Is the Psycho-Social Hypothesis Failing the Stress Test?
This is my response to the second part of CJ’s searching investigation of what UFOs are, published on his blog yesterday. In this piece, CJ explains his dissatisfaction with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As he explains, the psycho-social hypothesis or model means different things to different people, but it roughly states that the UFO experience is shaped by social stresses and anxieties. My view of the phenomenon is slightly different, following that of the small press magazine Magonia. This was for a long time Britain’s leading sceptical UFO magazine, with slogans like ‘Hard on Ufology, hard on the causes of Ufology’ parodying Blair’s slogan on crime. It was based very much on the psycho-social model, which to them meant that UFO encounters were internal, psychological events prompted in many cases by an external object or phenomenon. The imagery experienced in these encounters was drawn from popular culture and folklore. Thus, in the ancient and medieval worlds, people encountered fairies, angels, gods and demons. In our modern, scientific age these have been replaced by spacecraft and aliens.
CJ makes it clear that he is certainly not an opponent of the PSH, and that he shares many of the views of Jean-Michel Abrassart. Dr Abrassart is a sceptical Belgian psychologist and UFO researcher who presented a fascinating talk on UFOs to ASSAP at their weekly online Zoom meeting last week. He showed research from a Belgian perspective that UFO narratives are shaped by culture. Belgium is a multilingual country with three different linguistic groups: the Flemish, who speak a form of Dutch; the Walloons, who speak French, and a small, German-speaking enclave. His research showed that stories of UFO encounters were sometimes confined to particular ethnicities and did not cross over to the others despite all of them sharing and occupying the same country.
CJ did not take aim at the whole Psycho-Social Hypothesis but just one aspect: that mentioned above – the theory that UFO flaps appear in response to social anxieties. He also notes that many UFOs are indeed misidentified astronomical phenomena. Jean-Michel showed how many of the flaps followed the 18-year Saros or Metonic cycle. This is when the Earth and Moon adopt the same positions to each other after that number of years, and has been used to predict eclipses since the days of ancient Greece. It also allows one to test some UFO sightings, by returning to the location with the witness when the Moon appears in the same position as the original sighting. While it sounds ridiculous that people could misidentify such a familiar sight as the Moon, there is certainly corroborating evidence on this side of the North Sea. Magonia mentioned decades ago the case of a group of British coppers who began to believe that their car was being pursued by a UFO. They knew that in reality the object above them was the Moon, but had to stop their vehicle for a moment to be sure.
CJ then goes to show how many of the classic flaps correlate with the social anxieties of the time. The sightings of Martians in the 1950s were a response to Cold War anxieties. That of the 1970s was spurred by the emerging awareness of the ecological crisis, while the dark, sinister encounters of the ‘90s reflected the predominance of paranoia and conspiracy theories in popular culture. But these flaps don’t always reflect those fears.
There was definitely more than element of paranoia in 50s Ufology, following the writings of Donald Keyhoe who was convinced that the UFOs were preparing to invade. The American Air Force general, Kolman von Kebizcy also called for America to prepare for an invasion from Mars following the 1952 mass sightings of UFOs over Washington D.C. But it was also the era of the Contactee, people who believed they had met aliens and been given messages to impart to the rest of humanity. These were generally greetings of interplanetary brotherhood and warnings about the threat of nuclear weapons, which also reflected contemporary concerns about the threat of nuclear annihilation. In some of the messages, these were a threat to the planet itself and would throw it out of orbit if used. Other aliens warned that they put not only humanity but the whole universe in peril, and were forcing the other intelligent beings of the cosmos to act. These encounters and their messages from benevolent but concerned aliens resemble the plot of the film The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was based on an SF short story, ‘The Return of the Master’.
The 1970s were another decade of great social anxiety. The report, Limits to Growth, had been published arguing that in the very near future the Earth would become massively overpopulated. Humanity would use up the planet’s resources leading to the collapse of civilisation. The Club of Rome had published its findings that the world’s flora and fauna were also threatened. This led to the foundation of various Green parties in western Europe, along with campaigns by newly formed environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature, to save the whale and the tiger. Popular children’s television shows like Newsround covered these issues for their young viewers along with the threat to the Ozone layer from aerosols. There were also numerous UFO encounters, of which one of the best known is probably the abduction of Travis Walton, an American logger. This was later filmed in the 90s as Fire in the Sky. It was also the decade Steven Spielberg released his blockbusting Close Encounters, with its final scenes in which short, spindly aliens emerge from the alien mothership to meet a group of human scientists. All the people they have taken over the decades come out of the craft with them to rejoin their families. Finally, they depart, taking the film’s ordinary joe hero, Roy Neary, with them. This has undoubtedly had a massive impact on UFOs in popular culture worldwide. There were comic book adaptations and spoofs in film and television, including Britain’s own long-running comedy show, The Goodies. And the film’s slogan, ‘We Are Not Alone’, became a catch-phrase for UFOs and aliens generally. I don’t, however, recall the aliens encountered in this period giving messages about the ecological crisis. This appeared more in the 90s.
