Conspiracy Theorists Are the Greatest Challenge to Democracy?!?

[Peter Lemkin]

Conspiracy Theorists Are the Greatest Challenge to Democracy … According to … Here's who …

Tuesday, 29. October 2013
Have you ever come across an imperialist who was keen on activists challenging the establishment?British establishment mouthpiece BBC leads the way again. This time it is about the biggest threat to democracy today. No, it is not terrorists. No, it is not Islamism. And, no, it is not the Western-Installed Dictator Regimes around the world. No, no, no, no, no. The new enemy is the conspiracy theorists. It is those who question their governments. It is those who find facts and confront the mainstream lies and liars such as BBC. Basically, it is you … and me.
Allow me to wade through all the fillers and present you with a few telling excerpts from this BBC report:
Are conspiracy theories destroying democracy?
The more information we have about what governments and corporations are up to the less we seem to trust them. Will conspiracy theories eventually destroy democracy?
…
Mr. Naughton is one of three lead investigators in a major new Cambridge University project to investigate the impact of conspiracy theories on democracy.
…
David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, the third principal investigator, is keen to explode the idea that most conspiracies are actually "cock-ups".
…
"Actually the conspirators are often the paranoid and crazy conspiracy theorists, because in their attempt to cover up the cock-up they get drawn into a web in which their self-justification posits some giant conspiracy trying to expose their conspiracy. "And I think that's consistently true through a lot of political scandals, Watergate included."
…
He is also examining whether the push for greater openness and transparency in public life will fuel, rather than kill off, conspiracy theories… "It may be that one of the things conspiracy theories feed on as well as silence, is a surfeit of information. And when there is a mass of information out there, it becomes easier for people to find their way through to come to the conclusion they want to come to.
…
What are they really talking about? What are they really presenting? A few things.

1- Challenging official stories, no matter how the record and history proves them to be false or exaggerated, lowers trust in government and government officials. This is a threat to the establishment and their operations through states. Thus, this is a threat to democracy. That is, if you believe that the state, the government, represents democracy. It means government equals democracy, thus, you are challenging democracy every time you challenge your government and what your government is telling you.
2- These guys, these credible Cambridge professors, claim that openness, the internet, and greater information accessibility creates more conspiracies and conspiracy theorists.
3- Now, if you add item 2 to item 1, you get this: Openness and greater information accessibility leads to more conspiracies and increases the number of conspiracy theorists, and that my friend presents the greatest threat to our democracy today.

Wow. Oh, wow. I am not going to even bother with the logical fallacies imbedded in the points made by these distinguished professors. Of course I won't bother with BBC and its reputation and consistency when it comes to representing the establishment. Instead, I am going to get down and check out the source of funding for these academic hit-men.
Now, that was easy. I checked out Cambridge and this conspiracy theorist oriented research program, and I found the source of its funding right away:

Professor David Runciman is part of a new Leverhulme-funded interdisciplinary, collaborative project on conspiracy theories at the University of Cambridge.

Here is a short canned background on Leverhulme Trust:

The Leverhulme Trust was established in 1925 under the will of the First Viscount Leverhulme, William Hesketh Lever, with the instruction that its resources should be used to support "scholarships for the purposes of research and education." Since that time, the Trust has provided funding for research projects, fellowships, studentships, bursaries and prizes; it operates across all the academic disciplines, the intention being to support talented individuals as they realize their personal vision in research and professional training. With annual funding of some £50 million, the Trust is amongst the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK.
…

From the canned background I moved to the fund's founder, William Lever, and a few noteworthy points got my attention:

He began manufacturing Sunlight Soap and built a business empire with many well-known brands. He was an advocate for expansion of the British Empire, particularly in Africa and Asia, which supplied palm oil, a key ingredient in Lever's product line.
…
Lever was involved with freemasonry and by 1902 was first initiate to a lodge bearing his name, William Hesketh Lever Lodge No. 2916, he later formed Leverhulme Lodge 4438. He saw freemasonry as a tool to reinforce the hierarchy within Lever Brothers…
…
In the early 1900s Lever was using palm oil produced in the British West African colonies. When he encountered difficulties in obtaining more palm plantation concessions, he started looking elsewhere in other colonies. In 1911, Lever visited the Belgian Congo to take advantage of cheap labour and palm oil concessions in that country. Lever's attitudes towards the Congolese were paternalistic and by today's standards, racist, and his negotiations with the Belgian coloniser to enforce the system known as travail forcé (forced labour) are well documented in the book Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts,' in which the author states: "Leverhulme set up a private kingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labour, a program that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted for more deaths than the Nazi holocaust." As such, he participated in this system of formalised labour…
…

You see, when you read about William Lever and Leverhulme Trust's background things start making more sense. Don't they?
William Lever was a high-level Freemason and very committed to the secret society. The kind of commitment Freemasonry demanded:

Regular Freemasonry has in its core ritual a formal obligation: to be quiet and peaceable citizens, true to the lawful government of the country in which they live, and not to countenance disloyalty or rebellion.[12] A Freemason makes a further obligation, before being made Master of his Lodge, to pay a proper respect to the civil magistrates

You see, those who challenge the establishment are also challenging the core of Freemasonry. No?
Lever was an avid advocate for expansion of the British Empire, particularly in Africa and Asia. Have you ever come across an imperialist who was keen on activists challenging the establishment, aka conspiracy theorists who challenge establishment-packaged information (propaganda)? I haven't. Not one.
Lever was an enforcer of a system known as travail forcé, forced labour, in colonies where his business ripped the resources (Labor and agriculture). Back then, as it is today, moguls like Lever thrived based on their close partnerships with their imperial governments: colonization. What does that mean? It means, for imperialist business moguls like Lever, any challenge to the empires, challenging and questioning the imperial propaganda, equals a challenge to the empire's business partners such as Lever.
Now, with all the above, do you see how a handful of Leverhulme funded pea-brain academics spend millions of dollars to paint those who challenge imperial governments' misinformation as conspiracy theorists who present a great threat to democracy? Do you see how these conspirators easily grab spots under the spotlights of the imperial media machine-such as BBC?
Please take notice of another highly important fact about this entire operation: They, the establishment, must be getting extremely nervous and threatened to put on such a goofy show with even goofier players via the ultimately goofy outlet BBC. That, my friends, is really good news for the conspiracy theorists … you … and me.

- See more at: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/10/...more-25493

[David Guyatt]

I'd be more than interested in this if the Beeb were to accurately define what they mean by "democracy" in the first place?

[Magda Hassan]

:: My favorite bit is:

1- Challenging official stories, no matter how the record and history proves them to be false or exaggerated, lowers trust in government and government officials. This is a threat to the establishment and their operations through states. Thus, this is a threat to democracy.

As if the politicians themselves and rampant corruption, ineptitude, voodoo economics, and rank self interest is not enough.

All of these professors playing their parts in Sunstein's handiwork. And if they believe their own crap they all are suffering the Martha Mitchell effect too.

[Peter Lemkin]

:: My favorite bit is:

1- Challenging official stories, no matter how the record and history proves them to be false or exaggerated, lowers trust in government and government officials. This is a threat to the establishment and their operations through states. Thus, this is a threat to democracy.

As if the politicians themselves and rampant corruption, ineptitude, voodoo economics, and rank self interest is not enough.

All of these professors playing their parts in Sunstein's handiwork. And if they believe their own crap they all are suffering the Martha Mitchell effect too.

They don't come out and say it, but what they really believe in and desire is a totalitarian/top-down dictatorial system...NOT democracy...certainly not the REAL kind! Its these neo-fascist, oligarchical Neanderthals that are the main threat to democracy!!!

[Peter Lemkin]

Snowden leaks harmed US security more than any others'

Ex-CIA deputy director Michael Morell says former NSA contractor not a hero'

Michael Morell, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said Edward Snowden was not a hero and his leaks damaged national security more than any others in modern times.

First published: Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 17:01




Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell said Edward Snowden's disclosure of top-secret US surveillance, including spying on allies, harmed national security more than any other leak in modern times.
"The damage here was extensive, the most damage that I have ever seen from a disclosure," Mr Morell, a 33-year veteran of the US spy agency, said today at a forum in Washington sponsored by Bloomberg.
Mr Morell (55), who retired in August after twice serving as acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declined to say whether spying on allies is necessary or what the damage has been from reports that the US National Security Agency tapped phone calls of allies such as German chancellor Angela Merkel.

