Fertile soil for Sept. 11 theories
Richard Bernstein/NYT NYT
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
News Analysis
BERLIN The first sign of the appeal of the new
theory among people for whom it should have
none was a standing-room-only meeting in June
at Humboldt University of Berlin, one of
Germany's premier institutions of higher learning.
But a lower sort of learning was taking place.
More than 700 people enthusiastically greeted a
series of speakers whose argument was that the
terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were not actually
carried out by the 19 young Islamic militants
identified by the FBI. That, the argument went, is
one of many lies and distortions being perpetrated
by something vaguely called "the media" and by
something very specific: the United States
government and the administration of President
George W. Bush.
Who, then, did carry out the attacks? The answer
was not clear, but the implication was: It was
either allowed to happen or supported by the
United States itself, or the United States actually
organized the attacks to give it a pretext to send
troops to Iraq and, more generally, to dominate
the world.
Since the meeting at the university, the Sept. 11
conspiracy theory mania has grown in strength in
Germany. At least four books are on the market
here. One of them, "The CIA and Sept. 11:
International Terror and the Role of the Secret
Services," by Andreas von Bülow, who was
Germany's federal research minister from
1980-82.
Von Bülow's book, which has been as high as No.
3 on the bestseller list in Germany, is, as the
magazine Der Spiegel put it, "full of the
subjunctive, would have, could have, may have."
He does not directly accuse Washington of
anything, but he writes that the planes hijacked
on Sept. 11 had been secretly fitted with
equipment allowing them to be guided from the
ground.
Most unsettling, perhaps, in a poll first published
by the newspaper Die Zeit in April and published
again two weeks ago by Der Spiegel, roughly one
in five Germans agreed with this statement: "Do
you believe that the attacks were carried out by
the United States government itself?" Germans
are not alone in subscribing to the theories. One
of the four books available here is the German
translation of "The Appalling Lie," by a French
conspiracy theorist, Thierry Meyssan, who
contends that the Pentagon was not hit by a plane
at all but was bombed in a way to make it look like
it was hit by a plane. The book has sold 200,000
copies in France.
"There's a group of people in every country who
will believe any nonsense," a senior German
government official said, dismissing the popularity
of the theories here as nothing unique. But some
analysts say there is something about both
Germany and Sept. 11 that does make the
Germans especially vulnerable to the conspiracy
claims.
"The simple answer is that Germany, as well as
France, was against the war in Iraq, and that
nonacceptance of the war in both countries has
created a lot of mistrust about the explanations for
the war," said Klaus Hillenbrand, managing editor
of the newspaper die tageszeitung, which has
done exposés of Sept. 11 rumors.
A prevailing explanation for the popularity of
conspiracy theories is that they give psychological
comfort to believers. Der Spiegel quotes the
American political scientist Michael Barkun as
saying that conspiracy theories allow people to
"understand everything perfectly" because they
disclose that "all the evil in the world can be
attributed to a single cause."
Some people contend that Germany is prone to
theories that attribute great evil to somebody else
because it gives a sort of exoneration for its Nazi
past. "There was a small portion of the population
in Germany that used the Vietnam War as an
excuse for the crimes of the Nazis," Hillenbrand
said.
"They had the impression, 'Ah, the Americans do
crimes, like My Lai, as well, so they are the same
as us.' It's a special form of anti-Americanism that
has gained some support in Germany," he said.
The New York Times
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