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Michael Michael Collins Collins!
24 Plays6 years ago
The audio quality in this episode is, at times, terrible. Listeners should be advised!
Join us as we discuss Michael Collins and Michael Collins. One of them is an Irish politician. The other is someone who remarkably never set foot on the Moon. All of them have associated conspiracy theories!
Learn more about M's academic work on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories at:
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Transcript
Humorous Intro and Septum Surgery
00:00:00
Speaker
This week on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, we don't cover the fact that we didn't record an episode a week before last due to Josh's septuminal reconfigurement. And this week I'm definitely not crashing from a diet of too much cocaine. And we don't talk about last week's misrecording, which wasn't due to me consuming what was left of Josh's nasal fluids. Mmm, pustulent. All this and a few tangents coming up.
00:00:31
Speaker
the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. We've been away for the last few weeks, but we do, we have notes from our doctors and everything. I'm my own doctor. You sure are actually. For you are Dr. M. Denteth, whereas I am mere lowly Josh Addison. Oh, you're a master. You are, you are the master and I'm the doctor. Yep, that's true. This is a rivalry that spans time and space. Never thought of it that way, but you're exactly right.
00:01:03
Speaker
We are both in Auckland and yet we are not in the same place at the moment. I was not able to make it over to the wilds of Milford this evening, so we've had to go back to the cursive Skype, which is being its usual pain in the arse self, but we'll try and cobble something together from this recording. But yes, for those of us who are wanting to wish us well, a couple of weeks ago I had an operation
00:01:26
Speaker
to get my septum adjusted and sinuses bored out and all sorts of stuff so I could breathe a little bit better. Em's had a bit of a head cold. I think I'm getting a bit of a head cold, but that's by the by. We're speaking now and that's what we're going to continue doing for the next, I don't know, 40 minutes or so. And we're speaking the language we know best, dance. Now, because we've been away for a few weeks, we have a few weeks worth of news to catch up on, so we should probably blast straight ahead into that.
00:01:55
Speaker
because it looks like it's going to take up a bit of time. So let's not waste any more. Indeed. Let's snort ourselves a line of news. Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news. In local news just over a week ago, Auckland-based podcaster Josh Anderson spent a night in hospital having his sinuses operated on.
00:02:23
Speaker
I guess first, how is this news? And second, how is it conspiracy related? Please don't interrupt. As I was saying, Mr. Addison's operation has been commented on by local conspiracy theory experts. What was he having removed or implanted tracking devices, alien technology, the bullet that killed JFK? Hang on. This is wait, wait, wait, commented on by which local conspiracy theory experts?
00:02:47
Speaker
Now let me see. According to my moles, one Mdenteth has gone on record as saying, it's common knowledge on the dark web that Josh's naval cavities held microdart recording and confirming all of the QAnon allegations, including the ones that contradict each other and the rest of recorded history. Also there's stuff about hackers, trackers, aliens and JFK.
00:03:09
Speaker
He just made that up now. Will you stop interrupting? Mr Anderson has thus far been unavailable for comment, probably because it's hard for him to speak with the original footage of Kubrick faking the moon landings now lodged inside his face.
00:03:24
Speaker
Could we have some real news now? Unlikely! Instead, let's talk the FCC, those wacky people who used to regulate the internet.
Conspiracy Theories and Media Influence
00:03:33
Speaker
But now don't. News has surfaced this week that the Federal Communications Commission in the US lied to Congress, also in the US, about a May 2017 outage in the commenting section.
00:03:45
Speaker
The FCC claimed it was due to multiple denial of service attacks, aka ADDOs, when in reality it was due to the servers not being able to handle an influx of public comments. These comments were over the FCC's proposed repeal of net neutrality. You know, the thing which stops there being a tiered version of the internet for those who have and those who have not.
00:04:09
Speaker
John Oliver had encouraged viewers of last week tonight to comment on why they were against the net neutrality repeal. Now the FCC are blaming this on previous cheers and the like, claiming that the organisation today did nothing wrong. It was the previous people.
00:04:25
Speaker
But it's an interesting little tidbit because A, net neutrality is important, especially for podcasts like us, and B, these are the little things. And members of a government agency lying to elected representatives now exists in the little thing category. Which make people suspicious of governments and thus engender the belief that just maybe, if this is going on, other stuff must be going on behind closed doors as well.
