Quote of the Day and Another Rant About Conspiracy Theories

From Longrider on yet another post at OoL expounding dubious and unconvincing conspiracy theories:

I have to say that conspiracy theories really undermines what we are doing here. When we point out genuine, provable malfeasance on the part of those who would steal our liberties, our opponents will point straight back to the conspiracy theories and laugh.

Couldn't agree more. While I absolutely believe that James Higham et al should have a right to publish what they want, especially on a site co-run by Higham, I have to say the conspiracy theory guff does nothing for the cause of liberty and will probably end up harming it. We don't need a conspiracy theory about 9/11 to show that the Patriot Act was wrong, and we don't need a conspiracy theory about 7/7 to show that all the attempts to increase the detention periods in this country were wrong. All those conspiracy theories create straw man arguments that our opponents can easily bat away, making themselves look right in the process. And the worst thing is, in articles like the one linked to above, we create those straw man arguments, not our opponents.

And I don't understand why we have to create these largely unprovable and, in my humble opinion, false ideas that cultural Marxism has taken over the world, or that Obama is closet Marxist, or that Christianity is being undermined by arguably the most incompetent organisations in the world (namely, local governments). We're not dealing with opponents who are generally very subtle about what they do. There's no great attempt to hide the fact that the DNA of innocent people is being kept on the DNA database in what represents a massive u-turn and a real concern to anyone interested in championing civil liberties in this country. They're doing it, right now, down in London. We don't need to fight members of the Frankfurt School who have been dead for decades when Clegg and Cameron are doing tangible things to damage freedom in the here and now, right in front of our noses.

But anyway; enough. Fighting conspiracy theorists is a waste of time and effort. I believe in freedom and that belief encompasses the freedom of conspiracy loons to spout their paranoia on any platform they see fit. But that same freedom allows me to point out that what they are doing doesn't help the cause of freedom and actually hinders it.

Angry Loners

Interesting piece in the Observer today about the 7th July terror attacks in London. The bombers apparently waged their war on London on a shoestring budget, using the internet. They had no direct links to Al Qaeda. The implication is that the four bombers were the equivalent of Michael Ryan - angry loners, bent on the maximum destruction of random strangers.

But I think that there needs to be an further understanding of what happened. Ryan was a one-off - there have been others who have done similar things but generally speaking Ryan was a lethal loner. However, as the 21st July, 2005 so dramatically proved, Khan et al were not one offs. Whilst Ryan's suicide prevented any meaningful examination on what caused him to go on his rampage, it appears that he failed to connect with society at all. He was a loner, his motivation revenge on a society that he rejected and rejected him. However Khan et al could socialise with others, and were motivated by a mixture of politics and religion. To write them off as loners is counter productive.

Therefore I see three critical points. First of all, we need to understand how Islam - an inherently peaceful religion on some levels - was perverted to become a reason for mass murder. And we need to accept that this will be happening in other mosques in the country. There is nothing wrong with Islam. But there is something very wrong with this perverted version of Islam that inspires people to commit mass murder. We need to accept that, we need to say the perverted version of Islam is wrong, and we need to go out and convince fundamentalists of that. People are entitled to any belief they want to hold. But if that believe involves going out and killing people, we need to fight it. We need to convince people who hold fundamentalist views that they are wrong. They are allowed to hold those views in a liberal democracy, but we have a duty to prove them wrong.

Secondly, we need to accept that a War on Terror is not like a conventional war. It is not even like the campaign against the IRA. The IRA were an army - there was a clear reporting structure. Al Qaeda is not like that. Bin Laden long ago surrended operational control of his organisation, and the point of Al Qaeda ("the base", literally translated) is to act as an inspiration, not a coherent army. You will not stop Khan etc by arresting/killing Bin Laden. You will stop Khan et al by trying to convince they are wrong, or failing that using the police/intelligence services to stop of disrupt their activities. This should be a war fought covertly, not by bringing civil war to nations in the Middle East.

Finally we need an independent enquiry into what happened in London on 7th July, 2005. The government does not want this to happen. But we need to fight for it, because we need to know why this happened, what could have been done to prevent it, what can be done to prevent it in the future and what we need to do in the (sadly) likely event that it happens again.