9/11 Truth Isn’t Going Away

Alissa C. Johnson
Intercept

      As 9/11’s tenth anniversary approaches, the issues surrounding that seminal event are just as relevant today and a lot more urgent.  Despite the change of management, we still bomb, still rendition, still torture, still illegally wiretap, still detain indefinitely without habeas corpus and without counsel, among other international crimes.  These days we can add a few more items to that list like irradiate children, feel up grandma at the airport, and throw people in jail for not paying their credit card bills.  Another thing we still do in America: obstruct the truth when it conflicts with the official 9/11 storyline.

     “Hysteria” has been defined as a compulsion in which the actor repeats the same action over and over in the face of a negative outcome.  Our politicians and civic leaders, through the mainstream media machine are hysterical on the subject of 9/11, parroting the same tired lies as if by cramming that sandwich in our faces enough of us will eventually swallow it.  While we may see the pre-packaged fantasy internalized by dullards, most of us aren’t buying the government’s heroic tragedy, a fictional catalyst that has propelled the United States into war in Afghanistan, Iraq, now Libya and who knows where next. Syria? Pakistan? Yemen? Iran?

     There has been much analysis of the psychological roadblocks thrown up by those who cannot or will not accept the reality of a 9/11 false flag attack on domestic soil.  As described by activist Ken Jenkins, such denial may be attributed to the scale and sheer audacity of the act, the paradigm-shifting implications of 9/11, blind nationalist faith, shame on the part of those fooled, PTSD, and simple ignorance of historical precedents.[1]   Factor in an embarrassing level of credulity and these elements have contributed to the thumb-sucking compliance of a population dumbed down and infantilized to the point where it believes our government has its best interests at heart.

     Of course history does not support the gumdrop and gingerbread view of government to which so many folks subscribe.  But the myth of America is powerful.  We are the good guys, revolutionaries who threw off the yoke of British imperialism two hundred thirty-five years ago and created the Constitution, a document so powerfully associated with rebellion that the FBI identifies those who reference or defend it as domestic terrorists.[2]

     These days even the dullest coach potato is starting to realize that the interests our government seems to hold closest to the chasm in its tin chest are not those of the people, at least not We the People.  There is suspicion arising that it serves the interests of those other “people” known as “corporations.”

     This does not bode well for our masters (whoever they are) who had no doubt hoped to keep a lid on truth of all kinds long enough to establish more complete control over this part of the Western world.  We can see the soft fascism of the U.S. rapidly hardening into something scarier.  If you disagree with that assessment, you’ve probably never been Tasered for questioning a public official about his membership in a powerful secret society.[3]

    

     Despite the rumblings of discontent, there are still many people with their heads firmly in the sandbox when it comes to 9/11.  It seems incredible that anybody with a rudimentary grasp of physics – those physical laws that can be intuited by a five-year-old playing with blocks – would believe that the World Trade Center buildings crumbled at near freefall speed into their own footprints without blowing out supporting structures in a carefully planned fashion.  While such opinions exist in people with a scientific vacuum between their ears, it does not give us the complete picture.  Clearly there are powerful psychological forces at play when the best they can throw at the 9/11 Truth movement is name-calling and obfuscation.

     Incredulity in the face of horrific government acts is nothing new.  The concept of psychic numbing was developed in connection to the victims of the U.S.’s atomic atrocity in Japan. We not only became Death, as Oppenheimer commented after detonation of the first atomic bomb, we became Hell.  Survivors of Hiroshima have said that in response to the overwhelming horrors of the atomic bomb they “simply ceased to feel”, often within minutes or seconds.[4]   From a psychological standpoint, psychic numbing protects the self from shattering.  It is a survival mode, but intense psychic numbing can devolve into passivity and confusion.  One form of numbing derives from the human mind’s inability to take in what it cannot connect to prior experience or imagination. As one journalist who witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald put it:  “You can’t understand it, even when you’ve seen it.”[5]

     The most recent laboratory for psychic numbing of Western peoples took place during World War II as a result of the systematic annihilation of Jews and others in Hitler’s Nazi death camps.  Even the most politically astute Jews of that time had difficulty accepting the reality of the Holocaust. Maria Syrkin, former editor of the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier, described “how difficult it was as late as 1942 for even the most alert and nationally sensitive sector of American Jewry to make the psychic leap from an awareness of bloody persecution to acknowledgment of the reality of the Final Solution.”[6]

     For the Jews of that era, as for most people everywhere, the idea that a project so extreme and so murderous could be mounted in the middle of the twentieth century was simply unimaginable.[7] In late 1944, John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, turned to A. Leon Kubowitzki, a senior official of the World Jewish Congress, and said, “We are alone.  Tell me the truth.  Do you really believe that all those horrible things happened?”  Kubowitzki later wrote: “His sources of information were better than mine.  But he could not grasp the terrible destruction.”[8]  Even after the American press made public the news of the final solution, most Americans could not accept what was happening in Europe.  A poll of Americans in January 1943, when approximately a million Jews had already been killed, indicated that less than half the U.S. population believed that mass murder was occurring.  Most thought it was just a rumor.[9]

     Examining how the American public reacted to and absorbed the Nazi atrocities is particularly instructive because it took place at a time when media and information were ubiquitous. In the Internet age, news is distributed to us at a breakneck pace, no longer a fountain but an avalanche of data composed of information and disinformation, mainstream mouthpieces, independent journalist-bloggers and everything in between.  Today information documenting the discrepancies of the official 9/11 story is available on the Internet for anyone to analyze and consider. Yet many citizens still remain in the dark about 9/11.

     9/11 turned out to be a revealing social experiment that precipitated out one group of people and left the other dissolved.  Those who precipitated out are citizens not afraid to face the truth of government corruption.  We are the people who will not drink the Kool-aid despite personal and professional costs that run the gamut from arguing over the dinner table to losing a job.  We remember from grade school physics class that it is impossible for a building to fall at free-fall speed unless supporting structures have been removed.  We question the official story.