A few weeks ago, as part of my ongoing effort to review every Adam Curtis documentary, I covered the third part of The Power of Nightmares. One of the more shocking claims made by Curtis in that film is that Al Qaeda was essentially made-up by the American and British intelligence services. Yes, Osama Bin Laden was a real person and, yes, he hung around with some radical Islamist types, but they were never formally organised as ‘Al Qaeda’. One cannot help but laugh out loud re-watching the extraordinary claims by the American and British governments during the Bush and Blair era, including trying to pass off a tourist video at a theme park as evidence of Islamic terrorism, and wild claims about Al Qaeda’s vast underground mountain fortress, something akin to the lair of a Bond villain that – surprise, surprise, never existed.
Thanks for including the cut away diagram of the Tora-Bora mountain fortress of Osama Bin Laden, I am sure that I remember seeing it in some Sunday supplement on the evil forces of Al Qaeda, circa 2001.
"Labyrinth of connecting passages connect multiple cavern complexes and entrances" !😲
"Some chambers and passages are large enough to accommodate tanks and vehicles" !!😱😱
But where else have I seen that cut away? I'm sure it wasn't in the "Ladybird Book of Secret Underground Terrorist Bases", it was probably in "Fighting Fantasy V, The Death-Trap Dungeon."
But joking aside (slightly), we have all been fed pseudo-information from pseudo-journalists for years. In this case sourced from James Bond scripts about super-villain lairs.
Conventional theory has you believing that this constant lying leads to a legitimacy crisis of the institutions concerned.
This presupposes an informed and rational public. Outside of dissident circles, which are - granted - growing, it do not see this. There are still too many lemmings around, who may disapprove of one or the other muppet - like Starmer - but would never ever doubt the holy grail of parliamentarianism/"democracy"/globalism. Thus, the system itself does not suffer the legitimacy "downgrade" it deserves. Could be that this is a slow process that is already ongoing. In that case, however, it is much too slow for my taste.
Now if Al-Qaeda was made up, what are the chances the Government did 9/11 as a pretext for Ziowars? Remember building 7? I have seen apartment blocks in Ukraine and Gaza in the aftermath of bombing which are still standing. Yet a New York skyscraper collapses into it's own footprint because some burning debris hit it.
Truly excellent analysis, I am now inspired for an Adam Curtis rewatch. This, quite simply is not going to end well. Armstrong’s economic confidence model is showing a huge lack of faith in our leaders, the veil is slipping, the lies and deceit obvious. I cannot predict what happens next, Curtis has always said revolutions happen but nothing changes, not to the power at the top. I can only see war, as a means to address economic decline as the way out, but I cannot see it as a war that can be won, only the delusion of Western Hegemony.
Nice post; both solid writing/easily readable and strong points about our elite's narrative control. The movie "Wag the Dog" makes a similar point and is worth a watch or re-watch that, according to a review, “It’s a common trope in films and shows about politics: the one person, standing up to the Hollywood-produced machinery of Washington. The individual, fighting for authenticity in a political culture that wants nothing more than to be fake. What Wag the Dog suggests, though, is something both gentler and infinitely more cynical: Here, there is no one to push back. Here, there is no one to stand up for authenticity or truth or the empowerment of the individual. Here, it’s all a production; we citizens double as audiences. And the thing of it is that, in the movie’s dark vision, there is no difference between the two.”
This is the “beauty” of democracy, if you can call it that, and exactly what the regime intends with democracy. Essentially, the Hobbesian logic goes that the “people” ARE the sovereign and that the “sovereign” has vested within him the “mandate” (which is intentionally vague and discretionary) of the people.
Therefore, the subjects have no one to blame but themselves for voting into power their current representative, and should just VoTe HiM oUt. Rinse and repeat. Add some layers of bureaucracy and some subsidized private NGOs and you have yourself quite the Gordian Knot.
"This, then, is the problem with a government that always lies. We have no idea what is true, whether we are coming or going." This is of course by design, an old tactic when every statement is a fabrication, the populace is condemned to a perpetual fog, staggering between contradictory narratives and chasing phantom truths. It’s a masterstroke of control, really; by keeping the people dizzy with doubt, they rob them of the clarity needed to rebel or resist. In this Orwellian theatre, we’re no longer citizens with a grip on reality but spectators in a government-scripted farce, dutifully applauding whatever drivel is fed to us.
