[PEN-L:4130] Re: Illuminaughtiness

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tom Walker wrote:

>  Any one remember ex-FBI agent Dan Smoot and his John
> Birch Society rantings about the "Invisible Government" run by the Council
> on Foreign Relations? How does one totally dismiss such a "right-wing
> conspiracy theorist" and then seriously entertain, say, Noam Chomsky, Holly
> Sklar or Phillip Agee? None dare call it coincidence.

There just may be some purely verbal problems with the word
"conspiracy." Clearly the Foreign Relations Council is part of
the machinery by means of which the u.s. capitalist class rules.
And Sklar, Chomsky, Agee, Domhoff among others have
documented this in depth -- enough depth so that I would sort
of dismiss as the enemy anyone a member of the Council.

But I can see no earthly gain, and a good deal of loss, in calling
it a conspiracy. It lets capitalism off the hook and implicitly
ascribes all the ills of capitalism to those individually evil and
conspiring capitalists. If the FRC is a conspiracy, then there
is nothing in the world that is not a conspiracy, and "conspiracy"
is just a synonym for "Being."

Carrol