The Great Mexican Swine Flu Conspiracy - Gate

The 20th century saw the creation of a wide range of new art forms: the cinema, television, arranging seats in football stadiums to make words and pictures, and the Internet conspiracy theory. Of course, conspiracy theories are not new. Through much of history European countries have blamed any experience of collective adversity on the Devil or the Jews. But the 20th Century saw many new scapegoats, including international capitalism and international communism, the oil industry, Muslims, and (in the USA) the Federal Government and something called ‘the New World Order’. The Internet has allowed conspiracy theories to multiply and spread in days rather than months or years. The isolated and paranoid can meet their fellows on-line and confirm and reinforce each others’ beliefs.

What makes a good conspiracy theory? There should be a major disaster involving loss of life. Obvious natural events, like earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes must not be involved (although this will not stop enthusiastic religious believers from attributing these causes to the desire of a just and loving God to indiscriminately wipe out large numbers of guilty and innocent people as a sign of man’s fall from grace). There must be some real or imagined discrepancy in the official explanation for the disaster, which can ascribed to a desire by those responsible for the conspiracy to hide their involvement. Further attempts by governments to clarify causes of the disaster, hold commissions of enquiry etc, will be portrayed as a ‘cover-up’, usually involving the suffix ‘gate’. The fact that an effective cover-up would require complicity by the entire government, press and civil service becomes ‘evidence’ that it is a truly immense conspiracy.

What are the conspiracy theories of the future? I propose that Mexican Swine Fever could do the job. This began with predictions of pandemics and millions of fatalities. Then, all of a sudden, we heard of a few non-fatal infections. A conspiracy theorist would argue that the millions of deaths have and actually are taking place, but that governments are covering this up by taking over isolated warehouses and incinerating bodies in secret. Lots of people disappear every year, and this explains what is happening to them. Other bodies are being loaded on to ships and sent to the Gulf of Aden, where Somali pirates, who are part of the conspiracy, capture and sink the ships. We could imagine an even more comprehensive conspiracy theory, in which governments are responsible for the Swine Fever in the first place. This could be a result of using pigs for germ warfare experiments, to be tried out first on the Mexican population. Perhaps governments are in league with the Green Movement, who believe that only a massive reduction in the world’s population can - er - save the world’s population. Of course, the conspiracy theorists could themselves be part of an even wider conspiracy...