zonbron |
27 april 2011 22:27 |
Een recensie door The New York Times, het boek 'The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History' van David Aaronovitch
Citaat:
VOODOO HISTORIES
The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
By David Aaronovitch
David Aaronovitch’s Web Site
Nuts and Dolts
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: March 18, 2010
Paranoia is a bipartisan temptation. Amid last August’s town hall frenzy, there was a stir over a poll showing that roughly a third of Republicans believed that Barack Obama had been born outside the United States. Liberals trumpeted the finding as proof of the Republican base’s slide into madness. But conservatives had a rebuttal: As recently as 2007, they pointed out, polls showed that a third of Democrats believed George W. Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.
Neither statistic would come as a surprise to a reader of “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,” a sweeping tour of the paranoid style in Western politics by David Aaronovitch, a British journalist. In his account, which runs from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” down to the obsession over Obama’s birth certificate, the pendulum of paranoia is constantly swinging from right to left and back again, depending on which faction feels more powerless and put-upon.
So the McCarthyite hawks who blamed Communist infiltrators for “losing China” gave way, as liberalism declined and conservatism rose to power, to the left-wing paranoiacs who blamed the military-industrial complex for everything from John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the murder of an antinuclear activist in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The Clinton-era conservatives who insisted that Vince Foster’s suicide was really murder ceded the stage, in the Bush era, to left-wing cranks convinced that the British scientist David Kelly was bumped off by Iraq war hawks desperate to cover up their deception about weapons of mass destruction. And the ideological fringes are forever blurring into one another: Pat Buchanan can sound a lot like Gore Vidal, “truthers” and “birthers” often share common fixations, and both the far left and far right seem equally inclined to circle around, eventually, to pointing fingers at the Jews.
“Voodoo Histories” finds room for conspiracies of more uncertain political valence as well: the supposed murder of Diana, Princess of Wales; the “staged” moon landing; the pseudohistory of Christianity unveiled in “The Da Vinci Code”; and many more. This is a crowded book, in other words, thick with crazy ideas and even crazier people, and for a while its “and *another thing” comprehensiveness keeps us entertained. Every reader will have his favorite crank; personally, I was delighted to be reacquainted with Immanuel Velikovsky, the midcentury catas*trophist who revised the entire chronology of the ancient world, from Assyria to Greece, based on a wild theory about roving comets, planetary collisions and electromagnetic fields.
At the same time, there’s a fish-in-a-barrel quality to some of Aaronovitch’s debunkings, and the book’s sprawl means that its insights into the conspiratorial mind-set often feel hopelessly general or disappointingly banal. (You will not be surprised to learn, for instance, that the paranoid often “fail to apply the principle of Occam’s razor to their arguments.”) Every conspiracy theory is not created equal: the dark *anti-Trotskyist obsessions that produced Russia’s show trials, the subject of an early chapter, would seem to have little in common with the cheerful crankishness of a Velikovsky or an Erich “Chariots of the Gods” von Däniken. And an analysis that tries to account for them all won’t end up accounting for much of anything.
What’s more interesting about “Voodoo Histories” is the way its narrative subtly undercuts the popular notion that the influence of conspiracy theories has increased with the rise of the Internet and the decline of public trust in government. If anything, Aaronovitch’s book suggests that the paranoid style’s direct power over Western politics has declined precipitously over the last 50 years. (The politics of the Arab world, admittedly, are another matter entirely.)
You can draw a bright line from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to the anti-Semitic delusions of the 1920s and thence to Hitler’s criminal regime. It’s much harder to connect “birtherism,” “9/11 trutherism” or the wild fantasies surrounding the Kennedy assassination to anything save a diffuse mood of mistrust, anger and paranoia — and the occasional lunatic gunman at the Pentagon.
Yesterday’s conspiracy theorists governed countries, commanded armies and dealt out death and destruction on a vast scale. Today’s conspiracy theorists have detailed Web sites, slick videos and best-selling books, but precious little direct power. The paranoid mood helps polarize our politics, no doubt, and can inspire spasms of nihilistic violence. But for now, at least, it’s more of a sideshow than a clear and present danger.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/bo...Douthat-t.html
|
Nog uit timesonline
Citaat:
...
