David Ray Griffin and the Demonic
The individual most responsible for my high degree of confidence that the official 9/11 story is blatantly false is a most unlikely character for the job — a mild mannered, retired theology professor long ensconced in the pleasant Mediterranean region of Southern California. His name is David Ray Griffin, now 82 years old. For a variety of reasons, Prof. Griffin ended up writing a book called The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004).
Personally, I find it fitting that not just a theology professor, but one who has written extensively on God and His relation to Evil, used his dedication to morality and an extensive background in science to convincingly challenge the official US Government narrative. Further, he also situated the likely 9/11 cover-up and subsequent attack on Iraq in terms of a cosmic encounter with a demonic American empire.
Though Griffin would be horrified to hear it — and almost certainly would deny it — his lifework on theology and 9/11 points to the most pressing existential issue facing the entire world today — and inadvertently names the group that threatens the world.
Let’s get to work exploring that story.
From early in his academic career, Prof. Griffin was drawn to a corner of Christian theology known as process theology, in which a new conception of God and the nature (and limits) of His powers are envisioned. In short, the traditional Christian view that God was omnipotent and could alter the physical world and humans at will was amended in light of ideas that had grown out of the Enlightenment era and the rise of science. In addition, there remained the thorny contradiction that if God is omnipotent and wholly Good, how do we account for the obvious presence of Evil?
The traditional response, as well as the amended response from process theology, was that God created man with free will, and to maintain that free will, man must always have the choice to pick Evil. The traditional Christian dogma, however, maintains that God has greater power than Evil or Satan, so how could we reconcile the presence of so much Evil in history?
Griffin, his predecessors and his colleagues formed a rational though radical response, arguing that “divine power is persuasive, not coercive.” That is a beautiful way of condensing rather sophisticated arguments, the upshot being that “God influences every finite event, but God cannot wholly determine how any event will use its own creativity and thereby its twofold power to exert self-determination and causal influence on others” (Christian Faith, p. 132).
I was initially exposed to such thinking when we studied the philosophy of British intellectual giant Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who (I’m cribbing from Wikipedia) “argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.”
Whitehead’s analytic philosophy, however, like that of many other British philosophers, left me cold, so I focused far more on modern Continental thinkers such as Sartre and Camus. In the course of such study, we began to touch on the ideas of French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who — to me at the time — seemed to be working on a parallel path of emerging processes in his thoughts on Darwinian evolution. Further study on Teilhard and Whitehead came to an end for me, though, when I made the choice to downplay study of more abstract philosophy for the concrete field of intellectual history (in the course of which it was impossible to miss the outsize role of Jewish thought in the development of the modern world).
Fast-forward decades, past 9/11, and considering Griffin’s numerous books on that event, and I found myself reading Griffin’s 2006 shortish book Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11. The first half is a revisit to the physical claims about 9/11 and logical flaws in the official story, subjects I was intimately familiar with after reading Griffin’s longer books on these matters. The second half of the book, however, introduced me to a novel side of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as Griffin incorporated his own theology into a deeper understanding of the consequences of purported inside government participation in the implementation of 9/11.
In an approach totally new to me, he situated his views in the second half, called “A Christian Critique of 9/11 and American Imperialism,” in five chapters which are titled:
- Imperial Motives for a “New Pearl Harbor” (familiar to me)
- Jesus and the Roman Empire (new material to me)
- The Divine and the Demonic (blew my mind)
- The American Empire, Demonic Evil, and 9/11 (more shocking ideas)
- A Call to Reflection and Action (what Christians should do)
I won’t rehash the familiar parts of the 9/11 story because I can trust that a healthy majority of readers are already familiar with the evidence, proofs, theories and arguments. Also, most of us know about the work of Richard Perle and many others (heavily Jewish) in imagining what could entice the majority of Americans to exercise global hegemony in a more robust fashion. The events of 9/11 were an absolute boon to this group and (coincidentally, of course) advanced Israeli interests in the Middle East immensely. (A shout-out here for the book edited by Mark Green, Persecution, Privilege, & Power: Reconsidering the Zionist Narrative in American Life (2008), with essays by Kevin MacDonald and James Petras, among many others.)
With Griffin’s chapter “Jesus and the Roman Empire,” however, I was in new territory. Certainly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I’d long heard of the comparison of the United States and Rome as unrivaled imperial powers, but I’d never read Christian theological accounts of either.
With the chapter “The Divine and the Demonic,” I was immediately faced with seminal ideas — and connections — that I’d never anticipated. Griffin was taking the traditional Christian belief in “The Evil One” as seriously as many of us did growing up, hearing it constantly repeated in church every Sunday, in the Bible, etc. By 1970, however, these literal beliefs were quickly falling out of favor even in much of America, as secular humanism was establishing its reign in education and the popular mind with the help of TIME Magazine and countless other outlets. Honestly, who was taking the Devil and his temptations and misdeeds literally anymore (other than comedian Flip Wilson’s with his catchphrase “The devil made me do it.)?
Well, Griffin and those in his circles were. And I had not expected in the twenty-first Century to be one of those who suddenly considered taking the existence of “The Evil One” literally. But by then I’d seen growing evidence that the world was indeed in the presence of and under the growing control of Actual Evil, which is very serious stuff.
Though I was profoundly influenced at the time by this section of Griffin’s book, other priorities took me away, though I always knew I would return to these two chapters of the book. This year became that time because I could now see where Griffin’s discussion on Evil fit in toward a reconciling of Kevin MacDonald’s evolutionary approach to Jews and E. Michael Jones’ traditional (though shocking to modern minds) Catholic critique of Jewish behavior since the crucifixion of Christ over two thousand years ago.
Further, Griffin and his fellow process theologians charge that previous Christian thinkers were guilty of “supporting a doctrine of absolute divine omnipotence, giving Christians an insoluble problem of evil,” and — here’s a critically key point — undermining the New Testament’s conviction “that our world is the scene of a deadly battle between divine and demonic power” (p. 128).
Since reading those lines ten or more years ago, I slowly began to observe the growing evidence that we humans were not going to work our way out of our many metastasizing predicaments through politics, argumentation, social engineering, donating money, and all the other secular human methods of protecting and promoting our interests in this world. At first, more tongue in cheek than seriously, I’d say that “Only God can help us now,” but particularly over the last few years the shape of a literal “deadly battle between divine and demonic power” took form right in front of me. As I more and more began to believe in this battle, I grilled myself: Was I being intellectually lazy? Superstitious? Defeatist as the White world increasingly succumbed to attacks that always achieved their destructive goals?
No, I had to conclude, we were indeed operating in a realm that secular humanism had too long denied and we in fact find ourselves now in the midst of “a deadly battle between divine and demonic power.” This seems to me the most rational conclusion.
In order to keep this argument from Griffin’s work criminally brief, I will again refer to the concept that divine power is not as literally omnipotent as long supposed and that human free will is in fact an indispensable factor in the process of the world unfolding. In short, to quote A. N. Whitehead, “the divine element in the world is to be conceived as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency,” a claim that should be considered “one of the greatest intellectual discoveries in the history of religion” (p. 132).
From this segment of Griffin’s chapter onward, his arguments fairly cry out that demonic elements increasingly exercise control over our world, and most importantly indicate who the actors involved in the demonic sphere are. Yet Griffin entirely misses this. Completely. Thus, I would like to offer a speculative account of the reality we could be facing today.
Obviously, serious readers should get a copy of Christian Faith and carefully read the chapters under discussion here. For now, I will pick quotes that make the conclusions Griffin missed far clearer. First, unlike many Christian theologians before him, Griffin accepts the temporal evolution of primates, writing that “the greatest single increase in freedom, however, occurred when one line within the simians gave rise to human beings.” (Note that acceptance of such evolution is common also to MacDonald’s thought.) The second powerful clue claims that “the divine influences upon us … are always calling us to truth, beauty, and goodness.” Historically, this is undeniably true of some races, particularly East Asians and Whites. Yet this is consistently the exact opposite direction toward which one important other group heads.
