Conspiracy Theory in America
Lance deHaven-Smith
As an opener to our “9/11 – 15 years on” we’re sharing this extract from the book Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance deHaven Smith. People can obtain a copy of the book from the link. Regardless of where we stand on the events of 9/11 we need to be aware of the intelligence-backed media campaign that lies behind the current social context of the phrase “conspiracy theory”.
A Curious History
The term “conspiracy theory” did not exist as a phrase in everyday American conversation before 1964. The conspiracy-theory label entered the American lexicon of political speech as a catchall for criticisms of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman with no assistance from, or foreknowledge by, any element of the United States government. Since then, the term’s prevalence and range of application have exploded. In 1964, the year the Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which “conspiracy theory” appeared.
In recent years, the phrase has occurred in over 140 New York Times stories annually. A Google search for the phrase (in 2012) yielded more than 21 million hits—triple the numbers for such common expressions as “abuse of power” and “war crime.” On Amazon.com, the term is a book category that includes in excess of 1,300 titles. In addition to books on conspiracy theories of particular events, there are conspiracy-theory encyclopedias, photographic compendiums, website directories, and guides for researchers, skeptics, and debunkers.
Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy-theory label is employed routinely to dismiss a wide range of antigovernment suspicions as symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness. For example, in a massive book published in 2007 on the assassination of President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who doubt the Warren Commission report are “as kooky as a three dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia.”
Similarly, in his recently published book Among the Truthers (Harper’s, 2011), Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a similar point, if more colorfully, in his popular book Wingnuts, journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as “moonbats,” “Hatriots,” “wingnuts,” and the “Fright Wing.”
The same judgment is expressed in more measured terms by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule in a 2009 journal article on the “causes and cures” of conspiracy theories. Sunstein is a Harvard law professor appointed by President Obama to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He and Vermeule claim that once a person buys into them, conspiracy theories are resistant to debunking because they are “self-sealing.” That is, because conspiracy theories attribute extraordinary powers to elites to orchestrate events, keep secrets, and avoid detection, the theories encourage their adherents to dismiss countervailing evidence as fabricated or planted.
In a book on technology and public opinion, Sunstein argues further that conspiracy-theory groups and networks are proliferating because the highly decentralized form of mass communication made possible by the Internet is altering the character of public discourse. Whereas television and radio provide platforms for debating competing viewpoints on matters of widely shared interest, the Internet tends to segment discussion into a multitude of small groups, each focusing on a separate and distinct topic. Sunstein argues that this splintering of discourse encourages extremism because it allows proponents of false or one-sided beliefs to locate others with similar views while at the same time avoiding interaction with competing perspectives.
In Sunstein’s words, “The Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.” Sunstein acknowledges that this consequence of the Internet is unavoidable, but he says polarization can and should be mitigated by a combination of government action and voluntarily adopted norms. The objective, he says, should be to ensure that those who hold conspiracy theories “are exposed to credible counterarguments and are not living in an echo chamber of their own design”.
In their law review article, Sunstein and Vermeule expand this idea and propose covert government action reminiscent of the FBI’s efforts against the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s. They consider a number of options for countering the influence of conspiracy theories, including public information campaigns, censorship, and fines for Internet service providers hosting conspiracy-theory websites. Ultimately rejecting those options as impractical because they would attract attention and reinforce antigovernment suspicions, they call for a program of “cognitive infiltration” in which groups and networks popularizing conspiracy theories would be infiltrated and “disrupted.”
A Flawed and Un-American Label
As these examples illustrate, conspiracy deniers assume that what qualifies as a conspiracy theory is self-evident. In their view, the phrase “conspiracy theory” as it is conventionally understood simply names this objectively identifiable phenomenon. Conspiracy theories are easy to spot because they posit secret plots that are too wacky to be taken seriously. Indeed, the theories are deemed so far-fetched they require no reply or rejoinder; they are objects of derision, not ideas for discussion.
In short, while analyzing the psychological appeal of conspiracy beliefs and bemoaning their corrosive effects on public trust, conspiracy deniers have taken the conspiracy-theory concept itself for granted.
This is remarkable, not to say shocking, because the concept is both fundamentally flawed and in direct conflict with American legal and political traditions. As a label for irrational political suspicions about secret plots by powerful people, the concept is obviously defective because political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen. Officials in the Nixon administration did conspire to steal the 1972 presidential election. Officials in the Reagan White House did participate in a criminal scheme to sell arms to Iran and channel profits to the Contras, a rebel army in Nicaragua.
The Bush-Cheney administration did collude to mislead Congress and the public about the strength of its evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. If some conspiracy theories are true, then it is nonsensical to dismiss all unsubstantiated suspicions of elite intrigue as false by definition.
This fatal defect in the conspiracy-theory concept makes it all the more surprising that most scholars and journalists have failed to notice that their use of the term to ridicule suspicions of elite political criminality betrays the civic ethos inherited from the nation’s Founders. From the nation’s beginning, Americans were fearful of secret plots by political insiders to subvert constitutional governance.
Those who now dismiss conspiracy theories as groundless paranoia have apparently forgotten that the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory. The Declaration of Independence claimed that “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” by King George proved the king was plotting to establish “an absolute tyranny over these states.”
Today, most Americans are familiar only with the Declaration’s opening paragraphs about self-evident truths and inalienable rights, but if they were to read the rest of the document, they would see that it is devoted to detailing the abuses evincing the king’s tyrannical design.
Among the complaints listed are onerous taxation, fomenting slave rebellions and Indian uprisings, taxation without representation, and indifference to the colonies’ complaints. The document’s signers claimed it was this “design to reduce them under absolute despotism,” not any or all of the abuses themselves, that gave them the right and the duty “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
The Founders considered political power a corrupting influence that makes political conspiracies against the people’s interests and liberties almost inevitable. They repeatedly and explicitly called for popular vigilance against antidemocratic schemes in high office. Educated in classical political philosophy, they understood that one of the most important questions in Western political thought is how to prevent top leaders from abusing their powers to impose arbitrary rule, which the Founders referred to, appropriately, as “tyranny.”
Whereas Great Britain relied on common law to define the powers and procedures of its government, the generation that established the American republic developed a written constitution to set clear limits on public officials. Nevertheless, they understood that all constitutions are vulnerable to subversion because ultimately they are interpreted and administered by public officials themselves. The Founders would view today’s norms against conspiratorial suspicion as not only arrogant, but also dangerous and un-American.
The Founders would also be shocked that conspiracy deniers attack and ridicule individuals who voice conspiracy beliefs and yet ignore institutional purveyors of conspiratorial ideas even though the latter are the ideas that have proven truly dangerous in modern American history. Since at least the end of World War II, the citadel of theories alleging nefarious political conspiracies has been, not amateur investigators of the Kennedy assassination and other political crimes and tragedies, but the United States government. In the first three decades of the post–World War II era, U.S. officials asserted that communists were conspiring to take over the world, that the U.S. bureaucracy was riddled with Soviet spies, and that the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s were creatures of Soviet influence.
More recently, they have claimed that Iraq was complicit in 9/11, failed to dispose of its biological weapons, and attempted to purchase uranium in Niger so it could construct nuclear bombs. Although these ideas were untrue, they influenced millions of Americans, fomented social panic, fueled wars, and resulted in massive loss of life and destruction of property. If conspiracy deniers are so concerned about the dangers of conspiratorial suspicions in American politics and civic culture, why have they ignored the conspiracism of U.S. politicians?
Finally, there is something very hypocritical about those who want to fix people who do not share their opinions. Sunstein and Vermeule say conspiracy believers need to have their discussions disrupted, because they are dangerous. But what could be more dangerous than thinking it is acceptable to mess with someone else’s thoughts? Sunstein and Vermeule’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. They would have government conspiring against citizens who voice suspicions about government conspiracies, which is to say they would have government do precisely what they want citizens to stop saying the government does. How do Harvard law professors become snared in such Orwellian logic? One can only assume that there must be something bedeviling about the idea of conspiracy theory.
