9-11 and Cognitive Dissonance

Sep 4, 2013 by Edken

Duty  to Warn

9/11 and Cognitive Dissonance

 

By  Gary G. Kohls, MD

There is an epidemic of a  psychological phenomenon called cognitive  dissonance in the world today. Everybody is  susceptible to the reality of cognitive dissonance  in one degree or another, but, to many observers,  it seems to be especially prevalent in average  Americans today.    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 or belief systems. It seems especially  common among people who have been victimized by TV  commercials and other methods of brain-washing and  propaganda. It is also true of cult membership  that is led by a charismatic, deceptive leader or  membership in some other authoritarian system,  including punitive parenting and religious or  political indoctrination.    When there is a confrontation  of conflicting and mutually exclusive beliefs,  intelligent, open-minded and thoughtful people 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,  un-informed, ignorant, too-busy, addicted or  intensely conservative people may not, for a  variety of reasons, have the time, inclination,  intelligence or political will to look at new  evidence that might run contrary to their  ingrained beliefs. Therefore they may  unconsciously or reflexively reject the new  information, even if the evidence is  overwhelmingly and provably true.    Two good examples of avoidance  of unwelcome truths (and the fear of cognitive  dissonance) about atrocities committed during US  wars of aggression are the corporate media’s total  blackballing of those taboo subjects: veterans of  the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars  coming home to testify about the war crimes they  committed overseas. (See http://www.wintersoldier.com/<http://www.wintersoldier.com/> ;  http://links.org.au/node/3343<http://links.org.au/node/3343> ;  and  http://www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier<http://www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier> )    Of course the threat of  being ostracized or accused of being  insufficiently patriotic, traitorous or risking  one’s job for telling the truth are also huge  factors in covering up the Crime of the Century.  The hidden message is: what is happening to  Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward  Snowden and what happened to JFK, RFK, MLK and  Paul Wellstone might happen to you! As Daniel  Ellsberg, the famous whistle-blowing Pentagon  Papers “conspiracy theorist” that leaked the  painful truths about the atrocity-producing  Vietnam War, said: “I have had the owners of  highly-regarded media companies confide in me  privately that they don’t believe the  government’s version of 9/11 but are scared of  discussing it publicly because they don’t want  to be tarred-and-feathered for discussing  “conspiracy theories”. (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25286 <http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&amp;aid=25286> )    People who freeze, flee, faint  or fight when they are about to receive  information that contradicts what they thought  they knew are often influenced by spokespersons  for authoritarian entities that have hidden  agendas involving survival, greed and power.  Usually such thought-leaders are financed by  wealthy elites of the ruling class that have easy  access to powerful propaganda machinery. One only  has to look at America’s various media empires –  owned and operated by excessively wealthy,  politically conservative corporations – whose real  interests are well hidden.    Holding conflicting ideas  simultaneously is difficult or impossible for most  people (except for the bribed, the ignorant, the  distracted, the semiconscious, the drugged or  those with an “I don’t give a damn” attitude). So  the natural instinct for most humans is to make a  judgment in favor of the old, deeply embedded  idea. The tendency to be dismissive of the new  information, even to the point of angrily labeling  the new idea a “conspiracy theory” and then  ridiculing the “conspiracy theorists” who have  challenged them with unwelcome facts.    Not to do so may result in  having to admit ones errors, which, to many people  (especially Western men), can be psychologically  intolerable. Another good example of cognitive  dissonance and denial are certain religious  fundamentalists who, while professing that the  bible is inerrant, have to be in denial of the  fact that there are numerous internal  contradictions and inconsistencies between the Old  Testament’s ethical teachings that often justifies  homicidal violence and the nonviolent ethics of  Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that forbids  homicidal violence.

