Charlie Brooker's shabby approach to discrediting the idea of conspiracies looks to extremes of human behavior - severe obsessive-compulsive personalities being no more common than schizophrenics or manic-depressives - to ridicule and discredit beliefs held by millions of healthy-minded observers.
Cheap-thought writing like Mr. Brooker's tries to exploit the fact that there are people who are absolutely fixated with the idea of conspiracy, obsessive-compulsive types who have somehow become bound to the idea of conspiracy as explaining almost everything.
It’s just as if he took the paranoid thoughts of people who believe they have been taken over by aliens to ridicule the perfectly valid idea that there are likely other living things somewhere in the immensity of the cosmos.
Actually it is worse than that because the existence of other life is a probability. The existence of conspiracy is a fact.
Conspiracies are as much a part of history as any other human activity you care to name. Often we don’t learn the full story for a long time, but even in my lifetime, there are many publicly-known conspiracies.
It is historical fact that the C.I.A. conspired with the American mafia and some vicious Cuban exiles to assassinate Castro. There were many attempts, some of them more bizarre-sounding than anything in fiction.
The C.I.A. also maintained and trained and equipped a secret private army of Cuban exiles in Florida whose job was to terrorize Cuba, an operation costing tens of millions that made bin Laden’s camp in the mountains look like a boy scout operation. Some of these secret, government-paid thugs regularly raced over to Cuba and machine-gunned Soviet ships in port, others planted bombs in Havana hotels and, in at least one case, an airliner.
Richard Nixon started a secret group called The Plumbers in the basement of the White House whose job was to do break-ins and black-bag jobs against Nixon’s opponents. Among other deeds, they broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal his records.
Ronald Reagan also had a secret group in the White House carrying out completely illegal activities, for example, secretly trading American missiles to Iran for funds to give the Contras.
Israel attacked the then-sophisticated spy ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, during its 1967 war, spending two full hours strafing and bombing and torpedoing the well-marked ship, Israeli reconnaissance pilots even having made eye contact with crew members on deck before the attack. Later, Israel just said sorry, it was a mistake, a patently false explanation. The likely (unrevealed) cause: to draw the U.S. into its war.
Israel secretly assisted the apartheid South African government in developing atomic weapons in the 1970s. This help was in return for secure sources of certain strategic materials and, likely, assistance in carrying out a secret test explosion in the Indian Ocean. The weapons were secretly removed by American authorities with the fall of the apartheid government.
An American corporation, ITT, secretly supplied Richard Nixon’a agents with a $400,000 payment towards the costs of overthrowing the government of Chile, then the most important source of copper in the world. The government was overthrown, the elected President murdered, and a ruthless general took over, killing 15,000 people.
This list includes only a fraction of the genuine, known conspiracies over recent decades.
There are many issues around the official story of 9/11, too many to go into here, but without believing anything out of the ordinary, it is nothing but honest to say there are many unexplained matters, and then to ask, why?
