conspiracy theories

Once in awhile they’re true, but I must admit that I usually find them completely uninteresting. (Even though I do find it hard to believe that JFK was killed by one gunman.)

The possibility that the majority are being deceived by an intimate elite cabal that knows what’s really going on seems to me to be totally eclipsed by the fact that even intimate elite cabals are just as ignorant and bewildered as the rest of us. That’s where the real action is– the truths that are hidden even from the powerful.

I’m not sure why the bin Laden conspiracy theories are gaining so much traction. Certainly there’s been some slippage in the details given of the hit scene, but ideas such as the ones that bin Laden was dead years ago, is still alive and being secretly interrogated, etc., don’t make much sense to me.

It’s hard to find one person even in your own country (longtime FBI fugitive David Rudolph is a good example; it took years to catch Rudolph and he was simply hiding in the hills and coming down for food once in awhile), let alone in Pakistan where bin Laden may have been receiving help from somebody, even if just private citizens and quite possibly at a higher level than that.

Also, why is it hard to believe that the U.S. military, frustrated by bin Laden’s decade at large, would relish the chance to gun him down on sight? On paper it might sound better to interrogate him, but this is the greatest national monster in U.S. history, and almost everybody there wanted him dead. (Even Hitler never attacked the U.S., and was only an official U.S. enemy for 3.5 years.)

In short, while I think we’re probably not hearing a clear and accurate version of all the operational details, I don’t see that the basic official story runs contrary to probability. In fact, I think there were probably shoot-to-kill orders from the start, and that’s simply being obscured by mixed reports and legal concerns, but if you were the U.S. President you’d be most likely to have issued precisely those orders. Do you really think Obama wanted to deal with a bin Laden trial?

As for the idea that he’s being held in some secret torture facility, I strongly doubt that too. Too hard to drag him kicking and screaming into a helicopter, he might not talk anyway, and then they’d either have to release him for trial eventually or just do a dirty killing and dump the body somewhere, which could eventually leak if they tried it.

In any case, I generally find uninteresting the idea that someone else knows the truth and is hiding it from me, though there are certainly such cases for all of us.

I’m no Lacanian analyst, but it seems like you could have a Lacanian field day applying the concept of the “Big Other” to conspiracy theories. In fact, you could make the case that in the West conspiracy theories have filled the gap vacated by religion. (Though they also flourish in highly religious cultures as well, such as the one in which I live.)