Today Germany, tomorrow the world

We already knew Germany was fertile ground for 9/11 conspiracy theories, but it appears a line has been crossed:

On the evening of June 5th 2005 the state-funded network ARD broadcast a 90-minute episode of Tatort. The word means “scene of the crime” and it is a long-running murder mystery series watched by millions. The episode ("Scheherazade") concerned a woman who claimed that a man was murdered in her apartment. Not just any man, however.

He was one of the pilots on September 11, 2001. According to the story, he failed to board the plane he was supposed to hijack in Boston and he returned to Germany instead. The mystery revolved around the fact that in spite of the woman’s murder claim, the police could not find a corpse and the two detectives on the case spent most of the show trying to determine whether the woman’s story was believable.

Throughout the mystery the woman was chased by groups of unidentified villains who were out to kill her because she had a CD with photographic evidence of the Boston hijacker who got away. The subtext of the plot was her explicitly stated allegation that 9-11 was instigated by the Bush family for oil and power. The hit men were CIA/FBI types and the TV audience is led to believe they were the ones who killed the pilot and were now after the woman to insure her story would never be known. The conclusion of the mystery has the detectives believing her story as she escapes the CIA by fleeing to an unnamed Arab country.

9/11 conspiracy theorizing could go the way of Holocuast denial (believed by only a hateful fringe) or Kennedy assassination theories (a staple of pop culture believed by almost everybody, even though nearly all of them fall apart upon close examination). Unfortunately, it looks like the latter is coming true. Many people are so consumed with anti-American, anti-Bush and/or anti-Semitic hate (often with a healthy dose of dhimmitude) that a "neocon cabal" theory makes perfect sense. And just as people have a hard time believing an insignificant loser like Lee Harvey Oswald could have murdered a beloved President, many just can't bring themselves to believe that 19 people could have pulled off something as horrific as 9/11.

Right now, "alternate histories" of September 11 are showing up on German television, and I fear it won't be long before something similar comes from Hollywood. (JFK was released 28 years after Kennedy was shot, so I guess Oliver Stone's 9/11 should be coming out around 2029.) Unfortunately, for the true believers in this kind of thing, the truth is no defence.

Posted by damian at June 6, 2005 08:17 PM | TrackBack