This essay on conspiracy theories, covering three cultures and the collapse of religion, was first published in 2022 in the Critical Muslim’s Ignorance issue. It was recently translated and adapted for Arabic at Alpheratz.
Now here’s a strange coincidence. In the summer of 1994, after a year living in Rawalpindi and working for ‘The News’ – the English-language sister of the Urdu ‘Jang’ – I spent six weeks travelling in the high mountains of the Pakistani north. I hear the area has since been opened up for tourism, but in those days it was the very definition of isolated. You were unlikely to meet even a Punjabi up there, let alone a group of Scotsmen, let alone a group of Scotsmen from the specific part of Galloway in which I’d passed a large part of my childhood. And yet that’s what happened: in Mastuj, on the Chitral side of the Shandur Pass, I bumped into three sons of Galloway, artists, fishermen, farmers, and they were called Robin, Robert and Richard.
Brought together for a few hours there in a dip between the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush, we marveled at our common Gallovidian connections and the strange similarity of our names, and drank several cups of tea together, and shared several Chitrali cigarettes, then slept side by side on the floor of the tiny village’s one-room accommodation. The next day we continued on our respective ways – I towards Chitral, and they in the direction of Gilgit.
Soon the encounter was lost in the stream of events; that is, I more-or-less forgot it, until one afternoon fourteen years later, when I had recently returned to Galloway, and there was a knocking at my door.
It was Robin. The other one.
“I saw you in the shops and followed you home,” he said. “We met in Pakistan, years ago now. You’re Robin, I think.”
What were the chances of that? Not only of the meeting, but of the re-meeting too. In the following weeks I also re-met Robert and Richard. And Robin introduced me to others, in Galloway and further afield. A good part of my current social life owes to him, or to that serendipitous meeting in Mastuj.
What should I make of this?
Our storytelling minds always look for correspondences, for patterns. Through them we find rhyme and rhythm in reality. By them we make sense of what otherwise seems senseless.
Different people will approach patterns in different ways. Someone who sees no patterning at all in their life – and perhaps no meaning – stands at one extreme. A paranoid schizophrenic stands at the other. For such a person, every detail of life is meaningful, each atom contributes to an overwhelming plot. And the schizophrenic is personally at the centre of the plot as the prime or sole victim, the reason the conspiracy was born. A run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist stands somewhere in the middle, making a very normal effort to understand life’s strangeness.
But back to the meeting in the mountains. How to understand this unlikely intertwining of Robins? In retrospect, the meeting was a convergence which seemed predestined. Had it not happened, so many more events would also not have happened. Everything would have turned out differently. So can I say it was meant to be? Was it written into the fabric of creation? Or had it been planned on some lower level? Did some dark Gallovidian intelligence send the Scotsmen to find me? And to what end? (The lack of a punch line to the story makes it a poor candidate for this kind of reading. Had I or the Scotsmen disappeared after the meeting, or suffered some dramatic sudden change, then the plot would need to thicken…)
What kind of agent was at work? If the meeting occurred by God or nature’s arrangement, it was a fateful correspondence, a matter of destiny. If by human plot, a conspiracy.
Though the thing about conspiracy theories – for those under their fictive sway – is that they are bigger than human, very often they render human efforts redundant.
2
In upper Chitral we weren’t very far from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (in those days still called North West Frontier Province), which at the time was becoming a heartland of various conspiracy theories surrounding the polio vaccine. According to these tales, the vaccine’s true purpose was to render Muslim women infertile and thus to prevent the birth of future Muslim generations. The top level plotters were Americans, Israelis and UN officials, but the foot-soldiers were the Pakistani doctors and nurses who administered the vaccine. Several of these health workers were shot dead.
The conspiracy theory persists, and today Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries in the world not to have eradicated polio. The result, as well as dead doctors, is lives blighted by disability. But the explanatory power of the theory overcomes everything else. “My child has stopped praying since you last administered polio drops,” complains a parent in 2022.
How do these theories work? The perpetrators of the conspiracy keep changing to fit culture and context. They may be witches, Catholics, Freemasons, Ahmadis, the Illuminati, the lizard people, the EU, George Soros and his minions, or the Bill Gates Foundation. Whoever they are, a specified group of humans is conspiring against the rest of us. Yet the theory divides humanity not into two, but three. First there are the conspirators, with their evil plan. Then the victims, the conspired against, are split into two: the ignorant herd, almost always the vast majority, suffer from but are blind to the conspiracy; but the awakened few, who have access to the truth, are to some extent redeemed by knowledge. One undoubted benefit of being a conspiracy theorist is the sense of specialness that true sight conveys. To understand the conspiracy is to claim membership in the elect, the one right sect. In this informational if not moral righteousness, there are many echoes of religion.
