Deeper reading #2: Conspiracies, Bunga-Bunga and Pablo Escobar
In 2012 I was working for a financial news acronym on a very slow news day in the summer doldrums. We had run out of ways to speculate about when Greece would go bankrupt, or where the gold price would go, and so turned to the last recourse of the struggling, jaded and bored: the calendar. On it, we found, was the annual meeting of the Bilderberg Group—Davos without the Twitter account.
I didn’t know at the time, but mentioning Bilderberg is a Bat-signal for anyone who believes the world is run by the Illuminati, the Vatican, space lizards or the devil—back in those more innocent days when conspiracy nuts read major news websites, rather than writing them.
Scanning the previous year’s list of attendees—which is a who’s who of people you’d only dine with so that they’d pay the bill—I saw that then-Chancellor, now part-time editor George Osborne was a regular and, in an uncharacteristic attack of journalistic integrity I called up the Treasury to see where the man was today. The press officer, whose voice had that heat-blunted tone you get in the middle of silly season, gave an audible shrug and said: “oh, I don’t know where the Chancellor is today.” Clearly I ran that line, and within minutes had dozens of emails, tweets—even the phone calls seemed to be in capital letters. To this day, that is by an order of magnitude my most-read story. I’d call that humbling.
Since then, I’ve been treated to a number of New World Order conspiracy theories and prophesies of doom, often from unexpected sources. A hedge fund manager told me that he could tell the collapse of what he called the ‘Western Christian Empire’ was imminent because of the composition of US non-farm payrolls. In a Pret-A-Manger in Waterloo, an Eritrean asylum seeker segued effortlessly from a complex and balanced assessment of the UK’s migration policies to a declaration that Pope Francis would reveal himself to be the Antichrist in a speech to the UN, heralding the beginning of the Last War.
Somehow, in the last couple of years, conspiracy theories have drifted from the fringes to the mainstream of political discourse. In a world where fact is less important than feeling and narrative, making allusions to the ‘Deep State’ and insinuating that dark forces or an insidious ‘other’ are manipulating society has proven to be an effective strategy, contributing to everything from the Brexit referendum result in the UK, the rise of AfD in Germany, Donald Trump’s election win and growing Islamic fundamentalism in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Unsurprisingly, the USA is the epicentre of this bat-shittery. During the US election campaign I looked into how the Trump campaign had weaponised the vitriol, fury and utter bullshit of the news networks to ride to the Republican nomination, but then, I thought he couldn’t win the presidency, so what do I know?
Last year, in the Guardian, Carey Dunne wrote a sensitive and nuanced look at how conspiracies can take hold of even seemingly bright, engaged people—and how easily they can be exploited by dog-whistles from political parties and special-interest groups.
Nauseating—and sadly topical—Barbara Demick’s LA Times piece from 2017 looked how the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorists has emboldened the “truthers” who troll the families of school shootings and maintain that they are faked. The photographer JB Nicholas, who was on the scene at Sandy Hook in 2012, has been on the receiving end of a lot of abuse, and wrote this personal response in late 2016.
Perhaps the world’s most famous right-wing billionaire octogenarian sex-pest now that Hugh Hefner has died, Silvio Berlusconi has in recent years been out-Berlusconi’ed by Donald Trump. But, like the rubberised abomination he is, he’s bouncing back to emerge as a kingmaker in Italy’s elections. Rachel Donadio has been following his revival for The Atlantic.
Earlier this year, Singapore’s humourlessness about drugs reached a new high when the Central Narcotics Bureau said that it would “keep a very close watch” on a newly-opened pub called “Escobar”. The Colombian embassy complained, not unreasonably, given that Pablo Escobar was a criminal on a massive scale. He has endured, and in some cases been reinvented as a kind of Robin Hood of blow. In this month’s New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson has a wonderful narrative on Escobar’s ‘afterlife’.