Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  Plots Throughout History

  In his very entertaining little book on conspiracies, the doyen of British theorists Robin Ramsay takes a very different approach to historical causality. “By far the most significant factor in the recent rise of conspiracy theories is the existence of real conspiracies,” he writes. “People believe conspiracy theories because they see the world full of conspiracies.”8 Ramsay goes on to cite the following as offering prima facie evidence of a string of political conspiracies: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, of his brother Robert, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Malcolm X, of the corrupt leader of the Teamsters union Jimmy Hoffa, and the shooting and wounding of former Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace “when he appeared to threaten Richard Nixon’s chances of winning the 1968 presidential election.”a

  Since each one of these conspiracies is, to say the least, questionable, Ramsay is saying no more in effect than that conspiracist ideas beget more conspiracist ideas. Perhaps if he were to be talking about the conspiracy theories of the Middle East rather than those of the Western and English-speaking worlds, he might have a point. Daniel Pipes argues that one reason why the Middle East is awash with conspiracy theories is because that region, almost more than any other, “has indeed hosted a great number of actual conspiracies in the past two centuries. Time and again, Western governments relied on covert collusion or devious means to influence Middle Eastern politics,” from the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between France and Britain to carve up the Arab territories of the former Ottoman empire to U.S. and British involvement in the 1953 coup against the Persian prime minister Mossadeq.9 And it would be surprising if many Latin Americans, subject for fifty years to a sequence of military takeovers, were not of the same mind. However, in the last hundred years there have been very few major conspiracies in Britain and America that any two serious historians have agreed upon.

  Not counting Watergate, which was a rather pitiful botched conspiracy to cover up an attempt at political espionage, the Iran-contra affair of 1985- 1986 is the closest the United States has come to a full-blown conspiracy. Here, senior members of the Reagan administration sought to thwart a congressional prohibition on financial support to anti-Communist Nicaraguan insurgents (the contras) by procuring weapons and selling them to America’s sworn enemy Iran. The entire business unraveled; there were two inquiries; and two National Security Council employees were found guilty of minor felonies, their convictions being overturned on appeal on the grounds that they had been promised immunity from prosecution through testifying to Congress.

  The great British conspiracy is the Zinoviev letter of 1924. The conventional story for years was that British security, wanting to remove the first-ever Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, forged a letter ostensibly written by the head of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev. This letter, apparently approving of the pro-Bolshevik stance of Labour, was leaked to the Daily Mail, which—four days before the date for the October 1924 general election—ran it under the headline “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow Orders to Our Reds; Great Plot Disclosed.” Labour lost the election by a landslide.

  In January 1999, at the behest of the new Labour government of Tony Blair, the chief historian at the Foreign Office, Gill Bennett, conducted an investigation into the affair. She concluded that the letter had originally been forged by anti-Communist White Russians in Latvia so as to derail new treaties concluded between Britain and the young Soviet Union. The letter was then passed to MI6, certain members of which leaked it to the Daily Mail. Bennett found that, while the Foreign Office probably regarded the letter as genuine, the officers at MI6, themselves mostly Conservatives, may have had doubts, doubts that it was in their interests to suppress. She also concluded that high-level intelligence responsibility for forging and disseminating the letter was “inherently unlikely,” because such a responsibility would suggest “a degree of cohesion and control, not to mention political will, which simply did not exist.”

  Writing in the Guardian newspaper, the Labour foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, allowed that “there is no evidence that MI6 forged the letter. There is no evidence of an organized conspiracy against Labour by the intelligence agencies.”10 Nor, as Bennett also pointed out in her report, did the letter lose Labour the election. Labour’s problem was that it depended upon the dwindling Liberal Party for support. In fact, in October 1924 the Labour vote actually increased.

  The Ties That Bind

  What is evident from these examples is that true conspiracies are either elevated in their significance through exaggeration, or are in reality seemingly dogged by failure and discovery. That Richard Nixon, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even manage to get a few incriminating tapes wiped clean exemplifies most real conspiracies. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are often more successful at achieving their aims. As I researched the dozen major conspiracy theories that form the body of this book, I began to see that they shared certain characteristics that ensured their widespread propagation.

  1 . HISTORICAL PRECEDENT

  As has already been noted, conspiracists work hard to convince people that conspiracy is everywhere. An individual theory will seem less improbable if an entire history of similar cases can be cited. These can be as ancient as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and today may include references to Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, and the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin incident. The plot to murder JFK is first base if you want to convince people that RFK and MLK were also murdered by arms of the American state.

  When examining some of the biographies of those involved in the 9/11 Truth movement, I was struck by how this normalization works over time. One energetic woman in her forties, who had become an indefatigable activist in the Californian branch of the lobby, described how she had become convinced of the 9/11 conspiracy. In her youth, she told her sympathizers, she had sailed around the world, but her “political activism” had only begun in 1992, when she saw a film “which disturbed her” and as a consequence of which she began to do her own research on the government and media. The film was Oliver Stone’s JFK.

  2 . SKEPTICS AND SHEEPLE

  A conspiracy theory is likely to be politically populist, in that it usually claims to lay bare an action taken by a small power elite against the people. Or, as a Californian professor of theology could tell an audience at the Copenhagen central library with regard to 9/11: “Members of the elite of our society may not think that the truth should be revealed.” By contrast, belief in the conspiracy makes you part of a genuinely heroic elite group who can see past the official version duplicated for the benefit of the lazy or inert mass of people by the powers that be. There will usually be an emphasis on the special quality of thought required to appreciate the existence of the conspiracy. The conspiracists have cracked the code, not least because of their possession of an unusual and perceptive way of looking at things. Those who cannot or will not see the truth are variously described as robots or, latterly, as sheeple—citizens who shuffle half awake through their conventional lives.

  3 . JUST ASKING QUESTIONS

  Since 2001, a primary technique employed by more respectable conspiracists has been the advocation of the “It’s not a theory” theory. The theorist is just asking certain disturbing questions because of a desire to seek out truth, and the reader is supposedly left to make up his or her mind. The questions asked, of course, only make sense if the questioner really believes that there is indeed a secret conspiracy.

  4 . EXPERT WITNSSES

  The conspiracists draw upon the endorsement of celebrities and “experts” to validate their theories, and yet a constant feature of modern conspiracy theories is the exaggeration of the status of experts. The former UK 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 U.S. syndicated Alex Jones Show was refe
rred to as the “former number three in the Blair government.” The theologist academic David Ray Griffin, perhaps the most respected of all the 9/11 conspiracists, feels able to lay claim to a large and rapidly acquired capacity to evaluate arguments made in the areas of physics, aerodynamics, and engineering. How dubious this claim is may be gauged by imagining his reaction were, say, the editor of the science journal Popular Mechanics to claim competence to comment upon Griffin’s own work of theological scholarship, A Critique of John K. Roth’s Theodicy.

  If necessary, theorists become interestingly opaque about the qualifications of their experts. One of the two films made about the London bombings of July 7, 2005, included evidence from a Nick Kollerstrom, who was billed as a “lecturer and researcher.” But a lecturer on what, and a researcher in which fields? Kollerstrom, it turned out, lectured on the effect of planetary motions on alchemy, and was the author of a book on crop circles. b Another aspect of this fudging is the tendency among conspiracists to quote each other so as to suggest a wide spread of expertise lending support to the argument. Thus, over the events of 9/11, the French conspiracy author Thierry Meyssan cites American conspiracy author Webster Tarpley; Tarpley cites David Ray Griffin; and David Ray Griffin cites Thierry Meyssan. It is a rather charming form of solidarity.

  5 . ACADEMIC CREDIBILITY

  The conspiracists work hard to give their written evidence the veneer of scholarship. The approach has been described as death by footnote. Accompanying the exposition of the theory is a dense mass of detailed and often undifferentiated information, but laid out as an academic text. Often the theory is also supported by quotations from non-conspiracist sources that almost invariably turn out to be misleading and selective. To give one characteristic example, David Ray Griffin’s book about 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor, describes Thierry Meyssan as the head of an organization “which the Guardian in April 2002 described as ‘a respected independent think-tank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonableness and objectivity.’ ”11 This is a masterpiece in disingenuousness, given the full Guardian quote: “The French media has been quick to dismiss [Meyssan’s] book’s claims, despite the fact that Mr. Meyssan is president of the Voltaire Network, a respected independent think-tank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonableness and objectivity. ‘This theory suits everyone—there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality,’ said Le Nouvel Observateur, while Libération called the book ‘The Frightening Confidence Trick . . . a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation.’ ” Not the same thing at all.

  Another example of this misuse of the mainstream media is the ascription of final, almost biblical authority to immediate and necessarily provisional news reports of an incident if they happen to demonstrate the inconsistencies that the conspiracists are seeking. Reporters in the West 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 or speculative. Similarly, the passing opinions of journalists are given the status of indisputable truth. In The New Pearl Harbor, 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.’ ” In fact, this was not a report but the passing opinion of a columnist, Anne Karpf, who had no more knowledge about what might or might not have emerged from the Twin Towers than had any other columnist 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 or scientists. Interesting words and phrases include “psyops” (short for “psychological operations”), “false flag,” and more recently “wet disposal,” meaning assassination.

