This is not some kind of occasional preference, done merely to keep ourselves entertained. Mamet observes that just as children use up the last of the day’s energy by jumping around, “the adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama—which is to say to order the universe into a comprehensible form. Our sundown play/film/gossip is the day’s last exercise of that survival mechanism . . . We will have drama in that spot, and if it’s not forthcoming we will cobble it together out of nothing.”41
At first, hearing this may sound like a clever artist’s generalization—an observation and nothing more. But in 2006, the British human biologist Lewis Wolpert theorized that the compulsion to create a story, “to have drama in that spot,” might actually be biological—that it represented a “cognitive imperative,” an innate need to have the world organized cognitively. Wolpert speculated that the requirement to establish causality was a necessity for an animal that made tools in order to survive, and had thus become instinctive. “Once there were causal beliefs for tool use,” he argued, “then our ancestors developed causal beliefs about all key events.”42 If we are impelled, therefore, to find causes, it follows that failure to do so created discomfort or anxiety. Consequently, human beings evolved with “a strong tendency to make up a causal story to provide an explanation . . . ignorance about important causes is intolerable.”43 Wolpert’s focus was on the universality of religious beliefs, a universality that prevailed even though the beliefs themselves were mutually incompatible. But his idea works rather well with conspiracism: “We construct apparently coherent stories about what happened . . . but where consistency and internal satisfaction have to compete with testing against the real world, we choose consistency.”44
If Wolpert is right, then a religious conspiracy theorist like David Ray Griffin represents the ultimate in the triumph of narrative. Meanwhile, all of us who argue for a living, including this author, might do well to consider Wolpert’s observation of the tendency always to look for confirmation of preexisting stories rather than their falsification.
The Catastrophe of Indifference
So, we need story and may even be programmed to create it. But why are certain types and structures of story more successful, more satisfying than others? One possible answer is that a successful story either represents the way we think things should happen, or is the best explanation we can get of why they didn’t. A New York fire chief asked to account for the various theories surrounding the collapse of buildings at the World Trade Center attributed them to the disappointment of people’s belief in the omnipotence of the emergency services. “In the movies,” he said, “it’s always wrapped up in the end.” Or, as Norman Cohn puts it when discussing paranoid thought in his history of apocalyptic movements, people cannot accept “the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral.”45
The paradox is that, seen this way, conspiracy theories are actually reassuring. They suggest that there is an explanation, that human agencies are powerful, and that there is order rather than chaos. This makes redemption possible. “After all,” argues Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale, an American academic specializing in the ideology of terrorism, “if evil conspirators are consciously causing undesirable changes, the implication is that others, perhaps through the adoption of similar techniques, may also consciously intervene to protect a threatened way of life or otherwise alter the historical process.”46 There is, however, another possible form of reassurance, of an altogether more personal kind. The classic view of paranoia, the unwarranted belief that one is being persecuted, is that it is a wholly negative state. But what if paranoia is actually the sticking plaster that we fix to a very different kind of wound? That of feeling ourselves to be of no importance whatsoever, and our lives (and especially our deaths) of little real significance except to ourselves.
The London-based American psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz believes this may be the case. He argues, after twenty-five years of practice, that paranoia may often be a defense against indifference, against the far more terrible thought that no one cares about you. The elderly, at a time of their lives when no one very much wonders what they think, often become classically paranoid, believing that someone wishes to rob or hurt them. The lonely person fears that there is a burglar or a murderer in the empty house waiting for them. Indeed, they may often perceive the real symptoms of such threats—the noises, the shadows, the displaced objects. These fears disguise the truly obliterating disaster, the often well-founded fear that no one is thinking about them at all, what Grosz calls “the catastrophe of indifference.”47
Everyone knows Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Fewer will have heard Susan Sontag’s clever development of it: “I envy paranoids. They actually feel people are paying attention to them.” If conspiracism is a projection of paranoia, it may exist in order to reassure us that we are not the totally unconsidered objects of a blind process. If Marilyn was murdered, then she did not die, as we most fear and as we most often observe, alone and ingloriously. A catastrophe occurred, but not the greater catastrophe that awaits all of us.
