Where Conspiracies and Fringe Political Movements Come From
where internal logic is completely optional
Posted May 9, 12:45 pm in economics, politics, postmodernism
While I definitely don’t put it out of the realm of possibility for our government to cover up horrific things— as they have in the past for things such as covert nuclear testing in inhabited areas of Utah, where everyone got cancer and died, including of all people, John Wayne— there are two things that strike me about 9/11 conspiracies:
Firstly, I hear things like: “it was missiles that hit the pentagon, not a plane!” and I’ve heard stories about how the plane didn’t crash in Pennsylvania, and instead it landed safely and the people were herded off and taken to some location and locked away. The question that comes to mind is WHY. Why would the government safely land the plane only to do what amounts to killing the passengers anyway? And why would the government shoot a missile at the Pentagon and say it was a plane? What would that accomplish? Why not say it was a missile if it was a missile? Why not crash a plane if there was a plane to crash, and say it was a plane? What motivation does the government have to destroy part of its own headquarters? Why not destroy a part of DC that had a bunch of civilians in it, an act that would likely generate a lot more sympathy from the press and the public?
My second point is, for 9/11 to have happened the way conspiracy theorists say it did, it would have had to have been a massive operation, requiring thousands of people working together in total secrecy. Throughout history, we find that huge conspiracies involving thousands of people cannot happen because, to put it bluntly, those in the know cannot keep their mouths shut about it. Sure, there are conspiracies involving a select few people, but a 9/11 conspiracy would need thousands of people with the highest level of security clearance the government could offer— and there simply aren’t that many people who could get that. Even the president of the country is not on the highest level of security clearance, surprisingly.
If government employees saw a plane full of civilians being loaded into some kind of bunker for execution, there’s no way they could go without saying anything to anyone. It’s simply too traumatic, volatile, and shocking for people to keep to themselves. They may not come to the media about it, but people talk. All it takes is one drunk guy. Why do we not hear credible stories about this that actually explain the rationale for all these activities instead of just descriptions of events without any insights into the strategic value of their implementation? All I hear about from conspiracy theorists is that “‘they’ did this, and ‘they’ did that”, but I never heard about the rationale beyond a glib explanation of “they did it to maintain power over people and to control the world.”
I don’t mean to categorically dismiss alternative theories about world events by any means. What does cause me to pause is the fact that as many of them are presented, they completely defy internal logic; they can be very convincing and even terrifying to listen to, but often I find that such theories fall apart under examination, and either central characters’ motivations are not really aligned, or the conspiracy necessitates so many actors who are in on the secret that it begins to lose credibility.
Another example is this recurring myth that there were hundreds of Jews who didn’t show up for work in the World Trade Center on 9/11, having been tipped off by a pro-Zionist administration that orchestrated the whole event to inflame hostility towards Islam and pro-Islamic states, and setting up a publicly-sanctioned excuse to invade Iraq, a country rich with oil. But there are plenty of reasons to believe that is absolute nonsense. For starters, there’s absolutely no firsthand anecdotal or factual evidence suggesting that the aforementioned Jews skipped out on work that day. How would the government have discreetly informed them of the planned events anyway? And wouldn’t some of these people have felt some kind of kinship with some of their co-workers, and want to tell them not to come to work either? Why would the administration want to promote the name of bin Laden as the mastermind behind 9/11 before invading Iraq? Why not promulgate Saddam Hussein as the evil genius at the helm? It sure would make it easier to sell the plan to invade Iraq to the American people had 9/11 been linked to Hussein instead of some other guy who probably never set foot in Iraq before. But then again, Bush Sr. never had to offer any clear economic or political incentives for the US to get involved in the Gulf War in 1990-1991. We just went, apparently as a humanitarian effort. So why all the rigamarole with murdering 5,000 people on 9/11? History shows that it wasn’t even necessary to kill even a single US citizen before we used military aggression in the Middle East. Why employ this bizarre strategy when it isn’t needed, requires thousands of complicit partners (who also have to keep their mouths shut), and incurs the risk of exposure, which carries with it severe political and criminal penalties?
For these reasons, I am inclined to chalk up such conspiracy theories as a confluence of fear, helplessness, and distrust resolving themselves into a somewhat coherent package that can be easily digested and which apparently explain seeming inconsistencies in arcane facts about political events (themselves of questionable merit and veracity, and products of many unreliable and biased sources). What is quite remarkable about these conspiracy theories is that if their timelines and event details were the the ones propagated by the government, they themselves would be subject to so much criticism and suspicion for all their lack of consistency and internal logic. Go figure.
Conspiracy theories are nothing new. But lately they are a symptom of an increasingly interconnected world, where minds are free to wander with like-minded people on the World Wide Web, and collectively build complex storylines around miniscule details whose levels of significance are inflated severely by the number of eyes that cross them and the hyperreal, set-in-stone quality of every quote, fact, statement, or thought that crosses anyone’s mind online. More on that another time.
I don’t expect conspiracy theories to go away any time soon— in fact, I expect them to get increasingly bizarre and convoluted. Yet, at the same time, I do think they provide a valuable and convenient outlet for our most closely-held fears about the government and our worried insecurities about our roles in being able to shape our futures without intervention from an untouchable hand.