Schmonspiracy theory
Monday quiz:
Q: If I know a few blokes who have their eye on a bank, and I know another bloke who's got some gelignite, and I put them in touch with each other, then when they go out together and rob a bank, am I guilty of conspiracy?
A: Basically yes. The charge would be "knowingly concerned". It's usually extremely difficult to make such a charge stick, however, as the "middleman" rarely leaves a paper trail and can always claim in court that he never realised that the two sets of bad lads were going to do something illegal.
Q: If I happen to know of a group of Cuba-obsessed nutters who have a massive grudge against the President, and I know a Cuba-obsessed loner who has a gun and a record of trying to assassinate people, and I put them in touch with each other, then when the lone weirdo assassinates the President, am I guilty of conspiracy?
A: Of course not, how on earth would you have known anything like that would have happened? The worst you could be accused of would be negligence, so better organise a cover-up anyway.
Q: By the way, why were you fucking around with far-right Cuban solidarity groups and mentally unstable Soviet double-agents in the first place?
A: I'm sorry, that information is classified.
(This, a "shorter" summary of Peter Dale Scott's "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" is so far my greatest feat of precis. I am entering it in the Summarlympics).
I do love a nice little conspiracy, but as a fellow appreciator of the loving (if not obsessive) attention to detail in such matters, I expected better of you than a cheap conflation if UKian law with USian skulduggery.
ReplyDeleteI'm a relativist. I'm in the process of writing a proper post for the Guardian blog (hopefully) on PDS's thesis to the effect that once you've put together all the connections, the question "did the CIA or Mafia plans this or was he a lone nut?" just basically becomes a matter of taste - all the individual facts are as definite as you like, but whether you're going to call what happened a "mafia conspiracy", a "CIA conspiracy" or a "lone nut" is actually something that's pretty indeterminate and context dependent.
ReplyDeleteAnd Foucault and Derrida and that lot somehow neglected this little corner of the political discourse, did they then?
ReplyDeleteNot that anyone reads those crazy wacky weirdos anymore, of course, so carry on.
Foucault and Derrida both wrote quite a bit about the subject but, crucially, not on the Guardian blog.
ReplyDeleteLazy bastards, the both of them.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I like Laura Rozen's work, because she generally endorses Peter Dale Scott's point that just because the notion of "deep politics" sets off all sorts of nutters doesn't mean that deep politics doesn't exist. Any fucker who got within braying distance of the proto-pols in certain academic institutions knows what it looks and sounds like.
ReplyDelete(Rozen's profile of Edward Luttwak is really good stuff.)
Where is said Guardian blog thing?
ReplyDelete