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  pdftitle={Conspiracy theories and mythologies, and the grey areas in between them},
  pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, 5-2021 (lecture notes for Impakt.TV)},
  hidelinks,
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\title{Conspiracy theories and mythologies, and the grey areas in
between them}
\author{Florian Cramer, 5-2021 (lecture notes for Impakt.TV)}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

We need to distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracy mythologies.
Conspiracy \emph{theories} are speculations backed up by evidence and
probability. Conspiracy mythologies are belief systems that construct an
alternative reality. However, there is no binary distinction but many
grey areas in between the two, as my four examples should demonstrate:

\hypertarget{nsa-internet-surveillance}{%
\section{NSA Internet surveillance}\label{nsa-internet-surveillance}}

The picture shows the poster of the 2009 Hollywood action movie
\emph{The Echelon Conspiracy}. ``Echelon'' was the name under which the
telecommunications surveillance program of the NSA was known since the
1970s. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA's Internet
surveillance four years after the film came out, in 2013.

Before 2013, the near-total surveillance of the Internet through the NSA
and befriended agencies was a common conspiracy theory among hackers
(such as members of Chaos Computer Club), media activists and artists
(among others, heath bunting). Pre-Snowden, they were often dismissed as
being paranoid.

Through Snowden, it became known that the reality of NSA/Five Eyes
Internet surveillance was rather worse than in the pre-2013 conspiracy
theories. This is a striking example for the fact that conspiracy
theories should not be categorically dismissed and declared invalid on
the sole grounds of being conspiracy theories (as Karl Popper and
contemporary followers of his philosophy of critical rationalism do).

\hypertarget{abstract-expressionism}{%
\section{Abstract Expressionism}\label{abstract-expressionism}}

The conspiracy theory is: abstract expressionism was supported and
financed by the CIA. This is true. Globally traveling exhibitions of
American abstract expressionist painting were financed by the CIA in
collaboration with private sponsors. The vehicle for this were the CIA
front organizations \emph{Congress of Cultural Freedom} and
\emph{American Committee for Cultural Freedom}. They also published
intellectual journals in a whole variety of countries and languages.
Abstract expressionism's main evangelist, the art critic Clement
Greenberg, was an official member of the \emph{American Committee for
Cultural Freedom} as was the painter Jackson Pollock.

Abstract painting was used as an ideological weapon in the Cold War
against Soviet communism and its doctrine of socialist realist arts, to
promote the liberalism of the West.

There have been scholarly articles on the CIA's respective activities
since the 1970s, but the first comprehensive research effort into the
CIA financing of abstract expressionism was Frances Stonor Saunders'
1999 book \emph{The Cultural Cold War}.

It should be noted that some of the former CIA front organizations were
continued by the George Soros Foundation in Eastern Europe after 1990.
This brings us to the contemporary conspiracy theories and myths about
Soros that are being cultivated and spread by the extreme right, very
often mixed with antisemitism.

This is a perfect example for the grey zone between fact and fiction in
conspiracy narratives.

Back to proven facts: anyone who would have claimed in the 1950s and
1960s that abstract expressionism was co-financed by the CIA, or in the
1990s and 2000s that the Internet was under total NSA surveillance,
would likely have been declared a conspiracy nut. Both are, however,
true and factual conspiracies.

Let's look at two conspiracy narratives where fact and mythology are
harder to differentiate:

\hypertarget{neoliberalism}{%
\section{Neoliberalism}\label{neoliberalism}}

``Neoliberalism'' can be characterized as both a factual conspiracy and
a left-wing conspiracy narrative.

Let me try to untangle this: Originally, neoliberalism was a term coined
in the late 1930s by European liberal politicians and strategists after
the economic crash of 1929 had brought classical liberalism into an
existential crisis.

Unlike today's common understanding of the term, neoliberalism was
actually the concept of state-regulated capitalism with social security
systems, as opposed to laissez-faire capitalism. Neoliberalism, in this
original meaning, also was the economic system of many continental
European postwar democracies including Germany and the Netherlands.

There \emph{was} a factual neoliberal conspiracy, since the main
thinkers, politicians and proponents of economic, political and
philosophical neoliberalism were, and still are, organized in the Mont
Pèlerin Society which got its name from its first meeting on Mont
Pèlerin in the Swiss Alps in 1947. The Mont Pèlerin Society included
among others the inventor of the word ``conspiracy theory'', the liberal
philosopher Karl Popper, the original coiners of neoliberalism including
the German Alexander von Rüstow and the main thinkers of what is
nowadays identified with deregulated, globalized capitalism: the
economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

The problem, however, is that Hayek and Friedman initially didn't call
themselves neoliberals while the original neoliberals - such as Rüstow
and representatives of the German economic school of ordoliberalism -
eventually left the Mont Pelerin society because they disagreed with the
Hayek school.

