S
seekingObjectivity
Guest
I read an interesting article in New Yorker's October 16, 2006 issue featuring the idea of how certain conspiracy theories are able to become news. Unfortunately, Nicholas Lemann, the author, sidesteps the reality of the issue by more or less poking fun at those individuals that take such so-called "conspiracies" seriously. In fact, on the first page of the article is a cartoon, reminiscient of a schizoid's delusional thinking, of how any "suspicious" event can be connected to any other "suspicious" event that effectively taints theories developed by the sane use of logically cohesive reason. Of course, this is not really "news" to the members of this forum as we know all too well the presence of certain "forces" that seek to keep Truth at bay by substituting lies that appear to be "logically cohesive" to those without the apparent capacity of discriminating truth from non-truth, thus, maintaining the "mind of the masses" in a state of judicious incoherence perpetuating external conflict via well disuised internal processive "glitches." I am curious if one of us were to write a letter to the New Yorker confronting them with the massive amounts of well analyzed, cohesive material that did, indeed, represent evidence contrary to "popular" belief that there exists a rational/sane explanation for the presence of such "crazy" theories. Though I have not read enough of New Yorker's articles to ascertain the direction of their "spin", it would nevertheless be interesting to gauge their response to such a letter to see if they are open-minded enough to allow such an idea to be published within the public domain. Is anyone willing to give it a go?
The following is an excerpt of the article (more, though not all of it, may be found here http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_lemann):
" 'On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country,' President Bush declared nine days after the 2001 attacks, during an address to a joint session of Congress which may turn out to be the high-water mark of his Presidency. Not only was September 11th the first major attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor; it was a blow struck to the heart of the country's major centers of finance and government, with total surprise, by a shadowy opponent not susceptible to direct counterattack. It is hard to think of any event in our national life at once so devastating and so puzzling since the assassination of President Kennedy.
Bush quickly, and evidently correctly, identified Al Qaeda as the party responsible for the attacks on the United States, but he chose to present the nation with a different, more mysterious enemy: a broad category of terrorists, people scattered all over the world who 'hate our freedoms' and want to 'disrupt and end a way of life.' These were resonant and inspiring phrases, and they framed the national situation, plausibly enough for people not to notice that it was being framed, as one in which untold numbers of unseen enemies were engaged in an ongoing and highly effective conspiracy to do us terrible harm.
That already seems like a long time ago. Since then, the United States has not had another major terrorist attack, but the road from September 11th led first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq. The logic of the connection between September 11th and the American conquest and occupation of Iraq has been obliterated, and a series of other justifications for the war, starting with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, have also dematerialized. The conspiracy against America that Bush announced five years ago forms a kind of matched set with the conviction, widely held at least by those who don't like Bush and his policies, that the Administration conspired to use the September 11th attacks to launch an unrelated and unnecessary military adventure, whose prosecution has entailed so many dark doings--secret imprisonment, torture--that the war in Iraq looks like a tactical plot contained within a strategic plot.
In 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' published forty years ago in the wake of Barry Goldwater's crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election, Richard Hofstadter, the mid-century historian who was one of the country's leading intellectuals, identified politics that focusses on a "hostile and conspiratorial world" that is "directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life" as being at that moment mainly a phenomenon of the right, which felt that its country had been taken away forever. Now Gold-water no longer looks like a vestigial political figure, the right is in power in Washington, and the paranoid style dwells as much, or more, on the left. Hofstadter also saw the sort of American mind that is drawn to the idea of powerful hidden forces as being inclined to locate them somewhere outside politics. Today, much of the proliferating conversation about malign forces portrays them as operating from the top down, rather than from the outside in: the United States government isn't their target; it's their home........."
The following is an excerpt of the article (more, though not all of it, may be found here http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_lemann):
" 'On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country,' President Bush declared nine days after the 2001 attacks, during an address to a joint session of Congress which may turn out to be the high-water mark of his Presidency. Not only was September 11th the first major attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor; it was a blow struck to the heart of the country's major centers of finance and government, with total surprise, by a shadowy opponent not susceptible to direct counterattack. It is hard to think of any event in our national life at once so devastating and so puzzling since the assassination of President Kennedy.
Bush quickly, and evidently correctly, identified Al Qaeda as the party responsible for the attacks on the United States, but he chose to present the nation with a different, more mysterious enemy: a broad category of terrorists, people scattered all over the world who 'hate our freedoms' and want to 'disrupt and end a way of life.' These were resonant and inspiring phrases, and they framed the national situation, plausibly enough for people not to notice that it was being framed, as one in which untold numbers of unseen enemies were engaged in an ongoing and highly effective conspiracy to do us terrible harm.
That already seems like a long time ago. Since then, the United States has not had another major terrorist attack, but the road from September 11th led first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq. The logic of the connection between September 11th and the American conquest and occupation of Iraq has been obliterated, and a series of other justifications for the war, starting with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, have also dematerialized. The conspiracy against America that Bush announced five years ago forms a kind of matched set with the conviction, widely held at least by those who don't like Bush and his policies, that the Administration conspired to use the September 11th attacks to launch an unrelated and unnecessary military adventure, whose prosecution has entailed so many dark doings--secret imprisonment, torture--that the war in Iraq looks like a tactical plot contained within a strategic plot.
In 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' published forty years ago in the wake of Barry Goldwater's crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election, Richard Hofstadter, the mid-century historian who was one of the country's leading intellectuals, identified politics that focusses on a "hostile and conspiratorial world" that is "directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life" as being at that moment mainly a phenomenon of the right, which felt that its country had been taken away forever. Now Gold-water no longer looks like a vestigial political figure, the right is in power in Washington, and the paranoid style dwells as much, or more, on the left. Hofstadter also saw the sort of American mind that is drawn to the idea of powerful hidden forces as being inclined to locate them somewhere outside politics. Today, much of the proliferating conversation about malign forces portrays them as operating from the top down, rather than from the outside in: the United States government isn't their target; it's their home........."
