1) In warfare human beings discover a capability for violence they never knew they had; so long as it’s sanctioned by the state they can bomb and kill1) In warfare human beings discover a capability for violence they never knew they had; so long as it’s sanctioned by the state they can bomb and kill with ease. Now social media has revealed something else we weren’t aware of - a propensity in many people for wild untethered beliefs and uncouth speech that has come as a shock. We have all found out that for many people (your son, your dear little grandmamma, the hairdresser, the bassist in your third favourite band) there is absolutely no notion of the objective reality we ourselves always assumed; they actually never did believe in any of these concepts of democracy and liberal government and rule of law that the rest of us have been taking for granted, they think it’s all a puppeteered sham and we are the sheeple being herded about. And it’s never not been a sham.
2) But wait - if the conspiracies unearthed by the theorists are so vast, complex and powerful how are they ever to be defeated? What would success look like to a conspiracy believer?
3) One conspiracy pusher explains the difference between him and Marianna : ”You believe all people are good. I believe almost everyone is bad.�
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4) Marianna asks herself why she doesn’t believe in conspiracies:
At the heart of it is a simple answer: trust. I have faith in a system and institutions that have no on the whole let me down, plus a doctor for a dad and a mum who was once a nurse.
OMG, this sounds truly naïve, and I can hear even non-truther readers failing to stifle guffaws. And yet, I agree with her. I believe in double blind clinical trials, I believe in peer-reviewed scientific papers, I believe that the government is real and that I and my fellow citizens can throw the rascals out when we vote, and get some new rascals in.
5) But! If you oppose conspiracy theories you are quite often in the sorry unpleasant position of having to defend the findings of the FBI and CIA etc about such matters as 9/11 and JFK. It’s invidious.
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6) The conspiracy believers will take the official version of a particular event and give it unrelenting scrutiny and dismantle it and mock it. The arguments against the official version, however, are given zero scrutiny, they are instantly accepted.
7) You might think that the conspiracy believers get involved in their campaigns in order to feel better, to gain what they call “agency� these days. But you’d be wrong (I was).
The true believers become even more powerless, because ultimately thy can’t resolve the fabricated plot they think they’ve uncovered. They also find themselves exploited by new powerful people � the leaders of this conspiracy world.
That was an interesting insight, on page 46. Unfortunately on page 47 we read :
Conspiracy theories and falsehoods help believers feel powerful in a world where lots of people feel powerless.
So, er, which is it?
8) Isaac Newton was an alchemist and Conan Doyle believed in spiritualism, and also fairies. Some scientists are full of irrational thought.
9) The Russian state conspires to promote conspiracy theories about the West, NATO, Ukraine, etc. A real conspiracy encourages fake conspiracies.
10) The last part of this book is very repetetetive. Marianna sets up a number of fake accounts with the Big Five (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter/X, Tiktok) using various profiles and checks what stuff their algorithms send to her. No surprise, as, for example, a profile for a fake 14 year old boy, after he clicka and likes some videos, is quickly sent by Tiktok lots of videos glorifying gang life and knife carrying. Or a profile of a concerned 40 year old woman is sent antivax stuff. This is the stuff the companies say they don’t allow. When Marianna shows them proof that their vetting procedures are not working, they refuse an interview and fob her off with a bland statement. “Snapchat strictly prohibits bullying, harassment and any illegal activity…[we] provide confidential in-app reporting tools�.
Marianna is contemptuous in a polite sort of way :
These are the sorts of responses I often receive from social media sites. They are practically interchangeable, and often describe policies that my reporting contradicts or reveals to be inadequately enforced.
11) Conspiracy theories rely on the belief that many many people are almost superhuman, capable of plans that would be incredibly difficult or even impossible to pull off. When backed into a corner, conspiracy theorists afford magical powers to the cabal of powerful, corrupt people they believe are pulling all the strings.
12 ) Between 1 January 2023 and the end of June that year the BBC received 14,488 warnings about abusive social media posts relating to their personnel. Of this number, 11,771 relate to me. Because Marianna has been exposing online conspiracy trollers for a few years. They know who she is and they hate her.
FURTHER READING
I have already read :
Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout by Ginger Gorman
This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips
The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball
These are all well worth it, but of course the conspiracy theories of yesteryear begin to look quaint.
