Someone Proud of Being a Conspiracy Theorist 5

Then what is the hope? The hope is for people of principle to educate their own children and other children who may want to come along for the ride. Educate them in the principles of persuasion rather than power. Parents are going to have to fund their own children’s educations, and to keep those children away from the public school textbooks. They are going to have to develop new curriculum materials. They are going to have to teach, or find reliable people on the Web to teach, in order to help their children avoid the indoctrination by all tax-funded education. That is the minimum place that we have to begin. Anything beyond this is gravy.

This is our principle of action: replacement, not capture. We should not attempt to take over the existing systems of power and influence; we should attempt to create alternatives that are more reliable, more efficient, and more beneficial to the general public. We can’t beat something with nothing. We also can’t beat the system by capturing the system and maintaining the system. We are not smart enough to do this, and in any case, we are not ruthless enough to do it.

What I have outlined here I was taught almost 50 years ago. Rushdoony understood this. Leonard E. Reed understood it, and so did the editor of The Freeman, Paul Poirot. These men persuaded me that the quest for power in today’s society is the devil’s own quest.

I do have a sense of optimism about the younger members of the movement, who follow Ron Paul . . . Paul understands these principles. He is the only politician in my generation at the national level who has understood this position. This is why he is now known to millions of people, and no other congressman is. He stood alone when it paid nothing to stand alone, and he is now the representative of a movement that could turn into an effective political force at the local level. He exercises this influence precisely because he has not sought to extend power to the Federal government. He has not been involved in a quest for power; he has been in a quest for the decentralization of power, and the de-funding of power.

When the Soviet Union proved that communism could no longer maintain power, Western Marxists lost their faith. They had been Marxists only because they believed in power, and they somehow believed that they, as intellectuals, would be powerful people in a Communist society. They had not read carefully what Stalin did to intellectuals. They had not read what the Pol Pot did to intellectuals in Cambodia. He sent them to the farms or had them executed, if they had hands without calluses or if they wore glasses. He knew an intellectual when he saw one. They died.

You don’t change the system from the inside. You create an alternative system, and you wait for the existing system to go belly up. That is how you change people’s minds.

You can’t beat something with nothing. This is why people don’t really want to change it. It costs too much money, too much commitment, and too much time. That is why we face a crisis. 

But, if individuals at the local level begin to organize, this may change. 

We also have to develop institutions that are based on persuasion rather than power. 

Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/07/gary-north/how-to-fight-conspiracies/

Someone Proud of Being a Conspiracy Theorist 4

It does no good to expose the conspirators. Hardly anyone will believe you, and even if the person does believe you, there’s not a thing you or he can do about it. The public has finally figured out that the system at the top is structured against them, because they saw what happened to the banks in 2008. They saw the banks get the bailout money, not the man in the street. This upsets them, because they wanted the bailout money. . . They have only come to this conclusion recently. The far Left and the far Right have known about it since 1913. But who took them seriously?

I enjoy reading books about conspiracies. I especially enjoy reading heavily footnoted, carefully documented books about conspiracies. I enjoy books that do three things. First, they follow the money. Second, they follow the confession of faith. Third, they follow the media. If you show me what leaders believed, how they financed their beliefs, and how they got out their message to the general public, you have shown me what I really need to know about the history of any organization, any society, and any government. I don’t care whether you’re talking about conspiracies or the good old boys who were aboveboard about everything. You have to show me what they believed, how they financed what they believed, and how they got their message out to the voters.

Almost no book does this. You can look at the anti-conspiracy books, and they may follow the money, but they don’t usually concentrate on what the fundamental ideas were all about. And they almost never talk about media, except after 1930.

So, I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe there are lots of conspiracies, and most of them fail. 

The problem is not the conspiracies. The problem is the widespread acceptance by the voting populations around the world that it is legitimate for the government to send out tax collectors and extract wealth from certain groups of society in order to fund the favored boondoggles of some other group in society. The moment people think that they can make a living by voting instead of making a living by producing, they turn the government and the social order over to one or another conspiracy.

Secret or not, they could not get into our wallets unless we allowed them to. It is the essence of the conspiracy to persuade the public that the right and moral thing to do is to allow the state to help some group. As soon as the conspiracy persuades the public of this, the game switches from persuasion to power. It switches from donations to taxation. It switches from liberty to tyranny.

Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/07/gary-north/how-to-fight-conspiracies/

Someone Proud of Being a Conspiracy Theorist 3

Think about the World Wide Web. The establishments of the world did not think in 1990 that anything like this would be possible. The basic communications technology existed, but until Tim Berners-Lee developed a system for setting up addresses on the Internet, the World Wide Web did not exist. The Web now is undermining establishments all over the world. Yet there are people who are convinced that the Web is itself a conspiracy, and the conspirators are somehow using the Web to gain control over the population. I realize that there are not many of these people, but I do get e-mails from time to time telling me that the Web is capable of being used effectively by the conspiracies against defenders of truth, justice, and the American way.

The problem is not the conspiracies; the problem is the corruption in the hearts of the people. The fact that the voters would allow and even promote the creation of the modern welfare state is indicative of the fact that larceny is in their hearts. It does no good to replace one conspiracy with another conspiracy if you leave the system intact that enables the conspiracies to gain power.

