Perhaps it's a reflection on our media and how some stories lie relatively buried, but a committee of the US House of Representatives appointed specifically to investigate the Kennedy and MLK assassinations concluded in its final report (available on the Nat'l Archives website -- I don't have the URL right now)that there was indeed a conspiracy involved in the Kennedy assassination. Well, that might lead some to conclude that a coup occurred, but we have yet to hear much about that either.
Peter Hollings -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Scanlan Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 1:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] squawk ! squawk !conspiracy theory ! conspiracy theory ! On Oct 17, 2005, at 10:16 AM, Charles Brown wrote: > Jim D: > > BTW, my empirical observation is that conspiracy theories are much > more the rave these days on the left than are systemic theories (e.g., > Marxism). When Dan Scanlan suggested that "911 and other chaos ... Is > fostered [by the Bush elite] to keep arms sales up, oil controls in > place" > he was stating a type of opinion that is extremely common on the left. > > ^^^^^^^ > > CB: Dan Scanlan's statement doesn't sound like a theory that > everything > going on politicaleconomically is explained by this fostering of > this and > that, ergo, it is not a socalled conspiracy theory of anything but the > specific events referred to, that is it is not the error of > substituting a > conspiracy theory for a system theory. Here's what I actually wrote: "Issues like this [A CIA study reported in SLATE that Bush didn't pay attention to intelligence that predicted chaos in Iraq] keep us from seeing their own responsibility for 911 and other chaos that is fostered to keep arms sales up, oil controls in place, plain folks subjugated and progressives sidetracked. If we weren't discussing this, we might be creating strategies for prosecuting the CIA and its cohorts in the House, Senate, Executive and media for creating Al Queda in the first place and funding Bush family buddy Osama Bin Laden, etc." I made no reference to Illuminati, Gnomes of Zurich or the Wizard of Oz. I was addressing the fact that stories are floated by people with the power to float them that divert attention away from more important issues. My response to Jim's tossing of the phrase "conspiracy theories" at my argument is that giving the observation a name doesn't alter the validity of the observation. I may not have said THAT very well, but that's what I meant. The world is, in fact, replete with conspiracies, discovered daily. I'm not arguing and never have that they are connected into a larger conspiracy. It's been 42 years now that news media has been able to fluff off inconsistencies in the assassination of John Kennedy by simply calling them "conspiracy theories", ignoring all the while that the single bullet/single assassin scenario is, itself, a conspiracy theory, albeit unfounded in fact. I can't prove it, of course, but I do reckon that the folks responsible for that assassination have been running parts of the country ever since, and expect to be living in rapturous Heaven when the government files are released in the 2030's. Dan Scanlan
