10AR15-12

( - previous issue - )

Apologia Report 15:12 (1,017)

March 31, 2010

Subject: Tracking and debunking conspiracy theories

In this issue:

CONSPIRACY THEORIES - George Noory replaces "radio legend" Art Bell

+ new book summarizing "key proponents and tenets of each theory ... an evenhanded, lively, and fascinating look"

NATIVE AMERICAN SPIRITUALITY - "desecrated, mocked and abused by non-Indian 'wannabes,' cultists, and self-styled 'New Age shamans'"

----

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

"Host George Noory brings talk of the supernatural back to earth" by David Ferrell -- "On his 'Coast to Coast' show, heard nightly here on KFI-AM, guests and callers can talk about ghosts, Bigfoot and who killed JFK - and not be mocked. ...

"'You hear these stories,' Noory said, citing still another tale of

mind-boggling weirdness, 'and they're chilling.' People wait on hold for up to an hour and a half, he said, to relate their own tales of ghosts, premonitions, alien abductions, government conspiracies, yeti encounters, out-of-body experiences and other inscrutable mysteries during the open-phone-lines segment of the program. ...

"Founded in the early 1990s by radio legend Art Bell, who hosted the program from tiny Pahrump, Nev., 'Coast to Coast' grew rapidly into a national clearinghouse for the strange and unusual. After Bell entered semi-retirement, Noory took over the role of primary weeknight host seven years ago. (Ian Punnett, Bell and George Knapp handle the show on most Saturday and Sunday nights.)"

Noory is heard "on 528 stations across the United States and

Canada, plus Sirius XM satellite radio - by an estimated 3 million

listeners a week ... a huge share of the overnight market nationwide, including Los Angeles....

"'As far as the edge of science and reality is concerned, George is the center of the world right now,' said author Whitley Strieber, a regular guest whose No. 1 bestseller, Communion: A True Story [1], was supposedly drawn from firsthand experience, as an alien abductee. Strieber claims that a device was implanted in his ear in 1989 by invaders who entered his home dressed in black. He bristles at the cynics and likens Noory's show to a room with a warm fire where people with 'rejected knowledge' can chitchat in comfort. ...

"Scholars attribute the show's popularity to the same human

curiosity that has made ghost and UFO programs a staple of the History Channel and other television networks. ...

"Based partly on feedback from 1,500 e-mails a day, Noory has begun giving more air time to conspiracies, which run the gamut from age-old speculations about who killed John F. Kennedy to Hoagland's claims that NASA is hiding evidence of past civilizations on the moon and Mars." Los Angeles Times; Feb 21 '10; ppD1, D16; <www.tinyurl.com/yhc2qqy>.

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, by David Aaronovitch [2] -- updates the ongoing list with topics such as the Priory of Scion and the death of Vince Foster. Booklist (Feb 1 '10, n.p.) calls it "an evenhanded, lively, and fascinating look not just at the people who believe these theories but also at the people who promote them: the evidence manipulators, the liars, the con artists, and the almost pathetically gullible and uninformed."

Kirkus (Feb 15 '10) notes that Aaronovitch "describes the key

proponents and tenets of each conspiracy theory and the 'evasions, half-truths, and bad science' on which most are based." And that he "notes that the Arab world still widely invokes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document claiming that the world will be ruled by a supreme Jewish autocrat, and that by the 1970s the young and educated in the United States and Europe believed in a Kennedy assassination conspiracy. ... Unfortunately, such charges enjoy a patina of credence because of genuine U.S. government coverups, including Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair. But the real reason educated, middle-class individuals circulate conspiracy theories is the human need for a story, writes the author. We crave order, cannot tolerate the chaos of random events and are quick to insist that 'they' (Jews, communists, big corporations, etc.) are responsible."

In its review, Library Journal (Feb 1 '10, n.p.) mentions

Aaronovitch's conclusion: "Humans always seek comfort in knowing exactly what has happened, and the absence of certainty (because of the way history is) makes us susceptible to those who think they know more than we do. There is comfort in thinking that historical events cannot have random causes but must operate instead from some preconceived (and often diabolical) notion."

In her New York Times review (Feb 16 '10; ppC1, C4), Michiko

Kakutani puts it this way: "The principle of Occam's razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one - or as the character Gil Grissom in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, 'think horses, not zebras.' ...

"In most cases, Mr. Aaronovitch notes, conspiracy theorists would rather tie themselves into complicated knots and postulate all sorts of improbable secret connections than accept a simple, more obvious explanation. ...

"Although this book owes a huge debt to the classic study on this subject - Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style in American Politics [3] - Mr. Aaronovitch, who is a columnist for The Times of London, deconstructs a dizzying array of conspiracy theories in these pages with unsparing logic, common sense and at times exasperated wit.

"Some of the theories he examines are infamous for their malignity and horrific consequences, like the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: fabricated documents used to justify anti-Semitism in Russia, Nazi Germany and more recently in places like Iran and Gaza." <www.tinyurl.com/ydju5da>

---

NATIVE AMERICAN SPIRITUALITY

The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, by Suzanne Owen [4] -- Ian Corbett's review explains that "Owen examines the ways in which non-Native Americans have appropriated Native American spirituality without the consent of the original practitioners, and how Native Americans themselves, in response to such cultural aggression, have re-interpreted their own traditions." Corbett describes the "serious issues of religious exploitation and the ignorance of protocol, that is, the context and source of authority of the original ceremonies...." Later, this is further described as the "expropriation and unintelligent pillaging of their spiritual resources," by Corbett.

"Owen rightly avoids the term 'religion,' denoting ritual

repetition, as an expression that does not exist in most Native

American languages (and which therefore gave rise to much

misunderstanding on the part of early Christian missionaries). She

prefers the term 'spirituality,' as do the people themselves,

indicating not an abstract set of beliefs or worship rituals but, in

Vine Deloria Junior's words, 'an attitude towards the world which,

when seen in a social setting, can be transmitted to others by the

proper behaviour of the possessors of the tradition.' It refers to the

totality of life and experience."

Owen notes Native American objections which lament that they have "suffered 'the unspeakable indignity of having our most precious ceremonies and spiritual practices desecrated, mocked and abused by non-Indian "wannabes," hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled "New Age shamans" and their followers.' ...

"A distressing aspect of the whole situation, which the author

perceptively realises, is that the influence of Christian religious

systems and analysis has influenced many native thinkers to interpret their own traditions according to these lights." This having resulted in "a pan-Indian spirituality and [ambition] to universalize [Indian] spirituality and its major ceremonies into a system of beliefs and practices, analogous to western religions, that was both accessible to and suitable for all people, a world religion alongside others. ... It is unfortunate that, in this way, some of the most eloquent advocates for native spirituality have unwittingly been encouraged to dilute and vulgarise it. ...

"In a final chapter on the state of current scholarship, Owen

analyses some of the 'inside' (native) and 'outside' (non-native)

practitioners. She hints at, without answering, the dilemma as to

whether a purely academic study of spirituality is possible." Modern Believing, 51:1 - 2010, pp69-72.

-------

SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Communion: A True Story, by Whitley Strieber (Harper reprint,

2008, paperback, 336 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/y95g8tn>

2 - Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, by David Aaronovitch (Riverhead, 2010, hardcover, 400 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/yf8ahjl>

3 - Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard Hofstadter

(Vintage reprint, 2008, paperback, 368 pages)

<www.tinyurl.com/ybjql3a>

4 - The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, by Suzanne Owen (Continuum, 2009, hardcover, 204 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/yd9s76b> (Note: At the list price of $130, that's 63.7 cents per page.)

---

( - next issue - )