From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old boys who were making stuff up on 4chan which was a place of great unseemliness, not that I would know; they knew they weren’t being serious � well, not serious-serious - they weren’t serious about anything. I mean � there was no vast conspiratorial cabal in charge of everything, but it was such fun to pretend there was, and hey you know, maybe, I’m not saying it is, but maybe it’s true, who knows, not me for sure, but saying all this stuff seems to annoy the very people we love to annoy, it’s the elaborate internet version of ringing an old fart’s doorbell and running down the road. But the thing is, when this laughing gas escaped from its 4chan/8chan messageboards of icky sickness (many rape jokes, apparently), what do you know, people on facebook started taking some of it literally. And then Fox News! Now it really got funny! We couldn’t believe it! Let’s make some other wild shit up!
And they found that they could not make up shit that was too wild for people to believe.
Because people believe anything! Anything!
Not quite core to the conspiracy, but widely believed, was that the cabal was heavily involved in large-scale child abuse, quite probably for satanic or other ritual purposes
Leading to the stroke of genius that goes by the name of Pizzagate. You like that one? What about this:
Marjorie Taylor Greene [Representative for the 14th district of Georgia] in 2018 wrote that Californian wildfires had been deliberately started by a “Jewish space laser�
Yeah, throw that one onto the pile along with 5G and anti-vaxxing. It’s all true you know. They never went to the moon! You know why? There isn’t a moon!
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IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN
So this QAnon thing � it is the very definition of Anarchy. It’s a movement with no leaders, no fixed beliefs, no holy scriptures, it booms along and bits fall off it very frequently � like when a prediction that Trump will be reinstated doesn’t happen � yeah, didn’t happen, so what, we’re now waiting for the reappearance of John F Kennedy Jr � I know, the MSM say he died in 1999 but he didn’t and he’s back and he’s one of us � and anyway we’re all now busy doing research into the connection between Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan laboratory that deliberately started the plandemic � wait, maybe that was Hunter Biden� or Hillary Clinton � hold on, aren’t they the same person? My head hurts, I can’t keep all this straight. I need to lie down.
But no time to weaken, you have to be online 25 hours a day or you’re gonna miss the next livestreamed massacre courtesy one of your little QAnon pixies (3 QAnon-related mass shootings in 2019 including the Christchurch mosque attack). Because although the whole thing started as a lot of crazy humour, when the racists and nazis joined the party it wasn’t that funny anymore.
James Ball is a great guide through all this madness. Without overburdening us outsiders (who’ve never before heard of MyPillow or LARPing or Frazzledrip and only barely heard of gamergate and The Great Reset with too much detail -but there will still be too many obscure names and acronyms for some, it just cannot be avoided-) he pulls together and makes sense � in a way, in a way � of the means and methods of this amorphous nightmarish alternate-reality choose-your-own-plot do-your-own-research world we now inhabit.
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He says stuff like
The idea that there’s an elite running the show is something almost all of us believe to some extent � not least because it’s at least partly true
He says that the MSM response to this farrago of poisonous fantasy is debunking and fact checking and is a total non-starter because there is no debunking or fact-checking these people, they are immune, you can’t prove a negative and with QAnon types there is no proof you could give them that they would believe.
As an example, take the #SavetheChildren campaign, a QAnon offshoot.
The statistic bandied about by QAnon and QAnon-adjacent influencers is that �365,348 children went missing in 2020� as QAnon congresswoman Lauren Boebert once tweeted, citing the stat to the FBI. “You haven’t heard a word from the media about it.�
JB says � this number is accurate! Yes! But it actually refers to the number of missing person reports about children for the total year, not the number who are actually missing.
Considerably more than 99% of missing children in the US are found alive and even in the most high-risk category � abduction by strangers or by a family member with an outstanding felony warrant � 97% of children are recovered alive.
I think Lauren Boebert would probably wave away those stats as fake news. Even though they are from the same source that she uses.
JB says
So embedded are QAnon’s ideas in the conspiratorial corners of the internet that there are now hundreds of thousands or people who subscribe, at least in part, to QAnon without ever having heard of Q or QAnon itself.
