It seems to have become one of the most popular ways of ridiculing somebody’s argument or position, calling into question someone’s sanity or even somebody’s right to their very own existence in recent years are “You’re a conspiracy theorist!”, “That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me!” We hear such accusations let fly in TV and radio debates all too often as soon as anyone begins to question a perceived, generally excepted “truth”. The accuser always seems supremely confident that this accusation is enough to immediately put the accused beyond the pale of all human reason and that all participants and viewers of the debate should be expecting men in white coats to arrive at any moment and the accused to be led away in the interests of all for “corrective treatment”.
The definition of conspiracy of the on-line dictionaries insists on the “evil, harmful, bad” side of things. In other words; in the English language, it is impossible to conspire to do good. This is one of the reasons why the accusation of being a conspiracy theorist remains an effective put down as it implies that the accused believes that their government, company bosses and colleagues, military or police commanders, friends and acquaintances or even members of their own family and partaking in secret, evil deeds and plots for harmful ends which have happened or are going to happen and hence at best implies lack of good faith and paranoia and at worst, extreme negativity, treachery; being a fifth columnist. All labels with which most of us would wish not to be tarnished.
Here however are some alternative definitions of “conspiracy theorist”:
- someone who has seen through the bullshit (David Icke);
- someone who questions the statement of known liars (unknown).
It is clearly not possible to see these definitions as morally negative unless we are creators of bullshit or known liars.
Could it be that the time has come for a reappraisal of the definition of the word conspiracy because the following is palpably undeniable. Every development in politics and affairs of state, every war, every campaign within a war, every attack and counter attack, every putsch, every terrorist act, every revolution and even every democratic election manifesto and campaign, every new bill passed, every budget or construction project proposed on a national or local level ad infinitum, throughout human history has been born of human planning, plotting or conspiracy depending upon which side we were or are on or how you view the proposals! Effected to a lesser or greater extent by chance undoubtedly and maybe borne on a current of destiny as well! The latter I will not discuss further here. Not because I dismiss it. Heaven forbid. Simply it is not important for the points I want to make. One of the most important of which is this, in short: our history is littered with and shaped from, not conspiracy theories but conspiracy facts!
One of the earliest and most famous that springs to mind is that of The Trojan Horse. A very cunning plot by the Greeks which broke the stalemate of the long siege of Troy and enabled them to conquer and ransack the city but by the current English definition, a conspiracy only from the point of view of the Trojans as for them it was “bad and harmful” but not for the Greeks. But who amongst us now really sees one side or the other as the “evil” one? So was it a conspiracy or not?
A Nazi soldier gets ready to murder two Soviet Slavic women during Operation Barbarossa, summer 1941. This incident probably took place in the Ukraine or Belarus.
There are times in history, usually more recent history, (examine and discuss) when there seems to have clearly been a good and evil side. One such example I would posit is Operation Barbarossa. Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union! While this was of course a life saving event for Great Britain, even the most diehard anti communist must surely see that the invasion of Nazi forces into the USSR was unequivocally bad and harmful for the peoples of that empire as it promised no liberation at all; only abject slavery or total oblivion whatever their position in Soviet society. It was clearly planned or plotted in advance but according to the English language, it was only a conspiracy from the point of view of the peoples of the USSR and the Soviet government, not from the point of view of Nazi Germany and her allies as they perceived that attack as beneficial to them at the time which, of course, is why they contrived and went ahead with it.
What about Operation Overlord- The Normandy landings or D-Day? This massive military undertaking was literally years in the planning or plotting. Was it a conspiracy? According to the current English definition, only for the rulers of Nazi Germany as it can be argued that it was actually beneficial even for most Germans not actively involved in the Nazi hierarchy as it lead to their liberation as well as to that of the other nations of western Europe. In spite of this, the German army fought like tigers on the western front to the bitter end but I digress. I will however be returning to the D Day landings a little later for reasons that will become clear.
Surely therefore, it is obviously undeniable that the accusation of being a conspiracy theorist is in fact totally subjective and because of that, totally spurious from an objective, truth seeking point of view concerning any, as yet, unsolved or disputed events in human history or actuality and hence it follows that those using this accusation to discredit the ideas or theories of others have an agenda for doing so. This agenda maybe conscious or subconscious but it is always there.
The purpose of this article is neither to prove or disprove any famous conspiracy theories and, although I, like anybody else, have my own ideas and suspicions, I am not putting them forward here. What I am putting forward here is the fact that if you hear someone publicly dismissing somebody else’s ideas as conspiracy theories and especially if the “dismisser” is a western journalist, government spokesperson or a politician they are trying to prevent you thinking about something by ridiculing you into not delving further.. The unconscious agenda of such accusers I mentioned earlier is the cognitive dissonance caused when presented with information that contradicts long held and emotionally charged beliefs. The conscious agenda is of course blatant lying in order to cover up the truth.
Let us look at a concrete example. In Toronto Canada there is a high profile televised political discussion called the Munk Debate. Here is the link to the particular episode I’m going to concentrate on. The motion proposed on this occasion was “Be it resolved, The West should engage, not isolate Russia”.
As you can see this motion assumes that Russia is somehow wrong and the only question is how best to deal with Russia’s wrongness. Given this obvious slant from the beginning the pro team of Vladimir Pozner and Stephen F. Cohen did a reasonable job but were unable to fend off the barrage of 100% truth inversions (all of which conforming to the strictly controlled and censored Canadian mass media slant) from the rabid, foaming at the mouth, jumping up & down, Jihadi anti- Putin and Russia team of Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov. At around the 16th minute Applebaum starts to speak about the Kremlin’s “massive” investment in their multi-language media “disinformation machine” including RT television.
At around 17.12 minutes in this recording she then states that “When Malaysian airliner MH17 was shot down by a “Russian missile” over Ukraine this media machine immediately came up with all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories such as planes taking off already full of dead people” and explains that this is done deliberately by Russia and only by Russia in order to cloud people’s minds until “they” don’t know what to think any more. Well! Sure! Planes taking off full of dead people does sound pretty crazy doesn’t it. I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that one actually but let’s look more closely at what she said before coming back to that. How many conspiracy theories does she mention? One? Well, I count three and a half. The above mentioned plus two and a half more. The statement that Russian media is disinformation is also a conspiracy theory as is the position that they alone came up with all these conspiracy theories. Many of them are proposed and published by westerners.
The accusation that MH17 was shot down by a Russian missile is also a conspiracy theory as well as propaganda because all weapons at that time on both sides were either Russian made or Soviet made. Who is using them, how and why is the pertinent question which the western media always seeks to obfuscate. And yes, well, okay, true. I admit that the last sentence I’ve just written is another conspiracy theory at least for some of you. Are you beginning to see how deep the rabbit hole goes and how ridiculous the allegation of conspiracy theorist is under any circumstances?
Fact. The “official” version of 9/11 is every bit as much a conspiracy theory as all the others!
Especially as it has proved impossible to prove over the years and seems indeed, ever easier to disprove. When governments and the mainstream media tell us a version of events after a terrorist act or invasion or murder etc they then accuse anybody who voices doubts or proposes another version of events of being conspiracy theorists but the governments and main stream media are themselves conspiracy theorists until, I repeat, there emerges incontrovertible proof and evidence to confirm one of the conspiracy theories as the conspiracy fact.
Back to Applebaum’s “planes taking off full of dead people”. When I first heard that one I was literally seething at the sheer stupidity of such an insane theory being voiced almost immediately after the disaster. At the time I was still only just emerging from an umbilically wet, comforting “womb warmth” world where our western governments were working for our best interests but were just rather incompetent at doing it. In the immediate aftermath of that tragedy I reluctantly assumed that the self defense forces had mistaken it for a US backed Kiev bomber or that a guided missile had locked on to the airliner by error or evil destiny. After all at the time, they were being attacked by the air-force of the US installed Kiev government everyday and, in spite of having no aircraft themselves had been increasingly successful in downing their attackers.
Then came the immediate barrage of western press headlines. From Britain for example: The Sun: PUTIN’S MISSILE and PUTIN’S LOOTERS ROB BRIT VICTIM The Daily Mail: PUTIN’S KILLED MY SON The Daily Mirror: PUTIN’S VICTIMS to name but a few.
