All the people... Something I just realized

revusky

In terms of a general red-pill awakening, one of the things that I have come to realize is that we only rarely (if ever!) overestimate the amount of fakery there is in propaganda narratives. We almost always underestimate it.

For example, in the case of an archetypal propaganda event, 9/11, the bulk of the sincere 9/11 Truthers seem to believe that:

The event had many victims, real victims, 2,977 of them to be precise.
Airplanes really did fly into buildings – particularly in lower Manhattan (the Pentagon… well… not so much)

In particular, I want to talk about the first of the two propositions above. You may, dear reader, have never really thought about this very much. Why do the majority of self-styled 9/11 Truthers simply assume that there were these nearly 3000 victims? This is, after all, primordially a psy-op. The goal of the operation is to affect mass psychology. The operation is just as effective whether thousands of people are really killed or none at all – as long as the general population believes that all these people were really killed.

Aside from being a psy-op, 9/11 was undoubtedly a financial fraud. Insurance companies were bilked out of roughly 4 billion dollars to compensate Larry Silverstein for the loss of the WTC towers in a completely phony “terrorist attack”. (The buildings were indeed destroyed but not in a “terrorist attack”!) Another aspect is that a Victims’ Compensation Fund (VCF) was set up, with roughly 7 billion dollars – so an average of something over 2 million dollars for the beneficiaries of each of the victims.

A question that 9/11 Truthers (the most visible ones anyway) never seem to ask is why the perpetrators would kill several thousand real people and then compensate their beneficiaries (by and large, a bunch of random nobodies) with over 2 million dollars. Why not work up a list of fake victims (again, fake victims are just as effective for the psy-op as long as people believe they are real) and since these ciphers have no genuine beneficiaries, the victim compensation money can just be stolen. After all, each fake victim allows you to steal something over 2 million dollars. (A couple of million here, a couple of million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money!)

Once you think about this seriously, you realize that, just on these common-sensical grounds, it would be very surprising if the 9/11 victims were, by and large, real people!

Nonetheless, the assumption that the victims are all real is one thing that self-styled debunkers are often leveraging. Well, if no planes crashed into the buildings, then what happened to all those victims in the planes? These “debunkers” feel really triumphant when they trot that one out. (Heh, heh, I’m sure that question will have these conspiracy theorists stumped!) However, the question really has a very simple answer. By and large, these are not real people to start with!

Recently, I got a bit (over?)involved in a conversation on Unz Review which has well over 1000 comments. The Apollo moon landings, that utterly audacious hoax that is decades past its sell-by date is still one of those topics that can stir up a lot of discussion.

Here we are, over half a century after the hoax, and the true believers now have to believe that the pinnacle of manned space travel was achieved 56 years ago, in 1969. (Even 50 years after the last moon landing, nobody manned space mission had ever gone even 1/100 of the distance to the moon!) This is all so preposterous that we really ought to be able to end the conversation there. However, the self-styled “debunkers” do not give up. Their strongest “argument” is that NASA employed literally hundreds of thousands of people (the various AI chat engines give figures varying between 300,000 and 400,000 for the number of people employed directly and indirectly by the NASA space program in those key years) and it surely would have been impossible for the “secret” (that the whole thing was fake) not to be leaked.

Now, to start with, it is not even a very strong argument really because even if we assumed that hundreds of thousands of people were employed, doing things related to the Apollo missions, probably only a relatively small number would be in any position to know that the overall project was a hoax. The typical engineer is just working on his own sub-sub-system, let’s say some widget that connects to another widget. How would they know that the overall project was not real?

But there is another deeper problem with all of this. Surely a very big component of the Apollo missions is that they were a financial swindle. Why would NASA employ all those many thousands of people, give them busy work to do and dutifully pay them some nice professional salary?

It boils down to the same problem as with 9/11, no? Surely they wouldn’t do that! They would simply hire a bunch of ciphers, non-existent people (for the most part anyway) and pay these ciphers their salaries, except the money would just be stolen. But note that, in deep structure, the situation is in essence the same as with the victim compensation money for 9/11. Why pay all this money to a bunch of random nobodies when you can just “pay” the money to a bunch of non-existent people and then just steal it?

Now, to be clear, I have never been totally committed to the position that absolutely nobody was killed on 9/11 – though, that said, I really don’t know for sure. It may be that some people were killed on 9/11 and possibly their family members were compensated. But it would be a far lower number than the official death toll. In the case of NASA, I have to think that they were paying some people for real. In fact, some of the things NASA did were real, I suppose. (Just not the moon landings!) But the point is that the real numbers would be nothing like their alleged payroll of hundreds of thousands of people.