And because — in this view — God’s creation of beings with free will constitutes a grave risk should powerful enough beings choose Evil, God’s mission could be a failure. In Griffin’s words, “Because of the distinctive capacities of human beings, their emergence meant the rise of creatures who could, over time, come to exercise forms of power that could threaten God’s present purposes for our world” (p. 133). I see the world at that critical inflection point now.
Next, Griffin’s insights increasingly crescendo toward a nearly biblical revelation. “Therefore, demonic power would involve creaturely creativity that is exercised on the basis of hate or indifference and therefore without the intent to promote the welfare of all those affected by it (italics in original, p. 137). “Now that demonic power exists, accordingly, it cannot be unilaterally controlled. The battle between divine and demonic power is therefore a real battle, with the outcome still undecided” (my emphasis, 137).
Griffin continues: “Through this process … demonic power, which the rise of human existence made possible, actually came to dominance on our planet. … Civilization has been significantly shaped by the drive to produce coercive power that would be used with hate or at least indifference” (141).
At this point, I find it informative to note that the same year Christian Faith came out (2006), the indefatigable Griffin also published 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. I, with Canadian Peter Dale Scott, a scholar and diplomat often credited with the term “The Deep State.” And what, if nothing else, is today’s Deep State but an agent of Evil and the very demonic force about which Griffin is writing?
Yet from here onward, Griffin follows the wrong trail completely, arguing on p. 142 that the West (and Whites implicitly) are the authors of all the evils we read about just about everywhere in modern education and media. Whites are morally culpable for “the market economy, European colonization of the globe, the ideologies of Nationalism and Capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and various late-modern ideologies, such as Social Darwinism.” Griffin entirely misses the role of another distinct group and in fact elsewhere explicitly defends this non-white group when the evidence is overwhelming the opposite.
Finally comes the short passage Griffin wrote that stopped me in my tracks: “I begin with the notion that the demonic involves an objective symbolic structure, which presupposes the idea … that creativity as embodied in humans is capable of becoming demonic in large part because of our linguistic power[!]” [bold] (143, emphasis mine).
Who that has read Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy on a Jewish group evolutionary strategy could not have immediately recognized the import of what Griffin was saying? After all, superior verbal intelligence is an indispensable component of Jewish success and power, a factor absolutely central to MacDonald’s arguments. In the first book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, MacDonald notes in the Preface that “Judaism has been characterized by assortative mating and by cultural and natural selection for intelligence . … Jewish populations have higher average intelligence than their gentile counterparts” (xi). A result has been that “Jews have been able to compete successfully with gentile members of many societies for positions in which literacy and intelligence are important” (18). This is then developed at length in Ch. 7, “Judaism as an Ecological Strategy: Selection for Phenotypic Traits Related to Intelligence, High-Investment Parenting, and Social Cohesion.”
Beginning on p. 188, MacDonald writes under the subheading “Differences Between Jews and Gentiles in Psychometric Intelligence” that “Given these phenomena [success in intellectual achievement, social status and money, for example], it is expected that Jews will tend to exceed gentiles in intellectual ability and particularly in what psychologists term verbal intelligence. As Levinson notes, traditional Jewish education emphasizes verbal knowledge, verbal concept formation, and ability to understand abstract ideas — exactly the abilities tapped by modern measures of verbal intelligence.” This section examines a wide range of evidence showing that Jewish verbal IQ exceeds that of their gentile neighbors while coming in lower on other segments of IQ.
In Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, MacDonald devotes time to Jewish conceptions of their racial uniqueness, one component of which is their sense of intellectual superiority, such as Freud’s beliefs in this respect (159). This theme often appears in Jewish humor, such as the quip from The Jewish Daily Forward about the Yiddish translation of Shakespeare — “Translated and improved by A. Cahan.” The common use of “goyishe kop” (a dull mind, or one who thinks like a non-Jew) is another example of this.