Naming the Taboo Topic
In what follows, I shall attempt to reorient analysis of the phenomenon that has been assigned the derisive label of “conspiracy theory.” In a 2006 peer-reviewed journal article, I introduced the concept of State Crime against Democracy (SCAD) to displace the term “conspiracy theory.”
I say displace rather than replace because SCAD is not another name for conspiracy theory; it is a name for the type of wrongdoing about which the conspiracy-theory label discourages us from speaking. Basically, the term “conspiracy theory” is applied pejoratively to allegations of official wrongdoing that have not been substantiated by public officials themselves.
Deployed as a pejorative putdown, the label is a verbal defense mechanism used by political elites to suppress mass suspicions that inevitably arise when shocking political crimes benefit top leaders or play into their agendas, especially when those same officials are in control of agencies responsible for preventing the events in question or for investigating them after they have occurred.
It is only natural to wonder about possible chicanery when a president and vice president bent on war in the Middle East are warned of impending terrorist attacks and yet fail to alert the American public or increase the readiness of the nation’s armed forces. Why would Americans not expect answers when Arabs with poor piloting skills manage to hijack four planes, fly them across the eastern United States, somehow evade America’s multilayered system of air defense, and then crash two of the planes into the Twin Towers in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC?
By the same token, it is only natural to question the motives of the president and vice president when they drag their feet on investigating this seemingly inexplicable defense failure and then, when the investigation is finally conducted, they insist on testifying together, in secret, and not under oath. Certainly, citizen distrust can be unwarranted and overwrought, but often citizen doubts make sense.
Americans are not crazy to want answers when a president is assassinated by a lone gunman with mediocre shooting skills who manages to get off several lucky shots with an old bolt-action carbine that has a misaligned scope. Why would there not be doubts when an alleged assassin is apprehended, publicly claims he is just a patsy, is interrogated for two days but no one makes a recording or even takes notes, and he is then shot to death at point-blank range while in police custody at police headquarters?
Of course, some suspicions go too far. The idea that lizard-like aliens from space are secretly infiltrating top positions in government and business is ludicrous. However, the conspiracy-theory label makes fun of conspiratorial suspicions in general. Consequently, the label discourages Americans from registering doubts about their leaders’ motives and actions regardless of the circumstances. Any suspicions that public officials conspired to cause a tragedy or allowed it to happen are dismissed without further discussion because, supposedly, public officials simply do not engage in conspiracies.
Communication scientists Ginna Husting and Martin Orr, both of whom are professors at Boise State University, have studied the use of the conspiracy-theory label as a putdown. At the beginning of a peer-reviewed 2007 article on the subject, they point out how the label works rhetorically:
If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid . . . I twist the machinery of interaction so that you, not I, are now called to account. In fact, I have done even more. By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.
Husting and Orr go on to explain that the accusation of conspiracy theory discredits any explanations offered for specific social or historical events “regardless of the quality or quantity of evidence.” The label has this discrediting, end-of-argument effect because conspiracy theories have come to be seen as mere suspicions with no basis in fact, not as reasonable inferences from circumstances and evidence about matters of great importance.
In contrast, the SCAD construct does not refer to a type of allegation or suspicion; it refers to a special type of transgression: an attack from within on the political system’s organizing principles. For these extremely grave crimes, America’s Founders used the term “high crime” and included in this category treason and “conspiracies against the people’s liberties.”
SCADs, high crimes, and antidemocratic conspiracies can also be called “elite political crimes” and “elite political criminality.” The SCAD construct is intended, not to supersede traditional terminology or monopolize conceptualization of this phenomenon, but rather to add a descriptive term that captures, with some specificity, the long-recognized potential for representative democracy to be subverted by people on the inside—the very people who have been entrusted to uphold the constitutional order.
SCADs are defined as concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty.] Examples of SCADs that have been officially proven include the Watergate break-in and cover-up; the illegal arms sales and covert operations in Iran-Contra; and the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson by revealing his wife’s status as an intelligence agent.
Many other political crimes in which involvement by high officials is reasonably suspected have gone uninvestigated or have been investigated only superficially. They are included in SCAD studies even when the evidence of state complicity is contested, because excluding them would mean accepting the judgment of individuals and institutions whose rectitude and culpability are at issue. The nature of the subject matter is such that official inquiries, if they are conducted at all, are usually compromised by conflicts of interest. Hence the evidence must be evaluated independently on its merits, and decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis about which events are most likely elite political crimes.
Of course, as Husting and Orr point out, engaging the evidence is precisely what the pejorative conspiracy-theory putdown is deployed rhetorically to avoid.
SCADs constitute a special type of political criminality. Unlike bribery, kickbacks, bid-rigging, and other, more mundane forms of political corruption, which tend to be isolated and to affect only pockets of government activity, SCADs have the potential to subvert political institutions and entire governments or branches of government.
Committed at the highest levels of public office, they are crimes that threaten democracy itself. Clearly, such crimes and the circumstances that allow or encourage them warrant scientific study, both to better understand elite politics and to identify institutional vulnerabilities that can be corrected to make antidemocratic conspiracies less likely and less likely to succeed. Hence, one would have expected elite political crime, like white-collar crime, hate crime, and racketeering, to have been singled out for research and theorizing by social scientists long ago.
However, because powerful norms discourage Americans from questioning the integrity of their top leaders, and because anyone who raises such questions is likely to be seen as a “conspiracy theorist” who may be mentally unbalanced, the topic has been almost completely ignored by scholars. Social scientists have studied various forms of state crime, but in almost every case the potential for public officials in liberal democracies to subvert democratic institutions has been disregarded. Political science research on Watergate, Iran-Contra, and other U.S. political scandals has sidestepped questions about state criminality by studying the use of congressional investigations and independent prosecutors as political tactics in partisan competition.
Of course, a vast popular literature exists that presents a wide range of conspiracy theories of domestic assassinations and other high crimes, but the form of analysis employed, while careful and in many ways insightful, is not really scientific. Amateur investigators have uncovered important evidence overlooked by official inquiries, but, with only one or two exceptions, they have failed to investigate the general phenomenon of high criminality and instead have speculated about one suspicious incident at a time.
There is a body of work on the assassination of President Kennedy, another on the events of 9/11, and still others on the 1980 October Surprise, the disputed 2000 presidential election, and the anthrax letter attacks.
To be sure, we do learn a lot about each case; we learn a great deal, for example, about the assassination of President Kennedy and the assassination of Martin Luther King, but we learn next to nothing about assassinations in general, such as their typical targets, tactics, and timing, nor do we learn much about differences and similarities between assassinations and false-flag terrorism as political tactics. By the same token, since we learn little about the nature of elite political criminality in general, we gain little insight into the extent, nature, and role of elite crime and intrigue in American politics.
Perceptual Silos
The tendency to consider suspicious political events individually and in isolation rather than collectively and comparatively is not limited to the conspiracy-theory literature; it is built into the conspiracy-theory label and has become a pervasive predisposition in U.S. civic culture. For Americans, each assassination, each election breakdown, each defense failure, each war justified by “mistaken” claims is perceived as a unique event arising from its own special circumstances. While Americans in the present generation have personally witnessed many political crimes and tragedies, we see them as if through a fly’s eye, situating each event in a separate compartment of memories and context.
Even when obvious factors connect political crimes, the crimes are thought of as disparate and unrelated. For example, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were brothers; both were rivals of Richard Nixon and were hated by Lyndon Johnson; their murders occurred less than five years apart; both were killed while campaigning for the office of president; and both appeared likely to win the upcoming presidential election.
Without their murders, neither Nixon nor Johnson would probably have ever become president. Nevertheless, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy are seen as entirely unrelated; parallels, if they are recognized at all, are dismissed as coincidences. It is seldom considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial murders.
In fact, in speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, Kennedy assassinations. In the lexicon, there is the Kennedy assassination (singular), which refers to the murder of President Kennedy, and there is the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways and that they also deserve better—they deserve to be remembered as brothers who stood for the same values and who were somehow struck down by forces still beyond our grasp.
