> The idea is to go after them with all the means at your disposal, if
> the courts help, use the courts, if investigative journalism
> ('conspiracism' in Berletlandia) works, use that, all the while you
> try to build alternative institutions (not spend all your spare time
> flirting with the captains of industry at the CFR).
>
> You also create a false dichotomy between institutional analysis and
> investigative journalism. In fact there is rich complimentarity
> between both apporaches - because the political process is a function
> of both individual and institutional agency, which are somtimes in
> sync, sometimes not.
I wouldn't characterize the web sites and books you refer people to as "investigative journalism," exactly. Almost without exception, as Chip and others have tried to point out, they are riddled with elementary errors in logic and empirical investigative methodology, which is not true of *real* investigative journalists such as Sy Hersh. When challenged on some of their more outlandish theories, they retreat to the position: "Oh, we don't have answers, we're only suggesting questions." But professionals like Hersh don't toss out vague questions; they actually dig up answers, that is, facts.
Your "questioners" resemble no one so much as they do those amateur Einsteins who draw up one manifesto after another proclaiming that old Al was wrong about relativity or quantum theory and pester university physics departments with them. The problem is, these geniuses have never bothered to study even elementary physics. (The would-be biological geniuses who can "prove" that Genesis is right and evolutionary theory is wrong are another example.)
> What you call my 'conspiracy theories' in fact help people understand
> better the nature of capitalist or fascist power, by analysisng how
> their instutions operate, as well as analyzing the actions of the
> agents of these institutions.
That would be the case if in fact (a) your stable of experts on what really happened on 9/11/01 had come up with a true explanation, which they haven't, as far as I can tell and (b) the whole nature of capitalist power (or the most important part of it) consisted of conspiracies of this kind. But again, as Chip and others have patiently tried to explain, although it is true that powerful people do meet in boardrooms and government offices to plan stuff they don't want the public to find out about, the capitalist system is much more complex than that.
It's just like the amateur Einsteins vs. Big Al. The idea that everything that happens in the world economic/political system can be explained by a handful of people hatching plots to pull off big, splashy events like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 is incorrect on the face of it. The capitalist system, in concrete terms, involves millions of events every day all over the world. Who has time to plot all of them? In fact, the reason we call it a *system* is that these events occur routinely, according to something like a mechanism (not exactly, but in rough metaphorical terms).
> Are you suggesting that institutions act of their own volition, like
> in 'The Matrix' without any role of actual human agency. What you are
> suggesting leads people to hopelessness, to the idea that the
> insitutions we are up against are merely abstractions and do not
> manifest themselves in the form of human actors.
Nope. There *are* actors working within the institutions, of course. But they are almost never the actors you and your fellow conspiracists point to, and they almost never operate the way you allege those actors operate.
It's a bit hard to explain all this without outlining the whole theory of social institutions in general and capitalism in particular, about which books and books have been written, and which others on this list are much better qualified to expound on than I am. I would just say that the actors in the system form a complex hierarchy, ranging from all the workers employed by the system through their bosses and their bosses' bosses, as well as government officials and politicians, the media, etc. All of their activities, in all of their manifold dynamic interrelationships, constitute the agencies which cause the system to function. Even if your hypothetical plotters cooking up 9/11 existed, they would account for only a small part of this whole complex of actions.
Let's assume, hypothetically, that you and your "investigative reporters" are right: someone in the U.S. government either generated the whole 9/11 thing themselves, or learned that it was being plotted by someone else and sat by allowing it to go forward (grounding the Air Force fighters, etc.). To what end? Presumably, to produce a very shocking event that would cause the American people to acquiesce in getting the Patriot Act passed, support attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.
OK. Now suppose this whole plot is uncovered in a very convincing way by your "investigative reporters." Now what happens? The masses march on Washington and Wall Street and other centers of capitalist power, crying "The jig is up!" and instituting the United Socialist Republic of States of America? Well, I don't know what would happen, but I doubt it would be anything like that.
Think back to November 22, 1963. I believe you stated the other day that hardly anyone thinks that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot JFK on that date. I'm not sure you're right about what almost no one thinks :-), but suppose you are. Suppose it has now been conclusively demonstrated, and everyone now knows, that LBJ actually put together a conspiracy to make him President by whacking Jack. Is that going to enlighten everyone about the nature of the capitalist system? No, it will just convince them that LBJ was indeed a very rotten politician, and cause them to scratch their heads in wonder that, somehow or other, an awful lot of folks in the federal, state, and local Dallas governments as well as many, many media companies, the hospital staffs involved in trying to resuscitate and then in autopsying JFK, etc., were persuaded to conspire with him to pull it off and then cover up that conspiracy almost perfectly, producing the whole Warren Report and the whole historical record of the last 40 years. Amazing!
In other words, most people, if all of this were true, would be really pissed off at everyone involved in this plot, and would sadly conclude that politicians like LBJ are even more crooked than they thought. But would they have learned anything more about the capitalist system than they could learn right now from reading the collected works of Henwood, Chomsky, et al.? I submit that they would have learned much, much less.
I think that that is more or less what Cde Cox and others are trying to tell you.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt