Did Neil Armstrong really set foot on the moon?
Was the United States government responsible for the 11 September attacks?
Should we doubt the accidental nature of Diana’s death?
Voodoo Histories entertainingly demolishes the absurd and sinister conspiracy theories of the last 100 years. Aaronovitch reveals not only why people are so ready to believe in these stories but also the dangers of this credulity.
*Includes a new chapter investigating the conspiracy theories that question Obama’s legitimacy as president*
David Aaronovitch is an award-winning journalist, who has worked in radio, television and newspapers in the United Kingdom since the early 1980s. He lives in Hampstead, north London, with his wife, three daughters and Kerry Blue the terrier. His first book, Paddling to Jerusalem, won the Madoc prize for travel literature in 2001 and his second, Voodoo Histories, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Paddling to Jerusalem
The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in
Shaping Modern History
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Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Aaronovitch
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction: Blame Kevin
1. ‘The Uncanny Note of Prophecy’
2. Dark Miracles
3. Conspiracies to the Left
4. Dead Deities
5. A Very British Plot
6. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit
7. A Few Clicks of a Mouse
8. Mr Pooter Forms a Theory
Conclusion: Bedtime Story
Picture Section
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Copyright
For Sarah, Rosa, Lily, Eve and Ruby. My girls.
1. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent (from the Collections of the Henry Ford)
2. Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky
3. Hitler associate Alfred Rosenberg’s own edition of the Protocols
4. The young Pyatakov
5. Leon Feuchtwanger (AP/PA Photos)
6. Prosecutor Vyshinsky sums up against the Trotskyite saboteurs
7. John T. Flynn (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
8. Senator Joe McCarthy (U.S. Senate Historical Office)
9. America First Rally, Chicago, 1941 (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
10. A still from Zapruder (Zapruder Film © 1967 [Renewed 1995] The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. All Rights Reserved.)
11. Marilyn, JFK and the Mob: a page from the Cusack forgery
12. Mohamed al-Fayed (AFP/Getty Images)
13. Hilda Murrell
14. Tam Dalyell MP (PA Photos)
15. Demonstration at Greenham Common (PA Photos)
16. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent (AFP/Getty Images)
17. Pierre Plantard
18. David Ray Griffin
19. Stylish billing for a screening of Loose Change
20. Scholars for 9 /11 Truth website (© Scholars for 9/11)
21. David Kelly testifies (PA Photos)
22. Norman Baker MP (Solo)
This is the age of conspiracy, the age of connections, secret links, secret relationships.
Don DeLillo, Running Dog, 1978
This book is the fault of a fellow called Kevin Jarvis. Kevin was – is, though I haven’t seen him since February 2002 – a tall, youngish man with a wicked grin and a shaved head. We had been sent by the BBC to Tunisia to make a short film for a programme on holiday destinations in places that, away from the beaches and tourist sights, abused their citizens. Kevin was the cameraman-producer and I was what used to be called the ‘lips’.
All the filming had to be done secretly, as Kevin and I moved between the mosaics of Carthage and the homes of tortured dissidents, otherwise we would have been arrested and quite possibly roughed up and deported. Several times we caught sight of the ubiquitous Tunisian secret police in their leather jackets and shades as – terribly bored – they staked out the lives of opponents of the government.
It was, I think, in a hire car on the road down from Tunis to the Roman amphitheatre at El-Jem (where I was to deliver one of those ‘behind this attractive facade’ pieces to camera) that Kevin told me about how the 1969 Apollo moon landings had been faked by NASA and the American government. This was a shock for me; unlike Kevin I was old enough to have watched the One Small Step For Man on the television, and it was part of my personal history, like England’s 1966 World Cup win. I wasn’t anxious to lose it.
Kevin’s argument rested on one essential proposition: all the picture coverage of the landing, moving and still, was demonstrably fraudulent. There were things happening in the pictures that were impossible, and things not happening in them that certainly should have been. These phenomena included a flag that seemed to flutter in the non-existent lunar breeze, an unnatural absence of stars and a certain staginess about the movement of the astronauts. All of this was attested to by an army of photographic experts and scientists who had done years of research and whose conclusions were practically irrefutable. If the pictures were fake then, it followed, the moon landings themselves must have been counterfeited.
