Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia
By Denis G. Rancourt | Activist Teacher | September 12, 2010
Especially left and liberal professionals and service intellectuals but also right-wing members of the intelligentsia vehemently attack and ridicule “conspiracy theories” such as the present 911 Truth movement.
Why?
It’s as though power did not covertly orchestrate its predation of us? Is that not the modus operandi of power?
Is it so difficult to believe that the complex and highly successful military attack on US soil that was 911 (levelling three gigantic sky scrapers, blasting a hole into the Pentagon, and destroying four commercial jets and their passengers) was not orchestrated by a religious zealot from a cave in Afghanistan and executed by failed Cessna pilot trainees with box cutters? Or that those who measurably benefited in the trillions had nothing to do with it?
What the hell? Not even (admittedly rare) authoritative mainstream reports seem to matter [1].
What ever happened to “war is a racket” and “follow the money”?
In rigorous compliance with the true meanings of “academic freedom” [2] and “freedom of the press” virtually no academics or mainstream journalists have made it their research to find truth or to radically (at the root) question the establishment version.
Indeed, all the major and considered-radical academic pundits such as Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, have actively avoided the possibility that the 911 attacks could have been known or aided from within the finance-corporate-military complex.
What keeps them from crossing that line? What makes them demean attempts to cross that line? [3]
Similarly, even outspoken dissident parliamentary politicians such as George Galloway have ridiculed the concerns of 911 truthers (at his last public talk in Ottawa).
Is such self and projected censorship by star intellectuals only the result of the fear of being mobbed by ridicule? Is asking these questions in public fora so dangerous?
When barred and suppressed Afghan Member of Parliament Malalai Joya was asked about 911 by a truther in Ottawa last year she replied that those who sought answers in this matter should address their questions to the occupiers of the White House. To this writer’s knowledge, this is the furthest that any politician has gone in this direction, coming from “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” no less.
But what shocked the present writer more is the derision to which was subjected the truther at the Malalai Joya Ottawa event, at the hands of an “activist” and “progressive” crowd.
INTELLIGENTSIA SELF-DEFENCE
The intelligentsia appears to be addicted to the illusion that it has a monopoly on valid analysis and understanding. In order to preserve this illusion and to protect its standing in providing interpretations of the World, the intelligentsia must limit the scope of all investigations to domains that fall within its self-established interpretational paradigms (right-left, power politics, geopolitical chess board, corporate motives, etc.) and self-established research protocols.
Those paradigms and protocols, in turn, and the rigorously followed discipline of not supposing the worst in one’s research stance, were established in academia at the time when “academic freedom” was being defined by the cornerstone nineteenth century US battles for professional independence in academia. The academics and society lost that battle [2]:
“[T]he economists were the first professional analysts to be “broken in,” in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in universities. The academic system would from that point on impose a strict operational separation between inquiry and theorizing as acceptable and social reform as unacceptable.
Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a self-image of importance despite this fatal limitation on their societal relevance, with verbiage such as: The truth is our most powerful weapon, the pen is mightier than the sword, a good idea can change the world, reason will take us out of darkness, etc.”
Academics and “radical professors” train the intelligentsia…
And power owns the media.
TRUTH ABOUT TRUTH
But much more importantly power owns us, owns our jobs, owns students at school and owns the homeless on the street, the First Peoples on the reserves and the prisoners in the jails. As long as we are owned, information about abuse of power is irrelevant for social change.
This is the sociological fact that the 911 Truth movement has failed to recognize [4]. Truth will not set us free. Truth and information do not lead to action. It’s not a question of how many folks know the truth.
It’s only a question of what the truth means in real terms to however few individuals and will these individuals rebel, actually rebel and individually take back power over their lives.
Contrary to the mantra of our left academic idols, truth and research are not threatening to power in a culture of subservience and obedience. In such a culture, radical-in-thought academics only stabilize the system by neutralizing the more action-minded youth. [5]
In such a culture, the only truth that is threatening to power is one that it perceives as an attack on its self-image [6]. And, in such a culture, psychological self-image arising from power’s connection to the broader society is the only force that can move power to constrain itself [6]. In this measure, in the present culture, 911 Truth could have an impact. In this way, some of the low-level actual perpetrators and facilitators of 911 could eventually be sacrificed in show trials or in mainstream smear campaigns.
In conclusion, the intelligentsia works at protecting itself (and by extension the system) and therefore will be a visceral opponent of 911 Truth until it can integrate 911 Truth and participate in neutralizing 911 Truth in order for power to save face. Or, some citizens might actually rebel? The extent and projection/potential of such pockets of rebellion is the only force capable of leveraging real concessions from power [7][8][9].
