Vast conspiracy foretold by hollywood?

June 8, 2004 1:00 PM

I am thoroughly freaked out. I just saw the movie "The Long Kiss Goodnight". In it, the following dialogue takes place: Mitch Henessey: "You're telling me that you're going to fake some terrorist thing just to scare some money out of Congress?"
Corrupt politician: "Well, unfortunately Mr. Henessey, I have no idea how to fake killing 4,000 people, so we're just going to have to do it for real. We'll blame it on the Muslims, naturally. Then, I'll get my funding." [More Inside]

You can read the more of the context of those quotes here. I also found a more complete listing of 9/11 related coincidences here. I can't really vouch for the credibility of the two sites, but I have several questions. Sorry in advance for the conspiracy-theory questions, my mind is really jumping around. First off, are there lists of coincidences that involve other historical events? I find this phenomenon fascinating, apart from the conspiracy-theory garbage.

Conspiracy-Theory Garbage: Does anyone really believe that it is somehow possible that every human on Earth has some sort of collective consciousness? Can we tap into this collective consciousness to predict the future? Is it possible the government is actually causing these attacks as the evidence in this movie seems to suggest? It seems coincidental that many terrorists have U.S. military connections. Timothy McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden, and the Anthrax attacker, to name a few. If the government is not causing these attacks, are they unwittingly producing terrorists? Should the military be disbanded because it produces killers?

posted by banished to society & culture (25 comments total)

I don't have answers for your questions but I recently watched Armageddon (don't ask) and at the beginning, meteors are landing in New York and people are running and screaming, "Osama bin Laden is bombing us!" Creeped me right out.
posted by dobbs at 2:09 PM on June 8, 2004

First off, are there lists of coincidences that involve other historical events?

While it's not of the sort of "pop culture seems to presage actual events" sort of coincidences which your link describes, perhaps one of the best known lists of alleged historical coincidences is the list of parallels between Kennedy and Lincoln, here analyzed by Snopes.

Back around 1992, Skeptical Inquirer encouraged readers to come up with lists of similar coincidences between other pairs of presidents. Unfortunately, the whole thing doesn't seem to be online, but a summary and citations can be found here (scroll down to the "CSICOP Presidential Coincidences Contest" box).
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:21 PM on June 8, 2004

Last night, I was reading through a collection of X-Men reprints from the mid-80s, and was struck by a really creepy scene wherein a woman who has traveled back in time from your standard dystopic comic book future is looking at Manhattan and thinking about how horrible it was when the World Trade Center towers were brought down (can't remember the issue number, but the anthology was Essential X-Men 5). I don't have the text in front of me, but it was weirdly accurate.

Actually, there was another X-Men story arc in summer/early fall of 2001 that included a page of visuals of a giant robot cobbled together out of airplane parts smashing into the side of a skyscraper; in retrospect, I'm a little freaked out by this, because it came out a month or two before 9-11, but the imagery almost seems predictive.

I think the explanation for these coincidences is actually pretty simple, though: bringing down the World Trade Center, whether by plane or another method, was an obviously dramatic move. So it appealed to comic artists, movie makers, TV producers, and, yes, terrorists, because all of the above depend on spectacle.
posted by COBRA! at 2:22 PM on June 8, 2004

Here's the robot/plane-into-skyscraper page.
posted by COBRA! at 2:26 PM on June 8, 2004

also, a plane had actually crashed into the Empire State Bldg (another giant symbol used often in the past in art/movies/etc) during WW2, so there was precedent in real life for this happening.

Is it possible the government is actually causing these attacks as the evidence in this movie seems to suggest? It seems coincidental that many terrorists have U.S. military connections. Timothy McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden, and the Anthrax attacker, to name a few. If the government is not causing these attacks, are they unwittingly producing terrorists? Should the military be disbanded because it produces killers?

As to conspiracy theories, god forbid but i wouldn't put it past them. As to citizen terrorists that are ex-military (McVeigh, etc), i'm very afraid of it--people change after being trained to kill other people, or being in war situations.
posted by amberglow at 2:34 PM on June 8, 2004

Don't be freaked out, banished. The movie in question is FICTIONAL. It is not prophecy, it is not conspiratorial, it is nothing other than a great movie.

