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Title: Denial networks
Author: Datacide
Date: 2008
Language: en
Topics: 9/11, conspiracy
Source: Retrieved on 11th September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/denial-networks-crisis-continuity-911-truth-movement
Notes: This is a text produced for Datacide 10 late in 2007. Full contents of Datacide 10 are here: http://datacide.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/datacide-10-out-now/

Datacide

Denial networks

How is it possible that increasingly elaborate conspiracy explanations

for the events of September 11^(th) 2001 continue to find appeal amongst

a growing population of otherwise rational people, despite the day’s

events being witnessed by millions and despite these theories being

consistently debunked and embarrassed? Why are so many still convinced

that the perpetrators of 9/11 were innocent of their greatest

accomplishment: the mass murder of thousands for the sake of spectacular

Jihad against the west? Why would the partisans of these theories repeat

claims long proven false, even at the cost of their own reputations?

We would fail to answer any of these questions by investigating the

claims of the theorists themselves. Almost all conspirationist claims

have been analyzed and debunked point by point; not by the American

government (the nefarious backer of the so-called “official story”), but

by thousands of skeptics worldwide from a variety of backgrounds

including structural engineers and demolition professionals (see the end

for resources which debunk these theories). This collective debunking

effort has on the one hand had a large impact in terms of gathering

information that details the events of that day and exposes the truly

flimsy logic and “empirical evidence” held up by the conspiracy

partisans. And yet the emergence of comprehensive debunking has had

little to no impact on the Baptist-style evangelism of the core 9/11

truth movement, whose proponents not only continue to propagandize the

most obviously disproven “contradictions” from the initial period of

9/11 conspiracy theory (such as the American air defense program NORAD

standing down to allow the attacks to happen, the “existence of missile

silos at the Pentagon” which should have shot down the plane in

Washington, some hijackers still being alive in the Middle East, and

much more), they also maintain a multitude of more or less obscurantist

facts to dredge up and quibble over when any of their central claims are

exposed as logically implausible, or outright lies.

This is a useful strategy when the facts are not in your favor. These

self-described truthers, proponents of theories that September 11^(th)

was carried out by government forces, tend to pack the field with so

much incomprehensible counter-information during arguments that the

logical, material and scientific evidence which would sway a passive

listener (what Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt would call the

preponderance of evidence) is drowned out by the quick succession of

seemingly related facts. Similar to their viral videos on the Internet,

arguments with truthers usually involve suspending disbelief regarding

gaping logical inconsistencies in their assertions in order to sort

through a mountain of more or less obscurantist “unanswered questions”.

The unanswered questions themselves are only “unanswered” after being

removed from their factual and logical contexts, which one could use to

determine if they had sinister implications or not. The more the better,

since the rising pile of deceptive “coincidences” creates the basis for

imagining even more.

Even when main supports for the conspirationist line of argument are

destroyed in the process of debunking (much like passenger jets flying

straight into the support columns of the World Trade Centers), truthers

tend to hold out for victory by exhaustion or time-out; although they

may sense that the collapse is not far off. Fearing that these main

supports for their arguments are weak, i.e. a consistent motivation for

the conspirators, their material ability to pull the attacks off and

their ability to keep thousands of people who might know something

completely silent, the truthers hold their head above water with

constant revision, backtracking, and the mobilization of hundreds of

more or less obscurantist 9/11-related factoids; see for instance the

three versions of flagship truth movement series Loose Change. Even the

latest installment of this series, the Final Cut still clings to claims

disproven at standard debunking resources.

If a movement which claims to stand for exposing the truth does not

continually critique itself and its theories, then what “truth” could it

possibly stand for? If it cannot construct a counter-theory that is

remotely plausible, even an extremely hypothetical one, why would it

continue its activity?

