1. What we believe and know to be true isn’t a conspiracy theory:
“By labeling the obvious – that 9/11 was an inside job – a conspiracy theory, Wolf and Lindorff don’t have to consider the evidence. They stick to a priori assumptions, “before the evidence”, whereas we are arguing a posteriori, “after the evidence”. They are rather the theorists in this case, we are more like empiricists. (In the philosophy of science, empiricism emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to evidence, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.)
What does the term «conspiracy theory» really mean? In the JFK-case, the conspiracy theory was opposed to the lone nut theory. In that case «conspiracy» didn’t mean more than a plot.
However, the term «conspiracy theory» has a more sinister historical origin, it means a paranoid theory that secret societies are undermining society. First it was the Templar Knights, then the Rosicrucians, then the Jesuits, then the Illuminati, then the Jews, then the communists and so on. Those phantom conspiracies were all subversive. The conspiracy theory was about subversive forces.
It was not considered conspiracy theory that the people in charge were conspiring against the people, i.e. nobody labeled the communists «conspiracy theorists» although they believed there was no such thing as a western democracy. Being in charge, possessing the power, using it, was not considered conspiracy.
Let me point out that conspiracy thinking can be denial in itself. I think Michael Morrissey has a point here: «It is absolutely absurd to entertain this idea that “dark forces” are manipulating the government. This is a preposterous logical error (read my “Deep State Doublethink” in my blog), but it will not go away because of the denial and/or complicity factor. I’ll sum it up again in one sentence: Even if the “deep state” (to use Peter Scott’s term for the various characterizations of the oh-so-complicated and ever shifting mysterious evil forces) could have pulled off 9/11, if there WERE another, “public state” (as Scott and presumably this Russian and others believe), this “public state” would have long since done what it was supposed to do and would have solved the crime.»
…
Dark forces are mere TOOLS, not “the power behind the power”.
…
To a conspiracy theory we would expect a certain degree of theory. But please observe that in the debate David Ray Griffin vs. George Monbiot, it is the latter, defending the official theory, who insists on discussing theory, whereas Griffin insists on discussing evidence; Monbiot wants to debate a priori, Griffin a posteriori, or as Kevin Ryan exclaimed in debate with the so called ‘skeptic’ Michael Shermer, we need less speculation here and more facts!
…
The confession video of Osama bin Laden from December 2001 is as authentic as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Both were made by secret services, the Osama-confession probably by some secret services of the Pentagon or the CIA, the Zion-confession by the czarist Okhrana.
When it comes to cosmo political conspiracy, the official conspiracy theory is about a Muslim conspiracy to take over the world, and certain terrorist acts are seen as the impatient, activist, violent utterances of a long term strategy, “they hate our freedoms”, a long term strategy just like the one Hitler attributed to the Jews.
…
The conspiracy theory is that Osama and the muslims are conspiring against the West.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18373
2. “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18363
3. “the shock-and-awe attacks used on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in his “spiderhole” so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to destruction, and the world was not awed.
Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the Bush administration’s seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet; then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military, despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so, or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on the planet.”
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=13706
4. “Palin Thinks US Is Now at War With Iran
On October 31, Sarah Palin said that in the first 100 days of the McCain administration, we would “shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars.”
5. McCain threatens to bring back the draft:
“The argument that Congress would have to approve the draft does not reckon with the executive’s power in modern practice to begin military conflicts that then dragoon the legislature into funding and supporting them (look at the Pelosi Congress, which wanted out of Iraq as of Jan. 2007 but was blocked by the Republican plurality in the Senate).
…
The executive, with its legion of black ops units, can always get up a Gulf of Tonkin incident and stampede the the legislature into emergency measures. It could even start with a “temporary” draft, analogous to the “temporary” Bush tax cuts for the billionaires, which McCain now insists must be permanent.
