The Golden Age of Conspiracy

June 2009

I assume that readers do not believe that the CIA, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex or some other manifestation of the System ordered the murder of JFK. Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, once everywhere, are now confined to the diminishing audience for Oliver Stone's movies. I am not sure, however, that you can say, hand on heart, that you have not thought for a fleeting moment that maybe there just might be something in the following propositions:

That Nato governments and their tame journalists invented the "atrocities" committed by Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia and her allies in order to justify a war to expand the empire of neo-liberalism into the southern Balkans;
That Prince Philip, along with the British and French intelligence services, arranged the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, because she was about to marry a Muslim;
That the 9/11 atrocities in New York and Washington were an "inside job" organised by a rogue faction within the US intelligence agencies or maybe the Bush administration itself to justify war in the Muslim world;
That Israel warned Jews to stay away from the World Trade Centre on 9/11 but allowed the slaughter of gentiles to stoke up hatred of Muslims;
That the Jews, once again, formed a "lobby" in the US that pushed America into a needless war against Saddam Hussein;
And that the Bush and Blair administrations knew in advance that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction worthy of the name but lied and went to war under a false prospectus.

In the past 15 years, vast numbers of people have believed one or more of the above. For a decade after Diana's death, polls reported that between one-fifth and one-third of the British public thought she had been murdered — even though to sustain that conviction they had to accept that the conspirators must have known in advance that she would decide not to stay in Mohamed Fayed's Paris Ritz, what car she and Dodi Fayed would leave in once they had resolved to move on, who would be driving the car, where and by which route it would travel and — finally and bafflingly — that the poor woman would forget to put on her seatbelt.

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Steve

May 29th, 2009
2:05 PM

Anonymous, you should learn to read. The point was not that it was paranoid to doubt the existence of WMD, it was that it IS paranoid to believe that the government KNEW that there was NO WMD and LIED about them DELIBERATELY in order to justify war. Do you get it now? Thought not.

Matty

May 29th, 2009
2:05 PM

Crawling out of the woodwork here. Some people don't seem to have read/understood Cohen's argument in places. Anonymous the point about David Kelly is that people believe he was murdered as part of a cover up. Melvyn you are looking for order in chaos. The world is composed only of ordinary, fallible humans. Not all powerful monsters coordinating vast conspiracies.

Bill Corr

May 29th, 2009
12:05 PM

Whay does the Harold Wilson quote about the fat spider and the blind man remind one of William Burroughs' demented ravings in 'The Naked Lunch' and various other works? Was Roly-Poly Harold smoking something other than tobacco in that eternally-smouldering pipe of his?

Melvyn

May 29th, 2009
10:05 AM

Cohen uses the arguments of David Aaronovitch? Who defends the nazis and does not accept the evidence of the Reicshtag Fire? Aaronovitch failed German history at Oxford and was expelled for his low grades. Cohen does not mention once the evidence about 9/11 - such as William Rodriguez's testimony. And what about the anthrax attacks - which the 'paranoid conspiracy theorists' said was a US job? The FBI has confirmed as much. We were correct. Cohen and Aaronovitch ignore many other facts as well, such as the fall of WTC 7, which the BBC reported as having fallen at 5pm EST - 20 minutes BEFORE it fell...explain that one Cohen. Or why all 3 buildings fell in less than 10 seconds in what experienced firefighters called a "controlled demolition". Or why there were people loading up the gold, who had inside knowledge and were ready with trucks to load the gold up from the vaults in the WTC. Or why the insurance investigator, Kevin Ryan, noted that the buildings could not have fallen as stated due to the impact of planes. Or why bush claimed he saw the first attack televised when it never was. Or why the FBI refused to listen to Alan and Cindy Thompson when they ran into bin Laden in 1998. Or why the hole in the Pentagon was only 18" across. Or why the anthrax attacks were not properly investigated. Hundreds more questions, and one just might add to them: Whey are idiots like Cohen and Aaronovitch trying to sell the official story? It may not be that they are agents; stupidity and arrogance could well be their excuse, making them useful idiots.

Anonymous

May 29th, 2009
10:05 AM

A friend of mine who served in the Gulf War with US Forces told me: "We believed in the WMD, you guys (British Servicemen) didn't". David Kelly thought that there was 30 per cent chance that Iraq had a WMD programme. Scott Ritter thought there was no chance at all. To have been sceptical about Iraqi WMD in 2003 is hardly the same as beeing convinced that the Duke of Edinburgh murdered the Princess of Wales. And those of us who were sceptical turned out to be correct. (VW: horrific nearly - a comment in itself)

Bill Corr

May 29th, 2009
9:05 AM

Nick Cohen refers to the southern Balkans. Some truths are stranger than fiction. The U.S.A. has an immense military bases in Kosovo {Serbian nomenclature] or Kosova [Albanian nomenclature] but almost nobody, even well-informed people, even know it exists. Camp Bondsteel is the name of this immense base. Check it out on the Internet. For reasons which only a few score Americans know, there was none-too-covert U.S. assistance to the armed Albanians of western Macedonia during a brisk, but vicious Albanian versus Slav civil war in that impoverished land. The U.S. now has airbase favilities in Bulgaria. Can anyone explain any of this? On a lighter note, there's the nonsense about featherbrained-but-scheming Diana's death. Was she really going to marry a Muslim, as some claim? If so, which one? The playboy who perished at her side or the Pakistani surgeon?

Matthew

May 29th, 2009
7:05 AM

Actually, apologies, Nick was criticising the war for oil in that piece I quote from. He did argue that Britain was willing to fight the war because it owed the US £243m from World War II debts.

Matt

May 29th, 2009
7:05 AM

I remember a certain journalist used to believe a lot of these conspiracy theories. "America sustains fundamentalist monarchs because it wants their oil. ...Support for Israel, which has no oil and is the enemy of oil producing Arabs, confuses this simple reasoning. But it can be explained away as an aberration created by the enormous influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington." N.Cohen, April 7th 2002

Anonymous

May 28th, 2009
11:05 PM

"That the Jews, once again, formed a "lobby" in the US that pushed America into a needless war against Saddam Hussein;" Are you serious? Jews made up more than 50% of the neocons calling for war while being 2 of the US population! And what of the conspiracy of the Jewish far right "Eurabia" that Muslims control Europe

Eben Marks

May 28th, 2009
11:05 PM

Most of this I can get behind, but at what point did Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (helpful use of their own mythologising name there) start blowing people to pieces? I seem to remember it was after the invasion. If you had referred to all of Saddam's victims then the point might have stood. I think you may be seeing some of your own fat spiders.

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