A Dangerous Ideology 1 A Dangerous Ideology A Dangerous Ideology. Why No One Believes the State Any More. by Iain Davis Copyright © 2019 by Iain Davis All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United Kingdom First Printing, 2019 ISBN: 9781793871718 www.in-this-together.com 2 A Dangerous Ideology Contents: Preface: – [p.5] Part 1: The Dissonant Battle Chapter 1: Surely It's All Just Conspiracy Theory? - [p.15] Chapter 2: Who Are The Conspiracy Theorists? - [p.25] Chapter 3: Are Conspiracy Theorists Extremists? - [p.41] Chapter 4: Set Yourself Free. - [p.61] Part 2: Twin Pillars of Deceit Chapter 5: 9/11 – Disrespect or True Respect? - [p.89] Chapter 6: Where Did All The Money Go? - [p.109] Chapter 7: Where Did All The Security Go? - [p.121] Chapter 8: The Collapsing Hypothesis. - [p.142] Chapter 9: No One Could Have Believed. - [p.169] Chapter 10: The Able Danger of Intelligence. - [p.191] Part 3: London Laid Low Chapter 11: The Lacking London Narrative. - [p.218] Chapter 12: No Witnesses to a Forensic Mess. - [p.236] Chapter 13: The Success of Failure. - [p.254] Chapter 14: Oops! Looks Like We did It again. - [p.272] 3 A Dangerous Ideology Authors Note Thanks so much for reading my book. I hope you find it both challenging and rewarding. I wrote it because I care about the core message and hope you give it your consideration. We are living in a time of 'fake news' and disinformation. Society has become less certain of the narratives that weave their way through, and bond, our shared values and perspectives. This isn't necessarily unwelcome. We shouldn't blindly accept everything we are told. We need to be free to ask questions. What concerns me more is the way in which this uncertainty is being exploited. It is fertile ground for those who want to push us towards the political extremes. When accepted 'truths' are eroded, many are tempted to seek out new explanations to fill the void. The vacuum also provides justification for the clamp down on our freedom to openly debate and share information. However, outlawing opinion foments discontent and stirs resentment. The increasing polarisation of society is evident. The foundation of our entire way of life is free discourse based upon reasoned argument, empirical evidence and logical inquiry. We are all capable of critical thinking and already have the tools to withstand any nonsensical stories or claims which lack supporting evidence. We don't need to be told what to think. We just need an opportunity to apply our natural inquisitiveness to the information we are given. If this book interests you, please consider writing a review. I need them to promote the book. Please be honest, I need to learn how to become a better writer and your feedback, good or bad, will be welcome. If you can’t write a review any comments or shares you care to make would be appreciated. Many thanks. 4 A Dangerous Ideology Preface: Following the election of President Donald Trump, his Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, appeared to hugely inflate the attendance figures for the presidential inauguration. Justifiably criticised for talking nonsense, Counsellor Kellyanne Conway later defended Spicer by suggesting that he was simply providing “alternative facts.” The suggestion that facts could be malleable, and didn't necessarily require any substantiating evidence, was actually debated as if it were 'a thing.' This was perplexing. Facts are not subjective. They are either accurate or they aren't facts. The 'alternative fact' is not a concept at all welcome within this book. I consider 'alternative facts' to be rather like 'alternative cheese' in that they are neither cheese nor facts. Admittedly there has been no suggestion they are cheese, but nor is there any evidence they are facts. 'Alternative facts' just don't cut the mustard. Ironic, given that cheese does cut mustard quite nicely. For similar reasons so called 'fake news' is equally unwelcome. It appears the concept was introduced in an effort to highlight the problem of 'news' that is neither based upon evidence, nor facts. Hitherto this has been referred to as 'fiction' or 'propaganda' and no one, prior to the announced existence of 'fake news,' has ever felt the need to define stories based upon myth, unsubstantiated opinion, ramblings of the imagination or statements that lack any evidential basis, as anything other than fiction or propaganda. Such fictions have never, to my knowledge, been considered 'news.' For example, when, in the spring of 1917, the Times of London and the Daily Mail reported the Germans were boiling human corpses in factories to extract glycerine, this was not 'news.' It was reported as if it were 'news' and millions of British people believed it, but the total absence of any supporting evidence meant it was, in fact, propaganda. It was the story's estrangement from any 'facts' that rendered it fictitious, regardless of