Conspiracy Theory Loons

Whenever we are faced with a mix of tragedy and terror, two things tend to happen. Firstly, the government of the nation concerned flexes its muscles and - by intention or otherwise - suppresses freedom in an attempt to make the land safer. Secondly, the conspiracy theorists flex their limited intellectual muscles, and see the atrocity as part of a wider government led conspiracy to control the citizens. To date, the former hasn't happened in Norway. But in relation to the events of Friday, the latter certainly has - as some of the comments on this Orphans of Liberty post so ably demonstrates.

See, it isn't enough that a man might have gone a bit mental and killed loads of people. No, that isn't ghastly and terrible enough. Instead, we need the spurious and completely farcical notion that the governments of the nations concerned have run lethal operations in order to inflict draconian policies on their people. So the conspiracy nuts won't see Breivik as working alone or with one of two accomplices in the manner of Timothy McVeigh. No, he's a cipher - part of a "false flag" operation run by the government and/or its associates.

Of course, this is utter horseshit with no real grasp of reality. I mean, most governments are incapable of lacing their own fucking shoes without a government leak and the accurate accusation of incompetence. Look at the Watergate scandal - a genuine attempt by a government to create a conspiracy around a pointless fucking burglary. And the conspiracy unravelled within months despite all the power of the imperial presidency leading Nixon - who had just won one of the most stupendous electoral victories in US history - to resign. If a government runs a conspiracy, it will probably be the worst conspiracy in the world.

Yet this sort of analysis is not good enough for a conspiracy theorist. And so JFK was murdered on the orders of LBJ, just as the US government destroyed the Twin Towers with help from a Jewish Cabal. The fact that no government would be capable of the sort of secrecy involved in this sort of conspiracy is irrelevant. Instead, the conspiracy loons see malign shadows that are, at best, tricks of the light for the terminally naive. They are adding 2 and 2 and getting not just 5, but 55.

But why does this matter? Why not let the loons babble their nonsense without passing comment on it? Well, the answer is twofold. When so-called friends of liberty start spouting this shite, it reflects badly on us all. We cannot credibly point out the draconian knee-jerk reactions by government to terror attacks when so many of our numbers are unconvincingly accusing the government of having commissioned that atrocity in the first place. It obliterates what little credibility we have.

And then there's the creation of paranoia in the minds of the loons. For the most part, this is harmless. But the Norway killer seems to have believed in one of the increasingly popular conspiracy theory bollocks - that of cultural Marxism. And that may well have motivated his carnage. Of course, it is more than possible that the motivator for the killing spree is irrelevant since Breivik would have found an excuse for his killing anyway. But the more people believe in this non-existent underworld of absolutely non-existent conspirators, the more they lose connection with reality and with that the ability to respond to reason. Everything feeds their paranoid theories; nothing can be disprove those theories. It makes trying to debate with them like trying to debate with a block of concrete - completely pointless.

As an advocate of free speech, of course, I don't want to suppress the loons, even if the bollocks they spout has all the connection with reality as an episode of the Teletubbies. But I will use my right to free speech to call them on the shite they vomit forth, and in the process hopefully elucidate an analysis of the threats to freedom that actually has a connection to the real world.