“… we live and die at the confluence of innumerable mysteries.”
-Guy Debord
The intervening decade since 9/11 certainly lends credence to the air conspiracy surrounding those events. Before the dust had settled and dead were buried, and without any of the usual pretense to debate, the federal government, through legislation such as the Patriot Act, empowered itself to strip any person of their “civil liberties,” a quaint term indeed in these times, and invested law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels with Stasi-like authority. President Bush assumed emergency powers, declaring a permanent state of emergency that made the exception to the law the rule of law, and reserved the right to freely monitor the citizenry while stripping “detainees” from around the globe of their very status as humans beings in the grotesque carnivals of Abu Grahib and Guantánamo Bay, and in the process rendered the distinction between war and peace impossible, becoming the closest the world has seen in to a modern day sovereign. Two wars were launched in areas of the globe most hostile of American interests and which also hold the largest and most important reserves of fossil fuels, the very fuel of the economy, in what turned out to be a hare-brained attempt to control those regions and by extension the world. Of course, defense contractors and investment firms of all stripes made an absolute killing in the process. Meanwhile, we the bewildered herd clung to cheap sentiment, feigned outrage, and showed our resolve by merchandising in the face of tragedy, with all the FDNY/NYPD hats, t-shirts and bumper stickers you can imagine. The government was assured of no pesky pushback from the masses.
No one disputes these facts, they only attempt to apologize for or justify them to varying degrees. These explanations and justifications need not be reasonable if they are the only ones on offer. Considering these events, if you don’t view the events of 9/11 with a certain skepticism, you might indeed be the one who is crazy.
And it would be far from the first time this had happened. On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, Marinus van der Lubbe, a mentally unstable bricklayer and council communist from the Netherlands, was arrested for setting fire to the Reichstag, the parliament building of the German government in Berlin. Hitler subsequently assumed emergency powers, suspended civil liberties and crushed the left opposition to the Nazis. The circumstances surrounding this event remain murky, but no one seriously believes van der Lubbe simply acted alone.
In 1978, Italian politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades at a time when communist and anarchist groups were gaining ground politically in Italy. After the events, as the state was able to justify stricter control measures, this radical high tide broke and receded. Years later, the findings of the Italian government itself would find that the Brigades had been manipulated in some way by a faction within the state apparatus.
The 1990s saw the emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements throughout the world, culminating in the 1999 Seattle riots, which shook the assumptions of the final victory of American capitalism around the world after the fall of the USSR. In this case, the actual deficiencies of this movement are irrelevant – all that matters is how they would have been perceived by the state. Two years later, the specter of terrorism not only made the US appear as a paradise in comparison to the seeming chaos outside its borders, but it also dramatically increased the already incredible power and influence of that state. Any nascent left-wing movement was thoroughly trounced and is still in absentia: the 2008 “financial crisis” created as ripe conditions for revolution as most of us have seen in our lifetime and without so much as a peep from any group that might seriously challenge to the normal state of affairs. And in this sense, the state capitalized on terrorism as a kind of preemptive counter-revolution.
The "conspiracy theory of history" may have at once been a ridiculous belief, but the times have breathed new life into it. The “9/11 Truth movement” itself, however, focuses on what we might call “Wile E. Coyote” logic in its obsession with physics: how come a plane crashing into the Pentagon doesn’t leave plane-shaped hole in the building, like a cartoon character running through a doorway? Indeed, they act like such belligerent buffoons and make such obviously spurious claims that it is impossible to take them seriously. And since anyone who questions the events associated with 9/11 is lumped in with them, its as though they themselves serve as unwitting disinformation agents. These dupes ultimately reinforce the legitimacy of the very government they allege to question, and the fantasy they cling to is one in which bad people do bad things who must be punished, just like in the movies. They see only people, not systems. But the ease with which they manipulate and conceal information ultimately demonstrates their fundamental unity with the world of the global spectacle.
Indeed, so many groups – from terrorist organizations to the most repressive regimes on the planet – took advantage of the events of 9/11 that the most basic question we could ask - “cui bono?” - becomes utterly meaningless. Who is the prime suspect when everyone benefits? (Everyone in power, that is.)
As Malcolm X, that voice we so desperately need in these ominous times, would have been compelled to reiterate had he lived, 9/11 was indeed a case of the chickens coming home to roost. But the power of the state was ultimately reinforced and expanded. The American government may have had its nose bloodied, but when the bully becomes the victim, he is freer than ever to do as he pleases. And the insignificant masses of this world are ground into dust more easily and more quickly than ever before.
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