Voodoo History - Conspiracy Theories

[Ron Ecker]

I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the importance of history and historians.

I have to ask what is meant here by "history and historians." If you mean history as written by the Warren Commission, it's government bunk or voodoo history, and historians who simply accept its conclusions aren't worthy of the name.

I don't know where you stand on the Warren Commission, or the official history of the JFK assassination. I'm just saying it's voodoo history, to coin a phrase.

[Guest]

I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the importance of history and historians.

I have to ask what is meant here by "history and historians." If you mean history as written by the Warren Commission, it's government bunk or voodoo history, and historians who simply accept its conclusions aren't worthy of the name.

I don't know where you stand on the Warren Commission, or the official history of the JFK assassination. I'm just saying it's voodoo history, to coin a phrase.

A small aside.....indulge me.....it suddenly became clear why your posts resonated so much with me Ron, it was not just the inclusion of low pH humor, but that you, like me (and a some few others) have zero doubt as to which side the bread is buttered upon,....so to speak. An uncompromising man of integrity is hard to find - that knows (and knows they know) the voodoo IS the 'word' of the state. Others on this forum feel the same, but many are too afraid, in this time of fear, to say it - loud and say it proud. 

Indulge me also a moment Peter for I too have had a 'road to Damascus moment'... your post confirms to me that to you conspiracism represents your real religious faith. You clearly believe in a higher order of 'truth' (the absolute truth of all conspiracies) which transcends any evidence here or anywhere else presented. You absorb contrary opinion, reconfigure it, and then spit it out venomously as evidence of yet more conspiracy (I think you learnt this little trick from Jack White but you too are a master in the art). You are ferocious in your treatment of heretics and infidels.

There is less point in discussing with than there would be with the very worst type of Christian fundamentalist.

So much mechanical thinking and so little actual thinking .... just a small aside.

[Guest John Gillespie]

Of course the false assumption here, as John Judge likes to say,

"All conspiracy theories aren't equal."

taste for gunmen on the grassy knoll

By Michael Washburn Globe Correspondent / February 7, 2010

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20...e_grassy_knoll/

In late 2006 I was thrust headlong into one of the most infamous episodes in American history: the conspiracy to commit and cover up the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For several decades Arthur Schlesinger Jr. taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. After retirement Schlesinger retained his office, just down the hall from mine. Hastily tearing through my mail one day, I inadvertently opened a letter intended for Schlesinger. Within lay three-paragraphs of madness, speculation, and baroque innuendo purporting to be a ballistics analysis that obliterated the Warren Commission's jejune findings.

VOODOO HISTORIES: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

By David Aaronovitch

Riverhead, 388 pp., illustrated, $26.95

The letter bought into the persistent fantasy that the CIA, or the mob, or that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy. Despite the absurdity of its claims, for a brief moment, it was thrilling. What if there was something to this?

Given the popularity of conspiracy theories, not to mention the success of books and shows based on them, one could be forgiven for thinking half the country has received, and been ensorcelled by, such epistolary revelations. According to journalist David Aaronovitch, author of "Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,'' we are suffering through a long age of "fashionable conspiracism" in which nearly any event of note, from the moon landing to President Obama's birth, is subject to conspiracy theorizing.

"Voodoo Histories'' lucidly reveals the weaknesses of several popular conspiracy theories, including the JFK-RFK-MLK assassination trifecta, the origin of the "Da Vinci Code,''and Marilyn Monroe's death. The book endeavors to explain why "the counterintuitive, the unlikely, and the implausible . . . have a better purchase on our imagination and beliefs than the real."

Under this interpretation, conspiracy theories are, in Aaronovitch's subtle phrase, "History for losers."

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks, Bill,

Aaronovitch is another of the out of touch academicians who cover gullibility with glibness. Perhaps he truly believes his own words, though I doubt it. Regardless, he probably wrote much of it with the daily blarings of "All Things Considered" in the background, courtesy of one of the Insiders' institutions for disinformation, NPR/PBS, the establishment's own cozy and comfy...establishment.

