Among the Truthers (25 page)

The prototypical Doomsayer is an Evangelical Christian who vigilantly scans the news for signs that the world is moving toward some final, apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil. Early American history is littered with Doomsayer cults founded on this practice. But over the course of the twentieth century, as described in Chapter 1, the Doomsaying tradition fused with secular New World Order conspiracy theories that predict America's subjugation by a godless evil empire based in Moscow, London, Turtle Bay, or Tora Bora.

In many cases, the Evangelical Doomsayers I've met are not actually Evangelists, or even Christian: So saturated is American culture with the imagery of Christian eschatology that it has been widely co-opted by esoteric religious movements and cults such as Jonestown, the Nation of Islam, Garveyites, Rastafarians, Heaven's Gate, and the Branch Davidians. As scholar James Alan Patterson has reported, the common denominator in all of these is not any particular conception of God or theology, but a fascination with “visions pertaining to endtime, imminent cataclysm, judgment, and redemption.”

Once you strip away their jargon, radicalized Marxists also can be classified as Evangelical Doomsayers. Clipped to its spiritual essentials, their view of society is one in which injustice upon injustice will be heaped upon the toiling classes until some final cataclysmic revolution against the capitalist oppressor will deliver a classless New Jerusalem, in which man himself will be transformed into a viceless, iron-willed slave to the revolution. A similar analysis applies to Marxism's
tier-mondiste
offshoot, “decolonization,” which Frantz Fanon rhapsodically described in
The
Wretched of the Earth
as “quite simply the substitution of one ‘species' of mankind by another . . . the creation of new men.”

The Firebrand

Every radical political movement needs a street leader—someone with the self-confidence required to bark commands into a megaphone, and the charisma required to elicit compliance. For the New York City–area Truther movement, that man is Luke Rudkowski, a blond, baby-faced twenty-four-year-old Polish American construction worker who lives with his parents in Brooklyn's working-class Bensonhurst neighborhood. At rallies, Rudkowski always dresses the part of Truther statesman—in a funeral director's suit that he bought for two dollars at the Salvation Army. At Truther “street actions” on 9/11 anniversaries, he tends to affect a solemn, weary look—as if his knowledge about the New World Order weighs heavily on his shoulders.

It was April 2007 when Rudkowski made a name for himself in activist circles. At the time, he already was dabbling with the 9/11 Truth movement—but he was frustrated by its emphasis on low-key tactics. Rudkowski believed it would take something more than blog postings and church-basement lectures to rouse America from its ignorance. One day, by chance, he noticed a headline in one of his father's Polish-language newspapers: Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski—Trilateral Commission cofounder, Council on Foreign Relations member, Bilderberger—was speaking on the Upper East Side. In an instant, Rudkowski realized what he had to do.

A few hours later, Rudkowski was in the crowd at the 92nd Street Y, activated camcorder in hand. After patiently waiting during Brzezinski's presentation about the war on terrorism, he rose to his feet during the Q&A, and delivered this statement, captured for all to see on a widely circulated YouTube video:

Earlier on this year, you gave a speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where you alluded to the fact that the Bush Administration may stage a terrorist attack to justify a military action against Iran. And then in your book, you also acknowledged the fact that a memo was uncovered where Bush and Blair discussed painting a U2 spy plane in U.N. colors so Saddam would shoot it down. Although you have argued that deceptions to the American people may be necessary in order to deal with these enemies, how are we to know how many other terrorist incidents have been state-sponsored false-flag incidents including the largest one—the attacks of 9/11? How do we know, how do the American people know that 9/11 wasn't staged, wasn't engineered by you, David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and Bilderberg Group, sir?

As Rudkowski can be heard saying all this on the video, the crowd remains silent—until he gets to the end, when the radical gist of Rudkowski's accusation dawns on everyone all at once, and the room erupts in boos. Rudkowski perseveres, but is reduced to shouting staccato barbs through the repeated pleas to “sit down and shut up”:

It's a question. Answer my question. You sponsored al-Qaeda, sir. You are a criminal. You sponsored al-Qaeda. In 1979, you gave them money. That's true. You are CFR. scum. You are CFR. and New World Order scum. You and David Rockefeller will never have a New World Order. National sovereignty will prevail. Answer my question. Answer my question . . .

At this point, event organizers approach Rudkowski and ask him to turn off his video camera. Instead, he starts screaming, “9/11 was an inside job! Mr. Brzezinski is responsible!” and, “Wake up, people!” Then he dashes for the exit, camera rolling, guards in pursuit. Only after putting a few blocks between himself and the Y does Rudkowski stop to catch his breath, turn the camera around, and triumphantly declare into the lens: “Yeah, Brzezinski—you got yours!” The YouTube clip ends with Rudkowski on the subway back to Brooklyn, removing his suit jacket and white shirt to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “F**k the Federal Reserve.”

