Jamt
12-30-2009, 08:08 PM
How to fend off the people who insist they know the 'real story' behind everything.
By DAVID AARONOVITCH
This season's fashion in conspiracy theories—for those out of the loop of enlightenment—concerns health. The Web sites, marginal cable shows and radio phone-ins are full of tales about how Big Pharma and Bad Government are deliberately spreading diseases or manufacturing scares in order to sell us expensive drugs, gull us into dangerous vaccinations or just simply to create an atmosphere of panic which will allow "them" to take over.
Swine flu? The disease was created in a lab by a shadowy company, which had associations with ultra-baddies Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Israel, and released to sell the company's top product. HIV? According to a documentary called "House of Numbers," now doing the rounds of the highbrow film festivals, the link between HIV and AIDS is a fiction developed by pharmaceutical companies and AIDS activists to boost the profits of the former and the jobs of the latter. Cervical cancer vaccination? As one of my wife's acquaintances—a highly educated and intelligent woman—put it in an anguished round-robin email a few weeks ago, "girls have died in the U.S." from the vaccination, and the pharmaceutical companies know, but don't care as long as they make their profits.
We live in age of conspiracies, or rather, we are more aware of conspiracy theories than we used to be. Theories involving the hidden hand reproduce on the Internet and instantly jump borders. Giving the stories plausible heft are the exotic sites and TV stations now beaming everywhere, their studios, anchors and Web sites looking as professional and reliable as those of CNN, ABC News or the BBC. Channels such as Russia Today, Iran's Press TV and Al Jazeera pass on theories involving the supposed "real stories" behind world affairs to millions. Globalization not only assists with the spread of conspiracy theories, but because it causes such rapid change—in migration, jobs, security threats and the way we live—it leaves people desperate for clear, comforting answers. It is better to think that someone is in charge of everything than that the world is more often prey to accidents, madness and coincidence. That's why movies are full of dastardly but brilliant plotters, and hardly anything happens by chance.
View Full Image
k e v i n m c f a d i n
.This isn't new, of course. The Jewish Big Plan for world dominion was, in many ways, the first of the modern conspiracy theories. The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were widely believed and widely disseminated, particularly among the educated and professional classes in continental Europe after World War I. Henry Ford was one of their chief distributors in the U.S. The "Protocols" may also be one of the most effective of conspiracy theories, seeing use in pre-war German classrooms, providing a basis for the extermination of the European Jews and, more recently being screened on Iranian television for the instruction of youth.
These cyber-driven days, each new U.S. president has attracted theories of his own, assiduously spread mostly by partisans of the other side. So the saturnine Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster and a whole lot of men in Arkansas (we won't discuss what he did with the women of Arkansas), the infernal George W. Bush brought down the twin towers, and the foreign Barack Obama isn't an American at all, and has plotted to cover it up. Interestingly out-of-power Democrats are far more likely to believe the theories about in-power Republicans, and powerless Republicans far more likely to believe them about powerful Democrats. One aspect of conspiracy theories is that they are history for losers.
It doesn't always feel like that. Many of us, of course, are not believers but simply find ourselves confronted at a dinner party by the man who just knows the "real story," and has arrived armed with his killer facts and certainty. You on the other hand, have nothing but your instinct for nonsense. So, for everyone who has been, or will be, in that woeful position, I offer this short guide to how conspiracy theories work, the better to rebut them.
Even where conspiracy theories are not momentous, and may sometimes be physically (if not intellectually) harmless—such as with the gorgeous slew of nonsenses that prefaced "The Da Vinci Code," involving Templars, secret priories, hidden treasures and the bloodline of Christ—they share certain features that make them work.
Kevin McFadin
.These include an appeal to precedent, self-heroization, contempt for the benighted masses, a claim to be only asking "disturbing questions," invariably exaggerating the status and expertise of supporters, the use of apparently scholarly ways of laying out arguments (or "death by footnote"), the appropriation of imagined Secret Service jargon, circularity in logic, hydra-headedness in growing new arguments as soon as old ones are chopped off, and, finally, the exciting suggestion of persecution. These characteristics help them to convince intelligent people of deeply unintelligent things.
