Conspiracy Theory

Having spent a jolly couple of days reading through pages and pages and pages of web-based Holocaust Denial while simultaneously gagging and preparing a chapter for a book on historical method, I confess to being totally depressed by the number of such sites which connect to the `Christian' world.  Why the connection? 

Perhaps two reasons.  First, conservative American Christianity seems, at its extreme wings, either to see the nation state of Israel as the fulfillment of prophey and therefore beyond criticism; or it seems to see it as part of some massive conspiracy to take over the world and therefore beyond the Pale.  For the latter, the Holocaust operates as the rationale for original establishment.
Second, conspiracy theories have an aesthetic appeal: they make us feel more important in the grand scheme of things than we are.  If someone is going to all this trouble to con us into believing in something, then we have to be worth conning; and the impotence we all feel in the face of massive impersonal bureaucracies and economies driven not by democratic institutions so much as multinational corporations is not really the result of our intrinsic smallness and insignificance so much of our potential power which needs to be smothered.  Such views play to our vanity; and, to be brutally frank, the kind of virtual solitary vice which so much sollipsistic internet activity reprersents.
Conspiracy theories don't hold up, though.   Nobody is that competent and powerful to pull them off.  Even giant bureaucracies are made up of lots of small, incompetent units fighting petty turf wars, a fragmentation which undermine the possibility of the kind of co-ordinated efforts required to pull off, say, the fabrication of the Holocaust.  History, humanly speaking, is a tale of incompetence and thoughtlessness, not of elaborate and sophisticated cabals.  Evil, catastrophic evil, is not exceptional and brilliant; it is humdrum and banal; it does not involve thinking too much; it involves thinking too little.  The Holocaust was carried out by men and women who were not over-clever but who simply bought the party line, who thought only of their own job security; and I have a creepy feeling that the same applies to those `Christian' sites that help maintain the vile and twisted phenomenon of HD alive.  After all, some good Christian people believe in it so it must be true. A bit like apartheid.