The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine: A Poetic Masterpiece of War and Redemption
“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.”
—Vergil, The Aeneid
Not since Edmund Gosse’s classic memoir, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, has an estranged son written more nobly of his father than Douglas Valentine. Nobly because, apart from a brief author’s note, the son is absent from the book, except as a faithful and creative amanuensis to his father’s chilling, dark, life-long secret of his WW II years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese. A secret so horrifying that a reader can’t help but realize that its harboring throughout the thirty plus years of the son’s life could do nothing but poison his relationship with his father as it ate away at his father’s soul.
Responding to his ailing father’s call to come home and hear his tale of the war experiences that have tormented him his whole life, the son discovers that his father has awakened him to his vocation as a writer. By listening, the son receives the gift of telling. He answers the call. And in telling his father’s story, the son opens himself to other serendipitous opportunities that would result in other books exposing the treacherous secrets of state criminals, notably the CIA (The Phoenix Program) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, describes this acceptance of the call as follows:
The first stage of the mythological journey – which we have designated as the
‘call to adventure’ – signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred
his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown….
the hero can go forth on his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus
when he arrived in his father’s city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the
Minotaur.
While I doubt Valentine or his father – Douglas Valentine, Sr. – considers himself a hero in any popularly understood sense, both are heroes in a deeper sense. They are truth tellers. They tell truths that, if closely heard and meditated upon, could transform the lives of other suffering souls, just as they granted the father a semblance of peace and began to heal the broken bond between father and son. While nothing is more unheroic and conventional than the social lie that glorifies war and the modern Minotaurs who demand an endless supply of war victims to feed their blood lust, father and son make it clear that war is nothing but a sick racket. Many people will nod in agreement, but the Valentines, through graphic illustrations, courageously lance the festering wound that war’s depravity inflicts on all who experience it.
Part ventriloquistic non-fiction memoir, part history, part murder mystery, part war story, part confessional – wholly beyond categorization, really – The Hotel Tacloban is a mesmerizing read that will leave you stunned and shaken, but also awe-struck by the courage and depravity to which humans can rise and fall. So gripping is the story that I find it shocking that it hasn’t yet been made into a movie.
It is also a cautionary tale that exposes the destructive effects that guilty secrets can have on soldiers, who have returned from war terrorized by their experiences, and their families. And, by implication, on anyone who harbors secret nightmares that eat them alive.
Perhaps I would best describe it as a tale told in an Aristotelean tragic style that engrosses the reader from the start as one is slowly – as if stepping into quicksand – drawn into the story of a patriotic sixteen year old boy soldier’s war nightmare. With each page the tension builds as the reader is led by the action to feel pity, fear, and disgust – the gamut of emotions that lead to a catharsis, of sorts. At the end the reader, together with father and son, exhales, takes a deep breath, and exits the theater profoundly shaken by the experience. Shaken into life’s profound mystery.
Masterful in structure and eloquently written in poetic prose that belies its subject matter, it is reminiscent of the best American war writing.
Scene: New Guinea in the south Pacific. Late August 1942.
On the unpublicized orders of General Douglas MacArthur (“Dougout Doug”), poorly trained units of the U.S. Army 32nd Division are unexpectedly diverted to New Guinea to back up undermanned and beleaguered Australian troops trying to stop a Japanese advance to the southern Port Moresby. Among them is Douglas Valentine, Sr, a “sixteen, not too bright, runaway from a broken home in Pleasantville, New York, an orphan of the Great Depression.” His best friend, Bobby Stevenson, eighteen, an Indiana farm kid and former hoopster, who cannot swim, dies in an amphibious landing, despite Valentine’s valiant efforts to drag him to the safety of a rescue craft. “And when Bobby’s dripping body rose out of the sea,” he says, “I saw that both his legs were gone from above the knees. Not even his pants remained….That’s when I came apart.”
So this kid Valentine, who should have been in his sophomore year in high school, despite coming apart, joins his unit chasing the Japanese through the jungles up to the mountain ridges. Here’s is how Doug Valentine, Jr/Sr describe it:
Once the momentum had swung in our favor, we were little more than flotsam swept
along on the tide of the forward movement. All our time was spent tramping through
the twilight gloom of bamboo forests, or through mangrove swamps thick with wide
buttressed banyan trees, or across sun-drenched fields of kunai grass. We skirted pools
of deadly quicksand and we trudged through the stinking, greyish-brown peat bogs which
were a common feature of the water-logged terrain. Some were as large as football fields,
some were the size of swimming pools, all had rotten logs and decaying branches jutting
out of their foul, porridge-like mass. Swarms of mosquitoes floated above the algae-covered
surface, but we walked right through….We crossed frothing streams on slippery, moss-coated
logs and tramped endlessly through ankle-deep mud. Mud. Mud. Mud….Thirsty and sweaty,
filthy and soaking wet, sick to our stomachs from dysentery and burning up with fever, we
pushed through…
This incantatory writing leads the reluctantly hooked reader deeper and deeper into the center of the story that takes place in the static and claustrophobic confines of a prisoner of war camp, where the boy soldier spends the next three years, rather than in his sophomore, junior, or senior years of high school. Captured while on patrol by the Japanese after all his compatriots are killed and dismembered – “They were pulling the pants off the dead men, laughing and giggling like it was a picnic for the fucks; then chopping the pricks and testicles off the corpses and stuffing them in the breathless mouths.” – Valentine couldn’t understand why he was spared. As with Bobby’s death, guilt consumes him and follows him through his nightmare haunted life. As he was being transported in a locked and pitch-black cell in the belly of a ship to the Philippines’ POW camp, he tells his son:
Each time I shut my eyes to rest, I envisioned the anguished faces of the seven men
on patrol. I saw their terror and I saw them die. Even when my eyes were open they
stared at me from the infernal darkness of my cell, saying, ‘We died, but you lived.’ I
felt I had no right to be alive….the ferocity of those little Japanese monsters having
driven all vestiges of reverence for my own life completely out of my mind, neither
would I ever know peace of mind. The faces of those seven men would be my constant
companions; along with Bobby’s and Andy’s [who stepped on a land mine], and those
of hundreds of others.
The story then revolves around the sixteen year old Valentine’s three years at the Hotel Tacloban, so sardonically named for its nearness to the town of Tacloban on the Philippine island of Leyte. The sole American prisoner together with a few hundred Australian and British soldiers, Valentine endures nightmarish conditions, totally cut off from the outside world, barely surviving with little food and water, malaria-ridden and death haunted, watching fellow diseased prisoners die all around him, being tortured and watching others being killed – all within a confined space not fit for barnyard animals. A place from hell where time stood still, and yet a microcosm of the “normal” world where human relationships take center stage, and where, despite the limited stage for action, much happens in a condensed, intense, and dramatic fashion.
If I told you all the details of Valentine’s sojourn in this hotel from hell, I would ruin the book for you. So I will keep some secrets. You must experience it for yourself. Some books you just read, The Hotel Tacloban you experience. You need to check in and stay a while. You will find the accruing intensity so chilling and so mysterious that it will shake you to your depths and leave you wondering, not just about the depravity of war and those who wage them, but about the mystery of “fate” and how sordid secrets can devour the soul and ravage the relationships of those who feel they must keep them.
Valentine was once told by a fellow prisoner, Lieutenant Duff, a sterling Aussie camp leader and confidant for Valentine, that if they survived and were rescued, “the closer you get to civilization the less people will want to hear about this. They won’t be able to relate to the experience, and they won’t want to know.”
He took that advice to heart for far too long: “if I ever wanted to be part of society again, I had to obliterate the Hotel Tacloban completely from my mind. I knew that if I ever wanted to get well – if I ever wanted to be whole and normal – that I’d have to start forgetting then and there.”
Then, when Army authorities threatened him and insisted that he forget; when they obliterated his army record and created a false one in its stead; and when guilt got the best of him, Valentine buried the truths he needed to shout from the mountain top.
Trying to have a “normal” life and forget as ordered, he condemned himself to many decades of imprisonment in a prison camp of the mind. It was a place where the demons of memory never rest. Why he did so is more than understandable, despite the terrible consequences. He was a brave and admirable soldier betrayed by his own government, as is so often the case.
War spawns victims everywhere, generations of victims, even when you survive.
Those who wage the wars devour their children, as he came to learn. “The fact of the matter is this:”, he tells his son, “the U.S. Army is a predatory beast with the capability to destroy anything that threatens it, from within or without.” For a long time this fear of the Minotaur had him trapped him in its lair, and his guilt held him there. Miraculously he sensed that it would be his son, his namesake, who would spring him from the prison of forgetfulness and help him slay the monster by the simply act of listening. And then by writing this profoundly moving book through which a father and son discover each other in the telling. It is a liberating book in so very many ways. A labor of love.
Don’t miss it.
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
Those who wage the wars devour their children, as he came to learn. “The fact of the matter is this:”, he tells his son, “the U.S. Army is a predatory beast with the capability to destroy anything that threatens it, from within or without.” For a long time this fear of the Minotaur had him trapped him in its lair, and his guilt held him there. Miraculously he sensed that it would be his son, his namesake, who would spring him from the prison of forgetfulness and help him slay the monster by the simply act of listening. And then by writing this profoundly moving book through which a father and son discover each other in the telling. It is a liberating book in so very many ways. A labor of love.
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Fathers, Sons, and Blood Sacrifices
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” —James Baldwin
For years I’ve been haunted by the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Why, I’ve wondered, would a father be willing to sacrifice his son because he thought he heard the voice of God telling him to do so? Isn’t that something crazed murderers say: that God or the devil told them to kill, to take the knife and cut up their victims?
When I was growing up the catechism told me that sacrifice was “the most perfect way for man to worship God.” We were taught that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac was a sign of his obedience and a prefiguring of the death of Jesus, the son of another father, who was well-pleased with his son’s obedient sacrifice. But even as a youngster I could read the words and clearly understood that Abraham had tricked and lied to Isaac, and that Jesus was a free rebel dangerous to the Roman authorities, who put him to death for his revolutionary message. But church fathers and theologians later preferred to emphasize his execution as the act of a son obeying his father rather than the result of non-violent resistance to the authorities of church and state. Obedience became the justification for millennia of sacrificial victims and their compliant killers.
“I carried out the orders I was given, and do not feel wrong in doing so,” said Lt. William Calley about the grotesque slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.
Why all this need for blood, this need to prove obedience to a father God? It gradually grew on me that there was something perversely macho in all this, the kind of thinking that would encourage fathers to send their sons off to war, what the pundits like to call “the ultimate sacrifice,” and for sons to obediently march off to kill and be killed in a sacrificial bloodbath to appease the fathers.
But being an only son myself (with seven sisters) and coming from a patriotic milieu, it also seemed “natural” to me that sons had to be sacrificed on the battlefields for the sake of God and country. If not, the communists or Canaanites would seize our new Promised Land.
But a little voice and the tale of Abraham and Isaac kept speaking to me. I never went off to war, but I was in the Marines and quickly came to see the immorality of the war against Vietnam – the madness of war in general – and applied for a discharge as a conscientious objector. My father, a WW II era guy who tried to volunteer when he had five children but was refused for that reason, disagreed with me, but he supported me fully, and I was eventually honorably discharged. It was for me a harsh introduction to a world in which the group mentality holds sway and the individual is made to seem mad if he doesn’t obey the bloodthirsty impulses of society. And made to seem less than a man for rejecting the “manly” ethos epitomized in the Marine slogan, “My Rifle is My Life.”
It wasn’t mine, and I have an ironic memento of that truth. It’s a photo of my parents, who gave me life and sustained me, when they came to Parris Island for my graduation from boot camp, standing in front of, and partially blocking, a large red and gold sign ablaze with those egregious words resonating with a double entendre lost only on one totally unfamiliar with the Marines’ obsession with rifles and “guns” – as the other unofficial slogan hammered into us recruits put it: “This is for killing and this is for fun.” Fun with all the Suzie “rotten-crotches” we could find, as we were repeatedly told was a perk that came with the equally enjoyable opportunity to kill all the “gooks “we could find once we got to Vietnam.
Last week I was rereading a book when I again thought of these issues of socially-sanctioned violence passed down the male line. The book was Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and images of Abraham holding that knife to his son appeared to me. Perhaps it was Caravaggio’s painting that I saw. Or an image living in my imagination since I first heard that story that haunted me. Or was it Wilfred Owen’s words from The Parable of the Old Man and the Young forming on my lips?
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So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
I can’t say. But Roth’s story concerned another knife wielded by fathers against their sons, one Abraham was intimately familiar with.
Roth ends his novel with his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman arguing that circumcision is good because it immediately lets the baby boy know the world is a place of violence, not peace and love. Also, “circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in – also that you’re mine and not theirs….confirms that there is an us, and an us that isn’t solely him and me.” In other words, the painful act of cutting the skin off the end of an innocent boy’s penis to better make it resemble a weapon is good for the young whippersnapper, for it tactilely teaches him the need for pain and violence and the division of the world into us and them, good guys and bad. “The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right from the start,” Roth writes approvingly, “marking your genitals as its own.”
Philip Roth
I never knew that. I was under the impression that my genitals were mine; were me, just as my hands and brain are. Roth’s argument struck me as strange coming from a writer who made his reputation by being the Jewish malcontent. It seemed that Roth was offering this justification for circumcision – which Jews and Muslims trace back to Abraham, as another sign of his obedience to God – as a token of guilt redemption for all his criticism of fellow Jews. The wayward son, the creator of Jewish masturbators and fornicators, was finally seeing the wisdom of the father, Abraham. Father knows best, after all.
But our essential problem is obedience, not circumcision, which is just one symptom of a deeply rooted mindset in which we have confused honor and respect for fathers with mindless obedience. Obedience comes from a Latin verb - obedire, to listen to - and whether one is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, non-religious, etc., we have listened far too long to those calling for blood sacrifices. Howard Zinn advised as much:
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
Nothing could be truer.
Suppose a father was circumcised. Should he submit his son to the knife? Whom is he listening to? His father? Let us say the wife asks, “Why should Jeff be circumcised?” Many men might respond: “Because I was.” Tradition. Some would say that, although I suspect they’re the same people who justify much cruelty with the words, “I went through it and it didn’t do me any harm. So should he.” (Just substitute military service and war.) If not, they argue, the poor boy, looking different from his father, will grow up with some kind of penis complex.
This obsession with alikeness bespeaks a great fear of individuality, as if manhood were dependent on the look of your penis, its similarity to your father’s. Do some father’s say to their sons, “Take a look at mine, little boy, some day ….”? This is my rifle, this is my gun, this…
It’s quite funny, except that it’s serious. Back in the 1890s when circumcision became popular in the U.S., it was touted as the cure for many ailments – asthma, epilepsy, alcoholism, etc. – and for the treatment and prevention of masturbation, which, as everyone knew, especially medical authorities, led to insanity. Thomas Szasz, in The Manufacture of Madness, offers an explanation that makes sense to me and brings my reflections full circle. Masturbation, he writes, “symbolizes the individual’s separateness from, or rejection of, the group. This is why, psychologically, it is the gravest of all ‘crimes.’ Hence too, I surmise, its remarkable neglect in belles lettres.”
Back to Abraham. Both Jews and Muslims, the two main groups that practice religious circumcision, trace it to this patriarch. Christians have adopted the practice as well, despite no obligation to do so, just as they have joined the other religions in the martial spirit and have supported wars, massacres, and holocausts down through the centuries. Support is too mild a word - waged brutal and bloody wars and reveled in the mayhem as a sign of God’s blessing is the truth, always finding justifications.
Seemingly just an issue of tradition and, in modern times, one of health, circumcision is actually rooted in an obedience that rewards the spirit of war and killing; obedience to God who tests you by seeing if you will obey and kill your son, and who tells you that if you circumcise yourself and all males it will result in a conqueror’s booty. As a reward for his obedience, we are told, Abraham was promised many descendants who would defeat their enemies, take their women, raze their towns, kill their children, and establish powerful kingdoms.
Cut off the foreskins, sacrifice your sons, and you’ll be powerful, goes the message: you’ll conquer the world. Any uncircumcised male will be cut off from his people. (I guess God checks up on this.) He will stand outside the social circle, looking in. He will be a pariah, an enemy, an other. He will go insane.
I am not suggesting that women are immune from the urge for bloody war and sacrifice. History teaches otherwise. And we have some recent stellar examples, led by Hillary Clinton and her ilk, to whom I offer my humble apologies for leaving them out of these ruminations. Medea, after all, killed her children, and it’s said that she too was a feminist who took charge of her own life in a male-dominated world. Perhaps next Mother’s day I can take up that theme.
But this is Father’s Day, and there is a strange long cultural blood link through fathers to sons to fathers to sons to fathers down through the millennia that occurs to me now.
When I turned from being one of the “few good men,” my father, although he didn’t agree with my refusal since he felt it could lead me to jail, supported me completely. He understood that conscience supersedes blood, and that a father’s love means never sacrificing anybody’s son on the altar of old men’s wars or that of a savage God demanding grotesque sacrifices. For that and many other things, I celebrate my father today. He was a rare man and I was a lucky son.
Someday soon, I hope, sons and daughters around the world will celebrate their fathers for not sacrificing them to the gods of war, those fiends who sit in government offices throughout the world, knives held high above their victims as they await the word from on high to plunge it deep and watch the blood flow.
That will be a very Happy Father’s Day, a different kind of Sunday than the one we hear now, and have been hearing for aeons. It will require revolutionary non-violent resistance, the refusal to shed others’ blood. It will be born of disobedience.
