Smoking will make your nose drop off

Sorry about the alarmist headline, inspired by a snippet of information on disinformation in one of my history periodicals. Seemingly in 1934 the rumour spread that the Chesterfield Cigarette Company, based in Richmond, Virginia, had employed a leper to pack their product. A little like the famous Orson Well’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, the story caused a wave of panic, seriously impacting on Chesterfield sales.

Ligget and Myers, the tobacco company that owned the Chesterfield factory, issued official denials, but presumably on the basis of ‘they would, wouldn’t they’ the public was not reassured. Even the added support of the Board of Health (think of the irony here!) and the mayor of Richmond made little difference. A business rival was suspected; the company even offered a $25000 reward if the source of the rumour could be traced, but no definite evidence was ever forthcoming. As it was it took fully ten years for sales to recover.

I’ve done a spot of internet research on this subject and it seems that the bizarre association between leprosy and tobacco predates the Chesterfield panic by decades. In 1882 the Chester Times, a newspaper based in Pennsylvania, published the following alarming notice;

A physician who has studied the disease says that it is dangerous to assume that it can only be contracted by actual contact. The very atmosphere in which a leper moves is contaminated. It can be caught by using a chair or room which has been occupied by one afflicted with the disease, or by using a drinking vessel or anything that has been touched by a leper. The street cars are a prolific source of the contagion. Lepers are employed in the cheap cigar and cigarette shops, and scores of instances of the disease are known to have arisen from smoking the articles made by their plague-stricken fingers.

Now if that does not stop you smoking absolutely nothing will!

The association between leprosy and smoking continued to surface from time to time, even as late as the Vietnam War, when it was alleged that the marijuana cigarettes, freely available in Saigon and widely smoked by American soldiers, were made in a leper colony. This came with lurid added detail: that the individual lepers took part in the production process according to their disabilities, with the sickest of all licking the wrappers which sealed the joints! This was so gothically over the top that many solders suspected that it had been started by the Pentagon as part of an anti-drugs campaign, a fair deduction, I would have thought.

Rumour has long had power in human affairs which the advent of modern multi-media has done nothing to reduce. If anything the reverse is true, especially when it is combined with a growing X-files distrust of government and official sources of information. In the 1980s, to take but one example, a story emerged that Procter and Gamble, the American multi-national, was associated with Satanism, all on the basis of its moon and stars logo. In this case the rumour was eventually linked to a business rival, Amway, a direct selling company, resulting in a series of law suits, the most recent in 2007.


In the days before modern media hearsay was often the only way in which news spread. After the onset of the English Reformation during the reign of Henry VIII, a sensitive and dangerous time both politically and socially, the government had one blunt tool against the spread of damaging rumours – it traced them back to source. Those caught repeating a story were forced, under threat of dire penalties, to reveal who exactly they had heard it from, and so on and so on until the original malefactor was pinned down, presumably someone totally devoid of imagination or the wit to blame some passing tinker!

Will Power

If there is one thing that makes me fume it’s the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare! Not only is the controversy, which dates back to the nineteenth century, entirely bogus but it’s also tinged with obvious overtones of condescension and snobbery. No ordinary man, the argument goes, could possibly be so literate and so accomplished as William Shakespeare of Stratford, no; so the plays and poetry had to be written by, say, Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, or William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby.

Oh, but one mustn’t overlook the fact that some commoners have been roped into the ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ industry. There is Christopher Marlowe, also a playwright of humble origins, a man who wrote, amongst other things, The Jew of Malta, and then proceeded under the pseudonym of Shakespeare to write The Merchant of Venice, a play with a similar theme but vastly superior in every way.

Francis Bacon is another candidate, undeniable one of the greatest scholars of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, a man with a remarkably full life as a philosopher, politician, scientist and courtier who somehow managed to find time to compose the whole Shakespearean canon! He was first put forward as a possible candidate, interestingly enough, by one Delia Bacon, herself a failed playwright. For her Shakespeare, the real Shakespeare, was a “third-rate actor” without the “highest Elizabethan breeding”, suggestions that clearly reflect her own lack of success.

