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.
