911, American Exceptionalism and Idolatry

Editor’s NOTE:

A reader of this blog who submitted the piece below is a person who is dedicated to knowing and testifying to the truth but for various reasons is currently unable/unwilling to be identified--a situation in these increasingly dark days which many readers should be able to empathize with.

This essay raises some extremely important issues such as the necessity of discussing who was really behind the 911 attacks and what the conspirator’s wished to accomplish. Americans of good will must not be ostracized for being willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. A completely independent re-investigation of 911 is clearly needed.

Some readers of this site may be put-off by the author’s contention that “there is only one institution especially favored by God with an explicit mission for all humanity, only one indispensable and incarnation of divine goodness present now in the world: the Roman Catholic Church.” Or that “only the Catholic Church has a divine foundation and spirit, which, despite human sin and error, cannot be eradicated or changed.” The author is a Roman Catholic and has correctly stated the Traditional Catholic Church teaching. Clearly an attempt is being made to appeal to other Catholics as well as non-Catholics. However, one does not have to be Catholic to appreciate the arguments being made herein. We invite generous but courteous commentary.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert


“9/11 Denial” and the Idolatry of American Catholics


Bishop Williamson of the SSPX has not only been called a “holocaust denier,” but also a “9/11 denier,” in that he has said that 9/11 was an “inside-job,” a “false-flag” operation in which the World Trade Center buildings were brought down in a controlled demolition by criminal elements embedded in either the American or Israeli governments, or both. Is there a connection between his two denials? Most certainly. The Holocaust was the Jews’s Golgotha, and 9/11 was America’s Holocaust. Thus, 9/11 and the subsequent American “War on Terror” represent the crucifixion and resurrection of the now divine American Regime. Just like the Jews in Germany under Hitler, America, as the myth goes, was the sacrificial victim of absolute evil. And just like Israel is now justified and even righteous in its “defensive” wars of “survival,” as long as America claims to be fighting against that absolute evil, defending itself against being “wiped off the face of the map;” as long as it attempts to vanquish that evil for Americans’ sake and the sake of the whole world’s “freedom,” then America, like Israel, is not to be judged according to the moral law—for its very actions are what define good and evil—nationalized nominalist theology, as it were. When Israel murders Palestinian children and America murders Iraqi children, it is a good thing; for, Israeli rabbis and American Catholic neoconservative priests say it is.

What Bishop Williamson is saying in his “denial” is that 9/11 was a self-sacrificial act of violence, executed, perhaps, by the Mossad in conspiracy with a covert criminal network embedded in the American and global, new world order government. And those who inflicted this wound knew exactly the psychological and spiritual effects it would have on their victims, and what wonders it would permit them to do afterwards. Jews are now permitted to kill Palestinians en-masse with impunity because of the Holocaust; according to this insane logic, to deny the goodness of Israel’s actions is to implicitly deny the uniqueness and sacredness of the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust. Analogously, Americans are now permitted to invade and occupy countries that never attacked them because of 9/11—“never again.” And to deny America’s right “to defend itself” is to implicitly deny the sacred status of American suffering in 9/11. In the remainder of this article, I would like to defend Williamson’s “9/11 denial,” and then suggest a reason why most Americans, and almost all Catholics, should be doing the same.

What’s debatable?

There are certain convictions that a traditional Catholic should never question. God is love, for example. No matter how much hatred and evil we encounter and experience in the world, we are never justified in seriously doubting this truth. By divine Faith, we are obliged to believe that every act of hatred and evil will somehow result, by God’s miraculous grace, in more love and good in the world than if these acts had never occurred. God is love, and all that happens, all that happens, are only the various expressions of His love for us. Of course, God does not will our hateful sins, but He transforms them and their effects into good. We might have a thousand difficulties in reconciling our subjective experience with this rather incredible truth, but these can never justify one single doubt.

