Please, stop the madness. It's time to wake up, to take a stand against the lies of the elites. Don't you see? The devastating earthquake in Haiti. The volcanic eruption in Iceland. America's imperialist designs on Iran. There's a pattern. It's all connected.
You see, it turns out that the U.S. military has been experimenting for years on this thing called HAARP, a mysterious installation in the wilds of Alaska. They say they're just conducting experiments on the ionosphere as a way of improving satellite communications. Sounds reasonable, right? But there's something they're not telling you. Luckily a few brave souls like U.S. talk radio guru Alex Jones and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez are prepared to blow the lid off this thing. It turns out, they tell us, that HAARP is actually a "tectonic weapon" -- a system developed by Pentagon planners to cause earthquakes on cue. According to Chávez, the Haiti earthquake was just a "drill," a not-so-dry run for a planned geophysical attack on Iran. (Apparently, in a nice twist, even Sarah Palin's in on the whole thing. The original HAARP site is in Alaska, after all, and she used to be governor there.)
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Yes, I'm being sarcastic. I don't believe a word of it. As a matter of fact, I cling to the unfashionable belief that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cannot be summoned at will and generally don't follow anyone's political agenda. Let me go even farther. I do not believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, engaged in a covert effort to weaken America's national defenses against terrorism. Nor do I believe the 9/11 attacks were part of George W. Bush's nefarious master plan to take over the Middle East. To quite a few people in today's world, that makes me nothing less than a sap. One recent poll, for example, showed that 41 percent of the members of America's Republican Party (and 23 percent of the population at large) believe that Obama is prepared "to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers."
Some well-informed readers might wonder why I should be spending so much time on such obvious silliness. After all, aren't Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert already doing a perfectly good job of ridiculing wingnuts on Comedy Central? Sure. But that's not enough. It's my contention that we need to take conspiracy theories seriously (which is not at all the same thing as "at face value"). Over and over again, history has shown that people's willingness to believe in make-believe plots can get them into big trouble. In March, for example, FBI agents arrested members of a Michigan-based Christian militia group that was allegedly planning to kill police officers -- whom they regarded as the tools of a U.S. government in league with the forces of the Antichrist (identified in one position paper as former NATO secretary-general Javier Solana). Such theories may look comical to those on the outside, but we dismiss them at our peril.
I've found an ally of sorts in a new book by British author (and London Times columnist) David Aaronovitch. His new book is called Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. Aaronovitch sets out to analyze some of the most powerful conspiracy theories that have grafted themselves onto political thought in the West over the past century or so. He's especially good when it comes to describing the tenacious hold such thinking has on so many minds. The appeal, he says, is rooted in the "superior narrative" that conspiracy theories offer to their initiates. We can't help but suspect that somewhere, somehow, there's a privileged inside story that answers all those lingering questions no one has ever answered to our satisfaction. Figuring out the "code" that offers access to this hidden knowledge makes us feel heroic and strong -- and perhaps even a bit superior to the deluded masses, the "sheeple," who can't summon up the courage to challenge the official version of events. One might add that this desire to be on the "inside" also feeds our lust for gossip, a big factor driving today's frenzied celebrity culture. (Sometimes the two impulses merge: Just take the death of Marilyn Monroe.)
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