Think not? It gets harder, year after year, to determine which of the recycled 'Oswald did it' broadcasts, each with new and never-before-revealed information, will be submitted for the peace of mind of their contributors each November.

I don't doubt for a second that the above will offend the members of that particular hive, but so be it.

Regards,

JG

Edited February 10, 2010 by John Gillespie

[Guest]

I believe in a higher order of human behavior than I think you can conceive and am saddened that those humans who form the power structures over time continually embrace/enforce/propagandize the base view you see as the 'ceiling'. By the way, how do the rules on ad homs apply to administrators?....just a small aside.

Like I suggested conspiracism clearly gives you a sense of transcendence - it is your own strange esoteric religion.

ad homs?? If you cannot distinguish between yourself and your ideas/behaviour you are truely lost.

Returning to the topic of the thread: Would anyone who has actually read Voodoo Histories like to discuss its contents? Or are we all content to condemn it on the broad minded grounds aired earlier that it was written by a jew who supports Tony Blair??

[Ron Ecker]

Would anyone who has actually read Voodoo Histories like to discuss its contents? Or are we all content to condemn it on the broad minded grounds aired earlier that it was written by a jew who supports Tony Blair??

I would like to say that I haven't read it, don't intend to, and know nothing about its author's ethnic background. Personally I don't care to read any book that makes fun of me for believing in voodoo or a conspiracy, as in the JFK assassination. I believe there may be a conspiracy where there is evidence of one. I believe there may be a burglary where there is evidence of one. I believe there may be a crime anywhere there is evidence of one. I believe in common sense.

[William Kelly]

Of course the false assumption here, as John Judge likes to say,

"All conspiracy theories aren't equal."

Thanks to Jeff Morley for responding to this, which makes me want to respond as well.

There's two writers at work here, Voodoo author David Aaronvitch and Globe reviewer Michael Washburn.

My comments are in red and directed primarily at Michael Washburn.

taste for gunmen on the grassy knoll

By Michael Washburn Globe Correspondent / February 7, 2010

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20...e_grassy_knoll/

In late 2006 I was thrust headlong into one of the most infamous episodes in American history: the conspiracy to commit and cover up the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For several decades Arthur Schlesinger Jr. taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. After retirement Schlesinger retained his office, just down the hall from mine. Hastily tearing through my mail one day, I inadvertently opened a letter intended for Schlesinger.

Within lay three-paragraphs of madness, speculation, and baroque innuendo purporting to be a ballistics analysis that obliterated the Warren Commission's jejune findings.

I had to look up baroque innuendo, as I thought it was the financial position of most conspiracy researchers. (And I'll look up jejune later.)

I'm sure Prof. Schlesinger got a lot of conspiracy mail, many of it from conspiracy madmen, but based on my conversation with him, I think Schlesinger read some of it, and certainly knew a lot more than what he wrote in his books about the Kennedys. But in their years down the hall from each other, did Washburn ever bother to ask Schlesinger what he thought about the assassination?

I'm also pretty sure that each one of those letters that conspiracy madmen sent to Schlesinger, thinking that he may actually interested in who killed the President, stuck Schlesinger like a pin xxxxx as if he was a Voodoo doll. Yet, unlike Aaronovitch (Yes, I will read the book Andrew) and Washburn, Schlesinger maintained a stoic perspective, and never mocked those who tried to figure out what happened in Dallas.

If Washburn had taken the opportunity to ask, I wonder if Schlesinger, like RFK, would have given him a stock public response, like he's said everything in the books, or the Warren Commission got it right? Or would he tell him what RFK really said when he asked him, or what he told Anthony Summers when JFK's back channel diplomacy with Castro became known to the Bay of Pigs Cubans?

I'm also going to read the book so I can talk about it with Andy and Mike Tribe, and because it appears to make the case that Conspriacy Theorists actually have as much an influence on life and history as the conspiracies they study.

