How to Grapple With Conspiracy Theories
A few years ago, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky gave the inaugural lecture for The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom. In a talk titled, “Is Freedom for Everyone?” he asked, “Who said that even if it is good for other people, it is good for us that they will be free? Maybe it is dangerous for us.”
Invoking Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, he gave a confident answer.
“Speaking about this dissident or that one, about human rights in Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union, or any other part of the world, she was not doing it simply because she was passionate and sympathetic with it, but rather because she too saw the big picture,” he said. “She understood, exactly as Ronald Reagan did—and with all their differences, on this they were like twins—that there was only one way to win this battle with commu¬nism, one way to win the Cold War: and that was by promoting democracy and building allies on the basis of their belief in human rights and freedom.”
Imagine Mr. Sharansky’s shock at last week’s news that Mrs. Thatcher spent the weeks prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall instructing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to prevent it. “The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe.” Mrs. Thatcher said. “It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at NATO meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany.”
She added, “In the same way, a destabilization of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communization of Eastern Europe.”
I submit that this revelation is a lesson to democratic peoples about how much trust to put in their government and its leaders—the answer being “not very much.” It isn’t merely that Mrs. Thatcher cared more for the geopolitical interests of Britain than the freedom of Eastern Europeans, or that she turned out to be wrong about there being a tension between their freedom and the West’s security. The point is that her actions contradict the very core of the persona and intellectual arguments that she successfully sold to the world. Put another way, if you can’t trust the Iron Lady to oppose the Soviet Union against those it enslaved, who can you trust?
Be assured that I am not going to start alleging paranoid conspiracy theories. The most popular recent examples—that the September 11 attacks were an inside job, and that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States—are beyond the bounds of reasonable political discourse, full stop.
But just think, the conspiracy theorist might say, how you would’ve reacted before last week, if I’d asserted that Margaret Thatcher conspired with Mikhail Gorbachev to delay the fall of Eastern European communism. You’d have ignored me at best—more likely you’d have called me a loon! Or say I alleged, before documents proved it, that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI broke into Martin Luther King’s home, spied on him almost 24 hours a day, and wrote him an anonymous note urging him to commit suicide. Or to cite a recent example, imagine that I suggested, prior to this week, that ACORN staffers in two offices funded by taxpayer money tried on separate occasions to help college aged kids cheat on their taxes, open up a brothel for underage El Salvadoran girls, and funnel the profits into a Congressional campaign. You’d have said I was crazy.
The conspiracy theorist would have a point!
And rebutting their kind requires answering that challenge—glad as I am that Truthers and Birthers are ridiculed and dismissed, it is important that we’re clear on why they deserve no better. It isn’t that it’s unpatriotic to question one’s leaders, or that governments never hatch abhorrent plots, or that leaders never present one face to the world and another behind closed doors. It would be ahistorical and dangerous for a free people to believe all those things. Conspiracy theories ought to be dismissed based on the evidence.
Thanks to Popular Mechanics, the 9/11 report, and other fact-finding operations too numerous to name, it is established that the Truther nonsense, implausible from the get-go, is utterly refuted—anyone who believes otherwise isn’t engaged in a clear-headed, good faith examination of the evidence. The same can be said for the Birthers, never mind the nonsense being published by World Net Daily, a publication that dismisses not only public documents from Hawaii, the statements of its officials, and common sense, but that also hasn’t any way to explain announcements of President Obama’s birth that appeared in two Hawaii newspapers.
Why go through all that trouble, rather than dismissing conspiracy theorists –who always seem to miss the actual conspiracies—out of hand? Why not simply tell them that they are disloyal loons who ought to think better of the folks chosen to lead them?
I’d say that every democratic people must navigate a strait that passes between twin dangers—on one side, credulity and leader-worship that blinds it to the machinations of duplicitous elected officials; and on the other side, paranoid lies whose unchecked spread threatens a polity’s health and sanity. The safest way to navigate that strait is to skeptically investigate conspiracy theories, and to dismiss them on two most devastating grounds of refutation: a dearth of evidence that they are true, and a preponderance of evidence that they are false.
That may seem like a lot of work to go through for the sake of confirming what is regarded as obviously true. Usually it will be. But every so often, events in this world remind us that truth can be stranger than fiction.
Conor:
Surely you’re not equating someone who believes that 9/11 was an inside job with someone who believes that Barack Obama is not a citizen. I could easily believe that Barack, through some wierd technicality, is not actually a citizen. Perhaps there’s actually evidence that shows the truth, one way or the other. (It IS a little wierd that there’s so much secrecy about it.) The point is, that I don’t care. He is President and this birth certificate stuff is silly.