"From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of ****. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.”
I’d like to push back on this a bit, while agreeing with the basic thesis that our governments are lying liars who always lie to us. This also means they sometimes lie to each other, of course.
1) I’ve always thought Curtis’s “Al Qaeda didn’t exist” narrative went too far. Surely 9/11 was “formally organised”, for instance. It took planning, money, trial runs, coordination etc. Or does Curtis think it was an “inside job” by the deep state? Such a take feels a bit Alex Jones for Curtis. There were attempts after 9/11 to portray Al Qaeda as the “new USSR”, and Curtis should have contented himself with pointing out how ridiculous that was. At various times the USSR had the world’s largest standing army, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, the world’s most advanced space program, the world’s most effective spy network, and it controlled half of Europe - and they still lost the Cold War to the USA. Bin Laden and co never came close to any of that.
2) One thing about the Iraq War; the Bush government didn’t attempt to plant WMDs in Iraq, to then show to the press as vindication once the war was won. So either they believed their own propaganda and really expected to find WMDs, or they weren’t powerful enough to pull off that kind of a deception.
3) Regarding Southport, I’m probably more Alex Jones than anyone. I assumed from the start that the suspect would have an Islamist motivation, and might even have been radicalised after drifting into the very mosque the gammon rioters would later try to attack. I just assumed that MI5 would have him in a scary basement somewhere, training him for what to say when his trial starts. “Remember, you’re a member of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, and you did it in the name of Owain Glyndŵr, okay”. But again, it looks like they can’t quite pull off something like that. They’re not infinitely powerful, nor infinitely competent.
It might be argued that the reason things are projected as coordinated is precisely because they are in fact infinitely *in*competent. No one, the people themselves included, likes the idea that those with real power are this bad at wielding it. Pretending them to be 4D chess players serves all parties psychologically.
One way to redeem Curtis is to say that Islamicism in general is indeed nightmare made real. It is the simplified Islam that the West is willing to understand, that does appear in Islamicate history but is consistently internally squashed when it gains too much traction, that the West intentionally and unintentionally empowers to break past these traditional limits.
I mostly agree with this. There was real co-ordination over 9/11, though it wasn’t genius level. The main reason for the mission’s deadly success was that everyone operated on the assumption that hijackers always want to come out of the hijack alive. Once people adjusted their priors to account for suicidal hijackers, the tactic ceased to be effective. Even Flight 93 on the same day failed, because people understood by then what they were dealing with.
One reason I’m more or less an isolationist is, I think US/western intervention tends to prevent the emergence of relatively stable regional balances of power. I’m no expert on the middle east. But it feels to me that, between the major regional players, there’s easily enough countervailing power to create a balance of forces which can keep the Islamist crazies in check, while allowing the countries of the region to develop in relative peace. US intervention mostly has the effect of constantly throwing these emerging regional balances off-kilter. I’m not sure the State Department does this constant destabilisation for genius Machiavellian reasons. A lot of it seems to be dumb, even from the point of view of cynical US self-interest reasoning. Obama once told journalists aboard Airforce One that his main foreign policy concern was to try and avoid “doing stupid shit”. He implied that he thought Hillary’s decision to overthrow Gaddafi counted as “doing stupid shit”.
"But it feels to me that, between the major regional players, there’s easily enough countervailing power to create a balance of forces which can keep the Islamist crazies in check, while allowing the countries of the region to develop in relative peace."
Yup. No superhero outside saviour needed or welcome.
Avoiding "doing stupid shit" may be impossible if you have no concept of propriety and knowing your own area of business. Ideology/proselytism is not good at this.
1. Agreed, they trained and funded Osama and he participated in various conflicts on the NATO side and against NATO.
In my opinion, the organisation clearly does exist in a form, just not as it is presented.
The money was likely funnelled through the BCCI.
2. From what I've read, they tried to plant the WMDs but another group stole them in transit.
They could have just pretended to find some and fabricated a whole chain of custody, but I suspect they didn't want to involve the number of military personnel that would be needed to make that happen and on such short notice.