What we will find is that quite remarkably, the “truth” movement’s

embrace of its own contradictions is the only thing that can keep it in

motion given that its very modus operandi provokes a deep internal

crisis. This crisis is not for lack of interest. Truthers are correct in

claiming an embrace of 9/11 conspiracy theory on a significant scale,

for instance a September 2008 WorldPublicOpinion poll across several

countries found that “on average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al

Qaeda was responsible (for the September 11^(th) attacks), 15 percent

said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some

other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was

behind the attacks.” These numbers are certainly a testament to the

vacuum of knowledge that the lying American government has made

inevitable in the past seven years. Still, the so-called “truth

movement” itself is suffering from a dearth of attention despite the

wide-scale denial that the 19 hijackers affiliated with Al Qaeda were

responsible for the attack. Recent revisionist history projects such as

“the Shell Game”, a novel expounding 9/11 conspiracy theory, and Loose

Change: Final Cut, whose creators promised a major theatrical release,

have failed quite notoriously to penetrate the mainstream in the ways

they had promised. Truther conferences and meet-ups are sparsely

attended, flagship web pages see their traffic falling precipitously,

and this summer when truth movement superstar Alex Jones took his

bullhorn down to a Barack Obama rally at the DNC, he was roundly mocked

and physically confronted by the audience before having his bullhorn

cord cut.

The contradiction, that the conspirational explanations for 9/11 enjoy a

certain popularity on the level of popular consciousness, but that the

core propagandists who have helped shift responsibility from the

Islamists are more and more ignored is intrinsic to “truth creation”,

the productive core of the truth movement, which constructs its

interpretation of reality and its relation to others. Despite some vain

posturing, this paranoid reality tends to fulfill its own prophecy: that

the state of affairs could never be changed.

---

Producing a “truth” fitting one’s preconceived notions is hard work:

history must be appropriated as a malleable form (a raw material) from

which historical contexts and logical implications are stripped away so

that the newly bare data can be given a specific interpretation. For the

conspirationists and their readers, this interpretation has to avoid a

whole third dimension of history in which the motive force of history

originates not exclusively in the political superstructure, but with the

mode of production that drives and shapes the actions of human society.

Truthers tend to position the asymmetric conflict between fundamentalist

militias and would-be superpowers as the handiwork of powerful cabals,

bankers, secret societies and militaries, organizations which supposedly

determine everything. Presented with such a scenario, we as listeners,

as potential sympathizers, find no sort of imminent subjectivity for us

to confront these phenomena. Their significance is after all anchored in

a political sphere divorced from the everyday life we experience in

capitalism: production, circulation and reproduction for the sake of the

capitalist economy. Instead of imagining how the events of September

11^(th) bear on our individual and collective activity in capitalist

society, the truthers invite us to find the “real criminals” and enter

into a forensic examination of their crimes.

To interpret September 11^(th) and other major catastrophes (like the

July 7^(th) 2005 bombings in London and the Iraqi civil war), truthers

tend to elevate certain portions of existing information as definitive

above the broader contexts that surround it, orienting particular facts

into a new package. Take for instance the conspirationist claim that

sulfur content detected in the wreckage of the twin towers meant that

thermite, an incendiary, was used in a controlled demolition of the

towers. In fact, the considerable sulfur residue found by investigators

is just as attributable to the preponderance of drywall built into both

towers, which contained significant amounts of sulfur. Since the average

person is ignorant of this, it becomes a talking point, despite

contradicting basic knowledge about the buildings’ collapse sites.

Conspirationists want to attract attention by using information that has

been cut up to sound scandalous and terrible, despite the actual

explanation being entirely mundane. Often, the newly re-related facts

are deceptively phrased as “unanswered questions” to dodge immediate

logical contradictions about their larger contexts. The new commodity is

controversial: it asks the questions that haven’t been asked, or are

simply frowned upon by unpopular leaders. Yet even as a question these

claims are delicate, most incapable of surviving an empirical

investigation, let alone logical deduction.

Consider “Find the Boeing”, the original truther flash movie/website

which invited the reader to believe that American Airlines flight 77 had

not actually hit the Pentagon.[1] The site was created by France-based

writer Thierry Meyssan (founding member of the so-called “Axis for

Peace”), whose book ironically titled The Big Lie popularized

allegations of a faked Pentagon attack and has been translated into 28

languages. His photo series cherry picks visuals of the exterior wall of

the Pentagon after American Airlines flight 77 had impacted and asks the

viewer leading questions like: “Can you find debris of a Boeing 757–200

in this photograph?” or “Can you explain why the Defence Secretary

deemed it necessary to sand over the lawn, which was otherwise undamaged

after the attack?” (respectively: no, most of the debris was inside the

building, and trucks and vehicles which would haul this debris out of

the building had to have something to drive on). The goal is to provoke

doubt and allude to conclusions but at the same time avoid commitment.

Meyssan wants to state what he thinks, he wants to say what is taboo,

but he refuses the accountability of a definitive statement to let you

mouth conclusions that are his own. Thierry Meyssan is just asking

questions.[2]

The “inquiry” only succeeds in its limited capacity by sealing off the

crime scene, by capturing it in two dimensions outside of the logical

inconsistencies which would invalidate it. Inconsistencies like: why

would the government fake an attack on the Pentagon in the first place?

If the World Trade Center attacks were “inside jobs”, why go to the

trouble of taking the passengers out somewhere in favor of a missile?

What would a missile add to anything? What happened to American Airlines

flight 77 and its passengers..? Since Meyssan only presents images that

tend towards the conspiratorial explanation, many viewers at the time

assumed that these were the only pictures that exist of the crash scene

(of course they are not).[3] But the contradictions in logic and

evidence did not hinder the appeal of the page; in fact Find the Boeing

has enjoyed millions of hits. The “documentary” Loose Change followed,

as well as a bevy of other September 11^(th) conspirationist movies and

books.

Similar to a card game hustle on the street, one way conspirationists

manage to sell their theories is by appealing to the absolute authority

of one’s own senses. Take this conversation between a skeptic and a

conspiracy theorist in 2007 at Ground Zero, where the WTC towers once

stood:[4]

“So, you wanna know why the towers collapsed, and why World Trade Center

7 came down. How many structural engineers have you contacted to find

out this information?”

“No no no. Look I can tell you that I’ve read books, I’ve watched

videos, I’ve listened to mp3s, I’ve read a lot of articles, I’ve done as

much research as I possibly can, for myself using my brain, my heart and

my common sense.”

Truthers appeal to their viewers’ sense of imminent rationality,

claiming that no event is explicable beyond someone’s concrete ability

to perceive it. In the two-dimensional world of video analysis and

“unanswered questions”, the audience is invited to find their

subjectivity as impartial judges of events that pass before them.

Certainly this goes beyond September 11^(th). Any act of political

violence is fair game for being a “false flag operation” with enough

imagination and cut-up Internet “research”. All it takes to negate the

Islamist massacres of 9/11, the Bali bombings, the sectarian civil war

in Iraq and more is shoddy “video analysis” and hand-waving about

undetectable intelligence agencies conspiring to achieve the aims of

their governments. Multifaceted conflicts with a material class and

social reality are wished away with the same perverse pleasure that

children take in telling their friends that Santa Claus does not exist.

Believers find themselves in a vague limbo where no action can be

attributed as the satisfied work of fundamentalists, and society is

dominated by a pitiless ruling class, capable of killing anyone and

getting away with anything. This is an interpretation of reality that is

much more stable than actually existing class society, in which ruling

classes really have to struggle to retain legitimacy vis-à-vis the

working classes due to the miserable dispossession inevitable to

capitalism. Conflict is relativized to the perceptions of the conspiracy

theorist: in his world there is only the super-state and its duped

subjects. Any world event is appropriated as evidence of what is already

assumed. In this way, truthers can avoid traumatic encounters with the

wider context of logic and evidence around a particular event and

preserve their world view.

Many believed what they wanted to believe: that the Islamic

fundamentalists, who were not real prior to September 11^(th) and only

faintly so afterwards, didn’t have to be real after all. The martyr

ideology didn’t have to be comprehended and so what about their

motivations; these fundamentalist phantoms were only illusions, or

puppets hiding the real perpetrators. Inside job theories came to be the

easiest way out for the average person wanting to escape the new reality

where America had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. The Jihadist attacks

which started it all were just a bad trip.

The reasoning behind September 11^(th) truth conspiracy requires a

closed, two-dimensional world, in which the concept of contingency, i.e.

that uncertainty is inevitable in any still system, does not enter into

play. Truthers refuse to accept the convergence of security

vulnerabilities and Jihadist intent which constitute the random element

of the September 11^(th) events, instead insisting on finding

connections among the various ‘coincidences’.

In their movie, all characters are targets for the audience’s suspicion,

no object is throwaway and any coincidence necessarily hints at the

binds which hold the leviathan conspiracy together. Truthers have worked

hard to conceptualize September 11^(th) in this light, as a closed

event, as a soap opera. Everyone involved is a suspect, from the group

Project for a New American Century to the firefighters at the World

Trade Center 7. Nothing is off limits; even the desperate final phone

calls of Flight 93 passengers to their families are pitilessly depicted

as “hoaxes” in order to edge out any doubt that “everything’s connected

man.” This still world; this air-conditioned theater has been emptied of

the random chaos of reality. It exists solely to provide what the peace

movement couldn’t: the comforting illusion that the Americans who did

not act against the security and imperialist state after 2001 were

merely duped.

---

The truth only needs to be disseminated to change the whole scenario,

this is the conclusion which drives the baptist style activism of the

conspirationists.

Take for instance the We Are Change organization, whose members take

pride in their surreal Maoist-esque confrontations and denunciations of

supposed “collaborators” such as Larry Silverstein (the owner of World

Trade Center 7), Lee Hamilton (vice-chairman of the 9/11 commission) and

many others. We Are Change activists make it a point to go to public

speeches to heckle and deride their target from the auditorium, or try

to catch them off guard with a random bit of September 11^(th) trivia

which causes the target to stumble. This is all captured on video and

uploaded to the web.

What could appear to be a confrontation against the powerful, or brave

men shattering the passivity of the audience is anything but. When he

rises from his seat for this brave confrontation, the denouncer knows

that were the “conspirator” truly capable of organizing an international

plot to engineer the September 11^(th) attacks, they would also be

capable of making the denouncer disappear with no questions asked.

However, this is the very contradiction that ensures the reproduction of

the truth movement. The “heroic” act is just as necessary as the

paranoiac propagandizing about an all powerful state. In finding their

concrete target for denunciation, truthers openly acknowledge the

falsehood of their own “theory” in their own actions. However what would

otherwise be a painful admission of flawed thinking is ironically what

sells it. A semblance of activity in public is all it takes to lend

legitimacy to the dream factories online. There’s no real desire for

debate here. Most public “truth” performance is oriented towards the

listener and need only be long enough to shout out a website or

reference an Internet movie to keep the game moving.

If pressed, they are “just asking questions”. Pretending that they do

not already have foregone conclusions and are mere ‘truth seekers’ is

after all what has kept truthers marching in anti-war demonstrations and

allowed them a broad, if temporary, Internet audience. Still, the

truthers encounter another contradiction in that people quickly lose

patience with those constantly ‘asking questions’ to the wrong people:

namely not structural engineers and demolition professionals. A more

aggressive posture is needed, even if it contradicts the claims of

innocent inquiry. Thus at every truther rally we can hear the

self-assured chant that “9/11 was an inside job! 9/11 was an inside

job!“ This combination of fake skeptical inquiry with the joyous

certainty of their pornographic accusation keeps the truth movement

controversial even while adding to the stack of visible and laughable

contradictions within the milieu. But enough appeal is generated to

recruit the participants needed for its network experiment with

historical revision.

---

Anyone could be a producer, anyone could be a transmitter. For this

reason September 11^(th) conspiracy theories experienced a widespread

popularity. Free and accessible to anyone with a decent Internet

connection, the truth movement has even been described by some as an

anti-authoritarian network. Perhaps it has no central authority beyond

the token experts which produce its analysis, but there is certainly

what we may call a production structure here, one which relies on a

simulacra of classic capitalist production: “truths” are created with a

value created via collective labor, but this truth will lose its value

if it is not circulated. No listeners, no network. Similarly, the

hodgepodge of theories around the movement which roughly divide into

speculation about the two WTC towers, WTC 7, the Pentagon, Flight 93,

hijackers and Al Qaeda are capable of existing simultaneously

independent of each other as particular accusations and then coming

together as “the overwhelming evidence” often cited by conspirationists

to recruit the unprepared. If one theory fails, another is there to take

its place, not dissimilar to a capitalist division of labor.

Truthers would probably explain their own evangelism with the idea of

broadening the network of “truth-seekers” to carry on the forensic

battle, perhaps even recruiting in the crass sense. But actually the

need to recruit at all costs stems from the vulnerability of their

theory to source and fact checking. This in turn leads them to feign

legitimacy in science and forensics long enough to attract those already

ideologically predisposed to their belief system. Here truthers avoid

staking ground in any particular configuration of facts, nor producing a

coherent theory compatible with the existing eyewitness testimony, the

physical evidence and the reports of engineering organizations like that

of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Instead, the

truth movement wins what credibility they have by distributing their

distortions as far as possible and creating a false consensus, by

remaining in motion and asking the same answered “unanswered” questions

to people who simply haven’t heard them. This way, whenever a skeptic

thoroughly disproves certain claims (for example, that the phone calls

of passengers to their families were somehow faked via voice-morphing

technology) and the value of these “unanswered questions” is openly put

into question, the speculation survives because it can be shifted

elsewhere and taken up by others, somewhere else, who see some

rhetorical value in the memorization of conspirationist arguments and

now possess a thousand obscure factoids with which to unleash upon their

peers.

Born during the Internet streaming and downloadable video boom as well

as the explosion of blog-related media, these theories took a viral

form. This allowed even the most routinely debunked claims to survive

major debunkings thanks to network spread, since debates surrounding the

hard facts and core of the theories were not distributed in any

proportion to the claims themselves. Almost like a torrent or a file

sharing structure, as long as the films (Loose Change, 9/11 mysteries,

Zero etc.), manifestos, blog entries and so on survived, so did the

theory, because they could be re-transmitted to find new life with new

people. The core of initial conspiracy theorists whose “research” laid

down the tracks for the flagship allegations set up shop at the center

of a productive and distributive network which, once started, required

only a minimum of input from “researchers” due to the sheer popularity

of the conspiracy itself which was rooted in the political appeal of

negating the Al-Qaeda network, and in turn seven years of war. As long

as the “peers” are active in spreading and half-heartedly defending the

half-baked theories of the “seeds”, the truth commodities remain in

circulation. For their part, the more committed conspirationists at the

center like radio show host Alex Jones and the writer David Ray Griffin,

have multiplied their propaganda and demagoguery into small media

empires, staking real monetary interests in keeping the game moving.[5]

To keep information rotating and themselves in the public eye, truthers

deploy a wide variety of methods, anything from: Internet video, blogs,

“boosting” sites on search engines, spam relay machines, masking “truth”

movies as hot search items on Youtube and Google video, preaching 9/11

truth over Wal-mart intercoms (!) and even urging their readers to

“Trick or Truth” last Halloween (perhaps setting a record for sheer

asininity!). Like any pyramid scheme, the larger the pool of

participants and their perceived activity, the larger the pool of

perceived value; for the conspirators, the more hits on their Youtube

videos, the more people are behind them, the more their own

participation seems to acquire a deep meaning and even a messianic

importance.

Indeed, there seems to be no humiliation and no thorough debunking from

which the partisans of September 11^(th) denial cannot recover. While

certain deniers, such as the “Loose Change” crew of Dylan Avery, Jason

Bermas and friends have seen their stars decline due to boorish

ineptitude and plain-faced lies that thankfully did not go unnoticed, it

is true that a more general feeling that “9/11 was an inside job” is on

the rise. In this sense, the September 11^(th) attacks approach a sort

of urban legend status. Nowhere is this more true than in countries

without access to information that would contest these claims. There,

even ideas openly derided by veteran conspirationists, for example that

no plane hit the Pentagon, are picked up and run with by those looking

to focus popular resentment against America into political gain, or

publishers working on the profit motive and willing to overlook the

plausibility of these claims. Case in point, Yukihisa Fujita, a Japanese

Diet member from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan recently

caused a great stir when he argued against permitting the Japanese Self

Defense Force to provide fuel for the NATO mission in Afghanistan by

citing “evidence” that 9/11 was possibly an inside job. Using visuals

hardly more sophisticated than Google and Youtube movies, Fujita cast

doubt on whether a 757 really hit the Pentagon, described the collapse

of World Trade Center 7 as “strange” and speculated on stock deals right

before the attack. For his performance, he received adulations from

other diet members and of course from conspirationists all over the

world. Fujita is only exceptional in being one of the first politicians

to raise the lukewarm conspirationist points into an institution of

government. Previously of course these theories had mostly appeared in

organs of reaction like Al Manar, the American Free Press, the Tehran

Times etc., meeting with little controversy in traditionally

anti-American areas. Fujita’s example shows the potential for how these

theories can be used in helping ruling class factions politically shift

away from the American superpower.