This goes back to the famous chapter 10 in F. A. Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom. The chapter is titled, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Hayek argued that the modern socialist state, meaning the modern welfare state, encourages the worst people to get on top, because the worst people are the most successful in seeking and maintaining power.

Because central economic planning centralizes power, it grants to the state the right to confiscate the wealth of the public. We should not expect kindly people to be successful in the pursuit of power within such a system. We will find, and what we have found, is that the most ruthless people seek out the levers of power, precisely because the levers of power enable them to achieve their goal: control over other people.

. . . it is a moral obligation to preach and teach against the welfare state, because the welfare state is based on the principle of theft. It is based on the principle of the right of one group legally to extract wealth from another group. The moral foundation of the welfare state is corrupt.

Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/07/gary-north/how-to-fight-conspiracies/

Someone Proud of Being a Conspiracy Theorist 2

I was fortunate in the fact that I first discovered about conspiracies from my study of America’s entry into World War II. I wrote a high school term paper in 1958 on how Roosevelt maneuvered the United States into the war by pressuring the Japanese government to attack us. I have not changed my mind. This alerted me to the fact that wars are major means of expanding the power of the Federal government. I understood early that Presidents maneuver the country into war in order to expand their own power and the government’s power over the general population. Presidents find that the public does not oppose the entry into war, once we’ve gone into war. All resistance ceases. The expansion of the government then can go on without resistance. This is beneficial for the groups that are associated with weaponry. It is also beneficial to all the groups associated with the banking system, which funds the expansion of the arms industry.

In graduate school in 1965, this suggestion was considered a form of lunacy. Later, this began to change when Johnson pushed deeper into Vietnam, and the Gulf of Tonkin attack turned out to be a myth. In graduate school, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was untouchable. He was retroactively the great saint of the 20th century. Any suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately lured the country into war was considered conspiratorial crackpotism. I was one of the crackpots, so I generally kept my mouth shut on this issue, except in an upper division course on revisionist histories of World War I and World War II — the only such class in the United States in 1962.

This attitude has not changed today. The difference is, today more historians are willing to admit that Roosevelt did maneuver the Japanese into war. What we find, however, is that these historians say that Roosevelt’s action was wise. They applaud the fact that he used conspiratorial tactics to get the country into war. Anyone who says it was wrong for Roosevelt to have done this is regarded as a crackpot, but at least these days you can say that Roosevelt did it. You just are not supposed to say that was a bad thing that he did. 

Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/07/gary-north/how-to-fight-conspiracies/

Someone Proud of Being a Conspiracy Theorist

I would like to share a series of excerpts from a proud "conspiracy theorist", Gary North. I took these excerpts from his two articles posted in LewRockwell.com. The second article is very long and not many people today are patient enough to read such a long content. So readability is the reason why I divided North's articles into five.

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I have been a conspiracy buff for over 45 years. I got my spurs at age 16 when I wrote a paper on Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor. As far as I am concerned, that one is still in the top five. 

Over the years, I have stumbled into lots more conspiracies. Their name is legion. Some are more evil than others. Some are harder to prove than others. Some are hidden in plain sight — or, in the case of 9/11, plane site. Others are deep.

There are so many of them that no one can pursue all of them. In fact, the mark of a deranged conspiracy buff is someone who pursues dozens of them at once. He believes that there is one grand conspiracy behind all of them. . .

All of us who have spent any time following through on this or that conspiracy have met these deranged people. Their world is filled with conspiracies. 

I feel sorry for them. They do not specialize. They really do not know much about any of these conspiracies. . .

. . . For these people, there are only four kinds of people: conspirators, the ignorant masses, disciples, and enemies. 

Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/01/gary-north/my-conspiracy-is-bigger-than-your-conspiracy/

A man who sees conspiracy everywhere is a gravedigger. . .a gravedigger gives up hope. He works diligently, but he has no future. He is not going to be able to escape the plans of the executioners. This is how thousands of conspiracy theorists view their own efforts. They give up any thought of reforming the system that has been infiltrated. They offer no plans to replace it. They just wring their hands and cry, “The Conspiracy! The Conspiracy!”

I recall one man who spent his life clipping newspapers and photocopying items about how conspirators have done this or that. I never heard him offer a solution. I never heard him offer a theory of civil government or economics that would serve as an alternative. Yet he spent 35 years in the presence of the libertarian activists and conservative leaders. I never heard him quote an idea from Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, or anyone else. He was completely devoid of ideas. His entire life was spent with no theory of God, man, law, sanctions, and the future. He had no theory of conspiracies and causation. He only had clippings.

. . . people who are looking for ways to avoid personal responsibility for working to change the infiltrated system have a tendency to blame the conspiracy for having infiltrated any organization that might plausibly produce significant social change. In other words, they dismiss the activities of individuals who really are working diligently to transform the system. 

. . . whenever I found myself surrounded by people who attribute most of what takes place in life to a single conspiracy, I would be wise to disassociate myself from that group. He was convinced that it does no good to participate as a gravedigger. The goal is to transform society, and the way to do this is through religious and intellectual evangelism. 

. . . word and deed evangelism is a system. He (North referring to his father-in-law) was convinced that any form of evangelism, for whatever perspective, that does not include programs for transforming the world is simply spinning its wheels. He called this pietism. He also called it Neoplatonism. He was convinced that both pietism and Neoplatonism were basic to 20th-century Christianity. 

Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/07/gary-north/how-to-fight-conspiracies/