BETTER ONE LONE NUT THAN EN ENTIRE PEOPLE OUT TO GET THEM   [PART II]
                                                                   
                                by Neville Raymond

             Members of dysfunctional families are known to go to any lengths to deny that a respected family member is a child molester or a sexual predator.  It takes courage of the highest order to throw away the tissue of self-serving rationalizations and evasions that stand in our way and look squarely at the evidence that is before one’s eyes.  Certainly it is not for the faint of heart!  It is not for those prone to lying down and going along with the spurious comforts of the status quo!  It is not for those who must have quick fixes and easy solutions to appease a desperate need to cling to a shred of sanity.

            The truth is there is nothing harder than acknowledging that a well-liked or trusted uncle is a child molester.  Unless, perhaps, it is acknowledging that our beloved Uncle Sam – whom we are raised to respect from our high-school civics classes and venerate from our first Veteran's Day or 4th of July parade - is in collusion with the dark forces that are out to rape and ravage and ruin us. 

           

            Honestly now, which one of us hasn’t been tempted to drift on the river of denial?   Imagine your state of mind after your eyes had opened to the mountains of evidence proving that the plot to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at the highest levels of government, banking and industry.  

            Wouldn’t it be one hell of a hair-raising epiphany!                                      
            Wouldn’t the trusted pillars of your world buckle and fall like a row of dominoes?  
            Can you really go back to watching your favorite TV reality show or crime drama after experiencing a bombshell like that?   
            Can you wake up and go back to work the next day as if nothing had happened.

           

             Imagine your state of mind after listening to a briefing that leaves not a shadow of doubt that the World Trade Center was leveled by controlled demolition - that the 19 hijackers were dupes and patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald - and that the guiding force behind 9-11 was the long arm of the national security state.        

             Would you be able to take a load off and relax and make yourself comfortable, even if it is in your own living room?  
             Or would you be reeling from the fact that the iconic authority figures you trusted and believed in with the naiveté of a child have gone the way of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

           

            If you want the reason why the corporate-owned media has been so successful in bamboozling the American public with preposterous narratives of 9-11 and the JFK assassination, look no further, here it is!  People are scared witless of the implications of finding the invisible government guilty of orchestrating these horrific tragedies.  They are terrified of realizing that they are ruled by a criminal syndicate of high-level sociopaths and homicidal thugs.  

            It doesn’t matter how logical that realization may be.  Everyone knows that politicians lie and cheat where the masses are concerned.  Is it that much of a stretch to believe that they engage in mass murder as well?  
            Evidently not.  But the implications, the implications, the implications of it all!  
            If we really believe that a fire has broken out in the theater of American politics that threatens to devour everyone alive, how are we supposed to stay calm and carry on with business as usual!  Do we go home and pop a can of beer and zone out before our favorite TV sitcom?  Do we curl up into a fetal position and let a pack of lying, cheating, murdering psychopaths turn everything we stand for to ashes in our mouth?  Or do we stand on the street corner or climb to the rooftops and open our mouths like something out of an Edvard Munch painting and scream the horrifying news to the world?   

             
             This is what makes debunking the official government line so challenging!  Once we take on board the realization that the government is no longer to be trusted, it means rethinking everything we have been taught about authority figures.  It means reevaluating our concepts about democracy and capitalism, the greed of the powerful and the needs of the people.   
             And who knows, after all that rethinking and reevaluating, it might even mean that the onus is now on us to take charge, to organize, to blaze a path to recovery.  It might mean that the government of the world is now effectively up to us!  It might mean that there is nothing left but for us to deputize ourselves as leaders in our own right and go out and fill the hideous vacuum created by the moral collapse of our institutional leaders! 

           

            That can be a scary and unsettling proposition for anyone, even the best-equipped and most conscious among us.  What about for Americans who are dumbed down by the school system and drilled to keep their heads down and put their noses to the grindstone of corporate America?  For them it must feel downright crazy and terrifying.  Some of us would do anything to get out of feeling that!  And who can blame them if they do - by going along with the official conspiracy to pooh-pooh so-called conspiracy theories that expose the lawless underbelly of the corporatocracy.                
           The great thing about allowing ourselves to be taken in hook, line, and sinker by official explanations of the JFK assassination and 9-11 is that it lets us off the hook.  It doesn't matter how illogical and ludicrous they might be!  As long as we believe in these outlandish official explanations, we don’t have to rise to the personal challenge of believing in our individual selves and in our collective power to actually do something about it!   