It should be admitted here that conspiracies do in fact exist, and are in fact very common. Whenever two people conspire against a third, there is a conspiracy. Everyday family politics is full of conspiracy. So is the world of business, and no doubt governments, political parties, militaries and intelligence services are fairly constantly hard at work conspiring. The trouble with the conspiracy theory is that it over-simplifies, over-generalizes and over-explains. It assumes that one specific conspiracy wields the power to cancel out all others. It reduces the dazzling complexity of reality. It seeks to boil everything down to one key factor. It sees one overarching plot rather than a jumble of a trillion. The conspiracy theory, to borrow the title of Edward Casaubon’s failed book project, seeks to provide A Key to All Mythologies. Casaubon is the pedant and failed husband in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, and his book title is a pointer to his narrowness of vision, his attempt to force a poly-angular world into the square-shaped hole of his preconceptions. And so a child’s refusal to pray can be put down, very simply, to polio drops.
Pakistan is located in what used to be known as the third world, and polio thrives in the least developed parts of Pakistan. So it’s tempting – at least it was then – to believe that conspiracy theories are caused by underdevelopment. That they inhabit the minds of people who lack good information or proper education, people unequipped to understand how the world works.
Two things must be said: conspiracy theories concerning vaccinations are as old as vaccinations themselves, and they started in Enlightenment Europe. When – in 18th Century England – Edward Jenner inoculated patients against smallpox with a cowpox vaccine, critics claimed that the vaccinated would grow horns. Second, false narratives can be reinforced by idiotic interventions by those who are advanced in technology but undeveloped in wisdom. The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in Pakistan’s Abbottabad as part of its hunt for Osama bin Laden, seemingly confirming to local conspiracy theorists the notion that vaccines were a front for foreign imperialists.
The prevalence and salience of conspiracy theories rise and fall across time in cultures, rising particularly when people are confused and frightened by rapid social change. They are quite possibly catalysed by novel communication technologies. The spread of the printing press throughout Europe, for example, coincided with a witch-hunting mania of mass-murderous proportions. (One of the most popular and most frequently reprinted texts of the period was “Melleus Maleficarum” or “The Witch’s Hammer”.) Through the 20th Century newspapers and radio helped define national saviours and enemies and potential scapegoats. And today the internet creates instant communities of conspiracy theorists across national borders.
The ideal conspiracy theorist is someone who feels impotent amid the onrush of change. Someone who senses others are directing the changes, not him, and that none of them work in his interest. Someone who lives under dictatorship fits this profile particularly well. This suggests that political underdevelopment specifically may promote a conspiratorial atmosphere.
In its appetite for conspiracy theories, the Arab world is very similar to Pakistan, and very possibly worse. Pakistan is a seriously flawed but nevertheless working democracy. None of the Arab states are democracies – with the partial and precarious exception of Tunisia since 2011. In Arab capitals, until 2011 at least, conspiracies were usually how politics was done. The people of the area usually had no influence at all on the management or even the formation of their states. The borders were drawn by unannounced foreigners. Coups and counter-coups were organized by competing intelligence services and secret military committees. Nobody knew who was actually doing what, or why, so stories grew to fill the gaps.
In the Arab states, there’s always a lot going wrong, and always, therefore, a lot of blame to be allocated. Rather than blame economic, military and political failures on the regimes in power, or on generalized corruption, or on ourselves, it’s easier to blame the hidden machinations of foreign powers, or sectarian minorities, and best of all – as traditional anti-Semitism meets outraged anti-Zionism – the Jews.
In frustrated, censored, fearful spaces, stories epitomizing local concerns proliferate and grow until they perform as impossible explainers of the largest global events. So while it may be reasonable to worry about the Israel lobby’s influence on American policy in the Middle East, it isn’t reasonable to blame the Jews for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or for the failure of the Arabs to organize themselves into one mighty super-state. I’ve heard both of these theories from the mouths of café philosophers in Syria. In Damascus, copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are reliably on sale, without any introduction to inform the reader that the text is a forgery penned by Russian secret policemen in the nineteenth century.
Of course, the anti-Semitism is state-sanctioned. The ignorance and prejudice of the powerless is exploited and directed by the powerful, who will always do what they can to deflect popular anger. A typical if somewhat extreme example is Mustafa Tlass, Syria’s defence minister from 1972 to 2004, writing and publishing “The Matzah of Zion”. The book rehashes the ‘Damascus affair’ of 1840, which was itself a rehashing of the medieval European ‘blood libel’ against Jews. In 1840 Damascene Christians accused Damascene Jews of killing a monk in order to bake Passover bread with his blood. The accusation was adopted by the French Consul, who convinced the Egyptian governor of the city to arrest some unlucky Jews. Confessions were extracted under torture, and were taken as firm evidence then, and once again by the Baathist Tlass a century and a half later.
It doesn’t matter how far the theories stretch credibility, they’ll always find an audience. Lebanon’s Hizbullah started the story that thousands of Jews were warned not to go to work in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Jews are presumably so loyal to their central command that not one of these thousands spilled the beans (except perhaps to Hizbullah; otherwise, how would Hizbullah know?) I’ve been told over the years, by different people in different Arab countries, that the Saud family, Colonel Qaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, and Yasser Arafat were in fact secret Jews. This approach certainly obviates the need for political analysis, and suggests – optimistically – that to achieve success the Arab world only needs to find some actual non-Jewish leaders. As well as simplifying, these stories soothe wounded pride. It’s not so much of a failure to be defeated by an omnipotent global conspiracy – indeed, without divine intervention, no other result is possible. And the stories are also very flattering – for how important and frightening our nation must be if the Jews, the Freemasons, American capitalists, and assorted others in concert are constantly plotting to keep it down.
