Lawrence wrote:
Don’t forget, you can make up a plausible story about anything. It can
be a lie out of whole cloth but if it accounts for all the events, it
can be said to be plausible. That is what Middle Easterners do. Israel
bombed us on 9/11. The CIA did it. Etc etc. Get over it. Osama bin Laden
did it just like he said he did. Read about the Islamists. Bombing is
what they do? Read about Blind Omar bombing those same towers in 1993.
Why wouldn’t they try it again? Why wouldn’t the same group do it again?
Why would someone else want to do it and blame them for something they
spend all their time actually doing?
If you're going to do something so audacious, of course, you'd do
something that can easily be blamed on some ready-made enemy. It serves
a myriad of purposes.
Imagine writing a novel about an American President so venal (or so
controlled by venal people) that they want to set the world on edge for
oil profits and world power. But, it being America, there's that prickly
'power of the people' to worry about. So they look around for ideas
about how to circumvent that and they light on the example of Hitler (He
had this same problem, you'll remember. Germany was a democracy in the
early thirties.)
You see that you need an enemy. You're not going to choose Norwegians,
for heaven's sake. You go to the Middle East. There's lots of groundwork
there to build on. (Perhaps if it was a really long, ambitious novel,
you'd weave all that groundwork into it, too. Osama worked for the
Americans, you'll remember, and those madrasas teaching hatred of the
west were originally financed by the Americans.) So you work with a
ready-made enemy who just happens to also be sitting on the piece of
land you want to control.
You need to control the information that the American people get so they
can be brought to think your thoughts. Luckily, you thought to have your
friends buy up great gobs of the media over the previous fifteen years.
The newspapers and the radio talk shows and the TV news outlets will
speak with one voice (except for the few that appear to be renegades --
who will serve the purpose of showing what a free press we have and
allow the harmless venting of opposite opinion -- maybe even catch the
unconverted).
So now you've got all your legislation ready to go, all your evidence in
a row. All you need now is a really spectacular "Pearl Harbor" type
event to galvanize the people.
The end of the novel hasn't been written yet....perhaps it will turn out
to be one of those adventure novels where you choose the ending.
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