9-11 Redux, The other side of the mirror

I’m still getting some great email from all sides for that piece against 9-11 conspiracies I wrote for Arthur magazine a few months ago.

Just so people know I’m an equal opportunity meme-smith, here’s a post from the Simian Think Tank in which Kevin Barret of MUJCA some of the ideas in my book Coercion to make the opposite argument. Compelling stuff, and it applies whether 9-11 was perpetrated by the US government (as they contend) or simply exploited by ‘shock capitalists’ (as I would).

“Rushkoff’s Coercion is a sizzling exposé of mind control, American style. Unlike Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Rushkoff’s book provides a detailed guide to the nuts-and-bolts techniques employed against us every day by advertisers, marketers, public relations specialists, Hollywood filmmakers, salespeople, pyramid-scam artists, and cult leaders–the very same techniques applied for decades, and gradually perfected, by CIA interrogators and psychological warfare experts. These techniques are designed to disable rational thought and manipulate behavior at the unconscious and emotional levels. Anyone curious about why so many otherwise rational people have believed the official story of 9/11 for so long, in the teeth of the overwhelming evidence against it, should start by reading Coercion.

“The secret of mind-control is simple–so simple that Rushkoff can sum it up in one sentence: “In whatever milieu coercion is practiced, the routine follows the same basic steps: Generate disorientation, induce regression, and then become the target’s transferred parent figure” (64). Hard-sell car salesmen, CIA interrogators and psychwar ops, and cult leaders have long used this technique. Under coercion, millions of otherwise rational people can be persuaded to act against their own interests–whether by shelling out big bucks for an overpriced lemon, betraying a comrade and a cause, or allowing a gang of criminals to destroy their nation’s Constitution and launch criminal wars of aggression.”