JFK was paralyzed by poison contained in the flechette in less than two seconds—so paralyzed that the first rifle bullet that hit him did not knock him down, but left him in a nearly upright position. A second volley of shots fired at JFK a few seconds later struck a stationary, visible target. The paralyzing flechette shot was fired by a man holding the umbrella launcher.
—Richard E. Sprague and Robert Cutler, The Umbrella System: Prelude to an assassination (1978)
As it turns out, we know the identity of one of the (many) alleged participants in the plot to murder President John F. Kennedy. He outed himself in 1978: his name was (so he said) Louie Witt, and he was the Umbrella Man. There he is in that original found-footage horror movie, the Zapruder film, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him bystander holding an umbrella as Kennedy drove past on That Fateful—and sunny—Day. His umbrella, Witt said, was a Neville Chamberlain-based reference to the support for appeasement of the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, when Ambassador to London in the 1930s. But while you might have missed him, he didn’t miss the president—he launched a CIA-developed poisoned dart at Kennedy for the purposes of paralysing him so he could more easily be shot. Or, at least, that’s what some JFK conspiracy theorists believe.
Oliver Stone, in his exhausting tribute to stunt casting, JFK, more soberly suggested Witt in fact was signalling the assassins on that most sinister piece of topography, the Grassy Knoll, rather than firing flechettes.
Witt’s cover story isn’t as silly as it sounds, if you think about it. The whole concept of appeasement is a little hard to sum up visually, unless you could re-create Chamberlain’s hangdog features and what we’d now term his Walter White moustache. And that’s no good if the target of your protest is actually Joseph Kennedy, who was indeed, like many of his fellow Americans, a strong supporter of appeasement before the war. On the other hand, precisely what his son was supposed to do about that in 1963 isn’t clear, especially given his father had been disabled by a stroke two years before. Witt could have waved some shares, in reference to how Kennedy père made his fortune from insider trading; he could have waved some steroids, or women’s underwear, in reference to two of JFK’s many pathologies, but that would have looked less interesting and, in the case of the underwear, might even have been mistaken for cheering. A Chamberlain-style umbrella makes some sense.
And the umbrella-launched paralysing flechette has its problems. Yes, umbrella weapons had a rich Cold War history—the Bulgarians once used a pneumatic umbrella to kill a dissident with ricin in London. But if you could fire a paralytic agent from long range into the presidential blood stream, why not fire something, well, a little more lethal? Why such an elaborate assassination? Was there a kind of demarcation dispute between the assassins? Did strict union rules, or a particularly zealous interpretation of the CIA’s offshore mandate, require that the CIA only be allowed to paralyse the Philanderer-in-Chief, while other conspirators from domestic agencies got to actually kill him?
On reflection, there’s a certain comfort in this thought—that even assassins plotting one of the most infamous crimes in history had to follow strict bureaucratic rules about areas of operation. You could almost imagine a M*A*S*H-style comedy as the conspirators fight intelligence bureaucracy and bumbling paper-pushers insistent that all hell will break loose unless a presidential assassination is conducted strictly in accordance with the rules.
And for that matter, what is it with the CIA and convoluted assassination methods? Some of an apparently endless stream of CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro involved exploding or poisoned cigars, poisoned wetsuits and—the one that makes you wonder if the CIA’s LSD experiments went all the way to the top—an exfoliant that would, Samson-like, destroy Castro’s political authority by removing his trademark beard. In that context, maybe an umbrella-launched paralytic flechette isn’t too much of a stretch.
Welcome to the remarkable world of conspiracy theories.
