Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (37 page)

In fact, the evidence is that those who invented the Priory lied all the time and on every subject. You can see, however, where this is going. The Priory was a front for other shadowy forces—Freemasons, French nationalists, Francoists—and Prince and Picknett have discovered the real conspiracy behind the false conspiracy, so that just when you thought it was safe to go back into the bookshops, they manage to cobble together another possible bestseller out of the discarded carcasses of the old ones. And here I cannot forgo the pleasure of pointing out the error that appears on the cover of their book. Under “Praise for Picknett and Prince,” you may read: “ ‘Astonishing, gruesome, shocking and sensational’—
Washington Post
.” On their website, however, we discover—among comments about their book suggesting that Leonardo painted the Turin Shroud—the full quote, except it’s from the
Washington Times
: “This is a book to which all the tabloid adjectives truly apply. It really is astonishing, gruesome, shocking and sensational. It even appears to be true.” The
Washington Post
is, of course, a very different publication, an altogether more serious animal than the
Washington Times
. It is, one feels, a mistake that was unlikely to have been made the other way around.

The Anti-Stratfordians

Some of the theories discussed in this book have had disastrous consequences. You can’t say that about Templariana. No one has been killed seeking the Priory of Sion, though one may live in hope. There is a certain soft violence inflicted upon the idea of scholarship, but the only real damage done is that people might have been reading better books or, more questionably, watching better television.

There is, however, a psychological or anthropological question to be answered about our consumption of pseudo-history and pseudoscience. I have now plowed through enough of these books to be able to state that, as a genre, they are badly written and, in their anxiety to establish their dubious neo-scholarly credentials, incredibly tedious. So, if we’re not reading them for the prose, why are we? Why do we read bad history books that have the added lack of distinction of not being in any way true or useful, and not buy in anything like the same numbers history books that are often far better written and much more likely to give us an understanding of who we are and where we came from?

In one of the best of the several dozen books seeking to explain the success of
The Da Vinci Code
, Dan Burnstein speculates that the Dan Brown phenomenon owes a great deal to the author’s erudition and his cerebral ambition. “Our culture,” wrote Mr. Burnstein, meaning, I think, the United States, “is hungry for the opportunity to feed the collective mind with something other than intellectual junk food . . . All too few are writing novels that deal with big philosophical, cosmological or historical concepts.”
³⁸
In fact, there are plenty of novels being written which are stuffed to the bindings with those three -icals and more. But however hungry the culture might be for them, the paradox is that no one much wants to buy these books. The appeal surely lies elsewhere, and Mr. Burnstein has a second stab at locating it. Elevating
The Da Vinci Code
high above its station as a mere thriller full of characters with unconvincing, daft names, Burnstein connects it with the jittery zeitgeist. The book resonates with readers because, in a way, it’s true:

The modern American church concealed heinous cases of sexual abuse for years; the president of the United States may have launched an invasion of a foreign country based on concocted evidence of weapons of mass destruction; executives of companies like Enron and WorldCom deceived shareholders and regulators about billions and billions of nonexistent value. One can’t read
The Da Vinci Code
without hearing the echoes of these contemporary incidents of lying and cover-up—and the truth coming out in the end.
³⁹

The albino monks and Priory grand masters may be far-fetched, but the idea that the authorities are hiding the truth from us, manipulating us to believe that fact is fiction and are, in reality, doing what Sir Leigh Teabing is doing fictionally, is apparently all too believable.

Perhaps. There is also the element of fashion and genuine interest. Eco’s 1982 medieval thriller
In the Name of the Rose
was set in the world of heresy and early science of the Middle Ages. At the same time, the Cathars were becoming a popular subject for historical research. Books appeared about the Templars, the Bogomils, with Gnosticism and Manichaeanism. In 1957, Norman Cohn’s
The Pursuit of the Millennium
examined medieval mystical sects, and in 1971, Keith Thomas published
Religion and the Decline of Magic,
on the transition in Europe from magical and folkloric practices to formal religion and science. There was a weird world out there, which had run in parallel to what was depicted in the usual histories, in the same way as there was more to be said about women in history or the precolonial histories of America, Africa, and Asia. Novelistic treatments of subjects like these can create a painless entry point into more complex study.

There is also the playfulness associated with breaking codes and solving puzzles, from the silent clues supposedly offered by architecture and paintings to the Enigma code and Sudoku. Finally, there is the seductiveness and the romance of believing in the possibility of hidden treasure, of “wonderful things” to be seen through a sudden hole in the rock face, of the Lost World and Shangri-La.

In Umberto Eco’s spoof novel of the faux-archaeological genre,
Foucault’s Pendulum
, the worldly publisher Signor Garamond says to his employees, “It’s a gold mine, alright. I realized that these people will gobble up anything that’s hermetic, as you put it, anything that says the opposite of what they read in their books in school. I see this as a cultural duty: I’m no philanthropist, but in these dark times to offer someone a faith, a glimpse into the beyond.”
⁴⁰
Signor Garamond knows he has to give his buyers “anything that says the opposite of what they read in their books in school.” That way, when they have read his magical nonsense, they will think they know more than those who instructed them.

It’s a theme taken up by the American playwright and screenwriter/ director David Mamet. In his short book
Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
, Mamet throws a dart at those writers who over the years have decided to argue that the hidden truth is that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. This denial Mamet calls anti-Stratfordianism. The purpose of the writers, and by extension the purpose of their readers, is somehow to make themselves greater than even the greatest poet, partly, of course, by making him lesser. In this, says Mamet,

they invert the megalomaniacal equation and make themselves not the elect, but the superior of the elect . . . They . . . consign the (falsely named) creator to oblivion and turn to the adulation of the crowd for their deed of discovery and insight . . . They appoint themselves as “eternity”—the force that shall pass on all things . . . The anti-Stratfordian, like the flatearther and the creationist, elects himself God—possessed of the power to supervene in the natural order—and the most deeply hidden but pervasive fantasy of the above is the ultimate delusion of godhead:
I
made the world.
⁴¹

They also understand what everybody else doesn’t, what everybody else would most like to deny. They are the lonely custodians of the truth, and they got there through the quality of their minds—and by being brave enough to read a book.

