By Elias Davidsson 6 July 2007

One of the arguments advanced by those who reject the possibility that US leaders had masterminded the events of 9/11, is that such conduct is simply unthinkable. When pressed why this would be unthinkable, the usual answer is that leaders of a democratic country don’t do “such things”, let alone Americans to other Americans. Such thought is deemed outrageous. Let us examine such outright rejection in some detail.

The democratic argument

Adolf Hitler came to power after heavily contested democratic elections. A larger percentage of the German population voted for him than that of the American population for George W. Bush. In addition, the elections in post-Nazi Germany were substantially more contested than those practiced in the United States. In Germany at the time, powerful communist and socialist parties fiercely confronted liberal and right-wing parties. In the United States, two wings of Corporate America, or as some people have it, two trademarks of Corporate America, present their candidates. Corporate mass media stage the election campaign, which is financed by corporations. The election fraud by George W. Bush, abetted by the Supreme Court, has hardly changed the nature of American sham-democracy.

The moral argument (“We Americans don’t do such things”)

Pre-Nazi Germany has been a world citadel of culture, arts and science. Germany has given the world great composers, philosophers, painters, writers, poets and scientists. Who would have imagined in 1933 that German leaders would kill thousands of their own people and commit genocide? Anybody thinking along these lines would have been regarded as mad. Yet this happened at the behest of leaders of this historically cultured nation. The United States cannot claim a similar heritage as Germany. American history consists of a long trail of mass crimes, including the genocide of the native Indian population and mass enslavement. It also includes numerous wars of aggression, both in the Western hemisphere and around the world. In recent decades, the United States could claim the notorious record of being the largest incarcerator in the world, with almost one percent of the population behind bars. If it was possible for leaders of a democratic, cultured nation, to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity, there is no reason to believe that this cannot happen elsewhere, let alone in countries that have a long tradition of state-instigated violence, such as the United States. The question whether US leaders did instigate the events of 9/11 cannot be dismissed out of hand by simply stating that “Americans do not do such things”. It can only be answered by an empirical examination of the evidence. The 9/11 truth movement has taken upon itself this civic task.