Book review: Voodoo histories

IT'S a bit awkward. Somebody otherwise entirely sensible has just told you something silly. Aliens built Stonehenge, Jesus's heirs live in Midlothian, Mossad blew up the Twin Towers. That kind of thing. What are you supposed to say?

Journalist David Aaronovitch has some ideas. He, after all, has been in the same situation. A colleague, a thoughtful chap called Kevin, told him the Americans had never been on the Moon. The whole Apollo programme, Kevin explained, had been faked, its 1969 televised finale broadcast from a Hollywood set, not the surface of another world.

Pah! This was new to Aaronovitch but he wasn't convinced. Surely, he countered, such a hoax would have involved a cast of thousands and been even harder to pull off than actually firing some blokes to the Moon in a rocket? Kevin's response is not recorded, but his conspiracy theory, one that would make any hit-parade of popular make-believe, inspired Aaronovitch.

Not content with busting one modern myth, the Marxist-Leninist student leader turned establishment columnist has set his sights on them all. The result, years after his set-to with Kevin, is Voodoo Histories, more than 300 pages of dazzling debunkery. Aaronovitch's weapon couldn't be simpler: it's simplicity itself. He has armed himself with what philosophers call Occam's Razor. The rest of us know it as the old saying: "The simplest explanation is usually the best."

Why, for example, believe JFK had his brains blown out on the orders of the Mob – or the Communists, or even his own Government, when there is a much more plausible account? Could it be that America's 35th president really was shot by a single assassin, working to his own twisted plan, without any help from unseen gunmen on grassy knolls and elaborate conspiracies?

There have, after all, been lots of occasions when lone lunatics have tried to take out an American president. Kennedy wasn't the first – or the last – US leader to be shot by a deranged citizen. Yet two out of five Americans, nearly half a century after Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger, still think he was innocent or, at best, a patsy. They aren't alone. Even Aaronovitch's mum, the author admits, was convinced Oswald was the victim of "a frame-up", especially after he met a sticky end shortly after the assassination.

Time and again, Aaronovitch remarks with growing frustration, conspiricists claim they are sceptics, challenging the accepted version of events, while never allowing the same level of scrutiny to be applied to their alternatives. The conspiracy theorists have their own weapons. Their favourite? A single question, usually asked in Latin, with a flourish of italics: Cui Bono? Who benefits? VP Lyndon B Johnson, the theory goes, benefited from the death of JFK: he got his job. So LBJ is a suspect.

Aaronovitch can play this game too. Who gains, after all, from the conspiracy theories? Well, the theorists themselves. "Revisionist" history has now almost outgrown the real genre, at least in the popular media. Each new bestseller has to outdo the last, revealing why everything we have known till now is tosh. This, Aaronovitch argues, isn't healthy. Conspiricists have done real damage in the past. Take the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, documents that claimed to prove an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. This hideous national libel, we have known for nearly a century, was concocted by a Russian Tsarist agitator on the basis of a French rant against Freemasons. In short, it's garbage.

But it has cost lives. Distributed to "White" soldiers during the Russian civil war, penny dreadful versions of the Protocols inspired the murder of thousands of innocent Jews. It helped bring the Nazis to power. And, now, in another century, it is being cited on Iranian TV documentaries as evidence of the dangers posed by the state of Israel.

So has Aaronovitch got the myth-mongers beat? No. The human need for storytelling is too strong and the conspiracies too hardy. "Conspiricists are always winners," Aaronovitch writes. "Their arguments have a determined flexibility where any inconvenient truth can be accommodated within the theory itself." How will they deal with Aaronovitch? Easily, of course. He is, they are no doubt already whispering, part of the conspiracy himself. v