He says
In the US, a poll taken by YouGov as early as May 2020 found that 44% of Republican voters believed Bill Gates was plotting to use Covid-19 as a pretext to plant tracking microchips in billions of people around the world.
He explains how the wild ‘n� crazy turbulence of Trump AND Covid rebooted the whole mania, and he pulls in, of course, the QAnon low-point culmination on 6 January 2021. Actually to discuss this whole giant QAnon conspiracy thing you have to rant on about so many loony things you get to start sounding as mad as the people who believe it!
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THREE THINGS (OF SO MANY) I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND
I didn’t get where the obsession with Hillary Clinton came from.
I don’t understand that if the deep state stole the election why they won’t steal the next one too, so what might be the point of Trump running in 2024? He will lose, the deep state will see to it.
I still didn’t understand quite how the conspiracy believing MSM hating red pill eaters think our lives and our countries work. Because if there is a giant elite running everything, then democracy is a sham, justice is a sham, all those fine words mean nothing. Doesn’t matter which party wins an election, the elite will be pulling all the strings. They will continue to inject us all with vaccines to turn us into zombies or radiate us with 5G to turn us into� zombies� or zap us with a space laser to turn us into� zombies. How come they haven’t done all this already? I don’t understand. Oh boy, actually I don’t understand any of this.
Recommended for masochists who enjoy feeling their brain melting....more
This author calls the alt-right some bad names. They are all white nationalist, racist and antisemitic. And they hate women too. But alt-righters say
WThis author calls the alt-right some bad names. They are all white nationalist, racist and antisemitic. And they hate women too. But alt-righters say
We just don’t care what you call us anymore
WHO ARE THEY? WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHY DON’T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE?
Your average alt-righter, I would probably say someone who is thirty years old, who is a tech professional, who is an atheist, and who lives on one of the coasts (Richard Spencer)
They write a lot of nasty trolling stuff but they write as if nothing is really serious. This is Andy Warhol cut and paste so-what politics.
A penchant for aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs, often delivered in the arch, ironic tones common to modern internet discourse (Rosie Gray)
This is really different from what we remember the radical right to have been only a couple of decades ago.
In the past, the stereotypical young white nationalist was an angry bitter skinhead with limited skills and prospects
That’s right. We remember those skinhead guys! They were scary but they had no brains at all so they weren’t much of a threat. We see them in movies like American History X and The Believer (both recommended).
THE ALT RIGHT IS NOT VIOLENT? OH, I DID NOT QUITE REALISE THAT
This book is entirely concerned with the USA. That’s okay but I did not quite realise that. George Hawley says :
I am not implying that the alt-right is a terrorist movement. At the time of this writing, I am aware of no acts of physical violence directly connected to the alt-right � online harassment is another story
I was very surprised at this. I immediately thought of Dylann Roof, the lunatic who shot 9 people in a black church in June 2015. He was a white supremacist, wasn’t he? But George says
Dylan Roof’s manifesto suggests he was more influenced by older white-nationalist writers
Well, if you say so. If that is a distinction you wish to make.
RIGHT WING VIOLENCE
In June 2016 Jo Cox, British Labour MP, was shot and stabbed to death in the street by a guy associated with various online far right groups.
Previously to that, of course, you had the Anders Breivik attack in Norway in 2011. He killed 77 people in support of his anti-immigration white-nationalist cause. (He described the attack itself as “the book launch�, referring to his online manifesto.) He was the poster boy for white supremacism.
And only a month ago we had the horrible mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.
So, there are increasing real-world manifestations of the type of white-nationalism & racism that is peddled in arch, ironic tones by the American alt right, those boys sitting in their mothers� basements.
I did not think that this book should have so clearly exonerated the alt right of violence. But this book is nothing if not carefully argued.
THE ALT RIGHT IS EITHER VERY HONEST, FINALLY, OR DISGUSTINGLY WRONGHEADED ABOUT THE USA
George himself says, most bracingly,
Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of independence, the United States operated as a de facto white supremacist nation for most of its history
He adds that the alt right and Bernie Sanders would agree that “the United States was viewed by its founders as a country for people of European ancestry�
Of course, Bernie would then say “and that was bad� and the alt-right would say “and that was good, and we should get back there again�.
