Tiny cracks (Part two) Conspiracies (and theories about them)[

Tiny cracks (Part two)

Conspiracies (and theories about them)[1]



Assassinated President

Apart from performing bodily functions in public, few things are as guaranteed to upset as many people from all political walks of life, than using the word, conspiracy. It is one of those words that immediately sets off the alarm bells amongst a certain type of person.

 

The man who benefited from the assassination

I was once talking to a friend, a hardline Trotskyist, about Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel about the Kennedy Assassination. I made the very basic point that all the evidence in the case suggested that it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who was the killer. She immediately countered with, “So you’re a conspiracy theorist now”?


Needless to say, I gave up the conversation at that point, as to her it was a sign of my continuing political degeneracy..

 

As Jeffrey M. Bale wrote[2],

“Very few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility, and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies. Even when this belief is expressed in a very cautious manner, limited to specific and restricted contexts, supported by reliable evidence, and hedged about with all sort of qualifications, it still manages to transcend the boundaries of acceptable discourse and violate unspoken academic taboos.

The idea that particular groups of people meet together secretly or in private to plan various courses of action, and that some of these plans actually exert a significant influence on particular historical developments, is typically rejected out of hand and assumed to be the figment of a paranoid imagination….

So strong is this prejudice among academics that even when clear evidence of a plot is inadvertently discovered in the course of their own research, they frequently feel compelled, either out of a sense of embarrassment or a desire to defuse anticipated criticism, to preface their account of it by ostentatiously disclaiming a belief in conspiracies.” (Lobster 29)

I quote this at length for two reasons; first it sums up the reaction to conspiracies far better than I could and, secondly, Robin Ramsay quotes it in his book, Conspiracy Theory and if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

It’s not just academics who view conspiracies in the same light, other groups such as the media, politicians and the liberal middle classes have the same knee-jerk reaction. Surprisingly, or not, those who see themselves on the far left[3] of the political spectrum, often have the most venomous response. In the case of this group it is because conspiracies are seen as the province of right wing nutcases who harbour fantasies that the world is run by Jews or fanatics with a racist agenda. There is no consideration given to actually examining specific conspiracies to see whether any evidence exists to show that they are real. This automatic dismissal of an event being a conspiracy without any research is the same as their complaint that conspiracy theorists believe things without any evidence.

This reaction of the left is peculiar because anyone who has spent any time in this milieu would know that they are routinely involved in mundane conspiracies all the time. Having an informal caucus before, say, a union meeting to discuss how to act within it, is a conspiracy. To arrange amongst a small group of fellow members who will get on to a particular committee is a conspiracy as well. In the case of Trotskyists, the attitude is particularly ironic as the Bolsheviks under Trotsky and Lenin successfully conspired to take power off the working class.

In the case of the liberal media, the vanguard of the middle classes, part of their disdain for conspiracy theories comes from that smug, arrogant attitude which they display towards other classes who they see as not as clever as them. It is also because most, but not all journalists still believe that government and the state just don’t do that sort of thing. In Britain at least, most journalists of the so-called ‘quality’ press and the tabloids, went to Oxford and Cambridge with contemporary politicians. Their view of reality is based on the myth of the state as a neutral force; a myth that has been demolished continually over many centuries.

There is a telling anecdote in Robin Ramsay’s book Conspiracy Theories[4] back to the 1990s about Colin Wallace, who had been working for psy-ops[5] in the six counties of Ireland and was then had been framed for murder in an attempt to discredit his testimony about. Ramsay arranged an interview with the BBC current affairs programme, Newsnight for the day Wallace was released from prison so he could tell his story.

As Ramsay goes on to say, I had been told by Wallace that among the visitors to his secret psy-ops unit, Information Policy, in Northern Ireland, had been Alan Protheroe, who at the time of my Newsnight visit, was Assistant Director General of the BBC. Nicknamed 'the Colonel' in the BBC, Protheroe was, and may still be, a part-time soldier-cum-intelligence officer, specialising in military-media relations.
But unlike the journalists I had been talking to up to that point, Protheroe knew who Wallace was and what the Information Policy unit had been doing in Northern Ireland. To Newsnight I therefore said something like this: 'Protheroe's a spook; you'll have to watch him. He'll try and block anything you do with Wallace in it.' 'Really, old boy,' said the BBC people I was talking to, 'it isn't like that in the BBC'.
Their response was comical, really. It was then only just over a year since there had been several weeks of intense media interest in the revelation that the BBC actually had its own in-house MI5 office vetting BBC employees (still there, as far as I know) - prima facie evidence that, au contraire, the BBC was exactly 'like that'.