In these moon landing hoax discussions, somebody frequently comes into the conversation claiming vociferously that he (or maybe his dad…) worked on these NASA projects and how dare anybody say it was fake. The person pretty much invariably makes this claim from behind an alias. He never tells us his name. Why not?

Aside from the argument that only very few people would be in a position to know that the overall project was a hoax because it was (like any large engineering project) highly compartmentalized, we also have an argument by analogy that refers to the development of the Atomic Bomb in 1944/1945. The Manhattan Project.

If ChatGPT etcetera are to be believed there were also hundreds of thousands of people working on that directly and indirectly. The question I asked various AI chat engines was: How many people were employed in 1944-1945 developing the atomic bomb?

It seems like the absolutely lowest estimate you’ll get out of an AI model is something like 125,000 people. Other engines somehow came up with a million (directly and indirectly). Regardless, somehow it was kept a secret! So, the case of the Manhattan Project would suggest that yes, hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million people can keep a secret!

But hold on a second. How sure are we that this was not just another hoax? A man whom I am proud to call a friend, Michael Palmer maintains that the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW2 were a hoax. He wrote a book which can be read online here.

Well, again, we have the same problem as we do with the moon missions. “Hundreds of thousands of people were involved with this and how could they have kept the secret?” (Except the twist here is that the official line is that they apparently did keep the secret, while with the moon landings, the argument is that they could not have kept the secret. Somebody would have said something… Go figure…)

But my epiphany of just a few days ago was this: Why should we be so sure that these hundreds of thousands of people really exist? In fact, common sense would say that they don’t – by and large.

Well, I leave it there. It should provide some food for thought. I think that this should be developed/polished into a more complete essay, not just a discussion forum comment. That said, if you have any comment, feel free to add it below. If you are not signed up to the forum, it is easy enough to do so.

tonyhall

https://www.unz.com/plawrence/the-knesset-and-the-post-9-11-method/

Reading your reflections, Jonathan, on thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people busily employed in putting men on the moon or figuring out compensation agreements for dead people killed by terrorists on 9/11 creates in my mind an opening drawing attention to an Unz essay today. The author reflects on all the masses of people busily ordering the torture of terrorists after 9/11, busy locking them up in blacks sites or at Guantanamo or at Abu Graib. Many people figuring out innovative forms of torture or murder and then doing it. Masses of people being rounded up and subjected to torture for alleged terrorism. Think of all the money and contracting and accounting and banking. Once you start creating these giant castles proclaiming stunning scientific achievements or horrific terrorism and torture in action…. well then the sky is the limit…. not even the sky but all of outer space. Good work if you can get it….

MichaelPalmer

Hi Jon,

that’s a pretty fascinating angle. The numbers of participants in the “Manhattan Project” may indeed have been very much smaller is maintained by popular mythology. Moreover, most of the real ones most likely were not in on the fraud. The highest echelon – Oppenheimer, Fermi, Compton, Lawrence, Conant – were all in on it, as is clear from the meeting protocol of May 31, 1945

https://archive.org/details/interim-committee-may31-1945

Klaus Fuchs must have known the score, too. But for example Robert Wilson, one of the few physicists in the project who actually accomplished anything tangible, apparently was not. He oversaw the experimental physics research at Los Alamos, even though he was a fairly young man at the time, but even he was apparently kept in the dark. If he was, then surely those on lower rungs of the ladder were, too.

Leslie Groves maintained that the Project had three different plants for enriching U-235, which used different physical principles. Maybe that was part of the deception, too – every employee of one of those non-functional plants might assume that the others were the ones that worked. Similar to the puzzling TNT “test explosion” predating the “real” plutonium bomb test in Alamogordo – each crew may have been working under the assumption that the other one was preparing the real test.

The fallout from Hiroshima contains some weakly enriched uranium-235. This isotope has a natural abundance of 0.72%; the highest value detected in the Hiroshima fallout is 0.89% (as opposed to the 80% enrichment claimed by atomic mythology). Still, there probably was more of this material than could have been produced in Lawrence’s lab in Berkeley, so some or other of the Manhattan Project’s facilities would have produced it (i.e. one of the above three plants must have worked, even to a very limited degree). But running such a facility may have involved some dozens, or perhaps a few hundred employees. I’d assume the same for the research going on at Chicago. The actual but unsung “heroes” of that work were the nameless chemists who managed to quickly purify all manner of fission products from Fermi’s small amounts of reactor material. In contrast, most of the celebrated physicists seem to have been twiddling their thumbs, since they simply had no actual bomb material to work with. All they could do was work their slide rules.

