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George Monbiot Exposed as Neocon Agent

David Wong

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I couldn't find another link to this. If it's already been mentioned, mods, feel free to merge this thread. This is liberal George Monbiot describing his feedback to his article on Loose Change a while ago:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2017006,00.html

It's a great bit because it describes so perfectly the feeling of these liberals who immediately get labelled "Neocon" and "shill" when they come out against the Truth movement. Look at the presumption of Bush loyalty the conspiracists always bring with them to these forums.

EDIT:

The original article:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/02/12/short-changed/
 
David Wong said:
I couldn't find another link to this. If it's already been mentioned, mods, feel free to merge this thread. This is liberal George Monbiot describing his feedback to his article on Loose Change a while ago:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2017006,00.html

It's a great bit because it describes so perfectly the feeling of these liberals who immediately get labelled "Neocon" and "shill" when they come out against the Truth movement. Look at the presumption of Bush loyalty the conspiracists always bring with them to these forums.

EDIT:

The original article:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/02/12/short-changed/
Click to expand...



this jumped out at me:

The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward's fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights.
Click to expand...

Excellent summary!

-Gumboot
 
Yeah, a lot of the Truthers talk about the "false left/right paradigm" and the "corporate-controlled media" when trying to explain why even Bush-haters like Monbiot/Kos/Counterpunch/The Nation/Rolling Stone won't support their conspiracy theories.
 
I liked this bit:
Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.
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Nail on head.
 
I like it because it's not just a hateful spew, as one would be tempted to do in that situation. He sums it up so perfectly and logically when he says it's not a matter of whether or not Bush is evil, it's a matter of whether or not Bush is magic.

Some of the more radical ones on the left love to phrase it as, "I wouldn't put anything past these people! They're capable of ANYTHING!"

Really? What about TIME TRAVEL? Or shooting orphans with his LASER EYES?

They confuse "morally capable of anything" with "physically capable of anything."
 
I like this bit:


The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the "9/11 truth movement" is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward's fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on the Guardian Comment is Free website, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467. On the same day the Guardian published my article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain's biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems. It drew 60 responses. The members of the 9/11 cult weren't interested. If they had been, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.
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It expresses just what I've always felt about a lot of these guys. If they really wanted to make a difference, they could go out and do something real, but they'd rather hang around the basement, and post crap on a website, because they know they can't fail at that, while real life involves real risks. They forget that it can also involve real successes, too.
 
That is a great article.

It always amazed me how plenty of "truthers" would complain about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but then relegate it to a mere footnote of their imagined 9/11 conspiracy.

Here we have a situation where it's plainly obvious the administration misled the U.S. about WMDs in Iraq. The "truthers" claim it was all part of the plot, and yet... all it seems to merit is a little saliva on the corner of their mouths.

If they really thought they had something; that they really needed to get the Bush administration out of power, they would be focusing on this (amongst other known abuses).

Al Capone wasn't taken down as a direct result of his mob activities. He was busted on tax evasion. Strangely (and I vaguely remember actually seeing a "truther" claim this), they equate the alleged demolition of WTC1 and WTC2 to mob activities, and the alleged demolition of WTC7 as tax evasion.

To modify a classic: It's stupid all the way down.
 
It's a strange time to be a liberal. All the conspiracy nuts are calling us neocons, and all the neocons are calling us conspiracy nuts.
 
PerryLogan said:
It's a strange time to be a liberal. All the conspiracy nuts are calling us neocons, and all the neocons are calling us conspiracy nuts.
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In my experience people accusing other people of being something they're not is pretty much par for the course when it comes to US Politics.

-Gumboot
 
gumboot said:
In my experience people accusing other people of being something they're not is pretty much par for the course when it comes to US Politics.
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War is peace. Ignorance is strength. A little piece of cardboard is body armor.
 