VOODOO HISTORIES: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

By David Aaronovitch

Riverhead, 388 pp., illustrated, $26.95

The letter bought into the persistent fantasy that the CIA, or the mob, or that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

It's a persistent fantasy - more like a recurring bad nightmare experienced by 80% of the citizens of the United States - and it won't go away until the crime is resolved to a legal and moral certainty. And it's also true. True that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

Despite the absurdity of its claims, for a brief moment, it was thrilling. What if there was something to this?

Indeed, what if there was something to it? Something even thrilling? But instead of reviewing the baroque ballestic evidence, he studies the conspiracy theorists. Why not address the evidence, and more importantly, if Oswald really didn't do it, why isn't it important to figure out who really did?

Given the popularity of conspiracy theories, not to mention the success of books and shows based on them,

Wait a minute, if that's the case how come all the shows on the JFK Asssassination fail to report the documentary truth and no producer will touch the work of James Douglas, David Talbot, Jeff Morley, Anthony Summers or Doug Horne? Why are puff fake "documentaries" being made for TV, Cuban Cover-stories by Germans, and Bugliosi's Reframing the Lone Patsy but no real documentaries being made on what realy happened? There will probably be a documentary movie made on Aaronovitch's Voodoo History before any of the authors above get filmed.

one could be forgiven for thinking half the country has received, and been ensorcelled by, such epistolary revelations. According to journalist David Aaronovitch, author of "Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,'' we are suffering through a long age of "fashionable conspiracism" in which nearly any event of note, from the moon landing to President Obama's birth, is subject to conspiracy theorizing.

We are allowed to believe anything, but know nothing, as reflected by all the still-secret, missing and destroyed documents and records on the assassination. Of course there were questions about Obama's birth records, and its apparent the moon landing photos were altered, whether it was because they were staged or to keep the Soviet photoanalysists on their toes, it was still a conspiracy.

"Voodoo Histories'' lucidly reveals the weaknesses of several popular conspiracy theories, including the JFK-RFK-MLK assassination trifecta, the origin of the "Da Vinci Code,''and Marilyn Monroe's death. The book endeavors to explain why "the counterintuitive, the unlikely, and the implausible . . . have a better purchase on our imagination and beliefs than the real."

At their most basic, Aaronovitch writes, conspiracy theories are, "the attribution of a secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another." Here's a typical either/or. Which is more likely: that the US government has successfully orchestrated a four-decade hoax requiring the absolute silence of thousands of people, or that NASA successfully sent people to the moon?

Or consider the success of the 9/11 Truth movement. Forty-two percent of Americans believe the government has, according to Aaronovitch, "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks." The percentage of Americans that believes the government colluded in the attacks isn't much lower. In the 9/11 Truth literature, that people are skeptical of the official explanation becomes proof of the explanation's corruption. This circularity typifies much conspiracy theory "logic."

The polls have clearly shown that the decline in the American public's confidence in their government began immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, has continued to decline steadily since then, and will not abate until the circumstances of the assassination are properly determined. That 9/11 was a conspiracy, and that the government's official commission report has been demonstrated to be incomplete and wrong on critical points hasn't helped the logic of the official explanation.

Unlike many writers who straw man their way through conspiracy discussions, Aaronovitch treats these ideas as more than florid gibberish. Most conspiracy theories, according to him, "originate and are largely circulated among the educated middle class," not, as the same middle class assumes, some raving, slack-jawed peasantry. The cultural and political context from which these theories develop must be taken into account, and Aaronovitch, as thorough a researcher as he is a witty and muscular writer, goes further than most previous popular analysts of conspiracy theories.

I would take it a step further and advance the hypothesis that the conspiracy theories not only originate with the educated class, but are thought of in advance as part of the conspiracy plots - as some are promoted by those behind the conspiracy - since Castro, the CIA and the Mafia were framed as much as Oswald.