No one has died as a result of JFK conspiracy theories, unless you count Lee Harvey Oswald, slain before his guilt or innocence could be properly determined (conveniently!). But some other conspiracy theories come with a vast body count. The oldest recorded conspiracy theory—forget the Illuminati, they’re Johnny-come-latelies from the eighteenth century—is the ‘blood libel’ directed at Jews, who allegedly conspired to kidnap and murder Christian children for the purposes of ritual murder. This first emerged in the twelfth century, and for the following seven centuries it saw thousands of Jews murdered either by mobs or after ‘trials’ for killing Christian children or, more accurately, for being Jews. The blood libel was known at the time to be false—several pre-Reformation popes, starting in the thirteenth century, attacked it as merely an excuse to murder and steal property from Jews, but to no avail; indeed, the blood libel was only the beginning of a long list of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that continue today.
Such theories, and others based on racial, religious or ethnic stereotyping, relate to an identifiable group, easily targeted for violence or theft and easily demonised as the Other by white, Western societies. But there are different types of conspiracy theories, so a system of classification is needed. For example, in addition to theories involving groups easily identifiable as separate from the rest of society, some theories postulate the work of fifth columnists or domestic cabals, people indistinguishable from Us, who could be our friends and neighbours, who can operate undetected in plain sight.* But since the Enlightenment, and especially in the industrial era, conspiracy theories have focused on small groups of powerful figures—anti-Semitism began focusing on a finance industry elite, for example, and in the twentieth century it centred on large corporations, secret powers within governments or even supra-governmental bodies, which either kill key figures that pose a threat, stage dramatic events to extend their power or use technology to control some or all of the populace.
Such theories aren’t the preserve of any one ideology or side of politics. Left-wing conspiracy theories focus on wicked governments and evil corporations a little more than right-wing theories, in which the UN, atheists and internationalism are the villains, but libertarians are as eager to target overreaching governments as progressives are. Indeed, the revelations by Edward Snowden of the very real conspiracy of systematic intelligence agency surveillance of the internet and telecommunications have produced an unlikely and at times tense coalition of support between conservative libertarians and left-wing progressives, both opposed to governmental surveillance.
Now, the internet seems to have been a great enabler for conspiracy theories, with its capacity to empower and connect communities of like-minded users and the dramatically expanded research capability that it offers, enabling anyone to access a trove of data from which to cherrypick whatever information affirms their beliefs. At least one popular conspiracy theory, about chemtrails, is a wholly internet-era creation, although it only barely qualifies as a fully fledged conspiracy theory since no one has ever clearly explained exactly what the chemicals dispersed at such high altitude are supposed to do and why such an expensive and elaborately inefficient method has been chosen to distribute them when, say, you could chuck some stuff in the local water plant.
The internet is wonderful for conspiracy theories because back in the analogue era, theorists had to settle for amateur magazines or pseudopeer-reviewed journals devoted to their conjectures, or the Fortean Times, samizdat for the paranoid circulating on the fringes of publishing or sent like contraband through the mail system (for conspiracy theories about which, see Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49). They did, just before the early internet let a thousand alt.conspiracy newsgroups bloom, get their own TV show, The X Files, a drama based on the simple premise that not one or some but pretty much all conspiracy theories were right, thereby delivering a weekly stream of villains for the credulous detective duo to battle. ‘I want to believe’ was a key slogan of the show, encapsulating the basic problem of conspiracy theories in four words.
On the other hand, if you look closely at conspiracy theories, other than chemtrails (which is akin to that staple of the Cold War, the fluoridation conspiracy theory), there are very few genuinely new plots: 9/11 truthers reprise the FDR-knew-about-Pearl-Harbor theory with a dumber but even richer president;* corporations are still either holding back utopian technology or trying to kill us, as always; Muslims are less likely to be murdered by their fellow citizens than Jews used to be, but the alleged plot to ‘impose sharia law’ (aka ‘creeping sharia’ aka ‘jihad-by-stealth’) is a less grisly version of the blood libel, with halal food taking the place of blood-soaked matzo bread.
