94% OF YOU BELIEVE DIANA WAS MURDERED

Steve 41oo wrote:

most interested in the poll results

seems you mostly think it was an accident

yet the title of this thread was taken from the daily express who did their own poll, suggesting that 94% of people thought it "more than" an accident.

nimh wrote:

Plus the Daily Express isnt exactly the most reliable source of data even on the English... and I'm practicing my understatements here.

These two posts made me remember something Lord Ellpus once angrily posted, when I was writing about the British tabloid papers' "reporting" on asylum-seekers:

Lord Ellpus wrote:

The tone of this entire thread seems to infer that all British people read the Sun, and other such cr*p. What's more, you're assuming that we all believe every single word.

Please credit some of us with a bit more intelligence.

This is a common theme in discussion about tabloid (redtop) newspapers: yeah they sell like hotcakes, but you know, its a nudge-nudge wink-wink thing, we all may read those papers but we do also know that you cant really believe what they write.. so no need to worry, really.

Yet it seems time and again that tabloid reporting does (subconcsiously) get integrated in one's frame of reference anyway - that whats written there somehow get incorporated in how one looks at things after all. Eg, 94% believes Diana was murdered? Sure.. must be true, or kind of true..

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Daily Express (THE WORLD'S GREATEST NEWSPAPER!) frontpage:

Why are we so hooked on conspiracies?

Nick Cohen
Sunday December 17, 2006
The Observer

As Alastair McWhirter, the Chief Constable of Suffolk, was begging his colleagues for help in the largest murder hunt of recent times, Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, delivered a report that looks like the greatest waste of police time ever. Nine years after the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, at a cost of £3.7m, his 832-pages concluded by repeating what French detectives had said at the time: a drunk driver killed her.

If it had just been an investigation into a mysterious death, the Stevens inquiry would have been pointless - there was no mystery, so there was nothing worth investigating. But Stevens served a second purpose which has little to do with providing dry facts for a coroner. He has presided over Britain's first official inquiry into a conspiracy theory. The result is devastating: a relentless line-by-line refutation of Mohamed al-Fayed's elaborate story of how MI6 officers arranged the murder of the mother of their future sovereign because she was planning to marry Fayed's son, Dodi.

Nearly every chapter begins with a paragraph headed 'claims in support of conspiracy allegation' and ends with each and every claim lying in pieces. Fayed alleged that the princess and his son planned to marry because she was carrying his child. The royal family 'could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be the stepfather of the future King of England' so - QED - they ordered her murder. Well, asks Stevens, was Diana pregnant? Absolutely not, said the forensic scientist who tested a blood sample. Did anyone see the strobe light that blinded the driver in the seconds before the crash? No, no one saw it, says Stevens, because it wasn't there. What of Henri Paul, Fayed's driver? Was he truly drunk or acting on the orders of the British state? Of course he was drunk, says Stevens, his blood samples proved it.

Reading his findings is like watching someone tear down an elaborate folly. Brick by brick, he takes apart the baroque structure of fantasies and half-truths Fayed built to cover the inconvenient fact that the accident was the fault of a reckless driver in his employ.

There are many in Whitehall who feel that the effort is worthwhile. The allegation that they murdered the princess infuriates MI6 officers. They want the facts on the public record. Meanwhile, diplomats worry that conspiracy theories can be far more dangerous than those who laugh at them believe. With gruesome timing, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran made their point for them last week when he convened a modern equivalent of a Nuremberg rally in Tehran at which Islamist clerics, Ku Klux Klanners and European Nazis insisted the Holocaust was a myth. They had a political purpose that clearly was worth combating. Today's far right needs to deny the Nazi concentration camps for the same reason today's far left needs to deny Serb concentration camps in Bosnia. For modern fascists or Serb nationalists, the images of Jews at Auschwitz or starving Bosnian Muslims behind barbed wire have to be dismissed as the forgeries of conspirators because the crimes they record are huge obstacles in the way of a revival of support for fascism or Serb nationalism.

