Three years ago, on the second anniversary of 9/11, I wrote a commentary on the event for another site, and asked this question:

The paradigm shift since 9/11 has been drastic. Our perceptions of security and our place in the world have changed. But did reality change after 9/11, or just our view of it?

I tried to answer those questions then, and I hoped that certainly by the five-year mark, the answers would be well-understood universally. However, that is not the case. The core right-wing base still steadfastly stands by the conservative version of reality, and the “reality distortion field” thrown up by their dogged persistence has most of the people in the middle still fazed. Most people now believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, for example, but almost a majority also still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Along the way, a word was created, by Stephen Colbert, to describe the distortion: “truthiness.” The same concept has gone by many names in the past, including “agitprop” and “The Big Lie.” But it’s all the same: tell lies that are palatable to the people, play on their fears, keep insisting that your lies are true, and repeat them as often, as widely, and as loudly as possible, and you will be believed.

This particular set of lies is actually so egregious that it has taken a nearly non-stop campaign to keep the distortion field in place, and as time has worn on, the fabric of lies has worn thin and has broken in some places. But the lies are still in place, and too many people still believe them. The only real answer is to combat the lies with truth and the facts, to keep battering at the distortion field until it crumbles and breaks. Eventually, it will, and on this, my 2000th post for this blog, I will add my small share to the barrage.

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Terrorism is nothing new:

In the 1st century, Zealots conducted a fierce and unrelenting terror campaign against the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean. The Zealots enlisted sicarii to strike down rich Jewish collaborators and others who were friendly to the Romans.

One can be certain that terrorism existed before that. The use of violence is older than humanity itself. Our intelligence, however, has provided us with a new way to use violence: using example and anticipation to make people fear the potential of violence, and so act in ways desired by the terrorist. In fact, the terrorist does not harm or kill the majority of his audience; instead, he kills some as an example, and makes the audience believe that it can happen to anyone at any time. The quintessential bully.

However, the game is more complex than that. Terror is not as simple as a gun that one holds; it is an insubstantial weapon, depending upon communications–the media, in short–to survive. In order for people to fear something, they must see it or hear about it. If you can control the media which transmits these messages, you can control the fear, and thus direct the power summoned by terrorism.

That is what has happened.

The terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks did so in order to create that environment of fear. But after that point, people in power, especially in the United States, but to different degrees locally across the world, started working with the substance of the 9/11 attacks, using them like clay to mold their own form of control. These people had their own agendas and desires to shape their worlds, and recognized the 9/11 attacks as a free-floating form of power that could help them accomplish those goals. And the people of these countries, being fearful, responded as desired.

While those in power did not originate the 9/11 terror attacks, they did exactly what the terrorists themselves intended: they used the fear created by the terrorism to change things to their liking. In Japan, for example, conservatives took people’s fears of 9/11 and terrorism, mixed it in with fear of an aggressive North Korea, and have since been slowly using that cumulative terror to work changes in Japan’s political and military structure. Japan has since sent troops overseas, and is firmly set upon a course to overturn their constitution’s prohibition against war. Look at almost any country, and you will be able to recognize people who have been using the power of 9/11 to shift the balance of power and remake their societies in an image they prefer.

Nowhere has this been more true than in the United States of America. Look at the changes. We now are at war with a country not only completely unassociated with the terrorists, but a country where the leader was an enemy of the terrorists themselves. We now have a pre-emptive strike policy, the opposite of the decades before. The liberties of the people have been severely curtailed, and without going through the necessary legal processes, many constitutional rights have been curtailed and overrun, some to the point of creating de facto precedence simply because they have not been sufficiently challenged. The presidency has been transformed into a far more powerful role, in some ways approaching the level of dictator in that the office has elevated itself above the legislature and above the judiciary–or has tried its best to do so. It is still not strong enough to do anything it pleases, but the desire and the will are unmistakable.

This has worked because the country is like an arena permeated with fear which greatly empowers those now in control. And no one in a sufficient position of power has had the courage to enter the arena, armed only with fact and reason, and do battle against the new Goliath. There has been no Edward R. Murrow to take on the Joseph McCarthy of our day. Not yet.

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The damage done to our country over the past five years has been immeasurable. Our economy has been gutted where it once stood on the edge of hope, and now may never recover as it could have only a few years ago. We are now mired in a meaningless war that has so drained and torn apart our military that it is questionable as to whether we could sustain ourselves in a serious conflict. Our freedoms and civil liberties are endangered as never before. What once was a news media that worked to a degree has now been subverted and dragged down into a mud that makes anything that comes from it suspect. The arena of politics, in even worse shape when this started, is now so degenerate that it is hard to see anything constructive coming from it again.

It is easy to lose hope. But there is a way out. And one prerequisite of finding the way out is that we recognize the source of the problem. And the source is not the terrorists.

The terrorists were a spark. They are still a danger, but not the greater danger, to be certain. The majority of plagues that we now suffer were created by those who hijacked the power created by the fear the terrorists instilled in us. So let me suggest some tools that could be used to fight the real danger:

1. Resolve not to fear. Our present leader tells us to be afraid, where past leaders taught us to avoid fear. We have terror alerts, terror arrests, we are told that enemies abound in the world and unless we do as we are told by the government, they will slaughter us. Criticize the government, we are told, and you embolden the enemy.

