Book Review:
by Daniel Pipes
New York: Simon & Schuster (Free Press), 1997, 258 pages, hardbound, $25
Editor’s Note: EIR first published this article in Vol. 25, No. 8, February 20, 1998, pp.58-63.
Those among you who have visited a zoo, seen a relevant documentary, or, perhaps, visited the bank of the Nile, might recall the more startling function of the tail of a hippopotamus. Although I have never actually witnessed author Daniel Pipes’ tongue in motion, I can attest that his writing instrument provides a remarkable simulation of that same memorable function. It is fair to say, that the phenomenon within manifest human mental behavior, which corresponds to the witnessed act of defecation by the hippopotamus, is an incoherent stream of outpouring of utterly irrational rage. I shall not repeat here the uncouth popular term which says as much.
That sort of irrationalism, is the underlying characteristic of Pipes’ book taken as a whole. It is a flight away from the functions of human cognitive processes, into a wild, ranting exhibition of the same sort of anti-cognitive emotional association which is typical of the worst sort of populist “conspiracy-theorizing.”
In this case, reading Pipes’ book suggests a meaningful comparison to certain other current authors, who, like the pathetic “Third Wave” sophist, Alvin Toffler, lacking any serious original thought to contribute, appear to have turned into a book, what is little more than an arbitrary opinion shallowly superimposed upon a mixed bag of collected newspaper clippings and library-research notations collected on index cards. In the present case, this collecting, largely the work of his staff, is fairly described by Pipes himself as “cheerfully moving from one completely unrelated subject to the next.”
It can be fairly said of the book as a whole, that Pipes has made some weird sort of associative order among these fragments presumably supplied, largely, by a conspiracy of Pipes with his staff. Presumably, he has trimmed each selection a bit, and, then, like Toffler, added sufficient continuity to the resulting, small cracks between, to turn the resulting literary run-on rant as a whole, into what became, unfortunately, a published book.
Overall, it can be said of the leading arguments within his book, that either Pipes was simply acting out a fit of rage, or, engaged in what is, unfortunately, a currently not uncommon sort of contemporary, willful, academic lying—or, plausibly, both. He attempts, thus, by “moving from one completely unrelated subject to the next,” to befuddle the credulous into accepting his dogma on the subject of what he calls “conspiracism.”
Thus, the book falls into the category of things which ought to be reviewed, if at all, solely for their significance as clinical examples of aberrant behavior. Here, we expose a pathological characteristic of the book in a way designed to help our readers better to understand some of the important, apparently infectious lunacies against which the citizen is obliged to contend in the course of current daily life.
For example: Although, to his credit, among Pipes’ significant number of references to me, he does manage to make one refreshing correction of the lunatic libels of Richard Mellon Scaife’s protégé, Dennis King,[[1]] his treatment of his (chiefly) secondary and tertiary sources on my writings, is otherwise as absurd, and willfully reckless in its disregard for readily accessible truth, as the borrowings from the same “Grub Street” source, King, by local D.C.-area quackpot Dr. Jerrold Post,[[2]] or King’s own lying rant in such various locations as Roy M. Cohn’s weekly Our Town throwaway,[[3]] in the Doubleday book sponsored by Mellon Scaife’s intelligence-community cronies,[[4]] and Robert Bartley’s Mellon Scaife-allied Wall Street Journal.[[5]]
Otherwise, relative to the myth about “conspiracy theories” popularized by liberal ideologue Richard Hofstadter’s 1967 “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,”[[6]] there is essentially nothing axiomatically new in Pipes’ argument.[[7]] What is new, is the book’s effort to popularize a fruity neologism, conspiracism, now recently adopted by such conspiratorial denizens of the Internet’s left bank as Dennis King crony John Foster “Chip” Berlet. In short, matters have come full circle: rather than simply rejecting what the irrational Hofstadter classed as “conspiracy theories,” Pipes et al. have spun the thread of Hofstadter’s dogma into a “conspiracy theory,” the theory of “conspiracism.”
For our purposes here, it is better to begin with the evidence against Hofstadter’s (and Herbert Marcuse’s) absurd dogma, first, and, after that, apply that evidence to the special case of Pipes’ attempted myth-making.
To Conspire Is Human
There are, admittedly, many Americans today, who have been brainwashed in the manner demonstrated by the knee-jerk reaction in which they spit out “conspiracy theory,” at even the suggestion that the shooter had intended the bullet to hit the victim at which the shooter had aimed. Hofstadter’s and Pipes’ paranoia on this subject put to one side, there are three distinguishable, leading types of conspiracy-doctrines encountered in the U.S.A., in particular, today.