The strongest chapter in "Voodoo Histories'' dissects the loathsome Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the progenitor of modern conspiracy theory thinking. From the late 19th century to today, anti-Semites have deployed the Protocols as evidence of a Jewish plan for world domination. Aaronovitch spends considerable effort illuminating the dense tissue of lies and misinformation surrounding the claims. Plagiarized without subtlety from a now obscure French polemic directed at Napoleon III and placed into an anti-Jewish context, this pathetic cut-and-paste job morphed into the conspiracy theory that helped inspire the most horrific of actual conspiracies: the Final Solution of the Nazis.

That the Protocols are fake was well known before the Nazi's rise to power. But in the words of the renowned anti-Semite Henry Ford, the Protocols "fit" the threat that people felt to be true regardless of the actual, literal truth.

Yes, and that they were forged makes them a conspiracy too. And Aaronovitch has it backwards, the Protocols were promoted by the government as propaganda, just as the Warren Report is known to be wrong, yet still promoted as the truth. It is the Warren Report that is the new Protocols, not the conspircy theories.

What comes clear in "Voodoo Histories'' is how much conspiracy theories are really confirmation theories, political or social myths that confirm anxieties. As Aaronovitch argues, "There is a more than plausible argument to be made that, very often conspiracy theories take root among the casualties of political, social and economic change." This is particularly true in American political history, where our native populism has created factions eager to claim responsibility for successes, but even more eager to lay blame for failures at the feet of a rotating collection of scapegoats. Variously, New Deal liberals, African Americans, big business, Republicans, and most consistently, immigrants have been fitted for the black hat of conspiracy.

I thought those who sought the truth wore the white hats?

Under this interpretation, conspiracy theories are, in Aaronovitch's subtle phrase, "History for losers."

You got that right. As we are all victims of Dealey Plaza, Americans not only lost their President, their confidence in government, and the truth, we lost democracy and the Constitution, and won't get any of them back until that original conspiracy is rectified.

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Edited February 10, 2010 by William Kelly

[Guest]

I believe there may be a crime anywhere there is evidence of one. I believe in common sense.

Aaronovitch attempts to analyse the 'evidence' of several fashionable conspiracies and for this reason I would commend the book to you.

[Guest John Gillespie]

Would anyone who has actually read Voodoo Histories like to discuss its contents? Or are we all content to condemn it on the broad minded grounds aired earlier that it was written by a jew who supports Tony Blair??

I would like to say that I haven't read it, don't intend to, and know nothing about its author's ethnic background. Personally I don't care to read any book that makes fun of me for believing in voodoo or a conspiracy, as in the JFK assassination. I believe there may be a conspiracy where there is evidence of one. I believe there may be a burglary where there is evidence of one. I believe there may be a crime anywhere there is evidence of one. I believe in common sense.

--------------------------------------

The stroke of bigotry regarding "a jew who..." is worse than merely unfortunate, as is any support of Tony Blair. The above is nicely put, Ron, and the excerpts alone are more than I wanted to read from this agent of misinformation and misguided opinion. Bill Kelly's surgical strikes against this casuistry should suffice (aside to Bill: jejune, I think, is a kind of appetizer found in most restaurants in the South of France).

Regards,

JG

Edited February 10, 2010 by John Gillespie

[Ron Ecker]

Aaronovitch attempts to analyse the 'evidence' of several fashionable conspiracies and for this reason I would commend the book to you.

That sounds good. Tell you what. If he discusses the large exit wound in the back of JFK's head (seen and attested to by multiple medically qualified witnesses), I'll read the book.

[Greg Parker]

"Most conspiracy theories, according to him, 'originate and are largely circulated among the educated middle class'."

"conspiracy theories are, in Aaronovitch's subtle phrase, 'History for losers'."

I wonder if Aaronovich is even aware of his animadversion* on his "educated middle class"? Not to worry though... the middle classes are radidly disappearing. Presumably when they finally all disappear down the Wealth Gap, with them will go "conspiricism".

