To my beloved brother and sister Conspiracy Theorists

[Matt P]

Dr. Kevin Barrett explains what you already knew. Not only are you not crazy but you are THE smartest people on the planet.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/05/hate-conspiracies/


Are People Who Hate Conspiracy Theories Crazy?

Posted by Kevin Barrett on January 5, 2015

Or are they simply oblivious to what's going on around them?

The New York Times just published six short op-eds collectively entitled “Are Conspiracy Theories All Bad?” Amazingly, they’re not ALL bad. (The articles, not the theories.) Amidst the claptrap from figures like 9/11 cover-up criminal Cass Sunstein and airhead “social psychologist” Karen Douglas, the Times features decent short essays by Annie Jacobsen, Timothy Melley and Harriet Washington.

But the whole exercise begs the million dollar question: Are the best-known “conspiracy theories” – starting with the alternative narratives of the JFK and 9/11 coups – true? In those two cases, only an ignoramus could possibly fail to answer with an unqualified “yes.” (Or maybe “duh!” would be more appropriate.)

Given that the USA has suffered at least two obvious murderous coups d’état by psychopaths who are still in power, yet its citizens largely keep their heads firmly planted up their – er, in the sand – it’s pretty obvious that the nation as a whole, and its anti-conspiracy contingent in particular, is suffering from some kind of collective psychosis.

I recently published an article on this subject at Press TV, which unfortunately changed the headline. Here it is, with the original headline restored.
Are People Who Hate Conspiracy Theories Crazy?

By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor, for Press TV

Government propagandists want you to hate “conspiracy theories.” But according to a growing body of evidence, you’d have to be crazy to obey.

Two American professors, Lance DeHaven-Smith and James Tracy, have pointed out that the CIA has weaponized the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” to conceal government misdeeds. CIA document 1035-960, revealed by the New York Times in 1976, is the smoking gun.

That secret document was distributed by the CIA in response to widespread skepticism surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It ordered the CIA’s thousands of Operation Mockingbird media assets to begin squawking insults. Those targeted included historians, journalists and researchers, who had discovered that the JFK assassination was a coup d’état.

Today, the mainstream media has grown even more controlled. And the weaponized “conspiracy theory” meme has been deployed more massively than ever before… especially since the coup d’état of September 11, 2001.

During the past 13 years, thousands, then millions, now billions of people have awakened to the 9/11 inside job. (Polls show that more than one billion Muslims, nearly one billion Chinese, as well as one third of Americans and large proportions of Europeans all view 9/11 as a likely false-flag operation.)

As a new global majority calls the 9/11 myth into question, panicking propagandists have attempted to “stop the contagion” by medicalizing the search for truth. According to government-sponsored mind-control operatives like John A. Banas and Gregory Miller – the University of Oklahoma’s third-rate epigones of Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels – the “truth epidemic” must be stopped through “inoculation” of the public. In “Inducing Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Propaganda: Testing Inoculation and Metainoculation Strategies,” Banas and Miller brandish a medical metaphor to disguise the fact that they are advocating mass mind-control in service to high treason and crimes against humanity.

Banas and Miller spin their anti-conspiracy-theory inoculation program as a public health measure. But evidence cited by mental health professionals, including Frances Shure, M.A., L.P.C., suggests the opposite is the case. By trying to inject the public with an unconscious emotional block to impede rational consideration of the evidence surrounding 9/11, Banas and Miller are in fact undermining public health.

Frances Shure is the author of a series of articles published by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth under the collective title “Why Do Good People Become Silent – or Worse – About 9/11?” (Listen to my interviews with her here and here.)

In her articles, Shure points out that emotional resistance to “conspiracy theories” is a pathological, fear-based reaction that impedes healthy engagement with reality. While refraining from diagnosing people who resist conspiracy theories as mentally ill, Shure does observe that they often exhibit a troubling inability to come to grips with plain and obvious facts:

“How, for example, can some people watch World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) implode and collapse into its own footprint and not see what is right in front of them – even when they know about its free fall acceleration and the other characteristics of controlled demolition? These people may feel compelled to intensify their resistance with intellectually contorted measures to convince themselves and others that this was not controlled demolition. Others will content themselves with shaming anyone who wants to investigate the 9/11 evidence that contradicts the official sacred myth.”

For a dramatization of what might be called “Building 7 denial syndrome,” please watch Anthony Lawson’s brilliant youtube video “WTC 7: This Is An Orange”:

What explains such denial? Shure explores various factors including: A built-in human propensity to obey authority no matter how insane, as exemplified by the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo; the Orwellian “doublethink” process of “consciously inducing unconsciousness;” Leon Festinger’s notion of cognitive dissonance i.e. the rejection of realities that conflict with ingrained values or assumptions; the “irrational conformity” experiments of Solomon Asch and Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann; Irving L. Janis’s studies of groupthink: the evidence that some of these cognitive deficiencies are rooted in the physiology of the brain as posited by George Lakoff and others; terror management theory’s suggestion that unconscious fear of death drives 9/11 denial; and signal detection theory’s demonstration that “noise” such as mainstream media propaganda can drown out even the most obvious truths.

In upcoming articles, Shure will continue her analysis by considering Seligman’s studies of learned helplessness, Douglas Rushkoff’s study of mind control in Coercion, Bruce Levine’s work on American society’s institutional pathology, and other insights into why people irrationally refuse to engage with political and social reality in general and 9/11 truth in particular.

Though Frances Shure’s work on conspiracy denial is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject, many other scholars, psychologists and psychiatrists have discovered evidence that supports her analysis. Twenty Ph.D. psychologists and psychiatrists representing such universities as Harvard, Duke, Rutgers, and others “have concluded that the official version of 9/11 is false, and that those who believe the official version suffer from defense mechanisms.” The 156 members of Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth undoubtedly represents only a minuscule fraction of medical and psychiatric professionals who agree but prefer not to risk the wrath of the authorities by going public.

As I explained in last year’s Press TV article “New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile,” a growing list of psychological studies and peer-reviewed publications all point toward the same conclusion. Examples include: The findings of British psychologists Wood and Douglas that people who oppose conspiracy theories behave like stereotypical angry cranks more than pro-conspiracy people do; psychology professor Laurie Manwell’s work on how the suppression of so-called conspiracy theories puts Western nations “in denial of democracy,” and the recent emergence of a whole new academic field studying State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADS), including the JFK assassination and 9/11.

Tens of millions of Americans watched mob hitman & CIA gunrunner Jack Rubenstein murder self-proclaimed JFK-hit patsy Oswald on live TV. Yet we’ve all gone on pretending we didn’t see the coup d’état in Dallas. What’s wrong with us?

What will happen when the American people, and those of other Western nations, emerge from their cocoon of denial and face the reality that their rulers are among the worst criminals in human history? Will the people follow their leaders’ example and lapse into lawless, psychopathic behavior? Will Western leaders “flee forward” by launching wars designed to conceal the bloody tracks linking them to past misdeeds? Or will the pathocracy be overthrown and replaced by something more humane?

On such questions hinges the future of humanity. Given the high stakes, you would have to be crazy not to help spread the truth, change the system, and save the planet.

[Jake]

http:// projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?73526-CIA-Document-1035-960-and-the-Birth-of-the-Conspiracy-Theorist.&p=861161&viewfull=1#post861161


CIA doc 1035-960

Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report Source document: (http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html)



1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination.

Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:


a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:


a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

[Robin]

AHEM.....erm...I prefer the term Conspiracy Therapist, thank you. :)

[Ahnung-quay]

Loved the term "pathocracy"; describes many of our governments globally, not only the U.S..