fROM MY INTRO TO CONSPIRACY THEORY:

Are Conspiracy Theorists the Victims of a Conspiracy?

June 29, 2008

On the Trilateral Commission and the NAU

A Work in Progress Series:

By the Power of One Society

Les Aaron

Intro:

I wonder if the whole idea of framing of those of us with an interest in conspiracies would have resulted in the invention of the term, “conspiracy theorist” by those who are up to their necks in conspiracies and wish to deflect attention from themselves.

Preface:

Let me preface my remarks:

Some time ago, in a kind of Brownian motion familiar to most chemistry students, I discovered that if I were going to get to fundamental underlying truths, I would not be able to escape delving in conspiracy theories or investigating what was available through research on secret societies and their relationship to real time events. In the process, I was framed as a conspiracy theorist even though I seldom give voice to my views.

Why were my views so ardently dismissed as conspiracy theory with all of the pejorative associations? What puzzles me is that the reaction to what I have reported seems intentionally focused and repetitive and far outweighs my findings or comments.

Were there those who were potentially frightened by what an investigator might discover?

And, by the way, what is a “conspiracy theorist?”

According to the Encarta Dictionary, a conspiracy theory is the belief that “event is plot—a belief that a particular event is the result of a secret plot rather than the actions of an individual person or chance.”


My involvement with what many consider to be a near cousin of phrenology or something equally ersatz, unsubstantiated or lacking in credibility, was the result of my attempt to understand what the Bush administration was all about because nothing else I could uncover seemed to fill in all of the blanks.

If anything, most engaged citizens candidly thought that our new resident of the White House was simply inept or inefficient. That never did jibe with my suspicions which were predicated on signposts and associations from the organizations he was party to and his history. In fact, if you look at his performance predicated on some pre-existing agenda, it seemed to me that he was, if anything, uncompromising, absolutist, focused, unyielding and with virtually no peripheral vision.

During the first years of the Bush presidency, I became aware that the agenda of this administration, which was still a mystery to me, had little to do with the care and welfare of the people he was sworn to protect. In fact, it seemed to me, at least, that everything America stood for—from its Constitution to the precepts of the law—and the day to day operating rationale for this government coexisted in two separate, parallel universes.

Bush was unconcerned about the conventional issues of the day; instead, he was intent on his own agenda that seemed to be propelled by some kind of dark matter, an unknown substance that is known only because of its influence on other known matter but yet makes up more than 96% of the Universe. I chronicled in the first several years more than 400 different forms of legislation, policy, and action that seemed incompatible with what the rest of us thought of as priorities with many of them violating Constitutional law or side-stepping what we may have considered to government for the benefit of the people..

It was known that Bush was an oil man through and through.
And while that may have explained much of his behavior, it did not explain it all. It was also known that Bush had a cowboy “Don’t Tread On Me,” mentality and an absolutely unswerving commitment to what he intuited. He was never a ‘deep study’ or a contemplative man; conversely, once he had formulated a thought he was quick to delegate its implementation to others.

Clearly, few of us activists at the time had any understanding of the president and his inner-circle’s intentions or motivations at the time. We tended to write it off as inefficiency, a lack of focus and a failure to grasp the issues of the day. It was none of these things of course that motivated the behavior and actions of this White House.

And our first clue may have been the nonchalance and inattention that were evident in the outcomes after Katrina in New Orleans. Never before had any American president failed to shore up a city as Bush did after extending promise after promise and waiting until the weight of public opinion forced him to take some kind of positive action.

We should have known at that time what we were facing, especially when Bangladesh, the poorest nation on Earth volunteered to help out the richest country in the world, a country that couldn’t afford to bail out a city devastated by a natural phenomenon.




In trying to assess this nebulous “dark matter “ that seemed to define this government, we continued to probe to ask “why” were some of government’s actions approved, executed and implemented. And the larger question became “Why we’re we willing to jettison a system of government that had lasted two hundred years to build, and, at the same time, risk alienating the rest of the world?” What was our operating premise? Why were there all of these inconsistencies between the “compassion” and the deed? What did America stand for in the age of Bush?

These were questions that deserved answers and the media wasn’t providing them. In fact, that had reversed their former role of truth teller and subordinated it to becoming a lever for the Executive to influence the reader in a kind of inversion of the media’s perceived role in way too many situations. Did discovering this truth make us conspiracy theorists? .

Even in the government of Nixon, there was always a part of government that recognized its obligation to the public good, and, at the very least, a rationale for service; not so with the Bush II government. And Nixon never controlled the media as Bush managed to do by using “access” and the FCC, and licensing as “hammers” to keep the media in line..

There had to be a reason for what was happening that seemed so at odds with what we might of suspected of a new president considering the challenges we faced at the time.. And the reason seemed short-term special interests; but this alone didn’t seem to explain it all. I would have to go fishing in another pond for answers.


Moreover, it was also clear that this government did have an agenda, an agenda in fact that resulted in a flood of new legislation. There seemed to be no coherent core to this government aside from self-aggrandisement and perpetuation of its aggressive posture. I looked to the legislation to see if I could find traces that linked back to some kind of ideology, something that was invisible, yet powerful enough to have its own agenda.

What emerged were the following observations:

That legislation at first seemed to be unique and discrete, unconnected to a larger scheme other than control springing out of a right wing orientation. It seemed to be ; that is, until you began to think of it as part of a cohesive plan with strands to preexisting philosophies and ideologies that seemed to have less to do with a democracy than a despotic form of government. What we were beginning to as “policy” seem to emanate from a type of government that condoned aspects of totalitarianism, economic imperialism, corporatism and untrammeled unilateralism that eschewed or ignored those documents that formed the foundation of democratic belief.

If I was on the right track for diagnosing this “dark matter,” I was truly wading in over my head. And was discovering these things painting me as a conspiracy theorist; if so, I had only scratched the surface.

However, none of this could be expressed with certitude but as inferred or implied based on the nature of the legislation that evolved from the Executive power base, grown stronger and more convinced of its mandate than the popular vote would have suggested to any rational being.

Without the benefit of an insider’s perspective, what I conjectured was educated speculation. Again, I was stuck trying to find out who’s cohesive plan was it? And what end did it serve? The answers to these questions gained in importance because they would be helpful in defining a government who’s actions seemed to indicate that democracy’s best days were behind it and that there was a subtle movement to morph democracy into something else, a kind of corporatist elitest, unilateralist form of government reflecting the will of one person rather than the body politic.


I started doing some research but never seemed to be able to get beyond the Neo-con’s focus of exporting American beliefs and methods by force, if necessary. I was like Kafka’s protagonist trying to reach the castle but only finding myself getting further away from my goal with every step.

It seemed to me that the Neo-cons intent was not as stated to export America and democracy as they would have liked to have us believe, but, to, in fact, benefit from economic imperialism under the guise of exporting democracy. Certain wise Arab minds seemed to see America’s new stance as a kind of religiously-motivated Crusade to rid the world of terrorism, where terrorism seemed to be a kind of code word for Islam . No wonder the Islamists were worried. Others, with a democratic bent, saw in the ostensible endorsement of fundamentalism and literal interpretations of the bible along with acceptance of the End of Days scenarios as being literal, as clear indications that this government had veered seriously away from the heart and spirit of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.