---

It is not only the deceptive nature of truth production and circulation

within the movement that have come to define it. Many of the activists

who have helped shape “9/11 truth” are partisans of the fascist right,

veterans of manipulating information and history. We can see their

contributions in many of the obsessions of the “truth movement”. For

instance the accusations that Jewish financier Larry Silverstein blew up

an entire building to destroy documents a paper shredder would have made

short work of, the suspicion that a van full of celebrating Israelis

were orchestrators of the attacks as well as the crude anti-Zionism and

anti-semitism of sites like Whatreallyhappened, Rense.com and

Antiwar.com.[6]

Certainly a hard core of conspirationists had existed in nuclei in

variously libertarian, gun-clutching, anti-semitic and white supremacist

guises before the events of 9/11, cutting their teeth on conspiracy

theories surrounding the Oklahoma City bombings. Although there is a

more acceptable face on the 9/11 theories now in the person of

scientists, professors and right-wing politicians, it remains true that

the hard right put in a lot of leg work to deny the role of the 19

hijackers.[7] People like Christopher Bollyn, Eric Williams, Eric

Hufschmid and Carol A. Valentine as well as the American Free Press as a

publication were all instrumental to developing the initial crop of 9/11

conspiracy theories. All of them are vocal holocaust deniers and

obsessive anti-Zionists. Thanks to their work, core 9/11 conspiracy

theory beliefs such as: the basement bombs theory, Mossad involvement,

the shoot-down of flight 93, remote controlled planes, the Bin Laden

video hoax, doubts about hijacker Hani Hanjour’s piloting skills and

many claims of evidence fakery etc. were popularized on blogs and around

the Internet.[8] Holocaust deniers have been active participants in the

“truth” movement since its genesis, and today it is no surprise that

many white supremacist and Islamist groups promote theories that center

around Jewish or Israeli involvement in the attacks.

Take for instance the case of former peace activist and founder of

“Citizens for 9/11 Truth”, Steve Campbell. Over local public access

television in Aspen, Colorado, Campbell broadcast standard 9/11

conspiracy theory that eventually moved into holocaust denial and

anti-Semitic screeds.[9] Although the grassroots community access

channel looked the other way when Campbell aired films about “Zionists”

planning 9/11, it was only when his connections with Neo-Nazis,

including the National Alliance, came to light that the channel’s

executive board debated whether his show should be taken off the air.

Defending himself, Campbell claimed that “I think there’s a lot of

preconceived ideas that have been indoctrinated into people’s minds as

to what the Holocaust is all about. Showing the film would give people

an opportunity to decide for themselves.” Campbell’s show was taken off

the air, but his defense illustrates the scandalous logic of the 9/11

truth movement taken to its most obvious conclusion: history is a

laissez-faire market, a perfectly flat venue of ideas that are all

equally plausible. We can all buy into the fantasies we prefer and

“decide for ourselves.”

No matter their relation to the movement now (many have been pushed to

the fringes), for this wing of the movement and for Steve Campbell, it

was an important foray into the public. Their way of thinking — paranoid

anti-Semitism — was preserved in structure and spread to hundreds of

thousands of people worldwide.

Professor of theology David Griffin has been one of the more influential

authors churning the truth cash machine, putting out several books on

September 11^(th) “unanswered questions” including The New Pearl Harbor.

This book is enough of a flagship to have helped him create a cottage

industry of paid lectures and book writing (seven since 2004), despite

being repeatedly embarrassed for his outrageous claims that cell phone

calls from hijacked victims to their families were faked.[10] Griffin

cannot seem to put an article or book out which does not include quotes

or attributions to holocaust denier Christopher Bollyn, the anti-semitic

rense.com, the American Free Press, World Net Daily or other reactionary

right-wing journals. Mainly Griffin’s dependence on these sources is due

to the fact that these people pioneered the conspiracy “research” to

begin with and there are often simply no other sources around! This

August, Griffin brought the “truth” to Tennesee-based “the Political

Cesspool”, an avowedly “pro-white” radio show.

In terms of sheer reaction, Alex Jones is perhaps the best example of a

propagandist who combines “real” American nationalism, anti-immigrant

sentiment and anti-communism with 9/11 truth activism. The catch-all

conspirationist and populist radio host believes among other things that

the world government (run by bankers) is ready to kill 80% of humanity

to save on oil and that “globalism” is a tool of the global elite to

break down the nation state.[11] Outside of his fiery propaganda

speeches against the new world order which resemble the ranting of

professional wrestlers, Jones directs much of his ire at immigrants, in

one video accusing Latino high school groups in the United States of

“openly planning to kill all white males over the age of 16.”[12] There

is also Kevin Barrett, former professor of Islamic history and rather

vocal “truther”, who is published in the questionable “Journal of 9/11

studies” and describes himself as a “Scholar for 9/11 truth”. Barrett

has described the Iraq war as a “Nazi-style war of aggression” waged by

the US and Zionists against the Iraqi people, actively apologizes for

both Hezbollah and Hamas in their war on Israel and made sure to stand

up for holocaust deniers when their attendance was threatened at an

Arizona “truth” conference in early 2007.

