WEBVTT

NOTE Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Screen

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000
One of history's better-known politicians was Cicero.

2
00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:12.000
Whenever an assassination occurred in Rome, whose origins were unknown,

3
00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:16.000
Cicero would ask the question, cui bono?

4
00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:19.000
Which translated means, who benefited?

5
00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.000
Want to find out who the culprit was?

6
00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:25.000
And murder investigations proceed this way, as I think all of us are aware,

7
00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:55.000
The Theory of Money and Credit

8
00:00:55.000 --> 00:01:02.000
I think it's very reassuring and troublesome, I suppose, to realize that, at least statistically, if you are ever murdered,

9
00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:05.000
there will most likely be a friend or loved one who will do you in.

10
00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:10.000
You wouldn't want this task left to a complete stranger.

11
00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:14.000
But what about other wrongs?

12
00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:18.000
And in approaching questions of this sort, I...

13
00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:24.000
I've always liked the words of Thomas Pynchon in his novel, Gravity's Rainbow,

14
00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:30.000
he said, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

15
00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:36.000
And I thought about that in relation to the response to the 9-11 Commission,

16
00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:44.000
set up to discuss certain things or inquire into certain matters involving the attacks of that day.

17
00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:48.160
Here's a good example of someone who began with the wrong question.

18
00:01:48.160 --> 00:01:52.300
What was the intelligence failure that produced all of this?

19
00:01:52.300 --> 00:01:56.840
Instead of asking a more relevant question, who was responsible for 9-11?

20
00:01:56.840 --> 00:02:01.500
I haven't read their report, but what I've read of it in the newspapers and so forth,

21
00:02:01.500 --> 00:02:06.940
I suspect that that question was never inquired into.

22
00:02:06.940 --> 00:02:13.880
So the right question to me would have required going back to Cicero and asking the Cui Bono

23
00:02:13.880 --> 00:02:21.400
Who benefited from 9-11? And when I look around and try to figure out anyone who might possibly

24
00:02:21.400 --> 00:02:26.760
have benefited, the only one I can come up with is the American Political Establishment.

25
00:02:26.760 --> 00:02:30.600
Now keep in mind this does not mean, I want to emphasize this, it does not mean that they

26
00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:36.760
did it. It only means that they become what police in a murder investigation would call

27
00:02:36.760 --> 00:02:41.880
persons of interest.

28
00:02:41.880 --> 00:02:43.480
As inspector Morse

29
00:02:43.480 --> 00:02:45.640
might have put it, a suspicion

30
00:02:45.640 --> 00:02:49.280
is not the same thing as an accusation. And I think that's one thing that has to be

31
00:02:49.280 --> 00:02:51.080
kept in mind.

32
00:02:51.080 --> 00:02:54.920
Of course, we were told at the outset, on 9-11 itself, that Osama bin Laden

33
00:02:54.920 --> 00:02:57.880
was the architect of the 9-11 attack.

34
00:02:57.880 --> 00:03:01.500
But on that same date, one television network reported

35
00:03:01.500 --> 00:03:03.360
bin Laden to have said,

36
00:03:03.360 --> 00:03:07.520
You know, I don't know why they're blaming me, I had nothing to do with it.

37
00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:11.440
Which of course, his denial should not be taken at face value

38
00:03:11.440 --> 00:03:15.320
anymore than should the pronouncements of Mr. Bush.

39
00:03:15.320 --> 00:03:17.360
But we should by now

40
00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:20.640
have developed a healthy skepticism

41
00:03:20.640 --> 00:03:23.400
of the words and actions of all

42
00:03:23.400 --> 00:03:25.160
political figures.

43
00:03:25.160 --> 00:03:28.520
It's a little bit like dealing with magicians.

44
00:03:28.520 --> 00:03:32.800
Magicians are very adept at distracting our attention with wands

45
00:03:32.800 --> 00:03:50.800
and Smoke and Colorful Claws and the handkerchiefs and things like that, incantations, for the purpose of allowing them to deceive us into believing that elephants can be made to disappear before our eyes and things of that nature.

