12-10-2016, 02:55 PM
Here's one test of the validity of a conspiracy theory: if the criminal wrongdoing is so severe that its exposure would serve the interests of a hostile power to the danger of the sovereignty of a nation or its allies, or if it constitutes a crime that would lead to long prison terms or execution for those high in a hierarchy if it were to ever be brought to trial or the overthrow of the regime, and anyone who exposes it would be killed for exposing it, then the story is likely true. The worst crimes of state actors, like massacres at the behest of political or military leadership, can seem absurd. Imagine that you are a German in 1944 and you hear this:
Of course it is crazy. After all, "We live in a civilized country, and the BBC will say any lie that can hurt the German people". At the end of the war, nobody could deny it after having a guided tour of Buchenwald or Dachau under the armed guard of American soldiers.
The conspiracy story that would embarrass political leadership if true that that leadership brushes off with no consequences to those who disseminate the story probably has nothing behind it. Thus the 'faked moon landing', 'alien bodies tucked away at Roswell', 'AIDS a plot to kill black men', 'the elder Bush having sex with boys', 'drug activity at Mena, Arkansas that the President knows about', 'FEMA camps', '9/11 is an inside job', or 'Barack Obama was really born in Kenya' won't get one killed. Even a story about mass graves is almost certainly fake -- unless people who tell the story disappear or die under suspicious circumstances, in which case there probably is some mass killing that can be attributed to people high up in the government.
One might have been killed for exposing the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
Quote:Remember the Jews who got taken away from German towns? They were first 'resettled' in ghettos in Poland where they could only starve slowly while being worked to death... but they are now being taken to places where they are all killed. They are told that they are taking showers, obliged to strip naked, and herded into the showers. But there is no water. The doors are locked, and someone gases them. That's done to men and women alike, small children and old people, whatever their political views and whatever they did. People who did nothing really wrong are being murdered.
Hitler has to know. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt -- they surely know.
Of course it is crazy. After all, "We live in a civilized country, and the BBC will say any lie that can hurt the German people". At the end of the war, nobody could deny it after having a guided tour of Buchenwald or Dachau under the armed guard of American soldiers.
The conspiracy story that would embarrass political leadership if true that that leadership brushes off with no consequences to those who disseminate the story probably has nothing behind it. Thus the 'faked moon landing', 'alien bodies tucked away at Roswell', 'AIDS a plot to kill black men', 'the elder Bush having sex with boys', 'drug activity at Mena, Arkansas that the President knows about', 'FEMA camps', '9/11 is an inside job', or 'Barack Obama was really born in Kenya' won't get one killed. Even a story about mass graves is almost certainly fake -- unless people who tell the story disappear or die under suspicious circumstances, in which case there probably is some mass killing that can be attributed to people high up in the government.
One might have been killed for exposing the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.