Which is why everyone knows who they are and even back then, knew who they were. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! They always made sure everyone knew who they were. Just as they continue to not hide who they are and what they support. They even have KKK websites nowdays, magazines and forums where they post pictures of themselves, their families, etc.. You know, to make sure people can identify who they are. They even published photos with the blacks they lynched, with their faces showing. For example: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! So are you going to keep re-writing history and ignoring the absolute obvious? I am trying to figure out why you find all of this so funny? I weep when I look at these images and read back to the lowest of the low of human depravity. And you laugh. What is worse, you are laughing because you are attempting to deny how they committed the crimes they committed because you are hell bent on portraying conspiracy theorist, and thus yourself, as heroes against the oppressors. You misunderstand. It is disgust that you are using other people's suffering to paint conspiracy theorists like you like to believe yourself to be, to be some kind of hero. And in doing so, you are denying history and trying to change it to suit your personal narrative and agenda.
So you know better than someone who lived through it? Let me guess - you also understand the Holocaust better than the Jews who lived through it. So you LOL! LOL! LOL! Laugh out loud at those clueless Jews!
LOL! You really have nothing left to argue, do you? As usual you just repeat the same old disproven claims over and over, laced with personal put-downs, self-righteous attempts to belittle and demonize, and your typically sad projections of your own bottled up rage. It's a sign of your desperation--to win an argument, any argument, at all cost, no matter how much you have to twist and pervert me into some sort of horrible person. Sorry if I'm not playing your therapeutic punching bag this time. We're done here and my points stand as they were originally stated. The Nazis conspired against the Jews. The KKK and other racists in the South conspired against black people. And homophobes conspired against gay men in the 1950's. Thank god for the people who called these conspirators out, exposed them, and stood up against their attempts to marginalize and silence them.
LOL! That's all? I'm laughing at Jews now? Did you notice I was talking about the KKK's treatment of black people in the South? No you didn't did ya? I'm laughing at you now and your sick attempts to ad hom me as a way of just winning an argument. You have nothing left to argue, which is why you have to do this. I'm embarrassed for you. I really am. And also abit amused..Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Magical Realist, you are intentionally ignoring evidence (photographic evidence at that) being presented to you, most likely because you know it pretty well kills your case. These people were not "in hiding"... they were/are proud of what they did/do, as the evidence shows quite clearly. The fact that you are incapable of comprehending simple fact is, quite honestly, astonishing... one has to wonder what limits this places on your day-to-day activities... ... or is this all a charade that you put on, pretending to be ignorant and illogical and otherwise incapable of rational behavior?
So now it is the ones in power who were the conspiracy theorists and who conspired against the minorities.. Your points mean nothing. You are attempting to rewrite history and claim that no one knew. Perhaps you might feel this excuses other countries or the State from preventing so many deaths. At the start of this thread, you had claimed that it was the Jews, blacks and gays who were the ones who were the conspiracy theorists. You have completely ignored the fact that everyone knew what was going on. Are you telling me that the Jews and the Roma were unaware of what the Nazis were doing? From when they were discriminated against, to when their homes and businesses were destroyed? To when they were forced to wear the Star of David to identify them as Jews? How about when they were forced into the Ghettos and the mass killings started to occur? Why do you think Jews were doing everything they could to get out of Europe before the Final Solution became the killing machine it ended up being? Everyone knew what they were doing. Just as everyone knew what the KKK were doing and who they were and why. Just like we know what the homophobes are doing. To listen to you, would mean that no one knew what the Westboro Baptist Church were doing each time they would protest a funeral because "God Hates Fags".. I think what is the most despicable is just how and why you are trying to change history to make sure it fits into your personal beliefs. For example, at the start of this thread: So pray tell, who was calling who out? Because you seemed to believe that it was the victims who were the conspiracy theorists.. But everyone knew what was going on.. The Nazis, the KKK never once hid what their intentions were and would be. At all. Even what you linked clearly showed how the Nazis talked a lot about what they intended to do. They made it very public and very very clear. Now you are changing the narrative when you realised that it was painting you in a negative light because you see yourself as a conspiracy theorist. I find the flippant way in which you try to alter history, to the point where you are even joking about the deaths of millions of people, because you see yourself as a conspiracy theorist and the victim of the majority... It is despicable. For example: How anyone can find this subject matter amusing is beyond me. You were given more than enough evidence to prove you wrong. Sure, you can ignore it because it is to your benefit and it perhaps makes you feel better about yourself to deny reality and ignore history and try to change history.. I don't think anyone finds it amusing. It's kind of pathetic, to be honest. Because what you are doing in this thread is literally trying to alter the reality of history to make yourself out to be somehow the same as the victims of those horrific crimes in our history. You aren't a conspiracy theorist. You are an opportunist.
Ugh..more lying ad homs and repetitions of your disproven claims. It's just getting more and more pitiful. Why don't you lie down and rest? Breathe deeply. Drink a glass of wine. Losing a debate isn't the end of the world you know. Life WILL go on for you, I assure you.