The defenders of the aristocrats are, if anything, even more self-deluding in their sheer loopyness. Those who advance the Oxford claim, known collectively as the Oxfordians, clearly believe in drama after death, because their man shuffled off this mortal coil in 1604, years before Shakespeare’s greatest plays were published. Chief among the Oxfordians, wait for it, was one J. T. Loony!

But not all loonies were, well, Loony. Sigmund Freud took the absurd view, in accordance with his psychoanalytic theories, that works of art are essentially confessional, and that an ordinary man could not have imagined himself among kings. I see in this yet more condescension, coupled with a belief that his own notions could be projected back through history; that an unconscious oedipal conflict was the solution to Hamlet.

I have to say that this is the point of deepest irritation for me, the notion that all art is autobiographical; that if Shakespeare wrote about courts and courtiers he had to be familiar with courts and courtiers. It’s a view that becomes increasingly absurd if projected back through time and on to others. Do we assume that Sophocles, Aeschylus and Ovid consorted with gods and heroes? Bacon, Loony and, yes, Freud, are ranged with all those who would deny the power of the imagination, the power of genius, the power of an ordinary individual to reach sublime heights.

As I have said before that it’s almost impossible to knock down a good conspiracy theory when it’s up and running. There will always be people, no matter what, who believe that aliens built the pyramids, Richard III did not kill the Princes in the Tower, the moon landing was a hoax and Elvis, like King Arthur, somehow never really died! There will always be people who do not believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Boom

Now here’s an interesting little tale, one that took me by surprise because it concerns Nick Clegg, arguably the most boring man in British politics; nice, yes, but boring. Nice and boring, the very qualities that make him an admirable leader of the Liberal Democrats, the nice but boring party.

The odd thing is I have no clear idea what a Liberal Democrat is, never having met one, or at least never having met anyone who confessed to being a Liberal Democrat. I have a perfect image in my head of a Tory and even an image of a Socialist, a sort of urban Neanderthal, but all ‘Liberal Democrat’ conjures up is something fuzzy and unreal; neither this, nor that, nor anything in particular; no passions, no commitment, no energy-just nothing. Oh, that’s not quite right: there is Jenny Tonge, better known to her friends as Baroness Boom or Jihad Jenny. She believes alright, she believes there is something to be said for suicide bombers. My goodness; not so boring after all, though Baroness Boom is not a subject that Nick Clegg likes to dwell upon.

For those who do not know her Tonge is the former Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park. In 2004 she was asked to step down from the Party front bench after she made a speech justifying Palestinian suicide bombers, saying that if she had to live in similar circumstances she might consider becoming one herself. But this did not stop her being elevated to the Lords, where, in January of this year, she took up the Health portfolio.

But it isn’t just health she booms on about; continuing with her hostility to the state of Israel she has embraced some nice old fashioned conspiracy theories, the sort of thing that might be found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 2006 she announced that the “…pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.” I have no idea who has ‘a grip’ of Baroness Boom but commenting on this in the latest issue of Standpoint Douglas Murray writes “The idea that anyone has a grip on the LibDems would certainly surprise its membership.” Are they capable of surprise? I suppose one would have to wake them up first!

Anyway, Clegg was confronted by Murray on Boom’s outbursts after a lecture he gave earlier this year to the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. He was told that if she said anything like this ‘on his watch’ she would be in serious trouble. Unfortunately for poor old Corporal Clegg she has said worse with him in charge of the rag-tag army.

This year, as Murray reports, she met Khaled Mesha’al, the political leader of Hamas, praising him as “shrewd, plausible and actually very likeable.” Last year she shared a platform with Azzam Tamini, a British Palestinian activist and another enthusiast for suicide bombing. On this occasion she said that the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the United States was responsible for all of the world’s ills. All of them? Really? That’s nice to know; it makes things so simple if one happens to be looking for a final solution for all of the world’s ills.

When Murray brought these inconvenient facts to Clegg’s attention he dodged the issue, pretending that he became leader a year later than he had. Ah well, when the going gets tough a Liberal Democrat leader hides behind a lie. Best if you just go home, Nick, and prepare for government, you and Baroness Boom.

The People of the X Files

What is a conspiracy theory? Why, a tough little hybrid that flourishes in soil of imagination and has a strong resistance to all known dangers, particularly evidence and reasoned argument!

I’ve been thinking about the whole question of conspiracy theory after a brief exchange on the subject with another blogger. I also caught a comment recently from someone asking why they were now so prevalent. The answer to that is fairly simple, but let me postpone this for a bit.

There have always been conspiracies of one kind or another since the beginning or recorded history and doubtless before: political conspiracies, social conspiracies, religious conspiracies and on. Some have been discovered and aborted; some have been successful and thus no longer conspiracies; some never discovered and forgotten. But the conspiracy theory is and entirely modern phenomenon, emerging, as I’ve said before, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the early nineteenth century Augustin Barruel, a Jesuit priest, published a book saying that the whole event was the work of secret societies, involving the Freemasons and the Jews.

It is from this point that the phenomenon began its advance, helped on its way by various agencies, including a free press, and assisted by a growing cynicism among the general population, an unwillingness to accept things at face value. The modern conspiracy theory can range from forgeries like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the fictions of Dan Brown.

There is a continuous process of metamorphosis involved in the growth and sub-division of conspiracy theory in the modern age. People like Barruel and his followers at least made some attempt to base their arguments on evidence, though shaped towards their particular ends. The more recent forms, however, are shaped in resistance to wider, more complex realities, it might be argued, almost a perverse form of solipsism. In other words, the real world, the world of things and events, is subsumed into the imagination.

I like to think of the hard-core conspiracy theorists as the people of the X Files, the people who want to believe that government is all powerful, far more powerful than we imagine; that it exists to mislead ordinary people deliberately, to hide the truth for whatever reason. It’s these people who readily absorb stories of alien landings on earth but refuse to accept human landings on the moon, refuse to accept that Neil Armstrong ever made that giant leap, while ET hangs around their back gardens! These are also the people who believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the American government and so on and so on and so on. :-))

So, why are the conspiracy theorists so prevalent in the modern age? Simply because this is the age of the internet, an age of instant communication. In the past people who believed in a particular conspiracy had nothing to confirm their prejudice beyond their own active imaginations. Now they can find others like them, across every conceivable divide. Their beliefs, their perceptions, are confirmed and mutate into even stronger forms of assertion, deeper modes of solipsism. The real world dissolves into electronic pixels as Bishop George Berkley receives a lasting and ironic affirmation.

Conspiracy Theory-a Brief History

The modern conspiracy theory took shape in the aftermath of the French Revolution. I’m thinking in particular of the work of Augustin Barruel, the man who it has rightly been said who created a tradition, one that might be said to have emerged in Fascism, on the one hand, and the likes of the ghastly Da Vinci Code on the other!

Barruel, a Jesuit priest, wrote Memoirs to Serve for a History of Jacobinism, in which he claimed the Knights Templar, yes, the Knights Templar, had not been destroyed in the Middle Ages, but had simply gone underground, there plotting to take over the world. It was they, in their hatred of monarchy and the Catholic Church, who had organised the Revolution of 1789 and all that followed. Of course, they did not call themselves Templers, rather they hid under cover names, the Freemasons being the most noted of these.

So, by this, Barruel became the prophet of the counter-revolution. Towards the end of his life he began to find new agents of dissention in the Jews. There was, of course, a long anti-Semitic tradition within the Church, but Barruel was moving away from old notions of religious-based hostility towards an entirely new secular doctrine, where the Jews were not perceived as individuals but as a group, united in a common conspiracy. And as it was the Revolution that liberated the Jews from their old Medieval disabilities, made them part, in other words, of a modern civil society, then the Jews were clearly united with the Freemasons, or the Templers, as architects of the conspiracy that threatened to destroy Barruel's notions of all that was good in the world.

I am sure you can see where this is going, that there is a process that unites the thinking of this clerical oddball with the fantasies of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, and all else that followed.

Here is a text you might care to ponder on;

For a long time, the Jews have been planning, skilfully and with precision, for the attainment of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution...and most of the revolutions we heard about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons...and others in different parts of the world.

Do you have any idea where this is from; Barruel, perhaps, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No, it is from Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas constitution.