Lockdown Files, Conspiracies and Patsies.

The nature of conspiracies and fall guys who shield them from scrutiny

A guilty pleasure of mine is that I thoroughly enjoy Oliver Stone’s much-derided and discredited 1991 take on the JFK assassination. The assassination of President Kennedy is the permissible conspiracy theory that the powers that be are fine with people exploring, and even dabbling in themselves. It is the civic nationalism of conspiracy theories, but nevertheless, I maintain that Stone’s depiction is entertaining and engaging.

Our current age is overwhelmed with conspiracies, and the power structure is seemingly locked into a battle with misinformation and disinformation (I still don’t know the difference). But in 1991 when Stone released JFK the world was very different. The early ‘90s was an optimistic period of relative wealth and social stability, but also -- and not unrelated -- it was a pre-Internet age in which access to conspiracy material was limited. Oliver Stone inhabited a strange place in the cultural climate because, throughout the age of Reaganite optimism and hyper-capitalism, he maintained a cynical attitude to American power politics and, of course, his socialism. JFK can be seen, then, as a harbinger of what the ‘90s would become, which was essentially deconstructionist with regard to the earlier optimism.

Contrary to the America of Back to the Future, Stone’s America was inherently corrupt and murderous, a rapacious and greedy war machine always on the look-out for the next country to bomb, the next stock market swindle to benefit from, as in his Wall Street of four years earlier.

In this world, what today the media and political class call “conspiracy” is simply powerful men acting in their own interests. Often, the interests of different factions within both the power structure and American society generally overlap and converge; enemies become friends through mutual aims. In Stone’s JFK the schemers behind the killing of the president are primarily the military-industrial complex, various generals and higher functionaries in the military, America's most rabid anti-communists, and the Mob. Each faction has perfectly rational reasons for hating the Kennedy brothers. For example, the military-industrial complex disliked their dovish foreign policy which was costing them money, the Mob felt betrayed having assisted in getting votes for Kennedy, only for Robert Kennedy to later go after them with the Justice Department.

Stone’s view of conspiracy here is somewhat emergent. Surrounding John F Kennedy were multiple players, all with an ax to grind and a grudge to bear. Furthermore, they were all keenly aware that they had a convergent interest in ridding themselves of at least John F Kennedy, if not both of the brothers. Each faction had its own resources and expertise to deploy. The operation itself would only ever be referred to euphemistically and in coded language, which, once again, would be picked up and understood because of the common interest among them. They were, then, an “organised minority”.

It is clear that within this telling of the tale, Lee Harvey Oswald’s role is drastically reduced. Indeed, he may well have pulled the trigger, but in an operation of this importance, and risk, the conspirators would need to deploy their own shooters, and from multiple angles, to ensure the operation was a success. Lee Harvey Oswald, well, he was just the patsy.

Stone’s JFK and the archetype of the patsy came to my mind this week during the release of the “Lockdown Files” which placed former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock at the centre of the Covid response in Britain. To be sure, Hancock is not in any way a likable person. Indeed, it is his truly repulsive character, it could be argued, that makes him such a convenient scapegoat. The mainstream was allowed to boo and hiss at “Midazolam Matt” just as they had done when he broke his own rules to engage in an extra-marital affair, and when he appeared on the Celebrity Island television show.

A hundred thousand WhatsApp messages were leaked by the woman who had been drafted in to write Hancock’s autobiography. If one wanted to be extra, super conspiratorial about all of this it could be argued that Hancock was deliberately kept in the public gaze for two years precisely because his ultimate role was to be the fall guy for the disaster of the Covid policies: Hancock as manufactured twat, earning the public ire before being properly exposed as a sadistic sociopath, all over the media -- thus allowing the public a degree of catharsis.

The response of the mainstream influencers to the Lockdown Files was to reiterate that the Tories were out of their depth and woefully incompetent. This is true, but it simply begs the question of why they went along with the policies with such enthusiasm, and do they now feel they were duped.

The other framing would be to propose that the government was simply carrying out orders at the behest of other powers, but this, for the liberal influencer industrial complex, would be a conspiracy theory. That is to say, they believe in the Lee Harvey Oswald version of the JFK assassination.

It is clear from the WhatsApp leaks that the government ministers tasked with handling the pandemic were in over their heads, and yet no matter how doubtful they were about the vaccines, or confused by the low death rate of the virus itself, they implemented the policies that almost every other Western nation implemented.

This opens up a rather sticky problem in terms of sovereignty.

The British Government relied on information and policy proposals from scientists and medical experts such as SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) who built models and collected data. If politicians had decided against their advice and more people died, they would be to blame. At the same time, these “experts” were then being allowed a previously unthinkable amount of power over people’s lives. Indeed, the very definition of “technocracy” is “governance by experts”. The experts are themselves not beholden to the nation-state, but to a wider scientific consensus linked to institutions such as GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization) and the World Health Organization.

In other words, the people dictating policy were not actually the politicians but technocrats working in tandem with Globalist institutions and networks. And Covid-19, from lockdowns to vaccines to censorship, was their baby. They were not, however, alone. There was a multitude of interested parties, from governments ramming through all manner of legislation to corporations benefiting from small businesses being forcibly closed, to pharmaceutical corporations who now enjoyed populations being forced to not only pay for their products via taxation but get injected with them too.

The story we were given this week via the Telegraph's Lockdown Files stopped at the level of the politicians. There was no conspiracy: there was cock-up.

Oliver Stone’s JFK resembles a whodunnit more than it does a conspiracy. Traditionally, the word conspiracy was associated with murder mystery rather than the unhinged and paranoid trope of today.

Today we are supposed to believe that there are no conspiracies, which is to really say, there are no interested parties who will act together in an organised fashion immorally to benefit themselves at the cost of others. Consider the theory put forward in Stone’s JFK that powerful men in the military-industrial complex had President Kennedy murdered. Their motivation was that Kennedy was weak on foreign policy, and giving in to the Communists, but also that they were set to lose billions of dollars in armament contracts. There is nothing irrational about any of that, there is no esoteric blood sacrifice or scheme to rule the world. It’s immoral, but also rational self-interest.

It is noticeable in the Lockdown Files that there’s a clear cut-off point in terms of accountability: the breadcrumb trail stops with the politicians, or rather, it stops with the patsy. The wider network is left intact and without scrutiny or any questions being raised as to its nature and motivations. To “go there” would be to entertain a conspiracy, which, as we have seen, is simply an immoral network advancing their own interests.

There is something deeply infantilising and chilling about a discourse that seeks to reject as a matter of principle the idea that people plot and scheme to benefit themselves. It is a historic reality. It is, unfortunately, simply part of the human condition. It can be combated with truth and virtue, but as things stand now it cannot even be acknowledged unless the accused parties are themselves acceptable scapegoats. Putin and Trump come to mind.

There seems to be an assumption that in our enlightened and progressive age, we have in some way transcended and overcome such base motives as greed or indifference to human suffering, yet, in peddling this untruth we simultaneously warp and twist our understanding of what being human even is.