[Peace-discuss] Conspiracies, appropriate force

[Bob Illyes]

Answers to your comments, Mort:

1) Appropriate force is the idea that the use of force should be in 
proportion to the harm done or threatened. It is not appropriate, for 
example, to shoot a kid who is stealing candy. It was not appropriate to 
invade Iraq even if they had had the WMDs. It was not appropriate for 
police to pepper spray a kid just because he didn't want to talk to them. 
There is thinking in both the military and the police that the right way to 
do their job is to threaten extreme force, which they think will guarantee 
compliance. This is immoral, leads to the actual use of extreme force when 
their target doesn't back down, and is police-state behavior. It is not, I 
should say, a conspiracy. It is policy, and the right way to stop it is to 
change the policy by democratic means.

2) A conspiracy theory differs from a conspiracy in several ways, and is 
pretty easy to spot. The conspiracy is world-wide. The conspirators are 
claimed to be very, very good at their secret mischief. A conspiracy 
theorist never admits to error, and explains away facts rather than 
modifying the theory to fit them, i.e., rejects the scientific method. Once 
a conspiracy theory is widely accepted, the killing starts. Religions often 
buy into them, and both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have many 
adherents to the notion that they are a special group chosen by God, 
identify their opposition as a conspiracy against them and God, and think 
gives them the right to kill, steal and lie. Witch burning is another 
example of what a conspiracy theory is capable of, as was the Spanish 
Inquisition. More recently, we have the Holocaust. Marxists identify 
liberalism as a world-wide conspiracy against democracy, and we know where 
that went in Russia and China (liberalism exterminated, along with a lot of 
people, and no democracy). Conspiracy theorists are often perfectly nice 
people, but they play with fire.

I should point out, as I have before, that conspiracy theories consistently 
violate Occam's Razor. In an effort to make evil understandable, they posit 
an impossibly complex dark force.

3) Of course there are conspiracies. At issue is whether they are the 
driving force of history, or merely one of many factors.

Bob