"Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." "Opposition is True Friendship." -William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1796
The Augean Stables and The Second Draft
This blog takes its name from the Fifth Labor of Herakles, to clean the stables of Augeas, where thousands of cattle had left so much un-cleaned dung that the whole Peloponnesus smelled of it. At Second Draft, our discovery of both Pallywood and the Al-Durah Affair have led us to realize that — at least where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned — our MSM represent a veritable Augean Stables of accumulated misreporting. We dedicate this weblog to exploring the many aspects of our MSM’s problem, not only those concerned with the Middle East problem, but more broadly with the many ways in which our media’s errors and our media’s extraordinary resistance to admitting their errors, have contributed and continue to contribute to the serious problems that plague our globe in this young 21st century.
There’s a brouhaha about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. which deserves close consideration. I have written a good deal about self-criticism, and its origins in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Recently I have been hearing a consistent invocation of this “prophetic tradition” among those explaining (if not justifying and admiring) Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s preaching style.
Reverend Joseph Lowery explained on CNN that Wright’s sermons were only “divisive” in the sense that they distinguished between people who were in this prophtetic tradition and those who weren’t “in the community of faith” defined by that tradition.
Well, they certainly separate us from the people who are not from the community of faith and who do not subscribe to prophetic preaching. There are hundreds and hundreds of preachers in black churches across this country who may not use identical language, but they have a common theology with Jeremiah Wright. They’re in the prophetic stream.
The prophets of old, the Jeremiahs, the Amos, and they spoke angrily and sometimes with cruel phrases and words, to the rulers and kings of their day. That’s who they were talking to on behalf of the poor and oppressed of their day.
The black church has been a place where black people take their sorrow, their travail and their longing for hope and for deliverance. They expect the preacher and thank the preacher and say, “Amen, hallelujah,” to the preacher, who takes their burden to the Lord. And then they join in a movement to help bring new order and a new day into being. That’s prophetic preaching, and it’s traditionally the black church.
I often wonder if those who criticize these homiletical strategies of calling the nation to judgment do not read the 8th to 7th C. BCE prophets, such as Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. They delivered judgment speeches against the nations of Israel and Judah and their rulers because of the ways in which they oppressed the poor, perverted justice, and ignored the moral and ethical imperatives of the religion.
As someone who has read the prophetic texts, and thought a good deal about them in the context of the tradition of self-criticism, I think these characterizations of the “prophetic stream” represent a profound misunderstanding. The prophets are ferocious in their criticism of their own people; they have relatively little to say about the real oppressive forces in the world of their day in the 8-7th centuries BCE. When the people of Israel get smashed by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the prophets don’t go into a rant about how evil these vicious imperialists are; they invoke them as God’s agents in punishing Israel for their sins. When, under more normative conditions, when they chastize rulers and aristocracy for their treatment of the poor, they do so again with vigorous, even violent rhetoric, but they do so in the hopes of changing their people. The prophets, however rough they may be, love the people they chastize, and rebuke them for the sake of their transformation.
Historically, this “prophetic turn” represents something exceptional among ancient peoples, and one of the reasons that the Jews have survived these defeats, while the other nations, once conquered, decimated, sent into exile, tended to disappear. For these rebukes of the prophets aimed at reminding the elites that they had obligations to the poor; that the people of Israel constituted the unit, and that rulers ruled “for the people.” As a result, Jewish communities in the ancient and medieval world had an exceptionally high degree of internal cohesion that permitted them to survive under the most adverse conditions. Among elites in various civilizations — rulers, aristocrats, wealthy — Israelite and Jewish elites have the most highly developed sense of obligation to their commoners. Most nations, once conquered, saw their elites abandon them and join the lower echelons of the imperial administration that now held power. As Abraham Heschel pointed out, the prophets were among the few who denounced “the idolatry of power” with such fervor.
But the core reason for their success comes from the profound attachment that the prophets felt for their people. There is no trace of hatred in their clean anger, no desire to see failure and punishment, no joy in the downfall of the sinners. Indeed, their commitment to the very people they rebuked, in some cases, so savagely, meant that, often enough, those rebuked took them seriously. The very fact that these prophetic denunciations became canonized as sacred scripture — that we hear the shepherd Amos’ version of the tale, not that of the royal priest Amatzia — tells us that not only the prophets, but the leaders of the people shared these values and accepted the prophetic rebukes.
All this is very far from what is here invoked as “Black Liberation Theology” or the “prophetic stream” of African-American churches. There, although Reverend Wright repeatedly speaks about “we,” he really means the white ruling class who, in his mind, deliberately conspire to destroy, even wipe out the blacks, the innocent victims of that malevolence.
Some commentators have complained that Wright’s sermons have been cherry-picked — snippets out of context — for their shock value, and that a longer exposure to his thought gives a significantly different impression. Here is a larger segment of the post-9-11 sermon that Wright gave, so one can get a sense of the context.