Over the past two decades, Americans have constructed systems of intellectual silencing that stifle the range of debate among responsible and public-spirited people, They’ve resigned hugely important topics to the domain of cranks and haters.
A growing percentage of white America no longer views racism as a moral failing
THE ALT RIGHT LOVES TRUMP BUT THEY DON’T LOVE THE TYPICAL TRUMP VOTER. MEANWHILE TRUMP DOES NOT LOVE THEM BACK
Greg Johnson : Like an icebreaker, Trump has plowed through the frozen crust of artificial political consensus, smashing it to bits and releasing the turbulent populist currents beneath
But the alt-right are a whole different bunch to the Trumpanistas :
Evangelical Christians are more likely to be mocked than defended, and bald eagles and American flags are few and far between
I'M SO BORED WITH THE USA BUT WHAT CAN I DO?
So, it’s a new and different beast, and according to George, these guys (no surprise it’s always guys) actually want to dismantle the USA and erect in its place either one or several white race enclaves in North America, removing all non-whites from their territories. Pretty apocalyptic. I really don’t think you could do that without a little bit of violence here and there.
George Hawley’s little book is probably for politics geeks only, and I would instead recommend for those interested in the more disturbing or alarming areas of internet culture two other books :
This is Why we Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips
Syrian opposition activists, rescue workers and medics say more than 40 people were killed on SYRIA, JFK AND THINKING ABOUT THINKING
The BBC tells me :
Syrian opposition activists, rescue workers and medics say more than 40 people were killed on 7 April in a suspected chemical attack on Douma, which was the last rebel-held town in the Eastern Ghouta region.
Syrian government and Russian spokesmen have dismissed this. They say there was no chemical attack at all, the footage was faked to provide a pretext for an unprovoked missile attack by the western Allies on 14 April.
The same accusations followed by flat denials happened after the Salisbury nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal on 4th March. According to Theresa May it was Putin; according to Putin it was MI6 trying to frame him.
We flounder in a blizzard of fake news, but some of the news is true. How are we, the ordinary people, we who have no security clearance, we who know nobody who is anybody, how do we figure out what’s going on? When everything is disputed, how do we begin?
The JFK assassination is one of the great examples of disputed history. 55 years later there is no agreement about one of the most public of events. How could this be? I found myself being drawn into the JFK whirlpool. I had discovered the big kahuna, Vincent Bugliosi’s 1600 page Reclaiming History, which is the massive restatement of the official position, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone. I knew that maybe 80% of the American people don’t believe that. 80% of the American population is 260 million people � so where do they get their JFK information from?
The biggest, most popular pro-conspiracy statement is Oliver Stone’s 3 hour long movie JFK. So it was time to watch the movie and reread the book of the movie.
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The movie is brilliant (6 Oscar nominations and 2 wins for cinematography and editing � absolutely right, both are fantastic.) If you don’t believe in the conspiracy, of course, this makes JFK the most successful lying propaganda film of all time and a terrible disservice to the American public. Don’t mean to be insulting but if you think LHO killed JFK by himself, then that’s what it is.
Vincent Bugliosi says this :
Not even God can change the past. However, if we define history in the broader sense of that which succeeding generations believe and accept as the truth, then Stone, more than any other single American, is responsible for 75% of Americans currently believing that a dark and wide-ranging conspiracy involving the higher reaches of our government was responsible for the death of President Kennedy.
(Vince takes 90 pages in his big ole book to demolish the movie in detail. Vince does everything in detail.)
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY THAT YOU BELIEVE THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY?
The one proposed by the movie, as explained in two giant speeches, was perpetrated by the dark forces of the “military-industrial complex�. There were meetings involving those at the “very highest level�. Kennedy’s Vietnam policy was the problem. He wanted to pull out. Contracts worth billions would vanish in smoke if that happened. So a decision was arrived at � he had to go. Three shooters were organised, the motorcade route was fixed so Kennedy’s car would slow down to ten mph at one point, creating a “kill zone�. Normal security surrounding the presidential visit was “stood down� on the day. A patsy was secured to take the rap. It was all arranged. These were the men really in charge of America in 1963, men who would do that. Principles? None. Democracy and the rule of law? Don’t make us laugh. Does this make America in 1963 like any tin pot dictatorship where you get elections with only one candidate, fictitious voters lists and stuffed ballot boxes, where the military have only contempt for the people? Yes, although a lot more complicated than those countries. Was America really governed by a crypto-fascist warmongering elite? So the conspiracy says (the one put forward in the movie).