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, I teach sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. My writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. My website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
I am not suggesting that women are immune from the urge for bloody war and sacrifice. History teaches otherwise. And we have some recent stellar examples, led by Hillary Clinton and her ilk, to whom I offer my humble apologies for leaving them out of these ruminations. Medea, after all, killed her children, and it’s said that she too was a feminist who took charge of her own life in a male-dominated world. Perhaps next Mother’s day I can take up that theme.
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Haunted by the Ghosts of War
By Edward Curtin
[dropcap]M[/dropcap]emorial Day, May 29th, is his birthday. He died defending his country. A true war hero, a naval officer, he risked his life to save his men. Like so many we should remember on Memorial Day, he goes before us as an exemplar of courage, real patriotism, and a witness to war’s brutality.
But remembering all the war dead is like drifting on a ghost ship in a still sea of burning water. Haunted by the eerie silence of their absent presence, if we listen closely enough, we can hear such victims calling to us: Remember me, Remember me, why did it have to be?
“All warfare is ghostly,” writes Norman O. Brown, “every army an exercitus feralis (a funereal exercise), every soldier a living corpse.”
The world is littered with the corpses of war’s victims, those of the killers and the killed, soldiers of every nation – but the vast majority are innocent civilians who never picked up a gun. The earth is so saturated with all their blood that one would expect the rivers to run red as a reminder. But that only happens in poems, as with Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.”
Russian soldier, in his foxhole. Stalingrad.
But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don’t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love each other before we do – that war is an evil lie, as Wilfred Owen told us:
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut that was long ago. War’s victims still fall everywhere, every day they are stilled in deserts, mountains, jungles, cities, houses, hospitals, schools, on the open roads, in bedrooms, in woods, in alleyways, crouched in basements, killed from the sky, the ground, directly, remotely, by their own desperate hands, slowly in despair. Why count the ways, why count the victims – the truth is countless.
American casualty, Vietnam.
Yet we can remember a few that we know of and weep. Victims dead and victims alive.
There is that naval officer whose birthday I mentioned. He survived the south Pacific and Indonesian jungles only to die by enemy fire in an open car on a street in Dallas, Texas. Let us celebrate and mourn President John F. Kennedy, who would have been 100 years old today, while remembering how hard he fought for peace that the killers within his own government, led by the CIA, didn’t want then and don’t want now. So they shot him down “over here,” just as the U.S. war machine keeps killing millions “over there.” George M. Cohan was right: “The Yanks are coming.” They are always coming, but he was wrong to think it is ever over. It’s not supposed to be ever over.
Because he knew the horror of war and grasped the systemic evil of its proponents in his own government, John Kennedy grew out of the war machine – in James Douglass’s words from JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, when he was assassinated, JFK “was turning, Teshuvah, ‘turning,’ the rabbinic word for repentance,” against war and toward peace as his actions in the last year of his life make clear. As a result, the “unspeakable” deep state forces murdered him. But as a military veteran, his courage in turning against the war machine has inspired many other honorable veterans to do the same.
Like others who followed Kennedy – MLK, RFK, et al. – he died in his own country as a soldier in a non-violent “war” for peace and reconciliation for all people across the world. His enemies were here at home.
Dead Waffen soldier, filmed by an American. Death can look very unreal and incomprehensible sometimes.
And “over there,”Maha Khalil, a one year old Iraqi girl, was killed in the first few months of America’s criminal war against Iraq. Mrs. Ngugen Thi Tau was slaughtered by U. S. soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam. Who knows all the dead in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, East Timor, Indonesia, Cambodia, El Salvador, etc? Who can grasp it? Their names mean nothing to those who didn’t know them, just as the endless names of the U.S. military dead (most drafted into a war they didn’t want or understand) that line the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are a sad blur to those who come to look but didn’t know the fallen. The same is even truer for anyone who views the Holocaust memorial in Boston where all one sees are rows and rows of concentration camp numbers; for every number a real person, each one reduced by the Nazis to seven-digits tattooed on arms. When we try to name and count war’s victims, we are overwhelmed and stunned. Yet the wars persist. Like the pawns conscripted to fight them, the anonymous ghosts of all the victims murmur in our ears: Why?
Dylan sings:
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.
But not all of war’s victim’s die. Vast numbers become “living corpses,” also mostly anonymous and forsaken. Across the world wherever the American war machine has set its sights, the lame and crippled struggle on, victims of bombs and bullets, napalm and white phosphorous, nuclear radiation, small pox – all the grotesque weapons the ghouls of the weapons’ industry have conjured up from hell for their paymasters. Countless living victims, yes, but the weapons industries carefully count their bloody profits, as do those who invest in these companies while turning a blind eye to their own complicity.
And the innocent, too, in great numbers. (My Lai massacre, Vietnam).
Many of the wounds of war are psychological and spiritual. And so many of the victims suffer silently. Often misused and abused by their own government, they suffer (to paraphrase Douglass Valentine in his book , The Hotel Tacloban, a son’s riveting tale of his combat veteran father’s haunting by war) “in an anguish so profound and so abiding that they live in torment ever after.” War’s terrors follow them everywhere down their nights and down their days, and they can often find no escape from the nightmare images that populate their minds, flashing in and out. It’s beyond imagining the living hell of children worldwide reliving the sight of the bloodied mangled bodies of their parents at their feet, victims of bombs or death squads or perhaps “collateral damage,” as if any words or reasons could undue their everlasting trauma.
We owe it the wounded, dead, and tormented war victims everywhere to memorialize them with the words:
War is a lie, and only truth will free us.
Then we must devote ourselves to ending war. Each of us is responsible.
But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don’t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love each other before we do – that war is an evil lie, as Wilfred Owen told us:
Snow, Death, and the Bewildered Herd
By the longstanding administration of lies, half-truths, systematic omission of truths and other similarly underhanded methods, and by the use of an nonstop fragmentation as a form of communications syntax, in which the mind never has a moment to reflect, the establishment in America has denied the population a context to process reality, delivering them to a state of mounting confusion, frustration, anger, and cumulative ignorance. This grim, entirely manufactured situation, is lucidly examined by Ed Curtin in this essay recommended by the editors below.
—Ortega y Gasset “The Self and the Other”
As I write these words, the house is being buried in a snowstorm. Heavy flakes fall slowly and silently as a contemplative peace muffles the frenetic agitation and speed of a world gone mad. A beautiful gift like this has no price, though there are those who would like to set one, as they do on everything. In my mind’s eye I see Boris Pasternak’s Yurii Zhivago, sitting in the penumbra of an oil lamp in the snowy night stillness of Varykino, scratching out his poems in a state of inspired possession. Outside the wolves howl. Inside the bedroom, his doomed lover, Lara, and her daughter sleep peacefully. The wolves are always howling.
Then my mind’s lamp flickers, and Ignacio Silone’s rebel character, Pietro Spina (from the novel Bread and Wine) appears. He is deep into heavy snow as he flees the Italian fascists by hiking into the mountains. There, too, howl the wolves, the omnipresent wolves, as the solitary rebel – the man who said “No” – slowly trudges in a meditative silence, disguised as a priest.
Images like these, apparitions of literary characters who never existed outside the imagination, might at first seem eccentric. But they appear to me because they are, like the silent snow that falls outside, evocative reminders of our need to stop the howling media streams long enough to set our minds on essential truths, to think and meditate on our fates – the fate of the earth and our individual fates. To resist the forces of death we need to concentrate, and that requires slow silence in solitude. That is why the world’s archetypal arch-enemy, Mr. Death himself, aka Satan, aka Screwtape, advises his disciple Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to befuddle people against the aberration of logic by keeping them distracted with contradictory, non-stop news reports. He tells him that “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’ “
It is a commonplace to say that we are being buried in continuous and never-ending information. Yet it is true. We are being snowed by this torrent of indigestible “news,” and it’s not new, just vastly increased in the last twenty-five years or so.
Writing fifty-eight years ago, C. Wright Mills argued:
It is not only information they need – in the Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it….What they need…is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.
Today, as we speed down the information superhighway, Mills’s words are truer than ever. But how to develop an imagination suffused with reason to arrive at lucid summations? Is it possible now that “the information bomb” (attributed to Einstein) has fallen?
Albert Camus once said that “at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” While that is still true today, I would add that the feeling of an agitated and distracted bewilderment is everywhere to be seen as multitudes scan their idiot boxes for the latest revelations. Beeping and peeping, they momentarily quell their nervous anxieties by being informed and simulating proximity through the ether. Permanently busy in their mediated “reality,” they watch as streaming data are instantly succeeded by streaming data in acts of digital dementia. For Camus the absurd was a starting point for a freer world of rebellion. For Walter Lippman, the influential journalist and adviser to presidents and potentates, “the bewildered herd” – his name for regular people, the 99 % – was a beginning and a wished for end. His elites, the 1 %, would bewilder the herd in order to control them. His wish has come true.
A surfeit of information, fundamental to modern propaganda, prevents people from forming considered judgments. It paralyzes them. Jacques Ellul writes in Propaganda:
Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual’s capacity for attention or adaptations. This trait of continuity explains why propaganda can indulge in sudden twists and turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday.
And the more the better: more contradictions, more consistency, more complementarity – just make it more. The system demands more. The informed citizen craves more; craves it faster and faster as the data become dada, an absurdist joke on logical thinking.
Wherever you go in the United States these days, you sense a generalized panic and an inability to slow down and focus. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness fill the air. Most people sense that something is seriously wrong, but don’t know exactly what. So they rage and rant and scurry along in a frenzy. It seems so huge, so everything, so indescribable. Minds like pointilliste canvases with thousands of data dots and no connections.
In the mid-1990s, when the electronic world of computers and the internet were being shoved down our throats by a consortium of national security state and computer company operatives (gladly swallowed then by many and now resulting in today’s total surveillance state), I became a member of The Lead Pencil Club foundered by Bill Henderson (The Pushcart Press) in honor of Thoreau’s father’s pencil factory and meant as a whimsical protest: “a pothole on the information superhighway.” There were perhaps 37 1/3 members worldwide, no membership roll, and no dues – just a commitment to use pencils to write and think slowly.
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau asked. “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”
So I am writing these words with a pencil, an object, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, which haunts our present electronic world by being a ruin of the past. It is not a question of nostalgia, for we are not returning to our lost homes, despite a repressed urge for simpler times. But the pencil is an object that stands as a warning of the technological hubris that has pushed our home on earth to the brink of nuclear extinction and made mush of people’s minds in grasping the reasons why.
I think of John Berger, the great writer on art and life, as I write, erase, cross out, rewrite – roll the words over and look at them, consider them. Berger who wrote: “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper”; that “most mainstream political discourse today is composed of words that, separated from any creature of language, are inert….dead ‘word-mongering’ [that] wipes out memory and breeds a ruthless complacency.”
The pencil is not a fetish; it is a reminder to make haste slowly, to hear and feel my thinking on the paper, to honor the sacredness of what Berger calls the “confabulation” between words and their meaning. I smell the pencil’s wood, the tree of life, its slow ascent, rooted in the earth, the earth our home, our beginning and our end.
Imagining our ends, while always hard, has become much harder in modern times in western industrialized nations, especially the United States that reigns death down on the rest of the world while pretending it is immortal and immune from the nuclear weapons it brandishes. Yet the need to do so has become more important. When in 1939 Ortega y Gasset warned in the epigraph of a most grim war coming to birth so strangely, as people acted “mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism,” he was writing before nuclear weapons, the ultimate technology. If today we cannot imagine our individual deaths, how can we imagine the death of the earth? In a 1944 newspaper column George Orwell made an astute observation: “I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.” He connected this growing disbelief to the modern cult of power worship. “I do not want the belief in life after death to return,” he added, “and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact.”
I think that one reason we have not taken notice of this fact of the presence of a huge absence (not to say whether this disbelief is “true”) is the internet of speed, celebrated and foreseen by the grandmaster of electronic wizardry and obscurantic celebrator of retribalized man, Marshall McLuhan, who called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve and who argued that the extensions of human faculties through media would bring about abstract persons who would wear their brains outside their skulls and who would need an external conscience. Shall we say robots on fast forward?
Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse accepted as a “mediated reality” through so-called smart devices, we know – or should – that we are in big trouble. John Ralston Saul, a keen observer of the way we live now, mimics George Carlin by saying, “If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.”
Saul is also one of the few thinkers to follow-up on Orwell’s point. “Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than mortality unchained. With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man’s fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia.” Blind reason, amoral and in the service of expertise and power, has replaced a holistic approach to understanding that includes at its heart art, language, “spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” People, he argues, run around today in an inner panic as if they are searching for a lost forgotten truth.
Zygmunt Bauman, the brilliant sociological thinker, is another observer who has noticed the big hole that is staring us in the face. “The devaluation of immortality,” he writes, “cannot but augur a cultural upheaval, arguably the most decisive turning point in human cultural history.” He too connects our refusal in the west to contemplate this fact to the constant busyness and perpetual rushed sense of emergency engendered by the electronic media with its streaming information. To this end he quotes Nicole Aubert:
Permanent busyness, with one emergency following another, gives the security of a full life or a ‘successful career’, sole proofs of self-assertion in a world from which all references to the ‘beyond’ are absent, and where existence, with its finitude, is the only certainty…When they take action people think short-term – of things to be done immediately or in the very near future…All too often, action is only an escape from the self, a remedy from the anguish.
McLuhan’s abstract persons, who rush through the grey magic of electronic lives where flesh and blood don’t exist, not only drown in excessive data that they can’t understand, but drift through a world of ghostly images where “selves” with nothing at the core flit to and fro. Style, no substance. Perspective, no person. Life, having passed from humans to things and the images of things, reduced and reified. Nothing is clear, the images come and go, fact and fiction blend, myth and history coalesce, time and space collapse in a collage of confusion, surfaces appear as depths, the person becomes a perspective, a perspective becomes a mirror, a mirror reflects an image, and the individual is left dazed and lost, wondering what world he is in and what personality he should don. In McLuhan’s electronic paradise that is ours, people don’t live or die, people just float through the ether and pass away, as do the victims of America’s non-stop wars of aggression simply evaporate as statistics that float down the stream, while the delusional believe the world will bloodlessly evaporate in a nuclear war that they can’t imagine coming and won’t see gone. Who in this flow can hear the words of Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood/A river that goes singing/past the bedrooms…”?
If you shower the public with the thousands of items that occur in the course of a day or a week, the average person, even if he tries hard, will simply retain thousands of items which mean nothing to him. He would need a remarkable memory to tie some event to another that happened three weeks or three months ago….To obtain a rounded picture one would have to do research, but the average person has neither the desire or time for it. As a result, he finds himself in a kind of kaleidoscope in which thousands of unconnected images follow each other rapidly….To the average man who tries to keep informed, a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he cannot understand.
Jaques Ellul wrote that in 1965. Lucid summations are surely needed now.
Here’s one from Roberto Calasso from The Forty-Nine Steps: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.”
Anyone who sits silently and does a modicum of research while honestly contemplating the current world situation will have no trouble in noticing that there is one country in the world – the U.S.A. – that has used nuclear weapons, is modernizing its vast obscene arsenal, and has announced that it will use it as a first strike weapon. A quick glance at a map will reveal the positioning of U.S. NATO troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders and the aggressive movement of U.S. forces close to China. Hiroshima and Nagasaki make no difference. The fate of the earth makes no difference. Nothing makes a difference. Obama started this aggressiveness, but will this change under Trump? That’s very unlikely. We are talking about puppets for the potentates. It’s easy to note that the U.S. has 1,000,000 troops stationed in 175 countries because they advertise that during college basketball games, and of course you know of all the countries upon which the U.S. is raining down death and destruction in the name of peace and freedom. That’s all you need to know. Meditate on that and that hole that has opened up in western culture, and perhaps in your heart.
“If you are acquainted with the principle,” wrote Thoreau, “what do you care for myriad instances and applications?” Simplify, simplify, simplify.
But you may prefer complexity, following the stream.
The snow is still falling, night has descended, and the roads are impassable. The beautiful snow has stopped us in our tracks. Tomorrow we can resume our frantic movements, but for now we must simply stay put and wonder.
Eugene Ionesco, known for his absurdist plays, including Rhinoceros, puts it thus:
In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.
Ionesco emphasized the literal insanity of everyday life, comparing people to rhinoceroses that think and act with a herd mentality because they are afraid of the solitude and slowness necessary for lucid thought. They rush at everything with their horns. Behind this lies the fear of freedom, whose inner core is the fear of death. Doing nothing means being nothing, so being busy means being someone. And today being busy means being “plugged into the stream” of information meant to confound, which it does.
I return to the artist Pasternak, since the snowy night can’t keep me away. Or has he returned to me? I hear Yurii Zhivago’s uncle Nikolai speaking:
Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it ….What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible to not know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history….Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man – without them he is unthinkable – the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. Mind you, all of this is still extraordinarily new….Man does not die in a ditch like a dog – but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work. Ouf! I got quite worked up, didn’t I? But I might as well be talking to a blank wall.
I look outside and see the snow has stopped. It is time to sleep. Early tomorrow the plows will grind up the roads and the rush will ensue. Usefulness will flow.
But for now the night is beautiful and slow. A work of art.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
Appendix
Overwhelming the mind with fragmentation: or when torrents of data devoid of context become meaningless noise to the masses.
By Patrice Greanville
In 1972, one of the world’s pioneers in the study of modern political manipulation, Herbert Schiller, published his classic, The Mind Managers. In that slim but important volume, Schiller systematically analyzed the precise manner in which mass communications in capitalist America (and much of the world) had degenerated to convey mediocre entertainment and first-class, all-enveloping propaganda. His famous essay, The Packaged Consciousness, which contains the excerpt below, Fragmentation As a Form of Communication, is must read for anyone interested in the syntax of capitalist media, and its effects on the general population, an issue compellingly addressed by Ed Curtin in the essay above.
Fragmentation As a Form of Communication
The intrusions also trivialize highly dramatic moments, hindering emotional involvement in any given issue, and thereby indirectly dampening the potential for political protest.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that without advertising, or with a reduction in advertising, events would receive the holistic treatment that is required for understanding the complexities of modern social existence. Advertising, in seeking benefits for its sponsors, is serendipitous to the system in that its utilization heightens fragmentation.
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BEYOND THEIR WILDEST DREAMS: 9/11 AND THE AMERICAN LEFT
By Graeme MacQueen
(Special to Truth and Shadows)
ABOVE: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.
March 13, 2017
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.
The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.
In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]
I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]
Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue.
Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.
Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.
Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?
What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.
Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.
Castro: questioned JFK and 9/11.
Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9]But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]
The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?
Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.
If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.
I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.
The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.
The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.
9/11 and state officials facing imperial power
Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.[14]
Celso Furtado compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag.
Kenneth Maxwell wrote this paragraph in 2002. At the time he was the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The paragraph is from an article written for the Council entitled, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil.” In writing his article Maxwell clearly felt no need to give evidence or argument as he dismissed Furtado. He must have felt his readers would agree that the absurdity of Furtado’s remarks was self-evident. Furtado’s claim would be off their radar, beyond their imagination.
Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:
[15]
Did Celso Furtado have a wild imagination when he implied there was U.S. support for the coup? Not at all. The coup was not only hoped for, but prepared for and offered support at the highest level in the U.S. [16]
Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it’s plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination.
The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.
“The hypothesis is not absurd … that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”
“The hypothesis that is gaining strength … is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said. “Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”[17]
Actually, scepticism in Venezuela about the 9/11 attacks was not new. In March of 2006, for example, well known survivor and eyewitness of the September 11, 2001 attacks, William Rodriguez, had spent time with high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, and had given talks on television and in universities in that country.[18]
The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]
Chavez: “Those towers could have been dynamited.”
In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.
One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”
Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]
This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.
Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]
Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.
The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]
Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24]while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.
Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:
Monthly Review
Common Dreams
Huffington Post
Counterpunch
The Nation
The Real News
Democracy Now!
Z Magazine
The Progressive
Mother Jones
Alternet.org
MoveOn.org
In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.
In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]
Ahmadinejad proposed that the UN investigate 9/11.
The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:
Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.
Where were these anti-Semitic slurs? In his talk the Iranian President condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and included as one of the possible motives of a 9/11 inside job the saving of “the Zionist regime” by U.S. government insiders. But how is either of these an anti-Semitic slur? He said nothing in his speech, hateful or otherwise, about Jews. He did not identify Zionism, as an ideology or historical movement, with Jews as a collectivity. He did not identify the state of Israel with Jews as a collectivity. He did not say “the Jews” carried out the 9/11 attacks.
And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.
In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]
In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:
The official explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers is still about an attack by suicidal Muslim extremists, but even among Americans this explanation is beginning to wear thin and to be questioned. In fact, certain American groups have thoroughly analyzed various aspects of the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon building, and the reported crash in Pennsylvania. And their investigations reveal many aspects of the attack which cannot be explained by attributing them to attacks by terrorists—Muslims or non-Muslims.
He went on to give details of the official narrative that he found especially unconvincing, and he concluded that the 9/11 attack:
…has divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim and sowed the seeds of suspicion and hatred between them. It has undermined the security of nations everywhere, forcing them to spend trillions of dollars on security measures…Truly, 9/11 is the worst manmade disaster for the world since the end of the two world wars. For that reason alone it is important that we seek the truth because when truth is revealed then we can really prepare to protect and secure ourselves.[29]
There is no need to quote Western media coverage of Mahathir’s remarks because, as far as I can tell, there was none—an outcome Mahathir had predicted in his talk.
Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.
Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?
The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.
In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history… We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies.[33]
The hall of mirrors is real enough but Hedges’ rant offers no escape. As far as I can discover, Hedges has made no serious study of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has, therefore, no idea who knocked down the buildings.[34] Moreover, he appears never to have seriously thought about what a “conspiracy theory” is and what he is denouncing when he denounces such theories. Does he really mean to suggest that the American ruling class, in pursuing its interests, never conspires?
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
9/11 and public opinion
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?
Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?
There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.
In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]
The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.
This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.
Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”
Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.
What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?
The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.
The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]
In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]
The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.
Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]
Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?
Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.
There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.
Conclusion
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]uppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.
Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:
Intellectuals and lovers of peace should understand the danger that maneuvers of this kind could mean to world peace, and what a conspiracy of this type, what a Machiavellian policy of this nature, could lead to.
***
(*l would like to thank Ed Curtin for his inspiration and advice.)
***
NOTES
[2] Michael Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000 (Michael D. Morrissey, 2007), 436.
[3] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 241.
[4] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 14ff., Appendices VII and VIII.
[6] Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, 208 and throughout chapter 5.
[7] Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000, 421.
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1244&relPageId=137.
[9] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Church Committee Reports (Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1975), http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm.
[10] Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 275.
[11] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”
[12] Ibid.
[14] Kenneth Maxwell, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2002.
[15] “Developing Brazil Today: An Interview with Celso Furtado–’Start with the Social, Not the Economic’,” NACLA Report on the Americas 36, no. 5 (2003).
[16] “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Role” (The National Security Archives, The George Washington University, March 2004).
[17] “Chavez Says U.S. May Have Orchestrated 9/11: ‘Those Towers Could Have Been Dynamited,’ Says Venezuela’s President,” Associated Press, September 12, 2006.
[19] For this information I have depended on Phil Gunson, “Chávez Attacks Bush as `genocidal’ Leader,” Miami Herald, November 9, 2006.
[20] Ibid.
[21] “The Empire and Its Lies: Reflections by the Commander in Chief,” September 11, 2007, Discursos e intervenciones del Commandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente del Consejo. de Estado de la Republica de Cuba.
[22] Mark Tran, “Castro Says US Lied about 9/11 Attacks,” Guardian, September 12, 2007.
[23] Sue Reid, “Has Osama Bin Laden Been Dead for Seven Years – and Are the U.S. and Britain Covering It up to Continue War on Terror?” The Mail, September 11, 2009.
[24] The FBI was officially in charge of the investigation of the crimes of 9/11, and the Bureau bears ultimate responsibility for the official narrative of 9/11, which was adopted uncritically by other state agencies and commissions.
[25] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Before the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (United Nations General Assembly, New York, N.Y., September 23, 2010).
[26] Neil Macfarquhar, “Iran Leader Says U.S. Planned 9/11 Attacks,” The New York Times, September 24, 2010.
[27] Daniel Tovrov, “Ahmadinejad United Nations Speech: Full Text Transcript,” International Business Times, September 22, 2011.
[28] Richard Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures,” COTO Report, August 10, 2011, https://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/last-man-out-on-911-makes-shocking-disclosures/. The information about David Ray Griffin’s 30-60 minute discussion with Mahathir is from my personal correspondence with Dr. Griffin.
[29] Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, President of the Perdana Global Peace Foundation and Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Opens the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” Conference in Kuala Lumpur on November 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZdgaViIyI.
[30] Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures.”
[31] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1970), 46.
[32] Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican Left,” Counterpunch, November 28, 2006. For a critique of Cockburn see Michael Keefer, “Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence,” 911Review.com, December 4, 2006.
[33] Chris Hedges, “American Psychosis,” Truthdig, January 29, 2017.
[35] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11” (WorldPublicOpinion.org, September 10, 2008), https://majorityrights.com/uploads/who-did-911-poll.pdf.
[37] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11.” The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2008 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[38] “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist: Common Concerns About Islamic Extremism” (Pew Research Center, July 21, 2011), http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/4/. The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2011 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[40] Graeme MacQueen, “9/11 Truth: British Muslims Overwhelmingly Reject the Official 9/11 Story,” Global Research, December 29, 2016.
[41] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013).
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As I write these words, the house is being buried in a snowstorm. Heavy flakes fall slowly and silently as a contemplative peace muffles the frenetic agitation and speed of a world gone mad. A beautiful gift like this has no price, though there are those who would like to set one, as they do on everything. In my mind’s eye I see Boris Pasternak’s Yurii Zhivago, sitting in the penumbra of an oil lamp in the snowy night stillness of Varykino, scratching out his poems in a state of inspired possession. Outside the wolves howl. Inside the bedroom, his doomed lover, Lara, and her daughter sleep peacefully. The wolves are always howling.
Then my mind’s lamp flickers, and Ignacio Silone’s rebel character, Pietro Spina (from the novel Bread and Wine) appears. He is deep into heavy snow as he flees the Italian fascists by hiking into the mountains. There, too, howl the wolves, the omnipresent wolves, as the solitary rebel – the man who said “No” – slowly trudges in a meditative silence, disguised as a priest.
Images like these, apparitions of literary characters who never existed outside the imagination, might at first seem eccentric. But they appear to me because they are, like the silent snow that falls outside, evocative reminders of our need to stop the howling media streams long enough to set our minds on essential truths, to think and meditate on our fates – the fate of the earth and our individual fates. To resist the forces of death we need to concentrate, and that requires slow silence in solitude. That is why the world’s archetypal arch-enemy, Mr. Death himself, aka Satan, aka Screwtape, advises his disciple Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to befuddle people against the aberration of logic by keeping them distracted with contradictory, non-stop news reports. He tells him that “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’ “
It is a commonplace to say that we are being buried in continuous and never-ending information. Yet it is true. We are being snowed by this torrent of indigestible “news,” and it’s not new, just vastly increased in the last twenty-five years or so.
Writing fifty-eight years ago, C. Wright Mills argued:
It is not only information they need – in the Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it….What they need…is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.
Today, as we speed down the information superhighway, Mills’s words are truer than ever. But how to develop an imagination suffused with reason to arrive at lucid summations? Is it possible now that “the information bomb” (attributed to Einstein) has fallen?
Albert Camus once said that “at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” While that is still true today, I would add that the feeling of an agitated and distracted bewilderment is everywhere to be seen as multitudes scan their idiot boxes for the latest revelations. Beeping and peeping, they momentarily quell their nervous anxieties by being informed and simulating proximity through the ether. Permanently busy in their mediated “reality,” they watch as streaming data are instantly succeeded by streaming data in acts of digital dementia. For Camus the absurd was a starting point for a freer world of rebellion. For Walter Lippman, the influential journalist and adviser to presidents and potentates, “the bewildered herd” – his name for regular people, the 99 % – was a beginning and a wished for end. His elites, the 1 %, would bewilder the herd in order to control them. His wish has come true.
A surfeit of information, fundamental to modern propaganda, prevents people from forming considered judgments. It paralyzes them. Jacques Ellul writes in Propaganda:
Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual’s capacity for attention or adaptations. This trait of continuity explains why propaganda can indulge in sudden twists and turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday.
And the more the better: more contradictions, more consistency, more complementarity – just make it more. The system demands more. The informed citizen craves more; craves it faster and faster as the data become dada, an absurdist joke on logical thinking.
Wherever you go in the United States these days, you sense a generalized panic and an inability to slow down and focus. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness fill the air. Most people sense that something is seriously wrong, but don’t know exactly what. So they rage and rant and scurry along in a frenzy. It seems so huge, so everything, so indescribable. Minds like pointilliste canvases with thousands of data dots and no connections.
In the mid-1990s, when the electronic world of computers and the internet were being shoved down our throats by a consortium of national security state and computer company operatives (gladly swallowed then by many and now resulting in today’s total surveillance state), I became a member of The Lead Pencil Club foundered by Bill Henderson (The Pushcart Press) in honor of Thoreau’s father’s pencil factory and meant as a whimsical protest: “a pothole on the information superhighway.” There were perhaps 37 1/3 members worldwide, no membership roll, and no dues – just a commitment to use pencils to write and think slowly.
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau asked. “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”
So I am writing these words with a pencil, an object, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, which haunts our present electronic world by being a ruin of the past. It is not a question of nostalgia, for we are not returning to our lost homes, despite a repressed urge for simpler times. But the pencil is an object that stands as a warning of the technological hubris that has pushed our home on earth to the brink of nuclear extinction and made mush of people’s minds in grasping the reasons why.
I think of John Berger, the great writer on art and life, as I write, erase, cross out, rewrite – roll the words over and look at them, consider them. Berger who wrote: “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper”; that “most mainstream political discourse today is composed of words that, separated from any creature of language, are inert….dead ‘word-mongering’ [that] wipes out memory and breeds a ruthless complacency.”
The pencil is not a fetish; it is a reminder to make haste slowly, to hear and feel my thinking on the paper, to honor the sacredness of what Berger calls the “confabulation” between words and their meaning. I smell the pencil’s wood, the tree of life, its slow ascent, rooted in the earth, the earth our home, our beginning and our end.
Imagining our ends, while always hard, has become much harder in modern times in western industrialized nations, especially the United States that reigns death down on the rest of the world while pretending it is immortal and immune from the nuclear weapons it brandishes. Yet the need to do so has become more important. When in 1939 Ortega y Gasset warned in the epigraph of a most grim war coming to birth so strangely, as people acted “mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism,” he was writing before nuclear weapons, the ultimate technology. If today we cannot imagine our individual deaths, how can we imagine the death of the earth? In a 1944 newspaper column George Orwell made an astute observation: “I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.” He connected this growing disbelief to the modern cult of power worship. “I do not want the belief in life after death to return,” he added, “and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact.”
I think that one reason we have not taken notice of this fact of the presence of a huge absence (not to say whether this disbelief is “true”) is the internet of speed, celebrated and foreseen by the grandmaster of electronic wizardry and obscurantic celebrator of retribalized man, Marshall McLuhan, who called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve and who argued that the extensions of human faculties through media would bring about abstract persons who would wear their brains outside their skulls and who would need an external conscience. Shall we say robots on fast forward?
Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse accepted as a “mediated reality” through so-called smart devices, we know – or should – that we are in big trouble. John Ralston Saul, a keen observer of the way we live now, mimics George Carlin by saying, “If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.”
Saul is also one of the few thinkers to follow-up on Orwell’s point. “Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than mortality unchained. With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man’s fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia.” Blind reason, amoral and in the service of expertise and power, has replaced a holistic approach to understanding that includes at its heart art, language, “spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” People, he argues, run around today in an inner panic as if they are searching for a lost forgotten truth.
Zygmunt Bauman, the brilliant sociological thinker, is another observer who has noticed the big hole that is staring us in the face. “The devaluation of immortality,” he writes, “cannot but augur a cultural upheaval, arguably the most decisive turning point in human cultural history.” He too connects our refusal in the west to contemplate this fact to the constant busyness and perpetual rushed sense of emergency engendered by the electronic media with its streaming information. To this end he quotes Nicole Aubert:
Permanent busyness, with one emergency following another, gives the security of a full life or a ‘successful career’, sole proofs of self-assertion in a world from which all references to the ‘beyond’ are absent, and where existence, with its finitude, is the only certainty…When they take action people think short-term – of things to be done immediately or in the very near future…All too often, action is only an escape from the self, a remedy from the anguish.
McLuhan’s abstract persons, who rush through the grey magic of electronic lives where flesh and blood don’t exist, not only drown in excessive data that they can’t understand, but drift through a world of ghostly images where “selves” with nothing at the core flit to and fro. Style, no substance. Perspective, no person. Life, having passed from humans to things and the images of things, reduced and reified. Nothing is clear, the images come and go, fact and fiction blend, myth and history coalesce, time and space collapse in a collage of confusion, surfaces appear as depths, the person becomes a perspective, a perspective becomes a mirror, a mirror reflects an image, and the individual is left dazed and lost, wondering what world he is in and what personality he should don. In McLuhan’s electronic paradise that is ours, people don’t live or die, people just float through the ether and pass away, as do the victims of America’s non-stop wars of aggression simply evaporate as statistics that float down the stream, while the delusional believe the world will bloodlessly evaporate in a nuclear war that they can’t imagine coming and won’t see gone. Who in this flow can hear the words of Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood/A river that goes singing/past the bedrooms…”?
If you shower the public with the thousands of items that occur in the course of a day or a week, the average person, even if he tries hard, will simply retain thousands of items which mean nothing to him. He would need a remarkable memory to tie some event to another that happened three weeks or three months ago….To obtain a rounded picture one would have to do research, but the average person has neither the desire or time for it. As a result, he finds himself in a kind of kaleidoscope in which thousands of unconnected images follow each other rapidly….To the average man who tries to keep informed, a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he cannot understand.
Jaques Ellul wrote that in 1965. Lucid summations are surely needed now.
Here’s one from Roberto Calasso from The Forty-Nine Steps: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.”
Anyone who sits silently and does a modicum of research while honestly contemplating the current world situation will have no trouble in noticing that there is one country in the world – the U.S.A. – that has used nuclear weapons, is modernizing its vast obscene arsenal, and has announced that it will use it as a first strike weapon. A quick glance at a map will reveal the positioning of U.S. NATO troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders and the aggressive movement of U.S. forces close to China. Hiroshima and Nagasaki make no difference. The fate of the earth makes no difference. Nothing makes a difference. Obama started this aggressiveness, but will this change under Trump? That’s very unlikely. We are talking about puppets for the potentates. It’s easy to note that the U.S. has 1,000,000 troops stationed in 175 countries because they advertise that during college basketball games, and of course you know of all the countries upon which the U.S. is raining down death and destruction in the name of peace and freedom. That’s all you need to know. Meditate on that and that hole that has opened up in western culture, and perhaps in your heart.
