Hello World by Peter Cawdron

Author:Peter Cawdron [Cawdron, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N13
Published: 2019-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

Afterword

Conspiracy theories about Adolf Hitler abound. Most popular among these is the claim that Hitler didn’t commit suicide in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945, but instead escaped—perhaps with Eva Braun, perhaps to Argentina or Brazil—and lived out his days in anonymity. Other theories involving Hitler and the Nazis stretch credulity even further. The Nazis were building flying saucers; they buried millions of pounds of gold in Lake Toplitz in the Austrian Alps; they had a secret underground base in Antarctica; or was it South America; or the moon? And Hollywood has built a cottage industry out of claims that the Nazis sought to acquire mythical artifacts of supernatural power: the Ark of the Covenant; the Holy Grail; the Spear of Destiny.

I, of course, choose to write about none of these things and all of them at once. None of them are addressed in detail, but according to this wacky story, all of them could be true—although I’d bet on it being none :)

Conspiracy theories are prevalent in society for an entirely natural reason—we want to make sense of the world in which we live. Our minds are hardwired to seek reasons, to look for answers, but we don’t always like the answers before us, and so it’s tempting to cling to conspiracies as a way of resolving conflicts with our ideology.

Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Airplanes brought down the World Trade Center. Don’t like these answers? Make up your own. Everyone else does, but beware—reality changes for no one.

Are there real conspiracies? Sure. The Union Carbide cover-up of the disaster at Bhopal is one example; another is the way cigarette companies resisted the scientific evidence about smoking for decades, softening and downplaying the health impact—a tactic copied by oil companies and their promotion of climate change denial. But the common denominator in all of these examples is that the conspiracies were exposed with irrefutable, independently assessed evidence.

Actual conspiracies are rarely as devious and widespread and insidious and evil as people imagine. Humans simply are not that good at keeping secrets and planning such complex calamities, although we are good at being selfish, as cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris proved. Besides, when it comes to conspiracy theories, truth is often stranger than fiction.

I hope you enjoyed this tongue-in-cheek look at the ultimate conspiracy theory—that they’re all true but that they happen in different worlds.

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