9 Februay 2005: Ruppert "clarifies" his 9/11 activism position

Mike Ruppert has issued some remarks concerning the controversy over his recent speech in Seattle in his introduction to Catherine Fitts' new article at FTW, "WILL THE REAL ECONOMIC HIT MEN
PLEASE STAND UP?". Since I have recently let my FTW subscription lapse and have no plans to throw my cash in that direction again, I can only comment on his introduction and not the subscribers-only article. My comments are interspersed in brackets:

There are no real avenues left for 911 activism in the traditional sense of the word. The election is over. All three 9/11 suits (Hilton, Mariani and the Saudi case) have been dismissed or morphed as I said they would be. Congress has shown and will show no courage. The 9/11 Commission (totally compromised) has closed its doors. The Justice Department (part of the 9/11 plot) will do nothing. The courts are compromised and the mainstream media (also part of the crime) has moved on. NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer has yet to do anything with the 9/11 material he has received, remaining quiet in order to protect his bid for the NY state house. [First of all, Ruppert has hardly touched on all the possibilities for "activism in the traditional sense of the word", unless 'activism' refers only to legal and legislative action exclusively through offical channels. Even on those terms, however, this is still the worst possible time to throw in the towel for good on any possibilities for traction within the "establishment". The way things are shaping up, the Bush administration could face a monumental defeat on Social Security "reform". This wouldn't do anything in itself for 9/11 Truth activism, but the psychological sea change on Capitol Hill in the wake of such a defeat could open up unexpected opportunities, which might offer some traction even if they are only limited ones. So, I think that judgements on 9/11 activism through official channels should be withheld at least until we see how the Social Security battle plays out. Moreover, it has only been four years since 9/11 — Congress was pressured to create the House Assassinations Committe in the 1970s and partially reopen the JFK investigation more than a decade after the fact. Notwithstanding that it was a defensive limited hangout, it goes to show that there is no statute of limitations on this sort of thing when it comes to potential official action. So why the hurry to move on?]

But there are new channels of real accountability that can change the world, if 911 activists can persuade activist communities to understand the realities of economic warfare and to begin to promote marketplace strategies. Real headway can be made if we withdraw our deposits, purchases, investments and attention from media, banks, companies and investors complicit in 911 and war profiteering and cover up. These marketplace strategies can dovetail with other innovative tactics, building financial constituencies to support the rule of law [but supporting "the rule of law", i.e. institutional tactics, is just what Ruppert has seemingly dismissed as an objective of activism! But only now he invokes "dovetailing"...]. What would Elliot Spitzer do if millions of New Yorkers threatened to withdraw all of their money from the large New York Federal Reserve banks unless he moved forward with an investigation? What would happen if hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers cancelled their subscriptions to the New York Times in protest over the lies of 911? [but all of this sounds to me like "activism in the traditional sense of the word". I suppose the real message here is that 9/11 Truth Activism is useful, but only if it follows the "road map" of Ruppert, Fitts, et. al.]

There is still a great deal to learn from 9/11 that can proactively help individuals to read the real map of the world and make a difference in their own lives. This involves a fundamental change of approach: the old, futile course of action asks citizens to go hat in hand to government and corporate interests to make them change (an impossibility), while the new approach says that if the citizens themselves change enough within, that change can shift markets while there is still time to make some difference in the outcome for individual lives. In other words, one approach tries to convince us that the right path is to get someone else (with no interest in doing so) to save us and the other says that we must accept the responsibility for saving ourselves and gather and exercise the real power we have and have not yet used. [This is all the same old claptrap we've heard so many times before. The wheezy age-of-aquarius rhetoric that we can change the world by changing ourselves "from within". The delusion that we can take on corporate power simply by "voting with our pocketbooks" and defeat them on their own chosen battlefield by "changing markets". Isn't that stuff getting rather long in the tooth? And as usual, the too-general lumping together of government and corporate interests, perhaps with the implication that we should oppose ourselves to the former in lock-step with our opposition to the latter (a red herring that has been promoted as a phony opposition philosophy by the antistatist neoliberal elites themselves, through agents like the Club of Rome's David Korten, whom Ruppert promotes). Is this actually what Ruppert intends? After all, his political philosophy already implies a fundamental bypassing of national governments and the creation of new global governance authority, as seen in his calls (albeit increasingly vague in response to criticism) for a convocation of global leaders to arrive at a radical population control strategy, and the standard "peak oil" line that a new single global institution must be created in the very near future to regulate and control worldwide petroleum production — forever, assumedly. His green-ish communitarian localism doesn't contradict this; in fact, this outlook not only implies but in any practical sense demands new global regulatory authorities to control a critical subset of human affairs in order for radically localized economies to function successfully with the semi-autonomous characteristics he and Fitts envision. But the more important point is this: Ruppert is apparently not really opposing 9/11 activism after all; most of what he says here fits the normal and familiar concept of using direct grassroots action in some kind of synergy with organized, institutional approaches. It's just that he only seems to recognize value in it if we do it his way.]