Conspiracy theories: why we so desperately need them!

Conspiracy theory not only makes compelling reading, it is also great fodder for television and films such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, the 9/11 documentary Loose Change and the cinematic adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Entertaining as conspiracy theories often are, David Aaronovitch’s debunking of them, and in particular his attempt to get to the core of why conspiracy theories evolve in the first place and why so many people choose to believe in them, are even more compelling.

Inevitably conspiracy theories are rarely based on facts. For example there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald was not John F. Kennedy’s lone killer. There is no basis for Jim Garrison’s (played by Kevin Costner in JFK) suggestion that only a magic bullet magic from Oswald’s rifle could have caused the damage it did. Ex-marine Lee Harvey Oswald was a very competent shot and the presidential cortege drove along Oswald’s line of sight, not across it, which means - as many ballistic experts have demonstrated - that the shots were possible.

In 1982 Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh published The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The main claim of the book is that a secret society, the Priory of Sion, protects the Merovingian bloodline: descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This claim was based on the authors’ discovery of one crucial document known as the Dossiers Secrets suggesting that living descendants of the extinct Merovingian bloodline exist.

The problem with the Dossiers Secrets is that it is pure fabrication, a hoax planted in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris by the charlatan Pierre Plantard in the 1960s. If the document is false, there is no Priory of Sion, and sadly no ‘Sang Real’ (royal blood) either. But surely, revisionists would argue, it is possible that Jesus had a child? There is no evidence for this, but of course it is possible. And if it is possible, is it then not possible too that there is a descendant of Jesus living amongst us today?

Let us just contemplate this single-descendant theory for a minute. So Jesus had a child. That child would have had to produce a boy or a girl for the bloodline to continue. The child of that boy or girl would likewise have had to produce either a boy or girl, and so on and so forth for about a hundred generations. Now, what if somewhere along this line someone had had not one but four children, or worse, if multiple generations of Jesus-stock had multiple children...? Then we would end up with an awful lot of Jesus-bloodlines, an awful lot of Jesus-cousins, half-cousins etc.

What makes Aaronvitch’s account stand out is its analysis of why conspiracy theories develop. It is now a historical fact that the communist threat perceived by Joseph McCarthy et al in the 1950s was by and large a concoction, that is to say it was a conspiracy theory. Interestingly, those who spread the red scare were the very same people who had been sidelined politically during Roosevelt’s presidential reign in the 1930s, typically Republican politicians who had unsuccessfully opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes and anti-neutrality policy. More often than not it is ‘the losers’ who propagate conspiracy theories in an attempt to get back at the victors.

It is easy to see why parts of the gun lobby would circulate documents accusing Bill Clinton of having had more than 50 people murdered throughout his career because they stood in his way. It is also easy to see why extreme right-wing groups subscribe to 9/11 conspiracy theories that blame the ‘government’.

What is much harder to understand is why less radical, intelligent and well educated people – who do not have a political agenda – chose to believe in conspiracy theories. But what kind of world would it be without conspiracy theories, no beautiful (Audrey Tatou) holy descendants walking amongst us, no government-big-business behind the 9/11 attacks? What if the official reports were in fact true and there were no cover-ups? If Princess Diana’s car crashed as a result of her intoxicated driver speeding, John F. Kennedy was killed by a sole deranged individual, and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose?

We would be living in a world governed more by chance than some powerful behind the scenes elite. It would be a world less purposeful, lacking in grander designs. Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy and Princess Diana would all simply be very unlucky, meaningless tragedies. A good conspiracy theory knows how to thrive on the human condition.

Amazon: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History