9/11 and the Left: Is there any way forward?

[MacCruiskeen]

This just appeared at the website of something called the New Left Project. The author is some smug buffoon called Alex Doherty, who just happened to be 'lenin's' sidekick in that disgraceful medialens thread I referenced in the OP. It's a prime example of the kind of moronically dishonest pseudo-leftist drivel I've come to really despise. There is absolutely no excuse for it any more.

Why Conspiracy?
First published: 07 February, 2010
by Alex Doherty

Category: Activism

One predictable consequence of the failed attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day was the claim by elements within the self-styled “9/11 truth movement” that the aborted attack was in fact carried out by elements either within the US administration or by the CIA in order to maintain the necessary climate of fear that the architects of the “war on terror” depend upon. As usual, no serious evidence was presented in order to substantiate the claim, but then for the conspiracy theorists the certainty that the US government is behind such attacks is more of an article of faith than a hypothesis to be investigated. That is not to say that the “truthers” do not attempt to marshall some evidence to support their claims – but their methodology is so flawed and their contempt for the facts so extreme that it calls to mind the proponents of “intelligent design” who similarly attempt to cloak their bogus theories in scientific verbiage.

The conspiracy theorists rely heavily on the fact that in a debate between experts on structural steel say or the physics of collapsing buildings the layman will struggle to be able to follow the arguments. However even if science was on the side of the truthers (which it is not – none of the theories concerning the fall of the twin towers has managed to pass a peer review by any credible science or engineering journal) the alleged conspiracy would still be extraordinarily bizarre. The various versions of the 9/11 theories differ but in common to most of them are the claims that:

(a)The world trade centre was hit by planes under the control of the Bush administration but that the planes in themselves were not sufficient to bring down the buildings. Instead the buildings were levelled by controlled explosions; and/or -

(b) The Pentagon was not hit by a plane but instead by a missile of some kind again under the direction of the administration.

Others have comprehensively demolished the posited theories from a scientific standpoint, here I will instead offer a few common sense rebuttals to the above claims...

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... onspiracy/

...and so on and on and on and on and ever-more-dismally and disingenuously on.

"Category: Activism"? - Right, I'm going to come right out with it and say I'm convinced this guy is MI5. That's the most charitable interpretation available. The only alternative is to believe that he really is a bona fide "left activist" and that he really is as brainless as he appears to be.

Comments are open at the site, if any of you can bring yourselves to comment. I can't. It's February 2010 and my patience isn't endless. A left that stupid and/or mendacious is not any left I can recognise or want to be associated with. And the only response I'm inclined to offer that supercilious timewasting dickhead* Alex Doherty is a punch in his smirking gob.

*The term is precise.

[Simulist]

Alex Doherty is as infuriatingly articulate as he is terribly dishonest.

[MacCruiskeen]

Alex Doherty is as infuriatingly articulate as he is terribly dishonest.

Doherty's "essay" is not just morally and intellectually bankrupt but politically deeply counterproductive, and it's all-too-typical.

See this thread from Ken McLeod's blog in October 2007 if you need a clear picture of the British authoritarian ("hard") Left's response to 9/11, and if you are wondering why I am now at the stage of wanting to punch people's faces:

http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2007/09/ ... -hole.html

(I commented there as 'Qlipoth'; it's the name of a group blog to which I occasionally post.)

[MacCruiskeen]

Suffering Cockburn: 9/11 and the Left's Collective Unconsciousness

What Cockburn and Doherty and Taibbi and 'lenin' and all these guys have in common is their petty-bourgeois snobbery and resentment. What really bugs them is that the Great Unwashed/the proles/the plebs are having the temerity to think for themselves, without their august Leadership. The Authoritarian Left's stubbornly ignorant response to genuine grassroots thought is really detestable, and either depressing or infuriating, depending on your temperament.

I prefer to be infuriated, because at least that permits action, even if the action is only verbal and therefore destined to be dishonestly ignored, as ever.

High time for a shoe-throwing campaign.