During the Syrian revolution, the regime generated an endless string of conspiracy theories to explain the trouble it was in. Apparently Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Zionists, and al-Qaida were in bed together, and were paying protestors to take to the streets. Apparently protestors were fuelled by thousands of imported LSD ‘pills’, some of which were intercepted and displayed, each pill branded with the Al-Jazeera logo. Apparently Al-Jazeera had built stage sets of Syrian cities in the Qatari desert, and actors were performing as Syrian soldiers shooting at other actors performing as Syrian civilians.
Revolutionaries on the ground, meanwhile, laughed at the silly tales. Having broken with the regime’s alternate reality, they were taking responsibility for their own lives. They were organising their neighbourhoods, working with their neighbours, working for a better future. They were taking power.
3
Now I live again in Scotland, in Galloway, where the infrastructure is well developed, the economy healthy, the education universal. In Galloway we are free of war and state violence. We can vote. We can say what we like.
Twenty seven years after our initial meeting, what has become of Robin, Robert and Richard?
Robin is of an older generation, less internet-influenced. His fishing line keeps him down to earth.
Robert, on the other hand, is a deeply invested conspiracy theorist. He believes that Princess Diana was assassinated. He believes that 9/11 was an inside job. He believes these conspiracies are obvious, if you only choose to look. He has YouTube videos to back them up. He insists that you watch and listen. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. He waxes passionate. If you demur, he flares into anger.
His theories exaggerate intentionality and underestimate the arbitrary. In his world view, things can’t just happen by themselves. Cars don’t just crash; terrorists don’t just get lucky. To explain such events, he asks the question cui bono, or who benefits? Somebody must – and that somebody must be the person who has caused the event.
This fallacy has often been used to deny the evidence of regime chemical attacks against civilians in Syria. These must be false flag attacks, goes the argument, staged so as to provoke western intervention. The rebels benefit, therefore they (or their supposed allies in the Turkish, or perhaps French, states) must be the ones who carried out the attacks. The same argument was used many times to cover many different attacks – and long after it became evident that there would be no meaningful western intervention. Of course the rebels didn’t benefit from seeing their families choke and convulse to death; whereas the regime did benefit by spreading panic in revolutionary neighbourhoods and breaking the force of rebel offensives. And of course the rebels didn’t have the means to store or deploy chemical weapons, and no Turkish or French planes were flying anywhere near the vicinity of the attacks. But all this is irrelevant. The story is what matters, not the facts, and certainly not the dignity of the victims.
When Robert began repeating the Syrian conspiracy theories, I had to ask him to be quiet. Not in my presence, I said. Not about Syria. I can’t bear it.
What about Richard?
Richard is a man who talks with exclamation marks. For instance: “The carbon thing? That’s a hoax. A hoax! They’re saying climate change, yeah? Well of course it changes! If it didn’t change, it wouldn’t be climate! But you can’t say it. It’s like the Holocaust – you can’t talk about it!”
Does that mean you can’t talk about the Holocaust being a hoax? Better not to ask. Better to keep the conversation on those things right beneath our noses, because Richard has reliably outrageous takes on anything more distant. On things of which he has no direct experience, he has sudden enthusiasms which lead him immediately into a confidence as deep as the deepest abyss.
He was briefly – after listening to a podcast – an expert on Bolivia. When President Morales resigned amid protests over disputed elections in 2019, Richard was certain this was part of a secret American plot – known only to the plotters themselves, and the listeners of the podcast – to deprive China of Bolivian uranium. Another time I ran into him, he was an expert on gay men. Didn’t I realize that they were gay because the government was funding them to be gay? Before this recent funding opportunity, gays didn’t really exist.
Fortunately the expertise concerning the gays lasted only one day, as far as I could see. On covid, however, Richard has been a consistent expert since the beginning of the first lockdown. He knows for absolute sure that the disease doesn’t exist, and that if it does it’s no worse than a cold, and that vaccination is a ruse for gathering the population’s DNA, and that the vaccine is also designed to kill. “It’s a cull!” he exclaims. “That’s what it is!”
When a wave of covid hit India so badly that the crematoria were overwhelmed and people resorted to sailing their relatives’ corpses down the Ganges, I thought that at last Richard and people like him would have to accept that the disease was real. But I was wrong. He brought the subject up as soon as we next met, along with a ready-made explanation for the deaths. The Indians were dying not of covid but of hunger and thirst, because the Indian government had stopped the food and water supplies. It had done so because it wanted to create the impression that covid was killing people.
I didn’t ask how he thought the Indians could be so stupid as to believe they were dying of a virus when they were simply starving. I did question his wisdom on the gays, and I do sometimes tell him to change the subject, but usually, I’m afraid, I just nod and smile and wait for him to finish.
I’m not sure if this response is cowardly or tolerant. If I came across such a person on social media, I’d block them immediately. In the virtual world, such people enrage me. All I know of them are their statements, and their statements make a mockery of both truth and human suffering. They are statements which lead, before too long, towards the justification of all sorts of madness, up to and including genocide.
