How CIA invented "Conspiracy Theory" term
Stigmatizing truth seekers
globinfo freexchange
The “conspiracy theory” term has its origins back in 60s, invented by the CIA to block deep investigation about the JFK assassination. Until today, the term is used to stigmatize anyone who tries to escape from the official mainstream guidance, trying to shed light on poorly examined facts of serious events.
“... the public is essentially compelled to believe that political extremism of one form or another is the cause of each event, even in light of how the sophistication and scope of the Oklahoma City and 9/11 'attacks' suggest high-level forces at work. If one is to delve beneath the public relations narrative of each event, the recent Newtown massacre and Boston Marathon bombing likewise appear to have broader agendas where the public is again purposely misled.”
“Conventional journalists and academics are reluctant to publicly address such phenomena for fear of being called 'conspiracy theorists.' In the case of academe this has severely curtailed serious and potentially crucial inquiry into such deep events and phenomena in lieu of what are often innocuous intellectual exchanges divorced from actually existing social and political realities that cry out for serious interrogation and critique.”
“Indeed, the 'conspiracy theory' meme, a propaganda campaign waged by the CIA beginning in the mid-1960s to counter criticism of the Warren Commission report, is perhaps as little-known as Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program where hundreds of journalists and publishers actively devoted their services to spread Agency disinformation. The overall effect of these combined operations has been an immensely successful program continues to shape the contours of American political life and mediated reality.”
“Conspiracy theory’s acutely negative connotations may be traced to liberal historian Richard Hofstadter’s well-known fusillades against the 'New Right.' Yet it was the Central Intelligence Agency that likely played the greatest role in effectively 'weaponizing' the term. In the groundswell of public skepticism toward the Warren Commission’s findings on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA sent a detailed directive to all of its bureaus. Titled 'Countering Criticism of the Warren Commission Report,' the dispatch played a definitive role in making the 'conspiracy theory' term a weapon to be wielded against almost any individual or group calling the government’s increasingly clandestine programs and activities into question.”
“Ever since the Warren Commission concluded that a lone gunman assassinated President John F. Kennedy, people who doubt that finding have been widely dismissed as conspiracy theorists, despite credible evidence that right-wing elements in the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service—and possibly even senior government officials—were also involved. Why has suspicion of criminal wrongdoing at the highest levels of government been rejected out-of-hand as paranoid thinking akin to superstition?”
A recent example in Greece, shows how the system categorizes large parts of the population, more or less as irrational, sensitive to "conspiracy theories", in order to build the profile of the "rational" voter, who, of course, votes for neoliberal governments like the present one:
“... one could mark that there is an attempt for an arbitrary categorization to the same category, of people who believe in different things and relate them with anti-Semitism. For example, how can anyone conclude that someone who believes that the medicine for curing the cancer has been discovered but not circulated widely due to some big interests, is also anti-Semitic? Additionally, is it 'paradox' and 'belief without rational base' someone to believe that the medicine for curing the cancer has been discovered but not circulated widely because some research organizations will lose huge amounts of funding? Or, because some pharmaceutical industries will lose billions from drugs in which they invested and will become useless in such a case?”
“... either someone belongs to the 75% of the participants who answered that the crisis in Greece was premeditated by external forces to despoil the country, or, to the 27% who believes that the moon-landing of the American astronauts in 1969 was not real, is being categorized as the 'average Greek' who adopts conspiracy theories, and all these of course, are somehow related to the anti-Semitism.”
via: http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/10/how-cia-invented-conspiracy-theory-term.html