But Iran-Contra was exposed after only a couple of years, so I think it actually makes the point about secrets being “too hard to keep.”
Meanwhile, it’s been nine years since 9/11, 41 years since the moon landings and 47 years since the Kennedy assasination, and people are arguing over the SAME photos, documents and witnesses testimony from the original events. There’s no new evidence that’s come out, just a rehashing of the same thing, ad nauseum.
Evidence shows that a government can keep a secret, even a big secret, but only for a few years. Sooner or later, someone talks.
Imagine if the bombs had gone off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the US government had denied any knowledge or capability of having detonated them. Not tenable, IMHO.
The thing with the Moon landing is that it wouldn’t just be people involved in the project that you’d need to keep quiet. The list also includes, for instance, every ham radio operator on the planet, who could pick up the transmissions from the Moon. And yes, it is possible to tell the difference between transmissions coming from the Moon and transmissions coming from somewhere on the Earth, and such is well within the capabilities of amateurs.
I am willing to bet many thousands of people knew the secret who should not have such as spouses etc., the the vast majority of people did not. And as people have said earlier it was a short time and it was a secret for wining the war. If they tried to keep the secret indefinitely I am sure it would have only been a matter of time before many knew of it. Also if for example the project had backfired and detonated on route killing Americans I am sure it would have gotten out.
Not to mention that there’s a few hundred people unaccounted for if you believe the 9/11 conspiracy theorists - either They had all the people who were supposed to have been on those planes shot and buried in shallow graves (the sort of secret which, historically, has not kept well) or they’ve got them, what, stashed on an island somewhere? And nobody has surfaced, ever?
Keeping a secret like the Manhattan Project is easier to do because in addition to the time limit, it’s a righteous secret. “We can’t tell anybody because this may help us win the war.” As opposed to the reason you’d give people in the know to keep the 9/11 secret, which is…?
Which is the people behind 9/11 believe that it is a righteous secret. Read the PNAC papers or watch “The Power of Nightmares”. They are fanatics that truly believe they are doing what is best for the US. I have no problem believing these people could and would kill 3000 Americans to accomplish their goals.
The Manhatten Project and Iran-Contra, among others, prove that such things can be kept secret. The fact that so much time has passed from 9/11 does not really mean anything. In fact, it kind of makes sense.
The real conspirators have a very good reason not to talk. They know that they would most likely be executed for treason if their secret got out.
I do believe big secrets can be kept, but not in the traditional way we think of keeping secrets.
My argument? The Tiananmen Square massacre. Today, in China, many young people either do not know that anything happened, or have only a vague notion that something happened but it was a minor thing involving foreign agitators and a few naive students. My students ranged from zero knowledge to some vague rumors.
Now, of course, most people over thirty have a good idea of what happened and hundreds of thousands in Beijing witnessed the events. But it simply isn’t okay to talk about, and even if it was there is this idea that acknowledging it would be more trouble than it’s worth. The attitude, even among otherwise pretty passionate people, is that it is better to move on and erase it.
This has been remarkably successful. While Tank Man remains an iconic image of China throughout the world, many Chinese (especially the younger generation) have no clue that the image exists and wouldn’t have any idea of it’s significance. The Tiananmen Square incident has basically disappeared from China.
That’s just the point I was going to make. In the OP ,“this would be a secret too hard to keep”, is a bit too narrowly phrased. But, for a conspiracy theory to be even remotely tenable, everybody involved has to see some benefit to doing it, and a continuing benefit to keeping it secret. That’s true for weapons testing, code breaking, and such.
I don’t see how it could be remotely true for 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination. How does the “Oswald was a patsy” theory hold together? Did the real assassins know Oswald would take a rifle to work that day, and killed Kennedy knowing Oswald would take the blame? If Oswald knew someone else would do the shooting, why would he take part in a scheme in which he was unnecessary?
Some things have been kept secret for a while, but the motivations of all the participants have to make sense.
I’m late to this thread and I apologize if any of this came up already.
I think most if not all conspiracies are bogus for the simple reason that the people who are supposed to be the chief fomenters are the same people who brought us such hits as Vietnam, Iran-Contra, deregulation, etc. So the idea that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing is little more than bad fiction when you know for a fact that even using both hands they can’t find their own asshole.
That aside, I think what really matters is to what extent the parts of the conspiracy can be compartmentalized. If you need a lot of people to actually pull it off and they either know about or are responsible for important parts, then yeah, that’s not going to be a secret for long. But if there are lots of pieces that don’t obviously imply the purpose of the conspiracy and you only need a handful of people to bring those parts together, then I would give it a much higher chance of success.
The best example of the latter kind is what I’d call the self-assembling conspiracy - the kind where you put certain events in motion and based on the predictable behavior of the participants, can expect the desired outcome with a fairly high probability. I’m not aware of any proposed conspiracy that would fit this description but it should be possible at least in theory and especially if you can have multiple, parallel attempts.
The problem with conspiracies is that you can’t examine the successful ones
But I suspect that the two most important factors are going to be size, and alignment with all of the conspiracy members personal ideals, beliefs, and objectives. These are both area’s in which Hollywood or tinfoil internet conspiracies tend to fall down.
