Inform your opinion: The differences between conspiracy theories and conspiracies

Sometimes you see stories with titles along the lines of “Crazy conspiracy theories that turned out to be true”. If the claims are true, they are not theories. They are conspiracies.

Appropriately enough, the origin of the phrase “conspiracy theory” and the question of when it was first used are murky in the extreme, although most sources date it to sometime in the 19th century.

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories – and yes, that’s a real book – defines a conspiracy as: something that involves more than one person (The word conspire is derived roughly from the Latin “con” meaning “with” and “spire” meaning “breathe”); has goals that are “either criminal, hostile or nefariously political”; and must be secret.

There is no shortage of genuine conspiracies that meet the Rough Guide’s criteria. We don’t need to resort to speculation about the CIA killing President John F Kennedy or the Duke of Edinburgh ordering the assassination of Princess Diana or JFK being Diana’s father.

Among the many real secret deals: Volkswagen falsifying emissions test results for their engines; the CIA plotting (for real this time) to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro; the tobacco industry misleading the public about the health dangers of their product; Ronald Reagan’s government illegally supplying arms to anti-government Iranian forces.

A conspiracy theory has to be false, spread in order to mislead people deliberately, and be believed. It should also include the elements of a real conspiracy: something criminal and covert being carried out by a group.

Some conspiracy theories are so outlandish that they are more entertaining than dangerous. David Icke’s belief that the Earth is run by alien lizards in human form has run its course. But there is surely still fun to be had with the belief some hold that at the CERN centre in Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider, scientists are not really researching subatomic particles but are working on opening a gateway to hell itself.

The Holocaust was a clear example of a conspiracy – a secret plan to exterminate the Jewish race. Much effort went into concealing the planning that went into the Nazi plot that saw six million killed.

It’s appallingly appropriate that one of the drivers of the Holocaust was the anti-Semitic forged document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The relevant version was compiled in 1905 by Russian writer Sergei Nilus. Its contents, as wildly implausible and thoroughly discredited as they are, are at least vaguely familiar to many.