The people who posted this did so under the title “FOX Lies!! Barack Obama Pastor Wright”. They apparently think that this longer piece makes the snippet that played — as far as I know it was ABC, not FOX who broke this story — negates the meaning of the snippet. It certainly does show Reverend Wright calling 9-11 “unspeakable” and showing empathy at the tragedy of people — “black people” — throwing themselves out of the burning building. And this may or may not mitigate the appalling expressions of triumphalism — even glee — that Reverend Wright expresses to the delight of the audience, as he hits his “chickens coming home to roost” theme, although it hardly makes a “lie” of the snippet.
Shrinkwrapped has an important series of reflections on my post on Damian Thompson’s new book. I respond in detail:
Both Thompson and Landes have identified a serious danger facing our Civilization, however, if anything I think they underestimate the danger.
Both take the position that in our culture and civilization, rationality and reality testing are the default mode of thinking for the population. Unfortunately, this is exactly 180 degrees off. Rationality and logical thinking are late developments and are not universal. They are mental habits dependent on mental structures that are painstakingly assembled over the course of a long period of time. They are abilities that require a tremendous investment of time and energy to acquire and are extremely sensitive to disruption.
I don’t think this represents my position. (I’ll let Damian speak for himself.) I think that a) SW is right that reality testing is a mental habit painstakingly assembled over the course a long time — more or less a millennium in Western Europe — and not the default mode. On the other hand the reason I may sound like I think the way SW says, is that I think that this manner of “reading reality” — which includes self-criticism, a renunciation of narcissistic vanity, exegetical modesty — is at the core of civil society. So if we have a civil society it’s good evidence that this form of thinking has become the “norm” or “default mode” of western civilization, and if this kind of flakey thinking is still seeping into the mainstream, then this is a deviation — from a Western norm.
Damian Thompson seems puzzled by the easy acceptance of Conspiracy Theories and nonsense by large groups of people, and distressed to see such beliefs moving form the fringes toward the center. The cruel secret is that such beliefs are a great deal easier to acquire and hold than true knowledge.
As I have noted on many occasions, the human mind is a conservative device. Once a template has been established it is far easier to fit new data into the existing framework than to question one’s assumptions and expend mental energy trying to make sense out of contradictions.
This is problematic. We are trained to ignore conspiracy theories. That template was established and one of the things that attracts many conspiracy-theorists is that they are violating the accepted template.
If you already know that George Bush stole the election in 2000, then it is much easier to believe he could also be capable of engineering 9/11, of lying about Saddam’s WMD, and a host of other nonsense that has flourished on the left. If you do not understand how the theory of evolution has been researched and examined in minute detail by innumerable scientists, if you have no real idea how the edifice of science was built, then the minor flaws and incompleteness of the theory can easily be used to support beliefs that have no evidence to support them at all, such as Intelligent Design. (Perhaps the Deity did in fact create life and the universe and included a consistent body of evidence to support the theory of evolution; if so, this would not be resolvable using scientific methodology and until he or his agent appears or reappears, whichever you prefer, it is a matter of faith not science.)
There have been many factors that have contributed to the assault on reason which have eroded our capacity for reality testing. Science is hard; scientific knowledge is only slowly accumulated by extremely hard work mastered by only an extremely small minority of very bright people. Most science is impossible to understand by most people. We have long since reached the Arthur C. Clarke inflection point where “technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Magic is explained by magical thinking, not by science. Science has been reliably demonized by those who are incapable of performing or understanding science. The rigors of the Scientific Method, the single most important reason for our civilization’s success, are too difficult for our children’s tender self-esteem to tolerate. Once we no longer expect our children to understand that 1 + 1 must always equal 2, even if we want it to equal 1.99 or 3, and that all answers are equivalent as long as they are trying really, really hard, we have surrendered our ability to think.
Now we’re back to my comments on post-modernism. The problem is that one need not understand either the complexity of modern science or its technological magic boxes (computers), in order to partake of reality-testing. Self-criticism and a certain modesty is within the reach of every human being.
Worse, even among those who should know better, the temptation to take mental shortcuts persists. When rationality is further subverted by unconscious desires, it is no contest, real knowledge has no chance of surviving.
Anthropogenic Global Warming, a theory that is reliably presented as “proven” by politicians who have no idea what they are talking about, is a prime example. AGW might be an adequate focus for current anxiety; it might even be a potential problem down the road; but as an avenue to increase state power in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians, it has already been “proven.” They do not see themselves as cynical manipulators but as visionaries warning of danger and trying to save the planet. That science does not proceed the way they think it does completely eludes their attention.
This is a good example of what I meant about modesty. Proponents of AGW have enormous ambitions and no self-criticism; so science becomes another black box to manipulate. It’s interesting to think that in the Middle Ages, as far as I know, no one argued that black magicians actually thought they were white magicians. Today, at least in the West, some of the worst black magicians, think they’re doing white magic.
We are living in dangerous times. Anxiety over the future and the pace of change (change ushered in by magical technologies that no one can fully understand) naturally produces powerful regressive forces in a culture. Our rationality can be so subtly and easily subverted that we usually don’t recognize it until far too late. Worse, those whose grasp of reason is weakest, either through limited native intellectual abilities or poor pedagogy, are most susceptible to adopt the easy solutions of irrationality.
limited native intellectual abilities or poor pedagogy or emotional immaturity…
The pace of change naturally produces anxieties over the future, some of which can activate powerful regressive forces in a culture. The question is, what are non-regressive ways of expressing a legitimate anxiety about runaway technologically-driven social change?