<<<Cognitive  dissonance and 9/11 truth>>>

The best recent example of society-wide cognitive  dissonance that has placed America on the slippery  slope of global conflagration, economic collapse,  “Big Brother” surveillance states, endless foreign  wars and domestic martial law is what has been  happening ever since millions of observant,  open-minded patriots saw, and then courageously  said something about, what really happened on  9/11/01.    What they saw  contradicted  what the 24/7 corporate  media  reportage that was coming out of the  Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove White House and the  NeoCons of the Project for the new American  Century (google PNAC and 911). The disinformation  was obediently echoed – and enforced – by the NSA,  the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and by members of  both political parties who couldn’t admit that  they were destined to be  part of a  major conspiracy that would lead to the  evisceration of the Constitution and the deaths of  and disruptions to millions of innocent, unarmed  men, women and children in the Middle East.    <<<Believe  your eyes and not the lies>>>    People who watched the events  of 9/11/01 on live television or were actually  present in Manhattan saw fireballs erupt near the  top of both 110 story twin towers and then burn  out rapidly. Most eyewitnesses didn’t see the  first plane hit a tower until a day or two later  when accidental coverage by some French  videographers was shown on US television.  President Bush had lied when he said that he had  seen the first plane hitting the tower because  there was no live TV coverage of that incident.    Many credible eyewitnesses  (especially the scores of NYFD firefighters) saw  and heard multiple explosions in multiple sites in  both towers just before they exploded and were  reduced to pyroclastic clouds of fine dust. There  is testimonial and video evidence of widespread  destruction in the bottom floors of the Twin  Towers before the buildings were imploded. See: http://911blogger.com/news/2010-10-06/new-video-911-firefighters-reveal-huge-explosions-towers-collapsed <http://911blogger.com/news/2010-10-06/new-video-911-firefighters-reveal-huge-explosions-towers-collapsed>    Sturdy, over-engineered steel  girders up to 4 inches thick were nicely sectioned  by cutter charges into easily transportable  lengths before they hit the ground. Some of those  multi-ton steel beam sections had been thrown, at  high speed, horizontally, embedding themselves  into adjacent buildings up to 600 feet away. Mayor  Rudy Giuliani illegally tampered with the crime  scene when he ordered the sectioned beams to be  hastily shipped overseas as scrap metal to be  melted down before they could be examined in the  US.     According to the testimony of  hundreds of interviewees, some of the explosions  originated in the basements of the towers in the  minutes before the collapses and after the  fireballs had burned out at the top of the towers.  One eyewitness who worked in World Trade Center #  7 (later to be demolished by obvious controlled  demolition at 5:20 pm – on the direct order of WTC  complex owner Larry Silverstein) testified that  there were explosions in # 7 before any planes hit  the other two towers. That man has since died  under suspicious circumstances after giving his  dramatic and dissonance-inducing testimony on live  TV.    Many physicists, engineers,  chemists, architects, jet pilots, demolition  experts, scientists, intelligence agents and  others (those not co-opted or bribed by special  interests) have been exhaustively evaluating the  video footage of the collapses of the three  towers. They have concluded that the official  conspiracy theories were patently false.    Any honest viewer of even a few  of the hundreds of YouTube videos on the subject  of 9/11 will agree with those expert observers.  The scientists among them have proven, beyond a  shadow of a doubt, that all three towers came down  at accelerating free-fall speed, meaning that  there was nothing structurally intact below the  top of the collapsing buildings. Pulverized  concrete and suddenly transected steel columns  offered no resistance to the falling buildings, a  reality that totally destroys the absurd pancake  theory that the White House and uninformed others  want gullible people to believe.    The twin towers had suddenly  disintegrated an hour or so after the fires had  extinguished themselves and only black,  oxygen-starved smoke from low temperature office  fires was coming from the buildings. No plane hit  #7 and only a few insignificant, easily  controllable office fires (which did not occur  because of falling debris, since no windows had  been broken on the involved floors) were present  in that over-engineered (for sturdiness and  safety) high security building. Curiously, WTC 7  contained many offices of powerful entities like  the CIA, Mayor Giuliani’s emergency command center  and the SEC’s (Security and Exchange Commission)  files on Enron and other corrupt corporations that  were heading to litigation.    Within hours of the twin towers  being explosively pulverized into fine dust, the  corporate media was already reporting that  culprits had suddenly been identified, accused,  convicted and condemned, all without a jury trial.  Suddenly there were pictures on every news report  of 19 young Saudi Arabian men and the  terminally-ill, recent American ally Osama bin  Laden (who had already been nicely demonized in  the American media). The major media conveniently  failed to report later that at least six of these  alleged suicide bombers had been found, alive and  well, in the Middle East. Go figure.
<<<The “lone  assassin” and false flag operations fool most  of the people most of the time>>>
