Conspiracy History

Conspiracy History is the title of my latest book, which was published by Bretwalda Books last month. As the name suggests, it’s all about historical conspiracies – a subject that is usually ignored by conspiracy theorists. It shouldn’t be, though, because it really helps their case. The more you look at history, the more you realize that conspiracies are an inseparable part of human nature.

I started thinking along these lines a year ago, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. There were a lot of articles in the mainstream media about all the associated conspiracy theories, mostly of a sneeringly skeptical nature. The question they never seemed to ask themselves was: “Are there historical precedents for the kinds of scenario proposed by the conspiracy theorists?” When I looked into it, I discovered there were plenty – from the assassinations of Philip II of Macedon and Conrad of Jerusalem to those of Henri IV of France and Abraham Lincoln. Speculation that those powerful individuals were actually killed by members of “the establishment”, rather than by “enemies of the state”, have been around since day one. And it was a similar story when I looked at other types of conspiracy theory. For every seemingly wild suggestion on the internet today, you can find numerous historical precedents.

I tried the idea on Rupert Matthews at Bretwalda Books, and he liked it enough to take the book on. The result, a year later, is Conspiracy History: A History of the World for Conspiracy Theorists. To whet your appetite, here is the table of contents:

• Chapter 1: A brief introduction to conspiracy theories
• Chapter 2: False flag incidents
• Chapter 3: They acted alone – or did they?
• Chapter 4: Hidden agendas
• Chapter 5: Convenient deaths
• Chapter 6: Secret identities
• Chapter 7: The Illuminati and others
• Chapter 8: Rewriting history

The book includes a preface written by Nick Redfern, one of the most intelligent authors currently working in the conspiracy field. I’m really grateful to Nick for doing this, and for the very favourable review of the book he wrote for Mysterious Universe. Nick lives in Dallas, Texas – which of course was the scene of that most famous of all conspiracies, the JFK assassination. But Dallas has another claim to fame, especially for people of my generation – the eponymous TV series about the machinations of a bunch of greedy Texas oil entrepreneurs.

The original series of Dallas ran for 14 seasons from 1978 to 1991, and at its peak it was one of the most popular TV shows in the world. A couple of years ago it was resurrected for a new series, the third season of which is currently nearing its end in the UK (it’s already finished in the US). The first two seasons were a bit iffy, but this third one is as near to perfection as TV drama gets, and a worthy successor to the Dallas of the 1980s. One of the remarkable things about the original series – the thing that kept people watching week after week – was the fact that almost every character was a scheming, Machiavellian psychopath, prepared to go to extraordinarily devious lengths in order to get what they wanted. The new series is pretty much the same, except that you can now delete the word “almost”. Even Bobby Ewing is a scheming slimeball these days.

Of course Dallas is fiction, and it exaggerates reality. But few people would disagree with the basic principle – to be successful in business you have to break the rules and get away with it. So why is it so far-fetched to assume that governments – the successful ones, at any rate – operate on exactly the same principle? Even stranger, people only have difficulty with this view when they’re talking about current affairs. There’s nothing controversial about conspiracies if you’re talking about the Soviet Union of Stalin’s time, or the British Empire of Queen Victoria’s time, or the Florentine Republic of Machiavelli’s time.

And that’s why everyone needs to read Conspiracy History.