Censored 2014 (41 page)

Consider how positing that one's government may be partially composed of unaccountable criminal elements is cause for serious censure. Labeled “conspiracy theories” by a corporate media that prompt and channel emotionally laden mass consent, such perspectives are quickly dispatched to the memory hole lest they prompt meaningful discussion of the political prerogatives and designs held by a global power elite coordinating governments and broader geopolitical configurations.
¹⁶

In the mythos of American exceptionalism, government intelligence and military operations are largely seen as being directed almost solely toward manipulation or coercion of unfortunate souls in foreign lands. To suggest otherwise, as independent researchers and commentators have done with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)–Contra–crack cocaine connection, and 9/11, has been cause for sustained conspiracy panics that act to suppress inquiry into such events by professional and credentialed opinion leaders, particularly journalists and academics.

At the same time, a conspiracy panic serves a subtle yet important doctrinal function of manifesting and reproducing the ideational status quo of the “war on terror” era. “The scapegoating of conspiracy theories provides the conditions for social integration and political rationality,” Bratich observed. “Conspiracy panics help to define the normal modes of dissent. Politically it is predicated on a consensus of ‘us' over against a subversive and threatening ‘them.'”
¹⁷
These days especially, the public suggestion that an official narrative may be amiss almost invariably puts one in the enemy camp.

CHALLENGING GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY NARRATIVES

The time for a conspiracy panic to develop has decreased commensurately with the heightened spread and availability of information and communication technology that allows for the dissemination of news and research formerly suppressed by the perpetual data overload of corporate media. Before the wide access to information technology and the Internet, independent investigations into events including the JFK assassination took place over the course of many years,
materializing in book-length treatments that could be dismissed by intelligence assets in news media and academe as the collective activity of “conspiracy buffs”—amateurish researchers who lack a government or privately funded sinecure to overlook or obscure inquiry into deep events. The CIA directed media outlets and some key individuals to employ the term “conspiracy theorist” specifically to discredit publications and deter future inquiries into controversial, historical events.
¹⁸

Not until Oliver Stone's 1991 blockbuster film JFK, essentially an adoption of works by author Jim Marrs, Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, did a substantial conspiracy panic take shape as a response to such analysis thrust upon the public in popular narrative form. This panic arose from and centered around Hollywood's challenge to traditional journalism's turf alongside commercial news outlets' typically deceptive interpretation of the event and almost wholly uncritical treatment of the Warren Commission Report.
¹⁹

Shortly thereafter, investigative journalist Gary Webb's “Dark Alliance” series for the
San Jose Mercury News
demonstrated the Internet's capacity to explain and document a government conspiracy. With Webb's painstaking examination of the CIA's role in the illicit drug trade hyperlinked to a bevy of documentation and freely distributed online, the professional journalistic community and its intelligence penumbra fell silent for months.

In the interim, the story picked up steam in the nontraditional outlets of talk radio and tabloid television, with African Americans especially intrigued by the potential government role in the crack cocaine epidemic. Then suddenly major news outlets spewed forth a vitriolic attack on Webb and the
Mercury News
that amazingly resulted in the
Mercury's
retraction of the story and Webb's eventual departure from the paper. Years later, Webb apparently committed suicide.
²⁰

Criticism of Webb's work predictably focused on petty misgivings toward his alleged poor judgment—specifically his intimation that the CIA intentionally caused the crack epidemic in African American communities, an observation that many blacks found logical and compelling. So not only did Webb find himself at the center of a conspiracy panic because of his assessment of the CIA's role in the drug trade; he was also causing mass “paranoia” within the African American community that major news media suggested were predisposed toward such thinking. Not incidentally, the CIA not only no longer denies Webb's assertions, they have admitted, though obfuscated, the degree of their involvement.
²¹

Since the mid-1990s conspiracy panics have increasingly revolved around an effort by mainstream news media to link unorthodox political ideas and inquiry with violent acts. This dynamic was crystallized in Timothy McVeigh, the principal suspect in the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing, who through the propaganda-like efforts of government and major news media was constructed to symbolize the dangers of “extremist” conspiratorial thought (his purported fascination with white supremacism and
The Turner Diaries)
and violent terrorist action (the bombing itself). Conveniently overlooked is the fact that McVeigh was trained as a black ops technician and still in US Army employ at the time of his 2001 execution according to his death certificate.
²²

Through a broad array of media coverage and subsequent book-length treatments by the left intelligentsia on the “radical right,” the
alleged lone wolf McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing became forever coupled in the national memory. The image and event seemingly attested to how certain modes of thought can bring about violence—even though McVeigh's role in what took place on April 19 was without question one part of an intricate web painstakingly examined by the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee
²³
and in the 2011 documentary
A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995
.
²⁴

Independent researchers and alternative media utilizing the Internet have necessitated the rapid deployment of conspiracy panic-like reactions that appear far less natural and spontaneous than their predecessors to neutralize public debate and bolster often questionable official narratives of momentous and unusual events. For example, wide-scale skepticism surrounding the May 1, 2011, assault on Osama bin Laden's alleged lair in Pakistan was met with efforts to cultivate a conspiracy panic evident in editorials appearing across mainstream print, broadcast, and online news platforms. The untenable event, supported only by President Obama's pronouncement of the operation, was unquestioningly accepted by corporate media that shouted down calls for further evidence and alternative explanations of bin Laden's demise as “conspiracy theories.”

