The Elite's Religion of Terrorism, an Agnostic Perspective

9/11 is the myth that the elite of all political parties have selfishly used to coerce and convince us into supporting wars of aggression, handing over our already too limited freedoms and looking the other way while a massive security state is built and then unleashed on the world and us. They've reinforced it at every cynical turn. Whether you believe the government's story of the events of that day or not, 9/11 has become a lie. One in a very long list that politicians and the media have told us.

Contrary to the language generally used to describe the deaths that day, the people who were killed at work in the twin towers or going to work on those planes were not making a 'sacrifice'. Though their deaths were tragic, for sure. But, for the most part, they had no agency in their own deaths. They didn't wake up knowing there would be a terrorist attack and they did not decide to go to work anyhow. And they certainly didn't punch their time card that day so they could be used as a political excuse to justify the invasion of multiple countries, the massacring of more than a million innocent people and the extension of US imperial power all over the world. They were victims, not martyrs. But their deaths ought not to be revenged on faraway countries and peoples. In a truly just world, their graves, rightfully dug, ought to crowd out the fountains and security signs of the carefully manicured lawns of America's politicians, bureaucrats and capitalists. After all, it was the policies and actions of this elite class that offered then and continues now to offer us up as cannon fodder for their adventures abroad. Whoever was behind 9/11, it was still the American elite that made us all targets.

And make no mistake about it, all the crocodile tears and fire and brimstone emanating from the eyes and mouths of elites at ceremonies and vigils across the country today are meant not to pay tribute but rather to camouflage their callously calculating political manipulations and exploitations. They don't care about us. They never cared about us. In a real way, the 9/11 dead are the only workers killed on the job in this country that the elite pay any attention to. Think about that. Theirs are the only worker-corpses that will merit the tears of the elite - and only because their deaths can be massaged to the benefit of the rich and powerful. Since September 11th, thousands more workers have died on the job because of unsafe working conditions, stress, traveling to or from work (including crossing the deserts of the Southwest in search of jobs). Do the elite venerate these dead? No, because their deaths do not serve their political purposes.

I recommend that everyone take a long hard look at what happened on 9/11 and the context in which it occurred. Despite the grand and self-assured pronouncements of the elite that run this country (and haven't they always lied to you before with equal confidence?), the government's story of what happened that day is far from complete, correct or even plausible. It has very little to say about the historical or political background of terrorism and even less about the American role in creating, nurturing, exploiting and unleashing it. And why would it be otherwise? The 9/11 Commission was an exercise in political ass-covering and profiteering. Because of that, reflexive flag-waving and candle-holding are naive exercises that reinforce the 9/11 myth and, worse, signal to the elites your willingness to be manipulated still more for their narrow and selfish interests. And that can only mean more deaths.

This is particularly dangerous as the powers that be, having lunched on Iraq and Afghanistan, now cast their hungry eyes towards places like Iran and Syria. Those regimes are not governments to be defended - like ours they are deeply flawed and not representative of the interests of their people to very large degrees. As are all governments. Nevertheless, any US military action there will kill thousands who don't deserve it and won't be taken with either their or your interests at heart. Knowing how they have used this myth to manipulate you or your friends or your family into two wars already, can we expect that they won't try it again? Accepting the myth of 9/11 leaves you open to further influence by their machinations.

Remember how little you trusted government, politicians and businessmen before 9/11 came along? The fundamental facts that made you feel that way then haven't changed now. The rich still own almost all of the wealth. Politicians are still corrupt. Wars still kill way more innocents than they do combatants. Your job still sucks. You still have to pay rent and taxes - probably more now. Your credit cards are still maxxed out. The collections agents still call you. You still have bad, expensive health care - or none at all. If we're going to remember anything on this day, let's remember that.

If you must pay tribute this day, do it by learning how terrorism really operates in the world. Take a couple hours and read something by Nafeez Ahmed or watch one of these videos on terrorist operations in Europe. If terrorism is the defining issue of our time, we would all do well to get a clear understanding of what it really is and how it really functions. Terrorism in the First World is very much a tool of the elite. They use it to instill fear so they can control us. And they are not above organizing it themselves if it doesn't appear on its own. The elites worship terrorism and we would do well to remain at least agnostic in the face of their religion.

Ties With Terror: The Continuity of Western-Al-Qaeda Relations in the Post-Cold War Period by Nafeez Ahmed

Operation Gladio: False Flag Terrorism in Europe

A confession? Wolfowitz's speech at West Point June, 2001

In what either must be a heck of a prediction, a damn good guess or a thinly veiled confession before the fact, the video below shows noted PNAC Neo-Con, former Deputy Defense Secretary, architect of the Bush's Iraq invasion and current President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz delivering the commencement speech at West Point on June 2, 2001. His topic: "'surprise' and 'courage.'"

