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by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 12:49 pm
TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 11:44 am wrote:That might help to understand what I'm getting at... It's again sort of 'unacknowledged history', though not formally "conspiracy theory"...
by TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 1:25 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 12:49 pm wrote:TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 11:44 am wrote:That might help to understand what I'm getting at... It's again sort of 'unacknowledged history', though not formally "conspiracy theory"...
I would submit that most actual history is wholly "unacknowledged."
by TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 1:52 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 12:35 pm wrote:I am betting this has already been introduced in the thread, Bale is a fairly eminent practitioner, but if not: I present for the general edification of all participants a very eloquent and helpful essay, "Political paranoia v. political realism: on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics."
Enjoy: http://www.miis.edu/media/view/18981/or ... nspire.pdf
(From the article):
According to the High Court, Nathaniel Rothschild, scion of the banking dynasty and friend of seemingly everyone in the spheres of finance, business and politics, is indeed "puppet master" to the Baron of Hartlepool and Foy.
The banker and Bullingdon boy has lost his libel case against the Daily Mail, which he sued for "substantial damages" over its account of his and Mr Mandelson's extraordinary trip to Russia in January 2005.
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:09 pm
by TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:16 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:09 pm wrote:Utterly disagree with your assessment of Want to Know, it's just a big blender of shit with no discernment whatsoever.
A veritable firehose of disinformation -- in that respect, little different from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, but you don't see anyone here posting "Hey, check out this NYT archive on the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination - tons of information here"
You might as well just link to Google SERPs.
"Hey, check out this NYT archive on the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination - tons of information here"
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:31 pm
by TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:39 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:31 pm wrote:You just got here; we've been doing this a long time. This is 2006-vintage stuff, feel free to peruse the board.
Also: get used to venom from me, homeskillet.
Also, I don't know how much you're into "reading comprehension" but my post was about Wantoknow.info -- not The Independent.
by jakell » Thu Mar 27, 2014 3:23 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 3:31 pm
by jakell » Thu Mar 27, 2014 4:04 pm
TheBlackSheep » Thu Mar 27, 2014 4:44 pm wrote:
That being said... I sort of feel unable to formulate what I want to say coherently... but I think there is sort of 'non-conspiracy' hidden/unacknowledged history that plays a key role in historical development. It's not really conspiracy formally, but I am sure that it could be deemed conspiracy if someone was ideologically opposed to what you were expressing... For example, returning to my French/American revolution example... In The Federalist and the writings of the founding fathers of the united states there are definitely certain anti-democratic sentiments expressed... if that was tied into what I was getting at before to create this sort of subversive image of history, it is sure to be labelled conspiracy theory by some people if only because they will feel like what is being put forward is an attack on good old fashion american values.
Also, you're not implying that pattern recognition is a bad thing right? (I'm not saying you are)... because I would definitely see the ability to recognize patterns as being a quality of human intelligence. I've actually worked hard to hone my ability to recognize patterns.
by American Dream » Sun Apr 06, 2014 8:20 am
Chapter Twenty-nine
Elizabeth, Queen of the Jews
When LaRouche says the Queen of England pushes drugs or that Britain is the chief enemy of the United States, he is not merely indulging in eccentricity or a Freudian dislike of female authority figures. These statements have a serious meaning to anti-Semites and neo-Nazis in West Germany and the United States. They are eccentric only to those who have not studied the history of modern anti-Semitism, in which the theme of Jewish-British race mixing and Jewish domination of the British Empire looms large.
The original Nazis popularized this theory. In Mein Kampf, Hitler complained that the Jews in England exert an "almost unlimited dictatorship" through their manipulation of public opinion. Heinrich Himmler speculated in his unpublished notebooks on the "Jewish blood" of the English and Scots. Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century discussed the alleged identity of the policies of "Jewish high finance" with those of Great Britain and claimed that the British government had "handed over control of all financial transactions to Jewish bankers such as Rothschild, Montague, Cassell, Lazard, etc." Expressing a theory that the LaRouchians later would repeat in Dope, Inc., Rosenberg said that England had "allowed the opium trade to fall increasingly into Jewish hands."
