[from a snotty profile of Chomsky in today's Guardian <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1605276,00.html>]
"One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions."
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I'd be interested to see how uncle Noam would reconcile the above with what he said below in a 1990 interview. Perhaps he is he a born again 'inconsistency theorist'....:-
Joe W.
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19900907.htm
QUESTION: Well, do you feel also ... I mean, I know that you have advanced these arguments and a number of other people have also advanced these arguments -- they are there to be found by anyone who wants to seek them out.... But at the same time, I think there's a great effort in the mainstream media to write these arguments off as conspiracy theory.
CHOMSKY: That's one of the devices by which power defends itself -- by calling any critical analysis of institutions a conspiracy theory. If you call it by that name, then somehow you don't have to pay attention to it. Edward Herman and I, in our recent book, Manufacturing Consent, go into this ploy. What we discuss in that book is simply the institutional factors that essentially set parameters for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. Now, to call that a conspiracy theory is a little bit like saying that, when General Motors tries to increase its market share, it's engaged in a conspiracy. It's not. I mean, part of the structure of corporate capitalism is that the players in the game try to increase profits and market shares; in fact, if they didn't, they would no longer be players in the game. Any economist knows this. And it's not conspiracy theory to point that out; it's just taken for granted. If someone were to say, "Oh, no, that's a conspiracy," people would laugh.
Well, exactly the same is true when you discuss the more complex array of institutional factors that determine such things as what happens in the media. It's precisely the opposite of conspiracy theory. In fact, as you mentioned before, I generally tend to downplay the role of individuals -- they're replaceable pieces. So, it's exactly the opposite of conspiracy theory. It's normal institutional analysis -- the kind of analysis you do automatically when you're trying to understand how the world works. And to call it conspiracy theory is simply part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works.
QUESTION: Well, I think also the term has been assigned a different meaning. If you look at the root of the term itself -- conspire, to breathe together, breathe the same air -- I mean, it seems to suggest a kind of shared interest on the part of the people "breathing together." It just seems that the word has been coopted for a different use now.
CHOMSKY: Well, certainly, it's supposed to have some sort of sinister meaning; it's a bunch of people getting together in back rooms deciding what appears in all the newspapers in this country. And sometimes that does happen; but, by and large, that's not the way it works. The way it works is the way we described in Manufacturing Consent. In fact, the model that we used -- what we called the propaganda model -- is essentially an uncontroversial guided free market model.
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