Smoking-Bun

The BBC presented another of its ‘Conspiracy Files’ programmes, this time on a selection of the theories surrounding the 7/7 bombings in London. It cites the usual viral youtube videos as its inspiration, and sets out to rubbish them in an entertaining way with mission impossible style music running throughout.

The basic formula of these shows is always the same. A number of ludicrous conspiracy theories are introduced, and left hanging for 20 minutes while the programme fakes a serious tone, only to knock them apart with relative ease in the last 10 minutes of the show. As documentary making goes, this is utter schlock, appealing only to a very casual audience with no knowledge or any real interest in the subject.

So ‘campaigner’ Nick Kollerstrom happily presents his theories about how the so-called terrorists were never in London early in the programme. And he seems like a nice if slightly doddery old chap with a decent point to make. But wait – in the last 10 minutes he is uncovered as a holocaust denier, and confronted with clear evidence that blows his silly allegations out of the water – he wibbles into the camera a little bit. You actually do feel a little sorry for the nazi-sympathising old twat. If his silly claims weren’t a disgraceful insult to the victims of a terrorist attack you might almost be tempted to just give him a biscuit and a cup of tea.

Well-known British oddball Tony Gosling doesn’t fare much better. Confronted by the fact that two of the major proponents of 7/7 conspiracy theories also claim they are the messiah, he warns us that they may still have good points to make despite their Jesus-complexes and not to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. Truth is, most viewers could imagine these loons throwing babies with bathwater in any which direction.

As usual, this documentary won’t persuade conspiracy theorists of anything other than the fact that the BBC is in on the conspiracy. You can’t shift years of idiotic accusations with a glossy 50-minute documentary – there’s no time to even begin to engage the myriad of claims made by the fantasists. And the truth is that any attempt to actually engage with these issues would be deeply boring television. Conspiracy theorists simply sit in front of their televisions or computer screens getting annoyed and shouting “Yes, but…”. These theories never really end, they just shift endlessly from claim to claim, often in ridiculous circles.

The only real benefit of the programme might be to prove to British Muslims that the conspiracy theory that many of them have bought into was peddled by an internet youtube amateur with a wispy white beard who thinks he is Jesus Christ and that the ark of the covenant is buried under a hill near his house. The basic truth that most conspiracy theorists are slightly short of the full picnic is a very obvious observation to make, but perhaps it’s good to remind everyone of that fact from time to time.

I’m still hung up on this expenses scandal here in the UK. Members of the public are still sounding off ad nauseum about their disgust with politics and politicians, and it’s all quite nauseating. Of course this sort of anger in the UK can only stir up angry letters to The Times. “I was so angry I changed my status on Facebook”. We are such a docile breed now as the public.

The trouble with this debate is that a significant percentage of the public seem to be casually suggesting the idea of just tearing up our democracy with the vague notion that we would be better off ’starting again’. Whereas in reality there is no hope for that sort of process.

It’s an idle threat. “You’re never getting chocolate again” is what we say to our kids, both with the full knowledge that it’s a course of action we would never actually have the stomach to carry through.

Imagine we tore it all up or went communist or anarchist, or started some new and independent and highly successful system of self-governance. I guarantee that within five years the US would invade on some humanitarian pretext, if our closer neighbours in Europe hadn’t got there first. Start fucking about with our current system of government and we’d simply be swallowed up by those whom it threatens.

All we really want to do is vent our anger – we want our indignance noted. It’s not very healthy is it. It’s the equivalent of shouting down the phone at some poor dogsbody in India because you’ve been charged extra on your overdraft.

It makes me wonder if I’m just out-of-step with the general public. I have always assumed that politicians are power-hungry and money-hungry wankers – the expenses scandal tells me nothing that I didn’t feel I already knew. Is the public shock faked? I have to wonder. Are the public only shocked because the Telegraph tells them they should be?

Tom Dalyell is an interesting example. He claimed 18,000 pounds expenses to build a bookcase and was eventually given £7800 for the project. String him up? But he was one of the handful of MPs who actually vocally opposed our aggression in the middle-east, and thus one of the handful who blessed British politics with some sort of reasonable alternative in a crucial debate. His agitation may have saved lives. What do his bookcases matter in the face of a genuine political debate?

The biggest irony of the last week comes from some of the suggestions that the Queen exercise her right to dissolve parliament – I’d take a wild guess that the idea that anyone should live like royalty at the expense of the public probably doesn’t disgust the Queen too much.

Are most conspiracy theorists loonies?

It seems normal to think so. That’s why we don’t have newspapers full of the heartfelt opinions of holocaust deniers and people who think the World elite are alien lizards. Instead we choose to read more rational opinions about MMR, weapons of mass destruction and revolutionary underpants embedded with bio-crystals that make cellulite vanish!

