Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator
September 7, 2011
"Till one morning everything blazed:
one morning bonfires
sprang out of earth
and devoured the living;
since then, only fire,
since then, the blood and the gunpowder,
ever since then." - Pablo Neruda, from the poem, "A Few Things Explained."
Since September 11, 2001, a memory-industrial complex has emerged in America, Israel and Western society that seeks to cover up the truth of the events on that day and impose a false historical narrative on society.
Constructing false memories of transformative events for a society and false narratives about history is a tricky business, but in the right hands it is an art. Memory construction goes way beyond any traditional understanding of state propaganda. It enters the territory of the divine, where government is god and what it says is the final truth.
Washington's purpose of constructing the memories and beliefs about 9/11 and terrorism is to conceal the real impetus behind U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and its radical domestic laws in the post-9/11 political universe.
The memory-industrial complex includes the presstitute media, intelligence agencies, academia, Hollywood, think tanks, marketing companies, politicians, writers, and entertainers. They are the trusted guardians of the official lies and official history.
Ten years after 9/11, the media's role as the ideological engineers of human thought and mass memory is being understood more and more as it completely divorces itself from reality and defiantly defends political myths against scientific truths.
Journalist and author Stephen Lendman writes in his article, "Media Manipulation of 9/11 Truth":
To this day, 9/11 mythology remains official dogma on air and in print. As a result, most Americans remain unaware of the biggest lie of our time and its horrific consequences, touching their lives directly.
Academia also plays a central role in constructing a public mythology about the 9/11 events and reaffirming the government lie that radical Islamic terrorists are the culprits behind the attacks.
There is no freedom of speech in Western universities or schools. Paul Joseph Watson explains in his article, "Official 9/11 Fable To Become Part Of School Curriculum," about how freedom of thought is coming under attack in British schools, where organizations and groups are telling teachers to instruct kids to avoid alternative explanations about the 9/11 attacks. Watson writes:
In a week where the establishment is desperate to reinforce the official 9/11 fable, a government-supported charity group has embarked on a mission to include the state-approved version of events on the school curriculum in the UK as part of a bid to “demolish conspiracy theories” surrounding the attacks.Officialdom's war against alternative perspectives of history is a sign that it is weak and afraid of the truth getting out. But stigmatizing "conspiracy theorists" for not believing government liars hasn't worked for a decade, and it is unlikely to start working now.
American philosopher and author Robert Anton Wilson said we live in neo-authoritarian times. Our societies are ruled similar to how societies were ruled in the Dark Ages and the era of Kings, Popes and Tsars, when the government's authority over history and truth was absolute.
Wilson said that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration presented America with a warped logic by differentiating political views between "true, false and despicable." In an interview shortly before his death, Wilson said:
"The true statements are the ones the government makes. The false statements are the ones the enemies abroad make. And the despicable statements are the ones that we're not supposed to think about at all.I'm not sure he [Cheney] thinks he can stop us from thinking about it, but he wants to stop us from talking about it anyway. I heard him on CNN a week or so ago and he was asked about criticisms of the Bush administration and he described them as despicable.Yes is what you can prove. No is what you can disprove. And despicable is what you can't even test. You're not allowed to test it. It's the modern equivalent of the Catholic term "heretical." You're not supposed to think about it at all." (Quote is from Wilson's interview in TSOG: Tsarist Occupation Government.)
The authoritarian state's power comes from its capability to compel people to believe its lies. Authoritarians like Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and other members of the Washington establishment are experts in the manipulative art of political memory. They see themselves not just as actors of history, as Karl Rove told Ron Suskind in the New York Times, but as creators of history. In their eyes they are gods and the people are trash.
It is a profound revelation that our lives are dominated by government liars, and that the history we think we know is all a lie.
Collective memory is society's most sacred resource. Messing around with people's memories to gain profit and power is a crime that is unrivalled by all others because collective memories justify acts of organized evil and criminality against innocent human beings.
The politically constructed memory of 9/11 as an attack by radical Muslims against America has been exploited to invade innocent countries, enact authoritarian laws in the West, and plunder public finances.
Challenging the official memory of the 9/11 attacks is a task that the International Toronto Hearings is performing this week, which is starting on Thursday, September 8, 2011, and ends on Sunday, September 11, 2001.
What we choose to remember about the past, both individually and collectively, says a lot about our values, our knowledge of our society, our image of ourselves and our leaders, and our aspirations for the future.
