled Lenin: God of the Godless. Lothar Deeg, Kunst and Albers Vladivostok: The History of a German Trading Company in the Russian Far-East, 1864-1925 (Druck and Verlag, 2013), p.333. In 1925 Ossendowski was accompanied on an expedition to West Africa by Count Jerzy Skarbek (the secretary of the Polish Legation in Washington) who during his colourful younger years had been a chauffeur for John D. Rockefeller, and whose daughter became one of Britain’s most famous spies.
[15] Konstantin Sheiko and Stephen Brown, History as Therapy: Alternative History and Nationalist Imaginings in Russia, 1991-2014 (ibidem-Verlag, 2014), p.83.
[16] Sheiko and Brown, History as Therapy, p.84. Also see Marlene Laruelle, “Conspiracy and alternate history in Russia: a nationalist equation for success?,” Russian Review, 71(4), 2012. Notably one of the most pervasive alternative historians in Russia, Anatolii Fomenko, “received a massive boost in the late 1990s” from Garry Kasparov, who apparently now distances himself from Fomenko’s popular nonsense. Sheiko and Brown, History as Therapy, pp.23-4.
[17] Alexander Kurenkov was a committed monarchist (promoted to the rank of major general by Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich in 1937) who obtained a ‘doctorate’ from an Indianapolis-based “New Thought” correspondence school known as the College of Divine Metaphysics – an organization which still exists today.
[18] Laruelle, The Rodnoverie Movement, p.294.
[19] Victor Shnirelman, “Russian response: archaeology, Russian nationalism, and the ‘Arctic homeland’,” in: Philip Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, Nachman Ben-Yehuda (eds.), Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of Distant Pasts (University of Chicago Press, 2007), p.36. For another important contribution to this field of study, see Philip Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds.), Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[20] Laqueur, Black Hundred, p.114.
[21] Vladimir Chivilikhin did much to promote ecological concerns within nationalist circles with his 1963 essay “The bright eye of Siberia.” Skurlatov’s ideas were also taken up with “some success among writers of science fiction”. Laqueur, Black Hundred, p.114. Skurlatov’s toxic background is discussed in Boris Kagarlitsky’s Farewell Perestroika: A Soviet Chronicle (Verso, 1990), p.102; while another notable pagan proponent of eco-fascism was Aleksei Dobroslav (1938-2013), see Kaarina Aitamurto, Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism: Narratives of Russian Rodnoverie (Routledge, 2016), p.35. For a related discussion, see Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (AK Press 1995); and Murray Bookchin, Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism (Cassell, 1995).
[22] Laruelle, The Rodnoverie Movement, p.308.
[23] Kaarina Aitamurto, “More Russian than orthodox Christianity: Russian paganism as nationalist politics,” in: Nations under God: The Geopolitics of Faith in the Twenty-First Century (E-international relations, 2015), pp.126-32. Religious scholar Mircea Eliade also played a critical role in developing the relationship between paganism and radical nationalism.
[24] With reference to political direction of Desionizatsiya (1979): “Building on the earlier sub-genre of racist and anti-Semitic literature, Emelyanov constructed a theory of a plot of Jews and Freemasons, covering in its extent the entire world and ranging back to the times of King Solomon, the initiator of the conspiracy.” Kaarina Aitamurto, Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism, p.28. Valerii Emelyanov is credited as being the author of a 1973 article published in the patriotic newspaper Veche that served as a manifesto for Russian neo-paganism.
[25] Kaarina Aitamurto, “Modern pagan warriors: violence and justice in the Rodnoverie,” in: James Lewis (ed.), Violence and New Religious Movements (Oxford University Press, 2011), p.233. Aitamurto writes that Valerii Emelyanov sent copies of Desionizatsiya (1979) “to all of the members of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party. There is even some evidence that the KGB engineered or at least supported Paganism as a plot to break up the Orthodox nationalistic opposition. Emelyanov apparently also enjoyed some protection.” (p.245) Here the author cites Laqueur, Black Hundred, pp.112-6, pp.210-11. For a discussion of the ultra-nationalist pagan legacy of émigré Volodymyr Shaian (1908–1974) – the father of Rodnovery in Ukraine — see Mariya Lesiv, The Return of Ancestral Gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative for a Nation (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
[26] Shnirelman, “Russian response,” p.38, p.55. For the geopolitical implications of the mythical ‘Arctic homeland’ see Marlene Laruelle, Russia’s Arctic Strategies and the Future of the Far North (Routledge, 2015). A discussion of how far-right iterations of cosmism went on to impregnate the Russian security apparatus, is provided in Juliette Faure’s “Russian Cosmism: a national mythology against transhumanism,” The Conversation, January 11, 2021. A useful introduction to the reactionary ideas of Traditionalism is provided in Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004).
[27] Sheiko and Brown, History as Therapy, p.80.
[28] Shnirelman, “Russian response,” p.56. To make this point the author draws attention to a 1999 article published within the elite magazine President Parliament Government by the influential founder of “Aryan astrology” Pavel Globa. In 1991, leading Russian film-maker Nikita Mikhalkov (a former friend of Lev Gumilyov and now a devout supporter of Putin) released the critically acclaimed film Urga (released in North America as Close to Eden) which drew heavily on Eurasianist themes.
During the 1920s neo-pagan religion known as Tassi “fused supposedly ancient beliefs with a nationalist, right-wing agenda. Tassi never attracted more than a few thousand believers and was crushed as counter-revolutionary in Soviet times, but it is, nevertheless, a fine example of the way nationalism and esoteric beliefs sometimes crossed.” Palmer, The Bloody White Baron, p.14.
[29] Trotsky, My Life (1930). This focus for this historical text was however not of his own choosing and his study was largely inspired by the limited nature of the prison library, which Trotsky recalled “was made up mostly of conservative historical and religious magazines”. Moreover, in later years right-wing conspiracy theorists would attempt to turn history upon its head by propagating the lie that Trotsky and his revolutionary comrades were part of a Jewish cabal of freemasons, see Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe.
[30] For example, Annie Besant, once a leading member of the British Social Democratic Federation, after losing faith in democratic processes became the president of the Theosophical Society. In Russia it is notable that Maxim Gorky was deeply influenced by Theosophy, see Mikhail Agursky, “Maksim Gorky and the decline of Bolshevik Theomachy,” in: Nicolai Petro (ed.), Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society (Westview Press, 1990), pp.69-101; also of relevance is Julian Strube’s essay “Occultist identity formations between theosophy and socialism in fin-de-siècle France,” Numen, 64(5-6), 2017.
[31] George Orwell, “W. B. Yeats,” Horizon, January 1943; Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford University Press, 1997).
[32] With the collapse of the Soviet Union, science –which was closely associated with Marxism — entered something of a crisis of legitimacy. As Loren Graham and Irina Dezhina explain in Science in the New Russia: Crisis, Aid, Reform (Indiana University Press, 2008): “Following the disintegration of the USSR, a rapid decrease in the status of science and the prestige of research work occurred, both among policy- makers and among the general public. The effects of this decrease on the scientific establishment were profound and widespread.” (p.18) Western philanthropic foundations then intervened to restructure the scientific establishment. This represented an openly imperialist intervention that was then demonized in later years by the Putin regime.
[33] Between 1993 and 2006 the president of the US branch of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences was an influential climate change sceptic named George Chilingarian, who holds similar views to Michael Economides who has received numerous awards from RAEN and is the coauthor of Energy and Climate Wars: How Naive Politicians, Green Ideologues, and Media Elites are Undermining the Truth About Energy and Climate (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2010). The preface for Economides’s book was written by the Italian libertarian, Carlo Stagnaro, who himself is the author of the 2001 book Waco: strage di stato americana (Waco: A State Massacre in the US).
[34] Evgueny Faydysh, author of The Mystic Cosmos (2000), is a longstanding RAEN member, and he is the current president of the Russian Foundation of Transpersonal Psychology where he works alongside Ubiquity University’s Vladimir Maykov (see earlier).
[35] John Erickson, “‘We have plenty to defend ourselves with…’: Russian, rhetoric, Russia Realism,” in Stephen Cimbala (ed.), The Russian Military into the 21st Century (Routledge, 2013), p.25.
[36] Stefan Forss, Lauri Kiianlinna, Pertti Inkinen, and Heikki Hult, The Development of Russian Military Policy and Finland (Helsinki, Finland: National Defense University, Department of Strategic and Defence Studies, 2013), p.73. The early work of Alexander Dugin’s close political ally, Sergey Glaziev, meant that in 1995 he received the Gold Kondratieff Medal from RAEN and the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation.
[37] During the early 1990s Lt. General Alexey Yu. Savin had established a working relationship with American remote viewers like Edwin May, who would later write about their friendship in his co-authored book ESP Wars: East and West — An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players (Laboratories for Fundamental Research, 2014). Edwin May’s first trip to Moscow took place in 1992 and his host was the parapsychologist Edward Naumov, who in early 1988 (after recently making contact with Edgar Mitchell) was courting public fame on Soviet television while lecturing “to an audience of 1,000 on bioenergy fields, unconventional medicine, reading auras and moving matter by mind power.” Gerald Nadler, “Soviet parapyschology guru is back under glasnost,” UPI, April 17, 1988.
As in America, ESP obsessions run high in Russia, and Major General Nikolai Sham, who was appointed to the position of deputy director of the KGB in September 1991, played a key role in supporting such attempts at directing spiritual warfare (he also wrote the foreword to ESP Wars). Another individual who features heavily within ESP Wars was Alexander Korzhakov, a former KGB general who served as head of the presidential security service from 1993 to 1996, who had a deputy named Georgy Rogozin who claimed to have “raised the souls of the dead, penetrated people’s subconscious through photographs and made up horoscopes for Boris Yeltsin.” Oleg Kashin, “How the hallucinations of an eccentric KGB psychic influence Russia today,” The Guardian, July 15, 2015.
[38] Serghei Golunov and Vera Smirnova, “Proliferation of conspiracy narratives in Post-Soviet Russia: the “Dulles’ Plan” in social and political discourses,” Acta Slavica Iaponica, 37, 2016, p.39. For their useful discussions of conspiracies in Russia, see Peter Deutschmann, Jens Herlth and Alois Woldan (eds.), “Truth” and Fiction Conspiracy Theories in Eastern European Culture and Literature (Verlag, 2020), and Eliot Borenstein, Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy And Fantasy After Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2019). Also of interest is Ilya Yablokov’s Building Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World (Polity Press, 2018) and Edmund Griffiths, Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism (ibidem Press, 2021).
