Conspiracy Theorists

"Oh, I can tell you the British royal family is behind the accident that caused the death of Princess Diana." "No doubt about it, President Kennedy's assassination was engineered by the then director of FBI!" "911 was the work of America itself!"

These are the older so-called conspiracy theories one often reads. The new ones include the recent disappearance of MH370.

People just love conspiracy theories!

Conspiracy theorists take pain to draw evidence to support their conclusions. While some might be true, many are tailoring their "evidence" to suit their own conclusions. You can believe if the plot is hatched between a couple of individuals. But if they involved huge organisations and cross-boundary arrangements, then I think we should be more discerning in accepting.

 

There was a discourse about IS amongst our university classmates lately. It started with one chap forwarding an article about the origin of IS. This article has been in circulation in the Internet for sometime already. It is basically a pseudo-academic article, nothing very great to shout about. But people are just concerned; there is really no harm in reading it, even though a lot of  the facts offered are already common knowledge.

It soon attracted responses, which is to be expected, since many of my classmates are pretty scholarly during their younger days. The intellect of some are still formidable given the fact that our median age is about 67, and most have already retired.

One classmate is totally convinced that IS is the creation of Uncle Sam. And he wrote passionately about his belief.

 "Looked at so and so in the American establishment, see what they have said about IS.

 "Look at the Toyotas used by the IS. They are all designed for IS's specific needs. You think they can get the supply without American nod?"

So on and so forth.

"Oh, this MH370 thing, I can tell you it is an American plot. Go to this link and that link and you can see them for yourselves that what I say is true."

This friend of mine is assuming that for the former case, Obama has been working with the Republicans and the different political and tribal factions in the Arab world and Toyota to come up with an organisation to destabilise the region. For the sake of oil, maybe? As for the latter, ditto Uncle Sam is the culprit. He can cause all the military radars, Tony Abbott and Najib to remain silent (remembering he has been invited to play golf with Obama?), and allow America to bring the plane somewhere. Why? Because there is a military secret that the plane was carrying and Americans did not want China to have.

A person who is obsessed with conspiracy theories is usually a very imaginative individual. To them, there is definitely a connection between two points in space. All you have to do is to draw a straight line to join them. Bingo!