conspiracies were real

"“No voice may rise above the sound of the battle,” was the rousing cry of Arab regimes in the 1960s as they locked up dissidents and stirred talk of conspiracies.".  If you are talking about the Nasserist regime, he did much more than "lock up dissidents": he created a modern industrial state and establish standards of social justice not seen since, and the conspiracies against him were more than real.  A person who faced the tripartite aggression of 1956 and the 1967 war can't be cold paranoid if he invoked the talk of conspiracies. Hardly.