Towards Rigorous & Radical Conspiracy Theory

[TheBlackSheep]

I suppose I'm arriving at a new level of paranoia, where yes state-funded disinfo artists exist and yes insurgent propaganda and organizing from the far Right exist, but also that the nexus between the two is more important than I'd previously considered it to be. You're perfectly correct that what we might call the far Right preceded Fascism as such- and that the far Right very much exceeds what we might call Fascism today. This is a very important distinction.

I've definitely had my time wasted by disinfo before... searching out this kind of stuff necessitates that... although once you start finding out the names of the public disinfo agents you generally come to see the connections between them. It's a crazy world out there, it just happens to be crazier than most of us thought.... after all, none of this is taught in schools, so this kind of oddyssey is one we take in a wilderness packed with wolves and angels that harken us in sweet bliss straight over the bottomless precipice.

[TheBlackSheep]

Here's a bit of a curious one for those who are deep into conspiracy.

In my hunting I've come across a lot of strange branches of conspiracy thought. One of the ones that I had come across, in connection to the Freemasons, is the figure of Manly P. Hall who was a 33rd degree mason (I believe, the highest rank— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_Palmer_Hall). He wrote books about masonic beliefs and spirituality. His biggest tome is The Secret Teachings of All Ages which is sort of a historical compendium of esoteric beliefs. Another of his books is The Secret Destiny of America which details a masonic origin behind the founding and development of America. Some conspiracy sources tie these directly into a narrative of the historical development. Unfortunately I have not read these books, though I would like to, so I cannot give an in depth analysis of their contents. But I did spend some time reading about what they contain as well as dipping a little into The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which is available for free online.

In that book, as well as The Secret Destiny of America, part of Manly Hall's assertions are that Francis Bacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon) was a freemason and contributed to the ideology and purpose for the founding of America. This idea is supposed to have its clearest expression in Bacon's work The New Atlantis, which deals with the discovering of a new country and the way its political structure is to be instituted.

It was a while ago I had read about those things. To be honest I am often a little deterred by mystical interpretations of history, but still the Freemasons come up quite a lot in conspiracy theory so I was intrigued to read about them...

Anyway, at this moment I am reading the book History of Political Philosophy, which is a very thick tome of essays about various influential political thinkers through history. It is editted by Leo Strauss and one of his students Joseph Cropsey. Leo Strauss it should be noted comes up less in conspiracy theory, but in mainstream culture is often attributed as being the biggest forerunner of Neoconservativism... he is also frequently criticized as being elitist among other things. His wiki has a debate about that subject. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss) I had recently read that interpretation of him in Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Inc., which is a very interesting book.

To the point, I am now on the Francis Bacon essay of this book (History of Political Philosophy) and there was an interesting paragraph. Previously to this paragraph it had explained how Francis Bacon supported imperialism. Here is part of the paragraph:

Bacon's imperialism is emphatically a naval imperialism, as that of Machiavelli is not. That seems rather a small difference, hardly justifying Bacon's claim to be the first to regard imperialism as a civic duty. We must remember, however, that the kind of people who could bring about a successful naval imperialism were, around 1600, "new men". They were the kind of people who could follow the advice which Bacon scattered freely in his Advancement of Learning to learn how to get along in the world, to practice the arts of rhetoric and business management, and the courtier's art. They were the people who could bring the comforts and luxuries from the far corners of the world to the London shops. They were the men who were not ashamed to exact usury, which Bacon defended. They were those who could think of imperialism rather in terms of economic gain than in terms of despotic power. They were the true representatives of the spirit of capitalism, to which Bacon, at least as much as Calvin and perhaps more, contributed.
[pg. 373-374]

I just thought that was interesting in connection to what I wrote above as well as a lot of the main strains of thought that run through many conspiracy theories, particularly taking Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope into account...

[Sounder]

AD wrote….

It's not just a group of people controlling the banks (and it's certainly not their "jewishness" and/or "zionism" creating all the problems)

Yes, nothing is ever ‘just’ one thing or another. Nobody but crackpots suggest that "jewishness" and/or "zionism" (are) creating all the problems. Zionism however clearly creates problems. It is a racially supremacist ideology that is imposing its madness rather directly on several million Palestinians. It is a cancer on the larger body politic to have broad support for this state institutionalized racism, which uses ethnic cleansing as a primary tactical method.

Antisemitism and the (modern) critique of capitalism

Then there is the anti-imperialist left. As one of its more critical and distinctive thinkers, Perry Anderson (2001, p. 15) argued: ‘entrenched in business, government and media, American Zionism has since the sixties acquired a firm grip on the levers of public opinion and official policy towards Israel, that has weakened only on the rarest of occasions’. The Jews, then, have not only conquered Palestine but they have also taken control of America, or as James Petras (2004, p. 210) sees it, the current effort of ‘US empire building’ is shaped by ‘Zionist empire builders’. For Anderson, Israel is a Jewish state, its nationalist triumphs are Jewish triumphs, and its economy is a Jewish economy – and its state a ‘rentier state’ that is kept by the US as its imperialist bridgehead in the Middle East.

No need to discuss or analyze the substance of these types of assertions, right?

I suspect that the supremacist side of Jewish society loves the category confusion between Jews and Zionists.

I like this kind of material lots better than the hate baiting bullshit that some here feel compelled to post. Thanks Ilan Pappe

http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2014/03/2 ... el-change/

......I think, really, coming back to the main point. I remember when Desmond Tutu came to the West Bank and some other, sort of big shots of the ANC [African National Congress] came and I was accompanying them. They mentioned something which I had never thought of before. And I said, “Why do you keep telling me that this is worse?” Because I read so much on the life of Africans under the apartheid regime, and I was always moved. And it looked so callous and cruel. I said “Why are you so insistent that this is worse, in its totality?”
And Desmond Tutu said something very important. He said, “The whites in South Africa wanted to exploit the African. Which is very bad. They wanted to exploit, they wanted to make sure that everything is in their hands. But nonetheless, they still mixed. I mean there was an African nanny in every house of white families.” He said, “My feeling is — and he’s absolutely right — that Zionism doesn’t want to exploit the Palestinian, it wants to eliminate him.”

The Idea of Israel
And it’s far worse. If you’re exploited, then one day you liberate yourself. But if someone wants to eliminate you, and will succeed, there is no redemption. There is no end. And this I think, someone … only people coming from South Africa could immediately see this, that this is worse. I mean they have seen exploitation, and I think they are right. The Palestinians happen to be in a space where most of the people who have power in Israel to make decisions, don’t want to see them. I’m not talking about genocide, but ethnic cleansing. But ethnic cleansing can also lead to genocide. And there’s always this danger.......

Tell me AD, are the sabbah folk racists or they fighting against racism?

[jakell]

I suppose I'm arriving at a new level of paranoia, where yes state-funded disinfo artists exist and yes insurgent propaganda and organizing from the far Right exist, but also that the nexus between the two is more important than I'd previously considered it to be. You're perfectly correct that what we might call the far Right preceded Fascism as such- and that the far Right very much exceeds what we might call Fascism today. This is a very important distinction.

I've definitely had my time wasted by disinfo before... searching out this kind of stuff necessitates that... although once you start finding out the names of the public disinfo agents you generally come to see the connections between them. It's a crazy world out there, it just happens to be crazier than most of us thought.... after all, none of this is taught in schools, so this kind of oddyssey is one we take in a wilderness packed with wolves and angels that harken us in sweet bliss straight over the bottomless precipice.

The question I ask myself though is "is that time wasted?". Certainly, if you get caught in a loop that tends to reinforce itself, and if you allow yourself to keep getting entangled with the people who tend to maintain that loop, then your time is being wasted.

I say the initial forays down this road are not wasted time, they are an opportunity to learn the human environment, and to learn where the pitfalls lie. Why we, and especially intelligent we's, don't learn this is an interesting subject.

I started looking at this earlier, with my talk of escapism and self-indulgance, labels that point to our own weakenesses in the pursuit of rigour.

[TheBlackSheep]

I suppose I'm arriving at a new level of paranoia, where yes state-funded disinfo artists exist and yes insurgent propaganda and organizing from the far Right exist, but also that the nexus between the two is more important than I'd previously considered it to be. You're perfectly correct that what we might call the far Right preceded Fascism as such- and that the far Right very much exceeds what we might call Fascism today. This is a very important distinction.

I've definitely had my time wasted by disinfo before... searching out this kind of stuff necessitates that... although once you start finding out the names of the public disinfo agents you generally come to see the connections between them. It's a crazy world out there, it just happens to be crazier than most of us thought.... after all, none of this is taught in schools, so this kind of oddyssey is one we take in a wilderness packed with wolves and angels that harken us in sweet bliss straight over the bottomless precipice.

