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New book on conspiracy theories by David Aaronovitch

Magenta

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Magenta
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British journalist David Aaronovitch has a new book out on conspiracy theories called Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. He covers, amongst other CTs, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Pearl Harbor, JFK and of course 9/11 and 7/7. Excerpt from The Times:

The internet has created shadow armies whose size and power are unknowable. Cyberspace communities of semi- anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other's interests impossibly exotic or even mad. At the same time, the democratic quality of the net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd. But, increasingly, material originating on the net has turned up in popular culture - a millennial version of the word-of-mouth route to popularity. The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has, at the time of writing, become a first resource for many students, despite the amusing randomness of its reliability.
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Audio of an entertaining talk (with Q&A) by Aaronovitch here - he touches on scepticism and characterises the book as part of the war on stupidity. (911myths gets a thumbs-up, BTW)

Couple of reviews here and here.

It sounds like a worthwhile read; I'm going to ask my local library to order it in.
 
God, the guy has nailed my problems with Wikipedia in the term "random accuracy".
 
I'll be asking for it on my regular bookstore run this weekend, but since it's an import and even Amazon doesn't have it in stock right now it might be a while before I get to read it.

Naturally, of the two customer reviews on the Amazon Web site, one is from someone who just spews all the standard-issue claims from the "Paranoid Conspiracism's Greatest Hits" album including, believe it or not, the phrase "speed of gravity".

For some reason my desk appears to be developing a forehead-shaped groove. Crummy NWO-issue stuff just doesn't hold up to normal use.
 
Ironically and comically, David Aaronovitch, journalist and notoriously obsequious interviewer of Tony Blair, is as close to a government "shill" as one can get without tipping into parody!
 
Saw him speak about the book last night. It was an interesting and entertaining evening spoiled only by the nutjobs in the Q&A
 
As I remember it Aaronovitch was one of the fawning nutjobs who swallowed, or at least enthusiastically pushed, the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the west, ..the WMD, the 45 minutes and all that.
A 'journalist' like that has zero credibility.
 
plumjam said:
As I remember it Aaronovitch was one of the fawning nutjobs who swallowed, or at least enthusiastically pushed, the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the west, ..the WMD, the 45 minutes and all that.
A 'journalist' like that has zero credibility.
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Do you have a source for that?

Also, I just heard Aaronovitch interviewed about the book on NPR: Just heard Aaronovitch interviewed about the book on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123127032
 
It's a good book. Very enjoyable to read. It was published in the UK almost a year ago and I read it back in May.

But on the WMD and Iraq, here's an article which pretty much sums up his belief that there were WMD and that without their discovery the Iraq war wasn't justified.

It couldn't be any plainer:

I was never in favour of this war mainly because of the threats of terrorism or WMDs. Getting rid of Saddam (and therefore the myriad afflictions of the Iraqi people) was enough. But the weapons were the pretext on which the invasion was sold to a lot of people in this country, and was attempted to be sold to the people of the world. The British dossiers, released last autumn, claimed that Iraq had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, drawn up military plans for their use, retained illegal missiles capable of carrying WMD warheads, and concealed equipment from the weapons inspectors.
At the United Nations in February, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented evidence claiming that there were mobile laboratories and showing clear signs that the Iraqis had moved material to escape inspection from UN teams. Put together, all this was argued as constituting a clear breach of UN resolutions that therefore required urgent action.

These claims cannot be wished away in the light of a successful war. If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,945381,00.html
 
angrysoba said:
It's a good book. Very enjoyable to read. It was published in the UK almost a year ago and I read it back in May.

But on the WMD and Iraq, here's an article which pretty much sums up his belief that there were WMD and that without their discovery the Iraq war wasn't justified.