Alternatively, perhaps they never sent anything because it was cheaper to just lie and then pretend it never happened. It's not like they are ever held accountable.
3. There's no point doing that since they can make vague claims on the media repeatedly to achieve the same outcome.
It'd be a waste of resources to try that hard on a single case that will be forgotten by next month anyway.
1) I think AQ evolved over time. After 9/11, helped by the internet, it became a kind of franchise - the MacDonald’s of terror, so to speak. Disgruntled young Muslim men in western countries - people like the fictional character Ali in Hanif Kureishi’s 1994 short story “My Son the Fanatic” - could easily set up their own AQ franchise. They didn’t need to make contact with the man in Abbottabad or his associates; not in the way that, say, IRA terrorists in the 1980s and 90s usually had to make some kind of physical contact with each other in order to plan and execute attacks.
2) Who stole the WMDs? Disgruntled Iraqis? It can’t have been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, because he’d have used them to kill Shias.
3) My third comment was partly a silly dark joke. I still think Southport suggests that the regime is becoming less competent. The “controlled spontaneity” of the response to the Arianna Grande concert bombing was contemptible but very well-executed on its own terms. The Southport operation felt messy and awkward.
4) One extra thought. 80% of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi nationals. None were Iraqis. Yet the US chose to respond to Saudi aggression by invading Iraq. It’s as if Chamberlain had responded to Germany invading Poland by declaring war on Romania. I wonder if the Neocons thought they could turn Iraq into a viable alternative US ally to Saudi Arabia…
2. Most likely globalists who wanted to humiliate America on the world stage.
4. They invaded Afghanistan. And it was probably for the heroin money.
The gladio network established an enormous drug trafficking empire to fund their activities. This country would be a great addition. It also borders Russia, isolating the country.
Also some of the alleged hijackers are still alive, one in Morocco for instance. He claims his passport was stolen. The black box was melted beyond recognition, but the passports somehow survived being crushed under a building and submerged in molten metal?
Most likely they were planted after the fact. It's doubtful there were any hijackers, just as plausible that they remote controlled the plane in. The technology was state of the art then but it existed.
Also if I recall correctly the angle of the planes attack involved a manoeuvre that a human would struggle with due to g forces.
Al Qaeda did exist, but the real reasons for the appearance of manufactured threats requires subtlety and a deep understanding of the requirement for inflating specific threats, as well as numerous entrapments.
Imagine it's 9/11 and you've effectively been handed a blank cheque by politicians who are, behind the scenes, suddenly quite apologetic about the unheeded warnings of growing international threats- not just from the Saudis, but also China, Russia, Iran and a number of various other state and non-state actors. The problem is the money you've been given is largely earmarked to protect the Homeland/Mother Country from domestic terror threats, and you know full well that with the best will in the world, no matter how much money you are given, you're not going to foil more than 40% of incoming terror plots. You can see a clean sweep of all the carefully mustered agency resources you plan to garner looming under the burden of inevitable future failure.
So what's the answer? You use entrapment. You insist upon various necessary legislative changes, which also might happen to useful in handling the more the troublesome of the traditional foes- those pesky peasants (voters) with their pitchforks. It makes your numbers look more acceptable to your political masters- a 70% success rate looks a helluva lot more acceptable to the average Grauniad or Telegraph reader.
The woke agenda was an attempt to split an emerging populist wave into two intractable enemy camps. A combination of the Tea Party movement and Occupy had both the permanent state and corporate America truly worried. They correctly predicted the possibility of dangerously charismatic individuals with the power to unite the two factions and damage the institutional blob with their crony capitalist clients. Woke capitalism made it impossible for the two wings of the same populist reaction to neoliberalism to ever reconcile. People should watch Nick Hanauer's original TED Talk. It shares a dubious honour with Rupert Sheldrake in being one of very few virally popular early TED talks ever banned.
I just downloaded a CIA manual on sabotage. And another military handbook on camouflage. What can I say? I am an intellectually curious guy in an information age. 🤷♂️ 😉
Thank you. It's sobering to see political analysis not reliant on hysterical emotions or fearmongering, but attempts at just understanding what the hell is going on in our barely intelligible world.
