Michael: Alright Kevin, I have to ask. The book we're talking about today, Voodoo Histories, was inspired by a guy named Kevin who believed the moon landing was faked. Any confessions you'd like to make? Kevin: None whatsoever. My only conspiracy is that my coffee cup is secretly emptying itself. But seriously, it’s wild that a book this deep and well-regarded kicks off with such a simple, everyday moment. Michael: It’s the perfect entry point. And today we are diving into Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch. He’s a renowned British journalist and an Orwell Prize winner, but what's truly fascinating is his background. He’s the son of a very senior member of the British Communist Party. Kevin: Whoa, really? So he grew up inside a system with a very specific, all-encompassing worldview. That’s not your typical journalist's upbringing. Michael: Exactly. It gives him this unique, almost insider's lens on how grand, unifying theories—whether political or conspiratorial—can take hold of people's minds. He’s seen it up close. The book itself is widely acclaimed for its sharp, journalistic takedown of these theories, though some readers feel it focuses more on debunking than on the deep psychology of belief. Kevin: I can see that. It’s less about why we feel the need to believe and more about how the things we believe are constructed. So, where does this all start? Take me back to that car ride with the other Kevin.

Michael: Picture this. It's 2002. Aaronovitch is in a rental car in Tunisia, filming a documentary. He’s with his cameraman-producer, Kevin Jarvis, who he describes as intelligent and skeptical. Out of nowhere, Kevin starts explaining, with total conviction, that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was a hoax. Kevin: Oh man. I’ve been in that car. Maybe not in Tunisia, but I’ve been in that conversation. What was the "proof"? Michael: The classics. The American flag looked like it was fluttering in a breeze, but there's no air on the moon. There were no stars in the sky in any of the photos. The astronauts' movements looked staged. Kevin Jarvis had it all down, citing supposed photographic experts and scientists. Kevin: And Aaronovitch, a seasoned journalist, is just sitting there listening to this? Michael: He was floored. Not just by the claims, but by the fact that this smart, rational person genuinely believed it. He realized the sheer scale of the lie being proposed—hundreds of thousands of NASA employees, scientists, and contractors all keeping a secret for decades. It became an obsession for him, and it led him to his core definition of a conspiracy theory. Kevin: Okay, this is what I need. How do you actually define it? Because the word gets thrown around for everything. Michael: Aaronovitch offers a brilliant, two-part definition. A conspiracy theory is either 'the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended,' or 'the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another.' Kevin: In other words, it’s seeing a puppet master where there’s really just chaos or simple human error. Michael: Precisely. And his primary tool for cutting through the noise is Occam's Razor. The principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best one. He quotes the 18th-century writer Tom Paine, who applied it to religious miracles. Paine asked, "is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?" Kevin: That’s a fantastic way to put it. Is it more likely that NASA faked the physics of space and silenced half a million people, or that some photos look a bit weird? Michael: Exactly. But here’s the pushback you were hinting at earlier, and it’s an important one. What about real conspiracies? They happen. Watergate happened. The Iran-Contra affair happened. Are we just supposed to dismiss everything as a 'theory'? Kevin: Yeah, that’s the trap, right? If you believe nothing, you’re naive. If you believe everything, you’re a crank. Michael: Aaronovitch makes a crucial distinction here. He argues that real conspiracies are almost always messy, limited in scope, and characterized by failure and eventual discovery. Think about Watergate—it unraveled because of a clumsy break-in and, crucially, because Nixon kept tapes that incriminated him. It was a bungled cover-up, not a perfect, silent plot. Kevin: So real conspiracies are human and flawed. Michael: Yes! He uses the historical example of the Zinoviev Letter in 1924 Britain. It was a forged letter, supposedly from a Soviet official, designed to scare voters away from the Labour Party right before an election. It was a real plot, cooked up by anti-Communists and leaked by some people in MI6. Kevin: And did it work? Did it swing the election? Michael: This is the key part. The conspiracy theory version of the story is that it single-handedly brought down the government. But the reality, as historical analysis later showed, is that its impact was massively exaggerated. The Labour party’s vote count actually went up in that election. They lost for other, more complicated political reasons. The conspiracy was real, but it was clumsy and its effect was overstated. Kevin: That’s a great distinction. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are these grand, flawless narratives where the plotters are omnipotent and never make mistakes. They explain everything perfectly. Michael: They are perfect stories. And because they are just stories, they can’t be disproven. Any evidence against the theory is just part of the cover-up. Any inconvenient facts can be absorbed. The producer of the 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change famously said, "We know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves." Kevin: Hold on, that’s genius in the most twisted way. 'The mistakes are there on purpose to make you think for yourself.' You can’t lose! It’s a completely closed logical loop. Michael: It’s the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. And that kind of thinking, when applied to something truly toxic, can have devastating consequences. It’s not always as harmless as arguing about the moon landing. Kevin: That makes me think. If a simple theory about the moon can be so compelling, what happens when a theory is designed not just to explain, but to incite hatred? What's the most dangerous version of this you can imagine?

