11 september CHOMSKY DENIAL

Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the
intelligentsia

September 13th, 2010

by Denis G. Rancourt

Especially left and liberal professionals and service intellectuals
but also right-wing members of the intelligentsia vehemently attack
and ridicule "conspiracy theories" such as the present 911 Truth
movement.

Why?

It's as though power did not covertly orchestrate its predation of us?
Is that not the modus operandi of power?

Is it so difficult to believe that the complex and highly successful
military attack on US soil that was 911 (levelling three gigantic sky
scrapers, blasting a hole into the Pentagon, and destroying four
commercial jets and their passengers) was not orchestrated by a
religious zealot from a cave in Afghanistan and executed by failed
Cessna pilot trainees with box cutters? Or that those who measurably
benefited in the trillions had nothing to do with it?

What the hell? Not even (admittedly rare) authoritative mainstream
reports seem to matter [1].

What ever happened to "war is a racket" and "follow the money"?

In rigorous compliance with the true meanings of academic freedom [2]
and freedom of the press virtually no academics or mainstream
journalists have made it their research to find truth or to radically
(at the root) question the establishment version.

Indeed, all the major and considered-radical academic pundits such as
Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, have actively avoided the possibility
that the 911 attacks could have been known or aided from within the
finance-corporate-military complex.

What keeps them from crossing that line? What makes them demean
attempts to cross that line? [3]

Similarly, even outspoken dissident parliamentary politicians such as
George Galloway have ridiculed the concerns of 911 truthers (at his
last public talk in Ottawa).

Is such self and projected censorship by star intellectuals only the
result of the fear of being mobbed by ridicule? Is asking these
questions in public fora so dangerous?

When barred and suppressed Afghan Member of Parliament Malalai Joya
was asked about 911 by a truther in Ottawa last year she replied that
those who sought answers in this matter should address their questions
to the occupiers of the White House. To this writer's knowledge, this
is the furthest that any politician has gone in this direction, coming
from "the bravest woman in Afghanistan" no less.

But what shocked the present writer more is the derision to which was
subjected the truther at the Malalai Joya Ottawa event, at the hands
of an "activist" and "progressive" crowd.

INTELLIGENTSIA SELF-DEFENCE

The intelligentsia appears to be addicted to the illusion that it has
a monopoly on valid analysis and understanding. In order to preserve
this illusion and to protect its standing in providing interpretations
of the World, the intelligentsia must limit the scope of all
investigations to domains that fall within its self-established
interpretational paradigms (right-left, power politics, geopolitical
chess board, corporate motives, etc.) and self-established research
protocols.

Those paradigms and protocols, in turn, and the rigorously followed
discipline of not supposing the worst in one's research stance, were
established in academia at the time when "academic freedom" was being
defined by the cornerstone nineteenth century US battles for
professional independence in academia. The academics and society lost
that battle [2]:

"[T]he economists were the first professional analysts to be "broken
in," in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in
universities. The academic system would from that point on impose a
strict operational separation between inquiry and theorizing as
acceptable and social reform as unacceptable.

Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this
meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a
self-image of importance despite this fatal limitation on their
societal relevance, with verbiage such as: The truth is our most
powerful weapon, the pen is mightier than the sword, a good idea can
change the world, reason will take us out of darkness, etc."

Academics and "radical professors" train the intelligentsia…

And power owns the media.

TRUTH ABOUT TRUTH

But much more importantly power owns us, owns our jobs, owns students
at school and owns the homeless on the street, the First Peoples on
the reserves and the prisoners in the jails. As long as we are owned,
information about abuse of power is irrelevant for social change.

This is the sociological fact that the 911 Truth movement has failed
to recognize [4]. Truth will not set us free. Truth and information do
not lead to action. It's not a question of how many folks know the
truth.

It's only a question of what the truth means in real terms to however
few individuals and will these individuals rebel, actually rebel and
individually take back power over their lives.

Contrary to the mantra of our left academic idols, truth and research
are not threatening to power in a culture of subservience and
obedience. In such a culture, radical-in-thought academics only
stabilize the system by neutralizing the more action-minded youth. [5]

In such a culture, the only truth that is threatening to power is one
that it perceives as an attack on its self-image [6]. And, in such a
culture, psychological self-image arising from power's connection to
the broader society is the only force that can move power to constrain
itself [6]. In this measure, in the present culture, 911 Truth could
have an impact. In this way, some of the low-level actual perpetrators
and facilitators of 911 could eventually be sacrificed in show trials
or in mainstream smear campaigns.

In conclusion, the intelligentsia works at protecting itself (and by
extension the system) and therefore will be a visceral opponent of 911
Truth until it can integrate 911 Truth and participate in neutralizing
911 Truth in order for power to save face. Or, some citizens might
actually rebel? The extent and projection/potential of such pockets of
rebellion is the only force capable of leveraging real concessions
from power [7][8][9].

Endnotes

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