(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan
The standard media reaction to the suggestion that ‘economic rationalism’ and ‘free trade’ are false versions of the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, deliberately contrived to bring about domination of markets by the economically strong and to further the process of ‘globalisation’, is to label the claimant a ‘conspiracy theorist’. According to the ‘politically correct’ view, ‘globalisation’ is supposed to be ‘just happening’, the result of spontaneous forces beyond the control of man, ‘market forces’, forces of inevitability, history or destiny. That’s why the media are claiming the MAI is ‘unstoppable’.
One might think that the suggestion that world events somehow take place spontaneously without people plotting and planning is so absurd as not to warrant serious discussion, but it appears that is the point now reached in this society thanks largely to the media campaign against 'conspiracy theories'.
When one boils down what a ‘conspiracy theory’ really is, it is any interpretation of world events or their causes which differs from the officially sanctioned view put out by the media. To suggest that the official view might be deliberately false to serve or protect the interests of the people who own the media, or the people who in turn own them, is itself branded a ‘conspiracy theory’. Obviously the whole ‘conspiracy theory’ business is a label to quash speculation that the official media version of the world may be false.
The claim that ‘conspiracies’ are the result of the paranoid imagination is recent. Previous generations were not so coy. Writing in his book ‘The Nation State and National Self-determination’ in 1969, for example, Professor Alfred Cobban referred to “systematic attempts [by Nazi Germany] to destroy the independent states of Europe by spreading internal dissention.” Such ‘systematic attempts’ implied conspiracy. Cobben quotes another witer from a previous century, Lecky who, in another book, ‘Democracy and Liberty’ (1896) had condemned “the use of national divisions for the [deliberate] destruction of existing political entities”. How else but by ‘conspiracy’?
Weakening neighbouring states to make them ripe for conquest by deliberately stirring up trouble within their borders is as old as mankind. It did not happen through the aspiring conqueror sitting on the toilet and thinking hard, it came about through conspiracy: a plan, meetings, and briefings, and the financing of people within the target country to stir up trouble. Leckey referred to it as “the object of all such men [tyrants] to see surrounding nations divided, weakened, and perhaps deprived of important strategical positions, through internal dissentions”.1 According to Professor Cobban, and he is hardly alone, Germany did precisely this in the years before 1939. Nobody accused these learned writers of being ‘conspiracy theorists’.
Techniques similar to the ‘conspiracy theory’ stunt were used by the media to protect the communist movement in the post-World War II years. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is a conspiratorial document. The purpose of its authors, Marx and Engels, was to inspire the workingmen of all nations to unite and overthrow their capitalist oppressors and the state they controlled and replace them with a state in which the working class were the ruling class. An international organisation, the Communist International, was formed to coordinate the activities of the Communist movement world-wide. Lenin, in ‘What is to be Done’ (1902), urged communists to “go amongst all classes of the people as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organisers”. One can hardly get more conspiratorial than that.
And that’s exactly what communists did, yet anybody who suggested as much was accused by the editors of the mass media of ‘kicking the communist can’, or ‘seeing reds under the bed’. There was ‘no communist plot’, according to Western media, even though all the communist literature confirmed that there was, and any worker on an Australian factory floor was well aware of it. Even when Mihail Gorbachev, with the arrival of ‘glasnost’ and ‘peristroika’, confirmed that Russia has been ‘exporting revolution’ and said it was time that it stopped, no apologies from the editors of mass media were forthcoming.
That the American CIA works around the clock to prop up or topple governments in other countries according to their usefulness or otherwise to American interests is well known. Yet despite evidence the CIA may have been involved in the toppling of Australia’s Whitlam government in 1995, to actually say so gets you labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Things are what the media say they are, and anything else is ‘conspiracy theory’.
To suggest that human affairs have never been, or are not now the outcome of deliberate human connivings, some of them covert, is patent nonsense. Yet that, is what the editors and journalists of the major media are expecting the public to believe. That such stupidity could come out of the mouths of men and women professing to be objective reporters of human events and commentators on human affairs defies rational explanation. The evidence that there are hidden interests at work, and always have been, is so overwhelming that the persistence of media people in their irrational denial tends to confirm that there is conspiracy at work right now, and they are part of it.