how many people were 5 A Dangerous Ideology daft enough to swallow it. Traditionally we have all differentiated between news and fiction by virtue of the 'fact' the news attempts to objectively report an event based upon observation and available evidence. Whereas, fiction is 'made up' and blissfully free from these tiresome constraints. This is why reading fiction makes train journeys more tolerable while reading 'the news' often makes them seem utterly pointless. Consequently, all this 'fake news' stuff seems a bit odd. Thus far, the term appears to have been exclusively linked to those who are reporting the news, rather than its evidential basis, or lack thereof. As far as I can tell, anything written or broadcast by the mainstream media is extolled as 'fact based journalism,’ whereas anything which challenges the mainstream narrative is labelled 'fake news.' The origin of the term 'fake news' has largely been attributed to Donald Trump. A Twitter addicted orange man, with a terrifying comb-over, who has been elected to the office of President of the United States by mistake. Given the 2016 U.S. presidential election offered the American people a choice between a vacuous, serial bankrupt, TV personality and a woman widely accused of war crimes and child trafficking, you can't really blame the people any more than you can blame a cow for being milked. The only people with any legitimate right to complain are those who were wise enough to stay at home and not vote for any one. Realising that whoever you vote for you always get the government', only those who refuse to support the system have any right to criticise it. The rest of us, who keep falling for the same ruse time and time again, in the forlorn hope that it will change something, which it never does, just have to suck it up. Though give him his due, President Donald Trump has achieved something of note. He has invented a form of language which is apparently based upon the arbitrary use of words, loosely flung together, to form something he claims are sentences but lack the required 'meaning.' Remarkably he has surpassed the not inconsiderable achievements of his 6 A Dangerous Ideology predecessor in this regard. Language is not a haphazard construct. It is a precise tool we use both to understand one another and to form our own thoughts. Not only the conveyor but also the recipient of language must agree upon the meaning. Otherwise we are babbling incoherently to the clueless, even in our own minds, unable to express anything other than basic emotion. Objectivity requires far more clarity. For example, it is difficult to know what Trump meant when he tweeted, “guys are total losers—they had their story stolen right from under their bad complexions—other media capitalized.” Similarly, while “Bett Middler (his spelling, not mine) is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because I always insist on being politically correct,” doesn't necessarily fail the grammatical construct requirement, it does fall into the presumably Lewis Carroll inspired 'nonsense' category. Admittedly 140 characters or fewer (Twitter's former limit) isn't the ideal linguistic form for conveying complex, or even very simple ideas. Which is why you would have thought someone in his inner circle would have stopped him from doing it. Who knows? Maybe they tried. So to 'understand' what Trump meant when he popularised the term 'fake news' we should perhaps look at the etymologies of 'fake' and 'news' in an attempt to decipher his intention. Linguist Anatoly Liberman, writing in the Oxford University Press's publication 'Academic Insights for the Thinking World,' traced 'fake' back to the colloquial language of the 18th century London underworld called 'Cant.' The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the word as meaning 'to do' in Cant. They also offer further Cant based interpretation including to 'kill, wound or plunder.' Liberman traced the first written use of the word to Charles Dickens 1819 novel 'Oliver Twist' which included the term 'cly-faker.' 'Cly' was a Cant word for pocket, indicating that a 'cly-faker' was a plunderer of pockets. A 'pick pocket' in more modern vernacular. Liberman then sought to 7 A Dangerous Ideology determine how 'fake' was originally adopted by Cant speakers. He identified the Cant adoption of Germanic words like 'fik','fak' and 'fuk', meaning “to move back and forth” or “to cheat”. He wrote: “They probably meant 'go ahead, move; act, do,' with all kinds of specialization, from 'darn (a stocking),' to 'cheat,' to 'copulate.' Once they were appropriated by thieves, 'go ahead, do,' naturally, became 'deceive; steal, etc.'” These words, once used by English Cant speakers, then apparently morphed with 16th century English words like 'fukkit' and disused verbs, such as 'feague,' to produce arguably the most useful, and certainly the most adaptable, word in the English language.