So I never got out a mailing (for my campaign), or produced any serious amount of campaign literature--no buttons, no bumper stickers, none of the usual lawn signs (except three hand-made ones, and my treasurer made about a hundred simple black-and-white ones with Brouillet for Congress- Impeach the Terrorists! and put them up all over the district just before election day.) There were a few tiny mentions of me in a few papers. My film- Behind Every Terrorist- There is a Bush was shown several times on Free Speech TV and posted on the Internet. I had cameo roles in several 9-11 Truth documentaries, books, articles, and television clips. I received just over 2% of the vote--just over 4,000 votes (but probably from dissatisfied voters who simply voted Libertarian in the last election to protest the Democratic and Republican choices).
What did I learn from this campaign? (a) I need to be better organized. (b) Campaigns require a tremendous amount of time, energy, and^~ to be successful ~^money. (c) All efforts to raise human consciousness and engage people in the political process are worthwhile, even if immediate results aren’t tangible or measurable.
I still believe truth is the most powerful lever we can use to engage people and inspire them towards active participation in determining our collective future, as a nation and as a species. We must organize resistance faster than the Republicans and Democrats, working together, can organize repression. There is a greater need than ever to organize an alternative to the two pro-war, pro-corporate parties. Granted, there are some small “d” Democrats and probably Republicans who don’t have party backing and might run for the stated ideals of their parties, but they are quite rare. There were perhaps a dozen or so 9/11 Truth candidates in the last election; I hope there will be hundreds of grassroots candidates in 2008 (if needed to challenge or roll back the policies of these past five years.)
I have little faith in the Democrats to hold the current Administration responsible for its crimes or to significantly alter policy directions. (Actually, I believe the Democrats are better at masking their worst legislation to make it more palatable to those who should vigorously oppose it.)
In September I was invited to join a group of radical candidates that called themselves the Longhouse Coalition, which called for Impeachment, as well as a number of other reforms. In October I joined them and they added a 9/11 Truth plank to their platform. With all the new communications technologies, we should be able to organize ourselves into an effective political force in solidarity with similar movements around the world. Opposition to corporate oligarch-sponsored candidates is sweeping through Latin America, for example.
I think the challenge is to overcome the paradigm of fear, apathy, and cynicism that is so dominant today. We need to encourage, inspire, and empower larger numbers of people to become engaged and to genuinely oversee our electoral process. Elections have been stolen for decades and only the oversight and involvement of people at every step of the way will win us the right to vote. Probably more important than voting is being able to communicate directly with one another via the Internet, community-access television, and through our own events, rallies, and media--overcoming the censorship of critical analysis and information by the corporate press. Even the CIA has figured out that instead of organizing the usual military coup, it’s easier to steal elections and engineer “popular coups,” by managing popular opinion through pseudo-polls and clever marketing ( November 21, 2006, Coup d'Etat in Venezuela: Made in the USA).
I hope to help develop activist directories to improve communications within the movement so that people can communicate with one another more directly for freeway blogging, street actions, and other projects without having to endure meetings or go through a bunch of hoops trying to find others to work with them on specific projects. I think we have the people, the resources, and the vision; all it takes is a bit more organization and improving our activist communications infrastructure.
There is an excellent new book on the emerging social technologies being created to empower social movements titled Momentum- Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age by Allison H. Fine. There is also a tool, available at www.issuecrawler.net, that helps map out networks that are working on various issues, such as media reform. Richard Rogers, who developed the tool and offers it for free to NGOs and activists, wrote Information Politics on the Web (winner of the 2005 Best Information Science Book of the Year), which argues that the Internet should be, and can be, a "collision space" for official and unofficial accounts of reality. His tools capture the relationships between sources and contribute to understanding the competition between the official, the non-governmental, and the underground, in getting their story out to the public.
The 9/11 Truth movement is still in the “take-off stage” and the goals at this time are as follow:
- Creating a new nationwide grassroots-based social movement.
- Putting power holders’ actual policies in the public spotlight and on the agenda.
- Creating a public platform from which the movement can educate the public.
- Creating public dissonance by showing two distinct views of reality--the movement’s and the power holders’.
- Winning public sympathy and majority public opinion.
- Becoming recognized as legitimate opposition.
These goals are being achieved in cyberspace, and in various cities, with the production and dissemination of films, books, and all sorts of media. Various other movements that are intersecting with and evolving beside the 9/11 Truth movement.
Recently I was invited to join a “circle” and I couldn’t resist the invitation, because circles can be very powerful experiences. Native Americans have traditionally formed circles, passing a talking stick and speaking from the heart, to draw from the collective wisdom of the group to solve problems. Circles respect everyone’s ability to contribute and participate meaningfully. The most productive, meaningful gatherings that I’ve participated in have used circle processes; when they grow large, sometimes they give birth to many new circles. I see the spread of circles--concentric, overlapping circles everywhere--as people make more and more connections between the personal and the political, as the unconscious becomes conscious, and as light is cast upon the darkest shadows of our collective experience.
We are needed to midwife the transition from a dying “dominator paradigm,” where large institutions and governments hold power and legitimacy, to the “peaceful paradigm” where individuals and small groups with courage, integrity, truth, and heart will begin to shoulder greater responsibility for pointing a way through the rapids of change, to avoid the rocks, the whirlpools of economic collapse, endless war, and the unleashing of the latest wave of bio-terrorism attacks.
