Paul Craig Roberts' Paranoid Style

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and snooker attire catalogue model

Crypto-Truther, Paul Craig Roberts is JAQing off about the events of 9/11.

He wants to know:

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust?

and

How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires?


Well, as a partial answer to the first, two passenger planes loaded with fuel crashed into the Twin Towers. which led to their collapses. One of those collapsed into the third skyscraper and set that on fire.

Of course, that makes the second slightly easier to answer too. The question is wrong. In fact none of the skyscrapers fell down as a result of "short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires". As a former assistant secretary of Ronald Reagan I would have thought he'd be a bit more informed than that. WTC7 fell down after burning for seven hours and according to many reports the fires were not small or isolated.

Paul Craig Roberts is writing in response to a Washington Times article about AE9/11 Truth's recent "press conference". Of course, it would be cheeky to point out that none of the press turned up to it and that the Washington Times is not a real newspaper anyway, so I won't do that. Instead, I'll focus on the merits of his "argument" which is essentially to say that his compatriates are a bunch of complete idiots who'll believe anything.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them.


Isn't there a logical contradiction somewhere in that statement? Americans believe their government even when they know their government is lying? It's a tricky feat to pull off.

...more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the Government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.


What's so fantastic about it? A group of guys hijacked planes. It's been done before, many times. They hijacked them almost simultaneously. That too is not unheard of. Then they flew them into buildings. That bit was all but unprecedented but we certainly know people have attempted similar things.

What is it about what Roberts calls the Government story that he finds so incredible? Is it the Muslim thing? Surely he's not one of those people who think that Muslims can't fly planes or outsmart a "Westerner" yet I can't see what else he is alluding to that makes it so "fantastic".

Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him.

What is this? Is he really saying here, that he first heard of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks? Again, for someone who once had a high position in government one would expect him to have been better informed than that. Or maybe not.

Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 "mastermind" emerged to take bin Laden's place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee who was waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.


What is he talking about? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not "suddenly emerge" last year!

This goes on and on for the rest of the article. With Roberts excoriating the "naifs" in his supercilious manner, ridiculing everyone for their stupidity while unself-consciously exposing his own ignorance throughout building up to an eschatological crescendo:

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war.

The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of "their" government, are facilitating this outcome.

Paul Craig Roberts has noticably been becoming ever more alarmist about the near future which reminds me of one of Richard Hofstadter's characteristics of the "paranoid style" in American politics:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

And yes, I hope to get round to finishing off my post on Hofstadter before the apocalypse.