Comments on the possibility to successfully design a conspiracy (EN)

(The following quick draft is written in English because it is easier to type in this language on a QWERTY keyboard. However, English is not my mother tongue. Any reader is of course most welcome to criticize any aspect of it, including language.)

I have spent these last two days reading about the so called “9/11 conspiracy theory”
 

I would like to share some of my views about the key points underlying any conspiracy theories and debates surrounding them.

But, please, note that:

I do not intend to advocate any kind of conspiracy theory about 9/11!

I will attempt to discuss the following questions:

To what extent a conspiracy is conceivable? Which include this question: Can the conspiracy remain secret?

I think that is posible to give a univocal clear-cut answer...  

WHY WE WANT TO BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACIES

Okay, so we all observe that after a “cataclysmic” event that seems to have no reason at all or reasons that are so remote from any kind of rationality we could directly understand... we are scared.

It is as if my world and your world, the common world of security and, more important, certainty we are used to live in suddenly collapsed. Or rather, it is as if a change of such huge magnitude was opening the door to every kind of consequence that was hardly conceivable before.

Not understanding the World as an abstraction is not really a problem. In fact, nobody can. But understanding that we cannot understand it, and – as a matter of fact – understanding this for the first time in our life (because of a shock as huge as 9/11); this is scary!

This is precisely what happened when watching the box on this very day. Everyone not only understood he had never been able to understand the world – so he was leaving in an illusion of understanding – but he also understood that his own world, his surrounding environment, was to be directly impacted by these events.

When you experience such phenomenon, you’d better be prepared; you’d better find something to save yourself. You WANT an explanation. Not because you want to understand but because you want to save the way you think in the most effective way. And you also want to save as much as you can of your time, because you want to go on watching to the TV, and reading books is boring, and you need to read books to be able to understand those books you need to read to start having a clue about the causes and consequences of the events you want to understand. And so on.

This is why “conspiracy theories” are appealing. They provide fascinating explanations to events while avoiding the demanding and time-consuming efforts that would be required in the real word. And it looks like a thriller movie! So everyone can go back to her exciting fictional meaningless world.

DO LARGE-SCALE CONSPIRACIES OCCUR?

Do conspiracies exist? Are they conceivable? It is not because conspiracies are fascinating and look like your favorite TV-shows that they do not actually happen.

History shows that conspiracies do exist. You can find dozens of examples of conspiracies. On the 27 February 1933, it is very probable that the Reichstag was burned down by the Nazi Government in order to justify a more authoritarian regime.

But here rises the main difficulty: if you know for sure that an event was the result of a secret conspiracy then it no longer can be considered a successful conspiracy. Of course you can imagine that every single day, in the shadows of power and behind thrones; vicious plots are being designed against the people

But are such plots feasible in practice? Most important, are they practicable on a large scale?

Noam Chomsky, of course, believes that large-scale conspiracies are not possible the argument being that they would involve too many agents. So the necessary secret cannot be kept, and the conspiracy is soon uncovered.

So every single attempt to design large-scale conspiracy has allegedly been uncovered. I am ready to accept that huge conspiracies involving hundreds of people are just not practicable. My common sense (the greatest enemy of all time, by the way) tells me that this is a reasonable point. More, I really really like Chomsky because he is very very often very very lucid and very very thought-provoking...

But, no, I am not so ready to accept the argument. And I am not so ready to accept it because, of course, if such a large-scale conspiracy was once successful... we could not know it. I know, this is an extremely weak argument. So I have a better one, a historical one!

I do not know if it can really be labeled as conspiracy, but at least this was a huge secret, kept for years, and implying inhuman treatment of dozens and dozens of people... on the American soil. And, no, I am not going to start a stupid speech on supposed secret brotherhood. The tragic case of Gail Kastner described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, among others:

“Over the next decade, MKUltra would spend $25 million on research in a quest to find new ways to break prisoners suspected of being communists and double agents. Eighty institutions were involved in the program, forty-four universities and twelve hospitals” (2007:33)

A decade, eighty institutions, forty-four universities, twelve hospitals... Is it big enough for you Pr. Chomsky?

During years, Professors, starting with Pr. Cameron at McGill University, Canada, performed “research” experiments on human beings without their consent, with the full financial and moral support of the CIA. Such a project implied active and passive complicity of hundreds and hundreds of person, who kept horrible secrets for themselves. Some patients suffered up to 65 days of total isolation alternating with massive electroshock “therapy”. And this was revealed years after...

Are conspiracies practicable on a large scale? In democratic countries? The answer is definitely: YES. Such a thing is totally possible and can remain under cover for a sufficient period of time to perform whatever attrocities. But this is not a sufficient reason to suspect any event in the world History to be falsified without the first clue for that.