The Poison of Conspiracy
By: Britni Pepper
Tags: Politics, Crisis, Conspiracy Theories, America, Australia

The Poison of Conspiracy

“They” aren’t telling us the truth

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

There’s one every year. In 2020 there’s one every week. I’m talking about conspiracy theories, of course.

The Apollo moon landings were faked. There was a vast secret plot to assassinate President Kennedy. The 9/11 attacks were an inside job. Paul McCartney died young and hints were dropped in song lyrics and album covers. Rubbish, the lot of them.

Granted, there are grand secret conspiracies. Watergate was one, established to spy on the Democrats, and covered up by the White House. The July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The sales of weapons to Iran by the United States, breaking its own embargo.

The hallmark of successful conspiracies is that they are revealed at or soon after the decisive moment. Watergate unraveled under relentless scrutiny. When the bomb in Hitler’s bunker went off, it was clear that it had been planted, and within hours the conspirators had been found and executed. When some of the money from Iranian arms sales was diverted to fund rebels in Nicaragua, the plot was revealed and the ridiculously photogenic Marine Colonel Oliver North became a media star in his public testimony.

The fake conspiracies are likewise distinctive in one factor. There’s never any direct evidence. Instead, we are invited to connect the dots for ourselves, and the lack of evidence is in itself shown as support for a cover-up.

2020: the year of the conspiracy

Covid-45 spawned a battalion of conspiracies, none of them ever shown to be true. The simple fact is that a virus evolved into a particularly infectious and lethal configuration — as happens from time to time — and naturally infected and killed people. In this age of cheap international air travel, there was never any doubt that such a virus would not spread.

And now we have Don Trump pushing the theory that a grab bag of Democrats and Republicans conspired to rig the 2020 presidential election. No evidence has surfaced, and all investigations have shown that this year’s election was conducted fairly and efficiently under immense difficulties caused by the pandemic.

But still, Trump cannot accept that he is a loser, and to his millions of loyal supporters, the idea that he could be defeated at all is anathema. There must be some alternate explanation. A secret one.

So we now have the sad and embarrassing spectacle of a superpower head of state claiming that there was a conspiracy within his own administration and party. He cannot put forward any evidence, despite having immense investigation and intelligence resources at his disposal. Clearly, there is none, otherwise, he would present it in court and put the powers of the American state into action to expose and reverse a massive subversion of democracy.

Don Trump is happy to promote a crisis that digs deep into the heart of all that makes America credible to its own citizens. If the elections are not fair, then democracy is a failure, and America is a tyranny. He prefers that this message be the one sold to America, simply because he cannot concede defeat.

1975: the Australian experience

In 1972, with the slogan “It’s Time for a Change”, the leftist Australian Labor Party won a federal election in Australia, bringing to an end a quarter-century of the conservative national government.

Gough Whitlam (CC image via Wikipedia)

The party’s leader, Gough Whitlam, was widely hailed as a hero, implementing reforms in social programs. Within two years, the inexperienced government was beset by scandals and resignations and popular support had declined to the point where it was clear that if given the chance, the voters would boot out the charismatic but inept Whitlam.

Conservative Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser, aided by majority control of the Senate, delayed passage of the 1975 budget finance legislation, effectively threatening to shut down the government unless Prime Minister Whitlam called an election which he would surely lose.

It was a tense situation for some weeks, with neither leader backing down, each hoping the other guy would blink first.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching and money already beginning to run out, it became obvious that neither side had a solution, and there was no chance of a compromise.

At that point, the Australian Governor-General, who holds the executive powers of the moribund monarchy, stepped in, dismissed Whitlam, and appointed Fraser on the promise to pass the money bills and advise a general election.

Whitlam was effectively ambushed. Fraser passed the legislation and easily won the subsequent election.