Aphelion said:
George is so intellectually dishonest:

http://www.911blogger.com/node/6384
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From that article:

Has Monbiot forgotten that he asked us to question the events of 9/11? Seemingly he has and has also attempted to memory hole any evidence of this fact.​
Here is a screenshot from Monbiot's website. Note that he writes one article per week. (Also note that he calls us do-nothing cowards when we write multiple articles per day compared to his one per week). Also note that there is two week gap where the above mentioned article should be. Why has this one been removed when all his other weekly ones are intact? Methinks Mr Monbiot has done a little flip flop here and tried to cover his tracks huh? but then again I would say that because I am a "conspiracy moron".
Click to expand...
Monbiot's article was published on October 16 2001 (not September 25th as the blog article you link to asserts). It hasn't been removed from his site, in fact it's here:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/10/16/the-new-mccarthyism/#more-739

And is also still available on The Guardian's site:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,574809,00.html

If you read the whole article, you'll see that George is raising questions about a range of issues in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don't see how this obliges him to continue to ask the same questions after various investigations and more than five years. How is he being intellectually dishonest?

Also, I don't see anything in that article that suggests he believed any kind of inside job theory - his scepticism is addressed towards the conclusions that the US government was drawing in the immediate aftermath and that they may be manipulating (or even faking) evidence to their own ends. This doesn't mean a vast conspiracy or a false flag or LIHOP.

Edit: I was wrong, there iss another September 25th article, it's here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,557684,00.html

I still don't think it's especially supportive of "inside job" theories. I'm looking into whether or not George removed it from his website.

Edit 2: it looks like the article did used to be on his website:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011129100633/http://monbiot.com/

(click on "Foreign Affairs" on the left menu).

I don't want to guess why it was removed, so I'm emailing George to ask him.

I still stand by my assertion that the article is sceptical about the evidence presented to invade Afghanistan as it stood at the time it was written - two weeks after 9/11. Even in these circumstances, George Monbiot is not ruling out Al Qaeda and Bin Laden:

I think there are grounds to suggest that the attacks were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, even if we don't know precisely who they were.
Click to expand...

For these reasons and many others (such as the initial false certainties about the Oklahoma bombing and the Sudanese medicine factory, and the identification of live innocents as dead terrorists), I think we have some cause to regard the new evidence against Bin Laden with a measure of scepticism. There is no question that he is dangerous, and there is convincing evidence connecting him to previous attacks, but if the west starts chasing the wrong man across the Hindu Kush while the real terrorists are planning their next atrocity, this hardly guarantees our security.
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(my emphasis)

There is absolutely nothing in that article to suggest any form of US Government complicity in the attacks.
 
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Crud. They're onto him.

We'll need to activate another sleer agent to have another token liberal to criticize the movement.



Begin OPERATION PELOSI.
 
maccy said:
Edit 2: it looks like the article did used to be on his website:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011129100633/http://monbiot.com/

(click on "Foreign Affairs" on the left menu).

I don't want to guess why it was removed, so I'm emailing George to ask him.
Click to expand...

Well, I haven't had a personal reply from George Monbiot, and it's unlikely I'll get one:

George Monbiot's email auto-reply said:
Sorry about the automated reply. I read everything sent to me, apart from spam, but I can reply to only a very small proportion.

This is because I receive a couple of hundred personal messages a day, and if I answered them all properly, I would have no time for anything else.

[...]

Sorry again for all this, but I have found I cannot both do my work and be courteous. Something has to go, and I am afraid it is the courtesy.

Best wishes, George Monbiot
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However, the article is now available on his website, as well as The Guardian's:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/09/25/collateral-repair/

Given that the old version of the website had some bespoke ColdFusion based system for organising the articles and the new one is powered by WordPress, my guess is that the article simply got lost in the transition from one system to the other.
 
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Read the article

Fascinating and thoughtful analysis...particularly the comments about 9/11 CT work as being that of cowards. It's quite true. They merely bash a very straw man, which requires them to do very little research beyond watching videos, very little work beyond waging internet flame wars, and very little "activism" beyond spouting silly ideas.

Note how they expect us to do their research, prove them wrong, write their term papers, present their evidence. CT work is intellectually and morally lazy.

It is indeed mostly about displacing their problems in their own lives or the failures of their previous CT events. Nobody showed at their rally? The NWO secretly shut them down. They got booted off a web forum? It wasn't their language or behavior, it was the NWO's censorship campaign.

It is similar to neo-Nazis and other fringe groups, of course.
 
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