"Built to last" vs "Built for a purpose"
This week I have been mostly reviewing David Aaronovitch's "Voodoo Histories" over at Aaronovitch Watch. In doing so, something struck me about a particular form of argument, advanced several times by Aaronovitch in his book on conspiracy theories, but also by various kinds of economist who want to downgrade the importance of antitrust policy and the ubiquity of cartels.
The argument's a variant of the "nobody could organise something so big; somebody would talk" theory. It specifically states that the number of conspiracies/cartels which have been proved to exist in the past, is evidence against anyone who believes in a conspiracy in the present, as they all "failed", and demonstrate that it's impossible to organise a big plan against the public interest without being found out.
Except ... what's the definition of "failure" here? My guess is that the people who organised MK-ULTRA, or the Gulf of Tonkin incident, weren't necessarily all that concerned about posterity. An awful lot of these conspiracies were "found out" long after the people involved had retired on full pension, with their medals and with the political objectives they aimed to achieve long since won.
An engineering maxim variously attributed to Ferdinand Porsche, Colin Chapman and others, holds that the perfectly designed Formula One racing car would be one that crossed the finish line one metre ahead of its nearest rival and then fell to pieces. On that basis, the perfect conspiracy was Iran/Contra - it was exposed roughly five minutes after it was no longer needed, and everyone involved was acquitted of the major charges. Job's a good 'un; Oliver North is still considered an American Hero by everyone whose opinion he gives a fuck about. Conspirators do not need to take a bridges-and-tunnels approach to designing their secrecy arrangements.
Another even better example might be not MK-ULTRA but Ultra. I know it's not technically a conspiracy, but it was a large secret organisation with a common purpose. The participants in Ultra had even less motivation to keep silent; after all, the war had been won; and they themselves were not at risk of, say, revenge attacks, ostracism or criminal prosecution, unlike most conspirators. Quite the reverse, in fact. But, none the less, the thousands of Bletchleyites remained utterly silent about Ultra for thirty years, until the publication of the first (officially approved) history in 1974.
ReplyDeleteYes, including Alan Turing, who didn't even bring up his war service when put on trial for homsexuality and accused of being a Communist.
ReplyDeleteuntil the publication of the first (officially approved) historyDidn't R. V. Jones jump the gun? (Attracting great disapproval from his peers, which backs up your argument.)
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think in many cases the "someone would talk" argument is concealing a "pangs of conscience" argument - i.e. someone would feel guilty enough to talk. Which clearly wouldn't apply here.
Reading between the lines it's clear what dd is really saying: Bernie Ecclestone killed JFK.
ReplyDeleteI don't think RV Jones did, actually. I've read "Most Secret War" and while it spills a lot of other beans on radar weapons I don't remember it mentioning Ultra; also, it was published in 1978, after Winterbotham's "The Ultra Secret".
ReplyDeletePhil: good point, but conscience is just one reason someone might betray a confidence. The acronym to remember is MICE: Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego. A Bletchleyite might have been tempted by money (say, book rights); by ideology (the postwar use of Ultra to spy on third-world countries using Enigma) or, most strongly, by ego (why is my great intellectual triumph not recognised when my brother in the army got the MC?)
Also, don't forget that the people involved in illegal conspiracies may not feel pangs of conscience, either because they're convinced that they're doing the right thing or because they're sociopaths.
Yes, Aaro's argument about Pearl Harbor is basically "surely nobody would believe that people who had been specially screened for their ability to keep a secret, trained in the importance of keeping secrets and inculcated in a culture of keeping secrets, would keep this secret?!?" I don't actually believe the Pearl Harbor LIHOP thesis, but that's really weak
ReplyDeleteajay - I haven't read Most Secret War, so I suspect you're right with regard to this one. I think MSW did put Jones in rather bad odour with people who'd known the same secrets but succeeded in keeping them, but evidently Ultra wasn't involved.
ReplyDeleteI suspect keeping secrets in that world is a bit like the controlled use of force in the armed forces - it's your source of power and it's what you do. Digressing slightly, I grew up in a forces town (literally 'forces', it was a combined services base) and I've got to say it's left me with a real appreciation of the emotional appeal of militarism. With enough boots on the ground (properly trained, properly organised boots on the ground) you can do anything - or at least that's how it looks from the inside. Special ops need people who know how to keep a secret the same way that the army needs NCOs - and I suspect they take the same kind of care over training them up.
