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In Defence of Conspiracy Theories

category international | crime and justice | opinion/analysis author Friday September 14, 2007 07:54author by Brian Report this post to the editors

An attempt to answer some of the criticisms of 'conspiracy theorists', to show that factors in modern society make it all too possible for conspiracies to exist, and difficult for them to be exposed.

I know I know, this is way too long!:-) To solve that particular problem I thought I would try and start with a kind of executive summary of the points I am making, then anybody can go to any interesting section and read it rather than having to read the whole thing :

Modern mé féin culture - Just saying that the modern climate promotes individualism, and maybe selfishness, which then means that people are that bit more reluctant to come forward and expose conspiracies. Also there maybe a kind of low level corruption evident nowadays in the legal profession, political parties etc which makes its easier to keep conspiracies covered up.

Media and whistleblowers - Anyway when a person does come forward to expose some conspiracy the media usually will not report what they say, hence in fact many whistleblowers are out there, with eyewitness accounts of serious conspiracies, yet the mass media does not tell the rest of us about it. You have to chase up obscure publications and little known radio stations and such like before you can declare that such and such a conspiracy couldn't exist because it would require a large number of people keeping it a secret. Maybe it isn't a secret, possibly a whistleblower did come forward but the mass media never reported it.

Police and whistleblowers - Maybe much the same happens when whistleblowers approach the police, so again the 'conspiracy' is no secret to them but the state's law enforcement agencies are not interested in bringing the 'conspirators' to justice for whatever reason.

Technology - I think its logical to assume that modern intelligence agencies, and possibly other parties, have access to advanced technologies that are not known about in the civilian world, consequently it would be wrong to dismiss too quickly as 'conspiracy theories' allegations about the possible use of that technology, against modern dissidents say.

Secret Societies - I trace some of the history of secret societies in ireland to show that they have always been very powerful here, and therefore it might be wrong to dismiss as a 'conspiracy theory' allegations of their influence in recent times.

Underestimating the complexity of Politics - I think a lot of political goings on are complicated and that people are calling political combinations 'conspiracy theories' simply because they are underestimating that complexity. I look too at the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the German Plot in ireland in 1918 as examples of complex political plots, with various groups being lied to and manipulated by the powers that be.

Pervasive influence of the modern mass media - My point is that the huge wave of publicity that comes after some key events nowadays is so pervasive that the modern person thinks that its impossible for so many media personnel to lie about a given incident, but the original sources, the hard information that underlines this media wave, are generally only state agencies, and they can of course lie.

I also throw in a lot of Irish history to elucidate these points, the general idea being that if our ancestors underestimated the existence of state control over the media, police conspiracies, and the power of secret societies etc, then maybe we should make sure not to make the same mistake! Hopefully there are a few points there that are worth mulling on in any case.

Modern Mé Féin Culture
I think a lot of people would agree with Fred Johnston when he says that: "This is not the age of principles, as commentators keep telling us; we live in a fallen, mé-fhéin epoque, when nothing matters."(1) The thing is that this kind of general atmosphere has implications for the question of whether or not conspiracies flourish. Clearly if people don't care about their fellow citizens then they won't bother exposing conspiracies and are much more likely to participate in them for their own financial or career advancement.

I think another way of looking at it is that formerly the morals of society were set by the church, particularly by the Catholic Church in ireland, and probably by the public school and University systems in places like the UK, and this influence lead to a personal morality which, in theory anyway, certainly proscribed getting involved in any duplicitous practises.
- The Church. I know its perfectly true to say that many of those Christian Brothers, and others, in the later 20th century have not exactly lived up to the ideals they taught but I still wonder if its not fair to say that they impressed upon their students a code of morality, and an 'informed conscience', which encouraged their pupils not to get involved in 'conspiratorial' practises. Like obviously if you emerged believing in the 10 Commandments, which they drilled into people, with its requirements not to lie, steal, or kill etc then you really would be useless as a conspirator! Also the Irish Catholic church was always traditionally critical of secret societies and under that pressure those societies often wilted, so again it leaves the question that that particular 'conspiracy theory', that those societies are all powerful, would be truer in the period when the church is in decline.
- Universities and Public Schools. During most of the 19th and early 20th century these institutions used to boast of turning out a 'gentleman' who had a high standard of morality and learning. This certainly involved keeping your word, not stealing, and being well informed and educated about the world around you. Within that code incidentally they also tended to praise a kind of semi leisure existence, certainly working all the time to the detriment of expanding your mind was considered the ultimate social faux pas! (As Oscar Wilde once said "Work is the curse of the drinking classes!") Anyway this 'gentleman' type would also never tolerate the type of goings on that are described in the usual 'conspiracy theories'.

Obviously this education and code of morality was not followed by all who were brought up on it, plenty of Christian Brothers pupils, and teachers unfortunately, turned out to be perfectly evil and many of those 'gentlemen' were anything but. That being said you could surely make the case that people existing in a society which cherishes those kind of values are somewhat less likely to get involved in 'conspiracies' than a society where the pursuit of money, and even sex, are held up as the end all and be all of human existence. For example its well known that intelligence agencies are only too willing to provide those last two commodities for anybody wishing to participate in their 'conspiracies' so its natural to assume that they will have more influence on a society where they are glorified than in one where they are not.

I think as well that there are two other factors here which impinge on the question of conspiracy theories. One is that if the general public are selfish or deliberately uniformed, because they might consider work to be more important than being informed or educated about society, then they might not do very much to expose and crush conspiracies that might have been brought to their attention. The other issue is that this mé féin culture is permeating each of the various areas of civic life, leading to a climate of at least low level corruption, which again makes it difficult to expose and close down conspiracies.

On that first point I thought I would quote from Rodney Stich a former pilot with a lot of experience in dealing with whistleblowers and various conspiracies in all areas of the US government. At first, in 1978, he enthusiastically tried to engage with the general public trying to get them motivated to deal with the huge conspiracies that he described, very soberly and intelligently with all sources noted, on over 3,000 TV and radio shows and numerous books. But now he is very depressed at the level of selfishness and apathy that he sees in the general public, and regrets bothering to sacrifice all in trying to inform them about what was happening. He clearly now regards this apathy on the part of the general public as one of the main factors in preventing 'conspirators' from being stopped in their tracks. He would say that even when the general public know whats going on they don't attempt to get it stopped, either through the political system or when they serve on Juries etc. Its the ordinary American that he has given up on, he has even got depressed in dealing with relatives of people who lost their lives as part of these conspiracies, many of the latter being more interested in compensation payments than justice. He goes so far as to talk about the "public's complicity in corruption and tragedies", which he describes as follows:
"The widespread public ignorance, apathy, denial, about the corrupt activities detailed and documented in the books written by government insiders has made possible an endless series of tragedies. This information has been made available to the people if they would only look, show an interest, and read.
.....
Next in line for blame is the apathy, cowardice, or low morality, of the American public. Information has been available for years revealing this misconduct and the tragedies inflicted upon the American people. A culture of filthy songs, "music," drugs, has changed the morality in the United States.
In the books written by former government agents, there are such major factual matters stated, by people such as the former heads of secret CIA operations, that should have resulted in major media articles and public concern. Instead: nothing!
For instance: ...[Describes some of the activities highlighted in his books like murders and drug smuggling by the US government, and notes the 'no response' by the general public]....
The list goes on and on. The problems are numerous, including:
- Certain people are not sophisticated enough to contemplate anything more complex than the ball games or their grand children.
- Certain people don't care to hear about these matters, and could care less. It doesn't directly affect them.
- Certain people are so involved in corrupt activities themselves that they could care less or do not want to voice opposition to the corruption in government for fear of exposing themselves.
- The large numbers of immigrants reduces their interest, or ability to understand, the corruption in government (possibly due to the fact that government personnel from where they came from were also corrupt and that it was an accepted culture).
- Certain people feel there is nothing that they can do about it, so why try.
- Certain people rant and rave about misconduct in government, focusing on some relatively minor matter, and refuse to address the hardcore corruption brought to their attention; or that the hardcore corruption involves confrontation, while complaining about some obscure matter doesn't result in any confrontation or requires any efforts.
- The culture in the United States has deteriorated to such a low level that there is no interest in attacking corruption.
- The culture in the United States, and its morals, have deteriorated to such a low level that there is no outrage about the harm done to others or to the nation.
- The person who is too scared to speak out, afraid of what government officials can do to them.
- Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil―the in-denial American!
- In all fairness, it is possible that many who do nothing would show some semblance of character and integrity if media people did not cover-up for the misconduct.
........
Ball game fanatics with a gluttonous passion for sports (children games), while too cowardly, or too lazy, to address the corruption that inflicts such great tragedies upon so many people. Fiddling while Rome burns may be a good parallel. Flag-waving "patriot" who does nothing to learn or to react to corruption in government.
With similarities to Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, most Americans wash their hands of the tragic consequences of their inactions.
.....
What better example can there be than their support for the invasion and murder of tens of thousands of Iraqis on the obvious serial lying of their smooth-talking political leaders."(2)
The fed up Stich is now writing books talking about the 'Ugly Americans' ! I think one of the reasons he focuses on this is because his experiences go back to WWII, in which he fought for the US although he in fact is of Austrian ancestry. My guess is that he relates the atmosphere in the US today to the great tragedy that afflicted the German people in that war. Clearly your ordinary German didn't know that much about what their leaders were up to the 30s and 40s but they must have known something and yet they turned a blind eye, preoccupied with working hard, as they always do, and enjoying the economic benefits that the Nazis had brought at that time. They didn't know what was around the corner and as it turned out they played a high price for their indifference. Meanwhile it is obvious from Stich's comments that he sees the US public being indifferent about the guilt of launching an aggressive invasion (and you could add things like Guantanamo Bay - surely a second cousin to a concentration camp - and jokes being made about CIA 'snow boarding' practises) and is saying that the US public is similarly well enough informed and doing nothing to stop these things. A lot of people are saying now that ireland is becoming a lot like America and might end up suffering from the same sort of apathy. This then obviously impacts on the question of whether widespread 'conspiracies' exist, because if people are so indifferent when the facts about such 'conspiracies' are put before them then clearly the conspiracies can keep on flourishing.

The other point about this mé féin culture is that it means less people will come forward in the first place. Obviously if your morality is based on the next paycheck, the pension, career advancement, paying the mortgage etc then you aren't likely to bother whistleblowing about anything. It also doesn't help particularly if your morality is based on the law, because a lot of this corruption is committed by the State and they usually have some obscure legal opinion ready which justifies what they do. An example of that would be the legal opinion which the US government sought and used to justify their torture practises in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

What seems to be happening as well is that people quickly adapt themselves to the prevailing culture existing in all the different walks of life in ireland, and abide by that 'code' of morality rather than any other of these older codes of ethics which used to come from the church or the Universities or whatever. Unfortunately if these institutions have become corrupt then the new people who work there also become corrupt - to an extent - very quickly. An example could be the culture that has come across from evidence given to the Morris tribunal into the Gardai. Its clear from that that perjury is not considered such a big crime on the part of many gardai, and yet that has disastrous implications for the justice system considering the huge reliance that is placed there on the word of the gardai, and trust in their control over evidence and contact with witnesses.(3) In fact you can be jailed in ireland for quite a long sentence purely on the word of a senior member of the gardai given in court.(4) Obviously with that kind of corruption conspiracies can flourish easier than if they always told the truth in court. I think you can see this in a lot of areas in ireland right now, where the prevailing culture in those professions allows conspiracies to happen:

Legal Profession
Take the legal profession where there is widespread suspicion of a culture of coverup and fraud, as exposed by the VLPS group and the website www.rate-your-solicitor.com . Disillusionment with the professions is brought to the stage where:
"the solicitor who declines to take your case is probably doing you a better turn than the one who accepts your case". That is a fact." (5).
This VLPS group is even saying that:
"......We have a message from a decent High Court Registrar who told us there are only about five NON-CORRUPT judges operating in the Four Courts and we are highlighting this on the world wide web.A Fianna Fáil TD from the Midlands believes that this is the case..."(6)
Pretty shocking details are also coming out from the above website, like this from Kerry:
"They are noted for this..,[legal corruption, stealing property from vulnerable people] ...'Victim Farming & Harvesting' they call it in the trade....my late dad was a judge..."(7)

At their meetings they are saying that collusion, to the detriment of the client, between defence legal teams and Judges and gardai is totally endemic all across ireland. All other kinds of corruption is also rife behind the scenes apparently like bribery of solicitors. I wonder if the story of the Carey family in Waterford reflects some of these dubious practises. The Sunday Independent some time ago carried some curious quotes from an internal IDA memo, signed by an IDA executive, referring to the elderly Carey family living in the outskirts of Waterford City on land coveted by the IDA:
"We must bear in mind that the Careys did not want to move from their existing house and it was only because of representations made to them by Waterford County Council that they agreed to enter into discussions with the IDA.....I did indicate [to the solicitor for the Careys] that I would recommend that the IDA use his firm for the conveyancing of the two pieces of land - Careys to IDA and IDA to Carey. The reason for making that suggestion was to try and 'encourage' him to make a decision in IDA favour." (8)
The upshot was that the family, threatened with a compulsory purchase order, eventually moved onto new land that proved to be much smaller than the IDA had contracted to give them. Meanwhile in the US its actually alleged that about half of the Federal Judges are secretly taking bribes from the CIA ! Whats even more surprising is that this is apparently done through an Irish company, registered in Dublin !(9)

This situation looks so bad that you'd wonder of one of Stich's points has a particular relevance in this area:
"Certain people are so involved in corrupt activities themselves that they could care less or do not want to voice opposition to the corruption in government for fear of exposing themselves." Hence the conspiracies will flourish unchecked.

Academia
The atmosphere in Universities does not seem so great either these days, in the experience of climatologist Timothy Ball :
"No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.... Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.
......
Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information." (10)
He is trying to get across the fact that to his knowledge global warming is not caused by any man made activity, but is dependent on sun spot activity and other factors. In fact he can remember a time when there was huge international panic about global cooling !(11)

Politics.
The behind the scenes atmosphere in politics in ireland is also worth looking at I think. Say you were to test that atmosphere against one of the familiar 'conspiracy theories' that is floating around. You will often hear it said that political parties are so corrupt, and collude so much at a high level, that the party system operates as a control mechanism in society. The allegation is that the powers that be control the upper ranks, HQ and the party leader maybe, of the political parties but yet encourage the lower ranks to have all kinds of quietly pointless or toothless arguments among themselves, in order to keep divided the political activists in the country. In otherwords its alleged to be a kind of 'divide and rule' tactic by the powers that be. Some claim, like I think the Tipperary priest Fr Denis Fahey, that this is done by exploiting the necessity political parties have for large sums of money:
"This domination is permanent irrespective of the party in office. All parties require money, it often becomes profitable to the Money Power to finance all alike.....turned legislatures into a marionette show with puppets moved on wires behind the scenes."(12)

Then the standard reply to such a theory is that there are thousands of people involved in political parties, even just in ireland, and they are hardly all involved in, or could keep quiet, this massive conspiracy ? So that ok the number of party political leaders, and in the know HQ people, are pretty few, small enough to keep a secret, but then that group would have to have an iron grip on the thousands of party political activists scattered around the country, in order for such a conspiracy to succeed. Of course party policy is set by up to thousands of members attending Ard Fheiseanna, election candidates are selected by often quite well attended Conventions etc., so how could this conspiracy take place without this large group knowing about it? Again the answer might lie in the practical behind the scenes atmosphere within the political party system in ireland. I think its fair to say that in modern times a few people in the party H.Q.'s do dominate these parties behind the scenes, and the local activists have actually no say at all in what their party does. If democracy is the standard that you feel these parties should abide by, then my contention would be that they are mostly corrupt, democratic they just ain't! Some examples of that:

- In Fianna Fail Royston Brady has revealed quite a bit about what its like behind the scenes. He says that running for that party is just like setting up a franchise operation, you get the logos and posters from party HQ and all that but as regards influencing policy, as a candidate you can forget it.(13) He described that when he was asked at one point to speak on an important matter, while he was Lord Mayor of Dublin, he was just given a script by the officials in party HQ and when he didn't like what it said he found his only option was to walk out. He was simply not permitted to offer his own opinions. And in fact conventions are dying out as a way of selecting Dail candidates in Fianna Fail, and other parties, candidates are now being selected by the unelected officials in the party HQs.(14)

- Afaik at the last Fine Gael ard fheis no speaker spoke against any of the motions, and, generally speaking, nobody even voted against them. This is because the motions were all uncontroversial, a small group from HQ vet all the motions and speakers and I would say simply don't allow any divisive subjects to be debated.

- In the case of the special Sinn Fein conference that decided to recognise the PSNI many knowledgeable commentators have speculated that this was only the window dressing for a decision that had already been taken in secret by the IRA, with the latter operating as a kind of secret society within Sinn Fein.

- Amazingly it came out after the recent leadership election in the Green party that, unknown to the beaten candidate, the returning officer was secretly allowing some kind of telephone voting by party members in an election everybody thought was by secret paper ballot. This brought out some other stories from behind the scenes in the Green party:
"The Greens have a long history of fraud in selection conventions. The most egregious was the that defrauding the late, great Vincent McDowell. In that case, the rules and procedures committee was abolished in order to further the interests of one Mr Cuffe. What infuriated many of us about it was to see Vincent's obituary including the statement that he left the party after losing to Cuffe, giving the impression that this stalwart of Irish political life for half a century went off in a huff. As I recall, the RO was one john gormley.

A second trick was to tell a soon-to-be-defrauded candidate objecting at the convention that the vote was to be rerun, and then going ahead once (s)he had left to declare a winner. This happened in DSE in 2003, and the result was that all 3 council seats were lost. The DSE group up to that point were integrated enough to get all 3 elected; in fact, we used to be the last out of the Dail bar, itself surely a Green first.

What is intriguing in retrospect is to look at the whole GP set-up as simply an undemocratic congeries to further the political ambitions of several individuals. As someone who served on the National council 1997-2003, which determines policy, it was hilarious to hear talk from the TD's about “we must go into coalition to implement our policies”. Fact; none of these guys came to NC more than once every year, in some cases far less, and in Gormley's case he did not even cycle the one mile to get there. Then, of course, it became clear; policies that they didn't agree with could be rescinded at national convention, or in extremis simply binned at main office. The GM policy suffered both fates."(15)

Hence you can see that the reality on the ground in the party system is such that the above 'conspiracy theory' is just possible. It is only a small - and maybe secretive - group anyway that is calling the shots in the political parties, the large mass of party members are really only canvassing fodder for the party machine, they have no say in the policies of their parties.

Diplomacy
Behind the scenes in the world of diplomacy you see the same sort of ongoing corruption is routinely tolerated, this is from Conor Cruise O'Brien describing the UN in the 50s:
"To digress on the subject of "arm-twisters": this was a term very little heard in public discussions of the UN, and little used in academic examinations of the workings of the world body. But the concept was absolutely central from about 1948-1958 to the actual workings of the UN. Arm-twisters, of which there was invariably at least one on each of the seven main committees, were American delegates, usually of middle rank, whose function was to influence crucial votes, and make sure the United States got the necessary two-thirds support for whatever proposition might appear, at any given moment, required by American interests. The modus operandi of the arm-twister varied according to circumstances. Often, in the case of delegates who had been through the mill, a mere recital of what the United States wanted would do the trick. But the main function of the arm-twister was to smell out possible recalcitrance, and deal with it. "Dealing with it" could include bribery or blackmail or both together. If these techniques failed, in relation to an individual delegate, they would sometimes be employed directly on governments which were weak, dependent on American subsidies, or corrupt. Most of the world's governments fell into at least one, if not all, of these categories.
...[Referring to the 1948 vote on the recognition of the state of Israel:]
Some delegates were bribed, some of those who could not be bribed personally were recalled by their bribed or intimidated governments and replaced by suitably-instructed people. The necessary number of "unsuitable" delegates were replaced by an equal number of "suitable" ones. Several careers were ended and several new ones promoted. In the end the General Assembly passed the required resolution and the United States could bask once more, for a time, in the approval of the "moral conscience of mankind".(16)
Therefore some of the 'conspiracy theories' that people might have and which some might imagine would be exposed by diplomats, are not highlighted because for them this is just the normal experiences of their profession.

The overall point then is that if you are a person who believes that gardai never lie, that the legal profession is bubbling with practitioners always anxious to ferret out the truth, that political parties draw up their policies after nice democratic debates, and that those fine debates are also what lie behind decisions at the UN and advice given by academics, then you would naturally believe that those great 'conspiracy theories' couldn't possibly be true. You might think that there are just too many good people out there in these various areas of civic life that conspiracies would be easily exposed and stopped in their tracks. But I think the reality is that this mé féin keep-your-head-down type of era, that we live in, permeates these professions, where a kind of behind the scenes low level corruption is tolerated, which in turn makes these conspiracies possible. In many cases they just don't care enough about the public's rights and interests to bother getting involved in exposing conspiracies.

I think too that this type of atmosphere is worst at the higher levels, for example in the state system. Complete heartlessness and ruthlessness I think is often encountered at the high end of the power, and pay level, structure in any country and this should be factored in when people are considering whether conspiracies can exist or not. For example during the troubles of 1919-21 in ireland many people were talking about a 'conspiracy theory' that the state was involved in reprisal action against totally innocent Irish people, as punishment for various IRA operations. This 'conspiracy theory' was hotly denied by the state, for example by Hamar Greenwood in the House of Commons, and the question arises as to how could this be kept a secret, since it must have involved many people in the security and state apparatus in ireland at the time. Of course they did know but they just couldn't care less about the fate of those Irish people who lost their homes and lives to this policy. You can see this from the diary of a high up Dublin Castle official, Mark Sturgis, writing in 1920 on the sacking by the British forces of Balbriggan:
"Still worse things can happen than the firing up of a sink like Balbriggan and surely the people who say 'stop the murders before all our homes go up in smoke' must increase."(17)
Obviously he was hoping that the effect would be to turn people off the IRA. And of course at this level they have other ways of dealing with the few people in that circle who might develop a conscience, e.g. its a curious statistic that five people committed suicide in de Winter's, the intelligence head in Dublin Castle, office during the year 1920-21 !(18)

Media response to Whistleblowers
So OK say we get someone coming forward, breaking through the prevailing selfishness, and willing to expose a given 'conspiracy'. What he does he do to blow this conspiracy wide open ? Naturally he goes to the media, they expose it and all is right again, theoretically. The point is that the media does not react this way to whistleblowers, as a general rule the media does not 'do' conspiracies, most of the time they simply don't report what whistleblowers say irrespective of how much evidence they might have. Because this is the reality of the modern media it means that conspiracies flourish nowadays more than in the past.

Films like "All the Presidents Men" have given maybe a falsely romantic view of modern journalism. The general public thinks that there are small armies of investigative journalists out there just itching to get the truth out to the general public, but the reality might be a bit more mundane. I wonder if in fact there is only ever about 1 or 2 really fearless - not secretly police agents - investigative journalists in ireland despite the large numbers of journalists in general. Most people would certainly put the late Martin O'Hagan in that category, and look what happened to him. During his life it wasn't the case at all that his skills and courage were nurtured in Irish journalistic circles, as his friend Paul Larkin relates:
"One must ask where the job offers were from the quality newspapers or the TV industry for possibly the only journalist in ireland who made it his business not just to write tittle tattle about paramilitaries but also to seriously confront the question of state cooperation with loyalist killers? O'Hagan increasingly regarded the Belfast offices of the Sunday World as a cold house.....Put simply the courageous controversialist had very few outlets for his stories, some of which were of major importance."(19)

John Pilger, who served as a reporter in Vietnam, emerged with a somewhat jaundiced view of the modern media:
"There were 649 reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968 - the day that the My-Lai massacre happened - and not one of them reported it." (20)

In contrast in the US in 1994 some courageous journalists from Yorkshire Television did try and expose paedophile rings among the political elite in Nebraska but their resulting documentary ("Conspiracy of Silence", which is available on youtube) was pulled before it could be broadcast. They described in the documentary that when a number of these victims came forward talking about the paedophile ring operating among senior politicians, police, and media figures in Nebraska and Washington they found that the media set out to belittle them and as far as possible bury the story: "The whole purpose of the newspaper [articles] was to destroy" the credibility of the witnesses according to Foster Care director Carol Stitt with particular reference to the 'Omaha World Herald'.

Fred Holroyd describes in his book his huge efforts to expose what was going on in Ulster. Starting from the early 80s to I guess the present he has tramped the highways and byways of the UK and Irish media and at the end of that experience he has found himself compiling a long list of 'journalists' that he hinted are probably just government agents.(21) (Incidentally its often said that government agents are very active among security/defence/justice correspondents, diplomatic correspondents, and Northern Irish correspondents among others of course.) After trying every avenue on Fleet St for years he only managed to interest about 2 or 3 journalists in his startling revelations, despite being himself clearly well qualified to talk about these subjects.(22) Even the smaller publications proved to be keen on dismissing those allegations as just the fertile imagination of lunatics. For example it was Holroyd who rescued Wallace from jail, having read a letter by him that was discarded in one of the magazine offices as just one of the usual lunatic letters! The Belfast journalist Paul Larkin has described how some of his highly 'respected' colleagues in Belfast suspiciously went out of their way to rubbish Holroyd and Wallace's revelations, and that pattern continues: "one would have thought that his [Wallace's] rehabilitation would have been complete by Oct 1996 when his conviction for manslaughter was quashed. Wallace and Holroyd, however, are effectively shunned by most media outlets both in ireland and Britain."(23)

So this then is the real reception that your average whistleblower experiences in the mass media. It naturally follows from this that there are a lot more whistleblowers out there than the general public are aware of. And crucially there are a lot of 'conspiracies' which are proven by people coming forward to explain what is happening but the general public do not have ready access to their testimony because of this media silence. Just to take this one example, clearly if Wallace and Holroyd's story had been highlighted properly from the beginning then nobody would have spent the last two decades disparaging the 'conspiracy theory' that strong links existed between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries, a 'theory' which is only now accepted after a report on this was published earlier this year by the Ombudsman's office in Belfast.