46
00:03:50.800 --> 00:03:58.800
So when the political establishment creates a blue-ribbon commission composed of men and women whose careers have been tied to the establishment,

47
00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:15.800
You can be assured that their principal purpose, like that of a skilled magician, is to engage in a kind of ledger domain that will prevent the revelation of embarrassing truths and to keep your mind distracted from the tricks that are being played upon you.

48
00:04:15.800 --> 00:04:25.800
Now, at this point, when you get into a discussion of this sort with most people, you're usually greeted with the charge where you're advocating a conspiracy theory.

49
00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:33.800
The purpose for such a charge, of course, is to intimidate the questioner into not asking improper questions.

50
00:04:33.800 --> 00:04:44.800
In other words, to confine your questioning to the politically correct or the safe areas of inquiry, such as intelligence failures and so forth.

51
00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:51.800
Like our response to a naked man at a party, or perhaps a naked emperor,

52
00:04:51.800 --> 00:05:02.800
Most of us don't want to experience the shame that's associated with violating the covenant that we seem to have embraced to never call a thing by its true name.

53
00:05:02.800 --> 00:05:15.800
A man that I've known for some time through correspondence and only met earlier this year, Chris Tame from London, some of you may be familiar with him,

54
00:05:15.800 --> 00:05:19.800
We got into a discussion on this over in Holland this year, and he said,

55
00:05:19.800 --> 00:05:25.800
I'm not interested in conspiracy theories, but I'm interested in the facts of conspiracies.

56
00:05:25.800 --> 00:05:30.800
And this is sort of the approach that I'm quite interested in.

57
00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:35.800
Those who deny conspiracies outright are telling me a couple things.

58
00:05:35.800 --> 00:05:41.800
Number one, that they're completely unacquainted with history, particularly Greek and Roman history,

59
00:05:41.800 --> 00:05:46.800
with their numerous intrigues, assassinations, cabals, plots, etc.

60
00:05:46.800 --> 00:05:51.800
And secondly, they're certainly ignorant and unacquainted with Shakespearean tragedies,

61
00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:58.800
all of which are just a wash in conspiracies of one sort or another.

62
00:05:58.800 --> 00:06:04.800
One of my Jewish colleague of mine got into a discussion with him one time

63
00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:43.800
The cost arose out of a conspiracy, an alleged conspiracy by the German government to do in Jewish people.

64
00:06:43.800 --> 00:06:49.800
I have another colleague who teaches antitrust law. He made the same accusation.

65
00:06:49.800 --> 00:06:52.800
They charged against me one time. Well, I don't believe in conspiracies.

66
00:06:52.800 --> 00:06:57.800
I said, well, then we ought to reduce your antitrust course from a three unit to a one unit course.

67
00:06:57.800 --> 00:07:07.800
Because when you eliminate all the price fixing, the conscious parallelism, the combinations in restraintive trade,

68
00:07:07.800 --> 00:07:12.800
all the other conspiracy elements of the Sherman Act and all the other antitrust laws, you're not left with much.

69
00:07:12.800 --> 00:07:19.800
So let's make it a one-unit course. What about that? Well, no.

70
00:07:19.800 --> 00:07:26.800
And I'll be very blunt. I support any conspiracy explanation for which there is credible evidence.

71
00:07:26.800 --> 00:07:36.800
I am unamused by, shall we say, flighty kinds of conspiracy theories.

72
00:07:36.800 --> 00:07:43.800
I remember when I was in college back in the 50s, back at the University of Nebraska, where I did my undergraduate work.

73
00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:48.800
At this particular time, McCarthyism was still going strong.

74
00:07:48.800 --> 00:07:51.800
The House Un-American Activities Committee was still in place.

75
00:07:51.800 --> 00:07:56.800
and there was a state legislator in Nebraska who decided to get in on the game.

76
00:07:56.800 --> 00:08:03.800
So he took the position that it was time to investigate the University of Nebraska faculty

77
00:08:03.800 --> 00:08:10.800
because there was a big communist conspiracy going on amongst faculty members at the University of Nebraska.

78
00:08:10.800 --> 00:08:12.800
Well, at that particular time there was not.

79
00:08:12.800 --> 00:08:17.800
There were a lot of socialists, collectivists, as there are at every university.

80
00:08:17.800 --> 00:08:22.440
But not to Communists, and somebody called him on this, and he said, you know, there's

81
00:08:22.440 --> 00:08:26.160
no evidence of any Communist conspiracy.

82
00:08:26.160 --> 00:08:33.080
And his response was, that just shows you how deeply embedded this whole thing is, because

83
00:08:33.080 --> 00:08:35.880
you wouldn't expect them to have it out in the open.

84
00:08:35.880 --> 00:08:42.080
It sounds a little bit like the reasoning coming out of the White House these days.

85
00:08:42.080 --> 00:08:48.560
Let you get into other conspiracies through history and more modern times.

86
00:08:48.560 --> 00:08:55.640
The Reichstag fire, I think most of you are familiar with that, the extent to which the

87
00:08:55.640 --> 00:09:02.720
German government used that as a rationale for its particular police state activities.

88
00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:10.480
Pearl Harbor, the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt to manipulate the Japanese into ultimately

89
00:09:10.480 --> 00:09:16.800
the Attacking Pearl Harbor in order to get the United States into a war that 90-some percent

90
00:09:16.800 --> 00:09:20.120
of the American people at that time did not want to get into.

91
00:09:20.120 --> 00:09:25.560
Those of you who are not familiar with that, I draw your attention to the book Day of Deceit

92
00:09:25.560 --> 00:09:29.320
and the author just ran right by me.

93
00:09:29.320 --> 00:09:32.320
Maybe somebody can tell you that.

94
00:09:32.320 --> 00:09:36.840
It came out a couple of years ago.

95
00:09:36.840 --> 00:09:45.640
You might also be aware, some of you probably are aware of the Operation Northwoods scam

96
00:09:45.640 --> 00:09:52.840
that James Bamford reveals in his book Body of Secrets that in the early 1960s the Joint

97
00:09:52.840 --> 00:10:02.440
Chiefs of Staff had put together a plan directed toward an eventual attack on Cuba.

98
00:10:02.440 --> 00:10:09.160
Part of this plan would be for people in the United States to be shot in the streets, planes

99
00:10:09.160 --> 00:10:14.880
to be hijacked and destroyed, terrorist acts to be carried out in major cities, bombings

100
00:10:14.880 --> 00:10:21.240
and so forth, innocent people to be framed for these bombings and the like, all for the

101
00:10:21.240 --> 00:10:29.520
purpose of blaming Castro in order to rationalize a war against Cuba.

102
00:10:29.520 --> 00:10:52.320
The Cold War itself was premised on an international communist conspiracy, and those of us who

103
00:10:52.320 --> 00:10:57.080
denied this and saw the Cold War as a scheme for corporate state interest were attacked

104
00:10:57.080 --> 00:11:04.680
by the Anti-Conspiracy League as Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists.

105
00:11:04.680 --> 00:11:09.920
But it's interesting, you know, right after 9-11, we had George Bush getting on television

106
00:11:09.920 --> 00:11:15.320
and telling us, you know, let us have no conspiracy theories about all of this.

107
00:11:15.320 --> 00:11:21.240
He then began expounding on his own conspiracy theory, you know, the Al-Qaeda, Axis of Evil,

108
00:11:21.240 --> 00:11:24.520
International Terrorist Network, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

109
00:11:24.520 --> 00:11:36.020
In other words, any conspiracy theories that are outside the realm of what is politically correct and not to be examined, stick with the conspiracy theories we give you and you'll be alright.

110
00:11:36.020 --> 00:11:46.520
Those who believe in establishment conspiracies are patriots. Those who suspect the establishment of its own conspiracies are paranoid. They conspire, but we do not.