[39] The Russian state continues to play a critical role in promoting conspiracies to prop up Putin’s authoritarian regime. Nevertheless, under extreme circumstances even Putin is forced to act to reign in some conspiracists, thus in December 2020, Father Sergii, who remains just one of Russia’s many ultraconservative religious leaders was arrested because he had begun to extend the focus of his conspiracies to attack Putin instead of using them to defend him, see Eugene Clay, “Folklore and conspiracy theories of a COVID dissenter: the life and sermons of Father Sergii (Romanov),” Folklorica, 24, 2020.
[40] Marlene Laruelle, “Conspiracy and alternate history in Russia: a nationalist equation for success?,” The Russian Review, 71, 2012, p.577. For a discussion of Fomenko’s import to the West, see Jason Colavito, “A debunking of Fomenko’s theories: who Lost the Middle Ages?,” Skeptic, 11(2), 2004.
[41] Greg Melleuish, Konstantin Sheiko and Stephen Brown, “Pseudo history/weird history: nationalism and the internet,” History Compass, 7(6), 2009, p.1488. Two influential individuals who have popularized Anatolii Fomenko’s conspiracies have been the libertarian chess grandmaster, GarryKasparov, and the exiled dissident Alexander Zinoviev. This important subject matter is discussed in James Billington’s Russia in Search of Itself (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Demonstrating the elitist nature of patronage politics, the L.N.Gumilyov Eurasian National University has bestowed the title of honorary professor upon not only their neo-fascist darling, Alexander Dugin (in 2004), but has given the same honour to RAEN’s president Oleg Kuznetsov (in 2005), and to Hillary Clinton (in 2010).
[42] Russia’s most famous UFOlogist, Vladimir Azhazhi, is a member of RAEN; and demonstrating the bizarre cross-over between science and anti-scientific theories it is significant that RAEN was able to recruit Sergei Kapitsa (1928-2012) to serve as one of their vice presidents. This is important as Kapitsa was a scientist of international repute who regularly took to the media to debunk the rise of conspiracy theories (for example. see his article “Science and pseudoscience in Russia,” Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 1999). Even major historians of Russian science became RAEN members, like for instance the Harvard academic Loren Graham, who had been a former trustee of George Soros’s International Science Foundation (which supported Russian scientists after the collapse of the Soviet Union).
Edward Kruglyakov in his report “Pseudoscience: how does it threaten science and the public?” (Report at a RAN Presidium meeting of 27 May 2003) draws attention to the way that legitimate scientists are used to help bolster the mystical research being promoted by RAEN. The critic points out: “The Russian Academy of Sciences publishes several popular science journals. There are many outstanding scientists on the editorial councils and editorial boards. However an impression is being formed that they are being used as famous names and do not set the journals’ policy in any manner. How can it be explained otherwise that from time to time in these journals there appear articles extolling blatant pseudoscience?” In addition to right-wing ideologues like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who in 1983 received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion), the then current secretary-general of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was accepted as an honorary RAEN member (April 1994); while even George Soros (who boasts of doing so much to promote genuine science in Russia) apparently allowed his name to be used to promote RAEN’s work. For a longer discussion of the political reasons why RAEN came into existence, see Mikhail Akhmanov, “Tempting title,” Saint Petersburg Branch of the Russian Humanist Society, Undated.
[43] Concerns regarding the support that RAEN’s intellectuals lend to xenophobia were raised by Valentin Vydrin, see Maria Akhmetova et al., “Forum 8: Nationalism and xenophobia as research topics,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 5, 2009, pp.142-4.
[44] Isabel Gorst, “Mystic’s art collection at front line of Russian culture wars,” The Irish Times, March 8, 2017.
[45] Mikhail Gorbachev “wished to use the ‘Roerich idea’ to revitalize a Soviet ideology” and “appears to have calculated that Roerichite thinking, properly packaged, would infuse the Soviet worldview with a potent combination of aesthetically-appealing and exotic imagery; a pride in Russia that was neither chauvinistic nor at odds with the multiethnic nature of the Soviet state; an associative link between the USSR and respect for the ideals of peace, culture, and beauty; and the possibility of spiritual enrichment without the need for conventional religious faith.” John McCannon, “Competing legacies, competing visions of Russia: the Roerich movement(s) in post-Soviet Russia,” in The New Age of Russia, p.350, p.351. “On a related note, neo-Eurasianists such as Alexander Dugin have encouraged a free-floating association between Roerichite thought and their own quasi-millenarian vision of a Russia rising to glory over the ‘Atlantic’ West, although this is not an association sought by the MTsR or Agni Yogists in general.” (p.366)
Another individual who famously promoted the esoteric ideas of Theosophy from within Bulgaria’s Stalinist regime in the 1970s was Lyudmila Zhivkova (1942-1981): a leader whose political/spiritual work contained “a problematic universalism and a commitment to national and patriotic ideals that bear an uneasy relationship to the ethno-nationalist politics of the period.” Zhivka Valiavicharska, “Post-Stalinism’s uncanny symbioses: ethno-nationalism and the global orientations of Bulgarian socialism during the 1960s and 1970s,” special issue, dVersia, 2019, p.92.
[46] Anita Stasulane, “The Theosophy of the Roerichs: Agni Yoga or living ethics,” in Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein (eds.), Handbook of the Theosophical Current (Brill, 2013), p.211. Stasulane points out that: “The most active Russian physicists participating in the Roerich movement are (or were) those investigating so-called ‘torsion fields,’ Anatoliy Akimov (1938-2007) and Genadiy Shipov b. 1938, who in the 1990s made lecture tours in the collapsing USSR. To oppose their theory, the ‘Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and the Falsification of Scientific Research’ (Komissiia po bor’be s lzhenaukoi i fal’sifkatsiei nauchnykh issledovanii) was founded by the Russian Academy of Science in 1998, headed by the Nobel Prize winner in physics, Vitaliy Ginzburg.” Stasulane explains how during the Soviet era the Roerichs’ teachings “grew more and more popular in the USSR where their doctrine of Theosophy functioned as a spiritual alternative to the dialectical materialism imposed by the Communist regime.” (p.207) She adds:
“In the 1980s, the Roerichs’ youngest son Svyatoslav (1904-1993) played a decisive role in the development of the movement. In 1987 he met with the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Michail Gorvachev and his wife Raisa, who took part in the Moscow group of the Roerichs’ followers, a visit repeated in 1989 after Gorbachev had taken office. The collapse of the Soviet ideological system opened up much wider opportunities for the spread of Living Ethics, and a number of Roerich societies were formed in the territories of the former USSR. The Moscow group was the most successful; among other things it founded the Roerich Museum in Moscow and the Soviet Foundation of the Roerichs (1989), later renamed the International Center of the Roerichs (ICR) (1991).” (p.207)
[47] Anatoliy Akimov’s work is cited in Ervin Lazlo’s book The Whispering Pond: A Personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science (Element Books, 1999), p.196, p.238.
[48] Boris Kagarlitsky, The Disintegration of Monolith (Verso, 1992), p.37, p.38, p.101. For a more recent insider account of the continuing deprivations of Russia’s media and cultural elite, see Michael Idov, Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
[49] David Speedie, “Interview with Gavriil Popov, first democratically elected mayor of Moscow,” Carnegie Council, February 11, 2011; and for a less evasive interview covering much the same questions, see Speedie, “Arkady Murashev on the fall of the USSR,” Carnegie Council, February 8, 2011.
[50] Patrick Simpson, “The GOP’s favorite Russian professor spent decades building conservative ties to Moscow,” The Stern Facts, May 26, 2017.
[51] Robert Krieble was a founding board member of the Heritage Foundation, and in 1989, working under the remit of the Free Congress Foundation (a conservative think tank founded by Paul Weyrich and the Colorado beer magnate Joseph Coors) he had formed the Krieble Institute to promote ‘democracy’ and economic freedom in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
[52] Sarah Booth Conroy, “Russia House, trading in its name,” The Washington Post, October 27, 1991. Conroy adds that after the opening of Russia House: “That night in the gold-and-white pilastered reception room of the Soviet Embassy, Ambassador Viktor Komplektov entertained a remarkably diverse group: American businessmen hoping to prospect for gold in Russia; Sens. Claiborne Pell and Richard Lugar; a few ambassadors from neighboring countries, including Norway’s Kjeld Vibe; Allen Weinstein, president of the Center for Democracy; and of course Popov and the Lozanskys.”
Another leading officer of Russia House’s board was Paul Craig Roberts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies – a former treasury assistant secretary for President Reagan who is now a conspiracy theorist.
These are the footnotes for an excerpt from the second-half of chapter 10 of The Givers That Take (2021).
[1] Dave Prentis soon received a knighthood from the government for his role in selling out workers and enjoyed serving on the board of directors of the Bank of England between 2012 and 2019, and until his recent replacement Prentis remained in charge of Unison despite the best organizing efforts of rank-and-file trade unionists. Likewise, Prentis’ retrograde politics were tragically exported globally when he was elected as the President of Public Services International in 2010, and he served in this position for the next ten years.
[2] Frances Perraudin and Daniel Boffey, “Unison head faces leadership challenge from the left,” The Guardian, December 16, 2015; Tom Barker, “Another round of suspensions in Labour: we need a party of the working class to take on the Tories,” Socialist Alternative, December 21, 2020.
[3] In mid-2002 the Democratic Socialist Movement observed: “Nothing functions or is functioning as it is supposed to, despite Nigeria’s super-abundant natural and human resources. At the same time, you have opposition parties that are completely indistinguishable in all essential features from the PDP, which they all, individually and collectively, wish to remove from power. And most unfortunately, you have a labour movement led, at best, by elements who generally make a correct analysis/critique about the inherent failure of the capitalist system, but permanently shy away from adopting the necessary political and economic strategy that can bring an end to the system which has turned life into a permanent nightmare for most ordinary people.” DSM, Nigeria: Civil Rule in Danger (DSM, August 2002).
In spite of the many barriers including vote rigging, Lanre Arogundada, the Marxist senatorial candidate for the NCP in Lagos West, still managed to get a commendable 77,000 or 9.4% of the votes counted during the April 2003 elections. A DSM member who did well in these elections was Ayodele Akele who stood in the Agege constituency gaining 15% of the votes.
[4] Gani Fawehinmi, “The role of the election tribunals,” The Guardian (Nigeria), May 2, 2007. On July 24, 2006, Segun Sango, Lagos Chair of the NCP and General Secretary of the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) received an expulsion letter issued “by the Dr. Osagie Obayuwana led national leadership of the NCP.” The takeover of the NCP leadership by right-wing careerists “was based upon the legal requirement for any party wishing to stand in Nigerian elections to have offices in two-thirds of the country’s 36 states and its national headquarters in the federal capital, Abuja. As all these state units had to have representation on a party’s National Executive it meant, in the NCP’s case, that Lagos, the largest and most active state party, was nationally outvoted by people who in reality represented no-one but themselves.” DSM and the Struggle for a Working Peoples’ Political Alternative, p.23.
