Known knowns, unknown knowns, and so on
At the beginning of this week, Charlie Brooker of the Guardian wrote an entertaining piece on nutty conspiracy nuts. Today, the Guardian produces the ponderous and unfunny Dan Hind to object. He starts by saying that there really are conspiracies.
Wide-ranging conspiracies do take place, whether we are inclined to believe that they do or not. It might well be consoling to believe that the CIA plots the overthrow of unhelpful foreign regimes. But it is also true. To insist that, say, the CIA had nothing to do with the fall of Guatemalan leader Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, or the overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973 might feel terrifically sensible and sane — we can’t always be seeing the hidden hand of the CIA, there’s no call for reductionism. It is also, you know, wrong.
He sure is confident that he knows things. But then he tells us that there is no way to know about that big 9-11 conspiracy.
What happened on 9/11 is, in the end, a matter of fact – whatever our worldview might incline us to consider plausible or possible. The true authorship of the attacks is as difficult to establish as anything else about the world of international terrorism and espionage.
For myself, I have no idea what happened, because I have no more idea of how the business-intelligence-political nexus works than I have about what chess grandmasters are up to when they are staring at the board, looking all thoughtful.
The attacks on the US on September 11 2001 were part of a web of events that interconnect with oil, drugs, money, organised crime, imperialism, existing institutions and us. And religion, and a lot more money.
It might feel wise and sensible to declare that any explanation that differs from the official account requires hundreds of impossibly tight-lipped bureaucratic killers. But that presupposes that we know how the world works, and we don’t.
Maybe the 9/11 attacks were all about a small team of terrorists who managed to hold it together in a world otherwise characterised by crossed wires and blundering incompetence. But I don’t know, and nor does Charlie Brooker.
In Dan Hind’s curious mind, it is possible to know enough about how the “business-intelligence-political nexus works” to know about the CIA, but not 9-11. Funny thing, that.