FOOD FOR THOUGHT 11 (PART TWO):

THE GREAT CRIME OF 9/11: WHAT'S GOT TO BE DONE ABOUT IT IF THE REPUBLIC
IS TO BE PURGED, MADE HEALTHY, AND KEPT FROM BECOMING FOREVER FASCIST AMERICA
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Epigraph:
" 'The Fear Merchants'—An audio essay by Mumia Abu-Jamal:
In the US Empire 'Truth is Treason' "

ONE

..........I wish I weren't the author of A Nation Gone Blind . I wish I'd never written the thing, and I wish—most fervently of all—that I hadn't been so accursedly right, true, and correct not only in the book's central argument but in the analyses and examples that supported that argument.

..........Because, in light of the way things are going right now—the stripping of habeas corpus in the War Commission Act of 2006, the "private" signing by George W. Bush of a "revision" of the Insurrection Act that essentially neutralizes the Posse Comitatus Act and allows his government, at which time it may so wish, to turn U.S. troops against U.S. citizens—all I can say is what I said in the book, but in far cruder terms. To wit: I have no idea why there's so little response to what's going on in the government of our dismal, bloody, ignorant, lamentable, godforsaken, despicable, forlorn, fascism-teetering nation if it isn't simply the fact that the people who "live" in it have gone stark, staring blind, have gone and for a good length of time have been as blind as bats, as stones, as idiots, as fools, as anti-educated drones, as blind as those poor benighted victims who now more than sixty years ago meekly and obediently boarded and rode the Nazi trains to Treblinka.

..........We're in very, very serious trouble in America right now, and the most absolutely astonishing thing about it is that, except for the small few who are trying desperately to broadcast the truth, nobody seems so much as to notice, on the one hand, or, on the other, to be doing anything else than paving the way so as to let happen whatever the worst may be.

..........The absence of alarm, of resistance, the absence even of awareness—in most of the population these absences come about as a result of our having been for so long a nation of non-readers. After all, no one in America reads; no one in America has read for at least the past three decades and probably much longer; and no one in America is going to start reading—and as a result no one in the nation knows a pig from a poke or a fascist from a fig. I'm angry. I'm angrier than I've ever been in my life. And what I'm angry about are things that I never, ever, not in my most distant predictions or dreams, thought I would see happening inside my own lifetime. And these enraging things are not only the unconscionable, base, opportunistic, degraded, studied, malevolent, step by step destruction and overthrow of the republic itself, but also the positively insane lack of resistance, objection, or even notice from the general population or from the so-called intelligentsia.

..........I can hear the appalled chorus of righteous demurral already, shouting in my ear, "Yes, Americans do too read. More of them read more books now than ever before in their history."

..........Maybe so, answer I. People in America may read, but most of what they read, at best, is lulling, familiar, soporific stuff, and that includes almost all of what they're led to believe is "literary" or "quality" work. And what percentage of Americans do even that much? Take a quick look at Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (the study put out by the NEA in 2004) for a grim answer to that question. Or, say, give a read to the first chapter of A Nation Gone Blind. The truth is that almost all of America's "literary" writing today itself actually takes the form of lying, of being comprised of lies, and this happens not most of the time but all of the time without the author's knowledge of that grim and profoundly disheartening fact—read Ben Marcus on the subject, in the now-diminishing and all too likely soon-to-die Harper's.

..........Well, I'd argue that point with you, I can imagine a chorus of voices saying, a chorus that comes from smugly contented readers firm in their insistence that the literary world of today is just perfectly fine and even more firm in their contentedness with it, and with their regimen of a book-and-three-magazines a week, plus the Times every day.

..........And, the chorus may further ask, what about high-quality non-fiction, not only in books but also in magazines? Just tell us that! What about The New Yorker, for example?

..........And I: How curious that you should mention The New Yorker. After all, talking about The New Yorker was supposedly the reason we originally gathered here together, in our spots around this cozy little fireplace, on this cold and howling winter's night—wasn't it?

