Yes absolutely all these conspiracy theories are true. I’m not a peddler of holocaust denial, I simply just don’t buy that “being false” is a pre-requisite for a narrative to be a conspiracy theory.

All of these facts started off as contested and disbelieved by large parts of various publics.

The US’s involvement in the coup in Chile was certainly deduced by many Chileans and others outside Chile the day coup happened, thanks to a good understanding of the nature of the structure of US imperialism in latin america. However, there was little hard evidence at the time and US involvement was kept secret and denied by the US establishment and media. The fact that US military and intelligence agencies were intimately involved in the plotting and material support for the coup d’état was denied, covered up and obfuscated.

It was a conspiracy, and Chileans and others who said the US was involved were communicating a theory about a secret plot by the powerful, a conspiracy theory that was objectively true, but not accepted by the mainstream. Now it is widely accepted as historical fact.

The existence of weapons of mass-destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a hotly contested issue. The right campaigned to have it accepted as a fact, and their campaign was supported by much of the mainstream media in the United States, Britain, Australia and other allied countries. This involved the strategic leaking and revealing of reports from intelligence agencies that were designed to support the narrative that Iraq held a secret stash of weapons.

The anti-war left fought back with claims that this campaign was based on lies, that it had the goal of manufacturing consent for an illegal invasion. We claimed that Bush, his administration, Blair, his administration, and the military and intelligence agencies were conspiring to start an illegal war under false pretexts. This was a conspiracy theory. UN weapons inspectors denied the weapons existed, but the Bush administration cast doubt on their credibility and pointed to their own fabricated evidence that weapons existed.

In the end, the truth of the conspiracy was revealed bit by bit as the occupying armies in Iraq failed to turn up any evidence of the secret weapons.

The narrative of mass-surveillance on the internet emerged from the world of conspiracy theories in a similar way. First as concerns, then suspicions, then allegations, before finally becoming mainstream with the Snowden revelations. Even now there are many, perhaps a majority, who will look at you wide-eyed with disbelief if you try to explain the extent to which our activities online are monitored, recorded and monetized. Some will dismiss you: “you’re just a conspiracy theorist!”

But we live in a complex world, with different groups and forces in conflict with eachother. Groups often engage in conspiracies to achieve their goals, and conspiracies often must remain clandestine for some time up to and after their execution to be successful. This means that those seeking the truth about conspiracies will sometimes have to construct a conspiracy theory about the facts at hand, like a detective putting together the clues of an unsolved case. And like a detective who has multiple suspects in an unsolved murder, there will emerge multiple competing conspiracy theories around any conspiracy. It is in the pursuit of truth, the appearance of evidence that conspiracy theories are revealed as truth or not.

And so it is not wise to dismiss conspiracy theories as implicitly right-wing. To do so would give a pass to the powerful to engage in conspiracy without scrutiny.