Endnotes
[1] “Major media articles on 9-11 raise questions” by Fred Burks, 2010, Want to Know.
[2] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
[3] “Questioning Foundations: An Interview with Denis Rancourt” by Michael Barker, 2010, Dissident Voice.
[4] “911 Truth” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
[5] “Against Chomsky” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2008.
[6] “Psycho-biological basis for image leverage and the case of Israel” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
[7] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
[8] “Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
[9] “Murder and genocide are natural, therefore rebel!” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
corbettreport.com: 9/11 Truth is Still the Issue
TheRealNews: 9/11 Questions Remain Unanswered
Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]
10 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Featured Video
AUTISM IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF THE TRANS MOVEMENT
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The Curious Case of the Missing Professor Mifsud
By Johanna Ross | August 13, 2019
In The Times newspaper on July 30th, appeared a short and succinct article, easily missed were it not for its intriguing headline: ‘Missing academic Joseph Mifsud at heart of Mueller investigation’. The academic in question, one may or may not have heard of, depending on the extent to which one is reliant on mainstream media for keeping abreast of the news. But anyone attempting to keep up with the complex and murky world of the Mueller investigation, may be familiar with the name of this mysterious and elusive figure.
For it is none other than Professor Mifsud, affiliated with both the Universities of Stirling and East Anglia in the UK, that was identified by the FBI as being the source of the information that Russia had ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton. And intriguingly, the same Professor Mifsud who disappeared in October 2017 and has been missing ever since.
It was in April 2016 that Mifsud, who was qualified in education but somehow managed to find his way into the world of international diplomacy (becoming director of the London Academy of Diplomacy in 2012), reportedly met George Papadopoulos, foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, where he is said to have told him that the Russian government had ‘dirt on Hillary Clinton’. This information was then allegedly passed by Papadopoulos to the Australian High Commissioner in London, before being repeated to US authorities; that effectively Papdopoulos had known about the DNC hack prior to it being carried out. In short, Mifsud was the key to the whole ‘Russiagate’ scandal. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
papasha408 on Zelensky will not attend the N… michael on Zelensky will not attend the N… tonyopmoc on “Cool the Mark Out”: How the m… Bill Francis on The not-so-heroic lockdown… Best Johnd on The Media Lied Repeatedly Abou… Balthasar Gerards on “Cool the Mark Out”: How the m… charles allan on Turn Off, Don’t Automate, the… roberthstiver on The Union State Expects That T… papasha408 on Insisting on “demilitarized zo… Vlad the Skewerer on Weapon US gave Ukraine spotted… aletho on As Europe founders, is common… charles allan on CEO Of Top Carbon Credit Certi…
Aletho News- WHO Initiative Would ‘Promote Desired Behaviors’ by Surveilling Social Media
- The Ursula von der Leyen Affair
- CIA Vets: FBI Withholds Damning Evidence on Bidens Prior to Presidential Election, Again
- CIA hacked iPhones of diplomats in Russia – FSB
- US Advocacy Group Releases Emails Challenging Biden’s Statements on Son’s Connections
- State Department Defends “Disinformation” Grant That Funded Online Blacklists
- BBC Verify?
- Zelensky will not attend the NATO summit unless his ultimatum is met – FT
- FBI Refuses To Hand Over Communications About Twitter-Related Censorship
- The not-so-heroic lockdown critic
- If Americans Knew
- New 3rd political party “No Labels” seeks middle ground – except on Israel
- Is the United States Moving Its Capital to Jerusalem?
- NYT downplays Palestinian civilian deaths, political motivation for Gaza attack
- What is behind the latest Israel-Gaza violence?
- What’s standing in the way of an Israel-Gaza ceasefire? Israel wants to keep breaking int’l law
- Israeli Missiles Kill Eight Palestinians, Including A Child, In Gaza
- Israel closes Gaza crossings; possible serious deterioration of humanitarian conditions
- Israel has killed 20 journalists with impunity since 2000
- Israel attacks Gaza, killing 15 Palestinians, including women and children
- Khader Adnan’s death & Israel’s decades of despotic military orders
- Brownstone Institute
- New CDC Director Is Another Lockdowner
- An Ideology and Agenda of Estrangement
- The Fraying of the Liberal International Order
- A Myth-Making Toolkit from the Volcano’s Shadow
- The Deplatforming of the “Disinformation Dozen”: More Coverage From Tracy Beanz
- Complying, Not Defying: Twitter and the EU Censorship Code
- Ireland’s Assault on Free Speech
- The Economics of Lockdown Panics
- Misinformation Is a Word We Use to Shut You Up
- My Official Apology to the New York Post
- Richie Allen
- UK Health Security Agency Launches High Temperature Alert System
- Free Speech Champion Vows To Defend All Views
- Pesticide Firms Hid Brain Toxicity Studies From EU Regulators
- Schoolgirl With Terminal Cancer Was Told It Might Be Stress
- Amazon to Pay $25 Million Over Alexa Privacy Violations
- Labour Would Force Landowners To Sell Below Market Value To Boost Housebuilding
- Couple Fear Wedding Cancellation If Hotel Is Used To House 300 Asylum Seekers
- Scores Of Primary Schools At Risk Of Closure Due To Birth Rate Decline
- Sunak Backs Feminist In Oxford Free Speech Row
- Top Chinese Scientist Won’t Rule Out Covid Lab Leak
- Not A Lot Of People Know That
- Met Office Announce Water Scarcity Alert After Wet Spring!
