Kevin Barrett / Muslim-Jewish’Christian Alliance – 2006-06-24 23:04:39
http://mujca.com/bushcult.htm
Deprogramming the Bush Cult, Part 2:
Coping with 9/11 Anxiety
Kevin Barrett / Muslim-Jewish’Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth
9/11 truth activists know something about anxiety. Like dissidents at Jonetown, we are living in the midst of a dangerous delusional cult. Our insane leadership is dishing out horrific abuse, and most of our fellow citizens are accepting it, whether willingly or through inaction.
Even recognizing the reality of our situation is enough to provoke extreme dysphoria. Trying to do something about it, we imagine, might make us prospective targets, a thought which provokes even more anxiety.
Being subjected to so much distress, day in and day out, can be harmful to our physical and emotional health. Stressed-out 9/11 activists sometimes succumb to paranoia, while others suffer adrenal overload or plain old burnout. Some of the best members of the “first wave” of 9/11 truth activists have burned out, dropped out, or destroyed their own credibility with paranoid or racist outbursts.
We need strategies for coping with 9/11 anxiety, both in ourselves and in the fellow citizens we are attempting to deprogram. Here are some tried-and-true strategies for defusing anxiety; note that not all of them are equally appropriate for all people in all situations. They are presented in no particular order; feel free to pick and choose to suit your own needs.
*Humor. As the CIA psy-op magazine for the attention-span-challenged, the Readers Digest, puts it, laughter is “the best medicine.” At least it beats red-white-and-blue Kool Aid. Yes, I know that mass murder, high treason and war crimes are not particularly funny.
But what has happened to the USA since 9/11/01 is nothing if not absurd. Those whose sense of humor is sufficiently broad and robust to handle dark comedy, and gain a pleasurable relief from anxiety through it, are invited to look here and here.
Even those without a taste for dark humor should remember to laugh now and then, if only by forgetting about 9/11 for awhile and getting silly. In a pinch, Monty Python DVDs, or whatever you find funny, can have a salutary effect. And don’t forget that certain kinds of humor can be powerful weapons against authoritarian cultishness and stupidity in general. In short, laughter can help keep you sane.
*Meditation/Relaxation. Everyone should learn how to self-induce deep relaxation—especially people in such stressful situations as 9/11 truth activism. Many time-tested deep-relaxation exercises come with a religious tradition: Buddhists teach sitting meditation, Muslims enact a deep surrender to the Real in the five-times-daily prayer, Hindus do yogic breathing exercises, and so on.
But you don’t necessarily have to belong to one of these traditions to relax. Meditation, biofeedback and breathing exercises are widely taught these days. Lord knows we need them.
*Nutrition. Many people feel that good nutrition—some argue for vegetarian or vegan diets, periodic fasting, and/or certain kinds of supplements—can be a powerful anxiety antidote. At a healer’s suggestion, I have been taking coenzyme Q for energy and a special iodine formulation for 9/11-activism-stressed adrenals.
*Massage. Healing massage, especially deep tissue massage, can be a powerful stress-toxicity-reducer.
*Empathy. 9/11 activists are constantly feeling stressed by the burden of knowing critically important, dangerous information that many folks are simply not willing to hear about. Rather than scorning and writing off the “sheeple” we should to try to empathize with them. It isn’t that hard.
When you approach someone about 9/11 truth, you’re probably feeling a certain amount of anxiety. So are they! Try to let go of yourself and feel what that person is feeling. Listen to them calmly with full attention. Interact in a way that moderates or defuses their anxiety. Try to avoid hostile, paranoid rants, which just intensify the audience’s anxiety and harden their defenses.
*Community. There was a good feeling, almost a kind of ecstasy, in the air at the recent Chicago 9/11 truth conference. If I were paranoid, I would say that there WAS ecstasy in the air, pumped there by CIA agents who wanted us to forget about 9/11 and have a mass love-in. The non-paranoid explanation of why the Chicago conference felt so good, however, is probably correct: In the face of so much evil, and so much public indifference, it feels good to be around good people who share our beliefs and values. In Chicago, the 9/11 truth community became a real community.
Everyone who was there, including a few folks who have been known to spend too much time and energy venting paranoia and hostility toward their fellow 9/11 activists, discovered that it feels good to be with a whole bunch of people who, despite differences in values, lifestyles, religions, worldviews, personalities, and even 9/11 analyses, agree on one crucial point: 9/11 truth is a supremely important issue.
