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Category: Conspiracy theories

Categories
Conspiracy theories

A flaw in the white nationalist psyche

I am becoming disappointed with the white nationalist movement. If I were editor of any of the main nationalist blogsites, I’d be collecting lots of articles debunking the 9/11 conspiracy theories endemic in the movement. What we got instead is feminized timidity in face of the macho vehemence manifested by many truthers within the movement. Below I cite two of my recent comments of my previous entry, and another at Counter-Currents:

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I am not a believer of the “official version.” I am a skeptic of extreme claims that violate Occam’s razor intuitively.

Why I cannot be blamed that I am a believer of the official version? Because exactly ten years ago I listened a radio program in Mexico City. A commentator explained with vivid detail (in Spanish of course) that he was sure that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the attacks.

Take note that the US government had not made any official pronouncement when I listened the program. The Mexican commentator was so convincing that I’ve not changed my views since then. Which means that I didn’t get my POV from the US government, but from a known reporter outside the US with zero connections to the US establishment.

*   *   *

There’s something I call “intuitive Occamism”, which means that the majority of sane westerners have an in-built Occam’s razor without any need to study philosophy of science. It’s sheer intuition.

Such intuition works marvelously with conspiracy theories. Most reasonable people reject aprioristically the claims which advance a multiplicity of entities unnecessarily: for instance, the conspiracy theories about the UFO Roswell incident, the “faked” moon landings of the 1960s and 70’s, etc. The right hemisphere of their brains intuitively tells them that all of these theories are grossly violating Occam’s razor, yes even 9/11 theories that strain our credulity way beyond its breaking point.

The problem is that many other westerners lack this in-built intuitive Occamism in their cognitive process (something I call humoristically “antediluvian regression” or a regression to paleologic modes of thinking—cf. the first part my online book). That’s why I advice those nationalist truthers who are really honest to forget 9/11 for a while and study Bugliosi’s enormous study debunking the JFK conspiracy theories. The process of thoroughly refuting the other conspiracy theory that duped millions of Americans in the previous decades is good school to understand the Principle of Parsimony for those that, for one reason or another, lack intuitive Occamism.

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There’s a book published last month that I recommend, the revised and expanded edition of Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (which includes rebuttals on claims about Building 7) by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, with a foreword by James Meigs.

If you [James O’Meara et al.] have already listened to the attorney of these crackpot theories, the logical step now is to listen to the prosecutor. It’s not logical—as every single nationalist truther I’ve met in the net does—to listen the “attorney” and, as a member of the “jury”, leave the room every time the prosecutor talks in order to avoid the most elemental cognitive dissonance.


Postscript

I cannot be as demanding as to request nationalist truthers to read the 2011 book which cover appears at the top of this entry before considering angrily jumping on this thread and scold me for not believing in “The Truth.” However, if any of you wants to comment here I’d recommend at least to read the couple of Amazon reviews of that recently published book or this TV interview with one of the editors. Also, please watch this documentary that features several key individuals of the truther movement as well as the more rational responses by those skeptical of your “Truth”.

I am fed up to try to reason with those nationalists who have forfeited every single presentation of the prosecution side…

Categories
Conspiracy theories Holocaust Israel / Palestine

9/11: White nationalist paranoia





“We believe whatever we want to believe”

—Demosthenes




Further to my May 7, 2011 piece “Oh silly truthers…”

In the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks I am becoming increasingly disappointed with the irrational will to believe whatever we want to believe in the nationalist movement.

I’d be delighted that Mossad, the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, orchestrated the attacks. That could certainly boost legitimacy to our agenda among non-nationalist whites. But my cognitive processes are not dissociated enough from reality to make such a gigantic leap of faith and dismiss all evidence to the contrary.

My field of expertise is not racialism or politics but deep psychology, especially the trauma model of mental disorders caused by poor parenting. How did I become dragged into that field? It’s a long story. But for the moment let me confess that I am a triple apostate: since my teenage years I gave up Christianity, then a cult, Eschatology, and finally a pseudoscience, parapsychology (for a brief summary see here). The whole spiritual odyssey to give up faith in these beliefs destroyed my life, as many other lives are being destroyed among those who fall in destructive cults as a defense mechanism resulting from a failed intent to escape from the abuse at home.

That’s why I am indebted to Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, James Alcock and many other skeptics of the paranormal who taught me how to think critically about extreme claims, whether religious, paranormal or conspiratorial. The last time I saw them, in a 1994 Seattle conference, I had the pleasure to experience a handshake from Carl Sagan, author of The Demon-Haunted World, a book that encourages laypeople to learn critical thinking. During that event I also attended a conference debunking the conspiracy theories about the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Hadn’t all of these skeptics vaccinated my mind against magical thinking I’d still be immersed in it. Unfortunately, only through a dark night of the soul it’s possible to realize that we believe whatever we want to believe, and that those beliefs are not always rational or based on fact. Which means that the truthers in the nationalist movement won’t ever make an honest effort to listen the other side: they are forfeiting their dark night.

I gave up paranormality after more than fifteen years of belief in the paranormal precisely because at one point of my live, from 1990 to 1995, I made a serious effort to listen to those skeptical scholars who held diametrically opposed views of my cherished beliefs. Many white nationalists are not that honest; not even close to a mile. They won’t ever use such amount of time to listen to the other side.

Not all white nationalists are truthers of course (see e.g., this splendid summary by Ted Sallis published yesterday on how America became a madhouse after 9/11). But a substantial segment of the nationalist population believes in nuts like those ridiculed in this video.

Let me recontextualize what I’m trying to say. I admire Hitler and the Nazis. For Third Reich sympathizers like me the big question is, Were Jews slaughtered in World War 2? If Irmin Vinson’s approach to the so-called holocaust represents a quantum leap forward from mere denialism, a denialism almost ubiquitous in white nationalism, I believe it’s high time to apply the same flawless logic to the tragic events of a decade ago.