This clever feat of keeping the Kennedy assassinations singular and separate might be called linguistic “compartmentalization,” for, by avoiding the plural of “assassination,” we have unconsciously split and compartmentalized in our awareness significantly related events.
For another example, consider how we compartmentalize our perceptions of the disputed 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The election breakdowns are not widely suspected of being repeat offenses by the same network of political operatives employing the same tactics and resources, even though both elections were plagued by very similar problems, including inadequately equipped and staffed polling places in heavily Democratic areas, computer anomalies in the tabulation of county and state totals, highly partisan Republicans in charge of election administration, aggregate vote tabulations benefiting George W. Bush, and exit polls indicating that the other candidate had won rather than Bush.
The two elections are seen as separate and without any forensically important parallels. No one called for statisticians to review both elections for similar problems or signs of election tampering. No one speaks of “the disputed Bush-Cheney elections,” or of “the back-to-back election disputes,” or even simply of the plural, “election breakdowns.”
A slightly different example of this phenomenon of compartmentalization is offered by contemporary perceptions of, on the one hand, the hijacked-airplane attacks on September 11, 2001, and on the other hand, the anthrax letter attacks that began a few weeks later. Today, 9/11 and the anthrax mailings are cognitively dissociated even though initially they were thought to be closely connected.
It made sense to think they were connected because they shared many characteristics: they occurred closely together in time; both were acts of terrorism; both targeted private individuals as well as government officials; and both exploited essential services (commercial air travel and the postal service). In fact, for the first few months, the anthrax letter attacks were blamed on the terrorist group that was assumed to have carried out the hijacked-airplane attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Soon, however, the FBI investigation reached the conclusion that the anthrax came from a strain developed by the U.S. military at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This discovery should have caused investigators and the public to wonder if the events of 9/11 might likewise have been connected in some way to the U.S. military.
Alarm bells should also have sounded when, shortly after the anthrax letter attacks were discovered, the FBI authorized the destruction of a rare collection of anthrax samples at Iowa State University. According to scientists, this made it much more difficult to trace the anthrax in the letters to domestic laboratories. However, rather than look for connections between the anthrax case, the 9/11 hijackings, and what appears to have been an effort to prevent the domestic origins of the anthrax from being discovered, everyone just dropped the anthrax attacks from consideration as a terrorist threat. Talk of duct tape ended.
In effect, the anthrax letter attacks were quickly sealed off cognitively, and awareness of their domestic origins did not have to be reconciled with what Americans later learned about 9/11—about the warnings President Bush received in his daily briefing in August 2001; about the war games that were scheduled on 9/11, some of which included hijacked airplanes and interfered with the response to the real hijackings; about the expedited flights of Osama bin Laden’s relatives . . . The list could go on. The point is that the domestic origins of the anthrax became a side story, and yet, at the time the anthrax letters were being received and people were being infected, the anthrax attacks appeared to be an integral part of a war on America.
But once the anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick, the fear was relieved and the crime was mentally cordoned off. There were no calls for investigators to look for U.S. military personnel with multiple connections to air defense, war games, and germ warfare. There was never any effort to identify government officials who were involved in national defense policy and who owned or had recently purchased stock in pharmaceutical companies that manufactured medicines for preventing or treating anthrax infections.
To the contrary, rather than look for people linking anthrax, 9/11, air defense, and biological weapons, the investigation was narrowed to lone microbiologists who were considered to be disgruntled, emotionally troubled, or opportunistic.
Causes and Consequences
It should be stressed that this way of thinking about elite political crimes—this very common tendency to view parallel crimes separately and to see them as disparate and unrelated—is exactly opposite the way crimes committed by regular people are treated. If a man marries a wealthy woman and she dies in a freak accident at home, people would be suspicious simply because she was wealthy and the accident was improbable.
If this same man then marries another wealthy woman who dies in a freak accident at home, foul play would naturally be suspected, and the husband would be the leading suspect in the wives’ demise. If the husband had taken out a life insurance policy on either wife a few weeks or months prior to the accidents, it would be considered circumstantial evidence of foreknowledge. If police failed to recognize the obvious similarities in the wives’ deaths, they would be considered incompetent, negligent, or bought off.
It is routine police protocol to look for patterns in burglaries, bank robberies, car thefts, and other crimes, and to use any patterns that are discovered as clues to the perpetrators’ identity and the vulnerabilities to crime that are being exploited. This method of crime analysis is shown repeatedly in crime shows on TV. It is Criminology 101. There is no excuse for most Americans, much less criminal investigators, journalists, and other professionals, to fail to apply this method to assassinations, election fiascos, defense failures, and other suspicious events that shape national political priorities.
Why do we compartmentalize crimes involving political elites while doing just the opposite with the crimes of ordinary people? At least two factors discourage us from connecting the dots in elite political criminality. One is the term “conspiracy theory,” which is applied to crimes that have major political consequences but not to other crimes. The conspiracy-theory phrase encourages cognitive compartmentalization because the phrase is not meant to apply to interconnected crimes. In American public discourse, multiple crimes planned and committed by a single group are generally called “organized crime,” not conspiracies.
The term “conspiracy” is reserved for plots surrounding one major criminal objective and for the networks that come together for that purpose. The Mafia is not a conspiracy; it is an organization. A conspiracy theory about the assassination of President Kennedy is implicitly a theory about a temporary combination of plotters, not an enduring assassination squad or lethal criminal organization. Therefore, even if we think the assassination of John Kennedy was a conspiracy, and we think the assassination of Robert Kennedy was a conspiracy, we are nevertheless unlikely to see the two as connected, because the conspiracy concept envisions them as isolated, self-contained schemes.
The second factor impeding us from drawing connections between political crimes involving political elites is that looking for connections requires being suspicious to begin with, and yet being suspicious of political elites violates norms that are embodied in the pejorative connotations of the conspiracy-theory label. As shown by our speech habits and observation tendencies about assassinations, disputed elections, and terrorist attacks, we are averse to talking about such events as connected in any way.
This aversion is learned. Americans know that voicing suspicions about political elites will make them objects of hostility and derision. The verbal slaps vary, but they are difficult to counter because they usually abuse reason. For example, in using the conspiracy-theory label as a putdown, conspiracy deniers imply that official accounts of troubling events are something altogether much more solid than conspiratorial suspicions—as if official accounts are in some sense without speculation or presuppositions.
In fact, however, conspiracy deniers and debunkers are relying on an unstated theory of their own—a very questionable theory. In the post-WWII era, official investigations have attributed assassinations, election fiascos, defense failures, and other suspicious events to such unpredictable, idiosyncratic forces as lone gunmen, antiquated voting equipment, bureaucratic bumbling, innocent mistakes, and, in the case of 9/11 (to quote the 9/11 Commission, p. 339), a “failure of imagination.” In effect, official accounts of suspicious events have answered conspiracy theories with coincidence theories.
Far from being more factual and plausible than theories positing political crimes and intrigues, coincidence theories become less and less plausible as coincidences pile up, which they have been doing for decades in the U.S. It is like flipping a coin ten times and it always falls on heads.
In general, as SCADs and suspected SCADs pile up, the odds of coincidence drop rapidly. The Bush-Cheney ticket winning in one or two states despite exit polls indicating they had lost could have been the result of random variations in exit poll samples. When the same thing happens in state after state; when the difference between exit polls and election returns almost always favors the same candidates, the odds of this being by chance alone are astronomically low. This does not necessarily mean the elections were stolen, but it does mean something caused the election returns to differ from how voters said they voted.
The CIA’s Conspiracy-Theory Conspiracy
If political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen; if it is therefore unreasonable to assume conspiracy theories are, by definition, harebrained and paranoid; if the Declaration of Independence is a conspiracy theory; if the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory that alleged King George was plotting to take away the colonists’ rights; if the conspiracy-theory label makes it difficult to see connections between political crimes that, in fact, may be connected; if, because it ridicules suspicion, the conspiracy-theory label is inconsistent with the traditional American ethos of vigilance against conspiracies in high office; if, in summary, the conspiracy-theory label blinkers perceptions, silos thinking, and is un-American and unreasonable, how did the label come to be used so widely to begin with?
