The Necessary Embrace of Conspiracy
Several years ago I gave a talk on Martha’s Vineyard about many of the people whose portraits I’ve painted in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series. I spent some time talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. When I talk about King, I like to focus on his last year — the period when, defying the advice of many of his advisors in the civil rights movement, he spoke against the Vietnam War, equating racism with imperialism. King felt bound to make the point that the forces of capitalism, materialism, and militarism that were driving segregation were also driving the war, and until we confronted the source of the problem, the abuses would continue. It was April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church in New York, that he made that declaration. A year to the day before his assassination.
It has always confounded me every year when we celebrate Dr. King’s life that no mention is made of that Riverside Church speech in the major media. We are always treated to sound bites of the 1963 I Have a Dream speech. That speech’s oratory is as powerful as it is non-confrontational. Which is why it is re-played for modern audiences. Dr. King was about confrontation. Non-violence and confrontation, each ennobling and making the other effective. In 1967 he said, “… my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And he explained how our economic system thrived on exploitation and violence, or, as Emma Goldman put it, “The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.” This was probably the most important speech King ever gave and not playing it when we ostensibly honor him, is tantamount to castrating him morally and intellectually. Just as there is a long history of White America castrating black men, there is an equal legacy of Elite America cutting the most important truths of our social prophets out of the history books. We pay homage to King’s icon, the cardboard cutout, but not to his strongest beliefs and his most cogent analysis of our problems — to what vision called forth his courage. And, if we think that he spoke the truth, to censor that truth is to promote a curious kind of segregation. He is segregated, not for the color of his skin, but for the accuracy of his perception, how close to the bone his words cut. We can’t bear to hear the sound of truth’s knife scraping on hypocrisy’s bone. Only people who actually want to change the system dance to that music or want it to be heard.
Equally important, and part of the same neglect, is the intentional ignoring of the facts of his death. In my talk on Martha’s Vineyard I spoke about William Pepper’s book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper had been James Earl Ray’s lawyer. Ray was the man convicted of killing King. But both Pepper and the King family were convinced that Ray was innocent. The King family hired Pepper to represent them in a suit; they asked only $100.00 in damages to clear Ray’s name. Before the trial came to court in 1999, Ray had died in prison. The jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. Ray, the patsy, had left town before the shot was fired. Pepper had confessions from people involved from each of the organizations named. The verdict was barely mentioned in the U.S. media then and is not mentioned every year on the anniversary of his death. Why?
After my talk on Martha’s Vineyard a man came up to me and said, “I enjoyed your speech and was with you until you started that conspiracy stuff about MLK, Jr.” I said, “That’s not conspiracy. What I told you are facts.” End of conversation.
I think we’re confronted with two conspiracies here: one to commit the crime, the other to ignore it even when the facts are known. ( Two sides of the same coin.) The man who accused me of slipping into the neurotic, aliens-are-among-us land of conspiracy nuts was unable to hear the evidence, perhaps because he was so utterly convinced by our government and media that conspiracies don’t exist, people who espouse them are dangerous fruitcakes, and if you begin to think like that, your whole house of cards wobbles then topples. Who wants that? Better a standing tower of marked cards, than having to admit the game is rigged and the ground is shaking.
America is steeped in conspiracy, and even more steeped in propaganda that discredits those who try to expose the conspiracies. Whether we’re talking about MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK, Iran-Contra, 9/11, or, most importantly, the status quo, anyone who works to uncover the truth is branded a “conspiracy nut” and discredited before any evidence has a fair hearing. The government/corporate/media version is THE VERSION. Anything else is illusory.
In fact, the cultural success of labeling investigative reporters and forensic historians, and, simply, anyone who tries to name reality, “conspiracy nuts” is perhaps the most successful conspiracy of our time. Well, not the most successful. That prize goes to the conspiracy to give corporations all the rights of individual persons under our Constitution. That conspiracy has codified and consolidated corporate power so that it controls our lives in almost every meaningful way. It controls the election funds of our candidates, and them once they are in office. It controls our major media including public broadcasting. It controls the content of our television programming. It controls how are tax dollars are spent making sure that the richest get the most welfare. It controls the laws, the courts, the prison system and the mind numbing propaganda that we are the greatest democracy on earth. It controls the values with which we raise our children. It controls our ability to dispense justice. It controls how we treat nature, how we deface our land with strip malls, and blow the tops off our mountains — a form of corporate free speech. It dictates our modes of transportation. It controls our inability to respond to true crises like climate change. It attempts to create a spiritual deficiency in every person that can be filled and healed only with stuff — and no stuff is ever enough.
As Richard Grossman puts it, “Isn’t it an old story? People create what looks to be a nifty machine, a robot, called the corporation. Over time, the robots get together and overpower the people. … For a century, the robots propagandize and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up believing that robots are people too, gifts from God and Mother Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is good. How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, obedient.”
It is obvious to say that we have been engineered into a culture that values competitive consumption and consumers instead of community cooperation and citizenship. Capitalism with its obsessive and necessary appetite for consumption, expanding markets, resource depletion, and increasing profits has consumed democracy. Have you ever watched a small snake swallow a large frog? The snake’s hinged jaw stretches wider and wider, squeezing the frog millimeter by millimeter into its gullet until finally the snake looks like the Holland Tunnel might if it had devoured the Titanic. Then the acids and enzymes do their corrosive work. The frog becomes the snake. And the snake claims it is the frog. Capitalism has gulped down democracy and claimed it is democracy. When, immediately after 9/11, President Bush advised Americans to demonstrate their love of freedom and their resistance to terrorism by courageously, selflessly, hurrying to the mall to buy something, he was speaking as the snake that identifies itself as a frog. He was asking us to play a little game with our brains’ synapses, replace the snake icon with the frog’s. Sadly, he may also have been speaking about democracy in the only way that he can understand or recognize it. And, for him, Christianity has been another tidy meal for the snake.
Perhaps this switcheroo is nowhere more obvious than in the military /industrial complex. We are told that the vulnerable frog needs protecting. The threats are grave. So we fork over our money and children’s lives for war and weapons. We are told that we are building security and peace. More lives. More weapons. What we aren’t told is that the largest US export to the world is weapons. What we aren’t told is that enormous fortunes are being made from the arms trade. What we aren’t told is that the more precarious and unstable the world is, the better the business for the arms dealers — that the real promotion is not for security and peace but insecurity and war, that the lives of our children are the necessary collateral damage for this monster. What we aren’t told is that the only real security is in cooperation, conservation, and fairness, not imperialism. The frog, who is a snake, wrapped in a flag, pleads for patriotism and counts the cash. The snake’s forked tongue is a barbeque fork on which we’ve all been roasted.
I’d call that conspiracy.
The neocons have claimed, with some accuracy, that they can create reality faster than we can react: the deed is done, now deal with it. The troops have invaded, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Lockheed signed their contracts, the prisoners are tortured, your email is bugged, the resources for social programs are gone, the laws are changed, the Wal-Mart is built, the sludge dump has already polluted the aquifer, truth is hollowed out —- catch me if you can!
How is that not conspiracy?
The cooks & the crooks create a new status quo, legalize it, propagandize it, mythologize it, fundamentalize it, slather it with fear and patriotism, and force feed it to the complacent, sedated cow we call America.
How is that not conspiracy?
Of course, ever since the Constitution was signed and didn’t free the slaves or give the vote to women, poor folks, Native Americans and freed blacks so that people with power and money could continue to profit, America has been a conspiracy against itself. It’s been cowboy grilling his own heart over a smoke & mirrors campfire, a CEO with inherited wealth and three hundred years of patrician, affirmative action crooning “Only in America.”
The reason we can’t talk about conspiracy is because it is the modus operandi. It isn’t the elephant in the room, it is the room itself. We all live there. We can impeach a few elephants, and we should, but the architecture is in place. And they control it.
When I was in school, I was reminded - repeatedly — to avoid using an indefinite pronoun without identifying whom it refers to, as in, “They are coming to get us,” … or, “They control everything.” Who are They? It’s bad practice to think and write like that. Without reference it just sounds like paranoia. But the hell of it is that it’s damned hard to say who the They are that are in conspiracy to destroy democracy and, by exploitation, nature. Did They do it on purpose or merely discover by serendipity, like cavemen seeing copper ooze out of a rock by a fire, the wondrous possibility and power of what they had found. For instance, the invention of the TV was not a conspiracy. But once the realization of how TV could be used to submerge the public in a lobotomizing swamp of advertising, sound bites, inactivity, community destruction, titillation, false history, empty myth, consumption, and complicity in making fortunes for the sponsors, the program was clear. Conspiracy was the silent partner in the euphemism good business practice. And, once they saw the implications of giving corporations First Amendment rights, they were home free.
Time to re-think conspiracy.
We need to embrace conspiracy in two ways. One, admit that it’s real, its quotidian, it’s the fabric of our lives, the mercury in the air, the dioxin in the water, it’s filling the airwaves and the marketplace and the courts and the halls of Congress before we even get out of bed every morning. Two, counter it with a conspiracy of our own. On our side we have the fundamental fact that although the corporate They can alter many of our realities, they can’t alter Reality. They can’t change the behavior of Nature. They can sell off the rain forest, but they can’t leverage the effect of cutting it. They can keep the mileage of cars poor so we’ll buy more gas, but they can’t alter the amount of oil in the ground or the damage to the atmosphere. They can privatize every human interaction and every natural resource, but they can’t privatize the laws of nature. They have conspired to change reality. We must conspire to live in harmony with Reality.
