You see Donald Rumsfeld on the street. A man with a gun jumps Rumsfeld, apparently bent on killing him.

Who will you defend?

The responses I found in the comments were… interesting.

Let’s take it up a notch.

You see Donald Rumsfeld on the street. Aaron jumps Rumsfeld, with a gun, apparently bent on killing him. Bob and Charlie attempt to jump Aaron, with guns, and fail. Aaron’s shot kills Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld’s bodyguards shoot Aaron and Bob and Charlie. Aaron and Bob die; Charlie lives. The police arrest several of Rumsfeld’s bodyguards, charging them with various felonies, and Charlie for attempted murder.

Who will you defend? For whom will you speak out? With whom will you stand in solidarity? Aaron? Bob? Charlie? Don? The cops?

Now let’s take our compass and protractor and discern the “middle.” With my ideological tools, I see it as a largely aboveground business, accepting incorporation but only as a camouflage, afraid to deal with the Counter-Economy but equally in fear of the consequences of following regulations which will weaken or destroy the business. A highly unstable position, to be sure, as it should be. Tilting to the Right decreases risk but leads to a weaker business and less profit and thus the incentive to go ever-further right, begging, bribing and cajoling more and more statist intervention to assist the market-alienated firm, until finally it becomes indistinguishable from a branch of the State.

Tilting to the Left increases risk, but also profit and fitting supply to demand. As the company becomes more Counter-Economic, it prospers accordingly and has more capital to re-invest (since it’s paying little or no taxes) but if “outed” by the State, it can suffer ever-greater penalties. Finally, it goes completely underground and is a major Enemy of the State and essentially a key part of the Agorist Revolutionary strategy.

What keeps most entrepreneurs hovering between semi-agorist and semi-bureaucratic are the countervailing vectors of Fear of Risk/Failure vs Fear of Violence and Coercion. A few break free in one direction, embracing the risk and enjoying the freedom for however long they can succeed, and a few go the other way, embracing the State and reveling in whatever power they are granted over others.

Accepting money or any favours whatsoever is always wrong. Seizing property in the State’s sphere is always right. And what about those who fear for their families, that they will not be able to support their spouse or have their children seized and taken away? Where does cowardice fit on the political spectrum?

– “Deep Agorist Theory”, Samuel Edward Konkin III, 22 November 1999, LeftLibertarian mailing list

Anna:

Killing a mafia boss’s family to get him to surrender is still murder.

Mike:

Assuming their innocence, your morality is beautiful.

Anna: aww thanks! *blush*

Well yes. This (your qualification) is also revealing. To blame an entire people for the actions of their government is precisely the mindset of “the terrorists”. When it is employed by other people, it doesn’t become any more palatable.

Also, Mike I think what you’re doing with your state-abandonment project is one of the first open examples of what I call “post-agorism”… that is to act in all ways without accepting anyone as a legitimate authority at the point of action, not just in catallactic ways.

Mike:

You’re welcome. And… *what*! “Post-agorism”? Hmmm… I look at agorism as a very, very young social current. Would, even, that it were as glorified a thing today as a “fringe movement”. It ain’t, yet, despite what me might wish.

“Post”-agorism? What would that even mean? I’m totally stoked for that, but, seriously… I am not asking to be a jackass, I’d really like to know what you’re referring to.

Don’t make any mistakes, though, about my alleged purity. Though I am doing some perhaps bold things on the intertubes these days, I am really doing so yet only in spaces where I feel relatively safe. In that vein, I would like to be as bold as possible. I would also like to avoid prison and the gallows in the process. I have bowed to authority in becoming re-documented; not because I think that is necessary, but because the “stateless person’s travel document” functions as a talisman to ward off cops who might otherwise jail me.

Anna:

Ahh what I mean by that is that Agorism is usually applied only to catallactic transactions, that is to counter-economics. But the theory behind it can be applied to your whole life. That authorities aren’t “authorities” just people trying to control you, and it’s up to you to decide what everything means… to you.

I think it’s only wise to avoid the super-mafias of the world when necessary, but I just think most people who call themselves “agorists” need to look past just making wealth on the grey or black markets and to their entire life.

Mike:

Empowering.

In truth, I have little idea what “most agorists” look at. Where I can, I try to read what they write. We share some ideas. I have adopted the label and come to push the agorist dialectic, because early last year I found myself reading a few explicitly agorist writings (Konkin, Spangler, Royce Christian, others) and found myself saying: here is where I stop. Here is where I am home. I’ve found a model, imperfect though it might be, wherein I can reorganize my perceptions, at least until something better comes along.