I think this all adds up a situation where many whistleblowers end up in a kind of glass cage, where they are desperately trying to tell people what is really going on but cannot get the word out through an Orwellian media which puts much greater store on sport or sex than it does on this kind of serious political corruption. Then because the general public have no idea of the kind of practises that are going on, because the media never tells them, these whistle blowers become classed are 'cranks' or nutcases when they explain their case in the few fora, like on the internet, that is still open to them. To give a simple example of this take Hugh Murphy who is trying to highlight the fact that the big Irish unions cooperated with employers in shafting some Belfast dockers who had handled asbestos. He has been through the usual experiences with the media:
"I have tried them all, from The Irish Times, down.
I have told Vincent Brown, Fintan O’Toole and Kevin Myers, when he was with Irish Times..."
and in general about some media he concludes that "they are quelling a good story for political objectives."(24)

Then in trying to explain this to the chattering classes he discovers that:
"Why is it that when someone speaks the TRUTH - to SOME people, they are either drunk or a lunatic.
....
What is crazy about the corruption of ITGWU and the cover-up by SIPTU is that a so-called Left Wing union collaborated with the employers to SACK its own members! And that the so-called Free Thinking people in the South, when told of it, don't believe it."(25)

So I think a big factor in the growth of this 'conspiracy theory' accusation is the increasing power of the modern mass media. It is creating the agenda for what is or isn't plausible or feasible in the minds of many people, and it is doing that while systematically locking out facts and people that might challenge the prevailing viewpoint.

That the mass media in ireland have never been the clean conduit for information that the general public thinks they are can be seen from the pages of history. As early as the flood of pamphlets that undermined King Charles I, using a false account of the Irish rebellion of 1641, one commentator remarking on the media said it was "..incredible what mischief they do.." !(26) And I suppose it is but it is even more incredible to what extent the state in ireland secretly controlled the media over the centuries, totally unknown to the Irish people most of whom thought they were living in a country which, to a certain extent, cherished free speech.

Looking at that kind of picture I will begin with a letter the Chief Secretary of ireland wrote back to London in 1781: "We have hitherto, by the force of good words and with some degree of private expense, preserved an ascendancy over the press not hitherto known here, and it is of an importance equal to 10,000 times its cost..."(27) Some of this secret world began to leak in the mid 19th century, especially with the revelations concerning the spy ring run by the editor of the Freeman's Journal during the 1798 rebellion period. It became a popular subject at that time to try and hunt down the British government's moles in the Irish media, as you can read in the 'Sham Squire', a book that quotes this from the Dublin Evening Post of the time:
"This payment [the regular secret payments to the Freeman's Journal] may have been on account of proclamations inserted as advertisements; but the Duke of Wellington's correspondence, when Irish Secretary, makes no disguise that all money paid on such grounds was for purposes of corruption. This arrangement was partially relinquished from the death of Pitt; but in 1809, on the restoration of the old Tory regime, we find a Dublin journalist petitioning for a renewal. Sir A. Wellesley, addressing Sir Charles Saxton, the under-secretary, alluded to "the measures which I had in contemplation in respect to newspapers in ireland. It is quite impossible to leave them entirely to themselves; and we have probably carried our reforms in respect to publishing proclamations as far as they will go, excepting only that we might strike off from the list of those permitted to publish proclamations in the newspapers, both in town and country, those which have the least extensive circulation, and which depend, I believe, entirely upon the money received on account of proclamations. I am one of those, however, who think that it will le [be] very dangerous to allow the press in ireland to take care of itself, particularly as it has so long been in leading strings. I would, therefore, recommend that in proportion as you will diminish the profits of the better kind of newspapers, such as the Correspondent and the Freeman's Journal, on account of proclamations, you shall increase the sum they are allowed to charge on account of advertisements and other publications. [Meaning presumably other types of government advertisements, which would be more of a disguise than the obvious proclamations.] It is absolutely necessary, however, to keep the charge within the sum of ten thousand pounds per annum, voted by Parliament, which probably may easily be done when some newspapers will cease to publish proclamations, and the whole will receive a reduced sum on that account, even though an increase should be made on account of advertisements to the accounts of some. It will also be very necessary that the account of this money should be of a description always to be produced before Parliament. – Ever, yours, &c., - Arthur Wellesley."(28)

Some Secret Service papers leaked around that time show how much the British government controlled Irish newspapers all those years, this is from some preface written I think by Major Sirr describing these Secret Service receipts:
"100 original documents ...The several suborned proprietors or editors of venal newspapers and magazines of "The Correspondent", "The Patriot", "The Belfast Newsletter", "The Milesian Magazine" (Dr John Brennan), The "bought up" [these are his quotes!] "Irish Magazine" (of the "bought off" Walter Cox cum multis aliis [with many others]..."(29)
These papers include a letter from the aforementioned Walter Cox (dated Dublin 9 Jan 1815) where he says he was obliged to submit to the government to avoid another dreary imprisonment (which the Attorney General threatened would be in some remote jail). He is now to be paid £400 in America and expresses gratitude that at least his magazine didn't collapse through dullness but rather from "the overwhelming power of the British government." (30) He was actually paid an allowance by the British government on condition that he wouldn't start anymore publications, this was stopped by Peel in 1835.(31)

In 1836 a row broke out over the sale of the Derry Journal newspaper, during which it was revealed that the newspaper had always been in receipt of a secret government payment ever since it had been clandestinely purchased with government money in 1797. (By a Captain Ryan who then perished in the rebellion.) When it had been sold in 1829 one of the contract clauses said that it was being purchased "together with all claims which the Parties aforesaid have to a certain allowance heretofore annually paid by Government to the said newspaper." On 13 May 1837 the government decided that yes they would continue to pay the money secretly to the new owners of the paper.(32)

As you get into the late 19th century you find that the big newspapers like the Freeman's Journal and the Independent were the subject of endless intrigues by the different factions of the Irish Parliamentary Party. They in practise controlled the Freeman through much of this time and in a way died with it. You can read a lot of the intrigues here: http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/THealy/healy29.htm , http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/THealy/healy43.htm , and other chapters of that book. From that last reference you can read how £10,000 given to the Freeman before its collapse came from the US Secret Service, via T.P. O'Connor. Btw the 'suave' T.P., one of the big IPP 'bosses', was "known to be on friendly terms with the Prime Minister."(33)
More on the Freeman from Captain Sheehan MP:
"To show the veritable depths of baseness to which the so-called National Movement had fallen [the Irish Parliamentary Party under the secret control of the Ancient Order of Hibernians c.1909] it need only be stated that it was charged against their official organ --'The Freeman's Journal '-- that no less than eighteen members of its staff had obtained positions of profit under the Crown, including a Lord Chancellorship, an Under-secretaryship, Judgeships, Crown Prosecutorships, University Professorships, Resident Magistracies, Local Government Inspectorships, etc. In this connection it is also worthy of mention that when the premises of this concern were burnt out in the course of the Easter Week Rebellion it was reendowed for "national" purposes, with a Treasury grant of L60,000, being twice the amount which the then directors of the 'Freeman' confessed to be the business value of the property."(34)
The Irish Independent was famously owned by Tim Healy's close friend William Martin Murphy and Healy clearly had a big influence on this newspaper, and he in turn was always close to the centre of power in the UK. The paper also reflected Healy's estrangement from the IPP from about 1916 on, so it tended to follow an anti-IPP course, including attempting to crush the IPP's Freeman and backing Healy's close friend Michael Collins.(35)

Later the wine merchant Martin Fitzgerald, a friend of both Collins and Griffith's, bought the Freeman's Journal and Piaras Beaslai became the leader writer for it and at that point "a good deal of publicity was given to Mick Collins" in the paper.(36) This Martin Fitzgerald, who also had a say in the Independent later ("he controlled, I think, the Irish Independent") was in close communication with George Duggan, a banker and the father of George Chester Duggan of Dublin Castle.(37) George Chester was involved it seems in the intelligence department of the Castle, going by the fact that he audited Colonel de Winter's intelligence apparatus at one point.(38)

Of course the Secret Societies, powerful in every area of Irish life, also controlled a large swathe of the media. For example M. O'Hanlon, effectively the AOH's candidate in the East Cavan bye election, was the proprietor of the Anglo-Celt, (39) and Gaynor, the editor of the Evening Telegraph, was a prominent AOH member.(40) The IRB of course exercised its considerably muscle in this department too. 'Irish Freedom' and 'Nationality' were in fact, secretly, official IRB organs (41) ; the "'Irish World' and 'Saoghail Gael' ..[were] directly under their [IRB] influence."(42); while in the Enniscorthy Echo the editor, sub editor, and most of the staff were IRB men.(43) One of these IRB papers, The Irish World, reprinted in 1917 an interesting speech entered into the Congressional Record of the US by Mr Callaway of Texas, later highlighted by Hon. J. Hampton Moore of Pennsylvania:
"In March 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding and powder interests, and their subsidiary organisations, got together twelve men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.
These twelve men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of twenty-five of the greatest papers. The twenty-five papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper, to properly supervise and edit information regarding the question of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and the other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States army and navy, and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.
This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialise public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the army and navy under the false pretense that it is necessary. Their stock argument is that it is 'patriotism.' They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people."(44)

These forces which controlled the media of course abused that position, hence these influences in turn meant that Irish people many times came away with completely inaccurate views of important events. For example Sean Farrelly called the long time editor (1919-1960) of the Meath Chronicle, Patrick Quilty, "that irresponsible scribe"(45) in whose "ill informed journal" they printed a glowing nationalistic obituary on a guy who was actually a member of the Black Hand Gang which was a gang of criminals linked to the state.(46) And the secret to that particular mystery might lie in the fact that, according to General Sean Boylan TD, Quilty was all along a British agent.(47) Incidentally the previous editor of the Meath Chronicle, Hugh Smith, was involved in some mysterious effort to set up a fake Volunteer company in the Drumbaragh area, presumably to cause confusion in Volunteer ranks which, one could speculate, might have also been in the British government's interest at that time.(48) So in practise all kinds of manipulation of facts and information were going on all this time unknown I think to the vast majority of Irish people. This even included printing completely fictitious newspaper interviews.(49) Publicity lockouts were very common, where people or groups could get no say whatsoever for their case in any organ of the media. Even the Archbishop of Dublin complained in 1919 that "none of our newspapers dare publish the fact that I had subscribed to the Dail fund."(50) William O'Brien's party it is said got virtually no publicity for its viewpoint outside of Munster - a reference to the Cork Examiner no doubt. One of these MP's noted sadly that alongwith the Irish in the US most Irish people were very ill informed:
"In ireland, as I have said, outside Munster the truth was never allowed to reach the people."(51)

Also of course the cabal who controlled the media used that to condition the people to accept their long term political strategies. I think you can see a glimpse of that kind of grand strategy in the episode in 1918 when W.B. Yeats proposed to P.J. Little, the owner of the 'New ireland' newspaper, that "if I would turn the policy of the paper to a 'moderate, but passionate advocacy of Dominion Home Rule', Lord Wimburne would be prepared to subsidise it, to the amount of £2000."(52)

And nothing much has changed since those days imho!

Police response to Whistleblowers
So our mythical whistleblower guy gets nowhere in dealing with the media, so maybe he just goes to the proper authorities and everything is sorted out and the 'conspirators' get their legal comeuppance etc ? He contacts the FBI or police forces who take it from there, blowing apart any nascent 'conspiracy' in its tracks? Frankly this again is presuming upon a naive view of state agencies, especially the police. In practise the police as well do not 'do' conspiracy theories, generally speaking you will find that they are not interested in complaints about complex corruption say. I'm sorry but thats what I think you will find when you look into these cases.

As regards the FBI I will point to the experiences of the victims in the Omaha paedophile scandal mentioned above. According to a Nebraska State Senator the FBI and the police in that case "in fact....turned the witnesses... into the offenders so to speak, " referring to the aggressive way they demanded proof in backing up their assertions.(53)

You can read in the whistleblowing experiences of Major Holroyd how early on he gave detailed accounts of intelligence agency corruption to I think two police forces in England as well as to the RUC and to the Gardai and none of these investigations went anywhere. He even had physical evidence, including diaries and photographs, to back up his assertions but it did no good, they just weren't interested. One example was about the murder of an elderly man in Armagh which Holroyd had investigated and had written statements to back up his assertions, but:
"I had attempted to give the statement [that describes the case] to the Essex police who informed me as the crime had been committed outside their area, it was not their responsibility. As I know from bitter experience that the RUC have engaged in many cover-ups of these events, this case apparently will never be investigated, even though the informant identified himself in the statement."(54)

When Channel 4 broadcast serious allegations of a conspiracy that the RUC and loyalists paramilitaries were pretty much joint organisations, the RUC Chief Superintendent, James Nesbitt, put in charge of investigating these claims was actually involved in covering the whole thing up, according to the programmes producer:
"..the subsequent Nesbitt enquiry had been primarily interested in suppressing the truth and in limiting the damage we had inflicted on the RUC."(55).

A somewhat war weary Major Colin Wallace explained at a meeting of' 'Justice for the Forgotten' in Dublin on the 27th June 2003, that he had been through something like, I think, nine enquiries into his allegations but left the distinct impression that these proved to be nearly all whitewashes and coverups. (He harboured some hope though for the Saville tribunal in Derry and the Barron investigations in Dublin.)

You can also follow the experiences of the two whistleblowers in the RUC and the Garda Special Branch, Johnston Brown and John White respectively. Brown has written a book on his experiences of trying to investigate the links between the state and the killing of Pat Finucane - based on evidence that came his way - and his account outlines how his superiors and colleagues were either indifferent or anxious to get him killed! (56)

Det Sgt John White, meanwhile, was asked some time ago at the Morris Tribunal why he didn't blow the whistle earlier about the extensive illegal bugging by the Gardai. He replied:
"Because I knew exactly what would happen. The senior Garda authorities would turn on me like a team of dogs, if I was serious about making such a report. You look after your own. It's a big family and even when you retire you still look after your own. That is the situation and you know it."(57)

So in practise I think the depressing truth is that the police, and most state agencies, are much more interested in protected their employer, their own colleagues, and some would say even big businesses, rather than trying to genuinely investigate any 'conspiracy'. This obviously means again that 'conspiracies' can flourish that bit easier in our modern society, because the powers that be are so disinterested in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

In general too I think another issue involved in labeling people "conspiracy theorists" involves this very naive attitude that I think the general public often have about state agencies. It seems to this observer anyway that virtually any serious criticism of the police, for example, is treated as ipso facto a conspiracy theory. The general public in western countries seem almost to be brainwashed with a feeling that the police are there to investigate crime and catch the bad guys and thats it, the feeling that they could be the bad guys committing the crime is a view that is simply not tolerated in some quarters. I think this is partly because the media drill this concept into people constantly. An instance of this occurred on the Duffy show on RTE radio some time ago. During a discussion one of his guests said that she went to the gardai asking them to intervene to protect her son who was being threatened by some drug dealers over money that he owed them. The gardai simply told the mother to pay the debt and were entirely disinterested in knowing about the drug dealers who the mother was able to name. For her pains Joe Duffy simply shouted at her "I don't believe you", because apparently Joe Duffy knew for certain that police forces are incapable of such an act.(58) There are plenty of examples of that in the Irish media, local and national. When P J Brogan, one of the Donegal victims of the gardai, tried to tell his story to the local press in Donegal he was simply told by one of the leading reporters on the local newspaper that they never carry stories like his critical of the gardai.(59) It follows then that people who have grown up with this media silence naturally enough find it difficult to believe anyone who tries to articulate a completely different version of events.

I think too that another factor in this is the big influence that a generation of TV programs have had on people. Clearly your average western citizen has probably viewed thousands of hours of the Sweeney, Kojak, Hill Street Blues, Morse, Frost, Law and Order etc etc and has subconsciously absorbed these fictional accounts as being representative of how police forces normally operate. But in fact they are fictional and the large companies that control this output have no interest in allowing people to get a more 'conspiratorial' view of events. For instance the writer of the Sweeney, Troy Kennedy-Martin, realised how corrupt the system was but couldn't reflect this accurately because "we were getting a little bit of pressure from on high. The Metropolitan police was part of a structure then which was almost impervious to any kind of criticism." In fact it was later found out that that unit in the Metropolitan Police was completely corrupt, taking a cut of all armed robberies committed in the area etc etc. So the TV program is a sanitised view of the reality, the reality being a lot more corrupt, this is what the writer really thought was going on:

"I went, as we all did, to some of the do's. And there was this, I thought, rather unhealthy alliance between 'the bar', barristers that worked at the criminal bar, and judges and senior police officers, you know it was, to no small extent, masonic. Certainly a freemasonry in terms of the way they reacted and related to each other. We did hint at that from time to time. I think we pushed it as far as we could."(60)

The powers that be in ireland are particularly keen on keeping a close eye on what is permitted in fictional TV dramas, as this account in the Sunday Times about the RTE drama 'Proof' shows:
"Somebody evidently decided to cut this material from the final version in order to make the show more palatable. But to whom: viewers or politicians?
Thanks to a series of fortuitous circumstances, the original scripts for the four-part series have landed in my possession. Offering an intriguing glimpse of what the show might have looked like, they make fascinating reading.
.....the storyline revolved around an all-guns-blazing hunt for a stolen computer disc.
The disc was eagerly sought — by its owners and an investigative journalist among others — because it contained information linking a sex-slave racket and an international bank in a conspiracy to divert 25m euro in laundered funds into the election campaign of Myles Carrick, a charismatic Irish opposition leader played by Bryan Murray.
....
[In the revised script:] "This portrait of a noble statesman who is exposed as a victim of circumstance rather than a willful wrongdoer will no doubt have comforted the numerous Irish politicians currently facing allegations of malfeasance at Dublin Castle or the Four Courts, and their numerous colleagues who fear they could be next.
In the original script, a somewhat more plausible scenario was envisaged. The central conspiracy is no less fanciful but, crucially, Carrick is the taoiseach. He is acutely aware of the fact that he has been bought and paid for by big business, because he agreed the deals personally. His only concern is that nobody else discovers the terms and conditions under which he is contracted to his generous sponsors.
[The original writer left in frustration and the last two episodes were rewritten by new writers]....
The otherwise inexplicable neutering of the show’s original script suggests that the price RTE is prepared to pay for extra resources is to adopt a meek and docile attitude towards its political masters.
Editorial calls made on a lightweight thriller like Proof may seem peripheral to lofty questions of broadcasting policy, but they are indicative of a wider mindset. If RTE bosses are afraid to ruffle political feathers through fiction, what’s the likelihood of them doing so through current affairs coverage? "(61)

So this deliberately sanitised version of the truth, which is what we are getting in the media even in fiction, is the version that is in most peoples heads right now, and it is this mindset which prints out 'conspiracy theory' whenever a different view of the police or the political system is put forward. For all we know the reality could be a lot worse, after all if you think about the current era, as regards drug smuggling say, it is much the same as the Prohibition era in the US, and yet no self respecting gangster of that time survived very long without having the Chief of Police in his pocket.

To find out whats really going on you sometimes have to wait for regimes to fall, even the fall of the Royal Irish Constabulary in ireland in 1922 threw up a few interesting facts. It turned out that the RIC (and the Dublin Metropolitan Police) were by no means just involved in gathering evidence to use in court (which was obviously the posture they put on for public consumption) they had their own ways of dealing with people they disliked. Whenever a person came into their radar as a Sinn Fein suspect they immediately endeavoured to get them sacked from their employment, (62) and approached everybody else in the 'suspects' orbit in order to put the squeeze on their targets, using "all kinds of intimidation on the men [of the Volunteers] through approach to parents, employers, even to the clergy."(63) It was also a routine practise for the RIC to blackmail any publican who looked as if he might lose his vintners license because of repeated breaches of the licensing laws. The RIC identified such businesses, which were hanging on by a 'cobweb' to use their phrase, and of course promised never to raid them if they agreed to pass on any information that might be overheard there. (64) I think this is an important precedent because obviously in modern times the state has a great capacity for closing businesses using much more onerous tax, health and safety, and planning laws than existed at that time, which leaves a great potential for this kind of blackmail in our own era.

Agent provocateurs were quite heavily used by the RIC it seems:
"....the police in ireland were part of the British military establishment. They were armed with rifles and revolvers. Their policy was to promote crime and, as often happened to commit crime and have the blame placed on some unfortunate local person. There are many cases of this kind on record, but the House of Commons would not make them public.....[Proportionally the number of agent provocateurs in the RIC were few] but they were to be found in every area of ireland."(65)

They also dappled in the odd conspiracy. The writer of the above quotes, Captain Lawrence Nugent, relates that when his group had seized back - in an armed raid - the HQ of the National Volunteers from the AOH (c.1918 I think) he was approached by an Inspector of the RIC with a proposition. The Inspector asked him to launch a similar raid on AOH headquarters in Dublin, the bargain being that they could keep everything they seized except the register which the RIC wanted. This was obviously to remain an entirely secret mutually beneficial arrangement, which as it happens Nugent declined.(66) The police, I think particularily the DMP, at the time were very heavily infiltrated by the AOH, which was anti-conscription among other things. This meant that the powers that be would have wanted to weed them out in order to take back control of the police.(67)

This was nothing when you compare it to what British army intelligence were doing in ireland during the same period. Not long before the Truce the head of the Auxiliaries came forward to reveal something of what was going on, as reported in the New Statesman in May 1921:
"According to General Crozier, the whole system of military government in ireland is a vast conspiracy of silence and lies, in which everyone from top to bottom is involved. ....[As an example of that atmosphere he said that oftentimes expelled army cadets were let back in a short time later because of the blackmail information they had on their superiors.]....
Take, for example, the case of the "Drumcondra shootings" when two men, Kennedy and Murphy, admittedly innocent of any crime were taken out and shot in cold blood. General Crozier tells us that, at a subsequent enquiry at a military court, the evidence in favour of the officer accused of the crime was deliberately "manufactured" by the military authorities in Dublin Castle. It was all arranged and rehearsed, and he himself was present at one of the "rehearsals", which took place before a prominent officer of the Intelligence Department."(68)

Another scheme the RIC indulged in during the troubles was to sponsor criminal gangs, in County Meath anyway, presumably to create a lawless type of atmosphere, which would then be blamed on the IRA and justify harsher security measures against them. Also it might have been done just to scare the populace, encouraging them to go the police with information. Anyway this was the kind of conversation that the Duc de Stacpoole found himself having with General Sean Boylan, the head of the IRA in Meath of course, when Boylan's men were returning all his stolen possessions. Boylan explained that the police were disinterested in finding them and that in fact it was more likely that the RIC were linked to the robbers.(69) I think as well that this kind of huge agent provocateur thing might have been behind the famous Black Hand gang that terrorised north Meath during the troubles. This was a large criminal gang that contained AOH and Sinn Fein members, ex British soldiers, and even some IRA members which indulged in such amazing exploits as blowing up labourers cottages at the same time as the whole county was swarming with British military and the Black and Tans. It isn't therefore much of a surprise to find that the gang seemed to have some connection to the security forces. I say that because one IRA Volunteer, Joseph Martin, was given a warning notice by the Black and Tans which was signed by the Black Hand Gang.(70) In any case they were eventually put out of business by the IRA after they had murdered a Mr Clinton near Moynalty.(71)

But thats not the half of it, some other RIC practises were a lot worse. Eugene Bratton an RIC Constable based in Navan during the Troubles, tells a tale which involves his own RIC colleagues in the station murdering one of the few decent Black and Tans and even their own Sergeant Keighery. Also three senior local RIC members, including District Inspector Egan and his brother County Inspector Egan, personally murdered the Postmaster in Navan called Hodgett. Hodgett had refused a position in the post office to the daughter of the RIC Head Constable Queenan, and it was because of that he was killed, even though he had no connection whatsoever to the IRA. Of course the murderers were then placed in charge of the 'investigation' into the crime and proceeded to scrape away blood stains etc. The RIC in Meath also planted false evidence on, and then charged, the Crown Prosecutor in the county, Lord Dunsany who again had no connection to the IRA, because he was inclined to question police witnesses too closely. In short the RIC considered themselves "kings in their own area" and really did whatever they liked, (72) knowing of course that it is easy for them to cover up their tracks considering the power of the police in the justice system.

I think then that the RIC were certainly up to no good a lot of the time, but evenso I think there is some evidence that the powers that be were deliberately setting up the RIC for a fall in the 1916-21 period. After all it was manned almost entirely by Irishmen and the British government seemed to feel no great care towards them when the going got hot in ireland. I think one of their tricks was, after a certain point, to make the RIC deliberately unpopular and the focus of the IRA's efforts and the publics encomium to a degree that actually seems unfair. Maybe the government was afraid of their loyalty and wanted the conflict to develop into a nationalist v. RIC clash before nationalist and patriotic sympathies could develop within the RIC itself. Lawrence Nugent, at this time heavily involved in IRA intelligence work in Dublin, stated that:
"By every means in their power the Dublin Castle authorities tried to cause conflicts between the people and the police."(73) How they did this he doesn't say but I think it is interesting that the Irish Volunteers in the 1920-21 period - which perchance might have been infiltrated at a high level by the Castle - issued an instruction that all operations had to be passed by HQ with the exception that the RIC were to be shot on sight, which presumably then deliberately spared the British military.(74) De Winter's impression was that "everything was done to vilify and calumniate the police," which again seems to surprisingly leave out the British government and the military in these insults.(75) Maybe as well it is worth considering this passage in a circular sent out by Dublin Castle to the various RIC Head Constables around ireland, outlining the methods to be employed in dealing with Ginnell's cattle driving campaign: "It was essential that people should be roughly handled."(76) By these means they deliberately landed the RIC in it I think.

Hence I respectfully submit that when you look at real history, and the experience of other countries, you have to come to the conclusion that police forces can become incredibly corrupt, and the centre of huge byzantine conspiracies, which you will never see if your horizons remains fixed on the standard role of the village policeman in the justice system.

