Bin Laden: Dead or alive?
By Nicholas Kohler with Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - 25 Comments
Rumours about bin Laden are only the latest in a toxic new wave of conspiracy theories
AFP/Getty Images
On Good Friday in 1865, Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary, appeared at Ford’s Theatre in Washington to watch Our American Cousin, a contemporary farce. During the play, John Wilkes Booth, a popular Shakespearian actor and Confederate sympathizer, made his way to the president’s box with a .44-calibre derringer and fired a single shot into the back of his head. Booth then leapt down onto the stage and is said to have cried: “Sic semper tyrannis”—“Thus always to tyrants!” Somehow, amid the subsequent commotion, Booth escaped, leading authorities on a 12-day chase that ended with his being locked in a burning barn in Virginia.
The men carrying Lincoln from the theatre hadn’t yet laid him down in the boarding house across the street, where he died the next day, before the conspiracy theories surrounding his shooting, Booth’s part in it, and the shadowy forces that might really lie behind the plot began proliferating. These narratives began with the conspiracy led by Booth to kill Lincoln in the days following the Confederate side’s surrender to the Union and the end of the Civil War, but quickly became more baroque.
By 1937, when amateur historian Otto Eisenschiml published his tract on the assassination—Why Was Lincoln Murdered?—Booth had become just a patsy to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s steely secretary of war. In the one figure of the scheming Stanton, Eisenschiml sewed together all the accidents and curiosities of Lincoln’s shooting into one, cohesive plan. The book marshalled arguments that cast Stanton as an individual of such capacity and ambition that he could first manufacture a situation in which Lincoln was left unguarded, engineered Booth’s improbable getaway, then orchestrated a means of spiriting his fellow conspirators away, their heads hooded, to isolated prisons where they could never report on Stanton’s role in the plot. The book was a bestseller.
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Am I the only one who’s seeing this?
By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:10 AM - 38 Comments
Recession, war: nothing slows U.S. paranoia productivity. And nation, we can’t fall behind.
Their economy is in decline, their military is bogged down in two wars and their Jon & Kate have split up, but Americans remain undisputed world leaders in one pursuit: the creation of conspiracy theories.A building can’t be blown up, a prominent figure can’t be gunned down and a Marisa Tomei can’t be awarded an Oscar without a mistrustful minority of Americans blaming the shadowy hand of sinister forces beyond their sight and comprehension. The shootings at Fort Hood are just the latest example. Within hours, the attack was being described online as a Republican conspiracy to undermine opposition to the Iraq war, an Islamic conspiracy to undermine the Republicans or a CIA conspiracy to . . . well, that CIA is up to something.
Forget baseball and crystal meth: our neighbour’s real national pastime is paranoia. It’s as American as Mom, apple pie and childhood obesity. The assassination of JFK? A secret plot to install a New World Order. Efforts to fight climate change? A secret plot created by the New World Order. Discontinuing the McRib? You’ve gone too far, New World Order!
These skeptics have a number of things going for them. First, they have their moniker—conspiracy theorist. It makes them sound smart, and confers more credibility than, say, friendless shut-in. Second, they have the Internet. It’s hard to believe there was a time when the default domain of the conspiracy theorist was a blank sheet of foolscap crying out for cramped handwriting and spelling mistakes. Today, all that’s needed to disseminate one’s theory that the “moon landing” was filmed on Shelley Winters’ backside is an Internet connection and a knowledge of CAPS LOCK. (Because nothing makes you seem more rational than TYPING LIKE THIS.)
IN THE MIND OF THE CONSPI—oops, sorry . . . In the mind of the conspiracy theorist, every government decree is suspicious. Every “fact” is likely to be proven phony. Every newspaper headline is the handiwork of the cigarette-smoking man from The X-Files. In the writing of the conspiracy theorist, there is no such thing as a lone gunman, a benevolent Jew or punctuation.
This is not to say that all such theories are hogwash. There is, for instance, abundant evidence to support my belief that having Kathy Bates appear naked in About Schmidt was a vast Hollywood conspiracy to turn me gay. And everyone who’s anyone knows that Oprah is an amphibian shape-shifter.
The root of the appeal of these theories isn’t the conspiracy itself—it’s what the conspiracy means. It’s weirdly reassuring to believe the planet is secretly run by Jews, seven-foot-tall lizard people or—to push all limits of believability—seven-foot-tall Jews. Think about it: if dark, menacing influences are behind our every failing and calamity, we’re not to blame for screwing the world up. It was all the fault of the lizard Jews!
But you want to be careful when picking a conspiracy theory to probe, support and ADVOCATE ONLINE. Some are too underwhelming to warrant the kind of hysteria you’re going to want to express. Take the “birthers.” They believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is ineligible to serve as president. Alas, it’s hard to get people interested in a “conspiracy” that was allegedly masterminded by someone with 50 cents and access to a photocopier at Office Depot.
Other theories have disreputable connections. Consider the 9/11 “truthers.” They contend the 2001 terrorist attacks were the work of rogue elements in the Bush administration, or possibly rogue elements in the intelligence community, or maybe rogue Jews, or most likely all these people sitting together in an underground lair stroking their cats. The 9/11 conspiracy is big and exciting and it would be an excellent theory to get behind were it not for the fact its most prominent advocate is—and I am not making this up—Charlie Sheen.
Sheen is a hero among truthers. He has spoken about his belief that the twin towers were brought down by “controlled demolition.” (He has also spoken about his belief that his latest wife is “smokin’ hot,” a theory that is not in question.) The actor has even sponsored a contest offering a $14,000 prize for the video that best makes the case for a new investigation of the events of Sept. 11. And hey, if that video somehow manages to include a three-way with hookers, he’ll investigate that too, bro.
While the U.S. advances its dominance in manufactured conspiracies, Canada continues to lag. We can’t afford to fall further behind in paranoia productivity. First step: we need to develop an alternate history of some our country’s seminal moments. The failure at Dieppe? Aliens. The failure of the Meech Lake accord? Really boring aliens. That time when Kim Campbell was prime minister for 20 minutes? It was all the doing of a seven-foot-tall, Jewish Charlie Sheen.
And this column? This column never happened.
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Behold the awesome power of the fall legislative agenda!
By kadyomalley - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 3:45 PM - 21 Comments
Screenyoinked from parl.gc.ca earlier this afternoon:
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, ITQ will blame this on the New Spirit of Cooperation ™, although we should note that we have also heard wild tales of PMO plans of a most cunning kind: an omnibus bill of a size and scope never before seen in Ottawa, currently pupating in the deepest reaches of Langevin, which will descend, plague of Egypt-style, on the House just before the Christmas break, on the theory that the Liberals, at the very least, won’t have the stomach to vote it down. (Hey, I warned you that it was wild; it would, however, explain the uncharacteristic legislative silence coming from Canada’s Newly Reelected Government.)
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Attention Sorosophobes/philes: We've hit the big time, y'all.
By kadyomalley - Monday, October 6, 2008 at 11:48 AM - 62 Comments
OMG OMG! You’ll never believe this — like, moments after typing up the final entry in my liveblog of the Avaaz.ca campaign launch, who should appear in front of me but a friendly neighbourbood John Baird campaign staffer, bearing a stack of freshly printed press releases bearing the fabulously evocative headline: “SHADOWY FOREIGN ORGANIZATION ATTEMPTING TO INFLUENCE CANADIAN ELECTION” – which would be awesome enough all on its own, but the subhead made it even better: Apparently – their words, not mine – a “Wall Street Billionaire” is “bankrolling [the] campaign”.
