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of the American worldview ever since George Washington, in his farewell
address, cautioned against the lures of "foreign entanglements." And to por–
tray Lenin as a fanatic is to caricature the nature of his political genius, which
began in his retooling of Marxian abstractions into the ideological engine of
a revolutionary movement.
Not unlike the conspiracists, Pipes seems blinded by his own theory and
enamored of its simplifications. "In the period 1933 through 1945," he
writes, "operational conspiracism reached its apex as two totalitarian leaders
drenched in its phobias and hatreds challenged the world order." What world
order does Pipes have in mind in those years of confusion and upheaval, of
the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War?
It
was obvious then as now
that Hitler and Stalin had expertly manipulated the desperate conditions of
the interwar period. And to identify Hitler and Stalin as "history's two most
powerful and ambitious conspiracist rulers" is to miss the point. Hitler's mad
ranting theories were borrowed from the popular anti-Semi tic press of his
day and sounded a responsive chord among many Germans. And Stalin's
belief that he was threatened on all sides by counterrevolutionary plots, while
deluded, gave
hinl
the pretext he needed to eliminate rivals, real and imag–
ined, even as he projected himself as "Lenin's heir." What distinguishes the
totalitarian empire builders, in any case, is not their second-hand conspiracist
"ideas" but rather their talent for translating them into actions supported and
carried out by millions of their countrymen.
But as a guide
to
current manias, Pipes is very helpful. He covers the
whole spectrum-from O.
J.
Simpson's defenders to Pat Robertson's mus–
ings on international bankers-and points out that conspiracist thinking,
with its conjunction of malign fantasy and character assassination, crosses
ideological boundaries. For every Pat Buchanan there is a Noam Chomsky,
although, as Pipes points out, the Left's conspiracism has usually been more
nuanced than the Right's, especially in our own era. "The Right distributes
homemade videos; the Left has Oliver Stone making Hollywood feature
films that win top awards." Once you get beyond surface differences in
detail-black helicopters, CIA inoculation schemes, the Trilateral
Commission, the "Jewish mafia"-the theories sound alike because, says
Pipes, they "usually contain three basic elements: a powerful, evil, and clan–
destine group that aspires
to
global hegemony; dupes and agents who
extend the group's influence around the world so that it is on the verge of
succeeding; and a valiant but embattled group that urgently needs help to
stave off catastrophe."
Understandably it is the grand theories that engage Pipes. But most
conspiracism occurs on a local, unorganized plane, with only the occasion–
allarge-scale calamity---such as the Oklahoma City bombing-to awaken
us into alarm. One wishes Pipes explored more thoroughly the commonplace