Technology
Obviously on the internet and elsewhere there is a lot of speculation that intelligence agencies etc have access to very advanced technology which may be harming the health of dissidents using high tech gadgetry like even microwave weapons. Most of the people who then talk about those things are of course in turn laughed at as 'conspiracy theorists', or even the 'tin foil hat brigade' etc etc! But the thing is that there is, in my opinion anyway, pretty compelling information out there, from pretty respected sources, on this that cannot be laughed off so easily? As an example recently Pravda in Russia published an article which was actually illustrated with a picture of a person wearing a 'tinfoil hat' and yet they did not see any humour in that whatsoever. The article was a very serious short survey of the kind of advanced technologies that it seems are being used against dissidents today. A few bits and pieces from it:
"Major-general of the reserve of the Russian Federal Custodial Service Boris Ratnikov tells that Russia and other countries work on making special devices that turn humans into zombies.
It was already twenty years ago that mass media first mentioned the strange word combination ‘psychotronic weapon’. All information about such weapons arrived from military men transferred to the reserve and from researchers that were not officially recognized by the Russian Academy of Sciences. They usually told about some generators that could make people muddleheaded even when they were distanced at hundreds of kilometers.
Such devices were said to be able to control people’s behavior, seriously impair psyche and even drive people to death
...
Boris Ratnikov says that Russia has been working on the psychotronic impact upon humans since the 1920s. ...Thousands of brilliant researchers were working on the problem in the twenty secret centers.
....
At the same time, the official science still insists that psychotronic is mere charlatanry. Boris Ratnikov is sure however that in less than ten years psychotronic weapons will grow more dangerous than nuclear and atomic weapons.
It is known that several researchers are still investigating the problem in Russia.
.....
In North Korea, the Service for Security and Control of Foreign Policy conducts experiments with special oscillators that can modify functions of human organs.
In Pakistan, special services can use a special device that can cause dysfunctions of human organs and physiological systems and even cause people’s death.
The Spanish intelligence finances studies of the effect of physical factors on human organs and human brain with the view of making devices to cause dysfunctions of organs and mental transformations.
....
Many countries posses information about secret use of a distance impact upon individuals and large groups of people. And these are not at all mere experiments but also practical application of technologies for various political and military purposes. Such technologies grow more perfect thanks to scientific and technological innovations.
Boris Ratnikov says that he once saw a KGB’s classified document about potential threats and a psychotronic generator. The document said that the mechanism of a psychotronic generator is based upon the resonance of response functions of human organs, the heart, liver, kidneys and brain."(77)

Obviously a lot of dissidents have been alleging this for years and the standard reply has been that while things like microwave devices might have been developed, and used, in the former USSR yet in the west there is no question of those governments developing or using such technolgies. But of course they'd say that wouldn't they !!!, such denials don't mean very much :-). For decades the citizens of the west were assured that the huge western nuclear arsenal was of course never used in operational combat, it was only there as a deterrent in case the Communist Bloc used it against them. This of course was a very necessary piece of reassurance when you consider the long term effect of releases of radioactivity and all that. Then after the first gulf war it was revealed that the west had indeed used a type of nuclear weapon in that conflict, Depleted Uranium in ammunition, which went on to cause all the nightmarish injuries that radiation releases are famous for. It then slowly leaked out that the US had been contemplating DU weaponry since 1943, had deployed them in weapons systems since 1968, (78) test fired them on US soil in the 60s (79), and they had been used extensively in combat in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. (80) Hence its remarkable to what extent the powers that be in the west can successfully keep secret over a long number of years its, what might be called, reckless enthusiasm to use these horrific weapons against their enemies. So now we find that in this latest war it is coming to the fore, and accepted in the mainstream media, that they are extensively using these mysterious microwave weapons.(81) So how can we be sure that US intelligence agencies for example, have not used those things before? Is it not usually the case that the US would deploy these weapons in secret within those agencies long before their use would be publicly acknowledged in open warfare?

As I see it anyway the fact is that there is a huge time lag involved here, like in the case of DU it seems to take about 30 years before the civilian world gets up to speed on the kind of technologies in use in the military/ intelligence field, especially in the US. Dr Robert Duncan, a "Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Harvard University & Formerly Defence Scientist with the US government", has interviewed personally some 650 people in his research on the use of these esoteric technologies on US citizens and he has found that there is "at least a 35 year gap between civilian and military technology in this area."(82) We seem to live in a world where in civilian technology, in some areas anyway, precious little seems to change or improve all that much, say in medicine for example, but in the world of the US military budgets the skies the limit! Look at aircraft speeds for example. The fastest civilian aircraft now flying is the Cessna Citation X which travels at a top speed of Mach 0.92 (83), while the fastest acknowledged military aircraft is usually said to be the SR-71 Blackbird travelling at Mach 3.35. Note too that that Cessna was first rolled out in 1996 (84) while the Blackbird dates from 1964 (85) showing again this huge military-civilian technology gap. Btw the Blackbird has officially retired, and as such some might say I should compare it then to Concorde in the civilian sphere but while the latter has certainly gone it is generally felt that the Blackbird has been replaced by an aircraft that flies as fast as Mach 6 (86) or even Mach 8 (87), so comparing like with like would give you an even greater disparity. As time goes on this gap seems to widen all the time, the gap between the white acknowledged civilian technologies and the classified military technologies. For instance as far as I know this aircraft speed gap would have been much narrower at the time Concorde was rolled out in the 70s, and much narrower again at the time of the civilian flying boats flying into Foynes in the 30s.

Surely the logic of it then is that people should be nervous about dismissing specific allegations about the use of advanced technology ? And should acknowledge that history shows that the governments in the west are extremely good at keeping these things secret over very long periods of time, but yet are surprising ruthless and irresponsible in the way that they deploy them? As such maybe there is something to the allegations about the use of those weapons against dissidents, maybe even about the deployment of microchips in people (to track and maybe to influence peoples health slightly, I'm not saying they can control a person that way !), and certainly it is perfectly clear that many of the big western intelligence agencies, and maybe even some cults, have the capacity to implant and erase memories and even create split personalities in people using hypnosis, drugs and contrived episodes of physical and psychological trauma. Not a nice thought I know but the world we live in I think!(88)

Secret Societies
Another issue that crops up in this 'conspiracy theory' criticism is the role of secret societies. Obviously whenever anybody mentions them, particularly the Freemasons, a 'conspiracy theory' alert goes off and you might as well be discussing alien landings! But this is surely unfair, there are and have always been secret societies, and in ireland at any rate, they have frequently exercised great power over our political destiny, so it seems unfair not to be able to speculate about the role they might play nowadays. For example in the tumultuous 1770-1800 period in ireland the Freemasons seemed to have if anything the dominant role in the Volunteers (89), Defenders (90), and United Irishmen (91) and as such must have exercised a crucial role in Irish politics at that time. This role seemed to have continued afterwards as Larry Conlon writes in Riocht na Mídhe:
"Freemasonry has had a significant if not always obvious influence on Irish history and society.......[later, after the 1798 period] it became an increasingly powerful and influential organisation. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that many of the influential figures in Irish society and indeed internationally were Freemasons."(92)

Irish historical sources contain much gossip about what the Freemasons were allegedly up to which for some reason does not tend to be written about or reflected on by most modern Irish historians. Maud Gonne for example, commenting on events leading up to WWI in France, where she was then living, said that King Edward reconciled the UK's Scottish rite of Freemasonry with the French Grand Orient rite, the secret back drop to the Entente Cordiale, which in her opinion "made war inevitable".(93)
If talking about Freemasonry makes you automatically a 'conspiracy theorist' then there seems to be a lot of the latter in Irish history ! :-) Even Sean Lemass, the future Taoiseach of course, speaking in 1929 claimed that Mexico "fell into the hands of the Freemasons" at the same time "that foreign capitalists went into Mexico to exploit the resources of the country in their own interests." He went on to talk about a similar scenario here:
"Col Claude Cane Grand High Master of the Freemasons in ireland announced the fact that Masonry was booming here; that Freemasons held positions of power in government departments and enterprises that seriously affected the countries interests. Some time ago the official organ of Cumann na nGaedhal launched an attack on the Knights of Columbanus, because, it said, they wanted to become a second Freemason organisation. The 'Irish Times' next day reminded Mr Cosgrave that he was dependent for his position as President on a majority in the Dail that was composed of six Freemasons. If there was likely to be a situation here as in Mexico, in which Freemasons would dominate the country, he [Lemass] hoped the Irish people would show to it the same attitude as the people of Mexico had done."(94)

But obviously there are other secret societies that have had a great bearing on modern Irish history. The Ancient Order of Hibernians was one such society that is said to have completely dominated the Irish scene from around 1906-1916 say. It is reported to have been "a secret sectarian society that had the country in its vicious grip" during those years.(95)

But the big beast of the secret societies in ireland was soon to be the Irish Republican Brotherhood. This 'Brotherhood' - a word that is usually used in a certain context internationally - had huge influence over the Irish Labour Movement for example with members like James Connolly (96), William O'Brien (97) and P.T. Daly etc. Also the IRB had set up a special unit to infiltrate Irish labour unions in order "to get hold of men in important positions such as Power Stations, Railways and Transport Dock workers etc, .....[in order] to undermine the Cross Channel Unions" etc.(98)
The IRB had considerable influence over Irish arts, numbering among their members such luminaries as W.B.Yeats (99), Sean O'Casey (100), Charles Kickham, Ernest Blythe, and Piaras Beaslai, not to mention the obvious people like Pádraig Pearse.
Then an incredible number of Irish nationalist politicians of the period were in the IRB including Joseph Biggar (101) and Tim Healy (also apparently in the Invincibles (102)) from the Irish Parliamentary Party; Michael Davitt (a Supreme Council member of the IRB), Frank Byrne, Secretary, and Patrick Egan, Treasurer, of the Land League (Dr Hamilton Williams and other Land Leaguers were high officials in the Invincibles.(103) The Invincibles of course were an offshoot of the IRB.); Arthur Griffith ("at one time fairly high up in the councils of that organisation"(104), he apparently left fed up with its toleration of senior informers in its ranks.(105)), and obviously you can also write in nearly all the other big names of the 1916-24 period like de Valera, Cathal Brugha (those last two were at least at one time quite senior IRB people), the future Irish President Sean T O'Kelly (always a key IRB man and later an important member of the Knights of Columbanus), Liam Lynch, and obviously Michael Collins (of course President of the Supreme Council of the IRB), Bulmer Hobson, Dr Patrick McCartan, Mulcahy, Sean MacKeon etc etc.

This meant that a lot of the history of the time was in turn fashioned by the clandestine machinations involving this secret society. For instance the Irish Parliamentary Party tried to get control of the IRB at one time and it was at that point that the Invincibles broke off.(106) When relations between France and the UK were strained c.1900 it is said that the French government maintained contact with the IRB with a view to diverting UK military resources into ireland.(107) Also it is obvious now that the Redmondite takeover of the Irish Volunteers in 1914 was in fact "merely a gloss for the continuance of the old duel between the A.O.H. and the I.R.B."(108) This secret duel even extended to the IRB infiltrating the AOH in the c.1916-17 period. These IRB moles then later aggravated the collapse of the AOH's power which happened a little later, c.1920: "The members of the IRB who had joined the AOH were now able to bring the greater number of branches in their districts into line with the general breakaway."(109) Obviously then the Irish Civil War took off on the back of a split in the IRB - with Liam Lynch opposing the Treaty in the Supreme Council of that body which otherwise was mostly pro-Treaty - and in the opinion of some exacerbated the divisions at that time. One such commentator, Frank Henderson of the Dublin IRA, ruefully remarked in after years:

"We decided that [the] IRB had done the real damage. It had split the army. They now saw the reason for the Church condemning Secret Societies." (110)

The story of Irish Secret Societies and the modern Irish state doesn't end with the IRB either, a number of other secret organisations appear on the scene with apparently the same behind the scenes influence. This is a report of a debate held at the 1933 Fianna Fail Ard Fheis on the reported influence of the Knights of Columbanus:

"Mr James Comyn contended that the Knights of Columbanus and the Freemasons were a menace to the State.
...
He personally had been more affected by the machinations of the Knights than anybody else. Patronage in the Courts was bestowed on the Knights.

Not one brief had been given by the Attorney General except to Knights of Columbanus and there was not one of those Knights to whom he gave patronage who had not been an active enemy of the Movement from 1916 to 1923.
.....[De Valera denied that there was any such influence and claimed that for example no member of the Executive was a Knight]...
"Mr Comym: I say it is a fact.
Mr de Valera: I say it is not a fact.
Mr Comyn: I maintain it as a fact.

Mr O'Connor, said that as a Secret Society, the Knights of Columbanus, they must presume, wanted to get control of the Fianna Fail organisation. It was to be presumed also that they had in fact got control of the Civil Service, and "since the mutiny many officers in the Free State army are now connected with it." If they got hold of FF they would control the whole state absolutely.

It was generally believed that the Knights of Columbanus were working determinedly to get control of every department of the Civil Service, and it was also said that almost every Catholic member of the legal profession was a member. (cries "No.")

Mr P.T. MacGinley ('Cu Uladh') seconding, said he was convinced that the knights aimed at getting control of affairs of the State.

Mr E McGawran (Dublin) stated that he had evidence that at a place where he worked, which came under the direction of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, and in which 458 people were employed, all the people who held good positions did so not because of their ability or national outlook, but because they were Knights of Columbanus.

Mr Lemass (Minister for Industry and Commerce): name the department.

Mr McGauran: The ESB.

Mr Lemass: I have nothing to do with employment there."(111)

Clearly these delegates, having been through the mill of the Civil War period, were extremely interested and nervous about the role of secret societies, rather than dismissing such influence as unlikely or unimportant as many modern commentators do. Its like the more they knew about Irish politics the more they guessed that these societies were running the show. That the FF bigwigs seemed to have something to hide on this score was shown by Frank O'Connor writing in 1942:

"Every year that has passed, particularly since de Valera's rise to power, has strengthened the grip of the gombeen man, of the religious secret societies like Knights of Columbanus..."(112)

So going by this history I cannot see how people can be so dismissive of allegations of widespread influence held by secret societies, I mean anything is possible ?

author by Brianpublication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 08:06author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Underestimating the Complexity of Politics
In the case of 'conspiracy theories' in modern politics my contention here is that politics is simply more complicated and has more twists and turns - and duplicity - attached to it than the general public sometimes give it credit for. What I mean is that often a particular 'theory' automatically becomes a 'conspiracy theory' because what it entails is seen as complicated and therefore politicians couldn't possibly be that clever to pull off this particular 'theory' or plot say. I know all types are involved in politics, and it would be only fair to say that not all of them are that brainy or whatever, but some people at a high level of the political/security apparatus can, I respectfully submit, act very cleverly in the way that they manipulate people, and can pull off long term political stunts and goals. To give you an example of what I mean here is a fascinating quote from Jean Monnet, one of the great European 'statesmen' behind the creation of the EU:
"Europe's nations should be guided towards the superstate without their peoples realising what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each described as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation."(113)
So what people imagine are random or confused acts are, often enough, skillfully planned long term political manoeuvres. Of course there are errors and confusion too but my guess is that people generally under, rather than over, estimate the degree to which they are being conned by their political leaders. Some of these leaders are simply cleverer than people give them credit for, and the political game in your average western democracy is right now more a matter of manipulating large numbers of people than it is anything else.

To give you another example consider the agreement reached between the British and Irish governments at their mysterious conference at Baldonnel aerodrome in c.1974. In 2003 Major Fred Holroyd, formerly of British army intelligence of course and relying in this instance on later contacts, revealed that the two governments had jointly agreed to criticize each other in the media with respect to their handling of the IRA. Specifically it was agreed that the British government would criticize the Irish government's supposedly lax attitude in cracking down on the IRA. The beauty of this is that it would strengthen the Irish government's position, and all these politicians knew this of course, because the Irish public would rally round their government when it was being attacked like this by the old enemy. This then would nicely disguise the fact that the Irish government had sold out to the British, at the same meeting, with respect to their control over Irish intelligence matters.(114) Also, I would contend that it provided a nice explanation that the UK government could sell to their own electorate for their failure to stop the IRA campaign. They obviously blamed the presence of a porous border and the provision of safe houses in the South, while in fact its possible that the British government, at some high level, was actually supporting rather than crushing the IRA campaign, for its own reasons.(115)

That they often have such reasons you can see from these comments by the 71 year old English MEP Ashley Mote, speculating on the real causes of some recent airport security scares:
"We all know modern governments welcome, perhaps even contrive, what are known as "beneficial crises". Once an apparent threat arises, they can then introduce legislation and regulations which would not otherwise be tolerated by the general public.....We have to ask ourselves this: who is fighting against democracy? The terrorists? The British government? Or both of them?....There is undeniable evidence to support claims of such a sub-plot here. The British government is allowing a level of terrorist threat to continue – presumably believing it can be kept under control – so that it can complete a programme of draconian legislation to control all the rest of us.
The ultimate purpose is obvious. Previously legitimate peaceful protest and dissent will become much more difficult, if not impossible, in the future."(116)

When you consider political practices like that doesn't it sometimes look as if the general public are more like hamsters spinning around on these evil geniuses' caged playground rather than anything else? And they obviously rely upon the fact that the general public don't realize how conspiratorial and manipulative these politicians can be?

In fact I would suggest that it is frequently a very complex affair trying to unravel the true goings on in your average political drama. So complex in fact that I think sometimes it helps to understand what is going on by dividing up the actors in a given drama into various stages, say three, with a different explanation of the truth being given at each stage. I know that sounds awfully wafflish but if you read this article about the Irish rebellion of 1641 maybe you can see where I am coming from: http://indymedia.ie/article/84054 . Maybe it might be instructive to take a simple example, I will take the question of the British government's now pretty obvious support for Loyalist paramilitary groups during the recent troubles. I would suggest that there are maybe three different explanations given here, with the last one being nearest the truth:
a) The general public were of course told all that time that the British Army were there as honest brokers, trying to keep separated two groups of paramilitaries who were constantly at each others throats, and if it wasn't for their supposedly heroic defence of law and order there would have been a civil war. This is the line the general public got, and was followed virtually without fail by the mass media, and was of course the normal pack of lies that you expect from an advanced western democracy. I'm sorry to be so cynical but I doubt if that simple first explanation, the one the general public gets at the time, is ever a truthful explanation in modern times.

b) But then the question arises how could they have kept the truth a secret? Thousands of army and police personnel, not to mention politicians North and South and in London, must have known that the standard public explanation was a lie. We know now that many, possibly all, Loyalist paramilitary attacks were facilitated by the security forces 'freezing' areas to allow the paramilitaries to do their stuff unmolested by the security forces. But clearly then there must have been huge numbers of military and police who could see perfectly well that these attacks coincided with helpful enabling security arrangements that their superiors were instructing them to undertake. Bear in mind now we are talking about mostly completely innocent targets, taxi men, musicians etc etc, it really is amazing the low numbers that spoke out against this is it not? Again you have to factor in the huge number of people nowadays that hear nothing and see nothing that could jeopardies their pension etc. But the interesting thing here is the compartmentalisation of the real information and the spreading around of a false explanation of what was going on. Obviously you couldn't tell these personnel that there were no links between the army and the Loyalist paramilitaries, the explanation the general public was getting, instead these personnel were encouraged to think, I suspect, that the Loyalist paramilitaries were secretly supported as proxy armies of the British government fighting against the IRA. Then the security force personnel were happy enough to follow their orders and keep quiet, anything to hit back at the IRA which was seen to be the real enemy.

c) So hence you have two explanations spread around simultaneously, one for the general public, and one for the security personnel, the latter needing a different explanation because they had access to information which meant they wouldn't believe version (a). But I think that this is only stage 2, the security force personnel were lied to as well. Imagine if those personnel had known at the time that the IRA's security section, the 'nutting squad', was all along run by the British army, a fact that is now widely acknowledged? (117) Only a tiny number of them knew secrets like that and if they did know I'm thinking that they would have begun posing some serious questions about what the whole business was about. At the really high level in London it looks now that they were playing all sorts of political games, similar I think to the 'Strategy of Tension' tactic, the support of the security services for both sides in their paramilitary conflict, which was being played out in Italy at the same time.

So that is maybe a model to apply to understand some of these conspiracies ? Various groups know a portion of the truth, and they are then given different explanations, a process helped by a powerful compartmentalisation of information. After all, if you think about, when you organise information on a 'need to know' basis you make it very easy to organise a conspiracy! I hope to show two other examples of this, Hungary in 1956 and the German Plot in Ireland in 1918, divided again into three stages or explanations of what was happening:

Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956
a) The Soviet Union obviously invaded Hungary in 1956 and although the US actually never did anything to stop the Soviets, naturally they were seen to be appalled at the USSR's action. They blamed the UN for their inaction, as explained here by Conor Cruise O'Brien, working at that time as a leading Irish diplomat:
"Eisenhower, though rejecting any military reaction, was under pressure to find forms of reaction which would be showy and moralistic, but safe. ...To suggestions that the United States should intervene in Eastern Europe after the Russian intervention, Eisenhower's spokesman replied that the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, was a law-abiding power, bound to act only under the constraints of the Charter of the UN. In fact, as those who talked in those terms well knew, there are no such constraints. The Charter allows a power which feels threatened by the actions of another power, to act in legitimate self-defence: as the United States had been prepared to do over Korea, whatever the UN might have done. Still the picture of the United States as constrained by inaction by the UN Charter lent dignity to a policy of inaction and was highly congenial to the popular mood, both in the United States and Western Europe. ...
The matter was first brought before the Security Council and a resolution ordering the Soviet Union to withdraw its forces from Hungary was duly vetoed by the Soviet Union. Western spokesmen then spoke of the parlous condition of the UN "paralysed by the Soviet veto" and this was much healthier, from the point of view of the United States, than a public discussion of the position of the United States could have been. ...
[The United States publicly] deplored the failure of the Security Council to bring the aggression to an end. The Security Council had been "paralysed by the Soviet veto" and there was vague talk about the need to bring about "Charter revision".
The point of the whole exercise was, of course, to shift the blame for letting down the Hungarians away from the United States and on to the UN, which has in reality no material power to take any action at all.....[which amounted to] the shabby and dishonest series of transactions directed by the Americans but supported by the Europeans through which the sacrifice of the Hungarians had been achieved. "

b) The interesting thing is that among the diplomats at the UN they well knew that the public were told a pack of lies about all this. So they get a completely different explanation from the US, as O'Brien also describes:
"He [the US arm-twister at the UN] offered no bribes, nor did he use any threats. He simply offered me an analysis of the situation in Hungary in this brief period, when Imre Nagy was apparently seeking to extricate his country from the Warsaw Pact and trying to enlist the support of the United States. My arm-twister told me that Imre Nagy deserved absolutely no support or encouragements from any democratic country. He was as bad a communist as any other. Whether he was left in charge or replaced by some other communist would make absolutely no difference to anyone.
I was quite surprised by this discussion. Virtually the entire western press was highly supportive of Nagy, at this time, and wished him well in his efforts to liberate his country from the communist yoke. Nobody in the west was anything but supportive of Imre Nagy in public [last two words in italics]. But my little arm-twister was telling me something different and what he was telling me was correct in that it reflected the substance, as distinct from the style, of United States policy at this point.
...[The US Republican administration made very warlike noises in Eastern Europe and elsewhere but] The Republicans did not really expect to roll back any part of it [the Iron Curtain]. But they did want to give the impression that the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, had a policy for ending communist rule and were actively engaged in promoting it. This message would be highly congenial to many Americans of Eastern European origins, and more vaguely agreeable to many other Americans. In other words, it was a foreign policy for internal consumption. ....
Eisenhower seems to have decided very early on that no material encouragement was to be given to the Hungarians. Whatever those broadcasts might have encouraged them to hope, their hopes must now be dashed. ...
Letting down the Hungarians was a tricky business, in the light of previous propaganda, but the letting-down was accomplished in stages with considerable skill. While the fate of Imre Nagy and his colleagues remained in doubt, the United States government professed to see the situation as troubling but unclear. Privately and to friendly governments, the message was the same as that conveyed by my own arm-twister: Nagy, not to be trusted, as bad a communist as any of them. Reading the American signals correctly, the Russians decided on military intervention in Hungary, in the well-founded belief that the American reactions would be political, not military." (118)

c) But this second explanation that was given to these insiders, that Imre Nagy was not really different to the usual Communist leaders, is again, I suspect, not at all the truth. The more you look at the Cold War the more you are struck by how much both sides cooperated with each other in secret.(119) In particular it is now well known that Europe had been long ago divided into spheres of influence, which allowed the Soviet Union, by agreement with the west, to do whatever it wanted in Hungary. In fact there was talk in the air about these 'spheres of influence' before WWII had even started! (120) I would contend that it is more likely that this invasion was convenient at the time for both powers as they struggled to deepen their control over the countries allocated to them under these spheres of influence i.e. Eastern Europe given to Russia and Western Europe to the US and the UK. The sight of tanks in Budapest naturally concentrated the minds of the peoples in the East, while the US, at the exact same time, was able to introduce secret 'gladio' armies, attached to the NATO structure, which in time helped them to quietly control the peoples of western Europe.(121) The spectacle of the Soviet invasion of Hungary was no doubt just the trick to persuade the western European leaders to go alongwith these secret NATO arrangements. Its far more likely that this is no accident, I would suggest that the US knew all along what was going to happen in Hungary, and events transpired exactly as they intended.

