Dan LaLiberte and Rev. Ian Alterman contributed to this article
American politics
are like a schizophrenic coquette, teasing the American people with promises of
love and great sex and serious commitment. But she systematically and
consistently delivers none of these.
And so it goes: we
are seduced by the marketing machine that created Obama, then disappointed by
his centrism. We are betrayed by his expansion of war and torture, and then
even more frustrated when the right-wing surges at the mid-terms.
Looking back, how
did Clinton's use of bombs in the former Yugoslavia differ that much from
Bush's illegal war in Iraq? Both Clintons (Bill and Hillary) were involved in
the black operations of Iran/Contra, as were all levels of the family Bush.
American politics
seems locked in this pattern, two parties who stand mostly just to negate each
other, passionate for nothing as much as the other's annihilation. Yet when you
step outside their drama, you see their economic and foreign policies are
almost identical. The loud rivalry is all sound and fury, signifying about as
much as a feud between two egomaniac celebrities.
Who will break the
pattern?
What ideas and
practices are compelling enough to break us all out of this seductive trance?
The answer is a new
politics that addresses the whole body politic. A comprehensive politics that
is spiritual, that understands history. A spirit that understands the unique
nature of the USA, that has empathy for both right and left, without being
limited by either.
In mid August of this year, I
started something called The Truth Gathering, an informal conference to do
something practical around peace and truth. Since leaving the Green Party, I
have been carefully creating the groundwork for something new: The Truth Party.
The ideas grew out of my life-long
commitment to help end war, and the nine years I've spent questioning the
Bush/Cheney story on 9/11. I have started a couple companies in my day, because
I'm interested in publishing and producing alternative economic models of life.
I'm a punk rocker from DC willing to do whatever it takes to fire the people up
to stand up against the plastic death machine that is American life.
The Truth Gathering
was a lot of fun. We had lefties and Constitutional conservatives. Christians
and post-modernists. A bunch of people were spooked about the White House's
Cass Sunstein's declaration
to "infiltrate" and "disrupt" the 9/11 Truth Movement. And ironically enough,
we also had a guy who had only read and admired Sunstein's work on how the
internet can make knowledge more democratic, i.e. crowd-sourcing.
We were out in the
middle of the Catskill Mountains, upstate NY, with only around 60 people.
And yet, we all came away inspired, fired up. We saw something. We saw a
future.
The
New York Times noted how happy
and united everyone seemed. Their blogger, Dr. Stanley Fish did a story that
was interesting for its internal conflicts. It started out cynical like most
mainstream reporting on the Truth Movement. But eventually, this writer had to
recognize that in his own life, he was surrounded by truthers, good people who
have the common sense to put no faith in another Bush/Cheney lie. This same
paper that has never recognized the "9/11 Truth Movement" finally
reported on this, the most novel part of the peace movement today.
I am a
truther. It makes me a more able form of activist. I got up to the Catskills
early and did four days of constant, mantra-like promotion of the Truth
Gathering. The experience of marketing the event in small towns provided new
insights.
I was able to
connect to a soldier who had just done three tours in Afghanistan. I thanked
him for risking his butt over there. Then I told him I was doing the same thing
here at home. I told him I too loved the Bill of Rights, and that I needed his
help now in this police state that rules by shock and awe.
I kept
getting good responses from people when I told them the Gathering was all about
"peace activism through 9/11 truth." If the U.S. government system
can only go to war now through an artificial event, then this leads to a
startling conclusion. If only a highly-charged emotive stimulus will get us to
permit war, then that means the days of
war itself are numbered.
What is the future of the USA, as a political influence on
the world? Are we here, on this planet, to brutally display the same old
enforcement of bloody empire? I say we are an original creation.
Recently in LA,
talking to fellow activist Daniel Pinchbeck, I asked him what he thought about
9/11 truth activism. "9/11 is a black hole," he said.
I agree that this
can be true. I have seen good
people become obsessed with the minutia and the details. Sometimes it seems the
more esoteric the theory, the better. Some of us get so excited by what we've
found, we can't connect to other people. It seems that people in the peace
movement are either passionate truthers, or they passionately hate the way truthers
often talk about nothing else.