Do you have any other stereotypes you wish to use? There is no argument to be won or lost in this MR. I find it surprising that you see it this way. History stands and speaks for itself. Your attempts to deny and change it alters nothing, except for what exists in your mind. I think one of the most disturbing aspects of this is that you are attempting to portray the staff here and its members as being against you in some way, to make yourself out to be the victim, the conspiracy theorist who is the bastion of good, etc. At first, you tried to claim that it was the Nazis and the KKK who were the conspiracy theorists. At the very least, I am happy that you have stopped with that ridiculous argument. But what has become disturbing is the manner in which you are trying to latch on to these horrors and alter it completely because it does not suit or match what it is you wish to portray on this site. And that is why it is opportunistic. Your beliefs and your claims that the Nazis, the KKK never spoke of what they were doing or planning to do is proven wrong by historical fact. Hitler never once tried to hide his hatred of the Jews and the laws passed specifically to discriminate against Jews and the Roma were listed for you in this thread. Nor did he ever mince words about how and what he felt about Jews and other minorities. Not once. He openly said and passed laws that allowed for their being discriminated against, mistreated and even killed. This was not secret. There is even video footage of him saying this. The same with the KKK. They never hid who they were. They openly walked down the street with their Klan regalia on and made sure that black people saw them and knew who they were. It was an intimidation tactic. It was designed to keep black people under their control. Sure, sometimes they paraded with the hoods on, but they were also very open about who they were. I provided you with more than enough photos from the 1920's to show just how far they went in making sure people knew who they were. They were proud of who they were. Which is why they would often pose with the blacks they lynched, with the hoods off and it would be published in the local papers.. The point is that everyone knew who they were and what they were doing. Sometimes the biggest secret is that it is not secret at all.
Magic Realist creates an expectation when he posts. The reader familiar with his positions, mode of argument, etc. anticipates certain things. MR rarely disappoints, but when he verges on the truth, or at least a plausible alternative there is little chance it will be given serious attention since, after all, consider its source! Here is what I think MR may have been trying to say before he got sidetracked by his own arguments. 1. Every society has minorities within it. 2. These minorities are rarely accorded the same rights as the majority. 3. This situation is either denied by the majority, or more often justified on some questionable basis. 4. When members of the minority claim that they are being persecuted the majority respond that they are imagining a conspiracy. 5. Several of the points in JamesR's OP fit that bill. 6. The truth is that the majority are conspiring, generally in unspoken ways, to suppress the minority. That seems to me to be MRs argument and frankly I can find no fault with it: unless you want to argue that women should be paid less than men, and homosexuals should not be allowed in the military.
And if he had actually argued that, no one would have disagreed. Did the Nazis conspire against the Jews and the KKK against blacks? Certainly. But not in the way in which MR has attempted to portray it. The Nazis and groups like the KKK were obvious as they were not obvious. They never hid their true intentions or what they planned to do or even wanted to do. The conspiracies tended more towards stoking fear and revulsion for minorities among the majority. Theories that blacks were savage beasts for example and those about Jews and power as another example, were used specifically to turn the majority against the minorities. But the intention of the Nazis and the KKK were never secret. What they were planning were never secret. By spreading fear about the minority groups, he was able to tell of how he planned to protect the country against the those minorities. Hence why the Jews and other minorities were never in the dark about what the Nazis intended to do. Everyone knew. And it is that justification by the Nazis and groups like the KKK that MR seems to miss in his argument. It was never denied. And as you very correctly pointed out, it was either denied or justified. The Nazis and the KKK justified.. And never denied. Nor did they ever hide their intentions. Australia saw a bizarre conspiracy theory spread by a previous Howard Government in the lead up to an election. A boat, presumably owned by people smugglers, was intercepted by an Australian Navy boat out to sea. With over 220 refugees crammed on board, it was a desperate situation. The message from the then Prime Minister Howard and the then Immigration Minister and the Defence Minister was that the refugees on this boat had threatened to throw their children overboard if they were not allowed to get to Australia. They then showed images of refugees throwing their children into the water as desperate Australian Navy personnel scrambled in the water to try to save them. The Government then started to appear in the media, saying how they were going to protect Australia from such people - as though to say that what kind of person throws their own children in the ocean as a form of blackmail and do we really want them here?.. The Government won the election. They had stoked so much anger and hatred towards refugees and portrayed themselves as stopping 'those people' from reaching our shores, that people bought into their story. The scene had been well set by the Government. The story turned out to be false. And they knew it was false and they deliberately chose to not correct what they had said and instead, kept referring back to it and why the border of the country needed to be protected. The truth? The boat was sinking and the desperate refugees on the boat were throwing their children into the water to the awaiting Naval personnel who were in the water to save as many as they could. But the distrust and hatred towards the Muslim refugees was already set. And they had won the election. The conspiracy was to "conceal" and "deceive" and they were successful. The result of the impression the Government conspired to portray about asylum seekers still resonates through the Australian psyche to this day. The object of it all was to win an election. The distrust remains, there is still the belief that asylum seekers are the type of people who would kill their own children to get to Australia and who cannot be trusted to be allowed in.
