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

by David Aaronovitch

  Watching RFK Must Die at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall in London, I marveled at O’Sullivan’s resilience. When the identifications in his first film collapsed, everything else collapsed, since O’Sullivan had relied on the identifiers for much of his material. But what they said they were so sure of, they were, in fact, utterly mistaken about. Why had this happened? Who knows? Glory, money, stupidity . . .

  The True Skeptic

  Shane O’Sullivan and my friend Jim are both intelligent, both educated men, and both were holding fast to the idea of their own skepticism while simultaneously creating arguments to suggest that something singularly incredible might actually be true. But far from being skeptics, they were being willfully credulous. True, like many other believers in conspiracy theories, they were selective in their credulity, choosing to dismiss certain theories while endorsing other similarly implausible ones. It is a pattern one notices when reading books with lists of conspiracy theories from which the authors seem to feel obliged, almost arbitrarily, to accept one or two as being true, as though needing some kind of respite from the pure effort of exercising genuine skepticism.

  Real skepticism is indeed tiring and in many ways unattractive. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamed of in our philosophy,” Hamlet reminds his friend in words that almost every doubter has had quoted to them at some point in their adult lives. Such an admonition may have been uttered during a discussion of religion, spirituality, New Age philosophy, or alternative therapies, in which the doubter (or real skeptic) has tried to invoke common sense. It always means the same thing: it is the skeptic who has a closed mind, and the believer whose being is open to the world. So the believer in a conspiracy theory or theories becomes, in his own mind, the one in proper communion with the underlying universe, the one who understands the true ordering of things. There are plenty of other ways of enjoying that feeling of transcendence, however, such as embracing esoteric religion or Eastern philosophies. But at certain times and under certain circumstances in the modern, developed, and industrialized world, a large number of people find the story of a conspiracy, no matter how shallowly rooted in fact, almost impossibly seductive. Why?

  We should admit here that there is an objection to this entire line of inquiry. After an article I had authored in The Times, criticizing 9/11 conspiracists, a British psychoanalyst wrote to me in very civil terms, questioning my own psychological motives. “There is perhaps,” he suggested, “an even deeper anxiety that can lead us to dismiss possibilities that imply betrayal by those whom we expect to protect and care for us.” And, as an abstract proposition, one can see how this might be true. There are many examples of family members not being able to believe—denying—that a loved father or a respected grandfather was capable of sexual abuse. The reaction of Communists to the Moscow trials was to comfort themselves with the thought that, somehow, the party leadership in Russia must have known what they were doing.

  It is when we get down to practicalities that my critic’s analysis begins to fray. The evidence that I might be suffering from such a denial lay in my specific rejection of the writings of David Ray Griffin, whose role in the 9/11 Truth movement is discussed in chapter 7 of this book. Griffin’s work was, argued the analyst, “carefully and scholarly presented . . . [and] a highly disciplined philosophical analysis of some of the questions that have arisen in relation to official accounts of 9/11.”8 The problem, of course, as we have seen, is that Griffin’s account was no such thing, even if it maintained the outward limbs and flourishes of scholarship. Its evasions, half-truths, and bad science suggested a pathology of a kind not displayed by those who pointed out where Griffin parted from scholarship.

  So we return to the attractions of conspiracism with the observation that there are some obviously gratifying aspects to creating or consuming theories using its components and techniques. Who, for example, wouldn’t want to be on the side of the gifted and insightful? What is less explicable is the drive behind the determination—the need, if you prefer—that something so unlikely as, say, permitting an enemy government to blow up all your battleships should nevertheless be proved to be true. What creates the desire of large numbers of intelligent people to go along with such an idea?

  If the preceding chapters have demonstrated anything, it must be that conspiracy theories originate and are largely circulated among the educated and the middle class. The imagined model of an ignorant, priest-ridden peasantry or proletariat, replacing religious and superstitious belief with equally far-fetched notions of how society works, turns out to be completely wrong. It has typically been the professors, the university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants who have concocted and disseminated the conspiracies.

  One thinks here of the Potsdam audience for Professor Hans Kania’s lectures on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1924, of the readers of the New York Review of Books settling down with Professor Richard H. Popkin’s theory of the two Oswalds, of the 1940s admirers of the revisionist writings of John T. Flynn and Charles Beard, of Dudley Collard QC and Joseph Davies on their returns from Moscow, of the series editor of BBC’s Chronicle programs considering making a program about the lost bloodline of the Merovingians, of Tam Dalyell MP and Norman Baker MP, two decades apart, breathlessly retailing stories of anonymous insider tip-offs about murderous British agencies, of comfortable millennial Westerners debating whether they were about to be victims of a state-sponsored coup d’état. In the summer of 2004, the British writer Jonathan Raban, domiciled in the American Northwest, described the mood among his acquaintances before the U.S. presidential election of 2004:

  The backyard barbecue sounds like a convention of spooks . . . A bumper sticker, popular among the sort of people I hang out with, reads: BUSH-CHENEY ’04—THE LAST VOTE YOU’LL EVER HAVE TO CAST. That’s funny, but it belongs to the genre of humor in which the laugh is likely to die in your throat—and none of the people who sport the sticker on their cars are smiling. They are too busy airing conspiracy theories, which may or may not turn out to be theories.9

  One hardly needs to add that in November 2006, with no tanks appearing on anyone’s lawn, Americans successfully cast their ballots against the ruling Republicans, giving the opposition Democrats a majority in both Houses of Congress. Perhaps by the summer of 2007, the barbecue debaters were back to discussing basketball and celebrity. Even so, Raban was describing a real feeling, and one which, at certain times and in certain ways, has become widespread and politically significant.