The question I ask myself though is "is that time wasted?". Certainly, if you get caught in a loop that tends to reinforce itself, and if you allow yourself to keep getting entangled with the people who tend to maintain that loop, then your time is being wasted.

I say the initial forays down this road are not wasted time, they are an opportunity to learn the human environment, and to learn where the pitfalls lie. Why we, and especially intelligent we's, don't learn this is an interesting subject.

I started looking at this earlier, with my talk of escapism and self-indulgance, labels that point to our own weakenesses in the pursuit of rigour.

You love this kind of contemplation don't you. I see you're point but you might be looking too deeply into that statement. I began looking into this kind of stuff years back and I was definitely inexperienced (not that I'm some kind of master now anyway...) I wanted to know the truth, but I came up with a lot of lies. A lot of people don't have heaps of free time, so in that sense it was wasted. That it let me know that there is tons of disinfo being spread around is sort of relevant, but doesn't really justify the many hours I spent following fake leads... And no doubt it will continue to happen, because even (and sometimes especially) what we consider to be "reliable sources" are probably likely to hide or distort the truth.

Even in Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Inc. which I appreciated quite a lot, he brushes off the 2008 financial crisis by saying it was not due to government connivance... he even describes the development of American imperialism as a series of mistakes or coincidences a number of times in the book... not that it had me going out searching for fake information, but it definitely might work to distract the uninitiated from what is going on... which is a shame because I really appreciated that book on a lot of levels... Interestingly though, in his other book Politics and Vision he thanks the Rockefeller Foundation in the foreward... also I know he was a Fulbright scholar... so...

[jakell]

[quote="[url=http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=539647#p539647]

The question I ask myself though is "is that time wasted?". Certainly, if you get caught in a loop that tends to reinforce itself, and if you allow yourself to keep getting entangled with the people who tend to maintain that loop, then your time is being wasted.

I say the initial forays down this road are not wasted time, they are an opportunity to learn the human environment, and to learn where the pitfalls lie. Why we, and especially intelligent we's, don't learn this is an interesting subject.

I started looking at this earlier, with my talk of escapism and self-indulgance, labels that point to our own weakenesses in the pursuit of rigour.

You love this kind of contemplation don't you. I see you're point but you might be looking too deeply into that statement. I began looking into this kind of stuff years back and I was definitely inexperienced (not that I'm some kind of master now anyway...) I wanted to know the truth, but I came up with a lot of lies. A lot of people don't have heaps of free time, so in that sense it was wasted. That it let me know that there is tons of disinfo being spread around is sort of relevant, but doesn't really justify the many hours I spent following fake leads... And no doubt it will continue to happen, because even (and sometimes especially) what we consider to be "reliable sources" are probably likely to hide or distort the truth.

Even in Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Inc. which I appreciated quite a lot, he brushes off the 2008 financial crisis by saying it was not due to government connivance... he even describes the development of American imperialism as a series of mistakes or coincidences a number of times in the book... not that it had me going out searching for fake information, but it definitely might work to distract the uninitiated from what is going on... which is a shame because I really appreciated that book on a lot of levels... Interestingly though, in his other book Politics and Vision he thanks the Rockefeller Foundation in the foreward... also I know he was a Fulbright scholar... so...

Well, I wouldn't claim that level of emotional attachment, but it has become one of the things I have started to focus on more and more; examining my own lens as well as looking though it.

You say you followed 'fake leads'. I can't think of any other way of determining their authenticity other than by following them (except by taking someone's word for it**), and it seems your time was not completely wasted, you assessed them and reached conclusions. You may regret the amount of time it took you to do this, but I often wonder if this is a function of our inflated expectations

** and we wouldn't be here now if we we content to do this.

[Sounder]

Hey TBS, your post before mine was excellent and in general I think you bring great attitude, perspective and information to this forum. (You too jake)

Disinformation is good, first off; that is where most all information comes from anyway. People with agendas. Surely folk do not think that those 10,000 articles over at libcom wrote themselves, driven only by pure humanitarian sentiments. Or do you?

It’s a rocky road (to understanding and satiation of the cosmological urge), all the more so, if one lives by fixed pretences. We learn discrimination at our own pace and in our own manner.