US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the US had proof of exactly what kind of missile was used and where it was fired from. He stated, as reported by The Guardian, that “all the evidence surrounding the downed Malaysian airlines flight MH17 points towards pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine being to blame.” Well. All those newspaper headlines are simply conspiracy theories and as it turns out, more insane than the dead-bodies-taking-off idea.
While Kerry’s accusations could have seemed feasible at the time, the fact that not one jot of “all that evidence” has been made public twenty two months later reduces his words to a conspiracy theory too. The headlines are totally insane because of the lack of motive. The fact is, after taking into account the ill fated crew and passengers of MH17 and their families, loved ones and friends there is simply not one human being on earth out of all seven billion of us who had less motive to get involved in shooting down a passenger plane anywhere in the world, let alone over Eastern Ukraine than Russian president Vladimir Putin and his government followed by The Donetsk Republic’s armed forces who were and are fighting at home, on their own land for their very existence.
In the shock of the immediate aftermath, European governments some of whom had been resisting US pressure to impose sanctions on Russia as punishment for having saved Crimea, at the behest of Crimeans, from invasion by ultra racist Ukrainian US backed rebels bent on their eradication one way or another, caved in and sanctions were imposed. Anyone placing themselves in the position of detective would see straight away, that the new Ukrainian government had massive motive for and massive profit to gain from MH17’s downing if it could be pinned on Russia, followed by those governments who had plotted and helped the coup in Kiev -the US, UK, Dutch, Polish, Swedish and EU baron’s to name the main players. That in itself is of course not proof that they were complicit but it would be one of the areas where any real investigation would concentrate a lot of effort and inquiry.
In the Munk Debate, broadcast on the 11thApril 2015, more than eight months after the tragedy, Applebaum is careful to avoid pointing the blame specifically at Putin personally while using language that generally insinuates instead. Could it just be that legal advice has something to do with that. Another video, which judging by its title indicates that she “apparently” knew all the details of what happened,seems to have disappeared completely from the net: “Anne Applebaum: MH17 attack | what happened. How it happened and who was responsible.” If anybody saw it or has a transcript it would be great to know what she actually said here.
Meanwhile as more and more theories as to how this tragedy occurred were coming forth , spurred on by the lack of any evidence being made public, including the content of the black boxes, some aspects of the plane full of already dead people theory were beginning to seem, well, just slightly less insane. On March 8th 2014 Malaysian airlines flight MH370 disappeared on route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It’s fate remains a mystery to this day. Such a story is the very oxygen of conspiracy theorists, some well intentioned and some undoubtedly less so and the internet and You Tube is not lacking in explanations. Many posit the idea that the plane was hi-jacked to the closed US military island base of Diago Garcia and many, made and published before the downing of MH17 and all those I saw, none of which were made by Russians or the Russian media, predict that this missing plane would turn up being used in a future false flag event.
After the downing of MH17, it didn’t take long for the idea to gain circulation that it was in fact the missing MH370 and that it had been transported to Donbass and blown up on the ground maybe with the preserved bodies of the ill fated passengers of MH370 inside or that it had even taken off from Amsterdam with the bodies inside etc! Well dear reader, maybe you, like me find all these theories pretty far fetched if not ridiculous or maybe in very bad taste. The fact however is that neither you nor I can absolutely rule them out no matter how far fetched they seem because there is a small window of possibility. The US and her allies have the means to pull off such an operation and the motive.
We would do well to remember the film of an explosion on the horizon that was broadcast by all the world’s mainstream media, including Russian, as the explosion of MH17 hitting the ground. As many quickly pointed out, a plane, still over half full of fuel, blown up at high altitude by a ground to air or air to air missile would have left smoke trails in the sky as it fell. That seems beyond all scientific doubt but absolutely no traces in the sky appear in that video so that would seem to suggest that either it does not show the impact of MH17 but something else (more likely in my opinion) or, well yes, the plane was in fact blown up on the ground. There has also been a historical precedent for such an idea albeit on a much smaller scale physically but, nonetheless of great historical significance.
Operation Mincemeat which was made famous as a book and a film called The Man Who Never Was. This was a plan executed in April 1943 to fool the Germans into thinking that the allied invasion of Sicily would in fact happen in Greece. A dead body was procured, dressed up in a British officer’s uniform, given a false identity and a briefcase chained to his wrist containing “top secret” documents about the allied invasion of Greece not Sicily. The dead body was made to look like the victim of a plane crash of the coast of nominally neutral but in fact pro German Spain. In reality however his body was delivered to the area by a submarine. The plan worked so well that when the actual allied invasion of Sicily began the German’s thought it was just a diversion and didn’t respond having transferred the majority of their forces to Greece.