The 1918 German Plot in Ireland.
a) "Just before daybreak on the morning of Friday, April 12th, 1918, a German submarine surfaced near an island off the coast of Co.Clare. Out clambered my great-uncle, Joe Dowling, and proceeded to maneuver his small rubber boat onto the beach of Crab Island.
As dawn broke he realised that he was not on the mainland and while he was wondering what to do next he saw a fishing boat putting out from the mainland, some half a mile away. He waved at the crew and soon after they came and picked him up and took him back to the pier at Doolin Point."(122)
Such were the humble beginnings of the famous German Plot of 1918. The British government soon breathlessly announced that this Joe Dowling, who was said to have codes sewn into his handkerchief, was a secret agent sent to finalise military cooperation between Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers on the one hand and the German High Command on the other. Since this is just at the time of the crisis on the Western Front there was naturally enough an enormous outcry in the British media against what were seen to be treasonous communications with a mortal enemy. In response they therefore rounded up nearly all the main Volunteer and Sinn Fein figures and threw them in jail just as the East Cavan bye election was deciding the fate of the Irish Parliamentary Party. So we have version 1 of these events, which was pumped out relentlessly in the media at the time, and was extensively believed at least in the UK and maybe the US.

b) But not in Ireland. At the time Irish people had seen a lot of political dramas come and go and they tended to take a jaundiced view of whatever government line was being peddled in the mass media. Mostly they just didn't believe this explanation, and the thin evidence presented tended to reinforce this view. I think that Sceilg (a knowledgeable Kerry man who kept a beady eye on political goings on at that time) writing in his Catholic Bulletin articulates the view held by most Irish people then and since:
"Another State Paper [meaning I think one of the big London newspapers] palliates the deportations [of the Sinn Fein leaders accused of the Plot] by blazoning the descent of a solitary invader upon a remote island on April 12th, heralded by mysterious warnings from the Admiralty to the Irish Command. No discussion is permitted of the tryst of this British soldier [he was one of the POW's recruited by Casement in Germany] with the local coastguard, of his speedy bent towards a police-barrack, and his subsequent confidences with the London authorities." ...[Sceilg goes on to quote the Manchester Guardian's account of Dowling's trial:]
"The most surprising thing about the Dowling trial has been not what it disclosed, but what it did not disclose. Now not only was Dowling not charged with his connection with the plot, but not a word was said at the trial about it. On the contrary all the evidence showed that nobody in Ireland came to assist him or shelter him, and that he wandered about, got drunk, and changed his suspicious money in the ordinary way. There was not a vestige of the plot. Nevertheless, Home Rule has been jettisoned and coercion reinstated on the strength of the plot story. There is something here that requires explanation."
[Sceilg commenting on that:] So there is. But, as the Manchester Guardian must know, it is quite in the order of things in Ireland. The whole 'plot' is quite in line with 'the perpetual Act of Repression, obtained by forgery, which graced Queen Victoria's Jubilee year.' "(123)
And that is how Irish historians have typically read it, some will of the wisp made up 'plot' used by Lloyd George to justify throwing the Sinn Fein leaders into jail, although one recent historian concedes that "an element of mystery remains."(124)

c) Indeed there does because I would suggest that actually there was such a plot ! Richard Walsh was at that time both IRB centre for Mayo and on the Volunteer Executive in Dublin and later he wrote that he was quite certain that such a plot really existed. He is absolutely clear that Collins and possibly Dermot O'Hegarty had formalised elaborate arrangements with the German government at that time. He was also aware of much toing and froing between these two parties and German U-Boats anchored off the Mayo coastline in early 1918.(125)

So what exactly is going on I hear you ask :-) Well we have a certain Welsh wizard's movements to track here and I admit this does require a little speculation. The first point is that from the point of view of the British government what they always wanted to achieve I think was control over the leadership of each shade of public opinion in Ireland. In otherwords they wanted all groups to follow secretly compromised political leaders. That is the key, it doesn't matter at all what the different political leaders actually say, they can say whatever they like to keep their supporters happy, including criticising the British government, so long as the Irish people follow these false leaders not the real type. (After the war he can always plan to move around his secret pawns, the false leaders, to bring about whatever political outcome he wants, so long as he somehow gets control of these leaders first.) Now say for the sake of argument that the leadership of the two shades of opinion in Nationalist Ireland at this time - spring of 1918 - are NOT secretly under the control of the British government. These two groups are obviously the aging dinosaur of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the up and coming Sinn Fein party, and it might be useful to guess what Lloyd George does to both in turn, using this German Plot:
- IPP. Maybe he simply assassinates this party by sabotaging their electoral chances during the all important East Cavan Bye election. It has often being said that the German Plot arrests floored the IPP just as they were getting their act together in the ongoing bye election war against Sinn Fein at that time. John Dillon, the then leader of the IPP, is quite clear on this point:
"..we had Sinn Fein absolutely beaten. The tide had turned decisively against them and we would have won East Cavan by a decisive majority" if it wasn't for the government's German Plot arrests.(126) (Which included the Sinn Fein candidate Arthur Griffith.) And believe it or not in fact John Dillon himself did feel that the government was following a policy of deliberately humiliating the IPP in order to support Sinn Fein at that time, especially at strategic times during elections. His biography calls it the "'conspiracy theory' to which Dillon was to become increasingly addicted as time went on."(127) He talked a lot about this in his private letters at the time and even dropped some hints in a speech he gave in Baillieboro during the election:
"And so the game goes on (cheers). The reactionary government in England and their military advisers play the game of Sinn Fein an effective weapon to weaken and destroy the constitutional movement in Ireland - the only movement they are in the least afraid of - and having destroyed the constitutional movement, they think they can justify...breaking their pledges to the Irish people....That is the position which the Sinn Feiners are helping to drive our people into. ...Sinn Fein plays into the hands of the British government through sheer political incapacity to understand the tactics of Lloyd George, who is undoubtedly one of the ablest and most audacious politicians now living in the world.
...As I said at the outset, the situation now created by the arrests of the Sinn Fein leaders is one of extraordinary difficulty. I have no hesitation in saying that if it had been part of the settled policy of the government to support and strengthen the candidature of Mr Griffith and do everything in their power to secure his return, they could not have taken more effective steps than by the arrests of last week, the publication of the alleged German Plot, and the character of the document which they have issued in support of these charges [which was a very weak, vague document] (hear, hear)."(128)
From Lyold George's perspective then that solves the problem of the IPP, using the Plot and some similar episodes he calculatingly destroys the IPP and with it the political careers of their leaders.

- Sinn Fein. Now what does he do with Sinn Fein? I suspect that he again does not control the actual leaders, or at least not all of them, of the party in 1918, but maybe he did have a clique in his pocket here including Michael Collins and his circle, people like Harry Boland, Dermot O'Hegarty, Mulcahy etc. (Yes I did just say that I thought Michael Collins was Lloyd George's agent :-) don't panic I elaborate on that in the footnote !lol.(129)) Its interesting to note that in the months before the Plot arrests Sinn Fein and the Volunteers were making contingency plans for what they would do if their leaders were arrested as part of the Conscription crisis, and it turns out that they had selected this group, including Collins and Boland, as the future leaders if the main ones were to be arrested. Then as smooth as silk a few months later the old Sinn Fein leaders are arrested because of the Plot and deported out of Ireland and hey presto Collins and co. take over Sinn Fein and the Volunteers.! Hence Lloyd George was able to use the Plot to switch over the leaders within Sinn Fein, installing his agents to control affairs from now on ? That Collins "assumed a commanding position both in the Volunteers and Sinn Fein" as a direct result of the German Plot arrests is something that everybody agrees on I think, like Lawrence Nugent in that quote.(130). In fact the curious coincidence that it was the British government that handed Collins control over Sinn Fein like this seemed to raise some eyebrows at the time, and this slight suspicion might have also extended to wondering just why Collins' himself had not being arrested along with the other leaders. One of the Sinn Fein leaders who was arrested, Darrell Figgis, describes here the control that Collins, and the IRB which was already run by him, now exercised over Sinn Fein and the selection of the candidates for the upcoming election:
"The Brotherhood was therefore, in a strong position now to capture the control [over Sinn Fein] it had sought so long....And such was the curious chance by which the British government made the IRB masters of the scene. [Meaning the German Plot arrests.]
In this manner then, came Michael Collins to the control for which he had striven, which he held so tenaciously, and which he maintained to the end. A man of ruthless purpose and furious energy, knowing clearly what he wanted and prepared to trample down everybody to get it, he was the real master of the new executive.
.....
In the second place a further purge had been made by those who now controlled the IRB - and through the IRB controlled Sinn Fein; by sending representatives to be present at all Sinn Fein Conventions for the choice of candidates, arranging identical dates for Conventions in different constituencies, and giving each to believe that the name or names desired by it were that day to be chosen by some other; and by other adroit devices - with the result that a substantial majority of the newly created national parliament was ready to move to the word of command.
.....
[After observing the way that the IRB controlled Sinn Fein he notes how] "easy it is to manipulate political organisations so as to make them, with the appearance of freedom and finality, the mere agents of skillful intrigue."(131)

Hence if Lloyd George controlled Collins then the German Plot arrests neatly gave him complete control over the emerging Sinn Fein movement, so clever its almost beautiful!lol. I think too that LG planned for the Plot to be a real plot for a number of reasons. He presumably would have instructed Collins and co. to genuinely contact the Germans in order to have in his back pocket priceless blackmail information on these agents. Obviously if they fell out with LG later he would spring genuine telegrams etc that would prove the plot and a smooth path to the hangman's noose would await Collins! (Remember the legal system normally does not tolerate listening to wild 'conspiracy theories' by defendants, which certainly would include Collins trying to blame LG at any trial !) Secondly he needed to persuade the Irish executive and the RIC of the real existence of such a plot in order to persuade them to make those arrests, they would no doubt also be shown sight of genuine intercepted telegrams to win them over. Therefore a 'real' plot was better than a completely faked one!

The upshot then is that Lloyd George, after the 1918 elections, has now got rid of those Irish Nationalist leaders that he didn't control and swapped them for a collection of MP's that maybe he does control, all as a result of the German Plot and the arrests that followed! That I think anyway might be the real story of the whole episode.

I therefore respectfully submit that the political 'game', as John Dillon calls it, is often very complicated and if you don't believe in 'conspiracies' then you will never get to grips with what is really going on.

The pervasive influence of the modern mass media
But there is maybe an even deeper story here about the role of the modern mass media. The first thing to note is that stories in the modern media, about security issues particularly, are more controlled by the agencies of governments that at any time in the past. This is simply because crime scenes and places where 'terrorist' incidents have occurred are more systematically cordoned off from the public, by the police etc, than was probably the case in the past. What I mean is picture a reporter trying to report on the Tube bombings in London and ask yourself where he/she gets their information from. They turn up at the site and its been long ago cordoned off and huge numbers of security personnel are probably sealing off access to witnesses, stopping reporters getting into hospitals etc etc, and that this sealing off is probably more water tight now than ever before. Then all they can actually report on is whatever is released via the press offices of the various organs of the state. In fact in Ireland now there is a law against the Gardai talking to reporters, except through the government press office, which led to an Evening Herald journalist being detained by the state, briefly, not long ago. So everything, and I would suggest absolutely everything, that you hear in the mass media about these incidents is entirely the story that the state wants you to hear. And of course, since time immemorial, the state lies from time to time about these things.

But what is happening is that the general public are not conscious that the story they hear in the mass media has this one, controllable, origin. The way they look at it there is a huge range of TV programmes packed with all kinds of knowledgeable reporters and experts giving their opinions, and a multiplicity of radio and glossy magazines and newspapers all rowing in with detailed coverage of a particular incident. So the reasonable enough conclusion that the public draw is that surely all these people couldn't be in on some vast conspiracy to hide the truth? They just don't realize that all these figures are only getting the story from one source, government agencies, and yes they often do, and often have a vested interest to, lie. And as pointed out in the unlikely event that information does come to the mass media from sources other than the government, they simply don't report it! After all it has to be 'confirmed' which in practise means asking the state is it true or not! As an example Morgan Stack has described how he packaged a lot of information together on 9/11 and personally tried to hand it out in RTE, only for them to throw him out and call the guards on him. It was made clear to him that they just don't report stuff like that, and they don't want to hear about it either. Morgan described how he previously had quite a lot of faith in the truthfulness of the Irish media and ended up so shocked by this that he was reduced to tears. Now he makes the point what else are they hiding from us? (132) Whether you agree or disagree about the 9/11 controversy the point is that the mass media in Ireland, and across most of the world, are definitely not going to tell you about information that is contrary to the government line, and therefore you might be thinking 'conspiracy theory' only because you weren't aware of the true facts that are out there.

Also it seems to this observer that the most controlled media in the west are those that are described as media 'of record', the most respected highly thought of organs, like the New York Times (133) and the BBC (134). In Ireland the Irish Times is often said to occupy the same space, but famously certain correspondence between the proprietor of the Irish Times, Major McDowell, and the UK government has now cast a long shadow over its independence from the powers that be. Here is just a bit from the correspondence of the UK ambassador in 1969:
"But McDowell went on to say that he now felt that a certain degree of guidance, in respect of which lines were helpful and which unhelpful, might be acceptable to himself and one or two of his friends on the board; this was what he had had in mind in telephoning through to No.10."(135)

Surely the writing is on the wall then about the real role of the Irish Times for the last 40 years or so when you consider that the same Major McDowell "served as chief executive of The Irish Times between 1962 and 1997", retired as chairman of the Irish Times Trust in December 2001, and then made President for Life of the Irish Times Group. On top of that he is even said to have been a member of MI5 ! (136)

I respectfully submit that it is in fact possible that key organs in the modern media are being manipulated in a very systematic way by Intelligence agencies in London and Washington, with the former managing Dublin, just like what we now know about the role the British government traditionally held in secretly manipulating our media over centuries. Bearing in mind the pervasiveness of the modern media, and no doubt the subtle and advanced media manipulation that they use, I think you could almost speculate that the average modern western citizen is probably now as brainwashed by his government as the former citizens of the Eastern block were by their regimes. And maybe then it is in fact this brainwashing which is now fashioning citizens to think 'conspiracy theory' any time a complicated story of government lies and manipulation comes to their ears? Hopefully not but I think anyway that this media role is the most important one in the increasing popularity of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' in modern times.

Nowadays its all a conspiracy !:-)

author by Brianpublication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 08:12author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Footnotes
1. http://ireland.indymedia.org/article/83809.

2. Rodney Stich http://www.defraudingamerica.com/public_apathy.html .

3. Its not just in the Morris Tribunal where they are talking about this: "The routine lies that Guards peddle in the District Court to gain convictions are so common as to be barely worth remarking upon. Rarely acknowledged too are the regular beatings meted out to working class youths. The Department of Justice pays out over €1,000,000 annually in compensation for unlawful arrest, assault and harassment. And that figure represents the tiny minority who have bothered to make complaints that were successful. Many more are intimidated out of doing so; many never bother making a complaint at all." (Dec McCarthy http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=66410)

4. This is true of the Special Criminal Court, which Barry describes here: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82176 .

5. http://www.rate-your-solicitor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?...#p937 .

6. http://www.rate-your-solicitor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?...n=new also referred to at http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82175 .

7. http://www.rate-your-solicitor.com/index.php?section=de...10364 .

8. 20 March 2007 Sunday Independent p.10.

9. "Shamrock Corporation, CIA Paymaster
Other CIA assets, including Gunther Russbacher, had described the role played by the CIA’s Shamrock Corporation in Ireland, disbursing money for various CIA operations, including bribe money to federal judges and other covert agency assets. Crittenden described his relationship with Shamrock that focused on other areas of Shamrock’s activities. He said that the Shamrock Corporation paid his airline for the flights flown, which he said totaled over $500 million for flights from 1976 to 1988." (Rodney Stich "Drugging America /A Trojan Horse" (Alamo California, 2005) p.103)

Also mentioned in another book by the same author:
"I was prompted to ask Russbacher about payoffs to federal judges after private investigator Stewart Webb heard of a bribe connection between U.S. District Judge Sherman Finesilver in Denver and a corporation in Ireland. After he passed the information along to me I questioned some of my CIA contacts to determine if they knew anything of it. In response to my questions, Russbacher explained the path of money for bribing federal judges, trustees, law firms, and lawyers. Russbacher stated that the money for these payoffs came from a company located in Dublin and incorporated in Ireland, called Shamrock Overseas Disbursement Corporation. Its telephone is listed as Shamrock Overseas Courier Service. The function of this company was to place money at regular intervals into numbered bank accounts for the recipients to draw upon. Russbacher chuckled as he stated that the Chief Executive Officer at Shamrock Overseas Disbursement was the same person with whom he had worked at other CIA proprietaries: Donald Lutz.
Russbacher and Lutz were on the management staff of various CIA proprietaries, including Red Hill Savings and Loan and Hill Financial located at Red Hill, Pennsylvania, and at Silverado Bank Savings & Loan in Denver. Russbacher stated that the routing of the money funded by Shamrock was “From the Netherlands Antilles. And in turn came from Grand Cayman; that in turn came from the Southern Bank in Florida; that in turn came from Southern Savings and Loan in Illinois; which in turn came from National Brokerage Company.”
“Where does the money originally come from? Is it from stolen Chapter 11 assets?” I asked. Russbacher replied, “That’s part of it. It is a conglomeration of funds. It is what we call an all-purpose account. Arms shipments, the other stuff [drugs, weapons] that we were transporting back and forth. It is what we call the divisible surplus.”
I asked if the federal judges he referred to, as recipients of these funds, were only Bankruptcy Court Judges, to which Russbacher replied, “No, that’s not true. You have to include the DJs [U.S. District Judges] too.”
“How is it determined the amount that each judge will get, and what judges are paid off?” I asked. Russbacher replied:
“It is predetermined. If you will remember from one of my earlier tapes, I told you that the judges receive their funds regardless of whether they have heard a case in six months or not.”
“How do they determine which judges are recipients, what qualifies them to be on the payroll?” Russbacher replied, “The fact that they work hand-in- hand with the trustees, and they grant us full power to basically do what we [CIA] want in Chapter 11, 13, and 7 proceedings.”
“Are there any other similar corporations in the United States like Shamrock?”
“No, Rodney, they are all funded from Shamrock. In other words, if you pull the plug on Shamrock, you have it all.”
Russbacher explained how the recipients pick up the money. “They can get it overseas and pick it up, or they can go to Toronto and pick it up there, at the Royal Bank of Canada.” Russbacher stated, “When they go in to make a withdrawal, they request to see the President or Chief Account officer.” Russbacher explained that this scheme is part of Operation Woodsman, explained in earlier pages.
Russbacher explained that the recipient’s available funds will be found on the bank’s terminal screen and that “all they have to have is the account number. No ID is required. Just give them the account number and the four digit identification number.” Russbacher stated that Royal Bank of Canada, Manufacturers Hanover Bank in New York, and Valley Bank in Arizona, cooperate in this scheme. Russbacher repeated what he had told me in the past: that funds would also be disbursed to the recipient judges, trustees, or law firms at gambling
casinos, including MGM, Harrah’s and Resort in Atlantic City, and Frontier, Stardust, and Horseshoe in Las Vegas. The CIA gave the money to the casino, which in turn gave gambling chips to the recipients when they arrived, after which the chips are cashed in for money. In some cases the casinos report the money as winnings and income tax withheld." (Rodney Stich "Defrauding America" (Alamo California, 2005) Vol I p.132)

10. http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6042 .

11. Some of this panic is described in a reference from politics.ie:
"Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

"This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000."
-- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976

"If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."
-- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.
-- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971). "(http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=25189)
But if this is all a hoax then the question is why? My guess is that it is designed to give an intellectual backing for global, or supra national anyway, governmental institutions. Obviously the general public would welcome those type of bodies to tackle this issue, because it would be important and because it clearly couldn't be tackled by national governments alone, so providing a very good raison d'etre for the existence of those institutions. I notice for example that the first pan EU fines are being proposed for environmental crimes.

12. Fr Denis Fahey "The Rulers of Russia" (Dublin, 1938) p.100.

13. "FIANNA FÁIL has been compared by a well-known political insider as being like a McDonald's franchise but run with "a golden circle instead of golden arches".
The experienced commentator slated the Mount Street mandarins who pull Fianna Fáil's strings. "If you want to run for the party they'll roll out the hats, cups and straws. And if you succeed, well and good; but if you don't make it, then they don't want to know you."
Who's dishing the dirt on the Fianna Fáil leadership? None other than the former Mayor of Dublin, Royston Brady, Fianna Fáil's failed Euro candidate, who was routed by Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald (absolutely no relation with the Big Mac empire).
Royston, now a morning chat-show host on Dublin radio station Newstalk 106, is telling anyone who'll listen that the Soldiers of Destiny have dragged his name through even more mud after his disastrous performance by not keeping their promise to pay his election debts. The deserted Soldier of Destiny has debts of between €50,000 and €100,000 a year after his glitzy, high profile campaign. Royston is also the baby brother of leader Bertie Ahern's right-hand man and chief fixer, Senator Cyprian Brady. Are they in Royston's "golden circle"?" (http://www.anphoblacht.com/news/detail/9115 . He revealed more information during a recent Late Late Show appearance.)

14. Just before the last election a FF Senator, Liam Fitzgerald, resigned over this: http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0329/morningireland.html .

15. http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=24676&postdays=0...rt=24 .

16. Conor Cruise O'Brien "Memoir My Life and Themes" (Dublin, 1998) p.175-176.

17. Michael Hopkinson ed. "The last days of Dublin Castle / The Diary of Mark Sturgis"(Dublin, 1999) p.43.

18. Ibid p.180.

19. Paul Larkin "A very British Jihad" (Belfast, 2004) p.227.

20. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Journalis....html .

21. As described at the 'Justice for the Forgotten' meeting in Dublin on the 27th June 2003.

22. Including Paul Foot and Duncan Campbell as you can read in his book: Fred Holroyd and Nick Burbridge "War Without Honour" (Hull, 1989) passim.

23. Paul Larkin "A very British Jihad" (Belfast, 2004) p.227, p.283.

24. http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/about-us/ .

25. http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=23784 .

26. John Nalson "An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State" (London, 1683) Vol II p.809.

27. Chapter II of the "Sham Squire" http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/shamsquire/sham2.htm .

28. Dublin Evening Post No.1761 quoted in Chapter II of the "Sham Squire" http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/shamsquire/sham2.htm

29. Pearse St Library Gilbert Ms 218.

30. Pearse St Library Gilbert Ms 218 no.98.

31. Pearse St Library Gilbert Ms 218 No.102 For more on Walter Cox, who to be fair suffered very severely at the hands of the govt., see http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/shamsquire/walter...x.htm which is an Appendix to the "Sham Squire" book.

32. PRO CO 904/7 NLI M/F Pos 8165 p.507-482.

33. F.S.L.Lyons "John Dillon" (London, 1968) p.460.

34. Daniel Sheehan "Ireland since Parnell" Chapter XIX http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/3/9/6/13...3.htm .

35. See e.g. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.59 for references the Independent-Freeman feud.

36. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.180.

37. George Chester Duggan WS 1,076.

38. Michael Hopkinson ed. "The last days of Dublin Castle / The Diary of Mark Sturgis"(Dublin, 1999) p.61.

39. Kevin O'Shiel WS 1770 p.777. That's what O'Shiel says but oftentimes he has been described as the son of the proprietor.

40. Rev M.Curran WS 687 p.165.

41. Diarmuid Lynch "The IRB and the 1916 Insurrection"(Cork, 1957) p.96 referring to c.1919/20.

42. P.J. Little WS 1769 p.38.

43. Diarmuid Lynch WS 4 section called 'Casement Pamphlet this is c. post 1916.

44. Irish World, published in New York, 3rd March 1917 p.12.

45. Sean Farrelly WS 1734 p.22.

46. Ibid p.15. One Volunteer in Athboy seems to have been threatened by the Black and Tans in the guise of this gang, which shows its state connections (see Joseph Martin WS 1723 p.5).

47. Sean Boylan WS 1715 p.29. He was told that by Michael Hilliard TD, curiously enough.

48. Sean Hayes WS 172.

49. The media at one time printed a completely fictitious interview with Colonel Moore of the National Volunteers. (Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.101).

50. Fr. Michael Browne WS 538.

51. Daniel Sheehan "Ireland since Parnell" Chapter XVII http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/3/9/6/13...3.htm .

52. P.J. Little WS 1769 p.39.

53. Interviewed on the "Conspiracy of Silence" video (available on youtube) which was made by Yorkshire Television in 1994 but was pulled before it could be broadcast.

54. Fred Holroyd and Nick Burbridge "War Without Honour" (Hull, 1989) p.85 The case is further described here: http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68750#com...02800 .

55. Sean McPhilemy "The Committee / Political Assassination in Northern Ireland" (Boulder Colorado, 1999) p.303.

56. Johnston Brown "Into the Dark" (Dublin, 2005).

57. Irish Independent 18 May 2007 p.10.

58. http://www.gavinsblog.com/?p=1984.

59. http://oireland.tripod.com Chapter 5.

60. http://www.bilderberg.org/masons.htm#sweeney . The quote above it is from the same source.

61. Liam Fay in the Sunday Times 1 Feb 2004 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/newspapers/sunday_time...9.ece .

62. Eamonn Broy WS 1280 p.39.

63. Seamus Finn WS 857 p.2.

64. Eamonn Broy WS 1280.

65. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.163.

66. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.123.

67. T J McElligot, an RIC man who tried to set up an RIC union, WS 472 p.4 and 5. He says that the DMP "were highly organised at the time" to resist conscription, and that "I think John D. Nugent MP had a hand in it." The latter was the Secretary of the AOH so you can be sure it was that organisation which had infiltrated the DMP.

68. Colonel Winter's Correspondence PRO CO 904/177 p.392, available as NLI M/F Pos 8480, containing a copy of the New Statesman 28 May 1921 p.205.

69. Sean Boylan WS 1715.

70. Joseph Martin WS 1723 p.5.

71. Sean Farrelly WS 1,734 p.13.

72. The quote is from Eugene Bratton WS 467 p.11 and the other references are from the same source. About Hodgett see also Michael Hilliard WS 1622 p.3.

73. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.194.

74. From Richard Walsh TD from Balla Co.Mayo who was on the Volunteer Executive WS 400. Yes I do think it means that the British government had some 'influence' in getting that order passed. Sin Scéal eile!lol

75. Sir Ormonde de Winter "Winter's Tale / An Autobiography" (London, 1955) p.291.

76. TJ McElligot WS 472 p.5.

77. http://english.pravda.ru/science/tech/95965-0/ .

78. http://www.countercurrents.org/us-paulinson161106.htm .

79. http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2007/06/airborne/ .

80. Report prepared for the House of Commons page 3 http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/DUuse+hazard.pdf .

