Conspiracy Theories Drain Our Political Energy, Lead Nowhere

[8bitagent]

As if I didn't need any more reasons to dislike the smarmy hypocritical self absorbed "left" in America...

Conspiracy Theories Drain Our Political Energy -- and Lead Nowhere

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-ha ... 95348.html

This is the age of the conspiracy theory. In the interstices of the internet, no global event happens by accident - or as it seems at first glance - any more. While the truth is slowly getting its boots on, a paranoid counter-narrative is broadbanded across the world in a flash. We can all offer a list of conspiracies we have been told in a confidential whisper, backed up by a blizzard of small incongruent questions that are scraped together to make a fantastical answer.

Oh...it only gets better...

thank goodness there's a few REAL progressives out there in journalist land, like John Pilger(LOVE his new Obama article) and Jeremy Scahill.

Too bad so much of the left in popular media are pro government, pro Afghanistan war, Clinton and Obama worshipping tools.

Oh wait, here's another zinger from the article...in case you already wanted to vomit:

John Kennedy really was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

We know Oswald's motive. He was a lonely and troubled kid who, as Aaronovitch puts it, "defected to Russia in 1961 hoping to discover a better form of society - and discovered instead the Soviet Union." When he returned to America, he was bitter and angry, and determined that the only solution left was to tear down all forms of authority. He wanted to build an anarchistic society "without any centralized state whatsoever." All the endless theories that he couldn't have done it melt on examination. Take the nonsense of the "magic bullet": Aaronovitch talks the reader through how it has been shown by scientists studying the Zapruder footage to be not just possible but highly probable that Oswald's shots were responsible.

[slomo]

As if the collective energies of the "left" have ever led anywhere useful.

Where are we today? How balanced is our economy? Where is the political will to discourage the pillaging of our economy, or to discourage torture? What has been done to prevent Texas-sized garbage patches in the ocean?

Where is America even in comparison to tightly-controlled Europe?

You don't need "conspiracy theory" to demonstrate the emptiness of the American left. But the so-called leaders of the left never explain why we consistently fall behind, and never offer any plausible alternatives.

Unhappy? Be sure to email your congressional representative today. If you really want to be heard, use the telephone!

[Fresno_Layshaft]

As if the collective energies of the "left" have ever led anywhere useful.

Bingo!

Best post I've read in long time, Slomo.

[American Dream]

slomo wrote:

As if the collective energies of the "left" have ever led anywhere useful.

This is a quite the pat dismissal of what is a huge and very complex phenomenon.

Ironically, not so different from what Johann Hari is being criticized for with his wholesale discounting of "conspiracy theory"....

[MacCruiskeen]

Are there no limits? One day after Cosmic Cowbell on "pseudo child soldiers" (sic), we have Hari on Aaronovitch on "conspiracy theories" (sic)... Oh, it's bad, bad, bad, weak, smug, stupid, disingenuous, lazy, proudly ignorant, cravenly powershipping, profoundly stupid, and bad.

Example (one of many):

Aaronovitch returns to form in his conclusion. He argues that we keep returning so obsessively to conspiracy theories because they are, paradoxically, reassuring. "Paranoia", he writes, "is actually the sticking plaster we fix to an altogether more painful wound": the knowledge that life is chaotic and random and nobody is in charge.

Did I mention lazy? Did I mention inexcusably stupid?

Still, it peforms its task adequately, i.e. it demonstrates to his editor at the Guardian that Johann Hari, for all his occasional tepidheaded radicalism, is essentially a sound chap. And prudent. In short, a dependable employee.

nobody is in charge

In fact, Mister Alan Rusbridger is in charge. He, like his rag's advertising clients, will be pleased and reassured; a protegé (and prodigy) is coming along nicely. If Johann Hari had chosen to be less lazy, stupid and ignorant, he would most certainly now be out of a job.

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news:

11:47 GMT, Monday, 4 May 2009 12:47 UK

European economy 'will shrink 4%'

EU economies will contract by 4% this year, the European Commission has forecast, in a massive revision from its earlier prediction.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8032349.stm

In times like these, Johann knows, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do: shrink to fit. (But who knows if he even knows that he knows it?)

