Pro Tip: Mentally Replace All Uses of “Conspiracy Theorist” With “Iraq Rememberer”

I watched the film Official Secrets the other day, which I highly recommend doing if you want to rekindle your rage about the unforgivable evil that was the Iraq invasion.

Which is a good thing to do, in my opinion. Absolutely nothing was ever done to address the fact that a million people were murdered with the assistance of government lies just a few short years ago; no new laws were passed mandating more government transparency or accountability with its military operations, no war crimes tribunals took place, no new policies were put into place. No one even got fired. In fact we’ve seen the exact opposite: the people responsible for unleashing that horror upon our species have been given prestigious jobs in government and media and the US government is currently collaborating with the UK to set the legal precedent for charging under the Espionage Act any journalist in the world who exposes US war crimes.

The corrupt mechanisms which gave rise to the Iraq invasion still exist currently, stronger than ever, and its consequences continue to ravage the region to this very day. The Iraq war isn’t some event that happened in the past; everything about it is still here with us, right now. So we should still be enraged. You don’t forgive and forget something that hasn’t even stopped, let alone been rectified.

Apart from the howling rage surging through my veins during the film, the other thing I experienced was the recurring thought, “This was a conspiracy. This is the thing that a conspiracy is.”

And, I mean, of course it is. How weird is it that we don’t use that word to describe what the architects of that war did? Conspiracy is defined as “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.” From the secret plan between the NSA and GCHQ to spy on and blackmail UN members into supporting the illegal invasion which is the subject of Official Secrets, to the mountain of other schemes and manipulations used by other government bodies to deceive the world about Iraq, it’s absolutely insane that that word is never used to describe the conspiracy within the Bush and Blair governments to manufacture the case for war.

The engineering of the Iraq war was a conspiracy, per any conceivable definition. So why isn’t that word reflexively used by everyone who talks about it?

Easy. Because we haven’t been trained to.

The use of the word “conspiracy” is studiously avoided by the narrative managers of the political/media class who are tasked with the assignment of teaching us how to think about our world, except when it is to be employed for its intended and authorised use: smearing skeptics of establishment narratives. The pejorative “conspiracy theory” has been such a useful weapon in inoculating the herd from dissident wrongthink that the propagandists do everything they can to avoid tainting their brand, even if it means refraining from using words for the things that they refer to.

This is why the word “collusion” was continuously and uniformly used throughout the entire Russiagate saga, for example. It was a narrative about a secret conspiracy between the highest levels of the US government and the Russian government to subvert the interests of the American people, yet the word “conspiracy” was meticulously replaced with “collusion” by everyone peddling that story.

Syria narrative managers on Twitter have been in meltdown for a week ever since the Rolling Stone podcast Useful Idiots featured oppositional journalist Max Blumenthal talking about the US-centralized empire’s involvement in the Syrian war and its pervasive propaganda campaign against that nation. The entire site has been swarming with high-visibility blue-checkmarked thought police demanding the heads of the show’s hosts Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper for giving this evil “conspiracy theorist” a platform to say we’re being deceived about yet another US-led regime change intervention in yet another Middle Eastern nation.

Narrative managers use the “conspiracy theorist” pejorative to shove skepticism of establishment narratives into the margins of political discourse, far away where it can’t contaminate the mainstream herd. Whenever you see a dissenting interpretation of events getting too close to mainstream circles, as with Blumenthal appearing on a Rolling Stone podcast, Tulsi Gabbard saying on national television that the US government has armed terrorists, or Tucker Carlson interviewing Jonathan Steele about the OPCW leaks, you see an intense campaign of shrieking outrage and public shaming geared at shoving those dissident narratives as far into the fringe as possible by branding them “conspiracy theories”.

My suggestion then is this: whenever you see the label “conspiracy theorist” being applied to anyone who questions an establishment narrative about Syria, Russia, Iran or wherever, just mentally swap it out for the term “Iraq rememberer”. When you see anyone shouting about “conspiracy theories”, mentally replace it with “Iraq remembering”. It makes it much easier to see what’s really going on: “Oh those damn Iraq rememberers! Why can’t they just trust their media and government about what’s happening in Syria instead of indulging in Iraq remembering?”

