Bringing down the false flag

Of all the nutty beliefs I've examined over the years, the one that I have the hardest time understanding is the whole "false flag" thing.

The idea here is that the government (usually the United States government, although other countries have been accused of this as well) manufactures calamities in order to distract the citizens ("sheeple") from what they're really trying to do.  Their actual aims usually involve establishing a fascist dictatorship, disarming everyone, rounding up and executing civilians, and other special offers.

The fact that none of the latter ever happens doesn't seem to matter much.  Each time there's a new tragedy, raving wackmobiles like Alex Jones start yammering on about how it never really happened, it was just a staged event with "crisis actors" designed to divert your attention.  Maybe they really think by making all this shit up (what they would call "focusing your attention on reality") they're preventing the Bad Guys from killing us all.  Maybe they picture themselves as the dam holding back the flood, that without their brave reporting, we'd all find ourselves in FEMA death camps.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or maybe they're just loons.  I dunno.

So, here are a few things that are said to be "false flags:"

• The Sandy Hook massacre
• The Columbine shootings
• The Boston Marathon bombing
• Hurricane Katrina
• The Bali bombing
• 9/11
• The crash of Malaysia Airlines Flights MH17 and 370
• Hurricane Sandy
• The recent Ebola outbreak in Africa
• The riots in Ferguson, Missouri
• The riots and looting in Egypt following the fall of Hosni Mubarak
• The entire situation in the Ukraine

Yes, you're understanding this correctly; to the false-flagazoids, either (1) these events never happened, or (2) they were pre-arranged and orchestrated by the government for their own purposes.

But what about eyewitnesses, you may be asking, not to mention victims?

That you'd even ask the question means you've "drunk the KoolAid."  The so-called eyewitnesses and victims are either government plants, or else entirely fictitious.

And the conspiracy theorists work fast.  Whenever a story hits the news, you can almost set your watch and time how long it'll take before false-flag accusations start hitting the conspiracy websites.  It's only taken a day or so for the two current tragedies -- the Nepal earthquake and the Baltimore riots -- to be declared false flags by these crazies.  (Don't believe me?  Go here and here, if you can stand to.)

So as I'm considering this whole bizarre phenomenon, the thought crossed my mind; do these people believe that nothing bad ever happens unless it's caused by the government?  Or maybe that nothing bad ever happens at all, given that they seem to think that most of the awful things in the news were invented by the media?

So it occurred to me that maybe this was the common thread.  If you believe in false flags, it gives you a number of comforting fictions to fall back on:

1. Most of the catastrophes that get reported aren't real.
2. Even the ones that are real were staged by the government, so there's always a faceless entity there to blame if you don't like what's going on.
3. Because you are aware of the ruse, it means that you are in the know, i.e., you're not a "sheeple."

But I think there's a fourth underlying cause, here.  If you attribute everything down to your hangnails to the Evil Illuminati, you don't ever have to look at the underlying causes of the things that could be addressed.  If Sandy Hook and Columbine were fictional, then we never have to discuss the American attitude toward guns.  If Ferguson and Baltimore were staged by the police, then we can avoid talking about race and the enculturation of privilege.  If 9/11 was an inside job, we never have to consider the role that American foreign policy has had in the instability in the Middle East, nor our support of the repressive theocracy in Saudi Arabia because of our reliance on oil.

And if we disbelieve in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Nepal earthquake, we never have to confront the fact that the world is a big, scary, chaotic place, where terrible things sometimes just happen for no apparent reason other than the steering currents in the south Atlantic and the movement of tectonic plates under the Himalayas.  It means we can avoid dealing with our own fear, accepting our own mortality, understanding that we're always insecure, always in danger, and that none of us is going to get out of here alive.

But the blindness comes with a cost, and it isn't just the terrible cost of buying a lie instead of seeking the truth.  The worst part of all of this is that is absolves us of the responsibility of doing something to offer aid to the victims of these catastrophes.  We can sit back, secure in the superiority of our false knowledge, saying that we don't have to reach out and help anyone, because there's no one there to help.

To which I say: fuck that.  I haven't been able to find anywhere to which you can donate for the victims of the Baltimore riots -- there may be campaigns started in the next days, so keep your eyes open.  But here are two to help the victims of the Nepalese earthquake -- an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for shelters and medical aid, and one of my favorite charities, Médecins Sans Frontières.  Please consider donating to either or both.  

Because despite what the conspiracy theorists would have you believe, compassion and love will always beat suspicion, hatred, and fear.

My will be done

I was raised Roman Catholic, and considered myself Catholic for the first twenty or so years of my life.  I followed the precepts to the best of my ability, went to church every Sunday and to confession regularly, and in general did everything I could to be a good Catholic.