My immediate reaction was one of scepticism. It wasn’t that I was forearmed with arguments to disprove his theory; it was just that it offended my sense of plausibility. My uncogitated objection ran something like this: a hoax on such a grand scale would necessarily involve hundreds if not thousands of participants. There would be those who had planned it all in some Washington office; those in NASA who had agreed; the astronauts themselves, who would have been required to continue with the hoax for the whole of their lives, afraid even of disclosing something to their most intimate friends at the most intimate moments; the set designers, the photographers, the props department, the security men, the navy people who pretended to fish the returning spacemen out of the ocean and many, many more. It was pretty much impossible for such an operation to be mounted and kept secret, and inconceivable that anybody in power would actually take the risk that it might be blown. Given the imbalance in probabilities I was therefore sure, without even scrutinising it, that Kevin’s evidence was wrong. Besides, probably unknown to him, the entire thesis was familiar to movie-goers of a certain age: in 1978 the film Capricorn One had been based on the same premise, except this time the earthbound crew had to be eliminated, lest they tell the world about the non-landing. In that respect at least the movie was more credible than the theory.
The hare, though, was running. I became obsessed by conspiracy theories and what it was that made people believe them. Kevin was not some credulous blotter, absorbing any old liquid that his mind settled upon. He was a bright, well-educated and commonsensical man – you could trust him when the Tunisian secret police were around. What’s more, he’d probably have characterised himself, like me, as a sceptic. So why did someone like Kevin choose to believe, and argue for, a theory that was so preposterous? I wanted to understand what was going on, not least because, at the beginning of 2002, it wasn’t just the events of 1969 that were under particular scrutiny. All sorts of conspiracy theories were springing up around the attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent coalition invasion of Afghanistan, theories that seemed to me potentially dangerous in the world view they expounded. As I researched, these theories didn’t evaporate or appear purely marginal. Instead they seemed to become more insidious, more pervasive.
We in the West are currently going through a period of fashionable conspiracism. Books alleging secret plots appear on the current affairs and history shelves as though they were as scholarly or reliable as works by major historians or noted academics. Little distinction is made between a painstakingly constructed biography of John F. Kennedy and an expensive new tome arguing – forty-three years after the event – that the president was killed by the Mafia. Meanwhile, in music and DVD chains across the US and Britain, among the limited number of books on sale, the young browser is likely to come across A3-sized paperbacks with titles such as Abuse Your Illusions, You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths. Checking in at a rather substantial eighteen pounds, these books consist of a series of bite-sized essays by different authors dealing with myriad (and, frankly, random) subjects from the oil industry to crime, via geopolitics. The avowed purpose is to ‘act as a battering ram against the distortions, myths and outright lies that have been shoved down our throats by the government, the media, corporations, organized religion, the scientific establishment and others who want to keep the truth from us’.1
Browsing through one of the books in the Disinformation series (published by the countercultural tycoon Richard Metzger), I came across a chapter titled ‘The European Union Unmasked: Dictatorship Revealed’. In it, a Lindsay Jenkins – formerly a civil servant in the British Ministry of Defence – details the Eurocratic plot to destroy nation states. At one point Jenkins suggests that the encouragement of regionalism is part of this complicated conspiracy, the idea being to weaken Europeans and render them unable to resist the imposition of the superstate. So she writes, ‘Insistence on the use of minority languages, especially in educating children, will ensure that the locality is isolated and will limit the opportunities for people in the wider world. It will make them second-class citizens and easier to control. All regional assemblies will have multiple translation services, which will further reduce their effectiveness.’ A theory which I suppose could be summed up as ‘How Welsh destroyed the United Kingdom’.
One recent book published in the popular Rough Guides series, listing some of the most significant conspiracy theories and tacitly accepting quite a few of them, even goes so far as to situate itself at a turning point in the Great Historiographical Debate. ‘The idea,’ write the authors, ‘that long ago it was great men’s deeds that drove world affairs gave place to the notion that much bigger historical and social forces were at stake. Now, once again, it is being recognised that plans, projects conspiracies and even conspiracy theories can change the world.’2
Ideas like this may also be observed in television and, latterly, in factual movies. Documentaries are increasingly partisan and liable to include material that suggests conspiracy on the part of someone or other. One only has to think of sequences from Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 911 for examples. And such works are given the same treatment as major exercises in historical analysis or substantial pieces of investigative journalism. In fact, they are often given a better billing. Uncountered, their arguments enter popular culture.
If a conspiracy is defined as two or more people getting together to plot an illegal, secret or immoral action, then we can all agree that there are plenty of conspiracies. Many criminal acts are the consequences of conspiracies; security agencies whose plans are necessarily confidential are continually conspiring; and companies who seek to preserve commercial confidentiality – while sometimes employing others to infiltrate the confidentiality of others – often act in a conspiratorial fashion. An agreement not to tell your mother that you are sleeping with your boyfriend would qualify. A conspiracy theory, however, is something rather different, and it is the aim of this book to try to characterise what makes it so.
