Misunderstanding Power

Thanks in part to recent disclosures that a minimally competent federal security establishment would havehad reasons to know and act on intelligence predicting something like what occurred last September, conspiracytheorists are having a field day with 9-11. It didn't take such disclosures or the current Congressionalinquiry into what the relevant federal officers knew and when they knew it, however, to put the great Americanconspiracy industry into high gear. From the beginning, really, a small army of conspiracy-thinkers offeredvariations on the basic theme that Washington (and in some versions Tel Aviv) were somehow in on the terribleSeptember attacks.

In the mild version of 9-11 conspiracy theory, Washington merely knew about the impending attacks and chosenot to act. In the hard -core version, Washington (and/or Israel) actually plotted and conducted the attacks.

The motive(s)? To provide the perfect excuse for the subversion of democracy, to serve the interests of BigOil and the military industrial complex, to strengthen Israel's grip on its Palestinian subjects, and toexpand the reach of US military power yet further across the globe. To create, in short a pretext fordevelopments pretty much along the lines of main historical currents since September.

Many of the conspiracy charges, it seems, come from somewhere on the "left" side of the politicalspectrum, where conspiracy thinking is more common than some radicals like to admit. The far right, it isbecoming increasingly clear, has no monopoly on the paranoid and crackpot interpretation of historical eventspast and present.

September 11th conspiracy theorists advance some truly bizarre ideas, including the notions that the WorldTrade Center was actually destroyed by explosives, that the planes were actually commandeered by Americanmilitary remote control, and that WTC Tower 2 was hit by a missile. According to one web-site, the Pentagonwas not actually hit by an airplane.

Conspiracy theorists also make a number of accurate and uncontroversial observations that they would liketo think provide circumstantial evidence for their strange interpretations. They note Washington's (Cold War)history of training and equipping El Qaeda, Bush's father's role as former CIA chief, and the huge influenceof Big Oil and the "defense" industry on the current White House. They point to the creepycircumstances of Bush's 2000 "selection" by the Supreme Court, the Bush administration's initialoil-driven overtures to the Taliban and the White House's equally petroleum-related suspension of seriousinvestigation of the Saudi-connected bin-Laden network.

They note that Bush senior and Dick Cheney were consultants to the Carlye group, which advised the binLaden family and which has made out quite well from the post 9-11 expansion of the Pentagon budget. They pointto friendly historical relations between the US petroleum executives and the Taliban, reflecting the globaloil corporations' determination to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. They noteAmerica's long history of secret intervention in the internal politics and policies of other nations. Theypoint, of course, to growing evidence that top CIA and FBI officials failed to act on abundant evidence thatshould have sparked them to prevent the attacks.

"Left" conspiracy theorists put special emphasis on regressive and repressive policy developmentssince 9-11. Look, they say, as if this (below) is all you need to know, at:

• The overnight media transformation of Bush from incompetent illegitimacy to supposed grand statesman andthe related suppression and distorted reportage on the real facts of the 2000 presidential"election."
  
  
• The closing of meaningful debate on the harshly regressive domestic policy agenda of the Bushadministration and allies in Congress.
  
  
• The restriction of civil liberties at home and abroad, in the name of a new permanent War on Terror,really a permanent war of US and US allied state terror.
  
  
•  The massive new Pentagon budget, transferring an unprecedented windfall of taxpayer money topolitically connected high-tech "defense" corporations, granting them a practically blank check tobuild massively expensive weapons and support systems that often have nothing to do with protecting the nationagainst terrorism.
  
  
• The construction of new US military bases and the expansion of America's military presence in SouthwestAsia, providing new imperial protections for US-based petrochemical interests in the region
  
  
• The US government's lockstep support for Israel's vicious and criminal assault on the Palestinian people,justified in part by the notion that 9-11 gave Americans a new appreciation for virtuous Israel's strugglewith
  dastardly suicidal mad men! The list goes on.

