[Peace-discuss] 911 and Gore Vidal

[Ricky Baldwin]

Well, regardless of who supports the suggestion of a
direct "inside job" on Sept. 11, 2001, it still has to
stand on its own merits, which it seems pretty clearly
unable to do so far.

Sorry.  And I don't really like the way folks nowadays
insert their comments into the text they're responding
to, but I'm trying to adapt :-) ...

Ricky

--- n.dahlheim at mchsi.com wrote:

> Facing the awful truth of 911 as an inside job
> orchestrated theatrically by the 
> Bush Administration 

This is not really a "truth", you know.  It's an
opinion, which people who hold it often try to insist
that others accept.  There's no evidence for it, as
far as I can see, only suspicions and speculation. 
Even the best arguments for it boil down to "there is
no other way this could have happened", which is even
harder to prove than the conspiracy they claim somehow
pulled this off.

to 
> shift the dominant political narrative and paradigm
> to discussions of terrorism 
> (and away from the 
> more pressing concerns facing the planet, namely the
> mushrooming ecological 
> crisis) so that a crazy 
> bunch of lunatics can implement their designs for
> planetary domination is 
> difficult for progressives to 
> face.  

It isn't that difficult, apparently, since many
progressives seem to buy it without much persuasive
effort.  Part of the problem, I suspect but I can't
prove, is that we in the anti-war movement have
prefered to let it pass rather than get bogged down in
these circular arguments.  We've just been too busy
and at least initially we were too worried about our
numbers to stop and argue about it.  Maybe we still
shouldn't spend our time this way.  I don't know.

It means that the "opposition" Democrats have
> been either knowingly or 
> willfully ignorant of the 
> political peril into which the Executive Branch has
> plunged the country. 

Actually, I think the peril is more than political. 
It's real and it's lethal to thousands, hazardous to
many millions, if you consider the class war as well
as the military ops.  And I doubt the Democrats who
are on top are that ignorant of it - more like
complicit.  They differ on methodoloy, of course, but
not really on the goals.  But reasonable people could
disagree.
 
> Understanding 911 means 
> accepting that the system is broken and that the
> ritual of voting that tacitly 
> legitimizes the centralized 
> political and economic systems will no longer
> suffice for those who genuinely 
> want real social 
> democracy.  We need to look seriously at restoring
> local self-sufficiency as the 
> basis for real 
> democracy.  Local business and local government must
> be the trained focus of any 
> activism.  

I think people can reasonably devote themselves to
different kinds of projects.  Certainly local
institutions, community, cooperatives, independent
media and things like that deserve all the effort they
get and more.  But we also can't just pretend that the
 federal and state governments exist, any more than we
can ignore the corporate oligopoly, as long as such
entities have the power to kick in people's doors,
drag them off to prison, bomb thousands of people to
smithereens, or starve millions, and other horrific
things.  So challenging these "centralized" decisions
is also very valuable.

And it seems to me that a variety of strategies could
have an impact.

They must 
> be built with community in mind and they must be
> built to withstand the coming 
> political and economic 
> storm.  The centralized system is hurdling along a
> path that will suck all who 
> place faith in it into a 
> wormhole---one leading to a dark netherworld.  When
> important progressives such 
> as Lewis Lapham at 
> Harper's and Gore Vidal are seriously considering
> the detailed scholarly work of 
> Dr. David Ray Griffin on 
> 911 demonstrating the culpability of the Bush
> Administration for the destruction 
> of the World Trade 
> Center towers by demolition, it is time to wake up! 
> 
> 
> Here's Gore Vidal on his recommendation for Dr.
> Griffin's A New Pearl Harbor
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF4wmDwVLkc
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>
http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
> 



 
____________________________________________________________________________________
8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time 
with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut.
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news