What is conspiracy? Well, conspiracy literally means
breathing together. The connotation is that the people who conspire are those
who go into hiding together, and talk to each other in whispers because they
plan things that can be so detrimental to others; they want no one to hear
them. Thus, to conspire is to say something bad, even if no action has been
taken.
Based on this definition, the notion of conspiracy being a
bad thing hinges on how you interpret the three words “detrimental to others.”
If, for example, you consider that Capitalism is a method by which people
exploit people, you must view the board meeting of corporations as conspiracies
because this is where people breathe together to promote the interest of
shareholders. And this promotion comes at the expense of the workers who
produce the goods or the services, and comes at the expense of customers who
pay to acquire those products.
The same can be said about the gathering of any two or more
people during which time they discuss matters of self-interest. This would be
the case because by definition, self-interest can only come at the expense of
someone else. And this is the reality of life because nothing that cannot be
said loudly and publicly can avoid being a zero sum game. Thus, people who see
a conspiracy in almost everything may be technically correct if we go by the
strict definition of the word. However, the problem of these people is that
they are so insecure; they feel that any two who would say something against
them have the intent and the ability to hurt them.
But what about the wink and the nod? Can people conspire
without hiding in some place or whispering to each other? Can they conspire
with a simple wink and a nod? Yes, they can. For example, if a kidnapper is
holding the gun to the head of someone, the police chief could nod to one of
his snipers that it is okay to shoot the suspect now. In this case, the two
would have conspired without verbally addressing each other.
It was possible for the chief and the sniper to communicate
with a simple nod because the kidnapping scene spoke for itself. All that the
sniper needed to act was confirmation that this moment was the most opportune
to pull the trigger, and the chief's nod said so to him. It can also happen in
this day and age that people who are thousands of miles apart, and never met or
communicated with each other previously, would conspire without saying a word,
and set in motion a series of events that have serious consequences. This sort
of conspiracies often take place in the financial industries when one trader
sets up the right conditions, and another trader – on another continent –
presses on a computer key and makes or loses billion of dollars for his
institution.
This brings us to the notion of conspiracies being in the
making for decades between people who are alive today and people that died long
ago. It takes place between people that had no idea then, and people that have
no idea now they were then and are now conspiring to achieve an immoral end.
You can see one such situation playing itself out in the article that Jonathan
Foreman wrote under the title: “Building the U.S.-Kurdistan Special
Relationship” and the subtitle: “A U.S. base in Kurdistan would improve the U.S.'s
strategic position in the region while guaranteeing Kurdish independence.” It
was published on July 11, 2014 in the Wall Street Journal.
Foreman, who is of British descent; a country that had very
bad experiences in Iraq
during the first half of the Twentieth Century, says the following in the
opening paragraph of his article: “The Iraqi government is reeling from the
loss of key northern cities. Baghdad is looking
to Iran and Russia for
military assistance. That's led gurus in Washington
to call for a closer U.S.
relationship with Kurdistan Regional Government. It's a good idea, but they are
not going far enough.”
Like they say, you can kick the Brit out of the colony but
you can't kick the colony out of the Brit. In fact, the rest of the article is
about America (read the West
of which Britain is a part)
colonizing a section of what was Iraq ,
thus reviving the good old days when the sun never set on the British
Empire . And even though Foreman was not born when Britain was
kicked out of Iraq, he feels the urge to conspire with those that died decades
ago to bring back Britain's old glory even if it has to be done under the aegis
of Britain's old colony, America.