The No-Conspiracy Theory
by Rex Weyler
Polls show that thousands of people in the US and Canada believe there is no conspiracy by the rich and powerful to become richer and more powerful. No-Conspiracy Theorists genuinely believe that Free Trade has something to do with Freedom, that confessed CIA patsy Lee Oswald killed John Kennedy, and that former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s friends in Shawinigan deserved millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
No-Conspiracy Theorists (or “NCTs” as marketing experts call them) tend to believe that the US and Britain invaded Iraq to free the people. “Access to oil,” say most NCTs “had nothing to do with it.” When researchers asked these people why the US and Britain have not moved to free the people of, say, Tibet or Burma, they scoff: “The US and Britain can’t liberate everyone, not without some support.”
In the United States, No-Conspiracy Theorists still believe that Vietnamese gunboats attacked US ships in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, instigating the Vietnam War, that George Bush won the 2000 US election fair and square, and that his subsequent “tax-cut” really did benefit low income families. As a group, American No-Conspiracy Theorists believe CNN and FOX provide balanced news and that CBS, NBC, and ABC represent diversity.
Most US No-Conspiracy Theorists believe that the $1.38 billion no-bid contract handed to Halliburton in Iraq has nothing to do with the $34 million that Vice President, Dick Cheney received from Halliburton last year in stock options and other perks. NCTs doubt seriously that the $680 million contract handed to Bechtel was connected to the millions Bechtel has given Republican political candidates over the years. “There’s just no clear linkage,” says No-Conspiracy Theorist and Bechtel executive assistant Ann Douglas. “Show me the paper trail.”
Canadian No-Conspiracy theorists doubt that Chrétien had a hand in granting his hometown of Shawinigan the half-million-dollar Canoe Hall of Fame, million-dollar hotels, or $233,558 to celebrate Canada’s place in the world. “Chrétien apparently knew nothing about the new road into his private cottage,” said Pierre Gulliver from nearby Montagne Du Calvaire.
Canadian NCTs believe that having five companies control the media in a nation of 25 million and allowing a single family to own all the newspapers in a major international city – along with a dozens of other community papers, a national newspaper, and national television network – is good for journalism. “It gives the newspapers stability,” says Mabel Hendriks in Surrey, BC. “The reporters and columnists are still free to say whatever they want, within reason.”
British Columbia No-Conspiracy theorists point out that access to government is available to “almost anyone.” For a mere $2000, private citizens could purchase a chat with Liberal fixer Stan Hagan and grease development deals on Crown land. “That’s within most people’s price range,” said Ms. Hendriks. These NCTs believe it is “only a coincidence” that the same firm that donated $5,250 to the BC Liberals got a government contract to produce television ads for the Health Ministry.
NCTs point out that there there is “no proven quid pro quo” between Bermuda-based, tax dodging Accenture Consulting’s $12,000 donation to the BC Liberals and their lucrative contract to privatize BC Hydro transmission. Just because “Accenture” is a façade for Andersen Consulting, renamed when Arthur Anderson was busted for taking $52 million from the $1.1 billion Enron scam, and just because Arthur Anderson paid a $110 million settlement for fraud at Sunbeam in Australia and was the largest single donor to George Bush’s presidential campaign, doesn’t mean any of this was a “conspiracy.” The fact that Accenture received $246 million from Ontario taxpayers to take over their social services, charged fees six times higher than government staffers, and bilked Ontario citizens for $1.4 million in travel and entertainment expenses, doesn’t mean anything similar would happen in BC.
No-Conspiracy Theorists point out that BC received shares “possibly worth $75 million” in exchange for the $330 million of public assets given to the private BC Ferry Services Inc. These true believers aren’t worried that New Yorker David Hahn, the Ferry Services CEO, walked out on Covanta Energy Corp after it went $3.3 billion in debt, leaving investors on the hook. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d do it again,” said Vancouver NCT Nieva Crawford.
Just as Canadian No-Conspiracy Theorists believe “none or very little” of the millions in patronage payoffs to Liberal supporters finds its way back into Liberal political coffers, US NCTs believe that “none or very little,” of the $1.4 trillion dollars stolen from American taxpayers in the S&L scandal ended up in the political coffers of the Bush family. “Just because someone helps their friends steal money,” said NCT Jerald (J.J.) Johnson, “doesn’t mean they get any of it.”
No-Conspiracy Theorists have actually been around for centuries. No-Conspiracy Theorists in fifteenth century Italy doubted that the murder of Baldaccio d'Anghiari was directly related to di Medici family fortunes. Florentine NCTs in 1445 pointed out there was no real proof that the duke ordered Battista to assassinate Annibale or that the Venetian commissaries were insincere in joining the people in the piazza and clipping Battista, not unlike, say, a connected nightclub owner, troubled by the death of his democratic president might take out a CIA patsy in the basement of a police station in modern Dallas. “He deserved to die for his deed,” the Florentine elite claimed, “and die he did. So what's the big deal?”
No Conspiracy Theorists believe that just because the Americans brought Gehlen to the US disguised as a US General and later deployed his spy network in Russia, and just because CIA director Allan Dulles financed the Gehlen Organization in Bavaria for $200 million to help recruit and train Soviet young men such as Lee Harvey Oswald, and just because Gehlen’s associate Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, Adolph Eichmann's superior officer, entered the US in 1954, worked for Dulles' OSS, for Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign, and on classified Defense Department contracts, that doesn’t mean there was a conspiracy.
- - -
In the 1970s, No-Conspiracy Theorists doubted that the murder of Salvador Allende in Chile and his ambassador Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington DC, had any connection to Pepsi sales in Chile. Just because Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger met with CIA Director Richard Helms, Pepsi chairman Donald Kendall, and Chilean banker Don Agustín Edwards at the White House on September 15, 1970, following Allende’s election, and just because Nixon told Helms he wanted “a major effort ... to prevent Allende’s accession to power,” doesn’t mean any of these guys actually had anything to do with killing Allende or Letelier, much less with the thousands of people that General Pinochet’s secret police killed thereafter, even the ones pushed out of American helicopters.
“People want to make mountains out of molehills,” said No-Conspiracy Theorist and Pepsi shareholder Fred Green from Huntsville, Texas. “It’s like those thirty or fifty or whatever so-called witnesses who say that the traitor Kennedy was shot by riflemen from behind that fence thingy on the grassy-whatever. So what if that Union Terminal guy, Holland, says he heard the shots and saw a puff of smoke by the fence, and a few other people saw the same smoke. A puff of smoke is not evidence. And besides, Holland is dead. Most of those witnesses are dead. The government can’t even agree how many witnesses there were. And no one has any proof.”
No-Conspiracy Theorists point out that there is no proven link between US tolerance of Saudi torture chambers – or even the occasional use of those facilities – and the so-called Bush ties to the Saudi Royal family. “Okay,” says Green, “George H. W. Bush did provide training for the Saudi royal family elite guard as CIA Director, and even if he did make Saudi investments through businessman Jim Bath who blabbed of his links with Bush and the CIA and his hotsie-totsie trust agreement with Osama’s older brother Salem Bin Laden, and with Khalid bin Mahfouz who ran the Saudi royal family’s bank, that doesn’t mean there was a conspiracy.”
New Yorker Miriam Blaskic, who was a short distance from Ground Zero on that fateful day, says, “So what if all the Bulgarians working in the Trade Towers got a secret memo to stay home that day, and if no one in the FBI seems curious. It could have been a Bulgarian holiday. Did anyone think of that?”
