Notre Dame, Assange, and the non-existent Skripal ducks; alternative media does its thing

Notre Dame.

To mimic Woody Allen in the film, Manhattan Murder Mystery, it was an accidental fire, folks.

The original line in the movie from whence the phrase has been adapted is “it was a coronary, folks” – spoken by Allen to an imaginary audience at his dining table because his screen wife, played by Diane Keaton, is fixated about a conspiracy theory and is not listening to him – nor even taking any interest in a tuna casserole he has prepared. Keaton is suspicious that something is not right about the death of a woman who lives next door, and who supposedly died of a heart attack. She suspects that the death was caused by the woman’s husband. Receiving a phone call from Alan Alda, who encourages her suspicion, Keaton refers to the woman as having been “murdered”, which sets Allen off:

She wasn’t murdered. It was a coronary. It was a coronary, folks. It was a coronary. She wasn’t murdered. I don’t know what they’re talking about.

As it happens, Keaton is on to something – but has been wrong about the detail. Mrs House, the neighbour, is not dead. Her passing away was faked, but at this stage Keaton doesn’t know this. All she knows is that, in an incident that immediately precedes her interchanges with Allen, she has seen the “dead” woman on a passing bus.

The reason why Allen won’t listen to Keaton is complex: firstly he might be disadvantaged by the fact that he appears to think Keaton’s “obsession” is an excuse for a prelude to an affair between her and Alda. But still, he is not being unreasonable, because he sees things from a default faith in normality. Normally, people don’t murder their wives, whereas people do die of heart attacks, and far less rarely. On the other hand, by this stage, Keaton has already shown Mr House’s story about his wife’s demise to be worthy of suspicion because of evidence she discovered herself in the man’s apartment. Her seeing the woman on the bus confirmed that all is not as it seems. By this stage, too, Keaton also understands that Mr House has a motive for killing his wife: i.e. taking up with another woman. But it’s not that Allen disbelieves Keaton – he thinks she is mistaken, and this is not enough to disturb his reliance on the normal.

As for Notre Dame cathedral, this may come as a surprise to people, but history is replete with occasions when such a building has had its roof burn off – as happened, essentially, to Notre Dame. The latest in the UK was York Minster, 1984 – which also saw a fire in 1840. Both times, the roof was destroyed. Local to the author, Chichester Cathedral has had a roof fire in its life time. Indeed, if there is going to be a natural fire in a cathedral, then the roof is the place where it is going to happen. The construction makes this self-explanatory: all is stone except the wooden rafters. And while a roof fire can be extensively damaging, history also shows that supporting structures remain integral enough so that there can be rebuilding. No doubt this will be the case with Notre Dame.

On the other hand, a 2001 case of arson in Peterborough Cathedral caused a fire that was put out before it took to the roof. This perhaps indicates that a fire started on floor level (indeed, the BBC reports that it was “lit under a stack of plastic chairs”) – where there was relatively very little to burn. And maybe this makes sense – people without the authority to go there usually aren’t allowed ready access to cathedral roofs. Reinforcing the idea that a fire at Notre Dame would be a reasonable thing to expect is how the cathedral was undergoing, or about to undergo renovation. The presence of people working on the roofs, or at least setting up equipment in order to do so, would have introduced all kinds of new possibilities for fire. In truth, in respect of any theory that the Notre Dame fire was deliberately started, we are as the Allen character faced with no evidence that he can corroborate. There is nothing to disturb the sense of the normal.

Moreover, while there is a distinct lack of good reason to be suspicious, there is also no good reason to think that those who advocate a deliberate fire in the bonkers department of alternative media, given its track record, might merely be mistaken. One has a distinct impression of a good crisis not being let gone to waste; a good proportion of the alternative media, depending on who is being blamed, has either been hinting at, or openly stating that the fire was started deliberately. The Alt-Right, getting a big shove into it from Fox News’ Shep Smith, who seemingly had a so-called French elected official specifically appear on his show in order to be seen to be being prevented from blaming a suspect French social demographic, has been insinuating that Muslims did it. Then there is the bonkers “the Jews did it” part of the internet – with one high profile contributor to this garbage on this occasion appearing to blame the “Ghost of Jacques de Molay” (one would hope only figuratively, but you never know) . The author believes that any interest in the history of the dispute between what is essentially two Mystery Schools, (French) Masonry and Catholicism, can be characterised as part and parcel of an ongoing attempt in the most worthless of alternative media to disingenuously portray Masonry as intrinsically linked with Khazarian Jews. Masonry predates Abraham, let alone Israel. Once and for all, “the Jews did it” blanket explanation of the world is designed to create an environment where criticism of the state of Israel – which is merely a reconstitution of the Outremer for slightly different masters – can be banned.