When, the following year, just after the D Day landings, the Nazis found genuine top secret plans in an abandoned landing craft, they refused to believe them being sure it was another such ruse as operation Mincemeat. Here’s a link (now promise not to laugh) to a Daily Mail article on the whole subject. It does just suggest that the idea of already dead bodies in planes might have a certain feasibility after all which is something Anne Applebaum, among many others, doesn’t want you to think about.
I repeat that I am not supporting or debunking any conspiracy theories here. I cannot prove, or disprove just as you cannot prove or disprove any of the above mentioned theories or, for example, that Aliens exist or that they don’t exist therefore we cannot dismiss or confirm one hundred percent those theories involving aliens either. It really is that simple.
As for the conscious or unconscious agendas I talked about earlier, I would, in spite of his virulence, put Garry Kasparov in the unconscious camp. He so often loses control of his emotions and his discourse which is clearly out of all reality. I wonder if he has ever asked himself why he thinks and feels that which he does, I very much doubt it. Berezovsky was someone with a very similar mind set in my opinion. Anne Applebaum on the other hand seems to be squarely in the conscious camp.
In other words, she is deliberately lying in order to, not distort the truth but totally reverse it in true Orwellian style. I don’t claim to know exactly what her motive is. Due to the fact thather husband was the Polish foreign secretary (he was one of the EU politicians who brokered and signed the ill fated deal with the Yanukovych government in Kiev that didn’t even last twenty four hours), her finances had to be made public and, as many pointed out, she benefited from a huge spike in earnings as soon as the Ukrainian crisis began in 2013 followed by an ongoing scandal concerning the disclosure of their earnings in subsequent years but I find it hard to believe somehow that her motive is solely financial. Maybe simply anti-Russian racism and/or a commitment, ideological and self interested, to financial world takeover of the US, western debt based fractional reserve banking system. Whatever the reason is, it has to be admitted that she is a very effective propagandist who’s discourse remains coherent, controlled, pointed but utterly premeditated and false.
In fact her tirade in the Munk Debate against Russia since Putin became president is in reality one of the most concise and accurate descriptions of today’s USA and also post putsch Ukraine that I’ve ever heard. Her total insistence that the western media is truthful and objective is also a 100% truth inversion. Russian media has become infinitely more truthful and objective than its western counterpart which has descended into out and out double speak. I have never seen or heard her lose her temper or be overtaken by emotions of any kind. It must be said however that I’ve never seen her in debate against someone who actually takes her apart as it would be eminently possible to do. That, of course, is anything but coincidence.
“Truth is by nature self-evident.
As soon as you remove the cobwebs
of ignorance that surround it,
it shines clear” – Mahatma Gandhi.
As many of us have already noticed it is not a comfortable experience when our emotionally charged, often, long held beliefs are challenged by adverse, contradictory information which we are unable to ignore. It takes the kind of courage not given to all to accept and analyse the cognitive dissonance that comes in such situations and to ask why it is happening and many people, including plenty that I know personally, simply refuse to believe anything that contradicts the, invariably “cozy” world which they have allowed to be constructed for themselves. Such people often become defensive and sometimes down right aggressive when pressed. This is because they can’t ignore the information, only smother it or block it from their conscious mind.
The reason that some information is impossible to ignore is a very important phenomenon as basically this means that it is fundamental truth or at the very least the grain of truth that can lead us out of the pit of lies. If, for example, somebody tells you or I that the Earth is flat, we are not going to feel any surge of panic or cognitive dissonance of any kind for obvious reasons but try telling an American who comes from a staunch, traditionally Democrat family and has a deeply entrenched – indoctrinated belief that the Democrats are “the good guys”, the ones who care about other people and the poor at home and abroad and are anti-war etc, that, in fact, Obama and Clinton are among the most dangerous warmongers in history, responsible for illegal invasions and that they are just puppets of the military, industrial complex, Wall Street and “some people” called the Illuminati and sparks will certainly fly. There is an excellent video on-line called “Confronting Cognitive Dissonance – The Eyeopener”:
At 4.54 an American lady begins to describe her physical reaction when she understood that she was receiving very uncomfortable information about 9-11 which, much as she wanted to, she just could not ignore. Her reaction is courageous and very moving and anyone who dismisses her as a conspiracy theorist can only be mal-intentioned or seized by cognitive dissonance themselves. It is our intuition or as some like to say “our gut”; in truth, our connection to universal intelligence, that tells us whether such information is real or not. This is the same phenomenon as the moment of inspiration that artists and scientists have when a new scientific understanding or invention, poem, novel, song, symphony is born.