  It is important to de-mystify  the favored “blame it on a deranged lone shooter  instead of guilty entities that profit from the  killing” explanation (and therefore  non-conspiratorial] for assassinations that  governments love to trot out when their official  pat answers about how the latest progressive  leader or journalist or whistleblower had been  “offed”. (Recall the “lone assassins” Lee Harvey  Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan who had  been fingered as ending the lives and missions of  antifascist peace and justice advocates like JFK,  MLK and RFK.) There is abundant evidence, always  silenced by a total media blackout, that  legitimately questions the validity of the  official theories of, for example, who killed JFK,  MLK and RFK, or Paul Wellstone, for that matter.  (See Dr. James Fetzer’swww.assassinationscience.com <http://www.assassinationscience.com>  andhttp://911caper.com/2011/03/12/paul-wellstone-they-killed-him-a-15-part-documentary/<http://911caper.com/2011/03/12/paul-wellstone-they-killed-him-a-15-part-documentary/>  for much more on these and other critically  important issues that can cause cognitive  dissonance.)    Devious opinion leaders and  disinformation agents like to proclaim simplistic,  seemingly plausible explanations for complex  events, especially when corporate or state  interests are at stake. These entities hire  cunning communications experts that are geniuses  at “explaining/propagandizing” everything with  pithy slogans and 20-second sound bites that are  articulated by “embedded” journalists and their  “news reports” (that are actually propaganda  pieces) that most of us patriotic (and very  short-attention-span) Americans want to  believe. Even incredibly complex situations like  American invasions of or attacks against sovereign  nations are often only given simplistic  explanations whose opposing points of view are  rarely given adequate media exposure.    False flag operations are  clever, pre-planned propaganda events that  governments orchestrate in order for it to justify  going to war. In addition to the obvious false  flag operation of 9/11, the Berlin Reichstag Fire,  Operation Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin  episodes (google them) come readily to mind. False  flag ops, breathlessly proclaimed and endlessly  referred to (and therefore ultimately accepted as  truth by most folks), fool many supposedly smart  Senators and Representatives, as well as  presidents. Of course, one must also wonder how  many or our so-called leaders in the fall of 2001  were in on the deception or have since been part  of the cover-up (and therefore an accomplice of  the crime).    Many citizens simply want to be  led by a charismatic leader (“Fuhrer”, “El Duce”  for example) or an attractive Prime Minister or  President, but what happens if these citizens are  incapable of using what may be seriously atrophied  critical thinking skills? Do they wind up  believing what they have been told over and over  again by the ruling elites who have control of the  White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court and  fraudulent investigative committees like the 9/11  Truth [sic] Commission? Indeed that is the case.  And what guarantees the success of the elite  ruling class’s agenda is their control over what  gets published or discussed in the media.     Lone assassin theories and  false flag operations are absurdly easy to  propagate by endlessly repeating the sound bites  and perpetually re-stating lies as truth. 19  brown-skinned, bearded Arabs and a dying, despised  Osama bin Laden were easy patsies, just like the  patsies Oswald, Ray, Sirhan and the pilots of  Wellstone’s fatal plane. (See the documentary  “Wellstone: They Killed Him” at http://www.snowshoefilms.com/wellstone.html <http://www.snowshoefilms.com/wellstone.html>  and the black-balled [in the US] book exonerating  James Earl Ray, titled “An Act of State: The  Execution of Martin Luther King”. Also learn about  the 1999 jury trial convicting Lloyd Jowers and  “other unnamed co-conspirators” for MLK’s murder  and listen to King family attorney William Pepper  on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWS1KPCmOrI<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWS1KPCmOrI>  and athttp://www.williampepper.com/ <http://www.williampepper.com/> ).     It is far too easy for the  propagandists to convince us busy, distracted,  over-entertained Americans to believe their lies,  whether repeated by talking heads on Fox News,  CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, or  regurgitated by normal people in the local bars,  street corners or pulpits. And it’s hard to speak  up when one is likely to be shouted down by a  crowd of dis-informed folks whose opinions have  been shaped by cunning propagandists who have had  control of the megaphone.    <<<Lessons  from Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda  and Public Enlightenment>>>
The master propagandist, now unconsciously  emulated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn  Beck, Shawn Hannity and Bill O’Reilly was Joseph  Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and  Public Enlightenment.    Goebbels had authoritarian  control over all of Nazi Germany’s print media,  radio broadcasts and the movie industry. If it was  broadcast on German radio in the 1930s, it was  information that was right-wing, state-sanctioned  and pro-Nazi. Dissension was verboten, and no  alternative news reporting was allowed. Liberal  printing presses were smashed and their editors  and journalists were often thrown in prison or  concentration camps.    As an example of the many  official (and legal) repressive actions, Goebbels  was able to suppress the showing of the classic  antiwar movie “All Quiet on the Western Front” by,  initially, having his obedient brown-shirted,  thuggish, traumatized ex-combat vets (from World  War I) in the right-wing SA set off stink bombs  and released mice in the theaters. Goebbels  subsequently banned the showing of that movie,  which, by the way, is likewise frowned upon as  being too truthful about the savagery of war by  all militarized nations, including our own.  Goebbels’ techniques of brain-washing eventually  were supplemented by harsh legislation that was  enforced by the Gestapo and punished by the  People’s Courts (often resulting in the death  penalty). Listening to radio broadcasts from the  BBC was a capital crime in Nazi Germany.