The next day, Rudkowski put his video from the Brzezinski confrontation on YouTube. Almost immediately, the link went viral. Accolades poured in from Truthers around the world, who were thrilled to see their theories get an airing—if only for a few seconds—at a respectable Manhattan speaking event. Admirers contacted Rudkowski, asking if they could be part of his next guerilla theater stunt.

Coalescing under the banner, “We Are Change,” Rudkowski and his followers began ambushing other alleged New World Order insiders at public events—including Rudy Giuliani, who then was making a run for the GOP presidential nomination. They also slipped into a subway car carrying New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and managed to hector him for a full sixteen minutes. Rudkowski got up during a pretaping of Stephen Colbert's
The Colbert Report
and began speechifying about the Bilderberg Group—an episode that didn't make it to the air, but, like everything else We Are Change does, was posted with much fanfare on YouTube. In their most ambitious stunt, group members secretly configured a public-address sound system in a Barnes & Noble bookstore the day before a scheduled appearance by Bill Clinton. While the former president signed books, the system was activated, causing a loud disembodied voice to announce that “9/11 was an inside job.”

In time, Rudkowski became a regular on Russian television news station RT (which often features conspiracy theorists), as well as Alex Jones' popular Texas-based radio show. Some even have begun speaking of Rudkowski as Jones' protégé—high praise in the world of right-wing conspiracism. And he has begun branching out from the Truth movement to other causes. In one widely circulated video from the 2009 G–20 Conference in Pittsburgh, for instance, Rudkowski, megaphone in hand, can be seen shouting slogans as he leads a pack of protestors being routed by an advancing line of police: “We are American citizens! This is not China. This is not Nazi Germany! We have freedom of assembly under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and we shall uphold our rights as American citizens because we love this country, and we love national sovereignty! . . . U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Eventually, the Pittsburgh police arrested Rudkowski for disorderly conduct and threw him in jail for a night—an event that he played for pity on his web postings. Increasingly, Rudkowski presented himself to his followers as a sort of Truther martyr, destined to suffer until the New World Order had been overthrown. One Facebook status update for September 2009, for instance, read: “When a man goes in front of a wave of oppression, he is beat down, but it is his persistence and willingness to stand there, that motivates and inspires others to stand with him and in that creating a relentless force that cannot be beaten down nor stopped . . .” This was followed by: “I want to thank everyone for the love and support, I do this for you and all humanity,” and “Another long night[with] a lot to do . . . 4 a.m. now, been up since 7 a.m. yesterday. But I am thankful for the energy I get from your support because without [it], I wouldn't be as strong as I am.” The follow-up comments from his admirers included, “You're a hero for the republic,” “I fear if 9/11 truth is uncovered, the elite will stage something bigger to ‘shut you up,' ” and “It takes courage to go against the grain, Luke. Keep up the good work!”

C
onspiracists of the firebrand type are the easiest ones to spot, because they always are the noisiest. For the firebrand, conspiracism supplies an ideological pretext to strike shocking, militant political postures, and thereby satisfy his hunger for public attention. Most specimens of the type are in their late teens or early twenties, a time when the developing mind is most vulnerable to angry, totalizing ideologies.

In another age, the firebrand manifested himself as a communist or anarchist. But since those creeds now seem merely quaint—not shocking—he instinctively has migrated to more exotic beliefs.

Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies in Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of this theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?”

—Karl Popper

The writing and telling of history is bedeviled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperation and shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again.

—Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Enter Satan

In the late 1920s, a British anthropologist named Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard deposited himself in the lightly wooded savannah of Southern Sudan, and took up residence with the traditional farmers and hunter-gatherers of the Azande tribe. The Zande people were divided into a number of separate tribal kingdoms, each with its own dynastic aristocracy, separated from one another by stretches of unpopulated bushland. But as Evans-Pritchard discovered, they all shared very specific beliefs about the supernatural, the details of which became the centerpiece of his 1937 classic,
Witchcraft
,
Oracles
,
And Magic Among the Azande
.

In the Zande mythology, people do not die of “natural” causes: Almost always, blame can be traced back to a witch in the community, or a conspiracy of multiple witches, who have cursed the unlucky victim. Witchcraft, they imagine, is not an abstraction, but an actual substance found in the body (attached to the edge of the liver), which grows with age (thus making the elderly especially vulnerable to sorcery allegations), and passes from generation to generation. At night, this witchcraft substance leaves the body of its host, floats through the air in a haze of bright light, and implants itself in its target—sometimes without the witch even being aware. Once implanted, the vampiric miasma slowly eats away at the soul of the unlucky recipient, until the soul has been entirely consumed and the victim dies.

