| This
tragic event -- nearly 300 people were killed
-- lends itself to students
of conspiracy thinking because both leftwing,
rightwing, and no-wing nuts, and Western stooges
and tools of Soviet disinformation, and 'The
Nation' magazine (and the NY Times), and paranoid
North Americans imagining the DC gummint had
betrayed surviving passengers trapped in a
Bolshie GULag, fastened onto the event like
an army of barnacles.There
were even two made-for-TV Hollywood 'docu-dramas'
(Angela Lansbury was in one--
Donald Sutherland was the 'CIA
spook' who confessed to her it was a US gummint
plot).
A number of anti-Reagan fanatics funded some programs
to convince relatives of the victims to blame
the US government, and go on national TV and break
down in anguish denouncing the CIA, and otherwise
freak out over phony conspiracy arguments -- all
for a greater ideological 'good', these fanatics
must have imagined. I thought it was atrociously
cold-blooded and cynical manipulation of the grief-stricken,
whom the fanatics only saw as means to a political
end. |
