In Defense of Conspiracy Theories
Everybody condemns conspiracy theories, but nobody does anything about them! Actually, I have come not to bury the conspiracy but to, well, maybe not praise it, but at least offer a devil`s advocate defense of it. It occurs to me that there is a conspiracy to destroy conspiracy theories, and such a nefarious plot must be exposed for the world to see! If we allow the conspiracy theory to be destroyed, what will stop the alliance of Haliburton, Karl Rove, Elvis, and the Lochness Monster from eventually conquering the world?
Robert Bidinotto has a piece on the folly of the conspiracy theorists in which he rails against the tinfoil hat club. (Fortunately, I made my hat from extra thick foil!) Actually, I greatly respect Mr. Bidinotto and I basically agree with him, and with those who think that the principle of Occam`s razor should first be applied to a given situation, but I do have to point out that paranoids have enemies too, and that there indeed HAVE BEEN conspiracies in history-in fact, there have been lots of them.
Consider Nazi death camps; most of the world was ignorant of what was occurring at these institutions. Even America was ignorant of what was happening in those places (actually, it has been suggested that Roosevelt knew but didn`t want to make this a war ``for the Jews`` wink! wink!) The fact that Jews and other ``enemies of the Volk`` were being slaughtered by the millions was carefully and effectively hidden. This would never have come out had the Allies not invaded Germany. This was a successful conspiracy.
Ditto the Russian gulags.
Ever heard of a Potemkin Village? The Tsar ordered Potemkin to build a series of villages, and he didn`t do it. One day the Tsar decided to visit these grand new towns his faithful servant had built for him, and Potemkin built a series of mock-ups which he peopled with anyone he could scrounge up. The Tsar, traveling by boat, was proud to see clean, new villages filled with waving, healthy people. He didn`t notice that the next town looked exactly like the first and was full of the exact same waving healthy people, or the town after that, or the one after that...
Consider, too, the U.N. Oil for Food program-half of the U.N. member states knowingly violated the embargo, and they conspired to hide this violation. That is why France and Russia were so duplicitous, and fought our intention of going into Iraq so bitterly. We only found the proof after we invaded; there was clearly a conspiracy between member states of the U.N. and the hierarchy in the U.N. itself.
How many people believe today that Columbus proved the world is round? This was a fraud perpetrated by lefties in the 19th century to foster the idea that the Church was anti-science, and it survives today thanks to a friendly media and academia; the ignorant may have thought the Earth was flat, but the knowledge that the world is a globe dates back to the Greeks, and every knowlegeable person knew the truth at the time of Columbus (it was agreed that Columbus` calculation of the SIZE of the world was grossly in error.)
How many children are taught that the Crusades was an unprovoked attack on a peaceful Moslem people? This is a form of academic conspiracy designed to attack Christianity and Western Culture.
The entire Spanish-American War was a conspiracy to make news and generate war profits. William Randolf Hearst and his fellow ``yellow journalists`` began a drumbeat against Spain, accusing the Spanish of all manner of untrue things to enrage the public and foment war. (Spain had been a good ally of the United States since our Revolution, and there is bitterness of the SA war to this day.)
In fact, the half-truths and distortions of the media can be considered a type of conspiracy. For three years we were told Karl Rove ``outed`` Valerie Plame, and this severely damaged the credibility of the Bush Administration. How many people think Bush is unethical because of a conspiracy? The media, and the special prosecuter, all knew from the first day the truth of the matter, yet this whole sordid affair had to play out.
The electronic media was decidedly liberal until Ronald Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine and the internet came along, and they simply chose not to report anything which they didn`t agree with. They maintained a tyranny over the dissemination of information, and they repeatedly claimed they were unbiased. There was assuredly a conspiracy on the part of those who controlled these media. This includes movies, radio, and television.
Does anyone remember the code of silence in regards to Bill Clinton and his antics? Does anyone remember that they spiked the Lewinski story?
Today there is a leftist conspiracy to maintain control of University Campuses; conservative white males need not apply for most tenure-track positions. The University doesn`t TELL you this, but uses such code as ``women and minorities especially encouraged to apply``, or ``we are a diversity-oriented institution``. This is an open conspiracy, but a conspiracy none-the-less.