Finally, in the third book of the trilogy, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, the topic of superior Jewish verbal and intellectual intelligence is so prominent that it has its own index entry as “Intellectual superiority: as characteristic of Jewish-dominated movements,” with multiple pages listed. For instance, MacDonald repeats from A People That Shall Dwell Alone the evidence that “the mean Jewish IQ in the United States is approximately 117 and verbal IQ even higher.” (MacDonald now defers to (Richard Lynn’s estimate of 111).
Of the many results of this higher verbal IQ, a representative one is that “Jews were prominently represented as leaders of the Bolsheviks,” and within the Bolshevik movement, according to historian Albert Lindemann, “citing the absolute numbers of Jews, or their percentage of the whole, fails to recognize certain key if intangible factors: the assertiveness and often dazzling verbal skills of Jewish Bolsheviks.” (95) Needless to say, this dominance worked out terribly for non-Jews caught in that murderous regime, as many of us at The Occidental Quarterly and Occidental Observer have consistently emphasized.
Returning to Griffin, we read that he goes on to note that power, including that emanating from linguistic power, constitute “destructive, enslaving powers that seem to come ‘from beyond all human agency.’” To buttress this claim, Griffin quotes Ephesians 6:11-12:
Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. (143)
When Griffin goes on to describe “the demonic soul of a culture,” then, we can immediately equate that with the decay of the West from roughly the 1960s, where “the individuals whose souls are formed in that society will tend to be ready servants of demonic evil.” How Griffin can miss the import of this next part is a mystery to me:
…by being warriors they are obeying the will of, and even imitating the behavior of, the deity of the universe; … it will lead them to believe that by dying in the service of this deity, they will be especially rewarded; it will lead them to hate. … it will convince them that they are a chosen people, so that by subjugating others they are actually bringing about divine rule on earth (emphasis added, 145–47).
In the following chapter, “The American Empire, Demonic Evil, and 9/11,” Griffin indicts today’s America in no uncertain terms: “The conclusion that the American empire is evil, and in fact the principal location of demonic power in our time,” follows from its policies related to nuclear weapons, global warming and the events of 9/11. Of course only the latter issue concerns us in the present essay.
Griffin fairly enough points to neoconservatives as the main force in promulgating Middle Eastern policies that (conveniently) benefitted them and their favored foreign state once the events of Sept. 11, 2001 transpired. He then blithely goes on to discuss members of that group, completely ignoring their identities. I now list the names we read beginning on p. 151: Charles Krauthammer, Ben Wattenberg, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Dinesh D’Souza (non-Jewish), Max Boot and Joshua Muravchik.
He can be this blind because sixty pages earlier he had unilaterally absolved Jews from responsibility for any of this, arguing explicitly that “The term ‘neoconservatism’ is, in any case, used here to refer to an ideology, not to any biographical facts about those who hold this ideology” (p. 87). Griffin allows that “many of the prominent neoconservatives have been Jewish” but he fails to pursue that telling pattern at all, which is a pity because his own theology and biographical evidence about neocons strongly supports the central role of Jews as Jews.
This is more than a missed opportunity; it is practically a moral and intellectual crime. And never once in reading books by Griffin have I sensed that he understands the Jewish role but is deliberately coy for practical, career or other reasons. He just seems blind to his own citation of glaring facts. Take, for example, his discussion of executive director Philip Zelikow’s role in what Griffin identifies as deliberate deception in the official 9/11 Commission Report. Never noting that Zelikow is Jewish, Griffin writes that Zelikow had coauthored in 1998 an essay on “catastrophic terrorism,” showing that Zelikow “had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/11.”
The quote Griffin uses from Zelikow reads: “Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.” While we can forgive Griffin for not seeing the future where these things have come to pass in spades (high tech surveillance from “private companies,” deplatforming of government critics, and most of all policies revolving around Covid-19 and its attempts at amelioration), we can only remain stunned that as brilliant and courageous as Griffin is on so many other fronts, he completely drops the ball on this main issue.
