The soul of man under Socialism

by Oscar Wilde

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hungerpinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night's unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.

Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material wellbeing of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment.

The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No; a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under these conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.

Under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively realised Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man's personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man s property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. The industry necessary for the making of money is also very demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One's regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be - often is - at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never have.

It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.

Full jobbie, here

"This website is not for you!"

Progressive Independent's.......conversion to class politics? Hmmmmm.

That graphic used to be worded quite differently. Shame the WayBackMachine has been blocked by Progressive Independent's use of Robots.txt.

Odd place.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard Hofstadter

Written before Alex Jones was even born, Hofstader does such a great job of describing "the paranoid style" we can clearly recognise Alex Jones and The Troof Movement in his words.

If....we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
.....
Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three:

First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Uncanny. What a good description of the Conspiracy Theorists of 2010. Watch out for the Jew World Order!!

This part is interesting (I'm thinking of Larry, and many other NWO-believers):

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery.

Chip Berlet - Toxic to Democracy

“Right-wing pundits demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in the audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.”

Read the full text of the body of the report

Not only is this an interesting read on the (far) right, but Berlet suggests a very cogent explanation of conspiracy theory in general. I think he's pretty damn spot on.

Here's the Executive Summary:

Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as the
44th President of the United States the Internet
was seething with lurid conspiracy theories exposing
his alleged subversion and treachery. Among the
many false claims: Obama was not a proper citizen of
the United States (and his election as President
should thus be overturned); he was a secret, fundamentalist
Muslim; he was a tool of the New World
Order in a plot to merge the government of the
United States into a North American Union with
Mexico and Canada.

Hours following a flubbed inaugural oath of
office, the Internet circulated claims that Obama was
not really President of the United States because the
wording of the oath of office had been scrambled by
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. A few
days after the inauguration came a warning that
Obama planned to impose martial law and collect all
guns.

Many of these false claims recall those floated by
right-wing conspiracy theorists in the armed citizens
Militia Movement during the Clinton administration
—allegations that percolated up through the media
and were utilized by Republican political operatives
to hobble the legislative agenda of the Democratic
Party. Assertions that President Clinton assisted drug
smugglers, ran a hit squad that killed his political
enemies, and covered up the assassination of his aide
Vincent Foster first circulated on right-wing alternative
media, spread to right-wing information networks,
and eventually appeared in mainstream
media outlets.

A similar scenario could add to the already
daunting challenges of the Obama administration.
When Obama’s “web-savvy” aides saw “conspiracy
theories building up on the internet,” they staged a
repeat swearing in as “the fastest way to stop the
speculation getting out of control.” Such events illustrate
the power and pervasiveness of conspiracism.

What Richard Hofstadter described as the “paranoid
style” in U.S. right-wing movements derives
from belief in an apocalyptic struggle between “good”
and “evil,” in which demonized enemies are complicit
in a vast insidious plot against the common
good, and against which the conspiracist must heroically
sound the alarm. As seen in the aforementioned
examples, this type of conspiracism can move
easily from the margins to the mainstream.

This study challenges the validity of conspiracy
theory as a form of political analysis, and traces the
roots and dynamics of conspiracism through United
States history. Drawing on his extensive scholarly as
well as popular writing on the topic, author Chip
Berlet shows that the development of modern conspiracismis
rooted in bigotry and that the conspiracist
analytical model itself encourages demonization and
scapegoating of blameless persons and groups. In so
doing, conspiracism also serves to distract society and
its would-be agents of change away from ongoing,
structural causes of social and economic injustices.
Examining various episodes spanning more than 200
years of U.S. history, Toxic to Democracy demonstrates
how conspiracy theories have repeatedly garnered
mass public followings. Throughout, the basic
dynamics of conspiracism remained the same regardless
of the ideological leanings of the conspiracists, or
the (often interchangeable) identity of their targets.

The resurgence of conspiracy theories—on both
the Right and the Left — since the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks, and the tendency for antisemitic
conspiracies to surge during times of financial
crisis, makes the lessons of this study particularly
urgent. What follows is a summary of key findings
from Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracies, Demonization &
Scapegoating:

THE CONSPIRACIST ANALYTICAL
MODEL: TOOLS OF FEAR

The conspiracist narrative is built upon four key

elements, which Berlet calls “tools of fear”:

1) Dualism; 2) Scapegoating; 3) Demonization; and4) Apocalyptic Aggression.