“Besides,” says Ann Douglas at Bechtel, “a lot of so-called conspiracies have proven to be untrue. So why should we believe anybody?”
http://www.rexweyler.com/works/essays_nocons.html
by Rex Weyler
Polls show that thousands of people in the US and Canada believe there is no conspiracy by the rich and powerful to become richer and more powerful. No-Conspiracy Theorists genuinely believe that Free Trade has something to do with Freedom, that confessed CIA patsy Lee Oswald killed John Kennedy, and that former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s friends in Shawinigan deserved millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
No-Conspiracy Theorists (or “NCTs” as marketing experts call them) tend to believe that the US and Britain invaded Iraq to free the people. “Access to oil,” say most NCTs “had nothing to do with it.” When researchers asked these people why the US and Britain have not moved to free the people of, say, Tibet or Burma, they scoff: “The US and Britain can’t liberate everyone, not without some support.”
In the United States, No-Conspiracy Theorists still believe that Vietnamese gunboats attacked US ships in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, instigating the Vietnam War, that George Bush won the 2000 US election fair and square, and that his subsequent “tax-cut” really did benefit low income families. As a group, American No-Conspiracy Theorists believe CNN and FOX provide balanced news and that CBS, NBC, and ABC represent diversity.
Most US No-Conspiracy Theorists believe that the $1.38 billion no-bid contract handed to Halliburton in Iraq has nothing to do with the $34 million that Vice President, Dick Cheney received from Halliburton last year in stock options and other perks. NCTs doubt seriously that the $680 million contract handed to Bechtel was connected to the millions Bechtel has given Republican political candidates over the years. “There’s just no clear linkage,” says No-Conspiracy Theorist and Bechtel executive assistant Ann Douglas. “Show me the paper trail.”
Canadian No-Conspiracy theorists doubt that Chrétien had a hand in granting his hometown of Shawinigan the half-million-dollar Canoe Hall of Fame, million-dollar hotels, or $233,558 to celebrate Canada’s place in the world. “Chrétien apparently knew nothing about the new road into his private cottage,” said Pierre Gulliver from nearby Montagne Du Calvaire.
Canadian NCTs believe that having five companies control the media in a nation of 25 million and allowing a single family to own all the newspapers in a major international city – along with a dozens of other community papers, a national newspaper, and national television network – is good for journalism. “It gives the newspapers stability,” says Mabel Hendriks in Surrey, BC. “The reporters and columnists are still free to say whatever they want, within reason.”
British Columbia No-Conspiracy theorists point out that access to government is available to “almost anyone.” For a mere $2000, private citizens could purchase a chat with Liberal fixer Stan Hagan and grease development deals on Crown land. “That’s within most people’s price range,” said Ms. Hendriks. These NCTs believe it is “only a coincidence” that the same firm that donated $5,250 to the BC Liberals got a government contract to produce television ads for the Health Ministry.
NCTs point out that there there is “no proven quid pro quo” between Bermuda-based, tax dodging Accenture Consulting’s $12,000 donation to the BC Liberals and their lucrative contract to privatize BC Hydro transmission. Just because “Accenture” is a façade for Andersen Consulting, renamed when Arthur Anderson was busted for taking $52 million from the $1.1 billion Enron scam, and just because Arthur Anderson paid a $110 million settlement for fraud at Sunbeam in Australia and was the largest single donor to George Bush’s presidential campaign, doesn’t mean any of this was a “conspiracy.” The fact that Accenture received $246 million from Ontario taxpayers to take over their social services, charged fees six times higher than government staffers, and bilked Ontario citizens for $1.4 million in travel and entertainment expenses, doesn’t mean anything similar would happen in BC.
No-Conspiracy Theorists point out that BC received shares “possibly worth $75 million” in exchange for the $330 million of public assets given to the private BC Ferry Services Inc. These true believers aren’t worried that New Yorker David Hahn, the Ferry Services CEO, walked out on Covanta Energy Corp after it went $3.3 billion in debt, leaving investors on the hook. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d do it again,” said Vancouver NCT Nieva Crawford.
Just as Canadian No-Conspiracy Theorists believe “none or very little” of the millions in patronage payoffs to Liberal supporters finds its way back into Liberal political coffers, US NCTs believe that “none or very little,” of the $1.4 trillion dollars stolen from American taxpayers in the S&L scandal ended up in the political coffers of the Bush family. “Just because someone helps their friends steal money,” said NCT Jerald (J.J.) Johnson, “doesn’t mean they get any of it.”
No-Conspiracy Theorists have actually been around for centuries. No-Conspiracy Theorists in fifteenth century Italy doubted that the murder of Baldaccio d'Anghiari was directly related to di Medici family fortunes. Florentine NCTs in 1445 pointed out there was no real proof that the duke ordered Battista to assassinate Annibale or that the Venetian commissaries were insincere in joining the people in the piazza and clipping Battista, not unlike, say, a connected nightclub owner, troubled by the death of his democratic president might take out a CIA patsy in the basement of a police station in modern Dallas. “He deserved to die for his deed,” the Florentine elite claimed, “and die he did. So what's the big deal?”
No Conspiracy Theorists believe that just because the Americans brought Gehlen to the US disguised as a US General and later deployed his spy network in Russia, and just because CIA director Allan Dulles financed the Gehlen Organization in Bavaria for $200 million to help recruit and train Soviet young men such as Lee Harvey Oswald, and just because Gehlen’s associate Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, Adolph Eichmann's superior officer, entered the US in 1954, worked for Dulles' OSS, for Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign, and on classified Defense Department contracts, that doesn’t mean there was a conspiracy.
- - -
In the 1970s, No-Conspiracy Theorists doubted that the murder of Salvador Allende in Chile and his ambassador Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington DC, had any connection to Pepsi sales in Chile. Just because Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger met with CIA Director Richard Helms, Pepsi chairman Donald Kendall, and Chilean banker Don Agustín Edwards at the White House on September 15, 1970, following Allende’s election, and just because Nixon told Helms he wanted “a major effort ... to prevent Allende’s accession to power,” doesn’t mean any of these guys actually had anything to do with killing Allende or Letelier, much less with the thousands of people that General Pinochet’s secret police killed thereafter, even the ones pushed out of American helicopters.
“People want to make mountains out of molehills,” said No-Conspiracy Theorist and Pepsi shareholder Fred Green from Huntsville, Texas. “It’s like those thirty or fifty or whatever so-called witnesses who say that the traitor Kennedy was shot by riflemen from behind that fence thingy on the grassy-whatever. So what if that Union Terminal guy, Holland, says he heard the shots and saw a puff of smoke by the fence, and a few other people saw the same smoke. A puff of smoke is not evidence. And besides, Holland is dead. Most of those witnesses are dead. The government can’t even agree how many witnesses there were. And no one has any proof.”
No-Conspiracy Theorists point out that there is no proven link between US tolerance of Saudi torture chambers – or even the occasional use of those facilities – and the so-called Bush ties to the Saudi Royal family. “Okay,” says Green, “George H. W. Bush did provide training for the Saudi royal family elite guard as CIA Director, and even if he did make Saudi investments through businessman Jim Bath who blabbed of his links with Bush and the CIA and his hotsie-totsie trust agreement with Osama’s older brother Salem Bin Laden, and with Khalid bin Mahfouz who ran the Saudi royal family’s bank, that doesn’t mean there was a conspiracy.”
New Yorker Miriam Blaskic, who was a short distance from Ground Zero on that fateful day, says, “So what if all the Bulgarians working in the Trade Towers got a secret memo to stay home that day, and if no one in the FBI seems curious. It could have been a Bulgarian holiday. Did anyone think of that?”
“Besides,” says Ann Douglas at Bechtel, “a lot of so-called conspiracies have proven to be untrue. So why should we believe anybody?”
http://www.rexweyler.com/works/essays_nocons.html