My abandonment of the Faith Of My Fathers didn't happen all at once, with some kind of scales-falling-from-the-eyes experience that left me realizing that I was on the wrong path.  But even back then, there were some signs and portents that were indicative of the kinds of questions I'd be asking in a few years, questions that admitted no easy answers, and even seemed to stump some of the more learned of the church leaders.  And one of these had to do with the nearly constant attribution of events and decisions to "God's Will."

I recall thinking, "How do you know what god's will is?  You're so certain you know the mind of god?"  It seemed to me to be the height of arrogance.  I've always felt unsure about just about everything I do and think, especially my position apropos of the daily chaos I see around me.  To claim that my opinions, biases, and judgments are the same as those held by the eternal and infallible creator of the universe seemed to me even then to be the worst sort of spiritual pride, which as I recall is said to Cometh Before A Fall.

The Seven Deadly Sins by François-Marie Balanant (ca. 1785) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I noticed too how gentle, kind people tended to attribute gentleness and kindness to god, and harsh, judgmental people imagined god as an inflexible, rule-based micromanager.  And suddenly it occurred to me: these people are creating god in their own image, not the other way around.

In other words, they're making it all up.

It struck me as bizarre then, and it still does today, that people are so quick to put their own words in god's mouth.  I found two appalling examples of this tendency this past weekend.  So let me tell you about them, and see what you think.

In the first, we had another example of god prohibiting catering to gays, this time a company in Oregon called "Sweet Cakes by Melissa."  The owners, Aaron and Melissa Klein, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, and were sued for discrimination.  The judge found in favor of the gay couple and fined the Kleins $135,000.

So the Kleins launched a GoFundMe drive to raise money to pay the fine.  They'd made it to $109,000 -- which is appalling enough in and of itself; didn't Jesus say to care for the poor, not the bigots? -- when GoFundMe cancelled the drive.  They cited their policy, stated clearly on their site, that you cannot use GoFundMe to raise money to pay for the repercussions of breaking the law.

And Melissa Klein wrote on her Facebook page, "Evidently Go fund me [sic] has shut down our Go fund me page and will not let us raise any money.  Satan's really at work but I know our God has a plan and wins in the end!"

So these people are so sure of themselves and their beliefs that they not only attribute what they're doing to the will of god, but claim that anyone who gets in their way must be motivated by the devil?

Not to mention the fact that was pointed out more than once to the Kleins on Twitter, namely that they had declined service to someone who they disagreed with, and then when GoFundMe did exactly the same thing to them, they claimed that GoFundMe must be doing the work of Satan.

In the second, and even more horrifying, example we have a prominent Christian preacher who felt it necessary to express his opinion about the devastating earthquakes in Nepal, which caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage, the loss of irreplaceable historical buildings, and worst of all, a death toll of 3,200 that is likely to continue rising.  Pastor Tony Miano, of the evangelical ministry group Cross Encounters, went on his Twitter (@TonyMiano) and responded to the devastation thusly:

Praying 4 the lost souls in Nepal.  Praying not a single destroyed pagan temple will b rebuilt & the people will repent/receive Christ. 

Seriously?  That's your response?  You are so certain that your opinions are a perfect reflection of your god's wishes that you are willing to say publicly that everything in Nepal will be just hunky-dory if everyone converts to Christianity and puts churches in place of the Buddhist temples that were destroyed?

It's not only the heartlessness of this comment that gets me; it's the mind-bending arrogance.  "I understand the universe perfectly," Miano seems to be saying.  "All you have to do is agree with me, and you'll be agreeing with god."

Which seems to be the same thing the Kleins were saying, and the same thing a lot of the extremely religious claim.  After all, what else are the mullahs doing in the Middle East but saying that their biases regarding the treatment of apostates and the place of women and rules regarding sexual purity are a flawless mirror of the will of Allah?

It was exactly this sort of thing that struck me thirty years ago.  Because that's the commonality, isn't it?  "Do what I say.  You're confused, whereas I know what god's opinion is about everything."

Like I said, the realization I had when I was 21 or so didn't lead to an immediate loss of faith.  I had been steeped in Catholicism too long just to give it up in one fell swoop.  So I limped along for a while, but eventually came to the conclusion first that if there was a god, it was impossible to know his will -- and finally that there was no evidence of a god at all.  The whole thing began, though, with my puzzlement over how the priests could be so sure that they knew what god wanted, not only for themselves, but for everyone else.

And nowhere, I think, does this hypocrisy show quite so clearly as in the coalescence of one's own opinions with those of an almighty deity.

The religious call this "faith."  But how is this not simply a bad case of megalomania?