Right-wing conspiracy

On Aug. 2 the British Sunday paper, The Observer, ran a long analysis of what Hillary Clinton has alleged is "a vast right- wing conspiracy" against her husband and herself. The paper concluded that it exists but that it goes "beyond politics and binds together the two propellers of life in the American South, race and war".

Conspiracy theories are often simply paranoia writ large, personal demons projected on to a wider canvas. But not all such theories come unstuck.

The Observer article reminds us of Clinton's political beginnings in Arkansas. The people most upset by his rise include those for whom race and war are not abstract issue. One is "Justice Jim" Johnson, a prime mover in the White Citizens' Council and a man with an absolutely visceral hatred of Clinton. The president's faults in Johnson's eyes include his racial liberalism, to Johnson this is tantamount to treason, his Vietnam War draft-dodging and the whole shebang of "crimes" such as long hair and rock n'roll that Clinton's generation is deemed to have committed.

In the early 1960s "Justice Jim" was urging the people of Arkansas to resist "mongrelization", a peculiarly unpleasant term for racial mixing and one close to the language of both the Nazis and the Afrikaaner "Herrenvolk". Clinton could not be further distanced from this, Johnson and his people are religious fundamentalists and is the way of such people especially unforgiving (so much for their professed Christianity!). They have pursued Clinton remorselessly (the Dictionary of English Etymology defines "remorse" as "to bite again") and large amounts of banking billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife's money.

Much remains to be seen but one is obliged to ask why these people never got excited about George Bush's connections to Manuel Noriega or Oliver North's trading with the Iranian "enemy". But then we know the answers to those questions, don't we?

DAVID JARDINE

Jakarta