MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

Collective memory refers to how groups remember their past. Today while Americans remember 9/11 and subsequent events, the collective memory like many memories of tragic events can be blurred or even incorrect.

Defective memory recall has been the explanation for what has been called the Mandela Effect as many people recall pop culture events in many different ways –far from the actuality of what really concurred.

For example, many generations have passed since World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. All the memories are dying as those who were there have aged and have passed away.

Families can recollect the stories that great-grandpa told about the war — Hollywood can fill in the rest but is it truly history and we need to ask ourselves how emotions affect the collective memory.

Collective memory about World War II, Korea, and Vietnam now are simply facts about recollections second hand. When asked to remember World War II, Americans report numerous events, but the majority of people report the attack on Pearl Harbor, D-Day and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

To understand a country’s memories is to grasp something essential about their national identity and outlook. Of course, countries do not have memories; it is the people in the country who retain the memories, but often there are common themes rather than true memories.

Collective remembering implies that collective forgetting also occurs and 18 years is enough time to forget details about 9/11 and so out of sheer laziness we trust the official narrative that tries to cloud some inconvenient facts that were reported first hand on the day that we are told we should never forget.

Collective memory is a burgeoning topic of research, one that might be used to understand the perspective of people in other groups, whether of a nation or of a political party or other social group. In certain cases, we can also measure collective forgetting and the events of 9/11 should be analyzed for clarity and also the narrative that is played over and over again should be exposed as an attempt to induce false memory and should be called a scam.

It can be argued that false memory implantation of 9/11 created a social contagion that began the extreme polarization of the country. It can be argued that false memories and lies about the event were intentionally made in order to provide impetus for declaring two wars with the potential for more and the lingering paranoia that was used to scare people into thinking that if they did not accept new laws that destroyed their civil rights –another event similar to the attack on New York would be carried out with more people dying and more people in peril.

A particularly dramatic form of social contagion is seen in studies of memory implantation. In these studies, rather than conversation shaping memory for incidents that actually happened, individuals are induced into taking on rich, vivid memories that were conjured and used for social engineering.

The conjurers of these contagious memories are the media and teachers who do not value the need for accurate history that supersedes political leanings or ideology.

In America today, the education system has failed in its attempt to create an interest in preserving historical consciousness. The various narrators of the events of 9/11 have intentionally overlooked details that have certainly put the official narrative in the category of induced false collective memory.

The mainstream media will be a mouthpiece for a political agenda. They have a very important influence on the formation of collective memory.

Moreover, studies on collective memory have suggested that this effect of inducing false memory by a powerful narrator can occur independently of whether the narrator is viewed as an expert. One can imagine a variety of circumstances in which one person dominates a discussion, even though the group does not view the individuals as possessing any special knowledge or expertise.

This means that regardless of who sits at the news desk with the lights and cameras rolling they are by no means an expert – they are only paid to be powerful narrators. The public, unfortunately, trusts them without knowing their backgrounds in journalism or in the subject they profess to know about.

News documentaries and Hollywood movies are an effective and influential means of spreading memories within groups. Even if the history is twisted or glamorized for the public, a lot of things we believe about history have been given the Hollywood veneer in order to make them palatable for the public’s cognitive resonance.

Through conversations, and viral stories passed around in social networks people come to a shared rendering of the past, where otherwise people would possess their own individual rendering.

There are those who still have their individual renderings, especially those who experienced what has happened first hand.

Bringing the attacks of the Twin Towers in our homes made the 911 events a shared experience but it was through the keyhole provided by the mainstream media.

When people remember the past in a social context, when they rely on recall they get from the media and from Hollywood there is the potential, through social contagion, to influence each individual’s subsequent memories and thus increase the cohesiveness of these initially disparate memories.

Things like the Mandela Effect, faulty recall, all have the potential to implant new memories and even more epiphanies about historical events.

Even though we are told that we should never forget the events of 9/11, the whole process of creating new memories is the act of forgetting other moments and memories that when not repeated are forgotten over time.

Could conversations 18 years after 911 serve as vehicles for promoting forgetting as well as remembering?

I would say yes.

84 percent of the American people feel as though we have not been told everything about the attacks of 9/11 and there has never been an event so sacred in American history as that dreadful day.

So what is it that has been forgotten – what has not been said in 18 years that needs to be said? What needs to be revealed in order to show that there has been a concerted effort to plant false memories about the event, we are told not to forget.

There is no reason to forget. Perhaps there is no reason to forgive, I am only saying that we can’t let the event cloud what happened to our country and how it was the catalyst that opened the dialogue for the socialist state and the complete and utter negation of constitutional rights.

That it was the catalyst for the polarization of the nation long before we put all of our hate into President Trump.

It is terrifying to remember that immediately after the events of 9/11 We were convinced of the necessity of big government making big decisions that were unpopular and uncomfortable and we are now in a very frightening time in our history where the shadow of what happened looms forever as a political football in the hands of endgame strategists that will do anything to keep us in a state of flux.

When we are terrified or confused we forget what is happening in real-time. We hide and we flee. We ignore details and in some moments accept cherished myths that take the sting away from the reality that we have always been vulnerable.

