There have been a lot of threads on the John F. Kennedy assassination lately and so, once again, I took the time to watch the JFK film in its entirety.
This quote by Mr. X, in the scene where he meets with Jim Garrison in Washington D.C., stood out to me for some reason.
I think the reason the quote stood out to me is that Michael Barkun, professor emeritus at Syracuse University, defines a conspiracy theory as “a belief which explains an event as the result of a secret plot by exceptionally powerful and cunning conspirators to achieve a malevolent end”. Because before the “conspiracy theory”, before the “conspiracy”, there had to have been the “secret plot”. We’re through the looking glass here, people. The question is just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Do the perpetrators have to know each other? Does the perpetrator have to know that the other perpetrator even exists? Who controls the perpetrators? Who is at the most secret point?
The secret plot is the conspiracy, and there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to have a conspiracy theory, as in the JFK assassination where no evidence of a conspiracy has ever been discovered.
Why don’t you look at acknowledged conspiracies, which have eventually been revealed after long periods of secrecy: the mafia organisation revealed by the Apalachin summit, the Wonderland child pornography ring which was eventually infiltrated by the police, the Oliver North organisation, the “Gladio” operation revealed by then-Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti.
For an actual conspiracy to kill an American president, you can read about the Lincoln assasination, several people put together a secret plot to kill the president, disrupt the federal government and escape. The managed to kill the president, cause some chaos, but failed at the escaping part.
Real conspiracies involve specific people who do specific things for a specific end. Conspiracy theories involve vague groups who maybe-sorta agreed with another vague group to to do… something… with the end concept being WORLD DOMINATION! Or whatever.
Real conspiracies generally involve very few, very dedicated people because people like to blab. A lot. Unless someone has very, very good reason not to talk, they will. Plus, once the conspiracy strikes, it’s usually over with and it becomes a case of every man for himself. Few conspiracies survive the intial crime, if they even get that far.
Real conspiracies are revealed through good police investigative work, conspirators blabbing or otherwise screwing up.
The faux conspiracies of conspiracy theorists, involving vast numbers of people ingenious enough to commit intricate and horribly grievous acts but careless enough to leave a long trail of clues, are doomed to perpetually remain conspiracy theories.
See also Guy Fawkes, who had a real Popish Plot (though I don’t know if the Vatican was actually involved or even knew about it; Wiki doesn’t say) to blow up the government and kick off a Catholic revolution.
If I told you, I’d have to have some anonymous hitman kill you, but leave a string of evidence allowing a team of nerds and obsessives to trace it back to me, but not so anyone else would believe.
Kill? Nah. I just make sure to drag them on a wild goose chase stretching from Boston to Bombay. Plus, I like takig perfectly clear photos of me giving the camera the finger and “enhancing” them into a grainy, blurry shot of John Cleese secretly killing JFK.
Keep in mind that Oliver Stone admits he created the character of Mr X in the movie. But Stone paradoxically believes Mr X is real despite the fact that he invented him. Stone started from the premise that a conspiracy existed. And for a conspiracy to exist there must be somebody controlling it. So when Stone couldn’t identify this controller, he didn’t decide that his premise was wrong and no conspiracy existed. He invented the person he assumed must exist and put him into the story.
There’s also the Pazzi conspiracy in 15th century Italy, which involved a surprisingly large amount of people who were in on it (including no less than two armies of mercenaries and the goddamn Pope).
It failed, but only because the execution got messed up. The planning part wasn’t - The Medici definitely didn’t see anything coming, despite them being by all accounts fairly darn bright and thoroughly at home with backroom schemes.
I believe paradoxically that Mr. X is describing 9/11 despite the fact that the film was made ten years before 9/11. I’m starting from the premise that conspiracies, tabula rasa, are possible.
I can name one conspiracy that has gone undetected to this day. When I was 5-9, I would get up early on Easter morning and raid all the Easter baskets, being careful to eat just as much from mine as from all the others. The second year my older sister discovered me and I convinced her to join me rather than turn me in. To this day the younger siblings are unaware of this. Of course such mundane conspiracies are both common and uninteresting.
In fairness, no one would be able to name a truly successful large scale conspiracy because no one would know about. But if such was possible, and people tried it, then some would be less than perfectly successful but much more successful than what we have. So, the best question would be, has there ever been a conspiracy on the scale of a JFK assassination, moon landing, 9/11, etc. that was only discovered years later?
Another example of a real-life conspiracy is Watergate – or to be exact, the burglary itself.
At the heart of the conspiracy, there were two people, Liddy (who came up with the idea) and Mitchell (who approved it.) Liddy then turned over the actual details to an underling (McCord) and an outside specialist (Hunt). They in turn, hired five nobodies to do the actual dirty work, who subsequently got caught.
Now if everyone had been careful, it might have ended there. Instead, a routine search of one of the burglars turned up Hunt’s name, which was connected to McCord. Then one of the burglars was found to have deposited a cashier’s check made out to Mitchell’s organization.
So the lesson is this. If you’re going to hire someone to do your dirty work, pay them in cash, make sure they don’t know your real name, and don’t use a middleman with whom you can be directly connected.
I agree that conspiracies are possible. But I assume you would agree with me that non-conpiracy crimes are also possible.
So when you look at a crime and the evidence surrounding it point to it being a non-conspiracy crime rather than a conspiracy crime, then the best conclusion is that it’s a non-conspiracy crime. The nuttiness begins at the point when you see all the evidence that indicates a crime was a non-conspiracy and conclude from that that it was a conspiracy disguised to look like a non-conspiracy.