http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088...
Conspiracy Buffs Warn of Kissinger Cabal, Red Mailbox Dots: TV
May 26 (Bloomberg) -- Radio host Alex Jones says 9/11 was “an inside job†orchestrated to create panic and more reliance on an increasingly repressive government. One of his sympathizers is convinced that Halliburton Co. is building “concentration camps†capable of holding 50 million Americans.
Jones and his fellow conspiracy theorists are the subject of “New World Order,†an engrossing, scary documentary airing tonight on IFC at 6:45 p.m. New York time.
No Facts
Jones and his cohorts offer no evidence to back up their fantastic tales. I don’t know whether this is because evidence isn’t their thing, or because filmmakers Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel preferred to concentrate on wacky personalities rather than hard facts.
Did anybody see this?
http://www.ifc.com/new-world-order/
Diana’s Death, ‘Da Vinci Code’ Feed Lust for Conspiracy: Books
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088...
May 26 (Bloomberg) -- David Aaronovitch is a brave and patient man.
He read up on endless insane conspiracy theories, then set out to debunk them in his engaging book, “Voodoo Histories.†He must have annoyed a lot of people in the process.
An awesome number of men and women believe that U.K. agents bumped off Princess Diana, that 9/11 wasn’t what it seemed, that Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code†is more than a novel, and that Marilyn Monroe died of a poisoned enema. Equally breathtaking is their reluctance to see their cherished theories trashed.
Aaronovitch, who writes a column for the Times newspaper in London, distinguishes between conspiracy theories that feed on facts and those that are utter fabrications.
U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, for example, was an out-of- control conspiracy theorist. But that doesn’t mean there were no Communist moles in the country. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and many others were indeed found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union. Newly released records show that Comintern agents penetrated the U.S. to a surprising extent, though never enough to justify the panic and infractions against civil liberties that the paranoid McCarthy whipped up.
Other “conspiracies†have turned out to be pure fiction, like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.†An infamous forgery, the book purported to be the notes from a Zionist Congress where participants supposedly plotted in 1897 to overthrow national governments. The hoax inspired a generation of Nazis and played a role in the Holocaust.