As for the argument that the USG can’t afford a draft, uh, I’ve got news for the civilians who say this. They don’t pay draftees anything to speak of, and they have plenty of cots and plenty of barracks and old blankets. If it happens, you’ll see what a good deal it is for the USG, especially compared to the $200,000 a year they pay the mercs.”
6. About The Washington Post Ombudsman D. Howell:
“She adds: “Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage — and that’s as it should be.”
What if the actual facts — i.e., “reality” — are consistent with the views of “the hard-core left” and contrary to the views of the “hard-core right”? What if, as has plainly been the case, the conservatives’ views are wrong, false, inaccurate? What if the McCain campaign was failing and relying on pure falsehoods and sleazy attacks, and The Post‘s coverage simply reflected that reality? It doesn’t matter. In order to sell more newspapers, according to Howell, The Post‘s news coverage must shape itself to the Right and ensure that “their views [are] reflected enough in the news pages” (I don’t recall Howell complaining when her newspaper — according to its own media critic — systematically suppressed anti-war viewpoints in its news pages and loudly amplified pro-Bush and pro-war views).
In Howell’s view, The Post shouldn’t determine its news reporting based on what is factually true. Instead, it should shape its coverage to please this discredited, failed political movement — in order to sell more papers. That corrupt formula is, of course, what is now meant by “journalistic balance” — say what both sides believe and take no position about what is true — and it is precisely that behavior which propped up this incomparably failed and deceitful presidency for so long. The establishment media bears much of the responsibility for what has happened during the last 8 years, and amazingly enough, the lesson many of them seemed to have learned is that they didn’t go far enough (“we’re too liberal; we need to accommodate the Right more”). If there is an Obama presidency, watch for them very quickly to re-discover the long-dormant concept of “adversarial behavior.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
7. “Redistribution is never an issue when the money is flowing upwards. It’s only when working people are poised to get a few scraps that all hell breaks loose. That’s when self-styled “mavericks” and their political cadres spring into action and unleash their vitriol at anyone who challenges the failed “trickle-down” dogma of the investor class. When Barak Obama naively pointed out the need to “spread the wealth” the media descended on him like a pack of feral hounds. The gaffe was followed by weeks of derision and vicious attacks. McCain branded him a the “Redistributionist-in-Chief” while his rabid friends on wingnut radio invoked the musty specter of Karl Marx.
…
Novelist Honore d’Balzac said, “Behind every fortune is a crime”. The perceptive Frenchman must have anticipated the gaggle of venal money-grubbers who currently occupy the penthouse suites in lower downtown Manhattan. There’s only two ways to deal with selfishness and cynicism on this scale; regulation and taxation. Nothing else will work. “
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21140.htm
8. “Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.
Republicans’ authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.
Authoritarian conservatives are primarily anti-government, except where they believe the government can be useful to impose moral or social order (for example, with respect to matters like abortion, prayer in schools, or prohibiting sexually-explicit information from public view). Similarly, Republicans’ limited-government attitude does not apply regarding national security, where they feel there can never be too much government activity – nor are the rights and liberties of individuals respected when national security is involved.
The McCain/Palin Ticket Perfectly Fits the Authoritarian Conservative Mold
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.
The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America’s needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to “trust us” and suggest that their opponents – Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden – are not “real Americans” like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama “a socialist,” “a redistributionist,” “a Marxist,” and “a communist” – without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.
McCain, especially, fits perfectly as an authoritarian leader. Such leaders possess most, if not all, of these traits:
- dominating
- opposes equality
- desirous of personal power
- amoral
- intimidating and bullying
- faintly hedonistic
- vengeful
- pitiless
- exploitive
- manipulative
- dishonest
- cheats to win
- highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
- mean-spirited
- militant
- nationalistic
- tells others what they want to hear
- takes advantage of “suckers”
- specializes in creating false images to sell self
- may or may not be religious
- usually politically and economically conservative/Republican
Incidentally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also can be described by these well-defined and typical traits — which is why a McCain presidency is so likely to be nearly identical to a Bush presidency.
Clearly, Sarah Palin also has some qualities typical of authoritarian leaders, not to mention almost all of the traits found among authoritarian followers. Specifically, such followers can be described as follows:
- submissive to authority
- aggressive on behalf of authority
- highly conventional in their behavior
- highly religious
- possessing moderate to little education
- trusting of untrustworthy authorities
- prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals and followers of religions other than their own)
- mean-spirited
- narrow-minded
- intolerant
- bullying
- zealous
- dogmatic
- uncritical toward chosen authority
- hypocritical
- inconsistent and contradictory
- prone to panic easily
- highly self-righteous
- moralistic
- strict disciplinarians
- severely punitive
- demanding loyalty and returning it
- possessing little self-awareness
- usually politically and economically conservative/Republican
The leading authority on right-wing authoritarianism, a man who devoted his career to developing hard empirical data about these people and their beliefs, is Robert Altemeyer. Altemeyer, a social scientist based in Canada, flushed out these typical character traits in decades of testing.
Altemeyer believes about 25 percent of the adult population in the United States is solidly authoritarian (with that group mostly composed of followers, and a small percentage of potential leaders).
It is in these ranks of some 70 million that we find the core of the McCain/Palin supporters. They are people who are, in Altemeyer’s words, are “so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21137.htm
9. “ But his book The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes – published this week in Britain – caused a much bigger sensation when it came out last year in Israel, at once becoming a best-seller and provoking a furious reaction not only from the right but from many of Burg’s former colleagues on the political centre-left. In the book – a compelling mix of polemic, personal memoir, homage to his parents and meditation on Judaism – Burg argues that Israel has been too long imprisoned by its obsessive and cheapening use – or abuse – of the Holocaust as “a theological pillar of Jewish identity”. He argues that the living role played by the Holocaust – Burg uses the regular Hebrew word Shoah or “catastrophe” for the extermination of six million Jews in the Second World War – in everyday Israeli discourse, has left Israel with a persistent self-image of a “nation of victims”, in stark variance with its actual present-day power. Instead, the book argues, Israel needs finally to abandon the “Judaism of the ghetto” for a humanistic, “universal Judaism”.
The implication of Burg’s analysis, one that perhaps only an Israeli would have dared promote, is that the fostered memory of the Holocaust hovers destructively over every aspect of Israeli political life – including its relations with the Palestinians since the 1967 Six Day War and the subsequent occupation. “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context,” he writes, “and turned it into a plea and generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah and therefore all is allowed – be it fences , sieges … curfews, food and water deprivation or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21133.htm
10. “Congo advised to ‘sex war up’
The United Nations have sent an aid convoy to the Democratic Republic Of Congo with orders that the displaced millions need to “Jazz up their plight a bit” in order to garner international support. As General Nkunda’s military coup continues, the war has yet to establish a poster child or hot-button issue to focus the West’s increasingly-diminishing attention span.
Ebbsfleet also feels that the complexities of conflict, which has previously involved five other African nations, inter-tribal warfare and military/political disputes, is a big turnoff. “Take Somalia in the 80s. Crops have failed, loads of hungry kids and Bang – there’s your poster. 2004, a big wave kills thousands. That’s a no-brainer in humanitarian terms. But this is currently too confusing to get a really sexy, vibrant campaign going.”
…
E4 are also believed to be planning a fundraising concert in the Congolese capital, with Coldplay set to headline. “We have to do what we can to help” said Chris Martin “It’s terrible that the people of….erm…what?…oh yes, the Congo have to go through whatever it is they’re currently going through. The third single from our latest album is out on December 15th, by the way.”
“We want the civil war in the Congo to be the number one water-cooler conversation this Christmas” said Ebbsfleet. “We’re trying to play down some of the less saleable aspects – mass rape, corrupt international mining operations – as they don’t play well across the key 18-25 year old demographic. We want this to be the ‘Crazy Frog’ of the internecine armed conflict world.”
pushjelly.blogspot.com
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
Leave a comment