TWO

..........The time for politeness, I am afraid, is past, the moment for good manners gone. If we don't wake up, if people don't start wearing their see-through-the-lies-of-all-the-media spectacles, if they don't start seeing things for what those things actually are—and don't start naming them with their real names—fascism, torture, murder, war profiteering, plunder, for just five—if people don't start doing these things pretty damn soon, the immeasurably powerful and also—by every humane and common-sense measure—clearly insane oligarchy that "governs" us will continue its coup against America that's now well underway and will complete it in such a manner as to make any disassembling of it—ever—an impossibility. And this crazed, Dr. Strangelove-ian oligarchy might do it all with the added plus of entertaining everybody—one last theme-park adventure before the final end-with the better-than-Disney spectacle of a nuclear Armageddon.

..........What to do? And where find the means to do it? How do you awaken a country to the truth not only of what really happened on 9/11 but of what's now being prepared for every so-called citizen of that country when the elections are already rigged and fixed and bought and meaningless and when 98% of the so-called American people aren't even paying attention but are watching television instead, their mouths open and slack, lower jaws resting on their living room rugs?

THREE

..........I warned you that the time for politeness is past.

..........Some of you will remember that a ways back I mentioned Treblinka, before we went off into the subject of reading. Now I'm going to join the two together, reading and the death camp.

..........I'm going to do it by quoting fairly extensively from a very, very valuable and immensely powerful book. It's called A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, and it consists of journalism written by Grossman for the Russian newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). Grossman, physically unfit, was rejected for military duty, but he was able to get himself attached to the Red Army, and, after writing his way through the entire battle of Stalingrad with its indescribable ferocities and courage, he followed the armies all the way west to Berlin and, there, he covered the end of the European part of W.W.II. For the entire time, he kept writing, and his war pieces have now been edited and translated by Luba Vinogradova and by the great British historian, Antony Beevor.

..........The paragraphs I'm going to cite have their origin in the summer of 1944, when the Red forces that Grossman was with, pushing west toward Poland and then Berlin, discovered the death camps first of Majdanek and then of Treblinka. Of all the thousands upon thousands upon thousands who were either brought to their deaths at Treblinka or were forced to work there as slaves, only a tiny handful, forty terrified people hiding in the woods, had survived by the time the Red Army got there. Grossman interviewed them, and he wrote, and wrote, and wrote about Treblinka. Here, he has just described the horror of what it was like when sick and dying prisoners from within Germany itself were transported to Treblinka in cattle cars. We pick him up at a point of contrast:

....................Trains from other European countries arrived at Treblinka
..........in a very different manner. The people in them had never heard
..........of Treblinka, and believed until the last minute that they were
..........going there to work. . . [ellipsis in original] These trains from
..........European countries arrived with no guards, and with the usual
..........staff. There were sleeping cars and restaurant cars in them.
..........Passengers had big trunks and suitcases, as well as substantial
..........supplies of food. The passengers' children ran out at the
..........stations they passed and asked whether it was still a long way
..........to Ober-Maidan. . . [ellipsis in original ]

....................It is hard to tell whether it is less terrible to go towards
..........one's own death in the state of terrible suffering, knowing that
..........one was getting closer and closer to one's death, or to be ab-
..........solutely unaware, glance from a window of a comfortable
..........passenger car right at the moment when people from the
..........station at Treblinka are telephoning the camp to pass on de-
..........tails about the train which has just arrived and the number
..........of people in it

....................Apparently, in order to achieve the final deception
..........for people arriving from Europe, the railroad dead-end
..........siding was made to look like a passenger station. On the
..........platform at which another twenty carriages would be un-
..........loaded stood a station building with a ticket office, bag-
..........gage room and a restaurant hall. There were arrows
..........everywhere, indicating 'To Bialystok','To Baranovichi',
..........'To Volokovysk', etc. By the time the train arrived, there
..........would be a band playing in the station building, and
..........all the musicians were dressed well. A porter in rail-
..........way uniform took tickets from the passengers and let
..........them pass on to the square.

