sherief said:
Why bother entertaining 'conspiracy theories'
... I'm asking this because on the front page of this forum, I see one 9/11 conspiracy theory, one about AIDS, and another rather active post about a nuclear attack against Iran. What good comes of these musings or microanalyses, in terms of a real politics or political stance? Isn't the conspiracy theory simply the consolation of the defeated, who takes comfort in the fact that she knows what 'really happened' or that however horrid a situation is, it's even worse because there's a devious set of masterminds controlling the whole thing?
...
Zizek has a similar bit in one of his lectures, if I recall, where he says that the moment that you get into a debate with a holocaust denier, you've already lost. You've conceded something at the moment you consider his pathology (pathological even if he's 'right') worth rational debate. This seems to be the difference between 'facts' and truth. What the former may give us is only further ground to argue, more fuel for our fire. However, the important thing would seem to be asserting a truth which explains the situation with regard to its consequences, what now is to be asserted, to be done, so that this sort of thing cannot happen again or so that we can approach the more serious, deeper rooted injustices, no?
Well, I think the difficulty here is with the gratuitous labelling of some stance,
any stance [political or otherwise] that is outside the dominant ideology and its media outlets as "conspiracy theory", for it presupposes some irrefutable, established knowledge [factual or analytic] on the part of the one doing the labelling, so conflating issues of paranoia with those of conspiracy. [For instance, is the claim that 19 members of Al-Kaida flew planes into the WTC itself not a "conspiracy theory"? If you refute this, upon what do you base your refutation? ie. conspiracy works
both ways ... is inescapable, unless one is a smug gliberal post-modernist, who somehow always-already simply "knows"]
You refer to Zizek: he makes the same argument about the Bush Admin's claims regarding WNDs in Iraq as he does about the Holocaust deniers [as well as marital jealousy, Nazi anti-semitism, Islamophobia], the WMDs as a - paranoid - displacement of the underlying problem [unaccountable US power], and therefore irrelevant [ie. even if Saddam did have WMDs, the Bush Admin's claim was still based on prejudice, the later possible "fact" of it serving simply to reinforce their pathology].
Along the same lines, isn't it unwise [Dissensus translation: downright irresponsible?] to dismiss the - widely documented - US-planned invasion of Iran as "conspiracy theory"? This is essentially simple ignorance of the actual underlying geo-politics [and ironically, Zizek has also properly expressed concern about US designs on Iran ...
Give Iranian Nukes A Chance] taking refuge [Dissensus translation: recklessly resorting?] to the conspiracy theory trope as justification for such continued ignorance. Prejudice by other means.
Yes, we know that the problems are inherently
structural [the interpellated symbolic network of Big Other Kapital], but this does
not mean that we should pay no attention to its Agents, or fail to continue to report on their behaviour.