In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and alternative media have been replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.
These critiques have ranged from mild to harsh, and have covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their disastrous consequences and killing fields. Many of these articles have emphasized how, as a result of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the U.S. has lost its footing and brought on the demise of the American empire and its standing in the world. Some writers celebrate this and others bemoan it. Most seem to consider this inevitable.
This flood of articles has been authored by writers from across the political spectrum from the left through the center to the right. All were outraged in their own ways, as such dramatic events typically manage to elicit much spilled ink informed by the writers’ various ideological positions in a media world where the categories of left and right have become meaningless.
These articles have included cries about phony tears for the wrong victims (those who died in the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and on the planes), how good intelligence could have prevented 9/11, how so many died in vain, how it all led to torture, how whistle blowers were not heeded, how the military was right, how the collapse of the towers led to the collapse of the American empire, how bin Laden won, how evil U.S. war making came home in the form of 9/11 evil, how the longest war was in vain, how the Pentagon received vast sums of money over the decades, how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a betrayal of the 9/11 victims, etc.
Many of the points made were valid; others were not. This flood of opinionated outrage was very emotional and no doubt stirred deep feelings in readers. It fed on the widespread feeling in the country that something dreadful has occurred, but what it is isn’t exactly clear. The sense of mass confusion and continual disaster permeating the air and infecting people’s daily lives. The sense of unreality existing everywhere.
These articles have almost run their course and a new series of post mortems can be anticipated as fear and trembling attaches to new matters, particularly the ongoing Covid-19 fear porn minus the dire consequences of government policies. Fear is the name of the game and untruth snakes through the media hidden in the grass of truth. Many of the articles I referred to above – and you can check for yourself as I have purposely left out names and links – contain truths, but truths that disguise deeper untruths upon which the truths are allegedly based. I will leave the logic lesson to you.
Since many of these articles have been penned by liberal writers, some of whom one might naively expect to grasp essentials, and since those further to the right are considered defenders of Pax Americana, I will quote the outspoken anti-war singer/songwriter Phil Ochs, who prefaced his trenchant 1965 song, Love Me I’m a Liberal, with these words about logic:
In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
So here’s the rub about the logic. Almost without exception (there are a handful of truthful writers aside from those I am here referring to, such as Kit Knightly, Michel Chossudovsky, Pepe Escobar, et al.), from the left to the right and everywhere in between, the authors of all these articles about the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and Afghanistan have based their points on a false premise.
A false premise. This is the way minds are shaped in the era of mass propaganda and servile journalism. Assume (or make believe) something is true despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and build from there. Slip in this premise or background assumption as if it were truer than true. This is what has happened throughout the media in the last two weeks. It is not new but worth pointing out.
The false premise is this: That 9/11 was a terror attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as blow-back for American wars against Muslims, and this terror attack on the U.S. led to the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
The evidence is overwhelming that this premise is false. In fact, the evidence makes clear that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag attack, carried out by sinister forces within the government of the United States with a little help from certain foreign junior partners to justify its subsequent war crimes across the globe. I will not explore here the ample evidence concerning 9/11, for it is readily available to readers who have the will to look. Even the use of the shorthand – 9/11 for the events of September 11, 2001 – that I have used here for brevity’s sake, is a crucial part of the linguistic propaganda used to frighten and to conjure up thoughts of an ongoing national emergency, as I have written elsewhere.
One is not supposed to say that the mass murders of September 11, 2001 were a false flag attack, for it touches a realty that is so disturbing in its consequences that all the hand wringing post mortems must deny: That nearly three thousand innocent people in the U.S. had first to be murdered as a pretext for killing millions around the world. It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic. American innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema.
It is another example of the unspeakable, as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said long ago and James W. Douglass referenced in his monumental book, JFK and the Unspeakable, to explain why John Kennedy died at the hands of the CIA and why that fact had to be suppressed. The mass murders of September 11, 2001 recapitulate that systemic evil that defies speech.
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…
From true writers and journalists we should expect something better – that they don’t repeat official declarations, utter hollow platitudes, and build analyses on false premises – but these are not the best of times, to rephrase Ochs, and safe logic keeps one’s legitimacy intact and protects one’s brand.
It’s always personal when it comes to the unspeakable.
Thank you. From the morning that “it” happened I had never believed the “story” we were told of 9/11/2001 but I always felt I was alone in that belief. Certainly everyone I knew, all my friends, bought the story. I kept my mouth shut out. Because I didn’t know who might turn on me…
That scene of government officials holding hands singing kumbaya made me sick to my stomach. It was all so staged and phoney. Even now I cringe. The only thing 9/11 means to me is that it is my Bestie’s birthday. That is all it will EVER mean to me.
The last 18 months, likewise, have meant little to me. From day one I never bought the lies. Fortunately, my close friends are of like minds on this one. Thank Goddess.
It’s always SOMETHING, isn’t it? Always something…Shock Doctrine (I’m reading it right now). Fear-mongering. Fear Porn (I like that one). Basically I don’t believe anything that’s being told to us.
Probably a smart way to live.
Thanks Ed, your essays are always a reassurance that I am not going crazy.
I am trying my hand at blogging and got an essay posted at this odd website. My reflection on the 20th anniversary was to take note of how the story about September 11th, and implicitly about those who doubt the official narrative, is that they are responsible in an indirect way for the January 6th riot. Talk about twisting truth and living in an Orwellian age.
Check it out; fyi; again, thanks for your work.
https://conspiracytheorem.exposed/blog-posts/
chuck fall
“It’s always personal when it comes to the unspeakable”.
