This could be the first finest translation from American English to American English. Everybody (except idiots) is reading between lines but no one is doing it like you do. I came with this awful but plausible idea: today's blogs have replaced the '60-'70's mass demonstrations. We have the power to change something and we hope it could be done by sitting in a comfortable chair and writhing. Well, it couldn't. There is nothing like a mob of 100,000 or more shouting against war. ~~ Take a brake for a Drugs Compare.

Thank you again, Paul.

Your point(s) are well taken. I do choose to "conspire" to be part of democratic left movements for social justice and democracy and ecological sustainability and all the rest.

Stephen Lendman had a very good article in today's Znet: Holiday Hypocrisy. In that article, he points to many things that, over the years, fed the conspiracy lot. How many would love to know who really killed MLK, JFK, etc? I know I would (albeit a major distraction). I have participated in the "belly of the beast" and have been witness to things (in my past) that would curl teeth. They were very real and eye-opening to me. But, again, they were part and parcel of something that I was engaged in when I was very young and naive.

My awakening was much later in my life, being sparked by a labor movement in the early 80s (shipyard mgmt/labor disputes involving safety, wildcat strikes, FBI provocateurs...you name it). I learned so much from that (personal) involvement. Mostly, however, I learned that the power structure in this country will go to any lengths to stop movements of social import. Theirs is a machine of grand proportion.

Ever onward, Paul. Please keep stoking the coals. I do appreciate it

In solidarity

R

Okay Ron. Maybe I should apologize for seeming so harsh to others. Okay, I apologize. I do get agitated about this issue. Here's my most diplomatic possible bottom line on the conspiracy question: Let's say you wanted to really take the 9/11 conspiracy theories seriously. I don't think you should (for reasons explained in various places, including here) buy say you do and you don't want to have to rely on videos downloaded from the web and all that. How many years are you willing to dedicate to combining your accumulation of the various field knowledges required --- and remember we're talking civil and/or structural engineering, aeronautics (sp), thermal enginnering, physics, etc., not something simple like History (my doctorate) or sociology or political science: three, four...a decade? How many years investigating all the relevant details? And don't you (if you are real 9/11 conspiracy theorist anyway) worry that you will probably be rubbed out for your efforts? Anyway bear in mind that that's all you'll be doing by and large...not much time left for buiulding movements for a society that values peace and survival over death, empire, inseuality and global dominance. "Conspire" (if you like) to be part of democratic left movements for social justice and democracy and ecological sustainability and all the rest. Let's build the sort of truly democratic and particiatory and egalitarian institutions where concentrated power's absurdly infinite multiplicity of countless so-called conspiracies is impossible.

Paul, Thank you for your response.

Many weeks ago, I read Cockburn's comments regarding 9/11 conspiracy issues. I was a tad put-off by his remarks but, in fairness to it all, I decided to do the research and find out what it was that upset me.

So, here I am. The issues of 9/11 (and others) are very interesting, to say the least. But, I do understand the need for focus. In Albert's article, it struck a clear chime.

Differentiating the needs for change, based on (internal) conspiratorial or (systemic) institutional theories, is key. The impetus can be made towards one or the other but the effect, imo, becomes minimal when the institutional is ignored. Maybe it can be viewed as the "the-forest-for-the-trees" effect.

We are all engaged in a learning process, however, and I do believe that we depend on one another for support. As involved as we become (active, pro-active, radical or ??), that support becomes crucial to future involvement. That support can make or break mass movements but it can also fall apart into individual "opportunities." Opportunism is a nasty thing where once there was coalition.

Working together to promote a worthy movement depends on worthy and able leaders...leaders who recognize "focus" and "direction" and can get that point across to those that want to participate.

As you said: The real scandal is the elevation of hegemony over survival and that's about the politics and institutions' structures of power.

Again, a call to revolution! Let it be heard.