Really good stuff. I was sure when the Southport story originally broke that it was an act of terror. There were other very similar acts happening around the same time by individuals that fit a similar profile. I still do believe that it was an act of terror extremism, but you've put a shred of doubt in my mind with your last few paragraphs - that this too could just be another lie.
I don't know what to think anymore...but I know that what is happening in the West - this erosion or more like destruction of a our faith and trust in institutions - only plays into the hands of the authoritarians who wish to dominate the world and destroy the West.
Honesty is the only way to fix this, and it doesn't even need to be complete honesty. But they HAVE to be blunt with us and admit some of the mistakes that they have made. We know too much for them to keep lying. It will not end well if they keep lying to their citizens. The sooner they level with us, and we can process and understand those mistakes with them, the sooner we can get to the other side of this.
All in all, I tend to find your hypothesis most likely that this is an operation to get rid of the PM. I fail to see any benefit to the powers that be in suppressing information about a potential "Islamism" connection even at the time of the initial reporting (other than perhaps permitting a quicker memory-holing). Depending on the angle one is coming from, even sharing this information back then would have led to a narrative that is more easily compatible with the liberal paradigm than the narrative that results when omitting or outright denying it.
Now, some lie more than others 😏. I wouldn't give a timeline (80 years?) on this, as I believe lies always happened from immemorial time with any governments or social organisations... 🤷 Lies are necessary evils anyway 🧐
Now, to be a credible liar you need more brain power than this 😳 "blank ster meuhr" 🐮
Always look like he was found with his hands in the sweet jar 🤢
But do not worry my fellow travelers, the "Real Men in Power" will replace this pawn quickly, probably with Nigel 🦊🍻 the salesman, the "new saviour" of Britain 😏
It will never end, the corruption goes far too deep ... 🤷
We don't need "saviours", we just really need:
- lifting up education levels,
- Engineering, by promoting Future Industries (automation, AI, Space, high speed computing, small & flexible nuclear power etc...)
- Business and Peace,
- A Small "Austrian school", boring government,
- A return to small taxes!
All that coupled with geopolitical real independance
& a small army with a national deterrent.
And internally: stop illegal migration, support for the really needy but not the dole profiteurs 🤑...
And most important: freedom of speech and a return to an independent Justice.
In brief, a return to our Victorian 🇬🇧 values and culture, rooted in Christianity and Science.
And feercly independent from our US, EU and Chinese "friends" 😏
The West truly is "The Empire of Lies".
Thanks for including the cut away diagram of the Tora-Bora mountain fortress of Osama Bin Laden, I am sure that I remember seeing it in some Sunday supplement on the evil forces of Al Qaeda, circa 2001.
"Labyrinth of connecting passages connect multiple cavern complexes and entrances" !😲
"Some chambers and passages are large enough to accommodate tanks and vehicles" !!😱😱
But where else have I seen that cut away? I'm sure it wasn't in the "Ladybird Book of Secret Underground Terrorist Bases", it was probably in "Fighting Fantasy V, The Death-Trap Dungeon."
But joking aside (slightly), we have all been fed pseudo-information from pseudo-journalists for years. In this case sourced from James Bond scripts about super-villain lairs.
They just took a picture of the Egyptian pyramids and added their own fantasies 😏🤥
Conventional theory has you believing that this constant lying leads to a legitimacy crisis of the institutions concerned.
This presupposes an informed and rational public. Outside of dissident circles, which are - granted - growing, it do not see this. There are still too many lemmings around, who may disapprove of one or the other muppet - like Starmer - but would never ever doubt the holy grail of parliamentarianism/"democracy"/globalism. Thus, the system itself does not suffer the legitimacy "downgrade" it deserves. Could be that this is a slow process that is already ongoing. In that case, however, it is much too slow for my taste.
Now if Al-Qaeda was made up, what are the chances the Government did 9/11 as a pretext for Ziowars? Remember building 7? I have seen apartment blocks in Ukraine and Gaza in the aftermath of bombing which are still standing. Yet a New York skyscraper collapses into it's own footprint because some burning debris hit it.
Truly excellent analysis, I am now inspired for an Adam Curtis rewatch. This, quite simply is not going to end well. Armstrong’s economic confidence model is showing a huge lack of faith in our leaders, the veil is slipping, the lies and deceit obvious. I cannot predict what happens next, Curtis has always said revolutions happen but nothing changes, not to the power at the top. I can only see war, as a means to address economic decline as the way out, but I cannot see it as a war that can be won, only the delusion of Western Hegemony.