Dualism is an overarching theme or
“metaframe” in which people see the world as divided
into forces of good and evil. Scapegoating is a
process by which a person or group of people are
wrongfully stereotyped as sharing negative traits and
are singled out for blame for causing societal problems,
while the primary source of the problems is
overlooked or absolved of blame. Demonization, a
process through which people target individuals or
groups as the embodiment of evil, facilitates scapegoating.
Even the most sincere and well-intentioned
conspiracy theorists contribute to dangerous social
dynamics of demonization and scapegoating.
Apocalypticism, also ametaframe, involves the expectation
that dramatic events are about to unfold during
which a confrontation between good and evil will
change the world forever and reveal hidden truths.
Apocalyptic Aggression occurs when scapegoats are
targeted as enemies of the “common good,” and this
can lead to discrimination and violent acts.

INTERCHANGEABLE
TARGETS/BROAD APPEAL

The way in which the tools of fear are employed
allows for scapegoat targets to change along with
historic circumstances, even as the process by which
these targets are vilified using the “Tools of Fear”
remains the same.

A central motif of the 1950s Red Scare was that
the enemy — communists, both at home and abroad
— threatened the common good. Today Arabs and
Muslims are portrayed in a similar demonizing way
as an alien force conspiring to destroy Western culture
from without and within. It is not that threats do
not exist; it is that these threats are hyperbolized in a
way that harms civil society and weakens homeland
security.

The Christian Right, which in the 1960s mobilized
to battle “Godless Communism,” now battles
“Godless Secular Humanism” which they see as supporting
sinful abortion and gay rights. Since these
views are often wrapped around conspiracist theories
claiming liberal sedition or satanic collaboration, the
ability to resolve disputes through civic compromise
is hobbled.

THE TERROR ATTACKS ON
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 MOVED
CONSPIRACY THEORY TO CENTER
STAGE IN THE UNITED STATES.

Immediately following the attacks, stories began to
circulate about 4,000 Jews being warned to avoid
the twin towers on 9/11. Reporters traced the contention
back to a series of rumors and claims by
unnamed sources that bounced around the Internet,
becoming more elaborate with each retelling. Within
weeks of the 9/11 attacks, some on the Left circulated
claims that government officials were “Guilty for 9-
11.” This has turned into a “9/11 Truth Movement”
where conspiracists debate whether then-President
Bush and Vice President Cheney allowed the attacks
to happen to gain political advantage, or actually
planted explosives to collapse the World Trade Center
and sent amissile into the Pentagon. Outlandish conspiracies
fingering then-Vice President Dick Cheney
and “the neoconservatives” have been injected into
mainstream anti-Iraq War venues and documents.
Sometimes these claims carry the baggage of antisemitism.

CONSPIRACISM’S BIGOTED ROOTS

The roots of contemporary conspiracism can be
traced back more than 200 years to the French
Revolution. Conspiracists claimed the French
Revolution was not due to long simmering public
resentment due to poverty and despotism, but was
orchestrated by the Illuminati, a secret society
evolved from the ranks of Freemasonry, who were
allegedly scheming to turn contented peasants into
violent rebels.

In the early 1900s, the merger of Freemason and
Jewish scapegoats took hold in the United States with
the publication of the influential hoax, entitled the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Protocols
purports to be the minutes of secret meetings of a
Jewish ruling clique conspiring to take over the
world. It incorporates many of the core conspiracist
themes outlined in the Freemason attacks, and overlays
them with antisemitic allegations. A common
conspiracist interpretation of the Protocols is that,
peeling away the layers of the Freemason conspiracy,
past the Illuminati, exposes a rotten Jewish core.
Some contemporary conspiracy theorists directly
mention the Protocols and claim they are an authentic
document. This is easily found on Far Right websites,

especially those affiliated with Neonazis and
Christian Identity. However, mentions of the Protocols
cut across the political spectrum.

RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACISM
In the 1960s the John Birch Society (JBS) and other
Patriot Movement groups peddled the anti-
Freemason ideology from the 1790s, using it to
explain the communist threat. Communists allegedly
were just one guise of the Mason’s Illuminati leadership.
Later the Illuminati were variously said to control
Wall Street, Hillary Clinton, and Dick Cheney. In
terms of public discourse, when the JBS blamed the
secret elites and plutocrats for the vast conspiracy, the
organization was not covertly blaming the Jews.
Instead a favorite theme of the JBS continues to be
that the liberal globalists are planning a New World
Order run by a totalitarian One World Government
through the United Nations. Nonetheless, the JBS
cites books and other works that perpetuate stereotypes
about Jews, banking, and global power.

The right-wing group Populists American takes a
step further toward antisemitism. For this group, the
problem is not all Jews. Rather, its website explains
that the real “enemy of all mankind” is the “Zionist
Jews” who are “not to be confused with other Jews.”
The website then posts the text of the Protocols with a
disclaimer typical of this genre.

Out on the fringes of conspiracism are organized
White supremacist groups and neonazis who are
mad about what they call ZOG: the Zionist
Occupational Government (their name for the U.S.
government in Washington, D.C.). The National
Alliance, Aryan Nations, and Christian Defense
League are White racist groups that cite the Protocols.

LEFT-WING CONSPIRACISM

Contemporary Leftist conspiracism gained a significant
foothold as a response to blows suffered
by social justice movements, starting with the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and
increasing after the 1968 assassinations of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F.
Kennedy. Conspiracism percolated at the margins of
the Political Left until the mid 1980s. In 1986 the liberal
Christic Institute filed a lawsuit, Avirgan v. Hull
(known in the popular press as the La Penca bombing
case), which unwittingly helped pull at the seam of
what would soon unravel into the Iran-Contra scandal.
The Christic Institute charges originally concerned
a series of allegations of CIA misconduct
involving covert action and gunrunning in Central
America to assist the overthrow of the socialist
Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Christic soon
wrapped the case in conspiracy stories dating back to
the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War —
diverting attention from the illegal activities of the
Reagan administration. The case was dismissed, but
the conspiracist claims lived on.

TRACKING FROM RIGHT TO LEFT

Leftist conspiracy theories of the ’60s and ’70s
established conspiracism as a form of discourse
and analysis on the Political Left as well as some leftof-
center countercultures, thereby facilitating the
migration of (somewhat sanitized) right-wing conspiracy
theories from Right to Left.

In its signature Avirgan v. Hull lawsuit (mentioned
above) the left-leaning Christic Institute incorporated
the central, conspiracist claims of The Secret
Team, a book by right-wing populist L. Fletcher
Prouty. Christic’s investigators maintained back
channel communications with right-wing groups
known to purvey antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Christic inadvertently took conspiracy allegations
rooted in the Protocols, sanitized the antisemitic references,
and peddled the results to the Political Left
and gullible liberal funders.

The 9/11 conspiracy theory alleging 4,000 Jews
were warned of the attacks is a clear case of antisemitic
conspiracism peddled by certain Political Right groups
as a recruitment tool. Their ultimate goal is mobilizing
people to oppose progressive social and economic justice
campaigns by targeting vulnerable communities as
scapegoats. The progressive version of the 9/11 conspiracy
generally avoids blatant antisemitic references.
Some on the Left, however, picked up phrases such as
“international bankers,” “globalist elites,” “secret government,”
“international bankers,” and “banksters,”
that historically have been used as coded references to
alleged Jewish power.While their target was Bush and
Cheney, the accusations and catchphrases employed
were laden with antisemitic bigotry.

SEEMINGLY UNBIGOTED
CONSPIRACISM ENCOURAGES
SCAPEGOATING AND DEMONIZATION

While some theories reject overt bigotry, as in
the main branch of the “9/11 Truth

Movement,” they fail to appreciate that the analytical
model of conspiracy thinking normalizes the
process of demonizing a scapegoated group. Once
researchers embrace the conspiracist mindset in
which a vast global conspiracy is effectively an analog
of the allegations about conniving secret elites
found in the Protocols, the step from a Secret Team
to a Secret Jewish Team is a very small one. Even
when conspiracist theories do not center on Jews,
homosexuals, people of color, immigrants, or other
scapegoated groups, they still create an environment
where racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia,
homophobia, and other forms of prejudice,
bigotry, and oppression can flourish.

GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACISM:
COUNTERSUBVERSION

Conspiracy theories are not confined to the margins
of the political spectrum. Conspiracist theories
have been used by governments to preserve the
status quo against those they characterized as subversive
alien outsiders and their sympathizers.
Countersubversive conspiracy theories can be utilized
by governments to build mass support for the
surveillance, disruption, and crushing of dissident
social and political movements in the U.S., as was
done during the McCarthy era and again with the
backlash against the social justice movements of the
1960s and ’70s. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, anticommunists
both inside and outside government
moved away from conspiracy theories about global
communist subversion and embraced a new target—
terrorists. These conspiracy-based fears are present
in hardline U.S. foreign and domestic counterterrorism
policies that undermine First, Fourth, and
Fourteenth Amendment protections for dissidents
and religious and ethnic minorities whose views
span the political spectrum. This could have potentially
far ranging implications for how the United
States prosecutes the “war on terror” abroad. Antiterrorism
policies based in hyperbolic conspiracy theories
reduce the effectiveness of homeland security.

THE (IL)LOGIC OF CONSPIRACISM

Conspiracism is neither a healthy expression of
skepticism nor a valid form of criticism; rather it
is a belief system that refuses to obey the rules of
logic. These theories operate from a pre-existing
premise of a conspiracy based upon careless collection
of facts and flawed assumptions. What constitutes
“proof” for a conspiracist is often more accurately
described as circumstance, rumor, and hearsay;
and the allegations often use the tools of fear—dualism,
demonization, scapegoating, and aggressively
apocalyptic stories—which all too often are commandeered
by demagogues.

Thus conspiracism must be confronted as a
flawed analytical model, rather than a legitimate
mode of criticism of inequitable systems, structures,
and institutions of power. Conspiracism is nearly
always a distraction from the work of uprooting hierarchies
of unfair power and privilege.

CONSPIRACISM IS PERILOUS
TO IGNORE

Conspiracist theories are attractive in part because
they start with a grain of truth embedded in preexisting
societal beliefs.

Conspiracy theorists are correct about one thing:
the status quo is not acceptable. Conspiracists have
accurately understood that there are inequalities of
power and privilege in the world—and threats to the
world itself—that need to be rectified. What conspiracy
theorists lack is the desire or ability to follow the
basic rules of logic and investigative research.
Conspiracy theories spotlight lots of fascinating questions—
but they seldom illuminate meaningful
answers.

While conspiracists tell compelling stories, they
frequently create dangerous conditions as these
stories can draw from pre-existing stereotypes and
prejudices. Cynical movement leaders then can
hyperbolize false claims in a way that mobilizes dangerous
forms of demonization and scapegoating.
People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes
act on those irrational beliefs, and this has
concrete consequences in the real world. Angry allegations
can quickly turn into aggression and
violence targeting scapegoated groups.
Conspiracist thinking and scapegoating on a
mass scale are symptoms, not causes, of underlying
societal tensions; and while conspiracism needs to be
opposed, the resolution of the grievances themselves
is necessary to restore a healthy society.
Whether conspiracist claims are circulated by
angry populists or anxious government officials, the
dynamics generated by conspiracy theories are toxic
to democracy.

Alex Jones - Part 38

Here's a good description of Alex Jones, written by Michelle Goldberg:

.....Jones’s roots are very much on the far right. He represents an old strain of American conservatism--isolationist, anti-Wall Street, paranoid about elite conspiracies--that last flowered during the John Birch Society’s heyday. He began his radio broadcasting career in 1996, in his early twenties, with the Austin-based show "The Final Edition," which promulgated all sorts of black-helicopter theories about Bill Clinton. Steeped in the rhetoric of the militia movement, he’s long been a champion of Randy Weaver, the white supremacist whose wife and son were killed in 1992 by federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
.....
On March 15, Jones released a documentary called The Obama Deception....... [a]rguing that Obama is the front man for an oligarchy working to create a planetary totalitarian state, it is like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion stripped of any reference to Jews.
LINK

Spot on?

