The Big Conspiracy
Tom Wilson 02.07.04

This past week I've been working on my own conspiracy theory. It's not hard to do. Identify a minority group, connect them with a global problem and pepper your theory with some difficult-to-corroborate historical references. My own final theory concerns stamp-collecting vegetarians, global terrorism and the connection between the two that dates back to the Boer war. Of course, I could tell you more, but I'd have to kill you afterwards.

Next, simply 'leak' an email of your hypothesis to one of those half-witted individuals who continually fills your in-box with Nostradamus predictions and pictures of kittens in baskets (you know who you are) and voila - half the population will be on the look-out for stamp-collectors by mid-afternoon. A word of advice: make sure to make use of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks!!! These have the advantage of making whatever you write appear especially convincing.

Conspiracy theories aren't just an entertaining way of killing time at the office. They tell us lots about the world we live in. Modern society puts huge distances between us and The Truth. The huge degree of specialisation that our society demands and the complexity of the issues involved means that it would take us a lifetime of research just to personally verify a handful of basic facts about our world. One of my personal favourite conspiracy theories, for example, concerns fluoride. Prior to the Second World War, one of fluoride's main uses was as rat poison - it's more toxic than lead and a little less toxic than arsenic. The decision to begin adding fluoride to drinking water in the US coincides with a crisis in the Aluminium industry regarding what to do with the huge quantities of fluoride the industry produces. And it doesn't end there: the American 'Manhattan Project', which constructed the first atomic bomb, also coincides with the mass-fluoridation of water. One of the major by-products of this research was, you've guessed it, tonnes and tonnes of Fluoride. Oh, by the way - fluoride also reduces IQ, makes people passive and generally more susceptible to authority. Mrs Thatcher added it to the drinking water in Northern Ireland shortly after an escalation of violence in the province.

So how much truth is there in these allegations? Where is the dividing line separating fact from fiction? I don't know. And neither do you.

Post 9/11 we've had the perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories. It's partly because so much of what is actually going on in international politics has started to resemble something out of the X-Files. It's hard to believe that some of the big names in the Bush team (Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush) are behind an organisation entitled the 'Project for a New American Century'. How exactly did they come up with the name, I'd like to know? Were they trying to outdo each other in coming up with the most terrifyingly conspiratorial title imaginable? Why not cut to the chase and include references to the KKK, the Kennedy Assassination and the Roswell incident in the title? Rumsfeld and his chums have almost made conspiracy theories redundant. You no longer need to go digging around in dusty archives to discover that in September 2000 the PNAC noted the need for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor," in order to implement their radical foreign policy objectives. This might look like fiction. It's accepted fact. What's clear is that the best way of keeping a secret today is to make it public. Ours is an information society choking on data - an overwhelming background noise that offers a surer way of keeping the truth quiet than any form of censorship.

On 27 May, a particularly interesting letter was printed in the UK 's well-respected daily newspaper The Guardian. The ideas it proposed might sound somewhat conspiratorial, but when they come from a University expert, who has in the past provided advice to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, you're more than inclined to sit up and notice. The letter is here reprinted in its entirety. The first sentence refers to the idea that Iran misinformed the US over Iraq in order to remove its neighbour and enemy, but this isn't important. What is, is the rather curious Romania connection. It requires no further comment:

“It is not just Chalabi who may have led the Pentagon up the garden path. After 9/11, the ex-communists still in charge of Romania convinced Washington they could be invaluable to the coalition effort in Iraq because they had intimate knowledge of Saddam's power structure. This was not a falsehood. Under Nicolae Ceausescu , Romania had built much of the Iraqi infrastructure. The Securitate had very close ties with its Iraqi counterpart.

A grateful Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz promptly rewarded Romania with full membership of Nato, something the Clinton administration had refused. What the gullible Republicans chose to overlook was that the Securitate officers schmoozing with the Ba'athists in the 1980s still enjoy positions of power. For example, a leading spy stationed in London from 1974-84 today sits in the Romanian parliament and is a government adviser.

Throughout the 1990s and beyond, the sprawling intelligence community in Romania continued to have very close ties with counterparts in a host of radical Middle Eastern regimes. It was a desire for money and influence that kept such ties alive. This is the basis of the improbable link with the Americans. Despite state-of-the art snooping techniques at Menwith Hill and Fylingdales, crass US neo-cons have probably given away secrets by the bucketful to these fairweather friends.”

Prof Tom Gallagher

Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford

© Tom Wilson / ZF 2004