"Come on, man," one conspiracy theorist recently told me, with a sneering grin, incredulous at myinability to sign on with his dark, all-knowing interpretation of the above developments, "the Bushiesand all their rich buddies have got everything they ever wanted from this thing. You know they cooked itup."

In one case, the suggestion of high-level US complicity has come from a progressive US Congressperson -Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.). Last April, McKinney noted that "persons close to [the Bush]administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new [9-11-provoked] war." McKinney pointedespecially to the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based and defense-related investment firm that employs a largenumber of high-ranking government officials and retains the senior George Bush as a leading advisor. McKinneynoted that the Carlyle Group and other firms close to the White House "directly benefited from theincreased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11."

There is not space here to list and refute the various specific claims of 9-11 conspiracy theories, butthree points of rebuttal should suffice. First, it is incredibly unlikely that the necessary network ofplayers and operatives would or could have undertaken such a complicated and insanely risky enterprises asconducting the attacks or even of covering up evidence of their likely occurrence. Even on the incrediblydubious assumption that the required high-level players were so uneasy in their very privileged pre-Septemberlives that they felt compelled to concoct such schemes of mass murder on American soil, the likelihood ofdiscovery would have made it prohibitively dangerous.

Second, conspiracy theorists of the hard version forget that the likely perpetrators - the bin-Ladennetwork - had both the independent means and (un-controversially) the motive(s) to conduct the operation.There's something practically racist in the notion that only people of European ancestry could have carriedout something on 9-11's scale. The operation, moreover, is deeply consistent with threats made and targetsmarked by the likely culprits for quite some time.

Third, the idea that the elitist consequences of 9-11 - more wealth and power for the few and less of bothfor the many - somehow prove that 9-11 was the product of an elite US conspiracy is incredibly naïve.Conspiracy theorists of the sort who sneered at me fail to understand that aristocratic outcomes from crisesare basically written into America's economic and sociopolitical structure. Democracy is a political systemwhere each person has an equal vote and equal policy influence. It cannot meaningfully exist in a societystructured along the lines of the contemporary US, where 1 percent of the population owns 47 percent of thenation's wealth and considerably more of its politicians, policymakers, and media.

It cannot exist where ordinary people lacking cohesive organization, meaningful institutions of autonomouspower, popular expression, and democratic organization, and even a sense of common interests face off againsthighly organized and extremely class-conscious wealthy interests. It cannot exist where such people areworked, commuted, and shopped to the point of exhaustion and must rely on a highly concentrated privatelyowned media for basic information. It is especially absent from the making of foreign policy, which is evenmore insulated from popular influence than domestic policy and whose largely hidden conception and executioncarries vast consequences for the entire planet without anything but the slightest input from world citizens.

The structure of media ownership is especially pivotal in the current era. The owners and managers of thehighly globalized corporate media, who have strong linkages with the military and oil industries and thenational security-state, possess awesome, structurally encoded power to shape popular perceptions of currentevents. It does not serve their interests to translate the meaning of events in ways that question eliteprivilege and the related American imperial project. The outcome - incredibly biased coverage that favors war,imperial expansion, military expenditure, reduced civil liberties at home over critical democratic examinationof US foreign policy and its role in making terror attacks on US targets predictable - is itself remarkablypredictable, without resort to conspiracy theory.

A key consequence of this harsh structural reality is that those who possess highly concentrated wealth andpower have remarkable capacity to exploit crises. They act on their special, structurally enabled capacity toturn terrible events and developments, including especially foreign attacks and domestic rebellions, intopretexts for policies that further their own wealth and power at the expense of everyone else.

Such is the traditional and consistent goal and behavior of those who sit atop society's leadinginstitutions. As Noam Chomsky noted last February, the privileged "relentlessly" search for pretextsto advance their standard agenda, summarized in what Adam Smith called "the vile maxim of the masters -'Everything for me and nothing for everyone else.'"

"Crises," Chomsky noted, "make it possible to exploit fear and concern to demand that the[people] be submissive, obedient, silent, distracted, while the powerful use the window of opportunity topursue their own favored programs with even greater intensity." They are a means for "discipliningthe population," which tends to look with disfavor as policies embodying the "vile maxim," and"shifting wealth and power even more" into "the master's" hands.