The set of unquestionable truths includes not only supernatural ones like the aforementioned, but also self-evident, natural truths, as well as those truths directly derived from them, the truths of the natural law, and the truths of man’s universal and particular experience of the world and himself. That things are, and I can know them; that truth exists, and I can discover it; that I have an immortal soul, and that it will be judged; that one must do good and avoid evil; that something cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect; that nothing in this created world can satisfy me; that the United States of America was founded in 1787; that the earth is round (though not necessarily revolving around the sun!—see the pioneering work of Solange Hertz and Robert Sungenis on this).

Then there are those truths that are, in a word, doubtable. Convictions about these matters should be held rather loosely, even when we are convinced of their truth, and they should be perpetually questioned, not because these are necessarily bad or false convictions, but because these are, unlike the self-evident or common sense truths and facts of nature, or the revealed supernatural truths of supernature, inherently debatable. These are the kinds of convictions we have regarding matters of human history, personal actions, and interpretation of particular experiences, such as the precise causes of historical events, the details of scientific theory, judgments of character, and deliberations of prudence. We may indeed have the right opinion on one or more of these sorts of issues, but it must be seen as just that—an opinion. There are simply no non-debatable, unassailable reasons to hold mere opinions to be non-negotiable and indisputably true, unless of course, they are transformed from opinions into knowledge (for the best analysis ever written on how this may occur, read Plato’s Republic). But until then, and some opinions will never make it to the realm of knowledge, there is no unimpeachable authority, including the authority of the opinions themselves, that obliges us to hold any of these opinion-level convictions without some level of epistemological doubt. On the contrary, it would be an act of disobedience and impiety to truth not to place these kinds of convictions under critical scrutiny and subjective doubt.

Unfortunately, it is just these types of convictions about which absolute certainty cannot be possessed, or at least with much more difficulty than one presumes, that are often held with the most intransigence and naïve fidelity by many Americans. In the remainder of this article, I would like to discuss two convictions that most Americans, and far too many Catholics, hold with a misplaced intransigence and naïveté. Though determining whether these convictions are true or false is, I would argue, essential to the welfare and even the very survival of our country, I will not attempt any determination of this here. For, I think the more important question to be asked about them is whether they are debatable?

Taking exception to American exceptionalism

The first conviction I would like to analyze in terms of debatableness is the belief in American exceptionalism. Many Catholics believe that America is special, but not special as all countries are special to their citizens, as my own mother is special because she is my mother, but especially special. Along with Israel, America, according to this idolatrous exceptionalism, has been chosen by God to be a sort of secular church with the mission of bringing peace and prosperity to the world. These maintain that America’s system of government and political culture is intrinsically superior to all others, for America is the nation marked out by God’s providence to bring God’s gift of freedom to the world. In short, not an insignificant number or Catholics hold in their heart of hearts, though they may be unaware of it and may deny it when it is made explicit, that America is, for all intents and purposes, equal in importance to the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Now, it is not my intention to determine the truth of these convictions or any other ones in this essay; for, I only want to determine whether they are debatable. As far as I know, there is only one institution especially favored by God with an explicit mission for all humanity, only one indispensable and incarnation of divine goodness present now in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. Only the Catholic Church has a divine foundation and spirit, which, despite human sin and error, cannot be eradicated or changed. The Church is alone favored and chosen by God, for it is the new Israel it is His own body, and He infallibly brings goodness and truth to the world through her alone. The Church will never lose these divine attributes, and it will continue to display them visibly for all to see to the end of time (though often clouded by human error and sin) in its hierarchical and incarnate body and head This is undeniable and indubitable.

Therefore, it is impossible that any other institution could ever have these attributes in any way, or even approach them, for they are divine. Yet many attribute to the American regime some or all of these divine attributes! It may be an implicit or unconscious attribution, one that materializes itself only in emotional reactions and knee-jerk practical and political attitudes, but it is clear that too many Catholics have adopted to some extent a virtually religious belief in American exceptionalism.

Now, prescinding from the question of whether the American regime[1] is or is not actually “a force for good in the world” (as a certain intransigent Irish talk-show host from New Jersey likes to affirm incessantly) it is certainly the case that this question is debatable. One is, without doubt, morally permitted to demure from the Americanist narrative, to question its veracity, for it is the kind of conviction the truth of which can only be determined by a combination of philosophical and theological analysis and historical interpretation; and the latter, because it deals with changeable and ambiguous subject matter, renders it an intrinsically debatable conviction.

