9-11 at Nine: The Conspiracy Industry and the Lure of Fascism

9-11 at Nine: The Conspiracy Industry and the Lure of Fascism
By Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report

New York City’s WBAI Radio—flagship of the progressive, non-profit Pacifica Network, where I am a producer—unfortunately provides a case study in the increasing embrace of right-wing conspiracy theory by the remnants of the American (and global) left.

The most useful propaganda device in this ongoing hostile take-over of the rump progressive forces has been an exploitation of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001. Alex Jones, who trumpets anti-immigrant bromides alongside 9-11 pseudo-exposés, now rivals Noam Chomsky as an icon on lefty websites. Where our rhetoric once invoked the military-industrial complex and even the sacrosanct capitalist system, today our ire is frequently targeted at such arcane entities as the Bilderberg Club, the Bavarian Illuminati, and stranger things.

WBAI provides a useful case study because it has followed the same trajectory as many of basically progressive inclination since 2001. What began as an examination of seeming anomalies in the case of 9-11 has lured some of our best minds down a black hole of irrationality that ultimately leads—and this, as shall be demonstrated, is not just hyperbole—to fascism.

Continue reading here

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Left, conspiracism, left-right overlap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 Comment

  1. Someone posted this text to New York City Indymedia, and if you take a glance at the comment thread you see that antisemitism is not simply a tolerated marginal phenomenon but rather a very dominant one which nearly every poster is obsessed with. See here: http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2010/09/112151.html

    [Reply]

Comment

Fields in bold are required. Email addresses are never published or distributed.

Some HTML code is allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
URIs must be fully qualified (eg: http://www.domainname.com) and all tags must be properly closed.

Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted.

Please keep comments relevant. Off-topic, offensive or inappropriate comments may be edited or removed.

  1. News & Etc.

  2. Recent Comments

  3. Categories

  4. Donate