The troof is out there
The rise of the troofer is evidence of our continuing fascination with conspiracy theories - why?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/09/the_troof_is_out_there.html
Conor Foley
September 16, 2007 2:00 PM | Printable version
What is about conspiracy theories that fascinate us so much? A few days ago Peter Tatchell wrote a piece for Cif about the problems surrounding the 9/11 Commission, which contained a fatal reference to
"the unexplained collapse of the 47-storey World Trade Centre building 7". Over 700 people rushed to respond, a record that George Monbiot had previously surpassed when he explicitly rejected conspiracy theories surrounding the attack. A few weeks before this, Robert Fisk declared himself "increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11", sparking off a flurry of rebuttals which reminded us of where the phrase "fisking" comes from.
I had my own minor run-in with the "troofers" when I wrote a piece in which I mentioned conflicting claims about an Israeli military attack on two Red Cross ambulances during the conflict in Lebanon. Coincidentally, this appeared the day after the Israel Defence Force stated saying that the ambulances could indeed have been hit by something fired by them. I wrote a follow-up piece, which covered this report and also the findings of the Guardian and Human Rights Watch investigations into the incidents. I was genuinely amazed at the response I received.
The problem with debating "troofers" is that you have to be prepared to work through many levels of assertion and rebuttal. First they will point to some inconsistencies in the reporting of the initial incidents. Then they will raise some technical issues to "prove" that the official account cannot be true: at what temperature does steel melt, for example, or what does a vehicle look like after it has been hit by various types of ordinance? After you have dealt with these, they come back with the killer, "people are lying to us" theory, which it is almost impossible to refute since, by believing the official explanation, you have, by definition, become part of the conspiracy.
Not all troofers are mad, but there is a point at which it is no longer worthwhile debating with them. This might be summarised as when you get to the "so what?" question in the debate. Often this coincides with ad hominem accusations where the person who is pointing out some logical inconsistencies in the conspiracy theory is imputed to be, therefore, an agent of the forces of evil in the troofers' imagination.
Identifying this point is actually quite difficult because one of the things that make us all a bit susceptible to conspiracy theories is that they underpin a large amount of mainstream debates.
As Seumas Milne has noted, some critics of Naomi Klein's new book immediately threw the conspiracy theory charge at her disaster capitalism thesis. Green activists like George Monbiot have faced similar treatment for exposing the links between politicians and big business. Indeed, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, every attempt to find some causal explanation for major economic and political developments could be rebutted by those who maintain "stuff just happens".
Most people believe that politicians regularly lie to us and have little difficulty believing that this could include lies about important things such as the invasion of Iraq.
However, it takes more than a couple of logical steps to get from here to believing that US government blew up the Twin Towers itself and then faked the rest of the evidence to frame Osama Bin Laden. In fact the process would bear some comparisons to a religious conversion. A truth has been revealed to the believer which dramatically changes their worldview and forces a reconsideration of some of their most basic other beliefs and assumptions. The desire to "convert" those around them must be overwhelming.
Most of us remain fairly agnostic about many conspiracy theories. I would not be particularly surprised if some of the stories about the Kremlin's manipulation of some of the protagonists in Chechnya's conflict turned out to be true. I think that all sides use propaganda during conflicts and never automatically dismiss allegations of dirty tricks by various security forces.
When I was working at Liberty I was once taken for lunch by MI5's legal officer (which is a longer story in itself) and I quizzed him about some of the prevalent conspiracy theories of the time. I had just finished reading Seumas Milne's book on the miners' strike, which alleged that the story of "Gaddafi's gold" may have been a piece of black propaganda by the spooks. He denied this, while half-conceding that the possibility of planting a mole within the leadership of the National Union of Miners at the time was not that far-fetched.
I tend to agree with Milne's view that automatic deference to the cock-up rather than the conspiracy view of history can sometimes be a lazy evasion. However, I also agree with Monbiot that conspiracy theories can be a displacement activity. Why bother arguing about the rights and wrongs of US foreign policy, if you think 9/11 was an inside job? Why bother responding to criticisms of Israel's human rights record if you can dismiss its critics as habitual liars or dupes?
This seems to me to be what distinguishes sceptics from troofers. Sceptics should probe for "inconsistencies in the official narrative", but then apply a "balance of probabilities" test with the alternative explanations on offer. Troofers demand "proof beyond all reasonable doubt" because they already have another view fixed in their minds. Most of us already know the telltale signs when someone tells us that they are "increasingly troubled by some of the details about how many people actually died in the Holocaust" and shut the conversation down immediately. I think that we probably need to start treating 9/11 conspiracy theorists in a similar way.