00:04:52
Speaker
like the Pentagon being unable to account for 21 trillion dollars in spending between 1998 and 2015. That's more than the GDP of the US. Well, if you are going to sit Bend up, spend up big. That's what my mother taught me, and she's on a luxury cruise in the Hebrides right now. Basically, mothers aside,
00:05:13
Speaker
If you want people to stop believing in conspiracy theories, you need to stop people from actually conspiring. But do you want to stop people believing in conspiracy theories? Perhaps not if we were to believe a 2014 study which showed that conspiracists are the most sane of all. But we're not, because it didn't.
00:05:34
Speaker
The study in question, what about Building 7, a social psychological study of online discussion of 9-11 conspiracy theories by Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas, is one we looked at in this podcast a couple of years ago. It turns out it was pounced upon at the time by the website Natural News, who took one of the study's conclusions that conventionalist arguments tended to have a more hostile tone that is compared to conspiracist arguments. They took that as proof that conspiracists are more mentally well-balanced.
00:06:04
Speaker
Which is a bit of a leap to begin with to say nothing of the fact that the sample set was far from representative. The study concerned only comments to news articles featuring 9-11 and other keywords. Suffice it to say, the general claims about the relative sanity of conspiracy theorists are in no way supported by this particular study. So why are we talking about studies and arguments that are four years old now? Because Snopes.com
00:06:31
Speaker
put up a refutation of the conspiracists are the most sane of all claim just a couple of days ago. And why do they do that? Well, why does anyone do anything? Why do birds shine? Why does the sun sing? It's all part of life's rich tapestry. You don't know, do you? I do not know. What I do know is that I covered this very issue in my blog many a year ago.
00:06:53
Speaker
Now, I have some quite significant disagreements with both Karen and Mike, who I've met, dined, and drunk with, with regards to the whole our conspiracy theories cray-cray argument. Indeed, I wrote an entire paper devoted to that, pointing out the flaws of the kind of conspiracy theory theory they happen to espouse. That paper being this year's the problem of conspiracism in the journal Argumenta. You can find it online. We discussed it on this podcast.
00:07:20
Speaker
Also, I love unicorns. Unicorns? More like uni horny. But I digress into degeneracy. No, I have issues with what they write. Not what people think they write. Because what these people say they wrote is not what they wrote. QED. Now I'm a unicorn.
Political Comparisons and Scandals
00:07:38
Speaker
You know who else might be a unicorn? Rudy Giuliani, legal representative to a little-known US President Donald J. Trump. That sounds about right. Ah, I've missed Trump news. Anyway, Rudy recently told the press that truth is not truth, and thus it is obviously isn't false to say Mr. Giuliani is probably a unicorn.
00:07:57
Speaker
Now, this truth-is-not-truth bizzo might make you think of Donald Rumsfeld's interesting epistemic gloss on unknown unknowns. Those things we don't know, we don't know. But Giuliani is nowhere near as clever as Mr Rumsfeld. He's just saying that the defense of telling the truth... As Mr Trump would be required to if questioned by Robert Mueller in the Mueller investigation,
00:08:20
Speaker
would simply be someone's idea of the truth, which is either a cover for Donald's gonna lie big time, or Donald isn't smart enough to realise he's been misinformed. Trump isn't having a good time of it at the moment either. Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen have been convicted of crimes committed during the presidential campaign, and after insulting the now-dead John McCain, Trump is getting pushback from the court which usually supports him no matter what.
00:08:45
Speaker
But nothing beats the backroom deals and shenanigans both here and across the ditch. Here's our Australian correspondent, Josh Ozzieson, to give us the goss on this beautiful Australian accent.
00:08:59
Speaker
PM Malcolm Turnbull was rolled recently in a spiel that's all for backroom stabbing of a political leader. I find that Australian accents are really hard because they're so similar to a New Zealand accent, you know? It's hard to, like, if something's really different then, you know, anyway. Josh, stop interrupting Mr Ozzieson. I'm sorry, to continue, yes. Mr Ozzieson, please, that was a very rude interruption, please continue. Last week, after being challenged by a minister in his own government, Peter Dutton,
00:09:25
Speaker
Scott Morrison, of course, went on to become Prime Minister. Hold on, what? Well, Peter began signalling that he was going to challenge Melk, which led to Melk cleverly vacating the leadership position before Peter could get the numbers to roll him. After now winning the leadership, Melk was presented a signed letter by 43 of his MPs asking for another leadership race, which led to Melk resigning not just as PEM, but also, oh god, I don't even know what I'm doing now.
00:09:48
Speaker
The other thing is that I know actual Australians, but they're different regions. I find it very hard to sort of abstract an Australian accent when I'm pulled in different directions by the slightly different... Anyway, sorry, I'm interrupting Mr. Aussies again. Do continue, please. Two more people I can't do.