I don’t think journalists in the media have this quite right – they may think that conspiracy theories are irrational and plain wrong, but somehow they shrink from their duty to publicly reflect this. If you hold a heartfelt belief, and you find that the rest of the world seems to ignore it, you wonder why it is being ignored. On internet sites conspiracy theories are flourishing, and the ‘conspiracy of silence’ in the mainstream media only encourages them that they are right.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are unconvincing. If you watch the right video on the internet, or read the right article, you can be convinced of virtually anything. Read the heartfelt testimony of those who say they felt explosions in the twin towers before the planes ever hit, or the woman who swears she was sexually abused as a child by world leaders. You have to deny these people’s very essence to dispute them. Read the testimonies of Jesus’s disciples and tell me that you deny their essential belief – it’s not always easy.

It has happened with climate change. As the consensus has grown that climate change is man-made, the minority who disagree have found themselves given less and less of a platform in the media, and rather than just accept that more scientists believe one explanation over another, the idea that there is a conspiracy at work has grown. It’s a siege mentality. Whatever you believe in, you would like to see it given more column inches. It is this factor, over and above any of the scientific evidence, that has created this political divide.

As the 9/11 conspiracies grew virally on the internet, they found themselves left virtually unchallenged in the media. Soon a small army of internet investigators were uncovering thousands of anomalies in the 9/11 events that the media never bothered to address on their behalf. Left to their own devices, and with no legitimate form of redress, they have flourished. The force of the campaign promoting the ‘inside job’ theories of 9/11 has simply been left unchecked for far too long, creating a mountain of mistaken beliefs that it will take decades or even centuries to undo.

The Kennedy assassination conspiracies are a long-term example of this – the controversy around this event will never ever die. Millions of enthusiastic man-hours have been sunk into this conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone made a movie about it. It is so embedded in popular culture that you can be almost guaranteed that one of your friends will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could never have killed Kennedy. And I think now that the Princess Diana theories will exist as long as time itself.

How did it come to this?

I think part of this comes down to the mistaken belief that conspiracy theorists are loonies. That they are slightly loopy eccentrics who, while fairly harmless, are not really to be engaged – leave them to their imaginary worlds. The idea that if you talk about them, it only encourages them and gives them unwelcome publicity.

In my dealings with conspiracy theorists, I have found some people I would describe as loonies. But by far the majority are people who simply have got the issues muddled in their heads, and have been left to their own devices to interpret them. Most are honest and some spend a lot of time on their campaigning activities, man-hours that could have been spent on something more progressive and less… wrong!

I blame the media as an entity. Or the establishment in general. For always peddling the middle line, and ignoring the polarised ends of every issue. For dismissing certain researchers as crackpots but refusing to tackle the actual content of their debate. For thinking that if you ignore something it will just go away – that doesn’t work.

There will always be a level of organised madness in life – I see it as much in the establishment as I do in the outliers who believe in lizards, or so-called religious cults who believe in the second coming of Elvis, or those who peddle what is essentially water as a progressive alternative medicine. Instead the establishment tell us that Jade Goody is some sort of saint, that the values of capitalist society are so superior to the alternatives, that the soap opera of political skullduggery is more important than the issues they are employed to address.

Please point out to me who the loonies are, because I could never work it out.

Have you ever laid awake at night worrying about the expenses claims of politicians?

Apparently everyone in England has, because there is such a feeding frenzy about the fact that some politicians have been fiddling theirs. If you’re a journalist this sort of thing is gold-dust – politicians on the fiddle, an opportunity to whip up a sense of corruption at the heart of British politics, and the opportunity to feign disgust on behalf of the electorate.

The latest casualty is the speaker of the commons Michael Martin (pictured above) – the bloke who basically chides MPs when they speak out of turn in the chamber, and is the ultimate icon for political pomposity. They’ll hire a new one, and nothing will actually change. If a politician goes to prison for fraud over this, a new one will come up in their place.

If you’ve been laying awake at night worrying about the expenses claims of the speaker of the house of commons there can only be three reasons. You are Michael Martin. Or you are his wife. Or you are clinically insane.

I agree with Stephen Fry, who has courted controversy by going against the journalistic line…

“Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong – things like wars, things where people die – with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It’s not that important. It really isn’t. It isn’t what we’re fighting for. It isn’t what voting is about. And the idea that ‘oh we’ve all lost faith in politics, because’… it’s nonsense. It’s a journalistic made-up frenzy.”

There’ll be a lot of journos mumbling about ‘Fry getting his’ and plotting the demise of the greatest living Englishman after that. How dare he piss on their scoop!

But he’s right. Whatever politicians do with their expenses, the issues actually don’t change at all. The story has as much relevance to actual political issues as the plotline on the feeblest daytime soap opera.

What will happen is a general reshuffle as some politicians are picked off and destroyed, while others seize the chance to make political capital from the fallout. A tightening of the rules on expenses may be a good thing, and perhaps a debate about the general level of pay of MPs. It’s a subject about as close to my heart as Pluto.

Does that really help you sleep at night?