[MacCruiskeen]

For those who can read German, this is brilliant (and witty):

Mein Freund, der Chefredakteur

Ludwig-Sigurt Dankwart

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/15/15599/1.html

For those who can't: sorry. I have been meaning to translate this for years. The title means "My Friend, the Editor-in-Chief". It's almost certainly about the top dog at Der Spiegel, the former news-magazine now affectionately known as "the house journal of the CIA in Germany". Dankwart's article was published online in 2003 to coincide with the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The two accompanying photos are worth a look, because they practically tell the story themselves.

[RocketMan]

Dang, just when I was starting to like Mr. Hari.

[KeenInsight]

Oh wait, here's another zinger from the article...in case you already wanted to vomit:

John Kennedy really was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

We know Oswald's motive. He was a lonely and troubled kid who, as Aaronovitch puts it, "defected to Russia in 1961 hoping to discover a better form of society - and discovered instead the Soviet Union." When he returned to America, he was bitter and angry, and determined that the only solution left was to tear down all forms of authority. He wanted to build an anarchistic society "without any centralized state whatsoever." All the endless theories that he couldn't have done it melt on examination. Take the nonsense of the "magic bullet": Aaronovitch talks the reader through how it has been shown by scientists studying the Zapruder footage to be not just possible but highly probable that Oswald's shots were responsible.

Bollocks!

The "magic bullet" was actually the nonsense of the Warren Commission! What kind of journalism is this where critical thinking is not allowed? Garbage.

[ninakat]

related idiocy, but at least Zinn doesn't say that we feel better when embracing conspiracy theories -- still, witness the hypocrisy:

Say It Ain’t So, Howard Zinn!
by Richard C. Cook

Global Research, May 4, 2009

Howard Zinn, 86-year old folk hero, activist, professor, historian, and author of one of the great books of American popular literature, A People’s History of the United States, is telling people that searching for the truth about what really happened on 9/11 "is a diversion."

Say it ain’t so, Howard Zinn!

He used the word "diversion" several times during an interview on The Real News Network with senior editor Paul Jay. http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?opti ... mival=3553

Here are some excerpts:

"There are some issues that are interesting but are diversions from what we really have to do. This is one of them."

"Maybe there was a conspiracy. Who knows?"

"It’ll go on and on and on and people will write books and talk about it; it’ll be an enormous waste of good energy… I just don’t think that it leads anywhere."

In the interview, Paul Jay points out to Zinn that much of current U.S. foreign policy, such as the Afghan War, "still has its roots in 9/11." Making it clear that no matter what we may think about conspiracies, Jay states that peculiarities about 9/11 are part of the historical record.

For instance, he cites the fact that then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged to the 9/11 Commission that she had been warned about an attack by Osama bin Laden during the summer of 2001 but that she did nothing about it. Jay also points out that "hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans" question the official version.

Zinn: "It will never be clear. It will be one of those situations where nobody will ever be able to prove anything, and it will lead us nowhere."

To be fair to Zinn, he also states that "9/11 was used as an excuse by the Bush administration to go to war," but adds that what should be investigated is, "Why are there people in the world who want to blow up our buildings, who want to scare the American people, who want to do terrorist [things]," and who "are enraged by American foreign policy."

He says, "We should be concentrating on in what way is American foreign policy responsible for the terrorism that exist in the minds and hearts of so many people in the world and which in a small number of them results in violent acts."

It reminds me of another famous 9/11 conspiracy debunker, Professor Noam Chomsky. On October 6, 2006, Chomsky said on ZNet: "One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background, crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis." http://www.oilempire.us/chomsky.html

It would be easy to criticize Zinn for failing to be consistent. He knows how important the study and writing of history really is. In his People’s History of the United States he set out to correct the record about the role of the labor movement, U.S. imperialism in Latin America and around the world, the violence of our culture, and many other issues.

Zinn knows, as we all do who have worked in the genre, that the writing of history is about discovering the truth. We know that absolute truth about the past is an impossibility. But we can try to get close, because the truth matters. A good historian is a scientist, attempting to draw conclusions from factual data. A good historian knows that even small discoveries, properly validated, can change the way we view the past and make decisions in the present.