00:10:06
Speaker
Two more people other than Peter enter the race. Julie Bishop, the deputy leader and Scott Morrison. But Julie, the preferred candidate, according to national polls, lost when people tactically voted for Scott in order to stop Peter. Classic Aussie rules. Hold on, Mr. Aussieson or Mr. Anderson. So Peter Dutton had support in the party to roll Malcolm Turnbull, but no one wanted Peter Dutton as PM? Well, yes, he's a bastard. Our very own version of Donald Trump. And this is conspiratorial how? And in your thickest Australian accent, please.
00:10:36
Speaker
Well, it's classic backroom politics. No, politics? Where the hell was that? I think I've been to Boston for a second. Malcolm Turnbull heard on the grapevine that he was about to be rolled, so he conspired against the conspirators to head Dutton off at the pass. Then when Turnbull was rolled, Turnbull's supporters conspired against both Bishop and Dutton in order to get Morrison elected. It's conspiracy all the way down. Now hold on, I'm going to cover that's offensively appropriative.
00:11:02
Speaker
Unlike your various accents. Now we turn to our New Zealand correspondent, Bruce Addison, for a look at the recent scandal and politics back here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Do I have to do another accent? Yes, because the script demands it. Fine. Yeah, g'day. So Simon Bridge, as leader of the Major Opposition Party National, got into a bit of a scandal week before last when it was leaked that he was using government limousines to cruise around the country canvassing for votes.
00:11:29
Speaker
Well, nothing he did was actionable. It was taken to be a bad look for someone trying to get votes from the rural areas. Using a limo to go to a farm show looks very out of touch. Tell us about the leak. Well, it occurred three days before the information would have become public anyway, although given it was a leak rather than an official information dump, Bridges ostentatious mode of travel around the country became immediately newsworthy. Now the leader of the opposition was not happy about the leak and demanded investigations, answers, dinner and like. And he got it because the information could only have been leaked to the media by a political insider.
00:11:57
Speaker
the Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard, said he would instigate an investigation when he, which he began to do, until the text. The text, and also I should point out your accent is slipping. This is a New Zealand accent. It's the only one I have. Yeah, but it's not the one, it's not the theatrical one, the audience demand. And I say the audience demand, the scriptwriter demand. I demand a really provy accent. Ah, God, should I try Jeanette McDonald? Yup. I'm afraid I could kind of cause some sort of explosion if I do.
00:12:27
Speaker
Well, no, I can't. It's not that I try to summon it. It just doesn't come up. Well, someone texted both Mellard and Bridges to basically say, hi, I'm the leaker. I'm a national party insider. I hate Simon Bridges as leader. Please don't help me because I have mental health issues. Well, that's interesting. Isn't it just? Mellard shut down the investigation after consulting the authorities about the legitimacy of the text.
00:12:50
Speaker
If the leak was an inside job by a National Party member and not by a civil servant, Mallard would not be able to justify spending public money on the investigation. But Bridges was not happy. Now his party was impugned and he still didn't know who the leaker is or was. So what's happening now? Well, Bridges is still demanding answers and is conducting his own inquiry, the results of which might not become public. But some National Party members are claiming it was a put up.
00:13:14
Speaker
Mallard leaked the information initially and has created a false persona to take the blame using the mental health thing as a smokescreen. So either it's a potential conspiracy by members of the National Party to embarrass their leader, or it's a conspiracy by the government to embarrass National. That's the long and the short of it. And talking about long, this has been going on long enough. How about we ditch the Oz and Kiwi accents and go Irish? Big horror! What a good idea! Ah, so I hear you're a turf now, Father. Ah, Father Ted.
00:13:44
Speaker
Such a shame. Such a shame. Was that a Graham Linehan reference? It was a Graham Linehan reference because he's a bit of a turf now. To be honest, when I kind of react to the word turf the same as I react to the MRA saying the word cuck, it just seems a little bit of an inside sort of a term.
00:14:06
Speaker
That's it, I haven't followed Graham in the hand for a long time because I stopped filming because he's just such a grumpy bastard. Yes, it doesn't help that he's horrible on the internet anyway, but now he's doxxing trans people on Twitter and going on about biological essentialism. Well, that's just a silly thing to do. Still, he's Irish, and we're going to be talking about Ireland a bit today.
00:14:30
Speaker
Now, this is a little bit weird. This is a string of odd coincidences have led to this episode today. A little while ago, I was listening to some podcast or other and someone just happened to mention the number of famous people whose names happened to be Michael Collins.
