Among the Truthers (30 page)

Because of the fleeting way in which many people consume the mass media, conspiracist causes can gain strength even when mainstream journalists seek to tackle the underlying subject in a professional and objective way.

In late 2009, I appeared on the CBC television documentary program
The Fifth Estate
, in an hour-long episode dedicated to the 9/11 Truth movement. The show gave plenty of airtime to various conspiracy theorists, but also provided an opportunity for me and other critics to debunk their claims and put their movement in historical context. The next day, a teacher at my daughters' school told me she'd seen the show, and found it interesting.

“All that stuff about the World Trade Center is pretty mind-blowing, huh?” she said off-handedly as I removed my youngest daughter's coat and boots. “Maybe there's something to it. What do you think?”

“Not really,” I said. “Didn't that come through in the show?”

“I guess I missed that,” she said, half-apologetically. “To be honest, I wasn't really listening that closely. I was on my cell phone.”

Later that day, other friends and colleagues mentioned they'd seen the CBC show. When I asked them to describe their impressions, they also seemed to have only a vague idea about what actually had been discussed. Some confessed they'd been eating or BlackBerrying while watching, or flipping from one channel to the next. In any case, the big deal, as they saw it, wasn't what I'd said, but simply that I'd been
on TV—
an accomplishment in its own right.

The teacher's words, “maybe there's something to it,” worried me in particular. While the producers had intended the show as a profile of a conspiracy movement, she clearly saw it as part of a legitimate debate between two rival camps. Like me, the Truthers appeared on camera dressed in suits. Like me, they seemed confident about their position. More importantly, someone had made the decision to put them on television. And so their message must somehow be legitimate.

The idea that we should take seriously the viewpoint of anyone who appears on television, or who earns a high ranking on a Google search, or a stellar hit count for his YouTube video, is part of a phenomenon that might be called “informational relativism”—to complement the moral relativism that's been a feature of our cultural landscape since the 1960s. Genuine expertise now means little. Instead, we rely on what Internet pioneer Andrew Keen decried (in his 2007 book of the same name) as “the cult of the amateur.”

“The 9/11 Truth movement is a perfect example of the disappearance of truth—or even a general agreement of what truth is,” he told me in an interview. “If you throw enough garbage at the wall, some of it is going to stick. It reflects how media-illiterate people are. Even if you put a clear lie out there, it will be picked up and spread by the mob, virally.”

Like the medical patients who now imagine they are qualified to diagnose their maladies just by plugging a list of symptoms into Google, modern conspiracy theorists imagine themselves better qualified to analyze the collapse of the World Trade Center, the medical effect of vaccines, or the machinations of the Federal Reserve Bank than accredited structural engineers, immunologists, and economists. Many 9/11 Truthers I spoke with told me they were certain that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by explosives because the collapse looked somewhat like demolition jobs they'd seen in movies or on the news. In their propaganda videos, this point is “proven” by setting footage of WTC 7's collapse alongside implosion footage from professionally collapsed structures in other parts of the world. The fact that no legitimate expert on the demolition of large buildings has ever embraced their view is not seen as problematic: The conspiracist imagines his own native intelligence and instinctive suspicion to be a sufficient arbiter of truth.

Unlike the true expert, whose spurious leaps of logic might be spotted through the process of peer review, the conspiracist-minded amateur doesn't care about appearing ridiculous in the eyes of informed observers. In fact, he imagines that their ridicule proves his status as a freethinker, uncorrupted by the suffocating dogmas imposed by the credentialed intellectual establishment. He is completely satisfied merely to attract attention from other amateurs, which he accomplishes by providing a narrative that is more lurid and titillating than the informed technical fare served up by people who have earned degrees in the field.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

There is no medium of communications better suited to political propaganda than film. Literature and the spoken word can be used to bombard a person with facts. But only cinema can transport him wholesale into an invented world. Through the artful use of music, lighting, and shocking visual images, a propagandist can entirely control the emotional mood of his audience. Unlike an essayist, the propaganda filmmaker can short-circuit the rules of logic—or, preferably, ignore them entirely.

This can be done in a matter of seconds, a classic example being the 1964
Daisy
TV ad for Lyndon Johnson: A small child counts off the plucked petals of a flower as the camera zooms in on her face. Then comes another countdown—this one from an ominous male narrator. The screen is filled with a mushroom cloud, and the voice-over switches to Johnson: “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” The target of the ad—Barry Goldwater, who had mused about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam—was never mentioned. It wasn't necessary, or even desirable. The purpose of the ad wasn't to make an argument, but to create emotional linkages—between a child's sweet face, LBJ's resolute voice, and the terrifying sense that the world, with all its cute little girls, will descend into apocalypse without him leading it.

On both sides of the Cold War, propaganda bore the indirect imprint of Nazi directors, who had pioneered the use of film as an instrument of brainwashing. As Philip Taylor wrote in
Munitions of the Mind
:
A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day
(quoting British American film historian Roger Mavell): “ ‘Nazi newsreels were not informative, they were impressionist, emotive, all-conquering—a blitz in themselves of sound and image.' Their message was clear: German military superiority was plain for all to see and the ease with which victory was achieved was testimony to the superiority of the German race and the will of the Führer.”