If my abstract arguments have not yet convinced the reader that American exceptionalism is a debatable conviction, then perhaps a little philosophical, theological, and historical analysis may help. The Enlightenment was in essence a secularization of the heresy of private judgment held by the Protestant revolutionaries, with both Protestantism and the Enlightenment a dialectical reaction to fourteenth-century nominalist theology. Not content merely to judge Christian revelation, completely independent of the authority of the Magisterium, the Enlightenment philosophers presumed to adjudicate reality itself, independent of any authority whatsoever, whether the deliverances of nature, the force of law, immemorial custom, or time-tested tradition. These claimed to obey “reason,” but as Nietzsche and the post-modernists have demonstrated (and this is perhaps the one salvageable truth in their otherwise satanic movement), all this talk of reason was just a cover for revolutionary will. The Enlightenment model of the ideal political order was one in which man’s will, disguised as “reason,” would be king.

To make a long historical story short, the most obvious concrete, historical incarnation of this Enlightenment, man-centered political order was the 1789 republic of France. But this wasn’t the first incarnation. The 1787 American Republic holds this dubious honor. It is not my intention here to argue this point against Michael Novakian hagiographers of the Founding Fathers, but I will point out one salient characteristic of the American regime in lieu of an argument. Even though one must accept that the American Founding had some godly influences, that it was pervaded in part by a Christian ethos, one must also recognize that the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found in its official documents, and unwillingness to utter the Holy Name in public is the unmistakable sign of Freemasonry, the archenemy of Catholicism.

Let us jump ahead a couple hundred years to present-day America. Tens of millions of unborn babies are being murdered by American “doctors” hired by the children’s own mothers; an innocent woman is starved to death by her husband in plain sight of everyone, including a “pro-life president,” and no one has the will or the power to stop it; a president and other operatives of an enormous, Leviathanian military-industrial complex conspire to lie to the American citizenry and the international community in order to attack and occupy a country that never attacked it, torturing many innocent citizens and murdering thousands of civilians, including women and children, in the process; the first black U.S. president is in favor of baby-murder—all in the name of God and freedom.

I hope that in light of the preceding, it is at least a little bit clearer now that the belief in America’s intrinsic, essential, and constitutive goodness, exceptionalism, and mission, although not demonstrably an untrue belief, is certainly debatable. Perhaps the American regime is morally superior to all other nations and always will be, but there is no authority, from history, reason or revelation, that morally obliges one to think so. Thus, there is no a-priori reason to judge the American regime, its governmental principles and practices, and its moral and political culture, to be qualitatively better or worse than any other nation. And one is certainly free to judge it qualitatively worse, culturally speaking, than other historical empires, such as the British and the Spanish. Is this out of the question? Is it unpatriotic? Is it un-American? Is it blasphemy? These aren’t the appropriate questions. The appropriate question is whether it is true. Now, whether America is blessed or cursed by God, or simply held in the same esteem that he holds any other created society of sinners, is certainly a pertinent question. But the question one must first ask is whether one’s conviction about the American regime’s moral and spiritual exceptionalism is debatable—and it is.

9/11 denial

We are now ready to discuss the second conviction I would argue is mistakenly considered by many Catholics to be non-debatable: that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were orchestrated and executed by Islamic terrorists from a foreign country. As I will try to show, there is a reasonable, though debatable, alternative explanation that is just as plausible, if not more so, than the explanation the U.S. Government has given us in the official 9/11 Commission report, and the main-stream media has echoed and supported. Before I describe what this alternative view is, and why I think it is plausible, let me explain why I am even bringing this “conspiracy” issue up in the first place.

I think that there has been a massive, concerted effort on the part of the U.S. and Israeli governments, the military-industrial complex, globalist interests, and the mass media, which is overwhelmingly Zionist controlled, to keep Americans in the cave, so to speak, with respect to what truly occurred on September 11, 2001. The Internet, interpersonal conversations, and courageous book and journal publishers are our only life-preservers in this veritable ocean of propaganda. The vast majority of the media, both right and left, are mere puppeteers and shadow-watchers.

