by Roberto Quaglia
www.roberto.info
It may still be too early to come to a definitive conclusion on the Brussels terrorist attacks. However, after just 48 hours, the event is already verging on the surreal, as is usually the case with these kinds of events in the Brave New Western World. The head of the Ukrainian secret services would like us to know that he wouldn’t be surprised if “Russia is behind the Brussels attack”. This is the type of person Western journalists turn to for explanations of what has been going on in Ukraine over the past two years. Keep that in mind next time the news talks about the crisis in Ukraine.
Turkish president Erdogan stated he is ready to help Brussels fight terrorism, just a few days after stating that “There is no reason why bombs exploding in Ankara could not explode in Brussels.” I imagine that the next logical step will be “There is no reason why democracy in Brussels can’t be abolished like it has been in Turkey.” (Obviously, the use of the word “democracy” here has to be considered exclusively in the light of poetic license.) And to highlight the truly surreal surrealism, we also need to remember that in an interview for Bel-RTL on the 26th of April 2013, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders, talking about Belgian jihadists, stated: “Perhaps we will erect a monument to them as revolutionary heroes.” Perhaps someone should ask him now: Has that time come?
CNN and mainstream media all over the world raced to show us videos of the explosion at the airport, as it was filmed by the security cameras — what a shame they were fake. They were, in fact, videos of the 2011 terrorist attack at the Moscow Domodedovo airport which, at the time, the Western media covered very differently than this similar Brussels event. It is interesting to note how the mainstream media tried to blame this outrageous fakery on the social networks. (Here are examples from the Independent and Rainews24.)
One is tempted to think that, starting with CNN journalists all the way down to our own, if they don’t check Facebook and YouTube, they can’t quite understand what’s going on in the world…But the truth is that at such high levels of journalism, that type of mistake is not just culpable, but malicious for sure – the ones who get duped are the foolish local journalists. If those videos had really come from CCTV cameras in Brussels, certainly CNN would have known it before some anonymous Twitter user from whom CNN is now saying they copied the video. (Don’t try to tell me that CNN doesn’t have privileged sources!) Not to mention that the second video they showed was even difficult to find online before they themselves published it. Here it is on a Russian site. It’s certainly not the first time that CNN has been caught faking the news, so being surprised now or thinking that it was a mistake would make no sense.
Is anyone actually wondering what the CCTV cameras in Brussels actually recorded? Now that the eyes and the minds of the public have registered the faked images, they will remain for the record. Nothing else matters. In another video, a man who has survived seems to be holding a doll rather than a real baby. In the Brave New Surreal World, you can’t even trust your eyes anymore.
In keeping with the ever-more successful surreal Western tradition, the Brussels attacks give coincidence theorists something to chomp on. We learn that one of the near-miss survivors had already been a near-miss survivor in Paris at the Bataclan, on the 13th of November 2015. His name is Lahouani Ziahi, a French citizen, who, with all the possible places to be in the world, had such bad luck that he managed to be right where the terrorists struck — twice! And, lucky enough, naturally, to escape unharmed both times. Quite a coincidence, but on the other hand, once in a while, someone really does win the lottery. As the saying goes, “some have all the luck”, and here we have someone who seems to actually benefit from the surrealism, managing to win the lottery of bad luck (while having the best bad luck imaginable) two and a half times.
That’s actually the case of 19-year old Mormon Mason Wells, who, before being injured in the explosion at the Brussels Zaventem airport, was at the Boston marathon on April 15th, 2013, not far from where a bomb exploded. Mason Wells was also in Paris on the day of the attacks at the Bataclan. According to Il Corriere della Sera, he was injured there as well; according to other more reliable sources, he was in another part of the city. So the third miracle may only be half a miracle at best. Meanwhile, one of the wounded survivors of the Bataclan attack was a repeat victim who survived none other than the 9/11 attacks in New York. He was at the foot of the South Tower when “the first plane hit”. This growing phenomenon of repeat victims who bounce more or less unscathed from one disaster to the other should sound the alarm for any rational person. But in the Brave New Surreal World, this all seems normal to us.
The impression we get from this growing number of massacre regulars is that the probability of being a victim of a terrorist attack is very high. Look how many people have experienced it more than once! The next time, it could be you! You who haven’t experienced it even once! But that’s not true. The probability is infinitely low. So we contemplate the extremely improbable without batting an eye. And if we wanted to critically analyze other purely American events such as the Sandy Hook school shooting or the San Bernardino shooting, we’d discover that we are in fact living out the story of Alice in Wonderland.
