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Conspiracy theory special: But that's what they want us to think

Posted on: Sunday, 16 November 2003, 06:00 CST

So here we are, 40 years on this week from the birth of one of the great Conspiracy Theories of all time, when Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed US President John F Kennedy with a mail-order rifle from an upper floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. He was subsequently arrested, then himself shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner.

That was how things went for Oswald and JFK, and there is not a single aspect of the "official" version of events that has not been questioned, denied, replaced with increasingly tortuous layer-upon- layer of conspiracy ever since. The Kennedy assassination conspiracy just will not go away.

Everything is a conspiracy

It's not just JFK, of course. Trawl the Web and you will see that any event can attract conspiracy theories. The list is almost endless. Jonestown, Harold Wilson, Trident, KA007, PsyOps in Ulster, Cocaine trafficking and the CIA, Irangate, Combat 18, the Vatican (repeatedly), Willy Brandt... where does it end?

Or, more constructively: where does it start? Almost invariable from one of two points: the sense that this should not have happened; or, alternatively (though more rarely), that this should have happened but didn't. Into the first group fall, for example, 11 September, the death of the Princess of Wales, the assassination of JFK, the deaths of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Into the second group, most perennially, fall the stories of (or the stories of the official suppression of) alien encounters, cures for Aids and cancer, endless cheap (or free) power and all those bought-up- and- suppressed-invention stories.

To attempt any deeper taxonomy of conspiracy theories would be to flog an (allegedly) dead horse, but there are one or two mechanisms that seem perennially popular. The first is the "Pearl Harbor" type. It's fairly straightforward in mechanism, if not in execution, and is founded upon the false logic which says that if event B follows event A, then A caused B. The accomplished Conspiracist will start by examining B to see who benefits, and conclude that they caused A to come about. In this type of conspiracy theory, for example, the Allies were in some way to blame for provoking, staging, or at least suppressing advance intelligence about, the Pearl Harbor attacks in order to get the US into the Second World War.

The current beneficiary of Pearl Harbor theory is, of course, 11 September. The Twin Towers came down, then the USA invaded Iraq, and there are literally thousands of pages of superficially appealing material on the Web claiming to demonstrate that hidden powers (which powers these are varies according to the taste of the individual Conspiracist) arranged, from within the US, the destruction of the World Trade Centre in order to justify the (pre- ordained) invasion. The application of Pearl Harbor theory is helped here by all those what-the-hell...? factors surrounding the events of 11 September: the mysteriously intact passports, the conveniently discovered Pilot's Operating Handbooks, the apparently undersized jet engines, the mysterious bulge in the tower wall just before the plane hit...; things which just don't quite add up.

The second common Conspiracy is the Conjurer's, the Kennedy, or the What-You-Thought-You-Saw-Is-Not-What-Actually-Happened model. It's a kind of illusionist's misdirection of the audience which pleasingly operates both ways: if officialdom tells us we saw X, we can be sure it wasn't X we saw; and if officialdom tells us that, whatever we saw, it certainly wasn't X, then - gosh darn it - X it was.

Again, on 11 September, the events at the Pentagon have been subjected to Conjurer's model, the major speculation being the rather dramatic assertion that, a) nothing actually hit the Pentagon and, b) if something did hit the Pentagon, it wasn't an airliner. "What," the theorists ask, "happened to the wings, then? Where did they, like, go to? And why was the jet engine `found' at the scene so small?" and many other apparently legitimate questions, before reaching the conclusion that it was a bomb within the building, or a remote-controlled drone, or a Cruise missile#.

As well as mechanisms of conspiracy theory, there are also two main types or scopes of conspiracy, and two main classes of conspirator. Historically - and consistently - they have fallen into two main groups: the Jews and the Secret Societies (primarily the Freemasons and the - functionally innocuous, transient, and rapidly disbanded - Bavarian Illuminati), both accorded ambitions, power, status, and historical legitimacy wildly beyond that which they actually possess, or ever possessed#.

Not to suggest that the two are exclusive. While it can be argued that the Eastern Front in the Second World War was a sort of inconclusive Armageddon between the two great conspiracy theories (the Nazis, genocidally terrified of the Jews, versus Stalin's Russia, lethally paranoid about internal cabals of kulaks, running dogs, infiltrators), the two frequently merge into one: a consequence of Conspiracism's inherent Pringles Effect ("once you pop, you just can't stop").

Generally, the merging is in the direction of the Jews, most recently ventilated by the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who he said, "the Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy." At one time or another, the Jews have been held up as being behind just about every powerful organisation on earth, real or imaginary, public or secret: the Illuminati, the World Bank, the US Government, the Freemasons, the Lutherans, the Jesuits#, the Catholic church (the Jews being behind the election of innumerable Popes, either through stealth, through financial pressure#, or by the suggestion that a large number - in some cases, a majority - of cardinals are Jewish), even Christianity itself.

