Conspiracy theories

Part of the problem is that the conspiracy theories of the right have become, god help us, part of the established discourse of how we see things.

Even people who hate the Republicans and all their deeds, for example, often still accept that there was a single, global entity called ‘World Communism’: that its tentacles spread into almost every country in the world, that the US and the UK faced infiltration (or worse) from this entity, that many (perhaps most, perhaps all) ‘terrorist groups’ in the West were at least funded and perhaps ‘run’ by this entity….and so on. In other words, that the Cold War was essentially a defensive ‘war’ fought by the ‘west’ against its will, and so forth…in other words, that the ‘war’ against ‘Communism’ was essentially the same as the war against Fascism, and that if you supported one, you would have to support the other.

Once you have made that fateful connection then everything else follows, and it becomes easy to follow the logical next step, that, whereas before there was ‘Fascism’, then ‘communism’, there is now a unified movement called ‘Islamo-fascism’ which fights ‘the West’ and which ‘we’ have to ‘defeat’ before it does something or other.

This is conspiratorial thinking in its craziest and most lunatic form, but few people are laughing. Instead, even relatively intelligent people like Salman Rushdie and Francis Wheen (author of a rather excellent biography of Marx) sign up to a ridiculous ‘petition’ which begins: ‘After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism…’ etc. etc. etc.

I don’t think “World Communism” is a right-wing conspiracy theory – in the sense of Republicans being right-wing to the Democrats’ left-wing. Rather it’s an official doctrine, the exact equivalent, mirror image of the corresponding Soviet doctrine.

One obstacle to even getting as far as the conpiracy theories is that some of the garden variety administration talking points are wrong:

MADRID, Spain – A two-year probe into the Madrid train bombings concludes the Islamic terrorists who carried out the blasts were homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, two senior intelligence officials said.

The intelligence chief said there were no phone calls between the Madrid bombers and al-Qaida and no money transfers. The Western official said the plotters had links to other Islamic radicals in Western Europe, but the plan was hatched and organized in Spain. “This was not an al-Qaida operation,” he said. “It was homegrown.”

If the left wing had ever cornered the market on conspiracy theories Slim Pickens would have been wearing a beret.

‘Japanese marxists + palestinian nationalists, the IRA + whatever ideology Colonel Ghadaffi was.’

Y’see this is exactly what i’m talking about. Whatever one might think about this, there is a long tradition on the left (or the ‘left’ depending on your point of view) of supporting aims that are perceived to be ‘anti-imperialist’ or whatever. So there is a good reason for Marxists to support the Palestinians (especially under fatah) or for Ghadaffi (an Arab nationalist) to support the IRA (Irish nationalists).

That’s a whole other ball game from claiming that Saddam Hussein (Arab Nationalist) would be supported by ‘Al Qaeda’ (religious Islamic ‘group’ keen to re-establish the Caliphate (an aim incompatible with ‘nationalism’)).

It’s even further from the claim that there is a single ‘movement’: ‘Islamism’ which sponsors terrorism throughout the world, and which perhaps even has a single ‘leader’ and a single ‘organisation’ etc. etc. etc.

That really IS conspiracy thinking.

“often still accept that there was a single, global entity called ‘World Communism’: that its tentacles spread into almost every country in the world, that the US and the UK faced infiltration (or worse) from this entity, that many (perhaps most, perhaps all) ‘terrorist groups’ in the West were at least funded and perhaps ‘run’ by this entity….and so on.”

I don’t know about single ‘World Communism’, at least after the Sino-Soviet split, but inflitration, terrorist group funding was definetly going on. Pretty much every major country in the world HAD been infiltrated by commie agents of one sort or another. Most terrorist groups of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s DID get their finding from one of the commiunist states (unless they were getting their money from the CIA), not to mention many cover organizations with purportedly peacful means in the West.
I’m not so sure if you can call the failure to properly distinguish between Stalinism and Maoism or other farleftyism a ‘conspiracy’.

I seem to recall that the most notorious conspiracy theory, and arguably the most persuasive, revolved around international Jewish bankers. Needless to say, this theory was introduced and continues to be promulgated by the right.

Political discourse in my youth, during Nixon’s presidency, was persistently paranoid. I dismissed most of the speculation at the time, and was soon proved wrong – they were in fact spying on us, there were agents provocateurs among us, there were even plans for prison camps for protesters.

I still think I was right to be skeptical then, even though I was wrong, but the idea that I’m missing what the paranoids are catching is something I keep in the back of my mind.