Indeed, a LexisNexis search for “bin Laden” and “conspiracy theories” yields over 500 such stories and opinion pieces appearing across Western print and broadcast media outlets for the week of May 2, 2011.
²⁵
“While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden,” the
Washington Post
opined, “the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened.”
²⁶

Along these lines, retired General Mark Kimmitt remarked on CNN, “Well, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this, about why it was done? Was it done? Is he still alive?”
²⁷
“The conspiracy theorists are not going to be satisfied,” Glenn Beck asserted. “Next thing you know, Trump is going to ask for the death certificate. And is it the real death certificate? And then all hell breaks loose.”
²⁸

Like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War and the events of 9/11 used to justify the invasion of Iraq,
²⁹
the narrative has since become a part of official history, disingenuously repeated in subsequent news accounts and elementary school history
books—a history handed down from on high and amplified by corporate news outlets continually perpetuating nightmare fictions to a poorly informed and intellectually idle public.

This psycho-symbolic template is simultaneously evident in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, and in the Boston Marathon bombing events and their aftermaths on April 15, 2013. Indeed, the brief yet intense Sandy Hook conspiracy panic, and to a lesser degree that of the Boston bombing, revolved at least partially around the “conspiracy theory professor,”
³⁰
who, as a credentialed member of the intellectual class, overstepped his bounds by suggesting how there are many unanswered questions related to the tragedies that might lead one to conclude that the events did not take place in the way official pronouncements and major media have represented them. It is telling that critical assessments of domestic events and their relatedness to a corrupt media and governing apparatus are so vigorously assailed.

Yet to suggest that the news and information Americans accept as sound and factual on a routine basis is in fact a central means for manipulating their worldviews is not a matter for debate. Rather, it is an empirically verifiable assertion substantiated in a century of public relations and psychological warfare research and practice. Such propaganda efforts once reserved for foreign locales are now freely practiced in the US to keep the population increasingly on edge and disinclined to voice valid questions and concerns.

As a disciplinary mechanism against the public use of reason directed toward political leaders and the status quo, conspiracy panics serve to reinforce the myths and thought processes sustained by the corporate media's typically wholehearted advocacy of official narratives and deference to the dominant political rationality. Despite (or possibly because of) the immense technological sophistication at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a majority of the population remains bound and shackled in the bowels of Plato's cave, forever doomed to watch the shadows projected before them.

CONCLUSION

In 2013, the truth emergency remains a major concern, and in an era of seemingly never-ending pseudo-events and Potemkin villages
presented as the reality with which we must contend,
³¹
the application of independent reason in pursuit of truth has all too frequently been replaced with an unthinking obeisance toward the smoke screen of expertise disguising corporate power and control.

Addressing the present truth emergency that began with the complex and still largely inexplicable set of events surrounding 9/11 requires a broad rekindling of the reasoning faculties so critical to further apprehending the objective reality Fromm pointed to almost sixty years ago. With this in mind we must ask whether modern educational institutions themselves are up to such a task. Project Censored is incorporated into scores of college classrooms each year, and is exemplary in pursuing the broader goal of an authentically liberal (liberating) education. Yet much of what passes for education today increasingly involves the conditioning of a docile yet efficient workforce and citizenry. Such a populace is far removed from seriously understanding or questioning the overall order of things, much less recognizing their own intrinsic social and historical agency.

In fact, the university environment actually makes one less inclined to voice opinions generally regarded as unpopular. This is reflected in a 2010 study by Association of American Colleges and Universities revealing that less than 20 percent of 9,000 faculty members surveyed believe it is safe to hold “unpopular views” on campus. Along these lines, the research also suggested how the longer students are enrolled at university the less open-minded they become. Of 25,000 students polled, only 40 percent of first-year students feel safe expressing unpopular positions versus 31 percent of seniors. Thus, ironically, the modern university tends to diminish the capacities it was originally established to cultivate—namely an appreciation of and proficiency in reasoning and informed inquiry.
³²

In a vein similar to Fromm's, Mills observed how the liberal educator's responsibility to the student and public revolves around two central aims: