A day or so ago, Ran posted a really interesting semi-speculative item about the usefulness of cities as detainment centers in the case of a crisis (real or engineered):
Some foilhead has a website where he takes photos of empty yards with barbed wire and towers and says they’re concentration camps ready to receive inmates. They might be, but why bother? Our cities are already concentration camps — they are places where most of us are concentrated, and in a crisis, when the rulers need to keep us concentrated, they just block a few dozen lanes of freeways and smaller roads, and we can’t get out! The food and water systems are already in place, the airports are there to take the elite in and out, and if we get to be too much trouble, they just “incompetently” cut off our life support. I can’t think of a scenario where they would do it to all the cities, but how about a few coastal cities that get unruly and un-useful as the economy fails?
In case you’re not familiar with the “foilhead camps” Ran’s talking about in this first line, I recommend checking out the rumored Rex 84 program which Wikipedia claims was (or is) “a plan by the United States federal government to accommodate the detention of large numbers of American citizens in case of massive civil unrest or national emergency.” There are a few sites with photos of these alleged camps floating around online. And Rotten.com has a piece connecting the Reagan era Rex 84 program to the 1940’s detainment of Japanese-Americans in WWII.
Anyway, as far as paranoid conspiracies go, I think what Ran’s saying here makes a lot more sense. If what you’re looking for is population control on a truly massive scale, it seems like it would be easiest to maintain that by keeping people right where they are and utilizing existing infrastructure. But who knows, I’m no social-disaster planner. But maybe Ran’s right on the money here. There’s a quote floating around online from George Bush (repeated by the SF Gate here) where Bush supposedly said “We don’t need internment camps. I mean, forget it.” Hard to forget though, isn’t it?
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- NutraLoaf-Watchers!
- Modern Occult Map
- Holocaust Denier Sentenced to Three Years in Prison
- The Conspiracy Samurai
- Top Ten Occult Cities
19 Comments
as if the projects arent already way too close to a concentration camp…..
or the prisons!! they are huge… i mean, here in NYC, its its own friggin island…
i do think though, if they were to start cremating mas amount of folks, they would have to take it outside the cities…
bush is trying to make it so that the military will be in charge in the aftermath of any “natural” disasters. just another minor detail that supports the big picture of the coming police-state dictatorship. at the same time they are launching new advanced “GPS” satellites into orbit. hmm…..
He isn’t “trying to make it” - he’s already made it. It’s over and done with
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005...9/04/war-plans-developed-for-us-soil/
who would you prefer to be in charge in the aftermath of a disaster? people around the world are fed, clothed and sheltered by the u.s. military(and others) after floods, earthquakes and big waves. the survivors tend to be grateful. the military are the best trained and equipped to do the job. i can`t think of another organisation better suited to the task.
regarding cities being prison camps. most urbanites are prisoners by default. most of my city friends get panic attacks in the wide open space of the suburban/rural environment i live in. one of my friends has a starbucks half a block from his apartment. when i told him the nearest one to me was 5 miles away he couldn`t comprehend such an arrangement.
prison/internment, call it what you want, urbanites are in jail already and wouldn`t leave if you paid them.
I am kind of worried by Bush’s move with the military–it just doesn’t seem to follow. I would think he’d be revamping FEMA and DHS, not defaulting to the DOD–but the DOD obviously has plans, hence the recent round of base relocations away from civilians–and here’s a hint, it’s not to protect centers of population from terrorists. Terrorists don’t attack hard targets.
I don’t like the way Hakim Bey-style anarchists trash “Civilization” or the “Urban”. It simply makes sense to keep populations dense but small and surronded by rural areas–having to drive to get necessities, or head to a bar or church, is ridiculous, and having to rely on a farm out in the Midwest for bread sounds like plans to starve. Now, the effete urban cosmopolitan lifestyle; I’m disgusted by that.
Check out these links:
A Bridge Too Far
Audio version
Mutual protection and cooperation works, but first the trusts, then the National Association of Manufactuers, today the corporate-media-government monstronsity did a good job burying anything that suggested so.
Oh, Rex 84. That was my favorite issue, artwork-wise, in the Invisibles, but unless the conspiracy-minded can provide a reason why to sign into law “secret” prisons when the US already runs a number of them like Gitmo etc., or why it’s necessary to have “secret” prisons when it’s sufficient for crowd control to extend the period of habeaus corpus (In Virginia you can spend two days in a holding cell without charges) and then just issue trumped-up charges and plant evidence. . J. Edgar Hoover caused more trouble without altering any laws. Which is easier, finding a crooked cop, or drafting an executive order?
i do think the republican national convention ex-bus depot turned holding pen in NYC and the “Camp Greyhound” in New Orleans are good examples of what you can expect from TPTB….
Speaking of Virginia, I read an article a while back that you could be arrested for walking out of a bar drunk… I’ll have to look for it.
Speaking of Virginia, I read an article a while back that you could be arrested for walking out of a bar drunk… I’ll have to look for it.
It is in Littleton CO. In fact it’s even quasi illegal to walk anywhere at night there.
In VA, outside of the DC suburbs in the “Northern Virginia Yankeefied Green Zone” as I refer to it, it’s common practice for the police to wait outside of bars at closing time. JK, it’s funny that you mention the attitude that walking is practically illegal.
James Howard Kunstler pointed out in The Geography of Nowhere that in the States, since a sign of respectibility is owning a car, and since it’s practically a necessity outside of the handful of still-remaining urbanized environments of small towns, New York, and maybe Chicago or Philedelphia, and most certain a necessity in the suburbs, that anyone not driving is, essentially, creating cognitive dissonance. They’re disrupting consensus, therefore, they must be criminal.
