David Ray Griffin: A reply to George Monbiot

Via 9/11 Blogger: "In “Bayoneting a Scarecrow The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a coward’s cult.” (Guardian, February 20), George Monbiot accuses members of the 9/11 truth movement of being “morons” and “idiots” who believe in “magic.” Having in his previous attack---“A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world,” Guardian, February 6---called me this movement’s “high priest,” he now describes my 9/11 writing as a “concatenation of ill-attested nonsense.”

If my books are moronic nonsense, then people who have endorsed them must be morons. Would Monbiot really wish to apply this label to Michel Chossudovsky, Richard Falk, Ray McGovern, Michael Meacher, John McMurtry, Marcus Raskin, Rosemary Ruether, Howard Zinn, and the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who, after a stint in the CIA, became one of America’s leading civil rights, anti-war, and anti-nuclear activists?" Read more...

People like Webster Tarpley, and indeed David Ray Griffin in the past have argued that the best way to stop the wars and the police state may to be run with 9/11 itself. I can certainly see the logic there. The only criticism I've said is that you have to be careful not to say that well '9/11 was inside job, therefore everything that has come after it is bad'. No that is false, everything that has come since 9/11 is entirely wrong irrespective of whether or not 9/11 is an inside job.

I think if anything DRG has been extremely conservative in his list of people here, remember you've got people. who while don't necessarily fully endorse the inside job position, are not satisfied with the current fable either and feel that MIHOP can't be ruled it out, from what I've seen would seem to include the likes of Daniel Elsberg, Rabbi Michael Lerner and possibly Gore Vidal from when I heard him on Alex Jones' show along with many many others.

The problem I have with George Monbiot is that he is the distraction here, and part of an insidious, albeit perhaps well-meaning, Axis-of-Drivel aimed squarely at the coffee-sipping left (chattering) middle classes, to which Monbiot has tried to elect himself a hero of.

Despite all the things he claims to have done in his life, Monbiot gives the firm impression that the hardest decision he has ever faced is what nut cutlet dish to choose from the local healthfood store. Now, a caricature of humanity, Monbiot is like the Modern Parents cartoon you may remember from Viz, nothing but a walking list of failed left clichés and a stupid poster boy for the international establishment's global taxations and so on.

Monbiot, is the exemplification of why the establishment left has failed, not just failed itself which is neither here nor there, but failed its constituency and everyone else at large. This idea that governments are benign creatures and that only another crippling tax to appease the white guilt of Monbiot will save the world really has been perhaps one of the most dangerously failed pseudo-zeitgeists of our time.

When I see this sort of drivel, its sadly no surprise that the US and the UK are embarking on horrific and brutal wars of aggression across the Middle East, slaying and maiming thousands upon thousands, accompanied by the construction of a dizzying, terrifying, humiliating and dehumanizing police state at home, as despite whatever Monbiot's anti-war direct political affiliations have been, he and his autistic friends have effectively given the green light for this with their stream of self-indulgent and valueless trinket distractions that have willfully distorted, misrepresented and masked the gravity of what is going on in the world today.

I think we can say that George Monbiot and the kind of thinking he represents can be safely disregarded.

George Monbiot David Ray Griffin 9/11