I think that may well be what he was saying - it's certainly what he appeared to be saying in his first post or two. What then happened is that others, noting it was MR, attacked a slightly different argument. MR, perceiving it as an attack on his position now attempted to defend it. That led to an inevitable to slide towards him defending the indefensible and tying himself in knots. It is quite common on forums. If we were assigning blame, who would we hold responsible? That's a rhetorical question. I think these discussions would go much better if the participants made sure at the outset that they were using the same definitions. Semantics? You bet, but then I may mean something different by semantics than you.
The tactic taken to refute my initial claim was that conspiracies are always secret. I pointed out that was not true as given by the definition of conspiracy as simply when one group plots against an individual or individuals. But conspiracies often DO take actions and commit atrocities in secret. This I showed is what happened with the Nazis in their extermination of Jews, with the KKK in their lynching of black people and their burning of crosses, and the many hatecrimes of homophobes against gay men. Bell, ignoring the evidence for this, goes on a 6 post rant all about how the Nazis talked about their killing of Jews, that the KKK today has many open members, and how gay men are openly persecuted today by the Westboro Baptist Church. These did not refute my claims and were dishonest attempts as moving the goalposts. After repeated slurs about how I'm making fun of Jews and black people and didn't have the right to discuss their history, about how I'm posing as some sort of hero by defending conspiracy theorists, and how I'm revising history, I decided to quit discussing this and leave the thread as is. My points were made, the evidence was provided, and people here were too immature to handle that. That's all I have to say on this. The posts speak for themselves.
True; not a conspiracy theory. True. In modern society - and in most societies within history - not a conspiracy theory either. The reduction of rights is quite public. Banning of gay marriage is a good example. Often true, and also not a conspiracy theory. In many cases they are imagining a conspiracy theory, when in fact they are just seeing persecution. The OP concerned conspiracy theories, not persecution or injustice. Those are two different things. Again, that is not a conspiracy theory. Slavery was not a conspiracy theory; there was no group of people conspiring together to hide the fact of slavery in America. They may not have spoken much about how they punished escaped slaves (for example) but there was no organized effort to keep slavery secret. The right wing's attacks on gay marriage were not a conspiracy theory; indeed, they used the press to their advantage to promulgate their arguments. Some examples of true conspiracy theories - The Gulf of Tonkin incident. There were no attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats; that was made up (and the reality covered up) to justify increased bombing of North Vietnam, and provide a virtual guarantee that the war would escalate. The US Public Health Service syphilis experiments. Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. They were not told; after tests revealed their condition they were told they had “bad blood."
My point, at least was that, contrary to MR's assertions, the actions taken against the Jews were, at best, a poorly kept secret and so, contrary to MR's assertions, when Jews started coming out of Europe claiming they were being persecuted by Nazi's the response wasn't "LOL, pass the tin-foil" as MR stated (or implied), but rather it was one of international condemnation - as shown by the Joint Declaration by the Members of the United Nations" : The attention of the Belgian, Czechoslovak, Greek, Jugoslav, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norwegian, Polish, Soviet, United Kingdom and United States Governments and also of the French National Committee has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children. The above-mentioned governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They reaffirm their solemn resolution to insure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end. in response to this document: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I'm not terribly interested in the semantics of what does and does not constitute a conspiracy theory.
You are usually a lot smarter than this. The OP is about the psychology of people who imagine conspiracies where none exist. The Jews were being persecuted by the nazis. The counter claim was that the Jews fit the psychology of conspiracy theorists and were imagining things. That is, I suggest, one half of MR's argument - or perhaps even its entirety.
Close; it is about conspiracy theories, as evinced by the title, and about the psychology of people who believe them. Yes. And if surely would have been unfortunate if Jews had been treated as conspiracy theorists. Fortunately they were not.
Picture yourself a Jew taking your spouse to a German restaurant one night. You are aware of the new policies of the Nazi party, but at this point it is still nebulous and unknown about what they will do. You order your meal from a waiter who seems a little on the gruff side. Fellow patrons of the restaurant seem to be glancing at your table too often. There's a whisper here and there. Are they Nazis? You don't know. They may be all around you. You are paranoid and afraid for your family. Of course you have a conspiracy theory. In certain respects it is true and in others it is not. That's generally how conspiracy theories work. They can be true, but are never certain as to their extent or means of employment. Who is in on it? What are they saying about me? What will they do next?
False Equivocation and/or Doublespeak... that's all he seems to have to back his arguments anymore Origin... probably best to just ignore them and let them settle to the bottom dregs of the forum.
