“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
— Thomas Pynchon
I had a discussion with some twenty-something Tunisians recently that left me discouraged. When the conversation turned to current events and the horrors that ISIS is inflicting on the people of Iraq and Syria, the conspiracy theories began to fly.
“Ive heard that ISIS is actually just an invention of the Americans and the Israelis,” said one. “I mean, if the US wanted to stop them, they could, but they don’t. Why? It’s because they don’t want to. They want to keep Muslims weak. It’s the same thing they did with South Sudan, dividing the country to make it weaker.”
“Did ISIS really kill those journalists?” another asked. “It doesn’t make sense. America is the most powerful country in the world. If those journalists had really been in danger, America would have rescued them. The whole thing was faked just to give America a reason to attack Muslims.”
And on and on, in that vein. Sometimes there were references to “Jew armies,” presumably referring to the IDF.
The people saying these things were college-educated, intelligent, secular-seeming, and western-oriented. But the common thread in their discourse was the premise that America, Europe and Israel were nearly omnipotent and omniscient, and therefore that everything that happened in the world was under their control. Once you accept that notion, you start to construct zany conspiracy theories to explain away Muslim-on-Muslim violence. I was reminded of the crazy conspiracy theories which posited that 9/11 was actually a “false flag” operation by the US, Israel or the UN.
Where to begin to break this circle of epistemic closure? The belief that America controls everything gives rise to conspiracy theories which reinforce the notion that America controls everything, which in turn reinforce the conspiracy theories, and so on. Challenges to either pole of this belief system only serve to reinforce it.
American culture is hardly immune to faulty thinking and kooky ideas, but somehow these phenomena are easier to see in other peoples. I have no sense yet of how widespread this kind of thinking is in Tunisian society. My hope is that it’s anomalous; my fear is that it isn’t.
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