From The Sunday Times
May 3, 2009
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch
Cape - £17.99 - pp368
The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart

22 Nov.1963 - President Kennedy and wife Jackie in motorcade. Pic from Sunday Times.

In his introduction to this forensically intelligent and hugely enjoyable study of modern conspiracy theories, David Aaronovitch quotes the great British historian, Lewis Namier. “The crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense — an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen.”
It is precisely that sense that conspiracy theorists lack. Instead they have a kind of facile, adolescent knowingness, resembling nothing like proper, ordered knowledge, let alone the kind of instinctive wisdom Namier commended.

Typical of their type is a group of 76 mavericks calling themselves the Scholars for Truth, who, since 9/11, have argued that the destruction of the World Trade Center was nothing to do with Islam, but an American government plot. The 76 soi-disant scholars include not a single Middle-East expert, but instead an engineer who believes America is plotting to bomb Jupiter with antimatter weapons, and another who is an authority on the mechanics of dentistry. Their theories and pronouncements have been widely disseminated, and admired, on the internet, which is, of course, the conspiracy theorists’ natural habitat: a vast maelstrom of mis­information, the cyber-equivalent of that huge floating gyre of rubbish in the Pacific.

Aaronovitch begins his survey at the start of the 20th century, with a consideration of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a wildly anti-semitic Russian forgery of 1903, intended to prove that the Jews were plotting world domination. It might have helped to have had some overview of conspiracy theories in the pre-modern age. Didn’t the Victorians believe in wild rumours, too? If not, why not? And surely during the Middle Ages large populations were regularly swept by lunatic suspicions and beliefs.

They’re still keen on the long-since discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Middle East. Hamas alludes to it regularly in its official Covenant, which also blames Zionists for the French revolution and the First World War. The latter was fought “to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate”. This is a perfect ­example of the frequent vanity inherent in conspiracy-think. It enables the jihadists of Hamas to put themselves at the centre, to say, “The first world war? It was all about us.”
The full review at The Times online.