Once Nazi Germany and Britain were at war, the Nazis developed a more exaggerated version. World-Battle, an official propaganda organ, depicted "English high finance" as Judaism incarnate. England's aggression against innocent Germany, it said, was the result of the Jews buying Churchill with piles of gold. Meanwhile Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, came to regard the Jews and the British upper classes as virtually one racial entity. He wrote in his diary in 1942: "Rothschild...took the floor [of the British House of Commons] and delivered a tearjerker bemoaning the fate of the Polish Jews....All members of Parliament rose from their seats as a silent tribute to Jewry. That was quite appropriate for the British House of Commons, which is really a sort of Jewish exchange. The English, anyway, are the Jews among the Aryans. The perfumed British Foreign Minister, Eden, cuts a good figure among these characters from the synagogue. His whole education and his entire bearing can be characterized as thoroughly Jewish."
The Jewish-British theme was popular among American anti-Semites as early as the 1890s. According to historian Richard Hofstadter, "anti-Semitism and Anglophobia went hand in hand" in populist writings of that decade. One tract included a map of the world with an octopus squatting on the British Isles, its tentacles stretching across the seas. The octopus was labeled "Rothschilds." Another tract denounced President Grover Cleveland as a tool of "Jewish bankers and British gold." Gordon Clark's Shylock; As Banker, Bondholder, Corruptionist, Conspirator (1894) accused the Rothschilds of bribing the U.S. government to deliver the American people "into the hands of England, as England had long been resigned into the hands of her Jews." The leading anti-Semite of the period, William Hope ("Coin") Harvey, called for war with Jewish-dominated England to "blot her name out from among the nations of the earth."
LaRouche's version most closely resembles War! War! War!, a Nazi tract published in 1940 under the pseudonym Cincinnatus to convince Americans that Hitler was right and that the United States should stay out of the war. (The pseudonym was apparently borrowed from the Society of the Cincinnati, an early American patriotic league named after Cincinnatus, hero of the ancient Roman republic.) Cincinnatus called the British Empire the "British-Jewish Empire." The United States, he argued, should not come to the aid of "a mongrel England, ruled not by Britons of the blood, but, largely, by a galaxy of Jews, half-Jews, and quarter-Jews." He added: "The England which...beseeches us to come to her rescue is little more than another segment of the Jewish 'nation.’" Just like LaRouche, Cincinnatus said that the real enemy of the United States is a "New York City, New England, Anglophile, Jewish plot."
There are many other parallels: LaRouche says the British are plotting to starve "billions" of people to death in the Third World. Cincinnatus said, "The starvation of men, women and children has been the most approved English method of warfare since the Jews became dominant there...." LaRouche says Henry Kissinger and Ariel Sharon are "British agents." Cincinnatus quoted the British anti-Semitic author Hilaire Belloc as saying "the Jew might almost be called a British agent upon the Continent of Europe and still more in the Near and Far East." LaRouche calls the British philosopher Bertrand Russell the most evil man of the twentieth century. Cincinnatus devoted several pages to Russell as the alleged purveyor of "Jewish" immorality. LaRouche claims that the British-Rothschild establishment (and the Queen) controls the international drug traffic. Cincinnatus devoted a chapter to "The Chinese Opium Wars and British-Jews." LaRouche and his followers write about the alleged hereditary taint of the British aristocracy, its congenital brain damage, etc. Cincinnatus quoted Belloc: "[W]ith the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception. In nearly all of them was the strain more or less marked; in some of them so strong that though the name was still an English name...the physique and character had become wholly Jewish and the members of the family were taken for Jews whenever they traveled...." With all of these similarities, it is not surprising that LaRouche's New Solidarity includes a column by one "Cincinnatus" (although the alleged author of the 1940 tract is long dead) and that LaRouche's Security staff once applied for concealed weapons permits under the name of Cincinnatus Associates. (Of course the LaRouchians would claim they merely are identifying with the patriotic society of George Washington's day.)
