It has been widely reported that no sooner does the multi-party conference in Germany select pashtun leader Hamid Karzai as the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan than a stray 2000lb JDAM bomb from a USAF B-52 comes within a hair’s breadth of killing him. I suspect the only reason the conspiracy theorists are not already in full voice on this one is that three US soldiers were killed in the same incident.
But give them time… once it has rattled around in their heads for a few days, the dark theories will start to emerge. You think I am wrong? Well if an armed prison revolt in Mazar-i-Sharif can be reported in some quarters as a ‘massacre involving US forces’ in spite of the fact a German TV crew caught on video a captured prisoner blowing himself with a hidden grenade (and injuring attractive British ITN reporter Andrea Catherwood) and SkyNew filmed outgoing rifle, machinegun and mortar fire (having a camera man injured in the process), then methinks you underestimate the strangeness of the conspiratorial mindset. When wild and woolly theories about Hamid Karzai’s close call start to appear, I call on all Samizdata readers to e-mail them in to us.
Emmanuel Goldstein and I have crossed swords over this one on the Libertarian Alliance forum. That said, I do not regard Emmanuel as a complete looney tune conspiracy theorist (in spite of some intemperate remarks I may have made in the past), merely someone with a few looney tune theories and his Airstrip One blog is not without it’s perverse charms.
Although I am someone who finds 90% of all conspiracy theories not just bogus but ludicrous, they do have a certain entertainment value. I have my own pet theories regarding the conspiracy fetishists (as I prefer to call them). One of my more sublime discoveries after reading many of them is that they almost all, if you regress them far enough, will be traced back to the Knights Templar.
As Fox Mulder of the X-Files would say, “The truth is out there”… but so is the paranoid bullshit. And so for your edification, gentle reader, I present my semi-serious conspiracy meta-theory:
The vast majority of conspiracy theories tell us nothing about the subject matter of the conspiracy but quite a lot about the mind of the theorists themselves. However the endless procession of conspiracy theories are in fact perpetuated by institutions with real conspiracies to hide on the basis that when a true conspiracy theory actually hits the mark, it will then be dismissed out of hand as the paranoid ravings of a fantasist.
Are you impressed? You should be: that is an anti-conspiracy theory conspiracy theory!
Of course as I fit the profile of a sinister globalist illuminatus myself, you can safely assume I am just saying these things to conceal The Truth.
