To the non-Americans: What are your country’s own conspiracy theories, roughly equivalent to the American ones around the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing or 9/11? What event in your own country gets the local tin-foil hat brigade all hot and bothered?
Here, I’ll start.
I grew up in Sweden, and there it’s pretty much all about the 1986 murder of Olof Palme, the country’s Prime Minister at the time. Was it the Kurds? Was it the South Africans? KGB? CIA? Palme’s own wife? Palme’s own son? Palme himself, in the weirdest suicide ever? Rogue Nazi cops within the Stockholm police department, and/or Gladio’s local anti-communist stay-behind cell? And so on and so forth.
Second place goes to the MS Estonia disaster in 1994.
Jesus fucking Christ. That’s seventy-two (72!) footnotes in a Wikipedia article about a “controversial, real-life professional wrestling incident” back in 1997. The internet, ladies and gentlemen.
Circling back to the subject at hand, the idea for this thread came from reading an article with a Russian metal band (Коррозия Металла), which included the following gem:
In 1981, in Spain, after Franco’s death with incipient democracy taking place, there was a failed coup d’etat, with tanks in front of the Spanish Congress of Deputies and all. This being the country it is, it was less a James Bond-ian affair than a pathetic screwball comedy conducted by not very bright people.
In any case, the myth that grew out of it is that the conspirators expected former king Juan Carlos to pick their side and command the army, that he refused and that the televised call to order he made at 1 am caused the coup to fizzle out.
The conspiracy I’ve heard repeated by several people? He was in on it. He had two speeches ready, one in case he was certain the insurrection worked, and another in case it didn’t.
Oh God yes. Not so much in Norway itself, it seems - I’m guessing they’re just too damn reasonable, chilled-out and level-headed? - but outside of the country, all bets are off.
Here’s Gilad Atzmon, a British CT’er / jazz musician / fucking lunatic:
I was going to say, does Vladimir Putin lurk on here? Pro-Russian supporters of the Ukraine conflict like to throw around “Nazi” a lot. And AIDS denial or accusing homosexuality of being a western plot exists in many countries.
David Icke is of course British, but that “conspiracy” is trans-national.
Wonderful. I love that there are Wikipedia pages about the most specific, random thing that are damn interesting.
My favourite New Zealand CT is that these islands were colonised by the Celts/Egyptians/Phoenicians centuries before the arrival of Maori and the evidence for this is systemically suppressed by the entire academic system so that Maori can claim indigenous status.
One New Zealand CT that I actually believe is that the All Blacks were poisoned on the eve of the 1996 Rugby World Cup final.
There are a bunch related to the Avro Arrow, including one that its cancellation was a CIA operation, or something. There was also something about how Lester Pearson was an American agent, and the US fixed the 1963 elections. This was after Kennedy and Dief fought over the nuclear issue.
Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in 1967 while swimming. At a notoriously dangerous beach. In a heavy surf. While on strong painkillers, possible morphine. He had already got into trouble skindiving twice that year in the same area.
The body was never found. Clearly, the only possible explanation was that he swam out to meet a Chinese submarine!
And the rebuttal I’ve most commonly heard is “nah, he ain’t got the brains. She does; he doesn’t,” (she being Queen Sofía) said with a shit-eating grin and sometimes followed by instructions on how to make your conspiracy theories believable.
The American ones are popular pretty much everywhere, I think. A friend of mine who fuzzes over the Palme assassination also fuzzes over the Kennedy assassination, and the 9/11 stuff has truly gone global.
But you have to admit that it is a classic Aussie style conspiracy theory. Who could be bothered coming up with a proper one, she’ll be right. Saves on all the controversy too.
“You hear Holt didn’t drown he left on a Chinese sub?”
“That doesn’t sound at all likely under the circumstances.”
Point of order – I lived that night when I was a teen and the memories are permanently branded in my brain (including seeing my father putting the biggest kitchen knife we had on a little table next to the door of our flat, while saying “the Guardia Civil came already once for me. They are not going to come twice”). There were no tanks (I assume you mean rebel tanks) in front of the Congress of Deputies. The only place where tanks were put in the streets was in the Military Region of Valencia (my city, Albacete, belonged to that region – Military region III). Its chief, general Milans del Bosch, was the only head of a Military Region who actively supported the putsch. Regions I (Madrid), VI (Burgos) and IX (Granada) remained loyal to the government. Several others (regions II, VII, X) were “watching the events unfold” without taking any action. Finally, others (IV, V, VIII) were seeing what other regions did. Region V would have rebelled if region I had; region IV would have rebelled if region V had; region VIII would have rebelled if region VI had.
Region XI (Canary Islands) doubted whether to join the putsch or not, but when they saw that Milans del Bosch was the one activelly rebelling, they decided against joining the putsch. Apparently the head of region XI hated Milans and did not trust general Armada (who appeared to be the individual designated by the putschists to become prime minister).
In Madrid a rebel officer tried to take command of the Brunete armored division in order to take control of key points in the capital, but he failed to unseat General Juste (the commander of the division). This was fortunate, for several units of the “Brunete” were doing exercises near Zaragoza (region V) and this might have pushed region V to rebel, which would have dragged region IV along with it.
Another thing was that the rebels were all from the Army. The Navy and the Air Force remained loyal.
Albacete has an air force base, and as soon as the news came that the top commander of region III had rebelled, the head of the air force base ordered all of his planes to take off and go to bases in Madrid (loyalist region). The commander of the air force base in Manises (very close to Valencia) gave the same orders – and those planes that could not take off for whatever reason were placed on the ground as fixed weapon platforms, covering the accesses to the base, with orders of, “if there are tanks coming, shoot your air-air missiles at them straight from where you are”.
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OK, sorry for the wall of text and my ramblings
In any case – I do not think that the king was “in” on the coup. I think that the planners genuinely thought that the king would end up being on their side, and that is why they did not bother cutting communications between the king and the rest of the world (would not have been too difficult to do so).
I think that the much more dangerous aborted plot planned for October 27, 1982 (the day before the elections that put the Socialist party in power) shows that the putschists did not trust the king – the first thing they intended to do was to keep the king incommunicado, with military personnel occupying the residence of the king himself in La Zarzuela. The secret services got wind of the plot in early October, and it was decided that it was too dangerous to let it unfold. On October 3rd the three main plotters were arrested, and other measures were taken. Everything was done in a rather “hush-hush” way to avoid scaring the population.
The last coup attempt (that we know of) in Spain was a rather half-baked plot that was planned for June 1985. The secret services knew of it from the beginning, and they simply let the organizers know that they were under strict surveillance and that the plot was known. The organizers aborted the plan, and nothing was said in public until the late 1990s. That was done because Spain was in the last stages of being admitted to the EEC (Spain and Portugal joined in January 1986) and the government did not want to spook the EEC. Also, to avoid giving more “martyrs” to the extreme right.
Also, that.
Additional comment: Some day I will have to tell the tale of what happened in 1978 when JuanCar came to Albacete for a 3-day official visit. Let us just say that it involved some ladies of the night, the best hotel in the city, and a surprise 3 AM visit by the Queen
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BTW, commenting on other CTs… What about the Death of Lady Di? I understand that it has been a source of CTs not only in the UK and France, but also in Egypt (Dodi Al Fayed’s ancestry was Egyptian).