The Jewish-British conspiracy theory is popular today with hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan. You can purchase dozens of pamphlets on this theme from the Sons of Liberty in Louisiana. Mostly written by British fascists in the 1930s, the titles include The Jews and the British Empire, Our Jewish Aristocracy, and How Jewry Turned England into a Plutocratic State. The latter says that the Jews regard "the British Empire only as a stepping stone towards a coming Jewish World-Empire" and that "the English government is only the British facade for the Jew....The English statesmen are the well-paid dummies of Jewish-English finance-capitalism." The pamphlet also describes the alleged "judaising" of the English aristocracy through intermarriage. Because of these "blood-ties," it concludes, "Jewish finance-capital is identical with British finance-capital."
In 1984 the Sons of Liberty republished War! War! War! with an introduction by Eustace Mullins, a scholarly anti-Semite who is friendly with the LaRouchians and attended their 1984 annual convention. The Sons of Liberty also launders LaRouche's neo-Cincinnatus doctrines into white supremacist circles via the pamphlets of the Christian Defense League's Dr. John Coleman. Scores of Coleman's pamphlets have titles similar to those of LaRouchian articles or books and contain identical analyses. They never mention LaRouche's name, yet the ideas are his. Mullins, who is a contributing editor of Coleman's World Economic Review, says that Coleman "claims to have mysterious connections in British intelligence, but for the last ten years all he's done is copy LaRouche's stuff." Thus does the LaRouchian message circulate in the swastika-and-bedsheet crowd, while LaRouche, the self-styled friend of the White House, is spared unnecessary public embarrassment.
LaRouche himself has admitted the true meaning of "British" on at least two occasions. In The Case of Walter Lippmann, in his discussion of the slave trade in early-nineteenth-century America, the word "British" is immediately followed by "Rothschild" in parentheses. In "Anti-Dirigism Is British Tory Propaganda" (1978) he expanded the "British" to embrace a network of wealthy Jewish families. "The policy-shaping kernel of the enemy forces centered in the British monarchy is a group of private banking families," he said. "These are notably the family interests of the Lazard Brothers, Barings, N. M. Rothschild, Hill Samuel, and other small private banking houses." He then added: "Britain--these same families’ interests--has controlled the international opium traffic since early during the 19th century." Although LaRouche threw in a single non-Jewish family, the definition was essentially the same as Alfred Rosenberg's.
The British-Jewish theory was given symbolic expression in New Solidarity in 1978 by a Star of David with Queen Elizabeth at the top flanked by Henry Kissinger and economist Milton Friedman. The caption alluded to "satanic connections." Thus was made clear the real meaning of LaRouche's accusation that the Queen pushes drugs.
In "How to Analyze and Uproot International Terrorism," a 1978 tirade against the alleged British controllers of European terrorist cells, LaRouche discussed how the British oligarchy reflects the "national interest" and national "state of mind" of a network of wealthy families "embedded in various institutions of each nation." Traditional anti-Semitism regards the Jews in precisely this way: the cosmopolitan nation living parasitically off other nations. LaRouche implicated wide strata of Jews in the conspiracy. Around the Rothschilds and other leading families, he wrote, there is gathered a "secondary layer of plebeians. These...include leading intelligence and political families going back a generation or two, certain families with a legal professional tradition, and so forth....Around these there is an outer layer of agents, trusted, deemed useful....Around these strata, another layer of agents, and so down to the pathetically demented individual environmentalist and terrorist."
