Thursday, September 29, 2011

On The Tenth Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, Reflections on 9/11 Truthers as Self-Worshipping Cultists


The 9/11 truth movement is a cult. Like most cults, it recruits its members through the two-pronged deployment of belittlement and flattery. With one voice, it threatens that if you disagree with them, then you’re a “retard,” “sheep,” “liar,” or “disinfo agent.” But, the second voice says, if you only believe what they say…. why, then you’re part of an elite vanguard of heroic freedom fighters enlightening the masses. (I’m not sure why it would be worth anyone’s time to enlighten a mass of people that one thinks are all cowards and frauds, but never mind.) It’s the same principle that underlies the “good cop, bad cop” routine: resist, and you face the bad cop; merely cooperate, and you are soothed by the good cop. All the truther has to do is assent, to submit- which necessitates no effort whatsoever- and he is immediately transformed from a sheep to a hero. And you can only be one or the other. The miniscule ratio of effort to reward is the chief appeal of joining the truther movement, not any “evidence” it has for a government conspiracy.

Notice that the truther doesn’t actually have to do anything. The 9/11 truth movement, besides mugging for media attention, has barely taken a single concrete step of any magnitude to advance its cause in the real world, even when its adherents once constituted roughly a third of the entire US population and a considerable percentage of the international community. It never filed a lawsuit against the government, for instance, or sued for another investigation of the 9/11 attacks. It never conducted its own investigation of the attacks, despite the supposed mass of engineers and architects within its ranks. (The closest they got was to create a campaign for other people to form "truth commissions" in various states; none of these commissions ever came to be.) It never ran its own candidate for any office anywhere in the country, or organized its own campaign for any politician like Cynthia McKinney who was skeptical of the official story. It never created a lobby. It never boycotted any companies, such as media outlets that promoted the official accounts. It never engaged in civil disobedience. It never destroyed, occupied, or commandeered property a la the activists in Seattle or the Occupy Wall Street protestors. It never rioted. It never centralized into an organized and effective political unit (9/11 Truth is a a glorified conference organizer and simply doesn't qualify), preferring instead to remain a disparate array of internet dwellers. It never attempted to build coalitions with other existing movements, such as the antiwar or civil liberties movements. It never seriously attempted to build any kind of mass political power base. It never came to any kind of consensus about political demands or goals other than calling for new and different investigations of the attacks. It never created international solidarity movements with those who shared their beliefs in other parts of the world who are bearing the brunt of America's post-9/11 foreign policy, such as the Pakistanis and Palestinians. And despite the fact that they believe they’re being governed by psychopaths who massacred their own citizens, they never attempted violent resistance or assassination. Violence would clearly be justified as an act of self-defense in this instance- so how come the FBI never busted a single truther sleeper cell in possession of several thousand dollars of laundered money, forged documents, and a cache of assault rifles?

Serious movements that actually do want to change things try to convince people of their cause through propaganda, but they simultaneously take concrete political and social action in order to cement their position on the ground. They garner support through deeds as well as words. But the 9/11 truth movement was content with disseminating propaganda alone, never leaving cyberspace or its conferences to engage the real world other than to heckle journalists and talk show hosts. Critics wrap mocking quotation marks around the word “truth” when discussing the “9/11 truth movement,” but they should firmly weld them to the term “movement” as well. There never was a 9/11 truth movement. There never will be a movement. Except for the sheer number of people who shared similar beliefs about the 9/11 attacks and a supposed “leadership” of frauds and mediocrities like Alex Jones, Dylan Avery, and David Ray Griffin (who were only an assortment of recognizable figureheads, not people who actually lead anything), there was precious little about this nebulous assortment of people that resembled a movement. The women’s suffrage movement was a movement, the civil rights movement was a movement, the abolitionist movement was a movement. Calling this horde of carnival barkers, cyber bullies, and naive hanger-ons a “movement” is an insult to those activists in actual movements, whether benign or malignant, who participated in real actions to effect real change.