For example, category confusion was introduced between the second and third sentence in the following bit, when the author switches from Perry Anderson’s 'American Zionism' label into the label 'Jews'. This agenda is also hate baiting in that it associates all Jews with Zionism. Zionists deserve opprobrium, Jews do not, if you still need a clue.

Antisemitism and the (modern) critique of capitalism

Then there is the anti-imperialist left. As one of its more critical and distinctive thinkers, Perry Anderson (2001, p. 15) argued: ‘entrenched in business, government and media, American Zionism has since the sixties acquired a firm grip on the levers of public opinion and official policy towards Israel, that has weakened only on the rarest of occasions’. The Jews, then, have not only conquered Palestine but they have also taken control of America, or as James Petras (2004, p. 210) sees it, the current effort of ‘US empire building’ is shaped by ‘Zionist empire builders’. For Anderson, Israel is a Jewish state, its nationalist triumphs are Jewish triumphs, and its economy is a Jewish economy – and its state a ‘rentier state’ that is kept by the US as its imperialist bridgehead in the Middle East.

[jakell]

I think we downgrade the word 'disinformation' too much , there are just different sorts of information, and what we term 'disinformation' actually gives us clues about the source rather than what it is pointing to.
Disinformation is actually the meat and potatoes of conspiracy theory.

You're right about us learning discrimination at our own pace. sometimes we are impatient and sometimes we are being subtley railroaded, and it is the first we should really learn to control. One of my methods for this is to try to be aware of my lens in addition to the world beyond it, this has a way of slowing me down (in a good way). A small smudge left on the patio door may remind us to stop running into it.

There is a small caveat to the above that we have talked about recently, and that is that sometimes the outside world unavoidably pushes us along and reduces the timeframe. Sometimes this is real and needs acknowledging, and sometimes we are mistaken.

[American Dream]

Here's a bit of a curious one for those who are deep into conspiracy.

In my hunting I've come across a lot of strange branches of conspiracy thought. One of the ones that I had come across, in connection to the Freemasons, is the figure of Manly P. Hall who was a 33rd degree mason (I believe, the highest rank— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_Palmer_Hall). He wrote books about masonic beliefs and spirituality. His biggest tome is The Secret Teachings of All Ages which is sort of a historical compendium of esoteric beliefs. Another of his books is The Secret Destiny of America which details a masonic origin behind the founding and development of America. Some conspiracy sources tie these directly into a narrative of the historical development. Unfortunately I have not read these books, though I would like to, so I cannot give an in depth analysis of their contents. But I did spend some time reading about what they contain as well as dipping a little into The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which is available for free online.

In that book, as well as The Secret Destiny of America, part of Manly Hall's assertions are that Francis Bacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon) was a freemason and contributed to the ideology and purpose for the founding of America. This idea is supposed to have its clearest expression in Bacon's work The New Atlantis, which deals with the discovering of a new country and the way its political structure is to be instituted.

It was a while ago I had read about those things. To be honest I am often a little deterred by mystical interpretations of history, but still the Freemasons come up quite a lot in conspiracy theory so I was intrigued to read about them...

Anyway, at this moment I am reading the book History of Political Philosophy, which is a very thick tome of essays about various influential political thinkers through history. It is editted by Leo Strauss and one of his students Joseph Cropsey. Leo Strauss it should be noted comes up less in conspiracy theory, but in mainstream culture is often attributed as being the biggest forerunner of Neoconservativism... he is also frequently criticized as being elitist among other things. His wiki has a debate about that subject. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss) I had recently read that interpretation of him in Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Inc., which is a very interesting book.

To the point, I am now on the Francis Bacon essay of this book (History of Political Philosophy) and there was an interesting paragraph. Previously to this paragraph it had explained how Francis Bacon supported imperialism. Here is part of the paragraph:

Bacon's imperialism is emphatically a naval imperialism, as that of Machiavelli is not. That seems rather a small difference, hardly justifying Bacon's claim to be the first to regard imperialism as a civic duty. We must remember, however, that the kind of people who could bring about a successful naval imperialism were, around 1600, "new men". They were the kind of people who could follow the advice which Bacon scattered freely in his Advancement of Learning to learn how to get along in the world, to practice the arts of rhetoric and business management, and the courtier's art. They were the people who could bring the comforts and luxuries from the far corners of the world to the London shops. They were the men who were not ashamed to exact usury, which Bacon defended. They were those who could think of imperialism rather in terms of economic gain than in terms of despotic power. They were the true representatives of the spirit of capitalism, to which Bacon, at least as much as Calvin and perhaps more, contributed.
[pg. 373-374]

I just thought that was interesting in connection to what I wrote above as well as a lot of the main strains of thought that run through many conspiracy theories, particularly taking Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope into account...

Yes- I'm familiar with the Hall books and actually ambivalent towards Freemasonry as a whole: I see neither a monolithic satanic conspiracy directed towards molesting children and taking over the world (though surely there are elements dedicated to these sorts of things) nor as the wholly benevolent Illuminati which Manly Palmer Hall seems to suggest.

I just think it's bizarre, by my lights, to suggest- as Hall does- that the British colonization of the Americas and subsequent settler colonialist project known as the United States of America-- should be considered this wholly benevolent project sponsored by enlightened initiates setting up a pure and exceptional "New Atlantis". WTF???

Nothing about genocide and slavery, leading towards industrial capitalism and white supremacy? It seems crazy to me...

[TheBlackSheep]

Disinformation is good, first off; that is where most all information comes from anyway. People with agendas. Surely folk do not think that those 10,000 articles over at libcom wrote themselves, driven only by pure humanitarian sentiments. Or do you?

I might not go so far as to call disinformation good but I see your point and I concede to it. In any case it is probably inevitable. I don't mind so much if a source is ideologically motivated because it can often be easier to separate value judgements from a fact and reevaluate it by your own standards if so desired... Being "informed of a fact" which turns out to be a fabrication can be much more frustrating to track down to its source... and it also causes problems for when there is an actual "fact" that is difficult to verify, and so you end up giving up and disregarding it as bogus when it just needed some deeper digging to uncover the reality behind the statement. But I do get what you and Jakell are saying and it makes sense. It is no doubt my inflated expectations... seriously. I have in the past been naively idealistic.

[TheBlackSheep]

Yes- I'm familiar with the Hall books and actually ambivalent towards Freemasonry as a whole: I see neither a monolithic satanic conspiracy directed towards molesting children and taking over the world (though surely there are elements dedicated to these sorts of things) nor as the wholly benevolent Illuminati which Manly Palmer Hall seems to suggest.

I just think it's bizarre, by my lights, to suggest- as Hall does- that the British colonization of the Americas and subsequent settler colonialist project known as the United States of America-- should be considered this wholly benevolent project sponsored by enlightened initiates setting up a pure and exceptional "New Atlantis". WTF???

Nothing about genocide and slavery, leading towards industrial capitalism and white supremacy? It seems crazy to me...

It definitely seems like Freemasonry goes to great lengths to promote an image of being devoted to the uplift of humanity, etc. That in itself might even strike me as a little suspicious if only because it is hard to believe that that group would be so idealistic, while simultaneously feeling it necessary to cloak their organization in exclusiveness/secrecy... I was listening to some of M. Hall's lectures on youtube around that time I had heard about him, in particular I listened to one about Secret Societies and he said that there are no secret societies in modern times because our culture is much too open and there is no need for secret societies... Having read Quigley, I wonder if Hall would be uninformed or just fibbing. Even the Bilderberg meetings weren't formally outed all that long ago, and prior they had gone to lengths to keep their meetings "private"...

[American Dream]

Yes- I'm familiar with the Hall books and actually ambivalent towards Freemasonry as a whole: I see neither a monolithic satanic conspiracy directed towards molesting children and taking over the world (though surely there are elements dedicated to these sorts of things) nor as the wholly benevolent Illuminati which Manly Palmer Hall seems to suggest.

I just think it's bizarre, by my lights, to suggest- as Hall does- that the British colonization of the Americas and subsequent settler colonialist project known as the United States of America-- should be considered this wholly benevolent project sponsored by enlightened initiates setting up a pure and exceptional "New Atlantis". WTF???

Nothing about genocide and slavery, leading towards industrial capitalism and white supremacy? It seems crazy to me...

It definitely seems like Freemasonry goes to great lengths to promote an image of being devoted to the uplift of humanity, etc. That in itself might even strike me as a little suspicious if only because it is hard to believe that that group would be so idealistic, while simultaneously feeling it necessary to cloak their organization in exclusiveness/secrecy... I was listening to some of M. Hall's lectures on youtube around that time I had heard about him, in particular I listened to one about Secret Societies and he said that there are no secret societies in modern times because our culture is much too open and there is no need for secret societies... Having read Quigley, I wonder if Hall would be uninformed or just fibbing. Even the Bilderberg meetings weren't formally outed all that long ago, and prior they had gone to lengths to keep their meetings "private"...