While the Secret Society version is attractive enough to its adherents, what it lacks - whether its target is the New World Order or the Illuminati, the Freemasons or the English or the Americans (or at least Hidden Powers behind the governments of those two nations) - is the perfect finality of the Jewish version. And so, once again, we see the Pringles Effect: that things may appear to be down to, say, the Illuminati, but behind the Illuminati lie... the Jews#.

And just in case you were wondering how come one of the world's historically most calumniated, persecuted, annihilated and generally buggered-about peoples can be thought of as secretly running the show... well, behind the Jews stand the Elders of Zion. The vast majority of Jews (in this popular version) are themselves dupes, unwittingly in thrall to the Elders with their global ambitions, hideously revealed in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion... and if the Protocols were proven to be a ` 19th- century forgery, got up by anti-Semites, well, so what? That's just what they'd want us to think#.

The Mind of the Conspiracist

In the Conspiracist mind, the Truth is that which we do not know, and what we do know (or think we know, or are told by the authorities) cannot therefore be the truth. The simple explanation is seldom, if ever, the true explanation. It is as if Conspiracists have entirely abandoned the principle of Occam's Razor, which declares that, when looking for an explanation of things, one should not unnecessarily multiply entities. Conspiracists multiply entities as if there were no tomorrow. "Cause" is piled upon "cause", conspiracy upon conspiracy; where one conspiracy proves inadequate, another conspiracy is called in to fill the gaps. One of the most persistent JFK theories requires more bullets to have been in Kennedy's body than were found. At this point, any scientist would revise the theory. Not so the Conspiracist, who accounts for the missing bullets by introducing a sub- or meta-conspiracy of doctors, who secretly removed the "missing" bullets; and so their apparent absence does not undermine the theory, but strengthens it. In a logic-defying display of intellectual limbo-dancing, the dedicated Conspiracist attempts to demonstrate that, the more multi- layered a conspiracy theory becomes, the more likely it is to be "true".

Yet they appeal to us. The allure of conspiracy theories is apparently universal. While most of us would like to present ourselves as Horatios, we are all inclined, at least in part, to play Hamlet, to declare (even if only in private) that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the philosophies of those who believe what they are told.

Sometimes, this is because of gaps in the record. Something in our psyche demands conclusive closure, and if we can't get it legitimately, hell, we'll just make it up. But that desire - to get the answer and move on - can lead to, at best, a complete abandoning of logic. Conspiracy theory - the belief that what we're told is almost by definition not what happened - leads to some truly wild abandonings of the laws of reason. Even without any sense of human nature, the simple exercise of probability can demonstrate that Grand Conspiracies are almost bound to fail, simply because of the multiplying of risk that someone will - deliberately or inadvertently - talk.#

Think about those Princess Di assassination theories. Here was a young woman in a heavy, clumsy car driven through a notorious accident black spot by an inexperienced driver at high speed. Enough, perhaps, for logic to say, "Yes; here's the cause."

But this young woman was also an icon of beauty; invested with the semi- magical aura of royalty; involved with a man who might be characterised as an interloper; possibly pregnant by him; and herself a sufferer from various neuroses and mild paranoias (helicopter crashes, car crashes and the other externalisations of insecurity you might expect in one who has been drawn into, then ejected from, a glamorous, celebrated and undeniably powerful family). Conspiracy theory demands that all these factors be taken into account; and when it is "revealed" (the butler did it) that she had "predicted" her own "assassination" in a car crash, instead of accepting that as a highly likely fantasy of an unsophisticated woman who felt herself under threat (a staged car crash in any circumstance, let alone one so dependent on contingency and last- minute mind-changing as the Alma accident, is perhaps the least dependable method of assassinating someone), we instead follow our instincts to make sense of everything and drive recklessly towards at least the illusion of closure. As one Conspiracy proves inadequate, others are piled on top, and we are not deterred by the fact that the structure very soon becomes insupportable, if only because of the sheer number of people who would need not only to be 100 per cent effective, but also to keep 100 per cent silent.

If the urge for closure is one potent factor in the mind of the conspiracy theorist, then the desire for some sort of illusory moral justice is another. Powerful emotions cry out for equally powerful explanation; it is hard to acknowledge that grievous oaks from innocent acorns grow - something we all surely recognise.

