In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

31st May, 2011

The British press is awash with articles denouncing the French obsession with conspiracies theories and their belief that Strauss-Kahn has been set up. Such an idea is , of course, unthinkable to the trusting anglo-saxons. Obviously Shakespeare laboured in vain to alert us to the skullduggery implicit in power politics. His plays are a veritable compendium of manipulation techniques. assassinations, news spin and slander, some of which are remarkably modern sounding. It was during the Elizabethan period that techniques such as false flag operations were honed by Walsingham and the Earl of Essex. Even mainstream academic histories have to admit that these gentleman routinely organised “Spanish/Catholic plots’ aiming, for example, to kill the queen. This technique was known as “projecting”- the plots were, naturally, always “uncovered”. We know definitively that the Babbington plot which implicated Mary Queen of Scots in a supposed Spanish invasion was organised by  Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s intelligence chief.

In Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, Richard (Gloucester) is intently eliminating all rivals to the throne. After the cold-blooded killing of Hastings he unhesitatingly spins an impromtu cover story:

Buckingham: Well, well, he was the covert’st shelt’red traitor
That ever lived. Look ye, my Lord Mayor,
Would you imagine, or almost believe,
Were’t not that by great preservation
We live to tell it, that the subtle traitor
This day had plotted, in the council-house,
To murder me and my good Lord of Gloucester.
Mayor: Had he done so?
Gloucester: What? Think you we are Turks or Infidels?
Or that we would, against the form of law,
Proceed thus rashly in the villain’s death
But that the extreme peril of the case,
The peace of England, and our persons’ safety
Enforced us to this execution?

The “plot” having been uncovered there was no choice but to kill him immediately given “extreme peril of the case” to “The peace of England, and our persons’ safety”. A bit like having no choice but to kill Bin Laden after being rushed by his wife or countless other examples from the contemporary “war on terror”.

The allegedly  uncontrolled sexual appetite of the late king is another fruitful bit of spin employed by Richard. Since the king’s sons still live it is necessary to bring into question their legitimacy and he sets his spin-doctors to work:

“Infer the bastardy of Edward’s children.
Tell them how Edward put to death a citizen
Only for saying he would make his son
Heir to the crown, meaning indeed his house,
Which by the sign thereof was termed so.
Moreover, urge his hateful luxury
And bestial appetite in change of lust,
Which stretched unto their servants, daughters, wives,
Even where his raging eye or savage heart,
Without control, lusted to make a prey.”

A remarkably topical ring, don’t you think?