....................Three or four thousand people loaded with sacks
..........and suitcases would go out into this square support-
..........ing the old and sick. Mothers were holding babies in
..........their arms, older children kept close to their parents
..........looking inquisitively at the square. There was some-
..........thing sinister and horrible in this square whose earth
..........had been trampled by millions of human feet. The
..........strained eyes of the people were quick to catch
..........alarming little things. There were some objects aban-
..........doned on the ground, which had been swept hastily,
..........apparently a few minutes before the party emerged
..........—a bundle of clothes, an open case, a shaving brush,
..........enamel saucepans. How did they get here? And why,
..........right where the platform ends, is there no more rail-
..........way and only yellow grass growing behind a three-
..........metre-high wire fence? Where is the railway leading
..........to Bialystok, to Sedlez, Warsaw, Volokovysk? And the
..........new guards grin in such a strange way surveying the
..........men adjusting their ties, neat old ladies, boys wearing
..........navy shirts, thin girls who had managed to keep their
..........clothes tidy throughout this journey, young mothers
..........adjusting lovingly the blankets in which their babies
..........are wrapped, the babies who are wrinkling their
..........faces. . . [ellipsis in original] What is there, behind
..........this huge, six-metre-high wall, which is densely
..........covered with yellowing pine branches and with bed-
..........ding? These coverlets, too, are alarming: they are all
..........different colours, padded, silk or satin. They are rem-
..........iniscent of the eiderdowns that they, the newcomers,
..........have brought with them. How did this bedding get
..........here? Who brought it with them? And where are their
..........owners? Why don't they need them any longer? And
..........who are these people with light blue armbands? One
..........remembers all the thoughts that have come into one's
..........head recently, all the fears, all the rumors that were
..........told in a whisper. No, no, this can't be true. And one
..........drives the terrible thoughts away. People have a few
..........moments to dwell on their fears in the square, until all
..........the newcomers are assembled in it. There are always
..........delays. In each transport there are the crippled, the
..........limping, and the old and sick people, who can hardly
..........move their feet. But finally everyone is in the square.

....................An SS Unteroffizier suggests in a loud and dis-
..........tinct voice that the newcomers leave their luggage
..........in the square and go to the bathhouse, with just their
..........personal documents, valuables and the smallest pos-
..........sible bags with what they need for washing. Dozens
..........of questions appear immediately in the heads of
..........people standing in the square: whether they can take
..........fresh underwear with them, whether they can unpack
..........their bundles, whether the luggage of different people
..........piled in the square might get mixed up or lost? But
..........some strange force makes them walk, hastily and
..........silently, asking no questions, not looking back, to the
..........gate in a six-metre-high wall of wire camouflaged
..........with branches.

....................They pass anti-tank hedgehogs, the fence of
..........barbed wire three times the height of a man, a
..........three-metre-wide anti-tank moat, more wire, this
..........time thin, thrown on the ground in concertina rolls,
..........in which the feel of a runner would get struck like
..........a fly's legs in a spiderweb, and another wall of
..........barbed wire, many metres high. And a terrible
..........feeling of doom, of being completely helpless comes
..........over them: it's impossible to run away, or turn back,
..........or fight. The barrels of large-calibre machine guns
..........are looking at them from the low, wooden towers.
..........Call for help? But there are SS men and guards all
..........round, with sub-machine guns, hand grenades and
..........pistols. They are the power. In their hands are tanks
..........and aircraft, lands, cities, the sky, railways, the law,
..........newspapers, radio. The whole world is silent, sup-
..........pressed, enslaved by a brown gang of bandits which
..........has seized power. London is silent and New York,
..........too. And only somewhere on a bank of the Volga,
..........many thousands of kilometers away, the Soviet
..........artillery is roaring.¹

FOUR

.........."No, no, this can't be true." But it was true.

..........And the coup d'état that's happening in the United States today, that has been happening since 1963, that sped up considerably after January 2001, and that's been spectacularly fast-going since September 11, 2001—of it, too, people could say, "No, no this can't be true." But it is true, too.

