The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  The big bubbles at Coke decided to fight back in 1985 by changing the formula of Coke. Alas, “New Coke” was loathed by pretty much everyone in the USA (with the exception of Angelinos) and consequent public clamour forced Coke bosses to hastily reintroduce the original drink formulation, now rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic.

  Pepsi executives laughed themselves silly at Coke’s marketing disaster and fast U-turn, gave their staff a day’s holiday and declared that they had won the “Coke wars”.

  They laughed too soon. Coca-Cola Classic put on sales galore and Coke gained itself the rep as “the company that listens to its customers” – leading to speculation that the “New Coke” venture had been nothing but a clever marketing ploy. Or conspiracy.

  There are almost as many versions of the New Coke conspiracy as there are bubbles in a can of New Coke/Classic Coke. The main trio are:

  Version one maintains that there was no actual difference between Classic Coke and New Coke save what was on the outside of the tin, and the introduction of New Coke was designed to fail and make Joe Public clamour for the real stuff. A certain fact is suggestive here: in numerous blind taste trials punters could not tell the two drinks apart. Also, the speed with which Coke reintroduced the classic brand – within three months, with cans enough for everyone – led to speculation that the company had a stockpile of the classic stuff ready waiting in the wings.

  In version two people believe the switch back – planned all along – to “classic” Coke allowed the company to subtly change the drink’s formula, substituting inexpensive high fructose corn syrup for sugar. Working against this conspiracy is the fact that Classic Coke everywhere outside the US is made with sugar.

  By the lights of version three, the New Coke–Classic Coke manoeuvre was cover for the company to remove all traces of cocoa plant from the drink at the behest of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Actually the new version was cocoa free, but there is zero evidence to suggest that the DEA laid down the law to Coke’s executives.

  Although sly, black-hearted, power-mad capitalist execs are stock characters in conspiracy theories, in real life the suits are more prone to cock-up than conspire. When one Coke exec said of the New Coke venture, “We’re not that dumb, and we’re not that smart,” he likely spoke the truth. Coke underestimated the affection of the American people for the iconic drink (the dumb bit) but when the New Coke deal started to go wrong, the company smartly responded by bringing back the real thing (the smart bit). And, hey, even capitalists can get lucky.

  NEW WORLD ORDER

  During the Persian Gulf War, 1991, as USAF aircraft and ships launched their opening missile salvoes against Baghdad, President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to Congress proclaiming, “a big idea – a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of Mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law”.

  Whoa. In one fell speech Poppy Bush confirmed the worst fears of the John Birch Society (JBS), the patriotic militias, the fundamentalist Christian right and pale computer buffs who need to get out more: George Bush was bent on the introduction of one-world government controlled by a micro clique of capitalists. Within weeks the world of conspiracists went mad for the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy.

  The phrase “New World Order” had been common currency in the Birch Society, almost since its foundation in 1958 by Robert Welch. A fervent anti-Red, Welch initially identified Communism as the primary force pushing a globalist agenda. (Not unreasonably: one of the first proponents of the concept “New World Order” was British socialist and writer H. G. Wells in his 1940 book of that title, (see Document, p.364) which envisioned a technocratic global order with a planned economy.) Looking at the US Republican right, Welch saw an equally criminal desire to construct a global power system run by the “Insiders” and one, given the inherent weaknesses of the USSR, the main power-base of Communism, with a better chance of realization. Welch was heavily influenced by his readings of eighteenth-century scribes on the Bavarian Illuminati, Augustin de Barruel and John Robison, while the theory was honed by John Birch Society’s pet intellectual Gary Allen in None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), which described a “world supra-government” headed by international bankers and controlled by NY-based, Rockefeller-funded think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

  If Gary Allen put the wheels on the NWO conspiracy, others promptly climbed aboard. Christian fundamentalist Pat Robertson was one of the first to take a seat with The New World Order (1991), which detailed the long roots of the NWO plot beyond the CFR, beyond Adam Weishaupt and the Bavarian Illuminati to … Satan. In Robertson’s millennarian vision, the NWO is paving the way for the coming of the Anti-Christ. At least if the NWO do make Hell on Earth the alien Reptilian Humanoids, which David Icke believes head up the conspiracy, will find the heat to their liking. Aliens also make their bow in the US patriotic militia’s take on the NWO, whereby the Black Helicopters supposedly used to monitor them are powered by “back-engineered” ET technology. A subterranean base at Denver International Airport is NWO/alien HQ. Reputedly. Invariably, in NWO conspiriology the fronts by which the cabal will instigate its final coup in the USA are the United Nations and FEMA.

  Truth to tell, the NWO theory, with its apocalyptic scenarios and instrumentalist politics, has long left the orbit of history and entered the realm of paranoid mythology.

  Further Reading

  Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, 1971

  William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game, 1954

  William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse, 1989

  Jim Keith, Black Helicopters Over America: Strike Force for the New World Order, 1995

  Pat Robertson, The New World Order, 1991

  DOCUMENT: H. G. WELLS, THE NEW WORLD ORDER, 1940 [EXTRACT]

  There will be no day of days then when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives, discover unsuspected problems and go on to new adventures. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder. For its maker will be not this man nor that man nor any man but Man, that being who is in some measure in every one of us. World order will be, like science, like most inventions, a social product, an innumerable number of personalities will have lived fine lives, pouring their best into the collective achievement.

  We can find a small-scale parallel to the probable development of a new world order in the history of flying. Less than a third of a century ago, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have told you that flying was impossible; kites and balloons and possibly even a navigable balloon, they could imagine; they had known of such things for a hundred years; but a heavier than air machine, flying in defiance of wind and gravity! that they KNEW was nonsense. The would-be aviator was the typical comic inventor. Any fool could laugh at him. Now consider how completely the air is conquered.

  And who did it? Nobody and everybody. Twenty thousand brains or so, each contributing a notion, a device, an amplification. They stimulated one another; they took off from one another. They were like excited ganglia in a larger brain sending their impulses to and fro. They were people of the most diverse race and colour. You can write down perhaps a hundred people or so who have figured conspicuously in the air, and when you examine the rôle they have played, you will find for the most part that they are mere notorieties of the Lindbergh type who have put themselves modestly but firmly in the limelight and can lay no valid claim to any effective contribution whatever. You will find many disputes about records and priority in making this or that particular step, but the lines of suggestion, the growth and elaboration of the idea, have been an altogether untraceable process. It has been going on for not more than a third of a century, under our very eyes, and no one can say precisely how it came about. One man said “Why not this?” and tried it, and another said “Why not that?” A vast miscellany of people had one idea in com
mon, an idea as old as Dædalus, the idea that “Man can fly”. Suddenly, swiftly, it GOT ABOUT – that is the only phrase you can use – that flying was attainable. And man, man as a social being, turned his mind to it seriously, and flew.

  So it will certainly be with the new world order, if ever it is attained. A growing miscellany of people are saying – it is GETTING ABOUT – that “World Pax is possible”, a World Pax in which men will be both united and free and creative. It is of no importance at all that nearly every man of fifty and over receives the idea with a pitying smile. Its chief dangers are the dogmatist and the would-be “leader” who will try to suppress every collateral line of work which does not minister to his supremacy. This movement must be, and it must remain, many-headed. Suppose the world had decided that Santos Dumont or Hiram Maxim was the heaven-sent Master of the Air, had given him the right to appoint a successor and subjected all experiments to his inspired control. We should probably have the Air Master now, with an applauding retinue of yes-men, following the hops of some clumsy, useless and extremely dangerous apparatus across country with the utmost dignity and self-satisfaction …

  Yet that is precisely how we still set about our political and social problems.

  Bearing this essential fact in mind that the Peace of Man can only be attained, if it is attained at all, by an advance upon a long and various front, at varying speed and with diverse equipment, keeping direction only by a common faith in the triple need for collectivism, law and research, we realise the impossibility of drawing any picture of the new order as though it was as settled and stable as the old order imagined itself to be. The new order will be incessant; things will never stop happening, and so it defies any Utopian description. But we may nevertheless assemble a number of possibilities that will be increasingly realisable as the tide of disintegration ebbs and the new order is revealed.

  To begin with we have to realise certain peculiarities of human behaviour that are all too disregarded in general political speculation. We have considered the very important rôle that may be played in our contemporary difficulties by a clear statement of the Rights of Man, and we have sketched such a Declaration. There is not an item in that Declaration, I believe, which a man will not consider to be a reasonable demand – so far as he himself is concerned. He will subscribe to it in that spirit very readily. But when he is asked not only to subscribe to it as something he has to concede by that same gesture to everybody else in the world, but as something for which he has to make all the sacrifices necessary for its practical realisation, he will discover a reluctance to “go so far as that”. He will find a serious resistance welling up from his sub-conscious and trying to justify itself in his thoughts.

  The things he will tell you will be very variable; but the word “premature” will play a large part in it. He will display a tremendous tenderness and consideration with which you have never credited him before, for servants, for workers, for aliens and particularly for aliens of a different colour from himself. They will hurt themselves with all this dangerous liberty. Are they FIT, he will ask you, for all this freedom? “Candidly, are they fit for it?” He will be slightly offended if you will say, “As fit as you are”. He will say in a slightly amused tone, “But how CAN you say that?” and then going off rather at a tangent, “I am afraid you idealise your fellow-creatures.”

