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digital culture It Ain't Crazy If It's True
Conspiracy theorists have taken to the Web to get their message to the masses. Besides, they needed something to do when The X-Files went off the air.If you're naïve enough to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and that the Titanic was actually sunk by an iceberg, then perhaps you haven’t been spending enough time online. The truth is out there-on the Web that is. Call them what you will: crazy, delusional, paranoid. Creators of conspiracy theory websites have another name for themselves, namely, defenders of the First Amendment. “There are only two forms of true freedom of the press in the U.S. right now,” says Richard Green, editor of RumorMillNews. “One is printing out personal newsletters and distributing them by hand, not by mail, where they are subject to government guidelines. The second is the Internet.
RumorMillNews is just one of dozens of conspiracy theory sites that can be found on the Web, giving the public the truth at any cost, or at least their version of it. Think that was the moon that Neil Armstrong made one small step on? Think again. Conspiracy theorist Kevin Overstreet argues on his website that the U.S government faked the moon landing to claim victory over Mother Russia in the space race. What the “astronauts” actually landed on was a stretch of rocky terrain in the Arizona desert. Ever wonder why the drug problem in the United States seems to be spiraling out of control? Perhaps that’s because the only war on drugs the U.S. is waging is the Central Intelligence Agency’s war to eliminate all foreign competition so that it can create its own monopoly on the domestic drug market. ConspiracyPlanet.com has the documents to prove it. Just as all good lies must contain some truth in order to be believable, the best conspiracy theories are based on some percentage, however small, of historical fact. The exact size of that percentage is where the debate lies. For cynics, the most frustrating thing about conspiracy theories is that while they are difficult to prove, they are often equally difficult to disprove. “Here is the information, you decide for yourself whether it is true or not,” says Tim Swartz, editor of ConspiracyPlanet.com. “We prefer to remain skeptical until we are shown otherwise.” Of course, Swartz’s skepticism is frequently at odds with the logical principle of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation for a problem is usually the correct one. Conspiracy sites like The Black Vault, which has managed to acquire government documents proving there's been an official cover-up of the existence of UFO’s and revealing the role played by the secretive society, the Freemasons in running the country, are guided by the underlying principle that the more information that is available to the public, without interference of any kind, the better. According to Green, who says that RumorMillNews draws over 345,000 unique users, or 10 million hits, per month, “Our goal is to do what MSNBC is doing, while simultaneously telling the truth.” The implication here is that MSNBC is simply delivering the news that is supplied to the cable-news network by high-level government agencies. RumorMillNews avoids being part of what it calls the “controlled media” by fastidiously sticking to its prime directive: “To reveal and thereby thwart the plans of the worldwide conspiracy that wants to destroy our civilization and replace it with a feudal slave state.” Swartz says that the progenitor of conspiracy theory website was the personal newsletter, which he believes reached the height of its popularity in the late 1960’s. These newsletters, or handbills, were simple one-page documents handed out to the public, mostly political in nature, which gave the writer a personal forum in which to speak his or her mind. According to Swartz, the personal newsletter differed from the popular underground newspapers of the time, such as The East Village Other and The Los Angeles Free Press in that the newsletters were individual, rather than group, efforts. This was before the Xerox arrived, so the authors of these handbills relied on the mimeograph machine, a messy, ink-spilling behemoth popular with school teachers of the day. “Despite the obvious technological differences, the handbill and the website are very similar animals,” says Swartz. “Both are ways of getting a person’s ideas out to the masses, [a person] who might not have any other way to reach people.” Of course, you don't think all this freedom was just handed over to the public by a benevolent government, do you? “The liberties that the Internet provides the average citizen are basically unintended consequences,” says Green. “Beginning with ARPANet, the government was simply trying to protect [itself] in the event of a nuclear attack. The Internet was never designed with the public in mind, and the government probably had no idea of the effect it would have. What it comes down to is that their fear of nuclear war was greater than the fear of having their establishment overthrown.” Despite having stories about aliens living among us and ancient civilizations on Mars, websites like ConspiracyPlanet.com insist that they
RumorMillNews balances its more far-fetched conspiracy theories with their more grounded, albeit biased (the site leans left) news about the war in Iraq and the world of politics. Green is aware of the reputation many conspiracy sites have for doctoring photos and falsifying news reports, but he isn’t concerned that such practices will damage his website’s credibility. “If your neighbor doesn’t do his laundry, who stinks? You or him?” Likewise, Green insists that although many of his stories cast an unblinking eye on the U.S. government, he is a proud citizen and a true patriot, in his estimation. Like the ACLU-style defender of free speech who must defend even that which offends him, Green feels that he must show the ugly parts of U.S. history to hold the country to its democratic ideals. “This country is so unique,” he says. “If we lose it, we lose something valuable not only to us, but to the entire world.” ConspiracyPlanet.com is also leading the fight to make the country more secure for democracy says Swartz. He does his best to verify the stories he posts on the site, he insists, although some are harder to verify than others. Like the one about the race of Reptilian overlords who have conquered earth and plan to enslave mankind? “There are some stories that are just too good to resist,” he says with a laugh. Related Links: TopConspiracySites.com, If you think the people behind RumorMillNews, ConspiracyPlanet, and the Black Vault were paranoid, you haven't seen anything yet. Moontruth.com, a very funny site created by a British filmmaker who decided to film his own moon landing. The Skeptic, a site dedicated to proving conspiracy theorists wrong. The Skeptical Inquirer, an organization dedicated to science and reason. Conspiracy theorists need not apply. This website provides a list of the major JFK assasination sites on the Web. Is the popular notion that more than one lone gunman killed President Kennedy the one time conspiracy theorists got it right? Kasey Wehrum edits the “Net Art” section of ReadMe and is a graduate journalism student at New York University. |
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