On a very meta level, I could criticize agorism for demanding secrecy TODAY in the hopes of realizing freedom TOMORROW. I could, but I won’t. The enemy is extraordinarily powerful, very well organized, and has crawled into the brainspaces of nearly every person on the planet to the extent that those have built part of their identity around the corruption. Secrecy seems necessary, at least in part, for practical reasons, though regrettable for idealistic ones.

– Samuel Edward Konkin III in An Agorist Primer, ch. 7, pp 76-78

David Gross of The Picket Line submits an exploration of ethical reductionism in the context of political theory: Does political philosophy reduce to ethical philosophy?

[This] is what makes the liberal political theories and their justifications difficult for me to swallow. They seem to have this backwards. According to them, some behavior at the ethical level switches from unethical to ethical based on the description it is given at the political level, rather than its description at the political level being based on an analysis of it at the ethical level. Whereas it seems to me that whether a particular action is ethical or not should not depend on what political system you’re operating under or what role the people involved play in that system; rather, whether the system is reasonable and coherent should depend on whether the individuals enacting their roles in that system behave ethically in so doing.

With his submission, he says: “Some anarchists and libertarians seem to believe that political philosophy reduces to ethical philosophy, the same way some scientists believe that chemistry ultimately reduces to physics. Is this part of the appeal of anarchism, and does it make sense?” I for one do believe that the political ought to reduce to the ethical, that this does make sense and that it is part of anarchism’s appeal. My own posting on the clown suit defense makes this point, though a bit obliquely.

Mike Billy of Reflections from a Rotting Nation writes of another incident in what seems to be a new trend driven by both advances in technology and some rather insane law in Teen Girl Charged With Sex Offense For Sending Nude Pictures of Herself.

The girl may receive a punishment of several years in a juvenile detention center and forced registration as a sex offender. This new status could prevent her from living within a specified radius of any school, church, or park for the rest of her life. It may also force her to inform all of her neighbors that she is a sex offender when she moves.

So now, not only does she have nude pictures of herself floating around, but she also has the stigma of being labeled a sex offender hanging over her head. But hey, that is the law and ignorance is no excuse.

The ABC News story linked to in the post has comments attached which present both many defenses of the girl’s action as well as a catalogue of what passes for sexual “morality” in America, especially as connected to children: “Satan on the loose”, “She doesn’t need jail, she needs therapy”, “What the hell are kids thinking these days!”

The blog post I never wrote reacting to this incident and to some of the ABC News commenters was going to bear the title, “Shocking news! Teen girls enjoy fucking”.

Mike also brings us The Financial Crisis is Not a Market Failure:

No, the financial crisis is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of fascism. Allowing one unchecked overarching organization known as the Federal Reserve to control the money supply and thus the interest rates has caused the failure.

And how do they propose to fix it? By having that same organization create even more money to bail out these banks.

Like a fly repeatedly striking a glass window, more of the same will not solve our problems. It is time to end the Fed.

The economics lemurs at nostate.com agree wholeheartedly.

Commenting on a resurgence of the Taliban and the displacement of the anemic, imperialist-funded state in Afghanistan, Darian Worden, author of Bring a Gun to School Day (worth reading, and promoting!), says, “Revolutionaries, Take Note“:

When desired goods and services are provided in a revolutionary context, the consumers then join entrepreneurs in building revolution. A revolution based on libertarian principles ought to build liberty outside of the system. It is not enough simply to tell people that the free market can do things better. They must be shown that we will make it do things better. Agorism and other left libertarian philosophies provide ideas for such action.

Pity the Taliban aren’t agorists, or anarchists of any stripe.

Francois Tremblay of the Check Your Premises blog submits a controversial article entitled “Why hierarchies are immoral“. He writes:

Anarchy, as a position on social organization, forces us to rethink the purpose of society itself. What is the goal of social action? While mainstream political ideologies disagree on various issues, there is one thing they all agree on: they universally elevate economic and technological progress as an ultimate, unimpeachable goal, and that the only disagreement is how to effect it and how fast. But this goal is driven by hierarchies that concentrate power and seek to expand that power by all means necessary. Anarchists are the only people who pipe up and say “hey, maybe this whole idea of limitless progress at all costs isn’t so great- maybe the costs are greater than we’re ready to accept.”