He certainly comes off as a dedicated and well informed propagandist. Are ideological zealots the best at that sort of work? Perhaps- but intelligent and well-trained sociopaths will give them a run for their money!

[TheBlackSheep]

He certainly comes off as a dedicated and well informed propagandist. Are ideological zealots the best at that sort of work? Perhaps- but intelligent and well-trained sociopaths will give them a run for their money!

I'd say in general I am more susceptable to the sway of ideological zealots. It's probably a remnant of that desire to believe in something... no less dangerous of a trait I'm sure... problem is I'm equally scared of letting cynicism turn me completely callous.

[jakell]

He certainly comes off as a dedicated and well informed propagandist. Are ideological zealots the best at that sort of work? Perhaps- but intelligent and well-trained sociopaths will give them a run for their money!

I'd say in general I am more susceptable to the sway of ideological zealots. It's probably a remnant of that desire to believe in something... no less dangerous of a trait I'm sure... problem is I'm equally scared of letting cynicism turn me completely callous.

In line with what I've said previously on obsessions, obsessions can produce useful results. There's absolutely no reason that they have to run out of control once we gain a degree of maturity, and I would say to someone who is this way inclined to not try to banish your obsessions, but cultivate others in addition, one's that may inform and give perspective to the others.

The same goes for 'believing in something', why do we think it has to be one singular thing? Why not several things that are not strictly antithetical to each other?

[American Dream]

More on the positing of "productive" capital against finance capital:

All during the rise of euro-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the left dissed & dismissed them as pawns of the capitalist class. Whether in the brilliant German Communist photomontage posters of Heartfield or the pronouncement from Moscow that “fascism is the terroristic dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie”, there was a constant message that Italian fascism and German Nazism were only puppets for the big capitalist class.This has important elements of truth, but is fatally off-center and produces an actually disarming picture.



Today we think of fascism so much in terms of its repression, that we forget how much Nazism built its movement by campaigning against big capitalism.One famous National Socialist election poster shows a social-democratic winged “angel” walking hand in hand with a stereotyped banker, with the big slogan: “Marxism is the Guardian Angel of Capitalism”. Hitler promised to preserve the “good” productive capitalism of ordinary hard-working Germans, while wiping out the “bad” parasitic big capitalism of the hidden finance capitalist Jewish bosses. In fact, tens of millions of Americans (and not just white folks) would support such a program right here & now. Fascism blended together a radical sentiment against the big bourgeoisie and their State, together with racist-nationalist ideology, into a political uprising of the middle classes .

From: J. Sakai – The Green Nazi: An Investigation into Fascist Ideology

The Devil is in the details. It's not just finance capital causing our problems- it's also "productive" capital. It's not just a group of people controlling the banks (and it's certainly not their "jewishness" and/or "zionism" creating all the problems) it's much more importantly a system- which has a life of its own- remove one set of bad guys and new people will surely take their place.

The ruling class does manipulate us through their media and some owning class people surely do profit from war but it's not nearly so simple nor dualistic as people like David Icke would lead us to believe..

This may help explain things a bit better:


Antisemitism and the (modern) critique of capitalism

The Nazi ideologue Rosenberg (1938) formulated the modern essence of antisemitism succinctly when he portrayed it as an attack on Communism, Bolshevism, and Jewish capitalism, a capitalism not of productive labour and industry, but of parasites - money and finance, speculators and bankers.

There is of course a difference between the antisemitism that culminated in Auschwitz and the antisemitism of the post-1945 world. However, whether antisemitism persists because or despite of Auschwitz is, ultimately, an idle question. The notions ‘despite’ and ‘because’ give credence to Auschwitz as a factory of death that is assumed to have destroyed antisemitism. Furthermore, and connected, antisemitism is viewed as a phenomenon of the past, that merely casts its shadow on the present but has itself no real existence. In this way, overt expressions of antisemitism are deemed ugly merely as pathological aberrations of an otherwise civilized world. In this context the critique of antisemitism is either belittled as an expression of ‘European guilt’ or rejected as an expression of bad faith: a camouflage for insulating Israel from criticism (Keaney, 2007).

The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism.

https://libcom.org/library/antisemitism ... capitalism