There is this notion I seem to see quite often from people who are opposed to the efforts of the movement not because of any factual interpretation, but because for some 9/11 is just a distant memory. I've always remembered this article in the local paper back in 2007 that had a story on the 9/11 Truth Movement, and in part of it a guy goes up to the activist and says "Dude, it was six YEARS ago. Get over it!"
With another two and a half years gone by since then, that attitude has been more noticeable in several people. It's a psychological phenomenon I don't quite understand. To say that each passing day without progress is discouraging and upsetting would be an understatement. Yes, it can be a real pain in the ass having to fight rampant disinformation and poorly thought-out promotional strategies within our own movement while STILL trying to get our points to the public. It's distressing to watch people doing their angry bullhorning on the streets, or saying the Jews were part of 9/11, or snapping at anyone who disagrees with them instead of trying to rationally persuade them. Yet, despite all the fighting and the difficulty in progress it leads to, I have never lost my will to fight for this cause.
Personally, I don't consider 9 years a particularly long time when it comes to something like the murder of 3,000 people. Certainly not 6. But that's beside the point. Is it just lost on the people we're talking to? The gravity of the situation? We give them evidence of government complicity, and the counter-response isn't a retort, but simply a complaint that it was too long ago for them to care. I just don't get it.
You know, from when Rosa Parks made her stand on a bus to when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it too just under nine years. It took another four years for the extension bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, to be passed. But what if neither bill had been passed by 1968? Do you think they would have stopped? How many hundreds of political issues are discussed and debated daily by the public because it's a subject they feel truly passionate about? And how is seeking accountability for the deaths of 3,000 citizens any different from that? Is that not a cause to rally around?
The culture we live in today seems to thrive on the joy of not caring about anything meaningful. As we watch our freedom slowly die over the years we are happy to ignore it and say "Well, what am I supposed to do?" We can watch videos of people being tased and consider it funny. I remember my high school years very well. I remember the talks I had with my peers. Some would listen, I knew some people who knew how to take serious issues seriously. But most people opted instead for "Nobody cares, Kamen." And why not? Why is it suddenly "cool" to not care? Why is it a pest when someone is talking about something that has an IMPACT on this country. Well, some of us still love the liberty this country was founded on, and some of us believe that there SHOULD be a REAL investigation into the attacks. Some of us believe the people are entitled to the truth. Some of us will never stop fighting.
Still think it's long gone? 9/11, it happened, so what? Alright, then conduct yourself an experiement. Go and look for Lorie Van Auken, or Kisten Breitweiser, or anyone else who lost a loved one in the attacks who is fighting for an independent investigation. Go find them and say, "It was 9 years ago. Get over it." Could you? Would you have the courage to stick to your inane criticisms? Because that wouldn't be courage. It would be cowardice. Cowardice that you'd rather sweep it under the rug and forget about it than fight for the pursuit of justice.
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Where's your film? It's been nearly a year.
ReplyDelete"from when Rosa Parks made her stand on a bus to when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it too just under nine years"
ReplyDeleteThat's not really a valid comparison. With regards to the issues of the Civil Rights Movement, the basic facts were all agreed upon openly by everyone. There was never a dispute about whether or not Jim Crow Laws actually existed in the South. Some people defended those laws by claiming that it was for the good of the nation that different races should be kept separate. But no one actually disputed the fact that such laws did exist for a time and were eventually repealed.
A better comparison with regards to 911 would be with the whole set of claims that circulated for many years charging that Roosevelt deliberately sabotaged the defenses at Pearl Harbor. Such a claim rests upom an interpretation of certain facts and an effort to extrapolate beyond the bare data to a rather specific hypothesis about Roosevelt having known enough to prevent the Pearl Harbor defeat and having deliberately avoided doing so. No such thesis open to historical dispute about such narrow questions was ever involved in the civil rights debate. So it's not the same.
The Pearl Harbor issue shows a lot of the pitfalls which 911-activists are subject to. As far as I can tell, it has never really been established that Roosevelt honestly had enough full information to avoid the Peark Harbor catastrophe and consciously sabotaged such an effort. It is granted by historians that Roosevelt was committed to an alliance with England against Germany long before Pearl Harbor. It's also clear that Roosevelt was deliberately using sanctions to pressure Japan with an expectation that this would probably lead to an eventual state of war. All of that invites a natural comparison to the way that Paul O'Neill has described Bush coming into office and looking for a way to go to war in Iraq, while plans for an eventual campaign in Afghanistan were on the drawing board before 911.
But despite that, no one has really succeeded in establishing that Roosevelt fully consciously engineered the Pearl Harbor defeat, and I doubt that anyone will. What's more likely is just that the yellow Asiatic Japanese were honestly underestimated at every level of the US command, from Roosevelt at the top down to Kimmel and Short at the bottom. I doubt that any new documentary revelations are going to contradict this point that 'we just underestimated the gooks' before Pearl Harbor. But that type of debate is clearly different from anything which was involved in the civil rights arguments.
"The culture we live in today seems to thrive on the joy of not caring about anything meaningful."
ReplyDeleteThat could describe truthers to a 'T.' I've heard that David Ray Griffin has been pushing the hijackers-still-alive story again lately. I can remember running across that old BBC story back in 2003 and taking it very seriously back then. At the time it seemed like a natural footnote to Colin Powell's UN presentation about Iraqi WMDs. It was easy to believe that they'd just lied about everything back then.
But I dropped the issue about living hijackers in 2005 when it became obvious that the 911-movement has been growing but was not making any real effort to investigate things more substantively. I've heard some people make fun of Kevin-the-clown Barrett because he supposedly went to the Mideast and attempted to track down some of these living hijackers. While Kevin-the-clown has done some goofier things, on this point he's fully correct.
If Griffin is going to be getting on Russia Today and giving interviews where he claims that some hijackers were still alive after 911, then Griffin has the responsibility to set about aiming to contact these alleged hijackers and interview them carefully so as to bring to light some new information beyond just an old BBC report. If 911-truthers were actually producing new substantive research of this type then that would be noteworthy enough to justify a continued interest in trutherism. But Griffin is just recycling the old BBC reports without doing such follow-up research. That approach shows a singular lack of seriousness by Griffin.