Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America [Hardcover]

Professor Robert Alan Goldberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2001

There is a hunger for conspiracy news in America. Hundreds of Internet websites, magazines, newsletters, even entire publishing houses, disseminate information on invisible enemies and their secret activities, subversions, and coverups. Those who suspect conspiracies behind events in the news, such as the crash of TWA Flight 800 or the death of Marilyn Monroe, join generations of Americans, from the colonial period to the present day, who have entertained visions of vast plots. In this enthralling book Robert Goldberg focuses on five major conspiracy theories of the past half-century, examining how they became widely popular in the United States and why they have remained so. In the post-World War II decades conspiracy theories have become more numerous, more commonly believed, and more deeply embedded in our culture, Goldberg contends. He investigates conspiracy theories regarding the Roswell UFO incident, the Communist threat, the rise of the Antichrist, the assassination of President John Kennedy, and the Jewish plot against black America, in each case taking historical, social, and political environments into account. Conspiracy theories are not merely the products of a lunatic fringe, the author shows. Rather, paranoid rhetoric and thinking are disturbingly central in America today. With media validation and dissemination of conspiracy ideas, and federal government behaviour that damages public confidence and faith, the ground is fertile for conspiracy thinking.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Historian Goldberg (Barry Goldwater) analyzes "conspiracism" in American history with balance and precision, presenting conspiracy belief as a traditional part of our culture rather than a fringe response from deranged or abnormal personalities. Goldberg discusses a range of examples, from the Salem witch trials, to the abolitionists' slave power conspiracies vs. the Confederates' slave insurrection plots, to the Klan's hatred of African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. However, he focuses his study on five post-World War II conspiracy theories: the Communist fifth column, the belief in the Antichrist, the assassination of JFK, the plot against black America, and the Roswell incident concerning a purported alien attack. Goldberg's writing is clear and vivid, and his willingness to tackle conspiracies emanating from many points of the political spectrum makes his argument more cogent. Underlying his analysis is the view that both the media and, ironically, the government have been instrumental in making these five conspiracy theories (and others) more credible. This important and unusually accessible study is strongly recommended for academic libraries, most public libraries, and large high school libraries. Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"An extraordinarily well-written and carefully analyzed study of alleged conspiracies in our midst since the end of World War II." -- Leonard Dinnerstein, University of Arizona

"From esoteric theologies . . . political scandals to blockbuster movies, Goldberg skillfully guides us through the foremost conspiracy theories in contemporary America." -- Leo P. Ribuffo, George Washington University

. . .[C]lear and vivid. . . tackle[s] conspiracies emanating from many points of the political spectrum. . . [An] important and unusally accessible study. -- Library Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Printing edition (November 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300090005
• ISBN-13: 978-0300090000
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #260,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read, November 8, 2001

By 

Anne Freed (SLC, Utah United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (Hardcover)

Conspiracy is a subject many Americans have on their minds since Setember 11, 2001. It seems their is a need to use conspiracy thinking as a coping mechanism. Robert Goldberg's new book explains this phenomenon. Perhaps conspiracy beliefs are a means for control and peace of mind. Compelling and complicated, Goldberg ventures into a maze of detail, in an effort to make sense of the nonsensical. From the Roswell incident to the Kennedy assassination Goldberg does not provide the reader with an answer to "was there really a conspiracy" but instead tries to reason the theme through history. What a pleasure to discover a writer as talented as Robert Alan Goldberg.

25 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Power Tools, March 9, 2003

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (Hardcover)

ENEMIES WITHIN affords deep insight into the gothic "conspiricism" that has infected our public discourse in the United States. Countersubversives such as Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, Louis Farrakhan, Pat Robertson, and various writers like Whitley Strieber all have used conspiricism to rally the troops (or consumers) to their various causes, to suppress or destroy rivals, to form power bases through an insurgency against the mainstream, and to make money. American as apple pie, they are enacting the same "paranoid style" first described by Richard Hofstadter in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, a style which was initiated by the likes of Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and in later generations by the Anti-Masonic movement in 1820s New York, and the Know Nothings a generation later.

Goldberg argues that Hofstadter's theory looks in retrospect too bound to the ideas of deviant psychology popular after WWII. Instead, he sees conspiricism, rightly, I think, as a struggle for power. To demonstrate his thesis, he takes five well-known recent examples of conspiracy thinking: the "master conspiracy" (i.e. the Birchites Robert Welch's fabrication of the New World Order which postulates an elite who run the world through the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign relations, " "The Rise of the Antichrist (exampled through Pat Robertson's take on Revelations), "The View from the Grassy Knoll" (the Kennedy assassination), "Jewish Devils and the War on Black America" (a brief history of the exploitation of the exploitation of the ill-feeling between Louis Farrakhan and Jews, and "The Roswell Incident" (the "cover-up" of the alien invasion in 1947, and the mainstreaming of these theories through TV -- the X-Files, Independence Day, etc.)