It was a messy business and has been the subject of many books and a great deal of discussion ever since. Whitlam’s legions of supporters cried foul and sought to explain their hero’s demise as a conspiracy. They pointed fingers at the CIA, and at the Queen, whom they suspected was pulling strings behind the scene. Above all, they were appalled that an elected Prime Minister had been dismissed by an appointed official. (The Governor-General is appointed by the Queen on the sole advice of the Australian Prime Minister. In this case, Whitlam, who had made the mistake of selecting a senior judge, who saw himself as a sort of constitutional magistrate.)

They overlooked two critical points in their staunch defence of Whitlam:

The Governor-General acted within his constitutional powers. He alone possesses the power to appoint a Prime Minister and government ministers— (Section 64). There is no requirement for these ministers to even be members of parliament, let alone hold the confidence of the House. The Governor-General could select anyone off the street and make him the PM, though such an unelected leader would have trouble getting finance bills through parliament, which was precisely the difficulty facing Whitlam. The matter was put in the hands of the people a few weeks later. Say what you will about unelected officials and dirty tricks, but in the end, the voters made the decision on who was to govern them.

Whitlam’s defenders might squawk about needing to enjoy the confidence of the House in a Westminster system of government, but ignore the far more important matter of holding the confidence of the people.

Fraser would not have acted if he thought that the voters would back Whitlam, and the Governor-General would not have dismissed Whitlam without ensuring that the people would have the final say.

Don Trump and Gough Whitlam: two peas in a pod

Poles apart on policy, both Trump and Whitlam both fell victim of the cult of personality, believing that they were always in the right, and only treachery or cosmic disaster could strike them down.

So for decades, the Whitlam loyalists have blamed everyone but Whitlam, and even today some maintain that there were dirty tricks going on. Whitlam, of course, did nothing to quash this attitude, least of all admit that his government was so chaotic and inept that he turned massive support into a landslide defeat in only three years.

And right now, as I write these words, Don Trump is doing much the same thing. He cannot admit that his government was a shambolic disaster and he mishandled the Covid-45 pandemic so badly that millions of Americans caught the virus and hundreds of thousands of them died.

He and his one-eyed supporters are trying to create a myth of conspiracy and fraud that toppled a true and honest patriot when the reality is that the voters simply preferred a change and voted for the other guy.

Trump does nothing to support any narrative other than his own wild fantasy, and likely never will. He will never have the courage to make a concession speech, he will never graciously hand over power to a new leader, and he will never ever admit that when it came to the crunch, democracy ruled, and the voters delivered the message: “You’re fired!”

So where’s the conspiracy?

The events of 1975 occurred long before I was born, but the outrage of Whitlam’s dismissal sparked a movement to remove the monarchy from Australian affairs. In the closing years of the Twentieth Century, the republican movement became a topic of public discourse, and a Constitutional Convention was held in Canberra, and a referendum to amend the Constitution held a year or so later. As a teenager, I became involved in the campaigns through family connections and had the opportunity to listen to and even talk with some of the major players from 1975. All of them elderly and gracious gentlemen by that stage; there were very few women in Australian politics and government forty or fifty years ago.

Once again, the people had the final decision, and the republican movement was soundly defeated when put to the vote. Australia remains a notional monarchy, and the Queen’s head remains on the coins.

To this day, Whitlam’s supporters have not presented a shred of evidence that there was any conspiracy beyond what has already been documented. The Governor-General consulted with many people and sought their views, but he and he alone acted to resolve the crisis.

Don Trump has suffered defeat after defeat in the courts as he seeks to overturn democracy. He has found a few dozen votes here and there that may have been counted in error, but nothing that would come close to the millions he claims are fake, must be fake. He still maintains he won, without any support from the electoral officials, the courts, or indeed any of his intelligence or justice agencies.

Not a shred of evidence to back up the conspiracy theory. Sound familiar?

For the sake of party politics and the cult of personality, some who consider themselves as democratic leaders would smear and attack the very foundations of democracy. The people put them in their high office, and the people remove them in due course. It may be hard to accept, but accept it they must, because although democracy is not a perfect system, it is better than any alternative.

Britni