I've only rarely come across a modern conspiracy theory that doesn't seek to establish supposed historical precedents for whatever the conspiracy is—arguing that since it has happened before, there is nothing unnatural about it happening again. Sometimes the history can be voluminous; I was present at one large 9/11 Truth meeting in London in 2005, which began with the revelation that the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was an inside job (James I's chief minister Robert Cecil, if you want to know) and progressed through the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin and the '60s assassinations, before making the devilish administration's attack on its own cities seem like an almost inevitable progression.
The second characteristic is the implication that the theorist and his co-believers are part of a brave insurgency against a corrupt elite or a stifling orthodoxy. It is of course, an ironic pleasure to witness a West Coast academic tell an audience of Danish professionals at the Copenhagen Central Library with regard to 9/11, that "members of the elite of our society may not think that the truth should be revealed." By contrast, he seemed to be suggesting, belief in the conspiracy makes you part of a genuinely heroic anti-elite elite group who can see past an official version propagated for the benefit of the lazy or inert mass of people by the powers that be. Now, you have to admit, to be such a rebel while risking so little is cool.
Cool too is the special quality of thought required to appreciate the existence of the conspiracy. If the conspiracists have cracked the code, it is not least because of their possession of an unusual and perceptive way of looking at things. Those who cannot or will not see the now-revealed truth are variously described as robots or, latterly, as sheep—citizens who shuffle half-awake through their conventional lives. Erich Von Daniken, propagator of the theory that aliens built the pyramids, commended his own courage for writing his books in the teeth of the "reactionary flood" and his readers for their courage in reading them. The authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," the "non-fiction"book that lay behind "The Da Vinci Code," argued that they had developed a new form of scholarship which allowed them to see connections invisible to stuffy old academics.
And then there is the violent innocence of much conspiracism, in which the theorist is "only asking questions" about the official version of the truth, and doesn't go so far as to have a theory himself—other than it is impossible that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald alone, that the moon landing happened in the way the world imagined, that Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes. "I'm not saying he wasn't born in Hawaii" argue sophisticated birthers of Obama, "all I'm saying is why won't he produce his birth certificate?"
Conspiracists draw upon the endorsement of "experts" to validate their theories, and yet a constant feature of modern conspiracy theories is the exaggeration of the status of their experts. The former U.K. junior environment minister Michael Meacher, a leading "disturbing question" figure on the edges of the 9/11 Truth movement, was never a member of the British cabinet. But in a radio interview on the syndicated "The Alex Jones Show" was referred to as the "former number three in the Blair government." David Ray Griffin, perhaps the most respected of all the 9/11 conspiracists, lays remarkable and repeated confidence in his judgement that his tatterdemalion handful of scientist-scholars somehow see a truth that armies of engineers, demolition experts, and aerodynamic specialists don't or won't. In one recent British conspiracy movement a much cited "lecturer and researcher" turned out to be an inquirer into alchemy, astrology and crop circles.
Today no conspiracist publication or Web site wants for the outward flourishes of scholarship. The footnotes are compendious, the sources are seemingly authoritative. It is only when you get in amongst them that you discover what the footnotes actually refer to. Many are examples of that new art form, the cross-citation, in which, say, the French conspiracy author Thierry Meyssan cites American conspiracy author Webster Tarpley; Tarpley cites David Ray Griffin; and David Ray Griffin cites Thierry Meyssan. Others will be references to contemporaneous news reports which, because they were necessarily provisional, now supposedly establish "anomalies" between them and the "official" (i.e. later) version of what happened. It is another irony, this ascription of a final, almost biblical authority to immediate and necessarily provisional mainstream news reports of an incident—providing, of course that they can be used to demonstrate the inconsistencies that the conspiracists are seeking. Reporters usually do the best they can in frightening and confused circumstances, but early explanations of major disasters will contain much that turns out to be mistaken. But mistakes do not exist in the world of conspiracy.
In his first book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11," theologian Mr. Griffin questions the survival of evidence from the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, using an article in the Guardian as support: "As a story in the Guardian said, 'the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism.'" Readers would not know that this was not a report but merely the passing opinion of a columnist called Anne Karpf, who had no more knowledge about what might or might not have emerged from the Twin Towers than had any other columnist based in north London.
