Conspiracies of 9/11: Left To The Right

I sat down to write about 9/11 conspiracies and came up with this rambling essay about 9/11; what happens when sentiments on the Right and Left converge; the Three Way Fight; and why Leftists, revolutionaries, anarchists, whatever, can’t afford to ally with the Right. What’s immediately obvious to me is that I write about political things in a very different way then I do about my personal life, or art, or history. Maybe someday I’ll learn to integrate those things together in my writing…

This dude Alex Jones has a documentary about U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 attacks called TerrorStorm. It’ll probably give you an idea of what I think about 9/11 conspiracy theories when I say “TerrorStorm” sounds to me like a freakin’ ride at 6 Flags, not an any coherent political theory. For a long time, that’s been my general attitude about the 9/11 conspiracy stuff (or the “9/11 Truth Movement,” if you’re feeling generous): that it’s worth a laugh and disdain from a distance, but little else.

Well, my consideration of the matter has gotten a little deeper as of late, thanks to an interesting back and forth with a friend of mine over e-mail about this 9/11 Truth business. He’s a smart guy and an anarchist buddy, and we go way, way back, and I’ve got to say, I was a little surprised he was so into it. Essentially, he believes 9/11 Truth is a strategic opportunity for radicals that can’t be passed up. I heard him out on the issue a little and now its got me thinking.

Quickly I realized my dismissive attitude towards the 9/11 Truth Movement had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever. I have no clue what happened on 9/11 - maybe a few uninformed doubts here or there - and I’m left wandering why it really matters that I know. My friend argues that were 9/11 truth revealed (assuming government complicity), it 1) would sow disillusionment with the State, and 2) prevent the government from committing similar acts.

I’m all for sowing disillusionment with the State, but I’m still not sold on the importance of organizing around 9/11 truth. One reason is that the 9/11 theories are still just that - theories, meaning they’re not concrete enough to organize people together in the same ways that the facts of daily oppression (shitty work places, sexual assault and violence, prisons, etc.) are wholly concrete and simply proved through the experiences of every life. To paraphrase Ward Churchill, there’s no need to speak truth to power because power knows what its doing. Better to organize with oppressed people - build power - than over-emphasize the shady machinations of the powerful.

Another, more important reason, is that I don’t see those most effected by the Statist aftershocks of 9/11 (immigrants and people of color in particular) taking part in the “9/11 Truth Movement.” I’m not sure it really matters, in the long run, to folks on the ground whether Bush/the government/whoever was complicit in 9/11. Just as Malcolm X wasn’t leading the call to unearth the truth of the JFK assassination after it happened.

My So-called Zines

“I actually published my thesis on zines and how zines can serve as kind of a way to radicalize kids from communities of privilege–you know, like young, white, middle-class kids thinking about race, class and gender issues.” So says Jason Kucsma, co-founder of the now defunct Clamor magazine. Without having read Kucsma’s thesis, I immediately know what he’s talking about - zines radicalized me in a lot of ways, particularly the act of making them myself.

I didn’t do a thesis on zines, but they played a big part in my extra-curricular undergraduate activities. When I was still a student, I found that the access to resources - internet access, software, printing privileges - conspired perfectly for making zines. I know I’m not the only one: I even know of one person (who shall remain nameless!) whose zine-making several years before I started school was partly responsible for the university’s student printing paper quota. S/he’d stay up all night printing them off - and that’s exactly what I did too (for academic purposes, of course!).

Here are a few highlights from my zine-making days - all of which I recently donated to the fantastic Zinelibrary.net, an on-line database out of Olympia, WA. Click on the titles to be directed to where you can download them.

Breaking the MANacles: An Anti-Patriarchy Reader by various authors

I compiled this anthology together as a final project for a class on Anarcha-Feminism taught by the estimable Toby Smith at Fairhaven College in Spring 2004. It focuses mainly on how patriarchy manifests itself (usually unconsciously) within activist circles, primarily from those of us socialized as men. The articles are mostly centered around debates in anarchist circles that proliferated in the early years of the anti-globalization movement, including works by Dan Spalding, Chris Crass, Traci Harris, and the Rock Bloc Collective. None of the articles are perfect, but that’s sort of the point - the zine is supposed to be an entry into discussions about patriarchy, not the final say on it. I hope you find the illustrations as funny as I do.

Looking for Color in the Anti-War Movement by Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez

This an anti-war sequel to the seminal essay Martinez wrote following the WTO protests, “Where Was the Color in Seattle?“ It’s divided into two parts, the first addressed to white people and their historic ignorance of the imperialism in their own backyard; and the second addressed to folks of color concerning anti-war work. I made this into a zine when I worked at Western Washington University’s Peace Resource Center (now the Social Issues Resource Center), and I think we tried to use it in a discussion group that never came together.