81. http://www.bilderberg.org/micwaves.htm .

82. Interviewed on the Investigative Journal 6 June 2007 http://arcticbeacon.com/audio/2007/2007-LRN/06-2007-LRN/ . There is a bit more about him here: http://www.campusactivism.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=31...fe50e .

83. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_Citation_X .

84. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_Citation_X .

85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird .

86. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/5079044.stm .

87. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_aircraft .

88. One interesting report on this was written by Gunther Russbacher, a former CIA and ONI operative originally from Austria, showing the use of mind programming in those organisations http://india.indymedia.org/en/2002/01/532.shtml . This type of programming is also allegedly used by cults, e.g. see Svali at: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4088 , this whole subject is quite complicated as you can see from her website: http://web.archive.org/web/20060116065148/www.lionlambm...6.htm . More on these cult allegations, this time by David Marr, available at http://www.danofisrael.com/id33.html . For some other links on these strange technologies see http://oireland.tripod.com Chapter 3 footnote 117.

89. "Many leading members of the Masonic Order, were also commissioned officers in the Volunteer movement, which perhaps explains the large Masonic involvement amongst its membership. From the 1770s, when the Volunteer companies were first raised there was encouragement from the leadership of each new company to form their own Masonic lodge, and it was not unusual to find the entire membership of a Volunteer company being in the same Masonic Lodge." (Larry Conlon "The influence of Freemasonry in East Cavan during the rebellion of 1798" Briefne VIII no.33 1997 p.791.)

90. "Evidence of clandestine or hedge Masonry being widespread amongst the Defenders since their institution in 1782, are given in various historical accounts. There also exists evidence that their organisation was governed by a 'Grand Master' and operated a numerical lodge system similar to that of regular masonry."(ibid p.796)

91. "The government spy, John Henry Smith, alias Bird, reporting from Belfast to Dublin Castle, in 1796, wrote:
'there is scarcely a United Irishman who is not a Mason, nor a Mason who is not both.'"(ibid p.805)

92. Larry Conlon "The influence of Freemasonry in Meath and Westmeath in the 18th century." Riocht na Mídhe Vol IX no.3 1997 p.128.

93. WS 317 second part p.5.

94. A report of a speech by Sean Lemass in The Irish Independent 13 March 1929.

95. Daniel Sheehan "Ireland Since Parnell" (London, 1921) Chapter XIX http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/3/9/6/13...3.htm . That book goes into considerable detail describing the AOH. Another corroborating reference can be had from Kevin O'Shiel, the Tyrone barrister, who described it as "this secret, sectarian and political society" (Kevin O'Shiel W.S.1770 p.139)
As regards the whole atmosphere of the AOH dominated Irish Parliamentary Party for this period, I thought this letter from Archbishop Walsh of Dublin to Denis Gwynn of 25th May 1915 makes some pretty serious criticisms:
"I regret that, as one result of a radical change that has gradually been effected in Irish political affairs through the establishment of a working alliance between the "leaders" [his quotes] of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the late government, I have now, and for a considerable time, found it impossible to take any further interest in Irish politics. I am so saddened and, I must say, sickened by the change of front, the results of which I cannot but see in government appointment after government appointment, incontestably due to the active intervention of some of our leading politicians, that I have long since had to give up even the reading of articles or letters touching upon the political situation in Ireland. I never could have thought, 30 years ago when I came to Dublin as Archbishop, that I should live to see the great bulk of the nationalists of Ireland so hopelessly mislead by the palpable misrepresentation of the obvious facts, as I see it today."(Rev M.Curran WS 687 p.15)
In the account written by Walsh's former secretary, Monsignor Curran, we are told that the Irish Party had abandoned "independent opposition as far back as 1906."(ibid p.302)

96. William O'Brien WS 1,766 p.75, and also see Donal Nevin "James Connolly"(Dublin, 2005) p.624, which I think puts that question beyond any doubt.

97. The Labour leader, not to be mixed up with the other William O'Brien. (Diarmuid Lynch "The IRB and the 1916 Insurrection"(Cork, 1957) p.101.)

98. Luke Kennedy WS 165 p.15.

99. Maud Gonne WS 317 p.13.

100. Valentine Jackson WS 409 p.4.

101. Tim Healy "The Letters and Leaders of My Day" Chapter III http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/THealy/healy3.htm .

102. Tim Pat Coogan "Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland"(New York, 2002) p.390 et seq. quoting Sean MacBride's interview in the Irish Press 16 and 18 October 1982.

103. Captain H.B.C. Pollard" (Kilkenny, 1998) p.62. The other references are from the same source except the Egan one which is from Tim Healy "Letters and Leaders of my Day" Chapter VI http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/THealy/healy6.htm.

104. Richard Walsh TD from Balla Co.Mayo WS 400 p.155.

105. Maud Gonne WS 317 p.13.

106. Richard Walsh WS 400 p.56.

107. Richard Walsh TD from Balla Co.Mayo WS 400 p.156.

108. Captain HBC Pollard (Kilkenny, 1998) p.100.

109. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.89.

110. Michael Hopkinson "Frank Henderson's Easter Rising / Recollections of a Dublin Volunteer" (Cork, 1998) p.2.

111. Irish Independent 9 Nov 1933 p.10.

112. Terence Brown "Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 to the Present"(Cornell, 1985) p.119.

113. Daily Telegraph 4 July 2007 p.21.

114. Although a well attended public meeting held in Dublin city centre this is the only media report of it made anywhere afaik: "An agreement was reached that all intelligence would be shared and that the 'Irish Government' would be vilified by the British (for the duration) for failing to deal with the IRA. This would create the impression that the Irish were soft and so would not be suspected of collaboration;" (Report in Saoirse on the Justice for the Forgotten meeting 27 June 2003 http://www.iol.ie/~saoirse/2003/jul03.htm .)

115. For which see Chapter 4 at http://oireland.tripod.com .

116. http://www.ashleymote.co.uk/topics.php?filter=2&sec=art...d=347 .

117. For which see http://oireland.tripod.com Chapter 4.

118. For this and the previous quote: Conor Cruise O'Brien "Memoir My Life and Themes" (Dublin, 1998) p.176-180.

119. See http://www.indymedia.ie/article/81544 eg. at footnote 19.

120. http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/red-symphony.html .

121. "In 1956, the arrangement was formalized in a written agreement, using the name ``Gladio'' for the first time. According to 1956 documents uncovered in Italy in 1990, Gladio was divided into independent cells coordinated from a CIA camp in Sardinia. These ``special forces'' included 40 main groups. Ten specialized in sabotage, six each in espionage, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics, and 12 in guerrilla activities. Another division handled the training of agents and commandos. These ``special forces'' had access to underground arms caches, which included hand guns, grenades, high-tech explosives, daggers, 60-millimeter mortars, 57-millimeter machine guns and precision rifles.
In 1956, Gen. Giovanni De Lorenzo was named to head SIFAR on the recommendation of U.S. Ambassador Claire Boothe Luce, the avidly anticommunist wife of the publisher of Time magazine. A key player in Gladio was now in place." (CAQ article on Gladio by Arthur E. Rowse http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/gladio.html .)

122. http://www.dowlingfamily.info/i1918su2.htm . Colonel Maurice Moore discussed the Joseph Dowling business in the Senate: http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0001/S.0001.192307040010.html .

123. Catholic Bulletin July-December 1918 p.367-368.

124. Seán McConville "Irish Political Prisoners, 1848-1922: Theatres of War" (2003) p.624 .

125. Richard Walsh TD from Balla Co.Mayo WS 400 p.101.

126. Dillon to T P O'Connor 18 June 1918 quoted in F.S.L.Lyons "John Dillon" (London, 1968) p.142.

127. The historian F.S.L.Lyons describes Dillon's analysis of government policy at the time:
"This is the first appearance of what one can only call the 'conspiracy theory' to which Dillon was to become increasingly addicted as time went on. The parliamentary party, he believed , had become a nuisance to Lloyd-George. On the one hand it stood in the way of a settlement based on the exclusion of Ulster. On the other hand, because it was a constitutional party, it could not be coerced. If, however, it became thoroughly rejected by the Irish people at the next election, then the way would be left clear to deal with the Ulster Unionists - presumably on the basis of six-county exclusion - and to impose, by force if need be, whatever settlement of the rest of Ireland seemed desirable to Britain. Because events were later to follow out this prediction with uncanny accuracy it is tempting to think Dillon's theory of conspiracy was well founded." [Although Lyons goes on to say that it wasn't a 'conspiracy', just blunder etc.] (F.S.L.Lyons "John Dillon" (London, 1968) p.426) A few more references that show Dillon's opinions at that time: (I admit this number of references is overkill, but its fascinating to see his thinking with respect to these events.)

"In the three bye-elections fought since the beginning of the year - South Armagh, Waterford City, and East Tyrone - the parliamentary party had beaten off the challenge of Sinn Fein and more than held their own. But, as so often before, just at the very moment when the fortunes of Sinn Fein seemed on the wane, the Government had stepped in to revive them."(ibid p.434)

"There can be no doubt that L.G. has let loose Hell in Ireland and with our knowledge of his political instinct and intelligence it is very difficult to resist the conviction that his action during the last year has been all of a piece - a Machiavellian plot to escape from the necessity of granting Home Rule....[by discrediting the Irish Party in the US and:] make it safe for England to have a regular quarrel and stand up fight with Ireland." [The last point meaning that the UK wanted the situation militarised, because they would have been confident of crushing any Irish rebellion bearing in mind the huge size of the British army in 1918. It mightn't have worked out quite like that though!] (Dillon to T.P.O'Connor 23/24 April 1918 ibid p.435)

"Considering the L.G.'s action in bringing forward his measure applying conscription to Ireland hot foot on our three successive victories over S.F. at the last three [bye] elections ...it is hard to escape from the conviction that he deliberately adopted the policy of destroying the constitutional party in Ireland and throwing the country into the hands of the Revolutionary Party. The purposes of such a policy are plainly apparent."(Dillon to C.P.Scott 24 April 1918 ibid, and from the same it is noted that most of Ireland apparently felt that somehow "the whole business has been an elaborate plot by LG.")

"L.G. is not a bit mad, but he is playing a very deep game, a game which necessitates the encouragement of S.F. up to a point sufficient to kill the Parliamentary Party and identify Irish nationalism with S.F. and pro-Germanism in the eyes of the world, and especially in the eyes of America. And he has played the game with immense skill and superb audacity. The S.F.'s, being utterly devoid of political sagacity, and overcharged with poetic fervour and wild unregulated enthusiasm, have played right into the hands of L.G. and Carson, who is now the practical dictator of Ireland."(Dillon to Shane Leslie 14 June 1918 ibid p.441)

"I have a good deal of information going to show that the Castle authorities winked at and deliberately abstained from interfering with the outrageous intimidation of the S.F. bands on the polling day. And this combined with the well known fact that S.F. is riddled with spies and government agents will give you an idea of the devil's cauldron that L.G. has set going in Ireland."(Dillon to T.P.O'Connor 28/29 Dec 1918 ibid p.454.)

"L.G. will find that by betraying and killing the Irish Party he has not got rid of all his difficulties."(Dillon writing on Christmas Day 1918 ibid p.455.)

[Mentions the pursuit of a Republic which he says is pushing the country into catastrophe:] "believing as I do that there is a powerful and influential gang in the government of the country who are carrying on their present system of Government in Ireland with a view to producing such a catastrophe, and that this has been adopted as a deliberate policy, and as the safest method of killing the danger of Home Rule."(Dillon to Leslie 24 June 1919 ibid p.463.)

"But he [Lloyd-George] made one grave miscalculation - he utterly underestimated the forces he was letting loose in Ireland." [Which is an obvious reference to the surprising military capabilities and successes of the IRA during that winter.](Dillon to C.P.Scott 18 Jan 1921 ibid p.466.)

"But so far as I am able to judge, the military government which has been placed in complete control of Ireland by the policy of Sinn Fein, is determined, so far as power goes, to make any constitutional movement in Ireland impossible, and to goad the people to acts of violence and folly and to crime, in pursuance of a rule, and with a view to defeating any attempt to arrive at a rational and friendly settlement of the Irish question......[The policies of Sinn Fein] play into the hands of the military party, and all the bitterest enemies of the Irish people." ("The New Policy" a published letter by John Dillon of 30 December 1919.)

128. Speech given by John Dillon at Baillieboro Sunday 26 May 1918, printed in the Freeman's Journal. Btw I am not saying that the IPP, or maybe even Dillon, was free from corruption at this time because unfortunately it definitely wasn't. I think the British government needed to get rid of the IPP because it simply wouldn't have had any justification to deny it Home Rule after the War. The IPP had obviously lost a lot by backing the government in that war, not a few of whom fought in it, and they just couldn't be denied that promise of Home Rule which was supposed to take place after the War. With Sinn Fein they could use a whole pile of new excuses like not negotiating with 'terrorists' etc. For examples of that corruption, and their at times suspicious lack of real opposition towards the UK government, see Daniel Sheehan "Ireland since Parnell" (London, 1921) available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13963/13963.txt , Colonel Maurice Moore "History of the Irish Volunteers" serialised in the Irish Press in 1938 (e.g. 17 Feb that year), and the account by Diarmuid Coffey WS 1248, which corroborates Moore's account.

129. I suspect Michael Collins, and this clique within the emerging new IRB, because of facts like the following:
a) He and his family were particularily friendly with the RIC in West Cork, not a crime of itself but somehow left out of most (?all) of his biographies. (i)

b) When in London in 1913 he became 'intimate' with Moya Llewelyn Davies, one of Lloyd George's personal secretaries. She and he are together then after that throughout 1919, 20, 21 and she described herself as a spy and a close adviser of Collins. Collins was also a good friend all this time with her husband Compton who "had been largely instrumental in getting Lloyd George into Parliament."(ii)

c) A fellow Cabinet Minister of Collins, Sceilg, pretty much accuses him of being a British agent. Sceilg, who's real name was John J. O'Kelly, was quite a learned intelligent figure as you can read in his biography by Brian P. Murphy: "The 'Catholic Bulletin' and Republican Ireland with Special Reference to J.J.O'Kelly (Sceilg)"(2005). (iii)

d) We are told that he had many meetings and was well in with Alfred Cope from the date of Cope's arrival in Ireland, and specifically Richard Walsh says pre August 1920. Bear in mind that the war only really got going in the winter of that year (for example Tom Barry fires his first shot against the enemy on the 22nd Oct 1920) so Collins was closely involved with Lloyd George's main man in Ireland from the very beginning of the intensive phase of the conflict. (iv) Incidentally Collins is often said to have been very close to Eamonn Duggan, who preceded him as Director of Intelligence, and Duggan - believe it or not! - has been described as a close friend of Cope's throughout the conflict. (v)

e) Probably Collins' closest political adviser was Tim Healy, who was advising him at least since early 1918, during the time he was on the run, and at the Treaty negotiations. etc. Healy was accused by Sean MacBride of being the Castle's biggest agent in Irish politics at that time. (vi)

f) A message was accidentally intercepted in August 1920 from a General in the 'Imperial Intelligence Service' writing to Collins. This was Brigadier General Sir George Cockerill, MP for Reigate, close friend of Lloyd George, 'Director of Special Intelligence at the War Office', who seems to have been quite an admirer of Collins, as he describes in these modern sounding references:
"These indeed are Michael Collins' own words and he shows statesmanship and vision of a high order when, exhibiting a rare comprehension of the forces which are reshaping the modern world, he declared that "in the creation of the Irish Free State we have laid a foundation on which may be built a new world order." (vii)

g) Seamus Robinson TD, O/C of the 2nd Southern Division of the IRA and later a member of the Irish army's Bureau of Military History, felt that 'directions' were given whereby exaggerated and ultimately positive publicity was ordered to shine on Collins during the war. The most likely explanation for this would have to be that Collins himself was an agent. (viii)

h) Instead of it being the case that the British military were baying for Collins' blood at that time, and straining every sinew to lay hands on him, he even had a drink with a British captain at the time who well knew his identity.(ix)

i) Also his handling of IRA arms procurement (x), unmasking of lesser spies (xi), control of vital documents (xii), and large operations like the French assassination attempt (xiii), the Customs House and Stackumny railway attacks (xiv), etc look a bit different in retrospect from the usual impression people have of Collins as "the man who won the war." So I'm a bit suspicious in any case!

Footnotes to the above.
(The WS numbers are witness statements in the National Archives in Dublin.)
i. Peter Folan WS 316.
ii. John J. O'Kelly (known as Sceilg) W.S. 384 p.66; Meda Ryan "Michael Collins and the women who spied for Ireland" (Cork, 1996) p.21; Robert Barton WS 979 p.12; Pat Moylett WS 767 p.147; Peter Hart "Mick / The Real Michael Collins"(Oxford, 2005) p.353.
iii. John J. O'Kelly W.S. 384 passim.
iv. Sceilg WS 384 p.60 et seq.; Richard Walsh WS 400 p.74; Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.222-223.
v. James J O'Connor W.S. 1214 p.5 et seq. Even de Winter, the head of the British Secret Service in Dublin at the time, noted that "many of Cope's activities were centred in the person of E.J. Duggan, a solicitor whose office was situated close to the Castle gates."(Sir Ormonde de Winter "Winter's Tale / An Autobiography."(London, 1955) p.341).
vi. Tim Pat Coogan "Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland" (New York, 2002) p.390 et seq. quoting Sean MacBride's interview in the Irish Press 16 and 18 October 1982; for the importance of Healy see e.g. Sean Moylan TD WS 505 p.2. and Richard Walsh TD WS 400 p.78.
vii. For a description of the message interception see Richard Walsh TD WS 400 p.74-76; and also Pat Moylett WS 767 p.51 who carried the message. The quote from Cockerill is from Brigadier General Sir George Cockerill "What fools we were."(London, 1944) p.97.
viii. Seamus Robinson TD, WS p.49.
ix. Sir William Darling "So it looks to me"(London, 1952) p.212.
x. See e.g. the statement by Liam Mellows:
"He said he [Collins] was interfering with his job as Director of Purchases by buying arms across the water and paying more for them than he was. He was buying them, he said, not to use them but to prevent him (Liam) from getting them. This shocked me. .."(Peter Hart "Mick / The Real Michael Collins"(Oxford, 2005) p.261 quoting Mrs Woods UCD P17a/150.) Richard Walsh who was in England for a time trying to procure arms for the Mayo Brigade said that:
"there seemed to be nothing being attempted by G.H.Q. agents, and it could not have been for want of money" (Richard Walsh TD from Balla Co.Mayo WS 400 p.131.)
xi. I think that the Quinlisk, Molloy and Jameson episodes are worth another look in that respect for which see Richard Walsh WS 400 and Peter Hart "Mick / The Real Michael Collins" (Oxford, 2005) p.237.
xii. De Winter describes in his memoirs the huge haul of documents that they recovered. His department compiled 'epitomes' of the most vital information in the documents and for the period Oct 1920-July 1921 they compiled 1,200 such epitomes, some over 200 pages long. He himself noted that "It was fortunate that the Irish had an irresistible habit of keeping documents." (Sir Ormonde de Winter "Winter's Tale / An Autobiography."(London, 1955) p.p.303-304).
xiii. This was described by Seamus Robinson who, along with some others based in Tipperary, used to assist in Dublin operations. He wasn't impressed with Collins' role at all:
"The first time I found Mick Collins to be a bit of an artful dodger, was when he arranged the first, the "phoney" attack on French."(Seamus Robinson TD WS p.47-50).
xiv. Both being large operations that went suspiciously wrong. For Stackumny see Matthew Barry WS 932 where Collins' military advise is found to be a bit perplexing in retrospect.

130. Lawrence Nugent WS 907 p.242.

131. Darrell Figgis "Recollections of the Irish War" (London, 1927) p.218, 233, 245.

132. At a meeting in Dublin addressed by Webster Tarpley.

133. From Carl Bernstein, using mainly revelations that came out during the Church Committee Hearings in the US:
"The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.
Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates.... The mighty didn't want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability.
...
CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions.
Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency. “We were in touch with them—they'd talk to us and some cooperated,” said a CIA official. The cooperation usually involved passing on information and “spotting” prospective agents among foreigners.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of the Times’ dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them.
...
According to Wayne Phillips, a former Times reporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s name when it tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952 while he was studying at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. Phillips said an Agency official told him that the CIA had “a working arrangement” with the publisher in which other reporters abroad had been placed on the Agency’s payroll. Phillips, who remained at the Times until 1961, later obtained CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act which show that the Agency intended to develop him as a clandestine “asset” for use abroad."(http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html)

The CIA is said to be able to intervene to censor all articles pre publication: http://digg.com/politics/New_York_Times_op_ed_article_c...w_pic .

134. This is from ex BBC journalist Tony Gosling: "That the corporation was far too controlled, particularly in its news and documentary coverage, by the Foreign Office and by Downing Street. I know this because a friend worked as a temp for several months in the TV newsroom and explained to my horror that she was putting calls through regularly from top government officials and passing messages on to the editors about the best angle to take on sensitive news stories."(http://www.bilderberg.org/milne.htm)

John Pilger: "While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened... It didn't matter. It was of no interest." "(http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6919)

This view is from the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray: "Ask yourself - when is the last time you saw an anti-war voice, as opposed to a pro-war "military" or "security" expert, asked by the BBC to comment on a Middle East development? Yet the majority of people in this country are against the war. If they want an ex-diplomat, they go for pro war cheerleaders Pauline Neville Jones or Christopher Meyer, even though eight out of ten ex British Ambassadors are against the war.... No 10 have a policy of regularly putting pressure on news outlets, and the BBC in particular." (http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/04/video_kil....html)

A letter written by Ashley Mote MEP to the BBC: "I referred in my original letter to the 40.4 million euros provided by the European Investment Bank [to the BBC] in 2002, and the 96.46 million provided by the same source the following year. These sums were in the form of loans, and are listed as such on the EIB website. In addition to these loans to BBC subsidiaries, another 240 million euros has been 'loaned' by the EIB to other broadcasting and production units in the UK since 1989.
Several questions arise: on what terms of repayment, over what period and at what rates of interest? Are these soft loans - meaning will they be written off quietly in a few years time because you know (and the rest of us can make an intelligent guess) that the BBC will never be in a position to repay such sums and is not expected to do so. Even the EIB's own website admits they were made under the "most favourable of terms...financing capital projects according to the objectives of the Union". It goes on to declare that one of its objectives is to "contribute towards the integration of member countries"!
....
For some considerable time the BBC has conducted a systematic and persistent policy of stifling criticism of the EU, it has been in clear and permanent breach of its own Charter, and it continues shamelessly to ignore, let alone address, any of these issues. With the tacit support of the British government, and its dependency on EU funds, it has become a brazen supporter of the European 'project', bought, paid for and tied up in financial ribbons.
....
During the signing of the Nice Treaty, and within the hearing of several bystanders, the BBC reporters on the scene were instructed not to record or report the significant demonstrations against the treaty going on all around them. Such entirely legitimate opposition was literally whitewashed out of the event by BBC editorial controllers." (http://www.ashleymote.co.uk/topics.php?filter=24&sec=ar...d=319)

135. British ambassador to Ireland writing to the Foreign Office 2 Oct 1969 http://www.indymedia.ie/article/64231. More on the correspondence here: http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/182/8/ .

136. http://www.anphoblacht.com/news/detail/4342 .

author by Sleeperpublication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 09:38author address author phone Report this post to the editors

You have done much research and indicated sources in footnotes and web links, so I am convinced you are not given to paranoid delusions. Your article and the long list of sources are too long for this site. Maybe you have the framework for a detailed, well written book here.

Problem is that there are hyper emotional and sometimes delusional individuals around the world who are attracted to imagined conspiracies. In the history of Europe there were imagined conspiracies about sinister women called witches, giving rise to witch hunts and trials by ordeal, with totally innocent women drowned and burned. The Spanish Inquisition imagined jewish conspiracies and underground heresy conspiracies, giving licence to torture, "confessions" and public burnings at the stake.

In the 19th century the freemasons, the jews and the jacobins were spasmodically singled out in Britain, France, Russia and elsewhere for anti-social and anti-state conspiratorial activities.

In the 20th century the fabricated late 19th century "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was rolled out by the Nazi Party to whip up public frenzy against Jews and other non-Aryans. And in the mid-1930s, again in the late 1940s, Joe Stalin conducted show trials to highlight imagined anti-revolution conspiracies by "cosmopolitans" (code word for Jewish communists) and others, with a frightful loss of life and talented personnel.

Ezra Pound in his long poem The Cantos raves continually about the rate of interest and his imaginings that international Jewish bankers are to blame. The list can go on.

Jewish 'conspiracies' are still alleged to carry on into the contemporary world. So we have the Bilderberg banking conspiracy today attracting the attention of some rightist religious groups, but also the attention of some leftists. The freemasons and a sinister crowd called the Illuminati (the descendants of French Revolution times, apparently) are additional ingredients to this exotic pudding.

I don't deny that business and political conspiracies exist, have existed. The Iran-Contra affair, the Cold War CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which secretely funded Encounter magazine and various international intellectual conferences), and the systematic bribing of African military dictators by foreign investment firms looking for monopoly exploitation concessions - these are obvious examples of actual conspiracies since the end of WW2.

But I do worry about paranoia and what it can do to critical thinking. So I tend to be sceptical about allegations of new, hitherto unknown conspiracies. Not to deny that brown bag culture operates widely in Ireland and gets things done without the general public knowing.

Better write that book Brian.

author by W. Finnerty.publication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 10:57author address author phone Report this post to the editors

What about people (and their theories) such as Dr Joseph Stiglitz, who is a former World Bank Vice President & Chief Economist, a Nobel Prize winner, and a one-time member of the United States Administration (under President Bill Clinton)?

Is Dr Stiglitz a conspiracy theorist I find myself wondering? If you believe so, are you in a position to provide us with any meaningful evidence?

"Stiglitz agreed that the process of hijacking and looting key infrastructure on the part of the IMF (International Monitory Fund) and World Bank, as an offshoot of predatory globalization, had now moved from the third world to Europe, the United States and Canada." (This piece of text has been taken from the article at http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2006/301006...h.htm .)