 

 

I'm with Chomsky and Albert and the venerable radical writer Alexander Cockburn (who I admire) and with Christopher Hayes (The Nation piece I linked previously): I think going down the conspiracy path is just a terrible and tragic error and is itself richly indicative of how pathetic parts of the what passes for a left in the U.S. have become.  It's a fundamental mistake of potentially gigantic proportions. You're either inoculated from this sort of lunacy or you become hopeleslly useless to the left cause in my opinion. I think I'm more like Cockburn than Chomsky in that I'm not trying to be   slightly diplomatic about it. Hayes is diplomatic when he says it's understandable that people get sucked into the grand conspiracy diversion --- this because they are so marginal in the U.S. power structure; that's a good point. He's right but  I'm absolutely willing to lose friends and allies over this; I want nothing to do with people who approach history, politics and current events this way. It's all just a huge waste of effort and energy. And its like Chomsky has been saying recently, even if all the wacked out conspiracy theories about 9/11 had any real basis, the 9/11 thing would be nothing compared to the current scandal of basically provoking a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. because the policymakers' quest for hegemony trumps their concern for the peoples' security, which is a mere afterthought.  Now to carry the 9/11 crackpottery to the level of saying the power elite would pop a nuke in a leading homeland city just violates my concept of sanity in looking at the world.  The real scandal is the elevation of hegemony over survival and that's about the politics and institutions structures of power.   

Paul,

I have read with interest the exchanges about conspiracy theory, etc. (9/11, etc.) and I must say that I am sympathetic with the contributors (Victor in particular).

Who wouldn't be interested in these topics?

In addition, I can honestly say that, in our system of governance and oversight, I do not trust anyone when the necessity for thorough investigation is required. Call it an educated gut reaction, but I think we all know the feeling.

That said, I found an interesting article by Michael Albert about this topical subject (conspiracy theory):

http://www.zmag.org/ParEcon/conspiracy.htm

It presents the ideas of conspiracy theory and institutional theory with interesting commentary by Noam Chomsky.

I strongly suggest that it be read if you are so inclined.

Please feel free to comment.

R

Street wrote: I am going to design a left-anarchist/libertarian-Marxist 12-step program for conspiracy theorists. Put your hand on the ZNet Bible (or a copy of Deterring Democracy), confess that you are controlled by your conspiracy addiction, and prepare to save yourself from foolishness without end!

lol Paul, I subscribe this is too funny..hmm Paul? There is also this conspiracy rumour running arround that american first walk to the moon was a fake made up in studio.. including Neil Armstrong famous "one small step.... etc.. The theorists claims that thethe tape was made to frustrate the Russians and this original tape is been reported lost.

(subscribe)

The "conspiracy" talk is just childish, chest-thumping, pseudo-radical avoidance of serious confrontation with the fundamental underlying authoritarian and hiearchical structure and operation of core U.S. institutions. Those institutions are obviously (upon serious and honest examination) about serving the privileged few, advancing the interests of the investor class, and screwing over the general population (whose well being hardly even qualifies as a policy afterhtought) and especialy the poor and defenseless in countless ways. No conspiracies required. Within that structure you can find (if you want to lose your mind) literally thousands of "conspiracies" every day...rural town boosters who lie in some way as part of their "conspiracy" to push for getting a state prison to house thousands of black urban prisoners who big city police chiefs "conspired" to target for racially disparate drug busts....prisons where wardens "conspire" to trap inmates in offenses that extend their stays behuind bars....academic hiring committees who "conspire" to deny job offers to a qualified radical....foreign policy spinners who "conspire" to delete critical information that contradicts their vile agenda....and [fill in the blank]. It just goes on endlessly and it all becomes ridiculously infantile. Think of all the time that could be dedicated to building alternative institutions and structures and building resistance to dominant structures and policies but which gets wasted on the futile disentenagling and (as with the 9/11 madness...if I was a conspiracy theorist I'd say IT was cooked up by a secret Cheney/Pentagon/CIA team out of "24")imagining of great conspiracies that tragically laid our supposed great democracy low. I am going to design a left-anarchist/libertarian-Marxist 12-step program for conspiracy theorists. Put your hand on the ZNet Bible (or a copy of Deterring Democracy), confess that you are controlled by your conspiracy addiction, and prepare to save yourself from foolishness without end!

And there are so many others. Why the left cannot accept that such conspiracies take place every day, I just fail to understand. To expose these is to shine bright and harmful light upon the rats who love the darkness.

are treated so shabbily, got to Bill Blum....he can tell you...

A report of the US congress in 1994 informed us that:

Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as human subjects in the 1940s to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite [blister gas]. Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical followup after their participation in the research. Additionally, some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents, and family doctors. For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research had taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many veterans who became ill after the secret testing.

In the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, we find a remarkable variety of government programs, either formally, or in effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs -- marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots then sent through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments; behavior modification experiments that washed their brains with LSD; exposure to the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and Vietnam ... the list goes on ... literally millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring.
     Proceeding now to the 1990s: Many thousands of American soldiers came home from the Gulf War with unusual, debilitating ailments. Exposure to harmful chemical or biological agents was suspected, but the Pentagon denied that this had occurred. Years went by while the GIs suffered terribly: neurological problems, chronic fatigue, skin problems, scarred lungs, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, personality changes, passing out, and much more. Eventually, the Pentagon, inch by inch, was forced to move away from its denials and admit that, yes, chemical weapon depots had been bombed; then, yes, there probably were releases of the deadly poisons; then, yes, American soldiers were indeed in the vicinity of these poisonous releases, 400 soldiers; then, it might have been 5,000; then, "a very large number", probably more than 15,000; then, finally, a precise number -- 20,867; then, "The Pentagon announced that a long-awaited computer model estimates that nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers could have been exposed to trace amounts of sarin gas."
     Soldiers were also forced to take vaccines against anthrax and nerve gas not approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and punished, sometimes treated like criminals, if they refused. (During World War II, US soldiers were forced to take a yellow fever vaccine, with the result that some 330,000 of them were infected with the hepatitis B virus.) Finally, in late 1999, almost nine years after the Gulf War's end, the Defense Department announced that a drug given to soldiers to protect them against a particular nerve gas, "cannot be ruled out" as a cause of lingering illnesses in some veterans.
     The Pentagon brass, moreover, did not warn American soldiers of the grave danger of being in close proximity to expended depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield. Depleted uranium is a radioactive metal associated with a long list of rare and gruesome illnesses and birth defects.
     If the Pentagon had been much more forthcoming from the outset about what it knew all along about these various substances and weapons, the soldiers might have had a proper diagnosis early on and received appropriate care sooner. The cost in terms of human suffering was incalculable. One gauge of that cost may lie in the estimate that one-third of the homeless in America are military veterans.
     This scenario is in danger of being repeated to a distressing degree for the veterans of the invasion of Afghanistan beginning in 2001 and Iraq two years later. Depleted uranium, for example, has again been widely used by the United States in both countries. (See chapter 12.)
     Soldiers serving in Iraq or their families have reported purchasing with their own funds bullet-proof vests, better armor for their vehicles, medical supplies, and global positioning devices, all for their own safety, which were not provided to them by the army.
     And throughout all these years, and all these wars, the numerous complaints by servicewomen of sexual assault and rape at the hands of their male counterparts were routinely played down or ignored by the military brass ... "boys will be boys".
     The moral of this little slice of history is simple: If the United States government does not care about the health and welfare of its own soldiers, if American leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain and suffering of the wretched warriors they enlist to fight the empire's wars, how can it be argued, how can it be believed, that they care about foreign peoples? At all.
     When the Dalai Lama was asked by a CIA officer in 1995: "Did we do a good or bad thing in providing this support [to the Tibetans]?", the Tibetan spiritual leader replied that though it helped the morale of those resisting the Chinese, "thousands of lives were lost in the resistance" and that "the U.S. Government had involved itself in his country's affairs not to help Tibet but only as a Cold War tactic to challenge the Chinese."

BTW, if you have questions about whether conspiracies involving very large numbers can remain secret, read the first part of this again.

 

I spoke incorrectly in my last comment. Tonight's nationally televised speech by the Worst President Ever is not the annual State of the Corporate Fascist Empire Address. The arch criminal will be speaking about his forthcoming SURGE (escalation) to the bewiledered, debt-ridden, underpaid and overworked Amerivan herd from the oval office. The nominal War Criminal in Chief will give the State of the Corporate Fascist Empire Address next week or something like that. The real chief operative Darth Cheney will be visible behind him chewing a special new imperial gum manufactured from the harvested organs of U.S.-murdered Iraqi children.

Did you read FRIDA BERRIGAN AND NICK TURSE today on Z Net?

 

These people make Dr. Strangelove look like Alice in Wonderland.

This from Ron Kovic, from his wheelchair, thanks to Mssrs McNamara, Kennedy, Johnson, Kissenger, et al.....

 

Question; We hear so much about “support the troops” while they're in war. But what does it mean to support the troops when so many of them are coming back home wounded?

Kovic: I don't see how this administration is supporting the troops when they're clearly cutting back the budgets of the veterans hospitals around the country. That is outrageous. That is unacceptable. How can you spend billions of dollars fighting a war in Iraq and not care for those who are wounded when they come back home?

What did OUR DEAR LEADER have to say about that?

 

btw, Gandhi wasn't quite the saintly figure for most low caste poor people in India that he was and remains for Western liberals.

Hi Metrodorus:

 "Atomikos" in Modern Greek actually means "personal", as in "personal life-preserver".

 

A person, that is, an "individual" (non-divisable). To match your etymology :)

Speaking of American idiocy, I just watched the imperial state capitalist Evening News on General Electric Television (NBC). I sat slack-jawed as I witnessed dominant war media's boot-licking fealty to the messianic militarist Liar and Decider in Chief. So what if the people loathe the Worst President Ever and oppose his illegal war? The forthcoming SURGE is being reported in respectable Orwellian fashion as a reasonable fait accompli that only some whiney latte-sipping liberal Democrats oppose. Never mind the silly opinions and values of the mere citizenry of the U.S. or for that matter the irrelevant people of "liberated" Iraq. "The president," one correspondent told war media anchorman Brian Williams, needs "to educate the American people" on the "real situation" in Iraq and why the SURGE (a funny name for an ESCALATION) is required. Our arch-criminal DEAR LEADER will get to instruct all us poor little ignorant child citizens and policy spectators tomorrow night during his State of the Corporate Fascist Empire Address. God help us if we let this president stand for two more years.

My point is that people in debt (which includes most students and mushrooming numbers of others) aren't exactly prime candidates for living out slogans like "think globally act locally" that had resounded with earlier generations of less "financially disciplined" students and other members of society.

And while these silly examples of citizenship are wasting their time wallowing in self, some other citizens are doing this..........

Nano Air Vehicle: Imagine a world in which mechanical gnats infest a city, buzzing through people's homes, intruding on their lives, filming whatever they choose with tiny cameras and transmitting the data back to U.S. troops. This program aims to "develop and demonstrate an extremely small (less than 7.5 cm), ultra-lightweight (less than 10 grams) air vehicle system… to provide the warfighter with unprecedented capability for urban mission operations."

IN OUR NAMES, YET, WITH OUR MONEY, YET, PLANS TO INVADE AND KILL AND MAIM OUR GRANDCHILDREN, YET.!!  

Plans for future warfare! Oh! goody! Nick Turse at  Tomgram quotes an advisor to the shrub ¨We´re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality......we´re history´s actors......and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.¨, then goes on to say since that dog did not hunt, they have gone to future war for their fixes......war 2030s style. BUT THESE JERKS ARE SERIOUS AND HAVE THE POWER TO HAVE THESE LITTLE GADGETS DEVELOPED........FOR USE AGAINST WHOM?? GUESS!

So, for the umptenth time our wonderful leader has invited us all to GO SHOPPING. So, I guess it is not surprising that this drivel is being taught in universities.

Paul, you have a much stronger constitution than I. I have never been able to get thru one full broadcast of Oprah, or that women´s viewpoint show with BaBaW and the girls. But, I have not seen a full ¨talk show¨since, was it Merv Griffin? They used to actually discuss things that mattered. Of course, 60 Minutes did shows on things that mattered. 

Now it is left to Z-Net and sites like it. How do we increase the reach?    

Paul, An absolutely brilliant commentary. As for Gandhi, he was very much a a corporate-minded person, encouraging people toward personal sacrifice, toward living out life in their personal lives as they would want to be treated themselves by the English colonialist power. Gandhi was always for the power of the people to effect change in the world through total social disobedience to unfair and unjust laws. His approach was to drive the people as a whole to a higher awareness of social responsibility, personal empowerment, and national obstinacy against injustice. He would NEVER have embraced the New Age shit that is flowing free today.

carrotwax I commend you on your amusing Internet name. I wouldn't and won't call you a "new aged idiot" and I wish you, your friends and a widening circle of humanity all the compassion and happiness in the world. But I will subject your rant to some critical scrutiny.

You have me denouncing the goal of personal happiness but I don't really do that. I say that we should be "careful about how far we want to go in elevating personal satisfaction as a life goal."

You cite the wonderful democratic socialist (did you know that about him?) and anti-imperialist activist Martin Luther King, Jr. without seeming to know that he would agree with that conclusion (I don't know enough about Gandhi to talk about him). King made a big point of the need to go beyond individual and small-group compassion to embrace what he saw as the essential "radical reconstruction of society" to overcome what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated": (1) racism; (2) poverty/economic exploitation/capitalism/materialism; (3) militarism/imperialism.

King would have shuddered at Mr. Rasmussen's comment. He would have been horrified by the standard authoritarian New Age notion that it is "dysfunctional" to take up collective arms against the triple evils because those evils are beyond (to use the language of the Twelve Steps recovery movement's so-called Serenity Prayer)our proper "sphere of influence."

You actually have me setting up a conflict between individual happiness and collective happiness and/or between working on the individual level and working on the collective level when I say the following (!): "there is no good reason to set up false dichotomies between individual change and collective change."

You imply (at the end) that the New Age approach has some sort of monopoly on compassion and caring. I disagree.

You say your New Age approach "works" and I think it does in some ways, times, and cases. But please take an honest look at the world. Living things and the environment that sustains them are not doing terribly well right now and forecasts are very dark indeed on numerous and multiple, interrelated levels. If your implicitly avowed change-the- world-through-private-happiness-one-person-at-a-time approach "works," you and others like you need to start making it work for more people (and animals and plants and ecospheres) on a much larger and faster scale.

I am convinced that actually doing that in a meaningful way would mean crossing over into the collective struggle for democratic and revolutionary transformation. That takes me well beyond Oprah's New Age book club and into confrontation with the dominant sociopolitical order that New Age wisdom tells us (toxically) is beyond our sphere of influence. I would have King on my side in that conclusion.  

You have deleted MLK's radical content (and perhaps Gandhi's as well...that would be my guess). King was very and radically different from the more narcissistic and commodified use of New Age ideas (you do not address the Oprah issue) in deadly hyper-plutocratic later-imperial America.

You even have me opposing "human nature," carrotwax, but that's a little slanderous. Do you share the bourgeois concept of "human nature" as egoistic, hierarchical, competitive and acquisitive? I do not: I see a greater share of underlying solidarity, altruism, cooperativism, and democratic collectivity.

Call me a left-anarchist libertarian Marxist idiot, but I honestly think that a post/non-capitalist, radically democratic and participatory, non- hierarchical social order would be much more closely aligned with human nature than the current profoundly hierarchical and authoritarian Winner Took All and Pulled Up the Ladder regime of Empire and Inequality, Inc. - the one that so unjustly enriches an increasingly bitchy Oprah even while there are at least fifteen neighborhoods just in her home-base city (Chicago) where more than a quarter of the children are living at less than half the federal government's notoriously inadequate level.

Those children and the rest of the world's impoverished and assaulted people are waiting for the circle of American popular New Age compassion to work for them. They ain't holding their breaths, if you know what I'm saying.

sk that was very unclear.  I won't try to respond to something that incoherent.

 

I enjoyed your article. In modern Greek, "idiotic" [idiotikos] is the word for private.

If you walk through Athens, you'll see signs warning that certain parking lots are reserved for "idiotic parking," that is, private parking. It always makes me chuckle.

Odder yet, the word "atomic" [atomicos] etymologicaly means "uncuttable" or "indivisible," (a [=not] + tomos [=cut]). An atom is somthing which, at one time, was thought to be indivisible. It was as small as something can be. So often you very disconcerting things labeled "atomic"--on ships, for instance, you'll see "atomic life-preservers" and such.

 

 

I wonder how the outlook of Brandon Rasmussen might have been different had he (most likely) not been looking at a big fat pile of debt upon graduation.

This applies to "grown ups" of society as well. Last weekend I came across a Payday storefront operation in an "inner city" neighborhood which openly billed itself as a branch of the corporation with the largest assets in the world, HSBC (bright neon sign of it's famous logo, which previously I had seen only in the swankiest financial districts and airports around the world). These ever-present "facts of life" need to be taken into account as well before people are labeled as idiots.