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Princess Diana |
Moon landings, and conspiracy theories that are out of this world
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
By David Aaronovitch.
Jonathan Cape £17.99
WE deliberately stayed up late to watch the first Moon landing on TV 40 years ago. It was a momentous occasion, an amazing mission to be seen as it happened. Yet, in the office next morning, I was dismayed to discover I was the only one out of 20 journalists who bothered.
And within weeks there were stories that it never actually happened, that it was all an illusion, an event filmed in a garage in Belsize Park, no less, or so it was said in my Hampstead pub. So what’s all the fuss about?
That’s how conspiracy theories are born – and remain hysterically alive and packed with paradox. Indeed, on TV last week we had a full-scale documentary revealing that 7/7 was a government-inspired conspiracy, the massive number of people killed and maimed deliberately organised, to make us come to terms, seriously, with the existence of terrorism.
There are still many who believe that 9/11 was an optical illusion, that the Manhattan skyscrapers were hit by American missiles surrounded by holograms.
People do hold such ludicrous beliefs, the incredible detail involved in such lunacies – surely the appropriate description – still creating dinner table debates.
The belief persists that Princess Diana was undoubtedly murdered, never just a tragic Paris car crash victim without a safety strap, and that President Kennedy’s death was another case of collusion.
All this – and much more too, such as the “murder” of Marilyn Monroe – is the fascinating subject of David Aaronovitch’s equally fascinating and equally droll yet exhaustive examination of events that have shattered and distorted history and set off the chattering classes, among others.
It was the Apollo Moon landing, now being celebrated again, that set Aaronovitch off on his search. A young man named Kevin Jarvis, with whom he was making a BBC documentary in Tunisia in 2002, insisted that the event was faked. The basis of his claim: how come there was a flag fluttering in the non-existent lunar atmosphere?
And there were personal reasons too, given Aaronovitch’s background as a former Marxist student leader, as well as an award-winning journalist and broadcaster, who is Jewish and whose parents were Communists.
It is the place too, of course, where a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital caused such overwhelming damage – and that’s what conspiracy theories can do – by claiming that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine jab for children causes autism to an unacceptable degree – and had been either hidden or ignored.
Certainly Aaronovitch’s own life has proved to him that Jews, as well as Communists, have suffered from malignant paranoia and persecution in the past, and still do. So he includes on his agenda the Protocols of Zion, the anti-Semitic Russian forgery, dating from 1903, which claims to prove Jews were plotting world domination.
The Protocols may well have been disproved many times over as a fraud, but that hasn’t stopped them becoming part of the constitution of Hamas.
The joke, alas, is on us. It seems that while history may be described as the story of the victors, conspiracy theories are the response of the victims. And, despite the convincing and sometimes totally conclusive evidence that Aaronovitch has assembled, people demand freakish drama. So, apparently, they provide us with absurd claims that ultimately draw attention to themselves.
The media obviously doesn’t help, drawn forever towards sensationalism and, nowadays, celebrities who, remarkably, have failed to increase newspaper circulations. That’s because the internet, fancy free in its choice of “facts”, has taken over.
For me, the great debunker of so many of these foolish hoaxes is that the elegant truth is always stranger than fiction. For proof of that, take all those scandalous expenses claims of our politicians. Mythical duck houses and blocked moats have never had it so good.
GERALD ISAAMAN |
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Your comments:
The writer of this article must be joking if he is realy telling me that such a thing as political conspiracies do not exist!
J. Goyogana
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