The American scholar and author of two books about conspiracy theories, Daniel Pipes, argues that, in essence, a conspiracy theory is simply a conspiracy that never happened, that it is ‘the nonexistent version of a conspiracy’. For the US historian Richard Hofstadter, on the other hand, writing in the early 1960s, what distinguished the true ‘paranoid’ conspiracy theory was its scale, not that ‘its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events’.3
These two definitions don’t quite work for me. How, for example, can Pipes prove categorically that a conspiracy is ‘nonexistent’? Obviously any conspiracy is a theory until it is substantiated; therefore those supporting a conspiracy theory might be entitled to observe, either that their own particular notion was simply awaiting definitive proof or, just as likely, that in their judgement such proof was already available. And I find it hard to accept Hofstadter’s definition of conspiracy, which would, for example, include the idea – given play in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – that the Church has for two millennia systematically suppressed the truth about the bloodline of Jesus (a truly vast deception), but not the smaller-scale accusation that British (or French) intelligence agencies had Diana, Princess of Wales, brutally done away with in Paris in 1997. It is important not to overlook the smaller theories, since if believed, it seems to me, they eventually add up to an idea of the world in which the authorities, including those who we elect, are systematically corrupt and untruthful.
I think a better definition of a conspiracy theory might be: the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended. And, as a sophistication of this definition, one might add: the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another. So a conspiracy theory is the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable. It is, for example, far more likely that men did actually land on the moon in 1969 than that thousands of people were enlisted to fabricate a deception that they did.
In arriving at this definition, I was influenced by the precept known as Occam’s razor long before I knew what this famous implement was. In Latin this precept reads, ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate’, translated as, ‘Plurality should not be posited without necessity.’ This can be restated as, ‘Other things being equal, one hypothesis is more plausible than another if it involves fewer numbers of new assumptions.’4 Or, far more vulgarly, ‘Keep it simple.’ And the razor is given to William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century Franciscan monk and theologian not because he invented it, but because it was his favourite tool in a dispute.
What is also called the principle of parsimony may usefully be applied in other situations where credulity is demanded. Take the theatrical mind-reader or the village-hall clairvoyant. We should only accept that the one has ESP and the other communes with the dead (things none of us possess or can do) once we have exhausted the much simpler explanations that they have shills in the audience communicating information to them by some pre-agreed system. It is strange that we understand that magic tricks aren’t really magic at all, but are willing to be convinced that our minds can be read by a man on a stage.
The eighteenth-century radical and sceptic Tom Paine applied exactly this thinking to religious doctrine in his book The Age of Reason. ‘If we are to suppose,’ wrote Paine, ‘a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?’
Of course, definitions of historical likelihood and unlikelihood can be argued about. So it was possibly inevitable that any strenuous argument against conspiracy theories should come to be described – by certain academics – as being as flawed as the theories themselves. Writers like Daniel Pipes, argues Peter Knight in his book Conspiracy Culture, seem to see a belief in conspiracy theories as a ‘mysterious force with a hidden agenda that takes over individual minds and even whole societies’. This is a neat inversion, but Pipes’s systematic attempt to show how conspiracist thinking can contaminate political argument seems hardly to merit this rather lurid description.
In a similar way, it has been argued that a coherent argument against conspiracism constitutes its own, and equally questionable, ideology. ‘Contingency theory’, as this way of thinking is called, essentially seeks to demobilise where conspiracy theory seeks to inflame. Instead of trying to find an explanation, as conspiracism does, of why power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and why society is riven by unresolved antagonisms, contingency theory pacifies its clients by telling them that there are no such antagonisms and that everything is fundamentally all right. It ‘salvages the American status quo by turning a blind eye to the social relations underlying “large events” and spinning these often traumatic moments as the product of “addled individuals”’.5 Contingency theory, then, is supposed to be the ruling-class response to insurrectionary conspiracism. It is a way of thinking that has, say its critics, an ‘equally ideological vision of historical causality’.6
My response is this: fraught though the understanding of history is, and although there can be no science of historical probability, those who understand history develop an intuitive sense of likelihood and unlikelihood. This does not mean they are endorsing the status quo. As the great British historian Lewis Namier wrote, ‘The crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense – an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen.’7 Conspiracy theories are theories that, among other things, offend my understanding of how things happen by positing as a norm how they do not happen.
