ANTICLASTIC 9

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LISTEN WITH MOTHER 3

BBC putz Mark Kermode's recent smug patronising non-review of Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11 is beyond grating - to think little old ladies are going to jail for non-payment of the annually extorted licence fee to keep this lard-arsed wanker stocked up in hairgel and his belly full of beefburgers. Ever since 9/11 there's evolved a whole new unpleasantly aggressive breed of what you could loosely describe as conspiracy-deniers who get worked up about anything (even mildly) critical of the anthologically nonsensical official explanation of what transpired and the subsequent justifications for wars and serious incursions into personal freedom.

Just conflate things with various other assiduously handpicked examples such as faked moon landings, Area 51 alien abductions, Princess Diana assassinations and the like. Combine this varsity playground rhetoric with the dubious theory that to question orthodoxy is somehow more 'reassuring' (despite being quite clearly the contrary). It's a strategy used to belittle disapproved-of ideas, and one that also conveniently deflects from directly having to address the issue at hand.

It's as if the very notion of a 'conspiracy' could not by definition exist.

And of course there are fucking conspiracies and conspiratorial cultures at play within all strata of society, constantly. Conspiracies to make things happen, conspiracies to make things not happen, conspiracies to cover up mistakes, conspiracies to cover up embarrassing or sensitive information. Participants can be involved knowingly and unknowingly, and they can occur spontaneously based on shared objectives. Some conspiracies are completely or partially successful, some are completely or partially bungled. We're all involved, all the time. It's a mess. And getting clear retrospective answers, as even in the simplest court cases, is extremely challenging.

Personally, I admit to still finding the 9/11 case fascinating primarily because so little is still known about what was an extraordinary set of events. The Italian documentary cited above is an exceptionally good one (barring some unnecessarily melodramatic stylistic flourishes); not that it provides many new answers, but because it asks the questions so cheerily well, with some heavyweight contributions by the awesome Gore Vidal and others.

DEATH ON TWO LEGS

If you thought like me at the time it happened that the post-9/11 anthrax scare was extremely fishy (as with so many other events of this whole era of the so-called 'war on terrorism'), then I thoroughly recommend this article. And considering what a huge story this was at the time, and one which arguably had even more serious consequences than 9/11 itself (i.e. a crucial part of the rationale for the invasion of Iraq), why the hell are these developments getting such scant news coverage? Especially in August when there's so little genuine news to report.