[Joe Hillshoist]

The only alternative is to believe that he really is a bona fide "left activist" and that he really is as brainless as he appears to be.

There's a few of them about. I dunno if it is brainlessness or self interest.

Or some combination of the 2.

The thing I get from the left (at least most of the Australian mainstream left) is that they really are petty bourgeois people who want a career based on them being "the good guys". Today on one Australian left wing blog I read about someone whinging about the climate debate.

His argument was the believers (and being a lefty he was one) are actually trying to maintain our western lifestyle while the deniers are going to cost us our lifestyle in the end....

WTF?????



They are definitely elitist snobs. Tho they probably don't see that.

What really bugs them is that the Great Unwashed/the proles/the plebs are having the temerity to think for themselves, without their august Leadership. The Authoritarian Left's stubbornly ignorant response to genuine grassroots thought is really detestable, and either depressing or infuriating, depending on your temperament.

There is a fair bit of that in there.

[MacCruiskeen]

The only alternative is to believe that he really is a bona fide "left activist" and that he really is as brainless as he appears to be.

Yeah, Joe, and sadly that too is an all-too-plausible explanation. Even if Alex Doherty isn't a spook, he might as well be. Unpaid and unconscious employees are the most cost-effective of all.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Sorry mac I pressed submit by accident at the start of a post.

They are brainless in that they submit to authority - or in that they argue by, and base their worldview on unquestioning appeal to authority. But its not power as authority. Its an abstract thing based on scientific materialism. There's nothing wrong with scientific materialism as a method for understanding some things. But it makes a pretty poor substitute for religion, especially when its used by atheists as one.

(And of course authority and knowledge is held by the priesthoods, and the left defers to them.)

I guess part of the problem is they believe in the system, think it works and only needs tweaking...

[nathan28]

The only alternative is to believe that he really is a bona fide "left activist" and that he really is as brainless as he appears to be.

There's a few of them about. I dunno if it is brainlessness or self interest.

Or some combination of the 2.

The thing I get from the left (at least most of the Australian mainstream left) is that they really are petty bourgeois people who want a career based on them being "the good guys". Today on one Australian left wing blog I read about someone whinging about the climate debate.

His argument was the believers (and being a lefty he was one) are actually trying to maintain our western lifestyle while the deniers are going to cost us our lifestyle in the end....

WTF?????



They are definitely elitist snobs. Tho they probably don't see that.

What really bugs them is that the Great Unwashed/the proles/the plebs are having the temerity to think for themselves, without their august Leadership. The Authoritarian Left's stubbornly ignorant response to genuine grassroots thought is really detestable, and either depressing or infuriating, depending on your temperament.

There is a fair bit of that in there.

Suffering Cockburn: 9/11 and the Left's Collective Unconsciousness

What Cockburn and Doherty and Taibbi and 'lenin' and all these guys have in common is their petty-bourgeois snobbery and resentment. What really bugs them is that the Great Unwashed/the proles/the plebs are having the temerity to think for themselves, without their august Leadership. The Authoritarian Left's stubbornly ignorant response to genuine grassroots thought is really detestable, and either depressing or infuriating, depending on your temperament.

I prefer to be infuriated, because at least that permits action, even if the action is only verbal and therefore destined to be dishonestly ignored, as ever.

High time for a shoe-throwing campaign.

I hadn't actually read any of the hit pieces on non-OCT. They're pretty bad. Really bad, actually. "Snobbery"?

I'm going to take it as given that all of them do research for a living. But what they've condescended to doing in their 9/11 troof-spoofing is to neglect doing research. Because I don't see anyone except Taibbi interviewing Truthers. Cockburn and lenin just make shit up--like I said, paper tigers. It would be disgraceful if anyone paid attention. Because the only thing I see going on is the suggestion that CT'ing is an "energy sink" and full of loonies.

It's a two-pronged dismissal--first, an dismissal of amatuer and vernacular historians, and second, a dismissal or serious investigation by either committed journalists or investigators like P.D. Scott. Like you said, Mac, half of NYC is tinfoilhat-wearing. Probably all those immigrants in Brooklyn, though, you know, those unwashed masses who still go to church and mosques.

