Two chapters in ...

... and it's actually quite a good book. I think readers ought to be aware that, which might not have come over from my preview and snap reaction, this is definitely not an unstructured rant like "What's Left?" or a cuttings job like "Waiting for the Etonians". It is actually a proper book. Aaro is a good writer and he has clearly done a lot of research on it over the last three years - I am still as concerned as I said I was about the non-appearance of any sensible conspiracy literature references, but he's done at least some hard time in the British Library checking up primary sources (I own three books about the Maud Allan Affair[1], but had not previously been aware of Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas's fascist newspaper, "Plain English", for example). I don't know how many AW readers are able to spend £17.99 on a book without wincing, but I think I would actually recommend it when it comes out in paperback.

The introduction is, frankly, embarrassing - it's the bit where Aaro sets out his general theory of conspiracies, favourably cites Daniel Pipes and gives his definition of what distinguishes a "conspiracy theory" from a genuine history of a conspiracy - the definition is quite literally, something where it subjectively seems unlikely to Aaro that a conspiratorial explanation is the right one. But then it gets onto the actual stuff and that's much better.

I'd forgotten that Aaro is a history buff - and is in general a much more rounded and less one-dimensional character than yer average Decent, and he knows how to build a story. The chapter on the origins and dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is excellent and has more or less everything in it that you might need to know. Particularly, Aaro is generous enough to provide you with ample evidence to undermine his whole thesis - in that although the Protocols is a story of a clearly fake conspiracy, the way in which it was brought into general circulation was by the specific and purposeful actions of individuals who concealed their actions.

This phenomenon whereby Aaro aims to demonstrate that there are no conspiracies by describing a big conspiracy becomes parodic in the next chapter, on the Soviet show trials. This one's such a hoolie of a counterexample that he does have to put a little bit of caveating at the end (basically, Stalin really did (probably) believe that there were Trotskyite plotters, so there's nothing conspiratorial about a massive operation to invent meetings which never happened, falsify confessions, brainwash and create the illusion of a vast international network which never existed). The chapter itself, though, rattles along and once more, gives about as good a capsule introduction to this secret politics episode as you're going to get.

Aaro even at one point describes the reaction of altogether too many western liberals, which was to say that the show trials were obviously genuine because, well, hey, how could anyone falsify so much evidence? It is an almost perfect template for the later invention of Decency, right down to the repulsive cheerleading for a foreign imperial power which "invents its own reality".

All of which sounds like I'm having a go at Aaro, which I am, because I still don't like his thesis or his politics. But I'm not being sarcastic or trying to damn the book with faint praise; I do think that, if approached critically rather than credulously and in awareness of its agenda, it's a very good piece of work. And frankly, in anything to do with the conspiracy literature, you had better read everything "critically rather than credulous and in awareness of its agenda", or you'll end up believing an awful lot of crap.

I am now halfway through the third chapter and it's not as good - I don't really know very much about the Pearl Harbor debates, but I get the strong impression that Aaro is portraying the controversy over Robert Stinnett's book as more one-sided than it really was - he certainly takes a rather partial view of how widespread US popular support for entry into the Second World War was. But now he's started on the HUAC and McCarthy redhunts and I expect that this will be much better.


[1] A wee belter of a conspiracy story btw - it is a bit obscure and I don't want to come over like one of those guys who can't believe that "Kooks" wasn't on the Bowie Greatest Hits album, but any AW readers interested in this sort of thing ought to keep an eye out for "Oscar Wilde's Last Stand" by Philip Hoare, in second hand bookshops. It has everything - Lloyd George, a maniac MP who built his own aeroplane, secret books of treason, the Cult of the Clitoris, General Haig and an attempt to carry out a coup through the unusual method of libelling the world's most famous stripper. Everyone in wartime London was intriguing to try and destroy everyone else.