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    Re: The view from the bridge Archived Message

    Posted by Sinister Burt on August 18, 2020, 9:59 am, in reply to "Re: The view from the bridge"

    If you read robin ramsay's output, he's not as disimissive of the general idea as this passage suggests (for instance he's written a lot about the kennedy assassination over the years; and i've read him talk about the origin/use of the term conspiracy theory with the warren comission in the sense you mean). He may make a distinction with 'parapolitics' which he's written plenty on - eg in the book 'politics and paranoia' which is a good read.

    Here's some of his earlier stuff on the subject:
    https://www.serendipity.li/eden/laconspi.html

    Excerpt:
    " The difficulty for a naive empiricist or rationalist like me is that in a sense the people who are currently producing and recycling all the rubbish about global conspiracies, the David Ickes and William Coopers of this world, are right. But only in a sense. Some of the world's politics and economics is influenced — but not controlled — by little groups of people. The Bilderberg Group does exist, does meet. The Trilateral Commission does exist, does meet occasionally and discuss a new world order. After all, these are the guardians of capital, and disorder is what they don't want. Global investment likes order. There are bankers ripping us off — but few of them are Jewish. David Icke and the many Americans from whom he has adopted these ideas, have a little nugget of truth there, but thanks to the way they use it, they contaminate the subject matter and unwittingly play into the hands of the very people they think they are opposing.

    For most of the chattering classes — the media and knowledge industry, academics, politicians and their assistants — the epithet `conspiracy theorist' is the kiss of death. One of the bed-rocks of the ideology of liberal democracies is that conspiracy theories are always wrong, and those who espouse them are mental incompetents at best. This unquestioned belief usually manifests itself in the endless genuflections like this: "of course I'm not a believer in the conspiracy theory of history", or: "as usual the cock-up theory of politics turned out to be true". Indeed, I would say that the espousal of the belief in the cock-up or coincidence theory of history is at the heart of what passes for political and intellectual sophistication in liberal democracies.

    This is understandable up to a point. Who wants to be associated with nutters who believe the world's being run by a cabal of American politicians and extra-terrestrials? Or the Masons? What irritates me, however, is that this legitimate allergy to mega conspiracy theories extends much further than the crazy fringe to a general prohibition on conspiracies. And this is very strange, because it is blindingly obvious — is it not? — that political parties, for example, are intrinsically conspiratorial. Routine internal party politics is a network of interlocking cabals plotting how to get their hands on this group, committee, caucus meeting, council, party, pressure group. It is only a slight exaggeration to say, as Carl Oglesby did in the early 1970s, that conspiracy is normal politics. Yet this idea would produce everything from outrage to patronising shakes of the head from almost all intellectual and political circles in this country. "Really, old boy, the world just isn't like that."

    I met this view of the world on my first visit the Newsnight office in 1986. I was then trying to persuade the media to take seriously the allegations of Colin Wallace about anti-Labour activities by the intelligence services in the 1970s. Wallace was then still in prison — he was framed on a manslaughter charge. I had written to him and mentioned that I would be visiting Newsnight and Wallace wrote back warning me that up in the higher reaches of the BBC was a man called Alan Protheroe, who was an asset of the British secret state and who knew Wallace and what Wallace had been up to in Northern Ireland in 1974. When I met the Newsnight journalist who was interested in Wallace and was proposing to interview him when he came out of prison, I said "Wallace says watch out for Protheroe. He thinks he will ky-bosh your interview."

    I got the patronising smile of the higher media who know everything: "Oh come on, the BBC isn't like that." What happened? Wallace was interviewed, and Protheroe blocked its transmission. The BBC then denied that the interview had ever taken place. About a year later it was revealed that M15 actually had an office inside the BBC from which it vetted applicants for BBC jobs."

    Robin ramsay's best stuff imv has been his stuff about the dodgy state actions supressing left wing politics over the years up to /including new labour - this could be called conspiracy theory by some:

    ...Just looked and can no loneger find 'the clandestine caucus' online (which ccovers anti-left state action throughout the 20th century), but this one's good too:
    https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster63/lob63-new-labour.pdf

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