First meeting of Leeds Truth Group 2nd April

In your advert you don't mention that your group is based around conspiracy theories. Truth?

If this advert interests you I advise you to do a little background reading and thinking.

 http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/02/20/bayoneting-a-scarecrow/#more-1043

The problem with the 9/11 Truth Movement is that it leads people to fundamentally question the reality they get from the mainstream media, after questioning 9/11 they often start to question the 7/7 bombings and before you know it they don't trust their government, believe the "War on Terror" is phony and want to see an end to the Empire.

This site has a collection of article on the "War on Terror":

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/topics/terror/

And it includes a feature article on 9/11:

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/09/350617.html

Of course there is disinfo around 9/11, for example Shayler pushing "no planes" theories and there are worse examples... It takes some time to sift the disinfo from the reality. A good place to start researching this aspect of the 9/11 Truth Movement are the 4 audio shows here:

 http://www.visibility911.com/cointelpro.htm

For a broad perspective on the Empire see this series of recordings:

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/03/364938.html

"I believe that they [the Bush administration] were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-Qaida..." --George Monbiot, "9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns"

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2017006,00.html

Well then, Mr. Monbiot has just validated our main point: We need a truly independent investigation of September 11th, because crimes were committed by the administration and they were allowed to cover them up.

How ironic that a scatterbrained hit piece about Loose Change would lead to an admission of the glaring criminal negligence that -- at the least -- allowed the attacks of September 11th 2001 to occur.

When you go along to a 9/11 'truth' event you find yourself in the scary world of right wing paranoid cults. It's only a little later that the cult will reveal other more sinister beliefs, for instance, they don't believe that man made climate change is real but is a con by the liberal media. Suddenly the fearless truthers find themselves on the same side as big oil companies but they are used to keeping unpleasant company. Trace back their weblinks and you inevitably find yourself on right wing US websites such as prison planet - a homophobic, holocaust denier website that produces much of the 9/11 'truth' material you come across.

The 'truthers' will claim they are beyond left or right but of course that is the cry of every neo-nazi and right wing populist group of the 1980's onwards and was in fact the main slogan of the Third position neo-nazi group that Nick Griffin lead proir to heading the BNP.

There is some truth in these allegations, Alex jones is homophobic and anti-migration, basically a loud mouth US nationalist, but where is the evidence that he is a Holocaust denier?

Some 9/11 truth groups have got crazies involved, this is true and this appears to be something that is being encouraged to put people off, but part of the blame here lies with the left for ignoring this issue.

There are people on the left who have questioned the official story of 9/11, for example:

Michel Chossudovsky
 http://globalresearch.ca/

Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
 http://takingaimradio.com/

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
 http://nafeez.blogspot.com/

Nafeez is from the UK and his book is promoted by the likes of the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities - see the link to his book, The War on Truth : Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism on the front page of their site:

 http://www.campacc.org.uk/

There is a good audio recording of Nafeez speaking here in which, near the end, he makes some valid points about the 9/11 Truth Movement:

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/11/356939.html

"Right wing paranoid cult", by supporting the US governments, totally discredited, fable about what happened on 9/11 and saying that only far right crazies are questioning it you are not helping -- because this isn't true.

I agree that some, although very few, people who see themselves as left wing or even anarchist have been attracted to 911 'truth' ideas because they see it as somehow anti-Bush or anti-government. The point is that the world view that produces these conspiracist ideas is structurally right wing, Have you never thought to ask yourself why far right nutters dominate the 9/11 'truth' 'movement'? Or why supposedly left wing activists are posting climate change denier material on Indymedia?

Conspiracism as a world view is a form of right wing populism.

Here's a definition:
Conspiracism is a narrative form of scapegoating that portrays an enemy as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good. Conspiracism assigns tiny cabals of evildoers a superhuman power to control events, frames social conflict as part of a transcendent struggle between Good and Evil, and makes leaps of logic, such as guilt by association, in analyzing evidence. Conspiracists often employ common fallacies of logic in analyzing factual evidence to assert connections, causality, and intent that are frequently unlikely or nonexistent. As a distinct narrative form of scapegoating, conspiracism uses demonization to justify constructing the scapegoats as wholly evil while reconstructing the scapegoater as a hero.

Of course you could more or less fit George Bush's worldview into that structure and it is the structure of right wing thought generally.

Populism avoids an analysis of how power works systemically. It's always some group who are corrupting the system, which would otherwise be ok. This group could be neo-cons, Lizards, Jews...

So the problem isn't the need to reveal some pretend hidden truth to the ignorant masses. Most people know the world is fucked up but don't know how to act to sort it out and have lost belief in their power to do so. That is the real task and it is made much harder by having real politics mixed up with people whose politics are like the plot of a bad B movie. The reason Hollywood loves conspiracy plots so much is that they are neat and involve the slow unfolding of a preordained story. Real life isn’t like that. It’s complicated and is contingent.

