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

by David Aaronovitch

  Twenty years ago, such an exercise would have been easy, and the grouping of people around any particular cause might have been described by its political or class affiliations. A campaign might be left-based, involving trade unions, socialists, and left-liberals, or it might be center-right and include business representatives and conservatives. One could, by dint of reading a select few far-left journals, develop the ability to distinguish between the various revolutionary parties, who in any case were always anxious to publicize themselves.

  The 9/11 movement, as it calls itself, obeys none of these rules. It is composed of people whose other interests are so diverse, from Buddhism to nativism, as to defy any categorization. Even so, this movement has developed an ideology that it, itself, barely recognizes. When I delved into the background of Princeton-educated Tarpley, for example, I discovered that he was, in fact, a longtime associate of Lyndon LaRouche, the wealthy cultist who, you may recall from chapter 4, believes that the British royal family conspires with finance capital to run the world. Should you browse the back catalog of the LaRouche Connectionp videotapes, you can find Tarpley variously hosting “A Conversation with Helga Zepp-LaRouche” (Lyndon’s German wife), interviewing Lyndon himself on the topic of “Food and Metals Hoarding,” taking part in a press conference to demand an end to “The British Whitewater Assault on the [Clinton] Presidency,” and, on a similar theme, warning against “The British Oligarchy: America’s Mortal Enemy.”

  Although he is supposed to have left the LaRouche movement in the mid-1990s, the same strain of historical eccentricity runs through all Tarpley’s work. In his book Against Oligarchy, Tarpley charges, “the events leading to the Great Depression are all related to British economic warfare against the rest of the world”; in Surviving the Cataclysm, one of his targets is Karl Marx, who is described, possibly for the first time, as an “Anglo-Venetian ideologue.” Surviving the Cataclysm argues that to beat the coming crash (there is invariably a coming crash—and occasionally they even come) the United States must colonize space. Tarpley’s 1991 work George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography claimed that the father of George W. Bush, then president, was a psychotic whose mental health would be the main election issue in 1992.

  Something significant about the diversity of 9/11ers is exemplified by the active participants in another event involving Webster G. Tarpley, which I came across only because I was looking for video evidence of his various speeches. The First Axis for Peace Conference took place in Brussels on November 17-18, 2005. According to its organizers, it gathered together 150 leaders from thirty-seven countries, including “intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, and military officers,” with the twin aims of promoting world harmony and criticizing the hegemonic and imperialist plans of the United States of America, with the latter being rather more prominent than the former.

  A few years earlier, such a prospectus would have placed the conference firmly on the left of the political spectrum, and during the Cold War might even have suggested the possibility of sponsorship by a Soviet-funded body such as the World Peace Council or the International Union of Students. But the Axis for Peace event, as much a product of globalization in its own way as many of the phenomena that it deplored, could certainly not be said to be mainly a gathering of progressives. It was organized by Réseau (Network) Voltaire, a French private think tank named after the great figure of the Enlightenment. Originally set up to combat racism and to resist legislation seen as repressing free speech, the Network’s organizing genius and president was a former student of theology, Thierry Meyssan, who had been active in the small French center-left Parti Radical de Gauche, and had subsequently become both a campaigner against far-right organizations and a proselytizer for the decriminalization of hard drugs. One aspect of the Network’s operation was to supply with information a series of independent media outlets, particularly in Latin America.

  But in February 2002, Meyssan, who must have worked extraordinarily quickly, published one of the very first books to argue that 9/11 was an inside job carried out by the Bush administration. L’Effroyable Imposture (published in the United States and Britain as 9/11: The Big Lie) became a bestseller in France following an appearance by Meyssan on a popular current affairs show on France 2, one of the main television channels, in which he was able to outline his thesis apparently without being challenged. According to the New York Times, 100,000 copies of L’Effroyable Imposture were sold in the fortnight following the broadcast.26 “Copies have been flying off shelves,” a bookstore clerk told the BBC. The book topped Amazon France’s best-seller list.27

  Where there is Tarpley there is also Lyndon LaRouche, so it was no surprise to find among those addressing the Brussels conference LaRouche’s wife and head of the LaRouchian Schiller Institute, the rhythmically named Helga Zepp-LaRouche, along with the editor of the French LaRouchian newspaper and the head of the French LaRouchian political party. Also present was a pair of colorful British mavericks, at that moment with no careers or clear means of support: Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who had left his job, some said pushed for political reasons and others because of his exciting private life, and the ubiquitous former MI5 man David Shayler.