But if conspiracy theories are paradoxically comforting, it doesn’t mean that they are not harmful. It is worth quoting at length here the judgment of the historian Stephen E. Ambrose:
We should care because conspiracy theories about past events usually carry with them a political agenda for today. Erroneous or downright mythical views of the past can have important, even crucial, influence on the present. The coming to power of the Nazis, German rearmament, ultimately World War II might not have happened without widespread German belief in the stab-in-the-back conspiracy. Widespread acceptance by the American people of the “merchants of death” conspiracy thesis about our entry into World War I was a prelude to the ill-fated, nearly disastrous neutrality legislation of the 1930s. The unhappy consequences of McCarthyism would not have come about had the American people rejected his conspiracy thesis about the triumph of Communism in China.48
Ambrose could have added many more examples and, facing some dangerous challenges in the early twenty-first century, so could we. I am with John Maynard Keynes, whose view was that “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.” I have written this book because I believe that conspiracies aren’t powerful. It is instead the idea of conspiracies that has power.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has taken a long time to write. When my wife, Sarah Powell, first made a joke about feeling like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, I went back to Eliot and discovered that Edward Casaubon’s ever-delayed Key to All Mythologies was indeed a precursor of this book, at least in its early stages. Casaubon’s project, like his soul, “went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” Sarah and the girls have had to put up with a lot and for a long time.
So, too, have my patient, ever-encouraging agent, Georgia Garrett, and the ebullient Dan Franklin at Cape, who punished wing-flapping with excellent lunches and then supplied the wonderful Rebecca Carter as editor. I am grateful, I suppose, to Kevin Jarvis for launching me on this journey. Quite how grateful will depend on sales. I am indebted to Chris Brougham, though only he knows why. Francis Wheen consciously supplied me with Dudley Collard and—less deliberately—with an example of how writers can write, and my hugely valued colleague at The Times, Danny Finkelstein, read the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions. Eamon O’Connor procured me a priceless DVD.
Finally, I couldn’t have coped without the Yankee friends of my middle age, John Lahr and Stephen Grosz, one of whom effortlessly solved an immense problem I was having with structure, thus clearing the way, while the other dipped deep into his own discipline, psychoanalysis, to bring things to a conclusion. Unbelievably, much of this was accomplished whilst
eating porridge.
NOTES
Complete publishing information on sources here referred to only in part may be found in the bibliography.
Introduction: Blame Kevin
1 Russ Kick, ed., Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, 5.
2 James McConnachie and Robin Tudge, The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories, xi.
3 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays, 29.
4 The Skeptic’s Dictionary, http://skepdic.com/occam.html.
5 Skip Willman in Peter Knight, ed., Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in PostWar America, 25.
6 Ibid.
7 Lewis Namier, Avenues of History, cited in Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy, 38.
8 Robin Ramsay, Conspiracy Theories, 38.
9 Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand, 325.
10 Guardian, February 4, 1999.
11 David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, 26.
12 http://smithmag.net/2006/08/10/korey-rowe-the-loose-cannon-of-911.
13 Morning Star, March 26, 2005.
1. “The Uncanny Note of Prophecy”
1 Cited in Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 166.
2 State Department Decimal File 861.00/5339.
3 More than a decade later, the issue of the Jewishness of Soviet Communism still preoccupied British diplomats. In the recently published diaries of Reader Bullard, British consul in Saint Petersburg from 1931 to 1934, there is constant mention of the Jewishness of various party and state officials, as well as of the apologists from abroad who defended the Stalin regime. Buller himself was a liberal, but his diary records an article in the Listener, of May 2, 1934, in which a Professor Hyman Levy argued that the Soviet system was the opposite of fascism. Buller remarks, “I have ceased to expect a Jew to criticize anything in Soviet Russia. I understand their point of view. The Russian Jew was bottom-dog before the Revolution, and now he is a member of the ruling class, with the diplomatic service, foreign trade, journalism, and propaganda largely in his hands.” Reader Bullard, Inside Stalin’s Russia, 264.
4 Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel, 51.
5 Marsden version, 184-85.
6 Richard S. Levy, Introduction to Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and A Libel, 7.
7 Quoted in Cohn, 149.
8 Cited in Cohn, 149.
9 Levy, 120.
10 Cited in Cohn, 168.
11 Marsden subsequently produced his own translation of the Protocols. It’s the one sitting on my desk as I write this, bought from an American mail-order company. In an anonymous preface, the edition tells readers that Marsden was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and his health ruined. He came back to Britain but died suddenly after covering the empire tour of the Prince of Wales. “His sudden death,” says this edition, “is still a mystery.” Marsden version, 6.
12 Cohn, 170.
13 Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 49.
