Four Wrong Ideas Everyone Has About Conspiracies
While writing about Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay about JFK the other day, I found myself thinking about conspiracies. Middle-of-the-road types like the New Yorker pundit can’t be blamed for cherishing the status quo, it having been so good to them; but woolgathering essays notwithstanding, there exists a big and unfriendly world out there, and you don’t have to be nuts to recognize it.
Just don’t call it a conspiracy. “Conspiracy theory” equals “crazy and wrong.” “Conspiracy theorists,” in the view of cold war liberals of a certain age, reeks of McCarthy and the John Birch society, black helicopters and mutterings about “the Jews”; having grown up around what Richard Hofstater called “the paranoid style in American politics,” they naturally distrust kooks who see secret plots everywhere. It’s obvious to them that there are no conspiracies, at least not on that scale these crackpots suppose. And they have four reasons to explain why, all of which are wrong.
They are as follows:
There are no conspiracies, outside of the paranoid imagination. This one is especially childish. Of course there are conspiracies. Watergate was a conspiracy, and Iran-Contra was a conspiracy, and the plot to kill Hitler was a conspiracy, and the “business plot” to overthrow FDR was a conspiracy. Strictly speaking, the Mafia is a conspiracy, and is frequently charged as such by federal prosecutors. J. Edgar Hoover, of course, maintained that the Mafia’s existence was a ludicrous fantasy, and a said so with complete assurance for years. Then Joe Valachi came along and spilled the beans, telling the world of a secret society called the Cosa Nostra, with an arcane initiation ritual and a deadly code of silence. Hoover was unconvinced.
Even if there was a conspiracy, someone would talk. This canard, which is has been almost 100% effective in shutting down any argument — and suspect for that reason alone — is alike easy to refute. The very definition of a conspiracy requires its members to dummy up. The conspiracies we know about were indeed, ruined by loose talk; but what reason is there to think that there are no conspiracies we don’t know about? The Mafia lasted for decades before being outed at Appalachin; the CIA spent decades performing mind-control experiments on unwitting civilians as part of its MKUltura project; the Tuskeegee experiments, in which African-American syphilis victims were deliberately left untreated so scientists could watch them die, was so fragile a secret that it went on for forty years. Kim Philby was the British intelligence service’s man in Washington, and he was a commie spy. Some secrets do get kept.
If one of the conspirators did talk, it would blow the lid off the conspiracy. It doesn’t matter if someone, or many people, blab. Somebody has to believe it. And, even if they do believe it, they have to take it seriously. Remember when the President planted a male prostitute in his press conferences to give him softball questions? No? That’s because the story was treated as a lark by the press. Remember when people said that the CIA was tacitly allowing Nicaraguan contras to move blow into the US, as part of an arms deal? What respectable journalist would ever take such a tale seriously? A reporter named Gary Webb did, with the predictable result that he ceased to be respectable, lost his job, and later “committed suicide” by shooting himself twice in the head. But what could you expect from a nut like that? Later, of course, Webb was vindicated, and the L.A. Times reporter who attacked him made a public apology, but only a nut would say he was murdered. People shoot themselves twice in the head all the time! Kim Philby was the British intelligence services senior representative in Washington, and he was a commie spy, one who had kept his position despite multiple leaks.
Official skepticism is the world’s greatest gift to a conspirator. What are the odds that James L. Reston or Wolf Blitzer will come out and say, “boy, were we wrong”? Worse than that of somebody talking?
If the lid did blow off the conspiracy, heads would roll, and the nation would doubt its very foundations. Really? J. Edgar Hoover didn’t lose his job when it turned out the Mafia existed. the Business Plot was never revealed to the public. It’s always assumed that the machinery of the law would roll right into action, but why should they? If The Shawshank Redemption happened in real life, the account books Andy Dufresne sent to a bunch of local newspaper editors he didn’t know would have gone right in the garbage; Warden Norton would still be running the prison. The stream of squad cars that arrive at the prison within hours, sirens wailing, are as far-fetched a fiction as King ever produced. I’d be less surprised to see Pennywise talking to me from the sewer.
I’m not saying that every conspiracy theory has something to it, or is even entitled to sustained investigation. But the idea that none exist, and that anyone who suspects they might is a “conspiracy theorist,” i.e. a nut, had held sway way too long. It has, ironically, been essentially one giant counter-conspiracy, and that one the most effective of all.
