Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (2 page)

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 Defense—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 that I suppose could be summed up as “How the 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 recognized that plans, projects conspiracies and even conspiracy theories can change the world.”
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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.

So, What Is a Conspiracy?

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 characterize what makes it so.

An 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 U.S. 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.”
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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 judgment 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 whom 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 where 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.

Occam’s Razor

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.”
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Or, far more vulgarly, “Keep it simple.” The razor is given to William of Ockham (Occam), a fourteenth-century Franciscan monk and theologian, not because he invented it but because it was his favorite 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 mind reader or the séance medium. We should accept only that the one has ESP and the other communes with the dead (things none of us have or can do) once we have exhausted the much simpler explanation that they have shills communicating information to them by some agreed-upon 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 skeptic 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 defuse 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.’ ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

Plots Throughout History

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.”
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Ramsay goes on to cite the following as offering prima facie evidence of a string of political conspiracies: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, of his brother Robert, of Martin Luther King, Jr., 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.”
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Since each one of these conspiracies is, to say the least, questionable, Ramsay is saying no more in effect than that conspiracist ideas beget 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 U.S. and British involvement in the 1953 coup against the Persian prime minister Mossadeq.
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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- 1986 is the closest the United States 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 unraveled; 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, Grigory 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 organized conspiracy against Labour by the intelligence agencies.”
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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.