PROMETHEAN ANTAGONIST

Last year a friend loaned me a segment from a BBC documentary on Terrorism and 9/11. Just last week I watched The National Geographic Society's documentary "Inside 9/11." Notably, although both documentaries addressed similar issues, it was obvious that the initial assumptions of the writers were quite different, and the impressions one would come away with from watching them were very different as well.

The BBC documentary (funded of course with coerced funds from British taxpayers who would be punished if they didn't pay for the BBC's world-wide communications empire) was wrought with intrigue and a foreboding ambience – not about the terrorists, but about America's CIA and responses to terrorism. The basic premise behind it all was that there was no Islamic terrorist threat until "we" created one. It even went further and suggested that, even now, there is no real threat from Islamo-fascism – that it would fade or diminish considerably if we would just leave "them" alone (never mind the numerous plots and successful attacks on Europeans and others around the world).

From a professional and highly budgeted institution like the BBC, the "documentary" was almost comical in its use of foreboding music and reenactments. A CIA operative drove somewhere and one found themselves in the car on a reenacted dreary night behind the wheel while dark music suggested that something ominous was occurring when in fact a guy was simply driving a car (the horror!).

Of course I'm biased, like everyone else, so I saw the National Geographic documentary to be the more sober of the two documentaries I had watched. To begin with, it was based more on facts than the speculations rampant in the BBC view of events. While the BBC dwelled on possible clandestine meetings and attempted to paint a dark picture of America's motives and actions, the National Geographic documentary had several actual interviews with CIA persons actually involved in relevant events (as well as journalists, first responders, and common citizens – some who lost family members to acts of terrorism). Not all of their comments were favorable to Bush or the U.S. government but their comments were certainly more supportive of the fact that there has been a long history of aggressive "Jihad" thought against the West and the United States – long before the current Iraq conflict and even the earlier one (which, one should remember, involved an international coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from an invaded Kuwait).

The National Geographic documentary is rather strait-forward. Terror cells were rampant throughout Europe and the U.S., Support and funding occurred from Middle-Eastern countries, and Arab / Islamic nationalists trained to carry out acts of mass murder in the West. Not all that hard to believe.

Some, of course find the simple reality of our current confrontation with 21st century fascism as unlikely. To the conspiracy monger, every act of terror or attempts to impose authoritarian government is the result of an evil American foreign policy, a Hitler-like president, and – as usual, the dreaded forces of free-market capitalism ("blood for oil").

Ever since 9/11 the conspiracy nuts have had a field day and have convinced many in America, and especially Europe, that the real actions and events of 9/11 were part of some ominous plot by greedy and power-mad conspirators from the west itself.

The left in general loves this stuff. First America wins a cold war against their much loved Soviet gulag and now it continues to spread the attributes of open society and market driven prosperity. When will it all end!

I recently encountered one of the more fringe types in the conspiracy crowd. He claimed to have "studied these issues" for several years (between watching videos and drinking a lot). Of course "studying" crackpot theories doesn’t mean evaluating simple and fully believable facts. In the world of anti-American conspiracy theory, one need only read a best selling book from Europe, watch Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," and scan some of the more bizarre web sites.

The essence of such conspiracy theory inevitably involves the belief that the Twin Towers and Pentagon were destroyed on the orders of secret conspirators (always involving the supposedly stupid George Bush) who sought to create a crisis so as to establish a police state in America and "steal oil" from the Middle East. To these deluded clowns the idea that an authoritarian religious ideology has merely made good on their threats is beyond their comprehension.

The conspiracy details that some partisans have come up with regarding 9/11 are often as bizarre as their larger general worldview. I was told by one such seeker of fanciful intrigue of how skeptical he was when he saw the towers collapse on television. He elaborated on a classic 9/11 urban myth; that the towers were actually brought down by explosive charges placed in the bottom of the buildings. The simple question wouldn't occur to such fools as to why even have guys hijack planes and fly them into the buildings if you're actually going to bring them down with this other imagined scheme. To him it was just too far-fetched that commercial airliners going at top speed into a skyscraper could actually weaken the structure enough that the twenty or so floors above them might not be able to hold the weight.

The Pentagon crash site is their favorite place to "unveil what really happened." The stale delusions from a much read European writer are the basis for most of these claims. "The hole was too small…there was no wreckage…there were no bodies…etc." When one points out that all of their claims have been investigated thoroughly by sober-minded sources and shown to be ridiculous, the conspiracy monger will come back with something like, "how do you know?"

How do "we" know anything? Radical skepticism is the ultimate last defense of a person unable to defend their delusions. Indeed, I wasn't there, I don't really "know" that terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. I really don't "know" that there are Islamo-fascists at the far flung corners of the world who hate me and my freedom. (I do know that there was a World Trade Center in New York and there isn't one now since I used to come into the buildings on the "E" train everyday to go to work in that part of Manhattan, and I've since been to New York and noticed a rather large hole in the ground where the buildings used to be – all more direct first-hand information than the average anti-U.S. socialist Euro-snob has available to them).

The conspiracy monger is ultimately on the usual Jacobin ego trip. He or she "sees behind the veil," "doesn't believe what [he or she] is told," and has inevitably, "studied the issue." The rest of us; we're just stupid. We "don't see behind the veil," we "believe what [we] are told," and we "haven't studied the issue."

For all we really know, Martians destroyed the buildings, George Bush is an incarnation of Elvis, and maybe terrorists really are nice guys and would leave us alone if we kissed their holy behinds and killed homosexuals for disgracing the "prophet's" noble views.

What annoys me most from the fools who have bought into some of the most fanciful and ridiculous "theories" regarding terrorism and 9/11 is what I find most annoying from the left in general – their blatant arrogance. Those of us who hold other views are seen as, and often told to our faces that we are, ignorant, evil, greedy, or plain stupid. Why? Because we believe Communism is bad, or living under a Muslim theocracy would really suck. People like myself actually believe that massive tall buildings rammed by fully fueled jetliners can weaken and fall to the ground, that maybe the people who did it are the one's who later bragged of doing it, had planned doing it, and had actually tried before…but that would be too far-fetched. I suppose only a fool would believe that Fascism, Communism, and Islamo-fascism have been threats to civilized living and will continually seek to make good on their threats. I suppose only fools (like myself believe in the goodness of diverse open society and free choice in economic exchange. Of course, we're "not really free." We're only "imagining it" and we need a pampered leftist control freak to set us strait -- someone smarter, wiser, and morally pure.

In leftland, the real danger, the real threats, and the real conspiracies, are always the one's which are most magical and complex, and the ones that can only be "seen through" by armchair philosophers and disgruntled thinkers in their perpetual war with "selfish materialism."

Maybe Islamo-terrorists are really no danger. Maybe those of us in free society are the bad guys…Maybe Elvis has not "left the building."

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 5:23 PM