Michael Collins and Irish Politics
00:14:44
Speaker
And I thought, and then I had a look and saw there are conspiracies around the death of Irish Michael Collins.
00:14:50
Speaker
And of course, Michael Collins, the astronaut, is involved in Moon Landing's hoaxes. So maybe we could just do an episode devoted to people called Michael Collins for no good reason whatsoever. And for no good reason, we are doing an episode on Michael Collins and also Michael Collins. And yet I went into hospital and then came out and started researching to do this episode a week later. And as I was looking at it, I looked down and thought, hang on, Michael Collins, Irish Michael Collins was assassinated on the 22nd of August.
00:15:19
Speaker
And had we recorded last week, that would have been the 23rd of all. So it was actually the anniversary of Michael Collins's death just last week. So without knowing it, I actually picked a topic that was actually was completely timely and appropriate. But then we put it off for another week. So now I'm a week out of date. But
00:15:37
Speaker
Anyway, it's a Michael Collins Stravaganza for all your Michael Collins requirements this week. Now, for those of us who don't know who the Irish Michael Collins is or was, who was or is Michael Collins? Michael Collins, he was the leading or definitely a leading figure, quite possibly the leading figure in the struggle for Irish independence back at the
00:15:59
Speaker
near the start of the 20th century. He was a big, big figure. They made a movie about him in the 90s with Liam Neeson starring as Michael Collins. The movie is just called Michael Collins. So he's quite a big name, especially in Ireland. Now, I have to admit, I don't know a huge amount about Ireland's political history. And what I do know suggests it's quite a bit of a mess.
00:16:25
Speaker
And in researching for this episode, that impression has been confirmed somewhat. So I'm quite possibly going to get things wrong and misunderstand things. That's only partly due to my laziness and lack of diligence. I think it's partly also due to the fact that Irish politics is just all over the shop. But essentially, my understanding is this. In the early 1900s, during World War I, there was a war between Ireland and Britain as Ireland tried to become an independent republic.
00:16:54
Speaker
There was a ceasefire, a truce was called, a treaty was signed, the treaty being the one that essentially divided Ireland as it is today into Ireland and North Ireland.
00:17:05
Speaker
And that then kicked off a civil war within Ireland between people who were okay with the treaty as things were and people who rejected the treaty and wanted to ditch it entirely. And these were the Republicans who wanted an entire Ireland and weren't happy with it being divided like that. And Michael Collins was at the center of all this. Well, he was very greatly involved in all this in a couple of different ways. Things actually got quite complicated from what I understand because
00:17:34
Speaker
the people whose side he was fighting on in the war against the British, many of them were the people who he ended up sited against in the Civil War. So his sort of former compatriots then became his opponents and he
00:17:50
Speaker
eventually became the chairman of the provisional government of the Irish Free State, which eventually became the government of Ireland. And apparently, he also was at odds with certain people within the provisional government, so even the people on his own side. So things were very, very messy. But he is an important figure, and there are conspiracies around him.
00:18:14
Speaker
which is why we're talking about him today. Shall I continue? I think I think you should. I just the one thing I do think you've skipped over here is your connection with Garth Ennis on this particular issue. Oh, yes, I did write that. Yes, my initial basically everything up until a few weeks ago when I started doing a bit of reading about this, my main knowledge of
00:18:38
Speaker
of Michael Collins was informed by the fact that A, he was in a movie played by Liam Neeson and B, in the old issues of the comic preacher, not the TV show preacher about which we do not speak, the couple of issues that gave Cassidy's origin story involved him being part of the Easter Rising in 1916. And Michael Collins has a little cameo where he gets humorously kicked in the bollocks by Cassidy's older brother as the two of them
00:19:08
Speaker
ditch the Easter Rising, accurately predicting that they are about to get their asses handed to them by the British. So there you go. I'm just gonna do the whole Highlander 2 thing and say there's a TV series? Yes, no, we don't. I mean, I know people, I wasn't sure, right? Because I watched the first season of the Preacher TV series, which is quite different from the comic and was very, very deliberately different from the comic. And I was sitting there watching it going,
00:19:35
Speaker
I'm not liking this so much, but is it just because I really liked the comic and it's different from the comic? But then the more I watched it, the more I thought, no, I just don't think this is very good. So I don't know. I do know people who've never read the comic and enjoy the TV series just fine. So I watch I watch season two as well. And it was awful. It was better than the first season, but it was still awful. Well, that's enough of that then. So conspiracy theories and Michael Collins, Michael Collins, the first
00:20:03
Speaker
So, they're basically to do with his death. So, this happened in 1922. The Civil War was winding down. He had been appointed chairman of the provincial government in January of that year. In August, he was touring around the country, seeing various areas that had been retaken from the anti-treaty Republican forces. He was touring around court.