For years the U.S. government denied that thermonuclear weapons detonated in the upper atmosphere produced an electromagnetic pulse which could knock out electronics-this while they had been experimenting with this very thing. They also denied that they had experimented with syphilis on poor blacks and had conducted radiation-exposure experiments on soldiers in the 1950`s. This has all come to light in recent years.
Ditto ``race norming``; government jobs are handed out on the basis of civil service test scores. A large number of these jobs went to minorities for years-a disproportionate number. For years people accused the government of cooking the books, grading on the curve for minorities. For years they denied this was true. The Freedom of Information Act opened the records, and the government finally had to admit they had been doing this for years.
In real estate, you cannot give an opinion on how good an area is by law, but the government does not want a licensed Realtor to tell the public that this is a requirement of the law.
Does anybody remember Al Gore`s telephone surcharge? The government ordered the phone companies to impose this, but to no list it on the phone bill so as not to indict the Clinton Administration.
What about the Mafia? How about Al-Quada? No such thing as a conspiracy?
The Scopes Monkey trial was a conspiracy by the ACLU to overturn Tennessee law (Scopes knew nothing about Darwinism and had not actually taught it) and the subsequent demogoguing of the issue by those who have a stake in the success of Darwin can be viewed as a conspiracy.
So, what`s the point of all this? The point is that a stopped clock is right twice a day, and, although many a conspiracy theorist is simply a crackpot, we should not state categorically that there are no conspiracies. I believe the Plame Affair was a conspiracy by President Bush`s enemies, for example.
Still, there are conspiracies and there are CONSPIRACIES, and the idea that Bush and the Jews conspired to take the Trade Center down is batshit, if you`ll excuse my vernacular (that ain`t no vernacular, it`s a derby!) Ditto Holocaust denial. Ditto the idea that international bankers own the whole world, or that we went to war for Exxon-Mobile and Haliburton, or that Elvis is alive and living in Idaho, or Bigfoot is being hidden, or space aliens, or any other unprovable and dubious assertion. These are modern fairy tales, and anyone really interested in disproving them can do so. They fall of their own weight. But we shouldn`t say there are no conspiracies.
Global Warming and Environmentalism is a classic rebuttal to the no-conspiracy argument; socialists, upon realizing the jig was up on their ideology, flocked into environmentalism and hatched up the concept of Global Warming to impose their economic programs on us. This is as conspiratorial as they come, and they have used a friendly media to sway opinion and hide their true agenda. Gorbachev is one of their brightest lights! So is Al Gore. Kyoto served no purpose but to hamstring the U.S. economy, yet the movement still has credibility, in spite of outlandish doomsday predictions which have repeatedly failed to come true. This is most definitely a conspiracy.
My point is, there are actual conspiracies in this world, a great many of them. We must exercise discernment and be able to identify the real ones from the frauds. I think it serves no useful purpose to deny the reality of conspiracies; we live in a fallen world, and the first conspiracy was hatched when Adam and Eve sought to hide their disobedience behind those itchy fig leaves. Still, we mustn`t succumb to the pleasure of indulgence, of chasing after shadows and boogeymen. Read Dan Brown if you want to, but understand that his is a work of fiction, and that he is laughing all the way to the bank at those who have bought into his novel as a serious treatise. We should all take conspiracy theories with a healthy dose of skepticism, but keep in mind that people have been plotting from the beginning. We have to exercise wisdom.
And, considering that modern wisdom is dispensed from the teachers unions and the facile minds of the media, by Al Gore and Al Franken, by all the mavens of pop culture and Hollywood, it is little wonder that we have seen a sharp rise in beliefs in the modern fairy tale-type conspiracy theory. Three blind mice have turned to millions of blind mice being lead by an equally blind, pie-eyed piper. The wisdom dispenser has not been restocked in a long, long time. Moreon.ogr has taken the place of grandmother`s storybook.
Now where did I put that bottle of non-flouridated water?
Robert Bidinotto has a piece on the folly of the conspiracy theorists in which he rails against the tinfoil hat club. (Fortunately, I made my hat from extra thick foil!) Actually, I greatly respect Mr. Bidinotto and I basically agree with him, and with those who think that the principle of Occam`s razor should first be applied to a given situation, but I do have to point out that paranoids have enemies too, and that there indeed HAVE BEEN conspiracies in history-in fact, there have been lots of them.
Consider Nazi death camps; most of the world was ignorant of what was occurring at these institutions. Even America was ignorant of what was happening in those places (actually, it has been suggested that Roosevelt knew but didn`t want to make this a war ``for the Jews`` wink! wink!) The fact that Jews and other ``enemies of the Volk`` were being slaughtered by the millions was carefully and effectively hidden. This would never have come out had the Allies not invaded Germany. This was a successful conspiracy.
Ditto the Russian gulags.
Ever heard of a Potemkin Village? The Tsar ordered Potemkin to build a series of villages, and he didn`t do it. One day the Tsar decided to visit these grand new towns his faithful servant had built for him, and Potemkin built a series of mock-ups which he peopled with anyone he could scrounge up. The Tsar, traveling by boat, was proud to see clean, new villages filled with waving, healthy people. He didn`t notice that the next town looked exactly like the first and was full of the exact same waving healthy people, or the town after that, or the one after that...
Consider, too, the U.N. Oil for Food program-half of the U.N. member states knowingly violated the embargo, and they conspired to hide this violation. That is why France and Russia were so duplicitous, and fought our intention of going into Iraq so bitterly. We only found the proof after we invaded; there was clearly a conspiracy between member states of the U.N. and the hierarchy in the U.N. itself.
How many people believe today that Columbus proved the world is round? This was a fraud perpetrated by lefties in the 19th century to foster the idea that the Church was anti-science, and it survives today thanks to a friendly media and academia; the ignorant may have thought the Earth was flat, but the knowledge that the world is a globe dates back to the Greeks, and every knowlegeable person knew the truth at the time of Columbus (it was agreed that Columbus` calculation of the SIZE of the world was grossly in error.)
How many children are taught that the Crusades was an unprovoked attack on a peaceful Moslem people? This is a form of academic conspiracy designed to attack Christianity and Western Culture.
The entire Spanish-American War was a conspiracy to make news and generate war profits. William Randolf Hearst and his fellow ``yellow journalists`` began a drumbeat against Spain, accusing the Spanish of all manner of untrue things to enrage the public and foment war. (Spain had been a good ally of the United States since our Revolution, and there is bitterness of the SA war to this day.)
In fact, the half-truths and distortions of the media can be considered a type of conspiracy. For three years we were told Karl Rove ``outed`` Valerie Plame, and this severely damaged the credibility of the Bush Administration. How many people think Bush is unethical because of a conspiracy? The media, and the special prosecuter, all knew from the first day the truth of the matter, yet this whole sordid affair had to play out.
The electronic media was decidedly liberal until Ronald Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine and the internet came along, and they simply chose not to report anything which they didn`t agree with. They maintained a tyranny over the dissemination of information, and they repeatedly claimed they were unbiased. There was assuredly a conspiracy on the part of those who controlled these media. This includes movies, radio, and television.
Does anyone remember the code of silence in regards to Bill Clinton and his antics? Does anyone remember that they spiked the Lewinski story?
Today there is a leftist conspiracy to maintain control of University Campuses; conservative white males need not apply for most tenure-track positions. The University doesn`t TELL you this, but uses such code as ``women and minorities especially encouraged to apply``, or ``we are a diversity-oriented institution``. This is an open conspiracy, but a conspiracy none-the-less.
For years the U.S. government denied that thermonuclear weapons detonated in the upper atmosphere produced an electromagnetic pulse which could knock out electronics-this while they had been experimenting with this very thing. They also denied that they had experimented with syphilis on poor blacks and had conducted radiation-exposure experiments on soldiers in the 1950`s. This has all come to light in recent years.
Ditto ``race norming``; government jobs are handed out on the basis of civil service test scores. A large number of these jobs went to minorities for years-a disproportionate number. For years people accused the government of cooking the books, grading on the curve for minorities. For years they denied this was true. The Freedom of Information Act opened the records, and the government finally had to admit they had been doing this for years.
In real estate, you cannot give an opinion on how good an area is by law, but the government does not want a licensed Realtor to tell the public that this is a requirement of the law.
