Conspiracy theorists overestimate how bright their foes are

Consider the popular theory that Deep State Svengalis psy-opped the Laurel Canyon rock scene into existence in 1965. Isn't that expecting a little much of middle-aged civil servants?

One of the general rules of history is that few things go exactly according to plan.

A popular example of this wisdom, even though it’s not exactly true, is that Field Marshall Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1891-1906, meticulously created the Shlieffen Plan for how Germany could quickly win a two-front war against France and Russia: invade France first, take Paris, then go east and beat the less nimble Russians. As he reminded his fellow Junker generals on his death bed, the one thing that could go wrong was if they lost their courage when the Russians invaded their East Prussian estates and demanded that to stop the Russians, troops be pulled from the French front before Paris is taken.

But of course, his successors did exactly that and the Germans were stopped by the French outside Paris at the First Battle of the Marne, which then led to over four years of catastrophic trench warfare, bringing down the royal houses of Russia, Austria, and Germany.

Well, actually, this didn’t quite happen the way it’s often recounted in popular histories, especially not Schlieffen’s prophetic deathbed words, which nobody ever claimed in print that he said until many years later. In truth, the reality was vastly more complicated.

But, still, the popular version offers a pretty good, if highly stylized, lesson: the Imperial German General Staff was possibly the most competent planning organization in the history of the world up through 1914, but even their plans didn’t quite work, and within a half decade there was no more German Empire. (Then, as you may have heard, a whole bunch more stuff happened that nobody had foreseen before the Great War.)

In contrast, popular conspiracy theories tend to assume that civil servants are malign but far-seeing savants capable of flawlessly managing triple bankshot plans of vast historical consequence.

One of my favorite local conspiracy theories is that the famous Laurel Canyon rock scene of the mid-1960s (The Doors, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Still, Nash & Young, The Byrds, etc.) was a Deep State psy-op to … well, what the purpose of it was is usually a little speculative.

Sure, it would seem as if the rise in the U.S. of long-haired post-Beatles rock from 1965 turned out badly for young people’s support of Washington’s war in Vietnam in the later 1960s.

Granted, late 1960s rock wasn’t as leftist as rock critics claimed — “Taxman” by George Harrison and “Revolution” by John Lennon are not unrepresentative of the relatively few songs of the time with overtly political lyrics.

Still, the efflorescence of rock music from the mid-1960s onward thrust into the forefront of popular culture a more innately anti-war temperament: musicians tend to be less overtly masculine than, say, jocks. Moreover, rock music allowed a lot of draft age young men who didn’t want to be cannon fodder to become superstars, while not long before movie stars had tended to be older men who had either served impressively in WWII (e.g., Lee Marvin) or had sidestepped service for respectable reasons (e.g., John Wayne).

But that’s not point, say the theorists. The point is that rock music was obviously a brilliant conspiracy to bring about … well … whatever it is that the theorists dislike about the years after the 1960s. Sure, in 1965, the Deep State got the impact of rock music on support for the Vietnam War in 1968 wrong … but, nonetheless, they were geniuses about how it would lead to transgendermania in 2015 or to the “racial reckoning” in 2020. Or something.

The main evidence that 1965 American rock was a Deep State psy-op seems to be that Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison was the son of Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was in the chain of command during the dubious Gulf of Tonkin Incident:

I’m putting the paywall here, with 1400 words afterwards. In it, I offer a new, more plausible conspiracy theory about what the Deep State might really have done to alter American pop music in an anti-Communist direction in 1965 by getting in touch with the one guy who actually mattered.