             What though there is a weight of scientific evidence to prove that 9-11 was an inside job and that the JFK assassination could only have been carried out with the full resources and complicity of the national security state?  To dismiss the preponderant weight of this evidence is a small price to pay for relieving ourselves of a more pressing weight – you know, the sheer weight of responsibility of getting off our rear ends and stepping up to the plate and doing whatever needs to be done to create a world that doesn't arrest the fulfillment of our potential as a species by perennially banking on threats of danger to advance the agenda of power. 

           

            At the end of the day, that is the ace in the hole of the anti-conspiracy cabal.  
             That is the chief selling point of a corporate mythology that pooh-poohs the evidence that 9-11 is the Reichstag fire of a newly emergent fascist state and that the JFK assassination is organized at the highest reaches of power.  
              That is the beauty of inoculating the populace against so-called conspiracy theories.  
              As long as we can buy into the party line, we can all forget about mobilizing in a white heat of consensual outrage and tamely retreat into our individual shells.  As long as we believe that Oswald or Osama did it, we can be secretly relieved that we dodged the bullet and go back to binge shopping or binge TV watching and act as though nothing is fundamentally wrong! 
             On the surface, America might seem to be a violence-prone aggression-addled, gun-addicted nation, but there are times when Americans seem to fit the psychological profile of women who love too much.  They would rather put up with those plutocratic bad boys who abuse them silly and betray their trust ten ways to Sunday than face the daunting prospect of dumping their treacherous asses and starting over.  
            Or as the Elvis Presley ballad goes, "I'd rather go on believing your lies than living without you."

            
            If we want to fool ourselves about 9-11 or JFK, that's our prerogative.  But let's not fool ourselves about how tough it can be to see these events for what they really are - a clarion call to throw off our victim status and take charge of our collective destiny.  
            Why not come right out and say it?  It's going to take everything we have to stop putting our blind faith in authority figures who have lied and swindled and slaughtered their way into our hearts throughout history.  It's going to take everything we have, and some things we didn't even think we had in us, to walk away from those who have walked all over us for centuries and wake up to the realization that we are the ones we are waiting for! 

           Naturally there is some scared part of us that thinks that it might be better to delay that realization as long as humanly possible.  Better still, couldn't we just put it off indefinitely by being good little citizens and swallowing the Big Lie that the system has our best interests at heart? 

            Sure we could.  But for how much longer?   How unbearably hard must it get for us before we decide not to take the easy way out?  Clearly the system is geared towards working for someone’s best interest.  It's sure as hell not ours.  It's theirs!  And come hell or high water, they are determined to keep it that way.                 
            Which is why they would rather give us to believe that the world’s most powerful plutocracy can be brought down by an occasional loser or kook than give us all the reason we need to come together with a common purpose and bring it down en masse. 

BETTER ONE LONE NUT THAN AN ENTIRE PEOPLE OUT TO GET THEM   [PART I]
                                
                                    by Neville Raymond

           Every time the anniversary of a landmark American tragedy rolls around, they come crawling out of the woodwork - or is it the networks.  The 50^th anniversary of the JFK assassination brought them out in droves.  It was quite the seasonal spectacle to behold.  The minions of the mainstream media, swimming upstream against the currents of common sense and logic.  The usual assortment of shills tying themselves into pretzel-like knots over the official explanation of the JFK assassination.  They may as well just grab the country from behind and perform a giant Heimlich maneuver, because this is one pretzel that the American people find it increasingly difficult to swallow without choking. 

           

            Let’s face it.  The plutocrats know the public is on to them.  They know that fewer and fewer people believe their outrageous conspiracy theories.  Lee Harvey Oswald, a known CIA asset, methodically set up to take the fall for a presidential assassination, is trumpeted as the lone shooter.   Steel buildings burn up from a depleted supply of kerosene fuel and pancake down at free-fall speed.  It can only happen in a twilight zone where the laws of physics and logic and common sense are violated on a surreal scale.  And so armies of spinmeisters have to be marched out to shore up the house of cards.

           

            One of the treasured explanations in their little boxed set of fairy tales is the psychological one.  This one takes the cake.  Here are shills who normally wouldn’t give a psychotherapist the time of day, all of a sudden trying to explain America’s mass acceptance of ‘conspiracy theories’ in psychological terms.  Google any article that seeks to explain the mounting level of disbelief in official stories.  Pull down the “Edit” menu and under “Find” insert such words as “scared” and “powerless” – and oh, the all-time biggie, “comfort”.  They are guaranteed to make an appearance in every such mainstream article. 

            The prevailing theory is that these shocking events cause Americans to feel frightened.  A lone nut can bring down a president.  A few crazed hijackers can bring down U.S. landmarks.  This is too scary to contemplate.  And so people grasp at the straws of conspiracy theories in their hunger for meaning and structure.  The idea that these events are staged by invisible powers allays their sense of powerlessness.  It helps them to make sense of the world.  It serves as a much-needed source of comfort.  

