It's a conspiracy, I tell you!!!

[Slytovhand]

Given Mysty's problems with voting for Bush, and also Blas' thoughts that we'll all be dead by a virus concocted by some government on the sly....


Conspiracy theories?

For or against?

Am I a complete and utter nutter for thinking that various elements within the US government and military planned and carried out the attacks on the WTC?

Am I a nutter for thinking that MI5 had a hand (well... the whole arm and rest of the body) for the London train bombings?

Roswell?

Kennedy?

I, for one, like to think that if the 'facts' I've been presented with are accurate, then there is something the various governments have been, and will continue to, hide.

(part of my thinking is: we are talking about organisations which calculate 'acceptable losses' in their strategic plannings. Also, if X government can obtain Y Billions of dollars, at the expense of a 'mere' few thousand lives of its citizens, then that's fair enough for the 'good' of the country. People are paid to calculate those sort of figures. And as the old saying goes... Power corrupts)


Slyt

[Greenday]

Area 51 - Does it exist? Hell yes it does? Is it for aliens and UFOs? I doubt it. More likely than not, it wouldn't surprise me if the government had just been testing new fighters/bombers/etc and people mistaken them for UFOs. I mean, the B-2 bomber could easily be mistaken for a UFO.

JFK - Does the government know what happened? I'd give it a 99.9% odds of the government knowing what really happened. They know. The only question is, why wouldn't they tell us?

9/11 - Regardless, Al Queda still did the attack, whether we knew about it or not, and they deserve to pay for it. I'd prefer to go with the logic, "No president could know about such an event and willing let his own people die like that."

Pearl Harbor - People say FDR knew about the attack in advance. I stick to the same logic as the 9/11 conspiracy. FDR wouldn't have stood by and let that happen if he could have stopped it from happened or at least warned the troops in Pearl Harbor.

[Boozy]

Am I a complete and utter nutter for thinking that various elements within the US government and military planned and carried out the attacks on the WTC?

Yes.

But if I didn't like nutters, I wouldn't spend so much time on the internet. So please, carry on....

[miffed]

I do think that our government is capable of less that honorable actions.

A little while ago I did some reading about the atom bombings of Japan that were supposedly necessary to end the war. One atom bomb I think would have been enough, but then they had to drop another, even bigger bomb. Retaliation for Pearl Harbor? Japan's industries and munitions were firebombed after Pearl Harbor and the Navy was prepared to surround them with a starvation blockade. I'm fairly sure the bombings were just unnecessary displays of power, especially considering that Pearl Harbor was a military attack on a military installation, whereas the atom bombings were military attacks on cities filled with civilians.

So yeah, I'm not too sure our government is the shining beacon of morality that it's often cracked up to be.

[Pedersen]

miffed, the dropping of the two bombs is, simply put, controversial. I can find arguments for and against.

The for arguments? Dropping those bombs would save lives in total. I don't have links handy, and am going from memory. However, assume that those two bombs killed 2 million people. The estimates were that a ground battle to take over Japan would have resulted in (unsure of exact number, so assuming here again) 3 million people. 1 million lives saved.

So, the dropping of those two bombs is not necessarily a good example.

You want examples of dishonorable behavior? Check Teapot Dome, Little Big Horn, Guantanamo Bay (very current), any number of examples from Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and quite a few others.

Use the bombs as backups, not as part of your primary argument. The bombs just are too weak of an argument against somebody who knows even a smidgen of American history (like me).

[miffed]

A ground battle on Japan? what would the japanese have fought with? Spitballs and sticks? Like I mentioned before, their munitions had been firebombed, they were already on the verge of surrendering. They just didn't want to unconditionaly surrender and give up their present leader, who also served as their spiritual leader.

Sure the bombs might not be the worst thing in American history, but it is still one of many controversial events.