“If you are acquainted with the principle,” wrote Thoreau, “what do you care for myriad instances and applications?” Simplify, simplify, simplify.
But you may prefer complexity, following the stream.
The snow is still falling, night has descended, and the roads are impassable. The beautiful snow has stopped us in our tracks. Tomorrow we can resume our frantic movements, but for now we must simply stay put and wonder.
Eugene Ionesco, known for his absurdist plays, including Rhinoceros, puts it thus:
In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.
Ionesco emphasized the literal insanity of everyday life, comparing people to rhinoceroses that think and act with a herd mentality because they are afraid of the solitude and slowness necessary for lucid thought. They rush at everything with their horns. Behind this lies the fear of freedom, whose inner core is the fear of death. Doing nothing means being nothing, so being busy means being someone. And today being busy means being “plugged into the stream” of information meant to confound, which it does.
I return to the artist Pasternak, since the snowy night can’t keep me away. Or has he returned to me? I hear Yurii Zhivago’s uncle Nikolai speaking:
Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it ….What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible to not know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history….Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man – without them he is unthinkable – the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. Mind you, all of this is still extraordinarily new….Man does not die in a ditch like a dog – but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work. Ouf! I got quite worked up, didn’t I? But I might as well be talking to a blank wall.
I look outside and see the snow has stopped. It is time to sleep. Early tomorrow the plows will grind up the roads and the rush will ensue. Usefulness will flow.
But for now the night is beautiful and slow. A work of art.
Appendix
Overwhelming the mind with fragmentation: or when torrents of data devoid of context become meaningless noise to the masses.
By Patrice Greanville
In 1972, one of the world’s pioneers in the study of modern political manipulation, Herbert Schiller, published his classic, The Mind Managers. In that slim but important volume, Schiller systematically analyzed the precise manner in which mass communications in capitalist America (and much of the world) had degenerated to convey mediocre entertainment and first-class, all-enveloping propaganda. His famous essay, The Packaged Consciousness, which contains the excerpt below, Fragmentation As a Form of Communication, is must read for anyone interested in the syntax of capitalist media, and its effects on the general population, an issue compellingly addressed by Ed Curtin in the essay above.
Fragmentation As a Form of Communication
The intrusions also trivialize highly dramatic moments, hindering emotional involvement in any given issue, and thereby indirectly dampening the potential for political protest.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that without advertising, or with a reduction in advertising, events would receive the holistic treatment that is required for understanding the complexities of modern social existence. Advertising, in seeking benefits for its sponsors, is serendipitous to the system in that its utilization heightens fragmentation.
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BEYOND THEIR WILDEST DREAMS: 9/11 AND THE AMERICAN LEFT
By Graeme MacQueen
(Special to Truth and Shadows)
ABOVE: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.
March 13, 2017
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.
The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.
In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]
I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]
Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue.
Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.
Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.
Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?
What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.
Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.
Castro: questioned JFK and 9/11.
Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9]But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]
The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?
Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.
If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.
I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.
The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.
The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.
9/11 and state officials facing imperial power
Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.[14]
Celso Furtado compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag.
Kenneth Maxwell wrote this paragraph in 2002. At the time he was the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The paragraph is from an article written for the Council entitled, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil.” In writing his article Maxwell clearly felt no need to give evidence or argument as he dismissed Furtado. He must have felt his readers would agree that the absurdity of Furtado’s remarks was self-evident. Furtado’s claim would be off their radar, beyond their imagination.
Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:
[15]
Did Celso Furtado have a wild imagination when he implied there was U.S. support for the coup? Not at all. The coup was not only hoped for, but prepared for and offered support at the highest level in the U.S. [16]
Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it’s plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination.
The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.
“The hypothesis is not absurd … that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”
“The hypothesis that is gaining strength … is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said. “Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”[17]
Actually, scepticism in Venezuela about the 9/11 attacks was not new. In March of 2006, for example, well known survivor and eyewitness of the September 11, 2001 attacks, William Rodriguez, had spent time with high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, and had given talks on television and in universities in that country.[18]
The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]
Chavez: “Those towers could have been dynamited.”
In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.
One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”
Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]
This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.
Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]
Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.
The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]
Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24]while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.
Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:
Monthly Review
Common Dreams
Huffington Post
Counterpunch
The Nation
The Real News
Democracy Now!
Z Magazine
The Progressive
Mother Jones
Alternet.org
MoveOn.org
In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.
In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]
Ahmadinejad proposed that the UN investigate 9/11.
The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:
Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.
Where were these anti-Semitic slurs? In his talk the Iranian President condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and included as one of the possible motives of a 9/11 inside job the saving of “the Zionist regime” by U.S. government insiders. But how is either of these an anti-Semitic slur? He said nothing in his speech, hateful or otherwise, about Jews. He did not identify Zionism, as an ideology or historical movement, with Jews as a collectivity. He did not identify the state of Israel with Jews as a collectivity. He did not say “the Jews” carried out the 9/11 attacks.
And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.
In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]
In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:
The official explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers is still about an attack by suicidal Muslim extremists, but even among Americans this explanation is beginning to wear thin and to be questioned. In fact, certain American groups have thoroughly analyzed various aspects of the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon building, and the reported crash in Pennsylvania. And their investigations reveal many aspects of the attack which cannot be explained by attributing them to attacks by terrorists—Muslims or non-Muslims.
He went on to give details of the official narrative that he found especially unconvincing, and he concluded that the 9/11 attack:
…has divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim and sowed the seeds of suspicion and hatred between them. It has undermined the security of nations everywhere, forcing them to spend trillions of dollars on security measures…Truly, 9/11 is the worst manmade disaster for the world since the end of the two world wars. For that reason alone it is important that we seek the truth because when truth is revealed then we can really prepare to protect and secure ourselves.[29]
There is no need to quote Western media coverage of Mahathir’s remarks because, as far as I can tell, there was none—an outcome Mahathir had predicted in his talk.
Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.
Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?
The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.
In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history… We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies.[33]
The hall of mirrors is real enough but Hedges’ rant offers no escape. As far as I can discover, Hedges has made no serious study of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has, therefore, no idea who knocked down the buildings.[34] Moreover, he appears never to have seriously thought about what a “conspiracy theory” is and what he is denouncing when he denounces such theories. Does he really mean to suggest that the American ruling class, in pursuing its interests, never conspires?
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
9/11 and public opinion
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?
Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?
There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.
In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]
The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.
This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.
Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”
Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.
What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?
The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.
The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]
In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]
The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.
Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]
Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?
Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.
There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.
Conclusion
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]uppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.
Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:
Intellectuals and lovers of peace should understand the danger that maneuvers of this kind could mean to world peace, and what a conspiracy of this type, what a Machiavellian policy of this nature, could lead to.
***
(*l would like to thank Ed Curtin for his inspiration and advice.)
***
NOTES
[2] Michael Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000 (Michael D. Morrissey, 2007), 436.
[3] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 241.
[4] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 14ff., Appendices VII and VIII.
[6] Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, 208 and throughout chapter 5.
[7] Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000, 421.
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1244&relPageId=137.
[9] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Church Committee Reports (Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1975), http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm.
[10] Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 275.
[11] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”
[12] Ibid.
[14] Kenneth Maxwell, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2002.
[15] “Developing Brazil Today: An Interview with Celso Furtado–’Start with the Social, Not the Economic’,” NACLA Report on the Americas 36, no. 5 (2003).
[16] “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Role” (The National Security Archives, The George Washington University, March 2004).
[17] “Chavez Says U.S. May Have Orchestrated 9/11: ‘Those Towers Could Have Been Dynamited,’ Says Venezuela’s President,” Associated Press, September 12, 2006.
[19] For this information I have depended on Phil Gunson, “Chávez Attacks Bush as `genocidal’ Leader,” Miami Herald, November 9, 2006.
[20] Ibid.
[21] “The Empire and Its Lies: Reflections by the Commander in Chief,” September 11, 2007, Discursos e intervenciones del Commandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente del Consejo. de Estado de la Republica de Cuba.
[22] Mark Tran, “Castro Says US Lied about 9/11 Attacks,” Guardian, September 12, 2007.
[23] Sue Reid, “Has Osama Bin Laden Been Dead for Seven Years – and Are the U.S. and Britain Covering It up to Continue War on Terror?” The Mail, September 11, 2009.
[24] The FBI was officially in charge of the investigation of the crimes of 9/11, and the Bureau bears ultimate responsibility for the official narrative of 9/11, which was adopted uncritically by other state agencies and commissions.