   Do not be afraid of terrorists. They are not that great of a threat, not enough to allow what has been done to us in the name of fear. There will always be attacks. We simply have to live with that, just as we live with the possibility of traffic accidents, natural disasters, and crime. 50 times more people have died in traffic accidents in American since 9/11 than died in terror attacks. Be vigilant, have good investigative police work, have good international cohesion and support, and we can deal with terrorism as well as it can be dealt with. Terrorists were here before, and they will always be here. We must protect against terrorism just like the other threats, but it should not control us or allow others to control us.

2. Fight for liberty. By “liberty” I do not mean “against terrorists”; such a mindset empowers those who truly threaten us now. By “liberty” I mean the principles that our country was founded upon, the principles so threatened at this time. The principles that so many conservatives hate so fiercely and would wish to destroy. The principle of separation of church and state. The principle of individual rights. The principle of limited governmental power. It is not our personal safety which is at stake here, it is our liberty. And it is not terrorists who threaten us, it is our own current government and those who support it.
3. Appeal to reason and fact. Do not allow others to think for you, and truly study and understand what is happening. Almost all the conservatives I have observed visit this site have come armed with nothing more than arguments they heard others make, their arguments as shallow as the punditry they absorbed. It is usually easy to shatter the arguments simply by digging just a little bit past the copied-and-pasted propaganda; what is harder is to shatter the presumption of righteousness that goes beyond facts, information, and truth. These are the extreme examples of people who have surrendered their ability to rationally observe a set of facts in order to instead appease their desired perception of reality. If you surrender your reason to sate your desire, you are terribly easy to control, like a cigarette smoker instantly believing a study that says smoking is not harmful, disregarding the fact that the study is a fraud paid for by the tobacco companies.

   Most people are not yet too deep in that abyss yet. To keep from being dragged in, you must never allow your desire for a thing allow you to believe it. I believed in the Killian National Guard memos too easily and for far too long, only because I wanted to; that caused a weakness in my ability to argue and debate, and probably caused those who read what I wrote to believe my words less. Don’t be afraid to question what you want to hear. Study the information. Reason for yourself instead of simply following the crowd you have chosen. Don’t be afraid to come to a conclusion, but allow the facts, and not your fears or desires, to inform that conclusion.

   A tangent to this is the need to keep the media honest. Do not accept the words of those whose bias overrides their dedication to the facts and honest appraisals of a situation; do not accept the idea that opinion rates as strongly as fact. The truth does not compromise; if a contention or representation is not supported by fact, then it is not acceptable. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth should be the standard, and if a media entity giving the impression that it relays facts does not live up to this standard, it should be duly and strongly scorned and disrespected. Somehow, along the way, too much opinion crept into factual reporting. There is a place for reporting, but the core of a healthy news media is stark, bare fact.

4. Be willing to sacrifice. Desire can be all too compelling a weakness for others to control you with. You want money too much, and so others use that desire to rob you. You want safety too much, so others use that to steal your freedom. We are far too easily manipulated because we crave more than we think. We crave tax cuts and so vote for them, only to find we’ve been shaken down and tossed aside. We think we can get things without paying for them, so we end up with education and health care in a shambles, and still believe the impostors who tell us that “throwing money at the problem won’t fix anything,” even as they throw trillions of dollars at rich people because that will “fix” the economy.

   As Robert Heinlein said, TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Don’t vote for a tax cut because you’d like an extra few bills in your pocket; be willing to sacrifice for better schools and hospitals. And instead of whining about how politicians can’t be trusted to spend, try to actually monitor how your representatives vote and control their actions like you should be doing. In a democracy, the citizen is supposed to be the boss. So act like one. Be informed, responsible, and manage. Surrender that control, and expect to be cleaned out by con men.

   And one more thing: if you think a war is necessary, be prepared to enlist and fight. If even half the conservatives of fighting age who spend their days vehemently arguing the ‘rightness’ of the war in Iraq were to actually enlist and serve, there would be no problems with the shortage of troops.

I’m sure that list could and should be longer. Go ahead and add to it in the comments. But this is, in essence, what we have to do.

So many politicians have appealed to our sense of patriotism since 9/11. But in this climate of fear, blind patriotism is what the politicians have been counting upon. Blind patriotism, however, is the antithesis of actual patriotism, just as blind faith is the antithesis of true faith. True patriotism does not mean that you do what you are told. “My country, right or wrong” does not mean that you overlook the wrongs and support those who commit them. True patriotism is a citizen who goes to the trouble to find the truth, to the best of their abilities, and in good faith, works and sacrifices to make their country strong, peaceful, and free.

I would call on you to do nothing less than your patriotic duty.

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It was exactly five years ago as I write this that I came home from work, sat down in front of the television, and happened on to a news channel just as the attacks began. We cannot undo the attacks and their aftermath, but we can repair the damage, and perhaps learn enough to prevent the same thing from happening again. This is the purpose of history. I have hope for that.