What's fascinating is that Goldberg shows how these various conspiracy often borrow from and reinforce each other. The KKK, Farrakhan and Robertson, for instance, all point to the "Jewish banking conspiracy" or ZOG of running the world, pulling the strings behind the scenes, duping the masses into thinking the governments they live under have any real power while the real masters start wars, and kill national leaders like Kennedy when those leaders interfere with their grand designs. Farrakhan, like those who accuse the government of a disinformation campaign over the so-called Roswell incident, teaches his followers that there is "mother plane" circling the earth, ready to pick up the faithful when the time of tribulation ends, a strand of belief that links them also to the revelations scenario of Robertson and other millenialist preachers.

Goldberg summarizes all these discourses with admirable clarity, showing how all use using circular logic, exclude other explanations, and, in the process form dense self-referential webs of commentary that cannot be breached by reason. Whether its the Illuminati, ZOG, the hand-picked members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Masons, or aliens who have infiltrated the highest reaches of power, the story is always the same: a powerful elite whose only scruple is the preservation of power, and the making of profits is behind everything. Conspiricism, in Goldberg's view, offers the faithful complete and seamless explanations for the radical discontinuities and fragmentation of modern and post-modern existence.

He also shows how the entertainment industry has found this all very profitable. The mainstream media has learned from Oliver Stone's remake of the Kennedy assassination, that rewriting history to conform to fringe theories can capture the public imagination, and more important, loose the purse strings. Conspiracy theories have also been mainstreamed by U.S. corporations notes Goldberg, such as U-Haul, which uses the standard bulb-headed, big-eyed alien icon on the side of its New Mexico trailers and moving vans as emblematic of that state.

Goldberg notes with equanimity that there have been cover-ups fostered by government bureaucrats, and that these cover-ups have eroded the public's faith in its institutions, i.e., the infiltration of the FBI into the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims, or the paranoid scrutiny of Martin Luther King by Hoover's men, the black men whose syphilis was never treated in Tuskegee as part of an "experiment," etc. Given these abuses of power, Goldberg says conspiricism gains in credibility and influence. At the same time, he argues that this conspiricism is serving to debilitate belief in government to an unwarranted extent. When Ronald Reagan expressed the idea that "government is not the solution, but that it is the problem," he gave voice to a group of countersubversives that later managed to make David Koresh a hero, who spun a web of egregious nonsense about Vincent Foster's suicide to support and extend their attacks on the Clintons and, in the process, driven nearly mad with hatred, turned the U.S. government into a machine to wreak vengeance on a too-amorous young woman and her prevaricating paramour.

He notes the proliferation of "Gates" from the original "Watergate," to include such "conspiracies" as "Whitewatergate," "Travelgate," "Irangate," has blurred them all into one messy symbol of the business-as-usual corruption of the U.S. government, when in fact some of these events did constitute abuses of power, while many more did not. What countersubeversives know is that if you can get your label to stick to an issue, a label that either contains the seed of your side of the argument or negatively characterizes your opponents side, you have already half won the battle. Thus the jockeying around such phrases as "Tort Reform," which more correctly should be called "The Liability Ceiling Law."

Conspiracy thinking is not new in America. But, Goldberg notes, the intensity of this type of thinking has picked up considerably the past five decades. Most recently, he says, driven by an insatiable desire for profits, the purveyors of infotainment have raised the volume of conspiricist claims to such a pitch that it is difficult to advance less scabrous theories against them. Reasonable theories don't draw audiences, he suggests. They can't sell ad space. They don't foster fanaticism, build mass support, or scare into submission citizens or politicians who hold opposing views.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Truth Is In Here!, October 25, 2001

By 

Michael Mack "Shoe Tree Hugger" (Phoenix, AZ, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (Hardcover)

Once again, Goldberg has brilliantly researched and written about another American phenomenon, just as he did in his recent Goldwater biography. This time around, the good doctor explores in magnificent detail, several enduring conspiracies and the reason why so many of us want to believe that greater forces are at work. The book is gripping and honest, and of course, the documentation is excellent. Why doesn't this man have his own talk show on the History Channel? That's one conspiracy yet to be unraveled.