Most Americans will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in 1967. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren Commission’s report. The propaganda campaign called on media corporations and journalists to criticize “conspiracy theorists” and raise questions about their motives and judgments.
The CIA told its contacts that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.” In the shadows of McCarthyism and the Cold War, this warning about communist influence was delivered simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy-theory label with powerfully negative associations.
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Reblogged this on satoconor and commented:
Nice the term SCAD! I’m a conspiracy myself, I mean there is a conspiracy around me, against me, the darkness around me, read my blogs
One minor error:
“For example, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were brothers; both were rivals of Richard Nixon and were hated by Lyndon Johnson; their murders occurred less than five years apart; both were killed while campaigning for the office of president …”
Actually, JFK already was president when he was killed. It was Bobby who was assassinated while campaign for the office.
JFK was killed while campaigning for re-election as President, while his brother was killed while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for election as President.
In both cases, just who the real killer was – or killers were – has never been fully established.
Try this.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/conspiracy-theory/
One interesting phenomenon is that people often and very unfairly ‘pool’ you into a conspiracy theory group because you question the accuracy of some fact. You must either believe that the Americans went to the moon or you don’t. I am convinced that many of the pictures and videos of the moon landings have been faked (and I came to this conclusion myself without any internet input). But that doesn’t mean I don’t think the Americans went to the moon. There are many reasons why the US would fake the pictures. This all or nothing assumption is really quite wrong. I could question the authenticity of some or much of the evidence in the holocaust narrative and I instantly become a holocaust denier even though I believe that millions of jews were horribly assassinated during the war. ‘History’ is the constant renegotiation of the past. The conspiracy theory denier is hampering our ability to manage this renegotiation effectively.
Good point. The way our mind is being ‘entrained’ is a binary exclusion zone of “Either/Or”. There are logical situations where this is applicable but Mind of an embracing and discerning awareness is not a fight/flight subconscious routine and dysfunctions to become negatively polarised when ‘fitting’ itself into such an ‘identity trap’.
As Mark Twain just ‘said’ to me via one of the speakers while watching a video on Syrian peace initiatives
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain.
In other words an identity investment that operates to defend its ‘belief system’ as if it is itself.
If you are not my friend you are my enemy. If you are my enemy’s enemy you are my ‘friend’ – at least while I use you to invalidate or destroy any rival narrative perspective.
But there is another facet of lying as a sanctioned open weapon that has absolutely no scruple or sense of wrong in lying – because it is only to sub-humans or non-humans and morality does not apply to those who have been invalidated. Indeed this lie can commit out-rage and immediately blame the victim – while playing victim and appealing for sympathy. It is not in the least open to any idea of truth or honesty – for these are redefined in terms of asserted and controlled narrative and honesty would simply be opening weakness for enemies to exploit – whereas power operates an honesty of control and superiority over the outcome – which is the explicitly achieved victory of an implicitly believed right to power – by the taking of it!
This kind of scam does because it can – and dares to pull it off – and so stands in the “real world where morally handicapped weakness not only cant get its act together – it is open to being manipulated through its beliefs and sympathies in ‘truths’ that are really and incapacity to meet the world of death and power – that operates regardless of ‘nice ideas’ that have no real power – for where is it – while we use your own mind – such as we allow you to have one – to work for us”.
You already know about manipulators using known fears, but this lie and the father of it operates through the trojan horse of our invested beliefs. Which will be seen to be positive spin over a negative or fearful sense of self – or we would simply rest in the peace of knowing without needing to justify, assert, validate or get reinforcement for. It is important to note that it is un-owned or denied, un-faced and un-healed fears that provide a back door of correspondence for the phishing and corrupting of our mind. But it is also worth noting that the self-certainty of the psychotic operates the belief in knowing with a very high degree of intensity from which most back away or align under as ‘power’.
The irony of the power seeking lie is that it embodies the hollowed out puppet that it believes itself to be the power over – as if it is not likewise USED. it sacrifices others as if to become powerful and feed its power-appetite – and yet becomes nothing but a sacrifice of true to the illusion of power – or the power to deny open awareness – and I might say the Life that rises spontaneously from it. Deceit is not different in different guises – but is all operating against – and yet feeding upon – undermining and denial of a truly felt, lived and shared life – which must embrace and include feelings that we have aversion to – because true feelings are messengers that serve the reclaiming and re-awakening of our wholeness of being – and not enemies to eradicate. Why do I say true feelings? Because the feeling of love, framed in a belief in loss, or grievance – easily becomes heartbreak, powerlessness, guilt, blame, hate and rage.
The evil or backwards is operating from and through a faulty sense of self as a result of the way we use our mind. But once we invest in externalizing evil to get rid of it – we make it ‘real’ to our self – or make an identity invested in KEEPING IT OUT!
The Both/And operator can encompass THAT someone else holds a particular view while also holding seemingly contradictory views – and be open to a higher inclusive perspective. But this through a process of embrace and inclusion – whereas the scam of point-counterpoint and directed synthesis or solution operates through exclusion – that is – there is no embrace or real receptivity to communication but a device to trick the mind to accept a pre-framed answer to a falsely framed problem – which is what you were commenting on.
I read Lance de Haven’s book some years back. It is good work, although I think much more could be written about the philosophical underpinings of the ‘Conspiracy theory’ label.
I do want to echo and add to the comment by ‘dechutes’ here. What I found most desturbing about studying the evidence around 911 was the sense of being ‘in the wilderness’ -that I had to endure baseless condemnation by intellectuals that I otherwise generally respected.
So many apparently honest and critical writers and thinkers have derided or simply ignored the investigatory efforts of Griffin, Thompson,Peter Dale Scott, Hopsicker, Ryan, Jones, Harrit et al. These investigators are clearly not ‘cranks’, and their work is factually substantiated to the highest standards, so why haven’t we seen an honest appraisal of their work on Democracy Now, Alternet, Counterpunch, Znet, etc. Why do we hear the very same bankrupt smear tactics from the likes of Greenwald, Scahill, Michael Albert, Naomi Klein, Monbiot and many others? – and why the silence from medialens writers David Edwards and David Cromwell and the likes of Craig Murray? At ‘the top’ of this pile of Left leaning writers whom I admire on other subjects but who fail on 911 is Noam Chomsky whose comments on this (and JFK) are indefensible.
My conslusion is that, effectively, the ONLY thing supporting the official 911 story is the unwavering public acceptance of it by these Left leaning voices, to whom we look for a critical perspective on the Anglo American Empire. It is taboo.
If Off-guardian took on some of this issue, I would be greatly impressed. [I am already impressed that they have decided to mark the anniversary in the way that they are. ] This is no small side issue, it is about a lack of intellectual integrity amongst that vast bulk of Left leaning critics of Establishment power in the West, on a subject that defines the era in which we are currently living.
As always, it is necessary to ask “Cui bono” or “Who benefits” from any such coverups?
As far as I can see, there is only one country that has benefited from all these events.
That country is Israel.
911 followed comments at West Point by Wolfowitz about the US needing a “Pearl Harbour” moment.
A group of high-fiving Mossad agents were seen videoing the planes striking the WTC buildings.
They were apprehended before possibly destroying the George Washington Bridge.
However – as in the case of the USS Liberty – No Israeli ever faced justice.
Their “employer” flew to Tel Aviv within days to avoid questioning.
See http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fiveisraelis.html for full details.
Note carefully bin Laden’s reported remarks about the event and who was behind it.
In the end, of course, he became yet another expendable patsy like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.
Obama and Clinton took care of the job of shutting him up – permanently.
Ever wonder why – when they could have taken him alive?
As the old pirate shanty goes “Dead men tell no tales”!
Get your anti-semitism under control. Plenty of non-Jewish people have made money out of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and their occupation.
I didn’t detect any antisemitism there. Israel is not Judaism, it is a political and geographic state. Not every Israeli is a jew. Don’t go all guardian on us!
Colin Powell : Criticism of the state of Israel is not anti-Semitism.
You are confusing Jews with Israel.
Far more Jews choose not to live in Israel than choose to live there.
