"Conspiracies Show Our Prejudices," column by Dan O'Rourke

| Submitted by admin on August 15, 2009 - 7:33pm.

The following, "Conspiracies Show Our Prejudices," by CPJ member and regular columnist in the Dunkirk Observer, Daniel O'Rourke, was published on Thursday August 13, 2009. 

 

The word “conspiracy” comes from the Latin meaning to breathe together.  Recently, there has been some heavy breathing -- hyperventilation really -- over President Obama’s place of birth. There’s a small but vocal group of Birthers, who persistently claim Obama was not born in the United States and therefore, in accordance with the Constitution, is not legitimately President.  The evidence to the contrary, however, is overwhelming.

The Birthers claim that Obama’s birth certificate, which has been digitally copied and widely circulated, is insufficient -- even forged.  Staffers at Factcheck (skeptics should check out www.factcheck.org) have “seen, touched, examined and photographed” the original certificate. Their conclusion: it is genuine; Obama was born in Hawaii.  Hawaii’s Director of Public Health has confirmed that Obama was born in Honolulu.  Linda Lingle, the governor of Hawaii -- a Republican -- has also declared the birth certificate authentic. 

The downtown Honolulu Public Library, moreover, has microfilm of a notice in the Honolulu Sunday Advertiser for August 13, 1961.  Under “Births, Marriages, Deaths,” it reports the President’s birth: “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, a son, August 4.”  No evidence, however, will ever be sufficient to convince the Birthers. They are conspiracists and evidence doesn’t matter. Many consider them right-wing, wing nuts. They have made up their minds. They do not want to believe that Obama is our legitimate president.  How could he be?  He is an African American with a Muslim sounding name.

Conspiracies are not new and don’t easily go away. Sixty years after Pearl Harbor, some still believe that President Franklin Roosevelt provoked the Japanese attack, knew about it in advance, and did not prevent it because Machiavellian-like he wanted the country to be drawn into the war in Europe. Historians now have access to all significant reports, documents and memoirs. Their consensus: our national intelligence agencies had indeed picked up evidence of a pending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but that bureaucratic bungling and not Roosevelt’s conniving were responsible for our not preventing it.  But don’t try to convince Roosevelt haters of this.  They are psychologically programmed to believe the worse of him.  No matter what historians conclude, it will not change their minds.

Consider too the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite three separate government investigations that have found otherwise, some still claim Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that there was another gunman firing from the grassy knoll in Dallas.  Dozens of books have been written on that conspiracy. 

 

Deniers of the Holocaust are an outrageous international example.  These conspirators reject or minimize the Nazi genocide of five to seven million European Jews.  Despite overwhelming documentary evidence of Nazi policy and contemporary newsreel footage of concentration camps and their gas chambers, they continue to deny the Holocaust. They have written dozens of books attempting to rationalize their preposterous conclusions. Deniers of the Holocaust, however, will never go away because they are conspiracists.
History has many examples of people believing what the scientific and academic communities deny.  Some examples are harmless like the Sasquatch Bigfoot and the Lock Ness Monster; others like the Holocaust Deniers and the Birthers are insidious.
There are also examples of religious conspiracies. The sudden death in September 1978 of Pope John Paul I only a month after his election as Pope has prompted some. His death in the papal chambers without witnesses and the Vatican’s untruthful statements concerning his death have encouraged a number of conspiracy theories. David Yallop, Malachi Martin, and Robert Huthchison in their books have linked his death to poisoning in an attempt either to avoid more adverse publicity for the Vatican in the Banco Ambrosiano banking scandal, or to silence the new pope’s liberal views concerning church teaching on birth control (allegedly he said they were outdated), or to squelch his opposition to Opus Dei, a highly conservative and influential church group.
On the other hand, John Cornwell’s book, “A Thief in the Night” claims that Albino Luciani, the future Pope Paul I, had already been in poor health.  The late Pope’s niece Pia Luciani, a medical doctor confirmed this claim. She said his ankles and feet were so swollen that he could not wear the papal shoes at the time of his election. His blood pressure was alarmingly low and two years prior he had suffered a retinal embolism. The most likely cause of death was a pulmonary embolism not poison, but try telling that to the conspiracists who want to believe that the Roman Church, as in medieval times, still encourages the murder of troublesome popes.
Some people just do not trust the government (The Kennedy Assassination).  Some are instinctively suspicious of Franklin Roosevelt (Pearl Harbor).  Some are anti-Semitic (Holocaust Deniers). Some are anti-Catholic (John Paul’s Death). And some just can’t believe that an African American is President of the United States (The Birthers). But what do all these conspiracists have in common?  They are all so deeply committed to their conspiracy that no evidence or fact will change their minds.

Moreover, what can conspiracies of all types teach us?  We should work hard to have reason instead of prejudice form our judgments.  We should try our best to see what is really there and not what we would like to be there.  To paraphrase only slightly Max Born, the Nobel Prize winning physicist: The belief that there is only one truth and that I possess it is the deepest root of evil in the world.

Retired from the Administration at State University of New York at Fredonia, Daniel O’Rourke lives in Cassadaga, NY. His column appears in the Observer, Dunkirk, NY on the second and fourth Thursday each month. A grandfather, Dan is a married Catholic priest. He has published "The Spirit at Your Back," a book of previous columns. To read about the book or send comments on this column visit his  website  http://www.danielcorourke.com/