But doesn’t what Zinn is saying about 9/11 go beyond the writing of history? Isn’t he suggesting by talking about "the people who want to blow up our buildings" that it is probable that those who carried out the 9/11 attacks really were a few angry Arabs with box-cutters, just like the Bush administration told us? Isn’t he asking us to buy into the government’s own flawed conspiracy theory regardless of whether we think the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolition or the Pentagon was attacked by a missile rather than an airliner, or whatever?

It doesn’t seem to me Howard Zinn really is saying we’ll never know what actually happened on 9/11 or that trying to find out is a "diversion." It seems to me that what he is saying is itself a diversion. Please correct me, Mr. Zinn, if I am wrong.

Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public policy issues. His book "We Hold These Truths: the Hope of Monetary Reform" is now available at http://www.tendrilpress.com. His website is http://www.richardccook.com.

[MacCruiskeen]

Great Britain may not have the world's freest press, but perhaps it has the cosiest.

The tome under review is by Hari's ex-colleague at the Guardian, David Aaronovitch: a "former left-winger" who defended Emma Brockes' foul interview with Noam Chomsky at the Guardian when nearly everyone else had seen it for what it was (a hit-job), and who is normally busy defending the Israeli state's every action at every available opportunity, usually by claiming to detect anti-Semitism every time the actions of the Israeli state are criticised by anyone anywhere.

Today, The Times (his new employer) gives him plenty of space to plug his new book with a sizable extract. Here's the single sentence on which it all turns:

A summary of what a made-it-happen-on-purpose 9/ll Truth activist is likely to believe goes something like this.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life ... 187493.ece

Did you see what he did there? And that was just one sentence! I don't have the time or the patience to sift through this crap in detail, because unlike Aaronovitch's pal Hari I'm not getting paid for it, so I'll just highlight the smelliest bits:

A summary of what a made-it-happen-on-purpose 9/ll Truth activist is likely to believe goes something like this

.

There follows the usual opportunistic mixing of the possible, the probable, the provable, the proven, the unprovable, the unlikely, the dubious and the plain mad, all culled (but of course) from "the Internet", of evil repute. The result is a nice thick aromatic broth, of the kind Aaronovitch is an expert at rustling up: Shit Soup, a witches' brew.

Entirely unsurprisingly, he names only four "9/ll Truth activists" by name, and they are:

"the millionaire 9/ll Truth activist Jimmy Walter"

"the ingenious A.K. Dewdney"

"David Shayler and his partner Annie Machon, the former [sic] employees of MI5".

(Hari additionally quotes him quoting Korey Rowe...)

Is it already clear where Aaronovitch is taking his readers? Is it clear why he selects these four luminaries as typical "9/11 Truth Activists"? Is it clear why there's no mention of (say) Nafeez Ahmed, Nick Levis, Jon Gold, Michael Ruppert, the Jersey Girls, Cynthia McKinney, Jamey Hecht, Bryan Sacks, Mark Robinowitz or indeed Jeff Wells? Is it clear why neither Gore Vidal nor Lynn Margulis are allowed to get a look-in?

Is it clear why Aaronovitch overgeneralises and then overpersonalises, selectively, at his leisure, precisely as it suits him?

Is it clear why he prefers to attack people tout court (don't blame me, he started it with the French phrases) rather than arguments?

Is it clear why, when he does address arguments, he prefers to address only the weak ones?

Is it clear why he is perfectly happy to use the cant term "conspiracy theory" without ever once asking himself what it does and what it's for?

Is it clear why he appears never to have heard of the term "probable cause"?

Is it clear why he is so keen to reverse the burden of proof?

Last not least: Is it clear why The Times is happy to poach him from The Guardian and pay him handsomely for his carefully minimal efforts?

- Ach, the whole thing is beyond endurance, although it's as common as dirt. In 2009, there is simply no excuse for this stuff, unless greed or moral cowardice count as excuses.

It would be far too generous, and in fact inaccurate, to call David Aaaronovitch an idiot. He is an effortlessly-dishonest self-serving hack, and therefore very good at what he does.

No wonder the print media are in decline.

