Hegemonic NWO or peaceful coexistence

November and December 2011

I wish the season of goodwill was at the beginning of the year rather than the end, tagged on merely as an afterthought. We will have a short break (a good time to bury bad news), then everything will be back to normal. The wars will continue, and so will the belligerence which could so easily lead to new wars. Not so long ago there was talk of bombing Iran, then the focus moved to Pakistan, until China warned the US that an attack on Pakistan would be considered an attack on China. Then it was Syria, and still is, though Russia has now placed two warships off the coast of Syria.

And then it was back to Iran. And in the meantime there was the matter of regime change in Libya, which had little to do with bringing democracy to the country, and everything to do with control of an area with huge oil assets and an independent banking system.

Suddenly the Werritty Affair blew up, as questions were asked why defence minister Liam Fox was being accompanied by his friend Adam Werritty in diplomatic meetings. Craig Murray, the whistleblowing former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has been investigating. Under the heading ' Liam Fox, Adam Werritty, and the curious case of Our Man in Tel Aviv' the Independent reported

on the involvement of the UK ambassador to Israel, and secret meetings between the three of them. Yet it has been left to the former UK ambassador Craig Murray to uncover four more similar meetings, they reported.

"I have no doubt that there is a 'separate policy' on Israel and Iran, different to that acknowledged in public. I have no doubt that the Fox/Gould/Werritty meetings – and the blanket cover-up of them from scrutiny in parliament, documents or the media – afford a key way into it".

But now we have disturbing reports of US troop activity in and around Syria. A report appeared on Russia Today's website headed 'US troops surround Syria on the eve of invasion?' stating:


"A former official from within the ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reporting that US and NATO forces have landed outside of Syria and are training militants to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, formerly a translator with the FBI, wrote over the weekend that American soldiers are among the NATO troops that have mysteriously and suddenly landed on the Jordanian and Syrian border. … Additionally, Edmonds says that American and NATO forces are training Turkish troops as well, to possibly launch a strike from the north of Syria".

Further details are given on her 'Boiling Frogs' website, which also contains an article reminding us that not long ago the US was sending people to Syria for torture.

But perhaps it won't be Syria after all. Or perhaps it will be Syria, and after that London. It's just been announced that 13 500 troops will occupy part of London for the Olympic Games, with the support of two warships, military helicopters, fighter jets and ground-to-air missiles.

Britain will provide up to 13,500 troops to protect next summer's London Olympics -- more than it has in Afghanistan -- after organisers said international uncertainty meant security for the event needed to be doubled.

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the military support would provide back-up for police and private staff already hired to secure the perimeters of the Olympic and Paralympic venues in what will be Britain's largest peacetime security operation.

The military presence will also include special forces and specialist bomb disposal units as well as a 1,000-strong contingency force "in the event of an Olympics-related civil emergency".

So perhaps when we've had a short break (a good time to bury bad news), we'll be told after the season of goodwill has ended, who we're going to be at war with in the new year. It's all supposed to be about bringing democracy to these countries, but democracy itself is the most easily undermined and destabilised form of government there is. With the best will in the world, how do run a democracy when you know how easily it can be usurped by a foreign power, especially if you're Iranian and have vivid memories of the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohamad Mosadeq? Is the fighting in Syria just a local rebellion, as we in the West are led to believe, or is it civil war fueled by a foreign power, as the Russians seem to believe?

There is now a war of words over the recent Russian elections between the US and Russia. Was Russia being destabilised by the CIA, as the Putin and Co seem to think, or were the protests merely internally generated amongst the Russian people, as Hilary Clinton seems to be suggesting? The best way to encourage a fledgling democracy is not to intervene subversively, but to let the people of the country get on with it. Otherwise clamp-downs become inevitable. Unfortunately, not everyone has the best will in the world, and constant destabilising foreign interventions will sooner or later lead to a return of Stalin and Hitler.

In the EU itself democracy seems to be being extinguished. Elected governments are being replaced by financial technocrats. In the UK we have a dramatically growing scepticism over the EU, starting with the Euro, which was clearly a project destined to failure.

The UKIP MEP Nigel Farage, who wants the UK to withdraw completely from the EU, is now becoming incredibly popular with the mainstream media.

I suspect, though, that some of the big-wigs in Government want to return EU powers not to Westminster, but to The City, and so to the financial institutions that seem to be running this country. Others want to make the EU more democratic, but they are losing the battle. The 17 Eurozone countries have now accepted fiscal union. So who will now be running the Eurozone if not the financial institutions? These changes were not brought about my normal democratic processes, but by a project destined to failure, whose objective could only have been to consolidate power at the heart of Europe. Can the fiscal union work? In the short term it probably can, but in the long term I should have thought there would be a backlash from the far right, in particular in France, when they see themselves being taken over by German corporate interests. How will the union respond to that? Probably by a clamp-down, thus further consolidating power in the hands of the few; otherwise the whole union could break up.

I was amazed to see the film 'Inside Job' on BBC Four.





This film is the financial equivalent of 'ZERO: an investigation into 9/11', which has never been broadcast on mainstream television in the UK. That's why I was amazed that the BBC would broadcast it. Public interest into the economic meltdown is now so intense, that even the BBC must be under great pressure to admit that the whole thing was a set-up. That set-up was enabled by the 'light touch' of the regulators in the US and the UK. I would like to know what pressures the politicians were under to bring about that 'light touch'. Since this was international, it seems likely that those pressures would have been coming from financial corporate interests.

In the UK the government's Financial Services Authority has published a report into the failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Their press release reports that "RBS’s failure amid the systemic crisis ultimately resulted from poor decisions made by the RBS management and Board. But deficiencies in the global capital regime and liquidity regulations made the crisis much more likely". In addition, the press release says, "flaws in the FSA’s supervisory approach provided insufficient challenge to RBS".

However Craig Woodhouse in The London Evening Standard writing under the heading ' FSA blames Blair, Brown and Balls for RBS collapse' digs a little deeper, and states: "Labour's light-touch regulation of the City was a key factor in the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, a report by the financial watchdog found today. The Financial Services Authority said it came under 'sustained' political pressure to spare the Square Mile from red tape in the years before the banking crisis"

It seems that a 'light touch' has been the policy also in the regulation of the education system in the UK.

The Daily Telegraph carried out an investigation into the practices of school examination boards in the UK following commercialisation initiated by the Blair government.

They found that exam boards were secretly coaching teachers on how to increase pupils’ marks in GCSEs and A-Levels. They also found evidence that exam boards are actively boasting about the ease of their courses in an apparent attempt to try to secure valuable business. "The increasing commercialisation of exams has coincided with a sharp rise in the number of children achieving top grades", they stated. This survey led to concerns that exam boards are driving down standards by aggressively competing with one another to persuade schools to take their tests. A senior official of one board stated in a covert recording that she didn't know how they got their syllabus through the official regulation system that is supposed to ensure high standards in GCSEs and A-Levels.

As a result, the education secretary has ordered an inquiry

Could this have just been due to criminal neglect? Or could it be that politicians like to falsify reality if that makes things look good for them? Or could it be that somone is trying to dumb down the education of our kids in order to make them politically more compliant? From a sociopath's point of view, the purpose of the education system would be merely to provide skilled people for employment in the industries that would build up the strength of the corporations. Beyond that, education could be dangerous. Having trained physicists specialising in physics is fine, but the last thing you want is trained physicists enquiring too much into social issues and the power structures of the country. That would, as I discovered, be dangerous. In the UK, knowledge of foreign languages could undermine the push for linguistic hegemony, and we saw how Baroness Catherine Ashton, then an unelected politician under Tony Blair, brought about the collapse of an already faltering language teaching programme in England's schools. So could all this be part of an intentional dumbing down process?

Shortly before reading about the Telegraph's research, I had come across an Alex Jones video, called 'Charlotte Iserbyt: The Miseducation of America'. Charlotte Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long-term strategic plan to transform America from a nation of individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they're told.

She explains how conditioning and training under a corporate agenda has replaced traditional education, leading to a deliberate dumbing down of Americans.

She linked her own experiences to the financial and militaristic ambitions of those behind the New World Order, which she had read about in a book published in 1970 called 'None dare call it conspiracy'

Link to Amazon

which put together how financial institutions had been involved in political propaganda in controlling populations, even to the extent of initiating wars, in which they would finance both sides, so that when the wars came to and end both sides would be indebted to the banks that they had borrowed from. She had been sent that book by a friend, and by chance, I had been sent a copy by a friend and was reading it when I came across the video. Much of the book is based on the writings of Professor Carroll Quigley, who revealed much of the workings of the 'insiders'.

Then a story broke about a row in the City of Stoke-on-Trent. The Council had published a proposed budget for the following year, which included quite severe cuts, and had announced a consultation period, to end on 23 December.

However, a local independent news website published an article under the heading 'Are We Really Being Consulted On The 2012 Budget?' It stated:

"It seems that the decision to close the Wedgwood Memorial College has already been taken and just needs to be rubber-stamped by the Cabinet at their meeting on 15 December which is a day before the last public consultation event and over a week before the consultation closes on 23 December".

The Wedgwood Memorial College is an adult residential college offering short courses. I had understood that the college had, until some time in the 1990s been run by the Workers' Education Association, and that the Principal was in their employ. When it was taken over by Stoke-on-Trent Council, the Council became his new employer. Following his retirement the new Principal managed to make the College pay its own way, but then in 2007 she resigned, and was not replaced. The Friends of the College believed that there was an intent to close the college down, but since it was breaking even, they concluded that the motive could not have been to save money, but to gain money by selling the assets off. They campaigned to save the college. An inquiry by Staffordshire County Council concluded that the college was viable. Stoke-on-Trent Council reacted by changing its use so that it wasn't viable, and is now proposing to close the college to save money. So here we have a viable educational establishment being taken over by a local authority which is now attempting to close it down.

The Wedgwood College is also the location of the headquarters of Esperanto Association of Britain, which moved there in 2002, following a grand opening of Esperanto House.That building had been payed for and built on the college premises by the Esperanto Association for the College, and so for the City of Stoke-on-Trent Council. Members were led to believe that the association had a 99 year lease on the property, whereas in fact they had a lease only for one room of the house, used as their office, with separate arrangements for the use of other parts of college property and the hire of an office administrator from the City of Stoke-on-Trent Council. The long-standing Principal of the College had not been an Esperantist, but learned Esperanto and entered the Management Committee of Esperanto Association of Britain in 2000, taking on a leading role in the negotiations to relocate to the college.

