“A customary way for the elite to deflect criticism is to term it a “conspiracy theory”, which is common across the ideological system. There is a good reason for it. British elites have built a fundamentally secretive political system for which they are minimally accountable to the public. As noted in chapter 13, they believe the public should have only a marginal say in this system outside elections, and – to judge from some of the views expressed in the Scott inquiry – neither do they think the public should even know what the decision-making processes are. Elites are especially keen to deflect criticism exposing how the system works, which is more threatening than criticising specific policies (which can be dismissed as “exceptions”). The term “conspiracy theory” is often deployed once criticism has moved beyond the specific and is closer to exposing how the system as a whole works.
“My view is that “ordinary people” – and I count myself as one of these – generally distrust their sources of information and know, ultimately, not to believe what they read or see. This is partly because ordinary people, in my view, have a much healthier scepticism of those in power than those closer to power or those aspiring to the political class. People have little stake in the elite and therefore have no reason to trust it.” – Mark Curtis
“…beneath the open surface of our society lie connections and relationships of long standing, virtually immune to disclosure, and capable of great crimes, including serial murder….These forces are still with us, and they are not benign.” – Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, pp. 17 and 21.
Peter Dale Scott’s concept of “deep politics” may be more appropriate than “conspiracy theory” to categorize much of what we’ve been discussing here:
“…the investigation of parapolitics, which I defined (with the CIA in mind) as a `system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.’…I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional… it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture’s rational surface. Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of deep politics, all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”
- Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, pp. 6-7
For a concrete example of what he means by “deep politics,” read Deep Politics: Drugs, Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism, a briefing he gave for Congressional staff on July 22, 2005. (It also explains why Kosovan independence is so dear to Western hearts.)
In “JFK, 9/11 and War,” Dale Scott explains related terms such as “deep events”:
“In American history there are two types of event: ordinary events which the information systems of the country can understand and establish. There are also deep events, or meta-events, which the mainstream information systems of the country cannot digest. I mean by a “deep event” an event in which it is clear from the outset that there are aspects which will not be dealt with in the mainstream media, and will be studied only by those so-called “conspiracy theorists” who specialize in deep history.”
And he goes on to define the related concepts of “deep history” and “deep state”:
“If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media. Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and now 9/11. All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.
“When I talk of a deep state, this term (as opposed to others, like deep politics), is not my own invention. It is a translation of the Turkish gizli devlet, or derin devlet, a term used to describe the networks revealed by the so-called Susurluk incident of 1996, when the victims traveling together in what became a deadly car crash were identified as “an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli.” The giveaway was that “Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself.” He was carrying narcotics with him at the time of the crash.”
“… the word “conspiracy” does not do justice to what is, after all, merely a group of people from similar backgrounds with similar goals, all working to a common purpose which is hidden from the world at large by virtue of a Great Wall of wealth, prestige, culture and power. We begin to see that what the rest of us call conspiracy is just business-as-usual for the people who operate above, behind and below what we know as consensus history, consensus reality. I believe the word “conspiracy” is over-used and emotionally-loaded in this context. Let us instead, and rightly, use the word “cabal” to denote this gathering of sinister forces.” – Levenda, A Warm Gun, p. 316
“Some people can’t put their minds around real history, Lisa Pease, of the Real History Archives writes. “They can’t conceive of a world with that much deception. When you wonder how we could have so much false history, recall what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:
The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.
The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.
Such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts. Even explanations would long leave them in doubt and hesitation, and any trifling reason would dispose them to accept a thing as true.
Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.
~ Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
In a TV show about the crash of flight TWA 800, presenter Greta van Susteren asked, “And what about the conspiracy theorists who keep insisting the jet was actually shot down?”
In Into the Buzzsaw, Kristina Borjesson deconstructs van Susteren’s ploy:
With this rhetorical question she shoots down two birds with a single phrase. Because “now she’s telling you to think that anyone who doesn’t buy the government’s unproven theory, anyone who thinks the jet may have been shot down, is a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Tacitly attached to the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ are all kinds of other nouns and adjectives like goofball, nutcake, bottomfeeder…. Using insulting and false labels to marginalize dissenting or politically incorrect voices is a ploy that the government and corporations as well as the press use on a daily basis.
In his foreword to the book, Gore Vidal adds this comment:
Why daily? Certainly because in the real world conspiracies are the rule not the exception…. what on earth is a political party but a conspiracy to appropriate the powers off the state for secret ends like a preemptive war in order to annex oil fields for cronies while awarding contracts to other cronies that specialize in the demolition of cities that other companies will be paid hugely to rebuild?
Luckily, for the conspirators (never fear to use the right word), American consumers are so comfortable dog-paddling in the waters of Lethe that they do not read with any care the lies much less the corrective truths that the authors of this volume have collected at some cost to themselves.
The problem with Chomsky is that he sees capitalism as a monolith. It’s institutions not individuals that matter. So it doesn’t matter to him if Kennedy was assasinated by elements of the government because all capitalists are the same. Same with 9/11. The likelihood that the terrorists were aided and abetted by American officials doesn’t fit his anti-imperialist narrative that the terrorist attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Either he’s dangerously naive or so blinkered by ideology that he can’t see that some capitalists are worse than others. What baffles me about those on the left who eschew conpiracies is that they seem to support the establishment narrative when its legitimacy is seriously questioned.
Notes
Mark Curtis, “Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World,”
http://human-nature.com/reason/01/curtis.html
Lisa Pease, Real History Archives, http://www.webcom.com/lpease/collections.htm