00:20:30
Speaker
his home county down in the south of Ireland, which was at the time still occupied by Republican forces, but he apparently had been heard to say, they wouldn't kill me in the home county. So the official version of events is
00:20:48
Speaker
that as they were passing through Bail Nablus, which is a fairly out of the way crossroads in the countryside, they stopped to ask directions by a man who turned out to be a Republican century who recognized Michael Collins. And so after they departed, he ran off, rounded up a bunch of his mates, and they set an ambush at Bail Nablus to get him traveling, get him on the way back from wherever he'd been going. So they sprung the ambush,
00:21:18
Speaker
There was a fight. At one point, Michael Collins moved out from behind the cover of his armored car and moved down the road, firing at the ambushes. And during the fight, he was shot in the head and killed.
00:21:31
Speaker
Now, nobody disputes the fact that Michael Collins did die from a bullet to the head during a fight between his and Republican forces at Bail LeBlanc, but there are sort of differing events which tend to put different spins on the whole of fear. Partly this is due to the fact that obviously there were no third parties, right? There was Collins' side, there was the Republicans, there was no objective
00:22:01
Speaker
objective witness to the whole thing. And so the only accounts we have of what happened are from people who basically have an agenda. And it could be said, have motivation, perhaps, to not tell the full truth, depending on the exact circumstances by which he was ambushed. And indeed, the people on his own side, if it turned out that they had made some sort of a screw-up
00:22:27
Speaker
which led to the death of their hero, you could say. They also could possibly have a motivation to color the events. So the official version is that a man by the name of Sonny O'Neill fired the shot that killed Michael Collins. He claims that he said he did it, although at the time he fired the shot, he didn't know who it was he was shooting at.
00:22:50
Speaker
Apparently, it was not until 1980 that he specifically was named as the man who shot Michael Collins, but that's the official thing. And the official theory as it stands isn't really overly conspiratorial. It's more, I mean, if we have the usual toss up between conspiracy and cock up, or at least conspiracy and coincidence, it kind of leans more towards coincidence. They happened to be spotted by some people
00:23:18
Speaker
who managed to set up an ambush and someone happened to get off a lucky shot and kill him. And that's just how it happened. There have been some suggestions that maybe he wasn't killed by Sonny O'Neill, that maybe he'd been killed by a ricocheting bullet, which could have been fired by one of the Republicans or could even have been fired by one of his own men.
00:23:35
Speaker
which would have given people cause to maybe lie about what had actually happened because no one would want to say he'd been accidentally killed by his own side. Oh, an accidentally shot my own leader! That's a bit awkward. Better blame it on the blokes across the side of the road. Style thing.
00:23:52
Speaker
is. Even more conspiratorial is the idea that he was deliberately shot by one of his own men. The idea that because he was at odds with some of the other members of the provisional government that maybe some of them had decided to get him out of the picture and had someone on the inside who either had somehow orchestrated the attack or took advantage of the attack to get rid of Collins.
00:24:19
Speaker
or possibly that even the British Secret Service had wanted to get rid of him, and so had planted some sort of a mole in his party as well. I don't know that there's, I didn't, I sort of read it as, here are some alternate theories, but I didn't see an awful lot of evidence presented for them. The one theory though, that seemed to be argued for a bit more strongly,
00:24:42
Speaker
is the idea that rather than being a coincidence of people happening to be in the right place at the right time, the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it, the Ambush at Balibla was actually set up much more deliberately and
00:24:57
Speaker
and in a much more planned way than was thought of. So, this is the hypothesis put forward by G. Gerard Murphy in his book, The Great Cover-Up. Well, yes, that's the most recent one that was released, I think it was just earlier this year, it might have been late last year, his book, The Great Cover-Up. And I should say, of course, there have been numerous books on the death of Michael Collins and the history of him in general, but this most recent one
00:25:21
Speaker
argues that I think his particular theory is that Collins was traveling through Cork on his way to a peace summit with certain Republicans, certain prominent Republicans, at least one of whom was known for being sort of a Republican that feeling neutral about the whole affair and therefore willing to sort of broke a peace talks.
00:25:46
Speaker
Murphy's theory is that this man wasn't actually as neutral as he pretended to be, was actually quite a strong Republican, and so therefore set up these peace talks as a smokescreen, just as a way to get Collins where they wanted him, and therefore set up the ambush in advance, knowing that he would be traveling through Bail LeBlanc on his way to these supposed peace talks.
00:26:11
Speaker
One of the arguments is that it's simply that the official theory that they drove through it one way and then the guys waited for him to come back the other way and got him on the way back doesn't make a lot of sense because they had no guarantee whatsoever that he was going to come back the way that he'd be. He was touring around the whole county. They had no way of knowing he'd done that. He'd have done that in Murphy.
00:26:34
Speaker
I don't know the details, not having read his book, but he claims, in fact, that Collins didn't even go through Down the Blur on the way down and only came through it on the way back where these forces were waiting for him. And I think, I mean, this book just came out recently, but I think some version of this theory has been around for a while. And although I haven't actually seen the Michael Collins movie, from what I've read of it, they suggest something along these lines that
00:27:01
Speaker
I've watched clips of it on YouTube just to see what they're talking about. Sort of a bit where he's actually assassinated. There's no question of it being on the way, him being on the way back from anywhere. In the movie, they sort of stop, ask for directions to Bail in the Blur by a guy who immediately runs back to the room where a whole bunch of his friends are waiting with guns and they all run off and set up the ambush.
00:27:26
Speaker
And from what I understand in the film here, they also suggest that he was on his way to some sort of peace meeting that had been set up by some unknown intermediary. But yes, so Murphy, Murphy, he claims that what his quote is, both sides fabricated accounts both to cover the tracks as they responsible for the killing and the careless military outfits that let it happen.
00:27:51
Speaker
So I think he's suggesting that the aversion of intervention is the one that both sides sort of were happy to settle on because it made them look the least bad, if you will. It paints the Republicans as people who just got lucky rather than conniving backstabbers. And it paints his men, it paints Collins men as people who were, you know, the victims of an ambush and fought back as best they could.
00:28:19
Speaker
And, you know, as opposed to being incompetent. Yeah. And indeed, I mean, the official theory kind of blames Collins for his own Collins for his own death a little bit. In the movie, at least they stop at a there's a roadblock, there's some carts blocking the road and they stop and that's where they get funneled into this ambush. The official counts
00:28:40
Speaker
that I'd read don't mention a roadblock at all and indeed suggest that it was Collins's call that they stand and fight rather than make a run for it in their cars and that it was Collins who chose to leave the cover of his armoured car and therefore got shot. So yes, I don't know. So yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing to simply look at. It's a fairly significant event in Ireland's history.
00:29:05
Speaker
And it's interesting to see that the competing conspiracy theories that sort of have the balance between conspiracy and coincidence that kind of each one has it in a different area, what exactly where the conspiracy was and what was accidental and what was planned and so on. But it's interesting. What would you say to this idea that a lack of objectivity
00:29:28
Speaker
is a problem for sort of a reliable historical record and gives room for conspiracy theory. Given that in most times of conflict you're very unlikely to be able to get an objective witness to any such event. Well, especially since there is a natural inclination by people involved in traumatic events to cast themselves in the best possible light.
Conspiracy Theory Analysis and Memory
00:29:49
Speaker
So you can imagine as they're dragging Michael Collins' body back to Dublin.
00:29:53
Speaker
and they're being asked to account for what happened. The drivers and the security staff associated with them are going to present themselves in the best possible light in the same respect that the assassins, whether they were lucky assassins or it was a planned hit, are also going to be celebrating what they did in the best possible light as well.
00:30:16
Speaker
So without there being a third party, some godlike figure looking down upon the world, being able to detect fact from fiction and elaboration from the unvarnished truth, then yes there are going to be vagrates in the story with every retelling, people are going to recast their role in a slightly better light and their enemy's roles in a slightly lesser light. And so you've got two competing narratives from the
00:30:44
Speaker
Republicans and the pro-treaty sympathizers, and so you're going to get a conflicting story, which is only going to get worse as time goes on. We're dealing with an oral history which has been written down from the early part of the 20th century, and now we're theorizing about which is the right story, when it probably was never clear what the right story was within minutes of the event happening.
00:31:12
Speaker
Very well then, shall we go on to Michael Collins, the astronaut? Yes, let's go from Ireland up into space and then back again. So Josh, what is an astronaut? An astronaut is a person who travels up into space in some kind of space vehicle. Now, are you saying this has happened, that there are actually astronauts there? Because we know the moon landings were hoax, so don't give me any malarkey about the moon.
00:31:38
Speaker
Have we gone into space? Well, that's what they would have you believe, yes.
