From the column of Xavier Batalla (Barcelona, 1948 - 2012) to The Vanguard (March 11, 2006). My own translation. Twenty years ago yesterday, journalist Batalla, an expert in international politics and professor of the subject at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), wrote this article, which shed light on a phenomenon—conspiracies—that is now resurfacing worldwide. This afternoon at 6 p.m., the Catalan Journalists' Association hosts the Xavier Batalla Memorial with a round table discussion of experts entitled World disorder.
The 11-M date [it marked two years since the Madrid bombings], if we are to believe the current leaders of the People's Party, is an ideal opportunity to swell the ranks of conspiracy theories. Before the attacks in New York and Washington, seemingly rational people were already claiming to be convinced that the UN was an invention of extraterrestrials. Now the situation is more serious: September 11th was a catalyst for the conspiracy theory industry, a theory that has proven popular. Conspiracies, however, do exist. History demonstrates, for example, that it has never been easy to justify a war that wasn't a response to aggression, which is why some decided at the time to give it a push. The Iraq War, to name just one example, will go down in history as a paradigmatic, albeit unique, case. American history is replete with cases where the excuse for going to war is surrounded by controversial circumstances that delight conspiracy theorists, fueled both by those who distrust power and by many who make their living by thinking about power. [...] There are times when conspiracy theories, however outlandish, turn against their originators. This was the case with the United States' declaration of war on Japan. The American decision to go to war was more than justified, but Republicans opposed to the New Deal believed they had discovered a goldmine to accuse Franklin D. Roosevelt. The opposition accused the Democratic president of knowing about the Japanese aggression beforehand and of having used it to ensure the United States' entry into World War II. And the Republican accusations outlived the president. Now we have the Iraq War. Two recent revelations have reignited the debate about George W. Bush's decision to go to war. On the one hand, Philippe Sands, a professor at University College London, has written that Bush became so fixated on the fruitless search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that, in a meeting at the White House on January 31, 2003, he had thought of "the colors of the UN." The president reportedly added: "If Saddam fires on them, he will be violating UN resolutions." [...] What lessons should be drawn from these cases? An expert on American foreign policy, Morton Keller, a professor at Harvard, has drawn two: one emphasizes, if necessary, that wars have often been waged on highly questionable grounds; and the other warns that the political opposition must handle such materials with great caution. This is not the case here, where conspiracy theories are often mistaken for clumsy botching, especially when it is the leadership of a party that has lost the election—they must have done something wrong—that fuels the conspiracy theory to cling to power. [...]
Xavier Batalla, 2006
