David Aaronovitch interview: The conspiracy killer
WE ALL KNOW THE FEELING. YOU meet a stranger and he tells you exactly why President Kennedy was clearly assassinated by more than one gunman and the reason they never caught the other one was that someone bumped him off because he was in charge of the TV studios where they made the film of the fake moon landings, was acting on the orders of the man who deliberately didn’t order those planes to be shot down on 9/11 or who willfully concealed evidence that the blood descendants of Jesus Christ are among us, yea, even now.
Conspiracy theorists. The heart sinks, the eyes glaze over, the brain starts to shut down. At least, in their presence, mine does. But broadcaster and columnist David Aaronovitch is different. He argues back.
In the study of his Hampstead house, there are shelves full of books by the green ink brigade. There’s a lot of them about, more than ever before. Want to believe that Princess Diana’s death wasn’t an accident; that the Pentagon was struck by a missile, not a plane, on 9/11; that there’s been a vast conspiracy for centuries covering up the truth about Jesus’s children? In the conspiracy corner of our bookshops, you’re spoilt for choice – and that’s just the more recent ones.
There’s nothing new, of course, about conspiracy theories – anti-Semitism has been based on them for centuries – but the extent of their spread into mainstream culture is, Aaronovitch argues, a phenomenon of our age. For the last seven years, alongside his day job as a columnist on the Times, Aaronovitch has been on a mission to refute them – “what I call, in my vanity, my war against stupidity”.
For that, though, he’s had to do what none of the rest of us ever bother to do when confronted with a conspiracy theorist bore: research rebuttals, work out logical fallacies, re-examine evidence and point out inconsistencies. Because although some conspiracy theories are harmless (if barking), others are decidedly deadly.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a made-up blueprint for world domination by a secret Jewish cabal taken as a real, historical document by anti-Semites everywhere is the classic example. While the fact that it’s a forgery has been known for the best part of a century, it’s still widely believed in modern Iran and – as Aaronovitch finds, interviewing the deputy leader of Hamas in Gaza – Palestine too.
But if the Protocols’ fallacy is universally accepted by historians in the West, a lot of conspiracy theories still command mass support. “I’m not saying I’ve always been immune from them,” says Aaronovitch. “Often they permeate the culture so deeply that they become almost unquestioned, as the JFK assassination conspiracy theory was, and there was a time when without having examined the evidence, I would have gone along with it. We all did. And when as a 16-year-old, I saw Henry Lincoln’s first programme on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, because of who he was and the fact that it was being shown on the BBC – I bought it. I didn’t have any reason not to. I didn’t have an intuitive sense of how things don’t happen as I feel I do now.
“Conspiracy theories always have a killer fact or two – with JFK it’s the ‘magic bullet’ and the ‘fact’ that Oswald ‘couldn’t possibly’ have fired two shots in 7.1 seconds. But when you look at the evidence, it’s perfectly possible to fire two shots in less time than that, and perfectly possible for the bullet that passed through Kennedy’s neck to wound Governor Connally doing what it did (ie ricochet wildly]. People say, if it did all that, it would be completely shattered. No, it wouldn’t. And they’ll say, well, the bullet they found was pristine. Again, it’s not: it is marked.”
In other words, people see what they want to see and disregard evidence to the contrary. Hamas needs to demonise Israel, so it accepts a blatantly forged document as true. Americans don’t want to accept that their President’s life was snuffed out by a random assassin (just as Britons don’t want to believe that their pin-up princess died in a simple car crash) so they move beyond the obvious.
“It’s because conspiracy theories make them feel better,” says Aaronovitch. “The alternative is catastrophic – the notion that an event was completely accidental, that it made no sense. Because if there’s no sense in bad being done, there’s no sense in good being done either: the world we live in becomes contingent, accidental and our deaths are just pointless and lonely. Conspiracy theories are ways of not facing up to that.”