[5] The Lagos State chapter of the NCP fought back against the undemocratic manoeuvrings of the right-wing leaders, who had also undemocratically imposed a candidate upon their region. The chapter did this by announcing (on March 27, 2007) that they were collectively refusing to participate in the forthcoming general election. With the battle for democracy within the NCP lost, later that year the NCP chapter then decided the time was right to quit the party in order to work towards building a “genuine pan-Nigeria working masses’ political party, committed to the struggle for the betterment of the poor in or out of political power.” After attempts to launch a mass party, in 2012 members of the Democratic Socialist Movement launched the Socialist Party of Nigeria.
[6] Omolade Adunbi, “Embodying the modern: neoliberalism, NGOs, and the culture of human rights practices in Nigeria,” Anthropological Quarterly, 89(2), 2016, p.432.
[7] For a detailed critique of Transparency International, see Julie Bajolle, “The origins and motivations of the current emphasis on corruption: the case of Transparency International,” presented at the International Anti-Corruption Movement’s European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops, April 25–30, 2006.
[8] General Obasanjo had been imprisoned in 1995 using “concocted evidence heard at a secret trial alleging an offence being committed in Nigeria at a time when he was shown to be in New York attending a board meeting of the trustees of the Ford Foundation” (as Transparency International put it at the time). In later years Transparency International would obtain most of their funding from development agencies, USAID, corrupt corporations like Shell, and billionaires like George Soros.
[9] With the 1999 transition to civilian rule, President Obasanjo’s new regime famously served the needs of international financial institutions like the World Bank: “Hence the dominance of anti-people reform policies that formed the bed rock of [his] administration from 1999 to 2007.” Nigerians were thus compelled to organize their first general strike within a year of Obasanjo’s assumption of power — a militant response by workers which had the desired effect of forcing his government to backtrack on their initial neoliberal ‘reforms’. But with powerful capitalist allies salivating at Nigeria’s plentiful oil reserves — Tony Blair and Bill Clinton being two notable examples – Obasanjo’s administration is best remembered for its unswerving dedication to deregulation, privatization and cronyism. Nkolika Obianyo, “Globalization and democracy in Africa – the Nigerian experience 1999-2007,” Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Political Science (NAJOPS), 3(1) August 2012, p.3.
Lucy Baker, “Facilitating whose power? WB and IMF policy influence in Nigeria’s energy sector,” Bretton Woods Project, April 2, 2008. “Deregulation of the downstream petroleum market (refining, supply and distribution) has been a key ingredient of World Bank and IMF policy advice since 1999. The most contentious of the IMF’s structural benchmarks was the sale of the Kaduna and Port Harcourt oil refineries. The process turned into a mockery. The sale was first put on hold due to the difficulty in attracting high quality international investors. Then having been valued at $800 billion, the refineries were sold off during Obasanjo’s last days in office in May 2007 for a paltry $500 million to a consortium close to the president called Bluestar Oil Service Limited. The ensuing protests which contributed to a June national strike saw Bluestar withdraw from the deal and its money refunded.” Although not mentioned in this article one of the key members of this controversial consortium was Dangote Industries.
[10] Omolade Adunbi, “Extractive practices, oil corporations and contested spaces in Nigeria,” The Extractive Industries and Society, 7(3), 2020, p.6. Former Shell vice president Alan Detheridge is presently a board member of Publish What You Pay – a global organization that has includes more than 700 member groups.
[11] Demba Moussa Dembele, “Toronto, Naples, Lyon, Cologne and London: G7 leaders and the debt trip to nowhere,” Pambazuka News, March 10, 2005.
[12] Damien Millet and Eric Toussaint, Who Owes Who: 50 Questions about World Debt (Zed Books, 2013 [2004), p.96
[13] Mike Hall, “The international debt crisis: recent developments,” Capital and Class, 35, 1988, pp.14-5. Although not acted up at the time, the early proposals made in April 1987 by Nigel Lawson, the Tory British Chancellor were, “to a great extent, an acceptance of the inevitable. As Lawson himself recognised `there is no realistic prospect of actually securing anything like full repayment if rates are not reduced’ (The Financial Times, 23rd July 1987).” “While the Lawson plan affects official debt only, it is not, on this count, without potential benefit to Africa’s private creditors. In reducing the burden of servicing the continent’s $200bn. of external debt, the majority of which is official, the plan makes default and interest payment moratoriums less likely on the minority private component of that debt.” (p.14)
[14] Shola Omotola and Hassan Saliu, “Foreign aid, debt relief and Africa’s development: problems and prospects,” South African Journal of International Affairs, 16(1), 2009, p.92. “Available statistics indicate that between 1970 and 2002, Africa received a total of $540 billion in loans and paid back $550 billion — $10 billion more than the original loans — over the same period. Yet, Africa owed $293 billion at the end of 2002.” (p.87)
[15] Iraq was the other country that like Nigeria received huge levels of debt assistance, obtaining an “80% reduction of the Paris Club debt” which had reached a massive $42.5 billion. Victor Okafor, “The Paris Club deal: reason to celebrate?,” Africa Update, XIII (1), Spring 2006.
[16] Aliko Dangote made the bulk of his fortune through Dangote Cement and the active financial aid he received from President Olusegun’s Backward Integration Policy (BIP) in Nigeria which led to the “transformation of Dangote Cement from a trading entity to the dominant cement manufacturing company in Nigeria.” Akinyinka Akinyoade and Chibuike Uche, “Dangote Cement: an African success story?”, African Studies Centre Leiden, ASC Working Paper No.131, 2016, p.6. Other multinational cement manufacturers like Lafarge were able to profit from Nigeria’s privatization of state-run cement industries deregulatory but owing to their foreign ownership were more sensitive to public outrage than Dangote when it came to engaging in corrupt activities in Nigeria. All the same Dangote and Lafarge continue to work closely together. For example, Gbenga Oyebode, who previously served as in-house counsel at Gulf Oil, joined Lafarge Africa’s boardroom last year, and is currently a trustee of the New York based Africa Center that was established as a project between Halima Aliko Dangote (Aliko’s daughter) and Chelsea Clinton (Bill’s daughter). (Since 2019 Oyebode has also served on the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation.)
[17] Omolade Adunbi, “(Re)inventing development: China, infrastructure, sustainability and special economic zones in Nigeria,” Africa, 89(4), 2019, p.666. The Lekki Free Zone is majority owned by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (which owns 60%) of the Lekki Free Zone Development Corporation. The famous human rights lawyer Felix Morka played an important role in overcoming public resistance to the creation of the Lekki Free Zone, and subsequently Morka “joined the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC)–the party in power in Lagos.” (p.669) For more background, see Jeremiah Ikongio,” The cultural protocols of free trade,” e-flux Architecture, “New Silk Roads,” February 2020. A report from August 2019 noted: “Chinese investment in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry has reached $16 billion, according to Nigeria’s state-run oil company.” This investment came via the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). Note that the former CEO of CNOOC from 2003 to 2011 was Fu Chengyu, who then went on to become the chair of Sinopec (from 2011 to 2015) and is presently a board member of a global investment company headquartered in Singapore known as Temasek where he serves alongside the former CEO of Shell (Peter Voser) and the former president of the World Bank, 2007 to 2012 (Robert Zoellick).
[18] “Addax’s man in Nigeria until 2000, Richard Granier-Deferre,” was “fined approximately $200,000 in 2007 by a Paris court as an accessory to Mr. [Dan] Etete’s money laundering.” Eric Reguly, “Off the map in Africa,” The Globe and Mail, January 11, 2008; Will Fitzgibbon, “Secret documents expose Nigerian oil mogul’s offshore hideaways,” Premium Times, July 25, 2016.
Another notable individual who served alongside Oladele on Addax Petroleum’s board room was Brian Anderson, who had been the head of Shell’s Nigeria operations between 1994 and 1997. Anderson is presently the chairman and Managing Director of Anderson Energy (Hong Kong) Limited, a consulting firm for the energy sector, mostly in Africa and China; and he is a board member of Kaisun Holdings Limited.
[19] “In the first three days of 2021, China launched its first free trade agreement (FTA) with an African nation,” that country being Mauritius. Wang Cong and Xie Jun, “With first FTA, diplomatic trip, China to boost cooperation with Africa in 2021,” Global Times, January 3, 2021.
[20] Oil companies spent decades opposing the science of climate change and are still acting to slow action to this day. For example, between 1979 and 1998 Shell “supported a campaign to sabotage climate policy” by funding the research of Professor Frits Böttcher who “was a high ranking Dutch scientist, co-founder of the Club of Rome and member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy.” “Smoking gun found hidden in an archive,” Code Rood, February 20, 2020.
[21] Prior to become the new CEO of SEforALL at the start of 2020, Nigerian national Damilola Ogunbiyi obtained $350 million from the World Bank to help launch the Nigerian Electrification Project, an initiative promoting the construction of solar mini-grids and the deployment of solar home systems to meet the needs of Nigeria’s energy deprived.
In 2019 the Rockefeller Foundation launched the Global Commission to End Energy Poverty to contribute towards capitalism new humanitarian mission. Tony Blair joins Damilola Ogunbiyi among the group’s many commissioners, as does Akin Adesina, a central Nigerian intellectual who previously helped push forward an earlier philanthropic ‘aid’ project known as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. For detailed criticisms of this Alliance, see Timothy Wise, “False Promises: the ‘Green Revolution in Africa’ is failing on its own terms,” Climate and Capitalism, July 14, 2020; also see Wise’s useful book Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness. Family Farmers and the Battle for the Future of Food (New Press, 2019) which shows “how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests.”
[22] Overseeing Shell’s contribution to helping the poor access green energy is Nigerian management guru Dr. Wiebe Boer, who in 2010 became the inaugural CEO of the Tony Elumelu Foundation (established by the Nigerian banking giant of the same name) after serving his philanthropic apprenticeship as an Associate Director for the Rockefeller Foundation in Kenya. More generally in recent years oil companies like Shell have begun investing more of their profits in purchasing renewable energy companies, but this still remains a small overall investment. For example, “Shell’s investment target for green energy projects was set between $4bn and $6bn for the period from 2016 until the end of 2020 – but with less than a year to go, The Guardian says the sum is “well below” those figures.” James Murray, “How the six major oil companies have invested in renewable energy projects,” NS Energy, January 16, 2020. During those same four years Shell “more than $120bn developing fossil fuel projects and set out plans to increase its total spending to $30bn a year in the early 2020s.” The lack of urgency in moving away from fossil fuels recently led to the resignations of a number of Shell’s senior executives whose jobs entailed promoting renewables. (Note: in 2019 one of the most ambitious schemes that has backed by the Shell Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation is the CrossBoundary Energy Access, “Africa’s first project financing facility for mini-grids,” which aims to “unlock” more than US$11 billion for mini-grids.)