<<<The three  “wise” monkeys>>>

As children we all saw the  pictures of the “three wise monkeys” that we were  told were supposedly telling us to “See no evil,  hear no evil, speak no evil”. I thought about that  “lesson” a lot as I grew up. There was something  profoundly true about the image of the monkeys  holding their hands over eyes, ears and mouths,  but there was something subtly wrong with the  sentiment that was giving children a moral message  to stay away from evil.    I now think that the three  monkeys were actually conveying to us something  entirely different. They could as easily have been  conveying this much more sobering message, one of  obedience to authority: “Avoid seeing, listening  or speaking painful truths”; be good little  patriots and mindlessly say the pledge of  allegiance to the flag every day.    The Sicilian Mafia, who  demanded unconditional obedience to authority,  probably saw the image and message that way. That  brutal organization actually still uses the symbol  of the monkeys as emblematic of their code of  conduct and “honor”, which is a code of secrecy  similar to the oath of allegiance that many  powerful institutions abide by, including such  groups as the National Security Agency, the  Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, local law enforcement  agencies, multinational corporations and many  political groups.    The Mafia – as is true of most  of the other groups mentioned above – never admits  their criminality, immorality or unconstitutional  behaviors. The reason that they promote falsehoods  or engage in other illegal activities does not  involve cognitive dissonance. Rather, they remain  silent (pleading the 5th Amendment if  they ever get subpoenaed) because they are  threatened, are afraid for their lives or  livelihood or have been paid off. The rule in many  such authoritarian groups is “if you rat on us –  you die”. Such “traitors” are cold-shouldered,  blackballed, imprisoned or disappeared, which was  or will be the fate of all those whistleblowers  mentioned above, but their motivation is not the  fear of psychological discomfort.    <<<Trying  to save the soul of our errant nation by  speaking truth to power>>>   Most of the whistleblowers that  I know are altruistic patriots who have seen the  dark underbelly of their own nations and choose to  overcome their cognitive dissonance and  courageously speak the painful truth, risking the  chance that they will be unfairly labeled  “conspiracy theorists” by those that don’t know  any better. They are trying to save the souls of  their errant, but beloved nations.    The painful truth of the matter  is this: contrary to the drumbeat we have heard  over and over again about 9/11 for the last 12  years, the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove White House  Conspiracy Theory about 9/11 is provably false and  the proof has been available since 2001. There has  been so much evidence disproving it that it is  almost laughable that anybody who looks at the  evidence and still believes the lies could still  defend their beliefs.  9/11 is still  regarded as a taboo subject in America and one of  the reasons for average citizens remaining  ignorant about it is cognitive dissonance, the  reluctance to admit to having been fooled by the  propaganda machine. The ability to accept the  humiliation of being conned into believing a  falsehood is not a common trait among Americans.    Many American may not care  enough and perhaps are too distracted, too busy or  too addicted (to brain-altering drugs,  entertainment, videogaming, food, sports,  religion, etc) to take the time to do their own  research and to double-check the veracity of what  has been proven over and over again about the WTC  towers: they were demolished by unknown insiders  who pre-planted the explosives and not by  foreigners. That is both important and tragic, for  9/11 is the Crime and Cover-up of the Century. It  is the most serious issue of our day, the cause of  massive death, destruction and wars and one that  is deciding the increasingly dismal future that  may not be able to sustain a healthy living  environment for those who are following us.     To continue to ignore the  truths uncovered by the multitudes of  thoughtful, highly intelligent and courageous  prophetic voices world-wide and to continue to  believe the absurd official theories when there  is overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to  helplessly go along with the evil agenda of  shadowy, exploitive, psychopathic powers that  are not your friends; nor are they the friends  of your children, your nation or the earth. To  continue to be oblivious about the Crime and  Cover-up of the Century will be putting our  children and their planet in peril.    For more information, please  start your research here:  (check out these very  informative websites that reveal the truth about  9/11, including Dr James Fetzer’s Scholars for  9/11 Truth athttp://911scholars.org/ <http://911scholars.org/> ,  Richard Gage’s Architects and Engineers for 9/11  Truth at: http://www.ae911truth.org/ <http://www.ae911truth.org/> or Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice at www.http://stj911.org/ <http://stj911.org/> .  Dr. Kohls is a  retired physician who practiced holistic  mental health care for the last decade of  his career. He has been involved in peace  and justice issues for decades and continues  to speak out against totalitarianism,  fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism and  other anti-democratic movements. He is also  a member of Medical Professionals for  9/11Truth (http://patriotsquestion911.com/medical.html<http://patriotsquestion911.com/medical.html>