Members had in 1999 voted for the sale of their London premises on the basis of three factors put to them by the Management Committee:

(1) the falling capital of the association
(2) the decrepit state of their own property
(3) professional advice received

I have to say that in my studies I could not substantiate any of those claims. Furthermore, I found that the capital had actually been rising dramatically over that period. It took more than five years for the treasurer to finally admit that my figures were correct (See my October newsletter). The current treasurer has now acknowledged that the association did not have exclusive occupancy of the whole house, and that they took legal advice on the situation which would arise if the college were to close. She reported that the association would receive occupancy of the whole house, but would have to pay more for the maintenance costs. Taking legal advice would of course not have been necessary had the association simply had a lease for the whole house as they had led members to believe.

A letter of mine, calling for a public inquiry, appeared in the Staffordshire Newsletter.

It seems that in one foul swoop, antidemocratic forces in Stoke-on-Trent were dumbing down the educational activities of two registered charities.

Next year should be an interesting year (A medical practitioner once told me what 'interesting' meant!). It is the year for which I had in 2005 forecast the demise of the Esperanto association. My colleague thought that they would keep it running as a token group, in order to block anyone else who might want to set up a new national association. Perhaps we were both right. I was amazed later to find that 2012 was being forecast as the year in which the New World Order takes over. All sorts of justifications were being put forward, ranging from astrology to the Book of Revelations. Looking back on that, it now looks quite simple; it looks as if there may have been a twenty-year programme starting in 1992, the year after the fall of Communism, which comes to completion in 2012. It was around that time that we saw the appearance of Demos, the New Labour group in the Labour Party, Common Purpose, which according to Brian Gerrish's researches has been 'messing up' in local government and other institutions, and Academic Cooperation Association, which looks as if it may may be a front for pushing for the hegemony of English in the EU. It was also the year of an otherwise unexplained sudden linear decline in membership of Esperanto Association of Britain.

Next year will also see the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, and with it the extinction of a leading light in investigative journalism, as well as founder of the then 'Stop the War' campaign. William T Stead was the most famous passenger on the Titanic, and he had acquired a phenominal reputation in the UK for his highlighting of social injustices. He also had ideas of bringing peace to the world by benevolent use of capital raised by entrepreneurs.

There was a television programme on BBC2 on 22 November called 'When bankers were good' (Youtube link) narrated by Ian Hislop who explained about the growth of the banking industry following the industrial revolution, and how some of those leading bankers, being members of religious communities, left huge fortunes in trust for the public good. He finished by explaining the ideas of nineteenth century Oxford don John Ruskin, who developed the idea, distinguishing between what he called 'wealth' and 'illth'.

I had just finished reading the book 'None dare call it conspiracy', which explains how John Ruskin's ideas were subsequently developed, I think not quite in the direction that John Ruskin would have hoped.

Before reading that, I had just read a more recent book, also based largely on the writings of Carroll Quigley, called 'Brotherhood of Darkness' by Stanley Monteith.



This book, too, had just been sent to me by a friend. It concentrated more on the personalities involved, and how they operated internally.

One student at the time of John Ruskin was Cecil Rhodes, who was so taken with Ruskin's idea of using huge fortunes to bring peace to the world, that he himself gained huge fortunes in Southern Africa, and became a strong force in colonisation. In the name of peace, he recruited two other very influential people. In 'The Anglo-American Establishment ' Carroll Quigley writes: "One wintry afternoon in 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance to the British Empire and to the world as a whole. For these men were organizing a secret society that was, for more than 50 years, to be one of the most important forces in the formulation and execution of British imperial and foreign policy. "The three men thus engaged were already well known in England. The leader was Cecil Rhodes, fabulously wealthy empire builder and the most important person in South Africa. The second was William T. Stead, the most famous, and probably also the most sensational, journalist of the day. The third was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V." It emerged that Rhodes' idea of bringing peace to the world included further colonisation. Of course, the main military opposition would come not from the natives, but from other Europeans. When Rhodes used his position to provoke the Boer War, Stead objected. Rhodes insisted on absolute loyalty, and that caused a bitter schism in the movement for a New World Order. Stead was marginalised, but campaigned hard against the Boer War. In 1904 he suffered a nervous breakdown, which I can well understand. He wanted to pursue the way of co-operation between ethnic groups, rather than to impose hegemony on them. As part of that, he supported the idea of an easily learned auxiliary language, and in 1904 became the first President of the newly formed British Esperantists Association (Inc).

That schism still exists today. Carroll Quigley was one of Bill Clinton's professors at Georgetown University, before Bill Clinton became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He paid homage to Carroll Quigley in his 1992 nomination acceptance speech for the US Presidency. Quigley wrote in 'The Anglo-American Establishment': "The Rhodes scholarship established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes’ seventh will are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes, in five previous wills, left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire". In another book, 'Tragedy and Hope' Quigley wrote that the aim of this secret society was “…nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole".

Carroll Quigley wrote that he knew of the operation of this network because he had been permitted to study it for two years in the 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. "I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have for much of my life been close to it and to many of its instruments", he wrote, "In general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown". That sounds to me a bit like the Demos people, who have been advocating 'open infiltration', presumably because people have become so accepting of what is going on that the public would just become acquiescent. So we can trace Rhodes' ideas on a militaristic hegemonic New World Order through Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair, and through to the present-day wars. The Stead side of the schism was marginalised. A strong pacifist movement grew up. I knew one or two pacifists from the First World War, including the concert pianist Frank Merrick, whom I interviewed on his 90th birthday in 1976 when he was Honorary President of The London Esperanto Club. Belatedly, I now find I can understand their pacifism. I still think we have the right to defend ourselves, but this wasn't about defence, unless, of course, 'defence' is interpreted in the Orwellian sense. Since 9/11, these values have been revived. There is now a huge truth movement throughout the Western world, consisting of thousands of individuals who want to know the truth about the real sources of terrorism in all its forms, including financial terrorism and the use of 'illth'. But governments and the mainstream media are overwhelmingly controlled by corporate interests, to such an extent, as George Orwell put it in his introduction to 'Animal Farm' that "anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness".

The world has to decide which way to go. Will it take the route of Cecil Rhodes, Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, towards a hegemonic New World Order controlled by huge corporate financial interests, or will it take the route of democratic peaceful co-existence, respecting each others' human rights, their cultures and their languages, and turning the huge financial resources available into wealth rather than illth?

We need to spread that question far and wide. Whatever language you do it in, keep talking.

Its Democracy, Jim, but not as we know it

It seems the revolution has begun. The Occupy demonstrations have taken place in over 95 cities across 82 countries but it's no longer just about 'the economy, stupid' (to use Bill Clinton's famous phrase), but about the corporate state. The economic crisis was caused by large financial institutions which had more power than elected governments. It was the economy that moved people into activism, but a bigger picture is now emerging.

Mussolini talked of the "Corporate State of Fascism". That's exactly what's developing now. It's been a hidden Fascism, with a democratic veneer, but since the turn of the century people in the US and the UK – 'Oceania', as George Orwell described it in '1984' – have been increasingly frustrated at their lack of a voice in big decisions of state. In the UK we had no voice in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite there being two million people out on the streets; Parliament voted on the basis of a lie. In 2001 Parliament had no vote at all, since decisions on waging war could at that stage be taken only by the Prime Minister in conjunction with the Monarch. So who did take these decisions? There is a growing feeling throughout the Western world that such decisions are taken not by elected politicians, but by gigantic financial institutions which in the end will profit from these wars.

So what would one expect from a corporate society? We may not expect the same brutality that one would have in an openly tyrannical regime, and, indeed, I am grateful to my opponents for not pulling my fingernails out, but in principle we would expect something similar. A corporate society does not uphold democratic values, even if it pretends to. Any troublesome group will be infiltrated by the corporate state, to neutralise its activities, or at least to keep them within certain limits.

This is exactly what has been emerging over the past year. On 20 October Newsnight broadcast a further revelation about an undercover policeman having infiltrated a civilian group with the purpose of subverting it:

"So far this year there have been no fewer than eight inquiries set up, after the discovery that undercover police have been used to infiltrate political organisations. There may be a ninth soon, because Newsnight has evidence of another operation, in which undercover policemen may have given false evidence in court. The officer became an activist in the Reclaim the Streets campaign, and was arrested after a group from the campaign occupied an office".

'Reclaim the Streets' is a direct action group which is concerned about the increasing takeover of urban streets by the corporate state. Their video documentary does show law-breaking, and indeed this is to be expected in a society which is more and more sceptical of the democratic processes in the country. "It turns the street into a road …", says their video, " the street can be much more about community, about social interaction … the road is a means of getting from A to B". The police do have a responsibility to keep the traffic flowing, but are their methods appropriate, and is it acceptable for the police to incite the very law-breaking which they are supposed to prevent, by means of agent provocateurs?

The Newsnight programme was about a cyclists demonstration of August 1996 in Central Lonon, in which a splinter group went to the headquarters of London Underground to unfurl protest banners. The incident led to the false arrest of one protestor, and false testimony in court by the undercover cop, who had played a leading role. The officer concerned was Jim Boyling, known in 'Reclaim the Streets' as Jim Sutton.

The Metropolitan Police were due to publish a report on an internal inquiry the following day, but at the last moment that report was delayed

It transpired that the alternative news source Indymedia had first become aware of the issue of undercover cops in protest movements and had passed information to The Guardian and BBC's Newsnight team, who worked together on their investigations. Again, the agenda is being driven by the alternative media rather than by paid investigative journalists

Since this is not just a British issue – some of these British cops had also been subverting groups abroad - Indymedia is now asking people to translate a statement on this into various languages.

I reported previously on Mark Kennedy, who had been posing as Mark (Flash) Stone in an environmental group, and whose actions had nearly led to the imprisonment of at least twenty innocent campaigners,

Lynn Watson (real name unknown), the police officer dressed as a clown in the Rebel Clown Army, a tiny group protesting against the Iraq war,

Other undercover police officers unmasked were Bob Lambert, posing as Bob Robinson,

Mark (Marco) Jacobs, whose real name is unknown,

Peter Black

and

Simon Wellings.