First, there are alleged conspiracies for which people are, or have been formerly imprisoned. Disallowing such conspiracy-charges, would have the benefit of emptying many of the beds of the presently overcrowded prison-system, especially the Federal institutions.[[8]] Persons who pretend to reject “conspiracy theories,” might be respected for their sincerity, at least, if they spent more efforts to the purpose of cleaning up the relevant corruption in the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal courts on this account.
Second, there are populist forms of “conspiracy theories,” such as those circulated by ideologues of the John Birch Society, which are identical to, or about as bad, or perhaps sometimes worse hokum, than those which the U.S. Department of Justice dispenses. We shall turn to that matter below.
Third, there is the truth. The pervasive fraud in Pipes’ dogma, is that he evades the fact, that the primary issue is whether a certain type of, or particular report of a conspiracy is truthful, or not. On this account, he perpetrates the widely practiced fraud of petitio principii: asserting that the mere evidence that a conspiracy is implied in an argument of a case, is presumptive proof that that argument is therefore axiomatically false, without further consideration. On this point of petitio principii, conspiracy theorists such as Pipes conspire to agree. In a number of the cases referenced by Pipes, such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, truthful, rigorous investigations have shown that the infamous Warren Commission report was simply an outright hoax, and that the line of criticism employed by former prosecutor Jim Garrison was truthful, and also consistent with the way things do work, all too often, in the world in our times.[[9]]
Back during the 1966-1973 interval, I used to begin one part of my one-semester introduction to economics, by emphasizing to the students, that, without the benefit of a far-flung conspiracy, for example, one could not have procured what used to be a nickel cup of coffee in a diner. Without a more or less highly reticulated set of agreements among a relatively smaller or more widespread concert of purposeful action, society could not perform any useful social functions—or, many more or less commonplace kinds of undesirable ones, either.
The 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, for example, was a conspiratorial action directed against what it accurately defined as a British conspiracy. The U.S. Federal Constitution, as drafted in 1787-1789, to which virtually every patriot has sworn allegiance, was crafted by a conspiracy, is a conspiracy, and every person who is guided by its influence, is a conspirator. Whoever denies the significance of conspiracies in history, marks himself as either pitiably illiterate, or simply, like the late Herbert Marcuse, a liar, such as Hofstadter, or Daniel Pipes.
We shall now begin our argument with this third case: that persons who deny the existence of conspiracies are untruthful, either because they are liars or simply foolish. In the course of developing the argument, we shall employ as a model illustration, my own account of the “conspiratorial” role of the British monarchy in the modern world.
To conspire is human.
The characteristic of human behavior, is a social practice lacking in any other species. In using the term “conspiracy,” we emphasize a willful factor in concerted action, or inaction. This willful factor, reflects either one, or a combination of both distinctive elements of human mental functioning, learning and cognition.
In this connection, we must distinguish “learning” by individual ants, octopi, and apes, absolutely from the qualitatively different quality of “learning” characteristic of individual human social behavior. Among other species, apes, even Britain’s professed great ape, Prince Philip,[[10]] for example, learn, and even transmit the experience of learning, for better or worse, to their progeny. The essential difference, is that among humans, the characteristic of individual learning, has an underlying cognitive feature, lacking in the social behavior of inferior species (such as Britain’s Prince Philip professes himself to be).
To be precise, human learning is dominated by a permeating, underlying axiomatic quality, the quality of cognition, or Reason, which is best typified by the sovereign, independent action of an individual human mind, which produces a validated (or, validatable) new discovery of a physical principle. This latter might be either an original discovery of that principle, or the reenactment of that act of original discovery by a student in a Classical humanist program of education.
This latter quality, cognition, or Reason, occurs not only within the domain of physical science narrowly defined. It defines the absolute distinction between Classical (i.e., cognitive/agapic) and contrary (sensationalist/erotic) art-forms.[[11]] This is the notion crucial for a rational comprehension of the subject-area of “conspiracy.” A summary outline of the role of cognition, is a required interpolation at this juncture.
That is, the validated discovery of a principle of nature, yields a kind of mental object which, while provably efficient in nature, is not the kind of thought-object defined by the senses. These higher, cognitive sorts of thought-objects, are termed by Plato and others, ideas.
