There is a Logic to Empire and the Truth of 9/11
By: Richard Curtis, PhD
Remarks at David Ray Griffin’s Town Hall Speech, Seattle, May 18, 2007
Implicit in what you have heard is the charge that my government, your government conspired to murder thousands of its own people for political gain. This is a serious charge to contemplate, let alone make. But let us be clear, the implication is not that these deeds were done for personal reasons to do with the victims or with pursuing evil as such. Those responsible presumably believed that what they did they did because it had to be done – that it would lead to the best outcome for their conception of the national interest, in accord with their values. Now it may be true that these people are callous, greedy and act on a “deeply perverted values system,” but there is a reason to what may seem like madness. There is a logic … to Empire.
In 2006 Dr. Griffin wrote:
On the one hand, the American empire plays an explanatory role with regard to 9/11. Only if we understand the nature of the American empire along with ideas for extending it that were developed in the 1990s, can we understand why the attacks of 9/11 occurred. On the other hand, the attacks of 9/11 play a revelatory role in relation to the American empire. For it is only when we realize that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out and covered up for the sake of America’s global domination project that we can, as I [Dr. Griffin] have suggested elsewhere, “fully grasp the extent to which this project is propelled by fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system.” (Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, page 183)
“Empire” is a word that most people don’t use much anymore, but we must all acquaint ourselves with it to be good citizens, not to mention moral human beings. As Dr. Griffin reminded us in 2005 (speech: “9/11 and American Empire”, aka “The Madison Speech”), the word “empire” is used these days in right and left political circles, and while they have different opinions of its moral status all are agreed that the United States is an empire – the most vast and powerful the world has ever known.
In spite of that universal agreement on its existence, a discussion of imperialism is not a normal part of our public discourse, and this seems to show we have failure to communicate here. The problem with communications with our leaders is that they live in a conceptual fog in which their experience is taken to be reality. Here is how basic that conceptual fog can be: during the 1992 campaign the first President Bush expressed astonishment at the scanners used in grocery stores, scanners the rest of us had already grown accustomed to. Their lives are real enough to them but they mistakenly or intentionally overlook the very important point that their lives are not like ours. They do not think like we think – they live in a conceptual fog.
So they believe that there are certain things that must be done for the good of the nation, which primarily means things that are necessary to keep us controlled. Democracy is still a radical concept, too radical for the times, for it means turning the country over to the people. They are not “the people.” They are rulers. To their way of thinking they have a great deal to loose and not much to gain by actually turning the country over to its citizenry. So they don’t. It is easier to manage than to share power.
But managing people is hard, especially if the point is for them not to be aware that they are being managed, controlled. Leo Strauss, the intellectual behind the founders of Neo-Conservatism – and I would argue Neo-Liberalism – taught people who were his PhD students and now members of the administration that to control people you need war and religion.
War must be controlled and ideally, for their purposes, sustained indefinitely. As in the title of a recent book: War is a force that gives us meaning. You might have noticed the Iraq war makes no progress; there is no winning and no loosing. Some naively assume the prolonged war shows incompetence – it does not. That analysis assumes that peace is the goal – it is not. To understand this one might look differently at Vietnam. What really went wrong, from the rulers’ point of view, is not that they lost but that we forced them to lose. We, the American people, forced them to act decisively and as they could not win they had to accept defeat. War without end is difficult to achieve.
Religion is easier in its way. But none of this encouraging the masses to change the world, they need a religion that preaches acceptance of the status quo, respect for authority, and if this can dove-tail with militarism and war all the better. Strauss called this a Pious Fraud. And you will have noticed the radical increase in fundamentalist forms of religion around the world. Strauss’s ideas are not used just here, after all.
Still, any given collection of human beings is not likely to support war without end, let alone the other evils that come with imperialism. We are a variable that they must consider, which at times they do with incredible precision and other times more confusedly.
That is their problem, another problem is our problem, and it is largely conceptual at this point. We need to learn to distinguish their projection of reality from reality as such. This is not as straight-forward as it sounds since, in addition to the government, they control the major media and thereby most of popular culture and what passes for news. Further they work to confuse and divide us very directly in the political realm. You see they have worked out a way to pretend that our decisions actually change their behavior. Now, to some degree this is does happen: each party panders to its base and so small domestic changes – which may indeed be very significant in individual lives – are made depending who is in power. But one thing remains constant – empire.
One of those old German philosophers once remarked that the government is like the executive committee of the ruling class. And this may be an odd take on that but it seems to me that 9/11 forces us to confront a deeply important and curiously non-ideological truth: the empire is bi-partisan. Both major parties determine foreign policy on the basis of the “deeply perverted value system” Dr. Griffin called our attention to.
When it comes to domestic politics, my own analysis is that they play a good cop/bad cop game with us. Each of the major parties casts the other as the bad cop and pretends to be the good cop to some segment of the population. To this crowd, I would imagine the Republicans are the bad cop because they favor evils a socially liberal crowd rejects. To some in our country the Democrats are the bad cop, usually for some irrational reason the Democrats, I am suggesting, are unwilling to confront. Rational debate would show the intellectual and moral depravity of both parties, and so they do not have rational debates. And while they trade meaningless slogans they will never live up to, the media pretends that what is news is some sort of horse-race, since it too will not risk exposing us to rational debate.
And so we are pawns in this game where they pit us against each other over small things while they continue on with the big thing, running the empire. We are complicit in that empire by virtue of being citizens and thus likely to resist it when we recognize its effects – the massive suffering and death it causes as a normal course of operations.
We do not have to accept this state of affairs; that is the point Dr. Griffin made in the quote I read. That is the deep truth that 9/11 forces us to confront. We are being treated like puppets on emotional strings, manipulated by fear of an enemy that is really them. But we do not have to accept this fantasy version of reality in which we are complicit in death and destruction on a horrific scale. We can change the world if we wish, that is the incredible power of democracy.
They will not admit the truth of their empire but we, none-the-less, do not have to accept it. We can demand just relations with the rest of the world. We can demand an end to militarism and lies. We can demand the truth. They believe, in the words of an old movie, that we can’t handle the truth. They believe that we are inferior, unable to confront the vagaries of life in the modern world without the artificial constructions of totalitarian states and irrational forms of religion. But we can, in fact much better than they can because we are more moral, our values are humane and caring, theirs are deeply perverted, voracious and barbaric.
And thus the challenge that you will leave here tonight with, is will you accept being a pawn in their game of global domination or will you stand up as a moral human being and say No – No to their empire, No to their political manipulations, and No to the grand charade of 9/11? Can we demand the truth, not just of 9/11 but of empire? Can we then create a just world in which the lives of millions are not the daily sacrifice we make to sustain their lifestyle?
Not only can we, we must! In Cuba they have a term that fits here – Venceremos. We will triumph!