And what about your own theories?

How are we to know if your theories (concerning other theories) are correct, particularly when you are using a nom de plume, and consequently don't have to take any responsibility for anything you publish here on Indymedia?

Related Link: http://www.constitutionofireland.com
author by Sleeperpublication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 12:26author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Mr. Finnerty challenges me: "And what about your own theories?
How are we to know if your theories (concerning other theories) are correct, particularly when you are using a nom de plume, and consequently don't have to take any responsibility for anything you publish here on Indymedia?"

a. I have a theory (actually a policy) that I shouldn't believe any old hair raising theory related to race, business or politics. Goebbels said the bigger the lie the more people will believe it. So I tend to suspend judgement.

'Brian' who published the detailed article with massive footnotes is also a nom de plume. Most posters here are noms de plumes. Maybe some of them (me?! or you or 'Brian'?!) are special branch or CIA pot stirrers.

I mentioned some theories about 'imagined' conspiracies from recorded history i.e. the crazy hate-filled theories about witches and jewish heretics from the middle ages and inquisitorial Spain. Stalin's allegations about political conspiracies by Jewish communists and others in the 1930s have been disproved by Robert Conquest in his book The Great Terror, also Stalin's paranoid denunciations of Jewish doctors trying to poison him in 1951. These are not my theories about historical conspiracy theories: they are proven facts.

author by W. Finnerty.publication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 14:57author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Sleeper (Fri Sep 14, 2007 12:26 above),

Thank you for your reply.

It seems to me you do not consider Mr Stiglitz to be a conspiracy theorist (please correct me if I’m wrong).

That being the case, I wonder how you and Brian (and others) feel about the Dr Stiglitz’ remarks?

"Stiglitz agreed that the process of hijacking and looting key infrastructure on the part of the IMF (International Monitory Fund) and World Bank, as an offshoot of predatory globalization, had now moved from the third world to Europe, the United States and Canada."

This observation by Dr Stiglitz, if correct, seems to me to have VERY serious implications for all of us – having due regard for the many problems connected with the planned PPP M3 Toll Road close to the Hill of Tara, and the “energy infrastructure” controversy at present taking place in County Mayo (for example).

The point I’m trying to make is that warnings of the kind Dr Stiglitz is attempting to communicate should be very seriously considered perhaps, and, far more importantly, acted upon (by the majority of citizens) in effective ways without delay? – assuming of course that his theories are not concocted and/or false.

My fear is that all hope of such effective action will be completely lost in a fog of unproductive debate about the many conspiracy theories of the past.

What about the present?

What about the here-and-now?

Are we all just happy to say Dr Stiglitz is entirely correct of course in his observations, and he is not a conspiracy theorist by any means: and then just leave it at that?

In other words, should we all just sit back now and let the “looting and hijacking” continue “as an “offshoot of PREDATORY globalisation”, and do absolutely nothing to try and stop it by way of practical actions which might prove effective?

Related Link: http://www.europeancourtofhumanrightswilliamfinnerty.com
author by .:.publication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 16:25author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I appreciate how your sources have changed & indeed are much wider since the last article you put up.

I normally establish my credentials to mutter about conspiracy theories on the sensible basis that I am one. Not a month goes by without some sensitive and quick to notice an anamoly sends me a bit of fanmail. Conspiracy theories are wonderful in that they ask you to keep mutually incompatible pieces of information or opinions in your brain at once. Probably proving better for you than a complete life subscription to sudoku or mephisto type cryptic crossword sites. But one of the difficulties with any conspiracy theory is deciding when to begin. William is upset about the IMF and stuff. But if he cast his mind back before the IMF he'd be upset about what came before. If he went further he'd be really upset about who won, lost or reported on the Battle of Trafalgar. Quickly become a reliable source free time traveller William would in a jiffy be puzzling over the late medieval age. Perhaps I should illustrate my point another way..........The Moon.
As we know today the 13th of September 2007 the Japanese launched a rocket which they say will go to the moon. Orthodox history tells us the Americans under Nixon went to the Moon already, but many conspiracy theorists offer quite good reasons to challenge that belief that men ever went to the Moon, yet other conspiracy theorists offer us evidence that men never stopped going to the Moon & half of the hooded spooky masters of the world live there part-time. Which is a more exciting theory or version of history? (1)We never went to the Moon coz we can't and that's why we never went again once Nixon and his team of Haig and Rumsfeld and the young Cheney complete with his own heart were exposed as dirty liars. (2) We never stopped going to the Moon and we've mined half of modern technologies most valuable minerals up there and reversed engineered half the galaxy's alien gizmos...but in secret.

Many people even in the conspiracy theory circles find they can hold both sets of suppressed truth to be as small a disagreement as that held by many Christians who despite differences of theological detail can still hold a general communion of belief as being true - it's a matter of faith & what by trial and error becomes the "canon" of accepted shared fantasy.

I reckon though the upset types are right. We do need action to stop secret societies taking over the world & its international institutions which they quite probably made in the first place.

Thus I propose a ban on hooded jackets & parental supervision of AM/MW radio listening.

author by Fergus O'Connorpublication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 17:31author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The link is to an article by Richard Hofstadter, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics'. Its essential reading for anyone interested in the deluded crackpots who believe in conspiracy theories.
http://www.nationalism.org/patranoia/hofstadter-paranoi...e.htm

author by Sleeperpublication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 18:04author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Regarding the question above on a quotation from Stiglitz I can't give an answer because I don't know what sources he quotes. I don't know where the quote is taken from. My only knowledge of Stiglitz is a quick read of his well known book about globalisation and its discontents. I accept his good intentions to point out economic, social and cultural problems being caused to poor and less poor nations by the globalisation process. Stiglitz was writing as an insider economist employee, so we should heed his points about globalisation carefully. It was good for him to write that insider book. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with what he says about the IMF or any other institution.

There are and have been real political and business conspiracies in recent and more distant times. There have unfortunately been imagined conspiracies as well, which have been believed by rightists and leftists.

'Brian' can write a detailed book based on his interesting research to draw wider attention to his concerns.

Meanwhile my personal policy is to suspend judgement about all kinds of alleged conspiracies in Ireland and elsewhere. There has been business corruption all around us in Ireland and some of the dirt has been washed in public, although nobody except Lawlor went to jail.

author by phantom of the opera - (personal capacity - my livelihood is at stake - no names)publication date Fri Sep 14, 2007 18:25author address author phone Report this post to the editors

You'd be asking a lot of people who don't know about the late medieval dilema to tackle the real problem hard core element all the same.

biology, chemicals & a bit of drugs to be fair.
biology, chemicals & a bit of drugs to be fair.

author by Sleeperpublication date Sat Sep 15, 2007 00:48author address author phone Report this post to the editors

?!

author by phantom of the opera - (personal capacity - my livelihood is at stake - no names)publication date Sat Sep 15, 2007 20:29author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Fans of moon-exploration hoax circumstancial evidence will have been heart-warmed by news that today the Russians blasted 66kg of gerbils (or twelve of them if you come at this from the furry sentient beings with eyes side) into far orbit to test conditions [which science has always deemed very risky] in a hypothetical future human life exploration of Mars or the Moon. You would have been looking at the absence of stars in the backround and silly lighting effects back when Rumsfeld was advisor to "i'm not a crook!" Nixon to get that one.

http://www.federalspace.ru/NewsDoSele.asp?NEWSID=2431
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6996671.stm

Fans of hollow Earth theory will be interested in how yesterday beleagured Bertie Ahern missed a joint Icelandic declaration of foreign policy on Artic exploration. The photos published today by ESA not only show two northern trade routes becoming free due to thawing ice, but also clearly show a hollow earth entry to the planet being censored. You're looking for the suspicious black circle on this one.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMYTC13J6F_index_0.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6995999.stm

author by We the Peoplepublication date Sat Sep 15, 2007 20:51author address author phone Report this post to the editors

There is something very fishy about the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was an inside job to impose restrictions on the American Citizens ,erode freedom , declare a state of national emergency and introduce martial law to destroy the Republic from within.

It's common knowledge that the Bin Laden Family is CIA backed and dealt with the criminal bush family for years. It's quite easy to check all of this.

Related Link: http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/911_nyc_webster_hall_alex_jones_speech.htm
author by gurgle - (personal capacity - my livelihood is at stake - no names)publication date Sat Sep 15, 2007 21:20author address author phone Report this post to the editors

the true............... Why?
your call is recorded to this number.
always.

Now we'll have much more fun if we keep it with clearstream, the moon, bertie, bashing the iranians, the lead content of a Barbie doll, hollow earth filled with gwenyth paltree lookalikes or the late medieval question. Where do YOU! really stand on the late medieval question? Where does your spider sit? ---Which space between official history with its knocks and shocks and reality as it really was do you want to begin from? Your brain isn't wired to answer that one.

sorry.
So you pick your story.
& the real conspiracy is that our minds seem to work together @ explaining what we are not wired to answer. Yeah. Afraid not am I. ;-) .:. i wouldn't be adding anymore now. semi-official policy on not responding to that particular bzzzt So you feel strongly about the 11th of September, then do you?

author by Qui Bono ?publication date Sat Sep 15, 2007 23:13author address author phone Report this post to the editors

When Roman Emperors were Assassinated they asked Qui Bono ? Who Benefits ? In today's modern World, Mainstream Media Attack Dogs Attack any hint of Conspiracies in your own Backyard. A Common phrase for this is Sweeping the dirt under the rug. We all know that Drug Running is a Large Scale Conspiracy. We all know that the invasion of Ireland was a Conspiracy. So too is the present War For Oil in the Middle East aka the so called War on Terror. As is the Importing of Taliban Heroin by People inside the US Government. And Washing the Proceeds of the Taliban Heroin on Wall St. And the Post 9-11 use of Draconian Rule to Put Down Dissent in the Homeland. As are preemptive attacks on Antiwar Protesters by Riot Cops. The list goes on and on. Now ask yourself this question. Could all this Post 9-11 Wars For Oil, Importing of Taliban Heroin, and Shredding of the Bill of Rights happened without the Collapse of the World Trade Center? So it is my belief that the Collapse of the World Trade Center had to be assured in order to guarantee a Public Outcry for War in the Middle East. Not to mention a massive shift in Budget Spending from Domestic to Military.

author by jim cairns - mepublication date Tue Oct 09, 2007 20:24author email dekarnys at yahoo dot co dot ukauthor address author phone Report this post to the editors

To Brian Nugent, (I hope you get to read this!)
you are a great writer and have wonderful sources of incrediblle information!
Ive shown several people articles written by you!
You published facts about Bertie Ahern and Albert Reynolds months before they became news to me and the mass of the Irish populace.
I read your article on the McBrearty meeting at the Mansion House in 2005, I thank you for your comments on my short and nervous speech on that evening!
Im unaccustomed to public speaking functions!
Did I meet you that evening?
I was waylayed down a false alley by Jim Gunneys speech!
A young man approached me just after I heard Gunney speaking, and he said that he had read my book! Was that you Brian?
If so, Im sorry for my stupidity. I missed possibly one of the bravest and most intelligent people at that meeting!
Im involved in this campaign because my family has been made a target of an organised crime and paedophile network in Ireland!
Im not sure of your motives for your interest in these dangerous subjects, but credit must be given to you in great measure for doing so!
I would like to talk to you offline, theres a lot I can tell you,
give me a call on 085 152 8467
or email me at
dekarnys@yahoo.co.uk
Regards Jim Cairns

author by Hugh Murphy - Sacked by my ITGWU and Belfast employers.publication date Tue Oct 30, 2007 08:46author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I just came across this brilliant and well researched article.

On a {shorter} note: would the lady whose paper represents the Right Wing in Ireland please explain why she's purporting to fight for Freedom of Speech, and is cherry - which scandal she chooses to report.

I have sent her and her TAME reporters ABSOLUTE proof that Larkin and Connolly's Union became corrupt and controlled by the employers, in Belfast. So much so, that, along with other persecutions too numerous to mention they {with the employers} sacked their own members.

Not only is this manipulation of the Public - but it proves every word said in the lead article,

She, and anyone in doubt can google Corrupt Siptu Hugh Murphy.

author by Cowaedly Tom - also sacked by ITGWUpublication date Sat Nov 10, 2007 21:09author address author phone Report this post to the editors

what a wonderful article, i take my hat off to the author. All the more so becaus e i know one of th e men he mentions Hugh Murphy. Hugh fought against our unions coruption in Belfast till the employers and union sacked him in their court.

why will the followeress of trade unions not believe that the leaders of siptu are corupt.

one day they will have to belive the truth and shame the devil

author by Cowardly Tom - Also sacked vy ITGWUpublication date Fri Nov 16, 2007 22:54author address author phone Report this post to the editors

i;m a 70yer old ex docker Belfast and seaing hughie murphy has named all the prople responsidle for th coruption a thee docks on slugger o tole indymedia cedar lounge an poltics ie and others becase won;t the fact that the bravo reportters down south wont report on it proves that evey ting said about conspricy thories is ded rightt.

author by Dear Saint - Nonepublication date Sat Jan 26, 2008 16:16author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Brian,

I wonder if you actually read the Witness Statements mentioned in your tremendous article and if so, how did you gain access. I tried and was informed that they were available to Next of Kin........ sometimes.

author by Brianpublication date Tue Mar 04, 2008 09:04author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Go raibh míle maith agat for all the comments and I apologise for my laziness in getting around to replying. Just on the general point about conspiracy theories in Irish history I thought I would quote from Vincent MacDowell who spent about half a century knocking around Irish politics, starting from the time he was imprisoned in Belfast as a Republican during WWII:

"There are very rarely coincidences, very rarely simple fortunate (or unfortunate) accidents in matters of state. Most things are arranged and managed, with varying degrees of success, often by those organisations with centuries of experience at this sort of thing."
(Vincent MacDowell, Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Dublin, c.1997), p.x.)

That then is the exact opposite of what most people say nowadays? If you listen to most commentators they jump at the opportunity to say such and such a thing is only a coincidence and the problem with these conspiracy theorists is that they link everything up when they are only miscellaneous accidents etc. But people with long experience in politics, like MacDowell, come away with a totally different outlook. Incidentally his book is an incredible account of Ireland in the 1920s. Based on an earlier work by Michael O'Cuinneagáin he says that Andy Cope was the MI6 man in Ireland and that he ran numerous agents in the Irish political Establishment, as he hints at here:
"Richard Mulcahy was bitterly attacked in the Dail, and it would seem in retrospect, that a hidden hand had been in operation in the upper ranks of the movement for several years; that in the discussions about the Treaty, influences were brought to bear and decisions were made that were not in the interests of the Nation; that on many occasions when it would have been possible to heal the split and make peace, passions and tempers were deliberately inflamed...."
(Vincent MacDowell, Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Dublin, c.1997), p.155 drawing heavily on Michael O'Cuinneagáin, On the Arm of Time (Taratallon, Donegal Town, 1992).)

As an example of the overall 'conspiratorial' atmosphere he points out that the anti-Treaty IRA garrison in the Four Courts were giving their guns to the Free State Army and were getting back British supplied guns back from them. The anti-Treaty IRA guns were then to be used by the IRA in the North, the subterfuge being necessary to disguise the Free State's role in arming the IRA there. This in fact is a well known episode but its still amazing to find that it was happening right up to the time the Four Courts was shelled by the pro-Treaty forces as Michael O'Cuinneagáin relates:
"The last shipment of arms to leave the Four Courts for Donegal left on the day upon which the Four Courts were attacked, the 27th June 1922." (Michael O'Cuinneagáin, On the Arm of Time (Taratallon, Donegal Town, 1992), p.68.)

Again the more you look at Irish history the more you would be all at sea if you insisted on not believing in conspiracy theories ?

Qui Bono
Absolutely and there are other time honoured principles that can be applied to figure out what is going on in some conspiracies. For example one useful principle I think is "by their fruits you shall know them" which actually comes from the Bible. The theory there is that you should give up listening to what maybe a list - frequently a litany ! - of excuses from the powers that be as regards a given situation and instead you should just accept that if a situation continues for a long time then the people who are in a position to change things must in fact want the current situation to continue. Which is a long winded way of saying that after a while you should give up listening to these excuses and instead accept that the powers that be want this state of affairs, whatever it may be, to continue even though that might at first seem implausible. To give you an example consider the crime situation in Moyross. The community there obviously spent years asking the powers that be to deal with the crime problems and for their pains they got this litany of excuses, resources, legal problems created by having to respect peoples human rights etc etc. But in fact if you look at Rossport say you can see clearly that the same authorities have virtually limitless resources at their disposal to deal with an area that interests them and in court cases there the Gardai and prosecution authorities turn out to be quite ruthless, your constitutional rights etc can quite easily go up in smoke if the government takes a dislike to you. So the theory is then that you should forget about these excuses that are given about Moyross, just accept that the 'fruits' on the ground are what the government actually wants to see happen. Then the game is to try and figure out why. Imho what they are doing is destroying the tight knit communities - for reasons described in that value system thing below - using the excuse of the anti social behaviour, which therefore they have no vested interest in stamping out. Look at the speed at which they rolled out regeneration and the moneys that they have to spend bulldozing those communities as opposed to protecting them? Looks to me that that was their game all along...

Hugh Murphy and Cowardly Tom
Many many thanks for your kind comments and I'm sorry again that I am such a layabout in not replying sooner. Unfortunately I have no difficulty believing your account of Irish trade unions etc. Just look at the way all these trade union and industry bodies march in step when it comes to EU referenda, every single time they have opted for more power to be given to Brussels which is obviously very much the agenda of the powers that be. Thats either an amazing coincidence or somebody has been got at somehow! I'd say there are groups all over the country, maybe even in protest campaigns, wondering a little bit about the true motivation of the people representing them. Apparently they are even wondering now about the taxi unions: http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=32441 . The truth is that we are babes in the arms of these intelligence agencies etc, they have it down to a fine art infiltrating groups and manipulating the media, its a full time job just trying to keep track of them! But I guess if we don't get on top of this you can kiss Irish democracy good bye....

Dear Saint
I think they are available now alright, at least until very recently? Don't forget that you go to the National Archives in Dublin, don't go to the Military Archives. Up until a few years ago they were embargoed as you say but now you can see them there alright. They look like this: http://www.nationalarchives.ie/topics/1916/gallery.html and no question are well worth looking through. There are 1,770 of them covering the whole country although the index only lists them by name so try to have an idea of what names you might be interested in before you get there. Just bring some ID and they will give you a reading ticket and then away you go, they are typewritten so quite easily read.

gurgle
One of the more apt pseudonyms! lol......Mind you there are plenty of other miscellaneous bubbles floating around there as well, what on earth could the Late Medieval Question be referring to :-) ?

Sleeper
As you say the Iran Contra affair is a good example of a very implausible 'conspiracy theory' that turned out to be true. But the fact is that it only emerged in the public domain after a huge effort was put in by elements in the Israeli govt (there was a feud in that government at that time.) If you read Ben Menashe's (a high up Israeli official working directly at the time for the Israeli Prime Minister) book 'Profits of War' you can see how all the big international media and US agencies refused to assist in highlighting the story and it only then came into the public domain when the Israelis got one of their own agents in a small Lebanese newspaper to leak it. Again the story shows that the media, and police structure, is pretty impervious to any real public accountability, only by a miracle or a fluke do the public get to hear about these things and hence there must be a lot of conspiracies going on that we don't get to hear about. As regards that book your prayers are answered! lol: http://www.lulu.com/content/1362154 .

We the People
Well i don't think the mainstream media are going to give us the true story anyway. Like a while ago they debated 9-11 on politics.ie and one of the threads highlights the testimony of an EMT responder to the world trade centre. His version of what happened is totally different to the official version but when he tried to highlight this he faced a brick wall:
"Following the attacks, Mike made a sustained effort to inform the relevant authorities of what he saw, including the FDNY, the NYPD, newspapers and television networks. In every case he was told to "shut up", "forget about it", or "let it go, for my own good."

Initially praised as heroes, when Mike and his colleague tried to alert their EMT Coordinator In Charge of what they had witnessed, they were brought up on charges of disorderly conduct, fired, and fined for damaged uniforms and equipment they had used on 9/11. Two other colleagues who witnessed the same events now refuse to even acknowledge they were at ground zero for fear of reprisals."(http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=26385&postdays=0...rt=72)

Methinks thats pretty much what happens to anybody who questions the government line, the police and state agencies ignore him and the mass media never reports what he says, which is how the general public are left in ignorance about the real facts? Here is another account in the same vein, this time from a Marti Koski, a Finnish guy that is alleging that microwave weapons are used against dissidents in the west:
"Why Does Nobody Speak Out?

Why doesn't anyone listen to, or grow concerned enough over these charges to investigate further?

A large part of the answer lies with how dependent we are on the major news media to shape our view of reality: if we see it on TV, hear it on the radio or read it in the newspaper it happened--if we don't, it didn't. Blacking out stories like mine--censoring them in fact--is the first line of defense the authorities take in defending or hiding their unethical and illegal activities.
...
Freedom of the press means the freedom not to print the news the powers don't want to be printed.

This blackout technique has a double effect: first, it allows the authorities to keep victims like myself isolated, out of contact with others who may have experienced the same things; second, if information does become public, like my using the posters and now this pamphlet for example, the person behind the publication is considered to be some kind of singular "kook" or "crazy", somebody beyond the fringe of "normal" society.

A second element playing a large part in cutting off investigation into claims like mine is the deliberately bizarre and frightening nature of it all. Telepathic terrorism with microwaves--none of us wants to believe it can happen.

When some people reacted to my posters and leaflets and called the RCMP to protest, the first tactic the police used was to sympathetically explain I was mentally ill. They advised the callers to just tear up my leaflet and forget about it.
.....
Despite the evidences I had I was unable to get proper investigation from Finnish Police authorities. More obvious reason than simple stupidity is that Finnish authorities as authorities in many other countries, appreciate more good relations with another country than constitutional rights, health or even life of one Finnish citizen. If police don't investigate crimes of foreign intelligence services they won't find them."
(http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/v/mylife.htm)


There are 618 victims listed at that website here http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/victm-hm.htm and some 548 members in this forum saying much the same thing: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mcforums/ . So like at some point people have to say that it is a greater 'conspiracy theory' that all these people have suddenly gone insane with these bizarre stories than it is just to believe them and admit that this type of thing is indeed going on?

W. Finnerty.
I guess Stiglitz is interesting alright but I think that John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, has a more exciting and clearer account of international finance. Basically he says that the US deliberately goes around getting countries into debt and then destroying them if they don't march in step with US interests. He was actually recruited into all this via a sexual liaison with an NSA agent, and then kept quiet about it via large bribes. His thoughtful account also dwells on how easy it is to control people when they have those kind of modern American values:
"They also discovered a lot of weaknesses in my character (I like to think of them as kind of the big -- the three big drugs of our culture: money, power, and sex) that they could use as a hook to bring me in. So, I was told from the very beginning by this amazing woman, Claudine, (who's described in detail in the book) who is basically my trainer that, 'Look, you're going into a dirty business. Once you're in, you can never get out of this business; but we're going to make it very attractive for you to go into this business.'
(http://www.johnperkins.org/Newsletter%20Archives.htm)

author by Brianpublication date Tue Mar 04, 2008 09:22author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Anyway like Perkins I have been daydreaming about this whole value system malarkey and the way they can be deliberately manipulated, via the media for example, to create subservient cowed citizens. By values I mean the things that people pursue, or measure themselves by, the value systems in the society at large. I figure that its not necessarily an accident that the modern public have come to embrace values that actually assist governments in controlling them. I call it:

How to create a Value System in a population to make Political Control easier.

This is a bit like joining the marines, firstly you have to strip out of people their previous identity and values, and almost deliberately break them down as it were, then build them up again using a new set of values. The first set of numbers below are the value systems to be knocked out of people, followed by those to be implanted:

1) Religion. Firstly then you must burn out of people their religious identity and value system. This is definitely priority number 1. Clearly the main churches, Christian Moslem and Jewish, teach people a comprehensive set of values and moral teaching, some of which that have stood the test of 2 millennia, which make it impossible for a new value system to be imposed on top. Like Stalin then the first cry is that religion is bunkum, 'the opium of the masses', established religion has been people's oppressors for centuries, cause of all wars etc, blame them for everything except the weather !

There are also more subtle ways of discrediting religion, and of setting world religions against one another in order to destroy each in turn:
a) Islam. Maybe it might be possible to hype up a totally false virtually charicatured version of Islam, where so many virgins get to comfort a suicide bomber and where you get your hand chopped off for doing nearly anything. Don't forget that this extreme version of Islam comes from places like Saudi Arabia and among the Moslem fighters against the USSR in Afghanistan, both groups which are or were closely allied to the powers that be in the US and the UK. Then maybe you can embarrass and humiliate Moslems themselves with this kind of exaggerated Islam as well as use it to cause disquiet in the Christian world.
b) Judaism. Some would say that a clique which claims to be Jewish (but actually are not but are rather followers of ancient Babylonian pagan religions, including those involving the Cabala, as well as Jewish heresies like Spinozans, Frankists etc) are in powerful positions worldwide which in turn understandably infuriates the citizens of places like Russia, the US and Palestine who feel oppressed by this clique. This then serves to discredit Judaism in general and likewise creates tensions between them and the other great religions. After all if you think about WWII you cannot help but be struck at how this always powerful clique did very little to help the mass of the - real - Jews when they really needed it.
c) Christianity, in particular Catholicism. There is actually evidence out there that Communists, and others, deliberately infiltrated into senior positions in the Catholic church and then no doubt did nothing to stamp out the emerging corruption which has done so much to discredit Catholicism in Ireland and around the world.(1) According to Det Jim Rothstein of the New York Police Department, who personally handled agents in the Vatican and the UN as part of major investigations into worldwide paedophile rings, the US and USSR intelligence agencies both targeted the Vatican, because maybe both had a vested interest in seeing it discredited:

"There was a concerted effort by ...both intelligence communities, the Americans and the Russians, to infiltrate the Catholic Church and subvert what they were doing. And that's how the paedophilia really got started."(2)

There are even suspicions that Pope John Paul II was himself a Communist agent ! (3) This would certainly explain why the Catholic church has been so ill led in recent times, not least in Ireland where the hierarchy was obviously appointed by that Pope or his predecessor Pope Paul VI, another person who has attracted similar allegations.(4) The Catholic church is particularly vulnerable to this kind of infiltration because it is so hierarchical. If you can control the guy at the top you can destroy everything, you can even get the church members to destroy their own liturgy and churches.

