Blog Watch: The Left, The Right, And The Wrong

Thursday, 3 November 2005, 12:22 am
Opinion: Scoop Blogwatch

You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view. - Bob Dylan

Last July 27, the US State Department very thoughtfully posted a resource tool for journalists and media consumers entitled "How to Identify Misinformation." Though "there are no exact rules" to tell whether a story is true or false, the State Department offers clues. First among them, "Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory?"

Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations.

The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories.

To demonstrate a pattern of falsity, the "counter-misinformation team" provides links to just three of the "many conspiracy theory websites which contain a great deal of unreliable information": Rense.com, Joe Vialls and Conspiracy Planet.

Rense.com boasts that the State Department ranks it "number one," but I find that unwarranted in light of the pattern the State Department establishes in its attempt to discredit the critical study of High Crimes.

Consider its solitary example of 9/11 conspiracy theory: Thierry Meyssan's Pentagon cruise missile. I've written numerous times here what I think of the supposition that something other than Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Regardless of what any of us think, it remains the most divisive wedge issue and energy sink for 9/11 activists. Of course the State Department would draw attention to it, to the neglect of all others. No mention of insider trading, squelched investigations and coincident wargames. The "counter-misinformation team" is trying to proscribe counter-information by accentuating the preposterous. Meyssan's work becomes, in a sense, "approved" conspiracy theory, because it's the only one to receive official recognition. Not only in this State Department publication, but in virtually every mainstream treatment of alternative appraisals of 9/11 the "no plane" theory still takes pride of place. (A similar process is occurring with respect to reports of Katrina "conspiracy theory," in which soft rumours of the levees being blown take precedence over hard analysis of the intentional withholding of aid.)

Two of the three sites singled out by the State Department are, rightly or wrongly, widely perceived as containing anti-semitic bias. Rense.com's enthusiastic support of Ernst Zundel, and its linking to revisionist accounts of his "heroic struggle," may be made in the spirit of idealized libertarianism, but Zundel is a Nazi, and his kampf is not my own. The late Joe Vialls did some very commendable work, particularly his series on the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman murders, but he also tended to see Jews under the bed an awful lot ("Kosher Kerry Cons Christian America", for one mild instance).

What the State Department is doing by holding up these sites - one, Vialls, rather obscure - as exemplars of "conspiracy theory," is to administer a poison pill to contrary analysis. To the poor journalist or media consumer taking cues from the "counter-misinformation team," it will appear as though conspiracy theory has an essential core of anti-semitism. But there's maybe more going on than that.

In the first part of my interview with ritual abuse-mind control survivor Kathleen Sullivan, she made the following observation:

Another interesting factor is that most of the more outspoken disinfo agents present together at conferences that either pander to “conspiracy theorists” and/or to the sector that is pro-Aryan and/or “Patriot.” Not all people in the Patriot movement are pro-Aryan. However, I have learned that most of the mind-control disinfo agents are, privately if not publicly, avowed racists. This would seem to be a rather odd connection, if one did not know that many Aryan organizations and cell groups use “trauma-based mind control” on their members, to ensure their submission and compliance.

I find this fascinating. Sullivan says that the occult-intelligence perpetrators of ritual abuse belong to the Aryan networks, as do those who have claimed leadership of its exposure. This is one of those things that threw me for a cognitive loop when I began discovering this material, which nearly tempted me to pretend the evidence for it didn't exist. (Another one was that many of the self-styled champions of mind control survivors become their lovers and handlers.) These characters, like Fritz Springmeier, Mark Phillips and Ted Gunderson, are either drawn from or pander to the extreme right: the militias, the White Nationalists, and the "Patriot" communities. (Linda Blood, author of The New Satanists, had a WTF? moment in the mid-90s at a ritual and cult abuse conference, to the delight of debunker Evan Harrington: "Blood, who spoke later in the day, protested that she was 'unhappy to be following someone [Marqui] who is pushing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' which she said was anti-Semitic trash. Blood's protest deeply angered some and bewildered others, while about four of Blood's friends clapped in support.")

The conspiratocracy nurtures a false opposition on the far right, to cause gentler hearts across the spectrum to turn away in disgust from inquiring after darker secrets, and perhaps also to provide cover to a pool of low-level functionaries.

And it's no exaggeration to say Nazis are throwing their thought-bombs at us, attempting to make their cause respectable and infiltrate our side and - worse - our minds. On the "White Nationalist" board Stormfront, a recent post from "Free Zundel Now" spoke of success spreading a "stealth article" calling for Bush's impeachment on "forums that ordinarily won't take our kind of subject matter." "Free Zundel Now" tried it on the RI board, and the Nazi spamming was exposed.

From Stormfront's "Celtic Nation," advice on infiltration:

...you have to speak a language they will hear, and speak to what they will hear, and as you said, point out racial realities. The constant drone of Jew bashing will start to turn people off. It does make WN's look like kooks and conspiracy theorists, and hearkens people back to nutty stereotypes of Col. Klink from Hogan's Heroes, and paranoid conspiracy theorists who are mentally off-center.

When I discuss Israel and the Jews, I try to talk of the evils of the state of Israel, and if they are ready for it, introduce more. The fact is that most of what we struggle against is the big picture - the superstructures in place by the Jews in power.

Sometimes Israel means Israel, sometimes Zionist means Zionist. But sometimes it means something else. We need to know this, we need to become sensitive to the sometimes encrypted message, if we are to meet and defeat the true enemy. Because in every instance, Nazi means Nazi.

ENDS

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