In the Kepler-Leibniz-Gauss-Riemann development of the notion variously termed “Analysis Situs,” “modular functions,” “hypergeometries,” “multiply-connected” manifolds, etc., these “ideas” are treated as “dimensions” of a physical geometry rooted in the principles and practice of experimental physical science. Each such discovered “principle,” or “dimensionality,” is prompted by a vicious contradiction—otherwise describable as an ontological paradox within the domain of experimental physical science—within existing scientific belief. The idea which overcomes that paradox, the new, validated principle, then becomes the needed newly discovered principle of science.
In Classical art-forms, the function of ontological paradox is assumed by a similar kind of posed contradiction in meaning, called metaphor. The ideas which correspond to validatable solutions for such metaphors, have the same kind of significance, respecting the cognitive functions of the human mind itself, as valid discoveries of physical principles serve us in the domain of experimental physical science. The metaphor, which, in its role as paradox, prompted the discovery of the principled solution (idea), thereafter serves, in communication, as the name for the idea whose discovery it prompted.
In both instances, science and Classical art, the ideas so generated by cognition can not be explicitly communicated in a sensory or deductive mode; they can not be derived within the terms of a communications medium as such. Hence, the axiomatic absurdity of Norbert Wiener’s radical-positivist hoax, “information theory.” They are communicated only by virtue of the shared cognitive experience of generating the idea, as solution, from its point of departure, as the idea of an ontological paradox. In short, the name of an idea, is simply a label for the common cognitive experience of solving an ontological paradox, and validating that solution.
For convenience, list both validated scientific discoveries of principle and the ideas of Classical art-forms as “metaphors.” This serves to simplify the needed exposition here, and incurs no error of principle.
The distinctive experimental fact about the human species as a whole, is that were our species’ potential relative population-density (“ecological potential”) defined as we define it for the higher apes as a group, the following would be the case: Under the conditions existing on this planet during the recent two millions years of advancing and retreating “ice ages,” had the human species’ behavior been that of a higher ape, at no time could the living population have exceeded several millions individuals. The orders of magnitude of functionally increasing difference in “ecological potential,” between the apes and mankind, are the cumulative result of the development of validatable ideas (metaphors) generated through social replication of individual cognitive discovery of such ideas of principle.
In summary, it is by reenacting the validated original discoveries of metaphor contributed by preceding generations, that cognition defines a distinct type of ordering principle as distinctively characteristic of the human species. Thus, when we speak of the relatively inferior form of human behavior, mere learning, we must distinguish human learning from the kinds of learning typical of animals; in human behavior, the distinctively human individual’s potential for cognition underlies the function of learning. Thus, the history of the human species, is the history of ideas; thus, the social behavior determining willfully concerted action within society, is a reflection of those functions of the individual will, associated with the acquisition and deployment of cognitively generated ideas.
Here lies the disgusting absurdity of the arguments of those assorted illiterates and hoaxsters who subscribe to the views of a Marcuse, Hofstadter, or Daniel Pipes, on the subject of “conspiracies.”
How People Conspire
For reason of this distinctive feature of human behavior, social behavior is dominated by what must be recognized as various expressions of conspiracy. Attention is now focused upon the two principal formal aspects of conspiracies, as conspiracies are viewed by choosing formal, deductive logic as a benchmark.
All human knowledge is a matter of those ideas which function in a manner similar to the role of a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates in a traditional secondary-school geometry; in Classical culture, especially the Platonic tradition, such a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, belongs to the general category associated with the term hypothesis. In this simplest case, the question of whether or not a proposition may be adopted as a theorem of that geometry implies two distinct tests of relative truthfulness: First, is the proposition supported by (consistent with) the available evidence, in the sense of an experimental standard for evidence? Second, is the proposition also free from inconsistency with any of the set of definitions, axioms, and postulates of that geometry, its underlying hypothesis? Those who accept that proposition as a theorem of that geometry, constitute a conspiracy.
This brings us to the matter of effectively perceived notions of “self-interest.” In the case of the class in geometry, we might assume the proximate motive of the class’s members was to master the subject in a rational way.[[12]] In life more generally, motives nominally extraneous to the narrowly defined subject of inquiry intervene. However, it should be readily recognized, that any such motives can be regarded as added postulates of the relevant, underlying set of definitions, axioms, and postulates.
The simple definition of a conspiracy, therefore, is a willful concert of action, or inaction, defined by the sharing of a common hypothesis, as we have broadly defined an hypothesis, immediately above. Examples include the Leibnizian hypothesis implicitly embedded in the original drafting of the anti-Locke 1776 Declaration of Independence and 1787-1789 Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.
