The breaking scandal in Europe that the HSBC bank
has been actively assisting its larger clients in tax avoidance
(background BBC story here) is not only further illustration (after the ‘Great Recession’ of 2007-2008) of
how endemic ethical malfeasance is in the international finance sector, but
also perhaps of a small, albeit significant, shift of emphasis from the state
to the corporate and financial sector as the central loci of realpolitik
conspiracy in the early 21st century.
In a broad historical sense, conspiracy
theories (in the West at least) have generally followed two main templates centered around the state.
The first template, and the oldest
historically, is the people vs the state – that is, groups in the wider
populace at large are conspiring against the state or its historical
equivalents such as the monarchy, regional fiefdoms, or dominant institutions
such as the Catholic church. An example
of a genuine realpolitik conspiracy in this sense is the Gunpowder Plot of
early 17th century England, in which Catholic dissenters sought to
blow up the British Houses of Parliament; an example of this type of thinking
manifesting in more ideological forms the accusations by 18th
century ur-conspiracists like John Robison and Abbe Barruel that the French Revolution
was instigated by Masons and Illuminati seeking the overthrow of the monarchy
to their own evil ends.
While ‘conspiracies against the state’ are
still common in conspiracy culture (e.g. the official narrative of the JFK
assassination, that the disgruntled ex-Communist Oswald killed the President of
the USA) they have been mostly surpassed by the second template – the state vs
the people. These conspiracy theories claim that the state itself is conspiring
against the citizenry it is ostensibly working on behalf of in democratic
societies. That this template is pre-eminent in a contemporary conspiracy
culture dominated by Amerocentric perspectives is of little surprise
considering that suspicion of the ‘State’ or ‘government’ has long been a
feature of American political life (ref. the seminal essay by the American
political historian Richard Hofstadter from which this blog takes its name).
while always present, this template seems to have become entrenched as the
dominant mode of American conspiracism during the 1960s and 1970s.
Significant factors playing a role here include
the demonization of the American ‘establishment’ by the counterculture; the
systematic abuse of government authority revealed by the Watergate scandal
which led to a pervasive loss of trust in, and suspicion towards, the
Government; and evidence that American intelligence agencies such as the CIA
and FBI were engaged in unconstitutional and unethical activity against the
American public (and other countries) under the justifying framework of the
Cold War. Examples of this template in contemporary conspiracy culture include
the New Age Illuminati conspiracy mythos, which interprets almost all aspects
of popular culture as one massive ‘psychological operation’ or ‘psy-op’, using
secret government-developed techniques of mind control to subliminally
condition the populace into a state of passive acquiescence to Illuminati
control. These beliefs have some genuine realpolitik conspiracising at their
root, notably the revelations in the 1970s that the CIA had undertaken
psychological warfare experiments on American civilians under the Cold War
MK-ULTRA program, instigated as a response to American paranoia about Communist
regimes alleged prowess brainwashing (as reflected in the excellent 1962
Hollywood thriller The Manchurian
Candidate). Similarly, the 9/11 truth movement is based on the
premise that the 2001 attacks on the twin towers were ‘false flag’ events
staged by the American government and related elites to bolster their power through
geo-political conflict and the narrowing of civil liberties.
I’ll muse here that the HSBC scandal, along
with a lot of other high-profile discussion of corporate tax avoidance over the
last couple of years, is representative of a third template for the
relationship between conspiracy and the state: corporations/big businesses vs both
the public and the state. The notion of big business conspiring against the
public is nothing new, of course, having a long pedigree in Marxist-derived thought,
such as the work of the Frankfurt School. However, such conspiracy discourses generally
conflate corporate power and state power,
i.e. big business and the government are effectively seen as one and the
same – the democratic duties of the state having been co-opted by business
interests, with government functioning as a façade disguising the extent to
which genuine democracy has been thwarted (Noam Chomsky is a notable proponent
of this perspective in relation to American politics).
Why I’m postulating
these realpolitik conspiracies of corporate tax-avoidance by corporations as a
notable variation on established templates of conspiracist thinking about the
state is because they contain an emotional subtext in which the state, along
with the public, are configured together as victims of the conspiratorial
activity of business. As corporate tax evasion is hurting the state in terms of
one of its main democratic roles and functions - to provide services to
citizens through tax revenue, the discourses of these stories implicitly affirm
the democratic union between public and state against the rapacity of
capitalism, a union that is at the basis of the values of social democracy that
are still core ideals of Western societies.
However, this reading only applies to the subject of taxation as, in
most other recent cases of corporate malfeasance, governments are considered to
be a vassal of big-business power. For example, the failure of the Obama
administration to adequately punish and reform the American finance sector,
whose criminal activities were instrumental in instigating the global financial
crisis, is usually explained in relation to American politicians’ intrinsic
class and career links to big business. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to
see if the rise of populist political movements around the world, as a response
to the ongoing repercussions of the global financial crisis, will contribute to
a more explicit rehabilitation of the state in future conspiracy theories of a
realpolitikal bent.
The HSBC scandal – made public by a former
finance sector employee who hacked incriminating files and provided them
to news outlets - is also noteworthy as
another event that further entrenches the ‘whistleblower’ as the key figure of
21st century democracy. Democracy in the 20th century was
typified by the dramatis personae of the statesman – the elected politician who
enacted the democratic spirit of a nation, through thought and deed, against
the adversities of war and economic depression (e.g. Churchill and WWII;
Roosevelt and the New Deal; Kennedy and the Cold War). However, as discussed
above, the neo-liberal era of the last thirty or so years has been marked by a cynical
perception of politicians as less upholders of democratic ideals than opportunists
and careerists furthering the interests of capitalist elites over the public
good. The sense that democracy has been irrevocably compromised by neo-liberal
ideologies is reflected in the fact that very few leading contemporary politicians are seen to
embody the ‘essence’ of democracy as the statesmen outlined above (George W. Bush & Tony Blair, anyone?)
Instead, it
is whistleblowers (along with investigative journalists) who seem today to
really personify and enact the democratic ethos. These are generally ‘little
people’ in big organisations who risk their jobs and reputations on behalf of
the principle of transparency – that the workings of political and economic power
should be clearly visible to the public gaze to prevent the abuse of that power.
While every nation has its whistleblowers, the last few years have seen certain
individuals, such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, gain
international attention due to the ethical and political implications of the
information they have released and/or publicized regarding the non-democratic
nature of classified American military and intelligence activities.
The
whistleblower is also a key figure in conspiracy culture, with many conspiracy
theories having their basis in claims of cover-ups made by individuals who
claimed to have insider knowledge of government organisations or corporations.
For example, American ufology today is almost entirely predicated around
outrageous stories of crashed UFOs and alien-government alliances made by
ex-military or intelligence personnel. Such whistleblowing also enables
conspiracy theorists to assume the mantle of investigative journalists, making
public information which would otherwise remain conspiratorially hidden from
the public eye.
The difference, of course, is that genuine
whistleblowers are usually able to provide some legitimate evidence of their
claims (such as authentic government documents), whereas the likes of UFO
whistleblowing remains purely in the realm of fantastic anecdotes, suggesting
that the whistleblowing is motivated more by psychological factors rather than an adherence to democratic ethics.