As Evans-Pritchard continued to study the Azande, he noticed that witchcraft and its related mythology were used to explain not just death, but virtually every aspect of life. “Its influence is plainly stamped on law and morals, etiquette and religion; it is prominent in technology and language,” he wrote in his 1937 book. “If blight seizes the ground-nut crop, it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game, it is witchcraft; if women laboriously bale water out of a pool and are rewarded by but a few small fish it is witchcraft; if termites do not rise when their swarming is due and a cold useless night is spent in waiting for their flight, it is witchcraft; if a wife is sulky and unresponsive to her husband, it is witchcraft.”

The Zande worldview may sound fatalistic. But it is not. For their mythology also incorporates an array of countermeasures that victims can execute to block, and even reverse, the effect of witchcraft and magic spells.

Many Zande tribespeople, Evans-Pritchard found, made a regular visit to local oracles, who would inform them if they were under attack from nearby witches—and would even supply them with their names. In the most popular oracular approach, a smidgen of red powder extracted from a poisonous forest insect was thrust down the throat of a fowl, who would then enter violent convulsions. The accusation of witchcraft put to the oracle would be decided on the basis of whether the fowl died or not.

Once the Zande tribesperson found out who was bewitching him, he could confront the witch, and ask him to desist. Or he could threaten vengeance magic. Or he could simply move out of the area for a short while, since it is imagined that the witchcraft, being physical in its transmission, can travel only short distances. Whatever path the putative victim chose, the important point was that he could do
something
. He was not without recourse in the face of uncooperative nuts, animals, termites, and women.

The beliefs of the Azande are unique in their particulars. But they exhibit a universal aspect of human nature: our need for control. When we can't control something directly, we invent gods and witches who can; gods and witches who themselves can be controlled through chants, ceremonies, amulets, and magic.

In primitive societies, religion typically is a polytheistic affair involving a menagerie of bickering deities. Homer, for instance, described the Trojan War as the result of a jealous argument among the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. In the
Aeneid
, similarly, Virgil cast the founding of Rome as originating in a petty grudge held by the goddess Juno against the defeated Trojans. But this began to change—at least, in regards to what we now call the Western tradition—with the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, whose basic elements began taking form approximately three thousand years ago.

In the emerging theology of the Israelite religion, there was only one true God, the all-powerful Yahweh. In Deuteronomy (among other places in the Bible), he pronounced polytheism to be a sin: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God . . .” Through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the Abrahamic faiths—this once-novel vision of a world controlled by a single divine entity eventually would become the overarching theme of religious life in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the New World.

But even from early days, monotheistic adherents were presented with an agonizing philosophical problem: the presence of evil. Under polytheism, tragedies could be explained by the careless cruelty of warring deities (of which Homer's
Odyssey
, for instance, was one long catalog). But under monotheism, that dodge was difficult. If Yahweh was omnipotent and benign, why did he permit natural disasters, mass murders, war, and other forms of slaughter? In short, why did he let bad things to happen to good people?

It is a question presented (but not satisfyingly answered) in the book of Job, when one of God's angels afflicts the long-suffering protagonist with boils, destroys all his possessions, and kills his ten children—all for no other reason than to see how the ostensibly pious man would handle it. Job's agonized plea to God expresses the timeless confusion and agony of a man who has done everything right in life, yet sees his virtue repaid with suffering:

My body is clothed with worms and scabs,

my skin is broken and festering.

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle,

and they come to an end without hope . . .

When I think my bed will comfort me

and my couch will ease my complaint,

even then you frighten me with dreams

and terrify me with visions,

so that I prefer strangling and death,

rather than this body of mine.

I despise my life; I would not live forever.

Let me alone; my days have no meaning.

What is man that you make so much of him,

that you give him so much attention,

that you examine him every morning

and test him every moment?

The godly helper who sets Job's agonies in motion is none other than Satan. But he is not playing his later role of “horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents' tears” (as Milton described him). In the book of Job, as throughout the Hebrew Bible, Satan functions as the divine court's chief prosecutor—a vital, if necessarily sinister, member of God's angelic entourage. (His name derives from the Hebrew
ha-satan
, meaning “the accuser.”) His primary mission is to test Job's spiritual mettle, not make him suffer for suffering's sake. It is only much later, in Revelation, that Satan assumes his form as a dragon-like creature bent on destroying God's kingdom.

As T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley argue in their 2005 book,
The Birth of Satan
:
Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots
, this satanic transformation arose from a profound psychic need to divide the single God of the Hebrew Bible into two components—an omnipotent King of Kings to receive human prayers, and a demon to take the blame when those prayers weren't answered. By bending the rules of monotheism to permit the existence of a lesser, malevolent superhuman entity, Christians could ponder a less existentially numbing answer to the prophet Amos' chilling question, “Does disaster befall a city, unless the
LORD
has done it?”

