On Connecting Dots

When I picked up Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' a few weeks ago in an local bookshop, I knew it would prove a very valuable source of information. And the book indeed surpassed my expectations as it documented a systematical and conscious fine-tuning of a kind of 'laissez faire on speed'. The book follows a wealth of historical examples that reveal again and again that behind the facade of supposedly 'objective economic truths', the free market model is actually an antidemocratic seizure of the public sphere for capital to commodify and marketise.

In normal English, Klein compares today's neoliberalism with the classic days of Adam Smith: "Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier, which corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthlessness and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home the gold and silver of the Andes. Where Smith saw fertile green lands turned into profitable farmlands on the pampas and the prairies, Wall Street saw "green field opportunities" in Chile's phone system, Argentina's airline, Russia's oilfields, Bolivia's water system, the United States' public airwaves, Poland's factories - all built with public wealth, then sold for a trifle." Crucial to Kleins' argument is that this is all made politically possible by powerful people exploiting crises and shocks -whether it be military coups, mass torture, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or hyperinflation. And to take the argument even further, the useful crises have often been artificially designed or manipulated with the express purpose of creating these new frontiers for lucrative investment. In short, 'The Shock Doctrine' reaffirms the classic picture of expansionist (crony) capitalism by documenting it in historical and political context.

This alone is already quite heavy stuff to digest, but the narrative is still acceptable for a broader audience. It's still common, at least in left wing or academic circles, to follow Klein in her connection between crises, repression and corporate expansion. This is considered respectable; connecting two themes that, in the main stream media seem "totally unrelated", may require arguments and justification to many, but is perfectly within the scope of debatable discourse. However, what happens if you start assembling a larger picture from combining Klein's account of the shock doctrine with other plausible but deviant investigations?

I can simply no longer keep this conclusion to myself. I need to share it with people at least once. The point to the shock doctrine, using moments of crisis to reduce the public into a regressive, childlike state, to create a window of political opportunity for 'free market reform' and resource grabs, seems to me exactly identical to the motivation for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. At first hesitantly, I reviewed some of the literature on the attacks of September 11th; especially David Ray Griffin's 'The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions', 'War and Globalization' by Michel Chossudovsky, and Michael Ruppert's 'Crossing the Rubicon' helped me clear up my mind on the matter. It seems only reasonable and, frankly, unavoidable to conclude at the very least that the US intelligence and top officials knew of the attacks before hand. The evidence is just too overwhelming. For those readers who need this claim backed up, just pick your favourite story. The insider trading cannot possibly be statistically accounted for without assuming foreknowledge. Whistleblowers like Mike Vreeland who warned of attacks months before they happened were being ignored, in Mike's case he was kept tucked away in Canadian prisons. The head of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) Mahmood Ahmed wired 100,000 dollars to Mohammed Atta shortly before the attacks and then spent a full week before, during, and after the attacks in the United States, meeting with CIA director George Tenet. Various people like New York fire department chief Nick Visconti, George Bush, and Rudi Guiliani displayed knowledge of the second twin tower and building 7 collapsing before it happened. Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder to building 7, admitted in a jawdropping interview that he gave permission to blow up building 7 with explosives. All this is documented in the three books I mentioned, and the list of evidence goes on much further. Are we just to ignore this or can we conclude something from these verifiable basic facts?

At least so much has to be concluded that the Bush administration top officials like Dick Cheney welcomed the attack, had intensive ties with one of its main financiers Mahmood Ahmed, and did their best to make the attacks pass through the most standard of air defense procedures. We can also be sure the Twin Towers and building 7 could never have collapsed from just the plane crashes; never before 9/11 have steel beams collapsed from fire and never after. Knowing all this, who could doubt that 9/11 was one of the most ambitious attempts yet by a closely knit ideological clique, to whom the shock doctrine is the bread and butter of advancing their politics, to advance a plan they debated and planned years ahead in publicly available documents. Both foreign policy 'realist' Zbigniew Brzezinski in 'The Grand Chessboard' and the neoconservatives of the Project for A New American Century in 'Rebuilding America's Defences' were speaking of the necessity for a new enemy to galvanise the American people into supporting an endless 'War on Terror'. Reading the Shock Doctrine confirmed my suspicion that this was nothing new, it was just high time for a daring new phase in the expansion of capital. In 'The Last Oil Shock', David Strahan writes that Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, had been arguing in 1998 that the Western oil industry will very quickly lose its productive capacity if the industry doesn't gain access to Middle Eastern oil. In dire need to open up the critical markets for pushing the envelope of collapse, a few shock doctors were willing to go a step further. (Again, all my factual claims are publicly reviewable. If in doubt, ask me for sources.)

Naomi Klein, however, would not agree (publicly at least) with this analysis; in interviews she repeatedly stated that the attacks were exploited immediately afterwards, but she won't say anything on guilty parties or intention behind the attacks. No need to look further into these obscure matters nobody can know anything about, the consequences of the attacks are all we need to build our case on, she says. Like many people on the left and in activist movements, this is where the scope of Klein's critique stops short of coming full circle. One has to ask, what event has been more of a watershed in the return to imperialism and realpolitik than 9/11? Surely one of these rare moments, on par with the Reichstag fire or the Gulf of Tonkin incident is worthy of the same investigative rigour as Klein applied to other shocking events?

Asking the same questions, many frustrated 9/11 skeptics developed notions like 'left gatekeeper'. Influential writers like like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Naomi Klein are seen by these 'truthers' as serving the 'powers that be' by stopping the dominant critical discourse short of investigating 9/11. They keep the issues that would be too undermining to those in power marginalised, and are therefore must be somehow complicit. In return, Chomsky, Klein, and other public intellectuals claim the 9/11 issue takes away energy from more real and actual concerns. And so the stage is set for tensions between those who think a proper understanding of 9/11 is central to understanding the war on terror and those who think the subject is irrelevant. Sometimes the debate can be a quite juvenile case of left infighting over who is more subservient to power. A debate not worth getting dragged into, one that needs to be transcended. I prefer to take from people on both sides of the debate what knowledge I can.

The inability to officially come to terms with 9/11 can be best be explained in terms of ideology, as Zizek uses the word; for him ideology is made up of 'unknown knowns', the assumptions we do not explicitly make but that implicitly guide our actions. You can sort of feel it in your gut what is speakable and unspeakable, there is no need to communicate the rules explicitly. Connect too many dots that the mainstream media and so the general public do not relate, and you are seen as simply outside legitimate debate. The herd mindset kicks in and arguments don't matter. Connecting junta coups and laissez faire economic policies as inherently related is acceptable. Adding 9/11 as the new high score to beat for shock doctors makes you a strange conspiracy theorist. And adding peak oil to explain why 9/11 was so essential for business, that the motivation was not just simply profit but the need to stay in the game for American industry and the American empire as a force in the world, and probably to be the 'last man standing' in the coming resource scarcities, that is just another bridge too far.

At this risk of sounding crazy, I want to assimilate as much knowledge of what is really going on. Every thinker quoted or linked to on this blog I believe holds an important piece of a puzzle that is too large to ever complete. The point is to try and see how much of the puzzle we can assemble in an attempt to understand the world we live in. I realise that is difficult; the more relations you see and issues you integrate into one single narrative, the more assumptions seriously need to be justified and double checked. But I believe there is no topic that a priori precludes objective investigation. The real problem is not that careful research into all these issues is impossible, but only the fear of falling down the rabbit hole we should try to overcome.