In the real world, nine out of ten people whip out their mobile phones to film the slightest event or to take selfies which they post all over Facebook and YouTube. But in Brave New Surreal World, youngsters completely forget to behave like that, the apps in their smartphones carefully avoid flooding social networks with images uploaded in real time. I’m still waiting, in vane, for videos and photos of the Brussels attacks to start flooding social networks. It never happened with Paris. It probably won’t happen this time either.
Coincidence theorists will be smug. They don’t need to stoop so low so as to actually think or question the dominant narrative in order to know what’s going on. The more unlikely the coincidences, the more they are thrilled with their ability to blindly accept it as normal.
I recall that immediately after the Paris events I became suspicious of the fact that, with just a few exceptions, no “news vultures” were interviewing the hundreds victims’ relatives. Newspapers wouldn’t show pictures of most of the victims. Wanting to know more about them, I looked for the victims’ profiles on Facebook. To my surprise, a high percentage of them, practically half of them, didn’t have one. This at a time when it’s nearly impossible to find a young person who isn’t on Facebook. 
Furthermore, when I stuck my nose into the US Social Security Death Index, which is accessible online, in a search of people who died on 9/11, I discovered that over 80% of them were not there. In other words, for the United States of America, those people never died. Don’t get angry with me. I’m just giving you the facts. How you decide to interpret them is your own business. To those who are interested in the mysteries of 9/11, I suggest reading my book The Myth of September 11. For the moment, I would just like to stress that the Brave New Surreal World goes way back, and its roots go even further back than that incidentally.
Victims who don’t seem to exist at all who contrast with nearly-victims who seem to exist too much — like Cordelia Bowdery, the 22-year old student who posted a short and moving essay on Facebook about her experience at the Bataclan. A story so “perfect” that it almost seems written by a professional (“It’s wrong to think badly of someone, but very often you’re right”) and which rapidly got over 3 million likes and almost 800,000 shares. Absurd contrasts from the Brave New Surreal World where nothing is as it seems. The fact that the name of the miracle survivor Mason is quite odd (doesn’t it suggest masonry as a source of something?) and the name of one of the surviving Italian victims is Chiara Burla (which means “Clear Mockery” in Italian) shouldn’t make us suspicious. In these situations, a quick search on Facebook can’t hurt. And this time, what do we discover? On Facebook, “Mister Miracle 2.5” goes by the name of Elder Mason Wells. His name was odd to begin with, wasn’t it? Now it is even odder. His FB profile seems unusual as well, with just less than one post a year. Is this some kind of hint to tell us that the freemasonry possibly involved here is particularly ancient ?
But if you are bewildered by all these things, you are reacting correctly. This is the goal. The Brave New Surreal World is structured so as to put its own citizens in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance. It’s a known fact in psychology that someone who feels lost and confused and unable to rely on his own judgment submits more easily to authority.
The alleged Brussels terrorists are brothers (“the el-Bakraoui brothers”). Again. For a while now, it seems like you can’t be a terrorist if you don’t partner with your brother. Even a Russian media outlet jumped on the bandwagon, by revealing (falsely) that the suicide bombers were thought to be two Belorussian brothers (who immediately contacted the press to ask how come they were still alive after supposedly blowing themselves up). For the Paris attacks in November 2015, we had “the Abdeslam brothers”. For the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we had “the Kouachi brothers”. For the Boston bombing, we had “the Tsarnaev brothers”. It’s fine that Hollywood movies use the same storylines, but aren’t we supposed to be in the real world here? It’s becoming harder and harder to suspend our disbelief. Furthermore, according to Erdogan, one of the el-Bakraoui brothers was arrested in Turkey in June 2015, then sent to Belgium with a warning note to Belgian authorities that he seemed to have ties to terrorism. Even this is a recurring theme, a standard. The terrorists were “known to security agencies“.
Similar patterns were reported in many other terror attacks also, starting with the London bombings in July 2005. The myth that security agencies are inefficient is reinforced in order to create the pretext that their powers should be increased. However, no one ever gets punished for these “mistakes”. On the contrary. After 9/11, the heads of the American military and intelligence services who had “failed” in preventing the attacks were not fired. Instead, they were promoted. Budgets for “security” were doubled, tripled. Does anyone still have their brain turned on? Does anyone remember what cui bono means?