Groups infected were a variety of protest groups, such as anarchist, animal rights, anti-fascist, anti-globalisation, anti-racist, environmental and left-wing political groups. Those groups included: 2008 Camp For Climate Action, 2008 demo against the planned military academy at St Athan, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, Animal Liberation Front, anti-EDL, Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN), Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum, Climate Camp, The Common Place (Leeds anarchist centre), Dissent! (the network mobilising protesters for the G8 summit at Gleneagles), Globalise Resistance, London Greenpeace, No Border campaigns, Rebel Clown Army, Reclaim the Streets, Rising Tide Network, and Trident Ploughshares direct action network.

The lengths some of these undercover cops will go to in gaining credibility in the groups they have infiltrated are extraordinary. Kennedy provoked fellow officers to beat him up in a Climate Camp. Jim Boyling lied under oath in a criminal trial to protect his identity. Bob Lambert appeared in court under a fictional name. Several of them had sexual relationships with some of their victims, sometimes long-term relationships.

Jim Boyling even married one of his victims and had two children with her, now aged 5 and 7. How do you explain that one to the children, even when they are older, and how will they feel when they realise how they were brought into the world? Does the state have liabilities for their maintenance and for compensation for possible psychological trauma?

So if all this is going on with the police force in groups taking part in street activism, then what is going on with the security services in other groups that the corporate state disapproves of? I have already dealt with reports from former MI5 officers of large-scale infiltration in political parties, even "tiny organisations which pose no threat to national security". The purpose would be to turn these groups into controlled opposition, or to dismantle them, or at least make them ineffectual. It appears that the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party had around a thousand members each at the time the Berlin Wall fell, and each had, I understand 20 to 40 agents, whose job it was to cause quarreling and to demolish the organisations. How extensive is this, and how far will they go in 'gaining credence of the committee', to use a phrase from an email to me from the Director of Development of Esperanto Association of Britain shortly after he had left, admitting that that was all he had been doing for the two years in which he was being paid to develop the association.

Most people's reaction to anything like this is to pretend it isn't happening, and to try to shut others up when they talk about it. They'll tell you you're putting people off joining. I take the opposite view. I'm pleased to see that Cardiff Anarchists Network put out a statement on this:

But he [Marco Jacobs] also deliberately and systematically set out to damage a movement, and we think it is important that knowledge of what he did, and how he did it, is shared and discussed as widely as possible". They also wrote that many members were reeling with anger, resentment and guilt. "Marco worked hard to sow distrust, dislike and suspicion amongst us, and it was allowing him to do [that] that was perhaps our biggest mistake", they wrote.

Yet after all this, no-one, it seems, is capable of uttering the words 'the British secret police', even though it is patently obvious that such a thing exists. Yet the police now have a problem, because if they carry on behaving like SS thugs more cases will be uncovered. It will be in their interests to keep their noses clean until the whole issue has passed over. Perhaps that is why there was so little violence in the Occupy demonstrations in London this month. It is generally believed by many of the regulars who demonstrate for various causes in Central London that the police regularly use such tactics.

The late Brian Haw complained bitterly about such things and former MP George Galloway made allegations about agent provocateurs during some demonstrations. I myself would not have believed that such things could happen until I started taking part in truth and anti-war demonstrations only a few years ago, and started seeing things for myself.

We need more people to speak out. Most people who know things won't, and those who do will get criticised for their 'methods'. Some people, such as those in the South Yorkshire Police in the Tony Farrell case, see themselves as 'footsoldiers of the Government' and are therefore consciously complicit in the cover-ups. Others, like many I know, are simply in denial, or are suffering from Cognitive Dissonance or doublethink. Even those who recognise what is going on remain silent. Yet a few, like Tony Farrell have the courage to speak out.

During my researches into the Esperanto association in 2005, I would have loved to have come across a report somewhere of subversion in some other membership association which was being taken over by an inner clique, so that I could see how that may work, and so that I would have a base for comparison. Surely someone, somewhere would have been carrying out some investigation into their own association. Did no-one in the Labour Party compile membership statistics and link them to what was recorded in the minutes and the accounts? I could find nothing. If anyone knows of any such work, I would love to receive information on it. We need this information in order to build up the bigger picture, which is now looking very ominous indeed.

I can say that at long last we have a response from the Esperanto association to my financial chart, which I eventually managed to publish in EAB Update (pp 12-13) and, in the following issue, the treasurer accepted that my figures were correct. That issue of the periodical has now appeared on the Internet for all to see (p19).

That means that she should now explain why she told the Management Committee that the capital was being eaten up when at the time it was growing. Instead of doing that, she demonstrated how she had also given the same impression to members, by producing a rival chart showing a decreasing capital. She can be sure that few members will read the text, because they have such confidence in the treasurer, that they would refuse to believe that such a contradiction would be possible, rather than looking at the evidence, so they would not notice that that was a forecast for November 1994! Why produce the forecast figures when you have the real figures, unless the intent was to deceive? The other chart gives the impression of annual losses, which obviously could not have been the case if the capital was in fact increasing.

Yet members will not speak out, but will criticise me for doing so. In the same issue (page 17) a former Honorary Secretary expresses that he could not see the point in publishing my article, even though he says I have a point. He also wrote that my chart raises the question of why they sold the shop in London. Fine, but that's his point, not mine. I could have made a case out on that, but I didn't. That letter had actually been written before my article appeared, though it was presented as a reaction to it. Criticism of the President, with which I wholeheartedly agreed, had been cut out by the editor, who also rejected my reply, saying that the matter of the capital was a 'non-issue'.

A second letter in the same issue, from a former President, criticises me for virtually everything under the sun, including my work for the 9/11 truth movement, but avoids the issue which I had raised in my article (pp 17-18). There was nothing provocative about my article, and in no way was it critical of the committee, since that had been an explicit condition imposed by the editor. The problem of waking people up in a membership association is a small-scale example of waking up the masses in the case of hidden tyranny. The solution that I see is two-fold: (1) engage with the small minority who will be prepared to engage with you, and (2) take the issue outside the brainwashed community. Then things can start to happen. The statement by the Cardiff Anarchists Network may help to encourage others to speak out.

I also found an article by comedian Mark Thomas, who had had to come to terms with the fact that a close friend and trusted co-worker had been found to be spying on his activities. That turned out to be industrial espionage, which takes us back to consider the whole lot as different aspects of the corporate state. If that causes such soul-searching, imaging what it's like if there are five, ten or twenty of them whom you've known for as many years.


I found an interesting video called 'Psychologists help 9/11 truth deniers' which describes how people react when their fundamental beliefs are challenged. This is well-worth watching by anyone who understands English. It applies not only to 9/11 but to any situation in which people may react by saying "I refuse to believe ...", rather than looking at the evidence.






I've received a couple of messages from Esperantists, saying that they were interested to hear of the infiltration of the cyclist group or the environmental group, but that I should keep quiet about the Esperanto case. Eventually they will realise that by the same logic some in the cyclist group, the enviromental group, the 9/11 truth movement, and many other groups, may be interested in the Esperanto case for the same reason. The common issue for all these groups, even though they may be working for different causes and may not agree with each other, is the defence of democracy. For undemocratic methods to be brought to light, people need to speak out in public. It's not necessary to be able to prove who has infiltrated an organisation and with what purpose; it's only necessary to demonstrate behaviour. My crime was to produce hard facts, with no allegations or interpretation. It was then for others to interpret those facts, and we have just seen examples of that in the magazine. On the other hand, members should have been more alert to undemocratic methods being used by people of influence. This is essentially the point being made by former accountant for the European Commission Martha Andreasson, who is now an MEP for my area. The accounts had not been audited, and that in itself should be good reason to replace the people in charge. Concealment in itself should be sufficient reason to remove people's representatives from office whether at governmental level or in a tiny membership association.

My idea of advancing this issue at about the same rate as the general truth movement seems to be paying off. I reported in my last newsletter about the Guardian report of a 9/11 conference in the US.

Since then we have seen a blog in the Daily Telegraph, usually one of the most establishment of the national newspapers, with the title 'The 9/11 conspiracy theories aren't as irrational as you might think'.The rest of the article was critical of the truth movement, but at least here we have a grudging acceptance that we may actually have a point. Keep them coming! Encourage them to keep slagging us off, as long as there is a grudging admission that we may be right!

There are also big issues arising in the mainstream media. The Murder of Muammar Gadaffi may have been an uncontrolled revenge killing by soldiers on the ground, or it may have been allowed to happen by those higher up. Gadaffi would have realised that they couldn't send him to the International Criminal Court for trial because of the incriminating evidence he may provide against some of the NATO governments. His murder had actually been attempted by a group in the 1990s by what is now known as Al Qaeda, paid for by MI6, but it was bungled. That was what eventually made David Shayler decide to leave MI5 and blow the whistle.

As regards the Euro crisis, was it not all inevitable from the start? I kept quiet when the Euro was about to be introduced because I regarded myself as an ignoramus on economic affairs, when the experts were telling us all that it would be alright. Are we really to believe that no-one in the higher echelons of the EU spotted the flaw? Many in the financial markets below them would have been fooling themselves rather than accepting the obvious. So was this a project destined to failure? Was the objective to force the EU countries into a United States of Europe similar to the United States of America? Fine if they want to form such a union, but only if such a decision is taken by democratic means. So what happens if we in the UK have a referendum on leaving the EU? It's quite simple, really. If the vote goes against, we stay in, and if it goes in favour, we have another referendum. But if we were really to withdraw, what would be the consequences? Is it not time someone produced a proper analysis? Are those who want power to return to Westminster deluding themselves? Who has the power now, and who would have it if we were to withdraw? It sounds to me like the gigantic financial corporations in both cases. It's just a question of which financial corporations.

So where do we go from here? I think we are on the right track. We need to maintain an awareness of the bigger picture regarding corporate control of our society, the way in which we are manipulated by hidden propaganda, financial dealing, fear-mongering, and infiltration even in tiny membership association which pose no threat to national security. There will be more revelations. When the Occupy movement starts putting up placards relating to 9/11 truth, then the whole issue of who controls our society will come to a head.