So, the reader will note that the greatest work being done after Notre Dame is in the encouragement of people to take to tail-chasing with regards an incident that is otherwise meaningless in terms of opportunity for the “rules-based international order” (New World Order) to pursue its agenda. Moreover, that the incident is remote to the English-speaking world is in itself a cause to wonder at the need of people in the US, never mind the UK, to waste time and energy on it. In the film, Manhattan Murder Mystery, while Keaton’s character reads about other cases of murder in other American states, she doesn’t fixate upon them. Instead, she becomes initially interested, and then intimately involved in a local issue because of her close proximity to it – which is normal behaviour.  And this reminds that one of the purposes of getting remote audiences to care in an abnormal way about events beyond their sphere of influence is to make them blind to local issues that they could affect if they would but occupy their time with them.

It was stated above that there was a distinct lack of good reason to be suspicious about the Notre Dame fire, and this needs to be expounded. The main evidence for the idea of a deliberate fire appears to be that lots of churches in France have very recently suffered in the same way. This theory, however, relies on establishing that all the fires being cited as evidence were deliberate, or else it is like saying that Mrs House, in Manhattan Murder Mystery, was killed because lots of other old ladies died of a heart attack.  The author thinks that the people pushing this idea cannot establish that there has been a significant enough amount of fires, and a significant portion of them deliberately set, in order for it to carry any weight. When one looks underneath headlines of stories claiming a “string of desecration”, there are much fewer named examples than one might expect – and not all are cases of arson. One discovers that the reader has been fed a sense of coordinated atrocities merely through the headline.

Even if churches are being vandalised routinely, to claim that one type of people is doing it for a particular reason, we will probably find, is completely disingenuous. What is going on in France these days? The answer is general social discontent verging towards violent street protest. Will those blaming Muslims or Jews consider for a moment that the Catholic Church might be seen as being part and parcel of a hated Establishment by the general population? Moreover, at one time being state-subsidised (the President apparently still appoints bishops), it appears that whatever arrangements for funding are now in place, the Catholic Church in France does not necessarily have the wherewithal to invest in its infrastructure. Notre Dame was reportedly in a poor state of disrepair – hence the renovations – and so imagine the state of ruin that common or garden churches would be in if the centre piece of the Church in France was dilapidated. A question we might like to ask is would these buildings be especially prone to fire when, let’s imagine, people do nothing more aggressive than break in to take shelter in them?

It should be noted that FBEL is not alone at this time in examining how the “truth movement” has so much trouble with the truth. However, the more “serious” end of alternative media – the portion from whence this analysis has lately emerged – is not blameless when it comes to encouraging what might be called “displacement activity”†. The audience of high-end alternative media has most recently been exhorted to be concerned about the fate of Julian Assange – the man at the centre of a case that looks exactly like one of the CIA mopping up its own operation.

In an article that is currently in the works and due to be published at FBEL in the near future, the author takes a look at Philip K Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly” as representing a CIA safe house set up, where the agency’s own assets are drugged and surveilled for signs of being potentially rogue. This interpretation would point to Dick being a “prison guard” – and who knows what else – and thereafter we would need to question the purpose of his literature, and the filmography that was borne of it. The point being made is that there is indication enough in our experience of US intelligence activities to make us understand that while the CIA might not be concerned for its own survival by outsiders and their limited audiences, there may well be a big danger to the distributive power of the control grid from insider sabotage, or operations gone wild. It won’t have occurred to the proponents of Assange as journalist hero that he may well have, essentially, been resident in a safe house all these years already.