00:31:42
Speaker
But have you believed that there are people in space right now? I believe there's a website you can go to that's something like HowManyPeopleAreInSpace.com that tells you specifically who is in space right now on the International Space Station. Which reminds me there's also a Twitter account that tells you who the current Prime Minister of Australia is. This is important because as we covered in the news, the most recent Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was rolled, I say the previous Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was rolled for the most recent one, Scott Morrison. There have been
00:32:12
Speaker
five prime ministers in the last five years. It's been a tumultuous time for Australia. They go through prime ministers like other people go through biscuits. Yes, the joke I've been hearing recently is, oh, Australia has a new prime minister. Time to check your smoke alarm batteries. But yes, now Michael Collins, Michael Collins, Michael Collins gets a bit of a raw deal, really.
00:32:33
Speaker
If you weren't aware, Michael Collins was the other guy on the Apollo 11 mission. The one who didn't land on the moon? No. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually got to land on the moon and walk around on us and so on and so forth, Collins was in the command module orbiting the moon, waiting for them to finish their work and come back up and dock with him and then they'd head back home.
00:32:58
Speaker
So, yeah, he gets a bit of a raw deal, really. He gets overlooked a little bit, but he was there. He was an integral part of the mission. He was very important. But unfortunately, he also kind of gets left out of the conspiracy theories a little bit. I mean, he has been bugged by that Bart Seabrell guy, the guy who wrote
00:33:15
Speaker
Not Roach, made the documentary, what was it called, if anything happened on the way to the moon? And the one who got punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin. Yes, exactly. So he's the one with the history of going up to Apollo 11 or Apollo mission astronauts and either insisting right then and there that they smear on a Bible, they actually went into space or calling them hoaxes and frauds and so on. So apparently he accosted Michael Collins in a supermarket or something and Collins just laughed him off, whereas he managed to annoy Buzz Aldrin enough that Aldrin punched him in the face.
00:33:44
Speaker
And yeah, because he wasn't one of the two that actually got, you know, that there is movies of bouncing on the moon and all that stuff, he didn't get to utter one of the famous quotes or anything. He gets left out of history just a little bit and left out of conspiracy theories just a little bit. But not left out completely. One thing apparently that people have jumped on is his inconsistencies in his account of his experience at different times.
00:34:13
Speaker
things little things like um in one account apparently he talked about had it being in the command module and looking out the window at all the stars other times he said that there were you couldn't see any stars from where he was in the command module little things like that that people have jumped on and said ha ha ha can't keep his story straight that shows its all hopes which i mean i i don't really see you can really place a lot of
00:34:41
Speaker
Also there's a quite well-known phenomenon, this actually comes from my knowledge of Doctor Who fandom, in that people start telling stories about their experiences which get mediated over time and you can find that they told one version of the story when they were younger
00:35:01
Speaker
And it's just been changed ever so slightly, maybe for dramatic effect or to make the story more intriguing. And with time, these people keep telling the same modified story to the point where it actually seems to have become inculcated as a memory. They seem to remember it the way they tell it now, despite the fact you can go back and show a look. 30 years ago, when you were telling the story about your time on Doctor Who,
00:35:30
Speaker
you said this thing, now you say this thing, oh no no, I must have been wrong back then, this is what I remember. And it's not beyond the bounds of probability that Collins has the same kind of experience about
00:35:48
Speaker
searching for memories of that particular day. I mean, he was orbiting the moon, but also it was another day at work, and he was really quite fixated on making sure that Neil and Buzz actually got back to the command capsule, the orbiter alive. Looking out the window and staring at stars was probably not high on his agenda. The main thing I've seen about Michael Collins, where conspiracy theories get involved,
00:36:18
Speaker
is a famous photograph of him. So there's a photo of Michael Collins floating in zero gravity in his spacesuit. Now this photograph is not actually of Michael Collins in space. It's him on a training mission in one of the, in the sort of the vomit comet zero-g simulating aeroplanes, I believe.
00:36:39
Speaker
So he's just floating around in that wearing his astronaut gear. But that photograph of him has been taken and manipulated in various ways to make it look like he's floating in space or something. And people have taken these various photos. Here's Michael Collins, look, doing a spacewalk, floating in space with the stars and blackness in the background. But look, if we compare it to this photo of him in the training mission, you can see it's the same photo. It's a hoax. It's all false.