If we limit our attention solely to those cases in which the relevant hypothesis is unchanged during the course of the action being considered, we have a case in which learning, as compared with the higher mental function, cognition, predominates.
Once we introduce the notion of scientific and technological, or certain other expressions of progress, for example, cognition becomes a decisive factor. In this case, the characteristically distinguishing feature of the conspiracy is the implications of choosing to add a new idea to the repertoire represented by a preexisting hypothesis. In other words, we are overturning the old hypothesis, in favor of a new one. This, for physics, locates the relevant conspirators within the domain mapped out successively by such leading features, as Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz (his notions of Analysis Situs), Carl Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann. Such a conspiratorial state of affairs is sometimes termed a “revolution,” scientific or otherwise.
In this latter circumstance, we are confronted with potentially two general types of disagreement between the members of the relevant conspiracy, on the one side, and each group of their factional opponents, on the other. One of these types is the issue of whether or not to tolerate, or promote progress itself. The other is the choice of method by which new ideas will be generated and incorporated into making changes.[[13]] This brings us within the domain marked out by Plato’s dialogues, the domain of that Socratic method, which searches out, and calls into question the underlying hypotheses of contending sets of beliefs, of contending conspiracies.
The Principal Conspiracy in History
The argument of Marcuse, Hofstadter, Pipes, and others, has a specific point of origin within the setting of modern history, the modern revival of the irrationalist dogma of the medieval sophist and obscurantist, William of Ockham. This revival was introduced widely, about the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, chiefly by Venice’s Paolo Sarpi, and by such English assets of Sarpi as Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and their sundry British and other empiricist followers. It is from this late-Sixteenth, early-Seventeenth centuries’ well-spring of Ockhamite empiricism, that radical positivist Pipes derives his eccentric attack upon what he insists, in fact, is a widespread conspiracy to promote conspiracism. It is from that same origin, typified by the case of Thomas Hobbes, that populists such as the ideologues of the John Birch Society derive their historical illiterate’s concoctions.
In all cases, through and beyond Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the American pragmatists, these sorts of pro- and anti-conspiracy mythologies, have a common origin in the same underlying assumptions expressed as the influence and writings of Sarpi and Hobbes. Inevitably, that origin is a savagely perverse misconception, and specifically anti-Christian, axiomatic view of both the nature of the human individual, and of mankind’s efficient interrelationship with the universe as a whole.
This issue, which reaches to the depth of profundity of what Plato identified as “higher hypothesis,” is not some arbitrary, typically academic sort of ivory-tower foolishness. It reflects the central issue of all the conflicts which have dominated the known pre-history and history of Europe, since long before a highly developed Dravidian maritime culture established a colony known as Sumer, and thus brought writing, barbaric forms of civilization, and the absolutely terrible religious tradition of Shakti-Siva,[[14]] to the primitive Semites of lower Mesopotamia.
The global significance of Christianity is, that it was Jesus Christ and his Apostles who first gave true meaning to the notion that each of all men and women is made equally in the image of God, to exert dominion over the universe, without permitting any racial or other ethnic impairment of the notion of equality. Although a millennium and a half was needed, before the first society premised on that principle was established—the reconstruction of France under Louis XI—it was the heritage of Christ, and his Apostles, notably John and Paul, which underlies that principle out of which our U.S. Federal Constitutional Republic was conceived: in that principle, if often in practical violation of this, we are entrusted with the noblest conception of society yet to appear in practice.
To be precise, and fair, we are the finest product of European civilization, who were enabled to establish a republic based upon a true principle here, because of the advantage of distance from the reach of the powerful feudalist landed aristocracies, and Venice-type financier oligarchies which kept Europe under the feudal thumb, up to the present day.
The essential struggle, is a struggle based upon two irreconcilable, opposing conceptions of man and nature, the one, our own, called “republican,” and that of our adversaries, including the faction to which Pipes adheres, known since ancient Babylon as “oligarchical.” In the circles which own and deploy Pipes, the name for “oligarchy” is “the families,” as the Mellon family of thuggish Richard Mellon Scaife and his retinue of lackeys illustrates the point.
