There is always something leerily fascinating and sensationally suspect about conspiracy theories.  Few open-minded people would sit to read a book or an article or watch a filmic expose of a conspiracy theory and truly not question a thing or two about their settled, even saner, views. For instance, every documentary I see or any book I read about the assassination of JFK often sets me wondering what really had happened. And what happened to Marilyn Monroe? Was she killed because she had slept with both John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert?

Did Elvis Presley die for real? What about Tupac Shakur? What happened to Princess Diana? Was she killed by the British Secret Service as Mohammed Al Fayed, Dodi’s dad, would like to believe? Was it truly the case that the Royal Family did not want her to marry a swarthy Egyptian, who would in turn become stepdad to the future English monarch?

Nigeria’s air is also shot through with conspiracy theories. What really happened between the wife of military dictator and a musician? Did she truly have a son for the crooner? And did another military dictator kill his firstborn son because he had doubts? And did  the same dictator not die the big death possibly before or just as he was experiencing what the French might call the’ little death?’

Often I choose not to give conspiracy theorists no more credibility than they deserve, which is not much. But there is a sort of conspiracy theory industry here in the west that it is hard for anyone to ignore. Just about anything can be conjured from the theorists’ bags of tricks. Any canard, rumour or whim is grist that can be brewed into dark heady malt of conspiracy.

In the late eighties through the nineties the po-faced Brit, David Icke, served us Byzantine pulp-fictive fantasias of dark forces working behind the scenes, controlling the destiny of the world. The British Royal Family and George Bush the elder featured a lot in Icke’s fevered imagination. These leaders of the world were a reptilian lot, able to take on saurian form, they could ‘shape-shift,’ slip off human form and become slithery chimera. Few people took Icke seriously then, as now. These days he only occasionally appears on wacky - and some would call them tacky - Sky channels like Paranormal and The Unexplained where he still barfs on about the latest lizards taking the world stage.

The best-selling novel of the closing first decade of this new millennium is based on a conspiracy theory. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code feeds people’s need to believe just about anything that offers not-so-unpleasant alternatives to received views. The Jesus Brown offers his readers in the novel is hardly a monster, he is even cunningly anthropomorphic,  made to be married to Mary Magdalene, possibly have a child with her. Even many younger Christians who read it had imagined they were reading a true history, at least when they were reading it. I think the magic might be slipping now for new readers, as the clunky film made from the novel has betrayed its brainless banality.

Dan Brown’s other ‘thriller,’ Angels and Demons, is about the world-powerful Illuminati. Again, in the book Brown forcemeats his not-quite-original fantasies into unfilled gaps in people’s imagination, offering seemingly truthful and abstruse revelations of the workings of a world-dominating secret organisation whose iron-grip tentacles reach into politics, business, government and religion, although the central plot in Dan Brown’s novel is that the Illuminati are seeking to destroy the Vatican, with several closing twists.  

Dan Brown has been described as a smart chancer because he had taken subjects about which conspiracy theorists are passionate and turned them into padded thrillers, knowing quite well that he would only be seen not as downright cranky as Icke who insists that what he is saying is gospel truth. The Illuminati conspiracy theory has been around for centuries, but unlike Icke who believes he knows all the members of the Illuminati by name and swears by the facticity of his claims, Brown only deepens the mystery with conflictual extravagance of pop fiction. 

One of the issues that have spawned conspiracy theories in recent times is the 911 terrorist attack on World Trade Centre. No, it was not the handiwork of Al Qaeda. It was masterminded by George Bush himself. Even if it was Al Qaeda, the CIA knew about the plot and just allowed things to ride. No, it was the work of a Jewish secret service. It was part of a plot by the Illuminati to test Bush’s mettle as a leader of the world, to see how he would go after terrorists, or to give him an opportunity to institute the final battle between Christianity and Islam, which was why he used the word ‘Crusade’ a number of times.  

Whoever had been voted the 44^th American president would also have been fodder for conspiracy theories. Obama’s mixed-race parentage had not made him less vulnerable, as a matter of fact it might even make theorists go to town with the notion of ‘house negro’ that Osama bin Laden broached just a day after Obama’s election.

