Joe Rogan on Conspiracy Theories and Alex Jones’ Comments on Charlottesville

It seems that Alex Jones just keeps going lower and lower in his statements and mouthings about stupid and poisonous conspiracy theories.

In this clip, Joe Rogan, the host of an internet radio show in the US, and his co-presenter talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. They discuss the problem of credibility and the refusal of people to accept when they genuinely don’t know anything. They also contrast real conspiracies with the wild, bogus theories spouted by Alex Jones.

Rogan gives as an example of a real conspiracy the plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s to shoot down an American passenger aircraft and blame it on Cuba. There were also other strategies to arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay, thus allowing them to blame it on Castro and start a war. These are genuine conspiracies, which have been revealed by documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

He contrasts these with the bizarre, deep conspiracies, such as Kennedy being assassinated by his driver, and the rubbish pushed by Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is the main man behind Infowars, and I’ve blogged many times about his insane and dangerous theories. Jones is a 9/11 truther, but has gone on to claim that the ‘globalists’ who run the world really are demonic entities, either literally so, or are extra-dimensional aliens. The global elite sacrifice children to Satan, and perform black magic orgies. Barak Obama was possessed by demons. So is Hillary Clinton, though she may also be a robot or cyborg. The Clintons were also involved in a paedophile ring running out of a Boston pizza parlour. Gay rights activists are a ‘transhumanist space cult intent on producing genderless humans’.

And the global elite, including Obama, are just waiting to incarcerate true, freedom-loving Americans in concentration camps. They also manufacture emergencies, including gun crime and mass shootings, in order to pass legislation to deprive Americans further of the rights and liberties. Of which, the most important is the right to carry guns.

Hence he declared that the Sandy Hook school shooting was entirely fake, and that the victims were all ‘crisis actors’. Apart from being massively wrong and offensive, this has led to the nutters, who believe this nonsense approaching the bereaved parents to challenge them about the deaths of their children.

And now it appears Jones has done something similar following the events at Charlottesville. He has claimed that the violence there was staged by ‘Jewish actors’, at least according to Rogan. If this is true, then it’s a new low. The mob marching to defend the statue definitely included real Klan members and Nazis. These stormtroopers really did try to beat up and kill the counterdemonstrators, and the anti-racists inside a meeting hall, attended an inter-racial, interfaith meeting, in which the participants included Dr. Cornell West and Rev. Traci Blackmon, two Christian ministers committed to social justice. West and Blackmon have stated that it was the anarchists and the Antifa, who rescued them when it looked like the Nazis were going to beat them to death.

And the Nazis also marched on a local synagogue, surrounded it, and chanted ‘Sieg heil’, terrorizing those gathered for the evening service. The rabbi and staff were so frightened, that they smuggled the Torah scroll out of the backdoor in case the Nazis should try to damage it.

Rogan and his fellow presenter also state that these daft conspiracy theories are a distraction from what the authorities really are covertly doing.

This is all absolutely correct. Parapolitical writers, like Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, draw a distinction between real conspiracies, such as those discussed by Rogan and his fellow host, which they sometimes term ‘parapolitics’ or ‘Deep Politics’, and the bogus conspiracy theories, such as Jones’ rants about the coming one world Satanic state, the various anti-Semitic theories about the Jewish bankers, and contact with shape-changing alien lizards.

As for Jones and his nonsense about ‘Jewish actors’, this is stuff of which the Nazis would have been proud. The Nazis and fellow Fascist parties in the rest of Europe, like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, blamed just about every misfortune on the Jews, including their own negative image. Mosley devotes an entire chapter in his autobiography, My Life, to what he calls ‘Jewish opposition’, claiming that he was unfairly maligned by his Jewish opponents. Needless to say, he wasn’t. His biographer, Skidelsky, claimed that Mosley wasn’t originally anti-Semitic, but only became so after he was attacked as such by the Jews. He supposedly ordered one of his lieutenants, who came from the Britons or another of the anti-Semitic societies, to look into it. And this officer then duly came up with the daft conspiracy theories and libels blaming everything on them. More recent studies, such as by Stephen Dorrill and his biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, have shown Mosley was anti-Semitic from the start.

Jones, and those figures on the right like him, are going down a very dangerous path when they repeat the same type of lies that the Nazis used to try and fool people into believing that they weren’t a collection of violent thugs intent on mass murder.

It’s questionable how much of this bilge Jones really believes. Jones has tried to defend himself in the court case involving custody of his children by having his lawyer release a statement that he doesn’t believe any of it, and that he just a ‘performance artist’, like a ‘rodeo clown’. If true, it means he’s consciously lying, which makes him even more similar to Goebbels in this matter.