The alternative to urban “imprisonment” should not be easy motoring; it’s insulting to those of us who strive to consume less resources, particularly oil, that Prier glorifies the anti-urban attitude. I find it hard to believe that so many anti-civilization anarchists, probably munching on tofu-burgers, eating vegan food, and smoking machine-rolled cigarettes, earnestly believe in a return to hunter-gathering. Plow-driven agriculture, the only way to feed lots of humans without taking animal lives, leads to those ills of “Civilization”, i.e., slavery, property, opression of women.
Ran makes sense, and has a keen insight into the MO of the power elite. The Cabal hyperventilates everyone with fears of NORTHCOM and FEMA turning amerika into a Gulag replete with its own exurban prison camps, and then when the time comes, they simply convert your town into the camp, to which we give off a sigh of relief: oh, well, that’s not so bad! Phew.
I’m really not sure I’ve ever heard anybody in “the cabal” ever even mention any of this. To be fair, it seems like only conspiracy theorists are whipping people into a frenzy about it.
Tim, your point leads to a kind of synthesis (maybe?) in this point: there is little distinguishing the ‘power elite’, the Cabal, from the conspiracy theorists, or the conspiracy itself. What if the so called high cabal is actually the growing hoard of conspiracy theorists?! The MO, as it were, of the power elite is to sow the minds of the conspiracy theorists so that they are both the generators and receptors of the conspiracy itself - so, they are actually sowing the conspiracy deep within themselves. Does that kind of make sense?? Takes one to know one?
“By the way,” fantastic stuff you do.
Yes, it makes total sense and I’ve articulated the same thing many times elsewhere. It’s a fabulously unpopular thing to tell conspiracy theorists though!
Conspiracy theorists inherit the earth.
Gouda, I have no idea what you mean, at all. For this reason: first and foremost, we continue to use the term “conspiracy theory” prejoratively and in a manner that discredits anyone who comes up with valid research, lumping the “What about the pods?” (disinfo) people with the “Proctor & Gamble logo is 666″ (urban legend) people with the “Riggs Bank and the Saudis sure were up to some shady shit and Jonathan Bush is on the Board” (reporting under-reported facts) people. Again, I point everyone to Jeff Well’s Coincidence Theorist Guide to 9/11 and Russ Kick’s print article, Missing Pieces of the 9/11 Puzzle, as an example of facts, garnered from reputable sources, not Coast to Coast AM, that, if you labelled “conspiracy theory,” would be discredited, despite being, under reasonable analysis, facts and not based on interpretations.
It may simply be that I have an axe to grind. For disclosure, I spent a good portion of my life the past year working with–i.e., closing with a minimal amount of noise–Riggs Bank. Just look at Wikipedia and come up with your own conclusions. “Why is it in plain sight?” First, because sometimes evil combines with arrogance to produce sloppiness and negligence that’s grossly mishandled. Second, no one cares. Third, there was something about hiding in plain sight, but I forget.
Secondly,
You seem to be claiming that disinformation agents, the actual elite narcotraffickers, financiers, bankers, politicians, and CEOs, and anyone reporting outside of CNN, all belong to the same group. In that some act, others misinform, and others attempt to interpret the same phenonmeon, that is correct–which means little, for beyond that point, it is not meaningful information.
I am not an agent of the CIA. I generally don’t repeat outrageous stories as I hope not to spread disinformation. When I do repeat them, I preface them appropriately. It may be disinformation that George Washington was president once, but at some point, I must trust my sources.
I took Gouda to mean more that there is a sort of spiritual connection between the conspiracy theorists and the shadow cabals they try to root out. Maybe it’s a Jungian thing, where one is the shadow of the other, the receptacle for all the negative projections that exist in the other’s psyche. To me, there is a great deal of validity in that type of reading. And to follow through on the Jungian analysis would mean that we ought to try as much as possible to withdraw our own projected images, the things we suppress in ourselves, so that we can see other people and other groups for what they really are, rather than as a fictionalized, stereotypical knee-jerk condemnation.
channel null, actually, I agree with and understand what you say on that level. I am also a fan of Jeff’s “Coincidence Theorists Guide†and have argued (elsewhere) against the conspiracy phobia of the establishment Left. I certainly do not mean blur distinctions between your stereotypical conspiracy theorist (those with websites featuring the creepy black backgrounds, for example, as Tim has pointed out), and legitimate lines of inquiry carried out by some alternative researchers/investigations (I think of guys not so easily lumped into the denigrating category of “conspiracy theoristâ€, who understand conspiracy for what it really is and do great work, such as Michael Parenti or William Blum, Paul Wolf, maybe Alex Constantine).
Now, whether we embrace the term “conspiracy theorist†or re-define it is another matter, which has been argued on this website.
I was musing on another level about the whole paranoid, infinitely regressive disinfo element of the game, ongoing with both sides, the conspirators and the conspiracists, and how they take on the character and MO of the other and help each other out with the conspiracy itself, which is in this case: whipping up a fervor regarding martial law – I was merely thinking, late late late at night, along the lines “Celine’s Laws” by Hagbard Celine (Robert Anton Wilson) in The Illuminati Papers, while also playing off Tim’s ideas. Things kinda fused together in my head that night after reading Tim’s response to my previous, rather hackneyed posting.
And Tim is right - we have to steer clear of reactionary, self-feeding, self-baiting, self-fulfilling stereotypes. I have to be more rigorous about that myself, often falling into that trap because it fits rhetorically or is the lazy, fun thing to do.
Channel null, if you see this, can the Russ Kick print article you mention be found at his memoryhole site? If not, could you direct me to where it can be got?
One Trackback
[...] ense mechanism than the willingness to injure other people. Oh, one last note– both Tim and Ran talk about how our cities are really the most effective c [...]