Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy

To my astonishment, I discovered last week that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced in The Beatles by a lookalike Scottish orphan called Billy Shears, who has been masquerading as the legendary musician ever since.

I was equally surprised to find out that Adolf Hitler survived the Second World War and fled to Antarctica, that multinational armed forces will soon arrive in black helicopters to bring the US under UN control, and that the supposed “water” contrails emitted by flying aircraft actually contain a toxic chemical mix of aluminum, strontium and barium as part of a secret population control program.

What I did not find out was that US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the KGB, or indeed all of them acting together.

You probably (I hope) recognize all the above as conspiracy theories, and the reason the Kennedy one has achieved new prominence is the release last week, on the orders of US President Donald Trump, of more than 63,000 pages of documents in about 2,200 files comprising the entire official archive relating to the events in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.

Sadly for conspiracy theorists everywhere, there is no smoking gun — or rather, only one — but that will not deter them. Even now, they will be convinced that the archive itself has been manipulated by the deep state, the Illuminati, the global elite, the Freemasons or possibly that child sex abuse gang supposedly run by Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats from the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington — a restaurant that does not in fact have a basement, but the denial of irrefutable truth is a key component of conspiracy theories.

Sadly for conspiracy theorists everywhere, there is no smoking gun in the JFK files — or rather, only one — but that will not deter them. 

Ross Anderson

There are a couple of misconceptions here, the first being that the typical conspiracist is a not particularly well-educated young man sitting at a laptop in his mother’s basement wearing only underpants and a tinfoil hat to deflect the death rays from space. This does not explain the conspiracy obsession with George Soros, the multibillionaire philanthropic investor who is frequently accused of controlling most of the world’s wealth, not to mention governments. Among those who have suggested that Soros secretly funds individuals and organizations for nefarious purposes are Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and Rudy Giuliani — none of whom, as far as I know, possesses a tinfoil hat.

Curiously, we may owe Trump’s presidency, at least in part, to a conspiracy theory. In 2011, three years after Barack Obama was elected president, Trump was a key proponent of the absurd “birther” conspiracy that questioned Obama’s US citizenship and demanded publication of his birth certificate. Obama took his revenge in a speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner that consisted mostly of jokes mocking and ridiculing Trump — who sat in furious silence as the entire room laughed at him. Several Trump allies have since said that this public humiliation was the moment when he decided to deploy his considerable energy and wealth in a serious campaign to reach the White House.

The other misconception is that conspiracy theories are harmless fun, providing endless amusement and adding to the gaiety of nations. Tell that to the proprietors of Comet Ping Pong, which was shot up in December 2016 by a self-proclaimed “rescuer of children” armed with an assault rifle. In January 2019, an arsonist linked to the QAnon conspiracy movement started a fire at the restaurant.

So where does all this come from? It is fertile ground for psychologists, who have identified in conspiracy theorists such psychopathological conditions as paranoia, schizotypy, narcissism and insecure attachment, as well as a deviation from rational judgment known as “illusory pattern perception” — a tendency to see connections that are not there. Others suggest that the origins of conspiracy theories lie deep in the human brain, the remains of anxiety from early in our evolution.

The other misconception is that conspiracy theories are harmless fun, providing endless amusement and adding to the gaiety of nations. 

Ross Anderson

A colleague suggested to me in conversation last week that Arabs were more susceptible than most to conspiracy theories. While the evidence for this is more anecdotal than empirical, there may also be an economic root. Outside the Gulf, few Arab countries have fully exploited their potential, owing mostly to widespread government authoritarianism, incompetence and corruption, along with frequent Western interventions that do more harm than good. The result has been successive generations of frustrated young people denied the opportunity to create their own prosperity and looking for someone or something to blame — fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

It is also true that, while conspiracy theories existed long before X, Facebook and Instagram, the creation of social media echo chambers in which people hear only the increasingly loud voices of others with whom they already agree has done much to propagate what can only be described as nonsense. This year, for example, X proprietor Elon Musk posted a social media tirade against UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, claiming that Britain’s jails were full of prisoners who had committed no offense other than sending the occasional disobliging tweet. Musk’s rant was remarkable in that it contained nothing remotely resembling a fact and displayed a lamentable ignorance of how the UK is governed or how it functions, but such is the audience he has at his fingertips that millions read and believed it — and another conspiracy was born.

The mother of them all, however, remains the Kennedy assassination — the subject of more than 1,000 books, at least 90 percent of which support the view that there is a plot to conceal the truth. I have always been puzzled by how people who believe this think it would have worked. For a start, it would have required the complicity of literally tens of thousands of people, from witnesses at the scene to investigating officers, security services, medical staff and record keepers. There being no internet in the 1960s, they would all have had to meet to ensure that they had their stories straight. But where? Madison Square Garden? Surely someone would have noticed.

Perhaps we should leave the last word to the highest authority we have. It is said that a deceased conspiracy theorist arrived at the gates of heaven, where God told him that he could ask one question. “Who really killed JFK?” he inquired. The Almighty consulted his records and declared: “It was Lee Harvey Oswald, and he acted alone.” The conspiracist considered this for a moment, before replying: “Hmmm ... this goes higher up than I thought.”

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.