I stumbled across this word (being, like Shakespeare, of small Latin and less Greek) looking for a name for my new Google group, after I decided that the idea of a 9/11 truth "coalition" (the name of my Yahoo group, now defunct) was dead, gone, and non-resuscitatable. "911truth" was already occupied, and "911veritas" is somebody's web moniker, so I found this. As it turns out, I like it. It's fuzzy and furry, doesn't make a lot of noise, and you can play with it.
Hence was born 911aletheia. The word (rhymes with panacea) has a long history, as one might expect of a Greek word (except for medical neologisms), but what I like most about it is that it is not related to words like truth, going back to words meaning "faith, trust" and "firmness" (hence the further connection with tree), or to veritas (English verity, verdict, French vérité) or the set of words connected with German Wahrheit (cf. English aware, beware), which are also rooted in concepts of faith or trustworthiness. Aletheia means "not forgetting," from a- "not" + the word for "forgetting" that comes from Lethe (rhymes with leafy), the river of forgetfulness. The American Heritage Dictionary, which is pretty good on etymology, has the river name (one of five rivers in Hades) from the word for forgetfulness, not vice versa, but it doesn't matter.
If we were ancient Greeks, and dead, we would take a swig from the Lethe to ease our passage into the next life. Today, we don't have the Lethe but we have the Teevee. Works great, and we don't even have to die to use it. All the bad stuff goes right down the tube as soon as the current crisis is over. Rarely does it last as long as Vietnam did, though Iraq/Afghanistan is running a close second. The mass larceny known as the "financial crisis" will be over the minute the stock markets bottom out and the bankers have robbed us of us of everything but our ditch-digging backs and toilet-scrubbing fingers, the AIDS depopulation scheme is long since forgotten by everyone except the presidents ex-preacher, and the 9/11 "truth movement" is hopelessly fragmented. Back in 2006, I failed even to get a significant number of leading "truthers" to unite behind impeachment, much less make common cause with antiwar groups. The chances of anything like that happening now seem even more remote, with a semi-popular president, despite polls that show a widening disjunct between what people believe and what passes as for "truth" in the mass media and official publications (e.g., the Warren Report, 9/11 Commission Report). It's still a good idea, but for that very reason it is unlikely. The propagandists have been much too hard at work.
It is not a matter of "protective stupidity," as Michael Green calls it. We are not too stupid to understand a world run by "privatized covert action mercenaries" created by the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations. In his more recent essay, Green offers a hodgepodge of tired phrases ("invisible government," "ruling class"), obviously new to Green or he wouldn't spend 4 out of 14 pages repeating them in an article about thermitic dust, which I would not object to in principle any more than I do to Peter Scott's masterly elaboration of the same ideas in The Road to 9/11 (see my "Deep State Doublethink"). The key words in Green's amateurish analysis, if you look for them, are the standard wooly words like cooperate, coordinate, conjunction, high-ranking members, elements, ultimately, and fundamental source.
[The WTC demolition was] "coordinated through the security apparatus of the World Trade Center in conjunction with high-ranking members of the U.S. military...whose cooperation was required...
...the intelligence agencies that coordinated this grand act of political theater.
The USG, in cooperation with elements of private industry and finance capital, brought us 911.
Not all of the actors who served the cover-up were aware of their roles, but they were ultimately set into motion by those who were.
...the fundamental source of political power...known well only to those who participate regularly in it, and to a small number of personas...
...the "invisible government"...persons who control domestic covert action to effect profound changes...and who also own and control much of Congress.
The ruling class of the United States responded to threats to the U.S. dollar and U.S. global hegemony by generating a pretext for war in the Middle East...
All this, Green continues, is too much for "very good" researchers like David Ray Griffin and Niels Harrit to understand because they have "failed to learn the palpable lesson" that calling for a new congressional investigation is pointless.
This reminds me quite unpleasantly of the reaction I got from all sides (e.g., planers and no-planers, left and right) in 2006 when I tried to launch my 9/11 truth coalition to impeach Bush-Cheney, which drove me to verse. Things were quite a bit hairier then, I dare say. We have breathing space now, with Obama, and there's no telling how long it will last. Now is the time to put the pressure on, and no one as enlightened as Green says he is could fail to see this.
Perhaps if Green and his friends Jim Hoffman and Victoria Ashley spent less time trashing their fellow truthers (see here, here, here, and here) hope could be re-engendered for making common cause with myriad groups that have organized against the 9/11 lie and the wars and anti-constitutional laws it has brought us. Discrediting by association is the oldest trick in the book, and these three have used it systematically, first against Fetzer, Reynolds, and Wood by throwing them, with no justification whatever, into the same pot with anti-Semites like Eric Hufschmid, and then against a whole slew of people for allowing themselves to be "associated" with Fetzer, Reynolds, and Wood by belonging to the same organizations (Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Patriots Question 9/11). Even if membership in these organizations actually meant anything, such tactics are deplorable and hard to see as anything but purposely divisive -- which of course is what they accuse their designated enemies of being by daring to discuss or even support arguments about no-planes, video fakery, and non-conventional weaponry.
Since when did the suppression and demonization of ideas qualify as science? I am not a no-planer, but why shouldn't I be able to discuss it on the Scholars for Truth and Justice forum (of which Ashley is the moderator), and why shouldn't Congress be asked to investigate the claims of video fakery and directed energy weapons along with thermitic dust? The argument that "asking Congress to investigate many poorly defined, and highly implausible hypotheses minimizes the chances that Congress would be willing or able to investigate the actual evidence," as Ashley writes on behalf of S9/11TJ, begs the question, obviously, of what is plausible. The purpose of the investigation would be to find that out. If the investigation turned out to be as dishonest as the first one, and could not distinguish more plausible theses (such as thermitic dust) from implausible ones (e.g., 19 Arabs defeating the U.S. Air Force), there would be no point in having it at all. Nothing would be lost, and much gained. If nothing else, the "wayward" (or open-minded) truthers could be shown the error of their ways and brought back into the fold.
Discrediting by association, which Ashley risibly fails to see applies to her own piece more than it does to the organization she is trying to discredit, Patriots Question 9/11, is bad enough when used against people, but when it is also used against ideas, it is even more despicable (if that is possible). Of course there are limits to free speech. But video fakery and non-conventional weapons are not Holocaust denial. Nor are they arguments for the innate superiority of a certain race, the benefits of National Socialism or Communism, cannibalism, incest, or child rape. They are not morally reprehensible. If they are silly, let them be shown, or show themselves, to be silly.
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