I wrote this comment for a thread that just got deleted, so I’m just gonna post it here. It’s on the subject of the CIA pushing and popularising the idea of conspiracy theories in order to give themselves cultural cover…
Pretty much, certainly the US government at large. People often point to the aftermath of the JFK assassination as the Warren Comission report famously referred to ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ frequently and the press ran with those terms. To the degree that this idea has been ‘debunked’ by modern corporate media, they use the classic sleight of hand by investigating whether the Warren Commission coined those terms, rather than popularised them.
One of the primary counter-agruements these people use is that Karl Popper’s influential philosophical book Open Society & Its Enemies used the terms when discussing how society creates meaning from events in 1945. And if you couldn’t tell by the title of that work, yes, Popper was a reactionary with a deepseated hatred for historicism, Marxist based thought, who believed that historicism was responsible for “20th Century totalitarianism” and that liberal democracy was the only acceptable form of government (because it didn’t require ‘bloodshed or violence’ for improvement ). And yes, he was of course popular with the US political class and establishment academics at the time, meaning the very people that would go on to be part of the state (from those elected to the intelligence community) in the 1960s when they popularised the term.
If you’re interested, the book Mirage Men might be worth a read. It’s a history of how the US military industrial complex and government perpetuated and used the UFO phenomenon not only as a smokescreen for secret projects and military action, but also psychological operations against the public. I think someone made a documentary of it years ago, but I’ve never seen itnso can’t say whether it’s a good portrayal of the book or not.
The Americans had already used the bomb, twice, and even before that there wasn’t really any doubt they would if they could. As history proved both before and after Nagasaki, the US was happy to cause any amount of death and destruction to fight the (mostly extremely paranoid and overstated) ‘threat of communism’. And whatever you think about the idea of nuclear deterrence in the modern era, there’s little to no doubt it was the only thing preventing the US using nukes against the USSR.