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 Kennedy, of his brother Robert, of Martin Luther King, 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’.i
Since each one of these conspiracies is, to say the least, questionable, Ramsay is saying no more in effect than that conspiracist ideas create 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 US 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 1985–6 is the closest the US 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 unravelled; 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, Grigori 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 organised 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.
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.
I was struck when examining some of the biographies of those involved in the 9/11 Truth movement by how this normalisation 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 sympathisers, 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. Sceptics 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 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 witnesses
The conspiracists draw upon the 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 US syndicated Alex Jones Show was referred 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 7 July London bombings in 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.ii 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 organisation ‘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 called 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. Convenient inconvenient 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 Just William schoolboy ingenuity of Korey Rowe, the producer of Loose Change, a highly popular documentary about 9/11, who when challenged about the existence of 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 programme 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 emails were being intercepted by persons unknown. Some emails sent to him, he told his interviewer, had only partly been 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 orthopaedic surgeon David Halpin – worried that his emails 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
Part of the motivation for writing this book was the light-hearted 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 theories 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.
i The shooting in fact took place in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election.
ii In 2008 Kollerstrom was removed from his position as a research fellow at University College London for having written a number of articles suggesting that there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz, and drawing attention to the number of orchestras at the concentration camp, as well as the existence of a swimming pool for the use of the inmates.
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 Encyclopaedia. 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 Ykaterinburg, the Orthodox Church suppressed, the lands of the nobility sequestrated and the factories of the magnates nationalised. An organisation 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.
Everywhere peoples stared out of the abyss, their certainties and traditions replaced by extreme anxiety and dangerous novelty. The experience of war, so totally brutalising and massive in its industrial scale, had shaken their faith in progress itself. The technologies that were supposed to bring comfort and prosperity had instead brought death and unbelievable destruction. No one, save a few eccentric doomsayers, had entered the war imagining its catastrophic consequences. Not the intellectuals, not the generals, not the leaders, the philosophers or the clerics. How, then, should they now make sense of the world?
People could have blamed themselves. Many had tolerated or encouraged their governments in arms races, in belligerent patriotism, in imperial ambitions, in bellicose diplomacy and egoism. Journalists and writers had embraced the prospect of conflict – conflict in which one’s own side was inevitably victorious and one’s troops would be home by Christmas. Those who had argued loudest against war had been the most reviled. The people of 1919, however, were no more likely to point the finger of blame at themselves than we are today, who enjoy universal adult franchise, a free press and the free exchange of information. Instead, they looked elsewhere. They had, it seemed, been badly led, politically and militarily. Some went as far as to believe they had been actively duped, fooled, lied to and, where defeated, betrayed.
For the socialist and Marxist Left the culprit was obvious. Imperialism was to blame, an imperialism fostered by the insatiable demand by business interests for cheap raw materials, new markets and vast profits. Who, after all, had gained from the four years of warfare? Men in top hats with currency signs on them, men from Krupp, Vickers and Nobel, men with access to the highest reaches of government. The industrialists had effectively encouraged the carnage to begin and had then kept it going, making fortunes from the slaughter. You had to look no further than them and their agents; monopoly capitalism was the hidden hand.
Capitalism was for many people, however, an abstraction. They needed to find a group of people who appeared to have benefited from the war and the revolutions that followed it. For if they had benefited (and were still benefiting), might they not also have helped bring this situation about?
It did not seem ludicrous to the conservative man or woman of 1919 to suspect the Jews. Unlike most peoples, the Jews were international, living in every country and apparently holding positions of influence and wealth in almost all of them. But though they were omnipresent, they were also aloof, and though ubiquitous in public life, they were separate in the private domain. With their archaic language of worship, their aversion to mixed marriages, their extreme attachment to education, they gave the impression of being heirs to a great secret.
What was more, throughout history the Jews could be found standing next to – or just behind – the agents of radical change. It was pointed out by many Right-wing writers and amateur historians that one of Oliver Cromwell’s earliest acts, after executing Charles I, was to readmit Jews into England, whence they had been banished nearly 400 years earlier, and that both the American and French Revolutions, with their advocacy of the rights of man, had released Jews from previous restrictions. Napoleon’s conquests had been followed by Jewish emancipation, and in 1806 the Corsican tyrant had even convened the Grand Sanhedrin, a gathering of notable European Jews. Jews had been prominent in the bourgeois and nationalist revolutions of 1848, in the Paris Commune of 1871 and in the 1905 revolution in Russia.
