State-sponsored conspiracy theories - from China to Zimbabwe

 

Until I started researching “Don’t Get Fooled Again”, the typical image that sprang to mind when I thought about conspiracy theorists was that of the tin-hat wearing eccentric pictured here.

But one of the most striking things I found while writing the book was the extent to which conspiracy theories are often being disseminated not by lone “nuts” but by established governments.

The Chinese authorities have been at it recently, with a series of increasingly colourful claims about the nefarious global activities of the “Dalai clique” - but the prize of the month has to go to the ruling party in Zimbabwe, who have published several documents, including a letter ostensibly signed by Gordon Brown, detailing a conspiracy involving the British government, the German Central Bank and the Zimbabwean political opposition to invade the country, oust Robert Mugabe, and restore the old white-supremacist state of Rhodesia. Justice minister Patrick Chinamasa reportedly insisted he would stand by the allegations even if the documents were shown to be fake, because “even if Brown hadn’t put it in writing, everyone knows that is what the British are plotting”.

From “Titanic Express” to “Don’t Get Fooled Again”

“Don’t Get Fooled Again” is a very different kind of book from “Titanic Express”, but there are some common elements. Both, in their own ways, centre around a search for the truth, personally and politically. Both also look at how we can distinguish what’s true from what isn’t - or at least how we can tell a reasonable assumption from a completely nonsensical one - and why it is that these things matter. And both look in some detail at the issue of conspiracy theories, and the damage they can do.

In “Titanic Express”, the conspiracy theories I came across were often all-encompassing - so much so that at one point I was told that my sisters’ killers suspected me of being part of some devilish global plot to discredit them. And in “Don’t Get Fooled Again”, many of the most disturbing delusions I looked at - such as the belief that HIV doesn’t exist or is harmless, seemed ultimately, again, to rest on the belief in some conspiracy or another. What I wasn’t able to do in “Titanic Express” was to look in detail at the features that define a conspiracy theory, what it is, psychologically, that attracts us to such ideas, and the tools that we can use to unravel them - so it was great to have a chance to go into these questions a bit more in DGFA.