London Times columnist David Aaronovitch has written a new book on conspiracy theories: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, published in the UK. It covers the Kennedy assassination, The September 11 attacks, Princess Diana’s death, Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the moon landing, the attack on Pearl Harbor and other popular conspiracy theories.

I haven’t read the book yet, but Aaronovitch published excerpts in The Times on April 29 and gave a talk on this subject at the London School of Economics on May 7.

Aaronovitch makes the point that conspiracy theories assume unworkably complex arrangements. He writes, in The Times, about those who wrongly believe the U.S. government planned the September 11 attacks:

This group of conspirators would have had to suborn, dupe or train 19 hijackers, create elaborate background stories for them, send them to flying schools to be seen around Florida and other parts of the US, before disposing of them either in the crashes or, in the case of Flight 77, in a manner unknown.

… The conspirators would have had to have sent experts in to rig the two main [World Trade Center] towers and WTC7 with sufficient explosives to be sure of bringing the first two buildings down some time after the planes had hit them, and WTC7 whenever it was felt expedient to do so. But the explosives had to be sufficiently inert not to be triggered either by the impacts of the planes or by the thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel, an especially tricky proposition since no precedent existed for the crashing of a large civil airliner into a 1,000-foot skyscraper. …

Hundreds, if not thousands, would have to have been directly involved in different aspects of the conspiracy. And all of them would have to have been either fanatically committed to the project or else almost unimaginably immoral.

Yet, as Aaronovitch points out, a government that allegedly engaged in such a super-secret conspiracy, with absolutely no leaks, couldn’t accomplish the infinitely easier task of “plant[ing] weapons of mass destruction in the vastnesses of the Iraqi desert.”

Sounds like a good read to me.