Conspiracy theories such as JFK distract from the real threats we face
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct...
The temptation is great to laugh off such thinking as the province of harmless potting-shed eccentrics, green-ink cranks whose tightly spaced letters could once safely be filed in the dustbin. But conspiracism – of which the JFK industry was the early exemplar – matters. It has become a defining, and dangerous, feature of the world we live in now.
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Conspiracy thinking is no longer harmless idiosyncrasy. Not when it leads to the bereaved parents of Sandy Hook or the wounded of Las Vegas being bombarded with death threats and online abuse, branding them “crisis actors†paid by the government to help stage a hoax. But there is a deeper danger too. All this energy spent trying to find the hidden hands that secretly plot our destruction is energy not spent looking for the truly hidden hand — which does not belong to one shadowy individual, or even a group, but rather to the much more complicated forces of politics, economics and history that are shaping us every day.
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Superficially, conspiracy theory and post-truth might look different. The conspiracists insist that they are bent on uncovering the real truth, while post-truthers shrug their shoulders, suggesting such truth doesn’t really exist, can never be known and doesn’t really matter anyway. But what both have in common is an indifference to facts and evidence. The conspiracist brushes off inconvenient facts as bogus, while the post-truther says they have “alternative facts†of their own. But both end up in the same place, dismissing the hard, established evidence that is the basis of reason.
They share too a supposedly defiant attitude to the establishment and the powers that be, casting themselves as heroic truth-tellers who have broken free of the credulous herd – lions among sheeple. They have favoured targets in common too. Both the JFK obsessives and a post-truther such as Donald Trump – who, let us not forget, offered his own addition to the Kennedy conspiracy canon with an evidence-free claim that the father of his Republican primary opponent, Ted Cruz, was involved in the assassination – perennially cast the FBI and the CIA as the key tools of dark, unseen forces.
This soon descends into a cynicism about democracy itself. In this view, elections are a sham; politicians are mere puppets; the real masters are hidden and lurk in the shadows, pulling the strings. Which is why, incidentally, so many conspiracy theorists, like so many post-truth merchants of the populist hard right, end up reaching the terminus of antisemitism. For antisemitism is itself often rooted in conspiracy theory: the belief that the secret hand behind world events, manipulating each and every development, belongs to the Rothschilds or George Soros or, when no euphemism is required, the Jews.