00:37:08
Speaker
And people, I believe Joe Rogan has mentioned this one on his podcast. This one has
00:37:13
Speaker
floated around a bit there. But I think from what I can tell, yes, this is a photo of his that has been taken and has been doctored in various ways, but I don't believe the doctored photographs have ever actually been presented as real photos. They've been used for things like the cover of his autobiography. They wanted a photo of him, you know, an image of him floating in space. So they took this picture and just, you know, prettied up for the cover of a book, things like that.
00:37:40
Speaker
And indeed, Michael Collins himself has... Because there are no surviving photos of him in space, are there? Yeah, yeah, Michael Collins himself has actually expressed disappointment that it's a shame that when I did my spacewalk, nobody took any photos of it. So he's gone on the record as saying that there are no photos of me floating in space. So any photo of him floating in space is one that's just been doctored for effect. So yes, so people...
00:38:08
Speaker
We'll simply see these images side by side, see that one is clearly a doctored version of the other, and say, ha, ha, ha, look, here we go, and this is doctoring photographs.
00:38:16
Speaker
ergo the Apollo missions in Rolex, but really that just does not wash. Poor old Michael Collins, kind of out of the conspiracy theory loop, and yet no photo of the spacewalk exist. Yes, I mean I do. I would feel sorry for the guy if he hadn't actually got to be a damn astronaut and go into space and do things that a mere handful of human beings have ever done in human history. So I imagine he's fairly chuffed with himself, quite frankly.
00:38:42
Speaker
It's true. If I had commanded the command module and brought two astronauts back to Earth alive, with alien parasites in their stomach, to then engage in experiments on Earth for 60 years in order to breed a new super race, I'd be pretty pleased as well. Now, really, did you ever see that found footage film of polo 19, the one that was about the secret space mission that...
00:39:08
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, I didn't. I know of it, but I never saw that. It was Space Williams on the Moon or something. Basically, yes. Apparently, it was pretty terrible. It was certainly no moon trap. Now, there's a film about space. That's a classic film with Bruce Campbell and Walter Koenig. Walter Koenig. But don't watch the spiritual sequel. That's truly awful. Oh, well, I think we've come to the end of our of Michael Collins' Palooza. All of Michael Collins' goodness you could ever possibly hope for. Racked up in one podcast package.
00:39:37
Speaker
The quality of the Skype call has been fairly abominable but I imagine we'll be able to make some sort of if not a silk purse out of a sales ear in maybe at least a sort of a sales ear that's kind of in the shape of a silk purse that maybe you could you can keep a few coins and
00:39:52
Speaker
Keep a few pennies in your cells here. That's what we say in the podcasters guide to the conspiracy. Yes, the sound quality sound quality in my end has been variable. You sound as if you're guggling rocks. It has the quality at my end, but we should like to thought we haven't hopefully.
00:40:10
Speaker
The stars will align next week and we will both manage to co-locate and record together as all the gods in heaven intended. And there'll be no lag and there'll be heaven on earth and sheep will come out of pockets in the universe where they exist. I have no idea I was going with that. So let's just bring this to a happy conclusion.
00:40:31
Speaker
I think, yes, before the call drops out entirely, let's say thank you for listening. We really do intend to be back next week without any more delays, due to illnesses and hospitalizations and what have you. So until then, it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from me. You were expecting a two-runners reference and you didn't get one. Boo sucks to be you. Yep.
00:40:57
Speaker
I think that's the way it should be, quite frankly. What sort of unoriginal bastard would end things on someone else's bit? Disrespectful, I assume. I don't know.
00:41:07
Speaker
says the person who did a really, really bad Australian accent. It's not true. You did several bad Australian accents. I find it really, I don't know. I can do, with a decent run-up, I can sort of handle an Irish or a Scottish accent because there is a sort of a canonical Irish and Scottish accent. It's probably not, it's kind of possibly like the equivalent of received pronunciation or something. There may be no actual human being who speaks like that, but it's an accent that everyone understands. But I don't know what the
00:41:37
Speaker
I'm too close to the Australian. It's just, yeah, it escapes me. It's quite strange. And you know what escape does? The ending of this podcast. So let's just say goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It is written, researched and performed by Josh Addison, a.k.a. Monkey Fluids, and M.R.X. Tenteth.
00:42:03
Speaker
aka Conspiricism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean and Stitcher. It can also be watched on YouTube. Just search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or if you happen to be technophobic, consult the Auguries.
00:42:26
Speaker
You can support the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy via our Patreon page, as listed in the podcast description, or just by searching for us on Patreon. You can also support us via the Podbean patronage system, if that is more your style.
00:42:43
Speaker
You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or find us on Facebook. And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.