Indeed, there’s a case for the 1960s, not the internet era, being the heyday of conspiracy theories, not merely because of assassinations, social upheaval, the Cold War and Vietnam, but because of the feedback loop created by popular culture. Even before Kennedy’s death, The Manchurian Candidate (starring none other than Kennedy pal Frank Sinatra, the centre of many a Mob-based conspiracy theory himself) had played with the idea of patsies used for presidential assassination. Stanley Kubrick had made Dr Strangelove, a satire of nuclear war all the funnier and more discomfiting for being an entirely plausible characterisation of the military mindset (Kubrick had to change a Slim Pickens line to remove a mention of Dallas after the death of JFK). The hugely popular Bond films were ritualistically, even archetypally, conspiracy theories featuring a procession of well-resourced cabals and super-villains. In 1967, the spoof US government paper The Report from Iron Mountain argued that extended periods of peace were bad public policy and governments needed a variety of lurid social controls to cope; the satiric nature of the work wasn’t clear to the media at first, and later the text would, inevitably, be adopted by conspiracy theorists as actual evidence of a New World Order plot rather than a clever piss-take.
Then there was the Apollo project conspiracy: it was only possible to maintain that the moon landing was faked after 2001 had made space travel look realistic; inevitably, it was Kubrick who was alleged to have filmed the fake moon footage. That wasn’t the only way the Apollo conspiracy oozed into Hollywood: in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, Connery-Bond (sadly sans umbrella weapon—that would get a mention in the Moore era), in the course of investigating an elaborate Howard Hughes-inspired conspiracy, actually interrupts what appears to be a restaging of the moon landing in the villain’s lair in the Arizona desert.* The whole of the sixties seemed to teeter on the brink not merely of social chaos, but of some bizarre admixture of farce, tragedy and conspiracy, all invariably played out on screen, from where it seeped into popular culture.
The emergence of conspiracy theories at such times of social stress suggests they have a valuable psychological role. Indeed, conspiracy theories have multiple important uses. For starters, they’re a great mechanism for disposing of unwanted information. This is why denialism inevitably and logically ends up in conspiracy theory: while cherrypickers try hard to explain away the vast reams of data from the world’s climate scientists showing a warming planet, or how vaccination saves lives, ultimately the only satisfying explanation is that scientists or the medical profession or drug companies are colluding in secret to push an agenda.
So, at its most benign, the warmist conspiracy theory is supposedly that scientists have faked global warming to maintain government funding for their research. Most versions are a little more melodramatic and tend to involve the United Nations’ plans for one world government (seventy years of trying and still nothing!), a left-wing plot to de-industrialise the world—there’s no soy latte on a dead planet, after all—or even, more rarely, a right-wing plot to promote nuclear power.
But conspiracy theories are less about the epistemological challenge of inconvenient data and more about the human need to find meaning in randomness. The human brain reflexively finds patterns and structures in its environment, a skill immensely useful in the days of primitive humans competing with other predators (as portrayed by Kubrick in the early, funny scenes of 2001): try hunting and gathering without an ability to make sense out of the sights, sounds and smells around you, much less more complicated tasks like farming, building or, speaking of pattern recognition, writing scripts for Bond films. Better to be predisposed to make Type One errors—false positives—than Type Two errors—false negatives—since the latter will get you killed much more quickly out on the early Anthropocene savannah.
The hypertrophying of this intellectual capacity to identify patterns—apophenia*—can lead to tendencies like thinking you’re hearing things when you play records backwards; satanic backmasking is a charge levelled at artists as varied as the Beatles, Britney Spears, Hall and Oates, Judas Priest and the Bee Gees, of whom it might be said that it’s satanic enough to play them forwards, let alone backwards. But it also enables sufferers to skilfully fish out every piece of evidence that appears to confirm a conspiracy while failing to see, or explaining away, every piece of contrary evidence.
This surely is one of the reasons why there’s a well-established correlation between belief in one conspiracy theory and belief in others. It may be that if you distrust governments enough to think they’re poisoning us with chemtrails, you’re likely to think they killed Princess Di (although for what reason has never quite been explained). That’s especially the case if you live in a culture that is predisposed to conspiracy theories—as Richard Hofstadter argued in the 1960s in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, even since colonial times Americans have seemed predisposed to seeing plots all around them. This reflects not just a tendency to mistrust government, but a mental predisposition to spot conspiracies, which means your brain will constantly spot evidence that some nebulous They is engaged in perpetrating a collective crime.