Thank you Ed. As always your thinking and writing finds a path to the heart of things. The very personal “unspeakable” that my wife and I now find ourselves facing (along with countless others no doubt) is that although we will never consent to taking the “vaccines” ourselves, we are now increasingly fearful that our 4-year-old and 6-year-old grandsons will be required by school authorities to take them at some point, and that their parents will be forced into the impossible dilemma of both working from home full-time (way more than 40 hours per week), but not being able to send them to school if unvaccinated.
Perhaps it will be the clear selfless love we feel as grandparents that will coalesce we old folks into an unyielding spearpoint of resistance to this madness. I am not quick to anger Ed, but the thought of these monstrous forces willfully harming the children is more than I can bear. It is truly “unspeakable.” LA schools have already mandated age 12 and up vaccination, so we know where this is going.
Homeschool?
A timely case in point… Oliver Stone…
https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/534860-oliver-stone-defends-biden-afghanistan-withdrawal/
“It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic. American innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema.” Yes, so sadly true, which is why the World Trade Center Atrocity remains THE loose thread capable of unraveling, against all odds, the staged deep state takeover of American government which Ed has clearly and convincingly explained, a takeover which began at least as early as the 1963 assassination of JFK. Ed and I disagree (and it’s a source of great pain) about the pandemic being the latest orchestrated event in this sinister series of “unspeakables,” but he will always be for me the first one I go to to more fully understand what happened to my country and the world during my lifetime. Has a single generation, during whose watch ecocidal, imperial neoliberalism triumphed, ever done more damage to their country and their world by complacency and complicity? Despite our youthful antiwar/anti-racism “radicalism,” the system we condemned on campus cut us in and bought us off…at least those of us, unlike Ed, who are now looking around for a second vacation home or planning the next cruise.
More false premises buried in the glut of covid fear porn: the efficacy of face masks, the accuracy of the PCR test, that “cases” equal actual instances of illness, to name a few. The biggest false premise is that the powers-that-be actually give a rat’s ass about the former citizens (now subjects), all frozen in fear and lusting for the shot. I walk around saying, Why did they suddenly start caring about us? Or is it about creating a new class of Big Pharma billionaires? People wave me off like I’m a lunatic.
If you had a beloved uncle (named Sam), whom you always considered a most decent guy, who’s become in your mind like a second father, how would you react to some guy who claimed to have hidden evidence that your beloved uncle was a mass murderer? Isn’t that what the Truth Movement has been up against, at least with so many in the generation now leaving us (up Shit Creek)?
A friend of mine has used a writer’s position on the great false flag of 2001 as a litmus test of whether it is worth reading them or not. It seems a fair way of determining how much of what they say could be valuable, though it is a blunt instrument.
People who otherwise seem to be telling the truth, but omit or distort the 2001 events seem to fall into the gatekeeper category. There are some good writers who are spot on about US imperialism and love bombs, but who totally avoid certain subjects like this one. It could be that they don’t want to scare off some of their readers or lose their platform, but ultimately, they lose credibility as part of the solution.
James Corbett uses it as one way to judge whether alleged whistleblowers are the real deal. I’m not sure if it is both Snowden and Assange who have made statements in support of the official fairy-tale or just one of them. If one of them did not, I must apologize, though Corbett has doubts about both of them – and I should go and research further just what those are based on, since I bring up the subject
Personally, I am struck by the name Snowden in the context of a whistleblower, as Snowden was a character in Catch-22 who was wounded in a military plane hit by flak and who “spilled his guts” when his uniform was opened. But that of course does not discredit the current Snowden, who due to his location in Russia might also be cold.
(But regardless of whether the two are genuinely what they appear to be, no one should be happy about the treatment they are allegedly getting, or the message that sends to journalists – a message many are clearly getting.)
But every year we are regaled by what is mostly disgusting humbug (at the risk of being visited by the ghost of 9/11 past) on the anniversary, as of course accompanies several other dates elevated due to their importance to the American myth, usually relating to victims of the also mythic “lone gunman”.
So it is wonderful to see you, Ed, as you have done for so long, expand on the subject in an honest and interesting way – and sans the void.
Great comment. Did you see Glenn Greenwald’s big story on the 20th anniversary of 9/11?
“What Happened With the Tumultuous Pro-Bolsonaro Protest in Brazil? Plus: a Rumble Update”
Apparently that was the most important story that weekend.
Regarding Snowden, etc…Webster Tarpley has had some unsavory things to say about Snowden’s Damascus Road conversion. He doesn’t believe the guy who said “conspiracy theorists should be shot in the nuts” (or something similar) to have changed his opinion so suddenly and drastically. He calls the Greenwald/Snowden/Assange clan a limited hangout. Not sure if I agree, since I’m a fairly big fan of all three…but his arguments seemed sound.
Thanks, Andy. I’m pretty sure Corbett would lump Greenwald into the same category. I believe the thought is that Wikileaks was/is used to draw in potential whistleblowers and control what was published. I need to look up this stuff on thecorbettreport.com and remember what exactly he was saying about them.
It’s difficult to discern sometimes whether someone is legitimate, and you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Often people have some good information, but stop short of reporting the whole story. It pays to be vigilant and not take for granted that people are what they seem to be.
It makes sense the PTB would plant some controlled opposition and that those people would be elevated in the public consciousness as “the whistleblowers”, and that real whistleblowers would get no publicity. Part of the reason these people are suspect is that what they reveal is stuff that researchers knew or that was actually public information, just not publicized until elevated by these guys.
My mind is not totally made up on any of them, but since their stories are part of the current popular zeitgeist, I think it makes sense to take them with a grain of salt.
What we can learn from them is that the popular press is cowed where issue of free speech are concerned.
As a classic liberal (believer in very limited government and strong individual rights derived from our common humanity), I applaud you, Mr. Curtin :).
“It’s always personal when it comes to the unspeakable”.
Yes, Buto theater…
Thank you Edward. Take care.