911 Truth Telling - and Listening! - towards a rounded view

[Keith Mothersson]

Someone wrote a really ill-tempered letter e-mail recently and I found myself replying that if we are angry enough and nasty enough we can make 2 plus 2 = 4 into a lie, a discreditable proposition people recoil from.

In other words I suggest that 911 truth isn’t just a matter of coming to recognise a certain state of affairs. It is also about how we speak the truth in a rounded skilfull way. The following are some of the classical criteria for what the Buddhists refer to as ‘Right Speech’, which we can run through our minds as an internal check-list:

1) Speaking from a good intention: Do we want to make an offering which may help people or do we want to try to fight, dominate or impress people? Are we magnetised by the energy of righteous denunciation of others, or do we speak out from compassion – to try to use the opportunity which 911 offers the people of the world to reduce the terrible suffering which 911 has brought and continues to cause. ‘Only trust the sad revolutionaries’ (seventies slogan, anon).

2) Not speaking cruelly, abusively, holding people up to ridicule, encouraging hatred – even of lost souls whose policies and actions have caused and are causing so much suffering. [When afflicted by obsessive righteous anger it can help if we recall times we ourselves lied, were violent, etc. And also if we recall that Bush just signs papers and stands at lecterns, etc. Even Cheney, Baker, Kissinger, Rockefeller, Murdoch are largely figureheads for a whole socio-economic system of institutional fratriarchal domination, working through fear, greed, hate and delusion which lots of people buy into: Sky TV anyone?! If no one obeyed them, they wouldn’t have been able to wire up even one floor of the WTC between the lot of them!]


3) Speaking soberly. Not getting drunk on our own cause; Avoiding the temptation to exaggerate or embellish the truth.

4) Speaking relevantly. Avoiding idle speculation: concentrating on the most important things about which we can be sure and not pretending to certainty (e.g. about the planes) if we aren’t really sure or if the data are such that we aren’t really entitled to form conclusive judgements.

5) Speaking with integrity: not saying substantively different things to different people. Avoiding the temptation to bond with people by going along with their passivity-maintaining hatred of Bush, the Yanks, Blair, etc.

6) Speaking skilfully: However we should adapt our comments to different audiences/readerships and contexts. Ideally we should also try to speak in a clear, well organised way (but the main thing is having goodwill and sincere intention).

7) Speaking betimes: Is now the best time and place to speak? Sometimes it really is vital we speak out clearly and directly, but often it may be wiser to wait until someone is more likely to be able to hear us, or else maybe to hear the truth from someone else in our team.

Not making things worse: if someone is fixed in their views then it almost always makes matters worse to keep trying to persuade them (that is us being fixed in our views!) Identifying at least some common ground before moving on to work with other people or contexts. Nobody ever ‘wins’ arguments – in discussions we both/all win. So as soon as we sense an argument starting up, it is wise to switch tack entirely to talk very humanly about that fact. We can share our perceptions and feelings about the situation between us and our interlocutor(s) – or the atmosphere in the meeting, etc. We can try to discuss from that level (awareness of process) which can still unite us with others - and avoid getting stuck on the info-content-ideas level at which one or other side or both is perceiving something is threatening, divisive, etc.

9) Last but not least right speech means being open. Really listening. Not interrupting nor switching off and waiting for someone to finish. We shouldn’t assume that we know what they are about to say, or why they are saying it. We should listen for the fine detail, to how they say it, for what else they may also be concerned about, etc. Either they understand more about 911 than we do, so we can only benefit from listening; or they don’t, in which case it is only if we listen really respectfully and carefully that we stand a chance of being able to come up with something which helps them - and maybe ourselves! – to see deeper.

All these are easy enough to recognise in theory but hard to work into our daily awareness in practice. (Definition of practice: One darn mistake after another. But hopefully the mistakes get a bit smaller over the years!)

I would add another point here about truth and denial. The truth about 911 isn’t just about building collapse rates, put-options, military anthrax sent to Senators, etc. It also includes the fact that a lot of people aren’t interested or are afraid to find out or work through the implications. While some others are or seem to us resolutely wedded to falsehoods!