Sure enough, Alex Jones’ The Obama Deception runs somewhat along those lines. I read about the documentary film somewhere and decided to see it. From the first, I knew it was genre film, the title had screamed it loud that it is was going to be a conspiracy-theory tract on screen. But nothing could be wrong with hearing ‘the other side’ of the Obama superlative success story (only a couple of weeks ago I’d savoured a BBC documentary on Obama’s mastery of the art of rhetoric). It might not be wise to use a conspiracy flick as mediative for the more favourable films on Obama, but then to dismiss such a film as completely unworthy of notice is like saying to the filmmaker that though Obama’s feet might be made of clay I’d choose to ignore them.  

Alex Jones’s day job is radio talkshow host, that often sniping, glib tribe of knowalls. Worse still, Jones is a GOP, a paleoconservative as he would like to describe himself. Although he’d like to see himself as balanced, especially in the anarch slant he gives his cheapmade films, he is a conservative at heart. In a number of earlier films he trashed George Bush,  a man for which the Iraq shoe-throw tied up the burden of unpopularity he carried on his shoulder for most of his time in office. For anyone on any side, Bush was a veritable punching-bag. But then Alex Jones films are often of the slapdash angst-ridden type certain to appeal to a few. Although Jones might want to set himself up as the Michael Moore of American conservatism, he is far less watched as a filmmaker than Moore, far less popular, something that has to do with him being a milk-and-water brew of Rush Limbaugh and Moore. Jones wants to come across as a firebrand, a bolshy rightwinger, which might sound like a contradiction in terms to many. 

One of opening scenes of The Obama Deception is a black-and-white clip of American President Dwight D Eisenhower introducing the phrase Military Industrial Complex to the country’s political lexicon. MIC is now a buzzword for American affluence, American influence, as well as American affluenza, it is the presiding term for American gunboat machtpolitik. So far as Alex Jones is concerned, at the time Eisenhower made the speech in which he used the term American was still in its innocence, it was still a country unspoilt by power and arrogance. He makes the claim that John F Kennedy was the last American President under whom the ship of state was not secretly piloted by self-effacing forces. After Kennedy the dark cabal had muscled their way into the presidency. And today Obama is the latest presidential pawn on the chessboard of the powers-that-be.

There are not many talkingheads in the documentary. There is Webster Tarpley, author and a recurrent appearer on wingnut FOX TV. Since I just watched Brad Pitt playing it up as Benjamin Button in the eponymous film, it was the Gollum-like image of the character as he grows backwards which first came to my mind when I saw Tarpley. But then this was only a warped figment, fed by my own rather leftie prejudices. In the real world, Tarpley looks more like Karl Rove, the GOP archstrategist. And there is also Gerald Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute.

There are two black men, possibly insinuated into the documentary as racial tokens. The rapper KRS 1 who has changed his names more times than Prince. And Professor Griff, one of the members of the superannuated hip-hop band Public Enemy. These two may just as well have been featured for Judas effect, in so much as other more successful and popular hip-hop figures like P Diddy and Jay Z and others were so discipularly loyal to Obama during the electioneering.

The documentary begins with giving itself airs of topicality. Obama’s inauguration flicks through the screen with clips of enraptured, tearful, members of the public witnessing the epochal event. But for Alex Jones the inauguration was hardly momentous. From the first, he dresses Obama in the garb of a serviceable butler in the shadowed hall of Washington freemasonry. Obama is set up as a ‘puppet president,’ the consequence of a decision to put a black face on the New World Order, since the last white face was no more than a clown.

From Jones’ coign of vantage, America’s long-held agenda of a New World Order, the sneakily imperial ambition to control the world from Washington is still going strong and Obama is now the figurehead, the latest spoke in the towering Babel-like ladder that America is climbing towards supranational heaven. From the eyes of the documentarist, America is the New Empire, the engine-room of Anglo-American World Order – because just like many before him, Jones sees a conspiracy by Britain and the descendants of its American emigrants to dominate the world.

In the documentary, Wall Street, the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission are often concurrently named as the real brooding power behind Obama’s Chair in the Oval Office. American government is described as ‘Government of Wall Street, for Wall Street and by Wall Street.’ The old mantra of Wall Street giving Main Street the kiss of death is repeated a number of times.  As far as Jones is concerned America’s globalist agenda is oiled, engineered, and driven by Wall Street and to an equally vast extent the Bilderberg Group. With the way the filmmaker hypes the clout and stock of the Group, the members might as well be the new illuminati, vicars to some sort of God – possibly Mammon. The group is bestowed with omnipotence and a certain omniquotient, it is conferred with Sadducean substantialness.

