February 14, 2010
Conspiracy Culture and the Tendency Toward Luciferian Anarchy
Link to What is Human Nature post
Link to Mysticism and Freedom post
Link to What is History post
Link to gnostic atheism post
Link to Conspiracy Culture and Musicians
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=gadsden+flag+revolutionary+history&btnG=Google+Search
Claremont Institute – A Flag of Conviction
Ron Paul and Glenn Beck on Gadsden Flag
Metallica – Don’t Tread on Me
Terence Mckenna – Culture is not your friend
Terence McKenna – Conspiracy Theory
Terence McKenna – Thank God for Jefferson and the Constitution
Noam Chomsky answers audience questions about the CIA and other topics
Chomsky Hatred of Democracy
Chomsky Fear of Democracy
Noam Chomsky – Enlightenment Principles
quote chomsky on anarchism and historical universals
Quote From:
Our History of Conspiracy Theories – National Geographic – American Conspiracy Articles
“Collectively, their accusations form a meta-narrative in which official sources cannot be trusted, and in which nothing ever seems to happen by chance.”
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“Our societal attraction to conspiracy theories is evidenced by a 2007 national poll carried out by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University. The poll indicated that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that federal government officials may have chosen to ignore advance warnings of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and 81 percent believed that it was “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that oil companies conspired to keep the price of gasoline high. Thirty-seven percent believed that flying saucers might be real and that the government was hiding the truth about them, while 42 percent suspected that government officials might have had prior knowledge that President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in 1963.”None of this is completely new. As University of Utah historian Robert Goldberg notes in an essay in the 2003 book, Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia, Americans struggling to survive in a new land early on saw themselves as being beset by enemies, both real and imagined. One of the first manifestations was the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, triggered by Massachusetts colonists’ belief that members of a coven had entered with Satan into a diabolical plot to drive out the Christian religion from the new land. In the late 1700s, the American Revolution was fueled in part by a belief that the British government was plotting to systematically enslave the colonists, some of whom harbored an even darker suspicion that King George III actually was the Antichrist predicted in the biblical book of Revelation in part because the numerical conversions of Greek and Hebrew translations of the phrase “royal supremacy in Great Britain” totaled 666.
As the nation grew, so did its suspicions. In the early 1800s, the Freemasons, who were rumored to have murdered an ex-member to conceal their nefarious doings, and the Roman Catholic Church, suspected of plotting to use Irish Catholic immigrant votes to take over the U.S. government, came under scrutiny, while by the century’s end, the Populist party was fingering Wall Street and big banks of engaging in “a vast conspiracy against mankind.” In the 1920s, industrialist Henry Ford decided that the Jews actually were culpable, and published articles and a book accusing them of everything from secretly backing communism to fixing baseball games. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, some Americans found it suspicious that U.S. aircraft carriers were safely at sea that day, and decided that President Roosevelt had allowed the attack to happen so he would have an excuse to enter World War II. In the 1950s, the John Birch Society and Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, among others, proclaimed that the U.S. government had been infiltrated by vast numbers of communist agents. Others argued that the fluoridation of drinking water, ostensibly to prevent tooth decay, actually was a Soviet plot to physically and/or mentally weaken the American public, so they would be unable to resist a future communist takeover.
American conspiracism grew even more explosively over the last half of the 20th Century. Perhaps the greatest single impetus was the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In their grief, many Americans found it difficult to believe that a single, disgruntled assassin was responsible, and the Warren Commission’s release of vast amounts of physical evidence and testimony, intended to calm suspicions, only fueled them. “The big mistake was publishing 26 volumes of evidence, which had a lot in it that didn’t substantiate the report,” Paul Hoch, publisher of the Echoes of Conspiracy newsletter, once explained. “Anyone could shell out $80 and get all the material and look at it.” JFK assasinologists pounced upon the inevitable inconsistencies and unexplained details, using them as raw material for myriad theories, ranging from the second gunman scenario to speculation that official culprit Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. secret agent—or a KGB double-agent. Others posited the involvement of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro or the Mafia.
Even a subsequent Congressional reopening of the JFK investigation in the 1970s didn’t stop the public fascination with conspiracies. Partly to blame, no doubt, were discomforting revelations of other actual, verifiable government cabals, such as Watergate and the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret attempts to develop a mind-control drug. A decade later, the Reagan Administration was caught selling weapons to Iran and using the profits to fund the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government, a scandal that arguably helped make even the craziest accusations seem not quite so implausible. By the 1990s, America had dueling choruses of conspiracy theorists at opposite ends of the political spectrum, with leftists accusing the CIA of having imported and sold crack cocaine, and rightists claiming that Clinton Administration aide Vince Foster—found dead in 1993 of what several official investigations concluded was a self-inflicted gunshot wound—had been murdered to cover up liberal wrongdoing. In the middle, still others warned that both political parties were complicit in a larger plot to impose a “New World Order” and unify the planet under a single international government.”