Just beneath the surface of even the most stable and reasoned mind exists a cauldron of irrationality. The Unconscious can never be fully tamed and is forever attempting to find access to the Conscious mind to enable and effect its desires. Conspiracy Theories, false prophets and messiahs, and easily identifiable scapegoats are the result; they are here to stay and will plague us and increase until we re-establish the safe haven that can only come from Knowledge.
I’m a bit confused by this finale. Can you explain what the “safe haven that can only come from Knowledge” is? Is this (regressive) pre-post-modernism: knowledge=truth=objectivity=reality? Why is knowledge “safe”? It may “set us free,” or empower us, or enlighten us, but nothing about it suggests either stability or safety. On the contrary, part of what is so frightening about reality and why people run to the cocoons of conspiracy theory and other forms of counter-knowledge is precisely to flee the ego-wounding world of registering what’s going on around us.
My friend Damian Thompson, author of one of the better books on apocalyptic thought, The End of Time is now pursuing a really interesting project on “counter-knowledge”. (He’s the anonymous questioners in the second opening anecdote of my article on post-modern conspiracy theory. His exploration draws our attention to a critical dimension of (an often unconscious) information warfare that we are conducting, in many cases, against ourselves. Nothing illustrates the danger of using post-modernism (e.g., “there is no such thing as objectivity”) to detach ourselves from the kind of “reality testing” that only a sober form of self-criticism can assure.
Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact, warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book
George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. “Creation science” disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus.
The fantasy that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks has wormed its way into the mainstream
Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these “secrets”? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace.
This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.
We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world.
That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information.
Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings; someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory; someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.
Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more vulnerable than at any time for decades.
I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his “doubts” about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-sounding observation: “Look at the way the towers collapsed vertically. Jet fuel wouldn’t generate enough to heat to melt steel. Only controlled explosions can do that.” The rest of the party, not being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. “You’re right,” they said. “It did seem strange…”
Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and a masterpiece of counterknowledge.
The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon; that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were faked using voice-morphing technology.
The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated. Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. “Expert testimony” is lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with strong links to the far Right.
Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11 conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a member of President Sarkozy’s government has suggested that President Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might have been behind the attacks, said: “I think it is possible.”
Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed “without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services”. Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred publicly to “the myth of the Jews’ massacre”.
In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts it: “The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics.”
We do not normally think of creationism and maverick physics as conspiracy theories; but what they have in common with Loose Change is a methodology that marks them as counterknowledge. People who share a muddled, careless or deceitful attitude towards gathering evidence often find themselves drawn to each other’s fantasies. If you believe one wrong or strange thing, you are more likely to believe another. Although this has been true for centuries, the invention of the internet has had a galvanising effect. A rumour about the Antichrist can leap from Goths in Sweden to Australian fascists in seconds. Minority groups are becoming more tolerant of each other’s eccentric doctrines. Contacts between white and black racists are now flourishing; in particular, the growing anti-Semitism of black American Muslims has been a great ice-breaker on the neo-Nazi circuit.
In June 2007, the home page of The Truth Seeker, a conspiracy website, included claims that Aids is a “man-made Pentagon genocide”, that Pope Paul VI “was impersonated by an actor from 1975 to 1978″, that new evidence about the Loch Ness monster had emerged – plus a link to Loose Change.
Yet, as we saw earlier, more than 100 million people have seen that film. In the 21st century, bogus knowledge is no longer confined to self-selecting minority groups. It is seeping into the mainstream, cleverly repackaged for a mass market. This crisis goes beyond traditional political ideology. Yes, the Left has helped to spread counterknowledge by insisting on the rights of minorities to believe falsehoods that make them feel better about themselves. Afro-centric history aims to raise the self-esteem of black youngsters by feeding them the fantasy that the origins of Western civilisation lie in black Africa. Last year, a British government report revealed that some teachers are dropping the Holocaust from lessons rather than confront the Holocaust-denial of Muslim pupils.
But Left-wing multiculturalists are not the only guilty ones: entrepreneurs are turning counterknowledge into an industry. Publishing houses pay self-taught archaeologists and pseudo-historians large amounts to turn fragments of fact into saleable stories. Titles are placed in the history sections of bookshops whose claims have been thoroughly demolished – yet the publishers carry on bringing out new editions.
The dividing line between fiction and non-fiction is becoming increasingly hard to draw. These days, public opinion is so malleable that a product does not even have to pretend to be fact in order to affect perceptions of truth: the success of The Da Vinci Code has persuaded 40 per cent of Americans that the Churches are concealing information about Jesus.
Meanwhile, publishers, television channels and newspapers are making huge profits from another branch of counterknowledge: alternative medicine. Unqualified nutritionists make claims for vitamin supplements and “superfoods” that are unsupported by scientific literature; conveniently, these people often have a commercial interest in selling the supplements in question.
Fashionable advocates of alternative medicine, and the executives who profit from them, are as reliant on counterknowledge as any bedsit conspiracy theorist. Their miracle diets and health scares undermine science by distorting the public understanding of cause and effect, and therefore of risk.