A final polish is given to the conspiracists' illusion of authority by the use of what is imagined to be Secret Service or technical jargon, as though the authors had been in recent communication with spies, generals or scientists. Web sites and books are adorned with interesting words and phrases include "psyops" (short for psychological operations), "false flag," and, more recently, "wet disposal," meaning assassination. Such use helps to establish an interior jargon for the conspiracy community.
No inconvenient fact or refutation discombobulates the believer—conspiracists are always winners. Their arguments have a determined flexibility whereby reverses can be accommodated within the theory itself, or simply discarded. So, embarrassing and obvious problems in the theory may be ascribed to deliberate disinformation originating with the imagined plotters designed to throw activists off the scent. One believer in the conspiracy to assassinate the Princess of Wales in 1997 claimed that it was the very proliferation of absurd theories concerning Diana that first convinced her that this was the MI6 squad at work seeking to cover up its real role in the killing.
The young makers of the viral Internet film on 9/11, "Loose Change," originally made much of the supposed impossibility of the phone calls made by passengers and crew from the hijacked planes to relatives and colleagues. During the film its writer and narrator, Dylan Avery, ridiculed the very idea. "The cell phones were fake," he scoffed, "No question about it." A few weeks ago I found myself on a San Francisco talk show with Mr. Avery, and pointed out the lunacy inherent in this claim. "You're just nitpicking!" he told me, adding that the really important evidence now concerned traces of a magical explosive "super-thermite" discovered from samples taken at Ground Zero and analyzed by an un-peer-reviewed Danish conspiracist chemist.
Mr. Avery could have opted for the ingenuity of the film's producer, Korey Rowe, who, when challenged in a 2006 Smith magazine interview about the glaring factual mistakes in the film, replied, "We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves."
Finally, there is hardly a conspiracy theory, but its promoters are under some kind of threat from shadowy powers. Their phones are bugged, their offices are burgled but not robbed, they are followed, their hard drives fragment and their emails mysteriously disappear. But oddly, given their unique insights into the malefactions of powerful rulers, bent scientists and ruthless corporations, and their heroic role in bringing these into the public domain, they are never seriously harmed. A fact which, readers must surely agree that, though welcome, is very suspicious.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times of London. This essay was adapted from "Voodoo Histories: the Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History," due out from Riverhead next February.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704238104574602042125998498.html
By DAVID AARONOVITCH
This season's fashion in conspiracy theories—for those out of the loop of enlightenment—concerns health. The Web sites, marginal cable shows and radio phone-ins are full of tales about how Big Pharma and Bad Government are deliberately spreading diseases or manufacturing scares in order to sell us expensive drugs, gull us into dangerous vaccinations or just simply to create an atmosphere of panic which will allow "them" to take over.
Swine flu? The disease was created in a lab by a shadowy company, which had associations with ultra-baddies Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Israel, and released to sell the company's top product. HIV? According to a documentary called "House of Numbers," now doing the rounds of the highbrow film festivals, the link between HIV and AIDS is a fiction developed by pharmaceutical companies and AIDS activists to boost the profits of the former and the jobs of the latter. Cervical cancer vaccination? As one of my wife's acquaintances—a highly educated and intelligent woman—put it in an anguished round-robin email a few weeks ago, "girls have died in the U.S." from the vaccination, and the pharmaceutical companies know, but don't care as long as they make their profits.
We live in age of conspiracies, or rather, we are more aware of conspiracy theories than we used to be. Theories involving the hidden hand reproduce on the Internet and instantly jump borders. Giving the stories plausible heft are the exotic sites and TV stations now beaming everywhere, their studios, anchors and Web sites looking as professional and reliable as those of CNN, ABC News or the BBC. Channels such as Russia Today, Iran's Press TV and Al Jazeera pass on theories involving the supposed "real stories" behind world affairs to millions. Globalization not only assists with the spread of conspiracy theories, but because it causes such rapid change—in migration, jobs, security threats and the way we live—it leaves people desperate for clear, comforting answers. It is better to think that someone is in charge of everything than that the world is more often prey to accidents, madness and coincidence. That's why movies are full of dastardly but brilliant plotters, and hardly anything happens by chance.