The seeds of Satan's transformation were sown amid the Babylonian exile, at a time when the idea of monotheism was taking its definitive place in the canon of the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish scholars were casting about to explain how Yahweh could have permitted them to be thrown out of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar II. The Babylonian exile also coincided with the religious dualism conceived by the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra, originator of Zoroastrianism, who viewed existence as a struggle between light and darkness. In the Zoroastrian faith, a god of light (Ahura Mazda) battles for supremacy against a “fiendish spirit” known as Ahriman—a battle involving a Christ-like savior figure (Saoshyant) that culminates in a decidedly Revelation-like eschatological climax.

“This type of storytelling sought to reveal the reason for the frustrated hopes of a people who could not reconcile their misfortunes with their theology,” conclude Wray and Mobley in
The Birth of Satan
. “If the descendants of Abraham and Sarah were partners to a covenant with the Architect of the Universe, then why had their cultural and political properties been condemned by a parade of Near Eastern tyrants? The response of the Jewish apocalypticists was to construct a new theory to explain this conundrum. They built the theory from pieces of Jewish folklore, puzzling Biblical passages, and the myths of surrounding cultures. The theory revealed a cosmic conspiracy at work, led by a supernatural criminal mastermind (Satan) who controlled a vast, nefarious network of demonic forces dedicated to frustrating the divine purpose at every turn.”

It's a dark vision of the world. Yet it came with a happy ending. As Norman Cohn noted in his definitive 1957 study of medieval millenarian cults,
The Pursuit of the Millennium
, it is no coincidence that the Bible's earliest apocalyptic fantasies—the dream sequences contained in the book of Daniel—were written during the agonies and upheavals of the Maccabean revolt. Daniel's revolutionary eschatology allowed Jews to believe that their suffering was not in vain: The plagues rained down upon the Jews were merely building up to a climactic cosmic counterreaction, with the Saints of God rising up at the last possible moment to defeat Satan and establish a timeless earthly utopia.

Centuries later, the same theme would be picked up by Christians—in far more lurid fashion—in Revelation, which some scholars interpret as an allegorical commentary on the Roman persecution of Christians dating from the first century AD. Eventually, it would also find its way into the eschatology of Islamists, who imagine that jihad and martyrdom will propel the world toward a one-state paradise, cleansed of conspiring infidels, under the reign of Sharia.

This analysis shows why conspiracism and millenarianism often go together: Both of them put the fact of human suffering at the center of the human condition. Conspiracism is a strategy for explaining the origin of that suffering. Millenarianism is a strategy for forging meaning from it: Once our tears and blood fill up some cosmic chalice, the scales of history will tip, and New Jerusalem will open its gates.

The Devil's Legacy

Aside from Christian Doomsayers, for whom conspiracism and scripture often are one and the same, very few of the conspiracy theorists I've met are conventionally observant members of mainstream Christian denominations. Consistent with their generalized skepticism toward any conventional institution that commands the obeisance of the masses, most nonevangelical conspiracy theorists tend to embrace the dissident fringes of American religious life. Richard Gage, for instance, has been an active supporter of the Unity movement, which emphasizes New Age concepts such as life force and spiritual healing. Steven Jones, a celebrity Truther who pioneered the myth that the World Trade Center buildings were brought down with thermite, is a Mormon who has authored an article called “Behold My Hands,” in which he presents a mishmash of Mayan-era evidence aimed at proving that Jesus Christ once visited America. Robert Bowman, a former military man who directed the Pentagon's early Star Wars antimissile research in the 1970s, declares himself the “Bishop Protector of the Society of Blessed XXIII,” a pro-gay, pro-feminist, pacifist, “pre-Constantinian” fringe offshoot of Catholicism.

But such heterodoxy is immaterial: The mythology of Satan and the End Times is hard-wired so deep into the circuitry of Judeo-Christian civilization that its influence has become universal—even in regard to avowedly secular ideologies. Marx may have declared religion to be “the opiate of the people.” But as noted previously, his theory of class struggle—whereby history's final act would play out in a Manichean struggle between a virtuous proletariat and its evil capitalist overlords—would have been recognizable to the ancient prophets. (It is telling that the first writer to use the term “communism,” French utopian socialist Étienne Cabet, took his inspiration from Christianity.) In the minds of many secularists, government long ago replaced God as our omnipotent protector. And when that secular god fails in some epic way—when a president is killed in broad daylight, or the heart of Manhattan is pulverized—his worshippers tend to hunt for Lucifers and Christ-killers.