Conspiracy Theories E-Book

Robin Ramsay

• Herausgeber: Pocket Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 183

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Did you think the X-Files is fiction? If so, you must be one of those deluded fools who think Elvis is dead, and believe that the US actually went to the moon, and don't know that the ruling elites did a deal with the extra-terrestrials after the Roswell crash in 1947... Boy, it really is getting strange out there. At one time, you could blame the world's troubles on the Masons or the Illuminati, or the Jews, or One Worlders, or the Great Communist Conspiracy. Now, in addition to the usual suspects, we also have the alien-US elite conspiracy, or the alien shape-shifting reptile conspiracy to worry about - and there are books to prove it as well! Conspiracy Theories? They are all in here - but not just lined up to be ridiculed and dismissed. OK, there is some of that, but the author also tries to sort out the handful of wheat from the choking clouds of intellectual chaff. For among the nonsensical Conspiracy Theory rubbish currently proliferating on the Internet, there are important nuggets of real research about real conspiracies waiting to be mined. This book has done the mining for you. Fully sourced and referenced, this is both a serious examination of Conspiracy Theories and the Conspiracy Theory phenomenon, and a guide to further explorations of the subject.

Leseprobe

Did you think the X-Files is fiction? If so, you must be one of those deluded fools who think Elvis is dead, and believe that the US actually went to the moon, and don’t know that the ruling elites did a deal with the extraterrestrials after the Roswell crash in 1947…

Boy, it really is getting strange out there. At one time, you could blame the world’s troubles on the Masons or the Illuminati, or the Jews, or One Worlders, or the Great Communist Conspiracy. Now, in addition to the usual suspects, we also have the alien-US elite conspiracy, or the alien shape-shifting reptile conspiracy to worry about - and there are books to prove it as well!

Conspiracy Theories? They are all in here - but not just lined up to be ridiculed and dismissed. OK, there is some of that, but the author also tries to sort out the handful of wheat from the choking clouds of intellectual chaff. For among the nonsensical Conspiracy Theory rubbish currently proliferating on the internet there are important nuggets of real research about real conspiracies waiting to be mined.

This book has done the mining for you. Fully sourced and referenced, this is both a serious examination of Conspiracy Theories and the Conspiracy Theory phenomenon, and a guide to further explorations of the subject.

Robin Ramsay is the editor and publisher of the journalLobster (www.lobster-magazine.co.uk). He is the co-author of Smear! Wilson And The Secret State!, the author ofPrawn Cocktail Partyand author ofThe Rise of New LabourandWho Shot JFK?in the Pocket Essentials series.

CONTENTS

Chapter One

The world is not like that; conspiracy is normal politics; one of those no weatherman required situations; notes.

Chapter Two

I am paranoid but am I paranoid enough?; paranoia and the paranormal; notes.

Chapter Three

From blue skies to Dark Skies; notes.

Chapter Four

I can’t see them but I know they are there; why the Right?; the EU; Uncle Sam needs us; BAP; the official conspiracy theory; notes.

Chapter Five

It’s the state, dummy; teaching aliens to line-dance; mind control; David Icke; notes.

Chapter Six

Disinformation; disinformation about UFOs; notes.

Chapter Seven

Conspiracy theories and conspiracies; a conspiracy culture?; concluding comments; notes.

Copyright

One

The world is not like that

There are all kinds of books about conspiracy theories, many of which end up being lists of stupid things that strange people have believed about the world. This isn’t one of those. There are some accounts of the weird stuff in the heads of some people; but this is more personal, more judgemental and, I hope, therefore more interesting than a catalogue of dumb beliefs.

In my experience the explosion of interest in conspiracy theories began in the UK in the summer of 1996. That’s when TV companies began ringing me up, mostly to pick my brains for ideas for programmes about conspiracy theories. Of those calls I remember only one, the most asinine, from Channel Four’s then breakfast show, the Big Breakfast. A researcher, who had no idea who I was, asked me, ‘What’s the weirdest conspiracy theory you’ve come across recently?’ He wanted me to appear on this wacky morning show and tell the viewers something wacky. I declined to travel 400 miles to do this.

It’s not as if I was that interested in conspiracy theories; they were just on the edge of other things. At that point I had spent most of the previous decade reading and writing on the role of the British intelligence and security agencies in British post war politics. I had even managed twice to attract agents – presumably from MI5 – one of whom quite successfully pumped me. (Not that he found anything interesting or secret: I was publishing everything I knew as fast as I could assemble it.) When I spotted what this man was up to, he disappeared and eventually another tried to get close to me. The second one, talented actor though he was, I identified more quickly.

I had come to the attention of the TV companies because I had been invited to speak that year on conspiracy theories to the annual Unconvention of the magazine Fortean Times, which is interested in strange phenomena, and regarded the upsurge of interest in conspiracy theories as one such. I asked the Fortean person on the phone how many they were expecting at my session. ‘Oh, about 40.’ In the event there were 400 people in a room built for 100. Standing room only for conspiracy theories!