  History for Losers

  There is a more than plausible argument to be made that, very often, conspiracy theories take root among the casualties of political, social, or economic change. More particularly, there is something of a pattern in which overarching theories are formulated by the politically defeated and taken up by the socially defeated, deriving “from the concrete experience of modernity by losers who will not go softly into the night but instead rage against it.”10 These losers left behind by modernity can be identified in the beached remnants of vanished European empires: the doomed bureaucrats, the White Russians, and the patriotic German petit bourgeois. They are the America Firsters, who got the war they didn’t want; the Midwest populists watching their small farmers go out of business; the opponents of the New Deal; the McGovern liberals in the era of Richard Nixon; British socialists and pacifists in the decade of Margaret Thatcher; the irreconcilable American right during the Clinton administration; the shattered American left in the time of the second Bush.

  If it can be proved that there has been a conspiracy, which has transformed politics and society, then their defeat is not the product of their own inherent weakness or unpopularity, let alone their mistakes; it is due to the almost demonic ruthlessness of their enemy. Richard Hofstadter noted that one of the most important characteristics ascribed to the conspirator (other than his complete lack of moral inhibition) was “his possession of especially effect
ive techniques for fulfilling his desires.” Hofstadter saw in this a psychological opportunity for conspiracists “to project and freely express unacceptable aspects of their own minds” while suggesting that this was all the fault of the conspiring “other.”11 Such projections made of the enemy “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.”12 This is certainly true of the way in which, at various times, Jews, Communists, Trotskyites, or big corporations have been depicted by theorists.

  In its most basic form, this demonic projection consists of the assertion that “they” are capable of almost any act. Writing in the skeptical New Humanist magazine in 2005, Derek Kaill asked whether the U.S. government could possibly do such a thing as organize the mass murder of its own citizens, and answered himself, “I think that the flag-waving, war-minded, fundamentalist Christian administration currently in control of the United States would do almost anything to retain and expand their control over the world.” Note here how the humanist Kaill adds “Christian fundamentalist” to the list of attributes possessed by the particularly villainous. 13 A few weeks later, in another publication, the Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy pointed out to those critics of the United States who might dismiss such conspiracism that they were able to accept:

  We and our controlling U.S. interests continue fearlessly to terrorize countries unconnected with the attacks, to place permanent military bases near oil reserves and pipeline routes, to harass and murder Muslims anywhere we can, and to foment terrorist resistance at every opportunity . . . But you’d never want to think that on 9/11/2001 covert U.S. government intervention killed thousands of innocents and handed the country, if not the world, to a commerce-friendly, torture-loving, far-right junta. That would make you a paranoid, depressed conspiracy theorist.14

  Again, it is impossible not to mark Kennedy’s idiosyncratic linking of “commerce-friendly” with “torture-loving,” as though shopping was but a prelude to the thumbscrews. Making allowance for the author’s use of irony and her specific devils, however, it is possible to recognize the sentiments of Joe McCarthy on the Commie-riddled pinko Establishment that had sold China to the Reds, of John T. Flynn on the amazing villainies of Franklin Roosevelt; and of prosecutor Vyshinsky on the incredible destructiveness of Comrade Pyatakov. In each case, the claim was that the miscreant combined malign intention and a remarkable capacity for deceit with omnipotence in action. Or at least did, until they met their match in the far-sighted exposer of their malevolence.

  When the opponent has magic powers, the hero must match these powers or else be inevitably doomed to defeat. If it’s the latter, then the forces of good, though overwhelmed, have their excuse: We were robbed. This psychic cop-out has always irritated dissidents who are not conspiracists, with writers such as I. F. Stone and Noam Chomsky in the United States and George Monbiot in the United Kingdom urging fellow radicals not to effectively rule themselves out of the great leftist struggle by following the false trail of the theorists. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 were a “coward’s fantasy,” wrote Monbiot, “an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.”15 The response from various corners of the conspiracist world was that Chomsky and Monbiot had become self-appointed “gatekeepers,” whose purpose was to police the dissident movement so that it didn’t do too much damage to the corrupt Establishment.

  The Soul’s Version of the Truth

  For some more radical students of conspiracism, the possibility that conspiracy theories are history as written by the losers confers a kind of underdog’s truth upon them. According to this view, the theory is the fuzzy shadow cast by the hidden bulk of real oppression: it has a kind of reality. The O. J. Simpson case of 1994-1995, in which a black athlete and movie star was acquitted, by a predominantly black jury, of the murders of his white wife and a white man, was seen by many as an appalling case of injustice in which a palpably guilty man was freed because of his color. But there were those who argued that the jury’s decision was almost valid, because, in the words of Sam Smith in the Progressive Review, “Simpson is carrying the mythic weight of decades of ethnic abuse under the justice system . . . [his] case serves as the mythic translation of stories never allowed to be told.”