It couldn't be any plainer:

I was never in favour of this war mainly because of the threats of terrorism or WMDs. Getting rid of Saddam (and therefore the myriad afflictions of the Iraqi people) was enough. But the weapons were the pretext on which the invasion was sold to a lot of people in this country, and was attempted to be sold to the people of the world. The British dossiers, released last autumn, claimed that Iraq had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, drawn up military plans for their use, retained illegal missiles capable of carrying WMD warheads, and concealed equipment from the weapons inspectors.
At the United Nations in February, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented evidence claiming that there were mobile laboratories and showing clear signs that the Iraqis had moved material to escape inspection from UN teams. Put together, all this was argued as constituting a clear breach of UN resolutions that therefore required urgent action.

These claims cannot be wished away in the light of a successful war. If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,945381,00.html
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I had never heard of Aaronovitch before today, so I don't have a strong opinion of him one way or the other. But the quote above doesn't warrant, in my view, Plumjam's statement two posts up:

As I remember it Aaronovitch was one of the fawning nutjobs who swallowed, or at least enthusiastically pushed, the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the west, ..the WMD, the 45 minutes and all that.
A 'journalist' like that has zero credibility.
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I don't think it's quite fair to call Hussein being a threat to the West a conspiracy theory--more like conspiracy fact. There was an actual, real life conspiracy perpetrated by the US and British governments to make it look like Iraq had WMD and was conspiring with Al Qaeda etc. Aaronovitch should have been more skeptical of the claims, but to me that doesn't reduce his credibility to zero.
 
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Jim Tron, I completely agree that it doesn't reduce his credibility to zero. But he was, undoubtedly one of the most vocal supporters for the war in Iraq and clearly says that without WMD the credibility of the UK and US governments' arguments for war with Iraq is seriously undermined. In fact, he suggests that their credibility ought to be reduced to zero, quite clearly.

It is of a different order to many of the conspiracy theories he debunks. There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein was happy to cultivate the idea that he did have weapons of mass destruction.

Also, the weapons inspector, David Kelly, who is the subject of one of the conspiracy theories Aaronovitch deals with in his book also seemed to believe there were weapons of mass destruction there too (as did Hans Blix etc...). So the idea was by no means crazy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/aug/31/huttonreport.iraq
 
You'll find a recent interview with DA in the Little Atoms podcast archive. I believe he was talking about this book.
 
Tenth post and I end up backing up JiJa. :boggled:

Ah well.

Aaronovitch Watch (can't link, am noob) has a pretty good dismissal of his book, from a non-troofer perspective. Also there's a snarky take on it from John Crace's Digested Read at the Guardian.

Basically, the book doesn't tell you anything about conspiracies any hardened JREFer doesn't already know and contains added hilarious apologias for Aaro's Iraq war cheerleadery and swipes at his political enemies. lots of crappy UK conspiracy stuff, no academic literature on conspiracists and the conspiratorial mindset and hilarious bits where he mocks the very idea of believing in conspiracies while uh... highlighting famous government conspiracies.
 
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Sorry, I don't follow. Could you quote or link to some of this stuff? You can post links if you leave a gap or change the ".com" to "DOTcom". And I'm not quite seeing how his being wrong on one thing makes everything he has to say worthless.
 
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aaronovitchDOTblogspot.com/2009_05_01_archiveDOThtml and wwwDOTindependentDOTcoDOTuk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/voodoo-histories-by-david-aaronovitch-1676707DOThtml

A bit less scathing than I remember, but the nut graph is that he isn't really good at the how and why of conspiracy theorising and his Iraq war cheerleading drives him to exessive deference to the idea that all conspiracy theorists are rubbish while almost-simultaneously highlighting massive successful government conspiracies - and this might just have something to do with his Iraq war cheerleading and being a New Labour hack.
 
JihadJane said:
Ironically and comically, David Aaronovitch, journalist and notoriously obsequious interviewer of Tony Blair, is as close to a government "shill" as one can get without tipping into parody!
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I saw him tonight on a National Geographic doc on 9/11. It appears the entire program was just a lead-up to sell his book.
 
plumjam said:
As I remember it Aaronovitch was one of the fawning nutjobs who swallowed, or at least enthusiastically pushed, the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the west, ..the WMD, the 45 minutes and all that.
A 'journalist' like that has zero credibility.
Click to expand...

So he's just another Zionist NWO conspirator.
 
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