Thank you for the welcome
(Denglisch)-
You are exactly right about how "conspiracy theory" is being used, it is a weapon against critical thinking and pursuit of difficult topics.
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In comments above you refer to "conspiracy theory" being first employed by Karl Poppe in 1945 in his book "The Open Society and Its Enemies". This is quite recent and not so distant from when the entire field of "conspiracy theory" was developped as Roswell UFO incident happened in 1947 which clearly was a highpoint of intelligence directed operations in conspiracy culture.
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In the texts from COMPACT it is insinuated that the same type of study that is now conducted in Europe have been done before - which means that Academia in the USA already have been down the roads Peter Knight will take the ‘Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories in Europe‘. Interestingly, the president of COMPAC Peter Knight have written an encyclopedia* of "conspiracy theories in American History".
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The emergence of a great number of American style terror events in Europe is clearly not happenstance in the growing European Academic interest in Conspiracy theory.
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From the COMPACT MoU above i find that particularly the intention to help "stakeholders" to counter accusations of conspiracy particularly ooffensive as the commission tries to neutral in as much as they do not judge if a conspiracy is real or not, while they indiscrimately intend to defend the possible conspirators against any accusation of the sort.
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In the UK they have a special unit at Goldsmiths that has held lectures on Conspiracy Theory as a psychological condition : the Goldsmiths Anomalistic Psychology Unit* headed by Professor Chris French since 2000, former editor of The Skeptic Magazine. Current members of the COMPACT comission has held lectures at Goldsmiths such as Dr Dan Jolley, Professor Karen Douglas and also Robert Brotherton (American author*).
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https://youtu.be/1Yx3E1G9IMcKaren Douglas* On Conspiracy Theories
Humanists UK – 10 Jan 2012 – 59:34 (mm:ss)
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*Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia by Peter Knight
https://books.google.fr/books/about/Conspiracy_Theories_in_American_History.html
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*Goldsmiths Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit Invited Speaker Series
https://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/speakers-archive/
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*Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Robert Brotherton
https://conspiracypsychology.com/2015/11/02/suspicious-minds-why-we-believe-conspiracy-theories/
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*Professor Karen M Douglas CREST Conspiracy Theory research database
https://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/people/douglask/crest-database-latest.xlsx
