Blogging can indeed be fun. A post by JC this week over at 4&20 devolved into a firefight about conspiracies and “conspiracy theorists”. I believe in several conspiracy theories, and so was victim of the standard “tin foil hat” insult. It’s the easiest posture of all to adopt when one is thoughtless, unimaginative, and compliant.
What “conspiracies” do I believe in? It’s not that simple. Events are complex, and cannot be managed so much as motives disguised. Take, for example, the case of the JFK assassination. It was a conspiracy for sure, as there was more than one person involved. It threatened to expose government activity that our government did not want exposed, and so inspired a cover-up. And the cover-up inspired wild conspiracy theories about the CIA, LBJ, JFK as a martyr, and Vietnam.
It took some conspiring to cover that crime up, to pin it on a patsy, but it was mostly people thinking on their feet, making things up as they wildly scrambled to cover up other things that were going on. They came up with some crazy theories, patently false on their face, about what happened that day. There was no magic bullet, there was a shooter in the grassy knoll, and as I am fond of saying, Lee Harvey Oswald and I share one common trait: neither of us were in the window of the Texas Book Depository that day.
So far, so good – a murder, a mystery, a cover up, crazy theories on all sides about what happened, one (Oswald acting alone) spun deliberately to mislead the public. It gets even more interesting. It’s a lesson in how various people form opinions about the world.
With JFK, there’s objective data out there that says that official explanations do not make sense. Plenty of it. Different people approach it differently. Me and my ilk look at it, wonder, look for alternative explanations (and are often wrong) – it’s a curiosity that compels us to delve deeper. We don’t buy the official story. Some of us just love a good murder mystery. It’s my favorite genre.
Others get their “truth” from authority figures. The official explanation is that Oswald did it, and that he acted alone. To make this theory, which is virtually unsupported by evidence, stick, they rely on the willingness of people to trust those in power, and the gullibility of people to believe any lie if it is told by an authority figure. Would Earl Warren lie to us?
Mr. Warren did what he had to do, and he did it for high and noble reasons. But he lied. LBJ selected him to head the Commission that looked into the crime because he was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and was therefore extremely credible. He had a big lie to tell, and it had to be told with force, and it had to be believed.
Earl Warren was an honorable man. And he lied to us. Reluctantly. He didn’t want the job. LBJ talked him into it. LBJ was a persuasive man.
Down here at the bottom, we who are naturally curious, who wonder and read and are enthralled by mystery have to endure fools of a sort who have the audacity to call us names based on their willingness to accept official truth, no matter how flawed. It’s way too easy, and they shouldn’t get away with it. Journalists, who should be naturally curious, are oddly the most likely to rigidly adhere to official truth and fire the tin-hat arrows at us. I don’t really understand why that profession is so deeply flawed. They should be more curious, more willing to question official truth, but they aren’t.
There are conspiracies afoot, everywhere, and especially in politics, where most of what we see in front of cameras is mere theater. Politicians, by the very nature of their profession, must forge alliances among natural enemies. They lie, play charades and engage in elaborate tricks to make things happen. It’s a real skill, and I admire those who are good at it. I like Dick Nixon, for example, purely Machiavellian, dark, brooding and conspiratorial. He’s my ideal.
And conspiracies are generally effective when carried out by people who have power. Pizza delivery boys don’t generally succeed at attacking military bases, but wealthy Wall Street Barons can deal secretly in oil futures and drive up the price, play the naked short-sell game behind the scenes and bring down investment houses, and have so much financial power that presidents are at their beck and call.
Oh, yeah – and they can steal elections, get us into wars based on brazen lies, murder people, entrap them in flagrante delicto, destroy and make careers, and and make people behave as they wish. That is the nature of power.
I wonder about those who seem to believe that power behaves itself. That’s loony, tin-hat thinking. Power is as power does.
Understand, of course, that events are random and largely uncontrollable. The Bush people who got us into the Iraq war probably thought it would be quick and easy. They set in motion a deadly set of unmanageable events that in the end, would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. They suffered from the illusion of control and had weaponry at their disposal. They are dangerous, and should be in jail or hanging, Nuremberg style, at the end of a rope.
But powerful people can influence events, and most importantly, influence how we view events. Iraq was about oil, among other things. That is painfully obvious. The degree to which the reader of this essay thinks in line with official truth about why we invaded Iraq defines how compliant that person is in his thoughts. Most people are followers, and so adhere to official truth. It’s a pity, as there is so much fun to be had trying to understand this crazy world.