Michael: Well, that brings us to what is arguably the most destructive and influential conspiracy theory in modern history: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Kevin: I’ve heard the name, but I honestly don't know the full story. It sounds ancient and sinister. Michael: It is. And it’s a perfect case study in how a complete and utter fabrication can shape the world. The story starts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Europe is in turmoil after World War I, and people are desperate for an explanation. Why did this horrible war happen? Why are revolutions sweeping the continent? They needed a scapegoat. Kevin: And the Jews were the convenient target. Michael: The perfect target, from a conspiracist's point of view. They were an international community, perceived as influential in finance and politics, yet culturally distinct. And right at that moment, this document appears: The Protocols. It purports to be the secret minutes from a meeting of Jewish leaders, outlining their master plan to take over the world. Kevin: A step-by-step guide to world domination? Michael: Exactly. It describes how they will use liberalism, finance, and control of the press to foment wars, destroy monarchies, and install a global government under their control. It was the 'smoking gun' that explained everything people were anxious about. Kevin: But it was fake. Where did it actually come from? Michael: This is the truly incredible part. It was a forgery, largely plagiarized from a completely unrelated book: a French political satire from 1864 called Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. That book was a critique of Napoleon III's ambitions. It had nothing to do with Jews. The forgers, likely working for the Russian secret police, just took the blueprint for a generic political takeover and slapped the label 'Jewish plot' on it. Kevin: That is absolutely audacious. They just did a find-and-replace on a 40-year-old satire. So, when it was exposed as a fraud, everyone just laughed and threw it away, right? Michael: You’d think so. In 1921, a journalist for The Times of London, Philip Graves, exposed the whole thing, showing side-by-side comparisons of the texts. It was undeniable proof of plagiarism. But it didn't matter. Kevin: Why not? The proof was right there. Michael: Because, as Henry Ford, a huge promoter of the Protocols in America, said, "They fit with what is going on." It didn't matter if it was real; it felt real. It confirmed pre-existing anti-Semitic prejudices and provided a simple, satisfying answer to complex problems. An editorial in The Times before the debunking captured this perfectly, asking of the Protocols: "Are they a forgery? If so whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy...?" Kevin: The 'uncanny note of prophecy.' That gives me chills. It’s a 19th-century deepfake. People believed it because it confirmed their biases. It’s the same reason a fake news headline spreads like wildfire on social media today. It doesn't have to be true; it just has to align with what you already feel. Michael: You've hit the nail on the head. And the consequences were catastrophic. The Protocols were used to justify pogroms in Russia. Hitler referenced them in Mein Kampf. They became a foundational text for the Nazis, providing a 'rational' justification for the Holocaust. Kevin: So this isn't just some quirky historical footnote. This is a document with millions of deaths on its hands. Michael: Millions. And Aaronovitch quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who made a profound point after the war. She said, "The chief political and historical fact of the matter is that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery." Kevin: Wow. The belief in the lie became the historical event. The story became more powerful than the reality. That's a terrifying thought. And it makes me wonder how that same mechanism—that need for a story, for a villain—plays out in our own time.

