Conspiracy and the Morality of Politicians.

I've been a regular reader of Jean Michael Greer's Blog - 'The Archdruid Report' - since its inception. The guy has a handle on the implications of 'peak-oil/energy' for our globalised industrialised economic/political systems that produces regular keen insights into the way things are likely to unfold. His analyses of human societies' handling of unwelcome change is deeply thoughtful and clearly springs from extensive pondering of the issues it raises. Put all that together with with a certain gift of expression and you have a highly informative and readable blog.

So it happened that I was enjoying his latest piece when I was struck by a couple of jarring notes. They are the subject of this post.

Jean Michael is clearly a gentle man who seeks the best in people. I have no issue with that and admire him for it. But it was his repeated use of the term 'Conspiricist' and his assertion (to paraphrase) that politicians are broadly representative of the populations that they spring from - good and bad - that jarred.

Firstly the term 'Conspiracist'. Like other pejoratives, (Holocaust denier, Anti-semite, Communist, Fascist Flat-Earther etc) its use is generally intended as a debate changer by making those it is applied to appear 'beyond the pale' or 'ridiculous' and thus unworthy of a hearing. So, what is it supposed to mean? and why is it ranked right up there with those other powerful debate changers?

Jean Michael uses it to dismiss those who he sees as proposing wide-ranging or all-encompassing conspiracies as having a significant role in human affairs. Put that way it seems to me that the 'anti-conspiracists' are the ones with some explaining to do. At the most basic level of meaning, it really ought to be beyond dispute that conspiracy by constituent cliques and cabals prior to ANY type of  minuted, publicly accountable meeting or action - from the lowly local club right up to the highest reaches of government decision-making - is actually the driving force behind pretty much any and all collective human endeavour. IOW the Public Agenda is largely driven and determined by hidden, private agendas that are furthered by conspiracy. It is simply the way the world works.

So why is it that the terms 'conspiracist' and 'conspiracy theorist' have become such powerful debate-clinching pejoratives? 

Since it is invariably applied to those suggesting conspiracy and complicity by elements of the State in violence against its own people, I suggest that it has to do with peoples' overwhelming need to believe in the basic good intent of the State, its Government and Agencies. Granted they can be stupid, bungling, incompetent - even corrupt at times, but the idea that they would or could EVER act deliberately and with calculation against the interests of the general population, let alone be involved in persistent gross deception and/or deliberate acts of domestic terrorism, is simply too abhorrent and downright scary to countenance - And that in spite of overwhelming evidence that latter day Western Governments are literally up to their necks in all of those things.

Which brings me to the morality of politicians.

At the outset of a political career and discounting the allegiances that political dynasties impose, I guess the aggregate of wannabe politicians are indeed representative of the aggregate of the populations they spring from. Self-evident really and in that sense Jean Michael is quite right in his assertion. However, it is the attributes required to produces a 'successful' political career that are the nub of the matter. 'Successful' here meaning one that achieves ministerial/cabinet/Privy Council Rank in the UK or their equivalents elsewhere.

I suggest that, whatever genuinely altruistic public-service ideals may originally have motivated a politician or 'public servant', it is the progressive compromise and ultimate abandonment of any such principles that is the sine-qua-non of elevation to the high offices of State. The career progression of such an individual can be likened to the degrees of initiation bestowed by a Masonic Order. Following initial elevation by the masses, any further advancement is by invitation and appointment by superior initiates. Ability and merit may have a bearing on the matter but if so, it is ability and merit in the promotion of the official narrative of events and the State's part in them that is the crux of the matter. Such narratives effortlessly accommodate the divisions between the major political parties which boil down to little more than froth. But on their substance, no departure from orthodoxy is tolerated.

Thus, an alliance of superior, freedom-loving democracies is valiantly striving to fight the evil of terrorism and generally to do good in the world; with its heroic armed forces sacrificing their lives selflessly in multiple distant desert countries that we might avoid having to fight their malign evil in our own lands.

Take a step back and try to look at that as might a visitor from another world - or better yet as a young innocent staring at his naked Emperor. It is so self-evidently absurd as to be risible, yet it IS the basic official narrative of the early 21st century, lapped up by a fearful, insecure and gullible population. It is trotted out endlessly by mainstream political parties and media of ALL persuasions in the manner almost of a religious creed and woe-betide anyone - especially an ambitious politician - who dares question it.

It is the sordid realities behind that and other absurd 'official narratives' that the ambitious politician is gradually initiated into such that, by the time the higher degrees are reached, there is little of principle left in the initiate beyond defence  of the existing power structures at any price. My latest (somewhat seasonal) analogy for the relationship between the State and its general population is that, as a matter of rigid orthodoxy, communication is conducted around an intellectual and emotional framework not unlike that of a parent and 5 year old child but absent any altruistic/parental bond - such that the official narratives of most events of importance are massaged to a level of factual accuracy resembling those of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. In other words - in the interests of an over-riding imperative to maintain 'The System' and protect its corrupt, self-serving interests, we are lied to systematically as a matter of time-honoured and sanctified practice - PERIOD. In the immortal words of that venerable Irish muckraker Caud Cockburn therefore: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied".

On the narrow subject of 'conspiracy theories' and terrorism, I personally doubt more than about 10% of all so-called terrorist outrages in the West occur without deep complicity on the part of our SIS's and their 'assets' - its called 'calibrating the level of violence and tension the better to further the policy agenda and secure compliance from a fearful population',  and anyone who thinks that an exaggeration - or more likely absurd - should first of all read up on 'Operation Gladio' as a primer before moving onto the more outrageous stuff. The information is readily available; it is just studiously ignored, other than as the occasional butt of ritualised ridicule, by the MSM.

So personally and in spite of JMG's admonitions, I'll stick with 'conspiracy theory' rather than 'coincidence theory' as a consistently superior explanation of events, with States, their Governments and especially their SI Agencies - per Spymaster extraordinaire Robert Cecil and his foolhardy dissident victim Guy Fawkes - as the model conspirators.

Cruel and mindless carnage

Reflections on the 4th Anniversary of the London Bombings
By Felicity Arbuthnot

On the 7th of July, the fourth anniversary of the London bombings, a dedication ceremony was held in London's Hyde Park, for a monument commemorating the fifty two dead and the hundreds injured in the tragedy.

Relatives of the dead gathered to hear The Prince of Wales, Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, Humanitarian Assistance Minister Tessa Jowell and former newsman Sir Trevor Macdonald, who hosted the ceremony, pay their tributes.

As the skies wept, moving words were spoken at the site of the fifty two stainless steel pillars, grouped in four clusters, representing those who died in the four attacked locations: Tavistock Square, Edgeware Road, King's Cross and Aldgate. Those who were killed in Tavistock Square, did not die in underground trains, as did the others, but on the number thirty bus, which runs between east London's Hackney and central London's Marble Arch. Ironically they died just yards from the poignant statue of Mahatma Ghandi, central to a tiny, leafy park, aromatic with floral scents, from vibrant, abundant flower beds and shrubs and a place of pilgrimage for visitors from around the globe.

The Prince of Wales spoke, without irony, of: " ... a brutal intrusion into the lives of thousands of people and the tragedy of those who "...did not walk away from what happened on that awful day.'" He commented on the "grief and anguish" of his wife and himself : "at the appalling aberrations in the human consciousness which produce such cruel and mindless carnage ... an inhuman and deplorable outrage."

He continued on a personal note, having some "small awareness of the shattering loss you have all suffered (recalling) the intense despair ...when my beloved great uncle Lord Mountbatten, was murdered by terrorists thirty years ago next month - together with my godson, his grandmother, and the boatman's son."

He concluded that the "memories of those taken from us" would lead to a path committed "to eliminating the circumstances that caused the violence in the first place" and those memories "lead to a path for peace..."

It has to be wondered, that if the bombings were as we have been told, the work of 'Muslim extremists' - the government have doggedly refused a public enquiry, though under pressure from the relatives of those lost and injured, seem to be caving in, the transparency and independence of the terms await to be scrutinised - if the Prince is a man of reflection. In ten years Britain has joined the United States in three major bombardments of Muslim lands under dubious (the Balkans and Afghanistan) and nil (Iraq) legitimacy.