In the same way, they can conspire to kill Martin Luther King, Jr., but they can’t totally eradicate the truth of who did it and why.
Con + spirare, from the Latin. To breathe together. Those are the roots of conspiracy. Breathing together doesn’t sound like an activity of the ideologically deracinated whispering seditiously in a dank cellar or a board room, foul breaths denting a weak flame flickering over a candle nub, gunpowder or greed blackened fingers setting a timer, the whites of creased eyes glinting like knives with treason, murder, power, and deceit.
Con + spirare sounds like healthy men and women standing in the sun figuring out how in the hell they are going to take care of each other and their aging mother Earth and love life while doing it. Breathing together, sharing the same air, plotting to make sure that what’s mine is yours, conspiring to save their self-respect, their ideals, the future for their children.
I want to be part of a conspiracy. Pervasive, populist, revolutionary, and totally transparent. Grassroots. Idealistic. Simplistic. Life-affirming. Community building
A conspiracy to make the common good and the love of nature the common denominator of every economic transaction.
And the simple truth is either we start breathing together, conspiring big time, right out in the open, nakedly, unashamedly, or we will have conspired in secret, by default, in our own demise.
We have let them breathe for us, and they have stolen our breath, our air, our spirit.
Secret con + spirare is death. Open con + spirare is life.
Conspiracy is dead. Long live conspiracy!
Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine
www.americanswhotellthetruth
Great article.
Looking for a silver lining in the Bush/Cheney debacle, one could claim that they inadvertently made it clear just how heartless, mean-spirited, vicious, callous, self-interested, and mendacious the members of the corporate oligarchy that run this nation are. And that they consider there to be nothing, absolutely nothing, beyond the pale, and so anything is possible.
Incredible. Someone is actually typing about the MLK assassination conspiracy. Finally, in the last year and half, people are beginning to realize “oh, you mean MLK gave some speeches after 1963?” Of all the most obvious examples of corporate censorship, the censoring of the late MLK is the most obvious, as are the motives of this censorship.
In these speeches he does exactly what the Bendovercrats do not do today– he links foreign war with the domestic ramifications of this war. Since about 17 bullets in 1968 no Democrat has done that since. Its time we reintegrate these political assassinataions into a braoder narrative that can help explain why the Democrats have become a second Republican party. Conspiracy theory? Yes, if these assassinations are depicted as the ONLY variable in this rightward drift-turned rampage. I am not suggesting the assassinations are the only factor.
But, in my opinion they are a factor. I highly recommend the book mentioned in the article ACT OF State By WIlliam Pepper.
http://www.amazon.com/Act-State-Execution-Martin-Luther/dp/1859846955
There is an easier explanation for the frustration expressed above.
The term “conspiracy theory” is a rhetorical device deployed by power interests to marginalize viewpoints that are not in alignment with the version of reality that is preferred.
When Bush, or Cheney, or Karl Rove, or the NYT or Wash Post editorial section, or Tim Russert uses the term “conspiracy theory”, it is usually a way to put those without power back in their place — to remind the have-nots where they stand.
Anyone who things it is instead related to a search for the truth or an attempt to construct an accurate account of events is operating entirely in the wrong realm of analysis and understanding.
It’s a rhetorical device tied to power and not an investigative term tied to accurate journalism.
A case in point is the work of Greg Palast regarding the election fraud of 2000 and 2004. The United States is not supposed to have stolen elections. The concept of stolen elections is too dangerous, I suppose, to a perception of trust and faith that the powers-at-be want to project about the state of democracy.
Palast has proven both elections were stolen. Not with conspiracy, but with hard evidence in the form of purged voter rolls, uncounted voter rolls, provisional ballot counts, internal documents from Secretaties of State, etc.
You can read for yourself, but let’s just say for the sake of argument Palast has proven it decisively. It doesn’t matter. The idea of stolen election in 2000 and 2004 was met when he published his work as laughable conspiracy theory not worthy of attention.
Interestingly, over time, the false result of 2000 has become accepted wisdom, and it has slowly creeped into mainstream discourse that Florida chose Gore.
The same may still happen with the Ohio result in 2004. But, it won’t be because new evidence has surfaced.
All mainstream power brokers dismissed Palast’s work as “conspiracy theory” without having read his work or weighed the evidence. That’s because the search for the truth is irrelevant here. All that matters is the reality of choice of those that control the message.
Conspiracy theory = term used to put the politically dispossessed back in their place.
Nothing more. No relation to facts or reality.
‘They Live’ - a movie.
They tried and couldn’t do what they sure can do now using computers, data mining and secrecy. They.
Who are they? I thought I knew who they were before. At least in retrospect. The new ‘They’ seems different. The modern ‘They’ is created in secret, hires in secret, works in secret and their existence is also a secret.
Only THEY know who they are and what they are doing. Who watches the watchers who watch us? And who watchers the watchers when the watchers aren’t watching? They.
How does one apply for a job nobody knows about? Whom do ‘They’ hire… but themselves, since nobosdy else knows about it anyway.
THEY
So, together then!
“in harmony with Reality” - as in harmony with nature and the Laws of Nature referred to in the Declaration of Independence. Shetterly gets at this idea. But if we don’t be more precise, enumerate these ideas and seek law and justice accordingly, stand and act in unison, and find a way to sustain that critical mass, then we will most assuredly continue to tend toward the reality THEY create for us.
In “They Live”, the revolutionaries (and the sell out hobo) clearly delineate who they are.
They are aliens from another planet called the Free Enterprisers.
And they make strategic alliances with the Earth’s Power Elite in order to both plunder the earth of its natural resources and exploit the Earth’s workers.
In other words, the aliens are turning the U.S. into “their” Third World country. The Earth’s Power Elite act as the alien’s cheap labor contractors.
Earthlings and aliens get good jobs in the mass indoctrination media and the security forces (the eyes and arm of the state).
If you put on your treated sunglasses (later contact lens) you can observe the subliminal messages and flying spy machines put into place by the aliens.
Increased economic exploitation of workers and nature requires increasing amounts of propaganda, and state repression. “They Live. We Sleep.”
The elusive “they” are bankers who originated in Europe, aren’t they? Thanks for a great article and great comment from mirf59. I’m so sick of having my beliefs dismissed as conspiracy theory. It’s such a discussion stopper, and what’s democratic about that?
balakirev, thanks for the wonderful but totally unnecessary parody.
I think Shetterly’s litany of crimes by the ruling class is dead on, but categorizing what is really a self-reproducing power structure as one big conspiracy is misleading. Our exploitative system funnels power and money up to the ones with the big bucks, guns, bullhorns, and banks. Sometimes conspiracies are hatched to forestall perceive threats to that system, or to settle scores among rival factions, but the system has a tremendous momentum of its own. Understanding the dynamics of the system, and how united struggle can subvert it, is much more important than basing our struggles and credibility on every possible or even likely conspiracy.
Those who express doubts about any particular conspiracy theory are not necessarily part of a conspiracy “to ignore it even when the facts are known” or “utterly convinced by our government and media that conspiracies don’t exist.” To say so is an ad hominem argument and it undermines the unity we need to save our country.
Enormous crimes and the madness of their perpetrators inevitably evoke outrage and a frustration that our fellow citizens do not understand these crimes and act. We rightly want to expose these crimes, secure justice, and nurture sanity and reason.
But doubt is the leaven of reason. Don’t be so sure that when we break open some of the vaults, we won’t look like Geraldo. Don’t be so sure that the firefighters, TV anchors, and eye-witnesses who have been vilified as co-conspirators won’t turn out to be victims of misplaced outrage.
“…Bankers who originated in Europe…” Hmmm…
You mean as opposed to butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who originated in Europe?
Or, gulp!, is this some sort of code…?
The term “conspiracy theory” is a rhetorical device deployed by power interests to marginalize viewpoints that are not in alignment with the version of reality that is preferred.
________________________________________________________________________________
So good it deserves to be repeated in bold. Just when I’m cursing the Mother Ship one more time for abandoning me on this planet and wiping out the memories of my likely extraterrestrial origin, I run across an Earthling (?) like mirf59 who makes me feel that I’m not so alone.
It really depressed, but also outraged, me when I first ran into smug, supercilious, reactionary rejection of the position that there are genuine and severe defects in Official Versions of various national catastrophes– The Truth about 9/11 leaps to mind– on supposedly progressive blogs. One in particular has many academics among its regular commentors. Every time some hapless or unwitting stranger leaps in with “conspiracy” ideas, the stranger is set upon by anti-conspiracy regulars. Suggest to these regulars that there is a disquieting element of groupthink and bullying manifest in their reaction, and they will bridle that, on the contrary, they are merely confronting the conspiracist and handily defeating it with the tools of rationality.
People are bloody ignorant apes. (Present company excepted.)