But this isn’t social media, and Richard is in actual fact a nice guy. He’s always been good to me. When I tell him it’s time to change the subject (because what’s he saying will lead us into dispute), he does change the subject, and does so with a smile. Besides, he’s too unconnected to power, or to anyone beyond his own small circle, to do anyone any damage. And within his local sphere of practical knowledge, he’s actually pretty impressive. He rebuilt his house around an enormous wood-burning stove, for instance, and is now entirely self-sufficient in fuel. He grows vegetables, raises goats, chickens and geese, and cuts his own hay with a scythe. He’s built a tower from tree trunks, and attached gargoyles to his roof. He’s obviously a great father to his son.
On the other hand, he isn’t much of a critical thinker. In terms of internet media, he’s largely illiterate. “The word on YouTube is….” he declares, unironically, not understanding how the YouTube algorithm works. How it works is this. Videos are selected and presented to the user according to the user’s search and watch history. So watching a video which questions vaccines leads to a selection of videos condemning vaccines, and eventually to videos claiming that vaccines are designed by Bill Gates to cull the population and engineer a great economic reset. Soon each video presented is more extreme than the last, and no video is presented which might provide a counterweight. This creates the impression in the viewer that the videos and the conspiracy theories they express are not extreme but mainstream. After that, confirmation bias kicks in. This is a mental rather than digital algorithm, by which a person registers only that information which confirms a pre-existing belief. So if someone suffers a heart attack, and was vaccinated in the months previous, Richard reasons that the heart attack must have been caused by the vaccine. The smoking, drinking and cake-eating have nothing to do with it.
Usually conspiracy theorists are eager to explain that they aren’t conspiracy theorists, simply observers of the truth. Richard, however, claims the label with pride. “I’m a conspiracy theorist, me!” he roars. “I swallowed the red pill early!”
The openness is disarming, and makes him seem like a special case, but Richard’s mental habits, though not generally owned up to, are remarkably common. Our aged neighbor, for example, knows that covid is real, and isolates himself for fear of it. But he won’t take the vaccination for fear that the government will murder him. He also has fixed ideas concerning the Arabs. “They are divided,” he told me over his garden wall, “into Sunni and Shia. That’s why they need a strong leader to stop them fighting. That’s why Qaddafi did so much good for Libya, and why it’s chaos there now he’s gone.” I pointed out that Libya isn’t actually divided by sect, given that the Libyan Shia population is tiny to the point of insignificance. Without missing a beat, Monty shifted to his next stock explanation. “It’s Israel, then. Whenever there’s trouble in that part of the world, Israel’s the one behind it.”
Reader, you can leave the Arab world behind, but these days it will follow you.
A friend who isn’t a conspiracy theorist visited a friend of his who is. When he said he’d been vaccinated, his friend not only told him he’d been injected with a microchip, he even brought out a device to locate it. This was a tool he’d purchased through the internet. When it didn’t provide a reading, he grew upset. “O well,” my friend said, smiling gently. “The chip must have embedded itself in my brain by now.” But the conspiracy theorist said that couldn’t be the case. “It stays in the arm. It doesn’t move around.” He threw his tool to the ground. “It’s broken,” he announced. “I’ll ask for a refund.”
You can laugh, but you can’t escape these theories. You can laugh until you grow tired of laughing, until your cheeks hurt, and still the theories come.
Someone I know visited the local reflexologist. During the friendly chit-chat accompanying the foot massage, she was informed that Putin had invaded Ukraine not because he wants to recreate the Soviet empire, not even because he’s disgruntled by NATO expansion, but in order to break up pedophile rings.
I’d just noted down this list of local conspiracy theorists when my wife and I decided to drive into the nearby town to buy a kebab. While waiting for our order, we each opened a copy of the free newspaper which lay on the counter. It was called The Light (with the strapline: The Uncensored Truth). In previous decades a free newspaper available in a public place, if not advertising products, would likely have advertised religion, or perhaps workers’ rights. The Light, however, is a publication serving “the truth movement”. Most of it covers what it calls “the covid coup”, but there are also articles on “the fake war between Russia and Ukraine, deliberately triggered by the conspirators” and “weaponised LED 5G streetlights.” Products are advertised too, mainly things you can ingest or wear to protect your health if you’re not gullible enough to submit to the vaccine.
One of The Light’s columnists warns of “the conspirators’ blood-thirsty ambition to reduce the world’s population by 90%,” and ends his piece thus: “whenever anything bad happens, ask yourself ‘What is the most sinister reason for this?’ … Eternal paranoia is now the price of freedom.”
4
I’d like to believe that conspiracy theories are particularly prominent in this particular part of Scotland (as well as in the Arab countries, and Pakistan), and not everywhere else. That perhaps isolation renders rural people more paranoid than the average, or more vulnerable to the algorithmic rabbit hole. But when I look out into the world – metropolitan as well as rural, western as much as eastern – I can’t see anywhere free of the curse. Because once again we are in the midst of an age of conspiracy theories. They determine our high politics as well as our popular culture.
