SCHOLAR ISLAND
CONSPIRACY
"Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"There are two versions of history: the safe, sanitized "Disney" version-and the other, darker version. That second, scarier version of history often goes by the name: conspiracy theory."
Jim Hougan
The 70 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
"Unlike the French or the Italians, for whom conspiracies are an integral part of government activity, acknowledged by all, Americans have been temperamentally prone to discount them. reflecting its audience, the press follows suit. Editors and reporters like to offer themselves as hardened cynics, following the old maxim "Never believe anything till it is officially denied," but in truth, they are touchingly credulous, ever inclined to trust the official version, at least until irrefutable, evidence-say, the failure to discover a single WMD in Iraq-compels them finally to a darker view."
Alexander Cockburn The American Conservative July 2010
"Man is a peeping, prying discoverer of secrets."
-Josst A.M. Meerloo Truth Extractor
"In "Let Me Take Off My Tinfoil Hat for a Moment." Bill Keller muses on conspiracy theories and discusses "why otherwise smart people fall for crackpot conspiracy theories." I read the article to see if Keller would include in his examples how reporting the events leading to the Iraq war, "otherwise smart people" at the Times fell for the malicious crackpot conspiracy theory of the Bush-Cheney administration that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States. But alas, no. Millions of people here and abroad, thought, saw through this particularly wacky notion, the consequences of which, in deaths, displacements and destruction, are far worse than the consequences of some poor guy believing he has the key to the J.F.K. assassination."
-John Hanrahan, Washington
(letter to Editor The New York Times Magazine June 10/20 2011)
"TV-watchers have no doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. "Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?" A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators-whether in the FBI or on the Supreme Court toiling for Big Tobacco-are up to. It is also a sure way of keeping information from the public. The function, alas, or Corporate Media.
-Gore VidalPerpetual War for Perpetual Peace
"The only people in the world, it seems, who believe in the conspiracy theory of history are those of us who have studied it. While Franklin D. Roosevelt might have exaggerated when he said "Nothing happens in politics by accident; if it happens, it was planned that way," Carroll Quigley-Bill Clinton's favorite professor at Georgetown University-boldly admitted in this Tragedy & Hope (1966) that (a) the multitudes were already under the control of a small but powerful group bent on world domination and (b) Quigley himself was part of that group."
-Pat Shannan Journalist-at-Large, Media Bypass Foreword to Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy
"Deluded people! There exists a conspiracy in favor of despotism, against liberty, of incapacity against talent, of vice against virtue, of ignorance against Light! It is formed in the depths of the most impenetrable darkness, a society of new creatures who know each other without being seen, who understand themselves without explanation, who serve each other without friendship. The aim of this society is to rule the world, to appropriate the authority of sovereigns, to usurp their place, leaving them only the sterile honor of wearing the crown. It has adopted from the Jesuit regimen, blind obedience and the regicide principles of the seventeenth century. From the Freemasons, it has taken its trials and exterior ceremonies; from the Templars, its infernal evocations and bold unbelief. It employs the discoveries of physical science to impose upon the uninstructed multitude; it uses fashionable myths to arouse curiosity and inspire dedication; it goes back to the opinions of the ancients to get men used to commerce with intermediary spirits. Every species of error which afflicts the earth, every half-baked idea, every invention serves to fit the doctrines of the Illuminati...everything serves equally to their views, everything becomes cause and instrument; they reject nothing which is proscribed by the community of mankind. And none of this do they admit by conviction; they allow it to subsist as a method of multiplying opinions and trials ....a base upon which rests a new conspiracy. The aim is universal domination.
Luchet
Essay on the Sect of the Illuminati 1789
Marquis de Luchet – 1789
"The less we know the more we suspect."
-H.W. Shaw
"Suspicion may be no fault, but showing it may be a great one."
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?"
-George Eliot
"A wise man will keep his suspicions muzzled, but he will keep them awake."
-Marques of Halifax
"The government of this country has not only to deal with governments, Kings and ministers but also with secret societies, elements which must be taken into account which at the last moment can bring all our plans to naught, which have agents everywhere, who incite assassinations and can if necessary lead a massacre."
