Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> I was shocked to find that about _five_ 9/11 conspiracy theorists
> (only one of whom I had seen before) showed up at a local anti-war
> meeting yesterday, which made them about a quarter of the meeting
> participants. This was the first local anti-war meeting after the
> annual March mobilization against the Iraq War called by the Central
> Ohio Peace Network. It seems to me that, as the anti-war movement
> generally went down, the movement of conspiracy theorists grew. What
> is to be done about this problem? I doubt that any thinking people
> want to come to a meeting if they have to listen to a prominent
> contingent of conspiracy theorists wishing to educate everyone about
> The Truth of 9/11.
This is a tough one -- and other localities could well face it as the war drags on and on. We only had one aggressive conspiracist; we gave him the second half of a meeting to present a video. I went home & left Jan there to start the debate. (I didn't think I could sit through the video peacefully.) I returned mid-debate, and we did succeed in putting up a friendly but determined enough opposition that he decided that while he would continue to support the group he would no longer attend meetings.
The argument we used primarily simply ignored the technical argument over The Towers and focused on the political difficulties of basing the anti-war movement on theses that had to be argued in detail: we argued that _even if_ the conspiracist theory was true it was politically stupid to try to mobilize large groups of people with it. And we underlined that argument by applying it to issues in which there indeed had been something like a conspiracy -- e.g. the Ohio election in 2004 -- pointing out that though that was probably true it confused the issues by preventing focus on the obvious horrors of Iraq which weren't debatable.
One possibility: Schedule one or more special meetings for discussing the topic, and use whatever parliamentary procedures are available to simply suppress debate on it during regular meetings. But I do counsel against arguing on the conspiracists' grounds -- i.e., I simply won't discuss what happened 9/11 but always turn the question back to how best mobilize opposition to the war.
Carrol