But the danger is, as always, some false-flag terror event, which could bring everyone back into line, in supporting the next war, and persuading the population that they really do love Big Brother. At the October meeting of the Keep Talking group in London we had a guest speaker from Oslo, Torstein Viddal, who is the key researcher in the truth movement into the Norwegian attacks of 22/7. He lives only a couple of minutes away from where the Oslo bomb exploded, and despite a building between there and his flat, his window was blown open. He grabbed his camera and rushed out. At the Keep Talking meeting he showed a short video of how the International Criminal Court works, and suggested that we call for an investigation by the ICC with a view to prosecuting for war crimes. That's worth thinking about. His text can be read on the Norwegian 9/11 Truth site

Also worth thinking about is the issue of corporate government, and how to bring all these issues together in the current rebellion, and how to cope with the next terrorist event, which may well be intended to derail the rebellion and give an excuse for going in with truncheons, tasers, jack-boots and worse. Keep thinking. And keep talking.

Take Charlie's advice: Begin your own cognitive infiltration

September 2011

I think everyone's now suffering from 9/11 fatigue, following the bombardment from the mainstream media over the period of the tenth anniversary. Some of it wasn't too bad, and some was even revealing, but of course virtually none of it questioned the official conspiracy theory (a summary of which can be watched HERE and the ridiculous assertions put out relentlessly by governments and the mainstream media over the past ten years. I see reasons for hope, though.

After the showing of the BBC's Conspiracy Files programme '9/11 Ten Years on' on 29 August someone asked me "How was it?" The falsifications were so blatant that I could honestly reply that it was encouraging, because many people would now be able to see through the propaganda who couldn't have seen through it in their previous programmes. I thought it signaled a break-through.

It was just as described by John Pilger in his Chicago address, when he reported an anecdote from visiting Soviet journalists in the US. Their spokesman said: “I have to tell you, that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?"

And yet it was surreal. Throughout the blogs of the mainstream media the comments from the public were overwhelmingly critical of the official story, and of the press's reporting of it. I had expected that we would be swamped with all sorts of weirdos doing their usual stuff to ridicule anyone who wasn't towing the official line and to disrupt intelligent discussion. Dealing with this had become a way of life. But where were they now? Had they given up? I contributed some comments myself in various places, and even complimented BBC Newsnight's team on revealing the plight of many first responders who were now dying of cancer. I suggested that it was now OK for journalists to let a little bit of the truth out, because now they would have the support of the public. I think we're winning, folks.

On 12 September, an amazing blog appeared on the The Guardian's website 'How the world changed after 9/11'. "On the day of September 11, Charlie Skelton attends a symposium of critical thinkers in New York", ran the subheading. Yes, it was a proper journalistic report of a conference of leading critical thinkers on the 9/11 attacks. The blog mentioned Webster Tarpley and CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

Charlie Skelton concludes by saying:

"We have to do something. Even if that something is simply to Google 'Cass Sunstein' and start from there. Begin your own cognitive infiltration. Google 'Vigilant Guardian' or 'Able Danger'. Crosscheck 'Abdel Hakim Belhadj' and 'Al-Qaida'. Begin digging. Begin thinking. And stop believing." I see that as a break-through. Mr Skelton has also blogged on New York activists and the 9/11 demonstration outside the BBC in 2009 but primarily on the Bilderberg group.

For the first time as far as I am aware, an article has appeared in the mainstream media in the UK raising serious questions on the official conspiracy theory on 9/11. The significance of this is not just in the effect of that article as a one-off, but that it signals to other journalists that it's now OK to raise such issues in the national press. I hope it doesn't get Charlie Skelton into trouble, since George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee and David Aaronovitch all write for The Guardian. Unless the authorities find some way of silencing people over that Guardian article, other journalists will get the message, and the cracks in the facade will widen.

So I was interested to see an article by Guardian journalist Nicolaus Mills on 15 September in The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' headed 'The anthrax scare: not a germ of truth', and subheaded 'Ten years on, the anthrax attacks seem a footnote to 9/11, but we forget how George Bush used them to push for war in Iraq'. The breakthrough is real.

During the run-up to the tenth anniversary we would discuss what we could do to mark the event. Anything I could think of, and any ideas from others, all seemed like a drop in the ocean compared with the expected onslaught. I remembered the tactic of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, when they would await enemy fire, count a certain number of seconds, then all pop up from their underground hideouts and return fire when the enemy had run out of ammunition. However, shortly before the 9/11 anniversary Belinda, who used to organise the 9/11 Truth meetings in London, had a bit of inspiration, and organised a public meeting at the Indian YMCA for the Keep Talking group. The speaker was Ian Crane, who had been the first chairman of the London 9/11 Truth movement before I was around, and who now organises the Alternative View conferences. At the time, he was planning a lecture tour around the UK. Belinda has the magic touch, and so does Ian Crane. I was getting nervous about a low turnout, which could make the event look ridiculous in such a large hall, so I sent out a press release using various freeby services. The Keep Talking group put a couple of classified advertisements in London newspapers (one of which didn't appear). But I think it was Ian Crane's own publicity machine that got the people there. On the evening itself some of us initially put out about fifty chairs. About 170 people turned up. The issue is very much alive, and the authorities could hardly have done better in helping us keeping it alive.

Earlier the same day, some members of Keep Talking were driving down from Sheffield, where they had been attending the employment tribunal hearing for Tony Farrell, the former Principal Intelligence Analyst for South Yorkshire Police, who had been sacked for his assessment of terrorist risks in the area, even though his bosses recognised that he may be right, as I reported in my August newsletter. By chance, Ian Crane had been due to speak in Sheffield on 9/11 and related issues. In the event, following his talk, Ian Crane ended up representing Tony Farrell at the tribunal. That evening, just as Ian Crane was about to speak at the London Indian YMCA, Tony Farrell unexpectedly turned up, looking in high spirits, despite having lost the case. He told us he intended to appeal. He got an enthusiastic round of applause after Ian Crane had outlined his story.

I've just been speaking to someone I don't know over the phone, who was telling me all about Tony Farrell's mistakes, and why he can't be right. But for me, the case shouldn't rest on whether or not he is right, because no-one challenged him on that. In fact, he reported that his bosses had admitted that he may be right. So what was he fired for? It's quite simple. As his bosses in South Yorkshire Police put it: "We are footsoldiers of the Government". So, I sometimes think, are the courts.

Petition to reinstate Tony Farrell

I wasn't at the hearing myself, though initially I had planned to be. I thought it better to follow events on the Internet, and post the occasional comment. I also got a couple of press releases out and tried to catch up on other urgent work, like preparing for an Interlinquistics Symposium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, where I had been invited to present a paper on the cause of the stagnation of the Esperanto movement. The university runs a course on Interlinquistics, and one of the organisers, a professor of sociology had sent me a paper of his titled 'Esperanto-movado: Ĉu perdita komunumo?' [The Esperanto movement: Is it a lost community?]

In that paper he contrasts two tendencies in sociological research: the common sense approach and the science-based approach, arguing that there was a dearth of science-based sociological research on the Esperanto movement. I had been doing science-based research work into the Esperanto movement in the UK, and this had caught his attention. They wanted at the Symposium to identify the present-day challenges to the Esperanto movement. In my presentation, I brought it all down to one single factor, the same as I would for the whole of the truth movement: coping with Cognitive Dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling that people sometimes get when they are confronted with facts that are in contradiction to deeply held beliefs. This can lead to them making all sorts of silly statements and incoherent explanations, in order to avoid having to admit that their beliefs could be mistaken. I linked this to George Orwell's 'voluntary censureship', which he wrote about in the preface to Animal Farm, though this was censured out during his lifetime

As long as this Cognitive Dissonance reigns, mass deception will be successful, but as soon as it is overcome, mass deception will be seen for what it is. The fundamental problem is not that an association or a government may be taken over by fraudsters, but that if it's done with a smile, most of the voters will let them do it. Look at Tony Blair. How is it possible to believe that someone with such charm could have so many conflicts of interest whilst working as a peace envoy in the Middle East? 0A Channel 4 Dispatches programme on 27 September presented an amazing story. But will there be consequences?

The way to break through Cognitive Dissonance I think is to introduce the issues in the abstract, and then show the bigger picture when the person has accepted the simple facts or the logic. The best example of that that I can think of is the Dutch television interview with demolition expert Danny Jowenko:





Since he was an expert, he may have recognised it as controlled demolition anyway, but I think many of the viewers would have been coloured by previous knowledge. After the interview he was prepared to speak out on Building 7. I was saddened, on looking up the link for the video, to find that he died in a car crash.

Similarly, in a talk at the London Esperanto Club, I had asked members whether any of them knew about the matter of Dermod Quirke and the library. As expected, they looked perplexed. I then told them that I didn't either. I read out a short text which had appeared in the national association's periodical, saying that no-one on the Management Committee knew anything about it either, and neither did whoever wrote the text. They looked bewildered. I then told them that I had asked Dermod Quirke about it and he couldn't tell me. So who did know anything about it? Whether or not it happened to be true, the whole thing was a concoction. Only when members were sufficiently mystified did I reveal the context. It was part of a statement by the President, and presented an example of my 'mischievous and possibly defamatory' allegations against the Management Committee. It was their way of silencing me when I had revealed information which members were entitled to know. Members were being kept in the dark over a campaign to save the college in which the association's own headquarters were housed. The President's deception had worked.

As I flew back from Poznan, some of the Keep Talking members were attending a 'Conspiracy Theory Day' conference in London. Speakers were to include the two authors of the Demos report on 'conspiracy theories' whom we met on 25 October 2010, when we in the Keep Talking group challenged them to demonstrate their ideas on 'open infiltration'. Also billed to speak was their friend David Aaronovitch, known for his anti-truth-movement campaign. It was clear that this was to be a propaganda event for the conspiracy deniers. My eye was particularly drawn to the name of Robert Brotherton, said to be doing a PhD on conspiracy theories at Goldsmith's College. Now that's interesting; our confrontation with Demos took place at Goldsmith's College by the invitation from another PhD student in conspiracy theories.

I was expecting the whole thing to be stage-managed. Demos had not responded to my challenge for a return match, and we had not been invited to present our case at their 'conspiracy theory' meeting. But at the last moment something weird happened. David Aaronovitch pulled out, and he was replaced by Ian Crane. Some of the Keep Talking group attended as members of the public, including Kevin Boyle, who wrote the meeting up on his blog and reproduced in the Sovereign Independent. From his description of the event, it sounds as if it was far from walking into the lion's den, as I had expected. He wrote that Ian Crane's presentation was "clear and powerful and punctuated with regular applause". Ian Crane also handed the stage over to Tony Farrell for five minutes, "and here was the whole confrontation of the day personified in one man", Kevin wrote.

