by Rigorous Intuition » Tue Jul 12, 2005 8:40 pm
<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>This address was the highlight for me last Spring at Toronto's 9/11 Truth Inquiry.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Conspiracy and the State of the Union</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>by Jamey Hecht, PhD<br><br>...<br><br>Dissidents are patriotic critics — in the best cases, anti-nationalist cosmopolitans — whose arguments have not yet won the day. If ever the merits of their cases are established and their ideals legitimated, others come to recognize the urgent benevolence that motivated their dissent, and their faces appear on postage stamps with those of Thom Paine, Crazy Horse, and Paul Robeson. A critic is an interpreter who uses his or her mind and heart to clarify a text or a situation for the effective benefit of the larger public. Political criticism is a vexed but noble attempt to think past the limits of official opinion and earnestly diagnose the legitimacy of our political institutions and their occupants. Critics of the national security state are marginalized as dreamers, sometimes brilliant in their efforts at information gathering and critique, but finally unable to dramatically change the brutal order of realpolitik they denounce. The public they address is mostly indifferent, powerless, and thoroughly distracted from issues of the greatest possible relevance to their own well-being. <br><br>The forces of violence, reaction, and American exceptionalism can claim a long series of epochal triumphs, of which I will name only the most egregious: Operation Paperclip, which brought the Nazi Intelligence “community” into the nascent CIA (thereby rescuing the most depraved murderers in history from certain death at the hands of British military tribunals); the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA as a secret society of military adventurism and political sabotage under the guise of an intelligence-gathering body; the murders of President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, which issued in a disastrous Vietnam War that killed up to three million people and pitched the U.S. economy into a permanent free-fall of debt; the Savings and Loan Robbery, which did so much to bankrupt the vanishing middle class; the 1990’s three trillion dollar theft under the auspices of the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which motivated America’s international creditors to begin withdrawing their confidence from the dollar; and the “velvet coup” of the fraudulent presidential election of 2000, which openly discredited the residual myth of popular sovereignty. But perhaps 11-22-63 and 9-11-01 are the deepest wounds they have inflicted upon the body politic so far. These represent two seizures of state power by the most violent elements of the longstanding elites who make policy in the absence of popular sovereignty and genuine legislative oversight. In the long meantime, they have consolidated their power and expanded their domain of operations and propaganda with an inexorable momentum. <br><br>...<br><br>THE TERM ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’<br><br>This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category. <br><br>...<br><br>If we say, 9-11 was orchestrated by the bin Laden organization, the Pakistani intelligence agency, and elements of the neoconservative group that seized power in 2000, that’s an hypothesis, derived logically from a set of documented facts that constitute evidence. It isn’t a theory. It can become part of a theory if it’s joined with other hypotheses into a coherent descriptive pattern that can help to predict future events in general terms. <br><br>For instance, the amply demonstrated hypothesis that the 35th President of the United States was murdered by a consortium of interests including the CIA, Cuban exiles, organized crime, and the military. 11-22 and 9-11 are examples of premeditated murder by more than one person – in law, they are cases of conspiracy to commit murder (and fraud, and perjury, and treason). Taken together, they imply a theory whose greatest expression is the work of Peter Dale Scott, who coined the term deep politics: “the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government.”[7] Deep politics is a robust theory, a powerful explanatory account of demonstrable phenomena; it applies to myriad cases and offers a unified understanding of their causes and meanings. Like Goethe’s conceptual account of color, and like Newton’s rival account which refuted it, Scott’s deep-political theory applies uniformly to the domain it describes. <br><br>Conspiracy, on the other hand, is a hypothesis about a particular case at hand. The only rigorous meaning that the phrase “conspiracy theory” can have would be that political crimes involving more than one actor are usually exceptional episodes unrelated to one another – rather than the ongoing, systemic and unacknowledged relationships between authorities and the criminals they are paid to hinder and to punish. <br><br>The appeal of the phrase “conspiracy theory” lies in the slang meaning of “theory”: unproven and even unprovable claims about the way things get done in government and business. But there are two problems here.<br><br>First, a theory is still rightly called a theory long after it has been proven, even to the limits of human understanding. Einstein’s theory of Relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution are incomplete, like every product of human thought. But they are as certain as any grounds we can give for them, as certain as the palpable facts on which they rest. The public imagines that this word “theory” implies confusion and controversy. It doesn’t. <br><br>The second problem is this: in order for a theory to be worthy of that name, it must be falsifiable. This is a term invented by Karl Popper; it means that your description of events has to be demonstrably true based on valid experiments – or genuine evidence – that might otherwise have proven it demonstrably false. Like the hypotheses that form its bones and flesh, a theory must turn out to be either true or false, or it’s not a theory. For instance, consider the beautiful claim that the world is governed by a God who rules by reward and punishment. Nothing observable counts as evidence for or against the claim. If I say “show me a sign,” an immediate lightning bolt on my head is not evidence of a God any more than the absence of a sign is evidence against it. Nothing can count as a test, so theism is not a theory; it may be something wonderful, but it’s something else. Relativity, however, is a theory of the natural world, verified by experiments like Michaelson-Morley which demonstrated its conformity to observable facts – and had the experiments turned out differently, the theory would have been falsified. The public thinks falsifiability means that the theory can already be disproved and is therefore wrong. It actually means that the theory is either right or wrong, but not meaningless. <br><br>...<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.911inquiry.org/Presentations/JameyHecht.htm" target="top">www.911inquiry.org/Presentations/JameyHecht.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