In the long run it might be hoped that all these religions would kill each other off in a kind of 'Clash of Civilisations' - which would include Moslem v. Christian clashes on the streets of Western Europe - which in turn would allow the powers that be to tell us that all wars are created by religions which we should then take care to stamp out. In the meantime you can always play them off against one another. For example if you wanted to stamp out Christian symbolism in the Gardai or the schools or wherever you would highlight the use of Islamic scarves or Sikh turbans, get Christians infuriated at their presence or potential presence in Christian countries, and then use that outrage to pass laws which ban religious symbols in general. These laws can then be used to crush Christian symbols mostly, because they are after all more prominent in Ireland and other western countries.

Anyway you have to destroy religion before you can really mess with people's minds and impose a new value system, its absolutely critical. If people must learn some religion at school then subtly destroy the catechisms taught there. (Caitlín Ó Seighin in the Rossport book describes how the new catechisms taught since the 70s are completely different from the traditional teachings of the Catholic church. She regards this change as being crucial to understanding what is going on now in modern Ireland and the attitudes of the people.(5)) In the long run though it would be much better to destroy religious education totally, if at all possible, say its been modern and tolerant and all that !lol

2) Nationalism. This area again can provide a kind of yardstick by which people judge their actions, and a sort of pride that would cause people to pause before they would do something very terrible. Think of Hacker in 'Yes Minister' and the way he would square his shoulders and quote Churchill when he would do something heroic for the good of the people (and not just for his own political self interest). For political control purposes we don't want anybody doing anything heroic ! Its easier to control people if they are only motivated by the unheroic! We want people to think its all about the money or the job etc, thats the spirit if you want to keep people in a kind of open prison camp.

Irish nationalism and patriotism has over the years motivated people to do genuinely unselfish acts, and survive, with their values intact, everything the state could throw at them. While I know this is a minority viewpoint :-) I actually think, if you were to be fair minded, that you could see genuine idealism and courage in the face of state oppression in the actions of Irish leaders as diverse as Eoin O'Duffy and Brendan Hughes, and with many people in the - wide! - gap in between. Both of them could be relied upon to stand up to the state when they needed to.(6)

Nationalism puts a kind of backbone into people I think, it frequently causes them to strive above themselves and do the best they can for their country. A 'backbone' is exactly what you want to strip out of people if you want them to be passive sheep in a controlled state ! As well as this nationalism can provide a way of uniting people and this is also bad news for our putative prison guards. Its obviously much more of a threat to the system if a number of people can unite against it at the same time, rather that individuals acting alone. This is another reason why national identity must be stripped out of people in a controlled police state type of world. How they do this is the interesting thing, basically they mess with people's minds and seek to root out the pride people have in the achievements of their country:

a) If, like most places in Western Europe, the country has a colonial tradition then it is said that the whole nation was one slave driving mass oppressing gang of fascists! Its very hard to play this card on the Irish nation, but you can always try e.g. by claiming that Irish people were willing oppressors in the British Empire etc.(7)

b) Cast doubt on the origins of the country and the genuineness of its borders, how historic they are etc. For example you sometimes hear that Belgium is a country just cobbled together from the remnants of post Napoleonic Europe, without any great claim to unity or historic identity. This is surely unfair though because Belgium is a recognisable and unique stretch of land going as far back as the 16th century, when it was already distinguishable from Holland and France. One writer on Bangladesh, Mohammad Zainal Abedin, who says that RAW - the Indian intelligence agency - controls 90% of the officials of the state television there, states that the latter intelligence agency tries to cast aspersions on the circumstances of that countries independence in the hope that this will drain the country of its sense of purpose and morale:
"Now to over run a country an aggressor cripples its citizens psychologically....Though the country seems to be independent outwardly but psychologically and culturally its people are made subservient. They become imitative. Their cultural identity and exclusiveness and their spirit of nationalism gradually die down. A day then comes when they fail to perceive the significance and necessity of protecting independence and sovereignty. RAW relentlessly has been endeavouring to create such a situation in Bangladesh."(8)

You can get a little whiff of this creeping into revisionism in Irish history. We are supposed to have been conquered by the Romans - and hence not unique in Western Europe - the Celts didn't exist at all really, and anyway the Celts of Tara and the Gaelic lords of the Flight of the Earls were just the usual clique of oppressing horrible aristocrats that we are supposed to be well shut of.
You can compress historical periods in order to create the impression that all nations are just haphazard collections of passing migrants and not, and were never, a united mass. For example you can try that in Ireland and say that those Irish people descended from the Vikings or the Normans are just the same as the 'new' Irish from Poland or wherever ignoring the fact that the Normans have been in Ireland since 1170, a long time ago and for at least 500 years of that they were not considered Irish. It wasn't until the 1660s that they qualified as 'new Irish' (see for example John Lynch's 'Alithinologia'). You have compressed the time period so that the centuries of shared history is forgotten.
Waves of revisionism can descend on the narrow shoulders of your historians, knocking the 'myths' that give a country its nationalistic pride. In Ireland's case we have been told over the last few years that Tom Barry was sectarian, that Oliver Cromwell was a good guy if a little misunderstood, that the Penal laws never really happened or were at least wildly exaggerated etc etc which thankfully our underpaid and overworked amateur historians have managed to beat off in time, not least on indymedia.

c) But the main way to destroy national identity is via mass migration. Effectively a country loses its historic sense of itself if most of its citizens - or at least a large proportion - just don't identify with the traditional unifying ethnic makeup of a country. In a recent interview in the UK:
"Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said that government promotion of multiculturalism has destroyed the unity that used to hold British society together."(9) [.... Referring as well to the UK's Christian heritage he is reported as saying that with this immigration flow] "people lose their bonds of belonging and sense of identity. He says this is already beginning to happen."(10)

The likes of Hacker quoting Churchill 'we will fight them on the beaches', or talk of the 'ancient liberties of a free born Englishman' will die out because all this means nothing to a person of Pakistani, or African or Chinese descent.
Its no good thinking you can get people to pass some exam as a citizenship test or some other such proposal that increasingly desperate administrators and citizens in countries like Denmark, the UK, Holland and France and increasingly dreaming up. You cannot graft onto a people some new artificial identity like this, it will never work, most migrants (and the descendants of migrants if they are of a different ethnic background to the host nation) just do not, and never will - or at least not for some 500 years - feel the sense of identity to their new country which is necessary for genuine patriotism and nationalism to exist. This is no doubt why mass migration flows seem such a feature of the modern world, maybe they are quite deliberately sponsored by the powers that be to create this effect of stripping out the nationalist identity from people. Although we are late to the game this is no doubt also slated to be the fate of Ireland as well.

The only thing people are left with then is a sense of belonging to an ethnic group that is probably a minority in the country where it used to be the majority. In otherwords a white English person night derive his sense of himself from being around other people of the same ethnic group and background and history within England, even if the country itself no longer has that identity. They might end up similar to countries that never had, or live outside, a traditional state like the Basques who live in Spain and France, or even the Irish of the UK and USA or even north of the Border. Like some in Belfast people might end up identifying with people on the basis of their appearance, or surname - or even first name - rather than the state, and ethnic identity and nationalistic pride could survive that way. But the powers that be have thought of that, they are ready for you there! They call that racism and are going to extreme lengths broadcasting constantly and educating people that that is totally unacceptable.

Hopefully then, from their point of view, in time nationalism and ethnic identity will collapse, to be Irish will just mean having a letter on a car number plate or a passport, it wont mean anything at all more than that in a bland globalised world of completely mixed up races and nationalities.

3) Communities. Another value system, and 'backbone', can come to people from strong communities, not just those at a national level. I think in places like working class Limerick a person would refuse to become some evil prison guard, or whatever, because their mates would kill them! (Thats metaphorically speaking for everywhere outside Belfast :-) only kidding..) A certain code of behaviour exists in those places I think and this community spirit gives people strength which is again bad news to the powers that be. Hence those places will just have to go, bulldoze them to the ground on some excuse. After a while as those people begin to live apart they wont know who they are and will all the more readily give in to the system.

4) Families. This can also be a source of pride and a value system for some people. Maybe you wouldn't do anything that would make you feel ashamed in the eyes of your children or your parents or your grandparents or whoever. This could be the kind of bedrock values that a person has, he/she might have in their mind's eye what their father or mother would have done in a particular situation, so providing a kind of ongoing value system.
I'm afraid this is for the chop then too! Spread around Restraining Orders like confetti in legal proceedings! At least try to have children brought up by only one parent, so they lose half that value system (and get rid of grandparents and extended families out of children's lives too.) Do whatever it takes to bring them into the divorce courts, encourage adultery, whatever. Teach constant repetitive sex education classes. Never mind the fact that it bores the pupils and embarrass the teachers hopefully it will highlight sex in such a way that long term monogamous relationships become impossible. Promoting that kind of lifestyle can also be useful in controlling society by simply distracting people away from focusing on political issues, a trick that the Romans called bread and circuses, as Aldous Huxley relates in his preface to a 'Brave New World':
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom.....it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."(11)

Hopefully this will drive people further away from religion as well, helping to destroy that other identity.
Maybe in some cases family pride can even extend to some historical references, a family might claim to live in such and such an area for centuries, and were always 'decent people' who wouldn't stoop to some low evil act. Ban or discourage history teaching while you are at it then! (Which is useful for stripping national identity too.) By hook or by crook then people will no longer know about their family history and will not have that pride to guide them. In time maybe half the population will be illegitimate children who possibly never knew both their parents at all, and this then is the right material for the powers that be to work on.

Ok then now you are ready for the next step. Imagine a line of people lined up like the Marines with their heads shaven, their identities stripped from them. All types are lined up intermixed, black, white, Asian, whatever without any groups formed that could interfere with the imposition of a new value system. They all now speak the one language too, a kind of unaccented bland broken English, the only language a mass of different races can use to communicate with one another. They have nothing to grasp at now that would cause them to stand up to their prison guards, no pride that could give them that inner fire to resist. But not to worry, we will now give you all new identities that will make our control over you all the easier.

1) Law. Its often been said that the origin of most law in the UK and Ireland derives from centuries of seeking to curb the arbitrary power of the state and providing inalienable rights and privileges that the latter cannot trample on at will. This might be true, by and large, of the Irish constitution and as well as the ancient common law type of rights and principles like trial by jury, right to silence, innocent until proven guilty (actually CAB proceedings in the Irish courts work exactly the opposite way now), that a person cannot be convicted on just one man's word against another (a dead letter now if the other person is a Garda or state expert), that when you did your punishment under the system then you can start afresh, that you cannot be tried again if acquitted of a crime (double jeopardy) etc. The point is that if you look around you today you can see that these ancient privileges are quietly being abolished.

Take one principle for example, the right to public justice as opposed to some private or secretive inquiry by some state body. It has always been clear under time honoured legal principles that justice must be public to be fair, for a whole host of reasons not least because parties can lie through their teeth in private proceedings and not face any consequences for doing so, because most people in a position to know the truth will not have access to their testimony, and also it can allow people to say one thing in public and an entirely different thing privately, a fantastic facility for a corrupt politician! As the philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) noted:
"Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spirit to exertion and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge, while trying, under trial.”(12)
Look at the Irish legal system now in that light. Michael McDowell changed centuries of Irish legal tradition when he created the Morris tribunal which for the first time can hear and report on a mixture of secret and public testimony. He claimed that was not to prejudice future legal proceedings, supposedly in the interests of the McBrearty family, while what has happened of course is that families like the McBreartys have been grilled mercilessly in the public hearings while senior figures like Garda Commissioners and Justice ministers have been put on the stand only in the secret portions of the tribunal. The inquiry into Clerical child abuse allows the various religious bodies to issue a public statement, frequently casting doubt on the full force of the allegations against them, and then the actual evidence from the victims is heard in secret. The recent inquiry into the death of Brian Rossiter in Clonmel has been held in secret which, one suspects, is precious little use to this family in their quest for justice. The whole Irish family law system is buried under layer upon layer of secrecy with only now and again horrifying tales of legal corruption and state aggression emerging into the public domain.

Another example of a time honoured legal protection could be the Coroner's courts. These were established in Ireland as long ago as the 12th century as a way of hearing public on the record testimony about the circumstances of a person's death, and are, and always were, particularly called into being if there are any unusual or suspicious circumstances surrounding that death. If you read newspaper accounts from the 19th century, for example, you can see how much interest there was in these courts. Frequently there would be a report of a suspicious death and then the general public would await the Coroner's court to find out the real circumstances of the particular death. Then if the court found that a person died in a suspicious way a murder investigation might be launched. It makes perfect sense to arrive at a verdict as to how a person dies and then possibly arrive at future court cases to determine who might be responsible for foul play. Nowadays the way it works is that the media, using selected Garda leaks - from the Garda Press office or inspired by government bodies you can be sure, not the initative of individual Gardai - pump out a particular version of events quickly, frequently fingering some person for the crime without the slightest hesitation. (For instance look at the media coverage of the Sophie du Plantier killing, or Rachel O'Reilly, or the media coverage of the tragic house fire at Omagh.) After a while, after the media version has sunk into everybody virtually brainwashing them with this official line, then the Inquest comes along and the same Gardai close it down claiming that it might prejudice a future court case. Even the Garda Ombudsmans Office closed down an Inquest while the verdict was being considered by the jury, again on the basis of some will o' the wisp future never ending investigation. This then ensures that the public get a version of events which is not backed up by open testimony in a court setting, what that means is that they can make up any facts they like in these media leaks and don't have to take an oath and stand over their word given in public. The Omagh bombing is interesting to look at in that regard. The media story was burned into people's heads very quickly after the bombing but when the RUC were pressed for the hard facts at the Inquest, held a long time later, they actually refused to testify on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves.(13) Then the only other forum where the hard facts needed to be put on the table, during the two trials held North and South, it turns out that the judges themselves flatly accused the state of manufacturing evidence.

Anyway the point is that the legal system now is not at all the ancient way of protecting the citizen, those old rights are being brushed aside with contempt and all we are left with is statute law, realms of it, creating new criminal offences at an enormous rate.(14) Statute law right now effectively is the rule book written by Bertie Ahern who has ruled over us either as Taoiseach or senior minister for well nigh a generation. If you think he is somewhat dishonest then don't be too surprised if the statute laws that you and I abide by right now have some other purpose than the stated ones! The English MEP Ashley Mote puts it succinctly:
"The law was once championed as a shield for the protection of the common man. In the hands of today’s ruling elite it has become a weapon of the state. It is now much to be feared. It is used ruthlessly to destroy opposition, however modest, wherever it is perceived."(15)

It isn't surprising then that the powers that be are very comfortable in this new legal set up, and they would like you to feel the same way. The law has now been established as the first and most important of the new values in this police state.

We want you now to quote the law in all your transactions, we want you to measure good and evil, and all your actions, according to this yardstick. This is now your new religion and identity, learn to love it, learn to hate those that infringe on it in any way. Now as you go around the prison camp you can quote from the law (which is just the prison camp rule book, drawn up by the prison governor) whenever you see some poor fella eating an apple as he cycles along between the prison huts, or read the riot act to some guy who pulls on a cigarette in a restricted area. Just get into the habit of judging your fellow inmates by this yardstick, be judgemental don't be afraid to aggravate your neighbours with every pointless subsection in every regulation in that manual, even if it is patently the wrong thing to do. You don't question the law, you abide by it and criticise anybody who doesn't or hasn't abided by it with the same full intensity. There is also a full set of organisations to complain to if you see anybody breaking the law, with confidential phone numbers advertised everywhere for you to inform on your fellow prisoners. (Don't give me that Irish tradition of not informing, don't you know there is no such thing as being Irish? What did it ever mean exactly? I don't want you quoting 'traditions', myths, scientific untruths! Haven't you been to the re-education classes, don't you know nationalism - aka racism - is wrong? - This just proves again how you must burn out nationalism in order to control people properly.)

Then some laws come down to you like Star Trek 'from the Federation', with even less likelihood that you had any say in drawing them up. Don't question the merits of that law that requires the school huts to pay for water when the very thing seems to come down in buckets constantly! Excuse me you don't do that, when the law asks you to jump you ask how high, don't ever question the laws we give you ever again, is that understood?

2) Tax. Another set of values, related to the legal one, is tax. Again paying tax is hyped up as the end all and be all, a crucial yardstick in judging your fellow man.

This is because the prison is actually an open prison, people work outside it so its very important that when they come back they give the prison authorities all their income. After all thats what funds the whole prison system, if they didn't have that where would they be? Of course you are told that the taxes are to pay for the prison health service etc but if you look around you carefully you might notice how that service, and nearly every other one, goes to rack and ruin while every corner of the prison now has new shiny CCTV cameras, and the prison guards and officials seem to always get higher pay and perks. Also its important for the prison system to track all the money transactions made by the prisoners, that way they can police them easier and the tax system facilitates this surveillance.

3) Work. Or rather work work work to give it its official title:-). We want to burn this into your soul, work is what we will allow you to do to gain self respect and dignity and all that. We want you to work constantly and judge people by the amount of work that they do. This is the next most important value system. If people are completely obsessed with work, as some people accuse Americans of being, then they will all become lovely worker ants without any spark of life in them or with enough time to look around and see the creation of the prison system around them.(16) As well as creating a value system that puts work above almost all other human activities it might be possible to increase the rate of growth in a country which can itself compel people to work harder, in order to keep afloat of an increased cost of living.

Communism, in the former USSR for example, always strove to install the work ethic as one of the great values that people should have by giving awards to great workers and other similar schemes. (Don't forget that this modern obsession about work in the west is quite a new thing, about 100 years ago the exact opposite was considered to be the right qualities of a gentlemen. While I suppose a conscientiousness in doing work, and supporting families, was always valued to a certain extent nonetheless at that time being honest, well read, having cultural talents etc would be much more highly prized in a person, and society, than just working for works sake which is where we are now really.) The USSR authorities obviously knew that if they could keep their citizens busy with their heads down working constantly, or travelling to work, then they could more easily control them.

Furthermore a workaholic type culture can have the effect of coarsening society, which in turn makes it less cohesive and therefore will help to kill off that community (or family) type value system as described above. What I mean is that in non workaholic environments society functions with towns and villages full during the day, with some people knocking around who aren't all the time working. (Or indeed just not taking their work so seriously that they couldn't stop for a chat now and again.) Also families will clearly function best if there is somebody there to talk to etc. Clearly if everybody is at work all the time then family structures and village life collapses.

If you think about it too you can see that cultural aspects of a society usually depend on people who don't have a regular job. Irish culture heavily depends on its penniless poets like Patrick Kavanagh, or ill paid musicians, or actors, or historians, or even people who could be relied upon for a long conversation during the day. In a workaholic culture often the cost of living drives these people to abandon their pursuits and they could even just get fed up meeting people who pester them with questions about when they are going to get a 'proper' job. This kind of bleak social landscape is the inevitable byproduct of a workaholic culture.

Hence now we want you to develop that boiled eyed insensitivity and constant resentment of the workaholic. See that guy protesting over there, go over and ask him will he grow up and get a job, go on thats the spirit! We want you to work work work, think workhorse with blinkers on, thats you! Don't think, you're not paid to think! In fact in education we want you to be focused on what your future employer wants. We don't want dreamy spires with philosophers thinking about the world around them. Coming to think of it it would be helpful if the cost of living or fees were so high that students had to work full time while trying to study. Thats the spirit, no time to read things, you're just there to regurgitate what you're told. We don't want these student types with time on their hands able to go to demonstrations or whatever, better to have an economic necessity so that for them its work work work too!

Now having burned this work value system into your soul, at times, when we need to, we might pull it away, or threaten to, and collapse your sense of yourself or your standing among your peers. To a remarkable degree the powers that be now have the capacity to deny the possibility of work to those they dislike. Most jobs now are either on government contracts - frequently short term without any job security, they even want teachers to be like that now - or require some kind of tax certificate or state licensing permission e.g. you cannot even apply now to be a nurse on the CAO form without going through a Garda vetting process. Royston Brady has come forward recently to say that he was directly threatened by a senior Fianna Fail figure that if he didn't stop speaking out in the media:
"I would find it very hard to get work in this town. It is a small town."(17)

He doesn't say who this senior FF figure was but in all probability it was Bertie Ahern, who is described as Royston's mentor in FF, and you can see that with so much employment resting on the say so of state agencies, which obviously he ultimately controls, it is a very real threat in the modern age. Frances Cahill, the daughter of Martin Cahill 'the General', has described in elaborate detail how none of her family were ever allowed to take up normal employment, even though many of them had nothing to do with criminal activities. The Gardaí went to enormous lengths to sabotage any attempts that Frances made to find work, even as a shop assistant.(18) The threat of losing employment is held over all who might threaten the system, and this threat is greater when work - and to a certain extent the money derived from it - is hyped up as the ultimate in human endeavour.

Sin a bhfuil ar aon nós, my tuppence worth on the type of values that make political control that much easier in our modern world. To clarify look at it from the perspective of a British administrator in modern Ireland for example. From his point of view if he could burn out of people their historical memories and nationalism (what you are trying to kill off is the memory that Ireland had been united and that the British had stolen Irish lands in the Ulster Plantation) and their religious identity then thats how you can make Ireland as British as Finchley as the saying goes! That gets to the heart of the resistance in a way, without those values every place becomes a sort of bland suburban landscape where the established hierarchy and laws are submitted to without question. If, for example, you had some map of the troubles and you were trying to figure out again the 'roots of resistance' what you would notice I think is that people will stand up to the state in those working class areas where many people are related to one another and where there is great solidarity, and in rural areas where there is great historical memory and pride (the type of place where they could point out to you the bog they had to live in when Cromwell confiscated their estates) everywhere else you will find no serious resistance. In particular if you could look at such a map now and see the large amount of middle class suburb type areas, where different ethnic groups live together, you can see that no serious rebelliousness would ever come from there. They get their values from the media, which emphasise things like the above, and anyway they couldn't unite because they have nothing in common with their neighbours. If you were such an administrator plotting a plan of political control then what you would do is bulldoze out of existence those tight knit urban areas - they call that urban regeneration! - and drive out of rural areas the original inhabitants - say by various planning things, collapse of rural services, transport nightmares, the ruination of the agricultural economy etc - and this will cement political control both now and into the future.

While no doubt most people would not agree that the powers that be in this country are that powerful or clever enough to contemplate these things my guess, as listed above, is that they can be cleverer than people think, and some prominent international power structures have indeed thought through long term planning of things like this.(19) Again if you look at the history of Ireland you can see the same pattern. The British government made enormous efforts, over centuries, to stamp out the Catholic religion in Ireland knowing that it promoted a set of values that they couldn't control. (And of course they pushed the Anglican religion instead, an 'established' church which not accidentally was headed by the English monarch and had its bishops appointed by the British Prime Minister.) They always kept a beady eye on, and frequently executed, Irish poets and harpers knowing full well that if they could root out the cultural sense of Irishness out of the people then they could more easily be able to psychologically take over the country. Then having done that they used the education system and the media to quite deliberately spread around the notion of British fair mindedness and the fruits of liberty sealed by a 'Glorious Revolution.' Colonel Maurice Moore accused them of this when he wrote his account of the Irish Volunteers:
"It is not only the vanity, but also the policy of the English people to spread these fallacies, and they certainly have had considerable effect, by dint of hearing them repeated, people believe to a certain extent in their truth....[but after 1916 Irish people] began to consider history more carefully; they remembered that ....'Perfide Albion' represented the European view of her diplomacy." (20)

Daniel Sheehan, an Irish Parliamentary Party MP, describes the same policy:
"Through the whole of the nineteenth century it had been the malign purpose of England to destroy the spirit of nationality through its control of the schools. Just as in the previous century it sought to reduce Ireland to a state of servitude through the operations of the Penal Laws, so it now sought to continue its malefic purpose by a system of education "so bad that if England had wished to kill Ireland's soul when she imposed it on the Sister Isle she could not have discovered a better means of doing so" (M. Paul Dubois). And the same authority ascribes the fatalism, the lethargy, the moral inertia and intellectual passivity, the general absence of energy and character which prevailed in Ireland ten or twelve years ago to the fact that England struck at Ireland through her brain and sought to demoralise and ruin the national mind."

Then the atmosphere in Ireland changed dramatically after the Irish Ireland movement started:
"In giving to the young especially a new pride in their country and in their own, great and distinctive national heritage, it did a great deal to strengthen the national character and to make it more independent and self-reliant. It started the great work of rooting out the slavery which centuries of dependency and subjection had bred into the marrow of the race. Mr Arthur Griffith has admitted that the present generation could never have effected this work had not Parnell and his generation done their brave labour before them, but considered in themselves the achievements of the Gaelic League can only be described as mighty both in the actual revolution it wrought in the moral, intellectual and spiritual sphere, in the reaction it created against the coarser materialism of imported modes and manners, and in the new spirit which it breathed into the entire people." (21)


Hence at a high level they can really do this, with control over the media, and other institutions, they can mould the ethos of a whole population to suit their aims of longterm political control. Its just as well then to keep a close eye on what they are up to!

author by Brianpublication date Tue Mar 04, 2008 09:30author address author phone Report this post to the editors

1. See for example Marie Carré, "AA-1025 / The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle" (Rockford Illinois, 1972), passim and the statements of Bella Dodd, the Attorney General Designate of the Communist Party in the US, to the US Congress in the 1950s quoted in Hamish Hyde "Church Infiltration" Hibernian Magazine Jan 2007 issue 9 available at http://www.hibernianmedia.com/ . and from http://www.tldm.org/News6/VaticanII-1.htm :
'"In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within." Twelve years before Vatican II, she said: "Right now they are in the highest places in the Church". She also predicted changes in the Church that would be so drastic that "you will not recognize the Catholic Church."
Dr. Alice von Hildebrand recalled, during an interview with Latin Mass magazine, that "Bella Dodd told my husband and me that when she was an active [Communist] party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican 'who were working for us'." (Latin Mass magazine, Summer 2001)'

2. Jim Rothstein interviewed on the Investigative Journal 27 March 2007 http://www.republicnewsradio.com/station/archives/17?page=2 .

