New book “Dynamic Duo” celebrates American resistance

This is my “Final Word” for Mike Palecek’s new book The Dynamic Duo: White Rose Blooms in Wisconsin.

(Don’t miss the book release party next Sunday!)

With this book, Mike Palecek has done something brilliant, brave, and beautiful. He’s done that before in his novels. But this is different.

In a way, this is the first real book of the internet age. The internet and the 9/11 truth movement came of age at the same time, during the decade after 9/11. But people just kept on writing the same old type of pre-internet books as if nothing had happened.

Even the 9/11 truth books are pre-internet artifacts. I know, because I’ve written two and edited one.
Compared to this, all other books are like hand-copied manuscripts post-Gutenberg. They’re relics – throwback to an earlier era when a tiny handful of people controlled the written word.

Today, the truth is on the internet. Everyone owns it. It comes in a jumble of bite-size pieces. It’s chaotic. It’s messy. There are mistakes. There’s disinfo. It’s a crazy-quilt that you have to sew together yourself.

Mike Palecek put it all together and figured out – as so many of us have – that something is rotten, and not just in Denmark.

He realized that that the US empire, or the US-Israeli empire, or the Bankster Empire, or whatever you want to call it, is a horror-show. He came to realize that just about everything in the mainstream media is lies – that when the truth shows up on dead trees, it means that someone isn’t doing their job.
Because the job of the people who control what gets printed on dead trees is to suppress the truth, and peddle the lies.

So to hell with dead trees.

But wait a minute…what if we tried to document the truth, as it has emerged on the internet, preserving the immediacy, the whole style and flavor, of the get-it-out-quick-and-dirty gonzo truth-seeking generation of truly alternative journalists? And printed it on dead trees?

That would be a whole lot like what the White Rose resistance group did in Nazi Germany.

The White Rose pioneered what later became known as samizdat in the Soviet Union, then red-pill journalism in the post-9/11 USA. They were on a suicide mission for truth and justice. Their audience wasn’t just their fellow Germans, the good Germans who went along with all the fascist war-mongering bullshit.

They were really writing for posterity.

In a sense they were transcribing oral rants…stump speeches…heartfelt snippets of oration. In that sense they weren’t writing at all. They were speaking. And their voices rise from their graves and ring out more and more clearly every day.

And that is what Mike Palecek is doing here. He is collecting and preserving authentic voices of real dissent, so that some day, people will be able to look back at the post-9/11 USA the way we look back at Nazi Germany today and say: Yes, almost everyone went crazy and became complicit in the most atrocious crimes against humanity imaginable…but a few people somehow preserved their sanity and spoke out against it.

Rather than just selecting and assembling the best internet samizdat, Mike decided to intersperse it with transcripts of interviews with me and Jim Fetzer.
 
Why me and Jim? I guess Mike thinks we’re two of the best internet samizdat artists. Can’t argue with him there. And we both happen to live in the same region as Mike, the Upper Midwest. The land of bowling. That’s why Mike put the bowling alley picture on the cover.

I’ve hardly set foot in a bowling alley since I signed up for Bowling 101 to satisfy my high school gym class requirement. And even then, I never wore a Batman mask when I bowled. But hey, it’s a cool picture.

And I see what Mike is getting at. In some ways, Jim and I are actually just ordinary Midwestern guys who saw a chance to do the right thing, and decided to go for it.

Jim could have brown-nosed his way to the top of the Philosophy of Science profession. Instead, he sidetracked his brilliant career and put a big asterisk next to his reputation by championing JFK truth, and later Wellstone truth and 9/11 truth. He did that that because despite his sometimes obtrusive ego, at heart he is a simple ordinary guy (with an unusually good mind) who has somehow retained the simple ordinary ability to know right from wrong, and just do what’s right.

And that’s why I wound up sacrificing my academic career on the altar of 9/11 truth. Not because I’m some kind of hero. I’m just simple and ordinary enough to know right from wrong.

I’m so simple and ordinary and unimaginative that I honestly cannot imagine why every professor at every university in America hasn’t done exactly what Jim and I have done. Whatever ivory towers they’re sitting in, they’re obviously way, way above me. They must have some elaborate and compelling reasons for making themselves complicit in the worst crimes against humanity ever committed. I’m just too dumb to understand what those reasons could possibly be.

So Mike sees us as representative of the American everyman and everywoman who hasn’t gone along with the genocidal charade, in the same way the voices of the White Rose represent the “bad Germans” who didn’t go along with the Nazi program. I guess he wanted to get a little bit up-close and personal, get a sense of the human beings behind the samizdat-artist masks. So he tape recorded and transcribed all those interviews with us.

I think Mike is the real samizdat-artist hero here.

Even if an EMP pulse weapon or solar flare fries every computer on earth and takes down the internet permanently, this book will still exist, somewhere, in some post-apocalyptic version of a monastic library. Maybe it will even be hand-copied and illuminated à la Canticle for Liebowitz, who knows?

And until every last hand-copied illuminated manuscript version finally rots, and the dead trees are broken down by bacteria and returned to the earth to nourish living wood, the existence of this book will prove that quite a few ordinary American men and women stood up against the genocidal 9/11 charade, the political assassinations, the torture, the perpetual murder of truth and justice and decency that passes for public life at the beginning of the 21st century.

God bless Mike Palecek.

To order Dynamic Duo: White Rose Blooms in Wisconsin go to CWGPress.com . . . or if you want an autographed copy, email me at kbarrett(at)merr(dot)com.