*payback for having to look up "ensorcelled" and "epistolary"

Edited February 10, 2010 by Greg Parker

[William Kelly]

Of course the false assumption here, as John Judge likes to say,

"All conspiracy theories aren't equal."

Thanks to Jeff Morley for responding to this, which makes me want to respond as well.

There's two writers at work here, Voodoo author David Aaronvitch and Globe reviewer Michael Washburn.

My comments are in red and directed primarily at Michael Washburn.

taste for gunmen on the grassy knoll

By Michael Washburn Globe Correspondent / February 7, 2010

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20...e_grassy_knoll/

In late 2006 I was thrust headlong into one of the most infamous episodes in American history: the conspiracy to commit and cover up the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For several decades Arthur Schlesinger Jr. taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. After retirement Schlesinger retained his office, just down the hall from mine. Hastily tearing through my mail one day, I inadvertently opened a letter intended for Schlesinger.

Within lay three-paragraphs of madness, speculation, and baroque innuendo purporting to be a ballistics analysis that obliterated the Warren Commission's jejune findings.

I had to look up baroque innuendo, as I thought it was the financial position of most conspiracy researchers. (And I'll look up jejune later.)

I'm sure Prof. Schlesinger got a lot of conspiracy mail, many of it from conspiracy madmen, but based on my conversation with him, I think Schlesinger read some of it, and certainly knew a lot more than what he wrote in his books about the Kennedys. But in their years down the hall from each other, did Washburn ever bother to ask Schlesinger what he thought about the assassination?

I'm also pretty sure that each one of those letters that conspiracy madmen sent to Schlesinger, thinking that he may actually interested in who killed the President, stuck Schlesinger like a pin xxxxx as if he was a Voodoo doll. Yet, unlike Aaronovitch (Yes, I will read the book Andrew) and Washburn, Schlesinger maintained a stoic perspective, and never mocked those who tried to figure out what happened in Dallas.

If Washburn had taken the opportunity to ask, I wonder if Schlesinger, like RFK, would have given him a stock public response, like he's said everything in the books, or the Warren Commission got it right? Or would he tell him what RFK really said when he asked him, or what he told Anthony Summers when JFK's back channel diplomacy with Castro became known to the Bay of Pigs Cubans?

I'm also going to read the book so I can talk about it with Andy and Mike Tribe, and because it appears to make the case that Conspriacy Theorists actually have as much an influence on life and history as the conspiracies they study.

VOODOO HISTORIES: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

By David Aaronovitch

Riverhead, 388 pp., illustrated, $26.95

The letter bought into the persistent fantasy that the CIA, or the mob, or that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

It's a persistent fantasy - more like a recurring bad nightmare experienced by 80% of the citizens of the United States - and it won't go away until the crime is resolved to a legal and moral certainty. And it's also true. True that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

Despite the absurdity of its claims, for a brief moment, it was thrilling. What if there was something to this?

Indeed, what if there was something to it? Something even thrilling? But instead of reviewing the baroque ballestic evidence, he studies the conspiracy theorists. Why not address the evidence, and more importantly, if Oswald really didn't do it, why isn't it important to figure out who really did?

Given the popularity of conspiracy theories, not to mention the success of books and shows based on them,

Wait a minute, if that's the case how come all the shows on the JFK Asssassination fail to report the documentary truth and no producer will touch the work of James Douglas, David Talbot, Jeff Morley, Anthony Summers or Doug Horne? Why are puff fake "documentaries" being made for TV, Cuban Cover-stories by Germans, and Bugliosi's Reframing the Lone Patsy but no real documentaries being made on what realy happened? There will probably be a documentary movie made on Aaronovitch's Voodoo History before any of the authors above get filmed.

one could be forgiven for thinking half the country has received, and been ensorcelled by, such epistolary revelations. According to journalist David Aaronovitch, author of "Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,'' we are suffering through a long age of "fashionable conspiracism" in which nearly any event of note, from the moon landing to President Obama's birth, is subject to conspiracy theorizing.