Our lives are circumscribed by loss. Our icons (the World Trade Centre, Diana, Elvis, JFK) shatter, our yearnings (peace, harmony, wise visitors from outerspace) come to nothing, and so we cry, "How can this be?", demanding that our powerful feelings are attributable to uncommon causes. A car crash, clever terrorists, an unhealthy lifestyle, a man with a grievance and a mail-order rifle: these are not enough. They belittle us, bring our dreams down in (sometimes literal) flames, point up the smallness of our lives and the inadequacy of our control. Rather than accept that, we feel that such terrible things must have been done by terrible men working in conspiracy against the common good, and therefore for their own ends.

But this, too, plays into our own sense of relative powerlessness and insignificance. We are at the mercy of chance, but how can the great, the beautiful, the noble, the good be at that same mercy? We are powerless to alter great events, so how can any lone man - Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray - alter events by assassinating JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin ` Luther King#? And when Henry Steele Commager, writing about conspiracy theories in 1967, suggested that "there's some psychological requirement that forces [conspiracy theorists] to reject the ordinary and find refuge in the extraordinary" could it not be simply this: that we instinctively feel that extraordinary events require extraordinary "explanations"?

The British conspiracy-theory expert Robin Ramsay, editor of Lobster magazine, cites innumerable examples: a conspiracy of unemployed lawyers who allegedly assassinated Nicole Simpson and framed OJ to get their hands on an FBI bar applicants' blacklist; one Michael Todd of Selby, who offers, for just under 100 quid, evidence of Pelt, a secret conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of environmentalism; a UFO buff who "tried to persuade me that the US has a secret base built under Loch Lomond, from which emerge mysterious craft... `Why,' said I, `would they put such a base under the single most popular tourist spot in the west of Scotland?'"

But Ramsay is not such a blanket quasher of conspiracy theory as one might expect. It has got easier, he wrote, to spread them#, thanks to new technology. It's getting increasingly hard to work out what's real and what's not, especially for "Mr & Mrs Joe Sixpack" who probably haven't read a book since high school, and who may be born again. "America," says Ramsay (pointing out that that's where most of the theories that reach us come from), "is a profoundly religious society... people who are waiting for `rapture' haven't that far to go to believe that the sky at night is swarming with UFOs...

"What irritates me is that this legitimate allergy to mega conspiracy theories extends much further than the crazy fringe to a general prohibition on conspiracies. And this is very strange, because it is blindingly obvious - is it not? - that political parties, for example, are intrinsically conspiratorial." As Ramsay points out, the existence of powerful pressure groups both within and without the mechanism of the state is acknowledged and uncontroversial. Never mind the Freemasons; what about "the important conspiracies... those run by the state"?

Conspiracy: it travels well

If we have a fundamental human need for explanations, however improbable, for the bad things which happen, and the good things that don't, then it's surprising that conspiracy theory has been one of the West's more successful exports of recent years.

What may be surprising, though, is the almost intact nature of the export, complete with fears and mechanisms embedded in Western history which seem to require little, if any, localisation for consumption. The Malaysian PM's remarks about Jews, for example, are not remotely hors commun, even though Malaysia has had little historical (or even geographical) opportunity even to encounter Jews, let alone work itself up into a state about them. Africa, India, Japan - all these have imported Western concerns along with Western conspiracism, Japan going so far as not only to fear the power of the Jews it has never encountered. Perhaps it's part of Japan's "Westernisation": if you're going to compete in Western markets, emulate Western looks (even to the extent of plastic surgery), music and fashion, and walk around with Western writing on your shopping bags and T-shirts#, then importing Western conspiracy theories to go with it all was perhaps inevitable.

Great conspiracies

If, then, we can legitimately think of Conspiracism - the "paranoid style" - as a cast of thought deeply rooted in Western history, revitalised by the complexities of the modern world, directed primarily against exemplars of modernism in its broadest sense (Jews, Freemasons/Illuminati, the English, the Americans), exported in recent years almost intact, thriving on the Internet, and meeting the twin, and deep, psychological needs for closure and for what we might call "proportionate cause", then it's easy to see how it can be so readily exported, and so easily applied.

What is interesting, though, is the range, and scope, of things which have been attributed to Conspiracies (as opposed to conspiracies - small "c" - which have always happened and will go on happening). We've touched on Elvis, the Kennedys, Diana; think, too, of the Moon landing all those years ago: there are still thriving theories saying it never happened; only last week I was cornered by a man who said there were anomalies in the footprints, anomalies in the flag, anomalies in the dust thrown up by the buggy, all of which encouraged him to believe that - life imitating not art, but Hollywood - it was all faked in a warehouse somewhere (last year Nasa hired a writer to scotch that once and for all).