I've seen some people get similarly freaked out after watching "The Siege," with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis -- it involves major bombings in NYC, and a subsequent "martial law" order that forces Muslim men to be locked up in a a large stadium.

But remember -- the job of moviemakers is to entertain us -- they think up incredible/amazing/threatening/impossible plots and themes for the purpose of making money by providing entertainment.

Coincidences DO exist. It's not a consipiracy.
posted by davidmsc at 2:38 PM on June 8, 2004

Coincidences are SUPPOSED to happen, statistically speaking. Think of all the goings on in the world and the few real world events that are important or get press. There has to be overlap. Not to mention terrorism is old hat.

There are tons of these, like the band i am the world trade center's album in 2001 had a track 11 called September.

Its bound to happen. Theres no conspiracy and no proof of any "collective" anything.

Funny how you see your loved one's name everywhere? Or how your lucky number is everywhere too. This is another form of selective perception.

Ironically, believing in conspiracies or "collective minds" is a self-fulfilling prophesy. How many people have died over the "zionist conspiracy" or how many people have joined horrible cults because they can "feel mother earth's spirit."

Fuck that shit.
posted by skallas at 2:41 PM on June 8, 2004

If the government is not causing these attacks, are they unwittingly producing terrorists?

I think they knew damn well then and continue to know now that they are producing future terrorists.
posted by falconred at 2:42 PM on June 8, 2004

davidmsc's right. It's more a matter of coincidence than any actual Jungian gestalt. The concept of Muslim/Arab terrorists destroying U.S. landmarks before September 11th was little more than a stock contrivance, much like aging Nazis searching for lost gold in the Bermuda triangle. The Mid-East crises of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations set the scene for a "new" bogeyman.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, the Mid-East terrorist filled in for the Russian menace, as well as the plot gimmick of aging KGB agents searching for lost gold, etc. (You get the idea.) Most conspiratorial suspense novels and films generally pick whatever catchy/controversial adversary they can and recycle the same warmed-over pulp from way back when*.

Groupthink strategies have only done more in setting progress back than they have in providing any speculative trust for improving or safeguarding the future.

*(Daleks were the "new" Nazis at one point, but it was the Cybermen who worried about gold.)
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:43 PM on June 8, 2004

Remember the Lone Gunmen pilot?
posted by CunningLinguist at 2:46 PM on June 8, 2004

The classic example of Pop Culture presaging real events is Wreck of the Titan, written prior to, and creepily predicting, the wreck of the Titanic.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 2:52 PM on June 8, 2004

I wholeheartedly think our government is capable of doing something like this. The question of DID they, though? I'd wager heavily: no.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 2:53 PM on June 8, 2004

Television writers and terrorists who did not know each other imagining the exact same event constitute proof of a collective consciousness if anything ever could. Not that it is necessarily an organic, material, corporeal thing, but rather an acknowledgement that we are all made of the same stuff---a fact that many would like to deny.
posted by goethean at 3:27 PM on June 8, 2004

I remeber a while ago reading something about conspiracy theories being healthy via a kind of perverse logic.

The world's a very random place, and sometimes really bad stuff happens to nice people. This is obviously stressful. So if we concoct a version of reality where all the bad stuff is part of some evil plan, we can sleep easier. As I said it's a little perverse.

If I was feeling handwavy I could talk about those all-powerful invisible supermen things here, but I won't.
posted by Flat Feet Pete at 3:29 PM on June 8, 2004

At some level, pop culture and reality feed off of each other. While Osama Bin Laden is probably not a Netflix subscriber, it's easy to speculate that domestic and foreign terrorists know to some extent what big explosions and sci-fi drama "look like" to the average American.

The assassination attempt episode of "The West Wing" also mentioned OBL as a suspect in the aftermath of the Bartlet shooting. He was a very publicly well-known figure pre-9/11.
posted by PrinceValium at 4:07 PM on June 8, 2004

So if we concoct a version of reality where all the bad stuff is part of some evil plan, we can sleep easier.