Remember that a conspiracy is only ever going to be a strong as it’s weakest member, so it’s security will tend to decrease exponentially as it becomes larger and more amoral.
Remember as well that these types of conspiracies are going to involve a lot of work and risk, therefore they are going to need to make really good sense for the players involved (Why risk the involvement of hundreds of people and the risk of getting caught in the act or in later examination, to blow up a skyscraper that you are already going to fly a plane into).
For a genuine weird, super science, conspiracy you are going to require a small group and a strong motive for keeping quiet.
“The Tuskegee Study published its first clinical data in 1934 and issued their first major report in 1936. This was prior to the discovery of penicillin as a safe and effective treatment for syphilis. The study was not secret since reports and data sets were published to the medical community throughout its duration.”
Tuskeegee was ignored until the early '70s which is scandalous, but has nothing to do with people conspiring to keep it a secret.
I’ll second (or third) the argument that secrets like the Manhattan project are kept because they involve righteous security matters. Bizarre plots such as the ones the 9/11ers want us to believe (huge numbers of people keeping the lid on the kidnappings/murders of thousands of Americans for insanely nefarious purposes) are not going to command such loyalty in an age when whistleblowers are revered and can count on lucrative public appearances and book sales (not to mention big payouts for exposing corporate malfeasance).
If one just has to believe in a conspiracy, anything can be twisted to make “sense”.
Well, the simplest conspiracy theories fit that bill sort of - for example, it makes a LOT more sense and is much more credible that instead of, you know, murdering a bunch of civilians and disappearing some planes just so they could set off bombs or missiles to make it look like you hit some buildings with planes (seriously, guys? Smart people think that?) the administration, or certain people within it, either knew it was going to happen and allowed it to take place, therefore having the terrorists do their dirty work for them, or just made a policy of ignoring intelligence that would give them a burden to stop it.
I’m not saying I believe that, but it’s at least a theory that holds up under the most basic scrutiny - it’s possible to do it with a very small number of people, it has motives that make sense, and it can be explained away with just plain mistakes. In other words, anything that comes out can go ahead and come out as long as the major players, who are all getting something from it, keep quiet, because nothing has been faked - the action can be explained by incompetence, and all the work was done by people who weren’t in on it.
I am morally certain that that sort of thing happens all the time and we really don’t find out about it, because it’s a very small number of powerful people who made a deal in a men’s room somewhere and left no records of it. As opposed to missing airplanes and such.
See Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. Somebody knows where he is.
Nobody on the inside is writing books about it. And, if they are, nobody is believing them. Can’t beat that system.
A good conspiracy is composed of serious disciplined men.
More to the point: I hear the line of reasoning used against the JFK Conspiracy.
Grant that there was a JFK conspiracy, for the following:
First of all, we are looking at some serious players. Not just players…the ultimate players, who make life and death decisions over nations. Not a bunch of jugheads, but trained, disciplined people, in a Cold War, with serious background. Playing for high stakes.
Now, say somebody wants to make some big bucks and spill their guts about it.
They are confessing to murder.
They would have to implicate powerful, powerful people.
If they were involved with serious, disciplined, powerful cabal who have committed murder, and decided to roll over on them, do they think that the functionaries of the government would listen to their story against another functionary of the government?
If they did spill their guts, who would believe them?
If they did spill ther guts, wouldn’t somebody say “It’s too big a secret! It would have had to come out!” to the person who was bringing it out…
People in government conspiracies would be more disciplined and wouldn’t go around blabbing about what crimes they commit. Run of the mill schmucks blab abou run of the mill conspiracies, but people who run things are in charge for a reason, and cackling about crimes and pecadilloes that they commit aren’t how they got into those posiitons.
Try this on for size:“Hmmmmm…the Military/Industrial Complex murdered the President of the United States. Well, I’LL bring them down! They sure won’t hurt an eyewitness, once I’ve made it known to the press!” Falls kind of flat, doesn’t it.
And on, and on…
I can’t remember anything from my propositional logic class, but, there is a fallacy there…Straw Man? Begging the question? Something???
At any rate, if somebody is looking for a blabbermouth, it will be the kind of guys you see on COPS, or something like that, not a bigtime government conspiracy. Not that often, at least.
And your evidence for a “JFK conspiracy” is that no one has confessed to it, so there just had to be “serious disciplined men” behind it, otherwise someone would have confessed like on “Cops”. :dubious:
Never mind all the sleazy corporate crimes or government malfeasances like Iran-Contra that have come to light, despite having had the support of “powerful powerful” men who presumably could’ve taken out anyone who threatened to reveal their secrets.
It comes back to the idea that there are shadowy super-cabals which create master plots but always wind up being too idiotic and sloppy to carry them through without getting the attention of alert conspiracy theorists. If the cabalists were that powerful, serious and disciplined they’d do a little better job of carrying out their nefarious schemes.
Probably not.
That was 45 years ago. The people who ordered it are probably long dead. Even if they got some young guy rather than an experienced person to actually do it, that guy would be past retirement age now. More likely dead – in that business, longevity is not common.