Only around half the residents of Occupied Palestine are Jews.
The remainder are Christians, Muslims, Druze and Secularists.
My concern is not about Jews but the inhuman practices of the rabble ruling in Tel Aviv.
So-called antisemitism has nothing to do with it.
Arabs and some Africans are also Semites.
Got it?
Here’s more on the Israel-911 theory: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/9-11/Israel_did_it
A very convincing case, all in all.
Great article. It is surprising how many famous journalists refuse to look at 9-11 and question the official story. Chomsky, Hedges, or even journalist Robert Parry of Consortium News website are such journalists. At Consortium News, Mr. Parry goes so far as to automatically delete any comments under articles–on 9-11 mind you–which question the official 9-11 commission narrative. When I emailed him about this, he glibly snarked back that he had zero tolerance for conspiracy theories about thermite, aliens hijacking planes, explosives planted in the towers, etc. and such conspiracy nonsense would never be tolerated at his website. So you see he did just what this article described: he bundled together ALL theories of what happened on 9-11 with the most stupid and unbelievable: space aliens conspiring to pull off 9-11. Epic fail by Robert Parry! I now have much less respect for him. But further, I think that most of the big alternative media journalists are afraid of taking on 9-11 because, of course, they are afraid of being smeared ‘conspiracy theorists’ and having their career trashed in the process.
If someone’s not done it already I heartily recommend Greg Maybury’s three part exposition on this subject as further reading. It’s a mine of useful links for further research and understanding. Go to: http://poxamerikana.com/?s=conspiracy+theory
I rather like his tongue-in-cheek alternative phrase for conspiracy theorist ‘counter-subversive hypothetician’. Which I’m sure is intended to piss on the PC merchant debunkers bonfire…
I read this article and I cringe because I know that the American public are too stupid to understand how they have been bamboozled. You see the truth laid out for you and you are still too foolish to understand what it means. What in Heaven’s name to you need to lead you to the truth? I;m sorry but Americans deserve to be lied to because they are too dense t even contemplate the truth!
Perhaps now you understand how it is that people can treat other human beings with callous disregard for their lives – because they are ‘unworthy’.
I see that awakening ‘others’ is a ruse by which a partial understanding is frozen and blocked from full acceptance.
If your awakening to a true sense of worth doesn’t reach or seed in others a like reaction – move on to where you find a more resonant reception – as well as ensuring you are not preaching different from what you practice.
Accepting others where they are at is not possible without a like quality for ourselves. Self rejection is a kind of hate that tends to blame life or others or the past – for its loss of presence. I have a sense that others carry aspects of a wholeness of which I am also integral – and that I can at least start to recognize judgements and underlying fears that formed my personality – in some willingness to regain and share in a sense of worth – rather than fixated in what is ‘wrong’ with everyone and everything.
If everything is possible to find if we look for it enough – then what we find can also be an indicator of what we are in fact looking for and finding – why we want that is a line of curious discovery.
Ultimately others make choices – as do you – and live the fruits thereof. But as you are becoming aware, many have given away their awareness of choice to a mind that they believe offers at least temporary power and protection against a worse outcome than not obeying their mind would believe (according to their mind’s thinking).
The capacity to challenge one’s experience is the recognition that perception and interpretation are not revealing a self-evident reality – but are a construct serving an agenda. Believing is seeing the reinforcement or corroboration of the belief.
As I indicated a moment ago on this page – is the call to war a ruse over the call to heal? So as to leave hate operating in your background – running your show – providing you with an identity that is defended against recognizing the need for healing? Then you understand why people are well defended against any incoming threat to their thought system. But in any moment of willingness for communication – seeds of an energetic nature are shared – and then call forth their own process of fruiting in ways relevant to those ones – which may be completely different in form than my own – but share in purpose.
The true teachers are learners and the most alive musicians get out of the way of allowing the music through. The attempt to be a ‘someone in our own right’ does not endear us to others – excepting they see something to get from or use for their own agenda.
The world you see depends on the mind you see it through. And this is a freedom of choice – even if we think we have had that freedom denied or lost it in an entanglement of deceit. What thought runs in your name? That is your freedom of association. Perhaps it was your sense of a feeling of caring amidst a sense of despair that sparked me to respond to the sense of caring. It is easy to find food for despair when dispirited. But would we rather be right and in miser-y or uncover errors whose correction frees us to joy? Yes – many may persistently ‘choose’ the first – but where are the witnesses to joy – and where are the messengers sent to find them? If you wait for ‘everyone else’ – you limit and deny your truth for a sense of ‘belonging’. But in taking one step in true willingness – willingness grows perspective in which to see another. I don’t ask you to see the forms of unworthiness as different – so much as see from a sense of worth – which brings a compassionate recognition in place of the need to change the world or else!
Of course you can fake it – but that will only bring to you a world of fakes. And of course your ‘mind’ cant believe such worth is true or open to being seen – because that is the whole deal of mind-control – to cover over the truth so as to assert and impose a personal version. And then we become habituated and conditioned by choosing to prefer our personal assertion of mind to an act of listening response – and define our life out of existence.
Tubularsock likes to make it simple ……. “. . . it’s not a theory when it’s true.”
Possibly there´s already another conspiracy on the way!
Things to Possibly Come
Preface: At present my WordPress Blog WiPoKuLi is defect and I´m not able to post new articles. Thus I take this way to publish my analysis about possible developments.
USA: New „Business Plot“ under way?
The real US Power Elite might count just 100 People. It is made up of the super rich, the „Military Industrial Complex“ (of which already Eisenhower warned) and the most influential heads of the „Intelligence“ community and the military. Since Kennedy´s assassination no US President ever dared to go massively against the will of that Power Elite. But still there might be too much of Democracy in the US according to the taste of those 100 people.
Now we see the elections coming up in the US. We see a female warmonger, who is basically to the taste of those guys but also seems to have serious problems. Her health seems shaking. More and more „casualitues“ around her and her husband surface. Alternative media talk about the „Clinton Body Count“. Adding to this are scandalous email cases regarded by many as treason. Leaving alone the financial scandals.
I made a prediction: if Trump´s chances to win the race increase, something nasty could happen to him. The „lone weird gunman“ might already be waiting. Could I´ve been wrong and things might go the other way round?
In 1933 part of the US Power Elite planned the aborted „Business Plot” of 1933. This showed the readiness of the super rich to do away with US Democracy. Those days power wasn´t as concentrated as today. What if another more effective Business Plot is „in the pipe“? What if a serious „False Flag“ is on the way? The US Power Elite has „qualified“ for such a thing already with „Nine Eleven“, preparing the way for the War of Terror against the world.
One and a half decade after Nine Eleven: another False Flag?
Let me present a scenario: those media controled by the Power Elite have already tried to tie Russia to the Wikileaks publications. They´ve tried hard to present Trump almost as Putin´s agent. Could there be a setup in planing to liquidate the weird sick woman Clinton and present it as a Russian Secret Service operation?! The „answer“ could be a „State of Emergency“. It would be declared “in order” not to let the US fall into the hands of „Putin´s Agent“ Trump. And quite a number of people might be happy to have the „Freak“ prevented. Democracy might be suspended for „the better of the US“. That might cause an uprising but strange things are already reported about FEMA camps. US Society would go full swing into militarization, even much more than already happened. The „allies“, maybe better called vassals, might hardly say something out of fear, the „terror might come“. Apocalypse Now?!
Andreas Schlüter
Sociologist
Berlin, Germany
My articles on the USA: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/list-of-my-articles-on-the-usa/
Great article, and very timely.
For a specific critique of Cas Sunstein (husband of Samatha Power) read ” COGNITIVE INFILTRATION ” by David Ray Griffin. He provides a truly adequate and specific response to Sunstein’s deeply-flawed and legally-questionable arguments. Griffin deconstructs the obfuscation and puedo scholarship employed by Sunstein to create the illusion of a rational critique of the 9/11 truth movement’s alternative account of the events of September 11, 2001.
Griffin presents the ten theses put forward by Sunstein, and shows that each is fundamentally flawed. Further, he demonstrates that Sunstein is unable to avoid numerous self-contradictions, either explicit or implied, that together amount to an internal, hidden counter-argument to his own position.
