oioioi wrote:
jewshillcommiezionistbloodtraitor

andyh wrote: It would be very interesting to understand that last point, whether there is a unity of absolutists vs a unity of pragmatists regarding Knowledge and "truth", or whether unity is more ideological, financially or racially motivated.

How does knowledge become truth? Omg my head hurts

Thank you everyone for your warm welcome!

Mike wrote:
Generally speaking, the New World Order, the Illuminati or whoever will invariably represent what you personally do not like. At least somewhere like the Icke forum. Homophobe? There's the 'homosexual agenda'. Racist? There's a plot to impose multiculturalism on everyone. Anti-Semite? The Jews run everything. Reactionary conservative? There's a deliberate plot to undermine family values. Etc. For a lot of people - the Icke forum Nutzis being a shining example - the 'big conspiracy' and its ultimate agenda is a projection of their own personal fears and prejudices.

Contemporary conspiracy narratives draw off a bunch of influences, though overall predominantly ageing American right wing conspiracy ideas. This is why you get people who still think there are reds under the bed and pop music is satanic. This is also why you get hysterical stuff about e.g. the Frankfurt School and Tavistock Institute. Conspiracy ideas often portray themselves as radical and revolutionary, but more often that not are firecely traditionalist and reactionary - so Alex Jones is essentially a dull paleo-conservative who's about as radical and revolutionary as Ed Milliband who has carved himself a media empire out of shouting a lot. He's selling a product and it's not in his interest for anything to change. If Ron Paul got elected, he'd suddenly think of a reason to make a film about how evil he is. He wants you to buy baseball caps and send him your money for nothing every time he feels like asking. He's a bit like one of those 80s televangelists selling you salvation by subscription.

Icke just mixes up a bunch of stuff other people have said and attaches his own sci-fi spin to it. Sometimes he says stuff that is accurate, much of the time he's just recycling other people's conspiracy memes. His books are full of half-truths, distortions and downright falsehoods and aren't worth anything as a source of information unless as a prompt to fact check a whole bunch of stuff.

Alan Watt is like an Icke that never got the lucky break and hit the big time.

Jeff Rense is a cunt.

The conspiracy scene has about as much chance of changing society as Strictly Come Dancing. This is because it can't agree on anything. Even the single most unifying conspiracy idea - 911 being an inside job - is broken down into an array of people arguing fiercely about planes/no planes/mini nukes/death rays etc and ending up with people who think everyone but them and their mates are government shills. This is unfortunate because the conspiracy scene features many good people who want to make a difference. But whereas political groupings have a habit of constantly falling out and splintering off, they at least have the same core ideas - the conspiracy scene ranges from hippy anarchists spreading a message of universal love to angry Nazis who want to round up everyone they don't like and put them in concentration camps. That;s why the Icke forum is so crazy.

i get interest piqued when ppl say alan watt ... but then im sad cos its not alan watts

batou wrote:
A familiar feeling.

dogsmilk wrote: I've read this in other places, I was quite surprised didn't really think it was true, i thought the consipracy theorists were generally lefties, with anti-war, anti-imperialist-anti-authority, pro-liberal positions on most questions.


I can see why it might get to that stage, so in a way it does change society?
Most people are discussing very important theories with large implications for one's world view, sense of order attitude towards life, my view towards history, religion, politics and other things has been pretty much radically changed over a few months.

do you think in it's own way Strictly Dancing changes society, culture and society? It's quite interesting modern reality television, it's changed the way people watch tv, requires people's active participation as the basis of the show and even the watchers are called into actively determining the outcome of the competition.

Mike wrote: I've read this in other places, I was quite surprised didn't really think it was true, i thought the consipracy theorists were generally lefties, with anti-war, anti-imperialist-anti-authority, pro-liberal positions on most questions.[/quote]

