The latest brutal terrorist attack on innocent civilians – this one taking place in New York, my adopted city, two blocks from where I was last Tuesday – was another senseless dot on a bloody timeline. And yet, these seemingly random dots may somehow be connected.
Conspiracy theories are a kind of mental illness, and the granddaddy of them all, the JFK assassination 54 years ago, has just got a shot in the arm with the release of a batch of previously classified material. Three generations of madmen will now be pouring over the new trove, each seeking corroboration of his or her pet theory as to which secret service killed the Kennedys and why.
Then there is the subculture claiming that the 9/11 terror attacks were perpetrated by US security services, the Israeli Mossad or both.
Such things hit close to home. One of my cousins is a 9/11 truther while another rejects that conspiracy but believes that the Tsarnaev brothers had nothing to do with the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013. The strange killing of their friend Ibragim Todashev by an FBI agent fits seamlessly into his narrative.
Everyone knows at least some conspiracy theorists. They may be certifiably mad or merely mildly paranoid and their claims are relatively easy to dismiss. Except for the fact that our societies are crawling with spooks, spies and secret agents of every kind, as well as their snitches.
The Soviet Union built an extensive foreign intelligence network in the 1920s and 1930s, which paid huge dividends in the form ofatomic secrets and Kim Philby at the top of British counterintelligence operations. At the same time, the internal wing of the secret police mounted a nationwide domestic surveillance operation, recruiting an army of paid and pro bono spies.
The Allies had to create spying agencies during World War II l, which then expanded during the Cold War. By the 1980s, the spooks started to rise to political power. Ronald Reagan, The New York Times reported in 2012, was an FBI informant in his Hollywood days, something that seemed to have greatly helped his political career. George Bush, Sr. ran the CIA.
Since 9/11, domestic and international spying – electronic as well as physical – grew into a major US industry, endowed with unlimited human and financial resources.
In Soviet Union, the Communist Party feared Stalin’s ubiquitous secret police that arrested and killed people at every level without warning, and after his death party bosses placed the KGB under strict party control. This didn’t prevent Yuri Andropov using his chairmanship of the spy-cum-political-police agency to rise to political power. Mikhail Gorbachev, while not officially a KGB man, was nevertheless Andropov’s protege. This gave rise to a conspiracy theory that the whole of perestroika policy was a clever ploy by the KGB.
Now Russia is ruled by a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB who at one time ran its successor, the FSB. Opposition leader Vladimir Milov recently pointed out that Russia’s Security Council, a group of 30 members of Putin’s inner circle who are the true power that be in Russia, has 17 siloviki – current and former high-ranking officers of various security agencies.
Seventeen also happens to be the number of security agencies of the United States government.
With so many spooks of all kinds running around, it’s no wonder people start thinking about conspiracies. In fact, one is currently dominating headlines in American media: the Russian conspiracy to influence last year’s presidential elections and the likely collusion with the Trump campaign. As a corollary to it, there is a competing narrative being peddled by Trump and his supporters, of Hillary Clinton also colluding with the Russians.
ISIS-inspired acts of terror in Europe and America have been random and were committed by people with no discernible connections with each other. They lived in different countries and hauled from different Muslim states. Some had claimed to be religious Muslims and others hadn’t shown much interest in religion. Some attacks had been planned for months, while others appear to have been spontaneous.
And yet time and again the timing of such outrages seems to be carefully chosen – and they seem to be deliberately designed to promote right-wing, anti-Muslim causes.
A slew of terror attacks in Europe in 2016 and early 2017 hit countries that were holding crucial elections, in which mainstream candidates were certain to be defeated. Anti-immigrant, nationalist right-wingers were poised to come close to power in the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Similarly, attacks in the UK occurred as Theresa May called a snap election that was going to set Britain definitively on course toward Brexit.
In Spain, the carnage in Barcelona fed into Catalonia’s separatist sentiment. Catalan independence is not a right-wing cause, but it is certain to undermine the European Union, which at the age of Trump has emerged as the last bastion of liberal democracy.
The latest outrage in New York took place one day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled his first indictments against Trump associates.
There is probably nothing to it and all this strange timing is a simple coincidence. Still, there may be more there than meets the eye. There may be a coordinated effort to create a clash of civilizations on the part of radical Islamists. More ominously, radical right-wingers in the West share this goal, and security services often tend to sympathize with right-wing causes. With so many spooks around, and some obviously running fake ISIS sites in order to snare potential terrorists, spread disinformation, discredit the movement and for a variety of other purposes, we should be vigilant – especially if terror attacks continue to come at moments that favor the election of right-wing parties.