But the truthers? Please tell me you’re not equating them with the birthers. The truthers have some serious paranoia and/or hatred going on.
The fact that you include them in the same group is troubling.
— jd · Sep 14, 11:54 AM · #
jd, I’d suspect that the mindset of a full-frothing birther isn’t much different than that of a truther, but you’re right that they’re not really commensurate. Probably a closer analogue to birtherism on the left would be the Bush TANG dispute — not obviously false, but also not particularly relevant. And a closer analogue to full-on trutherism on the right would perhaps be the “Clintons had Vince Foster killed” thing.
— kenB · Sep 14, 01:07 PM · #
It is not true that “conspiracy theorists always seem to miss the actual conspiracies.” Two examples:
1. From the 80s – Government is flooding black communities with crack. True, although the “nuts” did miss the important element of selling arms to Iranian terrorists to jump-start the drug operation.
2. From the 90s – California energy crisis is engineered. True: see Enron.
— phasearth · Sep 14, 01:31 PM · #
Life is short. Conspiracy theories are many. Some are true; most are false. As a society, we don’t have the bandwidth to weigh every one of them, lest we push more probable problems aside.
— Joe S. · Sep 14, 02:39 PM · #
So what you’re saying is … common sense?
— paul h. · Sep 14, 03:02 PM · #
I’m curious why the default assumption is that she is being honest with Gorbachev. Isn’t it equally possible (if not more likely!) that she was providing false reassurance to him?
— TW Andrews · Sep 14, 03:15 PM · #
Phasearth wrote:
Whoa.
We have a real live one here. Let me guess, phasearth. If given a choice between birther and truther, you’d be a truther, right?
KenB:
Just for the record, I agree with your analysis. The difference is that there just weren’t any conservatives of note (other than Falwell) who believed in the Vince Foster thing, while the truther movement has all kinds of well-known liberals, including one that just got fired from the Obama administration.
— jd · Sep 14, 06:16 PM · #
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— xc · Sep 14, 06:49 PM · #
“Woah” what? These are things that are known to have happened. What, conservatives don’t believe in the Tuskegee Project, either?
It’s an interesting post, Conor, but I wonder if you’d consider some attention to the reverse phenomenon, “anti-conspiracy theories”, such as jd has displayed above. You know, where some truthful historical events are asserted to be too conspiratorial to have actually occurred.
— Chet · Sep 14, 07:51 PM · #
JD,
Watch “The smartest Guys in the Room” the Enron guys not only explain how they engineered the CA energy crisis, they are proud of it.
— Eric K · Sep 14, 08:47 PM · #
I was having dinner with General William Odom, former head of NSA, in 1999 while Mrs. Thatcher gave a speech. During the question period, he challenged her on her opposition to German reunification in 1989. She answered back, then came over after the formalities and the Baroness and the General went toe to toe like a baseball manager and an umpire for 15 minutes over German re-unification. Finally, Odom said something to the effect that his ancestors had stood behind trees and shot her ancestors in their dumb red coats, and they both laughed, and went off to have a drink in the bar together.
— Steve Sailer · Sep 14, 11:05 PM · #
Eric K: Yeah, watching those Enron guys high-fiving each other as brownouts roll over California is quite an eye-opener…
— phasearth · Sep 15, 02:49 AM · #
How do we know that Thatcher wasn’t lying to Gorbachev? Perhaps she foresaw (and supported) the reunification of Germany, but used this letter to maintain plausible deniability about the extent Britain’s involvement.
— adina · Sep 15, 05:58 AM · #
the papers published this week simply provide further evidence of what was already known from the views of those around at the time, including thatcher’s own autobiography. This one is not a shock in comparison to what was known but a shock in comparison as to the myth that grew up after she had retired about what “Thatcherism” was. She was much more realist in reality than she is remembered.
The different reactions of those involved in 1989-90 bring you back to the reasons for the existence of NATO, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in (Europe) and the Germans down”. thatcher and Mitterrand feared that too much success in number 1 in defeating the Russians would also lead to failure in the other two causes, i.e. the Americans would quickly go home and the Germans would become a super-power again.
— Dan · Sep 15, 05:59 AM · #
Read “Crossing the Rubicon” by M.C. Ruppert and then let’s talk about 9/11 “conspiracy theory”. I know many dismiss Ruppert as a crank, but look past the blather and read the research. There are many points to consider before a blanket dismissal.
