St. Crispin's Day

The post-war order was established in the smoldering ruin of Europe. The main winners of the Second World War were the USA and the USSR. Communism swallowed half of Europe and threatened virtually everywhere they didn’t directly rule. On the other hand, the US and the handful of industrial neutral powers financed and supplied, on credit of course, the rebuilding of the destroyed powers which fell outside the so-called Iron Curtain. Much of this fell under the guise of the Marshall Plan and the like, but not all.             A dipole world order that lasted for the better part of fifty years wasn’t the only major outcome of the war. The Nuremburg Trials and the less sexy counterpart in Japan established that any defeated power in any major war in the future could look forward to potential war crimes charges if they colored outside the margins of the Geneva and Hague conventions. Complaints ranged from agitating a war of aggression, producing effective and unseemly propaganda, mistre

Popper and perhaps others posited in the early to mid-20 th century that conspiracy theories were implausible simply on the face of it. [ 1 ] Any claim of a ‘conspiracy theory’ as deemed by ‘experts’ should require such a massive burden of proof that it should be absurd and likely beyond the ability of amateur researchers to prove. His specific statement was something along the lines of ‘any large group engaged in [nefarious] secret activity is unlikely to keep its secrets long.’ For now, we’ll let this stand. Suffice it to say, I think that there are enough case studies if you like or Bayesian priors which lead one to conclude that his thesis was wrongheaded. That is, if you attribute no ill motives to him or the others who helped create the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and then pathologize it. The first and obvious counter is that states do things in secret which they are tasked in the name of known objectives, the foremost being national security, national interest, protection of