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s strictly business. The difficulty of social change in the United States stems from the belief that it would require a cabal of some kind to blind the people, to render them indifferent to our actual past. The truth is that consumer society requires nothing more than a populace that is willing to work itself into a stupor, fearful of what will happen if even the lousy paying shit job is cut away from us. That’s capitalist economy, which, in the words of Jay Gould, can hire one half of the working class to kill or humiliate the other half. Who even needs conspiracies with a public that’s willing to purge its own best thinking in order to survive?
Socialism is an arduous, difficult process, one which will require “too many meetings”, as its critics say. But that’s the cost of democracy extended into economy. That’s why, even in it’s most nightmarish form, it was preferred over Hitler in 1945. That’s why, even in it’s ridiculous bureaucratic form, it will continue to be upheld in Venezuela and Cuba after Castro and Chavez are gone. Because the choice is one between being and nothingness, and even an arduous being is better then the nothingness of an empire that can do nothing but encourage people to consume, become red and bloated as tics, and then die, in full support of a murderous machine that brings death to others who have much less than ourselves, a machine that prefers extravagant waste and nickel counting in the name of “efficiency”. Who needs a conspiracy, when we become that stupid?
it’s also very plausible that decidedly third-rate “conspiracies” are deliberately presented by those with an interest in keeping the reins hidden, in order that any challenge to an official point of view can be painted with the same brush, and dismissed as crackpot ravings.
Conspiracy theory: term used by the mainstream minds when they are not able to refute reasonably the facts that are presented in front of them and prove them wrong.
Wise up! THEY is US. Let’s not try to pretend we’re not complicit. Unless you are truly “off the grid” you are part of the conspiracy that is making the lives of tens of millions of our fellow beings miserable and wrecking our home planet. How many of us are willing to stop driving today to save the planet? How many are willing to stop buying today from U.S. multinational corporations? How many are willing to rise up today and risk jail to take back our democracy?
Great article! I’m glad Common Dreams has posted this. With regards to this discussion, I would simply note that of the controversies mentioned by the article: political assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK–and the 9/11 event–all have “official” explanations that are, in fact, conspiracies of some sort.
Although the assassinations are officially portrayed as “lone-gunman” events, 9-11 is portrayed as a fairly complex and convoluted conspiracy of “arabs with box-cutters.” When one begins to read about the assassinations, one realizes that the official versions are myth–at least in the case of JFK and MLK. (I simply don’t know much about RFK, I’ve not read any books on the subject). JFK and MLK were assassinations and, if one examines the existing evidence, or summaries such as William Pepper’s book on the MLK assassination, it is clear the government, elements of the Military Intelligence Groups (902, 109, 111, & 116 in particular) and the Memphis Police were involved in the assassination; James Earl Ray had been given various identities by government intelligence agencies and was set up as a patsy. A jury ruled on this matter and it has been kept a secret from the public. See: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKconExp.html
I’m glad someone else link Pepper’s book, An Act of State.
Regards 9/11, the official story is an “outrageous” conspiracy theory that MUST be false as it does not fit with the abundant evidence contradicting it and indicating that the operation involved elements of the US government; everyone should demand a NEW investigation, one that involves professional investigators with no ties to the US government, no government agencies (such as NIST), no private contractors or attorneys working for the government or with government agents (such as Philip D. Zelikow), and so on. Such an investigation deserves to be international in composition, given subpoena powers, etc.
Of course, that’s all on the agenda AFTER the revolution…
For the mother of all conspiracies see the Zeitgeist movie. Part 1 describes the myth of Christianity, parts 2 & 3, somewhat unrelated, describe the myth we’re being fed while society is being engineered along the lines in this article.
I am very glad that Bush is a compassionate conservative. Just think what the Bush administration would be like if he were just a regular conservative.
Wow - Mr. Shatterly nails the core problem of brainwashing in America, it’s results, and the reason why Joe Average American looks at anyone who dares use the word “conspiracy” like the proverbial fruitcake. Just excellent. Check out his web site.
Great article.
To fight back: Quit watching TV and, instead, read. Don’t buy junk you don’t need. Avoid debt. Register for any party except, Republican, Democrat, or Independent (pick an actual opposition party). Vote against anyone who supports wars of Empire.
Few will do this, but if many did, it would scare the holy heck out of “THEM”.
one of the rhetorical devices used to discourage conspiracy theorizing is to pose a rebuttal in the form “do you really believe that x number of people sat down in a room and planned y and z?” (patient chuckling and “grownup” analysis follow).
that’s not the way these things work. certain people are allowed to advance to positions of increasing power based on how they have responded to events at lower levels. recently on another thread i offered the example of christine todd whitman, who rose from county freeholder to chair of a state regulatory board, to governor of new jersey, to head of epa (and finally to “spend more time with her family”). at each stage she acted dependably and with minimal prompting to advance the interests of her class. many political careers follow exactly this farm-team-to-big-leagues pattern, so that when a real crisis emerges, those in charge will know and do what’s expected of them. no meetings, no memos, ergo no “conspiracy” can be proved, but the net result is the same.
of course, occasionally a brave exception to this rule appears—an fdr, a jfk, a wellstone—but to be considered a traitor to one’s class is a fatal flaw.
Conspiracy theories are said to originate in Paranoid minds.
It’s not Paranoia when THEY are really out to get you!
Great Article!
Governments have always murdered anyone who opposed them–unfortunately the US is not the only culprit.
Here in Latin America there has always been a bumper crop of victims–the murder of Gaitan in Colombia in 1948 set off a 60 year and still going “civil war”–which of course is funded by YOUR tax dollars.
Just one example.
It’s about time this article appeared on Common Dreams!
Thank you for running this article, Common Dreams
Little Brother,
I have to come clean and say this is not my thinking, it comes from Palast and Noam Chomsky. They argue the phrase “conspiracy theory” is the cue for all the conventional power brokers to start chuckling amongst themselves. It’s a social cue, I suppose, in addition to the other ways to describe it.
That being said, I think hard evidence is very important. In the case of the Presidential Elections of 2000 and 2004, the evidence is very strong. Unfortunately, a lot of the Ohio ballots have been illegally destroyed — with no punishment of course. Still, statisticians have essentially proven that fraud is the only way to explain the outcome, with the certainty of DNA evidence.
I might not say the same about the 9/11 theories or the idea, for example, that we never went to the moon. In the first case, I’d want a “smoking gun” like explosives, detonators, etc., clearly planted with one clear purpose. In the case of the moon thing, I’d want to aim a telescope where the landers are supposed to remain.
One should never forget that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
In the case of MLK, he may well have been assassinated by the government. Lord knows LBJ probably would have strangled him personally if he could have gotten away with it.
But, we can’t have Americans thinking that people who speak out are killed by the government. That’s why it’s always going to be a conspiracy theory, no matter how compelling the evidence is.
Take your pick….THEY potentially equals the Illuminati or Council of Foreign Relations or AIPAC or Oligarchic Military Industrial-Oil-Media-Complex or a combination of all of the above…..The conspiracy then driven by, [as Noam Chomsky would opine] the “Manufacturing of Consent” keeping the US masses drugged, compliant, easily used and expendable…..
I always find discusions on ‘Conspiracy Theories’ per se disturbing, possibly because some of them [including the content of this article] are true….
Regardless of whether any particular “conspiracy theory” has sufficient evidence to be taken seriously, it seems the critical point is that there is no more reason to believe the “official version” than there is to believe a fairy tale (one particular fairy tale has been in wide circulation for a couple of millenia) unless the hard evidence used for that version is presented openly and transparently and competing theories are debunked in the same manner. It really does become about process, as humans inevitably abuse power, and what can be done in secret by those with power will inevitably result in abuse.
Societies are actually physical systems and they evolve, just as biological systems do, and what is rewarded usually becomes more common in the society and what is punished usually becomes less common. And patterns of behavior that one might consider objectionable at one time become accepted later if there are no perceptible negative consequences, such a lack of consequences naturally resulting from an excess of secrecy. And societies that tolerate increasing amounts of destructive behavior, because the actors are shielded from consequences, become self-destructive over time. And since societies can reach dead ends just as biological systems can, as a nuclear-armed USA approaches its dead end it is hard to imagine the consequences will not be cataclysmic.
Kivals,
Exactly. I have come to the same conclusion. We have arrived at a point in history where one of the few certainties is that the official version is false and should be treated as cynical garbage.
This puts the official version on equal footing with the most outrageous nut theories that are almost certainly false with no investigation required.
At least one can start from the assumption that the official version is dog shi’ite, and rule it out immediately if you have the ability to research what really is going on.
Unfortunately, most people do not have the time to probe every significant issue, to investigate the veracity of all the competing claims. That’s what the news is supposed to be doing for us while we pursue our own specialized vocations.
But no. We are now at the point where it is necessary to invest a lot of time and effort to understand what is going on, starting from the certainty that the official version is not what really happened or why it happened.