But conspiracy theories are more than group inkblot tests: they fulfil the need of many people to wish away the unpleasantly messy nature of life and the essential purposelessness of the universe. Believing that some cabal somewhere—Jews, climate scientists, the CIA, Big Pharma, the Illuminati, the Bee Gees, whoever—is in control and doing things for their own motives, however sinister, is a more comforting thought for many people than that bad things merely happen, often for no larger purpose, that the universe is a cold, indifferent place in which chance plays a far greater role than human design.
In that sense, the sheer ineptitude of so many conspiracies, by any credible measure, is irrelevant. Fluoridation has been a spectacular failure as a mass-poisoning scheme. False flag gun massacres intended to provide the basis for greater gun regulation in the United States have likewise failed. The death of JFK ushered into the White House the most aggressively liberal president on domestic issues in US history. If the Jews or the Rothschilds or the Masons or an international drug cartel headed by the Queen of England controlled the world’s financial system, they did a terrible job in 2008 with the destruction of trillions in wealth in the global financial crisis. But none of that matters. What matters is that someone, somewhere is in control—in secret, and with evil designs (if plainly incompetent), but at least there’s someone in charge. This is a more appealing idea than that there might be something profoundly wrong with your society, or that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies are inept, or that a beloved figure could be killed in an entirely meaningless accident or act of violence. More appealing than the idea that things, even big, dramatic, epoch-making Things, do not, necessarily, happen for a reason.
Conspiracy theories are also a readily obtainable marker of status, at least in the eyes of the theorists themselves. To believe in a conspiracy is to understand the way the world really works, to have privileged access to information that the rest of society doesn’t have or refuses to acknowledge, to be an insider, part of an information elite self-selected because of their intelligence and scepticism. This information snobbery enables the theorist to look down on the rest of us who are too dumb or too sheep-like to recognise reality, who’ve been gulled by the cover stories of the conspirators: ‘That’s what they want you to think.’
This can lead to a certain exasperation if a conspiracy turns out—as some do—to be correct. ‘There’s nothing new there; everyone knew that’ is the annoyed reaction of many experts to the revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, seemingly angered that everyone else has now acquired what some previously used as a personal marker of distinction. Conspiracy theories are a club that becomes unappealing if too many people join, their members epistemological hipsters who knew 9/11 was a con, that Big Brother was watching us, that the moon landings were Stanley Kubrick’s finest work and that LBJ killed JFK before it was popular to believe it.
A decision to believe in conspiracy theories, and what conspiracy theories you choose to believe, is thus similar to a consumer decision to buy one particular product or another based on its advertising and what the product says about you. In Australia, affluent inner-urban families are significantly less likely to vaccinate their children than in lower-income areas, and a similar phenomenon has emerged among affluent, well-educated mothers in California and the UK. Deliberately refusing to vaccinate one’s children has thus become a marker of social status, a lifestyle accessory that marks one off from the broader herd, the immunity of which is so important. For older right-wing males, belief in a giant UN-controlled global-warmist conspiracy demonstrates their individualistic, capitalistic mindset. More traditional-minded conspiracy types might prefer the Old Faithfuls of the conspiracy world, JFK and fluoridation, while scholarly theorists embrace the Illuminati, the Knights Templar and plots involving the Catholic Church, ancient texts and historic figures—although, God help us all, Dan Brown might have come dangerously close to popularising those.
