Lies News
absurd
newsfakes
biased
lies
honest
journalism

American Pravda: How the CIA invented “Conspiracy Theories”

08/13/2019 / By News Editors


A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and although the plot wasn’t any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature to me.

(Article by Ron Unz republished from UNZ.com)

Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers—from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption—could objectively be categorized as a “conspiracy theory”but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.

Put another way, there are good “conspiracy theories” and bad “conspiracy theories,” with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never described as such. I’ve sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to totally invert all of our most famous “conspiracy theories” in the minds of the gullible American public. The notion that nineteen Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses, and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridiculed as the most preposterous “conspiracy theory” ever to have gone straight from the comic books into the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd “lone gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.

Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis of implied association. In the initial weeks and months following the 2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print, soon becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world. But as the Bush Administration and its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden’s arch-enemy. As a consequence, by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70%of the American public[1] believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade Center. By that date I don’t doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” anyone with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.

These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America[2] was Prof. Lance de Haven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.

Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.

During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording,arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.

But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.

For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals[3] had been historian Charles Beard[4], whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.

Read more at: UNZ.com and Conspiracy.news.

Tagged Under: bias, CIA, conspiracies, conspiracy theories, deception, government, Group Think, lies, mainstream media, manipulation, Media Manipulation, propaganda, skepticism



Comments

RECENT NEWS & ARTICLES

Sorry, climate change fanatics: Turns out, Greenland’s glaciers are actually growing
08/13/2019 / By Vicki Batts
CEO of Overstock claims that AG William Barr FINALLY set to break open the biggest political scandal in the history of America: Spygate
08/13/2019 / By JD Heyes
So-called “manifesto” of El Paso shooter was NOT uploaded to 8chan by the alleged shooter, warns 8chan owner
08/13/2019 / By Ethan Huff
JOURNO-DELUSIONS: Dan Rather insists media should talk about what they think Trump “believes” instead of accurately reporting what Trump actually says
08/13/2019 / By JD Heyes
American Pravda: How the CIA invented “Conspiracy Theories”
08/13/2019 / By News Editors
Fake news NY Times says Norwegian terrorist posted manifesto on 8chan before attack… except 8chan has been down for a week
08/13/2019 / By News Editors
MIND BLOWING: Did the Deep State CIA “pull the strings” and help orchestrate the El Paso massacre?
08/11/2019 / By S.D. Wells
Google obeys MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, urgently alters YouTube search results to divert people away from learning the truth about the Federal Reserve
08/10/2019 / By Lance D Johnson
The media crossed a line this week and there’s no going back
08/10/2019 / By News Editors
Nine examples of MSM exploiting mass shootings to spread anti-Trump propaganda
08/10/2019 / By News Editors
FACT CHECK: Elizabeth Warren repeats Charlottesville ‘fine people hoax’
08/09/2019 / By News Editors
LA Times trying to rewrite history, DENIES historical warming and Ice Age events
08/08/2019 / By Vicki Batts
Democrats’ claim that “white nationalist” males commit the majority of mass shootings in U.S. is a complete myth, data show
08/08/2019 / By JD Heyes
White supremacy paranoia is a massive HOAX perpetrated by the toxic media that pushes hatred, bigotry and lawlessness
08/07/2019 / By JD Heyes
Ben Shapiro complains about getting smeared as a white supremacist…after falsely calling Trump supporters white supremacists!
08/07/2019 / By News Editors
Toxic, treasonous media pushing “white supremacist” hoax and hit lists of Trump supporters in desperate scheme to drive America into civil war
08/07/2019 / By Mike Adams
FAKE SCIENCE: Medical journals are paid to push lies about vaccine “benefits”
08/07/2019 / By Ethan Huff
Flat out, the establishment media is LYING when they claim mass shootings are ALL carried out by young white males
08/06/2019 / By JD Heyes
Liberal media blackout: Chicago hospital had to stop accepting patients as weekend shootings left over 50 dead or injured
08/06/2019 / By News Editors
FBI director is focusing his agency more on “white supremacy violence” despite the fact that Left-wing anti-Trump anarchists are committing most of it
08/06/2019 / By JD Heyes

COPYRIGHT © 2017 LIES NEWS

Privacy Policy