  Then there were two European politicians who had been elected representatives in their home countries. The first, Andreas von Bülow, had been a minister in the SPD government of Helmut Schmidt, serving as state secretary in the West German Ministry of Defense and the Ministry for Technology. Out of politics since 1994, von Bülow, like Meyssan, had written a book accusing the Bush administration of having carried out the 9/11 attacks. The second, Giulietto Chiesa, a member of the European Parliament, had been a correspondent in Moscow for the Communist newspaper L’Unità. Latterly, in several books, Chiesa had been advancing the view that a new-world super-elite, the “super clan,” acting without check in the United States, was destroying liberal democracy and trying to bring about “a world much worse than the Orwellian.” Only Europe, argued Chiesa, could resist the super clan.

  Charles Saint-Prot, former chairman of the French Peace Committee for the Middle East, was described by the event organizers as an “Iraq specialist.” He had also, I discovered, interviewed Saddam Hussein in 1982-1983. The interview was published as a booklet by the Al-Huria Printing House of Baghdad, and a copy was discovered in one of Saddam’s palaces in 2003. In this interview, Charles Saint-Prot asks various obsequious questions, such as, “Concerning Franco-Iraqi relations, I believe Your Excellency has talked about them favorably. Is Your Excellency pleased with the results of the talks recently held in Paris by [Iraqi minister] Tariq Aziz?”

  For Lebanon, there was pro-Syrian former Prime Minister Selim Ahmed al-Hoss; for Belgium, Michel Collon of the Workers Party (PTB), member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. From Russia had come the former chief of staff of the Russian defense forces and current vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Studies, Colonel General Leonid Ivashov. Ivashov had already expressed the view that only a government agency could have organized an attack on the scale of 9/11, concluding, “Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda cannot be the organizers or the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources, or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.”28

  Ivashov’s primary concern, however, was that modern Russians were failing to discern that the main enemy of their nation was not Chechen rebels but the West. “Young people are confused,” Ivashov had written, “they are disoriented and cannot see the long-term threat. Yes, NATO troops do not shoot and bomb Russia today, and this creates the impression that the threat is not real . . . In addition, Western values are being planted in Russia, while its own historical and cultural roots are coming into oblivion.”29

  From America came two representatives, who were on the face of it from different sides of the political divide. One was an academic and self-profes
sed socialist revolutionary with a dispiriting line in dense polemic, James Petras. Petras’s view of 9/11 had, between the event itself and the Brussels conference, undergone an interesting metamorphosis. Initially sharing the belief that the attackers were terrorists of Middle Eastern origin, Petras was eager to explain their motives. “This was not an indiscriminate attack against ‘America,’ ” he claimed, “but a political attack against a major military-financial target which is central to U.S. global empire.” The Pentagon was vital to U.S. imperialist military designs on the world, and the World Trade Center the obvious symbol of its economic imperialism. So “September 11 was a complex act in which human tragedy and strategic political issues were intertwined . . . The terrorists acted with rational forethought: if the intention was to challenge the empire, they chose a significant target, although the ‘collateral damage’ to civilians is excruciating.” Even so, he reassured readers, “Some of the victims in the WTC are known swindlers.”30