The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.
But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.
These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.
Islamic countries, in particular, have embraced counterknowledge to a remarkable degree. In 2006, the Pew Research Centre asked Muslims in Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan whether Arabs carried out the September 11 attacks. The majority of respondents in each country said no. Indeed, most British Muslims – 56 per cent – also thought that Arabs were innocent. A quarter of British Muslims believe that “the British Government was involved in some way” with the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005.
The battle between knowledge and counterknowledge is not just a struggle to protect the public domain from bogus facts. It has profound implications for the safety of the West. And, make no mistake about it: this is a battle we are losing.
Mind you, being susceptible to counter-knowledge — conspiracy theories, propaganda, and the like — do not make one self-destructive. On the contrary, prime-divider societies run by ruthless elites thrive on this kind of stuff. It’s civil societies that prize freedom and mutual respect that need to reality test.
Just in case you were starting to feel optimistic about the human race, the following post will quickly dispel those feelings. Conspiracy theorists have long produced their paranoid exposés about global domination by some nefarious organization, be it the oil industry or, of course, the Jews. The internet has provided them with a convenient forum, and conspiracy theorists develop a synergy with one another, feeding off other paranoid individuals.
This post deals with one such conspiracy theory. (hat tip: lgude) If it had stayed in the perverse little universe of anti-globalization and anti-Semitic blogs, I would not waste my or your time on the issue. However, the theory, though it is inconceivable to the point of being ridiculous, has made its way into two major media outlets. Their adoption of the theory is another example of their ideology leading them away from what can be considered even remotely respectable journalism. But that makes the theory dangerous.
The conspiracy theory in question answers, in its proponents minds, questions about the 2004 tsunami that killed over 200,000 people, primarily in Indonesia and India. The theory has its usual villains- George Bush, Dick Cheney, the CIA…and the Zionists. It goes along these lines — George Bush, primarily because he is evil, but also to aid his war effort in Iraq, ordered U.S. forces to detonate a nuclear device in the Sumatra trench in the Indian Ocean as a catalyst for the tsunami. Each theorist has his/her own variation. Let us take a journey to the twilight zone that is the paranoid left’s blogosphere:
Here’s an interesting scenario to nibble on: The Bush junta is tired of explaining itself to the media. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice are sick of the liberals in this country pointing out how many American lives are being lost in Iraq… so……Bush and his cronies devise a cunning and dastardly plan. In order to take people’s minds off of Iraq why not create a natural disaster? We’ve done underwater nuclear weapons tests before (see Bikini Atoll) and they have a significant seismic effect. Is it then possible that the Bush regime detonated a large nuclear device on the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia? After all, a natural disaster of these proportions certainly takes your mind off Iraq…
With Bush and his cronies calling the shots anything is possible…
I see…Bush (whose powers rival God’s, apparently) created a natural disaster to distract us from Iraq. Since the tsunami took peoples’ minds off Iraq, then it is within the realm of possibility. I accidentally whacked my thumb with a hammer while banging a nail into a board last week, and for a few minutes of excruciating pain, I definitely was not thinking about Iraq. Were Bush and his cronies behind it? Anything is possible…
Joe Vialls introduces the anti-Semitic element that was so lacking on Sarge’s blog. Vialls theory blames ‘New York’, specifically Wall Street. They control John Howard, he says, which he presumes to be able to prove based on Howard’s actions.
Only Little Johnny knew, and of course his trusty crystal ball in New York. To hell with Sri Lanka, his bosses wanted a main base for the huge reconstruction contracts in Asia, designed to replace the failed oil theft and reconstruction in Iraq, and keep poor old Zion on its tottering New York legs for a few more weeks or months.
In the end, what the hell did it matter how many Goyim had to die? And, hey, on the credit side they’d already managed to kill more than 100,00 Muslims in Sumatra with a single tidal wave, which was partial payback for their own resounding defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq..For the Zionist Cabal, obtaining a thermonuclear weapon in America is no great trick, especially when we have the precedent of 100 small ‘decommissioned’ air-to-air atomic warheads being smuggled out the Pentagon’s (civilian) back door, to form the core of the Jewish State’s current nuclear arsenal. Once a weapon system is out date and out of service, loyal uniformed US military personnel can no longer track it.
India Daily introduces the next prerequisite for a good conspiracy theory, UFOs-
Recent alien contacts have been reported with the South Asian Governments especially India. UFO sightings have been rampant over the region affected. Some in Nicobar Island say that it was an experiment conducted by the alien extra-terrestrial entities to correct the wobbly rotation of the earth. And some of the Indian scientists are actually seeing that wobbly rotation of the earth has been corrected since the massive underwater earthquake and tsunami.
The Pagan Prattle has compiled an archive of tsunami conspiracy links.
Ok, we’ve had our fun. Lonely bloggers typing up drivel in their mothers’ basements should cause us to shake our heads sadly, nothing more. We understand how ridiculous the theory is, but it should not surprise us that it exists.
What also might not surprise, but should definitely alarm, is the echoing of these theories in Arab media. This is no longer a joking matter. Are they really that out of touch with reality? Or will they use any chance to smear America, Israel, and the West in order to incite the Arab public against them? Cybercast News Service reports:
The Egyptian nationalist weekly Al-Usbu’ accused the U.S., Israel and India of carrying out nuclear testing that may have cased the tsunami. Those nations were testing “how to liquidate humanity,” the newspaper said.
“Was [the earthquake] caused by American, Israeli, and Indian nuclear testing on ‘the day of horror?’ Why did the ‘Ring of Fire’ explode?” Mahmoud Bakri asked in his “investigative” piece published in the weekly on January 1.
“According to researchers’ estimates, there are two possible [explanations] for what happened. The first is a natural, divine move, because the region is in the ‘Ring of Fire,’ a region subject to this destructive type of earthquakes,” Bakri wrote according to a translation of the article provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute on Friday.
“The second possibility is that it was some kind of human intervention that destabilized the tectonic plates, an intervention that is caused only in nuclear experiments and explosions,” he said…
Al-Jazeera.com reports that many point the “finger of blame,” not at Mother nature, but at “government cover-ups, top secret military testing in the waters of the Indian Ocean and even aliens attempting to correct Earth’s ‘wobbly’ rotation.”
But the most popular theory, it says, is that the Indian and U.S. military are the “main cause of the disaster by testing eco-weapons, which use electromagnetic waves, thus triggering off earthquakes.”
That is the Arab media. They operate under different rules than the Western media, and they have reported on more fanciful theories. Major Western media networks would not treat such a theory seriously. Or would they?
The BBC treats the issue as worthy of serious debate:
Why did US base escape tsunami?
Following the tsunami, conspiracy rumours have been circulating on the internet of how the US base at Diego Garcia managed to avoid casualties while other islands suffered huge losses.
The US Navy’s official Diego Garcia website said the island wasn’t hit by the devastating tsunami because it is surrounded by deep waters and the grade of its shores does not allow for tsunamis to build before hitting land.
The site said the earthquake generated a tidal surge on the island estimated at six feet.
Is America a power for good or ill in the world? Was there a malign hand at work, or has America’s role in the crisis in fact been a model of humanitarian leadership.
Let us know what you think. Is this just anti-US sentiment on the web or something more worrying?
It is something more worrying. It is profoundly worrying that the BBC even asks the question. But, alas, it is not terribly surprising.
Brussels Journal has a posting on how Belgian authorities have given permission for a march sponsored by United for Truth protesting Bush’s involvement in 9-11, but not for one against the imposition of Sharia in Europe. The reasoning:
Unlike the anti-Sharia demonstration, planned to be held next September 11 in Brussels, the “9/9 United for Truth” demonstration of September 9 has been authorized by the Brussels authorities. Last week the Brussels mayor, Freddy Thielemans, banned the anti-Sharia demonstration because he fears it will upset the Muslim inhabitants of Brussels.
It is a favorite trope of the “progressives” to claim that they are courageous because they “speak truth to power,” or as a French journalist said to me in 2003 while France was protesting the American threat to invade Iraq, “Courage is resisting the powerful, and right now, America is the most powerful.” This goes to the heart of our current dilemma. The most powerful today - the US in the world, Israel in the Middle East - are also the most tolerant of criticism. So any American can say Bush was involved in 9-11 — including congressmen — and at worst, suffer criticism from others. Similarly, a journalist can compare Israel to the Nazis or South African apartheid and still operate freely in Israel. But try criticizing Muslims and you get real problems.
The mayor’s response is reminiscent of the British journalist’s association that gave their annual prize to a disgusting political cartoon showing Ariel Sharon in a Goya-like pose devouring (not his own children as the Goya original depicted) but Palestinian children. Unvarnished blood libel (Sharon’s sure doing it on purpose). When confronted by Martin Himel in the movie: Jenin: Massacring the Truth, with why Arafat wasn’t also in the cartoon, the Peter Benson, head of the British editorial cartoonists’ society which honoured the Independent’s Sharon-eating-babies cartoon responded:
Himel: My question to you is, why, in all these paintings [sic] don’t we see Sharon and Arafat eating babies?
Benson: Maybe Jews don’t issue fatwas.
Himel: What do you mean by that?
Benson: Well, if you upset an Islamic or Muslim group, um, as you know, fatwas can be issued by Ayatollahs and such, like, and maybe it’s at the back of each cartoonist’s mind, that they could be in trouble if they do so.
Himel: If they do what?
Benson: If they depict, uh, say, an Arab leader in the same manner.
Himel: Then they could suffer?
Benson: Then they could suffer death, couldn’t they? Which is rather different.
Benson is grinning throughout this section of the interview.
And of course, he is right. When the Jews and Israelis objected vehemently to this blood libel, the response was contemptuous dismissal. Wrote one journalist:
“the accusation of anti-Semitism is also a favourite weapon of those who wish to suppress debate on the measures Israel takes in the occupied territories.”