It sounded like a rout, so I sought a report from the other side, and found one, of all places in the CiF Watch website, which describes itself as "Monitoring and exposing antisemitism on the Guardian's newspaper's 'Comment is Free' blog" guest written by "Mitnaged".

What the relevance of that is I haven't yet figured out, but Jamie Bartlett did try to tell me that the antisemites were having a go at Carl Miller because of his Jewish name. Don't try to make sense of it. In any case, is the idea that there could be criminals in the Knesset as well as in Westminster and the Capitol antisemitism? If it is, that can only be because 'anti-semitism' lost its hyphen long ago.

The CiF Watch report stated that nothing in Ian Crane's presentation constituted "what could be called rigorous scientific evidence let alone proof". Yet Carl Miller had admitted to us that their own statistical results linking conspiracy theory groups with terrorism was not based on any statistical analysis, and Jamie Barlett admitted that the Demos report was "not a scientific report". However, CiF Watch did inform us that "The 'troofers' also set up a stall at the back of the hall from which they sold copies of DVDs which purported to tell us the real story about the events of 9/11 and 7/7". Great! The intention had been to hand them out outside the conference, but they ended up selling the packs at £1 each. They reported back to Keep Talking: "DVDs and flyers went like hot cakes at yesterday's Conspiracy Theories Conference. A great day for our side".

As for the psychologists, I found a documentary on YouTube, broadcast on Channel 4 three years ago, featuring Professor French and his co-worker Patrick Leman. Dr Leman stated: "As psychologists, we're not principally interested in whether one particular conspiracy theory is true or another one isn't" 'Conspiracy – Who really runs the world?'. Exactly. I wonder whether anyone has researched the reasons some people become witch doctors, voodoo practitioners, psychologists etc.

One could turn the question around, and ask why some people believe what they are told by authority. My colleague David Bowman has put up an analysis of this on the Berkshire 9/11 Truth blogsite, under the title 'See No Truth, Hear No Truth, Speak No Truth'. This is an excellent analysis, and again it comes down to tackling Cognitive Dissonance. The remaining practical problem that I see is tackling the opposition, the propagandists who know all the psychological stuff and have been applying it more effectively than we were, but to mislead and discredit. As always, I think the main part of solving the problem is understanding it, and David's analysis is very welcome in furthering that aim.

I found it interesting that former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, giving a BBC 2011 Reith Lecture on 20 September, asserted: "The terrorist now has at his disposal tools which were once the sole preserve of the state".

Really? Hydrogen peroxide and black pepper? That's what we were told the 7/7 Four used to blow up three trains and a bus. Hydrogen peroxide has been used in hair dye since about 1860, and black pepper goes back at least as far as Rameses II, and was available in Europe in the Middle Ages. So what is Eliza Manningham-Buller suggesting? I don't know, but if in the past only states had the facilities to commit such terrorist atrocities, then perhaps that's still the case. Well, actually, in her first lecture on 6 September, she stated:


"But I do not expect terrorism as a tool, often used by states in earlier decades, now used largely by groups, to disappear"

So who sponsors these groups? Yet there was no consideration of such issues; she stated that they came to an immediate conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible.

See Ian's comment"It's amazing that MI5 could come to an immediate conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible, and the following day they and those in Washington could have no doubt about their atrocities, before carrying out any forensic analysis or collecting any evidence."

These partial admissions are interesting. These people seem to be positioning themselves; it's now only a matter of time before the mainstream media start asking them what they knew and when they knew it.

Yet as the national press is starting to admit reality, Liverpool Football Club is considering disciplinary action against striker Nathan Eccleston for tweeting: "I ain't going to say attack don't let the media make u believe that was terrorist that did it. #OTIS.".

'OTIS is presumed to stand for 'Only The Illuminati Succeed'. This is reminiscent of the American footballer Rashard Mendenhall, who got into trouble for Twitter remarks questioning the public celebrations of Osama bin Laden's death, and whether the World Trade Center towers were really brought down on September 11 only by crashing two hijacked airliners into the buildings.

Joey Barton, a footballer who has a notorious bad-boy persona, has stated: "People should embrace the fact they're individual," Barton tells me. "I can't think of anything more morose than being the same as everybody else. What would we get out of that? I embrace that I'm peculiar and refuse to conform.

This is a breath of fresh air.

These people need our support, if only because others who may wish to speak out should not feel intimidated.

The antidote is to keep talking.

"Belief amongst senior officers that it's better to cover up than own up", says former Met Police Officer

August 2011

"It's just horrible, and I myself have been crying a lot", wrote my correspondent in Oslo. I had just arrived in Copenhagen for the Universal Congress of Esperanto when I heard of the attacks. It felt so close. It could have happened in Copenhagen, and the conference at which the massacre took place could just as easily have been the Esperanto Congress. We did, after all, suffer attacks of vandalism in 2009 when it was held in Bialystok, Poland, a place where such vandalism is rare. I was relying mainly on the BBC World Service to keep me informed, though I did sometimes watch Danish Television, straining to make sense of the subtitles, the body language and the tone.

One of the first public statements on the attacks came from President Obama of the US, who said that the events in Oslo were a reminder that the world has a role in stopping acts of terrorism

Twelve minutes later a BBC correspondent put out that he believed an al-Qaeda influenced group was most likely to be behind the attacks. Then one minute after that the Norwegian Prime Minister urged Norwegians not to cave in to fear caused by the bombing. "But it's important that we don't let ourselves be scared, because the purpose of that kind of violence is to create fear", he added. Forty-three minutes later the BBC reports that the Norwegian government has not yet pointed the finger toward groups who could be responsible. I saw a press conference with a police representative, who was very correct, stating that all options had to be considered. How very different that was from Tony Blair's reaction to 7/7, when he stated: "We know those who did this did so in the name of Islam". Yet after the Oslo bombing the government line remained firm. "You will not destroy our democracy or our ideals for a better world", declared the Norwegian Prime Minister.

But who did he have in mind? Was it a message directed at the the US and NATO to keep out, in response to President Obama's suggestion? Or was it aimed at someone else? Or was it aimed just at the people of Norway? They were right to keep their options open. The man arrested at Utøya was ethnic Norwegian, and no Islamic links were in evidence.

At the opening ceremony of the Esperanto congress we held a minute's silence in memory of the victims. During the week it wasn't difficult to lapse into conversation on the Norwegian attacks, or on the bigger picture, with people from a whole range of nationalities across the world. How the climate of opinion has changed from five years ago when I started talking to people about the 9/11 truth movement, the false flag attacks, state intervention in civilian groups and the subversion of democracy at all levels in Western societies. No-one at the Copenhagen congress thought I was crazy. I could talk freely about topics which only five years ago would have brought about cynical responses or ridicule, or would be ignored altogether. Everyone I spoke with in Copenhagen was positive and interested.

When I got home I looked up the Norwegian 9/11 truth website (http://www.911truth.no/2011/07/oslo-zionist-terror-not-a-false-flag-op/) and found that they man they had arrested had written a 1516 page manifesto, '2083 – A European Declaration of Independence' (http://911truth.no/oslo-j22-abb-terror-manifesto.pdf). under the anglised name of Andrew Berwick. I skimmed through about two thirds of that manifesto, and it was a detailed treatise on multiculturalism and why he was against it. The final part was about militancy and weird stuff about the Knights Templar. So why, if he was protesting against multiculturalism would he be bombing ethnic Norwegians? The Norwegian 9/11 truth website quoted a passage on page 1167 of his book: "So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists".

In the meantime, my colleague Nick Kollerstrom had been writing up events on his website: "Was Anders Breivik a Zionist, who massacred the children in response to Norway's anti-Israeli stance? Or did he do it for the reason he stated, namely that too many Muslims were flooding into Norway?", he asked. The media have taken the latter view, he stated, whilst some had taken the former.

Norway's Labour Party had passed resolutions just a day or two before the youth gathering on Utøya Island, and the day before the attacks, Norway's Foreign Minister told the youth meeting that the Palestinians must have their own state, the occupation must end, the wall must be demolished and it must happen now. If we go to the Norwegian 9/11 site we see a photo of the Foreign Minister with the young people on Utøya Island, who are holding up a banner 'Boikott Israel'. The website also points out that the attack came on the 65th anniversary of Irgun's attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

This is very much ongoing work. Nick has already included much analysis on his website. The Oslo article points out that the mainstream media have failed to mention the link to the Jerusalem bombing. "Zionism – obviously – is still very much a taboo subject in Norway", the article states. The author explains in reply to one of the comments, that the word 'Zionist' relates to Jew just like 'Nazi' relates to German. I've always thought that the word 'Zionist' is bandied about too easily. In this context it refers to Zionist militants, rather than those who emigrated to Israel for a more peaceful life, by buying up land from willing arabs.

One thing that still puzzles me is why Breivik should have added to the end of his treatise a number of quality press photos, ready for immediate use by the press when he was arrested. It seems that he wanted to be arrested and to become the focus of the investigation, presenting himself as a lone nutter. Why would he do that? Was he a decoy for a larger operation? Does he have an escape route? Was he told he had an escape route and did he believe it?

Another thing is that, whilst reading his document, I couldn't help but think of that other report against multiculturalism issued by the Conservative Party think tank Policy Exchange on 29 January 2007. It was headed 'Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism'

I carried out a study of that and gave a talk on it to our London Keep Talking group in February. That was after the Prime Minister had stated that multiculturalism had failed in a speech in Munich on terrorism. It seemed to me self-evident that his speech was based on that document. The report was 90 pages long and used the same sort of twisted logic that Anders Breivik seemed capable of. The gist of the argument in the Policy Exchange report was that terrorists in the UK were normal Muslims, rather than extremists, and so there was a paradox. It therefore followed that the root source of terrorism in the UK was multiculturalism. Shortly after issuing that report, Policy Exchange issued a further report about terrorist literature in mosques. That was widely reported in the press, until Newsnight discovered that some of their receipts had been falsified.