  As you press him, you will find this kindliness evaporating from his resistance altogether. He is now concerned about the general beauty and loveliness of the world. He will protest that this new Magna Carta will reduce all the world to “a dead level of uniformity”. You will ask him why must a world of free-men be uniform and at a dead level? You will get no adequate reply. It is an assumption of vital importance to him and he must cling to it. He has been accustomed to associate “free” and “equal”, and has never been bright-minded enough to take these two words apart and have a good look at them separately. He is likely to fall back at this stage upon that Bible of the impotent genteel, Huxley’s Brave New World, and implore you to read it. You brush that disagreeable fantasy aside and continue to press him. He says that nature has made men unequal, and you reply that that is no reason for exaggerating the fact. The more unequal and various their gifts, the greater is the necessity for a Magna Carta to protect them from one another. Then he will talk of robbing life of the picturesque and the romantic and you will have some difficulty in getting these words defined. Sooner or later it will grow clear that he finds the prospect of a world in which “Jack’s as good as his Master” unpleasant to the last degree.

  If you still probe him with questions and leading suggestions, you will begin to realise how large a part the NEED FOR GLORY OVER HIS FELLOWS plays in his composition (and incidentally you will note, please, your own secret satisfaction in carrying the argument against him). It will become clear to you, if you collate the specimen under examination with the behaviour of children, yourself and the people about you, under what urgent necessity they are for the sense of triumph, of being better and doing better than their fellows, and having it felt and recognised by someone. It is a deeper, steadier impulse than sexual lust; it is a hunger. It is the clue to the unlovingness of so much sexual life, to sadistic impulses, to avarice, hoarding and endless ungainful cheating and treachery which gives men the sense of getting the better of someone even if they do not get the upper hand.

  In the last resort this is why we must have law, and why Magna Carta and all its kindred documents set out to defeat human nature in defence of the general happiness. Law is essentially an adjustment of that craving to glory over other living things, to the needs of social life, and it is more necessary in a collectivist society than in any other. It is a bargain, it is a social contract, to do as we would be done by and to repress our extravagant egotisms in return for reciprocal concessions. And in the face of these considerations we have advanced about the true nature of the beast we have to deal with, it is plain that the politics of the sane man as we have reasoned them out, must anticipate a strenuous opposition to this primary vital implement for bringing about the new world order.

  I have suggested that the current discussion of “War Aims” may very effectively be transformed into the propaganda of this new Declaration of the Rights of Man. The opposition to it and the attempts that will be made to postpone, mitigate, stifle and evade it, need to be watched, denounced and combatted persistently throughout the world. I do not know how far this Declaration I have sketched can be accepted by a good Catholic, but the Totalitarian pseudo-philosophy insists upon inequality of treatment for “non-Aryans” as a glorious duty. How Communists would respond to its clauses would, I suppose, depend upon their orders from Moscow. But what are called the “democracies” are supposed to be different, and it would be possible now to make that Declaration a searching test of the honesty and spirit of the leaders and rulers in whom they trust. These rulers can be brought to the point by it, with a precision unattainable in any other fashion.

  But the types and characters and authorities and officials and arrogant and aggressive individuals who will boggle at this Declaration and dispute and defy it, do not exhaust the resistances of our unregenerate natures to this implement for the establishment of elementary justice in the world. For a far larger proportion of people among the “democracies” will be found, who will pay it lip service and then set about discovering how, in their innate craving for that sense of superiority and advantage which lies so near the core of our individual wills, they may unobtrusively sabotage it and cheat it. Even if they only cheat it just a little. I am inclined to think this disingenuousness is a universal weakness. I have a real passion for serving the world, but I have a pretty keen disposition to get more pay for my service, more recognition and so on than I deserve. I do not trust myself. I want to be under just laws. We want law because we are all potential law-breakers.

  This is a considerable digression into psychology, and I will do no more than glance at how large a part this craving for super
iority and mastery has played in the sexual practices of mankind. There we have the ready means for a considerable relief of this egotistical tension in mutual boasting and reassurance. But the motive for this digression here is to emphasise the fact that the generalisation of our “War Aims” into a Declaration of Rights, though it will enormously simplify the issue of the war, will eliminate neither open and heartfelt opposition nor endless possibilities of betrayal and sabotage.

  Nor does it alter the fact that even when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.

  And it will be no light matter to minimise the loss of efficiency in the process of changing the spirit and pride of administrative work from that of an investing, high-salaried man with a handsome display of expenditure and a socially ambitious wife, into a relatively less highly-salaried man with a higher standard of self-criticism, aware that he will be esteemed rather by what he puts into his work than by what he gets out of it. There will be a lot of social spill, tragicomedy and loss of efficiency during the period of the change over, and it is better to be prepared for that.