This post provoked a great deal of response, in my view, some of which can be found here, here, here, here and here, as well as in the comments to all those posts. One needn’t agree with Tremblay’s definition of hierarchy or with what he derives from it in order to find valuable explorations of social theory here.

Francois continues to push boundaries in his second submission, “I know what’s best for people”:

The Anarchist view is that our institutions and rules must be grounded in the individual’s values: that social morality, like everything else in society, must be a bottom-up system. In contrast, the ruling class imposes the concept of “law” in order to justify its coercive control over society.

An extremely important point, and one which ought to be shouted constantly at those who would seize control of whatever illegitimate coercive apparatus is at hand in order to try to impose their own vision of a “shining city on a hill” upon the rest of us. Looking at this from an agorist perspective, we might say that there is a tendency where if the values forced upon people do not comport with those of the individuals subjected to them, then the power of black and gray markets will increase. Or, as Princess Leia told the Governor: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Hosting the carnival gives me a little bit of power, which of course begs to be abused. In that spirit, I present also two things that I wrote this past month: Agorism and ancap panarchy – a response to an Obama voter, and The Golden Rule is insufficient.

Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

From Wikipedia:

Some girl (probably not a samurai) pretends to prepare to do something with a samurai sword during filming of some movie

Tsujigiri (辻斬 tsuji-giri, literally ‘crossroads killing’) is a Japanese term for a practice when someone, after receiving a new katana or developing a new fighting style or weapon, tests its effectiveness by attacking a human opponent. Originally, this practice took the form of traditional duels between bushi, but as the classical ideals of Bushidō were largely forgotten during the Edo Period, the mannerisms of Tsujigiri became increasingly dishonorable. By the 18th Century, it was not uncommon to hear of ronin ambushing unarmed peasants in the dark for simple amusement. A warrior who practiced this often would often be referred to as a Tsujigiri.

Essentially, the question posed by the assignment was this: Imagine that in your society the errant samurai was not sanctioned for ambushing and killing a hapless passerby simply to test his new blade. Does that make it right?

Having recently liberated myself from a fettering moral absolutism, I predictably and foolishly adopted the utterly unfettered relativist position and proclaimed in my essay that even though such a practice might seem barbaric today, it was morally acceptable because it formed an accepted part of the culture which existed in that place and time. It’s been a long while since then, and the essay is lost; perhaps I discussed what little I knew of the samurai code and its origins, imperial Japanese culture and other such matters.

What I certainly did not address in the paper were the passersby themselves. Ooops. I’d thrown away what I considered the stifling values of my upbringing in the name of discovering truth by its own lights. Unfortunately, I’d thrown out a great deal of the good along with the bad, leaving me in a place where, from my diminished principles, it was entirely possible to simply ignore the fact that the passersby were human beings. Definitely not part of the analysis was an examination of the moral standing of each of the actual participants in the tsujigiri exchange — the heavily armed, imperially-costumed samurai and the hapless peasant traveler — or any questioning of how the situation would be different if, instead, both or none were wearing the same costumes, or if the sword was moved from one set of hands to the other. I never asked myself about the samurai’s political status relative to that of the peasant or about what privilege was implied by the samurai’s costume. Certainly I knew nothing of the clown suit argument. I examined the beliefs of the collective in terms of my own belief that there could be no objective morality, and came to the preposterous conclusion that this jolly slaughter at roadside was just fine. The samurai was the samurai, and that was the system.

I’ve started writing a new version of my essay response to this tsujigiri question. I have just completed a first draft:

Tsujigiri

by Michael Gogulski

Down with the samurai! Death to the Emperor!

How do you think it sounds so far? I know I need a lot more words to reach 1,500 and I do need to mention something about moral relativism, but this is kinda what I’d like to say. Any tips?

To the most recent, Francois Tremblay offered both praise and a question of consistency:

I also applaud you, however do you also do the same for corporations? It seems to me that if you refused ALL statist jobs you would be on the street, unless small businesses and coops are much more numerous over there.

Though I have been refusing all manner of government work — both directly employed by governments or by companies that exist only to serve governments — for a very long, I have not really bothered thus far to firmly delineate that which I find acceptable versus unacceptable. I will attempt to do so here.

There are some basic ideas in play here which derive from my own philosophical axioms:

• Government is evil
• One should endeavor to avoid actions which support or strengthen government, thus avoiding evil
• Taxation is theft, and therefore evil, and doubly so since it supports the evil that is government
• Taking money stolen via taxation for oneself at the very least carries the taint of evil, and in very many cases makes one complicit in the original theft and therefore guilty of doing harm

If I may be forgiven for misrepresenting any of Francois’s views, there is an additional critique of the relationship between state and corporation which must be added here, and it consists of things like:

• The corporation is a creature of the state, a privilege granted by evil, and therefore morally questionable at best, condemnable at worst
• Corporations have successfully manipulated state mechanisms everywhere in order to secure greater privileges for themselves and their owners than accrue to ordinary people, and continue to do so
• The legal concept of limited liability is an abomination against natural law, and serves to encourage corporations to act more immorally than fully-accountable individuals might absent it
• The legal tradition of treating a corporation as having status equal to that of a person is also abominable, and leads to additional tendencies toward abuse by those exercising the state-granted corporate privilege

There is much to be added to both of these lists, of course, and others have done a far better job than I ever will of cataloging the immorality of both state and corporation. I believe that I share common ground with Francois in the critique of the corporation as statist creature at the fundamental level, though one as clever as he and one as obstinate as I will no doubt find any number of points to argue over bitterly. I believe I also share the view with him that one should work to minimize the evil they do and the evil they support in every way possible.

As recently as the beginning of this year, I sometimes took on a very narrow subset of government contracts. I was once asked to translate a tender for supply of small-arms ammunition to the Slovak military, and rejected it out of hand. At the same time, when a request came in to translate some text to be used by an agency working to promote tourism in Slovakia, I accepted it. I believe very strongly in the value of casting things into moral absolute categories, but must recognize also that there is a continuum. And, presented with the opportunity to reclaim some of the money stolen from me in tax by the state, I thought that doing the state’s work in one of its least harmful manifestations would be acceptable. Tourism okay, supporting the troops, fuck no. The limit to this would be that one should not accept in compensation for work from the state any more than the value stolen from you previously in tax.

That view of mine has already changed, and led to a new formulation of principle for me: Stealing back what the state has stolen from you is morally acceptable. But working to support the state in exchange for what has been stolen is not acceptable because you are still supporting the state by doing so.

I’ve had more than one client come back to me, after learning my position on working for the state, and offer something along the lines of “Well, you’re not really working for the government; I have this contract already, someone’s going to do it, might as well be you, you’re working for me.” This doesn’t hold up for me one bit. Adding layers of misdirection to hide the original theft of taxation would not change the fact that I commit evil by taking stolen money in support of the state through my work.

I have long rejected working for companies which do a large portion of their business with government. Before I became independent of “bosses” two years ago, I did not apply this principle consistently. But I can recount many telephone discussions with recruiters about job opportunities with companies which are basically state organs in private form (think “defense” contractors in particular, and others), and telling them there was no way morally I could work for such a firm. At the same time, and I will give particulars here, there is much to hate about General Electric. Even so, several years ago I accepted a one-year contract with GE Medical Systems to develop software, network infrastructure and procedures which allow doctors and medical technicians to receive training on the operation of MRI, x-ray, CAT scan and other medical devices via network delivery as opposed to having a trainer physically sent to the hospital/clinic work site. GE happens to be a company which makes death weapons as well as life-saving devices. Gray area? Maybe. I really needed the job in any case. Would I work for GE Medical Systems again today if the opportunity was there and the incentives interesting? I’m not sure (the corporate “culture” there is something which if placed in a Petri dish on a bit of substrate would rapidly spill out into a sickening, purulent mass which would fill all available space and consume everything in the production of its own tumorous growth), but I still wouldn’t object on moral grounds.

There are some questions I ask myself when considering a job which carries the potential taint of the state:

• Who pays? If the answer is taxpayers, I refuse.
• Who owns the company? If it is a state-controlled company, or a branch of the state, I refuse.
• Would this job exist were it not for the state? If no, refuse. This is a tricky point, in that I do accept jobs which violate this from time to time, such as the time I translated a response from an auto manufacturer to the Slovak anti-monopoly office defending itself against a charge of “unfair competition”. I also accept work from recently-privatized utility companies; the ownership of them remains dubious and the notion that a territorial monopoly on the scale even of a country as small as Slovakia is dubious as well, but it would be akin to suicide to refuse cooperation with those who bring clean water, electricity and other services into my home. I do refuse “public” transport companies and the “private” companies which develop the roads, but do so because they fail one or both of the first two criteria above.
• Will my work result in harm to anyone? If yes, refuse. It’s difficult if not impossible to know all of the potential implications of one’s action, of course, but when the answer to this is clear then so is my response.

I would like to live in a world in which the privileges that corporations in all their forms enjoy were abolished. I would like to also educate those who take state privilege as to why there is immorality in their firms’ conception. I would also not like to starve. The vast majority of my clients are incorporated as limited liability corporations or stock corporations, and this is especially true of all the translation agencies that send me work. I would like to stand on principle, but as Francois alludes to, truly standing on such principle in this world will lead one to ruin.

At the same time, even though they enjoy the privileges conferred by the state, not all corporations are necessarily evil simply by virtue of being corporations. There is an easy scale to point to which suggests that their evil (or capacity for evil) increases in proportion to their size, but then we also have counterexamples such as GE developing and selling life-saving medical devices which break the easy formulation. The fact that the statist corporate form exists and offers so many benefits is a problem which in my mind should be attacked in terms of the state itself and the institution of the corporation. I find it very difficult, though, to find fault with the businessman who, having grown his one-man operation to the point where he would like to expand, incorporated in order to gain flexibility and protection. This is rational behavior on his part.

It is also true that given the corporate-statist milieu we have before us, many businesses simply could not operate were it not for the corporate form. I should not wish that every airline disappear, however, nor refuse to patronize them simply because they are creatures of the present system. And I am not going to win any arguments with my clients by suggesting that they forsake limited liability and the other benefits the corporate form provides. They, also, must eat.

"The Deal" by woodsy @ sxc.hu

Dear ____,

Thank you for making contact today.

I might have been clearer on the phone regarding my refusal of government work. The document you sent is a response from ____ to the EU about some scandal involving ____. From the document you sent:

“The shareholders of _____ are: The Ministry of _____ (__%) and the ___ of the Slovak Republic (__%).”

So, ____ is a government agency.

My objection is not about terminology or difficulty of the work. Rather, I believe that governments are evil, immoral organizations that exist only by stealing through taxation. I don’t want to support such evil and immorality in any way, and I don’t want to take stolen money in payment. Therefore, I will do no work at all for governments.

So, I would not be willing to handle this one for you. If you do have something for ____, ____, etc, I would certainly be willing to have a look at that for you in the future.

Best regards,
Mike

Voting for representative government is an act of violence. The only morally acceptable vote is one given to a referendum, and only when it is “no” to the expansion of government power or “yes” to its reduction.

Hundreds of years ago, bright people recognized that organizing society around a monarch with a “divine mandate” and hereditary succession was logically and morally unacceptable. The system we’ve inherited, democracy, changed nothing about the fundamental immorality of placing rulers above individuals, it merely altered the formula for stamping “legitimacy” upon them. Today, “democracy” is the God of politics, and voting its chief sacrament.

One day, I reckon, people will look back at this time and think, “gee, good on them for getting rid of the divine right of kings, but how silly they must have been to replace it with democracy!”

Mock teh vote!

Why not pop over, register, and do a bit of mocking of your own?

First of all, and let me be very clear, I love you guys (and girls).

Around 8:30am Pacific Time on September 11, 2001, after my girlfriend and I had watched — shocked, horrified, and barely awake — mass murder in our bedroom as the second World Trade Center tower collapsed , her prior boyfriend sent out a message on a local Santa Cruz, California-based chat and messaging system that predates the modern internet.

What he said exactly, I don’t remember. But the essence of it was this: “This is the end of America. Martial law is coming. The last barriers have fallen today.”

I recognized the truth of this immediately. The thought was my own, though he found a voice for it first. He’s at least one more standard deviation away from the human average intelligence than I am, so it was no surprise that he’d get through the shock to the most important conclusion more rapidly than I could.

He was right of course. We both were. The USA PATRIOT Act, the Global War on Terror, Military Commissions Act, FISA, fusion centers, national security letters, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, FOX NEWS, stormtroopers on the streets, gleeful embrace of the new American authoritarianism, mothers forced to publicly consume their own bottled breast milk at the airport, the Imperial Presidency, $400 million for construction of large-scale detention centers inside the US, no impeachment no matter how great the lies, the rise of a modern Stasi culture in the land of the “free” and home of the “brave”, all set to the stirring anthems of American exceptionalism and slogans evoking bygone days when things like words and principles and logic actually meant something.