With this elite group of originators and propagandists, it is no shock

that figureheads of anti-enlightenment reaction such as Malaysian Prime

Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, who believes Jews run the world by

“proxy” and who banned the New York Philharmonic from performing in

Malaysia because they play “Jewish music”, as well as Mahmoud

Ahmedinejad, the plainspoken propagandist for a “final war” with Israel,

have hopped on the truth bus as well. Ahmedinejad writes in an open

letter to President Bush:

“September eleven was not a simple operation...Could it be planned and

executed without coordination with intelligence and security services –

or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated

guess...Why have the various aspects of the attacks been kept secret?

Why are we not told who botched their responsibilities? And, why aren’t

those responsible and the guilty parties identified and put on trial?

All governments have a duty to provide security and peace of mind for

their citizens.”

To which the Alex Jones-affiliated and widely-read Prison Planet “issued

a challenge to leaders of all ‘rogue states’ imploring them to blow the

whistle on the Achilles heel of all major western government’s, their

propensity to fulfill geopolitical agendas by means of carrying out

staged false flag terrorism…It is now time for all governments who still

operate outside of the control of the Globalists to come forward and

join humanity in unveiling the real terrorists who are attempting to

deform the world into a prison planet.’”[13] And so the “freedom

fighters” of the 9/11 truth movement stand together with the worst

totalitarians in the world in a struggle aimed at the “globalists.”

---

The left for its part seems to have largely contented itself with tacit

toleration of 9/11 conspiracy theory. Truthers seem welcome at anti-war

protests, with only scattered accounts of confrontations.[14] Major

“progressive” radio stations like Air America, KPFK and KPFA have given

a great deal of airtime to truth movement figureheads. Given the large

support base of the reactionary right within truther groups, one would

expect people fighting for a better world to show extreme skepticism and

even outrage against these falsifications of history. However, like

Counterpunch’s Alexander Cockburn observed back in 2006:

“Five years after the attacks, 9/11 conspiracism has now penetrated deep

into the American left... These days a dwindling number of leftists

learn their political economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist

groupuscules. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a

diffuse, peripatic conspirationist view of the world that tends to

locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation,

or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in

locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly

“rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11

“conspiracy”, or “inside job”, is the Summa of all this

foolishness.”[15]

In the same magazine, the writer Joann Wypijewski observes in her

article “How Far We’ve Fallen” that:

“Here was the ultimate failure of politics, translated, Go to your room,

alone, immerse yourself in ephemera, alone, meet others just like

yourselves so you can talk endlessly about this or that loose end lately

discovered in your hours of isolation in front of the screen.”[16]

With no vocally progressive movements in either Iraq or Afghanistan

waiting “in the wings” like the Vietcong of the 1960s or the Sandanistas

of the 1980s etc., parts of the left have begun to circle the drain and

replace the search for a heroic other abroad with the search for an evil

other within. The task of transforming the life we experience everyday,

which carries within it the violent exploitation and expropriation

propping up the inter-imperialist conflict remains quite remote.

Despite the wider tendency to casually accept these theories, both

Counterpunch and Znet have made admirable efforts to debunk and expose

their reactionary logic. However most on the left simply don’t feel like

burrowing into engineering textbooks to defend their interpretation of

political economy and stand up to September 11^(th) denial. The backwash

of cultural relativism has led to a sort of reality relativism: what do

we really know? Who are we to say? Let’s just avoid the uncomfortable

schisms. Liberals, anti-imperialists and the reactionary right can all

find common ground in skipping over an analysis of Jihadist martyrism to

preserve a simpler world view: the neo-conservative take-over. For those

in the left who avoid a structural analysis of society and a real

engagement with history, it’s easier this way.

---

Despite their success in contributing to the shift to a paranoid “mood”

amongst the public at large, these are hard times for the activist core

of “truth” movement. Rallies and conferences meant to galvanize the

public are sparsely attended, and the actual amount of material from

which to draw new “unanswered questions” from has been severely

depleted. Conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, chemtrails, the

North American Union etc. are new attractions that are easier to believe

in than the “hard science” and obscurantist justifications for 9/11

conspiracy theory. Certainly, shuffling around the old lies with new

varnish will work for awhile. As long as movement leaders focus on

trivia and make sure not to address larger contexts or logic, a certain

core of enthusiasts will be able to justify their interest, and serve as

new consumers of old conservative ideologies. But there is an entropic

principle at work on the truth network that spins a thousand claims,

eventually the facts catch up, no matter how large the circle is spun.

