‘When more than half a population believes a conspiracy theory, it does begin to look less like a theory.’ 

 
Few things are more inconvenient to a power-hungry bureaucracy than debate on a difficult issue. Avoiding such discussion is always a challenge. Certainly, with an acquiescent media, debate can be contained and manipulated, but short of shooting dissenters there’s really only one way to prevent it – and it doesn’t involve legislation.

Bans succeed only in buying time and, ultimately, inflating the issue in question. German efforts, for instance, to ban Holocaust denial have triggered an underground movement that is gaining in strength and which will almost certainly one day raise its head publicly. Banning an opinion, no matter how ugly, only ever gives it a special status – not least because cynics will inevitably wonder what it is the Establishment has to hide. In the case of Germany, an open, free and democratic debate would leave little doubt about what really happened in the 1940s. 

Taking the high ground 
Prohibition doesn’t work. But creating taboos does. If the Establishment can make it unacceptable to hold certain opinions, then – whatever the issue – they will not be debated. The current Establishment has been extremely successful at this. Some left-wing commentators, for instance, refuse to campaign against the single currency because, despite their deep hostility to it, the campaign has very cleverly been depicted as an ugly right-wing cause. The effect is that public figures with only a passing interest in the issue will tend to veer towards what they see as the ‘progressive’ or path-of-least-resistance, non-controversial position. In fact, both in the UK and elsewhere a large and growing body of opposition to further centralisation of power in Europe comes from the Left. But because of the fabricated taboo that opposition to monetary union is a right-wing position, it takes some courage to oppose the euro. 
Making people reluctant to hold certain views on the basis that they will be siding with the unacceptable is highly effective. But it doesn’t always work. Development secretary Clare Short, for instance, has been trying for years to dismiss anti-globalisation protesters on the grounds that they are white, middle-class rich kids trying to prevent the rest of the world from ‘catching up’. But her declarations appear rather silly when they’re directed at protests headed by the likes of Indian campaigner Vandana Shiva or the Third World Network’s Martin Khor – both of whom command great respect in their own countries. 

Emotional blackmail 
Nevertheless, creating taboos is a tried and tested solution to unwanted debate. And when the world was confronted with the possibility of another war in the Gulf, that is exactly the tactic the Establishment tried to adopt; it knew that there were no arguments that could win over a sceptical public. In this regard, the US had a head start. On the back of September 11, it was very easy for the authorities to gun down dissidents on the basis of their lack of patriotism – a charge that has become as emotive in the US as that of siding with communists was in the Cold War. With the US’s corporate media offering very little in the way of right-to-reply, disagreeing with Bush has indeed become ‘unpatriotic’. 

In Britain the patriotism ‘card’ has been less useful – the term itself having become rather sullied. There being no obvious taboo to grasp then, the authorities had either to engage in direct debate or to invent a taboo. Taking the first course was never really an option. That would have meant answering very difficult questions. Why now? Why the sudden rush? Why Iraq as opposed 
to other threatening regions? Why the sudden interest in human rights? Where’s the evidence? 

So a taboo was invented. Opponents of war, or at least opponents of war as proposed by the US, became ‘conspiracy theorists’. Tony Blair himself announced that the impending invasion of Iraq ‘has nothing to do with oil, or any of the other conspiracy theories put forward’. The term, as intended, immediately conjures images of conflicting shadows beneath Neil Armstrong’s feet, of flying saucers paying the CIA chief a visit. 

It immediately allows the Establishment to laugh away testing questions without addressing them. 

But the questions remain. If oil, for instance, isn’t at least part of the parcel, then why are oil companies already bickering over the spoils of a future war? Why did British companies heckle the Prime Minister for not being active enough in their interests? And if Mr Blair’s latest reason for war is humanitarian, then how can he justify the use of indiscriminate and manifestly un-humanitarian depleted-uranium weaponry? The use of such arms in the last Gulf war has been linked to a 700 per cent increase in cancer among Iraqi people. Finally, what are more persuasive; Mr Bush’s arguments that the war is about security, or William River Pitt’s on page 20? 

When more than half a population believes a conspiracy theory, it does begin to look less like a theory.