- Ireland’s mooted cow massacre is a warning to net zero Britain
- Dominic Lawson: Lower tax revenue and higher CO2 emissions: What Starmer’s financially illiterate plan to stop North Sea drilling would really mean for Britain
- What the media won’t tell you about . . . hurricanes–Roger Pielke Jr
- Labour plans to block new North Sea oil fields could cost Scotland £6bn
- Telegraph’s EV Fan Gets A Shock!
- Bournemouth’s Spate Of “Deliberate” Heath Fires
- Yet Another Coffee Scare
- Labour Will Block New North Sea Oil & Gas
- Britain’s Weather A Hundred Years Ago
- No Tricks Zone
- Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier Narrative Collapses…Total Melt Raises Sea Levels 1-2 mm, Not 3048 mm
- Expert Prof. Gerd Ganteför Calls For More Studies On The Regional Climate Impact By Wind Turbines
- New Study Destroys ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Narrative…Today’s Ice 8 Times 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑟 Than Last 8000 Years
- Cold Grips Globally: Alaska’s 4th Cold Winter… Record Cold Down Under…UK’s Delayed Spring…
- Aarhus University Researchers Find Arctic Warmer, Ice-Free In Summertime 10,000 Years Ago!
- Professors: The Entire Fossil Fuel Industry Must Be ‘Euthanized’ To Save Humanity From Warmth
- German Green Parliamentarian Shocks The Nation…Couldn’t Even Name First German Empire Chancellor!
- Another New Study Shows The Siberian Arctic Is Warmer When CO2 Is Low And Colder As CO2 Rises
- German Greens In Crisis, Plummet 40% In Opinion Polls As Anger Mounts Over Bans, Scandals
- Germany’s Growing List Of Bans: Next Up: Wood Stoves And Heating With Wood!
Aletho News 
Fascinating article – explains the deep opposition to a rigorous investigation of 9/11. But immensely depressing that not only can the politicians avoid any examniation of the event, but also that the ‘intelligentsia’ close down any debate on the many unresolved issues. Should we all give up?
LikeLike
Yes, Prof. Rancourt’s analysis is brilliant. Truth will not set us free so long as the frame of reference for truth is manipulated by the “intelligentsia” or should that be “Stupidsia”
Tyrants will go to any lengths to protect themselves, and sabotaging the truth is an integral step. Without exaggeration, the governments of Canad and The U.S are waging an undeclared war against their own people.
Civil liberties, the rule of law and truth itself are now subjective political instruments. By rights, any measures taken to protect our societies against the fascist cliques that despoil them is permitted.
LikeLike
“Intelligentsia”, a misleading term, should read extra-indoctrinated.
Hardly any pretense of civil liberties or rule of law left at all.
Better not to relinquish your rights easily. Giving up your freedom is a losing strategy.
LikeLike
For an adequate synopsis of this issue, please review the following website:
http://www.bigeye.com
A discussion is had of 911 and related topics in a manner which is far removed from the narrative of the mainstream press. Please review and decide for yourself the veracity and validity of these issues.
It is extremely sad that the American narrative is coming to a close, it being so riddled with holes and half-truths that it is collapsing on itself. Those who have chosen this path of treason have dug a hole so deep for themselves that it appears they can’t climb out. The world (except perhaps US mainstream media and in particular, FOXNews)appears to grow tired of American financial fraud, American lies to invade countries and related issues evidencing a moribund culture and morality.
One hopes that the American people, in their wisdom and generosity can find the courage and competence to put the truth and morality back together together as Humpty Dumpty falls from such a high height that the pieces referred to in the original nursery rhyme have morphed into nanoparticles.
