![]() It also aims to equip CIA contacts with arguments against those who challenge the findings and the official version of the event. The document expresses concern about the considerable number of people who doubted the official investigation into Kennedy’s murder, the Warren Commission, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. It was released in 1976 after The New York Times requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. ![]() Smoking gunĪlthough they make differing claims about the origin and development of the term, the proponents of both versions invariably point to an official CIA document called Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report as their smoking gun. Second, the more moderate version received a big boost in popularity a few years ago when American political scientist Lance DeHaven-Smith propagated it in a book published by a renowned university press. ![]() Even die-hard conspiracy theorists have a hard time trying to ignore this. As a search on Google Books quickly reveals, the term “conspiracy theory” emerged around 1870 and began to be more frequently used during the 1950s. First, it is very easy to disprove the more extreme claim that the CIA actually invented the term. The more moderate version has been particularly popular in recent years for two reasons. A more moderate version acknowledges that the term existed before, but claims that the CIA intentionally created its negative connotations and so turned the label into a tool of political propaganda. The more extreme version claims that the CIA literally invented the term in the sense that the words “conspiracy” and “theory” had never been used before in combination. There are even two versions of this conspiracy theory. This conspiracy theory claims that the CIA invented the term in 1967 to disqualify those who questioned the official version of John F Kennedy’s assassination and doubted that his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone. So it may come as no surprise that there is even a conspiracy theory about the origins of the label. It was only a few decades ago that the term took on the derogatory connotations it has today, where to call someone a conspiracy theorist functions as an insult. Conspiracy theories have a long history, but the actual term “conspiracy theory” emerged much more recently.
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