Today's left-wing notion of ``neoliberalism'' as deregulated
laissez-faire capitalism factually identifies Hayek's school with
neoliberalism. Likely - and this is my own conspiracy theory - this
historical misunderstanding comes from a misreading of Michel Foucault's
late lectures on neoliberalism. In his lectures, Foucault had correctly,
being the historian he was, referred to West German neoliberalism of the
post-war period and its ordoliberal concept of ``social market
economy''. Outside Europe, his analysis was related to the radical
capitalist reforms fostered by Hayek's school first in Chile under the
Pinochet regime, then in British Thatcherism and U.S. Reagonomics of the
1980s. Perhaps, this misreading is also due to the fact that ``liberal''
in America is generally being (mis)identified with ``left-wing
politics'', so ``neoliberal'' was chosen to clarify the difference.
Eventually, this (mis)understanding of neoliberalism was re-imported by
political activists in Europe during the anti-globalization protests of
the late 1990s and early 2000s.

\hypertarget{cultural-marxism}{%
\section{Cultural Marxism}\label{cultural-marxism}}

``Cultural Marxism'' as it is being used today goes back to an US
American extreme right, antisemitic conspiracy narrative, whose popular
contemporary versions are perpetuated by among others Jordan Peterson
and Thierry Baudet. It typically blames ``Cultural Marxism'' for
corrupting cultural norms and traces its origins to the Frankfurt School
while extending it to contemporary left-wing academic cultural theory,
including feminism and postcolonialism. Often, such as in the case of
Peterson, it lumps it together with postmodernism, such as in his term
of ``postmodern neomarxism''.

The sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit antisemitism of the original
``Cultural Marxism'' narrative is related to the fact that the founders
of the Frankfurt school were of Jewish origin and went into U.S.
American exile during the Third Reich. Blaming the Frankfurt School for
``Cultural Marxism'' seems to be a particularly American misreading,
grounded on the fact that the Frankfurt School called its sociological
research ``critical theory''. In continental Europe, ``critical theory''
is understood as referring only to the Frankfurt School, while in
Anglo-Saxon countries, ``critical theory'' has become an umbrella term
for poststructuralism, cultural studies, feminist studies, postcolonial
studies - many or most of which do not refer to the Frankfurt School at
all, or only to very minor degrees.

But even more hilariously, the contemporary right-wing rejection of
poststructuralism has actually been shared by the Frankfurt School. Its
late representative Jürgen Habermas accused the French poststructuralist
philosophers Foucault and Derrida of being ``neoconservatives'' as early
as in the 1980s. One could go even farther and rightfully claim that the
contemporary political right and the Frankfurt School have more common
ground than both would acknowledge, since they share such ideas and
tropes as cultural pessimism, rejection of mass and popular culture,
critique of alienation and destruction of values in contemporary
capitalism. Adorno even appreciated the right-wing thinker Oswald
Spengler, sharing his cultural pessimism and occidentalism. Adorno's
rejection of black American music, and the language in which he did
that, could perfectly resonate with today's white suprematists.

However, there is a kernel of truth in the conspiracy narrative of
Cultural Marxism for several reasons:

\begin{enumerate}
\def\labelenumi{(\arabic{enumi})}
\item
  the Frankfurt School's Marxist sociology focused on culture rather
  than economy, so it might be called a culturalist school of Marxism;
\item
  aside from the Frankfurt School, there actually has been ``Cultural
  Marxism'' as a proper school or movement, but just not where today's
  right-wing conspiracy mythologists think it is: namely in British
  post-war Marxist cultural studies, of (among others) Raymond Williams
  and Stuart Hall, and its 1980s follow-up in a school that called
  itself Cultural Materialism (``materialism'' in the sense of Marxist
  dialectical materialism). But likely, this (literal) school of
  Cultural Marxism is too little known outside the academic humanities
  to serve as a scapegoat and grand conspiracy narrative.
\item
  lastly, one could argue that the Italian Marxism of Antonio Gramsci
  and his successors was a ``cultural'' Marxism since it abandoned the
  revolution paradigm in favor of obtaining discursive hegemony in
  society. Gramsci, however, is another unfit scapegoat for today's
  extreme right, since the so-called ``Nouvelle Droite'' of Alain de
  Benoist and Guillaume Faye, its equivalents in the European New Right
  (such as Armin Mohler and Götz Kubitschek in Germany), and its
  American equivalent, the ``Alt-Right'' (of Richard Spencer, Jared
  Taylor and others), actually adopted Gramsci's hegemony strategy for
  themselves and could therefore be said to be cultural fascists who use
  neo-Marxist - respectively: ``cultural Marxist'' - tactics.
\end{enumerate}

\end{document}