Conspiracy theories are a distraction

When imagined plots lead to the bereaved and wounded receiving online hate, they are no longer harmless eccentricity but a dangerous diversion

uefully, and rightly as it turned out, one lifelong investigator of the Kennedy assassination predicted that there “won’t be any smoking gun” in the cache of nearly 3,000 JFK-related documents released late on Thursday night. It was a suitably ironic choice of phrase by Jefferson Morley, the editor of the JFKfacts website. Because this, of course, is a rare case where there was very much both smoke and a gun, in the form of the 6.5mm Carcano rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It’s just not the smoking gun Morley’s readers were looking for, the one that would prove a vast, hidden conspiracy to murder the 35th president of the United States.

There were plenty of juicy titbits in the papers all the same. Conspiracy theorists will seize on the CIA memo that reports that Oswald, while in Mexico in September 1963, spoke to a Russian diplomat identified as a KGB officer and member of Department 13, a unit “responsible for sabotage and assassination”. Others will delight in the ambiguous words of the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, who two days after the killing wrote of the urgent need to “convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin”. My personal favourite is the mysterious phone call to a British local paper — the Cambridge Evening News — 25 minutes before the shot rang out in Dallas, instructing a reporter to call the US embassy in London to hear “some big news”. Of course, there were conspiracy theories before the murder in Dealey Plaza. But JFK provided the template for the modern-day version of the form. Whether it’s the microscopic analysis of photographs and film footage, or the casual assumption that governments could enlist many hundreds, if not thousands, of officials to collaborate in a murderous lie, all of them taking their secret to their graves, the pattern was set with the Kennedy assassination — redeployed to cast doubt on everything from September 11 to the death of Princess Diana, from the shooting of very young children at Sandy Hook to this month’s mass slaughter in Las Vegas.

Descent into cynicism

Again, there was a time when you might have dismissed such talk as the derangement of the bug-eyed, irrelevant fringe, but that’s no longer so easy. Not now that we live in the era of fake news and post-truth. Those terms are used to describe a trend that is pervasive and indeed mainstream, that in the US has captured the highest office in the land. The man who sits in Kennedy’s chair today is himself a conspiracy theorist, responsible for spreading one of the most malicious inventions: the wholly debunked claim that Barack Obama was not born in the US. Both the JFK obsessives and a post-truther such as Donald Trump — who, let us not forget, offered his own addition to the Kennedy conspiracy canon with an evidence-free claim that the father of his Republican primary opponent, Ted Cruz, was involved in the assassination — perennially cast the FBI and the CIA as the key tools of dark, unseen forces.

This soon descends into a cynicism about democracy itself. In this view, elections are a sham; politicians are mere puppets; the real masters are hidden and lurk in the shadows, pulling the strings. Which is why, incidentally, so many conspiracy theorists, like so many post-truth merchants of the populist hard right, end up reaching the terminus of antisemitism. For antisemitism is itself often rooted in conspiracy theory: the belief that the secret hand behind world events, manipulating each and every development, belongs to the Rothschilds or George Soros or, when no euphemism is required, the Jews. Conspiracy thinking is no longer harmless idiosyncrasy. Not when it leads to the bereaved parents of Sandy Hook or the wounded of Las Vegas being bombarded with death threats and online abuse, branding them “crisis actors” paid by the government to help stage a hoax. But there is a deeper danger too. All this energy spent trying to find the hidden hands that secretly plot our destruction is energy not spent looking for the truly hidden hand — which does not belong to one shadowy individual, or even a group, but rather to the much more complicated forces of politics, economics and history that are shaping us every day.

On Thursday we learned that 1,500 billionaires have now amassed $6 trillion (Dh22 trillion) of wealth, a level of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. That’s not come about because of a secret meeting in a hidden boardroom, but because of a system that is fatally flawed. Tackling that may lack the satisfying clarity of exposing an evil government agency or clandestine cabal, ready to murder its own fellow citizens or assassinate a youthful, golden president. But it would get us closer to the truth. Jonathan Freedland is a weekly columnist and writer for the Guardian

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