Andrew L. wrote:So Cranius, would you say that Pynchon's use of conspiracies, paranoia, etc, isn't part of a particularly American imagination or literary consciousness?

Hmmm...it's both, because he's about as post-modern as it gets.

Paranoia is a recurrent leitmotif in Pynchon's writing and operates as the superstructure and trademark content of his books. This paranoia has many different connotations and complexions. Often it's expressed as zany humour, because I think much of the attraction of conspiracies is that they're seductively fun and absurd (this is where most conspiracists fall down, because they're too self-serious to get the joke).

Pynchon's conspiracies are part of a Cold War consciousness that is essentially paranoic (which I guess you could say is the core American experience of the latter half of the 20th Century). This paranoia rides on top of deeper and darker ontological themes, which are generally characterized as delusion, chaos, entropy and ultimately death.

His main characters are often just 'holy fools', who surf this chaos and represent the poverty of aspiration of those who relinquish themselves to chance*. In this respect, those who dabble in conspiracy put themselves at the mercy of 'higher powers' and are unable to determine the events that control them. For example, Vineland is a direct parable about the manipulation of the counter-culture by the hierarchical authority, through their propensity for drug-fueled paranoia; all set against the backdrop of a burnt-out ideological wasteland.

*See Game Theory, the RAND Corporation and Vietnam.

At this point someone should mention Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminati (and no I haven't read it).

clocker bob wrote:The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet...

I hope this doesn't sound facetious:

I'm thinking maybe this isn't an agreed-upon, mutually understood reference point on which to base other arguments.

oxlongm wrote:

clocker bob wrote:The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet...

I hope this doesn't sound facetious:

I'm thinking maybe this isn't an agreed-upon, mutually understood reference point on which to base other arguments.

I wish I could find the graphic that has the Bush family genealogy going back a few generations, and their relations to the Saudis, the Nazis, the oil industry, the US Intelligence agencies, and the like. It's a lovely graphic.

Here's something that may or may not stand up to any serious skepticism. I really don't know because I don't spend my life trying to get the real dirt on this kinda stuff, which is of course not always easy.

"George Walker, GW's great-grandfather, also set up the takeover of the Hamburg-America Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. In Germany, I.G. Farben was most famous for putting the gas in gas chambers; it was the producer of Zyklon B and other gasses used on victims of the Holocaust. The Bush family was not unaware of the nature of their investment partners. They hired Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, to hide the funds they were making from Nazi investments and the funds they were sending to Nazi Germany, rather than divest."

Source: http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/



Just read this page and you'll get a sense of A) the language used by conspiracy theorists which virtually ensures that they won't be taken seriously, and B) what names you might research to find out if all the links between the Bush family and the Nazi party are valid or not.

Conspiracy theories are, exactly as Clocker Bob said, very "draining exercise". There is no end to what sorta stuff you can find yourself reading about, if you invest the time and energy. And nothing will ever change them, the theories themselves, or even whether or not the theories are legit.

Finding out the number of US presidents that have been high-ranking Masons doesn't really change anything about anything. Seeing the "Skull and Bones" on GW Bush's college transcript doesn't really change anything. And the more you think about it, the more depressing it gets, and the uglier reality looks. It's like, in a nutshell, in the movie The Matrix... really we all just need to take the blue pill. Or the red one. I forget which, but whichever one it is that has you not seeing the way things really are because it's too much to handle.

I love walking through Washington DC and passing the Washington Monument, built largely (openly) by the Masons, walking past the Mason Headquarters on 14th street, walking past the gigantic Masonic Temple with the statue of George Washington's head out in their big weird backyard... the stained glass windows of the big Masonic buildings is very, VERY fucked up looking.

Clocker Bob,

I have taken the time to read your post more carefully, as I just scanned it amidst working on other things the first time around.

Short of a few sentences, like maybe two, I don't think a single thing you've said is accurate.

I feel like it helps me to understand economics and politics better when I include conspiracy theories into my studies.

But you don't seem to understand economics at all. You resort to simplistic categories like "greed" and "evil' at every turn and believe WWII was staged by handful of the world's wealthiest men.

I don't know what to say to you.

that was a good article you posted andrew l.
i enjoyed it a lot, thanks.

i remember seeing a documentary last year about jfk which absolutely convinced me that oswald killed kennedy on his own. there's a sense of palpable frustration because it was such a neat mystery for a while.

still, someone told me the other day that everyone in interested in the wrong kennedy assasination. apparently rfk's murder was the one everyone should be contending. there's some silly stuff about it here.

tommydski wrote:that was a good article you posted andrew l.
i enjoyed it a lot, thanks.

