How Justified Is Anti-Government Lunacy?--Stanek

Forty years ago this weekend a former test pilot from Ohio took a small step and made one of the largest leaps in human history. The historic voyage that brought him and two companions to their destination—currently being reconstructed in real time in painstaking, minute-by-minute detail by the Kennedy presidential library—surely ranks as the longest, most dangerous, and most ambitious ever undertaken. Braving computer overloads that forced an unplanned manual component to their landing and a broken circuit breaker that threatened to make ascent impossible, these travelers set foot on another celestial body and returned safely to the Earth.

Only a few years later, distrust of the American government led to the formation of a small cult of lunar landing hoax believers that has persisted to the present day. Not content to merely believe that CIA-backed-anti-Castro-Cuban-exile-Soviet mafiosos killed Kennedy, that the Federal Reserve exists to fund the New World Order, and that Men In Black is a true story, these diehards believe that one of the seminal events of the twentieth century played out on a government soundstage somewhere. Yesterday NASA released pictures taken a few days ago by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing for the first time the landing sites of several Apollo missions. It’s like looking at pristine snow ruined by human trudging and a meadow spoiled by junk left by inconsiderate campers, all at once. But this is hardly convincing to the conspiracy theorist. These images were released by the government, right?





Of course, suspicion of the government might have been warranted. The 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers proved that a president and his government had misled—if not outright lied to—a nation about key aspects of a disastrous war. Three years later the nation learned that this president’s successor was, despite protestations to the contrary, a crook. Incidents throughout recent history, ranging from the Tuskegee Experiments to the Iran-Contra scandal to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program (the extent of which still remains unknown) easily refute any notions of the U.S. government, hazily defined, as a strictly benevolent and trustworthy organization. Deception for political gain is hardly a novel concept. Certainly the success of the Apollo program was a public relations gift to the Nixon administration and NASA itself. But how far can we stretch our wariness of relying on the integrity of government officials?

There are gun "enthusiasts" who believe that all efforts to regulate firearms are government attempts to achieve a docile and defenseless population; libertarian-minded observers who believe that anti-poverty measures are a government conspiracy to enslave an increasingly--and purposefully--dependent segment of the population; and, of course, some kooks that think the current president is a secret, foreign-born Muslim whose loyalties do not lie with the United States. Anti-government paranoia reaches far beyond the moon landing deniers. The line between the absurd and the plausible is a thin one. I find the X-files picture of a secret cabal controlling the highest levels of the government to be silly, yet I am sympathetic to Elite theory. I scoff at the notion that the CIA could play a role in the assassination of a sitting president, yet accept the findings of the Church commission (including reports of bizarre CIA mind-control experiments and the active suppression of democratic organization). I find claims that the government would or could willingly fake a lunar expedition for political gain to be ridiculous, yet I don't doubt that convenient incidents or distorted bits of intelligence have been used as flimsy pre-texts for full-scale wars multiple times in recent history (One, Two, Three).

As we have discussed previously, we live in an age where technology both democratizes the spread of information and presents opportunities for nefarious powerbrokers to control it. Should we fear that the government may do this? Though I've used it several times now, I am uncomfortable with a label as vague as "the government." The government is a massive institution with numerous factions and individuals that rarely, if ever, function as a unit. It doesn't lie to you, individuals in it do. Some officials, as with any large sample of people, will be unsavory characters and may opt to advance agendas in questionable ways. That does not justify living in a state of extreme paranoia or deciding to arm yourself and live off the land in Montana. The old adage "Trust but verify" seems appropriate here. Numerous facts--as well as the photographs released today--verify the reality of the Apollo 11 landing. Many other theories of the evils of "the government" remain unverified. We cannot always assume the worst simply because men are flawed. If our view of government ever degenerates to that point, we might as well call the whole thing off.