7. A FEW CLICKS OF A MOUSE

We have become entranced by demonic power, so focused on lust for wealth and control that almost anything becomes possible.

—DAVID RAY GRIFFIN, AMERICAN THEOLOGIAN
¹

F
riends House is a square building in the neoclassical style, built in 1927, whose stone has become so engrimed by the passage of traffic down the busy Euston Road that you can no longer tell what color it once was. For decades, its large hall, let out by the Quakers for next to no charge, has provided the venue for lost or unfashionable causes. The room is paneled, with tiered seating and a high stage at the end, upon which—on a mild day in early summer 2005—there is a high screen showing tropical fish swimming in a large tank, edited to a relaxation-therapy soundtrack. For a moment, I think I have come to the wrong fringe meeting, a discussion of homeopathy and ley lines perhaps, instead of the gathering billed to rail against the cover-up of the capitalized Truth of what happened in New York on September 11, 2001.

When the fish swim off, the music dies and the lights go down, the hippie feel is heightened by the fact that our host is the actress Susannah York, most famous as an open-faced flower-power girl movie star in the late sixties and early seventies. Now short-haired, York is still beautiful, but her manner, far from thespian, is hesitant and vague. “What is the truth about 9/11?” she asks us, though most of the audience seem to have a good idea. Apparently, whatever this truth is, it is being hidden from us, because, according to York, it is “increasingly the norm to prevent the people from knowing what’s going on.” She then goes on to suggest that cover-ups have been consistently deployed over time, listing a series of historical events that might have been taken from the
Ladybird Book of Conspiracies
under “Plots to Get Us into War.” Her timeline starts in 1898, with the sinking in Havana harbor of the USS
Maine
. Then she cites 1941 and Pearl Harbor, a “subtly engineered ploy by Roosevelt,” followed by the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which President Lyndon Johnson used an alleged attack on a U.S. destroyer as a pretext to begin the bombing of North Vietnam, thus providing much fodder for conspiracy theorists. All of this culminates in 9/11, when the Pentagon “wanted a new evil empire to justify their expansionist policies.”

York’s job is to introduce the other speakers, who include veteran conspiracy theorist Lisa Pease, described as a “lifelong information activist”; Canadian Barrie Zwicker, “author and media critic”; and Webster G. Tarpley, writer of a book on “the role of Prescott Bush in the rise of Hitler.” There is also in the audience a special guest star, David Shayler, “former counterterrorist staffer with MI5.” It is a prototypical panel for a 9/11 Truth event, missing only an academic, though Zwicker has been a visiting professor in his time. The speakers seem to suit the audience of four hundred mostly white, middle-class Britons, dressed in their most casual clothes, some sporting The Who and eco T-shirts.

First up is Lisa Pease. An American in middle-middle age, Pease puts 9/11 into an almost personal historical context: “The government has been trying to sell us a pack of lies,” she insists, “since I was born.” She is followed by fellow American Tarpley, a wide, shiny sixty-year-old, bald and slick, who possesses the menacing amiability of a big-tent evangelist smilingly consigning sinners to eternal torment. “My new book,” he tells us, reveals how 9/11 was “an own goal by a faction within the intelligence community . . . A faction that has been around for a hundred years. The Secret Team. The Invisible Connection. The Parallel Network.”

What is arresting about Tarpley is his absolute contempt for the very idea that Islamist fanatics could have been in any way responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. This version is, he emphasizes, “One of the most absurd stories of all time . . . an insult to your intelligence!” He doesn’t so much argue with the notion as seek to annihilate it. The Arab hijackers were “patsies, dupes, useful idiots, fanatics, police agents, Oswalds.” And just as Oswald “did not have the physical ability to shoot the shots,” so the nineteen Arabs “did not have the ability to do what they were accused of.” Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian generally thought to be the hijackers’ leader, was clearly a “double agent.” What kind of life, after all, demands Tarpley, was that for a good Muslim boy? “Cocaine, prostitutes, the Beastie Boys.” (At this, the girl in front of me laughs at the wonderful absurdity of anyone thinking that Atta was a genuine jihadi.) No, in Tarpley’s view, 9/11 was “state-sponsored false-flag terrorism,” which is the true threat to democracy and liberty, whereas the Islamist threat is the purest of confections. “Terrorism,” declares Tarpley, “is the myth of the twenty-first century.” And as for the Twin Towers, “The 9/11 myth is the way George Bush controls America.”

This assertion receives some support from the last panel speaker, David Shayler. Shayler’s time with MI5 lends him an authenticity denied to Tarpley, and allows him to use phrases such as “I stand here as a personal witness” and sound credible, even though, rather than the field agent that some of those present may imagine him to have been, Shayler was actually a desk operative. His view is that 9/11 was the “first attempt at a new Pearl Harbor.” Then Shayler makes one of the distinctions that are increasingly important in the growing 9/11 Truth movement. “I used to think they let it happen,” he says, and pauses. “I have come to believe, with my counterterrorist hat on, that they made it happen.” This conversion earns Shayler applause, because it marks his transition from the less full-on let-it-happen-on-purpose (LIHOP) position to the more full-hearted made-it-happen-on-purpose (MIHOP). The acclamation dies down, and then is renewed when Shayler tells us, “We are, in fact, looking at a coup d’état.”