There is an extensive literature on the political uses of collective memory and public memorials by the totalitarian regimes in East Germany and the Soviet Union. In a book review of, "Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past," edited by Jan-Werner Muller, Steven P. Remy writes:
"The second half of the twentieth century has been a fruitful field for memory studies given its legacy of wars, genocides, imperialism and failed political experiments. Now nearly every nation can claim a ‘memory problem’, as contested interpretations of the past pervade the landscape of political, legal and cultural discourse from Santiago to Seoul." (1).Dick Cheney's recently published memoir, "In My Time," can be understood in the context of the political construction of memory for the justification of illegal policies.
Cheney is putting his signature on his time in a last ditch effort to erase his crimes from the pages of history and persuade the American people that he did nothing wrong. Rumsfeld and Bush sought to accomplish the same political objectives with their memoirs.
Memoirs tell a story, and stories have tremendous political consequences. Hollywood doesn't just entertain, it molds the thoughts and perceptions of society. Henry L. Roediger III and James V. Wertsch, co-authors of the article, "Creating a new discipline of memory studies," explain that the stories that regimes and rulers tell the people impact their emotions, lives, choices, and destinies. They write:
"Wertsch (2002) has argued that underlying ‘schematic narrative templates’ organize much of how a group recounts its past. In Russia, for example, the ‘expulsion of foreign enemies’ narrative template is invoked when talking about many events from the past. Employing this narrative template means that events are emplotted such that they start in a setting where Russian people are living peacefully in their own land, minding their own business. A great threat then appears in the form of a foreign enemy. This threat is massive and may come close to destroying Russian civilization, but in the end the Russian people rise up and, through great effort and sacrifice, manage to expel the foreign enemy. This template provides a tool in what Bartlett (1932) termed the ‘effort after meaning’ and provides a collective interpretation of the Mongols of the 13th century, King Charles XII of Sweden in the 17th century, Napoleon in the 19th century, Hitler in the 20th century, and even communism in the Soviet period. National narratives of one sort or another (Wertsch, 2005) help organize historical memories of a people and are embedded in the literature, the customs, the politics and the ways of thinking of peoples all over the earth." (2).
The 9/11 story is the defining story of our time. There are unending wars because of the lie. Millions of lives have been ruined. Individual rights have been destroyed. It has impacted the destiny of nations, and of human civilization.
Clarke E. Cochran, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, says in his article, "Joseph and the Politics of Memory," that memory is an essential aspect of social cohesion and collective identity. He writes:
"Carefully crafted stories provide structure to the memories of a community. It is not enough for the survival of a community that memories come randomly; rather, the remembering on which a community's life and identity depend are intentional; they depend upon acts of willed remembrance." (3).In the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iranian clerics used the story of the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussain ibn Ali was slaughtered by the tyrant Yazid I, to embolden the spirits of young Iranian fighters and encourage them to follow the path of martyrdom.
The tactic worked, it kept Iranian's territorial integrity intact and preserved Khomeini's revolution. If America and Israel attack Iran the story of Hussain ibn Ali's defiance against tyranny will be retold a thousand times in Iran. The spirit of the Braveheart of the East will be reborn.
During times of war, a culture's stories of sacrifice and bravery are useful and need to be remembered. But there is a danger that the rulers of the kingdom will exploit the emotional impact of such stories and needlessly lead soldiers to their deaths. I think Iran's ruling clerics were guilty of this sin in the Iran-Iraq war.
"The ways in which a people remembers its founding event," says Cochran, "are vital to a regime's politics." The Iran-Iraq war was the big event that secured the Islamic regime's power over Iranian society and gave it popular legitimacy.
By comparison, the 9/11 attacks was the event that gave greater power to the U.S. shadow government and America's treacherous rulers. How we remember both events is significant because Iran and America are on a collision course with each other, and an apocalyptic war is not out of the question.
We need to radically re-examine the tensions that exist between both countries and re-open the pages of history.
I believe it is our spiritual and intellectual duty as individuals to educate ourselves and question what we put into our minds. We know our schools, governments and the media have failed us. But what matters is that we do not fail ourselves and future generations. At the end of the day, it is about taking personal responsibility for one's beliefs and thoughts.
The tyrants can call what we are doing individually and collectively, "conspiracy theorizing," but that doesn't change the reality that we are preserving the real history and truth of our age.
When peace comes at last to the world, she will be riding on the horse of truth.
Notes:
1. Remy, Steven P. "Book Reviews: Review of Jan-Werner Muller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past." Nations and Nationalism 10.3 (2004): 388-389. Print.
2. Roediger, Henry L and Wertsch, James V. "Creating a new discipline of memory studies."Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 9-22. Print. Pg. 13
3. Cochran, Clarke E. "Joseph and the Politics of Memory." The Review of Politics 64 (2002): 421-444. Print. Pg. 438-439.
