More Considerations on Conspiracies

It goes on and on, right? You’ve got the Edith Wilson presidency, in which the wife of the President – who married him after he was elected as a widower, mind you – assumed the duties of his office without the slightest hint of or attempt at public consent or approval, after president Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke in October of 1919. Between then and January 1921, his wife – unelected, unannounced, unacknowledged, and with all the bravery and spirit and not a jot or tittle of legal or moral authority – assumed the duties of the presidency.

Then there’s the cancer-causing properties of cigarettes. Most folks know that in the mid-20th century before official science linking lung cancer and tobacco use was established the tobacco industry did such insane things as hiring doctors to sell cigarettes. What many don’t know is that even into the late 1970’s – over a decade after the US Surgeon General had established the requirement of a health warning on all cigarette and cigar packaging – international tobacco companies conspired at the highest levels to minimize, hide, and obfuscate the health risks of smoking from the general public for the sake of maintaining their lucrative and addicted market share. I want to note here that I have distinct and reliable memories of some pretty questionable metrics around the “truth.org” anti-smoking ads that the tobacco companies were forced to create after the big class action settlement back in the ’90s. I’m having difficulty finding that information now, and it may be apocryphal, or the problem wasn’t as big as I remembered, or it was one of those jokes that got out of hand. (“Say, these anti-smoking commercials make me want a cig! Hahahah!” “Yeah hahahaha hey wait…”)

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident that started the Vietnam War is particularly interesting because of the way they used a legitimate incident to fabricate a second, more serious one that was then used as a premise to pursue military escalation, eventually leading to lots of dead kids, lots of rich military contractors, and lots of deformed Vietnamese babies (do not google “agent orange birth defects” if you’re not prepared to have nightmares. I’m not linking any relevant content; the hint is enough).

Then there’s the abandoned – thank $DEITY – Operation Northwoods, in which the US government proposed launching “terrorist” attacks against itself and blaming Cuba as a precept for war against that country. Of course the one most of us are most familiar with, the Iran-Contra affair in which the United States Government sold military equipment to sanctioned and open US opponent/critic Iran to fund the radical right-ring insurgent Contras in Nicaragua. Some of that entanglement also provided the pathway for the CIA to fund – whether intentionally or not remains an open question – a significant portion of the incoming crack cocaine in the 1980s, the devastating effects of which are still being felt. Nearly every word of those two sentences is a federal crime. The most instrumental person in those crimes, Oliver North, is now a well-known TV talking head who often tells us what we should think about the military, government, and ethics.

Many poor black people had claimed for years the feds were in on the crack situation and were blown off as…well, crackpots. Turned out they were right. As were the hippies and black radicals of the sixties who were accused of paranoia and fantasy when they told people they were being infiltrated and even directed by outside elements, probably the government.

And that’s not even the biggest fish in the barrel…