Does anybody remember Al Gore`s telephone surcharge? The government ordered the phone companies to impose this, but to no list it on the phone bill so as not to indict the Clinton Administration.
What about the Mafia? How about Al-Quada? No such thing as a conspiracy?
The Scopes Monkey trial was a conspiracy by the ACLU to overturn Tennessee law (Scopes knew nothing about Darwinism and had not actually taught it) and the subsequent demogoguing of the issue by those who have a stake in the success of Darwin can be viewed as a conspiracy.
So, what`s the point of all this? The point is that a stopped clock is right twice a day, and, although many a conspiracy theorist is simply a crackpot, we should not state categorically that there are no conspiracies. I believe the Plame Affair was a conspiracy by President Bush`s enemies, for example.
Still, there are conspiracies and there are CONSPIRACIES, and the idea that Bush and the Jews conspired to take the Trade Center down is batshit, if you`ll excuse my vernacular (that ain`t no vernacular, it`s a derby!) Ditto Holocaust denial. Ditto the idea that international bankers own the whole world, or that we went to war for Exxon-Mobile and Haliburton, or that Elvis is alive and living in Idaho, or Bigfoot is being hidden, or space aliens, or any other unprovable and dubious assertion. These are modern fairy tales, and anyone really interested in disproving them can do so. They fall of their own weight. But we shouldn`t say there are no conspiracies.
Global Warming and Environmentalism is a classic rebuttal to the no-conspiracy argument; socialists, upon realizing the jig was up on their ideology, flocked into environmentalism and hatched up the concept of Global Warming to impose their economic programs on us. This is as conspiratorial as they come, and they have used a friendly media to sway opinion and hide their true agenda. Gorbachev is one of their brightest lights! So is Al Gore. Kyoto served no purpose but to hamstring the U.S. economy, yet the movement still has credibility, in spite of outlandish doomsday predictions which have repeatedly failed to come true. This is most definitely a conspiracy.
My point is, there are actual conspiracies in this world, a great many of them. We must exercise discernment and be able to identify the real ones from the frauds. I think it serves no useful purpose to deny the reality of conspiracies; we live in a fallen world, and the first conspiracy was hatched when Adam and Eve sought to hide their disobedience behind those itchy fig leaves. Still, we mustn`t succumb to the pleasure of indulgence, of chasing after shadows and boogeymen. Read Dan Brown if you want to, but understand that his is a work of fiction, and that he is laughing all the way to the bank at those who have bought into his novel as a serious treatise. We should all take conspiracy theories with a healthy dose of skepticism, but keep in mind that people have been plotting from the beginning. We have to exercise wisdom.
And, considering that modern wisdom is dispensed from the teachers unions and the facile minds of the media, by Al Gore and Al Franken, by all the mavens of pop culture and Hollywood, it is little wonder that we have seen a sharp rise in beliefs in the modern fairy tale-type conspiracy theory. Three blind mice have turned to millions of blind mice being lead by an equally blind, pie-eyed piper. The wisdom dispenser has not been restocked in a long, long time. Moreon.ogr has taken the place of grandmother`s storybook.
Now where did I put that bottle of non-flouridated water?
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 9:56 AM
3 Comments:
Excellent post, my friend. Sometimes I think we forget to verify, verify, verify those things we read--especially on the internet. Additionally, it seems that most conspiracies can be linked back to a particular group's agenda that they're pushing. In other words, the conspiracy theory they're advancing is their sales pitch. Again, great post.
Great post, Tim! Yes, even paranoids have real enemies. One thing I've always wondered about those 9/11 conspiracies is this -- what do the theorists think happened to all those people on those airliners?
On another note -- conspiracy theories are handy for rationalizing to yourself and others why you are a failure. That's one reason why conspiracy theories abound in the ME and Islamic world. It also explains democrat failures - it's all a VRWC, don't you know - has nothing to do with their failed politics.
On a personal level there is the guy who is always justifying the fact that he can't hold down a job by saying that there are always conspiracies against him everywhere. The other employees are jealous of his obvious superiority so they conspire against him, etc.
Interesting subject.
Remember that FDR was a Bonesman, and he belived in many of the ideas that were the cornerstone of the Nazi Fascist movement.
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