             Talk about bending and twisting the psychological truth back on its head.  It is an upside-down position that does a yoga master proud!  Maybe these shills are naïve but anyone with a scintilla of understanding of psychology knows better.   People naturally crave reassurance and comfort during times when assassins and hijackers seem to run the show.  But nothing provides greater reassurance than a narrative that allows the authority figures to assert themselves as the good guys, and convince the rest of us to put ourselves in their capable and protective hands.  Nothing brings greater comfort to a traumatized nation than the notion that the evil that is loose in society is the work of isolated crackpots beyond the pale, against which the forces of law and order are committed to defend us.

           

            But what happens when the good guys we turn to in times of crisis turn out to be the bad guys who are secretly terrorizing us?  Then it is not just a President who gets shot.  The credibility of an entire system of government is shot to pieces.  
            What happens when the orders had to have come from high up to rig the World Trade Center with explosives or shut down an air defense system to give planes a chance to fly off course and crash into U.S. landmarks?  Then it is not just a couple of skyscrapers that blow up.  The prestige and authority of an entire power structure blows up in our faces as spectacularly as the Capitol dome in the trailer for Independence Day!                                                                             

            So-called journalists can allege all day long that conspiracy theories combat a sense of impotence and confusion.[1]  Nothing is calculated to induce a more debilitating anxiety, a more demoralizing sense of despair, betrayal and confusion, than the charge that our public servants are foot soldiers, enforcers and hit men for a criminal conspiracy that is hatched in the highest corridors of power           

           

            That’s why they fight tooth and nail against any suggestion that those who are entrusted with keeping us safe could in any way, shape or form be responsible for terrorizing us.  Our very survival as a civilized society depends upon it!  And that’s why we are determined to idealize our leaders in times of danger and dutifully give them every benefit of doubt, no matter how much evidence piles up to prove their complicity and guilt! 

            In times of crisis, people instinctually home in on a comfort zone that is fortified all around by towering walls of denial.  They desperately want to blame some alien or isolated scapegoat or other for the shocking tragedy.  The last thing they want to believe is that their own leaders could be up to their necks in plots to assassinate their commander-in-chief or massacre three thousand of their own citizens.  Please, please, let it be a ragtag bunch of lone nuts and rogue psychos at work!  We don’t have to know that they flunked their flying lessons or used a rifle that couldn’t shoot straight.   Just so long as we can mop our brows and declare it’s a huge load off our minds.  Just so long as we can all heave a collective sigh of relief, and after an initial period of grief and mourning, go back to business as usual! 

           

            Conspiracies theories in this respect don’t go down easily at all with most people.  In fact, they go against the very grain of our collective need for stability, sanity and social orderliness.  Why on earth should we open ourselves up to the possibility that these shocking tragedies are planned, organized and executed by the national security state?  Do we really want to be confronted by a monstrous evil whose scope knocks the wind out of our sails and demolishes every anchor of our existence!   Are we really such gluttons for punishment that we would want our whole world to come crashing about our ears? 

            Talk about the horror of the abyss staring us in the face!  That is what it is like to believe in a JFK “conspiracy theory”!  That is what it is like to believe that 9-11 was an inside job!  Far from being a source of comfort, we find ourselves at the mercy of a nightmarish evil that rips every shred of comfort from us!  Far from helping us to make sense of the world, it turns our whole world upside down and makes a sweeping mockery of the most cherished principles on which this country was founded!  Far from allowing us to regain a semblance of power, it leaves us squirming in the grip of an Orwellian power that is so fantastic and far-reaching that we have difficulty going to sleep at night!

            Who in his right mind would want that?  Who would deliberately choose to believe a “conspiracy theory” that cuts the ground from under all the hallowed pillars that the American people hold dear?  Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to continue swallowing the anodynes of the official story and go back to enjoy the sleep of the blissfully ignorant and the politically unconscious?  That there is such a swelling groundswell of refusal to go along with that is proof that the American people are made of sterner stuff than we give them credit for!  That as much as two-thirds or even three-fourths of Americans reject the official story speaks volumes on our heroic willingness to confront the unthinkable.  

             Either that or the cover story put out by the corporate media has worn so threadbare over time that its preposterous premises show through at every turn – and you would have to be a mentally challenged pollyanna not to face up to the grim, chilling ugly reality that a government that is sworn to be the protector of the people is really a violent predator of the craziest sort.

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[1] Patrik Jonsson, “50 years after JFK, conspiracy theories of all sorts thrive in America”, Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 2013