Michael: It plays out constantly. That psychological need for a narrative that 'fits' didn't die with the Nazis. It’s the engine behind the biggest conspiracy theories of our lifetime. Think about the assassination of JFK. Kevin: The ultimate conspiracy theory. The 'lone gunman' theory just never felt satisfying to a lot of people. A great, powerful president couldn't be brought down by one sad, strange little man. It feels... disproportionate. Michael: Exactly. The chaos and randomness of it is too unsettling. A grand conspiracy, involving the CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans—that feels more proportionate to the scale of the tragedy. It imposes order on a meaningless event. It gives it a reason. Aaronovitch points out that within a week of the assassination, polls showed that less than a third of Americans believed Oswald acted alone. The doubt was immediate. Kevin: It’s the same pattern with Princess Diana's death. A tragic, senseless car accident is unsatisfying. A royal plot to eliminate a troublesome princess? That’s a story. It has villains, motives, a plot. It makes sense. Michael: And then you get to 9/11, which became the ultimate conspiracy catalyst for the 21st century. The official story, while horrific, is complex. It involves geopolitics, intelligence failures, and religious fanaticism. The conspiracy version is much simpler: it was an inside job. Kevin: The '9/11 Truth' movement. And what’s fascinating there is how it brought together such strange bedfellows. You had people from the far-left, who distrusted American imperialism, agreeing with people from the far-right, who were driven by anti-Semitic theories about Israeli involvement. Michael: It’s a classic convergence. They all shared a common enemy: the official story, the 'establishment.' And the internet allowed them to find each other, to build communities, and to create echo chambers where their beliefs were constantly reinforced. Kevin: Which brings us right up to the present day. I can't help but think of that viral video from 2009, with the 'Lady in Red' at a town hall meeting. Michael: A perfect, modern example. A congressmen is holding a meeting, and this woman stands up, waves a piece of paper she claims is her birth certificate, and declares that President Obama is not an American citizen. And then she yells that famous line. Kevin: "I want my country back!" It was so raw and emotional. What was she really saying? Michael: She was doing exactly what Aaronovitch describes throughout the book. The reality of a complex, changing America—with its first Black president, shifting demographics, and economic anxieties—was deeply unsettling to her. So she reached for a simpler, more sinister story. Kevin: A voodoo history. Michael: A total voodoo history. The story wasn't about complex societal change. It was about a secret plot. Obama isn't a legitimate president who represents a different America; he's an illegitimate usurper, a secret Kenyan, a fraud. The conspiracy theory provides a clear villain and a simple explanation for her feeling of loss. Kevin: It turns a feeling of disenfranchisement into a battle of good versus evil. And it’s so much more empowering to believe you’re fighting a secret enemy than to accept that the world is just changing in ways you don’t like. Michael: That’s the seductive power of it. It gives you a narrative where you are the hero, the one who sees the truth that the 'sheeple' miss.

Kevin: So, when you pull it all together, from a faked moon landing to a forged document that fueled a genocide, to a woman at a town hall meeting, what's the one thread that connects all of these 'voodoo histories'? Michael: I think Aaronovitch's ultimate point is that the real power isn't in the conspiracies themselves, which are often non-existent, bungled, or far less impactful than believed. The real, enduring power is in the idea of conspiracy. It's a type of story. Kevin: A story that we tell ourselves. Michael: Yes. It’s a story we tell ourselves to explain away failure, chaos, and change. It's a way to impose a narrative of deliberate evil onto a world that is often just messy, random, and indifferent. It’s a comforting lie when the truth is too complex or too painful to accept. Kevin: And it’s a lie that lets us off the hook. We don't have to grapple with our own society's complicated problems if we can just blame a secret cabal pulling the strings behind the curtain. Michael: Exactly. It absolves us of responsibility. The danger, as Aaronovitch shows so powerfully, is that these stories aren't just stories. They have real-world consequences. They distort our understanding of history, they poison our politics, and at their worst, they lead to violence and persecution. Kevin: It makes you wonder, what are the 'voodoo histories' we're telling ourselves right now, without even realizing it? Michael: A question to ponder. This is Aibrary, signing off.