111
00:11:46.520 --> 00:11:58.260
Paranoia, in this connection, is not a fear of others, but a baseless fear of others.

112
00:11:58.260 --> 00:12:03.400
What would one say of a Jewish person in Nazi Germany who thought the government was out

113
00:12:03.400 --> 00:12:04.920
to get him?

114
00:12:04.920 --> 00:12:05.920
Paranoid?

115
00:12:05.920 --> 00:12:11.760
If so, what would you say about another Jewish person in Nazi Germany who didn't think the

116
00:12:11.760 --> 00:12:13.800
government was out to get him?

117
00:12:13.800 --> 00:12:17.100
Psychologically healthy?

118
00:12:17.100 --> 00:12:23.000
Does paranoia in fact not describe the state of mind of U.S. government officials today

119
00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:29.800
who see all of us as potential terrorists, airport searchers, persons in baggage of everybody,

120
00:12:29.800 --> 00:12:34.800
armed security guards, helicopters patrolling the cities, government buildings overly protected.

121
00:12:34.800 --> 00:12:43.740
It's very interesting, I was in a city, a government building a few weeks ago, and over

122
00:12:43.740 --> 00:12:49.720
in Glendale, California, you just walk in, no big searches or anything.

123
00:12:49.720 --> 00:12:55.360
Federal building, you go into any building that has government offices, and it's like

124
00:12:55.360 --> 00:13:00.960
what getting onto a military base used to be 20 or 30 years ago.

125
00:13:00.960 --> 00:13:09.960
And government officials and politicians with all their extraordinary security, who are the paranoids?

126
00:13:09.960 --> 00:13:14.960
And of course the clearest example of this sense of paranoia, I think, is President Bush's line that,

127
00:13:14.960 --> 00:13:18.960
if you're not with us, you're against us.

128
00:13:18.960 --> 00:13:24.960
Well, I think it's time for us to stop allowing ourselves to be intimidated into not asking questions

129
00:13:24.960 --> 00:13:41.720
In the 20th century, governments killed, through wars and genocides, some 200 million people.

130
00:13:41.720 --> 00:13:45.560
And I think it's now time to say enough.

131
00:13:45.560 --> 00:13:50.760
It's time for us to speak the truth, not just to power, but more importantly to ourselves

132
00:13:50.760 --> 00:13:53.040
and to one another.

133
00:13:53.040 --> 00:13:58.040
We must stop being afraid of our own minds and to relearn what we insisted upon as children,

134
00:13:58.040 --> 00:14:03.120
namely to call a thing by its true name.

135
00:14:03.120 --> 00:14:09.680
A friend of mine, a Swiss psychiatrist that I have corresponded with and talked with a

136
00:14:09.680 --> 00:14:17.640
number of times, was telling me about an Inuit elder, an Eskimo, a man who had been invited

137
00:14:17.640 --> 00:14:25.400
to a conference over in Europe, and when he got up to speak, he made this statement, he

138
00:14:25.400 --> 00:14:33.840
said, your children yell and scream, you lie to them. And I can't think of a sentence that

139
00:14:33.840 --> 00:14:39.880
better encapsulates the state of western culture than that. Your children yell and scream, you

140
00:14:39.880 --> 00:14:46.800
lie to them. I also recall the words of, and I don't remember who it was, but I recall

141
00:14:46.800 --> 00:14:51.040
The words, maybe somebody here can give me the source, but either John Stuart Mill or

142
00:14:51.040 --> 00:14:56.600
John Locke, who once said that a man has a moral obligation to not allow his children

143
00:14:56.600 --> 00:15:04.000
to live under tyranny. And I've always liked that. I think it's time to take moral responsibility

144
00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:10.400
and begin asking what Thomas Pynchon would consider the right questions. One might begin

145
00:15:10.400 --> 00:15:16.640
by asking, what role, if any, did the American political establishment play in creating or

146
00:15:16.640 --> 00:15:22.240
at least having foreknowledge of the events of 9-11. Again, these are questions, they're