Then came the August riots in England. So who was behind them? What has been emerging is that in London alone there were 200 gangs which were normally fighting each other, but which suddenly called a truce in order to wreck selected areas in London. When the rioting began, the Metropolitan police held back, letting them get on with it. The social networking sites Facebook and Blackberry were blamed, and the secure encoding of the Blackberry phones meant that the police didn't know what was going on, and so were taken by surprise. They arrived unprepared for criminal activity, just expecting some sort of peaceful demonstration. Is that credible?

One man who doesn't think so is Brian Paddick, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, and now a high profile member of the Liberal Democratic Party. In a special session of the BBC Television's Question Time (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/9562804.stm) on Thursday, August 11, he said there was no excuse for not having sufficient officers on duty in Tottenham on the Saturday night, and that if they had had that, and if the officers had acted rather than standing back, then he didn't think that they would have had the copy-cat violence in Clapham Junction or anywhere else. He also said: " ... these crowds were organising themselves using social networks, using Twitter, using Blackberry messaging. Well, why weren't the police on Twitter, on Facebook, on Blackberry messaging, getting one step ahead of the crowd?".

Another panel member, David Davis, MP, pointed the finger at ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, saying: "The place where this is discussed broadly is ACPO ... and they're the ones bluntly who made the mistake on this".

So what is really going on? Who was behind the August riots? In any investigation you start off with three basic questions: 1: Cui bono? (Who benefits?), 2: Who has the means, and 3: Who has done it before? The third question is easy to answer.

There is a thuggish gang based in London which has been found to be engaged in infiltrating peaceful civilian groups and inciting people to break the law and wreck other people's property. In one instance, one of their agent provocateurs was found to be inciting to riot abroad. The Germans I spoke with in Copenhagen were generally aware that a British undercover police officer had been sent in as an agent provocateur to incite riotous behaviour in their country. His name was Mark Kennedy, and I wrote about that case in my newsletters of May and June/July this year. The gang for which he was working was ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, which had set up a secret police force in the UK, operating not for national security but against our own people. This, it appears, was done in collusion with the Crown Prosecution Service. The only substantial difference I can see between the Mark Kennedy case and the August rioting is a matter of scale.

Why were there no prosecutions of members of this gang? Instead, the police force merely announced that responsibility for infiltration had been transferred to the London Metropolitan Police. Do we believe them? We have no means of checking. One of the high-profile police officers – probably the most high profile police officer in the mainstream media – appearing during this period on national radio and television was Sir Hugh Orde, President of the Association of Chief Police Officers. So not only does ACPO have the means of inciting rioting, they have the means of covering up, even if their cover-up of the Mark Kennedy case, in collusion with the Crown Prosecution Service, did eventually break down after seven years of betrayal.

Another thuggish gang which I have reported on in previously is one that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, was a member of in his youth, together with the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Other former members include the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The gang is called the Bullingdon Club, which had a reputation for being awfully polite and respectable, arrogant and snobbish, and smashing up high-class restaurants. They would get away with that because they had more money than sense, and would pay off the restaurant owners in hard cash to keep them quiet. On one occasion, when the restaurant owner complained to the police, the police just held them overnight for questioning, then let them go free. The film 'When Boris met Dave', which I reported on in my October 2009 newsletter, is well worth watching for anyone who is interested in understanding how elitist cliques take control, not only in government but at all levels of society. The Bullingdon Club clearly provides excellent training for going into politics, where graduates can put into practice the art of charm, arrogance, and selective aggression, as in smashing up civilian life in Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably many other places, including the UK.

There was no suggestion that Cameron and Co were themselves responsible for smashing up restaurants, but they were members of a gang which had that reputation. If I had been invited to join such a group when I was a student I would have said "No, thank you". I wouldn't have been invited, though, because I wasn't at Oxford University, and I hadn't been to a training camp within a stone-throw of Windsor Castle, known as Eton College. But there are plenty of thuggish groups willing to smash things up at all levels of society, and I just wasn't interested in that sort of thing. Mere membership of such a group from a top politician who is condemning similar behaviour from others is sheer hipocracy. What signals does that send out when leading members of the political establishment and the police force itself are members of such gangs? If we are really interested in stamping out such behaviour, then we have to seriously consider what the root cause could be, and what measures have to be taken.


The BBC television programme Newsnight sometimes presents some excellent investigation into possible criminal activity by the state, but in a special edition on August 12 about the August riots, they invited historian Professor David Starkey to take part in an ill-informed discussion.

David Starkey is well known for his arrogant and uncompromising views. He appeared to be blaming the August riots on immigrant groups from the West Indies, even though most of them weren't from the West Indies. His justification was that some of the white English rioters used some West Indian dialect. His absolutely uncompromising manner was a complete distraction from the real issues. Although he lacked the subtlety of expression, the version of English which he was using was that used by elite English bankers.

The Cameron-Blair formula is to turn the whole situation into abstract nouns. Just as Blair put it about that 9/11 was due to mindless terrorism, justifying his 'war on terror', Cameron has attributed the August riots to 'criminality'. Of course, that doesn't apply to the Bullingdon Club or to ACPO, because they seem to have some sort of immunity to prosecution. Most of these gangs no doubt do have a thuggish mentality, but is that enough to make them all suddenly declare a truce and start attacking shops in the high street? Of course not. It is enough, though, together with a widespread sense of grievance against a racist and unjust establishment, for unthinking people to be incited into action that they would not normally be involved in as individuals. The ground would be fertile for the secret police and their agent provocateurs.

So, cui bono? The London Metropolitan police force had been itself coming under pressure, with talk of criminal collusion with people in the Murdoch empire. A national scandal was developing, in which the police were being discredited, and public confidence in them was evaporating. Suddenly all that changed. With the August riots, the police were suddenly held in high esteem. The public suddenly realised they needed the police to enforce law and order. Their sins were forgiven. New, and more repressive laws were talked of by senior politicians, in addition to the current draconian legislation that has been introduced since the attacks of 9/11. Many in the truth movement are very aware that all the legislation they need to turn the UK into an overtly fascist state is already in place. All it would take would be some sort of false flag attack, and an enactment of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, alternatively known as the Abolition of Parliament Act.

It may not even take that:





There has been some apprehension that the 2012 Olympic Games in London could provide the background for such an excuse. There could be a repeat of the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972. The police force would be overstretched, and so the army would be called in to keep order on the streets of Britain, whilst their own agent provocateurs incite rioting to give them the excuse. Perhaps the August riots were a trial run for this. It's not a nice prospect, but the one thing that makes such things possible is that the public still believe such things to be impossible, because we're British.

We need urgently to sort out these thuggish gangs, and we need to start at the top. Members of such gangs in leading positions in the police force or in Government, should be removed. There should then be a proper inquiry into the August riots, and any investigation should start by asking the standard questions: (1) Cui bono? (2) Who has the means? and (3) Who has done it before?

As part of this, we need to establish and maintain standards of honesty and decency within the police force itself. The job of the police is to solve crime, not to cover it up, and not to avoid rocking the boat when inconvenient evidence crops up. The Guardian contained an interview with Brian Paddick on Saturday, August 11. The article states that Brian Paddick's rise in the London Metropolitan Police was halted when he revealed, five hours after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by armed police at Stockwell tube in 2005, that senior officers had known he was carrying a Brazilian passport, and was therefore unlikely to have been a suicide bomber.

"The police's release of misleading information to the media following the death of an innocent man has become a familiar pattern", writes The Guardian, "It was repeated when newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson died after being shoved to the ground by a police officer during the 2009 G20 protests. Then, nine days later, when Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in Tottenham, police accounts told of a shootout with Duggan and an officer's life freakishly saved when a bullet lodged in his police radio". It was later revealed that the bullet in the radio was police issue, and a non-police weapon retrieved from the scene had not been fired. "There is still this belief amongst senior officers that it's better to cover up than own up", said Brian Paddick.

A strong desire not to rock the boat was reported at a meeting of the Keep Talking group in London on 5 July when a former Principal Intelligence Analyst for South Yorkshire Police narrated how he had been sacked, after having come to the conclusion that the biggest single threat to terrorism to the UK was now coming from internal tyranny and in his opinion far exceeded any threat from Islamic terrorism. It was his job to produce an annual 'Strategic Threat Assessment Matrix', giving probabilities of threats to public order in the area. His assessment for 2010 was due on 8 July, but a week earlier he stumbled upon information on 9/11, which led him on to further information on 7/7. Like many of us, he was shocked at what he found, but he had only one week to digest the information and decide what to do. He told us of the reactions of his bosses when he told them of his findings. "Tony, you and I will never get to the truth – we are mere footsoldiers of the government", he was told.

As a result, he rewrote his Strategic Threat Assessment Matrix as a brief document, stating that the real threat to society was almost entirely of the state-sponsored kind, and that other threats were insignificant by comparison. On being dismissed, he was told by the Director of Finance: "Your beliefs are very sincere, and you may be right, but it is I'm afraid incompatible at the moment with where we are". Why the Director of Finance?

We discussed going public on this at the Keep Talking meeting, but we agreed for the moment to treat the issue with discretion. Otherwise, we would have had a national scoop.

Later, Tony decided to go public, and a report appeared in The Sun and the Mirror

It was, of course, the sort of thing you'd expect, but, as Gandhi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". I was actually quite encouraged. Then a similar report appeared in the Sheffield Star on 19 July

Tony took the matter to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, and his appear hearing will begin on 7 September. Nick Kollerstrom did an excellent write-up of this story on his Terror on the Tube website, with links and comments

Best of luck to Tony, who has shown outstanding courage. If the hearing goes against him, that will confirm that the primary objective is not to rock the boat, even in a case in which the police have admitted that he may be right.

This brings us up to the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and the onslaught of repeated lies that will hit us through the mainstream media. That has already started with the BBC's television programme '9/11 Ten Years On', broadcast on 29 August produced by (Mike Rudin's discredited 'Conspiracy Files' team.

It's encouraging to see that they are being pushed further and further into a defensive position, broadcasting material that couldn't have been shown just a few years ago, even if they are still countering good science with bad science, and telling us that the 'conspiracy theorists' are wrong. Perhaps that's because the BBC's own opinion poll shows that one in seven people in the UK believe that the US government staged the 9/11 attacks, and that the equivalent figure for 16-24 year-olds is one in four. So how many would have answered 'No' to a straight question 'Do you believe the government is telling the truth about 9/11?'.



One in seven people are convinced that the U.S. government was involved in a conspiracy to stage the September 11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people.


