Maybe Birds Are Not Real: The Age of Fake News and Conspiracy Theories

Recently, the good folks at Keinrath Publishing asked me to write a lengthy article for them about American history. The topic I picked is one that has been on my mind for a while. As I write in the essay, “Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Why can’t you spend more than five minutes on social media before you run into someone telling you that birds aren’t real, that lizard people rule the world, or that the scientific establishment is working overtime to screw over everybody? Are there historical reasons to explain why we live at a time when conspiracy theories are so ubiquitous?” The short answer to the latter question is ‘yes’, and that’s precisely what the essay I wrote for them is all about.

On their website, they sell the full essay for the princely sum of $ 1. Here, I’ll lay down the key points I made in the essay’s introduction and present one out of the twelve case studies I discuss within it.

So, without further ado, here we go:

“A strong belief in conspiracy theories is nothing new, but there are historical reasons why, today, conspiracy theories seem to be more popular than ever. The past few decades have seen a growing segment of the population losing trust in both government and traditional media. At least part of this is the result of real conspiracies being revealed and proven beyond reasonable doubt. These revelations have played a number on the collective psyche. After the public was able to peek at some of the awful things happening behind the curtains of power, it was inevitable that trust in government, corporations and media would take a nose-dive. After you find out that conspiracies A, B and C are true, you may start wondering what else may be happening. It doesn’t seem a stretch to believe conspiracies D, E and F may be true too.

My reason for discussing this is not to justify belief in some outlandish theories. While I despise the entire industry of grifters who profit by peddling conspiracy theories to a gullible audience, I think it’s important to understand that real conspiracies have happened, are almost certainly happening at this moment, and will continue to happen. The tricky part, then, is being able to separate the few real ones from the vast number of clearly fabricated ones that people choose to believe despite no credible evidence.”

What follows here is one of the case studies I discuss in the essay: Operation Northwoods.

The others not included here are:

-The Tuskegee Experiment

-The 1954 Coup in Guatemala

-“Cigarette Smoking Is Good for You”

-The Military Industrial Complex

-The Assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (this one is not a fully analysis but a brief mention)

-The Vietnam War: From the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to the Pentagon Papers

-Cointelpro

-MK Ultra

-Watergate

-Iran Contra

-The Iraq War and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Operation Northwoods

What I’ll tell you about is a conspiracy that didn’t happen, but not for lack of trying. The fact that this plan was hatched and seriously considered by high level government officials is more than scary enough.

Back in 1962, with the Cold War experiencing one of its hottest moments and tension rising between the United States and Cuba, the U.S. military had a problem. If things escalated, how could the American public be convinced that a war against Cuba (and likely a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union) was a grand idea? As much as people hated Communism, the specter of mutually assured destruction had a tendency to make people a little shy about endorsing such a war. And this was something that needed to be fixed.

General Lyman Lemnitzer

The fine folks at the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff rolled up their sleeves and got to work to solve the problem. Their plan, signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer, called for staging terrorist attacks against both American military and civilian targets, including blowing up an American ship at Guantanamo Bay, planting bombs in American cities and killing Cuban immigrants fleeing from the Communist regime. If you are wondering what the rationale was for doing such horrible things, the answer was simple: in the most classic of false flag operations, it’d make it look like all the acts of violence had been carried out by Cuba in order to blame them for the attacks. At that point, the American public would be outraged and would support war. As the document stated, “The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.”

I can only imagine President John F. Kennedy’s face when he received this proposal. All the plan needed to be put into action was the President’s signature. Luckily, Kennedy was not insane, so he unequivocally shot down the proposal. General Lyman Lemnitzer was removed from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but was reshuffled into a new role as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO. The idea that a man advocating the kind of terrorism outlined in Operation Northwoods would be placed in charge of allied NATO forces leaves me speechless, but in any case… The general public remained blissfully unaware of this proposal until 1997, when the documents were slowly released until the full release in 2001. The fact that such a plan could have been carried out if the choice had rested in the hands of someone other than John F. Kennedy is terrifying.”