Nice post; both solid writing/easily readable and strong points about our elite's narrative control. The movie "Wag the Dog" makes a similar point and is worth a watch or re-watch that, according to a review, “It’s a common trope in films and shows about politics: the one person, standing up to the Hollywood-produced machinery of Washington. The individual, fighting for authenticity in a political culture that wants nothing more than to be fake. What Wag the Dog suggests, though, is something both gentler and infinitely more cynical: Here, there is no one to push back. Here, there is no one to stand up for authenticity or truth or the empowerment of the individual. Here, it’s all a production; we citizens double as audiences. And the thing of it is that, in the movie’s dark vision, there is no difference between the two.”
https://substack.com/@neofeudalism/note/c-74061980
This is the “beauty” of democracy, if you can call it that, and exactly what the regime intends with democracy. Essentially, the Hobbesian logic goes that the “people” ARE the sovereign and that the “sovereign” has vested within him the “mandate” (which is intentionally vague and discretionary) of the people.
Therefore, the subjects have no one to blame but themselves for voting into power their current representative, and should just VoTe HiM oUt. Rinse and repeat. Add some layers of bureaucracy and some subsidized private NGOs and you have yourself quite the Gordian Knot.
"This, then, is the problem with a government that always lies. We have no idea what is true, whether we are coming or going." This is of course by design, an old tactic when every statement is a fabrication, the populace is condemned to a perpetual fog, staggering between contradictory narratives and chasing phantom truths. It’s a masterstroke of control, really; by keeping the people dizzy with doubt, they rob them of the clarity needed to rebel or resist. In this Orwellian theatre, we’re no longer citizens with a grip on reality but spectators in a government-scripted farce, dutifully applauding whatever drivel is fed to us.
"From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of ****. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.”
– Gustave Flaubert, 1850
I’d like to push back on this a bit, while agreeing with the basic thesis that our governments are lying liars who always lie to us. This also means they sometimes lie to each other, of course.
1) I’ve always thought Curtis’s “Al Qaeda didn’t exist” narrative went too far. Surely 9/11 was “formally organised”, for instance. It took planning, money, trial runs, coordination etc. Or does Curtis think it was an “inside job” by the deep state? Such a take feels a bit Alex Jones for Curtis. There were attempts after 9/11 to portray Al Qaeda as the “new USSR”, and Curtis should have contented himself with pointing out how ridiculous that was. At various times the USSR had the world’s largest standing army, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, the world’s most advanced space program, the world’s most effective spy network, and it controlled half of Europe - and they still lost the Cold War to the USA. Bin Laden and co never came close to any of that.
2) One thing about the Iraq War; the Bush government didn’t attempt to plant WMDs in Iraq, to then show to the press as vindication once the war was won. So either they believed their own propaganda and really expected to find WMDs, or they weren’t powerful enough to pull off that kind of a deception.
3) Regarding Southport, I’m probably more Alex Jones than anyone. I assumed from the start that the suspect would have an Islamist motivation, and might even have been radicalised after drifting into the very mosque the gammon rioters would later try to attack. I just assumed that MI5 would have him in a scary basement somewhere, training him for what to say when his trial starts. “Remember, you’re a member of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, and you did it in the name of Owain Glyndŵr, okay”. But again, it looks like they can’t quite pull off something like that. They’re not infinitely powerful, nor infinitely competent.
It might be argued that the reason things are projected as coordinated is precisely because they are in fact infinitely *in*competent. No one, the people themselves included, likes the idea that those with real power are this bad at wielding it. Pretending them to be 4D chess players serves all parties psychologically.
One way to redeem Curtis is to say that Islamicism in general is indeed nightmare made real. It is the simplified Islam that the West is willing to understand, that does appear in Islamicate history but is consistently internally squashed when it gains too much traction, that the West intentionally and unintentionally empowers to break past these traditional limits.
I mostly agree with this. There was real co-ordination over 9/11, though it wasn’t genius level. The main reason for the mission’s deadly success was that everyone operated on the assumption that hijackers always want to come out of the hijack alive. Once people adjusted their priors to account for suicidal hijackers, the tactic ceased to be effective. Even Flight 93 on the same day failed, because people understood by then what they were dealing with.