But most nationalists are no match to Vinson’s honesty…



Postscript of September 14

A featured author is now saying at Majority Rights that because I wrote this entry I must be… a Jew! After days of controversy he clings to his belief. He supports the claim that I am Jewish on the basis… of my criticism of the truth movement!

Well, this is magical thinking to be sure, or the deductive fallacy to use more academic language.

This is how paranoids and paranoiacs reason: If something major happens in the political world (e.g., the assassination of a president; an Islamic terrorist attack) there must be a conspiracy involving someone in the American government. If a critic is skeptical of any of these conspiracy theories, he himself must be part of the conspiracy (e.g., a Jewish blogger pretending to be a non-Jew).

Naturally, since paranoid modes of thought are endemic at Majority Rights I won’t ever comment there again. But I decided to write this postscript to show how this affaire corroborates my view that there is indeed a flaw in the white nationalist psyche.

Fortunately, not every nationalist suffers from paranoid delusions, as proven in the Johnson article that I republished here, and in the comments by Matt in this entry’s thread. It’s a pity though that those who subscribe to Aristotelian modes of thought are a minority in the movement.

Categories
Conspiracy theories Turin Shroud

Oh silly truthers…

Since Majority Rights (MR) and The Occidental Observer (TOO) are two of the three blogsites that I advertise here, I find it a little embarrassing that, on the issue of the 9/11 attacks and the recent assassination of Osama bin Laden, quite a few commenters of those blogsites unabashedly embrace conspiracy theories.

I used to believe that those racially conscious were smarter than counter-jihadists. But on the topic of Al Qaeda, militant Muslims, bin Laden and 9/11 the curious reader will find much saner information in anti-Islamic sites, such as Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.

Although I have elaborated a dense psychological theory that purports to explain the conspiracist mindset, for the moment I will limit myself to reproduce a couple of my recent comments at a Counter-Currents article:


Cesar Tort at 33I came to the racialist camp from the counter-jihad movement. But before I entered it I subscribed the Skeptical Inquirer magazine; read lots of books published by Prometheus, and learnt how to think critically about crank claims.

In my previous comment at another C-C thread I implied that Occidental Dissent (OD) was not a very sane site. But now that in recent MR and TOO threads 9/11 truthers seem to outnumber the skeptics, I find it rather comical that at least OD has not succumbed to this nonsense.

But this is not the place to explain why some psychologists believe that the search for meaning is common in conspiracism; and that the development of conspiracy theories (CTs) violate both Occam’s razor and falsifiability. Suffice it to say that the conspiracy paranoia I see among those nationalists who are also 9/11 truthers is analogous to the denial of the genocide perpetrated in 1942-45 (I’d never use the word “holocaust” because I tend to avoid newspeak terms). It is also analogous to other CTs such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History is must reading here), the “staged” Apollo Moon Landings, or the sightings of Elvis Presley—a CT suggesting that, like some CTs on bin Laden, he is still alive.

Yes: Western elites lie to us 24 hrs/day. There’s no question about that. However, instead of denying the genocide of Jews I prefer to point out how Stalin’s Jews murdered more civilians than Himmler. Similarly, instead of blaming Mossad for 9/11 I would criticize the US government, both Bush’s and Obama’s, for its deranged Judeophilia and Islamophilia.

If meta-politics is paramount at this stage of the struggle, I’d venture to say that we badly need lots of Bugliosis and books like Reclaiming History, but this time about 9/11, in our (still embryonic) movement…

Interpolated note for this blog: Responding to a comment (“The Onion ran a piece that cracked me up, because it described something that I did years ago. The story was about an open-minded guy who realized how many years of his life he has wasted putting up with other people’s bullshit. Life is too short, and the cause is too important, to suffer kooks”), I wrote:

Twenty years ago I subscribed parapsychology journals. Since the contributors to these journals are usually people with PhDs, you cannot imagine how difficult it is to address the scholarly claims and find holes in the parapsychologists’ methodology.

Debunking crank claims demands incredible amounts of research and energy. This is why I believe that CSICOP’s approach is worth reviewing.

Individual CSICOPers usually focus on single fields of fringe claims. For instance, there are one or two researchers who spend their time researching, say, the pseudoscience known as UFOlogy (when I attended CSICOP conferences they were Phil Klass and Robert Sheaffer). In the case of parapsychology, the skeptical researchers were Ray Hyman and James Alcock, both psychology professors.

The same could be said of conspiracy theories. Bugliosi spent twenty years of his life researching and debunking the John F. Kennedy CTs. Obviously, however smart Bugliosi is, he could not handle, in addition to that field, parapsychology—however pseudoscientific it may also be. The same with Klass or Hyman: they could not have handled JFK CTs: they used to focus on either UFOs or psi claims respectively. Sometimes it even takes a single researcher to debunk a single “paranormal” case, e.g., Joe Nickell on the Turin Shroud. In my own case, I spent my time researching the Bélmez Faces. I started as a believer in 1991 and ended skeptic in 1995 (see my research mentioned, e.g., here).

Noam Chomsky complained about the amount of energy that it would take to debunk 9/11 CTs. He simply, and wisely, dismisses the preposterous claims. Of course, nationalists cannot waste their precious time “putting up with other people’s bullshit”, as you say. When I wrote that we need lots of Bugliosis I meant that sooner or later it will be pretty handy to get, under a single cover—like Bugliosi’s book on JFK—, a comprehensive and definite account on how silly 9/11 CTs were in the past.

I look forward for a definite, skeptical book on it (the one by Popular Mechanics was published in 2006).