The conspiracy whose existence lackey Pipes, like lackey Marcuse before him, is at such pains to deny, is not one featuring secret links to some obscure freemasonic scholar buried deep in Germany’s Black Forest, or mountainous Tibet. The conspiracy, is the continued corruption of our society by gaggles of decadent, powerful, lascivious, mean-spirited families, mostly much too wealthy for their own good. These families “Like it our way,” and are, as always, determined, if possible, to keep it so, at any price to their victims. The struggle, is to secure for each and every future and present citizen, of every part of this planet, the right to enjoy nothing more nor less than the principal authors of our Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution intended to secure for us all.
The struggle between republican patriot and oligarchical one-worlder, is thus simply defined, defined simply the way the nature of the conflict compels any rational person to view it.
The essential issue, as it was for the Apostles John and Paul, and for Plato, is the nature of the human individual. If that individual is a creature “made in the image of God,” so distinguished by the potential for cognition embodied in each, must society not be so composed that this cognitive good within each individual is developed to the utmost possible? Must society not so order its economic and other affairs, to give the relatively greatest opportunity of expression to that developed good of each individual? Must society not protect this right against all who would impair it? Must this society not defend the good which its individuals have done, to ensure that that benefit be preserved for future generations?
If, however, there exists a powerful class of people, oligarchs, which prefers that the overwhelming majority of the population be prevented from acquiring the knowledge required for rulers of society, prefers that the overwhelming majority be degraded to the status of virtual human cattle, living in the mental and other conditions the oligarchy desires for its cattle, what is the nature of the individual person which that oligarchy will wish to have imputed to its cattle? There you have the empiricist conception of human nature, otherwise known as the empiricist doctrines of Sarpi, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, René Descartes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and so on, down even to the teachings spread from the tail of the oligarchical hippopotamus.
In that respect, Daniel Pipes, the conspiracy is alive and well. More relevant, perhaps, it is against everything you currently pretend to represent. Be advised, Daniel Pipes, a notable forerunner of yours was long ensconced, stuffed like any other subject of taxidermy, in a closet at London University, taken out only for dusting, or to preside at annual meetings. That is a sort of fame, we must admit, and, you must admit, a far greater celebrity than you are likely to secure by continuing along your presently foolish course.
Imagine Daniel Pipes being told by his physician: “Please, don’t stick out your tongue.”
[[1]]: “Dennis King insists that [LaRouche’s] references to the British as the ultimate conspirators are really ‘code language’ to refer to Jews. In fact, these are references to the British.” Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From, p. 142.
[[2]]: Jerrold Post and Robert S. Robins, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
[[3]]: After New York Times writers Paul Montgomery and Howard Blum volunteered details of a Times plot against me to subsequently exposed tape recording, during Summer 1979, the initiation of the relevant libel was passed to the notorious Roy M. Cohn. For this project, Cohn used a New York weekly throwaway, Our Town, edited by one of Cohn’s ex-convict clients, Ed Kayatt. For this project, Our Town picked up a left-wing Progressive Labor Party cast-off, Dennis King, then making a sleazy living under the rubric of “Caspar the Ghost,” fabricating term papers and similar products for a pick-up clientele of less-than-ethical university students. The series of wild-eyed libels published under King’s by-line in Our Town, then provided cover for the Times itself to proceed, the following October, with its new series of assaults on me. This was the second such Times campaign against me. The first, featuring sports-writer Paul Montgomery was done, in January 1974, as an effort to cover up for what subsequently released (FOIA) documents showed was an FBI, J. Edgar Hoover-style COINTELPRO operation, run by the FBI, according to its own record, through the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A., run for the stated purpose of effecting my “elimination” from politics. Montgomery was involved in at least one additional featured, similar libel against me, in the New York Times in July 1974.
[[4]]: Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 1989). As King notes in his acknowledgements within that book, the preparation and publication of the book was sponsored by agencies of the U.S. intelligence community. In fact, this employment of King, on behalf of the George Bush/Ollie North corner of the 1980s National Security Council, was arranged through the John Birch Society’s propagandist John Rees, who promoted this employment of King through the “Daddy Warbucks” of privatized CIA projects, Richard Mellon Scaife.
[[5]]: Pat Lynch and Dennis King, “The Empire of Lyndon LaRouche,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1986.
[[6]]: The appropriate reference is that supplied by Pipes’ own footnote: The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967).