We are allowed to believe anything, but know nothing, as reflected by all the still-secret, missing and destroyed documents and records on the assassination. Of course there were questions about Obama's birth records, and its apparent the moon landing photos were altered, whether it was because they were staged or to keep the Soviet photoanalysists on their toes, it was still a conspiracy.

"Voodoo Histories'' lucidly reveals the weaknesses of several popular conspiracy theories, including the JFK-RFK-MLK assassination trifecta, the origin of the "Da Vinci Code,''and Marilyn Monroe's death. The book endeavors to explain why "the counterintuitive, the unlikely, and the implausible . . . have a better purchase on our imagination and beliefs than the real."

At their most basic, Aaronovitch writes, conspiracy theories are, "the attribution of a secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another." Here's a typical either/or. Which is more likely: that the US government has successfully orchestrated a four-decade hoax requiring the absolute silence of thousands of people, or that NASA successfully sent people to the moon?

Or consider the success of the 9/11 Truth movement. Forty-two percent of Americans believe the government has, according to Aaronovitch, "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks." The percentage of Americans that believes the government colluded in the attacks isn't much lower. In the 9/11 Truth literature, that people are skeptical of the official explanation becomes proof of the explanation's corruption. This circularity typifies much conspiracy theory "logic."

The polls have clearly shown that the decline in the American public's confidence in their government began immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, has continued to decline steadily since then, and will not abate until the circumstances of the assassination are properly determined. That 9/11 was a conspiracy, and that the government's official commission report has been demonstrated to be incomplete and wrong on critical points hasn't helped the logic of the official explanation.

Unlike many writers who straw man their way through conspiracy discussions, Aaronovitch treats these ideas as more than florid gibberish. Most conspiracy theories, according to him, "originate and are largely circulated among the educated middle class," not, as the same middle class assumes, some raving, slack-jawed peasantry. The cultural and political context from which these theories develop must be taken into account, and Aaronovitch, as thorough a researcher as he is a witty and muscular writer, goes further than most previous popular analysts of conspiracy theories.

I would take it a step further and advance the hypothesis that the conspiracy theories not only originate with the educated class, but are thought of in advance as part of the conspiracy plots - as some are promoted by those behind the conspiracy - since Castro, the CIA and the Mafia were framed as much as Oswald.

The strongest chapter in "Voodoo Histories'' dissects the loathsome Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the progenitor of modern conspiracy theory thinking. From the late 19th century to today, anti-Semites have deployed the Protocols as evidence of a Jewish plan for world domination. Aaronovitch spends considerable effort illuminating the dense tissue of lies and misinformation surrounding the claims. Plagiarized without subtlety from a now obscure French polemic directed at Napoleon III and placed into an anti-Jewish context, this pathetic cut-and-paste job morphed into the conspiracy theory that helped inspire the most horrific of actual conspiracies: the Final Solution of the Nazis.

That the Protocols are fake was well known before the Nazi's rise to power. But in the words of the renowned anti-Semite Henry Ford, the Protocols "fit" the threat that people felt to be true regardless of the actual, literal truth.

Yes, and that they were forged makes them a conspiracy too. And Aaronovitch has it backwards, the Protocols were promoted by the government as propaganda, just as the Warren Report is known to be wrong, yet still promoted as the truth. It is the Warren Report that is the new Protocols, not the conspircy theories.

What comes clear in "Voodoo Histories'' is how much conspiracy theories are really confirmation theories, political or social myths that confirm anxieties. As Aaronovitch argues, "There is a more than plausible argument to be made that, very often conspiracy theories take root among the casualties of political, social and economic change." This is particularly true in American political history, where our native populism has created factions eager to claim responsibility for successes, but even more eager to lay blame for failures at the feet of a rotating collection of scapegoats. Variously, New Deal liberals, African Americans, big business, Republicans, and most consistently, immigrants have been fitted for the black hat of conspiracy.

I thought those who sought the truth wore the white hats?

Under this interpretation, conspiracy theories are, in Aaronovitch's subtle phrase, "History for losers."

