Conspiracy Theory Made Easy

[Minstrel Boy]

Posted to my blog, here.

Conspiracy Theory Made Easy

A fascinating article today entitled "Untimely Deaths in Ukraine", disputing the official explanations of "strange suicides and car crashes" in the Ukraine.

Get a load of this, and from the Los Angeles Times, no less:

The former Ukrainian interior minister, scheduled to meet in just a few hours with prosecutors to give testimony in a high-profile case of political murder, aimed a gun at his chin and fired, sending a bullet ripping through his cheek and out his upper jaw. Then he aimed it at his temple and fired again.

Suicide, government investigators ruled.
...
Zvarych, the justice minister, has expressed doubt that the former interior minister could have recovered sufficiently from the shock of the first wound to have delivered the second.

"I have certain doubts personally speaking about whether someone can pull the trigger twice in order to commit suicide," he said. "There's this threshold of pain, I think, that one would need to be able to cross in order to be able to do that, something called a 'pain syndrome,' that I think is very difficult to overcome.

Consider that Gary Webb - "the last North American career journalist," in Al Giordano's words - was also judged to have killed himself with two gunshots to the head. Consider the mainstream media was as incurious about the circumstances of his death as it had disgraced itself regarding the substance of his investigations. And consider it was the LA Times which played the point in Webb's character assassination, even in his obituary.

My purpose isn't to rehash speculation about Webb's death, but to underscore the selective speculation of the American press.

Imagine if, in the space of five years, figures of the stature of John F Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy had been murdered anywhere else in the world.

Imagine if finely-milled anthrax had been mailed to the opponents of Hugo Chavez, just as his government introduced "El Acto Del Patriota," which promised to consolidate power in the presidency and violate the spirit and letter of the Venezuelan constitution. And imagine if the investigation led to a bioweapons lab of the Venezuelan military, and then faltered.

Imagine if "Pavlov Wellstonski," Vladimir Putin's leading opponent of the war in Chechnya, had died in a plane crash which decided control of the Duma.

Nothing is as disreputable to the American mainstream media as "conspiracy theory," but it's riddled with conspiracy theorists who apply their craft liberally to other countries. "Conspiracy theory" appears to be disreputable only in domestic practice, not in international theory. The LA Times' byline attributes the story to Kim Murphy, but it may as well be Alex Jones, with the singular exception that the suspicious deaths are made in the Ukraine, not the United States.

The Times could easily publish a story entitled "Untimely Deaths in the US." Except it would never do such a thing. So I guess it's not that easy after all.

[jdots]

1. The case closed flag waving warm fuzzys.

Alfred E. Newman said it all " What me worry ? "
The Bushies find comfort in ignorance.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Defense Chief Pays Visit to USS John F. Kennedy

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=900431

edit
oops sorry MB wrong thread!

[bobthedrummer]

3. Yes, it is all that, and a bag of chips in realpolitik.

Conspiracies abound in realpolitik. We Americans prefer the lone nut explanation over naming names of conspirators. But they DO have names indeed and sometimes we read them in threads here at DU.
Thanks MB.

[starroute]

4. Americans feel a need to believe they're different

Other countries have corruption. Other countries have coups. Other countries have political assassinations. Other countries have governments that lack legitimacy because they came to power in questionable ways. But that's only other countries.

It may be because the United States doesn't have much history behind it, but Americans look to their government as the source of shared identity in a way that other nations don't. As a result, Americans have an obsessive need to believe in the absolute legitimacy of their government and a clear trail of legitimate hand-offs of power from one administration to another going back to George Washington.

All the great crises of the last half-century -- the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Bush fiasco -- have been crises involving the legitimate transfer of power. And the more obvious it become to any impartial observer that the system is completely broken, the deeper most Americans sink into denial and pretense.

In a sense, they're not wrong, because the moment you admit that there is no longer any source of legitimate authority in this country, the entire contraption falls apart. Does anyone else remember the old joke about the man born with a golden screw in his navel? One day he got tired of wondering why it was there and decided to try unscrewing it. His ass fell off.

So if you mean to convince Americans that their government lacks legitimacy, you're going to have to deal with the problem of how to pick up the pieces when America's ass falls off.

[Minstrel Boy]

5. And that's how the cover ups keep perpetuating themselves

"So if you mean to convince Americans that their government lacks legitimacy, you're going to have to deal with the problem of how to pick up the pieces when America's ass falls off."

It's thought the system would fly apart if the nature of the crimes were officially disclosed. So the lies compound into one big, illegitimate mess, riven with cognitive dissonance.

Where once all that was required was a relatively small corrective, now begs for a revolution.

[Al-CIAda]

6. Indeed. Thanks for the article/posting.

:thumbsup:

[JohnyCanuck]

7. IMHOP, you've hit the nail on the head (again)! n/t