Sundays WaPost had an interesting piece in their editorial section about the experience of two African-American XM radio hosts who were cancelled after a battle over a conspiracy theory popular on African-American radio stations. I thought the other NG readers would find it interesting as well. (the following selections are not in the order they appear in the original).

A 1990 survey by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference found that one-third of black American churchgoers believed that AIDS was a form of genocide. One-third also believed that HIV was produced in a germ-warfare lab, and 40 percent of black college students in Washington, D.C., agreed. An even higher percentage of blacks polled said they thought that crack cocaine was custom-made to be planted in African American communities to keep them crime-ridden and poor and that the government deliberately targeted black elected officials to drive them from office. These beliefs keep some black Americans from having their children vaccinated, from receiving AIDS tests and early medical treatment, and from practicing safe sex or using clean needles, as Patricia A. Turner and Gary Alan Fine note in their book, "Whispers on the Color Line." They also make seeking the truth an uphill battle.

In "Black Africa and the U.S. Black Movement," also known as Memorandum 46, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser outlines a sinister 1970s government strategy to undermine black leadership in the United States and sow discord with Africans abroad.

It's a fantastic story, and on June 23, we devoted an entire edition of "The Casey Lartigue Show," our weekly political talk show on an XM satellite radio channel aimed at black listeners, to debunking it and other urban legends.Everywhere we looked, we found evidence that the document was fake: ....

One thing that we haven't discussed here before (I think) is how many conspiracy theories started out as an old Soviet disinformation campaign. Examples include Jonestown, baby-body parts snatching, AIDs as a "man-made" plague, etc. The KGB had several non-Western and non-Eastern bloc papers that would print pretty much anything, especially several in India. The KGB would pass these papers a story, it'd be reprinted, and then other third world papers would pick them up. When the local US embassy complained the local papers could say "but it was an Indian paper that printed it, not a Soviet one!" One irony is that I've seen such stories picked up by the hard core Bircher RW in the US, with the result that the Birchers parrot actual real-life communist propaganda! If it wasn't sad how these stories were believed it'd be funny.

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