Yes a lot are, but by the same token a lot aren't. And a lot of core ideas are fairly old ones originally championed by the right or far right. For example the idea of The New World Order originated in parallel right wing secular and religious versions but was heavily popularised by Pat Roberson's the new world order that drew heavily from anti-semitic loon Eustace Mullins. The freeman on the land notion of being able to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars from some account the government holds that Rob Menard peddled originally comes from Roger Elvick who used the notion to scam white supremacists he hung around with. Concerns about flouride in the water being a deliberate strategy of affecting people's cognition was originally borne of suggestions it would make them more receptive to socialism/communism (which is why it was thus satirised in Dr Strangelove). Loads of these ideas come from right wing conspiracy notions in many cases going back decades. And of course there's the religious element which gives us all this satanic stuff. Today, a wide array of ideas are mixed up and merged together so they come out as a confused blending. This is compounded by people on the left and right often having intersecting concerns. At a fundamental level both are unhappy with the status quo, both feel marginalised and both want radical social change. Then take take something like, say, Zionism; the left tend to be opposed to Israel and champion the the cause of the Palestinians, while the anti-semitic far right hate Israel for obvious reasons and have a habit of using "Zionist" as a codeword for"Jew" since at least as far back as Willis Carto started doing it. A lot of left wing people aren't going to stick up for Israel, but at the same time the age old Jewish conspiracy theory gets recycled except it's now "Zionists" instead of "Jews" who are the root of all evil while somehow a fairly specific notion about a Jewish homeland somehow becomes the predominant obsession of the evil overlords.
Similarly, left wing people tend to hate globalisation because of the effect rampant capitalism with immense corporate power screws everyone - so do ring wing nationalists who feel their national identity is being usurped.

The right wing influence is abundantly clear in stuff like the cheerleading for Ron Paul, the anachronistic preoccupation with communists and 'socialisation' and favourite targets like the Frankfurt school, Tavistock Institute and Fabians. Stuff like Jordan Maxwell and Brian Gerrish seeing communists everywhere like they've suddenly forgotten the last 20 years happened. I think people forget a lot that conspiracy notions don't all come from pioneering researchers determined to uncover the truth, but an awful lot of them have their own history and political context in which they arose.

There are other significant dynamics though - like the insistence you get that there's some kind of overriding power with a specific 'agenda' whereby everything that happens must happen because 'they' decided it. Generally not allowing for the notions that shit happens, nobody controls everything and that multiple social and political forces are at play at any given time.

Well it can certainly bring up interesting stuff and there are certainly very interesting debates and some great people, but the point I'm making is the conspiracy scene creates a big mix of wildly divergent competing ideas. So you've got a massive array of theories people may or may not believe and ascribe different levels of importance to. And then you've got a clash of wildly different interpretations of these theories. This forum would never have existed in the first place if the DIF didn't support Stormfront's outreach efforts to promote their own particular interpretation. Conspiracy stuff doesn't have a particular ideology or worldview. Anarchists all believe in anarchy and Fascists all believe in Fascism - either can believe popular conspiracy notions. This of course raises the complex question of how exactly you define "conspiracy theories" and this then filters down into the range of beliefs - one person might just think 911 was an inside job but not believe the moon landings were faked, the Holocaust was a hoax or there are occult symbols in pop videos - but if you hang around the conspiracy scene these are the sorts of ideas other people are going to be promoting. This means you may well end up arguing about all kinds of tangential stuff - I spent years arguing with Holocaust deniers only because I originally encountered them trying to push their bullshit back when I hung around the 911 truth movement. - I hadn't given the subject any thought at all before that.

See, the problem is the way all this stuff gets mixed up. Take that fuckwit David Dees' ugly artwork. He mixes up images a lot of people can relate to in a broad sense.



together with right wing memes, in this case a particularly idiotic one



with bargain basement Holocaust denial foolishness, here promoting some twat from the pro-Nazi Adelaide Institute it should take anyone with google about five minutes to debunk.



Dees is a prime example of what can be the problem with the conspiracy scene - where people start believing any old crap because it's pitched as the hidden truth THEY don't want you to know!!!!!. This obviously does not apply to everyone - this forum for example is not full of people like that - but at the same time if you look at the DIF it's really difficult to see how it could ever be regarded as enlightened people offering some kind of alternative.

In fact, this Dees image does a good job of capturing what I'm trying to get at.



Heh. As a meaningless choice of some self-publicists you're encouraged to buy into the excitement of selecting, I'd say it's certainly a reasonable metaphor for contemporary democracy. I guess the US Presidential elections are a bit closer than the UK to this sort of thing, but maybe one day we'll have Cameron up on stage waltzing with George Osbourne in a fetching frock before belting out burn baby burn, benefits inferno and then we all cast our vote based on his performance.