The best-known specimen of this genre is Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will
, which chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. Like all the most effective propaganda of our own era, the film pressed its message by leveraging the inborn human impulse to make broad moral judgments about complex issues, even whole races of people, based on fleeting, emotionally charged human images. Not a minute goes by in which Riefenstahl does not remove the viewer from the mass spectacle of the Party Congress to focus on a single person, whether Hitler himself lecturing sternly from a stage, or one of the proud, confident, clean-cut youth members in rapt attention. It is in their faces that her story is told: The planes, the flags, the architecture, and the spectacle are all presented as mere manifestations of their iron will and commitment to national glory. Riefenstahl's images, scored with themes from Wagner's
Götterdämmerung
and similar compositions, were so powerful that they effectively created our modern understanding of the prewar Nazi movement as a clockwork-precise machine, burying the reality of Hitler's amateurish, disorganized personality cult. And the same cinematic formula would be copied by other totalitarian movements—especially Stalin's Soviet propaganda apparatus, which filmed May Day parades and other set pieces in a recognizably Riefenstahlian manner.

George Orwell, the twentieth century's most insightful student of propaganda and its toxic effect on Western societies, understood that film could equally be used to vilify others to the point of murderous hatred. His lengthy description of “The Two Minutes' Hate” is one of the most memorable passages in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and worth quoting at length:

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity . . . It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party . . . And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice . . . In its second minute, the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen . . . A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Six decades after
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was published, video propaganda continues to lure viewers into extremist ideologies—but not in the way Orwell predicted. During the World War II and Cold War eras, video propaganda was the domain of governments and established studios—since only they had the money needed to rent studios, hire actors and film crews, and run media distribution networks. Riefenstahl, for instance, had a crew of 120 people, and an unlimited budget, for
Triumph of the Will
. During World War II, the U.S. War Department alone spent in excess of $50 million on film production. On the Soviet side, film propaganda was supervised by the well-founded Directorate of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee—the origin of the term “agitprop.” In his 1958
Blue Book of the John Birch Society
, Robert Welch devoted a scant two paragraphs to television, dismissing it as a tool for promoting his cause: “I know the fantastic cost of television programs. So let me point out that I do not think any early extensive use of television by us would be [wise] . . . Its separate impacts are glancing blows of little depth, compared, let us say, to that of a great book which can be read again and again.”

In purely quantitative terms, moreover, there simply wasn't that much stock footage available for the era's conspiracists to cobble into their productions. Had JFK's assassination taken place in 2011, the event would have been recorded by dozens—possibly hundreds—of amateurs using camcorders and cell phones. Within hours, much of that footage would be uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, and other sites, where it would be dissected by conspiracists for “anomalies.” In the case of the actual Kennedy assassination, the event was recorded by precisely one individual—dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. And even his 8mm footage was of limited use to conspiracists, since Zapruder had signed over the rights to
Life
magazine. It wasn't until 1975—twelve years after JFK was killed—that assassination researchers were able to show the Zapruder film on network television.

Beginning in the 1990s, the amount of amateur-available video surged radically thanks to the Internet and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology and video-editing software. Costs plummeted. In fact, many of the most widely distributed films now on YouTube were made for quite literally nothing—since they consist only of material shot by other people, and then edited using shareware software. One particularly popular video genre on conspiracist websites, for instance, is what might be called the Smoking Gun Mash-up—which consists of decontextulaized video snippets in which some public figure, or group of figures, is made to seem as if they are repeatedly admitting to some shocking crime or secret. One popular ten-minute video, entitled
Obama Admits He is a Muslim
—which had been viewed about two million times by the time I saw it in the spring of 2010—consists of dozens of such snippets from Obama speeches and interviews—many of them shorter than even a single sentence.

In many cases, conspiracists can even cast themselves as the stars of their own propaganda videos. As discussed, obsessive 9/11 street demonstrators such as Luke Rudkowski, for instance, habitually post YouTube videos in which they “confront” public figures with the Truth, a practice that generally involves harassing them with bullhorns at public events, or reciting manifestos during the Q&A sessions following speeches at colleges.

But some things haven't changed. Like Riefenstahl, or Orwell's imaginary Big Brother, today's Internet propagandists overwhelm viewers' intellectual defense mechanisms with the endless piling on of disconnected snippets of footage that build toward a single, overarching, spine-tingling capital-T Truth. Internet-circulated jihadi propaganda movies, for instance, usually consist of endless carnage scenes featuring dead and dying Muslims slain by American bombs or Israeli tank shells, interspersed with claims that Islam is being besieged on all sides by genocidal infidels. Where possible, the camera lingers on the dead child's face, the shrieking parents, the mangled corpses. The underlying circumstances of the killings are either ignored or fantastically misrepresented. Many terrorists have admitted that these videos were the most powerful factor in their indoctrination.