But while conspiracy theories notionally give the theorist a greater, more authentic understanding of the world by explaining what is really going on, they’re often predicated on ignorance. At the heart of many conspiracy theories are howling errors of fact or absurd non-logic. The blood libel, for example, is said to have derived from apocryphal tales of the behaviour of Jewish families during the Crusades; in the face of forced conversion to Christianity, they preferred to die or kill themselves and their families. What would, in a Christian context, be interpreted as martyrdom was considered evidence that Jews were disposed to murder children. The Knights Templar were disbanded because the King of France saw it as a way of evading the huge debts he owed the order. Rather than being an incipient dove, JFK was every bit as signed up to escalating the war in Vietnam as his successor.* The claims of 9/11 truthers about air interception and controlled demolitions of the towers have been repeatedly debunked. The Protocol of the Elders of Zion is a fabrication. The lawyer for drug trafficker Schapelle Corby admitted simply inventing his claim that corrupt baggage handlers planted the cannabis she tried to import to Bali. Andrew Wakefield falsified data in the paper he used to claim a link between autism and vaccination and planned to make money from scaring people off vaccination; he’s been struck off the medical register in the UK and a US judge threw his libel suit out of court.
But conspiracy theory factoids are the cockroaches of epistemology, capable of surviving even a nuclear blast of contrary evidence. Indeed, the act of disproving them often reinforces their validity in the eyes of adherents. After all, if you’re bothering to try to discredit their theories, they must be on to something, especially if you work in the media and are therefore in on all the conspiracies because you need to cover them up.
Another core theme of most major modern conspiracy theories is a belief in the unity and competence of governments. Most of the challenges confronting governments around the world—keeping economies growing, delivering services effectively while struggling to convince voters of the desirability of paying tax, the looming impact of ageing populations—look a doddle compared to the superhuman feats of organisation required to poison the entire population without anyone knowing, tightly control thousands of climate scientists around the world or use swine flu to declare martial law as a prelude to a New World Order. Disillusioned voters the world over can only dream of governments with the organisational genius required to pull off the conspiracies with which they are so often charged.
The sordid truth is that governments aren’t especially competent even in the areas they directly control, and nowhere near as unified as conspiracy theorists make out. If multiple US government agencies had conspired to kill JFK, they almost certainly would have had problems of interoperability and demarcation. Bureaucrats everywhere protect their turf. Some like to build empires. Some like to avoid responsibility of any kind. All look with scepticism at the activities of other agencies. Tribalism is still tribalism despite the PowerPoint presentations and bureaucratese. And information is harder to control than conspiracy theorists realise. There’s always someone who gets caught and spills, or a whistleblower, or an agency that won’t cooperate, or even if a secret is kept close, the passage of time tends to out it. Climate change denialists like to compare global warming to Lysenkoism, the absurd agricultural and genetic theories that became legally enforced orthodoxy in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. But in fact Lysenkoism demonstrates how hard it is to enforce quackery even with a state apparatus dedicated to surveillance and thuggery—it took full-blown Stalinism to suppress opposition to Lysenkoism, and only in the Soviet Union itself; in other Eastern Bloc countries, it was criticised and rejected. After Stalin’s death, criticism of Lysenko re-emerged despite the Communist Party’s control mechanisms and within a decade he was denounced and his theories abandoned.
But in the minds of conspiracy theorists, democratic governments operate with Stalinist brutality and remarkable efficiency, moving at top speed to execute their plans flawlessly, like in a Hollywood film: the black helicopters materialise at a moment’s notice, the men in suits all act as though part of a hive mind, decisions are made in a split second, plenty of resources are always available. But as anyone who has worked in government knows, bureaucratic reality is messy, and laborious, and frustrating: half the black helicopters are being refitted because of a poor procurement decision, there aren’t enough pilots on duty to fly the rest, and poor intelligence caused by agencies refusing to share information has sent them to the wrong location anyway.