LaRouche was not only speaking of Jews; the secondary agent layers included non-Jews such as the Churchill family. But in LaRouchian propaganda Zionism is the chief international tool of the British, and Zionists are usually British agents. Since most Jews are Zionists, the implication is that most Jews must be British agents. In attempting to make this connection, the LaRouchians seized on General George Brown's infamous 1974 statement about the alleged excessive influence of Jews in Washington. In 1977 LaRouche wrote that it was time to "kick every British-loving son-of-a-bitch out of Washington." With a deft touch, the article took the form of an open letter to Defense Secretary Harold Brown but the picture was of George Brown. A New Solidarity editorial then accused the entire leadership and most of the membership of American Jewish organizations of being part of the treasonous British conspiracy: "Their loyalties lie not with the United States but with the Zionist-British organism."
Through the years, New Solidarity has fleshed out this theory in hundreds of articles. The first wave in 1978 included headlines like "British to Sell World Short," "Brits Run Spy Hoax to Push Cold War Clime," "British Launch Drive to Break Up the EEC," and "Expel Britain's Kissinger for Treason." When describing British machinations, New Solidarity referred to mostly Jewish names (Oppenheimer, Montefiore, Meyer, Weill, Warburg, as well as Rothschild). If the name weren’t obvious, they'd add a tag--e.g., "Lord Crewe, a Rothschild family cousin." When non-Jews in the British Establishment were mentioned, there was often a different kind of tag. Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson was referred to as a "Rothschild agent," while Conservative MP Winston Churchill III was said to live up to his grandfather's "reputation for sycophantic...braggadocio in the service of the Rothschilds."
The LaRouchians listed what they believed to be the key institutions of British power in the twentieth century--the Fabian Society, the Round Table group, the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the British Secret Service, etc. Each was said to be under "Rothschild" control. In a pamphlet on the British aristocracy, LaRouche aide Chris White wrote that the scions of the Rothschild family "preside over" the British organs of power: The "evolution of the Rothschild family and its outlook" has determined the "evolution and outlook of the British political system."
The LaRouchians concocted a pseudo-history of England to bolster this. The Norman Conquest in 1066, they said, was instigated by converted Jews around the papacy as a flanking maneuver against the Teutonic peoples, (That the Jews were later driven out of England by the Norman kings was irrelevant to this theory. The oligarchy doesn't always need to rule directly on the spot. Indeed, it may sometimes prefer to rule from afar, using ideology as its control mechanism. Was not Oxford University in the Middle Ages a nest of bestial nominalists?)
The reestablishment of direct Jewish control of England supposedly began in the late seventeenth century when William and Mary allowed a few to settle in London. A Dutch Jewish banker, Solomon Mendoza, fastened on the Churchill family as the chief oligarchical agents for the centuries ahead. Ideological brainwashing of the English upper classes was accelerated through such mechanisms as the Anglican Church, the Freemasons, the Knights of Malta, Humean empiricism, utilitarianism, Fabian socialism, and most recently the Tavistock Institute. The vigorous English aristocrats of the Neoplatonic Tudor era were transformed step by step into effete puppets. Hence the frequent LaRouchian quips about homosexuality and genetic deficiency in the British royal family and top aristocracy: How can the British be real men if they've never stood up to the Jews?
by BrandonD » Sun Apr 06, 2014 4:39 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 27, 2014 12:35 pm wrote:I am betting this has already been introduced in the thread, Bale is a fairly eminent practitioner, but if not: I present for the general edification of all participants a very eloquent and helpful essay, "Political paranoia v. political realism: on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics."
Enjoy: http://www.miis.edu/media/view/18981/or ... nspire.pdf
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Apr 06, 2014 4:50 pm
by American Dream » Sat Apr 12, 2014 8:02 pm
Lawrence Jarach
Democracy and Conspiracy: Overlaps, Parallels, and Standard Operating Procedures
The Mythic Appeal of Democracy
A myth isn’t a lie-it is a story told by people with a particular outlook to others with a similar outlook. It can contain truth and falsehood in varying mixtures and ratios, but the important thing is that it makes sense to its audience.
