'New World Orderism', The Guardian and Syria

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Below is a comment - not by me - on a piece by Julian Borger attacking Charlie Shelton's investigation into the Syrian opposition. It is deliberately provocative and full of straw men as well as tin hats.

Borgers is a good piece every word of which I agree with, but I must insist that there is nothing anti-US or anti-imperialist about the tinfoil-hatters who will attack it. They are, when you peel away the first layer of the onion, white supremacist, elitist and anti-semitic devotees of American Exceptionalism. How often have you heard a troofer affect to mock the idea that "a gang or Arabs" could work the controls of a modern aeroplane?
Their world view is that everything on the face of the planet is either at rest or else in uniform straight-line motion unless one of the Jews who run America acts upon it. They believe that not only the "Islamist" and secular/liberal parties in middle-eastern countries but also the socialist and communist parties are all being run by the CIA. There is nothing either anti-US or anti-imperialist about mourning the fall of Hosni Mubarak. It's just a twisted determination to see every event as proof of the omnipotence of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy which has occupied America.

I do feel there is something to the accusation that New World Order - Bilderberg - Jewish conspiracy - David Ickistss see the world through a distorted prism. They believe the UN is trying to take over America, rather than America taking over the UN. The commentator reduces the 9/11 inside job claims to 'a bunch of Arabs couldn't have done it' racism, and is grossly unfair, although it is true that that line has been used and it does smack a bit of racism. However, you don't have to be a New World Orderist to recognise the evidence that Mossad and the CIA had a pretty good handle on the 9/11 plot long before 9/11. If you choose not to look at those facts* or to denigrate them, that is your choice.

But I am not a New World Orderist inasmuch as I don't believe that the world is run according to a single overarching conspiracy. I also don't accept the official account of 9/11, because the evidence against it being the whole story is overwhelming.

The NWO line is trotted out in the propaganda doc Thrive, a kind of NWO utopian techno bourgeois save-American-freedom-with-the-aliens manifesto. If only we can harness alien technology, we can overthrow the bankers and big business, reduce taxes to zero and solve climate change with free energy for all. Some of these goals are very worthy, but Thrive dodges the tough political questions with utopia. One problem with NWO is it is very American-centric. It fails to see that we live in an increasingly multipolar world with new powers and regions challenging traditional western dominance. China is the foremost of these. It also denies agency to all the other actors in the world. They are all patsies of NWO. That cannot be true unless you are a fantasist. It is also Manichean in that it sees a banker-controlled US government puppeteering events in all countries. It is fundamentally mistaken to believe that an imperialist power, however mighty, can actually control events. The history of empire is strewn with disasters and unanticipated outcomes of attempts to maintain dominance. Otherwise empires would never fall - or lose a battle or a war. Some NWOists want to purify the American Project by removing internationalist / Jewish banking elements from the US elite and return to Jeffersonian (white AngloSaxon) democracy.

It seems facile to see all evil as emanating from America, even though a lot does. Tyrants are ten a penny, thankfully less common than they were. For me, governments who use slaughter and terror to control their populations are not worthy of defending, even if one does not want tyranny replaced by neoliberal oligarchy. We have to have faith that people fighting for freedom will not passively fall in line with the US State Department's vision of limited pro-western democracy. One might not agree with the ideology of all Bashar al-Assad's opponents, but that should not translate into supporting Assad against 'western imperialism' while his forces crush the resistance of the people. This is my enemy's enemy thinking and it is both two-dimensional and callous toward those who are suffering. The right to resist oppression and tyranny is inviolable, and is not conditional on whether you share the views of the oppressed. Otherwise your thinking is no different from the 'imperialists'. Sometimes, when fighting your oppressor, you may take offers of support from those whose motives are not honourable or good. That's politics - and it is what revolutionaries have done down the centuries. Syrians have as much right to fight tyranny and state violence as the next man or woman. Who are comfortable westerners to tell them not to truck with US imperialists? If they do that, it is at their own risk.

* the most obvious being the Susan Lindauer story, the dancing Israelis recording the Twin Towers attacks and the Gomel Chesed Cemetary incident, as reported by Muckraker in 2006:

In October 2000, approximately 11 months before 9/11, a retired Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) officer, and veteran of the Yom Kippur War, was collecting English Ivy cuttings at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery located at McClellan and 245 Mount Olive Avenue, which is near the city lines of Elizabeth and Newark, New Jersey. The Gomel Chesed Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery.

The man overheard a conversation spoken in Hebrew, which drew his attention. He hid behind an 8-foot tall retaining wall and listened in to their conversation as they stood below. Shortly after a Lincoln town car approached the two people and the man in the backseat got out to greet them. After normal niceties were exchanged the third man said:

“The Americans will learn what it is to live with terrorists after the planes hit the twins in September.”

One of the men that had been leaning against the retaining wall expressed concerns that the upcoming presidential election (November 2000) might impact the plans. The man that arrived in the Town Car quelled the doubts by saying:

“Don’t worry, we have people in high places and no matter who gets elected, they will take care of everything.”

The observer who overheard this conversation related it to the FBI on numerous occasions only to be ignored each time. Nothing was done about it, and no investigation into the incident has ever taken place.