Vincent Bugliosi 15 years after the film put the matter like this :
Even if we imagine the unimaginable, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and leaders of American industry were crazy enough to be willing to murder kennedy would they be so crazy as not to at least first try to beat him at the ballot box by putting all their money, power and influence behind his opponent when he came up for election in just one year?
Next question: was this elite, the elite which (literally) called the shots, ever got rid of, or has it been in charge of the USA since the 1960s?
Leading to the next question: is the USA a democracy at all? Or is all the voting just smoke & mirrors, the distractions used by the stage magician? Come on, sheeple, wake up!
I think the 260 million Americans are not really thinking that. But the implications of the belief in a conspiracy tend inexorably towards the rewriting of what up to now has been an accepted historical American reality, that it is a (more or less) democratic country of the people (more or less) by the people (more or less) and for the people (more or less - and eventually, once you have redefined the non white population as “people� � that took some time. LBJ, the beneficiary of this conspiracy, tried his best to make that happen).
I think the 260 million Americans more or less sort of shrug and say well, you know, it looks so fishy, one nutty guy who happens to be a great marksman, three shots, including a magic bullet which zig zagged, then some other lone gunman conveniently knocks off the patsy before he can start to spill the beans, must have been something going on. And some of them have seen the movie and think yes, I sort of thought as much. Damn, it should be shown in every school!
ANOTHER STRANGE THING
But if the conspiracy could rise to the massive crime of killing the president, you might have thought they could have put Oliver Stone in a body bag before his movie came out and blew the lid off. After all, we know about how all those annoying witnesses ended up dead. Come to that, why aren’t all the major conspiracy theorists dead too?
JUST A PERSONAL TENDENCY
I find it a lot easier to believe in the lone gunman theory. Actually, just to be clear, I believe in it because I think it’s true! Every other week in America lone gunmen decide to shoot some people. We are all very familiar with this aspect of society. Quite a number of these types have had a go at the President. It’s not that unusual.
But I confess a psychological tendency towards disbelief in any conspiracy. It wasn’t Mossad or the Bush government who attacked the World Trade Center; they did land on the moon; the MRI vaccine does not cause autism; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fake, and Sandy Hook was real.
THE BOOK OF THE FILM : A STRANGE BEAST
The first third of this book is the screenplay, but :
It is not the final film. Certain scenes in this screenplay have been cut and some have been transposed to other places in the film.
So an already complicated and possibly confusing film which intersperses actual documentary footage with staged footage with made up scenes (“speculations on what might have happened� Stone writes) is made that much more complicated by this odd decision to use an early draft. The rest of the book is a whole bundle of articles about the movie and to Stone’s credit all the ferocious attacks are included. Except for that launched by Vincent Bugliosi 15 years later of course.
For anyone wishing to begin their slide down the biggest rabbithole in US history, the movie and this book is a great place to start. That’s why it gets 5 stars from me.
WHICH IS ONLY 45 PAGES LONG (BE THANKFUL FOR SMALL MERCIES).
Our manic author makes some very interesting points in his intA REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION
WHICH IS ONLY 45 PAGES LONG (BE THANKFUL FOR SMALL MERCIES).
Our manic author makes some very interesting points in his intro. Since very few of you will be reading this book, I'm guessing, it's worth listing them here.
1. JFK’s image, his popularity, is not based on what he accomplished but the promise of what he was going to accomplish. The grief and trauma of the assassination was because of the death of what America was going to be like, compared to what it became. Under LBJ and Nixon an undeclared low level civil war broke out in America; there were more assassinations; there was Vietnam and Watergate; it was a terrible time. The JFK myth implies that none of that would have happened if he had lived. So the assassination is the key sliding-door moment for America.
2. In 1964 70% of the American public agreed with the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Now, around 75% of the American public thinks there was a conspiracy. At least 1000 books have been written about the assassination, but 95% of them have been from the pro-conspiracy/anti-Warren Commission side of the argument. The public has only heard one side.