View Full Image
k e v i n m c f a d i n
.This isn't new, of course. The Jewish Big Plan for world dominion was, in many ways, the first of the modern conspiracy theories. The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were widely believed and widely disseminated, particularly among the educated and professional classes in continental Europe after World War I. Henry Ford was one of their chief distributors in the U.S. The "Protocols" may also be one of the most effective of conspiracy theories, seeing use in pre-war German classrooms, providing a basis for the extermination of the European Jews and, more recently being screened on Iranian television for the instruction of youth.
These cyber-driven days, each new U.S. president has attracted theories of his own, assiduously spread mostly by partisans of the other side. So the saturnine Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster and a whole lot of men in Arkansas (we won't discuss what he did with the women of Arkansas), the infernal George W. Bush brought down the twin towers, and the foreign Barack Obama isn't an American at all, and has plotted to cover it up. Interestingly out-of-power Democrats are far more likely to believe the theories about in-power Republicans, and powerless Republicans far more likely to believe them about powerful Democrats. One aspect of conspiracy theories is that they are history for losers.
It doesn't always feel like that. Many of us, of course, are not believers but simply find ourselves confronted at a dinner party by the man who just knows the "real story," and has arrived armed with his killer facts and certainty. You on the other hand, have nothing but your instinct for nonsense. So, for everyone who has been, or will be, in that woeful position, I offer this short guide to how conspiracy theories work, the better to rebut them.
Even where conspiracy theories are not momentous, and may sometimes be physically (if not intellectually) harmless—such as with the gorgeous slew of nonsenses that prefaced "The Da Vinci Code," involving Templars, secret priories, hidden treasures and the bloodline of Christ—they share certain features that make them work.
Kevin McFadin
.These include an appeal to precedent, self-heroization, contempt for the benighted masses, a claim to be only asking "disturbing questions," invariably exaggerating the status and expertise of supporters, the use of apparently scholarly ways of laying out arguments (or "death by footnote"), the appropriation of imagined Secret Service jargon, circularity in logic, hydra-headedness in growing new arguments as soon as old ones are chopped off, and, finally, the exciting suggestion of persecution. These characteristics help them to convince intelligent people of deeply unintelligent things.
I've only rarely come across a modern conspiracy theory that doesn't seek to establish supposed historical precedents for whatever the conspiracy is—arguing that since it has happened before, there is nothing unnatural about it happening again. Sometimes the history can be voluminous; I was present at one large 9/11 Truth meeting in London in 2005, which began with the revelation that the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was an inside job (James I's chief minister Robert Cecil, if you want to know) and progressed through the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin and the '60s assassinations, before making the devilish administration's attack on its own cities seem like an almost inevitable progression.
The second characteristic is the implication that the theorist and his co-believers are part of a brave insurgency against a corrupt elite or a stifling orthodoxy. It is of course, an ironic pleasure to witness a West Coast academic tell an audience of Danish professionals at the Copenhagen Central Library with regard to 9/11, that "members of the elite of our society may not think that the truth should be revealed." By contrast, he seemed to be suggesting, belief in the conspiracy makes you part of a genuinely heroic anti-elite elite group who can see past an official version propagated for the benefit of the lazy or inert mass of people by the powers that be. Now, you have to admit, to be such a rebel while risking so little is cool.
Cool too is the special quality of thought required to appreciate the existence of the conspiracy. If the conspiracists have cracked the code, it is not least because of their possession of an unusual and perceptive way of looking at things. Those who cannot or will not see the now-revealed truth are variously described as robots or, latterly, as sheep—citizens who shuffle half-awake through their conventional lives. Erich Von Daniken, propagator of the theory that aliens built the pyramids, commended his own courage for writing his books in the teeth of the "reactionary flood" and his readers for their courage in reading them. The authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," the "non-fiction"book that lay behind "The Da Vinci Code," argued that they had developed a new form of scholarship which allowed them to see connections invisible to stuffy old academics.
And then there is the violent innocence of much conspiracism, in which the theorist is "only asking questions" about the official version of the truth, and doesn't go so far as to have a theory himself—other than it is impossible that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald alone, that the moon landing happened in the way the world imagined, that Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes. "I'm not saying he wasn't born in Hawaii" argue sophisticated birthers of Obama, "all I'm saying is why won't he produce his birth certificate?"