[[7]]: The dogma was by no means original to Hofstadter. Hofstadter himself acquired the dogma from such “Frankfurt School” followers of avowed arch-conspirator Georg Lukacs, as the sometime OSS and CIA agent, sometime Communist, and active conspirator Herbert Marcuse, who used to begin his lectures with the sing-song “There are no conspiracies in history.” The “authoritarian personality” dogma of such Frankfurt School existentialists as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, is derived from the same axiomatic assumptions as Marcuse’s and Hofstadter’s ban on “conspiracy theories.” Since the name of Marcuse connotes the cases of Karl Korsch, the Communist Party’s Angela Davis, and the origins of the Weathermen LSD and terrorism band, the reference to Hofstadter is liberally preferred today.
[[8]]: The present writer was charged, unsuccessfully, with one count of conspiracy, in Boston, Massachusetts, in July 1987, and charged, successfully, on two counts of conspiracy, plus co-responsibility for “acts in furtherance of” the first of those two, latter conspiracies, in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 1988. Without the hoked-up conspiracy charges, there was no case. In fact, the origin of the first count of conspiracy in Alexandria, was actually the fruit of a conspiracy run by the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, under the direction of George Bush political ally, William Weld. These fellows plotted and launched a politically motivated, concerted action to perpetrate a false bankruptcy against three publishing firms, for the stated purpose of creating the pretext for a subsequent charge against this writer and others, a charge based on the firms’ being forced, by the Federal government, to cease repayment of soft loans, of a type tantamount, in publishing of books and periodicals, to election-campaign loans in the political realm. This bankruptcy, and forced termination of loan-repayment, was done by the Federal government, in the interest of the prosecutors, in April 1987, by means of what was latter adjudged to have been a fraud upon the court; this was plotted, and done, for the previously stated purpose of halting the three publishing firms’ rollovers and repayments of soft loans. The stated purpose of that fraud-permeated, politically motivated action by the U.S. Department of Justice, was to craft a criminal charge against this writer, on the pretext of the termination of loan-repayments by those three firms. The cessation of payments by these three firms, was subsequently employed, according to an earlier stated intent for bringing the bankruptcy, in October 1988, to present a felony charge of “conspiracy to perpetrate loan-fraud,” against this writer and six other defendants. There are a significant number of others, in other cases, who have actually served time in prison on the basis of similarly fraudulent actions by the U.S. Department of Justice and complicit Federal judges, although there is no case which ranks in combined lapsed time, scale, and prosecutorial turpitude to this one. In the writer’s case, there was an honest Federal judge in the Boston case, and a crooked, politically motivated, lying, Federal judge in the Alexandria, Virginia case; that often makes the difference. However, a study of much Federal paper leads to the estimate that even a person who actually committed a crime may have great difficulty in securing an honest conviction in Federal courts these days.
[[9]]: The argument which the Justice Department and NBC offered against Garrison, was the presumption borrowed from the tradition of Senator Joe McCarthy’s notorious rampages: that, since Garrison’s investigation contradicted the doctrine laid down by the prestigious Warren Commission, Garrison was either a “kook” or a liar, by virtue of perpetrating the offense of lèse-majesté.
[[10]]: See Mark Burdman, “‘Jury’ Votes Equal Rights for Apes,” Executive Intelligence Review, Jan. 26, 1996.
[[11]]: The Classical Greek (i.e., Platonic) and Apostolic Christian distinction between agapē and eros is connoted. As illustrated by the example of the Classically educated Romanticism of Carl Czerny and his pupil Franz Liszt, “erotic” signifies an emphasis upon sense-experience, as opposed to the emphasis upon metaphor and ideas which characterizes the compositions of such Classical followers of J.S. Bach as W.A. Mozart, F. Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, et al. Typical of Romanticism is the irrationalist aesthetical dogma which Immanuel Kant asserted in his Critique of Judgment, and the (“art for art’s sake”) categorical separation of Reason (Naturwissenschaft) from the irrationalist misconception of social subjects (Geisteswissenschaft and populism Volksgeist) decreed by Karl Marx’s Berlin law professor, neo-Kantian Romantic K.F. Savigny. For example, modernist and post-modernist notions of art are derived from emphasis upon the sado-masochistic perception of the momentary experience of pleasure-pain, a view coincident with the broader sense of the term “eroticism.”
[[12]]: We leave it to readers who might care to do so, to speculate upon the standard of classroom mental life, at the universities where Dr. Daniel Pipes variously studied and taught: Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania.
[[13]]: With Plato, this is termed “higher hypothesis.”
[[14]]: Shakti, otherwise known as Ishtar, Lilith, Astarte, and the Gaea of the Gaea-Python satanic cult based at the site of the Delphi cult of Apollo.