3. The conspiracy theorists do not agree on who was behind the conspiracy but they all have to include the Warren Commission members, who not only covered up the conspiracy but framed Oswald as well. Members included Earl Warren and Gerald Ford and of course a bunch of top nobs. VB says this fact alone makes the idea of a conspiracy ridiculous. He swings with both fists from the get go and you can feel the pent-up frustration letting loose finally as he starts handing it out to those malicious fools who have been peddling their stupid theories for half a century. (You can tell that's what he's thinking because that's actually what he says, more or less.) But his belligerence will not make any converts. Not, as i already said, that there would be any converts. If you believe there was a conspiracy, nothing in heaven or earth will convince you that you're wrong. It's like a religious thing.
4. “A tenacious, indefatigable, and, in many cases, fraudulent group of conspiracy theorists� have transformed a relatively simple murder case “into its present form of the most complex murder case by far in world history.�
5. The anti-conspiracy argument is necessarily less interesting than the pro. The conspiracy theorists however are suffering from the fallacy whereby people think great events must have great causes, and so by extension great events can’t be caused by some miserable nobody like Oswald. It must have been some grand conspiracy�. That makes an emotional sense. Similarly, in movies, the big villain, say, the Sheriff of Nottingham, has to die at the hands of the big hero, Robin Hood, at the end of the movie, and not be killed by some random arrow shot by a nameless outlaw.
6. The source of 95% of the theorists� arguments is “some document, affidavit or testimony� contained in�. the Warren Commission report or its ancillary 27 volumes of files. Yes, the very source they say was corrupted from the get go.
I must say I was rather jarred by finding out that this whole giant enterprise was based on a television reconstruction of the trial of Oswald which never happened. The tv show was shown in 1986. So that's where VB got going. It took him 20 years to produce his giant book and you can see where the time went.
When I'll get up the energy to tackle the whole thing I don't know....more
OR, IF EVERYBODY’S IN ON IT, WHY HAVEN’T THEY ASKED ME?
Our text for today is :
Things only appear random because THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF WALMART
OR, IF EVERYBODY’S IN ON IT, WHY HAVEN’T THEY ASKED ME?
Our text for today is :
Things only appear random because you're standing TOO CLOSE!
Let's cut to the chase here. Conspiracies are real. A trade union is a conspiracy against the rat-bastard capitalist running dogs who run big business. The capitalist running dogs in turn conspire against the honest workers to screw them out of every penny and when they're coughing and flopping about from emphysema, sack em and be done with em! A political party is a public conspiracy against its rivals - or, it's the public face of a private conspiracy. Football teams sit around and watch videos of the team they're up against next and figure out where the weaknesses are - they're conspiring in secret too.
So : you look at it one way, and everything's a damnable conspiracy! And that's the way I'm looking at it today! That woman across the road has some remarkable hanging baskets outside her house, but I REALISE NOW that all those peonies and dahlias are hiding cameras! They can't fool me. I call upon you all as witnesses, in case I'm found in a bag of quick drying cement on a grassy knoll somewhere.
Pardon me, I have to take my tablets.
David Aaronovitch's introduction spells out nicely enough why the conspiracists get my goat and my other pack animals so successfully. It's because they put me in the position of having to defend the authorities ! Yes! Me! Like I would want to do that! But that's what I'm doing when I bat away these crazy theories, which are like, you know, only a theory like gravity's a theory - we know they're really saying this is how 9/11 really went down, man . (It was Mossad!) So then I have to say no, no, you're wrong, the FBI is an organisation of great integrity and would never fabricate evidence and never perpetrate falsehoods upon the public! That's right! Of course they wouldn't!
There's a word for the position these conspiracists put me in : invidious. There's a feeling I get when blustering about how the authorities are honest and trustworthy : mortified.
That's the first reason why I hate these conspiracy theories. And the second is : they mess with my mind in making me think that facts aren't facts at all but received opinion. In this they are like a sharp course in practical philosophy - how do you know what you know, Descartes, what lies beyond the veil, cogito ergo vomit, how do you know you're not a brain in a tank and all that kind of stuff which is alright in theory but not when someone is ranting about the death of Robert Calvi, the CIA and the first Gulf War and the vatican and Monica Lewinsky and the protocols of the elders of Walmart.
