Recently Münzenberg, at Soob, wrote a little piece on Conspiracy versus Conspiracy Theory. A lot of it dovetails nicely into my recent paper on what it is that Conspiracy Theorists believe; Münzenberg’s argument is that just because people believe wacky Conspiracy Theories isn’t a reason to have a wholesale dismissal of belief in potential Conspiracies now. Münzenberg uses the example of pre-9/11 conspiracy theorising:
The example was FBI field agent Ken Williams who wrote the Phoenix Memo about the possibility of Al Qaeda members training in flight schools. His memo was discounted by his leadership. Whether or not they thought his views were conspiratorial we don’t know, but Williams uncovered a smaller part of a greater conspiracy and he was discounted. We all know what happened after Williams theory was discounted right? Thousands of people died. But that is ok, because LE guys like Williams with his crazy theories are “prone to believe in nonsense” according to Shrinkwrapped.
Münzenberg raises the important object to wholesale scepticism of Conspiracy Theories; some of them will turn out to be warranted. We should not forget that.
I (of course) wrote a paper on this very subject just over a year ago (at that Kaikoura conference), which I kept promising to upload the final version thereof and never did. Well, now I have. LaTeX-ed and slightly reformatted (for the modern age), I present: