Conspiracy Theory!
Recently a friend drew my attention to a documentary available on YouTube about the 9-11 terrorist attacks in America. The documentary is called ‘Loose Change’ and seems to have been put together by a group of young Americans who were not happy with the official explanations of the events of September 11th 2001.
Basically, the documentary proposes that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were actually organized by the Bush administration (& CIA, FBI, etc) in order to create a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Outlandish as such an idea may sound to some people, there are a number of interesting facts reported in the documentary which make it worth watching even if one is not happy to swallow the story whole.
Although derided by more ‘official’ organizations as a mere ‘conspiracy theory’ , the ‘Loose Change’ documentary became a bit of an internet phenomenon when it was first posted up on the internet and the makers appeared quite frequently on TV media in America to put their arguments and questions to a variety of experts. Certainly, watching the video one does get a feeling that maybe these guys are actually onto something. True experts seem to have little time for their ideas though.
Perhaps the high profile that the ‘Loose Change’ documentary achieved after its release is more due to the lack of credibility of the Bush administration - people were, and still are, hungry for any revelations that will damn the Neo-Liberal project.
It would be interesting to hear what people think about this.
And here’s another, perhaps more believable, conspiracy theory from an article in the Japan Times.
bamboo4 wrote:
I think I share the thinking of may people that we admire living in the community wherein this type of rubbish eventually gets sorted out by the collective intellect instead of by a handful of those whose overriding mentality is to quash it and control it. Just think of the possible consequences of someone thinking of disseminating something like the ‘Loose Change’ story in North Korea or China!
I also think that our democratic philisophy, even though it is ever ineffecicent as hell and so slow, to add insult to injury, entrusts in the mass wisdom eventualy to reject or eliminate such crap (or to accept it). The same process applies to the similar crap as articulated by Prof. Akira Kimura. As he is a professor of a university, whatever he does to gild his story in that status can be a pure BS and the public knows this because it does not add anything, in my opinon, to what had been hashed and rehashed many times before.
I am well aware that my opinion here expressed would be subject to the same fate, and I am quite obedient to that fate.
Posted on 27-Aug-07 at 1:21 am | Permalink
ben wrote:
Yes, we should be glad that people are free to hold and disseminate their own opinions without fear of anything more than being exposed as ‘most likely wrong’ or perhaps ‘not very clever’, or ‘biased’, etc..
Most of us do not have access to (or the inclination to access) the information we need to judge whether or not someone like Prof.Kimura’s research is sound or not, so we make quite subjective judgements about whether or not we should subscribe to their theories. We can also judge a good theory by the kind of support it wins, or just believe it because it supports what we already believe.
Posted on 27-Aug-07 at 9:32 am | Permalink
bamboo4 wrote:
All I’m saying is that there have been many alleged historical materials, theories, conjectures, you name it, that were supposed to deal with the circumstances surrounding the termination of the Pacific War and the dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Books were written and many reports, comments, editorials, etc. were filed on that issue. Any allegedly “new” theory such as that propounded by Prof. Kimura only ends up, in the eyes of those who lived at the end of the war, with somewhat sarcastic comment of “et tu Brutus.” We were at war with America, England and other Allied Powers at that time, and anything could have happened there.
Let those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki rest in peace. The sad fact is that those noncombatants died in agony and in utter dissolation, and digging up whatever conivances that took place in dropping those bombs on these two cities do not amount to a hill of beans for those perished.
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 5:40 am | Permalink