This can be seen in the best recent example of a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true: that a US government agency, in league with its counterparts in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has a giant internet and phone surveillance and computer-hacking system that it uses to monitor everyone in the world with a phone or internet connection. This was an actual, real-world conspiracy of exactly the kind portrayed in movies, in which the US government, from the president down, implemented a vast, secret plot to spy on their own people and the rest of us. But the core problem was the vast nature of it—it was so huge that the plot extended beyond politicians and government officials and men and women in uniform to private contractors, cleared by a privatised former government security vetting agency. It only took one contractor among hundreds of thousands to decide that the illegal, secret mass surveillance being conducted by the NSA needed to be exposed for the conspiracy to fall apart. Even in the America of Barack Obama, in which whistleblowers are jailed as spies and journalists are regularly spied on, it proved impossible to keep secret a giant government plot to turn the planet into a panopticon.
And as it turns out, secrecy is a highly inefficient way of conducting affairs. Julian Assange has written of a ‘secrecy tax’ that makes organisations trying to operate in secret less efficient, less internally communicative and less adaptable. The response of the US government to the Edward Snowden revelations has been a sublime demonstration of the secrecy tax in operation: despite knowing that more revelations were to come, and thus preparing for them, or even being proactive in pursuing a debate about surveillance that was going to happen anyway, the Obama Administration and its agencies remained, for months, painfully reactive and relied for an extended period on denial, evasion and casuistry that has left officials, Congressional figures and the president himself embarrassed.
Another logical fallacy at the heart of conspiracy theories is the straightforward post hoc ergo propter hoc (‘after this, therefore because of this’). For many theorists, what comes after a major event, and who benefits from it, provide an insight into who caused that event. But merely because Western governments have exploited 9/11 to justify a significant reduction in their citizens’ basic rights and funnel money to defence contractors does not mean 9/11 was an inside job; merely because the Vietnam War rapidly accelerated after 1964 does not mean JFK’s death was a factor. The proper question isn’t ‘Who benefited?’ but ‘Who best exploited it?’.
The problem is, when governments behave as if they are engaged in conspiracies, they enable conspiracy theorists. The War on Terror has encouraged conspiracy theories because governments have given themselves more power, decreased accountability, engaged in extra-judicial killing, kidnapping, torture and unjustified imprisonment, and reduced transparency. A government that by its own admission abducts people and transports them to ‘black sites’ for torture, taps the entire internet or breaks into the systems of major internet companies even after those companies have given them access to their data, can easily be assumed to be doing much worse besides that we don’t yet know about; indeed, it may be sensible to assume that they are doing much else that hasn’t been disclosed. Even a government like Australia’s secretly approved its citizens being ferried about for torture while publicly denying any knowledge of them, and used its intelligence services to bug the Cabinet rooms of a vulnerable micro-state to benefit a resources company.
This furtive behaviour of governments, their continual arrogation of power, their attacks on whistleblowers and their treatment of their own citizenry as (to use the National Security Agency’s own term) ‘adversaries’ to be constantly monitored seem designed to confirm the worst biases of the paranoid and make belief in conspiracy theories look like a sensible precaution rather than seeing them as the delusions of tinfoil wearers. Real-world governments behaving like governments in movies do worse than blur the line between fact and fiction, they undermine the basic compact of trust between electors and those who, at least notionally, serve them as elected leaders. It becomes much harder to argue that governments are not conspiring against their own citizens when, in fact, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
BK
* In its Cold War form, this theme produced three of the greatest science fiction films: the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Howard Hawk’s The Thing From Another World and then John Carpenter’s remake, in which the most faithful human friend of all, the humble dog, turns out to be—spoiler alert—One Of Them.
* Gore Vidal long claimed that FDR was complicit in Pearl Harbor, and was a 9/11 truther in his last years, demonstrating that Vidal was less America’s Biographer than its Dream Diarist.
* Proper Kubrick conspiracy theorists, of course, can see that the director left any number of clues pointing to the earlier conspiracy in The Shining, thereby giving us a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory inside a movie.
* The term began life as a description of a form of psychosis, but has since spread more widely—quite rightly given what a cinematic term it is.
* And for the same reasons—JFK had poor advice from both the State Department and the military about Vietnamese nationalism, and the Democrats couldn’t stomach a reprise of ‘who lost China’.