..........I'm perfectly aware that I'll be reviled and passionately calumniated for my political incorrectness in comparing victims of the Nazi murder-machine to us; for implying that what those total victims suffered under the Nazis is in any way comparable to our oppression under the Bushiscti. It's necessary for me to say two things in clarification and in my defense.

..........First, I'm not saying that they're comparable. As of now, they're obviously not. But I am saying that there are potential parallels or similarities between the Nazi genocide-machine and actions that now, in the United States, are not only possible but have been prepared for in such a way that if those actions were to take place, they would be legal. Torture is legal. Stripping of habeas corpus is legal. And now, with the Bushiscti's change of the Insurrection Act, first, and what with that change's attendant weakening of Posse Comitatus—now Treblinka would be legal in America. No, I'll say more: Now, Treblinka is legal in America.

..........I'm not in any manner, form, or degree denigrating or taking lightly the immeasurable sufferings of any or of all the victims of the Nazis. I'm saying this: In our familiar and seemingly unchanged nation, today, right now, our government has completed setting the stage for the legal arrest and incarceration of anyone it chooses without showing any cause or justification whatsoever and without allowing the victim the right to any appeal. And it has also completed the legalization, should it choose, for that same government to turn guns and other military weaponry upon any citizens or upon any groups or categories of citizens of the United States that it may choose. That is to say, it now has the legal right to arrest them, incarcerate them, and kill them, or to do any combination of these three, or to do them all.

..........And it's our fault. We're the ones who have let this happen. We haven't just been blind, but we've been blinder than blind. We have been, in a word, insane with blindness. We've been insane not to have seen from the start that 9/11 was a fraud, that it was a self-imposed, malicious, murderous, purposely self-inflicted wound that was delivered for the very purpose of scaring us into complete acquiescence—no, into craven eagerness—as the already-existing plans were step by step formed into actualities. Illegal wars? Eagerly accepted. Massive stripping of civil and Constitutional rights in the fraudulently named "Patriot Act"? Eagerly accepted. Illegal spying on citizens? Not a big deal. Routine rigging and stealing of elections through "friendly" electronic voting machines that leave no paper trails? Another not big deal. And now? Well, what of torture? What of habeas corpus? What of Posse Comitatus? What of the Insurrection Act?

..........And it's all been done on the basis of the biggest and most fraudulent lie of all. And that's the toweringly obvious lie that "Al Qaeda" and a handful of ragamuffin and absurdly non-observant Muslim men hi-jacked four commercial airplanes all by themselves, and that it was just—well, it was just somehow the case that the entire military air-defense system of the most powerful military nation in world history—well, it just somehow happened that that air-defense system didn't get any airplanes off the ground in time or at the right place to do any good whatsoever for the entire hour and a half that was needed for the whole plan of "attacks" to be implemented and brought to an end.

..........Of course, there's more. Book after book (see the bibliography at the end of Part Four), article after article, scholar after scholar—all of them provide overwhelmingly numerous examples of the absolute absurdity not only of the "official theory" itself of 9/11 but also of the "Kean Commission" report—and at the same time they show the absolute obviousness of 9/11 having been in fact a "black flag operation," a self-inflicted wound and self-generated "attack," whether one that was planned and perpetrated by the Bushiscti themselves (probably not), or by what Webster Tarpley calls the "oligarchy" or the "invisible" or the "rogue" government that's actually in control of the nation—these questions are matters for scholarship, and they've been and are still being ever more deeply and accurately explored through scholarship.

..........But then, setting the scholars aside for a moment, there's also all the rest of us, the population in general—everybody, the poverty-stricken and abandoned, the working class, the intellectual class, the professional class, the corporate rich, the old aristocracy, and so on. We—all of us—can be saved from tyranny, from fascism, even from the Nazi-style militarism that's already been more than hinted at—we can be saved from these horrors, from permanent and total loss of a free republic, by only one means and in only one way: The Bushiscti and whoever is ruling them can be stopped from wholesale plunder and destruction only by the free and clear exposure of the truth about 9/11, and only by the acceptance of that truth by a sufficient part of the population that the perpetrators of one of the greatest of treasonable crimes ever committed can and will be brought to trial, convicted, and punished.