Returning to the chapter on Demonic Evil, we reach Griffin’s conclusion: “The attacks of 9/11, understood as a false-flag operation orchestrated by forces within the U.S. government, can be taken, I suggest, as the chief revelation of our time. Not a divine relation, to be sure, but the chief revelation of the demonic — of the extent to which it has taken control of the American government” (180–81).
OK, but since his 2006 book, has Griffin asked “Who DID 9/11?” Nowhere have I seen Griffin consider anything more specific than “forces within the U.S. government” led by neocons to account for 9/11 and its long, long aftermath. But in the current year, two decades after the initial event, we have strongly suggestive evidence, as well as a compelling narrative, about the responsible parties to this portion of our “demonic” history.
So “Who DID 9/11?” The most expedient way to answer this question is to visit and follow The Unz Review, where French writer Laurent Guyénot submitted an 8,500-word article called “9/11 was an Israeli Job,” where the very title gives you Guyénot’s conclusion. Three years later, Jewish American Ron Unz offered a similar conclusion in “American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years.”
For the best account supporting this thesis of Israel’s guilt (actually, it would more properly be considered as world Jewry’s guilt and complicity), see journalist Christopher Bollyn’s Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World (2012), a version of which is available online.
This explanation of 9/11 alone would constitute demonic Evil, but one must think of the vast, vast litany of other Jewish crimes, genocides and foul deeds rather than just the span of the last twenty or so years. No other group in history remotely approaches this level of Evil, possibly because, as Griffin notes, “America has by far the most extensive empire ever created” (p. 106). And what have writers from TOO and Unz Review shown over those years but that America is effectively ruled by Jews?
We have seen how this empire helped destroy Germany, followed by a steady attack (often through subversion and financial manipulation) on the “victorious” Western nations such as Great Britain and America. The acceleration of this attack since the 1960s has been well documented on TOO, by various writers and by E. Michael Jones, who also sees a cosmic dimension where God’s benevolent will is being contested by the Jews who rejected Christ’s divinity at the foot of the cross and thereby, as told by Jones in his magisterial The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, also rejected the Logos at the core of God’s plan. Jones expanded on his understanding of Logos in Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality (2020), a book which strongly buttresses Griffin’s theological perspective, but one that takes into account the critical conjunction of Jews and Evil.
l hope that by identifying Prof. Griffin’s lacuna in his analysis of Evil in the modern world, I am not at the same time undermining the value of the work he’s done with theology or with 9/11. Rather, I am taking his work and building on it through synthesis and the addition of more current relevant details. Taken together with my last long essay on the work of Kevin MacDonald and E. Michael Jones, I hope I am properly outlining the broadest possible picture of the state of our world at present.
Sadly, the picture I have discovered is an apocalyptic one in that “our world is the scene of a deadly battle between divine and demonic power.” Currently, the forces arrayed on the side of the divine are in indisputable retreat, possibly fatally so. God remains remote and silent, it seems, though E. Michael Jones rallies us with cries of “Reversal is in the air.”
Perhaps — and this is a desperate stretch — Jones is right that traditional Church fathers unravelled the truth that God uses evil to produce good, for that is the conclusion of Jones’ Logos Rising book. Is there anything, however, that we humans, endowed with free will according to the theologians and philosophers Griffin and Jones discuss, can do to prod God to produce good? I’m getting nervous.
TOO writer Thomas Dalton offers advice to the United States that could apply to the entire White world (as currently it is almost exclusively the White race that is under sustained Jewish attack):
Unless and until White America is willing to collectively acknowledge its responsibility for its own well-being, and to acknowledge the fundamental role of Jewish supremacy in the many crises of our nation, our problems will never end. We must use this moment to turn the tide against the Jews, to reclaim our country, and to secure, for the first time in many decades, a vastly brighter future.
In closing, let me say that we need to get very, very serious about the current world situation. As E. Michael Jones writes in his October issue of Culture Wars, the Jewish Question is the main issue facing the world in our day. He is right. So I strongly advise putting away talk of all other topics to focus exclusively on the JQ. The near-term fate of the world hangs in the balance.
https://www.unz.com/article/david-ray-griffin-and-the-demonic/
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