Then there was the 90s and the explosion of UFOs and conspiracy culture. The latter partly had its roots in controversies over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Gulf War. Many on the left believed that, instead of being a war of liberation to free the country from a murderous dictator, it was instead a ‘resource war’ to steal those nations’ oil. In America protesters marched chanting ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go! We won’t die for Texaco’. These fears and anxieties were fanned still further by George Bush Senior’s statement about creating ‘a new order’. To many, this recalled Adolf Hitler and his declaration of the same thing, as well as conspiracy theories about the founding of America by the Freemasons, as shown in the Eye in the Pyramid on the dollar bill and the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saecularum’ – New World Order.
It also roughly coincided with the publication of two books which together helped to shape the emerging abduction narrative. These were Above Top Secret by the British violinist, Tim Good, and Communion, by the American horror writer Whitley Streiber. Good’s book claimed that America had secretly made contact with the aliens and there were secret bases all over the world, plus a group Above Top Secret, the Majestic 12, set up to supervise these encounters. Streiber’s book claimed that he had been repeatedly abducted and examined by Grey aliens. The two, and the many other similar books that they inspired, founded the abduction mythology in which America had done a secret deal with the aliens to allow them to kidnap and experiment on humans, including sexually, resulting in the creation of half-human hybrid children. This myth became a social panic, with abduction researchers like Bud Hopkins and Leo Sprinkle taking their experiencers on popular talks shows like Oprah. It exerted a very strong influence on the X-Files, whose heroes, FBI agents Scully and Mulder, were on the trail of a secret conspiracy to create human-alien hybrids in preparation for a hostile alien invasion.
So what about today? The past few years have also been a period of acute social stress. This was most pronounced with the Covid pandemic and lockdown. The virus itself was sufficiently terrifying to many ordinary people, following as it did films about scientists battling deadly germs which threatened to destroy humanity. I think one of these in the 90s was Outbreak, while a similar film, The Satan Bug, was released in the 70s. There was also stress caused by the government’s response of locking down society and industry to prevent the spread of the disease. Inessential businesses were shut down and the public were allowed out only for essential activities like shopping and a day’s exercise. People naturally worried about their jobs and businesses. There were also some truly damaging conspiracy theories, in which it was claimed that the vaccines offered against the disease contained mind control chips, or that the real purpose of the lockdown was to allow the World Economic Forum to seize power and create the one world superstate.
And this is where it gets interesting. If UFOs and other paranormal encounters are produced by social stress, then we should have experienced another wave of sightings of alien spaceships, ghosts and other supernatural beings. But we haven’t. CJ has gone through the stats. People are not seeing more alien spaceships. At the same time, the male suicide rate hasn’t risen and there hasn’t, mercifully, been an increase in self-harm either. Nor are people turning to religion or the paranormal.
Not that you would know it from the press. CJ states that magazines and newspapers, including New Scientist, have been telling their readers that the stressed population is indeed turning to religion and the paranormal, and encounters with aliens and spooks have very definitely risen. The gentlemen and ladies of the Fourth Estate have duly contacted CJ to confirm their views, only to close the interviews when he disappoints them by stating plainly that this isn’t happening. I think we can be confident this is correct. Not only is he a very diligent researcher himself, but he is assisted by Becky, who did her PhD analysing the Society for Psychic Research’s Census of Hallucinations to show that the core ghost phenomenon did not change in the 19th century. It has been said the Victorian period saw changes in ghost imagery and narratives in popular culture. For example, ghosts generally appear solid, but Victorian artists drew them as transparent simply to show they were ghosts. This may present another challenge to the Psycho-Social Model if real ghost experiences don’t match those in popular culture, as in shows like Scooby Doo or Rentaghost.
This poses the question of what is going on here. Is the Psycho-Social Model totally invalid, despite apparently holding true for previous flaps? Or perhaps the psychological and social mechanisms that create flaps during times of stress are actually more complex than previously thought, and require a number of subtle factors that have been absent during the Covid outbreak? Or perhaps this follows a continuing trend of cultural exhaustion that some have claimed is being experienced elsewhere in society and the arts.
One of these is Stephen E. Andrews, a former bookseller and the author of 100 Science Fiction Books You Must Read. On his YouTube channel, Outlaw Bookseller, he reviews and discusses literature and bookshops, especially Science Fiction. In one of his videos he discusses hauntology, a cultural phenomenon in which the arts turn back to the past and previous tropes and images. He argues that this is occurring now in Science Fiction, as authors use the same old plots and ideas, and that this is also part of a general trend in wider literature and the arts. Here’s a link to one of his videos on hauntology.