[25] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Before the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (United Nations General Assembly, New York, N.Y., September 23, 2010).
[26] Neil Macfarquhar, “Iran Leader Says U.S. Planned 9/11 Attacks,” The New York Times, September 24, 2010.
[27] Daniel Tovrov, “Ahmadinejad United Nations Speech: Full Text Transcript,” International Business Times, September 22, 2011.
[28] Richard Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures,” COTO Report, August 10, 2011, https://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/last-man-out-on-911-makes-shocking-disclosures/. The information about David Ray Griffin’s 30-60 minute discussion with Mahathir is from my personal correspondence with Dr. Griffin.
[29] Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, President of the Perdana Global Peace Foundation and Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Opens the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” Conference in Kuala Lumpur on November 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZdgaViIyI.
[30] Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures.”
[31] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1970), 46.
[32] Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican Left,” Counterpunch, November 28, 2006. For a critique of Cockburn see Michael Keefer, “Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence,” 911Review.com, December 4, 2006.
[33] Chris Hedges, “American Psychosis,” Truthdig, January 29, 2017.
[35] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11” (WorldPublicOpinion.org, September 10, 2008), https://majorityrights.com/uploads/who-did-911-poll.pdf.
[37] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11.” The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2008 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[38] “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist: Common Concerns About Islamic Extremism” (Pew Research Center, July 21, 2011), http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/4/. The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2011 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[40] Graeme MacQueen, “9/11 Truth: British Muslims Overwhelmingly Reject the Official 9/11 Story,” Global Research, December 29, 2016.
[41] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013).
NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE
AUTHOR TEXT HERE
ABOVE: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.
March 13, 2017
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.
The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.
In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]
I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]
Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue.
Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.
Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.
Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?
What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.
Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.
Castro: questioned JFK and 9/11.
Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9]But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]
The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?
Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.
If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.
I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.
The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.
The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.
9/11 and state officials facing imperial power
Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.[14]
Celso Furtado compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag.
Kenneth Maxwell wrote this paragraph in 2002. At the time he was the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The paragraph is from an article written for the Council entitled, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil.” In writing his article Maxwell clearly felt no need to give evidence or argument as he dismissed Furtado. He must have felt his readers would agree that the absurdity of Furtado’s remarks was self-evident. Furtado’s claim would be off their radar, beyond their imagination.
Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:
[15]
Did Celso Furtado have a wild imagination when he implied there was U.S. support for the coup? Not at all. The coup was not only hoped for, but prepared for and offered support at the highest level in the U.S. [16]
Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it’s plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination.
The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.
“The hypothesis is not absurd … that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”
“The hypothesis that is gaining strength … is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said. “Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”[17]
Actually, scepticism in Venezuela about the 9/11 attacks was not new. In March of 2006, for example, well known survivor and eyewitness of the September 11, 2001 attacks, William Rodriguez, had spent time with high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, and had given talks on television and in universities in that country.[18]
The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]
Chavez: “Those towers could have been dynamited.”
In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.
One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”
Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]
This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.
Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]
Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.
The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]
Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24]while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.
Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:
Monthly Review
Common Dreams
Huffington Post
Counterpunch
The Nation
The Real News
Democracy Now!
Z Magazine
The Progressive
Mother Jones
Alternet.org
MoveOn.org
In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.
In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]
Ahmadinejad proposed that the UN investigate 9/11.
The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:
Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.
Where were these anti-Semitic slurs? In his talk the Iranian President condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and included as one of the possible motives of a 9/11 inside job the saving of “the Zionist regime” by U.S. government insiders. But how is either of these an anti-Semitic slur? He said nothing in his speech, hateful or otherwise, about Jews. He did not identify Zionism, as an ideology or historical movement, with Jews as a collectivity. He did not identify the state of Israel with Jews as a collectivity. He did not say “the Jews” carried out the 9/11 attacks.
And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.
In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]
In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:
The official explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers is still about an attack by suicidal Muslim extremists, but even among Americans this explanation is beginning to wear thin and to be questioned. In fact, certain American groups have thoroughly analyzed various aspects of the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon building, and the reported crash in Pennsylvania. And their investigations reveal many aspects of the attack which cannot be explained by attributing them to attacks by terrorists—Muslims or non-Muslims.
He went on to give details of the official narrative that he found especially unconvincing, and he concluded that the 9/11 attack:
…has divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim and sowed the seeds of suspicion and hatred between them. It has undermined the security of nations everywhere, forcing them to spend trillions of dollars on security measures…Truly, 9/11 is the worst manmade disaster for the world since the end of the two world wars. For that reason alone it is important that we seek the truth because when truth is revealed then we can really prepare to protect and secure ourselves.[29]
There is no need to quote Western media coverage of Mahathir’s remarks because, as far as I can tell, there was none—an outcome Mahathir had predicted in his talk.
Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.
Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?
The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.
In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history… We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies.[33]
The hall of mirrors is real enough but Hedges’ rant offers no escape. As far as I can discover, Hedges has made no serious study of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has, therefore, no idea who knocked down the buildings.[34] Moreover, he appears never to have seriously thought about what a “conspiracy theory” is and what he is denouncing when he denounces such theories. Does he really mean to suggest that the American ruling class, in pursuing its interests, never conspires?
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
9/11 and public opinion
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?
Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?
There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.
In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]
The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.
This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.
Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”
Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.
What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?
The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.
The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]
In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]
The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.
Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]
Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?
Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.
There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.
Conclusion
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]uppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.
Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:
Intellectuals and lovers of peace should understand the danger that maneuvers of this kind could mean to world peace, and what a conspiracy of this type, what a Machiavellian policy of this nature, could lead to.
***
(*l would like to thank Ed Curtin for his inspiration and advice.)
***
NOTES
[2] Michael Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000 (Michael D. Morrissey, 2007), 436.
[3] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 241.
[4] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 14ff., Appendices VII and VIII.
[6] Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, 208 and throughout chapter 5.
[7] Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000, 421.
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1244&relPageId=137.
[9] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Church Committee Reports (Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1975), http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm.
[10] Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 275.
[11] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”
[12] Ibid.
[14] Kenneth Maxwell, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2002.
[15] “Developing Brazil Today: An Interview with Celso Furtado–’Start with the Social, Not the Economic’,” NACLA Report on the Americas 36, no. 5 (2003).
[16] “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Role” (The National Security Archives, The George Washington University, March 2004).
[17] “Chavez Says U.S. May Have Orchestrated 9/11: ‘Those Towers Could Have Been Dynamited,’ Says Venezuela’s President,” Associated Press, September 12, 2006.
[19] For this information I have depended on Phil Gunson, “Chávez Attacks Bush as `genocidal’ Leader,” Miami Herald, November 9, 2006.
[20] Ibid.
[21] “The Empire and Its Lies: Reflections by the Commander in Chief,” September 11, 2007, Discursos e intervenciones del Commandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente del Consejo. de Estado de la Republica de Cuba.
[22] Mark Tran, “Castro Says US Lied about 9/11 Attacks,” Guardian, September 12, 2007.
[23] Sue Reid, “Has Osama Bin Laden Been Dead for Seven Years – and Are the U.S. and Britain Covering It up to Continue War on Terror?” The Mail, September 11, 2009.
[24] The FBI was officially in charge of the investigation of the crimes of 9/11, and the Bureau bears ultimate responsibility for the official narrative of 9/11, which was adopted uncritically by other state agencies and commissions.
[25] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Before the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (United Nations General Assembly, New York, N.Y., September 23, 2010).
[26] Neil Macfarquhar, “Iran Leader Says U.S. Planned 9/11 Attacks,” The New York Times, September 24, 2010.
[27] Daniel Tovrov, “Ahmadinejad United Nations Speech: Full Text Transcript,” International Business Times, September 22, 2011.
[28] Richard Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures,” COTO Report, August 10, 2011, https://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/last-man-out-on-911-makes-shocking-disclosures/. The information about David Ray Griffin’s 30-60 minute discussion with Mahathir is from my personal correspondence with Dr. Griffin.
[29] Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, President of the Perdana Global Peace Foundation and Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Opens the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” Conference in Kuala Lumpur on November 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZdgaViIyI.
[30] Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures.”
[31] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1970), 46.
[32] Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican Left,” Counterpunch, November 28, 2006. For a critique of Cockburn see Michael Keefer, “Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence,” 911Review.com, December 4, 2006.
[33] Chris Hedges, “American Psychosis,” Truthdig, January 29, 2017.
[35] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11” (WorldPublicOpinion.org, September 10, 2008), https://majorityrights.com/uploads/who-did-911-poll.pdf.
[37] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11.” The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2008 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[38] “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist: Common Concerns About Islamic Extremism” (Pew Research Center, July 21, 2011), http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/4/. The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2011 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[40] Graeme MacQueen, “9/11 Truth: British Muslims Overwhelmingly Reject the Official 9/11 Story,” Global Research, December 29, 2016.
[41] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013).
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