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on 6/24/02 1:29 PM, Austin Kelley at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
To apply Paul Street's principles of political awareness (below), the
"system" killed John Kennedy. Without foreknowledge or planning? It was not
a cabal of fascistic killers? Am I a "crackpot" for detailing specific
identities and connections related to the murder? Seems to be so. Of course,
the venerable Noam Chomsky, from whom Street draws inspiration, has long
claimed that "the identities of Kennedy's killers are not important." He
also claims the assassination itself is "not important." Why is this so,
Great Chomsky? "Kennedy was just another president, nothing special about
him," explains the great MIT scholar.
I have Chomsky on tape making these statements to a rapt audience of
smart people, and no one giggled.
If Chomsky was forced, kicking and screaming, to research the
assassination in Dallas at gunpoint, he would have to concede that there was
indeed a plot to kill Kennedy. But he deceives himself -- and us -- by
avoiding specifics and relying upon sterile abstractions to explain
conspiracies away. When one asks for names, dates, places, it is suddenly
"not important."
Anyone this full of himself, this blind to the significance and
workings of key historical events, is bound to have a hard time with 9/11.
This is amusing enough: "it is incredibly unlikely that the necessary
network of players and operatives," certain parties in the DoD and
intelligence apparat, "would or could have undertaken such a complicated and
insanely risky enterprises as conducting the attacks or even of covering up
evidence of their likely occurrence." Yes, indeed, the CIA and FBI have had
a terrible time covering up evidence that they "looked the other way." The
foreknowledge issue has been difficult to bury.
But those who know how fascist government actully works do not escape
into dissociative abstractions and claim that political murder is "not
important." We face reality.
Conspiracy research is not a "crackpot" enterprise in the hands of a
capable writer (George Seldes, Peter Dale Scott, Christopher Simpson, Mae
Brussell, etc.), though there are, of course, crackpots on the right and
from the same intelligence groups widely blamed for killing Kennedy, etc.,
who discredit the real thing. Explaining events away, attributing them to an
impersonal and amorphous "system," and concealing the specific identities of
the culprits with sweeping, condescending cracks at legitimate
information-gathering strikes me as hypocritical, irresponsible and smug.
It gives rise to startling remarks like "the identities of Kennedy's
killers are not important." Not important to whom? To self-important
academics from MIT who cringe at using the word "fascism?"
Chomsky (who once refused angrily, at my request, to discuss CIA mind
control experimentation, a field in which there is no shortage of
documentation) claims that propaganda is the result of systemic capitalistic
corruption in the press. He calls this his "Propaganda Model." It would be
self-defeating for him to mention Operation Mockingbird, the wholesale
infiltration of the media by the CIA, because it violates his insular and
ultimately disreputable thesis. And so it goes.
Paul Street claims that we do not live in a democratic system. True
enough. So what sort of system is this, precisely? Again, we are left
wanting for specifics. If it is fascistic -- an advanced and decrepit and
suppresive form of capitalism -- it is most definitely conspiratorial. And
only a "crackpot" would equivocate himself into a corner to split hairs with
ignorant and conceited swipes at conspiracy researchers. It is Noam Chomsky
and Paul Street who are the crackpots if they actually believe that fascist
conspiracies do not exist. Is this not clear?
I doubt that any legitimate researcher on the left actually believes a
"global cabal" calls the shots. This is a simple-minded stereotype and a
misrepresentation that exploits the ignorance of readers who do not
understand the field of conspiracy research. To contradict Noam Chomsky, the
identities of Kennedy's killers are critically important. Sterile
abstractions and conceited equivocations are not important to me, personally
-- a good researcher doesn't place himself above the truth He serves it. To
me, the identities of Kennedy's killers are obviously important. I'm
"naive," I know. And I guess I'll go on telling the truth without shame
while Chomsky and his parrots hold themselves above the truth and spin
sterile abstractions to explain it all into oblivion.
-- AC
>
>
>
> From: "Glen Anderson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Austin Kelley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,"'finica rosu'"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Misunderstanding Power - Critique of 911 conspiracy theories
> Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 01:33:05 -0700
>
> This is a much more reasonable explanation than a lot of what I've been
> hearing since last September.
> This article deserves wider distribution.