  6 . CONVENIENTINCONVENIENT TRUTHS

  Conspiracists are always winners. Their arguments have a determined flexibility whereby any new and inconvenient truth can be accommodated within the theory itself. 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 a conspiracy to assassinate the Princess of Wales claimed that it was the very proliferation of absurd theories concerning Diana that first convinced her that this was MI6 at work seeking to cover up its real role in the killing. Few, however, match the schoolboy ingenuity of Korey Rowe, the producer of Loose Change, a highly popular documentary about 9/11, who, when challenged about the glaring factual mistakes in his 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.”12

  7 . UNDER SURVEILLANCE

  Conspiracists are inclined to suggest that those involved in spreading the theory are, even in the “safest” of countries, somehow endangered. During a February 2007 BBC program looking into the death of Dr. David Kelly, the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who had been contesting the verdict of suicide on the former weapons inspector, referred to his suspicions that his e-mails were being intercepted by persons unknown. Some e-mails sent to him, he told his interviewer, had been only partly received by his computer, and he thought this most ominous. Similarly, one of the physicians who began the Kelly conspiracy story by writing a letter to the Guardian disputing the forensic evidence—retired West Country orthopedic surgeon David Halpin—worried that his e-mails were being interfered with. In March 2005, Mr. Halpin sent this letter to the Morning Star newspaper:

  Dear Sir,

  The firewall on my computer became inactive five weeks ago. Therefore I opened the email system for very brief periods only. However, in those few days every one of my 6000 plus email files was erased or removed. This will have been done by a state sponsored agency and not by an amateur acting singly.

  Who might wish to cause me great difficulty? I speak and act firmly for justice in Palestine and against an occupation of indescribable brutality. I have asked, with other specialists, for the law to be upheld in the case of the late Dr. David Kelly; that there should be a full inquest and not the half one that has taken place. I have spoken, marched and written to stop the war crimes committed against Afghans and Iraqis by our government and its odious leader.

  So which agency is the most likely culprit? Only one other associate has lost a mass of email files and that is the lay chairperson of our “Kelly Investigation Group”—last Autumn. I have made a formal complaint to my MP and also about delayed email transmission. My right to privacy, association and free speech are ostensibly inviolate in this country—pro tempore.

  Yours faithfully David S. Halpin, MB BS FRCS13

  Fun or Frightening?

  Part of my motivation for writing this book was the lighthearted aim of providing a useful resource to the millions of men and women who have found themselves on the wrong side of a bar or dinner-party conversation that begins, “I’ll tell you the real reason . . .” and have sat there, knowing it was all likely to be nonsense but rarely having the necessary arguments to hand. It is designed to offer users of the Internet something that can act as a counterpoint to the tens of thousands of websites that argue, post-in post-out, that They are most certainly out to get you.

  I also wanted to understand just why it was that the counterintuitive, the unlikely, and the implausible would so often have a better purchase on our imagination and beliefs than the real. In other words, I wanted to understand the psychology of the conspiracy theory.

  But there is a more sinister aspect to jovial arguments about whether or not the moon landings actually took place, and to speculation about why we enjoy such arguments. The belief in conspiracy theori
es is, I hope to show, harmful in itself. It distorts our view of history and therefore of the present, and—if widespread enough—leads to disastrous decisions.

  1. “THE UNCANNY NOTE OF PROPHECY”

  1919

  Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

  Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

  Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

  To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

  The night can sweat with terror as before

  We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

  And planned to bring the world under a rule,

  Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

  —W. B. YEATS, “NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN”

  In 1919, the European citizen—who five years earlier had perhaps, like the young Hitler, celebrated the outbreak of war—now surveyed a world that was utterly changed. For the victors, the alteration was great enough: millions of young men dead or wounded, women widowed and children left fatherless, mountains of debt, economies turned wholesale to the production of armaments, and colonies newly aware, through their own sacrifice, of their right and potential to become independent nations. But for the defeated, the change had been cataclysmic. The ancient empire of the Habsburgs had flown apart and was reconstituting itself as a series of small nations, with the flags of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria about to be added to the Children’s Illustrated Encyclopedia. In Istanbul, though the sultan hung on, the Ottoman Empire itself—which had lasted half a thousand years—was finally being dismembered by foreign forces and native independence movements, but not before the killing of a million Armenians in the hills of Anatolia and the plains of Syria. And then there was Russia, which had entered the war as a vast, creaking monarchy and exited—following an audacious coup d’état led by men with strange noms de guerre such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin—as an experiment in an entirely new type of government, one completely unrooted in history or experience. In 1918, the entire Russian royal family had been murdered in Yekaterinburg, the Orthodox Church suppressed, the lands of the nobility sequestered, and the factories of the magnates nationalized. An organization was set up, the Communist International, or Comintern, dedicated to spreading the revolution to all the nations of the world. In Europe the sound of strange marching songs could be heard coming from the East.