Maxt
09-19-2006, 06:32 PM
Conspiracy mongering is a vicious instrument
Sept. 12, 2006
For some people, any official explanation of an event is always and only a synonym for a cover-up.
For such types, reality is a labyrinth of shadows and speculation, nothing is ever as it seems.
One plus one always equals something other than two, and there is no such thing as a straight line from "A" to "B".
They live in a world of spies and schemers, of aliens who are never seen, corporate forces who manipulate whole countries, governments who plot and kill their own citizens, and where Zionists or Freemasons, the Templar Knights or Opus Dei, have been running the planet for ages.
This is the mentality that argues Roosevelt staged Pearl Harbor, that John F. Kennedy had more assassins than the entire cast and extras of "Ben Hur" - it was really crowded on that grassy knoll - and that Princess Diana was most likely done in by members of the royal family; Elizabeth II, the Buckingham Palace Soprano.
On a pop level, this is the world that finds an audience of millions for the lukewarm stew and plastic history of Dan Brown's fatuous Da Vinci Code and has tentacles that reach towards those true believers in the mystic power of New Age crystals, spirit channelling, of people who talk to trees and fully expect the bored trees to talk back to them.
On a much more sinister level, conspiracy mongering is a vicious instrument of defamation and hate.
The hideous granddaddy of all conspiracy theories is also the most durable one: the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the document that "proved" the most lasting of malicious fantasies, that the Jews run the world and seek its ruin. The Protocols are loopier than a bucket of eels on a Ferris wheel and known to be a hoax for over a century, but of malicious gullibility there is no end. 9/11 has spewed conspiracy theories almost from the moment the first plane hit the first tower. Among the earliest and the most despicable - an echo of the Protocols here - was that 4,000 Jewish employees stayed home that day. In other words, the Jews did it.
Lately, there has been a whole whirlwind of broken logic and wishful thinking, malice and misinformation trying desperately to dress up as truth.
One of my personal favourites is the claim that no planes at all were involved in 9/11, that those were missiles wrapped in holograms that slammed into the buildings. Hand me a pointy ear, Spock, someone's been watching far too much Star Trek.
The overarching theory is that Bush and the neo-Cons, not bin Laden, not al-Qaeda, not Mohammed Atta and his virgin-hungry suicide team, but slow-witted George and his puppet masters, that they are the real villains, that the president and his plotters murdered 3,000 of their own citizens.
I do not know why we give any oxygen to these extraordinary libels. Detestation for George Bush may qualify a person for many things, but it is not a degree of metallurgy, just as anti-Americanism is not a branch of physics.
These theories that suggest a sitting president and his advisors would murder their own citizenry are a calumny, as lunatic as they are contemptible. They come from the imagination of hate, the pernicious concoctions of minds allergic to reality, and are beneath the dignity of reasoning human beings. For "The National", I'm Rex Murphy.
Sept. 12, 2006
For some people, any official explanation of an event is always and only a synonym for a cover-up.
For such types, reality is a labyrinth of shadows and speculation, nothing is ever as it seems.
One plus one always equals something other than two, and there is no such thing as a straight line from "A" to "B".
They live in a world of spies and schemers, of aliens who are never seen, corporate forces who manipulate whole countries, governments who plot and kill their own citizens, and where Zionists or Freemasons, the Templar Knights or Opus Dei, have been running the planet for ages.
This is the mentality that argues Roosevelt staged Pearl Harbor, that John F. Kennedy had more assassins than the entire cast and extras of "Ben Hur" - it was really crowded on that grassy knoll - and that Princess Diana was most likely done in by members of the royal family; Elizabeth II, the Buckingham Palace Soprano.
On a pop level, this is the world that finds an audience of millions for the lukewarm stew and plastic history of Dan Brown's fatuous Da Vinci Code and has tentacles that reach towards those true believers in the mystic power of New Age crystals, spirit channelling, of people who talk to trees and fully expect the bored trees to talk back to them.
On a much more sinister level, conspiracy mongering is a vicious instrument of defamation and hate.
The hideous granddaddy of all conspiracy theories is also the most durable one: the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the document that "proved" the most lasting of malicious fantasies, that the Jews run the world and seek its ruin. The Protocols are loopier than a bucket of eels on a Ferris wheel and known to be a hoax for over a century, but of malicious gullibility there is no end. 9/11 has spewed conspiracy theories almost from the moment the first plane hit the first tower. Among the earliest and the most despicable - an echo of the Protocols here - was that 4,000 Jewish employees stayed home that day. In other words, the Jews did it.
Lately, there has been a whole whirlwind of broken logic and wishful thinking, malice and misinformation trying desperately to dress up as truth.
One of my personal favourites is the claim that no planes at all were involved in 9/11, that those were missiles wrapped in holograms that slammed into the buildings. Hand me a pointy ear, Spock, someone's been watching far too much Star Trek.
The overarching theory is that Bush and the neo-Cons, not bin Laden, not al-Qaeda, not Mohammed Atta and his virgin-hungry suicide team, but slow-witted George and his puppet masters, that they are the real villains, that the president and his plotters murdered 3,000 of their own citizens.
I do not know why we give any oxygen to these extraordinary libels. Detestation for George Bush may qualify a person for many things, but it is not a degree of metallurgy, just as anti-Americanism is not a branch of physics.
These theories that suggest a sitting president and his advisors would murder their own citizenry are a calumny, as lunatic as they are contemptible. They come from the imagination of hate, the pernicious concoctions of minds allergic to reality, and are beneath the dignity of reasoning human beings. For "The National", I'm Rex Murphy.