US SECRET POLICE EPISODES

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 10:48 AM 6/11/99 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
>More specifically, this thread is on secret police in the U.S. and  the
idea is that it was elite U.S.secret police operations that assassinated
the Kennedys  It was a coup d'etat by one part of the ruling class against
another , but to have that open rather than secret would ruin the U.S.
public relations image as a "democratic" country with power at the level of
President transferred only by elections and with no secret police violence.
>Transition of supreme state power by means of government agent
assassination is an extreme form of secret police.

-- snip

Charles, my problem with conspiracy theories of that sort is not that they
are false in the factual sense - to be sure, business and political elites
are de facto conspiracies -  but that people who circulate them usually
have not way of learning about them in a matter of fact way.  If the
assassination was the work of secret police, how for goddess sake would
peons like us know about it? 

The popular demand for these stories has similar origins as demand for
religion, personal god and similar crap - anthropomorphization of natural
or social forces, which provides an illusion of an explanation to minds
untrained in critical thought.

I may also add that blatantly outrageous conspiracy theories serve a very
useful function for the preservation of the status quo - a function that is
similiar to that proverbial boy crying "wolfs."  Circulating blatantly
improbable conspiratiorial fantasies discredicts whistle-blowing and fact
of the matter reporting of elite wrongdoing.

wojtek
>