And that makes it all in bad faith. It would be one thing to state, "hey, I don't think this 9/11 truth can be a political ends" that'd be fine. But that's not what they're saying. They're saying it's completely illegtimate because it's completely illegitimate. If Cockburn doesn't want to 'waste time' or 'energy' maybe he should stop editing stories about child-abuse panics, which are also not actionable w/r/t social democracy.

[kenoma]

This just appeared at the website of something called the New Left Project. The author is some smug buffoon called Alex Doherty, who just happened to be 'lenin's' sidekick in that disgraceful medialens thread I referenced in the OP. It's a prime example of the kind of moronically dishonest pseudo-leftist drivel I've come to really despise. There is absolutely no excuse for it any more.



Comments are open at the site, if any of you can bring yourselves to comment. I can't. It's February 2010 and my patience isn't endless. A left that stupid and/or mendacious is not any left I can recognise or want to be associated with. And the only response I'm inclined to offer that supercilious timewasting dickhead* Alex Doherty is a punch in his smirking gob.

I responded twice but comments are under review, so don't know if any will survive. My second one read:

My God though, this whole article is just a travesty. The 'Narrative Simplicity' paragraph for instance... it's just a Turing test, isnt it?

"The theorists, much like the neocons and their allies, offer a pleasantly simple narrative, - with the United States and to a lesser extent her allies cast as the repository of all violence and evil in the world. Instead of having to grapple with the messiness of reality, we can instead inhabit a Star Wars style fantasy with one locus of evil to concentrate on. This plays on the natural human desire for order and simplicity."

And onwards to a History Channel precis of the cold war, having absolutely no bearing on the subject at hand...

But what is this shit: "the natural human desire for order and simplicity"? Is order and simplicity in fact something naturally desired by most humans? Is this really an observable and irrefutable fact of human experience? Or isn't this little turd of non-thought rather the expression of a consciousness so limited by convention that it dearly wished its own "desire for order and simplicity" were somehow representative of the Universal Human Condition?

The general intellectual shoddiness of the article is represented by that snippet of nonsense, regardless of its determined ignorance of facts about 9/11 and flight 253. This autogenerated 'skepticism' , posing as Marxism, but relying on the dumbest form of idealism by creating these caricatures of human experience and behaviour. And all of course while expending an enormous amount of energy in denouncing what a waste of energy it is to spend on 9/11 when we have so many better things we could be doing (online).

[MacCruiskeen]

Thanks, kenoma. That's a brilliant and succinct response.

I predict that it won't be printed (they'll probably plead some "software glitch" - there is no limit to their dishonesty). In the unlikely event that it does appear, every point you make will be ignored while somebody says something ribtickling about Alex Jones or UFOs.

Goodnight.

[Joe Hillshoist]

But what is this shit: "the natural human desire for order and simplicity"? Is order and simplicity in fact something naturally desired by most humans? Is this really an observable and irrefutable fact of human experience? Or isn't this little turd of non-thought rather the expression of a consciousness so limited by convention that it dearly wished its own "desire for order and simplicity" were somehow representative of the Universal Human Condition?

Do you mind if I file that for future reference.

I can see it becoming quite handy.

[MacCruiskeen]

Unbelievable. This just appeared below Doherty's article, sometime in the last 12 hours:

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... onspiracy/

Of course he means "no longer available". Only 21 comments made it through, the last from Lord Doherty himself, three days ago:

Alex
16:42 - 12 Feb 2010

kenoma, I hate to be proved so depressingly right. I'm not clairvoyant, but I just knew they would block you out. That's standard operating procedure among Left Opinion-Leaders when their sainted authority is challenged. Your comment was rational and therefore unanswerable. Being stuck for an answer would have embarrassed them, and they were having none of that.

There is just no talking to these people (none of whom I know personally, by the way). There is simply no end to their cowardice and dishonesty.