147
00:15:22.240 --> 00:15:31.240
not accusations. It gives us an avenue, an approach to begin asking for relevant facts

148
00:15:31.240 --> 00:15:38.880
and to have the investigation go wherever the facts lead. It's called for a genuine

149
00:15:38.880 --> 00:15:49.440
Inquiry, not the 9-11 charade that was conducted. It's a little bit like having the mafia investigate

150
00:15:49.440 --> 00:16:01.200
itself. Bring out some good inquisitors, if you will. Seymour Hersh and John Pilger and

151
00:16:01.200 --> 00:16:07.720
Noam Chomsky and Robert Higgs and Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo and others in this room

152
00:16:07.720 --> 00:16:29.120
Let us no longer settle for the kinds of non-inquiries into such topics as failure of intelligence

153
00:16:29.120 --> 00:16:34.120
systems or need for an enlarged military police state.

154
00:16:34.120 --> 00:16:39.720
These questions may satisfy the anesthetized minds that watch Fox News or accept media-related

155
00:16:39.720 --> 00:16:45.000
press releases that they ought not to satisfy intelligent minds.

156
00:16:45.000 --> 00:16:49.800
My book, an early book I wrote, Calculated Chaos, was dedicated to one of my folk heroes,

157
00:16:49.800 --> 00:16:56.800
Dorothy's dog, Toto, and L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, a free-spirited mutt who exposed

158
00:16:56.800 --> 00:17:02.360
to his ostrich companions the humbuggery being perpetrated upon them by the wizard.

159
00:17:02.360 --> 00:17:06.520
As the wizard's deceit was being revealed to those who trembled before his smoke and

160
00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:10.920
mirrors show, spiced with terrorizing shouts designed to keep his conscripts in obedience

161
00:17:10.920 --> 00:17:15.800
to his will, he was heard to admonish his audience, pay no attention to that mayan behind

162
00:17:15.800 --> 00:17:21.160
the screen. Such has been the response of every political schemer desirous of keeping

163
00:17:21.160 --> 00:17:24.900
his or her followers from an awareness of the nature of the politically self-serving

164
00:17:24.900 --> 00:17:31.360
rackets being perpetrated at the expense of the alleged beneficiaries of political systems.

165
00:17:31.360 --> 00:17:35.560
I'm reminded of the closing scene provided by another fabulist, George Orwell, an animal

166
00:17:35.560 --> 00:17:40.980
farm. The pigs had schemed to tyrannize their barnyard brethren with the same kind of lies

167
00:17:40.980 --> 00:17:47.780
and factual distortions that have long emanated from the district of collectivism. War is

168
00:17:47.780 --> 00:17:54.480
peace, freedom is slavery, love is hate, all animals are equal but some are more equal

169
00:17:54.480 --> 00:18:00.720
than others. At the end, the pigs conspired in the living room of the hated farmhouse

170
00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:05.280
with the human business interests from town who had participated in the systematic exploitation

171
00:18:05.280 --> 00:18:08.760
and killing of the denizens of Animal Farm.

172
00:18:08.760 --> 00:18:12.380
As the pigs conducted their business with the local humans, the other animals looked

173
00:18:12.380 --> 00:18:17.760
in the window of the farmhouse to discover the conspiracy that had been playing out at

174
00:18:17.760 --> 00:18:19.900
their expense.

175
00:18:19.900 --> 00:18:25.540
The story ended there, leaving us to contemplate what, if anything, the barnyard bourgeoisie

176
00:18:25.540 --> 00:18:29.440
and the pastureland proletariat might have learned and what responses they might have

177
00:18:29.440 --> 00:18:59.440
made to this awareness. At a time when our lives, liberties, and wealth are being consumed by a Leviathan that is metastasizing itself throughout the body of all humanity, it is incumbent upon us, the living, the protectors of our children and grandchildren, to insist upon looking where we are told we ought not to look, and to resist those who warn us to pay no attention to that man behind the screen. Thank you.

178
00:18:59.440 --> 00:19:01.440
Thank you very much.