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This year, we commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 WTC bombing. In line with this, we repost this important article by Dr. Gary Kohls, first published in 2019.

“It is my firm belief that 9/11 skeptics—and true skeptics of any paradigm-shifting and taboo subject—who publicly expose lies and ‘naked emperors’ are heroes …They have suffered the ridicule and wrath of those emperors, their minions, and the just plain frightened…In our American society, many of our authority figures routinely lie to us, but nonetheless, many citizens continue to look to them for truth and safety—especially when fear is heightened.

This strong tendency to believe and obey authority is another obstacle with which skeptics of the official 9/11 account must contend…By unquestioningly believing and obeying authority, we make very bad decisions, which often negatively affect others. This can be equally true for the four human proclivities studied by social psychologists: doublethink, cognitive dissonance, conformity, and groupthink.” – Frances Shure, clinical psychologist and early skeptic of the official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory that two hi-jacked commercial jet planes caused three concrete, steel-reinforced towers to explode into fine dust and collapse into their own footprints in less than 12 seconds.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan

“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth … For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” — Patrick Henry – March 23, 1775

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them. … “What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think.” — Adolf Hitler

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.  …  Propaganda must always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”– Joseph Goebbels, German Nazi “Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment”

“We’ll know that our disinformation campaign has worked when everything the American public believes is false.” — William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director at his first staff meeting, 1981

“Image of the World Trade Center’s South Tower as it explodes, from top to bottom, into fine dust and severed steel columns. Within the next 12 seconds much of the tower blows away and the rest collapses into its own footprint into a relatively small pile of debris. The arrow points to one of the exploding “squibs” from one of the multitude of pre-planted demolition charges that are intended to section all the massive steel 110 story columns (4 inches thick at their bases) which allowed the building to fall straight down rather than falling sideways and causing damage to adjacent structures or people. This image is typical of what it looks like when standard controlled demolitions take down high-rise buildings in the most cost-effective manner possible. In the 100 year history of skyscrapers, the only tall buildings that have ever fallen down without controlled demolitions (allegedly) were the 3 World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 – and they all happened on 9/11/2001!. ” (Check out  www.ae911truth.org for everything you need to know about the many anomalies that conclusively disprove the “official”, CIA-, Pentagon- White House- Mainstream Media-approved conspiracy theories about what happened of 9/11.)

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The question posited by the title of this article, explores the dilemma faced by truth-seekers who have the facts that totally refute the Big Lies about 9/11/2001 about which the mainstream media, their elected representatives in Congress, their presidents and the Deep State refuse to debate.

These “9/11 Truthers” have been unfairly labeled “conspiracy theorists” (a pejorative term invented by the CIA after the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 raised all sorts of skepticism doubting the official story blaming “the single shooter”).

This courageous group of truth-seekers have been attempting to inform and enlighten individuals and institutions that have chosen to disregard and/or disbelieve the overwhelmingly documentable evidence that proves that pre-planted controlled demolition charges – and not airplanes – pulverized into fine dust the three WTC towers on 9/11/01.

The corollary of course is that the three towers could not have bee demolished by anybody other than insiders using explosives.

Given that the alleged planes that allegedly hit 2 of the towers were commercial planes (that of course contained no explosives), no other conclusion can be drawn than that the explosives that brought down the three skyscrapers had been pre-planted in the manner of classical controlled demolitions, which are the only way that concrete, steel-reinforced, high-rise buildings can be efficiently demolished.

It is obvious to many folks who were alive and aware in the era of the assassinations of the 1960s (the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King) that 9/11/01 was a false flag operation that has seriously (and intentionally, according to the Project for the New American Century – google it) destabilized the Middle East and the world and justified the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course the rapid passage of the Patriot Act by the bamboozled US Congress ensured that the United States took another step closer to becoming an armed police state, by seriously curtailing the civil liberties of its citizens.

That series of programmed events started a state of perpetual US-led wars in the Mideast (wars that only benefited our one ally in the area [Israel]. It also ensured the lucrative future of America’s military-industrial-congressional complex and global weapons manufacturers.

These self-perpetuating – and ultimately bankrupting – wars have destroyed and are continuing to destroy the physical and psychological well-being of the tens of thousands of duped patriot soldiers (and their families) as well as the millions of unarmed innocents that were victimized by the lethal, often indiscriminate weaponry of our military. Also victimized forever were their cultures, their religions, their economies and the very planet that militarism is making uninhabitable.

And, it must be mentioned, our illegal and ill-advised military aggressions have raised up billions of mortal enemies all around the world whose enmity and justified desire for revenge will never be quenched until “the Great Satan” is finally beaten.

The dilemma raised by the title question, “Why Do Good People Remain Silent”, has been faced throughout the history of the world by a multitude of truth-seekers and truth-tellers long before the events of 9/11. A short list of American examples that have shaped world history was enumerated in the previous two Duty to Warn columns, which are available at (See this).

The “bamboozle quote” from Carl Sagan above should help any thinking person to understand one of the psychological reasons why both human and inhuman entities (such as corporations and the corporate-controlled press) so readily accept – and even promote – Big Lies; and then, when the truth comes out that thoroughly refutes the lies, these entities refuse to admit that they have been bamboozled.

