Related: Leftists Don't Care About 9/11
"Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”, Has “No Practical Political Significance”
New comments cause more outrage after leftist historian said he didn’t care about what really happened on 9/11
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Nov 21, 2008
Just days after left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, he has repeated the sentiment, stating that questions regarding the attacks have “no practical political significance” and that 9/11 truth activists are “fanatics” who are wasting their time.
During a lecture at UQAM university in Montréal, Zinn was once again asked if he would support a new 9/11 investigation.
Zinn responded:
“I have said that what happened on 9/11 deserves to be investigated more than it has been because I don’t accept and believe official investigations and official reports.
But having said that, and I want to say that this has really annoyed a lot of people, but why not, and I will annoy more people by saying that I think there are many people who have become fanatics about 9/11. By fanatics I mean, they think we should drop everything and just concentrate our energies on finding out what happened on 9/11.
I don’t think the question of what really happened on 9/11 is the most important question we can ask.”
Zinn then took a direct swipe at the 9/11 truth movement by stating:
“To tell a movement of citizens in the United States that this is something that we really have to make an issue of, I don’t believe it because we don’t need what happened on 9/11, we don’t need that to tell us about the crimes of the Bush administration.
I believe there are certain things that happen in history and certainly questions that are asked that divert us from the important things that we have to do at hand.
The truth is I don’t think anyone will ever really know what happened on 9/11 just as I don’t think anyone will really know who killed John F. Kennedy, and there are a lot of people who wasted a huge amount of time working on something that did not have any practical political significance.”
Zinn then asserted that his previous comments at a lecture in Colorado has been distorted and that he never said he did not care about 9/11 or the fact that it was in the past.
Zinn’s exact words that day were “I don’t know enough about it (the 9/11 conspiracy) and the truth is I don’t much care, that’s past.”
Watch the video:
In our previous article we analysed how other leftist luminaries such as Noam Chomsky have belittled the efforts of 9/11 truth activists and attempted to dismiss the political significance of asking questions and highlighting evidence of government complicity in the attacks, while at the same time clearly acknowledging that the truth remains covered up and withheld.
This cements commentators such as Zinn and Chomsky as intellectual cowards and allows them to be used as leftist gatekeepers by an establishment that even they admit has used 9/11 as a means to facilitate aggressive and monstrous foreign and domestic agendas.
What really happened on 9/11 is not a distraction, it is the key to everything:
Without 9/11 there would be no “war on terror”.
Without 9/11 there would be no “clash of civilizations”
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Afghanistan.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iraq.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iran.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in… (insert any country classified as part of the “axis of evil” or defined as being “with the terrorists”)
Without 9/11 thousands of U.S. troops would not have been sent to their deaths.
Without 9/11 hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been sentenced to their deaths.
Without 9/11 there would be no inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Without 9/11 there would be no civilian contractors in Iraq and the scandal that has followed them would have been averted.
Without 9/11 there would be no false military reporting (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch), and no crack down on the freedom of the press (banning photographing the returning coffins).
Without 9/11 there would be no Patriot Act.
Without 9/11 there would be no NSA warrantless wiretapping program.
Without 9/11 there would be no Camp Delta and no Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay.
Without 9/11 there would be no Military Commissions Act and no coordinated program of extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture of those defined as “enemy combatants”.
Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in secrecy and complete militarization of intelligence under the newly created office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Without 9/11 there would not be thousands of dead and dying emergency workers who are suffering crippling and fatal respiratory illnesses.
Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in military and security spending that goes arm in arm with huge cutbacks in other key social programs (such as levees in New Orleans).
Without 9/11 there would have been no total abandonment of fiscal restraint, which has contributed to plunging the nation into an abyss of debt and looks likely to tip the world into a deep recession if not a complete depression.
And on and on and on.
Perhaps most importantly, without 9/11 there would be no “post 9/11 society/mentality”.
The ongoing ignorance of official 9/11 lies will continue to feed the fear and hostility that this post 9/11 environment is founded upon. If it is “fanatical” to attempt to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, so to speak, then every member of the 9/11 truth movement should plead guilty.
The definition of a “fanatic” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, much closer to the actions of the fawning audience at both of Howard Zinn’s afore mentioned lectures, who proceeded to inanely cheer their hero no matter what came out of his mouth.
Much more fanatical are the kind of pocket radicals who latch on to one way of thinking, stick steadfastly to one political paradigm, completely close their minds to the wider picture, proceeding to repeat adfinum to their friends in the “coffee revolution” shops what Zinn, Chomsky, Vidal and their ilk have said, in between conversations about the finer points of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness prose, their understanding of the term ‘multiculturalism’ and the origins of Che Guevara’s seminal manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare.
Such people can groan all they like when questions over 9/11 are raised, it doesn’t change the fact that every single significant action the Bush administration has taken over the last seven years, every attack on freedom and crime against humanity that they have committed stems from the events of 9/11.
Yes Mr Zinn, you have angered a great many politically minded people with your comments, but what do you expect when you state that you do not care about what really happened on the most historically significant day in our recent history, and in the lifetimes of many of us?
Indeed, this is the key to Zinn’s comments. To him, what really happened on 9/11 is not significant because it is HE who represents the past, it is HE who is wasting his time and it is HE who is politically insignificant.
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