Political Conspiracy and Slander - Essay Example

However, the investigations were unsuccessful in solving crimes of political slander or even pinpointing the officials and organizations most probable to have been executors (Pfau, 2005). Thus investigations of doubtful political incidents eventually came to be ridiculed as ‘conspiracy theories because, after reviewing official accounts, they frequently apply vague proofs to hypothesize about threatening schemes and convoluted cover-ups (Goldzwig, 2002). As remarked by Stewart and colleagues (1994), “a conspiracy may be real or imagined, but the process is the same; a chain of apparently unrelated events or actions is linked to reveal concerted actions and intentions to cause all sorts of social, economic, political, religious, and moral problems” (ibid, p. 3). Thus, it is at times hard to discern fantasy from reality. It may be hard to put off disorientation as well.

This remains a reality. People of the United States are still prone to be victims of suspicious events that benefit and confer an advantage to political elites, and still, Americans lack means of finding out whether the events are inevitable incidents or, rather, crimes instigated or allowed by the authorities themselves (Smith, 2006). Recent cases in point are the 2000 and 2004 election troubles; the failures of defense on the 9-11 attack; the chain of threats of terrorism circulated based on weak evidence (Katyal, 2003). A number of these events were never scrutinized. Others were investigated shallowly. Even the September 11 attack, which gained the most elaborate and systematic investigation, was studied by political insiders who circumvented inquiring whether the incident might have been a conspiracy (Smith, 2006). Nevertheless, elites exploited these incidents to defend constraints on civil liberties, a current strategy, and American militarism, unparalleled for the United States, of preventive conflict (Melley, 2000). To be certain, large portions of the U.S. population and all over the world think that the administration of Bush accepted and may have in some way allowed the 9-11 attack, yet these misgivings are only another group of conspiracy theories that create more issues than clarifications.

Even though conspiracy theorists have been unsuccessful to build up a sufficient explanation of state crime, they are worthy of recognition for emphasizing a threatening possibility historically taken for granted by scholars. The latter have investigated different types of state criminality, but in nearly every instance the opportunity for government authorities in liberal democracies to undermine or challenge democratic principles and practices has been overlooked (Pozen, 2010). In criminology and sociology, a large number of studies on state crime have emphasized connections between subversive and public organizations, particularly the symbiosis that frequently emerges between organized crime and law enforcement agencies (Pfau, 2005). Hardly any intellectuals in these disciplines have also investigated state criminality as a kind of political subjugation, an issue that diverts their attention away from democratic organizations’ state rebellion and toward state hostility aimed at the defenseless and the impoverished (Pozen, 2010).

Studies in public administration have focused on business policies, governmental dishonesty in policing, and comparable policy domains that are vulnerable to graft and corruption (Rafuse, 2008). Most intellectuals in political science who have investigated state criminality have overlooked liberal democracies and have concentrated rather on ‘regime terrorism’ (ibid, p. 59) within the system of communism and fascism. Social scientific investigations of political slanders in the United States have avoided issues about state crimes by examining the employment of independent prosecutors and Congressional reviews as political strategies in a partisan contest (Jeffres & Perloff, 1997).

Political conspiracy, as an operational definition, can be illustrated as “concerted actions or inactions by public officials that are intended to weaken or subvert popular control of their government” (Pozen, 2010, 257). Political conspiracy, as hence described, involves not merely slandering/libel/defamation, political assassinations, public graft and corruption, election scam, and alike crimes when they are initiated by government authorities, but also more covert breaches of democratic mandates and practices. Mainstream democracy involves continuous opportunities for the people to articulate important decisions in competitive, just, and transparent elections with actual outcomes (Fenster, 1999). Thus any combined attempt by government authorities to distract or trick voters, dampen citizen involvement, or in other means weaken informed citizen decisions comprises an attack on democratic principles (Fenster, 1999).