Just like in a Hollywood film, the Brussels massacre comes a few days after a plot twist where “the good guys” scored a victory — the unlikely and spectacular capture of the extremely evil Salah Abdeslam, also known as “the mind” of the Paris massacre. And just like in a Hollywood movie, after a positive climax halfway through the story comes the “unexpected” plot twist — a negative climax, the massacre. The difference between all this and the movies is that in this case, we’ll pay the price of the ticket after the show.
The storyline also requires finding the usual passport, which the perfect terrorist carefully carries with him when he goes on terror missions only to invariably leave it in the car or somewhere else so investigators can find it, possibly along with a Koran. (On 9/11, with the passports and a Koran there was also a VHS tape of instructions on how to fly a Boeing, a very useful item to have in your car before boarding the plane). But if you overdo the surreal treatments, they just end up being boring, so this time the suicide bomber confesses his guilt by leaving a note in a computer which he then throws in the garbage. And to find out where the terrorists lived you just have to ask a taxi driver.
Another screenplay variation: for the moment, no anti-terror drill has been discovered, as has been the case with all the previous terror attacks, where the attack takes place at the same exact time and in the same exact places as the exercise and so by chance the fictitious scenarios become real, or “go live”. However, we do have a big prophetic drill that took place at the end of February just 400 meters away from the Maelbeek metro station. Some would say it’s better than nothing. More impressive, the mega-drill which happened a few months ago in London, so perfect in every detail that one wonders if they were really training to react to a crisis or making a movie instead. If you think I’m joking, think harder.
We are all capable of reasoning with hindsight, but it gets really interesting when someone can foresee what will happen in the future. No, this time I’m not referring to Erdogan, but to the American journalist David Chase Taylor, editor-in-chief of Truther.org, who has self-exiled himself in Switzerland. One week before it happened, he foresaw a terror attack taking place in Brussels between March 16 and 23. But there is also someone who foresaw an attack on the exact day, the 22nd of March 2016 even though he couldn’t say exactly where it would take place. It seems that the number 322 (March 22, 3/22) is considered by those in certain circles of power to be one of those “special” numbers that has a particular significance. Searching online, you’ll discover that, over the years, much has been said about the 22nd of March. Much like the number 11, another quite popular number in certain circles, which has given us unforgettable experiences such as September 11, 1973 (Chilean coup d’état), September 11, 2001 (9/11), March 11, 2004 (Atocha train station bombing, Madrid, Spain), March 11, 2011 (Earthquake and tsunami, Japan) — and the list doesn’t stop there, but not to disappoint coincidence theorists too much, let’s add to the list the event which occurred on 11/11/1919 (WWI, Armistice Day), not to mention that it happened exactly at 11 o’clock in the morning.
For those who are still eager for more coincidences, here’s a little macabre gem. There is only one photo of the massacre inside the Bataclan in Paris, which shows a couple dozen corpses in the theater. (By the way, about a hundred more are missing. But such insignificant details don’t seem to interest the mainstream media). Judging from the wide red trails on the floor, it seems that some corpses were dragged around back and forth for no apparent reason. One of the trails even forms an arc which loops absurdly back to the starting point. But realistically speaking, it’s very doubtful that dragging bleeding bodies around could produce such regular trails. Instead, it looks like someone wanted to intentionally draw something in blood on the floor. But what? And why? The most incredible answer comes after the Brussels events. The picture drawn in the blood on the floor of Bataclan astoundingly resembles the Brussels airport logo. For the coincidence theorists, this is the moment of absolute triumph! Alternatively, someone among those who pull the strings in the shadows appears to have a certain macabre sense of humour.
What will surreal terrorism present us with next? A NATO invasion of Syria? A merging of the security forces of the different European countries? Further losses of sovereignty? New laws against a free press and freedom of expression? A little bit of all that? No need to rush! We’ll soon know. The former chief of Mossad suggested in an interview to the Italian newspaper Repubblica that we adopt a European Patriot Act. Wow! What a surprise! That’s just what we need…
To sum it up, based on the facts, the Brussels event appears to be the umpteenth remake of a situation which we’ve seen many times before. The comments of those who notice politics only in these cases stir up deep sorrow and disgust. Nothing new on the Western Front. However, from the artistic-philosophical perspective, it’s another important step towards the Brave New Surreal World, the finish line we are rapidly being led to and which many still mistakenly call by its now obsolete name, the “New World Order”.
Roberto Quaglia
(many thanks to Leni Remedios and Débora Blake for the careful editing of the English translation)
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