The Foreign Office must believe that the Diana conspiracy theory is a similarly malign myth. Within days of the princess's death, Colonel Gadaffi and thousands of others in Middle Eastern politics and journalism were agreeing with Fayed that the royals had ordered a murder to stop the princess marrying an Arab. I can see how diplomats could argue that they had to combat a fantasy that was adding to already Himalayan levels of suspicion about Britain. If they were to look more closely, however, they would see that this conspiracy theory doesn't fit neatly into a clash of civilisations argument between 'the West' and 'Islam'. It is much weirder than that.

After all, Fayed's greatest champion isn't the proprietor of some radical Islamist journal but the editor and readers of the Express, an old Tory newspaper which long ago lost the last of its marbles. Fayed himself isn't turning to Gadaffi for support but to Lyndon LaRouche, an American Trotskyist turned conservative loon who believes that Elizabeth II and Prince Philip are leading a British conspiracy to take over the United States with the help of Lord Rees-Mogg, the 'Joseph Goebbels of the British oligarchical mob'.

The great American novelist Don DeLillo, who has made paranoia his theme, long ago explained the appeal of Fayed and even LaRouche to otherwise reasonable people when he said that 'if we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme... [It] is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach.'

Nothing Lord Stevens can say will change the minds of the readers and journalists of the Express and millions of others who feel themselves to be DeLillo's outsiders. Like children with their noses pressed at a grimy window, they try to make a 'rough sense' of the murky world beyond by imagining that the British government - of all incompetent institutions - has the ruthless intelligence to get away with organising an astonishing crime. You can't explain away their fantasies with the half-rational explanation that they are manifestations of wider conflicts - not least because the overwhelming majority of Express readers aren't Muslim. They believe in this conspiracy theory, as they will believe in the next one, because conspiracy theories bring order to a chaotic universe. The hundreds of pages of patiently collected witness statements will make no difference to those who are too frightened to accept the messiness of life.

After the princess and his son died, Fayed proclaimed that: 'If this planet lasts for another thousand years people will still be talking about the terrible event we are now living through.'

The awful truth is that he is probably right.

I'm not entirely sure of the point you make here N. The Daily Express used to be a tabloid Tory rag [..]. However they have taken a strong and courageous line regarding the Diana death. Something is not right with this straighforward accident, and to their credit the Express have their teeth....sorry colagen enhanced lips... into it.

Steve 41oo wrote:

I'm not entirely sure of the point you make here N. The Daily Express used to be a tabloid Tory rag [..]. However they have taken a strong and courageous line regarding the Diana death. Something is not right with this straighforward accident, and to their credit the Express have their teeth....sorry colagen enhanced lips... into it.

This seems a circular argument.

and does the 20.7% mean anything?

I'm not interested in circular arguments. I just want a simple answer to a simple question. Where did the 20.7% carbon monoxide in Henri Paul's blood come from?

Steve 41oo wrote:

I'm not interested in circular arguments. I just want a simple answer to a simple question. Where did the 20.7% carbon monoxide in Henri Paul's blood come from?

But you have just said yourself, if I didnt misunderstand you, that you havent actually looked at any of the hundreds of pages of the Stevens report. How do you know that your question hasnt been dealt with in his report? If you are so ardently curious about the question, shouldnt you at least look what the inquest has to say about it?

My hesitant guess right now is that you'll say, oh but its not worth bothering to read any of the report cause of course theyre not going to admit anything. But with that we'd be back to the circular argument: you indignantly demand the question to be answered, but would reject out of hand any answer they'd actually propose....

Speculation about Diana's death will continue

This are questions, asked by an American columnist ask - the CO2 isn't questioned there but

Quote:

Speculation about Diana's death will continue

Actually, you should ask the French authorities, Steve.

You certainly remember that this accident happened in France and not in the UK.

A jury should hear the inquests into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, the High Court has ruled.