Definitely one of the best articles I’ve read about the anti-war movement, along with Kenyon Farrow’s “Not Showing Up.” Martinez’s essay was written a few years ago, and definitely demands to be re-read against all the momentum the anti-war movement has been building in the past few months. Perhaps the topic for a future blog post if I can get my act together…

The Student Movement of 1968 by George Katsiaficas

My first zine I ever completed at school. As a college freshman, I was absolutely obsessed with the student movements of the Sixties, especially in images. I poured every book I could get my hands on that had pictures of the era. After reading Katsiaficas’ excellent primer on the era, The Imagination of the New Left, I decided to put together a zine matching his chapter on international student movements with my favorite pictures. Per my preoccupations at the time, this resulted in lots of militant street scenes.

Naomi Jaffe on the Weather Underground

As my studies of the Sixties era matured, I became more and more enamored with the story of the Weather Undergound Organization. I don’t necessarily care for their tactics, but more with their ability to grow over the years in a way that mirrors my own feelings on their era: from romanticizing street confrontations (e.g. the Days of Rage) towards much more strategic discussions about white anti-racism and solidarity. This trajectory is captured beautifully by Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America, but it’s also summarized by former WUO member Naomi Jaffe in this small statement written after the release of the Weather Underground film by Sam Green and Bill (for the record, a film I really don’t care for). I made this zine (more like a pamphlet, really) to be passed out a screening of the film and presentation on the WUO that I did in Summer 2005 (which didn’t go all that well).

The Flesh and Blood(shed) of Popular Culture

A friend of mine is due to leave for Iran in the coming weeks, where she plans to stay for several months visiting family. As she awaits her departure, she’s bombarded each day with media from all angles - film, print, politics - that seem custom-designed for U.S. confrontation with Iran.

The latest sour bit of propaganda is the sword-and-shield blood-and-guts dude-fest 300, currently tops at the box 0ffice, which pits its “heroic” Spartans against what it paints as a bloody-thirsty Persian Empire. A review in the Village Voice (”Man on Man Action“) assures me the film is as dumb as it looks, but lack of smarts has never been known to keep away American film-going audiences, nor has it ever kept the US government away from military interventions. In response to the film (and its politics), a petition is circulating demanding that Warner Bros. own up to its ahistorical warmongering.

But war-mongering needn’t be blood-red and blunt to be dangerous. Whether its art film or action film, the same stubborn assumptions keep popping up, as in a recent interview with Abbas Kiarostami, the celebrated Iranian filmmaker who has been in New York City recently for a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. The interview is with that most ostensible of liberal media, The New York Times, and “The interviewer, Deborah Solomon,” observes Zach Campbell, “seems to have one guiding theme–hit home that ‘over there,’ in Iran, those people, those Islamofascist tyrants who presumably control every facet of every citizen’s life, are … well, bad. And how crazy is it that Kiarostami is able to make his beautiful masterpieces in the midst of all that crazy oppressive fanaticism over there?”

It’s not that Iran doesn’t have its political problems - it’s that Iran is not the sum of its government’s vices. As film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum writes, “What Bush is choosing to call `Iran’ is chiefly a narrow-minded fundamentalist like himself, not a complex society of millions of diverse individuals that is every bit as multicultural as the U.S.” This a diversity featured heavily in Kiarostami’s films - from the severe class chasms and urban/rural divides of the informal Koker earthquake trilogy (Where is the Friend’s Home?, …Life and Nothing More, and Through the Olive Trees) and The Wind Will Carry Us; to the various nationalities of the passengers in Mr. Badii’s Range Rover in Taste of Cherry, to the varied ages, classes, occupations and love lives of the female passengers in Ten.

You might say the violence of the State is reflected in the violence of a film 300 - not only in its desire for bloodshed, but in its purporting to represent diverse and complex histories and peoples as the whole they are not. Kiarostami’s films, with their hours of driving, talking, driving, running, talking, and driving some more, are the very antithesis of violence - and perhaps at times, the antithesis of the State as well.

Elsewhere, author Fatemeh Keshavarz discusses similar problems as they exist in popular literature, in a recent interview posted at MRZine. According to Keshavarz, in print media of the past decade, such as the popular Reading Lolita in Tehran, “everything [about Iran] would revolve around religion or politics, and people would be villains or victims… I felt like saying to people, ‘This picture is full of holes! That is not about me! The culture I grew up in has its flesh and blood just like yours. It has good and bad things just like every culture. Shake my hand and you will feel it!’ ” Her own book, Jasmine and Stars, aims to rectify these oversights.

I recently read Seymour Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker about the Bush administration’s strategic swing against the Shi’ites, as represented - to them - by the Iranian government. Personally, I hold onto the hope that the severe U.S. shortage of troops (what I consider the biggest political booty of the anti-war movement so far) prevents invasion of Iran, but troop shortage doesn’t preclude a U.S. bombing campaign or other military attacks.