Apart from the issue identified by CJ, the 20th century was a period of immense social and political change. This included the collapse of the European empires and the rise of America and the Communist Soviet Union to superpower status, as well as the shock in domestic culture of the emergence of the teenager and youth culture, feminism and the promise and threat of new technology like the atomic bomb, genetic engineering and information technology. These trends were reflected in the arts and literature, including Science Fiction. Aldous Huxley predicted a future in which babies would be grown in hatcheries in Brave New World, published in the 1920s. But this began to look like it could become reality in 1962 with the experiments of the Italian biologist Daniele Petracci. Petracci was experimenting with gestating human embryos outside the womb. One of these had even progressed to developing eyes and limbs before the experiment ended. And the second half of the 20th century saw other scientific advances that seemed similarly threatening of promising. These included household robots, holidays in space and flying cars. These have not materialised, with the exception of flying cars. The Outlaw Bookseller considers that scientific advance is accelerating, but looking at books such Paul Milo’s Your Flying Car Awaits about the failed predictions of the 20th century, it could seem instead that scientific and technological invention has slowed down. Some of this is due to the problems tackled being far more complex than scientists in the 50s and 60s believed, as in aging. It could be that in the absence of the spectacular social and technological change promised in previous decades, western society has settled down to a pattern and that some of the changes previously regarded as shocking are now viewed as part of traditional western society. There is still a suspicion towards parts of youth culture, for example, but Mods, Rockers and Punks no longer cause quite the alarm they did when they first emerged, and indeed are frequently the subject of affectionate nostalgia. Perhaps it isn’t just social stress that is required for UFO flaps, but specific social stresses about new social phenomena, and that society has become used to many of the old threats and concerns. In the absence of lunar and Martian colonies, for example, space travel seems almost routine. The exploration of space, and the possibility of alien life are still the subjects of immense interest. And any number of books, films and TV stories are still coming out about invasion by hostile aliens. But they’ve become an accepted part of the media landscape, and so the element of novelty that may have been part of the impetus behind previous decades’ flaps are absent. And so, although society was gripped by tension during the Covid outbreak, this did not lead to people turning to the paranormal, or meeting a helpful spaceman offering advice.
Yes, it is a ridiculous idea. Or it would be if Tony Blair hadn’t been so chummy with his old pal George Dubya that he didn’t go to various Republican conventions in the US. Having radicalised and helped wreck the Tories, Bilious Barrage is clearly looking round for another political role, and clearly thinks he can do it with Starmer in charge of Labour. The really frightening thing is that Starmer, as a true, blue Blairite, might just let him. Here’s Open Britain’s analysis of the situation:
‘Dear David,
The UK’s number one power-seeking provocateur has yet another scheme to get into the limelight. Nigel Farage, seeing the writing on the wall for the Conservative party he worked so hard to radicalise, is now proposing an unlikely alliance with Labour. In the event of a Trump victory across the pond, Farage thinks he can be the “bridge” between the American far-right and a new Labour government.
It’s tempting to just dismiss Farage as the opportunist crank he so clearly is. But that would be to ignore the massive influence his movement has had on British politics over the past decade. Farage’s framings of immigration, Brexit, and British identity (unfortunately) continue to shape our political discourse. Like it or not, he’s got a foothold in our political system, and a Conservative defeat likely won’t be enough to see the back of him.
Farage is no bridge-builder. The man who wants to scrap postal voting, who champions racist conspiracy theories like the “Great Replacement” and the “Deep State”, who disparages the civil service, and who throws petrol on every single culture war fire from 15-minute cities to flags may get Trump’s blessing, but his destructive instincts mean he will always be more inclined to sew discord than start dialogue, so he’s unlikely to be of any value at all to a new Labour government.
This is merely the latest attempt by Britain’s US-backed far-right to weasel their way into a flawed democratic system, despite the polls indicating their ideas are about to be roundly rejected at the ballot box. It’s an attempt to draw Britain even closer to America’s burgeoning far-right, steering us even further away from fairness and accountability.
Even if Trump wins this year, we should not appoint one of his agents as a trade envoy. We should not enable his transatlantic far-right network to worm its way into another european democracy. We should not put the national interest in the hands of someone like Farage, a mouthpiece for American billionaires who would happily stomp all over British values and ways of life if it meant making a buck or two.
Instead, we should focus on removing the financial loopholes and repairing the broken safeguards that empower Farage’s far-right. We should build a democracy powered by real people instead of dirty money from the American uber-wealthy and the Russian oligarchs. We’ve got the blueprints…and, with your support, we will build a democracy that works for everyone, before it’s too late.
We’ve seen Israel-critical Jews smeared as anti-Semites by the official Jewish organisations in this country, like the Chief Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the United Synagogue and that rag the Jewish Chronicle. These foul lies have been picked up by Stalin Starmer and used to purge the Labour party of dissenting Jewish voices and the gentiles who supported them. Incredibly principled people like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and so many, many others. About 3/5 or 4/5 of the people purged from Labour for anti-Semitism were Jews. In addition to this, there is the media blackout on the military aid Britain seems to be giving to Israel. Mike carried a report on his site last week about nine Israeli planes landing in Britain. Private Eye in its ‘Letter From…’ column a few fortnights ago reported that British airbases in Cyprus were being used by American planes en route to the Middle East. Mike asked whether ordinary Brits had been asked about Britain being involved in the Gaza genocide. Well, no, we weren’t, and anyone who does will be accused of anti-Semitism and, if Muslim, an Islamist and fanatical supporter of Hamas. Even if they’re just going by John Lennon’s words in another grotty war: ‘All we are saying is, ‘Give peace a chance’. It’d be great to see that translated into Hebrew and Arabic.
But this story from Middle East Eye shows that anti-Zionist Jews in Germany now seem to be suffering the thin end of the wedge of corporate/state persecution. And let’s be clear here – German Jews have every right to be critical of Israel. Before the Second World War Zionism was a minor movement in European Jewry. Most Jews wanted to stick to the homelands of their birth and fight to be accepted as fellow citizens, not to migrate to a country they’d never seen, to displace people who’d never harmed them, and who belonged to a religion many Jews believed had treated them better than Christianity. The Jewish groups the Nazis really feared were the German Jewish ex-servicemen’s association. These were courageous men who had fought for their country, and who patriotism was indisputable. They couldn’t convincingly claim that Jews had betrayed Germany in front of old soldiers with war wounds and the medals to match.
And the Zionists were quite prepared to sacrifice European Jewish lives if it served their purpose. David Ben Gurion said that he didn’t care if the Nazis exterminated half the Jews in Europe, if the other half went to Israel. And then there was Rudolf Kasztner, the head of the Hungarian Zionists, who made a deal to send Jewish Hungarians to the death camps if some could go instead to Israel. As for the trial of that abomination Erich Eichner, the nascent Israeli state also followed other western countries in recruiting Gestapo agents for their intelligence services during the Cold War. For more information, please go over to Tony’s blog and start reading. It all comes from respectable historical sources and is minutely documented.
Israel gets very strong support from Germany, no doubt motivated from guilt over the Holocaust. Germany was the no. 1 holiday destination for young Israelis because of how well they were treated. But this positive attitude shouldn’t exempt Israel from justified criticism nor permit the persecution of German Jews who do not share this attitude to Israel.
‘A state-owned bank in Germany has frozen the account of a Jewish anti-Zionist organisation and demanded the group disclose a list of all its members. Judische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost, or Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East, announced on Tuesday that its account with Berliner Sparkasse was frozen on 26 March with immediate effect. “In 2024, Jewish money is once again being confiscated by a German bank: Berliner Sparkasse freezes Jewish Voice account,” Jewish Voice said in a statement on its social media platforms. The group received a letter from the bank informing it that a full list of all members, including adresses, tax documentation, income statements and other internal documents, needed to be submitted to Berliner Sparkasse by 5 April to “update customer data”. “It’s a very creepy letter. You’d think they are working together with the state criminal police bureau,” Wieland Hoban, chairman of Jewish Voice, told MEE.’
This week, George Galloway managed to shock the political and media establishment by getting himself elected as MP for Rochdale on a pro-Palestine ticket. This was for a Muslim majority area which had given the Labour party a rough time for Starmer’s refusal to back a genuine ceasefire. And Starmer kept the door wide open for him by removing the whip from the Labour candidate, who dared to suggest that all may not be as it seems in the horrendous terrorist attack against the kids at a music festival that precipitated the war. Such as why did the Israelis ignore the Egyptians’ warning of a coming terrorist attack from the direction, and why did it take so long for IDF troopers from nearby bases to respond? Israel has form when it comes to false flag attacks and lies, but the pro-Israel lobby immediately responded with the customary accusations of anti-Semitism and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews. As if Asghar Ali, the Labour guy, was reading out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was accusing Israel of the Blood Libel, the international banking conspiracy and the medieval smear of poisoning wells so that people get leprosy. Ali wasn’t accusing the Jews, just the state of Israel, which is a different thing entirely.