Cheers. There's a much longer version of the same article with direct links to conspiracy theorists' websites and more discussion of leading conspiracy theorists such as Michael Ruppert.

Andrew L. wrote:Clocker Bob,

I have taken the time to read your post more carefully, as I just scanned it amidst working on other things the first time around.

Short of a few sentences, like maybe two, I don't think a single thing you've said is accurate.

I feel like it helps me to understand economics and politics better when I include conspiracy theories into my studies.

But you don't seem to understand economics at all. You resort to simplistic categories like "greed" and "evil' at every turn and believe WWII was staged by handful of the world's wealthiest men.

I don't know what to say to you.

If everything I posted minus two sentences was inaccurate, then you ought to be boiling over with things to say to me. If it's a matter of time, I can wait.

I just re-read my earlier post. I said capitalism was fueled by greed once and I called the uber capitalists evil once. Is that "at every turn"? I compare my description of capitalism to yours and I find our expressions of contempt for it to be very similar.

Do you just really, really hate when conspiracy theories are included in economic or political analysis? If that's your position, fine, but there is more than one way to skin a cat and there is more than one way to dissect how capitalism functions.

Regarding WWII: the financing for the governments of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and Hitler was sourced from the same banks and trusts and industrialists and corporations and churches. By the time the 1930's came along, the shadows cast by any large financial cartel crossed many borders, and the controllers of those cartels didn't really care who their money supported in what war, as long as they stood to profit.

Just like the arms merchants of today, they will sell to whoever can pay. The best climate for the world's largest banks or anybody else with money to loan is the climate of war; money in a vault never grows, but you loan it out and it comes back with interest forever and ever. Get two countries with Rottweilers willing to fight and pay them to put those dogs in the pit- you might get sprayed with some blood but you won't bleed.

The U.S. Federal Reserve is a private corporation. The central banks in most other European nations are private corporations. They are designed to transfer money to governments that run perpetual deficits because they're always financing wars, like our government. Then the parents of the children who die in the wars pay their income taxes to the gov't and the gov't pays back the Federal Reserve for the Treasury notes, plus interest.

Eventually, those payments land back in the vaults of the ancestors of the people who bribed the U.S. Congress into turning control of the money supply over to a private corporation. The US gov't will never pay off our giant deficit, because that would make money cheaper to obtain.

If you want to blow off all the above as bullshit, I know that I don't care. If you don't, you're going to have to go deep into the world of Rothschilds and Rockefellers and Bilderbergers and Illuminati and the Vatican and the Masons and the Club of Rome, and frankly, I don't recommend it.

You might remain happier understanding capitalism the way you think you do.

I'll leave you with a question, though- if wars are fought between countries and the people at the very top aren't all on the same team, then why can Switzerland simply proclaim neutrality and never be robbed and pillaged by an invading army?

Because they hold the gold from all sides. Whoever attacks Switzerland will have a real war on their hands, not war theater devised to enrich the richest.

oxlongm wrote:

clocker bob wrote:The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet...

I hope this doesn't sound facetious:

I'm thinking maybe this isn't an agreed-upon, mutually understood reference point on which to base other arguments.

You think correctly. I just rode home on the El, and since I didn't see people's heads exploding like they were in "Scanners", I'm assuming that my reference point is still an unpopular one.

nihil wrote:
I get very frustrated as well. And the word "seduced" is very accurate. I know people who are intelligent and realize, on a gut level I think, that they can't trust the official doctrine.

Man oh man... what if intelligent people realize on a gut level that they can't trust the official doctrine, and they respond to that gut feeling by trying to explain to their own brain why they can't trust it? Okay, I'm excited now, I feel on the verge of learning something...

nihil wrote:But, and this sounds harsh, I think they are too lazy or not interested enough to study history and make an effort to understand the very complex world we live in.

Shit, I knew it! They're those damn lazy intelligent people who didn't come by their intelligence by hard work and education! They're the kind of intelligent people who can't understand the complex world we live in. Maybe they should donate their guts to science before they die, because they can't be trusted with gut feelings?

Now I don't know where this is going; I'll keep reading...

nihil wrote:So, they seem to gravitate towards an easy and sensationalistic answer that seems to satisfy them because it feels rebellious and dramatic.

Or because it correllates with evidence that they've found using their intelligence and their gut instincts?

I remember when I first decided that the official account of 9/11 didn't adequately explain for me what I saw that day.

I remember how I couldn't wait for 9/11 to come up again in conversation with my friends or co-workers, when I would have the choice of either silence, a lie that I still believed the official story, or I could say "Hey, I know I'll sound like a nut, but I have these theories about US gov't complicity that you really ought to hear, and once you get past the reflex response to call me crazy and commit to spending the same endless number of hours reading everything at these URL's I'll provide for you, there's a slim chance that you might not hate me for saying our own gov't attacked us".