[Truth4Youth]

Re: Howard Zinn

To be fair Zinn hasn't kept nearly as much distance from the 9/11 truth movement as people like Chomsky. He spoke highly of David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor.

That article implies to me that Zinn's belief in blowback negates his (possible) belief in a conspiracy. I don't think that's the case.

[mulebone]

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod_opsec.html

The use of the Internet could reduce the unrestrained public appetite for "secrets" by providing good faith distraction material

A strategy could then be devised by DoD and the components, based upon this evaluation, to implement a coherent and complimentary plan to achieve the declassification goals. For example:

=> Openness: Discussion of balance between necessary secrecy and openness- i.e., continued classification of old nuclear test data to keep out of terrorist hands.

=> Diversion: List of interesting declassified material - i.e. Kennedy assassination data.

This bit from this Federation of American Scientists document seems to allude to the fact that "conspiracy theorists" can and should be diverted by choice document release. Maybe the author of the 1st piece on here is right about "conspiracy theory" being distracting, he's just mistaken about the reasons.

I would have to add that "conspiracy theorists" are far too defensive when issues like these are raised. The lore of conspiracy is seemingly endless, and, at times, not all that different from religious belief. Yet, you rarely find two "theorists" who agree on all aspects of "the conspiracy." "Theorists" are also as touchy as the most rabid fundamentalist whenever any tenet of their "theory" is de-bunked or even questioned.

It's amazing how many folk there are on the internet who know "the truth" yet they rarely, if ever, do anything about it except gossip.
If I'm not mistaken, one ex-spook referred to "conspiracy theorists" as "spook groupies." While the term may be insulting, it isn't completely untrue.

In many ways, conspiracy theory doesn't seem much different than any other aspect of "the cult of personality" that obsesses so many folk these days.

One other thing, is it really so surprising that the left likes government as much as the right? From what I've seen, both want a father figure to care for them. Those on the right want a stern daddy who will cut their allowance and occasionally spank them, while those on the left prefer a kinder gentler poppa. One who will tuck them in at night and powder their little bottoms while ensuring that the big bad boogie man doesn't do anything unfair or mean to them.

It all seems a bit silly.

[ninakat]

Re: Howard Zinn

To be fair Zinn hasn't kept nearly as much distance from the 9/11 truth movement as people like Chomsky. He spoke highly of David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor.

That article implies to me that Zinn's belief in blowback negates his (possible) belief in a conspiracy. I don't think that's the case.

from the article:

To be fair to Zinn, he also states that "9/11 was used as an excuse by the Bush administration to go to war," but adds that what should be investigated is, "Why are there people in the world who want to blow up our buildings, who want to scare the American people, who want to do terrorist [things]," and who "are enraged by American foreign policy."

Sure sounds like he's embracing the government's blowback conspiracy theory.

But I do agree that Zinn isn't nearly as bad as Aaronovitch, Hari, Chomsky, etc. Lesser of the gatekeepers, I suppose.

Not meant to derail the thread.... just seemed relevant.

Mac, great analysis above.... keep it up. Thanks for your voice of reason and sanity.

[MacCruiskeen]

Yet, you rarely find two "theorists" who agree on all aspects of "the conspiracy".

Which is wholly unsurprising, considering that most of the evidence is and has been systematically concealed from them.

The Big Lie, to which Hari and Aaronovitch both inevitably assent, is that the burden of proof lies elsewhere than with the prosecution. It doesn't, and the prosecution has abjectly failed to make its case (despite having all the evidence at its disposal). If there's any serious evidence that those Nineteen Deathloving Superstudents actually dun 9/11, all on their own and without warning, then let's see it, at long last.

Meanwhile, there is tons of overwhelming evidence that the Bush gang, the intelligence services and the 9/11 Commission all lied their asses off. There is, indeed, abundant proof of it. (If the police had such evidence about me or you, we'd be clapped in irons before we could say "Trifecta".)

This is the only aspect of what you call 'the "conspiracy"' that any honest and rational observers will immediately agree upon, unanimously and without reservation (unless they are worried about their jobs). And it's more than enough to justify the immediate arrest and interrogation of at least half a dozen prominent US citizens.

Or if would be, if the USA were not a post-legal society.

[vanlose kid]

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