Nothing interests me more than things that make me angry, and there are few things that leap up and down on my annoyance button than slack jawed, hooting fucking stupidity. But what is there on the internet that could possibly be stupid enough to annoy me out of this boredom funk I was in?
It didn't take long before I started reading, through screwed up eyes and with gritted teeth and clenched fists, 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Have you ever seen these things? Jesus Christ, it beggars belief! All the tinfoil-hatted lunatics urging us to "wake up, sheeple" and pointing at other, equally demented lunatics' wild allegations as infallible evidence that George Bush personally pressed the big cartoon plunger that blew up the world trade centre. It was annoyance gold! Content with my klondike, I settled in for a good read, and was soon fuming with rage at the sheer boss-eyed mongolity of some of the world's inhabitants.
There are a lot of conspiracies, each constructed around the premise of the attacks being perpetrated to achieve one of a small number of agendas, from legitimising a war for oil to population control (yes, population control. I know. I KNOW! Ha!) Some of them are quite sophisticated, with "professionals" quoting a lot of confusing jargon to prove that the towers were blown up or that no plane hit the pentagon. Of course, as soon as any bona-fide research or experimentation provides proof that the claims are exactly what they seem to be (shite) then that's all part of the cover up! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Some of them are classic. Here are some of the more hilarious ones.
There were no taxis in the area around the WTC before the attacks, as mostly all taxi drivers in america (as everyone knows) is an Arab and they had been warned about it. Yep. And they all still know about it.... that's right! Every taxi driver in New York is in on the "cover-up", making it so vast and widely known that it's not a cover up at all. This largely springs from the fact that dumb-as-shit twats trying to flee the scene were unable to hail a taxi, as there weren't any (probably because a vast terrorist attack had just taken place and normal work-day hours had been suspended or some bizarre thing like that) and their brains couldn't grasp the fact that there were no taxis so THERE MUST BE A REASON! Quite why the large volume of Muslim victims of the attacks both on the planes and in or around the towers were not warned to stay away isn't explained. Maybe they were all martyrs, eh? Stayed there on purpose? Yeah that must be it. They're all mental aren't they? Yeah. Jesus Christ.
The planes that hit the world trade centre were not the ones reported as hijacked. They were, in fact, replicas. The actual planes were diverted to secret runways and the passengers are being held in secret prisons. This one is genius. Quite why this is supposed to have happened escapes me...... why save the lives of the passengers and not the people in the towers? And for what? So they can live forever in prison so they can't reveal the secret? For fuck's sake. And why fly replicas in? Why not just fly the original ones in? Why? WHY? NNNGGGGG!
Another brilliant version of this is that no planes hit the WTC at all. They were actually missiles! Variants of this one swing between the missiles being hidden in plane shaped containers, the planes being photoshopped into footage later (and somehow, amazingly, into the memories of the eyewitnesses too as proponents of this theory have no explanation as to why people there saw the planes with their own eyes apart from "They're in on it". Maybe it's mind control. Yeah. Mind control. I used to love the X-files.) and, hilariously, that the missiles projected a hologram in the shape of a plane in a sort of star trek like cloaking field. It's absolutely hysterical! What happened to the actual planes and people on them is a mystery, probably the same as in the one I mentioned before. Why they went to all this trouble to disguise missiles as planes rather than, say, just use planes, is a mystery only the luna..... "theorists" know.
No plane hit the pentagon, because on the footage there's no wreckage and the hole's too small. Another magically disappearing plane involved in this one as it has no explanation as to what happened to the plane that is reported to have hit it (probably stored in a big x-files type hangar somewhere in area 51). Yep, again it was a missile. They fired a missile then constructed this huge, easily uncovered conspiracy to cover it up. Well..... it WOULD be easily uncovered if it had happened, so easy, in fact, that it would be far simpler to simply hijack a plane and crash it into the pentagon, creating (if the theorists are to be believed) far more damage. Then no-one would poke their noses in and find out we'd told a fib. OH! I said we! I must be in on it too! I'm in the illuminati! I'm a lizard person! We eat babies in ice cream while watching streaming videos of you in your house! Sheeple!
