The far-right and conspiracy lunacies - made for each other

Published on Tuesday, 24 July 2012 01:00 Written by Ketlan Ossowski

watchmen

I had a bit of a major fall-out with a friend recently over the issue of conspiracy theories. This friend of mine spends far more time scooting around the internet than I do and, while I have a pretty narrow field of interests, he is omnivorous, meaning that he'll read any old crap and generally speaking, swallow it.

Up to a point, this is fairly entertaining but it rapidly ceased to be so when he began relating nonsense that came from the no-doubt turquoise pen of David Icke.

Whether he thinks he is one or not, Icke is widely regarded as an anti-semitic lunatic, although he temporarily went up a number of notches in my estimation when, donkey's years ago, he publicly refused to pay the Poll Tax, then a cause very close to my heart. Sadly, he spoiled that with his tales of the royal family all actually being lizards from another dimension, which seemed to put the clincher on the second part of the definition - but what of the first?

A quick look at Wikipedia gives us enough of an answer to be going on with, at least for me and almost everyone else I know.

'In The Robots' Rebellion (1994), Icke introduced the idea that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, which supposedly presented a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. According to Mark Honigsbaum, Icke refers to it 25 times in the Robot's Rebellion, calling it the "Illuminati protocols".'¹

The article then adds;

'Alick Bartholomew of Gateway, Icke's former publisher, said that an early draft of And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995) contained material questioning the Holocaust, and that Icke was dropped because of it.'¹

If Icke is widely regarded as an anti-semite, he has only himself to blame.

Icke is loved by the far-right, which seems particularly prone to conspiracy theories, possibly in an attempt to deflect its own impotence into safer channels where third-parties can be blamed for its failings. These third-parties, naturally, include the Bilderberg Group, bankers, the Illuminati, freemasons, the New World Order and, of course, Jews.

Alas, the conspiraloons appear to have taken a giant step forward (or backward - it's difficult to tell), with a new theory that, startlingly, looks like it has been lifted straight from the pages of the classic graphic novel Watchmen².

In the real world, we currently have the so-called Arab Spring causing havoc, tensions between America and China reaching boiling point, the temperature between Iran and Israel becoming decidedly frosty and, just to add to the chaos, economies everywhere appearing to be in meltdown.

In Watchmen, the situation was similar. There is war and the threat of war pretty much everywhere and the economy is collapsing. In particular (and it's worth remembering that Watchmen is over a quarter of a century old) the then Soviet Union is preparing to invade Afghanistan. In short, chaos is well on its way and the threat of global war is far from distant.

In both the real and the fictional worlds, laws are being enacted which, while purporting to protect the citizenry from terrorism and the like, have the effect of introducing an almost fascist control over the populace.

Conspiraloons claim that we will shortly see a false flag terrorist incident (meaning one organised by the government/NWO/Illuminati or whatever and carried out by terrorist puppets who don't realise they are being manipulated) which will enable governments to instigate martial law and thus control their citizens completely. Thus, the intention of any such attack is malign.

In Watchmen, the author takes a different approach. The world is in chaos and there will still be an attack, though its intention is to bring about peace and make former enemies allies against a common cause. In short, the intention here is benign.

Both attacks occur or will occur in the same way; there will be an apparent attack by aliens. In the real world, this will be shown by holographic images of spacecraft projected on to the ionosphere, to give the illusion of alien spacecraft heading for earth while lobbing a few nukes around. In the Watchmen world, it was achieved by the creation of a gigantic squid-like alien being which appeared, to disastrous effect, in the middle of a major city.

This isn't all. According to the latest conspiracy theories, vaccinations will be used to infect the populace with lethal diseases a la Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, while nanobots will be used to control us (don't ask me how - I'd stopped listening at that point) in more or less the same way as they were used in Michael Crichton's book 'Prey'.

It seems to me that such conspiracy theories allow believers to revel in both their paranoia and their political impotence. If we lack political control, we can blame it on the aliens (or the Bilderbergers, Illuminat or whatever other group we have pegged as this week's villain) and thus pass the buck.

It's no coincidence that, in Watchmen, Rorschach, one of the good guys, sends his rambling journal detailing the events that have taken place to New Frontiersman, a small, right-wing newspaper in New York which is most likely to print what, on the face of it, is a lunatic story. The far-right is infested with lunatics with their own axe to grind and if the shit in their lives can't be blamed on Jews, blacks or Muslims, then semi-secret organisations or aliens will serve just as well. Just so long as it can't be blamed on their own deficiences.