The Prince, who talked of peace, holds the ranks of Admiral in the Royal Navy, Air Chief Marshall in the Royal Air Force, General in the Army and has been Colonel in Chief of the Parachute Regiment since 1977.

The day he spoke, his sister, The Princess Royal, was "cutting the steel for Britain's newest warship ... the HMS Queen Elizabeth, to be followed by the HMS Prince of Wales, a £5 billion project for the Royal Navy. 'The vessels will be capable of carrying up to forty aircraft ... with a flight deck the size of forty football pitches.'

His youngest son, Prince Harry and eldest, Prince William, heir to the throne, are both in the Blues and Royals, one of the two regiments that form the Household Cavalry. William was especially attracted to the regiment's 'outstanding record in recent decades, most notably during the Falklands Conflict, Bosnia, Kosovo, in Iraq and Northern Ireland.' (BBC 21st September 2006.) That's an 'outstanding record' of killing.

Prince Harry co-ordinated 'overwhelming firepower' from a bunker in Garmsir, in Afghanistan. Before Britain dutifully joined the 'coalition' to blow to bits 'hearts and minds', it had been a 'thriving agricultural town.'

He posed, grinning from ear to ear, whilst: 'manning a machine gun post', his hands on lethal thousands-rounds a minute killing-ware. He was pictured on an 'abandoned', pretty smart, motorbike. Surely it wasn't liberated by his mates, the pride and joy and only means of transport and living for some soul. Professor Michael Carmichael of London's King's College, described Harry as "not over complicated." Indeed.

Whisked away when his presence was revealed, he was to go to Iraq, but it was feared he might get hurt, killed, or worse kidnapped and his presence would anyway endanger his 'boys.' He is now training to fly a helicopter, with which, reportedly, he seems to be struggling a bit. Unlike him, a fairly complicated machine. He says it would be "fantastic" to return to Afghanistan, this time safely enabling his colleagues to dispatch the population and shoot up funerals and wedding parties from the safety of considerable height.

At the Hyde Park ceremony, Tessa Jowell talked of the memorial as : " .. a place of great beauty but also a place of great pain."

Did she reflect on the unspeakable agony her country has inflicted which might have resulted in that terrible pain? George Bush announced that the assault on Iraq was a "Crusade." In June 2006, then Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, Jowell, former social worker and mental health expert, flew not one, but two flags of St. George on her Ministerial car - the Crusaders' flag - in the run up to the World Cup. She clearly did not reflect that when the British army invaded Basra, they went in flying the same flag of St George. Predictably, arguably justifiably, those of Muslim faith around the country burned that flag.

Sir Trevor Macdonald, a former newsreader, read the names of the dead. Did he reflect how long it would take to read the names of the dead of the slaughters of the Bush-Blair-Brown years?

Three weeks earlier, the Queen's birthday flypast over Buckingham Palace, marked 'nearly two decades of RAF operations in Iraq. ' Air Chief Marshall Sir Glenn Torpy, Chief of Air Staff, told the London Evening Standard : "This year marks the end of nineteen years of RAF operations over Iraq, this flypast recognises this significant achievement."

Did he reflect that the 'operations' during ten of the thirteen embargo were illegal, 'patrolling' and illegally bombing all outlawed by the Geneva Convention, child shepherds and their sheep, towns, villages, ancient archaeological sites, Baghdad repeatedly - and precious humanity? Did he reflect that the invasion itself was illegal? Did he reflect the: "cruel and mindless carnage ... the deplorable outrage"? Not a 'significant achievement'. One of unutterable shame.

Gordon Brown doesn't do reflection. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he wrote the cheques for ten years for bombing sheep and goat minders, little over kindergarten age, for grief, trauma and decimation across Mesopotamia. And he wrote the cheques for the illegal invasion and its near unequalled human cost.

Those public figures in Hyde Park on 7th July should above all, reflect for all time that the actions of the British government brought to their own shores, the pain, on the utterly innocent, going about their daily tasks, that they have wrought across the globe.