In moving beyond our own initial denial about 911 (all of us who didn’t see it directly) we also need to keep moving so that we also move beyond our denial about all those other people out there who will continue to think differently, even including some who are part of the 911 truth movement (e.g. Lihop believers; Ickeites; socialists; anarchists, take your pick!). If we listen to them with respect and listen and speak carefully to their concerns (whatever they are) then they may conceivably come to understand 911 the way we do. But equally they may not, not now, not soon, and possibly not ever. At all events anger and contempt will certainly be entirely counter-productive. Paradoxically it is only when we accept reality as it really is, stop trying to fight it, that we have a chance of changing/changing ‘it’.

More on denial here: http://www.nineeleven.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=4193&highlight=

911 truth needs to include so much more than 911 info getting or provision of 911 facts to others. It should also include awareness about our feelings around 911 – including underlying feelings which arise of anger, or frustration or sadness or excitement or uncertainty and ambivalence. When we find ourselves getting really angry with the sheer obtuseness of X it is important that we realise that it isn’t really X who is ‘making’ us think or feel negatively about him or her, there have to be earlier feelings in play on our side (as well as on their side often or maybe). When was the first time we got so frustrated at someone not listening to us? Or someone defensively ridiculing us? That way we can choose to work on ourselves rather than promote the One True Line in such an angry way that we ‘piss everyone off’. (Actually they too have a degree of choice how to respond if we are hostile or arrogant, which is why I put that last phrase in inverted commas).

Another deepening and 'roundening' of our awareness about what is involved in a truth movement is when we realise that as well as info provision and ethical integrity and skill and emotional literacy and sensitivity in how we share what we know, we also need to concern ourselves with helping people integrate 'our' anomalous facts into their various interpretive ‘frameworks’ so they can ‘get it’ and then be more likely to actually want to work with and from what we have communicated to them.

Are they hardline deniers like Dr Stephen Moreton, who seems to play a national fire-fighter role in regional papers to challenge letters to the editor from us lot and to promote www.debunking911.com? Or super-well-publicised 'Radical' 'Islamists' or people like Ward Churchill who accept the official story and glory in it?

Are they Post-Modern sceptics about the possibility of truth? Or hard-bitten 'realists' who are quite certain that large conspiracies don't happen and don't see how the question of the speed of collapse of the triple towers is logically prior to their concern - http://www.nineeleven.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=753&highlight= ?

Or journalists and academics worried about being thought to be 'conspiracy theorists'? or Marxists who are needlessly counter-posing our social action theory (sub-genre conspiracies, fraternities) to 'proper' structural or institutional analysis such as serious intellectuals engage in (not yer plebian masses with conspiracist mindsets who jump to simplistic paranoid conclusions in a complicated world we can't understand)? Or are we dealing with libertarians taking their lead from Chomsky and meanwhile concerned to have nothing to do with our sick cult (www.911cultwatch.org.uk)?

Do they deny the facts (and which facts?) or are they denying that those facts add value for us, since we would need to deal with Imperialist war and racism anyway? Or do they keep dodging back and forwards between these positions? Are they Blowback leftists like the SWP and Galloway or are they 'Enlightenment Progressives' like say the Euston manifesto and Peter Tatchell who are focussed on the threat of 'Islamofascism'? Or greens who think that all this terrorism argument is a distraction from dealing with Climate Havoc and don't see how the iconic towers provide gthe people of the world with an open goal to defeat the Big Oil 'frat' and burn-it-all-till-we-all-die Cult.

The point being that when we are in the grip of all these and other intellectual attachments, opinions and identities they create frames so strong that we can't see what is in front of all our eyes.

So as well as concerning ourselves with coming up with the 'correct facts' (spoken at right time, skilfully, with good will, etc) we also need to think how we can loosen those frames which are getting in the way. We often won't need to ask people to ditch their commitments to scepticism, equality, liberty, human rights, gender politics, etc - merely stop interpreting these values in opposition to facing and absorbing 911 truth and working it into enriched ingellectual schemas.

Whichever tribe or tribes people belong to, we need to listen really well so we can understand who it is we have to deal with, and so how (if at all) we can help them understand better (or else learn from their greater or different understanding).

Happy 911 truth-telling and truth-listening too!

[Reflecter]

Thats a stunning post. Very informative.

Deserves a sticky!

[Light Infantree]