The truth movement’s slow circling of wagons and the retreat by many

activists from definitive controlled demolition claims into vague

speculation about internal government conspiracies which allowed the

attacks to happen indicates a forfeiture in the realm of public appeal

and an effort to preserve the continuity of only a core audience.

Whether this forebodes a discrediting of the movement is less clear due

to the widespread and insipid acceptance of certain conspiracy theory

memes.

Meanwhile, these ideologies wreak havoc among the gullible and those in

countries without access to debunking resources, wearing away at the

very imminence of contingency. Reality is deconstructed, relayed,

reassembled in networks that still see their raison d’être in denying

the possibility for 19 dedicated fundamentalists to change history.

Believers will trade a world which they do not try to comprehend for a

world which they have built to be perfectly consistent. This is more

dangerous than the casual subscribers to the conspiracy theorists

imagine. With 9/11 theories, the believer forgoes a critique of existing

conditions in favor of assuming the audience’s position as passive judge

for political events that pass before the eye. This demobilization

imagines away the lives and sheer will of Mohammed Atta, Hani Hanjour

and the other death squad members, as well as the training camps which

made their carnage possible. In denying the power of a small group of

men to overpower four planes and use them as suicide weapons, conspiracy

adherents wind up denying the possibility for uncontrolled action, for

unpredictability. They forfeit acknowledging subjectivities that

organize destruction for their own ends (no matter how barbarous)

despite a tight security environment, in favor of an ideology where

contingency is abolished, the security state is the only frame of

reference and you and I are mere subjects to be destroyed.

So far, the all-powerful ruling class that controls everything has not

managed to produce a stable Iraqi state and the US now enters imperial

brinkmanship with Russia, Iran and Venezuela over resources. In America,

the list of major bank collapses grows: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bear

Stearns, Lehman Brothers. As the imminent recession approaches, it will

be rising taxes and massive cuts in social spending that fill the gap

left by bank bailouts. This means that in a period where working class

people are more and more subject to ruthless exploitation, they will

nevertheless have to organize their activity even though they may see

little hope of revolution. In this struggle, paranoia about the

super-state and its invincibility must be the first trash out the

window. The working class is that contingent element in capitalism which

defies the iron laws of history. Its partisans will have to defend the

sudden and violent transformation of reality tooth and nail against the

conspirationist faithful who deny not only its realization, but its very

possibility!

[1]

www.asile.org

[2] This practice is referred to by many in the skeptic community as

‘JAQing off’.

[3] See photos on this page for instance:

wtc7lies.googlepages.com

[4] These claims are summarily debunked at

wtc7lies.googlepages.com

and other debunking pages. One must add that there is a particular

cruelty in denying that the last words heard from a loved one were faked

“by voice-morphing” technology. Especially coming from people trying to

downplay the heroism of those who fought back against the Al-Qaeda

hijackers intent on killing all of them.

[5]

youtube.com

[6] Even now, at Alex Jones’ Prison Planet we can find an appeal to

raise $80,000 for a “money bomb” to get Jones a satellite television

show. The slogan reads: “The sleeping masses see television as truth.

Let us prove them correct.”

[7] See “9/11 Truth is a bald regurgitation of a silly tale we heard ten

years ago” by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone,

www.rollingstone.com

[8]

911guide.googlepages.com

[9]

adamholland.blogspot.com

[10] Some of the idiocies behind his claims are debunked here, on a

truther website of all places!

www.oilempire.us

[11] Some of the idiocies behind his claims are debunked here, on a

truther website of all places!

www.oilempire.us

[12]

youtube.com

[13]

prisonplanet.com

[14] One funny example of truthers being confronted at an anti-war

protest is the conflict between supporters of Iraq War Resisters and the

Toronto Truthers in which two surly war resisters mock the hamster wheel

‘truth’ arguments. Videos here:

forums.randi.org

[15] “The 9/11 conspirationists and the Decline of the American Left”,

worth reading for Cockburn’s sharp-tongued deconstruction of the truth

movement:

www.counterpunch.org

[16]