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Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.
We live in a world in which apparently new realities are created over and over again. In this world, truth trades places with conspiracies and deep-seated biases, and “alternative facts” are presented more to obfuscate and deflect than to provide new avenues for thought or discussion.
In this world you plant a flag and defend it to the death, never mind new information (and the devil take the hindmost). In this world, single-story narratives are sanitised, curated, and sanitised histories and pasts take precedence, and are presented as inviolable.
Elvis is still alive. The assassination of US president John F Kennedy was either a CIA plot, a communist plot, or a hit by organised crime – take your pick. No human has ever set foot on the moon. Britain’s Princess Diana was assassinated and did not die in a car crash.
This is a world in which every communicable disease has been part of a grand ideological strategy. Conspiracies and biases are defended vociferously or shared in whispers in sub-texts. Jewish people control things.
A group of white men gather in a secret location, every morning, to decide “how do we screw the poor today”. Black people are lazy (always late) and have to be monitored. White people have been innocent brokers with good intent – always. Add to all of these a firm belief that good people cannot (ever) be bad, and bad people can never be good.
It is truly gobsmacking how a type of intellectual anarchy, laced with wilful obscurantism, scapegoating, gaslighting, dog-whistling, deflection and selective morality shape assertions, statements of facts, and “common sense” and are all presented matter of factly…
In a recent ‘test’ of an opinion that the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Centre was “an inside job”, I asked (on social media, as we all do, against better judgement), what the evidence was for the assertion. The response was funny, tragic, and sad.
It was suggested that I do my own research and that there was a lot of evidence online. This “do your own research” has become a standard response of MAGA conspiratorialists; for instance, ask them what evidence there was that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and they would reply, “Do your own research”.
This is not to say that doing your own research is not important or necessary. It is, like many things, necessary, but insufficient. The internet is filled with information that cannot be verified. You can create a website to make any claim. It has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories. It does not help that “science” often provides a basis for conspiracies, misinformation and disinformation.
Science, lies and conspiracies
Among the more dangerous things about conspiracy theories are the distortion of information, the spread of lies (presented as truth), and assertions and opinions stated as facts. This misinformation and disinformation become part of daily life and a basis for making decisions about every aspect of life. These habits usually spring from banter down at the pub, but often find support from ‘respectable’ scholarship.
For instance, a rather noxious essay by Jason Hardy, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (Harpending held quite crude racist views about Africans), established apparent ties between inbreeding among Jewish people to a gene pool that shaped intellectual, creative and business excellence. There is, of course, little scientific evidence to suggest that what is buried in the blood, (more correctly in the DNA) shows up in the corporate boardroom, the concert hall or on the list of Nobel Prize laureates.
It is this type of “scientism” that influences racism. ‘The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life’, a 1994 book by the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist, Charles Murray, paved a “scientific” path for racism, and a belief that black people (in the USA) are “intellectually inferior”, and that intelligence is genetically inherited.
These ‘scientific’ beliefs feed conspiracies about Jewish dominance and control, and about black people as ‘naturally’ inferior, and in need of white, Western or European civilisation. These make us act without thinking, or realising the ways that misinformation and disinformation, or lies and bigotry, shape our choices and actions. We’re harmless and do things matter-of-factly, not realising how deeply we have been influenced by bigotry or notions of superiority and exceptionalism.
For example, when Helen Zille was interviewed last week, she dropped a reference to Tony Leon making detailed notes about ANC leaders who were late to a meeting, suggesting that he would probably someday write a book on the matter.
This draws on the (racist) trope that whites are always on time, and blacks are always late. Like earlier European colonialists and settler colonialists (in literature, art or administrative bureaucracy), Leon was simply reproducing European colonial habits of recording the details of ‘misbehaving natives’ for use against them, or as justification for European ‘supervision’. The ideal colonial administrators were meticulous chroniclers and punctilious bureaucrats.
Anyway, we go about our lives, then, believing that Jews control banking, finance and the media and that black people are inherently or ‘naturally’ incompetent – and our daily choices are shaped by these perceptions, conspiracies, and, well, plain rubbish.
Conspiracies and prejudices laced in political discussions
Late last month, when Donald Trump was asked a direct and quite difficult question by a black woman during a gathering of black journalists in the US, his first response was to attack, or at least deflect to some kind of conspiracy.
He described the question as “horrible”, “hostile” and “disgusting”, and dismissed the media as “fake news”, all of which kept feeding the conspiracy theory that the media was anti-Trump and controlled by liberals, globalists or George Soros.
The same pony and trap is apparent when Economic Freedom Front leaders are questioned. Ask Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Julius Malema or Floyd Shivambu a difficult question, and a first stop will be to accuse the journalist of being part of “Stratcom”, without ever producing evidence to support the accusation.
Similarly, when Iqbal Survé comes under pressure, he replies that criticism was because his was a “black-owned” empire. When the mayor of Johannesburg, Kabelo Gwamanda, was questioned about administrative failures and calls for him to step down, his first stop was that he was being singled out because he was a “black child”.
The DA are smarter; they have mastered lexical legerdemain: John Steenhuisen or Helen Zille’s immediate response to almost any criticism was to deflect to black people or black leaders. It’s that convenient, “yes, but” conversation-stopper.
We detect this deflection when Zille said that Rise Mzansi was supported by white people. After the last election, Steenhuisen said: “I have got more black votes than Mr Maimane got when he was a leader,” suggesting, thereby, that the DA was both more attractive to black people and on the side of ‘good’. Always innocent and never with ill intent.
The point here is that Gwamanda, the EFF, Zille and Steenhuisen, and also Fikile Mbalula, the ANC’s Secretary General, all tap into some kind of conspiracy, a plot or types of misinformation, to state their claims of innocence and sincerity. There is always someone else conspiring against us.
The insidiousness and subtlety show when we simplify complex situations and identify convenient scapegoats; ‘Stratcom’, “‘whites’, ‘blacks’, ‘liberals’, ‘monopoly capitalists’, ‘globalists’, the ‘Illuminati’ or the ‘masons’, ‘the Jesuits’ or ‘the Muslims’. It is never us; we can never be wrong about anything.
American-style politics (See Richard Hofstadter’s book, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays’) make us either paranoid or anxious, but we almost always start from positions of innocence. For example, Jacob Zuma, Malema and Trump would insist they have done nothing wrong. See Zuma’s claim. See Trump’s record. See Malema’s statement. See a report on Iqbal Survé. Renaldo Gouws would simply say that he made racist comments in the past and that we should move on.
It makes one wonder about the cut-off date for remembering.
All things considered, conspiracy theories are overt and loud – like the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement, the fake moon landing, and Nasa denying that the world is flat – and subtle and insidious, like Jews control the media or banks, black people are lazy, uncivilised and always late.
Either way, we shape our responses according to these lies and myths. They give us senses of superiority, certainty and absolution. The 9/11 Truth movement is simply ‘asking questions’; Tony Leon is simply recording the facts (about black people being late); Zuma and Trump are innocent (because white monopoly capital or globalists are conspiring against them).
One thing that we miss about conspiracy theories is that they are titillating. They make us feel good about ourselves. DM
