# Posted 6:39 PM by Patrick Porter  

THE APPETITE FOR CONSPIRACY: Strolling through a big commercial bookstore today, I was taking a quick browse through the 'Politics/Current Events' section.

There was the usual fare, but very quickly I couldn't help notice that there were at least five titles putting forward various versions of the theory that 9/11 was a deliberate act of the US government.

This is a bookstore that doesn't do much in the way of fringe/marginal titles. So, is 9/11 conspiracy now selling well, or even moving its way into the mainstream?

Similarly, the other night I sat through Mark Wahlberg's thriller, 'The Shooter.' Early on, Wahlberg's character is about to surf the web at home, and as the camera pans across his copy of the '9/11 Commission Report', he mutters something like 'What lies is the government telling us today?'

The notion that the Bush administration not only willingly permitted but actually orchestrated the 9/11 atrocities can be countered either by ignoring it or arguing back with reason or empirical evidence, etc.

But it seems that the chorus is getting louder and that the idea is becoming institutionalised. An understandable skepticism about many claims of government mutates into a fanciful idea that a government which would struggle to organise a drink in a brewery was capable of pulling off this profound conspiracy.

Its hard to disentangle why this idea might be becoming institutionalised. In part, perhaps, it is a broader reaction to the catastrophe(s) in Iraq, to the revelations about torture and constitutional abuses in government. But it must be more than that, because it is still a big leap from the banal realisation about government corruption and misbehaviour to actual full-blown 'the government did it' paranoia.

Could it be this: there has long been a strand of anti-government and anti-state suspicion in American history for various historical reasons, where the state is not only the main threat but also responsible for inventing, fabricating or directing all other threats. Is this view now becoming more a reaction to be found all over the world?

Its certainly strong in popular culture. The British TV series Spooks, for example, where the culprit or hidden hand behind terrorism is almost always the British government, the American government, or at one point, Israel.

There are a lot of disturbing things about the apparent resurgence of 9/11 conspiracy theory, but this is the one that strikes yours truly, the naive view that because the state is a powerful political force and potential threat, it is the only one, that we live in a world without other self-directed predators.

What was that line from the Usual Suspects, that the smartest thing the devil ever did was persuade the world that he didn't exist?

I've clearly been watching too many films lately.

NB not to mention the classic, widespread element in many conspiracy theories and at the core of the most toxic ones, anti-semitism. but if this is part of the resurgence of 9/11 conspiracy theory today, the resurgence of anti-semitism also needs to be explained. (10) opinions -- Add your opinion