- He appended this ribtickling suffix to his screed:

Alex Doherty is a member of the NLP editorial team. He has written for Z Magazine, Counterpunch and Dissident Voice. You can contact him/accuse him of being “a left-gatekeeper”/wish violent death upon him etc at alexjamesdoherty@gmail.com

He maintains a blog here.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... onspiracy/

(E-mails he can cope with, because i) no one will see them but him, and ii) they can be deleted on sight and left safely unanswered.)

[nathan28]

It is an addiction to authority. That's all it could be. I used to be one of those "cryptofascist[s] addicted to authority" but got over it, mostly by getting older and burnt out. These guys don't even make good Leninists. They're too busy policing thoughtcrimes to so much as tackle the bigger monster--which to flog a dead horse is the massive project of right-wing editorial content that dates back at least to Luce's public'ns like Time magazine--something P.D. Scott identifies in the first pages of The Road to 9/11 (though he's talking about the '70s). It's so transparent.

Again, again, I don't know why they can't just write something like, "who cares who blew up (whoops) the WTC, it's a bigger problem than just that." And on edit, the issue they seem to bemoan is that all non-OCT thinking is somehow a right-wing project. It's not. It's vernacular history as it's being made, and even then, it's not all vernacular, hence the occasional presence of scholars.

[nathan28]

This just occured to me, while I was browsing the recent additions to a commie email list, over whether or not the Tea Party "movement" in the US represented a proto-fascism, or just a sort of paleoconservative anti-statist/gov't movement that can't really go anywhere. There's obviously arguments on both sides: the Teabaggers are at root racist nationalists, but not all racist nationalists support militarism and some are probably pro-demobilization; Teabaggers are "psychologically ripe" for demagogery, but their ideology is a confused mishmash that isn't coherent like fascism; etc.

Then it struck me: none of that is really the point. Like you might expect from a populist movement without an academic, legal or political leadership principals it's a hodgepodge of left and right wing populist sentiments, though not nearly so much as Joe Stack's (who is, none the less, apparently a Tea Party hero despite his intermittent and inauspicious communist leanings) with no unifying theoretical principle. So what does that mean?

It means it's ripe for manipulation. It obviously opens up the Overton window--e.g., "death panels". But more to the point--the commies on the mailing list didn't seem at all aware the the far-right industrialists of the Koch funded the Tea Party's astroturfing from its more recent inception (before they stole it from the Paulistas). Why does that matter? It shows the direct interference of moneyed, capitalist interests in popular politics--going so far as to underwrite a faux-populist movement--by virtue of $$$ alone. Is that important? You fucking bet it is, when the people writing the checks want to roll back labor rights until they match the Chinese's.

So? So the exact same elements discernible in the Teabagging of late 2008-present existed in the lead-up to not only 9/11 but WTC93 and Cable Splicer, etc. In fact, look into the Kochs and JFK. Wow, it's like there's a class of industrialists and mobsters so opposed to welfare capitalism (JFK) as too leftist that they may or may not order assassinations over it, but they certainly will pour billions of dollars into decades of propaganda and covert action to prevent anything but pure neoliberal policy, to use an anachronism.

Or don't, pretend it's just a bunch of nonsense made up by the far-right "paranoid style" of America.

What it is, IOW, is direct evidence of the capitalist class acting in an adversarial mode to manipulate politics. It's history, with people, dates and dollar signs. It's the type of thing that they train everyone except historians to avoid--empiricism. Recently I read, to paraphrase, that "the bourgeois has punished Haiti since its revolution." Okay, wow, gee, duh, but can you maybe put that into dates of embargos, amounts of reparations, immigration and foreign aid policies, etc., into some vague schematically-oriented language that is largely meaningless without empirical data?

Now, I can understand the urge to avoid that sort of thing because it's possible that someone might make the "bad apples" argument about the individuals involved. But that's a horseshit argument in itself. Because you make a process-oriented, system-wide claim about something from particular pieces of data and evidence, right? Apparently, for the priesthood, you don't.