One reason I’m more or less an isolationist is, I think US/western intervention tends to prevent the emergence of relatively stable regional balances of power. I’m no expert on the middle east. But it feels to me that, between the major regional players, there’s easily enough countervailing power to create a balance of forces which can keep the Islamist crazies in check, while allowing the countries of the region to develop in relative peace. US intervention mostly has the effect of constantly throwing these emerging regional balances off-kilter. I’m not sure the State Department does this constant destabilisation for genius Machiavellian reasons. A lot of it seems to be dumb, even from the point of view of cynical US self-interest reasoning. Obama once told journalists aboard Airforce One that his main foreign policy concern was to try and avoid “doing stupid shit”. He implied that he thought Hillary’s decision to overthrow Gaddafi counted as “doing stupid shit”.
Great point about the coordination.
"But it feels to me that, between the major regional players, there’s easily enough countervailing power to create a balance of forces which can keep the Islamist crazies in check, while allowing the countries of the region to develop in relative peace."
Yup. No superhero outside saviour needed or welcome.
Avoiding "doing stupid shit" may be impossible if you have no concept of propriety and knowing your own area of business. Ideology/proselytism is not good at this.
1. Agreed, they trained and funded Osama and he participated in various conflicts on the NATO side and against NATO.
In my opinion, the organisation clearly does exist in a form, just not as it is presented.
The money was likely funnelled through the BCCI.
2. From what I've read, they tried to plant the WMDs but another group stole them in transit.
They could have just pretended to find some and fabricated a whole chain of custody, but I suspect they didn't want to involve the number of military personnel that would be needed to make that happen and on such short notice.
Alternatively, perhaps they never sent anything because it was cheaper to just lie and then pretend it never happened. It's not like they are ever held accountable.
3. There's no point doing that since they can make vague claims on the media repeatedly to achieve the same outcome.
It'd be a waste of resources to try that hard on a single case that will be forgotten by next month anyway.
The public are amnesiacs.
1) I think AQ evolved over time. After 9/11, helped by the internet, it became a kind of franchise - the MacDonald’s of terror, so to speak. Disgruntled young Muslim men in western countries - people like the fictional character Ali in Hanif Kureishi’s 1994 short story “My Son the Fanatic” - could easily set up their own AQ franchise. They didn’t need to make contact with the man in Abbottabad or his associates; not in the way that, say, IRA terrorists in the 1980s and 90s usually had to make some kind of physical contact with each other in order to plan and execute attacks.
2) Who stole the WMDs? Disgruntled Iraqis? It can’t have been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, because he’d have used them to kill Shias.
3) My third comment was partly a silly dark joke. I still think Southport suggests that the regime is becoming less competent. The “controlled spontaneity” of the response to the Arianna Grande concert bombing was contemptible but very well-executed on its own terms. The Southport operation felt messy and awkward.
4) One extra thought. 80% of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi nationals. None were Iraqis. Yet the US chose to respond to Saudi aggression by invading Iraq. It’s as if Chamberlain had responded to Germany invading Poland by declaring war on Romania. I wonder if the Neocons thought they could turn Iraq into a viable alternative US ally to Saudi Arabia…
2. Most likely globalists who wanted to humiliate America on the world stage.
4. They invaded Afghanistan. And it was probably for the heroin money.
The gladio network established an enormous drug trafficking empire to fund their activities. This country would be a great addition. It also borders Russia, isolating the country.
Also some of the alleged hijackers are still alive, one in Morocco for instance. He claims his passport was stolen. The black box was melted beyond recognition, but the passports somehow survived being crushed under a building and submerged in molten metal?
Most likely they were planted after the fact. It's doubtful there were any hijackers, just as plausible that they remote controlled the plane in. The technology was state of the art then but it existed.
Also if I recall correctly the angle of the planes attack involved a manoeuvre that a human would struggle with due to g forces.
Al Qaeda did exist, but the real reasons for the appearance of manufactured threats requires subtlety and a deep understanding of the requirement for inflating specific threats, as well as numerous entrapments.