They can also, he says, be ways of avoiding facing up to the obvious evidence. How many of those who’ve heard all about the possibility of there being a second gunman on that fateful day in Dallas know that seven months previously, Lee Harvey Oswald had used the identical rifle to try to kill an American general? How many forget that the next day he was found in a Dallas cinema still holding the gun he’d used earlier that day to kill a policeman? As a lone gunman, Oswald had plenty of form.
Although he’s had to hack through thickets of fact to debunk conspiracy theories ranging from ones surrounding Dr David Kelly’s suicide to Gore Vidal’s thesis of Roosevelt’s complicity in Pearl Harbor, Aaronovitch is fascinated by the reasons otherwise intelligent people accept them so readily.
“My object is not just to debunk but to explain. I’m just making the case for scepticism. But those are both examples of false scepticism – ‘Whatever the government tells me is shit so I’ll go for the complete opposite’. And that’s not scepticism but inverted credulity.”
In the case of 9/11, he says, it took a couple of years for some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories to get traction. They certainly have it now, with books proclaiming that World Trade Center Seven was deliberately brought down by a controlled demolition, that the US deliberately fired a missile at the Pentagon (never mind what the witnesses said, they argue, it couldn’t possibly have been a plane) and all the rest of it.
“I can’t tell you how weird it feels to go to these 9/11 conventions and you see these theorists expounding these ridiculous ideas to retired executives in Connecticut and they’re all nodding in agreement. At one level, you feel everyone has gone bonkers, but they’ve got every conceivable fact they could possibly scrape together and all the inconvenient facts are shuffled away or just dismissed as disinformation…”
Weird? It’s beyond weird. Most of us wouldn’t dream of going near such conventions, much less trying to argue with the deluded souls who have accepted such patent implausibilities. What is it about Aaronovitch that makes him want to search them out and challenge them to debate? To read – and challenge – book after book by the blatantly bone-headed?
He gives me two answers. Although he is not particularly Jewish, he says, anyone with his surname tends to be sensitive to issues of conspiracy theory-fuelled anti-Semitism.
But the second reason is, perhaps, more revealing. “Most people dealing with conspiracy theorists will just say I don’t care, I’m not bothering with it,” he admits. “And because of that, it’s like arguing with Trotskyists: you have to be prepared to be the last person in the room when the vote is taken, and that takes some bloody stamina.”
Ah yes, Aaronovitch the student radical leader, president of the National Union of Students and then, as now, a hugely persuasive, engaging and articulate speaker. I was at the same university at the same time as him, and although I didn’t know him, I knew of him. It was the mid-Seventies, and everyone was a Marxist. Aaronovitch wasn’t a trendy Trotskyite, like every other middle-class politicised student, but a Young Communist. In that, he was staying true to the political faith of his parents, who were both CP members and activists.
Many of Aaronovitch’s contemporaries have given him a hard time about how much his politics have drifted rightward since then. I think that’s unfair. What’s happened instead may well be that he has grown intolerant of the politically blinkered, of people whose politics don’t reflect the complexities of modern life. People who don’t allow for the accidental, who are certain that they’ve got it right and everyone else has it wrong. People who don’t think for themselves. People like – yes, you’re there ahead of me – conspiracy theorists.
Talk to him about the hysteria on the MMR debate, about moral panics and irrational scares and it’s all of a piece with his attack of conspiracy theories. “It’s all about the construction of a true scepticism,” he says. “That’s why I wrote this book.”
I’m glad he has. And the next time you’re assailed by some nutter who thinks that a superpower that can’t even plant weapons of mass destruction in a desert is capable of staging a secretly fake moon landing or a terrorist attack on its own people, you might be too.
• Voodoo Histories, by David Aaronovitch, is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £17.99. David Aaronovitch will be appearing at the Borders Book Festival (18-21 June) in Melrose on 20 June at 7.30pm (tickets £12, £10 conc). For tickets contact 0844 357 1060 or book online at www.bordersbookfestival.org Autor: David Robinson
Fuente: sco
