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Friday, May 28, 2004

Gary Indiana on "Conspiracists"

[Village Voice, found via Weblogsky] An excellent beginning to a promised three-part discussion of "conspiracy theory" by novelist-critic Gary Indiana (who happens, along with Bruce Sterling, to be among my very favorite living writers). Especially nice is his comment on the way corporate media "reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid fantasy of 'conspiracy cranks' — for instance, the idea that successive "preemptive" wars might be launched against demonized enemies in order to award reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly helmed by, say, the vice president of the United States and other exalted government employees, or that the strategic purpose of one such war might be the economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a secure pipeline for the exploitation of said resources. Instead, the altruism and democracy-spreading goodness of the American power elite are portrayed as self-evident, taking all other motives off the media table."

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