It aggravates me more than I already am irritated to say that, because I generally sympathize with these people's ends. But I don't understand the inability and unwillingness to interpret history--especially history that would serve your ends--through one's preferred lens, and instead just ignore much of it.

[MacCruiskeen]

Archiving this latest nonsense from 'lenin' before it vansihes from the ML Message Board. (I'm going to blog a reply to his and Doherty's unconscionable crap as soon as I can find the time.)

Conspiracy theories

Posted by lenin [User Info] on February 16, 2010, 4:32 pm

There's a debate going on about 'conspiracy theories' on this board. I just wanted to make a few points, some of which will strike you as bone-crunchingly obvious, to clarify why most people on the left tend to take a dim view of 'conspiracy theories'.

1) The term 'conspiracy theory' is not used consistently, in any literal sense. Not all theories relating to conspiratorial actions are described as 'conspiracy theories', especially where the theory happens to be well-grounded in evidence. Secular rationalists, which I suppose characterises most people on the left, object to 'conspiracy theories' in this sense because they see them as failing to adhere to normal standards of evidence and plausibility.

2) The term 'conspiracy theory' is laden with epistemological doubt - meaning, to call a theory a 'conspiracy theory' implies that the theory is not only evidence-poor, but also in some sense seriously at odds with how one would expect things to be based on all other known data. A theory about the Nazi holocaust is not a conspiracy theory, because it pertains to matters that are both consistent with how one understands the Nazis to have behaved, and well-grounded in evidence.

3) Conspiracy theories - because they so often defy common sense explanations of the world - are supposed, in some sense, to be radical. But they are actually completely normal in the ruling ideology of modern states. From the Satanic conspiracy theories devised to explain Calvinist iconoclasm during the Dutch revolt, to the theories attributing the French revolution to Freemasons, to the antisemitic paranoia of the Nazis (and Stalin), to the Reds under every bed hocus-pocus of the Cold War, conspiracy theories have always been part of official thought. This is because ruling classes fantasise that the societies they rule are unified, organic societies that consent to being ruled, and possess no deep social tensions - so any manifestation of social tensions is ascribed to a minority of troublemakers acting under an exogenous influence.

4) Aside from such theories informing official thinking, the day to day discourse of the mass media is filled with such theories because they titillate and distract people, thus helping to attract a suggestible and attentive audience for advertisers - think of the fun they had with the Litvinenko scandal, or Diana's death. This is conspiracy theory as infotainment, and imho, it's the same genre that clearly informs a lot of the 9/11 stuff.

5) Conspiracy theories are generally avoided by the Left because they are associated with this kind of puerile tittilation, irrationalism and reactionary ideology. But the aversion is also explained by the wide variety of types of conspiracy theory, from vaguely supernatural ones to parapolitical ones. Of the latter, only some refer to well-grounded analyses of clearly delimited events based on detailed political analysis, while others either collapse entire social structures into networks of conspiracy (involving Jews, Freemasons, Bildebergers, communists and indeed any or all of these) or work, as I say, as a kind of infotainment.

6) Parapolitical conspiracy theories referring to specific events are actually not that controversial on the left, provided they are well-grounded in evidence. Cases in point: Ganser's revelations about stay-behind NATO armies, repeated revelations about Operation Clockwork Orange, Gareth Peirce's advocacy for the Birmingham Six, Paul Foot's reportage on Lockerbie, etc etc. We are not unaware of Tuskegee, Operation Northwoods, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra and subsidiary drug-running in the 'hoods, etc. So, when someone on the left dismisses something as a 'conspiracy theory', it's usually a concise way of saying that it seems highly improbable, and there doesn't appear to be much evidence backing it up: they are not objecting to the very idea that ruling classes, states, companies, intelligence services, criminal gangs etc., sometimes conspire.

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens ... 37950.html

Aha.

Jamey Hecht:

THE TERM ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’

This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category.

http://tinyurl.com/yb43ge4

QED, yet again.