No matter what you think is the truth of 9/11, no matter what you’ve heard or read or thought or said, you do have to watch the video. I’ll explain why in a moment.

What do I believe, you ask? I am really not sure what to believe. I’ve watched and read and listened to probably every substantive argument made, every investigative dissection and every crackpot, jackass theory about the events of 9/11. I’ve seen all the movies, I’ve watched all the YouTube videos. I’ve read the manifestos, the scientific probes and the loony fringe theories.

What falls out of all this, so many years later, is that there does not exist a preponderance of evidence  — nay, not even so weak a standard as probable cause — to believe that the official story of the events of that day is substantially in accordance with the truth. Some ancient cultures believed such rubbish as that the Earth was flat and carried on the back of great elephants who stood on the backs of cosmic turtles who rested atop more elephants and further turtles, ad inifinitum. At least the ancients chose such solid, believable creatures as elephants and turtles. What we are asked to believe today is that the modern reality of Western civilization is a world, donut-shaped, resting atop a house of cards supported by toothpicks and propped up by tissue-paper origami.

The 9/11 Chronicles: Truth Rising is a landmark film. The actors are nothing special, the audio mixing is often sub-par, the cinematography is uninspiring and there is no plot to speak of. Even the subject matter, at times — and especially for the uninitiated — may fail to connect and evoke the emotional response necessary for cinema to be an effective medium for human expression.

Also available in higher quality via BitTorrent download and from infowars.com on DVD.

What you are watching, though, isn’t an entertainment production. It’s not even really a documentary in the traditional sense. But what occurs, powerfully and over and over again is a profound conflict, a human story of several extraordinarily passionate serfs confronting their masters with their own hypocrisy, and refusing to back down in the face of overwhelming force. Whatever you believe about 9/11, whatever you believe about “Islamofascists” and “Axes of Evil”, even the most benighted and deluded of you should recognize — in what they do, what they say, and how they act — the human spirit. The indomitable, courageous and unyielding force of a being strong and brave enough to stand up to his master and say: “WHAT THE FUCK?” and “NO MORE!” and “HOW CAN YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT, AND STILL CALL YOURSELVES HUMAN?”

And again, and again, and again and again, the response comes back, oh so clearly, from those they challenge, those who have sold their souls and their humanity — be it for mere money, for status, for power or just for the chance to be on the team they feel is winning. The response is nearly uniform in its contempt, in its disgust that these mere peons would dare to question their masters. It is entirely uniform, though, in the self-abnegation, the servility displayed by those so-called “humans” who would defend that donut-shaped earth atop that house of cards supported by those toothpicks resting on that tissue-paper origami.

For showing this clearly, the authors of the film have won my endless praise. The bravery and dedication necessary to do this is no trifling matter. These people face death threats, harassment, physical assault, ridicule and legal action everywhere they go.

The fundamental analysis of the 9/11 truth movement is simple: the global elite — whoever they are — using their governmental tools either caused the attacks to happen or let them happen in order to profit from them. Those responsible are criminals of the highest order, and must be brought to justice.

If you accept that analysis, however, you must imagine that this elite is both very powerful and completely divorced from the morality of the common people.

Yet the 9/11 truth movement has adopted a rather strange posture in response. The call goes out over and over again to “demand a new investigation”. Who is going to carry out this investigation? Who shall be charged with carrying out the mechanics of bringing the criminals to justice? Why, the state, of course! That very institution which the fundamental analysis of 9/11 truth puts forward as being the instrument of the attacks. That very institution which is the tool of the elite who wanted the attack to happen. A great many of the people in the movement believe that the state was culpable in producing the destruction and terror of 9/11, yet they persist in appealing to the state to discipline itself.

This is madness! If the fundamental analysis of 9/11 truth is correct, what you are doing is the equivalent of asking a group of war criminals, the darkest evil in their hearts, heavily armed and with the support of millions, to simply turn themselves in. Why on earth would they do that? Why would they take any action whatsoever to disadvantage themselves? And do you really think that trying to shame those responsible will have any effect whatever? If they are responsible, they set aside such petty human concerns as shame, guilt and empathy long, long ago. You might as well approach the rabid dog that just tore your child’s throat out and ask, “now, puppy, don’t you feel ashamed for what you’ve done?”

If the 9/11 truth movement’s cause is just and if it is to succeed in bringing justice, a change of strategy and tactics is required. The state will never deliver justice if it itself is culpable.