Thursday, November 25, 2004

Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry

The Big Lie gets lots of public attention and is carried forward as in a big parade, with many hungry listeners, while the truth must come limping behind on crutches, struggling to catch up, panting with it tongue hanging out

Wilhelm Reich (paraphrased)

Be sure to read about the the lecture circuit experiences of James DeMeo during his European tour in his article Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry. I frankly don't know enough about his orgone energy theory to vouch for it one way or the other, but I will stand behind Masters of Deception 100%. (And by the looks of his experience in Europe, DeMeo is a man whom I would like to welcome into Americans Anonymous.)
…the 9-11 conspiracy books do not stand alone in making … fantastic charges. In fact, they are what might be called the "icing on the cake" of a larger onslaught of historical revisionist accusations, circulating for many years since even before 9-11 and originating from within neo-fascist far-Left and Right-wing political groups, which attempt to tarnish the USA and Israel as engaged in a much larger and ongoing conspiracy of conquest and empire…

Why should one need to bother wasting time to rebut them? The answer is, because so many people are attracted to them, creating real-world problems regarding credibility and international relations at many levels, not only between governments, but as I touch upon below, between ordinary people.

…Interest in my Saharasia discovery had grown over the years, and I was invited to lecture in Europe on many occasions. After 9-11, all that began to change. During one lecture trip to Berlin in 2002, I was pelted with questions derived from the conspiracy theorists — Didn't Eisenhower massacre a million German Prisoners-of-War? Wasn't it proven that FDR knew well in advance about Pearl Harbor? Didn't the USA provoke the Japanese, and Churchill provoke the Germans? Wasn't the USA now going fascist? Didn't Bush steal the last election? And wasn't 9-11 the result of a big American plot? No, I replied, with amazement that people had no embarrassment to ask such questions in public, without undertaking a lot of serious homework on the subjects, so as to really know. …

After [another] lecture, the Minister of Women's Affairs for Luxemburg, who had been in attendance, apologized to me with much embarrassment for the rude treatment I had received, saying she had never before seen such an outburst of hatred towards a speaker . …

Near the coffee bar, one large German fellow from the audience approached me, literally shaking with rage as he informed me that the "World Behavior Map" I had shown during my lecture was validating "Bushes Achse des Bösen " — the Axis of Evil. Somewhat astounded at this remark, I had to admit there was something to it. I told him my maps had been prepared in the 1980s, well before Bush or 9-11, and suggested it was no accident that the most socially violent cultures which were identified in my maps were also the fountain-heads of international terrorism. I asked, "what about Saddam Hussein and the millions he has killed? Don't you think he really was an evil character? Or the ethnic genocide and miserable treatment of women by the Talibans? What about the concentration-starvation death camps in North Korea, filled with political dissenters?" My suggestions that the modern terrorists and terror-supporting states were predominantly Islamo-fascist or totalitarian communist regimes brought only the most dismissive denials, and the even more incredulous accusation that I must be "a CIA agent, come to spread confusion". …

That same week, Der Spiegel magazine published a major expose on the worst of the 9-11 conspiracy books, focusing upon the popular books by Broeckers, Gerhard Wisnewski, Andreas von Buelow, and Thierry Meyssan, detailing the falsifications, fabrications, half-truths and lies-of-omission (the worst kind, as Orwell noted), as well as the whole-cloth fairy-tales. For awhile, it seemed the European intellectual scene would be completely over-flooded by the conspiracy materials, without any counter-critique whatsoever, when Der Spiegel waded into the quagmire with the article Panoply of the Absurd, revealing the most obvious distortions and fabrications, and in so doing, considerably drained the swamp. However, Der Spiegel (a liberal-left publication with anti-American sentiments) avoided discussion of two of the larger and probably more radically "serious" but willfully deceptive critics of the USA, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, whose influence and book sales have soared in inverse proportion to their factual content. …

Noam Chomsky is best known for his missives against the USA and Israel, who are misportrayed as the cause of all the world's problems. In this, he echoes the Islamo-fascists who rail against the "Great Satan" and "Little Satan", an idée fixe so intellectually nailed to the floor that he successfully avoids any mention of the genocidal butchery and crimes committed by the "Saharasian" Soviet Union, Red China and the multiple branches of the COMINTERN (100 million dead from that nasty bunch) — except perhaps to either blame their crimes on the USA and Israel, or deny that they occurred at all.

…With my own eyes, I have seen people take a deep drink from the revisionist's poisoned well, only to rise up having been wholly blinded to the authentic history of the 20th Century, and begin throwing hate at Americans, "the Jews" and Western democracy in general, a new form of generalized "scapegoating" among those who enjoy all the benefits the West can offer, while simultaneously openly supporting some of the most blood-soaked dictators and totalitarian fanatics one could imagine. The strange phenomenon of Western intellectuals, movie-stars and antiwar activists, throwing hate at Bush, imperfect leader of the free world, and then jetting over to give a big friendly hug to mass-murderers like Saddam Hussein or Kim Jung Il also can be traced back to similar poisoned wells, which legitimize bringing to the surface all the buried anger and rage people carry in their guts, and transform the character no less than wearing of the mythical "Ring" of Tolkien. They would have us believe, the world would be a better place if only the West, the USA and Israel in particular, had not existed.

…And then there is Michael MooreMoore has shown himself to be expert in the use of "lies of omission" — as well as of commission — which most people won't know about unless they consult his critics. … The devil is in the details, which in this case one can find most clearly gathered and discussed at the mooreexposed.com web site of David T. Hardy, a Tucson lawyer with genuine working-class roots and a respect for facts, who has devoted considerable time and energy to revealing the quite elaborated deceptions in Moore's books and films…

The precise details of Moore's lying in Bowling, Stupid White Men, Downsize This and Dude, Where's My Country? are presented by Hardy as well. He has a marvelous spoof essay on the shadowy connections between Moore and the Bin Ladens, using the same over-reaching illogic as employed by Moore and others against Bush. And he is not alone in gathering together documentation on Moore's quite deliberate distortions. Again, with some digging, an internet search brought forth a list of websites exposing Michael Moore's deceptions.

If you like Moore's works, and think he really is a good guy who wants to expose hidden facts and truth to mostly-ignorant Americans, you owe it to yourself to review these on-line materials. I'll add my own observation, made at the Hugendubel bookstore in Berlin. The cover of Moore's book Downsize This in the American edition shows him respectfully tipping his hat to the reader. The German edition … shows him menacingly holding forth several sticks of dynamite, in the manner of a terrorist. … The differences between the covers for his Bowling for Columbine DVDs are even more alarming…

[The] awful emotional rage … is a "feel-good" exercise, but one which so muddies the waters, that legitimate criticisms of Bush administration policies … are drowned out and lose effect. And what is genuinely honest, freedom-supporting and antifascist within the Bush policies, which have liberated the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq from genocidal tyrants and finally confronted global Islamofascism, this is shamefully ignored and thrown into the mud by the Chomsky-Moore-9/11-conspiracy crowd. …

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