  Within a few months, however, Petras wasn’t so sure that the power behind the attacks was quite so benignly anti-imperial and the atrocities quite so understandable. “The lack of any public statement concerning Israel’s possible knowledge of 9/11,” he argued, “is indicative of the vast, ubiquitous, and aggressive nature of its powerful diaspora supporters.” In 2006, he would go on to widen the scope of his assault on the “Zioncons” (neoconservative Zionists) by claiming that Mossad was behind several cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the publishing of which in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten led to riots, the burning of Scandinavian consulates, and the murder of a Catholic priest in Turkey. Petras’s causal chain was as follows:

  Given Mossad’s long-standing penetration of the Danish intelligence agencies, and their close working relations with the Right-wing media, it is not surprising that a Ukranian [sic] Jew, operating under the name of “Flemming Rose” [the editor of Jyllands-Posten] with close working relations with the Israeli state (and in particular the far-Right Likud regime) should be the center of the controversy over the cartoons . . . Prior to being placed as a cultural editor of a leading Right-wing Danish daily, from 1990 to 1995 “Rose” was a Moscow-based reporter who translated into Danish a self-serving autobiography by Boris Yeltsin, godchild of the pro-Israeli, post-Communist Russian oligarchs, most of whom held dual citizenship and collaborated with the Mossad in laundering illicit billions.31

  Interestingly, Flemming Rose had a similar accusation made against him by the other American speaker at the Axis for Peace conference, Christopher Bollyn, then a journalist for the ultra-right-wing American Free Press. In early 2006, Bollyn was to demand, “Are we likely to see cartoons in Jyllands-Posten calling into question the force-fed Zionist myth of the Holocaust, which has become the new ‘Holy Cause’ of Europe? . . . Take a good look at the non-Danish ‘cultural’ czar of Jyllands-Posten and ask yourself.” The accompanying photograph shows a man, presumably Rose, who has a moderately prominent nose.32 Bollyn seemed to be suggesting that the nose was indicative of its owner’s Jewishness.

  The Voltaire Network described Bollyn as an “investigative journalist,” but this professional label rather understated his political associations. The American Free Press was originally founded by Willis Carto, a disciple of the historical revisionism of Harry Elmer Barnesq and also a white supremacist and possibly America’s leading anti-Semite. Carto’s other legacy to American politics, the Barnes Review, named for his hero, is available for purchase on the Internet. Leading Review articles have included items such as “Of Teutonic Blood: German and German-American Contributions to Civilization as We Know It Have Been Massive,” and the intriguing-sounding “Adolf Hitler: An Overlooked Candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Carto’s erstwhile publishing company, Noontide Press, was responsible for publishing, among other books, The Myth of the Six Million, by a David Hoggan, which, as the title suggests, was a rejection of the historical truth of the Holocaust. Though the American Free Press tended to be somewhat circumspect about its attitude toward Jews, its concentration on stories involving Israeli perfidy, Israeli spies, Israeli brutality, and “Zionist” financial and political influence suggests that this may have been more a matter of marketing than political difference. Bollyn’s specialism at the magazine became articles on 9/11 conspiracy theories, although these, as we shall see, were not lacking in allusions to Israeli perfidy.

  As if to personify the ideological melange occurring at the conference, one of the two Polish representatives was another MP, Mateusz Piskorski, elected for Stettin in the 2005 parliamentary elections on the ticket of the Self-Defense (Samoobrona) Party. Samoobrona is an unusual amalgam of populist left-wing economics and xenophobia, but Piskorski, still in his twenties, had, as revealed in the mainstream Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, a previous history of far-right activism, including the translation and publishing of neo-Nazi material, including “skinzines” for the movement’s more physically militant elements. Now, Piskorski, sitting on the platform next to the onetime antifascist Meyssan, was applauded for expressing his shame that Poland had committed troops to the occupation of Iraq.