Left friendly to conspiracy thinking ? You can not refute the claim that left is accomodating to CT by pointing out that some right wingers also sometime help themselves. This is so because both may have the same problem i.e. nazis are as friendly to irrationality as the radical left is.
Better question is is left so susseptible and why ? Very sketchily answer must be that because left has come to tacitly or explicitly embrace Marxist notion that all thinking is ideological it becomes difficult to distinguish between intellectual bullshit and non bullshit . Consider how left is tolerant of post modernism which is wholesale rejection of reason. So I would say no supprise that left loves CT.

why is conspiracy theorising dumb ? of course there are conspiracies and sometime we uncover them but that is not at issue . What is wrong with it is that it is in the nature of this type of explanation ( when you invoke it to explain why US is in Iraq say ) that it cannot be tested ; essentially clandestine , behind the scenes mechanisms and plottings are at play . But this cannot be established to be true or false ( if you try to investigate such a claim and refute it the come back is always “ja those guys are good at covering their tracks and so on ) it remains always untestable speculation.
Of course for those on the left who dont need to do any investigating because they already know the truth this is not an objection . For them as the master said the point is not to understand the world but to change it.If you think like this conspiracy claims are useful tools in the ideological war with the class enemy.

So I would say no supprise that left loves CT.

Conspiracy Theory.
Crooked Timber.

Coincidence? I think not.

Paranoid thinking has its roots deep in the American political process incidentally, and probably has its roots in the first Puritan settlers who saw their pure and Godly attempts to create a ‘shining city on the hill’ perpetually sabotaged by Catholics and atheists and Jews and savage American indians.

‘In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.’

What is blatantly obvious to an outsider is that this is an American thing. British (for example) Tories simply do not have the same foam flecked, ‘they’re all out to get us’, bomb them and let god sort them out mentality, and never have.

Hence the name of the book: The Paranoid Style in American Politics. (http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/The_paranoid_style.html)

Incidentally, I deeply and fundamentally disagree with those who argue that there is ‘really’ or ‘to all intents and purposes’ etc. etc. etc. an entity called ‘World Communism’ (I should note that there were fall back positions. So after the evidence of the Sino-Soviet split, it became impossible for even the extreme right to claim that ‘they’re all in it together’. So it was claimed that the Soviet Union was behind all the bad in the world (the ‘evil empire’) and that, therefore anyone who opposed THEM was our friend. Hence Nixon’s wonderful shenanigans with Mao (later made into a bad opera) and our vigorous support of the Khmer Rouge, and Ceausescu, all of whom passed the criterion of being ‘anti-soviet’).

Anyway: to return. I think many people, even on the Right (and the Left) are still in denial about what a lot of these ‘Communist’ parties were about especially in the Third World. What I would argue is that many of these parties (especially the Cubans and the Vietnamese) are best seen, not as Communist parties at all, but as nationalist parties fighting what they saw as foreign interference or ‘imperialism’ and using Communist/socialist rhetoric which which to argue their case.

For example, why is Castro still so popular (comparatively)? Because he has delivered a socialist paradise? Hardly. No he’s still popular because he kicked out the yanks and, so far has kept them out. Everyone in South and Central American knows this, and hardly anyone in ‘the anglosphere’ understands it. Looking at ‘Communism’ as an entity predisposes you to look at things in terms of East vs West, whereas looking at things in terms of North vs South would probably make things a lot clearer.

Finally:

‘it’s generally lefty looniness.’

Oh really? Sad old SF fans like myself might have a copy of Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat kicking around, in the superb Savoy edition. It contains a review of a programme about ‘the common man’: ordinary working class/middle class joes shown in ’69. According to Ellison (and it sounds plausible) these views were common currency on the Nixon supporting Right.

‘They were, to a man, paranoid. There were conspiracies everywhere. The Black Militant Conspiracy. The White Liberal Conspiracy. The Communist Conspiracy. The Bureacratic Conspiracy. The Conspiracy of the Judiciary. All their troubles stemmed from poor people on welfare rolls and the ‘bleading heart liberals’ who stole from them.’

As one of the ‘common men’ put it: ‘If they (i.e. the army) are against Communism they can’t be wrong. J.Edgar Hoover says it’s a conspiracy, therefore it’s evil. It must be stamped on…even if we have to take out Russia’.

or as another interviewee Paul Corbett (what else? a travelling salesman puts it) ‘Black people just can’t cut it. They don’t have the intellectual ability. Now I know how the Liberal Mafia discredits people who speak like that…they call him a racist. But …I don’t even know what a racist is….’

Far from being extraordinary, these men would have felt quite at home in the discussions about the Bavarian Illuminati, the Masons, or the Jesuits which animated American politics in the 19th century.

‘So it does seem pretty likely saddam had other arrangements with different groups of domestic and international islamists.’

Actually it’s not just Cockburn. Juan Cole and others believes this. If you think about it, any head of state would make plans for what would happen after an invasion. Eg the Nazis with the ‘werewolves’, the French Resistance etc.

But like the ‘werewolves’ any Ba’athist resistance would have crumbled pretty quickly if it did not adapt and take on NEW fighters who were NOT terribly excited by the return of Saddam or the Ba’athists, but who instead wanted to fight the invaders and just joined the first organisation they found.

Needless to say, this hardly proves that any resistance movement set up by the Ba’athists therefore necessarily had any links with Osama Bin Liner.

ETA have no links with Al-Qaeda (or ‘Al-Qaeda’): never have, never will have.

