People Believe Wild Things Because Nothing Is So Brutal That It Cannot Be True

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2008 about conspiracy theories that many people believe. 

For example, 30% of black people believe it’s possible AIDS was deliberately manufactured to kill black folks.

This is held out as a crazy thing to think.

I don’t believe it myself.

But if you asked me if many white people and white politicians don’t care if poor urban black people live or die, I would say that’s correct.

And plenty of black politicians don’t care either.

In my own experience as a city council aide in Cincinnati, Ohio, I read the files of black cancer patients who had intentionally been given extra doses of radiation to see how they would react.

Get this—They suffered.

Poor black people in cities, blacks and whites in rural areas, our colonized undocumented labor force, and poor people of all kinds, get inferior hospitals and inferior care.

When you ask black folks if AIDS was the work of government, maybe what you’re really asking if the government would do things that would kill people who look like you do.

“Yes” seems to be a logical reply.

Mr. Kristof wrote that it was crazy that 36% of Americans believe that government orchestrated 9/11 or knew about it advance.

Well—I’ve always thought that was a mistaken belief .

George W. Bush was intent on going to war in Iraq before 9/11. He did not need any provocation.

What people know is that we lied about why we went to war, we did not give our troops the right equipment to save their lives, we sometimes kill innocent civilians, and that the troops sometimes get rotten care upon arriving back home.

Did the government or former President Bush know about 9/11 in advance?

No.

Was a government led by President Bush capable of terrible acts that cause people to die?

Sure–All the damned time.

Mr. Kristof mentioned two other conspiracy theories in his column.

One is that the levees in New Orleans were opened on purpose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

This was not so.

Yet it had been known for years that the levees might not hold during a bad hurricane and that much of New Orleans was vulnerable. Then, after it was clear the disaster response was poor, President Bush said his FEMA director was doing a “heckuva job.”

So why not figure that levees were opened by design? Is that much worse than the truth of the matter?

Another view held by many is that crack cocaine was deliberately introduced into poor neighborhoods.

Now that one is crazy.

These communities were already so flooded with alcohol, cigarettes, overpriced grocery stores offering inferior produce, bad schools and a host of other urban afflictions, why would you have to introduce something new to harm people?

The history books tell us that we won our land in good part by exterminating the native population, and that we built up the land with the frequent and longtime use of slave labor.

Our own experiences in life show us that our cities are left to rot year after year. And the poor are getting more poor even as the rich get richer.

So when you ask if the people in charge of our country are capable of barbaric or even genocidal acts, why would many give any other reply than “yes?”

And if you ask would millions of Americans stand by and do nothing or even support terrible and genocidal acts?

Of course they would.

People believe all sorts wild and terrible things because they have every reason in the world to believe such things.