[AFPheonix]

I imagine the government has its fingers in a lot more pies than we'll ever know about any time soon, but I don't think a lot of popular conspiracy theories about 9/11 and others really hold water.

[Pedersen]

A ground battle on Japan? what would the japanese have fought with? Spitballs and sticks?

Wow... just...

Okay, let's assume they have absolutely no munitions, or munitions factories, okay? What's left?

Swords. Knives. If they have bamboo nearby, they can make some handy blowguns. Rocks. Clubs. Got some string? How about a bow, and some arrows? Spears.

That's what I came up with in about 30 seconds of thought, and without knowing the terrain.

Add in local knowledge, and a proud people, and you have a recipe for a very long, protracted ground war. And they wouldn't keep to such trifling weapons for long. One patrol of American soldiers gets vanquished, and there's enough materials to start staging small raids to get more munitions from the incoming soldiers.

Are any of those weapons capable of taking out tanks? Hell no! But, at least in the 1940's, tools didn't fight wars: People did. Sooner or later, it comes down to one person killing another. And if the Japanese army had chosen to fight, they could have dragged out the war for a very long time.

That, though, is not a conspiracy theory, and I've derailed this thread too much. If you want to debate it further, start another thread, and I'll happily debate there.

[blas87]

My boyfriend thinks the government concocted the HIV/AIDS virus in hopes of ridding the population of black and poor people.

Don't slam me, I don't buy into that one, just sharing a conspiracy theory.

I DO believe if the government wanted a real free for all or wanted to get rid of enough people, they WOULD create a virus that would turn us into flesh eating zombies.

I don't believe in Roswell. My ex boyfriend tried to convince me that his father saw UFOs on a nightly basis in New Mexico while traveling. Where's the photos? Where's the proof?

I do believe JFK and Bobby had Marilyn Monroe killed.

I think Bush knew about 9/11 just as much as FDR knew about Japan's imminent attack on Pearl Harbor.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

I do believe JFK and Bobby had Marilyn Monroe killed.

Really? After everything I've read about that, I would think that Sam Giancana, the mobster, would be the most likely person to have had her killed, trying to bring the Kennedy boys down.

[miffed]

Pedersen, that is a good point but still, how many american soldiers would actually die in a battle of pointy things versus things that go boom? Maybe I'm just a little jaded after reading firsthand accounts of the bombing. It is quite horrifying thinking of seeing your neighbor's skin burnt and slipping off or a little girl trying to give her dead mother a drink.

I think it is a little bit of a conspiracy theory, mostly in how the government dealt with the matters and how the events are portrayed in most history books. They did something bad and they tried to hide it. Those are the basic elements of a conspiracy theory, right?

[Pedersen]

Pedersen, that is a good point but still, how many american soldiers would actually die in a battle of pointy things versus things that go boom?

And by limiting yourself in that fashion, you reveal quite a bit about yourself.

You'll note that my made up numbers did not discuss how many American soldiers would die, but rather how many people would die. If the choice is to kill five million, or to kill ten million (and you don't have adequate intelligence to tell you that the enemy is about to surrender, so you don't have to kill at all), which will you choose?

If you believe that your choices consist only of the following two items:

• Kill 5,000,000 people
• Kill 10,000,000 people

Which one would you choose?

That's the choice faced by President Harry Truman when he gave the orders to drop both "Fat Man" and "Little Boy".

Dammit, I did not want to reply here. But, you leave little choice.

Per the Wikipedia entry on Little Boy, approximately 71,000 people were killed immediately, and due to long term effects of radiation.

Per the Wikipedia entry on Fat Man, another 65,000 were killed/injured, with an unknown amount dying from the radion (sorry, but "thousands more" is not a quantifiable number. Since Little Boy outright killed more, I'm going say it's less than 10,000).

Total number of dead due to immediate death and radiation sickness: 146,000 people.

Per the Wikipedia entry on Operation Downfall, the number of American casualties would be at least one half that number. Add in the Japanese casualties, and the numbers go much much higher (up to ten million fatalities).