Utter bullshit. Common-enemy alliances with nothing much else in common are routine (e.g. WWII Japan and Germany).

If you define a conspiracy as any criminal action involving more than one person, it’s pretty obvious that there are lots of them.

John, that IS the definition of conspiracy. The phrase “conspiracy-theory” is used to smear people who allege a conspiracy by accusing them of insanity. There’s nothing insane about alleging a conspiracy. You have to go case-by-case and judge by the evidence.

Conspiracy theories are hard either to disprove or to prove. Supposedly the default should be disbelief in the conspiracy-theory and trust in the received opinion, but I don’t see why. I think that it should be even-handed skepticism, in full awareness that there are a lot of brutal, ill-intended liars in positions of power out there.

This doesn’t forbid you to conclude that some conspiracy theories are bullshit, but the generalized case is a big lie.

We should all be aware that we don’t really know what’s really happening and that some of the things we don’t know might be terrible. Pretty uncomfortable, isn’t it? But that’s our state of being. Anti-conspiracy theorists rush to comfort, but they’re fooling themselves.

Brendan: I have no inside knowledge of the facts of the case. It was your argument that was bullshit.

As I understand, though, some terrorists end up hiring themselves out as non-ideological destruction techs. I believe that both IRA members and ETA members have done this, and quite possibly al-Qaeda dropouts might endi up doing that too.

The grander conspiracy theories claiming the coordination of many different actions by many different agents over periods of decades or centuries deserve suspicion. Even so, the Comintern and Cominform really did exist once, and the CIA and similiar American groups still do.

I would suggest that the default theory of political assassinations should be some kind of conspiracy. Sometimes it’s easy enough to show that the default should not be followed. I don’t think that the Kennedy assassination was one of those cases.

So, to a sane rational person there would seem to be nothing in common between those fighting for Basque independence and those fighting to restore the Caliphate. And that’s because there is nothing in common between these two groups. ETA have no links with Al-Qaeda (or ‘Al-Qaeda’): never have, never will have.

You’re an idiot and can’t read, Brendan.

What’s bullshit is the logic of your argument above. It doesn’t follow — the “because” is bullshit. I don’t claim to have solved the case; I don’t know one way or another.

What I said about the Kennedy assasination is that there’s not enough evidence in the Oswald case to justify switching from the default conclusion, which is a conspiracy. In the case of Hinckley, for example, I think that there is. I haven’t solved that case either.

My main point has been that we often find ourselves in doubt about deeply unnerving questions of this type, and rather than calling people who say the wrong thing about them insane and irrational, as you do, we should just learn to live with our very real fears.

Your little “Inspector Clouseau” jibe should make it clear to most people that you are a lightweight dogmatist who’s not ready for the big time. Back to school, Junior.

You are a Kennedy conspiracist, consequently a moron, consequently a troll. I am going back to school where I will meet and teach many little boys like you. It’s rude to call your teacher ‘Junior’ by the way.

Pleeeeease don’t reply to this post, or any other, troll.

‘The effective use of facts and logic is another. ‘

Another what?

abb1: “A good kooky conspiracy theory has one well-defined very specific villain: bankers, islamists, terrorists, neocons, commies…”

A banker perhaps but no Commies, Islamicists or Neocons in this one and the banker wasn’t the villain, at least not the main one:

“Detectives in London have officially concluded that Italian banker Roberto Calvi was murdered in the city in 1982. Known as ‘God’s banker’ because of ties to the Vatican, Mr Calvi was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge but the death was first treated as suicide. Four people were charged with murder by the Italian authorities last month. . . ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4566709.stm

You’re right, I stand corrected. They’re all masons and their granfather’s last name is Goldstein.

…conversely, they are all anti-semites and their grandmother’s last name was Murphy.

The best conspiracy theories are the ones that sound like utter crap until evidence appears that proves that they were correct all along.

Eg … The CIA were using drug money to sponsor a war and effect regime change. Utter crap ’til … Ollie North. (There were people before him who spilled the beans – McCoy from Madison – but everyone put their heads in the sand).

Gary Webb’s stuff …

Michael Meiring …

How about in Canada … conspiracy theory: the CIA were conducting mind experiments on children (something like 50,000 children abused). Fact, the 3,000 or so, survivors have been offered pitiful compensation after fighting through the courts.

The interesting part is that absurdities are believed in preference to conspiracy theories, eg, arabs in caves bringing the US to its knees. Yeah, right.

Fascinating, yeah?

In ten years Homer Simpson will say, “al CIA Duh!” rather than ‘duh’.

Why would ETA want to influence the spanish election to get the PSOE elected? The PSOE set up a death squad in the 1980’s that ventured into the Basque country in France to kill ETA members.

‘Does anyone know when the funding was stopped? (I’d guess it wasn’t). Does this mean that the mujahideen are another branch of the CIA?’

The details are insanely complex, but a good book about this is ‘Ghost Wars’ by Steve Coll (http://www.desijournal.com/book.asp?articleid=130)