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PARTISAN REVIEW
theories to describe them. One can begin with President Clinton, whose
critics have accused him of improbable crimes ranging from murder to the
laundering of drug money, while he, not to be outdone, enlists the services
of a political adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, who in the pages of the
New
Yorker
has attributed the Cold War to a homosexual conspiracy and is him–
self referred to by White House colleagues as "Grassy Knoll."
How did we come · to this place? How did fevered speculations nor–
mally purveyed on the shabby fringes of our political culture-the domain,
says Pipes, of "the politically disaffected and the culturally suspicious"–
become popular sport and, worse, an essential part of our public dialogue?
Pipes's timely survey puts the question in historical perspective. He notes
that the phenomenon of "conspiracism" dates all the way back to the
Crusades, but first gained serious credence in the aftermath of the French
Revolution. With that event, he writes, "the power of ideas and the poten–
tial for radical change" became a fact of history. "Counterrevolutionaries
and other supporters of the old order, within France and outside it" were
nonplussed by the spectacle of "unruly mobs" tearing down the
ancien
regime,
"a divinely sanctioned system." The true culprits were hidden from
view: Bavarian Illuminati, Templars, Freemasons, or a combination of the
three. Elaborate theories were set forth in dense books rigged out as stur–
dy vessels of earnest scholarship. Thus was born the genre that gave us, a
century later, the most notorious and durable of conspiracist tracts, The
Protocols of the Elders
if
Zion,
which outlined a global Jewish plot to "sub–
due all the nations" and eventually achieve "sovereignty over all the world."
Pipes's narrative, though both authoritative and briskly told, succumbs
in places to the reductionism he so reasonably deplores. He is not a sure
guide through the labyrinths of twentieth-century history, particularly
when he turns to its great totalitarian systems. He presents the "Leninist
corpus" as a kind of fantasy: "financiers and manufacturers group together
to extract riches not rightfully due them by keeping down workers' wages
and controlling the government... .In capi talist countries, the state is said
to represent business interests, which it helps by repressing the working
class, offering hidden subsidies to corporations, creating loopholes to allow
cartels, and funneling tax money to businesses. This subservience also
extends to foreign policy. In particular, the capitalist need for inexpensive
raw materials and labor, combined with their desire for monopolistic con–
trol of markets, drives imperialist states to fight wars of expansion." But
Lenin's adaptation of Marx's theory of warring classes remains distinctly
plausible, even in this rendition. The charge that wars are fought for eco–
nomic reasons is not outlandish when applied, for example, to Germany's
aggressions in World War
I,
and it is not so great a stretch from Lenin's
distrust of "imperialist states" to the isolationism that has been a component