Benjamin Disraeli
"Who runs the world? Is there a mysterious they, a group of secret conspirators who manipulate world events? Almost as soon as we ask the question, we dismiss it as absurd. We are taught to believe that the world works in more complex and subtle ways…"
George Johnson
Architects of Fear
"Is everything a conspiracy? No, just the important stuff."
-Jeff Wells Rigorous Intuition
" There is indeed a "plot against the people," and probably always will be, for government has always been hostile towards the governed. It is not a new story, and the conspirators and conspiracies have varied from era to era, depending on the political or economic situation in their various countries."
Taylor Caldwell
Captains and the Kings
"it's a tightly knit, highly effective machine, that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. It's preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed. No secret is revealed."
-John F. Kennedy
"In his book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making, David Rothkopf, a former managing director of Kissinger Associates and the deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policy in the Clinton administration, wrote openly about the many internationalist meetings he has attended, including those of the Bilderberg Group. He quoted one regular Bilderberg attendee as saying, "I've been to most of the last twelve (meetings). It's nothing. It's a group of 120 very senior people. By senior I mean old. I'm not joking about them being old, by the way. Rockefeller is in his nineties." The regular attendee also commented that "Oprah Winfrey has more influence than anyone who goes to Bilderberg at this point." Similarly, he quoted a regular attendee of Trilateral Commission meetings as saying about the same: "It's a bunch of has-beens who do not have power except to convene themselves-and to feel a little bit more important because they have convened themselves." The attendee commented that the Trilateral Commission meetings typically consist of "useless presentations and levels of abstraction that are unconnected with reality."
Jerome R. Corsi, PH.D.
America For Sale
"These secret societies are created as they are needed. They are separated by distinct bands that are opposed merely in appearance, each respectively professing the most contrary opinions of the day in order to direct separately and with full confidence all religious, economic, political, and literary parties. Yet they are connected to a common center from which they receive a shared direction."
-Werner Gerson
"Monstrous fears feed on monstrous realities."
William W. Freebling
"It is naïve to think that conspiracies do not occur in history, but it is insane to think that history itself is a conspiracy."
Manochehr Dorraj
"The history that is dreamed is also the historian’s terrain."
Alain Dermurger
"The conspiracy theorist is an object of derision, so accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist is a sophisticated way of hitting below the belt, conspiracy theories are widely seen as the territory of either the genuinely delusional or at the least the hopelessly naive, those who fail to grasp nuance, who are only capable of seeing black and white when there are infinite shades of grey. A debate can often be brought abruptly to a halt when the charge of conspiracy theory is leveled. a senior analyst at the conservative Washington Institute thus easily quashed further probing in February 2003 when she brushed aside a question from a CBC radio interviewer about whether oil might be the real motive for the invasion of Iraq. "I think any rational analysis would expose that as a conspiracy theory," she said, closing the door firmly and conclusively on that line of questioning."
-Linda McQuaig
It's The Crude, Dude: Greed, Gas, War, And the American Way
"Let me just deal with the oil thing because....the oil conspiracy is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyze it."
-Tony Blair
"What does it matter what the crackpots believe? It matters to the extent that others come to believe them."
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"The airing of ideas releases pressures which otherwise might become destructive....Full and free discussion keeps a society from becoming stagnant and unprepared for the stresses and strains that work to tear all civilizations apart."
-Justice William O. Douglas (dissent in Dennis v. United states, 1951
"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."
J. Edgar Hoover
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"There also exists another alliance-at first glance a strange one, a surprising one-but if you think about it, one which is well-grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our communist leaders and your (monopoly) capitalists."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Unreal conspirational traumas leave profound scars in history."
Henri Zuckier
"The conspiracy theory of society…comes from abandoning God and then asking "Who is in his place?"
Karl Popper
"What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive movements going on around us? Are there several powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest – the circle of the real Initiates?"
Nesta Webster
"There also exists another alliance-at first glance, a strange one, a surprising one-but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our communist leaders and your capitalists."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the sources and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed among the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become a constant object of our hopes and fears: and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependence."