But I think Big Brother and Pop Idol are more guilty of pioneering the format.

Wow Dogsmilk, that's a fairly comprehensive post there, maybe I could use that one day for an article?
The format of the post, with the David Dees pictures hurt my head a bit, it kinda leaps around, I had to google stormfront outreach program, what does conspiracy theories have to do with White supremacists?
I also had to google freeman on the land and robert menard, this shit is mind boggling, tbh I'm just gonna ignore most of the links in your post, if it's been around for a few years and I know nothing about it from my buddy over on ATS, it's probably not worth spending hours watching youtubes about now.

Some of the things I find convincing are the secret rulers theories, Elitist factions, some of the occult stuff and some of the UFO stuff.

Have you heard this recent Alex Jones and David Icke radio show on the 21st December 2012, Icke speaks about the Archontic Energies, it was pretty spooky stuff, Is Icke Islamic or Religious in your opinion?

Mike wrote:
Some of his 'followers' certainly are...

Mike wrote:
He's anti-semetic in my opinion. Whether or not that equates to him being religious, I wouldn't know.

Mike wrote:
Oh sorry - "Stormfront Outreach" referred to the well established phenomenon of Nazis from Stormfront turning up on the Icke forum to speak of the glories of Hitler and dread menace of race mixing and Jewish people. I haven't looked at ATS much, but AFAIK it's pretty regulated in terms of bigotry facilitation, whereas stuff like homophobia, racism and antisemitism are more than tolerated on the Icke forum as long as they don't get too extreme. There has traditionally been a very strong streak of in particular antisemitism sunning through the DIF. This unsurprisingly attracts Nazis.

Make sure you don't believe a word Rob Menard says - he's a fraud whose claims can lead to real world actions with very real consequences.

conspiracy theories can have a lot to do with white supremacists - though I'd hasten to add in the majority of cases they do not. I mean, the whole 'Jews control the world' thing is the standard Nazi viewpoint updated to incorporate contemporary events. The 'Zionists rule the world' thing is the same thing changed slightly to appear less bigoted. This is a 'daddy' conspiracy that others may be subsumed under - so like when the civil rights movement in America gained ground, to Nazis this couldn't possibly mean black people had done this for themselves - not those inferior jungle bunnies who were by nature less intelligent. So who was behind it? The cunning Jew of course! (see Leonard Zeskind's blood and politics for an account of this)
You can see this played out on the Icke forum quite regularly in a watered down form when people bemoan race mixing and how it's undermining 'our race'.
Hell, though the UFO community has traditionally been, well, just people interested in UFOs, even that has had far right elements creeping in - a book about this in America is Michael Barkun's a culture of conspiracy. IIRC in the UK in the 90s flying saucer review had some dodgy bastard editing it, but I can't remember the details.

I'm not trying to make out the conspiracy scene is all Nazis or something, just saying it's an element and less extreme right wing influences a fairly prevalent one. Like with people like Alex Jones. It starts pushing towards the outskirts of camp Nutzi when you hit Jeff Rense. Y'know, with people like David Duke, Eustace Mullins and Ingrid Rimland (wife out out'n'proud Nazi Ernst Zundel) just from glancing at his front page.

I'm only sort of vaguely aware of this 'archonic energies' stuff. Since Icke decided the rings of Saturn are beaming Fox news into everyone's heads or whatever it is, I can't be doing with paying any attention. That moon stuff was bad enough.

If I wasn't so busy and so inherently lazy I'd like to spend more time getting into the occult though. I flirted with that stuff years ago and it was interesting. But I prefer this kind of take on it



I mean, why do we need all this Dennis Wheatley stuff about evil rituals involving pan dimensional lizards?

See this -



It's a symbolic and linguistic representation that taps directly into the consciousness of another with a good chance of manipulating their behaviour towards your desired end. And that's magic!

I've not seen quite as critical and informed a stance on conspiracy theories on any forums related to conspiracy as your posts here Dogs, so this idea that in a modern liberal society, authoritarian, moralistic and regressive world views are popular within CT, makes quite a lot of sense.

It's like the reaction to the problems inherent in Liberal society is less liberalism, I was pretty shocked actually googling the various conspiracy theorists and the word's zionist, israel, jewish conspiracy, torah etc.

Considering it's become quite a popular mainstream phenomena in the last year or two near me, and obviously has much mass appeal in popular culture, it follows that it has the potential to be quite a powerful force, how can somebody dismiss the explanation for the current crises CT offers, or say they support satanism, conspiracies against peoples and nations, putting fluoride in the water, or covering up the truth of 9/11 and the Iraq War, put bluntly you can't realistically deny alot of people with real fears and worries will at some stage find conspiracy theories offering the alternative explanation for events.

I thought CT's were around 90% the underground continuation of the anti-globalist, anti-WTO movements of the 90's and early 00's, and 10% was out there like the X files, but I was totally wrong it seems, so it would seem that this is the latest mass movement against WTO Free trade, and has the support and backing of at least some culturally conservative groups and maybe even small nations? Belgian, UK, Scandinavian and Hungarian Right wing MP's have offered occasional backing to various conspiracy theories in recent times.

Was Anders Breivik a Conspiracy theorist?

Mike wrote:
I don't think I'm particularly well informed, just argued on and off with Nutzis for about five years and learned from it.

I think the more left orientation is very much there, just it exists in tandem with the other side and they can blur and fuse in strange ways at some points. I also think conspiracy stuff has several edges. Ranging from pure pop culture onwards. I think it needs to be kept in perspective. I'm not knocking or belittling people for being interested in, say, 911 theories. I find all that stuff interesting myself even though I decided I don't believe the inside job notion. But I think people have to ask themselves in 2013 if it's ever going to go anywhere. There's ample reasons to be pissed off about stuff without needing to focus on endless arguments about why buildings fell down over a decade ago. And there's ample reasons to distrust governments without it,.

I think it's 100% correct that conspiracies give people an outlet for their fears and worries. The thing is, are they being focused in the right direction? Icke wants you to believe you're somehow being controlled by the moon and the answer is to go see him at Wembley and wait for some mass awaking to occur. Alex Jones wants you to fight the New World Order by giving him your money. People are selling you some notion of how it all makes sense if you pin it on this or that (and buy their DVD or whatever). I think it's a system. Like Jew theorists blame everything on Jewish people - do they seriously imagine if every Jewish person vanished tomorrow it would mean anything but a bunch of rapidly filled job vacancies?

I think the real point is that a LOT of people are pissed off and paranoid and are searching around for something to explain why the fuck the world is such a damn mess and that nagging feeling that despite their Android life seems somehow empty and unnecessarily stressful and insecure. And people (rightfully) don't trust their leaders and are aware they're somehow being shafted. That's not a conspiracy - it's just the product of the dominant ideology.

I know there were a lot of Neo-Nazis on the internet saying how good Breivik was for attacking a Labour party youth camp and killing a load of politics students, justifying his disgusting crimes with absurd Nationalist conspiracy theories.

Well it seems some CT staples, like the banking conspiracy stuff is more mainstream all the time, RT runs some pro-palestinian, pro conspiracy narrative stories quite regularly, I couldn't believe Piers Morgan and Alex Jones chatted on TV.

So more and more people it seems are pissed off and paranoid, only five or so months ago there were people sticking Joseph Kony posters up here and there, the nature of the alternative media means 40,000 people can be exposed to propaganda very easily, and infact disseminate it themselves without understanding the context, history or meaning of it, they just need to have a just cause for promoting it, or be compelled by the material, a lot of people got exposed to Conspiracies via "the industry" I don't know if you ever caught that, it was about the music industry and how it's used by Satan/The Illuminati to brainwash people, if anything the real brainwashing is in the film itself, snippets of lyrics, choreographed hand movements, styles, colours, symbolism, taken separately can be shown to parallel occult style and symbolism, taken together they represent an artistic performance, taken together with suspicion as to the artists intent, they can be shown to subvert "morality", "values", "traditions", and by relating it to Satanists" like Crowley, asserted to have sinister intent, ergo you have Lady Gaga being a modern day transgender Witch and Rhianna singing songs for some spirit being called the "rain man", apparently also "channeled" by Eminem once or twice.