  Smith was writing just two months after Timothy McVeigh, a former soldier with connections to the extreme-right-wing militia movement in the United States, blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing nearly two hundred people. Although McVeigh was a drifter without strong community ties, Smith’s article posits an overarching analysis that is applied to both Simpson and McVeigh:

  Like urban blacks considering the justice system, the rural Right has seen things the elite would prefer to ignore. It has observed correctly phenomena indicating loss of sovereignty for themselves, their states and their country. They have seen treaties replaced by fast-track agreements and national powers surrendered to remote and unaccountable trade tribunals . . . Like urban blacks, they have not been paranoid in this observation, merely perceptive.

  Seen this way, conspiracist and similar narratives, however crazy they sound, contain real validity, something that the economists and dusty actuaries of politics and the press are unable to comprehend. What is needed, argues Smith, is a more poetical reading of these claims, because “the poet understands that a myth is not a lie but the soul’s version of the truth.”16

  A decade on, in the late summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the American Gulf Coast, resulting in the flooding of the city of New Orleans and the evacuation of 80 percent of its population. Since those worst affected by the disaster were poor, most of the poor were black, and the response of the authorities was considered utterly inadequate, it was wholly understandable that claims of official racism would be made. But for some people what had happened was more sinister than that, and stories began to circulate that some of the flood defenses, or levees, had been destroyed specifically so as to flood black areas.

  The following year, the renowned black filmmaker Spike Lee completed a four-hour-long documentary on the disaster, titled When the Levees Broke, which dealt with many aspects of the catastrophe, and in which some of the participants repeated their belief in the conspiracy to drown the blacks of New Orleans. Though the film did not specifically support or contest these theories, Lee made plain his own ambivalence in a late-night live TV discussion hosted by Bill Maher.

  MAHER: [Black activist] Louis Farrakhan . . . was saying, last Saturday in Washington, that he thinks that the federal government, there was a conspiracy to actually blow up those levees so that they would flood the poor black districts in New Orleans. I have to tell you, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe it. But when you see some of the things that have gone on in this country . . .

  LEE: Exactly. It’s not far-fetched.

  MICHEL MARTIN [TV JOURNALIST]: That would require a conspiracy. I mean, look, we can all understand, anybody with any knowledge of history can understand why a lot of people can feel this way, that that’s a reasonable theory. But it would also require a conspiracy at three levels of government—the local, the state, and the federal. It would require no white residents—

  LEE: Presidents have been assassinated. So why is that so far-fetched?

  MARTIN: Because it would require, because it would require no white person in the government to have a moral compass. It would require no black person to have a spine and I think that’s a very hard case to make.

  LEE: Let me ask you a question: do you think that election in 2000 was fair? You don’t think that was rigged? [audience applause]

  MARTIN: It’s not a question of not being fair, it’s a question of—

  LEE: If they can rig an election, they can do anything!17

  A number of critics, while praising Spike Lee’s film, were disturbed by the conspiracy claims. In the New York Times, Nicholas Kulish described the effect as “by turns powerful and frustrating,” becau
se “without quite endorsing them,” wrote Kulish, “Mr. Lee presents the utterly unfounded charges that the failed levees were blown up to flood poor black neighborhoods.”18 Kulish soon found himself under fire in the letters page. He had missed the point, according to several correspondents, including a professor of African-American studies at Columbia University, which was that Lee offered “alternative perspectives from other residents, journalists, and scholars. That so many black residents believe that the levees were purposely blown up is a result of their historical experience and their continuing sense that their safety and well-being will be sacrificed.”19 In other words, the possible untruth of the allegations was far less important than the bigger truths revealed by them. So, in that sense, arguing about whether there really had been a conspiracy was not just beside the point, but amounted to an attempt to try and deny the larger alternative truth.

  This is an approach that dovetails with an intellectual trend, loosely labeled postmodernist or post-structuralist, which has become increasingly attractive to academics and intellectuals in recent years. One aspect of this inclination is a distrust of normative notions of truth. “You show me your reality,” it suggests, “I’ll show you mine,” and the man in Maine with a lobster in his hand will show you his. All accounts of events are essentially stories, and no single account ought to be privileged above another. It is a seductive and not entirely worthless way of looking at the world. Intellectuals like Spike Lee can take this one step further, to suggest that the truth or otherwise of conspiracy theories is less important than their existence, because they are, properly analyzed, an expression of an underlying reality, representing “a not entirely unfounded suspicion that the normal order of things itself amounts to a conspiracy.”20 So they are valid even if they are themselves actually false. They may be, writes Mark Fenster, professor of law at Florida University, “an ideological misrecognition of power relations” but “Just because overarching conspiracy theories are wrong does not mean they are not on to something. Specifically, they ideologically address real structural inequities, and constitute a response to a withering civil society and the concentration of the ownership of the means of production.”21