3. See for example the article by Fr Michel Marchiset, a former SSPX priest, in translation from the French here: http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecont...e.htm , and this from Fr M E Morrison of San Francisco:
"On June 27, 2007, the roof blew off one long-time Newchurch cover-up. A special commission chaired by Newchurch Archbishop Slawoj Glodz, of Poland, publicly presented the results of its investigations, which found that one out of ten Newchurch bishops in Poland after Vatican II were spies for the Communist Secret Service (SS). Twelve of them are still living. Glodz passed over the delicate question of whether Karol Woytyla, later JPII, was one of these spies."(http://www.traditio.com/comment/com0707.htm)

You can see where they are coming from if you mull over two simple, and I think widely accepted, facts:
a) The Communist authorities in 1956 had won the right of veto over appointments to the Catholic hierarchy in Poland. As an example of widely respected authorities that prove this I will quote from two academics, and note as well the phrase ' traditional protocol' in the Yallop quote below:
"After Gomulka came to power in 1956....a 1950 agreement accommodating Church activities was renewed, with the added provision that granted the state veto power over Church appointments." (Arthur J Wolak, "Forced out: The Fate of Polish Jewry in Communist Poland" (Tucson, 2004), p.104.)

"This found expression in a resumption of interference in ecclesiastical appointments in 1958. Until then, the government had not exercised its right of veto under the terms of the 1956 agreement.. ......Wyszynski testified that on several occasions during the 1960s he had changed the list of candidates for ecclesiastical positions following state interference."
(Hanna Diskin, "The Seeds of Triumph: Church and State in Gomułka's Poland" (Budapest and New York, 2001), p.163.)

b) Approx. 20 per cent of the Catholic clergy in the Krakow diocese are thought now to have been Communist agents. See for example:
"As a result of the presbyter's investigations into the documents of the National Remembrance Repository, opened after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, implications also arose about much Krakow's former Newchurch archbishop, Karol Woytyla, later JPII, himself cooperated with the Communist Secret Police. Polish historians have concluded that up to 20% of Woytyla's diocesan clergy were involved in collaboration with the atheistic Communists. Was he himself?" (http://www.traditio.com/comment/com0712.htm referring to Fr Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski and citing Source: Catholic World News)

Actually the percentage varies in some reports but even where it is a little smaller it is agreed that in the urban university cities like Krakow the rate would be much higher than in
rural areas:
' “There is a sort of unholy alliance in Poland that has been present for many years, but is fully visible only recently, that is based on a culture of mendacity,” said Andrzej Zybertowicz, professor of sociology at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, the heart of the Polish church’s most conservative camp.

He argued that there were three elements of this alliance: former members of the secret police and the Communist Party who are now active in business and politics; apologists who wanted to forgive and forget past collaboration; and an influential part of the hierarchy of the Polish church.
.....
Poland’s current primate and archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, told an Italian news agency last year that the overall percentage was 15 percent. The percentage was likely to have been much higher in major cities and university towns, some historians say, where surveillance was heavier.'
(New York Times 10 Jan 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/world/europe/10poland....html)

The obvious next step is put those two facts together and conclude that presumably the Communist authorities would use their right of veto to get appointed their own agents as bishops? An easy thing to do since we now know that so many of the clergy were Communist spies? David Yallop in his uncomplimentary but highly respected biography of John Paul II relates this anecdote on the appointment of John Paul II as Archbishop of Cracow:

"Acting on the traditional protocol, Cardinal Wyszynski submitted three names to the Polish Government. All three had previously been approved by the Pope. Wojtyla's name was not on the list. Months later the list came back to Wyszynski with all of his candidate's rejected. The files of the Polish secret police and additional information from former Communist-Party members reveal a wonderfully ironic tale - independently confirmed by papal biographer George Weigel [footnoted as "Witness to Hope"]. A bemused Primate retired to his study and eventually a further three names were sent to the Vatican for papal approval, which was forwarded to the Polish Government. After a further three months the second list came back to Cardinal Wyszynski; again the regime had given the thumbs down to all three names.

During the late autumn of 1963 Father Andrzej Bardecki, the ecclesiastical assistant on the Catholic Church-financed paper, Tygodnik Powszechny, had a visitor at his Cracow office. Professor Stanislaw Stomma headed a minority Catholic Party in the Polish Parliament. With a maximum of five members it was in reality no more than a rump yet it served many useful purposes, not least as a conduit between the Communists and the Catholic church. The professor quietly invited Father Bardecki to join him for a stroll around part of the city. As the two men walked, Professor Stomma recounted a conversation he had recently had with Zenon Kliszko, the Communist number two. Kliszko had asked him who would be the best candidate for the vacancy in Cracow. 'I told him, firmly and categorically that Wojtyla was the best, indeed the only choice.'
Kliszko beamed and replied, 'I've vetoed seven so far. I'm waiting for Wojtyla and I'll continue vetoing names until I get him.'... [ This was a hint to be passed on to the Catholic authorities:] Kliszko's tactics worked a charm. When he had received a further nomination from the Cardinal, the list contained the name 'Wojtyla'. It is not every Communist leader that can claim to have been instrumental in the making of a Pope."
(David Yallop "The Power and the Glory" (London, 2007) p.11-12. While the specific points in the text are not footnoted the bibliography includes:
"Polish State Files on Karol Wojtyla, including Sluzba Bezoieczenstwa (SB - Secret police) reports covering 1948-1978, Cracow and Warsaw archives. This includes one document dated 5 August 1967 entitled in English: 'Our tactics regarding Cardinals Wojtyla and Wyszynski.' This document is described by Yallop on p.15:
"The recommendation was that Wojtyla be given every support even to ensuring that he should be handled very gently... ..the Communists planned to keep maximum pressure and discomfort on Wyszynski [the senior Polish cardinal] who, they believed, would eventually erupt as he saw the young man being granted every conceivable privilege and respect.....So the old man was to be humiliated and hemmed in at every turn while 'we should act positively on matters of prestige that would improve Wojtyla's self-esteem.'")

4. See www.indymedia.ie/article/81544.html footnote 18.

5. Mark Garavan ed., "Our Strory / The Rossport 5" (Magheramore, 2006), p.81-82.

6. Obviously a lot of people don't think that about Eoin O'Duffy but I include him because I can find precious little genuine evidence of horrible Hitler like anti semitic actions that he is supposed to be responsible for. As I see it all he did was lead a group of people who tried to stand up for free speech in the face of intimidation from the state intelligence services - the Broy Harriers - and then lead them to Spain to stand up for the Catholic church, showing, like Brendan Hughes, the courage of his convictions. I'm just trying to be fair minded to all strands of Irish nationalism, and to note that bravery and genuine unselfishness (and abuse in the popular media !) is to be met with everywhere in the Irish nationalist tradition.

7. Consider these comments for example in a recent edition of Studies:
"Ireland did not have an empire, but the Irish helped administer one and, in doing so, inevitably imbibed beliefs about racial inferiority than justified Western imperialism. ... Republic of Ireland, all this suggests, came into being with the software of Western racism preloaded. This might, for instance, account for the experiences of recent African immigrants, noted in survey after survey, of very high levels of racist incidents.The software kicked in when they arrived.
A recent effort to conceptualise Irish racism, After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation, by Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh, falls within this school. Their core argument, using a concept developed by David Goldberg, depicts the Republic of Ireland as a racial state in the process of becoming a racist state.....
Here the duty of the civilised liberal is to be intolerant of intolerance. A new insistence upon Western cultural superiority seems to underpin opposition to multiculturalism within a number of Western states.
....
In The IRA and its Enemies the historian Peter Hart documents disproportionate killings of Protestants and Travellers as ‘informers’ in West Cork during the war of independence. Travellers, the ‘tramp class’, had been ordered to leave the county in early 1921 by the North Cork Brigade. Cork, incidentally, was the location of Frank O’Connor’s fictional Guests of the Nation. Hart’s evidence suggests that any real informers were unlikely to be from these minority groups:
Not all executed ‘spies and ‘informers’ were strangers or deviants and some of those who were, were in fact guilty of helping the authorities. Nevertheless, these were exceptions. The great majority of suspects – and, it seems, most informers – were respectable Catholics, but the great majority of victims were not. They were killed not for what they did but for who they were: Protestants, ex-soldiers, tramps and so on down the communal blacklist. Their deaths were not the consequence of political heresy, but of a persecution that went beyond the immediate hunt for informers. Guerrilla war transformed them into the unwanted enemy within.
The hostile reception to Hart’s research by non-historians, such as the literary critic Luke Gibbons suggests that ethnic-nationalism, anti-colonialist or otherwise still has a hard time coming to terms with real exclusions, past and present. Gibbon’s 2005 Village article “Memory without Walls: from Kevin Barry to Osama bin Laden” exemplified the politics of memory (as distinct from actual history) at work here.Gibbons claimed, erroneously, that historians like Hart ‘have sought to recast the guerrilla warfare of Tom Barry, Liam Lynch and others as ‘‘terrorism’’, ‘’serial-killing’’ or “ethnic-cleansing” ’. Yet, ‘ethnic-cleansing,’ a term popularised after the break-up of former Yugoslavia, might not be inappropriate to describe sectarian burning-out and forced land sales between 1919 and 1923 in both parts of Ireland.
Gibbon’s article ends with a discussion of an iconic photograph of two African women walking past the shutters of 16 Moore Street (first published in The Sunday Tribune), the building where the rebel leaders of 1916 surrendered. Real immigrants, the new guests of the nation, can only be bit players in such post-colonialist pageants. The exclusions they experience may have much to do with racism, but they also have something to do with longstanding local identity politics. In this context to insist blithely that the Republic of Ireland is a racial state serves to mask a broader potential mechanics of exclusion." (Ryan Fanning "Against the Racial State Studies March 2007 http://www.studiesirishreview.ie/j/page78)

8. http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/raw_and_banglade...h_one , http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/23249 and http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/raw_and_banglade...final . One of RAW's aims is "To mount malicious propaganda about founding principles and ideological basis of the country and create favourable public opinion for merger with India." The TV reference:
"Ninety percent of the officers of BTV [state owned bangladesh TV] have close links with RAW. These officers receive regular monthly allowance from RAW (Weekly Sainik : July 17, 1991)."

9. http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/sharia-law-....html .

10. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor Sunday Telegraph 10 Feb 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/20...edbox and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/20...age=2 .

11. http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8059 . Pope Leo felt that some groups promoted this kind of lifestyle in order to weaken people's courage and resolve:
"For, since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring."(Humanum Genus Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/....html)

In Peru Montesinos promoted much the same kind of bread and circuses philosophy:
"For the big national broadcasters that he intimidated, bribed, and then videotaped, Montesinos had some advice: keep politics off the air as much as possible, or else. Not just the opposition and its demands (that went without saying), but politics itself was suppressed, in favor of game shows, soap operas, and sports." ( http://www.bostonreview.net/BR26.3/rosen.html )

12. http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/Supreme_Court/ll_...00905 .

13. http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68249 .

14. An example of this can be seen in the UK as described by Ashley Mote MEP:
"For every single day that Labour have been in power since 1997 one new criminal offence has been created - a scale of state oppression which surpasses even the best efforts of Hitler and Stalin. The sheer number of criminal offences on the statute book today is double the number in 1997.
Criminal law now seeks to manipulate the attitudes and views of ordinary, otherwise law-abiding people....and has seriously undermined 800 years of British freedom and our rights. It is a draconian piece of constitutional vandalism...." (Ashley Mote MEP, "J'Accuse...!" (2008), p.38.)

15. http://www.ashleymote.co.uk/topics.php?filter=&sec=arti...d=474 .

16. This apathy - or exhaustion - type effect has been noted before by devious minds that hoped to control societies. For example you can see this in the famous Protocols of Zion. I wish to strongly emphasise that I, like everybody else, believe these to be forgeries in the sense that they most certainly do not represent the collective agreed views of the Jewish people, but whoever drew them up, even if it was the Czarist secret police, seemed to have a great insight into how to manipulate societies:
"In order to give the goyim no time to think and take note, their minds must be diverted towards industry and trade. Thus, all the nations will be swallowed up in the pursuit of gain and in the race for it will not take note of their common foe. But again, in order that freedom may once for all disintegrate and ruin the communities of the goyim.
.....
The intensified struggle for superiority and shocks delivered to economic life will create, nay, have already created, disenchanted, cold and heartless communities. Such communities will foster a strong aversion towards the higher political and towards religion. Their only guide is gain, that is Gold, which they will erect into a veritable cult, for the sake of those material delights which it can give.
.....
What form of administrative rule can be given to communities in which corruption has penetrated everywhere, communities where riches are attained only by the clever surprise tactics of semi-swindling tricks; where looseness reigns: where morality is maintained by penal measures and harsh laws but not by voluntarily accepted principles: where the feelings toward faith and country are obliterated by cosmopolitan convictions?"
....
"The principal object of our directorate consists in this: to debilitate the public mind by criticism; to lead it away from serious reflections calculated to arouse resistance; to distract the forces of the mind towards a sham fight of empty eloquence. In all ages the peoples of the world, equally with individuals, have accepted words for deeds, for they are content
with a show and rarely pause to note, in the public arena, whether promises are followed by performance. Therefore we shall establish show institutions which will give eloquent proof of their benefit to progress.
We shall assume to ourselves the liberal physiognomy of all parties, of all directions, and we shall give that physiognomy a voice in orators who will speak so much that they will exhaust the patience of their hearers and produce an abhorrence of oratory.
In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the GOYIM lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public. This is the first secret."
( http://web.archive.org/web/20060206040834/http://book-c...x.htm )

17. Sunday Independent 27 Jan 2008 Living section p.4.

18. Frances Cahill, "Martin Cahill, my father" (Dundrum, 2007), passim.

19. To show that serious and powerful groups have indeed thought through these kind of theories on a global scale consider this from a manual on Soviet psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is defined as the 'the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through "mental healing."' The manual begins with a foreword by Beria and goes on to say:
"In rearranging loyalties we must have a command of their values. In the animal the first loyalty is to himself. This is destroyed by demonstrating errors to him, showing him that he does not remember, cannot act or does not trust himself. The second loyalty is to his family unit, his parents and brothers and sisters. This is destroyed by making a family unit economically non-dependent, by lessening the value of marriage, by making an easiness of divorce and by raising the children whenever possible by the State. The next loyalty is to his friends and local environment. This is destroyed by lowering his trust and bringing about reportings upon him allegedly by his fellows or the town or village authorities. The next is to the State and this, for the purposes of Communism, is the only loyalty which should exist once the state is founded as a Communist State. To destroy loyalty to the State all manner of forbidding for youth must be put into effect so as to disenfranchise them as members of the Capitalist state and, by promises of a better lot under Communism, to gain their loyalty to a Communist movement.

Denying a Capitalist country easy access to courts, bringing about and supporting propaganda to destroy the home, creating and continuous juvenile delinquentcy, forcing upon the state all manner of practices to divorce the child from it will in the end create chaos necessary to Communism.
....
If we could effectively kill the national pride and patriotism of just one generation, we will have won that country. Therefore, there must be continual propaganda abroad to undermine the loyalty of the citizens in general and the teen-ager in particular.
...
The role of the psychopolitical operator in this is very strong. He can, from his position as an authority on the mind, advise all manner of destructive measures. He can teach the lack of control of this child at home. He can instruct, in an optimum situation, the entire nation in how to handle children -- and instruct them so that the children, given no control, given no real home, can run wildly about with no responsibility for their nation or themselves.

The mis-alignment of the loyalty of youth to a Capitalistic nation sets the proper stage for a realignment of their loyalties toward Communism. Creating a greed for drugs, sexual misbehavior and uncontrolled freedom and presenting this to them as a benefit of Communism, will with ease, bring about our alignment.
.....
The first thing to be degraded in any nation is the state of Man, himself. Nations which have high ethical tone are difficult to conquer. Their loyalties are hard to shake, their allegiance to their leaders is fanatical, and what they usually call their spiritual integrity cannot be violated by duress. It is not efficient to attack a nation in such a frame of mind. It is the basic purpose of Psychopolitics to reduce that state of mind to a point where it can be ordered and enslaved. Thus, the first target is Man, himself. He must be degraded from a spiritual being to an animalistic reaction pattern. He must think of himself as an animal, capable only of animalistic reactions. He must no longer think of himself, or of his fellows, as capable of "spiritual endurance," or nobility.
....
As it seems in foreign nations that the church is the most ennobling influence, each and every branch and activity of each and every church, must, one way or another, be discredited. Religion must become unfashionable by demonstrating broadly, through psychopolitical indoctrination, that the soul is non-existent, and that Man is an animal. The lying mechanisms of Christianity lead men to foolishly brave deeds. By teaching them that there is a life here-after, the liability of courageous acts, while living, is thus lessened. The liability of any act must be markedly increased if a populace is to be obedient. Thus, there must be no standing belief in the church, and the power of the church must be denied at every hand.

The psychopolitical operative, in his program of degradation, should at all times bring into question any family which is deeply religious, and, should any neurosis or insanity be occasioned in that family, to blame and hold responsible their religious connections for the neurotic or psychotic condition. Religion must be made synonymous with neurosis and psychosis. People who are deeply religious would be less and less held responsible for their own sanity, and should more and more be relegated to the ministrations of psychopolitical operatives.

By perverting the institutions of a nation and bringing about a general degradation, by interfering with the economics of a nation to the degree that privation and depression come about, only minor shocks will be necessary to produce, on the populace as a whole, an obedient reaction or an hysteria. Thus, the mere threat of war, the mere threat of aviation bombings, could cause the population to sue instantly for peace. It is a long and arduous road for the psychopolitical operative to achieve this state of mind on the part of the whole nation, but no more than twenty or thirty years should be necessary in the entire program. Having to hand, as we do, weapons with which to accomplish the goal.
...
Because its [psychoanalysis] stress is sex, it is, itself, adequate defamation of character, and serves the purposes of degradation well. Thus, in organizing mental health groups, the literature furnished such groups should be psychoanalytical in nature.
...
We have battled in America since the century's turn to bring to nothing any and all Christian influences and we are succeeding.
...
Movements to improve youth should be invaded and corrupted, as this might interrupt campaigns to produce in youth delinquency, addiction, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity.
....
The degradation of populace is less inhuman than their destruction by atomic fission....The psychopolitician has his reward in the nearly unlimited control of populace, in the uninhibited exercise of passion, and the glory of Communist conquest over the stupidity of the enemies of the People." (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics.html and http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-....html)

As pointed out in the article Masonic Lodges often encompass some powerful groups who contemplate pretty extraordinary social engineering as can be seen in:
"The following quotations from the speech made by Domenico Anghera, Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rites when conferring on General Giuseppe Garibaldi the 33rd degree and administering his oath of allegiance [c.1870], are here of interest in view of the connection of the two masonic powers in France:
" . . . Our first step, as builders of the new temple to the felicity of human glory, must be destruction. To destroy the present social state, we have suppressed religious teaching and the individual rights of persons....
' I swear to recognize no fatherland but that of the world. I swear to work hard, everywhere and always, to destroy frontiers, borders, boundaries of all nations, of all industries, no less than of all families. I swear to dedicate my life to the triumph of progress and universal unity and I declare to profess the negation of God and the negation of the soul'. " And now, Brother, that for thee, fatherland, religion and family have disappeared for ever in the immensity of the work of Freemasonry, come to us, illustrious, most puissant and very dear Brother and share with us the boundless authority, the infinite power that we hold over humanity. " The only key of progress and happiness, the only rules of good, are thy appetites and instincts "
(Lady Queenborough [Edith Starr Miller],"Occult Theocrasy" (1933) p.340 quoting Domenico Margiotta, "Le Culte de la Nature dans la Franc maçonnerie Universelle", p. 45 et seq.)

Here is a paraphrase from the French of another curious Masonic document that was prepared in the past for those involved in the Rite of Mizraim and the Prieure de Sion:
"The Mass Media creates the thoughts of the people. It tells the people what they need, it allows the people to voice their complaints, and to express discontent. By using the power of the Press secretly we have also made much money. We are leading the people from one disenchantment to another. They will even tire of our rule and welcome the King/Priest dictatorship of the House of David that we have
been preparing for centuries.
Agents tell the people that in order to secure liberty, the international brotherhood of all, and their equality of rights they need to abuse their national governments. This is to be accomplished by a unification. But we do not tell them who will rule the unification.
Who can overthrow an invisible force? Freemasonry remains a mystery to the public and serves as a screen for us.
It is critical to undermine all faith, destroy the principle of the Godhead, and replace it with materialism and mathematical calculations. Keep the public busy, put industry onto a speculative basis, and foster a desire for consumerism and wealth.
We will slowly increase the centralization of government.
We have created a class of specialists from our administrative branch that have developed the manipulation of the public into an art. This skilled manipulation uses theory, verbiage, regulations and other items and quirks which the public can't comprehend. The principle object is to debilitate the public's mind by criticism, and lead it away from serious reflection of what is really going on. These distractions along with sham fights will prevent resistance. We must bring them into a state of bewilderment by allowing and promoting so many contradictory opinions, that people will lose their heads in the labyrinth, and come to believe the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in politics. Sow discord, dislocate the forces against us. Discourage sincere personal initiative. A man with genius and initiative is more dangerous to us than millions of the public.
In order that the real meaning of events are not realized they will masked with economic theories. We will manipulate government through public opinion, which we can create by the power of the Press.
We will create tenor [recte terror presumably]. We will harness the anarchists, the socialists, the Utopian dreamers so that they will bore away at the last foundations of the established form of order. We will not give them peace until the New World Order is in place.
In order to carry out struggles, money is needed, and all the money is in our hands. We have fooled, corrupted, bemused, amused the youth with principles we know are false. We have created laws that are an incomprehensible tangled web.
Should any city dare oppose us, we can terrorize it so that even the bravest will be intimidated. The subways, sewers, and other subterranean corridors can be mined and the city blown into the air along with its government, records, and service systems.
We will be saviors to the mobs, who will vote us into power. We have everyone regardless of qualifications voting, because otherwise it will be difficult to get our consensus from a properly educated group of people.
We set up republics with constitutions. And then use the press to condemn the rulers and make them impotent and inactive, and in effect they become useless and superfluous. We put into power presidents from the masses, who can be blackmailed. The people in government are often not our own people, but our puppets who we can blackmail and destroy if they don't follow orders.
In order to create conditions so that people will want a world government, every kind of trouble and discord must be promoted, including the inoculation of diseases, starvation and drug use.
Secret Masonry is not known, and the aims are not even suspected by the cattle. They are attracted to us by our show lodges which serve to throw dust in the eyes of their fellowman. Any attempt to attack us by the press on its own will be stopped. But note that we ourselves will
attack ourselves in the press—at predetermined points. Not a single pronouncement will reach the public without our control. The International News agencies are already ours, and use what we dictate to them. The masses look at events of the world through the glasses we provide them.
We will neutralize the influence of the privately owned press. If ten privately owned presses are permitted, we will have 30, and so on. But the public will never suspect this, because our journals will be the most opposite in appearance, opinions, and procedures. The official publications are guarding our interests. Then come the semi-official publications. Then will come what appear to be the organs of opposition to us. Our real opposition at heart will accept this stimulated opposition as their own and will show us their cards.
Like the Indian god Vishnu, we will have a hundred arms— publications of all possible complexions.
Our false attacks on ourselves will convince the public that all organs that oppose us lack substance to their criticism. Our opponents will lack the ability to give full expression to their views because of the lack of their media power. We can ignore them.
The masses must be retrained and given new employment periodically. Keep them further distracted with amusements, passions, games, sports of all kinds, art competition. They will grow less and less reflective, and adopt more and more our way of thinking. We will continue to direct their minds with all kinds of fantastic theories, new and apparently progressive. Progress, like a fallacious idea, serves to obscure truth, so that none may know truth but us.
We have stage managed so many people over the years in many institutions. Our belief will not be examined, but the shortcomings of the various beliefs of the masses will be discussed by our experts.
In countries called progressive we have created senseless, filthy literature, to direct the masses to learn what knowledge we want them to know.
Whenever we come into power, even into the New Order, Masons that know too much will be eliminated.
We are facing only two major powers, the Russian Czar and the Papacy.
The curious join the Masonic Lodge. Using their vanity they can be brought into a total state of slavish submission. Their conceit allows us to bring them into a state of naivete. Masons who know too much are executed when required by a normal kind of illness. This action prevents any opposition from within Masonry itself."
(Fritz Springmeier, "Be Wise as Serpents" (1991), p.653.)

20. Col. Maurice Moore "History of the Irish Volunteers" Irish Press 25 Feb 1938.

21. Daniel Sheehan, Ireland since Parnell (London, 1921), available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13963/13963.txt .

author by Savant - Justice and Secrecypublication date Mon Jun 29, 2009 13:22author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Brian

I compliment you on a brilliant and well researched article. I think in the current climate your article of 2007 is well worth re-visiting. The reasons, I would suggest, are the scandals in our Church and how for almost 70 years, it was kept so secretive.

I think yesterday the people who met our President felt proud. They felt wanted again as Irish citizens and as one victim, Michael O'Brien, (Clonmel) said so eloquently - 'that he felt happy today and for a short period the pain left him'.

Sadly Brian, we have a long way to go. We have good people, fighting for good causes, like the preservation of Tara and on the same grounds we have Lismullin - the secrecy, the power and the selective recruitment of Opus Dei. O yes, Brian - we certainly have a long way to go and that is why we need Indymedia to give us a voice and take on the cloak and dagger of Opus Dei and others

Savant (particularly I enjoyed the Secret Societies

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