You spend a bit of time listening to how Obama is going to use his presidency to carry on Africom to America’s advantage, how Obama is going to be advancer of the status quo ante, and that the US President is more of a myrmidon than a master, muppet than president. Actually, oblique insults are trained on Obama for most of the documentary – but one must be careful about showing undue sensitivity to animadversions thrown at the African-American president, after all his predecessor, George Walker Bush, was a figure of fun during his time, and whether this was always justifiable is debatable.

In the documentary, the hum the Republicans wish to lilt up to a deafening din is repeated, that Obama is a weak, untried lictor only bearing the shield for his rose-hidden betters. Then he is called a liar, someone seemingly becoming fond of doing the sea-change on anything he promised. And the filmmaker wades into what he describes as the ‘Obama kin.’ Raila Odinga, purpotedly Obama’s ‘cousin,’ and who, incidentally, is also the Prime Minister of Kenya, is described as a former CIA agent, a man with deeper Islamic sympathies than he let on. Now fancy this: Odinga is all but tagged a terrorist sympathiser because he named one of his daughter after Winnie, Mandela’s former wife, an allusion to the admittedly disreputable youth football club she presided over.

While one should expect such Heath-Robinson embellishments of the truth in this faux-documentary, if Jones had done a bit more research, or if he had chosen to be less mischievous, he would easily have discovered that Raila Odinga and Obama are not cousins. Odinga made the claim in an interview that he was Obama’s cousin, but an uncle of Obama’s had confuted this. If Odinga was ever Obama’s cousin he could only have been that many removals, the Obamas and the Odingas only belong to the same ethic group of Luo.

One is apt to wonder what other inexactitudes and titivations the documentary had served as fact or truth, because I think I can remember the phrase ‘the truth strikes back’ from somewhere in the film. For me, the only thing that strikes back in the documentary is, at best, doctored truth. To call it half-truth is to dignify it with the half-full-cup logic - which is the way more people than anyone would like to believe see this sort of conspiracy-theory extravagance.

Sometimes people offer conspiracy theorists the benefit of the doubt. While watching the documentary you may mull it over: Perhaps America is ruled, truly, by Wall Street, maybe the Bilderberg Group constitutes the ultimate power in America, perhaps Obama is a stooge of certain behemoth vested interests. And, truly, something about this sort of allegations is that anyone would easily be able to pick pebbles of truth from them, pebbles not weighty enough to construct the sort of magniloquent edifice - a mere folly - that someone like Jones had built.

The trouble with this sort of documentary is neither believability nor unbelievability, but boringness, its torturous sameness. The Wall Street/Bilderberg reprise is repeated throughout, varied by scurrilous comments from both Celente and Tarpley. The black guys, being only immaterial makeweight, only contribute hot-air, as you would notice that in spite of agreeing to be part of the documentary they seem not totally on the offensive, they only generalise, jabbering about a conspiracy that persists in spite of the coloured man at the helm. KRS 1, particularly, is so vociferous and gruff that you sometimes imagine he is rapping gibberish.

I stumbled on The Obama Deception by accident, one of the quotidian little discoveries that may or may not be worth exploring. But considering who Obama is, his person, his pre-eminent position, his roots, his plethoric power as the president of the topmost country in the world, I thought spending some time watching a film that connects his name with deception was worthwhile.

I did not search for long. Not being a film released for commercial purposes, Youtube had given me the opportunity to watch it whole, although carved up into 12 parts of approximately 9 minutes apiece.

I watched the first three parts with some curiosity, and towards the end of the long-winded film it had all become heavy-going and scrappy, and I had even wished that my broadband would stream like spilled glue, so I’d give myself a reason to give it up. But it all ran well, so I didn’t. I watched it to the last shorter clip, which was where I discovered that from the 350,000, give or take, who had seen the first clip, the number had dipped to 30,000 in the last. Which seemed to say it all. The Obama Deception is a damp squib. 

Robot  # 1 | 29.04.2009 07:04

The documentary begins with giving itself airs of topicality. Obama’s inauguration flicks through the screen with clips of enraptured, tearful, members of the public witnessing the epochal event. But for Alex Jones the inauguration was hardly momentous. From the first, he dresses Obama in the garb of a serviceable butler in the shadowed hall of Washington freemasonry. Obama is set up asa ‘puppet president,’ the consequence of a decision to put a black face onthe New World Order, since the last white face was no more than a clown. ...Read the full article.

Uncle Sam  # 2 | 29.04.2009 18:40

There are indeed so many conspiracy theories out there. I can even create one if I have the time for it. Do you believe in these theories? Or you felt like listing them?