I just read Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". It teaches us: No, the people I'm talking about weren't paranoid strictly speaking, or mentally ill in any way, but their style was paranoid. Second, even if someone with the paranoid style is right, they're still paranoid. Third, the m,aximal example of the paranoid style is Hitler.
ReplyDeleteAnd the populists were paranoid like Hitler, whether or not they were right that interest rates, finance, tariffs, freight monopolies, and milling monopolies were all stacked against them. Because, you know -- economic growth, and progress, and kulaks, and omelettes. They were standing in the way of progress.
And just in passing he pointed out that a lot of silly people had paranoid ideas about the Kennedy assassination (about a year before he wrote.) That's the real clincher right there; everyone knows assassinations are always lone gunmen.
To go on (regardless of the topic of the thread) I've never seen a liberal anti-Communist acknowledge that if you go from strict neutrality, to an apocalyptic global war against Fascism (allied with the Communists), to a global war against Communism (allied with the surviving Fascists), within the course of about 10 years (1938-1948; certainly 12 years, 1936-1948), that you would have a PR problem -- that some of the weak-minded people you'd asked to face death twice in a few years for diametrically opposite reasons might take it badly and develop their own personal apocalyptic paranoia.
ReplyDeleteOceania has always been at war with Eurasia. And if Oceania did not exist, we would have to invent it.
And we did.
I mean Eurasia. We regret the error.
ReplyDeleteBut Oceania too, of course.
Another point about the Hofstadter article, which I'm trying to gently introduce to the world via "Secret Society of the Week", is that one reason why Americans might have believed that things were being stitched up by conspiracies, is that such a very large proportion of Americans were members of secret societies (or at the very least, fraternal lodges) themselves.
ReplyDeleteIf you and the boys and Councillor Bloggs have met up after an Elks lunch and sorted out a couple of zoning decisions to the mutual economic benefit of all those present and at the expense of those who weren't, it's hardly all that much of a leap to assume that similar stitch-ups are being carried out by more important people who are members of more exclusive lodges.
In 1948 Americans for Democratic Action, the original liberal anti-Communist group, functioned more or less as a Leninist secret society when (under Hubert Humphrey's leadership) they purged Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor (Wallace Progressive) radicals. Delton's "Making Minnesota Liberal" tells the story, highly recommended.
ReplyDeleteThe Communists and alleged Communists purged in 1948 were the FLers who had agreed to merge with the Democrats a few years earlier, when the party's neutralist ("isolationist") wing had resisted.
Your bridges-and-tunnels metaphor also calls to mind Ariel Sharon's "Facts on the Ground" strategy. Basically if you're in the driver's seat for two or three days you can make a lot of arguments moot. I am convinced that Dick Cheney is a disciple of Sharon.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I believe in the Great Man Theory of History, but if Sharon had been the leader of a large prosperous nation, that would have something I would have enjoyed watching, though preferably from a distant planet.
Or President Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, or the two of them together.
"Yes, Aaro's argument about Pearl Harbor is basically "surely nobody would believe that people who had been specially screened for their ability to keep a secret, trained in the importance of keeping secrets and inculcated in a culture of keeping secrets, would keep this secret?!?" "
ReplyDeleteIn addition, those people are subject to varying penalties for breaching secrets, from loss of career and social ostracism to criminal punishment, flat-out torture and possibly a fatal street robbery or hit-and-run accident, that's got to help a lot.
-BArry
I just happened to be reading Mirowski's "Machine Dreams" and it popped into my head that when Hofstadter wrote about (stylistic) paranoids in American political life, he failed to mention the (actually certified and locked up) paranoids engaged in nuclear war strategic planning.
ReplyDeleteOr, for that matter, intelligence. Wisner and Angleton come to mind.
ReplyDeleteTenuously related comment, that links into DD's main point - I've seen several highly-artificial tax avoidance schemes[1] explicitly marketed with the proviso that they'll be blocked as soon as the Revenue becomes aware of them[2]...
ReplyDeleteIt must be said, though, that since observing the timing and spin of press articles on a transaction whenever I've been working on them at the time, I've become a lot more accepting to the principal of conspiracy theories.
[1] but not been involved in implementing, I hasten to add - it's a small profession.
[2] Which is, of course, far earlier than it used to be, thanks to the disclosure rules. The field used to be very conspiracy-like. Still is, mind.