The Golden Age of conspiracy

By Nick Cohen (Standpoint)

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.

A 2006 poll by the Pew Research Centre asked Muslims in Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan whether Arab terrorists carried out the September 11 attacks. A majority in all countries — and a huge majority in Pakistan — replied that they did not. ...

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