[23] Lumos Global has been a key partner of international finance institutions keen to invest in the solar field; indeed two years prior to receiving support from “All On” Lumos had obtained a $50 million investment from the US government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Since early 2020 Adepeju Adebajo has been employed as the CEO for Lumos Nigeria. She had previously served as the Commissioner of Agriculture in Ogun State and as the CEO-Cement for Lafarge in Nigeria.
Lumos’ cheapest product, Lumos ECO, comes with a 80 watt solar panel and a 200Wh battery set, they offer full ownership “after 48 continuous monthly instalments”. The initial down payment is N22,000 (£42), and 48 months of hiring costs N178,500 (£340). In Nigeria a worker earning minimum wage takes home around N30,000 a month (£57) which is not actually not even paid by most states and private sector employers. In the UK a worker earning minimum wage earns approximately £1,500 a month, and (on average) the cost of providing for an entire household’s gas and electric for a year is around £800 (for a small house/flat that uses 11,000kWh). Contrast this to Nigeria where to get a tiny fraction of the energy (perhaps around 200kWh) workers must pay N50,000 a year, which is the equivalent of nearly two months pay (on minimum wage).
[24] Ethan Chorin, “Electron rush: why U.S. renewable energy is converging on Africa,” Forbes, May 1, 2017. One UK-based company to benefit from All On’s investments is iKabin, whose Managing Director is a senior executive at PwC UK. However, it is true that homegrown companies have also benefited from Shell’s All On funding, with another up-and-coming outfit being Arnergy Solar, which recently raised $9 million in a round of funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (a funded with more than $1 billion in green investments which is chaired by Bill Gates). Launched in 2014, Arnergy’s current COO (and early advisor) is Stephen Ozoigbo, the founder of African Technology Foundation (a corporation based in Silicon Valley). For some years he has been overseeing the management of the US State Department’s Lions@frica program which had been launched at the 2012 World Economic Forum on Africa. In 2015 Arnergy received earlier backing from the Bank of Industry and the United Nations Development Programme.
[25] Nigeria’s power companies generate only about 4,000MW daily. This means that “Power sector specialists are placing their hopes in mini-grids, independent solar panel systems of up to 1MW capacity — the threshold at which a developer must apply for a full-scale power generation licence — that can power up to a few thousand households.” Emily Feng, “Off-the-grid thinking to end Nigeria’s blackouts,” Financial Times, November 21, 2018.
[26] Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick Trent Greiner, “Renewable energy injustice: The socio-environmental implications of renewable energy consumption,” Energy Research & Social Science, 56, October 2019, p.8.
[27] Hilman Fathonia, Abidah Setyowati, James Prest, “Is community renewable energy always just? Examining energy injustices and inequalities in rural Indonesia,” Energy Research & Social Science, 71, January 2020; Festus Boamah and Eberhard Rothfuß, “From technical innovations towards social practices and socio-technical transition? Re-thinking the transition to decentralised solar PV electrification in Africa,” Energy Research & Social Science, 42, August 2018. In South Africa for instance: “Many poor Africans who were off the grid now have access to electricity, but do not have the money to pay for its use.” Akhil Gupta, “An anthropology of electricity from the Global South,” Cultural Anthropology, 30(4), 2015; C.G. Monyei, A.O. Adewumi & K.E.H. Jenkins, “Energy (in)justice in off-grid rural electrification policy: South Africa in focus,” Energy Research & Social Science, 44, 2018.
One early investigation into emerging energy transitions to cater to the needs of the energy poor in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrated how investment across the whole of Africa “had grown six-fold between 2003 and 2013, respectively from USD$750 million to over USD $4.7 billion.” Most of this investment (around 79%) had been focused on sub-Saharan Africa, “but even that figure was well below the estimated USD $55 billion annual spend required to meet the target of universal access by 2030.” Yet as “most initiatives focus on how to facilitate the creation of energy markets and attract private sector investment” little is being done to address the deeper capitalist explanations of why such systemic poverty and exploitation continue to exist. This led the authors of this study to state that “the number of people without access [to energy] seems to be rising–not decreasing–due to a combination of natural population growth, increase in energy exports, as well as an intensification in demand through urbanization.” Idalina Baptista, “Space and energy transitions in sub-Saharan Africa: understated historical connections,” Energy Research & Social Science, 36, February 2018.
[28] The research found that “51 per cent of Lumos customers live below the World Bank international poverty line of $3.20 per person per day (2011 PPP). In relation to the national rate – 73 per cent of the population of Nigeria live below the $3.20 poverty line – Lumos is reaching a slightly wealthier group. Twelve per cent of Lumos customers are estimated to live below the extreme poverty line of $1.90 per person per day compared to 43 per cent of the Nigerian population…They are generally well educated, with 85 per cent of customers having someone in the household who had attained tertiary level education (polytechnic or university), consistent with the earlier finding that Lumos customers tend to be better off than average.” Insight, “What is the impact of solar home systems in Nigeria?,” CDC Investment Works, March 25, 2020.
[29] “Power Africa: A U.S. government-led partnership,” Updated November 30, 2020. For a discussion of the problems inherent in neoliberal approaches to large-scale solar production, see Hamza Hamouchene, “The Ouarzazate solar plant in Morocco: triumphal ‘green’ capitalism and the privatization of nature,” Jadaliyya, May 23, 2016; and Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick Trent Greiner, “How long can neoliberalism withstand climate crisis?,” Monthly Review, April 1, 2020. For a critical review of the privatization of Nigeria’s energy sector, see Sandra van Niekerk, Yuliya Yurchenko and Jane Lethbridge, “Nigeria energy sector transformation, DFID, USAID, and the World Bank,” Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU), 2016. The report notes that the only part of energy provision that remains is public hands are the transmission networks, which are of course in the process of creeping privatization.
[30] Steffen Haag, “Finance for renewable energy in Africa follows colonial roots,” OpenDemocracy, February 10, 2020.
[31] Alagoa Morris en Akpotu Ziworitin and Hilde Brontsema, “Traces of Shell in Nigeria’s oil spills,” Friends of the Earth Netherlands and Environmental Rights Activists, Amsterdam, December 2020, p.7. “Those who perpetrate the spills (often young people) first inform their Shell Nigeria contact by telephone that they are interested in sabotaging some pipelines. They are then given the green light or are requested to wait until a later time. Once the sabotage has been completed, the same Shell Nigeria employees will call these same Ikarama youths and clean-up contractors to arrange a meeting in a Yenagoa hotel.” (p.13)
[32] Neil Munshi, “Why Nigeria struggles to win its security battle,” Financial Times, October 27, 2020. “Extortion is a potent symbol for a state whose modus operandi is the extraction of oil revenue from central coffers to pay for a bloated, ruinously inefficient, political elite. Security is not the only area where the state is failing. Nigeria has more poor people, defined as those living on less than $1.90 a day, than any other country, including India.”
[33] For recent background on the struggles against corporate looters in the energy sector, see Wole Olubanji, “Kick out the profiteers… for a socialist alternative!,” Movement for a Socialist Alternative, September 21, 2020. On December 8, the same national trade union leaders agreed to a tiny reduction in fuel prices which still put pump prices above before they called off the General Strike. Important to note is that in early September the “cost of fuel at the pump has risen by around 15% in recent days, hitting a record high of 162 naira per litre”. Then after the strike was called off the government further increased the pump price to 168 naira per litre, which then led to a meeting with the union leaders who walked out the meeting happy that the government would reduce the price to 162.44 naira. In the run-up to the December 8 meeting it was reported that “The Nigeria Labour Congress has asked the Nigerian government to revert to the old pump price of N158 petrol or face indefinite strike from workers.” The prices never came down, and yet the NLC failed to initiative any form of stike action.
[34] Dagga Tolar, “Workers must reject the endorsement of deregulation and fuel price hike by Labour’s official leadership: for a 48hrs general strike now!”, Movement for a Socialist Alternative, October 5, 2020. The Labour leaders who called off the general strike were led by Ayuba Wabba (who has been President of the NLC since 2015) and Olaleye Quadri (who has been the President of the TUC since 2017). Notably, for the past two years Wabba has also served as the President of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), a successor organization to the imperialist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
[35] Frankmoore Ike and Ronke Idowu, “Edo organised labour rejects strike suspension by national labour leadership,” ChannelsTV, September 28, 2020.
[36] “Unions not consulted on Chevron Nigeria plans to lay-off 1,000 workers,” IndustriALL Global Union, October 15, 2020; “Shell workers determined to overcome Covid-19 challenges,” IndustriALL Global Union, November 6, 2020. Issa Aremu is the vice president of IndustriALL, and he is a member of the executive council of the Nigerian Labour Congress and served as the vice president of the congress during the tenure of Adams Oshiomole. On November 30 Aremu was a member of a IndustriALL delegation (including representatives from NUPENG and PENGASSAN) that visited the site of the new Dangote Refinery to “deepen harmonious industrial relations” with the billionaire. “President of NUPENG, Comrade Williams Akporeha whose Union is seen as a critical stakeholder in the downstream sector of the Petroleum industry on his part extolled the virtues of the President of Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote… He added that the company should have it behind their back that they have a Labour movement that is ready to collaborate with them to achieve greater and fruitful results in the industry.” Emmanuel Ajibulu, “IndustriALL Global Union pays courtesy visit to Dangote refinery,” NUPENG, November 30, 2020. In keeping with the pro-capitalist orientation of such right-wing trade union leaders it is worth recalling that Mele Kolo Kyari, the current head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation once served as the NNPC Group Chairman of PENGASSAN from 1997 to 1999.
[37] In other related strike news, in December the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria “declared an indefinite strike over the sacking of 500 workers” by INTELS and one of their subcontractors with the state then intervening to outlaw the strike. INTELS provides logistics services for the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry, and until recently was most famous for counting the former Vice President of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar, among its major shareholders. INTELS most famous owner is the billionaire profiteer Gabriele Volpi, who until recently served on the advisory board of Dangote’s Gateway Partners.
[38] Neil Munshi, “Nigeria’s Buhari overhauls military as security crisis worsens,” Financial Times, January 26, 2021; Editorial Board, “Nigeria is at risk of becoming a failed state,” Financial Times, December 22, 2020.
These are the footnotes for an excerpt from the second-half of chapter 6 of The Occult Elite: Anti-Communist Paranoia and Other Ruling-Class Delusions (2022).