This was The X-Files effect. In 1996 this country was halfway through the second series on terrestrial TV of the American drama The X-Files, which ran between 1993 and 2002 in the USA and was eventually broadcast over much of the world – to 90 countries in 1994, I have read – triggering a boom in books, magazines and other TV programmes about what I think of as the X-Files agenda: UFOs, the story of the alleged alien-US government conspiracy, the paranormal, alternative history and archaeology. Many of these subjects had been around since the 1970s, barely noticed by the major media, a kind of underground literature. Some of it I had read in the 1970s. It was entertaining but not serious. Also in the mix were conspiracy theories. The X-Files’ creator, Chris Carter, took this minority, alternative, hippy-dippy stuff and turned it into a TV series. I concluded my talk to the Unconvention in 1996 by remarking that most of this conspiracy theory stuff was baloney and I would continue with my own research into political conspiracies long after the major media had moved onto the next fad. I presumed that the X-Files material would simply return to the background. What I had not reckoned with was the arrival of the internet onto which all this X-Files material moved and where it proliferated.

The next landmark event in the rise of conspiracy theories was 9/11/2001. Within 36 hours of the Twin Towers collapsing, conspiracy theory forums on the internet had already drawn two conclusions about what was then being discussed as ‘the American Reichstag fire’: this is just too convenient for the government of George W. Bush to be what it looks like; and the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolitions. This latter idea was first suggested by a demolition expert, in an article in the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico on the day of the attacks, and circulated the next day.

In late June 2002 ‘9/11 conspiracy’ produced 42,300 hits on Google. That was a mere nine months after the attack and the Net material on 9/11 was already too big to deal with (and I stopped trying to save and process it); and, in September 2005, the same formula ‘9/11 conspiracy’, produced over 5 million hits. (In 2012 it produced 129 million.) On the other hand, where the material criticising the official version of the Kennedy assassination, the obvious parallel, had to be run past editors of one kind or another before hard copy publication, the Internet is mostly editor-free and a lot of what is posted is just rubbish. Of those 129 million hits, how many are going to be worth examining?

Two years later came Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with 20 million sales, read by 4 million people in the UK, which triggered alarm bells among major media commentators that the success of a conspiracy theory novel about a group which doesn’t exist was a sign of conspiracy theories creeping into the mainstream.

In 2005 the US State Department set up a website to counter conspiracy theories, headed by one of its officers who had previously been involved in countering Soviet disinformation. (Has anyone ever gone to that site, read the State Department line on – say – 9/11 and thought: ‘OK, all those conspiracy theories are nonsense?’)

In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Cass Sunstein, who became Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, co-wrote a paper proposing that the U.S. government employ teams of covert agents to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites which advocated ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the government, defined as ‘an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.’ Sunstein advocated that the government send covert agents into ‘chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups’. He also proposed that the government make secret payments to so-called ‘independent’ credible voices to bolster the government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the government).1 As far as I know none of this was ever enacted and is manifestly an absurdity: the Internet’s conspirasphere is simply too vast to police in this way. In any case, Sunstein’s definition of a conspiracy theory, ‘an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role’, describes huge chunks of American politics and history since WW2; and this isn’t difficult to demonstrate: the CIA’s activities, for example. Essentially Sunstein was proposing to attack those who wanted to deal with the reality of America and its foreign policies.

Even Polly Toynbee in The Guardian felt moved to warn us of the pernicious nature of conspiracy theories. I agree with her: they are pernicious. Or, rather, to anticipate one of my arguments below, some of them are: the all-encompassing, mega variety which offer to explain great chunks of history and politics by the secret machinations of small groups – the Jews, the Masons etc – are pernicious. The X-Files, Dan Brown’s excruciatingly bad novel and 9/11 seem to me to be the recent major landmarks in the development of the ‘conspiracy culture’, the conspirasphere, in the English-speaking world and two of the three are fiction. What this tells us, I’m not sure.