You may have seen videos with a crusty nuclear engineer named Galen Winsor:

He is worth listening to. In the late forties or early fifties, he worked in a large facility in Hanford, Washington, busily purifying plutonium. But that facility probably grew big only a few years after the war. Before that, there would have been no point, since the “Manhattan Project” had not managed to produce significant amounts of reactor material from which to purify anything. The above-mentioned meeting protocol makes that very clear.

The most difficult aspect of keeping the secret may have been the bomber crews that flew the conventional (and chemical) attacks on the two cities. They would have to have been in on it, at least to some degree. (If you look at pictures of the Enola Gay crew, you can see the same sort of mirth and perhaps duping delight in some of the faces that you can also see with the Challenger crew – those folks that obviously did NOT perish in the crash of that mission.)

So overall, I think that your idea of a very much smaller number of people involved in the Manhattan Project as of 1945 is probably correct; and many or most of those people likely were “compartmentalized” and not actually part of the conspiracy.

revusky

MichaelPalmer
Well, as you surely understand, my original comment was based on a flight of speculation. In particular, I don’t know very much about the Manhattan Project. Of the three, I’ve certainly spent the most effort on 9/11. Of the three hoaxes, Manhattan Project, Apollo moon missions, and 9/11, I think 9/11 is most obviously a financial fraud. The goals of the operation were not purely financial, of course, but that is doubtless a big part of it.

So, once you understand the event as being very largely a financial scam, (AND once you understand that there was a 7 billion dollar victim compensation fund!) it would actually be surprising if the (nearly) 3000 victims were real people. I think there were a handful of real people who used the event to fake their deaths, to go deeper undercover, as it were. For example, here is one that I only “discovered” the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_W._Hatton_Jr I think that guy’s death being faked is pretty obvious. This guy just happens to be there on 9/11 and he dies a hero, trying to help evacuate people from the building (Yeah, right. What people?) Actually, I found that guy by searching on the string “FBI agent who died on 9/11” and that guy’s name came up and also this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O%27Neill But I already knew about that guy! Hatton was new to me.

Of course, the “official” (fake, really) 9/11 Truth movement is not interested in those guys, or even in such a blatantly fake person as Betty Ong. (Gee, why would that be?)

Now, as for the other hoaxes mentioned, the moon landings also must be, at root, a financial fraud. There are competing hoax narratives. I have heard (or read) that NASA had intended to put men on the moon for real but then when they were confronted with the sheer difficulty of the task, at some point they adopted plan B, which was to fake it. The alternative narrative would be that they never seriously attempted to put men on the moon, so it was a hoax from the get-go.

Personally, I lean towards the second theory, simply out of the sheer relative proportions. To commit to a moon shot at a point in time when you have never sent a man even 1/1000 of the distance… (For starters, why would the US gamble so much of its prestige, and SO MUCH MONEY on something that is extremely unlikely to succeed?)

Thus, I reason that if the goal of the manned flight to the moon was a hoax from day 1, then the whole thing was very largely a financial swindle. Okay, you can say they did it for national prestige and so on, but money talks…

So, I think you could confidently predict that the “hundreds of thousands” of personnel working on technical aspects of the project are very largely fictitious people. I think you can make the conjecture that this is what research would show. Though, that said, I don’t know whether it is really possible to research this. And frankly, I think the most likely result of trying to get your hands on all the various employment records would be another “oops, the dog ate our homework” sort of moment.

Of course, one has to think that NASA had ongoing research projects and actually did some real things (though not sending anybody to hop around on the moon!) so some people were employed but the numbers would be far lower than the official figures of hundreds of thousands of people working on this. As for where all the money went,… well, I don’t know! (Probably nothing very wholesome…)

I extended my speculations to the question of the Manhattan Project and I guess some of the same reasoning applies. However, MP may be fundamentally different from Apollo in certain ways. I am at least moderately convinced that the moon landing project was a fraud from day 1. It may be that the MP really did set out to build the weapon of mass destruction but when they realized they weren’t getting anywhere, decided to fake it. (Or it was a conscious fraud from the beginning? I don’t know for sure.)

But it is natural to wonder about the financial end of it regardless. Did they really expend those vast resources to build a nuke? All those people employed on this and so on? Would it be possible for a researcher to get his hands on the necessary records to ascertain (or disprove) this?

Well, there are other things (flights of fancy as well maybe) that occur to me about this whole thing, but I’ll have to set that out separately.