[1] Curtis MacDougall, Superstition and the Press (Prometheus Books, 1983). On the issue of media misreporting, one scientific study examined 2,337 terminal cancer patients in palliative care and determined that, while most died after 5 months, one percent survived beyond five years. But somehow the Independent newspaper reported in January 2006, in an article titled “’Miracle’ cures shown to work”, that the reason for survival owed to alternative medicine, when nothing of the sort was shown. Instead, the scientists had merely shown that a small number of people recover for no known reason even without any additional form of medical intervention. By way of a contrast, when a 2007 article from the British Medical Journal showed that a cheap practical parenting program could significantly improve children’s behaviour, the story was “unanimously ignored” by the British news media. The article in question is titled “Parenting in Sure Start services for children at risk of developing conduct disorder: pragmatic randomised trial.” Goldacre, Bad Science.
[2] In China acupuncture dropped in popularity at the onset of the First and Second Opium Wars, and its use was only revived in 1949, precisely because it served as a cheap alternative to mainstream medicine in a poverty-stricken country. In line with this practical reasoning, Chairman Mao’s personal physician confirms that Mao did not personally believe in the use of Chinese medicine, but Mao thought it useful as it allowed him to appear to be caring for his populous by creating an extensive network of traditional healers (‘barefoot doctors’). For further details about the invention of “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” see Kim Taylor, Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–1963: A Medicine of Revolution (Routledge Curzon, 2005).
[3] Singh and Ernst, Trick or Treatment?, p.144, p.145. When homeopathy was first introduced to India in 1829, the primary reason for its quick uptake owed much to the fact that it was “perceived as being in opposition to the imperialist medicine practised by the British invaders.” (p.144)
In June 1988, homeopathy received a welcome boost from the scientific community when the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an article by a French scientist named Jacques Benveniste that supported homeopathic claims about the efficacy of their regime of water dilutions. Yet given the magical claims being made in the article, John Maddox, the editor of Nature, added a disclaimer saying that Nature was rerunning the experiment to confirm its legitimacy. The only other time that Maddox had made such a statement was when Nature had published a paper (in 1974) by Uri Geller about his mystical spoon-bending powers. When Benveniste’s experiment was eventually repeated with external supervision by a team from Nature, they determined that the results of the study showed no evidence to support homoeopathy.
[4] For a useful critical overview of the development of health clinics, see the January 1972 issue of Science for the People (pp.22-6). Indeed, Neighborhood Health Centers (NHCs) “were not without their critics. Some black rural and urban physicians worried that the NHCs would compete for Medicaid patients. A 1971 exchange between Dr. Jack Geiger and Dr. Howard Levy of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) and Health-PAC, a New York–based New Left think tank devoted to medical issues, also revealed a negative view of NHCs from a progressive point of view. This exchange revealed that not all members of the movement to transform health care in the United States were happy with the NHCs. Levy critically assessed the NHCs as tools of a medical establishment bent on collecting Office of Economic Opportunity federal dollars without delivering any real transformation of health care or empowerment of the poor.” Nelson, More Than Medicine, p.87.
[5] Joel Schwartz, “Cancer: we cause it, we cure it!,” Science for the People, July 1971, p.12. Writers affiliated to Science for the People who travelled to China, were, like their counterparts in the American mainstream, unfortunately overwhelmed by the alleged curative powers of acupuncture. In fact, the first article that Science for the People carried on this issue was written by the same American biologists who had been featured in a New York Times article earlier in the year that had emphasized the wonders of China’s alternative treatments. Ethan Signer, “Biological science in China,” Science for the People, September 1971, p.5; Seymour Topping, “U.S. biologists in China tell of scientific gains,” New York Times, May 24, 1971.
[6] Jon Feltheimer, “The U.S. ethical drug industry,” Science for the People, July 1972, p.12. Feltheimer correctly explained that the “Food and Drug Administration has caused further deterioration to an already sick situation, by making the public believe that the drug industry is heavily and scientifically regulated.” (p.32) In another excellent article contained within the same issue titled “What do health maintenance organizations maintain?” Britta Fischer highlights two particularly important critical texts: the first was the Medical Committee for Human Rights’ booklet Politics of Health Care (1972) which was edited by Ken Rosenberg and Gordon Schiff; and the second was Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics (Vintage Books, 1971) which they say “is the best radical analysis available.” (p.25)
[7] Joshua Dressier, “Free to choose your own destruction: laetrile, helmets and libertarians,” In These Times, October 5, 1977; Ron Rosenbaum, “Tales from the cancer cure underground,” Harper’s, November 1980. Right-wing health freedom activists had first formed the International Association of Cancer Victims and Friends in 1963, while in 1973 another group that was spun off from this association was the related Cancer Control Society. The latter group counted Lorraine Rosenthal among their cofounders, the individual who was responsible for the production of the National Health Federation documentary, Action for Survival, that had starred Ralph Nader and Adelle Davis. Another significant Laetrile lobby group was Dr. Robert W. Bradford’s Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy (later known as the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Medicine). This group had been formed in 1972 around a nucleus of diehard members of the ultraconservative John Birch Society.
[8] An informative review of this aspect of the Laetrile wars is provided in Mary Ziegler’s book Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2018), pp.121-62. “Arguments based on the right to choose allowed the Laetrile movement to convince politicians who agreed on little else, from feminists and populist Democrats to small-government conservatives. While the medical establishment convincingly insisted that Laetrile had never helped anyone, almost half the states in the nation embraced what many saw as a patient’s right to choose.” (p.143)
[9] James Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1987), p.273.
[10] The John Birch Society’s toxic legacy lives on through the activities of an influential group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, see Olga Khazan, “The opposite of socialized medicine,” The Atlantic, February 25, 2020. Furthermore, to this day Laetrile quack treatments continue to be administered in Tijuana; and until his death in 2004, National Health Federation activist Michael Culbert, the author of the early conservative classic Vitamin B-17–Forbidden Weapon Against Cancer: The Fight for Laetrile (Arlington Press, 1974), had served as the information officer for the Tijuana-based Bio-Medical Center. Although Culbert earned a BA from the University of Wichita, his medical degree was obtained from the Sri-Lankan based Medicina Alternativa – the very same institute which, in 1984, delivered a “doctor of biochemistry degree” to Robert W. Bradford (another leading Laetrile activist).
[11] Ralph Moss still promotes Laetrile and starred in the conspiracy documentary Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering (2014) which was directed by Eric Merola – a director who has produced a number of documentaries promoting the related quackery of Stanislaw Burzynski, the most recent one being Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-Up (2016). In the film Second Opinion Moss recalled how he had initially tried to promote his advocacy of Laetrile within the New York Chapter of Science for the People. However, Moss noted that most members were not interested in a cancer treatment so closely associated with the John Birch Society so Moss and a few others “broke away” to form their own group called “Second Opinion” which printed the first leaflet/publication December 1976 (discussed in documentary from 39 min). Moss’ employer, New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was featured in the September/October 1976 issue of Science for the People, but it is important to highlight that at no time in the magazine’s history did Science for the People cover the issue of Laetrile.
[12] Gary Null rose to health fame after publishing a series of articles in Penthouse magazine in 1979. “The great cancer fraud,” was the title of the first explosive piece in Null’s series exposing the alleged “suppression of independent thought,” an article which named-check many of America’s most notorious cancer fraudsters, including Harry Hoxsey, William Koch, Max Gerson, Linus Pauling, and Ralph Moss and other boosters for Laetrile which Null states had by then “become the central target of American Cancer Society door-slamming.” Null’s series of articles somehow manages to contain no mention of the central importance of right-wing politics to the health freedom movement.
The first article in the Penthouse series was published in September 1979. The second Null article was then published the following month as “The suppression of cancer cures” (which focused on the work of Stanislaw Burzynski); and the final part, which was co-authored with Anne Pitrone in November, was titled “Alternative cancer therapies.” In this final instalment Null introduced his readers to the controversial views of Dr. Dean Burk. After retiring in 1974 from a senior position at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Burk had promoted Laetrile and led campaigns against water fluoridation (which he referred to as “a form of public mass murder”). Finally, it is relevant that in later years that Null, who in his earlier years had been highly influenced by the magical beliefs of Rudolf Steiner, went on to promote dangerous conspiracies about AIDS and became a leading opponent of vaccinations. For a useful examination of the anti-vax movement, see Jennifer Reich, Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines (New York University Press 2016); and for a discussion of the many problems caused by Null’s popular legacy, see Andrew Leslie Phillips, “Alarming Pacifica developments“, The Unrepentant Marxist, January 14, 2014.
It is perhaps fitting that the founder of Penthouse, Bob Guccione, himself played a critical role in promoting paranormal beliefs which were an integral feature of his other publishing outlet, Omni magazine. (Omni was cofounded in 1978 by Bob Guccione’s long-serving business partner and later wife, Kathy Keeton, who also maintained a lifelong commitment to alternative healing modalities. In 1989 Keeton also founded to her founded Longevity magazine which has counted leading health conspiracy-theorist Patrick Holford among their regular columnists.)
[13] In the late 1970s Peter Barry Chowka published a number of articles about fictitious cancer treatments for the East West Journal (which was the official organ of the macrobiotic community). Within the pages of this, and other New Age publications, Chowka revived the mythology of Hoxsey and other persecuted treatments like Laetrile. Chowka currently acts as a regular commentator and host on far-right talk shows like the Hagmann Report which is a close ally in the war on truth with Alex Jones’ more famous InfoWars.
[14] Samuel Epstein, Cancer-gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War (Routledge, 2005), p.7. Epstein’s pioneering cancer research featured prominently in the pages of Science for the People during the 1970s, although their magazines writers remained critical of the liberal orientation of his work. In Science for the People’s 1980 review of Epstein’s classic The Politics of Cancer (Anchor Press, 1979) Bob Ginsburg points out how “Epstein evidently denies that the basic problem is the nature and priorities of capitalism.” (Ginsburg, “Why there is no cancer prevention,” Science for the People, May-June 1980, p.20.)
