The 9/11 Truth Movement as something we should not talk about http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=...
But we’d still be willing to spill blood to keep the oil flowing. And yet as I travel now among the supposedly peace-loving and progressive Americans of the Left Coast, again and again I meet people who want to place all the blame for this war on Bush -- and who are so eager to scapegoat him and his administration that they eagerly immerse themselves in the most labyrinthine of conspiracy theories. Earlier this indian summer, at a junior high school in Berkeley, I attended a 9/11 truth event. Some five hundred people each paid fifteen dollars (minimum) to hear David Ray Griffin (the author of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11) and four other very articulate and persuasive intellectuals present a series of lectures which showed, rather conclusively, that our war in Iraq has been sold to the American people on the basis of a multitude of lies, big lies and small lies, lies blatant and subtle. Lies, lies, and more lies. But I already knew this.
So what lies behind the lies? I wanted to ask. For the lecturers at the 9/11 truth event barely addressed this question; there was not much more than the occasional allusion to the neo-cons’ dastardly plans for world domination. I was left intellectually unsatisfied (to say the least), but most everyone else in the crowd seemed energized -- so great was their fascination with speculation about rumors about studies about lies about the secret machinations of the powerful and the evil. In certain respects the 9/11 truth event was like a viewing of The Da Vinci Code for leftists.
What was truly remarkable about the truth event, however, was this: Never once, in the course of some three hours of talk, was the word oil uttered. No one was going to be made to face the fact that without shitloads of cheap imported oil, we Americans, whether we consume vegan hipster delights or Happy Meals, whether we commute around in hybrids or in stretch Hummers, are in for some unwelcome downsizing. No one was going to be made to think, Uh oh, if we don’t keep the oil flowing, I might not be able to keep my mortgage payments current. The 9/11 truth event occurred in a sort of intellectual vacuum.
But let’s pause here and imagine that Griffin and the other lecturers had described oil as the material cause for our nation’s policy in the Persian Gulf. Indeed, not long after the 9/11 truth event, writing from Melbourne, Australia, Adam Fenderson (co-editor of EnergyBulletin.net) called my attention to Ronan Doyle’s well-produced film, “Oil, Smoke, and Mirrors†in which Doyle, presenting Richard Heinberg as his star speaker, argues explicitly that Bush and his administration, being all too aware of the implications of Global Peak Oil, effected 9/11 (and by extension the entire War on Terror) in order to provide us with a pretext for assuring our control, by military means, of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf region.