Wrote a member of Parliament:
The labelling as anti-Semitic of Dave Brown’s cartoon, which depicted the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a naked, child-eating ogre, was entirely spurious - but entirely predictable. Nor is it surprising that the lynch-mob was led by the Israeli embassy in London, once a respected diplomatic mission, but now the instrument of Israel’s worst- ever Foreign Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
Then, when he received the award for the best political cartoon of the year, Brown “thanked the Israeli embassy in Britain for increasing the cartoon’s publicity by its angry reaction.” So apparently the lynch mob didn’t really lynch… illustrating the weak hold that some British analysts have over the difference between metaphor and carnal reality… “it’s not meant to be taken literally, it’s meant to refer allegorically to everybody in the Zionist business.”
But when it comes to real violence, these people have no problem distinguishing metaphorical from real lynch mobs. The full measure of the cowardice and hypocrisy of this affair came out two year’s later with the publication of the Muhammad cartoons and the really violent response of Muslims. The selfsame Independent which showed it could stand up to the Jewish mafia, all of a sudden found that politeness and concern for hurt feelings of Muslims trumped independence.
…while we `defend Jyllands-Posten’s right to publish, we also question its editorial judgement. It is not a decision we intend to emulate…There is no merit in causing gratuitous offence, as these cartoons undoubtedly do. We believe it is possible to demonstrate our commitment to the principle of free speech in more sensible ways. It is interesting that the entire mainstream British press feels the same way. No national newspaper has printed the cartoons.
In other words, we’re all cowards and our solidarity shows we’re right. As Taguieff put it in describing European anti-Zionism in the 21st century: “When all the fish are swimming in the same direction, it’s because they’re dead.”
Which brings us back to Brussels and the problem of the 21st century. Part of the reason that all the fish are lined up in the same direction in Europe has much more to do with intimidation and appeasement of genuinely violent and demonizing Islamists and genuinely tolerant and self-criticial Israelis/Jews/Americans, than it does with any of the intellectual merits bandied about. And until we begin to understand the impact of this pervasive intimidation, we will have enormous difficulty reality testing.
It’s not talking back to civil power that counts so much as speaking truth about ruthless exercise of power. When the same people who claim to speak truth to power, then turn around and wax sychophantic about ruthless killers with genocidal programs, we’re all in trouble except the thugs.
This doesn’t mean you can’t criticize the USA and Israel. Almost everybody does. It just means that you don’t engage in grotesque criticism and think yourself brave because you get yelled at, but then fall silent about real dangers, like people who’s idea of a good fatwa (a religious ruling on any issue), is a death sentence to people who have offended Islam.
Excerpt from Heaven on Earth: Varieties of the Millennial Experience
This section in principle comes either at the end of a chapter on UFOlogy as a form of millennial thought, in which I discuss the close relationship between UFOlogy and conspiracy thinking, or in an epilogue, after the final chapter on Global Jihad as an apocalyptic millennial movement. The text is still raw — needs to be more coherent, and possibly more substantive — and the version below has been altered in ways that correspond with the style of my blog and the style of my academic writing (less of my “jargon” about demopaths, more careful about passing judgments). I welcome comments, links, reflections, criticism, etc.
9-11 and Post-Modern Western Conspiracy Thinking: We Are to Blame
9-11 Conspiracy constitutes the most powerful conspiracy theory in the brief history of the internet age. Within hours of the attacks, accusations that the Israeli Mossad had planned and executed the attacks while “4000 Jews stayed at home,” appeared, particularly in the Arab world, a textbook case of internet conspiracy mongering.
In the Muslim world these theories became the dominant public voice. There, traditional conspiracy operated: We are innocent, our enemies are guilty. In 2002 a Gallup poll found a majority of Muslims interviewed did not believe Bin Laden or any Muslim did 9-11. A 2006 Pew poll found this attitude widespread even among Muslims in the US — 28% — believe that Muslims did not do 9-11 (and 32% unsure, leaving only 40% of US Muslims polled agreeing that Bin Laden carried out 9-11.
Such claims, and their eager acceptance among fringe elements of Western conspiracy thinkers, especially those who already believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, should not astonish observers. Like so many other such conspiracies, they combine “cui bono?” [who benefits?] – Israel, Fascists in the US government – with a semiotic arousal that moves from perceived anomaly — isn’t this strange! — to “obvious” conclusion — what else could explain this? — in the blink of an eye. Among the plethora of Muslim conspiracies that blossomed in the wake of 9-11, perhaps the most scholarly and consequential came from the “progressive” Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom which came out within months of the event in February 2002 and blamed not Israel, but the US Government.
But the story was only beginning. Over the next months, a vast array of hypotheses, laid out in detail at a host of websites, accused George Bush and his administration either allowed the 9-11 attack to occur (Pearl Harbor version), or actively carried it out (Reichstag Fire version). The logic behind all of these theories focused on the perceived anomalies – the size of the hole in the Pentagon (too small), the collapse of the Twin Towers (too neat), of Building 7 (too far away), even the overall success of the plan (too great) – and rapidly moved to explaining them in terms of a government plot, primarily aimed at turning the US government into a police state. Cui bono? – the proto-fascists in the Bush administration. (more…)
Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all they won’t believe it.