Powerful people and institutions secretly coordinating with each other to do evil things is the absolute worst-case scenario for the rest of the population; it is precisely the thing we fear when we allow people and institutions to have power over us. We need to be able to talk about that worst-case scenario occurring, especially since we know for a fact that it does indeed happen. Powerful people do conspire to inflict evil things upon the rest of us, and we do need to use thoughts and ideas to discuss how that might be happening. We are not meant to think about this, which is why we’re meant to forget about Iraq.

The Iraq invasion was like if a family were sitting around the dinner table one night, then the father stood up, decapitated his daughter with a steak knife, then sat back down and continued eating and everyone just went back to their meals and never talked about what happened. That’s how absolutely creepy and weird it is that the news churn just moved on after a conspiracy within the most powerful government in the world led to the murder of a million human beings, and now we’re all somehow only supposed to care about Trump’s rude tweets.

Never forget the Iraq war conspiracy, no matter how hard they try to make you. They did it before, they’ve done it again in Libya and Syria, and they’ll continue to attempt it in the future. When you sound the alarm about this they will call you a conspiracy theorist. All they’re really saying is that you’re one of those annoying pests who just won’t shut up and forget about Iraq.

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

13 Comments
  1. silver7 says

    The US has not even been targeted for using depleted uranium, a chemical weapon, which they don’t deny. The west is silent but Russia and China never said anything so who would, who did, no one.

  2. CHUCKMAN says

    “Absolutely nothing was ever done to address the fact that a million people were murdered with the assistance of government lies just a few short years ago; no new laws were passed mandating more government transparency or accountability with its military operations, no war crimes tribunals took place, no new policies were put into place. No one even got fired.”

    Yes, but even worse, Iraq became just the first in a series of wars in the region, the Neocon Wars.

    They’ve not all been fought the way Iraq was fought with a big conventional invasion.
    That was unbelievably costly both in treasure and in damaging public opinion.

    The wars following – Libya, Syria, etc – were fought with hybrid methods and/or proxy forces.

    It’s a dirty record of destruction with likely about two million killed and many millions turned into desperate refugees, refugees whose impact on Europe has been destabilizing.

    The planning for these wars goes well back.

    The names of the countries destroyed in the Neocon Wars were long ago on a list of seven countries that were to be toppled in the future. The list was seen by General Wesley Clark at the Pentagon not long after 9/11. It was part of a project under leading Neocon Paul Wolfowitz. Syria was on the list, as was Iran.

    Iran, with its newly demonstrated impressive military capabilities under recent intense American pressure, may just have avoided the fate of the other countries on the old Pentagon list.

    1. Jozo Magoc says

      Depleted uranium shells,white phosphor and chemical weapons used by the zio-nazi forces of the West weren’t conventional weapons, you should know it!!!

      1. DarkEyes says

        Even “small” nuclear bombs have been used.
        Who cares.
        Iraq was and still is a part of a “Great Zion-Lebensraum”-project.
        And therefore it is okay to genocide ME people?

        The indigenous people in the ME are getting more and more angry but also wiser, better and the zionists know it.
        There plans have been stopped by Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia.
        The risks are becoming too big to continue warmaking.
        And nuclear bombs are not the answer.

        The zionists are feeling this cannot go on the way they are expanding at will. That is why they are looking already for an emergency exit to Poland and maybe also Ukraine in case it becomes too hot.

    2. pooi-hoong chan says

      So far, N Korea has avoided being hit. And China is trying its best to avoid military conflict, but is now reacting to economic war and colour revolution in Hong Kong.

    3. Rilme Hakonen says

      ” Iraq became just the first in a series of wars in the region”
      I see the US war in Iraq as one in the middle of a long series of US wars in Asia. It followed the USUK invasion of Afghanistan and the US bombings and terrorist attacks in Pakistan. Of course, the USers want us to forget about the millions killed and maimed by the US in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, South Korea, North Korea, and so on, and so on. Why does the US kill so many Asians?

      1. pooi-hoong chan says

        Because of racism.

        ” The targeting of Japan was affirmed during a September 1944 meeting between British prime minister Winston Churchill and US president Roosevelt. The official summary of the meeting makes no mention of any possible use against Germany, but reports the Allied leaders’ view that the Bomb ‘might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender’.