> _____
>
>
> Misunderstanding Power [on 9/11 conspiracy theories] -- (June 14, 2002)
>
> by Paul Street
> Refuting and Explaining the Popularity of September 11th Conspiracy
> Theories
>
> June 06, 2002
>
> Thanks in part to recent disclosures that a minimally competent
> federal security establishment would have had reasons to know
> and act on intelligence predicting something like what occurred last
> September, conspiracy theorists are having a field day with 9-11. It
> didn't take such disclosures or the current Congressional inquiry
> into what the relevant federal officers knew and when they knew it,
> however, to put the great American conspiracy industry into high
> gear. From the beginning, really, a small army of
> conspiracy-thinkers offered variations on the basic theme that
> Washington (and in some versions Tel Aviv)
> were somehow in on the terrible September attacks.
>
> In the mild version of 9-11 conspiracy theory, Washington merely knew
> about the impending attacks and
> chose not to act. In the hard -core version, Washington (and/or Israel)
> actually plotted and conducted the
> attacks.
>
> The motive(s)? To provide the perfect excuse for the subversion of
> democracy, to serve the interests of
> Big Oil and the military industrial complex, to strengthen Israel's grip
> on its Palestinian subjects, and to
> expand the reach of US military power yet further across the globe. To
> create, in short a pretext for
> developments pretty much along the lines of main historical currents
> since September.
>
> Many of the conspiracy charges, it seems, come from somewhere on the
> "left" side of the political
> spectrum, where conspiracy thinking is more common than some radicals
> like to admit. The far right, it is
> becoming increasingly clear, has no monopoly on the paranoid and
> crackpot interpretation of historical
> events past and present.
>
> September 11th conspiracy theorists advance some truly bizarre ideas,
> including the notions that the
> World Trade Center was actually destroyed by explosives, that the planes
> were actually commandeered
> by American military remote control, and that WTC Tower 2 was hit by a
> missile. According to one
> web-site, the Pentagon was not actually hit by an airplane.
>
> Conspiracy theorists also make a number of accurate and uncontroversial
> observations that they would
> like to think provide circumstantial evidence for their strange
> interpretations. They note Washington's
> (Cold War) history of training and equipping El Qaeda, Bush's father's
> role as former CIA chief, and the
> huge influence of Big Oil and the "defense" industry on the current
> White House. They point to the
> creepy circumstances of Bush's 2000 "selection" by the Supreme Court,
> the Bush administration's initial
> oil-driven overtures to the Taliban and the White House's equally
> petroleum-related suspension of serious
> investigation of the Saudi-connected bin-Laden network. They note that
> Bush senior and Dick Cheney
> were consultants to the
> Carlyle group, which advised the bin Laden family and which has made out
> quite well from the post 9-11
> expansion of the Pentagon budget. They point to friendly historical
> relations between the US petroleum
> executives and the Taliban, reflecting the global oil corporations'
> determination to build a pipeline from
> Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. They note America's long
> history of secret intervention in the
> internal politics and policies of other nations. They point, of course,
> to growing evidence that top CIA and
> FBI officials failed to act on abundant evidence that should have
> sparked
> them to prevent the attacks.
> "Left" conspiracy theorists put special emphasis on regressive and
> repressive policy developments since
> 9-11. Look, they say, as if this
> (below) is all you need to know, at:
> · The overnight media transformation of Bush from incompetent
> illegitimacy to supposed grand statesman
> and the related suppression and distorted reportage on the real facts of
> the 2000 presidential "election."
> · The closing of meaningful debate on the harshly regressive domestic
> policy agenda of the Bush
> administration and allies in Congress.
>
> · The restriction of civil liberties at home and abroad, in the name of
> a new permanent War on Terror,
> really a permanent war of US and US allied state terror.
>
> · The massive new Pentagon budget, transferring an unprecedented
> windfall of taxpayer money to
> politically connected high-tech "defense" corporations, granting them a
> practically blank check to build
> massively expensive weapons and support systems that often have nothing
> to do with protecting the
> nation against terrorism.
>
> · The construction of new US military bases and the expansion of
> America's military presence in
> Southwest Asia, providing new imperial protections for US-based
> petrochemical interests in the region
>
> · The US government's lockstep support for Israel's vicious and criminal
> assault on the Palestinian people,
> justified in part by the notion that 9-11 gave Americans a new
> appreciation for virtuous Israel's struggle
> with
> dastardly suicidal mad men! The list goes on.
> "Come on, man," one conspiracy theorist recently told me, with a
> sneering grin, incredulous at my inability
> to sign on with his dark, all-knowing interpretation of the above
> developments, "the Bushies and all their
> rich buddies have got everything they ever wanted from this thing. You
> know they
> cooked it up."
>
> In one case, the suggestion of high-level US complicity has come from a
> progressive US Congressperson
> - Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.). Last April, McKinney noted
> that "persons close to [the Bush]
> administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new
> [9-11-provoked] war." McKinney pointed
> especially to the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based and defense-related
> investment firm that employs a
> large number of high-ranking government officials and retains the senior
> George Bush as a leading
> advisor. McKinney noted that the Carlyle Group and other firms close to
> the White House "directly
> benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath
> of September 11."
>
> There is not space here to list and refute the various specific claims
> of 9-11 conspiracy theories, but three
> points of rebuttal should suffice. First, it is incredibly unlikely that
> the necessary network of players and
> operatives would or could have undertaken such a complicated and
> insanely risky enterprises as
> conducting the attacks or even of covering up evidence of their likely
> occurrence. Even on the incredibly
> dubious assumption that the required high-level players were so uneasy
> in their very privileged
> pre-September lives that they felt compelled to concoct such schemes of
> mass murder on American soil,
> the likelihood of discovery would have made it
> prohibitively dangerous.
>
> Second, conspiracy theorists of the hard version forget that the likely
> perpetrators - the bin-Laden
> network - had both the independent means and
> (un-controversially) the motive(s) to conduct the operation. There's
> something practically racist in the
> notion that only people of European ancestry could have carried out
> something on 9-11's scale. The
> operation, moreover, is deeply consistent with threats made and targets
> marked by the likely culprits for
> quite some time.
>
> Third, the idea that the elitist consequences of 9-11 - more wealth and
> power for the few and less of both
> for the many - somehow prove that 9-11 was the product of an elite US
> conspiracy is incredibly naïve.
> Conspiracy theorists of the sort who sneered at me fail to understand
> that aristocratic outcomes from
> crises are basically written into America's economic and sociopolitical
> structure. Democracy is a political
> system where each person has an equal vote and equal policy influence.
> It cannot meaningfully exist in a
> society structured along the lines of the contemporary US, where 1
> percent of the population owns 47
> percent of the nation's wealth and considerably more of its politicians,
> policymakers, and media. It cannot
> exist where ordinary people lacking cohesive organization, meaningful
> institutions of autonomous power,
> popular expression, and democratic organization, and even a sense of
> common interests face off against
> highly organized and extremely class-conscious wealthy interests. It
> cannot exist where such people are
> worked, commuted, and shopped to the point of exhaustion and must rely
> on a highly concentrated
> privately owned media for basic information. It is especially absent
> from the making of foreign policy,
> which is even more insulated from popular influence than domestic policy
> and whose largely hidden
> conception and execution carries vast consequences for the entire planet
> without anything but the
> slightest input from world citizens.
>
> The structure of media ownership is especially pivotal in the current
> era. The owners and managers of the
> highly globalized corporate media, who have strong linkages with the
> military and oil industries and the
> national security-state, possess awesome, structurally encoded power to
> shape popular perceptions of
> current events. It does not serve their interests to translate the
> meaning of events in ways that question
> elite privilege and the related American imperial project. The outcome -
> incredibly biased coverage that
> favors war, imperial expansion, military expenditure, reduced civil
> liberties at home over critical democratic
> examination of US foreign policy and its role in making terror attacks
> on US targets predictable - is itself
> remarkably predictable, without resort to conspiracy theory.
>
> A key consequence of this harsh structural reality is that those who
> possess highly concentrated wealth
> and power have remarkable capacity to exploit crises. They act on their
> special, structurally enabled
> capacity to turn terrible events and developments, including especially
> foreign attacks and domestic
> rebellions, into pretexts for policies that further their own wealth and
> power at the expense of everyone
> else.
>
> Such is the traditional and consistent goal and behavior of those who
> sit atop society's leading
> institutions. As Noam Chomsky noted last February, the privileged
> "relentlessly" search for pretexts to
> advance their standard agenda, summarized in what Adam Smith called "the
> vile maxim of the masters
> - 'Everything for me and nothing for everyone else.'" "Crises," Chomsky
> noted, "make it possible to exploit
> fear and concern to demand that the [people] be submissive, obedient,
> silent, distracted, while the
> powerful use the window of opportunity to pursue their own favored
> programs with even greater intensity."
> They are a means for "disciplining the population," which tends to look
> with disfavor as policies
> embodying the "vile maxim,"
> and "shifting wealth and power even more" into "the master's" hands.
>
> The aftermath of 9-11, Chomsky noted, is "typical" in this regard. As
> John Pilger has recently noted in his
> important work, The New Rulers of the World, ""the attacks of September
> 11, 2001 did not 'change
> everything,' but accelerated the continuity of events, providing an
> extraordinary pretext for destroying
> social democracy." They have provided the post-Cold War era's most
> spectacular excuse to date for the
> ongoing "reduction of democracy to electoral ritual: that is,
> competition between indistinguishable parties
> for the management of a single-ideology state."
>
> As when applied to other events, conspiracy theories regarding 9-11
> reflect two core misunderstandings
> of power and how it operates in the US. The first, broadly encouraged by
> the American educational,
> political, and media establishments, holds that the US is in fact a
> democracy. People who accept this fairy
> tale - the Founding Fathers' (most of whom agreed with John Jay that
> "those who own the country ought
> to run it") and the modern business class's ultimate shared nightmare -
> cannot easily grasp policy
> outcomes that dramatically serve the interests of the few over the many.
> For them, the temptation is
> strong to see such outcomes as the product of a dark conspiracy
> operating behind the back and against
> the wishes of their elected representatives and other leaders of the
> society's main institutions.
>
> The second misunderstanding is of a different, even opposite nature. It
> wraps itself in an all-knowing
> sneer of cynicism yet holds a curiously wide-eyed and fantastic view of
> the masters or at least some part
> of the ruling class. Common among those who have been disabused of
> democratic myths and feel
> especially powerless in the face of concentrated power, it holds that
> dastardly elites manipulate the
> course of history from on high, pretty much in accordance with their own
> wishes. Little happens in the
> course of human events, some conspiracy theorists think, without the
> approval and intervention of an
> all-powerful but strangely secret elite.
>
> Real understanding of power is found outside these poles of illusion.
> Those who possess it know that the
> weight of dominant influence over sociopolitical decision-making and
> public information (mass persuasion)
> is rooted in historically developed structures of concentrated power,
> "state and private, closely
> inter-linked" (Chomsky). They do not conclude from this that certain
> select members or designated
> operatives of the master class have been granted limitless potency to
> shape history from above. History,
> they know, is full of remarkable developments, some inspiring - the
> early phases of the Russian
> Revolution, the anti-Vietnam War movement, for example
> - and others quite horrific (9/11 for example) from a radical-democratic
> perspective, that took place much
> to the surprise and against the wishes of the power elite.
>
> That elite, they are aware, possesses exceptional capacity to make
> unexpected and initially unwelcome
> developments into pretexts for the expansion of their wealth and power.
> In the past, for example, it
> turned the initially unwelcome (for the privileged) existence of the
> Soviet Union into a pretext for the
> (welcome) historically unparalleled expansion of the military-industrial
> complex. It turned the antiwar
> movement, urban racial unrest, and antipoverty programs of the 1960s
> into pretexts for the expansion of
> a rigidly authoritarian criminal punishment state and workfare regime
> that enforces harsh class and race
> inequality in contemporary America. Now, with special assistance from an
> initially unwelcome and truly
> historic and evil terror attack last September, it has made the threat
> of terrorism into a pretext for an
> endless expansion of imperialism, militarism, and class privilege.
>
> To note these outcomes, rooted in structurally encoded inequalities of
> ideological and policy power,
> however, is very different from saying that the masters have "cooked up"
> the developments they were
> able to exploit. The latter conclusion reads history through the rear
> view mirror and exaggerates the
> power and foresight of the ruling elite.
>
> In truth, ordinary people would be fortunate if the masters of war and
> wealth needed to work behind or
> otherwise undermine the United States' leading institutions to achieve
> regressive and repressive policy
> results like those we have seen since 9-11. At the same time, we can be
> thankful that those masters
> have not become the God-like manipulators of history and consciousness,
> capable of creating historical
> events like something out of a bad X-Files episode. History lurches
> forward, in all its horror and glory, full
> of possibilities that continue to be chained and tragic consequences
> that remain predictable unless and
> until we develop and act upon an
> appropriate understanding of power and how it operates.
>
>
> Paul Street is a social policy researcher and freelance writer in
> Chicago, Illinois.
>
>
>
>
>
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