14 Ibid., 59.
15 Ibid., 81-85.
16 Dearborn Independent, January 22, 1921.
17 Baldwin, 140.
18 Cohn, 284.
19 Marsden version, 293.
20 Stephen A. Bronner, A Rumor Against the Jews, 85.
21 Hermann Bernstein, The Truth About the Protocols of Zion, 31.
22 Cited in Cohn, 88.
23 Bronner, 91.
24 Levy, 16.
25 Douglas’s Plain English was full of surprises, some of them hilarious. The anti-Semitic Conservative MP Captain A. H. M. Ramsay—interned during the war against Hitler—records in his book The Nameless War, “According to a letter published in Plain English on 3rd September, 1921: ‘The Learned Elders have been in existence for a much longer period than they have perhaps suspected. My friend, Mr. L. D. van Valckert, of Amsterdam, has recently sent me a letter containing two extracts from the Synagogue at Mulheim. The volume in which they are contained was lost at some period during the Napoleonic Wars, and has recently come into Mr. van Valckert’s possession. It is written in German, and contains extracts of letters sent and received by the authorities of the Mulheim Synagogue. The first entry he sends me is of a letter received: “‘16th June, 1647. From O.C. (i.e., Oliver Cromwell), by Ebenezer Pratt. In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England: This however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape. In reply was dispatched the following: 12th July, 1647. To O.C. by E. Pratt. Will grant financial aid as soon as Charles removed and Jews admitted. Assassination too dangerous. Charles shall be given opportunity to escape: His recapture will make trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal, but useless to discuss terms until trial commences.’ ”
26 . Segel, 68.
27 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 307-8.
28 Cohn, 254.
29 Levy, 42.
30 Quoted in Segel, 83.
31 Ibid., 89.
32 Segel, cited Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 151.
33 Levy, 32.
34 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 357.
35 Levy, 35-36.
2. Dark Miracles
1 Quoted in Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 384-85.
2 Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center. Trial, 22.
3 Ibid., 23.
4 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929, 174.
5 Ibid.
6 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 36, 594-96.
7 J. Arch Getty and Oleg U. Naumov, The Road to Terror, 36-37.
8 Trotsky’s wife, quoted in Deutscher, 249.
9 Deutscher, 342-43, 352.
10 Getty and Naumov, 43.
11 Trotsky, quoted in Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, 75.
12 Trial Report, 26.
13 Ibid., 27-28.
14 Ibid., 29.
15 Ibid., 31.
16 Ibid., 36.
17 Ibid., 43.
18 Ibid., 169.
19 Ibid., 47.
20 Ibid., 119.
21 Ibid., 60.
22 Ibid., 62.
23 Ibid., 65.
24 Ibid., 185.
25 Pravda, August 21, 1936, quoted in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 98.
26 Trial Report, 539.
27 Ibid., 541.
28 Ibid., 550.
29 Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 149.
30 Central Committee, secret resolution, cited in Getty and Naumov, 255.
31 Getty and Naumov, 293-94.
32 Joseph Davies, Mission to Moscow, 45.
33 Ibid., 44.
34 Feuchtwanger, 135.
35 Ibid., 147.
36 John D. Littlepage and Demaree Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold, 102.
37 Dudley Collard, Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others, 82.
38 Ibid., 93.
39 Ibid., 90.
40 Ibid., 99-100.
41 Ibid., 102.
42 Ibid., 107.
43 Feuchtwanger, 137-38.
44 Ibid., 162.
45 Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, 376.
46 Ibid., 388.
47 Trotsky, letter to Smirnov, cited in Getty, 62.
48 Sotsialistichesky Vestnik, no. 5 (243), March 14, 1931, 11-12. Cited in University of East Anglia document website: http://www.uea.ac.uk/his/webcours/russia/documents/ambamonch.shtml .
49 Chuyev, cited in Getty and Naumov, 3.
50 Extract of diary published in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s.
51 . Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, 79.
52 Collard, 8.
53 Cited in Getty an
d Naumov, 51.
54 Feuchtwanger, 173-74.
55 Keynes, talk for BBC Radio, 1936.
56 François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 155.
57 Note of June 28, 1937, published in Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow, 161.
58 Cited in Roy Medvedev, “European Writers on Their Meetings with Stalin,” Russian Politics and Law, vol. 42, no. 5, 161.
59 Feuchtwanger, 128.
60 Service, Lenin, 361.
61 Getty and Naumov, 26.
62 Felix Chuyev, Tak govoril Kaganovich (Thus Spake Kaganovich), Moscow, 1992, cited at http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdvln2/chuyev.htm.
63 Time, February 8, 1937.
3. Conspiracies to the Left
1 See It Now, CBS Television, March 9, 1954.
2 Theodore Roosevelt, speech to the Gridiron Club, Washington, March 17, 1906.
3 Cited in Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States, 439.
4 Ibid., 542.
5 John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching, 252-53.
6 Smedley D. Butler, “I Was a Gangster for Capitalism,” speech, 1933.
7 Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket, 23.
8 Report of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, 3-13.
9 G. P. Nye, speech to the Mecca Temple, February 9, 1936.
10 Roosevelt, radio address, December 29, 1940.
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 42
