9/11 TRAUMA: INSIDE JOB OR INSIDE JOKE?

The following passage is taken from Andy Nowicki's book, Conspiracy, Compliance, Control, and Defiance, published earlier this year.

by Andy Nowicki

How did the remarkable sight of dissolving, crumbling iconic skyscrapers play upon the psyche of the unsuspecting viewer on September 11, 2001?

To be sure, it helped to further reinforce his already frightfully consuming sense of horror, compounding the upset which had been stirred in his mind by the initial crashing of the planes into the towers. But such an event, while certainly psychically wounding, could have been partially salved by what ought to have followed: that is, the fires ought eventually to have been put out, or more likely, ought to have simply died out on their own; then, over the course of the weeks and months to follow, the wreckage ought to have been slowly but surely repaired, the gaping gashes closed up, the exterior and interior restored to their former conditions; thus, the tragic devastation of the attacks, while surely never forgotten, would have been effectively patched over in a thoroughly convincing manner that hid evidence of the destruction.

Shouldn't these fires have burned out on their own?

In such a scenario, of course, haunting whispers would still linger in the atmosphere for years afterwards, as would the awareness of lives taken through terrifying, heretofore unheard of, terroristic methods. But the average citizen would be able to take a kind of solace from the fact that, in spite of the spasm of discombobulation which engulfed an iconic landmark of a major American city, the structural integrity of reality essentially remained intact: a transparent “healing” would have taken place (i.e., the “wounds” in the buildings would seem to “get better,” the same way that skin eventually grows back around a cut in one’s flesh. This would be a purely superficial assessment, of course—it would not assuage the damage done or address the loss of life—but then the human senses have their own manner of judgment, moored merely in sense-perception: if the true human mind knows that catastrophe cannot be so erased, the mind of man’s eye perceives the return of things to their accustomed sheen as evidence that all is well, a sure indication that the distressingly aberrant has been abolished, and comforting normalcy restored.

 In such a circumstance, wherein New Yorkers, and Americans in general, would have witnessed the “healing” of the towers, and their restoration to their former “business as usual” status—as again, by all accounts, is what ought to have happened—then, sense-perception-wise, the destructive aspects of the attack would greatly have been minimized in the popular imagination. But in fact the towers did not stand, wounded, to heal later through concerted reconstructive efforts; rather, the towers came down hard; rather than simply buckling, or becoming scarred, charred skeletons or burnt-out husks—as is typically the casewith fires in high-rise buildings—they instead essentially ceased to be. The iconic landmark wasn’t just damaged; it was somehow knocked into nothingness. The very fact of this occurrence, and the knowledge that the buildings which had stood so colossally indomitable mere hours earlier had now not merely been damaged, but had simply disappeared, had effectively been absorbed into the ether, cannot be understated with regard to the dramatic punch it packed to all on hand who witnessed this terrible transformation, whether live or on TV. 

...Instead, the entire massive structures became dust and ash in a mere moment

In addition to helping reinforce the perception that no one was safe—i.e.,  that a painful, horrifying, and humiliating death awaited us all unless we immediately flung ourselves into the arms of those who, coincidentally enough, just happened to be looking for new reasons to keep us servile, supine, and supplely pliable to the molding, molesting manipulations of their hidden hand—other useful, readily-exploitable psychic aspects of the buildings’ inexplicable total immolation can surely be enumerated.

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First, as already indicated, this event—that is the double-collapse of the two towers—lent the affair an undeniable aura of permanence, a sense that the “old” world had truly ended, that there was now no turning back, that things had been inexorably and undeniably transformed, that it was now time to swim or else sink, or more accurately, to fight or else perish. If we did not manage to adapt (the message was sent), then we would be crushed, just like those hapless denizens of Manhattan fleeing the deadly dust-cloud accumulating in the wake of those two suddenly stricken structures which had occupied their skyline for decades but were now, outrageously enough, no more to be seen.  

In short, all of our wires were tripped that day, in a totally “go for broke,” “no holds barred,” pell-mell sort of manner. We responded to this alarming stimuli just like rats whose adrenal glands have been triggered by a passionless (and compassionless) crew of experimenters looking on with heads cocked and eyebrows raised with disinterested regard: like those rats, we promptly lost all notion of proportion. Old certainties had fled, in our frantic minds, and we now perceived naught but endless war ahead of us, but this perpetual conflict we foresaw did not entail an actual fight against a tangible enemy, but rather an unfathomably titanic struggle against a patent abstraction, no less terrifying for being oblique: namely, TERROR.

Terror: the natural reaction to purposely induced trauma

This was in fact the true coup undertaken by the establishment: to use terror as a diabolical instrument of terror in order to arouse popular sentiment against terror. Whether or not 9/11 was an in fact an “inside job,” in this sense it effectively amounted to a sort of “inside joke.” And to emphasize the general sense of desperation and despair, to seal the pervasively purveyed impression of the utter inescapabilty of lurking doom, there is the notable—and supremely visceral—metaphor of these familiar, sturdy, massive, steel-framed structures somehow reducing themselves to tiny particles of ash, right before our eyes! Nor need be pointed out the many “Freudian” aspects of this sight upon the psyche: that is, the notion of proudly erect metal mammoths being chopped down and rendered as nothing. Such resonance is suggestive not merely of impotency, but of sheer, outright emasculation.

On a less prurient, but still potent psychic metaphorical level, the two towers represented a pair of bulwarks somewhat resembling enormously long legs extending up into the heavens, as if belonging to a titan or a god. Thus, the abrupt shredding of these legs on September 11, 2001 gives the horrified witness an intimation of a mighty force suddenly losing that which he had relied upon to be ambulatory, and of becoming terribly and irreparably maimed. Loss of power, dissipation of potency, erasure of limbic integrity, and thus loss of mental independence are in this manner suggested by the towers’ fall, as well as the subsequent reduction of this once grand and imposing being to a state of drooling, helpless, infantile degradation and patently bovine decrepitude. All of these baleful notions were communicated with peculiar intensity by the conspicuous deconstruction—in fact, the wholesale evanescence—of World Trade Center towers 1 and 2 on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. He occasionally updates his blog when the spirit moves him to do so. Visit his Soundcloud page.