Galloway’s tactics here aren’t new. He tried it out a few years ago with his Respect party, which seemed to be a mixture of Muslim activists and people from the Socialist Workers’ Party, to challenge Blair in a London constituency after the Iraq invasion. And the right has reacted in the same way, crying out that this is the fearful alliance between Islam and socialists which will destroy the west, Islamism is on the march and so on. Just as they’re doing with the pro-Palestinians marches, which are also, unsurprisingly, being denounced as anti-Semitic, despite the presence of many Jews.
No doubt various attacks on Galloway will surface in the coming months as he takes his seat in parliament, drawing on everything he’s ever said that is shameful or embarrassing. Like when Have I Got News For You showed a clip of him saluting Saddam Hussein for his indefatigability. But there’s another clip of an incident that is really embarrassing and cringey, which will also doubtless get shown. Yes, it’s that time he pretended to be a cat fawning over Rula Lenska on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. This was on just about compilation show of most embarrassing celebrity performances for quite a little while, and is probably going to come back to bite him again. And so, just to remind you all how terrible it was, here it is on Private Eye’s cover for 20th January to 2nd February 2006. As they used to say on Crimewatch UK, ‘Don’t have nightmares’.
The right hate Owen Jones with a passion. He came under a barrage of abuse and criticism a week or so ago for expressing perfectly reasonable criticisms of the Israeli film about Hamas terrorism and atrocities. As different people around the world, including presenters on Sky News, have caught Israeli officials lying again and again, his scepticism wasn’t unreasonable. But the right forbids any criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, persecution that forms the background to the atrocity committed by Hamas that began the present war in Gaza.
This video comes from 38 Degrees and their channel on YouTube. It’s a clip from an appearance on Sky News by Jones, in which he lists Murdoch’s biased coverage and his pushing of bigotry and war. He starts by stating that Murdoch owns 174 newspapers around the world. And twenty years ago, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, all of those newspapers pushed for the invasion. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and the destabilisation of the Middle East. And yet we are supposed to have an independent, free press with good, responsible journalism.
Then Jones goes back to the ’80s and recalls the horrors of the AIDS epidemic and the way the disease ravaged the bodies of the young gay men stricken with it. But that didn’t stop Murdoch’s papers pushing anti-gay hate. Then there’s Fox News, and the way it pushed stupid conspiracy theories about Obama, as well as the Murdoch media’s racism and islamophobia. All this prepared the way for the Trump presidency, and Trump talked to Murdoch every day when he was in office.
He concludes that Murdoch isn’t just media magnate. He’s an unelected politician, who is using his power to influence and manipulate global affairs.
Jones is absolutely right. That’s exactly what Murdoch is. There’s a book about the man, which was reviewed in the conspiracy magazine Lobster a few years ago. The book argued that Murdoch had a consistent set of very right-wing policies he was determined to promote, including the privatisation of the NHS. As for the quality of his journalism, when Murdoch took over papers in Sydney, Australia, and New York, the hacks went on strike objecting to the lowering of their papers’ standards which they knew would come.
The man himself is supposed to be perfectly genial, but his views and his papers are poison and his influence on global politics – in America, Australia, Britain and other democracies – is utterly malign, as Jones points out.
This comes after Laurence Fox was suspended for misogynistic comments about a feminist journalist and the sacking of Dan Wootton for laughing at them. Mind you, in the case of the latter, I think it was the last straw following accusations of sexual harrasment against male co-workers. Nevertheless, this is a very full discussion of everything wrong with the broadcaster and its connections to the Conservatives and far right.
‘Dear David,
Somehow, GB News – the far-right cesspool of hate, abuse, inane conspiracy theories, and desperate fear-mongering – is allowed to call itself a news channel. That fact alone tells you everything you need to know about the dysfunction in Britain’s media environment.
What other UK news channels do you know that:
Routinely engage in hate speech: Lawrence Fox’s nasty remarks about Ava Evans earlier this week were horrific enough to get him and host Dan Wootton suspended, but the channel has a long history of hate speech. Vitriolic rhetoric about migrants, college students, protestors, and anyone caught up in their culture war abounds, and their news site has an entire page dedicated to Meghan Markle hate.
Consistently ignore impartiality rules: GB News has been reprimanded by Ofcom in the past for having Tory MPs interview each other, failing to include multiple points of view. It looks like they’re set to do it again tomorrow, with Tory Party Chair Lee Anderson set to chat with Home Secretary Suella Braverman about her monstrous attitude towards migrants.
Promote harmful conspiracy theories: GB News hosts and guests point to inane conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as anti-semitic references to “Cultural Marxism” that are taken quite literally out of the Nazi playbook.
Dedicate themselves to fuelling the culture war: Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and other “NatCon” loonies use GB News as their own personal propaganda platform, disgorging authoritarian bile in order to further the agenda of Britain’s rising far-right movement.
Have extremely shady ownership and financial history: One of the directors of the firm that owns GB News is a key Tory peer and financier. In addition, hosts on the programme have murky links to right-wing think-tanks.