Yeah, I gravitated right to that easy sensationalistic answer. Couldn't wait to be ostracized!

Thankfully, I don't think I lost any friends when I chose that path, but then, I run with a cool and tolerant group.

nihil wrote:I do not claim to understand the world, it's a process.

But you claim to understand it well enough to know that conspiracy theories have no place in it?

nihil wrote: The answers that you do find make sense, but are far from dramatic.

Do you accept that there are answers that you don't find?

nihil wrote:Regarding 9/11, it took me a few seconds to come to the conclusion that all of the "theories" are bullshit. How many people would it have involved?

That is the laziest way to refute a conspiracy theory. How many do you think had to know the full scale of 9/11 to facilitate it is a better question.

Everybody involved in a crime like that is on a need to know basis, and many of those who aid the plot are just doing their job, and never know they were part of anything; maybe their job was altered to a very small degree by their boss or their commanding officer.

Alone, they're nothing, but when the generals move them all together, the wheels turn, but if you're part of the wheel, you're not even aware that you're turning in a suspicious direction.

The biggest threat to exposure of the 9/11 conspiracy is the video from the cameras around the Pentagon. They can't say that none exists, and they can't say that the five frames released is all they have, but apparently, they will continue to stonewall. Five years later, we don't see it. They can squash all the theories about the missile or the A3 hitting the building- why don't they?

nihil wrote:Too many for the government to understand that the odds that someone would leak...would definitely not be worth the scandal that would surely ruin their narrow hold on power.

A leak is only effective if people are willing to hear it. How many people who may know have enough instant credibility with the American people that they would immediately be put front and center on network TV and the world would stop while he leaked to us?

It's a very short list, and that person would unquestionably be risking his life from the moment he began his defection, because if, for example, Colin Powell could leak this story, it would mean the end of the US Government, and if the citizenry survived that shock, it could mean the end of the military industrial complex that owns the US gov't, if drastic measures weren't implemented immediately.

The story of 9/11 laid out by someone in an obvious position to know could spark revolution. If you're Colin Powell, do you want to light that fuse?

nihil wrote:Besides, look at the sources...especially on the internet. The websites have the exact same layouts/graphics/fonts of all those women out there that devote their lives to writing poems about their cats.

Dumb and irrelevant. Let's go back to measuring the veracity of the Loose Change documentary by criticizing the soundtrack.

nihil wrote:I would also like to say that these conspiracy theories are a nightmare for organizers on the left,

I can see why, because many conspiracy theories lay bare the fraud of right and left being opposing forces. When it comes to the rudder of the American economy, the direction never changes no matter whose hands are allegedly on it. The only organizing that needs to be done is organizing the controlled to resist the controllers, the lower classes vs. the elite.

The ideology of the left is a fantasy until the leaders tell progressives the really bad news: you ain't never getting back what you're owed unless you're willing to use everything at your disposal to take it back, including possibly your life.

It's not some fucking game.

Keep voting, but don't get your hopes up; the rules do not favor you.

Otherwise, pay your taxes, buy your cheap Chinese shit and watch your television as GM eats your pension- you are owned like a dog. Go fuck something if you can, look at your porn, sneak some drugs into your system, there is still fun to be had if you watch your step, but don't go asking for a fair economy to go with your fun, because you're not getting it.

nihil wrote:and a wet dream for the government because they create a diversion from the very real ugliness that is taking place. Anybody who is serious will agree that the war in Iraq is illegal and disgusting.

Yeah, it is disgusting, and the road to that war was paved with lies. Glad you agree that the gov't doesn't always tell you the truth. And people leaked the early pre-9/11 planning, people like Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke; you know, they kind of exposed a conspiracy, didn't they?

nihil wrote:Focus on that. Who cares if Hitler is still alive and is dressing up as Santa Clause at the local mall.

Conspiracy Theories......CRAP!!!!

Okay, you focus on that. But if the day comes when you have to use a conspiracy theory to explain some event, you might be rusty if you shut that part of your brain down.

You are missing the point. Who are you helping? Yourself? Good for you. Put that in perspective, and you might just understand.

Wonder Woman called...she wants her belt back.

Think about those who are suffering in the world. Then think about why.

You are wasting your time and energy on something that means nothing. Good for you Super Boy. You are so brave.

Think about the things that really matter. If you need my help, I'll gladly volunteer. But please stop wasting time. The time that has been courageously spent by so many people around the world...excluding you.

People who have an unselfish compassion and a realistic understanding of the world. People who are dedicated to change.

oh yeah...

fuck you, you selfish prick.

i mean that in the nicest way.