Did the anti-war movement win the recent election? Is the Baker/Iraq study group just a mask for the fascists to hide behind, as they lick their wounds and retreat? The proposal to create a North American Union--a more draconian expansion of NAFTA that asserts control over Mexico’s energy resources--allows for the super-exploitation of labor and the environment and guarantees profits to the major players with the costs to be borne by people and planet. A few Congressmen have put forward a resolution condemning and drawing attention to the plan. The idea will be vigorously opposed at the grassroots level. After a suspicious election, the legitimacy of the Mexican government remains questionable. Repression, rebellion, and murder in Oaxaca have sparked solidarity protests in many American cities and other countries as well. The Global Justice movement, set back by the events of September 11th, is reviving and again challenging the most visible dominant institutions that exercise the most obvious power over most countries.
There needs to be a strategic educational effort to expose the history of state-sponsored terrorism worldwide, to curb the use of it today, and to reduce the artificial support for “engineered wars.” The ousting of the right-wing leader of Spain after the Madrid bombings should be an example to all people everywhere. There can be no peace and justice without a strong Truth movement. Until the worst leaders can be held accountable for their crimes against their own people and their wars of aggression, necrophiliacs will continue to entrench themselves within the most powerful government and corporate circles to serve the few at the expense of the many.
Kevin Barrett, one of the great heroes of the 9-11 Truth movement, said in a talk entitled “A Folklorist Looks at 9/11 ‘Conspiracy Theories’”:
(Folk meaning “the people,” as opposed to the “rulers and the press” who in the past have authoritatively defined “event/reality.”)
Marshall McLuhan’s famous line “the medium is the message” could describe the way the 9/11 Truth movement is an artifact of the Internet, and the radically-enhanced folk-communications it has brought. Thanks to digital audiovisuals, email and the world-wide web, the folk are now a leg up on their would-be manipulators, those well-paid professionals in corporate media, public relations, marketing, and psychological warfare or psy-ops, whose collective job is to reify and manipulate their fellow human beings.
It is one thing for the content of informal, non-institutional, “folk” communication to subvert institutional authority. It is another and more significant thing for the very medium of folk communication to radically shift in a way that empowers the folk and disempowers the institutions. And that is what has happened. The world has been turned upside-down as the old oral-transmission grapevine has gone digital…
Today’s digitally-enhanced subversives and skeptics can spread large numbers of copies of audio, video and photographic evidence, along with an unlimited amount of writing, for pennies. This digital awakening may turn out to be our second post-Gutenberg revolution in half a century. Its importance may rival the emergence of writing, which created hierarchical societies of kings, priests and scribes; with the invention of the printing press, which created the kind of mass-literate societies we call “democratic”; and with the invention of television, which McLuhan suggests created a global village of creeping Orwellian fascism. 9/11, in this view, was the last gasp of television as a means of mind-control via mass hypnosis, while the 9/11 Truth controversies may represent the birth pangs of the new, digitally-enhanced democracy.
I am heartened by Barrett’s words, but at the same time sobered by the realization that if the world’s population was reduced to 100 representatives, only one would have a computer, or have attended college, and he would have more wealth than all the others and be from the United States. While 70 percent of American homes may have access to the Internet, they are not representative of the world. However, an enlightened American people would be a grave danger to the advancement of the American Empire. We are uniquely responsible and able to thwart or advance the aspirations of the US oligarchy.
The grand strategy of all social movements is for the hearts, minds, and support of the majority of the people, and to get them to exercise the “people power” that resides within them. In Doing Democracy, Bill Moyer notes:
Political and economic power ultimately rest with the majority population; the power holders in any society can only rule as long as they have the consent or acquiescence of the people. Exposing the lies is perhaps the easiest part of social change; winning over, involving, inspiring people to work to change policies and power-holders at the personal and at the institutional level are the hard part. Slowly but surely, the population is waking up, with each revelation, each act of courage, each technological advance that benefits the “folk” and helps to expose the institutions and the disparity between “the stated purpose of the institutions” and their actual policies.
For substantial changes to occur, the public must be won over three times. First they need to realize that there is a problem; next that the current power-holder policies are undesirable and need to change. Finally, they need to believe that there is an acceptable solution or alternative to current policies.
9/11 Truth- Our Best Hope
Truth = Justice = Freedom
While it may seem obvious to me and other activists that the world would be better off if we redirected resources from killing, controlling, and wars towards healthy human relationships and biosphere rescue work, we must continue to pursue the educational work of introducing such ideas to a public that doesn’t realize that the press might be lying to them, or at least failing to convey important information, about the most critical issues and events that affect our lives.
Just as birth is feared and desired by parents, we need to reassure people that the frightening, painful part of learning/birth is part of a greater process that ultimately will bring us joy and happiness. We need to be able to see that 9/11 Truth will bring all of us and future generations true peace and freedom that comes from knowledge.
When 9/11 Truth is realized, humanity can spend less energy on the unnecessary war on terrorism, and more resources on health, education, and better living standards for everyone.
9/11 Truth means eliminating fear, terrorism, war and the growth of healthy, harmonious relationships between all people.
We are not alone in this effort. A European 9/11 Truth group is working on a European 9/11 Citizen's Jury. There are plans for another national 9/11 Truth Conference in Arizona this February with a focus on strategy for genuine accountability. The convergence of movements, including the impeachment movement, is prompting some of the worst administration officials to resign. A tremendous number of creative actions and organizing is taking place across the country and it is becoming easier and easier, and more fun, for people to join in the larger movement for truth, peace, and justice.
End