9/11 truth is only
good as a path to go through the
black hole. It's important to have the courage to confront the truth about the
darkest evil of our day. The weakness of American culture is that we are raised
on a diet of very little substance. We are not raised to respect truth. The
facts that the Truth Movement calls attention to are a set of facts that many
of us can't even bear to gaze upon. But the facts are indeed there: the CIA and
Pentagon were in fact very close to the key "9/11 hijackers" and shepherded
them through the USA before 9/11. It's never been proven who did 9/11, and the
Bush/Cheney 9/11 Commission of DC insiders is today declaiming its own work. Laws
of physics saw that those buildings could not have exploded the way they did.
Jet fuel fires of 700 Fahrenheit can not melt steel to 2000 Fahrenheit. In
2009, high-end explosive "nano-thermite" showed up in scientific tests of four
dust samples from the wreckage.
But if we go here,
into the facts, only to stew here, in this soup, we risk stagnating in the
"black hole." How can we come back out into a place of light, of peace-making,
of understanding?
Well, now you know
the wisdom of the founders of this country. The idea behind the First Amendment
is that it is better to let a free-flow of information exist, so that the
reason and light within us all can be allowed to be the supreme authority.
The U.S.A. was
built to be a truth machine. We are a product of the Enlightenment. When
you think of the history of the USA, don't just
remember the crimes our country committed in its bloody birth (slavery,
genocide of natives, Hiroshima, etc.) When you think of the USA's greatest
legacy in the past 100 years, think Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, or
Dorothy Day.
These are the real
American heroes. Not theoreticians, but activists. They were prophets. They
used a kinetic form of direct action non-violence to quickly win massive gains
for justice. It's their legacy that is the future. Instead of a bloody empire,
we need to become the country that is #1 at peaceful, enlightened conflict
resolution. We can lead the world in what Gandhi called
"truth-force." YES this is the hard road. YES this is going to take
all of the blood, sweat and tears that we all can muster. But this is how we
regain ourselves, our moral dignity. This is how we rip ourselves off the path
of torture, secrets, and war. This is how we can create something for the USA
to stand for, at home, and as an example to the world.
The Freedom of
Religion clause in the First Amendment is a kind of anti-war document in
itself. The interminable wars of post-Medieval Europe were largely based on the
miscegenation of religion in a bad romance with state power. The first words of
the First Amendment abjure the U.S. State's preference of any one religion. We
see here the Founders setting us on a trajectory towards peace and freedom.
Out of these bold,
liberating ideas, we were able to form a multi-ethnic democracy. We were a new
country, but also a new kind of
country. We weren't defined by a single national ethnic identity. Here, the
people are sovereign, and the Republic rests on the consent of the governed.
The Bill of Rights sought to limit state power so that democracy could begin to
exist.
The only problem is
that the money-power in this country has become so potent, the people don't
know their rights, their freedoms, they don't know the truth about world
events, and they don't know how to withdraw their consent. We have two
political parties on the same side when it comes to all the key issues: war,
torture, secrecy, Wall Street power, the Fed, 9/11 Official Story, etc.
Well, I can tell
you one way you can begin to withdraw your consent. It's to read the U.S. Constitution.
There you see a reasonable blueprint for a peaceful country. There, one crime
and one crime only is deemed important enough to be defined: treason. The US Constitution defines
treason as "levying
war against the United States." After nine years of intense research, I can
prove that 9/11 was an act of treason.
The reason this
issue will not go away, and only becomes more relevant is that even in these
times of confusion, in which a lack-of-truth is preached as a cultural gospel,
the war machine in the USA thought it could rely on the American people's
laziness. They thought we would ignore the artificially created justifications
for their current wars. But they gravely miscalculated. Three different scientific
polls show the country divided on the 9/11 issue.
And if you read the
case law
on exactly what the Founders meant by putting that stuff about treason in the
Constitution, you get the message that fooling the people into war is one of
the gravest mortal sins you can commit.
If there is any question about
a "cause of war" we Americans are ordered by our founding charter to
treat the question with exquisite care, with scientific rigor. Because war is
so terrible, treason is the creation of war, through false means.
But instead of 9/11
being questioned, our media and government have bent over backwards to attack
and censure the grassroots movement that has not only asked the right questions
about the War on Terror, it has influenced US and world opinion with its
skepticism.