Randy Weaver, white supremacist? Here's Infowars reporting a story about how Alex Jones helped promote Randy Weaver involvement with the Ed and Elaine Brown standoff thing:

Alex Jones.....first publicized Weaver's willingness to travel during an interview on his show Tuesday.

"He said, 'I'd like to go support those people to draw attention to that,' " Jones said in a phone interview yesterday. "Next thing I heard, he is on his way up to the property, and I'm really excited about it because I want to get as much attention to this nationally as I can."
LINK

Ron Paul and Bill Johnson (Who he?)

I missed this at the time, but worth recounting.

First of all, Who is Bill Johnson?

Judicial candidate's racial separatist past exposed
May 1, 2008 | 9:25 pm

It just goes to show what can happen if you don't pay attention to judicial elections. Los Angeles voters could unwittingly end up electing white separatist Bill Johnson to the court.
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Bill Johnson, a white separatist?

Johnson wrote a 1989 book, under the name James O. Pace, called "Amendment to the Constitution," backing what became known as the Pace Amendment. Here it is, in part:

No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.

And what's Bill Johnson's relationship to Ron Paul?

Follow-Up on Bill Johnson

New updates on the Bill Johnson scandal. It seems as though Ron Paul was close enough to Johnson to host a fund raiser at his house last September. Admission for the event was completely sold out, at $2,000 a person. Good lord! Someone should submit that story to Digg. Of all the venues where they could have held their fund raiser, it seems that Ron Paul was unlucky enough to host it at the home of a known white supremacist. Whoops! This of course forces the question... exactly how much money did Bill Johnson help raise for Ron Paul?
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Alex Jones, Ted Pike, and a bunch of nazis.

Why do all the same people keep cropping up?

Because they share something - ideas - goals - a worldview: ideology.

Here's Alex Jones talking with "The Reverend Ted Pike" --- notice the imagery? Seemingly one might suspect Pike and Jones must be warning of fascism - particularly nazism.



The video is uninteresting, Pike is clearly a nut. It's the same old crap. I post it for reference only - it's an example of Alex Jones' promotion of Reverend Pike......and it clearly illustrates how twisted and plain fucked-up Alex Jones, Pike and their audiences political worldview is/are.

Simply - Alex Jones supports Pike, and Pike and Alex are closely affiliated with a range of anti-semitic and fascist agencies. Jones and Pike are part of the far-right propganda and organisational network.

It's undeniable. Here's the real low-down on our pious Reverend Pike:

Ted Pike/National Prayer Network - Affiliations

Pike maintains a broad-based network of anti-Semitic, white supremacist and conspiracy-theory oriented affiliations to broadcast his anti-Semitic message. Pike has given numerous interviews to anti-Semitic and racist radio and television hosts. For example, he has made appearances on the Internet radio show run by Daryl Bradford Smith, an American living in France who publishes articles on his Website that name "Zionists" as the "masterminds” of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

He has been a guest on the Tennessee-based radio show, "The Political Cesspool," on which neo-Nazis and white supremacists regularly appear. Additionally, Pike has appeared on conspiracy-oriented Internet radio shows that often feature anti-Semites and extremists, including the “Jeff Rense Program,” and former Michigan militia figure John Stadtmiller’s “National Intel Report.” Pike has also appeared on “Current Issues,” a weekly cable television show hosted by Palestinian-American Hesham Tillawi, which regularly features Holocaust deniers and white supremacists.



Pike has a long-standing affiliation with American Free Press (AFP), an anti-Semitic conspiracy-oriented newspaper that prints articles written by Holocaust deniers, racists, and conspiracy theorists and promotes groups, events, books, videos, and individuals espousing such ideologies and theories. Willis Carto, AFP’s publisher, founded the now-defunct Liberty Lobby, an anti-Semitic propaganda organization, and also currently publishes The Barnes Review, a Holocaust denial magazine.

