I also don't see how a partial endorsement of the official version makes one a "racist," any more an endorsement of the alternate version makes one an "anti-American", "conspiracy theorist" or any other such label. At a certain point a rational assessment of the facts seems to get supplanted by axiological codes of conduct. It was heretical when Galileo said the earth revolved around the sun; that didn't make him wrong.
I also object to the association of the terms "hokey" and "atavistic" with "left wing." Imperialism is certainly a real and applicable term in the 21st century, perhaps more so than it was. Obviously the term imperialism wouldn't fly today if we were to take an atavistic, mechanical view of leftist thought.
-adx --- Joseph Wanzala <jwanzala at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From : Chuck0 <chuck at mutualaid.org>
>
> Joseph Wanzala wrote:
>
> Joe W: I totally reject the right wing efforts to
> shoot down Churchill, to
> censor him over *anything*. But his position is
> really bad on two accounts.
> First, He supports the official story, ie that 9/11
> was an attack from the
> outside on America, only he celebrates it, much as
> the article by the Retort
> Group (my friend Iain Boal & Co.) in the New Left
> Review from last Summer
> did. Such people WANT to believe 9/11 was an attack
> on America, because such
> a view corresponds to their ideological needs. Two,
> his branding of the
>
>
> ChuckO: No, it reflects the facts and the evidence.
> I'm willing to be
> skeptical of the official story, but I've found
> little if anything to be
> credible in the arguments of the 9-11 conspiracy
> critics. Truth be told, our
> friends on the Left have a tendency to believe
> elaborate theories that fit
> what they want to believe.
>
> JoeW: It is one thing to look at a set of facts and
> come away with different
> conclusions. It is another thing to denigrate
> conclusions different from
> yours as 'conspiracy theory'. Any view of 9-11 is
> necessarily a conspiracy,
> since the events were secretly planned by more than
> one person. Any attempt
> to come up with an explanation of how the attacks
> were carried out is
> necessarily a conspiracy theory. It is really a
> matter of which conspiracy
> theory you buy into, not whether or not you 'believe
> conspiracy theories'.
> One thing I don't understand is how people, mainly
> on the left have put
> little to no intellectual labor into interrogating
> the official story. At
> the very least, in order to carry out the planning,
> the alleged hijackers
> *had* to have had some level of infiltration into or
> complicity from, even
> if just a matter to bribing or paying people off, to
> do what they are
> alleged to have done. Just as drug traffickers rely
> on corrupt law
> enforcement and banking officials to smuggle drugs
> and launder money. These
> people's actions are jut as criminal as the the
> actions of the drug cartels.
> So the question becomes, why has there been no
> formal investigation and even
> some symbolic head rolling. Instead, we are led to
> believe that the entire
> operation within the United States (i.e. 'the
> conspiracy') pretty much began
> and ended with the alledged 19 hijackers and a
> couple of stragglers like
> Moussawi, coordinated by Osama in a cave in
> Afghanistan. The left buying
> into such a simplistic scenario is racist to the
> extent it ascribes almost
> supernatural powers to 'Arab terrorists', a major
> compoent of racism has to
> do with ascribing superhuman powers to people of a
> particular race and
> creating myths around them, and anti-Arab racism
> already ran deep in the
> American psyche long before 9-11.
>
> ChuckO: It's also no surprise that the people who
> were involved in the 9-11
> truth movement instantly flipped over into yelling
> about the "stolen
> election" last year. This is all pseudo-intellectual
> nonsense that is not
> much diferent than right wing theories we laugh at,
> like "intelligent
> design."
>
> JoeW: In fact, the people making the loudest noises
> about the stolen
> election in 2000 and 2001 were not the 9-11 Truth
> Movement but MoveOn,
> Howard Dean Fan Club types. To be sure, there was
> overlap between these
> groups, but in the main, MoveOn Democrats are as
> hostile to the 9-11 truth
> movement as you, Doug, and Co. are. Thus, the
> Cockburn declaration, which
> you echo, that "the 9-11 truth movement instantly
> flipped over into yelling
> about the "stolen election"" is a careless and
> inaccurate reading of what
> happened. In fact, 9-11 researchers, like myself,
> are much more likely to
> agree with Cockburn's (and presumably your) view
> that the elections have
> been stolen for a long time and that as Gore Vidal
> is fond of pointing out,
> the United States is a Republic, not a democracy,
> and voting does not make
> any real difference.
>
> ChuckO: I believe that these conspiracy theorists
> are engaged in a racist
> reframing of the 9-11 events which aren't much
> different than what the
> UFO-Art Bell crowd think about the origin of the
> pyramids in Egypt. In case
> you don't follow these theories, they can't accept
> the fact that a bunch of
> brown people living in Egypt several thousand years
> ago were smart enough to
> build these great mountains of rock. They argue that
> these structures are so
> complex that aliens from outer space must have built
> them.
>
> The conspiracy theory that the U.S. government
> organized the 9-11 attacks
> isn't much different. They refuse to accept Occam's
> Razor when it comes to
> what happen. A well-organized conspiracy to attack
> America was executed by a
> global network of people who took advantage of
> America's arrogance. The U.S.
> government didn't organize the attacks nor did they
> let them happen. The
> attacks were successful because the American ruling
> class was arrogant and
> complacent about their superpowers. Sure, they were
> aware that the attacks
> were a possibility, but being the racist, arrogant
> pricks that many
> Americans are, they thought that nothing on the
> level of 9-11 could ever
> happen to the U.S. In many ways, the American
> arrogance about it's power and
> impregnability are similar to other follies in world
> history such as the
> Maginot Line.
>
> JoeW: As I have argued, it is people who buy into
> the 9-11 official story
> who are buying into racism by ascribing supernatural
> powers to a global
> network of Arabs to penetrate the US formidable
> security defenses - without
> complicity from within. i.e.: letting the white
> establishment off the hook
> by allowing them to say 'we were too arrogant' while
> avoiding raising
> questions of accoutability. In fact I *am* saying
> that a global network of
> people managed to outwit US security apparatus (see
> my post re Ptech, the
> Saudis, Cheney etc.), but they could only have done
> it with inside access
> and collaboration. It is not a matter of saying that
> 'brown people could not
> have done it' it is a matter of wondering precisely
> *how* they were able to
> do it, beyond vague references to Al Qaeda and
> Osama. You have offered no
> information as to how this global network carried
> out the attacks that is
> different from the official fairy tale version. Your
> theory about
> 'arrogance' being the reason why the attacks were
> succesful is an assumption
> not backed up by any evidence. Evidence shows that
> they KNEW OPERATIONS TO
> ATTACK THE US WERE UNDERWAY not that they did not
> believe any attacks to be
> possible. The only question is why did they not
> intervene to stop them?
>
> ChuckO: These are some of the reasons why I find
> Churchill's arguments so
> compelling. He is also articulating what many of the
> Left believe, but won't
> admit in public. 9-11 was the chickens coming home
> to roost after two
> centuries of American empire and imperialism.
>
> JoeW: This view is hokey, atavistic, left wing
> romanticism about a 'strike
> against imperialism' and it is a very flawed view.
>
> Chuck
>
>
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