Imagine it's 9/11 and you've effectively been handed a blank cheque by politicians who are, behind the scenes, suddenly quite apologetic about the unheeded warnings of growing international threats- not just from the Saudis, but also China, Russia, Iran and a number of various other state and non-state actors. The problem is the money you've been given is largely earmarked to protect the Homeland/Mother Country from domestic terror threats, and you know full well that with the best will in the world, no matter how much money you are given, you're not going to foil more than 40% of incoming terror plots. You can see a clean sweep of all the carefully mustered agency resources you plan to garner looming under the burden of inevitable future failure.
So what's the answer? You use entrapment. You insist upon various necessary legislative changes, which also might happen to useful in handling the more the troublesome of the traditional foes- those pesky peasants (voters) with their pitchforks. It makes your numbers look more acceptable to your political masters- a 70% success rate looks a helluva lot more acceptable to the average Grauniad or Telegraph reader.
The woke agenda was an attempt to split an emerging populist wave into two intractable enemy camps. A combination of the Tea Party movement and Occupy had both the permanent state and corporate America truly worried. They correctly predicted the possibility of dangerously charismatic individuals with the power to unite the two factions and damage the institutional blob with their crony capitalist clients. Woke capitalism made it impossible for the two wings of the same populist reaction to neoliberalism to ever reconcile. People should watch Nick Hanauer's original TED Talk. It shares a dubious honour with Rupert Sheldrake in being one of very few virally popular early TED talks ever banned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8&t=2s
I just downloaded a CIA manual on sabotage. And another military handbook on camouflage. What can I say? I am an intellectually curious guy in an information age. 🤷♂️ 😉
Thank you. It's sobering to see political analysis not reliant on hysterical emotions or fearmongering, but attempts at just understanding what the hell is going on in our barely intelligible world.
Really good stuff. I was sure when the Southport story originally broke that it was an act of terror. There were other very similar acts happening around the same time by individuals that fit a similar profile. I still do believe that it was an act of terror extremism, but you've put a shred of doubt in my mind with your last few paragraphs - that this too could just be another lie.
I don't know what to think anymore...but I know that what is happening in the West - this erosion or more like destruction of a our faith and trust in institutions - only plays into the hands of the authoritarians who wish to dominate the world and destroy the West.
Honesty is the only way to fix this, and it doesn't even need to be complete honesty. But they HAVE to be blunt with us and admit some of the mistakes that they have made. We know too much for them to keep lying. It will not end well if they keep lying to their citizens. The sooner they level with us, and we can process and understand those mistakes with them, the sooner we can get to the other side of this.
Very well said sir, very well said...
All in all, I tend to find your hypothesis most likely that this is an operation to get rid of the PM. I fail to see any benefit to the powers that be in suppressing information about a potential "Islamism" connection even at the time of the initial reporting (other than perhaps permitting a quicker memory-holing). Depending on the angle one is coming from, even sharing this information back then would have led to a narrative that is more easily compatible with the liberal paradigm than the narrative that results when omitting or outright denying it.
Governments lie 🤥, period.
Now, some lie more than others 😏. I wouldn't give a timeline (80 years?) on this, as I believe lies always happened from immemorial time with any governments or social organisations... 🤷 Lies are necessary evils anyway 🧐
Now, to be a credible liar you need more brain power than this 😳 "blank ster meuhr" 🐮
Always look like he was found with his hands in the sweet jar 🤢
But do not worry my fellow travelers, the "Real Men in Power" will replace this pawn quickly, probably with Nigel 🦊🍻 the salesman, the "new saviour" of Britain 😏
It will never end, the corruption goes far too deep ... 🤷
We don't need "saviours", we just really need:
- lifting up education levels,
- Engineering, by promoting Future Industries (automation, AI, Space, high speed computing, small & flexible nuclear power etc...)
- Business and Peace,
- A Small "Austrian school", boring government,
- A return to small taxes!
All that coupled with geopolitical real independance
& a small army with a national deterrent.
And internally: stop illegal migration, support for the really needy but not the dole profiteurs 🤑...
And most important: freedom of speech and a return to an independent Justice.
In brief, a return to our Victorian 🇬🇧 values and culture, rooted in Christianity and Science.
And feercly independent from our US, EU and Chinese "friends" 😏
All governments always lie.