— Richard · Sep 15, 11:30 AM · #
The “death panel” crap is orders of magnitude more paranoid than the truther movement, with far more high-profile backers. In order to be a truther, you have to believe that a few key decision makers would be willing to secretly allow thousands of Americans to die to further their political aims. Knowing what I know, of course, this is absurd. There’s no way law enforcement and intelligence could be effective enough to figure out we would be attacked and simultaneously corrupt enough to keep that fact quiet.
But in order to be a deather, you have to believe that hundreds of legislators, thousands of bureaucrats and medical professionals, and the general public at large would be willing to work together to publicly kill millions of elderly and disabled people. To be a deather, you basically have to think that your friends and neighbors are Nazis.
And as to whether birthers or truthers are crazier, that’s a hard call. To be a birther isn’t merely to believe that there is some technicality on which Obama isn’t president, like the status of the canal zone for McCain or whether Bush and Cheney are actually residents of different states. It’s not just an issue of legal interpretation, it’s an assertion of a conspiracy to hide and falsify the relevant facts decades before they became relevant.
Sure, the alleged conspiracies of truthers and deathers are more evil than the alleged conspiracies of the birthers. I’d say that’s what makes the birthers more paranoid, not less: the truthers assert a large conspiracy in pursuit of a large goal, while he birthers assert a large conspiracy in pursuit of a rather small goal.
— Consumatopia · Sep 15, 01:05 PM · #
Typical how some commenters compare truthers to birthers, but hold out that “I could easily believe that Barack, through some wierd (sic) technicality, is not actually a citizen.” and “the truther movement has all kinds of well-known liberals, including one that just got fired from the Obama administration.”
Both birtherism and trutherism are incredible (i.e., not credible) conspiracy theories. Period. Stop. End of discussion. And for those going to the conservatives’ false equivalence well – the birth certificate was posted online. During the general election. Personally verified and confirmed by Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI). The issue of President Obama’s citizenship was not raised by Sen. Clinton in the primaries. Or by Sen. McCain in the general. Or by Chief Justice Roberts before the inauguration.
In looking around for links to trutherism, I found two former Democrat Congresspersons associated with that group. And if you want to say Cynthia McKinney is a responsible Democrat, you have to admit that Alan Keyes is a responsible Republican birther. At best a wash. Van Jones is the only Obama staffer linked to the truthers, and all the right has done by driving him out of the administration is raise his profile and double his speaking fees. Meanwhile I’m sure he will still be consulted on broad policy matters, much like Tom Daschle is advising on Health reform.
On the other hand, you have actual, current Republican members of Congress advocating or at least encouraging birthers. Rep. Roy Blunt, Rep. Jean Schmidt, Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. James Inhofe off the top of my head. Another 10 or 11 Republican Congressmen co-sponsoring the so-called ‘Birther Bill’, and Sen. Tom Coburn said he would give it a serious look if the legislation got to the Senate. (And dozens of state Republican legislators as well.)
It’s not that I think the Congresspeople are truly birthers, but they are cynically using the sentiment of the “I want my country back” fringe for political purposes. And folks, no one took your country away from you, there was a fair election with a clear result. The GOP is going to have to push back against this fringe (as they did with the John Birch Society in the ’60s) if they want the moderates back in their column in future elections.
— JS · Sep 15, 04:01 PM · #
JS:
I’m not going to argue or disagree with your comment except to point out Mark Cuban, Rosie O’Donnell, Charlie Sheen, Cynthia McKinney, Van Jones: truthers all.
However, none of what you said changes the fact that believing Barack might not actually be a citizen is a long way from believing that 9/11 was an inside job.
If you can’t see the difference, then we have no more to discuss.
— jd · Sep 16, 12:42 PM · #
None of those people you mention are currently elected officials. Aside from Jones, none have ever been in a position to set policy for the Democrat party. (McKinney, while elected to Congress, was never more than a back-bencher.)
It’s less the degree of the lie I’m comparing, it’s the authority of the people doing the lying I’m talking about. Now I’m hearing that around 30% of NJ Republicans are open to the idea that Obama is the Anti-Christ. — This is not from “The Onion”. — Conservatives need to push the people inciting this nonsense back under the rocks they crawled out from.
— JS · Sep 17, 01:25 AM · #
When you hear those voices, it’s usually a good idea to just keep it to yourself.
— jd · Sep 17, 02:16 AM · #