It seems to me that hearing about these things doesn't make you aware of your immediate situation, factual history, everyday life, if anything it takes you further away from your everyday reality into a world of suspicion, supposition and suspension of disbelief.

There is no mention of the Dominant Ideology within the Truth, there is just the Masses of Sheep, the Elite and the Truth, anything against the Elite, or under the banner of Truth, is good, without concern for the ideological motivations behind it.

Took me ages to reply to that last message sorry if it reads a bit disjointed, I was thinking about the points you made.

Mike wrote:
It was a really interesting reply. Particularly this -

Exactly. So if you want change things, the only way to realistically do this is get together with people - modern society fragments us into isolated consumers in direct competition with one another and encourages us to engage in a race for status. But instead of thinking we should be uniting with other ordinary people in basically the same boat to stick up for our common interest, the world becomes a frightening surreal nightmare where there are no coincidences and you should trust nobody. People start seemingly genuinely believing that random stranger on the internet they're arguing with is working for the government or something.

I find stuff like "the industry" pretty fascinating (despite not having the patience to watch even half of it). One of the really interesting aspects of it being it's so superficial and commercial. Ok, firstly I find that sort of thing funny - I grew up listening to among other things Satanic metal right at the time it was all that backwards messages bullshit. At least back then the target was something that frequently was trying to be a bit Satanic and stuff to sell records. It's weird how all this modern stuff totally ignores bands that...actually sing about Satan and stuff.

And how come video directors and dance choreographers are putting all these 'symbols' in videos and stuff? How's that supposed to work? In a realistic, practical way. Apparently you don't need to know that.

It's like this robots thing in The Industry - where's Kraftwerk singing The Robots in 1977? Surely that's about the most famous robot themed song in music history? Robots are cool. Surely that's all you need. Or given all this stuff about Metropolis and people being robots are we now supposed to believe the Illuminati are actively infiltrating German power noise acts for no reason?





Or putting up a fan video featuring footage from a Japanese film about someone turning into a sort of robot?



Thing is, as much as people moan about 'the sheeple' obsessing about celebrity culture, these people do exactly the same thing. Madonna, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z blah blah blah. If you want a music conspiracy, why not invent a proper one?

Like take Peter Christopherson - founding member of the immensely influential Throbbing Gristle - that's a big chunk of the dawn of industrial music right there. Founding member of Psychic TV - who helped invent acid house and thus are a major influence on the evolution of modern dance music. With which you've also got collaborator Genesis P Orridge who has basically been turning himself into a woman over the last few years after he started some experiment where he and his wife (who died) were trying to turn themselves into the same entity (or something)
Christopherson was a gay man and overt fan of Alistair Crowley who then formed Coil with another gay man and overt fan of Alistair Crowley, John Balance. Both are now dead having died young within six years of each other (silenced by the Illuminati after serving their purpose?????).
Just with this start you've got the standard memes cropping up - sexuality (these people are often homophobic 'family values' types), transgressive notions of identity, the occult, not to mention all the other stuff you could find if you tried - and these people influenced music in a more behind the scenes way - sinister!.
Surely this guy is a far better starting point for an Illuminati conspiracy to corrupt music?

These people spend hours trying to find hidden stuff that isn't really there in commercial pop, while deeply influential yet more underground acts have been overtly into the occult, said they're overtly into the occult and done all kinds of weird transgressive stuff for the sake of art. All these 'symbolism' people do is look at the pop charts and seem to have no idea of what music outside of the pop charts has been doing for decades. Because it's as obsessed with celebrity culture as the 'sheeple' it hates. There's fucking shitloads of 'occult' stuff in music - from the totally OTT camp to the deadly serious - who needs to scrutinise Lady Gaga or whoever to find none existent stuff to read into it?

It's just another arm of pop culture trying to pretend it isn't.

oioioi wrote:
touche

novum wrote:

novum wrote: I was a big fan of Che, did you know his schoolmates called him "The Pig" on account of his poor personal hygiene?

Mike wrote:
We've had a few Che fans here, past and present.

I wasnt aware of the pig thing, but you learn something new everyday here hey, i guess thats one of the things that keeps people coming back.