Think, too, of the alleged Roswell aliens, secretly carted off to Nevada to be anatomised on a site which is now involved (such is the Pringles Effect) in building flying saucers and death rays, and has been disappeared from the maps, just like the Diamond as Big as the Ritz. Think of the Aids conspiracy, a virus got up by forces within the US to get rid of blacks and gays; think of the equivalent rumour of the soft drinks made in New York (by a largely black company) and tainted, deliberately, to poison blacks. `

Think, too, of the small conspiracies, local in intention, but global in effect. These are not prompted so much by the desire for "proportionate cause" (after all, they do not elicit quite such powerful emotion as the generic "death of a dream") but more by the need for closure in explaining worrying or unfamiliar phenomena. Take Microsoft, an unappealing monolith and a daily irritant for millions, against which every possible allegation has been made: it's trying to control the Internet, it does control the Internet, it is spying on its customers, it is paying people to write viruses so that its customers have to upgrade and upgrade, locking them in to the (evil) Windows empire, it has secretly developed the world's most perfect operating system but won't release it because that would foul up its revenue stream#.

Think of the "black helicopters" allegedly flying around the US, abducting citizens or ferrying aliens around. (Scott Carr, editor of the Flying Saucer Gazette, actually saw one! Flying over his flat! "While they did fly over our building again, they did not come in as close as before. You see, they must have realised I was on to them, and were wary. They knew that if they got in too close... I could potentially expose them." Donning his tin-foil cap "to block the microwave mind-control" Carr reaches his conclusion: probably traffic choppers, or police on some sting. But others are not so gifted logically...) Think, more soberly, of the paedophile rings conspiring to pervert all our children, just like the homosexual rings used to do before we realised they didn't exist. Think of the secret messages hidden in pop songs or on album covers. Think of the doctors, doctors who hate their patients and want them to die, conspiring to cover up the Wisdom of the Ancients and keep their patients in ignorance; think of the "cliques" who control access to the media and admission to our universities; think of the Anarchists, if you can remember the Anarchists, who held Europe in fear in the 19th century. Think of the scientists who suppress heterodox research.

These small conspiracies, like the grand conspiracies, have, at their root, the same mechanisms. Bad things happen: how can this be? One trivial example offers a clue to the scope, and to the methodology of conspiracism: the question of the "Brain Chip". This website# announces that, "You are Slated for Total Dehumanization: Brain Chips for You and Your Entire Family By the year 2025" and quotes the US Department of Defense: "The civilian populace will likely accept an implanted microscopic chips that allow military members to defend vital national interests."

The inference is irresistible: the military turning on its fellow citizens, who are dehumanized by Brain Chips, in order to prevent them obstructing the Grand Master Plan, whatever that may be.# And in case we need convincing, the author deploys another Conspiracist trick, the apparently supportive citation. "You can actually find the above quote at the below links" we are told. But if you actually follow the citation, you find a very different story. The author does indeed speculate on the availability of "brain chips". But they are for soldiers on the battlefield, fighting not politically inconvenient fellow Americans, but "the enemy"; and they are implanted as communications devices: better than head-up visor displays, better than earphones, because you can't lose them, the enemy can't steal them, and they are more secure.

Nowhere is the proposition that civilians are the proposed recipients of "Brain Chips" even raised, let alone validated. The chips are a piece of military kit, and that's that. So why cite them?

Perhaps because in most conspiracy theories great or small, the underlying purpose is not to find the truth but to derive an "explanation" which, however improbable, is internally consistent. Religions operate in the same way (all requiring the initial "leap of faith") and probably fulfil the same psychological needs. But without an omnipotent god, without revelatory texts or a body of orthodoxy, the conspiracies open the door, not to the eerie tranquility of the religious, but upon a black hole. Everything that fits is fitted in; everything that does not fit is manipulated and distorted until it does fit. Conspiracism is the opposite of science. Science revises its model, where Conspiracism reshapes the "evidence". (But then science, some believe, is just another conspiracy, an example of the gulf between the secret elect and the rest of us dupes.)

There are, of course, conspiracies. There are, of course, things which simply do not smell right. The events surrounding 11 September and its aftermath certainly raise questions which have not yet been satisfactorily answered. But the position adopted by people I have spoken to - people one might think would know better - is, alarmingly, that either you believe in the conspiracy theory, or you accept what you're told.

Not so. The opposite of Conspiracism is not acceptance, but investigation. It is, in a sense, a perversion of the pursuit of history. Conspiracists seek to construct an explanation which is coherent, with no loose ends and a clear purpose. Historians seek the explanation, accepting that it may never be - perhaps never can be - complete, that there will always be loose ends, and that contingency is as powerful a force as purpose. It is with the historians that our best hope lies.

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