Conspiracists draw upon the endorsement of "experts" to validate their theories, and yet a constant feature of modern conspiracy theories is the exaggeration of the status of their experts. The former U.K. junior environment minister Michael Meacher, a leading "disturbing question" figure on the edges of the 9/11 Truth movement, was never a member of the British cabinet. But in a radio interview on the syndicated "The Alex Jones Show" was referred to as the "former number three in the Blair government." David Ray Griffin, perhaps the most respected of all the 9/11 conspiracists, lays remarkable and repeated confidence in his judgement that his tatterdemalion handful of scientist-scholars somehow see a truth that armies of engineers, demolition experts, and aerodynamic specialists don't or won't. In one recent British conspiracy movement a much cited "lecturer and researcher" turned out to be an inquirer into alchemy, astrology and crop circles.
Today no conspiracist publication or Web site wants for the outward flourishes of scholarship. The footnotes are compendious, the sources are seemingly authoritative. It is only when you get in amongst them that you discover what the footnotes actually refer to. Many are examples of that new art form, the cross-citation, in which, say, the French conspiracy author Thierry Meyssan cites American conspiracy author Webster Tarpley; Tarpley cites David Ray Griffin; and David Ray Griffin cites Thierry Meyssan. Others will be references to contemporaneous news reports which, because they were necessarily provisional, now supposedly establish "anomalies" between them and the "official" (i.e. later) version of what happened. It is another irony, this ascription of a final, almost biblical authority to immediate and necessarily provisional mainstream news reports of an incident—providing, of course that they can be used to demonstrate the inconsistencies that the conspiracists are seeking. Reporters usually do the best they can in frightening and confused circumstances, but early explanations of major disasters will contain much that turns out to be mistaken. But mistakes do not exist in the world of conspiracy.
In his first book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11," theologian Mr. Griffin questions the survival of evidence from the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, using an article in the Guardian as support: "As a story in the Guardian said, 'the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism.'" Readers would not know that this was not a report but merely the passing opinion of a columnist called Anne Karpf, who had no more knowledge about what might or might not have emerged from the Twin Towers than had any other columnist based in north London.
A final polish is given to the conspiracists' illusion of authority by the use of what is imagined to be Secret Service or technical jargon, as though the authors had been in recent communication with spies, generals or scientists. Web sites and books are adorned with interesting words and phrases include "psyops" (short for psychological operations), "false flag," and, more recently, "wet disposal," meaning assassination. Such use helps to establish an interior jargon for the conspiracy community.
No inconvenient fact or refutation discombobulates the believer—conspiracists are always winners. Their arguments have a determined flexibility whereby reverses can be accommodated within the theory itself, or simply discarded. So, embarrassing and obvious problems in the theory may be ascribed to deliberate disinformation originating with the imagined plotters designed to throw activists off the scent. One believer in the conspiracy to assassinate the Princess of Wales in 1997 claimed that it was the very proliferation of absurd theories concerning Diana that first convinced her that this was the MI6 squad at work seeking to cover up its real role in the killing.
The young makers of the viral Internet film on 9/11, "Loose Change," originally made much of the supposed impossibility of the phone calls made by passengers and crew from the hijacked planes to relatives and colleagues. During the film its writer and narrator, Dylan Avery, ridiculed the very idea. "The cell phones were fake," he scoffed, "No question about it." A few weeks ago I found myself on a San Francisco talk show with Mr. Avery, and pointed out the lunacy inherent in this claim. "You're just nitpicking!" he told me, adding that the really important evidence now concerned traces of a magical explosive "super-thermite" discovered from samples taken at Ground Zero and analyzed by an un-peer-reviewed Danish conspiracist chemist.
Mr. Avery could have opted for the ingenuity of the film's producer, Korey Rowe, who, when challenged in a 2006 Smith magazine interview about the glaring factual mistakes in the film, replied, "We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves."
Finally, there is hardly a conspiracy theory, but its promoters are under some kind of threat from shadowy powers. Their phones are bugged, their offices are burgled but not robbed, they are followed, their hard drives fragment and their emails mysteriously disappear. But oddly, given their unique insights into the malefactions of powerful rulers, bent scientists and ruthless corporations, and their heroic role in bringing these into the public domain, they are never seriously harmed. A fact which, readers must surely agree that, though welcome, is very suspicious.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times of London. This essay was adapted from "Voodoo Histories: the Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History," due out from Riverhead next February.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704238104574602042125998498.html