By uniting on that basis, we don’t need to fall into lockstep behind one leader, one 9/11 analysis, or even one program for action. Our various approaches become mutually-supporting, synergistic, and more than the sum of their parts — rather than mutually-destructive — when we get together, as we did in Chicago, under the banner of the 9/11 truth community.
(Another advantage of being a decentralized community, and avoiding the lockstep-behind-a-leader cult mentality, is that it deprives the bad guys of the chance to take out the leader and destroy the movement.)
*Religion/spirituality. This one is controversial, since many 9/11 activists are dyed-in-the-wool skeptics, gung-ho partisans of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Having seen so much sham religion, they wouldn’t recognize the real thing if it ran up and bit them on their godless butts.
But even the rabid atheists among us, when they look at the 9/11 truth work of such genuinely religious individuals as Steven Jones, David Griffin, Faiz Khan, and Michael Lerner, may recognize that actual religion, as opposed to the counterfeit variety that Faiz Khan identifies and flays, can inspire remarkable courage and clear-sightedness. Faith, piety, and religious commitment and practice can be powerful antidotes to anxiety.
*Action. It is always less stressful to try to do something about your problems than to sit around worrying about them. It is less stressful to take to the streets in support of 9/11 truth, and risk anxiety-inducing encounters with the unenlightened, than to sit home thinking about how you should be taking to the streets but aren’t. So for a relatively stress-free five year anniversary of 9/11, consider joining us in New York!
Mailing #8: The Anthrax Attacks
By Matthew Orr
So far, this course has dealt with the 9/11 attacks. Today, we widen our focus to the anthrax mailings that occurred shortly after 9/11/01. These, too, can be analyzed with both the official and the alternative version in mind.
Under the official version of the war on terror, we are engaged in a struggle against a global terror network with access to chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear materials. According to this version, we might expect the anthrax spores to have been cultivated in a laboratory in a Muslim country in Asia – a country like Iraq, perhaps, which we invaded under the auspices of preventing such activities.
Under the alternative version, we are immersed in a large-scale PSYOPS (psychological operations) program, conducted by insiders within our own government and military. Where would the spores have originated under this second scenario?
According to the Nov. 30, 2001 Washington Post (“Ames Strain of Anthrax Limited to a Few Labs”), the anthrax used in the mailings was developed at Texas A&M in 1981 and mailed to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Thereafter, USAMRIID was the “main custodian of the virulent strain of anthrax used in the…terrorist attacks” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36408-2001Nov29).
Since the mid 1980s, USAMRIID had distributed it to only five laboratories, “under strict controls to ‘legitimate workers in the field.’” The source of the spores, therefore, is consistent with an Operation Northwoods-style attack on US civilians by treasonous elements within the US military.
Once the anthrax evidence pointed unequivocally to our own military, there followed a common pattern: Steven
Hatfill, a US Army bioweapons scientist, was paraded in the press for a while under a campaign of baseless
innuendo. Like Osama bin-Laden, and like every one of the thousands of individuals arrested or detained under terrorist suspicions under John Ashcroft (see Mailing 10), Hatfill was convicted in the media, but never in court.
The only legal proceeding to stem from the Hatfill affair, and in fact the only legal proceeding stemming from the anthrax attacks at all, was one in which Hatfill sued the government for violating his Constitutional rights
(http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/26/lawsuit.hatfill/).
Why might military insiders feel compelled to mail anthrax after the 9/11 attacks had succeeded so well? There are at least two explanations consistent with the hypothesis that the anthrax mailings were an inside job.
Explanation #1: Inserting terrorism into the US postal service brought the “threat” home to every American who receives mail. It personalized the fear of terrorism.
Explanation #2: Only two politicians, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were targeted by the anthrax mailings
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks). Both were prominent Congressional Democrats in a position to impede the passage of the Patriot Act and other unconstitutional maneuvers by the Bush administration.
According to investigative journalist Michael Ruppert’s book Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, Senate minority leader Daschle had made it possible to temporarily block passage of the Patriot Act in early October 2001.
Leahy was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and had demanded an appearance from John Ashcroft before the committee to explain attempts to wiretap attorney-client conversations, to detain foreign nationals in secret, and to conduct secret military tribunals.
With both the House and Senate Office Buildings closed down by the anthrax mailings, the Patriot act passed with Congress in recess, and without most Congressmen reading it. (Incidentally, the vast majority of the Patriot Act was written prior to 9/11.)
The anthrax attacks reinforce how media and political officials in our country, intentionally and/or not, simply refuse to address the obvious hypothesis that the real terrorists are homegrown, conducting their operations in plain sight.
