Nicholas
Levis heeft op CounterPunch een artikel geschreven waarin hij betoogt
dat juist de figuren die complotten uitwerken, mensen aanwijzen als de makers van
samenzweringstheorieën (of complottheorieën, wat je wilt), als deze het complot blootleggen die zij de
rest van de bevolking willen opdringen. Het is als met de hysterie
over fake news in de reguliere media (en politiek), waar journalisten
zelfs durven te eisen dat er censuurmaatregelen moeten worden genomen tegen bepaalde sites op de
sociale media, daar men fake news zou verspreiden……. Terwijl diezelfde media keer op keer fake news (nepnieuws)
brengen, sterker nog: fake news brengen op basis waarvan illegale
oorlogen zijn aangegaan door de VS, weliswaar aantoonbaar ingegeven door leugens van de
geheime diensten van de VS, maar met grote graagte overgenomen door die reguliere (massa-) media…… 

Levis
wijst dan ook niet voor niets naar de illegale oorlog van de VS tegen
Irak, waar het volk (ook in de EU) werd voorbereid op deze oorlog met
de hersenspoeling van het volk door politici en media met leugens als
zou Saddam Hoessein, destijds president van Irak, geheime voorraden
massavernietigingswapens in bezit hebben gehad….. Een enorme
leugen waartegen VN-wapeninspecteur Blix als een Don Quichot
tegen vocht, keer op keer liet hij de wereld weten dat Irak zelfs
geen massavernietigingswapens kon hebben, al deze wapens waren
vernietigd en men had bij wijze van spreken elke vierkante meter van
het land onderzocht……

Ook Henk Hofland, die door de Nederlandse pers als belangrijkste journalist van de 20ste eeuw wordt vereerd, geloofde deze leugen en ventileerde die op de NRC, de ‘slijpsteen van de
geest’ (eerder de overdosis morfine voor de geest)….. Let wel,
ik zeg ‘geloofde’, echter Hofland moet dondersgoed geweten hebben dat
dit een pertinente leugen was en toch stelde hij zich achter de
illegale oorlog tegen Irak, wat hij tot zijn dood is blijven doen,
ondanks dat deze leugen werd doorgeprikt….. (Hofland, de Nederlandse journalist van de
20ste eeuw… ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!)

Alle
terechte ontkenningen van Blix konden niet op tegen de leugens die de geheime diensten en de Bush administratie de wereld inbrachten, dit met grote hulp van de
reguliere media die het volk opzweepten….. Gezien het voorgaande kan je
deze zaak niet anders zien dan de grootste samenzweringstheorie van
deze eeuw, waar belachelijk genoeg de tegenstanders van die illegale
oorlog destijds complottheoriedenkers werden genoemd!!!!! Kortom de
wereld op de kop…….

Voorts merkt Levis nog op dat Irak werd beschuldigd van het deelnemen aan de 9/11 aanslagen en zonder
enig bewijs herhaalden Bush en vooral Dick Cheney deze leugen….. Na
verloop van tijd was het grootste deel van de bevolking in de VS ervan
overtuigd dat deze leugen de waarheid was (en ook in de rest van het
westen
begon men deze leugen te geloven….) Belachelijk, daar de VS Al Qaida als organisatie had aangewezen die verantwoordelijk was voor de 9/11 aanslagen en als er iemand was die de schurft had aan Al Qaida was het Saddam Hoessein wel!!

Lees het
uitstekende artikel van Levis en laat je nooit meer foppen met
leugens als zouden mensen die de overheid en reguliere media kritisch
volgen complottheoriedenkers zijn, niet voor niets kan je een groot
deel van de beste journalistiek op de sociale media vinden….. De reguliere (massa-) media zijn organisaties die de belangen van de eigenaren
van die media moeten behartigen, plutocraten die belang hebben bij oorlog,
ziekten en het in stand houden van de huidige status quo (en daarmee
de huidige neoliberale politiek) >> goed voor de
aandelenportefeuilles en daarmee voor de winsten en nog grotere bankrekeningen!!!

September
16, 2020

Conspiracy
Panic

by Nicholas
Levis

The most consequential false
conspiracy theory of the last twenty years in the United States
centered on fabricated accusations raised against the Iraqi state in
2002-3. These claimed that Iraq maintained secret stores of “weapons
of mass destruction” and intended to use them against the West,
perhaps imminently. Most versions also insinuated the Saddam regime
was involved in some vague manner in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks
together with its sworn enemies, the jihadi movements then doing
business as al-Qaeda. That is what the vice-president running the
regime, Cheney, repeatedly said. His president, Bush, just repeated
the magic words 9/11-Saddam-9/11-Saddam-9/11 for months, until it was
taken to be true by enough people to allow a smooth start to the
carnage. The claims were actively fabricated by officials and agents
at several agencies of the U.S., UK and other national security
states, by various client groups and allied journalists, and by
freelance assholes looking to get a piece of the action. The
fabricators knew they were lying, and they knew that they lied so as
to sell a planned, unprovoked war of aggression to the American, UK,
and other western publics. The resulting war destroyed a nation, led
to more than a million deaths, and accelerated the establishment of
an archipelago of torture centers under U.S. control.

In short, the “Saddam-WMD-9/11”
conspiracy theory was a top-down psychological operation conducted by
state-based agents against the public, and freely trumpeted by nearly
all organs of the U.S. corporate media. It has been completely
discredited, but rarely will you here it called a conspiracy theory.
None of the perpetrators of the campaign have been prosecuted, and
most have continued their career trajectories unhindered by their
participation in this well-known crime. Today many of them have been
embraced by the Democratic establishment as heroic fighters against
Trump — the same Democratic establishment that always seeks
distance from actual fighters against Trump.

The most consequential American
conspiracy theories ever were the Red Scares of 1919-21 and the late
1940s and early 1950s. Both met with a degree of popular enthusiasm
and broad fear-based assent, but both were initiated and run by state
and corporate-based elements as top-down psychological operations
against the public, specifically targeting the left, labor
organizers, and journalists, celebrities or teachers who showed
insufficient anti-Communist fervor. Both campaigns succeeded in
transforming American society and politics in a right-wing direction,
and helped in partly dismantling the progressive, leftist and
honestly liberal movements of their times.

A recent conspiracy panic campaign,
#Russiagate, presented a mythic (and facially laughable) explanation
for how the Democrats managed to lose the unloseable 2016 election.
It appears to have been intended to weaken or to knock Trump out of
office. If so, it backfired completely, presenting a fictional
distraction from the far-worse realities of the regime’s violent
policies and incipient fascism. Every time that the ludicrous and
byzantine accusations fell apart (predictably, in every case),
Trump’s position was strengthened, and that of real opposition to
Trump’s barbarities was weakened.

Given their failure to actually
fight Trump on policy, and given the Democrats’ embrace of Bushian
politics and Bush-era war criminals, austerity, and imperialism, and
given their propping-up of a right-wing candidate who has his own
degree of involvement in Trump-style nepotism and is visibly
suffering from cognitive impairment, Trump would be cruising to
reelection. Cruising, that is, except for the unpredictable factors
of Covid, the Depression, and the open outbreaks of organized fascist
street violence that he praises. And because a real opposition to
this regime’s particular horrors exists, and has not surrendered.
(If they lose, the Democrats will blame the real opposition, and are
already doing so preemptively.) 

Thus, for the moment, Trump is well
behind in the polls, despite the four-year favor to him delivered by
the #Russiagate operation with its demand for 24/7 coverage and
predictable serial failures.

However, the #Russiagate conspiracy
panic operation also succeeded, insofar as it has functioned to
condition most Democratic-type liberals (and some of the left) to
uncritically accept a xenophobic explanation for the rise of an
all-American fascism, and insofar as it has gained much support among
them for a bellicose, new-Cold War stance and widepread favor for
censorship measures (run by private mega-corporations) to combat
“propaganda” and “conspiracy theory.”

It cannot be known at this time,
but the QAnon narrative appears likely to have also originated with
an intel operation, or the action of a Trump-friendly outfit, with
the design of casting noise over a story that sounds just like it,
but is actually true. Trump, Bill Clinton and various celebrities and
intellectual hooligans were all tied to the long-time human
trafficking and rape-ring run by likely intelligence asset and
“billionaire” Jeffrey Epstein. He was convicted, and his
co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell stands accused. The operation’s
apparent purpose was to gain material for political blackmail.
Trump’s former labor secretary, Acosta, was formerly the Florida
prosecutor who made a deal to allow the convicted Epstein to walk
free in 2008, and to seal the records of his clients. It’s fine to
condemn QAnon, but when you spend your hours talking about how
ridiculous and hateful and wrong the story is, you are not talking
about Epstein and Trump and Clinton (and the various other Epstein
“friends”). You are not talking about or acting on a million
other things that matter. From the perspective of the QAnon
propagators, you are helping to promote and reinforce the ruse.

America, like many places, is home
to fantastically, facially false grand conspiracy narratives positing
that the political economy (so evidently managed by a ruling class of
owners and corporations and policy-makers reigning over large
instituions, who act mostly in the open) is secretly run by a single,
smaller, invisible cabal of satanically-inclined mystery men who just
want to do evil because they hate America, or maybe because they want
to destroy Trump’s beautiful white race. There are many varieties
of grand-global conspiracy theories, but they often pander to odious,
hateful, and exterminationist politics. The latter are often modeled
on the old European anti-Semitic blood libel, or, in fact, repeat the
old European anti-Semitic blood libel.

Grand-global conspiracy narratives
can appeal to a common socio-psychological make-up that hankers for
denial and magic and simplicity, for stories that attribute social
ills and human troubles to a corruption that can be theoretically
excised, restoring a normality that never really existed as it is now
imagined. In this they are akin to other quick-fix narratives, many
of them based in religious dogmas (e.g. bad things happen because
people reject Jesus and commit acts the Bible supposedly prohibits;
or, to take a now-abandoned version, alcohol consumption is the true
primary cause of social ills and prohibition can fix it). For most,
the reality that their society is systematically rotten to the core,
burning the planet, and heading for a predictable fall, and that any
change to this reality must be revolutionary or will be nothing, is
much harder to process, above all emotionally. It also subjects one
to the accusation of radicalism, extremism, or “conspiracy theory.”

I dispute that very many people
change their politics or prejudices or world-view as a result of
exposure to one of the global-type conspiracy theories. On the
contrary, these are devised to aggrandize and manipulate
already-existing political tendencies. People tend to believe what
they were long-ago conditioned to believe, and they tend to see what
they believe. And remember, the most effective and consequential
conspiracy theories in the modern milieu are rarely products of
autopoeitic convergences of mass psychology. They almost always have
original authors who know that they are inventing this shit, like
QAnon. 

They are the products of modern public relations and popular
mood management.

Granting that grand-global
conspiracy narratives exist, the use of the phrase “conspiracy
theory” in American discourse has always been rotten as fuck.
Whether true or not, whether or not believable or grounded in
evidence, any claims that attribute malfeasance to the American
ruling class and policy-making power elite, or to the actual owners
and runners of a system in which high-level crime was long ago
legalized, is derided as “conspiracy theory” by the very same
ruling class, power elite, corporate media, punditry, and
liberal-authoritarian establishment. However, claims that mirror the
same narratives, but allege them against an officially designated
enemy, are never called conspiracy theory. In fact, once the latter
tales are circulated within the corporate news media, to question
them comes itself to be classified as conspiracy theory. You are a
conspiracy theorist if you reject the outlandish #Russiagate
conspiracy theories. And, once called a conspiracy theorist, you are
supposed to be automatically and forever discredited from
participating in public discourse. Increasingly, you are seen as the
bearer of a dangerous and contagious disease, associated loosely with
all other persons categorized as “conspiracy theorists,” and
treated as fair game for censorship.

Conspiracy panic is a propaganda
weapon that props up an overall portrayal of the mass of the people
(and especially critics of the ideological hegemony, of whatever
stripe, good or bad) as ipso-facto stupid, preemptively discredited,
crazy, unworthy of participation in discourse, and dangerous.
Conspiracy panic nowadays is a go-to for liberals to deny and
distract and divert to incremental bullshit, and not have to think
about systemic irrationality, falsehood, evils and failures, and how
most of the unfolding disasters — including Trump himself — are
not aberrations or surprises but predictable and systemic. It’s
easier and more comforting to affect being appalled at the stupidity
of QAnon (or the supposed millions who were moved to vote for Trump
only because they saw a “Russian” post online), and to
virtue-signal that you are different from the dumb right-wing patsies
who eat that shit up, than to spend too much time being aware that
the billionaire and corporate and ensconced policy-making ruling
class as a whole — their names are known and plastered in the
headlines — is by definition a predator class, professionally
incapable of mercy, with overwhelming power over the rest of us,
acting in ways that guarantee capitalism and its “ways of life”
will continue burning the planet, literally, until the ecosystem’s
capacity to sustain the present human civilization and population
collapses. Which, speaking in historical lengths, is imminent, and
possibly no longer reversible. Fight this anyway.

To respond to this piece,
complain about the omission of citations to Jack Bratich, Liz
Franczak or Karl Marx, or to remind Nicholas Levis that he ought to
follow his own advice, write to N24CP2020@gmail.com. (wat een maffe toevoeging!! waarom heeft CoutnerPunch dit niet voor publicatie overlegd met Levis??)

=======================================

Zie ook:

‘9/11 werd mede georganiseerd door Israël‘ 

‘Opname van 100 kinderen en andere kwetsbare mensen is een schandelijke doek voor het bloeden (en dat op de herdenking van 9/11)‘ 

‘Echte democratie is onbestaanbaar zolang de reguliere media de bevolking manipuleren met fake news, andere leugens en (neoliberale) propaganda‘ 

‘VS propagandamachine onder de loep genomen door schrijver Nick Schou‘ 

‘‘Respectabele burgers’ vs. samenzweringstheoretici‘ 

‘De onderbroekbom-leugen ten behoeve van onveilige body scanners‘

Voor meer berichten over complottheorie, Irak, 911, Bush, Cheney en/of Blix, klik op het betreffende label, direct onder dit bericht.