The Global War on Terror, reducing dozens of conflicts to a decontextualized, homogenized story of good warriors versus evil plotters, was somewhere between a conspiracy theory and a slogan. That’s how our century began.
Two decades on, and Donald Trump has proudly performed the first social-mediatised post-truth presidency. His original move from real estate and reality TV into real politics was via Birtherism, the unevidenced belief that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and therefore was ineligible for the presidency, and that this secret was being hidden by scheming liberal elites.
Following the populist playbook, Trump, an enormously rich and privileged man, presented himself as a man of the people and a victim – like the people – of various malign cliques, most notably the ‘fake news’ media. In this way he neutralised the truth-telling potential of investigative journalism – he simply declared the truth to be fake, and his own lies to be truths, even when they contradicted each other. He also profited from the QAnon movement – an interlinking set of conspiracy theories which hold that establishment figures including Hillary Clinton are engaged in the trafficking and sexual abuse of children, and are also conspiring against the Trump presidency. (The Scottish reflexologist’s story about Putin battling Ukrainian paedophiles seems to be a variation on the QAnon theme.) Trump’s biggest conspiracy theory, and the most damaging to democracy, was the story that the result of the 2020 presidential election was falsified by the Democrats in league with shadowy deep state forces. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 53% of Republicans choose to believe this lie. That’s many millions of people, many of them armed. The full ramifications have not yet played out.
Underlying a great deal of Trumpist politics – the Birtherism, the border wall, the travel bans – is racial resentment, and specifically the American version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This story is about the Democratic Party and other liberal plotters destroying America’s white majority by ‘replacing’ white people with non-white immigrants (many, no doubt, originating from “shithole countries”). According to YouGov, 61% of Trump voters and 53% of Fox News viewers believe this stuff. Tucker Carlson of Fox News has referred to the Great Replacement on his show more than 400 times. The most extreme iterations of the theory deploy the term ‘white genocide’, and often identify the liberal plotters as Jews. This is why the marchers at the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 chanted “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us” interchangeably.
The European version of the Great Replacement theory focuses in particular on the supposed Muslim demographic threat. Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban frequently refers to it, and it was bandied about during the recent French presidential elections, not only by the two professedly far right candidates, but also by the centre-right Valérie Pécresse as she attempted to compete on the far right’s territory. 67% of French people say they are worried about the Great Replacement. The Bosnian-Serb general Ratko Mladić justified genocide against Bosnian Muslims by stating that the Islamic world is armed, if not with an atomic bomb, then a “demographic bomb.” Burman Buddhist ethnic cleansers in Myanmar imagine their Rohingya victims – poor farmers and fishermen – as the striking arm of an organized demographic threat which has already wiped out Buddhism in parts of Asia including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hindu nationalists in India see love affairs between Muslims and Hindus as a ‘love jihad’ conspiracy, an attempt to subdue India by non-military means. (And these replacement stories travel to the strangest places. Sometimes Muslims will pick up an Islamophobic conspiracy theory and repurpose it as a wish-fulfilling dream. A Syrian once told me – a little over twenty years ago – that within twenty years Europe would have a Muslim majority.)
Renaud Camus, author of the 2011 book “The Great Replacement” – the text (in French) which gives the conspiracy theory its current name – routinely refers to non-white immigrants in Europe, those arriving from ex-colonies, as ‘colonisers’. And so, by these rhetorical turns, even the powerful can recast themselves as powerless. The victimisers, confused and frightened by rapid social change, turn themselves into victims.
In Britain, Brexit, while containing many dimensions and motivations, was built on a foundation of national victimology. Great Britain, it was sometimes implied and sometimes openly stated, was being held back by European bureaucrats and all kinds of immigrants. Control – or sovereign power, or liberty – had been snatched from British hands. The solution was expressed in the free-floating three-word slogan ‘Take Back Control’, and then, when nobody could agree on what taking back control should actually mean, in the even more brutally uncomplicated three-word slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’.
Not the climate crisis, or increasing poverty, or rising strategic threats, but this politics of myth and bruised identity is what dominated British public life for over half a decade. It was a diet of dreams, perhaps expressed most clearly by a man seen on TV, interviewed in a pub on Tyneside: “What do they mean we’ll be isolated after Brexit? Of course we won’t. This is the British Empire! There are billions of people in the British Empire.”
It was a remarkably stupid thing to say, but also remarkably revealing of what lay beneath the surface of more intelligent pro-Brexit commentary. The bar-side take, about three quarters of a century out of date, expresses nostalgia for a time when Britain did rule the waves, just as the Trumpists of the United States dream of a time when the ruling classes were entirely white, and Black people knew their place. Most British people and most white Americans in fact had far shorter and poorer lives in those times, but the burnished image of those times, their happy representation, shines brightly when compared to the troublesome global complexity of the present.
Indeed all this reaching for walls, reinforced borders and simple certainties, the isolationism and protectionism, could be understood as an angry reaction to our internationalist reality, in which waves of trouble, ideology, wealth, or democratization starting in one part of the world may quickly wash into another. Those white supremacists who marched at Charlottesville had almost as many opinions on the politics of the Arab world as on immigration policy in the United States. “Support the Syrian Arab Army!” they shouted (and I quote:) “Fight the globalists! Assad did nothing wrong! Replacing Qaddafi was a fucking mistake!”