Of course, sometimes it is part of some evil plan. C.f. Operation Northwoods. And this is the stuff that has been declassified.

Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”

posted by IshmaelGraves at 4:15 PM on June 8, 2004

Check out the funky beatnick-esque documentary The Cruise, in which a tour bus guide remarks that the WTC is built to sway slightly in the wind, "something to...consider." And then later he lies on his back at the foot of the towers and tries to watch them sway.
posted by bingo at 5:54 PM on June 8, 2004

The most eery example is the one Cunning Linguist mentioned. Government officials conspire to fly passenger jets into the the WTC to increase counterterrorism spending. *shiver*

The pilot for the crappy time travel show 7 Days had suicide terrorists flying a small, explosives-laden plane into the White House. Their backup plan was a poison gas attack, reminiscent of the first WTC bombing.

Conspiracy-Theory Garbage: Does anyone really believe that it is somehow possible that every human on Earth has some sort of collective consciousness?

The Global Consciousness Project thinks so. They call it the noosphere. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab has claimed for years that with concentraction and concerted effort, humans can slightly influence the results of electronic random number generators. So now, they've set up random event generators all over the world, and they analyze the numbers over the internet. Seems whenever the earth has a shared event--something with a lot of global media coverage, like 9/11--there is a statistically significant amount of correlation in the otherwise random numbers. This sounds really flakey, but I swear, I'm getting all of it from a princeton.edu URL.
posted by jbrjake at 6:08 PM on June 8, 2004

post hoc ergo propter hoc
posted by rudyfink at 12:20 AM on June 9, 2004

The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual... Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces ... then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation ...

Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'.

George Orwell, "1984"
posted by Pericles at 9:15 AM on June 9, 2004

The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual... Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces ... then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation.


Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'.

George Orwell, "1984"
posted by Pericles at 9:16 AM on June 9, 2004

Government officials conspire to fly passenger jets into the the WTC to increase counterterrorism spending. *shiver*

This has always struck me as, quite frankly, very likely. War is considered good for the economy (and it takes a loser of a president to have a bad economy in wartime). I was taught in my first Poli Sci class at the University of Rochester that the widely recognized list of benefits from war includes economic boost and population control.

Also, collapse of Soviet Union = no more Cold War = no more easy excuses for defense spending, and the Defense Industry is one of the biggest and most influential lobbyists. They don't call it the "Military Industrial Complex" for nuttin'.

In short, if the gov't wasn't behind 9/11, I cannot help but believe that, at the very least, W Bush's heart leapt with joy at the potential benefits of it. I say this with a clear, unemotional mind that has studied politics and history to a fair degree.

W certainly has capitalized on every remotely conceivable opportunity, blaming the Taliban and moving into Afghanistan and then riding the tide into Iraq, fanning the flames of patriotism and creating a "War on Terror" to "Defend Freedom."

Hmm... I guess a vague "War on Terror" would really have no boundaries whatsoever, would it? A war on terrorism certainly has no end in sight. It's better, even, than the Cold War.

Besides the reconstruction contracts (Halliburton springs to mind obviously) and potential oil deals, a war against a Muslim people makes the lowest common denominator of America happy as hell that the U.S. is "bombing the towelheads." As badly botched as Iraq is, I'm still betting W gets re-elected.

Does anyone really believe that it is somehow possible that every human on Earth has some sort of collective consciousness?

Carl Jung believed it, naturally.
posted by Shane at 9:54 AM on June 9, 2004

BTW, did anyone mention the Superman comic book/Trade Towers disaster coincidence? Weren't the comics pulled from the shelf right around 9/11?
posted by Shane at 9:56 AM on June 9, 2004

Tom Clancy writes of an airliner crashing into Congress during the President's State of the Union and wiping out most of the government (bad guy = Japan in that one I think).

He also writes of a nuclear bomb wiping out the Superbowl.

That Lone Gunmen Pilot is freaky.
posted by jacobsee at 9:35 AM on June 10, 2004

EB White talked about buildings and planes in Here Is New York, written in the summer of 1948.
posted by Dukebloo at 7:37 AM on June 11, 2004