Just for the record, I am not advancing a theory here. I noticed a lot of people who I don’t consider knee-jerk conspiracists were made particularly uncomfortable by Hastings death, especially when details of the accident emerged. Predictably, there was the customarily strong push to belittle these suspicions with talk of tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories and nutjobs.
Though I don’t generally embrace most conspiracy theories, I also don’t find knee-jerk anti-conspiracism any more thoughtful or satisfying if it isn’t predicated on something weightier than the assumed essential decency of the state and its agents, or presumed knowingness about how conspiracies work or don’t. This has always struck me as a form of exceptionalism that ignores both our own domestic history and this country’s foreign policy now and in the past.
I don’t think reflexive, a-historic, exceptionalist defenses of the state are something that radicals should countenance without grounds, particularly when these defenses aim to belittle and stigmatize people who are more suspicious. To me it is far more realistic to credit the state with limitless ruthlessness in maintaining control — even with flawed theories — than to keep insisting that everything wrong is ‘right out in the open.’
I posted this in part as resistance against the silencing aspect of anti-conspiracism and also on the assumption that people are more likely to draw more correct conclusions about the incident if they have the opportunity to discuss it.