Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  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

  9. “I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!”

  CONCLUSION: BEDTIME STORY

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Paddling to Jerusalem

  RIVER HEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2010 by David Aaronovitch

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aaronovitch, David.

  Voodoo histories : the role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history /

  David Aaronovitch.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18521-6

  1. Conspiracies. 2. Conspiracies—History. I. Title.

  HV6275.A

  909.08—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  For Sarah, Rosa, Lily, Eve, and Ruby. My girls.

  INTRODUCTION: BLAME KEVIN

  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 named 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 program 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 rental car on the road down from Tunis to the Roman amphitheater at El-Jem (where I was to deliver one of those “behind this attractive façade” pieces to the camera) that Kevin told me about how the 1969 Apollo moon landing 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 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 nonexistent 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 skepticism. It wasn’t that I was fore-armed 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 their entire 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 scrutinizing it, that Kevin’s evidence was wrong. Besides, probably unknown to him, the entire thesis was familiar to moviegoers of a certain age: in 1978, the film Capricorn One had been based on a similar premise, except that 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.

  But the ball was already rolling. 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 characterized himself, like me, as a skeptic. 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 worldview they expounded. As I researched, these theories didn’t evaporate or appear purely marginal. Instead they
seemed to become more insidious, more pervasive.

  Conspiracy in the Bookshops

  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 United States and Britain, among the limited number of books on sale, the young browser is likely to come across oversize paperbacks with titles such as Abuse Your Illusions, You Are Being Lied To, and Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies.

  Checking in at a rather substantial thirty dollars each, these books consist of a series of bite-size essays by different authors dealing with myriad (and, frankly, random) subjects, from the oil industry to crime, via geopolitics. Their 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 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.”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.

  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.”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 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.”4 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 ce
rtain 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.’ ”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.