The Atlantic's Shadowland Series
Debunked
Part 3:
The American Civil War Conspiracy
Part 1 of 9: Debunked "Shadowland" The Power and Danger of Conspiracies
Part 2 of 9: Debunked The Birther Issue
Part 3 of 9: Debunked The American Civil War Conspiracy
Part 4 of 9: Debunked The Teenage Conspiracy Theorist known as Ellen Cushing
Part 5 of 9: Debunked The Conspiracy Theorists are Winning
Part 6 of 9: Debunked QAnon, the Pro-Trump Conspiracy Religion
Part 7 of 9: Debunked Paranoia in American Entertainment
Part 8 of 9: Debunked One America News, Trump's Favorite TV Network
Part 9 of 9: Debunked The 5G Radiation Conspiracy
By: Shawn Alli
Posted: June 20, 2020
Copyright Pixabay
* All individuals and organizations receive 3 full days of pre-publication notice to respond to questions.
We move onto the next article "The Conspiracy Theories That Fueled the Civil War" by Annika Neklason.And it's more or less the same as Adam Serwer's article in Part 2.
Conspiratorial thinking led to the civil war.
Umm...no. The issue of freeing slaves led to the civil war.
Neklason starts off with newspapers in the South claiming that Lincoln hated the South and that his policies would lead to violent revolts by black people. She believes these types of "conspiracies" fanned the flames of civil unrest.
Umm...no. The claims are "propaganda." Something that each group has used for millennia. Today, propaganda is reborn with the label "fake news." But even if you blame propaganda, it's not enough to explain the civil war. What would explain it? Racism of course. The Southern states simply "packaged" racism in the form of propaganda. But the question remains. Is propaganda and conspiracy theories the same? Of course not. All groups, especially governments employed propaganda in the past. If you substituted that word for conspiracy, it wouldn't sound right.
All groups, especially governments employed "conspiracies" in the past.
No, it doesn't work. And it's foolish to claim that governments are creating conspiracies theories. They're employing either disinformation (also known as propaganda) and misinformation. Governments don't operate in the fringe world of conspiracies. Hitler believed that Jews were the scum of the Earth because he was a racist, not because he had conspiratorial thoughts.
Liberal journalists at the Atlantic are misunderstanding the term "conspiracy," and reinterpreting history in order to match their ideological bubble.
Defending a racist claim with conspiracies isn't conspiratorial thinking. It's just racist thinking through the lens of conspiracy theories. If you claimed that such thinking was conspiratorial, almost all thinking would be deemed conspiratorial. Someone cut you off at the grocery store? It's a conspiracy. Your favorite bread was out of stock. A conspiracy. Funds went missing from your bank account? It's not a conspiracy. It was your wife. Ha ha ha.
Conspiratorial thinking is simply a reaction to official events, such as 9/11, Pearl Harbor, immigrants, Trump, the deep state, the liberal agenda, missing children, pedophiles in Hollywood and such. But having those thoughts doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. Of course, there's no valid definition of who counts as a conspiracy theorist, but it's usually someone that doesn't operate within the norm of society because of their conspiracies. Thinking about conspiracies without telling people or acting on it doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. While liberals from the Atlantic would claim that you have "conspiratorial thoughts," the label means nothing because it's not affecting your state of being.
Alex Jones, David Icke, and the Pizzagate shooter are all conspiracy theorists in my book because they're living their life through a lens of conspiratorial thinking. An action that almost no one in the world does, let alone the global or American public.
It would even be incorrect to call religious beliefs "conspiratorial." Why? Because religious beliefs are mainstream and out in the open. There's no real conspiracy about the content. Of course, if you go deeper down the rabbit hole, you might find that the religions themselves were created by...wait for it...extraterrestrials. That would be conspiratorial thinking. But even if you believed that it means very little unless you're taking action and "exposing" the supposed conspiracy with some sort of "evidence."
The point I'm trying to make, is that the Atlantic has a false perception of the power of conspiratorial thinking and the effect that the conspiracy theory movement has had on the world. In other words, they wasted their time in writing this series, and I in-turn am wasting my time debunking it.
Gotta love the irony of criticizing others. It's a waste of time, but after you've done it, you feel better.
And then you move into twitter sound bite attacks and call your opponent a dumb c*nt. It only intensifies the reaction of your opponent, but you want/need that reaction in order to continue your way of thinking.
Gotta love the progress humans have made in the last 5000 years or so in their path to maturity. If I didn’t know any better, I'd say that someone/some group is blocking humanity's path of development. You can label that a conspiracy theory but the label means nothing. I don’t plan to "prove" or "disprove" it. As if I could. Conspiracies, like most things in life, are not falsifiable claims. You can never prove or disprove it.
And no, it wasn't a conspiracy for Southern White people to believe that the slaves, once freed, would kill their masters, rape White women and destroy White people in America. That was a legitimate fear at the time. I'm not saying that I would have killed White people if I was a freed slave. I would probably go with emotional and mental torture. Killing would be too easy. Why kill when you can torture for decades, break their spirit, and force them to kill themselves? Hypothetically speaking of course.
While peaceful emancipation was possible, by no means was it guaranteed. And if Black people had easy access to mass weapons when they were freed, history may have taken a very different course.