David Hume
Natural History of Religion
"The Order of the Quest, the JASON Society, the Roshaniya, the Cabbala, the Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Knights of Columbus, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosae Crucis, the Illuminati, the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Executive Members of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Group, the Brotherhood of the Dragon, the Rosicrucian's, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Vatican, the Russell Trust, the Skull & Bones, the Scroll & Key (secret societies of Harvard and Yale Universities), the Order are all the same and work towards the same ultimate goal of a New World Order."
Bill Cooper
"The ‘Disney’ version of history could just as easily be called the ‘New York Times version’ of history of the ‘TV news version’ or the ‘college textbook version.’ The main resistance to conspiracy theories come not from the people on the street, but from the media, academia, and government – people who manage the national and global economy of information."
Preface to Fifty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
Jonathan Vankin & John Whalen
"The reason it is difficult is that we have been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories, and few people will risk public ridicule by advocating them. On the other hand, to endorse the accidental view is absurd. Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception."
G. Edward Griffin
The Creature from Jekyll Island…a second look at the Federal Reserve
"The Conspiracy theory of history , meaning the conviction that there is a central conspiracy behind all the world’s evils and discontents, is probably as old as historiography. At times it appears as a deep persecution mania afflicting individuals and whole peoples. In the modern age the Puritan Revolution , in England, as well as the French Revolution, were attributed to a conspiracy of philosophers, Illuminati, and Freemasons. Jews appeared as members of the coalition only with the publication in 1869 of a book by the French Nobleman Gougenot des Mouseeaux, Le Juif, le judaisme et la judaisation des peoples chretiens, which was translated into German by Alfred Rosenberg. By 1880 the belief in a World Conspiracy began to gain ground among the extreme right in France, Germany, and Russia; the protocols were merely part of this tradition, a text concocted by Rechkovsky, the head of Tsarist intelligence in France in collaboration with some agents and supporters.
Walter LaQuer
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson."
--Franklin D. Roosevelt to Colonel Edward House, Oct 21, 1933
"Two World Wars and their intervening wars, revolutions, and crises are now generally recognized to be episodes in a single age of conflict which began in 1914 and has not yet run its course. it is an age that has brought to the world more change and tragedy than any other in recorded history. yet, whatever may be its ultimate meaning and consequence, we can already think of it and write of it as a historic whole."
Harris & Bayley Chambers
This Age of Conflict
"We are at present working discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be, perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited."
Arnold Toynbee (from a paper read at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Institute for the Scientific Study of the International Relations at Copenhagen, June 1931)
"Conspiracy theories are the opium of the right-wing extremists; once the habit has been deeply ingrained, it seems to be exceedingly difficult and painful to shed it."
Walter Laqueur
Black Hundreds
"In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are in fact, at work searching for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible anti-bodies."
-George Orwell 1984
"Secrecy is a peculiar matter. Not only in the field of religion but also in our social life. When the priests of Demeter created the Eleusinian mysteries, they knew very well what they were doing. After hunger and love, the gravest of social forces is probably human curiosity. The priests enlisted this curiosity in their cause. Human society is so constituted that men will allow their neighbors to possess millions in gold, but not a paltry secret. Society abhors gaps in its knowledge as nature abhors a vacuum. The might of social curiosity overpowers the secrets of individuals and communities. The pressure comes from all sides, like that of water upon a diving bell-either society will compel its own admission to the secret, or it will avenge itself upon the holders of the secret by turning them out of society, making them outlaws. Society's reaction to any exclusion from knowledge is: "What is concealed from me must be unclean."
H.E. Jacob
Six Thousand Years of Bread
"One last set of numbers: there are approximately 500,000 college professors in the United States, including both two-and four-year institutions. Of course, there are others-inventors, industrial scientists, computer programmers-responsible for generating and conveying knowledge, especially technical knowledge. But to fix ideas, 4 million people hold clearance in the United States, plus some vast reservoir who did in the past but no longer do. Bottom line? Whether one figures by acquisition rate, by holding size, or by contributors, the classified universe is, as best I can estimate, on the order of five to ten times larger than the open literature that finds its way to our libraries. our commonsense picture may well be far too sanguine, even inverted. The closed world is not a small strongbox in the corner of our collective house of codified and stored knowledge. It is we in the open world-we who study the world lodged in our libraries, from aardvarks to zymurgy, we who are living in a modest information booth facing outward, our unseeing backs to a vast and classified empire we barely know."