Fail to hold their own people accountable, even when the evidence is overwhelming: Byline Times’ multi-part investigation into Dan Wootton has produced shocking revelations, yet the broadcaster remained silent until the massive public backlash of the Lawrence Fox interview.
The rise of politicians like Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson, and Nigel Farage, who promote authoritarian and hateful ideologies, is only possible when they have access to media outlets prepared to tolerate – or even encourage – their harmful rhetoric. By giving these people exposure, fake news channels help create the impression that their fringe views are widely held across the population and have democratic legitimacy. That cannot be in the public interest and should not be allowed.
Democracy depends on people having access to reliable information on which to make voting decisions. When we’re fed a steady diet of lies by a wealthy and powerful minority, even if it’s draped in the Union Jack and misleadingly labelled “news”, democracy ceases to function.
Our new “UK Democracy Goals” report makes several recommendations that would make UK media work FOR democracy rather than undermine it.
Even without getting into the details of that report, it’s clear that a sensible first step would be for the independent regulator to hold platforms like GB News accountable for what their presenters say on air and for any damage those comments may do to specific individuals or society at large.
It’s also clear that we should be supporting independent media organisations that take their responsibilities seriously, that ask hard questions about what’s going on in the world, that robustly challenge those in power…and not those that are there solely to amplify the propaganda of an increasingly desperate government.
OB will be campaigning for that and everything else in our report in the coming months (and years!). And we won’t stop until it’s done.
I gather from glancing at some of the right wing videos on YouTube this morning that Kath Viner’s mighty organ, the Groaniad, has declared that the stories and speculation circulating about Jeffrey Epstein’s private island are ‘conspiracies theories’. Presumably this is meant in the pejorative sense of unfounded paranoid myth-making. But conspiracies and parapolitics are real, as Robin Ramsey and Lobster magazine have been showing for donkey’s years. GB News’ Leo Kearse was ranting against the Groan’s dismissal, and from what I’ve seen, the speculation about Epstein and his death in prison is very much a right-wing phenomenon. But I really do believe there are good reasons for thinking that Epstein and his foul paedophile operation were some kind of intelligence operation.
I came across a couple of videos of the American physicist Eric Weinstein talking about how he met Epstein in 2002, and how at the time he thought things were wrong. Epstein’s behaviour simply didn’t make sense, to the point that Weinstein told his missus afterwards that he thought Epstein was a construct. He came across as someone playing a role.
Epstein was a currency trader, although he started out from a much less impressive background as a maths teacher in a private school. And then something happened to transform him into a currency trader with a fortune of $600 million. Weinstein met him when he was doing some work for hedge funds, and Epstein had asked him to do some work for him. So he went round Epstein’s mansion, and found the man weird and frightening. They talked over a long table shaped like a coffin and which was draped with the American flag. Weinstein, as an ordinary patriotic American, naturally didn’t want to drip his coffee over Old Glory. And the way Epstein introduced himself when he came into the room was peculiar. He walked in and said that he’d been doing some currency trading. This didn’t seem right to Weinstein. It reminded him of the scene in a comedy movie in which Steve Buscemi, with a skateboard slung over his shoulder, tries to introduce himself to a load of high school children with the words: ‘What’s up, fellow kids?’ Although in Epstein’s case, it’d be ‘What’s up, fellow currency traders?’
And Epstein’s very conspicuous consumption and lavish lifestyle doesn’t match his income bracket. Weinstein said that when you’ve been around the super-rich, you find that they behave very definitely according to how massively wealthy they are. Epstein bought private islands, had a fleet of private jets, a mansion in New York and property all over the US. That’s how someone with an eleven-digit income spends their cash, not someone with a nine-digit income. And as for Epstein’s currency trading, Weinstein wonders why no-one has actually tried to check out the paperwork to see if he did. And he connects this to Robert Maxwell and his wife, Ghislaine. Maxwell appeared out of nowhere, well, Czechoslovakia actually, with a fortune nobody really knows how he acquired. Then he died falling off his yacht. Then Epstein appears out of nowhere with a fortune, and the common denominator is Ghislaine Maxwell.
Weinstein compares Epstein’s persona and paedophile activities to that of a known Mossad agent, Eli Cohen. Cohen was an Egyptian Jew, but was given a cover by Mossad as an ethnic Arab playboy from Argentina. He then went to Damascus, where he became friends with Hafiz al-Assad and started holding orgies to collect information on the Syrian rich, powerful and perverted. And yes, it does look like Epstein was something similar. The intelligence agencies have been using their targets’ sexual indiscretions to blackmail them since forever and a day. The Nazis did it with the only brothel in Germany under their rule, Salon Kitty, run by the Gestapo, and the KGB did it in the Soviet Union. Weinstein is, understandably, disturbed that if it was such an intelligence operation, it was using underage girls. But my impression of the intelligence services is that they’re completely amoral, or at least, some are. Sexually exploiting underage girls wouldn’t bother some of them.
As for no journalists actually checking the Epstein story of currency trading, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve been warned off. It has happened. Years ago, Ramsey in Lobster told the story of how a producer for World In Action, ITV’s documentary programme, started to think there might be something fishy with the World Wide Fund for Nature because of the number of very top people, like Prince Philip, who were involved in it. But he got a warning not to pursue it any further. It wouldn’t surprise me if something like that had happened with Epstein too.
Weinstein and his interviewer also discuss Prince Andrew’s interview with the Beeb, in which he made the absurd claim that at the time of his alleged molestation of a girl at Epstein’s he was in Woking Pizza Express with his daughter. As an alibi, it’s not really credible. And that’s the point. Andrew was making fun of the whole interview by deliberating spinning a yarn he knew was unbelievable. And now Randy Andy’s come back and wants his security unit re-instated, which costs us, the British taxpayer, £3 million a year. A lot of people are upset at that. There’s already been an e-petition, and this morning a very right-wing YouTuber posted a video of a computer-generated Enoch Powell criticising Andrew for it in very forthright terms. My view is that Andrew now should be kept well away from the rest of the royal family as possible, as whether Epstein was an intelligence agent or not, Andrew’s a security risk. Quite apart as someone who should plausibly be in prison for his crimes against children.
It seems that the nonsense about the ‘Great Replacement’ has spread to the north African Arab nations. Steve Courage is a Black, Christian Nigerian YouTuber and this video seems to be his reaction to a chilling statement by the president of Tunisia that there is a conspiracy to change the demography of his country. This clearly refers to the number of Black Africans from south of the Saharan, who’ve come flooding into the country. Courage explains that they’ve done so as it’s ‘the last bus stop before Europe’, and they’re hoping to cross the Med to the nearest European and western middle eastern countries like Italy, France, Spain and Turkey. The sea crossing is horrendously dangerous, and Courage gives the horrific figures for the numbers of such hopeful migrants, who’ve drowned. It’s in the hundreds of thousands, if not a million people. But many migrants also don’t have the money to pay the people traffickers, and so become stranded on the southern side of the Mediterranean.
He goes on to explain why the migrants are so resented in Tunisia and other north African Arab countries – Egypt, Libya and Morocco, for example. Nobody likes illegal immigrants, he says, because it’s like somebody jumping the fence into your house uninvited and eating your food. It’s especially resented because Tunisia is experiencing a terrible recession which has left a significant percentage of the population unemployed. People are so poor that they cannot afford vegetables nor horsemeat, which is sold as the cheapest available meat. Courage also reminds his viewers that Black African nations have also expelled migrant workers during recessions, as Togo did in 1958, Ghana in 1968 and his own country, Nigeria, in 1963. The migrants there were other Black Africans from neighbouring countries.
He also asks his audience to understand why the Arabs fear demographic change: the population of their countries is so small that they could easily become swamped and a minority in their own country. Tunisia has a population of just over 12 million, Libya something like six. Courage’s home state of Lagos also has 26 million people. He also notes that while people have multiple identities, that does not mean that they are willing to sacrifice one of them. The north African countries are African, but they are also Arab and Muslim, and they don’t want to sacrifice that identity. Courage himself is African, Nigerian and a Christian, but he similarly would not sacrifice his Nigerian identity if his homeland was invaded by the rest of Africa. Nor would he sacrifice his Christian identity if radical Muslims seized power and tried to turn Nigeria into a Muslim state. Thus Arab north Africans naturally don’t want to see a situation in which you see seven Black Africans in their countries before you see an Arab.
He ends by stating that, rather than emigrating, Black Africans should stay in their countries to help build them up and change them. Because Blacks are more likely to be maltreated abroad than in their own nations.
It’s interesting to hear that the north African, Muslim countries also fear demographic change and destabilisation due to mass migration and the explanation for this by a Black African YouTuber.
I’m sad and disappointed at this news, but not surprised. While the so-called ‘commies’ of the real Labour party celebrate Clem Attlee and Nye Bevan, the founder of the welfare state, Starmer and his coteries worship Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown, the heart of New Labour. Blair got rid of Labour’s commitment to nationalisation and replaced it with Thatcherism: private industry, the further part-privatisation of the NHS and the dismantlement of the welfare state and deliberate humiliation of welfare claimants. BlaIr won three elections, but with lower votes than Corbyn had in 2019. And during his long tenure of power the party lost members as ordinary Labour voters, activists and supporters felt ignored and betrayed by a party that had turned against them in order to win Tory voters and big business and its donors.