Other noteworthy books/articles that successfully draw attention to how a focus on prevention and capitalist exploitation would best address the environmental causes of cancer include Robert Van den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy (University of California Press, 1978); Jack McCulloch, Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians and the State in South Africa (James Currey, 2002); Dan Fagin, Toxic Deception: How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law and Endangers Your Health (Common Courage Press, 2002); Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Bloomsbury, 2008); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Rachel Carson’s ecological critique,” Monthly Review, February 1, 2008; Alexey Yablokov et al. (eds.), Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Mahiben Maruthappu et al. “Economic downturns, universal health coverage, and cancer mortality in high- income and middle- income countries, 1990– 2010: A longitudinal analysis,” Lancet, 388(10045), 2016; and Vinayak Prasad, Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). As Mike Marqusee concludes in The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer (OR Books, 2014), “What we need is not a ‘war on cancer’ but a recognition that cancer is a social and environmental issue, and can only be fully addressed through far-reaching economic and political change.” (p.35)
[15] One famous right-wing powerbroker who cut his legislative teeth in the Laetrile wars was Dan Burton, who served as the Republican Congressman for Indiana from 1983 until 2013 and thereafter became a lobbyist for the Church of Scientology. In 1977 while serving as a state representative in Indiana, Burton had led a successful fight to approve the use of Laetrile, although during his later years in Congress he was more famous for the support he led to the misconception that vaccines cause autism. On a related matter Burton’s first wife died from cancer in 2002 and in 2006 he married Dr. Samia Tawil, the women who had helped care for his dying wife. Dr. Samia Burton is currently a board member of the Wongu University of Oriental Medicine, an institution which was founded in 2012 (in Nevada) by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Considering the leading role that Dan Burton played in building the anti-vaccine movement it is significant that right-wing health freedom advocates (whose ideas were popularized by the mainstream media) were at the forefront of undermining public trust in vaccine safety.
Here the one documentary that arguably did most to promote vaccine distrust was DTP: Vaccine Roulette (WRY-TV, 1982) which prominently featured the fearmongering of the then president of the National Health Federation, Dr. Robert Mendelsohn (this controversial affiliation however was not mentioned in the documentary). In the wake of the release of this documentary, worried parents came together to form a group “called Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT), and this group would eventually go on to become the National Vaccine Information Center, which is now the largest organization in America that is committed to eliminating vaccine mandates.” Today this group attempts to maintain a nonpartisan approach to politics – eliciting sizable support from both liberals and the far-right – with major funders of their work including the Albert and Claire Dwoskin Family Foundation (the Dwoskins’ being major Democratic Party donors) and leading Republican Party donors, particularly individuals who are “supporters of libertarian candidate Ron Paul.”
“As befits a movement leader trying to gather together a big tent of supporters, [Barbara Loe Fisher] invokes lefty-sounding environmental terms alongside right-wing libertarian values.” Thus, the single most famous right-wing multimillionaire who continues to donate the most money to Fisher’s National Vaccine Information Centre is the osteopathic physician/vitamin supplement salesmen’ and Covid-19 conspiracist, Joseph Mercola. Another important libertarian funder of the anti-vaccine movement is the hedge fund manager and New York-based philanthropist Bernard Selz, whose wife, Lisa, happens to be the president of a vaccine misinformation group known as the Informed Consent Action Network. This latter group was founded by Del Bigtree, a vocal libertarian who now promotes countless conspiracies through his own widely watched internet talk show, but who first courted fame when, with the assistance of Andrew Wakefield, he produced the controversial documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up To Catastrophe (2016).
Emily Willingham, “Former U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, vaccine foe, now lobbying for Scientology outfit,” Forbes, October 21, 2015; Reich, Calling the Shots, p.59;Anna Kirkland, “The legitimacy of vaccine critics: what is left after the autism hypothesis?,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 37(1), 2011, p.80; Kirkland, Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (NYU Press, 2016); Neena Satija and Lena Sun “A major funder of the anti-vaccine movement has made millions selling natural health products,” Washington Post, December 20, 2019; Bryan Smith, “Dr. Mercola: visionary or quack?,” Chicago magazine, January 31, 2012; for a useful debunking Andrew Wakefield’s anti-vaccine propaganda, including a critical review of Vaxxed, see Jonathan Berman, Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (MIT Press, 2020), pp.69-96; and Brian Deer, The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (Scribe, 2020).
Another highly influential individual who continues to spread anti-vax propaganda across the world is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. whose most recent toxic addition to the world has been his release of the documentary Medical Racism: The New Apartheid (2021) which “mixes real examples of racism in healthcare and vaccine misinformation to push an anti-vaccine agenda on marginalized communities of colour.” Jonathan Jarry, “The anti-vaccine propaganda of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,” McGill Office for Science and Society, April 16, 2021. Tragically Kennedy tricked progressive and even socialist activists (including a leading member of the Black Lives Matter movement) into participating in this film without letting them know the true purpose of the documentary (an issue which is discussed in Will Stone’s article “An anti-vaccine film targeted to black Americans spreads false information,” NPR, June 8, 2021).
For a progressive alternative to Kennedy’s manipulations, in 2022 PBS will be airing Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Medical Racism, “will take a hard look at the evidence for medical racism in America, connecting today’s stories to a long and reprehensible history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis study, the eugenics movement and slavery in the Americas.”
[16] Barrie Cassileth, “After Laetrile, what?,” New England Journal of Medicine, 306, 1982, p.1482, p.1483. In response to Cassileth’s article, James Harvey Young comments within his book The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1992): “The new mode owed much to New Age philosophies and religions from the Far East, as well as to earlier unorthodox traditions that once had great vogue in an earlier America: homeopathic and naturopathic concepts, and the belief that intestinal putrefaction lay at the root of disease.” (p.460)
A well-publicized example of the growing promotion of such mind-cures in the mainstream media came about when Norman Cousins published his autobiographical book Anatomy of an Illness (W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), which was made into a television movie in 1984. For criticisms of this influential book, see Florence Ruderman, “A placebo for the doctor,” Commentary, May 1980; and Sidney Kahn, “The anatomy of Norman Cousins’ illness,” The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, 48, 1981.
[17] For a review of similar occult literature, see E. Patrick Curry, “Carl Jung, Stanislav Grof, and new age medical mysticism,” SRAM, 6(2), March 2002.
[18] In 1953 Giovanni “Gianni” Agnelli (who was introduced earlier in this book) married Marella, whose father, at the time, was working as secretary-general to the Council of Europe.” (The Times obituary, February 26, 2019) “The obituary notes: “For the second half of the 20th century Marella and Gianni Agnelli were, in effect, Italy’s royal family. At their peak, his businesses, which encompassed hundreds of companies including FIAT, Juventus football club and the newspaper La Stampa, constituted a quarter of the value of the country’s stock market.” David Rockefeller appointed Angelli to the international advisory committee of Chase Manhattan Bank. For two detailed examinations of Giovanni Agnelli’s reactionary politics, see Alan Friedman, Agnelli and the Network of Italian Power (Mandarin, 1989); and Jennifer Clark, Mondo Agnelli: Fiat, Chrysler, and the Power of a Dynasty (Wiley, 2011).
[19] Dr. John Richardson and Patricia Griffin (the wife of G. Edward Griffin), Laetrile Case Histories: The Richardson Cancer Clinic Experience (Bantam Books, 1977); Gerald Markle, James Petersen, and Morton Wagenfeld, “Notes from the cancer underground: participation in the Laetrile movement,” Social Science and Medicine, 12, January 1978.
[20] In the early 1970s Dr. Norm Shealy cofounded the Science of Mind Church of Chicago, an institution which eventually evolved to become Holos University. Notably Dr. Shealy trained the “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss. Myss has co-authored many books with Shealy and maintains her own Russian connections through the leading role she played at the helm of Mikhail Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum and in leading the work of the Wisdom University (now Ubiquity University, whose founding was discussed earlier).
[21] Dr. Norm Shealy, “Who runs the world?,” Shealy-Sorin Wellness Center, August 13, 2013. In the same article Dr. Shealy expresses his debt of faith to the work of conspiracy theorist David Icke; while in a later blog post he writes that he had first been inspired by the John Birch Society classic None Dare Call It Conspiracy when he had first read it in the 1970s (see “The perception deception,” Shealy-Sorin Wellness Center, July 30, 2014).
[22] Orrin Hatch’s political orientation is closely connected to the activism of Utah-based health freedom warrior Clinton Miller whose experience of the FDA in the 1950s led him to equate their surveillance of supplement manufacturers as being akin to Hitler’s regime of terror. He therefore soon joined the National Health Federation and played a leading role in opposing the fluoridation of water in Utah. Although in later years Miller played a part in supporting DSHEA, throughout the sixties and seventies he excelled himself as one of the NHF’s most effective spokespersons and lobbyists in helping push through the Proxmire Vitamin Bill. Riding the revivalist tide of right-wing politics, in 1976 Miller then sought the Republican nomination to stand in Utah, and amongst the four other prospective candidates was Orrin Hatch, whose lack of prior involvement in politics allowed Hatch to stand as the “nonpolitician.” To improve his chances of victory, Hatch “ran to the right of his four competitors, seeking the support of the most conservative factions in the state” with one of his “most prominent backers” being Cleon Skousen – the bestselling Mormon writer for the John Birch Society, who helpfully provided finances and volunteers for Hatch’s successful campaign. Matt Canham, “The political birth of Orrin Hatch,” The Salt Lake Tribune, January 31, 2012; for more general context, see Matthew Harris (ed.), Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2019); Jay Logan Rogers, Utah’s right turn: Republican ascendancy and the 1976 U.S. Senate race, M.A. Thesis, University of Utah, 2008; and Michael Tomasky, “The sad trajectory of Orrin Hatch,” New York Times, January 3, 2018.
Once elected in 1977, Senator Hatch embarked upon a long political exploration in conspiratorialism that only ended in 2019, making him the longest serving Republican Senator in history. Hatch thus played a critical role in pressing forward a coalition between the Old Right and the emerging New Right, a coalition that echoed Skousen’s own positive reception among the Reagan administration and the ultraconservative evangelical community centered around Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Critically, the Christian Right “formalized its acceptance of the Mormon Church in 1982 by appointing Skousen to the board of the Council for National Policy.” Skousen’s Freeman Institute (which had been formed in 1971) was subsequently renamed the National Center for Constitutional Studies upon Reagan’s election, and Skousen’s reactionary ideas were now” being taken up by Idaho-based militias and white supremacist groups”; while Reagan remained a fan and praised Skousen’s Center as “doing fine public service in educating Americans.” Alexander Zaitchik, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), p.226, p.229.
“Crucial to the growth of his [Freeman] institute was Skousen’s unlikely friendship with the Korean mogul and self-declared prophet Sun Myung Moon. When Skousen arrived in D.C. at the dawn of the Reagan era, Moon was energetically showering the nascent Christian Right with cash. Skousen made sure that the Freemen Institute benefited from Moon’s largesse, and before long the humble Mormon had established a close working friendship with the billionaire cult leader and tax felon, whose claims of a direct line to God mirrored those of Mormon founding prophet Joseph Smith.” Zaitchik continues: “This odd couple became an even more bizarre trio with the addition of former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who was baptized a Mormon in 1983 and soon became friendly with both Skousen and Moon. Cleaver, one of Mormonism’s most famous midlife converts prior to Glenn Beck, gave lectures under the Freemen Institute banner until 1986.” Zaitchik, Common Nonsense, p.271.