..........Only that and that alone could and would lance the boil whose infectious toxin has leached everywhere into the blood of the republic; only that and that alone could and would expose and release the purulent, vile stench of the snot-green and thoroughly rotted miasma of lies, fraud, cover-up, hypocrisy, and deceit; that and only that could and would expose and disinfect the secret corporate cum military cum intelligence gangsterism of murder, thieving, killing, invading, overthrowing, and eternal and omnipresent drug-running that have become the staples of so-called "government" by the invisible and the powerful, by the Trilateralists and the Bilderbergers, by the global hegemonists, by the hateful, the profiteering, by the cruel, the self-interested, and the ruthless.

..........After all, that's who and what is in "charge" of America now, those are the ones leading it directly and ever more rapidly into the fascism and tyranny that will serve themselves alone with enormities of profit and power while destroying the liberties and the lives of all others. Only by exposing the one enormous crime of all their crimes, the crime of 9/11, the one that's not only symbolic of all the others but that's so obviously and clearly and truly capable of being exposed, only by bringing this crime into the demystifying and sanitizing light of day, only by then prosecuting those—no matter how many or how few—who committed the crime, only by convicting and punishing them: only in this way can we regain the United States of America for its people, only in this way can we restore the nation's health, only in this way purge the purulent sickness and infection from its blood.

..........And why doesn't this happen? Because, for one thing, there are among us very great masses of the genuinely blind, those many citizens so thoroughly deluded, those who have been kept purposely in so extreme a state of ignorance and often of poverty as well, that they can scarcely serve or save themselves, let alone save their cruel and ruinous nation. For another thing, there are among us very, very great numbers of those who are or who have been or have allowed themselves to become compromised, who are thus dependent upon the criminals, or dependent upon the apparatus of the criminals, and who, thus co-opted and depraved, do all in their power to keep secret the truth about 9/11. Among this group will be found members of high corporate leadership, members of the United States Congress, members of the Bush cabinet and many who serve near the center of that administration, while included also are very great numbers of public figures who in differing ways are self-interested rather than nation-interested and who are therefore wholly dedicated to suppressing the truth about 9/11 even though they very well know that truth and in many cases were involved either in the planning of the crimes of 9/11 or became almost immediately compromised during the commission of the crime. Among these are figures such as Larry Silverstein, Rudolph Giuliani, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Condoleezza Rice, and also the victim Colin Powell, a good man wholly destroyed in the most Shakespearean way by his own party and immediate political colleagues.

..........That such people as those in the second category above are traitors and should be treated as such is unarguable. But for those who make up another highly significant group, the matter of treason is not quite so clear cut: And these are America's intellectuals, the intelligentsia, if you wish. For purposes of clarity at this point in the discussion, I must exclude the neocon intellectuals, some of whom are compromised, others less so, some not at all. Aside from the neoconservatives, though, I count as intellectuals those who are in academia, in journalism, in communications or the media, in publishing, and in the more sophisticated and substantive levels of the performing and creative arts.

..........This is the group—America's intellectuals—that more than any other should be the one right now most powerfully serving the nation by exposing, describing, defining, and disseminating the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about 9/11. But they're not doing it; they're not doing the job they ought to be doing; they're not seeking, studying, describing, and displaying the truth of 9/11 and true state of our dying nation today. Whether this makes them traitors also, or whether it does in some cases while it doesn't in others, and why—these are questions I'll take up two steps down the road, in "Food for Thought 11, Part Four." When we get there, I'll concentrate mainly on literary intellectuals, those who, once upon a time and now seemingly a world ago, were my intellectual, artistic, and political companions—before they all went and died inner deaths on me, the outrageous, inexpressibly dangerous, and ruinously lamentable event that's chronicled in A Nation Gone Blind.

......................................................................Eric Larsen
......................................................................November 5, 2006
¹A Writer at War (New York, 2005), pp. 286-289.