First the moment of inspiration and insight; then starts the hard work of creation, building, experiment, investigation, trial and error and bringing forth. Every single human being is connected to universal intelligence, not just an elite few, but intuition, just like any other human faculty, becomes stronger the more we use it. The vital fact here is that we all know the truth when we here or see it whether we like it or not. Again, “Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear”.
We live in a time of massive change where the world seems to have been turned upside down at such lightning speed that many of us feel that we can’t keep up which is of course disturbing. I use words like “seems” and “feels” because this is an illusion. In fact this situation has been growing for a long time. Centuries in fact and some would say millennia. This particular moment in history started, was started (examine & discuss) at the beginning of the 1990s. I would liken it to a wave that as it comes in slowly to shore, grows and swells inexorably until it finally crashes leaving that which was on the top, on the bottom. That which seemed democratic and free, undemocratic and tyrannical, that which seemed to be built on solid foundations, built on quicksand, that which seemed good, evil and vice versa. Above all, there are no ideologies left although for those with the aforementioned long held emotional attachment to this or that ideology = products of Man’s ego, this is pretty hard to accept. What’s left on the shore as the wave recedes is simply right or wrong, good or evil, truth or falsehood. In fact a world of fundamental polar opposites. Many. Especially in the western world lulled by the media bubble of unreality are seemingly, on the surface, unaware of these massive shifts.
My own awakening only came with the Ukrainian crisis as I have already documented in “NATO Through the Looking Glass”. I now live in a totally different world and it is much more frightening than the one I was living in up to three years ago but I’m getting used to it and in no way want to return to unconsciousness. I now question everything and am exercising my intuition and faith, in the true sense of the word, every day. What this reveals is infinitely more terrifying than the cozy “womb warmth” I used to live in but the payback is that things line up and actually make sense and I feel much healthier for it. The many layered onion skins that were enveloping my perception are falling away one after another and I’m very aware that this process is very far from over but the idea of crawling back into my former mind set is impossible for me. It would be akin to committing suicide. I’m also very aware that, thank God, I am very far from being the only one undergoing this process.
Of course, like so many others during these times, I’ve got used to being called a conspiracy theorist which is probably why I was moved to write this article. I am proud to be in the camp inhabited and moved by people such as the lady in the “Confronting Cognitive Dissonance” video who states that she felt physically sick when she understood that her government, which she had more or less trusted up until that moment might have been behind 9-11. Such people are searching for truth and discovering themselves. The other kind of conspiracy theorists are those who invent or propagate conspiracy theories for money and power and, or because they want to convince us that their particular prejudice is the one and only true prejudice whoever it be directed against. “It’s all the fault of the people I’ve learned to hate and you must agree with me.” Perennially popular targets remain: The blacks, the Jews, Monarchs, business people, immigrants and Russians to name but a few and these conspiracy theorists are of course the 100% polar opposite of the former.
One looking for the truth and the other, deliberately trying to destroy it. The American Lady reluctantly facing up to her realization that the official government conspiracy theory about 9-11 doesn’t hold water and the fear of looking into what seems to be at first glance, the darkness of the abyss or: Anne Applebaum’s constantly and professionally reiterated conspiracy theories about Putin being a tyrannical dictator and mafiosi obsessed with world domination who has to be stopped by the “free, democratic” West before he, followed by his “brainwashed” millions in Russia will march in “good old” WWII style to enslave us all. I leave you to contemplate these two examples. These two absolute, polar opposites. The seeker for truth and the bald faced liar for gain!
Marcus Godwyn is the British musician and amateur essayist who has been around Russians for the last 30 years. The original text was subject to editorial trimming.