The controlled demolition theory is probably the biggest and most widely known one. This one basically states that the two towers of the world trade centre and the other one that fell down "mysteriously" (because it contained "secret information" and not because two huge buildings had just collapsed virtually on top of it) were blown up on purpose. Yes, secretly (that's the pertinent bit there, remember this is all done without anyone noticing) three large buildings, including two of the tallest buildings in the world, were laced from head to toe with demolition explosives which were then set off to bring them crashing to the ground, then everybody who knew about it, from the demolitions teams to the building security managers kept shtum about it. Now. I'm not an engineer. Or a demolitions expert. But explosions make flashes. And Bangs. I've seen enough Bruce Willis movies to know that. There weren't any. If you were one of these nut-cobs, sitting there reading this, your face glowing with rage as me, an ill-informed drone picks at your elaborately constructed reality, you would no doubt already have begun furiously typing in a reply stating all sorts of expert testimonies from engineers who watched the towers fall on the telly like the rest of us, interspersed with lots of threats, suppositions about the size of my penis and questioning my parentage and moral background. You would, if you were one of them, be constantly stating that there is no explanation as to why the towers fell because, with a limited grasp of all the things involved and a vast array of internet "research", you are now an expert on structural stress. I'm not an expert either..... though I would say if you fly a jumbo jet into a building, it's not really an earth-shattering surprise if it then falls down. Like I said, I'm not an expert, here. I've watched documentary material and read enough stuff about the towers falling which completely debunks all the claims made, they've done a good enough job without me weighing in. What I would say, however, is why would they do this? Why? WHY? "They" (the illuminati? Israel? Corporations? You name them, they're implicated) have just flown two passenger planes into two densely packed buildings. Isn't that enough? Why blow it up too? That will be more that needs to be covered up. Surely we should just use the planes? Isn't that enough?
See that's the whole thing. "Why." That's the thing that's missing from the whole conspiracy equation. The froth-mouthed crackpots claim it was for many reasons, but mostly unanimously it all boils down to "justifying the war". Well, first off, I can just about see where that comes from. If, on an episode of 24, Jack Bauer had to stop a terrorist attack orchestrated by the american government to sway public opinion towards a vastly lucrative yet extremely destructive war, I'd think it was one of the less imaginative plots. But for fuck's sake, stop there! Right, I can get my head round the planes flying into the towers on George Bush's behest, but why add all this stuff about the towers being detonated and missiles hitting the pentagon? It makes it, frankly, unbelievable, because there's no fucking reason for any of it. The planes would have been enough! They really would! The theorists claim it gives credence to their claims about the attacks being orchestrated from within the U.S., but actually what it does is expose them for the idiotic lunatics they are, willing to believe any old shite that even accidentally backs up their drivel.
Having said that, the whole crux of the thing that there is a belief that the american string-pullers co-ordinated the attacks themselves to promote the war is really top-class bollocks as well. First...... massive success there. Second...... what? Why? If they wanted a war, they could fucking well have one. See, the WMD thing..... that was cooked up to promote the war. Limited intelligence was passed off as unequivocal fact that Iraq had nukes or dirty bombs or sharpened sticks with shit on the end of them or whatever. That's about as sophisticated as "cover ups" get..... using the limited knowledge of the public to sway opinion towards one thing or another. It's called spin, these days, and the toffs use it all the time. The idea that such a huge terrorist attack could be organised in secret and then that everyone who knows about it (for they would number in their thousands) would keep quiet is just ludicrous, the stuff of multi-seasoned drama series. That they had to do all this to persuade people to support the war? They're the government, they can do what they like, and if they need public opinion they'll garner it through either fact or, unfortunately, misinformation, not vast, paper-thin conspiracies that every nutjob in internetland can start ripping into thin strips before the blood has congealed. Third..... call me naive, but I like to hope that the upper echelon of society isn't populated solely by unfeeling, ice-hearted maniacs who would willingly machine gun children into paste to avoid paying inheritance tax. I realise fully that there are grasping, power mad people in the world who will do anything for wealth and position, but I'd like to hope that there's at least enough human decency among the many who would HAVE to know about the cover-up, were it to exist, that someone would at least have the conscience to speak out about it if not try to stop it, considering it's vast scale.
In short, 9/11 conspiracy theorists are fucking idiots. The attacks were perpetrated by delusional religious fanatics striking out at innocent civilians in retaliation to injustices they perceived had been laid upon them by western powers. Were they right to do what they did? Nope, of course not. But the world is full of lunatics and equally full of policy-makers who rile them up. It's a great big shite sandwich and we're the crusty wheatgerm bread. You don't need to invent some cock-and-bull conspiracy theory to make the world seem like a bad place.... it's bad enough as it is.
Oh, and just as a final aside..... grasping at every ill-informed fact that will back up your over constructed reality no matter how unlikely or stupendous it has become does NOT make you an open minded champion of free thinking. It makes you a moron who cannot accept anything but your own version of event. Moron.