• Obama may ban spying on allied heads of state
  
• German parliamentary inquiry into scope of US spying may call Snowden
  
• US spied on '60 million phone calls' in Spain in one month
  

This latest round of disclosures based on documents leaked by Mr Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA who has been granted asylum in Russia, has triggered waves of protests around the world and calls by US lawmakers for investigations into spying practices.
"In my mind, this guy is not a hero," Mr Morell said, because Mr Snowden "violated the law and violated the trust that was placed in him."
US president Barack Obama has ordered an independent review of NSA operations that is being conducted by former government officials, including Mr Morell.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement yesterday that her panel "was not satisfactorily informed" of the eavesdropping on allies.
"It is my understanding that president Obama was not aware chancellor Merkel's communications were being collected since 2002," said Ms Feinstein, a California Democrat. "That is a big problem."
The committee now plans to conduct an investigation into all intelligence collection programs, she said.
Mr Morell said the one good thing to come from the spying disclosures is that they will force what he described as a healthy re-examination of agency operations.
"It is a good thing for an organisation, or a community organization, to scrub themselves, to take a hard look at what it is they're doing," Mr Morell said. "That's exactly what the president is doing," he said.
"It's exactly what Congress is doing, and it's what the president has asked the review board to do."
Mr Morell served as acting director of the CIA when Leon Panetta left the post to become secretary of defence and again after retired General David Petraeus resigned in the midst of an adultery scandal.

[David Guyatt]

Of course, in the same way that the question needs to be asked about defining "democracy" in the first post of this thread, the same question needs to be asked about defining what "national security" actually means to these people, so that the rest of us also know what exactly they are saying when they state Snowden "harmed" it.

This may seem very pedantic points, but language is used to hide and twist meaning by politicians and state functionaries.

In the case in point "national security" seems to mean US commercial interests - in that the bulk of the focus of data collection was of a commercial nature. One might, therefore, be forgiven for assuming that the term "democracy" has a similar commercial or elite reality - which has little or nothing to do what the rest of us plebs actually think the word democracy means (i.e., our domestic political rights).

[Tracy Riddle]

This is the same stuff we've been hearing since the Warren Report came out, and Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style." One of the biggest motivations for forming the Warren Commission was because none of America's allies abroad believed the two lone nuts theory (Oswald and Ruby), and so the idea was to appoint some prominent citizens to shore up America's credibility as "leader of the free world."

[Dawn Meredith]

:: My favorite bit is:

1- Challenging official stories, no matter how the record and history proves them to be false or exaggerated, lowers trust in government and government officials. This is a threat to the establishment and their operations through states. Thus, this is a threat to democracy.

As if the politicians themselves and rampant corruption, ineptitude, voodoo economics, and rank self interest is not enough.

All of these professors playing their parts in Sunstein's handiwork. And if they believe their own crap they all are suffering the Martha Mitchell effect too.

It's pretty bad when these bastards can make such an admission and call the questioners " a threat to democracy". Black is white.

Dawn

[Magda Hassan]

:: My favorite bit is:

1- Challenging official stories, no matter how the record and history proves them to be false or exaggerated, lowers trust in government and government officials. This is a threat to the establishment and their operations through states. Thus, this is a threat to democracy.

As if the politicians themselves and rampant corruption, ineptitude, voodoo economics, and rank self interest is not enough.

All of these professors playing their parts in Sunstein's handiwork. And if they believe their own crap they all are suffering the Martha Mitchell effect too.

It's pretty bad when these bastards can make such an admission and call the questioners " a threat to democracy". Black is white.

Dawn

They can't have free range thinkers coming to their own conclusions and disturbing the tranquil coma of others and forcing them to question things. Especially if it doesn't correlate to the official party line. Keep those brains tightly controlled so they don't stray from the straight and narrow. Co-incidentally they are trying to force consumers in Australia to only be able to buy caged eggs once again. For our health and well being of course. Bird flu. Which we haven't got and which is carried very fast in battery hen egg production as seen in overseas locations where it has developed. But that is the logic. And where the money is in both cases. Battery hen farms paid for their polly. ROI.