Starmer is a true-blue all-the-way-through Blairite. The Labour shop a few months ago was selling New Labour, Tony Blair branded merchandise. Now it seems Starmer has also given the war criminal some kind of official post. Arch-right-wing YouTuber Mahyar Tousi reported last night that Starmer had just made him the party’s ‘Global Advisor’. Because Blair has set up an institute employing 75 people meddling in 40 countries, according to a report in the Spectator. This was followed by a long stream of tin foil hat paranoid nonsense from Tousi about Blair being a globalist, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum and ‘Star Trekky’ one world government.
In fact, rather than pushing for a global green communist order, as the extreme right views ‘globalists’ like Schwab, Blair almost certainly follows the neoliberal orthodoxies of the IMF. Their favoured solution to every economic crisis presented to them by countries in the developing world seeking help was privatisation, with state industries preferably sold to American multinationals and the scaling down of the state bureaucracy. More often than not, this made the situation worse. Some countries prospered by not paying any attention at all to the advice. As a devotee of Thatcher and the free market, this is almost certainly the line Blair will take towards economic development in these nations.
Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq and other Neo-Con imperial adventures are responsible for much of the hatred towards America and Britain felt by the rest of the world, and particularly Islam. This has been shown in polls carried out by reputable organisations. Contrary to right-wing claims that the Muslim world hates us because of our freedoms, and especially that enjoyed by western women, what they really hated us for was invading their countries. The Iraq invasion destroyed that country, but this wasn’t recognised by the Obama administration. One of Hillary Clinton’s deputies tried telling a crowd in Turkey during a diplomatic tour that conditions for women had improved immensely since the invasion and allied occupation. She was then squarely put right by a group of Iraqi women who told her how the situation had actually become much worse. I doubt Blair has learned anything from these imperial debacles either.
His solution to the wave of Islamist terrorism following 9/11 and 7/7 was to claim that he was an admirer of Islam and read the Quran regularly. He also recruited various mullahs and Islamic community leaders to his anti-radicalisation schemes and initiatives. Ed Hussein, a former member of the Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, describes in his book The Islamist how the various Muslim clergy and preachers traipsing through the door of No. 10, one after another, were all hypocrites. All of them were radicals pretending to be moderates. And after leaving office, Blair set up an international organisation to promote interfaith dialogue, lampooned in Private Eye as Drawing All Faiths Together (D.A.,F.T.)
Blair has absolutely nothing to offer Britain or the world. His economic views are a shop-worn neoliberalism well past its sale-by date, which is doing nothing but but making peoples’ lives poorer and more miserable. He is a war criminal who destroyed countries so the big oil companies could grab their oil and American multinationals their state industries. And despite his best efforts to appeal to the Muslim community there is still a threat from Islamist terrorism and recruitment.
If Blair really has been given some kind of office by Starmer, then all I can see is more people deciding to leave the party and more voters turning away from it. At the moment, Starmer’s appeal to the electorate appears to be that he is not the Tories. That’s not good enough when he’s breaking one pledge after another and showing every inclination of following their economic agenda.
But then, back in the 90s when Blair emerged, an anagram game produced this description from Blair’s name: ‘I am Tory Plan B’.
I just found this story, ‘GB News presenter called out by Jewish group over ‘dangerous conspiracy theory’ by Ruth Lawes in the Metro. It begins
‘GB News host Beverley Turner has been condemned by a Jewish group after tweeting Covid-19 had been bioengineered to ‘cause less harm to certain ethnicities.’
The 49-year-old wrote a now-deleted and ‘dangerous’ post on Twitter, screenshotted by The Jewish Chronicle, that the coronavirus had been manufactured to ‘destroy the west’.
She also bizarrely linked Dr Anthony Fauci, who was the chief medical adviser to the US presidency during the pandemic and, as a result, the subject for many conspiracy theorists, to the ‘bioengineering’.
Turner said: ‘Sars cov 2 virus causes less harm to certain ethnicities – east Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews (Fauci anyone?) than to European, S Asian & African … Just let that sink in.’
Referencing conspiracy theories Covid was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, she continued: ‘This is looking increasingly like a bio weapon to destroy the west.’
Pointing out the dangers of Turner’s post, Dave Rich, the head of policy at the Community Security Trust, told The Guardian: ‘It’s both depressing and alarming how easily an antisemitic myth can spread from the cranky corners of the internet into mainstream politics and media on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘
While this seems to be paranoid, anti-Semitic rubbish, a little while ago the Laowhy vlog on YouTube did post a video which presented evidence that the Chinese were collecting genetic information from the west connected to the development of bioweapons genetically tailored to attack non-Chinese. That said, Laowhy has been criticised for racism towards the Chinese, so it’s claim may need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 