"This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a military disaster whose name has become synonymous with surprise—the attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly, that "surprise attack" was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals. Intelligence reports warned of "a surprise move in any direction," but this made the Army commander in Honolulu think of sabotage, not attack. People were reading newspapers in Hawaii that cited promising reports about intensive Japanese diplomatic efforts, unaware that these were merely a charade. An ultra-secret code-breaking operation, one of the most remarkable achievements in American intelligence history, an operation called "Magic," had unlocked the most private Japanese communications, but the operation was considered so secret and so vulnerable to compromise that the distribution of its product was restricted to the point that our field commanders didn’t make the "need-to-know" list. And at 7 a.m. on December 7th, at Opana radar station, two privates detected what they called "something completely out of the ordinary." In fact, it was so out of the ordinary that the inexperienced watch officer assumed it must be friendly airplanes and told them to just forget about it.

"Yet military history is full of surprises, even if few are as dramatic or as memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re still surprised by it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always there have been warnings and signals that have been missed--sometimes because there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out, sometimes because of what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called "a poverty of expectations"—a routine obsession with a few familiar dangers.

"This expectation of the familiar has gotten whole governments, sometimes whole societies, into trouble. At the beginning of the last century, the British economist Norman Angell published a runaway best seller that must have drawn the attention of professors and cadets of West Point at that time. Angell argued that the idea that nations could profit from war was obsolete. It had become, as he titled his book, The Great Illusion. International finance, he argued, had become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that it had rendered war unprofitable.

"One of Angell's disciples, David Starr Jordan, the President of an institution on the West Coast called Stanford University, argued that war in Europe, though much threatened, would never come. "The bankers," he said, "will not find the money for such a fight; the industries will not maintain it; the statesmen cannot. There will be no general war." Unfortunately for him, he made that prediction in 1913. One year later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell to an assassin’s bullet, plunging Europe into a war more terrible than any that had come before it. The notion of the Great Illusion yielded to the reality of the Great War.

"One hundred years later, we live, once again, in a time of great hopes for world peace and prosperity. Our chances of realizing those hopes will be greater if we use the benefit of hindsight to replace a poverty of expectations with an anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely."

I know it isn't popular with many of the leading figures in American anarchy to entertain conspiracy theories about 9/11 other than the one supported by the government, but I have generally found the evidence compelling that the attacks of that day must have involved government and private organizations and individuals in the US. Would such a conspiracy have gone as high as a Deputy Secretary of Defense? It doesn't seem necessary, but neither does it seem impossible.

Some may say that it doesn't matter which conspiracy it is, the problem is the system (capitalism, the state, empire and hierarchies in general). And I would agree. '9/11 Truth' as a movement does not contain the systematic critiques necessary to develop into the kind of revolutionary movement that most anarchists would be sympathetic with. The 9/11 Truth movement, like Arizona's so-called libertarians that crow constantly for the closing of the border and the wider regulation of non-white labor, certainly seems to be participating in a dialectic that leads not to more freedom, as they claim to desire, but rather to substantially less. Bill Weinberg of the excellent World War 3 Report has written on this phenomenon, and, although I disagree with his position on the 9/11 attacks, I find his critique of that movement to be insightful and generally right on. Of course, anarchists should be careful not to write off a group's ideas simply because of the people who believe them. After all, I've met my share of anarchist weirdos and nutjobs.

But I've written about my position previously ('The Ruling Class Loves Terrorism So Much They Married It'), so I won't rehash old arguments, save to say that regardless of what one thinks about the real nature of 9/11, false flag terrorism does in fact exist, and lots of governments, including the US, Britain, Italy, Pakistan and Russia, have engaged in it at various times. Those who are in what I will call the 'Al-Qaeda did it on it's own' camp would do well not to forget that state sponsored terrorism, directed under false pretense by intelligence agencies within their home countries in order to obtain specific domestic political goals, certainly fits well with the post-9/11 landscape of fear and distrust and, as such, will certainly be manipulated by authorities in the future for the purpose of controlling their populations, especially as the political and economic situation grows steadily worse - as it surely will.

Nevertheless, I present the video of Wolfowitz's speech here for entertainment purposes if nothing else. Although, perhaps there's more there than we might like to admit. Try this link if the video doesn't play below.