The thing that most irritates the author about the Assange case is that his treatment has been deemed as being an object lesson to all as to what to expect from an imminent totalitarian government. His fate is key to everyone’s, supposedly. The trouble is that the totalitarian government is already here and already ruining destinies, as can be demonstrated in the way that the author’s local council can disregard data protection legislation to steal household income. Hundreds of thousands of Britons will be suffering similar injustices, and the accumulative damage sustained to a free society is far worse than any example that can be made of Assange – but then, what is not agenda for Government is not worthy of the attention of alternative media.

And there is no better example of this in the last past year than the over-flowing and voluminous coverage afforded to the Skripal hoax by the usually conspiracy theory averse pre-911-attitude blogosphere. Lots of content was clearly produced for to encourage a very large audience (drawn from the mainstream, so that it needed to be gatekept after discovering the tip of a conspiracy iceberg) to chase its own tails and to confuse what should be a very simple idea (that was supported by the evidence): i.e. the Skripals were not poisoned, and had not indeed been in Salisbury on the day they were supposed to have been. The FBEL audience has been warned that the producers of this content, despite other appearances, have merely been engaged in promoting the official narrative, and one culprit has been named openly.

The reason that the issue is receiving a mention here is that this week something happened that demonstrated the disproportionate ultimate usefulness of even the most seemingly insignificant of controlled alternative media. It emerged that in order to inspire a robust response to Russia in the wake of the incident at Salisbury in 2018, Donald Trump was shown pictures of poisoned ducks and hospitalised children, both supposed collateral damage of the so-called Novichok nerve agent attack against the Skripals. It is with great interest that we note that Wiltshire health officials responded by confirming that there had been no such things as poisoned ducks or children – and this much was already known at FBEL.

The reason why the White House has been able to use this story is because of the traction gained by a particular piece of disinformation published by one particular, but unfortunately relatively well read outlet in the pre-911-attitude blogosphere – and then also regurgitated by other alternative media using this original platform as expert material. The underlying claim [off the top of the author’s head]  is that an unnamed source had seen CCTV footage, or an image taken from the same, showing Sergei Skripal sharing bread with children to feed to the ducks in the same park where he was supposedly later found poisoned. The imagery in question has never been seen by the public, and the source of the story has never been identified – as far as the author can ascertain. And yet it has proven to be fertile breeding ground for a veritable orgy of Skripal theorising and tail-chasing – and is evidently now useful to some Presidential-level lying. It is quite clear to the author that the legend had been introduced to place the Skripals at the scene of their poisoning [or succumbing to it] – when they never were there.

Also deserving of a quick mention in this hall of infamy is the alternative media that is leading its audience to believe that Britain left the EU on 29th March, and all that is required is to somehow force Government into recognising it (please send money to support the legal action, etc). It is quite clear to the author, from his reading of Government publications, that the essence of Britain’s being in the EU is intrinsically wrapped up in the European Communities Act of 1972 being statute. It is information that the FBEL audience has had shared with it since 2016: repealing the EC Act 72 means leaving the EU, regardless of any Article 50 treaty, or anything else. The EC Act 72 was not repealed on 29th March.

It could be said that between Assange and Notre Dame, a lot of the alternative media has shown itself this past fortnight to be, at best, irrelevant, and at worst controlled. In this context, the author would have very few recommendations to make as to where visitors to this place could elsewhere go so as to find media that will consistently make any real difference to them – not that anyone would take any notice. It is the author’s opinion that the alternative media audience is as lost as the mainstream, and is largely incapable of differentiating between valuable and worthless contribution. It doesn’t like being disabused of its prejudices and preferences and having its ignorance demonstrated to it – the same is to be said of a mainstream audience, which also struggles with being stupid. It sees the truth not in terms of an absolute, like it or lump it, but what supports its perspective. It likes to be stroked, and have its construction of history and science proved – no matter how fantastical it is – and thus any (should be blatantly obvious) limited hangout merchant willing to do the stroking will prosper and in turn set up another generation of prejudiced truth seeker. Just as people get the government they deserve, so do they with their intellectual landscape, their culture; so do they with anything else.

† “Displaced activity” would be more accurate. The actual term that the author was possibly looking for is “redirected behaviour”. Note added 18/7/19