Oh, yeah, and weak people would conspire, if they could. I haven’t heard anything about McDonald’s clerks quietly working behind the scenes to influence its stock price. I do hear all the time about powerless people who seek to make their living dealing in illegal substances. That’s conspiracy, and it happens all the time.
Why is it so easy to believe in conspiracies when the perpetrators are weak people, but so hard when they are powerful?
Could it be that thing about the emperor?
Piece of Mindful 
I get what you’re saying, and agree with a lot of it. On the other hand, there’s a process working on the other side too. The most lurid conspiracy theories tend to push people to official truth, even when there are problems with it. The DFH’s, with their puppets, made the Iraq War look more attractive to a broad segment of the public. Vince Foster theorists, like birthers and deathers, are, at best, pawns in a cynical movement designed to de-legitimize. Plenty of the participants in the various conspiracy-theory cultures aren’t coming to it because of a dispassionate examination of facts, but a conviction that something they don’t like cannot have happened without some kind of deus ex machina.
I don’t know who was involved in killing JFK. People who want it to have been rogue generals (or intelligence people) trying to prevent JFK from pulling out of Vietnam seem more interested in preserving a particular somewhat unreal vision of JFK than in figuring out what actually happened. [My guess is that it was the mob, unprompted by any public employees. But this had to be covered up because of an overlap in personnel between mob figures involved in this and in other activities that were publicly sanctioned.]
I don’t know what you’re really talking about wrt Iraq. The official version contains all the elements: everyone knew there weren’t WMD of quantity to justify intervention by the end of February 2003, but the loss of face inherent in backing down at that point was just too great to bear. Anyway, the thing would go well, the dictator would be deposed, and everyone would live happily ever after: so what’s a little white lie or two in that context? But the real problem was the failure of the majority of Iraqis to greet us as liberators. Did Cheney (and his buddy Rumsfeld) honestly think they would? I believe so, and I don’t know of any evidence that they didn’t. They certainly acted like they believed it, in failing to have any plan whatever to deal with what would happen if it didn’t work out. Now it was stupid to believe the Iraqi exiles — Machiavelli gives a specific warning on this point — but this is the sort of self-delusion that powerful people/empires fall prey to all the time.
LikeLike
Have you read Waldron/Hartmann? The mob/overlap theory is theirs. Makes sense to me.
Smart people manipulate stupid people too. It doesn’t seem to take a whole lot of conspiring to push people in a direction they want to go anyway. The birthers/oathers/teabaggers are angry, and are merely given a reason to be angry.
Iraq: We disagree. It was never about WMD’s – that was part of the ‘sexing up’ process. It was a long-held objective – to control those oil fields, to remove the threat of Arab unity that Saddam held out. Foreign policy is consistent, if often bumbling and always subject to random events. The thrust of the 1991 war, the Clinton bombings and sanctions, and finally the Bush II invasion, was a long-held goal of conquering that country. It was all put in motion by another random event with unpredictable fallout – the fall of the Soviet Union.
Anyway, we are never told the truth about wars. Never. Ever.
LikeLike
And didn’t the CIA do the exact same thing(returning exiles to power)in Afghanistan? The only difference I can think of is that Saddam “threatened to kill (baby Bush) my daddy” and Karsi didn’t. We’re just the latest replacement for the Brits, who also bankrolled their “trusted” puppets to re-fight the previous war against the Russians, and paid a heavy price.
Neocons need perpetual war. Where next? They’re conspiring as we speak.
LikeLike
Wolfowitz was, imo, telling the truth when he said WMD was the one excuse they could all agree on (until it fell apart — and then the loss of face on the one hand and obvious success on the other was what they could agree on). But I don’t buy the broader control point — unless you’d call, say, Jordan, “controlled” by the US — because they didn’t have any plan or the forces to do it. They weren’t looking for a colony, or even a puppet — their purposes would have been perfectly served by the creation of something between a Jordan and a Kuwait. (I spent much of 2003 saying that they were going to get something between an Afghanistan and a Pakistan, and how many US deaths are justified by that, but nobody wanted to hear it).
There were a bunch of reasons to invade Iraq, and I think that has not only always been apparent, but is reasonably part of the official story.
LikeLike
And now, having read the BB thread, I regret having opened my mouth here. We don’t disagree much at all.
LikeLike
What’s.the BB thread?
And don’t get me wrong. I theorize and revise but really can’t know things until 30 years later when the papers are released in presidential libraries. And even then, many powerful forces interacting. Who really knows?
LikeLike
blackbirds
LikeLike