Monday 5 November 2007

Guy Fawkes, green lizards and Tony Gosling

There are few sadder sights than a good man fallen among knaves. Such is Tony Gosling, Quaker, community radio activist and one-time stalwart of The Land is Ours campaign, which organised various land occupations and other events that I was involved with in the 1990s. These included a number of actions on or close to St George’s Hill, in Surrey, where Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers occupied vacant land as a ‘common treasury for all’ during the English revolution.

Gosling was a volunteer activist with TLIO. He’s now a volunteer activist with the 9/11 ‘truth’ brigade, and tonight he’s helping organise the first of a series of public meetings by the self-proclaimed US ‘terrorologist’ Webster Tarpley. Gosling is billing the meetings as a chance to hear Tarpley’s belief that ‘Guy Fawkes was a victim of Lord Cecil’s anti-Catholic “sting operation” and that similar tactics are still being used by western intelligence services and military today’.

Most famously, according to Gosling, Tarpley and their ilk, this includes the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. No plane hit the Pentagon. The twin towers came down as the result of a controlled explosion. The ‘apparently unprovoked collapse’ of World Trade Center Building No 7 is the ‘smoking gun non plus ultra’ that ‘proves’ that it was all an inside job by the intelligence agencies and supporters of the ‘new world order’.

Gosling doesn’t go quite so far as to say that no Jews went into work that day, but he mixes freely with those who do. He’s written about the supposed 'Bilderberg conspiracy' and the 'Illuminati' at length and refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as if it wasn’t a long-proven anti-Semitic forgery. In doing so he’s kept uncritical company with some unpleasant racial supremacists and others from America’s rich vein of right-wing fruitcakery.


I’m not sure if he’s followed former Green Party national speaker David Icke into believing that we’re all being ruled by extraterrestrial lizards, or former MI5 whistleblower and fellow 9/11 conspiracist David Shayler into believing (with the help of copious quantities of magic mushrooms and other substances) that he is the ‘last incarnation of the Holy Ghost’. But Gosling and others in the 9/11 truth brigades are certainly ghosts of their formerly rational selves.

The sad thing is that they’ll probably get more people at Tarpley’s meeting tonight (St John’s Church, Waterloo, at 7.30pm – bring your own hallucinogens) than any rational political discussion on 9/11 could hope to attract.

3 comments:

pennymachines said...

"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect."

Your ad hominem attack on the views of Mr Gosling is ironic in view of the reverence you show for Bronowski's quote.

I don't know Gosling's particular take on 9/11 but am familiar with the "evidence" thus far mustered to prove the attacks were solely the achievement of a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists acting under the leadership of bin Laden.

Anyone who has taken the hard route of doing some research instead of swallowing uncritically what the mainstream media has fed us - anyone who has taken the considerable time required to study the 9/11 Commission, FEMA and NIST reports, the recent NIST press release on WTC 7, plus the myriad press reports and other documentary sources, will know that the official story is so shot through with contradiction, coincidence, anomaly, secrecy, omission, obfuscation and lies that it defies a rational mind to believe it.

The History Commons Complete 911 Timeline is a good place to start researching the documentary trail of 9/11. As an an experiment in open-content civic journalism it is also perhaps a model of the corporate-agenda-free, real journalism of the future.

Derek Wall said...

more on Tony here http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2008/12/tony-gosling-suspended-from-bristol.html

He done some good work but homophobia and anti-semitism (see his stuff on the protocols, for example) are no fun!

or may be I am just swallowing uncritically what the mainstream media feeds me?

Steve Platt said...

As I've just commented on your blog, Derek:

Sadly Tony is one of those people who, for whatever reason, lose their grip on reality and come to see anyone who points this out as confirmation of their delusional ideas. I doubt that he is personally homophobic or antisemitic but the views that he espouses certainly are. Bristol Greens had no choice but to suspend him; if he doesn't leave of his own accord, they will have no choice but to expel him permanently.