As David says elegantly :
given the desire to believe, it is easy to confuse detail with thought.
9/11 : in August 2004 Zogby Opinion Research found that 2/3 of New Yorkers under the age of 30 thought that the US Government either knew the attacks were going to happen and allowed them to proceed or actively engineered them. So what? Most people living in the US and UK believe their governments are corrupt, cover up crimes routinely, steal you blind, go to war for hideous ignoble reasons and lie about them all the time, it’s the nature of government. So what? Do we think that people in former centuries thought they were blessed with their Kings and Popes?
Let’s imagine that � say � America wakes up one day and says - Stone the crows!* You were right! Bush and Cheney are indeed war criminals! Let’s try ‘em! Let’s prosecute all those who sold this phoney war to us citizens and got so many soldiers killed for nothing! What then? Will future governments never make these blunders again? Will the CIA become a force for Good? Do the conspiracists dream of a world without spies? Or again: the Iraq war was according to many conspiracists “all about oil�. If oil is going to become scarce in the West in � say � 50 years time, wouldn’t it be a prudent thing for the US government to secure future supplies? And since you can’t invade a country just like that you have to find a reason, hence WMD and the non-existent threat of Saddam Hussein? Hey, you purple in the face anti-Bushers, you should be praising this great president for guaranteeing our lovely Western lifestyle for another few decades!
What happens in Britain : a big controversial event takes place (death of Diana, invasion of Iraq) � official explanations are offered and routinely derided � the whole outraged nation demands a public enquiry with one voice � and they get one � 18 months later the chairman Lord Seriously-Old or Sir Dreadful Bastard announces the results � which confirm the official explanation was correct in all particulars � two thirds of the nation by then have become bored and are playing on their X-Boxes � the one third left all denounce the findings as Yet Another Whitewash. What has been accomplished? It is a kind of theatre. Everyone takes their appointed place and goes through their allotted script.
VARIOUS OBSCURE PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN UNCLEAR CIRCUMSTANCES
It doesn’t matter if the theorist believes in his own conspiracy theory because these theories are, like religion, a series of psychological strategies which exist to deal with the extreme perplexities of our human situation. We are meaning-seeking individuals in an apparently meaningless and very big & scary universe. Yesterday I heard an astronomer on the radio describing what you would find if you rocketed off to outer space and didn’t stop for nothing � her voice became a pleasant, relaxing drone� “then when you leave the solar system you see now that you are in an outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy which contains hundreds of billions of stars and then you see that the Milky Way itself is part of a cluster of galaxies each of which which contains hundreds of billions of stars and then you see that there are far away hundreds of billions of other galaxy clusters each of which which contains hundreds of billions of galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars� and by this time I was seriously freaking OUT and in a burst of Tourette’s syndrome I screamed at the radio “HEY LADY, WHO KILLED BRIAN JONES?�
So, for instance, the theory of the deliberate blowing-up of the levees in New Orleans in order to flood the black areas � almost endorsed by Spike Lee’s film � is an expression of the perennial feelings of people who feel oppressed. Many of the main theories propose such a vast complex conspiracy that they become truly farcical � you get quite indignant that you aren’t in on it, everyone else seems to be. So this stuff appears to me to be like the secularised, dark shadow cast by the setting sun of religion. Whereas the Christian cosmology presents an essentially benevolent universe spelled out by Jesus:
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.
GODLESS MALIGNANCY. COOL!
The conspiracist sees only godless malignancy, a world of men suborning each other, killing the good, doing harm. I note that each believer, the religious and the conspiracist, denies the existence of accident, co-incidence or mistake : everything is intentional in these thought worlds. There is always a Plan. The conspiracists replace one God with many � but are they not all facets of the One in an infinite dance? No. The hundredheaded gods of the conspiracists don’t dance at all � you put a foot wrong and the CIA or the Freemasons or the Jews or the British Royal Family or the Order of the Solar Temple or the Jesuits or the Knights Templars or the Communists or the Mob will frug you to death.
I realise now I have been conspiring against my own peace of mind for years!
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