These talking points – support for Syria’s Assad regime and the conspiracy theories which absolve it of blame for mass murder and ethnic cleansing, the Islamophobia which underpins these theories, the notion that ‘globalists’ staged the Arab Revolutions, and the idea that the Libyan revolution was entirely a foreign plot – are shared to some extent or other by much of what remains of the left.
Because it’s not only the right. The conspiratorial mode of thought, the radical overgeneralization and oversimplification of the world, is every bit as common on the left. Partly because the left is in deep historical trouble, but mainly because the reductive habit of mind is universal, conspiracy theory is prime left-right crossover territory.
Having failed to adequately update its economic and social models to adapt to the current age, having failed to reckon with the legacy of left-wing authoritarianism, having despaired of the hope that people (‘the masses’) would ever rise up to effect radical change, far too often the left has turned from hard analysis to demonology, and from a focus on the struggle within states to an obsession with the struggles between states.
But it’s a mythic, storied struggle, because the analysis is so poor. The world view which describes itself as ‘anti-imperialist’, as espoused by leftists such as Jeremy Corbyn or Noam Chomsky, first identifies its villains, the bad states – the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Saudi Arabia. Then, by crude binarism, any state deemed to oppose, or to be opposed by, the baddies becomes one of the goodies. The first set are imperialists (or perhaps, in the Saudi case, a tool of imperialists); the second set, therefore, are anti-imperialists.
The world has never been as simple as this schema assumes, and it certainly isn’t today. Leftists who begin at the position that every problem originates in American imperialism will not be able to understand, for instance, that Iran is both a historical victim of western imperialisms and a contemporary perpetrator of imperialism (in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen). Similarly, they were unable to understand (or admit) in the 1990s that the immediate danger to Bosnians and Kosovans wasn’t NATO but Serb fascism. Corbyn scornfully referred to the organized slaughter of Kosovan civilians and the burning of their villages as “a ‘genocide’ that never really existed.” Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and his allies murdered almost 58,000 Muslims in Bosnia and over 11,000 in Kosovo, as part of a concerted effort to permanently destroy Muslim existence in the Balkans.
For these self-proclaimed anti-imperialists, anything outside the framework of active American oppressor and passive third world victim does not compute, and must therefore be either ignored or re-imagined to fit the established narrative, even to the extent of genocide denial.
So taking American empire as the key to all mythologies, they argued that the Arab Spring, when it spread beyond those states with obviously pro-American regimes, was an attempted replay of the 2003 Iraq invasion. They failed to recognise the popular revolutions in Syria and Libya, preferring to see western ‘regime change’ operations. They shut their eyes to the evidence and their ears to the voices of Syrians and Libyans. They implied that the Syrians and Libyans struggling against tyranny either didn’t exist at all, or did but only as putty in the foreign plotters’ hands.
This denial of agency is racist, and plainly absurd when people are facing bullets. The implication is that these backward fools are so hopelessly under the sway of the clever American that they will risk death again and again because the CIA has somehow got through to them. It’s a stupidity reminiscent of Richard’s imagined Indians, dying of hunger and thirst but believing they’re dying of covid. Once again, it’s the story that’s important, not logic, not facts, certainly not human suffering. It’s as if the people involved aren’t real, but only pawns in the plotline.
The UK’s Stop the War Coalition never marched against Assad’s barrel bombs or chemical attacks, or Iran’s starvation sieges, or Russia’s levelling of cities, but they marched against any proposed western action against Assad. ‘Hands Off Syria!’ they chanted then. This kind of leftist usually agreed with the fascists on the basic Syrian tropes: Every oppositionist is a Saudi-funded jihadist. The White Helmets are an American-funded al-Qaida front. An Arab regime possesses the sovereign right to deal violently with its population. “Assad did nothing wrong.” Alleged atrocities are ‘psy-ops’. Alleged victims are ‘crisis actors’.
This last phrase was attached by American conspiracy theorists to the bereaved relatives of the children and teachers murdered at the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which they held was a hoax orchestrated by – cui bono? – those wishing to implement gun control laws. Some were so certain of their story that they tracked down and berated as liars the weeping parents they’d seen on TV.
Here we enter the territory of esoteric religion, in which apparent events are simulacra, facades conceal secret meanings, trickery is a divine principle, and only the elect can see through the veil. And then, as the human mind’s basic storytelling urge meets propaganda and post-modernity, we move beyond even that territory into a realm where meaning breaks down completely. Here nothing is true and everything is possible, because the purpose of contemporary propaganda is not to establish a particular story as the single truth, but simply to confuse, and therefore to undermine any possibility of positive action.
A few weeks into the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Pakistani friend sent me a clip of Russia’s chief diplomat Sergei Lavrov engaging in such bluster.
“If you cannot sleep because of Russian Ukrainian conflict,” Lavrov said, “there are some advices to calm you down. First, imagine that this is happening in Africa. Imagine this is happening in the Middle East. Imagine Ukraine is Palestine. Imagine Russia is the United States.”