From the government’s point of view, or at least that of a district attorney, you can be convicted of conspiracy simply by being aware of the existence of an ongoing crime. “They” expect to be judged by less rigorous standards. Thanks for a great article, Mr. Shetterly. Tony Vodvarka, Hartly DE
Take these two reports on the FBI from Democracy Now today:
“New FBI Network Allows Instant Wiretaps on Any Communication Device
Wired Magazine is reporting the FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any private communications device. The network allows an FBI agent in New York to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California. This would allow the FBI agent to immediately learn the phone’s location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. The surveillance system is called the Digital Collection System Network. It connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet providers and cellular companies. Experts say the system is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than previously suspected.”
Add that onto a little historical perspective:
“FBI Spied On Coretta Scott King For Years After MLK’s Death
Newly released government documents show that FBI agents spied on Coretta Scott King for several years after her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968. Memos show the FBI was concerned that she might attempt to ‘tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement.’ There is also evidence that the Nixon administration and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were kept informed of the FBI’s nearly constant surveillance of Coretta Scott King.”
The FBI includes ‘conspiracy charges’ in every single one of it’s indictments… but isn’t it the FBI that is conspiring against the rights of ordinary citizens?
By the way, whatever became of the FBI investigation of the fall 2001 anthrax attacks? Why didn’t they ever interview the most likely suspect, Battelle Memorial Insitute - you know, the big biowarfare research institute that was the contractor on the Vaxgen anthrax vaccine… recipient of at least a billion dollars of Project Bioshield funds? Also did Project Jefferson and Project Clear Vision…
Must be another ‘conspiracy theory’….
My Google search of Zionism Mossad 911 brought no results!
“But the hell of it is that it’s damned hard to say who the They are that are in conspiracy to destroy democracy and, by exploitation, nature. Did They do it on purpose or merely discover by serendipity…”
On purpose, and in public as well. Rove’s scheme for a one-party dictatorship, Cheney’s USA global hegemony by missile, Rummy’s Full Spectrum Dominance, the Loonitary Decider’s wiping away of virtually all regulations as well as the staffs and budgets needed to enforce them, the transfer of wealth from our Treasury to a small group of loyalbushies, AKA his “base,” (doesn’t al Qaeda also mean “the base?”) The corrupting of every department and agency with the dumbest of the corporate cult minions who ignore the law while handing copies of the key to our store out to the same corporations whom they used to - and will again - work for. Marking every shred of anything “secret,” and even reclassifying previously public info the same. The demoralizing of our military forces, which keeps them unwilling and/or able to revolt, while financing private armies and private detention facilities for reasons not yet revealed - but it’s safe to say there is a most definite reason.
Is it still a conspiracy when “they” openly brag about forcing their insane, anti-American nightmares down our throats - and even double-dare us to try and stop them?
While we are talking about assassinations, let’s not forget JFK, Jr. and his pregnant wife. That was no “accidental” plane crash. Also, Wellstone and a host of others who tried standing up to the powers that be.
Great article.
To fight back: Quit watching TV and, instead, read. Don’t buy junk you don’t need. Avoid debt. Register for any party except, Republican, Democrat, or Independent (pick an actual opposition party). Vote against anyone who supports wars of Empire.
Few will do this, but if many did, it would scare the holy heck out of “THEM”.
———–
Whoever Im quoting here is right on. I stopped buying NYT and only read books on the way to work..Id’ turned 17% smarter by the following Thursday! As for the RFK assassination, its old but its still be best and most relevent book and its “impossible to put down”
http://www.amazon.com/Assassination-Robert-F-Kennedy/dp/0786719796
Absolutely great piece. As one that has investigated several of the major conspiracies over the years in depth and found the official stories sadly lacking, I say bravo for this bold writing. There are so many conspiracies, yet there is essentially only one. That is the one to keep those in places of power remaining in power and handing the reins over to their descendants if they are approved by the power elite.
We must realize that the power elite are not like the rest of us, never were and never will be. The sooner we realize that, our grassroots efforts to free ourselves from their dominion will meet with success. There are not that many of them and in order for them to remain in power they must control others that sniff about the arses of those of the actual power structure and do their dirty work. It all comes down to a good cover story.
I’ve heard it said time and again, Follow The Money. The money leads to the banksters and they are the pinnacle of the conspiracy in this 3D reality, outside of the few that are even beyond having to work ever. Follow The Money and you’ll find the ultimate culprits. Follow your heart and find ultimate freedom.
The legal definition for CONSPIRACY is: “a combination of two or more persons to commit a criminal or unlawful act”
Let’s face it, it goes on all the time. Of course our duty as good citizens is to pretend it’s not happening.
I loved this article, it brings to light my favorite logical fallacy, “equivocation”. Using a word with two meanings, one its defintion and another, it’s implied meaning. I’m sick to death of people, giving you that unacceptable glance when you bring up subjects concerning the mismanagement of the GOVERNMENT, and in the next breathe complaining about how much the doctors visit was for their child.
LITTLE BROTHER. Earthship? Extraterrestrial origin? Earthlings? DON’T. I’ll rip you a new one
CYON I don’t know whether to applaud you or bitch slap you. Yes, we are all part of the problem. But an individual taking himself off the grid, or not driving to work, but instead; losing his job, taking his family out into the woods to eat berries and nuts is slightly extreme. Ask yourself, who REALLY are the biggest polluters. Joe blow or Exxon/Mobil? You may be surprised to learn that oil refineries do have the technology to reduce pollution. But it costs about 10 million dollars per plant; and they don’t have that because they gave it to Mr. Douchebag CEO.
Mirf 59,
The smoking gun of 9/11 is the numerous videos of the collapse of the WTC and Building 7. It is irrefutable evidence of controlled demolition. They are all in effect, snuff films. It is absolute proof of conspiracy, and not only that, but from within the highest reaches our own Military and Government.
Controlled Demolition means that there was nothing spontaneous about the building collapses. The impact of planes into the buildings is part of an illusionist’s bag of cheap tricks, creating false cause in the minds of most people at the time.
I admit, it took me more than a year, before I woke up. I say that, because when the realization hit me, it was so profound, that I call it a revelation. So, it is possible to view those videos, without really “seeing” what is going on. It is possible to have an unconscious suspension of disbelief. To not know, what you do not know.
The media have much to be blamed for, as the instrument of mind control, dizzying enough to spin an entire nation to sleep, they are guilty of Psychological Warfare. The bubble of control surrounding the US is limited in range. Perhaps the critical mass necessary for revelation is best reserved for America’s enemies, i.e. the rest of the world. For it is The “War on Terror,” that is Orwell’s Perpetual War, manifest as real in this lifetime. The stakes have never been higher, and the truth more desperately needed.
It is militarism itself, that seeks to be preserved in the face of its own obsolescence. World War III is a myth that need not happen. The threat of terror is a lie told by traitors and only the truth can defeat a lie.
9/11 is not like other “conspiracy theories” because it has unleashed a global war upon the world. If we are serious about anything, we must be serious about the “War on Terror” because it trumps every other cause worth fighting for. The scope of it is so overwhelming that to be “green” without confronting 9/11 is to miss the paradigm entirely.
“They Live” is a great film. It captures the scope of the conspiracy very nicely indeed. The scene I hated most, I’ve begun to appreciate more over time. It is the scene where Roddy Piper fights to have his friend simply “look through the glasses.” It is a fight that goes on and on and on. And when you think it is over, they fight some more. It is the struggle to share the truth, a truth so important that one must commit to raise endurance beyond endurance. It is so simple to say, “Look you idiot, that’s a clear example of controlled demolition, can’t you see it?”
Its like the experience I have most times I share.
Put on the glasses and the life you knew is over. It is like Neo taking the red pill in the Matrix. It is the Zeitgiest of our time. Wake up or die.
I must say, that there is strength on the other side. Once you put on the glasses, you no longer doubt your own sanity.
The anti-dote for this can be found in the “other” plan. The one silently working out at higher levels before precipitating here physically. This reality is far more encompasing than any other. For complete story see www.shareintl.org
He who dies with the most toys wins? Let’s face reality, we’re here by an absurd chain of events more improbable than a group of monkeys typing “Hamlet” by chance. Maybe evolution has arranged that like ants, there are queens and kings and there are workers who work totally mindlessly of their meaningless existence.
Certainly the rulers should use the workers for their own purposes–they have no other reason to exist? So the hedge fund managers bleed the economy, the cigatette companies profit from a mild and addictive poison, the media bleat out the usual garbage which occupies some space between their ears, the food corporations peddle low cost slighly addictive unhealthy garbage, and the politicians hypnotize with lies.
Someone once asked me what the use was of studying history. My response was there was none as we do the same things over and over. Maybe what passes for history gives many people the structure of national mythology and gives some basis for mental stability.
Face it, too many americans are too out of touch with reality to ever make “democracy” work. They’d rather get apoplectic about gay marriage anyway. Being in touch with reality, though, never made it easier to pass though here.
Let’s face it again, the system makes the rich, richer–is there any reason they could possibly want it any other way.
(They maybe haven’t quite come to grips with the fact that they can’t take it with them, well I never said anyone was totally rational.)
That millions, other than the very rich, would voted for an alcoholic, draft dodging, liar, who’s addled brain can hardly utter a single sentence that is not gibberish; I take as pretty good proof that evolution has gone as far as it will go. Life will continue in some form perhaps for millions of years, but clearly humans will reduce themselves, at best, to a few waring low tech tribes.
