Arthur Goldwag's Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies

Kinokuniya are having a sale (20% off all imported books!) so I decided to break my pledge to not buy any more books and picked up an intriguing volume called "Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies" by a writer called Arthur Goldwag. Having never heard of the author before I had no idea what opinion he would have on conspiracism but I bought it anyway because I liked the cover! (Eyes right!) And also because it looked like an amusing and concise exposition of an eclectic run through of the various psychological stances people employ to make sense of the world.

As with most books I talk about I haven't read it yet but I flicked through it looking for references to Lyndon LaRouche and came to this brilliant passage that explains how conspiracy theorists like to engage in conspiracies themselves and organize on conspiratorial lines:

[T]he erstwhile science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) and the ex-Marxist Lyndon LaRouche each claimed to have been the victims of a cabal of international bankers. Both the House of Windsor and the Bush family have been the objects of intense suspicion in conspiracist thinking. 9/11 Truthers are as likely to be right-wing racists as left-wing anarchists, but they all loathe their government with equal intensity. Some of these people are mentally ill: their personalities and ideations are shaped (or distorted) by the same pathologies; they don't so much agree with each other as exhibit the same symptoms. Because they are narcissistic, they think of themselves as gods; because they are paranoid, they are secretive and defensive; because they are grandiose, they fancy themselves the victims of vast conspiracies - or they organize and even execute vast conspiracies themselves.

Whilst LaRouche has hardly been that successful in executing his vast conspiracy he is the founder of his grandly named Executive Intelligence Review which distributes press releases such as this : "LaRouche Announces the Role He Will Play in a Post-Obama Administration". And his followers have managed to infiltrate the Democratic Party such as Kesha Rogers who has won a Congressional candidate nomination whose own press releases are shaped (or distorted) by the same pathologies as Lyndon LaRouche - in particular his belief that the British Royal Family is still running the world:

June 3, 2010 -- Let the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico be a lesson to the American people: the British and those who run British Petroleum, still consider the United States as one of their colonies. The time has come to expropriate these British SOBs, kick them out and let them take their puppet Barack Obama with them back to Britain.

Anyway, enough of this digression, I'll try to get round to reading Goldwag's book and hopefully to reviewing it too. In the meantime, his blog is here.

Update: Arthur Goldwag has helpfully provided some links to information regarding Lyndon LaRouche's antipathy towards Obama. This cocktail of racist invective, lasciviousnes and conspiracism is taken from a speech LaRouche gave in 2008:

Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father–he wasn’t much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5′s operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called “Coming in Samoa.” [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you’ll find Obama’s ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody’s climbing and swinging from the branches there–from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime–which is a branch of British intelligence.


Some more on LaRouche here and here.