When we began our project in 2013, we thought it was a mainly academic enterprise, but with the Brexit and US Presidential election campaigns it gained public significance. The world has entered the era of ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ in which conspiracy theories have become part of the international currency of ‘fake news’ on the […]
I only have a very small part in the film Denial compared to those of David Irving (played by Timothy Spall), Richard Rampton QC (played by Tom Wilkinson), Anthony Julius (played by Andrew Scott), and Professor Deborah Lipstadt (played by Rachel Weisz), but I like to think it’s an important one. When Irving sued Deborah […]
The main arguments in favour of an answer in the affirmative are (1) they sow distrust in government in particular and politics in general, and (2) they substitute irrational suspicion for a cool appraisal of the evidence and so make it difficult for democracies to make reasoned decisions. The question that needs to be addressed […]
Because I am a historian, naturally I began with a historical view of the evolution of conspiracy theories over the last couple of centuries or so, based on the idea that the broader and wider the public sphere becomes, the more likely you are to get conspiracy theories based on popular suspicion of government, while […]
Don DeLillo’s gripping and brilliantly written novel “Libra”( 1988) tells the disturbing life-story of Lee Harvey Oswald. It presents him as the tool of three disaffected CIA operatives who want to galvanise the USA into retaliation against Cuba by engineering the assassination of President Kennedy and ensuring it is attributed to Cuban agents. The story […]
A conspiracy, according to the dictionary, is a group of two or more people who get together for some criminal or illegal purpose (it is thus different from a plot, which is the plan that the conspirators draw up). It follows that it naturally has to be secret, though this isn’t a central part of […]
An important part of this project is to investigate conspiracy theories as a form of alternative knowledge. Many conspiracy theories posit a massive cover-up of historical truth by governments, historians, the media and the publishing industry have colluded in suppressing. In recent years, there has been a growing vogue for books that take this belief […]