I’ve repeatedly discussed the prominence of conspiracy theory in the Arab world as both a function of a) explaining away humiliation and impotence (3 million Israelis didn’t defeat 300 million Arabs, America did it), and b) projecting ill-will. This latter, more fundamental mechanism operates according to the basic rules of prime-divider society: since everyone works according to the political axiom “rule or be ruled,” no one can make a generous offer that he really means. It must be a ruse. Ditto with any “positive-sum” solution. As Arafat said about Camp David: “It was a trap.” And from his zero-sum universe, where any Israeli “win” is a loss for the Arabs, it was indeed a trap.
A remarkably self-critical post by the Jordanian blogger Omar, illustrates one aspect of this tendency to assume conspiratorial motives behind all action. He writes:
Arabs often see themselves as being more aware than others in what matters politics, they like to think of themselves as not being fooled like other nations and that they know why everything happens. In general, they have this thought of that most people around the globe are being fooled either by their governments or by their misleading media tools, while they (Arabs) are not.
What he means here — I think — is that Arabs assume people’s nasty motives: no one is in good faith; anytime someone claims altruistic motives, they are manipulating. Since all conspiracy theories are based on the assumption of (really vicious) malevolence on the “other side,” to see conspiracies everywhere is to assume malevolence in everyone. And as I’ve suggested, that paranoia often represents a projection of one’s own state of mind.
Hence, Westerners have the pitiful tendency to believe people who claim honest intent, and therefore, they are, to the Arab way of thinking, suckers. As a result, they can look down on us, as Omar describes here, for being so credulous. The irony of this self-perception (which, to his credit, Omar criticizes), is that to the Westerner, there is no example of a culture more credulous, more willing to believe the most outlandish nonsense than the Arabs. As Joanne commented:
Darwish has GOT to be kidding. Omar, too.
Arabs weren’t being fooled by their own media. By media that promote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? By media that promote the blood libel, that say that Israel tried to make Arabs infertile with poisoned chewing gum and that Israel is developing a special bomb that targets Arab genes (!)?
Of course, the Arabs always know better. They were always more savvy. Unlike naïve Westerners, they KNOW that the Jews control the US and British governments. They KNOW that the US government caused 9/11. They KNOW that 4,000 Jews stayed home from Twin Towers on 9/11, having been warned away. They KNOW that the Jews control the Western media. They’re so savvy, they KNOW that the Jews want to extend Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Add to that, the predictable accusations in the Muslim media that Israel and the United States are behind the Gaza meltdown. Cui bono? Who benefits? If the meltdown hurts the Palestinians and benefits the Americans and Israelis, they must have done it:
The political [policy] of the conspirators in Washington and Tel-Aviv, [aimed at] spreading destruction and undermining the unity of the Arab societies in these three countries, as well as in other [countries] that they are able to influence with the help of their agents within them - is termed ‘creative chaos’…
Al-Thawra (Syria), June 18, 2007
Paradoxically, believing that everything stems from base motives (one definition of a cynic), actually makes people more susceptible to manipulation, more likely to believe nonsense as long as it’s phrased in ways that make sense. Hence Friedman’s deft formulation of the problem.
And, if I can reflect for a moment on the nature of the Israeli soul, we come to the great tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Israelis, even the most hard-bitten and bitter, are almost to a person desirous of a peaceful solution that benefits everyone. The sabra (cactus pear), hard and prickly on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside, is not the Israeli term for a native born by accident. That’s why the Israeli peace camp is so large, varied, and Pavlovian in its desire to believe Palestinian good will in the hopes that things will go better, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
And yet, in the most colossal illustration of the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, nothing the Israelis do can penetrate the hermetically sealed mistrust of the shrewd Arabs. So rather than economic cooperation — which should solve terrorism, no? — the Arabs see chewing gum that causes sterility and shampoo that makes you bald.
And rather than outsiders who can intervene in this tragic cognitive deadlock that threatens mutual destruction, the “progressives” come in to show their “solidarity,” armed with their Post-colonial paradigm, and confirm every fevered detail of Arab paranoia.
I have discussed on numerous occasions the ways in which, even as the Israelis and Jews are hyper-self-critical, Arab and Muslim culture far prefers demonization to self-criticism. This fundamental failure (characteristic of honor-shame cultures), means a very low learning curve on the one hand (hence the exceptionally low level of accomplishment in Arab and Palestinian universities), and a tendency towards conspiracy theories to explain all the failures one cannot acknowledge as one’s own fault. The response of (at least some of) the Arab media to the current revolting and cruel meltdown of civic behavior between Arab and Arab, Muslim and Muslim that we have just witnessed in the Gaza Strip illustrates precisely these self-defeating dynamics at work.
Inter-Palestinian fighting in the Gaza Strip has unleashed a barrage of virulently anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic cartoons in the Arab and Muslim media, according to the Arab Affairs desk of the Anti-Defamation League Israel.
Cartoons and caricatures in the recent Arab press depict Jews in stereotypical fashion, as manipulative and conspiratorial and with hooked noses, long beards and black hats.
Recent cartoons portray Israel and the Jews as encouraging, mocking and enjoying the conflict between Hamas and Fatah.
“Once again the Arab media have gone out of their way to accuse the Jews and Israel for their plight. In the part of the world when editorial cartoons have great impact, it is not surprising that there is so much animosity toward Israel and the Jews in the Arab street,” the ADL Israel office said in a statement.