When you ask people to revisit the events of 9/11 and reconsider what really happened, you enter the Twilight Zone of public mythology where people don’t want to rethink unhappy events and where you challenge their personal egos. If you eliminate the emotional baggage and the constant bombardment of the false narrative you may be able to see the truth. Images begin to re-emerge and forgotten information comes back.

All of this we see being reported in the mainstream now, all of what awaits us could have been prevented if we were just able to see through the programming years before the event. If we are to look back in history we can see that there seems to be a paper trail of intent, a money trail of crime and denial of people that want to hold on to an ideal that died the day the towers fell.

FDR once said, “If it happens, it is because we planned it that way.” This kind of mindset negates the belief that people are always in control of their government. Voting seems to be the last great argument of defense. But as we can obviously see the stakes are so awesome in this contest of life and death, that the characterization of the good guys and the bad guys have reached new levels of propaganda. Those who coerce you into believing that the government will protect you from terror are very likely to be the criminal element behind that terror. They have created it and they can cure it.

They can also convince you how it all happened, with a tone of religious reverence and nationalist mythology powerful enough to convince people that giving up rights and freedoms are acts of patriotism.

One man who knew how to use political mythology was Philip D. Zelikow. At Harvard, he uncannily predicted the future. He had written in 1998 that in the future the inevitable next step is terrorism. He stated in his work “Catastrophic Terrorism” that readers should imagine the possibilities for themselves because the most serious constraint on current policy [non-aggression] is lack of imagination.

“An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force.”

More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great “success” or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a “before” and “after.” The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the “before” period, will seem woeful, even pathetic when compared to what will happen “after.” Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.” – Philip D. Zelikow, “Imagining the Transforming Event.”

Zelikow also believed that policy and history can be misused to reform cultural myth. He believed that: “contemporary” history is “defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of ‘public presumption’,” he explained, “is akin to [the] notion of ‘public myth’ but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word ‘myth.’ Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.”

Zelikow was the executive director of the little known Aspen Strategy Group whose members included Condoleeza Rice. He also worked with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz – the same men responsible for drafting the ‘Project for the New American Century’.

Philip D. Zelikow was the author of the 9/11 Commission Report – the report was later was demonstrated to be a complete myth, full of lies and propaganda meant to shape what we now know as the 9/11 narrative.

Both Rice and Zelikow appeared on NBC’ Today Show promoting yet another book pushing the Neocon vision of a post 911 world called “To Build a Better World” and praising the work of their co-conspirator John Bolton who recently was fired by President Trump as National Security Advisor.

The interview illustrates that the same people

We want to control the narrative and that they wish to keep their secrets close to their vest.

Is it any wonder that there are conspiracy theories being spun about the 9/11 attacks?

In all of the chaos, there were so many stories being thrown around in the media that no one got the real truth about what was happening. Even Washington couldn’t get their suspects straight.

While Osama bin Laden was the media darling and chief evil-doer-in-charge. He wasn’t even Washington’s first choice as mastermind for the attacks. All points and circumstantial evidence was being calculated by Donald Rumsfeld and he had expressed great interest in focusing our manhunt in another area.

CBS News reported in 2009: “that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.”

It was John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others that created the PNAC brief in order to send a message to Bill Clinton that he was too soft on Iraq. They demanded a regime change on January 16, 1998, following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections. Members of the PNAC drafted an open letter to President Clinton asking him to remove Saddam Hussein from power using U.S. diplomatic, political and military power. They thought that Saddam would pose a threat to the United States, its Middle Eastern Allies and oil resources in the region. They also claimed that he had weapons of mass destruction.

Itundefineds all the same stuff we heard about after 9/11.

Does this surprise you – do you remember this? It certainly wasn’t brought up during the Condoleeza Rice interview. In fact, after Philip Zelikow praised John Bolton, the pair were asked questions about the President’s decision to meet with the Taliban and Camp David and then it dovetailed into questions about Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the President and the Russian meddling and collusion in the 2016 election.

None of this, in my opinion, was important on a day where we are supposed to remember the 911 attacks.

Unless we remember who headed up the investigation of 911 – none other than Robert Mueller head of the FBI at the time. Robert Mueller, of course, we all know is the man who recently led the probe into allegations of Trump/Russia collusion.

The media has placed in the public collective memory the idea that Mueller was a relentless crusader standing up to Trump and digging for truth.

But when it came to investigating foreign influence into 9/11, he wasn’t much of a truth warrior at all. Of course, the state sponsor of 911 was not clear enough in our collective memory of 911 thanks to Mueller and for some reason, Saudi Arabia was overlooked in the quest for truth even though Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and 15 of the 18 hijackers were Saudi nationals. It was a case of putting political interests first and not the victims of the attacks.

Do you remember?

Both the so-called phantoms of the attacks—Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are dead which in the end we were told had nothing to do with 911. It is also forgotten that Osama bin Laden may have died weeks after the September 11th attacks due to kidney failure.

And yet the announcement of his death was made by Barack Obama on May 1st, 2011.

Is this some sort of Mandela Effect? Does your memory play tricks?

Timing is everything. Do not forget the attacks of 9/11, but understand that the collective memory is being used to lure us in a social trance. A trance that may bring us back to the idea that the safe route is to find a new scapegoat; however, the suspects have always been in plain sight.

Some of them are still pulling the strings.