Bayoneting a Scarecrow
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a coward’s cult.
By George Monbiot
03/02/07 "Guardian" -- -- “You did this hit piece because your
corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset
of the New World Order … bought and paid for.”(1) “Everyone has
some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and the
Special Branch recruit agents?”(2) “Shill, traitor, sleeper”,
“leftwing gatekeeper”, “accessory after the fact”, “political
whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all.”
These are a few of the measured responses
to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film
Loose Change, which maintains that
the US government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon. Having spent years building up my left-wing
credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I’ve blown it. I
overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney,
by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.
I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most
scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into
government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they
were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence
about a potential attack by Al Qaeda, and that they have sought
to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents.
I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity
provided by the attacks to pursue a long-standing plan to invade
Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam
Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled
the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and
about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is
responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.
But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of
the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of
magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while
persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could
wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without
attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had
ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower
in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear
into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the
passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit
tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great
crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.
In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite
the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of
mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam
Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of
cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project
since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and
a spy.
Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying
the movements which some of us have spent a long time trying to
build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues –
climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality
– are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress; that
corporate power stands too heavily on democracy; that war
criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have
invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream
political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly
susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.
The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush
administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are
completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of
the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of
the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction
used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real
political fights.
Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose
Change two weeks ago The column I wrote about Loose Change two
weeks ago generated 777 posts on Comment is Free, which is
almost a record. Most of them were furious.. The response from a
producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467(2). On
the same day I published an article about a genuine,
demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential
information from an arms control campaign to Britain’s biggest
weapons manufacturer, BAE. It drew 60 responses(3). The members
of the 9/11 cult weren’t interested. If they were, they might
have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy
is that it calls on you to do nothing.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A
displacement activity is something you do because you feel
incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a
larger squirrel stealing its hoard of nuts. Instead of attacking
its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it
to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real
issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement
focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or
say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t
exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by
repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.
Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend
that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC’s film
The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation
of the conspiracists’ case. They urge us instead to visit
websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org,
and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin
and the physicist Steven E. Jones. Concerned that I might have
missed something, I have now done all those things, and have
come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested
nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will
find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible
fact; rumour and confusion transformed into evidence; selective
editing; the citation of fake experts; the dismissal of real
ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true
believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get
to the heart of the conspiracy.
The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the
climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing
any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents.
Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain
that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the
demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this
because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the
brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can
discover, unrelated, but what does he know?(4)).
Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the
Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this
crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular
oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would
please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of
themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But
as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that,
wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.
www.monbiot.comReferences:1. Gary Allen, 911truthnc.org, 6th
February 2007. Email.
2. “sirarthurchichester”, 8th February 2007. On Comment is Free.
3. George Monbiot, 13th February 2007. The parallel universe of
BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law. The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2011751,00.html
4. Quoted by Will Sullivan, 3rd September 2006. Viewing 9/11
From a Grassy Knoll., US News and World Report.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060903/11conspiracy.htmClick here
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