  The exemplar of the politics of the event may have been the French comedian Dieudonné Mbala Mbala, who contributed to one of the panel sessions of the Axis for Peace, arguing for the need for new political movements to replace those that had, he claimed, “given in to the Zionist lobby.” A formidable stand-up comedian, the half-Cameroonian Dieudonné had received a UN special award for antiracism in 2000. By 2004, however, his main targets appeared to be not the racist right in France but Israel, Zionism, and Jews. Interviewed in Le Journal du Dimanche that February, he accused all Jews of being “slave-traders who have turned to banking or show business and, today, to terrorist action to show their support for Ariel Sharon’s policies.”33 When challenged about this assertion in a subsequent interview for the Ha’aretz newspaper of Israel, Dieudonné elaborated: in the fifteenth century, much wealth was earned from trading in slaves, and every person who became wealthy exploited slavery in some way or another. “History tells us that many Jews earned their fortune during that period,” said Dieudonné. “Do you think it’s logical that businessmen throughout the world got rich out of this and Jews had nothing to do with this?”34 The comedian was careful to differentiate between being an anti-Zionist, which he admitted to, and being anti-Semitic, which he denied. His interviewer, Raney Cohen, had found it hard to appreciate the distinction when attending a Dieudonné show in 2004:

  Dieudonné said—with a serious expression on his face—that he had decided to apologize to “the Chosen People.” When he finished his request for forgiveness, he was quiet for a moment, then glanced all around suspiciously and explained in a whisper that “When the cowardly Zionists attack someone, it’s always from behind.” Then he smiled mischievously to the audience and concluded with a crude gesture and shouts, “You can shove my apology up your ass, Chosen People!” as the crowd went wild.35

  A British journalist, John Lichfield, witnessed a similar Dieudonné skit.

  He is greeted with roars and whoops by a packed, multiracial audience, which is young, trendy, intellectual, and Left-wing. Many of them have come straight from the latest demo against the government’s new jobs law for the young . . . However, something else intrudes, something darker and more sinister. Dieudonné is obsessed with Jews. All races, including his own mixed black and white origins, get a gentle mickey-taking in his show. When Jews are mentioned—and they are mentioned often—the tone becomes more aggressive, even violent. In one skit, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Jewish-French philosopher, haggles with a street potato seller. Dieudonné/ Lévy says: “How can you ask me to pay so much when six million of us died in the Holocaust? ” Roars of delight from the audience.36

  Dieudonné’s trajectory and his embracing of diverse themes previously thought to be contradictory is emblematic of the Axis for Peace and of a certain kind of radical politics that forms the ideological spine of the 9/11 Truth movement. This
politics is a loose coalescence of impulses: antiglobalization, broadly antimodernist and anti-imperialist—with imperialism being inevitably and solely associated with American power. These impulses are easily felt both by the far left and the far right, and the consequence has been an unofficial and almost, but not quite, unconscious alliance. What binds this alliance even tighter is its anti-Israeli bent. In February 2005, three members of the administration council of the Voltaire Network resigned precisely because of what they called the organization’s “redbrown” (far-left/far-right) orientation. “The pretext of resisting American Imperialism, [plus] lenience toward Chinese and Russian imperialisms and closeness with Islamists,” they protested, “is symptomatic of a latent anti-Semitic drift among the leadership.”37

  The Missing Four Thousand

  In David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor, the work of “independent researcher” Eric Hufschmid is frequently cited: his book Painful Questions is described as “most valuable,” and his notion of the Twin Towers collapsing at “free fall” speed is accepted uncritically. But Hufschmid believes, “Most wars and terrorist attacks of the past century were instigated by Zionists. They pretend to be Americans, Communists, Russians, Liberals, Republicans, Greens, Christians, Muslims, and 9/11 researchers. They infiltrate, bribe, and blackmail our governments, militaries, news agencies, and police.”38

  As the 9/11 Truth movement gathered momentum, Hufschmid began to worry that the Zionists were somehow arranging for the truth about their involvement in the attacks to be obscured by other theories, which concentrated on the culpability of the Bush administration. One example, according to Hufschmid, might be the inexplicable popularity of Avery’s Loose Change video over his own effort, Painful Deceptions. As a consequence of this belief, Hufschmid recorded an hour-long telephone conversation in April 2006 between himself and Dylan Avery, who was accompanied by his sidekicks Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas.