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NPR: Debunking Conspiracy Theories In 'Voodoo Histories' (6 posts)

1. mark
   Member

   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story...

   No Moon Landing, Jesus Blood line, 9/11 and JFK, among others ...

   mixing the ridiculous with the disinformation and the real in the middle as a shit sandwich. If you believe in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy then you must also believe that the astronomers are all in collusion to coverup the absence of alleged moon landing site debris (at the places the moon landings supposedly happened). Of course, there are enough paranoid gullible people without critical thinking that they fall for any and every claim of conspiracy without bothering to differentiate between those that have some evidence (JFK, MLK, 9/11 foreknowledge) and those that do not (lunatic no moon stories, 9/11 disinformation, etc).

   It's a predictable formula.

   I'm glad I never watched an X-files show (except for "The Lone Gunmen") or read a Dan Brown novel.

   Posted 14 years ago #
2. truthmover
   Administrator

   As you said, very predictable. In fact, it seems like some mainstream left hack demonstrates his paradigm addiction in this way on a monthly basis. Always with the moon landing.

   Posted 14 years ago #
3. truthmod
   Administrator

   We had a couple threads discussing this Aaronovitch guy:

   http://www.truthmove.org/forum/topic/1520?replies=...

   http://www.truthmove.org/forum/topic/1500?replies=...

   I love how all these hit pieces appeal to people's fear of alienation by always offering some obvious cue as to what is "reasonable" and what is "ridiculous." This isn't journalism; these people are telling you WHAT TO THINK in a very devious way.

   Also interesting, on the Reichstag Fire:

   His personal favorite? Aaronovitch says he always liked the conspiracy that Hitler himself set fire to Berlin's Reichstag building in 1933 so that he would have an excuse to suspend civil liberties in Germany.

   Aaronovitch says that while researching the book, he discovered "that the Reichstag was set on fire by the single man who said he did it, said all the way through the trial that he was the only person who did it, and went to his execution saying that he didn’t understand why everyone was trying to say it was the Nazis or the Communists."

   The last word on wikipedia (yeah, not the greatest source) on the controversy is this:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire

   However, new work by two German authors, Bahar and Kugel, has revived the theory that the Nazis were behind the fire. It uses Gestapo archives held in Moscow and only available to researchers since 1990. They argue that the fire was almost certainly started by the Nazis, based on the wealth of circumstantial evidence provided by the archival material. They say that a commando group of at least three and at most ten SA men led by Hans Georg Gewehr set the fire using self-lighting incendiaries and that Van der Lubbe was brought to the scene later.[14] Der Spiegel published a 10-page response to the book, arguing that the thesis that Van der Lubbe acted alone remains the most likely explanation.[15]

   Posted 14 years ago #
4. mark
   Member

   And the "no moon landing" nonsense obscures the fact that Kennedy changed his mind on the moon race and offered to make it an international cooperative effort with the Soviet Union. His speech at the UN on September 20, 1963 is worth reading on this:

   http://www.oilempire.us/moonrace.html

   The "faked space mission" comes in part from a bad Hollywood film "Capricorn One" (which I watched as a kid). And Fox TV ran a special promoting the hoax in Feb. 2001, a month after Bush stole the White House and a month before they ran the "Lone Gunmen" show suggesting a small cabal in the government might crash a commercial plane into the World Trade Center via remote control under the cover of a war game exercise. Glad to know it could never happen for real.

   As for the Reichstag Fire, William Shirer's exhaustive history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich suggests that while Van der Lubbe did try to burn the Reichstag, the Gestapo was in the basement at the same time doing the arson, which parallels 9/11 pretty closely. The perpetrator really wanted to do the crime and was guilty but had (unknowing?) assistance from the State.

   http://www.oilempire.us/reichstag-fire.html

   Posted 14 years ago #
5. truthmod
   Administrator

   http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/02/03/davi...

   "Voodoo Histories": When smart people believe dumb things

   We live a global period, and there’s a huge temptation among people to believe there is a master plan, because otherwise the suggestion is we’re interdependent and the world is chaotic — and that’s a mindfuck.

   There are entire societies where the default position is to believe in conspiracy theories, like in Pakistan or Iran. There are very few people in the Pakistan military, for example, who don’t believe that Bush was behind 9/11. But they're also probably more easily dispelled, especially in places like the U.S. or Britain. Maybe I’m a false optimist, but I think we have a good skeptics’ movement. My book has done quite well in the U.K. I do think there is some appetite amongst the skeptics that we’ve had enough of this shit and it’s time to fight back.

   ---

   We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president. In those circumstances, it’s not surprising that an overarching conspiracy theory emerges. It suggests that somebody is in control, rather than that we’re at the mercy of our neighbors and to some extent of ourselves (as was the case with Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana). It’s the urge to make sense of a particularly traumatic moment.

   ---

   It is deep down a leap of faith, but it doesn't present itself as a leap of faith. It presents itself as not only rational but a better kind of rationality. It’s incredibly important that a conspiracy theory has the appearance of science. The literature on Kennedy is beyond voluminous. It's absolutely enormous. There are vast tomes to suggest that the CIA did it, or other people did. [Conspiracy theorist] David Ray Griffin has come out with a half dozen 9/11 books, and all of them have hundreds of footnotes. They're either to instant news reports that have since been contradicted, or to other conspiracy theories — but the work nevertheless takes on the appearance of scholarliness.

   You deride Naomi Klein's "No War" in the book. Do you think Klein is a conspiracy theorist?

   Her last book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," was essentially a gigantic conspiracy theory book — claiming that chaos is more or less created in order to encourage capitalism. It was a fashionable book, and I think people wanted to buy it because they felt guilty. It was bought by guilty capitalists. It's not like "The Shock Doctrine" was being sold out of baskets hand-woven by hippies.

   Posted 14 years ago #
6. mark
   Member

   Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" book does not mention anything even remotely challenging to the 9/11 official story, nor is there a mention of Peak Oil and how there's not much discussion of this (partially avoidable) disaster in the media.

   These folks would be more believable if they'd conceded that occasionally there are conspiracies to commit crimes, that's why "conspiracy" has a respected place in the legal code.

   I recently listened (not in person) to a presentation by Jefferson Morley about his research into a CIA officer's role in the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Morley claims that the former staff director (Blakey) of that Committee has changed his mind on "who did it" after seeing Morley's documentation and now thinks the CIA was more involved than the Mafia. I don't think that story will be covered by NPR.

   Posted 14 years ago #

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