The aftermath of 9-11, Chomsky noted, is "typical" in this regard. As John Pilger has recentlynoted in his important work, The New Rulers of the World, ""the attacks of September 11, 2001 didnot 'change everything,' but accelerated the continuity of events, providing an extraordinary pretext fordestroying social democracy." They have provided the post-Cold War era's most spectacular excuse to datefor the ongoing "reduction of democracy to electoral ritual: that is, competition betweenindistinguishable parties for the management of a single-ideology state."

As when applied to other events, conspiracy theories regarding 9-11 reflect two core misunderstandings ofpower and how it operates in the US. The first, broadly encouraged by the American educational, political, andmedia establishments, holds that the US is in fact a democracy. People who accept this fairy tale - theFounding Fathers' (most of whom agreed with John Jay that "those who own the country ought to runit") and the modern business class's ultimate shared nightmare - cannot easily grasp policy outcomes thatdramatically serve the interests of the few over the many. For them, the temptation is strong to see suchoutcomes as the product of a dark conspiracy operating behind the back and against the wishes of their electedrepresentatives and other leaders of the society's main institutions.

The second misunderstanding is of a different, even opposite nature. It wraps itself in an all-knowingsneer of cynicism yet holds a curiously wide-eyed and fantastic view of the masters or at least some part ofthe ruling class. Common among those who have been disabused of democratic myths and feel especially powerlessin the face of concentrated power, it holds that dastardly elites manipulate the course of history from onhigh, pretty much in accordance with their own wishes. Little happens in the course of human events, someconspiracy theorists think, without the approval and intervention of an all-powerful but strangely secretelite.

Real understanding of power is found outside these poles of illusion. Those who possess it know that theweight of dominant influence over sociopolitical decision-making and public information (mass persuasion) isrooted in historically developed structures of concentrated power, "state and private, closelyinter-linked" (Chomsky). They do not conclude from this that certain select members or designatedoperatives of the master class have been granted limitless potency to shape history from above. History, theyknow, is full of remarkable developments, some inspiring - the early phases of the Russian Revolution, theanti-Vietnam War movement, for example - and others quite horrific (9/11 for example) from aradical-democratic perspective, that took place much to the surprise and against the wishes of the powerelite.

That elite, they are aware, possesses exceptional capacity to make unexpected and initially unwelcomedevelopments into pretexts for the expansion of their wealth and power. In the past, for example, it turnedthe initially unwelcome (for the privileged) existence of the Soviet Union into a pretext for the (welcome)historically unparalleled expansion of the military-industrial complex. It turned the antiwar movement, urbanracial unrest, and antipoverty programs of the 1960s into pretexts for the expansion of a rigidlyauthoritarian criminal punishment state and workfare regime that enforces harsh class and race inequality incontemporary America. Now, with special assistance from an initially unwelcome and truly historic and evilterror attack last September, it has made the threat of terrorism into a pretext for an endless expansion ofimperialism, militarism, and class privilege.

To note these outcomes, rooted in structurally encoded inequalities of ideological and policy power,however, is very different from saying that the masters have "cooked up" the developments they wereable to exploit. The latter conclusion reads history through the rear view mirror and exaggerates the powerand foresight of the ruling elite.

In truth, ordinary people would be fortunate if the masters of war and wealth needed to work behind orotherwise undermine the United States' leading institutions to achieve regressive and repressive policyresults like those we have seen since 9-11. At the same time, we can be thankful that those masters have notbecome the God-like manipulators of history and consciousness, capable of creating historical events likesomething out of a bad X-Files episode. History lurches forward, in all its horror and glory, full ofpossibilities that continue to be chained and tragic consequences that remain predictable unless and until wedevelop and act upon an appropriate understanding of power and how it operates.

(Paul Street is a social policy researcher and freelance writer in Chicago, Illinois.)