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The Conspiracists
Richard J. Evans
Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s
Enduring Mystery by Benjamin Carter Hett
Oxford, 413 pp, £18.09, February, ISBN 978 0 19 932232 9
Conspiracy theories cluster around violent and unexpected political
events. The sudden death of a head of state, the assassination of a
government minister, a bomb attack on a building or a crowd: these
seemingly random occurrences demand explanation, and for many, the idea
that they could be the product of the deranged mind of a single
individual seems too simple to be plausible. The authorship must surely
have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing
of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin
Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which
conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever
more elaborate explanations and pseudo-explanations. Argument continues
to rage, as the proponents of rival theories construct evidential
edifices of such staggering detail and complexity that they are often
almost impossible for a lay reader to navigate.
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/richard-j-evans/the-conspiracists
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