The “Planet of the Apes” and “Soylent Green” are the truth and the future, which nearly everyone is spared from being able to see. Really, it does work better that way. Good luck to those few with unshackled minds–you need it.
Fine article, well said.
A “conspiracy theory” is any idea that tends to take one beyond the comfort zone of official dogma.
Official dogma is not rational. It is emotional. People cling to the official story of 911 like they cling to the idea of the “virgin birth” and other such religious ideas.
Even “experts” can view the video evidence of the WTC demolitions and claim that what they are seeing is entirely “natural” in spite of the fact that the laws of the conservation of energy and motion are being violated. Even life-long critics of official dogma, such as Noam Chomsky, can betray simple common sense observation and become quite emotional denouncing the idea that 911 was an “inside job”.
“Conspiracy theory” is a rhetorical weapon in this “free and open” society like “capitalist running dog” was in the USSR, but it embraces fare more than simple political ideology.
If the idea that secret CIA mind control programs use trauma-based techniques (psychological & physical torture) on infants and children to create sex slaves and Manchurian candidates is so repellant to me that I cannot accept it, then I will pronounce proponents of such ideas “conspiracy theorists”. The same applies to alien abductions and ideas of alien/military collusions. Even Robert Shetterly imposes limits on what conspiracies are acceptable. He does not like to be thought of as one of those “aliens-are-among-us land of conspiracy nuts”.
Robert Shetterly will invoke the conspiracy theory defense, too, when the limits of his comfort zone are reached and he is asked to believe in reptilian blood-drinking child sacrificers, a group that includes Queen Elizabeth II, among others. “These people are just whacko”, he would vehemently insist. “They don’t know what reality is. But I do!”
That’s pretty much the way Noam Chomsky feels about some one like me who believes that agents within this government conspired to blow up the WTC and blame it on Osama bin Laden in order to create the political will for war in the ME.
It is not a rational belief. Chomsky just does not want to live in a world in which such things happen, so he denies that such things do happen. We are all in this position when the limits of our comfort zones are reached. It just happens that for the largest portion of the American public, the comfort zone is quite small and limited. Americans do not want to believe their government does evil things and for that reason will believe the lies they are told.
Why?
Because the world is a more fearful and dangerous place than it has even been in the recorded history of which we are generally aware. The readers of the 60 million+ copies of the “left Behind” series of Christian eschatalogical fiction live in terror of the “End Times”. Americans by and large buy into the “war on terror” and the horrific scenarios of terrorist nuclear/biological attacks. Fear is the dominant emotion of the time.
And it was not GWB and his gang, or their masters in the secret government, that created this fear and anxiety. It did not begin on 911. The myth of the “war on terror” did considerably narrow and limit the comfort zone of the average American, but that comfort zone has been developing into a bunker for many years, and the Constitution has been almost completely overruled.
The Constitution is a document produced by fearless and expansive men ( with Dolly Madison doing the needle work and Abigail Adams cheer leading ) in another time when Nature had not yet been beaten into submission and non-white peoples had not yet been converted to the one, true, universal rule of empirical reason and Enlightenment.
We no longer have bright expectations for the future. The whole of Nature is turning against us. We cling like barnacles to our little comfort zones. There is a whole lot of wierdness and danger out there…
…way too much….
I prefer the phrase “conspiracy fact” over “conspiracy theory”.
MLK has been reduced to a soundbite used to placate the masses during times of unrest. It makes me sick when I hear conservatives say things like “MLK would be rolling in his grave” regarding Affirmative Action. Hell, I think that if he had lived, we wouldn’t need Affirmative Action.
Also, as I said in another string about MLK, talking about class is akin to discussing cannibalism. It’s taboo. That’s why we never hear about his views on socialism and how we was in the corner of poor and working Americans of all colors.
Daniel Borgstrom August 31st, 2007 7:08 pm
The legal definition for CONSPIRACY is: “a combination of two or more persons to commit a criminal or unlawful act”
Let’s face it, it goes on all the time. Of course our duty as good citizens is to pretend it’s not happening.
If these “two or more conspirators” can dictate the investigation, withhold crucial evidence, intimidate the public, and control the legal system, our duty as good citizens is to call their criminal/unlawful act just a theory.
Thank you for the wonderful article Mr. Shetterly —
Dictators rise to power on propaganda and violence and there is now a long list of dead truth tellers in the past decades which should make clear to anyone of common sense what is happening in America.
I also have to agree with the poster who points to the evidence of 9/11 demolition which we can see clearly with our own eyes, to such a degree that I can only expect that they will be airbrushing the tapes and removing “squibbs.”
In fact, I agree re JFK, Jr.’s plane “accident” and would go so far as to say that the Moon Landing was a hoax.
Even recognizing a conspiracy as it is happening doesn’t mean that we can stop it. One of the most blatant was the stealing of election 2000, including the GOP fascist rally outside of Miami-Dade Election HQs in order to STOP the vote counting. All followed by the outrageous ruling by the Supreme 5 which put George Bush in the White House.
Why Americans didn’t all come out into the streets at that time amazes me. Yet, we didn’t.
Was it because we had confidence in our system of Justice -a system now revealed to have been so politicized/corrupted as to be criminal, itself?
There are people in the streets protesting almost every day now. All we have to do is join them.
Superbly written article. When the cards fall, the world is truly revealed. To walk w/ that knowledge unafraid and joyously do good and unselfish works in spite of it is true power. Its a spiritual thing.
Hey!!! bostonbound2 You don’t need to give up hope so easily. Sure maybe all of history has proved liberation wrong, but it might be OUR time, you can’t just drop things. Ultimately, you trying to make things right counts for your existence. I would rather die trying, than pass my last moments giving up.
About the trial where William Pepper represented the King family in 1999, Mr. Shetterly writes that “the jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army.”
The trial in question was a civil suit for $100 against Loyd Jowers, who owned a bar and grill under the rooming house where James Earl Ray was living at the time of Dr. King’s assassination. No rebuttal was presented at this trial to Mr. Pepper’s allegations of an enormous conspiracy, with “evidence” supplied by witnesses like Glenda Grabow.
Before she got mixed up in the assassination of Dr. King, Ms. Grabow claims she was Jack Ruby’s mistress in Dallas in 1963; she saw a man named “Dago” standing on the roof of a car with a rifle just before JFK was assassinated; she already knew “Dago” because he was a messenger between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Ms. Grabow had also parachuted out of one of the doomed airliners just before it hit the WTC on 9/11. Some people just have a knack for being at the right place at the right time.
I know I’m late to the party here. It took me a while to digest this great article and all the terrific comments. I particularly liked Kivals contribution related to societies being evolving organisms. That seems to me to be a key concept.
The one thread that I keep trying to follow is why do the majority of Americans believe the “official” explanations of major events? And why do they not want to even look at evidence that refutes the official version? One thing that has always confused me is that there are a huge number of Americans that still believe that Iraq had ties to 9/11 even in the face of the “official” report that refutes that concept. As much as I know that the MSM have great deal to do with the “reality’ that Americans accept, that doesn’t seem to be the only facit when it comes to conspiracy theories and peoples unwillingness to “look through the glasses” at the truth.
My theory is that Americans are unwilling or unable to accept that their government it complicite in any of the horrendous acts that we have been discussing here. Particularly 9/11. If they took their blinders off and actually saw the truth of what our government has done, is doing, and intends to do, it would scare them to death. They would become immobilized. I think their blinders are their only means of copeing with a reality that is too life threatening for them.
In my humble opinion, the “sheeple” are going to have those rose colored glasses ripped from their faces and they are going to have a very rude awakening in the not too distant future. They are no longer going to be able to deny a massive economic adjustment and/or the third world war that is about to begin. Their lives are about to be forever changed and they don’t even see it coming. I wonder if they will ever see the evidence and the truth, even then.
I’m not sure how many others here at CD share my gloomy outlook for our nation and the planet. I know that the worst is going to happen soon. I also know that I have to exert a great deal of effort every day to stay focused and engaged. I have to fight every day now not to give up all hope and just resign myself to the inevitable.
I’m a tough old bird, but I have to say that it’s really getting scary for me.
Cruxpuppy: I got distracted and didn’t see your post. You said the same thing, but a whole lot better. Thanks.
Rebel Farmer August 31st, 2007 11:43 pm
I’m not sure how many others here at CD share my gloomy outlook for our nation and the planet.
I share the same gloomy outlook as you. My worry: Another false flag attack is about to take place, possibly involving the going off of a portable nuclear device in a major city or a hijacked plane ramming and collapsing a landmark bridge. Iran is to be blamed. China and Russia, this time, will not sit by the side. This will be the final straw on the housing/subprime/derivative bubble.
Rebel Farmer, the rest of the world already knows the truth. It’s just the bunch of captive audiences here that will find it very hard to accept what used to be the source of pride turns into the source of shame. No doubt, the MSM will help them continue to delude themselves.
-BeingSpied24/7
I have hope, RebelFarmer and BeingSpied24/7, that there have been enough individuals willing to move out of their comfort zones that another act of domestic political terror will be avoided.
