El Blog de Montaner

BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.firmaspress.com

Anew conspiracy theory has emerged. The great paradox of conspiracy theories is that they usually begin with real conspiracies. For example, in 1903 a ferociously anti-Semitic book appeared in Russia, describing an alleged plot by rabbis and prominent Jews to destroy the foundations of society and conquer the planet. *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* was, in fact, a fabrication by the Russian political police intended to support the pogroms and the attacks on the anti-Czarist left, which included some Russian Jews.

There was a conspiracy, all right, but it was plotted not by the elders of Zion but by the Russian political police. The work was a plagiarism of a pamphlet written several decades earlier by the journalist Maurice Joly against Napoleon III, titled *Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.* The political police took the text, adapted it to anti-Semitic purposes and put it in circulation, where it remains to this day, consumed by a good many people who believe that behind any event (the creation of Israel or the remarkable success of the Jews, for instance) looms a dark conspiracy.

Well, on a different scale, the same has happened again with relation to the arrest in London of Julian Assange. Suddenly, Assange’s detention (and later release on bail) stopped being a weird lawsuit over the use of condoms and became a diabolical operation of the CIA.

Who say so? Israel Shamir, a Russian Jew converted to Christianity, who agrees with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran in wishing for the disappearance of Israel; Alexander Cockburn, the editor of Counterpunch; Keith Olbermann; an Oslo professor named Michael Seltzer, and a similar stooge at New York University named Mark Crispin Miller. But those are only a few of the hundreds of people who parrot this theory in the unfathomable world of the Internet or on newsprint-and-ink newspapers.

How did this new conspiracy originate? It all started with *Granma*, the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba. In that newspaper, the grand organ of tyranny, one of its employees, French-Canadian Jean-Guy Allard, a refugee in Cuba for the past many years, published the original lie: Anna Ardin was “an anti-Castro Cuban” who lived in Sweden and wrote against the revolution on the website of another Cuban, Alexis Gaínza.

Everyone was at the service of the CIA because they had relations with a well-known agent of that organization — me. That was the proof that Assange was the victim of a dark plot by U.S. spies and their allies, the Cuban exiles. Anna Ardin had accused Assange of a sexual crime as part of her tasks as a Cuban spy for the CIA.

All that was false and delirious. It was the strategic utilization of a notorious event (Assange and the WikiLeaks) to attack the democrats who oppose the Cuban dictatorship. And it was the 32nd article Allard published as part of the systematic campaign to discredit me mounted by the political police on the island. He was the executioner, the henchman entrusted with the dirty job.

In truth, neither Anna Ardin was Cuban nor Alexis Gaínza receives aid from Washington to maintain his website (he’s aided by Swedish liberals), nor do I know Ardin, nor have I exchanged words with Assange, nor have I ever been an agent of the CIA or any other intelligence corps. First, because my vocation is not black ops and, second, because I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to. For the past many decades, U.S. law forbids the CIA to recruit journalists who work in the U.S. media and can influence Americans, as in my case.

Several lessons can be gleaned. The most important is that one cannot possibly take seriously any official information coming from a dictatorship, such as *Granma*. Second, before subscribing to conspiracy theories, one should carefully analyze the origin of those constructions, motivated by political hatreds or ideological visions. When journalists forget the latter, they end up betraying their public and making fools of themselves.
That’s what just happened.

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