I admit, I’ve got a lot of pleasure before now from watching Jones’ insane rants and antics. But this is rapidly coming to an end. When he starts lying about real Nazis, who act like Nazis attacking Blacks, Jews, gays and anti-racist Whites, he’s crossed a line.

Even looking at him to get a laugh out of his ravings is dangerous. Karl Dietrich Bracher, a German historian of Nazism, describes in one of his books how some Germans turned up at Hitler’s rallies and his denunciation of the Jews and others simply as a bit of fun, without taking it seriously.

After Charlottesville, a number of internet servers are refusing to host Nazi and White supremacist sites. After Jones’ comments about the violence in Charlottesville being the fault of ‘Jewish actors’, his show should be treated the same way as well.

American State Censored TV Programme on American Nerve Gas Atrocity in Laos

I’ve blogged before about the way the Thames TV documentary, Death On the Rock, about the killing of an IRA terror squad by the SAS in Gibraltar, angered Maggie Thatcher so much that she destroyed Thames. The documentary presented evidence that the British army knew about the group’s movements, and could have picked them up peacefully at any time. They deliberately chose not to. The shootings were therefore a targeted assassination, with the SAS acting as a South American-style death squad.

This was, of course, too much for Maggie. She had Thames’ broadcasting licence removed, and they were replaced by Carlton. This is something to remember the next time John Humphries or anyone else at the Beeb tells you that she never interfered with the state broadcaster, and that this only began under Blair. I’m not arguing that Tory Tony didn’t interfere or throw his weight around with the Beeb. And there’s plenty of evidence that Maggie also had programme censored. She had the documentary, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, produced by Panorama, censored because it argued that the Conservatives had been infiltrated by card carrying neo-Nazis, just like the Labour party had been infiltrated by Militant. Perhaps in Humphries’ case, the Conservatives didn’t interfere with the news coverage, because they didn’t need to. It already reflected their own bias.

Such censorship isn’t confined to Britain. It also happened in America. William Blum, a very long time critic of US foreign policy, has a section describing the censorship of a documentary on American television in 1998 in his book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (London: Zed Books 2014). The company aroused the ire of the political, economic and media elite because it dared to tell the truth about a US gas attack in Laos that resulted in the deaths of civilians and American servicemen. He writes

In September 1970, American forces in Laos, acting under “Operation Tailwind”, used aerosolized Sarin nerve agent (referred to also as CBU-15 or GB) to prepare their entry in an attack upon a Laotian village base camp, with the object of killing a number of American military defectors who were reported to be there. The operation succeeded in killing in excess of 100 people, military and civilian, including at least two Americans. How many died before the attack from the gas and how many from the attack itself is not known.

Sarin, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s, can kill within minutes after inhalation of its vapor. A tiny drop of it on the skin will do the same; it may even penetrate ordinary clothing. It works by inhibiting an enzyme needed to control muscle movements. Without the enzyme, the body has no means of stopping the activation of muscles, and any physical horror is possible.

When the invading Americans were making their getaway, they were confronted by a superior force of North Vietnamese and communist Pathet Lao soldiers. The Americans called for help from the air. Very shortly, US planes were overhead dropping canisters of sarin upon the enemy. As the canisters exploded, a wet fog enveloped the enemy soldiers, who dropped to the ground, vomiting and convulsing. Some of the gas spread towards the Americans, not all of whom were adequately protected. Some began vomiting violently. Today, one of them suffers from creeping paralysis, which his doctor diagnoses as nerve-gas damage.

This story was reported on June 7, 1998, on the TV programme “NewsStand: CNN & Time”, and featured the testimony of Admiral Thomas Moorer, who had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970,, as well as lesser military personnel, both on and off camera, who corroborated the incidents described above.

Then all hell broke loose. This was a story too much in conflict-painfully so-with American schoolbooks, Readers Digest, the flag, apple pie and mom. It was damage-control time. The big guns were called out-Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Green Beret veterans, the journalistic elite, the Pentagon itself. The story was wrong, absurd, slanderous, they cried. CNN retracted, Moorer retracted, the show’s producers were fired…lawsuits all over the place.

Like the dissidents who became “non-persons” under Stalin, Operation Tailwind is now officially a “non-event”.

Notwithstanding this, the program’s producers, April Oliver and Jack Smith, put together a 78 page document supporting their side of the story, with actual testimony by military personnel confirming the use of the nerve agent. (pp. 139-141).

This is truly Orwellian. Orwell, of course, based 1984 on Stalin’s Russia, and the way party functionaries rewrote history to suit the needs of the party and Stalin. The most famous example of this was the way the regime turned Trotsky from a hero and co-author of the Revolution with Lenin, to its arch-enemy and betrayer.

This incident shows how the American military-industrial complex and its puppets and paid shills in the media are quite prepared to do the same, and vilify and expel anyone who commits the same cardinal crime of exposing state lies and atrocities.