Let me offer the reader some evidence that the official story of 9/11 might be a mass-produced delusional myth. How do you react to the idea that 9/11 may not be what you think it is, that it might indeed be an “inside job?” Is it with immediate disdain and disbelief at the mere possibility of a government cover up of this matter? If so, why? Think about your reaction. Is it logical? Is it coherent with your other beliefs? A government that protects the murder of babies and covers it up with propaganda is capable of lying about 3000 murders—don’t you think? Is it not capable of permitting and even orchestrating the murder of adults too, then, isn’t it? Bush sanctioned and permitted Israel’s murdering of innocent Lebanese a few years after 9/11, and Obama had “no comment” about the thousands of innocent Palestinians who were killed and injured by Israel. Is it absolutely unthinkable that powerful elements in our government would kill their own people if it meant securing and preserving their power? No, for they have done so already. That is certain.

There are, of course, many “conspiracy theorists” who think themselves safely out of the clutches of deception, but have only bound themselves more securely in it, through the chains of their fantasies. Nevertheless, false conspiracy theories can also be invented and imposed on society by those in public power, and just because they are de facto publicly authoritative does not make them any more non-conspiratorial and truthful than others. I am suggesting that the official story of 9/11 is just one of these debatable conspiracy theories, with factual and logical holes you can fly a Bowing 767 through.

Though one could marshal hundreds more empirical facts and several persuasive arguments that render the debatable conviction that 9/11 may have been a false-flag operation a plausible one, I will only mention a few here. As many engineers and scientists, such as Dr. Stephen Jones, as well as reputable commentators, such as Paul Craig Roberts, have insisted, the only plausible explanation for both towers collapsing into their footprints at virtually freefall speeds is controlled demolition, a process that would have taken weeks, if not months, to plan. Moreover, a number of the so-called hijackers are alive and have made their aliveness public. World Trade Building Seven was never hit by a plane, yet it collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint shortly after Larry Silverstein, its owner, who just happened to receive billions of dollars in insurance money because of its collapse, gave the order to “pull-it,” clearly meaning demolition (there is a you-tube interview where you can hear him say it clearly). In other words, logic dictates that the complex, time-controlled explosives were already carefully placed inside the building weeks before September 11. See THIS... for a professional quality, highly plausible documentary on the subject).

There is also historical evidence that the U.S. government is capable of massive lying, treachery, and murder. There is the recently declassified document available online called “Operation Northwoods” in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlined a plan in the 1960s to murder Americans and blame it on an “enemy,” Cuba, in order to provoke the public’s enthusiasm for war. Kennedy, in virtue of his Catholic conscience, however ill-formed it might have been, rightfully rejected this plan. Careful consideration of THIS document reveals that it is within the realm of possibility that 9/11 was a “false-flag terrorism” event. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything, but it at least shows that the U.S. government is capable of it. Consider also the fact that a government that allows the mass murder of its most innocent and helpless victims, unborn babies, for the sake of ideological consistency, mammon, and comfort, is capable of planning and executing the murder of a few thousand of its citizens for similar, self-serving motives. Granted, the idea that our own government might have either murdered its own citizens or deliberately permitted them to be murdered by others and covered it up so effectively is tremendously difficult to fathom, it is eminently debatable. If, as we have seen, there is no indisputable reason to consider the American regime intrinsically, essentially, and constitutively good, then there is no indisputable reason to consider its government incapable of deliberately permitting or committing a great act of evil.