Such a strange logic is implied here. Lavrov is saying something like: ‘Yes, I’m a murderer, but that guy over there is also a murderer.’ And his implied audience is nodding and smiling, patting him on the back. His implied audience doesn’t stop for a moment to consider that Russia is currently killing civilians in Syria, which is in the Middle East, or that the Wagner Group, mercenaries closely linked to the Russian state, is currently killing civilians in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic, which are in Africa. His implied audience – which is real, and enormous – follows the logic that we shouldn’t complain about the Russian invasion of Ukraine because in 2003 America invaded Iraq. Forget about the rights of Ukrainians. And look what happens when we keep the logic going: We shouldn’t complain about the invasion of Iraq because the Russians destroyed Chechnya. We shouldn’t complain about Chechnya because the Americans violently intervened in Central America. We shouldn’t complain about central America because the Russians invaded Afghanistan. We shouldn’t complain about Afghanistan because the Americans bombed Vietnam. And so it goes on. Forget everybody’s rights. Just talk about the chess game.
Lavrov says such stuff because he knows that it works. He knows his audience, and the power of binarism, and the human need to see goodies and baddies.
So Kémi Séba, a Franco-Beninese pan-Africanist, describes the invasion of Ukraine thus: Putin “wants to get his country back. He doesn’t have the blood of slavery and colonisation on his hands.”
This betrays ignorance of the long history of slavery (or serfdom) within Russia, and of the continual outward expansion of the Russian state to absorb the Muslim lands of the Caucuses and central Asia and the Buddhist and animist territories of Siberia and east Asia. It betrays ignorance of the many genocides perpetrated by Russian imperialism on non-Russian peoples, and most pertinently of the Holodomor of the 1930s, in which four million Ukrainian peasants were starved on Moscow’s orders.
‘Anti-imperialists’ like to remind us that Crimea used to belong to Russia. They don’t remind us that Crimea used to belong to the Tatars, a Muslim people deported en masse from their homeland by Stalin’s imperialist terror.
According to the 2022 Democracy Perception Index, Egyptians, Saudis, Moroccans and Pakistanis have a net positive view of Russia – not only after the burning of Ukraine, but after Russia’s recent mass slaughter of Muslims in Syria, Chechnya and Afghanistan.
This turns the notion of Muslim solidarity across the umma into a ridiculous joke.
5
We used to have better stories.
We were once sustained by the classical religions. These soothed our confusions and explained our pains by situating them within an overarching plot. Plot then meant a purposeful storyline, an arc tending to justice, designed by divine love.
But the classical religions in their traditional forms collapsed. In their traditional forms they were unable to adapt to scientific and social modernity, and so perhaps they collapsed for good reason. But still people needed to fit their fragile, temporary, fractured lives into a larger story. Without a larger story, there is only despair.
One way of understanding our post-religious history is as a series of failed attempts to produce alternatives to religion. In the 20th Century the old faiths were generally replaced by ideological grand narratives, that is by the nationalisms and political faiths which found virtue in shrinking or even erasing the individual.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Under Communism the story was of the proletariat marching forward to a classless society under the benign direction of the party elite applying the supposed science of dialectical materialism. Though progress was inevitable, it was also beset by scheming saboteurs. The Soviet system identified and eliminated class enemies (particularly kulaks, or peasants who were slightly better off than the rest, resisting agricultural collectivisation, and nomads, who happened to be Muslims, resisting urbanisation and proletarianization), as well as national enemies (the Soviet Union’s Poles, Ukrainians, Chechens, Tatars, Koreans, Jews, and others). Lest their imagined plotting ruin the bright future, millions upon millions were variously starved, shot, imprisoned or deported.
Under fascism the proletariat was replaced by the people, or race, in their monovocal state, and dialectical materialism by the pseudo-science of social Darwinism. Conspiring enemies were as central to the fascist vision as the pure race they supposedly victimised. Nazi pogroms against Jews were presented as self-defence, and the Holocaust was kicked into overdrive in 1941 when Germany failed to win a quick victory over the Soviet Union. What else could explain German reverses than the eternal perfidy of the Jews? What else could explain Communist Russia, capitalist America and imperial Britain working together against Germany except, once again, the transnational scheming of the Jews? Every Jewish woman shot, every old man gassed, every child burned, was therefore a practical part of the war effort, a necessary blow against the conspiracy.
There were also the Romani, and the disabled, and Ukrainian and Belarusian villagers, and the inhabitants of Leningrad, and of Warsaw, and the millions of Soviet prisoners of war deliberately starved to death. The Nazis designated these groups as different breeds of subhuman, not part of the same species as Germans. Soviet Communism did not speak such a racialised language – though it certainly oppressed non-Russian nationalities – but it agreed with the Nazis on the basic premise that human beings should be thought of statistically, as resources or as obstacles in the way of the future, not as complex miracles of consciousness, not as fully real.