But of course supporting Bush or adopting a conspiracist world view aren't the only two options. The whole world knows that the neo-cons took advantage of the fact of 9/11 to try and restructure the world. In the main they failed but unfortunately the new post-unilateral forms of power aren't going to be much nicer. Still it's against this multilateralism that we now have to struggle. One of struggles ahead is to stop capital and governments taking advantage of the facts of climate change to push the costs of it on to us. Once again the conspiracist cults will be on the wrong side.

Is that they do what you are doing -- they say that the mode of thought is wrong, therefore everything that comes from anyone questioning 9/11 is wrong and since everything they say is wrong there is no need to engage with anything they say on a concrete level.

What goes wrong here is that some people are not put off by the outlook of the likes of Berlet, they looking into things like the collapse of WTC7,  http://wtc7.net/ and then conclude that it was a controlled demolition -- physics trumps "points of view", sorry.

They are then faced with, as you say, many right wingers who appear to them to be telling the truth more effectively than the left who are fully behind Bush's version of events -- this is a big problem.

"It's always some group who are corrupting the system, which would otherwise be ok. This group could be neo-cons, Lizards, Jews..."

Yes the likes of Alex Jones see the world this way, but that can't be said of Ralph Schoenman can it -- he is a revolutionary socialist, with a very long history of activism and opposition to capitalism. You can see that 9/11 was some kind of an inside job and still be an anti-capitalist, these things are not mutally exclusive.

There are many different starting points for examining the world, the questions that you concentrate on reflect the predispositions of your worldview. If you are convinced the world is distorted by a secretive cabal but would otherwise be alright then you are predisposed to see their hand behind every world event, you will seek facts that confirm your world view and dismisss those that don't. This is the story of the 9/11 'truth' movement or the Patriot movement as it is also known in the US. Believe me that fact is self evident form outside your world view and I certainly won't get drawn into the endless circular logic where there is always another piece of conjecture to move to when a previous belief is knocked down. I know there isn't any fact that will be allowed to disrupt your worldview, you have invested too much in it. All I can do is point out that the focus of your world view is not just irrelevant as neo-conservatism is fundamentally waning but also politically dangerous as it draws people into right wing populist modes of thought.

Anti-capitalism gives you an entirely different focus and world view and brings you into line with social movements containing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people from across the world who are in broad agreement on how the world works. Your conspiracist world view is fundamentally outside it.

There is of course a danger for some of soft anti-capitalism falling into conspiracism, what some have called arrested radicalism. The idea that capitalism is what multi-national corporations or bankers do. This can lead to seeing the problem as being the G8 meeting and conspiring to carve up the world but of course the problem is much more fundamental; they and we act in the interests of capital as though it were a natural thing.

‘Capital’ is not something ‘out there’, something that we can fight against as if it were external to us and part of someone or something else—even if we sometimes talk about it as if it is. ‘Capital’ is not a person or group of people, nor an organisation or group of organisations. It’s not the sum total of ‘capitalists’ or ‘capitalist enterprises’. Capital is a social relation mediated through commodities. Capital is the way we live, the way we reproduce ourselves and our world—the organisation of the ‘present state of things’ as they are today.

That is of course a much more difficult thing to confront than a small cabal that secretly controls the world. It is an unsettling fact that noone is in charge. Conspiracism is a conservative, naieve reaction that wants someone, somewhere to be in charge, even if it's the bad guys.

In fact conspiracies only ever have the smallest effect on the world and large social movements, not tiny cults, are the only ones that can change things.

If you reply to this please say if you believe man made climate change is a hoax perpertrated by 'them'.

"I know there isn't any fact that will be allowed to disrupt your worldview, you have invested too much in it."

If you are who I think you are then last time we met I didn't think 9/11 was an inside job, I believed the official story, so your argument here just doesn't apply.

Would you like to try to convince me that WTC7 wasn't brought down via a controlled demolition?

 http://www.911revisited.com/

I'm sure we have had this debate before, with you using the same snippets of text to make your argument, if I find time I'll read the article you are quoting from:

Anti-Capitalist Movements
 http://www.commoner.org.uk/01-4groundzero.htm

Oh and while we are at it, perhaps you would like to read these articles that were also written by an anti-capitalist in the post-Genoa / post-9/11 period:

After Genoa: Reform or Revolution
 http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/3386

9/11: A Desperate Provocation by U.S. Capitalism
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2002/01/21075.html

9/11 in Context: Plans and Counter Plans
 http://colorado.indymedia.org/newswire/display/3877/index.php