(14) Sun 27 Apr 97 13:58 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Committed to Conspiracy St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:1c87 229b6f40 @MSGID: 1:278/15 0013369e Summary: America's paranoia fuels wild McVeigh theories and helps Heaven's Gate members believe in suicide COMMITTED TO CONSPIRACY 04/13/97 Portland Oregonian The courthouse is protected by fleets of police cars, by steel fences and concrete barricades. The suspect is held in a cell under the court building, so that he need not be driven through the streets of Denver, where he might be sprung from captivity by his allies -- or killed by them lest he reveal too much. Everything about the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the man accused of blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City two years ago, suggests a siege mentality. And, especially in America, this seems entirely prudent. Ever Since Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's probable assassin, was himself assassinated in a jailhouse corridor, unsolved mysteries have cursed America. They have fueled wild, paranoid theories. They have even made it easier for 39 cult members to believe mass suicide would bring salvation, via a UFO. Oswald was almost certainly a loner who shot Kennedy because of an insane grudge. Yet his own death, which forestalled the trial that might have provided a full accounting of his means and motives, unleashed much wilder theories: that he was acting on behalf of the Cubans, the Mafia, or even the U.S. government. itself. Polls suggest that a mere 20% 20 percent of Americans believe Oswald committed the crime unassisted. Three decades after the Kennedy assassination, an amazing 49% 49 percent of Americans are inclined to believe the CIA planned the killing of the president. Even before its opening last week, the McVeigh trial had become a feast of conspiracy and paranoia. The suspect allegedly killed 168 people with his bomb in Oklahoma because he believed the federal government was in league with shadowy foreign forces, that it aimed to enslave Americans by imposing something called a New World Order, and that armed resistance was the right response. To mitigate his client's supposed paranoia, McVeigh's defense lawyer is said to have prepared still more paranoid theories. The suspect was not acting alone, he will argue. He was the tool of a Middle Eastern terrorist conspiracy, perhaps connected to the Philippines, perhaps to a religious cult. All of which justifies the barricades around the courthouse: If the suspect were to escape, or if he were to be silenced by a hitman, elaborate fantasies about his motives and allegiances would survive for years. Yet But even a model trial, pursued to its conclusion, is unlikely to probably won't silence all wild theories. That is because American paranoia has grown worse since the Kennedy assassination. Then, a successful trial might have been enough to calm imaginations. It is too late for that now. PARANOIA PROLIFERATES America was founded in tolerance. ; and Its defense of the freedom to believe anything has always fostered maverick ideas. But until quite recently, truly whacky wacky suspicions had to be sustained by coercion or by ignorance. Sen. Joseph McCarthy defended his conspiracy theories about communists in the 1950s by intimidating doubters; fantasies around Kennedy grew up largely mostly because officials withheld the evidence that might have shot them down. These days, however, suspicions sprout more easily. People believe President Clinton may have been complicit in the death of his friend, Vince Vincent Foster; they believe the government may have suppressed evidence of a missile that supposedly brought down a TWA airliner a year ago; they believe the AIDS virus may have been a plot to kill off homosexuals and blacks. In the past month, the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has swallowed a preposterous yarn about his assassination, involving an alliance of secret servicemen, Secret Service agents, Mafiosi and white racists. It seems to make no difference that, 28 years ago, James Earl Ray was found guilty of the killing beyond reasonable doubt. Because of America's huge capacity for paranoia, the McVeigh trial cannot bury all the fantasies that will be aired in the courtroom. McVeigh's belief that the federal government is in the grip of foreign demons is shared by the 60,000 Americans who belong to right-wing militias, and probably by the 5 million or so who sympathize with their ideas. In the world's most information-rich society, overloaded minds lose the ability to distinguish between sound facts and nonsense. In an age when so much reality is virtual, virtually anything goes. A SHARED LEVEL Which brings up cults. It used to be said that the advance of science would extinguish religion. But the devotees of Heaven's Gate, found in their suicide shrouds a few days before the McVeigh trial opened, built Web sites on the Internet even as they believed they had come to earth Earth on spaceships, and that the same mode of transport would one day take them to a higher level. Like McVeigh's paranoid fantasies, variants of these cult fantasies are shared by millions: There are as many as 3,500 cults, or "new religious groups," in America. ; And in the space of half a decade, the past five years, Americans have doubled their consumption of New Age books to 10 million a year. There seems no doubt that cult delusions share much with militia fantasies, and that the two egg each other on. Both thrive on the Internet. Both are millenarian: The militias fear the coming of a repressive New World Order, the cultists look forward to a New Age. Both represent a revolt against ordinary standards of evidence: The militias believe in hidden political forces, the cults in hidden supernatural ones. The capacity to believe in one kind of fantasy makes belief in the other kind easier. The more Kennedy-style conspiracy theories permeate America, the more Americans will join cults. Perhaps this is a fair price for freedom: Any beliefs should be tolerated, so long as they cause no harm. But this brings up a final paradox. The Oklahoma bomber, by this standard, deserves no sympathy; and yet but McVeigh's lawyer may well might earn him some by suggesting that he was part of some international plot. On the other hand, the suicidal cultists have been viewed with contempt by most Americans. Yet, But by pursuing mad beliefs without disturbing others, the devotees of Heaven's Gate were American heroes of a kind. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.4/M 10 Beta * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 109/7 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 140/23 SEEN-BY: 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/777 1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 380/64 382/92 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 732/10 2401/0 2442/0 SEEN-BY: 3603/420 3606/10 3612/41 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 SEEN-BY: 3667/1 3674/1 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801