Those who perpetrated 911 can surely see in retrospect just how transparent the operation actually was. Recently NYC attempted to pass an anti-video ordinance. No one allowed to video on the streets without a permit for more than a few minutes. Video people subjected to police harrassment. Suppose this law were in effect on 911? We would not now have the evidence we have.
We’re all reporters now. False flag terror is only successful when it is accepted unskeptically. There are notable and high profile inidividuals, such as Lynn Margolis, supporting 911 truth. It doesn’t take that many to blow the cover of the conspirators, and I believe their cover has been blown. They don’t have to be identified much less prosecuted to be rendered ineffective.
I also believe that Bush/Cheney are on a short leash now. If Bush doesn’t back off, he will be incapacitated or assassinated. Cheney’s network is non-cooperative. The war rhetoric vis a vis Iran is a Nixonian madman strategy. Cheney’s heart will disqualify him for the succession, should Bush be taken out, and we could see our first woman president.
This month, a large 911 truth gathering in NYC, followed by a large protest in DC on the 15th. Those in power have not historically confronted the American people, but have led them by indirect means. Bush/Cheney have tried the confrontation strategy and failed.
The Neo-con agenda is kaput. That doesn’t mean back to business as usual. Those days are over. It just means the shock and awe strategy has failed. The last thing “they” want is a radicalization of the American people.
Those in power are fully aware of the chaos stalking the world and of the need for a new global order, especially a new financial system. They cannot provoke the masses too much. There are simply too many of us and not enough of them.
Amen
I heard of an FBI agent who believed alll that was officially printed such as “Warren Commission Report” until he found out who the Special Agent in Charge of Dallas was. He reversed his position 180 degrees based on knowledge of that man and started to do research of his own in files and found enough unanswered questions to categorically state that we had not been told the truth. He would not tell what he found but firmly believed that if the truth were known it would literally tear the US apart as a union.
#
Rayberth August 31st, 2007 5:06 pm
My Google search of Zionism Mossad 911 brought no results!
TRY
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Zionism+Mossad+911&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
GOOGLE In AUSTRALIA
How about this?
” Zionism Mossad 911 ”
Google Search Results 1 - 10 of about 203,000 for Zionism Mossad 911. (0.11 seconds)
Rebel Farmer asked, “The one thread that I keep trying to follow is why do the majority of Americans believe the “official” explanations of major events? And why do they not want to even look at evidence that refutes the official version?”
An answer:
Cognitive Dissonance - a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one’s beliefs. In simple terms it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what you already believe in order to ignore that information, and reinforce what you believe. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where “cognition” is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. - Wikipedia
Curmudgeon99, The Kennedy assassination is not quite the mystery that it is often portrayed to be. For instance, one can search high and low in the Warren Commission Report for an account of the Military Intelligence Battalion that would have been a normal part of JFK’s protection. More than one hundred men, it would have performed the routine tasks of protection along the parade route, closing open windows, posting men on rooftops and along the route (the Secret Service are personal bodyguards). As there is absolutely no mention of this unit at all in the report, one must assume that they were not present. Neither the Mafia nor a rogue CIA hit team is able to order a military unit not to respond. The withdrawal of protection has been a classic sign of a coup d’etat since the Praetorian Guard left Ceasar to his enemies. See “History as Mystery”, Michael Parenti.
Tony Vodvarka, Hartly DE
The ill defined, unspoken of and nebulous THEY of the sixties has become the high definition ‘in your face’ blatant THEY of today. The THEY back then could only wish for the technology that the THEY of today have at their disposal. Once the ultra greedy and powerful could only dream of having the power over events (particularly in controlling the situation after an event happened.). Now they have the tech and Bush let them establish themselves with it.
They! They trust in greed, their own and also trust that other greedy persons will ‘get it’ in a similar way. In effect They trust only teir own mutually shared greediness. That’s really all it took. Greed is good we were told.
Conspiracies? There have been many. However, far many more are just the pranks, commercial exploitations, planted spoofs, misdirections and utter nonsense stories. The half reptilian shape changers in DC which I am sad to hear have swam the Atlantic and went for the crown. So much for conspiracies?
Real conspiracies get lost a pile of half reptiles and alien …um…probers tales. Some conspiracies are wide out in the open but tacitly assumed rather than spoken of.
Some conspiracies are known only to those true believers who don’t know if they are true but are convinced that there must be something there. Even if actual proof is unavailable for making closure.
The essense of all conspiracy THEORIES is the missing pieces. If enough doubt is created and this cannot be assuaged with recognizable facts, it soon becomes all about what those missing details might’ve meant. There is the basis for most conspiracies… the unanswered questions. We watch TV. Everything gets sorted out by the end of the show.
Sadly some will always want to believe what they want. This person needs there to be a conspiracy to bring a sense of order to their unease. Subconsciously they feel that at least somebody is in control.
Do people in the USA believe Saddam had something to do with 9/11? That polled question’s results are often mentioned. But are these people victims of a conspiracy, being dumbed down and taken advantage of? Some but most don’t care really. Ask them if they think Saudi Arabia was involved. Or ask them if they think all muslims were involved… and then you would see the real answer underlying their belief Saddam did it. In their minds all muslims did it. They simply do not care to correct their belief about Saddam and 9/11 because for these people it has become US and THEM. The truth (correct information and facts) is truly secondary and therefore cannot be reasoned away by an appeal to the facts. These people do not care enough about whether they are wrong to bother changing their minds because of facts. Didn’t you ever hear someone say > “Even if it wasn’t Saddam, they all hate us over there anyway.” That frame of mind can choose what it wants to believe because they go under the umbrella of their gut feelings which repels and filters out annoying facts.
Cognitive dissonance a psychological tension between a person knowing what is right and knowing that THEY are doing wrong. Oh…and the knowledge that we are going along with it because we feel we can’t do anything about anything. Doing nothing is stressing us out. That’s the hard part. The tension…of doing nothing…when we know something should be done.
So do something. Carry a sign for an afternoon. It’s kind of relaxing actually. You can yell out a little and sing. You can lecture total strangers who then want you to take their picture. Live a little, THEY are having all way too easy.
The clarity of Cognitive Dissent as opposed to the stresses of Cognitive Dissonance. Do something. Too much doing nothing is stressing you out. Join a protest march. A peace rally. Do something because doing nothing is getting to be too much work and stress. You need to relax a little. THEY… are getting their way …way too easy. Our country will regret our failure to preserve and defend our constitution.
Cognitive dissent! Doing nothing is the biggest conspiracy.
Psssst! SHHHH! The Teletubbies are … THE ILLUMINATI !!!
( and the one with the pocket book is their accountant! Don’t be fooled by …shhhh! they speak in code and are always up to something. Nobody knows what that is. What does that tell you huh? See.
Um…do data mining people and these private intelligence services ever think about insider trading conflicts. Or someday soon will we find data mining savvy employees will do freelance work on their Perhaps offer certain business info for sale to… SHHHH! I hear them coming. Oh no wait that’s the Teletubbies (dang if they ain’t some scary critters). Phew. Oh no wait the Teletubbies might be listening to my phone and…nah… that is the FBI. They just announced it.
Data mining…insider trading…I bame the Teletubbies. SHHHH!
Dear BugsBBunnyIII, If a person doesn’t know much about a given subject in the first place, and really is not too sure about what they think they do know, the result is, well, confusion. Tony Vodvarka
The people who form the wider everyday conspiracy discussed in the article are your neighbors who give their assent to US miltarism, choose to ignore global warming, would rather not look at the human toll of cheap Chinese products. As a group, there is nothing these people will not tolerate in order to keep their lives as they are - destruction of the planet, destruction of the constitution, a return to slavery. There is no violence or perversion they will not countenance as long as it is rationalized by the narrative of their innate goodness being under attack from evil outsiders. Even the wholesale destruction of their children and future generations will be allowed to take place. How, then, to stand up to these people for whom no act is forbidden?
Stiv, I think that your belief that “THEY” were involved in the 9/11 alleged conspiracy alludes to your belief that “THEY” were brilliant and competent. In my opinion, “THEY” are neither.
They, like most predators, are clever, and opportunistic. But planning something like this is out of their league. The hijacking of the planes and the acts of violence perpetrated on that day could only come from people off the net so to speak. If by conspiracy you mean that they knew something was going to happen, I would agree. The reason being that I was on a trans-Atlantic in-bound flight five days before and as anybody else who flew that week, knew something was fishy, but nobody, and I think including the infamous “they” could pin point exactly what was going down. In fact they used the act as well as the conspiracy theories that erupted after it to take a stonger hold of the American soul. (I do believe that MLK and RFK were murdered and MLK’s murder was a definite conspiracy, but 9/11/2001 was NOT)
Forrtunately, the bloggers who roam this site are, for the most part intelligent and semi-conscious.
America is being run into the ground. Yes we use too much oil, yes, we buy too much stuff, but I do not see, nor hear of any major underground movement that preaches communal living, home gardening, staying home, making your own clothes; things that were done by many a generation ago, but ignored by the Starbuck’s hippies of today. Yes, we are all part of the bigger conspiracy explained in Mr. Shetterly’s article, and now people have to decide what the new they will do. Fortunately for Americans and unfortunately for AMERICA Corp. (DBA Bush, Cheney and Friends LLC) What they are doing is unsustainable. Like a T-Rex who fattens himself on a decaying piece of meet whenever possible, this governement, as created by the fat coporate powers across the globe, will soon be have to hunt for its food, the beast that survives by being dependent on carrion will itself be devoured by another. Capitalism is destroying itself, what will take it’s place?
