A rambling post, now with 33% more history!

[felis_ultharus]

Reading Henry IV, part I by Shakespeare. I'm loving it. I'm surprised it's not more popular -- I think his use of language is at its height, there, and his characters are even more interesting and better developed than in most of the Shakespeare I've read.

Of course, I've read about that era before because the two greatest works of medieval literature in English -- The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- also belong to the era of Richard II and Henry IV (the turn of the 15th century).

Richard II was a bad king -- so bad he inspired a peasant revolt and spent the treasury in a hopeless war with France. But Henry IV really takes a beating in Shakespeare, partly because he had Richard II murdered and his heir exiled.

If Richard II was the Dubya of his age, then John of Gaunt was his Dick Cheney. Gaunt was the power behind the throne, and legend had it was descended from the devil, and Gaunt's third wife, Katherine Swynforde, had been accused of witchcraft.

Interestingly, these old stories continue to inspire good writing. J.R.R. Tolkien was an expert in this era, and it shows in his work.

And J.K. Rowling throws a House of Gaunt into her last Harry Potter. And if there's any doubt that she's hinting at John of Gaunt, the House of Gaunt has "Peverell's Ring" -- Peverell being John of Gaunt's famous ancestor.

(Sometimes I feel like a literary degree is just a license to gather trivia. But it's really fun trivia!)

Comments

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

I just threw that out there because you mentioned him.

But there were unusual power-downs and evacuations of the World Trade Center mid to upper floors the weekend before 9/11. It was to plant the thermite explosives.

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

FWIW, it's unlikely that explosives would have been necessary.
A structural engineer is close friends with our family. He said shortly after 9/11 that all of the hot fuel from two almost-full planes would have been sufficient to melt the steel frames of the buildings.
Although high-rises are typically built to withstand (for lack of a better word) being crashed into by airplanes, it is usually assumed that such a crash would be caused at a time when the plane would be closer to its arrival point than its departure point, when the fuel is low, because of a landing gone awry or engine failure.

Conspiracy theories are a way for Americans to keep feeling "safe", because they allow America to keep up the illusion that no one in the world has the ability or the strength to harm them. It's just less scary to believe that some mysterious Illuminati chock-full of white guys killed a bunch of white-collar workers for their own mysterious reasons, than that some "ragheads" with box cutters were able to defeat all their safeguards. Because if they really believe that, they will realize that it could happen again.
And then, maybe the US would actually be held accountable for their egregious violations of other nations' sovereignty, a handful of UN Charters, and human decency. Not in a civilized manner, at the War Crimes Tribunal they so gracelessly oppose, but on the ground, citizen-for-citizen, eye-for-an-eye style.

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

That's the official explanation, and it's crap.

It's just less scary to believe that some mysterious Illuminati chock-full of white guys killed a bunch of white-collar workers for their own mysterious reasons, than that some "ragheads" with box cutters were able to defeat all their safeguards.

The whole idea - and result - was to make everyone afraid of "ragheads." I think it's far scarier - not less scary - to look at the possible reasons why this would have been engineered, or at least aided, by a bunch of white guys.

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

That's the official explanation, and it's crap.

Funny, then, that it came from a thoroughly disinterested Canadian citizen who knows a thing or two about SOP for building tall structures.

As far as I am concerned, some whackos decided to lash out at The Great White Satan and they succeeded. The same way anyone else succeeds at anything from baking a pie to performing surgery: using a combination of luck and ability. Period, end of story.

I spent a lot of time in the US in the two years leading up to 9/11. Even when I wasn't looking for it, I could tell that they needed exactly zero help in becoming racist and xenophobic. They would have rallied around The Shrub whether a passel of their best, brightest CFOs had perished at Ground Zero, or not. The unequivocal support that the U.S. has shown to Israel throughout the decades is evidence enough that Americans don't care when brown people are dying in the desert. And if they never did to begin with, why would anyone need to make them stop by orchestrating a terrorist attack?

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

Funny, then, that controlled demolition explanations come from credible engineers and physicists. And that chemical evidence of thermite has indeed been found in recovered debris.

I don't deny the wackos decided to lash out at the Great White Satan. But there's staggering evidence that U.S. and even international intel knew it was going to happen, and let it happen, even helped it along.

Maybe the American public didn't need a terrorist attack to go along with an invasion Afghanistan and Iraq. But such a huge attack was, in the opinion of many, necessary to facilitate the stripping away of civil rights in the name of security and a manufactured war on terror.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I agree with your points -- and I don't think this a conspiracy -- but I'd nitpick that we can't discard the possibility of conspiracy theories in general where the US is concerned.

The School of the Americas was up to its asshole in conspiracies, some of which it actually pulled off (much to Chile's dismay).

Conspiracies do exist. The more people they include, the larger their scale, the less time they remain a secret. Luckily for the world, people are blabbermouths, and drop in details to their spouses, their friends, prostitutes, etc.

And only in the movies can all tracks be covered.

All this means that conspiracies rarely last nmore than a decade, and often surface after just a few years.

But I agree on the motives for looking for a conspiracy in this case. America needs to believe that superior money and technology can protect it from anything -- an 18th-century Enlightenment idea, but then America is really an 18th-century dinosaur masquerading as the future.

(I suppose that it could be argued that trying to connect the terrorist attacks in New York to Iraq after the fact was a kind of conspiracy -- after all, a small group of people were plotting to manipulate the public.

It was such a badly-done conspiracy that it only fooled only the people who wanted to be fooled, so it scarcely deserves the title.)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Conspiracy theories about the American government always fascinate me -- many Americans sense their government can't be trusted, but when coming up with theories, they always miss the mark.

I outlined my reasons above for not thinking this is a conspiracy. It's too clumsy for Cheney's work -- Cheney would've chosen Saddam as conspirator, not bin Laden -- and if it had been Bush, he'd have used model airplanes.

Besides, the CIA seems to have been against this whole Iraq War, and its hard to pull off anything without them.

And the alien-conspiracy theories are way out there. If the US government were hiding aliens, Clinton would've trotted them out to distract people from Monica Lewinsky.

But then, when it comes to the real, well-documented conspiracies -- especially CIA shenanigans of the 1970s and 1980s.

Plus, there's probably enough evidence of election fraud in Ohio during the last presidential election to impeach the president, if any of the lily-livered democrats would be brave enough to try.

But for some reason, the conspiracies with solid evidence backing them don't seem to capture the imagination :/

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

I recall seeing a memo by Cheney or Rumsfeld or one of those dudes written shortly after 9/11 with a hand-scrawled margin note asking how to tie it to Iraq.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Exactly -- it was an afterthought, a clumsy attempt to work the tragedy into Cheney's larger schemes.

As for Cheney's motives, they're not only well-known, they've been publicly admitted. He co-runs an organization called Project for a New American Century with Donald Rumsfeld, and this organization has been calling for an attack on Iraq since at least 1998.

Here's their letter, on their own website, addressed to Clinton (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).

They also -- by their own admissio (http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm) -- have been urging Bush to make war on Iraq since 9 days after the terrorist attacks in New York. So it's not like this is a secret.

(Project for a New American Century is scary -- they're dedicated to bringing about another century of American domination at any cost. Even scarier is that they operate in the open and no one notices them.

Cheney's name used to be everywhere on their website, but now I can only find it signed on the Statement of Principles (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm). They must be trying to downplay their power in the White House.)