[23] One commentator concluded that: “In their own way, vitamins are at the centre of a cult that is as powerful as any religious movement that has swept across the nation.” Fried, Vitamin Politics, p.28, p.45. “Incredibly, no government agency is presently responsible for testing dietary supplements to assure their purity and potency. One hundred years after Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, supplement manufacturers continue to enjoy a free pass to operate outside the bedrock principle that all drugs should be, at the very least, pure and of reliable potency.” Dan Hurley, Natural Causes, p.159.
[24] Frank Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Greenwood Press, 1985). In the following presidential election, the Populist Party’s presidential candidate was the white supremacist David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While by the late eighties Maureen Salaman was playing host to her own popular television show “Accent on Health,” which was broadcast on a new right-wing evangelical network called Family Christian Broadcasting Network. Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Black Rose Books, 1990), p.27.
[25] Robert Pear, “Health frauds said to prey on elderly,” New York Times, May 31, 1984.
[26] Eric Boyle, Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America (Praeger, 2013), p.158.
[27] Nestle, Food Politics, p.241.
[28] “It is a tribute to the effectiveness of supplement industry lobbying efforts that suggestions made by its leaders in 1985 and again in 1987 were eventually incorporated as elements of the 1994 DSHEA. In 1987, however, the CRN [Council for Responsible Nutrition] proposals merely encouraged the White House to continue to delay publication of regulations until the FDA could guarantee that they ‘would not be too restrictive on industry.’” Nestle, Food Politics, p.244.
[29] Nestle, Food Politics, p.255.
[30] Shortly after the raid, Dr. Jonathan Wright temporarily replaced Maureen Salaman as the president of the National Health Federation.
[31] Hurley, Natural Causes, pp.84-6, p.94. Other celebrities who supported the public service announcements promoted by the supplement industries newly form Health Freedom Task Force included Whoopi Goldberg and Randy Travis; while Victoria Principal starred in her own advert that was produced by the Nutritional Health Alliance.
[32] Reflecting upon his own spiritual awakening, William Gazecki, talking on a conspiracy channel on YouTube (in 2016), explained that: “Complete, open and free knowledge of divinity, the sharing of mind, knowledge and experience, coexistence, you know the Essene lifestyle in its day was quite evolved and unique considering its surrounding cultures. My involvement with the Essenes began when I was quite young, I was in my twenties, and I was introduced to an Essene – it was a woman, I will call her a master, an Essene master, she was a clairvoyant. She developed a system of healing using color, meditation and projection, and reflection of color. It was a very sophisticated system, it was her life’s work, and she taught it. Apparently, she was also involved with esoteric translation of ancient texts, though she was schooled in Sanskrit and perhaps other ancient languages. A very interesting person. I only met her physically once although I was around her work, her students, quite a bit. One of her students was my mother-in-law. I married her daughter, and it was a very, very profound environment to be around, especially at my young age.” (from 50min onwards) “The Knightly News: William Gazecki” (hosted by Michael Henry Dunn), Project Camelot TV YouTube Channel, streamed live on March 31, 2016. (The current leader of the Modern Essenes is holistic health practitioner, Rabbi Gabriel Cousens.)
[33] At the time Steven Fowkes was the president of Direct Action for Treatment Access, a San Francisco based advocacy group which campaigned for rapid drug approvals for treatments relating to diseases like AIDS. For a useful discussion of how drug companies were able to use such campaign groups to push forward their own deregulatory agendas, see Courtney Davis and John Abraham, “Desperately seeking cancer drugs: explaining the emergence and outcomes of accelerated pharmaceutical regulation,” Sociology of Health & Illness, 33(5), 2011.
[34] The main medical advocate promoting “alternative medicine” in the PBS documentary was Dr. Russell Jaffe, a person who, in 1990, had established the Health Studies Collegium, which he did after converting to the cause of alternative medicine following a long career as a science-driven medical practitioner. Other recent integrative researchers based at Dr. Jaffe’s institute included Artemis Simopoulos and Michael Lerner (a cofounder of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute).
[35] Dan Hurley, Natural Causes, pp.226-7. Michael Barkun argues that “No work on the Illuminati published in recent decades – whether secular or religious – has matched the influence of Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, which first appeared in 1991.” Barkun adds: “Oddly enough, Robertson’s views passed nearly unnoticed by the mainstream press for four years, until they became the subject of two lengthy and critical articles in The New York Review of Books in 1995. The articles’ authors, Michael Lind and Jacob Heilbrun, pointed out that Robertson had drawn heavily on the work of both” Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins “and that in fact he was recycling their anti-Semitic theory of history.” Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, p.53.
[36] In Susan Stafford’s autobiography, Stop the Wheel, I Want to Get Off! (Xlibris, 2010) she recalls how privileged she felt to be on the advisory council of Tony Nassif’s Cedars Cultural and Educational Foundation –a group which Stafford points out focused on the problem of keeping the traditional family intact to protect against sex trafficking. (p.18) Later Stafford adds to her story the bizarre claim that “Nearly 800,000 children a year are reported missing in America.” (p.17) For a useful review of the far-rights obsessions with satanic panics and more recently with QAnon, see Ryan Milner, You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape (MIT Press, 2021).
[37] Nestle, Food Politics, p.259. Another ‘health freedom’ program that attacked the FDA was Kevin Miller’s 1994 documentary “Let Truth Be the Bias” a film which was narrated by Earl Ray Jones. Following on from this documentary Miller had gone on to make a series of health-related films that bolstered similar far-right conspiracies, which includes the 2005 documentary “We Become Silent: The Last Days of Health Freedom” which was narrated by another celebrity, Dame Judi Dench. This latter documentary features all manner of conservative authors like Carolyn Dean (author of Death By Medicine) who apparently believes that 784,000 American die prematurely every year “due to modern medicine intervention”; with Dean following this statement by adding that she had “also found studies that said we are only capturing 5 to 20 percent of the actual deaths.” (4.22min onwards). Another talking head of note who features in “We Become Silent” is John Hammell, who is a member of Freedom Force International – a group that describes itself as “a network of men and women from all parts of the world who are concerned over loss of personal liberty and expansion of government power.” The founder of Freedom Force is the influential member of the John Birch Society, G. Edward Griffin (see Sean Easter, “Who is G. Edward Griffin, Beck’s expert on the Federal Reserve?,” Media Matters, March 26, 2011).
[38] Nestle, Food Politics, p.273; Jonathan Berman, Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (MIT Press, 2020), p.169. Latest estimates suggest that globally the supplement sector could be worth around $278 billion a year by 2024.
[39] Hurley, Natural Causes, pp.102-3. The romanticization of natural ways of living extends far beyond medicinal remedies, and particularly since the early 1990s we can see a similar trend with conservative Christian activists like Dr. Sears sermonizing about the need for mothers to return to natural (and allegedly healthier) methods of childbirth and care provision. For more on this see Ornella Moscucci, “Holistic obstetrics: the origins of ‘natural childbirth’ in Britain,” BMJ Postgraduate Medical Journal, 79, 2003; Chris Bobel, The Paradox of Natural Mothering (Temple University Press, 2001); Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (Simon & Schuster, 2013); and Alison Phipps, The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Wiley, 2014).
Oftentimes opposition to the medical establishment is linked to a rejection of mainstream education, both being topics that were popularized in the 1970s by the anti-establishment writings of Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975). Yet Illich’s radical critiques can just as easily serve the needs of the capitalist free-market as can be seen in the following socialist critiques of his work: Herbert Gintis, “Towards a political economy of education: A radical critique of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, 42(1), 1972; and Vicente Navarro, “The industrialization of fetishism or the fetishism of industrialization: A critique of Ivan Illich,” Social Science & Medicine, 9(7), 1975. For a related discussion of the politics of homeschooling, see Heath Brown, “Steve Bannon hopes homeschooling moms will be his new shock troops,” The Daily Beast, September 14, 2021; and Brown’s book Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia University Press, 2021).
[40] James Harvey Young, “The development of the Office of Alternative Medicine in the National Institutes of Health, 1991-1996,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72 (2), 1998, p.280. “Growing up poor in rural Iowa during the 1940s, Tom Harkin, a coal miner’s son, found little reason to put much faith in mainstream medicine. His mother, a Slovenian immigrant, died when Harkin was ten. His brother Frank became deaf at the age of nine. During the 1970s, while Harkin was serving as proudly liberal Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, two of his sisters died from breast cancer. So, in 1991, during his second term in the Senate, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that when he was offered an unconventional treatment for his hay fever allergies, Harkin was willing to give it a try.” Hurley, Natural Causes, p.241.
Initial members of the Office of Alternative Medicine’s advisory panel included best-selling New Age authors Deepak Chopra and Bernie Siegel (who in 1986 was the author of the HarperCollins’ bestseller Love, Medicine & Miracles), not to mention Bedell and Wiewel. Harkin’s key lobbying role paid off when he was able to appoint four of the initial 18 members of the board overseeing the Office of Alternative Medicine, these being Berkley Bendell, Frank Wiewel (“the leader of a group called People Against Cancer, which arranged trips outside the United States for people seeking remedies, such a laetrile”), Ralph Moss (“who published People Against Cancer’s newsletter”), and Gar Hildenbrand (the executive director of the Gerson Institute, “which recommended, among other things, coffee enemas as a way to prevent and treat cancer”). Hurley, Natural Causes, p.243.
Max Gerson (1881-1959) was a Jewish, German-born American physician who developed the Gerson Therapy, a dietary-based alternative cancer treatment that he claimed could cure cancer and most chronic, degenerative diseases. As the fifth edition of the Gerson Therapy Handbook (Gerson Institute, 2013) noted, Max “considered that degenerative diseases were brought on by toxic, degraded food, water and air.” In the same paragraph the book makes the ridiculous statement that it “is rare to find cancer, arthritis, or other degenerative diseases in cultures considered ‘primitive’ by Western civilization.” (p.11)
Gerson therapy has received much positive publicity in recent years as a result of the film-making efforts of Steve Kroschel who has produced and directed four films about the treatment. These four documentaries are The Gerson Miracle (2004), Dying to have Known (2006), The Beautiful Truth (2008), and Heal for Free (2014), with the latter featuring all manner of other proponents of alternative medicine including Edgar Mitchell and Dr. Joseph Mercola. Another right-wing proponent of Gerson therapy is South African right-wing Christian evangelist, Peet Louw, who in 2004 established Christian Resource Network, a one-stop Christian DVD resource distribution and marketing company. Louw in addition to providing “godly”, “anti-Darwinian” onboard entertainment to the passengers of the long-haul bus operator Intercape, is the head of the South African branch of the National Health Federation. Craig McKune, “Bus company offers only ‘godly’ shows,” IOL News, July 24, 2009.