I cannot tell you how increasingly frustrating it is to wake up each day and see how much more hate and damage that has been visited by the american republic upon the world. the litany of crimes piles up daily and the body count is ever higher.
we, the world, are tired of you. we are sick of you. we want you to go away. you won’t of course because you are mad, insane, and ugly to the core of your being.
your government, if it can still be called that, is like a dime store, price tags for any piece of legislation, every politician and government agency.
republicans, who fester and foster the insane right wing christian morality - the holier than thou thing - keep getting caught sucking dicks in washrooms, molesting children, wearing diapers….very impressive.
the biggest disgrace, hands down, are the ever fattening public who stand by and do nothing. you, sirs and madams, have relinquished your right to democracy, freedom and that plain old “doing the right thing” thing. you sit back on your fat asses and watch television and try to find out who the true idol is. talk about false gods.
you starve the world, kill the indigenous people, rape and rob without the slightest sense of when enough is enough.
we are sick of it. we are sick of bush, cheney, neo-cons, bombs, war, genetically modified food, globalism, and so on.
the american government couldn’t give a sweet fuck about the american people and what they want. it doesn’t natter. you all have become a cancer on the world, a tumor, malignant and stenching and believe me the world will take care of you, not you the world.
we are sick of you. 1 billion plus muslims, the chinese, the indians, the central and south americans.
you think you run the world but you can’t even run the u.s., let alone iraq or afghanistan. you have been overrun by wetbacks who take jobs and suck social services for the benefit of wallymart and the like. 90% of you want something done, the government pisses on you and carries on with the invasion, aiding and abetting it at every step. the nafta super highways will one day cut your country in half and you have nothing to say.
the psycho bushie still accuses iraq of 9/11 (us government attack on its own people) wmd, alqueda. just oozing out shit because he wants to nuke iran. and you do nothing.
your country is owned by foreigners, like the chinese, and you finance this insane world domination thing with foreign money - these bills will come due one day - then what.
we hate you and want you to go away! get it! go away! go away!
Dear Robert,
As a former resident of Martha’s Vineyard for 17 years, you gave your talk in the most hollow of materialistic places ever to exist.
And I find it interesting that I haven’t skimmed any comment above that questions, why are you going to where the rich people flaunt their wealth and elitism to discuss issues we know “they” are in control of? My sons are building houses there now. They aren’t regular houses, one just completed by my elder was half the size of a city block where I am working in San Francisco; equal to about six San Francisco houses. And that will sit there doing nothing for 9 to 10 months of the year.
Martha’s Vineyard is not sustainable and not interested in being sustainable. The place is happy being a summer colony of New York and Boston, competing with Nantucket and the Hamptons as one of the places to be if you’re rich in the summer.
Perhaps it is the perverbial Chilmark Coctail parties where all the Council on Foreign Relations maneuverings goes on, or perhaps Edgartown tea time, but I can assure you no New World Order exists in the back neighborhoods of Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven, or in the vast stretches of the West Tisbury toxic permeation fields.
R
Sure the cover up of our killed leaders is conspiracy.
I personally think that Bush let it happen because the FBI was told to ignore the Bush/bin-laden business connections before 9/11.
The racket of war is a conspiracy to many of us but it is the traditional way of the world economy from before any of us were born.
I would like to hear comments on http://www.debunking911.com/
A conspiracy is legally defined as a crime, or plot to commit one, involving more than one person. I’m not an attorney, but I believe the word “conspiracy” is referenced all over various statutes.
What’s interesting in Western linguistics/jargon/memes is that if the government discusses an historical event, crime, attack, tragedy, etc. the explanation is considered a “fact” at face value. The word “conspiracy” is generally avoided publicly, and reserved for non-governmental accounts, explanations, evidence, etc.
So, even if one accepts the official 9/11 story as true, it remains a conspiracy (obviously, Osama didn’t pull it off by himself).
I find it interesting that the government is so trustworthy. Whether it’s global warming, science in general, secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, closed-door energy meetings, no-bid contracts to Halliburton, disappearing money in Iraq, etc. they have an awfully terrible record. A conspiracy in its own right. But when it comes to 9/11, JFK or MLK we’re supposed to treat their word as unquestionable gospel?
Let’s be gentlemen here. The question isn’t so much whether they’re crooked — but how much so.
The other side of the conspiracy theory coin: public relations interests have done a great deal of work to convert the phrase into an insult or a smear.
The real conspiracy in the world today is the conspiracy of entrenched corporate energy interests against the vast majority of the people (and other creatures) on planet Earth. Rather than give up their control over global economic activity (which currently relies mainly on fossil fuels), they are fighting to maintain that control regardless of the consequences - which include global warming and increased warfare over ever-scarcer supplies.
They have conspired for decades to keep renewable energy sources off the market. They have conspired to send US and British military troops on oil raids to all corners of the planet - Iraq is just the latest in a long string of military interventions designed to control foreign oilfields. They have conspired with corporate media interests to keep the truth - that clean renewable energy from solar and wind and sustainable organic agriculture can meet all our energy and food needs without any need for nuclear electricity or fossil fuels, period.
In order to draw attention from this central conspiracy, they use every trick in the book - including dreaming up fake conspiracies to feed to the public using expansive Internet-based PR campaigns that promote ridiculous notions - a good example being “The 911 Truth Movement” which claims that thousands of US military members, US federal government officials, New York City civil servants and casual observers conspired to plant bombs in the World Trade Center before flying airplanes into them, and then fired a missle at the Pentagon and caused a plane to vanish over Pennsylvania, after which they faked an airplane crash. Almost as good as “The UFO’s control our government” conspiracy theories.
However, the real conspiracy affecting the planet today is the gigantic effort to keep renewable energy off the market so that corporate fossil fuel interests can maintain their positions of great power and great wealth.
Cheers to all who resist them!
Shetterly’s article is one of THE best pieces I have ever read on Commondreams, in part because it creates am umbrella under which most of our concerns lie.
KUDOS to: Tiberius Bond, Eshu, Mirf59, Hazmat, CruxPuppy and others. EXCELLENT thread.
KIVALS: I always resonate with your thoughtful logical commentary, but I’d like to add that EVERY system also experiences serendipitous elements. Call that perturbation or mutation. Therefore allow room for OTHER, in spite of all evidence for patterns that were and appear to yet remain.
BLEVE: I try to live that way, do what we can, live from a place of inner integrity in spite of a world that insults such efforts.
BOSTONBOUND: In my view, your observations relate most to recent history and don’t grant due credence to indigenous societies that were not based upon hierarchical structures or greed. The models we have are largely those of white male dominant societies, and in NO WAY constitute the whole. What we take for HUMAN NATURE has been in part conditioned. Are there are competitive, bestial urges. Yes. But societies have been built that hold these in check. Sadly, we are living in a time when the WORST impulses (what I term Mars, or lower ego, me-first, rules) are being championed, and all things are being calibrated to suit the appetites of our lower natures. It is a suicidal banquet to the vanities but again, massaged into prominence by a MSM that serves its capitalist money masters and therefore works to MUTE the forces in each person that are better than this. Each of us is a Divine “molecule,” but the body is so soaked in toxins a great many have lost that HIGHER sense of self. Needless to say, this conspiracy article explains WHY and HOW these influences have come into such unapologetic power, and how without consciences they are utilizing their resources for all the wrong things. It’s too soon to call the outcome… mankind is ingenious, there ARE forces that are in alliance with our better selves, and YES… this IS a test. Which master do you/we serve. As Aymon (if I might be so bold as to quote him without his immediate permission) would say, it’s about cleaving to LIGHT or darkness. The darkness has sought to subsume the light (which it cannot), and certainly made headway in co-opting it (much in the way that bio-hazard waste industry has coveted the “organic” labeling device) by aligning the most vile and violent urges of humanity with religion, a/k/a god’s will (now there’a powerful conspiracy theory that also deserves being dissected). Anyway, Write on!
fazzbot September 1st, 2007 10:36 am
They, like most predators, are clever, and opportunistic. But planning something like this is out of their league. The hijacking of the planes and the acts of violence perpetrated on that day could only come from people off the net so to speak.
fazzbot, Quite possibly, there was no “hijacking of the planes.” If so, are ‘they’ qualified to be in the league by your standard?
A dedicated 9/11 researcher Ph.D. Morgan Reynolds came to the conclusion. Visit his website. He filed a Request For Correction (RFC) with NIST; he is dead serious.
-BeingSpied24/7
RE: ike September 1st, 2007 12:28 pm
While I completely agree with the premise of your post, that there is a pervasive, massive and long term conspiracy by the fossil fuel & nuclear industries to maintain the status quo by blocking expansion renewables, I think you are way off base in thinking of 911 as a ‘fake’ conspiracy. This doesn’t even compute.
