Bert Bobock:
Conspiracy Theories after 9/11 - An emerging subculture undermining authority as a result of the new media age: Facts or Fiction?
The access to the american mind lies up to this day within the medium of television. The average american spends about 3 hours and 46 minutes each day or almost one quarter of their waking hours on Earth watching TV. The television has even become the electronic storyteller of our age and people like to believe they can differentiate between facts presented to them in the news and fictional stories and movies. Sometimes though facts can be mistaken as fiction and vice versa. When we first saw the crashes of the airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City it seemed almost unreal to us, exactly as shown in the movie "Independence Day" or when seen controlled implosions of old skyscrapers in the news. Fact and fiction construct each other and often become inseperable from each other. After the shock of the events of September 11 (9/11) though, which were horrendous crimes against humanity, a vast amount of people didn't limit themselves on the official versions and sometimes confusing information broadcasted by US mainstream media companies but searched internet forums extensivly for explanations to their many unanswered questions. Why did the collapse of the World Trade Center towers look so much like controlled implosions? What really happened to Flight 93 which was supposedly aimed to hit the White House or even Air Force One? Was it shot down as was published immediately on September 11 and later revised, and if so why was it revised at all? As for motive, they ask, are we to believe that a band of Islamic terrorists are the most likely suspects? Are we to believe that hijackers took over four airplanes and overruled dozens of passengers with self built razor-knifes? Was it a state-sponsored terrorist group (quoting G.W.Bush) "living in caves" that had the most to gain by launching such an assault? With a violent reaction answering the attack of 9/11 more than predictable they surely won't emerge as the winners in this national tragedy. When the bombs began to rain down upon them the loss of life, property and hope was by far more profound for them than it will be for the people of New York. Their short-term "victory" will be a hollow one indeed. George W. Bush named the official villains and combined them in an "axis of evil" and a tremendous "conspiracy against freedom and civilization itself" and indeed it seems that terrorists all around the world have now replaced the role of the "other", formely performed by the communists during the cold war era. Interestingly though, there was in fact a massive conspiracy behind the suicide attacks. Webster's New World Dictionary defines conspire as: to plan together secretly, esp. to commit a crime or to work together toward a single end. Any rational person would have to agree that that was in fact what transpired. The only debate is over who was behind the conspiracy. Of course, suggesting that a band of Arab "terrorists" for years (financed by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight against the communist threat in Afghanistan) planned together secretly to commit a crime is not derived as "conspiracy theory", whereas suggesting that a group of covert U.S. operatives planned together secretly to commit a crime is always dismissed as such.
For questions like these people seemed to be scurrying about the Internet, trying desperately to snatch up any little morsel of information that the media are holding back on and building up a subculture that could only arise out of the pluralist constitution of the internet. People who are trying to make sense of a story that even when believing everything the authorities say, makes no inherent sense and leaves various incidents puzzled and a great range of questions open. Since the internet is a decentralized medium of gathering information and undermining any kind of authority, the reliability of information is always to be questioned. But so is the reliability of corporate media companies and the government versions itself to gain a more thorough view of the truth out there.
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