The attack that occurred on September 11, 2001 was an act of enormous evil. Therefore, the government of the American regime, or at least, criminal, traitorous elements embedded in the U.S. government, being capable of enormous evil, may have deliberately permitted or committed the 9/11 attacks. One cannot deny the conclusion of this syllogism without denying either the major or the minor premise. The minor premise is undeniable, so that leaves only a denial of the major premise as the reason for not accepting the conclusion. For those who can’t or won’t recognize that the American regime may not be what its popular spokesmen claim it to be (the kind of claim one might hear on the Sean Hannity show or in a speech by the former president George W. Bush), it is impossible to recognize that 9/11 may not be what its popular spokesmen have claimed it to be, namely, an attack on America by Islamic terrorists who hate us because of our goodness and freedom. However, for those who can recognize the intrinsic debatableness of the major premise, it is impossible not to admit the intrinsic debatableness of the conviction that 9/11 may have been an “inside job,” what conspiracy theorists call a “false-flag operation.” In other words, it makes no sense to deny the possibility, and no amount of propaganda and political and cultural pressure can change this fact. Personally, I think the empirical data show that it is more than just a mere possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, but I leave that for the reader to discover on his own. My main point is that there is no a-priori rational reason for Catholics to refuse to consider the possibility that 9/11 was orchestrated and executed by criminal elements embedded in the United States government, and possibly in the government of Israel. See the work of Christopher Bollyn on this possibility HERE...

9/11 and the holocaust vs. Christ crucified

In conclusion, I want to explain why I think it is vitally important for Catholics to look at 9/11 with a more skeptical eye. Apart from the fact that if 9/11 were indeed an inside job, it would change drastically how one perceives the political and cultural landscape—it would give a whole new meaning to the “war on terror”—and this is certainly vitally important in itself, I think that if Catholics cannot even accept just the possibility that 9/11 was a self-inflicted wound, or a wound inflicted by “our democratic friends in the Middle East,” they are at risk of losing their Catholic Faith. As I have shown, the only reason one would not consider it a possibility that 9/11 was an inside job is because one does not believe the American government capable of that kind of grave, deliberate evil. And the only reason not to consider it possible that the American government could deliberately permit or commit grave evil is the belief that the American regime is an institution intrinsically, essentially, and constitutively good. But only the Catholic Church deserves this attribution.

Therefore, if one refuses to consider it even a possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, he, at least implicitly, denies the exclusive identity of the Roman Catholic Church as the only infallible and indefectible force for good in the world. I think it is an inescapable conclusion. The Roman Catholic Church—in its divine aspect, of course, and not in its eminently peccable human members—is the only institution incapable of doing any evil, let alone grave evil. America has no divine aspect whatsoever. Not to consider it possible that one’s government could do the unspeakable and murder its own citizens is to implicitly divinize one’s country (as perhaps many German Catholics did during the Hitler regime, leading to his not being stopped much earlier), and insofar as one identifies himself with his country, it is to divinize oneself. "I preach Christ crucified," St. Paul said. And he meant Christ crucified—and nothing else. Catholics must be integrally Pauline in this respect, or be of antichrist.

To get back to Bishop Williamson: The real issue here is the relative historical and spiritual status of the crucifixion of the God-man in relation to the historical suffering of Americans in 9/11 and Jews in the Holocaust. For those Jews and Americans under the spell of the 9/11 and Holocaust idols, however, the crucifixion is to be seen as ultimately irrelevant to history and to spirituality, and should be acknowledged as such by all, indeed, must be acknowledged as such, or else one is "anti-semitic" or “anti-American,” heretics deserving severe punishment. The Holocaust and 9/11 must replace the crucifixion as the dual-centers of historical and spiritual gravity, must be recognized as the loci of all evil and the true revelation of the Jewish and American divine victimhood. Either Jesus is the eternal victim of unrighteous violence, or the Jews and Americans are. There is no third man. The Church, regardless of its sympathy with Jewish and American suffering, and whether or not it accepts the sacred, mystical "six million," or that “the Muslims attacked us because of our freedom,” can never acknowledge the Jewish and Americanist dogma of divine self-victimhood, and so will always be the enemy to the unrepentant Jews and the Americanists, to anyone with an unrepentant, anti-logos, Jewish and Americanist consciousness.

NOTES:

[1] I say “American regime” to distinguish it from America the country or people. Here we are considering the merits of the philosophical and theological principles embedded in America’s government, institutions, and overall ethos and culture, America in a formal, not material, sense.