Twenty years ago on 9/10/01 I felt anxious and a bit deranged towards the end of the day. The morning of 9/11/01 I was desperate, something was happening to me--I had nothing to be upset about yet I felt I was going crazy. I called in sick to work and my wife told me to focus on doing something that required no thought and she had a little project for me to do requiring me to go to the hardware store. There I saw people looking at a small TV that showed that a plane had just crashed into a WTC tower and figured it was an accident. The towers had been built specifically to weather a crash of the a Boeing 707 then the largest commercial plane so we had no idea what would happen next, certainly no one thought the buildings were in danger. Then shortly after that another plane hit the other tower and suddenly we knew some shit had hit the fan. I went home, I was concerned, but I was no longer going crazy nor did I feel anxious. I understood why I felt that way and I also knew everything would be different from now on.
Later, a plane hit the Pentagon in a very bizarre way and that was basically a fifteen minute drive from my house--what next I thought? For the next several days I was listening to C-Span radio and as many talk shows as I could. The basic theme of those few days was around this concept--what had we done to cause a suicide attack of that kind and the mood was not warlike. After about three days the tone changed to revenge and war and that has not changed to this day.
Over the next couple of years I researched the 911 events and quickly realized this national tragedy an apparent "attack" was clearly something very different. In the 90's I had read many articles by the suddenly emergent "neoconservative" movement that, in the publication, Rebuilding Americas Defenses by Project for the New American Century, counselled war as the only thing that could keep the USA whole and somewhat virtuous. The problem, they claimed, was that without a "mission", the country would sink into hedonism, and some form of tribalism. I believe the group was laying the groundwork for a structure of permanent war out in the open (the first time I think I saw the term "homeland" ascribed to the USA). I believed, based on my knowledge of the culture of the foreign policy and national security establishment that the 911 operation was set in motion somewhere in the early 90's when the neocons, who had hoped Bush I would have taken Baghdad during the first Iraq War, managed to take over the National Security State and to a great extent the Republican Party. The chief protagonists in those days and during Bush II were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld but they represented a faction within the Pentagon, the CIA, State Department and so on that agreed that the US needed a mission (because the Cold War that kept the Deep State in business had ended) and since the military was, by far (and still is) the most trusted and popular institution in the US permanent imperial war was the way to continue to keep Washington Empire in business (the Executive Branch knew that it was war and only war that expanded its power). They were not only going to save the country, give life meaning to the masses but they were also going so save the world from the Chinese "yellow peril." I know for a fact that the saying then and now was it was either us or the Chinese that would rule the world and it had better be us--this was a constant refrain within foreign policy circles which I knew for a fact from my contacts in Washington.
I'm not going to go into what actually happened on 911 but, despite the obvious bumbling and draconian measures used to hide the actual facts of those events, the planners knew that no matter how silly the conclusions provided to the media the people would accept this, frankly, silly story at face value. The US public has a long history of believing nonsense and lies more readily than real facts because they swallowed the obvious fakery of the Warren Report on the JFK assassination and other events from the major assassinations of the 1960s or the Tonkin Gulf "incident" (that never happened) or the attack on the USS Liberty or various foreign assassinations and coups that the CIA carried out since 1947 abroad and more recently the utterly fabricated Russiagate narrative. I say all this not as some wild-eyed, paranoid "conspiracy theorist" (a term invented by the CIA to staunch critics of the Warren Commission) but as someone who has read widely in world and US history and studied the matters I'm discussing here in some detail over the decades.
As a student of psychology, anthropology, and sociology I am not in the least bit surprised that the forces of Empire were able to foist any lie as long as it's big enough because of a collective mythological framework callded "American Exceptionalism" which tells us that the USA is a unique society (it is) that has a sacred mission to spread democracy, equal rights, and consumerist/capitalist culture to the world. Of course, this myth states that the whole world wants to be like the USA but is blocked by evil societies and religions and fanatical ideologies (communism, Islam, nationalism and so on) aided by the evil countries who similarly want to conquer the world and who the US must overcome, conquer and rule (for their own good of course). This semi-religion is one generally held by Americans of all social classes and, strangely, by the intellectual class above all.
I no longer have much interest in "news" that I've been almost religiously been following since I was twelve years old--I recognize that almost all stories are some form of propaganda meant to manipulate not so much ideas as such (no important organized political force in the US has any ideas) but emotions. In fact, after 911 it became clear that we had moved a post-rational historical age where myth, symbol, emotion, and tribalism dominates in our national culture along with the constant of consumerism and hedonism which in some ways betrays the vision of the neoconservatives who, in some ways, appreciated that we were straying very far from being a largely virtuous country and we are, in fact, beginning to disintegrate internally and certainly internationally as the utter failure (except to enrich the military-industrial-complex) of the massive wars as well as smaller covert actions always ongoing. We are, collectively, less virtuous, less coherent, less educated, and poorer as a result of 911.
No comments:
Post a Comment