Der Spiegel sinks to all-time low
The German news-weekly, Der Spiegel, sinks to an all-time low in its coming issue with a cover that stands the burning Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on their heads. What feelings are the magazine makers attempting to rouse with this? Revulsion or Schadenfreude? Or is it just one more cynical marketing ploy? It doesn't really matter as almost all issues of this wretched magazine are filled with rancour and overflowing with the kind of condescension that confirms every stereotype about the people that produce it and the audience that reads it.
Knowing that their cover would arrest attention, the amoral editors who manufactured it attempt to justify it by titling their their cover story "Pantopticon of the absurd" and asking: "Were the attacks on New York and Washington the greatest terror act of history or an enormous plot by intelligence agencies? Conspiracy theorists are writing best sellers with their alleged evidence. Already one fifth of Germans believe their half truths."
And as Der Spiegel doesn't want to be left behind in this race to the bottom, it joins a growing list of charlatans doing a steady business pawning their fabrications to a credulous public. Leading the field is Thierry Meyssan, the crackpot French author of The Horrifying Fraud, which posits that a missile fired by the military itself hit the Pentagon on 9/11. His horrifying, but successful, fraud was the inspiration for Mathias Bröckers, who penned Conspiracies, conspiracy theories and the secrets of 11.9. Among its suggestions, is that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington proved just as timely for George Bush as did the Reichstag fire for Adolf Hitler. The latest to join this bizarre list is Andreas von Bülow, a former SPD Minister of Research. His volume, which is doing brisk business, is entitled The CIA and the 11th of September: International Terror and the Roll of the Intelligence Agencies. It fingers the CIA and Mossad as the sponsors of 9/11 while sticking to the golden conspiracy-theory formula of offering supposition instead of evidence.
The insane 9/11 killers who found a happy home in Hamburg before going on to kill 3,000 people in New York and Washington must have enjoyed living in a country of crackpots.