Truman was facing a damned difficult choice: If he drops the bombs, he kills 200,000 people (by estimates). If he doesn't, he runs the risk of killing 50 times that number of people over a much longer span of time, and in the process completely obliterates a country and a culture.

There's no conspiracy here. And using the two bombs to try and drive home the point of a corrupt and untrustable government is, at best, a weak argument. At worst, it is sophistry of the highest order.

Now, I really am done with this argument on this thread. Want to debate it further? Spawn a new one.

[Boozy]

Dammit, I did not want to reply here. But, you leave little choice.

Good lord! I didn't realize that miffed was holding a gun to your head! I'll admit that we're pretty easy-going around here, but this is probably something you should report to a mod.

There are varying estimates of the number of casualties a full-scale invasion of Japan would have caused. But the generally accepted view of historians is that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was militarily justifiable, but the dropping of the second was the US showing the Soviets their strong hand. Nagasaki was how the US declared themselves the supreme military and technological power in the post-WWII world.

Now I suppose you're right - we really should be steering this one back on topic.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories, because by their very nature there is no solid proof of their existence. But one really doesn't need to believe that the US government is hiding alien corpses in Roswell to know that they're sneaky bastards who do many things away from the eyes of the electorate.

[ebonyknight]

My boyfriend thinks the government concocted the HIV/AIDS virus in hopes of ridding the population of black and poor people.

Well, if the government is willing to withhold treatment from blacks with syphilis in order to get data (Tuskegee Experiment), they I would believe them almost capable of anything. If the government were willing to pardon scientists responsible for the worst atrocities of WWII (Unit 731 anybody?), just to get their biological warfare data, then I would believe them capable of almost anything. If we can say that we are for freedom and democracy and then deal, support and give aid to regimes who openly crush those freedoms, then I believe them capable of almost anything.

Some things are based in history, others are just conjecture. As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.

[ebonyknight]

Good lord! I didn't realize that miffed was holding a gun to your head! I'll admit that we're pretty easy-going around here, but this is probably something you should report to a mod.

There are varying estimates of the number of casualties a full-scale invasion of Japan would have caused. But the generally accepted view of historians is that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was militarily justifiable, but the dropping of the second was the US showing the Soviets their strong hand. Nagasaki was how the US declared themselves the supreme military and technological power in the post-WWII world.

Now I suppose you're right - we really should be steering this one back on topic.

Damn, Ped. I am starting to wonder why you post here when you find it such a chore.

Miffed, Ped is right.

What people forget or don't realize is that the Japanese were training the populous for this eventuality. They were training children to swim out with mines/grenades to plant on the incoming landing craft. They were training with bamboo weapons to throw themselves at the enemy. They believed that Hirohito was literally God on Earth and would do anything to protect him.

The men, women and children were training to be suicide soldiers. Hell, in the last days of the war, there were German "kamikazi's" destroying bombers with their planes and Hitler wasn't even a God to them.

Their soldiers would routinely perform Banzai attacks when things were looking grim. I don't see why it's such a stretch to imagine Japanese civilians performing similar acts on invading soldiers. The cost in casualties would have been atrocious.

But back to the point. I believe this country capable of anything, so almost no "conspiracy" theory is out the window for me. Now whether it's believable or not, is another matter.

The thing about Bush is that people try to have it both ways, that he is an unbelievable idiot and that he is a deviously corrupt politician plotting the overthrow of the country. Now while people may not take it to those extremes, they generally believe both at the same time. Can't have it both ways.

But the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as far as the Presidents being involved, are there. As well as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. To believe that Presidents haven't gone around Section 1 Article 8 of the Constitution is a bit naive (to put it mildly). But that's what makes Conspiracy theories so pervasive and lasting.

If we didn't have conspiracies, life would be quite boring. What most people don't realize is that life really IS quite boring.