What does preclude military attack (at least of the overt variety), I realize, is popular opinion. Popular opinion, however nebulous it always is, however indistinct and unquantifiable, remains indispensable to the achievement of the U.S. government’s political objectives. After reading over the above interviews and commentaries, and reflecting on my friend’s feelings, I’m struck by how insidiously popular culture can prepare society for war - and I wonder to what extent pop culture swings public opinion.

For years, Kiarostami has played himself off in interviews as an apolitical person - and he has every right to be so, though I personally find a great deal of the political in his films. Nevertheless, whoever organized his retrospective is making a small, but very smart political maneuver: bringing attention to Iran as a nation, broader than its State, and beyond whatever designs the US government has on the region.

Drop Tuition, Not Bombs

This Saturday, February 24th, I was one of over 100 people who rallied in front of Bellingham, WA’s Military Recruitment Center demanding an end to both the US occupation of Iraq and military recruitment in schools. The event, called in part by Northwest Students for a Democratic Society, was done in coordination with similar actions in both Tacoma and Olympia.

The day began with a Critical Mass bike-ride meeting at noon in downtown. Community members, picketing along Meridian Street, Bellingham’s busiest thoroughfare, were already present to greet the bikers as they converged on the Military Recruitment Center at 1 PM.

Folks then gathered in the parking lot outside the Recruitment Center. Speakers began to address the crowd via bullhorn, with Sean Burke of Bellingham SDS serving as MC. Those who spoke included Dan First Scout Rowe, an anti-war Vietnam vet and professor at Fairhaven College; Aline Soundy of Community to Community Development; and several others. An attempt was made to play some music off a boombox, but it was too wet and cold for anyone to really dig the tunes, so folks marched back to Meridian Street and resumed picketing before calling it a day.

I really liked this event. While all the anti-war events I have been a part of in the past have had nebulous goals, this action actually had a target: the Recruitment Center. The rally managed to shut down the center for about 30 minutes, as the recruiters locked their door and turned off their lights. Police presence was moderate, with several squad cars stationed in a parking lot across the street, but never - to my knowledge - interacting with the event.

As far as I understand it, the action was only thrown together in two weeks, and in some ways this showed. The whole event was rather modest, only lasting about 45 minutes altogether, though this was something I sort of appreciated after all the long winded anti-war rallies I’ve been to in years past.

But the line-up of speakers suffered for the lack of preparation. With only a few exceptions, it was full of the dudes who love to jump on the mic at these events and talk no matter how interesting or relevant their speeches (No offense intended here, just an honest critique. I used to be this guy).

Overall, the attendance itself was remarkable for an event organized with such short notice, and hopefully indicates a larger interest in anti-war actions in the future. At this rate, future events will expand the forms of participation beyond listening to speakers, and will have a better cross-section of students and non-students.

Big up to Bellingham SDS and everyone else who made it happen!

Comrade Karim in Kangaroo Court

Friday, February 23rd, over 50 people gathered to support my friend and SDS member Karim Ahmath at his arraignment following an erroneous arrest on Thursday, February 15th. Karim was passing out anti-recruitment fliers at a Western Washington University career fair with other SDS members. While many engaged in debate with military recruiters, Karim was the only one singled out for arrest.

According to a message from my pal Ian:

They charged him with disorderly conduct, citing his argument with one of the Army recruiters as the reason for the arrest. However, I witnessed the whole thing, and although there was definitely a heated argument, I and others feel the arrest was unjust. At no time did anyone in charge of the Career Fair ask Karim or any of us passing out flyers to leave the event. At no time did Karim engage in physical contact with the recruiters or the police (except when the police put his arm behind his back, forced him out of the building, and later handcuffed him). In addition, I feel that Karim, who is Asian American, was racially profiled. Specifically, I feel he was profiled by the military recruiters, as they are the ones who requested the police remove Karim. My reasoning for this claim is that at least 5 or 6 other students were engaged in handing out the same flyers in front of the Army and Navy recruiting tables. Some of us were also engaged in verbal disagreements with the recruiters. One of us was even engaged in a shouting match with one of the Navy recruiters. But, the recruiters did not request police intervention for any of the rest of us. As you may have guessed, everyone of us, except Karim, is white.

This is only Karim’s first year in Bellingham, but his electric personality and mad organizing skillz, along with the radical energy of his SDS comrades, have endeared him to many in Bellingham - a fact testified to by the outpouring of support at his court appointment, which occured at 8:30 AM. Anything that can get college students up that early has got to be special.

Anyway, Karim plead not guilty, and his trial has been set for the 1st of May. May Day, can you believe it?!