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Meetings > Meeting Notes > November 18, 2007

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November 18, 2007

Zeitgeist Movie

We came together to discuss the Zeitgeist Movie, which tries to reveal the psychological, financial and political machinations behind the confusing events in our world today.

I began by clarifying that Zeitgeist is German and means "spirit of the times". (Zeit=time, Geist=spirit or ghost) I outlined the major themes of the movie: Basically Zeitgeist talks about how we are conditioned to ignore our own feelings, observations and knowledge of the natural world and look to "authority" to tell us what is real. (I mean illegitimate authority that uses violence and misinformation to coerce, not legitimate authority based on experience and knowledge, which guides. How did we come to use the same word for both?)

The first part of the movie focuses on religious dogma as a way of disconnecting people's knowledge of the natural world and substituting myths that benefit social elites. I feel that while true, this analysis is incomplete, because I remember being also conditioned to submit to force at home, in school and in medicine.

The second part of the movie posits that this preconditioning leaves us ripe for intentional misinformation (psychological operations, you might say) such as that given the public surrounding the events of 9/11. The movie shows an array of evidence for this, including footage of original broadcasts that we have been encouraged to forget we saw.

Part three brings the events of 9/11 into a larger context and reveals other times the perceptions of this nation and the world have been manipulated for the profit of an exploitive few. Evidence is given that the sinking of the Lusitania was deliberately provoked to draw the US into the war in Europe. There is a brief discussion of how Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather,with a clique of wealthy Americans and Europeans helped to finance Hitler's rise to power and the Nazi war machine. (To the meeting I brought copies of a chapter, called "The Hitler Project" from a1992 biography of Bush I that spells this out more completely with the texts from senate hearings in 1942 which investigated his father's company under the Trading With the Enemy Act.)

The movie continues with commentary on future plans of the clandestine manipulators. I am familiar with some of the elements, like the network of prisons being built in this country, moves to identify us all with implants, and can share material that elaborates on these claims and the background for them. But remember, we can determine the future, if we are willing to know and willing to act.

I expressed hope that when people realize how our humanistic impulses have been actively thwarted for centuries, it tends to lift self-doubt, and help peace advocates resist familiar accusations that we are stupid, or failures, or wimps, or naive about human nature. I think that in this country awareness of the broader story surrounding 9/11 is a necessary part of the shift in consciousness that we're always talking about in IONS.

Additional Comments

1. The question was asked at the beginning of the meeting, "Why are we talking about this at IONS?" Not prepared for the challenge, since I was asked to lead a discussion on Zeitgeist and so assumed that people wanted to talk about it at IONS, I did not respond as well as I can here after some thought.

IONS explores ways of knowing: reason, scientific testing, intuition, emotion, spiritual connection, etc. Moreover, it investigates things that have seemed unknowable. The deception and intimidation we live under today intentionally dampens our abilities to reason, test, feel, intuit and connect and tries to make us doubt our values and our sight of what is possible. Deconstructing deception makes what's before us knowable and frees our natural powers (not coercive, illegitimate powers, but inherent, life-giving powers--funny again, that we use the same word for both). We need these powers to accomplish the shift in consciousness we keep talking about, as well as the transition to a more equitable society. Part of the work is exposing deceptions to light.

2. On the truism thrown out and chuckled over, "If three people see the same accident, they will tell three completely different stories," I realized later that such comments tend to discredit inquiry. I should have pointed out that though each witness featured in Zeitgeist had a unique perspective, they corroborated each other's stories: firefighters had matching descriptions of explosions in the upper reaches of the WTC towers before they came down, William Rodriguez' story of huge explosions in the basements of the building matched the film shot from across the Hudson showing plumes of dust rising from street level. After the meeting I saw a film for the first time of a citizens' investigation team talking to four people, two of them Pentagon police, who saw a low-flying plane approach the Pentagon along the north side of the Citco gas station where they were working or filling their cars. Questioned separately, all four, standing where they were that day and recalling the relationship of the plane to features like the gas canopy and trees, drew the same path on an aerial photo. And the path they all drew was completely different from that asserted in the 9/11 Commission Report, which put the plane's path on the other side of the gas station. You can see the investigators' methodology, and decide if you think it is valid by going to www.ThePentacon.com and ordering a copy of the video. So the above truism can be tested, and these examples suggest it may not be true.

3. On the question, "How do we know the disturbing assertions in Zeitgeist are true that people have been manipulating the financial system and have plans to track all of us and subvert our constitution(s)?" I wish I had seen at the time of the meeting the video recordings of the 23rd conference on 9/11 Truth since 2003, held in Vancouver, BC last June titled, "Canada and the New World Order: Reclaiming Our Destiny." Canadians showed far more knowledge of this than Americans typically have. (I mean people of the United States; Canada is also in America.) In particular, Connie Fogal, a soulful blonde woman looking to be in her 50s, who heads the Canadian Action Party based in British Columbia, in a talk titled "Corporatism vs. Democracy," eloquently objected to the movement under way toward a North American Union. (NAU, the Canadians say, like they've all heard a lot about it.) She spoke of all the claims in Zeitgeist, as though they were already familiar to the audience. She described plans to abolish the (presumably solvent) Bank of Canada and replace national currencies with the Amero. Her party wants to stop the usurpation of all our constitutions for the benefit of corporations. She lamented the planned loss of her beloved Canada's sovereignty. I can share copies of her speech and everything else from the conference, for those who want a larger picture.

4. On the question, "Are they trying to make us afraid?" At the same Vancouver conference, Will Thomas, in a talk about the military stand-down on 9/11, concludes with these ideas (Jan, please show your friend Judy, who asked the question and might not be on this e-mail list):

"We're either complicit or explicit... This is not about one day, this is about the movement... the spiritual movement in ourselves, the world-wide awakening... that's where we would like to take this energy. Not into fear, down here... but up here into our unified spirit. And we open to the power that comes through us that informs our intuition on what is right, and we act on that knowledge.

"It's not just about impeaching the men. We must impeach the mindset behind the men. We must change our attitudes and priorities--that's what this is really all about. Just changing the suit isn't going to do the job here.

"So... I would suggest that we take heart and understand that this massive use of force, mass violence, mass murder that we're seeing and that makes us so heartsick is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of weakness and desperation and it marks the end of all empires. What is evil and rotten always collapses from its own conceit and contradictions. Always...

"Never mind the Republicans and the Demagogues. Go with We the People. Trust yourself. Trust your intuition. Trust that higher power that comes when you open to it.

"You know what Hitler said, "If the lie is big enough and repeated often enough people will believe it." Well, I would suggest to him and others like him that if the truth is big enough and repeated often enough, people will rise up and say, 'No more!'"

Respectfully submitted,
Susan Gonzales