        The fact that Japan was always the target, and that Nazi Germany was not considered, demonstrates a potent double standard in Anglo-American foreign policy. And the basis of that double standard was the issue of race. To the Allies, Germany was a fellow white power with which they had temporarily fallen out; but Japan was an enemy alien, a nation apart. That was why the architects of the Holocaust in Europe were never mentioned as candidates for a ‘humanitarian’ bombing such as Hiroshima. Instead, the atomic bomb was aimed solely at the Japanese. They were considered legitimate targets because the Western powers considered them to be a lower race; as president Truman put it in the letter quoted above, the Japanese were no better than ‘beasts’, and to be treated accordingly. ”

        https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/09/hiroshima-remembering-the-white-mans-bomb/

        1. Rilme Hakonen says

          ” the architects of the Holocaust in Europe ”
          It took me five seconds to realise you didn’t mean the Jews.

    4. Séamus Ó Néill says

      …..And as I’ve maintained for a long time, every American President, every General, every commanding officer and every Politician who bayed for blood in the ME and around the world ( and are still gripped by this satanic blood lust ), are war criminals, as guilty as any at the Nuremberg trials. America should have been at those same trials, not as Judge and Prosecutor, but in the dock for that wanton satanic butchery at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and elsewhere. If a few “Bush’s, Blair’s, etc, were sentenced for their nefarious war crimes, a bit more restraint would be shown today when contemplating their genocidal escapades !

      1. Mary E says

        And lest we forget: Russia may not be on the List of Seven, but it is there nevertheless….and as with Iran, Russia will not be toppled by any US bunch, no matter how intent they might be. It is just a fact that the US, as well as its military is fast becoming irrelevant in the world just because Russia and Iran have stepped up to prevent any more hostile and bloody takeovers….and that is how the US survived…by robbing other countries of their natural resources, be it oil or another vital one…Now that the Mideast is pretty much done with, they are on to South America…..what Washington calls their “backyard”…their own citizenry, Americans, are high on their list too….we are seeing it now!

  3. Mary E says

    This piece by Caitlin Johnstone really should be shared around the world in every Mainstream outlet, but it won’t be. But we have people like Caitlin and Max who do keep us reminded of what has happened and is happening in the world….we certainly won’t get it from the MSM, the outlets of the Evil Empire…Thank you Caitlin and Max- so much!

  4. Otto310 says

    This article hits the nail squarely and solidly on the head.
    Nothing has been done to sanction those that lied in order to bring about the invasion of Iraq. It has been proven, well documented and reported the invasion was illegal.

    The establishment will do nothing to address this state of affairs for the simple fact that until major changes are made as to how the countries involved in this mass murder,…predominantly NATO members…..conduct their foreign policies, the lack of action will give carte blanche to do the same again, as they have done with both Libya, and Syria without any fear of punishment.
    The war on Iraq is a plain and simple….war crime.

  5. Mark says

    Rock on, Caitlin. Although I question the efficacy of pointing out a truth that a significant part of western society is determined to not see. Somewhere around the middle of the Obama presidency, the demagogues who run American policy stopped trying to cloak their manipulations in a swirling cloud of red-white-and-blue freedom and democracy, and their use of those terms now has a palpable tang of mockery. Who can now doubt that Uncle Sam makes decisions in his own interests when he can just ring up an oil-rich nation like Venezuela, and demand that its president step down in favour of a US-approved toady? Who didn’t know that Bolivia, until recently ruled by the socialist Evo Morales, is the world’s largest source of lithium, which will be the new oil when the mass switch to electrically-powered cars gains momentum? The US-led Coalition of Plunderers is grabbing right and left, and anyone who demurs is told, “Shut up, and look away – don’t you love freedom and democracy? Are you some kind of Russian agent?”

    Oh, and don’t forget you signed up to spend 2% of your GDP on defense. I can recommend the products of the world’s largest arms dealer. Hey, funny story – I just read recently that Russia’s agricultural exports have surpassed the returns it realizes from international arms sales. When do you think the US president will announce a similar advantage for American farmers?

    https://www.sott.net/article/327508-Russia-earns-more-from-agricultural-exports-than-arms-sales

    Caitlin Johnstone for President.

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