Griffin demonstrates that Sunstein is unable to refute the major positions of the 9/11 truth movement, and doesn’t actually try to do so. Instead, Sunstein has produced a pseudo-scholarly “analysis” – footnotes and all – as a basis for a call for the government to neutralize the movement through (illegal) activities which create “cognitive dissonance,”
But in so doing Sunstein has provided Griffin with the means to demonstrate yet again that defenders of the official account of 9/11 actually cannot proceed by using reason and fact. The deeper we study the events of 9/11 the more we are forced to a simple binary decision: either the laws of physics are true, or the “deep state” and its media outlets – including Sunstein – are lying.
To yours, David, an additional, corroborating and reasonably brief review of Griffin’s book by Kurtis Hagen , who claims to have been the author of “… the first substantial academic rebuttal to Sunstein’s article[,]” the draft of which “. . . sparked the Internet buzz that appears to have first alerted Griffin to the issue[:]”
http://philosophy.cah.ucf.edu/fpr/files/11_1/hagen.pdf
I’ll have to read the book although it won’t be the first that I will have read authored by Griffin and on 9/11. So many thanks for the mention.
As for the excerpt from deHaven-Smith’s book, I liked this relevant bit :
“Sunstein and Vermeule’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. They would have government conspiring against citizens who voice suspicions about government conspiracies, which is to say they would have government do precisely what they want citizens to stop saying the government does.”
Indeed.
I must confess, however, that I almost stopped reading the excerpt as soon as ‘The Founding Fathers’ were invoked. But then if you know your intended audience and want to get through, I suppose that the strategy of walking your intended readers from their most likely ingrained cultural assumptions to ‘sort of’ where you’d like to take them might justifiably call for a little artifice, and who knows Americans better than Americans, eh.
In the end, I’m glad I kept reading and hope that deHaven-Smith’s book finds a broad audience, not among the choir, of course, but among the many yet innocent of the criminal duplicity ruling over them.
Thanks for the Hagen reference – I’d not seen it before. Its quite heartening to see academics writing what must be career jeopardising articles in support of the truth. I found my way to Sunstein by watching the demented diatribes dished out at the UN by his wife Samatha Powers – ( and seeing her standover tactics on the ever mild Antoly Churkin. ) I’ve a background in science, so for me the laws of physics win. But it does leave me with work in progress – that the alternative must involve deliberate malevolence arising from who knows where
I see 9/11 as having different levels – one of which being a terrorism of the mind. A declaration of power that intends to dictate the narrative without more than pretence to masking in ‘truth’. Perhaps indeed a declaration of the ‘post-truth’ politics – where the power to control the narrative no longer needs or is no longer able – to mask itself in justifications of appeal to a free allegiance.
If you want your ‘reality’ or mind to not break – you have to deny what you know and what you are – to allow that – for example building 7 free fell as a result of no collision, nor significant event. The fact of terror as a fragmenting of mind is an ancient hate – and its malevolence operates a ‘divide and rule’ effect of a hidden or shadow power. One can seek power to eradicate such evils – perhaps becoming the reseeding of it in one’s own ‘revolution’. Hatred is a result of NOT getting what one wants and believes one’s right and self-righteous hate is blind to that it is hate – where hate is merely temporarily blind in act. Who in some way does not feel denied? However there are checks and limits to the unrestrained act of power.
There is also the intent to break free of any such checks or limits to a notion of ‘freedom’ to pursue power without rival or hindrance – and in my sense of resonance and communication, birds of a feather flock together. The elitist self-excepting and self-supremacist presumption to power does not seek truth – it makes truth. It is not subject to law – it makes law – serving no one but itself – or rather the image and concept of self that identifies in seeking power over all that is seen to deny, weaken, rival or threaten.
Steal a kingdom and they call you king… ends the saying. But steal a mind and they will bow to a god. For the manipulation and control of mind is the lie to which denial of and hiding from terror calls upon for power and protection amidst a sense of overwhelm and unsupported isolation.
Psychological defences operate human society – and within them we live a virtual existence – overlaid upon our true being. The fearful ‘see’ threat and enmity everywhere and the more consciously identified in power via deceit see it is absolutely necessary to propagate and nurture threat and division so as to persist in their ‘security’ of privilege and influence.
Taking any part of a whole out of its context makes it impossible to wholly understand and although 9/11 operated a coup where the USA became the US – (globalist instrument – not a nation as such) – and ironically at war with IS whilst in fact using such proxies for a globalist or geopolitical stratagem – it remains that 9/11 is – or can be seen in very different perspective. If – as I hold – humanity is not a mind robot of some alien or hateful (inhuman) intent – then it has higher capacities by which to open perspective – as a result of releasing faulty thinking or dead-end futility that does not in fact resolve or bring fulfilment in the terms set.
What we (each and together) use anything FOR – will be the primary determiner of what it is – for ourself and our cultural appreciation.
It is also observable that deceit and violence have operated power in the world to a very great degree for a very long time – and that renewal of culture generally seeks to identify and address this in hope of a better way. In the scientific era – I see a greater tendency and technological capacity – to manually override or usurp Life processes ‘for the greater good’. One of these is to breakdown the structure of mind – or indeed society – in order to remake a new world order – excepting of course that the mind that operates such a hate is the inheritor of the power to dictate terms – and so merely represents a unipolar globalist government of technocratically enacted denials of humanity in the forms of a manipulated currency of thought.
Structural integrity is not altogether apt for a structure of lies – but at a given point the system becomes unstable in its own capacity to hide and find reinforcement of support – and so there is a breakdown of what had seemed and been asserted true – through which the recognition of dis-integrity of its foundation can allow a genuine integrity to be uncovers as a true foundation – from which to grow a culture of true witness.
My point will always be pointing to a deeper participation in self-deceit than the effects or symptoms themselves illuminate – and while I do support a due process of law for criminal acts – I don’t feel to be diverted into the personae of a drama of reactive hatreds that operate a jamming signal over the underlying cause being illuminated.
The old idea of a deceiver became degraded and useless when it was given power – so as to be in fact the Terrorist ‘side’ of God – although of course in the imprint of terror we can see Life as cruel or even sadistic in its inflicting of pain. But the idea of a deceiver – also called the lie and the father of the lie, is a mistaken identity – and not an external power. The capacity to recognize dis-integrity is the residual quality OF integrity – and if we have any eyes to see – we make choices that align with a true recognition – and test the fruits.
Being deceived is or has been part of the human conditioning since the year dot. The very nature of a self includes and embodies aspects of a focus of awareness through a particular template of definitions – or we could not function within the world that humanity models and ‘lives in’. I have a sense that originally this template necessitated a ‘forgetting’ of the wholeness or non-local Field of awareness – as part of a resulting experience in which to explore and grow abilities. Science and true spiritual enquiry can serve the removal of blinkers or blocks to the awareness of what is already true – and not otherwise hidden or withheld – but for the use of a mind that sees through a glass darkly. As if awakening from a spell or a dream in which everything seemed rendered in terms of a fragmented ‘narrative’ identity to which all the kings horses and men are compelled to attend in vain – or in vanity of power to usurp Life’s reintegrative movement.
Exposure of the denial and dictate of a hateful ‘power’ that seems at war with its own and itself – is an opportunity to recognize a need and a call for healing – in place of the call to war. Not going out to heal ‘others’ as if that is our function – but truly opening to the healing of our own mind – in which all these reflections of deceit will stir resonant participation. In this way our experience is our breadcrumb trail home – but in any recognition of a true integrity – we live FROM Home and grow it without reference to a hated or feared outcome. That there is a true integrity to be uncovered is my witness – regardless the habit-choices of human conditioning that interject as if to pass off as true.
You wouldn’t have been an evangelist in an earlier lifetime, by any chance?? 🙂
For all I know past or future lives could include a psychopath – I mean – what is the relation between different focuses within an Timeless OverSoul? A network of a complex and diverse range of qualities -particular to an overarching theme of which each part is an integral exploration. What is it to embrace Humanity?
I don’t know that evangelism is for me as I have no sense of converting anyone to do or be what they are not already in the doing and being of. But if it is simply a witnessing from which others can take (or leave) as they feel moved – then I’m ok with that.
I appreciate the political articles and commentary here – toward a truer record and conversation, but I also feel there is an undercurrent context that is ignored or forgotten when focusing on the dynamics of conflict and the personages or powers. If history repeats itself, it is because we have not addressed the causes in our consciousness and conditioning – because perhaps we are not interested in healing at the cause level but want our ‘side’ to win and Them to lose. War on symptoms is a very effective waste of time and life – for the more symptoms one kills, the more that arise. In the war on terror – so called – it is clear that the terrorist is cultivated and inflamed while using notional security to enforce tighter and tighter state control for populations. A world gone mad – or a mad mind exposed?
There was one US President who warned us of a gigantic conspiracy and still lived afterwards.
I am referring, of course, to Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.
What probably saved him was the fact that he was not standing for re-election as President.
His warning may also have been muted because of his own behaviour at the end of World War Two.
I think one of the reasons the label conspiracy theorist has been so successful in camouflaging real political crimes is because those who claim that organised political crime has taken place just have not done the work of fully investigating what happened and who did it.
I lived in the US for several years but in those days I was not as aware as I am today as to what was questionable about – for example – the deaths of President Kennedy and his brother Robert.
Since then, I have become aware of the culvert killer in Dallas, Texas. He was a car salesman in the culvert underneath the grassy knoll whose shot entered Kennedy’s head on the left side and exited through the right side of the back of his head, taking with it much of his brain and most of skull at the back of his head. Who he was is not known and what happened to him subsequently is also not known.
He is probably dead by now so he can never be questioned.
Oswald was conveniently assassinated by Jewish gangster Jack Leon Ruby (born Jacob Leonard Rubenstein) who, in turn, died allegedly of cancer within a few years of the death of Kennedy.
Why he really killed Oswald will now never be known.
The killing of Robert Kennedy followed a similar pattern to the killing of his brother. There was, once again, a “patsy” to deflect attention away from the real killer, who was not Sirhan Sirhan but one of the two security guards in the kitchen area. How do we know this? Because the security guard’s clip-on tie can been seen in a photograph taken at the time next to Robert Kennedy’s body as he lay dying on the floor of the kitchen. Who was the security guard and why did he do what he did? No one – as far as I am aware – knows. He too is probably no longer alive to question as the authorities preferred to propagate a make-believe story that they had caught the killer – someone as high as a kite at the time of the shooting.
Overall, even establishing the simple facts as to who did the killings and why remains as unknown today as it was at the time it happened. This indicates that the political criminals succeeded in obscuring the truth at the time and continue to succeed in their obscuration down to the present day.
I would encourage any reader that hasn’t already done so,to look at the overwhelming documented evidence available that disproves every single bit of the official versions of events on 9/11,the Kennedy assassinations (all 3 of them including Robert Kennedy jnr ).The case of MLK was taken to court by his family and a conspiracy was proven – yet no follow up investigation.
” It all happened a long time ago”,”We will never know for sure, so why open old wounds which will be painful to the victim’s families ?”,”We can’t change things ,we can’t do anything about it,why bother?”
These are the classic excuses I encounter,by those too lazy to inquire or too fearful to face the uncomfortable conclusions : that the USA ,the self appointed ‘world’s policeman’, is not a democracy,that at least 4 of their Presidents were involved in the conspiracy and cover up of murder.That their vote is meaningless,manipulated and switched by those that control the count.
The ‘Deep State’ has been the power broker for a long time and they serve the interests of the Bilderburg group,the oil companies,the MIC,the zionist bankers,rogue CIA elements and the Bush family since grandpappy Prescott’s involvement in financing Hitler,G H W’s central role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the CIA co-ordination of the shooters and cover up in Dallas, the dummy Dubya’s being carefully steered and guided by the totally evil Chaney,to today’s surreptitious buying up of water resources in South America.
A ruthless self serving ‘Illuminati’ or ‘0.1%’,have their fingerprints on all the crimes of state,start fitting the jigsaw pieces together and the picture that emerges begins to make sense of chaotic crisis our world is in.
And yes it is one big,bloody,connected conspiracy that goes beyond any class struggle that Marx ever imagined.
Deceit based power operates a power to corrupt, adulterate, infiltrate, subvert, and usurp truth. As such it operates a parasitic dependency on the host that is induced to feed it with sacrificial offerings of its own Life – in belief it thereby gains power, privilege or protection. But all operates to make sick and lay waste, while assigning such effects to falsely flagged symptoms intended to divert from true cause.
Using up Life to feed a separate self sense is a conspiracy to maintain darkness into which truth cannot enter – but is usurped by a mind-controlling narrative. The extreme examples of this on the world stage are fed and protected by the everyday ordinary practice of resorting to mind as control. The zombie state of humanity can in fact be likened symbolically to Earth being farmed by an alien or inhuman intent that feeds off our Life-energy via deception. The ‘reptillian brain’ is the fight-flight response of a subconscious survival mechanism. This has become fixated within a terrorized and split identity as the persistent war mind that is accepted as our true nature – of a predatory power struggle amidst a world of death – that is then covered over with ‘civilisation’ while running undercurrent because a stark awareness of such hate-rage is too ‘pure’ a power for any but the ‘elect’ to accept – and so there are degrees of sacrifice to such a ‘god’ of Life-denial in rage of feeling denied. Denial of self-hate operates by immediately projecting itself onto others and denying them as a way of seeming to take their power from an induced or terrorized sense of powerlessness. It is ‘mind-control’ where the sense of mind is cut off, divided in itself and calling for power to save it. In other words the ‘alien will’ answers the call and interjects itself as your mind. As the power to force order upon a sense of overwhelming conflict – because the mind is cut off in its own spin and not challenging or verifying its own premise or foundation.
Rather it protects its foundation in darkness or unconscious evasion and escape as if its very survival depends upon doing so – and everything and everyone else is collateral damage to this urge – until of course it is exposed to the light that it had caused you to forget is You – and then its lack of foundation or meaninglessness as a foundation is simply and directly recognized.
The key to a true balancing of mind within a greater consciousness and participation within Life – as a Life more abundant and on purpose – is regaining trust in which to grow willingness for honesty – as a true congruency of being and not as a narrative of self-validation unto others.
The vibrational quality of our consciousness tunes us to the experience of interpretation that we attract and in a sense unconsciously demand. Those who know not what they do can achieve their plausible deniability through any and every kind of device – along with the belief that their power and survival necessitate the form of lying to avoid an evil outcome or to attain a new world order in which evil will be vanquished… Feeding hate with hate or fear with fear is paying tribute to a false god – and yet feeling such feelings is part of recognizing the call for healing that hate was made to leave unanswered by seeming to be a malevolence outside and apart – alien from Life and against it – when an unconscious or denied self is pushed down and denied acceptance by a surface elitism that asserts the form of reality without the true presence. That gains a world at cost of Soul-felt knowing.
What if the only thing keeping us in hell is the mind that seeks to escape, evade, overcome, fix or redefine it – so as to obtain temporary mitigation of its symptoms? The very act being the reinforcer of the belief it MUST be overcome and thus persisting the focus in the fear, blame, hate, rage and heartbreak that then goes forth and multiplies its own version of abundant LACK?
What is the alternative to denial and eradication or ‘war on symptoms?’ but an honest willingness to uncover healing in place of conflicted self. In place of a mind-con troll that uses the carrot and stick to replace your true will – now there’s a phrase – your true will. Is this not the very thing that must be sacrificed and denied in order to appease a tacit but felt conspiracy of hiding or masking the true because it will attract denial? To thus be granted a stay of execution – a delay of the persecution and rejection that is associated with revealing and living the true presence of You?
