I Want to Believe
“We regard the Egyptian works of art as containing riddles, the right solution of which is in part unattained not only by us, but generally by those who posed those riddles themselves.”
Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel.
What is a conspiracy theory?
The dictionary definition of the word 'conspiracy' is pretty much useless once the word 'theory' has been added to the end of it. We all know that what is meant is some nefarious, sinister manipulation or cover up of an event, or of all events, by deep state intelligence services, secret societies, occult groups and/or aliens. They were once obscure, left field rumours, spread through specialist fanzines or in the letters pages of broad minded magazines, but everyone knows about them now. Now we have the internet to spread them, like viruses. From the curious questioning of an official narrative to some intricate, tenuously evidenced plot for world domination.
They spread for a few very good reasons. The first being that they are, often, fascinating and compelling stories. Stories that make sense (A sense) of the world. It's no wonder they started to grow more in the 1990s. During the cold war, society was buffeted between the two grand narratives of Capitalism and Communism. Two opposing stories that explained the world. These stories, and the fact that they were in conflict, provided society with an explanation for why things were the way they were. The incomprehensible and the malign could be framed in the context of the conflict between these narratives and so, though the world may have teetered on the edge of nuclear annihilation, it at least seemed to make sense. When one side in that conflict took a great fall from the Berlin Wall, that story stopped and a narrative vacuum was created. This vacuum was filled by the profusion of already existing grand conspiracies, explaining all the events of the preceding centuries as a different type of grand narrative - a plan.
These theories seem to split people into two camps. Those who believe practically everything they see spewed onto the internet – fake moon landings, secret, deep state alliances with aliens or inter-dimensional beings, that sort of thing. And those who consider any conspiracy theory to be, by default, total nonsense. To me, both of those reactions have more in common than they'd like to admit. The latter group tend to assume for themselves the role of rational actors. Many conspiracy stories are riddled with plot holes and the rationalists delight in pointing out the blinkers the conspiracists wear to avoid seeing those holes. But they often don't seem to be aware of their own blinkers. They have convenient blind spots, one is that, very often, official explanations for certain events are as absurd as some conspiracy theories, which is part of the reason conspiracy theories sprout in the first place. The other blind spot is the rather discomforting fact that some stories that emerge out of conspiracy-ville turn out to be true.
Conspiracies that have been proved to be (or are likely to be) true go from the palatable to the hard to believe. On the palatable side there are things like the Lockerbie bombing. Most still think it was Libya. It wasn't it was a Palestinian Liberation group backed by Iran and Syria and aided (either deliberately or inadvertently, depending on the narrative) by the CIA. The motivation was revenge for the downing of an Iranian Airliner by the Americans. This angle was the official narrative until 'we' needed Syria on side for Iraq War 1, when blame switched to Libya.
More acknowledged is Iran/Contra, during which 'rogue' American agents sold weapons to Iran so that they could secretly funnel the money to the Contras in Nicaragua. How much Reagan knew about it all is open to question.
CIA involvement in drug running during the 80s and 90s was also to aid the Contras in their fight against the Sandanistas. This was exposed by Gary Webb in the mid 90s. Webb suggested the drug running helped fuel the epidemic of Crack and the accompanying drug wars in American cities. He was blacklisted as a result and in 2004 shot himself in the head. Twice.
All of the above have been in the mainstream press and, now that they are, it's been quickly forgotten that all these things used to be conspiracy rumours and were scoffingly dismissed as such. These aren't the weirdest examples though. Some proven stories tread worryingly close to the grand, occult, secret society conspiracy.
All of the following are 'true'.
MK ULTRA – though still shrouded in mystery due to the deliberate destruction of incriminating documents. MK ULTRA was a wide ranging, secret US intelligence programme that conducted mind control experiments on members of the public. It's been implicated in numerous assassination conspiracies and the Unabomber was in the programme. Other notables include Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Magic Bus fame. There's a strong argument that the CIA were involved in the spread of LSD in the 60s, but that very nearly back fired, so they got into cocaine and heroin instead.
BOHEMIAN GROVE – A bunch of wealthy industrialists, politicians, bankers and celebrities gather together in some woods and take part in a bizarre, occult ceremony, during which they conduct a mock child sacrifice in the shadow of a massive owl effigy resembling the God Moloch. It's no longer denied. They really do this.
Yes, this video is from an Alex Jones documentary, but it is real. He did sneak in and film it.
BILDERBERG GROUP – Another which is no longer controversial, though it probably should be. The world's most powerful politicians gather together each year in a luxurious hotel, in secret, and, allegedly, plot out how things should be going. Stories of it were the province of conspiracy literature for decades but now the Guardian cover it every year. Not that they know what's going on in the luxury hotel. But something is.
Jon Ronson unveils the Bilderbergers, gets followed and his hotel is broken into. Shits himself. Well worth a watch.
PROPAGANDA DUE – A secret society within a secret society that was exposed during a variety of corruption trials in the 70s and 80s. Propaganda Due, P2 for short, was part of the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry. This masonic society was headed by Licio Gelli and its intention was to create an extreme right wing government in Italy.
A list found in Gelli's house revealed many bankers, the heads of Italy's three main intelligence services, mafiosi, more than 900 Italian politicans and media figures such as Silvio Berlusconi were all members of this secret society within a secret society. The story drags in the CIA, the KGB, the Mafia, shadow banks (that the CIA were using to launder the above mentioned drug money), real banks, false flag terrorist attacks and the Vatican.
So many people connected to all this were killed, as various trials approached, it was like a scene in Goodfellas. It's been suggested that Pope John Paul 1 was also offed as a result. Gelli himself was acquitted. He died in 2015 at the ripe old age of 96, long enough to see Berlusconi come to power. Of his reign he said,
"All is becoming a reality little by little, piece by piece. To be truthful, I should have had the copyright to it”
To me, if someone can know about these things and still refuse to accept that conspiracies do actually take place, they're doing the inverse of what the conspiracy theorists themselves do. They're simplifying the world for their own piece of mind. It's more convenient for them to ignore it, because it doesn't fit into the simplistic narrative they've constructed – or that’s been constructed for them - to make sense of the world. They wear their own, slightly more fashionable, tin foil hats.
But that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true isn't even as weird as it gets, because though some conspiracies may be true is, in the end, beside the point. Fictions can have just as much influence on the 'real' world as facts and in the second part I'll talk about a couple of examples of completely fictional conspiracies that went on to take a reality all of their own, with bizarre, and horrific, consequences for the world and for the people who made them up.