I’ve long maintained that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it. Wingnuts have been doing it for years… and apparently, it’s paying off.
A new poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid found that now, five years after 9/11, over one in five Canadians believe that the whole thing was a US-concocted conspiracy:
One in five Canadians believes the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden and were actually a plot by influential Americans, according to a poll released on Monday.
The Ipsos-Reid poll found that 22 percent of Canadians, and 26 percent of young Canadians, agree with the conspiracy theory. The number was the highest, at 32 percent, in Quebec, which has shown the least support for the U.S. war on terror.
The poll asked if the events of Sept. 11, “including the thousands of American citizens who lost their lives on that day, were actually orchestrated by a group of highly influential Americans and others as part of a wider global conspiracy to profit from and gain power and who are actually protecting Osama Bin Laden from being captured.”
Objection, Your Honour, leading the witness? Er, not exactly. Though another one of my favourite sayings is that “figures don’t lie but liars figure”, if anything, I’d expect that the blatant nuttiness of this question would, if anything, underestimate the number of people who believe in some sort of 9/11-related conspiracy theory. In all likelihood, there are even more people who would’ve answered “yes” to a question with softer wording. Scary thought.
And here in La Belle Province, next time you’re out for drinks with a few friends, look to the left and look to the right; one of you has been taken in by the conspiracy theorists.
Not just there; at least two of my neighbors are Yankee hating conspirazoids and they’re BOTH mature, well educated, intelligent adults.
…on the other hand, one of them’s into crop circles as well. 😮
Sorry,
While we can poke holes in virtually all the 9/11 alternate theories, some of them raise very good questions. Even after five years, the secrecy surrounding a lot of evidence is also questionable.
josh; Governments love secrecy, it’s what they do best. Historians are still waiting for a FULL disclosure of documentation from WWII…don’t hold your breath. I’m guessing that the really incriminating stuff has been long ago disposed of.
It wasn’t that many years ago that documentation was released casting Churchill in a not very humanitarian light. The Brits had decoded msgs. revealing the impending aerial bombardment of, I believe it was Belgrade, Yugoslvia. Rather than give the Yugoslavians a heads up to evacuate, thereby revealing the security breach to Germany, Churchill kept the information secret, leading to the deaths of thousands of Yugoslav citizens in the bombing.
and they’re BOTH mature, well educated, intelligent adults.
That often seems to be the trouble. Nowadays the intellect of anyone with more than a B.A. smells like a “B.M.”
J.P; 🙂