According to the believers in Democracy (rule of the people — however “the people” is defined and narrowed to exclude particular segments from participation in government), it is a system of decision-making that enables the rule of the wisest and most capable and skillful, regardless of hereditary class privilege; this is its republican (anti-monarchist) heritage. Democrats (especially those who identify with the tradition of Liberalism) believe that majority rule provides more voice in decision-making for more people. They believe that more representation means more fairness, that a more informed voting base increases the wisdom of representatives, which furthers the responsiveness and fairness of said representatives. For democrats, information is power. These are some of the myths of Democracy and they are tirelessly promoted by the State through public school indoctrination and fanciful media images.
The reality, though, is a bit different. Most democrats (who rule, rather than those who only aspire to rule) know that democracy is fragile and as easy to manipulate as any other style of government. They operate under the assumption that “the people” will always be unprepared to rule themselves, and therefore those who are the most wise and ethical have the paternalistic responsibility-nay, duty — to take upon themselves the heavy elitist burden to govern the rest of us. Duplicity is integral to democratic government (the less apologetically dictatorial forms we will leave out of the current discussion, but the parallels should be obvious); most people who live under democratic rulers don’t like to be reminded that they are incompetent (and yet the unprepared and immature people are magically transformed into fully informed, rational agents when it comes time to choose their representatives).
The Mythic Appeal of Conspiracy
A political conspiracy is a self-selecting group of people who get together privately in order to plan and implement a particular agenda with the goal of increasing power and social control. I take it for granted that all kinds of political conspiracies exist; some might just prefer to refer to these conspiracies as skirmishes in the class war, and I wouldn’t disagree. The term “conspiracy theory,” however, is a derisive dismissal of any possibility that private or clandestine agendas could operate (semi-)publicly in a democracy, and for that reason the term is useless and obnoxious; those who invoke it clearly wish to equate it with fantasy or falsehood despite all evidence to the contrary. One of the greatest of unintentional (or perhaps not!) ironies occurs when obvious conspirators (like some of the current crop: Bush, Cheney, Kissinger, etc.) pooh-pooh any and all counter-narratives as “conspiracy theories.”
Conspiracy theories work the same way as other myths, and (for their adherents at least) have supplanted the otherwise dominant democratic myths of American culture. But because I am unhappy with the way the term “conspiracy theory” is used, I have decided to replace it with a new term to describe how people think about and analyze these conspiracies: Conspiratology; the study and exposure of conspiracies and their respective conspirators.
What’s New in Conspiratology
A shift has occurred in American conspiracy lore in the past several decades. From the time of the founding of the United States until the Watergate scandal, conspiratologists were, almost to a person, politically reactionary: they suspected of subversion anyone with questionable or foreign loyalties, socialists of all stripes trying to undermine American Free Enterprise Capitalism, liberals and other do-gooders trying to undermine supposedly natural hierarchies. In other words they considered anyone with dissident views to be an outside agitator, whose ideas just weren’t American, or American enough. The fault for the failure of what would otherwise be the smooth, conflict-free functions of democratic government lies with unseen (or partially seen) sinister forces bent on the destruction of democratic values. These days, the usual right-wing conspiratologists have found many commonalities with their left-wing contemporaries; the main issues now include shadowy (undemocratic) government operations mixed in with the vagaries of national (and popular) sovereignty.
The theme that connects conspiratologists is that the social/political/economic order would be just, proper, and natural if only some secretive self-selecting powerful/power-hungry elite hadn’t ruined the original order. The elevation of the status quo ante into an recapturable ideal (whether that ideal is based more or less on the facts of relative privilege under threat, or the self-serving myths of some segment of a group that feels threatened) is the foundation of all Reaction, and that’s the main reason reactionaries have been (until recently) the driving force behind Conspiratology. It has only been with the unquestioned ascendancy of the less plebian right wing to governmental and bureaucratic power in the us that similar arguments have found adherents on the liberal left.