Over the course of
nine years, I have seen the emergence of a new politics, inside the model of
the 9/11 Truth Movement. The Truth Party is not something I "founded"
so much as something that reflects an already-emerging political reality. The
Truth Movement showed me that people on both the right and the left can and do
unite against huge US government falsehoods. We have been inspired to take up
the weapons of free speech against "State Crimes Against Democracy" a new term
coined by sociologists. We have created the beginnings of a mass movement for peace,
through truth. We have lived for freedom, through action.
Books on
social organizing show that flat-hierarchy, grassroots movements are
unstoppable. In Starfish and the Spider,
the authors point out that people united around common values, are much harder
to beat than movements or cultures reliant on lock-step authority. The ancient
classic Art of War also says that a
small organization will defeat a larger one if the smaller one has "the
fullness" or the unity of spirit.
Let's return now to the Catskills. I want to hand the mike
over to Daniel LaLiberte, an activist from Boston who was there. We are working
on truthgathering.com together. Here are his thoughts on what the Truth
Gathering was, and what it means for the future:
The
Truth Gathering was a confluence of people with many different perspectives on
all the problems of the world, shining a beacon of truth on everything that is
happening, deep into our history, and far into the future, all focused through
the lens of 9/11 truth. The image that is forming is how we, all of humanity,
can imagine waking up not just about 9/11 truth, but how we can truly, finally,
get our collective act together on a global scale.
What is
already happening is an ever-increasing acceleration of communications between
all peoples, locally and globally, people investigating and reporting, groups
organizing and deploying. The evidence of what is happening is everywhere on
the Internet, and spilling out into real life.
It's
already happening, but the Truth Party can serve as an active catalyst to help
move it along even faster. There is no time to lose. We should foster that same
spirit of integrity and trust that we found at the Truth Gathering, growing
thousands of Truth Gatherings at all scales around the world. We should
certainly meet face to face, especially in our local communities. That is the
foundation.
What we
intend specifically is the first-ever global Truth Gathering, August 2011, with
a two-way, global internet broadcast on TruthGathering.com, and real-space
events as well. Using new online video communications, we can make the Truth
Gathering bigger and better. The future is wide open and promising!
Are you wondering
how we could actually unite people around peace and truth? Well, if you look at
all the world's religions, they all advocate "truth." Even secular
communities show that we seem to be created for truth; it's in our blood, a
beauty that refers back to our Creator. This is what the Rev. Ian Alterman had
to say, in his speech at the Truth Gathering:
It is
instructive to note that every faith — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism,
Hinduism, etc. — and even non-believers are motivated by a seeking of, even a
thirst for, "truth." In Exodus, God is described as "merciful,
gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth." And
"truth" is among the three most common words is Psalms and Proverbs.
In the
Qur'an, adherents are admonished to "mix not truth with falsehood, [to]
not conceal the truth." In the Yajurveda [that would be the third of four
canonical texts of Hinduism, for all you pagans to Hinduism out there], we
find, "I am renouncing untruth and embracing truth. One should accept
truth, and should sacrifice their life to protect truth … I take an oath that
I shall always protect truth … Unless we do not renounce our greed we cannot
protect truth. Untruth inhibits self-development and physical, mental and
spiritual growth. Therefore we should all adhere by truth."
John
notes about Jesus "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us … full of
grace and truth." Jesus said of Himself that He was "The way, the
truth and the life." And, of course, John also gave us one of our greatest
quotes, cited by believers and non-believers alike: "And you shall know
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." So in many senses, God is,
indeed, truth.
Before he died
earlier this year, historian Howard Zinn said he'd like to be remembered
"for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in
the hands of people with wealth and guns, ultimately rests in people themselves
and that they can use it."
So, then, let's use it! But use it
in ways that we have not yet dreamt of.
There are huge
untapped powers of creativity in all of us, and in our collective democratic
endeavors. We can tap back into our Country's founding principles. We can unite
a mass movement for change, around the ideas of peace and truth. It's already
underway.
Get
Involved!
Truth Party Google Group.
Do you code? Read
about the new TruthGathering.com we are building, here.
