Part 3: Obeying and Believing Authority 

© by Frances T. Shure, 2014

Editor’s Note: Frances Shure, M.A., L.P.C., has performed an in-depth analysis addressing a key issue of our time: “Why Do Good People Become Silent—or Worse—About 9/11?” The resulting essay, to be presented here as a series, is a synthesis of reports on academic research as well as clinical observations.

In answering the question in the title of this essay, last month’s segment, Part 2, addressed the anthropological study, Diffusion of Innovations, which discusses how change occurs in societies. These anthropologists discovered that, within diverse cultures, there can be found groups that vary in their openness to new ideas and technology—groups that fall within a neat bell curve. The success of the spread of an innovative technology or new idea reliably hinges on one point: whether or not opinion leaders vouch for it. In this context, the mainstream media can rightly be seen as promoting the official myth of 9/11, and therefore aiding and abetting the crimes of September 11, 2001.

We continue Ms. Shure’s analysis in Part 3 with the authority experiments of Stanley Milgram, Jane Elliott, and Philip Zimbardo.

In his famous 1961 experiment on obedience to authority, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to answer the question, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

Film Review: 9/11 in the Academic Community

9/11 in the Academic Community is more watchable than most “9/11 truth” filmsThe exciting new documentary whose upcoming release we announced in a September 8 article is now here. 9/11 in the Academic Community was released for purchase on October 8, after having won an award for “Documentary Achievement” at the University of Toronto Film Festival earlier this year. At a manageable running time of 75 minutes, with a title designed to appeal to its target audience, and by avoiding hot-button phrases such as “9/11 Truth,” the film has an excellent chance of slipping out of the conspiracy theorist jacket and making inroads into the American and Canadian intellectual communities.

This is certainly a film that needed to be made. With few exceptions, there has been a deafening silence in the classrooms of North American campuses regarding many obvious and undeniable facts that undermine the official account of 9/11. If the faculty and students at institutions of higher learning cannot question and even contradict what we have been told by media and government about the “crime of the century” without being called “conspiracy theorists,” then what has become of the academic community? Those who wrote the U.S. Constitution and defeated the British Empire’s dominion over the American colonies well understood that the spirit of free inquiry and an understanding of history were key to a properly functioning democratic republic. Even with those freedoms and values, Benjamin Franklin famously predicted that it would be difficult for us to “keep it.” Nothing less is at stake with regard to the issues covered in this film.

9/11 in the Academic Community is more watchable than most “9/11 truth” films. One of its biggest strengths is that all of its speakers express criticisms of the way that the 9/11 account was advanced and how it’s been treated in the 12 years since then – mostly without sounding angry.