[41] A founding member of the advisory panel of the Office of Alternative Medicine, Barrie Cassileth, has since been highly critical of the Office, saying: “The degree to which nonsense has trickled down to every aspect of this office is astonishing… It’s the only place where opinions are counted as equal to data.” Young, “The development of the Office of Alternative Medicine in the National Institutes of Health, 1991-1996,” p.282. Eugenie Mielczarek and Brian Engler, “Measuring mythology: startling concepts in NCCAM grants,” Skeptical Inquirer, 36(1), January/February 2012; for an abridged version of this study see “Culling non-science from scarce medical resources.”
[42] George Zabrecky and Daniel Monti, “Thomas Jefferson University adds Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences,” Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine, 2017. In the same year Bernie Marcus distributed a gift of $38 million (over five years) to the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora to enable them to establish an Institute for Brain Health that will integrate alternative medical approaches with genuine medical treatments.
[43] For a useful critique of Andrew Weil, see Hans A. Baer, “The work of Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra – two holistic health/New Age Gurus: a critique of the holistic health/New Age movements,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 17(2), June 2003. Baer writes: “Like the larger holistic health movement, both Weil and Chopra engage in a rather limited holism in that they both focus largely on the individual rather than society and its institutions. Rather than encouraging people to become part of social movements that attempt to either reform or revolutionize society, they take the larger society as a given to which one must adjust “ (p.240) For other criticisms of Weil, see Arnold Relman, “A trip to Stonesville: Some notes on Andrew Weil,” The New Republic, December 14, 1998. It is noteworthy that his Weil Foundation, which was set up in 2005 to promote “integrative medicine,” includes on their board of trustees liberal members of the ruling-class like Adele Smith Simmons, the former president of the MacArthur Foundation. For another interesting discussion about philanthropy, see Orac, “Andrew Weil, the Coors Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity, or: “integrative medicine” isn’t just for hippy dippy lefties anymore,” Respectful Insolence blog, November 13, 2015.
[44] Other whacky funders of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine include Lynda Resnick, a lucrative purveyor of pomegranate juice (which she says cures cancer), and manufacturer of the less tasty pomegranate supplement pills. Until recently Resnick sat alongside David Koch on the board of directors of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, which had founded by the famous corporate criminal Michael Milken who, since his release from prison, has gone on to be the co-author of The Taste for Living Cookbook: Mike Milken’s Favorite Recipes for Fighting Cancer (1998). For more on Resnick and Milken’s anti-cancer activism, see Michael Barker, “Juicy cancer revelations: the POM queen’s secrets,” Swans Commentary, October 7, 2013.
[45] In 2017 Henry and Susan Samueli pledged a further $200 million to allow the construction of a new College of Health Sciences focused on the delivery of “interdisciplinary integrative health.”
[46] Dr. Dean Ornish has been celebrated by Forbes magazine as being “one of the seven most powerful teachers in the world,” and has been a physician consultant to Bill Clinton since 1993, serving alongside the former President on the advisory board of the exclusive elite retreat known as Renaissance Weekend. Dr. Ornish, who is the medical editor at the Huffington Post, which is an online outlet run by Arianna Huffington (a close friend of Lynda Resnick), whose content provides its very own microcosm of a snake oil salesman’s carnival wagon, a haven of quackery no less. Just a handful of the many well-known purveyors of nonsense (other than Dr. Ornish) whose new age wonders work grace Huffington Post’s digital netherworld include Ervin Laszlo (discussed earlier), Sandra Ingerman (author of such gems as Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide), Dana Ullman (who is one of America’s leading advocates for homeopathy), and last but not least Deepak Chopra.
[47] “Greedy Tea Party millionaire owns company that turns away cancer patients,” Teamster Nation Blog, March 6, 2013. In recent years Richard Stephenson divorced his longstanding wife and married a chiropractor (Dr. Stacie Stephenson).
[48] Steven Salzberg, “Making a profit from offering ineffective therapies to cancer patients,” Forbes, December 31, 2012. For a scathing criticism of Richard Stephenson’s business practices from one of his former employees, see “CTCA: The Cancer Treatment Charade of America? Profiting on alternative medicine,” Naturopathic Diaries, July 21, 2015.
[49] Amy Gardner, “FreedomWorks tea party group nearly falls apart in fight between old and new guard,” Washington Post, December 25, 2012.
[50] Bastyr University alumni Dr. Lise Alschuler actually served as the department head of naturopathic medicine at Midwestern Regional Medical Center – Cancer Treatment Centers of America; although she is presently employed at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. It is significant that the far-right spiritual movement headed by Rev. Sun Myung Moon also played an important role in building legitimacy for naturopathy. After bailing out the nearly bankrupt University of Bridgeport in 1992, Moon built upon Bridgeport’s already stellar commitment to pseudo-medicine, which in 1991 meant they had become the first US university to officially create a College of Chiropractic, by ensuring that his university established its very own school of Naturopathy (which was opened in 1996). Perry DeAngelis, “The cultiversity of Bridgeport,” The New England Skeptical Society, January 1997.
The comfortable alliance between right-wing activism and alternative medicine has historically speaking always been bolstered when mainstream medical organizations have been overzealous in their attacks on alternative practitioners. A suitable illustration here is provided in the instance of chiropractors, who received welcome publicity during the 1970s and 1980s when the juicy details of the American Medical Association’s (AMA) campaign against them were exposed in the media. This case arose when leaked internal documents from the AMA encouraged chiropractor Chester Wilk to file an anti-trust lawsuit against the AMA as early as 1976. Unfortunately, the lawsuit was only resolved in 1987 when the presiding judge ruled in Wilk’s favour, giving further fuel to the alternative medicine movements nearly completely fictitious claims to be oppressed by the establishment. Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (Corgi, 2009), p.202, p.206. Singh and Ernst provide a critical overview of the mystical origins of chiropractic therapy, but conclude that the scientific evidence suggests that chiropractors are only worth seeing if you have a back problem: even then they offer sage advice on how to consult with a chiropractor, the most important advice being to make sure you are not treated by a fundamentalist chiropractor, that is those who believe every word of the mystical founder of chiropractic therapy, B.J. Palmer.
In Holly Folk’s book, The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), the author provides a short but succinct overview of the politics of chiropractic practitioners. She surmises that: “The participation of chiropractors in radical groups seems to outstrip their natural distribution in the population. Chiropractors form a sizeable contingent of the Tea Party, and also of the Sovereignty and Tax Protest movements. And while the vast majority of chiropractors are not racists, a number of leaders of racist movements have been members of the profession. By far, the best-known chiropractor in the hate movement is Edward Reed Fields, co-founder and past president of the National States Rights Party, who studied at Palmer in the early 1950s. It is not clear whether Fields earned his diploma, unlike James Malcolm Edwards, who graduated from Palmer in 1951. In 1966 Edwards was named Grand Dragon of the United Klans of America for the State of Louisiana. Beyond the KKK, chiropractors have led other controversial movements. The notorious public-access television show Race and Reason was hosted by Florida chiropractor Herbert W. Poinsett. In the 1990s, Scott Anthony Stedeford studied chiropractic as he rose in the ranks of the Aryan Republican Army. More recently, South Carolina-based chiropractor William Carter, an associate of David Duke, has been a leader in the Populist Party and the Council of Concerned Citizens, and was one of the founders of the America First Party.” (p.263)
[51] Like other pharmaceutical companies, Metagenics doesn’t leave their financial fate to vagaries of the magical free-market, and they boost their bulging profits by employing skilled lobbyists to peddle their placebo treatments. One such lobbying outfit fronting for companies like Metagenics and Bristol-Myers Squibb is Walker Martin & Hatch, whose most significant founder and political operative is Scott Hatch, the son of Senator Orrin Hatch. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, “Swallowing anything: The hype behind alternative remedies,” PR Watch, 4(3), 1997. For a useful overview of the longstanding relationship between profiteering and science, see Clifford Conner, The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump (Haymarket Books, 2020).
[52] Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (Faber and Faber,2010), pp.108-9.
[53] Goldacre, Bad Science, p.109.
[54] Michael Hiltzik, “Orrin Hatch is leaving the Senate, but his deadliest law will live on,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2018. Jerry Rubin (1938-1994), the counterculture icon who helped lead the Yippies, ended-up ditching his radical ambitions and spent his final years working as a supplement distributor for a pyramid scheme known as Omnitrition, which itself was founded by three former Herbalife distributors, see Daniel Akst, “Freedom is still Rubin’s motto,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1992.
[55] Hurley, Natural Causes, pp.210-1. Amway, the firm which pioneered Herbalife’s marketing strategy, maintains close links to the supplement industry as Michelle Stout, who serves as Amway’s current regulatory policy director (with a strong focus on the dietary/food supplement sector) is presently the chair of the International Alliance of Dietary Supplement Food Associations.
[56] Young, Medical Messiahs, p.340. For a useful review of Nutrilite’s exploits, see Swann, “The history of efforts to regulate dietary supplements in the USA.”
[57] In 1960, a thirty-nine-year-old activist for the National Health Federation named Charles Crecelius joined Amway and quickly rose through their ranks to serve on the company’s prestigious National Distributors Association Board. By 1965, Crecelius had then become the president of the National Health Federation and remained in leadership roles within the Federation well into the 1980s. Nevertheless, the relationship between Amway and the NHF were mutually reinforcing and when Crecelius was set the task of instigating a mass letter writing campaign to lobby the FDA, it was critical that he could draw upon the hundreds of thousands of struggling “distributors” involved in the type of multilevel supplement marketing schemes that were overseen by Amway. This point is well made in Charles Marshall’s, Vitamins and Minerals: Help or Harm? (George F. Stickley Company, 1983), p.17. Also see, Katherine Carroll, “Leadership lessons from a freedom pioneer,” National Health Federation, September 2015.
[58] Stephen Butterfield, Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise (South End Press, 1985), p.2; also see Kathryn Jones, Amway Forever: The Amazing Story of a Global Business Phenomenon (John Wiley & Sons, 2011); and Kerry Lauerman and Rachel Burstein, “She did it Amway,” Mother Jones, September/October 1996.
[59] Butterfield, Amway, p.13.
[60] Davor Mondom, “Compassionate capitalism: Amway and the role of small-business conservatives in the New Right,” Modern American History, 1(3), 2018.
[61] Kshama Sawant, “‘The wealthy took their best shot at us, and we beat them. Again,’” Socialist Alternative, December 10, 2021.
Under the Mask of Philanthropy 