One cartoon from Al-Watan in Qatar shows Israel, in the form of an orthodox Jew, laughing out loud as he reads a newspaper headline declaring “The Palestinian Struggle.”
Cartoon from Ar-Raya in Qatar
Another cartoon form Al-Khabar in Algeria shows a Jew rubbing his hands in delight as he watches the Palestinians fight. He says “May ’God’ give them health. This is the true diversity.”
A third from the Akhbar al-Khalij in Bahrain shows an American arm using an Israeli hammer to strike the head of a Palestinian, splitting it into two.
Cartoon from the Akhbar al-Khalij in Bahrain
Another from Ar-Raya in Qatar shows the Jew as the winner standing on a podium with both Fatah and Hamas dead in second and third place.
Cartoon from Ar-Raya in Qatar
Now I don’t interpret these cartoons quite as negatively as the ADL/Ynet. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that these are ugly images straight out of the pages of Der Stürmer, and part of a demonizing discourse in the Arab world that has become second nature (especially since 2000). But with the exception of the one where an American hammer drives an Israeli wedge, most of the others are actually about either Jewish Schadenfreude at Palestinian self-destruction, or Israeli victory as a result of Palestinian fratricide. (Given their dancing in the street at Israeli suffering and their Schadenfreude exhibits, could they even imagine that at least some Israelis and Jews at least try not to gloat over their enemies’ misfortunes.)
Most of these cartoons might actually be taken as signs of a kind of (twisted) self-criticism in which the cartoonists try and “shame” the Palestinians: “Look at what you are doing, O Palestinian people! You make the Jews rejoice, you give them victory. Stop this madness.”
Even when they flirt with self-criticism, they manage to do it in as ugly a fashion as possible.
PMW has a review of the Palestinian contention that Israel wants the land from the “Nile to the Euphrates.” Perhaps one of the least-well appreciated elements of the Arab-Israeli conflict lies embedded in this belief that pervades the Arab world. Given what they believe about Israel, their hostility is more than understandable. For them Israel is, like the other European powers who came to the Middle East, an expansionist state with imperialist ambitions. Now this has virtually nothing to do with Israeli realities, where we find a powerful voice agonizing over occupying the small area of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But it has a great deal to do with Palestinian and Arab realities.
Indeed, the dream of Arab conquest from the Nile to the Euphrates represented the earliest imperial ambitions of Islam, and defines the core of Arab imperial expansion (Islam went further East than the Euphrates, but Arab ethnic dominance stops in Iraq). What we see in their hysterical accusations of imperial ambitions on the Israelis is a projection of their own profoundly imperial mentality. The fact that this imperial ambition appears once in the biblical text (Deuteronomy 11:24), confirms for Arab and Muslim observers that this must be at the core of Jewish religious ambitions. The theological reality that this text never appears in the rabbinical corpus as a warrant for expansion or in current Jewish discourse, that it cedes to a far more extensive narrative where the Jordan is the border within the biblical narrative, makes no impression on Arab analysts. Again they project their own maximally belligerent reading of the Quran onto the Jews: Who would have such a sacred text and not use it to justify conquest?
I speak often at this blog on LCE (liberal cognitive egocentrism). This is the other side of the moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism, DCE (dominating cognitive egocentrism), where the imperialist projects his mentality onto the other. This is the core projection that “nails down” prime divider societies, and justifies the principle of “rule or be ruled,” that is, “do onto others before they do onto you.” It is the kind of thinking that poisons the existence of Arabs everywhere where their own elites rule, and most especially poisons the Palestinians, whose “reality” gets defined by such paranoid and debilitating fantasies, what Blake called “the mind-forged manacles.”
Now normally, this information would be a dead give-away for anti-imperialist progressives (notice, no scare quotes). The deeply seated cultural and psychological signatures of libido dominandi are here for anyone who cares to, to see. To ignore this, and assume that the conflict pits an expansive Israeli imperialism to a modest “we just want our state” Palestinian national aspiration, systematically misreads the sitauton and strengthens the imperialist impulse.
But on the contrary, the Western “progressive” tendency towards PCP strengthens the grip of these mind-forged manacles by affirming the Palestinian “victim narrative.” Post-colonialism comes in and affirms the paranoid fantasies of the Arabs that the Israelis are imperialist; politically-correct comes in to silence anyone who might point out the gaping chasm between Israeli and Palestinian culture, between the fantasies of the Palestinians and the reality they supposedly describe. As a result, the Palestinians remain locked in their universe, feeling fully justified in telling their self-destructive scape-goating narrative, incapable of the self-criticism that will get them out.
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook - June 12, 2007
Lies and libels have been used for many years by the Palestinian Authority to present Israel as a dangerous existential threat to the Arab and Muslim world. One of the repeating libels, that Israel is planning to conquer Arab lands, including lands in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia – “from the Euphrates until the Nile” – was repeated this week in the PA daily Al-Ayyam.
For many years the Palestinian Authority (PA) has promoted this “Euphrates to the Nile” libel, and below PMW has cited more than 20 additional Palestinian references in recent years. As with all effective propaganda, detailed fictitious allegations are often advocated to make the lie sound credible.
