9/11 Five Years Later
An Assessment of the 9/11 Truth Movement

By Emanuel Sferios
Monday, Sep 11, 2006

--excerpt--

...But the World Trade Center demolition is obvious, which leads to an important question: why did they do it? Wouldn't simply crashing the planes into the buildings have been enough? Why bring them down completely? The typical responses here apply: They needed their "New Pearl Harbor," a mass casualty event to shock the public into supporting a retaliatory war. They also needed a spectacle that wouldn't be easily forgotten. These explanations are true enough. Another often cited and plausible one is that they needed to make the lie obvious enough that the people who mattered (government, corporate, and military leaders, for example) would know that they--the secret government within the government--did this and got away with it. This sends a powerful message of invincibility to anyone who might be thinking of opposing them. And the fact that they demolished building 7 later that evening in a classic-style demolition sure seems to support that argument. It's as if they were saying, "just in case you didn't get it the first time, we'll show you one even more obvious."

But there is another reason they demolished the World Trade Center towers, in my opinion the most important reason, which is that they needed the lie to be incredible. As Hitler and Goebbels understood, the bigger and more incredible the lie, the more people will believe it, because they will have to make a bigger psychological leap in order to disbelieve it. Mass manipulation of this kind plays on the natural desire many people have to conform, and it is much more difficult, psychologically, for the conforming individual to disbelieve a popularly-held incredible lie than a mundane one, for to do so would set one widely apart from the herd. To put this another way, imagine if they had merely crashed four planes into the ocean. How much easier it would be then for people to speculate that the government may have done this as a pretext for war. To do so would not require a really incredible contradiction of the official story, marginalizing oneself from the mainstream. It would not be so easy to dismiss such claims as "outrageous conspiracy theory," and ridicule would be less effective. What is important to remember here is that propaganda of this sort is not designed to fool critical thinkers, but to provide conforming individuals with a reason not to start thinking critically. Thus the total destruction of the World Trade Center in such a dramatic yet obvious way was, in my opinion, an essential, psychological component of the operation.

--snip--

9/11 was a pretext to launch the War on Terror, a war to control the world's remaining energy reserves in order to maintain the over-consumptive lifestyle that Dick Cheney insists is "not negotiable." And the War on Terror was conceived in response to peak oil, which threatens to end the current system of corporate greed, over-consumption and exploitation. That system requires ever-increasing amounts of material energy to continue, and peak oil is nothing less than the end of that increase. The War on Terror is, therefore, a war on "terra" to maintain the illusion of perpetual growth, the myth that over-consumption can go on forever. It is an extreme manifestation of the ego's desperate attempt to live forever, and it is doomed to fail. The earth is finite, and we cannot continue to to deplete its energy forever.

This can be seen as a crisis, which certainly it is, but it is only so in the sense that it demands a transformation of our political and economic systems, our consumption-based lifestyles, and our self-identities. As such it is also an opportunity, an opportunity to transcend our own greed, to face the truth of who we really are (interconnected with everyone else, and with the earth), and to make the necessary and inevitable sacrifices required of us. (Remember that sacrifice is not the giving up of the things we need. It is the giving up of the things we don't need, including our illusions.)

The neocons are so far unable to make this necessary transformation. They are trapped in the very system they have created, but there are those all across the planet who are trying, starting small and making some of the necessary sacrifices. People are struggling everywhere to create cooperative institutions of mutual aid and solidarity, to resist the forces of ignorance and greed. One needs look no further then the Bolivarian Revolution sweeping across Central and South America to understand this. And there are many people here in the US, as well, exerting the same efforts, implementing a powerdown strategy and working towards the re-localization of social and political institutions.

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(a follow-up of sorts to Golby's post)