But it was not just a matter of political radicalism. Jewish banks had financed the Industrial Revolution; Jewish entrepreneurs were at the forefront of the revolution in retailing, their names to be found on the fronts of great department stores. During the second half of the nineteenth century, public Jews like Disraeli and fictional Jews like Trollope’s adventurer Melmotte in The Way We Live Now excited public opinion with their political and economic activities. The large populations of ordinary, poor or illiterate Jews mostly failed to register. In proportion to their numbers, it was said, the Jews did incredibly well.
For the most part this was seen as a product of the character of the Jewish community – family orientated, cosmopolitan and ambitious. There had always been that strain in European conservatism, however, which, observing that the natural order of things was being subverted by progress and radicalism, preferred a more organised explanation. They suggested that secret societies had been behind the major upheavals of the past century or so: the Freemasons had been the organising force behind undermining the eighteenth-century ancien régime; a secret body called the Illuminati had been involved in French Jacobinism and the Revolution; and the Jews and Freemasons working together were responsible for the Year of Revolutions in 1848. There was some historical basis for these beliefs. In the early stages of the movement for Italian unity, for example, secret societies known as the Carbonari (charcoal burners) had indeed met in dark forests, sworn horrible oaths and conspired against foreign occupiers and petty kings. As the century ended, real anarchists with bombs and guns hatched plots to kill prime ministers and blow up emperors, sometimes with real success. So the idea of a more ambitious conspiracy seemed not so very far-fetched, and the possibility that the Jews might act in concert to achieve particular objectives not so very eccentric.
What brought the two ideas together was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. From the beginning it was evident that a large number of those most active in the building of the new Soviet Russia were Jews. Persecuted under the tsars and subject to occasional massacres known as pogroms whenever there was political unrest in the empire, it was natural enough that Jews had tended to side with the reforming or revolutionary Left, which promised an end to repression. In fact, the Bolsheviks had relatively few Jews in senior positions, in contrast to their allies the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were led by men and women from Jewish families. These few, however, caught the eye. There was Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) at the head of the Red Army; Grigori Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), boss of the revolution-spreading Comintern; and Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) at Lenin’s right hand.
The supposed prominence of the Jews in Soviet Russia was remarked upon by the professional diplomats working for the British Foreign Office. In 1919 the British ambassador in Copenhagen, Lord Kilmarnock, wrote to Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon that most Bolsheviks, as far as he could see, were either Germans or Jews. In the same year an official report published by the Foreign Office contained observations made in a dispatch by the Reverend B. S. Lombard, a naval chaplain serving in Russia. The revolutionary movement, Lombard claimed, ‘originated in German propaganda and was, and is being carried out by international Jews’. Lombard had also been ashore in Russia and seen the consequences of Red control over certain towns. ‘All business becomes paralysed,’ he wrote, ‘shops were closed, Jews became possessors of most of the business houses.’1
American diplomats were telling their bosses much the same thing. Documents from the State Department archives include a file dealing with the relationship between Jewish financial interests and the Russian Revolution. The main document, ‘Bolshevism and Judaism’, dated 13 November 1918, is a report stating that a Bolshevik takeover had been planned in early 1916, and listing ten or so Jewish companies whom the report’s author, an employee of the US War Trade Board, believed to have been involved. Also in the file are a number of cables sent between the State Department and the American embassy in London. One, which illustrates how this perception was commonplace among Western diplomats, is worth quoting in full.
October 16, 1919 In Confidential File. Secret for Winslow from Wright. Financial aid to Bolshevism & Bolshevik Revolution in Russia from prominent Am. Jews: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mendell Schiff, Jerome Hanauer, Max Breitung & one of the Guggenheims. Document re – in possession of Brit. police authorities from French sources.2
The perception that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution informed the opinions of some of the most illustrious political figures of the time, even in phlegmatic Britain. On 8 February 1920 Winston Churchill contributed an article to the Illustrated Sunday Herald. In it he addressed the threat from Bolshevism. ‘This worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality has been steadily growing,’ he warned readers. And as to who was behind it: ‘There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.’3
In the minds of some, then, including a certain former corporal in the German army who, a thousand kilometres away in Munich, was saying similar things to Churchill but with rather more venom, the notion that the Jews were behind the war and revolutions that had traumatised Europe began to take root. But this suspicion was as nothing compared to the conspiracy that others were suggesting might be at the heart of things.
‘Since the autumn of 1919,’ wrote a commentator seven years later, ‘a remarkable book has been circulating in Germany, the civilised countries of Europe and America.’4 This book was titled Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion – in English, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – and it contained within it the missing link between the events that had turned the world upside down and the Jews who seemed so prominent in upending it. It was what would now be called the smoking gun.