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Even Conspiracy Theories Can Be True by Steve Sailer UPI, January 17, 2001 |
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"Antitrust" is the latest movie churned out by Hollywood that portrays immense organizations secretly conspiring to have their way. In this new thriller, Tim Robbins plays an evil computer multi-billionaire who looks so much like a certain richest man in the world that his character might as well be named "Gil Bates." We members of the press love to nag you members of the public about why you rush out to see these conspiracy movies. After all, conspiracies don't really exist. If they did, we reporters would know about them! Right? Not necessarily. One reason people are interested in conspiracy theories is that at least some important secret operations really do exist. As Henry Kissinger liked to say, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies." For example, for a quarter of a century after World War II, the victors kept hidden from the public the very existence of what was possibly the most important factor in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany: "Ultra." To break the German Enigma codes, the British built a top-secret deciphering complex on the grounds of Bletchley Park in central England. This gigantic project, which lead to the invention of the electronic computer, employed as many as 10,000 workers. The German military, it turned out, wasn't paranoid enough. They refused to change their codes because they didn't believe anyone could mount an operation capable of cracking them. Omnipresent surveillance is a staple of conspiracy movies, so it can't be true. Or can it? For years, it was easy to assume that unhinged-sounding Frenchmen ranting about how the "Anglo-Saxons" were eavesdropping on their telephone calls had just spent too much time at the cinema. This Gallic paranoia turned out to be largely accurate, however. The U.S., U.K, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who have been working together to intercept communications since "Ultra," do indeed team up to run a vast global wiretapping network called "Echelon" Likewise, by refusing to view Russian politics from a conspiracy perspective, the respectable press largely failed to accurately report what was happening in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union. For years, the establishment media insisted on portraying Russian politicians as ideologically motivated public servants clashing over whether to emphasize the free market or the social safety net. Instead, these idealistic-sounding labels were mostly masks for the conspiracies of various criminal gangs struggling over who got the biggest share of the loot. In contrast to the serious press, Hollywood, which quickly added the Russian Mafia to its inventory of stock bad guys, may well have provided a more realistic sense of what power in Boris Yeltsin's Russia was really all about. Of course, the conspiracy explanations popular with screenwriters and the public are often the wrong ones. Yet, that doesn't mean that there are no conspiracies. The real computer industry, for example, is a lot duller than the one portrayed in "Antitrust." Yet, the history of the diamond industry is as lurid as any Hollywood thriller. For decades, the mighty DeBeers cartel fixed the price of diamonds so flagrantly that its executives could not set foot in the U.S. for fear of arrest. Meanwhile, DeBeers' ostensible partners, such as Russian government officials, tried to cheat on the cartel by smuggling freshly mined diamonds out of the country. Finally, many central African countries that had thought themselves blessed with rich veins of diamond mines have instead been wracked by wars fought to control the mines. Since 1997, diamond-rich Congo has seen eight foreign armies fighting on its soil. This gem-fueled chaos culminated this week in the shooting of Congo's president Laurent Kabila. Similarly, the mysterious wreckage found at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 has been a staple of films and T.V. shows claiming that the U.S. government covered up an alien spacecraft's crash. In reality, there were no aliens at Roswell. That's what long-time UFO advocate Karl T. Pflock reluctantly concludes in his upcoming book, "Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe." On the other hand, the military's public explanation that the debris came from a simple weather balloon was not precisely true, either. According to Pflock, the Roswell wreckage consisted of a secret reconnaissance super-balloon the U.S. government hoped to float across the Soviet Union to photograph strategic installations. Other UFO reports also originated in Soviet aerospace technology crashing back to Earth. For example, several times during the Sixties and Seventies, thousands of South Americans would witness numerous fireballs falling out of the sky. Immediately afterwards, stories of contacts with aliens would spring up everywhere. In the preface to Pflock's book, best-selling science fiction novelist Jerry Pournelle, who held various hush-hush jobs in the military-industrial-intelligence complex during the Sixties, says the fireballs were very real. The Soviets conducted numerous tests of a secret Fractional Orbital Bombardment System that could deliver a nuclear attack on the U.S. from the south, where we had no Early Warning System. Sometimes the dummy warheads came down on Peru or Chile. The alien stories, however, were Soviet KGB disinformation. According to Pournelle, the Kremlin didn't want to admit it was building the capability of launching a Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack on the U.S. So, it planted stories about extra-terrestrials. These ludicrous accounts muddied the waters, making the witnesses to the actual fireballs seem slightly delusional as well. Meanwhile, the CIA knew all about the Soviet tests, but didn't want the Russians to know it knew. So, our government never exposed the Communists' little green men hoaxes. Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.
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