And let us not imagine that the non-west escaped the phenomenon. China, deifying party and leader, produced its own totalitarian victimology, and dozens of millions of corpses. Baathism, replacing the Quranic message with the “eternal message of the Arab nation,” did similar damage, if on a proportionately smaller scale. Even in those countries considered to be still religious, religion has been repurposed to fit epic national stories and to scapegoat or demonise epic national enemies. The BJP’s very post-colonial, very materialist, very paranoid Hindu nationalism bears little relation to the Hinduisms of earlier epochs. Likewise, the various Islamisms of the last century have been inextricably wrapped up with arguments concerning the postcolonial nation states, and have worried inordinately about plotting foreigners and fifth columnists. In an ever more toxic mix, Marxism and fascism have been amalgamated with Islam. At the furthest extreme, the ISIS phenomenon set its tone more by computer games, action movies and gangster rap than by mediaeval theology.
ISIS pushed through the boundary from modernity into post-modernity, and absurdity. It was a 21st Century phenomenon, born in an age which had lost faith even in political religions. Communism was the god that failed, and fascist governance tended to make the walls fall in, even on the master race. Epic turned rapidly to tragedy, and so, like the classical religions before them, the grand narratives were defeated, or at least hollowed out, become parodies of their earlier selves.
What is left to fill the gap? Apart from the instantly evaporating stories of consumer capitalism, and celebrity iconography, and virtual reality, and drugs. What else? Only conspiracy theories in greatly reduced, non-epic, but nearly ubiquitous forms.
That copy of The Light picked up in our local junk food outlet contains the following letter:
“Knowing few other awakened souls, condemned by my family and losing my fiancé, I have felt desperate at times, but persevered, hoping that a newspaper such as The Light would appear….”
This is a religious language of exile and homecoming, of fallenness and redemption, and aptly so, because conspiracy theories manifest the return of religion in the most debased shape yet. They provide a kind of community and a sense of right and wrong, but they are poorly written. Plot no longer means the story which writes the universe, but the skulking cabal of enemies conspiring. There is no gospel, no good news, only bad. Even the enemies have been shrunk in size – no longer the Jews but only George Soros; no longer the machinations of international capital, but only Bill Gates.
All this is disempowering. The feeling that justice is continually squashed, and of impotence in the face of powerful forces, leads to a performance of gestures, a half-hearted role-playing, and an undirected anger which can explode in random violence.
But people love their stories, however shoddy they are. They turn them into positions, which they stick to. Their positions constitute their identity, which is something they’ll fight to defend. Here is the new sectarianism.
No remedies immediately present themselves. Perhaps in the future our cultures will write better stories, or reconstitute the old ones in more satisfying ways. In the meantime, we need at least to remind ourselves and those around us, as often as possible, of certain facts. That things can happen ‘by themselves’, or according to logics too complicated for us to follow. Life is infinitely more complex – thank God – than our conceptions of it could possibly be. That nobody is in absolute control, at least not in this sublunary world. That there are no absolute goodies or baddies but only human beings. Those who are good in one respect may be bad in another. Those who are good at one moment may be bad at another. That everything is in flux. That there are no short cuts to thinking things through.
And when we think, we must make the search for truth our central motivator. We must respect truth, but not ‘the truth’. We must prioritise the process of approaching truth, the investigation, but not hold onto a particular conception of the truth, the self-satisfied certainty.
“Thinking does not lead to truth,” wrote Hannah Arendt; “truth is the beginning of thought.”
Notes
The parent of the child who stopped praying is quoted in ‘It’s scary work but I’m determined. We will make Pakistan polio-free.’ The Guardian. 4th May 2022
A reflexologist’s surgery is not at all an unlikely place to hear a conspiracy theory. A long-running podcast called ‘Conspirituality’ (see www.conspirituality.net) investigates the prevalence of right wing stories in the New Age and ‘wellness’ movements.
‘53% of Americans view Trump as true US president.’ Reuters. 24th May 2021.
For my commentary on the white supremacists marching at Charlottesville, see ‘A Syrianized World’. www.qunfuz.com. 12th August 2017.
For the proportions of Republican voters or French citizens who believe the Great Replacement theory, see ‘A deadly ideology: how the ‘great replacement theory’ went mainstream’. The Guardian. 8th June 2022.
For the connections between Serb fascism and the Great Replacement theory, see ‘The Balkans in Rightwing Mythology’, by Adnan Delalic and Patricia Zhubi. www.antidotezine.com. 10th June 2019.
Anti-Semitism has famously been called ‘the socialism of fools’. In the same vein, Leila al-Shami has written of ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots’. www.leilashami.wordpress.com 14th April 2018. Similarly, see my ‘Is Corbynism anti-Semitic?’ www.qunfuz.com 4th August 2018 and ‘Genocide Denial’ www.qunfuz.com 22nd April 2018.
I take the phrase from Peter Pomerantsev’s book about Russia in the early Putin years. ‘Nothing is true and everything is possible: the surreal heart of the new Russia.’ Public Affairs. 2014.
Kémi Séba is quoted in ‘The Congolese student fighting with pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine.’ The Guardian. 8th June 2022
‘Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin’ by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books. 2010) recounts the organized slaughter of 14 million people between 1933 and 1945 in the lands between Germany and Russia. In a different way, Vasily Grossman’s great novel ‘Life and Fate’ also explores the practical similarities between fascism and Communism.
The God that Failed is a 1949 collection of essays by disillusioned Communists, including Arthur Koestler and Richard Wright.