You got that right. As we are all victims of Dealey Plaza, Americans not only lost their President, their confidence in government, and the truth, we lost democracy and the Constitution, and won't get any of them back until that original conspiracy is rectified.

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

[Paul Rigby]

Andy Walker: Would anyone who has actually read Voodoo Histories like to discuss its contents? Or are we all content to condemn it on the broad minded grounds aired earlier that it was written by a jew who supports Tony Blair??

Andy Walker’s compelling meditation on David Aaronovich’s Times column on the MI5 conspiracy to suppress details of the organisation’s complicity in torture will be appearing shortly. In the meantime, we must make do with this paranoid educated middle-class expose:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/1...med-torture-mi5

Top judge: Binyam Mohamed case shows MI5 to be devious, dishonest and complicit in torture

Is this ruling, one wonders, all part of a great anti-semitic plot to shake the faith reposed in the Anglo-American securicrats by such as Walker and Aaronovich? Only the Times will tell.

[Guest]

I believe in a higher order of human behavior than I think you can conceive and am saddened that those humans who form the power structures over time continually embrace/enforce/propagandize the base view you see as the 'ceiling'. By the way, how do the rules on ad homs apply to administrators?....just a small aside.

Like I suggested conspiracism clearly gives you a sense of transcendence - it is your own strange esoteric religion.

ad homs?? If you cannot distinguish between yourself and your ideas/behaviour you are truely lost.

Returning to the topic of the thread: Would anyone who has actually read Voodoo Histories like to discuss its contents? Or are we all content to condemn it on the broad minded grounds aired earlier that it was written by a jew who supports Tony Blair??

Why would you expect me to read a book by such a blatant propagandist and ideologue Andy?

Would you recommend I read Mein Kampf to alter my ANTI National Socialism beliefs?

What an extraordinarily obtuse and inappropriate analogy

I would expect self styled 'searchers for the truth' to read widely and not to be afraid to discuss their tentative premises on a public forum without recourse to paranoid projection and downright abuse. Unfortunately we don't appear to have any of them here.... never have had in my opinion..... what we do have is something quite different - a mindset which is utterly illiberal, intolerant of contrary opinion and deeply psychologically damaged. We see the pattern repeated and repeated and repeated - a case is made against conspiracy x or the 'evidence' presented to support it and out trot the wild eyed cavalry (hello Paul) with their 'ad homs' CIA membership and trolling accusations, demands for people who have the temerity to raise questions to be banned, wild assertions that he or she is 'authoritarian' in the pay of god's knows who and/or Nazi, have been too long in the classroom, have hacked the system and edit posts/settings and other such DRIVEL - nothing therefore EVER gets discussed about conspiracy 'x'. This I would suggest suits just fine those with cases, causes and personalities so flimsy as to flinch at the very prospect of what might pass for recognised debate following academic standards.

Not many will remember this so bad have things become, but this forum was intended to be a Teachers forum for the discussion of educational and curriculum issues. I later added a 'Research' as a category on request from a friend ........ And the rest as they say bears very little resemblance to 'history' as anyone with any training might recognise it..... No matter, I no longer pay the bills and the other founder of this forum who does seems quite content with the state things are in so please carry on - enjoy - expect fewer visits from me (there's only so many times you can be traduced online in a working day without getting weary of it and I've pretty much given up anyway), but most of all I have better things to do.

[Paul Rigby]

Lee Farley: I'll re-read the Taylor Report to get a good feel for what happened at Hillsborough.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the case, a sizable conspiracy, instigated, directed, and sustained by senior officers within the South Yorkshire constabulary, to suppress and fabricate evidence surrounding the deaths of Liverpool football fans at the 1989 FA Cup Semi-Final.

And I write that as a life-long fan of the team who lost to the b*stards in the subsequent final.

[Greg Parker]

Andy & Mike,

do you agree with Aaronovich that the educated middle classes are a bunch of paranoid losers?

Just curious.