Cockburn and Sinclair in their book, End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, describe the way the American military and media have managed news reporting to support the Iraq invasion, up to and including the killing of journalists. Now the situation seems ready to get worse under Fuhrer Trump. But this would have been under Bill Clinton’s presidency. And Blum’s book shows that the corruption goes back further than that, right back to the Second World War.

It really makes you start to wonder how free the American press and media is, or if it ever was.

Trump Replaces Military Chiefs with Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon on National Security Council

This is another stupid move by Trump, in which ideology is shown to weigh more in his mind than military experience and expertise. In this clip from the David Pakman Show, Pakman and his team discuss Trump’s reorganisation of the National Security Council. This is the top government organ for discussing issues of national security and foreign policy. Trump has just made Steve Bannon, the White supremacist head of the right-wing news agency, Breitbart, a permanent member. By contrast, the head of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence will only attend when issues directly relevant to them are being discussed.

Pakman and his team point out that Bannon doesn’t have any experience in national security. He was a naval officer, before becoming a documentary film-maker and then head of Breitbart. They also question how Trump has the authority to make these changes, as the legislation governing the composition of the council states that the president appoints its personnel with the advice and consent of the senate.

They also point out that this is part of Trump’s war on intelligence, which the orange buffoon insists doesn’t exist. Trump claims that the story that he is at odds with the espionage agencies is a falsehood created by the press. In fact, he is just against certain leaders, but values the work of the junior staff. Pakman and his team point out that Trump’s apparent downgrading of senior members of the Council – the head of the joint chiefs and national intelligence director, would send a signal to the junior members of those organisations that Trump definitely does not value them.

This looks like pretty much the same stupid manoeuvre George Dubya made with his selection of the top senior officers commanding the ‘war on terror’. One of the Conservative critics of Bush and the Neocons, a senior female officer connected to the Pentagon, was a fierce critic of Shrub’s maladministration of the wars in the Middle East. Shrub and the Neocons valued adherence to the ideological ‘party line’ far more than practical military experience, tactical knowledge and knowledge of the region. The upper ranks of the organisation handling the invasion of Iraq was overwhelmingly staffed by Bush’s fellow Neocons at the expense of experienced, knowledgeable military officers. Bush selected for membership of the commanding organisations personnel, who told him exactly what he wanted to hear. And he wanted to hear that the war would be over very quickly, and that the liar and fantasist, Ahmed Chalebi, would be welcomed back to Iraq as a national hero by a people grateful to the Americans for their liberation from Saddam Hussein.

Those officers, who told Bush the opposite were sacked. Shrub dismissed General Zilli, one of the senior officers in the section of the Pentagon dealing with the Middle East, because Zilli told him – rightly – that any invasion of Iraq would result in years of more war. This didn’t fit the Neocon view of the Middle East, and so Zilli lost his job. Despite being 100 per cent right.

Now Trump is doing exactly the same. He’s shown he values ideological adherence over military and foreign policy experience and knowledge. This is made worse by Bannon’s own White supremacist views. Well, contrary to whatever stupid, racist nonsense Trump and Bannon believe, the peoples of the Middle East are not stupid or less intelligent than Americans or Westerners. Nor can the resistance to the western occupation be put down simply to some kind of innate evil within the Middle Eastern psychology, or to their supposed envy of the political and personal freedoms enjoyed by the peoples of the West.

For many of the peoples of Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, opposition to America and her allies doesn’t necessarily come from Islam. It comes from the fact that we’ve invaded their countries, and are killing their compatriots and coreligionists, and members of their families – through bombings and drone strikes. Yes, ISIS and its backers in the Saudi government are responsible for much of the terrorism and resistance to the West in the region. But other causes are simply the natural urge of ordinary people the world over to hate and resist invaders. But this vital point is going to be missed with Trump’s appointment of Bannon to this important position. If, of course, Trump ever seriously considered it at all.

I’m afraid that the result of this will be more senseless war, just as Shrub’s valuing of Neocon political views over genuine military and cultural understanding has meant that the allied occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has lasted over a decade. It will lead to more needless civilian deaths, and even more of our servicemen and -women losing their lives, for no good reason. These wars haven’t been launched to build democracy in the Middle East. Bush launched them in order steal Iraq’s oil and its state industries after they were privatised. Syria is being bombed for much the same reason – to ensure the passage of an oil pipeline for the profit of the oil companies and countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, which Assad does not want passing through his country.

Bannon’s appointment as a permanent member of the National Security Council will make this debacle worse, and prolong further a war that has already gone on for far too long.