Into the conspirasphere

Take the death of Princess Diana. The motives of those chiefly involved in the conspiracy theorising were mixed. The main impetus undoubtedly came from Dodi Fayed’s father, Mohammed El Fayed, and is perhaps understandable as the reaction of a grieving parent, with several hundred million pounds to spend, who has suddenly lost his son and his son’s extremely glamorous girlfriend in a one car crash. Encouraging Fayed’s beliefs were some of the followers of Lyndon LaRouche Jr, a strange American conspiracy theorist whom I discuss below, who sees the evil hand of the British Royal Family behind much of the world’s troubles. For LaRouche’s followers it is axiomatic that the British Royals killed Di. Conspiracy theorists seized on the words of Richard Tomlinson, the former MI6 officer who told the world of a British intelligence plan to kill the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a tunnel, using a bright light to disorientate the driver of his car. (One witness from Paris had reported seeing a flash just before Di’s car crashed.) The former MI5 officer Annie Machon stated that she and her former partner, David Shayler, also a former member of the Security Service, suspected MI6’s involvement (although they offered no evidence).2 The driver of the car, Henri Paul, was discovered to have received large amounts of unaccountable money and is suspected of being in the pay of MI6;3 and the suspected driver of the white Fiat car, which was seen near the incident, the photographer James Andanson, died a bizarre death.4 Although the major media are no longer pursuing the story, there are still many Internet sites discussing her death and the ‘no conspiracy’ verdicts reached by the French legal inquiry and the British police inquiry, Operation Paget, will not deter the conspiracy theorists.5 There are enough loose ends to keep the fire going. Even the death of a relatively minor figure such as John F. Kennedy Jr in a plane crash in 1999 was immediately surrounded by question marks which ranged from the relatively simple – people reporting phenomena during the event not reported by the mass media – to full-blown conspiracy theories arguing that this latest dead Kennedy’s alleged plans to run for president provided the reason for his assassination.

The stabbing of former Beatle the late George Harrison by a Beatles-obsessed mental patient almost immediately produced a preposterous piece of nonsense called ‘Harrison Stabbing & Masonic Symbolism’, which included the following:

‘Considering… the Beatles’ key, pivotal role in the mass social experimentation carried out by Britain’s Tavistock Institute in conjunction with covert intelligence agencies like the CIA, NSA and Britain’s MI5/MI6, we’d say there is a strong likelihood that Harrison, like Lennon, was NOT the victim of some random act of senseless violence… We’d say it’s a good possibility Harrison was targeted to be bumped off by some of the same forces responsible for rubbing out Lennon, using MK-Ultra/Manchurian Candidate type mind-controlled assassin Mark David Chapman.’

I was more interested than I would normally have been in such twaddle because of the reference to the Tavistock Institute in London. You cannot graze in the lush fields of American conspiracy theories for long before coming across the alleged role of the Tavistock Institute in the subversion of America in the 1960s; but I had never understood what it was Tavistock had done to deserve this reputation. The piece about Harrison gave me a clue, telling me:

‘In fact, Lennon was murdered shortly after he gave an interview to Playboy magazine in which he blew the lid off the fact that the Beatles were part of massive experimentation in social control/engineering unleashed by Tavistock and intelligence agencies, as was the deliberate introduction of drugs like LSD into the burgeoning “counterculture” scene during the 1960s and 1970s. The Playboy interview was published not long after Lennon’s death.’

Just think about it. Had Lennon actually said any such thing it would have been a world-wide sensation. Since there was no such sensation, I knew without checking that John Lennon said no such thing. Nonetheless, I looked up the Lennon Playboy interview on the Net. I cannot pretend I read every word but, trust me, he does not mention the Tavistock Institute at all, let alone any of the rest of the nonsense attributed to him by our anonymous conspiracy theorist.6

The problem with the term conspiracy theory is that it comes with a lot of negative baggage. Some is recent, the accumulated effects of the mountains of ridiculous piffle on the Internet. Some of it is historical. To most of the intellectual Western world, to politicians, academics and journalists, and also to most Marxists and socialists, ‘a conspiracy theory’ does not just mean a theory about a conspiracy but something wider and more negative. At its worst ‘conspiracy theory’ evokes ‘the conspiracy theory of history’, the kind of all-encompassing theory that argues that everything is the fault of, or everything is controlled by X. In the past 300 years X has been, at various times, the Jews (or Jewish bankers), the Masons, the Catholics, the Communists, the Illuminati, or the Devil. More recently we have seen those conspiracy theories in which X is said to be the British Royal Family,7 Aristotle Onassis,8 the Committee of 300,9 the alien-US military axis and shape-shifting, extraterrestrial alien reptiles.10

Such all-embracing conspiracy theories strike the rational Western mind as absurd. We know that complex historical processes cannot be explained by the activities of some little group. The French and Russian revolutions, for example, cannot be explained by the existence of little cabals of Jewish bankers or Masons. The world just is not like that. Further, the term conspiracy theory was utterly contaminated by one such all-embracing conspiracy theory, the Jewish conspiracy theory, whose adherents included one Adolf Hitler. At worst, describing someone as ‘a conspiracy theorist’ evokes the gas chambers and Hitler’s insane obsession with the Jews.11 The result has been a virtual prohibition on the use of the word ‘conspiracy’ in orthodox history or politics. For most of the chattering classes – the media and knowledge industry, academics, politicians and their assistants – to talk of conspiracy is to risk being called a conspiracy theorist; and to be so described is the intellectual equivalent of being labelled a child molester.

