Whenever there are situations that people find hard to explain, most often they end up believing conspiracy theories. When the news of the moon mission in 1969 took the world by storm, with reports of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, many people found it hard to believe. The attitude is not much different today. A simple search on the internet about the first moon landing would lead you to stumble upon many sceptical views, along with those who challenge the authenticity of the achievement with testimonials and scientific evidence. There have been a few moon landing missions since then, but propagations claiming that none of them ever occurred still do the rounds. Confronting such theories with logical arguments is difficult since the propagators have tactics that look more convincing and people often fall for such stories due to ignorance and lack of historical, contemporary and scientific awareness. Following the unfortunate events that took place on September 11, 2001, the initial assessments and claims of the perpetrators clearly pointed to the working of a fundamentalist group. Then a little later came another theory that the whole incident was orchestrated by the US government and there are many reports that still endorse this view. Unlike incidents that involve stories of scientific breakthrough that can be tested and examined, events dictated by individual and political motives cannot be verified easily. Those who concoct conspiracy theories have a winning advantage when they play with peoples’ emotions and religious sentiments. During the past two years the wider campaign run by Taliban against polio vaccines in Pakistan had seen casualties and in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa tribal region, gunmen wounded a polio worker and killed a driver. And in the southwest province of Balochistan, four members of a vaccination team were abducted by the Taliban and later found shot to death. An apparent conspiracy theory that was doing the rounds was that there is a Western ploy to cause destruction and they somehow deeply influenced the Taliban. Common sense simply fails to guide those people who quickly play into the hands of the propagators of conspiracy theories. Recently on a television debate, someone argued that Daesh is the creation of the US and all the funding for the violent group is coming from sources affiliated to Western interest. Such arguments are not doing any good to confront the deadly ideology of Daesh when there is a possibility that people who still remain undecided in their stance could easily fall prey to another conspiracy theory.
— The reader is a business development coordinator based in Dubai.
