The Conspirasphere
Are the mainstream media and conspiracy theorists feeding off one another? NOEL RONEY looks at a surprising confluence of official and alternative news
Two stories currently galvanising both the mainstream media and the conspiracy tubes tell us something about the surprisingly – perhaps disturbingly – close relationship between the orthodox and alternative news systems.
The terrible death of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 (see FT218:4-5; 324:36-39) made the front pages all over the world. Litvinenko, an ex-FSB operative who had made his own contribution to conspiracy literature, was poisoned with the deadly Polonium 210, apparently delivered via that most genteel of English institutions, a cup of tea. His death followed a series of meetings with two other shady Russian characters, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, also ex-members of the FSB/KG B; Lugovoi and Kovtun are considered the prime suspects in Litvinenko’s alleged assassination.
Litvinenko’s longstanding link to the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky (pictured at right), and his stream of allegations about false flag operations perpetrated in and by Russia, made him a hated figure in security circles; rumour has it that FSB agents used a blow-up photograph of him for firearms target practice. Berezovsky also died in questionable circumstances, adding to the murky miasma surrounding the life and death of his erstwhile bodyguard.
An official enquiry into the death of Litvinenko has recently opened in London, and already a stream of lurid allegations is gracing the pages of the UK and international press. Behind Lugovoi and Kovtun, according to this rendition, stands the figure of Vladimir Putin, the strongman of modern Russian politics.
The death of federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Buenos Aries in late January has opened a can of conspiratorial worms for the Argentinian government. Nisman was
investigating the failure to indict anyone for the bomb attack on a Jewish community centre in 1994, which resulted in the deaths of 85 people, and hundreds of injuries. Strong rumours in the intelligence community suggested at the time that Iran was behind the attack, and that Hezbollah – a Lebanese organisation that has been in conflict with Israel for more than 25 years – carried it out.
Nisman’s death from a single gunshot to the temple was at first called a suicide by official sources, but they have since retracted that view and claimed he was murdered in a bid to smear the government. The circumstances of his death are markedly suspicious, and fertile ground for the conspiratorial imagination. Did his bodyguards abandon him? Was he about to spill the beans on a government cover-up? Why did he borrow a gun from a friend (the weapon that killed him) only days before his death?
Both these cases have to be seen against a background of renewed conflict. The long-running feud between the Israel Defense Force and Hezbollah has recently broken out into open warfare again; and Western governments are eager to throw mud at Putin to keep the proxy war in the Ukraine from fading into a vestigial European tragedy. In both cases, the mainstream press and conspiracy theorists are equally busy, and equally pruriently fascinated; they are feeding off each other as they feed off the tragedies. It’s arguable that, in both cases, they are equally guilty of helping vested interests to foment further conflict – a lesson for the wise?