Consequently, one of the bedrocks of the ideology of liberal democracies like ours is that conspiracy theories are always wrong, and that those who believe them are mental incompetents at best. This manifests itself in phrases such as ‘As usual the cock-up theory of politics turned out to be true’. Belief in the cock-up theory of history and politics is at the heart of what passes for political and intellectual sophistication in liberal democracies like ours. Public exposition of the cock-up theory of history shows that one is serious and aware of the intrinsic complexity of the real world; and aware, too, of the inevitable incompetence of human beings. The subtext here is: only ignorant simpletons believe the world can be explained by conspiracies.

The proponents of the classic, all-embracing conspiracy theories – Nesta Webster,12 the John Birch Society,13 Gary Allen,14 Lyndon LaRouche, the various neo-fascist and neo-nazi groups still clinging to the Jewish conspiracy theory and all the others – have indeed got it wrong; but not because of their belief that small(ish) groups of people have had an influence on history. That is an unexceptional assumption. Small groups of people do indeed have an influence on history. Think of Lenin and the Bolsheviks or the financiers of the City of London, or Bill Gates and his colleagues at Microsoft. It is false information and poor or nonexistent attention to basic rules of evidence and inference which discredit the classic conspiracy theory. It’s not what conspiracy theorists think but how they think. For example, the belief that some Wall Street money ended up indirectly funding the Bolshevik revolution is a fundamental tenet of Gary Allen, the John Birch Society and other American right-wingers. It may be true; I have never tried to check this. Both the British and the then smaller U.S. money markets had invested a lot of money in Russia in the 30 years before the Bolshevik coup of 1917. It would hardly be a surprise to find all the major moneylenders of Europe, a few of whom were Jews, in there, as well. (Banking was globalised then just as it is now.) When the German government funded Lenin’s little group of exiled Russian revolutionaries during World War I in the hope that they would take Russia out of the war and thus save Germany from fighting on two fronts, it is not inconceivable that some of the funds originally came from, say, loans made by non-German bankers, some of them Jewish. But some of the Americans who have found this important not only do not bother to check this factoid before recycling it, they further conclude, without evidence, that this proves that Wall Street was a bunch of Reds (or Jews, or Jewish Reds).

For example: it may be true, as Nesta Webster believed that Masons had a part to play in both the American and French revolutions. There is some evidence for both propositions.15 But Webster did not actually offer much in her books, and this tells us nothing about the power of the Masons today – or in the 1920s, for that matter, in Webster’s heyday.

For example: it clearly is true that the ramified Anglo-American network, centred round the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in Britain and the Council on Foreign Relations in America (discussed below), had a considerable influence in shaping British and American foreign policy, especially before World War II. This is demonstrably true with or without Carroll Quigley’s claims about the Round Table (discussed below). But this does not in any way substantiate the fantasies of the LaRouche organisation, which incorporated Quigley into an absurd (if entertaining) tale in which the UK controls America, the British Royal Family runs the world’s drug traffic, organised the assassination of John Kennedy etc.16

The aversion to talk of conspiracies on the part of the intellectually respectable is thus understandable up to a point. Who wants to be associated with the kind of rubbish propagated by people like LaRouche, let alone with people who think the world is being run by shape-shifting, extraterrestrial lizards? However, this legitimate and understandable allergy to mega conspiracy theories extends beyond the crazy fringe to a general prohibition on talk of conspiracy per se. Here is Dr Jeffrey Bale on the academic world’s reactions to talk of conspiracy.

‘Very few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility, and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies. Even when this belief is expressed in a very cautious manner, limited to specific and restricted contexts, supported by reliable evidence, and hedged about with all sorts of qualifications, it still manages to transcend the boundaries of acceptable discourse and violate unspoken academic taboos… The mere mention of the word “conspiracy” seems to set off an internal alarm bell which causes scholars to close their minds in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and possible unpleasantness, since the popular image of conspiracy both fundamentally challenges the conception most educated, sophisticated people have about how the world operates, and reminds them of the horrible persecutions that absurd and unfounded conspiracy theories have precipitated or sustained in the past. So strong is this prejudice among academics that even when clear evidence of a plot is inadvertently discovered in the course of their own research, they frequently feel compelled, either out of a sense of embarrassment or a desire to defuse anticipated criticism, to preface their account of it by ostentatiously disclaiming a belief in conspiracies. They then often attempt to downplay the significance of the plotting they have uncovered. To do otherwise, that is to make a serious effort to incorporate the documented activities of conspiratorial groups into their general political or historical analyses, would force them to stretch their mental horizons beyond customary bounds and, not infrequently, delve even further into certain sordid and politically sensitive topics. Most academic researchers clearly prefer to ignore the implications of conspiratorial politics altogether rather than deal directly with such controversial matters.’ 17