-Peter Galison
Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance
"In 1995, the National Research Council working with the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that the DOE's born and adolescent classified documents numbered some 280 million pages-an amount that would take its current complement of reviewers 9,000 years to review-if, against reality, not a line of new material were added. However incomplete it is now, this nine-millennium stack is ten times larger than the previous estimate given a few years earlier. Needless to say, neither the DOE nor any other agency has the budget, the mandate, or the intention of catching up. In the last few years, the rate of classification increased fivefold, with no end in sight. Secret information is accumulating, at a rate that itself is accelerating, far quicker than it is being declassified."
-Peter Galison from chapter "Removing Knowledge"
Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance
"But Dyer (Joel Dyer Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is only the Beginning) has unearthed a genuine ongoing conspiracy that affects everyone in the United States. Currently a handful of agro-conglomerates are working to drive America's remaining small farmers off their land by systematically paying them less for their produce than it costs to grow, thus forcing them to get loans from the conglomerates' banks, assume mortgages, and undergo foreclosures and the sale of land to corporate-controlled agribusiness. But is this really a conspiracy or just the Darwinian workings of an efficient marketplace? There is for once, a smoking gun in the form of a blueprint describing how best to rid the nation of small farmers. Dyer writes: "In 1962, the Committee for Economic Development comprised approximately seventy-five of the nation's most powerful corporate executives. They represented not only the food industry but also oil and gas, insurance, investment and retail industries. Almost all groups that stood to gain from consolidation were represented on that committee. Their report (An Adaptive Program for Agriculture) outlined a plan to eliminate farmers and farms. It was detailed and well thought out." Simultaneously," as early as 1964, congressmen were being told by industry giants like Pillsbury, Swift, General Food, and Campbell Soup that the biggest problem in agriculture was too many farmers." Good psychologists, the CEOs had noted that farm children, if sent to college, seldom return to the family farm. Or as one famous economist said to a famous senator who was complaining about jet lag on a night flight from New York to London, "well it sure beats farming" . The committee got the government to send farm children to college. Predictably, most did not come back. Government then offered to help farmers relocate in other lines of work, allowing their land to be consolidated in ever vaster combines owned by fewer and fewer corporations."
-Gore Vidal
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
"It is to be expected that advances in psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than the now have....Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils have left school they shall be incapable, of thinking or acting otherwise than their school master would have wished."
-Bertrand Russell
The Impact of Science and Society 1953
"Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so."
-Bertrand Russell
"The simple step of a courageous individual is to not take part in the lie. One word of Truth outweighs the world."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"A 'conspiracy theory' no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the governments explanation and that of its media pimps."
-Paul Craig Roberts
"In America today and increasingly throughout the Western World, actual facts and true explanations have been relegated to the realm of kookiness. Only people who believe lies are socially approved and accepted as patriotic citizens."
-Paul Craig Roberts
"If you report reality they treat you like a criminal."
"A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public."
-Mark Twain
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Book: "Strange Secrets: Real Government Files on the Unknown" by N. Redfern & A. Roberts
Book: "Conspiracy: Plots, Lies and Cover-Ups" by Richard M. Bennett
Book: "VOODOO History: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in shaping Modern History" by David Aaronovitch
Book: The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence" by Gerald Blain & L. McCubbin
Book: "Alien Agenda" by Jim Marrs
Book: "The Secret History of The World; As Laid Down By The Secret Societies" by Mark Booth
Book: "The Secret Message of Jules Verne: Decoding His Masonic, Rosicrucian, and Occult Writings" by Michel Lamy
Book: "Secret Societies: The Hidden Powers of Clandestine Organizations and Elites from the Ancient World to the Present Day" by David V. Barret
Book: "Secret Societies : Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day" by Michael Howard
Book: "Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" by Robert B. Stinnett
Book: "The Freemasons: A History of the World's Most Powerful Secret Society" by Jasper Ridley
Book: "Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America" by Timothy Melley
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