A survey, which interviewed 1,000 people in the UK and the same number in the U.S., found that 14 per cent of Britons 15 per cent of Americans think the past administration was involved in the tragedy.

They were asked: 'It is generally accepted that these attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda. However some people have suggested there was a wider conspiracy that included the American government. Do you, yourself, believe that there was a wider conspiracy, or not?'

See No Truth, Hear No Truth, Speak No Truth

“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, they will fight to protect it.” - Morpheus, The Matrix

Preface

The author of this blog has a degree in Psychology and Statistics and a postgraduate degree in Applied, Social and Market Research. Although I don't use psychology on a professional basis, I have retained a strong interest in social psychology and am offering how research may be used more effectively.

"conspiracy theorist" label

The ‘conspiracy theory’ label is being increasingly used in society and by the media as a pejorative and derogatory label, yet the Oxford dictionary defines a conspiracy as “1. A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. 2 the action of conspiring.”

Since 19 hijackers allegedly conspired to attack civilians and cause death and harm this would be defined as a conspiracy, yet to what extent it is theory or fact would be determined by an open and independent investigation, something that has not yet been carried out.

As those in the community know, US Government officials involved in the 9/11 Commission, as well as others, have themselves admitted the investigation did not involve full transparency and accountability from important agencies.

9/11 arouses strong emotions and the use of the "conspiracy theory" label implies a person who dismisses such ‘theories’ are threatened by information they do not want to understand and because it involves implications they are too frightened of to contemplate.

The "conspiracy theory" label is used for three reasons. First, it is used as a term of censorship and exclusion of individuals from a group, second, it is a method of deflecting awkward questions about important issues and, third, it is a way of attacking the competence of the person who has the courage to raise disturbing questions, rather than the attacker being able to investigate those very issues for themselves (i.e. being derogatory or condescending).

Bush famously declared, “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories regarding the attacks of September 11” and further said, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists”. Discussion and the examination of the evidence to understand who perpetrated 9/11 was forbidden. Even Obama said in a speech in Egypt on the 4th June 2009 that 9/11 is something to be dealt with, not opinions to be debated. What kind of Government would threaten the entire world into fear and emotional submission in order to proceed with its own global agenda?

A reluctance to investigate

The evidence, anomalies and the serious questions that have arisen and remained unanswered since the attacks of September 2001 and, similarly since the London bombings in July 2005, should convince any open-minded individual that a new investigation is required, indeed, should be demanded for both. Yet why are people so reluctant to look into either of these for themselves? The continuing obstacle of the truth movement is how to engage with the public more effectively.

Solomon Asch and the need to be liked

At heart, we are social animals, we want to have friends and we want to be liked but, under some circumstances, there can be an unfortunate trade-off. Our desire to be liked by others means we may not always want to express an honest opinion. Our behaviour is influenced by forces, some of which we are not even aware. We assume others see the world in the same way as we do, but we do not. We are influenced by what we hear, see, read, what kind of values we grow up with, what we consider to be important in society and how we relate to family, friends, work colleagues and other individuals in our own personally important social groups. Laurie Manwell stated the following in a lecture:

“On the first day of one of my social psychology classes, the professor got up in front of the class and said, ‘I can sum up human behaviour in these three things, and that’s people like to be liked, they like to be right and they like to be free and its in that order. Being liked is number one and they will trade with being right and being free with being liked.’ … The thing about being liked is that the pressure to not violate a social norm is a lot stronger than you think it is”.

Part 1 of Laurie Manwell's lecture

Despite belonging to various social groups, We like to think we are independent in nature and we like to think we are totally in control over how we feel, how we respond to others and what we say. In some circumstances there is a powerful need to conform or we don't like to say things because we don't want to appear foolish. This was demonstrated by Solomon Asch in his classic experiment on what was ostensibly a line-length comparison task in which he presented participants with a test line (x) and to choose a line from a set of options which they thought was the closest in length (A, B, C):





But there was a catch. The initial experiment consisted of only one genuine participant. The rest were confederates in on the ruse. The experiment was set up to look at the power of conformity by testing how a lone genuine participant would respond to deliberate wrong answers given by the confederates. As Manwell stated in the lecture, once a person gives up the need to be right in order to be liked they automatically give up the right to be free. If you are knowingly giving wrong answers, then you are not free. But people don't want to give a wrong answer, so they stay silent.

Demolishing the iconic psychological barriers of 9/11 truth

Laurie Manwell (2007) explains how individuals may find it difficult to investigate 9/11 and how we might engage with others more constructively. She states that the purpose of the first article is to

“review relevant scientific studies of the cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes that arise in response to information that contradicts the deep-seated beliefs that people have about 9/11”.


Given the nature of the attack and the horrific images presented by the world’s media, such as trapped individuals in the towers and others having the courage to jump. The collapses were shown live on TV and the deaths of almost 3000 individuals resulted in personal trauma. The 9/11 attack was intended to appeal to a person’s emotional state including anger and revenge.

We are deeply affected by our own mortality and fragility as humans. This is something we need to protect so we try to bolster our self-image by having a greater sense of patriotism or direct our anger at others. Any information that contradicts a person’s beliefs about their world view will prompt an emotional reaction which will trigger psychological defence mechanisms that will, in turn, hinder any discussion of the evidence. Among many people, even after ten years, this influence remains deeply ingrained and is possibly the reason why very little significant progress has been made in demanding a new investigation. Personal self-censorship has major consequences for society.

One of the issues is how we, as campaigners, set out to reduce or eliminate these mechanisms and to try to get people to be more open-minded. As it states in the article, “reminders of 9/11 can activate the attitudes that people already hold, and that the stronger they hold them, the more resistant they are to change”.

Manwell explains in the second article (Rebuilding the Road to Freedom of Reason) about how campaigners have gone through a period of openness and transformation. There is an acknowledgement that campaigners had believed the official account of 9/11 for various lengths of time. There is likely to have been a period of cognitive dissonance: do we ignore the evidence at our peril or overcome the defensive safety net and come out stronger and wiser? The conscience is activated and the moral compass is strengthened in favour of identifying with the victim’s families as well as with truth, justice, accountability and social responsibility.

Media

A person can either re-examine their beliefs or retreat into the fabricated media-controlled world. Manwell states that people who rely on the corporate media for information "may falsely believe that they are being presented with all sides of the debate … An important foundation for questioning the official story of 9/11 is the challenge to people’s beliefs about the role of the media in supporting or questioning the Government.”

Although mainstream news organisations have reported on various strands of the evidence surrounding 9/11 in the first two or three years after the attack (probably because they were reporting on important stories out of a genuine need), there appeared to have been no ability or motivation to connect the pieces together in any kind of coherent form. Indeed, since then the mainstream media has slowly ignored those early reports and turned to derogatory hit-pieces. It is the mainstream news and reporting record in the early years that matter most, just like when Dan Rather stated on 9/11 that, "for the third time today", WTC7 looked like a controlled demolition.





Collating and organising mainstream media reports has been a massive undertaking that Paul Thompson started in the early years, which still continues, in the form of the History Commons timeline that consists of hundreds of mainstream news stories.

Coincidences and discoveries

Another important area that Manwell raises is how independent events that occur at the same may lead to a subsequent re-interpretation and re-questioning of events. When we tell someone that there was a live hijacking exercise at the same time as the attacks and that inside trading occurred just prior to the attacks (to name just two), they are considered unusual but would be brushed away without a second thought. This is likely because accepting such odd coincidences will lead to a discovery that has disturbing implications a person would rather not think about.

This blog

In an attempt to expand on these articles by making further suggestions, based on other areas of research.

Self-affirmation theory

Depending on the culture, group or situation in which we find ourselves, we like to think we are law-abiding citizens with some level of social and lawful integrity. Self-affirmation theory suggests that a goal of the self is to protect and maintain that self-integrity. People are very vigilant to information that could call their integrity into question both for themselves and in the eyes of others. Whereas cognitive dissonance suggests a person will directly accommodate or reject a threat, self-affirmation involves reflecting on salient life values that are irrelevant to the threat in question, i.e. being engaged on the subject of 9/11.

Self-affirmation is about feeling positive on important issues irrelevant to what is at stake or to engage in activities that remind us of who we are. The experimental research used this idea to test how information lost its capacity to threaten self-integrity. The research paradigm involves getting participants to specify what they felt was personally important to them and write a short essay prior to the experiment on what they chose and explain why and how it made them feel good about themselves. The researchers would then ask the participants to take part in the experiment. The conceptual framework for the research is that a person would feel so good about themselves after doing the exercise that any information in the experiment that would otherwise be perceived to be threatening would lose that capacity. It is all about heightening self-esteem.

Research shows this to be the case. A study looking at US patriotism after 9/11 used an essay critical of American foreign policy ostensibly written by a person with an Arabic sounding name. The results showed that patriotic Americans were less critical of the essay if they had gone through the self-affirmation process. Another study using a mortality salience manipulation (as Manwell described in her first article, a defence mechanism which can lead to feelings of nationalism) showed that participants who had gone through the self-affirmation process eliminated this salience.

The results generally showed that participants who were self-affirmed prior to a study were less critical, could lead to greater attitude change and be more responsive to the intrinsic strengths of an argument rather than how those arguments were associated with prior beliefs. When a person feels their integrity is secure, they are far more likely to engage in a more open manner, increase openness to strong evidence against one’s position. This kind of result could be useful in attempting to persuade the public to look at the 9/11 evidence for themselves.

There are two additional areas of self-affirmation theory which could demonstrate some usefulness. There might be a motive to maintain, rather than improve, a feeling of self-worth and integrity. This can lead to the prejudice and stereotyping of others. A study on self-affirmation involving the perception of Jewish and Italian candidates for a job showed that participants who were not affirmed were more likely to be more negative, even more so toward the Jewish candidate than the Italian. Self-affirmed participants did not discriminate. The 9/11 truth movement, being in a minority, in conjunction with the common use of the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’, means our campaign is more than likely to subject to stereotyped views if a person feels threatened (the third reason for the use of the label). They are more likely to activate stereotyped views if they are confronted by campaigners in a negative way or receive information they might perceive to be threatening to their own world view.

It is in my opinion that this is what we need to think about as campaigners. When engaging with individuals on 9/11, we need to ensure their self-esteem isn't damaged or threatened in any way.

It has taken different individuals different amounts of time to question 9/11 depending on the circumstances. I consider the word “sheeple” or describing the general uninformed population as “sheep” to be derogatory. Up until we questioned the 9/11 attack, we were once “sheep”. So describing others in that way is hypocritical, and belittling others who are not “yet awake” will only provoke a negative, hostile or defensive reaction. It is divisive and does not help our cause. Like going to see a clinical psychologist for therapy, what you should really do is allow the person to retain their integrity as much as you can. Then the chance that person will seriously consider and think about what you tell them is likely to increase considerably.

Conflict of interest and social dilemmas

There are a number of critical issues in the world we live in which could be considered as dilemmas. Whereas experimental research is carried out in artificially contrived conditions, dilemmas on the scale of 9/11 affects an entire heterogenous population where group identification is difficult and individuals are anonymous. When it comes to 9/11 we, as campaigners, would say there is no dilemma. A new investigation, while extremely painful emotionally, would quickly end the wars and likely to permanently change the way we live. For those who still accept the official story, they would rather not face the dilemma of looking at the evidence for themselves because of the fear of the consequences.

Manwell introduced automatic processing and its impact on attitudes in her first article. Something she did not introduce is how these different processes can influence our decision-making in situations where a conflict of interest may arise, “Self interest is automatic, viscerally compelling and often unconscious. Understanding one’s ethical and professional obligations to others, in contrast, often involves a more thorough process.”

In psychology, an automatic process is considered to be effortless and, since this will occur outside of awareness, the consequence is that self-interest tends to prevail. In contrast, controlled processing is likely to be evoked when we encounter unexpected information, such as being given a flyer of information about the attack. Information that is inconsistent with an automatic judgement is subject to an extra level of scrutiny. Or it may even be the opposite reaction and is immediately ripped up and thrown in the nearest bin.

Research has shown that these two different types of processes can come into conflict and involves contradictory motives which lead back to cognitive dissonance. When we give someone a flyer on 9/11 we are, in fact, subjecting them to a conflict of interest. The dilemma is to ask the question: Which is more important? My personal self-interest in how I am perceived by others or the long term interests of society? We are trying to persuade someone we are engaging with to look at the evidence. For most, it would create a conflict between what is socially good in the long term for a population and the private self-interest in the short term.

Campaigners would not consider the 9/11 issue to be a social dilemma or a conflict of interest. An individual’s short-term self interest over-rides their responsibilities towards questioning their world view probably because, as Morpheus states in The Matrix, people are so dependent on the system they will do anything to protect it. But does that really have to be the case? Is there any way in which we can engage with the public on 9/11 and not make it sound like a conflict of interest? We have to persuade an individual that it is in their interests and their responsibility that they look at the evidence and ask questions about the attack.

Majority and minority influence

It is obviously the case that the 9/11 truth movement is in the minority though, among the general population, what that percentage might be is unclear.

A recent poll reported by the UK Daily mail states that 1 in 7 (or about 15%) believe the US Government were involved, increasing to 25% among 16 to 24 year olds.

A poll carried out on behalf of Reinvestigate 9/11 suggests there might be an agreement that the official account of what happened might turn out to be wrong in important respects.

Washington has listed the trend in poll results on 9/11 in the last five years. The trend isn't from questioning the official theory to accepting it. It is the opposite. When the official account is questioned, there is no going back to accepting the official account

From poll results, attitudes towards the 9/11 campaign movement can be taken in another direction of research that also has relevance: minority versus majority arguments. People are affected differently when receiving messages from those who are perceived to be in a majority compared to those who are perceived to be in the minority.

Some Dutch investigators looked into this which I will explain in some detail. They wrote: "Attitude change on the focal issue implies (unwanted) identification with the (aversive) minority, leading recipients to suppress change on focal issues in the case of minority influence."

Conformity and the need to be popular again raises its head. In order to be liked, people are unwilling to “stand out from the crowd” (or as the Japanese like to say, “the nail that sticks out is hammered down”) and more reluctant to be perceived to be associated with others who are deemed to be in a minority group. Because 9/11 campaigners are in a minority, most individuals won’t risk being associated with the 9/11 truth campaign, because we are likely to be considered "fringe" or "extremist".

Or as Mark Twain so eloquently put it, "In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

The researchers state in their paper that persuasive arguments from a majority elicit attitudes on the focal issue … while identical arguments attributed to a minority (1) have less effect in general and (2) influences attitudes on related issues more than attitudes on the focal issue.

So what are the implications for campaigning on 9/11? The obvious question the research raises is: should we make 9/11 the focal issue at all? Instead, should we be educating people about other historical events far more explicitly that may nudge individuals towards questioning 9/11 for themselves such as the Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbour, Gulf on Tonkin and Operation Northwoods? Given the mention of trying to get individuals to question the role of the mainstream media, should we be emphasising the role of the CIA and how it has been used for propaganda purposes?

The effects of prior theories on subsequent evidence

9/11 is an issue which is likely to induce sharp disagreements even among highly concerned and intelligent citizens (people who consider themselves intelligent don't like to admit they have been fooled, like Noam Chomsky).

People who hold strong opinions are likely to examine the relevant evidence in a biased manner and that data relevant to a belief are not processed impartially. In other words, judgements are based on the apparent consistency with the perceiver’s prior theories and expectations i.e. their world view and beliefs.

People tend to interpret subsequent evidence in order to maintain official beliefs by remembering the strengths, relevance and reliability of confirming evidence as well as accepting such evidence at face value.

Lord, Ross and Lepper (1979) found that proponents of capital punishment regarded a pro-deterrence study, including the quality of the research, to be more convincing. In addition, their position on capital punishment and its deterrence was more entrenched than it was at the start of the study.

Subject’s decisions about whether to accept a study’s findings at face value or to search for flaws and consider other interpretations appeared to depend on whether the results coincided with their pre-existing beliefs. When an “objective truth” is known or assumed then studies that reflect this truth may be given credence and not to studies where outcomes do not fit in with that truth.

A person’s shortcoming is their readiness in using evidence already processed in a biased manner to bolster the very theory or belief that justified the bias in the first place. People also expose themselves to be encouraged by patterns of data they should find troubling, but find it too easy to cling to beliefs that are not compatible with the latest evidence. The researchers state that “the mere availability of contradictory evidence rarely seems sufficient to cause us to abandon our prior beliefs or theories”. Is this another reason why progress towards a new investigation has been slow? Giving evidence to someone is not likely to be enough.

Spiral of silence theory

Manwell explains two theories that might be of some help in understanding how people may resist investigating 9/11. The ‘spiral of silence’ theory is a third which may also help.

This particular theory is concerned with the fear that people have of being socially isolated, and is an attempt to explain how public opinion can be treated as a dynamic process. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann explains that to fear social isolation, like conformity, is the need to agree with other individuals. Noelle-Neumann used Asch’s conformity results to explain not only how people can be nervous in voicing what they may deem to be unpopular opinions, but how a person’s opinion change over time (Asch used a number of experiments to see what extent an individual would say the wrong answer simply in order to be liked).

Hayes et al (2008) looked at the spiral of silence of theory. They state that “knowing the attitudes and opinions of other gives us insight into the sensibility and the social veracity of our own opinions and attitudes.” They further state that “we are willing to expend valuable cognitive fuel to regularly scan the information environment so as to remain appraised of where our own opinions reside in the landscape of public opinion.”

How do we know what opinions and attitudes other people hold without asking them directly? One major source of information from which we generate opinions and attitudes is the mainstream media. Hayes et al found that those with a greater fear of social isolation were more likely to pay attention to public opinion polls, thus consistent with a central idea of the theory – that social isolation will prompt individuals to attend to relevant information about the opinion climate. In another experiment, they also found that a person is more likely to think about what others are thinking, especially family members and close friends, when they are asked to state their own opinion.

Shoemaker et al (2000) also studied the theory. They state that “people constantly observe their environment very closely. They try to find out which opinions and modes of behaviour are prevalent, and which opinions and modes of behaviour are becoming more popular. They behave and express themselves accordingly in public”. They also state that “when a person’s opinion is perceived to be in the majority, the person may speak out in public without fear of losing popularity or self-esteem. If the converse is true, the person may elect to become silent, avoiding situations in which the person will be in a confrontational embarrassing situation, such as when one’s opinion is laughed at or criticised by others.”

As far as 9/11 is concerned, people are strongly involved in self-censorship due to the fear of being public self-conscious.

A suggestion at this point is that we use not just polling results but also the trend over the last few years, on flyers and information sheets to draw attention to the number of individuals, especially the younger generation, who are beginning to question the legitimacy of the official account.

Conclusion

In the process of engaging with individuals, we ought to constantly remind ourselves of the journey we have made from accepting the official story to becoming committed campaigners. We have left the cave. Unfortunately, any attempt to rouse the interest of other prisoners within is met by ridicule or disbelief.

I think the research has raised a few suggestions some of which the movement has been doing but needs to be emphasised:

1) People don't like to admit they have been fooled and certainly don't want to be treated like idiots. It is important for campaigners not be condescending or derogatory and to allow people time and space to think things through for themselves.

2) The 9/11 evidence can be treated as a dilemma for an individual who may be nervous of the implications. I think we need to present the idea that, while emotionally painful, it is for the good of society in the long run. May be present them as a series of questions? Are you tired of people in positions of authority? Do you want to see an end to western imperialism? Do you think future generations should be able to live in a more transparent society? I don't think it is about forcing the evidence down their throats, but ask them the questions that will encourage their own investigating.

3) The truth movement is in the minority so we should emphasise the trend in poll results which indicates that people are becoming increasingly wary of the official story. Since people tend to look at opinion polls, we can use such results to our advantage. Since the minority is less likely to have an effect with the direct evidence, should we concentrate on historical information?

4) Finally, we should encourage how the mainstream media has had a negative effect on society in terms of editorial control and propaganda, and that should help to persuade individuals that information on the internet is not "fringe" or "extremist".

These are suggestions baed on the psychological research. But the only thing we can do as campaigners is to try to remain patient, don't get frustrated, sow the seeds of enlightenment and let others make up their own minds as to whether they have the courage and the conviction to leave the cave.

I hope this has been useful.





“Unfortunately no one can be told what the
Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”



In the words of my colleague, Ian Fantom (who writes the newsletters), keep talking!!