One expects major corporate media networks like ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal (not to mention the Duluth News-Tribune) to refuse to admit that they are shills for the Deep State or their corporate advertisers or just being duped by them, but even the more honorable BBC, PBS, NPR and MPR do the same by continuously using the phrase “terrorist attacks on 9/11” instead of telling the truth. Perhaps, if one could only get through to these unaccountable and unreachable talking heads, they might at least claim that they were unaware of what is blatantly obvious to most unbiased observers.

The quotes from Hitler and Goebbels could have easily been made by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Allen Dulles’ CIA and right-wing politicians like the odious politicians during the McCarthy, leftist witch-hunt era, not to mention any number of the pro-militarization, pro-war, pseudo-patriotic “my country right or wrong” types that profitably occupy Wall Street, War Street and Washington, DC.

Those realities should help us understand how the misleaders of militarily powerful empires are able to manipulate the “Good Germans” of every nationality into believing Big Lies.

Clinical psychologist Frances Shure, who was an early skeptic of the official White House conspiracy theories has experienced her share of criticism from those who tend to implicitly trust their leaders. Her story, in a 9-part series on the subject, discusses the psychological background about how public opinion and beliefs can be manipulated. The series can be found here.

It is painful being an artificially demeaned and unfairly criticized “conspiracy theorist” about 9/11. Even though the 9/11 Truth-tellers have the scientific truth behind them, they have been mistreated by the mass media as a despised out-group for the past 18 years.

Being a 9/11 truth-teller is like being a black-listed anti-fascist author, writer or musician during Hitler’s thousand-year Reich or during the proto-fascist American McCarthy era of the 1950s.

One has to sympathize with Galileo who was persecuted by the authoritarian church when he proved that the earth revolved around the sun when 99.9% of the world believed that the sun revolved around the earth – because it said so in the bible.

I personally empathize with the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis who proved in the mid-1800s that washing or sterilizing one’s hands before delivering a baby resulted in a dramatic decrease in post-delivery deaths of new mothers from “child-bed fever”. 99.9% of physicians at the time often delivered babies between performing autopsies without washing their hands. His discovery never caught on with the profession, although midwives understood the wisdom and washed their hands prior to deliveries. The midwive’s patients had 10 times fewer deaths from infection than the doctor’s patients. Dr Semmelweis, just like many other dissident physicians to follow, was ostracized by his arrogant and ignorant profession for promoting such a radical notion and, labeled as being mentally ill, died in disgrace in a mental institution a few years later.

Cognitive Dissonance and 9/11

One major psychological factor that helps explain why the Cheney/Bush White House’s official conspiracy theory has become so ingrained is the concept of cognitive dissonance. A good YouTube discussion of the title question – by a number of psychologist colleagues of Frances Shure – can be seen here. I highly recommend watching it.

I wrote a Duty to Warn column devoted to the subject of cognitive dissonance in 2013. It has been archived here.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article:

“Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological or emotional discomfort felt when one is confronted with new information or a new reality that contradicts one’s deeply held beliefs.

“When there are conflicting, mutually exclusive beliefs, intelligent, open-minded and thoughtful people that have not been victimized by significant psychological trauma during their upbringing, are usually willing to change their minds by re-evaluating their prior stances, looking carefully and honestly at the new evidence, reassessing the credibility of both positions and then making a decision to adopt or reject the new information, depending on the evidence before them.

“Close-minded, distracted, uninformed, addicted, ignorant, too-busy, overly obedient, uber-patriotic, co-opted or radically conservative people may not have the time, inclination, intelligence or political will (or courage) to look at the available new evidence that runs contrary to their old, ingrained beliefs. Therefore, they may unconsciously or reflexively reject the new information, even if the evidence is overwhelmingly and provably true.”

Not too many people that live in punitive, militarized empires have the courage to do what the whistle-blowing boy did when he saw that his emperor had no clothes on. Not too many people want to be truth-tellers in a nation whose governmental bodies imprison, expel, black-lists or bans truth-tellers and their stories and suppresses every truth that threatens national security and corporate security or profitability.

Hitler got his timid or privileged “Good Germans” – who lived outside the concentration camps – to believe the Big Lie that “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“work makes one free” even inside a concentration camp) and that his dictatorship would last a thousand years. Citizens of supposedly democratic societies like America’s are told that “The Truth Shall Make You Free”, that “The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword” and that “The Arc of History Bends Towards Justice”. Don’t believe it, unless lots of courageous citizen take action and demand justice. Otherwise, those noble thought are just cunning lies to calm the people.

Without a body of dissenters, whistle-blowers and courageous people of conscience (like the multitude of banned 9/11 truth-seekers and antiwar, anti-globalist, anti-fascist activists) that are willing to go up against the conscienceless, the profiteers, the globalists, the fascists, the militarists, the racists, the corporate polluters, the economic exploiters, the bankers and the sociopathic corporations those exploiters will continue to grow in power, wealth and influence – fouling our planetary nest as they go. I would hate to see them succeed.

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