What better way for the parties concerned to maintain the status quo relating to fossil fuels than to capture the pre-eminent world oil supplies by invading & controling the middle east? As related in PNAC, what was needed was a ‘catyclysmic event on the order of Pearl Harbor’ to provide an excuse to arouse the public into support, and they got that in spades didn’t they?
The motive was clearly & publically stated, the means were absolutely at their disposal, and these people took the opportunity when presented. Even to this day the MSM & government conspire in the event by refusing to honestly deal with the scores of legitimate questions raised demanding answers.
I always find it interesting that ‘911truth’ posters are so willing to discuss a massive conspiracy involving thousands of US military members, US federal government officials, New York City civil servants and casual observers, which culminated in ‘controlled demolitions’ in the World Trade Center before flying airplanes into them, as well as firing missles at the Pentagon and faking airplane crashes over Pennsylvania…
Yet! Yet they are completely willing to even consider a much smaller conspiracy involving efforts by government psyops specialists in collaboration with private public relations firms to create fake ‘conspiracy theories’ which are designed to provide cover for the ‘real conspiracies’.
What are the ‘real conspiracies’? Well, there’s the fossil fuel industry conspiracy to keep renewable energy technology off the market, and there’s also the Republican conspiracy to funnel Katrina rebuilding contracts to Republican-connected engineering firms, and there was the conspiracy between Republican neocon warmongers and the US corporate media to fake news reports of Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons before the invasion of Iraq, to name just a few.
Given all these conspiracies, why is it ‘inconceivable’ that governments would use private firms to create ‘fake conspiracy theories’ designed to draw attention away from their real crimes? Half a million people are dead in Iraq due to the WMD lies.. and the US oil corporations are just an inch or so away from controlling Iraq’s vast oil resources —- compared to 3000 dead in the WTC attacks (and corporate America made money off that as well - Homeland Security contracts are very lucrative).
You know, if 911 was an ‘inside job’ carried out by thousands? of US ‘government agents’, don’t you think they would have come up with a better list of hijackers than ‘15 Saudis’? Wouldn’t the list have been ‘20 Iraqis and Afghanis?’
Think about it. Why is it so ‘inconceiveable’ that this is actually what is going on?
Personally, I think it ‘computes’ quite well.
Note to PaulMagilSmith, SiouxRose, Tiberius Bond, Mirf59, etc.
I always find it interesting that ‘911truth’ posters are so willing to discuss a massive conspiracy involving thousands of US military members, US federal government officials, New York City civil servants and casual observers, which culminated in ‘controlled demolitions’ in the World Trade Center before flying airplanes into them, as well as firing missles at the Pentagon and faking airplane crashes over Pennsylvania…
Yet! Yet they are completely willing to even consider a much smaller conspiracy involving efforts by government psyops specialists in collaboration with private public relations firms to create fake ‘conspiracy theories’ which are designed to provide cover for the ‘real conspiracies’.
What are the ‘real conspiracies’? Well, there’s the fossil fuel industry conspiracy to keep renewable energy technology off the market, and there’s also the Republican conspiracy to funnel Katrina rebuilding contracts to Republican-connected engineering firms, and there was the conspiracy between Republican neocon warmongers and the US corporate media to fake news reports of Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons before the invasion of Iraq, to name just a few.
Given all these conspiracies, why is it ‘inconceivable’ that governments would use private firms to create ‘fake conspiracy theories’ designed to draw attention away from their real crimes? Half a million people are dead in Iraq due to the WMD lies.. and the US oil corporations are just an inch or so away from controlling Iraq’s vast oil resources —- compared to 3000 dead in the WTC attacks (and corporate America made money off that as well - Homeland Security contracts are very lucrative).
You know, if 911 was an ‘inside job’ carried out by thousands? of US ‘government agents’, don’t you think they would have come up with a better list of hijackers than ‘15 Saudis’? Wouldn’t the list have been ‘20 Iraqis and Afghanis?’
Think about it. Why is it so inconceiveable that this is actually what is going on? In fact, it’s entirely possible that Saudi propaganda services are behind it, since it serves to draw attention away from the fact that it was mostly Saudis who carried out the suicide hijackings.. but that’s just speculation.
Personally, I think it ‘computes’ quite well.
Folks, PLEASE! THREE structural steel buildings fall at the speed of gravity into their footprints, their concrete and contents reduced to dust, which had never happened previously in history without the aid of explosives (use your eyes, the damn things are clearly exploding!), and simultaneously, the ultra modern NORAD system goes totally nonfuntional because of “exercises” being run by Cheney. Right in your face, folks! WHAT POSSIBLE BENIGN EXPLANATION is there for the coincidence of these wholly unlikely events? What could possibly shake our fellow citizens out of their trance if this cannot?
Tony Vodvarka
On the roller coaster of life, during the scariest parts, many of us are so terrified we shut our eyes! MLK, 911, JFK, are just too scary for some…those in control are relying on that!
It is up to the rest of us to convince them that no mater how tight we shut our eyes the danger, perceived or real remains!
There is a quite a bit of collective wisdom in these letters. Let me address two issues.
I must admit to being a skeptic about any conspiracy in which governmental operatives or corporations are concerned. Not that they don’t take place. Just that when they occur, inevitably it’s in the human condition to blab or blow the whistle.
We are vain like that.
Recall the film “Rashomon.” “Rashomon,” among other things, stood for the proposition that every individual is the hero of his own narrative; and/or he utters a statement with the intent, consciously or unconsciously, of vindicating himself or his authentic values.
At a deep level a person tends to use language to either validate himself or his actions. It’s called the validation-impulse. Evolution hard-wired us with it. It contributes to making man a social being. And if blabbing means validation, the person will blab.
Our other problem, from my perspective, is that the source of our current malaise is structural. It’s in the nature of our culture/society itself. It’s our cultural legacy.
Recall economist Robert Heilbroner (_Behind the Veil of Economics_): we live in a capitalist society. And capitalism is an ideology. As such it has its dogmas, its tenets, its rituals, its hierarchies and whatever else it needs to sustain itself. It has even developed a political structure to sustain and protect itself.
Historian Charles Beard’s in his classic, _The Rise of American Civilization_, tells us that the Founders, especially Hamilton, Madison, et al,–early capitalists–
set in place a Constitutional and political structure to sustain and nurture capitalism.
Little did they suspect how easily this structure could be hijacked and subverted by the ruthless and greedy in an age of instant and mass communication.
For the needs of the Eighteenth century they installed Constitutional checks and balances in order to prevent the masses from democratically voting wealth away from the privileged few. Hence, the Electoral college (a chosen few can still subvert the People’s choice) , a Senate with two senators per state regardless of population numbers (little Rhode Island and Delaware can neutralize California or Michigan), an independent judiciary (appointed by a President and ratified by the Senate) to make sure this structure was sustained, a Fifth Amendment prohibiting “takings,” (folks cannot vote away “excess” from the super-wealthy; hence, no socialist take-over), a no”impairment of contracts” clause (government cannot “impose” minimum wages in a “contract” between labor and capital;though, traitor to his class, FDR, got around this one).
Jefferson was overruled way too often in the early stages of the construction of this document,I would assume. He and Hamilton did not care much for each other. Wonder why?
And on an aside, in 1913–in time to subsidize WW1 and all wars thereafter–the People voted in the funding source of our common problem: The Income Tax Amendment, a bottomless pit of revenue to be distributed as 536 individuals + 9 justices saw fit. Imagine: every time an individual exhanges his time for currency he is taxed for that “transaction.” If the currency or commodities purchased with that currency in turn generate more currency, he is taxed on it. And so it goes. Read Edmund Wilson’s _The Cold War and the Income Tax_.
Meanwhile, Corporations have become a bane, if not a cancer, on the body politic. Not only did the Supreme court adjudge them “persons” but 1972 in _Buckley v. Valeo_ allowed them “free speech” rights in the form of corporate donations to campaign contributions.
A corporation “speaks” when it donates to a candidate or a political cause. And as we all know (or at least suspect) “corporate campaign contributions” is Orwellian for political bribes.
The irony in all this is that a corporation is a creature created with the government’s consent. It’s sole function–and real power–is to gather capital for business development or growth.
That capital was originally intended to be used in tooling up, paying salaries, acquiring resources, etc.
Now a chunk of it is invested in purchasing (oops, “supporting”) legislators and legislation that favor corporations and their profits. The public be damned! If they want wars (paid with our taxes) to increase profits and acquire cheap oil God buried in foreign lands, so be it. These corporations are not merely munitions makers and oil corporations. They are media. And as William Randolph Hearst told Stephen Crane, “Send stories. I’ll provide the war…”
And war not only sells stories (and faux patriotism), it distracts attention away from the structure and the problems inherent in it. And we are made to “feel good” in the process…
If this is not a structural problem. Nothing is.
By the way, a few years ago Thomas FRank wrote _What’s the Matter with Kansas?_ The premise was: how could voters vote against their own interests?
A few days ago “The New Republic” came up with one of the more insightful and frightening responses I’ve ever read.
W and cronies may have tapped into and hijacked the national subconscious using 9-11 as a fear tactic. For some reason, hard-wired perhaps by evolution, the fear of death and a yearning for immortality tends to make us support the “national”