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Forum:The Gleiwitz Incident
The Gleiwitz Incident: The dangers of Conspiracy Crackpottery in Politics
By Nutcase71733
We know conspiracy theories such as Watergate, Iran/Contra, Gulf of Tonkin and others. Those are conspiracies that have actually happened and have soiled the good name of the US government for untold years to come.
Then we have conspiracies for which we have no evidence of, such as aliens, Roswell, and Area 51. Finally we delve into conspiracies like 9/11 truth, NWO, and so on. These conspiracies can be funny, due to how absurd the claims are. The reptilian shape-shifters in particular never ceases to make me chuckle.
However, conspiracy theories despite how laughable they are can do real harm. Some people have had their lives ruined by those who harass them who want the "truth". This becomes even worse when a conspiracy theory of this sort ends up becoming a fixture of a political movement.
For an example, we shall be delving into a case called the Gleiwitz Incident.
The Gleiwitz Incident was a moment in German History just before world war 2 began that according to a fabricated "affadavit" by a disgruntled SS man, brought up at the Nuremberg Trials was what ultimately helped to start the war in the first place. The Gleiwitz Incident was supposedly orchestrated by Himmler and Geobbles to try and justify the invasion of Poland by planting evidence of a conspiracy, as they were accused of ethnic cleansing of Germans just before the war. If this were true, which it is not, In doing so, Hitler invaded Poland under false pretenses.
Now on one hand this could be taken to correlate the cause of the Iraq War, which is understandable given how everything had turned out. In fact I would say that given the right wing affiliation of America's Republican party and the Nazis of Germany one could say it's expected. However given the nature of this site I will not paint people with a broad brush, as I want to avoid making this seem like hack work.
Now my main topic of this is that conspiracy theories of the sort spouted off by Glenn Beck or Alex Jones and the like are crazy and should be best ignored sometimes, and torn apart with as much sarcasm and humor as much as possible the rest of the time. However I cannot deny the real world impact such ideas can possibly have, and with the Gleiwitz Incident now known to me it's something I can't ignore.
With the Sandy Hook incident there are conspiracy theories abound on the net now, calling the whole incident a false flag operation. People calling the parents of the deceased paid actors for the government to push the New World Order via gun bans. Alex Jones' show of stupidity on Piers Morgan's show after the massacre and the recent lunacy made by Glenn Beck where he's trying to create his own Rapture as seen in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and the video game Bioshock further show the dangers at hand.
Conspiracy theories have lead to a number of horrible events in recent history. From the shooting in Ohio done by a Glenn Beck fan who shot down several officers because he was told Obama was coming for his guns to Bill O'Reilly's "Tiller the Baby Killer" comments prove in my mind just how dangerous this stuff can be. And given the Gleiwitz incident, we have these people pushing these conspiracies into the mainstream to get people to believe them.
Already America is seen as another take on Nazi Germany, if we were to get someone like Alex Jones in the white house, things are sure to get worse as the general conspiracy mindset is if there is no evidence that supports them they will make it. This is what Hitler's men did and it allowed them to declare war on Poland, and ultimately start world war two and in turn the Holocaust as well.
Alex Jones in my mind is right now the one most likely to make such a power grab. Either him or Glenn Beck. They both share a number of the same qualities Hitler himself has. And their conspiratorial mindsets are born from much the same stuff Hitler complained about from Jews to liberals, secularists, among others. If they were to gain high office I wouldn't put it past them to manufacture evidence using their conspiracy-driven worldviews to justify some bigger goal. They currently have a goal with their schtick and that's money. That's still bad, but it's something we'd agree is better than using their conspiracy to grab power and then use it to kill people they don't like.
If they were to go for a chance at high office, or anyone like them (there's a lot of these folks) their conspiracy claims have to be debunked and their dishonesty exposed to the people of America. The problem is part of their plan to keep their base is to keep the public stupid and uneducated, hence part of the many reasons why education keeps getting slashed by conservative politicians. If too many people are made ignorant of the facts about the world it could very well lead to Hitler 2.0 if it hasn't happened already.
In closing the Gleiwitz incident was a proven false conspiracy theory that had been used by the Nazis to get support for invading Poland, and I could see countless other examples of this in all walks of the American media. Not just from the lies of the Iraq war but to more mundane and absurd claims like the alien shape-shifting illuminati.
I don't mean to bring this point up to restrict free speech, it's merely ment to be a topic to help enlighten the real life dangers of conspiracy theories, especially when they are taken to the realm of politics. As such I wish to encourage debate and discussion over this topic I raised, and perhaps learn other details related to this matter. I also apologize for any generalizations.
There may be a lot of things I may have forgotten to mention here, this is my first topic on this site, and I just joined today upon learning of the Gleiwitz incident and figured it'd make for a good discussion, especially since I saw no article of it here on the site, and I think it would help if one is made.
- I came across someone one a WWII encyclopedia who actually believed that the Poles were killing Germans before the war. ఠ_ఠ Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein des Sturmkrieg Sector 05:48, 25 January 2013 (UTC)