The Newsnight journalist, Julian O'Hallorhan, interviewed Wallace the day he came out of prison and then had his piece yanked out of a programme at the very last minute. I was actually watching Newsnight at the time and saw the confusion in the studio as the running order was rejigged while they were on air. We subsequently heard that Protheroe had indeed blocked the Wallace interview, and when asked, the BBC denied that they had ever interviewed Wallace. Protheroe's action in blocking the Wallace interview was reported four months later in the Sunday Times and has been confirmed since by a senior Newsnight staffer who has now left the BBC’”[6]

Politicians, of course have a vested interest in denying there are government conspiracies, though they also share the same view of the state as do the media. However, it is actually quite remarkable that anyone, in any country, can view the state or the government as a benign force after thirty or forty years of revelations of dirty tricks, assassinations, illegal wars, illegal murders etc.

This is one of the reasons why people believe in conspiracies; there have been so many examples in recent decades of governments lying about the facts and then being caught out by the truth being revealed. A prime example of this being Tony Blair and Sadaam Hussain’s non-existent weapons of mass extinction. Put simply, people just no longer trust governments and who can blame them?

At the same time, there is another side to the belief in conspiracies and conspiracy theories. The majority of working class people are continually told that the economy is improving, there are more jobs, the health service is improving, and education is getting better. Yet the evidence that they see in day-to-day reality contradicts that. At a time where the level of control over our lives has diminished and democracy has been eroded, it becomes easy for people to look for someone to blame. If it’s the case that the government lied about x or covered up y, then it is quite possible that they lie about everything. Once you assume that, the door is open for any possibility. It’s here where the knowledge of actually existing conspiracies can elide into a belief in more overarching ideas such as the queen being a shape shifting lizard or the Jews or the Illuminati running the world. That may, of course, be the case, but I’ve never seen any evidence for it and the word of David Icke isn’t enough for me.

However, in the real world there is more than enough evidence to prove that they exist. Off the top of my head, here is a short random list of conspiracies that are easily provable.

1.    The assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was this event that over time began to expose the nature of the state’s illegal activities and in this particular case, the activities of the C.I.A. From this time on, researchers began to systematically probe the security forces and the existence of the secret state. Not only was the actual assassination a conspiracy, so was the cover-up; The Warren Commission which was set up to investigate the killing was given its conclusion that Oswald was the lone killer before it was up and running. There is too much conflicting evidence for any rational person to accept that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

2.    The Campaign to get Britain to join the European Community, or Common Market, as it then was. The Foreign Office, over a number of decades continually lied about what the effect of Britain’s entry would result in. How do we know? The late Hugo Young, a firm believer in the European project, had access to a huge archive of classified documents that set out in great detail, the machinations to get Britain into Europe. His book, This blessed plot[8] reveals all of this, which really was a massive conspiracy against the people of Britain and, at times, its government.

3.    The Militant Tendency in the British Labour Party. This was a conspiracy that lasted for over forty years practising the tactic of entryism. When the Labour Party accused them of being a secret organisation within the party with its own rules, membership, paper and programme, they were absolutely right. Of course, the right of the party did the same thing and got away with it.

4.    Don Brash and ACT. This is a particularly crazy conspiracy; Brash, former governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and former leader of the National Party, conspired to take over the leadership of ACT in the 2011 election year despite not even being a member. It was all to no avail as he didn’t win a seat and ACT got only 1 MP, John Banks, along with its lowest ever vote. It was funny though…

5.    Security and intelligence services. All of them. All of the time.

6.    The Fourth New Zealand Labour government. Despite not mentioning it in their manifesto, Labour introduced sweeping Neo-Liberal reforms, known as Rogernomics after Finance Minister Roger Douglas. The consequences of this conspiracy are still felt today in New Zealand’s low waged, semi-skilled economy that is mainly reliant on tourism and exports of Meat, dairy products and timber.

(To be continued)

 

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[1] In this article, I use the word conspiracy or conspiracies to refer to specific events and the term, conspiracy theory, in relation to the wilder shores of the concept.

[2] Jeffrey M. Bale. Issue 29, 1995, Lobster magazine http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue29.php

[3] By ‘far left’ here, I mean those from Trotskyist type organisations etc.

[4] For an in depth analysis of what happened to Wallace, see Paul Foot, Who framed Colin Wallace

[5] Psy-ops is shorthand for psychological operations.

[6] This version of the story is from issue 8 of the magazine, Variant, Summer 1999. http://www.variant.org.uk/8texts/Robin_Ramsay.html

[8] The book broke the official secrets act but Young was never prosecuted and the archive was declassified shortly after its publication.