Because Life or awareness of Existence is a gift not of our own making – that comes with all that we are, within itself. Is the ‘choice’ of evil the condition in which a willingness can awaken to refuse it in accepting the true? Speaking truth to power has to speak to the true and not to the mask of power and this means recognizing the true beneath appearances of deceit – so as not to be baited, triggered into reaction of division. This may seem a tough call – but the means is in acceptance of true rather than the evolution, refinement or developing of the false and the fruits are a capacity for joy in being – as a re-integrative movement within consciousness that operates through active willingness and does not wait on answering the past in the future while denying presence.
The call to joy is within our presence and so it is not found in the mind of denial or fake reality. For we meet our reflection – not as personality – but as a split minded refusal to recognize our own definitions and core beliefs given embodiment and reinforcement – for the world or indeed the body – is not the distorting factor – but rather the mind that is covering the projector. Is our participation in our own pain a call for more blame? Or for rebalancing? Do we look to the mind of coercive control or opening a willingness of trust and discernment, one step at a time, in whatever way we can imagine, or recognize as a worthy step to take. True worth has to be uncovered to be extended. This is the ‘direction of Life’; giving and receiving in like kind. Watch your thought and see the linkage. It is not so hidden to an honesty of being – which makes way for a truth of a different order than peer-agreements or beliefs – but it is the heart’s knowing or recognition – from which to live anew – for each moment is anew an’you know that somewhere, despite investment in grievance as power of delay and denial of love’s awareness now.
A very thoughtful article, pointing to the ultimate conspiracy theory: This world is all there is; there’s nothing here but us molecules. A road down which most choose not to travel 🙂
When you say ‘this world’ you are really saying ‘these beliefs’. You can believe that ‘such a set of beliefs is ‘all there is’ and act as if that were true. You cannot make it true. But you can experience it as true for you. Yet you can challenge and question such ‘reality’ – except that while you believe it is reality – you will believe you know and so will not even think to ask. Believing we know sets our world in the terms of a past conditioning. Mind control is not really the work of an other but of our own psychological defences. Of course we think ‘others’ have such defences and we are in the ‘real world’. The only world there is…
“U.S. officials asserted that communists were conspiring to take over the world, that the U.S. bureaucracy was riddled with Soviet spies, and that the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s were creatures of Soviet influence. More recently, they have claimed that Iraq was complicit in 9/11, failed to dispose of its biological weapons, and attempted to purchase uranium in Niger so it could construct nuclear bombs. Although these ideas were untrue, they influenced millions of Americans, fomented social panic, fueled wars, and resulted in massive loss of life and destruction of property.”
Lumping these two ideas together is erroneous.
The Iraq claims were disproved as soon as they were unable to find any WMD’s, they never had any ‘proof’ of a connection to 911 and in fact Iraq was one of the many countries that warned America of an impending terrorist attack before it happened.
The U.S. bureaucracy (especially during the FDR presidency) was in fact riddled with Soviet spies, this was confirmed in the Venona Intercepts. The FBI had this information bit by bit (as decoded) but allowed the continuing suppression as the request of all presidents Truman onward. The info was declassified in 1995 after the soviet archives were partially opened and the info had leaked already by Vasili Mitrokhin, collected during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate.
The most senior spies were:
Harry Hopkins – Assistant president to FDR
Harry Dexter White – Senior U.S. Treasury department official, primary designer of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Lauchlin Currie – White House economic adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt
Julius Robert Oppenheimer – Scientific director of the Manhattan Project
Alger Hiss – Lawyer involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a U.S. State Department and UN official.
Hopkins and White had an enormous responsibility for the outcome of WW2 in the Soviets favour, even provoking the Pearl Harbour attack via <a href=”https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Snow-Soviet-Triggered-Harbor/dp/1596983221>Operation Snow, setting the unconditional surrender policy and Operation Overlord strategy to prolong the war allowing the USSR time to get a foothold in all of Eastern Europe, setting the ground for the cold war and the development of the Russian nuclear bomb
The following is a list of the Americans exposed via the Venona Intecepts from Wikipedia:
Names marked with a double asterisk (**) do not appear in the Venona documents. Inclusion has been inferred to correlate with codenames or similarly spelled names found in the documents.
Similarly, identities that have been inferred by researchers (i.e., the name appears in the Venona documents, but positive identification of the individual bearing that name does not), are also marked with a double asterisk (**).
Opposing and seemingly conflicting or competing ‘identities’ invite – and are used as a scam where a hidden agenda operates unnoticed. The ‘corporate-financial’ element of power in the world operates cartels of power via narratives in which identities are set up to be diverted and directed so as to give power to the hidden agenda. Thus we are deceived in aligning with false promise or entrapped in entanglement of falsity open to exposure and etc and etc.
The ‘faces’ or identifications of power over others are various – but is there any division in the power agenda as the consolidation of power in eradication of rival or threat to its persistence?
Globalism will use any and every ‘identity’ for identity is the attempt to validate self – which is itself a ‘power-struggle’ – excepting of course where one’s identity is received through the act of extending a true sense of worth – which the lack or loss of integrity cannot see – and so must seek its ‘self’, its power and its sense of worth, in external terms. One of which is to dedicate one’s life to the fight against evil – by which a sense of righteousness offsets or diverts from the feedback of symptoms that are now assigned to evil so as to harden resolve and fight the good fight. Of course there are many ways that loyalties split off and divide – but when Jesus said “Resist ye not evil” – I feel he meant something very profound – for what we resist persists as our framing focus and operates hidden agenda through self asserting identity.
Thankyou for your post
Nordhausen – Epitome of the Big Lie :
I think the use of the term “theory” is inaccurate.
Strictly speaking, a theory is a collected body of work that has been tested and found to be true, as far as practically possible. In such a case, details are interlinked so that proving one aspect false would invalidate the theory.
A hypothesis however, is more of a tentative “what if” thought experiment which does not require every detail to be completely accurate. In this way, the wider pattern can be deduced on a balance of probability. Hypotheses are subject to iteration as more solid facts come to be available and these eventually lead to a theory.
Given that the powers that be desire to hide wrongdoing, branding opposition arguments as conspiracy theories allows them to simply disprove one aspect of the “theory” (hypothesis) and render the rest of the argument moot.
More simply, hypotheses invite discussion, theories only invite falsification. Since “they” don’t want to discuss the matters, theories are the preferred term.
Some people still think the World is flat or that Hillary Clinton knows how to tell the truth & spell her name !
Professor de Haven Smith’s ‘SCADs’ invention is a potentially useful tool for countering unthinking “conspiracy theorist” labels. However, Lance de Haven Smith’s own conclusions about the events of 9/11 are extremely disappointing, as he clearly supports the untenable ‘LIHOP’ (Let It Happen On Purpose) version i.e. basically the official story of 19 alleged hijackers and four planes etc., with the exception only that the US government knew in advance that it was going to happen, ignored warnings … and “let it happen”. This is a popular view with people of the Left, because it allows them to believe that 9/11 was “blowback” for America’s foreign policy crimes.
Unfortunately for LIHOP – but fortunately for the truth – the theory has no factual basis. The FBI admitted as long ago as 2006 that the agency had “no hard evidence that Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11”. There is abundant evidence that the alleged hijackings were faked, including, for example, the faked calls allegedly made from one of the ‘hijacked’ planes. The FBI has also admitted that NO phone calls were made.
LIHOP makes no sense either in terms of the destruction of the THREE highest WTC towers – WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 (the last-named of which was not hit by any plane). All three disintegrated in classic “controlled demolition” fashion into their own footprint – not something Osama bin Laden could have organised from his alleged cave hide-out in Afghanistan (the lie that allowed the US and UK to destroy Afghanistan in what was a clear war crime, whether or not the UN sanctioned it).
AE911Truth (Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth) has meticulously compiled the physical evidence for the now irrefutable claim of controlled demolition (www.AE911Truth.org) on 9/11. This was indeed a SCAD – of monumental proportions, because its effects have been global and devastating, including the loss of millions of lives, massive destruction of societies – and the creation of the lie of ‘fundamentalist Islamic terrorism’. It was the biggest “false flag” event (so far) in history and the failure to fully expose it has allowed many more false flag events to be orchestrated, both in the USA and Europe. Unfortunately, the failure to “out” this crime means that we can expect more.