Realities of Democracy
American government has always relied on a semi-hereditary ruling class made up of men from the overlapping realms of the military and intelligence industries, large corporations/landowners and legal firms, energy companies, and ordinary gangsters. Most of those who wield real influence and power in Washington DC are never elected; instead they are appointed to cabinet positions (the current best example being Karl Rove). The constant recycling and reshuffling of unelected business and government executives (some in the current administration have careers dating back two or three decades) into these positions of power maintains the consistency of government regardless of whichever figurehead sits in the Oval Office. This is not the result of some kind of aberration or betrayal of democracy — it is exactly what a republican form of government requires for continuity.
Secrecy, or the division of labor based on access to information, is a cornerstone of all government, all bureaucracy. The most important function of bureaucracy is self-preservation and the maintenance of hierarchy; restriction of knowledge is the best and most effective guarantee for this, and just as the smooth running of the economy is a seemingly self-perpetuating cycle of buying and selling (its public face), the smooth running of a bureaucracy is based on the self-perpetuating cycle of knowledge and secrecy (mostly taking place in private). Those who believe that the economy is run by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market are as deluded as those who believe that bureaucracies are (or can be made to be) transparent, flexible, and subject to change. Not to be too Marx ist, but the class interests (e.g. increased power and wealth) of those who rule are too important for them to leave such things to chance. Democracy merely offers a broader range of cosmetic options compared to other forms of government.
Then there is the secrecy necessary for diplomacy and espionage, not to mention war. The obsession with secrecy as a standard operating procedure for maintaining government control showed up in anarchist history in a particularly tragic manner. During the Spanish Revolution, the telecommunications industry in Barcelona was collectivized and operated by a joint committee of CNT[1] and the UGT.[2] This allowed revolutionaries to be fully informed about the conversations and schemes of Republican politicians, a situation these professional bureaucrats couldn’t tolerate for long. On May 3, 1937, after months of having their calls overheard and sometimes disconnected, the forces of law and order had had enough. The pretext for the storming of the Telephone Exchange led by the Stalinist Chief of Police was this lack of secrecy.[3] In the words of a Catalan Stalinist:
It was high time such a step was taken. The CNT listened in to all the conversations between the central government, the Generalitat [the semi-autonomous Catalan government] and abroad. That couldn’t be allowed to continue. We had tried to get a member on to the central committee to stop the listening in. So it was decided to take more energetic measures. Of course, had the PSUC [the Catalan Communist Party] been in a position to listen in to telephone conversations it would have done so also. The party always wanted to be well-informed...[4]
Investigation and Exposure; The Myth of Liberalism
The opposite of this kind of secrecy is supposed to be total information. But in any political system that strives for total control, secrecy and information are poles of a false dichotomy; all rulers understand that most information is already biased, originating and disseminated from where they already have enormous influence and power, like think tanks, mainstream media, scientific research institutions, and intelligence agencies (please indulge my avoidance of the obvious overlaps among these sources). The Marketplace of Ideas can withstand any and all challenges — disinformation and biased reporting, scandalous insinuations, and outright lies are merely another pile of data to sift through in a search for some kind of overarching Truth. The glut of disinfotainment turns facts into a kind of white noise, which causes just about everything to be ignored and/or forgotten.
Even if there were some way to get a handle on an elusive Truth,[5] is the exposure of a conspiracy enough to curtail it — let alone thwart it? While embarrassment and guilt can be powerful motivators for those beholden to the ideals of decency, fair play, and justice, it is equally important to remember that bureaucrats and hierarchs hardly ever play by rules that would put them at a disadvantage. The first rule for those gangsters is hierarchical self-preservation, and honor and honesty have little to offer in that realm however much they might exploit the appearance of these characteristics.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Apr 12, 2014 8:07 pm
American Dream » Sun Apr 06, 2014 7:20 am wrote:LYNDON LAROUCHE AND THE NEW AMERICAN FASCISM
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