The Young Turks on Report Showing Iraq Invasion Based on Lies

This is a piece from The Young Turks on a recently declassified report from the intelligence committee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff showing that instead of the confident knowledge the Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, the result was the complete opposite. Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and Bush himself stated that they were absolutely certain that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and that they were only a few months away from developing nuclear bombs. They also claimed that the Iraqis also possessed the missiles to drop these bombs on Israel.

This report shows that instead of secure knowledge, Bush’s administration was profoundly ignorant whether Hussein really did pose a threat. The report states that they didn’t know how much they didn’t know. In some areas of Hussein’s weapons programme, they admitted that they had zero knowledge, while in others the information could go up to about 75 per cent. The report’s compilers admit that in some areas the report was based on 90 per cent uncertainty. They had very little information on Hussein’s chemical weapons. Furthermore, the report stated that the Iraqis did not have the precursors for a sustained chemical weapon attack. As for biological weapons, the report states they had no information on their whereabouts or the regime’s capabilities regarding the various stages in their manufacture. They also had little or no information regarding their nuclear weapons programme. And the report states that Hussein did not have long range missiles. In other words, there was absolutely no danger of him nuking Israel, despite Rice’s statement that the first information they would have about the Iraqi nuclear threat might be a mushroom cloud.

Cenk Uygur states that this report is damning. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies. The only fact to come out of it that might partially exonerate Bush himself, is a statement from one of the intelligence staff responsible for the report. When he was asked whether the report would have been sent to Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney to pass on to the president, he said, ‘That’s the last place it would have gone.’ The generals did not want Bush to know the truth, as they wanted war.

And in Britain Tony Blair’s regime also lied with the ‘dodgy dossier’ and ‘sexed up reports’. The results have been millions of dead and displaced Iraqis, the emergence of ISIS, and the destabilisation of almost the entire Middle East. But the American military wanted war anyway.

I think Ozzy Osbourne sang about this kind of affair in Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.

‘Generals gathering in their masses
Just like witches at Black Masses’.

Bush is a liar, but Ozzy still rocks.

The Young Turks on the Destabilisation of Syria and Treason by American Generals

This is another fascinating and chilling report by The Young Turks on origins of the war in Syria. The veteran American journalist, Seymour Hersh, has had an article published in the London Review of Books discussing the origins of the conflict. He has revealed that it began back in 2006, when Bush’s government decided that they were going to destabilise Assad’s government by creating sectarian divisions and fomenting rebellion amongst the disaffected and dissident groups in Syria, such as the Kurds and Sunnis. They also backed the government in exile of a previous Syrian vice-president, then resident in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. They also began funnelling guns and money to these groups via the CIA, through Britain, Turkey and Libya. The centre for the shipments in Libya was Benghazi, where the American embassy was attacked and the ambassador murdered by Islamist terrorists.

In 2013 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had changed their views about the desirability of supporting the Syrian rebels. They found out that the main groups benefiting from the arms shipments were Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. The al-Nusra front are al-Qaeda. These groups were also being funded by the Saudis. They were also concerned that the Turks had also co-opted the scheme, and were no longer funding moderate opponents of the Assad regime, but also turning a blind eye to the funding and training within Turkey of the radical Islamists. As for the moderates themselves, increasingly they didn’t exist. The rebels, who were trained and armed by the Americans and their allies, overwhelmingly defected to the radicals once they were in Syria. As for the Free Syrian Army, a German journalist, Jurgen Todenhofer, who toured ISIS held territory, states that they were regarded by Daesh as a joke.

The American generals took these concerns to Obama, and recommended that the attempts to overthrow Assad should be stopped. Obama disagreed and ordered them to carry on with the existing policy. So they attempted to undermine and circumvent it by giving outmoded and second-rate weaponry to the rebels, including arms that hadn’t been used since the Korean War and soviet military equipment. They also shared intelligence about the extremists with countries, known to be sympathetic to Syria, whom they knew would share it with Assad. The Turks’ presenter, Cenk Uygur, forthrightly calls this policy treason. It’s direct disobedience by the American generals of their commander-in-chief, the US President. He states that it runs against American democracy. It might be the right decision, but to act against the decision of the elected head of state is wrong. As for Obama’s Syrian policy, this has the bi-partisan support of the Republicans as well as the Democrats. There is a very revealing quote from one of the generals involved in these machinations, where he states that if the American people could see the intelligence they were receiving daily on Syria, ‘they’d go ballistic’.

This adds more information on why Syria is the mess it is, and whose decision it was to destabilise the regime in the first place. And Britain shares some of that responsibility through aiding the Americans in the funding and equipping of these rebel groups.

Uygur also shows how hypocritical the Republican rhetoric about Obama’s supposed ‘Muslim’ sympathies are. A large number of Americans really do think Obama is a Muslim, as well as a Socialist, Communist and Nazi. But it was Bush who started the policy of funding the radical Islamic Muslim Brotherhood.