A big part of the book's value is its reflection on the reason why such “theories” are concocted and believed. Trying to understand this matters not least because most of their originators are, as Aaronovitch points out, educated people in other respects perfectly capable of being sensible. They include writers, professors, MPs, senators, television producers and millionaire businessmen. What is it, he asks, that makes such people believe “that the British Royal Family executes its more awkward members, that Robert Kennedy had a poisoned suppository inserted into Marilyn Monroe before [himself] being assassinated by a Manchurian Candidate, or that the Roman Catholic Church has for two millennia been suppressing the truth about the secret bloodline of Christ?” And what is it that explains how such otherwise intelligent and informed people could believe that Bush, Cheney, the CIA, the FBI, and the oil and arms industries, all together and jointly, in a massive conspiracy, arranged for the 9/11 attacks on their own fellow citizens, risking even greater murder and mayhem in Manhattan and Washington than was achieved - and that was murder and mayhem enough?
Aaronovitch's answer is that it is not enough to cite a sense of powerlessness and disenfranchisement on the part of conspiracists, trying to wrest a little control by blaming dark agents for what is going wrong in their lives and societies. It is not enough to blame alleged scarcity or contradictoriness of information about these events, leaving “unexplained holes” in the accounts that trouble onlookers and make them suspect that something more is implicated.
Such considerations play their part. But Aaronovitch finds persuasive the further possibility that conspiracy theories are the outward expression of inner problems, as suggested by Elaine Showalter's study of mass hysterias in modern culture with its rapid communication capacity, allowing people in search of explanations for their difficulties to find them in a fatigue-syndrome virus, a Gulf War toxin, a repressed memory of childhood sexual molestation, a plausible-seeming account of criminality and manipulation by dark organisations.
The power of these alternative “explanations” is that they offer narrative accounts that people can share; the discovery that others in the blogosphere have the same doubts or experiences as oneself is a powerful propagator of beliefs.
Moreover, the accounts differ across gender and time: 80 per cent of chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers are women, as are 90 per cent of repressed-memory recoverers. Aaronovitch hypothesises that conspiracy theories are “hysterias for men”. Add to this that the paranoia involved in the belief that bad people are conspiring to dupe, manipulate and harm us may paradoxically be a salve to a deeper wound, namely that we do not matter and that no one cares whether we exist or not, and the psychological mixture at work is even richer. This is a suggestion that Aaronovitch finds in the work of the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz: paranoia as a defence against feelings of worthlessness.
Doubtless there is a number of co-operating reasons for the origination and acceptance of conspiracy theories. Whatever they are, Aaronovitch's concluding point is an important one: that conspiracy theories do harm, and can have dangerous effects on policy and international affairs, as illustrated by the Nazi determination to re-arm because of beliefs about alleged JewishBolshevik plans to take over the planet. For that reason it matters that “conspiracism”, as Aaronovitch calls it, should be combated with good sense and sound reasoning. He provides an excellent example of both here.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6193056.ece
|
Uit de NewStatesman
Citaat:
...
Aaronovitch’s decision to select his subjects not “for their similarities, but for their outward differences” is a risky one, and occasionally Voodoo Histories feels more like a collection of historical essays than a unified work. However, his narrative is often redeemed by insightful analysis. THe reminds us that conspiracy theories have no clear political character: they have emanated from left and right; have been religious as well as secular; and have flowed from the bottom up and the top down. This last insight is a useful corrective to the assumption that conspiracy theories inevitably pit the little man against Leviathan. Indeed, for authoritarian regimes, Aaronovitch writes, conspiracy theories offer “a painless explanation for massive failure”.Today, it is the Hamas-led government in Gaza and the Iranian theocracy which have resurrected the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
...
By far the most urgent objection to such delusions, surely, is that the extraordinary time and resources devoted to them (the part-time conspiracy theorist is a creature yet to be discovered) distracts believers from taking action against all-too-real horrors: environmental destruction, nuclear proliferation or corporate malfeasance. However, the author casually consigns this argument to the final pages of his book. Voodoo Histories says nothing about the kinds of political formation required to halt the forward march of conspiracy theories. The appeal to scepticism is insufficient in an age when the internet provides the cloak of anonymity necessary for conspiracies to flourish. Nonetheless, Voodoo Histories is a welcome reminder that the sleep of reason breeds monsters, and an elegant attempt to rouse misguided souls from their slumber.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/20...tch-conspiracy
|
|