LikeLike
you pretty much summed it up. the entire world at large has finally shaken off the exceptionism that was smoke and mirrors and bullshit moreso than actual altruism and a genuine stand up fight for actual FREEDOM and LIBERTY, which it abhors and destroys in a form of oxymoronic cruisade against virtually all of the things that the U.S. tried to convince the world it was, but truly never was. Concepts of freedom and liberty and all good things that are normally granted to any human being at birth, are totally nonexistent in the U.S., if they ever existed there, at all.
for instance, by now most of the world knows that the U.S., who harps about weapons of mass destruction and tyranny, is the only nation that has used weapons of mass destruction to mass murder two cities in Japan for no good reason. though the Japanese imperial government was in the process of surrendering and capitulating, the U.S. bombed that nation anyway, using the only two nuclear weapons ever used on civilians.
the world knows that the U.S., a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, murdered retreating Iraqi’s on the Highway of Death in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, under orders from George H.W. Bush to Gen. Normal Swarzkopf, while the Iraqi forces were withdrawing and retreating after dropping their weapons and offering no resistance of any kind. though this was a violation of the Conventions, it was never even brought up at a single United Nations Security Council meeting after it occurred, nor was it referred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, either, to be prosecuted under the Roma Accord.
it’s a pretty fair statement that the world as a whole has now shaken off the lies and the bullshit that the U.S. government parrots thru propaganda channels, television and radio networks, aka the Mainstream Media. alternative media sources have shown U.S. troops murdering everything from farmers out preparing for the next morning’s work, to people being blown up in broad daylight who had no more reason to be targeted for slaughter than any counterpart gathering in any U.S. city, minding their own business and harming nobody.
the world watches the drone murdering of innocent men, women and children, by a Nobel Peace Prize winner who makes jokes about drone murdering in front of press club gatherings as if he’s talking about an NBA playoff game.
don’t you think that on the whole that from one side of this ball to the other, people know exactly what American imperialism and land grabbing is?
nobody has any more illusions about what a monster the nation is, or for that matter, what monsters that Britain, France, and Australia have become, and for that matter, Canada as well? and for whom? for Israel, that’s whom.
isn’t it time we called a mass murderer death cult a mass murderer death cult and dispensed with the euphemisms and the wholly undeserved pleasantries?
LikeLike
The average “intellectual” doesnt want to believe that their sense of reality has been compromised
LikeLike
It is not that well-positioned academics and intellectuals eschew conspiracy theorising; they are the primary source of conspiracy theories about corporations, right wingers and White racism being the sources of most social problems. Rather, they are selected in the first place for their compliance, and then retain their positions and privileges depending on how well they understand which conspiracy theories to push and which to punish.
***
“all the major and considered-radical academic pundits such as Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, have actively avoided the possibility that the 911 attacks could have been known or aided from within the finance-corporate-military complex … What keeps them from crossing that line? What makes them demean attempts to cross that line?”
Academics and intellectuals in large part make their living attacking financial, corporate and military institutions, often making an attack on the supposed Whiteness of those institutions and an explicit part of their critique. There’s the clue. With 9/11 that isn’t an option. Ask ‘Cui bono?’ and ‘follow the money’ about 9/11 and it’s Jews for Israel from top to bottom. White people have no beef with the Muslim world, except that portion of it that has colonized us in recent decades as part of another Jewish-scripted program.
I’m not saying the typical poli-sci professor or journalist starts by suspecting a Jewish role in 9/11 and decides to go no further into it. The control of our ideas and consciences is much more deep and subtle than that. You can see this simply in the fact that while most White intellectuals think ethnonationalism is healthy and positive for Black and Asian peoples, especially including the Jews ‘considering all they have suffered,’ they just assume, somehow, that advocates of ethnonationalism for peoples that happen to be White are the gravest threat to peace and justice on the planet. They don’t know why they hold to these double standards that are objectively racist against their kind, even though they would claim to be against racism themselves; they just do.
And this taboo, like the one on serious study of 9/11, is borne of Jewish minds protecting and pursuing Jewish interests.
LikeLike
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/the-connection-between-zionism-organized-islamophobia-the-facts/
This shoulld be the clue to why the rampant Zionism and their latest wepond of smoke and mirrors, the Islamaphobia.
This is what have been done for years, the Zoogle rules the world, regading what people actually getts when the seach for something, or anything about Islam, and what do they gett, this pile of shitt.
My depest aprichiasions goes to those/that made this be exposed.
peace
LikeLike
[…] Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia […]
LikeLike
Pingback by [UK-911-Truth] 9/11 2014 anniversary: Dissecting Crime Of The Millennium- Peter Borenius | | September 10, 2014
because it is a racist ethnic conspiracy ,thats why, because the “activists” ,progressives” , ‘intelligentsia” “academia”, “radical professors” you speak of , are just code word for jews ,and 911 was a jewish conspiracy
“power owns the media” actually jews own the media and they also own the alternative media too and the 911 truth movement that they themselves created prior to 911 to misdirect the “movement”
this is why
LikeLike