The 9/11 truthers didn’t try to effect change because they’re not part of a movement. They’re part of a cult, and cults almost by definition never attempt to change anything. Their fundamental belief is that the world is too corrupt to be changed at all. They seal themselves off from everyone else, occasionally making brief skirmishes back into society solely to rub its own sins in its face. David Koresh had his compound in Waco, Texas; the truthers retreat back to the internet.

Take the Westboro Baptist Church cult, the guys who go to funerals with the “God Hates Fags” signs. When they’re actually asked about what they think they’re accomplishing by insulting mourners at funerals, their response is always the same: they’re not at these funerals to convert or save anybody, but only to tell the “truth” according to some warped Calvinist doctrine. They're not there to accomplish anything. In other words, they’re not at these funerals to improve themselves by attempting to change the world for the better; they are there to improve their own perception of themselves by making the rest of the world out to be disgusting by comparison.

The 9/11 truth movement isn’t as loathsome as the WBC (though the latter is at least honest, while Dylan Avery is as shameless and opportunistic a liar as anyone on the planet), but it owes its cohesion to the same psychological glue that binds the Baptists homophobes. We have to stand together, they believe, because the rest of the world is depraved. It's futile to try to change anything, because society is so corrupt and its inhabitants are hopelessly slavish. So why bother trying to accomplish anything at all?

David Wong, who wrote probably the best essay on the psychological motivations of the 9/11 truthers, pointed out that, “Most people, to feel special, have to actually do something special. But why not do what these guys do, and just make the rest of the world out to be wretched? Hell, once we’ve painted everyone else as mindless or murderous, all we have to do to feel superior to them is roll out of bed.” The disdain the truthers show online and in 3D proves this beyond a doubt. Everyone in the world is a liar or sheep except for them. The proportion of the contempt they have for everyone else relative to what they themselves actually do is astronomical.

I can’t prove this, but I always doubted that most religious people believe in God in the same sense that they believe that they have two hands, that a triangle has three sides, or that if they drop something then it will fall. If I believe that there is a chair in my way, I will walk around it. The action follows from the belief. But many religious people don’t seem to live out their beliefs through their actions. America is a fundamentalist Christian nation according to polls, yet I can name more of the Ten Commandments than most American Christians. Very few of these Christians attend church, and many of them are consumed with spite at the poor and cheer on military killings. Nietzsche claimed that the only true test of a philosophy was to assess whether or not one could live by it. If a religious person truly believes that by sinning he may damned to hell for all of eternity, then why do so many religious people sin so regularly?

Truthers resemble religious fundamentalists not only because they’re cultish, but because I doubt that they actually believe what they say. None of their actions seem to follow from their supposed beliefs. Remember, a whole third of the United States at one time at least suspected that the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or allowed them to happen. If so many people believed that 9/11 was a fascist coup d’etat, then at least some of them should've started a real movement in response. There are movements in this country to legalize marijuana, to remove certain books from public libraries, to legalize the hunting of endangered species, to allow the sale of teflon-coated bullets, and to make English the “official” language of the United States. There are movements for nearly everything in this country, however stupid or trivial. Yet a third of this nation can’t even form a movement to expose and prosecute the perpetrators of the greatest terrorist attack on American soil in the whole of its history? I certainly hope the truthers don’t believe what they preach, because otherwise the lack of any action on their part would speak of a stunning dearth of integrity on the part of millions of Americans.

The 9/11 movement did manage to expose one disturbing fact, though: how thoroughly debased and impoverished the concept of courage has become in this country. Courage in the United States is endorsing the 9/11 conspiracy theories, or voting for Ron Paul, or joining the Tea Party, or going on MSNBC and saying something mean about the Republicans, or posting populist copypasta on your Facebook wall, or just having an individual viewpoint on an issue. You know what courage is among those “barbarians” in the Arab world? Protesting dictatorship on the streets in the face of possible injury, torture, or death. Courage has somehow been defined-down in the US as occasionally doing something mildly controversial without the possibility of any real consequences befalling you. You don’t have to risk your job or even a rebuke from your boss, much less your life. As insane as it would be, if a truther pulled a Jared Lee Loughner and shot Dick Cheney in the head, he could at least legitimately claim the ludicrous amount of courage that the 9/11 truthers are alone in ascribing to themselves.