Pike is an AFP staff member, having served on its Western Regional Bureau since the Regional and International Bureaus were formed on October 29, 2001. He continues to serve on staff with several anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists, and Holocaust deniers including Mark Glenn, an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, AFP writer who authored a pamphlet blaming Israel for the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2001 anthrax mailings and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Pike also serves with George Kadar, an AFP reporter, associate of white supremacist David Duke, and active participant in the white supremacist Stormfront Internet forum. Another problematic figure that has served alongside Pike on the AFP Bureaus is Eustace Mullins, a prolific anti-Jewish propagandist.

AFP printed one of Pike’s articles in its first issue in August 2001. In that same issue, the newspaper advertised Pike’s video entitled Hate Laws: Making Criminals of Christians, which premiered at a conference run by The Barnes Review. In addition to AFP reprinting and promoting Pike’s works, Pike authored an article “exclusive to AFP” in its November 5, 2001, issue. Michael Collins Piper, an anti-Semitic AFP writer, authored a praiseworthy review of Pike’s 2003 anti-Semitic video Why The Mid-East Bleeds, in the April 7, 2003 issue of AFP.

Pike provides a link to AFP’s Website on the National Prayer Network (NPN) Website’s “Links” section. Pike also links the NPN Website to various other extremist Websites “as sources of further information concerning the thread of Zionist control.” These include links to Daryl Bradford Smith's site and to the site of Criminal Politics, a virulently anti-Semitic, conspiracy-oriented publication. He also “strongly recommends” visiting Web sites such as those belonging to the Arizona-based anti-Semitic group We Hold These Truths, the virulently anti-gay group Repent America, and Texe Marrs, a conspiracy theorist with a record of anti-Semitism.

Just as Pike affiliates himself with the radio shows, cable TV shows, and newspapers of a variety of extremists, so too do extremists often post Pike’s articles and sell his videos on their own Websites. In July 2006, the now-defunct neo-Nazi National Vanguard Website featured an article, co-authored by Pike and its own staff, which claimed that Jews are plotting to control the content on the Internet and that Jewish-run telecommunication companies want to initiate policies that would favor Jews and other “protected minorities” over other groups. Numerous other extremist individuals and groups have posted his materials on-line, including conspiracy theorist Jeff Rense; Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel; white supremacist David Duke; the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network; the virulently anti-Semitic Websites Jew Watch and Ziopedia; Western Voices World News, the news Website of the neo-Nazi European Americans United; the neo-Nazi National Alliance; and the Yahoo group of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.

Extremists have utilized Pike’s work in other ways. In 2005, the neo-Nazi National Vanguard produced an eight-part DVD entitled, The Dark Side of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, filled with anti-Semitic propaganda. Included in the DVD was Pike’s anti-Semitic 2000 video entitled Hate Laws: Making Criminals of Christians.

When Pike produced The Other Israel (1987), a professionally made, anti-Semitic video, Louisiana white supremacist James K. Warner and the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial organization, offered it for sale. Though 20 years old, anti-Semitic individuals, groups, and Websites still promote and/or sell Pike’s video, including Holocaust denier Mark Farrell, Texe Marrs, the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and Ziopedia.
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These are all sources close to the heart of 911 Troof. Indeed - 911 Troof looks like "a project" these guys run. To what purpose? Well, look at the nexus of the beliefs and the agencies pushing them? Anti-semitic and fascist/nazi. That's the locus. 911 Troof hasn't even noticed - let alone does it try to denounce and remove these elements. 911 Troof has shown itself incapable of resisting the ideological gravitational pull which anti-semitism and fascism have clearly exerted upon it. Hence Troof.....not Truth. There's a real relationship between anti-semitism, fascism and Truth becoming Troof.

BTW - in addition to what is mentioned above, Pike also has a column at David Duke's "WhiteRights" website.

Alex doesn't mention this to his viewers when fawning over Pike. Instead Pike and Jones wave a great warning flag against 'the rising spectre of nazism.'

Yet notice - they are *not* raising their voices against their own friends and colleagues and fellow-travellers whom are clearly closely identified with genuine fascism. No - instead they point to liberals and democrats as being the source of this supposed critical threat of fascism. Even as they hide the genuine fascism within their own ranks.

And now, of course, they have a whole army of delusional blackshirted internet dweebs (such as Troofers) shouting "FREEDOM!" as they jackboot their way about. Great.